A curt nod, and she drops clear of the car. I watch her shrink as the train picks up again, but I can see what she’s doing.

She knocks the bottle top off on the railings and pours beer across the floor. It’s halfway empty when she flips it around and takes the last half for herself. She didn’t know Lear. There’s no way she could. He’d been on Horizon as long as I had—less, now.

But this isn’t about Lear. This is about debt.

Jockeys wear flight suits so we can breathe if the hull springs a leak. We carry our own air, and enough water and feed to keep us going for weeks. We have armour of our own, and even more on our machines. Ejectors, crash restraints, and lines full of artificial blood, ready for transfusion. All that, and the odds don’t ever get better. Chances are, tomorrow will be your last day flying.

But, say there’s a way to tip things in your favour. What would you do?

The knuckledraggers call it superstition, but they don’t know what it’s like. Flying has a habit of making you superstitious. One day, a jockey will put their socks on in a different order for the way they usually do, or maybe they’ll change the sloppy eggs out for something else. They’ll forget to rub the strange mark on their doorframe, or forget to spit before they put their helmet on.

And the next day they’ll be dead. They’ll hit a gale, or get buttered by a lucky shot. They’ll lose a wing suddenly, feel it break on a fracture that the ground crew hadn’t noticed. All the precautions in place, all the training to make it work, and they’ll still be just as dead. No rhyme or reason. The sky just happened to fall on that particular pair of boots that day, didn’t matter who was standing in them.

Or maybe it did.

The jockey sets her bottle down, and her eyes glow as she blinks a request for another monorail car. She doesn’t say a few words, and she doesn’t wave her hands about. It may be superstition, but it isn’t magic. There’s a simple kind of logic at work.

She’s shared a beer with Lear.

NorCol, Locust, convict; whatever he was—now he owes her one.

Thirteen

THIRTEEN