I made it three feet from the alley mouth when my knees turned backwards, spilling me to the rough ground. The Cellular Sunset I’d swallowed down came back up in an acid tide of purple and brown, punctuated by the thicker remnants of the recharger. I heaved, choked on my own vomit and hacked it all out until my guts were empty and tears of effort streamed from my straining eyes.
Gasping, I wiped a shaky arm across my mouth and rolled away from the cooling pool.
This was not the way I’d hoped to spend the night.
Draping my metal arm over my eyes, I sniffed back iron-rich mucous, cleared my throat. I struggled to form my thoughts into a cohesive plan.
Slank had never screwed me up so badly. It had to be the combination of the Cellular Sunset, the straining nanos, and the stuff I’d inhaled.
Or it was something else. Something malfunctioning in my chipset? I’d be annoyed if I had to go back and tell Indigo he was right. But maybe, just maybe, he was. Maybe whatever the fuck was wrong with me was in my brain. Enough imbalances in the wiring, and permanent vertigo could set in. The odds of corruption increase with every fuckup in the system. A scan couldn’t hurt.
And if I was corrupted – if I really was fucked by that lab – only one man would give me a shot before he, well, fucking shot me.
As my head hummed, snapping back on fried synapses of pain, frustration, anger and anxiety, I closed my eyes and activated the projection protocols. The haptic note shoved up against my brain smegging hurt when the bandwidth opened.
In the space of nanoseconds, I appeared in a plain white room. Same table, same chairs. Baseline stuff.
I didn’t have to wait long.
“Riko, is that you?” My mentor’s voice was cranky on the best of days, and downright inhospitable the rest. I’d factor this one somewhere near grumpy, with a side of annoyance.
Same old Lucky. He’d figured out that receptors in the projection calls correlated avatars with connections. The programmers had decided, early in testing, that everybody who could make the ideal persona would. Who wanted to be a nobody?
This meant that Lucky, a nobody, wouldn’t trigger the ad blast. Win-win.
Illegal, but whatever.
I didn’t know where to look, so I settled for straight ahead. “It’s me.”
“Screw this box,” was his greeting. “Where are you?”
Yeah. Same old Lucky all the way.
“Alley near Plato’s Key, I think,” I said. The room flickered around me, and I managed a wan smile. “I might be losing consciousness, so–”
“Goddammit, girl,” he grunted. Then silence.
Would he find me? I didn’t know. I couldn’t ask. Here and gone again, not a kind word in between. Lucky was harsh, but fair. And the best street doc I’d ever known.
He didn’t owe me anything.
As the room turned to gray around me, I let go of the projection and came back to myself. Nose deep in street sweat, vomit inches away from my face reeking of acid and sugar.
Ribs aching. Head pounding. Limbs twitching.
I rolled onto my side. My ribs shifted.
I clenched my teeth over a shriek of startled agony and fell back, gasping.
Not healed yet. Not good. There was no reason why my nanos wouldn’t be remodeling the bone, even while I puked my guts out.
My vision turned black, speckle by speckle. Nanos. Love them or hate them, all they want is to keep your bits operational. Even if they have to steal your own resources to do it.
Everything has a price.
This one insisted I lose my shit in a back alley of the rack. Just another day, right?
Fuck this.
10
“Damn it, girl.” A sharp pain through my chest bowed my back, frissons of pins and needles slicing through my limbs to explode in a net of electrical shocks between my eyes. “Wake up!”
I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep. I groaned. “‘S’ a sec,” I slurred.
“No.” Another slam of currents that peeled the enamel off my back teeth. A scream lodged in my throat.
My eyelids flew open.
Tired brown eyes hazed into a struggling focus above me. Worn lines bit deep into a skeletally thin face, cheeks and bridge of his crooked nose spiderwebbed with broken capillaries. Lucky’s predominantly Kongtown features didn’t match the harsh gruffness of his street-worn way of speaking. Idiots always expected him to sound like some vidscreen Asian stereotype. Didn’t matter which one. Any of them.
Lucky wasn’t the type. Any type.
“One more,” he said tersely, “then you sleep while I see to your chipset.”
I tried to lift my hand, but it wouldn’t obey me. Struggling only made it worse. I was trapped. Restrained. I sucked in a breath. “Lucky?”
“I’m right here.” A thin, work-rough hand wrapped around mine. “Zen it, this is going to suck.” That was Lucky’s version of comfort.
I licked my parched lips. “Get this working fast,” I rasped. “I have to… I have...” My breath twisted in my chest.
“I said zen it.” I heard metal clink, heard the hum of a charge building. A needle slid into my neck and burned. “You been taking shit care of yourself.”
“Not dead yet,” I croaked.
“You sure about that?” His silhouette faded into bleary dark. “This much heat will take some time. Bite down.”
There was no bracing. The spark gathered, lit, and every limb, every digit, every cell seized. My head was strapped down, I wouldn’t break my own neck, but whatever Lucky was doing, it stripped me of my own kinesis.
I think I screamed. Then it all went white.
11
I woke up hurting, prone under a familiar gray ceiling – shingles laid side by side, rippled and stained by time, welded together with thick lines. Daylight trickled in under high, slotted vents tucked in beneath the slope. The usual cacophony of the city wasn’t all that far behind.
Lucky’s living space. Used to be mine, too, back when I was fresh on the street and – as Lucky would call it – built to break. Young. Naïve. Made to get fucked, in whatever way this city wanted.
I got lucky. Literally, I guess.
The bed under me wasn’t as hard as the cot I’d claimed at my place, but it was running a damn close second. It was clean, though, and didn’t smell like a vat of sanitizer.
None of my hurt could be attributed to the bed. My arm ached like I’d taken a red-hot poker to it.
I lifted the limb, heard the fine rotors whir and shift into place. The daylight settled over my synthetic hand, picking out the faint seams where plates had been put together to mimic hand and finger mobility.
I’d never be great at fine detail work, but I could pick things up, tighten a fist, crook each finger. Lucky had even polished it up some. He couldn’t abide grimy tech. Called it lazy.
My ribs weren’t tender, my knee seemed fine as I lifted my leg, bent it experimentally.
I sat up. Slid my bare feet to the floor.
The rest of me was in one piece. I felt calm. Healthy. Not hungry, which meant he’d plugged me into something while I slept. Needle marks would be long since regenerated, but I suspected he’d tubed me up.
Stretching didn’t make my arm hurt less. Instead, my shoulder tightened. As the inset filaments linking the reinforced biceps to the arm unit shifted, I winced my way through a quick muscle warm-up and contemplated painkillers as I crested the ache.
If I wanted them, I’d have to break into Lucky’s stash to do it. No, thank you. I’d only just been put back together.
I was wearing a pair of brown board shorts and a faded blue, bleach-stained tanktop, both left from the stash of extra clothes I kept in a corner of Lucky’s closet. Sometimes, I came by to kill a few days with the old man. Other times, I needed the getaway. It hadn’t happened all that much recently.
In any case, he must have cut my clothes off me, which annoyed me. I was rapidly losing my wardrobe. I made a mental note to grab something from
his hacked printer.
Cradling my arm, as if taking the weight off my shoulder would help, I got to my feet, stepped out of the narrow alcove that served as his guest room, and leaned against the railing looking out over Lucky’s chopshop.
It wasn’t much in the way of creature comforts.
Some chopshops go for quantity. Stack them in, operate fast as you can, cauterize them back together. Some places count a seventy-five percent survival rate a win. Not Lucky. This place was a one-at-a-time joint, with a single metal operating table in the center flanked by an array of various equipment. Computer system hookups, cold storage at the far wall, garage doors across the way that were, far as I knew, welded shut. The operating table waited silently from within a plain metal circle, which would rise to meet its twin from the ceiling in case of conversion feedback.
I’d only seen it used once. Some jackhole fresh off the SINburn had swaggered in with a metric ass ton of creds and a jacked up sense of his own ego. What he’d wanted was suicide, but he thought he could take it.
The smell was godawful, the screams of the man inside ear-bleeding. I was... what, sixteen? Still fresh on the street. Still built to break. I still remembered Lucky’s hands at my wrists, forcing me to witness the searing blue crackle, hear the agony of a man whose body couldn’t support the tech he’d demanded.
“Never forget,” my mentor demanded.
I never did. I also never knew if Lucky had done that on purpose despite suspecting how it would end. Just for my benefit.
Asking seemed harsh.
I padded down the bare metal steps. The grille dug into my soles, but didn’t bother me. The bottoms of my feet were no longer the delicate soles of a middle-class girl.
Just off to my right, a kitchen offered a wide sink and a riveted shelving fixture made out of plastic crates. Coffee mugs gleamed from hooks beneath it. The aroma of Lucky’s special brew lingered in here.
The place hadn’t changed much. The floor was still stained with the legacy of decades of wear, but clean. A plant in a mason jar sucked up whatever light could flicker through the frosted window over the sink, and a battered green printing unit hunkered by the entry. On top of it, a hotplate shimmered blue energy beneath an aluminum pot.
I let go of my arm, wincing when it pulsed in protest, and reached for a mug. Like all the rest, it was lopsided and lacking in paint. Lucky made a lot of his own home décor. He wasn’t exactly an artist, but he’d always preferred functionality over anything else.
I’d helped him with this one. One of my better memories, actually.
I found a big plastic syringe, one of those thick ones you could use to suck fluids out of a wound, and tucked it between my teeth to hold while I pulled the lid off the pot.
My fingers stilled over the handle, gaze falling to the curt note left on the printer beside the burner. The paper was rough and grainy, made of old pulp and shredded recyclables.
Recalibrated nanos. Don’t push your chipset, you fried your netware. Recharge. Coffee. Get out. Don’t be there when I get back.
No signature. There usually wasn’t. Lucky’s handwriting was distinctive to me only in that I’d gotten lots of notes over the years.
Get out, huh?
Worry crept in under all the pain twinging my nerves.
What did he find in me? What did he know?
A sick knot gathered in my stomach. Logic dictated that he hadn’t fried me, and he didn’t seem worried about my setup, so odds were good I wasn’t corrupted. But if I wasn’t corrupted, then I was running with something else jacked up in my head.
That smelled too much like feelings for me to be comfortable with. And maybe something less meatspace than busted tech. Something, I don’t know, mental.
I didn’t know anything about mental space.
Only one way to find out what the hell Lucky meant. And why. If nothing else, I could count on him to tell it to me straight – if I bothered to ask. He didn’t do casual enlightenment.
I wrapped one hand around the mug, pulled the syringe from my jaw before it cramped, and activated my projection protocols.
At least this time, the pulse registering the connection didn’t hurt. That felt like a victory. Sort of.
The all-too-familiar room squared up. I was vaguely aware of Lucky’s kitchen around me, the mug in my hands and the smell of coffee, but it dimmed to a dull murmur around me. My protocols gave the projection room priority seating.
This time, I waited longer. But because I was something of a shit, even on a good day, I did wait.
Sure enough, the door opened. Lucky’s voice followed. “You forget how to read?”
Always charming, my mentor. I sat on the table, arms folded under my chest, and glared at nothing. Probably part of the reason he pulled this disappearing act, too. Can’t glare at nobody. It made me look stupid. Which I felt acutely enough that my voice sharpened. “Why am I getting kicked out?”
“You kidding me?” He’d never win awards for tender, but his tone was flat enough this time to border offensive. “Riko, how long have you run these streets?”
That was obvious enough to both of us that I didn’t answer directly. I didn’t have to. “What are you saying?” I asked, but a knot formed under the sick gurgle in my stomach. “What do you know?”
“I know I didn’t teach you to be a cunting idiot.” The plain white room only seemed to emphasize the sharp edges of his accusation. “Your cred’s in the shitter, girl. Six ways of screwed. Whatever you did is mired in crap, but you know as well as I do what that means.”
The knot dissolved in bile. My throat dried.
Confirmation. The kind of confirmation from the only man I never wanted to confirm this kind of thing. My fingers bit into my arms. The metal of my synthetic arm was no more real in this room than Lucky was, but a rolling wave of pain surged into my shoulder anyway.
Asshole arm.
Flinching at that seemed a lot easier than flinching at my mentor’s truths. “How bad?”
Lucky knew what I was asking. He didn’t bother accentuating. “Bad enough I can’t have you hanging around my shop till you fix your shit.”
For a chopshop doc of his rep, being seen with someone whose cred had taken a massive hit would drag him down long before it pulled me back up. He’d already set his cred on the line for me once – only an idiot took in a girl right after SINburn.
He wouldn’t do it again. No matter what I said.
I couldn’t ask.
I slid off the table, lifting my chin. I didn’t know where to look, so I didn’t bother. Staring straight ahead, I said simply, “You got any details for me?”
“I ain’t your keeper,” Lucky snapped. “Fix your own shit. Don’t come back until you do.”
“So it’s like that.”
“Riko.” There. A measure of resignation I hadn’t been sure my mentor would feel. It went a little way to smooth the ache, but not by much. Especially when he followed up the name he’d given me with, “It’s always like that.”
True that.
I nodded once, a sharp acknowledgment, and dropped my arms to my pockets. Jamming my fingers inside the loose seam, I waited until I could be sure I was alone. All I really wanted to do was throw up.
I didn’t. I didn’t dare. Lucky may have been kicking my ass to the curb, but it wasn’t exactly unexpected. I’d always known what I was supposed to do here. What his raising had cost.
My cred would affect his. Period.
What pissed me off – what made me feel like I was choking – was the fact that whatever had gone down in my missing memories, it had cost me all the reputation I’d worked so fucking hard to earn on these streets.
A runner without cred was running on borrowed time. How far had my fall already spread? Who else knew?
Lucky had contacts everywhere. For a doc, he rivaled a lot of fixers I knew when it came to chatter. If I felt like being optimistic, I could consider him the vanguard to the shit I’d be dealing with as soon as
gossip hit the rest. Mercs loved their gossip.
So I’d have to fix it. And fast.
I didn’t promise I would. Not to Lucky. We knew each other well enough to understand without saying it aloud. I’d earn my shit back, or he’d never see me again. The end.
I was ready to disconnect when Lucky spoke again. “Riko.”
“What?” The word snapped, harder than I’d meant. My synth palm slammed against the table. It was almost a punch. I reined it in just in time.
My mentor’s voice graveled. “Have some coffee.”
It was as close to affection as he’d ever show.
For whatever it was worth.
I only had one question left. “My scan. Was it clean?”
“It was clean.” Then, gruffly, “You need new filters, replace your netware entirely.”
Which I wouldn’t get from him. Yeah. Without a word, I disconnected, came back to myself in the familiar kitchen with the smell of that brew thick in my nose, and realized I’d crumpled the syringe in my nanofactory steel hand.
“Damn it,” I hissed. The least of my feelings.
Lucky wasn’t just my mentor, he was my doc. My heals on wheels and my general technician. Nobody knew my tech the way he did, and now, I’d have to find a new doc – one who hadn’t heard about my apparent fall from grace – or I’d be in serious trouble next time I had a bad run.
It’s always like that.
It wasn’t personal. But fuck me, it felt like it.
Whatever I’d done, whatever had put me in that lab – hell, whatever had actually happened in there – it was costing me everything. Far beyond frying my tech, which could be replaced, I got caught up in something that destroyed the reputation I’d worked too hard to build. Tech could be bought with credits.
My street cred was bought with blood and sweat.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. The phantom pain, the knot in my gut, the taste of bile on my tongue, all of that came a serious second to the knowledge that I was rapidly running out of allies.
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