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Prologue

Midas. Area 4 (Ainis).

The large, domed arboretum showed off what Tanagura's vaunted biotechnology industry could accomplish given free reign. Every section of the park sported a variety of trees and brightly colored flowers. A rich variety of butterflies and insects and birds fluttered about carelessly. Soft breezes wafting from the negative ion generators bathed the skin. Taking a single breath of the refreshing air soaked deep into the flesh. It was a garden of paradise.

The nightless city of Midas had more to offer the visitor than the uninterrupted glow of garish neon that emanated from the Pleasure Quarters. Key among its many enterprises was this refuge where the exhausted party animal could pause and raise his spent spirits.

It was late in the afternoon. Iason and Katze strolled down one of the many flowered paths winding through the park. The two looked like a couple of businessmen taking a breather, escaping the hustle and bustle of the day in this tranquil setting. Except that one of them suggested something quite apart from the ordinary.

Though Iason's shades covered half of his face, they did nothing to diminish the impact of a beautiful face haloed by shining, golden hair. His body was designed as if to the artist's golden mean, and he was clothed in a deceptively simple uniform that represented the highest fashion of the elite. The combination entranced the eyes to a painful extent. The sense of Iason's presence was so overpowering that it turned the scarred face of Katze—who followed closely beside Iason like a shadow—into an afterthought.

The too-powerful pull of the sight was mesmerizing. Passers-by felt compelled to stop and stare and take a breath and exclaim: A Tanagura Blondy!

Such statements were accompanied by more than simple shades of longing. Still, nobody attempted to impede the refined gait of Iason and Katze as they wandered through the park. They were impervious to the whispered voices that erupted in their wake.

"So you still haven't tracked down Kirie?" Iason asked.

Katze could detect better than anyone the slightest change in degree of Iason's voice, a change that could lend a single word. But, as always, the tone of Iason's voice was low and calm as a summer morning.

"I'm sorry," Katze apologized. And then added, concisely summing up what he knew, "We've thoroughly searched every place he's likely to be. The crew he runs doesn't know anything."

"Then the incursion by the Midas Division of Public Safety was fruitless?"

"Not necessarily. Crossing the border limits the number of places Kirie can hide. Thanks to him, the idea of slum extraterritoriality has been proven false. After this, we can allow additional deterrents deployed against the mongrels, along with more effective propaganda campaigns from Midas."

Katze spoke plainly and without prevarication. He harbored no sentimental feelings toward his own home. He had roots in Guardian and Ceres, but at the age of thirteen, he'd been rendered a eunuch and installed as "furniture" in Eos. He hadn't only lost his ability to reproduce, but his ability to empathize with the fragility of human emotions. Even a sense of nostalgia was foreign to him. He knew too well that Guardian was just a polluted paradise.

Instead of rotting away in the fetid bird cage of the slums, Katze had neutered his emotions and become a perfect Eos appliance, ultimately destined to be cast out, rusting unused with the rest of the scrap. Katze's fate was to turn that on its head and retire from the black market as Iason Mink's faithful dog.

Katze had committed the most lethal act of betrayal furniture could, and yet he'd been granted clemency according to the whims of his owner. This was in spite of the advice from Iason's colleagues, who viewed life through the lens of a strict meritocracy. They considered Iason's actions equivalent to digging through the trash.

Calling it "good luck" wasn't accurate, though. It was the great wheel of fate turning, and that was where it had deposited Katze. Given the situation he found himself in, Katze was intellectually well-equipped to analyze all the data coming out of the slums and grasp the very essence of its reality. But moving chess pieces around the board was not enough.

The stifling, stagnant slum was a perverted slag heap of the male sex. Common sense and common values did not operate. Unnatural risks were taken as a matter of course. Lacking experience on the ground, what the head could comprehend ultimately added up to nothing more than empty theorizing.

When Riki had become a courier under Katze's tutelage, that raw truth had been forced into Katze's brain. He'd come to understand the nature and character of the slum mongrels that he had never experienced in the flesh.

Though that may have been the only value of Riki's existence, Riki shook Katze's whole identity—for good and bad, beyond all expectations, penetrating to the emotions hibernating in his soul. Though it was different from the way Iason had attached himself to Riki, Katze couldn't hope to extricate himself from this accursed Möbius strip.

If only Katze had made a different choice back then. Somehow things would have turned out differently. five years later and it still throbbed, like an open wound. And if he had, probably—surely—

The thoughts spun around in his head in an endless loop, never finding purchase. Those feelings should have been eradicated long ago. And yet—Katze remained untroubled about tracking down Kirie.

"In other words, better that attention be drawn to these entanglements with Midas than to some clumsily leaked goings-on at Guardian," Iason said.

Despite the irony, Katze sensed no disagreement on Iason's part. Though it wasn't actual praise, this was as close as Iason came to expressing his feelings.

"An incursion by the Midas security guards ratcheted up the impact even more than if it had been the Ceres police."

What Kirie had seen at Guardian could change everything in Ceres. But if they could stoke enough hatred in the slums and make Kirie the scapegoat, then the mongrels would rush to deliver Kirie into their hands.

Approached by someone in possession of the information Kirie had, there were people who'd take the risk and provide Kirie safe passage. But concoct an excuse for the Midas Darkmen to start invading the slums, and the mongrels would give any wanted man a wide berth.

Taking into consideration what was most likely to tip the balance of power between Midas and Ceres, it was the best strategy.

In the slums, the envy felt toward the "winners" went beyond ordinary jealousy. Those who strove to get ahead, got rejected, and then slunk back to the slums were the pitiful "Cockers." But Riki, the heretic in their midst, had rejected the title. Riki was more than just another "beaten dog."

"You've summed up the situation nicely, but these deterrents won't add up to much if they don't deliver us Kirie," Iason said.

At some point, running from cover to cover, Kirie's luck would run out. The potential squealers would weigh the plusses and minuses. There was no denying the power of fresh information, but sometimes the ability to put lives in the balance proved the winning trump card. No matter how highly a nouveau riche upstart thought of himself, he wouldn't amount to much if he couldn't factor those variables into the equation.

In this case, though, they were talking about a stupid brat with no sense. If Kirie didn't seek out a buyer for his information, then he'd have no defense. As far as Katze could tell, only luck had kept Kirie out of trouble for so long. Kirie was an amateur who didn't know what he had to be scared of.

"Nothing in the old mines at Dana-Burn?" Iason asked.

"Off-limits to residents of the slums. Unless Kirie was in a suicidal mood, he wouldn't go there."

"I was wondering if the internal security systems from back when Ceres declared independence were still operational."

Dana-Burn had once been a sanctuary to those "resisting" Midas. Now it was a forgotten artifact. It'd grown too big and soaked up too much capital to simply sell for scrap. So it sat there, neglected. The blueprints had been lost long ago, so it became a labyrinth from which none who entered escaped alive.

"Besides Bison, who else could Kirie turn to?" Iason asked.

"Nobody I'm familiar with."

"Lovers? Friends?"

"He was fond of boasting how he only had the best." Iason's mouth tightened into a wry smile.

"Kuger's kid?"

"Indeed."

"Well, at least he aimed high," Iason said nonchalantly.

The first time Katze had heard about it, the revelation had hit him hard, leaving him speechless. The "special" child who'd never stepped outside that corrupt Eden—the sheltered son of those who held the keys to the Guardian hegemony—an orchid nurtured in a greenhouse.

The scion of the Kuger Clan believed that everybody should, by nature, bow down to him. The pitiful product of his own hubris, Manon was an empty shell but with pride to spare, and he'd fallen under Kirie's spell.

Katze was amazed. He'd thought it was a joke at first. How had Kirie pulled it off? Whispered sweet nothings in Manon's ears? Offered Manon his body? Katze couldn't wrap his mind around the affair. What did Kirie have to bargain with? What bewitching powers did he possess?

The more Katze pondered this question, the more he had to conclude that Manon was stupider than he'd thought. The human animal was a mysterious creature that defied logic and common sense.

"It's hard to believe that Kirie had so much power over Manon, to get him down into the depths of Guardian," Katze said.

Hard to believe. And if Katze thought so, the news must have hit Guardian even harder.

"More than the gaping holes in security being revealed, their crisis management abilities were shown to be lacking," Katze went on.

Despite the overwhelming outside influence of Tanagura, Guardian had no competition, no natural enemies. Perhaps that was the sum of the problem.

"The blood is stagnating, you think?" Iason asked. "Perhaps Guardian's hegemony needs an infusion of new blood."

Katze couldn't discern from Iason's tone of voice what other meanings he might be getting at. He did know that this incident scared the representatives of the clan that led Guardian. The feared Blondy who ran the black market hated incompetence and carelessness. The situation wasn't the result of an innocent mistake, but the product of pure mismanagement. Tanagura could not kindly overlook it.

For purposes of public consumption, Ceres was designated a special autonomous region independent of Midas, expunged from the official maps. It being in fact nothing more than a giant bioengineering farm, there was no way a Blondy could get openly involved. For

that reason, it made sense to entrust Katze as the liaison between the two parties.

"What's become of the Kuger boy?" Iason asked.

"A shock like that would generate the highest degree of alienation. All the psychotherapy in the world isn't likely to restore his mind," Katze said, remembering how Manon had slandered him to his face.

"As one would expect, an orchid grown in a greenhouse is a fragile thing," Iason said, but who was he thinking of when he expressed his feelings so plainly? Katze didn't have to ask. "So what does Kuger have to say?"

"He is sorry that Manon was not properly supervised. But whatever punishment is handed down, the secret is already loose."

Perhaps taken aback by the sudden clarity of the otherwise hesitant Katze's unusually clipped reply, Iason stopped and looked at him.

"What's this? Something else on your mind?"

"No. Just that the head of Guardian seems more concerned about the state of his son than the gravity of the situation he finds himself in."

"Do you doubt that if his son had screwed up sufficiently to take down the entire clan, Kuger would love him just the same?"

For a moment, Katze's eyes opened wide. He had the feeling he was hearing Iason say something he'd never heard before or would again. A second later he wasn't even sure he'd heard it at all.

Iason raised an eyebrow. "You find that strange?"

"What?"

"My use of the word love."

"Well—not really—" the flustered Katze stammered. His heart pounded in his chest.

But despite that—

"So Kirie wasn't paired up with anybody but the Kuger boy?" Iason's unflappable voice snapped Katze back to reality.

"No," Katze said, a touch of hoarseness at the back of his throat. He clucked to himself. This was no time to drift off. He rebuked himself and stiffened his resolve.

"I guess Kirie's ambitions mean more to him than sex?" Iason asked.

"I suspect he sees it mostly as a means to an end."

Katze couldn't speak for someone as clueless as Manon, but he couldn't imagine a social climber like Kirie actually forming romantic attachments.

"But even possessed of such blind ambition, there are walls that cannot be surmounted," Katze said.

"You mean Riki?"

Rather than nod, Katze fell silent. He'd defer everything about Riki to Iason. Though Riki and Kirie didn't share anything in common, the simple truth was that the only person it all revolved around was Iason. And this turn of events surely had caught Katze by surprise as well.

"To get ahead in the world, Kirie would sell his pride without hesitation. Riki would sooner throw himself in the gutter than do the same. That difference amounts to an insurmountable wall," Iason said.

A counterfeit of the real thing.

In the end, the imitation had not bested the original. That summed everything up into the expected outcome. Or perhaps it had been a mistake all along to speak of Riki and Kirie in the same breath.

Kirie had believed that given the same once-in-a-lifetime chance as Riki, he would come out on top. But Riki had paid his dues and earned his scars. That was a completely different proposition than Kirie simply taking the bait dangling ill front of his eyes.

Getting ahead in the world.

Katze doubted that Kirie could begin to imagine the true meaning of "being prepared".

"Master Iason—"

"What?"

"Did you know that the Midas Police Center accessed Riki's records using a priority access code?"

"I know."

"But they could uncover Riki's pet registration and the fact that he was released back into the slums."

"Not a concern," Iason replied brusquely. "He's a slum mongrel. Pet Law applies only to Midas-registered serial numbers. Specialized breeds are exempt."

Under normal circumstances, a person looking for loopholes in the law and forcing square logic through round holes would be considered crazy. Katze had observed Iason play this "exception" card so often that he could only watch and sigh.

"Besides, all the records the MPC accessed have been deleted."

Meaning, the MPC had figured out that the special code indicated Riki's owner as a Blondy. No matter how feared the Darkmen were in Midas, they knew that there were people even higher up that they had to answer to.

In the entire galaxy, only a slum mongrel could be so stunningly ignorant as to underestimate the power and authority of the Tanagura elite. As a citizen of a perverted world cut off from the rest of existence, Riki could look Iason in the eye without fear.

At that moment, Iason slightly raised his gaze. "I take it they had a good time with him."

Katze saw Iason was looking in the direction of the earlier captivity and agreed that the Darkmen very probably had. Iason was a Blondy, standing at the very pinnacle of power in Tanagura. If the fancy struck him, his eyes could see anywhere he wished in real time.

"Because he's just a slum mongrel," Katze said.

That's what happened to a slum mongrel when the Darkmen got their hands on one. A slum mongrel who strayed into their territory was nothing more than a cockroach. Nobody needed permission to crush one underfoot.

Even the Human Rights Commission of the Galactic Commonwealth had nothing to say about the non-existence of Ceres. All their genteel thoughts and high-minded philosophies caved before the awesome power of Tanagura. That was the truth of the world.

When the Darkmen had been unleashed, Katze figured that Iason had tacitly approved of the inevitability of such an outcome. But Iason's anger at people taking his property for granted won out over cool logic.

Katze hadn't anticipated that the Darkmen would go so far as to transport Riki from the slums to the MPC. That they would access his personal data was another unexpected—and unforeseen—development.

The Darkmen's mission was to track down and apprehend Kirie, not drag his crew off to headquarters and interrogate them. But when it came to slum mongrels, they didn't have to worry about following the law. All they had to do was threaten and intimidate until someone talked.

And yet, Riki had ended up at the MPC. Why? The rest of the gang had been given the third degree on the spot. The Darkmen hadn't bothered to take them to the station.

The kids from the slums cruised the Midas nights to get away from the stifling, oppressive atmosphere of Ceres and blow off some steam. They'd mug a few tourists and pawn the pilfered plastic—but all told, it didn't amount to much. It was pocket change for drugs and alcohol. That was life in the slums.

The mongrels were insects, and so they were exterminated. Bugs to be swatted—that was the depth of the impression they left on the Midas Division of Public Safety. There was no need to go digging through personal files. It wasn't worth the time or bother.

In the slums, it was widely believed that when a mongrel fucked up and got nabbed by the Darkmen, his name went on a blacklist. The truth was, the Darkmen didn't bother with that, either. They had a little fun, gave them a working over, and tossed them out with the trash. Nobody asked for reasons, nobody offered excuses. Garbage didn't need it.

But Riki alone was different.

Katze didn't have to try hard to imagine what kind of treatment he'd received at the MPC.

A tone of voice betraying a brazenness just shy of arrogance—black-eyed insolence unwilling to curry favor with anyone—Katze understood how a man could fall headlong into the pit of his own making without realizing it.

Riki the Black. The destroying angel—how true the moniker was. That was the easiest thing to understand about Riki. For good or evil, there was something inside Riki that excited other men. He was a mysterious beast and they couldn't resist reaching out to stroke his mane.

Iason had. And so had Katze. They scratched that itch in different ways and for different reasons, and the implications were entirely different. Kirie had felt that impulse as well, felt it so strongly that he completely veered off-track.

If Riki knew that such things were being said about him behind his back, he'd no doubt fly into a white-hot rage. There was something else inside him as well that simply couldn't take it all with a smile and a shake of the head.

In a way, the hardened pride of the Darkmen would have made Riki the perfect toy to play with, a trophy to hang on the wall. But after they'd had their way with him, learning that he was a Blondy's pet must have drained the blood from their faces.

A slum mongrel being a pet was staggering beyond belief. No less than its owner being a Blondy. But the reality stared them in the face.

Without tying up all questions, Riki's records were expunged from the databases, not out of concern for the Tanagura elite, but from fear of the powerful Blondy.

They were well into the red zone on the crisis management dial. There were places in this world that a sensible person did not go, questions he didn't ask without first knowing the answers. The decision of the Darkmen chief was final, the frustrations of any individual team member notwithstanding.

"So how shall we proceed?" Katze asked.

"How, indeed?" Iason paused, and then delivered his orders in his typically unflappable tones. "Look deeper, turn over more stones. That kid might have allies in the police holding their tongues and biding their time."

"Any opinions about what methods shall be deemed appropriate?"

For the time being, it was better to be safe than sorry. Katze wanted to be sure he and Iason were on the same page. Though they always were.

"I'll leave that up to you. Only make sure I get that information, no matter how trivial it might seem to you."

Iason's calm and collected countenance betrayed no hesitation. His extraordinary attachment to Riki was undeniable, and yet he spoke in such a manner as to completely separate his public and private lives—the voice of the emperor of the black market, suffused with dignity and authority.

"I understand," Katze said and bowed deeply. He would do what had to be done, whatever that required.