Rasia’s hands were wrapped around the Hecutor stubgun in a vice grip. Blood pooled at the edge of the stairwell, darker where it touched the soot-glass tiles. Not hers.
They’d been three: Rasia, Vesk, and Dara.
The mission had been precise — infiltrate the vault levels of the old Summer Palace complex, retrieve a ledger said to contain the names of psyker-tainted lineages among the grandees of Palast Vire. Physical evidence. Valuable. The kind of thing the cell would have moved hard on, in the old days.
Too clean. Too fast.
The hallway sealed behind them. Vent systems kicked on. The air took on a sweet, chemical bite.
They ran.
Dara was slower. Younger, but loaded down with gear. Vesk didn’t glance back. He grabbed Rasia by the collar, yanked her through the auxiliary door before the vaults locked down behind them. Didn’t wait for Dara. Slammed the door interface. They heard Dara scream, just once.
Rasia hadn’t holstered her pistol since.
‘We need to talk,’ she said, voice flat.
They hid in the ruin of an old storefront, no power, only lamplight. Moss crawled across the display shelves. It ate away at pressboard screens, printed with Low Gothic runes and advertisements of the season’s fashions, now distorted and fouled by age and damp. Above them, floodlights passed in a distant search pattern.
Vesk paced.
He looked older than his years now. His coat was torn, bleeding from a graze along his ribs. He’d stripped his gear, but Rasia noted the rosette still hung from his collar. It didn’t mean anything anymore, but he wore it anyway.
‘I should have known.’
‘What?’ asked Vesk, tense.
‘You said the intel was good,’ Rasia said. ‘From Javin.’
‘I did. It was.’
‘Javin’s been dead for three years,’ came Rasia’s retort, her thumb twitching over the Hecutor’s hammer.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do. I found him in the Canto Rhaga last winter. Missed his ident-chip. Femur. Not the skull.’
Vesk kept pacing. Wouldn’t look at her.
‘The palace hall lock. We were scrambling signals. So it was mechanical. Local control. Someone knew exactly when we’d be there.’
Vesk stopped.
‘And Dara,’ Rasia said. ‘Tell me you thought she was compromised. Tell me you thought it was her.’
‘And Dara…’ Vesk didn’t lie. He just trailed off, let the silence hang, like there might be a way through it.
‘She was going to break, sooner or later,’ he said finally. ‘She wasn’t built like us. Wouldn’t have made it in the real Ordos.’
‘You drogging broke!’ Rasia snarled it, and then her gun hand was up, revolver barrel levelled at Vesk’s head. He didn’t move.
‘I tried to save you.’
‘You didn’t,’ Rasia spat back.
Vesk sank onto the sagging remains of a broken shelf, exhaled in a way that betrayed his age more than any physical signs. ‘Subir knew about us. For years. Throne, Rasia, we’ve done jobs for her. Rivals. Problems. Six months ago, and the one before that. And the island job, last year.’
‘And?’
‘Damn it, Rasia, we serve the Ordos, but we served her too. So she offered a deal.’
Rasia didn’t move.
‘One name. One body. One villain for her to spin a story on, and one flare to signal it’s done. That was the price for us to walk away from all this.’
‘You don’t get to decide.’
‘Dara would have picked you.’
‘Piss off!’
Vesk met Rasia’s gaze for the first time. ‘It’s wrong, what we turned you into. You’re the best of us, the best thing we did, but it’s wrong. The Great Rift made us harder, Rasia. We were already hard people. You think we’re alive here today because we avoided hard choices?’
Rasia’s grip on the gun eased. Not because she forgave him — but because she’d moved close enough that it no longer mattered.
‘We swore an oath to the Throne to endure,’ Vesk said. ‘Not die in this fetid swamp of a city.’
Rasia sat on the shelf opposite Vesk. Quiet. Eyes on the floor.
‘Does she know about me?’
Vesk hesitated. Too long.
‘She already knew,’ he said. ‘All of us. She made us all. I tried to keep you out of it.’
‘You failed.’
Rasia looked up slowly. Her coat rustled as she flexed her right arm. Vesk didn’t move. Just stared at the floor like he expected absolution to rise out of the moss.
‘You think the Inquisition will know we ever existed?’ Vesk muttered. ‘We’re roaches, Rasia. We swore to be roaches. We’re an echo of a memory.’
‘You broke,’ Rasia said. ‘Don’t dress it up as anything else.’
She hefted the gun from her lap and shot him once, centre of mass.
He slumped back against the wall with a little cough of surprise and was still.
She waited beside his body for the search drones to move on, until the latest hours of the night. Palast Vire never went silent, but even a den of vice must slumber.
She navigated a gauntlet of gantries to the roof of the commercia block’s superstructure — a part of the city long abandoned. Salt wind rattled broken vents, and all manner of rot and elemental ague afflicted the roof panels. She didn’t care.
She tugged a chemical flare free of her belt. Pressboard around a bright phosphor charge. Twisted the cap and yanked the ignition lanyard.
The chemical light hissed and guttered into life, like a little star in her hand, casting the inscrutable machinery of the block’s rooftop in harsh, white and black relief.
Somewhere across the city, a light answered. Brief, indistinct. Could have been a reflection on the water. Could have been nothing.
She didn’t wait for her flare to burn down.
She left it on the roof, and double-checked the fyceline charges she’d laid on her way up.
All good.
Sliding her pistol back into her belt, she ducked out into the street and disappeared into the quiet hours.
About the Author
Logan writes grimdark fiction about ordinary people trying to survive in the face of vast, incomprehensible horror. Informed by his own experiences as a faceless government staffer, he enjoys exploring the byzantine bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man, and its consequences. When he’s not doing words, Logan enjoys gaming, miniature painting, and creating screen-accurate scifi film and television prop replicas.
