Maya turned the Glock 17 over in her hands. The polymer frame was scarred, years of neglect and too much time out in the acid rain had done a number on it. The serial numbers had been filed off long ago, but she knew this gun's history better than most people knew their own families.
"Gen 4," she murmured to the empty room, running her thumb over the textured grip. "Nine millimeter. Seventeen rounds if you're counting, which you never did."
She'd found it buried in Narek's old gear, wrapped in a piece of that precious fluoropolymer mesh they'd liberated from the Heisenberg Institute years ago. Back when corporate labs still pretended their climate experiments were going according to plan.
Maya set the pistol on the makeshift table and leaned back, letting her mind drift to the conversation that had started it all.
"You want to know about the gun?" Narek had asked her once, maybe six months after he'd recruited her. They'd been sitting in the observation deck of the Persistence, watching the sunset paint the acid-scarred horizon in shades of amber and rust.
"I want to know about you," Maya had replied, because even then she'd been too direct for her own good. "The gun's just a starting point."
"I bought it when I was fifteen. Saved up for three months, selling stolen access tokens and synthetic dust to kids at the bio-neutrality center."
"Fifteen? Jesus, Narek. What did a fifteen-year-old need with a Glock?"
"Protection, I thought. From the adjustment counselors, from the grid monitors, from my parents when they figured out I'd been flushing my meds." He'd laughed.
Maya had waited, learning even then that silence was sometimes the best way to get him talking.
"This was before the rain turned," he'd continued. "Back when Portland still had green spaces and kids could play outside six months of the year. My family lived in Sector 7, low-income vertical housing, but stable. Clean water credits, protein rations, even entertainment feeds if you kept your carbon footprint below the monthly threshold."
"Sounds like paradise," Maya had said, deadpan.
"Felt like prison. All those rules, all those systems designed to keep you grateful for scraps while the corporate towers got taller." Narek had picked up the gun then, checking the chamber. "I started asking questions. Why the towers needed barriers if the air was safe. Why the protein rations tasted like cardboard while the executives ate lab-grown beef. Why kids needed adjustment meds to be 'socially compatible.'"
"And nobody liked your questions."
"My parents tried to increase my dosage. Teachers flagged me for 'antisocial ideation.' The grid monitors started showing up at our apartment for 'routine wellness checks.'" He'd set the gun down. "So I bought the Glock, started stealing from the well-off, sometimes even from people who weren't. I just wanted to push back, do something I wasn't supposed to. Prove I still had some kind of say in how I lived. Riding against the current, free. And yeah, I kept telling myself I was ready for whatever came with that."
"Were you?"
"Hell no. First time I tried to use it, I nearly shot my own foot off."
Maya smiled at the memory and picked up the pistol again. That conversation had been the first time she'd seen past Narek's armor, under all the anger and idealism he wrapped himself in like a balaclava. She'd been twenty-two then, fresh off a corporate security detail that had gone sideways when she'd refused to fire on civilian protesters. People with signs and rain ponchos. She hadn't pulled the trigger, but she hadn't exactly saved anyone either.
"You want to join us?" Narek had asked her that night, after she'd helped them steal three shipping containers of fluoropolymer mesh from a Heisenberg Institute convoy.
"Depends," she'd replied. "What exactly are you offering?"
"Purpose. Danger. Probably a short life expectancy." He'd grinned then, wild and daring, and her chest twisted. "Also the chance to make the bastards who broke the world pay for it."
"When you put it like that, how can I refuse?"
The fluoropolymer mesh had been their first major score, stolen from the same scientists who'd developed it as emergency protection after their atmospheric geoengineering project went catastrophically wrong. Dr. Sarah Chen's team had been trying to deploy sulfate aerosols to cool the planet during the heat dome crisis of 2057. Instead, they'd created a feedback loop that turned ordinary precipitation into hyperacidic death from above.
Maya remembered reading the leaked internal memos, the desperate attempts to cover up what they'd done. "Localized acidification events," they'd called them. "Temporary atmospheric instability." Bureaucratic language for the fact that they'd accidentally made the sky poisonous.
The fluoropolymer mesh was their attempt at damage control, acid-resistant fabric designed to protect infrastructure and personnel while they figured out how to fix what they'd broken. It worked, sort of. Lasted maybe twenty minutes in direct contact with the rain before the molecular bonds started degrading. Long enough for emergency response, not long enough for anything approaching normal life.
Long enough to keep pirates alive in waters that could dissolve human flesh in minutes.
"Maya."
She looked up to find Selene standing in the doorway. Her hair was streaked with silver, pulled back in a loose knot.
"Reminiscing?" Selene asked, nodding toward the pistol.
"Something like that. You need something?"
"Just checking on you. You've been in here for two hours."
Maya set the gun down and stretched, feeling joints pop that hadn't moved in too long. "Time flies when you're wallowing in nostalgia."
Selene stepped into the room properly, shutting the door behind her with a sure hand. Not flashy like Narek, but solid. She wasn't the loud type, but when it came to keeping people alive, she got the job done.
"You know," Selene said, settling into the room's other chair, "when Narek first told me about recruiting you, I thought he was making a mistake."
"Yeah? Why's that?"
"Too young, too angry, too pretty. I figured you'd either get yourself killed in the first month or seduce half the crew into following you off a cliff."
"I'm hurt. Truly wounded." Maya pressed a hand to her chest in mock distress. "What changed your mind?"
"You proved me wrong about the first two. Jury's still out on the third."
Maya laughed despite herself. Selene had that effect. It was a good quality in a leader, even if it wasn't the same kind of magnetic charisma that had made people follow Narek into problematic situations.
"Tell me about when you took over," Maya said.
"It was terrifying. Narek had this way of making everything seem possible, you know? Like if we just fought hard enough, believed hard enough, we could actually win. When he was gone, suddenly all those impossible plans just looked impossible. The crew was falling apart, half of them wanting to surrender to corporate security, the other half ready to go out in a blaze of glory that wouldn't accomplish anything except getting more people killed."
Maya nodded. She remembered those first few weeks after the news feeds had announced Narek's death. The way hope had bled out of their floating sanctuary like air from a punctured hull. "What kept you going?"
"My family. My husband Marcus, my daughter Theresa. They were counting on me to keep them safe, and I couldn't do that if I let everything Narek built fall apart." She paused. "Also, I was pissed off. Really, really pissed off."
"Good reason."
"I thought so. Marcus used to be a teacher before the domes went up. Theresa was seven when the first acid storms hit Portland. You know what a seven-year-old says when you try to explain why she can't go outside anymore? Why the sky wants to hurt her?"
"What did you tell her?"
"The truth. That some very smart people made a very bad mistake, and now we all have to live with the consequences. That it wasn't fair, but fairness was just another story we told ourselves, one of those fairy tales we didn't need to cling to if we wanted to make it through.
"Heavy conversation for a seven-year-old."
"Heavy world for a seven-year-old." Selene stood up, restless energy making her pace to the small window. "She's fourteen now. Never seen real grass, never felt natural rain that wouldn't kill her. But she knows how to patch acid-resistant fabric and calculate dive times and jury-rig water recyclers from spare parts. Skills no kid should need."
"But skills that'll keep her alive."
"Yeah. That's what I tell myself when I wake up at three in the morning wondering if I'm raising a daughter or training a soldier."
The conversation drifted into comfortable silence, both women lost in their own thoughts.
Maya opened her eyes and found herself staring at her reflection in the pistol's abraded surface. Older now, more scars than she'd had back then, but still recognizably herself. Still the woman who'd learned to deflect pain with sarcasm and motion, who'd turned restlessness into a weapon more reliable than any gun.
The memories kept coming. She let them wash over her like the stochastic rain outside, dangerous but impossible to avoid entirely.
The day everything changed had started like any other. Morning planning sessions, maintenance shifts, the endless game of trying to stay just ahead of the corporate enforcers. They treated the pirates more like a pesky headache than a real threat. Why waste resources chasing a bunch of moving targets on a poisoned ocean? Why risk aerial crews hunting for them, knowing that acid rain could start pouring down at any moment before the plane could safely land? It seemed like the authorities had assumed the rain was as unpredictable as the pirates, and that was okay, for now.
Maya had been scheduled for shore duty, a supply run to one of the underground markets where black-market dealers traded everything from real vegetables to intel on the population lottery lists. Every term, a fresh set of names got pulled, supposedly at random, to be sacrificed in the name of reducing the carbon footprint. Climate control, they called it.
But then Narek, their leader, got word: Kaden had been captured during an op tied to a civilian protest. Something about the latest lottery results, families starting to figure out the "random selection" wasn't so random after all. Kaden had been sent to pop the rear door on the van moving them to a detention center. Where, most likely, they'd be slaughtered. A little public theater to remind people what stepping out of line looked like.
"I need you to get Kaden out," Narek had told her. "I'll finish what he started. I'll handle the civilians."
The risks were already too high. Kaden was gone, and Narek wasn't about to send anyone else into that mess. So he went in solo.
She'd wanted to argue. Kaden was a dick, the kind of guy who turned every conversation into a game of one-upmanship and treated missions like auditions for smartest guy in the room. But orders were orders.
If only she'd known then what she knew now.
The detention facility had been almost too easy to get into. Corporate security back then was more about intimidation than actual security. She'd fried the electronic locks using gear she could've picked up at any black-market tech stall, and the guards were too busy with their card game to notice one prisoner less on the monitors.
"About time," Kaden had said when she opened the cell door. "I was starting to think you left me here on purpose."
"Don't tempt me." She tossed him a spare equipment pack. "We've got maybe ten minutes before someone realizes the locks are toast. Can you move?"
"I'm fine. They just had a lot of questions. About the pirates... and the old man."
The old man. That's what they called Narek, even though he hadn't even hit forty yet. Something about the pressure he carried made him feel older, like he'd aged a decade for every year since the world started falling apart.
They'd barely made it back to base when the news feeds lit up with reports of a "Notorious negationist leader killed. Threat to climate stability eliminated."
They called him a denier, a climate rebel, a terrorist, anything but what he actually was. Maya felt the memory hit her like a physical blow, even now. The way the world had seemed to tilt sideways, the way her chest had tightened until breathing became a conscious effort. On the screen, corporate spokesmen in their pristine suits had talked about justice and safety and the greater good.
Maya set the pistol down again. The anger was still there. Always would be. A few weeks weren't enough to fix anything, and she doubted anything ever would. But giving up? That had never been on the table. Life was a joke—a bad one, sure—but still a joke.
Why else did she always find something to laugh at, even if it was barely a chuckle? Even when it was her own misery on display, like a sad little story happening to someone else. And maybe it was. Maybe she was just wearing someone else's shoes, wandering through someone else's mess.
So what was the point of all of it?
Laugh. That was it. Everything else—pain, plans, philosophies—melted down into that one ridiculous reflex. A quick, stupid laugh at the edge of nothing. Maybe that was the closest thing to meaning she'd ever get.
Maya found herself thinking about those first days after Narek's disappearance, when Selene had stepped up the way a second-in-command was supposed to, driven by something close to maternal fury.
It had been Maya's idea to hack the lottery systems. Not because she thought they could change anything—by then, she'd learned to set more realistic goals—but because she needed to do something, anything, that felt like forward momentum. Grief wasn't even the right word. With the only person who'd ever given her life a direction gone, it felt like she'd been left hollow. But staying still was its own kind of death, and she wasn't ready for that either.
"I want to hit the Central Processing Center," she'd told Selene one morning, two days after the news of Narek's death.
"The lottery headquarters? Maya, that's suicide. Their security makes our usual targets look like convenience stores."
"Not if we're smart about it. Not if we go in quiet and get out before they know we were there."
"What's the objective? What are we hoping to accomplish besides getting you killed in a creative way?"
"Information. Proof that the system is rigged, that the 'random' selections aren't random at all, but that some powerful people's names aren't even in the pool. Maybe we can't stop it, but we can expose it."
"And then what? You think the people who designed a murder lottery are going to be embarrassed into stopping?"
Maya had shrugged. "Then at least we'll have tried."
The Central Processing Center had risen from the acid-scarred cityscape like a chrome and glass monument to bureaucratic murder. Maya had crouched on the maintenance platform four stories above the main entrance, watching the security patterns.
"Six guards on rotation," she'd whispered into her comm. "Standard corporate security, flash and intimidation, minimal actual training."
"Copy that." Kaden's voice had crackled back through the encrypted channel. "I'm in position at the service entrance. Thermal scans show two more inside."
"You sure about those numbers? Corporate facilities usually run heavier security."
"Trust me, I've done my reconnaissance."
She shoved the unease aside and rappelled down the side of the building, her suit's grip-enhancing fibers letting her ease down quietly, almost like she was part of the wall. The fluoropolymer mesh had been a game-changer when the pirates swiped it from Dr. Chen's lab. It was originally meant to shield researchers from the fallout of their acidified atmosphere experiments, but the crew had quickly figured out it could do a lot more.
Once they figured out how it worked—some adaptive molecular thing that let the fibers shift on contact—they started tweaking it. Now, the mesh didn't just hold up against acid, it could flick bullets away too. Not head-on, but anything brief or off-angle. It could shrug off glancing hits, ricochets, even laser bursts, anything that wasn't a full-on, sustained strike.
That's why the pirates didn't need heavy armor or bulky weapons. They relied on confusing their enemies, dodging and weaving, protected by gear they'd grabbed from the very people hunting them.
Maya had dropped the last ten feet to the building's service level, landing in a crouch that distributed the impact across her suit's reactive padding. The mesh had absorbed the shock.
"I'm in," she'd whispered, slipping through the maintenance access she'd scouted earlier. "Moving to the data core."
The corridors inside had been all white walls and harsh lighting that made everything look like a medical facility. Which, Maya had supposed, wasn't entirely wrong. The Central Processing Center was where they decided who lived and who died, just with spreadsheets instead of scalpels.
She'd made it halfway to the core when the first guard had appeared around the corner. Standard corporate security, body armor that looked impressive but wouldn't stop a determined attack, energy weapon that required a clear line of sight, reflexes dulled by years of dealing with compliant citizens who'd never learned to fight back.
Maya hadn't broken stride. As the guard had raised his weapon, she'd dropped into a slide that carried her past his feet, her suit's friction-reduction fibers letting her glide across the polished floor like she was on ice. The guard's first shot had gone wide, the laser bolt crackling harmlessly overhead.
She'd rolled between his legs, come up behind him, and delivered a precise strike to the nerve cluster at the base of his neck. He'd dropped like a sack of protein rations, unconscious before he hit the ground.
"One down," she'd reported, already moving again. "Where are you, Kaden?"
"Dealing with complications," had come the terse reply. "Keep going, I'll catch up."
The second guard had been waiting for her at the data core entrance, weapon drawn and ready. This one had been smarter, he'd heard the commotion and positioned himself with clear sight lines and no cover for Maya to exploit.
"Stop right there!" he'd shouted, his voice muffled by the standard-issue respirator. "Drop your weapons and surrender!"
Maya had spread her hands, showing empty palms. "No weapons to drop, friend."
The guard's confusion had lasted exactly long enough for Maya to spring into action. She'd rolled forward, her suit's reactive fibers deflecting the first energy blast with a spray of dispersed photons. The second shot had caught her in the shoulder, a glancing blow that would have burned through normal fabric but had merely scorched the fluoropolymer mesh before the energy dissipated.
She'd come up inside his guard, too close for his weapon to track effectively. A quick strike to his wrist had sent the blaster spinning away, and a follow-up to his solar plexus had left him gasping for air through his respirator. Maya had grabbed the weapon as it fell, spun it around, and stunned him with his own gun.
"Two down," she'd whispered, already moving toward the data terminals. "Kaden, where the hell are you?"
No response.
The data core had been a cathedral of information. Maya had plugged in her hacking rig and started downloading files, her fingers moving fast across the interface as she navigated through layers of security that were impressive but not unbreakable.
That was when she had found the personnel files. A photo had caught her eye, a face she recognized. Asset K-7. Recruited the same day Narek had disappeared.
Kaden.
When Maya had asked Kaden what he'd last heard from Narek, he said he'd told him he'd been caught during the mission. Narek had promised he was sending someone to break him out while he went to finish what Kaden couldn't. Suddenly, everything clicked. The authorities had known Narek was coming because someone had tipped them off, someone who knew.
"Son of a bitch," Maya had breathed out.
She had still been staring at the screen when footsteps echoed down the corridor. More than one set.
"Maya."
Kaden's voice, but not over the comm. He was in the doorway, flanked by four corporate enforcers in full tactical gear.
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" Her hand had darted to her utility belt, but the officers already had weapons trained on her. "Sorry for what, exactly?"
"Sorry for this. For everything. They were going to kill me. I bought my freedom with intel. I became their spy. Isn't that why we're all pirates? To survive? I just did what I had to."
"By selling out Narek? By getting him killed?"
One of the enforcement officers had stepped forward, weapon still trained on Maya's center mass. "Enough talk. Asset K-7, step away from the target."
Maya had looked at Kaden.
"You know what the really fucked up part is?" she'd said conversationally. "I almost understand why you did it. The fear, the impossible choices, the way they make you believe that betrayal is just another way of living."
"Maya—"
"Officers, you should know your asset here has been playing both sides. That's how we walked in like we owned the place. The layouts of this spot and others have been running through our base thanks to Kaden. He claims he got them from recon missions, yeah, that's a lie. But he still used that info against you."
The lead officer's weapon had shifted slightly, tracking toward Kaden. "Is this true, Asset K-7?"
"I never betrayed you," Kaden had said quickly. "Everything I gave you was legitimate—"
"But incomplete." Maya had already been moving, her suit's reactive fibers engaging as she'd rolled toward the nearest bank of processors. "He's been holding back critical intelligence about our operational capacity, our real numbers, our defensive capabilities. Playing both sides to maximize his own survival chances."
The officers' weapons had been tracking her movement, but Maya had learned long ago that corporate tactical training emphasized overwhelming firepower over precision shooting. She'd ducked behind the quantum processors as energy bolts scorched the air where she'd been standing, her suit deflecting the residual heat and radiation.
"He trusted you," Maya had said, though it felt more like she was reminding herself, stoking the fire in her chest as she moved between the processors, keeping low, edging toward the emergency exit. "Sent me to rescue you while he went to finish your mission. The mission you'd already told them about."
"It wasn't supposed to happen like that—"
Energy bolts had been flying by then, the officers trying to pin her down while Kaden stood frozen in the crossfire. Maya's suit had deflected most of the glancing blows, but she'd been able to feel the fluoropolymer mesh starting to degrade under sustained fire. The molecular bonds hadn't been designed for prolonged combat.
She'd reached the emergency exit and slapped the manual release, setting off alarms throughout the building. The blast door had started cycling open, but too slowly. The officers had already been moving to flank her position.
That's when she'd heard it: footsteps in the maintenance corridor beyond the exit. Someone pressed the space like they had seconds to spare.
"Maya!"
It sounded like someone she knew, only twisted, like a favorite song slowed down. "This way!"
Narek had stepped into the doorway, dressed in corporate gray, but moving with that same mutinous zeal she hadn't dared think about in weeks. He looked older, maybe more restrained, but he was alive.
"You're supposed to be dead," she'd said, not moving from her position behind the processors.
"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." He'd stepped into the data core, and the enforcement officers had immediately lowered their weapons. "Stand down. I'll handle this."
"Sir," the lead officer had said, "Asset K-7 has been compromised. Intelligence suggests he's been playing multiple angles."
"I'm aware of the situation." Narek's voice had been poised, nothing like the impetuous idealist she'd known. "You can leave us. I'll escort the prisoner to debriefing."
The officers had filed out, dragging a protesting Kaden with them. Maya had found herself alone with a man who looked like Narek, sounded like Narek, but felt like a stranger wearing his face.
"Hello, Maya," he'd said once they were alone.
"You're dead," she'd repeated, because it had been the only thing that made sense.
He walked all the way in, and that's when she really saw him. The crisp corporate getup, the too-clean haircut, like he'd been scrubbed of everything that used to make him Narek.
"What the hell happened to you?"
"I learned some uncomfortable truths. About the lottery, about the population projections, about what happens if we don't make the hard choices. The system isn't perfect, Maya. But it's not random either."
"No shit it's not random. That's why I'm here."
"Then you know about the weighted probabilities. Violent criminals, terrorists, political dissidents... they all have higher chances of being selected. The system isn't murdering innocent people, Maya. It's performing societal maintenance."
Maya had felt something bitter and jagged settle in her chest. "Jesus Christ, Narek. Listen to yourself. You're talking about genocide like it's a public service."
"I'm talking about survival. The planet can't support eight billion people, not after what we've done to the atmosphere, the oceans, the entire biosphere. Something has to give. The corporate councils helped me understand some uncomfortable truths. About population dynamics, resource allocation, the mathematical realities of survival in a damaged ecosystem."
"The corporate councils? The same corporate councils that broke the fucking sky? Those are your trusted advisors now?"
"They made mistakes. We all did. But they're also the only ones with the resources to fix this."
"By killing people!"
"By making choices. Hard choices that nobody wants to make but somebody has to." Narek had reached for her then, and she'd stepped back instinctively. "Maya, I know how this sounds to you. But I'm still the same person—"
"No, you're not. The Narek I knew would have died before accepting this. Would have fought until they put him in the ground rather than become their poster boy for acceptable genocide."
"The Narek you knew was naive. Romantic. He believed that wanting something badly enough could make it possible. This Narek understands that some problems don't have good solutions. Only necessary ones."
"So what happens now?" Maya had asked. "You turn me in? Have me executed for crimes against the greater good?"
"I'm going to help you escape. Because whatever else has changed, I still..." He'd trailed off. "Because some things don't change, even when everything else does."
"Why?"
"Just go, Maya. And try not to make me regret this."
She'd wanted to fight the guards and pour all her rage onto those corporate suits, to somehow drag her leader—her beacon of hope—back from whatever corporate hell he'd fallen into. Because she'd already mourned him—mourned the loss of him—and finding him alive didn't change that. He wasn't coming back—not the real him—and she'd already made peace with it, or close enough.
Losing her guide had felt like a cruel joke. But now? She was the one charting the course. Not even Selene, just Maya, setting the next waypoint, writing her own damn mission brief. And the strangest part? She liked it. That edge of solitude. No more waiting for orders, or needing someone to show her how to survive. She didn't need anyone. Not anymore.
And the elegiac trace of those thoughts chased her through the emergency exit, down the maintenance corridor, and out into the acid-scarred night.
Behind her, alarms had wailed and security teams had scrambled to contain a breach that was already over.
"Maya."
She blinked, the pistol grip slippery from her own sweat, and realized Selene had been talking to her. "Sorry, I was lost in thought."
"I said, he's been looking for you."
Maya's heart did something complicated.
"Should I tell him where to find you?" Selene asked.
Maya looked down at the Glock, picturing the impact of it in fifteen-year-old hands trembling with resentment, fear, and a suicidal need to make something—anything—make sense. Then she looked up at Selene and managed something close to a response.
"Yeah. Tell him I'm in here, reminiscing about old times."
Selene nodded and headed for the door, then paused. "Maya? Whatever else he's become, he came back. That has to count for something."
"Yeah," Maya said softly. "Maybe it does."
She didn't have to wait long. Footsteps in the corridor.
"Ready for another mission together?" Kaden asked, a childish grin breaking the poise of his statuesque arrogance.
Maya said nothing, so he kept going.
"Narek got us both out. That's got to mean something. He still trusted me, even after everything. The others let me back in. Maybe it's time you did too. Listen to Selene and team up with me. I'm done playing spy. I know which side I'm on now."
He took a step closer, like that might help.
"We used to be a good team, remember? Always trying to outdo each other. Two's better than one, Maya. You know that."
"Narek's judgment stopped mattering the second he gave himself up. And we'll see if you can keep up."
Kaden gave a short nod, turned, and walked off. He'd come back, though. He always did.
The door opened again. Whoever stepped in must've crossed paths with Kaden.
"You found it," Narek said, nodding toward the pistol.
"Found a lot of things, actually. Including some questions I didn't know I wanted answers to."
"Such as?"
"Such as why a fifteen-year-old kid who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn thought a gun would solve his problems. Want to tell me about the first time you actually used it? I mean really used it, not just waved it around hoping people would take you seriously."
"There was this girl, Elena Vazquez. Lived in our sector. Smart, funny. We could talk about anything, and I mean anything, even the stuff the higher-ups didn't exactly want passed around."
"What happened to her?"
"The adjustment counselors decided she was 'romantically destabilizing' my social integration. Said she was encouraging my antisocial tendencies. They recommended immediate relocation to a more compatible social environment."
"They were going to separate you."
"Worse. They were going to send her to a compliance center. Behavioral modification, chemical adjustment, the full treatment. Turn her into a nice, compliant citizen who wouldn't ask inconvenient questions or encourage others to do the same."
"So you stopped them."
"I tried. Followed the transport convoy, thinking I could force them to let her go. Got as far as drawing the gun before I realized I had no idea what I was doing." He sat down in the room's other chair, his years carved into the highways that mapped his face. "Security disarmed me in about three seconds. Would have killed me too, if Elena hadn't talked them out of it."
"She saved you."
"She saved me. Then she went with them voluntarily, to keep me from getting shot." Narek's hands clenched and unclenched slowly.
"That's when you left."
"That night, I took the gun, took everything I could carry, and never went back. It was also the night I realized a weapon doesn't fix your problems. If anything, it can make things worse. It gives you a kind of confidence you haven't earned. That's where the fighting style I taught the pirates came from. No weapons. Ducking, kicks, a body trained to move before thought kicks in, and a mind that stays one step ahead of the fight."
He looked up at her.
"I spent the next few years learning how to actually fight. How to survive. By the time the acid rain came, I was ready for war."
"And now? You're not one of them nor one of us either."
"Now I'm not sure what I'm ready for. Helping you both escape made me a rebel pirate again, which meant I had nowhere else to go. The current leader showed me a mercy I'm not sure I would've shown myself, if I'd never stepped down from command."
Narek leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Maya, about what happened at the Processing Center—"
"You mean when you tried to convince me that genocide was a reasonable policy position?"
"I meant what I said. If we don't make choices, nature will make them for us. And nature doesn't give a damn about fairness or justice or any of the other things we tell ourselves matter."
Maya placed the pistol on the table. For a moment, she toyed with the idea of smashing it against his skull.
"You know what the funny thing is?" she said finally.
"What?"
"I don't actually disagree with you. Not entirely." Somehow, she always found a funny side to everything, a way to connect, to mildly agree even with opposing views. After all, the comical—like everyone laughing at a joke or a stumble—was what tied people together. Pulling on that thread could help find some kind of middle ground. Maybe that was her strongest trait. "The planet is fucked. The population is probably unsustainable. Something has to change, and most of the available options are terrible."
"Then what are we arguing about?"
"We're arguing about who gets to make the choices. You think the corporate councils should decide who lives and who dies because they have better spreadsheets. I think that's insane."
"What's the alternative?"
Maya grinned, feeling that familiar spark of mischief that had carried her through every crisis and catastrophe of the past few years. "We make the choices ourselves. We take responsibility for our own survival instead of handing it over to the same bastards who broke everything in the first place."
"That's chaos."
"That's freedom. Messy, dangerous, probably doomed freedom, but freedom nonetheless."
"And if we're wrong? If we choose poorly and people die because of it?"
"Then at least they'll die free. Instead of being murdered by committee for the greater good."
"That's a hell of a gamble."
"Yeah, well." Maya stood up. "I've always been a gambling woman."
Despite everything, Narek almost smiled.
Maya picked up the pistol one last time. "Not exactly a revolver, but we could play Russian roulette."
She caught a glimpse of the angry fifteen-year-old who'd bought a gun to fight a world that never heard his complaints.
"Fine. Point it at me. If I die, you pair up with Kaden on the next mission. If not, you're with me."
She pulled the trigger, the cold barrel pressed against his crinkled temple. Nothing.
He eased the weapon from his grasp. "You knew it was empty, didn't you? No one's bothered to steal ammo in years."
"But you were scared anyway, weren't you?"
"Terrified," he admitted.
Maya smiled, remembering something else. "You know, there's something I never told you about why I joined up. About Elena Vazquez."
Narek went very still. "What about her?"
"She was my sister. Three years older, scary smart. My parents and I, we tried to handle it after she died. Then they died too. Grief, I guess. I figured out pretty quick that staying alive meant keeping my head down. Not like her. She died in that place, Narek. Chemical adjustment, they called it. Gone wrong. Last thing she said to me was to find some angry kid she used to know. Said he was worth the trouble."
Narek's hand found hers, their fingers slipping together with the sort of impulse shaped by years of not-quites.