Donnie Four-Eyes’s real name was Don Williams, but based on what I’d heard of his voice so far, he didn’t have a career as the gentle giant of alien country music ahead of him. He also knew an all-night soba and coffee stand nearby and agreed—reluctantly—to hear me out.

  The dragonflies that had watched our fight started to follow us, but I hit them with a cloaked blast of Moldering Bones. In a heartbeat, they rusted over and flaked apart, destroyed in an instant by millennia of decay. Metallic dust sprinkled across the concrete.

  Donnie frowned. “More surveillance drones are going to turn up to replace these. That’s what they’re programmed to do. Destroying them will only alert the hub that someone is taking out their dragonflies. Don’t do it again.”

  “I don’t need your Technol buddies looking over my shoulder.”

  “I control what they see. Let me handle them. You worry about convincing me not to slap on the Spirit suppression cuffs and drag you kicking and screaming into a cell.”

  That was an empty threat. He’d seen what I could do; he knew he couldn’t force me into anything unless I let him. That was the whole reason he was giving me the chance to explain myself.

  But we left the warehouse district and headed deeper into the city with the pretense intact.

  “And drop your cloaking,” Donnie said.

  “Why?”

  “So I can see an attack coming,” he said, an edge of duh in his nasally voice. “If you’re legit, if you really want me to trust you, that would go a long way.”

  “Fine.” I let go of Last Light, Last Breath.

  Doubts and problems from this insane night tried to flood my brain as we walked, but I pushed them back. I’d deal with all that later, when I had time for it.

  The soba stand was made of corrugated tin and driftwood. Instead of a front wall, it had a faded rain tarp hanging to the sidewalk despite being located inside a skyless bubble miles below the surface of the ocean. Warm, yellow light leaked out around the edges and through the patches where the tarp was getting stringy.

  Donnie and I ducked in and sat down at the counter. An ancient Selken with a spine like a crazy straw stood on a stool, watching a tiny black-and-white projection screen with the volume at I Don’t Need a Hearing Aide levels and stirring a cauldron as big as he was. Beneath the pot, a blue flame hissed.

  I held my breath while the old guy climbed off the stool, holding the shelves and wobbling every inch of the way. It was too easy to imagine Gramps in the same position, with his terrible balance and brittle bones.

  Finally, the old guy made it down. I forced my hands to unclench and my shoulders to relax as he shuffled over to us. It’d been a long time since I’d felt that. I hoped Gramps was all right back home, not doing anything that could get him hurt.

  “Coffee and a bowl, extra salt,” the old man rasped, pointing a gnarled finger at the CPA agent. He nodded at me. “What about this one? He all right, Donnie?”

  The Ylef glanced sidelong at me. Suspicion made his eyes look even more catlike.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ll see, I guess.”

  “Tell him to order something or get out. No free seats for meat roaches. And pay first.”

  I checked the prices on the grease-splattered chalkboard. Part of me knew I didn’t really need to these days, but I pulled up my USL account on the way to make sure I could afford it.

  “Coffee and a bowl of soba,” I said, transferring the credits. “With the regular amount of salt. And extra manatee steak strips, please.” I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since the party, and that had just been tiny finger foods.

  The old man’s HUD beeped a payment confirmation. He thumped his fist on the counter.

  “Coming up!” He started to turn back to his cauldron.

  “Hey, Hino, while I’m here.” Donnie held out the halves of his coke-bottle glasses. “Do you think you could…?”

  “For anybody else, no,” the old man said. “For you, also no.”

  Donnie snorted and handed the glasses over.

  Smiling at his own joke, Hino touched his thumb to the sheered-off ends of the nose piece. Amber Spirit oozed onto them. Then the old man squeezed them together. When he let go, they held. He gave them back to Donnie, the earpiece coming free of his gnarled fingers with a sticky sound.

  “Adhesive Spirit,” Donnie explained unnecessarily, shoving the glasses back on his face.

  Hino headed for the stack of bowls on a shelf. “Two coffees and two bowls. Now everybody stop bothering me so’s I can get ’em.”

  Donnie stared through his repaired lenses at the old man’s bent back.

  “You murdered a CPA agent,” he said in a low voice.

  “I killed her. It’s not the same. She was evil and she wasn’t going to stop being evil.”

  “You should be under Total Lockdown in a cell, waiting for your ticket to Van Diemann.”

  “It wouldn’t be my first time there.”

  “It would be your last time. If you made it all the way there. The CPA doesn’t take kindly to agent-killers.”

  “She wanted me to kill the guy she was using for a meat shield. A civilian. You saw. You were going to stop her.”

  “I—”

  Donnie went silent as Hino came back and sat down our bowls and two pairs of reusable chopsticks, peeling them out of his sticky grasp.

  “Coffees,” Hino muttered, shuffling off again.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “I wouldn’t have killed Ling Fey,” the Ylef finished. He raised his bowl to his lips and took a big slurp of broth. “Maybe I should have.” He thumped the bowl back on the counter. “But that’s not how it’s done. I have a badge now. I’m not that guy anymore.”

  “I know you’re not. That’s why I’m here.”

  I scooped up a tangle of noodles and meat while I tried to decide how much I should tell him.

  What Judgement Beyond the Veil had shown me for Donnie Four-Eyes was a man trying to do better, to become a force for good from inside a black hole of evil. The Digital Architect cultivator had been scooped out of a slum by the Technols when he was just a kid, before some big company or tech guild could get their hands on him. He’d spent years getting his Shogun any leverage she needed or wanted. Where there was no dirt, he built it out of ones and zeroes and bits and bytes. Where people stuck to their guns and resisted, he shoveled dirt onto loved ones or dug up family members in healer care and pulled the plug from continents or planets away. He had shut down shuttle systems midflight, opened the airlocks on transport vessels hundreds of thousands of miles from anything resembling an atmosphere, changed distillery prescriptions, emptied USL accounts, and filled other USL accounts.

  “I know every awful thing you’ve done for the Technols,” I told him. “And I know that once you got to Selk, you started looking for workarounds. Ways to sort-of carry out orders, but while hurting as few people as possible. You’re trying to change from one of the bad guys to one of the good guys. Why?”

  Hino plunked down two cups of coffee on the counter in front of us, then shuffled back to his blaring programs.

  Donnie balanced his chopsticks across the top of his bowl and took a sip of coffee. Green text flickered on his lenses, but he blinked out of it.

  “I don’t have a record and there’s no tracing me to the Technols,” he said. “It’s easy to look clean when you control the information that’s out there. Our Emperor needed someone in the CPA on Selk to keep his stooge Chillion at the top, and keep a leash on him while he was up there.

  “At the CPA training module, I roomed with a guy. Steppan. This knucklehead…” The Ylef smirked into his coffee cup. “He actually believed what the Confederation put in the handbook. Honor, justice, ‘we are the shining shields.’ All of it. We graduated together. I got posted to Selk, Step went back to Pilon. He wanted to clean up his home planet. And then…”

  Donnie blew out a long breath. “And then some Pilonian high on white rain stabbed him during a general store hold-up. Step wasn’t even on duty. He just saw civilians in danger and did what he always did—became the shining shield.”

  We sat there not talking for a while. Donnie stared at his coffee. I ate. Hino’s projector screen filled the cramped space with noise.

  “What you’ve been doing lately,” I said eventually. “You’re actually trying clean up the CPA hub here.”

  Donnie didn’t say anything and didn’t look up from his cup. Just when I had decided he hadn’t heard me over the old man’s programs, the Ylef nodded.

  I tapped my chopsticks on the rim of my bowl, thinking.

  “I’m supposed to be here to take over Selk’s arm of the CPA for the Dragons. Basically, just slaughter Technols until there aren’t any left. Once that was done, I was supposed to instate Agent Vaya Tre Ravomet as the new director. That would be the guy you heard me kill after Ling Fey.”

  “I know Vaya Tre. Local guy. Smoker. Awful teeth. Can’t or won’t curb his Corruption Spirit. His equipment has to constantly be replaced because he lets his affinity break it down. And they don’t assign partners to him anymore. Being around him wears down control, willpower, anything. His last partner had been on the wagon for years, but he went back to drinking within two days of walking the beat with him. There’s just something about him.”

  “He also beats his kids,” I said, because it felt like somebody should know it besides the kids. “Used to, I guess. Someone’s going to have to do something about them. There’s a boy and a girl. He got their mom declared an unfit parent, but from what I saw, she seemed good. So maybe if you could find her…”

  Donnie reached beneath his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I’ll take care of it.”

  For a minute, he went to work blinking around the hyperweb on his lenses.

  I finished the last of my soba and wondered how long I had before somebody told Emperor Takeshi that I’d killed Rav and ditched the assignment. Maybe the fact that Rav’s HUD and other equipment was always wearing down and needing replaced would work in my favor. Hopefully the Dragons who dealt with him were used to delays in communication. It had taken most of a month to get to Selk from Shinotochi-Ryu, but the Komodo Emperor probably had other ketsus stationed closer who he could send.

  Then something else broke through to my brain. If Rav could wear down someone’s willpower through proximity and intentionally brick someone’s HUD, could he erode a mountain of Miasma with an ancient khan buried inside?

  Death cultivator finds the answer too late, Hungry Ghost croaked. Corruption cultivator sensed a hidden grave and dug and dug just to see what might crawl out.

  Immediately, I dumped a full spiral of Miasma into Jealous as the Grave to reinforce what Rav had torn down.

  Hungry Ghost sent me a feeling like laughter. Corruption cultivator was too curious for Death cultivator’s own good.

  Furiously, I poured more Spirit into the construct.

  Hungry Ghost kept laughing.

  Then I realized what was happening. He was sucking down the Miasma as I fed it into Jealous as the Grave. The barrier was too thin now to stop him.

  I cut off the flow.

  Soon, Death cultivator, the ancient khan promised.

  “Death cultivator.” Donnie Four-Eyes was staring at me, leaned way back. “I’m warning you, if you don’t stop whatever you’re doing right now, I’ll have to take extreme measures.”

  Across the shack’s tiny kitchen, a tiny batwing back door swung noisily. Hino had cleared out.

  Oh right, I’d gone psycho silent while unspooling enough Miasma to alert cultivators all the way to the outer planets.

  “It was nothing. Just maintenance.”

  I added Hungry Ghost to the list of all the crap I was going to have to deal with.

  “So, we were talking about Rav. Right? He probably would have made things on Selk a million times worse as Director of the CPA. He was just in Sho, but our Emperor wanted him in charge, which means he was way more dangerous than he looked.”

  Had I already said all that? I skipped to the point.

  “Anyway, when I finish clearing out the Technols, I want you to be Selk’s CPA director instead. Do you know any agents you can trust? Ones who’ll keep the Big Five corruption out and try to fix things for the better?”

  Slowly, Donnie settled back into a normal sitting position.

  “Maybe.” His brow furrowed behind his glasses. “Why are you doing this? You’re a Death cultivator. Not to mention you might be the most infamous Eight-Legged Dragon who’s currently active. What’s your angle?”

  I cupped my hands around my coffee. Miasma was like a frozen turquoise fog, and even though I had my internal alchemy going, I’d just used enough at once that my fingers felt like ice. The warmth seeping through the walls of the mug burned.

  “You’re trying to do good,” I said. “And in the director’s position with a bunch of folks who are also good, you could do a lot more. I don’t want to just kill bad guys. That’s not enough. If you don’t put something good in place of the bad you took out, more bad will just grow back.”

  That sounded dumb. I should have thought this speech out ahead of time.

  “You’re someone who can make sure justice and right wins.” I studied the steam rising from my coffee. “I’m more like a broom sweeping up the evil. I can get rid of the bad, but I can’t bring in the good.”

  “Why not?” the Ylef asked.

  “Because I know what I am.”

  For all my accusing Rali of living in a dream world, he’d been right about one thing. On Sarca, I had taken innocent lives. That was murder. If I could justify murder once, I could do it again, and it wouldn’t matter whether it was me or the devil corruption, because the people in the way would be just as dead. I saw it when I looked Takeshi-ketsu in the eyes, and I saw it when I looked in the mirror.

  “People can change,” Donnie insisted. He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. “If that’s true for me, it might even be true for meat roaches.”

  Yeah, but maybe it’s not for Death cultivators.

  I took a big gulp of coffee. It scorched a trail down my throat to my stomach, trying and failing to warm me up from the inside out.

  “You stood up to your Technol friend even though she could have turned you into a puppet and made you cut yourself to pieces, and you tried to arrest me even though you couldn’t see anything and you knew I could squish your life point like a mosquito.”

  I set my cup down and got up, shoving my chair in under the counter.

  “You’re the kind of guy I want in charge in case I ever become the guy who needs taking out.”