Chapter 10: The Last Bunker — The Key of Oslov

Volume 17: The Tinderbox

Chapter 10 The Last Bunker

Chapter Notes

Yes, I’m back, and I’ve been writing. I made myself draft several chapters ahead before I let myself post this one. I don’t know if anyone is still interested in this ridiculously complicated cloak-and-dagger story, especially after that long break, but I missed my characters, and I can feel some of the knots loosening and things coming together.Huge thanks to everyone who’s left comments over the past few months or reached out on Tumblr. You keep me going! Sending my best wishes to everyone for a safe and happy 2023.

Chapter Notes

Huge thanks to everyone who’s left comments over the past few months or reached out on Tumblr. You keep me going! Sending my best wishes to everyone for a safe and happy 2023.

July, year 374

When the world whited out, Valgund Linnett was sure they were going to die.Bors had wandered a few paces off, holding out his navigational device and turning it this way and that, trying to catch a reliable signal. Already the whirling snowflakes had turned him into a blur, only his blue backpack visible. Valgund dashed after him, floundering in the fresh powder, and seized him by his parka hood.“We have to stay together! And stop moving, or we’ll go in circles!”“We’re only a few steps from camp,” Bors objected with his usual stubbornness. His face under the hood was haggard from days of reduced rations and coated in icy stubble.The final Bureau of Preparedness bunker was on the polar ice pack, and their mission to find it was nearly four days behind schedule.“In a white-out, you can die a few steps from camp,” Valgund reminded Bors, latching on to his arm. He strained his ears for the baying of sled dogs from the camp where their Northmen companions were hunkered down with the supplies. He heard only the gale.“Let’s go back, then.”“Don’t you remember your lessons from Prime?” Valgund released Bors. “Build a snow hut and wait it out.” He bent and began to sweep snow into a pile with both hands, hoping he could get it to pack and stick. “If it were January, we’d be dead,” he shouted over the howling of the wind. “But a summer storm blows over quickly, and then we’ll find the others.”“What we need is to find the fucking bunker. Then we’d be safe and warm!” Bors yelled back. But he crouched down and added to Valgund’s pile. “If only my damned locater would stop giving me bad readings.”“That thing doesn’t work up here.” And, without reliable GPS, they couldn’t be sure they’d reached the coordinates of the bunker. “Like I keep saying,” Valgund said, “we need to use—“The compass and the sun, the way people used to! I know—blasted compass!” Bors broke off, panting hard. “The damned snow won’t stick!”“We’ll make a windbreak, at least.” Valgund’s breath was heaving, too. “Breathe,” he said, patting his lover’s shoulder. “We aren’t going to die out here, Borsha.”In that moment, he believed it. Valgund had always considered himself an anxious person, but Bors’s panic had the strange effect of calming him down. Never mind that he hadn’t wanted to come out here in the first place, or that so far nearly everything that could go wrong on their expedition had gone wrong.As they navigated the icy sea, a cold snap had set in, and the bay where they’d planned to make landfall froze over. They ended up leaving the boat with Vlar on board and trekking to dry land on the ice sheet, sometimes leaping from giant floe to giant floe.When they reached land, they made slow progress toward the target coordinates. Four sledges of supplies weighed them down. The dogs, which they’d gotten on loan from a crew of Outers, weren’t easy to control.Aleks kept up the whole group’s morale, as always. But soon they were dividing their rations of dried fish, biscuits, and protein bars into smaller and smaller portions. Bers and Lasha kept talking about shooting a bear or sea lion with a rifle they’d bartered from the Outers. But Bors worried that a shot might register on any surveillance around the bunker.And that was the biggest problem: The damn bunker refused to appear. Who could find anything in this sea of white? Now that they were finally in roughly the right place, they’d been sitting in their camp for nearly three days, searching the area in shifts, and nothing.What if Einara’s coordinates were wrong? Valgund wondered if he should approach Aleks privately and ask him to announce that it was time to give up and go home before they all starved. Bors might not listen to Valgund, but he had enormous respect for Aleks’s bravery and stamina.

And me? I never wanted to be here in the first place. I came for you.

Valgund gave up on fortifying their little rampart of snow and tugged Bors into its shelter. “Any numbness yet?” he asked, throwing an arm over Bors’s shoulder to press their bodies close.Bors cleared frozen snot from his face with a filthy mitten. “Just my little fingers, little toes—you know how it is.”Valgund grabbed both his friend’s hands and rubbed them fiercely, trying to massage the blood into motion. They’d run out of handwarmers this morning, and frostbite was the last thing they needed. “Wiggle your toes,” he said. “If we stay close enough, we can keep each other warm.”Even as he spoke them, the words sent a cold arrow of fear into Valgund’s heart. A vivid, unwelcome memory came back from his teenage years.He’d fled into the Wastes with his friend Garsha Lindahl, may his last moment be bright. When a storm came up, they decided to wait it out in a sort of cave formed by a giant carapace of metal debris from the city.Valgund was whiny and nervous; Garsha was the stronger, more competent one. When their fire wouldn’t stay lit, Garsha wrapped his arms around Valgund and said, “You’re shivering so hard. Shhh. Let me keep you warm.”Valgund’s fingers and toes were going numb, yet he felt a strange lightness in that moment, as if his spirit were rising from his body. He remembered whispering in Garsha’s ear, “I don’t mind if this is my last moment. It’s bright, so bright, because it’s with you.”Had he said that aloud? Maybe it was only a thought. Anyway, Valgund fell asleep to the sound of Garsha’s steady breathing, not expecting to wake up.When he opened his eyes again, Garsha was still. His eyelids were frozen shut; his hands and cheek and chest were ice-cold.Valgund disentangled himself from the embrace and sat Garsha up as best he could. He rubbed Garsha’s cheeks and pounded his chest, trying to revive him, until he knew there was no hope. Then he sat there with his dead lover in his arms and tears frozen on his cheeks, waiting to drift off and die in his turn, until the rotor of a helicopter burred overhead.Even then, he didn’t move. He planned to let the rescuers pass over him without a clue. But he heard a voice, loud and clear as life: Get up, Gunsha! Flag them down! You still have a chance!Valgund didn’t want to live, but he obeyed because it was Garsha’s voice. He staggered outside and waved his arms until the helicopter hovered and descended. He let himself be wrapped in blankets and taken to safety, and then to moral rehab. Because Garsha wanted him to have a second chance at life, he took it.“Closer,” Valgund said now, grasping Bors tight as they slumped behind their windbreak. Why was he rehashing that awful memory? True, the white-out showed no signs of clearing, but camp was close by. No one was going to die today.Bors smiled. “Feels nice,” he said, teeth chattering.“Stay awake, okay?” Still rubbing Bors’s hands, Valgund made his voice stern. “If I see you drifting off, I’ll make you jump up and run twice around the windbreak.”“’Kay, kay.” But Bors’s eyelids fluttered.Valgund was tired, too—not from hypothermia, he told himself, but from the long, fruitless hike they’d been on. He willed himself to stay awake and monitor Bors.Still he strained to hear the dogs’ baying over the wailing wind. As his own eyes shut, he seemed to hear a familiar voice calling from far away: Gunsha, where are you? Are you here?The Northmen didn’t call him Gunsha. But there was no ghost calling him from across the polar wastes—he knew that. When he heard Garsha’s voice urging him to safety, long ago, it had been his own buried survival instinct.Ghosts were a superstition. Valgund had learned in moral rehab to reject superstitions. Yet, as he slipped into unconsciousness, his lips formed words: I’m here, Garsha. Come for me.*When Bors woke up, the first thing he saw was a pair of government-issue snow boots. A man’s outline loomed above them, backlit by a glaring silver sky.Not a Northman. Not an Outer. A stranger in Laborer clothing.Bors scrambled upright, knocking Valgund sideways. Valgund mumbled something and opened his eyes—that was a relief. They’d both survived their nap. Bors reached for the pack where he kept the pistol, but his numb fingers refused to close on the zipper.“State your name and rank!” he barked at the intruder. Why in the world would a lone Oslov come out this far, if not to ambush them?Valgund had a different reaction. “Willem!” he cried, sounding more surprised than alarmed.Bors kept his eyes on the stranger. “You know this man?” he asked Valgund.“Can you stand up, Fir?” The stranger spoke in the humble tone of a Drudge to his superior. He knelt beside Valgund and extended a hand. “I have a frostbite kit.”“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Bors braced himself on the ground and scrambled to his feet, trying to ignore his numb extremities. At least the blasted storm was over; they could return to camp.“You’re disrupting a classified operation,” he added, fixing his best interrogator’s glare on the Laborer. Now that they were eye to eye, the man clearly wasn’t that imposing—a dry little fellow in an oversize parka, with no military insignia that Bors could find. But how in seven green hells had he gotten here? “I suggest you let me scan your chip immediately.”The man shrank back. “Didn’t mean to disrupt anything, Fir. I just thought—”“It’s okay!” Valgund stepped between them. “Bors, this is Rehbrandt, Willem. He works with me at the botany station. Willem, this is … my friend Bors. We were doing a little recreational exploring, trying to pin down the range of the crinkled snow lichen. Is your camp nearby?”“Just a few steps, Fir.”Willem led them away from their windbreak and up a small rise, ignoring Bors’s continued glare. Bors scanned the horizon, but he couldn’t find the Northmen’s tents. Had they wandered so far from their friends?Valgund gave Bors a gentle nudge. “They’re probably right over that ridge.”“But—”“It’ll be okay.” While Willem knelt again, brushing newly fallen snow from the ground, Valgund bent and whispered into Bors’s ear, “He’s a friend. I don’t know why he’s here, but he doesn’t suspect anything. Just go along with my story.”Bors focused on Willem. Light glinted from the object the man had uncovered, revealing a hefty plate of steel.It was a door in the earth, identical to the doors of the other four bunkers they had visited.As Willem drew a device from his parka and placed it over the familiar lock, Bors tried in vain to draw deep breaths, his chest locking up. The mist of his previous breaths dissipated in the frigid air.This was the bunker they’d been seeking, right beside them all along. And Willem seemed to have easy access to it, which meant—Bors tried to make his sluggish thoughts move. They’d speculated that the bunkers had a caretaker, someone who dusted the interior rooms every year or so and kept the terminals functioning. If Willem were that person, if he had official access, then they mustn’t let him know why the two of them were here.Valgund’s eyes widened with recognition. “What is this place, Willem?” he asked too loudly.Willem didn’t answer. He tugged the trapdoor open and ushered them ahead of him, down the concrete steps.Bors didn’t want to walk into a trap, but the lure of shelter was strong right now. He followed Valgund into the dusty darkness of the subterranean burrow.At the bottom of the stairs stretched a concrete tunnel, exactly like the ones in the other four bunkers. At the far end, they found a steel blast door bearing the familiar seal of the Bureau of Preparedness. This one was half open, brightness shining from within.“Got the systems up and running,” Willem mumbled, as if talking to himself rather than to them. “Always do when I visit this one—takes so long to get here. It’s an overnight job, at least. So cold, too.”He waved them through the door. “Nice and warm in here, though, eh? Got the heat on. No need for a generator like you folks set up in the Southern Range.”The words zipped around Bors’s mind like projectiles in an incomprehensible video game. But his half-frozen body felt warmth emanating from behind the door, and he moved toward it.For the past eight days they’d been fighting sea water and ice and snow and raging winds. Even the cabin of their boat had never felt dry. Here, at last, was a pocket of civilization untouched by the storm.Time collapsed. Bors might as well have been back in the bunker in the Southern Range that Aleks’s crew had turned into a home. This one was almost identical. Dizzy, he sank into the chair in front of the familiar terminal and gazed up at the familiar ceiling. Had this expedition even been real? Or was he dreaming?Behind him, Valgund asked sharply, “What do you mean about a generator?”Yes, those words were important. Bors closed his eyes, trying to summon the energy to speak.“In the Southern Range facility, Fir.” Willem sounded meek again. “I’ve seen you there, you know, visiting those scruffy Skeinshaka. They’re outlaws, aren’t they?”

He knows. He’s been watching us.

In his imagination, Bors was springing up and seizing his pistol and holding it to Willem’s temple. In reality, he didn’t even know where his backpack was. He couldn’t seem to open his eyes.“Willem.” Valgund’s voice was thick with fear or resolve. “You don’t just work at the botany station, do you?”“No, Fir, I don’t.” Willem sounded as if he’d gone to the other end of the room. “But before we talk about that, we’d better warm up your friend. Here, I’ve got the kit. Give me a hand?”Someone was lifting Bors’s hands and carefully working his mittens off. Close to him now, Valgund said, “Botany’s just your cover identity, then?”“You could say that, Fir,” Willem said. “Been working for Defense since I was just out of school.”Bors squirmed as Valgund tugged the second mitten free, setting two of his fingers tingling painfully. If this little Drudge worked covertly for Defense, telling them so was a radical breach of security. But their very presence here was an even worse breach. Willem would be committing high treason if he didn’t turn them both in.The realization sent a pool of cold spreading through Bors’s chest. Willem could have spotted them here hours or days ago. Even now, copters from the nearest Defense base could be touching down in the Arctic, ready to collect them and bring them back to Redda and all the horrors of Int/Sec. Perhaps the Northmen were already prisoners there.“You’ll be okay, love.” Valgund patted Bors’s cheek, clearly misinterpreting his expression of dread. “We’re just going to get your fingers and toes into this nice bath. Do you have a painkiller? Or sap?” he added, presumably to Willem.“Just painkillers,” Willem said apologetically. “Haven’t touched sap in fifteen years.”They tried to force pills into Bors’s mouth, but he shut it tight. He needed his wits about him for whatever came next.How could he have been so stupid? He’d disabled the surveillance at each bunker, sending a clear signal that something was wrong. He’d guessed that the secret facilities had a caretaker, but he’d imagined that the next maintenance visit was years away.“So this is your real job?” Valgund asked, as if he and Willem were just shooting the breeze. “You watch over these old bunkers? Dust them off now and then, fix the network connections and the hardware, make sure no one breaks in?”“That’s right, Fir.” Willem sounded rueful again. “I maintain the facilities; it’s a Classification 013 job. You want to lift his hand now?”Bors forgot all about his terror when his fingertips hit the “nice bath.” Pain arced through his reignited nerves, making him writhe and bite down on his lip to keep from crying out.But the pain jolted him into alertness, too. Opening his eyes at last, he saw Valgund on his knees, busy working Bors’s left boot off. Meanwhile, in the corner of his eye, Willem readied another basin.“I’ll die before they take me.” Bors rasped out the words. “And if I’m taken alive, I won’t talk. I’m Int/Sec myself. I know all their tricks.”“Bors, please.” Valgund set his left boot on the floor and went to work on the right. “Does it look like anyone’s coming for us?”“This fool has to report us to his base commander. It’s a sacred trust. Not doing it is treason.” Bors swallowed down bitterness. Once upon a time, he’d regarded his own work as a sacred trust, too. “When are they due in, Rehbrandt? How long do we have?”“You’re confused, love. And very paranoid.” Valgund tugged off one of Bors’s socks. “Willem has known about us for months, by the sound of it, and he hasn’t done a thing. Isn’t that right, Willem?”“Eleven months, Fir,” Willem said in his sheepish way. “I noticed the surveillance in the Southern Range was down, so I went out to investigate, and … there you were. Normally I would have reported any intruder in the facility, of course. But then I saw you with those Skeinshaka—and I know you, and you’re a Linnett. I figured you must have a good reason to be there.”Because you’re a Linnett. Bors’s throat closed. Was this man really dim enough to believe that high names were above reproach?Then he realized Valgund’s high name might save them.They submerged his toes in the foot bath, and for five or ten minutes Bors focused mainly on not screaming. He knew the water was tepid, but it felt like having live wires threaded into his veins.Finally, the pain leveled off. Valgund was telling Willem a partially true story about needing a refuge for some friends from Thurskein who were in trouble. When he said the name “Aleks,” Bors twitched. What if Willem had heard about Aleks Snowblind, the notorious outlaw who had disappeared into the Wastes?Then things clicked in Bors’s brain. He sat bolt upright, pulling his hands from the bath, and turned to meet Willem’s eyes. He made his own gaze as merciless as possible.“Eleven months?” he said. “You’ve been watching us that whole time—tracking us—stalking us. No way you just happened to be here when we arrived. No one ever just happens to be at the North Pole. You saw us planning this trip, and you decided to ambush us.”Valgund would never understand Laborers the way Bors did. It took another Drudge to know when a Drudge was playing dumb and servile to get a Strutter off his case.And Willem was doing exactly that. His Aw, shucks, I thought a Linnett could do no wrong attitude wasn’t plausible for anyone with a Classification 013. Either he was corrupt, with a master other than his nominal superiors, or he had a plan for them.Willem flinched under Bors’s scrutiny, creases of worry appearing in his nondescript face. He knew how to fly under the radar—Bors was familiar with that game.“Why would I want to ambush you, Fir?” he asked, sounding utterly clueless.“I’d like to know that, too.” Valgund’s tone had hardened. “You didn’t just happen to be here, did you, Willem?”Willem shifted his gaze to the concrete floor. After a long moment, he said, “This facility’s not due for a checkup till next year. I told ’em I saw an anomaly on the surveillance—probably just a marauding bear, like usual—and asked for a copter to come up here and take a look.”Bors shot Valgund a grim look. See?Willem was focused on Valgund, too. “But it was for you, Fir Linnett,” he said, his tone becoming ever-so-subtly wheedling. “I wanted to see if you’d really come up here. And if you did, I wanted to warn you. That’s why I’m here.”“Warn me about what?” Valgund asked. Very gently, he took Bors’s hands and set them back in the bath. It barely hurt anymore, and Bors let them stay.“To stop!” Willem picked up a medi-kit and rummaged through it, probably for an excuse not to look at them. “When you were just letting your friends camp at the Southern Range facility, I could overlook that. I figured they needed a roof over their heads. But then you started exploring the other facilities, disabling the surveillance there. And you’ve been touching the terminals. Playing around with them. Trying to…”Hack them. Willem didn’t have to say the words. This was no mere cleaning grunt, Bors could see. He knew exactly what they were doing. Yet, if he was telling the truth, he hadn’t turned them in.Bors had to know why. It might be their only way out.He made his voice bone dry. “What exactly are you accusing us of?”“Not accusing anyone of anything, Fir.”“You know about Valgund’s past, I’ll bet. And you drew your conclusions from that.” Bors shot a glance at Valgund, warning him to stay silent for now.“Heard some gossip at the lab, yeah.” Willem looked at Valgund, too, then ducked his head. “I know you were in moral rehab, Fir. But I figured … well, sometimes they recruit spies from there. I didn’t want to interfere with an operation.”Bors didn’t believe a word of that. Either Willem was hoping to extort something from them, or he had subversive tendencies himself.“Well, you are interfering with an operation,” he said sternly, trying to keep his voice steady. “If you’d been a good boy and reported this to your superiors, they would have told you to leave us alone.”Willem blinked hard. “I don’t like the way your friend talks, Fir,” he said to Valgund. “He scares me. I don’t know what you two and your friends came up here to do, and I don’t much care. But since you are here, I just thought you should know that you won’t get into these terminals. Try for years, try any password generator you like. You’ll have no luck.” He patted the top of one of the boxy monitors. “They’ve got 00001x security—know what that means?”Valgund shook his head. Bors said, “It means the access password changes three times daily, and it’s set by an randomization algorithm beamed from the nearest Defense silo.”Willem nodded, then addressed Valgund again. “Like I say, I don’t care why you’re here, Fir Linnett. But if you have any ideas about the terminals, you should know you’re wasting your time.”Valgund’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know what these terminals do, Willem?”Willem began unwinding a roll of medical gauze. “We need to bandage up your friend, Fir, and then we’ll check your extremities, just in case.”Willem knew, or at least he had some idea. Bors could hear it in his studiously casual tone. “You’re not just a janitor,” he said. “You know something about security software, don’t you? More than you should.”“Hold still, Fir. We don’t want this to hurt.”Willem removed Bors’s right hand from the bath and patted it dry, making Bors wince again. Over Bors’s head, he said to Valgund, “I trusted an Upstart once, Fir. Little fellow with a face like a blade, darting eyes. He got me out of a jam—I had to trust him, really. We were friends of a kind. We used to play cards, until he got promoted back to Redda.“Years later, that same Upstart came asking me for a favor, and my gut told me it was a bad idea. But he’d married into one of the best-named families—a family like yours, Fir. He told me he was running some sort of classified operation, following orders he’d received from the highest level. So I didn’t listen to my own good sense, such as it was. My brain was sap-soaked in those days, and this Upstart was kind enough to supply me. I told myself nothing he wanted could be wrong.”“So you granted his favor,” Bors snapped. He was so tired of these high names placing themselves above the law—sick and tired and ready to do something about it. “What was it? Who was he?”“I can’t say, Fir.” Willem looked contrite. “It’s at the highest level of classification; if you were meant to know, you already would. But it wasn’t legal and it wasn’t good, what I did for him. And since then, I’ve done my job and kept my head down. I don’t want to report you, Fir, but I won’t make any deals with you, either. Even if I could help you with these terminals, I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”Bors wrenched his hand from the man’s grip. He didn’t like Willem’s tone. “If we’re part of a classified operation—which I can’t confirm we are, of course—then you have no right to speculate about anything we’re doing.”And you’re wrong—we can crack those terminals. Once we have Janta.“Borsha! Here, I’ll do it.” Valgund snipped a length of gauze and wound it around Bors’s index finger. “We have no plans to crack any terminals,” he said calmly. “We’re not mad, Willem. We’re just … curious. We wanted to find all five bunkers, and now our curiosity is satisfied.”What a pathetic lie. Bors’s nerves jangled, despite Valgund’s gentleness. Now that his body was no longer sending him danger signals about imminent hypothermia, he was ferociously angry with them both—Willem for being a deferent little sneak and Valgund for refusing to commit to anything, ever.The more Bors thought about it, the fewer viable options he saw. Either they could trust Willem with the truth, or they would have to kill him. Or the helicopters were coming to collect them any second now, and the question was moot.One thing was for sure: This Drudge wasn’t scared off by talk of classified ops. He’d experienced enough Strutter hypocrisy to see right through the lies that Bors was so sick of telling.Why not just stop telling them?“My friend isn’t telling the truth,” Bors said. “We do want to crack the terminals. In fact, we have a plan for it.” His body felt very light, as if he might float away—perhaps he would faint.“Bors,” Valgund said warningly, bandaging another finger. To Willem, he added, “He’s not in his right mind just now.”Bors had never felt more in his right mind. “We have a plan,” he repeated.Willem looked up, his face ashen as he realized that Bors meant it. His gaze moved from one of them to the other. “But … why?”Bors was floating, above his body. The words came to him as if dictated by the arctic air and the curve of the solid earth beneath them.“We’re going to take control of Redda,” he said. “We’re going to force the Strutters to share the fruits of our labor and live up to their own ideals.”They were both gaping at him now. Valgund had paused in his work, and Willem looked downright afraid.Good. He should be. It was two against one, and if Willem didn’t swear his loyalty to them now and forever, he wouldn’t leave here alive.“Borsha.” Valgund’s voice sounded strangled. “You’re talking about rebellion. Not just sneaking around and sabotaging things, but outright….”“Maybe he’s delirious, Fir.” Willem sounded as if he hoped so.Cowards. Suddenly everything was so simple, crystal clear. Bors wondered why he had fretted over his own motives for so long.“What was his name?” he asked Willem. “The Upstart who asked you for the favor?”Willem looked stricken. “Forget I ever said anything, Fir. That man could snap his fingers and have me killed.”“What was the favor, then? Why are you so afraid to tell me? Was it any worse than trying to crack these terminals?”Willem said nothing, staring straight ahead of him. So Bors went on: “I’ve done so many favors like that over the years—all for a sniveling little pretender named Niko Karishkov. A traitor who had somehow ended up as head of the Int/Sec committee. Whyberg himself would have been disgusted by the rot at the center of the ruling class he founded.”Yes, things were crystal-clear now. Maybe Bors was delirious, but he knew he was speaking the truth.“Keep right on bandaging me, Gunsha,” he said, offering his hands while looking Willem steadily in the eye. “Your friend has a simple choice to make. Is he going to do his job and keep his head down? Or is he going to join us in setting things right?”Valgund stared at Bors, his deep brown eyes full of fear. Willem muttered something under his breath that sounded like Strutter’s out of his head.“Am I?” Bors said. “No more than you, Willem—you already made your choice when you didn’t report us. You don’t trust or respect Upstarts, and you have good reasons not to, based on experience. If you’re going to disobey, why not do it for a greater purpose?”Willem held Bors’s gaze, his jaw set. “Maybe I don’t want to die.”“No one’s talking about dying.” But a cloud scudded across the new clarity inside Bors’s mind. “There are laws,” he said. “There are mechanisms for removing a corrupt government. Whyberg codified them himself. We would only be acting within the law.”“Borsha …” Valgund said.“Don’t take that tone with me, Gunsha.” Bors felt the heat of his lover’s reproachful gaze. He didn’t like how much it distracted him. “It’s time you made your choice, too.”Willem didn’t seem to follow their exchange. His mouth twisted, and a wild light flashed in his eyes.“Why should I trust laws, Fir?” he said. “They don’t matter. If a high Upstart wants to get rid of you, he can pluck a missile from the arsenal and aim it at you, and there’s fuck-all you can do about it.”Bors forgot what he’d been about to say, chilled by the man’s tone. “Not true. Deploying air ordnance requires a Council vote.”Valgund, too, was staring at Willem, one brow arched. “This favor you did for the Upstart with the face like a blade,” he said softly. “Was it … something like that?”Willem seemed to shrink back into himself. His skin went gray, his eyes dull. “All I’m saying,” he said, “is that I can’t help you, Fira. Play around in the bunkers all you like. Gamble with your lives. But don’t try to pull me into your games, because I have a knack for getting off scot-free.”As they both gaped at Willem, trying to wrap their heads around what he’d just implied, the little man’s tongue darted out and licked his thin, chapped lips. “I got away then, and I will now,” he said. “Nobody even notices me. And if I still have nightmares about what I did for that Strutter—well, that’s my business.”His eyes blazed in Bors’s direction. “Don’t ever tell me there’s justice in this world. I know better than that.”

July, year 374

When the world whited out, Valgund Linnett was sure they were going to die.

Bors had wandered a few paces off, holding out his navigational device and turning it this way and that, trying to catch a reliable signal. Already the whirling snowflakes had turned him into a blur, only his blue backpack visible. Valgund dashed after him, floundering in the fresh powder, and seized him by his parka hood.

“We have to stay together! And stop moving, or we’ll go in circles!”

“We’re only a few steps from camp,” Bors objected with his usual stubbornness. His face under the hood was haggard from days of reduced rations and coated in icy stubble.

The final Bureau of Preparedness bunker was on the polar ice pack, and their mission to find it was nearly four days behind schedule.

“In a white-out, you can die a few steps from camp,” Valgund reminded Bors, latching on to his arm. He strained his ears for the baying of sled dogs from the camp where their Northmen companions were hunkered down with the supplies. He heard only the gale.

“Let’s go back, then.”

“Don’t you remember your lessons from Prime?” Valgund released Bors. “Build a snow hut and wait it out.” He bent and began to sweep snow into a pile with both hands, hoping he could get it to pack and stick. “If it were January, we’d be dead,” he shouted over the howling of the wind. “But a summer storm blows over quickly, and then we’ll find the others.”

“What we need is to find the fucking bunker. Then we’d be safe and warm!” Bors yelled back. But he crouched down and added to Valgund’s pile. “If only my damned locater would stop giving me bad readings.”

“That thing doesn’t work up here.” And, without reliable GPS, they couldn’t be sure they’d reached the coordinates of the bunker. “Like I keep saying,” Valgund said, “we need to use—

“The compass and the sun, the way people used to! I know—blasted compass!” Bors broke off, panting hard. “The damned snow won’t stick!”

“We’ll make a windbreak, at least.” Valgund’s breath was heaving, too. “Breathe,” he said, patting his lover’s shoulder. “We aren’t going to die out here, Borsha.”

In that moment, he believed it. Valgund had always considered himself an anxious person, but Bors’s panic had the strange effect of calming him down. Never mind that he hadn’t wanted to come out here in the first place, or that so far nearly everything that could go wrong on their expedition had gone wrong.

As they navigated the icy sea, a cold snap had set in, and the bay where they’d planned to make landfall froze over. They ended up leaving the boat with Vlar on board and trekking to dry land on the ice sheet, sometimes leaping from giant floe to giant floe.

When they reached land, they made slow progress toward the target coordinates. Four sledges of supplies weighed them down. The dogs, which they’d gotten on loan from a crew of Outers, weren’t easy to control.

Aleks kept up the whole group’s morale, as always. But soon they were dividing their rations of dried fish, biscuits, and protein bars into smaller and smaller portions. Bers and Lasha kept talking about shooting a bear or sea lion with a rifle they’d bartered from the Outers. But Bors worried that a shot might register on any surveillance around the bunker.

And that was the biggest problem: The damn bunker refused to appear. Who could find anything in this sea of white? Now that they were finally in roughly the right place, they’d been sitting in their camp for nearly three days, searching the area in shifts, and nothing.

What if Einara’s coordinates were wrong? Valgund wondered if he should approach Aleks privately and ask him to announce that it was time to give up and go home before they all starved. Bors might not listen to Valgund, but he had enormous respect for Aleks’s bravery and stamina.

And me? I never wanted to be here in the first place. I came for you.

Valgund gave up on fortifying their little rampart of snow and tugged Bors into its shelter. “Any numbness yet?” he asked, throwing an arm over Bors’s shoulder to press their bodies close.

Bors cleared frozen snot from his face with a filthy mitten. “Just my little fingers, little toes—you know how it is.”

Valgund grabbed both his friend’s hands and rubbed them fiercely, trying to massage the blood into motion. They’d run out of handwarmers this morning, and frostbite was the last thing they needed. “Wiggle your toes,” he said. “If we stay close enough, we can keep each other warm.”

Even as he spoke them, the words sent a cold arrow of fear into Valgund’s heart. A vivid, unwelcome memory came back from his teenage years.

He’d fled into the Wastes with his friend Garsha Lindahl, may his last moment be bright. When a storm came up, they decided to wait it out in a sort of cave formed by a giant carapace of metal debris from the city.

Valgund was whiny and nervous; Garsha was the stronger, more competent one. When their fire wouldn’t stay lit, Garsha wrapped his arms around Valgund and said, “You’re shivering so hard. Shhh. Let me keep you warm.”

Valgund’s fingers and toes were going numb, yet he felt a strange lightness in that moment, as if his spirit were rising from his body. He remembered whispering in Garsha’s ear, “I don’t mind if this is my last moment. It’s bright, so bright, because it’s with you.”

Had he said that aloud? Maybe it was only a thought. Anyway, Valgund fell asleep to the sound of Garsha’s steady breathing, not expecting to wake up.

When he opened his eyes again, Garsha was still. His eyelids were frozen shut; his hands and cheek and chest were ice-cold.

Valgund disentangled himself from the embrace and sat Garsha up as best he could. He rubbed Garsha’s cheeks and pounded his chest, trying to revive him, until he knew there was no hope. Then he sat there with his dead lover in his arms and tears frozen on his cheeks, waiting to drift off and die in his turn, until the rotor of a helicopter burred overhead.

Even then, he didn’t move. He planned to let the rescuers pass over him without a clue. But he heard a voice, loud and clear as life: Get up, Gunsha! Flag them down! You still have a chance!

Valgund didn’t want to live, but he obeyed because it was Garsha’s voice. He staggered outside and waved his arms until the helicopter hovered and descended. He let himself be wrapped in blankets and taken to safety, and then to moral rehab. Because Garsha wanted him to have a second chance at life, he took it.

“Closer,” Valgund said now, grasping Bors tight as they slumped behind their windbreak. Why was he rehashing that awful memory? True, the white-out showed no signs of clearing, but camp was close by. No one was going to die today.

Bors smiled. “Feels nice,” he said, teeth chattering.

“Stay awake, okay?” Still rubbing Bors’s hands, Valgund made his voice stern. “If I see you drifting off, I’ll make you jump up and run twice around the windbreak.”

“’Kay, kay.” But Bors’s eyelids fluttered.

Valgund was tired, too—not from hypothermia, he told himself, but from the long, fruitless hike they’d been on. He willed himself to stay awake and monitor Bors.

Still he strained to hear the dogs’ baying over the wailing wind. As his own eyes shut, he seemed to hear a familiar voice calling from far away: Gunsha, where are you? Are you here?

The Northmen didn’t call him Gunsha. But there was no ghost calling him from across the polar wastes—he knew that. When he heard Garsha’s voice urging him to safety, long ago, it had been his own buried survival instinct.

Ghosts were a superstition. Valgund had learned in moral rehab to reject superstitions. Yet, as he slipped into unconsciousness, his lips formed words: I’m here, Garsha. Come for me.

When Bors woke up, the first thing he saw was a pair of government-issue snow boots. A man’s outline loomed above them, backlit by a glaring silver sky.

Not a Northman. Not an Outer. A stranger in Laborer clothing.

Bors scrambled upright, knocking Valgund sideways. Valgund mumbled something and opened his eyes—that was a relief. They’d both survived their nap. Bors reached for the pack where he kept the pistol, but his numb fingers refused to close on the zipper.

“State your name and rank!” he barked at the intruder. Why in the world would a lone Oslov come out this far, if not to ambush them?

Valgund had a different reaction. “Willem!” he cried, sounding more surprised than alarmed.

Bors kept his eyes on the stranger. “You know this man?” he asked Valgund.

“Can you stand up, Fir?” The stranger spoke in the humble tone of a Drudge to his superior. He knelt beside Valgund and extended a hand. “I have a frostbite kit.”

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Bors braced himself on the ground and scrambled to his feet, trying to ignore his numb extremities. At least the blasted storm was over; they could return to camp.

“You’re disrupting a classified operation,” he added, fixing his best interrogator’s glare on the Laborer. Now that they were eye to eye, the man clearly wasn’t that imposing—a dry little fellow in an oversize parka, with no military insignia that Bors could find. But how in seven green hells had he gotten here? “I suggest you let me scan your chip immediately.”

The man shrank back. “Didn’t mean to disrupt anything, Fir. I just thought—”

“It’s okay!” Valgund stepped between them. “Bors, this is Rehbrandt, Willem. He works with me at the botany station. Willem, this is … my friend Bors. We were doing a little recreational exploring, trying to pin down the range of the crinkled snow lichen. Is your camp nearby?”

“Just a few steps, Fir.”

Willem led them away from their windbreak and up a small rise, ignoring Bors’s continued glare. Bors scanned the horizon, but he couldn’t find the Northmen’s tents. Had they wandered so far from their friends?

Valgund gave Bors a gentle nudge. “They’re probably right over that ridge.”

“But—”

“It’ll be okay.” While Willem knelt again, brushing newly fallen snow from the ground, Valgund bent and whispered into Bors’s ear, “He’s a friend. I don’t know why he’s here, but he doesn’t suspect anything. Just go along with my story.”

Bors focused on Willem. Light glinted from the object the man had uncovered, revealing a hefty plate of steel.

It was a door in the earth, identical to the doors of the other four bunkers they had visited.

As Willem drew a device from his parka and placed it over the familiar lock, Bors tried in vain to draw deep breaths, his chest locking up. The mist of his previous breaths dissipated in the frigid air.

This was the bunker they’d been seeking, right beside them all along. And Willem seemed to have easy access to it, which meant—

Bors tried to make his sluggish thoughts move. They’d speculated that the bunkers had a caretaker, someone who dusted the interior rooms every year or so and kept the terminals functioning. If Willem were that person, if he had official access, then they mustn’t let him know why the two of them were here.

Valgund’s eyes widened with recognition. “What is this place, Willem?” he asked too loudly.

Willem didn’t answer. He tugged the trapdoor open and ushered them ahead of him, down the concrete steps.

Bors didn’t want to walk into a trap, but the lure of shelter was strong right now. He followed Valgund into the dusty darkness of the subterranean burrow.

At the bottom of the stairs stretched a concrete tunnel, exactly like the ones in the other four bunkers. At the far end, they found a steel blast door bearing the familiar seal of the Bureau of Preparedness. This one was half open, brightness shining from within.

“Got the systems up and running,” Willem mumbled, as if talking to himself rather than to them. “Always do when I visit this one—takes so long to get here. It’s an overnight job, at least. So cold, too.”

He waved them through the door. “Nice and warm in here, though, eh? Got the heat on. No need for a generator like you folks set up in the Southern Range.”

The words zipped around Bors’s mind like projectiles in an incomprehensible video game. But his half-frozen body felt warmth emanating from behind the door, and he moved toward it.

For the past eight days they’d been fighting sea water and ice and snow and raging winds. Even the cabin of their boat had never felt dry. Here, at last, was a pocket of civilization untouched by the storm.

Time collapsed. Bors might as well have been back in the bunker in the Southern Range that Aleks’s crew had turned into a home. This one was almost identical. Dizzy, he sank into the chair in front of the familiar terminal and gazed up at the familiar ceiling. Had this expedition even been real? Or was he dreaming?

Behind him, Valgund asked sharply, “What do you mean about a generator?”

Yes, those words were important. Bors closed his eyes, trying to summon the energy to speak.

“In the Southern Range facility, Fir.” Willem sounded meek again. “I’ve seen you there, you know, visiting those scruffy Skeinshaka. They’re outlaws, aren’t they?”

He knows. He’s been watching us.

In his imagination, Bors was springing up and seizing his pistol and holding it to Willem’s temple. In reality, he didn’t even know where his backpack was. He couldn’t seem to open his eyes.

“Willem.” Valgund’s voice was thick with fear or resolve. “You don’t just work at the botany station, do you?”

“No, Fir, I don’t.” Willem sounded as if he’d gone to the other end of the room. “But before we talk about that, we’d better warm up your friend. Here, I’ve got the kit. Give me a hand?”

Someone was lifting Bors’s hands and carefully working his mittens off. Close to him now, Valgund said, “Botany’s just your cover identity, then?”

“You could say that, Fir,” Willem said. “Been working for Defense since I was just out of school.”

Bors squirmed as Valgund tugged the second mitten free, setting two of his fingers tingling painfully. If this little Drudge worked covertly for Defense, telling them so was a radical breach of security. But their very presence here was an even worse breach. Willem would be committing high treason if he didn’t turn them both in.

The realization sent a pool of cold spreading through Bors’s chest. Willem could have spotted them here hours or days ago. Even now, copters from the nearest Defense base could be touching down in the Arctic, ready to collect them and bring them back to Redda and all the horrors of Int/Sec. Perhaps the Northmen were already prisoners there.

“You’ll be okay, love.” Valgund patted Bors’s cheek, clearly misinterpreting his expression of dread. “We’re just going to get your fingers and toes into this nice bath. Do you have a painkiller? Or sap?” he added, presumably to Willem.

“Just painkillers,” Willem said apologetically. “Haven’t touched sap in fifteen years.”

They tried to force pills into Bors’s mouth, but he shut it tight. He needed his wits about him for whatever came next.

How could he have been so stupid? He’d disabled the surveillance at each bunker, sending a clear signal that something was wrong. He’d guessed that the secret facilities had a caretaker, but he’d imagined that the next maintenance visit was years away.

“So this is your real job?” Valgund asked, as if he and Willem were just shooting the breeze. “You watch over these old bunkers? Dust them off now and then, fix the network connections and the hardware, make sure no one breaks in?”

“That’s right, Fir.” Willem sounded rueful again. “I maintain the facilities; it’s a Classification 013 job. You want to lift his hand now?”

Bors forgot all about his terror when his fingertips hit the “nice bath.” Pain arced through his reignited nerves, making him writhe and bite down on his lip to keep from crying out.

But the pain jolted him into alertness, too. Opening his eyes at last, he saw Valgund on his knees, busy working Bors’s left boot off. Meanwhile, in the corner of his eye, Willem readied another basin.

“I’ll die before they take me.” Bors rasped out the words. “And if I’m taken alive, I won’t talk. I’m Int/Sec myself. I know all their tricks.”

“Bors, please.” Valgund set his left boot on the floor and went to work on the right. “Does it look like anyone’s coming for us?”

“This fool has to report us to his base commander. It’s a sacred trust. Not doing it is treason.” Bors swallowed down bitterness. Once upon a time, he’d regarded his own work as a sacred trust, too. “When are they due in, Rehbrandt? How long do we have?”

“You’re confused, love. And very paranoid.” Valgund tugged off one of Bors’s socks. “Willem has known about us for months, by the sound of it, and he hasn’t done a thing. Isn’t that right, Willem?”

“Eleven months, Fir,” Willem said in his sheepish way. “I noticed the surveillance in the Southern Range was down, so I went out to investigate, and … there you were. Normally I would have reported any intruder in the facility, of course. But then I saw you with those Skeinshaka—and I know you, and you’re a Linnett. I figured you must have a good reason to be there.”

Because you’re a Linnett. Bors’s throat closed. Was this man really dim enough to believe that high names were above reproach?

Then he realized Valgund’s high name might save them.

They submerged his toes in the foot bath, and for five or ten minutes Bors focused mainly on not screaming. He knew the water was tepid, but it felt like having live wires threaded into his veins.

Finally, the pain leveled off. Valgund was telling Willem a partially true story about needing a refuge for some friends from Thurskein who were in trouble. When he said the name “Aleks,” Bors twitched. What if Willem had heard about Aleks Snowblind, the notorious outlaw who had disappeared into the Wastes?

Then things clicked in Bors’s brain. He sat bolt upright, pulling his hands from the bath, and turned to meet Willem’s eyes. He made his own gaze as merciless as possible.

“Eleven months?” he said. “You’ve been watching us that whole time—tracking us—stalking us. No way you just happened to be here when we arrived. No one ever just happens to be at the North Pole. You saw us planning this trip, and you decided to ambush us.”

Valgund would never understand Laborers the way Bors did. It took another Drudge to know when a Drudge was playing dumb and servile to get a Strutter off his case.

And Willem was doing exactly that. His Aw, shucks, I thought a Linnett could do no wrong attitude wasn’t plausible for anyone with a Classification 013. Either he was corrupt, with a master other than his nominal superiors, or he had a plan for them.

Willem flinched under Bors’s scrutiny, creases of worry appearing in his nondescript face. He knew how to fly under the radar—Bors was familiar with that game.

“Why would I want to ambush you, Fir?” he asked, sounding utterly clueless.

“I’d like to know that, too.” Valgund’s tone had hardened. “You didn’t just happen to be here, did you, Willem?”

Willem shifted his gaze to the concrete floor. After a long moment, he said, “This facility’s not due for a checkup till next year. I told ’em I saw an anomaly on the surveillance—probably just a marauding bear, like usual—and asked for a copter to come up here and take a look.”

Bors shot Valgund a grim look. See?

Willem was focused on Valgund, too. “But it was for you, Fir Linnett,” he said, his tone becoming ever-so-subtly wheedling. “I wanted to see if you’d really come up here. And if you did, I wanted to warn you. That’s why I’m here.”

“Warn me about what?” Valgund asked. Very gently, he took Bors’s hands and set them back in the bath. It barely hurt anymore, and Bors let them stay.

“To stop!” Willem picked up a medi-kit and rummaged through it, probably for an excuse not to look at them. “When you were just letting your friends camp at the Southern Range facility, I could overlook that. I figured they needed a roof over their heads. But then you started exploring the other facilities, disabling the surveillance there. And you’ve been touching the terminals. Playing around with them. Trying to…”

Hack them. Willem didn’t have to say the words. This was no mere cleaning grunt, Bors could see. He knew exactly what they were doing. Yet, if he was telling the truth, he hadn’t turned them in.

Bors had to know why. It might be their only way out.

He made his voice bone dry. “What exactly are you accusing us of?”

“Not accusing anyone of anything, Fir.”

“You know about Valgund’s past, I’ll bet. And you drew your conclusions from that.” Bors shot a glance at Valgund, warning him to stay silent for now.

“Heard some gossip at the lab, yeah.” Willem looked at Valgund, too, then ducked his head. “I know you were in moral rehab, Fir. But I figured … well, sometimes they recruit spies from there. I didn’t want to interfere with an operation.”

Bors didn’t believe a word of that. Either Willem was hoping to extort something from them, or he had subversive tendencies himself.

“Well, you are interfering with an operation,” he said sternly, trying to keep his voice steady. “If you’d been a good boy and reported this to your superiors, they would have told you to leave us alone.”

Willem blinked hard. “I don’t like the way your friend talks, Fir,” he said to Valgund. “He scares me. I don’t know what you two and your friends came up here to do, and I don’t much care. But since you are here, I just thought you should know that you won’t get into these terminals. Try for years, try any password generator you like. You’ll have no luck.” He patted the top of one of the boxy monitors. “They’ve got 00001x security—know what that means?”

Valgund shook his head. Bors said, “It means the access password changes three times daily, and it’s set by an randomization algorithm beamed from the nearest Defense silo.”

Willem nodded, then addressed Valgund again. “Like I say, I don’t care why you’re here, Fir Linnett. But if you have any ideas about the terminals, you should know you’re wasting your time.”

Valgund’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know what these terminals do, Willem?”

Willem began unwinding a roll of medical gauze. “We need to bandage up your friend, Fir, and then we’ll check your extremities, just in case.”

Willem knew, or at least he had some idea. Bors could hear it in his studiously casual tone. “You’re not just a janitor,” he said. “You know something about security software, don’t you? More than you should.”

“Hold still, Fir. We don’t want this to hurt.”

Willem removed Bors’s right hand from the bath and patted it dry, making Bors wince again. Over Bors’s head, he said to Valgund, “I trusted an Upstart once, Fir. Little fellow with a face like a blade, darting eyes. He got me out of a jam—I had to trust him, really. We were friends of a kind. We used to play cards, until he got promoted back to Redda.

“Years later, that same Upstart came asking me for a favor, and my gut told me it was a bad idea. But he’d married into one of the best-named families—a family like yours, Fir. He told me he was running some sort of classified operation, following orders he’d received from the highest level. So I didn’t listen to my own good sense, such as it was. My brain was sap-soaked in those days, and this Upstart was kind enough to supply me. I told myself nothing he wanted could be wrong.”

“So you granted his favor,” Bors snapped. He was so tired of these high names placing themselves above the law—sick and tired and ready to do something about it. “What was it? Who was he?”

“I can’t say, Fir.” Willem looked contrite. “It’s at the highest level of classification; if you were meant to know, you already would. But it wasn’t legal and it wasn’t good, what I did for him. And since then, I’ve done my job and kept my head down. I don’t want to report you, Fir, but I won’t make any deals with you, either. Even if I could help you with these terminals, I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”

Bors wrenched his hand from the man’s grip. He didn’t like Willem’s tone. “If we’re part of a classified operation—which I can’t confirm we are, of course—then you have no right to speculate about anything we’re doing.”

And you’re wrong—we can crack those terminals. Once we have Janta.

“Borsha! Here, I’ll do it.” Valgund snipped a length of gauze and wound it around Bors’s index finger. “We have no plans to crack any terminals,” he said calmly. “We’re not mad, Willem. We’re just … curious. We wanted to find all five bunkers, and now our curiosity is satisfied.”

What a pathetic lie. Bors’s nerves jangled, despite Valgund’s gentleness. Now that his body was no longer sending him danger signals about imminent hypothermia, he was ferociously angry with them both—Willem for being a deferent little sneak and Valgund for refusing to commit to anything, ever.

The more Bors thought about it, the fewer viable options he saw. Either they could trust Willem with the truth, or they would have to kill him. Or the helicopters were coming to collect them any second now, and the question was moot.

One thing was for sure: This Drudge wasn’t scared off by talk of classified ops. He’d experienced enough Strutter hypocrisy to see right through the lies that Bors was so sick of telling.

Why not just stop telling them?

“My friend isn’t telling the truth,” Bors said. “We do want to crack the terminals. In fact, we have a plan for it.” His body felt very light, as if he might float away—perhaps he would faint.

“Bors,” Valgund said warningly, bandaging another finger. To Willem, he added, “He’s not in his right mind just now.”

Bors had never felt more in his right mind. “We have a plan,” he repeated.

Willem looked up, his face ashen as he realized that Bors meant it. His gaze moved from one of them to the other. “But … why?”

Bors was floating, above his body. The words came to him as if dictated by the arctic air and the curve of the solid earth beneath them.

“We’re going to take control of Redda,” he said. “We’re going to force the Strutters to share the fruits of our labor and live up to their own ideals.”

They were both gaping at him now. Valgund had paused in his work, and Willem looked downright afraid.

Good. He should be. It was two against one, and if Willem didn’t swear his loyalty to them now and forever, he wouldn’t leave here alive.

“Borsha.” Valgund’s voice sounded strangled. “You’re talking about rebellion. Not just sneaking around and sabotaging things, but outright….”

“Maybe he’s delirious, Fir.” Willem sounded as if he hoped so.

Cowards. Suddenly everything was so simple, crystal clear. Bors wondered why he had fretted over his own motives for so long.

“What was his name?” he asked Willem. “The Upstart who asked you for the favor?”

Willem looked stricken. “Forget I ever said anything, Fir. That man could snap his fingers and have me killed.”

“What was the favor, then? Why are you so afraid to tell me? Was it any worse than trying to crack these terminals?”

Willem said nothing, staring straight ahead of him. So Bors went on: “I’ve done so many favors like that over the years—all for a sniveling little pretender named Niko Karishkov. A traitor who had somehow ended up as head of the Int/Sec committee. Whyberg himself would have been disgusted by the rot at the center of the ruling class he founded.”

Yes, things were crystal-clear now. Maybe Bors was delirious, but he knew he was speaking the truth.

“Keep right on bandaging me, Gunsha,” he said, offering his hands while looking Willem steadily in the eye. “Your friend has a simple choice to make. Is he going to do his job and keep his head down? Or is he going to join us in setting things right?”

Valgund stared at Bors, his deep brown eyes full of fear. Willem muttered something under his breath that sounded like Strutter’s out of his head.

“Am I?” Bors said. “No more than you, Willem—you already made your choice when you didn’t report us. You don’t trust or respect Upstarts, and you have good reasons not to, based on experience. If you’re going to disobey, why not do it for a greater purpose?”

Willem held Bors’s gaze, his jaw set. “Maybe I don’t want to die.”

“No one’s talking about dying.” But a cloud scudded across the new clarity inside Bors’s mind. “There are laws,” he said. “There are mechanisms for removing a corrupt government. Whyberg codified them himself. We would only be acting within the law.”

“Borsha …” Valgund said.

“Don’t take that tone with me, Gunsha.” Bors felt the heat of his lover’s reproachful gaze. He didn’t like how much it distracted him. “It’s time you made your choice, too.”

Willem didn’t seem to follow their exchange. His mouth twisted, and a wild light flashed in his eyes.

“Why should I trust laws, Fir?” he said. “They don’t matter. If a high Upstart wants to get rid of you, he can pluck a missile from the arsenal and aim it at you, and there’s fuck-all you can do about it.”

Bors forgot what he’d been about to say, chilled by the man’s tone. “Not true. Deploying air ordnance requires a Council vote.”

Valgund, too, was staring at Willem, one brow arched. “This favor you did for the Upstart with the face like a blade,” he said softly. “Was it … something like that?”

Willem seemed to shrink back into himself. His skin went gray, his eyes dull. “All I’m saying,” he said, “is that I can’t help you, Fira. Play around in the bunkers all you like. Gamble with your lives. But don’t try to pull me into your games, because I have a knack for getting off scot-free.”

As they both gaped at Willem, trying to wrap their heads around what he’d just implied, the little man’s tongue darted out and licked his thin, chapped lips. “I got away then, and I will now,” he said. “Nobody even notices me. And if I still have nightmares about what I did for that Strutter—well, that’s my business.”

His eyes blazed in Bors’s direction. “Don’t ever tell me there’s justice in this world. I know better than that.”