Stanford Minton woke early, always at six on the dot. Not because he loved mornings. Because it was easier to keep a colony in a fist when everyone else was still yawning. While they rubbed sleep from their eyes, the Head of the Colony already knew who was late, who had stolen, who was lying in a report.

  He got up, washed his face with ice water, pulled on a shirt, and buttoned the collar all the way to the top. Habit. Out here, habits kept you alive. In the kitchenette he drank coffee and ate a bowl of dry porridge without tasting it. Then straight to the office.

  The office looked like it belonged to a normal man living on a normal planet. A wooden desk. Real books. A lamp. Only the wall behind it was metal, threaded with cameras and guarded corridors.

  Minton sat down with the paperwork. The trade in gold and silver was running beautifully. The numbers were clean. Shipments on time. Channels secure. Contracts signed. Stations, banks, intermediaries, all satisfied. Money flowed like a river, and there was no miracle in it. Only the colony chewing through people and spitting out ingots.

  He signed two export permits for a silver shipment, opened the report for Mine Three, and skimmed the weekly loss list. Two dead in a tunnel collapse. Three in the med block. One had zeroed himself without anyone’s help. The system worked. The machine kept turning.

  What bothered Stanford was something else.

  Children.

  Three sons. Two daughters. They had grown up on his money and his authority, and not one of them wanted to live here. Not one of them wanted a life among wardens and convicts.

  Stanford closed the folder and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. An old photograph hung on the wall: his grandfather in a warden’s uniform, standing beside a man in shackles, no longer a person but a number. The image was hard. The Head of the Colony loved it anyway. That was where it began. An ancestor had started as a prisoner, worked up to guard, then to warden. The family had not climbed on honest smiles. They had climbed on order and fear.

  Now his children wanted only one thing. To live far away from all of it.

  Minton swore under his breath.

  “They want my money,” he said aloud, as if someone sat in the room with him, “but they won’t carry the weight. The whole nest can rot.”

  He went to the window. Beyond the glass lay the colony: walkways, towers, floodlights. Beyond that, empty flats of rock and dust. Somewhere out there, below everything, was the mine that fed him power.

  “This is ours,” he murmured. “This planet carries our name. Officially it’s just a colony, sure, but still. There’s so much money buried here that any smart man would hang onto it with his teeth.”

  He thought of Aterde, the resort world. Ocean, green zones, a real sky, wind that did not taste like ore dust. He had bought an enormous tract of land there, four hundred and forty thousand square kilometers, half a continent by local standards. Fifty billion crowns for the deal. Paid partly in gold, partly in silver. He could afford it. He had not done it out of greed. He had done it out of spite. To show his children the truth: money was him. Without him, they were nothing.

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  Aterde was supposed to be his retirement house. A place with no watchtowers in the view. A place to finish out his days in peace while others kept working for him.

  Now all of it was at risk.

  A riot.

  A cursed riot.

  Minton returned to the desk and opened a different folder, the private one. Names, notes, suspicions. He did not like the Inquisition. He did not trust them. But he knew what time was worth. If the prisoners rose, if the guards split, if the mines stopped, he would lose more than money. He would lose face. And that was worse.

  He ran through the list of who might be behind it.

  Too many people wanted a piece. Someone among the local wardens. Someone among the armored contractors. A business partner who stood to profit from panic, drive the metal price down, then buy everything back for scraps.

  Minton tightened his grip on the pen until his knuckles whitened.

  “When I find out who’s behind this,” he said quietly, “I’ll erase them.”

  Not as a threat. As a plan.

  He signed the next page and heard footsteps behind him.

  Not a guard. Guards walked heavy and identical. This was soft, nearly soundless.

  Minton did not have time to turn.

  A voice came from close behind, calm, almost amused.

  “So you called in an inquisitor.”

  Minton jolted upright. In the same instant something cold kissed his neck.

  A blade.

  Pressure under the jaw, exactly where a cut ended things fast. He froze. His heart hit once, then again. He did not shout. He simply understood that one wrong movement would be the last.

  The knife slid sideways, trying to bite deeper.

  And slipped.

  It did not go in. It skated along his collar like it had met a smooth plate, slid down, leaving only a sharp scratch and a thin line of blood.

  Minton drew in air and drove an elbow back.

  He hit something. Gut or chest, it did not matter. A grunt behind him. He spun and saw a man in work gear, no insignia, face covered. A short knife in his hand. Not a prison shiv. Something expensive.

  “Bastard,” Stanford breathed.

  He was not a fighter, but he had lived here long enough to know one rule. If you are still alive, hit first and do not stop.

  He grabbed a heavy binder off the desk and smashed it into the attacker’s knife hand. The blade rang off the floor and skittered toward the wall.

  The attacker stepped back. Quick, controlled, no panic. Trained. His eyes flicked to Minton’s neck, to the collar, and irritation flashed.

  “You’ve got an armored collar,” the man said, venomous. “Rich piece of trash.”

  Minton gave him something that was not quite a smile.

  “You don’t survive here any other way.”

  The attacker angled toward the knife. Minton kicked it farther, under the cabinet.

  “You thought I’m alone,” Minton said.

  “I thought you were a coward,” the man snapped. “And you are. You just bought yourself an iron throat.”

  Minton reached under the desk and pressed the hidden button. A silent alarm pulsed into the security system.

  One second.

  Two.

  The attacker understood the clock had started.

  He pulled something small from a pocket. Not a weapon, more like a stun unit. Minton saw the glint and barely had time to lift a hand.

  A crack.

  Pain punched through his fingers as if electricity had gone straight through bone. He clenched his teeth and stayed standing, but his hand seized.

  The attacker sprang for the door.

  “You’re still going to die, Minton,” he said fast. “The Inquisition won’t save you. It’ll gut you and call it order.”

  Then he slipped into the corridor.

  Seconds later two guards burst into the office with weapons raised. One rushed to Minton.

  “Warden. Are you alive?”

  Minton stood with a hand on his neck. There was blood, but it was not deep. Under his collar sat a thin protective insert he had once paid for with the price of a small mine. Today it had turned a blade.

  “Alive,” he rasped. “Lock the block. No one leaves. Pull the feeds. I want every entry to this office for the last ten minutes.”

  The guards nodded and ran.

  Minton lowered himself back into his chair, slow, as if his legs had turned foreign. He looked at the desk, the folders, the tidy numbers.

  The riot was closer than he had allowed himself to believe.

  And someone had already started playing for keeps.