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“That don’t look so scary,” Dano said when we first got the contract.
I smiled and nodded to Volga. “What if she were holding it?”
“She’d look scary waving a bloodydamn muffin.”
“If I had a muffin, I would eat it,” Volga said.
The blade sits behind two fingers of duroglass and is on loan to the museum from a private collector for only one week longer. Liberation Day is a perfect time for it to go missing. Volga and I scan the ceiling of the exhibit, looking for the telltale sign of a drone garage. We see it in the top left corner of the room, a small titanium flap built into the marble. I nod to Volga, and she slips on her spider gloves and jumps onto the wall. They stick to the marble and she crawls along the wall till she’s hanging beneath the garage door. She pulls four laser nodes from her pack and puts them on either side of the door and activates them. Two green lasers crisscross over the door. She gives me an eager thumbs-up and looks for more garages.
I nudge Dano. He’s up.
The boy does an ironic two-step dance on the narrow slip of the doorframe, jumps up onto the wall with his spider gloves, then pushes off with his legs, backflipping onto a glass case holding a Gold war helmet. He catches himself, turns, then leapfrogs case to case till he can jump onto one of the Ionic columns. He hits it midway up, hugs it and shimmies up. As he moves, I summon the autoflier from its garage five klicks away via my datapad. It drives autonomously through traffic toward the museum. Dano moves along the columns like some sort of human flea till he’s picked his way directly above the glass case. He lets himself fall, turning in the air so he lands on all fours in a way that makes my knees ache just to watch.
Dano stands and delivers an obnoxious bow before pulling his laser cutter from his pack. The glass glows as he cuts a circular hole into it. Then, with a triumphant smile, he plucks up the blade and holds it aloft.
The alarm goes off on schedule.
A high-pitched frequency screams out of speakers. It would shred our eardrums if we didn’t have sonic plugs. As it is, it’s little more than the annoying whine of a hungry dog. A second security door closes behind us, sealing us in. Two nodes on the ceiling lower and begin to pump disabling gas into the room. Does nothing with our recyclers running. Up high on the wall, the drone garage opens and a metal drone rips out of its hiding place, right into Volga’s laser grid. It smokes down to the floor in four pieces. A second follows and meets the same fate as she shoots out the cameras. At the windows, metal security doors fall to block us in. I stand still like a conductor at the center of his orchestra. All these variables falling into place just as I planned. And a deep, formless depression falls on me as the adrenaline fades.
“Locksmith, find your exit,” I mutter into my com.
Volga drops from her place on the wall to join me. She moves excitably, still young enough to be impressed by this. Dano hops along the columns back to the arch, where he graffities profanity with his laser drill. “The razor?” I ask.
He twirls it in his hand. It’s meant for a man twice his size. “A nasty little dick tickler.”
“The razor,” I say again.
/> “Course, boss.” He flips it to me casually. I snag it out of the air. Its handle is too big for my hand. Real ivory exterior and inlaid with gold filigree. The rest is brutally economical. In whip form it coils like a thin, sleeping snake. Eager to be rid of it, I shove it in a foam carry case and tuck it into my pack.
“All right, kids.” I open the canister of custom acid and tip it onto the marble floor. “Time to go.”
THE MORNING AFTER THE HEIST, on my least favorite day of the year, I drain the vodka from my glass, waiting for the arbiter to finish his inspection. “So, is there a verdict yet?” I ask without bothering to hide my impatience. The slender man makes a show of remaining silent at the desk over which he has been hunched for the better part of an hour. It’s overdramatic White slush. Anemic assholes think it profound to feign an air of aloofness, hiding behind contracts and commerce the way spiders hide and wait behind their webs. Two hundred were sentenced to life in Deepgrave during the Hyperion Trials for their part in the Gold judicial system. Should have been ten thousand. Rest were saved by the Amnesty declared by the Sovereign.
Bored, I survey the rest of the penthouse. It is painfully tasteful, done up in the restrained ostentation popular in Luna’s upper circles—minimalist decor with rose-quartz floors and large windows that look out over the glowing nightscape. On a moon where three billion souls clamor atop each other to breathe, only the offensively rich can afford to waste space.
It reminds me of so many of the decadent flats I encountered as a high-end claims investigator for Piraeus Insurance, before the Rising. Back when I was the help.
HighColors looked down on Grays because we took out the trash. LowColors hated us because they were the trash. Everyone else feared us, because for seven hundred years we have been the all-purpose knife of the state. Obsidians? Circus freaks, the lot of ’em. Grays do work. We are adaptable, efficient, and bred for systematic loyalty. Little has changed for most of them: new masters, same collar.
I yawn. I’m thinking too much again, so I pop a zoladone, stand and pace as the drug leads my wandering thoughts back to my employer with a cold, distant hand.
Oslo, if that is in fact his name, is an inoffensive, impossibly meticulous creature with a dreadful sense of calm that borderlines on the robotic. Slender, and professional in his white business tunic with a starched high collar and sleeves to his knuckles. His skin is squid ink black. His head bald and the irises of his eyes an unsettling white. He adjusts the digital monocle on his right eye.
“I do believe this is the item my clients requested,” he says in a harmonic baritone.
“As I said. Can we wrap this up?” He leans closer to the blade one last time before straightening and sheathing it very carefully into a gel-insulated metal briefcase.
“Citizen Horn, as ever, you delivered the requested item in a timely manner.” Oslo turns back to me, typing into his datapad. “You will note that the agreed-upon sum has been deposited into your Echo City account.”
I pull up my own datapad to check. His right eyebrow goes up. “I trust everything is satisfactory.”
“Yut,” I mutter.
“Yut?” he says in curiosity. “Oh yes, legion speak. Denoting an affirmation, usually done to convey affirmative sarcasm to a disliked officer.”
“It’s called dog tongue,” I say. “Not ‘legion speak.’?”
“Of course.” He touches his chest. “In fact I studied it extensively. I suppose you could say I’m a bit of a military enthusiast. The traditions. The organization. ‘Merrywater ad portas,’?” he says with a smile, using the phrase that seven centuries of legionnaires have shouted in memory of John Merrywater, the American who almost turned the tide of the Conquering by invading Luna—a reminder that the enemy is always at the gate.
