Page 17 of Alliance
“Expensive?” Roz asked.
“Do you have a cache?” he asked, licking a fang. He blinked away, ashamed. “I don’t have any creds to buy equipment.”
“Oh.” Roz blinked, looking down at the space between their bodies. She creased her brow. “Sorry, I thought—”
“It’s okay.”
“This is the only currency I have.”
Silence fell between them, Fásach’s chest tight with adrenaline. He swallowed hard and pushed her back. “You’re a doll,” he said quietly. “It’s natural for you to think that.”
Roz didn’t push back on being called a doll this time, and for some reason, Fásach’s mood fell. He slid off the bed and picked up his shirt, handing it to her. When she took it, he bent his neck, catching her eye. “You don’t ever need to pay for something with your body.”
She nodded, slipping the shirt back over her head.
“Okay.”
“You use creds for that. Or barter other items. But not you. Not if you don’t want to. If anyone says that’s the price, then tell them to fuck off.”
Roz nodded again, then silently mouthed the words,fuck off,as if she were practicing in earnest.
And even though she didn’t speak, a little chime tickled Fásach’s ear. He adjusted his pants discreetly, disturbed by his symphony, his reaction, his choices. He took another item out of his duffel, a thermophobic hood, the only cooling gear he had left, and fit it over Roz’s features. It was the best he could do to hide her and those spiraling tresses.
“Stay close to me and keep your head down, got it? Don’t take this off.”
“Where are we going?”
“I need to try to make some secure comms and pawn off a bunch of guild goods.”
“You’re going to steal from your own people? My coding suggests stealing from clients is wrong.”
“If I don’t, we won’t be able to afford getting off this dying ember.” Fásach grinned lopsidedly, though there was no mirth in it. “Besides, better to ask forgiveness than permission. Let’s go.”
He slid open the door and led Roz into the scorching afternoon gloom.
06
Fásach decided that the smartest plan of action was to strip the Pulpit. The safehouse was closest to his neighborhood and also burnt to a crisp. Anything that survived the firefight between Vin and Roka Lokurian would only be good for parts, but those parts would go for a hefty price. He’d parked Roz on the remnants of a countertop with a towel to keep her from smearing coal all over her backside and then spent two hours hauling wrecked guns, grenades, and printing bays. He even pried the heatproof siding off the walls.
Upon returning from his second haul, his heart practically leapt from his chest. Roz was no longer on the countertop…
But knee-deep in the floor of an armory safe. She’d given him a bright smile, filthy with black soot all over her arms and legs. “I found some palladium! Does that help? I want to be helpful.” She held up a heap of metals hidden beneath the floor like a child bringing their dishes to the sink.
The exchange had disturbed him. Dolls didn’t defy instructions, and no matter that Roz was something more, he still expected her to behave like one. Sometimes she was blank-faced and empty, but perhaps it was just that she was absorbing everything. She was observant, attentive… Fásach might even go so far as to sayempathetic.
As the Pipes’ bazaar lit its lanterns and raised its awnings for the night crowd, Fásach took a break, sitting in the safehouse’s exploded window, overlooking the plumes of smokefrom grill carts and the sounds of vendors hawking wares from their stalls. He stared down at his holotab, where the only contact he thought might be able to get them off-moon stared back at him with a rakish glint in his lens.
Might bewilling.
The first time Fásach had met Traveler was when Vin decided to shack up on theMummerand run supply shipments as a way to get Pom Pom out of the Volcage and into an environment that would make it easier for her to survive her illness. Novak had put him and Quiopha on dock security during those rendezvous, and the guild’s continued relationship with the ship’s eccentric captain was one of the reasons they’d become Huajile’s biggest authority outside of the institute.
During those days, he’d run wild with Vin and theMummer’sbilong enforcer, Sizzle. They’d bonded during drunken nights, damn near killing each other with their reckless dares and insults. Fásach grinned, rubbing his finger pads over the raised fang scars along his forearm. Sizzle had damn near shredded him open one night in an attempt to keep Fás from his bizarre collection of rusted old arrays. Afterwards, he’d been forced to join the guild to assure Novak and Traveler that he’d had no intention of actually eating anyone. A valid concern in the case of a bilong.
Those memories had long since tarnished though. Fásach wasn’t fit for sec jobs anymore, but he still had Traveler’s contact. The only problem was that as eccentric as the captain’s personality was, the cost of doing business was often just as unpredictable. He was under no illusion that Traveler would help him out of the goodness of his heart. He might not even remember him.
Still, it was Fásach’s only option.
“Comm Traveler,”he commanded his linguitor.
