The Embassy on Prohibition Moon

• Chapter 1: The Speakeasy in the Stars
• Chapter 2: The Art Deco Dome
• Chapter 3: Credentials of the Damned
• Chapter 4: A Treaty Written in Lead
• Chapter 5: The Saxophone Diplomat
• Chapter 6: Gravity’s Gin Joint
• Chapter 7: The First Secretary's Secret
• Chapter 8: Moonshine and Meteorites
• Chapter 9: The Embassy's Gilded Cage
• Chapter 10: Brass Knuckles and Velvet Gloves
• Chapter 11: The Midnight Accord
• Chapter 12: Whispers in the Ventilation
• Chapter 13: The Flapper from Fomalhaut
• Chapter 14: A Toast to the Extinction Clause
• Chapter 15: Shadows on the Obsidian Terrace
• Chapter 16: The Blue Note Betrayal
• Chapter 17: Smuggler’s Orbit
• Chapter 18: The Fine Print of the Treaty
• Chapter 19: Requiem for a Chancellor
• Chapter 20: The Brass Band of No Man's Land
• Chapter 21: Poisoned Champagne and Starlight
• Chapter 22: The Great Lunar Heist
• Chapter 23: Deco, Dust, and Deception
• Chapter 24: The Protocol of Sacrifices
• Chapter 25: The Final Set at the Void Club
• Chapter 26: Escaping the Moon of Silence

The basalt floor of Crater 42 vibrated with a rhythm that had nothing to do with lunar quakes or the dull thud of atmospheric scrubbers. It was a three-four time signature, hammered out on a stand-up bass whose spruce soundboard had been salvaged from an old transport hull and re-strung with high-tensile copper wire.

Silas Vance stood on the airlock threshold, waiting for the pressure gauge to equalize. The air inside smelled of stale ozone, scorched butter, and bootleg juniper gin—a heavy, sweet concoction that rasped against the back of his throat after three weeks of breathing purified naval nitrogen. He unclasped his pressurized helmet with a sharp hiss, setting the heavy brass-trimmed dome under his arm, and smoothed the lapels of his charcoal wool suit.

Across the room, glowing beneath the low, carved archway of black volcanic glass, was a neon sign that buzzed like an angry wasp. It read The Blind Comet in jagged, golden script that curved around an etched glass moon.

"Pardon the pat-down, pal," a voice rumbled from the shadows beside the coat check.

A hulking bouncer stepped into the amber light of a glass sconce. He was six feet six of bruised muscle, dressed in a tux that looked sewn together from surplus upholstery, with two extra arm-joints tucked tightly into the waist of his cummerbund. A native of the Jovian shipyards, no doubt. He ran a brass scanning wand over Silas’s pockets, stopping with a sharp chime at the inner lining of his jacket.

"Diplomatic credentials," Silas said quietly, slipping a heavy, gold-embossed leather folder into view just far enough for the bouncer to see the crest: two crossed olive branches wrapped around a brass gear and a champagne glass. "First Secretary Vance. Assigned to the Embassy as of zero-eight-hundred tomorrow."

The bouncer looked at the folder, then at Silas’s pale, travel-worn face, and finally at the sax case resting on the floor beside Silas's polished leather boots. The big man sighed, a sound like a bellows collapsing, and gestured toward the velvet curtain hiding the main floor.

"Keep the credentials in your pocket, Mr. Secretary," the bouncer grunted, pulling back the heavy crimson drape. "In here, nobody gives a damn about the Treaty of Vesta. Just don't spill your drink on the velvet, and don't ask where the rye came from."

Silas stepped through the curtain and into the warm, smoky haze of the finest speakeasy on this side of the Kuiper Belt.

The Blind Comet was carved directly into the lunar bed-rock, three hundred feet beneath the airless wastes of Prohibition Moon—or Sector 9-B, as the star charts sterilely designated it. Above them, towering over the crater rim in stepped tiers of polished chrome, black obsidian, and sun-gilded glass, stood the Grand Embassy. But down here, out of sight of the orbital patrol frigates and the austere gaze of the High Commission, the night was always twenty-four hours long, and the booze flowed through smuggled copper tubing tucked behind the mahogany paneling.

The room was a cathedral of Art Deco decadence carved from grey dust. Jagged sunburst motifs in brushed brass radiated across the low ceiling, catching the glow of vacuum-tube sconces that flickered with every surge of the generator. The bar was a fifty-foot expanse of petrified Earth oak, polished to a mirror shine, behind which mirrored shelves held rows of unlabeled crystal decanters filled with amber, emerald, and violet spirits.

Silas walked toward the bar, his boots making no sound on the thick oriental runner that spanned the aisle. The low gravity gave every step a slight, lingering float, making the flappers on the floor seem as though they were drifting through honey. They wore fringe dresses sewn with crushed moon-pearls that caught the light in iridescent sparks as they swung to the music.

Behind the bar, a man with grease-stained cuffs and a neatly trimmed mustache was shaking a silver mixer with practiced, rhythmic violence. He poured the frothy mixture into a pair of coupe glasses and slid them down the mahogany to a couple of alien delegates who were arguing softly in click-code over a plate of synthetic oysters.

"Whiskey," Silas said, sliding onto a tall chrome stool whose leather seat squeaked under his weight. "Neat. And make it something that didn't come out of a water-recycling vat."

The bartender paused, assessing Silas with eyes that had seen a thousand diplomats come off the shuttle vessels looking crisp, and leave six months later in an airtight pine box. He reached beneath the counter, pulled up an unlabelled bottle of dark cobalt glass, and poured three fingers of deep amber liquid into a heavy crystal tumbler.

"Eighteen-year Old Crow," the bartender murmured. "Ran the blockade through the Saturn rings last month. Cost me two crates of tungsten valves and a favor from an Orion navigator."

Silas raised the glass to his nose. The aroma of charred oak, caramel, and real Earth grain filled his senses, cutting through the synthetic sterile vacuum stench that had clung to him since leaving Port Chicago. He took a sip. It burned like a furnace oil fire going down, leaving a warm, radiant ember in his chest.

"Worth every valve," Silas said, laying a heavy silver coin on the bar. It wasn't the digital chit favored by the corporate cartels, but a real silver Dollar, heavy and cold.

"You're early, Vance," a voice purred from the stool beside him.

Silas didn't turn right away. He took another sip of the rye, letting the glass clink gently against the polished wood before turning his head.

She was leaning back against the bar rail, a cigarette held between two long, gloved fingers in a polished ivory holder. Smoke curled upward in thin, lazily looping ribbons that hung suspended in the low gravity. Her dress was silver lamé, cut low at the back, clinging to her frame like liquid mercury. Her hair was black, cropped in a sharp, geometric bob that framed a face with cheekbones clean enough to slice glass.

"The transport was running ahead of the solar wind," Silas said, offering a faint, dry smile. "Besides, Maeve, I figured if I went straight to the Embassy quarters, I’d be dead of boredom before the sunrise."

"Boredom isn't what kills people up there, Silas," Maeve replied softly. She blew a blue ring of smoke toward the brass ceiling lights. "It’s the fine print."

She gestured toward the brass-framed quartz viewport on the far wall of the speakeasy. Silas followed her gaze. Through the thick glass, framed by the dark, jagged rim of the crater, the Embassy sat under the endless starry blackness like a dead city made of silver and glass. Its tall, narrow windows glowed with an eerie, pale blue illumination—the glow of life-support fields and containment grids that had run continuously for fifty years.

"It looks peaceful enough from down here," Silas observed.

"So does an unexploded torpedo," Maeve said. She dropped her cigarette into an ash-receiver shaped like a rocket ship. "How many First Secretaries have they sent you to replace this year?"

"Two," Silas said. His smile vanished. "Holloway lasted four months before he had his stroke. Vance—the other Vance, no relation—walked out of the airlock without a suit three weeks ago."

"And you think you're going to be the one who finishes out his term?" Maeve turned on her stool, her dark eyes locking onto his. "You're a trumpet-playing paper-pusher with a disgraced record from the Mars Treaty talks. They sent you here because you’re expendable, Silas. The High Commission needed a signature on the quarterly renewal, and they needed a man who wouldn't ask why the air in the West Wing smells like formaldehyde."

Silas shifted his weight, his arm brushing against the saxophone case resting against his leg. The soft leather of the case was worn smooth at the handle, darkened by years of sweat from late-night gigs in Chicago, Luna City, and the floating orbital docks of Ganymede.

"I asked for this posting," Silas said quietly.

Maeve snorted, a sharp, cynical sound that cut through the syncopated trumpet solo coming from the stage. "Nobody asks for Prohibition Moon unless they’re running from a loan shark or a court-martial."

"Or looking for something that was lost," Silas countered.

Before Maeve could answer, the music on stage ground to a sudden, screeching halt.

The brass horn player dropped his instrument, the bell clattering against the wooden floorboards. The crowd at the tables—a mix of human diplomats in sharp, high-collared tuxedos, alien trade envoys wrapped in shimmering silk cowls, and local air-traders—went dead silent.

High above the speakeasy, reverberating through the miles of rock between the club and the surface, came a low, rhythmic hum. It wasn't the music. It was a mechanical groan, deep and resonant, like a massive iron door sliding across gravel.

On the far wall, the quartz viewport flickered. The pale blue lights of the Embassy up on the crater rim flared bright white for three seconds, illuminating the vast obsidian obelisks that guarded the main entrance. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the glow dimmed down to a sickly, thrumming violet.

Silas felt a sharp, icy needle of pain behind his temples. It lasted only an instant—a sudden drop in ambient atmospheric pressure or a surge in the local electromagnetic field that made his teeth ache. He reached for his glass, but his hand froze.

The surface of his whiskey was rippling. Tiny, concentric rings were spreading out from the center of the glass, pulsing in perfect synchronization with the low violet light burning in the Embassy windows above.

"What was that?" Silas asked, his voice dropping an octave.

Maeve didn't look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the glass port, her face paler than it had been a moment before under the amber lights. She picked up her coupe glass and drained the rest of her drink in one sharp gulp.

"That's the Embassy taking its cut," she whispered.

"The solar collectors?"

"No," she said, leaning closer so that only Silas could hear her over the murmur of the crowd, which was slowly beginning to chatter again as the band picked up a fast, nervous ragtime tune to cover the tension. "The collectors run on sunward orbit. That power draw came from the inside. It happens every night at midnight, right when the night-shift envoys sign off on the daily tariff reports."

Silas frowned. "The Treaty of Vesta doesn't authorize heavy industrial power draws on a diplomatic outpost. Sector 9-B is supposed to be a demilitarized neutral zone. Just administrative offices, a shuttle pod, and a small security detail."

"Read your diplomatic briefing again, Mr. Secretary," Maeve said, leaning back and signaling the bartender for a refill. "Or better yet, don't. The last guy who spent his nights reading the full text of the Treaty ended up swimming in vacuum without a helmet."

Silas reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his heavy silver pocket watch. He popped the latch. The hands were spinning lazily in reverse, the hairspring twitching under the influence of whatever localized field had just swept through the rock. He clicked it shut with a dry snap.

"I start my term at dawn," Silas said, taking another slow sip of his Old Crow. "I'm supposed to present my credentials to the Ambassador at eight."

"Ambassador Thorne doesn't take visitors before noon," Maeve said dryly. "He spends his mornings in the conservatory, drinking synthetic port and listening to gramophone records from 1924. If you’re smart, you’ll spend your morning down here, drinking real rye and learning how to play that horn of yours in key with the bass player."

Silas looked down at the brass-bound leather case between his boots. "I don't play much anymore. Not since the Mars talks went sideways."

"Then you'd better start again," Maeve said, her voice dropping into a register that was almost gentle, though her eyes remained hard as flint. "Because up there in that chrome cage, the silence gets so loud it’ll crack your teeth. Music's the only thing that keeps the air from feeling like lead."

She pulled a folded piece of heavy cream cardstock from her clutch bag and slid it across the mahogany bar. Silas looked down at it. It was an invitation, embossed with the gold sunburst crest of the Embassy, but across the bottom, written in a fine, elegant hand in black ink, were three words: Watch the clock.

"Where did you get this?" Silas asked, looking up.

The stool beside him was empty. Maeve had slipped away through the crowd, her silver dress catching the flickers of the vacuum-tube lights as she disappeared behind the heavy crimson curtain toward the exit.

Silas picked up the card, tucked it into his waistcoat pocket, and finished his whiskey. The bass player on stage was swinging into a slow, melancholy blues number, the notes rising through the smoky air toward the brass sunbursts on the ceiling. Outside, on the airless grey dust of the moon, the lights of the Embassy flickered once more, dropping from violet into a cold, motionless black.

The transit tube from Crater 42 to the diplomatic heights was a vertical needle of ribbed steel that smelled faintly of lavender floor wax and hydraulic grease. Silas Vance rode the gilded cage upward alone, his fingers wrapped tight around the worn leather handle of his saxophone case. With every fifty meters of ascent, his stomach did a slow, lazy flip as the artificial gravity generators of the Embassy’s lower tier adjusted from the rugged, low-mass swing of the moon’s core to the standard Earth-normal weight favored by the High Commission.

By the time the elevator doors slid back with a soft, pneumatic shuff, Silas felt the familiar, heavy pull of seventy-five kilograms settle back into his joints. He stepped out onto a floor of polished green malachite, inlaid with brass chevrons that pointed like arrows toward a towering wall of curved glass.

This was the lower observation mezzanine of the Grand Embassy, the southern lip of the great Art Deco dome that crowned Sector 9-B.

Above him, the dome rose two hundred feet into the airless black, a masterwork of pre-war engineering constructed from triangular panes of reinforced lead-crystal and structural bronze ribs. It was designed to look like a frozen fountain of light, its stepped tiers ascending toward a central spire that housed the primary communications array. Outside, the lunar landscape was a desolate, monochromatic ocean of grey basalt and jagged crater walls, but inside, the light was a perpetual, synthetic golden late-afternoon.

Silas walked to the edge of the mezzanine, resting his free hand on a balustrade of cold, brushed chrome. Below him lay the Grand Atrium, a sprawling terraced garden of genetically modified Earth flora that shouldn't have been able to survive three feet of lunar vacuum, let alone thrive. Giant weeping willows with leaves that shimmered like hammered silver draped over artificial streams of recycled water. Paths of white crushed marble snaked between beds of deep indigo roses that pulsed with a faint, bioluminescent glow—a bio-engineered touch that Silas suspected was meant to mimic the twilight of some lost home world.

Yet, despite the lushness, the air was dead. There was no wind, no hum of insects, no rustle of leaves except for the dry, rhythmic vibration of the air scrubbers hidden beneath the terraced lawns. It was a taxidermist's garden, preserved under glass, beautiful and completely devoid of spirit.

"First Secretary Vance?"

The voice was thin and dry, like old parchment scraping against a desk. Silas turned to find a man standing in the shadow of a massive, twelve-foot bronze statue of The Spirit of Progress—a winged figure holding a cogwheel toward the stars.

The speaker was small, carrying a slight hunch that even the standard gravity couldn't entirely account for. He wore a high-collared, double-breasted suit of dark plum wool that had gone shiny at the elbows, and a pair of round, gold-rimmed spectacles that sat precariously on the bridge of a sharp, hawk-like nose. He held a brass-bound clipboard under one arm like a shield.

"I am Silas Vance," Silas said, offering his hand.

The man looked at the hand as if it were an unexpected customs declaration, then gave it a brief, dry shake. "Aris Thorne. No relation to the Ambassador, I assure you. I am the Chief of Protocol and Archivist for the Eastern Sector. We had expected you on the midnight shuttle, Mr. Vance."

"The solar wind was favorable," Silas said, falling back on the standard naval excuse. "I spent the night at the crater floor. Getting my bearings."

"Ah. The Blind Comet," Aris said, his lips curling into a tight, disapproving line that made his mustache twitch. "A wretched dive. A sanctuary for blockaders, disgraced couriers, and individuals who find the concept of a trade tariff offensive to their personal liberties. I trust you did not contract any... local infections."

"Only a deep appreciation for eighteen-year-old rye," Silas replied easily.

Aris made a small, clicking sound with his tongue and turned on his heel, his leather shoes clicking a rapid tempo against the malachite floor. "Come this way, please. The Ambassador is still in his morning seclusion, but your credentials must be logged into the central registry before the morning session of the Tariff Council. We have three boundary disputes, a mining lease arbitration with the Callistan Syndicate, and a rather tedious petition regarding the shipping lanes of the inner belt."

Silas followed the archivist down a long, wide corridor where the walls were paneled in rich, dark Macassar ebony. Every twelve feet, a vertical strip of warm amber glass lit the passage, casting long, dramatic shadows that made the corridor feel like the interior of a massive, sleeping engine.

"The architecture here is remarkable," Silas observed, his eyes tracing the stylized brass sunbursts that decorated the ventilation grilles. "It feels more like a palace in Manhattan than a diplomatic outpost on a dead rock."

"The Treaty of Vesta was signed in 1928, Mr. Vance," Aris said without slowing down. "An era of... grand illusions. The High Commission believed that by wrapping their administrative claws in velvet and brass, they could convince the outer systems that the old world’s authority was eternal. This dome was built to be a monument to that lie. It cost three billion gold sovereigns and the lives of four hundred Martian laborers who died when the first pressure dome collapsed during construction. But of course, the history books prefer to focus on the decorative ironwork."

"And the current state of the treaty?" Silas asked.

Aris stopped abruptly. He turned, his spectacles catching the amber light of a wall sconce so that his eyes were replaced by twin discs of fiery orange.

"The Treaty is a machine, Mr. Vance. It has gears, levers, and a fuel supply. Our job is not to question the design of the engine, but to ensure that it does not seize up before our respective retirements. Do you understand?"

"I’ve signed my name to enough annexes to know how a machine works, Mr. Thorne," Silas said quietly. "I also know that machines need maintenance."

"Then you will do well here," Aris muttered, turning back to the corridor. "Provided you do not develop an interest in the plumbing."

They reached a massive set of double doors made of cast bronze, depicting scenes of miners shaking hands with top-hatted diplomats under a stylized solar system. Aris pressed his palm against a small brass plate embedded in the wall. The plate chimed, a musical, three-note chord that Silas recognized as the signature chime of the High Commission's registry offices.

The doors swung inward with a heavy, oiled silence.

The Registry was a circular room that looked like a cross between a bank vault and an astronomical observatory. In the center, a massive brass sphere—a mechanical model of the Solar System—rotated slowly on a series of nested gimbals. Around the perimeter of the room, tall, narrow filing cabinets of green-lacquered steel rose twenty feet to a domed ceiling painted with the constellations of the zodiac.

Behind a curved desk of black glass sat three clerks, their fingers clacking away at mechanical typewriters that had been retrofitted with small, glowing vacuum-tube displays where the paper should have been. The sound was a rhythmic, metallic rain that filled the space with a frantic energy.

"The credentials, if you please," Aris said, extending his hand.

Silas reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the heavy, gold-embossed leather folder. He placed it in Aris’s palm. The archivist opened it with a practiced flick of his thumb, his eyes scanning the elegant copperplate script of the commission document.

"Silas Vance," Aris read aloud, his voice flat. "First Secretary of the Third Class. Granted full plenipotentiary powers in the absence of the Minister Plenipotentiary. Yes, yes. It seems to be in order." He slid the document under a heavy, brass-rimmed magnifying lens that projected from the desk, checking the watermarks and the metallic thread of the security seal.

"The signature is from the Minister of the Exterior himself," Silas noted.

"I can see that," Aris said. "Though his signature has grown rather shaky of late. No doubt the pressure of the Martian grain strike." He tapped a small bell on the desk. "Mr. Callow, please bring me the Ledger of Succession."

One of the clerks, a pale young man with sleeves held up by silver-plated bands, hurried over to a secure cabinet at the back of the room. He unlocked it with a key that hung from a chain around his neck and returned carrying a massive, leather-bound volume that looked as though it had been recovered from a medieval monastery. The edges of the pages were tipped with gold leaf, but the leather was worn and stained with dark circles that looked suspiciously like old grease or dried sweat.

Aris laid the book open on the black glass desk. He turned the pages back, his fingers moving past columns of names written in black ink, many of which had been crossed out with a single, thick red line.

Silas leaned closer. His eyes caught the name Arthur Holloway. Beside it, a neat hand had written: Retired due to medical exigency, November 12, 1934.

Below Holloway's name was another: Charles Vance. Beside this one, the ink was fresher, the red line thinner but more decisive. Deceased in the line of duty, February 4, 1935.

"My predecessor," Silas said. "Charles Vance. We weren't related, though we shared the name."

"A common name," Aris said, dipping a steel-nibbed pen into a well of dark purple ink. "And a common fate, I fear. Charles was a very... industrious young man. Perhaps too industrious for the thin air of this altitude."

"What happened to him, exactly?" Silas asked. "The official report said hypoxia due to an airlock malfunction."

Aris paused, the tip of his pen hovering a millimeter above the paper. A single drop of purple ink gathered at the nib, hanging like a tiny grape before falling with a soft splat onto the white page, right where Silas’s name was to be written. The archivist didn't look up, but Silas saw the muscles in his jaw tighten.

"The airlocks on the West Wing are old, Mr. Vance," Aris said, his voice dropping to a whisper that was nearly lost beneath the clatter of the typewriters. "Sometimes the seals fail. Sometimes people forget that the moon is not a park in London. They go out for a walk, and they forget that the only thing between them and eternity is a quarter-inch of vulcanized rubber."

"He was found two miles from the station," Silas said. "Without his suit. That's a long walk to take by mistake."

Aris made a sharp, scratching sound as he wrote Silas's name into the ledger. Silas Vance. Appointed February 25, 1935. He blew on the ink to dry it, then closed the heavy book with a thud that sounded like a pistol shot in the quiet room.

"Your quarters are in the North Wing, Room 402," Aris said, ignoring Silas's comment entirely. "Your trunk has already been delivered from the shuttle. You will find the standard-issue diplomatic dress uniform in the wardrobe. The Ambassador expects you in the Conservatory at precisely two o'clock. Do not be late, Mr. Vance. The Ambassador has a great distaste for tardiness, and an even greater distaste for explanation."

Silas took his folder back, tucking it into his pocket. "And my duties for the morning?"

"Familiarize yourself with the staff directory," Aris said, turning back to his desk. "And I suggest you leave that instrument of yours in your room. The Ambassador is a lover of classical music—Beethoven, Bach, perhaps a little Chopin. He finds the... modern Syncopation rather vulgar."

Silas looked down at the saxophone case. "I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Thorne."

The walk to the North Wing took Silas through the central spine of the dome, a vast, open gallery that looked down into the administrative offices of the lower levels. Thousands of people—clerks, translators, runners, security guards in high-collared blue uniforms with polished brass buttons—moved through the corridors like ants inside a glass jar.

But as he crossed the threshold into the North Wing, the noise began to fade.

The ebony paneling here was replaced by plates of cold, grey steel that had been painted to look like birch wood—a cheap imitation that was peeling at the corners, revealing the metallic skeleton beneath. The air was colder here, carrying a distinct metallic tang that Silas recognized from his days aboard the troopships during the Mars campaign. It was the smell of recycled water that had been through too many filtration cycles, losing its natural sweetness and leaving only the flat, dead taste of chemicals.

He found Room 402 at the end of a long, dim corridor that overlooked the western crater wall.

The door was a simple sheet of steel with a brass number plate. Silas slipped the key card into the slot, and the door clicked open with a heavy, metallic groan.

The room was small, sparse, and smelled of lemon oil and dry paper. A single brass bed stood against the wall, covered with a heavy woolen blanket of dark navy blue. A mahogany desk sat beneath a round, brass-framed porthole that looked out onto the silent, grey plains of Crater 42. In the corner stood a wardrobe of green-painted iron, and on the desk lay his single leather trunk, its brass locks scratched and dented from his long journey through the stars.

Silas set his saxophone case on the desk beside the trunk. He unbuckled the straps of the case, popped the brass latches, and lifted the lid.

The sax lay nestled in its bed of faded purple velvet like a sleeping brass beast. It was a Selmer, gold-lacquered, its metal worn to a dull, warm patina where his fingers had pressed against the keys for fifteen years. He picked it up, feeling the comforting weight of the metal, and checked the reed. It was dry, split at the edge. He reached into the accessory compartment of the case to find a fresh one, but his hand brushed against something cold and hard tucked beneath the velvet lining.

He frowned. He hadn't kept any tools or spares in that particular pocket.

Silas reached deeper, his fingertips catching on a small, rectangular object. He pulled it out.

It was a small, silver-plated pocket watch.

Silas stared at it. He already had his own watch—the heavy silver one that was currently ticking backward in his waistcoat pocket. He turned this new watch over in his hand. It was an elegant piece, the back etched with a design of a rocket ship passing through the rings of Saturn.

He pressed the release button. The front cover popped open.

The watch face was white enamel, but the glass crystal was cracked in a spiderweb pattern that centered on the numeral nine. The hands were frozen. The hour hand pointed to twelve, and the minute hand was stuck at three minutes past.

But it was the inscription on the inside of the lid that made Silas’s breath catch in his throat.

To Charles. Keep the tempo. — M.

Silas held the watch up to the pale light coming through the porthole. The engraving was fresh, the cuts in the silver clean and sharp.

Charles Vance.

His predecessor had left this behind. Or perhaps someone had put it there after Charles died, knowing that another Vance would eventually come to open the case.

Silas remembered Maeve’s words from the speakeasy: Watch the clock.

He checked his own pocket watch. It had stopped its reverse spin and was now ticking forward again, but the hands were still twenty minutes behind the standard station time displayed on the brass wall clock above his bed.

He set Charles’s watch down on the desk, his mind racing. Why would Charles leave a watch in a saxophone case? The two men had never met. They had been assigned to different departments before Silas’s reassignment, and their only connection was their shared surname and their posting to this dead-end rock.

A sudden, sharp knock at the door made him jump.

Silas quickly slid the silver watch into his trousers pocket and closed the saxophone case, clicking the latches shut just as the door opened.

A young woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in the crisp, white linen uniform of an Embassy courier, complete with a small, tilted cap pinned to her short, auburn curls. She held a silver tray with a single, sealed envelope of heavy cream paper.

"First Secretary Vance?" she asked, her voice bright and professional.

"Yes," Silas said.

"A message from the Ambassador’s office," she said, stepping into the room and presenting the tray. "Ambassador Thorne has rescheduled your audience. He wishes to see you in the West Wing Conservatory immediately. The Tariff Council has been delayed due to... technical difficulties."

Silas took the envelope. "Technical difficulties?"

The courier’s smile didn't waver, but her eyes flickered toward the porthole, where the distant, pale blue lights of the Embassy’s central spire were beginning to pulse with that same, sickly violet glow he had seen from the speakeasy the night before.

"The generator grids are experiencing some minor variance, sir," she said smoothly. "Nothing to be concerned about. The engineers assure us that the life-support systems are operating at ninety-eight percent efficiency."

"Ninety-eight percent," Silas repeated. "That's very comforting."

"We do our best, sir," she said with a quick, professional curtsy. "The West Wing is at the end of the main gallery. Just follow the gold carpet."

She turned and vanished down the corridor, her rubber-soled shoes making no sound against the steel deck plates.

Silas opened the envelope. Inside was a card of the same cream cardstock Maeve had given him. The message was short, written in a bold, sweeping hand that looked like it had been slashed onto the paper with a broad-nibbed pen:

Vance. Come to the Conservatory. Bring your credentials, and leave your doubts at the door.

Silas tucked the card into his pocket beside the silver watch. He took a deep breath, adjusted his tie in the small, brass-framed mirror above the basin, and walked out into the corridor.

The air in the North Wing had grown colder. As he walked back toward the central gallery, he noticed that the Peeling birch-veneer paneling had been removed in several places, exposing the heavy, black iron pipes that ran like veins through the walls of the dome.

From inside the pipes came a sound that didn't belong in a modern diplomatic outpost.

It wasn't the hiss of steam or the rush of water. It was a low, rhythmic thrumming, like the beating of a massive, leather-winged heart. It was the same sound he had heard through the bedrock of Crater 42, but here, closer to the dome, it was sharper, more metallic.

As Silas passed one of the exposed sections, he reached out and touched the iron pipe.

The metal was freezing, so cold that it nearly stuck to his skin. But beneath the frost, he could feel a distinct, mechanical pulse.

One, two, three. One, two, three.

A three-four time signature.

Silas pulled his hand away, his brow furrowing. He looked up at the ceiling, where the massive bronze ribs of the dome met the lead-crystal panes. The synthetic golden light of the late afternoon was beginning to dim, replaced by a cold, grey twilight that made the silver-leafed willows in the garden below look like skeletal hands reaching for the stars.

The Embassy was changing its tune, and Silas Vance had a terrible feeling that he was about to be asked to play along.