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honoured the deal later anyway.
    If only he hadn’t been captured. Guilt and bitterness rose like bile in his throat. Didn’t mean he had to accept things though, did it? The one time he’d seen Sulawayo since, he’d tried to argue with her against sending someone up with the tech, but she would only send them together. He hated how they needed it. The only leeway they’d got was that Pont was under twenty-four hour guard by a Yalgu Warrior. Only one, but that was enough. One warrior was like five Helios grunts. And the woman, Pont, was scared of hers. With good reason. The Yalgu were Gondwana Nation’s army of sorts. Men who lived by their own code, dangerous but tied to protecting the Nation in a way that was as spiritual as it was physical.
    He followed Lakisha around a corner and down another corridor and through a final set of coded doors into the oversize lab they’d been using for the MalX tests.
    It was a huge long room, part of it sectioned into windowed quarantine cubicles for the volunteers who wanted to be part of their program, and another wall of it taken up with lab stations and equipment. A staff of four worked it, including Cassie and Lakisha and two assistants. And him, he supposed, if he could be considered an expert.
    “You took your time.” Cassie was seated at a flat holo display, frowning at whatever it was showing her.
    “Rainstorm,” Lakisha said shortly. “He needed seeing to.” She and Cassie exchanged a look, and Pip’s shoulders tightened, but neither of them said anything.
    Raina Pont was sitting next to Cassie, swiping her fingers on the holo display, working the machine. Thin, and in her thirties she radiated efficiency with her glossy short dark hair and a perpetual line between her brows. A few metres behind her, standing preternaturally still was her Yalgu guard, Budjardin. Wiry of build and dressed in the rough brown pants and loose shirt favoured by the warriors, he appeared to be gazing with stoic boredom at something in the air beyond Pip’s head. But Pip was sure one suspicious move by Pont would result in her being swiftly detained and most likely unconscious. Budjardin carried only a sheathed knife at his belt, no gun, but then he didn’t need one.
    Pip had seen Yalgu Warriors move faster than should be possible, faster than any grunt on enhancers, that was for sure. Despite their status within Gondwana as protectors and security, no one was particularly comfortable around them and no one controlled them. They lived on the spiritual fringes of the lands, coming and going like ghosts when needed. The Yalgu and their ability to make people disappear had been the basis of the night-time horror stories he’d heard in the dorms of the Helios Enclave on Mars. Now they were his allies. Funny how life turned out.
    “We have made some progress this time,” Raina Pont said, pausing in her work. “Your latest volunteer showed some signs of a surge in immunity for a while.”
    “A while?” Pip went to join her at the display and she swiped at the holo, bringing the results up in a shimmer of three dimensions to hover in his line of sight.
    “You see here?” She pointed at a row of equations and results that Pip didn’t understand. “His immune count is high, and it stayed that way for nine hours.”
    “That’s better than last time,” Lakisha said.
    “But it didn’t last.” Cassie placed a finger into the holo lights, pushing the first lot of results over, so the next group spiralled up. “See, it dropped down again forty minutes ago.”
    The spark of hope inside Pip faded. “So, basically, he’s dying again.”
    “Unfortunately, yes. Patient thirty-four is another terminal result.” Raina sounded like she was talking about a plant, not a person.
    Pip’s jaw clenched. “His name is Ayo.” He headed for the quarantine cubicles on the other side of the lab.
    “Pip …” Cassie began, but he ignored her. He stopped to stare through one of the plasglass