There wasn't a funeral set up in the morning on the street outside the building Jie had put us in, nor was there any sign of what had happened last night.

Save for the fact that the street was wet, scrubbed clean while everyone turned a blind eye. After all, if Songlai was anything like it had been before, Suicides were common enough to be an oddity instead of a disaster.

And it wasn't like you would start digging into why someone fell off a building; that was the quickest way to become the next street staining oddity.

No, instead, there was just a damp walkway in the middle of the simulated daylight, with the streets in front of the Casino mostly empty and none of the emerald green signs were illuminated. Station 26 had everyone awake and working,which meant that Songlai was asleep.

Victoria joined me in, staring at the wet spot on the ground; she hadn't spoken since I'd told her what happened.

Tash might have been a piece of shit in a lot of circumstances, but she'd also been close to my sister in others. I'd bitched a lot about the time I'd spent here on the Station, but there had been some good parts. Some good people.

Well, some decent people, at least. The bar was low around here. Whether Tash was, one of them was still up in the air.

But fuck, either way, she didn't deserve that. Fuck, half the reason we were on the outs was that she'd stuck working for Jie until the bitter end, even after she'd sold us out to get into power.

Then again, it had never really mattered what you deserved when it came to Jie, judgment came from her, and she'd had a habit of convincing everyone in the room that she was right.

Maybe because she usually was. It was hard to tell sometimes.

I shrugged the bag on my shoulder, everything I'd packed away to return to the ship. Victoria finally spoke up.

"You said the ship's ready, right?"

"Mhm."

"So we could leave right now?"

"Yeah, we should."

Victoria was standing beside me, staring at the mark on the floor, and after a moment, she sighed, "Then why aren't we?"

"You know, I'll let you know when I know," I sighed, "but the right thing to do is-"

"Leave?"

"Yes."

"That's the smart thing to do," Victoria pointed out, "but you know what's going on with me. I'm not sure there's a right or a wrong about it."

"Meaning?"

"I'm running, and I don't really know where I'm going," she moved half an inch closer to me, almost touching the bag with all my equipment in it. "I don't know if running off into space and, maybe, back to Fotul is right compared to whatever you're thinking about."

"I'm not thinking about anything," I explained, "'static behind the eyes if you know what that means."

"I don't, but I think I understand enough of it," she sighed, "so is there a plan?"

"No. I should have turned around after her the second th-"

"You would have gotten shot as soon as you were in the hallway."

"Might have made it further than any of my current plans."

"Those being?"

"Not worth talking about. You don't just go around and shoot up a station."

"Isn't that what you did before with them?" she asked.

"You're underestimating the size of the 'revolution,'" I explained, doing my best to ensure she could understand the air quotes around 'revolution.' "And overselling my part in it."

"I think Jie was doing that."

"Jie likes to think that her little inner circle was all that mattered in the end," I scoffed, "but being in that didn't get Tash very fuckin' far, so. Where does that leave us?"

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"I don't know."

"Yeah, it's a good question, isn't it?" I turned away from the stain on the ground before turning back to it one more time. How long had we technically known each other? Did the years without talking count? How much of a shit was I supposed to give about Tash when she'd gotten herself into this?

More than I did.

Or less than I did.

I didn't fucking know.

"I hate this place," I said after a moment, "I spent years not wanting to ever come back, then I was here for a night, and I'm struggling to figure out if I can fucking leave."

"Well, what do you want to do about it?" VIctoria asked.

"I don't know, and it's not my choice if you think about it," I pointed out, "you hired me to bring you somewhere. This ain't it. So, looks like we should get going, and I'll stop thinking about this in five years. Then I can swear off com-"

"Kingston."

"Yeah, let's go."

"That's not my call."

"Yes, it is; check the contr-"

"I'm not talking to you as a client right now," she sighed, "I'm trying to talk to you as someone who got you on the extradition list for the Meritocracy."

"Right, and we should be looking for a way to get off that instead of standing here thinking about something that happened to me years ago."

"One of our solutions to that is here," she pointed out.

"The Viedesshai are far from getting anything done about Jie on her Station. Even if they wanted to commit way too much to it…"

"We're here."

"We are two people Victoria and you can barely fucking shoot," I snapped a little too loud for a city street. Considering I'd taken the first steps away, I started walking to force her to follow. There were already going to be too many eyes on us here. "We are not an army, and Moldieki wanted to use us to annoy Jie. Anything other than us leaving the Station will get us fucking killed at this point."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Jie hates being wrong, and she's got the people on her side to prove the point for her," I hissed under my breath as we started the long walk towards the docks.

"And she 'knows' that you're going to leave."

"Yes, so if we do anything but that, she's going to have a field day picking out how she wants to end us,"' I sighed and took a deep breath to try and stop ranting. Whisper shouting my way down the street with Victoria wasn't helping anything.

I was just pissed because I knew what I wanted to do was dumb. I was supposed to take the pill Jie'd offered and swallow it. It was easy to leave. Which was why it fucking sucked that I didn't want to go through with it.

"Why am I arguing with you about this?" Victoria asked after a moment, stopping as she did.

"Because I don't have a good answer this time," I pointed out, "and I want to do the dumb thing, but I never want to choose the dumb option because it's fucking stupid to. In this line of work, you shoot it, and if you can't win by shooting it, you leave."

"Then let's leave, I guess."

"No," I answered after a second before growling at myself. "You take the ship and go. I'll settle this shit myself. Give me the Mako and-"

"My gun?"

"Yes. It'll be some fucking catharsis to shoot Jie with one of those things," I held out my hand. "You have the launch codes. Head to Ovigaia, and if I'm not dead in a week, I'll re-"

"Are you fucking joking?"

"What?"

"I followed your ass into Yinde's fun house before we had a conversation about being a team through this," Victoria snapped, "and now you want to shoot me off into space and tell me that you're going to reach out."

"It was dumb to bring you there and-"

"Not the point."

"Why would you stick around?" I asked, "It's not like you knew Tash."

"You're right; I didn't know her for very long," Victoria hissed, "but wanna know what? The list of people I know is pretty fucking short right now-"

"Victor-"

"I'm not done. There's my parent, who might want me dead and hasn't reached out. There is your friend Dvall who almost knows that I exist, the Ventinari signer, Musc and Jie," Victoria took a deep breath. "I didn't talk to people out in the rim because I was a fucking Fotuan, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do out there."

"Vic."

"So you're right, I didn't know Tash for very long, but there is one person I've got on my team right now, and it's you…" her eyes, for the second time I'd ever seen, were blue, "so don't tell me to go wait in space while you kill yourself, and don't try and make me get you to walk away from this when I can see that'd kill you too."

It felt very quiet in the middle of the street.

"So I'm staying," she said, "and if you won't agree with that then I'm going to do something stupid to keep you around here while I stay on the Station."

"How stupid?"

"I don't know the spectrum that you work off of."

"But?"

"But if we're going to do anything to Jie, she's going to need to be distracted, so I'm calling someone here."

"What do you mean?"

Victoria was already playing with the device on her wrist at this point. "I'm just going to connect to local networks briefly before we do anything else here. Which should mean that-"

"Victoria."

"The hunters should see that I was somewhere and be comi-"

"Why the"

"If the local government doesn't comply with Fotuan forces, they are trained to try and suppress it if there isn't a treaty," Victoria said, "you've protected me from them before, so having them here won't be as much of an issue for us as it might be for Jie. And if they're coming for me, you'll protect me."

"You're really overestimating me there," I pointed out.

"No, I'm not. You'll stay if I'm here."

"You're overestimating how well I can deal with the hunters."

"If I am, we leave, and Jie deals with them. Then we're back where we started, I guess."

"And what-" I stopped as I met Victoria's eyes; there was no twitch, none of the subtle scanning from left to right that you usually saw in people. Instead, she just met my stare with hers. She was sure about what she was doing.

"I- We could do something good with it," she continued after a second. "Then we figure out the rest of it after that. Then you- You won't have to think about it so much."

"Maybe, but it's not worth the-"

"I already did it," she cut me off before I was able to add 'risk for you.'

I took a deep breath and turned back to the wet on the walkway. Just one of the many stains on the sidewalk of Station 26, if I was being pessimistic, was just another to add to the list of those I'd caused.

No, that had been Jie. It hadn't all been her, but I didn't need to drag that around with me. If we had anything to say about it, she'd face the music.

"Then we don't have much time, do we?"