Tails You Lose

by Lisa Smedman

  "Japanese," Night Owl corrected him. "And a hundred other races. I'm a walking DNA cocktail. According to my father, I've got a little bit of everything in my genetic makeup—even Native. I probably could have claimed citizenship, if I'd wanted to."

  The flames on Hothead's scalp rose a centimeter. He pulled his chair back up to the table. "Does your father have citizenship?" Behind his contact lenses, his eyes gleamed with curiosity. His commodity was information—the tidbit Night Owl had just supplied to him had captured his attention like a shiny silver coin tossed before a crow.

  Night Owl leaned back in her chair. Hothead had just stepped over the line that separated fixer and runner, but she didn't care. She had his attention again. Deliberately, she tossed him another tidbit. She was feeling reckless tonight and was curious to see how smart the fixer really was. Would he be able to follow the datatrail and figure out who she was?

  "My father's dead," she answered. "He suicided—hung himself with a monofilament. It took his head clean off when he jumped off the chair."

  Hothead swallowed and tucked in his chin. "Why?"

  "The corporation he worked for screwed him over. A project he was working on crashed and burned, and he was the one blamed for it."

  Night Owl saw Hothead looking down at the table and realized that she was holding a spoon in her hands. She'd bent the stainless steel nearly double without even realizing it. Carefully, she laid it back down on the table, beside the tray that held Hothead's empty 'kaf cup and glass of water.

  A waitress came up to the table and asked if they'd like to eat. Night Owl ordered a 'kaf and some fries and garlic mayo.

  Hothead winked at the waitress and asked for a refill and a new spoon. "Don't make the 'kaf so strong next time," he joked. "It plays hell with my nerves." When the waitress left, his expression became serious. The flames on his scalp dimmed to a soft red glow, and his voice fell to a whisper.

  "The Red Lotus are looking for you."

  Night Owl glanced nervously around the restaurant. Red Lotus was one of Vancouver's most notorious street gangs, "younger brother" to a powerful triad based in the Republic of China. They dominated the city's heroin trade and were notorious for going overkill on anyone who crossed them. When the Red Lotus struck, bullets fell like hail and blood flowed like water.

  "What do they want with me?"

  "Well, since they can't get their boss's nuyen back, I guess they'll want your blood."

  Night Owl leaned forward, at the same time sliding her left hand back along the arm of her chair, bringing it closer to her pistol. "They don't know what I look like," she said slowly. "Unless someone has given them a description of me."

  Hothead carefully placed his hands, palms down, on the table. His eyes never left Night Owl's, even when her left hand started its slide under the back of her jacket.

  "They don't need a description," he said. "They have a vidpic of you. They got it out of Wharf Rat's eye."

  Night Owl blinked, then brought her hand back in front of her, resting it on the table again. "Frag—I didn't know his eye was cybered." She'd noticed that one eye was gold instead of the runner's natural brown, but she'd assumed it was a contact—like Hothead's dramatic red lenses.

  She'd also just been told that Wharf Rat was dead. Night Owl was suddenly sorry that she'd suspected Hothead. He was a friend—he was sitting here talking to her, when she was probably the last person in the world he wanted to be seen with right now.

  "Thanks, Hothead," she said. "I owe you one." Hothead smiled. "I know. Don't worry—I'll call the debt in someday."

  The waitress returned with two trays of 'kaf and water, balancing Night Owl's fries on the inside of one forearm. As she set them down on the table, Hothead glanced again at the door.

  Hothead drained his coffee in several quick swallows, then rose from the table. Without a word of farewell, he left Night Owl sitting with her fries and 'kaf and weaved his way between the crowded tables to the front of the restaurant. Night Owl watched him walk out into the night and tried to decide whether to finish her meal and go or hang tight in the restaurant. Either way, the gangers might find her.

  She decided to let fate choose for her. Digging her lucky SkyTrain token out of her pocket, she flipped it into the air. Heads she'd stay; tails she'd turn and run. Just as she caught it in midflight and slapped it down on the back of her right hand, however, something made her look up. The street kid she'd talked to earlier was coming in through the door. He was nervous and looking for someone; her. As soon as he saw Night Owl, he ran to the table where she sat, almost colliding with a waitress along the way.

  "Hey, lady, you'd better fly. There's some heavy people looking for you."

  Night Owl pushed back her chair and looked at the coin on the back of her hand. Tails. She shoved it into a pocket as she stood up. "Where? How many?"

  "Outside. Two men—Chinese, by the sound of 'em. They got out of a gray ragtop and crossed the street to your bike, and were scannin' it like they knew it. Then they looked up and down the street. They asked if I saw where the person riding the bike went, and I said I'd tell them for five nuyen. They liked that. I pointed them down the street, to the New Millennium

  Arcade. Stupid fraggers didn't even realize that you don't park a bike two blocks away from where you're going, especially in drekky weather like this."

  "I'm impressed," Night Owl said. She was already on her feet and moving to the front door. She had every reason to believe the kid—if he had tried to snag a few more nuyen by selling her out, she'd already be dead. So would most of the other poor fraggers in the restaurant. She tossed a small-denomination credstick at the waitress, telling her to keep the change, and peered out through the restaurant's front window. The kid pointed out the car—a turbocharged Saab Dynamit convertible that looked like it could crank some serious Ks. She didn't see anyone lingering near the sports car, and none of the people who were scurrying along the Drive under umbrellas looked like the gangers the kid had described.

  "Stay inside until I'm gone," Night Owl warned him. "I don't want you in my way."

  The kid grinned. He'd understood what she really meant.

  Night Owl pulled on her gauntlets and positioned the night-vision goggles on her forehead, ready for use. Then she pulled the door open and slid outside, moving low so the parked cars hid her. She swung up into the bike's leather seat, keyed in its ignition code, and rocked the Harley forward, taking it off its kick stand in one smooth motion. The engine's loud rumble filled the street, echoing like thunder off the buildings to either side.

  Just as she was wheeling away, Night Owl caught a glimpse of a running figure in her rear view mirror. He was young, Asian and armed—and looked pissed as hell. He ran out into the street, heedless of honking traffic, and leveled the Uzi he was holding. Its barrel flared red. Bullets punched into the parked cars behind Night Owl, shattering windows and exploding tires. Pedestrians on the sidewalk dived for cover.

  Night Owl wrenched the bike right and disappeared around the corner onto First Avenue. Thankfully the rain had eased up a little, although the streets were still slick. She twisted the throttle, and the Harley leaped forward, exhaust roaring. Steering with one hand, she pulled the night-vision goggles down over her eyes. The world shifted into greens and grays.

  She was weaving in and out of traffic when she heard the squeal of tires behind her. The bike's rear view mirror flashed her a glimpse of the Saab, hot on her trail. The ganger in the passenger seat was leaning out of his window, trying to line her up in the Uzi's sights, but there seemed to be too many cars in the way. He ducked back inside.

  She swung onto Knight Street, which offered a clear, straight run. She needed to lose those fraggers—but she wasn't going to do that in this part of the city, where the roads ran grid-straight. She needed a bolt hole, and she knew just where to find one. All she had to do was stay alive for the five minutes it would take her to reach it.

  Side streets and red lights flashed by,
and somehow both bike and Saab managed to miss clipping any of the cars that they rocketed past. Rain stung Night Owl's bare cheeks like ice-cold shotgun pellets, and her wet hair streamed out behind her. The water-repellent jeans she'd tucked into her Daytons fluttered like tarps in a hurricane, and her leather jacket pressed back against her chest. Wind roared in her ears.

  When she reached the southernmost end of Knight Street, she deked around a barrier onto the Knight Street Bridge. It had been condemned a year ago, after the Big One hit. This end of the bridge was intact, but the opposite side was a twisted skeleton, just waiting to collapse—a bridge to the ruin that had been the suburb of Richmond. A bridge to nowhere.

  Bullets spanged off a sagging light fixture beside the motorcycle as Night Owl flashed across the bridge. Even with her night-vision goggles, she had to rely on luck to find her way—rubble and holes flashed past so quickly that only her instinctive, last-second swerves got the Harley around them. At the last moment she spotted a gaping hole in the deck of the bridge that hadn't been there last week and deked around it in a tight swerve. Then she was below the crest of the bridge and zooming down the other side. In just a few seconds more, she'd be in the ruins.

  The Saab behind her was still accelerating; the driver must have managed to avoid the hole, too. As the car shot into view in her mirrors, Night Owl took the first offramp and blasted down onto what was left of Bridgeport Road.

  The road was intact for a few meters beyond the offramp, but then it became chaotic. Abandoned cars lay crumpled under the light fixtures that the earthquake had toppled on them, and long-dead electric wires snaked in tangles across the street. The road itself looked like a jigsaw puzzle that had been punched from below by a giant's fist: jagged pieces of asphalt reared up at odd angles, with weeds filling the gaps. On either side of the road were the dark shadows of ruined buildings. Some had collapsed into piles of rubble; others had tilted into the air like sinking ships when the earthquake liquefied the ground beneath their foundations. Only one in ten was still intact.

  Night Owl knew every centimeter of the ruined road by heart. This was one of her favorite bolt holes. Alternately revving and braking, she skittered her way across the largest and most level slabs of asphalt, leaping the bike from one to the next as if they were stepping stones.

  Behind her, she heard the twin thud of car tires hitting an obstruction, and then the screech of metal grating on concrete and an engine revving into the red. The Saab's engine stuttered into a rough idle, and then car doors slammed. For a moment, Night Owl thought she was clear. Then the Uzi roared. Bullets hissed through the night and ricocheted off debris all around her. One tore a crease across her front fender; another slammed into the seat, just behind her thigh.

  Night Owl skidded around a corner into the shadow of a ruined warehouse. She looped around the back of the property and entered what remained of the building through a motorcycle-sized hole in its rear wall. Braking to a stop, she cut the engine and slid off the bike, and then picked her way to the front wall of the warehouse to peek out through a rockworm hole.

  She nearly laughed at what she saw. The Saab was hung up on a twisted telecom pole several hundred meters back, rear wheels spinning in the air. It wasn't going anywhere. One ganger was standing on the broken roadway, Uzi in hand and eyes searching the night. He shouted something at the driver, but Night Owl was too far away to hear what he said. The driver shut the car down and climbed out of the vehicle. Both of them stood tense and silent, as if listening. The chase had suddenly turned into a game of cat and mouse—and neither one of the gangers knew where Night Owl was hiding. Behind her, the motorcycle made faint tic-tic-ticking noises as its engine slowly cooled.

  Night Owl was surprised they'd followed her this far. Even the hardest-hooped gangers balked at entering the Richmond Ruins. The suburb had been leveled by a quake a year ago and left to rot ever since. Rock-worms had made Swiss cheese of the concrete apartment blocks and office towers that still stood, making much of the terrain so unstable that the vibrations from someone walking along the sidewalks out front could tumble them. Devil rats had bloated themselves on the tens of thousands of people who had died when the quake leveled the 'burb, and now they roamed the ruins in swarms. But most fearsome of all were the ghosts of the dead. There were a lot of restless, angry spirits in Richmond—and none of them knew who it was, exactly, that they ought to be pissed at.

  Everyone agreed that the quake had been magical in origin—the silty ground under Richmond had been jackhammered up and down by what looked like an earthquake of more than nine on the Richter scale, but just across the river in Vancouver, the seismographs hadn't even twitched. Street buzz had it that a gang of secret Feng Shui masters had miscalculated the "straight-arrow" formed by the two-kilometer-long suborbital runway on neighboring Sea Island and accidentally triggered the quake. But nobody really knew for sure—and that was the scariest part of living in the Awakened world.

  Outside on the ruined street, the Red Lotus boys were having a shouted conversation. After a few minutes of cursing, they turned and jandered back in the direction of the Knight Street Bridge. They seemed to have given up the chase.

  Chuckling, Night Owl walked back to her bike. She was just swinging a leg up over the seat when someone kicked her other foot out from under her. She went down across the bike, and her weight overbalanced the heavy machine. The Harley slammed onto its side on the rubble-strewn floor, sending broken bits of concrete skittering. Night Owl twisted just in time to avoid getting tangled in it and landed face-up. She kicked against the floor, sending herself sliding backward, at the same time twisting and reaching behind her back for her Predator.

  Something heavy landed square on her chest, slamming her back onto the ground and trapping her left arm underneath her. She tried to shift the weight, but invisible arms locked around her torso, hugging her tight. A musky animal odor filled her nostrils, and she felt coarse hair pressing against her skin. Something magical was holding her, making it impossible to move. She heard a creak and felt a sharp pain under her breasts as the magical arms squeezed tighter. She couldn't tell if the sound had come from her leather jacket creaking or her ribs straining to the breaking point.

  A shape suddenly appeared in her night-vision goggles: a troll twice her size, with Asian features and two spiraling horns that angled out from his temples, giving his forehead the shape of a V. His long hair was gathered in a bun at the back of his head like that of an ancient Chinese warrior and was tied with a wide band of cloth that she guessed would have been red in daylight: the hallmark of the Red Lotus. A bear's claw pierced the lobe of each ear. The troll had dropped the invisibility and silence spells he'd used to sneak up on Night Owl, and now he rose to his feet, lifting his knee from her chest. One cartilage-crusted hand was balled in a fist; he held it over her. maintaining the magical spell that pinned her to the ground.

  "You're a dead woman," he said in Cantonese.

  "No . . . I'm not," Night Owl gasped. She knew better than to believe his threat. Entertainment trids to the contrary, gangers didn't make speeches before killing someone. They just greased them. "You . . . want something."

  She could feel her right eye twitching—an annoying quirk that cropped up whenever things got too close to the edge. She suddenly realized that there had been three gangers in the Saab—not two. The other two men had only pretended to leave. She could hear their footsteps outside even now, as they circled back toward the ruined warehouse—or maybe that was just the rain, starting up again.

  "You have angered Eldest Brother by cheating him," the troll said, eyes blazing. "You sold him property, then told the original owners where to find it again."

  "That . . . wasn't me . . . who told. Someone . . . else." It was the truth—she and Wharf Rat had probably been sold out by that joygirl Wharf Rat had been dossing down with this past month. Night Owl didn't expect the troll to believe it, however.

  "You agreed to the contract," the troll contin
ued in a grim voice. "You bore the ultimate responsibility." Night Owl pretended to be listening, but all the while she was testing her strength against the invisible arms that held her. She could rock back and forth slightly, although it felt as though the weight of a grizzly were on top of her. And she could still move her fingers. If she could just hook one of them around the Predator, she might be able to roll over and pull the trigger. With luck, she might hit the troll in the leg—if she didn't shoot her own hoop off first. As she strained her hand closer to the holster in the small of her back, she stalled for time.

  "I can pay . . . your boss back . . . twice what . . . he gave me," she lied. "There's twenty K on registered credsticks . . . back at—"

  The troll clenched his fist tightly, causing his bony knuckles to crack. Night Owl's vision swam with stars as the magical arms that were holding her squeezed the last of the air from her lungs. She fought to take a breath, but it was as if she were underwater, with no air to breathe. Dimly, over the pounding that filled her ears, she heard the troll's final pronouncement—and realized she'd been wrong about the trids. Sometimes real-life gangers liked to make speeches, too.

  "Your death will be a lesson that the other shadowrunners will remember."

  Night Owl's world dimmed to a dull red. Static filled her ears, and in her chest she could hear her heartbeat, so frenzied a moment ago, slow and falter. She was dying . . .

  A voice floated into what remained of her consciousness—a voice that sounded as ancient and wet as rotted silk tearing.

  That will be enough, Wu.

  The invisible bands of steel that had been tightening around Night Owl's chest were suddenly gone. Something cold dripped on her skin—rainwater leaking in through what remained of the roof? Eyelids fluttering, she took a ragged breath. Somehow, she forced herself to sit up. When her eyes could focus again, she nearly fainted.

  Looming over her, nearly filling the ruined warehouse, was an enormous eastern dragon. Its head alone was as large as a horse, and the sinuous neck that undulated behind it was as sleek as the body of a snake. Long, straggling whiskers hung from either side of its mouth, and multipointed horns jutted from above its eyebrows like broken twigs. One of its hands rested on Night Owl's overturned Harley, its fingers spread to reveal webbing between them. The nails on its fingers and thumb were nearly a meter long, as twisted and curved as peeled tree bark.