‘If we do this,’ Katherine said, and held up a finger before I could reply. ‘If, then there are some conditions. Understood?’
I made myself nod.
‘I need to know you can do this,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what if it’s your brother in there? What if it’s between you and him, and he’s about to plant a bomb?’
There were a hundred things I could have said. The stormtech nuzzled against my inner ribs. Telling me I didn’t need Artyom, or Grim or Katherine or anyone else. That they were anchors holding me down. I wished I could shut my eyes and have all the demands on me fade away, but life never works like that.
‘I’ll do what needs to be done.’ My voice sounded hard and rusty. When I’d first agreed to investigate the Reaper deaths and dived back into the world I swore I’d left behind, I knew it might come to choosing between my brother and my loyalty to the Reapers. That this could end with me and my brother staring at each other down the barrel of a weapon. In a world of terrible men, I’d tried to be a good man for him. Instead, I’d hurt him beyond repair. Choosing the Reaper War over my brother was the biggest mistake I’d ever made. No matter how hard I tried to fix that mistake, as a direct consequence of it, I might have to choose taking the Suns down over saving him.
What good do you really learn from your mistakes if you never learn how to stop making them?
I glanced up at the snapshot of Jae Myouk-soon. Turning over all the misery she and her empire of drugs had caused. My muscles swelled and the stormtech gleamed blue all over my body. I was to blame for the situation my brother and I had landed ourselves in. No question of that. But so was Jae. So was Sokolav. So was my father. So were all the Suns. None of us are innocent, after all. And whatever happened to my brother at the end of this bloody affair, she’d answer for it. As would they all.
As would I.
36
Suit Up
The drop-off was in an apartment building located in north Starklands. One of those spacious and opulent penthouses you constantly saw in adboards. Half a dozen bedrooms, elaborate kitchen, state of the art appliances, a private chainship garage. I stared down the vertiginous drop, where the city blocks I’d walked to get to my own apartment had been turned into a glowing circuit board of streets and buildings. Aerial traffic whistled past lazily in the late afternoon sunlight. Harmony used this place as a safehouse for stormdealer informants, spending a fortune and a half to make them feel comfortable. After dumping our bags down, I realised another reason they’d splurged. A gaping chunk of the back wall had been gouged out, leading down into the hollow of the asteroid.
Compass isn’t solid rock. Just as planetside buildings have basements and back doors for shipments and secure entries and exits, Compass has a network of tunnels, tubes, pipelines and accessways worming under its rocky flesh called the Hollow. Connecting to buildings and enterprises for deliveries, operative cells, emergency escape rooms, and quick access to spacedocks, the Hollow was a haven for criminals to use for hideouts and dead-drops, and also attracted thrill-seekers who got the smart idea of going on long and illegal expeditions through sectors of the asteroid only explored by drones. Little surprise Harmony had access.
Kowalski had told me to get cleaned up. After a quick scrub down in the jet-shower, I was dressing when I noticed myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and barely recognised the feral figure staring back. My hair tumbled down to my jaw. Black, bristly stubble was fast becoming a beard. My body was a series of sharp angles, muscles tight and straining beneath my scarred skin. Even after the shower, I could smell my own sickly-sweet reek. When I breathed I could feel the stormtech stretching with my lungs.
I was about to turn away when I noticed something in my eye. Grit? No. This was inside my eye. I pinched the flesh down for a better look. Small, blue tendrils were contorting in the white of my eye and fumbling at my iris like a writhing blue sea anemone. I couldn’t see them in my vision, but I could feel them like tiny worms squirming and thrashing inside me. Soon they’d crawl into my brain like a parasite chews through rotting cauliflower. I shut my eyes. The House of Suns wouldn’t need to destroy the people I cared about; I could end up doing that all on my own.
I’d become what I was in the Reaper War. A savage, uncontrollable monster who only knew how to hurt and be hurt. Back then, I hadn’t realised how bad it was going to get. But this time, I’d already walked this path with my body and knew I was in unmarked territory. My urges were less immediate, but more deeply worked into my body, harder to resist in the long run. The stormtech’s a jealous organism, and I’d already withdrawn from it once. Maybe now it was taking the necessary steps to ensure I was locked and wrapped up too tightly in its smothering folds to ever tear myself free again.
Don’t think about that. Can’t think about that. This first.
I walked back into the kitchen. The printer had been furiously at work well before we arrived. ‘We’ve found you a route in through the Hollow,’ Kowalski said, once we’d set up a connection. ‘It’s how the Academy takes deliveries. Only problem is, the whole museum’s rigged up with cams, sensors and top-grade security systems. So you’re going in a stealthskin.’
This sounded promising. ‘A stealthskin?’
‘Yes. They’re not cheap, so
