Lisbet ended up not being able to sleep after Beck left. It wasn’t his fairy tale by itself that caused her to twist sleeplessly on her mattress. The day had simply been too full to process. When she closed her eyes, she saw things coming back to her in a blundering mess of flashes. Tiffania was smiling like she didn’t know a knife was hanging over her head. The rogue transport ramming into Lisbet’s empty one and pushing it down the tunnel with a sound like thunder cracking. Beck tasering the reporter. Beck pulled the buttons of her shirt open on the examination table. He looked at her with such an odd expression on his face… Almost as if seeing her hurt and uncovered did something unpleasant to his insides. The reflections in his eyes changed and became dark.

That was when she opened her eyes in the half-light of her room. 

If she was honest, Beck hadn’t seemed very much like a little boy when he’d tasered the reporter, nor did he seem very childish in the way he looked at the circular bruises that made her look like she was part leopard. Exactly the opposite actually. The way he looked at her was not even a little bit like he got his jollies from looking at a naked woman. Granted, she wasn’t that naked (she was still wearing her bra), but she had responded very differently when she saw him with his shirt off later that night. She was a hundred times more bashful than he had been.

Mars, huh?

Suddenly, she realized that Beck was far more experienced than her in every way. Loneliness ate people on Mars, so he’d had much more sex than she’d ever had the chance of having. But more than that, Vantz wasn’t using her for her physics degree. He was using her physics degree to prove that she wasn’t a bubble brain when she spoke to the public. She had never been asked to help Beck with the terraforming project and even though he was much younger than her, he was her boss.

She toyed with the wedding ring on her finger. Vantz hadn’t given it to her specifically. He hadn’t even told her she had to wear one. It was a ring she’d found amongst the jewelry in the dressing room. She’d put it on herself the morning when she went to The Boiler Room for the first time. It didn’t mean anything. What mattered to Vantz was that she kept her promise to him regarding the stories she told the media. 

That was all.

And the prince with the crystal bubble girl was afraid he’d break another girl.

Who was that story actually about?

Lisbet wanted to think about it more, but at that very moment, a knock came at the door followed by two figures in the dark. Lisbet didn’t have to wonder who they were. Beck turned the light on immediately and showed himself and Invocation. 

“Good, you’re awake,” he said swiftly. “We need to go.”

“Where?” Lisbet asked, pushing the blankets aside and rushing to put her slippers on. 

“We’ll talk about it later,” Beck said, grabbing her elbow and pulling her toward her dining room. “You have a servants’ entrance in here. We’d better take it and we have to hurry.”

The servants' entrance was a cleverly hidden door in the wall behind a vending machine. Beck popped it open with a thud on the right spot.

“Have people been coming in through here?” Lisbet wondered, the thought giving her the creeps.

Beck and Invocation grabbed both her arms and pulled her through the door without a word. Invocation snapped the door shut while Beck hurried Lisbet up a staircase. 

“We’re on the seventy-fifth floor!” she whispered shrilly. “Shouldn’t we go down?”

Beck swatted at her to help her hurry up the stairs. “Obviously not. Castle Ares has fallen. It turns out that over seventy miners died in that explosion earlier and a mob has taken all the bottom levels. There’s no way we can go downstairs. We have a solarship waiting on the roof. We need to get into space because there is no down that is safe right now. Haul!”

Needing no further encouragement, Lisbet put some heat in her muscles and raced up the stairs.

When they got to the roof, Lisbet was surprised by how much her legs hurt. Gravity was less on Mars than it had been on Earth. She should have done better.

When Beck said ‘on the roof’, what he meant was a warehouse on top of the skyscraper. Mars didn’t have a breathable atmosphere. The warehouse was very sleek. The ship waiting for them was not. It looked old and a little like a bomb shelter someone had unearthed, but Lisbet didn’t have time to question it.

Soon they were aboard, strapped down, and Beck was taking the flight controls. 

“Why did I think you’d be flying it?” she asked Invocation.

“Because I look older and more sophisticated than Beck, so you’re looking to me for guidance,” he said, giving her a patient glance over his shoulder. “But that is nonsense because he is higher up on the food chain than I am.”

Lisbet gave the doctor a dirty look and craned her head to see if Beck had heard them. His seat was ahead of theirs on the flight deck.

“Relax. He didn’t hear me. Besides, it’s a normal reaction. People are always turning to me thinking I’m the answer,” he said with a wicked grin. “It’s good Beck isn’t too proud to drive a dumpster fire like this into orbit. Anything flashier would probably be noticed next to the debris.”

Lisbet had traveled from Earth to Mars, but she hadn’t known anything about the time she’d been in space. She’d been asleep. Escaping the planet’s gravity was less vomit-inducing than she expected. She held onto the armrests of her seat and looked out the window next to her. It was a rare treat watching the horizon turn as they gained altitude and evened out. Soon they were hovering in space. Beck navigated their ship through old satellites and the discarded rubble to hide their ship under the wing of a ruined vessel.

“This is what the space around Mars is like? A graveyard?” she asked, looking ahead through the window on the flight deck.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg. Yes, this is the remains of that battle, but all this was a little bit of a junkyard before you came. There’s junk everywhere on Mars,” Beck explained looking through the window with her. “You’re not ruining anything no matter where you dump it. The land is uninhabitable. It’s not like you’re going to drop something on your neighbor’s lawn. The same goes for the satellites. We need information transfer a hell of a lot more than we need clear skies. There are no oceans to damage. Nothing. It doesn’t matter where you dump things on Mars. Littering is part of the culture.”

The air hung on those thoughts while Lisbet saw the whole of the red planet for the first time. It was more black than she expected. The mountains were clearer. There were no heat waves or cloud cover to obscure the view. 

Beck turned in his chair to face her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to wait here.”

“For what?”

“Invocation has a job to do. A ship will meet us here and we’ll transfer him over. Once he’s left, you and I have a different job. Remember the bomb that went off accidentally?”

Lisbet nodded, feeling tense. She wished she’d had the presence of mind to grab the rhubarb pie cigarette Vantz had sent her instead of leaving it in her room back at the castle.

“As I said, the casualties in the explosion were significant. The government is trying to track the mining corporation that was on site. There was equipment left in the area, but suddenly no one can find anyone to talk to. They’re all fleeing underground, getting into their hidy holes. So, no one is taking responsibility for being in a place they should not have been. Vantz has been making public statements in your place.”

“I’m sorry. I should be the one doing that,” Lisbet said, feeling like she’d dropped the ball.

Beck waved away her concern. “He had to take over because he simply cannot send you out to make a statement immediately after the drive-by shooting. He can’t seem like a loving husband if you make a statement now. We’ve told dozens of lies to cover the movements of our operation, but now that we’re nearing the end of the project, we’re not telling lies anymore. He straight up told the media that it was a bomb planted in an evacuated pleasure palace and that anyone who’s thinking of looting an abandoned palace should think twice because those are the perfect locations for the bombs intended to terraform Mars. He’s warning people that Mars is no longer safe in the zones where you’ve announced that people have been evacuated. As a side note, he’s publicly turned on the artificial magnetic field. That way, if someone else sets off a bomb by accident, we won’t need to replace it.”

“Great,” Lisbet said in little more than a whisper. “Are you guys leaving valuables inside emptied pleasure palaces? Is that why people want to loot them?”

Beck shrugged his shoulders. “No. The palaces are being dismantled. The palaces are being smoked out with sleeping gas, the people are being removed, and everything of value is being confiscated.”

“What happens to those things?” Lisbet asked, always curious enough to follow the money trail.

“They’re given as prizes to the crews that empty the palaces. They’re the guys we played Emerald War with. They’re wrecking crews and followers of the Church of Voynich. Surely, you saw their black skin and green hair.”

Lisbet scratched her skull. “I didn’t put that together when I saw them in VR, but I should have. They hate slavery and… Is Benediction himself here working with Vantz?”

Invocation chuckled. “She doesn’t know much about the Church of Voynich from Io, but she knows about Benediction?”

“Why is that funny?” she asked, not getting the joke.

“That’s his church,” Invocation answered blankly.

“He has a church? I knew he was a member, but I didn’t know he was the leader. I thought he was a model–”

That was when Invocation lost it. He laughed outright. “He would cry tears of blood to hear himself reduced to the influence of a model. Obviously, he’s not a model. He’s the prime minister of Io, so not only is he the head of a church, but he is also the most important government official on the entire moon. His church hates slavery and they’re here helping us dismantle the pleasure palaces. His people are coming to retrieve me, but not Benediction personally. He’s on Io, arranging for all the treasures unearthed from Mars to be used to pay for the raids to free the slaves, but he’s giving the leftover profit to the freed Martian slaves, so they never have to come to Mars again.”

Lisbet swallowed. “That’s very good, but isn’t Io a stinkhole worse than Mars?”

Beck and Invocation nodded and shook their heads in unison. 

“Yes, it stinks on Io. Even though you can breathe the air there and it’s warmer than it is on Mars, they haven’t been able to curb the sulfuric stink, but to people who have suffered under Mars sands, it’s probably heaven,” Invocation explained simply. “They say you get used to the smell if you live there without nose plugs for a year.”

“Mars can be pretty smelly too if you’re in areas without proper air purifiers just because people without proper access to water stink,” Beck added before snapping the conversation in a different direction. “Lisbet, after the Voynich guys pick up Invocation, you and I need to replace the bomb that went off,” he explained, pulling a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and flicking it on.

“How are we going to do that?” Lisbet asked, eyeing his cigarette jealously.

“You aren’t going to need to do anything. I’ll handle all of it. There’s a discarded rocket in the same area that has one remaining engine that can fire. I’ll set it to explode on activation.” He took a puff on his cigarette before generously handing it to Lisbet.

She took it without question and inhaled. She breathed in the apple pie like it just came out of grandma’s oven.

“You two are close, eh?” Invocation said, looking at the two of them. “All alone in Castle Ares must have turned you upside down.” He gave them an envious look before announcing, “I’m gonna go to sleep. I was trying to sleep when all this went down. I’m gonna take cabin number one.” With that, he disappeared into the guts of the ship.

Lisbet turned back to Beck. “What happened to the other people in the castle?”

“There weren’t any. Anyone who didn’t have a job to do went into cryostasis soon after the Mammoths arrived.”

“Weren’t they worried that those ships might be attacked again?” Lisbet asked seriously.

“No. We wiped out the vast majority of the miners’ fleet. As soon as that danger was removed, most people living in the castle went to orbit and were put to sleep. Anyone else who has a job to do is off doing that job. By today, only the three of us were there. Robots were doing all the jobs. That’s why we lost control of the castle so easily. Not to worry. We knew that might happen at some point. Charcoal and Tavis have already been sent to the Saturn region. I initiated the self-destruct sequence on my equipment. I got Invocation and we left. Not to worry. All my equipment would have fried itself before we got to the roof.”

“What about my room?”

“There was nothing among your things that we would have minded being destroyed or pawed through by the enemy. At least not to my knowledge. Why? Is there something you’re going to miss? Please tell me you didn’t keep a paper journal.”

Lisbet dropped her head. “No. I didn’t. I guess I had nothing there that mattered. But now that we’re here, what are we going to do for clothes, for food?”

“There’s food aboard the ship. It’s not great food. It’s emergency rations, but if you pop into the kitchen, you can pour boiling water on one of the food packs. It’s not awesome or appetizing, but we’re not likely to be in space for longer than forty-eight hours. Not that I can promise great food wherever we end up after that.”

“Clothes?” she prompted.

“Forty-eight hours,” he repeated. “You’re going to have to make do with what you’re wearing. At the rocket site, a crate will be waiting for us with necessities. Vantz is taking care of it for us.”

“What will happen after we finish there?”

“I don’t really know,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Is there a place I can sleep?”

“Cabin number two.”

“You get cabin number three?”

“There is no cabin number three,” he replied humorlessly. 

“Oh, that’s why Invocation was so hot to say which bunk he wanted,” Lisbet concluded. “Where are you going to sleep?”