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"All caught up on your beauty sleep?" Buddy Aurinko asks, when Peter makes his way, leisurely enough to be called late, to the controls room.
"Might I remind you, my dear," says Peter, mildly, "that I only submitted to being sedated at your demand? The stimulant was very pleasant, of course, while it lasted, but the comedown is really quite painful. Going under for fourteen hours was the least objectionable option."
"For you," says Buddy, dryly. "The cleanup was less pleasant." But she nods to the seat beside her. She has transformed the lower deck into the headquarters of their little operation; above them, the control panels shift and sigh as Vespa changes gears, up in her pilot's seat in the narrow cockpit. Manual navigation. Interesting. Peter sits.
"No Sikuliaq this afternoon?"
"Change of plans," says Buddy. "We're making a pit stop. He's gone ahead."
"Oh?"
"Picking up an old friend. Two, if we're lucky."
"I don't suppose you'll tell me who that is," says Peter.
"Not until we're dead certain of 'em."
He hums, his attention only half on her. The glass shell of the cockpit opens onto black black space, torn through like fabric by flashes of white star. They have left the dark side of the moon Luna with a million creds cash and a favor owed by the Baron Nessor, intergalactic corsair: one of Buddy's old friends, who smiling took eighty percent of their cut and will not realize they've cloned his fingertips until Dark Matters catches up to him, loaded on something more than a simple stimulant, in the Great Dark Lakes of Terra.
Nevertheless …
He has had bad dreams in his synthetic sleep. A chaotic re-collection—Mag, the streets of Brahma, Mag, again, dying on his knife; the staged death of Eduard de Castille, the Cursèd Diamond of MPLM-1; and Miasma—always, last and worst, Miasma, the ghoulish awareness of her, the invasive tendrils of her mind rooting through his brain, the pain and the horror of it; and underneath it all the sick dread of the bomb that will, inevitably, insensibly, destroy every thing worth having in this world. In every dream he winds up behind the same door, breaking his fists upon it, despairing, begging for—begging—
Well. Bad dreams.
Around them the ship rumbles like a great beast. Peter swallows back the bile, and falls back to studying his companion. Spacelight casts shadows on Buddy's lean, smug mouth, the burnt-red fall of her hair over her ruined profile. She looks … good. When they last collaborated she was caustic, grieving. Working four marks at once. A good partner, perhaps, in a tight spot, but he could not have fathomed making their association a permanent arrangement.
Vespa's miraculous resurrection is a good look on them both. They got married. Their delight in each other, their grief at the years gone, are sometimes so brilliant they hurt to look at.
Not one person in a million gets to recover something so precious and so lost.
He needs to pull himself together.
He does. "Very well. What planet, Aurinko?"
Her attention is on the vitals control panel. She says, absently:
"Mars." And then: "Hope you like sewer rabbit kebab, Starr."
Wren Starr has never been to Mars.
Wren Starr has never impersonated a Dark Matters operative in order to burglar the greatest megamedia crime family this side of Saturn. Has never worked for a shady anthropologist turned maniacal mass murderer; has never broken into an unbreakable train; has never had his brain twisted and torn, his memories dissected and then discarded by an unstoppable force. He has never fallen in love.
Never woke up alone in a cold hotel room, either.
He has had other loves, of course. Other heartaches. He was careful, in the making of them, that they should be unreliable, unfamiliar, and as unlike Juno Steel as it is possible to get.
Wren Starr is a cynic; a realist. He enjoys the sweetest things in life, and, mostly, in other people's lives. He makes and breaks hearts. He mostly thinks of Mars as a backwater world, a badland of red breathless deserts that kill faster than you can draw breath. Buddy is a living example of how deadly Mars is; but still she speaks of it with undeniable fondness. Her ambition goes beyond her home, and yet—she goes back.
Peter watches Mars rise.
Truly, she is beautiful. A halo of blue light touches the curve of the surface, which, as seen from above, is burnt carmine and brilliant as the solar day ends. It will be full night by the time they land. Already he can see the glow of Hyperion City, under its great dome, in the far distance. They won't come close, of course: Hyperion City is no longer safe for people like them. Whatever happened there rippled through the coils and wires of the galaxy like a disease. They say something escaped. Something's still … alive.
He can't afford to wonder if Juno is still alive.
Half an hour before landing, they tune into the Martian link-up network. The screen on the observation deck flares to life.
"—ion City grieves. Three months after his death, Mayor O'Flaherty remains, more than ever, a controversial hero, whose legacy will prove as inexplicably shrouded in shadow as his past. He—"
The canyons and valleys of the red planet are coming into sight, tossed and turned by radiation storms. Peter applies himself to his eyeliner.
"Doubtless many will denounce his decision to do away with Oldtown. But can any of us deny that we, too, have once thought it best for the worst of Hyperion City to be erased from the map, as corrupted, crime-ridden, and deathly as it had become—?"
He is not entirely sure what Buddy's intentions entail. One last job, she claims it is: one last great job before she and Vespa disappear into anonymity and married bliss, at least until they get bored enough to come back. Thieves don't retire. You're made, you stay, you die. Peter has never wanted to stay in one place long enough to miss the stars. Never.
"—we are still in the dark as to the strange inflation of the population of what is now unilaterally called Newtown, as per Mayor O'Flaherty's final wishes—"
The ship descends, slowly. Hyperion City has disappeared over the horizon, like a great moon; they are not close to the Cerberus Province, and Peter does not recognize their surroundings. Far down below, in the hollow of a ravine, a steady beacon glows.
"—yet we know that one million new souls now call Newtown home. Perhaps that is worth the sacrifice of all that is gone."
His comms buzz.
"Landing dock in five, darling. Time for introductions."
Peter Nureyev does three things after leaving Mars, a desolate-looking hotel room, and any hope he had of a lasting partnership.
He removes himself to Io, steals a bottle of the most expensive honey-wine he can find in the grandest club in the galaxy, and sinks into a haze of liquor, sex, luxurious food, and hard deep slumber, for three weeks straight, until he emerges from the haze wearing little more than a river of pearls. He suffers from a raging hangover all the way through a freight shuttle journey to PXT-416, on the outskirts of Saturn, where he orders a hotel room and a great deal of black coffee, and there sets about rebuilding himself.
It takes time. It is a labour not of passion, as inventing a new identity from scratch has so often been in the past, but of necessity: he cannot endure being Peter Nureyev a moment more. His voice, his eyes, his hands, his eyes, his hair, his glasses—he changes it all, infinitesimally, marginally, until he feels that he can stand to watch himself in a mirror.
It isn’t enough, of course. It’s only barely good enough. But it will have to do.
Buddy Aurinko, legend among thieves, finds him six months later in a highly exclusive lounge-bar in Terra, charming the petticoats off a rather attractive young Terran: bored out of his wits, having already removed their tie, diamond pin, and identity chip—for later purposes. Buddy Aurinko offers him a job.
The Ruby 7 purrs gently in the copper lights of the landing dock. Her engine and the ship's remain connected while they are off-world, feeding off each other's energy; Ruby's mainframe is too clever by half to stay untouched for too long, and giving her access to the ship's central processor is a good way of keeping them both occupied. Feedback loops. A symbiotic relationship that mere humans can … dream of, a little, but never quite hope to attain.
Vespa, having locked the ship into autopilot, has joined them, though she looks troubled and irascible—doesn't like strangers, after what she's been through; or maybe she's never liked strangers. Buddy has changed into a dress so red it must have cost a kill or two. They three stand, side by side, as gently the ship lowers itself to the red ground: a nice little spectacle for their newcomers. Intimidation? Peter cannot imagine that whoever they are meeting would prove a match for Buddy's intellect or Vespa's grit. He sits upon the hood of the Ruby 7, arms crossed, waiting; props his knees up. He is a little bored.
The hull hatchway groans as it opens. It opens so, so slowly.
He recognizes Sikuliaq first: the frame of his large shoulders, his dark gleaming eyes when he takes off the visor helmet. Beside him is the atrociously lime-green hoverbike that shares garage space with the Ruby 7, much to Peter's chagrin; beside that is a small plump figure wrestling with their visor; and beside them—
His heart lurches, hard, twice, and then quietens, all at once.
Buddy gives him a sharp frowning look.
Peter says nothing. He leans slowly back against the Ruby 7, his hands flat against the warm, warm metal of its bonnet.
The short woman at last removes her helmet. Peter barely looks at her, though he knows who she is: kinky red hair and a pair of enormous glasses. He gives not the slightest glance to Sikuliaq, who is now hauling the hoverbike aboard. His attention—all of his attention—stays on the rather bedraggled one-eyed figure who's still coughing a sandstorm out of his lungs. Who will look up, in a moment.
Oh, Juno.
He had thought he understood. Juno had attachments. Juno believed Hyperion City could not survive without him; and perhaps it could not. Perhaps it has not.
The realization—so sharp, so bright in his chest—cuts like a knife. He has not imagined, in the past year, that he would see Juno Steel again. He has not hoped for a message arriving late in the night. He has not hacked into Martian surveillance streams. And now he is … here.
And—of course. Who else on this godforsaken planet would call Buddy Aurinko and offer to join a space crime gang?
But Juno recovers. His attention goes to his secretary first; she has already trotted up behind Sikuliaq, eyes full of stars. Well enough. Juno is protective. Peter watches him as he catches sight of Buddy, then Vespa—what is the story there, he wonders?—and then, at last, he sees the car.
Juno goes very, very still. He looks at Peter, and a strange light comes over his face.
It is only then that Peter understands how angry he is. A year, a year's worth of containing it, inside his body that still remembers Juno's touch: testing its boundaries, its confines, its capacities. Peter has a talent for revenge. He has a talent for hurt.
Juno stands in the streaming light of the ship, the eyepatch dark over his eye, the long black coat Peter remembers well streaked with red dust. He looks—sad. Slimmer, more tired. Magnificent. He looks like he's seen a miracle, and lived to tell the tale.
Peter smiles. Then he says:
"Hello, Juno."