Mars Time: 08:41, March 9, 2295

  Room 81, Hotel Lianhua, Lane 69, Dragon District, Xing Hong

  The silk was cold against her skin.

  Fuuka Natsukawa cinched the dark purple kimono at her waist where the fabric met the black corset beneath. The enchanted kimono itself was Proximan silk, woven by Radi-Mons called the Weavers on Shashan. It fit like a second skin. She wore it for missions, for reports to her Elder, and for the rare occasions when she wanted to feel like herself.

  Outside the hotel window, Xing Hong carried on.

  Someone three stories down was shouting. "Reconstituted pork buns! $1 Atomic Dollar each, buy two get one free!"

  A cab honked twice at the pedestrians, then a third time with a frustrated growl from its driver. "Buddha's ass, walk faster, you fucks!"

  Somewhere behind the buildings, a Zephyrium processor hummed its low, constant sound, so woven into the city's ambience that most residents forgot it was there. Fuuka never did. On Devithar—the now-dead Proximan planet she was from—silence meant the generators had failed and everyone had six hours to live.

  She checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Bob cut trimmed. Lips reddened. The face that looked back was twenty-three at most, soft-featured and lovely in the way that made Sol men drop their guard. Forty-three years behind those pearl-like eyes. A smile she'd cultivated like a weapon.

  One week since the Polaris—carrying the Prefect's Associates—departed from the Xing Hong. She'd seen it on the television. Atomic News Network had been running the story for days: a Fenris pack, carried by an Elder Kraken, had ambushed the outbound Terra Alliance ship in the Mars-Venus corridor. Dilinur Altai and her Associates had been attacked by a Kraken and boarded by Draugs. The distress call made by Diego Rodriguez, the ship's pilot, had bounced across half a dozen relay stations before the follow-up came through: successful resistance, ship damaged but intact, continuing course for Venus.

  The whole city knew. People in the Slumbering Mantis Inn were still buying each other rounds over it, as if the Polaris crew were local sports heroes who'd won an upset.

  Fuuka adjusted her sleeve, making sure the collapsed Spirit Lantern was seated properly in the left one. Kage, her Soma Dagger, sat on her right hip via the obi, the amethyst blade invisible under the sheath.

  She crossed the hotel room to the corner where the planter pot sat.

  The Valva Falam looked like nothing special from the outside. A fat succulent the color of a bruised plum, sitting in a ceramic pot on a wooden stand. Purple veins threaded its thick leaves. A hotel maid had tried to water it two days ago, and Fuuka had needed to gently explain that her plant was special. Which was true. Resembling a large purple vagina, the Valva Falam served very particular purposes.

  Fuuka knelt beside it and breathed out in Devavā?ī. "Valva Falam, ahmev, muktah. [Vulva Fruit, open up for me.]"

  Not a regular incantation. She pushed pheromones into the air, the chemical signature that only a Worm Witch's glands could produce. The succulent's leaves trembled. Then they peeled back, one by one, revealing the slick purple-veined interior beneath. The plant unfolded like a woman's canal opening, its fleshy petals pulling apart with a soft, wet sound. Beneath the outer shell lay the passage: a narrow channel of glistening tissue, wide enough for her body.

  Fuuka stepped out of her sandals and placed her bare feet on the Valva Falam's threshold. The tissue yielded under her weight, firm but giving, like standing on a tongue. She'd done this dozens of times. A shuttle made of meat.

  She closed her eyes and let herself sink in.

  The passage contracted around her in a slow wave, drawing her forward. Warm, slick walls pressed against her kimono, her bare arms, her face. Enzymatic secretions cleaned as they moved, breaking down the Mars dust and city grime on her clothes and skin, tingling. Rakshasa design never separated function from intimacy. The Valva Falam cleaned you, held you, pushed you through like something being born in reverse. Fuuka kept her breathing steady and felt the familiar compression as the passage narrowed, tightened, and then released.

  She emerged feet-first into light.

  The chamber on the other side was small, barely four meters across. Its walls were organic, ribbed like the inside of a gourd, surfaces dark and damp. Clusters of bioluminescent fungi clung to the joints where wall met ceiling. The air smelled like wet earth and overripe fruit. A low divan sat against the far wall, draped in dark cloth. Beside it, a low table with a ceramic tea set. Two cups.

  Shazmeen Vinh was already seated.

  The Elder Worm Witch wore a flowing long dress in aubergine huge, the high collar framing her jaw, the fabric split at her hips to fall over dark silk trousers. Her full lips the color of dark wine, her long black hair hung loose past her shoulders, straight and heavy, a bamboo hat beside her chair. No makeup beyond what her transformed biology provided naturally. She looked thirty, maybe thirty-five. She was a hundred and eight. "You've come."

  "I have come." When Fuuka approached, Shazmeen uncrossed her legs and lifted the hem of the dress past her thighs, past the absence of undergarments that would have scandalized any Sol woman watching. To a Rakshasa, concealing the vulva was a rejection of femininity. Shazmeen revealed herself the way a general reveals a flag: as protocol, as identity, as the thing you saluted.

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  Fuuka bowed at ninety degrees. Then she knelt, placed her hands on the cool floor, and pressed her lips to Shazmeen's labia, kissing it once before landing two gentle sucks on Shazmeen's clit. A formal greeting. Subordinate to Elder. The gesture carried the same weight as a Sol person's handshake, a priest's genuflection. Fuuka performed it without hesitation.

  Shazmeen hummed. A low, pleased sound. Her fingers found Fuuka's hair and stroked once, the touch fond and brief.

  "You may rise, sister."

  Fuuka rose, smoothing her kimono. "I bring news from Mars, Elder."

  Shazmeen's eyes traced Fuuka from feet to face, the way she always did, reading posture and pheromone shift for anything her words might omit. Then she gestured to the divan. "Sit. I've made tea."

  The tea was Vietnamese, brewed strong in a small steel filter that sat over Shazmeen's cup. The drip was still falling, slow and dark. Fuuka poured her own from a second filter and took the seat offered to her, tucking her legs beneath her on the divan. The cushion was warm. Everything in Shazmeen's pocket dimension ran a few degrees above comfortable, the organic walls radiating the heat of slow biological processes happening somewhere below.

  "The Polaris," Shazmeen said.

  Fuuka nodded. "You heard, ne."

  "Every bounty hunter in my Inn heard, Fuuka." Shazmeen lifted her cup and sipped. "What I haven't heard is detail."

  "Brynhild Fjeld boarded the ship with a Kraken and at least four other Draugs. She demanded Sigrun. They refused. Fighting in the corridors, multiple decks breached." She paused to let Shazmeen absorb the shape of it. "The Stalwart held the line. Marcus Thorne. He fought Brynhild's symbiote at close range and survived."

  Shazmeen's eyebrows rose by a fraction. On her face, that was surprise. "Survived close quarters with the First Princess's bonded symbiote?"

  "Survived and forced her retreat. With help. The Rigger found a weakness, Marcus held her and the Fjeld girl delivered the killing stroke to the symbiote's head." Fuuka drank her tea. It was bitter and good. "But Brynhild had a Kraken. She could have crushed that ship like a tin can. Instead she boarded and demanded Sigrun."

  Fuuka could see Shazmeen processing it, the older woman's long purple-painted nails tapping against her cup.

  "High Queen Maren wants her Third Daughter back alive," Shazmeen said.

  "Alive and intact. Which limits Fenris's options considerably."

  "And makes Sigrun more valuable to anyone who can get to her first." Shazmeen set her cup down. "The morning after your friends departed, I heard from a pair of palace attendants, off duty and drinking too much. They said Prefect Dilinur brought her Associates to the Seed Dumu shrine before the flight."

  Fuuka tilted her head.

  "Dumu refused Dilinur via her divination blocks. But when this Sigrun tried..." Shazmeen's lips curved. "The blocks landed true. The goddess blessed a Nordling woman who, and I quote the attendant, 'fights and fucks.' The palace staff had it across Xing Hong by dinner."

  "Seed Dumu blessed Sigrun Fjeld." Fuuka let the weight of that settle. A goddess of war and sex choosing a foreign princess who had spent a decade selling her body and killing monsters for bounties. "What do you make of it, mistress?"

  Shazmeen poured herself a second cup. "Seed Dumu blesses warriors. Sigrun qualifies. Simple. The other..." She raised the cup to her lips. "Dumu also blesses those who carry their sexuality honestly. Sigrun spent years as a Leased Lily. She knows her own body the way a Covenant man knows his blade. If the goddess sees that kind of self-possession as something worth filling with purpose..."

  Fuuka leaned back against the divan. "Then it makes her more interesting. And more dangerous to ignore."

  Neither of them said what they were both thinking: that the overlap between Seed Dumu's philosophy and Moro's was closer than either culture would admit.

  "And next," Fuuka said, setting her teacup down with a soft click. "H?kon."

  She pulled up her purple Nucleus Watch's display, angling the holographic readout so Shazmeen could see. Violet light from its dial carved with two-headed oriental dragon cast strange shadows on the chamber's organic walls. "I've spent the past week analyzing the biometric data I gathered when I scanned the baby Diabolisk back at the Inn. The results came back three days ago."

  Shazmeen waited.

  "99.91% probability that this H?kon is a Jokull Radi-Mon. His genetic markers are unmistakable. The mix of Viviparous Lizard, Swinhoe's Tree Lizard, and Komodo Dragon DNA." Fuuka closed the display. "Only one person in the Seven Realms breeds Diabolisks with that template."

  "Dagny Fjeld." Shazmeen's lips curved up.

  "The Second Princess. Primarch of the Jokull Horde." Fuuka folded her hands in her lap. "A baby Diabolisk egg, smuggled out of Europa and placed in the hands of Zhi-Xin Wu. A civilian Rigger. No military background, no Nordling blood, no visible connection to the Jokull Horde whatsoever."

  Shazmeen processed this slowly. She rose from the divan and moved to the low table, lifting the tea filter with her long fingers and setting it aside. Her movements were unhurried, always were. Fuuka had never seen her mentor rush. Shazmeen had outlived everyone who had.

  "Dagny Fjeld doesn't share, however." Shazmeen's voice was steady. "Her entire philosophy is built on Nordling self-reliance. Nordic problems are Nordic people's own concern. Never rely on outsiders."

  "Which means either she's changed, or someone beneath her acted without permission. Either way, Jokull is reaching beyond Europa. They're looking outward."

  "Against Fenris."

  "Against Fenris." Fuuka watched Shazmeen's face carefully. "Xin doesn't know what he's carrying. Only that H?kon is a little life he should nurture. Someone placed that egg where he'd find it. Someone chose him."

  The chamber's bioluminescent fungi pulsed slowly, as if echoing Fuuka's comment.

  "An eleven-year stalemate," Shazmeen murmured. "Dagny has held her ground on Europa against Skarn for over a decade, and she hasn't gained an inch. If someone beneath her is breaking their own rules to recruit Sol allies..."

  "Desperate people make alliances they wouldn't normally consider."

  "We'll keep this in mind." Shazmeen returned to the divan, sitting with her legs folded beneath her. "What else?"

  This was the part Fuuka had been dreading. She kept her voice level. "Venus. Our Proxima trade network picked up fragments. The scientist, Meiya Ji, the woman who created the original Radi-Human and Radi-Mon breeding methods. She was captured. Taken to a Fenris hive cluster some time ago." She paused. "She hasn't been seen since. The hive's profile matches known conversion sites."

  The implication hung in the wet air like the smell of overripe fruit.

  Shazmeen's expression didn't change, but her nails pressed into her thigh. "And her girl Ume? The Radi-Human?"

  "In an Imperial household on Venus. Serving in some capacity. Our source couldn't confirm details, but she's alive and in one piece."

  "Fenris has acquired the mind that created the first Hordes. The Imperium holds the product of her work." Shazmeen steepled her fingers. "And neither faction has moved further."

  "That's what worries me." Fuuka met her Elder's eyes. "They're sitting on these assets. Holding them in reserve. What are they waiting for?"

  Shazmeen didn't answer. The silence stretched. Then she reached for the tea.

  "Then let us discuss what you're really here to talk about."

  Fuuka smiled. Of course Shazmeen knew. She always did.

  "Which side should we help?"