Day Three
(age twenty-four)
It wasn’t just that she’d told Baz about the heist.
She’d done that, huddled in her sleeping bag in the Wildfire’s study as she waited in anguish for the ship to take off.
She’d felt like she had pages and pages of rage in her, so much to say that she’d never get to the end before the engines turned on, but in fact it all fit into a few curt sentences.
URGENT. The trip has gone very wrong. My date took me to meet Conchita Quixada from the Brimstone Syndicate on Io.
They want to steal Orlando’s character kernel from Ganymede and they are forcing me to come with them.
The ship is heading there immediately; please be ready with a security team.
There are four people on the job, including me. Will send more info when I can.
Then she’d stared at the pink crescent, biting her lip.
It had occurred to Kelli already that there was no guarantee the Quixadas were planning to let her go home.
Leverage didn’t just go away after you’d used it once.
Besides, tomorrow was Monday, and people were going to notice that Kelli was gone; if she was Conchita Quixada, she wouldn’t want to let Kelli stumble back into Inspiration headquarters days late, with a wild story about why she’d been gone.
Stealing Orlando’s character kernel already felt too awful to believe, but there was no reason to suppose that there wouldn’t be other jobs after that.
Worse jobs, the kind that hurt real people.
Or that the syndicate wouldn’t just kill her.
Blackmail was a leverage that came from fear. People feared their awful truths coming to light. They’d do those other bad things willingly, on and on forever, just because they were so scared of telling the truth. Kelli had been so scared of telling the truth, all of these past ten years.
And there was only one way to conquer a fear like that.
Kelli stared down at the pink crescent, heart in her throat.
Every cell in her body wanted not to. But the shock of the blackmail had given her a kind of clarity, a nerve that she didn’t want to lose.
Kelli wasn’t worse than Rowan, but she was worse than she liked to admit.
If there was any real scrap of goodness in her, then she would have come clean ten years ago.
She’d come close to it at the time—staring at the hyperloop map outside the hospital, tracing the route to the community standards enforcement office with a guilty, shaking finger—but she hadn’t, because she’d known it would hurt Rowan too.
She saw that choice now for the cowardice it was.
Even if she and Rowan had both gone to jail forever, it would have been no more than what they deserved.
If she flinched again now, she’d flinch later. When Conchita Quixada tried to make her do an even worse thing. She’d flinch then, and she could not let that happen.
Baz, she wrote, feeling the biggest hinge in the solar system turn slowly underneath her, I didn’t want to tell you this, but they are trying to force my compliance through blackmail, and I cannot let them.
So I need to tell you now, before they can tell you themselves, or use my fear of exposure against me.
I am telling you this in desperation, but I am telling you willingly, and in full possession of my faculties, such as they are.
I understand that this will have professional and legal repercussions and I accept the full consequences of my actions, as I should have done ten years ago.
I ask only that you show mercy, if you can, to Rowan di Pietro, who is a lying bastard, but who was only caught up in the events of a decade ago because of me—it was not his idea—and who is not involved in the present events willingly.
Let me tell you about the time I started a fuel-leak fire.