Fuck.
“He’s a cop?” Muerte asked me directly. I nodded. There wasn’t enough time to explain exactly who Greg was before he got fucked over completely. “He needs to be handled before he’s murdered,” she pointed out. The gritty voice of reason in a knot of nerves. “Any takers?”
“Whoa,” Greg managed. Alarm widened his eyes. “I can walk out–”
“Sorry,” I told the detective. “You did good. Boone,” I added, “hold him.”
Boone grabbed his upper arms, spun him to face me. “What–”
“You see those saints behind me?” I didn’t point. Just rotated an arm, warming up the joint. “Trouble. You’ll get paid soon as we extract Indigo, so look mean and tough so I can punch your pretty face and get you out of here alive.”
Tash stepped back, tucking her hands into the pockets of her loose yellow canvas pants. “Make it fast.” She was as antsy as I felt, and our eyes met in a moment of tense solidarity.
Whatever else was happening here, we both wanted Indigo alive.
To his credit, Greg didn’t fight. Maybe all this time rusting that badge with saints like me was beginning to rub off. “Make sure you call me if you need help,” he said quietly. I’d never seen him so… serious? Not the right word. There was more hiding under his usually too-casual features. Determination, maybe. Something stronger than the boy-next-door rut he leaned so heavy on. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
I gritted my teeth. “Thanks,” I said between them.
He nodded, the faintest tip, and tensed.
I prepared to deck him hard enough to ring his bell.
Was not prepared for him to launch himself at me. Surprised the shit out of Boone, who lost hold of one arm. The heavy reacted fast, tightened his hold on the other arm as Greg howled, “You fucking bitch, I’ll kill you!”
Surprised the shit out of me, too. I leapt back a step, instinct kicking in. My arm lashed wide, a right hook I forgot to soften. My fist connected so hard, his head snapped to the side.
I didn’t use my metal hand, which he better thank me for later, but I felt the impact of his jaw all the way to my elbow. Greg collided with Boone, who stepped back and let the detective collapse bonelessly to the floor.
Muerte howled with laughter; gritty, harsh and loud. As if we’d just tanked a chummer for fun. Although I’d bet real cred on the fact she’d just found it fucking hilarious.
Boone eyed him. Greg didn’t move. “He’s out.”
Finally. A little bit of trust thrown my way, and from Detective Douchedick, no less.
“Dump him,” I told the heavy. Didn’t add it should be somewhere relatively safe, Boone could extrapolate. Greg would wake up sore, but he would wake up.
Words pitched to carry drifted our way, a mocking octave to the sound. Pushing for a fight, maybe. I ignored Kilo and her psychos. Tashi’s lip curled so high, I expected to see fangs.
The heavy bent down, hauled the limp detective into the crook of one arm. “Want me to come?” The question was aimed at Tashi.
She shook her head, tapped her ear. They’d comm up later.
He nodded, stomped slowly away. I wish I’d had time to admire the sway of Greg’s limp legs and ass as they left. I’d throw it in his face. Hauled like trash out of the rack. Tough guy.
“We should–”
Tashi’s pale eyes turned to me. Ignored Muerte. “He asked for his team.”
I nodded. A terse gesture.
“You aren’t.”
I couldn’t argue that. So I nodded again. It was all I could do to keep from reaching for her skinny throat. I didn’t need the reminder, goddammit.
Muerte took a step forward. I put an arm out in front of her, halting her before she could open her mouth.
Tashi’s glance flicked to her. Without a beat, a long, spider-like hand flipped the thin knife she’d pulled without me noticing, turned the blade inward along her forearm. No warning. Just readiness.
“Madre,” Muerte muttered.
I dropped my arm. “Let me ride with you.”
“Why?” Tashi asked. A flat question.
I had a flat answer ready. “Because I owe Indigo my life, and I’m not going to sit back when he’s in trouble.”
She stared at me. She stared a lot. Eerie, and right now, uncomfortable. “Why?” she asked again. Flatter. Harder.
I wasn’t sure I could explain if I tried. A tight ball of fear packed in my chest, and I couldn’t tell if it came from everything I couldn’t take the time to deal with now or borderline panic. Indigo had gone to Greg for help. It meant something.
Digo knew I’d signed the detective over. Knew I’d be the first one he’d go to. It bypassed the rest of the team, which made me believe he wanted me there.
I wanted to be there.
My mouth tensed, flesh fingers opening and closing. Why?
Muerte studied us both. “I hate to break the mood, but shouldn’t we vámanos pal carajo?”
Yeah. We needed to.
Why? It rattled in my head. “Because he’s family,” I said, jaw aching with it. It cramped all the way down my throat, squeezed the heart I played I didn’t have. “And I’ll be fucked if I let some shitknockers take him down.”
Muerte’s chuckle accompanied Tashi’s slow nod. “Don’t go back on that.” A warning. A threat. Tashi’s gaze held mine for an uncomfortable moment more, and then she ghosted by us both, slipped off the curb with every intent to dart between vehicles. “Meet at the Central Market.”
“Do you know where he’ll be?”
She glanced at me, the briefest flash of pale, pale ice over a thin-boned shoulder. Neon caught the red lotus splayed on her elbow and lit it on fire. “I know where he lives.”
She vanished before I could ask anything else.
My feet kept going, but the words left a dent. A sharp little corner of something I refused to let be anything else but anger.
I’d never known where Indigo shacked up. Nobody ever had.
Except Tashi. And it made sense, but sense was the last fucking thing I was feeling.
My flesh fist clenched so hard, my ragged nails left half-moons in calluses. “Muerte.”
She pulled open the shield doors. “Ai?”
I climbed in. Stiff. Shaking. With rage. Just rage. Right.
She studied my face as I buckled in. Climbed in after, throwing her nanosteel leg over the seat. Her lips tilted, a kind of smile. “We’ll get there,” she said.
We had to. He was, fragile as the connection was, all I had left. I hadn’t lied. He was family. The only thing I had close to it. And the only one with any chance of helping me. I needed his contacts and his team, I needed his bird’s eye view.
I needed him alive, and I needed him to fucking trust me again.
Maybe hauling his fine ass out of this would help.
27
Catcurry isn’t a zone, it’s more like a neighborhood. A large one, but still just a piece of the overwhelming complexity of Deli. Technically called 57th Center 4A, only satellite layouts still label the area with the official name. Somewhere along the way, Catcurry stuck – a mocking indication of one of their more infamous exports.
Curry, and all its many flavors, is one of my favorite things. And it’s not all curry in there, but like most things in this cesshole of a city, accuracy isn’t really the point. If it was, I knew districts that should’ve been named Dried Babytoes. Wholesome protein and a great afternoon snack.
I’d take catcurry any day. Green stuff, not red; gives the meat a wild tang.
The market is always busy, and the shifts and stalls swap out day to night. Edibles and lamp-grown produce fill the place top to bottom, meat sold and cooked right on the street, animals penned up in cages ear to ass. Come night, the families fuck off and the rest of us defects slip in to intermingle, sell the shit daylight won’t tolerate – and that is some very, very unusual shit.
As Muerte ramped up the engine and sailed through three traffic lights nobody
paid attention to anyway, I frowned at the barren edges of the market. Food papers, greasy wraps and more tumbled over the empty road – narrow enough that cars didn’t fit and two-wheeled vehicles killed people daily. Shit had been left out, dropped, scattered around stalls.
Rats had found the untended cages closest to the road. The animals inside shrieked, eaten alive in a swarm of fur and teeth.
“Fuck.”
“No bueno.” Muerte pulled back the brake, threw the thing in a spin and squealed into a near perfect parallel park. Front facing out, like a damned smart runner with an eye on the getaway. Nothing greeted us, no corpcunts, no residents. Nothing. Sweat immediately popped out of every pore, smothered by the intense, sweltering weight of mid-depth summer. The lingering thickness of spice and heat and roasted meat settled heavy in my nostrils. Mixed with the usual aroma of piss, grease, animal shit and engine fumes, it flat out made my mouth water.
I’d murder just about anything for a good curry.
Neon signs popped in every direction, a smattered mix of languages that, like Kongtown, all looked alike to my uneducated eye. Same kind of spaces, though – you don’t escape the dives, the foodholes, the flesh trade and the sleep-ins just by hopping zones. Every place has them, if you know where to look.
And no district escapes the flash of a corp raid. Company helos are easy to spot, large and black, with backdrafts like a flamethrower drawn in blue. Spotlights rotate in every direction, peeling back the dark spaces.
Made the location a breeze to find.
I flung up my hand to shield my eyes. Muerte popped her shades on, index finger securing them to her nose.
Cool bitch.
“Guessing there.”
“No shit.” I started running. Right down the center of the market branch, unslinging my Valiant as I pounded towards the chaos. In the back of my brain, I noted figures hiding in shadows of doors and behind stalls. Saw movement in upper windows, lights turning off in a desperate attempt to escape notice.
Not my notice. The enforcers flooding the area, and the SINless fighting them off. No sinner would dare. Not when any activity around corporate interests is guaranteed to be monitored.
The noise was deafening. Gunfire and shouting, fire left unchecked and crackling as it ate up nearby tenements, stalls, whatever caught and burned. The maze of streets and lanes, overhead bridges and below byways made the origin of all the fighting hard to pinpoint by sound, but the rest was obvious: follow the flash.
Getting there was a straight shot.
Or would have been, if a rocket hadn’t gone so far off course that it collided with the fleshtoy shop directly over our heads. Screams erupted, wild and shrill. Muerte cursed as she leapt forward, pushing all her weight off her augmented leg. Her landing, less graceful than she probably meant to achieve, forced her into a hard tuck and roll.
I wasn’t as fast, and I lacked the boost her tech gave her. The corner of the rise turned inward, then crumbled. Sheets of disintegrating stone, wood, plaster and fire. Girders, steel plates melted and buckled. Debris rained down around me – chaos in vivid color, furniture flaming out, bodies of unlucky gawkers who hadn’t gotten out of the windows fast enough. Mirror shards glittered. Bodies hit the ground, some still screaming. Some bounced. Cracked. Twisted.
I threw my nanosteel arm over my head, barely averted a chunk of metal from crushing my skull. Splinters exploded outward from a barrage of broken debris, stung my leg from knee to hip. I’d be plucking those out later.
After we all got out of here alive.
Corpses charred and blackened, adding to the mouthwatering smell of street food already thick in the zone. Which was nauseating, but meat is meat. It all smells the same.
As we pushed inward, more bodies appeared. Some had spilled out of vehicles, splayed loose and mushy in the street where they’d landed. A girl in a bright orange wrap, her dark hair glimmering in the light of flames consuming the stall behind her, lay face-up on the bloody remains of somebody else. Both were missing a large chunk of their faces, and the rats were just hungry enough to brave the heat. The faintest gleam of light eyes stared at me as I ran by.
Other bodies sprawled in every direction, so much char and bullet-ridden flesh.
More vermin would come later, starving cats and dogs prowling for food.
If anything survived the carnage we ran through, I wouldn’t call it lucky. The raid had come in hard and bloody; why wasn’t an answer I had yet. Indigo couldn’t possibly be worth all this. Was it a coincidence?
The battlefield opened smack in the center of the market, like the intel had pinpointed the area but not the location. Barricades had been hastily erected across expanses of roads and grates, vehicles and hunks of cement, even the dead all piled together like a puzzle gone very wrong. Bullets peppered the road from every direction, shattered rock and windows, tearing through the grease paper plastered across some.
Screaming. Gunfire. Deafening whine of helos surfing backdrafts overhead. Straight chaos, and without Tashi here to guide us to Digo’s shack, we’d have to cover more ground.
“Split,” I yelled, and launched myself right over the first barricade. Muerte peeled off, vanishing somewhere along the outer rim.
Should have given her a comm. Hell, should carry the pissing things.
Landing jarred my knees. Poor form. No weapons came up at me – I didn’t look anything like an enforcer, wasn’t even wearing armor. Few nods as I landed. Most paid attention to the barrage of fire stemming from the other side of the barricade.
I glanced at the setup. Five mercs, a handful of others looking to hold down the spot. Some Deli militia, I think. Maybe saints, but probably not runners. Maybe sinners, too, but I doubted there were vidgrid achievements for murdering corp officers.
I didn’t recognize any of them, but an older woman with hair hidden under a pastel green hijab lifted a spotted hand. The fire reflected off her skin in warm shades of copper and tea. “Are you helping?” she demanded.
“Indigo Koupra,” I shouted back. Bullets zinged by my head. I ducked, crouched down and finished, “Have you seen him?”
The woman’s laugh croaked. “The only things I’ve seen are a trail of dead and a vanguard of soldiers.”
“I saw him earlier,” volunteered a teenager. He held a Phelps & Somers Manticore like he’d been born to it, for all he looked maybe fourteen. The weapon dwarfed his hands; he’d learned to compensate. Mud and soot smeared his face and hands, and wraparound glasses covered his eyes. Smart kid. The lenses, though clear, fucked with facial recognition software, and the dirt made it difficult to visually pick him out of a lineup. Even his clothes were filthy, hair covered in dried mud. A real city guerilla.
I flashed him a hard smile. Fighter to fighter. “Where?”
He pointed with a sticklike finger. “Back behind Preet’s.”
Preet’s. “Who?”
He took pity on me; I let him have it. This wasn’t my district. He’d more than earned his superiority in it. “Two shops past the burning stall on the left,” he shouted, and waddled toward me. Kept his head down, too. Whoever taught this kid, they’d done a fuckingly good job. “Look for the mural of Ganesh. Preet’s door is on the right hand.”
I frowned at him. “Who the fuck is Ganesh?”
We both paused as two mercs popped up from behind the barricade, rattled off belts of ammo. All sound drowned in the flurry, only to come screaming back when they ducked behind cover again.
The kid rolled his dark eyes at me. “Elephant,” he shouted. “Big ears, long nose!”
“Oh. Ganesh,” I repeated, like I’d known what the fuck. Religion stuff. Elephant god. Saint of, I don’t know, trampling sinners to death.
If he rolled his eyes any harder, they’d explode in his head.
“Thanks,” I added. I ruffled his crusted hair then and prepped to go.
“Hey!” he called. I glanced back at him. He backed up to the barricade, cheeky grin and crooked teeth firml
y bared. “Tell Indigo he owes me one.”
I couldn’t help it. I braced one hand on the ground, grinning. “What’s your name?”
“Jalender.”
“Right.” I touched my temple with two fingers. “I’ll deliver the word. Keep your head down or I’ll come back and piss on your corpse.”
He laughed, shrugged and turned to face the barricade. He didn’t stand and fight, I noticed as I scrambled around the crowd. He popped in and out. First on the left, then the right, sometimes in the middle for the random element. He fired precisely three shots every time.
The older woman tossed him clips. He worked them like he’d always known how.
That’s the city for you. Breed ’em hard or breed ’em to die. Even the beggars have a few tricks up their nonexistent sleeves. To run, if not to fight.
The square the fighters had locked each other down in was a killbox even I wasn’t stupid enough to run through. I had to go around, and to do that, I was going up. The nice thing about districts built on top of each other is the three-dimensional direction. Left, right, forward, backward… add up or down and any way in between, and that’s how we get around.
Even better, as I retreated into the nearest tenement, no corporate guns greeted me. Just a lot of worried faces peering from open doors, crying kids and vidfeeds left on and loud throughout the floor.
I shot one wide-eyed woman a glance. “You all good?”
She peered fearfully over my shoulder. Nobody had followed me in. “So far,” she said, worry thick in her voice.
I nodded. “Armed?”
She returned my nod.
It was the best I could do. Not everybody is cut out to be a fighter. “Quickest way to Preet’s?” I asked.
“Three floors up,” said another man from across the hall, old voice hoarse. By the look of his skin and his bloodshot eyes, emphysema. So far advanced even his nanos were suffocating. “Take Bali’s door, yellow stripe.”
“Her fire escape,” a man added from behind the fearful woman. Husband maybe. His turban matched her shawl. “Just cross it to the other side, hop down on the next roof, stairs down.”
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