Just a quick, easy jaunt into the enemy’s territory. Get in, get out.
“Me neither,” Eris said. “Can’t say I missed it.”
Clo scoffed. The princess’s experience on this planet wouldn’t have been anything like Clo’s. She would have grown up far above Clo’s rundown slums in that golden and opulent academy, which circled around the city of Kersh like a second sun. Clo had looked up at that building every day of her childhood, wishing for even one hour up there. Eating fine foods, being clean, not having to look over her shoulder.
Eris had that upbringing—she and her monster of a brother, Damocles. They’d grown up scheming together, right over Clo’s head. She stared at the other woman. Did you know? Did you know what your brother did on Jurran? Did you approve?
She kept these thoughts from Eris, out of the range of the Pathos. It was a skill, to keep from projecting thoughts. It didn’t always work.
Eris caught her look. “What?”
This spoiled woman had everything, and she’d walked away from the whole damn galaxy. What made her run? She wondered if Eris had told the truth about losing someone. That question had kept Clo up at night, those first days in the Novantae hospital, numb below the waist as they fixed the remnants of her leg.
She’d decided it was a lie.
“Nothing.” Clo turned her head. She slid the ship into a perfect place in the asteroid belt and unbuckled the chair’s straps. “You didn’t see much of the slums, did you?”
Eris flattened her lips. “If this is another dig—”
“Assumption.” Clo stood. “And I’m guessing a correct one. The Snarl was only something that ruined the pretty view from your floating palace when there was a break in the clouds.”
“Floating palace,” Eris murmured with a bitter laugh. “Yes, I suppose it must have looked like paradise to you.”
Clo’s expression hardened. “There was so much gold on that building that it heated the ground below. Sometimes, it melted the pavement, if the light went through glass.” She glanced again out the window as they flew closer and closer to her former home. “Don’t try to make this mission into a bonding thing. We may have both spent time on Myndalia, but you don’t know a fluming thing about where I lived.”
“I’d watch your assumptions,” Eris said, coolly. “I may not have stayed there, but I did go down to the Snarl. I killed one of my brothers there.”
Uncertain of how to respond, Clo focused on their landing point.
Most of Myndalia wasn’t solid enough to build upon, and what little land there was wasn’t exactly habitable. Arable land was used for farming food Clo had barely been able to afford on her mother’s meager benefits. Most of the planet was nothing but swamp and bogs parents warned their children about. Monsters lived down beneath the water, they whispered in the night, and loved to snatch tender morsels. Clo had never seen anything bigger than the fishes, but the tales had worked. She’d always kept to dry land.
The planet looked beautiful from above, all green, blue, and purple swirls, like a marble Clo had stolen from the market half her lifetime earlier. The parts of the planet not covered in swamps were rich in natural resources. The Empire grew crops and exotic fruits, enough food to feed dozens of other planets.
Those crops had become more strained since Charon’s mass die-off; that planet had been a huge source of the Empire’s food. The farmers on Myndalia were trying to pick up some of the slack, but the planet didn’t have enough arable land. What resources they did have? They were sent to the floating palaces or other Tholosian planets. The inhabitants of the Snarl, many of whom worked in the fields, received the same food given to gerulae: gelatinous nutrition made from ground-up bugs, cheap oil, and cheaper grains.
From their hands, the Empire was fed. And the workers were starved of the very crops they helped grow.
Clo fucking hated this place.
Growing up, she’d never known how beautiful Myndalia could be. All she’d ever been there was a small cog in the machine of the Empire—like everyone else who lived in the Snarl. The Oracle couldn’t weave One’s tendrils into the slumrats; they were the last natural-born humans, created within the womb instead of engineered in birthing centers. One’s programming hadn’t taken well within the Snarl. Too many people were left comatose.
After losing too many farmers to programming experimentation, the Empire decided to control those in the Snarl through other means: addiction to drugs supplied by the Empire to keep them “docile to influence.” Meant the slumrats were constantly off their face. Clo’s mother protected her from those drugs. That was the only reason Clo had been able to run away.
Once the natural-borns had all died out, Clo figured the Empire would let the swamp take the Snarl back. It’d sink into the bog as if it had never existed at all, just another forgotten place in an insatiable, vast Empire. The farming would be left to the gerulae.
“Let me do most of the talking once we arrive,” Eris said as they got ready.
Clo lifted a shoulder. “Fine by me.”
Clo watched as Eris made sure everything on her uniform was perfectly in place. It all had to be. Guards were trained to notice the small, imperfect details that betrayed a Novan spy who wasn’t born into the role they were playing.
The threads on Eris’s cuffs were the brown and purple of a middle-ranked Publican. In contrast, Clo’s uniform was a dark gray, embroidered with a silver chain around her own cuffs to mark her as a mechanic.
Over both of their left breasts, right across the heart, were the crossed scythes of the Tholosian crest, the blades dipping down like harpies’ wings. Between them rose the black circle symbolizing that death claimed all in the end. Eris’s hand kept creeping to it, as if she wanted to rip it off. Clo longed to do the same.
Publicans had the power to conduct surprise inspections, with the assistance of a mechanic to check the engines for any unapproved tracking, and then collect any fines or extra taxes. They would not be the guards’ favorite people, but they should command respect and a little dose of fear. Just what they needed.
They walked through the dusty Asteria to the transport room, stiff and silent. It’d been a long fourteen hours with a weapon always within reach. The small shuttle down in the hold looked like every other military emergency transport vehicle. It was an oblong craft that could barely fit two people. It looked like a bullet. Or a coffin.
Eris and Clo settled into the pod and Clo prepped the coordinates. She wasn’t nervous, exactly, but she was sparkish—it had been so long since her last mission. If Eris was on edge at all, it didn’t show. Clo remembered Eris as a chameleon, able to shift into someone else at a moment’s notice. She’d seemed to thrive on that knife’s edge of danger, as if it made her feel alive.