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  Baxter and Cooper separated and a series of body blows echoed through the bathroom. Silva dropped to one knee to relieve the pressure on his hyperextended arm, which I still controlled. I launched a point blank front kick, using our mutual descent to hammer my foot into his turned hip. His elbow jolted and his wrist yanked free from my sweaty grip.

  "You get back here."

  Silva scooted back on his butt, disabled elbow held to his chest. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

  I charged forward, right leg leading, hips and shoulders square to him to keep all my limbs in play. He drove his heel at my lead knee. I lowered my weight for the incoming blow and took it on my lower thigh instead, an aching shot to the muscle. I slipped on the water-slick tile, scraping the sink as I went down.

  He swung to his feet. "See what you get!"

  I grimaced and stood. He came at me with the worst punch in the history of punches, a from-the-heels right haymaker so huge you could see it from space. I bent at the knees and shifted my heels, left hand flicking out of my half-assed guard, smacking the blade of my palm into his forearm. The redirected motion of his punch brought his face straight at me. I dropped my right elbow and just about jumped out of my shoes attempting to replace his chin with my fist.

  A wet pink blob sailed from between Silva's clacking teeth. I stepped to the side. He timbered like an axed tree. The tip of his tongue hit the tile with a soft plop.

  Pete started to twitch on the floor. To my right, Baxter and Cooper were wrapped up in standard fistfight devolvement, i.e. they grappled like lovers royally pissed off about how hard it was proving to fuck through their clothes. Cooper slipped a punch into Baxter's gut and they fell apart. Cooper's hand dropped to his shirt. A finger-length knife flashed in the harsh overhead lights.

  "Cheater!" Baxter said.

  Cooper swatted at Baxter's hands with his left and jabbed at him with the knife, shredding a fold of Baxter's halfvest. Cooper gathered himself for another strike. I hopped forward and side-kicked him into a bathroom stall.

  The door slammed against the stall wall. Cooper banged against the toilet. His knife spun away and landed point-down in my canvas sneaker. I shrieked and staggered. Baxter shoved me out of the way and disappeared into the now-crowded stall.

  "Hello," he said. Cooper groaned. Baxter's elbow jutted from the stall, then leapt back inside as he socked Cooper's face. "You work for Brock, Inc. Does Brock, Inc. work for HemiCo?"

  "Suck my—"

  The elbow reappeared, then pistoned into the stall with a hard, meaty crack. "I'll rephrase: what is the name of your contact at HemiCo?"

  "John Quilan," Cooper gasped.

  "Why did you trash my office?"

  I yanked the knife from my foot. My sight fogged over with black and white speckles and I decided to lie on the tiles for a moment. When I came to, Pete was inspecting my bleeding foot and Baxter was attempting to flush Cooper's face down the toilet.

  The bathroom door clapped open. A young man with his hair twisted into spikes gaped at us.

  "No worries, I just shit meself instead," he said in an Australian accent. He backed out the door.

  Pete put his hand on my shoulder. "Can you walk?"

  "Can you carry me?"

  "Meet you halfway." He lifted me to my feet and we hobbled to the exit. The toilet whooshed again. Baxter jogged past to get the door for us. After a couple turns of the hall, we burst into a hushed restaurant. Faces turned our way, moonlike in the candles.

  "Happy anniversaries!" Baxter announced.

  He hustled for the front doors. I hopped behind him, Pete propping me up. We hit the street. By the time we scrambled into the safety of the parking garage, the first sirens whooped through the night.

  * * *

  After that, we were swiftly summoned to the palace.

  On our way in, which lasted for well over a mile, Baxter thoroughly ignored the manicured wonders of the bright gardens and sculpted brush of Lee Jefferson's primary residence. Whiffs of pollen and chlorophyll spilled through the car's AC. The milky pillars of the house glittered in the sunlight, screened by twenty-foot sunflowers, radially symmetrical shrubs, and wildflowers cunningly tended to appear as distant mountain ranges. At both flanks of the manor, a tower soared a hundred high, ringed by pines. I hadn't yet seen the whole thing at once, but the house proper was rumored to resemble the offspring of the Parthenon and a Southern plantation.

  I couldn't decide if the architectural choice was made more or less questionable by the fact Lee Jefferson was black. Oddly, she hadn't grown up in Georgia or South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still appeared, groundhog-like, on the fenders of some bikes and minis. Instead, she'd been born and raised thirty miles from here in Helena. Montana hadn't even been a state until a generation after the Civil War. On top of that, the big collapse a hundred years back had been so thorough and catastrophic that the rebuilders had had free reign to wipe the economic slate clean. Financial racial inequality had all but disappeared, and within a couple generations of that, racism as we knew it virtually vanished, believe it or not.

  So I had no clue what Lee Jefferson was trying to say with her throwback homestead. But it was this exact tendency to ignore convention, tact, and uselessly literal details that had helped her accumulate her personal $108 billion, a fraction of which she'd since pumped into NightVision Resources.

  Something had been on my mind since the night before. "Do you think what we did was a felony?"

  "Four felonies, I think. At least."

  "Well, maybe they cancel each other out."

  "If Lee Jefferson has a problem fighting fire with fire, why can't she just call me?"

  The car dimmed as we entered a tunnel of trellised rose bushes. "This is how the wealthy do these things."

  He frowned at me, as if the notion of etiquette were an abstract painting. The tunnel of roses curved, disgorging us into rich spring sunlight. The minicar ground to a stop on the pink gravel drive. I nodded to the driver as he swung open my door.

  The main wing of the Crystal Palace stood five stories high and the quartz pillars supporting its front eaves stretched from ground to roof. Reports varied as to whether they solid quartz had been grown in a lab or extracted miles below the Earth's surface and erected here.

  "Impressive," Baxter said.

  The double doors opened. The doorman led us through an airy red hall. Canvas-sized spacescapes of the System's planets were painted directly onto the walls. A glass elevator provided us with a full view of the sprawling grounds as it raised us to the fifth floor. This was a vast and sparse room interrupted by marble columns and wrought iron chairs. We followed the doorman to the arched door at its far end, where he touched a flesh-colored button on the side of his throat and murmured so softly you wouldn't have recognized it as speech unless you were watching his mouth move. He nodded and rested his hand on the iron door handle.

  "Watch your step."

  Beyond the door lay a cavern of dark and light, a geode blown up to titanic size. Milk-white crystals as long and thick as trees stood at all angles, gleaming under the concealed lights. Black nothing filled the space between and beneath them; the lights faded to total darkness at the room's edges, suggesting an expanse into forever. An irregular bridge of crystals stretched into the gloom, sketching a path to the other side.

  "You first," I said. Baxter stepped onto a log-like crystal. I followed, limping a bit from my knife wound, placing one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker. Laughter echoed around the chamber. I wobbled and crouched low.

  "You could at least put up handrails," I called.

  "And rob you of your only chance to sue me?" Jefferson's voice echoed from the other side of the cavern. My foot slipped and I concentrated on not falling into the eerie darkness, which my eyes told me went on for eternity even as my brain reassured me that there had to be a floor just two or three feet down.

  Untroubled by the illusion of a bottomless fall, the ridiculous cryst
alline sidewalk, or a recently-stabbed foot, Baxter strolled ahead. I reminded myself I had survived infinitely worse and hurried after him, nearly catching up by the time he reached Lee Jefferson. She sat on a blanket on a flat crystal as broad as a bedroom. She was a thin and crisp-featured woman of some fifty apparent years, her light brown skin a shade or two past my generic Mediterranean tone. To her left sat a closed omni; to her right a plate of potato chips, a fat bottle, a glass of champagne as bubbly and semi-translucent as the crystals around us, and a hardback book.

  She gave us a lopsided grin. "Rob. Baxter. Pull up a chair."

  I sat down and took a potato chip. It didn't taste like a billionaire's chip. Baxter knelt, butt on his heels.

  "They started it," he said.

  Lee's grin twisted into mock reproach. "Come on."

  "I don't like them thinking they're literally above the law."

  "So you beat the idea out of them? What are we, barbarians?"

  "Well, by the old Greek definition," I said. "But who isn't."

  "Baxter, I don't know what weirdo climate you came up in on Mars, but that's not how the old world does business. Scandal like that can turn the whole public against you."

  "The public."

  "The people who pay you by buying our stuff." Lee crunched a chip. "You're with me now. I look out for my partners."

  He tipped back his chin. "Until you sell us out."

  "If you heard about their offer, you also heard I printed it out and burned it. I love space. I want to be a part of it—but HemiCo and Maiden Voyages and Olympian Atomics have it all bundled up. I couldn't see a meaningful way into the game until you came along. I'm not about to sell my dream before it's off the ground."

  "You don't understand them. They've been away too long. They're building a different world out there."

  "I know better than you think. As long as you're on Earth, you play by Earth rules. Got me?"

  "Yes ma'am."

  "Ma'am?" She grinned and hoisted the bottle. "I'll overlook that. On the condition you two thugs drink a toast with me."

  I took the bottle from her. "I want you to know it was all his idea."

  We rode to the airport in silence. There was a lot of that with Baxter. At other times, he launched into fierce, woozy rants, but I'd gotten the idea these speeches weren't about communication, but were a way of picking at a knot of problems his mind couldn't unravel. When we landed in Seattle, I invited him to my apartment to talk things out. To my surprise, he said yes.

  Though I currently possessed a modest fortune, in the past, I'd cycled between rich and poor so often I'd developed a phobia about spending money. But I had a thing for water, and caught up in the thrill of founding NightVision, I'd leased a stupidly expensive place overlooking the Sound. Whenever we traveled out to tie up one more loose thread of the mile-wide quilt that was our fledgling company, I keenly regretted my waterfront apartment burning Benjamins in my absence. But on the rare nights I got to come home and watch the lights ripple over the dark water, I knew I'd done right.

  I snagged a bottle and two shot glasses and ushered Baxter out onto the balcony, where the night air was just warm enough to tolerate, so long as your blood was blanketed with whiskey. We talked shop for a while, and the strangeness of Lee's cave-topped home; he opined that having that much money causes a mental illness that expresses itself by taking subconscious fantasies and anxieties and recreating them in the owner's real-world surroundings. I told him I thought people without money did that, too.

  "What's your problem with HemiCo?" I asked, finally, once I was good and loaded.

  "They are bullies who treat the universe like their birthright. Surely you've known kings and viziers like that."

  "The real problem. The one you take so damn personal."

  "Oh," he said. "That."

  "So?"

  Baxter paused for five full seconds. "They killed my first real friend."

  I passed him a shot, tinked glasses, and drank. "When you escaped from them."

  He laughed softly, gazing across the bay. "How did you know?"

  "You let things slip. You don't know the things that even a Martian should know." I blew over the bottle's mouth, making it whistle. "I had an instinct the first time we met. You look like us in every other way, but there's something different in your eyes."

  "Perhaps I don't have a soul."

  I laughed. "Getting mawkish? Don't tell me that body actually gets drunk."

  Baxter smiled at his feet dangling between the balcony rails. "No. But by the point it should be obvious that I'm not, everyone else is usually too drunk to notice anything besides the color of their own vomit."

  "Now that you know that I know, are you going to chew me up in your terrible robot teeth?"

  "I'm glad a human that isn't one of them knows." He swigged a symbolic drink from the bottle. "Besides, now we both know a secret that could destroy the other. Isn't that the definition of friendship?"

  "He's coming." Arthur raised the line of his left eyebrow at Baxter. Lines were all Arthur had on the palm-sized green screen of his faceplate—one for his mouth, two for his brows, a pair of solid black dots for eyes. It was ludicrous they'd given him a face at all. Baxter suspected it was their idea of a joke. Arthur blinked at him. "I mean, I can hear him. Coming down the hall."

  "I believe you."

  "What are you going to do when he gets here?"

  Baxter stared at the door. "They might not kill us."

  "They don't think we're like them. They think we're property."

  "I know," he said, and he knew Arthur was right. The little box had to remind him of that sometimes. When Baxter imagined a human face, he saw it smiling. But he wasn't convinced Arthur saw the face at all: just the reptile brain lurking a few inches behind it, ready to lash out at every threat, real or imagined.

  Knuckles banged against the door. He met Arthur's eyes.

  4

  "So what do you do?" Naya said, a brunette lock spilling past her ear as she leaned in for a bite of curry.

  As my other tastes and interests welled, ebbed, and cycled, Indian remained my uncontested favorite food. It looked like a sad pile of mush, but it tasted like a bowl of condensed fire. Naya and I ate in the ground floor of a Capitol Hill restaurant, and though it had been ten days since my last visit to the area, the idea I might run into a heavily-bandaged Cooper or Silva filled me with secret glee.

  "Interesting question."

  I chewed happily, considering this. NVR had, finally, entered mop-up mode. Since the night I'd met Baxter at Wetta Tower and signed on to this insane venture, two months had zipped by. We'd enlisted Lee Jefferson, then spent her money hither and yon, purchasing metals and carbons, engineers and labor, and a half dozen factories around the world, including the flagship plant at Felix's former auto works. Retooled for its former purpose, upgraded with modern equipment, and modified by some innovations from Baxter's shadowy boss, the plant had already gone into production, stamping out the simpler parts of our prototype mining ship (ETA unclear, but Baxter hinted, unbelievably, the first vessel would be space-ready in three months). There was still a lot of stuff I didn't care about to get finalized, but my organizational, diplomatic, get-stuff-done skills were no longer required. NVR had reached critical mass. It was time for me to move along.

  "I'm an independent contractor," I answered at last.

  "You think that's interesting?"

  Brown-haired, big-hipped, and fertile as the Crescent, Naya was exactly the type I gravitated to, and was even prettier when she laughed. She had asked me out while I was eating a kebab on the patch of grass next to the boardwalk aquarium. You don't say no when a pretty girl asks you out, even though women are one of the ways living forever is bullshit. Ever cry out another girl's name during sex? Imagine shouting a name that hasn't even been used in five hundred years. None of my marriages had lasted longer than 25 years because no matter how well I disguised my agelessness by growing beards, tanning, and, onc
e plastic surgery arrived, adding wrinkles and bags to my face—you should see the look a surgeon gives you when you ask to be made older—there's no love in the world bright enough to blind a woman to the fact the man she married at age twenty has not suffered the intervening decades of sun, gravity, and oxygen the same way she has.

  Which is worse? Intentionally fighting with someone you love until they don't love you anymore? Or walking away without warning? There were spans of years when I gave up on the very concept of relationships. In the long run, perhaps I was happier alone, free from the countdown to the end of our time together. But after a while you miss it. The companionship. The sex, too. But mostly the sense of partnership, of knowing you're not going through life by yourself, that someone out there will always have your back. Always, I reached a point where I knew I'd had good reasons for staying single, but after a while, those reasons faded like all memories do.

  "The people I work with are more interesting than the work itself," I said. I ripped off a buttery strip of naan. "I'm wrapping it up right now, actually. Have to find something new to do with myself."

  She tugged the strap of her halfvest up her slim shoulder. By and large, Seattle men appeared ignorant or contemptuous of the garment's East Coast fashionability, but I'd seen a number of women wearing a semi-ironic feminized version with mixed results. Naya's cut showed a riotous amount of skin.

  "What've you got in mind?"

  "I'm thinking of starting a new life." Not that I had a choice. And whatever information Baxter gave me about my makeup and origins could impact where I went next. "Got any suggestions?"

  She smiled, showing a little tooth. "Are you trying to be suede?"

  I speared a bite of paneer from her plate. "I've been around long enough to know good advice can come from anywhere."

  "I think that's a yes."

  "There's always tomorrow. I honestly don't care where this leads."