Reaper’s Brat

1. Althea

ALTHEA

The shooting starts before I clear the salvage row, and Pell goes down between one stride and the next.

I don't stop. I've watched men die in the docks of Armstrong since I was a kid, and the one rule that's kept me breathing is simple: you mourn later, on your own time, if you live to spend any.

So I leave him and I run, through the noodle steam and the unlicensed clinics and a knot of cargo kids who scatter like birds, and behind me the debt collectors come on without hurry, because they don't have to hurry.

They know this row better than I do. They built half of it.

A pulse round cooks the wall a hand's width from my ear. I throw myself down the maintenance throat under Dock Nine and crouch there with my lungs on fire, and I dig through my bag for the cred-chits Pell swore were waiting, and what my fingers find instead is warm.

A flat black wedge, etched with a pattern that slides away when I try to hold it in my eye. A data core. Not human-made. I've handled a thousand pieces of salvage and never anything like it.

"What did you put in my bag, Pell," I whisper. He doesn't answer. He's a hundred meters back with his hands open to the ceiling.

It explains the collectors, at least. Nobody murders a salvage crew over scrap. They murder you over a thing six syndicates suddenly want, a thing they paid me to carry without telling me I was carrying it, which means I was never the runner. I was the box.

The dock sirens climb. Through the grille I can see the berths, most of them dark, except one — a freighter hunched at the far end with dead loading lights and a hull patched in mismatched plate, exactly the kind of derelict a port lets rot. Its mooring clamps are cycling open.

I don't have a better plan. I don't have any plan. I time the clamps, drop to the gantry, and walk up the cargo ramp telling myself I need one jump and then I'm gone.

The ramp seals behind me. That's the part I should have heard. A dead ship can't seal a ramp.

Inside, the corridor is warm. Lived-in warm, breathing warm, and the walls are wrong — plating from a dozen scrapped ships welded edge to edge, and where one seam has split I see what's under it: a panel of pale metal carved over every inch, swirls and figures, a face with too much grief cut into it. Whatever this ship is, it isn't ours.

I should freeze. Instead I put my boot down on a bad seam, and a strip of cold blue light runs the corridor's whole length like a vein going bright.

A voice answers the light from somewhere ahead. Low, and layered, and not in any language I know.

I run, which is pointless on a sealed ship, and I find that out when I turn a corner straight into them.

They're huge. That's all my mind gives me before it quits.

Gray skin marbled black, taller than the hatch they pour through, eyes lit from somewhere behind themselves, red as a furnace seen through a vent.

One has horns. One has bone growing wrong along his jaw.

Hands the size of my head close on my jacket and lift me off the deck, and they argue over me in that grinding tongue, and I don't need the words.

The broken-jawed one wants me dead. A female with a snapped-off horn keeps repeating one hard syllable that sounds like a sentence being passed.

They haul me through the ship. Past more carved panels. Past a galley where a pot is actually steaming, which is the detail that breaks my brain a little — monsters, and soup — and into a space that has to be the bridge, all scrap and hung cable, with a chair at the center of it.

The thing in the chair doesn't get up when they drop me at his feet.

He's bigger than the rest. Black hair gone silver in places, two horns sweeping back from his temples and carved their whole length with those grieving lines.

The others' eyes glow. His find mine and hold them, and what's in them isn't hunger and isn't a price being calculated.

It's the face of someone who just found a thing he was told all his life was only a story, and it's bleeding on his floor.

"Don't," I say. It's the only word left in me.

He stands.