Darwin offered a warm smile. “Officer Lees, do you really think we’d cart two thousand creds worth of raw fish down here without an official go ahead?”
Aaron plucked a thought out of the female guard’s head. “Maybe West is thawing out after having a baby?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Lees popped open his instant cooling can, some manner of high-octane energy drink with a frothing green troll on the outside. After a sip, he went down the hall. “Come on.”
The female officer waited to let them pass. Her body language indicated she meant to walk behind them. Aaron tensed but kept a pleasant face, pushing his cart along behind Darwin.
“I got it,” chirped Shimmer.
Not quite ten feet down the hallway, the woman behind them sighed. “Son of a bitch.”
“Better go, Santiago,” said Lees.
“Little damn convenient.” Officer Santiago narrowed her eyes at Aaron. “Something doesn’t feel right. Montez wants me upstairs right at the moment we get a special delivery?”
Lees glanced at Darwin. “Now that you mention it, the timing does seem rather convenient.”
Aaron clenched his hands on the cart, concentrating, seizing telekinetic hold of both guards’ rifles and swinging them up and under their arms into their faces with a loud crack. Darwin ducked. Lees’ nose burst into a gusher of blood and a distinct snap came from Santiago’s jaw. Aaron switched his focus to holding them upright. Shimmer squealed incoherencies, wings fluttering into a glitter-spewing haze. Every few seconds, a recognizable word crept out: cameras, security station, reroute.
“Christ, man.” Darwin straightened up. “Did you kill them?”
He floated the unconscious security officers together and guided them into the nearest doorway, which turned out to be a small six-person meeting room. Aaron rotated them horizontal and left them on the table. After a moment’s consideration, he relocated them under it.
Darwin ran over and checked their gear. “Shit, no cuffs. What kinda cops don’t carry cuffs?”
“Private security. The kind of ‘cops’ that don’t take people into custody.”
“Oh, damn.”
Aaron glared. “Oh, damn. Yeah… that’s a right fine way to put it. ‘Oh, damn’ works perfectly. You just now figured out a fuckup in here is going to translate to bullets and body bags, a whole mess of ’orrible shite.” He kicked the wall. “Shimmer, can you do something unseemly to this door?”
“Yeah,” said the faerie.
The access panel buzzed, and cast off a puff of dark smoke carrying the scent of burned silicon. Darwin rushed to the food cart and pushed it to the end of the corridor where a T intersection stopped them. He pulled a small, rectangular device about the size of a thumb out of his pocket and held it out. “Take the Horus. I’ll go to the break room with the fish. You head to the network room.” Darwin pointed left before dragging both hovering carts with him the other way. “Fourth door on the right side.”
Aaron pocketed the electronic tap and jogged into the corridor.
Shimmer yelled, “Left, now!” when he’d made it about halfway.
He dove through a door as it opened, surprising a thin Asian woman in a white laboratory-style coat over a black sweater and slacks. Four large shelves held an uncountable number of personal electronics, portable terminals, and desk units. One such terminal lay disassembled in front of her. Aaron had no idea what the sparking wand in her right hand was, except for knowing he didn’t want her to poke him with it.
“Who are you? You shouldn’t be in here.”
“We just brought some food. It’s in the main break room.” Aaron pointed over his shoulder. Someone heavy walked by in the hall outside.
“How did you even get that door open?” The tech reached for a NetMini. “It shouldn’t work for a contractor temp badge.”
“Officer Lees had to umm… Call of nature. He gave me temporary access.” She squinted. Aaron grabbed onto the thought at the tip of her brain. “Okay, he told me to say that. I think he was just being lazy.”
She relaxed.
“Clear,” said Shimmer. “Wow, look at all this shit. It’s impressive ’cause there’s so much of it, but it’s all year-old crap. Oooh, four years ago, I would’ve demanded you steal that Nakamura Kishinoken.” She pointed at a long, narrow box, about the size of what a single rose might come in, featureless save for two M3 interface plugs and a holographic emitter.
“Lazy doesn’t begin to describe that idiot.” The woman made a shooing motion. “Consider his message received; now get out of my lab.”
Aaron backed into the corridor and jogged to a dark blue door marked ‘Server 03.’ It looked armored, or at least reinforced, and had no window.
“Wait,” said Shimmer. “There’s a security checkpoint and airlock inside. Beyond that, the corridor splits into three zones. I’m going to open every door at once and kill the lights. The headset will give you an approximation of the path. You’ll need to haul ass. Ready?”
“No.”
The faerie tapped her foot on nothing.
“I mean yes.”
“Three… two… one…”
The heavy door slid to the side with such speed it appeared to vanish. Inside, everything went dark except for a green wireframe outline rendered in hologram by his headset. A floating dotted line pointed the way ahead. Shimmer overlaid the floor plan on his vision, which didn’t account for movable objects like furniture. Aaron attempted to sprint, but bumped a handful of chairs and one small table, before tripping into an embrace with a standing plant. Spitting out leaves, he swung around to align himself with the digital outline of a corridor and collided with a woman at a full run in the opposite direction.
Their face-to-face meeting was brief, intimate, and left him seeing stars with her unconscious on top of him. Shimmer vanished as the goggles flew from his head and clattered to the floor somewhere in the dark.
Aaron moaned, fingertip testing his lip for blood. “What kind of bloody idiot runs in the dark?”
“You,” said Shimmer. The voice emanating from the distant device sounded even more like a Faerie.
He pushed the woman off to the side, patting her on what he hoped was the shoulder, whispering, “Sorry about that.”
Heavy pounding, the hands of an immense ticking clock―or his heartbeat―got him scrambling about on all fours and sweeping his hands back and forth in a frantic search for the goggles. His fingers brushed plastic, swatting something farther away. Cursing, Aaron crawled in the direction of the skittering. He cringed at the rapid approach of another person, stifling the urge to grunt as a leg caught him in the gut and a body toppled over him. The man crashed into the side of a desk behind him, metal from the sound of it, and cursed as he fell in a rain of small objects.
A tiny patch of white light came on, highlighting every crevice in the rug six feet ahead. Aaron grabbed the goggles, fumbling to put them on as he leapt to his feet and leaned out of the way of another runner who sounded female. With the headset in place, luminescent green highlights once more created a sense of his environs.
Shimmer’s holographic avatar zoomed into his field of vision, pointing. “Go! You’ve only got two minutes.”
Aaron pointed at her, not that she could see, and pondered a series of choice invectives before he let his need to find Talis overwhelm his momentary indignation. He jogged in the direction indicated by the floating dotted line past two turns to a door. Once it closed behind him, the lights came on.
“Gah! Feck, I’m blind!”
“Oh, grow up,” chirped Shimmer. She flew among racks of server components, hovering by a panel. “Here. Open this one.”
Aaron stared at the tiny, floating apparition, disappointed a creation of mere light could not feel pain. He stormed over to the indicated machine, seething at her for a few seconds. She stomped on nothing and pointed. Grumbling, he lifted a hood-like panel to expose several arm-thick bundles of fiber optic cable, pulsing with a blue and red glow.
Aaron fished the Horus out of his pocket, extracted an asterisk-shaped prong from the underside, and plugged it in. The cable unwound to a length of two feet. Telekinesis allowed him to levitate the small component deep into the cabinet where even a child’s arm couldn’t fit.
Shimmer stared at him with her mouth open. “That was… awesome. They’ll never find it.”
“Is that it then?” He closed the cabinet.
“Not quite.”
He glared.
Shimmer pointed with her toe at the exit. “You gotta get outta here.”
Darwin jumped as Aaron slammed open the door to the break room. A modest group of security officers, technical personnel, and other casino employees looked up from their sushi at the sudden noise.
Aaron pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. “Arnie’s lookin’ for you. He wants us upstairs to help with the conference room.”
“Oh, damn, sorry all.” Darwin offloaded a few pre-pack meals into a mini-fridge. “I’ll leave these here in case more show up. Toss ’em if no one eats them in a day.”
Aaron slipped into the hall, trying not to look as frustrated, worried, and angry as he was. He grabbed Darwin by the smock as he emerged, spinning him around and putting his back to the wall. Aaron raised his finger, hand shaking, as if he were about to unload some bit of profundity.
Instead, he sighed, and trudged toward the elevator.
“Looks like things went well.” Darwin tugged at his catering jacket.
Aaron huffed. “I’m starting rather not to like faeries.”
atte black metal turned in Aaron’s fingers. He angled it back and forth, watching the shadows deepen and recede within the engraved letters of his wife’s name. The trinket blurred as his focus went past his feet to the bare concrete wall a short distance from the end of his bed. A former living room served as his private space, sectioned off from the rest of the apartment with standing barriers of debris and unwearable clothes hung from cords. He stared between the legs of a pair of moldy pink pants sized for a tween, pondering the source of the flickering light in Darwin’s sanctum.
Aaron wondered how he hadn’t noticed him there when he’d settled on this apartment. He assumed the presence of a Comforgel pad in the larger area would’ve attracted a squatter before the glorified closet his friend preferred. He remembered his disappointment at discovering a blown pad; the once gelatinous material inside had dried out into a substance with the consistency of thick, rubbery snot.
It didn’t heat up or cool anymore, but he’d come to regard it as comfortable in an unsettling way. Lying on it felt simultaneously relaxing and disgusting. He’d lost almost an hour the first time he’d touched it, watching the indentations of his hand fade back to the shape it had been in when it dried.
Green and grey fungus spread out from daisies embroidered on the shins of the little girl’s pants, souring his mood. He dwelled on the somber thought of a girl young enough to fit into them stuck living in this squalor and hoped they had been left behind when her family fled the blight. Twenty years ago, average people lived in this sector. He almost chuckled at the thought the previous owner of those pants might be older than him, then hoped she was.
The creep of decay over such an innocent article brought his mind back to Allison and the last thing she would ever say to him.
“Aaron! What are you doing?”
He closed his eyes, weathering the memory of her scream. Three days had passed since they’d planted the Horus in the casino without word from Shimmer. Talis was out there somewhere, off the radar of Division 0 and out of his reach. Aaron’s thumb brushed over the lettering again; he could almost read it by touch. Revenge seemed like an unattainable goal, something he’d gladly sacrifice for a chance to be with her again. The ruined pink jeans stirred in a breeze that scraped plastic sheeting over a window long devoid of glass. His mind tricked him into seeing those pants as belonging to his daughter, once he and Allie had kids. The rot faded, the pink brightened, and he pictured a blurry-faced nine-year-old running around giggling. For a few seconds, Aaron smiled.
Gunfire rang out a few blocks away, but he’d stopped flinching weeks ago.
The pleasant daydream world lost its color. Grass browned and died. Mold crept over the pants, and the little girl stopped laughing. She had no face because he couldn’t imagine her. Allison had died before they’d ever even discussed having kids.
Aaron set the nameplate on his chest and reached to his right, rummaging amid a pile of junk until he found the rubberized grip of his E-90. He pulled it from the debris and held the laser weapon with both hands, studying the twisted smears of his reflection along the silver housing. He turned it over, looking at it from all sides, the instrument of her death; the last time it fired, it took his wife from this world.
“You’re a cruel bitch, fate,” whispered Aaron. “Two years, I carried this miserable, bastarding thing. Only drew it three times when I wasn’t on the range.”
He gripped it in one hand and held the nameplate in his left as he moved to sit sideways on the bed. The rug had long ago disintegrated; beneath his feet, a giant hole of cold, scratchy concrete. Aaron’s gaze focused on the tip of the E-90.
He put his finger on the trigger. “Suppose if there’s any truth to the ’ole ghost thing, I could hurry things along a bit. How ’bout it then, Allie? You fancy revenge or a reunion?”
After a moment of perfect silence, he pressed the pistol under his chin. He had stopped caring about this world as soon as the life had left his wife’s eyes. Only the need to hunt Talis and put the bitch down kept him clinging, enough not to give up, but how much difference would killing her make? A woman like her would make an enemy worse than Aaron sooner or later. Did it really have to be him to end her? All he’d accomplished so far was delaying fate. Chasing her had cost him everything, and the more he stared at the child’s pants, the more he couldn’t bear not to be with Allison anymore.
Sound faded from his perception, save for the faint howl of wind somewhere distant. Aaron fixed his stare on a smear of dark substance in the corner where wall met ceiling, mold, paint, or something charred, he couldn’t tell. The pink pants in his ‘bedroom wall’ wavered in the moving air. What was the name of the girl who once owned them? Had she escaped the blight, or had it consumed her? Could Allison’s ghost be watching him now? Would she be staring at him, eagerly awaiting him to cross over or would she be trying to scream at him not to do it?
“Bollocks.”
He let his arm fall into his lap, E-90 dangling from his limp fingers. Allison would never have wanted him to kill himself. She had to have seen the look of abject horror on his face when his arm moved on its own. A sidelong glance at the child’s pants inflated a lump in his throat. Something innocent and pure, ruined and forgotten―like Allison. Sorrow deepened at his feelings of impotence at failing to protect her, worsened at his sense of inadequacy at avenging her. During his years as a frictionless player, he had women lining up, but he’d never had the least bit of interest in any of them. They saw a sports star, a giant credit statement, not a man named Aaron Pryce. Allison had no idea who he had been, and she still liked him.
“Fuck!” he screamed, leaping to his feet.
He looked around in a frenetic whirl, searching for something to shoot, but wound up slamming the E-90 down on a shipping crate forced into duty as a nightstand.
A deep, orchestral presence flooded Darwin’s room, stalling Aaron in his tracks. The eerie sound would have been the perfect opening to a fascinating documentary about deep space, narrated by someone with a bass voice.
The music cut.
“Hey, babe.”
“Don’t ‘babe’ me, Darwin. Is your friend there?”
Shimmer.
“Yeah, one second, babe.”
A faerie-sized snarl grew louder as Darwin mo
ved to the loose, indigo curtains hanging in the doorway between his sanctum and Aaron’s space.
“Oi, mate.” He flicked his NetMini at Aaron as if it were a jai-alai paddle.
Aaron frowned at Darwin’s horrible mockery of an English accent.
Shimmer’s holographic head leapt from the device, flickering into nothingness about three feet away. Aaron’s NetMini emitted a traditional and boring sound―a ringing phone.
“There you are,” said Shimmer, smiling. “Is something wrong? You look upset.”
Her aqua-colored hair shifted in a breeze existing only to her hologram. A glittering butterfly image spread its wings over her eyes, its body down the ridge of her nose. The digital tattoo cycled among shades of blue into violet. He smirked. Odds were high she looked nothing like this in reality. Probably an old man.
“Oh, no, just peachy. I adored sitting around for three days without a damn word. Please tell me you’ve got something.”
“This woman you’re trying to find wasn’t born on Earth. I think she came from a colony settlement and arrived via RedLink from Mars.”
“I don’t much care where she came from.” Aaron narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice, speaking in neat, clipped words. “I need to know where she is right now.”
Shimmer’s hologram leaned back, right eyebrow raised. “Well, she’s gotta be staying fringe. She’s got no ’mini I could find, and she’s keeping herself out of the reach of citycams, which puts her in at least a grey zone, possibly under the city.”
Aaron’s face reddened.
“Before your head explodes, that video data you sent me helped. I did get a hit on one of the others in the background.”
Four panels stretched out in midair around her head, each eight by ten inches. The left-most one displayed a still from his Division 0 helmet camera recording, frozen on a man in a bulky, green-camouflage coat. Muzzle flare from a pair of large handguns highlighted his dark brown face with blue; fat dreadlocks coiled into the air behind him like asps. Shimmer advanced the video frame by frame. The figure sailed left to right in the air, falling while firing both guns in the general direction of the camera. Aaron knew the video well. He paused playback before Allison ran into the scene from the left, returning fire.
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