Did it explode a head? Did I miss it?
I swallowed back a nauseating need to laugh.
A black-clad arm lay limp and discarded by my feet, leaking blood at the severed biceps. A crisp white logo glowed obscenely clean on the sleeve.
“MetaCore?” I asked, my voice sickeningly steady. My brain shut down the colors around me – red so heavy and dark it was nearly black; the brown spatter of thicker things my subconscious quietly shoved into the dark recesses of memory to be drowned in drink or slank later – and focused instead on the logo. “It’s MetaCore in here.”
But why? Was it me, after all?
Had I led them in here? Or were they after the same data?
“Thank you,” Malik said, anger and ice packed in to absolute calm. As if I wasn’t standing in a circle of butchery so complete, I wasn’t sure how I wasn’t screaming. Maybe he couldn’t see it. My helmet had vanished somewhere. “I’ll figure out why. Get your team somewhere safe.”
I raised my gaze from the mess around my feet, skimmed the rest of the street in either direction.
Indigo watched me from his splayed position against the front door of an empty junkshop, his helmet cracked and faceplate shattered. Blood smeared the side of his visible mouth.
To my left, Hooker was bent over the remains of something in black armor.
I didn’t see Carter.
Or maybe I did, and I wasn’t putting a name to the mangled remains.
Slowly, I picked up one foot. Put it down.
Gobbets of something milky and pink squelched underneath my boot.
Another step. This one made no sound.
The third splashed. Bile rose in my throat, burned a hole in my chest, but I forced myself to clear the street – squelch, squish, crunch, snap. The things I stepped on defied description.
Indigo’s eyes closed as I knelt beside him. “I forget,” was his resigned greeting.
“Forget what?” I put the knife down, searched his helmet for the clasp underneath his chin that would release the seal.
“You’re a hell of a splatter specialist.”
My smile felt too tight. I pulled his helmet off with care, caught his head when it would have fallen back against the shop’s rusted facing. The thick strands of his loosening braid clung to my blood-drenched fingers. “Obviously, you’ve been taking us on the wrong runs.”
Indigo looked like death. The quiet sort of death, not the ruinous mess of necro and corporate carcasses behind me. I couldn’t tell how much was pain and how much was terminal.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“Bad. Gut wound.” His teeth bared in a smile that indirectly reminded me of mine. Too much edge. Not enough warmth.
I was a terrible influence.
I tilted my head. “Malik?”
“Vitals won’t read without the head unit,” he said in my ear, as cool as control had been until shit hit the fan. “But if you patch it and down a recharge, your nanos will handle the rest.”
“You know what?” I put a hand on Indigo’s shoulder, forcing him to lean back until the bottom edge of his chest plate shifted out of the way. “So far, your armor sucks. Infrared that doesn’t see through stealth units better than yours, night vision without filters for near-zero light. I’ve seen scrap gear with better systems.”
“Noted. I’ll pass it on to tech the desk. When you return,” he continued on the same even note, “we’re going to talk about why your vitals just went apeshit.”
If it had anything to do with what happened in the four minutes I’d lost, that was not a conversation I was going to have. Maybe there was a good reason. Adrenaline, berserking haze, whatever. All I knew was that I’d led my team into a necro knot to shake MetaCore and barely come out in one piece.
Carter didn’t come out at all.
This shit scared me.
“Shut up, Malik,” I said, my tone making it clear I wasn’t paying any more attention to him. “I’m busy saving Indigo’s life.”
He said nothing, but Indigo sucked in a sound that might have been a laugh.
I peeled back the curled remains of the plating covering his gut and saw nothing but a bloody tear. “What the hell did this?”
“A necro,” he said tightly. “Tore through the armor like it wasn’t even there. I don’t know what the hell he’d been wired with, but it was sharp and fast and it sucks.”
“Yeah, well, sucking abdominal wounds, am I right?”
“Fuck you, Riko.”
Everybody was a critic. I stood. “We need to find somewhere safe. Can you walk?”
“I can lean,” he managed, and took my hands. I braced myself, hauled him upright, and flinched when he locked back a groan. Shoving my shoulder into his armpit, I stabilized him the best I could.
“Hooker!”
The kid jerked, scrambling for his discarded weapon.
It took everything I had to gentle my tone. “Come on, kid. We’re going.”
For once, nobody flipped me any shit. Tearing himself away from whatever he saw in Carter’s devastated remains, Hooker dragged himself to his feet, turned, and trudged after us.
At least the wasps in my head had settled to a mellow buzz.
We walked in silence, punctuated only by the crunch and squish of our boots dragging through obliterated corpses, and very deliberately did not talk about what happened.
I wasn’t sure any of us even knew.
24
We settled on a rooftop, high enough that it towered over its neighbors and lacking in any cover for necros to hide behind. Hooker’s eyes were starting to go glassy, so I set him on watch.
Not the kindest thing I’d ever done to a kid in shock, but he’d stay alert. If only to make sure whatever happened down there didn’t happen again. I was pretty sure that if I let him settle, he’d check out for good. Watching a teammate blow herself up with a mine still strapped to her back did that to a brain.
At least she’d taken out half the clot with her.
Heh. Clot. I was a grotesque riot.
It beat the alternative, though. I wasn’t going to die down here.
I stripped off my gloves, then helped Indigo out of his ruined chest piece and peeled back his skin suit. His flesh gleamed gold in the faint circle of light cast off from the glow rod propped on the ground beside us. Gold and bloody red. The edges of the wound curled out like a gaping flower, and blood oozed thickly with every panting breath he took.
I steeled myself. “Shit, Digo, that’s nothing.”
“Riko?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I flashed him a grin I didn’t feel as I peeled open the first aid bandages. “Fuck me.”
“Not even on my best day, sugartits.” But there wasn’t any laughter in his tone. Just pain, tension, and more resignation than I liked to see from a guy who’d been my linker for more of my runner years than not.
I packed the wound with a lot more care than his jibe warranted. “Been taking cues from Jax, huh?” He didn’t answer me, and I didn’t push. The skin around his mouth went yellow with strain. The harder I pushed, the paler he got, until sweat watered down the blood and he gasped out a harsh word racked with pain.
“I know, I know.” I firmed my grip. “Drink your recharge.”
“If I throw up on you,” he managed from teeth clenched so tight, his jaw stood out in harsh contrast, “you deserve it.”
I nodded, but I had nothing clever to say.
He was right. I’m the one who’d fucked his sister, vanished with her, and then left her behind. Whatever the reasons, whatever we found to explain what was going on here, I deserved whatever he put on me.
But I’d find out who betrayed Nanji first. Maybe if I offered that asshole’s head to Indigo, I’d make some amends. Maybe.
The fresh bandages under my ungloved hands slowly turned red.
Indigo drained the recharge pack, sucking out the thick green sludge until the plastic crumpled in on itself. I waited a full two minutes.
W
hen I raised the bandage to look beneath, I couldn’t tell if the bleeding had slowed or if I was used to the warmth of it on my palm. “Nanos kicking in?”
“Feels like it.” He spoke thickly. “It itches.”
“Itching is good.” For the really bad wounds, itching meant healing.
“Dunno. Never been hurt bad enough.” His blue eyes gleamed at me. “You itch when you reconstruct?”
“Fuck, yes.” Of the two of us, I was most likely to walk home with a bullet or worse. As a rule, we banded around our linkers. Runners didn’t get far when a linker’s death blinded them. “First time I ever got a gut wound like that, I kept shoving forks down my pants to get the bottom edge of the scar.”
A ghost of a smile shaped his mouth. “Kinky.”
“You only wish.”
We fell silent again, only the hum – softer, much less painful – and the thickening dark to keep us company.
This was the perfect time to talk to him. To tell him all the things I hadn’t yet – about me, his sister. About what we’d find down there, or at least what I was scared shitless we’d find.
I didn’t. I could claim it had more to do with Indigo’s need to knit without straining it, but I’d be lying.
The silence turned to an accusation, and I sweated it out in grim silence.
After ten minutes, I checked under the bandage again.
“Looks like it’s slowed.” With effort, I straightened from my huddle, flexing a hand that had cramped from the pressure. “Give it a few more for the worst of it to seal and the boost to kick in.”
He didn’t answer me, eyes closed. But his breathing had steadied, so I withdrew to a comfortable distance and took up watch on the edge of the roof. Hooker, with his longer range, had a vantage point of the street. I kept an eye on the rooftops closest to us.
“Hooker, down a recharge,” I told him, and watched for the movement of his back that said he obeyed. I fished out my own recharge from my belt.
My whole body ached, a lowkey throb.
I focused on twisting open the seal, on swallowing the slightly salty mix with more care than needed.
If I didn’t, if I let myself think about what had happened back there, I was afraid I’d end up like Hooker. Traumatized. Questioning everything. Glassy eyed and shellshocked.
Zombies? I wished. Every zombie shock vid I’d ever seen had seemed sad and pointless to me. None of it mattered: dead was dead.
This? This was insane. This was a tech virus infecting meat; killing the brain and replacing it with its own programming. It wasn’t right. Machines had killed before – ask any idiot who wasn’t paying attention on the job – but they didn’t have the right to kill. It shouldn’t have been a choice.
Tech infection seemed too damn close to a mechanical choice for me.
Who was the fuckhead who’d risked the corruption and didn’t tell anyone?
Was I the cause of all this? That didn’t seem likely. I’d missed going necro. But Nanji hadn’t.
Wouldn’t that just be perfect.
I sucked a gob of green sludge out of the squeezable plastic tube and stared out into the light-speckled distance.
“Do you suppose we’ll die in here?”
I looked back, surprised out of my silence. “Uh...” Brilliant. I tried again. “Sorry, but is this Indigo Koupra I’m talking to? Exceptional linker, brains behind the best operations on the street? Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “I’m serious, Ree.”
I held my breath for a moment.
What did he want me to say?
“Maybe,” I said, exhaling the word. “MetaCore on our ass, necros infesting the neighborhood like some kind of disease...” I shrugged. “Not the best odds we’ve ever faced.”
“Probably the worst.”
“Yeah.” I squeezed the plastic in my metal hand gently. The recharger squelched. “Probably.”
“You want to tell me what went down with you and my sister?”
Now it was my turn to close my eyes.
No. I really didn’t. Fuck. I still regretted not being the one to put a bullet in her. I didn’t know if we’d find her shacked up in the middle of all this carnage, the patient zero of the Vid Zone blight.
There was a lot I hadn’t worked out yet.
What if we died before we made it anywhere?
I opened my eyes to find him watching me.
I looked away. “What do you want to know?”
“Did you love her?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me.” He paused. “And it would to her, too.”
Guilt opened up like a bloody wound in my chest. My fingers twitched on the plastic casing, forcing a rim of green around the narrow strawlike tube. I took the moment to suck it clean, working over what I could say – what I should say.
The truth?
I guess I owed him some truth. “No,” I told him quietly. “Not like you want me to.” I met his gaze across the dim lighting. “I liked her, though. She was fun, friendly. I liked being around her. It was like...” I looked up at the low-hanging layer of smoke. “It was like the opposite of hanging with Jax, you know? She kind of had this thing, this quality that made you care about stuff.”
“Is that why you left us?”
I winced. “That’s... different.” Completely different. Without my memories, I didn’t know the first thing about why or how. Obviously, I’d left, then somehow ended up at that lab, but why?
He watched me, the skin around his eyes pinched. Anger, maybe. Pain.
“I didn’t mean to leave you.” I gestured at him with the boost. “I’ve been kind of fucked up lately, okay?”
His mouth tightened, that muscle ticking in his jaw. “Fucked up,” he repeated. “That’s it? That’s all you got?”
I didn’t have it in me to get mad. “Please don’t work yourself up,” I said instead, wearily. “You still have a gaping hole in your gut.”
“Fuck you.” He elbowed himself up, until he managed a semi-recline that let him stare me down. “You have a problem, Riko. You leave everyone who starts to like you, and it always screws it up for the rest of us. Why the fuck couldn’t you just leave Nanji? Leave her with me?”
I got it. Angry older brother. I couldn’t begrudge him the effort. He was even right, sort of. I left my folks without much of a backward glance. I’d left Lucky. Sure, I saw him time to time, but I didn’t really visit much.
I left Jax when things got too messy. Liked my fuckbuddies sexy and uncomplicated. I liked being wanted.
I didn’t see how any of that was wrong.
But I couldn’t drum up the energy to try explaining. I didn’t even know if I could. I was just too... tired. And it didn’t have anything to do with why I was here, anyway. That was my business. Not his.
He could go fuck himself.
I turned away, gazing out across the empty rooftops. “You’re right.”
“Damn it, Riko.”
“Yeah, that’s cool.” I shifted my grip on the Sauger, resting it across my lap for better access. Always one part of my brain on the job; the same trait that he was tearing at now. Guess it was okay when it was his ass I was watching out for.
“Yeah, I’ll bet it’s cool,” he spat. “You really don’t give a fuck how I feel, do you?”
“Right now, Digo, the number of fucks I have to give are rapidly shrinking.”
He glared at me. “And that’s why I don’t trust you anymore.” He leaned back, like he’d scored a point. “I thought you’d change when you hooked up with us, but you didn’t, did you? You don’t give a shit about any of us.”
That wasn’t true. These were my mates, my runners. I’d worked with them for more than a handful of years. Of course I cared about them. I trusted them.
“I’ll prove it,” I said to the thinning, smoky night air. “We’ll find her, and I’ll prove it.”
“You realize that’s another of your problems, right?”
My teeth clicked together. “Digo,” I said, all pretense at patience snapped, “I have a metric ass ton of problems, but I am not the one with a sucking abdominal wound.”
Okay, my turn to score a point. Never argue with a splatter specialist if your ass isn’t ready for a throwdown of the physical kind.
Maybe he remembered that unspoken rule of the street. He was silent for a long time.
Then, quietly, he sighed.
“For fuck’s sake, now what?” I snarled.
He shifted – his armor scraped the rough ground. “How fucked up?”
I stared out over the dark street.
This was it. An opening. I couldn’t ask for a better time.
Or a worse one.
“Talk to me,” he said. Not soft. Not quiet. But steady. Like he was making an effort.
He owed me that much. Just like I owed him. Trust, huh?
I sighed. “Very,” I said tightly. “Very fucked up. A lot of...” I hesitated, frowning at my weapon. “Most of that month after that MetaCore run is a blur.” Sort of a lie. “Whatever I did – I don’t know. It’s all gone, Digo.”
“You don’t remember?”
I knuckled at my eyes with a grimy hand. “Not really. It’s something I’ve been trying to figure out. Retrace my steps.”
“And Nanji’s part?”
Damn it. I winced, shifting on my perch. “Part of the blank.” I’m sorry. More than he’d ever know. “I don’t mean all of it. I was serious when I said I liked being with her. It’s just...” I blew out a harsh exhale.
“You lost a month?”
“I lost three. April to July, man. Anything after that MetaCore run put me on Lucky’s table. It’s like I went under and never woke up until that lab.”
He went quiet. Processing, maybe. Swallowing it down with the same effort I still couldn’t muster.
I lived it, and it still sounded like bullshit to me.
“Did Lucky clear you?”
“Yeah.” Mostly.
“Do you trust him?”
Any other time, I would have clocked him for the suggestion. Now, I couldn’t fault his logic. But I couldn’t go there. Not yet. “I do,” I said grimly. I had to.
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