larger than bugs. Vilaris and I were alone in a box of glass and metal large enough for twenty people.
“What was that all about?” he asked.
“I was just being honest. You are a wealthy son of a gun.”
“No, I mean all that nonsense about why we’re here.”
“Did you want him asking detailed questions about what we’re really doing?”
“What does it matter? We’re finding a streamboat and a crew. That’s not illegal.”
“Okay, so three primies from a secret city are here to find a ship and fill it with sailors, steal back the gravstone their former business associate walked away with, sign trade contracts with a dozen new buyers—trade contracts for the most valuable element in the world, mind you—and return home without leaving behind a trace of their existence. Is that what you wanted me to say?”
“I didn’t say that. But you didn’t have to embellish your story so much.”
“Let me tell you something, Clint. Those customs officers aren’t just there to make sure everyone’s following the rules. They’re there for a piece of any good action they manage to uncover. You think they don’t take bribes? Think they don’t report suspicious activity at the drop of a hat? It doesn’t matter if we’re breaking zero laws or a hundred of them; they can throw you in the hothouse because they don’t like the way you smell.”
Vilaris tossed up a hand, defeated. “Alright. What do I know? It was a little over the top, that’s all I’m saying. But I guess it worked.”
The elevator halted a few stories from the top of the cliffs, and the operators cranked the doors open. Instead of the city, we stepped out into a damp gray cave with harsh white bulbs flickering along the ceiling. Four customs officers in dark green uniforms were standing on the other side of the doors as if they’d been waiting for us, solemn and stern-faced, golden badges glinting in the cold light.
“Just this way, please,” said the first of them, a broad-shouldered man with a shock of blond hair showing beneath his crisp green cover.
Vilaris and I followed. The other officers didn’t move until after we’d passed them. I noted their sidearms, black snub-nosed revolvers, probably loaded with pulser rounds. The floor of the cave was smooth and flat, the walls rough and curvaceous. They led us down the arched hallway and we turned right into a side corridor. When two more officers appeared outside the doorway of the small windowless room ahead of us, I knew something was wrong. I’d guessed it as soon as we left the elevator, but now I knew. I kept up the act nonetheless.
“Eh, excuse me, officer. We’re meant to be headed into the city. Where are you taking us, exactly?”
Heedless of my words, the officer swept an arm toward the doorway. “Just through here, gentlemen.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Excuse me, I said. I demand to be told where you’re taking us.”
I heard hands brush against holsters behind me.
“Mulroney Jakes, we’re placing you under arrest. You’re to remain here until the authorities arrive.”
Andrew Partridge, you sly rascal. Sold us down the river without a hint of betrayal in your eyes, and I didn’t even catch on. Heavens forbid I ever come back to town to find you… “That won’t be necessary,” I said. “I’m turning myself in.”
6
I stuck my hands in the air and turned to face Vilaris. “Elevator. Run.”
Vilaris was confused. “Huh?”
I didn’t have time to spell it out for him. I shoved him aside and put a dart into each of the three officers’ chests before they’d unsnapped their holster straps. Without turning around, I pulled my flecker pistol from inside my jacket and shot the blond-haired officer in his big meaty head. “Run. Dangit Vilaris, run!”
The two officers in the doorway had drawn and started firing before Vilaris and I were halfway down the side corridor. I watched the pulser rounds explode around Vilaris and make the hair stand up on the back of his neck, but he managed to avoid taking any direct hits. Not that pulser rounds would’ve had much effect on primie flesh.
When the first pulser round hit me, on the other hand, it felt like someone had wrapped me in electrical wire and stuck me in a toaster. My bones lit up like fluorescent bulbs, and my skin crawled with those little robotic spiders that have sewing needles for legs. Two more rounds hit me while I was still in the process of collapsing, igniting my body in their electromagnetic agony.
Vilaris heard me fall and came back. He came back for me. Lifted me, dragged me to my feet and carried me, firing flecker rounds over his shoulder while we charged down the hallway. Someone hit the alarm as we rounded the corner. A siren wailed, loud and long and keening. The elevator lay ahead, our gate to freedom.
I hurt. All over. It’s just like the cops to put you in the worst possible pain you could be in without doing any real damage. I’d been hit with pulsers before, mind you. The miner’s thugs had used them on me earlier in the same night I escaped from the hovercell. That hadn’t been my first time getting pulsed, but gouge my eye out with a rusty fork if it hadn’t hurt more than the time before.
It was the worst feeling in the world, getting pulsed. Worse than getting crackled. It felt like your body was in the process of being melted down for scrap. Knowing you’d be back to normal in an hour or two didn’t make it any better. At least a flecker knew how to sear the flesh off your bones. At least a laser could burn a real hole in you. A pulser was little more than a hallucination of pain—the most powerful hallucination I’d ever undergone, including the ones I’d undergone by choice.
“Hold on, Mull. Not too much farther,” Vilaris was saying.
Somehow my augmented eye had zoomed itself all the way in, and my unenhanced eye was trembling like a coin on a train track. Trying to see anything felt approximately as effective as using a snow globe to look through a kaleidoscope with the lights out. The sound of footsteps echoed around us, and Vilaris was dragging me into the elevator and trying to figure out how to get us to the bottom. I leaned into the glass, my head swimming and my legs wobbling like jelly. The doors slipped shut as customs officers raced down the hall after us. Then we were descending, and I was putting my back to the window and reaching for Vilaris.
“I promise that after tonight, I will try not to ask you to do this ever again,” I said. “Hug me.”
Vilaris gave me his usual look of bewilderment.
“Come here and wrap those big sexy arms around me, Vilaris, curse you. I don’t have time for your games.” I leaned hard against the window and planted the bottom of my foot against the glass.
Vilaris took a step toward me.
I yanked him in close, whispered in his ear. “Pretend it didn’t happen this way.”
My heel port snicked open. The solenoid jackhammered the window, and an instant later we were floating downward on a bed of crystalline shards. I felt the grappler chomp into the elevator ceiling and let the winch loose, Vilaris’s startled screams and desperate, scrabbling arms worrying over my pained body.
He held on, heavens help him. Held on until I squeezed the winch tight and set us down like a couple of butterflies landing on a flower. Butterflies with rocks strapped to their ankles, landing on a flower made of the ground.
The winch was screeching inside my arm by the time we slammed down. Friction smoke was pouring from the wrist port as I ejected the wire and freed myself from Vilaris’s bear hug. I could hear the alarm ringing faintly through the open elevator shaft far above.
A group of customs officers came toward us. Vilaris pulled me into the crowd. Whatever they called those tunnels and dark rooms where they brought people who didn’t pass muster, neither of us wanted to wait around and find out. We were shuffling through a crush of bodies, ducking around baggage trains and pallets of building materials and carts full of wilting produce. Then we were in the airfield, darting through the maze of ships and campsites. My legs still felt like jelly and my head was pounding. It was only Vilaris’s constant guidance that got me back to The Secant
’s Clarity without curling up into the fetal position and crying alone in the dark.
“No way we’re going up in this thing again,” I said as we entered the control capsule through the gash in the Clarity’s hull. “We have to find another ship.”
“That’s what we just got back from failing to do, isn’t it?”
I draped myself over the pilot’s chair, my body still throbbing like a sore thumb. “What we tried to do was buy a streamboat in good condition from a rich person who took good care of it. What we’re down to now is finding any ship that flies, and getting off Mallentis before the cops find us.”
“I’ll start looking.” Vilaris moved toward the exit, but I stopped him.
“Where are Chaz and Blaylocke?”
“Crew cabin, maybe? Or aft, keeping the furnace going?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You go. I’ll find them, as soon as I can stand up without my knees clacking together like cold teeth.”
I sat alone, watching traces of firelight dance on the window panes, a cool nighttime breeze blowing in through the gash. My legs were splayed out, my arms hanging over the armrests, my back and neck both as stiff as a winter frost. No position I tried sitting in was comfortable.
After a little while, I stood and stretched. It felt like my whole body had a headache. A veil of malaise descended over me as I passed through the cabins in search of Chaz and Blaylocke. I found them both sound asleep in