“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just, that’d be debt-slavery. You must not know this, but I helped kill the last country that lived on this land to end that sort of thing.”

“So how much time would I owe you?” Sasha asked.

“Five years,” he said.

Sasha’s heart trembled with excitement at the offer. When she thought about the way the adrenaline had coursed through her during the fight in the clinic, she wanted to say yes. But when she thought about Darryl bleeding out next to his car, the shame inside her overwhelmed everything else. Sasha knew she couldn’t handle more weights like that on her conscience.

“I don’t want to kill people,” she said in a tiny voice. Shame dripped from every syllable.

“That’s fine,” Jim said, his grin widening. “We always need medics, you’ve shown an aptitude for that already. I have a feeling you’ll take well to combat engineering. There’s plenty for you to do without pulling a trigger.”

“If I work for you,” Sasha said, “I have a feeling I won’t be able to avoid pulling triggers.”

“Not entirely,” Jim shrugged, “but any shooting you’d do would be in immediate self-defense. And you’d have the right to refuse any missions that violate your moral code. I know that’s important to you.”

The way he said that last bit set the hackles on her neck arise.

“Is it not important to you?” she asked. “Morality, I mean.”

He swung his hands out to the side, palms up, in a vaguely ­Buddha-like pose.

“When I was a young man, not much older than y’self, I knew a lot of gallant men who claimed to live by codes of honor. Such things were fashionable in the warrior culture of a dying empire. None of those codes stopped the men I knew from serving that great beast we called a state. When you see enough good, moral men enable war crimes, you stop seeing value in the term ‘morality.’”

“So what matters to you?” Sasha asked. “What do you believe in?”

“Change, Miss Marion.” He smiled, revealing rows of pearly white teeth. The snake tattoos on his chest and shoulders writhed in excitement. “I believe in change. I grew up in a time when the climate changed, and my home became a deadly broiler. Politics changed, and democracy became a dictatorship of capital. For a time, I believed in the promises of change handed out by progressive politicians and centerfold revolutionaries. But every one of them was either co-opted by the system, or killed by it.”

He shrugged, and cast his eyes down to the carpet. For a moment, just a moment, his mask slipped. Sasha saw a deep yawning pit of despair in the tight lines at the edge of his lips and the subtle twitch of muscles below his left eye. It passed, and a black velvet smile took its place.