Died, or sold out to.
Which meant way too big for a smalltime fixer like Bukket Jehm.
What had he gotten into?
Or was it me they were after? I flashed back to that botched MetaCore job that was my last real memory and couldn’t shake the hunted feeling plucking at my survival instincts.
Was I being tracked? Followed? What for?
Fuck.
The other guy didn’t fire at his buddy, which suggested he’d been trained not to shoot randomly. Great. More competent assholes. Just what I always wanted.
“What the hell is your problem?” I gritted out, straining as my reluctant companion struggled to pull me off balance. The most prominent disadvantage to full armor was the lack of flexibility.
The bonus was, oh, he’d be a bitch to kill.
Lights seared through the window, painting the scene in florid blue and white. The heat from the helo’s backdraft burned out the air in the little apartment, and I heard shouting, barking orders, status updates, even while I danced with the one to keep him between me and his buddy.
My odds here sucked.
“Stand down,” ordered the man I grappled. “You are ordered to comply with Civic Code–”
Oh, screw this.
I reached back with my free arm, hooked my metal fingers into his faceplate and jerked as hard as I could. His words halted as his head snapped back, which cracked the top of mine hard enough to send stars shooting through my vision. It hurt me more than it did him, but it wasn’t his skull I was going for.
His elbow lashed back into my ribs, scored a direct hit that blew my breath out. I jammed my boot heel into the back of his knee, felt it catch on plated armor, but he jerked. When he staggered, I rammed my back into his, forcing him forward, right into his similarly outfitted pal.
I’d get one shot at this.
“Don’t move!” shouted the second guy. Er, lady.
Whatever.
Still didn’t work.
I palmed a smoke grenade off my dance partner’s belt, then let him go at the same time I shoved my foot between his. He flailed into his friend, armor meeting armor in a clatter eaten by the sound of the helo’s thrust outside the shattered window. The curtains flapped wildly, roiling up debris.
I spun around, launched a flatfooted kick into the guy’s back to make sure he stayed tangled with his galpal, and didn’t stop to watch them work out their balance. Darting across the room, I had a split second to decide which of Jim’s units would provide me the answers I needed.
And possibly make me a continued target for MetaCore, but if I could get out, I could shake them.
“Get her!” yelled one of the faceless freaks.
Naturally.
Eenie, meenie, miney, fuck it.
I palmed a unit, a handheld tablet hooked up to a dock, ripped the device out of its frame and sprinted for the opened window.
Glass crunched under my feet. The men behind me must have sorted out their differences because the deafening whine of the helo blocking the light was suddenly torn wide by the report of bullet spray. My skin crawled beneath a sheen of sweat, my heart pounding as I waited to feel the horrific agony of flesh and bone brutalized by 5.56mm caseless rounds.
For once, luck was on my side.
Muscles straining, legs screaming, I bent, and as I launched myself into the air – rolling and hunching gracelessly around the tablet I held to my chest – I thumbed the trigger on the canister I’d stolen and dropped it in my wake.
A woman yelled out something I couldn’t hear and the bullets ceased. Nobody saw the canister hit the floor until it exploded in a rapid burst of thick purple smoke. It belched out of the window I tore through, so fast I failed to see how close the helo really was until I felt the burn of its engines score my cheek, my bare arm, sear my shirt against the skin of my back.
I wrenched myself in mid-air and managed to tuck and roll into the most awkward dive of my extremely screwed up life.
I’d forgotten about the railing.
I skimmed off the top. My knee collided with the flimsy rail and bent it, which was enough to send me spiraling out over concrete. Landing one short story down drove the breath from my lungs, jarred my bones and my shoulder, and shot sparks where my metal arm scraped across pocked asphalt. I rolled, over and over, scrambling what was left of my brains, tearing away all sense of up and down.
When I finally stopped, laid out on my back and the world spinning, every inch of my body shrieked a string of curses I couldn’t summon the breath to vocalize.
So. Much. Pain.
My fingers cramped around the edge of the tablet as I forced myself to sit up.
I smelled burning fuel, a sharply acrid tang that only undercut the oppressive reek of a city baking under the summer heat wave. People had started to gather, a blur of color and open-mouthed faces gathering behind a line somebody stupid had designated as “a safe distance”. The hovering black machine hanging over what used to be the fixer’s base of operations backpedaled on an upsurge of thrust I felt singeing the fine hairs on my skin. What was left of it, anyway.
Shit.
The torrent of purple smoke was more than enough to cover my tracks from the ground crew, but if that helo locked on me, I’d never outrun it.
I leapt to my feet, gritting my teeth against the waves of pain surging from ringing skull to aching heels, and took off – right for the crowd watching it all unfold like some kind of daytime soap feed.
Eyes widened. The bodies comprising the stupidest idiots in the area rippled.
“Corp raid!” I shouted. Probably the most effective call to arms this city would ever care about. Raids were a fact of life. On a good day, there wasn’t a person existing in these streets who wasn’t fucking around with something illegal, intentional or otherwise. The question was how much it would be worth to the corps to litigate it.
The motel looked like a military strike zone from the outside, which meant to anyone with any street sense at all that MetaCore wasn’t playing patty cake. Raids like this, even spectators would end up dead. No one would care. The whole place could go up in smoke and it’d be just another footnote in the feeds.
But people love a good show.
What a bloody, abraded mess of screaming fleshbag couldn’t accomplish, the helo’s efforts to pull back and orient did. The spectators scattered. Like roaches under a light, thirty or so people darted for cover – cars idling in the street, alleys tucked between pay-by-the-hour shitholes like the one I’d left, whatever was handy.
The helo shuddered, swerving away from the smoking motel. A pack of people headed farther down the street, scared into a stampede as the helo’s loudspeakers crackled behind us. “Cease and disperse,” it droned. “Return to your homes. You are in violation of Code 311.875c. Repeat, cease and disperse.”
Chunk that noise.
Smelling my own sweat and blood beneath the reeking assault of garbage, oil and fear, I ducked my head, hands tight around the stolen comp unit, and ran like I was one of the crowd.
As I’d hoped, the smoke covered my trail from the ground team. Without a definite lock, I was just a warm body among a bunch.
Honestly, MetaCore should have been better than that; except maybe, I figured as I sprinted into an alley barely big enough to run through, they’d been surprised by my presence in Jim’s room. If they’d been there for Jim, and whatever he’d been digging into, then I was an unknown. A side project.
The last thing I wanted was giant MetaCore on my dick. As if my reputation wasn’t shit enough. Once everyone else learned I had some kind of massive target on me, my cred would only be as good as the bounty a corporation would pay for it. MetaCore could afford just about anything.
I couldn’t afford jack. But given the lack of pursuers in my wake, maybe that was one problem I didn’t have to worry about.
My breath came in hard gasps as I slowed halfway down the narrow alley. It was little more than a runoff drain, filled with the de
bris thrown out the windows inset into walls overhead and left to rot. I stepped over decaying clothing, abandoned plastic containers, crates broken into jagged angles, and shattered glass.
I was sweltering. The sun baked my seared skin into a crusty mess, sweat stinging the rapidly healing gashes the pavement carved into me. My throat was a dried, raspy column of bottled-up obscenities, and I wheezed a few for emphasis as I finally stopped running and sank into a gasping, aching crouch.
“What,” I panted, “the shit.” What the shit. What had Jim been dealing in to bring Meta-fucking-Core to his doorstep? He wouldn’t be the first fixer to wind up dead for dealing in the wrong information, but I never expected Jim to aim that high. MetaCore was serious baggage.
The memory of the sweaty stain his hands left on his own shirt flashed back through my rattled skull, and I swore again for emphasis.
No wonder he’d been so scared. I’d thought whatever it was he didn’t want me to know had done that. Had he been afraid of a raid?
That cunt.
I sucked in a long, slow breath, let it out on a gust.
So much for answers.
Idly, I flipped the comp unit over in my hands. The screen was already on, jarred awake by my rough handling, though it didn’t seem sure what to do with the remains of the dock still clinging to its connector. More than a few files had opened on the screen, probably from my stray fingers.
As I focused on breathing in and out, clearing the adrenaline-fueled rapid pulse from my chest, I eyed the info.
Names. Places. Dates. Bits of shorthand phrasing I suspected was Jim’s way of reminding himself what meant what.
And a single document called retirement plan.
Aw. So the weasely little bastard had his own dreams of a happily ever after. That was kind of sweet, in a naïve and definitely too late kind of way. Not that it was my fault. I mean, sure, I’d killed him horribly, but he was probably dying anyway.
This business wasn’t made for retirement.
Yeah. I’d pretend that somehow made what I did to him better.
Shifting my weight onto my heels, I flicked the folder open with a finger. Contract lingo filled the narrow screen.
I skimmed it. More names. More dates. More places.
And a shit ton of creds. Payouts, each listed with far too many zeroes to be right.
Only difference here was that I recognized the names on that list.
January. Indigo had brought her in on a run last year. Solid splatter specialist; I’d taught her a few tricks along the way. Young but hardcore.
Deck. A linker who’d worked on a co-op with Digo on a big score against a GinZeng operation.
Lingo. A fixer Indigo trusted enough to share a few intel lines with.
Fuck It Jim had been brokering deals to sell mercs. Somebody had been working with that weasel-faced fuckwit to sell SINless.
Among them?
Nanjali Koupra.
Sold to a chopshop in the Vid Zone.
The Vid Zone, exactly one ward north of the Third Junction – where the cops had picked me up.
How could you not remember? Jim’s incredulity slammed into me like a bullet. If I was the principal, then it meant I was working for Indigo. Period. I wasn’t stupid enough to work for anyone else when I had a good gravy train right here, and that meant Indigo knew.
He knew, and he’d fucking sold me out.
What relative calm I’d managed spiked into a red slash of rage.
The common denominator here was clear. I secured the tablet into the waistband of my pants and shoved everything else aside. Indigo had wanted info?
I’d jam proof of his greed so far down his throat, he’d die with the copper taste of revenge in his mouth.
14
Tracking down Indigo was as simple as putting in a call to the Mecca. They knew me enough to know if I was looking for Digo, it was important.
It was. Just not the way they thought.
He’d gone home with the redhead waitress. Laila.
She lived in an apartment complex within walking distance of the rack.
The place was a shithole, like most of the districts nearby, and as I pushed my way inside the boarded, shattered glass door of the complex, a huddled knot of filthy homeless grumbled profanities at me like I was the intruder.
Covered in dried blood and dirt as I was, they probably thought I was trying to horn in on their marginally cooler squat. I shot them a filthy gesture as I passed, ignoring the elevator – a deathtrap, was my guess – in favor of the creaking stairs somebody had tried to shore up with stolen street signs.
Classy.
Seven flights of stairs didn’t take the wind out of my sails. Instead, it pushed my blood into a simmering, steady beat.
Laila’s door was the third on the right.
I didn’t knock. I drew back and leveled a kick near the seam that tore the tumblers right through the doorjamb, twisting the metal into uselessness. It slammed into the far wall, and all hell broke loose inside.
Laila was sultry in a sari, but she was cuter naked, her light tats turned off and her hair snarled from a night of some serious fucking. Her eyes were huge in her pillow-imprinted face as she screamed, rolling off the single narrow bed in the one-room apartment.
Indigo was definitely leaner than I remembered, but he was still more of a thinker than a front-liner. As a linker, he’d processed the intrusion before Laila hit the floor, and I’d give him credit for the fact that he leapt out of bed and came at me, but he lost massive points for the free-wheeling slap of his balls against his hairy thighs.
This? This is why a man shouldn’t sleep naked. Especially when dabbling in shit that’d get his door kicked in.
Recognition filled his hungover features an instant before I hooked his swing with my flesh arm, sidestepped, and used his own momentum to toss him out into the hall. He stumbled over the threshold, slammed into the opposite wall and reeled.
A girl’s voice shrieked behind me.
On instinct, I sidestepped a second time, stuck out one hand to catch her, and tangled Laila’s bare ankles with a foot. She stubbed her toe on my boot, yelped, and instead of leaping on my back – why do people think that helps? – she found herself guided in a full circle and thrown onto the bed in the same stunt I’d worked on Digo. Her round ass rippled as she bounced across the surface.
The girl had a mattress that bounced. Serious jealousy.
“Riko, what the fuck!”
I turned, my teeth bared in a snarl ripped out on a harsh breath. “She leaves or she dies.”
Indigo had grabbed a picture frame from the skewed table beside the door I’d ruined, holding it in front of his junk like it’d somehow stop me from throwing myself on all his manly glory.
Please.
Angry color filled his cheeks; I’d never seen his blue eyes so enraged. “You wouldn’t dare.”
I pointed my metal finger at her without looking away from him, aware that she had scooted back on the bed, clutching the sheets over her nakedness. Her eyes were so wide, they were nearly all white. “Laila, right?”
She didn’t answer me with anything more than a low, strained whimper.
Blood-covered merc kicks your door in, I guess it’d be a shock. Good. “Get some pants on,” I told her, my voice pitched for menace. “Go away. I’m going to do some seriously bad shit to your fuckbuddy, and you? You don’t want to see this.”
“Fucking twat,” Indigo began, but Laila was already moving like the hounds of hell were on her pretty tail. Within thirty seconds, she’d grabbed whatever clothes came to hand and sprinted out of the apartment, trailing her sheet and sidling around Indigo like she’d catch on fire if she touched him.
He watched her go with helpless fury. When her footsteps vanished, he rounded on me. “You need get your shit checked out,” he seethed, fingers white around the picture edge. “What the fuck is wrong with you this time?”
“Lucky says I’m fine,” I replied. “You? Y
ou got more to explain than I do.”
I could have just jumped on his ass and been done with it; Indigo’s strength wasn’t hand-to-hand. But as pissed as I was, as fucking furious, I hesitated.
I knew myself well enough to know that some part of me was seriously hoping Indigo would have a good explanation for the evidence I’d brought him. Some little, fragile corner of that girl come down from middle-class safety, who still thought things like friendship meant more than cred.
Yeah. I hadn’t managed to brutalize her into silence yet. I was working on it.
“Get your smegging clothes on,” I said, every word a ragged edge. “I don’t want to be talking to your junk.”
The color in his face pinched almost white around his mouth. “You…” His voice trembled with it, he was so pissed. The muscles in his arms, his abs, even the muscled thighs framing the picture centered between them shook. “What... I don’t even know what the fuck to say to you right now.”
“Then let me help you,” I shot back. I stalked to the bed, sex-rumpled and pillows astray, found the black pants he’d worn to the club the night before, threw them at him. He caught them easily with one hand. “Let’s start with Fuck It Jim.”
I watched contempt undercut the fury etching his sharp features. “Turn around.”
I rolled my eyes at him, but presented at least my profile. It allowed him to half-turn, using his body to hide the dick I wasn’t even remotely interested in, without forcing me to lose sight of him in general. “What about Jim?” he demanded, setting the picture frame down.
Smooth. Not so much as a flicker of guilt.
Was that how he’d done it? Did he seriously not care?
“First,” I said, as evenly as I could manage, “he’s dead.”
I had excellent peripheral vision. Still not even a hitch as he drew the pants over his swarthy hips. “So what?” He turned back to face me again as he zipped up. “He’s worthless.”
My fists clenched. “Then why were you selling him mercs?”
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