A girl can never have too many knives.
Even gaining retractable claws, themselves as sharp as knives, hasn’t broken me of the habit of surrounding myself with edged weapons.
Before I gather up my books to head to the library, I take one of the smallest cooking knives and slip it down into the lining of my regulation boots.
I heave a silent sigh of relief.
For the first time since I left my hotel room on Pinao to catch the jetter to the Complex, I feel completely dressed.
I walk the housing corridors toward Main City until I get to a port to catch a glyder. Luckily, most of the inhabitants of the Complex are still heading away from the center of the domes, toward the homes they’ll live in for two years.
Presumably, anyway. I actually expect the jostling for more—better housing, more S-Co, more and better food—to begin almost immediately. I’ve never seen any city where people, Meta or Human, didn’t strive to improve their lives.
Even if it meant shoving their fellow citizens down a few rungs on the ladder.
On the heels of that thought, I wonder where Shaitan will be staying. He claimed he’d be here even though he didn’t have an official invitation. I’m pretty sure he sold me the one he’d been planning to use. He’s a typical demon—willing to sell his soul, if he had one.
Or someone else’s, if he can manage it.
I’m certain he’ll have found a way to get here, even though I’m not sure why he’d choose to enter the Complex without the financial incentive that’s drawn in everyone else.
Not my problem.
The glyder takes me to the Uni Library. Shaitan chose the librarian position for me, but it’s a good fit. Mostly it’s an information job—the bulk of the catalog is already uploaded to the Complex system’s computers, so my work will often involve helping people troubleshoot the system. I could probably do the job from my apartment, but there are just enough donated items to warrant a Uni storefront space in Main City.
I hold my right palm up to the sensor on the door, shivering at how easily it opens for me. The level of tracking that suggests is horrifying.
Lexi Maina will cheerfully wear the implanted device.
But at the first sign of trouble, Drina Movo will slice the thing out with her own newly obtained claws.
Before I duck inside, I glance around at the Uni businesses lining this part of the center dome area, most still unoccupied while their registered owners are processed into the facility.
Several doors down, I see the kitsune family I’d waved on in line, working to get ready to open a noodle restaurant of some sort, if the sign is right. That’s what I’m guessing from the name, anyway: Uni Versal Noodle.
Humans do love their puns.
I’m betting it’ll be a hit with them, at least.
Actually, noodles sound good.
They’ll probably be a hit with me.
I nod at the mother and her brood of children, and she returns the silent greeting.
Inside, the library is dark and cool, smelling of old paper and new electronics. It’s a soothing smell.
Opening up my reader, I log into my work account and tag the books I brought in as too rare to be checked out.
There. That should keep my hidden weapons easily available.
And then I settle into surviving my time in the Complex.
Better than prison, I remind myself. Or death. This way my entire identity gets laundered.
Two years, and I’m free and rich.
Chapter 3
By the end of my first six months in the Complex, I’ve settled into a routine. I resisted at first. Routine makes you easier to track.
But in here, it’s hard not to fall into a schedule. I spend most of my days in the library, answering questions about entertainment and education. I’ve been approached by the schools to offer information-tech seminars. The idea of performing for children makes my skin crawl, but as Lexi, I’m obligated to accept.
During my time off, I explore the Complex. It’s huge—miles and miles of space for the Humans and Metas to interact, though thus far that interaction has been fraught.
Still, we have space within this odd social experiment. Farmland and waterways. Multiple levels of housing. Businesses. Services.
Sometimes at night, I go for a run after shifting into my new leopard form, so different from my old wolf one.
Sometimes I wish I hadn’t given up the old one entirely. I miss howling at the moon.
I miss the moon.
But not often.
Mostly I worry that I don’t miss my old life enough—that I’m becoming Lexi a little too easily.
I need to remember that being complacent got me here in the first place.
Complacency leads to desperation.
Drina’s learned that lesson. I need to make sure Lexi remembers it.
When Shaitan convinced me to join the Complex, I’d been desperate.
My instinct about the bounty hunter on my ass had been entirely correct: he wasn’t going to give up until he caught me.
I’d gone to ground, hiding out for several days after the rooftop incident, calling in favors from both my old contacts and my father’s, even though no one had seen him recently. Rumor had it he’d been captured on one of the Human planets and tortured for information about his clients.
I was sure he was dead, though I didn’t expect to ever have confirmation.
Anyway, his contacts on Pinao seemed to be working for me. They helped me move from location to location and had plans to get me out of the capital city and on an off-planet transport entirely.
That’s what I’d been told, anyway. Tarvino, leader of one of the local gangs, woke me early the morning of what was meant to be my last day on Pinao. “Get up, Drina. Time to hit the road.”
His face was badly scarred, the result of weapons-fire he’d managed to survive—either in the war or since—and only one side of his mouth moved.
“Already? I thought we weren’t leaving until midday.”
“Change in plans.” He turned to leave. “Five minutes.”
I pulled on my clothes and shoes, leaving the cot unmade behind me.
“The hover-truck is in the garage.” His voice was more terse than usual, but I chalked it up to the early hour.
I’ve always been too trusting.
The cargo area was musty, smelling of some sort of vegetable and earth, and Tarvino gestured to a crate. With a sigh, I crawled in and let him secure the lid.
I was ready to be smuggled out of the city and off the planet.
The hover-truck only traveled for about twenty minutes, though.
And when the lid opened again, the bounty hunter was staring down at me.
“Well, hello, little wolf,” he said, a vulpine smile splitting his face, despite his Humanity.
He dragged me out of the crate, Tarvino’s guys having disappeared entirely.
Cowards.
I’d internalized Nema’s lessons, though. As he used those bulgy muscles to lift my feet up high enough to clear the lip of the box—seriously, what kind of Human has that kind of upper-body strength?—I let myself go totally limp.
But only after I’d pulled a couple of my knives out of my boots.
He had to have done some research on me, right? I mean his ability to chase me down so effectively not just once, but twice, suggested he had some idea of who I was.
And yet he didn’t seem to consider the possibility that I’d resist.
He certainly didn’t expect the knife I slashed across his shoulder and up along his face while his hands were busy.
The knife was extra-sharp, so the blood didn’t well up immediately—instead, the flesh parted and gaped open, as if shocked that it could be under attack at all.
The man’s reaction wasn’t much faster, though that might have been my own perception of time slowing down.
As the pain lanced his cheek, his grip loosened for the barest hint of a moment.
T
hat was all I needed.
Even as I finished the cut, I was dropping the knife and pulling all my limbs in toward my center. As his hands twitched toward his face, I kicked forward, using his stomach as a launching platform.
From his perspective, it probably looked as if I’d exploded into motion. I used the movement to shift into my lupine form. I wasn’t big as a wolf, but I was fast.
Faster than the Human who was chasing me, anyway.
By the time I hit the ground, I was in motion, skittering under an industrial-sized trash receptacle blocking an alleyway and out the other side.
He never had a chance of catching up.
The city flashed by in a kaleidoscope of sights and smells as I ran for all I was worth, cutting across streets and under parked vehicles. I moved erratically, without any purpose but to lose the bounty hunter.
To go up, I’d have to shift back to my bipedal form.
So I went down.
When I finally came to a stop, my sides heaving and my tongue lolling out as I worked to catch my breath, I was deep underground—literally. The Metas’ main cities had been built on top of the original Human ones. During the wars, we had won the planet, but we still used the original infrastructure as much as possible.
Unlike the newer cities, this one had not been planned. The original sewer system had built up organically, as its maze-like tunnels suggested.
I didn’t have to know where I was.
I just had to be able to follow my own scent back out—assuming I could find it under the stink of all this waste.
But follow it back out where?
I sank to my haunches, considering my options as my breathing finally slowed.
I’d used up all my contacts.
Except one.
The one I’d been trying to avoid all this time.
Shaitan.
I’ve relaxed into my new role so much that I have lunch at the noodle restaurant almost every day. It’s foolish—I know it is—but I rationalize it with the thought that not having a routine would be as out of character for Lexi as having one is for Drina.
“How you doing today, Lexi?” Serena asks as she nods toward an open table for me. Her mother is the primary driving force behind Uni Versal Noodle, her younger siblings—all too young to officially work in the Complex, but expected to “pitch in” anyway—help keep it running. Serena helps make sure it runs smoothly.
I’d like to make friends with her. She’s younger than me by a few years, but she and Lexi would have common interests.
And so I let my guard down.
“I’m good,” I say, sliding into a chair and holding out my palm for her to scan. “You?”
“Same old,” she says with a grin as two of her many siblings stampede through the dining room.
“Slower,” she warns them.
“Yes, Sissy,” they chorus.
She shakes her head and turns back to me. “Your usual?”
“Please.”
I’ve never had a ‘usual’ before.
She’s double-checking my order on her mini-tab reader when another of the little ones comes and tugs on her apron. “Uh, Sissy? There’s a vampire sitting at table four.”
I wave her off with a smile and she goes to deal with the potential problem.
I almost like being a citizen.
Almost.
I definitely like to come in here and watch the kitsune family interactions. All I ever had were my father and Nema, and they were more interested in creating a thief than raising a child.
Anyway, Nema wasn’t really family—just my father’s mentor. She stuck around to help with me because she was getting too old to take on heists herself.
They needed someone small and nimble. Lucky for them, they had me.
Wolves are supposed to have packs—or so I’ve heard.
The fact that we didn’t have one stopped bothering me after a while. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
Here I don’t have a pack, either. But I can imagine joining one for the first time in my life.
The irony of that?
I’m no longer a wolf.
Because of Shaitan’s activated curse, I’m a leopard shifter, through and through.
And leopards don’t have packs.
So I watch.
At least I like the spots.
After lunch, I take a stroll around our section of the Uni businesses—the promenade, as it’s called by Cordri, the nymph who owns the dress shop two doors down from the library. Cordri’s got a way with words, and I’ve discovered most of the shops’ owners and employees have picked up her slang.
I’m about three-quarters of the way around the promenade when the skin on the back of my neck prickles, not even with awareness, but with some precursor to it.
I stop at the stationery store and move around a display of old-fashioned writing utensils. Within the Complex, letter-writing has apparently become all the rage among the younger Humans and Metas.
But I’m not actually interested in the colorful pens—even though anyone watching would see nothing but a dark-haired, dark-spotted woman, head bent to examine a potential purchase.
Really, I’m scanning the promenade with all my senses.
Nothing yet.
Slowly, I make my way back around, sticking close to the brushed-metal walls rather than cutting across the open middle ground.
The non-retail lunch crowds thinned out about an hour ago. Most of the second wave of food-seekers, made up primarily retail employees, is beginning to disperse, too, but the space is still crowded for the afternoon of a workday.
And then I see him, almost directly across from me.
Talking to Cordri.
The breadth of his shoulders—too muscular to be average—sets off warning bells in my head.
I slow, ducking behind a display of fresh flowers and pretending to examine them. I murmur a meaningless response to the owner’s greeting, but my attention is fixed on the man, even when my eyes are not.
When Cordri points to the left, toward the library, the man turns his head and I catch a glimpse of his face. A jagged scar cuts from temple to chin.
I was right.
The bounty hunter is here, in the Complex.
Somehow, he’s tracked me.
And now I’m trapped inside with him.
I thank the flower vendor and turn to walk away from Cordri and the hunter.
Away from the library.
Away from the life I was beginning to love.
I’ve got to find Shaitan.
Again.
Dammit.
Chapter 4
I meant to track down the demon ever since I was processed into the Complex. But somehow, I never quite got around to it.
No. That’s not true.
I didn’t want to get around to it.
I haven’t made any underworld connections here, haven’t done anything that might jeopardize my identity as Lexi Maina.
One thought keeps echoing through my mind: I like my life here.
And now I’m in danger of having it taken away.
I know what they do to people who commit crimes inside the Complex—they’re sent away to stand trial on their home planets.
But what do they do to people who were criminals first and then entered the Complex?
I don’t want to find out.
I want to stay here.
So I head the one direction I’m certain Shaitan will have gone, if he really did make it into the Complex like he said he would.
Down.
The last time we’d met, back on Pinao six months ago when I went to Shaitan for help, he had looked like a king surveying his domain. Even the chair he sat upon looked like a throne, raised up on a platform overlooking a space that might have once been home to subway tracks. Petitioners gathered in the well below the demon king’s raised dais.
Granted, it was a shabby kind of throne room, with torches sending up smoke along with a reddish light, but generally, demon
s preferred subterranean spaces.
Rumor had it that even on the giant spaceships we’d used as we traveled through the stars—before we’d happened upon this system and its Human inhabitants—demons had gravitated toward the lower decks, as if spaceships’ levels were analogous to old ideas about heaven and hell.
This was the first time I’d shown up to see Shaitan without my father. When I’d come with him, we’d walked in together in our humanoid forms. This time, though, I trotted into the demon’s underground domain still in my lupine form.
From his throne, Shaitan watched me with interest, his head tilted to one side as he drew in my scent. I don’t know how well most demons can smell, but he recognized me almost instantly. Many Metas aren’t able to tell who I am when I’m in a shape they haven’t smelled before.
“Let her approach,” Shaitan said to the guards who stepped out in front of me, stomping their spears’ butts on the ground in order to stop me. “I’d like to hear what she has to say. Drina, is it not?”
I nodded.
“Your father doesn’t seem to be with you?” He waited long enough for me to respond with a shake of my head. “I’ll have my men show you just somewhere to change, so we can speak.”
His voice was affable enough, a little curious. I wouldn’t say that he and my father had been friends, not exactly, but Shaitan and Jozef Movo found each other mutually useful. Shaitan always wanted to keep his hand in whatever was going on in the criminal underbelly of the planet, and my father found Shaitan’s curses useful in many of his jobs.
No doubt Shaitan expected me to follow in my father’s footsteps.
I guess I wasn’t the only shifter who showed up here without clothing. One of Shaitan’s men had shown me to a small changing room with a cabinet where simple robes were folded and stacked high. It was a polite gesture on the demon lord’s part, one that I certainly appreciated.
But it wasn’t entirely necessary people who were desperate enough to trade with demons were probably desperate enough to stand there naked as they did so. In fact, I think that might have made the deals go easier for Shaitan himself then again, maybe he preferred having his supplicants indebted to him before they even start speaking.
Demon's Bounty (The Complex Book 0) Page 2