Aristide was not afraid of many things. He’d been in fights and ended them. He’d walked cliffs slippery with rain and sleet in darkness uncut by electric lights. He’d fended off wolves and foxes and folk bent on doing violence to his person. He’d gone hungry, slept in the street, sunk a knife into another man’s belly, and put a bullet through somebody’s skull.

He still hated flying.

By the time the Mgenu-330 picked itself up from the tarmac—three hours late, thanks to the weather—he had gotten therapeutically drunk. This had the effect of muting his terror when the little aircraft hit turbulence just after takeoff, but also increased his nausea when they banked to turn and the earth sank below the windowpane.

The flight was longer than he would have liked it to be. He should have stayed sober enough to get some work done—there were letters to write, both business and personal. Daoud had gawped at him when he said he’d be back in a few days, and come up with a raft of protests that mostly boiled down to reluctance over dealing with a testy Cross on his own.

But Aristide wasn’t sober by any stretch, and terror combined with monotony put him into a numb contemplative state.

Five years he’d been in Liso. When he arrived in Oyoti, drenched by the first monsoon of the rainy season, he’d been so sure of success. Foolish. He could acknowledge that now. If he hadn’t let himself get soft, he would have known it then, too. And it wasn’t just lush living in Porachis that had dulled his edge; considered retrospectively, his wits hadn’t seen a whetstone since he signed the deed for Baldwin Street.

He had achieved all the things he hoped to. Wasn’t it what he had always told himself? When I’m rich I won’t have to worry about that. He’d whispered it to himself until it was true, and then—stupidest of all—bought into the myth. Aristide Makricosta, king of the black market, monarch of the demimonde. Untouchable, untamable. Even the FOCIS’s Master of the Hounds couldn’t run him down, when it came to it, and instead turned belly-up beneath his teeth.

He hoped he’d learned his lesson. He would have liked to believe he was past arrogance now, only the thought itself smacked of the same.

Two years steaming in the equatorial rain forest, chasing phantoms through a war-torn jungle, had taught him to be leery of even the smallest trace of confidence. Anything that looked promising was likely to lead to disappointment. Anything that billed itself as a sure wager would inevitably end in embarrassment. Aristide had relearned caution in his later years, and greatly resented the lesson.