‘Now it’s your turn,’ I told her.
‘For what?’
‘Tell me something about you.’ I folded my legs under me. ‘You’ve never told me what you folks get up to. You Harmony folk try to be squeaky clean. Surely you’ve got skeletons in the closet.’
Katherine looked as if to deny it at first, but changed her mind. ‘Gambling,’ she admitted, a sly smile spreading across her face. ‘And not just your average CreditParlors. This stuff was high-stakes, played with games that came from the corners of the Common. Half of them aren’t even legal anymore.’
You wouldn’t find anyone with stormtech gambling – it’s hard to maintain a poker face when your body literally glows when you’ve picked up a winning hand. ‘And how did that happen?’
‘There’s a small ski resort on the top floors of Compass,’ she said. ‘All my friends were going. This was when it was just opening up and the waiting list was hundreds long. You could get the express entry, but only for the right price. Then there were all the snowboards, the snowskins with thermal stitching, all the equipment. A small fortune.
‘Not many ways to get hundreds of Commoners when you’re still a teenager studying at the Academy. So I taught myself gambling. The games to start out with, the safest bets, the fastest earnings, and the most popular ones. The loopholes, the exploits, everything. There’s no such thing as a fair game, Vak. There’s always a back door, always a crack you can slip through. And while everyone else was out drinking and having boyfriends, I was sitting on the itchy carpet on the floor of my cramped little bedroom, finding a way in.’
‘And did you?’
Katherine’s eyes shone with mischief and memory. ‘You should have seen their faces when they called the scoreboard with me in top place. A week later and I was tearing down the slopes with the edgiest snowboard the store had. There’s nothing like feeling the snow shredding beneath your feet as you cut down a mountain, feeling the wind in your hair. I fell over a hundred times, had bruises all over my legs for ages. But it was the best week of my life.
‘But I never went back there. Whenever I see a gambling house, I think about it. And every year, I make plans to get the old board out and give the snow another shot, but it never works out.’ She looked up, offered me a little smile. ‘I’ve never told anyone that story before.’
‘I’m glad you told me,’ I said, returning the smile. ‘I’m glad I got to know you better.’
Katherine looked at me for a moment before reaching out and placing her hand on my arm. My knee-jerk instinct was to move away, not let anyone touch me. But I fought it back despite the stormtech, liking the feel of her, liking that Katherine with her piercing grey eyes and wicked little smile and sandy hair tumbling down her shoulder, was sitting so close to me. ‘You know, when this is all over, maybe I’ll grab a snowboard and get back on the slopes again for a whole week, just like before. Maybe I’ll even take you with me.’
‘That’d be nice,’ I said, and meant it. And for a minute, I almost forgot about the stormtech. ‘That’d be really nice.’
30
Ghosts and Glass
The thrusters beneath my armoured feet erupt as I launch upwards, punching through the high mountain rainforests. I cover forty, fifty, sixty metres like a human rocket before gravity yanks me back down. Dust billows up as I land on a jutting ledge of rock, my armour’s absorbers soaking up the impact, thrusting me back up over the swaying treetops and into the sky. There’s the rhythmic metallic echo of my fireteam doing the same behind me. We go skimming like stones across the top of the forest.
It’s in all the timing. Too fast, you’ll smash your skull and splatter your brains over the rocks. Too slow, the railguns and pulse-rifles Harvesters are fond of scattering around the planet will smack us out of the sky. Good incentive to learn and learn fast.
I listen to my body. Temperature. Pulse. Heartbeat. The ever-present stormtech circulating through me, slithering from my armpits to the soles of my feet. I’m starting to learn it’s always speaking to me. It’s just a matter of tuning in to the right wavelength. I burn and streak through the muggy air. Accelerating to optimal speed, pumping my body up to lend me that extra edge that lets me glance sideways off the slope and go shooting through a narrow cleft in the treetops, narrowly avoiding a jutting chunk of cliff face. Leaves and branches are left smouldering under my boots as I burst back out into the open sky. It’s like I’m on autopilot. Trees, foliage, rivers, terrain whipping past my visor. The ground rushing up and down so fast it’s like it’s heaving beneath me. I grin wildly. I could do this for ever.
Our HUD waypoint blinks on. I touch down, my fireteam landing around me in a series of successive shudders on the stone shelf. There’re millions of vibrating metal bubbles itching beneath my skin, each one releasing a tiny burst of adrenaline. Even shelled in armour, with their faces hidden behind visors, I know my teammates are running on the same wavelength.
The rainforest around us is alive. The hissing of water. The hoots and growls of distant creatures. The wet-hot stink of the air, dripping with damp moss and bark. The susurrus of trees tall as highrises with a nervous system of branches, and leaves as big
