by Ren Warom
“So, was this a help?” Satyr asks with a rude grin.
Bone grabs Stark before he can launch at the man. “Fuck off, Satyr,” he snaps. “This isn’t a joke. People are dying.”
Satyr shrugs, careless. “And? People die every day. They die under my hands all the fucking time because they’re too damned stupid to know when to stop, and you expect me to care about some guy killing randoms? Good luck with that.” He flicks a finger at Harris again, his disdain all too apparent. “Get that kid off my table. I’ve wasted enough time and lost enough money, on your behalf and his. I’m done.”
And with that, he stalks from the surgery.
Chapter 34
Not long after 8 p.m., Bone makes his way back through the Zone, to the area nearest the Boreholes. There’s been fresh snowfall, and the sun’s simmering bright as a coin on the horizon as it begins to set, stinging the eyes even as the frigid air stings the flesh. He sucks in a freezing lungful, his nose burning, his torso filling with acrid cold. He follows it up with a searing blast of smoke, provoking a coughing fit of throat-scouring proportions. With Stark distracted by the Buzz Boys, come to transport Harris to Central, he’s off to find Ebony. Stark won’t be pleased, and neither will Nia when she receives his mail about not coming in until tomorrow, despite his obligation to start on the new bodies being found by spirals, but he’ll handle them later. He has to talk to Ebony about Lever. He’d planned to go and speak to her again after the Rope case ended, but it turns out Lever’s an integral part of the Rope case, and he needs to have that conversation now.
He needs to figure out why he was targeted, why he probably wasn’t intended to come out mentally intact. What benefit would Rope have gained from his mental ruin? He’s no threat to Rope and never was. Stark’s the threat. And there’s the undeniable fact that it was Tress taken in the sewers, not him. Surely, if Rope intended him harm, that was the perfect opportunity? These questions boil inside of him, leaving no room for anything else. So, here he is, wandering further out of Stark and Nia’s good graces to go and hopefully catch Ebony in her shop before she closes, because he has no idea if tonight is a Neophyte shift and couldn’t find her apartment again if he tried. It’s hidden deep in the turbulent labyrinth of the Zone’s Hub, a resident-only area he’d never been in before that night. Tucked away in a quaint line of shops off one of the Zone’s main squares, Ebony’s shop, Natty Dreads, stands out in bright purple, exactly as she’d described. There’s light beaming from the porthole windows. He breaks into a run.
“Hey, Ebony babe,” he calls as he enters the shop, setting off a ripple of entrance chimes.
Ebony raises her arms in delight. “Bone, well, what a pleasure!” She comes out from behind her console to envelope him in a generous hug. Holds him at arm’s length, looking him up and down with a searching eye. “And what brings you to my humble store this fine but rather chill evening? Come to liven up your mop to match that new ink of yours?”
“Hell, no,” he says with a smile. “I came to pick your mind.”
Ebony shimmies back behind her console as her screen pings and takes a brisk second to deal with whatever’s required before shoring her elbows up on the shiny purple surface. “Pick away.”
Bone leans on the other side of the console. “I wanted to ask you about a woman called Lever. Nathaniel said you know her.”
Ebony frowns. That worries Bone because she’s not the frowning sort, not once you get to know her a bit. “Dresses like a bar sign? Blue hair? Gold fingertips?”
“That’s her.”
“She’s been missing for a while. What do you want with her?” There’s a buried lilt in her tone that’s far from friendly––it may be accusation, or suspicion, he can’t tell. Whatever it is abruptly switches to sharp concern, edging into anxiety. “You haven’t got her corpse? Tell me you haven’t, Bone.”
And just like that, Bone’s scared for Lever all over again. He recalls the strange things she said about skin. In light of her shedding hers, they took on new meaning. He thought that meaning was transformation, but perhaps it wasn’t that at all, perhaps it was her cry for help. If she’s in with Rope, she could be in the same position as Burneo, at odds with Rope’s agenda and trying to find someone to help her put him down. Should that be true, he’s failed her just as much as he’s failed Rope’s nameless corpses. Bone feels as if he’s blurring. Why are all these messages and gifts for him when he so blatantly has no idea what the hell to do?
Ebony grabs his arm. “Bone! Do you have her corpse?”
He pats her hand absent-mindedly, barely feeling the pressure of her fingers. “Don’t worry, I don’t have her corpse,” he murmurs. “And as far as I know, from when I met her, she’s still very much alive.”
Ebony lets go of his arm. “When did you meet her?”
“Two days ago, I think. Time’s got a little out of my control of late. No longer than a few days, though.” And remembering the first part of it, before it all went severely fucked up, he can’t help but grin. “Well, I say met. To be honest, she picked me up in a bar, fucked my brains out, then kinda left me in the lurch.” He’s telling most of the truth, so it’s easy to look sincere. “I wanted to speak to her. Just make contact. See if she’s all right. She seemed like she might need help, and it’s been bugging me that I didn’t ask.”
Ebony looks worried again. “If she’s still alive, which is not what I was expecting to hear at all at this point, then I’m pretty sure she could do with a friendly helping hand. I’m also pretty sure she’d never ask for one.”
“What do you think’s happened?”
“You’re aware she’s Establishment freelance?”
“I am.”
“The mortality rate’s incredibly high. Usually, the Establishment would help her deal with any trouble she couldn’t handle alone …” Ebony falters, her face pinched.
“Unless?”
“Unless she was doing a job that wasn’t for them. That’d be her own mess to sort.”
“Is she dumb enough to try that?”
“Reckless enough. Lever is about as reckless as you can get. It’s why she’s a top freelancer.”
“I guess they aren’t much use if they’re sensible.”
“No.” She sighs, offering him a candid look. “Can you find her? I mean, it’s what you Morts do.”
“Maybe. With your help.”
“Mine? How?”
“Do you know where she lives?” It’s a long shot, and unlikely, but if you don’t ask, you don’t know. Morts always ask.
Ebony tips her head to one side in a move that reminds him bizarrely of Lever. “Why go to the cost of getting someone an SA, if they tell everyone they know their contact info? If she was in the habit of sharing that shit around, you’d never have had the chance to fuck her.”
“Long shot. Were all her mods done at Establishment surgeries?”
“No. Why?”
“I’m not without resources. There’s a chance she hit a surgery where I know someone who can crack SA coding.”
Ebony’s mouth drops open. “Are you kidding? Have you any idea how dumb that is?”
“Dumb, but occasionally necessary. Do you think it’s necessary we find her?”
“Fuck. Fuck you, yes, I do. But you be careful, and this does not come back on me.”
“Oh come on, Eb. I’m an outsider, but I’m not an arsehole. Spaz would have no time for me at all if I were.”
That mollifies her because it’s truth. “Okay. Non-Establishment surgeries, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Most of her surgical work was genetic. Her hair, for a start. Chameleon gen. Expensive like most of her shit. She had all the enhancements: muscular, vascular, respiratory, ocular, aural, and psi.” She pings the rim of a glass jar full of beads with a finger and says, “I saw her blow up a glass once. Kapow. Glass mist. It was epic.”
“Wouldn’t that all be Establishment, though?”
“Yeah, I have a poin
t here.”
“So, get to it.”
“All Establishment freelancers get those gens as standard, but a few top of the pile freelancers, the ones most in Spaz’s trust, get a little more.”
“Really? Like what?” Bone wants to ask about transmog. Has to practically gnaw his tongue off to stop himself. Dropping transmog into this conversation would obliterate her trust, whether the Establishment has kept up those secret labs or not. There are some things he hasn’t the right to discuss. He’s not gang, not family.
“I don’t know the whole list, but I know it includes that blastema-acceleration thing from Edgeway, and …”
“Edgeway aren’t Establishment,” Bone interrupts, feeling the first tendrils of real excitement.
Having the blastema mod means that, with the help of a few other accelerants and gen-patches, Lever could re-grow her skin, should it be lost. It also explains the slow coagulation of blood. It doesn’t explain the impossible, horrific poetry of muscular-skeletal re-design that comprises transmog, as Lever has it, but it throws a layer of logic over some portions of the encounter. Like the psi, which would perhaps explain the flight, and might also explain how strange he felt when talking to Spaz. He hopes his tattoo was his decision. He’d be pretty much devastated if he ever discovered he’d been manipulated into having it. Right now, he has to focus on Edgeway. It’s exactly what he was hoping for. He’s got a solid contact there, in the records dept, someone who finds it child’s play to crack an SA. Light glimmers at the tunnel’s end, a way through to answers.
“You know anyone there who can help?” Ebony asks, trying not to sound anxious and failing miserably.
“Indeed I do.” Bone stands up, wanting to leave, now he knows where he’s going.
Ebony grabs his arm again. “If you find her, Bone, be careful. Whatever trouble she’s in might find you.”
He offers her a smile. “I’m not sure it hasn’t already,” he says, and leaves before she can ask. There’s nothing she can do to help him or Rope’s victims. Only Lever can do that.
Darkness saturates the sky, stealthy as ink, and the larger solar lamps come on one by one. Being in these areas of the Zone this late is pretty much illegal, but it’s a chance he has to take. He slips fast as he can through narrow streets filled with sloping terraces; temples to modification in glass and steel; blocky, minimalist squats holding surgeries in their dimly lit bellies, and places that seem to have been built from whatever’s at hand. Reflections of sunset glint off the tops of glass spires like eyes in the gathering dark, watching him, warning him. Too aware of the time, he cuts through the organically sprawled innards of a small central Zone residential area, its buildings a haphazard rainbow of reclaimed wreckage ingeniously re-imagined. Urban gardens grow in the courtyards and across rooftops, lush and richly scented in the evening air. The silhouetted forms of Establishment runners appear in his peripheral vision, flashing silently across the jumbled rooftops.
At first, he’s worried they’ll catch him, perhaps take him to the gates, or maybe chop something off as a warning, but they seem content to follow. Bone relaxes. He zips up his jacket, disregarding the clammy cling of wet cotton beneath. His back stings a little, the salt in his sweat niggling at the scabs. He grits his teeth against the urge to scratch and continues on to Edgeway, its oblong mass a monolith on the horizon. When he exits twenty minutes later, it’s night proper and the snow has begun to fall again, a slow drift of tiny flakes tumbling from the darkness. He lifts his face, smiling, the small points of icy wet tickling his skin. He reaches into his back pocket and touches the square of paper covered in his own chaotic handwriting.
Lever’s address, in Gyre Central of all places. In the end, it was so easy to get, it was almost anticlimactic. His contact, the bio-drive Caden, was happy to break security to hunt her address, as if it were no more trouble than fetching an unsecured client listing. Bone’s fixed the words on that paper into his memory much as he’s had the snake etched into his flesh: 328 Willough Block, The Rise, Kirk Falls. Rising and falling. That’s where she is. That’s where he is. Aware that he’s now well past his welcome, Bone takes a cab to the Zone gates and hitches a ride on the open platform up the steep sides to the city proper. The snow becomes heavier as he ascends, falling in thick bunches of messy white that soak him in seconds, and at the top he half runs, half stumbles to the nearest Bullet station. Takes a seat on the next train to Kirk Falls without any glimmer of his usual phobia––it’s just so good to be warm.
At this time of night, the Bullet goes at half speed and he dozes fitfully as it cruises along, almost missing his station. He exits on feet still numb with cold, his teeth beginning to chatter. Gyre’s Canted Cross runners call above him, their cries snatched by wind and snow. He should probably be on his guard, especially this late, but he’s beyond caring. He stops only to check on the station map for where he has to go and then he’s off, running in the mix of black ice, slush, and soft, new snow. The storm gathers pace, as if mirroring his urgency, a screen of white static, obscuring vision. It forms like a skin on the ground, on his shoes, his shoulders, stippling in his hair and making the mess underfoot more treacherous than ever. But he doesn’t stop until he reaches Willough Block, where he slithers to a halt, transfixed, gazing up into the boil of dark grey in black, the insane swirl of descending white.
Is she home? Or is she up there somewhere? A bird made of viscera in a sky full of paradoxes, playing with the bundles of flakes as they tumble down helter-skelter. He wonders if she misses her tattoo like he’ll miss his, even though he’s had it less than two days. He’s so close to asking her. He steps to the entryway, his mouth dry. If this door is locked, he’ll have to wait and hope someone comes home late, but in this weather, he’d be signing his own death warrant. Bone licks his lip, shuddering at the frozen numb of them, and pushes. The door swings open. Heart contracting in his chest, sharp as hope, he steps in, taking the stairs at a pace his legs and lungs fiercely protest. Outside 328, he hesitates again, trying to gain control over the sudden and overwhelming urge to smash the fucking door in and be done with it. He doesn’t know if he’ll find empty, abandoned rooms, or Lever’s dead, skinless body, he just knows he can’t walk away without entering. Bone taps softly at the door. Waits, and then taps again, louder this time. There’s no response.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. One more try.”
He bangs at the door with a fist and puts his ear close, listening. Muted sounds from elsewhere in the building float to him in incoherent scraps, jumbled snatches, but from behind this door, there’s only silence. He sets his shoulder to the door, clutches the handle tight, and shoves with all his strength. There’s a low cracking noise, a little give. Reaffirming his grasp, he slams hard again. Twice more. The final time, the door gives under his shoulder, pulling away at his fingers and stretching his knuckles to burning point. He steps back and pushes the door inward, following it as it swings towards the wall, his feet sinking into the pillowed comfort of soft carpet.
He stops, astounded. Carpets are a ridiculous extravagance. Lever’s clearly wealthy. The building is old, the area poor, but her flat is filled with luxuries beyond his paycheck. Beyond the paycheck of most everyone he knows. He gapes around at everything, disbelieving, clocking bespoke furniture, real wood blinds, and silk drapes, before realising how exposed he is with the door open. He turns to wedge it carefully shut. If Lever comes back, she’ll discover the door is broken, but no one else will, not just by looking. He’s safe for a while. Pacing around her living room, he peers through open doors to the empty rooms beyond, the rest of the apartment, marvelling at the size, the contents. There’s so much on blatant display. Three thin tablets and two glass desktops sit on her desk, sucking power. Several tiny, slender drives ranged beside them mean there must be exabytes of information stored here. On the wall, the small glass screen of a digital sound system that would’ve cost thousands blinks patterns of lights next to a plasma screen thin as a poster.
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He catches a man’s reflection in it and walks up to the screen, realising as he does that it’s him. It’s got to be. There’s no real shock in the lack of recognition, he’s used to moments like this. The disconnect, the struggle to catch up with reality as it races away from him. Like when he’s stupid drunk and stands at his own door for excruciatingly long minutes, staring at the number and wondering why he’s there, sure he’s not in the right place. Impatient with himself, unable to spare the time to catch up with whatever hiccup of the brain this might be, he resumes his sweep of the room. All Lever’s hardware is integral, controlled by a panel on the wall next to the sound system panel. He can’t see a security system, but it must be here, so why are no runners smashing into the apartment to protect her? A sharp stab of uncertainty hits below his diaphragm. This is too easy. Too damned convenient. Bone’s not crazy, not yet.
Common sense dictates he should collect Stark from his office and show him all of this because Lever may not come back and there are people waiting to be saved, Tress amongst them, and it’s not for Bone to decide whether they live or die. He’s not a good man by any means, but he’s not Rope. Common sense, however, is not in control of his mind. Nor is his better self. Whatever is in control is hungry for answers and says with infallible logic: one look can’t hurt. He approaches the computers, peering at the symbols on the screens, gently spinning data nodes in the glass for anyone to access. Why is it not protected? Surely she’d be more careful? His gut screams at him again to call Stark, and he promises himself that he will just as soon as he finds what he needs. Definite proof that Lever needs his help. Some scrap of information about Rope’s plans for him.