Victoria was there when I got back, pacing the room, having already moved all the garbage scattered around into a neat pile on the corner. Her head snapped up as I pushed open the door.

"Kingston," she took a set of excited steps toward me before slowing down as I slumped through the doorway, almost falling into the room. "Where's-"

"Alive but gone," I answered, "she left."

"And-"

"Dead."

"Oh," she trailed off, still several steps short of me, "are you okay?"

"About as good as I could be."

"I heard gunshots."

"You should have called Jie then," I pointed out as I found the decent-looking chair in the room and flopped down to take the weight off my injured leg. "She would have come get you."

"You don't trust Jie."

"I trust bullets less."

"I can't argue with- What's wrong?"

"Just shot," I answered, doing my best to be nonchalant through the pain. She flinched at the idea, but it wasn't horrific on the scale of wounds. I'd been shot enough times that I'd stopped counting. The first time had been life-changing, the second time had been painful, and most of them had just been annoying since then.

Getting shot wasn't that bad as long as you lived through it and got medical attention fast enough to avoid racking up a massive bill.

"Where?"

"Leg," I hissed as I unbuckled the three belts that kept my armoured pants in place and took them off. The smell of burnt flesh permeated the room when I exposed it to the air. Where my skin had been, there was now a charred mess.

It was worse than I thought. Adrenaline was a hell of a drug. There was a reason injecting it directly into your system was banned on most formal battlefields.

"That looks bad."

"It is," I answered. Victoria was hovering, looming over the wound like she would magic it away with some Fotuan power I didn't understand. "I just need to give it a minute to breathe, then we can head to somewhere I can get synthskin."

"Can you walk?"

"I walked here, didn't I?" She was right to be worried, though. Walking was going to be a bitch. There was a marked difference between pushing onward and getting up from sitting. That said, I had to.

"Should we call Jie?"

"No," I answered a little too fast.

"Fine then, at least let me do something," she pulled a small vial out of her pocket and shook it, "but I'll need to get more."

"What the hell is it?"

"Fotuan synthskin," she answered, "should be fine."

"You know that meds can't be shared."

"We both have skin."

"It's not gonna be the same skin."'

"It's better than nothing, isn't it?"

"I do-"

"Stand up right now so we can go then."

"Fine-" I tried to get up, and my leg screamed at me. Now that I'd given it a break, it wasn't interested in going anywhere. Son of a bitch.

"You can cut it off or something if it bothers you that much," Victoria pointed out, "but right now, we should get this covered before you bleed all over the place."

"I'm not going to bleed; it's cauterized," I explained, which was part of the reason it hurt so fucking much.

"I don't know how human blood works."

"Well-" I was cut off by Victoria pouring the gray goop from the vial onto my leg; it was immediately freezing, I hissed, but the cold did stifle the pain. "Dammit, all."

"Are you alright?"

"It's so cold." It made sense, Victoria was several degrees colder than me on a good day, and I imagined that this temperature was simply normal for them.

"Better than shot?"

"I guess?" I looked down at my leg once I'd composed myself enough to open my eyes. The synth skin spread over the wound was a near-translucent silver, leaving a sharp line between where my skin ended and the medical attention began.

It wasn't quite the sickly gray of a dead human, but it certainly wasn't a healthy colour.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

I tapped my leg twice on the floor and then put some weight on it. There would still be damage on the inside for a while as microbes stitched things together, but it was a dozen times better than leaving it exposed to the air in Station 26. Plus, numbing agents made it seem like I hadn't been injured, save for the exhaustion that came with adrenaline.

"You good?"

I nodded.

"What happened?"

"Shit went sideways. Viedesshai showed up at the meeting. Collings tried to talk to Tash, and it all went to shit."

"So everyone shot each other?"

"Mostly. They had a rebel queen. I don't think she had a gun."

"A rebel queen was here?"

"Yeah, she-" I paused to grunt as I finally got out of the chair. Even if I wasn't injured, I was sore. "She was here with the Viedesshai alongside an Ashiir."

"Weird pairing."

"Yeah."

"And they're all dead?"

"Sevita," I saw Victoria squint, "the rebel queen is alive; I let her go. I don't think the Ashiir would have been caught. Aiguo… maybe."

"Who's Aiguo?"

"Carr's guy. Point is, it was quite the body count, and I don't think we really have time to stay on the station if shit like that's going down."

"Do we have a choice?"

"I can get on Tash's ass in the morning, assuming she got away and plans on showing up to work tomorrow." I couldn't know whether she was going to be at the docks. Carr would be looking for her there if he had a grudge, but skipping out on Lady Jie with rumours about a shootout swirling around would be just as bad for her.

If not worse.

"So that's tomorrow morning; what's the plan now?" Victoria asked.

That was a good question; now that I had something on my leg, we didn't need to desperately go out into the open in order to get it fixed. We could try to lie low by staying here but-

Well, we didn't know how much of the place Carr and Moldieki were going to tear up in their little shootout. I didn't want to bank on getting the drop on or getting mercy from Sevita if we ran into her again.

It put us in a different kind of danger, but it was better for us to go back to the hotel that Jie had put us in. We might have been walking into a potential trap, but at least it was a trap I understood.

"It's Jie isn't it?" Victoria asked.

I nodded as the only response before starting to buckle everything back together. My coat had self-trimmed to avoid damaging my skin too much when it'd been burning, but that just meant that I'd need to buy a new one or pay and wait to get this one repaired.

Shit, I should have listened to my gut and left Tash out on the street. Not like she stuck her neck out for me when push came to shove, and I wanted to get back here.

Maybe that wasn't fair; after all, she had offered to come back-

No. I needed to stop making excuses for Tash. She'd done enough shit to me to get killed for it several times over. Good experiences didn't make up for that.

"We should go and see Jie," I said as a way to finally rejoin the conversation, "if shit goes sideways down here, again, then that's going to be the best place for us to be… assuming she wants us alive."

"Assuming?"

"She hasn't killed us yet, and I don't think she has a good reason to."

"What if…" Victoria trailed off, now starting to grab the small things she'd left around the room, like the gun I'd given her, "what if the Hunters talked to her like they talked to Yinde?"

"They won't."

"What makes you so sure of that?"

"They would have needed to track us through the black and have guessed where we were going even when we were off course."

"Fair but-"

"And even if they got a tip about a Fotuan on Station 26 and assumed it was you, Jie wouldn't work with a Fotuan to win the lottery, let alone something she would see as doing them a favour."

"She-"

"She's not a fan of most people, let alone-"

"Yeah," Victoria cut me off. She understood there was generations of history behind the rivalry at this point. "As long as she doesn't take that out on us, it's fine."

"I think I have enough goodwill with the bitch."

"How?"

"Pardon?"

"How? What happened last time you were here?"

I frowned; going into the history of Songlai felt like digging up graves, sticking a shovel in the ground for the sake of bashing open a coffin. That said, it could give her the information she needed to get around the city without me if we got separated again.

Afterall, it wasn't like my plan of keeping our nose out of Songlai's business was working. Hell, maybe it was never going to work. Maybe I was just destined to get dragged down into the muck of this place if I ever went close to its orbit.

Happened to a lot of people. Why not me?

"I wasn't just here for a bit," I pointed out, "last time I was on Station 26 was because I lived here for about six years. First place I went once I was running on my own. Back then, it was a more mixed community. The Daggeral group in charge, the Polidian Mining Corporation, were just as bad as Jie, maybe worse, but…. Well, that's not the point."

"But?"

"Jie, and a couple other people who aren't around anymore, got the idea that the workers around the city deserved to take over the place instead of just having the Daggeral in charge because they'd built the place. It was exciting 'power to the people' energy. I'd got recruited as part of that idea."

"As a hired gun?"

"As Jie's friend who knew his way around guns," I explained, "we ended up trying to create a full-on resistance, but most of what we did was convince every gang with ambition that they could be the ones in charge of Station 26 instead. It wasn't us vs the Polidian after the first month; it was a free-for-all, and a bloodbath."

"So you help get Jie into power and now you regret it, seems pretty-"

"It's more complicated than that for all of us. Sure, in the end, I ended up helping her, but I can't count how many times people stabbed each other in the back during that time. I wasn't immune to it; there was a lot of money floating around. In the end-," I sighed, "in the end, Jie made some deals with the same people we'd started the whole damn thing to stop. I joined her with that."

"Why?"

"That's a fucking complicated question, Victoria," I pointed out, "For Jie it was more about winning than it was about changing anything at a certain point. For m- I don't know. I left pretty soon after. Ran into an Ovishir I thought I could mentor to be better and left the place behind instead of sticking around to see the aftermath."

"Dvall?"

"You're astute."

"I haven't met many Ovishir," she pointed out.

"Your turn now," I said, "explain what's got you on the run."

"No," Victoria answered, but there was a moment of hesitation, "I'm not-"

"Worth a shot," I pointed out as I finally got all of my things together so that we could head back out into the world. "Look, the point of all this is that I have goodwill with Jie and the people up there, but I know enough to understand that goodwill doesn't mean shit if you're between her and what she wants. The best thing we can do is get off this station before she decides that she doesn't want us here, or that I'm a liability, or that she needs us to do something before we leave."

"We just need to get the ship repaired tomorrow, then."

"Assuming that this whole mess tonight doesn't fuck that up. Tash left, don't know if she's alive or gonna be back at work, or- There's no way we're getting the guns she promised tomorrow but I'd be fine with just getting out of this damned place."

"I'll take your word for it," Victoria answered, "I've never been in a place like this, but I'm not exactly keen to learn what it's like by staying."

"Smart girl," I answered. "Let's clear out before Sevita shows up at the door and I have to figure out if the Nurse can pierce her chitin."

"The rebel queen?"

"Yes."

"Yeah, let's go."