Artemis

She angled the gun away from me. She still had a good grip on it, but at least she wouldn’t kill me by mistake if she sneezed. “The whole system has become an unintentional Ponzi scheme. And we’re just cresting the top of the curve now.”

For the first time, my attention was torn away from the gun. “Is…are we…is this whole city going bankrupt?”

“Yes, if we don’t take action,” she said. “But ZAFO is our savior. The telecom industry will want to upgrade, and ZAFO can only be cheaply made here. There’ll be a huge production boom. Factories will open, people will move here for jobs, and everyone will prosper.” She looked up wistfully. “We’ll finally have an export economy.”

“Glass,” I said. “This has always been about glass, right?”

“Yes, dear,” Ngugi said. “ZAFO is an amazing material, but like all fiber optics, it’s mostly glass. And glass is just silicon and oxygen, both of which are created by aluminum smelting.”

She ran her hand along the sheet aluminum desk. “Interesting how economics works, isn’t it? Within a year, aluminum will be a by-product of the silicon industry. And that aluminum will be handy too. We’ll have a lot of construction to handle the growth we’re about to have.”

“Wow,” I said. “You really are all about economics.”

“It’s what I do, dear. And in the end, it’s the only thing that matters. People’s happiness, health, safety, and security all rely on it.”

“Damn, you’re good at this. You created an economy for Kenya and now you’re doing it for us. You’re a true hero. I should really be more grateful—oh that’s right you fucking sold me out!”

“Oh, please. I knew you weren’t stupid enough to turn on your Gizmo without taking precautions.”

“But you did tell O Palácio where my Gizmo was?”

“Indirectly.” She set the gun down on the table. Too far away for me to lunge at. She’d grown up in a war zone—I wasn’t about to test her reflexes. “A few days ago, IT reported a hack attempt against the Gizmo network. Someone on Earth was trying to get your location info. I had IT deliberately disable security and let the hacker in. Actually, it was more complicated than that—they downgraded one of their network drivers to one with a known security flaw so the hacker had to work for it a little. I don’t know the details—I’m not a tech person. Anyway, the end result is the hacker installed a program that would report your location if you turned on your Gizmo.”

“Why the hell did you do that?!”

“To draw out the murderer.” She pointed to me. “As soon as you turned on your Gizmo, I alerted Rudy to your presence. I assumed O Palácio would tell their man Alvarez as well. I hoped Rudy would catch him.”

I frowned at her. “Rudy didn’t seem to know anything about it.”

She sighed. “Rudy and I have a…complex relationship. He doesn’t approve of syndicates or indirect measures like I had taken. He’d like to be rid of me, and in all honesty, the feeling is mutual. If I’d warned him the killer was coming, he would’ve asked how I knew. Then he’d look into how the information got out, and that would cause trouble for me.”

“You put Rudy on a collision course with a murderer and didn’t warn him.”

She cocked her head. “Don’t look at me that way. It makes me sad. Rudy is an extremely skilled police officer who knew he was entering a potentially dangerous situation. And he almost caught Alvarez right then. My conscience is clear. If I had it to do over, I’d do the same thing. Big picture, Jasmine.”

I folded my arms. “You were at Trond’s a few nights ago. Have you been in on this from the beginning?”

“I’m not ‘in’ on anything,” she said. “He told me about ZAFO and his plans to get into the silicon business. He wanted to talk about Sanchez’s oxygen contract. He had reason to believe they were going to be in breach soon and wanted to make sure I knew he had oxygen if that happened.”

“That didn’t make you suspicious?”

“Of course it did. But the city’s future was at stake. A criminal syndicate was about to control the most important resource on the moon. Trond offered me a solution: He’d take over the contract, but with six-month renewals. If he artificially inflated prices or tried to control too much of the ZAFO industry, he’d lose the contract. He’d rely on me to keep renewing and I’d rely on him to feed the ZAFO boom with silicon. There’d be a balance.”

“So what went wrong?”

She pursed her lips. “Jin Chu. He came to town with a plan to make as much money as possible, and by God he succeeded. He’d told Trond about ZAFO months earlier, but Trond wanted a sample to have his people examine—proof that ZAFO really existed and wasn’t just some fairy tale.”

“So Jin Chu showed him the ZAFO and Trond paid him,” I said. “And then Jin Chu turned right around and sold the information to O Palácio.”

“That’s the thing about secrets. You can sell them over and over again.”

“Slimy little bastard.”

She sighed. “Just imagine what a revelation that was for O Palácio. All of a sudden, their insignificant money-laundering company was poised to corner an emerging billion-dollar industry. From that point on, they were all-in. But Artemis is very far away from Brazil and they only had one enforcer on-site, thank God.”

“So what happens now?”

“Right now, I’m sure O Palácio is buying as many tickets to the moon as they can get. Within a month, Artemis will be swarming with their people. They’ll own silicon production and that damned oxygen-for-power contract will ensure no one can compete. And they already started their next phase: taking over the glass-manufacturing industry.” She gave me a knowing look.