Money.
Was it really that simple?
Of course it was.
Fate lived, ate and breathed money.
It was his Alpha and Omega.
The game had just changed.
Big time.
Now I wasn’t going up against some faceless corporate masters.
It was personal.
This was between me and Fate.
I wanted to know how he’d done it, of course.
How was almost more important than why, right now.
It wasn’t like I’d carried a hologram out of GenX.
He didn’t know I knew he was alive. But I was regretting my visit to the apartment before the funeral to stock up. If he went through his gear, he’d know stuff was missing. If he went through the security records, he’d work out my key had activated the locks. So that was the first thing I needed Mel to fix. And fast. She needed to wipe any trace of me in that place. She thought it would be fun to make it look as though Fate’s own biometric key had been used to open the door, meaning he’d seemingly robbed himself. I thought it was a bit cute, but I was quite happy for him to waste time worrying about who his quantum burglar was while I got on with the serious business of plotting out a very personal, very brutal revenge for my friends.
And I’ll be honest, even confronted with the truth, I couldn’t actually believe it.
I let Mel get on with covering my tracks and went in search of the final member of my team.
An assassin.
I knew who I wanted, but all I had was a name: Tenebrae.
There’s something mildly amusing about a ghost chasing a shadow…
But then, I’ve always had a perverse sense of humor.
How do you arrange a meeting with a hitman?
Easy.
Hire him to kill you.
I put the word out there was a new Bleeder in town, a ghost, and that I wanted his spectral head on a platter. There were plenty of takers, of course, from inexperienced wannabes with big ideas about their so-called talents to some seriously dangerous souls. I was only interested in one of them, but Tenebrae himself didn’t bite. Two weeks after the massacre at Fate’s funeral a broker reached out. The message came through coded, requesting a sit-down. The venue was a seedy old joint in the heart of the red-light district in Old Tokyo. Outside were neon lights for LIVE GIRLS, for GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS and guaranteed LIVE SEX while barkers that promised everything from ping pong shows to smoking genitalia and, well, everything imaginable. You name the perversion, someone along that strip was willing to feed it for cash. Not my ideal choice, but it offered a layer of anonymity, so it worked.
Inside, I felt like I’d just walked into the Stripper’s Graveyard where old pole dancers came to die. I ordered an overpriced shot of single malt, no ice and sat in a private booth to wait for my contact to show.
I was served by a girl young enough to be my daughter, and attractive enough for me to be glad she wasn’t.
The lights were low, blacking out everything bar the stage area, where a geriatric stripper leaned on her Zimmer and wiggled her ass suggestively. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, but I could see the extra roll of fat around her liposuction scars and the stretch marks where her sagging breasts hung low. Not even the tassels could save them. Her body was like a lunar landscape, all pitted and craggy. The music–supplied by a coin-fed jukebox in the corner–was about as inappropriately sexy as it could possibly have been. It was the very definition of unpleasant juxtaposition. The stripper gyrated her hips gamely, slipping her thumbs beneath the straps her thong and started to ease it down. I really didn’t want to see what happened next, so I turned to the rest of the room, scanning the dark for half-lit faces, but the booths were all carefully arranged to preserve clientele anonymity.
I checked my watch. Time was ticking by. There was no sign of the broker. Or maybe there was. I didn’t know who I was supposed to meet. I wasn’t sure how long I was prepared to wait.
Someone else fed the jukebox. The singer could hardly have imagined a darker interpretation of their lyrics than the one being danced on the stage right now if they’d tried. It wasn’t so much ironic as it was prophetic. After a few minutes of unbearable grinding, the strippers on stage switched. The new one was no more appealing than the last one, her Caesarean scar looking like a botched Frankensteinian transplant.
I was going to have to wash my mind out with bleach when I got home.
The broker obviously had a twisted sense of humor.
I checked my watch again then gestured one of the waitresses over. She flashed me a fifty-buck smile – the going rate for the single shot she thought I was going to order – and leaned in close, making sure I got an eyeful of her ample cleavage as she took my order.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said.
She looked at me blankly.
I tried again, “I’m looking for someone? I’m supposed to meet them here.”
Misunderstanding, the waitress waved over one of the past-their-sell-by-date strippers leaning against the back wall, thinking I wanted a table dance.
I held up my hands, shaking my head, “No, no. I didn’t mean—” my face twisted. “I’m supposed to meet someone here. I don’t know their name.”
“Sorry, man, no singles here tonight. There’s a dike couple if that’s your thing,” She shrugged, tilting her head toward another booth. “But they’re busy sucking face. Can I get you another drink? Single malt, right? The good stuff.”
The music changed again.
I dreaded to think what was happening on the stage and shifted in my seat so I didn’t have to find out. I decided to give it another hour before heading home. “Why not?” I said, “But make it a double. I think I’m going to need it if I want to sleep tonight.”
She laughed, but it was the kind of perfunctory, half-hearted laugh that meant she was working her ass off for that tip and she wanted me to know it.
I drank.
I waited.
I turned down a double-team table dance, one of the pair dressed in weird tin-foil silver spandex, the other in some sort of furry costume. Not my scene. In the background, the jukebox offered an unusual array of noise. The broker didn’t show.
I wasn’t about to stick around until the lights came up—I definitely didn’t want to see what the girls looked like in the cold light of day. I removed a fifty from my wallet, folded it up and left it underneath the tumbler before heading for the door, figuring it had been an expensive waste of time.
It wasn’t.
The broker met me as I stepped out into the street. “Hope you enjoyed the show, Mister Guerra.”
The cold air hit me like a slap across the face, his use of my name like a kick in the balls. So much for being a ghost.
It was three in the morning, and there wasn’t a soul in sight.
The club’s neon sign sizzled and hummed behind us.
“Honestly, I could have lived without it,” I said.
“Shall we walk awhile?”
“Well I’m not going back in there, so yes.”
We walked a while in silence, then he said, “My factor is most interested as to why you would want to kill yourself and pay so handsomely in the process? She suggested pills or a razor blade if you are averse to blowing your brains out. She is, of course, happy to take the contract assuming you are quite determined to die. You need only nod once, now, and we’ll consider the deal done.”
“Ah,” I said. “No,” I said.
“Then why, she would like to know, have you been so careless?”
That threw me.
“What do you mean?”
I thought I’d been clever. I’d not returned to any of the old haunts. I’d stayed out of the Beetle dens and everything else that might have brought the attention of my old employers.
He grabbed my wrists and dragged me to the side of the road. I was about to wrench my hand free and hammer my fist into the center of his face—I don’t think I’ve mention
ed it before, but I’ve got a real aversion to people touching me—but before I could, he’d twisted them palms up and with a tiny razor embedded in his thumb cut an inch long scar in the synth skin. Blood bubbled up. He pressed deep, and a tiny electronic tracking device emerged.
Sometimes I really am a fucking idiot.
Fate had chipped me. Or at least paid off some friendly doc to do it after the Akachi job, so he had eyes and ears on me at all times.
I felt sick.
He knew I was alive.
He’d known all the time.
I was burned. I couldn’t go back to the bolt hole, they’d have it under surveillance. I needed to warn Gant to get out of there and take evasive measures. I had no doubt he could look after himself, but there was no way we could meet up if he were being followed otherwise the broker’s impromptu surgery would be for nothing.
The broker palmed the tracker. “Let me take care of this for you,” he said. He wasn’t doing it out of any form of generosity. He intended to use it to lead Randall Fate a merry dance for his assassin. Good for him.
“Now that we’ve established you have no intention of suicide, and that someone has been following you for quite some time, why the rouse? I don’t mind admitting we are most curious. The loss of your crew sent shockwaves through the community. But there are whispers… things might not be all that they seem?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.
“Care to expand?”
“Can I rely on your discretion?”
“Bought and paid for,” he assured me. “Or it will be, assuming we take whatever job it is you really want to hire Tenebrae for.”
“We were betrayed.” He waited for me to go on. “By one of our own.” Again nothing. He knew how to get answers with silence. That was an impressive skill. “Fate’s alive. He faked his own death.”
“Ah, so this is about revenge?”
“Plain and simple. He sold us out to the corp, got my friends killed to save his own skin and make a few bucks in the process. He’s going to pay for that.”
“Who else have you got on your side?”
“A Flatliner, Mel Kamahi, and Rowel Gant.”
“I know them. Good at what they do. As are you. With Tenebrae, you would make quite a team. And you have a plan?”
“Right now I’m improvising,” I admitted.
“Not ideal.”
“Perhaps not, but I’ve only known that Fate is still alive for a few days. Up until then, I’d been planning to go up against GenX all by myself.”
“Well I can’t fault you’re bravery, Mister Guerra. Not, perhaps, the wisest course of action, though.”
“I worked that out for myself.”
“Very well, I will take your proposition back to her. I cannot guarantee she will accept it, but I will advise her to take it under consideration. In the meantime, I suggest you get some sleep. Tomorrow promises to be a long day.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Some days feel like they’re packed with a lot more than twenty-four hours.
This was one of them.
I ordered a strong black coffee thick enough to stand the spoon up in and leaned against the battered metal counter of the vendor’s food cart. Street food was the lifeblood of the megacities these days. Always people crowding around them. Bright lights above them enticing the hungry, the restless, the poor. Security would move them on after a while so you never knew where you’d find them again on their rotation through dozens of good spots they knew would keep the money coming. The coffee was good. I was on my own and for the first time since the meeting with the broker not jumping at shadows.
I slid a couple of crumpled notes across the counter in return for a stew pot of noodles and mixed mystery meats. I probably would have been better off with faux-fish bagel or something, but I’ve got an adventurous palate and the constitution to match. I tucked in with my chopsticks.
I didn’t notice the woman slide onto the stool beside me until she spoke. “What’s good here?”
“Nothing,” I said, turning to face her.
She was black—properly ebon, a Nubian goddess of a woman, with a long graceful black swan’s neck and deep soulful eyes that were almost as dark as her skin. She smiled. I understood exactly why the region her genetic roots stemmed from was known as the Cradle of Life in that one fleeting moment. Who wouldn’t want to create life, or at least practice, with those genes?
“Pity,” she said. “My friend tells me you’re looking to put together a team, at least temporarily?”
I looked at her.
Black as night.
Tenebrae. It couldn’t be anyone else. Funny when you don’t know what to expect, you’d think you couldn’t be surprised by the reality, but I was.
“Are you interested?”
“Well I wasn’t thinking of anything beyond lunch,” she said. Funny lady.
“Not into commitment?”
“Not a big fan of being tied down, no,” the way she said it was deliberately flirtatious. I didn’t rise to the bait. On another day, absolutely, I’m not above a little double entendre. I focussed on the noodle dangling from the end of my chopsticks and slurped it up. I washed it down with a swig of coffee then said, “Well, if you’re in, you’re all in. If you can’t do that, I’ll find someone else. I don’t have time for games.”
“But they won’t be as good as me,” she promised.
She was right, of course. If her reputation was anything to go by there was no one quite like her out there. But then my reputation was pretty damn good, and any idiot could have looked at the mess I was in and realized just how fucked I was, and how little my carefully cultivated reputation was going to help. Traffic moved around us, the constant ebb and flow of the jammed up city. Pedestrians walked in their little huddles, a few walked alone, eyes on some distant prize and moving with purpose. Everyone had a purpose. The corporations gave them one. I’d had one of those. Now I had something different. It wasn’t exactly a purpose. It transcended that into… into what? An obsession?
“All I need is someone willing to die for the cause.”
“How very noble, but surely it’s better to find someone good enough to stay alive for the cause?”
“You know what we’re going up against, do you really think anyone will be left standing at the end of it?”
“If they’re good enough,” she said, and it was obvious she meant it. And I’ll admit, I was buying into it.
“So, are you in?”
“Answer me this first: have you worked out how he did it?”
I didn’t need to ask who he was, or what it was he did. It was the same question I’d been asking myself for days: how did Fate fool me into thinking he was dead?
“No,” I admitted.
“Then I’m in.”
That surprised me. I don’t know what I’d expected, to be mocked, maybe, for my gullibility, or my complicit naïveté. I didn’t expect it to be what she wanted to hear. Turns out she was big on truth, and the fact I owned up to my own shortcomings was exactly what the assassin wanted to hear.
I had my team.
“What do you know about what happened?” Tenebrae asked.
“I told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“He took an arc-blade to the gut. It opened him up. He died. I carried him out of there in my arms. He was dead.”
“Well, obviously he wasn’t. So the only two things you know for sure are he took a blade, and you carried him out of trouble. So the blade has to be your answer.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” I admitted.
“I do,” Gant said. “You know he wasn’t dead, you’ve got proof now, but something happened between him being stabbed and you carrying him out that convinced you he was dead.”
“Exactly,” the assassin agreed.
I’d run events over in my mind a thousand times. More. But they were always the same. I wasn’t seeing it. Maybe my subconscious was working away on it, linki
ng the bits of the puzzle without me realizing what was going on, but my surface mind was clueless. Certain key factors kept coming into sharp focus: Fate had instigated it. I realized that now. He’d been the one who’d lost his cool and killed Auster, damning the rest of us. He didn’t have to do that. He’d deliberately escalated things with a shocking level of violence. We’re violent people, but it has its place. That room wasn’t it, even with all of the Sleepers surrounding us. I’d assumed he thought he was cutting off their heads, metaphorically speaking. But it was more than that. He’d given a signal to someone he’d paid off inside GenX, surely? One of the goons who’d escorted us down there. Probably the one who’d put the arc-blade through his spine after he’d shot Auster. That made sense. That was a deduction I could get behind. He’d needed us to know he was dead. To see it not just hear about it. He needed one of us to carry him out of there. But how do you arrange something like that? He could risk stopping his heart for that long, surely? There was no guarantee how quickly we could get out of there, and as any Flatliner will tell you, those precious few seconds, they’re fine margins you don’t want to fuck with.
“So how did he do it?”
“He couldn’t be dead, we agree on that, right?”
I nodded.
“So he had to be alive.”
She was saying the same thing, surely?
I nodded again.
“His heart was beating, either so slowly or so faintly you failed to notice and mistook him for dead.” That made sense. “And,” she continued, “For that to happen he needed to be in precise control of his apparent death. He couldn’t risk the blade going in an inch too high and actually piercing the heart, but he needed it to seem as if it had punctured something vital and die quickly.” I was nodding again. “So it couldn’t be the blade that did the work, it was purely the method of delivery.”
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