by Ren Warom
Frowning, Iyawa turns his attention to the larger, somewhat identifiable lumps. The discarded clothing. Sighs heavily. Wanders through, picking his way fastidiously over the wreckage, to the breakfast bar, where he finds bits of skin and flesh fashioned to makeshift flowers, the delicate patterns of Lucian’s doodling in the counter, and the curlicue of Jess’s copperplate, weaving their names together. He follows the design with a finger and laughs to himself. Flicks one of the flowers to the floor.
Tapping into his IM, he chimes for the housekeeper, who answers in her usual quiet way.
Yes, Mr Fashola?
I need a crew in the kitchen immediately. We have remains. I need this out of the floorboards before it stains further. Bring the removal crew too; there are parts needing collection and cremation. Oh, and have someone pick up my shoes for cleaning.
As you wish, Mr Fashola.
Excellent. Please don’t disturb myself, Monsieur duPont or Fräulein Amsel whilst you’re up here.
Snapping the channel shut, he skirts the rest of the mess as best as possible, toes off his shoes with a slight sneer and enters the living areas, hunting for them in various rooms. Finds them in the master bath, relaxed and laughing.
The water’s bright red between piles of bubbles and Lucian’s hair, as yet unwashed, looks livid against his skin, slicked to a deep poppy colour with blood too thick to begin drying. Taking a seat on the rim, Iyawa trails his hand in the water, spinning bubbles together. They all watch each other for a few moments, smiling.
“Had fun?” he asks eventually, flicking a finger loaded with bubbles in their direction. Jessamine leans to blow it away.
“I made flowers,” Lucian tells him, in a voice slurred with satiation.
“I noticed. Was that Cole’s team?”
Lucian gives a lazy nod, groaning as Jess straddles his lap to begin cleaning his hair with a sharp, lemon-scented shampoo from a glass bottle in the basket clipped to the outside of the bath. His eyes slide shut under the pressure of her fingers, and he says slowly, as if the words are dragging from deep inside, on the edge of sleep, “They lost our Haunt. Dong almost got him.”
“Dong? She’s in this race?”
“He killed her niece and nephew, Iyawa, of course she’s in, but I suspect only to kill.”
“Then we cannot allow her to succeed.”
“She won’t. She underestimated the Haunt,” Jessamine says, her hands massaging at Lucian’s temples. “Apparently the Haunt and his little swarm are on their way to us now.”
Cracking one eye open to reveal a slither of pale blue, a chip of ice in the steaming air, Lucian says, “He has a new gift too. Killed a hundred soldiers with a thought.” Eyes drifting shut again, Lucian drops his head back and hums in his throat. “It can’t go unpunished. I’ve put a bounty on their heads. Something interesting. Opened up the game to new players and challenged them to deliver us a Haunt.”
Drying his hand, Iyawa nods approval. “Let us see how they fare reduced to a skeleton crew.”
“Intention is the root of magic.” Jessamine sighs as she returns to her ministrations, smoothing shampoo through Lucian’s hair, watching red rivulets curl down into the water. “Watch us conjure a victory, Iyawa. It will be magnificent.”
Last Tango In Paris
Paris Hub is a metropolitan crush, a glittering bauble of history with a dangerous underbelly it doesn’t like to acknowledge. Amiga came here what feels like forever ago, when she first started doing bigger hits for Twist. The heady early days of being truly dangerous, of bad people genuinely running at the thought of her being after them. She’d been sent to Clean a medium-level porn dealer trying to move into hardcore shit who made the mistake of thinking Twist might sell it.
Funny how Twist had such excellent morals for an absolute bastard.
As for the porn dealer, he ran true to type—piece of shit didn’t want to die. He ran for it. Hid in underground Paris. Not literally under the ground, though Paris does have that, the Pirater underworld, the home of the J-hacks of Paris: the Bone Market. She almost died there, too confident and stupid to realize she wasn’t quite the biggest bad here. He died too though. Badly. That was the first time she had to stand back and wonder who the hell she was. Whether she was actually okay.
These days she knows the answer to that.
Racing the rooftops with Raid, Aggie and Sim, she pays little attention to the baroque architecture beneath her feet, the facade of Paris, hiding interiors more modern than those you might find in the Heights: all minimalist purity. Being rich here now is all about how many houses in a terrace you can knock together and call home, which of course means less housing for everyone else. The poor of Paris live much like the poor of the Gung—cheek to jowl and slowly starving.
The bright glare of sun gives her a headache and the galling fact that Paris is too fucking big to find anything with any speed sticks in her craw like an overcooked rice ball. But this is all they can do—Shock’s back at the shuttle, still doing his best impression of Sleeping Beauty, in the care of Deuce, Tracker and the Hornets too injured to run Paris. With Shock out for the count, Deuce and Tracker have tried to hack the info he found leading him to say the Cartel had HQ on Paris and so far have precisely squat.
They’re not lightweights, but the loss of avis is a blow, technologically as well as emotionally and none of them have much flim going spare for the steep prices the app demands for Slipping. Limited to J-Net, they’re all out of their fancier tricks. It’s seriously undermining their cool.
And having to be careful, to stay out of reach, out of sight, is rubbing her nerves to shreds. These are Hornet tactics. Measured. Cautious. Slow. The only reason she didn’t tell Deuce to fuck off when he asked her to be a Hornet with this one was the fact that, of the fifty-odd Hornets on their shuttle, just over thirty-five are physically good for any kind of fight. And in this case “physically good” means pretty much “still standing”. No one is in fantastic shape, including her.
She wants a shower, a sleep, and something to eat. Hell, she’d even go for ramen right now, which speaks volumes about the state of her stomach.
“How long are we supposed to do this exactly?” Raid asks, out of breath, speeding up to run beside her.
“Beats me. There’s a lot of city and only thirty or so Hornets. I guess we do this until we run into some Cartel or until Shock wakes up.”
Amiga! The IM breaks in breathless and harried, the Hornet on the other end, Rahul, sounds a peculiar mix of disbelieving and despairing.
Rahul? What’s up?
We’re taking fire. Got reports of other groups taking fire too. Not all, only some. We chased down whoever was firing on us. Did not look Cartel.
Targeted?
As fuck. Hedda got clipped on the shoulder, Jack got a near miss—literally a few millimetres.
Hedda okay? Amiga doesn’t know Hedda that well, but she’s nice—one hell of a scout.
Only needs patching up. They’re going to run interference and get her back to the shuttle safe and sound. I’m not liking the direct targeting. It frankly stinks. Anyway, watch yourselves, keep low, keep safe.
Having pulled her team in on the IM, Amiga catches Raid’s eye. “The footage,” she says. “We’ve been thrown to the wolves. Classic duPont.”
“What do we do?”
Amiga thinks a moment, trying to find a good way to say “not much” and failing, because that’s it now. If they’re being targeted they can’t do jack shit without attracting the unwanted attention of a bunch of mercs and Cleaners for hire fixing to shoot themselves a tasty wedge of whatever bounty it is duPont’s slapped on their heads. Perhaps fortunately, she doesn’t get a chance to find a way to share this—shots fired across the rooftops glance past her shoulder and catch Raid’s cheek, tearing a score from mouth to ear.
Hissing, he plasters a hand over it, the slap of palm to skin echoing into the hard ricochet of more shots. These ones are close enough to send sparks flying on
to their legs. In perfect sync, they drop to crouches.
“Fuck, I can’t see the direction,” she snaps.
“I’m not moving,” Raid says, as if she even asked.
Throwing him a nine point eight on the Richter scale of scorn, Amiga moves with swift purpose, trying to draw attention to herself whilst scouting the area. There’s a flash of movement. Brief. Tiny. Then more shots from that direction, too close for comfort, one so close it burns her ear. Gotcha. It’s a Cleaner too, no mistaking that precision on a moving target.
Over there, she says. It’s a pro. You okay to run interference?
Raid growls. Not even, but what the hell. We’ll draw fire, you go get the fucker.
Keep random. You’ll probably catch a few more scores but it’s too sheltered to get a proper kill shot.
He nods over to Aggie and Sim, who run over, keeping low. They still manage to pull fire, prompting Sim, their resident Imp—who only Imps for good these days—to up the levels on her cham-suit to reflect almost everything, making Amiga’s head throb.
“Don’t be too camo,” she whispers. “I need you to draw fire, not avoid it.”
“You going to get them?”
“That’s the plan.”
Sim nods once. Sharp. “I like the plan.”
With no more words, only signals, they move off, Sim dialled down but still camo enough to be a disorienting blur of moving roof. Backing away to the edge, Amiga sources a drainpipe and shimmies down to street level, cursing her everything and accessing internal GPS from the local Pirater server to find the quickest route to get around behind the direction of fire without having to keep checking, just letting her mind and feet work together.
Climbing up drainpipes is always worse than climbing down, and she has to go slow, careful not to distract the Cleaner firing at her team. Soft as a cat, she shadows the bastard until she’s close enough to get a good look and has to bite back on a curse. Even side on, she recognizes that face. Of course it had to be him, didn’t it? The universe loves having a hoot at her expense—loves shoving her stupid mistakes right in her face, like rubbing a puppy’s nose in piss. This is going to be awkward.
Wearing full-on headgear to gain long-distance advantage, he’s crouched up against the side of a chimney, taking careful pot-shots at her Hornets and swearing audibly in guttural French every time he misses—she learnt half those words from him, which is why she never uses them, no matter how effective they are. Sneaking in close enough to be his actual shadow, Amiga retrieves his knife from his belt and slides an arm around his throat, pulling him nice and close. Personal like.
“So, Falk,” she says in his ear, matter of fact. “I guess there’s a price on some Hornets, yeah?”
Carefully, he places his gun down. Holds up his hands. “You were triangulating me.”
“Bingo.”
“Fuck. Not my fucking day, is it?”
To say she and this piece of shit have history is an understatement. Falk was a short term lay on the make. He was the one who introduced her to the Bone Market when her target went under. All hunky-dory until he tried to kill her, which royally pissed her off. So much, in fact, that even looking at him all these years later, with revenge well and truly dealt to his guts and enough water under the bridge to float a land ship, she still wants to kill him.
“Nope, it’s not. Care to spill the beans on our price? Maybe choke up the whereabouts of Cartel HQ while you’re at it? I know you know. You worked for Lucian back when you did long-term contracts and he’s like a barnacle with seriously classy taste; he’ll find a sweet-looking rock and stick to it.”
He groans. “I cannot believe this.”
“Gotta love your luck, now do some talking. I’m feeling very twitchy, I might cut off something you need accidentally.”
“It’s duPont, yeah, so it’s a lot. A cool three hundred thou per head.”
“Per head?” This is why Amiga hates surprise, they’re inevitably the best way to a heart attack. “Fuck sake! You best cough up the addy of an HQ. No way I’m fine combing this fucking Christmas decoration for one second more with that kind of price hanging over the heads of half my peeps.”
Falk drops his head back to look at her. “Look, you already damn near gutted me, and from your general demeanour I’m guessing you’re itching to finish the job, meaning I’m dead no matter what. Besides which, you killed Twist by shooting holes in your own lung—as insane goes, that’s pretty high up the scale.”
“How the hell did that get around?”
“Everything gets around, Amiga. Cleaners gossip like grandmas. You know this. Upshot is, you’re literally going to kill me, so I’m not saving my life with this info. Ergo, I’m saying nothing.”
She purses her lips. Cleaners. Trouble with not being scared of much is that you’re not scared of fucking much. She digs around for something that might, on a bad day, give her enough pause to reconsider her choices. “So say I leave you alive but carve a few vital organs out? You could maybe get a print refill if you call the Meds in time? You registered here yet?”
“Oh fuck you.”
The tension in his body is slight, barely enough to feel, but she feels it. Nailed it. Moving the knife around, allowing the point to press in a little too hard, she asks again. Nicely.
“Cartel HQ? Pretty please.”
* * *
She’s wiping her hands off when the Hornets find her, having followed GPS coords she threw into their IM. Raid looks at the fresh blood all over her jeans and sighs.
“Another one?”
Amiga hefts the gun, refusing to feel bad. Falk knew what he was doing, and he knew the consequences, and now she has a pretty sniper rifle and a passable knife. “Waste not, want not. It was quick; I knew this guy. Anyway, I have an address, so we need to move, because the price per head is scary high and I took the liberty of borrowing the visuals given out to anyone joining the bounty hunt. There’s a load of us ID’d. If we don’t take out the Cartel leadership, or at the very least tie up their accounts, we’ll be running forever.”
You could tell me the addy, I can remote jack it to shreds. Deuce, not happy with the whole hit-the-HQ thing, even though that was their original plan and she has a gun now. Totally doable.
It won’t be accessible, Deuce. Dead zoned.
And who told you this?
The guy whose blood is on my jeans.
I genuinely did not need to know that.
So why ask? Anyway, we have a rendezvous point. We’ll hit in the next half an hour. You need to get those surveillance streams jacked and in our drives, so we can see what’s coming.
I need to be there.
Negative. Sort streams, keep an eye on Shock, and get moving with Tracker the second we have the dead zone down to jack the Cartel and wipe them. Everything. The whole lot. The only thing we need is their location elsewhere if this isn’t the mother ship. You get me?
His silence speaks volumes, blasting her with all manner of disapproval. There’ll be time for him to give her that piece of mind he’s longing to share when they’re free and clear. For now, he’ll just have to fume. Ah, combat brain. That good ole emotionless state of eerie calm before the storm. Amiga likes combat brain; it bypasses all the thorny emotional crap. Gives her freedom to move without conscience.
And she sorely needs it. They’re horrendously exposed, pick up several shadows with good guns on the way to the address Falk provided. Amiga, Raid and Aggie all manage to pot-shot a couple out of the running, but the heat gets way too serious, too many Hornets hit bad enough to require makeshift tourniquets and assistance, and they’re forced to steal some hover cars—luxury sedans. That’s when things get really interesting. Turns out wealthy Parisians really take offence to having their rides jacked.
Within seconds they have gendarme on their bumpers, fucking hordes of them like some J-drama where fleets of cops come out of the woodwork like they’ve been conjured. And racing down streets between neo-classical terraces w
ith gendarme wailing at your back is a sure-fire way to attract the attention of every bounty hunter in a twenty-mile radius, who all seem to have hover-bikes, riding close enough to shoot out their windows, smothering them in square chunks of glass.
“Fuck this shit,” Amiga snarls. “Raid, get me alongside one of these bastards.”
“Don’t do a dumb thing,” he says, although he does as she asks.
Amiga leans out of the window. Grabs at the jacket of the merc they’re driving beside, who slaps her hand away and scoots out of the way. Raid drives her in again. This time she gets a good grip on the back of his jacket and tugs, yanking him off the bike and into the door with a sickening thud. His weight damn near cracks her wrist, so she lets go, allowing him to drop to the road beneath the car, but not before she steals the handgun from his chest holster.
“Shame these things have no tyres.”
“Shame you have no sense,” Raid whips back.
“Hey I got one, didn’t I?”
He gives her a pointed glare in the rear view. “There are dozens more. No way I’m playing that game with all of them.”
Amiga holds up the gun. “That’s why I stole this. No way I’m wasting more sniper shots on these cunts.”
Raid tries and fails to hold back on laughter. “Okay, you win,” he admits as she leans out, takes aim, and begins to fire deliberate shots. “That’s brilliant.”
The address Falk reluctantly gave her is a terrace chateau. New. Or rather old remade new. One of those smashed-together blocks with severe modern interiors, ugly as high-end clubs. The sort that you don’t mind ruffling up a little.
Working in their usual seamless style, even with several of their number bleeding, some quite heavily, the Hornets manage to evade their pursuers and break in through fancy but entirely useless revolving doors. Aggie, their practical Tech, jams the mechanisms to keep the gendarme out. That’s about as good as it gets. The total score here is a big, fat nil.
The only Cartel in the place are a small number of military units similar to the ones they had after them on the Gung, and Corp Execs who look like they’ve never even seen a gun, especially not one pointed at them.