Jocelyn.”
She returned the salute, along with a radiant grin that made Murray chuckle.
Hans completed his salute in earnest. “Now, didn’t you have some important business?”
“Yes, I do!” Jocelyn whipped around, her sausage curls bobbing as she scampered off behind the curtain into the limestone tunnel.
Hans and Murray exchanged a bemused look, then Murray wrapped the last of the silk sashes around Hans, who held his arms up at his sides.
“Do you think Zorian will come?” Hans asked.
He hadn’t heard from Zorian since before their father’s arrest twelve days ago. Like Hans, Zorian lived and worked undercover as a fisherman in Piscator Territory. With it being peak fishing season there, they had to be careful to leave only on their days off—they couldn’t maintain their commonwealth identities without meeting the Office of the Chancellor’s quotas. In all, it was an especially troubling time for Zorian to disappear, but then his brother was nothing if not unpredictable, one of the reasons the Leadership had appointed Hans to head the Liberation Front in their father’s stead.
“I doubt it, kid.” Murray adjusted the sash, took a step back, and nodded approval. “Zorian will find his way back to the Front, in his own time and in his own way.”
Hans dropped his arms. “I hope so.”
Murray waved to the two helpers, then gestured toward Hans with an open palm. “Please finish.”
The children brought over their wooden stools, setting them on either side of Hans. First, they tied his leather boots and belts. Then they climbed the stools and set cuffs, bracelets, and sashes bearing the insignia of the Morelia spilota spilota , an ambush predator, around his wrists and arms and neck. After this, they dipped brushes into ceramic bowls filled with a dark paste and painted Hans’s face with lines, creating a labyrinth to and from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. This design represented the Front’s system of tunnels throughout the commonwealth, called the Polemon passageways. When the children finished, they stood to attention.
“You have the looks of a president,” Murray said, and when Hans scrunched his brow, “the look of your old man.”
Hans shook his head. “I’m not Jeremiah Selendia, and I don’t like these suggestions that he’s gone.” He smiled sadly to his old friend and developer. “Besides, I look nothing like Father.”
Jeremiah was a mountain of a man, with the broadest shoulders and a trimmed beard that swooped from his ears to beneath his chin. Hans had shaved his own beard after the assembly at which the Leadership appointed him, and he was slim enough to fit through the narrowest of passages.
Murray took Hans’s chin lightly in his hand and met his eyes. “You’re our leader now, Johann. You must see the truth, even when it’s the last thing we’d ever wish for.” He paused. “If Lady Isabelle has Jeremiah, he’s as good as dead.”
Hans broke away from Murray’s hold. “The way of Reassortment with her,” he swore. Lady Isabelle Lutetia, eternal partner to Chancellor Masimovian, held so many titles that Hans lost count. But the one that mattered was hunter of the Liberation Front. In that effort, she used Marstone—the artificial intelligence based in Beimeni City that monitored transhuman brain impulses in the zeropoint field—to probe for the unregistered of the underground. That she might’ve used Marstone to locate Father in Piscator unnerved Hans, for Jeremiah was a skilled telepath who knew how to elude it. His father had installed mechanized protections against Marstone in Hydra Hollow in the west and Blackeye Cavern in the east, but how much longer would they work? If Jeremiah was vulnerable, they all were, and everyone knew it, Lady Isabelle most of all.
Hans grimaced. “You think she took him to Farino …”
Murray peered at Hans from the corners of his eyes. Sweat budded over his forehead and above his thick eyebrows. His expression