Hotter on the Edge (7 page)

The shadows converged, and her heart stopped. Then a body clambered over the edge, as if to commit suicide, but Simon grabbed the assassin's arm before he could fall. From her vantage point, Mica could make out no features, only lily-pale skin swathed in black. The body swung like a large spider.

Those remaining on the museum floor gasped and sobbed.

Simon reached with his other arm to double clasp. To save the life.

But the assassin found purchase with his legs on the wall and wrenched free. Screams followed him down. The assassin broke his back on a reclining marble nude with eerie blank eyeballs.

Mica's high blades could take her that far without aid. She'd assessed many corpses before, but few humans. She felt stranger still standing over a death in her filmy gown instead of her survey second skin. The assassin's relaxed jaw, in particular, sent a shiver down her spine.

The person was hairless, including lashes and brows. The facial structure still skewed male. His pale skin was lined with years. Body short and stocky. She felt certain, especially considering the alopecia, that the man was Sol-born. A scavenger.

"Not another one," her mother said, coming up beside her.

Mica turned and raised her eyebrows. "Another?"

Her mother's eyes wandered to take in eavesdroppers. Then, under her breath, "That's the third attempt since this wedding madness started. We've moved up the date, but we can't seem to get Pilar married fast enough."

Scavengers.

"And Sr. Adulya," her mother hissed. "This will cause problems. Your father will have to explain."

The scavenger somehow had gotten inside the museum, perhaps as staff, but since weapons were confiscated and biomatter screened, he'd used what was readily available. Brought the house down.

A warm arm slipped around her, and she leaned against the familiar wall of a body.

"We need to get you and your family out of here," Simon urged. "Where there's one ..."

"Right," Mica finished for him. "…There might be others."

"Order the car," Simon told her mother.

Dimly, Mica was aware of her mother moving, the room organizing into purposeful actions. As the guests evacuated, the media bobs found their way inside.

…Simon Miner…

…tried to apprehend the assassin, to even save his life…

…none other than the consort of Mica Sol…

Voices buzzed around her, but Mica was still arrested by the gawp of the dead man before her. She worked so hard to understand the biology of alien species, but she could not fathom the psychology of her own. Simon had helped her with that.

A lowborn life, like that of a miner or scavenger, was a life of labor. The chances of escaping that fate were slim. No—Mica regarded Simon, the only person who'd seemed capable of doing it—he'd turned into a lawless criminal, too, taking up the same tactics as the scavengers. She revised her assessment: the chances of escaping a lowborn fate were nil.

…not hard to see why she chose him to warm her bed…

…where did he come from?

…the strength of two men!

And a life of unending labor was a life of slavery. That life might be more comfortable in Sol City with ready rations and breathable air. But the high plains of the west offered something better—freedom. So the scavengers traded health and long life for self-determination, and hated Sol, and therefore her family, for every hurt their people bore.

It's why she and Simon had developed the stake system for the mines. Presented it to the shareholders. Got it ratified into law. It had been just the beginning of their ideas for remaking her world. They'd wanted to create doorways through which the enterprising might pass and escape their birth. And right before she'd left, Simon had seemed poised to do just that.

…hero of the hour…

…sure to be richly rewarded…

Why hadn't it worked?

The weight of the problem settled heavy on her shoulders like the arm of an old companion. Her every step in life as princess and heir of Sol was unbalanced by the load—the inequality among her people. And now she knew what her companion looked like: Lily-pale skin. Stocky body. Unable to grow hair. And in his desperate heart burned the desire to end her family's lives.

Chapter Five

A thin-lipped man in the deep golds of the Sol livery showed Simon to his room. Simon knew the palace well enough to know that his quarters—a narrow cell—were located in the servants' hall, and were in their clean modesty better than most of the places he'd laid his head during his life. Very nice, but the room was located on the opposite side of the palace from Mica's—yet one more intervention by Drum Sol.

However, no self-respecting consort wouldn't show up for work his first night. And definitely not because of a disapproving father. At twenty-six, Mica was well into her majority.

As Simon suspected, Mica's father didn't know that Simon possessed the family passcodes and could move freely about the palace proper as long as he didn't draw the interest of any of the guards. He'd used the codes often five years ago, planned to use them to get to Pilar's dowry, and even now tapped the override into the light panel to the side of a fielded passageway.

The common spaces of the Sol palace were vessels of softly filtered light and air, with wide, flat benches to aimlessly count the minutes of the day; all this the rank opposite of the conditions in the mines, which he preferred. Every time he had to cross one of those wide courtyards, his skin tightened. Scaling the wall to her palace rooms was an act of devotion.

He found her as he'd always found her, in her cluttered study, with her head bent over a textlet. She still wore that filmy dress, but now absently brushed her dark hair while reading. Something about the text made her sad, but when he looked over her shoulder, he discovered an academic rendering of some kind of alien animal.

She looked up, amusement at his sudden appearance pushing away a bit of her melancholy. "Just like old times?"

Old times would've involved a welcome kiss. Why not?

Simon leaned down and brushed his mouth across hers. Yes. Then he tried for a full Mica smile. "I've come to perform my duties."

The bedroom was just through there. All feminine blues and golds. Curtains to enclose them in a world of their own. And he'd be staying to see to her safety. Sol needed Mica just as much as he did.

But she didn't smile; she lifted the mandible of some creature for his inspection. He wanted to laugh. Only Mica.

"See here?" She pointed to a depression in the bone that he would've never noticed otherwise, nor would be able to locate again. "This is a true adaptation; not a bioformed one. Took two hundred years on Sol for it to happen."

"I see you're in the mood for sexy talk." He lowered his voice suggestively. "Tell me more."

A light of humor gleamed in her eyes, but her expression hadn't yet caught. He was worried about her after what she'd endured over the past thirty-six hours. And that he was the cause of her distress bothered him even more. He hated her family and their power, but not her.

"I was thinking about the trials they're doing on Leto," she said. "I've heard that they've been successful in engineering a specialized respiratory system to process the toxic atmosphere."

Having listened to her dwell on the subject at length, Simon had the basics. There were three major classes of human-occupied worlds. The alpha class, and the smallest, comprised those worlds that had merged perfectly with mother Terra's bios and supported all the strata of life with little impact to the human genome or lifespan. The sacrifice of some indigenous lifeforms couldn't be helped. Humanity was reaching farther and farther into the deep.

A beta class world, like Sol, had been terraformed, but nevertheless couldn't support human life without artificial aids like breathers. Terran flora and fauna were adventive; time would tell whether they would survive the native species, but all indications—the dimple in the mandible excluded—pointed to Sol weeding out the foreign matter.

A gamma class world, like the aforementioned Leto, had no hope of sustaining human life as it was. In order to occupy the planet without comprehensive gear, the humans themselves would have to change, i.e. the gills they seemed to have successfully engineered for their soupy atmosphere. It was the most controversial of the god quests—to alter oneself from
sapiens
to
letans.
Of course controversy never stopped research before.

"I had a mad idea—" she bit her lip, which meant it really had to be crazy "—to submit a proposal reclassifying Sol as a gamma world and starting research that would adapt
sapiens
to Sol."

"Gods, woman," Simon said. "That
is
some dirty talk."

"It's more a long-term idea. My father would never go for it, and it'll be a hundred years before I take his place. Longer, if advances in age reversal continue as they have."

Now that made Simon panic. Aging wouldn't be conquered for everyone; only those with the wealth and access to the technology. Lowlifes like him would still grow decrepit and die.

"Anyway, I think that's what the scavengers are going for with their refusal of aid. I think they are trying to inherit Sol by forcing adaptation the hard way."

"And the ones who have been attacking your family? Is that about adaptation too?"

"I think the attacks are for the impatient among them." Thought lines appeared between her drawn brows. "Either way, it's revolution. Anyway, it's something to think about. Something to talk about."

She put the bone down. Tapped the textlet to save her place and hibernate. Looked him in the eyes, which meant danger.

Simon backed away; this was a bad idea.

"Tell me what happened." Her mouth pressed into a line, as if something tasted bad. "My father says you led a crew into the mines and had them work without safeties so that you could make a fortune at the cost of their lives."

Father says…without safeties…their lives…

He'd known this was coming, but his gut still burned as if someone had just ripped off a bandage from an unhealed, festering wound. Every nerve screamed. He couldn't breathe.

Small hands came to rest on both sides of his head. A soft body pressed against his. A mouth moved against his jaw. Mica. Peace. Comfort. He didn't deserve it.

So he took her by the arms and pushed her away. "That's the gist, all right."

Why was he in her room again? He couldn't seem to separate the before-time from the present. And in the present, he couldn't have her. He couldn't have had her back then, either, but he hadn't known it.

"In your own words, please." She'd left an arm up, as if to reach out to him. Maybe she was having the same kind of time trouble, too. She didn't seem to understand the murder part.

"Our stake system." He'd applied and earned the right to mine on his own time, and then sell his product independently. Made sense to sell to Sol, so as not to incur the taxes and export charges. Fine. Except Sol support and mine safeties—drones to test for cave-ins and gases, as well as quickmeds to preserve life—ate a percentage of his profits. A flat fee he could have stomached. But a
percentage
of the crude from pegmatites versus books of the red was wildly different.

"I found red. A cache of what had to be a thousand books." For a second, the wonder of the moment smacked him again and made his wound ache all the more.

"You found red. You mean solyite?"

He nodded, sick. It was native to Sol, only Sol, and had thermal properties far beyond that mined on Earth, long tapped out, the Reedy moons, and the Schist asteroid belt. Red was needed in the worm ships that traveled to distant galaxies. Red was wealth.

"Not long before you left."

It meant a fortune. It meant that he could make real pax for once. It meant that he could do as her father had charged him to do: Earn her. Work to match her. Make his fortune. If he wanted her so badly, Drum Sol had said it was possible.

So Simon had told her go to Encantada.
Go! Fly away!
When she got back, he would ask
her
to marry
him
. He'd put a Triskian jewel on her finger, and never let her go. He'd be a hero, like one of her terraforming god scientists. He'd have some power of the universe too. A red god. He'd be happy.

"And you mined without safeties because ..." She wasn't asking him, she was figuring it out for herself, nodding all the while. "…you didn't want my father involved. You knew he would find a way to take your stake from you. That he wouldn't leave such a precious resource in your hands."

He paced her office, which, with her clutter, allowed him only three good steps. "No, much worse. I just didn't want to give him a percentage." He squeezed his eyes shut at the madness of it. "I had two partners. Equal shares. We decided to do it the old way, in the dark." How gods were born.

Her expression went circumspect, a little remote. "But because you're a foreman—"

"—
was
a foreman," he corrected.

"The lives were your responsibility," she said.

"Yes."

"And there was an accident."

"A cave-in." He could still smell the dust, hear its clamor, slide, and soft rain. It was a bitter reminder that he and his friends were mortal and subject to the whims of fate. That he was made of the dirt that he mined, making it impossible to reach higher.

"And they died."

"Yes." Short words were much easier than full explanations.

"Your cache?"

"Confiscated," he said. An injustice, that. The men's families should've been able to have the worth of it, at the very least. Or had a representative appointed to sell the red mica on their behalf. But the two men had been listed as his "crew"—and so weren't entitled to anything in their own right. It was that word, "crew" that had damned him. Because no matter how much he professed that they were partners, they had been granted no stake of their own.