I’d set my palmerlog to alert me of stormtech-related news, and now it was lighting up like fireworks. More deaths as a result of stormdealer warfare. Crimelords attacking each other in their ships, on the streets. One of the victims was a kid, no more than fourteen. He’d been used as a foot soldier for a multispecies stormtech syndicate, shuttling stormtech between spaceports. He’d ended up in a spaceport his syndicate wasn’t allowed to operate in. Wasn’t there five minutes before someone shot him in the head and dumped his body in a shipping crate. Journalists and newsfeeds across the asteroid were already dissecting his corpse like carrion to back up their agendas and political stances, ignoring the tragedy, the horror of the casual violence. His body wasn’t even cold yet. A kid had died, just to teach his bosses a lesson.
And his bosses? Animal Kingdom.
His parents would be watching all of this. Wondering why we were up here instead of protecting innocents. Wondering what the hell it mattered that we’d stopped one stormdealer, when we couldn’t stop the rest of them.
My teeth were clenched. Everything we’d just achieved here felt empty and as useless as a breached airlock. One step forward, three steps back. How the hell do you fight an entire drug industry? How could we fight the Suns like this? Hell, they could be watching now. Through a cam-feed, a drone, anything. Gathering up intel to weaponise our own plans against us.
I stomped out of the room, distinctly aware that Katherine was watching me go.
34
Night Hunters
Kowalski had told me to hold off until she and Grim had broken through the data as they would need my help to trawl through it. I had a few hours to kill in the meantime and decided to attempt the local bathhouse, abandoned at the late hour. I sat sweating in the spherical clay sauna. Water dripped from me and splashed to the wooden floorboards. Somewhere, quiet ambient music was playing. I sipped from a bottle of gin beside me. You weren’t meant to bring alcohol in here, but I’ve never paid much attention to the rules when it comes to alcohol consumption. The stormtech seemed to enjoy the heat, and was spasming in furious bursts through my body. Tonight, it had also decided to wedge itself in my left armpit, writhing there with a furious tickling sensation. I’ve long learned you can’t dislodge the stuff from going where it wants to go: I rode the feeling out until it grew bored and decided to explore elsewhere.
I polished off the remainder of the bottle and got up to shower when I felt something slimy and slick wedged in my throat. I wriggled my jaw, tried to budge it with my tongue. I balled up a mouthful of saliva and spat it out. No dice, it was stuck fast. My chest heaved as I gagged on it, feeling my throat moisten and clench with the effort, until a slimy ball landed on my tongue. I spat it straight out. It looked like a piece of thick, rubbery phlegm, the size of my thumb. Except it was glowing blue. And seemed to be squirming. I slowly spat again and saw my saliva was flecked with the same glowing mucus. I looked in the mirror. Chunks of phlegm were wedged between my teeth, swimming along my tongue.
This wasn’t totally abnormal – my saliva and phlegm had been blue before. But that was years ago, before rehab had smoothed it out. Even with the Jackal forcibly injecting me, it was happening again too quickly. I didn’t want to dwell on it and began the process of scrubbing out my mouth, spitting and heaving all the mucus I could. No matter how much I spat, my body kept churning out a never-ending supply. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to be grower thicker, congealing to my tongue.
Feeling solidly grossed out by my own body, I finished showering and slipped into a fresh underskin. I caught three different traveltubes to throw off any pursuers before heading over to our rendezvous point. The room we’d booked was skimming the outer edge of the asteroid in one of those half-completed floors still in the process of being assembled. The floor-to-ceiling viewport showed a ruffled dark green ocean, heaving with curves and swells. The water rippled as ships from a dozen species and a dozen classes shot out over the ocean in bright blue streams, steering up towards the circular spacecraft tubes jutting from the ceiling.
Katherine was standing on the balcony. ‘You’re here early,’ she said without turning around. She was out of her work clothes, wearing a loose red shirt and woolly scarf.
I joined her at the rails, dangling my arms over the sides, our shoulders touching. ‘Just wanted to check in on you.’
She tilted her gaze up to follow the flight path of a yellow Torven ship until it melted lazily into the horizon. ‘I don’t even know anymore. It’s just all so numb.’ She was a dark outline against the darkening sky. Her hair was being blown around her face by the salty ocean breeze. ‘You know what I hate? People say the right things. They act the way they should. But when they look at me, they’re waiting for me to explode. They look at me like I’m a bomb about to go off, and they keep their distance. It just gets everything crashing back down again, and again, and again. And then I go and do what I did to that stormdealer and I wonder if they’ve got the right of it. Maybe I am a ticking bomb.’ She blinked hard and turned towards me. ‘I thought confronting him would make me feel better. Give me some sort of closure. And it did, in a way. But it tears a different hole inside you. And you wonder why you didn’t fix it sooner. Why you didn’t do things differently. And then
