“For fuck’s sake.” Jackson raised her hand like she wanted to smack the kid, but she changed her mind. “This is useless. Take what you need and get the medics in here.”
That was directed at me with an impatient scowl. We’d been called out from HQ at the very end of the shift, and Jackson had a wife and family waiting with supper on the table. I had no supper ahead of me except standard-issue canteen slop and nobody waiting in my single quarters three levels down, but I wanted out of that room too. I got to it. Sterile gloves, evidence box, and a deep breath of the relatively fresh corridor air before ducking into the room.
“Hey.” Jackson snapped her fingers in front of the kid’s face. “Hey. Listen. Parthenope Enterprises Security Protocol 17, Sections G through K, gives us the authority to confiscate and investigate your personal devices. Do you understand?”
The kid blinked. Swayed. Blinked.
“Your PDs will be returned to you after we’ve verified that you have not used them for any activities in violation of Parthenope regulations while residing on Hygiea. If you have any questions about Parthenope’s investigation process, refer to your residential contract or contact your company representative. Okay?”
I stepped gingerly through the messy room. There were three devices, one on the table and two on the floor, all smudged and unpleasantly sticky. I slid them into the evidence pouch and looked around to make sure I’d found them all. I didn’t look too closely. My contractual commitment to ensuring the safety and security of Parthenope Enterprises and its facilities, operations, and employees did not extend to searching through fluid-stained sheets beneath the bare ass of a twentysomething kid reckless enough to think that paying somebody to drill into his head was a good idea.
Jackson saw me glancing around. “You done, Marley?”
“I’m done.” I was already making for the door. I could feel the stench of the room clinging to my uniform. I would have to use a week’s worth of water rations to scrub it off. “I’ll get the analysis to you in an hour or two.”
“And I won’t look at it until morning,” she said. “As soon as this fucker’s out of my hands, I’m off the clock. You should be too.”
Which told me she wasn’t actually worried the kid was a terrorist or spy. I silently removed several items from my action plan for digging into this kid’s questionable life choices. When it came to low-level criminals and cranks, we didn’t get overtime for pretending to be especially eager Operational Security officers.
“Right. Yeah. Morning, then,” I said.
I had one foot out of that fetid chamber when the kid on the bunk made a sound.
It sounded like a choking cough, like he was swallowing his tongue—and wouldn’t that be the perfect end to the day—but he hacked wetly, then groaned out something that sounded like a word.
“What’s that?” Jackson said warily. “You have something to say?”
“Wait,” said the kid. His voice was so rough he could have been rolling nuts and bolts around in his mouth. The blood on his face was drying into twin crusted lines that stretched down his nose, over his lips, to the bottom of his chin. “Silver lady. Wait. Wait and tell me, tell me how—”
He broke off coughing; blood-pinked spittle flew from his lips. When the coughs subsided, he lifted his head, and for the first time since we’d come into the room, his bloodshot natural eye focused on something.
That something was me.
“Silver lady,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time. Tell me how.”
“Fuck this. Let’s get him—”
Before Jackson could finish, the kid lunged from the bed to throw himself at my feet. He scuttled toward me, reaching with both hands. I jerked back and bumped into the doorframe. The kid’s fingers, slick with his own blood, slid over the smooth surface of my boot. I kicked his hand away.
“Tell me how, it’s time, I’m ready, I’m so ready, tell me how, tell me how,” he was saying, over and over again, the words slurring together as they tumbled from his mouth.
“Don’t move.” Jackson had her stun weapon at the kid’s back, pressed into the nape of his neck. Electroshock weapons weren’t meant to be lethal—corporate security was subject to the disarmament treaty like everybody else—but I wasn’t sure this kid could survive the jolt. “Do you hear me? You don’t move a centimeter. Marley, get the hell out of here before this piece of shit gives himself an aneurysm.”
I was already backing out of the room. I squeezed past the medics in the corridor and ignored their snickers, their raised eyebrows, their questions. I felt the prickle of their attention as I strode away, heard the murmur of their voices as I turned the corner at the end of the hall. Whatever they were saying about me, I had heard it all before. I didn’t take an easy breath until I was on the lift and on my way up to HQ. I leaned against the wall for balance. I closed my eyes.
Hygiea was a loosely consolidated, carbonaceous chunk of rock and ice well out in the ass-end of the belt, with a diameter of over four hundred kilometers. Nowhere on the surface was the gravity any higher than one-tenth of Earth’s, which was a drag for lifelong belters, but for people like me, born and raised on Earth, it was light and strange and required constant adjustment. Even with gecko soles on my boots keeping me anchored to the floor, I felt unstable, unsteady, convinced the wrong move or the wrong step would send me hurtling toward the ceiling. The feeling got worse at the end of the day, when the joint where my prosthetic leg attached to my hip was aching and I was trying to favor it, because my ancient animal instinct was telling me there was more weight than what
