Their landing had been good.

  Lokoae’s main docking station, A’saad, stood three hundred feet above sea level, and was held up by the same gravitational anchors as those on Bor’tho, if not a slightly older, more temperamental made and model. The station’s automated guidance systems took over the final descent, easing the Black Fang into its designated berth with only the slightest shudder.

  A’saad was old, the same way her grandmother was old, Fang thought. The framework of its multi-tiered platform was either scaffolded, rusted, or tarnished from the exposure to the elements, specifically the briny tang of high salinity ocean spray being carried hundreds of feet into the air. Fang remembered how her grandmother had refused to wipe the table with anything other than that exact concoction of potentially lethal salted liquid, to the point that the table was reduced to no more than a patchwork of warped wood and crystallized salt crusts that occasionally fell off like patches of dandruff on her grandfather’s forehead. Fang’s grandmother’s obsession with salt-curing her furniture every evening had gotten so severe that her son had to replace it with a corrosion-proof alloy table, the kind advertised to withstand everything from acid rain to deep-space radiation. The sales pitch had boasted “Impervium?: The Last Table You’ll Ever Need!” with flashy graphics of laser blasts bouncing harmlessly off its surface.

  Turned out, that table was not fireproof.

  Her family had always said that Fang took after her grandmother.

  “What are you thinking about?” Asked Hunter. Only then did Fang realize that her heads were resting on her hands and her elbows were resting on the console. She’d been gazing out the cockpit window, staring idly at the rusted spires which rose and fell with the atmospheric turbulence.

  “Nothing,” Fang replied, a bit too quickly.

  Hunter gave her a sideways glance. “You had your brooding face on.”

  “I don’t brood,” Fang shot back.

  Hunter stared at her for another moment, then sighed. “You know, you could’ve used all that thinking time to just get some sleep instead. Also, the dockies are asking us why we aren’t exiting.”

  “Well aren’t those guys an impatient bunch. They barely handle more than five ships a day, but act like we’re holding back the entire star system!” Fang huffed.

  As she stood, Hunter slung her backpack over her shoulders again, and the straps routinely settled into place. Fang, ever the tech-savvy one, had taken more than a few curious glances at it over time. She was rather confident in her knowledge of hardware and engineering, but she had never seen tech quite like it.

  How the hell did you cram four appendages, a self-stabilizing gravity module, and three separate tool pouches into a single pack? She’d asked. But Hunter had just smiled back.

  They stepped off the ramp, earning a few well-deserved scowls from the dockworkers, who also possessed membrane-like wings like local Bor’thans. Fang, completely undeterred, clapped her hands together. “Alright, listen up. You’re gonna wanna check the aft stabilizers first—had a bit of a wobble on landing, so make sure the calibration’s still within a three-degree tolerance. Then there’s the coolant cycle in the starboard thruster. Ran a little hot, so flush the secondary vents before refueling. And don’t even get me started on the dorsal plating—I swear, one more microfracture and the whole panel’s gonna start rattling like a tin can in a sandstorm. Oh! And check the inertial dampeners! They’ve been acting weird since—”

  The scowls deepened. One dockie massaged his temples. Another crossed his arms and stared at the ship. He was probably going to do something to it later, and Fang would most probably not approve of that ‘something’.

  “Yeah, yeah, we got it,” one waved her off.

  Fang grinned. “Great! I’ll be back to double-check your work.” The moment she turned back to Hunter, she bemoaned, “Why does the bad guy have to be named Gonzo?”She could not stop thinking about Kai’s pet who, unfortunately, shared the same name as this shady individual.

  Hunter loaded up a holo-map of the city from her wristband, and they walked out of the docking station and into the streets. Their destination was The Sink, a partially-submerged district where the streets sagged under the weight of failing infrastructure and desperate adaptation. An absolutely horrific, and equally fitting place for a meet-up.

  Lokoae was even less pedestrian-friendly than Bor’tho. Every step felt slightly wrong, and the vertical sprawl of suspended platforms and floating marketplaces tethered by little more than wishful thinking and fraying cables did not do much to assure Fang of her steps.

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  Hunter glanced at her holo-map as she kept walking. “Looks like we’re going down three levels and—” She frowned. “—hopping across... something.”

  “Something?” Fang repeated.

  Hunter traced her hand on the holo-map, and after a second, pointed to motorized barge waiting at the dock’s edge. She hopped over and jumped on the machine, waving at Fang to come along. The thing did not look operational, its rusted metal deck sagging under her weight. Its pilot, a tired-looking amphibian, sat slouched at the controls, clicking his tongue.

  “This is your first time in The Sink, aye?” the pilot croaked. His accent was particularly phlegmy and difficult to hear, possibly because his throat was coated in whatever sludge passed for air down here.

  Hunter leaned forward slightly, trying to catch his words. “Something like that.”

  The pilot huffed and flipped a few switches, and the engine coughed its lungs off before settling into an unsteady chug. “Best keep your hands to yourself, then. And your feet. If you got a tail, keep that in check too, hai?”

  Hunter turned to Fang and said, “Hands and feet to yourself. Are we clear?”

  Fang completely disregarded both their warnings, stepped onto the barge, and grimaced as it wobbled under her. “This thing has a weight limit, right?”

  The pilot let out a wheezing laugh. “Limit? Ain’t that a funny word. Ain’t nobody fallen through yet.”

  Fang’s eyes narrowed. “Yet?”

  The barge lurched forward, and Fang slammed her forehead against a bronze metal pole protruded from the side.

  “Son of a—” She staggered back, clutching her forehead. “You couldn’t have warned me?”

  Hunter barely held back a snort. “I thought you were supposed to be quick on your feet.”

  The pilot let out a hoarse chuckle. “Watch where you’re going, aye. You don’t wanna be the one that finally knocks it apart.”

  Fang shot him a glare before rubbing her forehead, cursing in Mandarin in the process. The barge continued its slow, uneasy trek, and the water below rippled with streaks of oil, debris, and whatever organic that had been unfortunate enough to fall into the water recently.

  Hunter leaned against the barge’s railing, watching as they drifted past the shanty-like structures lining the edge of The Sink. The buildings were cobbled together from scrap metal, old shipping containers, and whatever salvageable heaps of scraps these creatures seemed to have found. A shirtless man with glowing cybernetic veins lounged on a rooftop, chewing on something suspiciously wriggling. A child next to him, no older than six, held a fishing line over the edge of a rickety balcony, reeling in something that looked more teeth than fish. Six was a really, really young age, but if he had been twenty years older, there would have been no way to tell. There were usually little physical differences between a thirty-year-old and say, a seventy-five-year-old. Many only started physically decaying at the age of 200.

  “Would be especially annoying to wear it in a place like this,” Hunter muttered.

  Fang’s brow raised. “What ‘it’?”

  “A dress,” Hunter said, nodding toward the waterlogged streets. “Imagine trying to wade through all this in some fancy, trailing thing. You’d be dragging half the city’s filth with you.”

  “I have never seen you in a dress. Though I could see you in one of those high-slit numbers. Hair down. Maybe a little eyeliner.”

  Hunter gave her a flat look. “Why does every conversation with you turn into me wearing something impractical?”

  Fang grinned. “You ever wear one?”

  She didn’t reply.

  The barge groaned as it pulled up alongside a cracked concrete ledge and sloshed the water against the support beams beneath. Hunter hopped off first, landing on solid ground with a relieved sigh. Fang followed, giving the deck a final glance, as if making sure it wouldn’t collapse the second she left.

  Their destination was one of the rare dry sections of The Sink, where the streets weren’t completely swallowed by murky water.

  The ground was particularly newfangled, consisting of glassy stone veined with blue streaks. The material that Fang didn’t know the name of, but knew was native to Mendax-12, was tough enough to withstand decades of corrosion yet smooth enough to reflect the neon glow from overhead signs. Though rare in most parts of the galaxy, here it was scavenged and repurposed like any other scrap, forming a striated mosaic beneath their feet. At least it didn’t shift or creak like the barge.

  “Where’s the man we’re supposed to meet?” Fang asked. That man was their lead, an acquaintance of Raiq, the acquaintance of Hunter. Hunter hadn’t even given a name, much less a solid description.

  When Fang pressed her for details earlier, she just sighed and relayed what Raiq had told her: “Oh, you’ll know him when you see him. He’s got that look—like a man who’s been awake for three days straight but isn’t allowed to act tired. Kind of hunched, too. Hair’s too short for long, too long for short, like someone cut it in a hurry and regretted it halfway through.”

  That had sounded spectacularly unhelpful.

  “Why ask me? Find him with me,” Hunter replied.

  But now, as they inspected the crowd, Fang’s gaze landed on a man leaning against a rust-streaked bulkhead. He was slouching in a way that suggested he wanted to fold himself into a smaller shape, and his uneven haircut looked like it’d lost a wrestling match against a dull blade.

  And he had golden irises.

  “Guy has yellow eyes!” Fang threw her hands in the air. “Your fling could’ve told us that!”

  “He’s not a fling. He’s a strategic partner,” Hunter corrected.

  “But did you kiss?”

  Hunter adjusted her pack. “Unimportant.”

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