“Kill you? With charred soy-curd and smoked habanero?” Tazoria tilted her chin against the emitter muzzle, ignoring the faint stink of ozone searing her bangs. “If my hitman syndicate worked on fifty-credit kitchen budgets, Morado, you’d be dead from high sodium, not capsaicin.” Vancor didn’t blink. His pupils were fixed points of obsidian, the muscle under his scarred left cheek twitching to the beat of an internal regulator. The metal edge bit harder into her skin. “Names. Handler. Coordinates.” “Loma-adjacent. Let’s call it Loma Two-Point-Oh,” she drawled, flashing a grin so bright it felt like a deliberate insult. She could feel the titanium brace behind his right forearm—military-grade, stiff, built to absorb recoil from anti-vehicle rifles. “Loma caught a stomach rot in the low docks. Vomiting her guts into the bilge water. She begged me, her favorite, marginally more talented cousin, to cover her shift so the Morado payroll bots didn’t wipe her family’s tier-three housing voucher. You’re welcome, by the way. Most assassins don’t balance the acid with lime zest.” Silence fell over the lounge, thick and venomous. Beneath the smell of hot gunmetal, she caught the faint, lingering aroma of toasted coriander and garlic oil. Vancor’s gaze flicked to the scattered crumbs on the parquet floor, then back to her face. A vein pulsed along his neck. He had starved for weeks. The sunken hollows beneath his cheekbones told the story Banto had whispered: the master ate nutrient paste because he trusted nothing that arrived on a plate. But his throat moved. He had swallowed that first bite. He had actually tasted it. “You lie with too much rhythm,” Vancor murmured, though the blue arc in the barrel dialed down from lethal amber to a standby hum. “Street vermin don’t speak with crisp syntax.” “Street vermin watch high-orbit dramas on pirated holos, sir. Some of us appreciate diction.” The double mahogany doors hissed open, hydraulic hinges wheezing under an aggressive kick. “Vancor, darling, what is that grotesque stench?” Drucia strutted across the threshold, wrapped in a shimmering coat of synthetic plume-fox that drifted behind her like frozen exhaust. Her high-collared neck brace flashed diamonds—or decent cubic zirconia—and her manicured hand clutched an ivory fan wired with biometric sensors. She stopped three feet into the room, her pointed nose wrinkling at the overturned tray. “Banto said you were breaking furniture again,” Drucia sniffed, her gaze sliding over Tazoria’s rumpled aproned figure pinned against the stucco. “And who is this scruffy gutter-rat? Don’t tell me the agency sent a dock-crawler to polish your silver.” Vancor lowered the plasma-pistol, tucking it behind his sash in a fluid flick of muscle memory, though he stayed planted between Tazoria and the door. “She is Loma’s cousin.” “She looks like an unwashed mechanic,” Drucia snapped, stepping closer, the sharp click of her magnetic heels ringing against the tile. Her pale face twisted in disgust as she spotted the grease streak across Tazoria’s collar. “Look at her nails. Disgraceful. Look at me when I speak to you, stray.” “I’m looking, ma’am,” Tazoria chirped sweetly. “Though the glare off your highlighter makes it tough on the retinas.” Drucia’s mouth flattened into an ugly slash. “Insolent sewer trash!” The slap came fast, fueled by genuine aristocratic fury, manicured nails hooked like talons aiming straight for Tazoria’s cheek. Tazoria didn’t flinch; she was already calculating the counter-pivot to drop the woman over her hip— A black gauntlet snapped through the air. Bone cracked against bone as Vancor’s cybernetic grip locked onto Drucia’s wrist mid-swing. The impact jarred the blonde’s entire torso, freezing her arm inches from Tazoria’s nose. Drucia let out a strangled yelp. “Do not,” Vancor said softly. The tone had zero volume, but the thermal sensors along the room’s perimeter whined in protest as his bio-signature spiked. “Vancor! Let go of me! She insulted my house!” “This is La Fortaleza. My house,” he said, not letting go until Drucia’s skin showed violet pressure marks under the pale dermis. “The kitchen staff answers to me. The dust answers to me. If she fails her duties, I shoot her. Not you.” He released her wrist with a flick of pure disgust. Drucia stumbled backward, cradling her arm, venom pooling in her painted eyes. She glanced from Vancor’s deadpan scowl to Tazoria’s brazen smirk, her breath hissing between porcelain veneers. “You’re losing your mind in this cage, Vancor,” Drucia spat, smoothing her coat with shaking knuckles. “Mother warned me your paranoia was degrading into rot. Keep the filthy little pet. When she poisons your broth, I won’t attend the tribunal.” She turned on her heel and stormed toward the corridor, slamming her palm against the access console. A tiny sliver of gold—a secondary override-ring Drucia had carelessly tapped against the keypad—flew off her swollen finger, pinged off the chrome threshold, and rolled under the baseboard. Tazoria’s boot casually slid three inches to the left, planting her sole directly over the dropped hardware. “You,” Vancor said, turning back to Tazoria. The dark shadows under his eyes looked bruised, but his stance was marginally looser than before. “Pick up the mess. Then fix the library. If I find one fingerprint on the glass displays, I test my new slug-thrower on your kneecaps.” “Understood, boss,” she said, bending down to collect the scattered bites with performative obedience. “I’ll dust so aggressively the molecules won’t know what hit them.” He stared at her for another beat, lingering on the upward curve of her lips as if trying to decode a military transmission. Then, with a curt grunt, he swept out of the room, leaving behind the ghost scent of crushed pepper and burnt gunpowder. *** By three in the morning, La Fortaleza slept under the blue pulse of automated sentry drones. High above the sea, gale-force winds battered the smart-glass panels of the master study, but inside, Tazoria was kneeling beside Vancor’s primary hover-chair with a micro-spatula and a stolen laser-pick. “Aggressive dusting,” she muttered to herself, popping the undercarriage panel open with a satisfying metallic snap. She had noticed the slight wobble in the chair’s magnetic lift coil when he entered the dining hall. The stabilization gyros were choked with carbon residue, running hot enough to bake an egg—a rookie maintenance flaw that probably made his old lumbar injuries ache like hell every time he leaned back. Her hands, trained since childhood in the private workshops of the sky-dock syndicates, worked through the fiber-optic ribboning. She bypassed the blown relay, swapped two redundant copper shunts, and calibrated the field to a silky four-millimeter hover clearance. “There,” she whispered, wiping a smear of dark grease onto her apron. “Now your butt won’t rattle off your spine, you grumpy bastard.” She clicked the hatch shut, slipped Drucia’s lost override-ring from her sock, and approached the study’s wall terminal. The gold ring carried an executive signature code—Drucia’s family held minor infrastructure concessions in the Cobre harbor, giving the ring high-tier protocol bypass. Tazoria held the ring against the glass sensor. The panel chirped softly, shifting from crimson lockout to pale cyan. Her pulse ticked up. This was the only terminal in the estate with an unrestricted quantum uplink to the orbital networks. She jammed a fingernail-sized data-chip into the aux-port beneath the desk, rapidly routing an encrypted bypass down to the regional testing databases for the Imperial Zenith Academy. She needed those astrophysics study packets. Two months until the scholarship exam. If she scored top five, the off-world waiver would pull her directly into high orbit, far beyond the reach of Puerto Cobre’s matrimonial contracts, out of her father’s suffocating grip, away from the hovering cruisers and gilded cages. Text flashed across the curved screen in rapid lines of amber code: [DEEP SKY ORBITAL CURRICULUM: DOWNLOADING 84%] [PROPULSION DYNAMICS III: VERIFIED] Tazoria smiled, a rare, unguarded spark lighting her face. “Almost out. Just a little more.” A sharp chime cut through the dark. The amber text vanished. The terminal screen flickered once, twice, and flared into a violent, strobe-like crimson. [WARNING: EXTERNAL QUERY INTERCEPTED] [HOSTILE SUBNET TRACE INITIATED] Tazoria froze. In the center of the bleeding red glass, an ornate holo-glyph rotated slowly: a twin-headed manta ray gripping a silver wrench, surrounded by razor wire. Her family’s hunting sigil. A mechanical voice rasped from the mansion's speakers: “Unauthorized handshake detected. Traced to: Val-Montier Heavy Industries Recovery Fleet. Vector: inbound.”

Aggressive Dusting