I missed my guns.
I took a shower in the crappy standup, which took longer than I liked my showers to be. Given the chance of water poisoning at any given part of the city on any given day, the safest disinfectant comes in the form of highly regulated and intense bursts of ionized radiation. People who make a decent living tend to have a nice radiation unit with speed settings. People who make enough to floss their asscracks with credsticks usually boast several units and a supply line into a private water purification process.
In this rundown shack, the radiation wasn’t so much a burst as a queef.
I stood there for ten minutes, naked and sweating, as the radiation took care of anything I’d picked up in the lab or on my adventurous trek through the city. I could have simply sprayed myself down with a can of sanitizer, but I liked radiation better. It’s always thorough, dry, and doesn’t leave you smelling like you’d rolled in alcohol and deodorant.
Shocking what a civilization with cancer-ending nanos and a complete lack of moral ethics could come up with.
My shower was slow, true, but at least the place had one. The city took radiation sanitation seriously. It kept some of the nastier infections from spreading among the cramped populace.
The downside to standing here was all the time it gave me to fume over Greg’s miserable failure of a reach-out. Married, cheated on her, and trying to hit me up for payday over it.
I mean, even if we got on like slankers and whores, he was police, not corporate. The boys in blue rank lower, pull shit duty, and have about as much security clearance as I did. Less, really. I knew people who could skate along clearance lines for the right price. Police get a gob full of red tape for the trouble.
Besides, helping me would probably cost him his job. I’d deny it if anyone called me soft, but now that I knew he had that little kid of his to feed, I was even less inclined to bring him on. He smelled like bait, and my line of work wasn’t easy credit.
Even if we spent it like it was.
I pulled my clothes on – the second of three sets I stashed, and none worth more than the time it took to dial them up from a cheap printer. Replacing the nanosteel jewelry I’d lost was just as easy. I’d get better shit later.
The light rod hanging from the ceiling painted the room in soft gold, providing me enough illumination to get dressed by. It turned on automatically at night, then spent the day recharging from the ambient daylight. Good tool. I always made it a habit to have one in any place I squatted in.
I opted for universal black pants, built a lot like the BDUs I’d stolen but better fitting. They bagged around my legs, loose enough to let me run without cinching, riddled with cargo pockets, and hung low enough on my hipbones that the light tattoo on my lower back was easy to see. Given my intended location, I would have gone for a sexier vibe, but I didn’t want to waste my red vinyl. Just in case tonight’s plan went cock-side-up and blood flew.
An electric yellow wraparound halter bared my arms, which meant nothing to get in my way. Dancing. Fighting. Breaking limbs. I was multipurpose like that. It folded around my nape, wrapped around my ribs. The front tapered to a point over my waistband, covering my navel and baring my back. If it got shredded, I’d call it street chic and wear it anyway.
The design showed off my ink. Since my genes had never been pure enough for my uptight mother anyway, I’d taken my authority issues a step further and burned the genetically formulated white right out of myself using as many colors as I could get away with. My right arm and shoulder sported an esoteric map that started with a retro Dia de los Muertos skull and graduated to toxic flowers and abstract designs. I’d had all the bare spots between shaded, outlined, textured by whatever the street artists had wanted to draw.
More vivid color stained my left ribs, my hip, all the way down my left thigh. My left shoulder had once been home to a lotus that matched Nanji’s and Indigo’s – most of us on the regular team sported at least one – but that had gone up in smoke with the rest of my arm.
A thought turned the vid-ink up to a thin gleam. Luminescent lights dotted the designs in complex patterns.
The pants could conceal more than a handful of weapons, but tonight, I only slid a single knife into my thick-soled, matte silver boots. The sheath fit right into the cuff, ideal for just this occasion. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t need it.
I didn’t put a whole lot of stock in luck, which explained the serrated interceptor blade. I was going in as close to naked as I could get while clothed. I didn’t like the feeling. My instincts screamed that I needed more – more weapons, more heat, more fury.
I didn’t know what was going on, but somebody was going to die for it. Brutally. Since I couldn’t achieve that without Indigo and the team, I had no choice but to check my shit and focus on the next step.
Nanji deserved better. Across the board, she deserved better. I’d make sure the jackhole behind it all knew her name when he died. Preferably with my fist in his chest.
I ran my hands through my hair, wrinkled my nose at the state of my borrowed crash pad. A layer of grime had settled over everything, like a dust storm had wandered by and I’d left the windows cracked. Totally not healthy. Was it this bad last I checked?
When was the last time I even cleaned?
At least now I could tell myself that dead girls didn’t have to clean.
Ah, shit. That reminded me, far too late. I should have brought that damned tablet out with me. Aside from the obvious problem – you know, that part where I wasn’t actually dead – it could have served as proof when I hit people up for answers.
Then again, if I’d done that, Fagan would have gotten his fat fingers on it. I doubt he would have recognized the value of the information.
Chunking cops.
By reflex, I grabbed for my harness out of habit and remembered that it wasn’t hanging on the edge of the window sill anymore. Fuck. It killed me that I’d lost my gear to that shithole I’d woken up in. I loved that harness. It was designed to carry almost any weapon I needed through its ingeniously constructed straps, and I’d broken it in perfectly over the past four years. It, along with all the weapons I’d been carrying when I vanished into that lab, would be mourned.
Assholes. That would cost them, too. Just as soon as I got the help I needed.
Some SINless runners work alone, banding into teams only when a job requires it, staying together long enough to get the job done and get paid. The problem with that life is the longevity. A good take split four ways suddenly becomes better split three, even better two, and best for one.
If you want a long – well, longer – life in this business, you find a group of people you trust and you make them trust you. You run together, take on jobs everybody understands, and split the take fairly. I’d found that in Nanjali and Indigo Koupra.
One old man may have taken my cocky swagger and turned it into a lethal machine – no pun intended, since the same old man had outfitted my arm – but Nanji and Digo had made sure I survived the effort. We watched each others’ backs. Got in, got out, got paid. We’d gotten good at it, built up a hell of a team. Cred came fast and easy. Well, easier than going alone, anyway.
Indigo had always been the brains of the operation. He was a dervish with a computer and knew more people than I’d met in my whole life – a qualified linker no matter what side of the divide. You know that person who always seemed to have a guy? A clothes guy, a getaway guy, a tickets guy.
Digo was that person. He had a guy for damn near everything.
Unlike the rest of us, he’d always kept an eye on the team’s bottom line. Nanji’d gone with gut, which explained why we’d bonded, but numbers were Digo’s love affair. Numbers and information, and Nanjali.
We didn’t always gel about the latter.
If anybody knew what was going on, what happened to me and Nanji and how to get to her, it would be Digo. And I knew the club to locate him. Calling him would have been easier, but at the same time, I didn’t trust
him not to fry my chipset with a temper tantrum – not that it wouldn’t be well within his rights to do it.
If it were me, I’d do worse. Even knowing what I knew. Facing Digo in meatspace meant I had a shot at kicking his ass if he came at me.
I seriously hoped he’d hear me out first.
I didn’t bother with makeup. My eyebrows were as brown as my roots, my lashes dark enough that compared to my bleached platinum hair, it looked like I made an effort. Besides, makeup smears, unless you have the program to keep it in check, and I didn’t. Surprise. More tech I didn’t have.
I took a quick glance at myself in the cracked bathroom mirror, turned to make sure the neon pink arrow at the base of my spine shone brightly, and nodded to my reflection. The nanos, fueled by the protein boost I’d inhaled earlier and some much-needed sleep, had finally repaired the damage to my face. The blood was cleaned, swelling vanished, headache gone, and my nose looked no worse for wear.
I was obviously a thug. There was no hiding it. I’d never make a best-dressed list and I wasn’t anyone’s idea of arm candy, but I looked fierce, lethal, and wired to blow.
I had this. As much as it was going to suck to look Indigo in the eye and tell him I’d watched his sister die, I was pretty sure he’d be all for finding out why.
The why would lead to the rest of the whys rattling around in my head – why we’d been down there, why I couldn’t remember anything.
That data was worth killing for. Hopefully Digo would see the value in that. It was all I had to give.
I hoped it was enough.
5
The Mecca had a distinctly fetishized Eastern Indian vibe to it, which explained why the Koupras had adopted the place as our unofficial turf. It took up residence in the rack – the district midway between corp gloss and street shine, filled with a metric asston of other clubs. Just one in a long list of too loud, too bright, too full, low-cost, merc-friendly joints. A lotus flower outlined in startlingly bright neon was its only sign, and the clientele usually came out of SINless ranks.
We tend to blow creds like we have the stuff to swallow.
The Mecca was a dance floor, a fully stocked bar, an overstocked drug cartel, a brothel, a meeting place, and job forum. It was run by a woman who called herself Shiva – like some old god – and there was a lot of rumor about her original state of being.
Transwoman, fashion savvy man in drag, ass-kicking cis female, it didn’t matter to me. I didn’t ask. She was gorgeous, soft-spoken to anyone who wasn’t really listening; mostly Kongtown with some bottom-shelf mix of ethnic markers too muddled to place at a glance. And she had a single rule: unless creds changed accounts first, nobody fucked with what was hers.
The woman’s dick was bigger than mine in the only ways I cared about – she owned the turf, and had saved our asses more times and in more ways than I cared to admit. For a fee, naturally.
Otherwise, the Mecca was a haven for those of us without a Security Identification Number and the go-to for some of the best highs this side of the Fourteenth Divide.
As I pushed inside the foyer doors, neon popped and flared across the darkened entry. Music slammed into me like a velvet fist, a savage beat that thrust into my chest and twisted. The sticky, cloying heat of the city turned into the slick, hungry swell of writhing bodies, slamming everything they had – flesh and bone, need and naked rage – on the dance floor.
The bouncer inside gave me a cursory once-over, but didn’t bother with a full scan. That was Shiva’s policy. Anything that damaged her business, she pulled out of skin and favors. It’s our own risk to take.
I grinned at the beefy black man perched on a stool that looked ready to splinter underneath his bulk. Unlike Fagan, Jad was all muscle, all the time, and didn’t mind flexing it when he needed to. I wouldn’t say he was all natural, but he didn’t showcase any metal and I’d seen him deadlifting three times his own body weight. That left any number of enhancements that wouldn’t ping anything short of a gene-sniffer.
“Hey, baby,” he greeted, his slow, sultry bass booming over the music’s beat. “Long time no see. Thought you’d gone and left me for good.”
I grinned, waving that away like the worthless air it was. The streaks of light accenting my ink left thin trails in the dark. “Hasn’t been that long.”
A large, thickly groomed eyebrow climbed up his pronounced brow, almost lost but for the neon barrage around us. “You finally here to give me a piece of that action?”
He wasn’t talking about me. While I was pretty sure Jad liked women fine, I only knew of one thing that made his palms sweat and his eyes light like the inside of a nuclear reactor.
Munitions.
Specifically, my Mantis Industries Valiant 14, one of only fifty ever manufactured and a gift from the man who’d saved my life when I was young and stupid and a cocky little shit. Where Lucky had gotten it, he’d never said.
Although Mantis’s reputation wasn’t built on arms, the Valiant 14 was a joint experiment between it and rival company TaberTek. It outclassed, outperformed, outravaged everything else on the market, but to hear Jad tell it, true love was never meant to be. Before the Valiant could hit mass production, the corporate world rumbled, the big money maw split wide, and TaberTek crumbled like so much dust.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my favorite firearm was missing. Thinking about the attached heat baffle specially built for deadly 12mm rounds and included laser sight would only make me tear up. Like my harness, I’d make them pay for its loss.
My smile faded to a grimace. “Man, you are hard on a girl’s ego.”
He laughed, his even white teeth brilliantly stark against his dark as a sinner’s wet dream skin. “Like you need me on that ass, fine as it is.” He said it the way men breathed; like he didn’t even think about it. Jad was a sweetheart.
I’d also seen him tear a merc’s head off with his bare hands. So there was that.
“No Valiant, then. You carrying tonight?”
I shook my head, and when he raised his eyebrows, added, “An interceptor in my boot.”
“Not your usual.”
“Aw, Jad.” I blew him a kiss. “You worried about little old me?”
He rolled his broad shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. Go on, girl.” He jerked a thick, square thumb to the beaded curtain behind him. “Digo’s in there somewhere, been here hours already.”
Exactly what I wanted to know.
A knot formed in my guts. I bumped my knuckles against Jad’s and pushed through the swinging curtain. It clattered, the sound all but lost under the frenetic pace of the trancelike beat.
Whatever else I’d missed, the Mecca wasn’t hurting for love. The floor was packed, a writhing, rhythmic sea of skin and neon and metal; just as I remembered it last. Sweat gleamed where the lights skimmed over the crowd, eyes and light tattoos and bits of tech left hanging out reflecting it back in a myriad of colors. The smell – spicy, sweaty, thick with a thousand different base notes and a top shade of lust – slammed into me.
Something kicked in my chest. As if that velvet fist uncurled, it thumped back against the cage of my ribs and begged to be let free.
All that skin. All those naked limbs.
All that hunger.
I flattened my bare hand against my breastbone, teeth clenched as I staggered for a nearby pillar.
The place was full of them, heavy decorative columns twined with reflective fabric designed to catch the light and bend it into diamond glints. I leaned against the support, resting my head back, my throat bared as I swallowed a jagged knot of something lodged there.
What the hell? Maybe my nanos hadn’t entirely recharged yet. An emergency recharge and one protein shake wouldn’t cut it.
It took me a few, but as soon as I could breathe without feeling like I was going to choke on something, I flagged down a serving girl – a pretty redhead with wide hips and a cute rack. Shiva was obviously on another sari kick. This girl wore enough fake silk to smo
ther a mummy, most of it trailing from the swatches covering her breasts and crotch, and her light tattoos mimicked electric green mehndi designs. She looked like something straight out of a pervy Indian fantasy.
Pretty much what people like me paid for.
She flashed me a smile, cute as hell. “What can I get you?”
“A recharge,” I shouted over the beat, “and Indigo.”
“The drink or the man?”
I’d forgotten the bartenders had named a cocktail after him. Sharp on the tongue, hard on the wallet, and mana on the brain cells. My mouth twisted into a wry grin. “The man.”
She pointed past the dance floor, where one of seven ornate arches carved into the fake stone façade, and vanished back into the crowd. Lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl – or what was supposed to look like it – glinted over the arch, while sheer fabric hung underneath in a semblance of privacy.
Not the usual room. We may have been among Shiva’s favorites, but some clients paid more.
I didn’t trust my energy reserves on the dance floor yet, so I circled it. The lights flashed and popped, strobed counter to the frenzied beat turning the dark feverish. If I were feeling better, if I had less important things to figure out, I would have been in the middle of all that.
I love dancing. The more aggressive, the better. Thrashing isn’t a hobby for the faint of heart, and tonight’s crowd wasn’t in a drawing blood sort of mood, but the barely contained aggression leaking from the sultry backbeat wouldn’t be denied for long. As I passed a couple of girls, one popped a fluorescent purple square into her mouth, licking it off her finger with relish.
Mood enhancers, or maybe uninhibitors. Something to take the anxieties of the day and turn them into something sweeter, usually with a side-effect of temporary loss of all common sense. Memories, too, if you’re unlucky.
Good times.
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