Ku smiled at the little girl. “Nice work! What’d you hear?”

  The mother grabbed the girl’s hand. “Baby, you don’t have to—” Ku gave her a warning glare. That was more resistance than she’d expected from a JJ-2 parent.

  “They couldn’t pick which way to go, at the elevator they couldn’t.” Now that the kid had Ku’s full attention, she was beaming. “They were saying ‘It’s up!’ ‘No, it’s down!’ ‘No, it’s up!’”

  Ku managed not to groan aloud. “Weird, huh?” That was the origin. Its central location in the Ceres Station sphere would’ve made reaching it a confusing proposition for people who never thought about the way grav pulled toward JJ-1, not deeper beneath Ceres’s surface. That also meant Max’s people had lied to Ku. She’d be sending so many of JJ-2’s syndicate wannabes to cause trouble in JJ-4 over the next few weeks.

  “Do you know which way they finally went?” Ku asked.

  “Please,” the mother said. “Don’t.” The kid looked up and sucked her lips between her teeth, making a nervous smacking sound.

  Ku stood and faced the mother in her kitchen. The origin would be a hazardous pain in the ass, and Ku wanted confirmation before she went there. Low and calm, she said, “We’re all on the same side.”

  The mother’s face twisted in distress as she whispered, “You’re not the only one asking about those people.”

  So, Fulton had decided to do his job. Maybe he couldn’t question teenagers respectfully, but he must’ve persuaded this mother that he had her kids’ best interests at heart. Ku raised her comp to the paypad by the door, which handled the apartment’s bills. The family was now paid up for the month. “I appreciate the help,” Ku said. “When she tells you which way they went, you know how to reach me.”

  The mother gripped both children’s hands and gave Ku a tight smile. Ku let herself out. Maybe the colonists would turn up on JJ-1 or JJ-3, but she didn’t have much hope of that now. It’d be so much easier if Fulton found them. Not cleaner, by the boss’s reckoning, but easier.

  The door was still closing when movement in her peripheral vision made Ku spin toward the building elevator. Fulton was running out of it, alone. Before she could so much as say hello, he hit her with his stunner. She grabbed the bottom of the family’s door and hauled it shut on her way to the floor under what felt like the weight of an industrial printer. If Fulton shot off another stunner charge, the door would stop it from hitting one of the kids.

  Ku’s voice came out in an agonized growl. “What the hell, Fulton?”

  The pain went on, and on, and on. She couldn’t think. Her legs shook too hard for her to get on her knees, let alone stand. Her back arched and she pounded on the floor with the fist that still obeyed her commands.

  While she forced her eyes open, Fulton secured her arms behind her. She twisted her wrists and thick metal dug into her bones. Fulton was grinning. Ku curled up to put her boots in kicking range, but he stepped away. Finally, the current cut off. She rolled backward over one shoulder and got to her feet fast enough to make Fulton take his stunner out again, although he didn’t zap her with it this time.

  She was breathing hard, damp and stinking of sweat from how much the stunner had hurt. The bastard duster kept grinning. “What . . . the hell?” she repeated.

  “That’s all you’ve got? I bet that family you were just threatening was asking the same thing.” Fulton gripped her shoulder and shoved her toward the elevator. She’d braced for it and only stumbled a step before she caught her balance and walked on her own, with Fulton following and reciting his required legal speech for an arrest.

  Damn him. He never would’ve pulled this shit if Cedar and Fuse were here, but they were looking for the missing colonists on other levels. With her hands pinned behind her, she couldn’t use her comp to call them back here.

  Alone, Ku might get in one hit before Fulton shocked her again. That wouldn’t be worth it. Maybe letting him feel powerful for a while would be a good thing. It’d be a hell of a surprise when he figured out he wasn’t, the kind of surprise that’d make him doubt his understanding of how things worked in JJ-2.

  He’d bound her arms in a manacle, an old word for a new device. The stiff bar between her hands forced them apart, but it also gave her something to brace against. When she was ready to leave Fulton’s custody, she’d push the device off over one hand. It’d make a bloody mess, but since Fulton hadn’t bothered with the “mitten” restraints that covered a prisoner’s whole hands, that was her best option. If she needed to do it, she could. Syndicate work had given her several opportunities to practice.

  “Can you hear me?” Fulton asked. They’d left the building and stopped by one of the independently powered cars dusters used to block traffic, including the delivery bots and EMTs trying to use the tracks built for them. The apartments around them hid hundreds of residents who must’ve been watching Fulton and Ku in their window feeds. “Get in and tell me you heard what I said or I’ll charge you for that too.”

  Dusters only got this angry when somebody was disrespecting them or bleeding, and she’d never seen one launch stunner charges that’d hit little kids if they missed the target. Fulton had something personal against the syndicate. It made Ku want to give him something to be mad about. She didn’t smile much, because it didn’t take much to turn his face an amusing shade of red. “Could you repeat that? I was thinking about something else.”

  Fulton shoved her against the vehicle and raised his hand like he was going to beat on her a bit. Instead, he slapped the vehicle with a resounding clang beside her ear. It must’ve been some kind of scare tactic. If he got up the nerve to punch her, she might be able to dodge and make him break his own knuckles. Fulton putting himself into a hospital for an hour or two would be just the gap in surveillance she needed to get back to searching for the missing colonists, and it’d be funny as hell. Enjoying the fun parts of life was most important when everything else was horrible.

  “Get in.” Fulton sounded thoroughly disgusted. She did.

  As the vehicle merged into the bot traffic, he repeated his speech. It included the word “kidnapping.” If he got the other dusters searching for the colonists, they’d find them faster than Ku by herself, and she wouldn’t have to go into the origin. The resolution would be messier than the boss wanted, but that was too bad. She shouldn’t have let Max do this crap in the first place.

  “Did you say something about kidnapping?” Ku raised the question’s pitch to convey indignant confusion. “You saw me walk out of that apartment alone. It’s on the cams.”

  “Not them,” Fulton snarled. “The six NEU citizens Solonik was muscling around in port yesterday. Nobody’s seen them since. And wherever I go looking for them, I find you.”

  Telling him what Ku knew about the colonists would be betraying Max. That wasn’t an option. Max’s talkative buddy Shor had found that out the hard way. “Don’t you have a partner or something?” Ku asked instead.

  Fulton snorted. “She’s the form filler. I do the street work.”

  “You can outsource that, you know.” The syndicate offered all sorts of ways to cut red tape. “You’d have more time to tour apartment buildings.”

  It was a good thing that the vehicle drove itself. Fulton looked angry enough to smash them into the nearest wall if he were at the controls. When they got to the police station, he hauled her in the front doors. His presence stopped the AI greeter from popping up to bother them. Following a tedious hour of removing her blades from sheathes, confirming her identity, and contacting her lawyer, the dusters put her in the same tiny room in which she’d talked to Max.

  Overly bright sunsim still glared down from the ceiling. The cams were in the same places on the walls. She would’ve been surprised if they’d moved any of the fixtures. This time she was the one sitting in the chair with the immobilization foam. The dusters still hadn’t bolted it down. Since she hadn’t taken all the official proceedings as seriously as Fulton would’ve liked, he’d left the manacle around her wrists, which meant he couldn’t use the foam to keep her seated. Maybe the mechanism was still broken from her visit the night before.

  Fulton stood before her, ignoring the second chair. “So, your one conviction was for beating the hell out of another syndicate asshole. Big surprise. You eat your own.”

  That’d been on cam, in front of twenty witnesses, and absolutely necessary to keep the rest of JJ’s syndicate wannabes from raping sex workers. Stopping that, and the primal satisfaction of cracking a rapist’s skull with her fists, had been worth the prison time. The party when she’d gotten out was one of her fondest memories. Ku indulged herself in that memory while Fulton asked questions about the syndicate that she’d never answer. Eventually the lawyer would turn up. If Fulton really cared about people or the law then he’d be asking about the missing colonists, not throwing Ku’s history in her face.

  “All right, I get it, you’re a hardass,” Fulton said after a while. “That’s not all we have on you, though. You’re not ‘the boss’s’ biological child. Those are all accounted for. Some people say she killed your family and stole you. Of course the records don’t back that up. But I mean, I’d believe that about her. Is it true?”

  Ku froze. Who the hell would’ve been talking to the dusters about that? She rarely thought about the time she’d spent stranded in the family ship, surrounded by null grav and darkness and her parents’ and brothers’ fear, until the boss came.

  Her family had been fuckups who’d shorted the boss on a deal. Ku didn’t miss them anymore. The problem was that Fulton shouldn’t have been able to find out about them. And the bigger problem was that what’d happened to her was too much like what was happening to those six people Max had stashed somewhere.

  “Oh, it’s true, isn’t it?” Fulton grinned, wide and nasty. “That’s one for the soaps. Gods, you people are fucked up.”

  Leaving aside the trouble he was making for the syndicate, he acted like he didn’t care about the colonists. For all she knew, they didn’t have enough O2 wherever Max had hidden them. And here was this duster poking at her past, wasting time they could both spend looking for the colonists.

  The way she’d twisted her hands when Fulton had put the manacle on had made it a little looser than Fulton had meant it to be. And last night, she’d messed up the solvent dispensers in the chair he’d sat her in. The solvent was slippery and safe to use on skin.

  She turned at the waist and slammed the solid side of the manacle into a solvent dispenser in the chair arm. It took a second hit while Fulton yelled at her to stop. The mechanism sprayed foam and solvent all over the room. She smeared her left wrist and hand through the clear solvent streaming out of the chair. Before she could think any more about what she had to do, she jammed the manacle against the chair arm and dragged her hand along the edge of the device and out in one hard wrench.

  Blood splattered into the foam and solvent sizzling on the floor. It didn’t hurt as much as Fulton’s stunner had, but she’d taken off a lot of skin. It hurt, it hurt, but her hands were free. She was that fucking good.

  Chapter Six

  Foam had splashed over Fulton’s holster and hardened there. He kept pulling at the stunner, but it stayed stuck. Ku grabbed the heavy chair she’d been sitting on and threw it at him. Blood from her flayed hand arced though the air and spattered the interrogation room’s walls. With the hand that still had skin on it she slammed his arm into the wall once, twice, until he let go of the stunner.

  She blacked both of his eyes and broke his nose, bouncing the back of his head off the wall with each punch. If she had to get his cooperation this way, she’d sure as hell make an impression that’d last, so she never had to do this again. Anyone who saw him tonight would see that he’d picked a fight with the syndicate and lost. His form filling partner should’ve come to help him by now. Maybe she was still writing up arrest records.

  With a hand on Fulton’s throat and a knee on his balls to pin him to the wall, Ku leaned in to put her face a centimeter from his bleeding mess of a nose. The interrogation room stank of blood and solvent. “Respect the syndicate,” she growled, “or next time I’m taking souvenirs.” She ground her knee into him until he yelped and pounded on her arm. He wasn’t hitting hard enough to make her let go. “I could’ve killed you eight different ways between the apartments and here,” Ku said. “I didn’t.” She bared her teeth in a smile that made people curl up and cry, when she let them. The glow from the tattoo on her arm might’ve heightened the effect. He flinched hard. “Now,” Ku said, “let Max and me out of here. Do it officially and legally.”

  Fulton squirmed to get his balls out from under her knee. She didn’t let him. “That’ll take time,” he said. “I can’t just—”

  “No stalling,” Ku snapped. “You were supposed to be looking for those NEU colonists.” Shit, Fulton had said NEU citizens earlier. If Ku hadn’t talked to Max about them, then she wouldn’t have known they were colonists. Fulton’s face was swelling too much for her to tell whether he reacted to her mistake. “Do I look like I know where they are?”

  Fulton squinted at her through the bruises that darkened his eyes, panting while blood from his nose flowed over his chin and onto her arm. Her skin crawled with imagined infection, and she held her torn up hand well away from him. Blood dripped from her fingertips to the floor in a steady rhythm audible over his breath.

  Fulton couldn’t be as stupid as he’d been acting. He was pissed off about something more personal than the missing colonists. Maybe that was why Central had assigned him to JJ-2. Although he wouldn’t accept the supplemental salary that the syndicate offered dusters, his anger made him careless.

  “Get off,” Fulton finally said. “I’ll do it.”

  Ku stepped back, into a pile of gummy foam beside her overturned chair. Adrenaline was draining out of her, leaving her jittery and cold. Her hand throbbed.

  Blood, foam, and slick solvent pooled on the floor. The metallic stench made her swallow hard to keep from gagging. So much for her “no blood” catchphrase. If someone fed this to the rumor mill, it’d give the up-and-comers all kinds of bad ideas.

  Max looked surprised to see Ku and Fulton bleeding outside his open cell door. Luckily, he kept his mouth shut and followed them to the lobby, where the syndicate lawyer was shouting at three more dusters, including Fulton’s partner, De la Cruz. The lawyer operated on syndicate hours, which meant that they did most of their work during the night cycle, and always acted as professionally offended as they did tonight. Ku bowed a greeting to the lawyer and stood still for the “My client is bleeding!” drama that the lawyer launched into despite Fulton’s bloodstained face and shirt. Fulton argued to keep both Ku and Max in custody, but his swollen and bleeding nose seemed to be distracting him.

  De La Cruz unlocked the manacle that dangled from Ku’s good hand in frightened silence. She must’ve done her research and learned what Ku, and the rest of the syndicate, were capable of. Ku gave the lawyer ten minutes to play the “was she tortured in custody” game before Ku said, “We’ve gotta go. Let me know if I’ve got to sign anything later.”

  Despite the afternoon sunsim on the street outside, Ku was hungry, tired, and hurting like hell. The trapped colonists would feel even worse, if they were still alive. At least the boss would be happier now that Max was free. Ku put her good arm around Max’s shoulders so he wouldn’t get away and hauled them both out the door and into the JJ streets.

  She slammed Max’s back against the nearest wall. The few pedestrians out this time of day swerved around them and walked faster. “Now, you take me to where you put those colonists,” she told Max in cant, “before they die, and the NEU sends investigators to make the boss a lot of expensive trouble.”

  “Yeah, fine. If it’ll get you off my ass about it, we’ll go.” Max grimaced at the blood still dripping from her bad hand. “Wrap that up or something, will you? It’s disgusting.”

  Between shifts, the streets’ quiet was broken only by trams, bots, and the atmo system’s ever-present rumble. Ku didn’t have anything to wrap her hand with, so she held it away from her side, trailing red droplets along the gray and silver tiles that bordered the buildings and the arrows that directed pedestrians toward port or the elevators. It wasn’t the first time her blood had stained these streets. It wouldn’t be the last.

  All Ku’s weapons and her comp were still in the police station, or wherever they shipped them for storage. The lawyer would have to send them to her later. They must’ve pinged Cedar and Fuse, because Ku’s shadows were standing outside the elevators with Max’s three remaining cronies when Max and Ku arrived. Fuse gave her a formal bow, which she returned. Cedar went straight for Ku’s hand. After a quick examination, ve pulled a sealed pack from vis pocket and unrolled a big length of bandage.

  “Wait a sec,” said Fuse. Cedar paused, eyebrows raised in an annoyed query. “Can you make a fist with that hand?” The position pulled the flayed flesh taut, but Ku managed it. Max’s cronies exclaimed in horrified fascination as blood oozed between her fingers. Fuse took either a lot of pics or a short vid with his comp. “That’ll look sick on the feed.”

  “It looks sick now,” Max complained.

  Cedar wrapped the length of bandage around Ku’s hand. It stung and smelled like disinfectant. “Thanks,” said Ku.

  Cedar shook vis head. “Hospital, after.”

  “Sure.” If Ku refused to go, Cedar would choke her out and carry her to the hospital. Ve took vis protection duties very seriously. Some battles didn’t need to be fought.

  Max accepted the loss of his fourth crony much faster than Ku would have if it’d been one of her shadows floating in stationspace. “If Shor turned on me once, he would’ve done it again,” Max said. “Fuck him. The boss did it right. I’m just sorry I didn’t get the chance to take care of it myself. I need a new one, though. Maybe two new ones. Four’s bad luck.” The surviving members of his entourage exchanged worried looks behind him on the way to the nearest printer, where the group used one of Max’s patterns to print enviro suits.

 

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