Chapter Text
The last thing Mag remembers seeing is his boy’s face.
It’s a sweet face, so much sharper now that it was when they’d first met, but not yet devoid of acne and baby fat. Sixteen is an awkward age—too old to guilt strangers on the street into tossing a few creds your way, and too young to woo the nouveau-riche into paying for your dinner. Mag was that age once, and he remembers how difficult it had been. Peter has taken things in stride so far, though. He’s always smiling that big, dimpled smile as he swipes purses off unsuspecting heiresses out on poverty tours.
He isn’t smiling in the memory, though. There are tears and snot streaming down his face and mixing with dots of bright red blood. He looks so scared and so hurt, and Mag wants nothing more than to reach out and give him a hug… but something’s stopping him. There’s a burning in his back, a searing pain spreading throughout his entire body.
Mag’s eyes shoot open.
It takes a second before they adjust—the genetic mutation he was born with may help him see at night, but it also means his eyes are ultra-sensitive to bright light—and he’s finally able to make out his location. He’s lying in the middle of a small, windowless room with sterile white walls, laid out on a metal stretcher. Aside from the stretcher and a few strange machines that look like something out of a car repair shop, the place is completely empty.
He sits up gingerly, holding his head. His entire body feels wrong, like he’d gone to the dentist for a filling and they’d accidentally stuck the numbing needle everywhere instead of just his gums. At least he’s not in pain, which is a big departure from how he’d felt the last time he was conscious.
His hand moves to touch his middle back, where the source of the searing pain had been, but there’s nothing there. No blood, no wound, nothing at all except the thin fabric of an unfamiliar gray jumpsuit.
He was captured. That must be it. The New Kinshasan guards had arrested him and brought him here, then given him medical treatment so he’d live long enough to be interrogated. He’d always known that was a possible outcome of his and Peter’s mission, though it certainly wasn’t the preferred one.
But that begs another question: Where is Peter?
Getting to his feet is a slow process, and once he’s upright he has to lean hard on the stretcher for support. He carefully makes his way to the exit, feeling like a toddler learning to walk for the first time. Predictably, the door is locked. He rattles the handle twice, then backs away when he hears footsteps and muffled voices on the other side of it.
“I saw him through the camera. He looks incredible.”
“Doesn’t he? I worried the body might have been in stasis for too long, but evidently it wasn’t. The brain was preserved near-perfectly, so his personality and memories should be intact.”
“Technology has come a long way.”
“Indeed. The higher ups were incredibly careful with him. They didn’t want to try this until they knew for certain they could do it right, and for that I thank them. It’s made my job much easier.”
Mag has no idea what the two voices are talking about, and he doesn’t care. He slams his fist against the door and calls out, “Where am I? Where is Peter?”
The footsteps pause, and there’s a sound like papers being shuffled.
“The boy I was with. Tell me what you did with him,” Mag snarls. “You can do what you want with me, but don’t hurt him.”
Just when he’s about to punch the door again it slides open, leaving his fist to swing through open air. Two people stand in front of him: a man and a woman, both of them a couple decades younger than him and dressed in plain white lab coats. The man is clutching a clipboard close to his chest, while the woman stands straight and tall, her expression as severe as her cropped blonde haircut.
“Hello, Mr. Gorchilin,” she says. “We heard that you were awake.”
They know his real name—not good, but not particularly surprising. Mag assesses the current situation as best he can. Based on her demeanor alone, he can surmise that the woman is in some position of power here. Both she and the man look like non-combatants, the kind he could take down with force if necessary. Of course, that doesn’t mean much when he has no weapons on him and no idea what kind of security measures the rest of the building contains. Not to mention the fact that Peter might be trapped somewhere inside its walls, and Mag can’t escape without him.
Don’t overthink. Just act.
That’s one of many first lessons he’s taught Peter, and only a fool doesn’t heed his own advice. He takes another second to assess the pair, then springs forward and pulls the woman into a headlock.
“Tell me where you’re keeping Peter,” he commands, putting his face right up to hers. To her credit, she gazes back at him without flinching. “If you do, I’ll allow you to live.”
“H-hey, stop it!” the man with the clipboard cries out, looking far more panicked than she does. “Let her go! I’ll call security!”
“That won’t be necessary. Peter Nureyev is the very thing we’re here to talk to Mr. Gorchilin about,” the woman says. She smiles at Mag through the headlock, then nods towards her partner. “Go on, Benji. Show him the photograph.”
“U-Uh, yes, ma’am.” The man—Benji—flips frantically through the papers on his clipboard, then holds up what appears to be a screenshot taken from a reel of security footage. It shows a sharp-faced man with black hair and glasses, standing in the middle of a supermarket aisle.
Mag doesn’t loosen his grip as he squints at it, bemused. “Why are you showing me this?”
“You wanted to see your boy, so there he is,” the woman says frankly. “We only have a few blurry photos and a recent burner comms number, but it should be enough to locate him if you play your cards right.”
“That’s not Peter.” Mag doesn’t know what game these lab coats are playing, but he doesn’t like it. The figure in the photograph looks a little like the boy he knew, but must be at least twice his age. They could pass for a relative, perhaps, but certainly not Peter Nureyev himself.
“Why, of course it is.” In one swift, feline movement, the woman twists out of his grasp and dances out of reach. “Don’t you recognize him? I’m surprised. I know he’s a bit older now, but I thought a father would know his son anywhere. Perhaps a non-biological bond can only stretch so far…”
He glares at her, considering trying to grab her again, but he finds his gaze drifting back to the photograph. The man it shows cannot be Peter Nureyev. It can’t be, but now that he’s looking closer, he sees a mole under the man’s left eye. He sees a missing notch in his right eyebrow, a familiar slope to his cheekbones and shape to his hairline.
He also sees a date printed in the bottom left corner, which claims the photo was taken twenty years in the future.
“What is going on here?” he asks, forcing his voice to stay steady.
Benji wrings his hands, glancing repeatedly at his partner like he isn’t sure what he’s allowed to say. “You’ve, uh, been asleep for a long time.”
The woman nods. “Twenty years, to be exact. And you weren’t asleep. You were dead,” she says, as though it’s the most reasonable statement in the world. “In fact, you still are.”
“Ah. And here I was, worried it was something serious,” Mag says, then lets out a hearty laugh. If they’d wanted to mess with his head, they could’ve at least come up with a more believable story. “Go on, then. Tell me how I’m walking and talking despite my apparent demise. I’d love to hear it. Is this the afterlife? No offense, but you two don’t look particularly angelic to me. You could’ve at least ditched the coats for robes, if you wanted to—”
“I assure you, this is the real world,” the woman says. “You didn’t ascend; you were cryogenically preserved and then resurrected by our team of scientists.”
It’s only then that he remembers the conversation he’d overheard between them in the hall. "The brain was preserved near-perfectly, so his personality and memories should be intact.” They’d been talking about him.
But that can’t be real, can it?
Mag knows there is technology in development to help the ultra-rich revive their pets. There are cybernetic enhancements that provide the illusion of life in birds and other small creatures, and even talk of full android recreations of dead humans by shadow organizations like Dark Matters—but nothing like this. “That kind of technology doesn’t exist. It’s a pipe dream,” he says.
“It didn’t exist when you died,” the woman agrees. “But it was getting further along each and every year, so we knew it was only a matter of time before the scientists and cyberneticists found a way. We have thousands of bodies just like you on ice, waiting to be resurrected.”
“I have all my memories, young lady. I can think and feel. I am, very obviously, not dead.” Mag intends to sound derisive, maybe a little amused, but even he can hear that the words have come out wrong. Like he’s trying to convince himself as much as her.
She folds her hands behind her back, her eyes cool and unsympathetic. “Very well, then. Check your own pulse, if you still don’t believe me.”
That’s something that Mag has done a thousand times. His mother had shown him exactly where to press his fingers as a child so he could feel his own heart beating. She’d taught him to control that beat, to never let it give him away.
He presses two fingers to the side of his neck right below his jaw. He adjusts them, then adjusts them again, then moves them to his wrist. Then his chest. Beneath his palm he feels a gentle buzzing, as if he’s touching the hood of a running car.
But no heartbeat.
The woman watches him passively as he processes this fact, then says, “I’m very sorry, Mr. Gorchilin, but the wound you sustained in the reactor room killed you. All you are now is a product, paid for by the New Kinshasan government and with an expiration date set within the next two or three years.”
“Why?” he rasps.
“Excuse me?”
He can no longer keep the tremor out of his voice, his hand glued to his apparently lifeless chest. “Why bring me back?”
“Because you have information we need. The suits suggested that I torture it out of you, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I think you’ll be perfectly cooperative.”
“Information about what?” He can’t think of a single thing he knows that would be worth doing all this over.
For the first time since entering the room, the woman smiles. “About a certain renowned terrorist and threat to national security.”
He wheezes out another laugh. “All the work and money you must have spent on this project, and you brought back the wrong man. I don’t know any terrorists.”
“You know Peter Nureyev.”
Ah, so that’s how they intend to play this. They’re going to blame it all on the sixteen year old boy.
“Peter Nureyev is not a terrorist,” Mag says, matter-of-fact. “And I’m not going to give you any information about him, regardless. You called him my son, and you were right. Do what you like with me, torture or threaten or scrap me for parts, but I don’t turn my back on my family. Not ever.”
There were times, in the past, when he’d had plenty of family. Parents and siblings, army buddies and fellow revolutionaries. Even other young children he’d rescued from the streets. They’d all died or moved on over the years, though, dwindling away one by one until only Peter remained. That’s all Mag really needs, anyway. Peter, his protégé. Pete, his son. Even if the woman is telling the truth and two decades have passed, that fact hasn’t changed.
He still remembers the day they met like it was yesterday. Peter was just some dirty, starving street urchin, bravely and stupidly sticking his hand into the pocket of anyone he passed. He was being chased by a police constable when Mag pulled him into a back alley and gave him a lecture about which passersby were the easiest targets and how to target them without being caught. Then Mag had bought some food off a street vendor, taken him to the park and let him eat himself sick.
“What’s your name, kid?” he’d asked.
“Peter,” the boy had said through a mouthful of hotteok. “Peter Nureyev.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Peter Peter Nureyev.”
That was the first time that Peter had groaned at one of his jokes, but it wouldn’t be the last. Not by a long shot. Mag would give anything to see that boy now, even just to see him roll his eyes and groan once again. The woman in the lab coat doesn’t look particularly impressed by the show of familial loyalty, though. If anything, she looks pitying.
“Oh, Mr. Gorchilin,” she says. “Don’t you remember anything about your final moments?”
“Of course I…” he starts to say, then trails off.
Does he?
He knows where he was. He can picture the reactor room perfectly, with its glossy titanium walls and machines bathed in red light. Reaching that room with Peter by his side had been his greatest triumph, and the culmination of an entire lifetime of work. They’d been right there, ready to pull the plug on New Kinshasa once and for all… so why hadn’t they done it?
He sees Peter’s face again, wet with tears and blood. He remembers reaching out to stroke the boy’s cheek, all while burning agony coursed through him from the wound in his back. Yes, that must have been what had killed him—that wound. That blade that had been shoved into his spine by a practiced hand.
He knows exactly how practiced, because he’s the one who taught it.
“No,” he breathes.
“Yes,” the woman in the lab coat says. Her smile widens. “And now that you remember… don’t you want to get revenge?”
Juno has been gone for twenty-two hours, forty-five minutes, and thirty seconds.
It’s less than a day, but every second added to the counter feels like an hour in one of Cecil Kanagawa’s torture chairs. Nureyev has spent most of it hidden in his room practicing his instrument, going over finances, and doing absolutely anything other than interact with the rest of the crew.
He’s not particularly good at it, is the honest truth—the whole crime family concept. All the more so when Juno isn’t around. His usual tricks and charms don’t work on the others, and he hasn’t found any good alternatives. At least when Juno is here he has someone to help pull him into conversations, who sides with him in most arguments and defends him from Vespa’s suspicion. Juno is the entire reason he was even accepted into the crew in the first place. Now that the lady’s going to be away on an undercover mission for a week, he feels… adrift.
The others haven’t been unkind to him in Juno’s absence, and his isolation is entirely self-imposed, so it isn’t as if he has any legitimate reason to complain. The strange feeling persists nonetheless, however, and he intends to keep a low profile for the next few days.
Beep-beep.
As if there is some cosmic force connecting them, Nureyev receives a message from Juno at the very moment his dear detective is at the forefront of his mind. He drops the book he’d been reading and picks up his comms, already smiling as he presses the notification. Juno has sent a single image: a small gray cat altered to look like it’s crying, captioned with the words “I miss you” in bubble letters.
Juno still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of typing on his comms, so Rita’s downloaded him a big folder of various macros and reaction images from the internet. Most of his messages are made up of these images, combined with strange arrays of emojis that Nureyev has to struggle to decrypt. Considering the sender, this particular text is surprisingly scrutable.
I miss you too, dear, Nureyev texts back, his chest aching fondly. Now quit messaging me, will you?
Juno is playing the part of an eligible bachelor on this solo mission, so it won’t bode well if anyone discovers he’s in a relationship. He’s so deep undercover that he isn’t even supposed to contact the crew unless it’s absolutely necessary and he’s one hundred percent certain he’s alone.
Beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep.
Nureyev intends to pick up his comms and affectionately scold Juno for calling him, but then he realizes that this sound isn’t coming from his personal comms. He has three communication units currently—one for the crew, one for his creditors, and one for other thieving work. It’s the third that’s ringing now.
Caller ID lists the number as unknown, which is no surprise. No criminal in their right mind would link their name to their comms. It could be any of his recent contacts, but he hopes it’s someone looking to buy. He could always use the creds.
He picks up the comms and waits for the person on the other line to speak.
“Hello, Peter,” a voice says in Brahman.
Nureyev instantly drops the device like it’s a venomous snake. It clatters across the floor, coming to a rest beside one of his many pairs of shoes.
Once the initial shock has passed, he forces himself to think. Hello, Peter. What can he surmise from those two words? A greeting in Brahman. Peter, but not Nureyev—that’s good. They might only know him as Ransom, rather than his true identity. But how do they know his planet of origin? A lucky guess, perhaps. He can answer in Solar, pretend he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Or he can choose not to answer at all, in case they use the call to track him… but no, his comms are shielded from tracking devices. He can reply, and he has to, in case the person on the line is a threat that needs to be taken care of. He’ll answer the call frankly and casually, and then wrangle as much information out of them as he can.
His hand shakes ever so slightly as he picks the comms back up and puts it to his ear. “Hello,” he says in Solar. “Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
“Come now, Pete. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your mother language already.”
Nureyev flinches at the nickname. It’s still only a derivative of his first name, though. Someone knowing that name and his home planet doesn’t have to mean anything; even Brock Engstrom knows he’s from Brahma. “Tell me who you are.”
There are a few seconds of silence, and then: “I know it’s been twenty years, but I’d really hoped you would recognize my voice.”
Nureyev does recognize the voice on the other line, is the thing. He has since it first spoke.
It’s the same voice that’s been invading his head for two decades, whispering thieving lessons and stern remarks from a time long gone. It’s the voice of someone who he’d loved more than anything in the universe, and whose back he’d stuck a knife into. But that man is dead. Maybe this is someone with a similar accent, tone, and cadence, but it isn’t him. It can’t be.
“You’re being very quiet,” the voice says. Its tone is gentle, reassuring—like a parent speaking to their child. “What’s wrong, Peter Peter Nureyev?”
Nureyev’s free hand flies up to cover his mouth.
Through his trembling fingers he utters a single, muffled word.
“Mag?”
Buddy Aurinko leans back in her bergère captain’s chair, observing Nureyev coolly from behind her desk.
“Let me get this perfectly straight,” she says. “You’d like us to go several thousand lightyears out of our way to land on a tiny satellite near the Outer Rim, a satellite which contains nothing other than a few refuel plants and a tiny marketplace, only to stay there for a single day.”
Nureyev has faced off with countless government officials, gang bosses, and law enforcement goons in his time as a thief, but none of them were ever quite as intimidating as Captain Aurinko. He doesn’t know what it feels like to be scolded by a teacher, but he guesses it’s something like this. “You’re refusing, then.”
“Of course not, darling. I’d be happy to do it,” Buddy says. “If only you’d inform me why you desire such a thing.”
He’d anticipated that question, naturally, and already has an answer prepared. “It’s a selfish request, I know. But one of the strings on my instrument has snapped, and the marketplace on PTR-78 is the nearest location to buy a replacement. It takes a very special brand, you understand, and my instrument means a great deal to me.”
“All this… for a replacement string.” Buddy touches a finger to her glossy red lips, considering him. “That’s quite an ask.”
“I know it is. Nonetheless, I feel inclined to remind you that this is the first time that I have ever requested we change course for my benefit alone.” He’s kept that fact in his back pocket for a while, purposefully avoiding any requests lest a situation arrive that made his presence at a particular location absolutely necessary. “I would go in the Ruby, but it’s too far a distance for that and I know Jet disapproves of me driving it alone.”
To his relief, Buddy nods in acknowledgement. “Rita has demanded trips to famous movie theaters and spas, Jet has turned the ship around to visit car shows… I, myself, have called for several personal excursions. But excepting the rare date with Juno, which is to the benefit of both of you, you have asked for nothing until today.”
“Oh, come on,” Vespa growls from where she’s leaning against the office door frame. She straightens up and stalks over to join them. “The thief is obviously lying, Bud. Visiting that satellite would take us further away from Steel, and you know he’d never risk that over something as stupid as an instrument.”
He swallows. She isn’t wrong, and he wouldn’t have asked for this under any other circumstances, but he can’t afford to let Vespa get in his way now. “I calculated the distance. Even accounting for the worst traffic possible, we should be able to reach the satellite, stay for the necessary time, and then return to the pick up location with a day to spare—”
Before he can react, Vespa steps up to him and digs her heel into his shoe. “Stop. Lying. To. Buddy,” she says, enunciating each word by digging her heel in deeper. “We’re not going anywhere until you tell us the real reason. A little satellite like that, out of the way of prying government eyes… It's the perfect place to stage an ambush, or steal our scores and sell them off right under our noses—”
“I agree with Vespa that we’ll need to hear a better reason,” Buddy cuts in. “Though you can stop stepping on him now, dear.”
Vespa relinquishes him and he rubs his foot gloomily, trying to puzzle out a way out of this. If Juno were here, he’d be on Nureyev’s side. Knowing that makes him miss his detective all the more, but it also makes him feel a little guilty. Juno would be on Nureyev’s side, yes, but he’d be wrong to be. Nureyev is lying.
There’s only one way out of this. He has to do the one thing he hates the most, and that's to tell the truth.
Not the entire truth, obviously, but if he arrives at the satellite and things actually go well, the crew might have to learn what’s going on anyway. Better to get it out in the open now than be forced to reveal it later and seem even more dishonest.
He straightens his posture and gives Buddy a brusque nod. “Apologies, Captain. Vespa is correct. I was not being entirely truthful with you—”
“Ha! Knew it,” Vespa says with a triumphant grin. Buddy hushes her and gestures at Nureyev to continue.
“—But not because I intend to cause harm to anyone on this ship,” he says firmly. He’ll have to choose his words carefully here. “My purpose for visiting PTR-78 is a personal one, and you know how… uncomfortable I am with revealing such things about myself. Even more so than that, I am wary of embarrassing myself if my visit there goes badly.”
“And what is your purpose?” Buddy asks. She’s hiding it better than Vespa, but he can tell she’s growing annoyed with his equivocations too.
He takes a deep breath. “A person I knew a very long time ago recently contacted me. I was under the impression that he was… gone, but it seems I was mistaken. He invited me to meet him on PTR-78, as a reunion of sorts.”
“And you agreed.”
“Yes. He’s someone I cared deeply about once, and I would very much like to see him again.”
“Well, I don’t see anything embarrassing about that.”
“We… didn’t end on the best of terms.” That’s the understatement of the century. “It’s possible that the reunion will go terribly, and I will regret ever agreeing to it. But I promise you there is no danger involved. Certainly not to any of you.”
“You really can’t be any more specific than that?” Vespa snaps, still staring him down suspiciously. “‘Someone you knew’ could mean anything. What is he? A friend, an ex, or…?”
Family. He was my family.
“A mentor,” Nureyev replies. “Of sorts. I learned a great deal from him when I was growing up, including how to be a master thief.”
“Then as your captain, I feel I owe him a debt,” Buddy says warmly. She may be very intimidating when she wants to be, but that just makes her smiles of approval twice as exhilarating. “Thank him for me, will you?”
He breathes in sharply. “You’re saying that I can go.”
“Of course, darling. I’m not going to deny one of my crewmembers such a small ask,” she says, ignoring Vespa’s grumbled dissent. “I’ll speak with Jet in a moment and request that he change our course.”
He bows his head, not yet able to internalize the gravity of what that means. “Thank you, Captain. Thank you very much.”
Nureyev spends the last two hours before they reach PTR-78 on the verge of a stress-induced pulmonary embolism. He paces in circles in his room, too keyed up to relax and too distracted to work. Despite not eating since lunch yesterday, he doesn’t feel hungry in the slightest. He changes his outfit four different times. He puts on his rings, then takes them all off again, worried they’ll seem too decadent—like he’s playing pretend at being the socialites he’d once laughed at with Mag. He straps five different knives to the inside of his jacket.
He isn’t a fool; not in matters like this. He knows that there is every chance this meeting will turn out to be a ruse or a set up. Even if it really had been the man he knew on that comms call, it still could be a ruse. He’d tried to kill Mag, after all. Who could blame the man if he wanted to repay the favor?
He hasn’t told Juno anything about the meeting. Their next call is scheduled for tonight, so he isn’t supposed to contact him until then anyway—and even if he could, he’d be wary of talking about anything related to Brahma over even the most secure comms link in the galaxy. Which, given Rita’s expertise, their comms link probably is. If he dies or gets captured today…
That’s irrelevant. He won’t die or be captured today.
He changes his clothes one more time, so he’s dressed in suede boots, slacks and a navy blue kosovorotka. The outfit wouldn’t look out of place in Sol or the Outer Rim, and implies he’s doing well without painting an illusion of wealth he doesn’t have, as his other looks so often seek to do. He’s strapping his knives back in place when he feels the ship shudder to a touchdown on the PTR-78 landing pad.
No more time to delay. He swallows down the queasiness in his gut, suddenly grateful that his stomach is all but empty, and walks towards the bay doors.
Rita is standing next to them when he arrives, grinning and conspicuously holding something behind her back. “Mistah Ransom! I’m here to tell you good luck!" she announces. "Captain A told me you’re meeting up with someone real important to you, and I want everything to go perfectly, not like that time I saw my high school best friend at our twenty year reunion and accidentally dropped a bowl o’ razzberry punch on her fancy dress.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.” If only spilling a drink was the worst possible outcome today. “But I assure you that it’s unnecessary, Rita.”
“Still! It’s a big day, and I want you to have this!”
She instructs him to put out his hands, then takes the object out from behind her back and drops it into them. When his fingers unfurl, he sees a small golden cat with a barbed tail attached to a keychain.
“Er… thank you,” he says. It is fairly cute, but he’s unsure how it’s related to his present predicament.
“Where I grew up, these are good luck charms!” Rita explains. “Lotsa folks at my school would buy them before asking someone out to prom, but they bring good fortune to all kinds of relationships, not just romantic ones. Friendships and family-ships and all that!”
“Rita, that… is so incredibly thoughtful,” Nureyev says genuinely. He believes in luck about as much as he believes in the spiritual and the supernatural, which is to say not at all, but if there’s any power in such things… he could certainly use it now. “I will keep it on me always.”
He makes a show of attaching it to his crew comms, to her delight. Then she gives him one last hug before he walks out the door. It’s a little longer and a little tighter than her usual, which he suspects means that he hasn’t been as good at hiding his trepidation during the lead up to their arrival as he’d hoped.
“I know things are tough for you without Mistah Steel,” she says, her cheek pressed against his chest. “Bet you wish he was here right now, right?”
Yes and no. If he were here, he might very well object to what I’m about to do.
“I’m doing just fine, Rita dear,” he assures her. “I’ll be back within the hour. Cross my heart.”
PTR-78 is a tiny satellite, a fact that Nureyev deeply resents the moment he steps foot on it. At least if it were bigger he could stall for a little longer, taking his sweet time to navigate to the location where he and the man on the comms had agreed to meet. He can already see it from here, though: the statue juts high above the crowds like it's taunting him.
The crowds are a positive, at least. He’d insisted on meeting up somewhere in public where many others were present, so at least if he’s killed or kidnapped, there’ll be an audience. He lets himself float through the pedestrians like he’s performing a dance, his fingers slipping in and out of pockets and purses. It’s second nature to him now, and serves as something akin to a calming ritual. As he gathers a small collection of jewelry, creds, watches and other trinkets, he can almost forget what he’s come here to do. He almost feels like himself again—Peter Nureyev the master thief, not Peter Nureyev the scared Brahman teenager.
But it can’t last forever. Even despite his slow, winding route through the marketplace, he reaches the square where the statue rests in less than fifteen minutes. It’s a towering metal sculpture of two hands, their palms facing each other but unable to meet due to a large rectangle wall between them. Some vague-but-meaningful commentary on the border between Sol and the former Outer Rim, most likely, as they’re less than a lightyear away from it.
Standing next to the statue, right where he said he’d be, is a man.
Nureyev has done double takes on the street an embarrassing number of times over the past two decades. Whenever he passes a big man with a bushy beard or a person with the same strange owl-eye mutation as Mag, he has to stop for a moment to center himself. The more time that’s passed, the easier it’s become to shake off such encounters and move on. Mag is dead, he tells himself each time. That isn’t him. That person is too short, too lanky, too freckled, too different to be him.
The man standing in front of him now isn’t different at all, from the top of his head to the tips of his feet. It’s almost eerie, even, how identical he looks to the Mag that Nureyev last saw. The only change he can ascertain from his current distance is a gray pallor to the man’s skin, likely a product of age. It’s been twenty years, after all.
Twenty years.
Nureyev has imagined this meeting over and over during that time, and the closure he never got. He’s fantasized about storming up to Mag and yelling in his face: “How could you lie to me? How could you possibly think dropping New Kinshasa was a good idea? Don’t you realize how many people that would have killed? Did you ever really love me, or was that a lie, too?”
He turns those words over in his mouth while he walks the last few yards to the man. He won’t start with them, of course. He’ll act cool at first, and interrogate the man with even more identifying questions than the ones he’d asked over comms. If he gets a single answer wrong, Nureyev will disappear and leave him here to rot, or tie him up in the Carte Blanche’s hull until he admits who he really is. His right hand subconsciously finds its way to the charm Rita gave him, wrapping around it and gripping it tightly as though it might actually protect him. His other hand grips a knife.
The man doesn’t seem to have spotted him yet. He’s staring thoughtfully down at the plaque in front of the statue, stroking his beard as he reads it.
Nureyev stops a few feet away from him and says, “Hello.”
It’s not the most novel of greetings, but what else is he meant to do?
The man glances up from the plaque. The moment he meets Nureyev’s gaze, his entire face changes. It splits into a broad smile, and his yellow eyes crinkle warmly. As he turns, the light glinting off the statue seems to form a halo behind his head.
“Oh, Pete,” he says, his voice breaking on the name. “Look at you. You’re all grown up.”
All of the words that Nureyev had planned burn to ashes in his throat. He ought to yell, to accuse, to keep his distance until he knows for certain that the man in front of him really is Mag—but he just is. This close, Nureyev knows it to be true. This person is flesh and bone, not Dark Matters robot, and his face is Mag’s. His voice is Mag’s. His smile is Mag’s.
Before Nureyev can think anymore, he’s crossed the meager distance between them and thrown his arms around the man’s neck.
“You’re alive,” he whimpers, tears spilling over in his eyes. “I didn’t kill you, after all. Thank the stars, you’re alive.”