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One of the other Reds laughs. “Got all high and uppity. Forgot he was a ruster.”
“Shut your bloodydamn gob,” Garla snaps. “And don’t use that word round me, hear? Ruster.” She spits. “That’s a slave word.” Her voice lowers and she shrugs at me. “Da liked to gamble. But Kangax hired him right back. No bad feelings. He was a good man. And Kavax is a good one too.” The others nod along. “Even if we just lug boxes and clean up shit, it’s our job to protect him here in this bloodydamn viper nest of a moon. All of us. Remember that.”
VOLGA, CYRA, AND I unload from the taxi onto the buzzing Hyperion street. The sliver of morning sky seen through a gap in the overhead bridges and buildings of the city above is as bright and blue as the dresses girls wear to the summer races at the Circada Maxima. This dilapidated deep level of Hyperion is naked under the high sun. Ancient buildings, moldering signs, forgotten by the progress above. Grafitti of upside-down pyramids embedded with screaming mouths score storefronts and alley walls. The Vox Populi seems to have an endless supply of paint.
On a building-side HC a newscast blares. A fatally serious Copper reporter drones on about the hunt for the Reaper after his murder of the ArchWarden. Hacked the man down in cold blood, they say. Sounds about right for the bastard. I might like booze, but power’s his cup of poison. The Colors are shocked, appalled that such an affront to the Republic could occur by their great hero. But after seeing the fall of one empire, I know enough to see the cracks in the foundation of this one.
I suck back a burner. With our preparations for the heist under way, we’ve been running eighteen hours a day. The first several days were strategic, scouting the viability of the three posited locations for the heist that the Syndicate provided. Once we picked one, I told Gorgo, our Syndicate liaison, the only way the task could be done proper was with a military-grade gravWell. I half told it to the Obsidian as a bluff to test the limits of his reach, but the Syndicate beast looked unfazed and kept smoking a burner over his espresso at the highrise café where we met. Said he’d run it by the Duke. He did. Said it would take two weeks. Guess dancing with the devil means you get hell’s resources.
I pull my wool overcoat tight against the early autumn chill and notice Volga staring up at a residential skyscraper with a sliver of green foliage on its roof.
“What would it be like to live up there?” she asks. “A garden atop the clouds.”
“After this you’ll find out,” I say.
Cyra snorts. “Don’t tease the crow. Even after this dreadnought of a payday, all of us together couldn’t buy that penthouse.”
“How much do you think it costs?” Volga asks.
Cyra shrugs. “Hundred million, maybe more.”
Volga shakes her head at the number, stunned on a primal level.
“There’s your Rising for you,” I say.
We cross the street after an automated grocery truck trundles past, and make our way across the fissured concrete to a small shop underneath a gaudy, glittering holosign proclaiming, KOBACHI’S TECH EMPORIUM. WON’T TAKE A BYTE OUT OF YOUR WALLET. Another sign underneath flashes: NO RUSTERS. NO CROWS. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Volga pauses outside the door. Cyra goes right on in. I pause and consider Volga for a moment. She kept my secret from the others. But the last few days she’s been sullen. “Want to see inside?” I ask.
She looks at the sign and shakes her head. “No, thank you.”
I sigh. “What’s wrong? You been slumping along like a wounded puppy since we took this job.”
She relents and looks at me hesitantly. “Are you not worried? Worried that this will hurt the Rising?”
“Life’s a mountain, Volga. Nasty, steep, covered in ice. Try to move it, you’ll go nowhere. Try to help someone else, you’ll fall right down with them. Focus on your own feet, and you just might make it up and over.” I reach up to clasp her muscled shoulder. “Now come on.”
“It will be trouble.”
In response, I flash the black rose in my interior coat pocket and grin. “Pale lady, today we’re the trouble.”
The interior of the shop is a dim jungle of gadgets and secondhand gizmos so thick they seem to grow into the humid air. Amidst floating indigo signs, obscure relics hang on hooks beside knockoff datapads and ocular implants. A good half of the store has been given over to biomodifications. Two teenage Greens with heavy tattooing and liberty spike hair sift through plastic packages containing discounted neurolinks. Idiots. After the darkness of the Society, this new generation is so desperate to plug in, to know everything instantaneously, that they put the whole holoNet in their heads without giving two shits about the consequences. The teenagers eye Volga nervously as she comes in.
Cyra’s already snagged a cart and is getting to work on her datapad’s shopping list. Volga stands behind me, eyes darting around like a puppy given leave over a butcher’s shop. They settle on a holoExperiental station that several kids have gathered around. “Go on, feast your eyes,” I say. She gives me
a careful smile, then, taking huge care not to let her broad shoulders knock over a rack of metabolic implants, lumbers over to watch. A Blue kid is sitting in a chair, nodes attached to his head. A projection of what he’s seeing with his closed eyes dances in the air above him. His friends watch excitedly, waiting their turn. They peer back as Volga’s shadow eclipses them. One of Kobachi’s employees, a gangly young Green, monitors the experiential over a tray of nasal caffeine inhalers. The Red’s flying a Colloway xe Char mission—the fantastical first where the dashing ex-pirate personally relieved House Saud of ten tons of gold bullion they were moving from their Luna banks to Venus in a caravan. They put a hell of a bounty on him after that, and made him famous.
The employee blanches when he sees Volga. “No crows,” he says, gesturing to the sign. She looks down at him, embarrassed. “Can’t you read, girl?”
“Yes, I can read,” Volga says in a small voice.
“She’s with me,” I say.
He doesn’t turn. “Look, if she was a ruster, she’d steal shit. If she was a Brown she’d clean shit. But she’s an Obsidian: they break shit. I don’t make the rules, brotherman.”
“Kid,” I say. I nudge the employee. He turns his bloodshot eyes to me. His pupils are huge on some designer drug, his armpits dark with sweat. “Watch your fucking manners.” He swallows, seeing the Omnivore pistol hanging on the holster inside my jacket. “Where’s Kobachi?”
“In the back.”
