Naomi turned spinward again, moving quickly without running, forcing him to keep up. As she walked, she scanned the crowd around her. If she was right, there might be others working in a team. She slid easily through the gaps in the press of bodies, finding the places that opened for a moment as people crossed her path and each other’s. She had spent six months on Ceres when she was thirteen and between ships, but the station was still a long way from home territory for her. She did her best, making for a side corridor that she was almost certain ran between the wider pathways.
And maybe she was wrong. Maybe the man, whoever he was, had just happened to be there when she was feeling particularly anxious. She didn’t look back until her side corridor rejoined the larger flow of foot traffic from the next gate over. She took the ground in at a glance, and found the place she needed. A currency-changing booth four meters away with opaque privacy walls made a little space in the flow of people like a stone in a river. Without pausing, she walked to the dead space at its far side and leaned against it, her shoulder blades taking in the cool of the metal. The air was thick enough that she was sweating a little, a dampness at her collarbone and the fringes of her hair. She made herself small and unobtrusive, and counted slowly backward from a hundred.
At thirty-two, Wings hurried past her, his chin high, scanning the crowd before him. The bright metallic taste of fear filled her mouth, and she turned back into the booth, and then past it the other way, down the corridor she’d just left. As she retraced her steps, her mind raced through possibilities. Marco had finally decided to end their standoff, and the threat to Filip had been bait for the trap. Or the security forces had been waiting all this time, and she was about to get caught at last. Or someone who’d watched the newsfeeds from Ilus too much had decided to stalk her. Or Marco was just sending his men to check up on her. The last wasn’t least likely.
Back in the main corridor, she flagged down a cart and paid for a trip up three levels to an open park. The woman driving the cart didn’t look at her twice, which was a relief. Naomi sat back against the hard formed plastic and finished her kibble. The tires hissed against the decking as they took the ramp up, closer to the center of spin and farther from the port.
“Go du-es someplace precise?” the driver asked.
“Don’t know where I’m going,” Naomi said. “Know when I’m there.”
She’d met Marco when she was sixteen and finishing her distributed classwork equivalency on Hygeia Station. On Luna, her work would have gotten her engineering placements at any of the big shipyards. Since it was just an equivalency, she’d known she had another three, maybe four terms before she could get the jobs, even if she already knew how to do the work.
Marco had been part of a salvage and mining crew that based its repairs at Hygeia Station, then looped out into the Belt proper, scraping out rare metals and taking care, sometimes, of the wrecks of old ships that crossed their paths. And maybe, the rumor was, some wrecks that were very, very new. His captain had been an old man named Rokku who’d hated the Inner Planets as much as anyone in the Belt. The crew was the deepest flavor of OPA there was, not a military cell because no one had asked them yet. Naomi had been living with Tia Margolis, another of her adopted aunts, and trading out unlicensed work at the refining station for air, water, food, network access, and a place to sleep. At the time, Marco and his cohort had seemed like a bastion of stability. A crew that had been working the same ship together for seven missions was as good as family to her.
And Marco himself had been amazing. Dark eyes, dark soft hair, a Cupid’s bow mouth, and a beard that felt against her palm the way she imagined it would to stroke a wild animal. He’d haunted the corridors outside the station bar, too young still to buy, but more than charming enough to get older people to buy for him on the few occasions he couldn’t convince the merchants to bend the rules directly. The others on Rokku’s crew – Big Dave, Cyn, Mikkam, Karal – had all outranked Marco on the ship and followed his lead on shore. There hadn’t been a particular moment when she’d become part of their crew. She’d just fallen into orbit with the others, been at the same places, laughed at the same jokes, and then at some point she was expected.
When they cracked the seal on a storage gate and made it into a temporary invitation-only club, she was invited. And then before long she was helping to crack the seal.
Hygeia Station hadn’t been at its best in those days. The Earth-Mars alliance had looked solid as stone back then. The taxes and tariffs on basic supplies hovered just below too expensive to sustain life. And sometimes above it. The ships that ran there ran on air so lean they courted anoxia, and the black market in usable hydroponics was a live and active one. Hygeia Station, while nominally the property of an Earth-based business conglomerate, was in practice a ragged autonomous zone held together by habit, desperation, and the bone-deep Belter respect for infrastructure.
When Marco was there, even the old, cracked ceramic decking seemed a little less crappy. He was the kind of person who changed what everything around him meant. There had been a Belter girl named Naomi who would have sworn she’d follow him anywhere. She was a woman now, and she’d have said that wasn’t true.
But here she was.
Bistro Rzhavchina was high up toward the center of spin. Doors of rusted steel painted in sealant blocked the way in, and a bouncer half a head taller than her and twice as wide across the shoulders glowered as she passed through them. He didn’t stop her. Up this far, more of the station’s spin felt like lateral pull. Water poured on the slant. It wasn’t only the cheapness of the real estate that made these corridors thicker with Belters. The Coriolis here started to have an effect just north of subliminal, and that wasn’t a thing that Earthers and Martians ever became really comfortable with. Living in spin was a source of Belter pride, a mark of who they were and how they were different.
Dark music filled the place, the rhythm like a constant, low-level assault. The floor was sticky where it wasn’t covered with peanut shells, and the smell of salt and cheap beer filled the air. Naomi went to the back, taking a seat sheltered from as many lines of sight as she could manage. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty people sat or stood around the place. She could still feel their gazes on her. Her jaw slid forward a degree, her mouth taking on a scowl that was protective coloration as much as actual displeasure. The wall she rested against vibrated with the bass.
She ordered a drink from the table’s system and paid with a preloaded chit. Before the thin-faced boy behind the bar could deliver it, the metal doors to the corridor opened again and Wings came in. His movements were tight and anxious, his expression closed and angry. He hadn’t followed her here. This was where he headed back to after he failed. Naomi faded back another centimeter.
Wings sat at the bar, stood up, sat again. A door hidden by shadows at the back of the club opened. The man who came out was huge. The muscles of his neck and torso were so large and defined, she could have used him as an anatomy lesson. His steel-gray hair was cut close to the scalp, white lines of scar crossing behind his left ear like the map of a river delta. A massive tattoo of the OPA’s split circle logo decorated the side of his neck. He went to the bar where Wings was waiting. Wings’ hands were already out in apology. Naomi couldn’t hear what he said, but the gist was clear enough. He’d seen her. He’d lost her. He was sorry. Please don’t rip his kneecaps off. She let herself smile a little.
The big man tilted his head, nodded, said something that seemed to relieve Wings enough that he managed a smile. The big man turned slowly, squinting into the gloom of the club. When his gaze reached her, it stopped. The boy at the bar started forward, her drink on a tray. The big man put a hand on the boy’s chest, pushing him back. Naomi sat up a little straighter, looking up into the big man’s eyes as he reached the table. They were as pale as she remembered.
“Knuckles,” he said.
“Cyn,” Naomi replied, and then his massive arms were around her lifting her up. She returned the embrace. The smell and heat of his skin was like hugging a bear. “God, you haven’t changed at all, have you?”
“Only got better, uhkti. Bigger and brighter.”
He put her down with a thump. His smile drew lines all across his face like ripples in a pool. She patted his shoulder and his grin grew wider. At the bar, Wings’ eyes were big as saucers. Naomi waved at him. The man sent to follow her hesitated, then waved back.
“So what did I miss?” Naomi asked as Cyn led her to the door at the back of the club.
“Only all of it, sa sa?” Cyn rumbled. “How much did Marco say?”
“Very damned little.”
“Always the way. Always the way.”
Past the thin door, a corridor snaked back into the raw stone of the asteroid. The sealant was old, gray, and flaking, and cold radiated out from the stone. Three men leaned against the wall, guns in their hands. The oldest was Karal. The younger two she didn’t know. She kissed Karal’s cheek as she passed. The others looked at her with a mix of distrust and awe. The hidden hallway ended at a steel door.
“Why so secret?” she asked. “You know the OPA runs Ceres now.”
“There’s OPA and there’s OPA,” Cyn said.
“And you’re that other one,” she said, but with warmth in her voice that covered her unease.