1
Ruthless moved with silent purpose, keeping to the shadows as she strode between the skyscrapers of Earthtown's expansion district. It was summer in the northern hemisphere of Kabuva, the air chill and dense but not frosty, the skunky musk of the sea a reminder that this wasn't home, this would never be home. Tumbler Moon was full, shining so brilliantly it might have been dawn rather than deepest night. She cursed its brightness as she walked, then reminded herself it could be worse: Mad Moon could be out too.
Arriving at Phoenix Avenue, she was relieved to find herself the only living creature on the ground. Nanocompiled towers rose around her, monolithic, smooth, and identical but for their height. Taking out a bootlegged scanner, Ruthless walked a quick circle in the middle of the unused intersection, checking for police transmissions. It registered a welcome concentration of signals, all bouncing around the occupied half of the refugee settlement.
The Kabu had over-estimated how many human exiles would make it to Refuge Island. They'd compiled Earthtown's skyscrapers with a figure of three million refugees in mind; only half that number actually escaped from Earth. So the squid sealed off the excess portion of the prefabricated city, deactivating the power and water grids, blocking the roads, and pulling out all but a handful of surveillance cameras.
According to her scanner, this was one of the surveillance dead zones—no cops nearby. Satisfied, Ruthless turned to a slashed plastic seal on the entrance of the building behind her. Pushing her way through the tear, she trotted up the stillborn escalators to the sixth floor. There another torn seal marked a door midway down the hall.
Ruthless crept to the door, rapping it with gloved fingers.
"Rav?"
"Auntie?" Raviel's voice was duller than an hour ago—less fearful, more shocked. She had been right in the middle of a hot flash when he called, sweat pouring down her face and chest as her nephew's panic chilled her heart.
Auntie. She wondered when he'd last called her that. Before Exile?
"Open up, Rav."
The door scrolled aside in jerks, powered by muscle instead of hydraulics. Ruthless didn't help him, didn't touch anything even though she had gloved up and sprayed down before leaving her apartment.
She took in everything at once. The blood, the corpses—one human and female, one squid and male—the smell of puke and, most important, the lack of an immediate threat. Having established the parameters of the crisis, she focused on Rav. Pale and hollow-eyed, her brother's son reeked of vomit and was bleeding slightly from a gash above his collarbone. The Kabu had come within inches of cutting his throat. She counted a dozen bruises and sucker-hickeys, all minor.
Rav's white-blonde hair was matted with ink and other alien fluids. His left arm was gloved in Kabu blood, black from fingertips to shoulder.
"Figure you want me to turn myself in," he said, and Ruthless was pierced by the memory of his father wearing a similar expression. Forcing himself to be brave, she thought, just like Matt before the battle of Las Vegas. "It'll be easier if you come with me. Auntie? Can you?"
When Ruthless did not reply, he said, swallowing, "I can call now if . . . "
"No, honey." She shook her head. "We're not calling."
Rav's pale face flushed red, and his eyes welled. He reached out—but Ruthless stopped him with a gesture.
"Can you answer me a couple questions?"
"Su-sure."
She pointed at the dead woman. "The squid killed her?"
"Yes," he said.
"You killed him?"
A slow nod.
"You know either of them?"
"No."
"Not at all?"
Face pinching, Rav pointed at the woman. "She's a local feeler. Comes to the Rialto sometimes, but . . ."
"But you've never spoken."
"Just—" He mimed tearing a ticket. "Enjoy the show, ma'am."
"Okay."
"She likes . . . liked silent movies. Always came to see Buster Keaton."
"Okay, Rav. You followed them because . . ."
"I'm documenting the touchie-feelie trade."
"You're what?" She wasn't as good at masking her feelings as she used to be—her tone made Rav flinch. "Doc—you brought recording equipment with you?"
He pointed to a button-sized blotch near the ceiling.
"That's a camera?"
"Latest model. Fly-on-the-wall, they call it." He laughed humorlessly.
The thing clung to the wall a discreet distance from the gore. It was too small to be anything but short range. Glancing around the room, Ruthless saw a receiver lying on the blue backpack she'd got Rav for his last birthday.
"Jesus, Rav, you filmed the killings?"
"I shut it down after."
"Is it shut down now?" It came out a growl.
Rav's head snapped up. "Yes. It's off. You're not on camera, swear."
"Where's the feed cached?"
"In my data pantry at home."
"You transmitted?"
"Using Ma's encryption protocols, yeah."
Ruthless drew in a slow breath. Elva knew her stuff: the feed would be safe.
Rav raised a shaking, blood-slimed hand to his face, as if to push back his hair. When he made contact he recoiled, staring at his blackened palm. "He was all the way down her throat. She was choking. I couldn't—"
"You had to help."
"I grabbed him . . . or he grabbed me. She was choking, all those arms—"
Ruthless nodded, remembering too well what it was like to wrestle an infuriated squid. They were bigger, and the tentacles made them seem stronger than they were. Not to mention slippery and fast.
"I overheard Ma once, telling her security boys you stuck your hand up a squid's mouth once in the war."
"I get the gist," Ruthless said, contemplating the corpses. Spatters, genetic evidence. Lot of cleanup here.
"She said you dug through to its brain with your fingers . . ." Rav continued, retching as he looked at his blood-gloved arm.
"You did the right thing, Rav."
Normally she'd be furious with Elva for letting the kid hear such a thing. Since it had apparently saved his ass, she silently blessed her sister-in-law's indiscretion.
"The right thing?"
She nodded, still thinking about cleanup. "You made it home from the playground, that's all that counts."
"Playground," he repeated, disbelieving.
"Huh—oh, sorry. Warspeak. It means—"
"I know it's warspeak."
"Means you didn't die."
"You've never . . . it makes you sound so old."
"Prehistoric." She looked back at the scene. "Gotta put your toys away, that's what we'd say about this."
He shuddered. "If I did the right thing and the feed proves it, why not tell?"
She shook her head. "Right or not, squid might still drown you. You killed one of them, just a fry from the looks of it . . ."
"He's a murderer!"
"It'll bring up old memories for them. Stuff about the war that the Kabu don't like to think about."
"That's a drowning offense now, making them remember?"
"It might be different one day, if we don't go back to Earth first. But change takes time and martyrs, Rav, and you are not getting sacrificed. Not for trying to save some poor feeler's life. Okay?"
Shuddering, he nodded.
"Now. I need you to take off the squid's hydration tank."
"What?"
"He'll have a tank. To keep his skin moist." She pointed and he fumbled the metal canister out of the dead sentient's limp, bell-shaped cap.
"Hold it so I can see the controls—good. There's enough in there for you to clean up."
"Should I get in the shower?"
"No! We get your genes in the drains, it's all over. Strip off your clothes in that corner and use his water supply to hose off."
"I'll get blood and stuff on the floor."
"It's okay. For now, just make yourself presentable."
As Rav washed, she unpacked her cloak on the corridor floor, laying out an assortment of sprays and other nanotech she'd squirreled away in the years since Exile. It had taken time to make contacts in a Kabuva forensics lab. She'd wondered sometimes if she wasn't wasting her money. Surely she'd be headed home to Earth before she needed any of these toys.
But the months since the Setback—nobody who'd made it to Earthtown called it the defeat it was—had stretched to years, seventeen of them now.
"Um," said Rav, shaking drips from his fine white hair.
"Clean?"
He nodded, blushing furiously, one newly-washed hand cupped over his groin.
Ruthless sprayed nanosols onto a towel and passed it over the threshold. "Here, dry off. Right. Now lay the towel on the floor like a rug and walk on it a couple times. Feet dry?"
"Yeah."
"Leave the towel, step over that tentacle, and come out into the hallway."
Nude, her nephew looked young and vulnerable. As he stepped out of the crime scene she clasped his shoulder with her gloved hand, feeling the pressure in her chest ease at the contact. "It's gonna be okay, honey."
Swallowing, he nodded.
"Let's get that wound." The edges of the gash in his chest were already red—Kabu saliva was notoriously infectious. She patted it dry with an antibiotic wipe and hit him with two immune-boosters. Last she painted on a thin layer of puttied skin, blending the culture until the cut was concealed.
"I'll need to refresh this every day for at least a week. We don't want it to scar: it's too obvious it's a beak bite. In the meantime, you'll wear high-collared smocks so nobody sees it. Nobody sees this, Rav, you got me?"
"Okay."
"You sleeping with anyone?"
"No."
"Are you?"
"No!" He flushed pink from forehead to toes.
"Good. Don't start until you're healed." Next she sprayed a thin mist up and down his body. Beading on his skin, it dispersed quickly, spreading like oil. "This'll die off in a day or so."
"It tickles."
"It devours any dead skin cells you happen to be shedding; also hairs, sweat, tears, blood—anything that might leave trace. Squid forensics labs developed it to keep their investigators from contaminating crime scenes. Not that they cry tears, of course, this is a variant they developed for working with human cops . . ."
As she hoped, her patter soothed him, the matter-of-fact voice easing his nerves and the peculiarity of his nakedness.
"Where'd you get the spray?"
"Black market lab in Little Canada," she said, handing him a smock. "Here, get dressed. Watch the edges of that synthetic skin on your chest."
He took the clothes with visible relief. "You just keep stuff around for covering up crimes?"
"As a precaution."
"Against what? Everyone here fought alongside the Kabu. Why would anyone need to cover up a . . ."
"A justifiable homicide?"
He swallowed. "You used to be a cop. Used to solve this kind of thing."
"And now I work in an umbrella factory. Listen, sweetheart. You tried to save the girl. A nice thing to do . . . and killing the squid was purely fair play."
"You'd cover it up even if I'd murdered him. If I wasn't your nephew I'd be sunk."
"Sure, I suppose that's true."
"So really, whether I did the right thing or not is beside the point."
"You're gonna go killing squid for fun now?"
He glared. "It wasn't fun."
"I'm not trying to offend you, Rav. I know anger feels better than being scared or freaked out."
"Don't tell me what I'm feeling!"
"You can yell at me later if you need to, all you want, anytime you want, about anything you think I've done wrong."
"That's not—"
She interrupted. "You'll have to yell at me, because as long as we're on Kabuva, you're never going to mention what happened here to another living soul. Ever, Rav."
He jerked the smock up over his hips, stretching the fabric, his hands trembling.
"Right now we have to get rid of the evidence. So I'm asking—do you need a pacifier, or can you hold it together?"
Rav frowned, confused, and she held up a patch
"I don't need drugs," he said.
"Good. Put on my cloak and remember to keep your face down in case there are fixed cameras."
"We're walking away? But my blood, and the bodies . . ."
"We'll come back and get rid of it all."
"How? All this . . . evidence."
"Dust it," Ruthless said, and Rav's face went so slack she might as well have pacified him. Head lowered, he shuffled after her as she headed down the hall.
The Kabu had interested themselves in Earth's civil war early on, throwing technology, medical aid, and eventually even soldiers into the Democratic Army's global fight against the fascist Friends of Liberation. In the end it cost the offworld sentients an uncountable fortune as well as the lives of over a million young squid . . . a million, that is, if one didn't count the conscripts who went home alive but just as thoroughly destroyed, body and soul, as their dusted kelpmates.
The Friends—Fiends, their enemies had called them—had alien backers too. Over the course of seventy grinding years they and their allies beat the Democratic/Squid alliance soundly. The Fiends devoured the world mile by bloody mile, starting in Asia and taking North America last of all.
The most terrible weapon of the war was dust, a nanotech agent that took everything in its path apart molecule by molecule. Equally useful for structural targets or as an anti-personnel weapon, dust erased its victims from existence. Direct hits left no trace. Nothing to bury, no DNA, just oddly sterile battlefields—overlapping craters filled with thin, rust-colored powder, sometimes edged with pieces of bodies. Arms, legs and heads, usually—it was the extremities that most often escaped the blast perimeters.
A child of the Setback, Rav had grown up dreading the very thought of dust. It was the bogeyman of his generation: go to sleep, kid, or the Fiends will come and dust you.
That threat hadn't kept him from pestering his mother and aunt for war stories: his fascination with the past was morbid and insatiable. Maybe now that will change, Ruthless thought, despite the guilty pang at her selfishness.
They arrived at the Rialto just after midnight, creeping in through a back door. "Go put on a smock that fits. Bring back the one you're wearing," Ruthless said.
"Okay."
"Before you go up, give me access to your pantry."
"It's fingerprinted."
"Scan in and authorize me," she said, nudging him toward a terminal.
"What are you going to do?"
"Delete the feed and anything associated with it."
"I'll do that later."
"Just get your clothes."
"Fine." Scanning his thumb and keying in the authorization, Rav vanished upstairs to his room.
Ruthless found the right directory easily enough: it was packed with video feeds. Feeds of feeler pickups—half-smocked women and men lurking in building lobbies. Human-chauffeured cars cruising slowly to allow the squid riding in the water tank in back to extend their tentacles, tasting the wares on offer. Feeds of quickie feels—an old squid with two burned tentacles slowly removing a woman's mask, delicately tasting her lips and the corners of her eyes. A human male guiding a tentacle delicately over his groin as he drank some concoction that made him break out in a heavy sweat.
The same man showed up in the next feed too—he was working a tentacle in and around his ear. And another; he was putting on a breathing rig that would allow a client to probe his throat without suffocating him.
Blind as kittens, the Kabu were taste-oriented: with each other, they probed and suckled with abandon. Humans who dealt with them wore smocks that sealed off their crotches, wore masks to protect their faces. The squid were supposed to content themselves with the scent and taste of human feet, palms, and underarms, a prohibition that worked about as well as any other taboo.
Ruthless never saw the Kabu in her day-to-day life if she could avoid it. Masks made her claustrophobic. And even after so many years there was something about the memory of a tentacle draping over her wrist, of small suckers tasting her palm, that made her stomach turn.
She reached the most recent feed. It began with the duo she had seen dead in the apartment, arriving at the building on Phoenix Street. As the car drove away, the woman looked upward, just for a second, gazing into the greenish light of Tumbler Moon.
Following them inside, the camera dipped and hovered, seeking a good vantage point. By the time it was settled the woman had stripped, leaning back against a wall so the squid could taste her various scent zones.
Why had Rav wanted this, Ruthless wondered, feeling queasy as the tentacles explored the woman's body, poking at her ears, the corners of her eyes, eventually probing into her vagina and anus. It went bad quickly after that: the squid yanked her tongue, pulling with brutal force before sliding another tentacle down the woman's throat.
As she began to choke, Rav burst in.
Mother-bear rage built within Ruthless as her nephew and the squid collided, as its beak slashed open Rav's chest and the blood sprayed. Rav thrust his arm past its maw, digging for the sentient's vulnerable palate. With a convulsive jerk, he punched through the gelatinous flesh, squeezing brain. The squid thrashed and then went limp.
Heaving free, Rav crawled to the woman, drawing a bloodied tentacle out of her throat. He checked her pulse; he started CPR. Good boy, Ruthless thought, running the feed forward. He gave resuscitation a good solid try before collapsing, curling in a spreading puddle of black blood, vomiting and weeping. It was some time before he recovered and shut off the camera.
Ruthless deleted the files and poked through the data pantry, searching for copies. The old feeds had been backed up, but not this newest. Relieved, she wiped the backups, fished up a couple of Elva's most aggressive security programs, and set them to disassembling every trace of the deleted feeds.
Then, trotting down the hall, she peeked into the theater.
Her sister-in-law had come to Earthtown wearing one formal smock and nothing else. In the two suitcases permitted to each Exile—and in one of Rav's—Elva had stuffed movie feeds, hundreds of them: blockbusters and art films and cartoons and classics, any entertainment data she could get her hands on. She had marched straight off the ship and demanded to see the licensing bureau. Within a day she had a business charter, sole control over a large theater space, and an extra-large apartment that was attached to her place of business. She began showing movies around the clock . . . and people came.
Within a Kabuva week, Elva had bartered for all the necessities she had left behind—clothes, kitchen goods, books. Culture-shocked and dispossessed, the human refugees welcomed even the slightest glimpse of home.
Nowadays, the business ran strictly on cash. As always, the theater was jammed, every one of the two hundred seats filled and a lineup of homesick humans, most of them Ruthless's age, waiting to get in. They were watching an old Bollywood thing—Mangal Pandey, she thought. Many were slack-jawed, entranced. Some mumbled along, reading the English subtitles.
Ruthless allowed herself one glance at the screen, one intoxicating sight of horses and desert, of the familiar Earth sky. Then she tiptoed into Elva's office. With a bit of fiddling and one of her sprays, she was able to bust the lock on the safe, liberating a sheaf of movie passes.
"What are you doing here?" Elva's voice brought her round. "Where's Rav?"
Elva was a wealthy woman by Refuge standards, but years of hardship before Exile had made her frugal. She was wearing the plainest of gray smocks and an aging pair of leather boots. She kept her hair shaved in a buzz cut, red and silver bristles that did not quite hide the scar that ran down the side of her skull. She hoarded food and medicine, Rav said, against the day when they went home.
Her eyes were emeralds—sharp, green, hostile. They'd played together on a lot of battlefields, but they'd never quite been friends.
"Rav's upstairs," Ruthless said, and when Elva made a move in that direction she said, "Leave him be."
"What gives you the right to tell me what I can do in my own house?"
"Sorry."
"Is he all right?"
"Mostly."
"Is he in trouble?"
"He won't be for much longer."
"What's the game?"
"You wouldn't want me to say."
Elva glanced at the theater curtain.
"If you're calling your security guys to take me out of play . . ."
"You think I'm stupid enough to strongarm you, Ruthless?"
"I guess we'll see," she said pleasantly, but Elva didn't move. If she'd called on her dogs, she wasn't taking it back.
"Go back to work, Elva. Act normal. Rav'll be home by dawn."
"That's all? Show up, scare me shitless, rob me blind, and you're not going to tell me?"
"You're not going to ask again," Ruthless said. "Not here. Don't ask him either."
"Bullshit."
"It'll be best for everyone if you pretend you don't know he went out. Tell anyone who asks that he was in all night."
"What the fuck have you gotten him into?"
"You don't do as I say, Elva, the squid will come for him. If you don't do as I say, the squid will drown him. You're family, Elva, but he's blood. You mention tonight to him or anyone else, you give the police a reason to eavesdrop, you get my brother's son killed, I will give it out around town that you worked for the Fiends."
"I never—"
"Mobs don't care about the truth, Elva. You're a woman, you're wealthy, and you're something of a bitch. You're not liked and you know it. Now go back to work before your kid comes down and sees us arguing."
"I'm not arguing."
"Look, it's going to be okay," she said, and Elva punched her hard in the mouth.
Ruthless fell back against the desk. She'd forgotten about the hair-trigger temper.
"Don't you threaten me, Ruthie. He's my kid. You think blackmail—"
"It's bad, okay? He's in trouble and it's bad." She tasted blood in her mouth and, fleetingly, imagined hitting back. It had been years since they brawled . . . long enough she could almost imagine it would be fun. Instead, she said: "I shouldn't have said that. He's your kid. You'll keep quiet, I know that."
There was a light footfall on the stairs. "Auntie?"
Elva dashed at her eyes with the back of one clenched fist. "Don't lose. Whatever the game is—"
"I never lose." Jaw throbbing, she edged around Elva, slipping back into the hallway.
"Ruthless?" A hoarse whisper.
"Just Ruth, Rav," she sighed. "Okay?"
"You're bleeding."
"One of your mom's goons thought I was a gatecrasher."
"He still alive?" The joke fell flat as his voice quavered.
"Killing suddenly not so funny, huh kid?"
"So what now?"
What indeed? Elva would need time to calm down, and Rav was too worked up to leave behind. And he was in the game now, anyway, wasn't he? Club rule number one: clean up your own toys.
She led him to a pedestrian walkway, grateful to see it was getting foggy. "Let's talk over the ways people get caught."
"Okay."
"They make phone calls and big bank transactions around the time of the crime."
"I called you."
"We'll work up a story for that. They confess to their lover or therapist a decade after the event; then the lover or therapist tells someone, who tells someone else, and the secret eventually finds its way to the cops. They write about it in their diaries. They stop trusting their playmates . . ."
"Playmates?"
"Co-conspirators."
"I was by myself, Ruthl—Ruth."
"Rav." She caught his gaze. "I can sink for this now, just like you can."
He paled.
"Come on, we're on a clock."
2
They caught a highspeed to her home district, riding in silence to Beijing Avenue. Between the buildings, they could see the black sheet of the ocean whose Kabuva name, Vinvalomm, meant the Blighted Sea. The water was obscured at its beachward edges by rising banks of mist. The shadowy figures of shellfish collectors, human and squid both, moved like ghosts along its blue-tinged beaches.
Passing through a brightly-lit market, Rav and Ruthless watched the squid who'd come to buy Earthly delicacies—bean sprouts, beef tripe, silk. Shopping districts like this were mostly open at night, when the squids' suns couldn't dry out or fry their delicate skins.
Amid the loud chatter of the market, Rav murmured in her ear: "Can I ask you something?"
She glanced at her scanner, nodded. "You can ask."
"You weren't a Fiend. You were fighting the Fiends, right, just like the Kabu were?"
"Yeah."
"How is it you ended up . . ."
"Killing squid with my bare hands?"
He nodded.
"You don't need to know—"
"Please?"
No, she thought, and when she opened her mouth to speak her whole body resisted—her jaw felt rusted shut. "The squid needed spies—loyal Demos who'd join the Fiends and report on what they were up to. Your father'd been taken prisoner; I figured I could look for him and gather intelligence all at once."
"You pretended to be an infiltrator?"
"That's right."
"You fought with them? I mean—on their side?"
"Yes. I shot Demos. I dusted squid."
"How could the Kabu trust you after that?"
"I was home free as long as I followed two rules: produced results and only killed conscripts, never officers."
Rav stumbled into a woman carrying a block of frozen fishmeat—few humans could afford to buy beef, or any of the other earthmeats they now grew for the squid as delicacies.
Ruthless couldn't help laughing. "Shocked, huh?"
He laced his fingers in a squiddish religious gesture, the symbol of reverence. "Kabu philosophy—the sanctity of water-based life . . ."
"They tossed away a million of their fry." Bitterness clawed her lungs; it was always a mistake, discussing this with kids. The words coughed out in spurts, like blood. "Easy for 'em to be sanctimonious now. A few years have passed, so they think . . . Rav? You okay?"
He had pressed a fist to his chest, right around the beak bite. "Hurts a bit, that's all. Did you ever want to stay? With the Fiends?"
She shook her head. "It felt good playing for the winning team, sometimes, but they really were bastards."
"Did you find my dad?"
"He'd died," she said, bracing herself for the inevitable flood of questions about that.
Instead, he looked thoughtful. "That's why we had to leave Earth. Because you betrayed the Fiends."
And because Elva's platoon killed thousands of them, including a Russian prince, with a good old-fashioned nuke one sunny morning in Chicago. But she nodded. "Fiends would've killed us all once they took over."
From the market they rode a service elevator up four hundred stories, emerging into the brain of a building engineering system that controlled four city blocks. There, encircled by monitors and compressors, they found a milk-pale man in his fifties. A giant with long gold-and-white hair, his smock was so worn that his flesh glinted through it at the knees.
"This is Cope," Ruthless said. "Cope, my nephew Rav."
"Name's short for Copenhagen." The man extended a grimy hand and Rav shook it gingerly.
"Copenhagen—like the snack?"
"Like the city," Cope said sharply.
"Where—" Rav began, but Ruthless cut him off before he could make it worse.
"Cope, I need grenades. Two, three if possible, thirty diameter dispersal, with timers."
Pale blue eyes gleamed. "Where's the playground?"
"Expansion district. It goes right, nobody should die."
"Mmmm," he said neutrally. "My expenses?"
She pulled out the sheaf she had taken from Elva's safe. "Movie passes."
Cope fingered through the wealth. "I could only get two grenades. Can you wait?"
"Nope."
"Figured." Tucking the passes into his tunic's waistband, Cope opened a panel under the HVAC monitor. He drew out an embroidered gold cushion, slipping it into a sleek plastic shopping bag. "Timers are wired in."
"Thanks."
"Need help?"
"This is plenty."
He gave her a faintly hungry glance before turning back to work. "Play safely, then."
She led Rav back out to the walkway, looking for all the world like a mother taking her son out for a late-night shop. Except . . . "Stop staring at the pillow like it's a bomb," she finally had to hiss.
"It is a—"
"Rav," she warned.
"He just had that lying around?"
"I gave him a heads-up after you called."
"I thought you said phone calls could tip off—"
"Who said I phoned?"
"Oh." He looked bewildered; Ruthless didn't bother to explain.
Back at the edge of the Expansion District, they slipped through the fences, heading for the crime scene. Dawn was maybe two hours away, and it was colder now. As they climbed the escalators, Ruthless saw Rav trying to imitate her way of walking, her soundless footsteps. Every third or fourth footfall he succeeded.
The scanner hummed against her thigh. She pulled Rav against her, spraying them both with a cooling mist and putting a finger to her lips. A roving monitor, she prayed, a random sweep. The spray would keep it from reading their body heat . . . if it wasn't looking too closely.
He shivered, obviously stressed and exhausted. Just a teenager, on the run . . . she remembered the feeling.
The scanner hummed again—they were clear.
"Ask you something?" she whispered as she let go.
"Sure."
"Why were you documenting the feelers? Of all the things about Exile . . ."
"You don't think the people back home will want to know?" he said, voice ironic.
"They'll be interested in anything that happened here. Why deviant squid?"
He shrugged. "Get something done? Expose the problem?"
"Come on, the cop's gone," she said.
He fell in behind her. "You knew feelers were vanishing?"
"Maybe."
"And that nobody's doing anything?"
"You saying you wanted to catch that squid you killed?"
"No! It's . . . back Earthside, if problems got exposed, got into the news . . . people dealt with them."
"You've been watching too many of your mother's movies."
"Ruthless, the touchie squid—"
"You can't stop them. It's like any other kink. There'll always be squid wanting a taste of us. They're hardwired for it. Until we leave for home . . . "
Rav grabbed her arm, cursing in Kabuva.
"What?"
"We're not going back to Earth."
"Of course we are."
They were in the corridor by now. The stink of death and human vomit darted out of the darkness, slyly, to meet them. Rav's face was wild. "Auntie. You're not one of those kelpheaded fossils who sits in Ma's theater all day reciting all the old movie lines."
"So?"
"Dreaming of when we'll go back? It's no good. We're never going back to Earth."
"Rav, Fiendish rule can't last forever."
"Why?"
"Because it—" Uncertainty buffeted her. "They're . . . Rav, they're the bad guys."
"What about here and now? If someone makes a fuss about the feelers . . ."
"We are going home," she said. She was angry at him, her perfect little nephew who meant more to her than the universe. Even now, her chest hurt—strangely, sweetly—at the sight of him, at the sense of possession and protectiveness. Her brother's child.
Suddenly she wanted to break his neck.
"My home is here," Rav said. "I don't want it to be a hunting ground for perverted sentients."
She pushed past him to the door of the apartment, comforting herself with the solidity of the mess within. Two corpses. Evidence everywhere. A job that needed doing.
"Help me open this up, Rav." They gutted the pillow, sending a cloud of synthetic feathers all over the hall. Inside, two boxes, each the size and color of a brick, each with buttons and a pop-up screen.
Ruthless set one to time out thirty minutes, handing it to Rav. "Go inside. Set this deep under the squid."
"Won't it vaporize everything, no matter where we put it?"
"I want it out of sight." She didn't explain that this was in case anyone arrived before the blast. Grenades were easily defused.
The second charge was for the building entryway, in case either of them had left prints or other traces while going in and out. They jogged down, Rav watching the street as Ruthless set the second charge against a pillar.
"There's someone out there," he said.
Ruthless pulled him down, peering through a hole in the plastic sheet. An aquarium-equipped limousine was parked in the street, motor running. The driver, a human man, was exploring the intersection.
"Police?" whispered Rav.
She shook her head. "Squid's chauffeur. Come on, game's changed. Escape and evade."
She waited until the driver turned his back, then led Rav around the side of the building, darting from there to the next one.
When they'd put a couple blocks between them, Ruthless looked back. The driver had finally reached a decision, striding purposefully to the cut plastic membrane and entering the building. Rav's body jerked in the direction they had come, but she grabbed and held him.
"It's too late," she said. "Grenade's almost timed. By the time he gets up there, the whole apartment will be dust."
"If he hurries, he'll get dusted too."
"Maybe."
"We could get back in time. Warn him."
"We warn him, Rav, you could drown."
"I don't want an innocent guy to die for me!"
"He's not innocent." She kept one eye on the building, talking slowly, wasting time. "That man has been driving your squid around Earthtown picking up feelers. Feelers who then vanished. Nobody's ever found a body, have they?"
"Thought you weren't following the story," he snapped.
"That supposedly innocent guy probably helped load the bodies into that very car, helped get rid of them—"
"You don't know for sure," Rav protested. "He could be a nice guy."
"Yeah," she agreed. "Or he could be a doctor. He could be a nun or the father of a newborn baby or the only grandson of the great General Hintegro. I still wouldn't give you up to keep him from getting dusted."
Tears welled in her nephew's eyes, spilling over his cheeks and spreading to oily nothingness as the nanosol consumed the evidence.
"We keep moving . . ." Ruthless began. Then a white-hot glow seeped through the sixth floor windows of the building.
She knew exactly what was happening. Dust was expanding from the grenade in a sphere, and everything it touched was disintegrating. The bodies and the barf—maybe the chauffeur too if his timing was bad—were already gone. Now the dust was eating a hole in the building.
"Come on," she said. "Blast'll bring the police."
Rav didn't stir.
Please, Ruthless thought. Don't make me hit you.
"He's okay," he said suddenly. The chauffeur threw himself onto the street, tangling with the plastic sheet and then falling clear. Gasping, he leaned against the building wall, wide-eyed with horror, fumbling for his phone and then staring at it blankly.
"Notice how he's not calling for help?" Ruthless said.
"Shut up." Rav scowled.
The building had a circular hole in it now, six floors up, the blackened area rotted like a cavity in a tooth. Perfect dispersal, Ruthless noted—game over, thanks Cope. Now to get the kid out of here before he did the math on the chauffeur's current position.
"Let's go," she said, but Rav was rooted in place.
"He's okay," he muttered, half to himself. The driver was weeping now, still collapsed against the building.
"No," she said, "he's doomed."
"What?"
"Police are on their way," Ruthless said. "He can't dust his traces like we did. If the car does contain DNA from the missing feelers . . . well, once they know his boss was the deviant, they'll sink the guy to shut him up."
"What makes you so sure he knows?"
"He's not calling the cops, is he?"
"He's not running, either."
"But—" Rav began, and that was when the second grenade blew. A ground-level fireworks-bloom of sparks expanded in slowmo through the plastic. The driver's reflexes were good; he started to run as the sparks turned fire-orange and then brown, unmaking the building, taking a cookie-bite out of the street. The tower shuddered; the plastic tore up to the eighth or ninth floor as the structure beneath cracked. There was a sound of glass breaking.
The dustball reached the running driver. With a truncated scream, he vanished.
Rav sucked air, wide-eyed, like a baby warming up for a long shriek. Ruthless dragged him off the road, climbing up to a walkway.
"Come now or I pacify you," she said, and he stumbled forward, beginning to carry his own weight only gradually as she hauled him towards safety.
"Guess I really am in your stupid club now," he said, and his laugh was caustic. "We should've warned him."
"He was dead anyway."
"You're so sure."
"Innocent, guilty, he'd have been sunk. Rav, dust death is fast. He didn't know it was coming."
"He'd be alive if I'd turned myself in."
"He'd be in an interrogation chamber next door to you, agonizing over how long it would be before they tied a rock to his ankles and dragged him out to deep sea."
He wrenched free, refusing to speak until they were on a highspeed back to the Rialto. Crabcake Star was rising in the south. His arms were crossed, his eyes red and puffy.
I couldn't bear it if he came to hate me, Ruthless thought, not if . . .
"Rav," she said. "You say we're not going back."
"I'm not going," he said dully. "If I don't, Ma won't. But don't listen to me, what do I know?"
The highspeed docked, and as the automatic door opened she took a long whiff of the fog, inhaling the soothing breath of Tumblertide. "Your playmates feel the same way?"
"My friends?"
She tried not to react. People her age never used that word anymore, not unless they meant Fiend.
"Yeah," he said, stepping onto the platform beside her. "Most of us figure we'll stay."
"Because you all grew up here."
"Kabuva's home for us, Ruth." He knotted his fingers together, approximating a squid gesture that meant safety, comfort, refuge. "You know what it's like to lose that."
He was all she had.
So. New game, new rules. She tossed her long-cherished dream of going home, cutting it away like a rotten limb and trying to ignore the pain, the sense of loss.
Back to the task at hand, she thought. "Rav, who knows you're making a documentary?"
"Ma. You. Some friends," he answered in a monotone.
"Which friends?"
"Jekkers, Clark, and Marion. Why?"
She scanned for surveillance once more before answering. "The limousine at the scene means police will probably tie the dust grenades to the feeler disappearances. They'll ID the missing squid and take a look at anyone connected to him, the driver, and the feeler trade."
"If people know I'm making a feed about the feelers, the cops will check me out," he said.
"Exactly. I'll prep you for interrogation, just in case. Maybe you can say you filmed a couple pickups as background for a bigger project."
"What bigger project?" He pressed his lips together.
"You tell me."
Rav stifled a yawn. "They won't come talk to me. Nobody knows what I've been shooting."
"You never told?"
"It seemed . . . unlucky. Stupid, right?"
Ruthless stretched out a hand, thinking to comfort him, but Rav stepped back, anger warring with misery on his pale face. Instead of chasing, she said: "Your father used to paint landscapes. He never let anyone see until they were finished. Unlucky, he said."
He blinked, surprised, and she was afraid she'd said the wrong thing. But finally Rav said: "I suppose you want me to give up shooting?"
"You have to stop documenting feelups, yeah. But if you dump your equipment and quit filming . . . that's a major behavior change, the sort of thing cops look for. Especially squid cops—they're very holistic."
"What am I supposed to do?" The anger was winning.
"Well, people know you're shooting something, so you'll have to get right to work on something else. As far as anyone knows, it's been the same project all along. But you'll need another topic."
"I'm not feeling real inspired."
He's going to torture himself over the chauffeur, Ruthless thought; he'll need close watching. And Elva's curiosity—there was that to consider too. She'd have to keep a watchful eye.
"What else isn't Earthtown talking about?" she said.
He looked at her blankly.
"You were doing this to get people talking, right? Rip off the scabs, heal some wounds, something along those lines?"
"You don't have to make it sound naive."
"Look, you said nobody talks about the feelers. What else do you think we should be talking about?"
"There's the war," he grunted. "What it was like to lose. What it was like to leave."
To lose. She nodded, thinking it through. "A lot of my playmates, the ones who survived the Setback and made it out, they're here."
"They won't talk to me. You saw that Cope guy. He thought I was kelpheaded."
"Well. I'm very persuasive."
He squinted at her in the morning light. "You'd do that?"
I'd do anything for you, kid, she thought, but it wasn't tactically sound to let him know that, was it? What she said was "Like you said, you're in the club now. People will sense it; it'll open doors. And I'll help."
"Okay." Rav gave her a faint, tired smile—his father's smile, Ruthless thought. Then he stopped walking. They had reached the rear entrance of Elva's movie theater. "That'd be . . . I could do that."
"It's a deal then—I'll call you tomorrow," Ruthless said. "Get some sleep, okay?"
"Thanks, Auntie." Ducking his head like a little boy, Rav tiptoed into the darkened theater and was gone.
"Last kid standing wins the game," Ruthless mumbled, turning east. Already considering ways to unlock the long-shut mouths of her playmates, she headed toward the fog-shrouded dawn, taking the beachward route home.