Chapter Text
The Night Market of the Twelve lies inside the hollow planet Null-10, in the farthest sector of the Outer Rim. It is, all at once, entirely like Juno imagined, and nothing like at all. And, sure, he's heard the stories—everyone knows the stories who’s ever heard of those dark criminal coves, where lives are bartered, bodies are rebuilt, hearts are assembled in copper and limelight, and even egg-diamonds are sold for their weight in old, real gold—but the real thing beats 'em all. Like one of the cathedrals from the old Terran stories: bright noise and stained glass and martyred sainthood. Gigantic. Enough to get lost in, forever. But Buddy leads the way without hesitation, the rifle swinging at her side, weaving her path easily between the shadowed booths and the bright-lit stands. The crowd—a heaving, roaring mass of voices and bodies and feeler limbs and joints—parts before her. Behind her: Juno, and Rita, hanging onto his arm.
They pass a shop of candied meat and brandy-poached fruit, and Rita falters for a second, craning her head to look back. Juno’s eye is caught by the vendor, who looks like nothing he’s ever seen before. Tall enough you’d think they don’t look right. Distorting space. This place is like a fever dream.
Buddy takes a sharp left. They plunge through an alleyway off to the side, in sweet darkness, and duck past a heavy curtain into—a bar.
It even looks like a Martian bar, Juno realizes: woodsmoke and well-whiskey and a bartender who's had their nose broken in more than a few times. The people there, not so much. He thinks the bulky shape slumped over in a chair might have a long, black elephant trunk slipping out of its ratty hoodie. A couple of dodgy-looking fellas glare at them from the farthest corner. Other than that, the place’s pretty dead.
"Sit down, darling," Buddy says, her hand around his arm. Rita has already slipped into a seat at a low table, tucking her elbows in. "Booze?"
"Sure, if you want me to feel at home," says Juno. She ignores him. Makes her way to the bar. Attracts attention, too: a tall dark woman with a very big gun watches her quite frankly, leaning her elbows hard against the counter. Then she turns to look at Juno, but slowly, slowly, like tectonic plates shifting. Her eyes are absolutely black.
"That's gotta be our contact, boss," Rita hisses at him.
"Gee," says Juno, rocking from the force of that look, "I didn’t notice," but he sits, anyway.
Good thing Vespa stayed on-ship: Juno doubts she'd have looked kindly on someone mooching up to her wife. Buddy smiles that million-cred smile of hers and utterly ignores her admirer. She returns some minutes later with a tray of shots and takes the seat next to Juno’s, folding up her long limbs in her casual, unreserved way.
“You got a bait,” Juno says. Behind her the dark woman looks away long enough to drain her pint in one hefty gulp, and gathers up her gun.
“Oh, yes, I know.” Buddy sounds unperturbed. “No worries, Juno, it will come out alright.”
“Last time you told me that, lady, my intestines were hanging outta my stomach.”
“It taught you a valuable lesson.”
“Not getting stabbed to death by your wife. Got it.”
“Boss,” says Rita, in a perfectly audible undertone.
“Yes, darling?” says Buddy, at Juno says, “What?”
“Buddy,” says the black-eyed woman.
Close up she’s even bigger. Her arms are strong as tree trunks, or look like it. She sits down. “Oh, that’s right,” says Buddy. “Juno—Miss Rita—this is Amanita Ann.” And then she adds: “My sister.”
“... you two look real different,” says Juno after a long, long moment.
“Of course we’re not related by blood, Juno. We look nothing alike.”
“That’s what I’m sayi—whatever.” He takes a shot. Liquor’s red and salty and burns all the way down. Not pleasant. Rita, of course, swallows hers without a whimper. Amanita Ann glares star-thunder at them all, and thunks her gun on the table right next to Juno’s fist.
“Oh, do be nice, Ann,” says Buddy, bored.
“Ten years, Bud.” Her voice is low and grave, resonant, like sandclouds gathering over the Martian deserts.
“Yes, well. I got busy. You know how it is, darling.”
“Too busy to make a home call.”
“Unfortunately so. Now, are we going to do business, or are you going to sulk?”
Amanita Ann’s face darkens further. “Fine.”
Nice to know everybody’s got a messed-up family, Juno thinks dourly. Rita is staring at Amanita Ann in the sort of way she used to stare at Yasmin Swift, which says a lot about Rita’s propensity to fall for people who’re hot, redoutable, and probably about to try and kill her. Which, hey, it’s not like Juno has any room to talk.
“We are looking,” says Buddy—voice like silk, and then some—”for an invitation to the Opera.”
That’s … new. And news. “Oooooh,” says Rita, who’s never been to the Opera in her entire life, “are we gonna dress up, are we gonna have petites-fours, do they still do The Lost Agony of Lord A—”
“Didn’t know you had Opera Houses in the Outer Rim,” Juno interrupts. Blunt. He can do blunt like a master. Buddy smiles thin and white.
“We don’t,” Amanita Ann rumbles. She downs another shot, and then reaches for another. “Except for the one on Brahma.”
They emerge some time later—an hour? two? the smoke got to Juno’s head, made him hazy and dull, made time elastic—with a token of trust grudgingly bestowed on them by Amanita Ann: a black six-sided die that weighs more than it should, and a word of advice to visit the Venusian Ambassador on Neptune.
“That went—well?” Juno hazards, as they find their way back through the endless stalls.
“Oh, quite,” says Buddy. “Do hurry, Rita darling, my sister is going to try and kill us.”
Rita squawks.
“What,” says Juno.
Buddy’s long strides do not falter, but she does cast an amused glance at them over her shoulder. “She is really quite angry at me. I’m sure you’ve noticed: we had a very long conversation.”
“Well, yeah, but—what’ve you done to her, anyway?”
“Oh, you know how it is; abandoned her in a tight spot, when she asked me to stay.” Juno swallows this. “She always was the one to hold a grudge,” Buddy ponders. “This way—quickly, now.”
They slip, backs bent, between a stall whose owner is bartering delicate glass wares, a food stand roasting up huge crustacean star-fish, and a wiry creature standing on a stage, belting out what is probably meant to be poetry, but really, really isn’t. The cobblestones, iron and rock melded together by centuries of wear, are rough and uneven, the farther into the Market they go, and the crowd looks even stranger—odd appendages, odder faces, smelly colorful clothes and terrifying masks. Buddy’s hand is tense on the butt of her rifle.
“What about that little token thing, Miss Buddy?” says Rita, timidly. Well, ish. As timid as Rita gets, anyhow. “It’s … blinking at me.”
“What? Oh, this. No, that’s worthless. Well, it’s worth enough—quite a few creds in obsidian tech, for one thing. Pretty little thing. Shame to destroy it.”
“Destroy it,” Juno repeats.
“That’s coz it’s a tracker, Mistah Steel,” says Rita, in confidence.
That drop-dead gorgeous smile again. “Well spotted, Miss Rita. Juno, will you be a dear and crush it under your heel?”
Juno snorts. He’s the muscle on this operation, technically, and Rita—well, he’s not sure why Rita’s here, except as moral support; but Buddy can take care of herself. “Sure you don’t want to say bye-bye to your sister, Aurinko?”
“Oh, no. We’ll see each other in another decade, I’m sure.”
Alright then. Juno gives it a good stomp. The die cracks open, and then, unsettlingly, dissolves into dust. Obsidian tech. Huh.
“Come along, Juno.”
Onward—through emporiums of light, smoky underground cafés, large bright plazas, bridges over dizzying heights, flanked by gigantic statues of creatures Juno half recognizes, and half not; raised voices and laughter, the sizzling flesh of some animal on a cathodic spit, the smell of hot spiced wine spilt; peddlers, pickpockets, mad poets and beggars. No one calls the Night Market home, and yet it never sleeps. God knows how big it is. Juno swears as someone rams into his shoulder, and shoves the person away with a grunt, ignoring the weak reprisal. Hand on his plasma gun, finger on the trigger. He wraps the other around Rita’s wrist without a word, and follows Buddy into another murky alleyway, inspecting the shadows for stragglers.
Not well enough. They’re three minutes out from their exit route when five goons in military uniform nearly take off his ear with blaster fire.
“Shit,” he gasps, shoving Rita away from him, and, spinning, opens fire. The shot goes wide off its mark but does take down one of the five—a brief burst of self-satisfaction—and then two are on him and two are on Buddy, and Juno grits his teeth and swings a fist wide.
Buddy’s reflexes are quick, relentless, and she fights like a mechanical tiger: without mercy or kindness. Juno wishes he could say the same. If he had the Theia—well. This would be a joke; a fight well-won, and fast. But he doesn’t, and he won’t, and that means he disables one of the two easily enough but doesn’t notice the other lurching up from his blind side. He does notice the hard stone floor when he's thrown bodily onto it, though.
Shit.
Professionals. Mask. Badge. Court-appointed shotgun. He stares down the barrel of the sort of weapon that’s not designed to stun, and—
Smell of burning flesh. There’s a gurgle. Goon Number Four sinks to their knees, and then sinks further sideways and sort of … faints.
Nureyev prods the fallen body with the tip of his boot and slides the plasma blade back into his sleeve.
“Well,” he says. He looks at Juno.
Juno’s down. His head hurts. He gasps for air.
A heavy thunk, as Buddy disposes of the last thug with the butt of her rifle, and then slings it over her shoulder, catching her breath. She looks a question at Nureyev. “Starr. You get it?”
That fox’s smile again. Goddamnit, Juno’s missed him.
But then Nureyev glances back down at him, and the smile fades. His voice is cool and not entirely unkind. “Are you going to stay down there much longer, detective?”
“You know, I don’t know, this is actually pretty comfy,” says Juno, cranky, “you should give it a try. Starr.”
“I’ll pass,” says Nureyev, and then, after a slight hesitation that has to be at least fifty percent fake, makes as though to reach down to help him up.
He doesn’t. He’s wearing black leather gloves, fingerless, and his hand pauses for a second in the air before he drops it again.
“Mistah Steel!” cries Rita, emerging from the hideout she was smart enough to dive to, “are you bleeding? Are you hurt? Oh god oh god he’s not moving is he breathing—”
“I’m fine, Rita,” says Juno, and hauls his own damn self up. Nureyev takes a discreet step back.
“Good work, Juno,” says Buddy, “you didn’t try to get yourself killed. For once.”
“Yeah, well, I’m trying something new. Self-preservation February, it's a whole thing—”
“However,” adds Buddy, “we are going to have to do something about that blind angle of yours before it becomes inconvenient.”
“No thanks. What were we, the decoy?”
“Of course,” she says, unperturbed. “Somebody had to get Ann’s attention while our friend was … withdrawing ... the real token from her quarters.”
“Oh, what,” says Juno, and Nureyev says, “Such a pretty thing, too.”
In his palm is an iron ring, plain black. Looks heavy. Juno eyes it with disfavor. “That?”
“That,” says Nureyev, lightly, “will procure us an invitation to an extremely select reception in honor of the Princess Royale of Jupiter’s coming of age. Ten days from now. On IO.” He glances at Buddy. “Where, unless I am mistaken, a very dangerous man by the name of Ellery Peace takes his recreational sabbatical every six years.”
“Ellery Peace,” says Buddy.
“Philanthropist,” adds Siquliak. “Philosopher. Philologist.”
“Son of a bitch,” says Vespa, in that rough, raspy voice of hers.
“He is that, too.”
“Extent executive director of the Jupiter-IO Affiliated System,” Siquliak continues, unmoved. “The record of his acquisitions and investments over the past twenty-four Solar months indicate he is a great lover of classical Martian art, butter croissants, and paramours suitably inoculated with rell-oil 23.”
“The stimulant,” says Nureyev.
“The black market narc,” says Juno, appalled.
“Oooh,” says Rita, but in as small a voice as she can manage.
Rell-oil 23 is—well, it’s not pretty, whatever it is: ideological brainwashing meets hardcore aphrodisiacs meets planet-hunger; cravings so hard you might chew your own stomach out. It’s a safe bet Peace’s enamoured swains aren’t in their best heads, if there’s anything of them left in their heads at all.
“Paramours helpfully provided by the Pontificate of Mercy,” says Buddy. “By the half dozen. He is a repeat customer of their all expenses paid package.”
“Ever thought of starting small?” Juno says faintly. Alright, sure: he’s heard of the Pontificate. He’s watched refugees arrive half-dead in Hyperion City’s space-ports, craving a little human warmth, detesting eye contact. He’s interrogated enough of them during his days in the HCPD to recognize the signs: the cold sweats, the dazed look, the wandering fingers. He’s had enough of ‘em taken off his hands, too. Smiling watchdogs came and paid off their dues and took them away, and they weren’t ever seen again, except those that got really unlucky and ended up in a cold case file somewhere, their organs sold off to whoever put in the highest bid. Wasn’t even that high, usually.
“Darling, we have started small. We have gathered information on Peace and his compatriots within the Pontificate for the better part of the last year. Rasbach—you remember—traded in slave-flesh; he, too, is on the board. We’ve exhausted the slightest, minutest chinks in his defenses; we have gained leverage and lost it, and then we’ve gained it again. We know what Peace likes. We know what he wants. We even know what he needs, and that, Juno, is knowledge not easily acquired. In transparency, what he needs is to not have committed tax evasion for a decade. Do trust me.”
“I take it,” Nureyev says, swinging a lazy ankle, “that we are to remove something from this person.”
“Remove. Ruin. Aneantize,” says Siquliak.
“Hang on,” says Juno, so startled he forgets about everything he is pointedly not thinking about. “How the hell can you not know? What, you joined the biggest job in the past centuries without knowing anything about it?”
Nureyev flicks him a thin, piercing glance. Every time he moves, every time he breathes, his silver earrings chime. “As did you.” And then he smiles. It’s a killer. “Until ten days ago, detective, I was unaware we were to have … partners … in this venture.”
He’ll bet. Had Buddy told him about picking Juno up on Mars, Nureyev would’ve been on the soonest shuttle out to the Outer Rim. As far as Juno knows—and Juno’s been careful to know—Nureyev has never returned to Hyperion City; nor the Cerberus Province, Olympus Mons, or, for that matter, Mars. None of his aliases has ever made it back on transit records in- or off-world. No rumors of stolen goods. No disappearing acts, no suspect alibis, no whispers. Nureyev disappeared as he swore he would, and he’s never looked back.
“I’m not a PI anymore,” Juno hears himself say. The words stick. The world dances. Mars is light-years away.
“My condolences, Juno,” says Nureyev, eyebrows high. “What are you, again, these days?”
And if that isn’t the ten million-cred question. “I got no goddamn clue,” Juno snaps, blinking, glancing away. Rita across from him is wide-eyed, worried, a spoonful of breakfast cereal frozen halfway to her mouth. “Be sure to let you know when I figure it out."
He feels the weight of Nureyev’s gaze upon him a moment longer. But even that pressure eases. Juno meets Siquliak’s eyes and finds nothing but calm, understated disinterest there.
“What the hell do you want with Peace, anyway? … you didn’t seem all that bothered to do business with a flesh-trader the day we met.”
“I wonder what about that day might have changed my mind,” says Buddy, sharp as a snake and deadlier, and Juno—immediately—feels terrible about himself. Vespa is standing at her shoulder, her hand heavy upon Buddy’s wrist. But she sighs. “And yet—you’re right. Vigilantism is hardly our realm of expertise."
"I have told you, Juno," says Jet, grave. "We are on the hunt for something big."
"By far bigger than Ellery Peace," adds Buddy. "No, he is … a sting operation. In Ellery Peace's personal safe is a great deal of information, most of which we require to carry out our intentions."
"Which are—what?"
"You'll know in good time."
"Like hell—"
"There is a reason we can't tell you, Juno," says Buddy. "Our success is dependent on a very, very few being aware of our plans; allies or enemies; it's all the same. We are in the crosshairs, you see: powerful foes know what we know, and know that we know it. The least you understand, until the moment comes, the least danger you—and, by proxy, ourselves—will be in."
"Until then," says Jet, "there is Ellery Peace."
"Who has the most modern security system in the Jupiter-IO Affiliated System," says Nureyev. Juno's attention, inevitably, is drawn back to him. He regrets it. Nureyev is wearing a disheveled white blouse, embroidered in such fine silver filigree it almost looks wet, clinging to his waist. Hair slicked back. Long legs crossed. He looks like a severe bird of prey. "A worthwhile pursuit, of course, but hardly one to be improvised in ten days."
"Would be, if we were doing that. We don't need to get past his security system," says Buddy. "Only into his head. Catch a fraction of the code in his brain. It should prove simple to apply it to an artificial protoplasm—and so open the safe … discreetly."
“Just like in the mooovies,” breathes Rita. “Ooh, Mistah Steel, remember, it’s just like in Darkling Doom and the Dread Duck, when Darkling decides to take their revenge on the Anseriform Mafiosi—”
“Haven’t seen it.”
“—and realizes their own sibling has impersonated them for twenty-eight years—sure you have, boss, we watched it together two months ago.”
“I fell asleep in the popcorn, Rita.”
“Darkling Doom wrestles the Dread Duck in mortal combat,” says Vespa quietly. There is a brief pause.
“Oh, Miss Vespa,” Rita breathes.
“Oh, dear,” says Buddy, and starts laughing.
Two days after leaving the Outer Rim, Nureyev comes out of his cabin wearing extremely tight pants, a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and a v-neck henley that shows entirely too much collarbone than is legal. Juno chokes on his drink.
"You shouldn't drink so fast, Mistah Steel."
"Shut up," he says, weakly enough to take the sting out of it.
Nureyev's eyes behind the glasses are pale and cool.
"Something wrong, Juno?"
Damnit, that voice. He hears it in his dreams. The best of his nightmares.
"No," he says, into his glass. "Nothing."
So: Nureyev is angry.
Juno … gets it. It takes a fool to double-cross someone that deadly, and Juno's a fool ten times over. He gets anger just fine. Hell, he's made best pals with anger when he was four years old, and even whatever Ramses O'Flaherty and the Theia Spectrum have done to screw with his head hasn't got him to let it go. He recognizes it now, pared down, slicked down, refined to an art—a Brahmese knife, sliding between the ribs. I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgiven.
Nureyev is a killer, a trickster, a liar, a fiend in bed, though almost impossibly tender, and Juno once trusted him better than he had trusted anyone in a long, long while. Nureyev gave him his name, gave him his past, promised him adventure and wonder, planets beyond his imagination, and Juno—wanted that so badly he could taste it on his tongue, in his mouth, in his throat—
Anyway.
Now Nureyev is unfailingly polite. He speaks to Juno with calm and dignity. Somehow, that’s worse than the dirtiest fight; worse than a punch in the teeth, worse than losing his own fucking eye. It is a swift, exquisite cruelty. Subtle. Intentional. In plain sight.
Juno knows it lies dormant under every persona Nureyev creates, easy as he breathes: the sort of ruthlessness that comes with a kiss and hurts like a heart and leaves you regretting something you never had.
Juno saw the fox’s malice behind Nureyev’s smile the moment he stepped into his office. There hasn’t been a day since he hasn’t longed to see it again.
It’s not a big ship. Buddy and Vespa are shacking up together, and Juno’s not entirely sure where Jet sleeps, if at all; he and Rita are right next to each other, which means he can hear her streams through the partition at two a.m. when he can’t sleep, which is most nights, but also means he can call out to her anytime. He’s not gonna, but. It’s nice to know he could.
Observation deck, supply vault, engine rooms, med bay, pilot cockpit, common area. The ship was built for speed, not comfort, and every space is defined by its utility. Most of what they eat is either rehydrated or recomposed. There’s not much room to move in, and they’re all defensive of what little they have.
Rita, at least, has taken to crime with frightening ease. She and Vespa strike up the strangest goddamn friendship Juno’s known Rita to have—Rita who has the worst taste in friends, as evidenced by her sticking to him like glue. Rita steals up to the medbay in the afternoon, where, Juno’s heard, they binge on dramastreams and hot buttered popcorn. Rita hardly ever stops talking, and Vespa says maybe one word in ten minutes, but she looks at her with a bright, intent expression, like she’s trying and failing to figure her out. Juno mentions it to Buddy, who smiles that movie-star smile of hers and says, “Vespa wants familiar things.”
“So … a friend?” Juno hazards.
“If you’d been sold into indentured servitude and subjugated to a psychic thrall for five years, Juno, what would you want?”
“Not being stuck in a tiny ship in space with no way out would be a plus.”
Buddy shrugs. “We make our own ways out.”
It’s an awkward, artless line of discussion, and Juno is grateful to drop it when Rita barges into it, bearing an empty popcorn bowl the size of a small canyon and chattering a mile a minute. Jet trails behind her, looking nonplussed yet amenable.
They’ve enough to do, as Buddy distributes roles and assigns tasks, that they hardly ever skirt the line of intimate conversation again. They spend the long spacetime evenings till they get to IO planning the job ahead of them, comparing strategies, debating the morals of using amnesia gas to secure their safe departure as opposed to just punching their way out: Juno’s favorite exit route, but not, as Jet puts it, the most expedient option, Juno. It’s a strange domesticity. It’s … nice.
They don’t talk about Hyperion City.
“Nothing to talk about,” he says, flippantly, the first and only time Buddy makes a passing mention of it. She makes a sound of sober understanding, and never brings it up again. When he looks up, cheeks burning, Nureyev is just glancing away.
Nureyev, who once gave him the choice between Hyperion City and the stars.
Juno feels, as he has felt before, as though part of him is still back there, in the doorway of their hotel room, and looking back: Nureyev’s skin pale against the bedsheets, his sleeping form restful, relaxed. His mouth that kissed Juno’s mouth. His hands.
Nureyev is always standing two feet away from him.
Wren Starr is—different.
Rex Glass and Duke Rose took up such boundless space—physical, audible, intimate space; they were capricious, effusive in their affections, chimerical in their amusements, larger than life and larger than Mars, bound for bigger and better things than Juno knew how to offer. He hasn’t forgotten a minute of it. Not one second. Glass’ knowing laughter; that intoxicating first kiss in Juno’s office; Rose’s hand resting at the small of his back as they conned their way into Engstorm’s Rangian Street poker party—it’s all there, still, somewhere, traces of Nureyev’s past selves in the man he is now, fragments, all of which fail to live up to the reality of him. Now. Here. Right here.
Starr drinks nothing but black coffee for breakfast, favors silver jewelry, sleeps with one eye open, and is glad to let Buddy take the lead in their criminal overtures. His tongue is sharp, his silence sharper. He wears tailored A-line suits, slim silver glasses, garçon-style culottes, and once, notably, a smoking-jacket embroidered in white roses, which Juno hates to look at. And always, always, heels—practical suede boots, red-soled pumps, piercing stilettos. Legs for days.
He flirts with Rita, who looks anguished and turns wide betrayed eyes on Juno and bites her lip fiercely. He touches Jet’s arm when they speak; he gives even Vespa the sort of smile that betrays a silent understanding. He sits next to Juno in the common area, hands him a bowl of reconstituted noodles, leans over his shoulder to consult floor maps. Juno, helpless against longing, finds himself watching his hands: the fingers he touches to his mouth when he thinks, the relaxed curve of his wrist underneath a long sleeve, the heavy black rings he wears on his thumb and index finger. Strong, long hands. Put bruises on his hips once. After a year of solitude and warm anonymous bodies, a whole fucking year of making himself not want what he was too much of a goddamn coward to let himself have, this abrupt godawful intimacy is almost too big to swallow.
Juno’s seen Peter Nureyev kill without sympathy and without remorse; he’s seen him so tender, so gentle, it would make a god cry with mercy. He sees that sweet sweet violence in Starr, magnified, purified, in the hard slant of his voice, in the hard line of his mouth, and he knows he had a hand in making it come to light.
Wren Starr is the man Nureyev built after he lost an … opportunity. While Juno was drinking himself into a stupor and letting a man he shouldn’t’ve trusted put a collar round his mind, Nureyev was putting together a past, a present, and a future; and none of them ever had him in it.
Nureyev does not touch him. Never. Nureyev looks at him sometimes, calmly, unflinchingly.
See? that calm, unflinching look says. See how well I’m doing without you?
Io is a world of sulfur and iron, inhospitable by almost every Solar standard, and mainly an alluring attraction for tourists, who get to observe the great volcanic celebrations from the safe shelter of a platinum-capped, top-of-the-line spacecraft.
IO, the Jupiter Imperial Operative Affiliated System, is a wide ring of moon-large satellites, interconnected, spinning, endlessly, on the influx of Jupiter’s magnetic field. It is a sequence, heavily regulated, of exclusive clubs, greater floating mansions, casinos, theatres, dance halls, Solar-summer residences, and orbital brownstones, where only the richest and most preeminent members of the greater galaxy congregate every six Lunar years for a sabbatical of liquor, sex, and gambling.
The rich. The worst of the rich—the swanky, the ritzy, the deluxe, who control, from on high, the destinies of a thousand thousand companies and communities across the Solar System. They abandoned Mars two centuries ago, leaving behind the prototypes of the huge, multi-estate generation dwellings they would go on to build; leaving behind the Prince of Mars and his kin—poor descendant replicas of an aristocracy long gone. These Families would buy out the Universe.
Juno hates it immediately.
The atmosphere itself is sickly sweet, so far from the murky, recycled air Hyperion City whooshes in its pipes that he chokes on the first mouthful. The eternal electronic evening on IO-15 casts everything in shades of gold and blue.
“Five minutes,” says Vespa’s voice, metallic, over the intercom.
Juno curses softly. Checks his holster—he won’t get to use his gun tonight, but hey he’s never suffered from an excess of caution—and tugs over it the dark jacket Jet deposited on his doorstep. It’s almost entirely black, and its décolletage is … suggestive, to say the least; the scions of IO want even their bodyguards to look obscene. Robotic silver vines climb up the collar, down the sleeves, across his chest, like thin, durable chains, pale against his dark skin. He catches sight of himself in the mirror. He looks more put together than he remembers being in a year, which says a lot about the past year.
He’s not so sure about the mask. Sure, it hides the ruined mess of his left eye, and, really, most of his upper face; in uniform, he’ll be little more than a nameless high-class goon among many, hired event-to-event to ensure the safety of the guests. Juno’s not entirely sure where they got that in. “Vespa knows someone who owes her a favor, and they know someone who owes them a favor.” Enigmatic. He screws the earcomms into his ear.
Banging on the door. “Move it, Steel! T-2 hours!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he mutters. Looks at the mirror again. Okay, fine: he looks damn good.
The ship purrs contentedly around him. It’s a comforting sound, sort of: a great big cat with only one great big eye. He got used to it. He makes his way to the loading dock, where Buddy is allowing Vespa to zip up her dress.
It’s a pretty great dress. He's a little envious. Off the shoulder, ink-blue, with a silk train. Vespa, in torn pants and a beanie, lets her hands linger possessively over Buddy’s shoulderblades. Juno hesitates in the doorway, unwilling to interrupt, yet too far to overhear more than smiling whispers.
“You need not stand on ceremony, Juno,” says Jet, in his ear. “You may go in.”
“Geez—” Juno gasps. Heart throbbing. “Warn a gal next time, will you?”
“My footsteps are perfectly audible,” Jet observes, and hands him a hovercycle helmet. “I will deposit you at the staff entrance.”
“I take it I will have to make my own way to the gallery,” says Nureyev, ruefully, arriving on the scene with Rita on his arm, “and make an entrance of my own,” and Juno’s throat goes very dry.
Nureyev is the only one of them canny enough—and invisible enough—to play the part of the wealthy, indulgent guest. The heavy black ring on his hand marks him, for anyone interested enough to notice, for a man of good fortune and high status: the sort of toothless capitalist who makes millions off the sweat of Plutonian slaves with the lift of his middle finger. But he's now wearing a backless bodice that dips very, very low, and loose silk trousers; piercings in his ears, four-inch stilettos. Perfect make up, too: eyeliner crisp and clean, a cool touch of highlighter. He looks dressed to kill. Juno's actually pretty sure he could kill someone with those heels.
Nureyev catches his eye. He gives him a very slow once-over that leaves Juno flushing, unhappy, and more than a little turned on. And then he grins that sharp sharp grin.
"Well. Will this do?"
"Should do," says Buddy, critically. "Steel?"
"Sure," says Juno, in a croak.
"You look extremely elegant, Wren," says Jet.
Nureyev hums, still looking, smiling faintly, at Juno. “You look quite well, Juno.”
“You look passably elegant, Juno,” says Jet.
“Buy a lady a drink first, Big Guy.”
On they go.