Hals and Li-Cha run to find Fifth and make a plan to escape the attack of Silver’s Culling.

“Listen, Lianne. You need to get off this station, before sunrise. Or morning, or whatever they call it here.”

Hals was confused. Li-Cha let her go and straightened up, then offered Nador her hand. He gave her a tiny, tight smile before shaking. 

“I owed you, from the Baranpar Pit,” he said. “But next time, well…”

“I won’t let there be a next time,” Li-Cha said. “Thank you, Nador.”

He nodded, turned, and left the alley. Hals struggled to her feet, staring at the four scorch marks in the wall. The holes the blaster had made were inches deep, penetrating the metal frame almost entirely. Her shields almost certainly wouldn’t have stopped them.

“The hell?” Hals managed to whisper. 

Li-Cha stood up.

“Your name is Lianne?”

“Nador,” Li-Cha said. “What are you doing here? Working with that pirate?”

“Could ask you the same. I always wondered where you slunk off to, ya know. People guessed you’d gotten tired of the life, settled down with some rich prick and stole a moon from him or something. Didn’t expect to find you here. You’re dead, by the way.”

Hals went cold. She debated charging him, but Li-Cha reached down and squeezed her hand, and didn’t let go. 

“I am, am I?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he pulled the trigger three times.

A shadow fell across Hals’s table, and she looked up to see Olfadden. He folded his hands in front of himself and gave her a knowing stare. She met his gaze and didn’t blink.

“What?” she asked.

“You should go talk to Li-Cha. She just quit.”

Hals felt her stomach sour. “She what?”

Hals decides to go into work despite nearly dying the previous day and learns quite a bit about Olfadden (and only a little about herself).

Hals and Fifth talk about wha tit means to live the life of a vagabond pirate on a lawless station like Adumon, and Hals finally gets some much needed rest.

Hals finally arrives at Li-Cha’s place, and things get steamy… and then very, very dangerous.

Hals didn’t recognize the woman, which mean she hadn’t been in the bar when the shooting started. Good thing too, or she would have died there; her shields were garbage. The blast from the Gobbler hit her shield and Hals watched it sizzle and her distributor implants glow orange before they failed totally, and the blast zipped through her skull. The woman attempted a scream as a neat centimeter hole punched through her temple and down into her torso. Then she collapsed noisily, falling down the stairs. Hals could hear the person on the horn screaming, demanding to know what was happening.

Asendor Ku’s home was part storefront, part industrial factory, and part livingspace. She’d helped him find it almost two years ago, after helping him out of a nasty debt he’d incurred down in Red Crescent at the chance houses. Once he’d managed to get his business up and running, he quickly became known as the premiere body-modder on Adumon. It was late enough that he was probably asleep, so Hals used her key and opened his back door, slipping in and waving at the automated defense mecha that guarded the door. It bleeped at her and went back to sleep, sliding its very powerful blaster away quietly. Fifth hadn’t even noticed.

Halsirena’s shift at the Maiden’s Lament was almost over when the shooting started, and she couldn’t have been more irritated.

The commute into Portland was long and exhausting on the best of mornings; but when the bridge rose to let a cargo carrier or yacht pass, it transfigured into the most important place in Ahmed’s world.

He put the car in park and thought about texting his boss to explain his imminent lateness. He did not. Let that controlling micromanager stew and worry– she deserved it, anyway.

Satisfied by his petty act of defiance, he opened the app and pulled his gaming goggles out of the glove compartment.

“This is ThunderCivic,” Ahmed said, joining the burbling conversation. “Who’s ready to kick some monster ass?”

“I can’t get a respectable wish out of anybody,” the man said. “My buddies always get the good responses, the ‘I wish I could talk to dogs’ or ‘I wish my mom’s cancer was gone.’ Stuff like that,” he said.

“Al Adeen even heard a good one from the president last year!” the alcoholic said. “He wanted the most delicious American cheeseburger. At least that’s original!”

“For the first time, the Marshall didn’t seem perfectly precise and put together. She wore an expression that reminded me of a kid caught in a lie. Nothing like when I’d got my cuffs off, but still she was surprised. Which got me thinking, maybe there was a way out of this for me.”

The handcuffs the Marshalls had slapped on me were a new fancy model, apparently “coded to my DNA and unescapable without the key.”

That was what they told me when they clapped them on, anyway. I sighed and laid down on the comfortable couch I was shackled to. Not like my crew cared enough to try to bust me out. I’d learned that the hard way.

When the interrogation lounge door finally opened, I was hit with the smell of hot, delicious coffee and fried bread. The woman who walked in had a steaming cup in one hand, and a box of doughnuts in the other. I salivated.