Daugher of Ash

by Matthew S. Cox

  She raised one hand and pulled at the air, tugging at the sense of combustion within the smoldering bodies. Gouts of yellow-orange fire burst from the charred husks and lapped over the survivor. He collapsed with a shriek, trying to guard his face. Kate slouched, hair touching the ground as she caught her breath.

  This is easier when I’m pissed off.

  A sharp snap of her head threw her hair back. She crawled through the bottom half of the old door and stood outside, brushing off the debris that did not burn away from her knees. The big man moaned and tried to drag himself away. Shouting from inside the improvised lab preceded another man running out with an assault rifle. He aimed it left and right, surveying the street as he walked past the dead. When he saw Kate, he pointed it at her, but tilted his head with confusion.

  Hands up, she offered a demure smile while concentrating on the air behind him.

  “Ain’t choo a fine piece.”

  One of the corpses squeaked as trapped gasses seeped out of holes in his flesh. The man shifted away from the body, grimacing. He tried to look tough, and grinned at her. Even a non-telepath could read his thoughts from the way he ogled.

  She covered her mouth with both hands and widened her eyes, staring past him. He whirled around to see what had ‘scared’ her. When he no longer aimed the rifle at her, she exerted herself. A cyclone of azure fire materialized around him, causing an immediate scream and reflexive automatic gunfire into the building. Kate poured energy into the flames until his motion brought him around, at which point she leapt for the cover of a nearby car. She tucked into the wheel, arms wrapped around her legs as the shooting and screaming continued for several more seconds.

  Paint smoked away, leaving two bare-metal handprints where she grasped the side of the long-dead vehicle. The rifleman had collapsed on his back, still burning. Inside the building, the mark shouted at the top of his lungs, demanding answers for what was going on outside. Kate rounded the front end of the broken car and jogged across the street.

  The ground floor room held a mass of folding tables covered in chemistry equipment. The mark, and two of his guards, stood near a handful of people in sealed white plastic protective wear with dark grey facemasks. All of them looked at her. She locked eyes with the mark, honing in on his surface thoughts.

  Shit, it’s that Syndicate freak. I got somethin’ for you, puta. His arm flew up, pistol in hand. Indirium bullets, bitch. Melt this!

  Kate let gravity take her down, falling hard on her knees while twisting sideways to take cover behind the wall by the door. Gunfire rang out, painting the lab in flashes of azure. Dust and sparks burst up from the floor, spraying her with grit. When the barrage stopped, she peeked around the doorjamb and induced a blast of flame in midair, inches from his face. The mark flinched, raising his left arm to guard his eyes. Breathing masks muted the screams of the chemists at the sight of combustion; in their panic, they plowed into the armed men as they scrambled for the door.

  She gestured, pouring power into a standing wall of orange flames, backing them into each other at the doorway. Muted shouts of “other door” drowned in a subsequent rush as vapors ignited; a backdraft sucked her flame wall and air deep into the broken shell of the former electronics store. Kate wobbled to her feet as she forced a surge of psionic energy into the burning, amplifying it.

  Boom.

  The explosion knocked her flat. Instinct stopped her from breathing; while the blast of fire going overhead felt comfortable, it carried toxic fumes. Debris, however, was less pleasant. When the concussive wave ended, she lay in silence, basking in the sting of dozens of cuts, serenaded by car alarms from several blocks away.

  Who the hell has a working car here?

  She sat up, pulling bits of metal and glass out of her body and dropping them one by one. Years ago, she learned her curse, as she called it, only heated the outside of her skin. The lesson had come painfully; soon after entering the city, fifteen-year-old Kate had stepped barefoot on broken glass, never having encountered it before. Once something pierced her skin, like shards of glass, she could not melt them out. Whatever subconscious process kept her ‘on’ all the time also prevented self-injury. Of course, glass didn’t melt at her touch anyway. She could force it to, but her constant temperature wouldn’t dull painful splinters underfoot.

  Crackling flames consumed the lab, burning in swirls of greens, blues, purple, reds, and yellows from the different chemicals. Each separate pocket of combustion glimmered in her mind, a sense beyond sight or hearing. Her consciousness mingled with the intensity of the burn; she felt the heat as a sentient mind, almost as if the flames breathed and desired to consume more, but starved. Kate slouched and exhaled. The effort to detonate the entire ground floor left her seriously considering sleeping where she’d fallen.

  Someone moaned inside.

  Dammit.

  She forced herself upright and staggered over to the abandoned assault rifle. Unlike the handguns, the magazine went in the top part of the stock away from the pistol grip, so she didn’t worry about touching it.

  The comfortable, rubberized pads on the grip melted between her fingers as she picked it up. She walked fast, putting a bullet or two into all the bodies strewn about, moving or not. Draped half out of the building, one man reached up, his molten face fused to his chem mask. Bloody slime oozed from the filter unit dangling at his chin.

  “You poor bastard.”

  She shot him in the forehead and stepped over him. The heat and flame in the lab didn’t faze her, though she remained close to the door, squinting from the fumes. She pumped four shots into the mark, just to be sure, and one each to the remaining chemists.

  “Oi, Kate. There you are, luv. ‘Ave a minnit?”

  She jumped at the sudden voice from behind, slipping and sliding in blood-laced chemicals that boiled on contact with her feet. A dark-skinned man, a mixture of African and something Latin, emerged from a hiding place among trash boxes. His gun remained in his belt, and he had both hands up. Heat from the chemical fire caused her bracelet to falter and her clothing to flicker in and out of existence for a second. She rushed out into the cool air, aiming the rifle at him and waving the armband to cool it.

  “Have you ever ‘eld one of those before, luv? You’re ‘olding it like a bloody action holo star what barely knows which end to point at the enemy. Stock to the shoulder, look over the sights. You’ll not hit a damn thing like that.”

  “I’m shooting dead men. They don’t dodge much.” Kate blinked. “What’s with the funny accent?”

  “Funny?” He gasped, adopting the hands-on-hip stance of an annoyed debutante. “It’s not funny. It’s British!”

  “Oh.” She lifted the rifle. “No offense… It’s just a job.”

  “Wait. I’m not one of these tossers; I’m a woman inside.”

  Kate pursed her lips. “We all got our issues. I don’t have anything to say to that. If you’re trying to make me feel bad for having to kill you―”

  “Bugger all, you’re not listening! I need to talk. I’m only borrowing this idiot.”

  His surface thoughts rattled on in a woman’s voice; somewhere beneath it, a man gurgled, making mental noises as if constipated. Kate took a step back, holding the rifle in a way to minimize how much she destroyed by touching it.

  The man shivered and twisted, staggering forward in a zombie gait. His shirt rippled and tore open; the skin on his chest stretched out into the hollow upper body of a topless woman with no hair. Arms to the sides, the flesh apparition smiled.

  “There we go.” The creature’s voice sounded feminine and seemed to emanate from nowhere in particular. “Does this make it easi―?”

  Kate learned where the full auto selector was.

  The recoil knocked her on her ass, but she held the trigger down until the magazine ran dry. More than half the bullets went off into the sky, sparking and clanking into a skyscraper a block away. A nude woman with paper-white skin, generous hips, and shin-length blonde
hair appeared in the midst of a cloud of glowing vapor behind where the perforated corpse hit the ground. Kate screamed like a schoolgirl, and released an expanding torus of blue flames.

  “Oh, hell,” said the woman.

  When Kate opened her eyes, she found herself alone with the scent of burned meat. Patches of fire clung to anything flammable, fluttering in the wind. The wail of distant sirens got her upright in a hurry. She looked up at the stars and over at flames inside buildings on the far side of the street.

  “Bastards probably saw that on satellite.” She backed away from the former drug lab. “Shit.”

  Flashing blue and purple lights reflected on the glass of a building several blocks distant, high in the air. She darted into the nearest alley and headed for the black zone.

  She needed to get somewhere safe.

  ate stumbled down an empty street where the line between grey zone and civilization blurred. The few people she encountered seemed absorbed in their own worlds. One man sprawled on the ground talking to a hallucination of his dead grandmother. A woman with bright pink hair reclined on a public bench, her face lit blue by ViewPane glasses, lost to a virtual simulation. From the muttered sound of her conversation with another player, she played some manner of vampire game. Another man sat on the ground like a wide-eyed five-year-old boy with marbles, only he picked at the bottoms of discarded synthbeer cans to get at the coolant chemicals. A small cry of victory preceded him raising one to his nose and snorting up a puff of white vapor.

  The odor of boiled blood followed her, tickling here and there as it steamed away from her skin. She had crossed the dangerous zone, Sector 2629, though the decay had spread at least a mile into the surrounding areas. Sector 2577, adjacent to the south, had the unusual trait of being rather mild in terms of grey zones. Whispers claimed local businesses threw large sums of credits at the police, resulting in a quicker response time and even the occasional patrol. Cops almost never showed up in the grey; that she had seen one or two here in the past few months had proved the rumor to her.

  With that arrangement, Sector 2577 had the distinct oddity of going from an area blacked off the NavMap to a close-to-civilized hybrid of gang-controlled territory and operational small businesses that did surprisingly well given their surroundings. Delivery bots experienced strange malfunctions here, except for large orders to local merchants. The sniper rifles had quieted as of late, as ComTec Corporation removed the sector from their delivery availability.

  She staggered into a lean on a lamppost and hung there in an effort not to faint. Her mind derailed from finding her way home to pondering the corruption of the world. The cops only cared about this place because they got paid to. Merchants only survived because the national delivery bot system stopped coming here. Gangs thrived because dolls and machines took most of the low-educated jobs away and guns were cheap and legal. Perhaps everything worked as intended after all; those in power encouraged the unwanted to kill each other. A self-cleaning infection.

  Kate wound up laughing. The corruption kept her working. She was part of it. Born from it, escaped from it, and suckered right back into it.

  “You okay?” asked a man who had snuck up on her.

  She shoved off the pole and stumbled on. “Yeah, fine.”

  He followed. “Looks like you can barely walk. You sure you don’t―”

  “Don’t touch me!” she yelled, yanking her arm away. She walked backward for a few steps, hands raised. “Seriously, just… don’t.”

  Scraggly black hair shifted over a dark, skin-tight shirt as he cocked an eyebrow. He raised his hands. “Suit yourself.”

  Kaos, I think. One of Fiona’s heavy hitters. Kate stopped, letting her head hang. “Kaos? Sorry, bad night.”

  Kaos chuckled. “You gonna be okay?”

  For a moment, she looked him up and down, all seven feet and change of him. Not many people out here could muster anything close to genuine concern in their eyes, and the way he looked at her made her want to curl into a dark place and forget the world. No matter how much she wanted to let him carry her home and hold her, she could never touch him. Never mind the minor detail of Kaos having a boyfriend… err, husband.

  “Yeah,” she muttered.

  Her tone made him back off with an apologetic face, as though he did something wrong. She trudged down an alley, heading for the oscillating shimmer of peachy-pink-toned light. The street-side of the building looked unremarkable, with an appearance that all but matched every other abandoned residence tower in this part of town. However, on the alley facing, a striped green awning over a deep porch held up pink letters that spelled out Tanked. Around and through the logo, a holographic couple floated and spun as they made love in defiance of gravity.

  Kate went up the steps onto the porch, careful to walk on the narrow strip of metal between the stairs and the door. Greg put that there after the fourth time she burned footprints into the false wood. The stink of molten Epoxil could linger for weeks.

  At this hour, the bar room stood empty, save for Greg, the bouncers Harley and Joan, and one of the waitresses everyone called ‘Nice.’ Harley leaned against the wall on the far side of the bar, arms folded. Between eyebrows and beard, she couldn’t tell if his eyes were even open. Joan busied herself―at least, everyone assumed Joan was female―at the GravPokit machine. None of the regulars had the nerve to ask, and Kate didn’t give a shit. Greg had gotten a cheap game unit, it didn’t use real balls, but the device simulated a click whenever the holographic ones collided. Joan had gotten good at banking shots off the lower plane into the top corners. The mere sight of twenty-four three-inch spheres floating in three dimensions made Kate woozy.

  “Shit, girl, what the hell happened?” Greg started to run out from the bar, but stopped at a raised hand.

  Kate didn’t look at him or slow down. “Need two stims, a shot, and a nap.”

  A door at the back end of the bar led into a narrow corridor that looked like something from an old prewar hotel with dark brown fake wood walls and brass fixtures. To the left, a wiry older man sat behind a counter in an alcove. He looked up with an open mouth ready to speak, but when he saw Kate, he went back to what he was doing.

  “Hey, Phil.”

  “Kate,” he muttered.

  She forced herself to trot in an attempt to minimize damage to the carpet and gasped each time her weight came down. Every cut, bruise, and embedded glass splinter pulsed with each step. The narrow corridor ended when it joined a wider hallway running left and right. Greg had gone to great expense to dress it up in the image of a high-end twentieth century hotel. Kate ignored the décor she had seen a hundred times before and wobbled as fast as she could to the last door on the right. A chirp emanated from the wall panel as she waved her bracelet near it, and the door slid to the side with a hiss.

  A large, clear cylinder dominated a room with a non-flammable tile floor, four feet high and filled with peach-hued slime. The thick metal disc at its base whirred and blinked with filtration systems and status readouts. A matching metal disc mounted to the ceiling above the tank would receive the two-inch-thick cylinder when it closed. Metal stairs wrapped around one side, leading up to the edge of the tank. Kate collapsed on a bench by two cabinets intended to hold the clothing of whatever amorous couple rented the room. To normal people, the tank offered a zero-g sex adventure.

  To her, it was home.

  Her face reddened at a knock.

  “Kate, it’s me, Greg. You okay?”

  “Yeah, come in.”

  The electronics responded to her verbal approval and opened the door. Greg entered carrying a tray, thigh-length dreadlocks swaying behind him like a cape. He set the stuff on the small table near the cabinets and spun to face her with a four-inch red Stimpak clutched in each hand. Kate laughed at the shower-slasher way he held them and looked down.

  “Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed? You look dressed.”

  “Yeah, but I know you know I’m not.” She gathered her
hair off her shoulders and bent forward. “Remember―”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Do it quick like, jabbin’ ya. So’z they don’t melt.” He approached, standing close behind her. “Hey, girl. Relax. I seen enough tittie workin’ here to last me till I’m dead fifty years. Kinda funny.”

  “What’s funny?” She switched the bracelet off.

  Naked.

  “For someone ‘oo neva wear nothin’, yer awful shy.” Greg’s energy diminished, he let off a sympathetic sigh. “Dis place drainin’. De city no’ be kind tae da’ forest nymph.”

  Maybe I should go back out there. Kate slumped forward, rubbing her face. “Yeah, well, maybe it bothers me because I don’t have a fucking choice.”

  “Oi, lady!” He gestured at dozens of bleeding cuts all over her, revealed when her clothes vanished. “What the ‘ell ‘appened to yas?”

  She made a pinching gesture. “Tiny explosion.”

  He stabbed her in the shoulder with one of the Stimpaks. “T’aut you was untouched by fire.”

  “Ow, dammit, not so hard.” She reached back and rubbed the spot. “Fire I can stop from hurting me; flying sharp shit, not so much.”

  Greg picked at a few larger pieces of shrapnel in her back, tugging them out and waving his hand to cool it. When her wounds ceased shrinking, he jabbed her with the other autoinjector. The pneumatic hiss drowned in another shout of pain as a whiff of chemical fumes drifted by. He looked at the tip, a metal nub the size of a pinky finger with a small hole in the middle.

  “Na melted dis time. I gettin’ better at dis.”

  She shivered as the last of her external wounds stitched closed. I wonder if those little nanobots know they’re millimeters away from destruction. He moved the tray to the bench next to her, a plate of raw chicken breast and a shot glass with a dark whiskey in it. She ate, cooking the chicken by touch, consuming it far too fast to care what it tasted like. Greg shook his head, chuckling.