This Brutal Moon

Book 3: The Kindom Trilogy

by Bethany Jacobs

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera; Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

Bethany Jacobs returns with the thrilling conclusion to The Kindom Trilogy that began with the Philip K. Dick Award–winning These Burning Stars, the debut epic space opera trilogy about revenge, power, and the price of legacy.
 
Violence has erupted across the Treble. The colony that Jun Ironway and Masar Hawks have fought to protect is now woefully compromised, and its people, unwilling to submit to tyranny once more, face a brutal fight for their lives and freedom.

In the midst of upheaval and rebellion, new enemies arise at every corner, including a familiar player who won't let power slip through his fingers again. Not when he has every Kindom Hand under his heel. And whether he will be as bloody-minded as his predecessors remains to be seen. 
 
As the quiet ones launch their attack and all hope seems lost, Cleric Chono looks to unlikely allies to fight a final battle for peace. But one crucial question remains: where is Six? 

Praise for The Kindom Trilogy: 

★ “An exciting start from a fresh talent, offering emotional and political complexity plus plenty of interplanetary action.” – Kirkus (Starred Review) on These Burning Stars

★ “Plotted like a chess match, confident and surprising as Jacobs moves each piece thoughtfully across her board ... If Jacobs’ second entry is anything like the first, we’ll have so much more to discover across her universe in the years to come." – BookPage (Starred Review) on These Burning Stars

"There’s no shortage of twists, betrayals, and unexpected alliances in this intricate story of revenge and survival. This sets things up nicely for a grand finale in book three." –Publishers Weekly on On Vicious Worlds 

Release date: December 2, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 512

Sample

Farren Ki

The Moon Jeve

In the deep, hollow darkness of the mine, she cast a light upon the wall, and saw the ropes of jevite weaving through gray rock. The miners had come upon this cavern unexpectedly, an offshoot of a much narrower tunnel cut through the seam. The space echoed above her; it stretched the breadth of a temple. The scarlet-veined striations of jevite were as thick as her arm. She tested the weight of the rock pick in her hand, the grooves of the handle fitting comfortably against her calluses, and approached the nearest wall.

It took very little effort to chip a hunk of jevite free. The facets were as smooth as glass and the edges like sharp blades. She held it, feeling its density, its purity. She licked it, tasting the unique mineral bitterness with its slightly sour aftertaste. This fresh find had some buzzing with excitement, but she felt only dread weighing her down, as if she had stumbled into a monster’s lair.

Someone came through the narrow passage into the cavern—Gus ben Roq, leading with his lantern. He set the lantern in the center of the cavern and turned up the settings. Fractals of light burst against the walls. He looked around pensively.

“Beautiful, no?” he said. He had a soft, unemotional voice, but there was reverence in it.

She hummed, noncommittal. “Several tons at least.”

Gus said, “That is conservative.”

She looked at the ground. She was treading upon more jevite. If they dug down, who knew how much they would find?

“We are two miles beneath the surface,” she observed. “The deeper we go, the denser the rock, and the greater the chance of cave-ins. Every time we cut a new tunnel, we risk burying our people alive.”

He, of anyone, knew this already. He had been the crew manager for more than ten years. He had seen his people die and nearly died himself, with scars and missing fingers to prove it. He gave her a steady look.

“This is our bargain, my River. Everyone takes the risk willingly.”

Yes, of course. She looked at the floor again, felt the unevenness under her boots. They would dig deeper. They always dug deeper. This had been the failure of the Kindom overseers two centuries ago. The known jevite seams ran a depth of a thousand feet to a quarter mile beneath the surface of the moon. When they reached the limit of those depths, the Kindom made them dig deeper. Half a mile deep. Three-quarters of a mile deep. A full mile. But the rock proved barren. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the jevite trade collapsed, and the overseers abandoned them to their carved-up moon and their decrepit biodomes and their mining pollution. But the Jeveni kept digging. At the two-mile mark, they cracked the stone carapace that divided them from a massive seam of jevite. And thus began this new, perilous chapter.

“Drae,” Gus said, and the sound of her name, when he always called her “my River,” made her uneasy. “I thought you would be pleased.”

“Why should I not be pleased?” Drae sen Briit replied, gazing up at the walls as if they were star charts, as if they might show the path to escape. In a way, they did. They were the currency that funded a great enterprise. But they were also the blood that had drawn predators, again and again. She said, “This is the richest section we have found in years.”

So rich, in fact, that it would move up her coming voyage to The Glitch, a frontier station far beyond Kindom reach. Laden with the wealth of this cavern, she would travel to The Glitch and pay for what they wanted. A high price for a needful reward.

Gus said nothing at first, and she almost thought the conversation was over. But—

“You are unhappy,” he said.

She looked at him with a flare of impatience but pushed the emotion down, her smile tight. “I am not unhappy with you. I am proud of you, and the miners.”

His expression was chiding. “But you are unhappy. Not with the miners. But with the seam.”

Drae felt caught, and she didn’t even realize how hard she was gripping the piece of jevite until she felt the sting and glanced down to find a little blood welling on her palm. She casually tossed the jevite aside and hid both her hands in her pockets, shrugging casually.

“Is there some requirement that I be happy?” she asked like it was a joke.

He wasn’t impressed. “You have always been serious. But you have also always been calm. Lately, you seem less calm. People have noticed. They ask me what is wrong with you, and I tell them there is nothing wrong, but I can see it, too. And now you are looking at this seam as if it wants to murder you.”

It does want to murder me, she thought. It wants to murder all of us. It always has.

Even thinking this was a kind of sacrilege among her people. The Jeveni revered jevite as a gift from the goddess, one that the outer worlds had stolen for centuries but was theirs by right. Drae had no such romantic perspective. The jevite had existed long before the Jeveni—it was an ancient, bloody fist in the middle of the Black. Circumstance had brought her people here, not to claim a birthright, but to feed the evil hunger of the moon.

Somewhere in the outer tunnels, miners began to sing. They did not sing loudly (volume carried vibration, and mines were no place to trouble the atmosphere), but still the song reached her, low and melancholy, describing the years of the jevite trade.

“Do you have doubts about what we are doing?” Gus asked.

That was a complicated question, but, “No,” Drae said. “I have no doubts about The Hope. But I am your River, Gus. It is my job to protect our people, and I have much on my mind. There is no need to worry.”

She hoped this would be the end of it, but it was not. Gus stared at her, and his stare began to itch, like mites tunneling under her skin, till her muscles and bones felt exposed by the intuition in his eyes. He did not believe her. He did not believe there was no reason to worry. At last, exasperated, she exhaled.

“I have been having dreams.”

Gus’s eyes narrowed, not with suspicion, but with the insight of a man who knew how to read meaning into the shifts of stone.

“Sajeven speaks to you?” he asked.

Drae made an annoyed sound. “Nightmares are just an expression of anxiety. We are within sight of achieving a goal our ancestors could only dream of. That is reason enough for me to have nightmares.”

“What are your nightmares?” he asked.

She glowered at him. He was patient. He had always been patient.

“I see a person walking through the tunnels ahead of me. They wear a red coat. I follow them, but I am not me, I am… some other person. As they walk, they rake their nails across the walls of the tunnel. The rock opens up around them, and it gets wider and wider until the tunnel is a cavern. Bigger than this one, bigger than any cavern in any seam we have ever found. I try to catch up to them, but the jevite they have torn down becomes a river behind them, and I can barely walk against the current. Then, when I think I am finally getting closer, they look back at me for the first time…” She trailed off.

Gus said, “And?”

Drae cleared her throat, as if doing so could dismiss the significance, and said, “They have my face.”

Gus considered this. Out in the tunnels the miners reached a new verse of their song. A prayer to Sajeven, beseeching her to bless them. Farther off, Drae heard the clanking sound of the elevator car descending from the surface, and she thought it must be a shift change.

“You should go to the Stone,” Gus said. “Tell him your dream. He can consult with Sajeven on your behalf, and maybe there will be answers.”

Drae grimaced. She had deep love and respect for the Stone of the Wheel—for all the spokes. But they were different from her. They were older, and their age and experience were like a summit she could never reach. They had known each other intimately for decades, and she was the outsider who had replaced the old River, a woman dead five years and descended by children and grandchildren. Drae had no children, though she was twenty-nine years old and most people had begun to fulfill their procreative responsibilities by now. If Drae went to the Stone, the Stone would tell her she needed more in her life than the mines and The Hope. She needed to begin her family, which would bring love into the empty places in her life.

Drae had doubts about that.

“It is only a dream,” she said, though the dream had dogged her for months.

Gus looked unconvinced, as though he would argue with her, but suddenly a youth came sprinting inside, red-faced and heaving for breath.

“Moon arise, child, what is this?” Gus asked.

The youth looked at Drae, their eyes wide. “My River, you must come.”

Drae felt ice in her stomach, a crystallizing burn. She saw the cavern in her mind opening like the mouth of a jump gate.

“What happened?” she asked.

“A ship!” they said. “On the east airfield!”

“A Kindom ship?” asked Gus.

“No. Civilian. But armored, and about ten saan have disembarked. The Wheel says you must come.”

No strangers had come unannounced to Jeve in decades. Even the ones who brought trade did it with the permission of the Wheel. No one defied their treaty rights anymore, for what would even pirates want with Jeve when everyone knew it had nothing?

Already she and Gus were rushing from the cavern, following the youth back to the aged elevator shaft that would carry them through sheets of rock to the surface some two miles from the dome city of Farren Ki. So far underground, Drae’s cast access was glitchy, but nonetheless she managed to access a view of the east airfield. The foreign ship was a midsize and pristinely built private vessel called The Blue Kite. Drae imagined some avian creature sinking its talons into the surface, and the talons were like the fingernails of the red-coated person in her dream, and she shoved the thought away.

By the time she reached the surface, the strangers were approaching the polymer tunnel that connected Farren Ki’s eastern pod bay to the interior of the dome. A ground shuttle waited for her, and whisked her away toward the city. The shuttle was fast, but it was a distance of almost twenty miles. By the time she reached the bay, there was only the vacuum-sealed door between the strangers and Farren Ki. But the strangers were not alone on their side of the door. A dozen Jeveni sentries had gone out to meet them.

The Wheel was waiting for her.

“Thank Sajeven!” cried the Tree.

“Drae,” said the Gale. “We did not know what—”

“Open the doors,” Drae said.

“It is unsafe! You cannot—”

Drae ignored them, storming forward to hit the release, and as she went through the doors, she saw her people pointing rifles. There was a great cacophony in the tunnel. The sentries were shouting at the strangers in Je, warning them to stay where they were, and the strangers stood frozen. They were dressed in space suits as modern and expensive as their ship. They had cast back their helmets and their eyes were amazed, but they didn’t seem to have weapons or to know what the sentries wanted. One of them, a dark-eyed, long-faced Katishsaan, stood at the front, holding up his hands and beseeching the Jeveni—

“Please! We’re unarmed! We’re no threat to you!”

He was speaking Ma’kessi. None of Drae’s sentries spoke Ma’kessi, nor had translator bots. One sentry, Dimon, snarled at the group, “Get on your knees!”

The long-faced man switched dialects. “Do you understand me? I’m sorry. My translator is having trouble with your—”

Another stranger, standing just behind him, said in growling Katish, “They better put those guns down, or I’ll give them a reason.”

The others, apparently in agreement, twitched with the threat of violence.

Dimon warned, “Get down now!”

Drae strode through her sentries and stood between them and the strangers. Authority poured off her like heat, and everyone went silent and shocked as she demanded in flawless Katish, “Who the fuck are you?”

The long-faced man blinked rapidly, seemed not to know what to do, and blurted, “I am a friend! My name is Lucos Alanye, and I am a friend!”

Drae answered with silence, let it stretch out until he looked confused but also afraid. At last, she murmured aside to Dimon and the sentries, “Lower your weapons.”

Dimon was incredulous. “They are uninvited!”

She gave him a look so quelling that he shifted back, and the rest of her sentries cautiously pointed their rifles at the ground. Drae turned to face the leader of the strangers again. He smiled for the first time, anxious and uncertain. He bowed over his open palms.

“Thank you for coming to speak to me. It’s an honor to meet you, Sa…?”

He had a deep, gruff voice, but his register lifted, inviting her to introduce herself. Drae thought it was very bold of him to thank her for coming as if it were a predetermined meeting, rather than a consequence of his unwelcome appearance. Drae considered not giving him her name, but that would be shortsighted, and it was better that he know who he was dealing with.

“I am Drae sen Briit, the River of the Jeveni Wheel.”

His eyes widened ridiculously. “Sa Briit,” he said. “I prostrate myself before the generosity of the Wheel.”

Drae lifted her brows at this, and replied, “Do you? All right, then.”

She made an encouraging gesture.

He asked haltingly, “I’m… sorry?”

“Prostrate yourself. If you hold me in such esteem.”

His confusion turned to uncertainty and alarm, as if he were trying to decide if it was a joke and also whether he could do it without losing the respect of his crew, who were glancing at one another and scowling.

Drae snorted. The Jeveni Wheel had no interplanetary authority. The Kindom regarded them as little more than the loose council of a savage race. Katishsaan of such obvious wealth would hardly get on their knees for her.

She didn’t push the matter. “You have made my sentries very nervous, Lucos Alanye. By the law of our treaties, strangers are required to request an invitation to Jeve.”

He looked chastened. “I apologize, Sa. I didn’t know.”

“The most cursory review of our treaties could have told you as much.” Was that heat in his cheeks? Before he could fumble more apologies, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

This seemed to relieve him. He smiled again. “My colleagues and I are researchers. We come from a small, modest university in Dunta, on Kator. We’re studying the long-term impacts of the jevite trade, particularly the phenomenon of sinkholes and crust collapse, and the vulnerability of the depleted seams. We want to understand how your dome cities have recovered from the effects of mining pollution, as we think it could yield insights for helping factory communities across the Treble. If we could find temporary shelter in Dewbreak, we can—”

“Farren Ki,” Drae interrupted. He looked at her uncomprehendingly. “The Treble called this city Dewbreak when it began its mining operations here. We Jeveni have older, truer names for our cities, and this one is called Farren Ki.”

Alanye nodded quickly. “Of course. May I ask what the name means?”

Drae said, “No.”

He blinked. For a moment they did not speak, before he recovered enough to say, “Well, I’m determined to respect your customs, if you allow us to stay in—Farren Ki. And of course we will compensate you generously for your assistance. We’ve brought many gifts, as well.”

He cast an image into the air. It displayed a rotating carousel of goods. Casting technology. Hydroponics equipment. Carbon dioxide scrubbers. Drae was indifferent, focused on his words. He had mentioned the depleted jevite seams; he’d said it with feigned casualness, apparently hoping the gifts would distract them. He was utterly transparent.

When she gave no reaction to the goods, he said cautiously, “If there are other things you want, we can certainly discuss it. We hope for a mutually beneficial relationship, if—”

One of her sentries interrupted in Je, “What are they saying, my River?”

She didn’t answer right away, aware that if she told the truth, the tunnel would become like a mine shuddering on the verge of collapse. Finally she said, “They want to study our pollution.”

One sentry scoffed. “His ancestors have done enough.”

Dimon spit on the ground. “Sajeven, speak to Som for me and I will kill these strangers.”

Before Drae could answer, the Star said in her aural link, “We have translated his statements. Come back to the bay at once.”

Drae paused, still watching Alanye, who looked like he was trying very hard to seem well meaning, despite his nerves. The ridiculous carousel continued to turn through the air. She tracked her eyes across Alanye, giving him a more clinical perusal. He was tall and lean, his hair pristinely shaved on the sides. In that fitted space suit, it was easy to see his musculature, his broad shoulders, his bearing—he was not some university researcher. He had a soldier’s build, though not the poise of a cloaksaan. Also, his accent was typical of the Kray West lowlands, an underdeveloped and impoverished area of Kator. A scholar would have trained those inflections out of his voice. And his comrades looked as little like scholars as he did. She was certain they had weapons of some kind.

“Wait here,” she said to him, and then spoke aside to Dimon. “Keep your guns down, but watch them. Cool heads, everyone. I will be back soon.”

In the bay, the other spokes looked grim and stormy-eyed.

“He is a mining contractor. He is here to look for jevite,” said the Tree. “We have seen this before.”

Drae knew her own history. Forty years ago something like this had happened, and though the Braemish explorers had not found anything of value in the ruins of the Pallor Seam, they had caused enough trouble in their time, harassing the Jeveni in every imaginable way. Drae had not been born yet, but the members of the Wheel all remembered it; they remembered how hard it had been to oust the Braems, and how many had been hurt in the process.

“We cannot allow them to stay here,” said the Star, his cloudy eyes fierce despite the failure of his eyesight. “We must send them away.”

Drae said, “If we send them away it will invite scrutiny. The Treblens do not take well to being denied what they want. They will assume we are hiding something.”

“We are hiding something,” the Stone retorted, voice querulous. “We must get rid of them before they look too close.”

This was true. When the pirates came forty years ago, the Jeveni had not yet drilled down through the Pallor Seam to the Blood Seam far beneath it. Today, entrance to the Blood Seam was carefully concealed, with miners coming and going stealthily, to put off any spies. But if Lucos Alanye went exploring, he might find their secret. She thought of the figure in the red coat.

Gus ben Roq said, “Kill them.”

Everyone looked at him.

“We cannot just kill them,” said the Gale, though she sounded as if she’d like nothing more.

“We can. We can kill them and destroy their ship. We can make it look like a crash. Others have crashed on our moon before.”

Drae flicked her eyes over the faces of the Wheel, saw them thinking about it, wanting it. They turned toward her again, and their expressions were almost hungry. All Jeveni had this hunger, this desire for revenge on the Treble, this epigenetic response. Drae had it, too. She hated the Treblens. She hated Lucos Alanye with his ignorance and his smile and his belief that he could fool them. With a single word she could signal Dimon, and her sentries would slaughter the Katishsaan.

But she laid all the details of Lucos Alanye before her, like a table in her mind covered in artifacts. The Kray West accent; the guardsaan build; the mention of a “modest” university. All compared against the sleek space suits and the modern, expensive ship outside Farren Ki. Not to mention the gifts he’d brought, and the promise of pay. Alanye had made a crucial mistake. His cover story did not suit someone with access to such resources. Not unless he had a patron.

“You will trust my judgment?” she asked the Wheel.

They looked uneasy. Since becoming the River, she had gained their trust, but it was the trust of older, experienced people for a youngster. Conditional. They glanced at one another, finally homing in on the Star, who was the final word, even in their democratic system. Drae was prepared to obey him, but she prayed to Sajeven that he would not ask her to kill these people.

“Very well, Drae,” he said. “You know the outer worlds best. We will trust you.”

She nodded crisply and returned to the tunnel with its vibrating tension and its thin barrier between oxygen and vacuum.

Alanye looked relieved to see her. “I should have mentioned before! We’ve come with a large supply of sevite. I know the Kindom only grants your people limited rations. Consider it another gift.”

Drae looked at him flatly. He had held the sevite in reserve, a bargaining chip, and the moment he faced uncertainty, he offered it. He was in over his head. He was a childsaan, and by some of the glances of the people behind him, she sensed that they thought the same. Who knew what sort of background they had? Mercenaries? Smugglers? Whatever band he had put together, they did not respect him. He was a puppet, and if he had sevite, it was fairly easy to guess who had hold of his strings.

“That is a kind offer,” she said, thinking with mean satisfaction of the tons and tons of jevite on her moon, a wealth that would make his little sevite gift look like a plate of animal droppings compared to a banquet. “We will of course accept your gifts and your payment for our hospitality. That said, accommodations are very limited in our city. We advise you to use your ship as a home base. Please return there now, and we will invite you back to share a meal.”

Alanye looked as if he wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or disappointed. The people behind him seemed wary. Drae’s sentries, perhaps noticing a change, shifted. She could only imagine what accusations and complaints she would face when she returned to the Wheel. But she put all that from her mind, holding Alanye’s dark stare.

“That’s very generous, Sa Briit,” he said. “And may I just say—”

“Tonight’s meal will be a casual affair. No business. In the morning, you and I will discuss your interests and determine a course of action. I will be your host and guide through this process. I expect our interactions to be illuminating.”

He smiled guardedly. Good. He was not so foolish that he did not understand the implications of her statement: He would have no free rein. He would operate under the eye of the River. Nothing he did would escape her scrutiny, and she would use his presence to her own advantage.

And though he didn’t know it yet, she would find out who had sent him here. She would uncover their purpose. She would wring the secrets out of him, and make him her puppet.

And if it served her people, she would kill him.

Farren Eyce

The Planet Capamame

Jun Ironway’s eyes dart across an array of casting views that crowd the air in her small office. Behind her, Liis Konye sits in an oversized chair and slowly, calmly, cleans a gun. It’s a Som’s Edge pistol, the gun Jun’s Great Gra gave her when she left home sixteen years ago to attend the Academy of Archivists in Riin Kala. Jun listens to the familiar sounds of Liis’s work, thinking how, not even a month ago, all the guns in Farren Eyce were locked away in the armory. Yet she feels safer knowing Liis is armed. The office has the rich green smell of the salve that Liis rubs into the stump of her severed arm, and Jun feels safer for that, too. But their last jar of the salve is almost empty.

On one of the views, a newscaster in Teros System is choosing her words very carefully as she describes the fighting on Trin-Ma. “While the governor of Trin-Ma left the city some days ago, Khen Ookhen Obair has sent his own fighters to shore up the continental army. First Cloak Seti Kess’s command ship, The Makala Iis, remains in Teron orbit. That no cloaksaan or Kindom guards have joined the battle against the rebels is proof enough of Sa Kess’s confidence in Khen and the military.”

Jun snorts, as much at the propaganda as at the use of Seti Moonback’s new name. Having shirked the First Family that bore him, he has propped himself up as something wholly independent and blessed by the gods. Though he never came right out and said it, it didn’t take long for talk to spread that “Kess,” a word from the dead language of the Treble’s early colonizers, means “crown of the gods.”

Jun has an impulse to spit on the ground. “Dick. Was he this much of a dick when you knew him?”

Liis is still working on the gun. “Yes. He was always a dick.”

Her voice is distant. When Jun looks at her, her mouth is a grim line. Jun recognizes that look, that way that Liis becomes sometimes, absent and haunted. Once, Liis had served under Seti Kess. Once, Kess’s second-in-command, Medisogo, had cut off Liis’s arm. All of Liis’s steadiness can’t hide from Jun the memories she carries.

The newscaster’s voice grabs back Jun’s attention. “While reports persist that rebel groups are expanding and that new insurgencies are popping up across the Treble, Kindom spokessaan assert that most of these are little more than social clubs of privileged university students. Many are personality cults ordered around the traitor Cleric Chono, who has been missing since she fomented rebellion in the Secretaries’ stronghold of Nikapraev just three days ago. First Cloak Kess continues to promise the law-abiding saan of the Treble that he will not rest until all rebels stand down.”

Jun fake-gags. “You know, a few days ago he was throwing money at any group that would cause trouble for the Secretaries. If you’re gonna rebel and then turn around and set yourself up as the crown-fucking-commander of the whole Treble, have the decency to make up a story about your one-time frontliners suddenly becoming bad guys.”

Liis asks, “Are the numbers holding steady?”

Maybe this is Liis’s way of saying she can’t talk about Kess anymore. Feeling guilty, Jun redirects her gaze at one of the other casting views.

“Some last casts straggling in. Not that they’ll change the outcome.”

Liis hmms.

“It’s absurd,” Jun says.

“What’s absurd?”

“This thing, this… voting.”

She grimaces on the word. She has no love for the autocracy of the Kindom or the regencies of space stations and cities. She’s all for allowing saan to shape their own government, and the Jeveni practice of voting in members of the Wheel seems in keeping with their communal ethos. But letting them vote in favor of being destroyed? How is that right? Then again, what does Jun know about best interests? How many choices has she made that have blown up in her face like the most spectacular and devastating fireworks?

“Masar was right,” Liis says. “Effegen was right. They knew what the people of the colony would want.”

“We’ll see how the people feel when Kindom warbirds flood through the gate. Tomesk should never have called for a vote. He must be pissing himself somewhere.”

Tomesk ten Ruvo, the Tree of the Wheel and a recalcitrant, distrusting man, had ordered that they let the colonists vote on whether to destroy the Capamame jump gate and, in so doing, prevent an invasion. Tomesk believed that now they know that it is First Cloak Seti Moonback (strike that, Kess) with access to their gate key, the people would do whatever it took to prevent him coming through their door. Tomesk was wrong. The idea of permanently losing access to the Treble is a bridge too far for the colonists, most of whom never intended to go to Capamame and many of whom hope to one day return to their birth worlds.

Liis says with a touch of humor, “He’s no doubt very disappointed.”

Jun snorts. “You know… that’s almost worth all of us getting enslaved.”

Another of her casting views, one with eyes on the hospital’s operating theater (“Morbid,” Liis had reproved her), gives a chime. The surgeon who’s been operating on Fonu sen Fhaan announces that the foot amputation went well, and they are returning Fonu to their recovery room. For all Jun has never liked the River of the Wheel, she exhales with relief. The memory of the last time she saw Fonu dogs her waking and sleeping hours, all the worse because it was also the last time she saw her cousins—who attacked and tortured Fonu, who terrorized the colony, who betrayed Jun—

Liis says, “You should take a break.”

“Effegen said she was going after the vote,” Jun answers.

“So set a ping. Come and sit with me.”

There’s the sound of the gun’s final pieces clicking back together. A dozen Seti Kesses could charge this office, and Jun would survive because Liis is here and Liis has a gun.

But—

“No,” Jun mutters. “I… I want to wait.”

She watches the three central views in the air, each a camera surveying a prison cell in the recently repurposed newsnest of Farren Eyce. In one of the cells, her cousin Bene is sitting on his cot, back against the wall as he reads a book of poetry that Liis brought him. He looks exhausted, circles under his eyes. Jun wonders if that’s a mark of innocence or guilt. Is it naive, this instinct to