Title: Under Pressure
Summary: Saluting kids and swanning around in white? Nothing on earth could persuade bounty hunter Sol Badguy to join the Knights of the Holy Order. At least, not until Commander Kliff Undersn made him the one offer he couldn't refuse.
Yuletide 2010 for Antediluvian. Guilty Gear series, creator: Daisuke Ishiwatari (Sammy/Arc System Works). Spoilers for Guilty Gear; Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus, Order Sol Story Mode; and Guilty Gear XX: Drama CD. Extreme liberties taken with the storyline. Title via Queen. Gratitude: Elfwreck patiently read through this fic for grammar wobbles, and advised me on rewrites. Qwerty combed through it several times, trying to mop up my flood of typos. I'm immeasurably grateful to both of them. Neither of them were familiar with GG, so any serious canon issues belong to me, as do any typos introduced by my constant poking. Thanks again (so much) to both.

NOTE: Sol/Ky slash. To conform to FFNET guidelines, this version was edited to remove explicit content. The Guilty Gear directory on Archive of Our Own (AO3) has the full version.

Sol had gotten the heads up from Undersn a few weeks before, an anonymous note tacked onto his bounty account with the Holy Order: now was the time to enlist if he still "wanted it." Yeah, Sol knew what "it" was, and yeah, he wanted it. If wearing this ridiculous white and red getup that the Holy Order called a uniform was part of the price, he'd do that. If saluting assholes was part of it, the price, he'd do that. If squatting in an abandoned school on the edge of the Baltic in the middle of fucking winter along with a cast who'd apparently checked themselves out of an asylum was part of it, Sol Badguy would do that, too.

But he was starting to wonder where he'd draw the line.

For instance, here he was, leaning on some rotted bleachers by a muddy, slushy soccer pitch, watching the lunatics batter each other with a whacked out assortment of weapons, and it wasn't that Ky Kiske was any different from half the other kids who were out there drubbing away at the adults and each other. He understood that drastically lowering their recruiting age had been a necessity when the Holy Order started to run out of recruitable people. That tended to follow when the world began to run out of people in general. Sol understood that.

But making them officers and placing them in command was another deal altogether.

Come to that, where the hell was Kliff Undersn, anyway? Sol had shown up and enlisted, had walked miles of patrol, had sat the rooftops on lookout, had scrubbed a few floors, and done every other type of scutwork, and still no sign of their High Commander, Undersn. Sol was suspecting he'd been played big time.

But like thinking about the old bastard had summoned him from some pit, Sol heard a huff behind him and saw the cloud of breath out the corner of his eye. "Ah, here you are," Undersn said, beaming up at him. "I was just coming out to have my tea. So how are you enjoying life as a Knight of the Holy Order?"

Sol rolled his eyes. "'Bout time you showed up. Wondering why I'm here."

"I am wondering as well," Undersn said, climbing past him on the creaking wooden bleacher seats to settle near Sol's arm. "Because I find you out here watching them, but my understanding is that your unit is manning the kitchen today."

"Wounded in action." Sol cocked his thumb with its thick wrapping. "Guess my potato peeling needs some work." It had already healed under his bandaging, but the chunk he'd sliced out in the kitchen had produced some impressive, effective gore. No one had wanted him to stick around with the food after that.

"I see. Well, you seem to be holding up well in the face of this tragedy," Undersn said, settling down comfortably and pouring himself a mug of tea from a battered canteen.

"Yeah. Well, you know me."

"Yes. A waste of resources, a disgrace to the uniform." At that, Undersn leaned over and delivered a resounding smack to the back of Sol's head. "Idiot."

"The hell," Sol said, rubbing the sting.

"And yet, for all that, I find am I comforted at how some things never appear to change," Undersn muttered.

"Don't even go there," Sol said. "You won't like where it leads." His lack of aging as Undersn had grown progessively older was the elephant in the room that neither one would look at, each for his own reasons.

"I have suspected that," Undersn said. "But nevertheless I will continue to trust your judgment." Neither said anything for a moment, as Undersn stroked his beard and observed the skirmishes on the pitch.

"Asked a question," Sol reminded him. "You got me up here to the ass-end of nowhere. So what the hell's this dog and pony show got to do with me?"

But Undersn's attention now was firmly fixed on the field. "Hmm."

So Sol turned to look, and didn't see anything that he hadn't seen before. Kiske had one of the two-handed general-issue swords, and he was using it to parry two different people, a severe-looking woman hacking away with a shovel and a heavy-set guy with a spikey metal mace. Kiske was knee-deep in some enthusiastic mud, which meant one of them must be an earthmover. Kiske blocked the mace, ran a crackling charge up it, then swung out as the guy dropped the mace with a bellow. The woman backed off instantly before he could do the same to her.

"Have you drilled with him yet?" Undersn asked.

"Who? That kid, Kiske? Nah. Not my unit." Sol rubbed his nose. "Why?"

"I will tell you a story," Undersn said cheerfully, and Sol buried his face in his arm and groaned. "Yes yes, I know how you always look forward to my tales of derring-do. This is different. A number of years ago," he continued, "I received word of an accident in one of the Order's orphanages. One that involved extensive property damage." He slid a sidelong look at Sol. "Their power systems had been accidentally fused by one of the children. Clearly one of the rarer affinities was involved."

"Lemme guess. Kiske," Sol said impatiently. "So what's your point?"

"I am explaining my point," Undersn said, "I wonder if you are listening. Unlike some," he glanced at Sol, "I am a reasonable, patient man. I knew that eventually I would find what I had been waiting for—someone with strong enough magical affinity, sufficiently powerful to become attuned with one of the Jinki, the Order's eight sacred treasures." He nodded at Kiske. "Still, I hadn't been expecting an electrical resonance—that one is rather rare, and usually not very strong. When I heard of his first, ah, exploit, I knew he had the potential. Yes, he is very young, but he is also very talented."

"So what's that got to do with me?"

"It is not always about you," Undersn said, irritated. "You must understand my position. The Order had rebuffed my every request and had turned aside every candidate I had suggested for wielding one of the Jinki. For them, it is not a question of power only, but also of moral fitness. Of virtue."

Sol snorted. "They're hunks of the Outrage. They're weapons. Not the fucking Holy Grail."

"Supremely powerful, dangerous weapons designed expressly for our conflict with the Gears. I do realize this. That is precisely why the Order wishes to ensure they're only held by those worthy of them." Undersn shook his head at the battle of the bureaucracy triumphing over his more realistic needs. "Yes, well, regardless, you see my difficulty. Now, if we could obtain and deploy even one of the Jinki on the battlefield—and our success was evident—then, well, I feel it would be only a matter of time before the Order would see the wisdom of requesting that the U.N. release the others as well."

"Yeah, fine," Sol was listening now. "Go on."

"Oh. So now that it is about you, you are interested," Undersn said, amused. Then he tipped his cup toward the pitch. "I would value your assessment."

"Kiske." Sol assumed Undersn wasn't asking about the kid's merit badge potential—from what Sol had heard, the kid was well on the track for canonization. Otherwise, he didn't have to think too hard on this one. Sol had been creating his own excuses for a week now to lurk around the field at the right times; in spite of himself, Sol had been as curious as anyone else to see one of the showier, rarer magics out on a test drive. "You trained him." At Undersn's glance of surprise, he added, "Pretty obvious. Some of those kookier moves, all yours." Undersn chuckled. "Only some are though. Rest are . . . nothing but a dance floor out there," he finished.

"Meaning?"

"Real traditional thinker. Tends toward rote moves. Worse, he's concentrating more on not hurting anyone than fighting them."

"I agree," Undersn said, "he is." At Sol's narrow look, he continued placidly, "Is that the extent of it?"

"Nah. Speedy little runt when he has to be. Real flexible. Got a lot of power in those swings, skinny as he is." He shrugged. "Never uses it for offense, but good defense—hard to close on him when he ramps up the voltage."

"But you don't feel he'd be much of a challenge."

Sol rolled his eyes. That wasn't even worth the breath to answer, but: "I'd bury him." He stole a glance at Undersn. "Want me to demonstrate, old man? See me paste him in front of his whole unit?"

"Not necessary," Undersn said. "I know what you would do."

"So you're thinking of snagging Fuuraiken for the kid. The Thunderseal Sword."

"He already has it."

Sol started, and felt the bench under his fist crumble. "Already fucking—?" He bit down on the next thing that leapt to his tongue: So why isn't he using the fucking thing? Because the answer was obvious: kid didn't want to hurt anyone. Sol's next thought after that was interrupted by a blinding flare off the pitch.

The duo Kiske had been fighting and a few other unlucky people in the vicinity were sprawled flat on their backs, not moving. Kiske was finally kicking free of the mud now that no one was controlling it; he looked a little pissed off with himself. Everyone else had stopped, too, rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads.

Yeah, okay. Kid was packing a helluva charge. But still . . . not much control over it.

"So, let us suppose that he were using Fuuraiken," Undersn said. "What then?"

"Still kick his ass," Sol said, because it was nothing but the truth.

"The Crusade continues, but I possibly may not," Undersn said heavily. "I am not a young man. I am continuously evaluating successors. Ky has already served with the Southern Battalion and acquitted himself reasonably well there. He does not have a friendly disposition, but he has been scrupulously fair and considerate of the troops' welfare, within reason." He sighed. "But it is far more important that he could potentially challenge Justice, the Command Gear."

Sol's snort of laughter drew Undersn's frown, but what the hell did he want? "Against Justice? He's dead. End of story."

"I am not unaware of what's involved," Undersn told him. "I have fought against her myself, numerous times." He packed away his tea mug, and said, "I believe you know what I'm asking. I could, of course, make this an order—you are now one of my minions." As Sol's grimace, he chuckled. "But I would prefer a mutually agreeable exchange. If you are reasonably confident that you could stand against Fuuraiken, then this may give me eventual access to something that you want."

Sol tried to picture it, the kid taking on the Command Gear who controlled every Gear on the planet—except one. Any way he looked at it, the scenario only ended one way. "Forget it," Sol said, pushing away from the bleachers so that he could glare down at Undersn. "Not a babysitter. Train up your own cannon fodder."

"He would not be cannon fodder with the proper training," Undersn countered. "You have said yourself that he has skills. He also has Fuuraiken. Unfortunately, whoever created the sword did not think to include an instruction manual. And," he added wryly, "I must respect his wishes to not use it against his own troops."

"Yeah? One of those troops right here," Sol pointed out. He was also the guy who'd failed to write the instruction manual, but Undersn didn't need to know that. It wasn't like Sol could have predicted that the Jinki would wind up spending a century in a vault, only dusted off for display once a decade.

"Oh, I have faith in your ability to force his hand," Undersn said. "That is my condition. Provided that you give our Captain Kiske a worthy opponent, I will request the release of Fuuenken, the Fireseal Sword, from the United Nations. You may use your own discretion in this. As the Commander of the Sacred Order of Holy Knights, I give you liberty to do whatever you like—short of killing him, of course."

"The fuck," Sol rumbled. "Thought you liked this kid."

"I do," Undersn said sadly. "So I would like him to survive this Crusade."

The renewed clatter of weapons on the pitch had fallen silent, and Sol glanced to the side. Everyone on the field had stopped, watching him looming over the diminutive Commander of their Holy Order. Kiske in particular looked a few seconds from attack. "Ah," Undersn commented placidly, "now would be an excellent time to salute me as my age and status justly deserve, I think."

"Hell," Sol muttered. When he grudgingly slapped a palm to his heart and bowed his head, the tension level out on the field visibly relaxed. "Don't you have a garden to gnome somewhere?" he muttered.

Undersn clapped his hands and rubbed them together enthusiastically. "Very well then. We are agreed. I will be transferring you to Kiske's unit, where I am certain you will enjoy saluting him often as well." He hopped down off the bleachers and waved a dismissive hand over his shoulder. "Yes yes, as you were, Private." He strode off, blithely ignoring the sound of Sol's grinding teeth.

Sol found the right hall and the right doorway by following the sound of Kiske's voice—his door was propped open. Sol leaned in to check out the action, and there was Kiske, sitting at a desk whose surface was covered with folders and slates, with a few open books pushed to the side. He had one elbow on the desk, hand cradling his eyes, the other hand was pressed palm down on the slate with the usual smear of blood to indicate 'confidential.' His shadow, Bernard, was nowhere to be seen.

So maybe a polite and civilized person would have waited outside and down the hall. Sol propped himself in the open doorway; all he needed was popcorn. He couldn't help himself—the contrast between the pinched, harried expression on what he could see of Kiske's face under the thatch of blond hair and the unwaveringly polite, distant tone of his voice was pretty fascinating.

"The new troops have arrived, yes. But I have not yet . . . No, my previous report was complete," Kiske was saying, "that was covered in—yes, I understand. Yes. Of course, I—You must understand that there is much to—No, that is not what—"

Not letting Kiske get a word in edgewise, whoever it was. Sol stifled a grin. He could only hear the one end of the conversation, but he had no trouble guessing at the other. Civilizations rose and fell, but bureaucracies never changed.

"In fact, Commander Undersn is on site," Kiske said firmly, wresting control of the phantom discussion to himself at last. "Clearly he would be a more reliable and trustworthy source for this information than myself, and naturally he will consider your concerns far more important than his breakfast. I encourage you to contact him immediately. If you will excuse me, I have several pressing matters to attend to. Good day." He swiped his hand from the slate immediately and put it to better use, rubbing his eyes, muttering "La vache" to himself—then he lowered his hands and blinked in surprise, chilly blue gaze focusing on Sol filling his doorway.

Kiske raised an eyebrow, and Sol figured what that likely meant. He slapped a palm to his chest, and Kiske frowned, not much placated by the perfunctory gesture.

"Yes, what is it?" he said curtly.

Sol pulled out the transfer paper from where he'd tucked it into the front of the uniform, flicked it open, and dangled it. "Reporting in," he said.

"What is this?" Kiske said, frown deepening. "Come," he said, waving Sol to the chair in front of the desk and extending a hand for the paper.

"I remember you. You enlisted last week?" he said, studying the paper, while Sol poked at the stack of books already occupying the chair in question. "Now Commander Undersn has transferred you to my group? Why would he—?" he looked up, mouth twisting wryly. "Move them to the floor. Our operations continue to be somewhat in disarray." He rolled his listing chair, which squealed a protest accordingly, over to the tall, narrow box slotted with the troop slates.

Sol scooped up the stack and glanced at the titles. With a scowl, he recognized at least two of the authors—as in recognized personally. "Gears?" he said.

"What?" Kiske said, glancing at him. "Oh. Yes. I believe it is best to know as much as possible about what we must fight."

"Order doesn't tell you what you need to know?"

"I would offer tea, but Bernard has yet to return with the water," he said, coolly ignoring Sol's question.

Huh, Sol thought, slouching into the chair. From this position, he could see that one of the open books on the desk that had been pushed aside was another monograph on Gears. They were way past Kiske's—or anyone's—level these days. It was like medieval monks trying to program a computer. He wondered what to make of Kiske's even trying to figure them out.

"You were a bounty hunter prior to enlistment," Kiske said, poking through his enlistment record. "Criminals?"

"Gears," Sol said.

"I see," Kiske said, rubbing his temple, looking perplexed. "You're listed as 'some fire magic,' what does that—?" he wiped the slate with a finger and sucked in a breath. "Commander Undersn has amended your file." He looked up, studying Sol, tone still pleasant as before, but now with an edge. "Now it says 'high-level fire manipulation'."

"Huh." Sol shrugged. Whatever Undersn was up to was news to him, too.

"Perhaps you are an acquaintance of the Commander," Kiske suggested. "Yesterday, that was you, was it not? Speaking with him, by the field?"

Sol shrugged, gave this one up for free: "Met him before, yeah."

So Kiske waited, expression filled with surmises, trying to work him out—but Sol had all the time in the world to take up space in his dingy little cubbyhole and play dumb.

Apparently Kiske knew to pick his battles, and they both knew he didn't have time for this. He sighed, and said, "As may have already been explained to you, my unit is composed of the stronger magic users because we are the first point of contact with Gear attacks. That is, we attempt to engage as many of them as possible, to kill as many of the strongest ones as we can before the other groups move in. We also draw the highest casualties among the Order groups."

"Good times," Sol said easily.

Kiske frown. "Excuse me?"

"Killing Gears," Sol said. He grinned. "S'what I do."

"Yes, of course," Kiske said, faintest flicker of distaste passing over his expression, indicating that Sol had just effectively canceled out any curiosity Undersn's move might have incited. Which wasn't so smart, Sol thought, but the kid would have plenty of opportunities to figure that out while Sol was putting in his time toward getting back Fuuenken.

The building seemed more spacious on the inside than the outside had suggested; the stone floor was bare like most medieval churches, glass from the windows and part of the roof missing where something large—and likely Gear-shaped—had slammed into the building's side. It was common knowledge that Kiske spent his off hours in here, praying or practicing or whatever. After that bomb Undersn had dropped on him, Sol figured it was a bit of both.

Sure enough: Kiske stood near the front, just down from the altar rail, eyes closed and holding Fuuraiken before him in a two-handed grip. The sword was slim, white, as long as Kiske was tall, with a blue hilt and guard. Ironic that this was the first time Sol had seen the damn sword since he'd made it nearly a century ago.

Kiske swung the sword in a graceful arc, once, twice, a third time, the latter accompanied by a crackling sheet of electricity. "What is it, Bernard?" Kiske said, not opening his eyes, moving into the next form.

Sol grinned. He slammed the door behind him shut with his heel, and leaned back on it. "Yo."

"What . . . ?" Kiske blinked, stopped. "Sol Badguy, isn't it? What do you want? I am not on duty right now, so—"

"Yeah? Me neither, kid."

"Captain," Kiske corrected him, irritated.

"In here?" Sol grinned. "Nah. Don't think so."

"Private," Kiske said warningly.

Sol gave that laugh it deserved. "So toss me in the brig." He grabbed the handle carved into the slab of rock he was using for a weapon these days, hoisted it up over his shoulder. "After we're done here, kid."

"You want to fight with me?" Kiske said, astonished. "I think you do not understand the situation."

"Understand it just fine. Got yourself a Jinki," Sol said. He enjoyed Kiske's look of surprise a lot. Sol sauntered out into the center of the room, released a bit of power, felt the rising wash of warmth lifting his coat, stirring the ponytail down his back. "Ain't gonna help you, kid."

"Sol," Kiske said, opting to switch tactics, trying to reason with him. "I do not wish to hurt you for mere practice—"

"How 'bout you don't piss me off, maybe I'll go easy on you," Sol snapped. Or yeah, no, maybe not. He was past ready to get this show on the road.

Kiske finally got the message that Sol wasn't going anywhere. "Very well," he said tightly, and took a breath, raising Fuuraiken over his head. "Please prepare your—"

"Blockhead Buster," Sol shouted, flinging a wave of force and flame right at him. Kiske folded like a sheet, sword clanging when it hit the ground with him. It was all pretty anticlimactic, but Sol was mildly interested to see that Kiske had somehow managed to keep a grip on his sword.

"Huh." So, was Kiske out? No, still moving. Sol ambled over, slid his slab to the ground by Kiske, and crossed his arms on top. Kiske promptly propped himself up on his elbows, staring at Sol in pure shock. Sol gave him a hearty thumbs down. "Pretty pathetic," he commented. "Need some training wheels for that thing?"

"You, I wasn't—"

"Ready?" Sol nodded. "Yeah, Gears are big on the honor duels."

Kiske rubbed his forehead. "This isn't a battlefield."

"Better treat it like one," Sol suggested, "if you wanna walk out of here." Then he lashed out a kick at Kiske's side, but he was already rolling away.

"Fast learner," Sol said, grinning.

"You—"

Sol's kick caught him this time, and the kid barely avoided the slab slamming into his hip. For his part, Kiske was scrambling now, trying to block, parry, and avoid everything he could, but Sol wasn't letting up on him. Sol had figured he'd had enough of charbroiling the kid tonight, that he'd concentrate on trying to take his head off, but the idiot still hadn't gone on the offense—which was fucking ridiculous, considering what he was packing as armament.

At that point, Sol had had it. "Gun Blaze!" Kiske jumped to avoid the sheet of fire rocketing over the stones, only to get hit directly by "Bandit Revolver!"—the shiny new move Sol had been working on. Looked like it was a winner. Kiske was down, and this time he looked out, too.

"Yeah, we're done here," Sol said, scratching his nose, contemplating Kiske. The kid wasn't hard on the eyes, and unconscious meant he wasn't talking—which Sol appreciated. Finally, the kid stirred, and not long after he noticed Sol. "Wasting my time," Sol told him.

"I don't know . . . what you want," Kiske groaned. "Why are you—?"

"What I want," Sol repeated. "Maybe for you to stop fucking around, Captain." He sketched an ironic little salute, and sauntered off. He'd heard that the illegal whiskey still that his old unit had been assembling was up and running at last—time to investigate the tip.

The next day at matins, beyond pointing out to the unit Sol's transfer, Kiske ignored his existence completely. That night, Sol beat him down again, and again. It became a pattern: Sol kicking Kiske around at night, Kiske pretending he didn't exist during the day. For all that Kiske looked as collected and distant as ever, Sol got very familiar with that peculiar ozone scent, like a storm was on the verge of breaking, that permeated the air around Kiske when he was ticked off.

It took Sol a little over a week to pressure Kiske into caving on his whacked-out, precious principles. Their weapons were locked together; Kiske had just blocked a hit, and Sol was using his full weight to push the kid into the paving—then Kiske snarled, "Stun Edge." And no, Sol hadn't been expecting that, a surge of electricity pretty much right in his face. Yeah, that had hurt.

Sol had grinned—and retaliated immediately. They were starting to get somewhere, he thought. But even though Sol figured he'd harassed Kiske more than enough, trying to get Kiske to strike back harder, the kid still wasn't using Fuuraiken the way it was designed to be used. After a few nights, he hadn't done anything with it that he couldn't have managed with one of the standard-issue beaters.

Other than Sol occasionally tossing out some insults to rile Kiske up—always entertaining because they clearly bugged Kiske, but he refused to let himself respond to them—they didn't say much to each other. They'd never had an actual conversation, and Sol had been pretty satisfied with the status quo. But it seemed like he was going to have to do something.

So the next time Kiske hit the floor, Sol dropped a foot on his wrist before he could lift the sword again; he contemplated how this was all Kiske's fault that they'd have to have to talk . . . until the kid, who'd been trying to move his foot, growled, "Get off already," followed by something that might have been an honest-to-god curse under his breath.

Sol sighed. He stomped down a bit harder to relieve his feelings, then crouched, grabbing Kiske's chin. He ratcheted him up and looked him in the eye. "Listen up," Sol snapped. "This," he nudged Fuuraiken, "not a toy."

"I realize what it is, thank you," Kiske said frostily.

"This is a Jinki," Sol said, ignoring him. "Piece of the Outrage, purest form of magic. Only eight of these on the damn planet."

"I know—"

"You don't know shit," Sol cut him off rudely, and Kiske blinked at him. "This is Fuuraiken. You get that?"

"What are you trying to—"

"First," Sol said, "you don't leave it sitting in your fucking room all day. You carry it. All the time."

"It's one of the sacred—"

"It's a weapon," Sol cut him off, exasperated. The kid shut down, giving him a mulish glare. It looked like Sol was going to have to lecture this out after all. He gave himself a breather and meditated for a few moments on his revenge on Kliff Undersn, the one who'd actually pushed him into this corner. "OK," he said at last. "They're tools. Some of the Jinki manipulate, like wind and earth. Those take a fucking high level of skill to use. Some generate. Some amplify—user provides the power. It takes a fuck-ton of magic to use those, plus the skill, and some abilities are fucking rare." He grabbed the scruff of Kiske's collar and shook him a bit. "You gonna keep wasting my time here?"

"No," Kiske murmured.

"Good," Sol snapped. "Fuuraiken amplifies. More you're attuned to each other, the more effective you'll be. It's gotta know your chords, recognize you. Tuning requires proximity. That means carry the damn thing around."

"All right. I understand," Kiske said stiffly. "What else?"

So yeah, he had his attention now. "Second thing," Sol said. "Hand. Gimme."

"What?"

Kiske was wearing the same fingerless gloves as Sol, which made this easier. "Index finger," Sol said, grasping Kiske's sword hand and shaking it. "Stick it out." When Kiske complied, confused, Sol slid his own over the kid's, and pressed them down against the grip, then pushed them along toward the guard. Kiske looked pretty uncomfortable with the proximity; that made two of them. "Feel that?"

"An indentation."

"Bingo. Press down here, like this," Sol murmured, "then up. See that flash?" The ends of the two poles set into the pommel briefly glowed.

"What is—ah. That's—" Yeah, he could see Kiske was already feeling it.

"See? It's charging. Intelligent collection mode," Sol said. "Trigger that when you draw or leave it on for set periods. Gathers any energy not being immediately used in a spell and holds it." That whiff of ozone that hovered around Kiske was growing heavier, intensifying—which meant he was already unconsciously feeding Fuuraiken just from his ambient, and the sword was already storing it. Damn, Sol thought, feeling the envy as he watched a flicker of charge travel down the fuller of the blade. Took a pretty fucking high level of innate magic to activate this type of Jinki at first touch. Looked like Undersn was right.

Once Sol had Fuuenken again, yeah. Then they'd really be rocking the casbah.

"So, this collector," Kiske said, licking his lips. "How can it be used?"

"Up to you," Sol said. "Principle's not that different from the solar-wheel spells. But point of discharge, size of discharge, shape of the spell, all user determined. That's where the skill comes in."

"So from what you have said . . . the charge may be cumulative?"

"Yeah. Exactly," Sol said, grinning. "Piece of the Outrage here—has damn near infinite capacity."

Kiske sucked in a breath. "I . . . see," he said faintly, shifting his hips against the floor. He looked pretty flushed, Sol noticed distantly, and that's when he remembered how the feedback from Outrage could feel at first, the flood of stored, compatible magic flowing back into the user. He also realized, irritated, that he was still pressing Kiske's hand into the hilt. He pulled it back quickly.

"Whatever," Sol growled. "So use it. Get used to it." He straightened back to his feet, as Kiske also rose to his knees. "Think we're done here."

He was halfway to the door, when he heard a distinctive crackle, and Kiske called his name. He turned and saw that Kiske had extended a palm in front of him, and an arc of bluish electricity was dancing steadily between the blade of Fuuraiken and his hand. The reflection made his eyes look even bluer than usual. "There are no surviving documents on the creation of the Jinki. I have tried to find them. If I were to ask how you gained this knowledge . . . would you tell me?"

"Nah," Sol drawled. "Gift horses," he pointed out, "don't look 'em in the mouth." Then he jerked open the door and sidled out into the cold air. No need to RTFM when you had the sword's designer to knock you around.

Kiske apparently could connect the dots on his own: he never asked Sol why he was obligingly beating the crap out of him on a regular basis. Otherwise, nothing else really changed. He and the kid still never talked or interacted much, inside the unit or out of it, and that was just the way Sol preferred it. It only made sense; they had nothing in common. Sol wasn't in the market for friends, and even if he were, the kid, who generally had all the warmth and spontaneity of a glacier, wouldn't have been on his buy list. Sol didn't think the kid had much in common with anyone, frankly.

So Sol was always taken by surprise at the small, unlikely evidences of an actual personality. Like the rumor that Kiske had a cache of teacups, of all weird things, packed away somewhere that he'd been carefully hauling all over the world with him. Or the way he'd light up once in a while at some new trick he'd figured out for Fuuraiken.

"Watch," Kiske told him, lilt of triumph in his tone. He ignored Sol's grunt of impatience, insisting, "No, look at this." He held Fuuraiken poised in front of him, waist level, and flicked a spark off the blade with his finger, out into the air; rather than flaring out instantly, it hovered, glowing. Then the spark began to expand outward, roughly confined into a ball; ripples of current arced over its surface, flowing through and around. He gently lifted the sword, and the glowing ball of plasma bobbed along with it. "But it may also be unbound," Kiske murmured, concentrating on it intently, "then directed and shaped."

"Up." Kiske gestured, and the ball rose to about chest height. Kiske reached out and stroked it like clay, shape forming under his fingers into a rough cone. Sol had never seen anything like this before—physically, it wasn't possible. Yet more evidence right there of magic fucking with the fundamentals of their world. "Go," Kiske said, smacking the base with his palm: it rocketed forward, dashing itself against the wall in a splatter of sparks.

Kiske grinned blissfully, and Sol was stuck for a moment, trying to remember if he'd seen Kiske smile before but drawing a blank. The kid was unsettling and irritating. Enough was enough.

"Yeah, real pretty," he drawled. "Done screwing around?"

Kiske's smile evaporated. "Well, I suppose the practical application will come later," he admitted wryly.

"Also forgetting something important, kid."

"And what is that?"

"This ain't a play date. I'm the guy kicking your ass," he pointed out. "Showing me the cards in your hand is nothing but stupid."

"Yes, I suppose it was," Kiske said, unperturbed. He crossed himself and settled back into his usual beginning stance, waiting for Sol to make the first move.

After that, the kid started to get creative—and maybe a little too enthusiastic about trying to turn the tables on Sol. Or maybe he considered it revenge; that didn't strike him as Kiske's standard operating procedure, but Sol had no idea what went on in that screwed-up head. Still, he could have predicted that the first time the kid got lucky, pulling off a surprise move—seemed "Ride the Lightning" wasn't an off-color joke; Sol got trashed by the kid's glittery wheel of ball lightning—Kiske wasn't going to just let it go like a sane person.

Of course not.

"Get the hell off me," Sol rumbled, as Kiske landed heavily on top of him. "Fuck are you doing?"

"Shut up," Kiske said, planting two knees in the middle of his back and fucking bouncing on top of him. "You have lost. Accept the consequences."

"The hell? Are you fucking five?" Sol said, trying to roll over, but Kiske shifted his weight—and Sol felt cold metal pressing against the back of his neck. "Kiske," he said warningly.

"It would not be advisable," Kiske told him gently, "to move just now." Then Sol heard the rattle of beads. "I have noticed that you spend a great deal of time sleeping during matins," Kiske said, his tone conversational. "You may make up for that now." He cleared his throat: "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, amen. Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem—"

"Kiske!"

"The rosary will take longer if you continue to interrupt," Kiske said, "but naturally that is up to you."

"Make you regret this," Sol muttered.

"Et in Iesum Christum, Filium eius unicum . . ."

Whatever.

After that, Sol guessed he only had himself to blame: he'd shown Kiske how Fuuraiken worked, and he'd already volunteered to be the guinea pig. So he wasn't exactly unhappy once they were heading back out on missions, giving the kid plenty of Gears to pound on and fry instead. Problem was, Sol usually got hauled along on all the unit's missions, even the small-group runs, which placed him in Kiske's vicinity more than he liked.

Such as the time he'd been stumbling back toward their camp after his turn on perimeter patrol, and he passed by good old Sergeant Bernard on the trail, giving Sol the silent stink-eye as usual. Sol should have predicted that the next person he'd encounter would be Kiske, parked at an old picnic table in the clearing next to their camp, frowning over one of his books.

Sol gave him his usual sketchy salute in passing—but before he could slip by, Kiske was beckoning him over: "Sol, if you please."

Nothing for it. Sol ambled over reluctantly. "Yeah?" He grinned at Kiske's dour expression. "Sir."

"I've been wanting to ask you about something," Kiske said. "You were a bounty hunter. You know a great deal about the Gears."

This didn't strike him as a safe line of questioning. "Some, I guess," he conceded. "Why?"

"Perhaps you might know about these creatures as well. They are often mentioned in these books, but they never explain what they are," he said, tapping a page. "They seem to assume that the reader already knows."

With a sinking feeling, Sol edged closer and leaned to look where he was pointing. "Nanobots," he read. Shit. Leave it to Kiske to zero in on the bad stuff.

"Yes, those," Kiske said, glancing up at him. "I have looked for other works on—"

"Not gonna find 'em," Sol cut him off.

"What?" Kiske blinked up at him. "Why not?"

"Blacktech," Sol said, and saw Kiske flinch at the word. "For making Gear cells. Books all got burned."

"Oh. I see."

"Yeah, so . . ." Sol started to edge away again, but Kiske wasn't finished with him.

"But you know what they are," he persisted.

Sol gritted his teeth. "Much as anyone else, I guess."

Kiske studied him for a moment, then gestured curtly at the bench across from him at the table. "Pretend that I am 'anyone else,' then. Please tell me what I already know."

Sol sighed. He perched on the seat across from Kiske, old wood creaking ominously under his weight. "Look," he said, exasperated. "You even know what cells are?"

"From the body, you mean," Kiske said. "They can be seen with the microscopes."

"Yeah, those. Well," Sol scratched his cheek and tried to think of some way to explain this that wouldn't offend someone as religious as Kiske too badly, where "religious" meant "anti-technology" nowadays. "Gear cells. Okay. Say you could make a machine that's as small as the cells in your body. Or one that's even smaller."

"I do not see how that would be possible—"

"Don't have to know how. Just assume it," Sol said impatiently. "Now say those little machines can be put in your body. That they'll attack your cells. Attach to 'em. Invade 'em. Rework 'em into something else. Say that they can use what's in your body to make more of themselves," he twirled a finger, "over and over and over."

Kiske looked a bit disgusted. Well, he'd wanted to know. "So that was how the Gears were created?"

"Dunno. Maybe." Sol shrugged. "Maybe there was more to it. A lot more. Maybe it never would have worked without magic. Hard to say. Nobody knows anymore." No one except Sol, anyway.

"Another thing I still do not understand," Kiske said, shutting the book and pushing it away with a shudder. "Why they would have done any of it. Created the Gears. Why they would have inflicted them upon us."

No one was thinking about you, Sol didn't say. He felt an unwilling pang of sympathy for Kiske, a kid born into an endless war that long-dead fools had made for him. Impossible now to explain the mindset to someone like Kiske, why Sol and people like him had done what they'd done, just because they could do it—not when the kid was living with the results.

"Back then," Sol said carefully, "they'd just discovered magic. Figured out they could do things that'd been impossible before." He fished for an example. "Say you got injured, couldn't move around. So you get a dog, and the dog's trained to do stuff for you. Makes good company, and it can guard you, too." That was safe enough; some people still tried to keep pets, though more people just ate them. "Smarter the dog, more it can do for you. Now say you can make it real smart."

He could tell from Kiske's troubled glance toward the ground that he was trying to imagine having a dog around all the time, and Sol snorted. "Whatever. A ship's cat. A horse. Any kind of animal. Maybe you can work its cells to change its shape in different ways. Make it bigger, stronger, better at specific jobs like guarding. That's the point. Animals aren't people, so you can make 'em do a lot of stuff people don't want to."

"Fight wars," Kiske said, running a finger listlessly over the binding of his book.

"Yeah," Sol said. "That, too."

"If they were so smart, these animals, they would not want to do these things."

"No choice," Sol pointed out. "That's what the Command Gear was for. Constant control. No way to step out of line."

"Justice, you mean," Kiske said. He laughed, but he didn't sound very amused.

They sat for a while, Sol shifting uncomfortably. Finally, Kiske said, "Well, I have kept you from your duties."

"Sure," Sol said, straightening to his feet. One of these days Kiske would finally figure out that ignorance is bliss. Sol didn't want to be interested in Kiske, the kid who asked uncomfortable questions and wasn't pleased with the answers.

Because, ultimately, Kiske didn't matter. He was just a means to an end.

Undersn, when he finally turned up again from the south, was ecstatic with the kid's progress. In a fit of nostalgia, he insisted on dragging Sol into a tavern to celebrate. "Drink this beer," he said, pushing five bottles in Sol's direction. "It is on me. You have earned it."

"Yeah, I have," Sol pointed out. "This wasn't the payment I was expecting."

"Ah. That."

"Yeah, that," Sol said, willing himself some patience. "Quit jerking me around."

"In fact, I have begun to make the inquiries about it," Undersn said, voice dropping. "Your service record so far hasn't been, ah, exemplary . . ."

Sol snorted. "I get the job done."

"There is that," Undersn said. "And that is what I am emphasizing, since you do not choose to make the task easier."

Sol rolled his eyes. "Look—"

"Ky's use of Fuuraiken has been very persuasive, and you are obviously the next most qualified," Undersn said. "That in itself has raised some questions."

"What kind of questions?" Sol said carefully.

"They wonder where you have come from, why someone who is obviously such a strong magic user has only recently enlisted in the Order. Why no one had noticed your activities before now." Undersn shrugged. "I am dealing with this."

"Bounty hunter," Sol said. "Nothing to hide."

"No indeed," Undersn murmured, drinking his beer.

"Just make up their minds for 'em faster," Sol said. "Justice knows what her Gears know. And she knows what's hitting them now."

"What do you mean?" Undersn said.

"She's not stupid," Sol pointed out. "Not like she wouldn't recognize a Jinki."

"Ah."

"Yeah, ah. She's had them gunning for it directly—kid's target number one on every raid now. Now's the time to get more of the Outrage out there."

Undersn looked troubled. "An excellent point, which I will be bringing up in future."

"Yeah," Sol muttered. "You do that."

"But I hope that you will continue to watch his back," Undersn said.

"Don't count on it," Sol grumbled. "Got my own self to take care of."

Sol hadn't had an easy time of it, tracking Kiske down in Rome while the whole damn city was falling apart around them, and every other street Sol had turned down had been crawling with Gears. The idiot had gone charging off to rescue I-No, that witch they'd picked up in a destroyed village along on the way. Sole survivor, Sol's ass. That evil bitch of a refugee had been a wrong number from the start. Trash-talking Sol as soon as Kiske was out of earshot, and then she'd even convinced the kid to toss Sol in the fucking brig.

After she'd high-tailed it into the city, Kiske had refused to leave her for Gear chow like she fucking well deserved. Sol figured he was the only one who had a chance of retrieving Kiske in this fiasco; he'd busted himself out to look for him. The longer it took Sol to find Kiske, the more danger it put everyone in, troops and refugees included.

Eventually he'd spotted a flash of white, down a side street, and there Kiske was, leaning against the wall of a ruined building—right beside a dead L-Class Gear that had taken out an entire city block when it'd died. He was staring at the sky, silently laughing to himself.

"Kiske! Yo!" That got his attention, but it didn't start him moving. For that, Sol had stomp down the street and yank him into motion. "Here to get you. So move it."

"Sol." Kiske sounded drunk, but he wasn't. Not good.

"That Gear yours?"

"Must have been," Kiske said, chuckling to himself. "No one else is here, are they?"

"Whatever. C'mon. Move the legs, kid."

"No, I'm wrong." Kiske patted Sol's cheek sloppily. "You're here. I knew you'd show up."

Sol slapped his hand off. "Cut it out. Move, or I'm carrying you." That threat was enough to get Kiske stumbling along with him.

By the time they'd picked their way back through the rubble to the ship, Kiske was mostly back to normal. Mostly. Enough to turn command back over to the airship's captain, but not enough to actually remove his own ass from the bridge. And from the sidelong glances, people were starting to get worried.

"Sir. Captain," Sol said, nudging him. "Forgetting something?"

Kiske tilted his head. "Sol," he said, looking surprised. He seemed to be genuinely making an attempt to remember.

"Not in the brig." Sol pointed to himself helpfully, and Kiske's face took on a look of intense concentration.

"You should be in the brig," he agreed. "Why aren't you?"

"All these guys are busy," Sol said. "So why don't you just escort me back there yourself?"

"I should do that," Kiske agreed.

Sol immediately grabbed his arm and hustled him off the bridge, trying his best to make it look like he wasn't dragging his unit captain through the narrow corridors, but likely failing. Fortunately, Kiske's officer cabin wasn't far—Sol checked that no one was in sight, muscled Kiske in, and slapped the door closed after them.

Kiske was teetering in the center of the small cabin, looking around with a vaguely puzzled expression, when Sol shoved him down on the bunk.

"That," Kiske pointed out, "is more insubordination. This is not the brig."

"That," Sol snapped, "is shock. Stop fucking around." Sol dragged the blanket out from under him and tossed it on him. "Wrap up."

"I'm not in shock," Kiske said mildly. But he obediently began to fumble with the blanket anyway, his lack of coordination pretty much putting the lie to the assertion.

Sol wondered if there was a god who looked after idiots after all. He dragged out the only chair, straddled it, and crossed his arms over the back. "Okay, kid. Talk. What happened back there?"

"I went after I-No."

"The evil bitch," Sol corrected nastily. "I knew that part."

Kiske frowned. "She wasn't a—"

"Yeah, Kiske, she was," he snapped. "Why the hell'd you go after that witch anyway?"

"I didn't want to leave anyone behind. She'd offered to help, so abandoning her would have been . . . No. 'In front of the populace I shall be a shield from the storm and a rock of support.'"

Trotting out the Oath meant nothing but rationalizing with Kiske. Sol studied him narrowly. That flush looked familiar; he wondered if maybe Little Miss Bitch had offered more than some help. Somehow, somewhere in Kiske's past, what little he had, he'd picked up some screwy ideas about women that not even an army full of badass broads armed to the teeth had managed to dispel—and the women in their unit knew it, too, and played on it pretty mercilessly when they wanted something. Probably the only female alive Kiske didn't regard as a potential damsel in distress was Justice—and if she'd invite him to tea, he might change his mind about her.

It was a lost cause, Sol figured. "Keep going," he said.

"I didn't find her," he admitted. "Then there was . . . a Gear. Then it was a dead Gear." Kiske frowned. Then, abruptly, he started to shake. "I can't be alive," he said wonderingly.

"Shit," Sol muttered, standing up and jerking the blanket into place. "Look pretty alive to me."

"But I can't be. That was a Large Class Gear," Kiske argued. "I was by myself. I was tired. It's simply not possible."

Sol was inclined to agree. The kid ought to be dead, but here he sat. And if the kid hadn't taken out that Gear, that meant I-No had. So she was a helluva lot stronger than she'd pretended to be, and her motives in this whole fiasco were—who the hell knew?

"So whatever. Say I-No took it out," Sol said. "A Gear keeled over right in front of you, destroyed a city block, you somehow managed to miss all the action."

"Evidently," Kiske said wryly. "I've actually . . . this wouldn't even be the closest I've come to being killed. Only this time it feels like someone's walking over my grave. Repeatedly. I can't even describe it."

Sounded like that witch had worked some hoodoo, and Kiske had been too damned close to the spell radius. It'd make sense. He was still shivering, and he was looking, for a change, like the skinny-ass teenager he actually was.

Sol gave up on getting anything else out of him. "Ah, screw it," he said gruffly. "Move over."

Kiske blinked at him, and Sol shoved him over, grabbing one side of the blanket and wrapping himself in with Kiske, trying to ignore the needle-sharp pops of static. Kiske just wasn't that comfortable to be close to when he wasn't in control. But Sol knew his own core temperature was a lot hotter than normal people, so he could play hot water bottle for a few minutes at least.

"Kiske," he said, "not gonna argue. You fucked up. Don't do it again. End of story." After a few moments, he added, just to be clear, "No more to-your-door service: next time, save your own damn self."

Kiske was already out like a light, so Sol guessed that last point was lost on him. Figured.

"I have been keeping track of the reports," Kiske was insisting, "and these are the confirmed sightings. Here and here . . ."

Sol stifled a yawn. Guarding a doorway that no one wanted in or out while the boys and girls in blue argued about their latest campaigns was pretty fucking boring. Even Undersn, normally Mr. Sunshine, was starting to look a bit droopy.

"No," Kiske was saying, "you are not—look at this map. I also have marked the positions of the earth tremor activity reported last year—"

Most of the town their regiment was occupying at the moment was deserted; earlier in the week, they'd dropped in to visit with the Gears who'd been taking the town apart. Some locals were sticking it out for some church honcho coming in from out of town, but most everyone else had headed for the hills. The heat here had been making it even more uncomfortable, and the tempers were matching the temperature. Kiske, cool and prickly as usual, seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way under the circumstances.

"So what's your point?" a woman said.

"What I am getting at," Kiske said slowly, "is that I believe it's going to be a major attack."

That got Sol's interest.

"But Large Class Gears, I don't see how—" one of the men was arguing.

"These mountains here could easily hide them," Kiske said. "If you look at the pattern of the reports, even leaving out suspect sightings, that still places this city," he pointed, "more or less in the center. The city that just happens to have the largest concentration of refugees this year, after these towns were attacked in turn."

Yeah, Sol thought. Put it that way, it did look a long-range plan to herd a lot of people into one place. In fact, now that he thought about it, Sol figured there'd be a good chance of Justice hitting that, live and in person. Chances were definitely looking good.

"I agree that it looks promising. But I am afraid we cannot send the full contingent," Undersn said. "The Cardinal is coming here, to this city, and at least one unit must be detached to remain. I am afraid that I myself must—"

"But we have already routed the Gears here," arguing guy interrupted rudely. "There's little danger of them returning. A full unit would be—"

Cardinal, Sol thought, tuning him out. That meant Rome-in-Exile, so that meant the entire Order's hierarchy. Everyone at the table seemed to think charging off to fight a city full of Gears was more important, which made sense, but . . . He turned that over a bit as another argument flared up about who'd have to stay behind. All those really convenient Gear sightings.

Sol caught Undersn's eye and made a jerking motion with his chin. Hallway, now.

Undersn raised an eyebrow. A few moments later, he said, "Excuse me," he said. "Carry on, everyone. I will be back in a moment." Sol was already slipping into the corridor, just another red-and-white uniform that no one noticed—except Kiske, who was frowning at them both.

Undersn waved off the saluting underlings as he passed, and caught up with Sol, who was lounging farther down the corridor by a window, safely out of earshot of everyone else loitering in the vicinity.

"What is it?" Undersn said, looking out the window, ostensibly admiring the view. "Is something wrong with the—"

"One thing. Think the kid's right," Sol cut him off, "but there's something you don't know."

Undersn folded his arms over his chest. "I am listening," he said.

"Remember what I told you once?" Sol said, shooting a look around and feeling perversely like he'd somehow stumbled into a spy flick, though he was the only one left who'd even recognize the comparison. "About the blacktech in the sky?"

"The machines," Undersn said, lowering his voice as well. "You called them satellites, yes?"

"Yeah, those."

"You said they were used for communication, but—"

"Like I told you, Justice taps into 'em." Sol shifted, uneasy. Spilling more of what he knew might not be a great idea on the self-preservation front, but he might be out of options. "It's not just communications."

Undersn's gaze flicked from the window and fastened on him. "What do you mean? What else then?"

Sol mulled over, briefly, attempting to explain optics, cameras, and resolution to someone born into a technological dark age, and gave up on it. "Like the binoculars, only a hell of a lot more powerful. She can see what's going on down here."

"I don't see how—" But Undersn seemed to catch his resemblance to the arguing guy back in the room, and he stopped himself. If he'd trusted Sol enough to set him loose on his pet project, then it had to go the rest of the way, too. He just rocked on his heels, thinking it over. "How much can she see?"

"Depends. But maybe that wagon train with your head honcho coming into town. Just for instance."

Undersn blinked. "Then separating our troops would be . . ."

"Set up," Sol said. "Justice won't be there." He cast a sidelong look at Undersn. "Was he just coming to review the troops? Seems like a long trip."

"I have not told anyone else of this, and you are not hearing this from me," Undersn said softly, "but I have been made aware that the head of the church was killed during the fall of Rome. That perhaps the church might be reestablished in a new city. With a new head."

The Pope's dead? Sol snorted. Pretty big news to be hiding from the entire Holy Order.

"They had specifically requested that I remain behind, here in the city, should any troop actions be undertaken . . ."

"Nice. Head of the church, head of the army, both in one place," Sol pointed out. "That happen often?"

"No, it seldom happens," Undersn said, frowning.

"Any particular reason why Justice wanted to whack the Pope?" Sol asked.

"The Gears massing in those regions has been confirmed," Undersn said, ignoring Sol's question. "We can't simply abandon the city. And we have had no reports of any further sightings in this vicinity, which was why I had suggested it as the place for this meeting." Undersn sighed. "If it is not one thing, it is another. I will deal with this. Return to your post."

"Hold up," Sol said. "What are you—" But Undersn was already stumping back down the hall.

By the time Sol had slid back in to resume his position has as a door decoration, he figured Undersn had already announced his new plans: he picked up that subtle but distinct scent of ozone he associated with Kiske, who had the pleasant but detached expression that generally meant he was seething.

"I have made my decision," Undersn was saying to the room; "a full mid-level unit must stay here in the city. Captain Kiske will be staying to command them, as the Cardinal has expressed a wish to meet him as well." To Kiske, he said, "Your unit, I'm afraid, must go to the front. Please keep with you here anyone from your unit that you feel would be useful in the event of the unexpected."

"Of course, Commander," Kiske said. He sounded agreeable enough, but Sol figured the only "unexpected" Kiske was expecting was some priest tripping on his robes on the stairs. Then Kiske's gaze settled on him, and Sol could practically feel the frost in the air. Yeah, Kiske knew who to blame for the sudden change of plans, and Sol was going to pay. "I have already decided who will be staying behind."

"Excellent," Undersn said, smacking his palms together. "It is settled. Please convey these orders to your units, and prepare everyone to move out by the original timetable. Dismissed."

Scooting chairs, feet on floor, murmur of conversation, and all the officers but Kiske shuffled their way to the door. Problem: "Dismissed" didn't include Sol until the room was clear. The room wouldn't be clear until Kiske left.

Kiske wasn't leaving. He was scratching out lines on a piece of the Order's rough paper, and paying no attention at all to Sol. Sol wondered how long Kiske was going to make him wait before lowering the boom. He shoved his hand in his pocket and propped up the wall for a while.

Finally Kiske carefully capped his fountain pen, tucked it away, and pressed his thumb to the slate surface and onto the paper, the glowing mark fading within moments. He flicked Sol a glance. "Here. You will inform everyone on this list that they are to remain in the city. You are on it. I will be talking to both units concerned in an hour, ours and the unit that is staying behind."

"Yeah, OK," Sol said, stepping forward for the paper. Kiske's eyes fell shut, and his fist clenched: there it was at last, visible flickers of electricity over his knuckles. That whiff of snow was stronger than ever now. Sol cut him some slack, just for the moment: "Yes, sir," he said.

Kiske let out a breath, and after a few moments, the crackles of charge died away. "What did you tell the Commander?" he said, tone polite and chilly as ever, but he hadn't moved, and he still wasn't looking at Sol.

"Ask him," Sol said.

"I am asking you."

"Yeah," Sol pointed out, "you are." He didn't know why Undersn wanted to play it so close to the vest, but he figured it had to do with the damned Pope and the United Nations, and a lot of other things Sol knew nothing about and had never given a shit about—but he knew a lot of people did. And Sol himself wasn't about to try to explaining the disadvantages of blacktech to Kiske, who'd probably toss him in the brig for even uttering the word right now.

"I am sending my people into a battle without me, against what may potentially be the largest contingent of Gears that we have seen in years, while I sit behind here, ensuring that no priest chokes on his soup. Christ." Bitter, and the closest to sacrilegious he'd ever heard from Kiske. Then he was finally looking at Sol, and it wasn't the anger he'd expected but something closer to betrayed. "I believe I deserve to know why."

"Not disagreeing, here," Sol said, quietly sliding the paper from under Kiske's fist. "But not up to me." He wasn't Kiske's friend, and he never would be. But right then, maybe for the first time since he'd checked into this nuthouse, Sol could see himself as the asshole Kiske thought he was.

"Wait." Kiske's hand flattened on the paper. "No. I can't be . . . irresponsible. Not about this. I'm sending you with them."

Shit. "Don't," Sol said.

Kiske flicked a look of surprise at him. "Excuse me?"

"Just don't," Sol said, kicking himself. "Keep me on the list." What the hell was he supposed to do?

Kiske's look narrowed and went speculative, and here they were, back to Kiske trying to fit together a puzzle when he was missing three quarters of the pieces. The trouble was, sometimes Kiske made pretty shrewd guesses about what the bigger picture might look like. Nothing Sol could do but wait it out.

Kiske lifted his hand. "All right. Take it," he said. So he didn't know what was going on, but Sol guessed he was willing to trust Undersn, if never Sol. Which was pretty damn smart, in Sol's opinion.

Sol dropped under the swipe of claws and turned his momentum into a spin, ending with an upward slam of his stone slab: "Storm Viper!" Roar of fire, Gear shrieking, stench of singed fur and fused plating. Somewhere in this sprawling melee was Kiske, somehow Sol had lost track of—a blinding flash, a sizzling crack of lightning rocketing upward a few blocks to Sol's left. Kiske accounted for. That just left Undersn battering on Justice, while Sol and a few other harried Knights from his unit held back their current dance partners: Justice's own guards, most of them outweighing Sol by a few tons. Sol caught a flare in the corner of his eye and ducked, just as Justice's Imperial Ray cut over his head, slicing into the bellowing Gear. Justice's aim could use some work there, Sol thought. "Ha!" Undersn shouted, and Sol heard the clang and grind of metal on metal that meant Undersn had whipped out his Skull Crusher move.

As it turned out, Sol and Kiske had both been right. But he didn't think either of them were celebrating right now.

The morning had started out humid, hot, and sticky, and everyone's tempers had been frayed. Kiske had been unsmilingly, painstakingly polite with everyone, still stewing over having watched his own unit trudging up the airship ramps without him several days before. The handful of people Kiske had held back, Sol included, were some of the stronger magic users; after their initial astonishment had worn off, they'd all begun to radiate resentment, too. Ever since then, Kiske had been acting like the mere sight of Sol lurking around on the periphery here in town was adding insult to his injury.

Sol couldn't even really blame him. Watching everyone else head out to fight without him had left Sol feeling more moody than he'd expected, and judging from the way people had been steering clear of his path, he figured he was looking it, too.

So if excess pomp and circumstance turned out to be all they were up against here, Sol didn't think he'd forgive himself either.

That morning, word had come back that Gears had advanced on the troops in the north soon after they'd arrived; the fighting was underway—and everyone standing in ranks behind Undersn, Kiske, and the Lambda Unit's captain knew it, as they watched the overly ornate airship and its train of smaller ships slowly descend for a landing. They were gently broiling in their full uniforms, in the field under the sun. Sol regarded the whole farce as a new form of torture. He may have been the only one who didn't mind the heat, but the humidity was starting to bother even him.

On top of all that, watching Kiske fidget like a preschooler was getting on Sol's nerves.

"Shoulda gone before you left," Sol had finally grumbled in an undertone. Everyone around Sol cast him sidelong, uneasy looks, but Kiske ignored him. So Sol nudged him in the leg with his toe. "Hey."

"Badguy," Kiske said warningly, "be quiet." Kiske's stance was still for all of a minute; then he reached up and began to shift the sword harness on his back.

Sol snorted, and Kiske's shoulders stiffened. Sol figured he was mulling over what exactly he could do about Sol without causing a major scene at an inappropriate time. Then Kiske muttered, "Fuuraiken is uncomfortable."

Sol rolled his eyes. Yeah, Fuuraiken is. Sol had just opened his mouth for a rejoinder that Kiske would ensure he'd regret later, when Undersn turned around, eyed them both with one bushy, raised eyebrow, and promptly seized the opportunity for a speech.

"I hope everyone today is prepared to show what it means to be a Knight of the Holy Order," Undersn announced. "'In front of the populace I shall be a shield from the storm and a rock of support.' Remember your oath, and the importance of a good impression."

Yeah, Sol got the message loud and clear. Don't give the Lord High Muckety Mucks that we need to impress the idea that you're the uncouth lout you really are. Sol settled back into a sulk of his own, sneaking up a hand occasionally to run a finger under his collar. It'd been a while—hell, over a century, give or take—but he'd sat through worse corporate meetings than this. He could deal.

Sol spent the rest of the morning gritting his teeth, staring into space, working out equations in his head. Trying not to think about the fighting to the north. Sol trudged when he was told to trudge, and he stood where he was told to stand.

After about an hour of that, all the airships had blown sky high.

By leaving a group behind to guard the civvies at town hall then splitting up the unit, they'd managed to head off the Gears before they could make it through one of the neighborhoods on the outskirts of town. There, Sol had gotten his first look at Justice—over seven feet tall, metal-clad, spikes and tail—the world's only Command Gear, who'd been steadily, methodically slaughtering her way across the world for decades. Justice obviously hadn't expected this much resistance; she hadn't brought a full complement of Gears. But the ones she had brought were special-purpose battle models, nasty fuckers all.

When Sol heard Justice's impassive, synthetic tones remarking, "You are much slower than you were in the past. This is an effect of human aging?" he felt the first prickles of uneasiness. Undersn had fought Justice to a standstill in the past, and she'd turned tail—literally—and withdrawn. Undersn's ringing laugh seemed confident enough.

But when the clanging behind Sol abruptly stopped, and Justice said, simply, "Are we finished already? Hmm," Sol knew he couldn't screw around with the small fry any longer. "Blockhead Buster!" right into the open maw of the nearest one to finish it off, and he was free to turn on his real target.

Justice was crouching over Undersn's unmoving form, poking him in an oddly disconsolate manner, as if she expected that to get him back on his feet.

Sol charged her. "Bandit Revolver!" Sol, stone slab, and flame blast all hit her at his top speed, staggering her backward, away from Undersn. He crouched ready to block whatever she threw back, but Justice didn't return the attack. Instead, she straightened, head cocked, studying Sol. Analysis mode, Sol realized. He knew damn well he shouldn't let her finish processing, but keeping her distracted from the people hauling Undersn away was more important.

"It is expected from that one," she said finally, a whip of her tail toward Undersn, who wasn't yet far enough out of range. "But I am surprised that another would face me alone. You must be very confident."

"Whatever," Sol snarled at her. "Bring it."

"Very well," she said. "I will permit you to try. Breaking you should be enjoyable."

"Yeah? Try me breaking you."

But taking on Justice, handicapped as Sol was, was turning out to be a mistake. He hit her with everything he had, but he couldn't activate his Dragon Install mode, not with this many Order troops still around: that much pressure bearing down on his suppressor might give them an eyeful he couldn't afford. He sure as hell didn't need Crusade 2.0 called on his ass.

He should have taken the risk. Even though he'd blocked most of Justice's Gamma Ray, her X-Laser broke a lot of bones he needed for basic mobility, and even he couldn't heal that fast in the middle of a fight. Sol was down, and he wasn't getting up.

"Hmm," Justice said, drawing a long metallic claw down Sol's face as he grimaced. "You are very powerful. That was both interesting and enjoyable." Her tone was clinical and disinterested, like Sol had been a minor diversion.

If he'd had Fuuenken, this would have gone a whole world of different. Sol gritted his teeth, willing his damn cells to work harder. Then Justice planted a clawed foot on his chest and pressed, and she was fucking heavy.

"I cannot decide," she said. "Perhaps I would like to fight you again, little human."

Human. Sol didn't know whether he should be patting himself on the back or raging about that particular mistake.

"Sacred Edge!" Justice tilted her head up just in time to get a face full of plasma that sent her staggering backward. Oh shit, Sol thought. Only one other lunatic aside from Kliff Undersn and himself who'd jump headlong into a situation like this: Ky Kiske, serving himself up already battered and splattered liberally with gore.

"Justice!" Kiske shouted. "Face me!"

Justice shook it off, and crouched. "Another?" she said, a trace of genuine curiosity in her tone. "Fascinating." Then Sol saw her side vents expanding, which had to be sensors deploying. "That is part of the Outrage."

"Stupid punk, get the fuck out of here!" Sol yelled at him, but Justice had lost all interest in Sol, now focused entirely on Kiske.

"Yes. I will fight you as well," Justice was saying, shifting, gracefully stalking toward Kiske, who now looked spooked.

Sol recognized that expression. It was one thing to know it in theory, but now Kiske was hit with the reality of a monster with a pleasant, distinctly female voice. He was hesitating, just like Sol had always figured he would. Kiske, dammit, not the time or the place for your issues, Sol swore to himself, rolling to his knees and crawling after his own fallen weapon.

But then Kiske's face took on a set, determined look. "This ends here," he said. "I will end it."

"Will you?" she said. Then she paused and shuddered, looking askance. "What is that?"

"What are you waiting for?" Kiske shouted. "Come on!"

But Justice was ignoring him, tail lashing furiously. "A trap," she said. "I should have known. It was all—No!" The grinding, metallic shriek that followed was ear-piercing, painful; even Sol was burying his head in his arms to shut it out.

Justice toppled, slamming to the ground, and the air around her was thickening, coalescing. As they watched, layer after layer it built upon itself, hardening into a shell that continued to expand outward until nothing was left but a massive, opaque stone monolith shot through with veins of red.

"What . . . ?" Kiske said, a little too loudly. "I don't—"

Sol had never seen one, but he knew exactly what it was. "Dimensional prison," he said. "Somebody just worked a fucking blood seal."

"A prison?" Kiske blinked, looking gobsmacked. "But—"

"Guess Undersn plays his fucking cards pretty close to the chest," Sol said, and he swore under his breath. So he hadn't even told Kiske, who'd been all set to throw himself at Justice—who wouldn't have let him go crawling away afterward, not like she had with Sol and Undersn, not with a Jinki.

"Someone saved your ass," Sol said. "You gonna complain?"

"So it's . . . over?" Kiske said, sagging. "The Crusade. It's over."

"Sure it is," Sol said, snorting, grinding himself to his feet. "Gears all over the world just got cut loose from their controller, going nuts."

"I meant—"

"I know what you meant," Sol cut him off. "But it ain't over." Yeah, he could walk. He scooped up his slab, and started working his way down what was left of the street. "See ya."

"Sol, wait!" Kiske said. "I have to talk to—where are you going?"

"Elsewhere," he growled. Sol turned his back on him and walked. It was a dick move; Kiske couldn't just drop everything and chase after him, and that was exactly why he did it.

Sol had shucked the damned Order coat, detoured long enough to grab his old pack, same one he'd been hauling all over the world for years, and he was ready to hit the road when his brain finally rebooted itself long enough to sort through everything that had happened.

So, sure, Sol had had a taste of his own medicine served to him on a platter by Justice, and, no, it hadn't tasted too sweet. Then they'd had a rug pulled out from under them by people who didn't consider them worthy of sharing their big plans. But whatever. No, what really bugged him was that he'd put in over a year, and had not a damn thing to show for it.

If Sol had just kept Fuuenken after he'd made it rather than trusting people to do the right thing . . . but how was he supposed to have known that he'd end up taking on Gears himself? Then Undersn had strung him along, dangling a promise of getting it back for him . . .

"Holy Order of Assholes," Sol muttered. If he'd had Fuuenken, he could have taken Justice. None of this would have happened. As it was, all she'd gotten was a blood-seal smackdown, just like that Megadeth Gear that was lying under London. Neither Sol nor anyone else could touch her now. So maybe not tomorrow, maybe not a hundred years from now, but eventually . . . no seal lasted forever. Then she'd be on the loose again, and all of this would start again.

So fucking stupid.

Then Sol was struck by a thought that brought him up short. That damn Cardinal hadn't been in town because of Justice. No, Justice had hit them here because the Cardinal was in town. Why was she even after him? Undersn had never answered that question.

Then Kiske's fidgeting this morning. "Fuuraiken is uncomfortable," he'd said.

Just like that, all the pieces fell into place. Sol knew. He knew. Undersn had told him that the Order had a bug for virtue—bunch of priests, after all. They wouldn't hand over one of their 'holy treasures' without some sort of ceremony.

All Jinki resonated with other Jinki, because they were all segments of the Outrage. Fuuraiken had known that Fuuenken was nearby. That was what Kiske had been feeling.

Of fucking course. If Sol had thought about it, he could have worked it out. He turned on his heel and headed back toward the town center.

When Sol got to the Cardinal's rooms in town hall, they were in chaos. He had no trouble shoving himself a path through the crowd of hand-wringing idiots into the main chamber where, sure enough, he found one dead Cardinal, dressed in his fancy robes, bleeding all over an altar. Yeah, self-sacrifice, the holier the better, made for the most durable blood-seals around. Justice had figured that out, too; so the preemptive strike on Rome and the hit here.

"You there, soldier, you can't—" Some priest was trying to get his attention. He'd do.

Sol grabbed the idiot by the collar and hauled him in. "Where is it?" Sol demanded, shaking him til his teeth clacked. "The sword. Where's the fucking sword?"

The guy blinked at him, and his mouth worked soundlessly. Then, unable to resist the tell, he glanced to the side. Sol saw another priest edging nervously toward a fancy chest sitting at the back of the room. Gotcha. Sol headbutted his ditherer and threw him at the other; they both tumbled in a flailing mass of robes and limbs, as everyone else in the room started to scramble away.

Sol strode over to the chest and delivered a few firm kicks, enough to collapse the side.

And there it was: Fuuenken. The Fireseal Sword. A white blade like Fuuraiken, but squared off at the end, with a box-shaped guard and wide, flat fuller, both in brillant red. A nuke among magical weapons . . . sitting on a pretty velvet pillow. Sol couldn't help himself: it was ridiculous. He started to laugh.

That's when he heard the shout in the hall, a voice he'd know anywhere. Kiske. "Little late, kid," Sol murmured. "'Fraid I'm standing you up."

He scooped up Fuuenken and exited stage right—as in right out the nearest window.

Sol was still within town but outward bound when Kiske caught up with him. Sol honestly hadn't expected it; sure, Kiske could be a persistent little bastard, but this was beyond the call of duty. He had a disaster site to clean up, not to mention years to track Sol down in if he wanted the Order's supposed property back that damn bad.

"Sol! Stop, damn you!"

Sol figured it was best to get this over with. He turned around and waited. Kiske was sprinting down the street, Fuuraiken strapped over his back. Somewhere along the way he'd ditched his now ragged overcoat and its smears of gore, and his shoulders, left bare by the basic uniform, shone with sweat.

He slid to a stop of the cobblestones, a few yards from Sol. Kiske panted, glaring at him.

"Yeah?" Sol said.

"You—" Kiske swallowed, caught his breath. "You do not walk away when I wish to speak with you."

"Guess again," Sol drawled. "Later, Kiske." He turned to leave, and heard the distinctive sound of Fuuraiken coming out of the harness.

Well, that did make a difference. Sol pivoted back on his heel, and released Fuuenken from its strap. "If you want this that bad, Kiske, try me later."

Kiske only flicked it a dismissive glance, and said, "I had thought that even if you never respected my authority, that at least you respected me."

Sol cocked his head. Kiske didn't even know that this was Fuuenken. He must have gone tearing after Sol without talking to anyone back at town hall. "What're you babbling about, kid?"

"I saw it, you know. Not all of it, but I saw you fighting Justice. I saw . . ." Kiske turned his sword in his hands. "All that time, I thought you were genuinely fighting me. So I believed that I was improving. But when I saw you against Justice, I realized that you never had. That you had always been holding back."

Sol stared at him. "The hell?" Then he was laughing; on top of everything else today, this was ludicrous. "You ran after me because your feelings are hurt?"

"That is what I am talking about!" Kiske snarled at him. "You have nothing but contempt for me, do you?" A hissing, ripping glow of current began to play over the blade. "You may defend yourself or not now, as you choose. I'm not holding back."

Sol's suppressor band had been seriously stressed in that bout with Justice; he was blaming that for what came next. His hackles rose at the threat, and something pleased and malicious uncoiled inside him. He wanted this. Without even being conscious of the motion, he'd flicked Fuuenken into activation. "Know what this is, kid?"

Now Kiske took a second look at the sword: red and white, blunt tipped, and beginning to glow with a faint reddish sheen. His eyes widened.

"Meet Fuuenken," Sol said, feeling a flinty smile stretching his lips. "The Fireseal Sword. Sure you wanna do this?"

Kiske's eyes narrowed, speculative. Then hardened. He raised Fuuraiken, ready stance, and flickers of plasma streamed over the surface.

"Bad choice," Sol said, pleased. "Let's rock."

They'd never been that badly mismatched, after Kiske had started getting up to speed. Sol's preferred fighting style had always followed the path of least effort: kick it, bash it, set it on fire. Kiske, on the other hand, was one of those speedy, slippery bastards who liked to stay out of range plotting his opponent's downfall, needling at him until he screwed up, then rushing in with a smackdown.

Considering that Sol was the actual mad scientist here, and Kiske was a devout believer in a religion that held magic to be a gift from God and technology a direct line to Satan, it all somehow stuck Sol as a little ironic.

All of which boiled down to Sol noticing that Kiske was still building a pretty damn healthy charge in Fuuraiken, so Sol was expecting some sort of unpleasant surprise out of him—without knowing what it was going to be. But that didn't mean Sol understood why he reacted to it the way that he did.

It happened fast: Kiske darted in, feinted, and stepped back, and while Sol was still pulling out of his aborted parry, he saw the ball of lightning still churning at the tip of Kiske's sword, and heard Kiske shout something Sol had never heard from him before: "Rising Force!" In that split instant, Sol didn't fuck around—he hit the street flat on his face, and heard the roar and felt the sear of the massive wave of plasma over his back.

Kiske, the little hypocrite, had been holding out on Sol, too. He'd figured out how to discharge the entirety of Fuuraiken's collector in one move—and if that had hit Sol directly, it would have permanently fried a lot cells that Sol couldn't spare.

Sol's brain hit code red.

When Sol thought it over later, he figured the out-of-the-ordinary stresses of that day combined with such an immediate threat of system failure—and maybe some personal stuff that didn't bear examining too closely—must have factored into his body's interpreting Kiske as a bigger threat than Justice.

Dragon Install triggered automatically: Sol lashed out in fully powered Gear mode, wings, claws, and tail, then slammed out Savage Fang, his instant-kill incendiary storm—before he even consciously realized what the fuck he'd just done.

His already abused backside hadn't appreciated Sol throwing himself on top of the kid and taking the brunt of the ensuing conflagration, but Sol figured he deserved it after that moment of temporary lunacy.

Sol could still feel the sharp points on his teeth, and the extra joints in his fingers and toes that told him just how much damage he'd done to his Gear cell suppressor. It was going to need repairs soon before it failed completely. As for Kiske . . . he'd been knocked out by Sol's first few hits, so maybe, just maybe Sol was luckier than he deserved to be.

Or maybe he'd drawn the attention of the entire Holy Order contingent in town. Time to clear the street. He gathered up Kiske and swords, kicked open the door to one of the deserted shops, and dragged them all inside.

Sol was sitting sprawled on the floor, propped up against the empty display case a few feet away, as Kiske came to. He watched him scramble backward, hit the wall, then settle, checking out the surroundings with a quick sweep. Sol wasn't a medic, and he'd never needed the stuff himself; but he'd watched Kiske often enough, working on himself after his evening ass-kickings. So Sol had dealt with the burns and the concussion in the same way. Kiske peeled off the standard heal pads, looked at them blankly, then dropped them to the floor.

Now he'd turned his attention to Sol, studying him narrowly. Sol figured Kiske was trying to work out what he'd actually seen versus what might have been some weird conk-on-the-head hallucination. Sol didn't intend to help out with that. But as the uncomfortable quiet and the shadows in the room both lengthened, Sol decided he'd had enough.

"Got what you wanted," Sol pointed out. "Happy now?"

"You," Kiske said. Then he shook his head, disgusted, and winced. But he didn't add anything to that, and his expression settled into his all-purpose glare.

Sol shifted, a bit irritated. "Spit it out," he said.

"That resolved nothing," Kiske said.

"Supposed to resolve something?" Sol sneered. "Help me out there."

Kiske just rolled his eyes and shook his head, teenage asshole language that had survived the centuries, and, once again, Sol had had enough. He'd crossed the floor, snagged Kiske by the front of his uniform's chest belts, dragged his scrawny ass up the wall before he could react.

"Let me explain then," Sol snarled, and thumped him back against the wall to emphasize each point: "I'm not your teacher. I'm not your nanny. I'm not your friend. I'm not even your fucking subordinate, not anymore. Got that?"

"Fine," Kiske shot back scornfully. "What are you?"

The question threw Sol for a moment. "I'm nobody," he decided. "Not to you. Not to anyone else."

"Do you really think," Kiske said, "I am that stupid?" He shot up a hand to grip Sol's wrist, and there it was, that sharp ozone smell that meant—

"Two can play that game, kid," Sol snapped. "You want burned, go for it."

Kiske dropped the hand, and Sol decided it was wiser to move his, too. So he slammed his palm into the wall by Kiske's face and was disappointed when he didn't get a flinch. Instead, the kid was staring him down; he'd acquired a few inches over the past year or so, and that pissed-off blue gaze was now nearly level with Sol's.

And once he'd noticed that, Sol started to notice more. Like how flushed Kiske's face was. Sol knew Kiske: when the kid got really angry, he just got more polite, more frosty, more distant; this wasn't that. This was . . . yeah, Sol had seen this before, too.

Sol needed to get the hell out of here.

That would be after he'd removed the hand that had been gripping the kid's hair to tilt his head so that Sol could keep nuzzling behind the kid's ear. Thing was, even suppressed Sol was still enhanced, so he always noticed this damned smell that no one else seemed to, like fresh snow, but now mixed with sweat. He'd wondered for a long time what it must taste like, and . . . no, it was just Kiske and sweat and skin and a fizzle like carbonation.

Sol dragged his tongue lower, down Kiske's jaw, and he heard the moist sound of Kiske licking his lips again. Which was a thing the little bastard did sometimes that seemed to be calculated to pull Sol's attention to his mouth, making him miss orders or fumble his swings.

Sol really needed to leave. Now. Unclench Kiske's fists from his shirt and leave.

The problem was that the fucking angle was wrong. He was grinding his hips into Kiske's, but it wasn't . . . Sol slid his hands down the kid's back and gripped his ass, hauling him in, and that was the better position, right there. He could move Kiske, get some friction going . . .

Kiske made a muffled sound against his shoulder and shuddered.

"What?" Sol growled.

Kiske had gone limp in his hands, and was panting a little. Sol blinked, a small flicker of genuine sanity coming back. It had to be the damaged suppressor's fault. Had to be.

The closer he got to the two century mark, not even Sol was certain where he'd fall on the animal or mineral spectrum anymore. But right now, he was going with animal. He'd just gotten Captain Ky Kiske of the Knights of the Holy Order off against a dirty shop wall in a ruined city. He wasn't quite sure how you apologized for that. Sol banged his head on the wall by Kiske, willing his damn suppressor headband to do its fucking job.

"What on earth are you doing?" Kiske said.

"Kiske," he said, hearing the rasp of his own voice. It was a warning, if anything. "I wanna fuck you."

"I know," Kiske said simply. "I've known that for . . . a while."

Sol gritted his teeth. He honestly didn't understand Kiske. Hell, he didn't understand himself, not anymore. On the one hand was the rational argument that said responsible adults didn't molest virginal teenagers in the shopfronts of abandoned cities, not even in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world of their own making. On the other hand was Kiske, flushed and still smelling of snow, fumbling open that damned buckle on the chest of his uniform, then dropping his hands down to his belt.

"No, I don't think you do know," Sol said, one last try. He grabbed Kiske's wrist and forced his palm to press over Sol's dick: a monster is a monster. "Get it?"

Kiske went still, just as Sol had expected. "No, I am not quite certain," he said thoughtfully. "Perhaps you should explain this to me in detail as well. A diagram might be helpful?"

Post-apocalyptic teenage virgins were snarky.

Kiske shook his hand free, shooting an annoyed glance at Sol and muttering, "You have ruined this buckle." Sol had carved "FREE" into his belt buckle one afternoon when he was bored, and, no, he'd never win any art awards, and yeah, it was just like Kiske to bitch that Sol had messed with his sacred uniform.

Then Kiske grabbed the buckle and unlatched it.

The other hand was all trumps. Sol had Kiske on the floor in an instant, tearing at his own uniform, hating the Holy Order just that bit more for their enthusiastic embrace of too goddamn many fasteners, probably expressly designed to stop shit like this from happening.

Yeah, like that'd work.

Kiske was fidgeting again, and Sol tossed a heavy arm over him to put a stop to it. So much for the afterglow. Naturally the kid just couldn't let well enough alone, had to start gnawing over everyone else's problems. Sure enough: "Commander Undersn is injured. The Cardinal is . . . dead," he murmured. "The troops are still fighting in the north, and here they are in disarray, and I have been derelict in my duty, I have been—"

"Figuring out that not everything's under your control?" Sol interrupted. He added, for good measure, "Idiot."

Kiske sighed and shifted his hips, and Sol went back to rubbing around the kid's hole, pushing his fingers in to feel the slickness. Two hard-up guys could pack a lot of sex into a relatively short amount of time. Kiske might have all that vaunted teenage stamina, but he'd had a rough day—Sol guessed a third round of fucking would probably be pushing it. Sol licked one of the bite marks on Kiske's shoulder; he'd never be able to look at Kiske in that fucking Order uniform again without—

Yeah, no. His own weird, possessive shit was creeping Sol out. He pulled out his fingers, and the kid muttered under his breath.

He rolled over and fastened a stern look on Sol. "No. There is one thing under my control," he said. "I cannot let you take Fuuenken."

"Didn't even know I had the damn thing until—"

"It is one of the Order's treasures, you can't just—"

"Deal. You lost, kid."

"I have not lost until—"

"Fine. Come after me later," Sol said. "Kick my ass, take it back. Some reason you need to do it now?"

"Oh, of course you are right," Kiske said coldly. "Do pardon me for—"

"Don't start that shit with me, kid."

"You—"

But whatever he had to say, he bit it back, and Sol ignored the random sparks hopping across the floor. Instead, he concentrated on sorting out their clothes, pulling on his own stuff as he came across it.

"When I first met you," Kiske said suddenly. "I'd met other bounty hunters before. I assumed you were like them."

"Good assumption."

"No," he said. "No, it wasn't."

"Kid . . ."

"You came for me in Rome," he said. "It was stupid, but you did it. This time, this time I came for you. And then you turned your back on me."

"Yeah," Sol said. "That's what I do." That's what he'd always done. Screw up, walk away, start over somewhere else. If he could walk off this planet, his biggest screw up of all, he'd have done it a long time ago. Instead, he was stuck trying to put it right somehow. Sol was the oldest of the monsters, the Prototype Gear, and he felt the weight of that every day.

And he was just too damaged to handle any more complications. "Have a good life, kid. Leave me out of it."

Sol left him there. This time, Kiske didn't follow.

Documents, evidence, folders, food, and occasionally mysterious items of which Ky never did discover the use or origins were perpetually being deposited on his desk. He'd come in to the office in the morning and find them. He would step out for lunch, and find them on his return. He would go down the hall to refill the tea kettle, and find them when he came back. No one ever thought to leave a note explaining why they felt these things belonged on his desk, in his already cramped office.

In many ways, Ky had found that the International Police Force was just as bad as the Holy Order had been.

Ky shifted aside the folder in which he kept track of reactivated bounty hunter accounts, and picked up the latest stray oddity. He could not make heads nor tails of it. He took to the hall, and flagged down a passing officer.

"Here," he said. "Excuse me."

"Captain?" she said promptly.

"You were at the front desk this morning, correct? Did you see who left this in my office?"

He held out the folder, and she stared at it blankly. "Oh yes," she said. "It was the representative from the U.N."

Ky blinked. What on earth? "Thank you," told her. "In future, I would prefer a note to tell me where such things have come from."

"Of course, sir!" She nodded. "I won't forget again. I apologize, sir."

He waved her off, comfortably certain that no such notes would be in the offing. He continued to request them because he preferred to live in hope.

"A Second Holy Order," he said, shaking his head, digging for his slate. For some reason, the translators at the United Nations seemed determined to translate Head of the International Police as Last to Be Informed of Everything. "And the Postwar Administration Bureau sponsoring a tournament to generate interest in it. It's a stupid idea."

Still, Ky had found the vague rumors about sub rosa plots to revive Justice to be as disturbing as everyone else. It wasn't that he believed Justice's seal could be broken; it was the thought that someone genuinely wished to break it.

"I will have to investigate this so-called Holy Order Tournament personally, I think," he decided. A year ago, the paperwork had been completed at a regional office to convert a certain inactive Order bounty account, which he'd been tracking, into one of the newer IPF accounts. If Justice was involved in any manner, Ky was certain that he wouldn't be the only one who would find a reason to drift into that vicinity.

.

.

.