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Persephone Jones ran.
She could hear the Corporate guards behind her, their metal-booted feet hard on her heels despite the weight of their armour. She was winded already, a stitch from the tarmac and cheese she’d forced down earlier a painful stitch in her side, the sheer exhaustion of the last few days catching up on her faster than Byzantium’s premier security force. Her brain was addled, the emotional fuses all blown from what she had been forced to do in the dank basement of the Ministry; she’d be hearing the screams every night for as long as she lived. But she couldn’t think about that now. She had to run. She was the distraction. If she messed this up the guards might realise she didn’t have the stolen chemicals and start hunting around the city for Max and Parvati, and then it would all be lost. Far better that she be the one to suffer the consequences. Phineas could carry on without her.
“Stop!” The Guard behind her shouted, the word a harsh wheeze through his helmet. He was flagging. Good. Persephone pushed past a dawdling couple and skidded around an elderly man, turning down a side street between two impressive rows of apartments. One had a hole in the wall. The clatter of boots behind her turned into an echo as the vibrations shot up the walls around her. “Stop!”
A thwip , and an explosion of pain in her thigh. She shrieked and stumbled but managed to stay upright, managed to keep going, fumbling for the bolter pistol she had strapped to her belt. She hadn’t wanted to do this. She hadn’t wanted anyone else to die by her hand today. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the tingling at the base of her skull. The power Phineas had referred to as her ‘tactical time dilation’ as she only ever found a use for it in combat. She wished he wouldn’t. It was a reminder of what this colony had made her into.
The world around her slowed to a crawl, her foot raised in midair, her long dark hair fanning out around her as she spun on her heel to face her pursuers. There was only one. She couldn’t see his face but she imagined it as frozen in a grin of triumph as she raised her pistol and aimed it at his head. I’m sorry , she thought in the long moments it took for her finger to depress the trigger. I don’t want to do this, but you’ve left me no choice .
She made herself watch the aftermath, just as she’d made herself stay in the lab as the people she couldn’t save writhed in the faint green glow of the tanks they were trapped in. The fire enveloped his head, his time-slurred speech - another stop! - turning into a dull, bassy scream as the energy ate away at his helmet and the flesh underneath. It took him only seconds to die. To Persephone it felt like hours.
When it was over she brought herself back to the real world and sagged against the wall behind her, fingers catching at the shoddy brickwork. She forced herself up, leg screaming in protest, and managed another few steps to the street at the other end of the alley. But when she emerged into the sunshine the world was loud and bright and confusing, an assault on her already raw senses, and she shrank back against the masonry once again.
Her legs gave out and she collapsed onto her knees, a painful moan escaping her lips as the shock of the impact hit her fresh wound. Her vision began to grey at the edges, the curious legs of the passers-by blurring into a rainbow of peculiar stilts. One pair clad in dark grey trousers stopped right in front of her, and a far-away voice she half-recognised said: “You?”
She didn’t remember anything else.
*
She awoke in a soft bed, surrounded by crimson walls lined with intricate embossed patterns that made her eyes swim and a ceiling of pure white that made them hurt. The room smelled of chemicals and an odd bouquet. She could hear the faint sound of people walking and laughing outside.
“This doesn’t look like a cell,” she mumbled to herself.
“I’ll thank you not to insult my home, Captain Hawthorne.” A second voice, behind her. It contained no malice - perhaps a hint of disdain, but she could live with that - and so she took her bearings before she turned to its source. She was clad only in her functional Halcyon underwear, a single piece of grey lycra that was surprisingly comfortable whilst also being utterly impractical in all bathroom-related matters. Her leg still hurt, but the pain was distant, dulled by painkillers. It had been wrapped perhaps a little too tightly in a clean-looking bandage, a small spot of blood the only sign of an injury.
Persephone looked to her left. Anton Crane sat cross-legged in a chair next to the bed, an old book clasped in his hands. “I had hoped,” he said as their eyes met, “to never see you again. As you can see, I made it to Byzantium - regardless of your interference in my affairs.” The words were mangled in his mouth, the affected accent she had noticed in Roseway so much more pronounced that he sounded like a bad actor who had only half-learned his lines. “And then I find you collapsed on my doorstep with a dead guard in the alleyway behind you. I take it your violent ways remain unchanged.”
They had parted on bad terms, Persephone frustrated that she hadn’t been able to make him see how many people his damned research would end up hurting, and Anton irritated with her very presence in the Communication Tower he had taken refuge in. “If you want to do Halcyon a favour,” she’d sniped at Rueben Porter as she had marched past him after their final confrontation, “you’ll shoot Doctor Crane in the face and burn that folder he has.”
She realised she was begrudgingly grateful that Porter hadn’t done so, and annoyed that she appeared to have ended up in Doctor Crane’s debt. “There must have been easier ways to get me into bed,” she said with mock-sweetness, throwing the covers off and attempting to stand; the moment she put her full weight onto her injured limb it buckled, the distant pain coming into sharp relief that made her ears sing with rushing blood.
Anton caught her around the waist before she could smack her head on the bedpost, his arm stronger than he looked. “I’ll not have you undo all of my hard work fixing you up with your stubbornness,” he grunted, almost throwing her back down onto the bed. His voice cracked at the edges, elements of his real accent bleeding through. “Not even the incredible Captain Hawthorne can walk off being shot in the leg, you halfwit.”
“You don’t say,” she said through gritted teeth, settling back into the sheets in a seated position. “How long have I been out?”
Anton settled himself back into his chair before replying. “Only a few hours. The guards are still looking for you outside. Perhaps if you irritate me enough I’ll turn you over to them for the reward they’re offering.”
“So why don’t you then?” Persephone snapped. “Go on. March out there and grab a guard and tell them you’ve captured the infamous Captain Hawthorne. Claim the reward. What’s one more corpse littering the grand stage of your life, eh? You’ve already climbed over enough of them to get here.”
She was a hypocrite and she knew it. Pistols and toothpaste. Bullets and chemicals. Which one of them was truly worse than the other? Or did they both have the same amount of bodies on their rap sheet when you came down to it: hers already dead, his already dying?
He scowled at her. “I have my honour. Consider this payment for services previously rendered, seeing as you wouldn’t accept my bit cartridge back on Terra 2.”
“That was blood money,” she muttered, folding her arms.
“Oh, really? So you’ve never once taken a cartridge from a dead man, is that right?”
Persephone thought suddenly of Alexander Frey, lying abandoned and forgotten in a cold, dead satellite among the stars. She used his drinks trolley to store her various boxes of ammunition and armour modifications. Sometimes, when she was alone, she raised a glass in his memory. “There’s a difference between taking bits from someone who no longer needs them and willingly accepting them from a monster.”
She tried to take the fleeting, startled look of hurt in his cold grey eyes as her own small victory but couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. She’d seen the results of Chatrand’s research. She’d walked to hell and back on Gorgon. Anton’s small tube of insidious fluoride was nothing when compared to a body run through a garbage compactor.
He began to reply, fumbling his words, but she interrupted him: “Sorry. I’m sorry. That was too far.” She could feel her face reddening as she did so, the sense of defeat palpable between them.
“It certainly was.” Curiously, he didn’t sound angry. Wary, perhaps. Tired, definitely. “I seem to recall us conversing about the harsh reality of life in this colony at Roseway. You’re still blind to it now, it seems. It’s everyone for themselves out here. That is how Halcyon works. That is how I earned my place in Byzantium. This is my reward for my sacrifices.”
“Your sacrifices.”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly, did you sacrifice, Anton?”
Now came the anger. “Everything. My family. My youth. Friendships, relationships. I poured my every waking moment since my sixteenth birthday into my work and now, finally , I get to have what everyone else here has. A life of my own.”
Persephone nodded, pulling her long hair back behind her ears, scratching at an itch on her neck. “And,” she said slowly, “how is that working out for you?”
He scoffed. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve made friends? A lover or two, maybe? Gone to those libraries and museums I’m sure you thought were here? Appreciated the fine architecture of this beautiful city that sure is slowly falling to bits around us? Or is the real reason you rescued me because none of the snobs here will speak to you and that book on the floor there is the only one you’ve seen since arriving?”
“I…” For the first time since she’d met him, Anton Crane looked unsure of himself. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“All right, let me put it in a different way: if you’re having such a fantastic and wonderful life why would you risk throwing it all away in an instant to help out a wanted criminal you don’t even like?”
He opened his mouth to answer and was again interrupted, this time by the far-away pounding of a metal fist on a metal door. Their eyes met.
“Go ahead,” said Persephone flatly. “Just get it over with. Maybe they’ll even put your picture in the Halcyon Observer and you can get that attention you so desperately wanted.”
He left the room without another word, his gait strangely stiff. Persephone had to admit that the fashionable threads he’d picked up suited him far better than the dirty Auntie Cleos scrubs ever had and felt suddenly ashamed for pecking at him. She was bitter, that much was clear. Anton Crane had reached the destination he had spent his life striving for, and perhaps she tore at it so desperately not because of jealousy but because she couldn’t imagine a life beyond working for Phineas Welles. She didn’t have a future to plan for. She just had one mission after the next, and one day they would stop and she would have to figure out what it was she actually wanted to do for herself.
Persephone Jones existed as a fixer to the colony’s many, many problems. But what use is a hammer when all of the nails have been dealt with?
The front door of the house lay out of her sight down a flight of stairs, the bannister of which she could just make out beyond the room. The sounds from below were muted by the thin flooring, barely audible from where she lay, but she strained to hear them all the same. If death was going to come for her she would much rather know about it. She heard the creak of the door open, and Anton saying something in a clueless, enquiring tone. The bark of an officer, probably a commander. She waited for the pounding of feet on the stairs, the shouting, the shots fired. She’d rather die than be sent to Halcyon’s idea of prison: suicide by guard was preferable to whatever torture the re-education programme would be.
But it didn’t happen. She did hear shouting, but it all seemed to be coming from Anton. The commander’s barks seemed to become quieter, then resentful, and then stopped all together. A few minutes later the door slammed, and a single pair of slippered feet made their way back up to her. When Anton re-entered the room he looked flushed and pleased with himself. “The guards here are all so much more skittish than the ones I was used to working with,” he said animatedly, his wide smile genuine for once. “If I had spoken to Porter that way he would have decked me.” His voice sounded strange, and she realised that he had shed the over-exaggerated accent he had first been using when she awoke. Now it was almost natural.
“I wish he would have,” Persephone said before she could stop herself. Anton’s smile dimmed a watt or two. “Sorry. They...they just left?”
Anton leant his elbows on the back of the chair. “Apparently they’re not paid well enough to risk angering the Auntie Cleo upper management.”
“Of course. Of course the guards in the capital city of an entire colony aren’t paid well enough to actually care about their jobs. Typical fucking Halcyon.”
“You seem disappointed that I didn’t let them take you.” The hurt she had noticed earlier made a brief cameo once again. “You’re that desperate to get away from me, are you?”
She sighed. “No. No, I’m not. I just…” Now it was her turn to fumble for her words. “...I’ve done my part. If Max - uh - my companions are as smart as I know they are then they’re hundreds of miles away from here now on their way to our employer with what we came here for. My role is done. There’s no use for me any more.”
The realisation came to her as she spoke. The reason for her misplaced anger at surviving the confrontation in the alleyway. This had been it. The quest for Phineas’s Dimethyl Sulfoxide, the last ingredient needed to awaken the lost colonists and bring hope back to Halcyon’s shrinking horizon, was over. He could do his thing now without her help. Or with the help of the rest of the crew of the Unreliable. He didn’t need her any more. Nobody did.
“What, by the Grand Architect, are you talking about?” Anton sounded more curious than exasperated, slipping back into his chair as he spoke. “You’re a mercenary, aren’t you? There will always be more work for you out there if the machinations of Sublight Salvage is anything to go by.”
“I’m not a mercenary. I never was.” She picked at the bedsheet. The stitching was awful and there was a loose thread at its eastern corner. Like everything else in her life, it was one tug away from utterly falling apart. “My employer chose me for... reasons best known to himself to complete a very specific task for him. Sure, it took me all over the colony and I bumped into people like you along the way, maybe did a few side jobs whilst I was out there, but ultimately my reason for being here is over and done with. And so am I.” She spoke without self-pity or sadness, the words plain and matter-of-fact.
Perhaps that was what made them so frightening.
“You speak as though your life is meaningless here.”
“It is.”
“Hawthorne -”
“Persephone. My name is Persephone Jones. Nice to meet you.” She meant it as a joke, the poorest one she could think of, but after a beat Anton held out his hand primly and she shook it almost automatically. It was rougher than she expected, the fingers calloused, the fingernails well manicured but thin, splintered in places. Chemicals, maybe. Or accidents with badly programmed machinery in his youth. But it was also warm, and human. She felt ashamed of the derision she’d poured on him. Even at his worst he was still a person whose ultimate sin had been vanity masking desperation.
“I believe I told you everything there really was to know about me when we first met,” he said quietly. “But I never asked you for your story.”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
He sat back in his chair, crossed his arms and legs. “Try me.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “I was born on Earth in the year 2250. I grew up watching reports on the construction of the Hope, wondered what it would be like to adventure amongst the stars. I loved music. I wanted to be a musician. But my family was poor, so I started working as a courier instead. I’d transport anything for anyone. Legal, illegal, so long as they were something I could carry I would carry them to wherever they wanted to go.” She remembered the thrum of her motorcycle beneath her, the thrill of the chase when the authorities caught on to her activities. She’d been an adrenaline junkie even then. “And then one day my family was killed. An accident. A stupid, stupid wrong-place wrong-time accident. I had nothing left, and everywhere I went I saw echoes of my memories of them. So I took all that money I had saved up to one day learn the violin and I bribed myself onto the Hope. Got the recruiting officer to fudge my qualifications, you might say. Turn me from a nothing into a something. And I got myself into a cryo-pod and I fell asleep thinking that no matter how bad colony life was at least there wouldn’t be any ghosts in Halcyon.” She clicked her tongue. “And then the bloody skip drive failed and the Hope was left to limp its way here on its sublight engines. The Board found her, you know. Ages ago. 2320. They found the Hope drifting in deep space and concluded that the hundreds of thousands of people aboard weren’t worth the effort, so they quietly moved her to Typhon and just...left us there. They left us all there to die.”
She expected derision, or mild disbelief at the very least. Even Max hadn’t been able to hide his amusement at her story the first time she told it. But Anton Crane simply said: “Then how did you come to end up here?”
Persephone hesitated. She didn’t mind throwing herself under the bus, but Phineas had saved her life. She owed him his secrecy in return. “A scientist who worked on the original team that found the Hope concluded that it would be possible to wake us all up if the correct chemical composition was used. Unfortunately, the Board had no interest in saving us and he only had enough supplies to wake up one person. So he chose me. He chose me, a person who barely wanted to live anyway, to save everyone else on the fucking ship.” She shrugged. “So I did what he said, took all the steps needed so that he could do exactly that. So that he could wake up all of the scientists and artists and teachers and musicians on the Hope and bring some, um, hope, to Halcyon. And I’ve done them all. He has the supplies now. And he has my ship and crew to help with the rest. I’m... surplus to requirement , as you might say.”
“It’s surplus to requirements , plural.”
“Thanks. That’s really helpful.” She sighed. “Listen, I…the reason I was…I saw it in you, you know. When we first met. The loneliness. Not having anything, not having any...one. To have this thing you know you need to do to find peace, but the people around you don’t understand why it’s so important to you and you can’t explain it to them. So they just think you’re a bit...odd. It’s why I was so angry with you, because you didn’t seem to realise that you were making yourself miserable with your quest for an unattainable goal. You’re right. You sacrificed every single potential human connection you were ever offered so you could come and live in this glitzy, hollow, disco ball of a city. Was it worth it? Was it really, honestly, truly worth it, Anton? Can you look me in the eye and say that it was?”
He was silent for a moment. His answer shocked her. “It was. But only because I got to see you again.”
Persephone’s brain filled with confused static. “What?” It was the only sound she could make for a moment. “But you said...when I woke up, you said you didn’t want to see me again. I don’t...I don’t understand.”
“When you first awoke, I wanted you to hate me. But I...I find it strangely distressing to continue in such a manner.” Anton closed his eyes. “I worked on that damned project for well over a decade of my life, you know. Before that, countless others. Before that, busy-body work. Before that, school, and before school watching my parents toil away to nothing in some Spacer’s Choice factory making things people would only break because that’s what they were made to do. I met hundreds of people. Thousands. All of them the same. Work, eat, sleep. Wake up the next morning, start again. Some had passions. Tossball, serials. I never really saw the point of them, although I loved reading the periodicals. It didn’t matter what the subject was, I’d read whatever was put in front of me. Ah - getting off the point. They had these passions but their passion wasn’t really in it. They were too tired for them to be anything other than distractions. That was life: you worked, or you were distracted. It was monotonous, and by the time I was posted to Roseway I was getting desperate. I would wake up of a morning and sit on my bunk and truly ponder if what I was doing was making any kind of difference to the universe, or if at the end of my life I would look back and realise I wouldn’t be remembered for anything. Professional or personal. It was...a bleak existence. Byzantium was the only thing I had left to hope for; I was too old to become a father - always told myself I’d wait, you know, until I got here - and I didn’t know how to make myself personable to people. I thought I was doing a good turn by Jameson, but even he hated me for who I made myself be. When the outlaws attacked I was almost strangely relieved in a way; I think deep down I sent that distress signal because I wanted the rat race to be over. I wanted Auntie Cleo’s to rain down hell upon me and send me away, wrestle the reins of my life out of my hands. Give me no choice in what to do next, give me nothing to hope for at all. But instead of them, I got you.”
“Must have been a bit disappointing.”
“No. No, I rather think you saved my life.”
“I marched into your place of work with my holier-than-thou attitude, my hunting rifle still smeared with the blood of the last poor bastard who got in my way, and then I shouted at you until I felt better and left immediately. I don’t see how you could have wanted to see me again.” She paused. “I would have been the worst kissogram ever.”
Anton looked at her. “You were alive . You had convictions, a backbone, a sense of justice that this colony was sorely lacking. I thought all of your ideas were wrong, of course, defended myself against your relentless attacks. You really were quite awful to me. But you cared. You cared enough about my staff, about my research, about who it would ultimately harm to be angry. You even gassed my Raptidons so that none of them had to die for my mistakes. And during that last argument when we were so awful to one another the only thing I could think was that I had disappointed you somehow, which only made me angrier.”
“Please don’t tell me you heard what I said to Porter on my way out.”
“I did.”
“Sorry.”
“No. Even at the time I thought you were quite right to say so. I was on the knife-edge of releasing a whole lot of harm across the entire colony and the one thing holding me back was the thought that it might upset you .”
“But…” She tried to think of a way to phrase what she had to ask delicately, but there was none to be found. “But you gave them the formula anyway. Your toothpaste is on the market.”
“Slimmer Than Nature is on the market,” he corrected her, and when he smiled there was a hint of impishness to it. “I made a last-second change to the calculations which I am certain, given the rush to get it onto the shelves, nobody at Cleo’s bothered to double check. The toothpaste will definitely reduce cavities and induce a vague sense of nausea that may put you off a meal or two, but once you’ve been using it for more than a month your body will acclimatise to it. It was the best I could do, given the circumstances. The rest of the data I produced has been thoroughly destroyed.”
She stared at him. “When they find out what you’ve done...Anton, they’ll kill you.”
“Then I will die having done the one good thing I was able to do. And perhaps someone will remember me for that.”
Persephone burst into tears. She didn’t know if it was cathartic release of her own issues, the pain medication wearing off, or the freight-train realisation that her actions were once again going to lead to the death of yet another person whose life would have been better off without her in it. She pulled her knees up to her chest, ignoring the jet of white-hot pain from her thigh, and sobbed into her bare knees. Not again , she thought. Not him . Not like this.
It took Anton a full ten seconds to react, and when he did the result was an awkward arm around her shoulders and a hesitant there, there that was so simple yet so beautiful. She grabbed at him blindly and cried into his shoulder instead, probably ruining the expensive fabric of his smoking jacket. She didn’t care. This was unbearable. But when the tears eventually dried up she had no advice to give: if the Unreliable was gone then they were both stuck in Byzantium. Perhaps she could face the music with him. Take the blame, even. Say she’d made him do it. It probably wouldn’t work, but at least she’d be able to live with herself.
“They should have called it AppeZap,” she mumbled, by way of apology. It was the only thing she could think to say. “That was clever. What the fuck does Slimmer Than Nature even mean .”
Anton chuckled. “At least somebody else ‘gets it’.” His arm remained around her shoulder, and hers awkwardly around his torso. It was clumsy and their backs would both suffer for it, but neither seemed inclined to let go.
“I liked you,” she said quietly. “I really did. I knew there was a good person in there somewhere, buried under all of the artificial airs and graces you wreathed yourself with. That maybe you’d just gotten yourself a bit lost along the way. But I never thought you’d put your own life at risk. If I had, I wouldn’t have spoken with you at all.”
“And I would have arrived here with my blinkers on and allowed the disappointment that is the reality of Byzantium to consume me utterly, all whilst denying it until my dying breath. At least now I can enjoy the few pleasures there are to be had here with my eyes open before they catch up with me, my dear.”
Persephone disentangled herself from him, looked him in the eye. If given more time, she might have done something more. A proper hug, maybe. A kiss, definitely. And from the way he was looking at her she knew both would be returned with honesty.
As it was, her underwear started beeping.
“Um,” said Anton, the both of them looking down at her crotch before he realised what he was doing and jumped away from her as though she were radioactive. “Is that...are you…?”
“I’m beeping,” Persephone said, nonplussed. “Why am I beeping?”
Phineas Welles’s voice emanated from the small of her back. “ Don’t panic ,” it said, pre-recorded and awkward. “ I outfitted your undergarments with a tracking device and if you’re hearing this message then whatever dimwitted crew you found yourself have finally worked out how to trigger it from Captain Hawthorne’s ship. I imagine they’ll be along shortly. If you’re in a prison cell you may want to mute this message before any of the guards hear it by placing your hand on the - oh, blast. Should have put that at the start. Hang on. How do I -”
The recording stopped. Persephone looked up slowly, an expression of scandalised fury plastered across her features. “Phineas fucking Welles,” she said, earlier commitment entirely forgotten, “put a fucking tracking device? In my fucking underwear ?”
*
It all happened rather quickly after that.
As Phineas had promised, Parvati and Ellie turned up on Anton’s doorstep barely twenty minutes later, Parvati apologetic and complimentary about the decor and Ellie furious that somebody other than herself had performed medicine on her own skipper. Anton had hovered in the background, observing their tearful reunion with a polite expression that couldn’t mask the disappointment in his eyes, disappearing completely once shooed away by Ellie’s own personal brand of bedside manner. But once Persephone’s wound had been fixed up properly and she had been helped back into her own clothes, Captain Hawthorne of the Unreliable sought the former doctor out and told him, sternly, to pack a bag. Nobody else, she said, was dying over a stupid tube of toothpaste.
He quite agreed.
He moved into her room, of course. The spare bed from the storage bay was set up next to the window and both of them using the washroom whenever they needed to change - any other way would have been improper. He witnessed the Hope skip-jump to the orbit of Terra 2, held her when she and the others raged over Phineas’s capture, and was left behind to help tend to the wounded from the Groundbreaker when they launched their assault on Tartarus prison. Shortly after Persephone Jones of Earth was installed as Chairman of the Halcyon Holding Corporation, Anton Crane quietly changed his name to Anton Jones.
He spent the rest of his life working with Phineas Welles and a team of scientists to re-awaken the Hope colonists needed to save Halcyon, and when he died the short-lived Auntie Cleo's Slimmer Than Nature toothpaste was not even a footnote on his official eulogy. His widow made sure of that.