These Deathless Shores

by P. H. Low

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

Gorgeous and devastating, P. H. Low’s debut fantasy is a richly reimagined tale of Captain Hook’s origin, a story of cruelty, magic, lost innocence, and the indelible power of stories.

Jordan was once a Lost Boy, convinced she would never grow up. Now, she’s twenty-two and exiled to the real world, still suffering withdrawal from the addictive magic Dust of her childhood. With nothing left to lose, Jordan returns to the Island and its stories—of pirates and war and the heartlessness of youth—intent on facing Peter one last time, on her own terms.

If that makes her the villain…so be it.

Release date: July 9, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 432

Sample

The Island tracked everything that washed ashore.

An invisible barrier surrounded it, a shimmering wall a hundred kilometers in every direction. Canoes sank in crossing; navigators lost sight of the stars. Later, trawlers and airplanes split themselves against nothing, and the probes they sent into the water returned out of sync or cracked precisely down the middle.

Only the birds arrived unscathed. Only the foxes, floating in on driftwood rafts.

So the Island embraced them with limestone arms and swaying trees—as it did the corpses, the broken gunports. Death is the way of things, after all, and who was it to question the sea?

And then came the child.

A baby, gurgling happily in the wings of birds, a laugh-bright golden creature clutched in his chubby hands. He lived. And when he grew into a boy, he flew away and brought others back to play with him: children from faraway lands, sailors reeking of gunpowder and cannon fire, silver-tongued tellers of stories. Cloaked, all of them, in the winged creature’s brightness—or else so close to death that they might as well have worn their own wings.

Only then did the Island feel itself filled, a nameless longing satisfied.

So it held still as the humans played among its cliffs and coves and hollow trees. Tousled their hair with cold breezes as they cobbled together homes in forests sprung from five hundred years of patience. Sighed as they hunted and fought and grew up (and yes, they did grow up, all of them except that first boy, whatever else the later stories said—their bones gathering in hidden places, blood seeping thick and dark into ready earth).

And when they came—a boy and a girl, to the extent the Island recognized such distinctions, creeping silently after the boy who had stopped growing old; roaming across cliff and cove and hollow tree, through rock and spring and waterfall, and into the heart of the forest—when they touched down on shore, a new beginning, or one as old as the world—the Island knew.

But it kept its silence.

Nine years after leaving the Island, Jordan still hated the city heat.

She shoved her duffel bag back behind her hip, breathed through the soup of air that stuck her shirt to her skin. Sweating spectators jostled and leaned toward the ring below, where two fighters in similar gear jabbed and blocked and danced.

An otherwise equal match, except one of them was going through karsa withdrawal. Even from up here, Jordan could see him shaking.

“Are you really the Silver Fist?”

She looked down. A boy of about ten stared up at her, grubby fingers clenched around a fried dough stick. No parents or siblings that she could see—and he was thin and wary-looking in a way that reminded her of Peter, of the Island, of crawling through forest underbrush with Baron, senses pricked for the rustle of a pirate or a Pale or a hungry feral boar.

An aspiring fighter, then. Or perhaps one already.

She wondered if he’d ever dreamed of the Island. If he’d ever read the Sir Franklin novel or watched the many movie adaptations and thought it, for a moment, real.

“No,” she said, serious. “It’s just a costume.”

The kid cast a long look at her hands. She spread them: the prosth on her right a glove of metal, the click of uncurling fingers masked by the crowd. “Pretty convincing, huh?”

“Sure,” said the boy, but he did not shuffle away to his seat. As Jordan turned back to the match, he hovered on her periphery, gnawing his lower lip; stayed until her focus broke like a wave against stone.

“You should get out,” she said finally. Smiled with all her teeth. “While you still can. Don’t let them use you.”

He backed away then, the stick of fried dough in his hand untouched.

The match below was not going well. Third rounds in general tended to be where the most bones broke, fighters both exhausted and amped on their drug of choice, but the karsa addict had fallen to his knees; when his opponent kicked him in the shoulder, he crashed backward and lay twitching on the sand.

As the referee raised his arms, a roar went up through the stadium, half triumph, half protest. This late at night, after the rookie matches and the polite international ones, the spectators hungered for fast punches and faster bets, snapped wrists and broken backs.

This late at night, they wanted a show.

And the addict had failed to provide.

As the medical team—not all of them certified—carried him out, Jordan caught a couple men in suits moving through the stands, wireless headsets hooked around their ears: syndicate muscle, most likely, deployed to ensure a quick disposal of the man’s body. The karsa had rendered him useless as a fighter, but they couldn’t have him shouting valuable intel in dark alleys, no matter how convincingly it came off as an addict’s ravings.

“Pity,” the man standing beside Jordan muttered to his friend. A dragon tattoo snaked down his shoulder, wrapped his wrist in flames. “I’ve been watching Gao Leng since I was in primary school.”

“Happens to all of them. They’re uneducated, desperate—” The friend’s gaze flicked to Jordan. “Hey, isn’t that—”

Jordan ducked toward the aisle, their eyes pressing into her shoulder blades.

Two purple cubes of karsa burned in her own pocket. She had deliberately kept her doses as low as she could stand, these past nine years, and not just because Obalang was a stingy arse who would withhold her next canister the moment she missed a rent payment. Karsa tore up your nerves and digestive system; spend too much time in its grip, and withdrawal would leave you vomiting and convulsing until you regretted the day you were born.

But she could not regret the choice she’d made, nine years ago. Not when the alternative, withdrawal from the Island’s Dust, would have killed her.

Not when it might still.

As she shoved into the locker room below the ring, a hand clamped down on her shoulder.

From anyone else, it might have been a gesture of encouragement. From Obalang, it was anything but. Jordan rested her right palm casually on top of his tobacco-stained fingers; felt them quivering there, hot and trapped. In a single twitch she could crush his bones so finely he would need a prosth to match hers, and for a moment she reveled in that, even if he held sway over the rest of her pathetic little life.

“You owe me,” he said.

Jordan’s eyes narrowed. Her landlord-dealer’s black eyes were jittering, thin lips parted in suppression of ecstasy. The eejit was sharp on his own drug.

“I said I’d run your errand in the morning.”

“What, and count that as payment for a four-ounce can? It’s a small deal. Weak stuff. I’ll barely get enough to cover the cost of transport.” His grip tightened; she shifted back.

“Then why didn’t you ask Alya to do it?”

Obalang scowled. His breath smelled of scorpion curry and the rotted sweetness that came with karsa chewing. A hint of the same, she knew, tinged her breath as well. “You’re replaceable, girl. I can find a dozen kids on the street quicker and hungrier than you. Don’t forget that.”

Jordan nodded at the stadium above. Ads for energy drinks and foreign cars blazed across the walls in four different languages, but beneath, the chant had gone up, faint but unmistakable: Silver Fist. Silver Fist. “Tell it to them.”

Obalang’s mouth twisted. It was his word that opened the Underground doors to her every Fifthday night, his karsa that kept her from melting into a drool-mouthed wreck.

Even so, it was not every day that one of his tenants made him big among the ringside betting circles.

“Make sure you win all three tonight,” he said as she shrugged off his grip and made for the locker room. “Or I’ll give that job to Alya after all.”

As the door swung closed, she flipped him a two-fingered salute.

The locker room was, if possible, even hotter. She shoved her bag in her graffiti-encrusted compartment as fast as she could get it off her; fished out a near-empty tube of ointment, which she smeared over her arms and face to keep her skin from breaking. Then she downed the two karsa cubes dry, and the world sharpened, sweet and slow: the bone-rattling thump of eedro music, the shift of a thousand sweat-slicked bodies, the gleam of her opponent’s smile as he prepared himself in an identical room on the other side of the ring. Shitty karsa, this—withdrawal would leave her sluggish and achy in thirty minutes, dry-heaving a couple hours after that—but she’d run out of the stronger stuff she’d nicked off errands, and she would ride this high for as long as she could.

And if her right arm prickled a warning beneath the prosth, if the very weight of her bones and blood simmered with the echo of pain—

Through the walls, a chime sounded. Jordan rolled her shoulders, shoved in her mouth guard, and pushed open the door.

The sound almost blasted her back into the room. She’d hovered at the outer edges of this crowd all night, but here at its center, the spectators’ fury washed over her like a tide. Her heart was an adrenaline pump, her body electric. As she raised her arms—at once a V for victory and a giant up yours to Obalang, who stood, arms crossed, in the front row—the screams swept her up, drowned her, coated her veins in titanium and glowing ore. Two words, pounded into chests and rusted benches.

Silver Fist. Silver Fist.

She fought to pay for the karsa, yes, and for a rat-infested closet Obalang called a room. Fought to keep her other addiction, her Dust addiction, at bay. But as she rolled onto the balls of her feet, felt the slow hard stretch of muscle and joint, she also felt alive.

She was a burning star, hungry and inexorable, and she would not be broken.

A pale silhouette sliced the opposite doorway.

Jordan did not blink. She had stayed up nights to study this fighter in the Underground’s video archives: his predator’s gait, the kicks he snapped like mouthfuls of scorpion pepper. As the ref raised his arms, she mouthed along to the name that blasted from the flat, tinny speakers.

“Gentlemen, I present to you—the White Tiger!”

Jordan’s opponent loped across the sand, his white-blond hair shining beneath the lights, and the crowd howled.

The White Tiger was the darling of the Underground, tall and lanky and arrogant—and Rittan, people whispered loudly behind their hands, as if in explanation. Jordan had fought him twice since she’d first shown up at the back gates of the arena. The first time, he’d knocked her out in seconds. The second, he’d snapped two of her ribs and whispered, as the medics carted her away, that he went easy on little girls.

But Jordan had come back. She’d wrapped her broken bones, iced her bruises. Learned to throw a punch with the full weight of gravity dragging her down, to stay light on her feet even when no Dust from the Island kept them in the air.

All in all, she’d gotten decent at fighting on sand.

And tonight, she would win back her pride—and her next week’s worth of karsa.

As they bowed to each other, the Tiger’s eyes locked on hers. His irises were giveaway Rittan, the cold pitiless blue of movie stars and senators’ sons, and at the sight of them, an old heat seared across Jordan’s chest.

“Pity you think you’ve already lost,” he said, the words crisped by his accent. “It might have been a good match.”

“Pity you’re an arrogant kweilo,” Jordan countered. “It’ll be fun to beat you.”

They stepped apart, and the scoreboard clock flicked into a countdown, digits burning red against the faded wall paint.

Ten seconds.

At the edge of the arena, Obalang flicked a cigarette. Three for three.

He did this sometimes, when someone big had bet on her and he was behind on rent or drugs or whatever increase in tribute money the Hanak were demanding from him that week. These days it was usually two for three, minimum, or that she hold out for a certain length of time—which gave her lower audience ratings, but fewer broken bones.

In the past few months, however, she’d been losing him fewer bets. Had even thrown a few matches on purpose.

Six.

The Rittan’s white tank top was a paper ghost. The memory of his video matches sketched across the backs of her eyelids: the dancer-like lift of his back foot before a kick, a phantom gap between raised hands. She just had to catch him in real time.

If only it were that easy.

Three.

Fists raised, a meter and a half apart, they crouched as one.

Two.

She needed this, she told herself. A hundred times more than he did.

One.

Another chime rattled the air.

They circled each other. Jordan’s ears pounded blood and bass; she didn’t dare blink. The Tiger did not bounce as some of the newcomers did, established no rhythm that would betray his first strike. His fists were points of light, the metal studs on his knuckles jeweled like snake eyes. The crowd above them stirred and murmured as sweat clung to their backs.

This late in the night, they wanted blows. They wanted blood. They wanted—

Strapped down to the hospital bed, screaming as Dust withdrawal burned through her veins—

Focus, dammit.

In Jordan’s periphery, Obalang scratched his nose.

She lunged. The crowd roared as she and the Tiger became a flurry of limbs, and she fell into muscle memory, blocking again and again as his kicks and alloy-capped fists barreled toward her. A roundhouse wrenched her left arm in its socket and she slammed it with her other forearm, teeth rattling as he shoved her to the ground. Then his heel smacked her shoulder—a starburst of pain, too close to her head—and she was rolling away, back on her feet, her eyes acrid with sweat. Her chest heaved. No shame in breathing hard, here. As they circled each other again, her vision embrittled into sand, light, shadow.

This time, he attacked first.

He fought with the grace of someone trained in classical martial arts—quick and elegant, kicks snapped perfect from the knee. Countering even the punches from her right hand with blows that would have fractured her ribs again if she’d sidestepped a millisecond more slowly. When she showed up five years ago, she had fought with the unrefined flailing she’d picked up on the Island: a child who’d always had the option to fly away, snuggle back into bed at the end of the day. But she’d figured out gravity. Figured out her arm. Now she lashed out with all she had, struck kidney, elbow, crotch—

Another chime, the clock over their heads blazing zeros, and amid the surge of shouting and uncreative slurs involving her anatomy, the ref shoved between them, arms outstretched. Jordan spun away and wiped her face—though that was a stupid move, since sand gritted her knuckles. The White Tiger limped, still tender, toward his locker room. A one-minute break, and no question that she’d ended on top.

Two more to go. A splash of water from the drinking fountain, a stimulant patch slapped on the back of her neck, and she strode back out to the center of the arena.

Even crouching with his legs slightly too far apart, the Tiger looked murderous.

“Just remember,” she called as time ticked down, “I took it easy on you.”

He bulldozed into her with a thud and she crashed breathless to the sand, kicking and struggling as his knees pinned her midsection. A silent fury in those glacier eyes, a studded fist swinging down toward her head, and small suns exploded behind her eyes shit shit shit—

She threw out an elbow, bucked her hips. Dove for him as he tipped off-balance. Her vision was fuzzing in and out—one moment narrowed to the bead of sweat at his temple, the next dazzled by the shine of the surrounding fence. Then she was punching torso, neck, head, her pulse a crack-snap of bone, red echo of tearing teeth—

“Time,” someone bellowed, “time,” and multiple refs’ arms vised around her, carrying her off the ground; the Tiger’s chest heaved as he glared and staggered to his feet. They had bowed to each other only minutes ago, yes, but there was no thought of sportsmanship inside the match itself—only this animal hate, the blue lightning of her body, the tang of ozone on her tongue. As Jordan was set back on the sand, she raised her arms again, and the crowd bore her up, heady as the name she had chosen for herself.

Round three.

The White Tiger was desperate now: humiliated by a girl, even if she was slightly more augmented than he was. It would make him reckless, but also dangerous. If he managed to get the upper hand, she had no doubt he’d break all her ribs tonight.

The clock blinked down its intervals.

One last time.

They circled again, briefly—both of them hot and loose now, the ring blurring with the sweat in Jordan’s eyes—and then he rushed her once more: head shot after head shot, lightning jabs and arcing kicks. Pushing her out of center, aiming for the knockout. She blocked, both arms shuddering with impact, huffed as his fist caught her full in the chest. Pivoted away, panting, toward the wire fence, the pounding sea of faces.

And paused.

Something was wrong.

Her ears felt stuffed with cotton. The taste of iron clogged her tongue. She was standing at the bottom of a giant fishbowl, the crowd a sick sea of gaping mouths and dead eyes, and a slow convulsion twisted her gut—separate from the pulse of her shoulder, the bruises blooming on her arms. A high tight tremor in her knees, her spine.

She thought of Gao Leng, twitching in the sand, and a cold void slid open inside her like a door.

Jordan edged farther away, both hands raised and clenched to stop the shaking. Obalang might have fucked her over—might have discovered she’d been skimming from clients, degraded the karsa he gave her on purpose, and then bet against her so he would profit anyway. But if he hadn’t—if this was the usual dose and it was her body that was habituating, demanding more—

When she was thirteen, she had sought him out at the convenience store near her parents’ house: a shifty, greasy-looking bastard with only the shopkeeper’s gossipy suspicions to recommend him. She had bought herself a few years, thinking to stave off the Dust withdrawal shredding her system hour by hour, and paid for it in people she’d left behind.

But she had always known it would return. Pain, after all, was the only thing that stayed.

Three paces away, the Tiger cocked his head. Understanding loosened the set of his shoulders—and wary triumph.

Jordan met those hard blue eyes. Jerked her head: Well, come on, then.

And when he plunged forward, his leg a flawless scythe toward her temple, she let her fists drop just enough that her head snapped to the side, and she tumbled into the dark.

“What the fuck?” Obalang snarled as Jordan emerged from a back entrance of the Underground, still bruised and raw despite the anti-inflammatory patches she’d slapped over her shoulder and temple. One of the other fighters had tossed her an extra cube of karsa for the withdrawal, but she now owed them a cut of A-grade from tomorrow’s deal, and lurking beneath her skin was the promise that this would happen again—and again and again, until her body gave up altogether. Obalang shoved her against the wall, and the world jarred. “You threw that match.”

“I didn’t,” she said, shouldering around him, but he stepped in front of her, the tip of his cigarette flaring orange.

“I don’t need to show you the godsdamned replay. You dropped your fucking hands.”

Jordan sighed. She had taken her time in the locker room precisely to avoid this. The reek of old sweat and rotting food filled the passageway, turning her stomach; across the street, people stumbled laughing out of bars, chattering in Burimay and Hanwa and Yundori, and she briefly envied them—the way they could lose themselves in the city without bracing for a knife or a fist or the cold kiss of gun to temple.

“These things happen,” she said evenly. “I’d fight better if I had a cut of the A-grade—”

“No,” Obalang snapped, as she’d known he would. “And you’re still running that errand tonight. Two a.m., or I’ll sell that silver fist of yours to the Hanak bosses. It’ll almost pay off the debt you just racked up, along with your next three weeks’ worth of karsa.”

Jordan shifted her gear bag on her hip. She’d always expected to part ways with Obalang eventually—though whether by hot-wiring a motorcycle and hightailing it out of the city, or being shot and dumped in an alley like this one, was yet to be seen. Now, as borrowed drug sang in her veins, she imagined their relationship as a timer, counting down.

Three weeks’ worth. Even if she skimmed off deals, called in every favor owed her, she would break by next Fifthday. And the fighter she went up against then might not be as merciful as the White Tiger.

She would rather die a quick death than a slow one. Would rather go up in flames while she was ahead than shrivel in a slow decay of consequences.

At the edge of her hearing, a little boy’s giggle, as if from inside a black-mouthed cave.

And now?

And now?

And now?

“Everything pays a price to survive,” Obalang said. Darkness eddied over his face, thumbprints of shadow dappled by the light of a nearby restaurant. He ground his cigarette out on the wall. “I’ve paid, all this time. And I’ll keep paying.”

“As will I,” Jordan said, and walked past him into the brightness of the city. She would pick up his godsdamned karsa—but not on his behalf, or the syndicate’s. By this time tomorrow, she’d be long gone. “I’ll be there. Two o’clock sharp.”

Baron always knew when the thunder was coming.

As he stared at his computer screen, the pages of his calculus textbook blurring into a senseless tangle of symbols, a warning thrummed in his ribs, the arches of his feet. Not impossible, or even difficult, to predict—he had, after all, been running on three hours of sleep and a cocktail of legal stimulants for a lightless smear of days—but the dread that fisted behind his forehead was no less potent for having been portended.

He shoved away from the desk, pushed back the keyboard on which he had been tapping uselessly, and it rammed into him with monsoon force.

His lungs seized. His breath came in gasps.

Thirty percent of his final grade in one of the two classes he wasn’t failing, and he didn’t understand half the practice questions.

He had shown up to every lecture, even when he’d lain awake the night before listening to the frantic judder of his heart; hunched over problem sets through the dark narrow hours of early morning. Yet the concepts slipped through his fingers like water, his Bs dipping to Cs and then Ds as the sometimes-doable puzzles of double and triple integrals gave way to a nonsense blear of theorems and proofs.

And now?

Vectors yawned at him, mocking, and Baron’s eyes blurred with sudden heat.

You just have to work harder, he heard his father say, the way he did every time Baron dared express the remotest difficulty with classes. Just because you missed a few years doesn’t mean you can’t catch up.

A few years. Baron was twenty-two, but being held back multiple times for subpar test scores meant he was only a sophomore. Less than halfway through.

He took off his glasses. Focused on cleaning them with the corner of his shirt, though his grip had gone so lax that he was just as likely to drop them on the floor. Breathe. The lab was in an engineering school building—even at one in the morning, students milled through the halls with steaming cups of coffee. Outside of his private study room, he couldn’t let them see him like this: scattered and shaking, his mouth gaped on the edge of a sob.

Get your shit together, he thought, and the voice in his head sounded remarkably like Jordan’s.

But he couldn’t, he couldn’t. His throat had closed; a lead weight crushed his sternum. He was everywhere and nowhere, collapsing and flying apart.

Breathe.

Adrenaline shot through his palms. He didn’t think he was going to die, but gods, he wanted to. Every nerve in his body vibrated toward it as if by gravity.

Breathe.

He looked, as he always did, toward the single narrow window, high on the wall. The world softened without his glasses, unreal—the sky a vague bruised velvet, downtown San Jukong a mere calculation of lights. But it helped him get his bearings back, if not his lungs. Reminded him that he was safe in the broadest sense of the word; that the world was vast, that he could be more than just suffocating.

“Hey.”

Baron whipped around so fast his neck spasmed.

Jordan—he shoved his glasses back on, although who else would fail to knock?—leaned against the doorframe, short hair dripping onto her rumpled shirt collar. Her duffel bag was slung over her shoulder. “Been here all night?”

Baron swallowed. His pulse rampaged in his ears, trapping him in a suit of marble, and he wanted to laugh, wanted to cry, wanted to open his fucking mouth, but his jaw was glued shut, his throat a skein of wire.

Finally he managed, “How’d you get in?”

She raised a brow. “The door?”

“Oh.”

She spoke to the ceiling. “The light was on in the window. And I didn’t think you’d—”

“Gone the fuck to sleep, yeah,” Baron said, and then he was breaking in earnest, his gasps headed toward wheezes. A strangled sound escaped him, like a leaked balloon.

“Hey.” He blinked and she was in front of him, her bag digging into his knee, and his heart lurched and the world was spinning and she was not the kind of person one fell into—she was the last person in the world one might fall into—but this was enough, it had to be enough, because otherwise he had nothing. “You do the five-five thing?”

Five-second inhale, five-second exhale, according to the doctor she’d forced him to see. His chest hurt. “I—I can’t.”

“Three body parts you can feel?”

He clenched his fingers. Curled his toes. Knuckled the ache at his temples, from week upon week of thin grey sleep. “Yeah.”

“Things you hear?”

“You.”

Her eyes like dark pools, searching. “That’s one.”

He clamped down against the urge to fold into fetal position, or scream. “I don’t understand this vector stuff at all.”

“The little arrows and shit?”

“I—yeah.” Baron lay his head on the desk. Counted to five on his next inhale, five out. Breathe. He could do this. Manage these few seconds sitting somewhat upright, listening to the blood roar in his ears. Treading water, moment by moment, and hoping he washed back up on solid ground. “I only got a D on the last midterm because one question was so similar to the example I found online. I copied the steps, I don’t actually know what’s going on—”

“I thought you were seeing a tutor.”

“They’re all booked for finals week. Though I’m failing most of my other classes anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” Baron closed his eyes. Willed the storm to subside, the adrenaline to drain out the back of his skull until he regained some semblance of control. As Jordan rummaged through his desk drawers—she doesn’t even go here, he thought, and a brief, weary consternation washed over him at the thought of one of his classmates peering through the glass door at this particular moment—he forced his jaw to unlock. Listened to her steps across the linoleum, the squeak of hinges.

Behind his eyelids, integrals burned gas-fire blue.

The squeaking paused. “You got any food?”

There. A concrete task. Baron forced his legs to uncurl from the chair, pointed at a drawer she hadn’t searched. “Yeah.”

“Nice.” Jordan plucked two cold pork buns from the white bakery box and stuffed both in her mouth at once. Muffled: “Thanks.”

As she settled cross-legged on the floor with her prize, Baron sat back into his chair, the knot behind his forehead loosening slightly.

“Are you still taking—?” he ventured.

“Yes.” Jordan grinned with her mouth full. “You want?”

“I’m fine.”

“It could—help.”

They did not often speak of his—problem, not unless he was dealing with it directly. But he appreciated the attempt. “No, it’s just—”

“Illegal?”

“Yes, and—”

“Addictive?”

“Yes, and—”

“Not looked upon favorably by the gods?”

Baron rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Everyone pays a price to survive,” Jordan said, taking another bite. “As someone told me recently.”

Baron stared, nonplussed. It was a rare moment that she seemed to let her guard down—when she was not the grown-up version of the Lost Boy he’d known on the Island, swaggering and swearing with the best of them. Not the girl who, every morning for five years, had made her own skin bubble and boil as she shaped Dust into a glamoured right hand that would allow her to appear as Baron’s Twin, unrelated though the two of them were.

He wanted to ask where she’d been tonight, how she’d gotten the bruises that mottled her forearms. But he suspected he didn’t want to know.

“How’s the arm?” he said instead.

She raised her left hand, with the attendant pork buns. “Same as usual.”

“The other one.”

“Response time’s a little slow.”

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

“Yes, and no, I’m not giving it back to you for maintenance so you can keep it for another four days.” She curled the mechanical fingers halfway. “Besides, I’ve gotten syndicate secrets soldered to the inner panels. If you’re caught with it, they’ll sink you straight i