Inside, the terminal’s glass walls muted the storm to a dull roar overpowered by the noise of the crowd. The place swarmed with aliens of all types, including a few Selkens who I guess didn’t want to get their clothes wet. When Takeshi-ketsu had said the election tournament was a big deal, I hadn’t realized he’d meant it was basically the intergalactic Super Bowl.

  Despite the cram, people inched forward in an orderly fashion. Dripping travelers wove between stanchions guided by smiling Selkens in Port Authority uniforms. Baggage went onto tricked out steampunk-looking conveyers. Tickets flashed on HUDs. Metallic dragonflies zipped around overhead.

  I followed the orangey flicker of Burning Hatred and rising steam. Warcry stood off to one side, drying his clothes with his flames and talking to a Selken in a black and white CPA uniform, hat, and bulky tactical vest that looked weirdly modern in the middle of all the hoop skirts, kimonos, cowboy boots, and bolo ties.

  The agent grinned when he spotted me.

  “Death cultivator!” He did the introduction bow, then swept off his hat, grabbed my hand and bowed over it again. Rainwater splatted when he slapped me on the shoulder. “Pleased as a punch to the gut to meet you! Vaya Tre Ravomet. Confederated Planetary Authority Agent, C-Rank.”

  I did one of my awkward bows. “Nice to meet you, too, Agent Vaya Tre.”

  “Call me Rav. A mutual eight-legged friend asked me to make sure you got down to Pearl City without any hassle.” Rav winked one huge lacy eye like I might not have realized who he was talking about. “Some of my fellow agents can be hell on certain new arrivals who don’t lean the right way on the high-tech issue.” Another big wink.

  He slapped his hat back on, spun on his heel, and motioned for us to follow him around the outer edge of the terminal.

  “Right this way. Rav’s MIPs—most important pals—don’t stand around waiting for a sub. Not on my beat!”

  Warcry and I exchanged looks. This guy was definitely not what I was expecting out of Takeshi-ketsu’s sleazy cop. We squeezed between travelers and Port Authority workers to catch up with him.

  Up ahead, Rav pulled out a cigarette-shaped thing. He glanced back, realized he was losing us, and slowed down.

  “You guys don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” Rav nudged Warcry with an elbow. “Of course the Burning Hatred cultivator doesn’t. Ha!”

  With his thumb, Rav tapped the end so the electronic cherry glowed, then stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

  He jabbed me in the ribs next. “Let me guess, Death cultivator—these things’ll kill me? Ha!”

  One of those paparazzi bots floated our way, but Rav flashed his badge at it.

  “Get lost, parasite,” Rav snarled, his voice dropping into demonic horror movie territory.

  The camera veered hard the other direction.

  Instantly, Rav cheered back up. “These press guys, amiright?”

  The lines in the terminal each wound their way to one of four swimming-pool sized holes in the floor. Entry hatch towers stuck up from submarines bobbing in the middle of the holes, and walkways stuck out over the waves so passengers could climb in.

  “CPA business!” Rav cleared the way for us through the crush of people waiting to embark. Smoke billowed out of his nose and mouth as he ordered people to, “Step aside, CPA. Unless you want a citation for obstructing official business, ma’am, I suggest you step to the side. Thank you.”

  We climbed down an ornate bronze spiral staircase into the sub. The interior was brightly lit with thick red carpet and shiny bronze fixtures everywhere. Low, liquid jazz like the musical version of watercolor flowed from some hidden speakers.

  “Below surface pass?” the Port Authority worker at the bottom of the ladder asked.

  Warcry and I started to pull up the travel documents on our HUDs, but Rav hopped down and leaned between us, badge out.

  “They’re with me,” Rav said, his smoke floating into the worker’s face. “Official CPA business. We’ll be commandeering the forward cabin on this dive. No guests. Thanks.”

  Before the worker could reply, Rav hustled us down the white-lit corridor, our soaked shoes squishing on the carpet. We passed cabins with cushioned seats and fold-down wood and brass tables. Each sliding doors had a bronze-framed glass porthole, showing that only about a quarter of the seats on the sub were occupied so far.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  It took me a second to register what felt so eerie about all of this. There wasn’t any trash, grime, graffiti, or bullet holes anywhere. The carpets and seats weren’t splashed with suspicious stains or pocked with cigarette burns.

  “Is this place weirdly clean?”

  Warcry snorted. “It’s an inner planet, grav. Act like you’ve been on one before.”

  “If this is your first visit to an inner planet, Death cultivator, you sure as Spirit picked the right one,” Rav said. “Selk’s by far the cleanest and most civilized in the Confederation. Tourists love us. Number one destination for family vacations six years running—and probably seven soon.”

  “We can visit, but we can’t stay, can we.” Warcry explained to me, “Selk doesn’t allow outsiders to buy property or settle on-planet without special permission from the monarch.”

  Rav laughed. “Hey, we’ve seen what you foreigners do to your planets. We want to keep Selk nice.”

  At the end of the hall, we stopped at a windowless door marked Forward Cabin – Diamond-Level Surface Pass Only. Rav stuck his HUD under the curlicued, brass-framed lock panel, then punched in a code. A seal hissed and the door slid open.

  “The forward cabin is airtight and compression resistant,” he said, stepping in. “Technically, it’s reserved for the big spenders, but CPA transports take precedence over Diamond Passes.”

  The light was softer in there, the carpet thicker, and the air smelled fresher. The rest of the sub hadn’t stunk, but there had been a sort of stale feeling to it. This was like they were piping in oxygen straight from a spring meadow after a rainstorm. Armchairs took up the space the bench seats had in the other cabins, with a real table bolted to the floor between them, not a fold-down.

  But the kicker was the huge glass wall looking out into the ocean.

  I drifted over to it.

  Bubbles washed up the glass whenever a wave crashed close to the sub. Way off in the distance, I saw shadows moving in the water. Swimmers headed down.

  I looked for anyone Kest-shaped, but from this far away, the shadows all looked pretty much the same.

  Rav plopped into an armchair and hung his uniform hat on his knee. “Can’t see much out there yet, but wait ’til the captain turns on the running lights.”

  We had a few minutes before boarding completed and we took off, so Warcry left his gym bag in a seat and went to find a bathroom.

  Since this wasn’t technically public, I took off my soaked suit jacket and hung it over the back of a chair to hopefully dry some. I wished I hadn’t let Kest hang onto my plastic bag. It would’ve been nice to change into some dry clothes.

  I dropped into one of the empty chairs. The leather squeaked and groaned against my wet pants and shirt while I scooted around getting comfortable.

  “So how was the flight over?” Rav asked. “Have to kill anybody? Need to get some Death Spirit out of your system before we get to work?”

  The fact that his voice hadn’t changed at all from that casual how-the-heck-are-ya tone threw me. It took me a second to realize he meant did I want to go murder someone for fun.

  “What? No.”

  “I guess that’s for the best,” he said like Shucks, darn the luck. “I’d take you straight to our first target if it was up to me, but you saw the dragonflies, I’m sure. Now that they’ve seen you, my CPA pals will have an eye and ear out for increased activity, if you catch my drift.” Huge wink.

  “Right.”

  “They’re especially harsh on Mortal supertypes, so if I were you, I’d keep my head down for a couple days. I know you’re ostensibly here to act as a bodyguard for Mr. Thompson and Miss Iye Skal, but make sure you don’t throw any first attacks. Hang around looking menacing, mix it up a little, but only if somebody else attacks first. If it even smells like you swung first, certain agents will be waiting with the Spirit suppression cuffs hot. We’ll give ’em a few days for the surveillance to slack off, then we’ll get moving on our little cleanup project.”

  Instead of a normal conversational pause, Rav took the split-second where I didn’t say anything for some kind of hesitation.

  “Oh, don’t worry, electronically silenced cabin,” he said, pointing his cigarette from wall to wall. “Trust me, old Rav knows all the good blind and deaf spots. I assume you’ve got silencer on your HUD, too? Anyway, you can speak freely in here.”

  He scooted to the edge of his chair, grinning like we were both in on a secret, and leaned his elbows on his knees.

  “Listen, I didn’t want to say anything out there among the unwashed rabble, but I’m a big fan, Death cultivator. You probably get that a lot. But I’m not your run-of-the-river admirer. I’m something of an enthusiast when it comes to wetwork. Done a fair bit in my day. Never on the books, of course. But let’s just say I’ve wrung out some confessions and left a few bodies to float to the surface.” He cracked his knuckles. “If you know what I mean.”

  It would’ve been impossible not to know, but I let him keep talking. He bragged about heinous tortures he’d come up with and bloody massacres he’d perpetrated while Judgment Beyond the Veil played out on his lace-patterned eyes.

  Vaya Tre Ravomet had never killed anyone in his life. He was one of those sleazy, adjacent-to-tough guys who loved the prestige but was too cowardly to commit any of the atrocities himself. Scared of the heat, but happy to stand next to the kitchen so everyone would think he was a chef.

  He had planted evidence that led to false convictions and wrongful executions, lost evidence so evil guys got off scot-free, intimidated witnesses, and watched doors so other corrupt CPA agents could carry out the kind of tortures and beatings he claimed he’d done himself. The only people Vaya Tre Ravomet was brave enough to beat up himself were his kids.

  Righteous fury burnt through my veins while I listened to Rav bragging, but I held back Damnation and nodded along, pretending like I believed everything he said.

  “See, I get it,” he said. “You and me, we know how to command respect. We know how to get done what needs to get done. That’s why the Emperor wants me heading up the CPA here on Selk. He knows what I’m capable of and how valuable that makes me.”

  What he knows is you’re a cowardly little puke who will do anything he says and never stand up to him, I thought. You’re not a threat to anybody but the innocent.

  This guy was going down, just not yet. It made me sick to wait, especially considering what his kids were going to have to live through in the meantime, but Rav had a job to do before I could take him out.

  He had to lead me to a good CPA agent to take his place.

  e