Virology

by Ren Warom

  The largest paddy-rise grows rice in shimmering expanses of water on the upper and middle balconies and rears pork on the lowest—thousands of pigs splayed indolently out in the sunshine, their sides smeared with mud. It belongs to the Zhangs, otherwise known as the Harmonys—once one of the most feared crime families on the Gung.

  Behind the vast balconies of bright-green rice spears are five levels of penthouses, the decadent legacy of generations of crime and commerce, inherited and then abandoned by Li and Ho Harmony, who had no interest in farming except where it intersected the slaughter of animals. Or people.

  This farm has been Gail’s home for years. An ex-WAMOS turned J-Hack, he came to work here at Breaker’s behest, hid his affiliations from the Harmonys for years, right up until they died in spectacular fashion four weeks ago. Now, despite Breaker’s death and the Movement being all but gone, he continues the work he came here for, hiding his affiliations from Aunty Dong, who graciously stepped in to run the farm, mainly to cut off her brothers and sisters and their children. In J-Hack terms, Gail acts as a double-agent, sitting inside criminal networks feeding vital information to J-Hacks to keep them safe and give them a heads-up on the best work going amongst criminals.

  His life is always in danger, and no more so than now.

  Hiding the Hornets is a death sentence for him, but he doesn’t care. These kids are amazing—what they’ve done, what they’ve risked for the Gung. He’s come to regard them as family, and he knows they feel the same. He’s nothing but glad that he jumped on the notion of hiding them here the second he heard they wanted to ask it. Hiding in plain sight is often the best tactic, and even though the most anxious member of the Hornets, Wi Ji Lin, or Knee Jerk, likes to call it “fucking stupidity”, they’re perfectly safe here. Gail makes certain of it.

  Tall, skinny and nervy, like some kind of oriental greyhound, KJ rolls into the kitchen, yawning and scratching his head, a full on bed-head masterpiece of bold angles and tats, a tiny gold angler fish, unspeakably ugly, resting on his shoulder, its lure bobbing as he walks. Moving with a sinuous ease at odds with his lanky body, he slides on to a breakfast stool as if his legs are about to give out and jumps over a foot in the air when Gail pops a plate down in front of him.

  “Easy, Knee Jerk. It’s just breakfast.” After four weeks of his company Gail knows by now that KJ is always in flight mode. He’s also always in snark-mode, and grump-mode, and suspicion-mode. It’s rather endearing.

  “Breakfast?” KJ pokes at his boiled egg. “This is food?”

  Going to the coffee machine to fix a fresh batch, Gail rolls his eyes. “Real food as a matter of fact. An actual egg from an actual hen. Fresh too. I got them from the Seng family in exchange for rice and pork.”

  KJ makes a face. Casually pushes the plate away like it’s holding a grenade. “You bartered?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you’re all rich, right?”

  Gail stares, because there’s no way he just heard that. Has KJ paid no attention at all in the past few weeks? “Are you serious? No. This penthouse is a perk, dude. I only live here because when Li and Ho left, they told me to. I used to live in the farmhand levels.”

  “Li and Ho lived here?”

  “Sure.”

  KJ’s hand rises to the remains of his ear. On the left side, all he has is a nub, huddled under tangled hair. The fish moves up to hide it and KJ smiles, running a finger over the curve of its ridged back, glints sparking off his fingernail as it glides through golden skin.

  “She used to talk about the pigs almost every time she killed,” he says, surprisingly calm now. Gail’s avatar does that too. It was uncomfortable at first, now he’s relieved that there’s something in the world that simply knows him, without ever having to be told.

  Nodding, Gail says quietly, “Caught her gutting a litter of piglets once, just for shits and giggles, Ho watching by the door in that way of his. Vacant. Pretending to be stupid. Thick as thieves those two, but she still pushed him off the top balcony when they were eleven. Fifty feet, face first into what used to be the pig pens. They swapped the top to rice after that, just in case—I mean pigs eat anything, right? I think Ho lived to spite her. He definitely got the plastic surgery to spite her, making him the prettiest twin. But people would see how they were together and call it love, not understanding a damn thing. No love lost there. They wouldn’t have known how. So why’d she cut your ear off? Did she have a reason?”

  “I wanted to quit working for them.”

  Gail’s mouth drops open. “And you’re alive?”

  “I cried,” KJ says simply, and it explains everything. Gail understands. He knew Li. “She licked the tears off my face and maimed me to make more.” KJ lifts his shirt, revealing a churn of ruined flesh hiding beneath.

  Gail winces. Now he understands the nerves in this skinny, snarky young man too. “Fuck me. Sorry.”

  KJ drops his shirt, shrugs and pulls the egg back toward him to poke at it some more. He dips his knife in the yolk and licks it. “That’s quite nice. Tastes like egg. When’d they inherit this place?”

  “Age twelve. Their father, An, was assassinated. Cleaner by the name of Mickey Stix, had a good rep, not quite up to your Amiga’s standard, but good. They found Stix a week later, skinned alive and nailed upside down to the side of a mono tower, fucking hundreds of feet off the ground, like they flew him there. Had a note nailed to his chest: Kindly dispose of our trash. Yours truly, The Harmonys.”

  Taking a big bite of his egg, smeared haphazardly on a slice of toast, KJ looks impressed. “You’re trying to slide it by me that Li and Ho hired Stix to kill An and then killed Stix so they wouldn’t have to pay?”

  Gail lifts a shoulder. “Yeah. Kang, An’s brother, wanted to inherit, but the farm and business went to them. He thought two twelve-year-olds would be easy pickings, despite what they were.”

  “They kill him?”

  “Nah, he’s still alive to a degree. They killed his kids. Dropped them from the hubs. Left their remains splashed on the ocean ranges like so much dyed bird shit.”

  “And you’re sheltering us with that crazy ass family hanging over your head? Man.” KJ wiggles his toast. “You’re nuts.”

  “Not so much. I’m used to a double life, and seriously, the rest of the family, they stay away; they’re too scared of Dong to come here and she never would. I never see her, just like I never saw Li and Ho once they grew up. I can’t believe Li and Ho are finally dead to be honest.” Awed, slightly afraid, Gail looks out toward the terrace, to the distant figure of Shock Pao, perched cross-legged right on the edge. “Can’t believe he killed them. The how of it. It’s crazy.”

  KJ snorts. “All of this is crazy. Feels like we walked through hell only to find that the only thing beyond hell is more hell. I’m the first to admit I’m a walking panic attack, but I have never been scared like this, not even when Li ripped my shirt off and her eyes went almost fucking gentle before she started carving chunks from my fucking chest.”

  “That’s one hell of a lot of scared,” Gail says.

  “Yeah,” KJ admits, with a wry smile. “But if you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d be there too.”

  “You been looking in the mirror again, Knee Jerk?”

  Cool and amused, Amiga strolls in and over to the coffee machine, snatching the biggest mug available. She’s filthy, her under-eyes delicately stained with exhaustion and the flake of drying haemoglobin, a dirty red-brown on tawny skin. There’s a cut on her forearm, a bruise on her cheek, but her eyes are like fire, the kind that boils, consumes, a tornado of hungry flames.

  That look gives Gail horrid creepy little shivers from toes to follicles. Li and Ho never had that look, they were ice and empty and this skin-withering curiosity, the kind you want to run from forever. What’s in Amiga’s eyes is harder to handle. Too much life and soul, too much heart, heat and murder. She’s full up of all the good human things, and still she’s a stone-cold killer.

/>   KJ’s avatar flares gold. Outrage. KJ flips her the bird with both hands and snaps, “Oh haha, bitch.”

  She snorts a laugh. “Jokes. You’re gorgeous. A regular Van Gogh.”

  “Very. Fucking. Funny.”

  “What can I say? I’m gifted.” She sips her coffee, gaze shifting out to Shock on the terrace. “He been there long?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe all night, maybe not.”

  “I need to talk to him.” Amiga makes another cup of coffee, as big as hers.

  “That’s your disapproving voice,” KJ notes. “Problems in paradise?”

  Halfway out of the terrace doors already, Amiga stops, offers a quirk of a smile that perhaps reaches her eyes enough to bank the fires boiling there; it’s too close to call for Gail. He finds everything she does unnerving. “Matter of fact there are. Our resident godhead has some explaining to do. Quite a fucking bit.”

  * * *

  Wrung out to fuck, Shock’s drifting in Slip, fingertips swirling into sparks of light, when the presence brushes his body IRL. He rises up just enough to look out of his eyes. Amiga’s squinting at him in the bright morning sun, haloed like an angel, holding up coffee like a white flag. Interesting, because the last thing in her face is surrender.

  “Give me blue eyes, not gold,” she says. “We need to talk.”

  Sliding out into his body is exactly like coming out of the water after swimming, the loss of buoyancy, the weight of flesh dragging you down.

  Blinking sleepily, a touch drained, he takes the coffee and salutes her with it. “This an offering before you kill me?”

  “You guessed, huh?” Amiga says, throwing herself down next to him, cross-legged, oblivious of the sheer drop inches from her knee caps. “I’m losing my edge here.”

  He sniffs, looking down. “No, I’d say you were right on it.”

  “This is nothing. I’m safer up here than in my own head,” she replies.

  “Amen to that.”

  Clinking cups, they drink quietly for a while, knees touching, breathing in sync.

  The view from the terrace jumps into the lungs, snatching air like a thief. All that sun and mountain and steel, glass reflecting sky into infinity, reflecting peaks into warps and jags, making them bizarre as fairground reflections. Too much light and colour. Too much air. Thin and bright and fresh, so fucking fresh it’s like breathing ice vapour. That invigorating. That painfully sharp. The lungs dizzy under the influence.

  Air makes you tipsy up here. Delirious and foolish, a sloppy grin of startling flesh laid over loose bones. They find themselves holding in lungfuls just to see how lightheaded they can get. Giggling on the out breath. Sipping too-hot coffee and just existing. Every moment should be like this. Life should be like this. Easy. Free. Uncomplicated.

  But in the end, like always, they have to break the moment. Abandon it. Shock leaves that to Amiga, because she has more courage than him. Or maybe because she’s more capable of savagery. She surprises him by coming in on a tangent.

  “Any word from Maggie on EVaC?”

  The Hornets’ resident Patient Zero, EVaC’s been in the care of Mollie and Maggie from before all the hell with the Queens walking on the Gung went down. The Hornets didn’t get to see him again to say goodbye—not that he’d have been compos mentis enough to hear or respond, ill as he is with the same sickness a number of other Patient Zeros’ contracted. A sickness none of them, not even Mother Zero, really understands.

  All they have of him right now is whatever Shock can glean from Maggie the few times she’ll allow him access on an IM band tight enough to leave permanent headaches. Amiga obviously wants good news. He hates to burst bubbles, but all he’s got here is pins.

  “He’s the same. They all are. Mother Zero is working on it.”

  “As ever.”

  “Yup.”

  “So. I tortured a Cartel minion a little bit.”

  “A little bit?”

  She cocks him a lopsided grin. “Fine. It was… bad. But he held out. I didn’t expect him to hold out.” Her jaw tightens. “Deuce saw.”

  Shock groans, they’ve talked about how terrified she is of the inevitability of getting it wrong, of how she knows for a fact that this is not a forever thing. These are not admissions she can make to Deuce. He wouldn’t understand, especially not now she’s let him choose what happens instead of choosing for him, even though she knows where that goes, because he’s special and all she’ll do in the end is reduce him to rubble. She’s told Shock all of this because he does understand.

  He’s like her. What he is precludes him from normality. Functionality. He makes dangerous connections, unhealthy ones. Only knows how to hurt and be hurt. Close scares him. Comfort scares him. Love fucking petrifies him. He wouldn’t know how not to Frankenstein love into some form of re-hashed and twisted dependence perfectly primed for destruction. He knows how ugly alone gets when it tangles up into lonely, hurt, broken and angry.

  “How the holy fuck did you allow that to happen, Amiga?”

  “He wouldn’t leave.”

  “Shit. Perfect Deuce being perfect. My admiration verges on hero worship these days. I may have a crush.”

  Elbowing him hard in the ribs, she chokes out a laugh too close to the sound of coming undone, but the relief in her eyes is extraordinary. “I hate you.”

  He throws an arm around her shoulders. “Nope,” he says, fully confident of this at least. “You don’t.” She reaches up to squeeze his fingers before he pulls away and steers her back to the inevitable moment she mentions his failure to warn them of incoming Cartel. “So. Torture?”

  “Got a name. One I know. One I don’t like one little bit.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” She gives him the side stank eye. Oh he really is in trouble. “Lucian duPont.”

  That hits like a hub falling out of orbit on to his sorry skull. “No.”

  “Heard of him?”

  “Of course. Worked for him and his… I dunno what the hell you’d call them. One’s his girlfriend or something and an Archie.”

  Amiga groans. “That bitch is an Archie?” Archies are forensic Archaeologists, sifting data. They can find anyone or anything given enough time—except Haunts.

  “Yeah, and she’s fucking good. The other’s Nigerian, yeah?”

  “Yeah, and huge. Like a mountain. Like Petrie.”

  “That’s the one. They’re very not good fun to work for.”

  “One of your disgruntled customers?”

  He rolls his eyes. “I literally only pissed off Li and Ho, Twist and Yan.”

  “Only, he says,” she drawls, mocking hard. “There’s no only in the universe vast enough to cover that.”

  “Maybe. But duPont was just a job. A bad job.”

  Amiga shakes her head. “Any idea which hub then? Because they were in with Twist but all I have on them is a single brief sighting at his home and the pricking of my thumbs.”

  “Nope. They had no connection to the Cartel then, at least as far as I knew. I can look. It’s easier to trace with a name, even though that Archie slash girlfriend of his has nailed the art of Archaeology in reverse, meaning they’ll be hard to trace.”

  Amiga groans. “That’s all we fucking need.” She places her coffee down and turns to face him. The cold look is back. “So now we’ve talked Cartel, let’s talk Cartel. Or rather, your failure to inform us the Cartel were on our fucking tail yet again. Where the fuck were you?”

  Words. He needs words. Excuses. There are none. Fact is, he found the ones she needed to hunt and then went back to the mountainside.

  “I wasn’t around. I should have been. Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “It won’t. Or as much as I love you I’ll finish what Pill started. Get me?” She’s deadly serious. Of course she is. That was their lives he left hanging in the balance.

  “You know I do.”

  Her eyes narrow on him. Oh she’s too perceptive, all sharp edges and smarts
, just like Puss. “What’s going on with you, Shock?”

  He stares down at his coffee for a moment. “Remember how they used to say to us at Tech that if there weren’t VA in the system that those of us in the one percent and up scale could be gods in there?”

  At its highest, most complex levels, only the best of one percent and up can hack VA, Virtual Armament, the security of Slip. But even the best of the best can’t crack all of it—not when it incorporates bio-ware and constantly morphing passwords as complex as fractals. It doesn’t stop Shock for very long any more. Nothing much does.

  “I do. Used to piss me off. Like the rest of us were crap or something.”

  He looks at her, letting her see his fear naked and unconfined. “They weren’t wrong. They weren’t saying enough. I don’t think they really grokked hard what godlike means in there. What it might mean if in there and out here get to be indistinguishable.”

  “And?” She looks unsurprised. Trust her to have insight. She knows all about how bad shit gets in the shadows of things.

  “Let’s just say I’m having issues.”

  “Shit, Shock. Join the club, innit. Can you keep a handle on it so we don’t all get fucking killed?”

  That pisses him off. “Can you?”

  “Like I have a choice,” she says, and there’s a raw sort of resignation in it that hurts to hear.

  Silence swallows them again. They sit and finish their coffee. Breathe cold air. Shore each other up without words, with only the touch of knees, the smallest of connections, still there for each other despite harsh words and dire promises.

  “I’ll go in and look for duPont and his dynamic duo,” he says when there’s nothing left to drink, to say.

  “If you find anything…”

  “I’ll IM you. I’ll be gentle.”

  Amiga punches his shoulder. “Damn right you will, Shock Pao. You pull the kind of shit on me you pull on Deuce and I’ll drop you from this ledge faster than Li dropped Ho.”