“No,” Kyla replied tightly. “This is nonnegotiable. You’re both going. And if one of you ends up killing the other, I’m leaving the survivor in the middle of the desert for the birds to pick at.”
Clo tried a different tack: “Sher, please. I don’t understand why—”
“Because it’s stopping for fuel on Myndalia. In Kersh.”
Clo’s head shot up, her nostrils flaring. “Excuse me?”
Sher’s expression softened. “I’m sorry. You’re the only two we have with advanced levels of training who spent extended time on Myndalia. You both know the different sides of Kersh, so you’ll look like you belong.” When Clo stared at him, he sighed and reached for her shoulders. “Look. I know the city brings back bad memories. But you won’t have to go into the Snarl, just the transport hub. You and Eris worked well together before Sennett, and I trust you more than any other mechanic we have. I need you both on this.”
Eris glanced at Clo. She only knew scant details about Clo’s past before Nova. Those who lived in the Snarl, a regional name for the slums of Kersh, were the only citizens in the Empire not engineered in birthing centers or under the Oracle’s influence. The Empire made up for this weakness by clustering the natural-born in densely populated urban areas, and carefully controlling the citizenry with drugs and heavy military presence. The existence of such communities had forced the Empire to implement mandatory sterilization five years before. Every citizen in the future would be engineered rather than born.
Clo’s upbringing would have been immensely different from Eris’s. Eris had spent years in the high-rises above Kersh. As long as the floating cities didn’t hover over the Snarl, they had glorious views of the sun reflecting off the marshlands that dotted Myndalia. But like everything about Tholosian society, there was no sense of kindness in that place, nothing more than constant studying and fighting. Every activity was framed by physical and mental deprivation disguised as a lesson.
You have to learn to think quickly in a war, when all hope is lost, and when you haven’t slept for days, her prefect, Mistress Heraia, had once told her. Eris had once gone six days without sleep in response to Mistress Heraia’s words, just to prove she could, and trained every day on top of it. Eventually, even with her body mods, she’d collapsed. They’d nursed her back to health and congratulated her.
Clo sighed. “All right. I’ll do it.”
Sher and Kyla both looked at Eris. She shrugged. “I already signed on. ITI mission, remember? Little chance of success, high chance of death. My favorite.”
Clo’s eyes met Eris’s. “Yeah. I’m familiar with Eris’s favorite hobby. It cost me a leg.”
4.
CLO
One year ago
“I’ve got another mission for us.” The breathless voice made Clo glance up with a grin. Eris was in the doorway of Clo’s quarters at Nova, her hair messy from the run clear across headquarters to find Clo.
“You’re back,” Clo said. “I thought you’d be off for a few moons, stealing ships and kicking ass.”
“I prefer to steal ships and kick ass with you, though.”
Clo’s grin widened. It’d taken her ages to convince Kyla to let her go on a proper mission after Sher had dragged her back from Fortuna, traumatized and broken but alive. Sher had stayed with Clo as she healed from her wounds, comforted her when she woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares of fleeing Prince Damocles. It was Sher who lured her back to training, sweating out all her fear and anger and heartache.
When the worst of the grief had passed, Kyla had eased Clo back into work gently—surveillance, reconnaissance, the occasional tampering with a ship’s engine while planetside.
Six months before, Kyla had paired her with Eris for the first time. The other woman had been quiet and intense when she first came to Nova—a deprogrammed soldier from the front lines, Kyla said. She kept her head down, did her job, but didn’t offer up much in the way of herself or her past. That’d suited Clo well enough. She could get plenty sparkish herself when people pried too much into her background.
They’d found a good balance, the two of them. Clo could count on Eris not to do anything stupid that would get them killed. Quick with a blade, but didn’t like Mors guns. Kept to her silly anachronistic weapon, but Eris was sharp enough with it.
The others at Nova found Eris odd—the way she took everything in without blinking, how she kept to herself. How she spoke in curt orders. She wasn’t making friends, or at least not with anyone else.
The first few times, Clo had knocked on Eris’s door, holding up a bottle of moonshine from the mechanic’s quarters. They’d drunk in silence, mostly, watching the sunset over the golden sands of Nova. Each visit, each bottle, loosened a few more secrets. When the bottle was nearly empty, Eris once mentioned that the Empire had taken her siblings. Her whole family was nothing but a sacrifice. Clo had given the barest sketch of what happened to her in the slums. They’d clinked their glasses and killed the rest of the bottle. Let loose a few more details of the lives they’d left behind.
Clo would wake up with a sore head but the strange pride that Eris had chosen her. Before Clo quite realized it, Eris was her closest friend on that desert rock.
“Show me,” Clo said, gesturing to Eris’s tablet.
Eris settled beside Clo at her bare desk and tapped a few icons until she pulled up the mission particulars. “Challenging,” Eris murmured.
“My favorite,” they said at the same time, smiling at each other.
Kyla was going to drop them straight into enemy territory.
Their task was clear. Land on Sennett. Blow up the factory that processed parts for a large percentage of starships in this quarter of the galaxy. That would slow down the Empire’s ability to send out ship after ship of soldiers throughout the Empire. It was an advantage the Novantae needed.
Clo had never been to Sennett, but that wasn’t saying much. She’d barely been anywhere that wasn’t a complete silthole backwater planet. Yet there on Sennett, everything was clean, despite the crowds. The streets were tidy and swept.
Still too fluming hot.
Clo waded through people, the air so thick and stifling that she fought the urge to pant with every breath. Her baggy shirt and tall boots—both worn to cover the Mors tucked into the small of her back and a few knives and lockpicks at her ankles—only made the humidity worse.
More than half of Sennett was covered in dense rainforests. The amount of foliage meant lots of cover, yet also plenty of opportunities for others to creep up on them. At least the Tholosians, in their thirst for draining the bogging galaxy dry, had killed most of the large predators on the planet. Most. Clo loved how the air smelled, though. Loamy, dark, and dangerous.