“What changed?” Digo’s voice rose an octave. “What changed, Riko, is that you betrayed me. You betrayed Nanji!”
The accusation was a slap in the face. My fingertips dug into the wood – fake blend, nanofactoried to decent specifications, probably replaced every week for damage. The numbers scrolling past my lateral display assured me it was more than heavy enough to break over Indigo’s skull.
He knew. How much? My jaw ached as I repeated, “Betrayed Nanji. What are you talking about?”
“I mean you vanished, Riko. One moment here, leading my sister around on your leash, and then you killed her.” Indigo’s tech wasn’t visible to the eye. It gave him hyperfocused perception and mental agility, and, like his sister’s, it catalogued everything he saw. Being around the Koupra siblings was like being flanked by cameras. They saw it all.
For that reason, I knew he clocked my confusion. I didn’t try to hide it. “I... killed her?” That was a stretch, even for me.
“Quit repeating me,” he spat back. Hatred sizzled across the table, carried on a spray of saliva and reeking of alcohol. “You talked her into that upgrade, you caused her conversion.”
The world fell out from under me. My stomach knotted. “Upgrade.” The metal reams replacing her spine, the nerve tech, the conversion. “I talked her into that?”
“Fuck!” He seized a glass and hurled it, spilling topaz yellow liquid in a long, luminous stream.
I threw my metal arm in front of my face. The projectile shattered against the diamond steel, sprinkling me with fragments and droplets of yellow.
I didn’t fight back.
In my mind’s eye, I watched Nanji’s trembling lips mouth an apology. Her near-black eyes. The spinal replacement.
I’d done that?
I couldn’t remember. Why would I do that?
Indigo opened and closed his fists between us, as if he could squeeze out his fury. His loathing. “The only thing that kept me from losing my shit,” he said from between clenched teeth, “was the fact you vanished. Dead, for all I cared. I was working on it, Riko. Nobody could find you, so I’d made my fucking peace. Now, here you are.”
Gingerly, I shook off the glass fragments. “Nice.” When he took a sharp breath, my fist slammed into the table between us. Glassware jumped. His retort, whatever fucking last thread he intended to snap, arrested. “I didn’t vanish, you smegging cock. I was missing. I didn’t just walk off into last night’s sunset – and oh, yeah,” I added bitterly, “thanks for giving up on me so fast.”
“Not fast enough.”
Oh, fuck him. “Then how’s this for fast?” I shot back. “Give me two minutes to explain. If you still think I’m at fault, I’ll walk right out of here and never look back.”
“The hell you will,” he countered. Not the easy, good-natured taunt I remembered, or even the annoyed sulk of the put-upon older brother. This was menace, cold and edged.
He’d changed. I wasn’t sure it was for the better. Of the three of us, I’d always been the stone cold merc. The role didn’t suit him.
But it seemed a lot had changed in a couple of days. More than I expected.
“Two minutes,” I repeated thinly.
“You have them.”
I started talking. It took longer than two minutes. The redhead waitress dropped off a glass brimming over with pink and gold liquid, my weirdly green energy boost, and a tall blue chute for Indigo. He didn’t touch his. I shot back the somewhat salty recharge, toyed with the Cellular Sunset that Shiva must have ordered for me, and told him everything I’d seen in that hellhole I’d woken up in. The guys with guns, the cold lab room – even about Nanji, locked behind that tempered glass.
When I told him about his sister’s conversion, his hands whitened to yellowed knots on the table. I could read the mistrust in his face, the confusion that had to stem from what I told him versus what he thought he knew, but he didn’t say anything.
When it came down to our own, Digo’s policy had never been negotiable: if it flips its shit, kill it. Nanji’s behavior fit right in that definition.
But I couldn’t shake the memory of Nanji’s last words. It was her, her eyes and her sad smile. She’d been fighting the corruption with everything she had.
Now here I was, basically telling Digo that he’d given up on her before she’d actually died. That sucked. That sucked harder than anything else I’d gone through, but how bad did it suck compared to his point of view of me?
All in all, I was so screwed.
I didn’t mention the cops. I couldn’t afford the scrutiny. When I was done talking, I drank every last drop of the Cellular Sunset and waited for him to call me on my shit.
He was silent for a long time, letting the frenetic thrashjam in the background fill the quiet. He stared into his glass. Rotated it idly between two long fingers. His hawkish nose seemed more pronounced in his face, his cheekbones sharper. In fact, now that I took the opportunity to study him, he seemed thinner underneath his dark blue neoprene. Always lean, he couldn’t afford to drop weight. His arms, ropy with muscle, looked tighter, less filled out and more sinewy.
Fuck, he was starting to remind me of me, except that I think I could still out-brutalize him in a fight. That was my job.
I chewed on my questions as the alcohol hit my system like the sunset it was named after.
Finally, he looked up. Flat, level blue. “You’re telling me you were down in some secret lab for two months.”
I snorted, brushing that aside like the bullshit it was. “No. Couple days at the most.”
The skin around his eyes tightened. “Then where were you until then?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Fuck you, Riko, it’s not astrophysics. It’s July. You went missing in May, the same day I last saw Nanji.”
Something cold gripped my chest. “May?”
“The eighteenth.” Just after my birthday.
A birthday I didn’t remember having.
The date. I needed to check the date, but that wasn’t processed through the software that managed my arm. A projection call would log dates, but users don’t see that data without the interface. An ad, somewhere, might list a release date for something, but I’d long since learned to tune that shit out.
Fuck. “Prove it,” I whispered.
Wordlessly, Indigo flicked open a hand. A projection screen lit to brilliant red. With a few swipes of his fingers, the screen flipped so I could see it right way around.
A calendar.
July.
Months, not days.
I stared into the dregs of my drink, frenetically searching it for answers it didn’t have. I wanted to order another, desperately, but given what little I was working on, I didn’t trust my nanos not to take it and run. Shiva’s drinks weren’t nano fuel, they were nano psychedelics. One Cellular Sunset was probably enough for this conversation.
May. I was missing since May, he’d said. But I knew that wasn’t possible. I couldn’t remember May. It wasn’t even supposed to be May. I gripped the glass so hard, red numbers pooled into the feed in my eye, warning me I was a second away from structural failure.
I eased up, but it didn’t help the pressure in my skull. My throat.
“Riko?”
I shook my head, hard. “Yeah, sorry. I, uh...” What the hell was I supposed to say? That despite his memories of me in May, I couldn’t remember anything for longer?
I was on dangerous ground here. The run I thought happened only the night before I woke up in that lab had gone down in April. I remembered it clearly. It was already hot as balls, and we were smack in the middle of a hit on MetaCore property. We’d gotten the requisitioned dataspike, ransacked the place so it looked like an everyday break-in, and were well on the way out when the whole place had gone up like Kongtown New Year.
They’d dragged me into Lucky’s street clinic with a piece of rebar in my gut and a bottle of whiskey clutched in my good hand. It seemed like a dream.
I couldn’t eve
n be sure it wasn’t.
That didn’t explain why I couldn’t remember anything after the night I got off Lucky’s table. We’d gone dancing, a party that started here at the Mecca and roamed the rack. Then... What? Apparently, I’d wandered around for over a month. Then vanished, and woke up in the lab.
Months, gone.
Shit. If I confessed to that, I may as well rip out my own spine and offer it on a smegging platter. An operation on a chopshop’s table followed by extended amnesia sounded too damn close to corruption to risk Digo’s better safe than sorry mentality.
I needed time.
Given the circumstances, I’d trade time for a team and get at the truth the old-fashioned way. “I know how to find answers,” I added grimly.
“Shit.” Indigo groaned the word into his hands, rubbing them over his haggard face. “Look. I’m not saying I believe you, but let’s pretend what you’re telling me is true.” Asshole. “According to that tablet you should have taken with you” – I winced – “that makes you clinically dead.”
“I am not dead,” I snarled.
“Obviously.” A sour edge, there. He rested his elbows on the table and stared me down with more aggression than I was used to from him.
It made a little more sense now. I thought he’d ditched me after days.
Turned out he’d had months to suck on this one.
“What do you possibly expect me to do about this?”
It wasn’t exactly an arms-wide welcome back, but I pushed for gold anyway. “I want a team, Digo. I want the best of your lot.”
“Hell, no.”
I glared at him. “Don’t give me that shit. I know you’ve got them. I want a heavy and two splatter specialists. I want you linking, a ’jector you trust, and–”
“Riko.” Indigo’s eyes flashed in narrowed impatience. “Slow your roll. You’re talking about some seriously deep shit. Corporate prisons? Labs? Stasis? First thing you need is a headscan.”
And there it was. The thinly veiled accusation I knew would be coming.
It didn’t sting any less. Even though I knew how close I’d skated to nanoshock, it pissed me off.
I stood, bracing my weight on my flattened hands. The table creaked. “I am,” I said, so quietly I think the music must have drowned it, “not crazy.”
Perceptive as he was, he heard me anyway. “Says you.”
I didn’t need a scanner to weigh in on that one. He wasn’t running any less hot for his veneer of calm. “Digo, you know me,” I pressed.
“Yeah.” He leaned back in the booth, folded his arms over his narrow chest. The blue neoprene didn’t crease. “Once. That cab has jumped the curb.”
I resisted the urge to slap the table; it wasn’t getting me anywhere. “For Nanji, Indigo. At least help me figure out what the shit put your sister and me in that vault.”
“You mean my dead sister? The one that was already supposed to be dead by the time you crawled out of whatever hole you came from?” The sharp fury in his eyes wasn’t gone. I’d only managed to sheathe it in glass. I push too hard, I’d shatter it and lose him again.
I took a deep breath, but I couldn’t force myself to sit down. If I sat, I’d crack. If I cracked, either I’d cry or bleed something. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried.
I didn’t do emotions well.
“Look,” he said, watching my hands curl and uncurl over the edge of the table. “If what you’re saying is true – and trust me, Riko, that is a big, fat flaming if – you got my sister into some deep shit. I want those answers, but you need scanning first.”
He wasn’t wrong. Hell, I’d have said the same in his shoes.
Just smegging awesome.
“Lucky’s still on the edge of Kongtown. Go get cleared.” He held up his hand again, as if to forestall anything I wanted to say. “When you’re all cleared for action, there’s this guy. He’s legit,” he added before I asked. “He’s got resources I don’t. See what he says.”
“Outside help?”
“Just do it. If he gives the okay, then maybe you’ll get a team.”
Something smelled off. Frankly, everything smelled off since I collapsed in that alley. I frowned at him. “What’s wrong with your own fixers?”
Digo leveled me a look that begged to know if I was serious. “Name one that won’t think you’re fucking with them.”
“Taylor Jax.”
“He’s not a fixer, and you know he’ll only fuck you in the end.”
Good point, obvious innuendo notwithstanding – been there, done that.
I wasn’t in the mood to fine tune the deal. “Fine. I’ll meet this guy.”
Even though he’d made it part of the bargain, Digo looked surprised. I guess I couldn’t blame him. Before now, I’d have asked all kinds of questions.
It’s not like I had options.
“Arrange the meeting.” I kept my voice as even as I could make it. My shoulders straightened, not even a hint of pain. Nanos functional, just like I liked them. “Have him meet me at Plato’s Key. Nice and public.” When he frowned, I pushed. “Tonight, Digo. Now. An hour. Whatever. And then I’ll see Lucky, okay?”
“Why?”
“Because everything’s fresh,” I snapped, covering the knot in my gut with temper. “Because the whole shitting place was on fire, Digo, and if they – whoever the fuck they are – get there first–”
“Wherever the fuck there is,” he cut in with pointed sarcasm.
I leaned on the table. Bright, sunshiny yellow fabric did nothing to take the edge off my twisted smile. “My point,” I said, very slowly and very clearly, “is that they have all the advantage. The least I can do is ride their asses on time.”
Indigo leaned back, and maybe it was partially because my reach could clear that table. Maybe he just gave up. Whatever it was, he didn’t argue, he just nodded and raised his drink in my direction. “One hour. I’ll see if he’s free.” He gulped half the blue shimmer in his glass, looked into it for a moment, then glanced up. “Just rein in the cyberbitch persona, okay? You don’t want piss this guy off.”
“It’s the Key,” I replied dryly. I let the crack about my persona go. That was all natural, and he knew it. “Public, filled with bouncers, and ask Fido over there about my dance floor moves.”
He didn’t smile. “I think this one will have moves you don’t see coming.”
“What do we have on him?” I asked, intrigued by Digo’s caution. “Sinner? Saint? Corporate bulldog?”
“Surprisingly little. But he’s discreet and he knows his shit.” Which was enough to make most problems go away, in Digo’s book.
I shook the fabric of my yellow shirt. Glass shards glittered as they fell to the carpet at my feet. Charming. “This guy have a name?”
“Reed. Malik Reed.” He drained the rest of his drink. “You’ll know him when you see him.”
“Great.” I turned, the middle of my shoulder blades itching as I made my exit. I knew he’d have a clear shot at my back from where he sat, and Shiva hadn’t patted either of us down for weapons.
I’d never thought of Digo as a threat before. It burned all the way down.
“Riko.”
I tensed, paused in the door. “What?”
His voice remained tight. Angry. “I really think you should see Lucky first.”
“After I see Reed.”
His curse fragmented on a frustrated sound. “Whatever. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
Not one of the things I’d ever say about Indigo Koupra.
At least, not until now.
7
It’d take the better part of an hour to get to the other end of the rack, where Plato’s Key claimed turf riddled by chromers and fashion slaves. The district was busy, packed with all the night life activists, the scum-suckers, the nocturnal denizens who didn’t want to – or couldn’t – step outside in the light of day.
I passed prostitutes who weren’t shy about shaking their bare breasts or
ass-crack shorts at anybody who looked like they were carrying – credits or drugs, it was all the same. A hairless, dark-skinned man smiled up at a large sallow man whose face showed nothing but rapture. As I walked by, a glint of neon light picked out the metal tubing extending from the paler areola of his left nipple, vanishing into the john’s pants. Didn’t get much more black market than that. Buy him for an hour, and he’d do all kinds of things with the tubular attachments he’d probably stashed all over his body.
Tech fetishists got off on that kind of stuff. The spreading stain at his crotch said the guy he’d marked was an easy payday, and his hands rifled the john’s pockets like it was no big.
It probably wasn’t.
He wasn’t the only john gagging for it, either. Not a meter away, a thick-thighed whore with a wealth of bright blue dreads flapped her bared asscheeks at a dark-eyed teenager sporting some serious flopsweat. He’d bite. They get that bad, they’re already in it – just not in it, if you get the idea.
All the pros have menus. Load ‘em up easy. A quick search is all it takes.
The city at night comes alive in ways that the daytime can’t touch. A heavyset man strapped into purple satin tapped his pal on the ass – a boy wearing a black suit, his face painted up like an homage to the skull on my shoulder. The voice that came out of his delicate boy lips was bass deep, and laughing. Another couple sauntered arm in arm, both sporting the same facial tattoos and wicked purple mohawks. Twins or into the kink, I couldn’t tell. You could buy a face.
I saw boys, girls, both, and neither. Genetically modified people who wanted to live the life of an exotic; ethnic people who wanted to maintain their own cultural purity no matter the cost; old, young, filthy, chromed. Black, yellow, red, white, and every color in between poured into a giant melting pot and smeared liberally with propaganda and opportunity. Everybody out for something. Credits. A high. A hit. A favor. A good time. A hard time. Blood. Profit.
Always profit.
The heat eased off some by night, but the air sparkled under the canopy of brilliantly colored luminescence. Signs, ads, flashing girls and blinking warnings. Sex offered, tempted, bought and sold; looking up netted a galaxy of pornographic stars.
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