“Where’d you get those, pretty boy?” The man waggled his eyebrows. “Black market?”
“Nah,” the stocky man beside him said. “Look, Barrow—gold and shit? That’s royalty.”
“Dammit,” Cavalon cursed under his breath. That took them all of about six seconds. He glanced over his shoulder to find Puck, but his CO had disappeared into the crowd.
“Tell me it’s true,” the brutish man, apparently Barrow, said. “We’ve really got our very own royalty to play with?”
His friends laughed.
Barrow looked Cavalon up and down, his deep-set eyes sharpening with a glint of realization. “Shit, I recognize you. You’re the Mercer heir, aren’t you? How the hell’d you end up on Sentinel duty? Didn’t think your likes enlisted.”
Cavalon ground his teeth. Even with as dumb as this lot looked, he had to assume that if they read the news, they’d have put two and two together. However, it had taken him three months to get here, so they could have forgotten about it. Though, headlines like “Mercers Begin Tradition of Sacrificing Heirs to Legion Service” were the kind that took a while to fizzle down. Though a more accurate headline would have been “Mercers Find Socially Acceptable Way to Ditch Defective Heir in Favor of Obedient Shithead Second Cousin.”
A knot tightened in Cavalon’s stomach with a realization. The more likely scenario wasn’t that these idiots hadn’t paid attention, but that it’d never been included in the galactic-wide vids to begin with. It was Living with Augustus Mercer 101 to wake up and find major news events either skewed beyond all recognition, or simply eradicated from the headlines.
It gave him a small solace to know that what he’d done had been too much even for his grandfather to fully cover up—too loud, too flashy, and way too expensive. Just as Cavalon had intended. But it wouldn’t have been hard at all for Augustus to throttle the news and stop it from spreading beyond the Core.
Bile rose up his throat at that, because it was specifically those people—the colonists in the Outer Core, the expatriates in the Lateral Reach, all the exiles all over the galaxy trying to build new lives … they were the ones who’d really needed to hear that news.
He’d been stupid for not realizing it sooner. Stupid, and blinded by that same damn irrational optimism that’d landed him here in the first place.
Cavalon cleared his throat, refocusing on Barrow’s stone-faced glower. “Don’t get much news out this way, do you?”
“We try not to concern ourselves with the Allied Monarchies.” Barrow cracked his knuckles. “That is, until you start trying to replace us all with robo-Drudgers.”
Cavalon sighed. Well, shit. Of course that would be the bit of news Augustus had made sure to spread far and wide.
The gathering lunch crowd began to murmur, glancing over as the conversation heated.
The stockier man chuffed. “Nah, Barrow, they’re clones, remember?”
A palpable hush fell over the crowd, more and more resentful glares focusing on Cavalon. He flexed his jaw as he strove to keep the heat from rising to his cheeks.
“Clones?” Barrow shook his head, face scrunching with disgust. “All clones are abominations—even Drudgers.” Barrow took an oafish step forward. “Just ’cause your great-great-great-times-ten or whatever fuckin’ grandparents did decent shit back during the Viator War, that doesn’t mean y’all have the right to fuck with the laws of nature.”
“Decent shit?” Cavalon growled. “If they hadn’t figured out how to counter the mutagen and turned it against them, not a damn one of you would even be here to give me such a fuckin’ hard time. Besides—they’re just Drudgers. Who cares?”
Only at the swell of gasps and honing of glowers through the crowd did Cavalon realize what a dumbass thing that’d been to say. He hadn’t meant it to sound so defensive, to sound like he could possibly even for a second agree with a single thing his grandfather did.