“I’ve released your man,” Morna said, frowning at Bharat. “Release mine.”
“Promise not to punch me?” Bharat asked Sheriff Cross.
Cross shrugged. “Like it’d help?”
Bharat shoved Cross forward and stepped back. Cross didn’t try to punch him in the face. So ... progress.
There was silence for a moment. And a moment after that. Bharat looked around, looked at Jan, and frowned. “What now?”
Jan rotated his arm, which had all but been wrenched out of its socket, and turned to Cliffside’s mayor. “Mayor Solace, you have my sincere apologies for this deception. This was not, as you may have surmised, my idea. I intended merely to visit and retrieve my partner, when” — he gestured — “all this happened.”
“That’s true!” Rafe said over the speaker. “I totally sprang this on Jan without telling him ...” He paused, gasped. “Oh, shit! Sorry, mate.” He’d just revealed Jan’s real name.
No help for it now. “Jan Sabato.” Jan bowed, rose, and fixed Morna with a radiant smile. “And may I say that the archives I’ve seen of your speeches scarcely do your beauty justice. You are truly a delight for the—”
“Please shut up.” Morna raised one hand. “And tell me what you’re doing in my server room.”
“The man on the speaker needed me to delete something for him,” Jan said. “Something he could not access on your servers despite compromising almost all of your systems.”
“Personal matter!” Rafe added. “Nothing of yours!”
“And I need the man on the speaker to pull off a job with my partner here,” Jan said, motioning to Bharat. “Which is why we came here to retrieve him and were ... enlisted in his scheme.”
“Right.” Cross glanced at Bharat. “Great job, Dave.”
“So if you’d be so kind as to let us leave,” Jan continued, “I will acquire my opportunistic partner, and the three of us will depart Cliffside, never to trouble you again.”
“Jan Sabato,” Cross said, eyes distant, like he was trying to remember something. His eyes widened. “Oh, shit! The Jan Sabato from Mercy Plaza? That Jan Sabato?”
Jan didn’t know word had gotten around about that. “Ah ... yes.” Where had Cross heard about the job at Mercy Plaza?
The hot air and thrilling suspense of his last job all came flooding back. The smashing success where he and Fatima — well, mainly Fatima, posing as an Advanced businesswoman — bluffed their way through three layers of Supremacy security using Rafe’s false IDs to steal four truckloads of Supremacy regenerative drugs. They’d sold those drugs to the Patriots of Ceto for an obscene amount of money, all of which had vanished when Fatima sold Jan out a day later. It was a good memory, up until it wasn’t.
“You were there?” Morna asked Cross.
Cross shook his head. “Heard about it afterward, like a dozen times. Captain Varik got a medal for that arrest.”
“Who?” Bharat asked.
“An asshole,” Cross, Morna, and Jan all said in unison.
Cross gave Jan a meaningful look. “I bet the Supremacy still wants you really bad. It’d be a real shame if Captain Varik learned you were back on Ceto, and since the Supremacy gave Tantalus prison back to us after the armistice, there’s a good chance he doesn’t know yet. Given how anal that man is about his arrests, I wonder what he’d do if he found out?”
Jan felt a hint of unease.
“Also,” Cross added, as a rather shit-eating grin spread across his face, “I’d imagine the CSD doesn’t know someone sprang you from Tantalus. If they did learn you were out, they’d flag you as an escaped prisoner. Having both the CSD and the Supremacy hunting you would make your job a whole lot harder, wouldn’t it?”
“Hey!” Rafe shouted. “That’s perfect!”
Jan and Cross both glanced to the ceiling. “What?”
“It makes us cool!” Rafe said eagerly. “If we blow your cover, Cross, you blow Jan’s cover. That’s bad for both of you, so both of you won’t do it, and I won’t do it since I like Jan. So it all works out. Everybody’s got dirt on everybody, and nobody releases it because we all like living. We all trust each other to act in our own best interest, and we all stay safe.”
Cross looked at Jan, then Bharat, then Morna. Then back at Jan. “Is it weird that he’s making sense?”
Morna sighed. “Your proposal has promise.”
“So we’re all good now!” Rafe assured them. “Friends?”
Jan closed his eyes and rubbed his aching temples.
All assurances aside, Jan didn’t actually unclench until the moment he, Bharat, and Rafe all stepped onto the maglev train that had pulled to a stop on Cliffside’s platform. Sheriff Galloway — or Sheriff Cross, according to Rafe’s blackmail data — stood just off the platform, scowling. Miller and Carrell remained on patrol, probably to avoid awkward questions.
Jan hoped Cross wasn’t having second thoughts. After all, Jan was certainly having second thoughts. A planetwide APB would make his job down here on Ceto absolutely impossible, and if Cross decided screwing him over was more important than not getting his secret identity revealed ...
The maglev doors closed. Jan sat down next to Rafe, who had wandered out of his habitation unit in muddy combat boots, pink pajama bottoms, and a leather vest that was scarcely darker than his russet brown skin. He had a ring through his nose, two rings through his lip, six rings through each eyebrow, and a bright pink fauxhawk. He did not get into fistfights.
Rafe’s manner of
