The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

“I can turn off the clamp and unlock the van, but I need you to help me in exchange,” the voice said. “I’m in apartment 401, sitting in an orthochair, deep sliced. There are three men in the room. The one you cut up, the one who Tasered you, and one more. They’ve still got the Tasers, and the last one has a handgun in an Adidas bag. I don’t know where your gun is.”

  Finch felt the clamp fall away and went limp all over. His muscles ached deep like he’d done four hours in the weight room on methamphetamine—a bad idea, he knew from experience. He reached to massage his shoulder with one trembling hand.

  “Grimes told me a non-duress passcode to give you,” the voice continued. “So you’d know to trust me. It’s Atticus.”

  Finch had almost forgotten that passcode. He’d wikied to find out why it made Mr. Grimes smirk but lost interest halfway through a text on Roman emperors.

  “You have to hurry. They might kill me soon.”

  Hurrying did not sound like something Finch could do. He took three tries to push himself upright on gelatin arms. “Is Mr. Grimes safe?” he asked thickly, tongue sore and swollen from him biting it.

  “He’s on a leisurely drive to a waiting ferry. He’ll be just fine. If you help me.”

  Finch crawled forward, taking a moment to drive one kneecap into the inactive clamp for a satisfying crunch, then hoisted himself between the two front seats and palmed the glove compartment. His Mulcher was waiting inside, still assembled, still loaded. He was dealing with some real fucking amateurs. The handgun molded to his grip, licking his thumb for DNA confirmation like a friendly cat. He was so glad to find it intact he nearly licked it back.

  “Please. Hurry.”

  “Apartment 401, three targets, one incapacitated, three weapons, one lethal,” Finch recited. He tested his wobbling legs as the van door slid open. Crossing the dusty floor of the parkade looked like crossing the Gobi desert.

  “One other thing. You’ll have to take the stairs. Elevator’s out.”

  Finch was hardly even surprised. He stuck the Mulcher in his waistband and started to hobble.

  HALF THE CITY away, Severyn wished, for the first time, that he’d had his cars equipped with seatbelts instead of only impact foam. Trying to stay seated while the limousine slewed corners and caromed down alleyways was impossible. He was thrown from one side to the other with every jolting turn. His kidnapper had finally cleared the windows and he saw, in familiar flashes, grimy red Southside brick and corrugated steel. The decades hadn’t changed it much, except now the blue-green blooms of graffiti were animated.

  “Pier’s just up ahead. I told my guy there’s been a change of plans.” Girasol’s voice was strained to breaking. Too many places at once, Severyn suspected.

  “How long before the ones you’re with know what’s going on?” he asked, bracing himself against the back window to peer at their pursuers. One Priest was driving manually, and wildly. He was hunched over the steering wheel, trying to conflate what he’d learned in virtual racing sims with reality. His partner in the passenger’s seat was hanging out the window with some sort of recoilless rifle, trying to aim.

  “A few minutes, max.”

  A dull crack spiderwebbed the glass a micrometer from Severyn’s left eyeball. He snapped his head back as a full barrage followed, smashing like a hailstorm into the reinforced window.

  By the time they burst from the final alley, aligned for a dead sprint toward the hazard-sign-decorated pier, the limousine’s rear was riddled with bullet holes. Up ahead, Severyn could make out the shape of a hydrofoil sliding out into the oil-slick water. The technician had lost his nerve.

  “He’s pulling away,” Severyn snapped, ducking instinctively as another round raked across the back of the car with a sound of crunching metal.

  “Told him to. You’re going to have to swim for it.”

  Severyn’s stomach churned. “I don’t swim.”

  “You don’t swim? You were All-State.”

  “Blake was.” Severyn pried off his Armani loafers, peeled off his jacket, as the limousine rattled over the metal crosshatch of the pier. “I never learned.”

  “Just trust the muscle memory.” Girasol’s voice was taut and pleading. “He knows what to do. Just let him. Let his body.”

  They skidded to a halt at the lip of the pier. Severyn put his hand on the door and found it blinking blue, unlocked at last.

  “If you can tell him things.” She sounded ragged now. Exhausted. “Tell him I love him. If you can.”

  Severyn considered lying for a moment. A final push to solidify his position. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said instead, and hauled the door open as the Priests screeched to a stop behind him. He vaulted out of the limo, assaulted by unconditioned air, night wind, the smell of brine and oiled machinery.

  Severyn sucked his lungs full and ran full-bore, feeling a hurricane of adrenaline that no puppet show or whorehouse could have coaxed from his glands. His bare feet pounded the cold pier, shouts came from behind him, and then he hurled himself into the grimy water. An ancient panic shot through him as ice flooded his ears, his eyes, his nose. He felt his muscles seize. He remembered, in a swath of old memory code, that he’d nearly drowned in Lake Michigan once.

  Then nerve pathways that he’d never carved for himself fired, and he found himself cutting up to the surface. His head broke the water; he twisted and saw the gaggle of Priests at the edge of the water, Fawkes masks grinning at him even as they cursed and reloaded the rifle. Severyn grinned back, then pulled away with muscles moving in perfect synch, cupped hands biting the water with every stroke.

  The slap of his body on the icy surface, the tug of his breath, the water in his ears—alive, alive, alive. The whine of a bullet never came. Severyn slopped over the side of the hydrofoil a moment later. Spread-eagled on the slick deck, chest working like a bellows, he started to laugh.

  “That was some dramatic shit,” came a voice from above him.

  Severyn squinted up and saw the technician, a twitchy-looking man with gray whiskers and extra neural ports in his shaved skull. There was a tranq gun in his hand.

  “There’s been a change of plans,” Severyn coughed. “Regarding the extraction.”

  The technician nodded, leveling the tranq. “Girasol told me you’d say that. Said you’re a world-class bullshit artist. I’d expect no less from Severyn fucking Grimes.”

  Severyn’s mouth fished open and shut. Then he started to laugh again, a long gurgling laugh, until the tranq stamped through his wet skin and sent him to sleep.

  GIRASOL SAW HOT white sparks when they ripped her out of the orthochair and realized it was sheer luck they hadn’t shut off her brain stem. You didn’t tear someone out of a deep slice. Not after two hits of high-grade Dozr. She hoped, dimly, that she wasn’t going to go blind in a few days’ time.

  “You bitch.” Pierce’s breath was scalding her face. He must have taken off his mask. “You bitch. Why? Why would you do that?”

  Girasol found it hard to piece the words together. She was still out of body, still imagining a swerving limousine and marauding cell signals and electric sheets of code. Her hand blurred into view, and she saw her veins were taut and navy blue.

  She’d stretched herself thinner than she’d ever done before, but she hadn’t managed to stop the skype from the end of the pier. And now Pierce knew what had happened.

  “Why did you help him get away?”

  The question came with a knee pushed into her chest, under her ribs. Girasol thought she felt her lungs collapse in on themselves. Her head was coming clear.

  She’d been a god only moments ago, gliding through circuitry and sound waves, but now she was small, and drained, and crushed against the stained linoleum flooring.

  “I’m going to cut your eyeballs out,” Pierce was deciding. “I’m going to do them slow. You traitor. You puppet.”

  Girasol remembered her last flash from the limousine’s external cams: Blake diving into the dirty harbor with perfec
t form, even if Grimes didn’t know it. She was sure he’d make it to the hydrofoil. It was barely a hundred meters. She held onto the novocaine thought as Pierce’s knife snicked and locked.

  “What did he promise you? Money?”

  “Fuck off,” Girasol choked.

  Pierce was straddling her now, the weight of him bruising her pelvis. She felt his hands scrabbling at her zipper. The knife tracing along her thigh. She tamped down her terror.

  “Oh,” she said. “You want that kiss now?”

  His backhand smashed across her face, and she tasted copper. Girasol closed her eyes tight. She thought of the hydrofoil slicing through the bay. The technician leaning over Blake’s prone body with his instruments, pulling the parasite up and away, reawakening a brain two years dormant. She’d left him messages. Hundreds of them. Just in case.

  “Did he promise to fuck you?” Pierce snarled, finally sliding her pants down her bony hips. “Was that it?”

  The door chimed. Pierce froze, and in her peripheral Girasol could see the other Priests’ heads turning toward the entryway. Nobody ever used the chime. Girasol wondered how Grimes’s bodyguard could possibly be so stupid, then noticed that a neat row of splintery holes had appeared all across the breadth of the door.

  Pierce put his hand up to his head, where a bullet had clipped the top of his scalp, carving a furrow of matted hair and stringy flesh. It came away bright red. He stared down at Girasol, angry, confused, and the next slug blew his skull open like a shattering vase.

  Girasol watched numbly as the bodyguard let himself inside. His fiery hair was slick with sweat and his face was drawn pale, but he moved around the room with practiced efficiency, putting two more bullets into each of the injured Priests before collapsing to the floor himself. He tucked his hands under his head and exhaled.

  “One hundred and twelve,” he said. “I counted.”

  Girasol wriggled out from under Pierce and vomited. Wiped her mouth. “Repairman’s in tomorrow.” She stared down at the intact side of Pierce’s face.

  “Where’s Mr. Grimes?”

  “Nearly docking by now. But he’s not in a body.” Girasol pushed damp hair out of her face. “He’s been extracted. His storage cone is safe. Sealed. That was our deal.”

  The bodyguard was studying her intently, red brows knitted. “Let’s get going, then.” He picked his handgun up off the floor. “Gray eyes,” he remarked. “Those contacts?”

  “Yeah,” Girasol said. “Contacts.” She leaned over to give Pierce a bloody peck on the cheek, then got shakily to her feet and led the way out the door.

  SEVERYN GRIMES WOKE up feeling rested. His last memory was laughing on the deck of a getaway boat, but the soft cocoon of sheets made him suspect he’d since been moved. Something else had changed, too. His proprioception was sending an avalanche of small error reports. Limbs no longer the correct length. New body proportions. By the feel of it, he was in something artificial.

  “Mr. Grimes?”

  “Finch.” Severyn tried to grimace at the tinny sound of his voice, but the facial myomers were relatively fixed. “The mise á jour, please.”

  Finch’s craggy features loomed above him, blank and professional as ever. “Girasol Fletcher had you extracted from her son’s body. After we met her technician, I transported your storage cone here to Lumen Technohospital for diagnostics. Your personality and memories came through completely intact and they stowed you in an interim avatar to speak with your lawyers. Of which there’s a horde, sir. Waiting in the lobby.”

  “Police involvement?” Severyn asked, trying for a lower register.

  “There are a few Priests in custody, sir,” Finch said. “Girasol Fletcher and her son are long gone. CPD requested access to the enzyme trackers in Blake’s body. It looks like she hasn’t found a way to shut them off yet. Could triangulate and maybe find them if it happens in the next few hours.”

  Severyn blinked, and his eyelashes scraped his cheeks. He tried to frown. “What the fuck am I wearing, Finch?”

  “The order was put in for a standard male android.” Finch shrugged. “But there was an electronic error.”

  “Pleasure doll?” Severyn guessed. Electronic error seemed unlikely.

  His bodyguard nodded stonily. “You can be uploaded in a fresh volunteer within twenty-four hours,” he said. “They’ve done up a list of candidates. I can link it.”

  Severyn shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I think I want something clone-grown. See my own face in the mirror again.”

  “And the trackers?”

  Severyn thought of Blake and Girasol tearing across the map, heading somewhere sun-drenched where their money could stretch and their faces couldn’t be plucked off the news feeds. She would do small-time hackwork. Maybe he would start to swim again.

  “Shut them off from our end,” Severyn said. “I want a bit of a challenge when I hunt her down and have her uploaded to a waste disposal.”

  “Will do, Mr. Grimes.”

  But Finch left with a ghost of a smile on his face, and Severyn suspected his employee knew he was lying.

  THOUGH SHE BE BUT LITTLE

  C.S.E. Cooney

  C. S. E. Cooney (csecooney.com) is the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning collection Bone Swans: Stories. Her work includes the Dark Breakers series, Jack o’ the Hills, The Witch in the Almond Tree, and poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction and poetry can be found in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Apex, Uncanny, Lakeside Circus, Black Gate, Papaveria Press, GigaNotoSaurus, Goblin Fruit, Clockwork Phoenix 3 & 5, andThe Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and elsewhere.

  EMMA ANNE HAD a tin can attached by a string to her belt. Lots of things on strings bounced and banged from it: some useful (like the pocket knife), some decorative (a length of red ribbon longer than herself, looped up), some that simply seemed interesting enough to warrant a permanent yo-yoing to her person (a silver hand bell, a long blue plume, the cameo of an elephant head wearing a Victorian bonnet).

  “Emma Anne’s Heavy Weight Stacked Plate Championship Wrestling Belt,” Captain Howard called it. Captain Howard often capitalized the first letters of words she spoke out loud.

  The belt was leather and embossed bronze, like a python wrapped twice about Emma Anne’s torso. It had appeared along with Captious and Bumptious the night the sky turned silver. So had the tin can. They were all part of Emma Anne’s endowments. (“Endowments” was the pirate word for objects or traits materializing Post-Argentum. “Post-Argentum,” another phrase of their design. Pirates had words for everything. But pirates were liars.)

  Emma Anne hadn’t known how to use any of her endowments at first. Nothing was obvious until it was.

  She brought the tin can up to her mouth and spoke into its cavity as clearly as she could. Endowments obeyed intent.

  “Emma Anne to Margaret Howard. Come in please, Captain Howard.”

  Captain Margaret Howard, Way Pirate of Route 1, did not deal in tin cans. What she had was her parrot, George Sand. George Sand got reception.

  “Rrrawk,” Emma Anne’s tin can blatted back at her. “Whaddya want?”

  “What do you want, over,” Emma Anne corrected.

  She wouldn’t have corrected Captain Howard to her face, but George Sand never failed to get on Emma’s nerves.

  “Rrrawk! Take it and rrawk yourself,” said George Sand. “Over.”

  There was a pause while Emma Anne’s chest tightened.

  The tin can blatted, “Cap’n Howard makes her apologies for her rude bird, over. Please continue, kid, over.”

  She took a deep breath and decided not, after all, to cry.

  “Captain, I’ve had a second visitation. It’s the Loping Man for sure. I think he’s coming for me tonight. Can you please meet me at Potter Hill preserve? He’s been showing up around eight o’ clock, so if you could come before that, I’d be really…
But I understand if you’ll be out, out…”

  Emma Anne knew the word she wanted to say, or knew that she had known it not too long ago. It dissolved at the back of her throat like a Vitamin C tablet. Left a tang.

  George Sand provided.

  “Carousing!” it squawked. “Roistering. Wassailing. Possibly pillaging. Pirate Banquet tonight up at The Grill. Starts at seven. Mandatory.” Another pause, wherein (Emma Anne surmised) Captain Howard related something to her parrot even it would not repeat. “Er… over.”

  “Bye,” said Emma Anne in a much smaller voice. She let the tin can fall. It bonged hollowly against her knee.

  Captious sighed. “Well. That went about the way we thought.”

  Bumptious let out a gentle “Oof” as Emma Anne flopped against his head. Being composed of fake fur and synthetic fiber batting, he was barely fazed by Emma Anne’s constant, casual assaults upon his person.

  “Margo Howard’s not reliable,” said Bumptious. “She used to be, before the sky turned silver. Remember how she organized the book club? Volunteered for every church committee? She made loads as an X-ray tech, too, Emma Anne, and always so modest not to mention it. But she did have one of those halfie cars that ran on lightning as well as gas, and you know they didn’t come cheap.”

  “Electricity,” Emma Anne murmured to herself, to make sure she remembered it. It was hard to think, with the Loping Man looming close as nighttime. “Hybrid. Hybrid cars.”

  “She sure ain’t modest now,” Captious observed. Captious was a weasel, stuffed, like Bumptious, about a third his size. Like Bumptious, occasionally sentient. “And who needs cars anyway, when you got a big old flying alligator for an endowment? Eats prisoners for fuel, all the parts. Very sustainable.”

  “What if you run out of prisoners?” Bumptious countered. His orange eyes glinted. They were made of that hard, cool plastic that looks and feels like glass. Emma Anne liked to tap on it with her fingernails when Bumptious was asleep. “At the rate she goes through prisoners…”