Being an affiliate had its perks. You weren't a slave or a servant.

  You weren't an associate either, but that didn't seem to matter. Everyone was locked into the Void Orb compound. If you wanted, you could go for a walk between the bunker walls and the razor wire separating it from the next compound over.

  "I don't like this," I told Hao, pushing down my stockman on my head as a gust of wind tried to tear it away.

  The air was never still on Remba. The wind whispered, howled, ripped, caressed. Always cold, always from the west, carrying tiny grains of sand that turned the sky a dull, pale yellow, the color of old bones. It made the blue sun look sickly.

  The old-fashioned razor wire made me sickly. It wasn't just the Void Orb compound. It was all over City. Fences three or four meters high, strands of razor barbs that criss-crossed each other in a never ending, never repeating pattern.

  "You've mentioned," she said. "At least we aren't locked up with the slaves. Or the Invisibles."

  I got a sour taste in my mouth at the mention of that name. Invisibles were the closest thing the Syndicates had to judges. Also, juries and executioners. Not belonging to any clan, but hired to enforce singular bargains. Crudmucking system. Only Syndics would be stupid enough to pay someone to stick around and kill you if you broke your word.

  Hao raised an eyebrow. So much for hiding my feelings.

  "We might as well be," I said, failing to joke it all away. "You hear anything from Talain or Geir?"

  "No luck," Hao said. "They haven't found anything. Other than everyone being on edge."

  Stanko's marksmen were quartered in a different part of the compound. I had hoped they'd come walk with us, but maybe they had found a Kylian. Or someone willing to talk. Or maybe they were locked up, about to be tortured and shot.

  Or maybe they were just tired of the scenery. I was. Dust had never been my favorite type of weather.

  "No wonder," I told Hao. "So many clans in such proximity is a fission bomb waiting to detonate. I'm surprised they haven't killed each other yet."

  We walked a narrow strip of sand between the grey concrete of the bunker and a razor wire fence. Another fence seven meters distant, this one separating the Void Orb grounds from the Red Ravens. Neither party was happy about that. Both parties were bored. Slaves who came within gunshot of the Ravens tended to get shot. Only a set of military fatigues and a clearly visible gun kept you somewhat safe.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Not completely, though. From what I'd heard, the clans sniped at each other. Mostly it kept to minor skirmishes, a few shots fired, some slaves killed. Sometimes, it erupted in gunfights out in the desert, when clans intruded on each other's territory without paying. Mostly those quarrels stayed in the desert. Sometimes, they got all the way into City, and then there was a major fight. Those were mostly political, debts and money changing hands as often as bullets. And when bullets flew, there were the Invisibles, ready to step in and restore order by way of more bullets. Lovely system.

  Walking the desolate strip of land between bunkers, surrounded by barbed wire, the wind blowing right through me, I almost wished the Ravens would take a shot at me. Returning fire would give me something to do.

  The 'pedia had lied. I'd expected that, but not the amount of falsehood. Nothing we'd read about Remba had hinted at what we saw. Everything was made up, including the weather reports.

  The wind was unceasing, driven by a Coriolis force and a distant sun, with nothing to break it except the two plateaus.

  It was a Syndicate game world, that much was the truth, but the number of citizens was grossly overrated. The 'pedia listed it at a hundred thousand. If there were five thousand on all of Remba, I'd be surprised. City didn't have a name because it didn't exist, merely a series of bunkers, surrounded by scores of minefields, gun emplacements, electro-scanners. Everything embedded in concrete, each complex a tiny enclave, each enclave a single Syndicate clan.

  Seven clans in all. The Red Ravens I recognized, their blood bird on a sable field flapping over the entrance to the clan bunker. The Void Breath Brotherhood I'd heard of, a bad clan, that, their reputation bloodier and darker than most. The rest were unknowns, or local clans. Either way, they didn't have much in terms of personnel, the Void Orbs included.

  We hadn't managed to find any trace of the Kylians. Small world, small population. They should have been easy to find.

  They were voidmucking impossible to find. I'd lost two kilos of helion playing hands of Three-finger Poker and Star Realms with the Void Orb grunts. Nobody was talking. Even the slaves, desperate to ingratiate themselves to a man with a gun, didn't say anything. I'd tried eavesdropping, but they kept quiet even in private, their chief concerns being food, where to bunk, not getting shot. It was a dreary existence. Even so, I got the feeling that they counted themselves lucky for being in City. Why, I couldn't understand.

  "I really don't like it," I said, expecting a raised eyebrow, or casual curse.

  Hao merely nodded.

  "Fire-and-forget on a pack of chemical rockets," she said. "These people are void-loving insane. Those missiles miss, and they'll go all the way to that fleet hanging above the port."

  "Maybe that's the plan," I said. "Threaten them so they'll make sure to target any escaping ships themselves. Saves the missiles. These Syndics are cheap and trigger happy. Seven clans in a single city. There's so much tension here that it's all primed to explode. We need to find the Kylians and get out."

  "Maybe we'll find something out tomorrow," Hao said.

  We did, but it didn't make me like things any more.