by Ren Warom
The roof is empty of guards, which surprises Amiga, until they get to the entrance of the Solarium and find it bio-locked.
“Peachy,” she says, kicking the bottom of the door. “Just fucking peachy.”
“Cool it, Cleaner,” Shock says, and rams his way in front of her. “I’ve got this. Key, remember?”
“I thought it wasn’t strictly a key any more?”
“No, but it hasn’t forgotten how to open and close shit.”
Shock’s fingertip flares gold on the pad, and the door yawns open to reveal a humid interior, wafting the stench of rotting vegetation into her face. Too many bad smells lately. If that’s not a metaphor for her life, Amiga has no idea what is. Hand over her nose, she follows Shock in, noting his sudden quiet. There’s quite the force of fury contained within it. A side of him that seems to be new. Post-murder.
Or maybe she missed it before?
Thinking about all he’s done and been forced to do in the past five weeks, she realizes the fury has been growing since the loss of Shark. Shark was made by him instead of given to him. It’s more than likely Shark wasn’t just an avatar but an impulse given form to contain it, a part of himself Shock either wanted or needed to deny or corral. Shock told her how he killed Ho, but he missed out the important part: when he unleashed Shark on Ho, he was really unleashing himself.
And with Shark gone, that unleashing is unravelling.
Her Shock was always a predator, the difference is that he’s stopped being able to pretend he’s not, and it looks like he’s begun to accept that. Cleaner to the core, Amiga finds a measure of comfort in that realization. Whatever happens from here on in, she can trust him to make the hard decisions, the bloody ones. No more protection racket—her job is to make sure he’s free to do what he needs to, and she can do that. It will be her distinct pleasure.
Expectations are strange things. Amiga expected the solarium to be quiet, perhaps some music—in her experience people like Dong love a bit of classical music— definitely the dragonflies Dong’s famous for droning beneath it all. And she does hear that, but instead of a musical accompaniment is a low sort of moaning gurgle. The sound of pain. Of injury. Coming out into the centre of the solarium the injured party proves to be a semi-handsome, slightly overweight salaryman type being attacked by what looks like a golden dragon made of leaves. An avatar of all things.
He’s not even attempting to prevent its frenzied passage around his head. He’s just lying there in a pool of blood in the shattered remains of a bulbous carnivorous plant, soaked in its juices. Shirt, trousers, every damn thing, covered in yellowish liquid. It’s even in his hair somehow. He’s also missing a thumb that, if Amiga’s not mistaken and she rarely is with body parts, is the mangled piece of squished flesh on the floor. Made more mangled as a minute, delicate old lady in a motorized wheelchair drives over it again and again, chuckling merrily.
Dong. More deranged and deadly than Amiga thought, and more beautiful.
The salaryman type fixates on the remains of the thumb and starts making this sound, a sort of whine like a kettle boiled too long on the stove. He’s gonna pop. Dong responds with a noise that reminds Amiga acutely of her own grandmother—a little tchk of impatience—and spins the chair toward him, speeding forward, her right hand clutching bloody secateurs.
Moving without thinking, Amiga leaps into Dong’s path, ramming her boots against the tyres to stall them. Leaning in over the tiny, hunched madwoman, close enough to smell the powdery perfume in her elaborate hairdo, Amiga grabs the hand clutching the secateurs, instantly surprised at the sinewy strength of it. Putting her whole back into it, she manages to wrestle the secateurs away. The little avatar comes zipping over and Amiga swats it. Her hand swiping through. It tingles.
“Fuck off,” she snaps. It ignores her, charging her again and again as, in the corner of her eye, she watches Deuce and the others move in to help the salaryman. Wow, leave her to it why not? Jeez. Below her, Dong growls. With both hands, she latches on to Amiga’s face and tugs her forward. Nails digging in and tearing she screams in her face. Harpy loud. Reducing her world to noise and comets of gold exploding into her face. Oh hell no, bitch.
“Shut. Up.”
Lifting the secateurs, she plunges the blades into Dong’s mouth. She doesn’t anticipate the feel of lips warm against her hands, or the sickening ease with which the blades slide down into Dong’s throat. All the way down, muscular oesophageal tissues scraping at Amiga’s knuckles.
Everything stops. The world on pause like someone hit a button. The avatar freezes. Dong coughs, almost polite. Gurgles. Her eyes roll up in her head right to the sclera, pale and shiny as boiled eggs. She convulses once, then again. The second time throws Amiga on to the floor, dropping her into plant digestive juices that soak through the seat of her jeans, making her shiver.
Pulling herself up and immediately scrubbing her hands dry on her clothes, Amiga watches Dong start to spin in circles, choking out noises like air escaping a tyre, her fingers grabbing blindly at her face, at the secateurs, so far down her throat only the tips of the handles are visible. The sight of them is ridiculous. Awful. They look so uncomfortable Amiga almost wants to get up and pull them out.
But she wants to watch Dong die more. Even when the avatar rushes forward to spin around with her, as if trying to catch her. The alarm, the despair, the agony of it drives into Amiga, slicing straight past everything she puts in the way of what she does.
Dong’s hands stutter. Flutter away. Fall to her sides. In slow revolutions, her chair stops moving. Her chest heaves one more time, as if drawing in air for a scream and her head flops to the side at a strange angle, which is one hell of a conundrum until Amiga realizes the secateurs are so far down her neck’s actually stuck. She blinks, trying to process. And then the avatar explodes in a shower of gold.
That’s when she starts laughing, and finds she can’t stop.
Deuce strides over and hauls her into his arms. She fights him for precisely thirty seconds, until she realizes she’s crying. A lot. Which is weird. What’s weirder is how much better that feels than the laughing did. And holding on to him? That’s about a million times better.
“What the hell?” she says, muffled in his chest and thick with stupid, pointless, unwanted tears.
“It hit you wrong. You’ll be okay.”
“I wanted her dead. I was fine. I was fine.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs into her hair. “I thought you were too until you started laughing. Don’t do that again.”
* * *
Sitting on the floor in the remains of the plant Dong tried feeding his thumb to, and one hell of a lot of his own blood, Hu Hai tries to process the last ten minutes and fails miserably. One second he was watching his thumb meet a second, third and fourth grisly end under Dong’s tyres and then Hornets buzzed into the room with a Haunt and a Cleaner at their head and changed everything.
They’re nothing like he imagined them to be, especially the Haunt and the Cleaner. The Cleaner needs a damn good shower and she looks way too young, with her battered boots over ripped jeans and bright-red anime tee. As for the Haunt, he looks like someone threw him into a candy machine and then dressed him in rags, and his eyes, wow, bluer than sky.
He can’t deny the sheer physical threat of them though, despite their visual lunacy. Their presence is magnetic. Extends out to swallow the whole room. He wants to do something dramatic; stand up and present Dong like a trophy, like a prize girl on one of Sakkura’s crappy live game shows, only his side aches too damn much to move and then Dong’s racing at him and all he can do is think oh shit.
The Cleaner snaps into focus. She’s on Dong before he can blink, wrestling the secateurs out of her grasp. At this point the avatar buzzing around his head deserts him to attack the Cleaner and he’s surrounded by overly helpful Hornets blocking his view, which is partly a relief but mostly an aggravation. He wants to see Dong die. Wanted to kill her himself, but death by Cleaner wil
l do. He hears the Cleaner tell Dong to shut up. Dong coughs. Gurgles. Her chair whines and whines as she gurgles and then stops.
The Cleaner starts laughing.
Hu Hai’s flight instinct explodes so hard his body jolts, but the loss of blood and the general unpleasantness of the day have all but wiped him out, and he’s able to do nothing but sit and be patched up by a perfectly jovial Indian called Ravi. Ravi’s a revelation. Gets the copious bleeding in his thumb and side under control with such amazing speed Hu Hai’s half convinced he must have passed out for a moment and missed something.
When he’s bandaged, Ravi moves aside, revealing the Haunt, who’s staring at him. Those electric-blue eyes are devoid of any friendliness. “The farm. You were behind that.”
Hu Hai finds himself doing that nodding thing. The thing where you can’t stop. He feels like a car ornament. “No choice you understand. You don’t say no to Dong. She’s been sat in my drive, driving me crazy. Terribly sorry. No offence meant.” The Haunt’s brow shoots up and he reaches out to pat Hu Hai’s shoulder, not even noticing when he attempts to shrink away.
“How’d she find us?”
“Er… Techs. We had software geared to look for physical quirks. Running thousands of hours of stream footage. Tracked you down myself in Hunin. That Wi Ji Lin. In a bar, with your friend Vivid. Made sure it was him and then followed them back.”
The Haunt groans. “Knee Jerk? You fucking followed Knee Jerk?”
Hu Hai swallows. “Uh… yeah.”
“That wasn’t cool. Not a bit of it. So you maybe want to make up for a few things. Dong’s soldiers took Gail, the farm manager. You have any idea where he is in here? If he’s alive?”
Shaking his head, Hu Hai says, “I didn’t go with the soldiers. I went back to Hunin. Got drunk. Freaked about what Dong would do to me. She tanked my life. All gone. Everything. I came here to kill her. I tried. I really did. So sorry.”
The Haunt pats Hu Hai on the shoulder again. “Chill. Amiga took care of that.” He looks at Ravi. “Look after him,” he says. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything rash. I’m going to scan for Gail.”
Ravi sketches a salute with two fingers. “You got it.”
“She won’t kill me, will she?” Hu Hai feels compelled to ask.
Pursing his lips, Ravi looks over at the Cleaner, currently in the arms of Deuce, the sane one. Hu Hai always thought of him that way—in the streams of the Hornets at work he looked in control. Organized. And he emanates calm, like a Buddhist shrine. Ravi sniffs; it doesn’t sound convincing. “She shouldn’t do. Just… don’t talk any more about Shandong being your doing, and especially not about using Knee Jerk. That will not go down well.”
“No?”
Ravi looks at him, and it’s far less friendly. Hu Hai’s shown the man beneath the jovial mask, and his heart starts pounding again. “No,” Ravi says softly. “Not with any of us.”
Less Than Zero
Losing the Zeros on Paris Hub hurt. Actual physical pain. Being tangled into their neural networks as they were subjected to wounds or blows sent the signals travelling to Zen’s body. Having felt so little for so long it struck her in unexpected ways. She used to be frightened of physical pain, but now all it does is make her long to be active again, to be out of this bubble and in the world.
It makes her impatient.
Waiting grates on her. Five weeks awake. Five weeks of patient play, of waiting for the pieces to come together, and then Emblem brought the Haunt here. Its intention was to warn. To encourage him to rethink coming to do what Mollie demanded, what Zenada knew full well she would ask if prodded in just the right way. His visit sparked such urgency. Such desperate need. And then this pain, this memory of life. She’s done with waiting. She wants out. Now.
She needs to bring Zeros to her signal, draw them close enough so she can see the outside of the place she’s been imprisoned. Find out where she’s being held. Reaching out to the closest Zero minds, she wastes no time with delicacy, tearing into them, forcing her control on them, whipping at them like cattle and yanking them to her. Insisting.
They come too slowly. She wants them to run. To sprint. But Zeros are sick and addled and she’s forced to bear with them as they make their way through streets frustratingly familiar to her—too blurred and confused through their senses to make proper sense of. Until she sees the building her signal emanates from in waves, pulling on their minds, their bodies. It almost makes her cry. She knows where she is.
Home. New York Hub.
That Breaker trapped her here is beyond cruelty. This, the Peace Tower, was built by her family, for themselves and for New York Hub, when they moved here from the Gung. They paid billions to buy not just an old ’scraper, but the land beneath it, so they could demolish, build a monument, a landmark, something New York could add to its skyline with pride. A white tower. A white tower with a white room. Josef couldn’t be cruel, so Breaker was cruel for him.
Love. What will it not do? And they call it pure. Ridiculous. Love is vicious.
Attacking and removing anything in her way, infecting anything she can’t use them to physically beat, and ignoring the pain any injury to their bodies causes her, Zen brings the Zeros to her, driving them up staircases and through bright, white corridors until she sees her prison through their eyes.
She makes them strike at the bubble from the outside until their hands are bloodied, their bones broken, achieving nothing but red smears all over her view.
Not enough. Not good enough.
She needs the key. And if he won’t bring it to her, she’ll just have to send something to fetch it.
* * *
The Hornets are busy doing essential clear up, covering their tracks by getting rid of bodies and deleting streams. They’ve just packed a pathetically grateful Hu Hai off, cleaned up and dressed in a suit found in one of the offices, with a bunch of flim stolen from various cred chips and DL’d to his when Vivid calls in with news of duPont’s death and the capture of Jessamine and Iyawa. They’re free and clear from Tokyo, tired, injured and hungry, but they’re one hundred percent hot to trot to get to Shanghai and deal with Tsai Holdings—as long as they get to nap and stop for noodles. Music to Amiga’s ears.
The best news of the day, in fact, until Shock confirms he’s found Gail in the building. Locked away in what seems to be a panic room in Dong’s private office and lounge on the level just below the solarium.
“How many guards?” she asks.
“Several. A big group of soldiers and two female guards—her personal ones I think. Fuck knows why she sent them down.”
“Not like she didn’t have poor old Hu Hai in hand, was it?”
“Guess not. Anyway, they’re all armed, and we have no guns.”
“As soon as they know Dong is dead, they’ll kill him.”
Shock nods. “Agreed.”
“Let’s move then,” Deuce says, pushing past. “And quickly. I’ll see if Tracker can remote-jack her systems to get that panic room open.”
“I can get that,” Shock says.
Deuce raises a brow. “Could be locked with her thumbprint.”
Amiga snags out her knife. Always practical. “Best cut off a hand then, just in case.”
Deuce grabs her wrist. Flays her with a look she’d rather not interpret. It’s not like she’s still in the same zone she was in after taking Dong down. And severing a hand? That shit has seriously low odds of throwing her back there.
“I’ll do it.”
“Jeez, Deuce, I’m all back in business. No more crazy moments. Cross my heart.”
“Yeah. I know. But I’ll do it.”
He’s got this set to his jaw. Cement-like. She could crack herself against it a little more, or let it go and get on with doing right by Gail. Flipping the handle toward him, she lets Deuce take the knife. Watches him walk away. Shock steps in close enough for their shoulders to touch. Unlike Dong, Shock feels as fragile as he looks. Takes a lot to put him down though
, that’s for sure.
“He’s good to you.” Stating the obvious is a skill. Shock has it in spades.
“Too damn good.”
“No such thing. I’d say he’s good enough.”
And Amiga can’t really muster an argument for that, having begun to reach the same reluctant conclusion herself. Not only about Deuce, but all the Hornets. They’re something else. Something she desperately did not want to deserve, but here’s the rub, the simple, complicated, beautiful truth—sometimes you don’t have to deserve something, sometimes you just get it anyway, because someone wants you to have it.
The panic room is behind Dong’s ornate, unused office, in her private lounge, a room with a window facing the curve of the dome, giving a perfect view of Hong Kong’s skyline with earth rising in the background and space above, rife with stars. Why is it these power-hungry types like to stare at all of earth and space? Do they fantasize being like Queens and stomping all over it? Stopping at the door, they brace on either side out of sight, watching the guards to see if there’s any way they can take them by surprise.
Isn’t right she had a view like that. Shock’s fixated on the stars, the distant blue of the ocean, muted under cloud and atmosphere.
Who’s to say she didn’t appreciate it?
It’s probably the wrong moment for devil’s advocate but what the hell, hearing her own thoughts from Shock made her realize how close that shit is to setting Dong into her own category, when she’s just human. Just a shitty, self-absorbed human. You’ve gotta acknowledge that, or you risk ending up the same way. Selfishness is such an easy fucking choice.
Appreciation isn’t the point, he mutters. Shitty people shouldn’t have nice things.
Shitty people invariably have nice things. Being shitty got them nice things.
Why the fuck is that?
Because life is absurd. Nothing makes any sense. Her conclusion, from a hella long time ago. But she’s willing to bet mountains of flim on it being true.