The woman strained to look around, panic clear in her eyes.
“Relax. The psionic kid isn’t here. She’s not even on Mars anymore.”
“W-what do you want?” Alys struggled to free her hands, muscles bulging in her arms. “I didn’t tell him shit. I said you were fuckin’ crazy and I ran away. Son of a bitch never said nothin’ ’bout you bein’ no tí-zhèn.”
Risa flicked her index finger, shaving thin slices from an empty instant ramen bowl on the carpet by the bed. “My interest in Lars changed. Where is he?”
The woman ceased struggling when she noticed the unconscious man. “You said you wouldn’t kill me…”
“How can someone with five―or is it six, kinda hard to tell from that pile up―sons threaten to kill a child?”
A nervous laugh escaped Alys. “If you had any, you’d understand how you’d be tempted to shoot one.”
“Guess we’re wired different.” Risa shredded the remainder of the bowl in one swipe.
“Hey!” Alys tried to squirm away. “Only one of the little buggers is mine. The rest’r his friends ’at never leave. Me an’ Zane don’t beat on ’em like their people, so they stay here. Doz might be an orphan.”
Risa sighed. “You don’t have to flog the sympathy bit. I didn’t come here to kill you. All I want to know is where you found Lars.”
“S’not dustblow.” Alys grumbled. “There’s all kinds of security systems and sensors and shit. Lars will see your tweaked ass coming.”
“Don’t be so sure.” Tamashī should be able to deal with that.
“He’s gonna kill me if I tell you anything.”
Risa got off the woman’s back and stood. “I sincerely doubt Lars will be doing anything after I’m done with him.”
Alys rolled on her side to look up at her. “You’re going to kill him.”
“Yeah.” She turned her hands palms up, and curled her fingers. “That’s probably the best way to deal with this.”
After a long stare, Alys broke eye contact. “You seem different somehow. Look, I know you can kill me before I can say ‘holy shit.’ Cut me loose, and I’ll tell you whatever I know.”
Risa leaned over and severed the binding with her pinky claw.
Alys pulled her arms around front and rubbed her wrists. “Mind if I put on a shirt?”
“Do it slow.” Risa glanced at the door. Hmm. Raziel’s not a real angel. Who do I pray to and ask that the kids stay asleep? It’s well past noon. What are they doing in bed now anyway?
After pulling on a ratty Mars-camo T-shirt, Alys got up from the floor and sat on the edge of the Comforgel pad. “He haunts this nightclub on the surface―Iniquity. It’s mostly full of emancipated.”
“Sounds lovely.” Risa frowned.
“I heard some rumors that he paid off the owner to let him like live there and stuff. Guy lurks in the back of the place like some kind of crime lord. I heard about that bounty he put out on you. Couldn’t resist. Got pointed at a chem dealer who sent me to a pimp, who―after I messed him up―sent me to some fixer name’a Hayato. He’s the one who told me to go to Iniquity and order a ‘purple fairy’ from the bartender.”
Risa rubbed her face. “Who the hell is this guy?”
“He looked like any other prong in a suit. He ain’t no Marsborn, that’s for sure.”
“If that’s a dead end, we’ll meet again.” Risa backed to the door.
Alys gazed down at the glowing red Comforgel pad and reached across her chest to scratch her arm. “It’s as much as I know. If he left…”
“Who’s this, Mom?” asked a small voice.
Risa glanced back at a thin black-haired boy somewhere between nine and twelve. Shoulder-length jet hair mushed all to one side from how he’d been sleeping. His dark-blue eyes reminded her of Kree. The boy blinked at the man face down on the floor, right arm bent back at an unnatural angle.
“She had a couple questions for me.” Alys pulled her hair out of her eyes. “Go back to bed for a few minutes.”
The boy stared at the man, looked at Risa, and laughed. He ran out, still laughing, and slammed a distant door. A muted “Zane got his ass kicked by this skinny chick” came through the wall.
Risa cracked a smile.
Alys looked away from an expression that had to come off as psychotic, given normal ears couldn’t have heard what the boy said. She kneaded her hands in her lap, eyeing the shotgun by the wall.
“Kid said something funny.” Risa faced the door out. “That all you got about Lars?”
“Yeah,” said Alys.
Something’s not right. Risa narrowed her eyes at the woman. “So why’d you grab Chaia?”
“Uhh. This is gonna sound like I’m feeding you dustblow, but…” Alys closed her eyes and leaned forward, face in her palm. “Lars said you had a thing about kids. You aborted some mission because some were in the way. He suggested I use that somehow.” She scowled. “I wish he’d warned me you were augged.”
Pressure surrounded Risa’s heart. How the hell could he know that? “If he told you that, you wouldn’t have taken the job.”
Alys sucked in a breath in her nose. “I found some muscle at Iniquity willing to split it three ways. We had no real idea where to find you. All we had was a cam-grab of you. We threw some creds at this fringer deck jockey one of ’em knew. Dude got into the cams. Couple days later, he buzzes me, says he got a ping. So we haul ass out there. Goin’ through this merch quad by the Silver Palm, and we see this kid alone, hiding in the corner.”
“Random opportunity?” Risa wasn’t sure what to make of the disoriented expression on Alys’s face.
“I… She looked right at me with those creepy eyes. Smiled, like I was her long-lost mother or something come to save her from the street. She walked right up to us, no fear at all, and asked if we were looking for ‘the purple-eyed lady.’ Next thing I know, it seemed like a great idea to grab this kid and drag her along as a hostage.” Alys hid her face in her hands and shivered. “Damn psios. One minute I think she’s adorable, the next I wanted to hurt her.”
“Damn…” Risa sighed. “Well, the three of you were planning on jumping me.”
“Maybe… but I was pretty close to chickening out,” said Alys. “The whole thing didn’t feel right. Then when that kid… all the worry evaporated. Creepy little thing even handed me the cord we tied her with.”
Risa pictured the wide grin on the girl with the too-blue eyes, unsure what to think of her now. “Chaia sees the future. She had to know I wasn’t going to kill you.” She told me to go for the men.
Alys stared into nowhere. “The kid led us to that alley. It went from not feeling right to being totally fucked. I don’t remember everything clear. Vak and Piston kept talking about having a little fun with you before we handed you over to Lars. Vak wanted to kill the kid too, you know… no witnesses. I felt like two different people. One screaming run the fuck away and the other all pissed off and fearless.”
“Maybe I don’t feel so guilty over killing those two.” Risa edged to the door.
After a minute of vacancy in her expression, Alys looked up. “That’s what’s different. You got new eyes.”
“Sorry about your boyfriend’s arm.”
“It’s hard to find a guy that ain’t an asshole down here.” Alys glanced at him. “Did you kill him?”
“No. Probably gave him a concussion.”
“We cool?”
“Yeah.” Risa walked out. “We cool.”
15
One Less Monkey
A clean, cool breeze blasted Risa’s hair off her shoulders when she emerged from the last leg of the stairwell leading to the surface. It hadn’t occurred to her how stagnant and metallic the air in the underground had been until she got a taste of surface fresh. Tamashī had agreed to help, and ran off somewhere in cyberspace doing the ‘ninja cat’ thing around the virtual recreation of Iniquity. She’d also hacked an order of OmniSoy and kids’ clothes into the TMC online store fo
r Alys. Hopefully, the bottle of headache pills would tell the woman who sent it.
‘Part 1: cut the balls off Lars’s surveillance system’ was underway. ‘Part 2: look inconspicuous’ was up.
She checked the local MarsNet in a large, curved wraparound ‘screen’ her headware pumped into her brain. It took less than a minute for her to find the nearest walk-in shop selling the sort of clothing that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd of mixed gangers. She summoned a PubTran car to her location, and hopped in. The store, ‘Nothing Matters,’ sat six miles away on the opposite side of the city.
The term ‘emancipated’ had once referred to a specific gang, which had disappeared long before she’d been born. They’d been the first gang large enough to attract the attention of the Defense Force, though their only real agenda had been anarchy. They considered themselves apart from society, beholden to no laws but their own. They were sort of like the MLF, if the MLF was real. Of course, the Emancipated didn’t try to liberate anyone but themselves.
These days, the word meant anyone affiliated with a street gang, from the ones who wanted nothing more than to sit around and get high all day to the vigilantes to the criminals to the psychotic murder machines. Risa sighed. I’m walking into a mess.
She hopped out as soon as the self-driving taxi opened. A silvery-grey building covered in ‘artistic’ swaths of barbed wire, bullet gouges, and graffiti looked open but deserted. Guess they’re still asleep. Lucky for me.
Dark cobalt-blue letters faded in and out over the door, a holographic rendition of the store’s name. Two mirrored panels opened at her approach, clearing the way for a wall of sound to smash into her. She cringed. The boosts in her ears dampened themselves, reducing the music to a tolerable level. Less than twenty seconds after she walked inside, her headware identified the net stream from whence the music originated, patched it into her hearing controller, and blanked it out of her awareness. As far as Risa was concerned, the only noise in the room came from her boots squeaking on the polished black tiles.
Ah, much better.
Shelves and stands packed the place full of gang couture. She spent only a few minutes hunting, not being picky, and grabbed a gauzy black skirt similar to Kree’s, which also happened to be flecked with black glitter. She’s going to lose her mind. Risa grinned. She snagged a hot-pink, midriff-baring, mesh tank top as well as a mini-jacket baggy enough to hide her laser pistols.
“Hey, what the hell are you doin’?” Across the store, a man shouted over the electro-slam she could no longer hear. “There’s a goddamned customer over there. Go help her.”
“Fuck off,” yelled a young-sounding female.
“You wanna get fired?”
After a short pause, the girl laughed. “Go ahead. This job sucks anyway. If you fire me, you lose access to this pussy.”
“Tia, your father isn’t paying me to be a babysitter. I’m paying you to supposedly work here. What’s he going to say when I tell him all you do is stand around?”
She scoffed. “What happened to ‘Nothing Matters?’ What do you think my dad will say when I tell him I’ve got your baby in me and I’m moving out?”
The man emitted a strange gargling noise.
Risa emerged from the tight-packed shelves. A thirty-something guy, tall, with deep-blue hair in a spherical poof stood near a girl that could’ve been anywhere from fourteen to nineteen. He had one fist pressed to his mouth, eyes closed as if meditating.
The black-lipsticked girl rested her elbows on a shelf behind the register area, her body draped in a casual backward lean, a dark ‘I win’ smile on her face. Another half-inch, and the entire store would see under a skirt so tight it made her hips look like polished volcanic glass. Half her hair was black, the other dark purple, and two shirts engulfed her insubstantial body: a baggy lime-green rag that hung off her right shoulder, a white half tee under it.
The man smiled at Risa and leaned closer to the girl. “At least ring her up. Do something to justify being here.”
“Fine.” Tia muttered and pushed off the shelf, sulking as she dragged herself up to the terminal. “Hey. Welcome to Nothing Matters and shit.” She grabbed the skirt, mumbling at a volume she thought the music would eat. “Oh, this is cute… if you’re six.” She scanned it and stuffed it in a thin plastic bag.
Risa ignored the jab, studying the black eyeliner on the girl’s face. The thought of using CamNano usually came with the unpleasant feelings associated with going out in public naked. Today, the nanobot-powered chameleon implant would be free of anxiety. Only invisibility required a lack of clothes. Risa changed her skin tone from Marsborn to pale-Caucasian, and darkened the area around her eyes in a complex fade from black through indigo to violet, inside the shape of painted stars.
“Whoa,” said the store manager, mesmerized by the change.
Tia grabbed the jacket, fluffed it out, and scanned it while yelling, “Okay, this is cute. Plenty of room for extra e-mags too.”
Blinding hot pink spread along the length of Risa’s hair, welling up out of the roots and racing down to where the tips hung a few inches from her belt. The skin tone effect reached her hands, as if color oozed out of her sleeves and wrapped over her fingers. She felt like a stranger in her own skin.
Tia looked up with a forced smile; her expression faded to shock for an instant, and she screamed. “Holy shit! Don’t do that!”
Risa plucked two Hello Kitty hair ties, hard plastic cat faces about an inch across, off a small rack by the terminal and added them to the pile. “Sorry. I’m in a hurry. Mind if I put this stuff on now?”
“I’d go into the back. You might wind up with a dick in a place you don’t want it to be.” Tia nodded at the guy to her left.
Risa looked at the man, who raised his hands in a ‘this chick is crazy’ gesture, and shook his head to the negative. This stuff is made to hide under clothing… I’m not going in there unarmored. She stepped into the skirt, pulling it up over the ballistic suit. The pink shirt came next followed by the jacket. Between the gauzy skirt, top, and boots, her armor looked like leggings. Last, she put her hair up in pigtails.
“Ugh,” said the clerk. “Where’d you learn how to do pigtails… you uhh, are trying to do pigtails right? You kinda suck at it.”
Risa raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”
“One’s almost on the top of your head, the other looks like it’s sticking out of your ear. They’re not even the same length or thickness.” Tia let off a noise part sigh and part exasperated yell, and darted out from behind the counter. Risa tensed at someone moving up behind her so fast, but kept herself still as the teen redid her hair into two neat pigtails. She even tied bows in the red-black ribbons on the hair ties. After securing the second one, she grabbed Risa’s arms and spun her around. “Oh, that’s so surface! Is that makeup or a tat job around your eyes? Like… all the colors.”
“Makeup.” Risa glanced at the manager. Nah… she’s just busting his balls.
From the relative safety of a dark maintenance passage between two residential towers, Risa observed the front of Iniquity. Strong spotlights bathed the place in an otherworldly crimson glow. Both bouncers by the entrance had cosmetic cyberware comprising devil horns, yellow eyes, and black teeth. The larger of the two musclebound oafs had even gone for the skin color shift to demon-red. At a touch past two in the afternoon, a crowd of forty-odd disaffected youths lurked in a mass out front. Most openly partook of various chems: inhalers, derm patches, pills, or synthetic alcohol.
A cough from behind startled her, though she held back any outward reaction other than a casual glance to the rear. Not quite thirty meters away, a teen girl sat up out of the trash. Naked, save for a thick, black choker, she gazed around as if confused by the presence of narrow pipes running along both walls in the narrow alley. A strip of fluorescent green hair sat atop her head, the sides shaved, and hung midway down her back.
“Ugh, not again.” She rolled onto her hands and knees, grabbed one
of the wire conduits, and pulled herself upright. The aftereffects of sex dribbled down her leg, and she spent a few seconds wiping herself. “I can’t believe those assholes just left me here again.”
Risa turned her attention back to the club. Too many people in the front. She watched for a few minutes, paying little attention to the echo of rustling. Somewhere within the red building, she hoped to find Lars Staanek. You’ve been a flea on my ass for months. I don’t get why you’re only trying to be annoying… but you crossed a goddamn line trying to kill Gen. She sighed. Another alley, wider than this maintenance conduit, on the left side of Iniquity offered the possibility of either a back door or a better way in.
“Fuck!” yelled the girl. “They swiped my shit too.” She growled.
Again, Risa looked to the rear. The teen had either recovered or scavenged clothes: a dark-blue bra, shiny leggings the same color, a black miniskirt, and heavy-duty combat boots similar to Risa’s. She shook a tiny purse as if the only reason drugs hadn’t fallen out of the empty bag was that she hadn’t thrashed it hard enough.
The girl made a sour face. “He’s a piece of shit.”
Risa walked out into the open, adopting the erratic sway of someone high on Zoom. She widened her eyes and stared into space, pretending to see hallucinations. Every so often, she waved her arms about as if for balance or tried to grab things that weren’t there. A Zoom high would have one of two effects on the average gang thug: either they’d stay well away from her, due to the tendency users had to swing in an instant from placid to violent, or they’d try to take advantage of a helpless girl.
She hoped for option one. The less of a scene she caused on the way in, the better.
Tamashī called in to her headware, which created a life-sized bust floating in space. Her avatar resembled a ten-year-old girl in a ninja costume, with cat ears, claws, and a tail. Well, that should help with my act. 「Hey. I’m in.」
「That’s adorable,」 said Risa over the mental comm link.
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