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three.”
    RoidBoy watched, fixated, and Dragonfly drifted his hand down toward the kid’s groin.
    I sauntered up, curled my arm around Dragonfly’s neck and added my hand to the mix. Seemed what they said about steroid use was true. “Tricks for three, too.”
    RoidBoy stumbled backward, sweating. “Get off me, freak.”
    “Baby doesn’t want to play,” I said, pouting, and laughed when he and his goggling friend made a quick exit.
    “Good,” murmured Dragonfly as we slipped past the bulkhead. “I was having fun with just us two.”
    I almost punched him before I remembered he didn’t know who I really was. My flesh still burned from kissing him, my breasts still ached, my thighs were still damp, and I hated him for it.
    “I’m still awake, I suppose,” I retorted. “Barely.”
    “I did say I was sorry.”
    He twisted the red steel hinge and wrenched the lever out and down, and the foot-thick blast doors parted with a clunk. At the end of a short corridor, through a clear plastic airlock, his ship’s tubular gangway gleamed, the dull metal fluorescing green and yellow with rabid biochemical security. He strode down the corridor, leaving me to seal the blast doors while he typed his code into the console studded to the wall. The plastic slid aside, and we scrambled on board.
    As soon as the airlock sealed, chemically induced nausea gripped me like a magclamp. I choked and doubled over, plastering my hand over my mouth.
    “Hold it in, can’t you?” He grabbed my other hand, dragging me around a corner and up the few ladder steps into the ship proper, the sickening luminescence crawling over me. Tears seeped out, a fist of pain squeezing my guts. I skidded around a metal workbench bolted to the deck and collapsed onto a sunken black sofa littered with tools and fragments of electromag kit.
    He hopped up the steps into the cockpit and slid into the padded grey command chair, the bright display igniting in the air at the brush of his finger. He tapped a couple of commands, cancelling the biochemical security precautions, and the luminescence died.
    I swallowed and wiped my mouth, the sickness subsiding but the sour taste lingering. He was already arcing the short-range propulsion, and with a lurch the ship rolled to starboard and darted away from Esperanza.

8
     
     
    The main deck of Dragonfly’s ship smelled of plastic and burned solder, like a workshop. By the time the security goons realized their mistake, we’d skipped traffic clearance, and Dragonfly gave a sharp arc-rocket boost to the ion drives and we were gone. Once the course was set and the drives accelerated us into slipspace, he shut the glass console down and stretched from the command chair with a sigh.
    I watched him from the sunken lounge in the saloon, rubbing angry hands on my thighs, his golden chip jabbing warm into my belly beneath my shorts. We were alone, Dragonfly and I. In my dreams, I’d waited for this a long time. I could kill him now and no one would care. Except Director Renko, and I could deal with that later. Claim he’d attacked me, that it was an accident.
    He stripped off his jacket and unholstered his pistol, tossed it wearily onto the console. He looked young and harmless, scraping soft hair from his dark-ringed eyes. Yes, I could kill him all right. Slide that shatterjay under his chin and blow his artery apart.
    But I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell my soul to Surov and black ops just yet. There was still the question of what Dragonfly was up to. I could blow his little ruse wide open, stab the insurrection in the heart and score even more points with Axis. There’d still be time to kill him later.
    He hopped down the steps and planted himself on the worktable before me, shoving aside a half-built gammaspace commlink and a bunch of colored wire. “Welcome to
Ladrona
,” he said, but he didn’t sound pleased to have me here. “Now give me my chip.”
    Ladrona
. Lady thief. It figured.
    I crossed one leg over the