Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“Wajoowant?” the Brown one asks. He’s a Terran bastard by the look of his thick thighs. His loamy eyes narrow.

“I reserved this booth, citizen,” I say.

“Deey don’t take reservations here. Slag off.”

“Sit there,” says the larger man, a Gray with a sour look. “And shut it ’fore you get carved up.” He points to a nearby open table and flashes a curved ionKnife the size of my forearm. It shimmers blue as he activates its charge.

“And you’re gonna do the carving?” I ask wryly. “You don’t look like you can even stand.” He stands.

“Please, bitch. I used to own little sleets like you in Whitehold,” the Gray says. By the look of his knotted forearms, he could easily break me to kindling. I should just move on.

“Whitehold?” I scoff. “That’s odd. I thought they sent pig sodomizers to Deepgrave.” Both stand, blades shimmering in the low light. I stumble backward, too late in realizing my tongue’s drunker than the rest of me.

The Gray’s about to come and try to open me up with that cutter of his when he sees something behind me and stops dead. There’s silence in the bar. Something fiendishly unique has just walked through the door behind me. And anything unique enough to this sort of crowd could only mean one thing.

She came after all.

I turn to see a Gray woman my height, but built like a snub-nosed boxer with the physical dimensions of a concrete building block. Freckles, made dark by her time under the harsh Mercurian sun, maul an ugly, broad nose, while her hair, shaved on the sides of the head, shoots up from the top of her head like a surfacing great white. Her military uniform is all black, but every eye, wary bartender to dazed whore, scans the red flying-horse standard on the forearms of her jacket and the matted wolfcloak that hangs from her left shoulder. Pegasus Legion, Howler Battalion. One of the Reaper’s own.

The woman strides past me up to the men blocking our path to the booth. “Move.” They dip their heads politely and back away. She sits down and pours two shots of what remains of their whiskey into the glasses, wipes one glass for herself, and nods to me. I join her as she tosses them a gold Octavia. A hundred-credit Lune crescent. Still the currency of the day, despite the Rising’s sad attempts to mint new legal tender. “For the whiskey, citizens.”

They skulk away and conversations slowly start again throughout the bar. The woman looks back to me, flinty eyes searching.

“Holiday ti Nakamura, the Howler. In the leathery flesh,” I say.

“Ephraim ti Horn. The dumbass with a death wish.” She jerks her head at the two thugs. “What’s your damage?”

“The usual. Would you like a thank-you for saving my ass?”

“Don’t thank me yet; night’s young. Besides, the Obsidian with the railgun over there might be a bit too much for you to chew.”

“Huh?”

“Far side, second booth. Big girl with the bulge under the armpit.” She jerks her head to a shadowy booth where a large shape is hunched in the shadows over a drink with an umbrella in it. In the haze from the vodka and pills, I didn’t even notice her there. “You’re slipping, Eph,” Holiday says as she warily sniffs the whiskey bottle.

“Dammit.” I sigh. “I’ll be right back.”

“Do you need help?”

“Only if you have tickets to the zoo.”

“What?”

“Don’t ask.”

I stalk across the bar. Volga hunches sheepishly as if she can sink into the shadow of the booth so I won’t see her. She gives up when I snap my fingers at her. “Outside.”

Rain drips sluggishly down from the green awning over the bar’s entrance. The bar itself is in a block of restaurants and drinking holes directly abutting a multilevel thoroughfare. Past the small retaining wall is a precipitous drop down into the concrete canyon between the buildings. I push Volga in the chest. “You stalking me now?”

“No…”

“Volga.”

“Yes,” she admits. “I am worried about you.”

“Worried about me? You’re the one who can barely catch a cab without me.”

“I tracked you, did I not?”