She needs a plant? Tess’s gaze snapped to mine. Through her lightweight but long-sleeved shirt, she tapped her still needle-marked inner elbow twice and then flapped her hands like a bird, not making a sound her necklace would pick up.
I nodded. I got it. We had to fly away fast and bring her A1 blood to Reaginine by tomorrow or her uncle—a fucking Dark Watch general and my ex-boss—would arrest one of the two women Tess considered a mother. Mareeka or Surral. Nathaniel Bridgebane would take one of them to Hourglass Mile if Tess didn’t deliver the six bags of blood that were currently hidden in a cooling unit on my little star cruiser, and I was pretty sure the safety and well-being of the Starway 8 orphanage, the kids in it, and the two women who ran it meant more to Tess than anything else in the entire universe.
We still hadn’t come up with a good excuse for the two of us taking off on our own to the Grand Temple on Reaginine. Announcing that we had to go hand over a cooler full of the base ingredient for the Overseer’s super-soldier serum wasn’t going to cut it. I could say I needed to pray at the home of the Church of the Great Star, but needing to pray right now was kind of ridiculous. And everyone knew Tess was firmly agnostic. The fact was, she’d stolen the Overseer’s supply of enhancers, and Bridgebane had blackmailed her into giving some back—or at least the means to make several new batches.
Now, I just had to make sure she didn’t get caught—by her Dark Watch enemies or her rebel friends. Either would be disastrous.
With a questioning shrug, I held up five fingers and mouthed Five minutes? It wouldn’t make a difference at this point, and Jax and Fiona were already ahead of us on the walk back to the ship.
Tess bit her lip and then said, “Sure. But be quick, Fi. People don’t seem to hang around outside in this place. Jax, watch her back.”
“Always, partner,” Jax said.
“I can’t quite reach it from the street,” Fiona muttered a few seconds later. “There’s a high fence. I have to go into the park for it.”
“Park?” Tess hesitated midstep before letting her long strides eat up the pavement again. “There could be surveillance.”
“It’s empty,” Fiona assured us over the coms. “Not a soul in sight.”
A bad thought suddenly ignited like gunpowder in the back of my mind. The ambiance on Korabon—the crowded restaurant but the empty streets, the swarming shuttle system but no real pedestrian traffic—was starting to scratch at something in my memory, something from one of my early hunts. I tried to remember… Could Korabon be on parole?
Tess caught my brooding look. “What is it?”
“Do you think this place enforces any AGLs?” I asked.
Her eyes widened. Worry shot through her expression, and she immediately spoke, low and urgent. “Fiona, I think you should stop. Merrick, check my tablet. Have any additional galactic laws been imposed on Korabon? Something that would explain why people keep off the streets?”
“They’re not common, but I’ll check,” Merrick answered.
I swore under my breath. This was the shit that happened when you went in blind.
“I’ll be quick,” Fiona said.
“Leave it, Fi.” Tess turned toward where we knew the others were, despite it not being our best route back to the ship.
I followed, matching her rapid pace and letting my limbs loosen and my body warm up. Something told me we’d be running before we finished this walk.
Paroled planets generally kept a low profile, trying not to attract anyone’s attention, let alone the Overseer’s. I’d studied up on a lot of places for different jobs, but I didn’t know the situation of every rock in the Dark. Nearly a decade ago, I’d followed a prize to a planet required by the Overseer to prove good behavior for a fifteen-year period in order to benefit from galactic financial and medical assistance again. Now that I thought about it, the unnerving emptiness I’d encountered outdoors there had felt a lot like this.
“I’m seeing incident reports,” Merrick relayed from the Endeavor. “Riots and uprisings in Koralight Crown about twelve years ago… Iridium deposits around and underneath the city… Nonviolent sanctions to preserve the continued exploitation of the element…”
Ir? I’d worked with it once. “Iridium is used in the manufacture of hyperdrives.” My engineering studies didn’t feel like a lifetime ago, even though in some ways, they were. I’d expected to use them again, just not like this. “It’s expensive and difficult to shape but extremely durable. Even at two thousand degrees Celsius, it won’t corrode or melt. A hyperdrive reactor lined with iridium lasts on average three times longer than one that’s not.” Essentially, the silvery-white metal was one of the only things able to withstand some of the severest conditions technology or nature could create.
Tess looked at me, her mouth pressed flat. I nodded, furious also. With just a little more time to prepare, to ask ourselves the right questions, we would’ve known this. Better yet, someone in the Fold could’ve handed us a fucking file with the information we needed. Even Ahern might’ve mentioned it.
“This has AGL written all over it.” Tess nearly broke into a jog and checked herself at the last second. “Everyone to the ship. No stops.”
“It’s okay to steal when it follows your agenda?” Fiona snapped. “We take risks every day for orphans and the Outer Zones, but I see a fruit-bearing plant and I can’t have it?”
“Of course I want you to have it,” Tess ground out. “But AGLs don’t pop up in cursory searches, and we didn’t have time for anything else. If there are additional galactic laws here, the Dark Watch will be twice as nasty as everywhere else. It’s free rein to terrorize people. Fines. Imprisonment.”
“Oh, you mean a regular day in the galaxy,” Fiona shot back.
“No, I mean worse.”
“Fruit, Tess. Fresh fruit on board. Think about it.”
“If you can make it grow,” Tess said.
Fiona scoffed. Tess let out a tight breath.
I stayed out of it. I understood the allure of a berry bush for a space-rat botanist. Hell, I’d only been living like a Nightchaser for a matter of days, and I already missed the food, fresh air, sunshine, and comforts of planet-dwelling life. But Tess was right. The Overseer didn’t want his draconian AGLs headlining as anything unusual on the rocks he’d imposed them on. For the citizens of Korabon, these laws were simply the norm, and outsiders just shouldn’t come here.
The thing was, we hadn’t come. We’d been sent—and someone should’ve warned us.
I ground my teeth in frustration. So far, the rebel leadership seemed as full of assholes as the Dark Watch.