The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  But she knows how this has to go down, truthfully, and it doesn't involve telling Rack to piss up a rope. She'll save that for a later date. Instead, before she can second-guess her decision, she pulls one of her pistols, ejects the magazine, thumbs one of the kill switches inside, and shoves it into his hands. There. Done.

  Rack stares down at her sweet, lethal baby like she's just handed him a dead cat.

  “She won't be expecting you to have one of my guns,” she says, by way of explanation. Her voice is hoarse. Chopping off one of her hands would've been easier, if less useful. “I sure as hell wouldn't, if I were her. Safety's off and it's ready to go; all you gotta do is point and pull. Careful your thumbs aren't behind the slide, unless you wanna get bit.”

  Does he understand what this is costing her? In pride, in trust, in all of that stupid emotional stuff? He looks back up at her — stunned doesn't begin to describe the expression on his face — and his eyes are wet and glassy.

  “Rhye… I can't… ”

  Yeah. He knows.

  “Aw, hell. Don't go getting all wet cereal on me, man,” she mutters. Making sure her remaining pistol is loaded and racked suddenly becomes very, very important. “Just make sure you're close when you fire, alright? I don't — ”

  (Pop)

  Of course Miss Security doesn't come over the fence; why would she bother? The only warning is that soft, sudden pop, like a blood bubble bursting on a dying man's lips, and there she stands, herniated out of the nothing because oh right, she is the fucking nothing. Rhye has just enough time to grasp that they've been played and just enough time to push Rack down and back and no time at all to do anything else but brace for impact as Not-Rhye slams into her and they take a backwards trust exercise straight into the pool.

  It's in her nose and her ears and her eye socket and it's warm, which is somehow the worst part. A warm green slurry pressing against her skin, turning everything to frogs and fungus and body temperature pea soup. Fingers scratching at her throat and her one good eye, looking to throttle or blind or both. Spots wriggling tadpole trails across her vision. She pushes out in slow motion, catches her attacker in the chest, tries using the momentum to pull away. No dice; it's like karate-kicking an amped-up octopus. They sink deeper, the light fading to darkness, seconds rubber-banding to grim, doubtful decades.

  And this is what I'll get for trusting Rack with my back. Should've gone with my instincts. Trust fucks you. It fucks you every time and puts a knife in your windpipe while it's at it. Lungs already beginning to ache. Can't grab for her gun, 'cause both her hands are busy keeping Not-Rhye at bay. Nobody'll come to save you, idiot. Or if he does, he'll get here about ten seconds too late. Let this be your final lesson about going home with strangers.

  The security program's good eye glitters in the gloom, black and triumphant. Gotcha, you fucker, it says, and it's the language of sharks she's speaking now, no mewling monkey noises needed. Don't even have to waste a bullet. She leans closer (Rhye has a sudden nightmare flash of her opening her mouth to show double-rows of pointed teeth, all the way back to the place where her jaw hinges), eager to choke, to rub out, to self-destruct. Rhye would keep fighting but there's seven feet of scummy water overhead and a tangle of grasping limbs dragging her further downward and god fucking damn she's tired. She can't even spit in her rival's face.

  It is at this perfect moment of physical and emotional exhaustion, with her arms pulling the fire alarms and her legs turning to full clips of concrete, that Rack chooses to dive into their underwater cockfight, like a toaster hurled slots-down into a bathtub. He arrives with a muffled splash, churning up bubbles, froth, muck from the bottom, algae from the surface. Now it's Not-Rhye's turn to be surprised. She spins around to face this new threat

  (occupied she's not paying attention to me my hands are free)

  lip curled, shoulders hunched, NOT a happy camper, she thought this was gonna be a one-on-one and turns out it's a threesome. She's all over his shit faster than you can say piranhas in the kiddie pool.

  (and now the grip's solid in my hand it'll fire it'll kill if we're close enough I believe in you baby air air AIR)

  The water's a whirlpool of bodies and spume. Rhye is dying by inches now; another half minute and her lungs will burst. But not before she does what she came here to do. She pulls that heavy, heavy gun up, the weight of a lead cannon in her hands. She waits for visibility to clear. And when the bubbles finally part and Rack's eyes meet hers

  (she's got her hands around his throat but he's letting her so calmly and she'll never notice the pistol kissing the underside of her jaw until it's too late)

  she shoves the muzzle of the 9mm snugly against Not-Rhye's back and sends a prayer to Lady Luck, that goddess all gunslingers kneel to.

  Rack and Rhye squeeze the triggers as one, the way good partners do.

  They find the kid balled up in a basement jail cell, groaning and bitching about his head. It looks an awful lot like the one Rhye spent her formative years gracing, but Christ knows what the kid sees. Good looking, late teens, perfect teeth and hair and body model. There's something wrong with the expression, though. Even confused and fucked up in the middle of a strange system he's sneering an entitled sneer that makes Rhye's fists curl like dead spiders beneath a radiator. I always get what I want, it says. Why wouldn't the world bend over and give it to me?

  “Sorry about the wait,” Rack says. “Ran into a little trouble.” He fumbles in his pocket for a key. “Doing alright?”

  The kid's eyes dart wildly. “A little trouble?” he says. “You call this a little trouble? I can't fucking move and you think that's a little trouble, fuckface? Suck both of my balls, man. Hey! Hel-lo? Are you still there? Are you listening to me?”

  Rack doesn't look up, just calmly keeps on doing what he's doing. Rhye can feel her molars grinding together. “Rack, can you hurry it the fuck along? I don't know how much longer I can put up with this shit, get what I'm saying?”

  “Absolutely.” A click and the door to the cell swings open. Rack steps back and nods at the kid, so irritatingly professional Rhye can hardly stand it. “Someone will be by to collect you shortly, I believe,” he says. “Your body is waiting outside.”

  “Goddamned right it is, you no-nuts bitch.”

  “Kid, you talk to him like that one more time and I'm going to blow both the balls you're so proud of off in a place where they ain't pretend and don't grow back, fuckin' got it? I don't care who your daddy is.” Rhye can feel a headache gathering behind her eyes. Time to get the hell out of here and go the fuck home. Her mattress is calling. “C'mon Rack, let's go. Compress your ass. My headspace isn't what you'd call flying first class, but it's better than the company in here.”

  There's a sound like bacon hitting a skillet, loud enough that the kid's bitching is blessedly drowned out. A glowing door pops up at the end of the row of cells. She's gotta hand it to Rack, he's nothing short of a goddamned wizard when he's free inside a program. Rhye grabs his hand and gleefully sets off for the exit, feeling more cheerful than she has all day. A little nervous about letting Rack piggyback inside her melon, maybe — there's shit in there she doesn't want anyone poking at, even her partner — but mostly too relieved at having him back to care. He lets her pull him along. Doesn't say a word, just smiles and follows, tie flapping like a pirate's banner in the weird wind pushing from the entryway.

  The light from the door is the cold, flickering white of a fluorescent bulb burning in an abandoned department store. They stand there staring into the static for what seems like ages. She doesn't let go of his hand. He doesn't let go of hers. Rhye wonders if it'll hurt, or feel weird, or if she'll be the same once it's done with. She sucks in a breath. Now or never, woman. Leave it to Rack to wait for a second fucking invitation.

  “Well?” she says. “You waiting for me to buy you a ring or what?”

  And that's when she finally catches the look in his eyes, the sadness of the little smile
quirking the corner of his mouth like a fishhook. She knows that fucking expression. She hates that fucking expression. He's not telling her something, and that something is going to sting.

  “Rack?” she says.

  “Rhye. It doesn't work that easily. I can't just compress myself without a console and a body to work the console. That's beyond my capabilities.”

  For once, Rhye is at a total loss for words. She gapes at him, mouth hanging open like a second useless asshole. It takes a full minute for her to push anything out. “Bullshit,” she manages. “Stop fucking around. You're some sort of goddamned superhero in here. You unlock things, you make doors, you designed this motherfucker. There's nothing you can't do.” Panic creeping up her spine with tiny naked rat feet. Can't shoot her way out of this one. “There's gotta be something. A trick, or a program, or — ”

  His voice is infuriatingly gentle. “Without a body? Compression is tricky. If I did it wrong, even assuming I could from inside a system like this, one of us could get hurt. You could be erased. That's not a risk I'm willing to take.”

  “Okay, fine. I'll come back, then. I'll get you a new body and come back.” He's slowly shaking his head even as she says it and Rhye's pissed, at circumstance and the mobsters and Rack and everything that hops, crawls, or breathes on this godforsaken planet. “I'm not leaving you here, you colossal fuckhead. Do you KNOW what I've gone through to fetch you out of this box?”

  “Once they've pulled the kid, do you really think they're going to let you back in for me? They'll erase everything on here just to teach their rivals a lesson.” He sighs. “Look. There's a locker in Brickton. The combi — ”

  “Fuck your money, Rack. And fuck you, too. Did you not hear me the first time?” Stop looking at me that way stop looking at me that way stop looking at me that way. Her heart is clawing its way through her sternum like a bum plowing through a back alley trash bin. She's got him by the tie, hands shaking, throat aching. “Take the risk,” she says. “Do it.” And then: “Please.”

  “I can't. I'm sorry.”

  They're nose to nose and forehead to forehead and now it's Rhye who's shaking her head. She can see a way out and she knows he won't agree to it, but fuck him and fuck a world without him, that's not a decision he gets to make. “No,” she says. “No. You ever hear anything about those old ships people used to sail? Protocol for wrecks and all that shit?”

  His brow furrows into confused little wrinkles. She'll miss that. She'll miss a lot of things about him. “What does… ”

  “I'm tying your ass to the mast. You've got no say in this, Rack. When you get done with my body, put it through a woodchipper or something, all right?”

  Rhye's push carries him over the threshold and into the white before the stubborn asshole has a chance to argue. His tie stays wrapped around her fingers, fluttering the goodbye she couldn't bring herself to say.

  Unlike his partner, he's not prone to bouts of rage and profanity. She explodes all over the place at intervals you can almost set clock hands to, like a geyser or a volcano or some other natural phenomenon. Beautiful to see, if potentially life-threatening to anybody within close range. Rack, though? Rack's different. If Rhye is Old Faithful, Rack is a glacier: cool-headed, steady, and inevitable. Excesses of emotion do not become him.

  When he comes to inside her body, the first word that bursts in his head, like a soap bubble giving up the ghost, is SHIT. A great big neon SHIT, all four letters glowing the lurid red of a 3 AM traffic light on a stretch of empty road.

  The dimly lit warehouse is full of equally dim goons. Six of them are alive. There were seven when he plugged in, but that dark smear on the concrete floor suggests Rhye's been engaged in some basic subtraction since then. All of them remain armed and extremely twitchy. A roomful of semiautomatic-carrying cats in a rocking chair factory, ready to pop off if so much as a moth flutters near one of the grimy windows. Rack knows how trigger-happy they can be; the slumped cicada's shell of his body in the corner is testimony enough, if any were needed. The big boss's foot is tapping out a patent-leather Morse code that, roughly translated, probably comes to something very impatient and vaguely threatening.

  The Kid's still stretched out on his hospital gurney, dead to the world. The mess of wires and cords connecting him to the black box on the desk makes Rack think of a kitten hopelessly entangled in a ball of yarn. A scruffy, obnoxious kitten, in desperate and immediate need of drowning. Rack would be happy to oblige — there's an unfamiliar emotion that came along with the big neon SHIT; he's reasonably sure it's cold anger building towards fury — but all eyes are on him.

  “Done?” Big Boss sounds like a side of beef being dragged down backcountry gravel. Rhye's eyepatch splits him into dual hemispheres, the seen and the unseen. Disorienting enough suddenly being in a new body — her body, no less, with a mysteriously bloody nose — without adding visual impairment to the mix.

  “Yeah,” Rack says, only it comes out in Rhye's voice, and that (as she would say) is a whole dump truck of what the fucking fuck landing on his senses. “All yours, Chief. You gonna send your tech in to collect Junior's code so I can get the hec — fuck out of here already?”

  A sharp, all too familiar click from the dark side of the mook. Ten to one it's not a wedding band he's holding in his unseen hand. “You will be doing this as well. Seeing as how you felt the need to — what are the words? — earlier retirement my computer-man.” He nudges the shiny toe of one shoe at the stain on the concrete.

  Oh, Rhye. How would you have gotten out of this one? You couldn't access a code for brine in the middle of the ocean. He's neck-deep in a slurry of anger, frustration, fear, and love. So much for his much-lauded control. The valve is broken, the water rising.

  “Sure,” he says, after another long, soupy moment.

  Because Rack is not entirely human, he can see all the possible ways this lock might turn. A shootout. A hostage situation. Piles of dead mobsters, lakes of blood, the hard-bitten damsel in the box safe and saved and — could it be? — possibly even grateful. Reach out and twist the meaty wrist. Hear that satisfying snap of bone like a cheap plastic chair leg bending the wrong way, a metallic clatter as gun and floor slug it out. Be an action hero. Take the shot. Use her body like the weapon it is.

  Rack's not big on weapons or violence. Before today, he'd never fired a pistol or snapped a man's wrist. Rhye, as she would quickly tell you, is no fuckin' damsel, nor is she any person's gun but her own. Trying to use her would inevitably blow up in their faces like a cartoon birthday cake studded with sticks of dynamite. Instead — gods of gratuitous violence and swaggering machismo be good — Rack spins the tires of his mind until they throw twin rooster-tails of oily muck. Trigger-bitten fingers tango across the keyboard, coding a different future. He may not be any good at murdering mobsters, but he's a goddamned pro at killing time.

  I hope I'm doing the right thing.

  The problem with making any move, of course, is that you never know what the outcome will be until the chips have fallen, even if you've got a brain manufactured in a factory crèche and a childhood's worth of experience cheating card sharks out of their greasy retirement funds. A guess, however educated, is still a guess. A white-collar criminal adjusts his tie in the heart of the City (because it's goddamned hot and the AC's gone out and there's nothing to drink but rye whiskey and if his partner sheds one more article of clothing he's going to go outside and club his crotch to death with a loose brick) and a tenement flat 300 miles away collapses into rubble and rebar and a bloody jigsaw of limbs. At the long, dark end of things, hoping for the best is all you've got. Rack breathes out letters and numerals and hope through their fingertips, clickity-clickity-clack. The screen fills up with green and black.

  The Kid twitches on his slab.

  He's Frankenstein. He's a zombie pumped full of chemicals. He's a greasy-haired son of a bitch with a face no factory in its right mind would take credit
for, sitting upright on his bed at the cost of the only person Rack's ever loved. Every head in the joint swivels to watch him as he blinks and gapes. Is it man, machine, or goldfish? Rack feels something heave in the direction of his (her) stomach, like a wet dog giving itself a shake. Keep it together, boy-o. For her. For both of you.

  Big Boss, like everybody else, seems too stunned by the sight to even give the Kid a hand. He stares at his beloved progeny as if the boy's just sprouted a pair of assholes where his ears should be.

  “Son,” he says. A slow, joyous smile creeps up the coffin length of his face, hands-down one of the most disturbing things Rack's ever seen. “Son! How are you feeling, my darling boy?”

  No response from the Kid. His legs are dangling over the side of the gurney now. The pearl-handled grips of the big expensive pistols strapped to his sides play peek-a-boo beneath the fabric of his coat, dancing in and out of Rack's limited line of sight. Show-off guns, Rhye had scoffed when she first saw them. Kiddo probably had a prick like a bedbug and the aim of one of those drunken seven-year-olds that used to hang out behind the apartment dumpsters.

  Even with Rhye's less-than-charitable assessment of the punk's skills ringing in his memory, there's something about the pistols that keeps dragging Rack's eye back. He watches them and he watches them good, holding his breath.

  Trailing wires, head down, the Kid lurches to his feet. His daddy's goon squad unfreezes and rushes to catch him before his delicate ass can hit the floor and catch a bruise. He shrugs off their hands; the gentleman will be seeing himself out, thank you. With precarious, rubbery grace — the kind baby animals and drunks possess in spades, the kind no sober adult has ever been able to accurately mimic — he pulls himself upright, takes a step forward, and lifts his head to get a better look at his surroundings. He scans the room, expression becoming more and more confused. Takes it all in — mobsters, brick walls, bare bulbs, bloodstains — and finally reaches Rack, at which point his brow ceases to furrow and begins sinking a mine shaft to his frontal lobe.