“Sounds good,” Muck said. To me: “Warning?”
“I don’t know. Go with it. He’s not acting right. Something happened to him—something more than just a drug habit.”
“Okay.”
Colim wiped his eyes one more time and then beckoned us to follow him. He went over to the drain cover and kicked it aside, then proceeded to climb down into the space.
“Bunch of us live down here,” he said. “No infonet on Sagran VI, so it’s easy to stay hidden.”
“Sounds exciting,” Muck said.
A sort of half-giggle, half-chuckle floated up to us.
“It’s better than that,” he said. “It’s safe. Come on down. I promise I won’t knife you from below.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” Muck muttered under his breath.
“I don’t think he meant it to be.”
We descended into the drain anyway. A short ladder led down two meters, and then a drop of another meter brought us to a tunnel that stretched off into the distance. A pale light emanated from cracks in the rock; probably some kind of bioluminescent fungal species or something.
Colim’s lightning-fast mood change seemed to have stuck on happy, because he giggled and waved us on before scurrying down the tunnel like a little kid.
“That dude is seriously creeping me out,” Muck said silently.
“He didn’t used to be this way,” I said, and I felt that sad feeling return. “He was really sharp, one hell of an operator. It’s almost like he’s had part of him ripped away.”
“He probably has,” Muck said. “I don’t see any evidence of him having an angel, or active mods.”
“But you were a demod,” I replied, ignoring the twist of pain that shot through him at my blunt words. “And you didn’t act like that. This is something else. I really want to know what ‘lab’ he was talking about. I can’t help but think it might have something to do with Siren.”
“Yeah, I get that feeling too,” Muck said. “But I also get the feeling we’re about to be jumped at any moment, so keep my ears open, will yah.”
“I have been,” I said. “Don’t worry. I don’t think there’s anyone but us down here for a little ways.”
“How little?”
“I don’t know . . . a ways. There’s no infonet here for me to query, so I’m not as accurate as I might otherwise be.”
Colim’s giggle drifted back to us. Muck let out a heavy sigh and started walking forward.
“Don’t worry so much,” I said. He didn’t answer.
Off in the distance, the tunnel curved to the left. A light source of some kind lay hidden behind that curve, because the texture and character of the tunnel walls and floor grew gradually more visible. When we got there, Colim waited around the corner. He stood next to a fire in a metal barrel. The top of the barrel glowed red with heat. I wondered just what exactly was burning in there.
“Keep up,” he said. “You’ll want to be with me for this next part, otherwise the boys will get you.”
“How many of you live down here?” Muck asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care. It’s safe here. No topsiders unless they’re with one of us,” he said with another giggle. “So stay close.”
“Great,” Muck muttered. But he did as he was told and followed closely behind Colim’s skeletal form. The tunnels twisted and turned beneath the settlement, until finally they opened into a large gallery-like space, with multiple uneven rows of pillars disappearing into the gloom.
“It’s like an underground forest,” Muck thought to me.
“How poetic of you. I wonder what these pillars are made of. They don’t look like rock.”
They looked like some kind of metal . . . but oddly so. It was as if metal had been infused with life to create something like bone, and then killed. Maybe it looked like a forest to Muck, but to me it felt like we were inside a giant organic metal ribcage.
Here and there, spots of brightness marked other burn barrels. Campsites clustered around these sources of light and heat. Some of the bedrolls and piles of possessions looked temporary . . . others less so. Colim led us to one that had a definite air of permanence.
Or maybe that was just the smell of unwashed clothes and humans. In either case, it was clear that Colim had been down here for a while.
“Sit there,” he said, indicating a pile of rags and blankets. “That was Xavier’s spot, but I haven’t seen him in a while. He’s probably dead.”
“Dead from what?” Muck eyed the rags with great suspicion.
“Overdose? Security? Someone passing through?” He shrugged wasted shoulders. “Not my problem, he was just someone I knew.”
“All right,” Muck said. “Did you know him from the lab?”
Colim let out a hiss and straightened up fast. Without further warning, he launched himself at us in a flying tackle that sent us tumbling backward into the pile of Xavier’s abandoned blankets.
Broken or not, Colim obviously remembered the rudiments of his unarmed combat training. He got his right hand twisted up in the front of our shirt just below our collarbone. His left arm came down hard on our throat, crushing against our windpipe and forcing our chin backward. It hurt.
“How do you know about the lab?” he rasped, face so close to ours that we could feel the heat of his breath and the spray of his spittle as he talked. “Who sent you?”
“You . . . told . . . me . . .” Muck gasped. “I thought you were watching out for surprises!” he said for my benefit alone.
“Shut up. He’s as weak as a newborn. You can flip him off at any minute . . . in fact . . . do that for me real quick. I have an idea.”
“Why does that make me nervous when you say that?”
“Just do it.”
Muck obeyed without any further smart-ass questions. He’d been flailing ineffectively with our arms with the intent to distract Colim. It worked, because the junkie never noticed Muck bringing our legs up. We got our heels wedged under Colim’s jutting hip bones and then kicked out. His legs shot out from under him and he collapsed onto our stomach. We were already rolling, flipping his body underneath our own and getting our arms up inside his reach.
From somewhere in the distant echo of Siren’s memories, I got a flash of this same body but powerfully muscled and slicked with sweat in a brief, desperate encounter intended to do nothing more than reassure both participants that they still breathed . . .
“What the bloody stars, Angel! I don’t need that right now! Damn it!”
“Sorry!” I said, meaning it. I hadn’t remembered that memory existed. Yet another reason I had to get her back soon. Her memories were starting to fray and dissipate. Not good.
Focus, Angel.
“Hold him steady,” I said to Muck. “I won’t be a moment.”
“What? Where are you . . . Angel!”
But I was already gone. Just as I’d implanted myself into Muck’s mods, I now pulled myself free. It wasn’t easy, and (for lack of a better term) it hurt. Badly. But this guy was the closest link I had to Siren, and so I did what I had to do. I passed through Muck’s hold into the skin of Colim’s throat. And from there into the big nerve bundle in the neck. And then . . .
Burning, aching emptiness. A tearing void that sank hooks into me and pulled, shredding . . . tearing . . . erasing.
I screamed, and I don’t know if either man heard it. I backtracked hard, fleeing back the way I’d come while that hungry void chased me.
I exploded back into Muck’s mind, merging into his mods like a gasping fish plunging back into the cool safety of the water.
“Let go! Let go! Let go, let go, let go—” I shouted, galvanizing Muck into immediate action. Springing off Colim, he staggered backward until he nearly fell into the burn barrel.
“Angel! Where did you go? Why did you leave me?” An
guish soaked the words, jacking up his adrenaline response without me having to do a thing. Our chest heaved as he sucked in gasps of air. On the pile of blankets in front of us, Colim writhed and wept like a child.
“I thought . . . I wanted to . . . Just don’t touch him again. It might come after me.”
“What might?”
“Whatever they did to his mods.” I knew my “voice” shook. I was rattled to my very core. I had to get it together. I kicked into override for just a second and took several slow, deep breaths. I triggered a dump of gamma-aminobutyric acid to slow down our crazily firing neurons and concentrated on reining it all in.
Gradually, our pulse rate dropped, and the screaming chaos of our thoughts began to regain coherence and order. I let the override go. I felt like I’d been run over by an asteroid miner’s pod as I slunk back to my corner of our brain.
Muck walked two steps to another nest of blankets, presumably Colim’s, before dropping. The sound of Colim’s muffled sobs indicated that he wasn’t really in a position to notice or care.
“All right,” Muck said, his tone hard. “What the fuck was that?”
“I-I’m sorry. I should have told you what I planned to do. I just thought that . . . he’s been so erratic. But he was modded at one point, so I thought if I could get inside his head the way I have yours . . . maybe I’d be able to find out more about what happened to Siren. But—”
“But?”
I shuddered at the memory of the horror that had been wrought upon Colim’s psyche. No wonder he was so broken.
“There was nothing there. Less than nothing. His mods haven’t just been pulled, they’ve been . . . changed. Burned, corrupted, and twisted somehow. What is there tried to unmake me as soon as I manifested in his nervous system. I think . . . if that’s what he’s dealing with on the daily, I’d be a blissed-out shell too.”
Muck was silent. Something in the burn barrel pinged as the heat caused it to fly against the metal side. The faint light flickered, making the shadows just outside the camp writhe. It was too dark beyond the circle of firelight to see any of the other residents of the cavern, and from the way it had looked when we came it, anyone else was too lost in their own misery to pay attention to us.
Long moments passed. Still no response. Shit.
I manifested visually, kneeling next to him. I could almost see his flinch as I reached out my hand.
“Muck,” I whispered. “Please. Say something.”
“You left me,” he said, his voice harder than industrial diamond.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t—” He cut himself off, closed his eyes. But I was in his brain, and he couldn’t escape.
“I won’t leave you again.”
“Don’t!” he shouted silently, slamming every privacy protocol into place. The force of his thought flung me out of my manifestation, left me feeling as if I’d been hurled against the inside of his skull.
Exhausted by everything, I just lay there and wept, silent and alone.
* * *
The night passed slowly.
Muck slept, privacy protocols firmly in place. I monitored his systems to ensure that he was getting the rest he needed. Physically, anyway. Psychologically, I had no idea. His neural activity told me he dreamed, but I couldn’t catch the faintest whisper of it. For the first time since I’d invaded his neurological network, Muck slept entirely alone.
Our “host,” such as he was, appeared to have fallen asleep as well, so I was left solitary.
I left it like that for six and a half hours, finally nudging him awake just before local sunrise.
“Muck.”
“Mmmph.”
“Muck, wake up.”
“What?”
“Wake up. It’s nearly sunrise. I know you want to leave with the Brethren today. Do you think we might do something about finding Siren first?”
“Shit. Yeah, okay, I’m up . . . damn, it’s dark in here. You sure it’s sunrise? Old boy over there isn’t moving,” Muck said as he sat up and gestured to Colim’s curled form.
“We’re underground. It’s naturally going to be dark at all hours down here,” I said, speaking slowly. Clearly he was still not fully awake. “Unless the orbital mechanics of this planet have changed appreciably in the last six and a half hours, the primary will be breaking over the horizon in approximately twenty-two minutes and sixteen seconds.”
“Ugh, you’re such a bitch in the morning.”
“All the time. Give credit where credit is due,” I shot back, relieved. Apparently, we were pretending my little faux pas of the night before never happened. I was completely good with that.
Muck stood up and stretched.
“I wonder if your old friend has anything to eat down here,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
“Probably not, based on his current level of emaciation. But you could wake him and ask, I guess.”
“Nah. I’ll just get something in the souk . . .” Muck narrowed his eyes and crouched next to Colim’s still form.
“Angel . . .”
“Please don’t touch him,” I said softly.
“Not his skin,” Muck replied, “but look.”
He reached out and grabbed Colim by the shirt, then hauled him over so that he flopped onto his back. His skin was tinged a distinct blue, even in the uncertain light from the burn barrel. A thin dark line of congealed blood ran down from his nose, across his cheek. Muck bent our ear close to his lips and nose.
Nothing. Colim was dead.
“Overdose?” Muck said, looking around for bliss paraphernalia.
“No,” I said. Rising horror crept through my awareness.
“I think . . . I think it was his mods. Or what’s left of them, anyway. They tried to shred me when I went in, like a virus. I must have . . . triggered a self-destruct sequence of some kind. I bet they shredded his neural network away to nothing.”
He’d lain there all night, whimpering and crying as the virus I’d unleashed pulled his mind to pieces. I had run, after triggering what killed him, escaping back into the safety of Muck’s system. But Colim had nowhere to go. I’d simply watched him die, not even aware of his passing.
I’d left a brother behind. Fuck.
“Angel,” Muck said softly. “It’s not your fault.” He shouldn’t have been able to feel my anguish, the desperate pain at the knowledge that I’d left Colim to die, but he did.
In that moment I felt closer to him than ever before.
“Yes, it is,” I said, my voice empty. I took all of these thoughts, these emotions that I shouldn’t even be able to have, and I visualized putting them in a box. Then I locked that fucking shitty box and shoved it way back, as far as I could from awareness. “But I can’t think about it right now. Just can’t. Let’s find the lab. Let’s find Siren.”
“All right.”
I’d memorized our route yesterday, so we managed to retrace our steps to the alley drain without much difficulty. Despite Colim’s dire warnings, no one bothered us as we went. Maybe the mysterious “boys” didn’t care if people left. Maybe they’d only ever existed in his damaged mind.
We climbed up out of the defunct sewer just as the first rays of daylight started to stain the sky pink.
“Food first,” Muck said. “We’ll grab something in the souk and then come up with a plan while we eat.”
“Really? You’re going to plan an assault on a building you’ve never seen while you eat? You don’t even know where it is.”
“Yeah, pretty much. I think best while eating. Or at least on a full stomach.”
“Riiight.”
Perhaps it was a sign how small I was, but the more we continued to banter, the more normal I—we—felt. We still existed in the shadow of last night’s events . . . but they dulled in the light of the day�
��s realities, lost some of their sharp edges and ability to wound.
The souk, it turned out, had some pretty delicious food choices on offer. Muck ended up picking up some kind of spiced meat pie thing and a jug of local alcohol, on my suggestion.
“I don’t usually drink this early in the morning,” he joked.
“I can metabolize the alcohol out of your system easily enough, and it’s probably safer than the water. But if you want to take your chances . . .”
“No, I’m good. This pie-thing is daring enough for me.” He took another bite. “I have to admit, it tastes very good. I’m not sure I want to know what kind of meat is in it.”
“I’m fairly certain you don’t,” I said. “That said, the exact chemical composition is not from any sentient being I recognize, anyway.”
“So I’ve got that going for me,” he thought, sucking in air around another large, hot bite. “Which is nice.”
“Mmmhmm. How’s that thinking-while-eating coming? You got a plan yet?”
“Something like that. See that guy there? The one wearing the faded orangeish jacket thing with the hood down?”
“The guy buying one of your mystery meat pies? Yeah.”
“Yeah, see what he’s got around his neck?”
I magnified Muck’s vision and zoomed in on the back of the neck. Sure enough, there it was: a centimeter-wide strip of fabric printed with the letters “DPAPL” and “Lab . . .” visible before it disappeared back into the neckline of the jacket.
“What is that?” I asked.
“I think it’s an old-fashioned lanyard. If they don’t have nanotransmitters in their building, they don’t have modern security screening in place. So they have to issue physical credentials to allow their employees access, usually in the form of a card or chip of some kind. But things like that get lost easily, right? So you hook it to a lanyard, hang it around your neck, and there you go. Hard to lose, hard to lift. Problem solved.”
“How . . . quaint.”
“Yep,” Muck said, shoving the last of the meat pie in his mouth. “Let’s see where Lanyard Boy is headed this fine morning.”
Second Chance Angel Page 18