Chapter One
Coreni
The loading dock smelled like salt water and bad decisions.
Coreni Mekkans had made the latter a professional habit over the years, so she crouched behind a cargo container and told herself this was fine. This was normal. This was exactly the kind of thing she did for a living.
The water sloshed against the plasteele platform in irregular surges, and every few waves found the gap between her boots and her trousers. Her feet had stopped feeling like feet twenty minutes ago. Now they felt like two cold facts she was choosing to ignore.
Amir had better be right about this.
She shifted carefully, keeping her head below the lip of the container. Her vid-recorder sat propped against the base of it, aimed at the alley mouth where the Chancellor and Senator Willa would appear — if her informant hadn't lied to her, which he had done before, twice, and survived both times only because he occasionally came through spectacularly on the third attempt.
Tonight was supposed to be the third attempt.
She pressed two fingers on the fake cybernetic implant above her left eye, an old habit. The metal was cold and smooth and slightly too perfect — no seam irregularities, no micro-scarring at the edges the way real implants always had. Anyone who looked closely would know. Nobody ever looked closely. People saw the implant and stopped looking, which was the entire point.
On a world where everyone had cybernetic parts, not having them stuck out too much.
Not a great thing, especially when she was trying to be incognito.
Coreni had never been able to wear real ones. Her body rejected the alloys in ways that no physician had ever satisfactorily explained, and she had long since stopped asking.
Her father had theories. She had a collection of cosmetic-grade fakes and a practiced expression that said nothing unusual here and between the two of them she'd gotten this far without anyone asking the wrong questions.
Twenty-six years old and fully functional. Some days that felt like an achievement. Other days, it just felt like luck.
Today might be luck.
The alley door between the two buildings opened.
She stilled completely — breath, movement, the cold — and pressed her thumb to the recorder's remote on her belt. The resolution increased with a soft haptic pulse she felt rather than heard.
Chancellor Migana stepped onto the dock first. Even at distance, even in bad light, the man radiated a specific quality of authority that Coreni had spent three years learning to be suspicious of. Senator Willa came after, shoulders high, head turning side to side like a man who expected the walls to start closing in.
Good instincts, Senator.
This wasn’t just a meeting of friends.
"I don't know about this, Migana." Willa's voice carried across the water, thin and uncertain.
"It will work." The Chancellor's voice did not carry so much as arrive, patient and absolute. "All of the previous attempts have been studied. This time, we know what went wrong."
Coreni tracked them through the recorder's display on her belt screen. They moved toward their individual transports. She needed thirty more seconds. Twenty. Just keep talking, you pompous jerks.
Then she saw the Fraluma appear.
They had been there the whole time.
Of course they were.
That was the thing about the Fraluma that official reports never quite captured — they didn't emerge from shadows, they simply were the shadows, until the moment they chose not to be. Two of them flanked the Chancellor, their silhouettes enormous and absolutely still, cloaks hanging in the wet wind without seeming to move at all.
Coreni's recorder kept running. Her lungs did not.
Do not move. Do not breathe. You are a crate. You are part of the dock. You have always been here.
"When we find the women," the Chancellor said, glancing at one of the Fraluma with a small nod, "we will find the key. That I promise you, Senator."
