The Last Chance Saloon had three rules painted in flaking gold: no shooting the musicians, no gambling with counterfeit currency, and no livestock upstairs. The last one was broken often enough that a pair of vacuum runners had been given their own feed trough beneath the sign.
Vera Nyx had already broken two of them. The counterfeit currency had been deliberate. The vacuum runner upstairs had followed her and therefore, in Vera’s opinion, was responsible for itself. And she hadn’t even started having fun yet.
She descended with one hand gliding along the brass rail, letting the room discover her by degrees as conversations faltered beneath the neon haze. A scaled courier stopped with his glass halfway to his mouth, and the piano player lost an entire measure. Vera forgave him; she’d chosen the black leather dress for this.
The dress fastened high at her throat, then abandoned modesty altogether. Dark lace filled the open sides, and the skirt flowed around her legs like poured ink. None of it interfered with the six-shooter beneath her arm, the knife against her thigh, or the wire hidden in her glossy black bob. Vera had no patience for clothing that couldn’t survive a robbery.
At the bottom of the stairs, a miner lurched out of her way and backed into a server carrying six glasses of luminous green liquor. Vera caught the nearest glass as it slipped from the tray and paused for an appreciative sip, the sweetness hiding the burn until it reached her stomach. She finished the drink and returned the empty glass to the server’s tray. “Put that on his tab.” The miner began to protest, but her smile cost him whatever argument he’d intended to make, along with any lingering concern over the price of the drink.
She crossed through tobacco smoke, perfume, engine grease, and the hot-metal breath of too many weapons. Freight crews drank beside prospectors who’d found nothing but red dust, while two off-duty marshals bent over a bottle worth more than their table. The music was loud enough to conceal a private bargain and the crowd rough enough not to question it.
The bartender saw Vera coming and set a glass beside the register, his metal fingers releasing it with a faint click. “Calder asked for you twice. He’s getting impatient.”
“Brinn takes waiting personally.” Vera lifted the gin and breathed in before she drank. The bartender had been known to stretch the cheap bottles with cleaning fluid and replenish the expensive ones from the cheap, but this glass smelled honest enough. She took a sip, tasting juniper and pepper. “His impatience is the only reason he agreed to meet me here.”
“He asked if you were armed.” The bartender went back to polishing the bar as though the question bored him.
Vera looked at him over the rim of her glass. “Please tell me you didn’t bother lying.”
“I told him yes.”
“Good.” She dropped a coin into his open palm and lowered her voice. “Anyone watching the exits?”
His metal fingers closed around the money. “Two men. One’s watching your berth. The other paid my dishwasher to let Calder’s people use the kitchen passage.”
Vera held the glass at her lips a moment longer. She had paid the same dishwasher to keep that passage clear. The boy had discovered the value of diversified income.
Her buyer waited in the curtained booth beside the stage, where carved wood and faded velvet suggested privacy without providing it. Brinn Calder had made his fortune stealing colonial fuel, then spaced anyone impolite enough to mention it. He wore a white suit and had polished his three horns to a buttery shine. His niece, Mara, lounged beside him with a pistol across her lap, following Vera’s approach with more interest than her uncle had managed so far.
“You took your time,” Mara said.
“I wanted to make an entrance.” As Vera passed through the open curtains, she noted the loose bracket above Brinn’s chair and the cord looped around the end of the rod. She took the remaining chair and arranged her skirt so the slit opened along her left thigh. Brinn’s eyes followed the movement, as she’d expected, while Mara kept her eyes on Vera’s hands.
Between them rested a black cylinder containing the supposed access sequence to twelve crates of confiscated Orison pearls. The pearls were real; Vera had admired them that afternoon behind excellent locks and disappointing guards. The sequence was real, too, though it opened a municipal sewage station six streets away.
Brinn rolled the cylinder beneath one jeweled finger, watching the green symbols flare along its side. “My reader says the encryption is genuine. Customs seal too.”
“Then your reader has earned his pay.”
His mouth flattened. “If this isn’t what I asked for, you won’t leave the settlement.”
Vera took another measured sip. Brinn was much easier to tolerate when he stopped trying to sound clever. “You asked for genuine encryption and an official seal. I dislike disappointing a man in a white suit.”
He placed a narrow credit bar beside the cylinder but kept two fingers resting on it. “Half now. The rest when my people have the pearls.”
Vera looked from the credit bar to the fingers pinning it down. “Half.” She met his eyes. “And here I’d been told the clever part of your reputation was the one people exaggerated.”
Mara failed to turn her laugh into a cough quickly enough. Brinn stared at her until she looked away, then returned to Vera. “Those are my terms.”
“By then you’ll have left the settlement, changed your ship registry, and discovered a moral objection to paying me.” Vera settled into the velvet and crossed her legs. While Brinn’s gaze dropped, she slid the credit bar an inch closer. “You’re buying the key, the vault schedule, and the name of the customs officer who can be persuaded to ignore an alarm. Betray me afterward if the urge becomes unbearable, but you’ll pay in full for the privilege.”
Brinn leaned close enough to breathe clove smoke and expensive meat across her face. “You think you can set terms because you have somewhere to run. You don’t. Your skiff was impounded ten minutes ago.”
So the man at her berth hadn’t been watching her skiff; he’d been waiting for the marshals to finish. Vera considered the settlement’s landing field, its three rental craft, and the money in her coat upstairs. Brinn watched her for fear, and she gave him mild interest instead. “Then it’s fortunate we’re discussing your transportation.”
Mara eased her boot from beneath the table and settled one hand beside the pistol grip. “She’s buying time.”
“Let her.” Brinn smiled for the first time that evening.
Vera smiled back. The cylinder was evidence of fraud, the kitchen exit had been compromised, her skiff belonged to the law, and at least four of Brinn’s people stood between her and the front doors. She’d escaped worse arrangements, though usually after being paid.
The saloon doors opened behind Brinn’s shoulder, admitting a gust of red dust and the man Vera had once loved enough to distrust more than anyone alive.
She recognized the eye first: black at the center, silver at the rim, moving over the room with inhuman steadiness. His other eye remained the impossible green she remembered. Ryker Starshadow paused inside the doors. Nine years should have done something discouraging to him, but apparently they’d declined.
The years had deepened the lines beside his mouth, threaded pale gold through his red beard, and given him two scars she didn’t recognize. Beneath a battered hat, his sandy-blond hair swept back in the same tight braids. He wore a leather duster stitched with his family’s symbols, his sword across his back, and the shortened fireball gun at his hip looking almost modest beside it. He moved with the economy of a man who knew where every weapon pointed, and people shifted out of his path before he reached them.
Then Vera saw the jeweled locket against his shirt, on the same chain and in the same worn setting. Delicate things sometimes survived because dangerous men loved them, he’d told her once. She knew the miniature inside, but this was hardly the moment to think about the woman who’d taught him to hold a blade, or a cave in the rain, or Ryker burning with fever while Vera tried to pretend she wasn’t frightened. She dragged her gaze back to his face.
His green eye found her and traveled from her face to her mouth, then followed leather and lace with the interest of a man revisiting a favorite crime. Her nipples tightened beneath the lace, which felt like a betrayal requiring disciplinary action later. Vera took a drink before her expression gave her away.
Brinn looked toward the bar. “You know him.”
“I’ve heard stories.”
The bartender set a bottle of wine and a glass on the counter without being asked. Ryker poured himself a drink and studied Vera over the rim. The cybernetic eye made him difficult to read at a distance, but his natural one had never learned to lie to her. She could see his anger. Under it, hunger. She remembered his fingers spread over her stomach, his beard against the inside of her thigh.
Brinn said something about the access key, but Vera barely heard him. Ryker Starshadow did not walk into rooms by accident. If he was standing in the Last Chance on the same night her skiff had been dragged into the marshal’s yard, coincidence could go bother somebody more gullible.
“Ms. Nyx.” Brinn snapped his fingers once beside her face, an error no one who knew Vera well would have made.
She turned from Ryker slowly enough to make Brinn wait. “If you do that again, you’ll spend the rest of the evening counting with your toes.”
Mara glanced toward her uncle, who kept his fingers well away from Vera’s face after that. Vera tapped the credit bar with one blue-jeweled finger. “The money, Brinn.”
Ryker approached the booth with his wine, his gaze brushing Vera’s open skirt before he had the decency to look at her face. “Vera.” He spoke her name without surprise, as though he’d known that sooner or later she would turn up in another bad room wearing something indecent. His voice had roughened with the years, and she remembered it against her ear.
“Ryker.” Vera returned his slow appraisal. The leather trousers still fit his ass magnificently. “Someone told me you were dead. I remember being skeptical, but apparently not enough to investigate.”
“You always did listen to the wrong people.”
“The wrong people are usually more interesting.”
Brinn shoved his chair back, crowding the booth with his bulk. “Whatever this is between you two, finish it later. We have business.”
Ryker looked over the cylinder under Brinn’s hand, the credit bar near Vera’s fingers, and Mara’s pistol across her lap. “This?”
“It doesn’t concern you.” Brinn tightened his grip on the cylinder. “Take your wine somewhere else.”
“I was going to.” Ryker looked at Vera instead of moving. “Then I heard you were in town.”
Vera tipped her head. “Did you?”
“Your skiff being hauled into the marshal’s yard helped.”
“How romantic.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
“Good. You were always better at other things.” The corner of his mouth moved, barely enough to count, and Vera hated that she still knew what it meant.
Ryker looked back at the cylinder and the credit bar beneath her fingers. “You’re in trouble.”
“I’m sitting down.”
“With Calder.”
“So are you.”
Ryker rested his free hand on the back of her chair. “I thought a friend might need help.”
Vera turned her head just enough to look at him properly. “Friend. Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“Seemed kinder than the alternatives.” He took another drink. “You stayed gone a long time.”
Her thumb stopped against the stem of her glass. He hadn’t said it loudly, but she found herself looking at the unfamiliar scar beside his mouth instead of Brinn or Mara’s pistol. She had no idea how he’d got it. Once, she would have known before the blood dried.
Before she could decide whether to answer honestly, lie beautifully, or hurt him enough to restore balance, Mara snatched up the cylinder and broke it against the edge of the table. A green municipal seal blinked inside the split casing. Mara studied it for one second, then looked at Vera. “Sewage.”
Vera set down her glass. “You have an excellent reader.”
Brinn drew a pistol from beneath his white coat. Mara already had hers leveled at Vera. Ryker looked at both weapons, then at Vera. “Yours?”
“I’d hate to damage your faith in me.” Vera reached beyond the edge of the curtain and caught the looped cord. “You’re welcome to leave before this becomes expensive.”
“No.” Ryker’s answer came without hesitation, and he took another drink of wine.
Vera yanked the cord sideways, tearing the loose bracket out of the wood and dropping the end of the curtain rod across Brinn’s wrist. His shot tore into the ceiling as she kicked the table into his knees and snatched the credit bar sliding toward her. As the table toppled against the booth’s open side, she drove her shoulder into Mara. Mara twisted aside, caught a fistful of Vera’s hair, and fired past her cheek.
Ryker smashed his wineglass against Brinn’s face and drew his sword while the gunshot was still ringing through the room. He struck Mara’s pistol from her hand with the flat of the blade, giving Vera room to drive an elbow into her mouth and tear herself free. Three black strands remained wound around the woman’s fingers.
Someone near the bar shouted that Starshadow had drawn. Half the saloon rushed for the doors. The other half stood up to watch. Brinn staggered out of the booth with blood and wine striping his lapels. He brought his pistol up again, but Ryker knocked his arm aside, sending the shot through the fallen curtain in a burst of fire.
Vera ducked beneath Ryker’s arm and drew her six-shooter as one of Brinn’s men charged from beside the stage. She shot him through the boot and retreated behind the overturned table while his falling body blocked the man behind him. Behind cover, she tucked the credit bar into her boot. She spotted two shooters near the piano, one at the bar, and another descending the stairs with her coat and money. “The stairs,” she told Ryker.
Ryker turned as the man reached the bottom steps and caught him across the chest with the blunt spine of his sword. He fell backward onto the stairs, spilling Vera’s coins from her coat. She shot the hanging lamp above the piano, plunging that end of the room into darkness, curses, and two wild shots that hit nobody worth mourning. The piano player crawled beneath his instrument. Vera had no quarrel with the man; his timing had improved considerably. Two house rules out of three. The musician survived on his own initiative.
Brinn leveled his pistol at the table. Ryker was back across the booth before the shot punched through the wood where she’d been crouching, catching Vera around the waist and hauling her sideways. Her back struck his chest, his forearm locked across her stomach, and his hand spread over the leather at her hip. With his mouth near her ear and the hard length of him against her ass, her body remembered him with humiliating enthusiasm. From the feel of things, she wasn’t the only one, which helped.
“You can put me down whenever the impulse strikes you,” Vera said, though her fingers remained closed over his wrist.
“I remember you giving the same order from several unstable surfaces.”
“This time I meant the floor.”
His beard grazed her temple when he laughed, but a round striking the booth beside them cut the moment short and drove splinters across Vera’s cheek. Ryker lowered her behind the table’s other end and dragged it farther between them and Brinn.
Vera shot the man at the bar through the shoulder, then turned as Mara rushed around the booth with a knife. She caught the woman’s wrist, turned beneath the raised arm, and slammed her face-first into the table hard enough to end the discussion.
The bartender rose from behind the bar with an enormous scattergun braced against his metal shoulder. “I don’t care who wins, but broken furniture goes on somebody’s account.”
Vera fired past the edge of the table and forced one of Brinn’s men back behind a pillar. “Calder’s buying. He’ll want something to remember me by.”
“Nyx!” Brinn had found another pistol, and rage had put a dark flush around all three horns. “You lying, thieving bitch. You sold me access to a sewer.”
“You had my ship impounded before you knew what I’d sold you.” Vera reloaded without looking down. “Neither of us approached this arrangement in a spirit of trust.” She snapped the gun shut. “The difference is that I expected to be disappointed.”
Ryker knocked Brinn’s weapon aside and planted one boot in the center of his white vest, sending him backward through the ruined curtain. More shots cracked from the front windows, where local marshals had arrived alongside Brinn’s remaining men. Poor timing or excellent cooperation; Vera doubted either would improve her evening.
While Ryker covered the room, Vera moved to the foot of the stairs and collected her coat, sweeping as many loose coins as she could reach into one pocket. Smoke rose from the fallen curtain as fire climbed the booth’s wooden frame. “Tell me the kitchen hasn’t acquired more company.”
“Two men outside. Armed.” Ryker wiped Brinn’s blood from his blade on a strip of curtain that had yet to catch.
“You’ve been here less than fifteen minutes.”
The silver ring around his artificial eye brightened and faded. “Didn’t need fifteen.”
Vera wanted to ask whether that eye could see through leather, walls, or poor intentions, but a burning fold of velvet dropped beside her before she could indulge herself. She pointed toward the stairs. “We’ll continue this conversation somewhere less flammable.”
They ran together, Ryker first with his sword held low, Vera firing past his shoulder whenever a man leaned too far into the open. She still knew when he would turn, and he left her the angle he couldn’t cover while bullets chewed the banister around them.
At the landing, Ryker kicked open the door to her rented room. Vera threw up the window and looked down at the stable roof twelve feet below while he pulled off his hat to inspect the new hole burned through the brim. “I see your planning has improved,” Ryker said.
“My plan was excellent until Brinn bought my exit.” Vera climbed onto the sill. “Where are you docked?”
Ryker’s expression sharpened. “No.”
“I haven’t asked yet.”
“You were about to.” He glanced toward the door as another shot struck somewhere below them.
Vera smiled at him. “The berth, Ryker.”
“What do you want with my ship?”
“At the moment? Transportation and a private conversation.” Vera gathered her skirt clear of her boots and waited on the sill.
He hesitated, which was nearly an answer. “North field. Berth nine.”
“Thank you.” Vera jumped before he could change his mind.
The stable roof groaned beneath her boots. Vera slid through the red dust before finding her footing and running across it, with Ryker landing more quietly behind her despite weighing more than she did. As the Last Chance emptied into the street, they dropped into an alley behind a rusted water cistern tangled with cooling pipes.
“You saw them take my skiff,” Vera said as they ran. “Did it occur to you to object?”
“To the marshals?”
“To anyone available. I’m not particular.”
“I came looking for you.” Ryker kept pace beside her without appearing to hurry.
“That was almost thoughtful.”
Ryker caught her by the sleeve before she ran out of the alley and released her as soon as she turned. A marshal’s wagon swept past the opening, its blue lamps revolving over the buildings, with Brinn’s men close behind on two dust bikes.
Once the wagon passed, they emerged from the alley. Ryker glanced at her knife. “You still carry that little blade?”
Vera crouched beside the nearest parked hauler and drew the knife to slice its fuel line. Clear propellant spread across the street in a shining ribbon. “You called it little the first time too. It was rude then.”
Behind them, the dust bikes turned back. Ryker fired one round from the shortened gun into the spilled propellant, igniting a rolling sheet of blue that sent the bikes skidding sideways. By the time the riders untangled themselves, Vera and Ryker had reached the landing field.
Ebon Steed waited in berth nine, long and dark against the red flats, her black hull worn silver at the edges. Vera knew the ship’s lines as intimately as Ryker’s body. She’d slept in its narrow bunks, repaired the port thruster with wire and a stolen fork, and hidden aboard one object she’d been too frightened to carry when she left. For years she had told herself the Haptic Cane was safer there. Now she could reach it.
She could take the ship, get clear of the settlement, and retrieve the Cane. Ryker could remain here, where he knew the bartender and had already made several new enemies. Asking permission would mean explaining what she’d left aboard and why she hadn’t returned for it. He could hardly expect her to conduct that conversation in traffic.
Ryker slowed beside her, his gaze moving from Vera to the waiting ship. Her name came out low and wary. “Vera. What did you leave aboard her?”
Vera pressed the old authorization stud on her ring, and the boarding ramp began to lower. Ryker looked from it to her hand. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
“You really should have deleted my authorization.” Vera sprinted for the ramp.
Ryker caught the back of her coat, but she slipped free of it and left him holding black leather as she ran aboard. The inner hatch recognized her palm, waking the passage lights in the old familiar sequence. Three strides later, she remembered that the coins she had just rescued were still in the coat pocket. There was no time to mourn them properly.
She struck the ramp control. Ryker dropped her coat and lunged up the rising ramp, reaching the hatch as it closed. The edge of his duster caught, but he tore it free and rolled across the deck before the seal engaged. Vera was already climbing the ladder to the cockpit when his voice followed her from below. “That is my ship.”
“I know.” She didn’t look back. “I’ve always liked her.”
The console opened beneath her hands as she settled into the pilot’s chair, and Ebon Steed’s engines answered with a deep vibration that traveled through the seat and climbed her spine. Outside, field workers scattered while a warning from settlement control flashed across the console, ordering berth nine to power down.
Vera closed the external channel, released the clamps, and drove the ship upward hard enough to interrupt Ryker’s climb behind her. Rusted roofs, landing lights, and blue fire outside the saloon slid beneath them. Three security cutters lifted from the field behind her. Warning lights flashed across the console, and settlement control renewed its order to power down. Vera dismissed the message. They’d already had their turn with her skiff.
Ryker entered the cockpit as the first warning shot lit the glass, one braid loosened and blood shining along his cheek where a splinter had found him. He looked furious and good enough that Vera had to return her gaze to the instruments.
“You’re stealing my ship.”
“Borrowing,” Vera corrected as she banked around a cargo tug. “My skiff is sitting in the marshal’s yard. I was left with limited options.”
“My ship wasn’t one of them.”
“She’s already proving that she was.” Vera kept her hands on the controls as he moved closer behind her. “I need to get clear of the settlement.”
When Ryker finally bent toward her, he stopped short of touching, his mouth near enough for his voice to reach her beneath the deepening thrum of the drives. “Where are you taking my ship, Vera?”
Refinery lights shone ahead of them. Vera smiled at their reflection in the glass. “I haven’t decided yet.”