I am somehow recognized in spite of all my precautions: Chapter 10.
In which - surprise, surprise - Deimos does something stupid and unstrategic that puts everything at risk.
Previously, on Jupiter Ruins Everything: Deimos Zaragoza has returned home to Ganymede to put a complex bloody revenge plot into motion, and he just made the first move by blackmailing one of his enemy’s flunkies into giving up crucial shares of her collective. Then he started seducing her son.
Here's the last chapter. Remember that you can always consult the Cast of Characters or The Lore document if you need a refresher, or start the story at Chapter One!
Chapter Ten: I am somehow recognized in spite of all my precautions
I stayed at the party too long, and drank too much. No more information was to be had - Tabriz’s boyfriend arrived, after which the poor smitten thing paled and turned away quick every time our eyes met across the floor - and Quezon Cyane was too drunk to be pumped for intel - and Sao and Thyone did not appear again.
A double red eye from Tlatelolco helped assuage the headache agony I awakened with (”don’t forget to put those stickers up where everyone can see!” she cried after me, ever the effective organizer), and I stepped out into the bright orange day.
Where are we going, Cyber Klotho asked in my ear, halfway there. Their voice low, apprehensive.
“I think you know,” I said.
No, they whispered. Please.
“Stop being ridiculous. Anyway you can always power yourself down. I gave you that ability. I don’t control you.”
They went silent, but did not whisk themself away into nothingness.
Much of out-side had changed a lot, since I left. Many of the modular stacks were gone, replaced by shining glass and steel. Some even bedecked in the jagged aesthetics of crystallized salt that connoted class and elegance in Ganymede Prime. The gutters were cleaner, less full of garbage and metal-processing run-off slurry.
But the smell was still the same, ammonia and fried food and the grassy septic rotting smell of the kilometer-long, thirty-story-high cyanobacteria battery. One of eight that had powered the ecoforming of Ganymede Prime, now allegedly reduced to thirty-percent capacity - but the smell so hideous that everyone out-side just assumed it had been left to rot.
And the alley where I’d lived the first sixteen years of my life looked and stank like it had been frozen in time. Little kids and the very old visible inside the open doors of tiny module homes, hard at work rolling fish balls or carving scrap into tools to sell. Scorched earthy smell from cyano fires. Dire wolf pups and sabretooth kits chasing each other eternally, joyfully, in the gutters.
I moved through slowly, taking it all in and putting up OFF-WORLDERS WELCOME / UNITY CORPS NOT SO MUCH stickers up on every easily-seen surface.
He’s not going to be here, Klotho said.
“He’s a slumlord. He won’t have gotten far. Even he’s not here right now, he’s still here here.”
I’d been feeling fine, none of Klotho’s apparent anxiety - surely this pathetic place no longer had any power over me! - until the module where we’d lived stopped me short. Snatched away my breath.
Heart rate spiking, Klotho said, chuckling. Now who’s being ridiculous?
“You don’t have a heart,” I said. “Or yours would be spiking too.”
Klotho laughed, but the laugh was sad, and I felt bad making fun of them for being dead. From somewhere down the alley someone had burned fish. Someone was always burning fish.
You’re a long way from the you that you were when you lived here, said one of the voices in my head. This small horrid life can’t hurt you anymore.
The rest of the voices in my head were not so convinced.
“Help you with something?” asked a legless man, wheeling himself out from the darkness within.
“Sorry, sir, didn’t mean to disturb you.” I said. “It’s just - a friend of mine used to live here. A long, long time ago.”
“Yeah?” He didn’t believe me for a second. “Who’s that?”
“Her name was Atalante Niobe,” I said, and my voice did not shake at all.
“Never heard of her. And she sure as hell don’t live here now.”
“The landlord,” I said, and made my voice sour, and spat. “Is it still Hamburg Aglaja?”
“Yes, may the stars curse him,” said the man, almost maybe sort of warming up to me.
“He still an evil piece of shit?”
“Evil motherfuckers just get eviler as they get older,” he said, “I should know.”
“He still own half this alley?”
“And half the alleys beyond it. Been cleaning up since the Wall came down, let me fucking tell you.”
“I believe it. He ever show his face around here?”
“Stars yes,” the old man said. “Loves to come and lord it over us. Boss us around, threaten us.”
This was new, but it made sense. Back then out-side had been stable, an unchanging hellhole where all he had to do was sit back and watch the movie flow in. Nothing he could do could make it come in any faster - but now, with a seismic market shift underway, he’d be wanting to make his properties more profitable. So he and his agents would be here a lot, making life miserable for the poor fucks who were still stuck here, because every space he could empty was something he could spiffy up and rebrand to edgy hipsters.
“One last thing,” I said, slipping a credit chip from my pocket and letting it rest on the water pump between us. “Tekmessa Semiramis. I’m betting he’s still here too. Where’s he fit in, in the local slumlord hierarchy?”
I saw the legless man ping a subvocal query to the chip, and I saw his eyes widen. “Same as he always was. Nothing really shifts, around here. If you been here you know how it goes.”
“Thanks,” I said, “sorry to bother you.”
He watched me go, suspicion aroused again - what if I was another evil slumlord? What if I was about to make moves that would cause him harm? Slumlords typically dressed down when they came out-side, to avoid getting jacked, but maybe I was just a dumb one.
I’d done my research, of course. Enough to know what Tekmessa owned, see that Hamburg was still a major owner out here, and that he’d only gotten bigger and more malevolent since he evicted us. Bought more buildings, let them fall into disrepair and used the profits to... buy more buildings. The idiotic, unspeakably profitable vicious cycle of slumlordism.
But I hadn’t looked into the module itself, or banked on how seeing it (smelling it) would destabilize me.
So when I turned the corner and walked right into a fully-grown saber-toothed cat, my reflexes were maybe not as sharp as they would have been otherwise.
Muscle memory did not save me. I stood there, caught in the grip of those baleful beast eyes, struck dumb as any antelope. And it padded toward me, and my fear burst like a bubble, and I took a step toward it, realizing - maybe not muscle memory, but some part of me - had - remembered - her
“Whoa, girl, whoa,” said a hungry kid running behind her. “I’m sorry, mister, she got a whiff of something and took off – she’s usually not th- “
And he stopped, and saw her, how she pressed her head into my hand. And his jaw dropped. And he said:
“Vanth?”
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[ Like all the imagery for Jupiter Ruins Everything, this image is a collage made from old posters that are in the public domain, NASA imagery from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (hence, also in the public domain), and sometimes my own photos. I’ve made these collages myself. Which is why they are not good. But hopefully establish a vibe? ]