8. Saving the Best for Last

Niko was good at making split second decisions. Niko was incredible in heat of the moment action. Niko wasn’t so great at sitting around in silence, stewing in his own poor choices.

This had been a mistake. He knew it, down to his core. There was no explanation that could prove otherwise, aside from satisfying a morbid curiosity. In the end, it didn’t matter why Kestrel did what he did. He was still killing galactic heavyweights by the week now. Zann had pleaded with him to put an end to it. His brother was relying on him.

So why, then, was he anxiously lying in bed, unable to sleep, insides crawling with dread and regret in knowing he would be leaving—voluntarily leaving—to the Vialis system to meet the very murderer he was hunting?

Niko would laugh at himself, if he weren’t so annoyed instead.

He sighed, turning over again and opening a hologram. The pale light bathed the entire room and he squinted against its assault to his dark-adjusted eyes. He ran the search he’d run several times now, looking to find anything new: Sunorrna.

Sunorrna had once been a promising city-planet in the making, full of grand infrastructure and packed with grid-laced streets and compact living quarters. It had been abandoned when the planet’s bizarre tectonic activity had gone haywire, resulting in mass casualties and structural loss in multiple districts. Readings revealed over time that further future investment would only lead to inevitable tragedy and lost income. The entire planet was a seismic ticking time bomb of phenomenal severity.

In the decades since, Sunorrna was gradually abandoned—by investors and citizens alike. It stood a silent skeleton of vast, nearly planet-wide city being reclaimed by the natural flora. Drone footage obtained by urban explorers revealed most of the structures still stood in the North and Southwestern districts—and probably would for another hundred years or more—but some had sunk and collapsed under the onslaught of violent earthquakes that occasionally ripped through the planet.

Was this where Kestrel was staying? Zann and his research team had gone mad trying to find where the guy’s base of operations was.

Zann. Niko thumbed through images of Sunorrna, mindlessly scrolling through most of what he’d seen multiple times already. The smart thing to do would be to notify Zann. To get backup, hidden in the wings. To finish this as quickly and cleanly as possible. Niko considered messaging him but hesitated again—Zann would want to know how Niko had gotten to the point of meeting with Kestrel in the first place. And, despite every sign pointing to this being some kind of wicked trap with the same cruelty of his precisely delivered headshots, Niko couldn’t help but want to see where this led.

He managed an hour of sleep before waking to the light of dawn yawning across his room through the shades. Niko’s thoughts came slow and groggy and every part of his body ached and protested, fighting each movement. This was even more of a mistake—to meet Kestrel alone, running on no sleep. His reaction time would be slower, his wits dimmed. But he was dedicated now.

After a quick breakfast and half-assed shave, Niko left for his private rented hangar where he kept his ship. He opened Kestrel’s contact in his list, which he’d since saved as ‘Supermassive Asshole,’ with a photo of the gargantuan, supermassive black hole that churned at the center of the galaxy set as his contact photo. There were no new messages—goading or otherwise. He grabbed the address from their last exchange and set the ship’s course.

Niko suited up and brought his favorite rifle—which he’d recovered from their tussle on Uula—and a pistol holstered at his hip. He paused, then made sure to bring two of the EMP grenades for good measure. He had no idea what he would be walking into. He knew he was stupid for coming here at all, but at the very least, he wouldn’t be going in entirely unprepared.

He landed the ship in an open space near the address Kestrel provided, in a wide and empty, mostly flat patch of dark red foliage that he surmised had once been a parking lot.

Sunorrna sprawled across the ship’s windshield view, surreal and eerie and making the hair on the back of his neck rise. It was a planet of contrasts—towering, glimmering skyscrapers and crowded buildings all standing in perfect silence and stillness, untended garnet plants creeping up along them, curling into windows and doors, sprouting from lofty rooftops. There was no bright symphony of usual city scents—street food stalls, restaurants, sewer grates, factories—that Niko was used to on Kaapra-19. There were no sounds, save a gentle wind through the ruddy leaves and an occasional insect rubbing its wings together in summer song. The absence of the perpetual hum of traffic, car horns, distant alarms and occasional patches of music or conversation was profoundly jarring.

As Niko stepped out of the ship and into the deep red foliage—its color a likely result of the combination of two suns that traveled Sunorrna’s green-tinted sky—he immediately regretted losing his helmet. It was a blatant and tragically unfortunate vulnerability, especially when meeting with an enemy whose preferred method of kills were headshots from afar. Kestrel could be camping him from any of these silent rooftops, hidden among the young trees sprouting there, wind whistling through them. He glanced around, feeling exposed and strange, half expecting to see him, occasionally mistaking clumping rooftop vines for a crouching figure.

Niko itched to hold the gun holstered at his back, but there was no point here, if Kestrel had him trained with his sniper rifle. And showing up with it out wouldn’t be a particular gesture of goodwill, even were that not the case.

He checked the address again, moving along a back street that was as silent, still, and overgrown as the rest of the towering city around him. He paused before an apartment complex, a garishly orange building with several levels of balconies that spanned the length of the building, and an exterior staircase. According to his map, this was 193 Tulnath Boulevard. Niko raised a hand to his brow as a makeshift visor, squinting up into the twin suns at the building. His heart leapt in his chest as his gaze fell on a lone figure on the third-floor balcony—the single soul among thousands of miles of emptiness.

Niko’s instinct was to reach for his gun and drop into defensive posture, to find cover, to—

There was nothing to hide from. Kestrel didn’t have his sniper rifle aimed down at him. He didn’t appear to have it at all. The other man stood, lazily leaning against the balcony railing, peering down at him from afar as though in bored contemplation.

Niko moved closer, each footfall heavy and echoing on the cracked, plant-laden concrete below.

When he reached the building, Kestrel let out a laugh, the sound seeming to split the oppressive silence of the empty world. A smirk spread across his face, the cloud of his unruly blond hair tossed about in the wind.

“Something funny?” Niko shouted up at him.

Kestrel’s smile grew, and Niko could see now it wasn’t something particularly pleasant. It reminded him of a dagger, surprisingly sharp. Bitter, even.

“You wore the suit,” Kestrel said.

Of course I did, Niko wanted to say. What the hell did you expect? Yet, glancing down at himself, Niko realized the awkward imbalance between the two of them then—Kestrel in nothing but dark clothes, liquid against the balcony railing, his elegant, bare hand draped over it, and Niko, in full combat suit, armed to the teeth.

Kestrel’s appearance hardly meant he wasn’t armed himself, though. Niko knew better than to underestimate him ever again. And he couldn’t imagine the other man showed up without any sort of protection or insurance of his own.

Not to mention, Niko couldn’t walk without the suit on. He sure as fuck wasn’t about to show up for this without it. And that was a fact Kestrel didn’t know—nor needed to know, as far as Niko was concerned.

He didn’t like this arrangement—Kestrel high above, looking down on him like he always did with his victims. Niko didn’t like having to squint up, either. He moved to the stairs, climbing them quickly, each footfall a heavy, achingly loud clang that struck against the silence. On the third floor, he walked towards Kestrel before stopping, keeping several feet between them. Kestrel turned to the side, pushing up from the railing, his own body visibly stiffening as Niko closed in on him.

So, he’s scared of me too, Niko thought. No. Scared is probably pushing it too far. But he’s wary. I’m still a threat.

He felt a little ornery, stepping forward to close that space, pushing up into Kestrel’s territory of nervousness. The other man went slightly more rigid, eyes on Niko warily. It pleased him. He wanted to control the situation, to remind Kestrel of the threat he very much still was, here in this place. The suit gave him a few inches on the other man, something he wanted to use to his advantage. He looked down at him.

“Why are we here, Elliott?”

“I wanted to talk,” Kestrel responded. It was impossible to get a straightforward answer from him, and it chipped away at Niko’s patience—which he had precious little of, due to lack of sleep.

“We were doing that on the phone already.”

“No,” Kestrel said loftily. “I wanted it to be in person. Unless you’re going to fumble around and try to arrest me again.”

Niko bit down on a slithering anger, a smirk rising unbidden to his lips. “No, this time, I won’t fuck around.”

“Come inside,” Kestrel said. Niko’s pulse beat along his skin. If this was indeed a trap, this was the moment he’d be walking into it. Kestrel turned and wandered inside the nearest door, leaving it open behind him. Niko hesitated a moment before following, every nerve burning with anticipation, ready to fight for survival.

Instead, he walked into a furnished apartment that was surprisingly well preserved and clean, with simple black furniture and framed abstract art on its white walls. It seemed to have been spared so far from the inevitably encroaching overgrowth and seismic destruction. From the lack of anything out of place, Niko knew this wasn’t where Kestrel had been staying. In fact, it probably wasn’t even on this planet at all, with its unstable tectonic activity.

Of course he’s playing it safe, meeting somewhere else,Niko chided himself. What did you expect? For him to pull something stupid like you would?

“Have a seat,” Kestrel said. “Make yourself at home. I don’t think the owners will mind.” He sank into a minimalistic wingback chair, crossing one leg over the other. There was something absurd about it all.

Niko glanced warily around the living room, half expecting to find someone else there, or something hidden behind a chair or couch. There was nothing, only the quiet stillness of an abandoned dwelling. Even the usual sniper rifle Kestrel carried was nowhere in sight.

Niko knew this was a man who relied on illusion and stealth regularly, though. Not seeing anything hardly was reason to let his guard down.

“Please tell me you’re not going to hover there awkwardly,” Kestrel said. Niko’s irritation flared again, but he understood it now—this was another game, a way for Kestrel to subtly regain his own control over the situation. A way to rearrange them so they were sitting, Niko no longer bearing down on him, and kept several feet apart.

Clever.

But he would still play this game. He had no reason not to, yet.

Niko sank slowly onto an equally minimalistic couch, the aged thing only emitting, to its credit, a quiet groan under the weight of the suit. He realized he must look awkward and out of place sitting in such a domestic environment—covered in armor, loaded with guns—and briefly wondered if being pushed into a sense of displacement and incongruity was just another angle of Kestrel’s game.

“Why are you killing people, Elliott? Why go through all this effort? And what the hell is Honeybliss?”

Kestrel’s gaze drew inward, becoming cold. The odd loftiness to him, as though he’d somehow caught some of the unburdened winds of Sunorrna within himself, vanished immediately. He frowned, but stayed quiet.

“You brought me all the way out here to talk. So, let’s talk.”

“I wonder,” said Kestrel, his voice detached, his eyes not focused on Niko, “if you would believe me if I told you.”

Niko willed himself to be patient. Kestrel had wondered the same thing multiple times aloud to him already. This wasn’t part of a game. He really was struggling with something, retreating deep inside himself. Prying it out of him wasn’t going to get the answers Niko sought.

He softened his voice instead. “I’m here, aren’t I? I want to understand, Elliott. Why do something like this? This—this is extreme. You mentioned them not being innocent. You accused them of trafficking people. How is that possible?”

Kestrel hesitated, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. Niko could see it, the way he held onto something and rolled it through his mind, as though testing whether to tell—and what to tell.

“They are trafficking people,” he said finally. “Honeybliss is a network and a club for the galaxy’s elite. The wealthiest and most influential. People who have no conscience but have enough money and power to inflict their cruelty and bored sadism on others. Everyone in it protects everyone else. And they have the money to make anyone who opposes them disappear.

“They’re all beyond the law. They practice trafficking of every sentient species. They take slaves. They rape and break and kill people, because it entertains them and because no one stops them. Every year, thousands go missing because of them. They’re never found again. They’ve done it for decades. Possibly longer.”

It was quite the accusation.

“That sounds,” Niko began slowly, “like a conspiracy theory.”

“It’s not a conspiracy,” Kestrel spat, his sharp gaze snapping up to meet Niko’s.

“Do you have any kind of proof to back up these claims?”

“I do,” Kestrel said. “I started researching them three years back. Security camera feeds, personal phone footage. Recorded conversations. Sightings of missing people. I have it all.”

That stunned Niko into silence. He was prepared for a deluge of empty conspiracy talk. After all, Kestrel’s files held ample history of his obsession with different groups. But if he had actual proof, somehow, that would change everything. “How the hell do you even know about any of this?”

“I—” Kestrel hesitated. “Let’s just say it’s a little bit personal.”

Again, dancing around the answers.

“What about the EverView Files?” Niko asked, bringing up one of the other conspiracies from his case file history.

Kestrel blinked at him.

“Uh, Nine Hatch? The Ascendance of Norovi? Secret Xaarthan Empire?”

Kestrel was scowling now. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

It was Niko’s turn to stare, dumbfounded. “You don’t… know what any of those are?”

“No. I don’t. I think I’ve heard of the Norovi thing? Some kind of ancient alien conspiracy that predates the modern species?”

Niko was speechless.

“If you think this is anything like that, you’re unfortunately very mistaken,” Kestrel said. “Here.” He began typing at a small hologram, then sorted through countless files with deft fingers. A moment later, Niko’s phone chimed. “Go home. And look at it there, if you want. It’s all on there—the evidence that they deserve everything I’ve done to them.”

Niko frowned. He wanted to open the compressed files here, to explore whatever it was Kestrel claimed to be hard evidence that leaders around the galaxy were engaging in the worst sort of crimes known to sentient species. He wanted to press the other man on it, to pick apart anything flimsy. To ask him how it was personal, how he knew any of this. Why it drove him to assassinate.

But Kestrel had told him to go away and look at it in private.

“Why not here?”

“Because if I have to see any of it one more time, I’m going to lose my shit.”

“Haven’t you already?” Niko asked, leaning back on the couch and draping his arm across the back of it. He eyed Kestrel. “Lost your shit.”

“Oh, no,” Kestrel said. “You misunderstand me. What I’m doing is to keep myself sane.”

What the hell is on these files? Niko almost dreaded to know. The room felt airless. Whatever this data contained was enough to make Elliott Kestrel call systematically killing the galaxy’s luminaries keeping himself sane.

“Why do you do what you do, Niko?” It took a moment for Niko to register that Kestrel had spoken. He blinked at the other man.

“Hunt bounties, you mean?”

“Yes. It’s not for the money.” It wasn’t a question, but rather a statement. Kestrel propped his chin in his hand, leaning against the arm of the chair as he regarded Niko. “If it were only that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“No, you’re right. It’s never been. I—” Niko hesitated, painful memories surfacing from the placid dark deep inside of him. He was about to lay himself bare before Elliott Kestrel of all people, to tell him what he’d shared with almost no one else. “Someone close to me was… was killed.”

“Lover?”

“No. My mom and brother.”

“So, you want to protect people now.”

“Yeah, I do. I want to stop it from ever happening to anyone else. I know that’s not realistic. But if I can spare even one family from losing their mom, or son, or sister, I know I’ve done my job.”

“And that’s why you’ve been fighting so hard to stop me,” Kestrel said. He eyed Niko, chin in hand still, expression as impassive and unreadable as a cat.

Niko shifted uncomfortably. “It is. You’re—”

“Killing innocent people? Ruining lives? Harming families? Look at the files and tell me if that’s what you still think.”

Niko looked at him. Sitting in the chair across from him, one long, slender leg draped over the other, he looked hollow. Inwardly drawn, pulling in all the light and sound in the room, holding some sort of maelstrom inside himself that he wasn’t yet willing to let out to Niko.

“You could have given me these files over the phone,” Niko said slowly. He wanted to know why. Why bring him here just to deliver a file? Why sit in sullen silence and refuse to answer almost any question straightforwardly? Why question Niko on the motivation behind his work? The fact that this wasn’t a trap was almost more concerning to Niko than if it had been.

“I wanted to see if you’d come,” Kestrel said simply.

So, this had been a test. To see how willing Niko was to listen. How sincere he was when he’d said he wanted to understand.

“Go on, then. That should answer all of your questions. Or most of them.” He paused, before adding, “You’ll see what happened to my sister, too. Since you were so curious.”

Niko sat a moment before rising. He felt awkward and strange. He’d been fearing, dreading this moment. Anticipating it, not having any idea where it would lead. Kestrel was predictable in ways—Niko was learning him as rapidly as he could. But in other ways, he remained confounding, drawn inward, a mystery. In his myriad imaginings the night and morning before he arrived, Niko had envisioned their meeting to be anything but a simple talk. Yet that’s—mostly—how it had gone.

It was all oddly amicable. Especially given how their exchanges tended to go.

It took several minutes to unpack all the compressed files. Niko gestured away the case documents he’d left hanging open above his desk, making room for what Kestrel had sent. He watched as the progress bar crept along, disturbingly slow. He hadn’t had to wait so long to process data since Zann had sent him Galapol’s original bulk of research on the Kestrel case.

A case that was disturbingly full of lesions in the truth its data claimed to bear. Kestrel hadn’t even heard of the conspiracies Niko listed off to him. His surprise and irritation were sincere. Yet—those same fictional cabals and Kestrel’s supposed historic insistence on them were the central key to a mental unraveling that Niko found didn’t synchronize with the man much at all. It was like the person Niko had had so many exchanges with and the man described in medical histories and interrogations were completely separate people.

It would be easy to paint a person as incoherent and unbalanced if someone had access to rewriting their history.

Especially if that person were a legitimate threat.

That hardly explained Kestrel’s parents, though. His ex-boyfriend, his former boss, even old friends. His Graceleaf University professors.

That was a whole other enigma to unpack. One person lying under testimony was believable, but everyone Kestrel had once held social ties to? Even his own family. The idea sent a chill rippling across Niko’s skin. There had to be an easier, simpler explanation. The assassin was, after all, more than capable of taking lives without hesitation. It may just be that the collected, sharp, and cautiously trusting man Niko had begun—somehow—consorting with was merely one facet of a greater, more unstable whole.

If whatever was on these files was valid, however, it would prove the man wasn’t at all deranged.

When the data was ready, it revealed a holographic list of hundreds upon hundreds of folders, all named after various people. He recognized many of the names—renowned politicians, celebrities, leaders, and others of influence among them. Most were still alive. Some had already fallen to Kestrel’s bullet. Even countless more names, Niko had never heard of. Each folder contained copious amounts of images, documents, sound recordings, and videos. He was intimidated by the sheer number of folders, but started with the first in the long, long alphabetical list: Giannis Alexopoulos.

Niko recognized the man’s name. He was a human vlogger who had rocketed to galactic fame through his supposedly hilarious film, game, and art reviews. Niko himself had never watched his material but thanks to the internet, could recognize the guy’s face from a crowd.

The folder revealed dozens more files.

Niko opened the first video. It appeared to be taken on someone’s personal phone camera, the shot shaky and amateur, often out of focus. Giannis’s face was painfully familiar, just as he was in all the videos and internet memes Niko had come across in the wild. But unlike the lighthearted jokes and art videos, nothing else about the man was familiar here. He had a wholly different look to him—eyes cold, expression displeased. He wore only a pair of pants with the button and fly lazily left undone.

A pair of people—a Heenva man and woman—were tied up on their knees, pleading and crying. They had no clothing on. It was clear from the setup of the room itself what was going on. Both were covered in dark bruises, their hair matted from what looked like days or more of suffering with no access to proper hygiene. They both begged him to stop. To spare them. To please just let them go.

Giannis took a swig of bourbon straight from the bottle, then violently smashed it across the woman’s face as though she were nothing but an annoying object.

Then he grabbed the man’s face and freed himself from his pants.

He…

Niko looked away. It was horrifying. It was sickening. He wanted to vomit, his entire body gone cold as ice at everything that was searing itself into his mind now.

He forced himself to watch. It was awful.

The cruelties and violations enacted on that pair were horrific. And the man—the same man who frequently went on camera and made lighthearted, sarcastic jokes about movie premiers or paintings—was an animal. He was a monster. He had no empathy, no consideration. He took what he wanted from them and they had no way to fight back, no way to stop it.

And when he was done, he killed them. Whoever held the camera handed him a pistol and Giannis simply shot them both, the woman screaming and the man not even uttering a sound, too broken by what had happened to him.

Niko wanted to wreck him. He wanted to take Giannis by his throat and wring the life out of him. He made himself look through the other files, through anything on the two Heenva—they had been a married couple, with three children back at home. Children who would never see their parents again.

It wasn’t just Giannis.

The entire long, long collection of folders was a compendium of nightmares. Again and again, Niko struggled to even watch it in glimpses, but made himself, regardless. For the victims. For the people who had once been living, breathing, real. Who had just been minding their own lives. Who had never done anything to hurt anyone. He made himself watch and see what had been so seamlessly hidden behind a well-paid hush campaign wide as a galaxy. Artists, actors, politicians, kings. There were so many. So many faces that Niko had been familiar with through the media, had even grown up seeing on TV in some cases. People who smiled and charmed and donated to charities and when the cameras weren’t on them, they inflicted the cruelest acts imaginable on what seemed to be an endless supply of lives, likely floated straight to them on vast sums of credits. Credits they had in such abundance that they could waste and not even miss.

Horu Duu’mari. The Gheroun Imperator Khaathra, the very one Niko had fought so hard to save. Even Princess Vhee-vaala. They were all here, and they all inflicted suffering in their own way. Some chose violence. Others chose a sexual sort of violence. In the end, they all had one thing in common: they had reached a status so lofty, so high, so untouchable, that they had turned to rending, ripping, and tearing their power from others, simply because they could. Because they were bored, maybe. Because they were randy and didn’t want to try for a real connection with another being or go through the effort of paying a sex worker. Niko didn’t know. It didn’t even matter. What mattered was that they did it. And they did it again, and again, and again, all bare and before him in file after file after file.

It was misery, spelled out in videos, pictures, and sounds.

Honeybliss had always been real.

Several hours passed and Niko sat in his chair, still forcing himself to watch as much as he could. He felt he owed it to the victims, to Kestrel. To the truth. Honeybliss had worked hard to wipe all the blood away, but here it still was, a little stain, caught in digital form. Niko wanted to see what they had tried to hide away forever.

His body alternated between ice and burning, his forehead pricked with cold sweat. He didn’t eat, didn’t give himself a break. He just kept watching.

At the end of the long, long list was a single folder different from the others. It had a single, short name on it:

CLEO.

Niko paused, hand hovering over the folder before he finally opened it.

His heart began hammering in his chest, hard enough to hurt. He felt it in his throat, in his wrists, in his hands—the beginning of a deep panic attack that lurked beneath the surface, like a whale swimming through dark waters, waiting to crest.

This was different. This was—

You’ll see what happened to my sister, too. Since you were so curious,Kestrel had said.

Let’s just say it’s a little bit personal.

Niko felt sick. To think he’d ever accused and had even tried to wound Kestrel with Cleo’s death filled him with a shame he couldn’t crawl out from under.

With a trembling hand, he reluctantly opened the first of her videos. Like many of the others, it was taken with someone’s phone, as though they’d wanted to record it and found it amusing. Or titillating.

Cleo was in a warehouse of some kind, her hands and feet bound. Like the Heenva couple with Giannis Alexopoulos, and many of Honeybliss’s other victims, she pleaded. She screamed. She tried to reason and ask why. Tried to even make deals, exchanges.

Uru Taal stood before her, the hideous, gargantuan Toliai crown prince. He gave her a sickening grin, one that held no warmth nor empathy whatsoever.

Niko closed the video.

He couldn’t bear to watch Cleo Kestrel’s harrowing final moments of life. The humiliation, the pain. The indignity. He looked down at his hands, realizing they were grasping the edge of his desk tightly, and that they were trembling.

Elliott Kestrel had lived with this knowledge for years. He had probably watched this footage of his sister’s torture. He’d compiled all the data. Had suffered through watching every video, saw every photograph that linked world leaders to trafficking of innocent people for their own pleasure. Niko had only been exposed to that deep dark for hours, and it already ate away at him.

Kestrel had never been deranged. He’d been noticed. They had seen that he’d seen. And they’d painted him as broken, unstable, unreliable for having used his voice.

Niko had gone to a speech of Uru Taal’s, early in his hunting of Kestrel. But Kestrel hadn’t shown up. Taal had even been present at the Deura-11 parade Niko had argued with Zann about, but Kestrel had gone to the concert instead.

If there was anyone in this galaxy the man must want to eat a bullet most, Niko couldn’t imagine it being anyone else. So why hadn’t he killed him when he’d had the chance? Why, in fact, hadn’t he made it a priority to go for Taal above anyone else in this devouring mission of revenge?

Niko pulled up their text window and wrote to him. Uru Taal is still alive. Why didn’t you go for him first?

Because I want him to know I’m saving the best for last, Kestrel replied.