“You’re uninteresting, Willem. Not in the ways most others are, but in your predictability. That took me way too long to understand. I can trust you’ll tell me exactly what you think of me, and I can trust that you’ll keep your word no matter what. You kept your agreement with my sister tonight. A lesser man might not have.”

  A secret smile spreads across her face; she knew exactly what he’d been thinking in those moments before he called Ximena. She saw the strength of will it took not to just end her then and there. And apparently she’s not going to say anything to Ximena. Not yet.

  “I’ve kept my promises,” Jaantzen says. “But now you’re dead and Bulari is breathing a sigh of relief. So explain to me, Thala. Why should I reverse that gift the universe has given us all?”

  Coeur closes her eyes for a moment, long enough that Jaantzen begins to wonder if she’s finally passed out from the incredible amount of pain she must be in. But then her lids flutter open once more and her face cracks into a shadow of her old million-mark smile. She’s missing an eyetooth.

  “You remember back when we were both just kids?” she asks. “You were running a crew out of that apartment building down on Fifteenth. You had that lieutenant, what was his name?”

  “Kai.”

  She lets out a gentle sigh. “Kai. He was a shit pick for a lieutenant.”

  The betrayal no longer stings; he had been a terrible pick. “It happens.”

  “That Manu, though.” Her smile turns wicked. “Mmm, he was a delicious catch.”

  Cold fire blooms in Jaantzen’s belly, and it’s not until Ximena moves to stop him that he realizes he’s half out of his stool, fist balled to do damage.

  Coeur laughs through split lips. “Don’t leave a bruise, Willem,” she says.

  “Thala,” snaps Ximena, and to Jaantzen’s mild shock, Coeur looks chastened. “Stop being a bitch or I’ll lose my temper myself.”

  Jaantzen forces himself back onto his seat, but it takes him longer than he would like to calm himself down; he can’t afford to let exhaustion dull his edge. Manu had been a catch for Jaantzen, certainly, but the word’s double-edged. It conjures up an image of Manu’s spinner in a ditch on the outskirts of town, one of his soldiers’ throat cut in the driver’s seat. Three days of waiting for the demand that finally came: a dozen of her soldiers for his lieutenant. In the end Jaantzen had acquiesced.

  A full day had passed without word before, early one morning, a body found in a playground in Jaantzen’s territory. Badly mangled, beaten and bloody. But alive. Jaantzen and Gia had gotten there well before the city’s first responders, and as expected, as hoped, as feared, it had been Manu: half-dressed and destroyed, his face barely recognizable, his left arm and right ankle at impossible angles, his breath coming shallow and wheezing as though a lung was pierced.

  His body a message for the gathering neighborhood crowd: this is what happens to those who side with Jaantzen.

  He’d been unconscious until they transferred him to the stretcher, until a bad jolt had woken him suddenly, horribly, with a scream that brought the rest of the neighborhood running. Jaantzen remembers Gia’s techs on him with their full weight to hold him down, her left hand on his forehead like a vise, her right jabbing him in the neck with a sedative.

  Jaantzen remembers ordering a cleanup crew to stay behind and rid the playground of all traces of the blood that had soaked into the concrete, splashed on the play structures, smeared glossy on the grass. He remembers how, back home, Gia had taken it one excruciating step at a time, cutting away Manu’s clothes to reveal a chest blackened with bruising and clotted with blood, left shoulder and elbow dislocated, left wrist and hand mangled, burn scars on his calves and feet, his right tibia and fibula each broken in three places.

  Now Jaantzen’s fighting flashbacks of standing in a room not dissimilar to this one, staring at Manu’s ruined body, Gia up to her arms in his blood, the sound of him choking on the breathing tube, the sweet and saline perfume blend of sweat and whatever luminous blue fluid Gia had used to fill the tank Manu was lying in; she’s calmly reassuring Jaantzen that it will stabilize Manu even though it looks for all the world like he’s drowning. Threads of pink twisting out into the currents from wounds too small for Gia’s attentions. Manu wakes again with a panicked start to thrash against the glass, and Jaantzen’s USL back then is so limited compared to what Manu and Gia and the others have picked up, but he knows enough to sign “You’re safe, you’re home” over and over until the sedative kicks in and Manu’s eyes close once more.

  The memory is here and gone in a flash, and Jaantzen is still face to face with Thala Coeur.

  She’s not smiling any more. “Are you ready for another civil war, Willem?” she asks. “Naali and Levi didn’t like each other, but they both knew they couldn’t hold my crew on their own. If Levi had the balls to kill Naali, that means he has a patron. Would’ve gone the other way, too. A smart man in your shoes would’ve made a move on Naali.”

  She lifts an eyebrow, considering. “You planned to, hmm? Too slow, I guess. Though it’s hard to be slower than Levi . . .” She trails off, slow realization dawning. “Shit.”

  Jaantzen watches her, waiting; her eyes smolder.

  “Zacharia got to him, didn’t he?” she says. “He would’ve had all the time in the world to make the sale, what with knowing ahead of time I was going to be dead.”

  “Tell me about Bennion Zacharia,” Jaantzen says. “What would his cult want with your crew?”

  “Distribution for his shitty drugs. When did they say I was dead?”

  “How long did the Dawn have you?”

  “Three weeks,” Coeur says, and there’s poison seeping through those words. If the Dawn knew Coeur the way he did, they would have killed her. Instead, they forged themselves a vicious rival. He doesn’t envy them.

  “You only died yesterday,” Jaantzen says.

  “How’d they say it happened?”

  “Shot in the back of the head on Indira. News feeds say it was a break-in.”

  She makes an offended noise in the back of her throat. “A fucking stupid way to go.”

  On the surface, the alliance between Acheta and the Dawn makes sense. Whereas Naali Hinoja had always steered Blackheart’s crew towards diversifying their business and creating something sustainable, Acheta had preferred the quick, volatile cash that came from the crew’s drug trade. He would want an agreement with the chief suppliers of those drugs — and the Dawn would fear losing one of their biggest distributors if Hinoja took control of the crew.

  But Coeur’s original tiff with the Dawn wasn’t about drugs.

  “Tell me what’s in the case,” Jaantzen says.

  “A business proposition,” Coeur says. A strained roll of her eyes takes in her older sister, who’s standing stiff as a soldier at her shoulder. “How much did Mina tell you?”

  “Pretend I don’t know anything,” Jaantzen says evenly.

  Coeur coughs, winces. “Fair. Let me tell you about the Alliance.”

  “I know about the Alliance.”

  “No, you don’t,” Coeur snaps. “Big man up here in your fancy suits and glittering tower. You might as well be them, now.”

  She’s trying to goad him again; he doesn’t know if it’s to make a point, or if it just comes as second nature to her. “If you’re done with conversation, I’ll go speak with my crew about what to do with you,” Jaantzen says. “Your call.”

  The fierce expression on her face smooths. So it had been instinctive after all.

  “I didn’t know, either,” she says, and it’s as close to an apology as Jaantzen will ever get out of her. “I was a kid when all those countries on Indira signed the Eyes of Durga Treaty, so I never knew what the planet was like before Alliance rule. I just saw their propaganda, same as anyone else.”

  Jaantzen has seen it, too, he remembers the unification videos shown at the orphanage, he remembers seeing images of kids just like himself in poverty-stricken countries, the before-and-after shots of their shacks turned into modern homes, their clothes clean and tidy.

  He remembers wishing the Alliance would take over New Sarjun, too.

  “But then I’m living there, right?” Coeur says. “Thanks for that. And it doesn’t take much looking to see that under the propaganda vids, Indira’s still falling apart. What land overpopulation hasn’t fucked has been bombed to ash to beat down resistance fighters, or torn up by wars they’re pretending no one’s fighting. They’re still exporting food to us and Durga’s Belt because we can pay for it, unlike people from New Manila or any other country on Indira that’s not Arquelle. When you first shipped me over to that rock there were riots every few months. Now it’s every week. Mina show you those photos? Open fields in the desert?”

  Jaantzen nods slowly. “So if the Alliance has found a way to reclaim the land they’ve destroyed . . .”

  “Or to grow crops at scale on New Sarjun and ship them back.”

  That all makes sense, but something still isn’t sitting right.

  “What does the Dawn want the tech for?” Jaantzen asks.

  “Same reason anyone would,” Coeur says. “It turns dirt into gold, Willem. The Alliance needs food, and you and I? We’re going to give it to them and get rich doing it.”

  A business proposition. Working with Thala Coeur. He wants to laugh at the absurdity of her offer, but this night has gone on far too long for laughter.

  “The serum, or whatever it is in the case,” he says. “It makes land arable.”

  “Correct.”

  “And I have it in my possession. So what do I need you for?”

  “You don’t know how to use it. The research is top secret.”

  “And you have this research?”

  “I can get it.”

  That false bravado in the pursing of her lips, that little shrug. Coeur doesn’t know where this research is any more than he does. Quiet beeps and hums fill the room around them, cut through by the rasping of Coeur’s breath. Jaantzen rolls his shoulders, considering.

  “I’ve been made better offers,” he says finally.

  She lifts an eyebrow, conceding. “True. But you saw the fight you’re up against with the Dawn and their new pet crew. You started a war with them tonight. Can you afford to be at war with my crew, too?”

  She has one real offer, they both know it. And it’s the last thing he can consider.

  “Put you back in power,” Jaantzen says.

  “You need me right now. This city needs me.”

  Jaantzen’s heard all he wants to tonight. He gets to his feet as gracefully as he can, willing his tired body not to betray any sign of the injuries he’s sustained.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Thala.”

  “Do you have to talk it over with your masters first?” Coeur asks with a cold smile.

  “Thala,” snaps Ximena.

  “You know what your problem is? You see everything through their perspective. What will Geum-ja think? What will Julieta think? Let me tell you my little secret for success: I don’t give a shit what other people think.”

  “You’re looking very successful right now,” Jaantzen says. He can’t deny the truth in her words: he’s spent years learning the rules for success, only to fall short not because of how he played the game, but because of where he came from. Coeur, on the other hand, has never bothered to learn a single rule. It may have shot her all the way to the mayor’s office, but it also sent her into exile without a single true ally, even within her own crew.

  “I remember you before you wore such nice suits,” Coeur says. “Back when you spent all your energy railing against the very society you’re so desperate to join today.”

  Coeur’s laugh turns into a cough. It’s painful to listen to, and Ximena tenses; he wonders if there’s fluid in her lungs, wonders at what point he should call the medic back in. He’s reaching for the button when she spits blood onto the floor, shoos one stiff, bound hand at him.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Let the cub be.”

  Jaantzen’s finger hovers near the button a moment longer, but her cough seems to have gone down. “We play the game differently,” he says. “And one of us is a fugitive in a hospital bed, while the other is a respected member of society.”

  “Fortune’s wheel spins quick, Willem. Don’t get cocky.”

  “That’s excellent advice, Thala.” He turns to the medical monitor, presses the button Elian had shown him. “Good night.”

  Coeur takes a sharp breath, glassy eyes sparking with fury. “Dammit, Willem. Fu — ”

  Her eyes flutter shut.

  Ximena collapses onto the cot beside her sister’s bed, exhaustion etched into the lines of her face. When she meets his eyes, her expression is troubled. Of course, she’s never actually seen him with her sister, and who knows how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other in person. Maybe Ximena truly had no idea how much pain Thala Coeur has caused.

  “Willem. I’m — ”

  “Don’t,” he says, because he’s not ready to stomach any more complicated emotions from this particular bloodline. If I had a family, he almost says, but he stops himself. Because, of course, he does have a family. “I would move heaven and earth for my family,” he says instead, and her shoulders slump as though she has just received a benediction.

  Jaantzen buttons his suit jacket; he’s not in the business of blessings.

  “You’re welcome to sleep here, or we’ve set up a guest room on this floor. You’ll be under guard either way.”

  She nods. “What are you planning to do with me?”

  “That depends in large part on your sister. Good night, Ximena. Let my people know if you need anything.”

  The lights are already on in Jaantzen’s penthouse suite, Starla and Manu at his conference table, a decanter and three glasses between them. Starla’s got both elbows on the table, one hand holding a glass of ice to her cheek. Manu’s feet are kicked up in the chair beside him, his fingers steepled over his stomach. He’s staring at the ceiling. They don’t appear to have been talking, and neither glances up as the elevator doors open, though Starla reaches to pour whiskey in the third glass.

  On the eastern horizon the finger slums are dark, but a line of dusty pink rims the plateau they claw into. As though triggered by the realization of the time, a wave of exhaustion crashes into Jaantzen. He pushes it off, lowers himself gingerly into his chair at the head of the conference table.

  “It’s been a few years since I saw this side of the sunrise,” he says. He drains the glass of whiskey Starla poured.

  Starla glances at him, brow furrowed and eyes clear, and he belatedly realizes she’s taken out her lens.

  “I haven’t been up this late for a while,” he signs.

  She makes a tired face. “It’s way more fun when you’re out dancing,” she signs.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  Manu’s rolled his head to watch them; now he drops his feet to the floor and sits up, reaching for his own glass.

  “Floor twelve’s secured,” he signs when he’s set his glass down. It’s empty. “El and Simca are getting some rest, and I’ve tripled security on this building. Calls out in the usual places for soldiers, for when we need them.”

  “We’ll need them,” Jaantzen signs. “We just declared war on Dry Creek. And the Dawn. I need to know what their strength is.”

  Manu nods slowly. “What about Acheta?”

  Jaantzen refills Manu’s glass, stalling. Tops off his own, trying to think of a way to say it. Manu’s watching him, exhaustion slowly replaced by understanding, then anger. He’s shaking his head by the time Jaantzen begins to sign again.

  “Coeur thinks she can control her crew if we put her back in power,” Jaantzen signs.

  Starla’s eyebrows shoot up. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Option one,” signs Jaantzen. “We plunge this city into another civil war with one of the biggest crews in Bulari, who’s allied with a cult that has a lot more firepower than we understand. Option two. We install her as a puppet back in her crew, keep her busy fighting the Dawn and Dry Creek, and deal with her when they’re contained.”

  Manu arches an eyebrow. “A major problem with both plans,” he signs. “Coeur murders us all and everyone we’ve ever loved.”

  Jaantzen nods, tired.

  Manu holds up a finger. “Solution? We murder her first.”

  Starla laughs, but Jaantzen can see in Manu’s expression that it’s not a joke.

  “It’s not so easy as that,” he signs.

  Manu shrugs. “Or, it’s actually super easy, because she’s just downstairs and she can’t fight back. We load her up in a plane, push her out over the desert.”

  “And Ximena?”

  “If we charter a big enough plane — ”

  “We’re not killing Coeur,” Jaantzen says, cutting in, then he switches back to USL. “Not until we have a clear understanding of what we’re up against, and whether or not we can handle both the Dawn and Acheta on our own.”

  Manu’s nostrils flare slightly, but then he gives Jaantzen an easy nod. “Sure thing, boss.”

  “But this is not something we do lightly. Once she’s done being useful, she’s gone.”

  Manu raises an eyebrow. “Just like that?”

  “Find me the thing we need to control her. Her kill switch.”

  “We can’t blackmail her.”

  Jaantzen shakes his head. Of course they can’t — there would be no faster way to find themselves on the opposite side of her knife.

  “Just find me leverage.”

  “You got it, boss,” Manu murmurs. Jaantzen can already see Manu’s mind racing. Where Jaantzen tends to keep his social circle tight, Manu has collected friends and favors in corners of Bulari’s underground Jaantzen probably hasn’t even heard of. If anyone can find the leverage they need to shut Coeur back down when they need to, it’s him.

  Starla snaps her fingers for their attention. “We’re missing another option here. We dump this thing on the doorstep of the Bulari Sentinel and tell them the Alliance found mysterious terraforming technology on New Sarjun that they’re not sharing with us.”

 

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