by Rich Larson
Then his eyelid starts to twitch.
* * *
I can see my reflection in the pool and it’s uglier than ever, a faceful of processed meat, every centimeter of skin either split or swollen. Blood keeps burbling out of my mouth and down my chin, more blood than I ever realized I had. All I want to do is topple forward into the pool and drown, but the guard behind me has his arm around my waist.
Nat is on one side of me; Yinka on the other. They’re making him stand. He looks like he’s about to be sick, then swallows it back down. After the initial flurry of anger, Quini lined us up by the pool and stuck one of my anatabs to his skinned knuckles. Now he’s walking up and down the tiles behind us, bare feet slapping the ceramic, and he has the surgical saw tucked under his stump.
“Where is it?” he asks again.
“Don’t know,” I try to say again, breathing broken glass.
“Natalia, mi amor, where is it? You know I don’t want to hurt you. I love you.”
I’m praying Nat will stay silent, how she’s been since arriving, but the words break her ice and she blinks. “Get fucked, Quini.”
He hurls the incubator pod against the tiles and it smashes apart. Then he comes up behind me, enveloping me in the cloud of sweat and alcohol, and his breath is hot in my ear. “I do love her, though. Still. You know, hackman, if it wasn’t for her, I never would have hired you the first time. We wouldn’t know each other.” He balloons a sigh. “I bet she feels bad about that. I bet that’s why she agreed to help you.”
I shake my head, making the faraday clamp throb. “Blackmail.”
“I’m trying to decide now. Who I start cutting.” Quini hefts the saw. “The negrito, he could use a break. So between Natalia and the hackman, I think it’s you. I think she cares more about you than you care about her. So even though she hates me, she’ll talk. To avoid seeing you flopping around in the pool with no limbs like some deformed fucking manatí.”
“Señor Caballo.” It’s Anton. I almost forgot about him. For a moment I think he’s going to save me, but he’s only being businesslike. “We should search him first. If it’s on his person, you don’t want to damage it by accident.”
Quini shrugs. “Go.”
Anton pads over to me, chasing the guard away. I stand spread-eagled, arms straight out, and think for the first time about not having them. He frisks from the bottom up, and as he’s checking my coat lining he pauses.
“Just out of curiosity,” he says. “How loud can you whistle?”
For a split second his hand passes over the faraday clamp. Then he finishes the frisk, finding nothing, and steps away. Quini grunts, like he expected as much. He switches the saw on. Cold sweat starts trickling from my armpits down my ribcage. I feel the whine in my teeth.
“We’re starting with the right,” he says. “That’s the trend. You will fit right in. Natalia, cielo, feel free to start theorizing. About where my fucking artwork is.”
“I wasn’t fucking here,” Nat says. Her voice is brittle. I hate that. I hate it when she’s hurting too much to hide it. “I was in Flux. With you. Remember?”
“We’re all in flux,” Quini says solemnly. “You know? Lie down, hackman. Arm out.”
“It’s all right, Nat,” I mumble through my torn lip. “We’ll just run it again.”
I lie down on the cold tiles, extending my arm the way Yinka did, and look up at the sky. It’s beautiful. The red’s faded out to one stripe of soft pinkish orange, and above that the morning light is breaking through a wall of cold blue cloud. I don’t have to look at any of Quini’s ugly architectural choices.
I do have to look at my choices, though. I’m about to get my limbs amputated by an unbalanced criminal, and there are no anatabs. No painkiller cocktail. These are probably the last few moments I’ll get to think about anything except screaming, and at some point in the very near future I’ll bleed to death.
Maybe it’s not just the peristalsis of an amoral universe. Maybe it’s what I deserve. For lying to Yinka and for a hundred bad things I did long before that. What I hate most is that I won’t even be dying as myself. I should have at least told Nat.
I squeeze my eyes shut, as if I can open up our private channel by force of will. Quini is muttering to himself in Andalusian Spanish, too fast for me to catch without my babelware. The whine of the saw intensifies.
Suddenly I understand what Quini’s saying. The steel wool in my head is gone. My implant comes unfrozen and I see the backdoor in my mind’s eye. The friend/foe mapper. I make the signal, the whistle, as loud as I possibly can.
Someone is screaming; maybe it’s me. The whine of the saw is a furious buzzing centimeters from my face. Hot liquid splatters my neck.
I open my eyes in time to see Quini sundered from hip to shoulder. The dog is up on its spindly carbon hind legs, saw spraying blood in all directions, tearing Quini’s flesh into pink ropes. It seems to go on for an eternity before the blade stutters to a halt on splintered bone. There’s a bang. Another. The dog drops to all fours. Quini sways.
“Mi cachorrito,” he says, not unfondly, then falls backward into the pool.
Nat yanks me to my feet. Her other hand is clutching Yinka. I look around, still lost, and see two dead guards, Anton reloading the scattergun. Quini is floating in the water, a red cloud billowing out around his shredded body.
“I don’t actually like Klobučar’s later stuff,” Anton says. “She got self-indulgent. I like money, though. And I liked your hackwork tonight. Very creative.” He produces an incubator pod from his jacket, identical to the one Quini smashed, but probably less empty. “I was stumped by that bioscanner.” He shakes his head, rolling his eyes, smiling a bit. “Stumped. Don’t forget your bags.”
Then he’s gone, off into the villa, scattergun propped on his shoulder. That leaves me and Nat and Yinka huddled together on the red-slicked tiles. Somehow none of us are dead. Yinka looks closest; he leans over and heaves.
“Can you walk?” Nat demands. “I’ve got your arm.”
Yinka heaves again, giving up a thin bubbly vomit and then something dark and solid that splats against the tile. He scrabbles for it with stiff fingers. We all stare.
Cupped in his shaking hand is a miniature human heart. Its beat is inaudible, but I can see it pumping and imagine the sound in my head. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Alive. Alive.
“Let’s dip,” Yinka rasps. “Before he figures out his pod is empty, too.”
I get Yinka under his undamaged arm and Nat grabs the refrigerated case. Then we all three stagger off into the olive trees, Quini’s gore-smeared cachorrito trotting along behind us.
* * *
When do you leave? I ask, but we’re talking in public, out on the beach by Pont del Petroli, so it comes out more like:
“Napta zuwani?”
“Napta imo yun,” Nat says: Tomorrow night. She toes a hole in the sun-heated sand. We’re sitting just out of reach of the tide’s soft gray pulse, watching runners move up and down the length of the bridge. Barge out of Shiptown, she adds with a tangle of clicks and plosives.
You see our Fleischgeist there? I ask.
Nat nods. Talked to him, even. Arm looks good. She pauses, turns her head to look at me. He never wants to see you again, though.
“Vensmur,” I say: Makes sense.
For a while we sit in silence. The tide pushes and pulls. Gulls wheel and shriek out over the waves. How about you? Nat finally asks. Where are you going?
Been looking at some clinics in Laos, I tell her. Been planning some changes.
Nat nods. I saw that. See that.
I finally did something with my hair, and I’m wearing one of those new prints from Mombasa. Makeup is hiding the worst bits of my face. It’s too bad I have to let it all heal up before I can have a more qualified surgeon mess with it.
So this is you, she says. Not just a fresh way to hide from the feds.
It’s me. And it’s sort of the opposite of hiding.
&nb
sp; Nat grabs my hand, and I release the breath I didn’t even realize I’d been bottling up. Good, she says. Good. You want a scan of my nose?
I blink. “M’mut?”
You want my nose, Nat laughs. You can admit it. Whenever we’re drunk, you say how perfect it is. She suddenly frowns. That shit will be expensive. The clinics. And the lying low. But you gave Yinka your whole share.
Yeah, I say. We made a deal back at the safe room.
Nat narrows her eyes. So it really was just revenge?
I take a heavy breath. He knew. Quini knew about me. He was a lot of things, but he was sharp. He saw it before I wanted anyone to see it. So when he beat me. When he called me a maricona. Laughed at me. It was personal. I chew the inside of my cheek, hit a suture and immediately regret it. I wanted him hurt, I mumble in nonsense. I don’t know about dead.
I wanted him hurt, too, Nat says, staring at the sea. Never thought about dead. But the world’s better off. Net total.
The silence swells until I can’t take it anymore. That was her heart, you know, I finally say. What we stole? It was grown using her cells. She had the whole thing automated. For after she killed herself. I looked it up. It’s the last Klobučar.
Nat raises her immaculate eyebrows. No wonder me and Yinka are so rich now.
Don’t rub it in, I say in one nasal syllable.
She wanted to live forever, maybe, Nat says. With people fighting over her heart. Buying it and selling it and killing for it.
Maybe she wanted us not to, I say. But knew we would anyways, so she did it on her own terms.
Nat stands up, brushing the sand off her pants. Fucking artists, she says. You hungry?
I could eat, I say. Good pintxos around the corner. Good curry a block down.
“Unta da unta,” she says: Both.
We’ve got time. At least a bit of it. And hopefully after a year of lying low, we both end up back in Barcelona. There’s lots more shit I want to do here as myself.
About the Author
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Grande Prairie, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Rich Larson
Art copyright © 2020 by John Anthony Di Giovanni