Kelly talks with both hands, leaning forward, breath reeking of whiskey highballs and cigar smoke. His palms cradle the air, like he’s caressing the conversation itself, soothing it to suffocation. Not like the filly talks much, anyways.

“—so I wouldn’t call them securities,” he continues, “and by that I mean only I wouldn’t. Others? Maybe they’d call them securities. But that’s a bad word. It means you’ve got regulations, red tape,” he lists with fingers, “but that’s only in some parts of Echelon space, maybe some Pan-African, but that’s about it. Mare Nostrum? Out in the galactic center? No regulations, but you still get to call them futures, which is catchy, people like that word. But anyways, all that matters is the underlying asset—the assassination contract, which can be argued is more of an event—but still, it’s securitized. Tradeable. Even in bulk. You can buy and sell a bunch of them without pulling a trigger. Banchieri do it all the time. Still following me?”

Ginevra’s gun hasn’t left her fist. Knuckles and joints on her left hand ache. Her grip wilts, Bergeret’s magazine touching the plastic table, barrel pointing upwards in her haze—aimed and ready to fire through the Old Eighty-Six’s ceiling and embed a round into Hu Shih’s artificial night sky. In only a few hours, the holographic display will start to fizzle, fake sun appearing on the ersatz horizon. Once again, the weather is predicted to be a perfect summer’s sun.

“Like I said, this thing’s a contract. Before, assassinations used to be like a raffle, all anonymous, at least before they were legalized. Free market kind of thing. And, sure, things have changed, but the principles are the same. First, you factor in a target’s life expectancy—otherwise known as a natural death, the failure of the assassination occurring—and get the baseline rate of return. Used to be almost a guaranteed return. Target’s got to die sometime, right? Well, with all the pharmaceuticals nowadays, forget it. And what’s life?” he wipes stray whiskey from lips. “What’s it even mean to die? For all those targets, I mean—not us, we’re invincible. But what if your target’s plugged into a mainframe, still kicking inside some digital world, calling shots? What if the target is the mainframe itself, with all these nodes and servers set up who-knows-where, ghost-in-the-whatever? Well, we know that’s an avvo’s job to deliberate stuff like that, right?” he smiles, “anyways…”

The filly is sloshed. Winded from the exertion of sucking down alcohol and tobacco. She’s tilting to her right side, resting an oblong, makeup-stained cheek on her free shoulder. Nickering, fighting against the slight spinning that enraptures her vision and makes her lower jaw seem weightless.

Before Ginevra is a massacre. Empty pint glasses stack like tiered pagoda rooftops, each rim’s pilsner residue becoming sticky when piled, each glass to be removed from atop the other with a firm pop. Picked-over plates of appetizers are bodies; burnt pseudomeat skewers that were once a plasticy veal substitute, double-fried corn cobs stripped of their kernels, fermented daikon radish cubelets, slathered in oily black vinegar blood. Each course of over-salted and marked-up appetizers reduced to stains on off-white paper plates. Defiled napkins crumple like body bags left atop the table for the desecrated aperitif corpses. Predators’ warnings.

The final bill—incalculable—was waved away by Kelly, whose hooded eyes have dimmed as each drink disappeared between his smiling lips, his plastic face only barely betraying a half-cycle of drinking. He’s a pro, after all. A corpo used to working and playing with both hands.

“Anyways” Kelly huffs, “then, you take contracts off that original assassination contract. A derivative. That is, you start making bets on how quickly the contract is fulfilled by assassination. Like how it was pre-regulation. Maybe you bet the target dies tomorrow. Incentivizes you to pull the trigger, right? What if you say they’ll croak two years from now? Well, sounds like you’ve got a pretty good bodyguard gig—just have to space all those other hunters trying to collect on the underlying contract before yours hits maturity. Easy—and if it’s not easy, then it’s worth it. Because, finally, when those two hypothetical years come knocking, and the target’s all relaxed, got his guard down, snoozing on some Alto Manzanillan beach, all liquored up with you by his side, talking about all the coconut-bra girlies he’s dreaming about... And he’s even got the little straw sunhat on, passed out and taking a nap, skin burning red, android arms reflecting sunlight all over and making that early hangover feel like a bullet through your skull…”

Ginevra’s tail is sore as she slouches. It’s bent against the plastic booth, sacrum straining at the end of her hunched spine. She shifts from flank-to-flank, uncomfortable. Her bulletproof pseudo-vinyl pants chafe at her thighs, pulling at the hair escaping near her hocks, sullied from the dirty floor. Her free hand plays with one of her seat’s open gashes, running fingers through pulpy plastic, disemboweling the seat in slow-motion. Boredom, discomfort, and burgeoning alcoholism overshadow the seriousness of the gun at her hand and she yawns, biting her teeth with a clack before resting a hand beneath her chin.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“But you get it,” Kelly suggests to his comatose audience. “Point is—Point is, I’m not lying when I say it. I’ve got quite a lot running on this—and running on this job of ours getting done within the month’s end. If we’re successful, it’ll pay off big. Very big,” he smiles with a tilt of his head. “Sure, we get the reward from your sister’s bounty, but the reward’s reward? That’s the kicker, for me.”

Ginevra realizes. It’s his eyes. Pure flesh. Malleable, without a hint of gingering. No plastic touch-ups, no cosmetic refiguring. A light brown. They don’t break eye contact with her—never tracing her Bergeret’s barrel with fear. Never lingering lower to investigate the cream-colored diamond at her chest, nor the barcode-coat-of-arms combination that normally draws leers from men his age.

She, annoyed, can only think of one other person with such an unforgiving composure.

“But what’re you doing all this for?” Kelly muses, fingertips tracing around an empty glass. “What’s a certain filly’s endgame here? We’re slated to space your sister, after all.”

“None—”

Ginevra snorts with petulance. She can’t vomit. It’s against her equine physiology. So the alcohol lingers on her breath, her stupor unavoidable since purging is out of the question. Cheap rice wine cut with recycled water burns in her abdomen along with over-gnawed peppercorns. She’s at risk of colicing—a gastric rupture. Yet she salivates, a hard-coded skill embedded within tank-bred DNA strands, teeth jutting with discomfort as she once more points her barrel towards Kelly with renewed vigor.

“None of your business. And don’t ask me again.”

“Listen,” he says, shrugging, “the attitude… I get it. I can empathize, I really can. But if we’re going to work together, I expect—”

“Who says we will?” Ginevra slurs.

Kelly sits back. He muses over the silence. His hands, as always, are atop the plastic table. They remain still, neatly folded, unlike the tap-tapping of Ginevra’s hooves, or the similar tap-tapping of the shakily held Bergeret’s grip. He’s stoic, even as the filly tears into a third bottle of water, unscrewing the plastic top with a non-dominant right hand, knocking it over once, twice, before succeeding and downing a two-thirds of the liquid in a single pull. It’s got no label attached. Leftover surplus from Hu Shih’s recent rationing, no doubt. She snorts through the nausea, completing her desperate attempt at fighting off drunkenness.

“Look at the two of us. Just a couple of professionals. Real pieces of work, right?” Kelly shakes his head with a sigh. It’s an about-face. A tactical maneuver that ignores Ginevra’s emotions entirely, as if she hasn’t said a word in protest. “I wasn’t expecting this eventful of meeting, that’s for sure.”

He toys with the automated menu at the table’s center. He’s careful to move his arms, maneuvering away from the picked-over fishbone carcasses and sauce spills. His sleeves, still blindingly white, cufflinks an antique sort of brass, intentionally low-cost and engraved with a few circles each—bezants—are at risk as he prods the menu machine with a smile. He pauses, looking at the filly, delivering his pitch.

“You know, if you’d like, we can share a hung t’ou. Whole lot cheaper that way. I’m over on the Western Edge. May beat your trip back East to the Soong—you’d get back by sunrise, at the earliest.”

Ginevra’s no fool.

Her finger caresses the Bergeret’s trigger. The safety’s off. It’s been off, ever since she landed on Hu Shih.

Each sleepless night on Hu Shih, she’s clutched the pistol in hand. Lying awake, sat up on her bed, criss-crossed legs, knees sore from stillness, head and shoulders on a swivel, checking and re-checking her angles sporadically. Her room’s cramped, bed for one if comfortable, two if enraptured, the dark cherry Elmwood bedframe casting right-angled and maliciously geometric shadows across the hotel’s expensive pseudowool carpeting, angular darkness rotating with the passage of artificial full moon outside floor-to-ceiling windows. She’s the Soong Regency’s twitchiest customer—acutely aware of the suspicious help that supposedly lingers outside her door, of the bright-eyed porters who place ears to the thin boiserie wall paneling, waiting maliciously for her to rest. For her to make herself vulnerable. Then, they’d strike.

She’s sure of it.

“Probably want to get some sleep, right?” Kelly smiles, digits lingering over the hung t’ou call button.

Ginevra ignores the pitch. Because before the Soong, the Bergeret’s safety was still off. It was off as she lingered around the Retaliation, where she swears she hears disjointed, off-kilter hoofsteps echoing from the recesses of space. Her sleepless nights spent firing at random, aiming at the misshapen shadows that form from the corners of her sleep-deprived eyes. Those ghastly humanoid figures berthing from the light of passing stars and comets and disappearing, leaving only filly with bloodshot eyes and perforated blast shielding where phantoms once stood—Ginevra’s grouping off-kilter, inconsistent and nowhere near killing.

She’d mull over Kelly’s offer if she had the wherewithal to do so, as beneath the overlapping layers of nausea, anxiety, and bad attitude, she’s unsure of how to proceed, following the first knee-jerk reaction that comes to mind. The evening’s broadcast of The Great Hunt’s programming repeats, the nearly-empty Old Eighty-Six punctured with the pop-popping of small arms fire of the pre-recorded insurgent documentary. A familiar canine’s voice won’t be long behind.

“Sure,” she slurs, eager to build distance from it.

From the plastic ordering mechanism, a Chow Chow’s single mechanical bark sounds.