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“I am,” says another voice from my past, one with an accent like my wife’s, except this voice is poisoned and bitter with anger. I turn to see Harmony at the door. Half her face still blasted with that terrible scar. The other half is cold and cruel, older than I remember.
“Harmony,” I say mildly. The years have done nothing to warm us to one another. “It’s good to see you. I need to debrief. There’s so much to say.” I can’t even think where to begin. Then I notice the glance she gives Evey. “Harmony, where is Dancer?”
“Dancer is dead, Darrow.”
Later, Harmony sits with me in front of Mickey’s desk in an office of cheap, angular furniture and jars filled with hybrid organs floating in preservative gas. Mickey sits behind the desk, fidgeting with that old platonic puzzlecube of his. He sees me looking at it and he winks. He’s gotten better. Evey leans against a barrel of chemicals. I sit, utterly lost. Dancer had a plan for me. He had a plan for all this. He’s not supposed to be dead. He can’t be.
“It was Dancer’s last wish for Mickey to carve us a new army. One that will rival the Golds in speed and strength. We’ve taken our greatest men and women and put them to the carving. They cannot survive a Gold procedure like the one you endured, but some manage to brave this new program.” She waves out the glass where a hundred coffin-like tubes splay across the floor. Inside each, Reds of a new breed. “Soon we’ll have a hundred soldiers who can cut Gold deeper than any before.”
As if a hundred would be enough to fight the Gold war machine. My Howlers and I could likely shred any unit these terrorists put together. And we’re not even the deadliest Golds.
She gestures with a new arm, having lost the one of flesh and bone to an Obsidian, when raiding an armory for weapons. It’s a limb of metal now. Fluid and strong, with illegal blackmarket sockets for weaponry. Good workmanship, but nothing compared with Mickey’s carving. Of course she’d never let him work on her.
“So Mickey is a prisoner?” I ask.
“Slave, more like,” Mickey grunts with a small smile. “They don’t even give me wine.”
“Shut up, Mickey,” Evey snaps.
“Evey.” Harmony fixes the young woman with a tolerant stare before regarding Mickey. “Remember what we talked about, eh? Mind your tongue.”
Mickey flinches, eyes darting down to her left hand. There is an empty holster on her belt. Something Mickey is scared of. Harmony is behaving for me.
“You afraid he’s going to say how you beat him?”
She shrugs, dismissing my judgment. “Mickey sold girls and boys. Can’t enslave a slaver. Far as I see it, he’s bloodydamn lucky not to have a bullet in his brain. Could hire a Carver to give him horns and wings and a tail so he’d look like the monster he is. But I haven’t. Have I, Mickey?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, domina.”
The word makes me recoil in disgust.
“Dancer always respected him,” I say. “I respect him, despite all his … eccentricities.”
“He bought people. Sold them,” Evey says.
“We’ve all sinned,” I say. “Especially you, now.”
“Told you he’d be bloodydamn holier than thou. Acting like he doesn’t compromise his morality day in, day out. Finding excuses for wicked bastards like our Mickey here.” Harmony smirks to Evey, sharing a private joke. “That sort of attitude is all fine up there, Darrow. But you’ll learn we don’t compromise here anymore. That’s the past.”
“Then Dancer is truly dead.”
“Dancer was a good man.” She’s silent for too short a moment for it to count as respectful. “Half a year back, he hired a Gray mercenary team to hit a communications hub so we could steal data. I said we should kill them once the job was done. Dancer said … what was it again?… ‘We aren’t devils.’ But after the Gray captain collected his pay, he pissed off to the local Society Police headquarters and offered them Dancer’s location. Bloodydamn lurcher squad put Dancer and two hundred Sons in the dirt in two minutes. Never again. If they kill one of us, we kill a hundred of them. And we don’t trust Grays. We don’t pay Violets. They’ve lived off our toil for ages. We only trust Reds.”
Evey shifts uncomfortably.
“There was another Red at the Institute,” I say afte
r a moment. “Titus. Was he one of yours?” I glance toward Mickey.
“Don’t look at me,” Mickey says.
“How did you know Titus was a Red?” Harmony asks quickly. “Did he tell you?”
“He … let it slip. Small mannerisms. No one else noticed.”
