Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

(Freeze here. Focus.)

The man with a blue facial tattoo.

I returned to my own mind enough to remember where I’d seen that face: in the shard of the elevator guard on the night I’d hired Standard. The Medusan lieutenant said that man had been looking for me. Whatever our attacker had found so instinctively off-putting about him tugged at something in my own memory, but I couldn’t name it.

That was it. There was nothing else to know.

Except that he had said my name was Sybil—that name, out of all of them. I hadn’t used it in decades; there was no way the Medusas could know to call me that. Even the Keepers couldn’t.

Who on Earth could still know me by that name?

Serena’s body jerked when I took my hand off her head. All the defiant strength in her eyes was gone, replaced by a pure bewilderment that faded by degrees into an even purer fear, and I slumped onto the floor, finally seeing her for what she was: just an angry kid whose aspirations to violence were only for want of any other kind.

I wanted to apologize, but I was afraid it would only make it all worse. I pressed my palm against her forehead one more time just to will her into a few hours of dreamless sleep. I wished I could do the same for myself.

Naoto stood back, looking stricken. I motioned at the door, and he opened it and brought Standard back into the compartment.

“Her name is Serena,” I said, when I found the breath to speak. “She acted alone. She hasn’t told anyone else we boarded this train. She knows nothing about her client other than the address he called from, which you’ll find as the most recent incoming call in her shard’s log. The unlock code is 2-9-1-0-6.” I swallowed hard. “Her only orders were to get me alone and take me alive. You two would’ve been collateral damage.”

I knew they were both staring at me, but I refused to meet their eyes. Standard was good enough to not ask for any explanations. Serena kept breathing—and looking down her internally-burned arm and the persistent mis-healed crookedness in mine, I knew exactly what I’d become.

Naoto picked up her pistols and started to put them in his backpack.

“Don’t,” I groaned. “Leave them for her. They’re all she has. When she wakes up, she’ll need something to pawn to get medical attention.”

Standard regarded me cautiously and said, “You aren’t worried she’ll come after you again?”

I looked back at Serena’s sleeping form one more time and felt a withering wave of regret. “No I am not,” I said. I climbed onto the cot and pulled the curtain closed behind me.

“Danae—” Naoto started.

“No more trains,” I said. And I lay there in silence for the rest of the ride to Crossroads Station.

Part II: Nameless

I

ALEXEI DIDN'T UNDERSTAND what he’d seen through the hairline gap in the door. From his perspective, Danae had simply put her hand on the assassin’s forehead, a silent minute had passed, and then she’d called him back into the room, suddenly knowing everything. Just as suddenly, Alexei knew less than ever about his clients—but his mind was clearing now, his heart falling back into a rhythm.

He had exactly what he needed now. He’d squandered his first chance to die, but he could rest assured there would be more, because he knew now that Danae was no ordinary tech servant on the run from Medusa Clan. She had secrets—maybe the largest and deepest secrets he had ever been close to—and where there were secrets like that, death always followed.

Danae lay still on the cot, face to the wall. Naoto stayed close, every so often whispering useless consolations. He told her she’d acted in self-defense. She ignored every word, until he had nothing left but to sit and stare out through the slit window. He’d never seen a sky that was farther away than the paint on the rusty crossbeams of Bloom City’s main habitat, and his lungs had never tasted unpressurized air; he’d followed Danae into another world altogether, knowing he could never go back. He needed someone to be there with him in that moment, and I regret so much—all the more for what lay ahead—that he had no one.

Far behind them, Bloom City was finally beginning to dry. Though no part of me was there to see it, the years I spent in those claustrophobic spaces make the scenes all too vivid in my imagination: how the seals were being repaired, flooded compartments drained, corridors sprayed clean of blood. Duke must have strolled victorious among his competitors—some bound and kneeling, others already dead—all flanking a path of crimson carpet that still squished with saltwater under his boots. He stood before the half-smashed remains of the throne he had coveted all his life and paused to savor a single touch of gilded, waterlogged wood under his fingertips—but just as he was about to sit, an urgent clang of running footsteps turned his attention to an underling offering him a data pane. At first he couldn’t understand why anyone would bother him with something so random: nothing but a fragmented emergency transmission from a portable medical scanner in a beached construction pod. But he looked closer. For all the glory he’d hung on the moment he finally sat on the Medusan Throne, he was barely aware of its ruined leather as he sank down. All his awareness was fixed instead on the many-spined thing in the center of a nameless woman’s brain, drawn in pale holographic light.

This is a story about people without names—some who lost their names, others who’d never had them. Serena had no family. Duke needed nothing but his title. Alexei’s last name was borrowed from a man who was not his