Digo grunted a wordless acknowledgment. For another few minutes, silence hovered like a smoky shroud. Then, “Is that why you’re here? To figure out what happened to you?”
“Yeah.” I tilted my head until I could see his silhouette out of the corner of my eye.
His armor scraped cement. “What if I said I believed you?”
“Do you?” When he hesitated, I shook my head. “It’s cool. Whatever we’ll find, it’ll answer both our questions.”
That was about as zen as I could manage.
“Yeah. Well, listen,” he said to my back. “While we’re being all touchy-feely here.”
I snorted.
“I guess I should mention that I sold you out.”
It took me a moment to register. A moment longer to work through the arrested hitch of my thoughts.
What the shit? I tell him I lost my goddamn mind and he comes back with a casual note of betrayal? I turned, my feet sliding off the ledge and hitting the rooftop ground so hard, dust puffed out from underneath the tread. “Sorry, what?”
Behind Indigo, Hooker stirred, his shoulders shifting as if he’d only just tuned in to the tension.
Digo ignored him. His eyes, the set of his jaw, even the hands fisted against the ground outlined defiance. “About a day before you showed up at the Mecca, Reed introduced himself.”
I expected the man himself to cut in on the feeds, but the line was silent.
Indigo looked away. “Mantis was offering a bounty for you. Paid in full on delivery. Said if you showed up, give him a call.” His laugh was harsh. “You were still AWOL, so it didn’t matter. I was done. At least I thought I was until you came back like nothing had changed.”
Very carefully, I set the dregs of the boost down on the roof ledge. I wanted to smear it. Wanted to turn on Indigo and kick the stupid right out of him.
Instead, I stood. “So you sent me to him in the guise of finding a team.”
He shrugged.
“I knew it,” I hissed. “Don’t say you never gave me anything? You spunkchucking son of a whore.”
Another shrug. “Turns out, you were worth getting paid for twice.” Amusement, sharp as a knife, cut me nearly to the bone. “Assuming we survive this.”
So that was the first payment owed. I could barely breathe around my fury. Betrayal. That hurt. “You just sold me out to the first suit who came looking.”
He nodded.
“Without hearing me out?”
Another nod, but the sharp amusement slashed into his features twisted. He didn’t explain himself.
I wasn’t interested in hearing it. My throat ached around a lump I didn’t know what to do with. I turned away. “Is this true?” Silence. I lifted a hand to my ear, as if it would help. “Answer me, you scumeating failure of an abortion, is he telling the truth?”
Malik didn’t bother with preamble. “Yes.”
The lump hardened. Anger replaced hurt and I let it. So much safer. So much less painful. “Why?” I gritted out. My fist clenched, unclenched; clenched again as it locked around the Sauger. “Tell me why I shouldn’t put a bullet in the last two men here with me and then come for you.”
“That would be counterintuitive,” Malik replied.
Behind me, I heard Indigo say my name.
It scored another notch into my rapidly fraying temper.
“Here’s what’s counterintuitive,” I said, my voice low. It shook – strain and fury. Betrayal, achingly sharp. “When I get out of here, Malik Reed, you’re first on my list.”
“I don’t doubt that.” His deep voice remained calm, a soothing counterpoint to my vibrating rage. I hated it. I hated him.
Nothing in this world would give me as much pleasure as sinking my fingers knuckle-deep into his eye sockets and watching his brain ooze out.
He used me. Right from the start.
My vision turned red. Bloody, furious red.
“Use your brain,” he said, the admonishment so sharp, I stepped back. “You’re in necro-infested territory and it’s only going to get worse. Do you want answers or not?”
I did. But did I want them at the expense of the payback I desperately wanted to deliver?
Fuck. Fucking chumsucking twats.
“Fine,” I hissed. “But tell me one thing.”
“One.”
How damned magnanimous.
“Why did you come looking for me?”
There was a pause. Then, simply, “I’ve been trying to get a lock on this operation for months. Sources pointed me to you.”
“What operation? This one?” Malik’s silence was telling. Just. Fucking. Awesome. “So you knew about this? The whole time?” And he’d used me to get the evidence he needed.
His tone didn’t shift. “Get out of there with the intel we need, and we’ll talk.”
Not if I murdered him first. The knuckles of my flesh hand cracked. “Did you–” It broke, and I swallowed hard before it all came out on a surge of bile.
Somehow, he knew. “Did I know about the number of necros?” Malik’s voice didn’t soften. I would have believed him less if it had. “No. But I wasn’t surprised. Keep the rest of your team alive, and we’ll find the truth inside.”
Every cell in my body went nova as my temper cracked against what little restraint I had left. All I could do was slam my fist against the wall beside me. It hurt like hell, but I notched it in with the rest of the bullshit I carried.
Hooker’s voice, still wired inside his helmet, filled my ears. “Chum,” he said, shaken and sounding every bit the kid I kept calling him. “That was not cool.”
Indigo closed his eyes. “Fuck you, Hooker,” he said wearily. “You’re named after a low-rent occupation.”
But he kept one hand on his Sauger.
25
Silence – stillness, anyway, and that dull disharmony – reigned. I let it. If it bothered either of them, relieved them that I wasn’t engaging, I couldn’t say. We approached our final destination without speaking, and I let them drown in their own thoughts.
While I drowned in mine.
So, I’d vanished after his sister’s death. I went missing for a couple months. I couldn’t remember any of that, and so what? Amnesia, motherfucker. What was his excuse?
Nanjali.
Everything kept circling back to her. Her face, her name, the sound of her laugh.
I hated this. The uncertainty, the anger. Maybe I couldn’t remember what had happened – maybe I was innocent of any wrongdoing – but she was Indigo’s sister. His only blood family, far as I knew.
That made up for a lot of shit decisions on his part.
Which meant my head of steam cooled faster than I wanted it to.
In the end, Digo and I were the same kind of asshole. A part of me understood that.
The rest of me – that part trained by the street and a runner’s survival instinct; the hard killing reflex conditioned to give no second chances – was growling that Indigo Koupra could eat me.
What the hell had happened to us?
“Pick it up,” Malik said, breaking the long silence with his relentless calm. “You have one hour and twenty-five minutes to get what you can and get out.”
“Got it.” Indigo’s confirmation, not mine.
Malik Reed could eat me, too.
The place didn’t look any different than any of the other structures surrounding it. Hemmed in tightly, it was nothing but flat metal facing shored up by rusted plates here and there, worn veneers and the occasional busted and boarded window. It smelled too much like smoke to get a clear scent, but I thought I smelled sour refuse underneath it. Stale and rotting.
“Hey, jackholes.” I pointed. “I think this is it.”
Indigo didn’t bat a pretty black eyelash. He looked like hell without his helmet, but we all did. Around the soot and dirt and blood, anyway. “According to the fixer’s notes, it is. I take it waltzing through the front door won’t work?”
If my patchy memory wasn’
t playing tricks on me, it wouldn’t. “Nope.”
“All right. Hooker, stay sharp. I’ll do a circuit and–”
“Wrong.” I frowned at him. “One more hit like that gut wound and your nanos are toast. You know that, right?”
“Aw.” His lips quirked faintly. “I didn’t know you cared.”
“I’m one bullet away from it, Indigo.”
He was silent for a moment, his study weighing me as if trying to decide if I was serious. Then, “You have it together enough to finish this out?”
“She does,” Malik said in my earpiece, putting words in my mouth I wasn’t ready to deliver.
I gritted my teeth. “Who asked you?”
“You did, when you asked me to fund this field trip.” His tone hardened. “Now get your shit together, all of you, and get this done.”
Over and fuck you, too.
Hooker said nothing.
I bent my irritation to the task in front of me. One thing at a time. Do the job in front of me, and I’d handle the rest later.
Better I blow my anger out on this, anyway. Maybe once we got out, I’d be ready to talk.
No smegging promises.
“There’s another way in,” I finally said, surveying the street in both directions. “I just have to figure out where the door is.”
“Make it quick,” Indigo said, his gaze on the street behind us.
Advice I could agree with. Maybe we’d gotten all the MetaCore enforcers, or maybe they were out playing tag with the rest of the necros, but whatever the reason, the relative quiet didn’t sit right.
The smoke thinned, shoved along by a breeze cooling my sweat and blood-streaked cheeks and easing some of the heat I felt keenly now that my suit’s templock had broken. The draft felt good.
A narrow crevasse sat like a black seam at the far edge of the faceless structure, as good a place to start as any. Without a word, I strode for it, withdrawing a flashlight from its band at the back of my belt and twisting it into the notch at the base of my Sauger. It weighted the front more than I liked, but with my helmet gone, I was almost blind out here.
The fact I knew about the door in that alley came down more to memory than sight, but I didn’t second guess myself as I stepped into the dark, weapon at the ready.
“Torch up,” Indigo told Hooker. “Keep an eye on our asses.”
Refuse greeted the searching light, piles of garbage left in torn plastic bags and crates tipped over by hungry animals, bums, or worse. The smell was nauseatingly thick.
“Ugh.” The first sound Hooker had made in almost forty-five minutes.
I didn’t blame him. Gritting my teeth, I forged through it, my light cutting through the pitch dark to glance off sharp edges, stained paneling and worse.
I stopped in front of a section of mottled wall, flanked on each side by tilting, bundled plastic.
“What?” Indigo peered over my shoulder, so close I could smell the lingering tang of dried blood.
I rolled that shoulder back hard enough that he backed up a step. “Scan here.”
He flipped open the arm unit, squinting at the narrow screen. The text on it scrolled at a rapid rate; his dark eyes reflected back the amber glow, missing nothing. “There’s a signal coming right below our feet. It’s faint, I can’t lock it, but something down there has power.”
“Which means you’ll lose this signal when you get in there,” Malik said over the feed. “Step it up. The burn team’s getting impatient and I can’t keep pulling favors for you.”
“You mean for you,” I muttered, but didn’t give either of us time to get into it. I flattened my metal palm against the wall’s cool facing.
Pretty typical stuff. Pocked metal over brick. Standard durability. I doubt anyone considered reinforcing it since nobody could tell it was here.
“No grenades.” I grimaced. “No mines, no heavy.”
“No problem.” Indigo palmed my shoulder. “Out of my way.” I tensed, but he dragged me back a step. “My job, Riko. Get lost.”
Lost wouldn’t be helpful to any of us, so I settled for shaking off his hand and folding my arms, Sauger cradled. I did not call him any of the names that came to my humming mind.
Strange. It was, I don’t know, like the more I listened to the buzz, the less it bothered me. I could focus, even hear through it. Maybe I was getting used to it. The pressure hadn’t faded, but a headache only gave a body two options: ride it, or drown. I was tired of drowning.
Indigo pulled two twisted cords from his belt, slipped them into place in the arm unit, and ran his fingers over the facing. At two separate places, he affixed the pads to the wall and tapped the arm unit’s keypad. He worked quickly, silently, running whatever programs he had stored up for the job. Once in a while, he shifted a pad. Then the other.
“Why are you using hardware instead of a projection?” Hooker asked.
“Trying to keep everything locked down to this single unit,” he muttered, but absently. After another long moment of trial and error, he smiled. The curve of it as he glanced at me was like a fist squeezing in my chest.
For one second, it was the Indigo I’d known for years; a stark echo of his sister, right down to the faintly pointed incisors giving their smiles an impish charm.
My guts twisted. By habit, my lips tilted up in return.
Reality didn’t let that slide for long.
His smile faded, replaced by the same wary tension infecting us all since we’d arrived inside the quarantine. “Got it,” was all he said.
As if something reached in and plucked a tight chord inside my skull, the hum I’d gotten used to shifted faintly. A note of harmony in the dissonance, here and gone again so fast, I gingerly tipped my head.
No shit. Was it that simple? I rubbed the base of my skull with one hand, nearly laughed out loud before I swallowed it on a grunt they ignored. The wasps in my head, the flicker I’d felt when Indigo’s tech cracked the system, were they just frequencies?
Just like the nanos needed to be calibrated, the chipset needed the same kind of calibration. By design, each chipset was supposed to be unique to its specific user and nanos, but any number of things could knock it out of sync.
Obviously, I was picking up on some serious interference, which translated to something my hardware – my brain – could understand. White noise.
Lucky had said I needed to recalibrate. This must be why.
Relief filled me as a seam hissed out compressed air. The unlocked panel slid into the wall, revealing an empty elevator smelling like the same air that filled the alley. And something sharper. Acrid.
Smoke, burning plastic and disinfectant.
The lights flickered inside. “Well,” I said, manically cheerful. “At least it has power.” And I wasn’t losing my mind. Total win.
“One hour and thirteen,” Malik reminded us. “Work fast.”
No problem.
We filed inside. “If I’m right,” I said as the door closed behind us, “the uplink lab will be two doors down to the right. We should be able to tap in, see if we can find traces of Nanji, get the data, and get out.”
“Sounds easy,” Hooker mused.
His tone mimicked my thoughts – and Indigo’s, I’d bet. It was going to be anything but easy. We just weren’t that lucky.
The car shuddered, lights wavering rapidly. Every shock vid I’d ever seen came to settle inside the narrow space with us, filling up the air with cold, nervous sweat. I gripped the wall with my flesh hand. It slipped, leaving clammy streaks of dirt and congealed blood.
Malik, probably nursing a hot coffee in one hand and counting stacks of credsticks with the other, didn’t sound the least bit worried. “Mr Koupra, is your isolated unit still in one piece?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” The line crackled, streaking Malik’s feed with juddering syllables as the elevator sank. “Do not interface with anything else. The chance... –ecro infection could... team won’t–”
“Bye b
ye, asshole,” I said, way perkier than the environment demanded. I shrugged at the two men staring at me – though of the three of us, Hooker still had his helmet and he could be sleeping on his feet, for all I knew. “He is an asshole.”
Hooker stirred. “What was he saying about interfacing?”
Digo didn’t argue with my take. “You get that the necro code moves tech to tech, right?” He pointed up at nothing in general. “Computer systems, wiring, servers. If it’s wired to a network or even a single drive, it’s fair game.”
“So... it’s... It’s alive?”
Fucking A. “No,” I said, all pretense of my fake cheer dropped. “It’s not alive, Hooker. It’s a machine.”
“Think of it more like a computer virus,” Indigo clarified. “This place still has power, which means it’s on a closed circuit. It could have active sectors of necro corruption in its databanks. Linking other systems to it provides a pathway for the virus to spread, you follow?” He closed his unit, tamping the plate down carefully on his arm brace. “Stay on your toes, watch out for each other. I’ll use the isolated system to pull whatever info I can from the place and we’ll get the fuck out.”
He did not, I noticed, mention his sister.
That made him the levelheaded one here. Even if he didn’t say so, the odds of Nanji’s survival in this mess had exponentially dropped the longer she remained in this shithole.
All I needed to know was how she’d died. If she was still dragging herself around down there, full-on necro.
Not that it’d matter. Dead was dead.
Was it for her?
No. No, it wasn’t. It was for me. I couldn’t let her corpse go because if I did, I’d never know what put me down here. What I’d done in those months I couldn’t remember.
I couldn’t fix my cred until I knew, and that was the simple fact of this whole fucking mess. It wasn’t about Nanji.
But unlike Indigo, who would go through his grieving stage, I just wanted to get the intel and move on. There was no other way to cope.
Yeah. This was going to be one hell of a hot mess.
Necrotech Page 28