Arya shrugged. ‘Kowalski wanted me here, in case they came after you.’
‘Got a Rubix for that.’
I invited her in as I made coffee and began lacing up my boots. Arya paused to dismiss the two Strikers hovering at the base of the apartment complex. Their mottled white armour was designed to allow movement and dexterity over protection. Blade-thin and lithe, they were lightning-fast operatives trained for operations that required a stealthy sharp edge.
Arya raised an eyebrow at me as I handed her a steaming mug of coffee. ‘I’m not a Reaper, if you were wondering.’ I must have been staring. ‘Just a skinnie, plain and simple.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and meant it. ‘How long?’
‘Three years. I was offered a tiny shot by some guy at a party. I always thought I’d know better.’ She pulled a face. ‘But one mistake, one slip-up, and you’re paying a life-long debt.’
Wasn’t the first time I’d heard that story and it wouldn’t be the last. ‘Isn’t Harmony the last place you’d want to be?’ I asked as I sipped my coffee.
‘My family said I disgraced them.’ Arya was counting down on her fingers. ‘I lost my job, and then my friends. I had nowhere to turn. Nothing to do with myself. Not until Kowalski recruited me. She said she needed people who knew first-hand what the stormtech did, who had empathy when dealing with victims of drug trafficking.’
‘And that’s enough?’
‘Of course not. But it helps, and that means something.’
Arya wasn’t the first skinnie, or Reaper, I’d met who’d fought to retake some residue of control over their body. I’d spoken to skinnies throughout Compass who’d found a way to cobble together something resembling a life. They were doing better than hundreds of thousands who’d simply surrendered to the stormtech. Whether or not it truly won you over sometimes depended on how determined you were to keep fighting back.
For every exception like Arya there were thousands of desperate skinnies prowling the streets and recycling centres of spaceports. And even for someone like Arya, years of work could all be undone with one bad day, one mood swing. People compare overcoming addiction to climbing a mountain, but that assumes there’s a peak to climb towards. Stormtech was more like swimming in an endless, churning sea. You never truly beat it. You just found temporary ways not to drown.
‘Harmony paid for all my therapy,’ continued Arya.
I smiled. ‘How nice of them.’
‘I’d heard Reapers are a cynical bunch.’
‘You would be too, if you’d seen what I’d seen.’
‘I saw enough of Harvest to know Harmony made the right decision,’ she said. ‘You really think we should have let Harvest bulldoze us? Nuke our planets with cobalt-clad warheads, fill our stations and habitats with toxic gas, butcher entire populations? You saw what they did on Arcadius. Whole cities razed to the ground, water sources poisoned, crop fields burned, families dragged onto the streets and slaughtered. They forced civilians to walk through minefields, then set their hunting dogs on the ones that survived. Made a sport of chasing them through the burning forests. That’s what would have happened all over the galaxy. We’d be standing in the ashes of billions upon billions. And for what? To say we’re the better people?’
‘You don’t get to tell me what it was like,’ I snapped. No one can begin to imagine the experience of being on one of the Dead Zones – the planets that sustained the most damage from Harvest’s onslaught. Bodies piled up as far as the eye could see. Refugees scrambling over razorwire to get into the overcrowded camps. Civilians covered in grime and blood, screaming for help, others dead-eyed and clutching at whatever was left of their families. Harmony SSC men collapsing with exhaustion. Reapers on the verge of insanity. ‘Don’t lecture me about something you can’t understand.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘And don’t tell me there was no choice. I couldn’t live with myself doing half the things Harmony people did.’ My fingers turned white around the laces of my boots. ‘They performed experiments on children. With biotech they knew was dangerous.’
‘They were wrong. We all know that, now. Maybe there was another way. Maybe, at the time, there wasn’t.’
‘Doesn’t give Harmony a free pass.’
Arya nursed her steaming coffee in silence as I stood. ‘Do you know about Kindosh? How she came to be where she is today?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Maybe you should. It’s relevant. She grew up on a station called Petroni, in the Sumikem System. They got rich from mining the local asteroid belt. Until Blade Hunters came along and forced them into quarantine with minimal life-support while they stripped their station bare. Five hundred people and food for fifty. Until Kindosh discovered a secret stash of emergency rations. The way she tells it, she divided up the rations day by day, eating exactly what she needed and no more. All done in secret. If anyone had discovered her stash it would have been stolen and fought over and no one would have eaten. She survived when half the station went mad, killing each other for scraps, until the day they were rescued.’
I was starting to see where this was leading. Arya set her half-finished coffee down. ‘Kindosh knows the cost of survival better than most of us ever will, and when she says it’s a price worth paying, I believe her. So every time I look at the worlds Harvest killed, the cities they levelled, the people they destroyed, I know where I stand.’
Kowalski’s breakfast venue turned out to be a French dessert bar on a Compass high-floor that also happened to do breakfast. The walls and furniture were a lavish baroque, festooned with gold filigree. Vast classical paintings peered down at us while soft Vivaldi carried across the room and echoed up to the swirling, vaulted ceiling. There were so many intricate patterns in the artwork I couldn’t stop staring.
Kowalski followed my gaze upwards. ‘That’s all
