by S. C. Jensen
LeRoy, minus his lump of muscle, stood at the top of the stairs. He bounced on his toes and watched me with his twitchy, amped up gaze. Suddenly it didn’t seem to be such a bad idea to let me make the first move. I let him stay there, blocking the only easy exit like a tube of nervous orange energy. If I scared up the perp, maybe knocking over the glow stick would slow him down long enough for me to catch him.
A rustling noise inside the room snapped my attention back to the door. I pressed myself against the jamb and held up my mech arm as if I had a gun in it. Old habits died hard. I hadn’t touched a firearm since the accident. Until that moment, I hadn’t had the sense to miss the old boom stick. I cursed myself silently and then peered around the corner.
A long-legged body lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of red light that turned her silver dress pink and the pool of blood black. A mirrored ball spun on the ceiling, sending motes of pale-rose light spinning drunkenly over the walls and the floor and the cheap plastic furniture. A dark lagoon oozed toward the door. And another long-legged body in an identical dress was bent over the bed, violently stuffing bits of gauze and tubes of lipstick into a shiny red bag shaped like a kissing mouth. The room smelled like artificial sweetener and old coins.
I slipped inside and kicked the door closed behind me. “Going somewhere?”
The girl spun to face me with eyes as wide as exit wounds. Black curls spilled around her face. A thin silver band wrapped around her throat, choker-style, with a teardrop pendant like a drop of blood between clavicles as deadly as a pair of freshly cut blades. The necklace.
Her painted mouth made a perfect O that somehow managed not to look practiced.
“I came to deliver a message from your sister.” The mirror ball slowed to a stop. The dizzying lights from its reflection twisted sideways before it reversed and sent the room spinning again. “What happened here?”
Tears glittered in tracks through her makeup as if she was made of something purer than flesh and blood underneath the getup. She stuffed something else into her bag and kept her hand there. “I don’t have a sister.”
“That’s funny.” I inched toward the girl with my hands in the air. “I’ve got a ’gram with your face on it and a fat stack of holocred sitting in my bank account from someone who claims you have.”
“We did the twin show.” The girl’s eyes flit to the corpse. Her knees trembled convincingly. “But she’s not my sister. I just want to get out of here.”
“Mama wants the drop.” I took another half-step toward the girl with adrenaline kicking in the pit of my stomach. “That mean anything to you?”
The girl’s expression didn’t flicker. She was either really good, or really the wrong girl. The blank eyed stare of the corpse leered up at me. She had her own choker, a thin black line of seared flesh separating her head from her body.
The living girl twitched, and I looked up to see a little pisskicker pointed at my guts. She said, “I’m leaving now.”
Smoky black circles ringed her eyes with the kiss of glitter at the outer edges. Thick black eyelashes drooped seductively without her having to put in the effort. The silver dress slipped off a skinny shoulder. She licked her lips and smiled. The expression was as red as the kissy-faced handbag and just as empty. The silver choker danced in the reflection of the mirror ball. If you ignored the gun, she was the picture of a Saturday night good time. Hang onto your chips.
“That’s a nice necklace.” I kept my hands in the air and my voice steady.
Her free hand flew to her throat, and she narrowed her eyes, the thick lashes squeezing together like black teeth. “What’s it worth to you?”
Blood hammered behind my eyes with the same insistent throbbing as the beat from downstairs. “Can you take it off?”
“That’s what he wanted.” She dropped her hand to reveal a clear droplet. Hadn’t it been red before? The girl backed into the crumpled pile of bedding behind her. Her shoulders hunched, and she looked up at me with something wild clawing behind her eyes. “Slit her throat over costume jewellery.”
The twin show. “Your friend had one too?”
“I was in the can.” Faint bruises ran along the inside of the arm holding the gun. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Who was he?” I said. “Where did he go?”
“Ran off when I screamed.” She tore the choker off and threw it on the body of the dead girl. “Take it. It’s not worth another life. Not even one as cheap as all this.”
Her pupils jumped to the necklace and then back to me. I could hear the gears grinding inside her head. Risk versus cush potential. Doing the math. The acrid scent of fear-sweat permeated the fake sweetness of powder and oils. Her skinny chest pumped like a rabbit’s. I felt the barrel of the little hand cannon trained on me like a laser burning a hole in my stomach.
“I’m going to reach down and pick it up,” I said. “Don’t get excited.”
Out in the hallway, LeRoy Lemieux’s voice shouted something unintelligible. The girl flinched. I twisted to the side a millisecond before a crack loud enough to tear the fabric of the universe filled the room. The air on the left side of my body blistered. The shot hit the holopainted wall behind me and sent a spray of concrete gravel into the back of my head. She yelped and dropped her gun. They didn’t call them pisskickers for nothing. She cradled her hand and glared up at me like I was the one who hadn’t taught her how to shoot the damned thing.
I crouched to pick up the choker, keeping my eye on the girl. She bared her teeth at me and bent her knees, reaching down for the little gun. I knocked it under the bed. A blank, inhuman look flickered over her face. Then a feral scream ripped from her delicate throat. She clawed her way across the floor like she wanted to strangle me with her bare hands. Not fast enough. The cold metal of the necklace pooled like fresh water in my hand, and the empty pendant sat like a drop of water in the centre. Empty. Why did I think that? Her silver fingernails stabbed into my closed fist.
I grabbed her by the neck with the upgrade and lifted us both off the floor.
“What’s the smoke, beautiful?”
She writhed in my grip like one of the glow-ups on the dancefloor, except she didn’t look half so pleased with herself.
I said, “I’m not here to fight you.”
She hissed through her teeth, words she wouldn’t want her mother to hear. The thick crust of eyelashes on her left eye had peeled away from the lid and rested on my prosthetic like a fat caterpillar. Black and poisonous. The kind birds didn’t eat. She dug her fingernails into my metallic wrist, and they tore away like chewed up silver leaves.
The door crashed open behind me and the girl boxed me in the groin with a stiletto shaped shoe. I threw her onto the bed and spun to face the party crasher. A dark shape stood in the doorway. I had expected the techRose goon, but against the electric blaze of black light on holopaint his silhouette was wrong. This was the lopsided triangle of a gym rat who spent too much time hitting the bench press and not enough time on his squats. Not the shapeless lump of Bug flesh.
The guy’s face was dark and his feet were quick. A thin silver wire hung loosely between his gloved hands. He whipped it around in a well-oiled movement and snapped it tight. The silver glowed hot orange. LeRoy’s body twitched in the hallway outside, the pylon suit muddy with a spray of blood. A black, sideways grin cracked the holopaint across the corridor. The perp must have been hiding in the room across the hall before he jumped LeRoy. The door now swung lazily open.
The girl leapt on my back and clawed at my real arm, trying to dig her way to the choker. She got a bony forearm around my throat. I gagged. The goon crept toward me. He had a shadow skin covering his face, but I could tell he was grinning. The bite of something sharp on my neck reminded me of the girl. I reached up and across my chest and hit her in the face with the hard goods. She dropped to the ground like a wet blanket.
“You shouldnta come here, baby.” Shadow Skin had the voice of someone who loved his work a little too much. “Imma have to have a word with the boss man.”
There was something about that voice. Downstairs the beat kicked it up a notch and sent the mirror ball jumping. The pale-rose spinners spiralled toward me like I was falling through stars. I shook my head. The reek of ozone sizzled from the thug’s wire. He snapped it a couple times as he prowled toward me, just for effect. A twitch from the girl at my feet made my heart kick. The invisible grin on Shadow Skin seemed to widen.
The organ beat against my chest like it had had enough of this gig and wanted out of here. A black haze blurred out the edges of my vision. My head felt like I’d been hitting something harder than the pure stuff. The girl’s silver dress seemed to spin at the centre of the room. The necklace slipped out of my fingers, and I reached up to touch the side of my throat. The little silver bee had stung me. My fingers buzzed and tingled.
The black haze became a flood and Shadow Skin went under the waves. My metal shoulder dragged on my body like a dead weight, and I felt the prosthetic fist spasming open and shut against my thigh. Systems down. The buzzing hit my face and my knees buckled.
I was out before I hit the floor.
Dragging myself out of a drug-induced coma brought an ugly whiff of nostalgia with it. The back of my throat burned. My teeth had grown a skim of fuzz. I rolled over into a pool of my own vomit and groaned. No. This couldn’t be.
Sickly pink fibres poked up out of the bilious mess like swamp grass. I gave everything I had to bring them into focus. Anxiety rippled through my body in a chilling wave, leaving goosebumps and electrified hairs in its wake. Where was I? How had I gotten there?
The burn of shame hit me so hard it obliterated everything else. Relapse. I hadn’t had a drink in over a year. I’d hung up the habit when I turned in my badge. For good this time. I didn’t know if I could face another Day One. I didn’t even remember taking the plunge that drowned me this time. How could I let this happen again? The last thing I remembered drinking was the dirty glass of overpriced tap water and the leering weasel face of Sy the bartender.
Where?
TechRose. Red lights, spinning. Ripples of pink fabric against my face. The client’s sister in a skimpy silver number with a drop of blood at her throat. The necklace.
My own neck ached like I’d lost a wrestling match with a python. I pushed myself off the ground with my metal arm. A lump under the prosthetic hand forced me to lean at an awkward angle, and a jolt of pain ran up my neck. I reached up with my flesh fingers and stroked the side of my throat. A welt raised up to meet me. My gaze slid back to the puddle of bile. The girl’s pallid grey hand curled atop the hideous pink rug like a dead spider. The tip of the index finger sported a slick little number, a silver thimble with a stinger hanging off the end. Relief washed over me like a cleansing flood. Not a relapse.
With my soul washed clean of the insipient guilt, the relentless internal gaze turned outside again. My eyes travelled the length of the arm attached to the hand with the thimble. The girl was dead; the hole in her chest was about the right size to have been delivered by the pisskicker gripped in my metallic fist. She lay across her twin’s body, both with the rigid posture of plastic dolls. They matched the plastic furniture of the room like toys discarded by a bored child. Tired playthings. The music downstairs throbbed, the mirror ball spun, the girls bled out their lives on the cheap, synthetic rug. The blood that hadn’t been pumped out onto the carpet now pooled in black bruises along the underside of the bottom girl’s legs. I reached out to touch the top girl’s ankle. Cool but not yet cold.
I hadn’t been out for long.
I pushed myself to my feet and scanned the room. No necklace. Shadow Skin had closed the door neatly behind him after tucking the girls in for the night. I looked at the gun in my hand and a wave of revulsion churned in my empty stomach. The nameless client. The girl with the necklace. Detective Thomas Weiland. The Shadow Skin. A gun in the hand that hadn’t touched a gun since the accident.
It was a setup.
I stumbled over to the bed and grabbed the kissy-faced handbag off the rumpled covers, dumped the contents, and stuffed the gun inside. I didn’t have time for a biosweep. Given the purpose of techRose’s backrooms, the boys would have a hard time picking my signature out of the thousands of generous samples left behind by the customers, happy or not. The floor thrummed beneath my boots and the mirror ball spun ceaselessly, like Terra Firma corkscrewing its way around Sol. I slung the bag over my right shoulder, punched through the blackout curtains on the wall kitty corner to the bed, and knocked as much of the glass into the room as I could with my nerveless arm.
I pulled myself onto a rusted fire escape and into the rain. Of course it was raining. The sky above HoloCity never stopped pissing on us long enough for anyone to dry out. Below me, the grid hummed with blurs of light from private boilercars. A strand of wet hair the colour of well-chewed bubble gum fell in front of my face. I raked my fingers through my mop to slick it back and then pulled up the white synth-leather hood of my vest.
I didn’t trust the grip of my real hand after whatever the girl had hit me with, but the upgraded seemed to rate. I swung myself over the railing and let myself drop to the next half-level, tucking the red bag under my arm like spoils from the world’s saddest burglary. My shoulder wailed at me again—time to get it refit—and the fire escape swayed beneath my feet. When it held, I swung over once more and landed with a clang atop the big, green recycling bin behind techRose.
Some punters, even more desperate than the ones upstairs, had claimed the shadowed recesses between buildings in the alleyway for their transactions. The cha-ching of pro skirts collecting holocred by the minute echoed faintly through the hissing drizzle, but neither they nor their clients bothered to look up as I pelted past them through the puddles.
When I reached the grid, I found an empty yellow taxi ring to stand in while I brought up the slug schedule on my tattler. The ring would ding me a small stack of creds if I left without pickup, but at least it blocked the rain. That time of night, taxis were hard to come by. The other yellow rings lining the grid sheltered slumped figures who had the look of people who expected to die here, with dead eyes and their fare clutched in sweaty hands. The blue rings for personal pickup all stood empty—no one with money for personal boilers came down to the Grit District—so the pillars of light shone into the darkness as if their only purpose were to hold up the rain-laden sky.
The entrance to the underground and the nearest slug was a half hour away at any kind of pace I could keep up. The residue of the sleeper drug hung in my veins and each step felt heavier than the last. I shook my head again and peeked inside the bag. Still there. Not just a bad dream.
Another setup.
I had known the cops were trying to nail me even before Weiland’s little visit. My career with the HoloCity PD had been a flash in the pan. A high-octane failure. I was nothing but a skid, a street kid, even when I passed my exams and slapped on the greys. I knew I’d been picked up to fill the Grit quota. I’d been the only one in my class. They had no choice. Back then, I couldn’t stop drinking long enough to feel bad about it. They liked us Grits when they could get them. It’s easy to buy off people who come from nothing. We do whatever we’re told. Maybe if I’d been sober, I’d have been stupid enough to do just that.
Hopping from glow-up to hangover made it tough to remember what I was supposed to know and what I was supposed to forget. I forgot a lot of things, but never the right ones. Like that last bust. I got clever and remembered all kinds of things. I got so clever they accidentally assigned me a faulty plasma rifle and ordered me to spend all day firing it in the practice range. I was lucky the blast hadn’t taken my head as well as my arm. The HoloCity PD wasn’t.
But Lady Luck is like anyone else. She can be had for the right price. It was
only a matter of time before Chief Swain paid up and I got knocked off. I didn’t have enough chips in my corner to buy my own fate, but I could probably get myself out of town. I had enough cush and fake tickets to get down and stay down. The chief would forget about me. He’d managed to forget much more important things.
The chief. Shadow Skin must be one of his. But was he a cop or a grifter? I knew the voice. It floated around in my head like a mote of light. The memories of a drunk are ephemeral things. You can chase them, but every time you grab hold they show up outside your fingers. Only the ugly ones have enough substance to hang on to. You never catch the memories you want to keep.
On the grid, the boilers zipped by like streaks of neon in a cheesy strip joint, too fast and too bright to be real. I had just decided there was no chance of a cab when a yellow pod slowed and took the pickup track. If there were a couple more where it came from, I’d be gold. But when the pod passed up the first couple of yellow rings and headed for me, I wasn’t feeling quite so shiny.
I cursed and backed out of the ring. My tattler chimed to let me know how much my stupidity was going to cost me, and I pounded it as far from the grid as I could get my jingle-brained ass in a hurry. Of course they were monitoring the rings. Probably the slugs, too. But I might be able to afford a ScanAnon pass for the slug. Even if they tagged me, they couldn’t swarm every station.
The pavement punched the soles of my boots and bit into my knees with every step, and I transferred the cred for a 24-hour ScanAnon transit ticket. The tattler gave a hollow chime, a and the ticket landed in my queue. That was it for my bank account. So much for getting out of town. I could get to my flat and grab the fake IDs, but I’d be pegging it out of HoloCity on my own steam now unless I could find somewhere local to scatter my signal.