Walking over to the window, I find myself facing rotting canvas. So I rip it down and toss it on the fire, which doesn’t improve the smell. But that doesn’t matter, because opening the shutters lets in the afternoon wind.
Two young women glance up from the square and look away, probably because I am naked. About the only thing you can say for Enyo Square is that it isn’t full of goats. There are no trees, no flowerbeds, no statues . . . None of the things I’ve come to expect from a square.
And I am looking down onto the sloping roofs of the other houses. They’re made from crumbling red tiles patched with sheet metal. An upper window in a building opposite lets into a bedroom where a woman is breast-feeding a baby. She must be precog, because she turns to meet my gaze.
A second later her shutter shuts.
‘Sir . . .’ Franc leads me away from the window. A second after that, she pulls what is left of the canvas from the fire and stamps it out with her bare feet. ‘Poppy,’ she tells me. ‘You’re feeling the effects of poppy.’
She’s wrong. I’m not feeling anything at all.
Certainly not as much as I expect to feel, given the raw skin covering my lower gut, which is puckered at the edge and sunburn pink. ‘Franc,’ I say. ‘About Colonel Vijay. You know he’s . . .’
‘We know who he is, sir.’
‘I’m sure you do. You’d have to be dumb not to. What I want to know is how he ended up joining Neen’s hunt for Shil.’
‘Originally, sir, the colonel intended going on his own.’
I make her repeat that.
‘Neen insisted on going,’ she says, knowing how absurd that sounds. Neen is a sergeant. Colonel Vijay outranks us all.
‘He told Neen to stay and then changed his mind?’
‘Yes, sir. That’s exactly what happened.’
Never issue an order you know will be broken. Never threaten punishment you don’t inflict. Never make promises you can’t keep. Sounds to me like Colonel Vijay is learning.
I wash myself, because I can’t see why Franc should. And I’m rinsing off the soap when Haze wanders into the attic, carrying my pistol. Without looking at me, he puts the SIG carefully on a table. After a second, I realize it’s because I’m naked. He is a strange boy, and I mean more than the braids twisting from his head.
‘Haze . . .‘ I say.
Turning back, he hastily looks away. So I tip what remains in my jug over my head and dry myself on a sheet taken from the bed. Believe it or not, that does improve matters.
‘You’ve lost your head dressing . . . ?’
Haze checks to see if he’s in trouble. He’s not. ‘Kyble knew,’ says Haze. ‘Told me not to be ashamed of what I was.’ His words come out in a rush.
‘And were you?’ I ask.
He nods.
When Franc returns, Haze leaves.
The bread is stale and the fruit spoilt, apart from the figs, which are unripe as bullets. I eat the lot because I’ve eaten worse. And worse is better than none at all, and I’ve eaten that too. As I wipe crumbs from my mouth, Franc steps back to strip off her singlet, unbuckle her boots and climb out of her combats.
‘Kyble’s orders?’
Franc nods and I laugh.
She is straddling me when Colonel Vijay comes into the square. Although Haze must say something, because the colonel shouts from outside, and then waits for a minute, before beginning to climb the stairs. By this time, I’m wearing the sheet I used to dry myself and Franc is back in her clothes. Well, mostly.
He barely looks at her.
‘Tracked Pavel to a city in the mountains,’ he says. ‘It’s walled, bigger than this, with guards on the gate. Looks locked down to me. So either they’re expecting us, or they’re expecting some other kind of trouble.’
His voice is clipped; it takes me a second to realize he’s angry. Another, to realize it’s with me.
‘Sir . . .’ I begin.
‘No,’ he says. ‘You’ll listen.’ Stamping to the window, he glares out at the square and then stamps back again. ‘You,’ he says, nodding at Franc. ‘Leave us.’
Saluting, she heads out without needing to be told twice.
‘Three points,’ says the colonel. ‘One, you cost us a trooper. Two, we have lost a week because of you. And three, you don’t commit suicide in my time. Neen’s on the edge of going rogue.’
He turns, scowls at me.
‘And I don’t blame him.’
He means it. The little fuck is siding with Neen.
‘You think you’d be alive without me, sir?’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’
‘Let me repeat it.’
‘Sven . . .‘
‘Sven nothing, sir. You’d be dead.’
I’m seconds away from putting him through a wall. Here I am on some fuckwit habitat in Uplift space, on a mission so secret that no one’s prepared to tell me what it really is. Because, sure as fuck, it is not about finding a missing U/Free. At least, not just that.
I’m pretty sure Colonel Vijay knows.
‘One,’ I say. ‘Shil disobeyed a direct order to retreat. Two, you almost blew the entire fucking mission with your little meltdown in the hub. And three, I’m bored shitless babysitting some little fuck with a chest full of medals for battles he didn’t fight.’
The colonel flushes.
‘Must be hell, sir,’ I say, ‘having Jaxx for your father. All that money, all those houses.’
‘You have no fucking idea.’
‘You’re right,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t. Never met my real father.’
‘Surprise me,’ he says. ‘I take it your mother was a whore?’
‘No, sir.’ I say. ‘That must be yours.’
Blocking his punch, I step back. Everyone has buttons; it’s just finding the right ones to push. All the same, for the first time, Colonel Vijay seems to know what he is doing. So I take another look and realize his face is thinner, his eyes harder. Wind has turned his skin to leather. ‘Some fancy tutor teach you to fight?’
‘A sergeant,’ he snaps. ‘No one you’d know.’
‘Horse Hito?’
He steps out of my reach. ‘You know Hito?’ Colonel Vijay sounds surprised.
‘Yeah,’ I growl. ‘Horse gave me the knife I used on Paradise. Went with me to have my arm fitted. Introduced me to General Jaxx. One of life’s good guys . . .’
Colonel Vijay is reassessing.
I’m not at all sure I like being reassessed by some smug little shit. Only the smug little shit is fading before my eyes and someone else is taking his place. Guess all Vijay Jaxx needed was to get out from under his father’s shadow.
‘So,’ I say. ‘How do you know him?’
The colonel laughs. ‘He’s the old man’s pet assassin.’
First I’ve heard of it.