It was illegal to land a non-CPA ship anywhere on Van Diemann, so Biggerstaff took a shuttle up to meet our transport in orbit over the planet’s Dragon Heartchamber 1. The sword geishas I remembered guarding the Shogun during my trial flowed into the shuttle bay first, fanning out and surrounding me, Kest, and Warcry.

  The catfish followed, his polished wingtips clicking on the grating. He opened his wide mouth, gill rakers flashing, and put the suppression on my Spirit sea. Warcry’s snarl said the Antimatter cultivator had preemptively clamped down on his Burning Hatred, too.

  “Just in case there are any hard feelings,” Biggerstaff said. “A Shogun can’t be too careful around old friends.”

  Seeing the catfish again did dredge up some bad memories, but I didn’t have any reason to attack him.

  “So you made Shogun after all,” I said. “That was fast. Did you stab Genkai in the back?”

  “Didn’t have to,” Biggerstaff said, pushing back the sides of his suit jacket and sticking his hands in his pockets. “The wheels were already turning, thanks to a certain Selken and her maneuvering. I just stayed clear of the treads and took advantage of what they left behind.” He smirked at my suit. “Looks like we’re both moving up in the galaxy these days.”

  “Speaking of you owing me,” Kest said, calling up a gold business card from the space ring, “I’m here to get my Crest of the Traitor back. As mentioned in my messages, I’m prepared to return the favor card you bestowed on me, unused.”

  Biggerstaff pulled an opal the size of a robin’s egg out of his pocket, and held it up, pinched between his thumb and forefinger so that the orange flecks in its milky blue depths caught the light. It was bigger than I remembered. The last time I’d seen the Crest of the Traitor, Kest had exchanged it for Biggerstaff’s gold favor card as a pledge that even though she was pretending to join the Technols, she would actually be spying on them for the Dragons.

  “The buzz around the Heartchambers is the Emperor is about to make a play for Selk,” the catfish said. “If I were a third-genner who needed her fancy opal to return to her planet, I would be willing to pay more than the break-even cost.”

  Kest had warned me before this meeting not to blow my stack if this slimy jerk tried to squeeze more out of this deal, so I played it cool. But I did give the catfish’s Antimatter suppression a shove with one Miasma spiral, just so he would know I could break loose if I wanted to.

  Biggerstaff’s whiskers twitched and he eyed me with new wariness. As if they had felt it, too, the sword geishas cinched their circle tighter around us.

  “The Crest is just a public relations prop.” Kest shrugged, bringing the attention in the bay back to her. “My family already paid the price for their heroism in their banishment. But the Crest will reflect well on me once I’m there. What’s the going price for appearances?”

  Biggerstaff pretended to consider it. “I could let it go for the return of my favor card and a platinum favor card from the future monarch of Selk.”

  “Forget it.” Kest turned to leave the bay. “This was a waste of time.”

  Biggerstaff’s grin stretched, but he was unconsciously leaning toward her.

  “It’s customary in negotiations to come back with a counteroffer,” he said.

  “Negotiations are for Big Five cogs in the outer reaches, Shogun,” she said without looking back, “not monarchs over entire inner planets.”

  “Fine, my favor card returned and one of equal value from you.” He was having a rough time keeping up the cheerful, in-control act.

  “Actually, I think I’ll keep your card,” Kest said, turning it over as if she were examining it. “You never know when a civilized ruler might need some dangerous muscle work done by expendable prison planet Shoguns and their hooligans.”

  “My gold and your silver,” Biggerstaff said, desperation creeping into his voice.

  “Well, you have always been such a good friend to us.” Silver flashed in her cinnabar hand, a second favor card appearing beside the first. She spun back to face him. “It’s a deal.”

  They exchanged the opal and the cards, then shook and bowed to each other over their clasped hands. Biggerstaff’s easy grin came back as he and the sword geishas climbed the ramp to their shuttle.

  “It was a pleasure doing business with you, Miss Iye Skal,” he said from the top of the ramp. “I look forward to your coronation.” He tapped her silver favor card on his forehead in a goodbye salute. “Long may she reign.”

  ***

  After Van Diemann, we transferred to an intergalactic luxury cruiser. Selk being an inner planet, multiple systems away from either Shinotochi-Ryu or Van Diemann, the trip took close to three weeks.

  Kest spent the time scouring the hyperweb for everything she could find related to the electoral tournament and studying the nuances of Selken culture that she’d missed growing up on Van Deimann among a bunch of criminals. She plotted out her victory, practiced different degrees of bowing for different occasions, and rehearsed the speeches and slogans she planned to use.

  I almost popped the question at least a half dozen different points, but the moment was never quite right. Not having to kill anyone for three weeks in a row felt kind of like a vacation, but at the same time, constantly looking for my chance to ask Kest to marry me kept the stress level high enough on its own.

  Luckily, the cruiser had a top-of-the-line workout center on board, so I could work off the frustration by training with Warcry. The ginger wanted to shake off the ring rust and get in fighting shape for his return to the legitimate tournament scene.

  And once I asked him about putting on muscle mass, his secondary goal shifted to lecturing me about a fighter’s health.

  “It’s all that bleedin’ trash you eat,” Warcry said, hopping over the grasping hands of Death Grip and slipping my shield bash. “Noodles and veggies aren’t gonna bulk you up. That’s spacemoth food. If you want to put on muscle, you’ve got to eat muscle.”

  “Makes sense, in a ‘You are what you eat’ sort of way,” I said. Sweat slung off my arm as I shoved a palm-strike at Warcry. “Rigor mortis!”

  Warcry blurred, flames making wakes behind him. My paralyzing blast missed him by an inch.

  “And don’t think I don’t notice you’re still freezing out that mess of scar tissue in your side! How’re you supposed to gain anything when you’re not even at a hundred percent yet?”

  “That makes less sense.”

  He came at me with a blazing volley of punches, ridge hands, and hammers. But I’d trained with Warcry long enough to know all that flashy stuff was just a disguise for his big roundhouse. I spun out of the path.

  His prosthetic foot whiffed past my chin.

  “If the big man were here, he’d tell ya,” Warcry said without missing a beat, whipping his leg back around in a vicious hook.

  I dodged.

  “Yeah, well he’s not,” I snapped, that unexpectedly awakened black cobra striking. “He’s off looking for a way to take me out. Want to go help him?”

  A wall of fire blindsided me, and I smashed into the mat like a rhino dropped from a cargo plane. Warcry never let us spar with the Gravity in the room set to less than eight times Standard Universal, so the impact gave me a bloody nose.

  I rolled over and mouth-breathed at the ceiling. Blood and snot oozed down the back of my throat while my healing script tattoo kicked into high gear.

  “Don’t need to go looking, do I?” Warcry said cheerfully, leaning over to slap me on the cheek. I knocked his smack away with an exhausted block. “I already know you don’t know how to channel your anger. All I gotta do is stoke the fire and you get tunnel-vision. That’s match. Five to four—you’re buying the Recovery elixir tonight.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Touche,” I groaned.

  “On your feet, grav.” He dropped into a taiji stance. “Moving meditation, while you’re good and done-in.”

  I fought the extra gravity to stagger back to my feet and joined him.

  Warcry’s philosophy on training went something like, Train until you’re almost dead, then cultivate until your Spirit sea is almost dead, then focus your mind until you’re braindead, then train some more.

  For a while, we moved through the rolling push-and-pull motions without talking. The only sounds were dripping sweat, deep breathing, tinnitus, and the ever-present hum of the workout room’s gravity well. Taiji wasn’t a direct cultivation technique, but it did center your Spirit, which was supposed to help your mind, body, and kishotenketsu in an overall sort of way.

  “Have any humans ever made it to Ketsu?” I asked, slowly pulling my hands through Tiger Rakes Wind. All the taiji moves have names like that.

  “If they did, the Ylefs made sure to erase it from history,” Warcry said, stretching into Pluck Needle from Stars. “But I’ll remind the bleeders what it looks like.”

  “How long have you been at Ten-level?”

  “Long enough. Focus.”

  “Months or years?”

  “Four years Qasparian. Had me first IFC match a year after I advanced to Burning Hatred, and clawed my way to the top from nothing. Twice—Under 16 Division, then Under 18.”

  “Did you fight any Ketsu-ranked cultivators in the IFC?”

  Warcry snorted. “A Ketsu, stooping down from their high perch to fight in some bleedin’ tournament with the rest of the commoners? Lower your stance.”

  I sank lower, my legs shaking.

  “But wouldn’t that be the fastest way to win something like the Selken electoral tournament?” That had been nagging at me since the Emperor gave us our assignments. “Everyone else enters a Ten champion. You enter a Ketsu and puree the competition.”

  “Think, grav! One, the Emperor would’ve had to find a Ketsu willing to risk losing to a Ten. It probably wouldn’t happen, almost no chance, but there ain’t no truly sure thing out there. And what if one of those Tens is right on the cusp of advancement? Say the Ketsu doesn’t even lose, say someone just scores a hit on him. Now he’s besmirched the reputation of Ketsus everywhere, hasn’t he? The rest of the Ketsus would destroy him to make sure everybody knew they weren’t soft.

  “Besides, most Ketsu are so high on themselves that they can’t even see us Tens. Something like Selk? It’s just a fancy toy to them. A bauble they don’t want someone else to have. Once the gang war’s over, it won’t be nothing but a blip on their HUD.

  “There’s your reason the Emperor didn’t send a Ketsu.” Warcry puffed up a little. “But he did send the next best thing, didn’t he. Now shut your gob and concentrate.”

  ***

  “Attention, passengers, we are now entering orbit around Selk. Please gather your belongings and move toward the shuttle bay designated on your HUD.”

  The PSA came in while I was showering off the training session. I hurried to finish up—accidentally smashing the shampoo bottle into the wall because I was still getting used to moving in regular gravity again—then hopped out and dressed.

  I didn’t have many belongings to gather up. Just the stupid gangster suits and a change of regular clothes for hanging out. I wadded it all up, shoved it into a plastic sack I’d gotten at the grocery store before leaving Ryu, and headed to Shuttle Bay 4.

  Kest was there waiting. She laughed at my trailer park luggage.

  “If the Dragon Emperor saw his 019-Rank walking around carrying a plastic bag full of clothes, he would drop his tail.”

  “He said I had to wear suits. He didn’t say I had to store them in fancy suitcases.”

  Warcry strolled up with a gym bag over his shoulder. “You can take the grav out of the slums, but you can’t take the slums out of the grav.”

  Kest held out her cinnabar hand. “Give me that, Hake.”

  “Why?” I held the bag out of her reach. “Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?”

  “Yes!” With a flick of her flesh and bone wrist, her chain gauntlet shot out of nowhere and wrapped around the bag’s handles. She yanked it away from me and disappeared it into her space ring. “That’s better. Now no one will know what a goof I’m dating.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I told her.

  Metal clanged and the shuttle bay jolted as the surface to orbit transport docked. The crowd shoved their way toward the doors. When the airlock wheezed open, it was a free-for-all, everybody flooding into the shuttle at once. We found three open seats near the engines, which apparently nobody liked because it was so loud.

  I didn’t care about the noise. There was a window. Warcry glanced out it once when he sat down, then belted on his landing gear and stuck his nose in his HUD. Kest and I leaned to the edges of our seatbelts so we could watch as the shuttle headed down to the planet.

  From orbit, Selk looked gaseous, like Jupiter or Saturn without the rings. Its atmosphere swirled varying shades of jade striped with curling ribbons of black. As our shuttle sank through the cloud layer, I realized the swirling black ribbons hadn’t been part of the planet’s atmosphere, but the endless oceans that covered the surface showing through. Black waves boomed and crashed, while the cloudy green sky bucketed down rain.

  “It’s beautiful,” Kest breathed, her eye lace darkening.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to visit the place your ancestors were from for the first time and couldn’t. The Hakes weren’t “from” anywhere. We were just your standard American mutts.

  As we got closer to the surface, waves as tall as buildings thundered around us. zipping around crests and through collapsing barrels. I gripped my seat’s armrests and tried to play it cool. My first planetary landing had been a disaster. The prisoner in the seat next to mine had barfed all over himself and died from a broken neck because his seatbelt had failed.

  Up ahead, a space port peeked through the rain. Since everybody kept talking about how civilized and advanced Selk was, I’d been expecting something more sci-fi sleek, but Selk’s port buildings looked like fancy Victorian train stations, all glass and flying buttresses.

  Our transport streaked toward it.

  This planetary landing calmed down once we were past the waves, and the harnesses functioned like they were supposed to, so no one died or broke anything important. The shuttle touched down gently, and the Politely Disembark sign blinked on at the front of the cabin. I unclawed my hands from the armrests and unfasted my seatbelt.

  Rain pattered on the outside of our shuttle. The doors hissed open, turning up the volume on the storm and the waves, and everybody snagged their baggage and shoved toward the exit.

  Over the heads of the crowd, I spotted Technol dragonflies darting around. Those drones would be sending live feeds of the new arrivals to the gang’s security team.

  That put me on high alert. The last time I’d dealt with those had been at the ruins on Sarca, just before Sanya-ketsu and her Technol buddies had massacred the ruins-delving team. I ramped up Dead Reckoning and kept my head on a swivel.

  A second set of more obvious cameras floated across the landing pad. These were big steampunked-out monstrosities that looked like they were violating all the laws of physics by flying around. Rainwater beaded on their polished wood and flung off their whirling gears. Logos from local broadcasting companies had been etched into their sides.

  Every now and then, a steampunk camera zoomed closer to a disembarking passenger and followed them. Tinny voices shouted questions from small victrola-style horns on the sides.

  “Paparazzi bots,” Kest explained as we stepped off the shuttle. She had to yell over the storm. “The electoral tournament is a huge draw, so they broadcast everything from the arrival of the champions to the matches to the voting to the coronation.”

  Everyone who knew their way around was sprinting for one of those glassy train station buildings in the distance.

  “Where we headed, Stumpy?” Warcry growled, holding his bag over his head. It wasn’t doing him much good; we were all already soaked.

  She checked her HUD, then pointed. “You guys want that terminal. Pearl City. Grab seats on the first submersible you can, and I’ll meet you down there.”

  Warcry broke into a jog.

  Kest started walking away from the terminal she’d indicated.

  I caught her cinnabar hand. “Wait, aren’t you riding with us?”

  “It’s traditional for Selkens to swim down.”

  She nodded at the crowds headed for a spot on the far side of the port where no seawalls protected the shuttles from the violent ocean surges. Like her, the locals were on the shorter side with black hair and huge, lacy eyes. Some had their capillaries set to designs that complimented their clothes, the black patterns standing out against their tan skin.

  Casual as could be, they dove over the edge and disappeared into the raging black ocean.

  I swiped rain out of my face.

  “Didn’t you grow up in a desert?” I looked from the storm overhead to the tsunamis all around us trying to smash down the space port. “Do you even know how to swim?”

  “I’ve read up on the technique.” Seeing my look, Kest squeezed my hand. “What’s the worst that could happen, Hake? With the Heartblood Crown, I’m unkillable. Not to mention that I’m amphibious. This is my natural habitat. I’m probably instinctively great at swimming.”

  When enough people in your life have died, ditched you, or gotten taken from you, you can get a little clingy. I’m aware of that and I’m aware of how uncool it is, so when a situation comes up where I realize I might be clinging, alarms go off in my head. This one sounded like a tornado siren.

  I backed off.

  “If we’re going to win this election,” Kest said, “I’ve got to be seen taking the home-planet girl approach. It’s good for my image. Oh, almost forgot my prop.”

  She called the Crest of the Traitor from inside the space ring and held it to her throat. Rolling silver beaded up from her skin, forming a metal choker around the stone.

  “How do I look? Royal?”

  “Monarchical.”

  “See you on the bottom.”

  I waved and started walking backward toward the terminal.

  Kest grinned at me, then put on a serious expression and turned not quite into the lens of one of those hovering steampunk cameras.

  “Excuse me, where can I find the route to Pearl City?” she yell-asked some Selkens passing by toward the water. “I’m here for the electoral tournament.”

  Ever since I’d met Kest, hooligans, Shoguns, and Emperors had said that Selkens knew how to manipulate circumstances to keep who the people they wanted in power. Right then, though, Kest cranked it to eleven.

  “Iye Skal Irakest.” She pressed her palms together and bowed over them at the exact forty-five degree angle she had told me on the trip was the proper etiquette for introducing yourself on Selk. “I wasn’t born here, so I don’t know my way around, but my Nona and Pop-pop were of the Iye Skal line, banished until the third generation. I’ve come to reclaim our rightful place and fight for the citizens we were torn away from championing one hundred and eighty-nine years ago.”

  From all around the space port, paparazzi bots zoomed over to get a better shot of the political exiles’ returning granddaughter. Selkens on their way to the water stopped to listen or politely offer her directions. A few looked annoyed, but a lot more looked intrigued.

  The politics game was on. I couldn’t help but wonder, if Kest could play it never having set foot here before, how much better at manipulation would a planet full of Kests with a lifetime of practice be?