With the magazine feed empty, she cycled the weapon manually, aimed it at the floor, and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s haptic grip panel vibrated against her palm, the signal for a successful dry firing. Someone had hacked the biometric lock on this pistol, and if the kid had pulled the trigger with the ammunition block still inserted, it would have fired. She checked the cadence selector on the side of the gun. It was set to salvo mode. One pull of the trigger would have let loose three rounds at once, each powerful enough to punch through light armor or blow a hole the size of a fist into an unprotected body.
You stupid, reckless child, she thought. What were you going to do with this in the middle of a crowded stadium?
When they were outside on the street again, the restrained kid walking between them under Dahl’s control, Idina had to make an effort to keep her knees from shaking. She took a few slow breaths and allowed herself a long sip from her armor’s water cartridge. Back at the gyrofoil, the kid blinked up into the hot sun, then closed his eyes while they waited for Dahl to open the passenger hatch, as if he were feeling the sensation of warmth on his face for the first time.
“Tell him he’s lucky. He almost didn’t get to see the sun again,” Idina said to Dahl.
“Oh, I think he knows that already,” Dahl replied.
CHAPTER 4
SOLVEIG
When she was on her morning runs, Solveig felt like she was the only person alive on Gretia.
The exercise trail was a seven-point-five-kilometer loop that started and ended at the gymnasium behind the house. Falk Ragnar thought that running in a straight line was boring, so the trail meandered like a river, looping and curving around natural obstacles instead of cutting through them. Solveig had run the trail thousands of times, and she knew every little twist and bend. The first kilometer and a half snaked through the fruit tree orchards before making a long downhill turn toward a brook. When she was still running for best time, she’d use the downslope to pick up speed and let the gravity assist shave twenty or thirty seconds off the total, but she couldn’t run against herself constantly and expect to improve her time each day.
Instead, Solveig had set herself a new challenge, one that would be achievable every single day if she remained focused on the task. Now she ran for accuracy, not speed. Every morning, she set out to run the trail to the same time down to the second, aiming to step back onto the wooden deck between the gymnasium and the pool exactly thirty minutes after starting her loop. With precision as the new benchmark measure, it made no sense to speed up on the downslope because it messed up her rhythm and timing, so she paced herself, enjoying the lessened effort and taking in the smells and sounds instead. It was summer; the early-morning air was cool and fragrant with the smells of dew-covered grass, and tiny pollination drones were silently flitting from tree to tree and flower to flower all over the orchard. All of this tranquil beauty was carefully managed and groomed, of course, but out here it was easy enough for Solveig to let herself be fooled by the illusion of unspoiled nature. She knew that even though nobody else was in sight, there were security drones high in the sky above the estate, monitoring her run. If she showed any signs of distress, she wouldn’t even have to use the flexible comtab bracelet she was wearing around her wrist. Marten or one of the other corporate security agents would be overhead in a gyrofoil in less than a minute. The estate was ringed with multiple layers of sensors. Whether by land or air, nothing bigger than a pollination drone could make it onto the Ragnar homestead unseen and unchallenged. But all of those guardians did their work out of sight and earshot, so for half an hour every morning, Solveig pretended they did not exist.
Six minutes, thirty seconds. Bottom out at the brook and start up the hill again.
She passed the little bend where the path came closest to the softly murmuring waters of the brook that marked the edge of the orchard. Her left foot hit the side of the trail in that spot right at the six-minute, thirty-second mark, and Solveig nodded with satisfaction. From here, it was a brief stretch uphill, eighty-six meters of incline followed by a thirty-meter stretch of even ground. Then the path took another left turn and led across the brook on a small wooden bridge. Beyond, the forest began, purposefully untidy rows of graybark oaks that had been planted here decades before she was born. Now the trees were ten, fifteen meters tall, and the path that
