“What the fuck is this? You invite me in, and then stop me at the door? Am I invited in or not?” Iris asked, about to just cut her way through the door. It seemed to be a steel, concrete amalgam. Tough to cut, but the micro-blade Mendel had given her this time had a superheating function. The edge could reach thousands of degrees without losing integrity. She could get in.

The receptionist stood unflinchingly, right in front of the door, as though she were using her body to keep Iris from charging in. There was something wrong about her posture though. Something too straight and proper in how she stood there wearing a frilly maid outfit and a blank porcelain mask.

The butler who had walked her up cleared his throat. “My apologies, Miss Haber. A slight problem, nothing more. The employees of Gomorrah are not at their own liberty. In certain respects, they are biological automatons. This one was probably commanded to only let proper guests inside, and not given a counter-command. I’ve relayed the issue, and help will arrive shortly.”

She spun on him, but he had the same machine-like posture. “You do what to people?”

“It helps keep the casino private. This is very important to our guests,” the butler answered, gazing back at her.

“That’s disgusting.”

“We wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Let me in or I’m forcing my way in.”

“I’m afraid we can’t, until one of the inner floor managers arrives to update the registry.”

She pointed her blade at him, touching the tip to his larynx. “You’re just stalling for time.”

A man laughed, not the butler but someone else. A familiar laugh. “You know, I never thought I’d see you again, Wildcard,” Park Young said. He was leaning against a side door, the kind of nondescript metal passage that implied a guardroom, a smoke break area. The smoldering cigarette butt between his fingers also said as much.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

The e-celeb shrugged. He looked like a gaudy buffoon, in a cheetah print suit and pants with a bright pink neckerchief. “Guest entertainment at the end of the world. Turns out a steel magnate is a big fan of mine. He invited me out for vague reasons before the missiles launched. Do I look like I’m complaining?”

Iris rolled her eyes. “Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’m here to crash the party. You sure you want to be chatting like this? Instead of running the other way?”

Park sucked down the last of his tobacco and flicked the butt away. He jerked his chin at the maid. “I can just bring her in as my plus one, can’t I?”

“You may,” the maid answered, and the two of them nodded. She bowed out of the way, and the bunker door rolled open. They stepped onto an elevator, and began the descent through layer upon layer of concrete shielding. Some things never changed, and Iris doubted whether meters of stone would ever become obsolete.

“Why are you helping me like this?” she asked, sheathing her micro-blade and watching the floor ticker roll by.

Park Young shrugged and clasped his hands behind his back. “You did save my life. Isn’t that reason enough? You certainly left a strong enough impression on me before you blew the train up.”

Iris blinked, lost her scowl, and turned to him with her mouth hanging open. “Oh, what? Shit, an impression like that?”

Park chuckled, a sad and defeated kind of wound he expressed with a laugh. “Spoken like someone who’s already taken.”

“I’m sorry, I’m here to kill people. That’s just totally not where my head is at, at all. I’m flattered. Really. Just, ever since the accident–”

“You don’t have to explain anything. Really, what you did was leave me with an interest in full body prosthesis. And then, here… well, you’ll see the things they do here. It has left me with a complicated feeling.”

She arched an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Wouldn’t you feel bad being friends with a monster? But at the same time, afraid to offend it, lest it turn fangs on you?” Park said, just before the elevator door slid open, and the top floor of the Gomorrah casino was unveiled. Gold, glittering lights, rolling slot machines, the ching ching ching of cascading coins all around her. The people strolled with drinks in one hand, and nubile flirts in the other. Men, women, old, young, the only constant was the wealth. The silk dresses, the tailored suits.

Underneath it all, her nose picked out every recreational drug known to man. She spotted cocaine on noses, heroine stupors beside blackjack tables, marijuana hookah pipes getting passed one way while half-dressed maids were passed the other way.

Iris had stopped two steps out of the elevator, her teeth clenching down the more she looked at the audacious display.

Park chuckled. “Just don’t take any of those masks off… most of the workers here don’t have anything underneath.”

Iris reflexively put a hand to her own chin, to that layer of synth-skin between the world and her metallic body. It made her sick to her stomach. “This is how the filthy rich are spending the end of days? The one they engineered?”

“Pretty rich, ain’t it?” He was grinning at her like his teeth were plated in gold.

She rolled her eyes and marched forward. “Try to not get killed, Mr. Young.”

“You can call me Park!”

She didn’t turn around again. The casino had been built into a missile silo by the looks of it, just like the old Soviet base she had fallen into. This one had been retrofitted for pleasure, rather than for rot and swamp. Floor after floor ringed the central chamber, each with its own theme and flair and clientele. The central gap had all manner of dangling chandeliers. There were crystal sculptures, caged dancers, and display screens silently playing the news. Summer Lee and Jack Forrester danced through the air on half a dozen screens, mouthing out the news to closed captions. They spoke of terror attacks, blighted monsters, military deployments, and so on. But they were also talking about the weather, and how crypto trading value had gone up, and what the latest press releases were in the video game world. No matter what they said, they had the same perfect smiles.

It was all the way at the bottom, beneath all the luxury, that Iris spotted the Shermans. They sat like Roman emperors, presiding over a gladiatorial arena. It wasn’t just them, but dozens of people watching a pair of cybernetic fighters hack each other to pieces. Not HAB units, just partial prostheses. Iris could see the amount of blood they were spraying across the sand.

She could have taken the stairs down, pushing her way through one layer of security after the next as she passed from table games to group roulettes to drinking escapades and more she could only hear but not see. She could have done that, but she had a much quicker way.

Iris walked right past the porcelain masked pit bosses and jumped up on the railing. That got a few people’s attentions. Word of her arrival spread from mouth to ear and around again, drifting like the flow of alcohol until finally everyone had noticed her. Then she jumped.

The crowd of rich assholes gasped, collectively sucking in so much breath it was like they were trying to emulate the top of Mt. Everest. The way she plummeted was a bit like base jumping off the top of a mountain, but she had no flight suit. She just hit the sand six stories down hard enough to crack the concrete.

That put a stop to the bloodsport as both warriors staggered away. They weren’t fighting with micro-blades, and probably didn’t even have combat-enhanced neural implants. They had just been swinging blunt machetes at one another with machine strength. A few people jeered at her for interrupting the fight, disgruntled gamblers it seemed. Her gaze swung past them without a second though, just long enough to record a picture of their faces before she drew and pointed her micro-blade at the Shermans sitting on their gilded thrones.

“Bravo,” Amy said, clapping her hands like at an old golf course. “I simply must commend you for entrance style.”

“You should be begging me for your life.”

Adam and Amy Sherman looked at each other and laughed. “Look around you,” Adam said. “This is our domain. You’ve entered our stronghold. Do you really think we would have let you in if we were worried about you?”

Amy grinned and grabbed her husband by the wrist, squeezing it as she said, “Iris, you are an absolute gem, you know that? So fierce in your convictions, and you grab the strength you need to see them through. Why, when you were fighting off Xi from that rust bucket, all to protect your friend, you brought a tear to my eye. I was so moved.”

“Moved to commit world genocide?”

Adam rolled his eyes. “It’s not genocide unless a specific group is targetted. This is just war, something humans have done for all time, right back to our eons past in the primordial soup of prokaryotes fighting for nutrients.”

“Oh, big fucking difference. I’m giving you a chance to plead for your lives, and if I have to prove you’re at my mercy, then so be it.”

Amy Sherman sighed and clapped her hands together. “Boys, if you would kindly make use of the Phoenix Project and put Iris in her place?”

The two gladiators stumbled. They swung about, grabbing their heads and groaning in pain. The only thing Iris could tell was both combatants suddenly had more data streaming in and out of their neural implants than a super-computer. She scanned the room, and spotted the computer they were connecting to, not nearly large enough to be doing the math for them, it could only be relaying from further on. It was, however, next to a human-scale hologram projector, casting the avatar of a man into a seat. He had all the same treatment as any of the trillionaires in the room, without an ounce of mass to him.

Iris gritted her teeth at him. It was the same black and white avatar that had toyed with her on the Leviathan-3. The data was all coming from him, the fourth member of the Tribunal. She considered destroying the computer, but just a cursory ping revealed dozens more potential relay points. Without the computational source, it was pointless.

When the gladiators regained their senses, they turned their machetes on her with sorrowful expressions. They were tired and bleeding, but faced her with full intent. “Aren’t they wonderful?” Amy asked. “The lengths some fathers will go to to get their children into safety with us.”

Iris broadened her stance, dialed up her reflexes, and cleaved her micro-blade through their two machetes with a twirl.

She missed both. “What?”

In perfect unison, both gladiators stepped in, taking huge arcing chops. Iris twisted, springing up on one foot to kick a blade away and snatch the next. Again, she found nothing but air and their blades hacked into her augment suit like hammers.

Adam laughed. “Digital pre-cognition is a wonderful weapon, isn’t it?” he asked as she leapt away, forcing distance between herself and the fighters.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me…”