The main interests of your everyday joes are breeding, consuming, fucking and feeding. Raise your kids or not, nobody gives a shit. But you get certain achievements for choosing, and no do-overs. Unless you pay for that, too.
The apps are the first thing a saint sheds after burning the SIN out.
Vermin in all shapes and colors plodded through the heat, all of it comprised of tech and chrome and skin and piss and the overpowering scent of deodorant. Pamphlets and posters, discarded propaganda, littered the streets and sidewalks. Bandwidth to reality, ads and graffiti mapped the place.
Too many people. Most slogging through adspace I blocked, the sinners among them chasing the thrill of achievements clocked. Hookers solicited any random joes going by, hands on slick hips, scraps of clothing built to entice. A few had stopped, scoping out the wares – some with jaundiced skepticism, others with naked greed. One dude in the sweltering black vinyl of a goth kid had his nose shoved into the gleefully exposed armpit of a large, hairy crossdresser.
Every pleasure for the right amount of creds.
A three-man booth across the way flashed as morning-afters irradiated the stink of burned off booze, sex and junk too gross to wear in the sun. The air over the booths warped as radiation escaped from the vents.
Muerte snagged my arm to get me moving. My left arm. I sucked in a hissed breath, jerked it out of her grasp. She snatched her hand back at the same time, eying the bared metal. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” I snapped.
She raised an eyebrow. “New arm giving you trouble?”
“It’s not new.” She didn’t ask more. A relief. “Where are we going?”
She shrugged. “Somewhere not here.”
“Why so secretive?” I demanded, rubbing the back of my sweaty neck.
“Because if anybody overhears this, you’re boned.”
“Again?”
“Not,” she said with emphasis, unfolding a pair of narrow shades and sliding them on her face, “the way you hope to be.” Counter to her duochrome approach to today’s look, her shades reflected the city back in mirrored black. They also hid the telltale rings around her irises, letting her take in the surroundings at her leisure.
Muerte was an information junkie. She always had been, just now her implants were better.
Fuck. I matched her pace across the street, weaving through end-to-end cars and motorcycles, bikes and scooters shittier than mine. Horns honked. One at me. Or maybe the teeming crowd jaywalking with me. I gave them a flesh finger. Sneered through the mask of drying blood my nanos had sealed. My bloody teeth apparently made the bitch behind the wheel slam on their brakes. The woman in the passenger seat flicked her finger back at me.
Muerte didn’t stop grinning. I’d always had this urge to punch her, catch her out of nowhere and do to her nose what she’d done to mine. Just to see if it’d kill her smile.
It wouldn’t. But she’d sure as shit try to kill me.
I’d have to warm up for round two.
12
Dives litter the lower streets. They burrow in to every district worth being in, and they usually have the best food. Most come and go, swap out from this cuisine or that. The great ones linger.
Like scars.
Muerte knew a place I didn’t. We set up on the back side, where we both had a clear view of the patrons and an easy way over the table. Just in case. Not everyone looked the part of badass looking for a fight; precaution beat a bullet in the back.
Story of my life.
She sprang for food and drinks. Greasy pancakes and oily shit they called coffee but didn’t come close. I’d know. Lucky used to brew his own. No idea how, real beans are even rarer than virgins.
I added a recharge to the order, and asked for something sharp in my coffee. It came with a hot pink plastic knife hanging off the edge, its curved end already melting in the heat.
Ha ha. I plucked it out, flicked it at the wall behind us where it stuck, one of many accessories left by many patrons.
The place was fast. And greasy as a bad lubejob. “Talk,” I demanded the instant both platters hit our table. The ads playing across the grimy vidscreen built into it scrolled in a nonstop blast of news and junk. Filters wouldn’t touch it; digital screens can only be hacked. “What’s got you going for a personal hello?” Aside from my busted freqs, anyway.
“How are you not inhaling everything right this second?” she replied, already loading up her fork. “Madre, I’m starving.”
I was too. A recharge would have gotten me by, but it’d been a while since I’d had pancakes. Or, for that matter, real food. Last time was with my corporate doc; a bet I’d lost.
This linecook mess would mop up at least half the hangover, settle the nanos I’d pushed hard last night. And this morning, no thanks to her. I folded one pancake in half, then fourths, and stabbed it in the center with my fork. “Three seconds to swallow,” I said, “and then spit it out.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Maybe to you.”
This time, her laugh didn’t make it through the pancake. She choked, had to slam back her coffee mix before she wore them both. Or I wore them both, given Muerte’s sense of timing.
Took five seconds. I was counting.
When I kicked her in her tech leg, my toes cramped. Even through my boots. It jarred all the way to my cunting arm. Hissing in a breath earned me an eyebrow. “How’d that work for you?”
“Face next,” I warned, jamming my fork so hard into the next pancake that the twisted tines sparked across the platter. “Round fucking two, only I know you’re there.”
Still snickering, she waved a hand at me. “Yeah, yeah. But look, don’t punch the messenger. Again.”
I nodded. Ate my pancake so I wouldn’t tell her to bite my clit and get to the point. I was, I thought grimly, in a foul fucking mood.
She set her fork down, half her plate cleared. “You,” she said seriously, “are sitting slightly left of some nasty crosshairs. Word is your cred’s taking a dive, and that’s catching attention.”
“You’re just now catching up to the gossip?” I asked around the fork in my mouth. “C’mon.”
Her gaze drilled mine. “I knew the rumors. The notice is new. Chummers’ve been sniffing around Squad looking for information about you.”
The pancake turned to rust in my mouth. I swallowed before it glued itself to my tonsils. “Yeah?” Affecting nonchalance, I propped my elbow on the table and pointed my fork at her. “When am I not on somebody’s shitlist?”
“Not like this,” she replied. None of that amusement filled her eyes now. “Saints’ve been hitting up our turf, and I hear your name raising a few digital eyebrows lately. Subtle stuff, at first.”
“At first?”
“There’s a player just good enough to dodge me and just rough enough to get my attention doing it,” she said. “In his wake, I’m seeing patterns. Carefully dropped bits of gossip, skilled diversions.”
“How skilled?”
Her jaw shifted, stung pride. “I run into more false stops than I do intel,” she confessed. “Riqa, who the necrofuck did you piss off?”
I stared back at her. I knew this was coming. I thought I’d been prepped for it. Should have been prepped for it the moment Carmichael had called me out. Hearing it, seeing it carved all over Muerte’s face, drove it all the way home.
First my team. Then Lucky.
Indigo had laid the final board and Muerte nailed it in place.
It wasn’t just a leak. Wasn’t just a stalker out to ruffle my cred. Somebody was fucking with me. With very, very real consequences.
I didn’t realize I was gritting my teeth until Muerte reached over and tapped my jaw. I jerked, swatted her hand away with my throbbing left as I took in a deep, freakishly painful breath.
I thought I’d lost the life I knew the day I’d woken up in that lab. I’d only been fooling myself.
I set my fork down beside my plat
e and leaned back in my seat. Draping my left arm on the back of it at least took the weight off my shoulder, even if I hadn’t stopped sweating since we sat down. Now I fought to keep my hands from clenching.
Somebody.
Was going.
To die.
“Can you find him?” I asked.
“I’m working on it. But in the meantime, you should know a few uppity pendejos are gunning for the cred boost.”
“Specifics?”
She pointed her fork back the way we’d come. She had excellent direction sense. “That one back there? 401Nasty.”
“Who?”
“Newly on the radar. Challenging the FriqaChiquitas for southside Caprese.”
“Isn’t your sister rolling with them?”
“Yeah. She’s good for the news.”
“No shit.” That made the 401s a bigger deal than the usual scum. The Chiquitas were known terrors, hadn’t lost a turf war yet. Brutal approach, no prisoners. In Caprese, that was the only way to scrape out a rep. “How’d they hear about this?” A pause. “And why haven’t the upper tier runners weighed in?”
Muerte tucked her fork between her lips, idly let it rest there as she shrugged around it. “The digirat’s signal isn’t spreading that far. I think he’s deliberately targeting the kiddies in the kiddie pool. Riling them up.”
That made no sense.
I let Muerte go, sat back hard and dropped my head back against the seat. The blackened ceiling glistened, stained by countless hours of oil, smoke and grease. In it, I read layers and layers of spunkfucking frustration.
Sense or not, this was it. My cred had dripped far enough through the networks that some asshole had up and taken me on, using low rate runners and scumslurping dregs to do it.
Soon as it reached upper echelons, I’d lose everything I had left. So why the long crawl up? Why couldn’t he go right to the top and smear me all the way down?
What the fuck was I, a psychic?
“I do not,” I said grimly, “have time for this.”
Muerte laughed, a short, sharp crack. “Who the shit does?” When she dropped her elbow on the table, chin in hand, I glanced back at her. “P’much everyone,” she said around the bending tines, “knows you tangoed Koupra’s bebe into necroland.”
“Old news.”
“Yeah,” Muerte said, bending into the table to lower her voice. The permanent dimples in her cheeks winked, though she wasn’t smiling. Her neon-rimmed eyes drilled into mine, and she took the fork from her mouth to point at me with it. “Except now they’re saying you took creds for making her overclock her threshold.” Then, even quieter, “There’s a vid up for sale.”
My eyes snapped wide.
“Something going for a price most, if you’re lucky, won’t be able to hit for a while,” she continued. “I don’t know if it’s related to the rumors or not, but there’s mucho speculation.”
No.
“And a lot of fixers,” she finished, stone serious, “will be sniffing it out.”
There weren’t enough curse words in the goddamn universe to fill this one. I lost the fight to look calm, fist clenched on the table, white-knuckled to the point of pain. Between my teeth, I hissed out a low, “Unfuckingbelievable.” It hitched on the rising tide of panic climbing up my spine. “Have you seen it?”
Her dark eyes studied me. “No, Riqa, I haven’t. No one has yet. To be blunt,” she added in her graveled sense of serious, “I’d rather hear it from you.”
My jaw popped. I forced my teeth to unclench. I jammed both elbows on the table and rubbed my face. My guts churned. Hangover. Bile.
Fear.
Goddammit. Fuckdammit. Shitfuckdammit!
This was bad. Worse than stalker level bad. That fucking vid showed me making a deal over Nanji’s unconscious body. Showed me signing my thumbprint on a tablet and then shaking the smeghead’s hand. Aside from the necro code sealed up in Malik’s lab, it was the only evidence Indigo and I had walked away with.
Fake or not, framed or not, this would destroy me in ways I couldn’t even comprehend.
Was Digo the source? Only he’d seen that vid.
No, wait. Reed. Reed knew. He’d seen the footage. Tested me on it. He’d placed scouts at my hangouts – corplickers made to look like the saints they infiltrated. I didn’t trust him as far as I could knife him. But what the fuck did he have to gain by ruining my cred? What would Indigo gain? Revenge would only work if Digo stopped associating with me altogether.
Why was everything so godshitting confusing?
I raised my head, pushing my tangled hair away from my face. Fear and fury screwed all the way down to the bone. “Anything else?”
She sighed, picked up her fork again to push the sticky remnant of pancake around. You have to eat the stuff fast, or it turns to mush. “Aside from the vid nobody’s picked up on, there’s one last thing raising eyebrows and stiffies.” One finger tapped on the table. Nail clicking. “Did Lucky drop your ass like a corporate drone?”
“Oh, what the tits.” I shoved my plate away so hard, it rattled all the way to the edge of the ads. Patrons looked up. I shot them a filthy glare. “Yes,” I snarled, lowering my voice and turning that glare to her. “So fucking what?”
Click, click. Another fingertap. “You know his cred overlapped yours, right?”
I snarled again. Longer. Meaner. Jumping the table to grab her by the throat wouldn’t net me anything, but my instincts didn’t care. I had to grab the edge to keep myself from leaning any farther in, halting almost nose to nose. “If you’re saying Lucky’s cred took a hit–”
She raised her other hand between us, cutting me off. “No, Riqa. I’m saying that everybody knows you aren’t under his umbrella anymore.”
Oh. That was it? I scoffed, relief easing me back to my seat. “I’ve been on my own for years.”
Muerte’s hand lowered. “You still don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. Her gaze, usually lined with the same shade of arrogant I painted mine with, had gone softer. “I’m saying that up until now, you’ve been enjoying his coverage. You didn’t,” she stressed as I opened my mouth, “have to be under his roof to reap the bennies. Lucky made sure of that.”
What?
No.
I blinked at her stupidly for a few breaths.
Covered?
By Lucky?
I shook my head. As much to clear it as try and knock myself back into the moment. “I developed my own cred. I mean, sure, he taught me everything, but I’ve handled my own shit.” Until now. “I took a hit, I lost enough rep that he no longer services my tech, but…” I paused. “How do you know he was keeping me under watch?”
As soon as I asked it, the answer came to me.
I was one of the few who hadn’t known.
Muerte saw it click; I read it in her eyes. The pity shaping her mouth.
My teeth snapped together. Ground until something crunched.
She nudged her cold coffee across the table, closer to my hand. Her version of helping. “Lo siento,” she said quietly. “But I wanted to make sure you knew.”
What, that my cred might not have been as good as I’d thought? That I’d only played at saint while my benevolent father figure watched over me?
It felt disgusting. A protective layer like the Christ, all guiding shepherd and shit.
And as my pride and rage and sense of cunting loss churned in my gut, Muerte watched me in apologetic silence.
Like I needed it.
I snatched the coffee cup in hand, drained it of as much as I could, and shattered the mug on the table between us. The screen underneath fractured, white streak turning brown as the leaking remains of coffee seeped into it. The sound cracked through the dive, piercing the clamor like a gunshot. Even Muerte jumped.
“Save your pity.” I used the remains of the ruined mug to push myself out of the chair. “I’ll deal with this without Lucky. And if you don’t think I can,” I added flatly, “then stay out of
my way.”
Muerte leaned back. Slow, but unfazed.
I spun, scowled at the sea of faces and eyes, and gave them a middle finger from both hands. “You hear me?” I snarled. “Stay the fuck out of my way!”
Not my finest moment. With the crunk of last night’s bender all over me, coffee and blood dripping from my flesh hand, and confusion roiling under my skin, I yelled at a dive full of strangers and left Muerte to pay for the mess.
I’d make it up to her later. I had to, given the info she’d dealt me. Nobody gets shit for free from a fixer. She’d eventually tell me what she wanted, anyway.
For now, I needed to get out. Go somewhere else, do something else while my brain tried to sort through the mess. I wasn’t built to think. But without Indigo or Reed in my corner, and both a suspect for trying to fence that vid, I had no one else to trust.
13
Of my two immediate problems, only one seemed in reach right now.
I stopped in a booth for a quick radiation blast, used by most of the city in lieu of water. Unless you’re rich and well-connected, water is a deadly combination of toxins and lead. It takes a shit-ton of purification, and costs a fuck-ton of creds to install.
Malik Reed had showers in his building.
Lucky had installed an extra large sink in his shop that tapped into some pirated source.
Everyone else not taking cumshots on credlines got radiation.
The stuff approved for human use is weak enough that nanos can eat any cancerous side effects, but strong enough to melt everything else off. The booths, made to process as many people as possible, didn’t fuck around. Hard and fast, in and out. Way better than disinfectant, which smells for days.
Once out, I didn’t bother changing my clothes. Didn’t feel like paying for more.
The recharge I’d consumed and a hit of hardcore nanocandy dulled the pain. My head did not rattle right off my neck as I guided the Vega onto the interzone and rode it all the way to C-Town. Hell, even the spinning panic in my skull mellowed slightly, space carved out of that meditative mix of wind and speed.
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