Loh Kustar is a tiny company, with just a few thousand machines to its name. I jockeyed with NorCol for most of a decade and only ever met two of the things: cheap commercial frames clocked well past the safety margins, bulked with after-market parts, salvage, and homebrew steel like nothing you’ve ever seen. Their jockeys are even rarer than their machines, and the stuff of crazy stories. Lear’s are crazier than most, but I’ve got a few of my own.

I watched a Locust dodge a bullet, my bullet, at less than fifty metres—point-blank, when you’re six storeys tall. I watched a wingmate crater himself trying to match an impossible turn, a machine that was nearly all engine outperformed by a flying scrapheap.

Lear nods. “Dragoon. Pattern 19, revision 6.” As if that should mean anything to anyone.

“Charge?”

“Criminal conduct in a time of war.”

Hail crosses her arms. “You were convicted of a war crime?”

Lear holds up a handful of fingers. “Crimes. Plural.”

“What did you do?”

“What the company wanted me to do, instead of what it was telling me to.”

That seems enough for her. Hail has weighed us up, done the dance. But there’s one more thing.

She puts eyes on us, suddenly crystal clear. “Did you choose to be here?”

Lear rattles his chains. “Well, we didn’t just wander in.”

Hail holds her ground. “I need you to spell it out, convict. Right now. Do you mean to be here?”

I frown at her. “We took the deal, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Salt nods. “There wasn’t much to lose.”

Hail almost smiles at that. “You’d be surprised.” She waves to the crew with the bolt cutters. “Get them out. I’ve got what I ordered.”

IT TAKES THE cutting crew a moment to decide where to start, but with Salt and Lear for company, it was always going to be me.

They work with calm detachment, break the damned lock on my chest and give me back my feet, all in just a few seconds. Seems they don’t know where the key is either. They leave me to rub the blister on my collarbone and to find my stride without the chain.

The next choice is harder than the first. In the end, they decide on Salt. I would too: he could do you just as much damage with his chains on as he could without, and he doesn’t give them any reason to change their minds. He leans so they can reach his throat, keeps every movement slow and obvious. When they’re done, they step aside to let him through; he hasn’t given them any trouble, and they don’t offer any themselves. They’re already sizing up Lear.

Salt finds me in Hail’s shadow, the both of us standing taller now without the weight around our necks. “Still alive?” he whispers.

“Enough to regret it. You?”

He nods back at Lear. “Enough to enjoy the show.”