by Jenna Black
Nate had never told anyone, not even Nadia, the truth about how he’d met Kurt. Sure, Kurt had shown up at one of the Basement recruitment drives the Chairman sponsored, but he’d come because Nate had invited him. Nate had first met Kurt at a Basement-fringe club called Angel’s, one of the favorite destinations of well-heeled tourists. At Angel’s, you could get cheap, home-brewed drinks that ate a hole in your stomach, or you could get expensive brands that weren’t carried by any official Paxco liquor stores. You could also get any drug your heart desired, and a pretty girl or boy to “entertain” you in one of the private rooms upstairs.
Last year, Nate had gone to Angel’s with a group of friends. Well, not friends, exactly. It was hard to make real friends when you had a secret you couldn’t afford to share—and when most people who tried to make friends with you were just kissing your ass because you were the Chairman Heir. Anyway, he’d gone to Angel’s with a group of other Executive guys. Getting laid at Angel’s was practically a rite of passage for an Executive boy, but Nate had been more interested in getting drunk when the press wasn’t around to snap embarrassing pictures.
He’d been well on his way to achieving this aim when he’d caught sight of Kurt, prowling through the crowd in a palpable cloud of sexual energy. One glance was all it took to see that he was trolling for customers, but like any born-and-bred Basement-dweller, he always kept his eyes open for unexpected opportunities. Like when he’d bumped into a very drunk Executive douche bag and carefully relieved the man of his wallet.
The moment Kurt had slipped the wallet into a gap in his clothing—no doubt a secret compartment sewn in for just such occasions—his eyes had met Nate’s. If Nate were being a responsible Executive, he’d have stormed over and demanded Kurt return the wallet. Instead, he froze like a rabbit, immediately and completely fascinated. A slow, wicked smile spread over Kurt’s lips, and Nate had to grab the back of the chair he was sitting in to keep himself in place. Here in the Basement, he could let loose a lot of his inhibitions, but his companions weren’t so drunk they wouldn’t notice if he made a pass at a guy. And since they weren’t really his friends, that would be a bad, bad thing.
Without meaning to, Nate licked his lips. The spark in Kurt’s eye said he saw the gesture as an invitation. Nate swallowed hard, wishing he could make a true invitation. But though he tended to recklessness, he wasn’t a complete moron and had no wish to experience the horror of “reprogramming.”
Most likely, Kurt knew exactly who Nate was and knew better than to approach. He merely winked at Nate and moved off into the crowd. Nate hadn’t been sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed.
That might have been the end of their acquaintance, if one of the club’s hostesses hadn’t glommed onto him a while later and started flirting. Naturally, Nate wasn’t interested, but the girl was persistent, and so sexy Nate’s companions started looking at him funny for refusing her. He’d given in because he couldn’t afford not to, but she’d surprised the hell out of him by leading him to a room that was already occupied—by Kurt, who’d paid her to catch Nate’s eye and lure him upstairs.
That had been one of the best nights of Nate’s life, made all the better by the knowledge that he was doing the forbidden and getting away with it. There was an undeniable chemistry between him and Kurt, something Nate knew was mutual. Before the night was out, Nate had extracted a promise from Kurt to show up at the next recruitment drive, so that Nate could give him a safe, respectable job. He’d paid an absurd amount of money for Kurt’s time, hoping that Kurt would be able to get by without having to turn tricks until the recruitment drive rolled around, but he half-expected him to be a no-show. Nate had been more thankful than he cared to admit when Kurt kept his promise after all.
Angel’s would always be a favorite for Nate because it was where he’d met Kurt. But it was also a place where money, both company scrip and real dollars, changed hands in epic quantities. If Kurt had arranged passage out of Paxco, he’d most likely arranged it at Angel’s. So tonight, Nate was going there, as he had countless times before since his first trip at the age of fourteen. With one big difference.
This time, he was going alone.
* * *
Nate looked at himself in the mirror and wondered if he’d gone completely crazy. Nobody sane would think of doing what he was about to do.
The eyes that stared back at him from the mirror weren’t his.
Well, yes, they were. They just didn’t look like it.
Pale blue contacts leached most of the color from his eyes, and the kohl he used to line them made them look paler still, almost inhuman. His naturally dark hair was hidden under a white-blond wig, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were painted soot black with more kohl. A thin, blue-white powder cooled and lightened his warm skin tone, and his black lipstick didn’t go all the way to the edges of his lips, making his mouth into a harsh black slash in his face.
He couldn’t do anything to change his basic bone structure, of course, but a couple of pouches artificially filled out his cheeks, giving him dimples, and the changes in his coloring were so striking that even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. If his own mother were around, that is. She and the Chairman had had a falling out almost ten years ago, and she’d withdrawn from public life, entering a fancy Executive “retreat” that bore a disturbing resemblance to a medieval cloister. Nate hadn’t seen her since. Apparently, staying away from the Chairman was more important to her than maintaining a relationship with her son.
Regardless, no one looking at him would guess that he was really the Chairman Heir in disguise. Right now, he was a different person. He was the Ghost, a Basement alter ego Kurt had helped him create. Well, bullied him into creating, at least at first. Nate had balked at just about every aspect of the costume. But he’d wanted to go to the Basement incognito more than he’d wanted to protect his dignity, and in this getup, he fit right in. Nate had the amusing thought that if his own staff should catch sight of him, he’d be detained as an intruder. But then he decided the thought wasn’t so amusing—if anyone should find out about his alter ego, his days of slipping away to the Basement would be over.
Dressed in black leather and silver chains that made his artificial skin tone look even paler and more sickly, Nate used the escape route he and Kurt had devised together to sneak out of his apartment without anyone knowing.
The escape started with a long slide down a laundry chute—one that was a lot less nerve-wracking when Kurt was waiting at the bottom. Tonight, Nate just had to hope no one was dawdling in the laundry room at one in the morning.
Nate hit the pile of laundry at the bottom of the chute with a soft “oof” he couldn’t suppress. The landing stole his breath for a moment, but he was relieved to find himself in a pitch-dark room. There was no one around to witness his escape.
When he caught his breath, Nate scrambled out of the laundry and edged his way to the door. From there, it was a long, nerve-wracking trek to the service stairs, and an even longer climb in the dim, echoing stairway down to the parking level. The only good news was that no one in their right mind used a stairway in a high-rise—especially at one in the morning—unless absolutely necessary.
Nate couldn’t set foot on the street in his disguise. Theoretically, Basement-dwellers could roam the city as freely as Executives and Employees, but in practice they tended to stay in the Basement. You could sometimes see them in their flamboyant outfits in the neighborhoods that bordered the Basement, but you’d certainly never see them in the streets of lower Manhattan, in the territory of the cream of Executive society. Even if he wasn’t immediately detained, he’d be noticed, and that might be just as bad.
But he couldn’t just commandeer his own car to drive out into the city. He’d have to use his parking pass to get in and out of the garage, and the activity would be logged for curious eyes to see. Which left him no alternative but to be a little … creative.
As a general rule, most people of the Employe
e class couldn’t afford to own gas-fueled vehicles, so they used public transportation. However, one of the men who worked the front desk at Nate’s building owned a motorcycle—an ancient Ducati he had inherited from his grandfather—that he doted on like a favorite pet. Thinking he might enjoy taking a joyride someday, Nate had persuaded Kurt to steal the man’s keys and make copies, a task that had been child’s play for Kurt’s nimble fingers. They never had taken that ride together, but Nate still had the keys. He figured it wasn’t stealing, as long as he brought the bike back in one piece. Besides, being on the bike would give him an excuse to wear a helmet and cover the most obvious parts of his disguise.
The bike had an obviously nonstandard storage compartment strapped awkwardly to the back. Nate removed his chain-laden leather jacket and stuffed it in the compartment, leaving himself in a plain black T-shirt and black leather pants. Still noticeably out of place in this neighborhood, but probably in the dark and on the move it wouldn’t draw too much attention, as the aggressive chains would.
Face and hair hidden by the helmet, Nate edged the motorcycle out of the parking garage. If anyone checked the records, they might well question the bike’s owner about why he’d taken the bike out when he was supposed to be on duty, but no one would guess Nate had taken it. No one would know he hadn’t remained safely asleep in his bed.
* * *
Maybe he was taking caution to the point of paranoia, but Nate decided not to drive the motorcycle all the way to the Basement. Instead, he pulled into a parking space on the street about three blocks from the border. By that point, he was well past the respectable neighborhoods where his outfit would draw unwanted attention. He hoped he wasn’t so far past civilization that the bike would disappear while he was gone. He didn’t want to think about how he would get home from here without it.
Of course, since he was walking into the Basement with no backup, planning to ask questions of people who generally didn’t take well to being questioned, perhaps he was being overly optimistic in thinking he would make it back at all.
With that cheerful thought, Nate stowed his helmet and donned the leather-and-chains jacket, taking a moment to check his disguise in the motorcycle’s side mirror. Was it his imagination, or did he look just a little wild-eyed?
As he walked away from the bike, his mouth was dry and his heart was jackhammering. He’d never realized before how secure Kurt’s presence on their jaunts had made him feel. Trips to the Basement had always triggered an adrenaline rush, but as long as Kurt was with him, he’d felt … safe. Which had probably been pretty naive of him. There was no such thing as “safe” in the Basement at night, even for its most powerful predators. But Kurt’s ease in his natural habitat had created a convincing illusion. And Nate had wanted to be convinced.
In polite society, the streets would be quiet at this time of night. But the Basement was anything but polite society, and the streets got progressively busier as he edged his way closer to its borders. The place came alive at night, its illicit clubs and bars filling the darkness with sounds and scents, drawing the unwary in like some exotic carnivorous plant luring insects with its nectar.
Once upon a time, the Basement had been the South Bronx, but when Paxco had bought out the state of New York, one of its first civic “improvements” had been to raze the neighborhood to the ground. That had happened well before Nate was born, and from what he’d heard, the residents had practically done the city’s work for it in the wave of riots that broke out when the plans were announced. They seemed to think they should make their own decisions about the disposition of their neighborhood and had shown their displeasure with the decree by tearing it down. Either that, or they’d just enjoyed the excuse to take to the streets in a frenzy of destruction.
The neighborhood that Paxco had built over the rubble was an homage to practicality. Every building was a high-rise, allowing Paxco to house its poor and unemployed in as small a footprint as possible, so the city could reclaim fringe neighborhoods and make them into something more respectable. And every building was identical, built of ugly gray concrete with small, regularly spaced rectangular windows.
There was technically no wall or other barrier to separate the Basement from the respectable neighborhoods of the city; however, the looming gray concrete high-rises were as intimidating as any wall, towering over the low-rent Employee housing that bordered them. When Nate passed between the first two buildings, a shiver traveled down his spine.
Most Basement-dwellers were far too poor to own cars, and most tourists were far too protective of their possessions to bring cars into the neighborhood. The architects behind the Basement had anticipated that, and they hadn’t bothered with wide avenues with multiple lanes and room to park. Instead, the Basement was a claustrophobic warren of narrow streets that made the high-rises on each side look even taller and more forbidding, and cars could only venture through when pedestrians allowed it.
In the Basement, there were no distinctions made between residences and places of business—not that there were any official places of business in the Basement anyway, unless you counted the soup kitchens and hospitals. The only way you could tell one building from another was by looking at the graffiti spray-painted on walls and doors.
This being a temperate almost-spring night, the streets of Debasement were at their most crowded. Floods of Basement-dwellers roamed the streets, hawking their wares or searching for prey. Others gathered just to socialize and posture, or to protect their territory.
Though Nate had been to Debasement many times, the first minutes were always a shock to the senses. In the world he was used to, there was a certain uniformity of appearance as Employees and Executives dressed in accordance with the conventions of their social circles. In Debasement, the convention was to be as unconventional as possible, each individual striving to stand out, perhaps in defiance of the uniformity of their surroundings. Nate had dressed in leather and chains because the outfit exaggerated the pallor of his ghostly alter ego, but the people around him sported a riot of colors. Neon orange, screaming hot pink, electric blue, sun-bright yellow.
Piercings had been a staple in Debasement since the neighborhood had first been born, but facial tattoos were becoming increasingly popular, and those who weren’t ready to commit to tattoos went for face painting instead. Street vendors offered to do elaborate face painting for a fee, a service that was used almost exclusively by tourists—and priced accordingly. It was like going to a very adult carnival—the kind where you could get your face painted while getting a blow job. The air smelled of street food, and of too many bodies, often laced with a whiff of illicit, sickly sweet smoke.
Dressed as he was like a native, Nate made his way through the crowd with relative ease, the predators ignoring him as uninteresting prey, the street salesmen dismissing him as not having money to burn. It was just the kind of camouflage he’d been hoping for, and it got him to Angel’s without incident. He almost let out a sigh of relief when the club came into sight, but passing through the crowd had been the least problematic part of his plan.
From the outside, the building that housed Angel’s club / bar / brothel / general den of iniquity looked no different from all the buildings around it, a bland gray pillar of concrete with windows like soulless eyes staring onto the street below. The name Angel’s had been spray-painted in metallic silver over the entryway, and the door was flanked by a pair of Debasement’s version of bouncers—men with the barrel chests and buzz-cut hair of lifelong soldiers but pierced, tattooed, and painted like some long-ago goth band.
Nate felt the eyes of the bouncers on him as he climbed the stairs to the front door of the club. He’d been here enough times with Kurt that he was sure they recognized him, but they gave him the evil eye anyway. As a general rule, Angel encouraged Basement-dwellers who didn’t work for her to take their business elsewhere; her club catered specifically to the Employee and the Executive class, where the money was. But money trumped everything,
and a Basement-dweller whose pockets were pleasantly stuffed after a lucky score could buy a handsome welcome.
Nate wished Kurt hadn’t taken all his dollars. He shelled out the cover charge in Paxco scrip, paying three times what he would have if he’d had dollars, and immediately demoting himself in the eyes of the bouncers. Customers bearing dollars were treated like visiting dignitaries, regardless of their class. Those paying with scrip were tolerated as long as the money held out, but ripped off at every opportunity.
Nate endured an overly personal manual search from one of the bouncers, whose hands moved slowly and squeezed harder than necessary. The guy stank of body odor and cigarette smoke, and was about as sexy as a pickup truck on cinder blocks. It was an effort of will not to shrink away from his touch.
“Want me to turn my head and cough?” Nate asked when the bouncer’s hands lingered where they shouldn’t.
The bouncer gave him a scowl to let him know he wasn’t amused, then gave his family jewels a little extra squeeze. Nate reminded himself that he could hide signs of weakness without resorting to his own special brand of humor, which he doubted would be much appreciated by his current audience.
Finally satisfied that Nate wasn’t carrying anything into the club that he shouldn’t, the bouncer let him go. Yet another hurdle overcome, but the greatest challenge still awaited him.
Someone with a keen understanding of architecture and structural engineering must have helped Angel renovate her club, because although it was located in a building identical to those around it, it was completely different on the inside. The apartment buildings had eight four-room units per floor. They were supposedly designed to house families of four, but they would be tight and cramped even for two. Certainly they weren’t designed to house a nightclub, which was why Angel had had all the apartments on the first two floors of her building ripped out.