“Yours or mine?”
“I’m not picky, both, someone has to die to sell it,” I said. None of his crew could hear the communication, Mel had made sure of that. I don’t know how she’d done it, jamming frequencies or something, but it meant that it was just me and him, and I wanted to know if he’d sell his team out again for his own survival, or if what had happened with us had really changed him like he claimed.
“Okay, I’ll make sure it happens. You just concentrate on making the show look convincing.”
In one line he’d proved beyond a shadow of a doubt he was as big a bastard as always. Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m glad this particular leopard hadn’t changed his spots.
“In the spirit of our newfound cooperation,” I said. “I should tell you I wasn’t kidding before. There’s a nice little package in that room counting down. I reckon you’ve got about thirty seconds ‘til it blows. You might want to take cover behind that bank of steel benches behind you.”
He didn’t say a word.
Fate dove for cover, hurling himself to the ground a split second before the C4 blew.
It was a contained blast, more flash than bang, even so, it brought a huge chunk of the roof down around them, and with an ungodly roar kicked up enough dust and debris to cover what I was up to for a couple of seconds, as a second charge took the door off its hinges and left the place wide open to attack. I hate explosions. They’re the epitome of destruction, absolutely out of control even when supposedly channeled. It’s like saying scorched earth is showing restraint. Some things, by their very nature, are just out of control.
I nodded to Mel, who triggered the squibs and a second later, amid the chaos, the sound of machine-gun fire ripped through the confines of the passage. If Fate had been paying attention, he would have realized there was no accompanying puff of masonry dust as the bullets tore into the wall behind him, because there were no bullets.
Fate kept his head down.
The rest of his crew were dazed and confused, stumbling about in the smoke.
Fate hadn’t warned them, so they’d been caught in the explosion.
He really was a piece of work.
I didn’t know their names.
One of them, the muscle, was bleeding from a head wound. The blood mingled with the dirt on his face. He staggered, needing the twisted metal frame of the bench for support. The detonation had been loud. Deliberately so. Noise fucks with the balance. Your ears are precariously tuned instruments. He’d be reeling for a couple of minutes, trying to get his bearings. The landscape could change a lot in that time.
I watched intently, waiting to see how long it would take for Fate to throw his newest disciple under the bus.
It happened quicker than I could have hoped. As his man stumbled around, Fate put a single bullet in the back of his head, and he went down. To anyone watching playback, it would look like one of our barrages had taken him out, only, of course, we hadn’t fired a single shot.
Fate started screaming, “Man down!” and his cohorts came out shooting blindly.
It was absolute and beautiful chaos.
It couldn’t last, of course.
We’d only laid enough charges to play out the charade for a few minutes, but that was a lifetime when you were under fire.
Beside me, Gant was itching to get down there and really get his hands dirty.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just let me go down there and kill the miserable fucker, seriously, all this smoke and mirrors shit gets really old, really fast.”
“Because,” I said slowly. “I’ve got no intention of killing him. That’s far too easy, and nowhere near satisfying enough. I want the bastard to live forever. Trust me, I think you’ll approve. You’re just about twisted enough to truly appreciate it.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue either way.
We followed Fate’s escape on the monitors, enjoying the show as he hammed it up for the audience. Had we actually been working together to rob GenX it would have been nothing short of genius. As it was, there was a beauty to the dance, like old lovers so intimately familiar with each other’s bodies, we knew just how to manipulate each other for the most pleasure.
The only thing that was missing from our side of the equation was a casualty.
But when it came right down to it, I just wasn’t like Fate. I couldn’t sacrifice Gant to sell the illusion. One corpse would have to be enough.
I saved a couple of tricks until Fate was almost out, but the best was absolutely saved for last.
Tenebrae.
The assassin faced him across the plaza.
She was dressed in full combat gear, ready to give the old man the fight of his life.
He came out of the place at a full run and skidded to a halt, facing her. He recognized the assassin immediately. I could see the cogs whirring away inside his head. She was him. She thought like him. She fought like him. She knew all his moves and shared all of the instincts he had as a base. And here she was, on-site with the corporation that wanted to use his brain patterns to build a super army of Bleeders they owned and controlled. Meaning he didn’t know if he was about to go toe-to-toe with his own worst nightmare or if she was some kind of temptation being dangled in front of him. I could see him thinking: what will happen if I kill her? Does it end here? Can I still get out of this or is it too late?
She walked slowly toward him, facing down the three of them as they emerged with all the bravura of a gunslinger.
He stopped.
Waited.
“What are you doing here?”
“I have my orders,” she said, four wonderfully creepy words. He didn’t wait for her to expand on them. He pushed one of his crew away, shoving them hard to the right, and made a break for it. Head down, arms and legs pumping furiously, he ran for his life, the assassin on his heels. She moved lightly, her body a thing of beauty as she moved, tight, taut, toned, and utterly relentless. She covered the ground between them in seconds. It didn’t matter how fast Fate ran, she was faster.
She had an arc-blade in her fist, glittering against the rising sun.
For a moment I thought she was actually going to cut him down. That wasn’t part of the plan. She was just meant to drive home the fear, reinforcing the fact that now that his brain had been patterned there was nowhere left he could run, someone would always find him because they shared all of those formative memories. The corporation knew him better than he knew himself.
Fate wasn’t helpless though; far from it.
He had a contingency.
He always had a contingency.
It was the way he worked.
In this case, it came in the form of a fifth team member, a getaway driver.
I was impressed. He was thinking outside of the box. In all the time I’d run with him we’d never employed a fifth crew member, even one that stayed on the outside. The car surged onto the plaza itself, nearly mowing down a gaggle of youths that were lost in whatever teenage world preoccupied them these days. There were yells and screams followed by bravado-fueled curses as the passenger door of the black car flew open. The getaway driver yanked hard on the wheel. The car slewed sideways across Fate’s path. Tenebrae was still twenty meters away. Even so, she hurled the arc-blade at Fate’s back, but he was ready for it. Ducking down, dove inside the moving vehicle and slammed the door behind him.
Only that’s not exactly what happened, no matter how it looked.
This was the real contingency: the lie he was trying to sell.
And on any other day I might have bought it, but not today. Today I was expecting tricks.
Tires squealing on the mosaic tiles of the plaza, the car roared away without him inside it.
I knew exactly what had happened. As he’d ducked inside the still moving car, he’d slapped at a button in the center of his chest and was gone. A short hop teleport lifted him out of the car even as it powered away, completing the illusion that his fifth man was getting him the
fuck out of there while he materialized a couple of hundred meters away in the safety of the shadows around the side of the plaza. It was good. Better than good, actually. It was smart. That was unlike Fate. He would have got away with it if not for the fact that I had the surveillance camera on full zoom and, pixelated or not, even through the tinted windows of the black car, I could see every the subtle shift in the shadows of the interior that betrayed the fact that he wasn’t sitting in the passenger seat as the car sped away.
The assassin chased the car out of the plaza, leaving her arc-blade where it had fallen.
I scanned the colonnades and vaults on either side of the plaza, high and low, looking for the telltale reflection from Fate’s suit, for anything that might betray him, but he was already moving.
He couldn’t hide from Mel Kamahi though. Her rig had already detected the new heat source his teleportation represented and locked onto it. He was running through a vectorized city on her screen, Mel watching him every step of the way as he picked a winding path through the canyons of super towers, trying to lose himself.
What that woman could do with a machine frightened me. She was easily the most dangerous of us all. She didn’t need an arc-blade or hollow points to end a life. She was capable of far worse and didn’t even have to leave her chair.
“Do you want me to bring him in?”
I shook my head. “No, let’s just watch him, see if he makes contact. If he does, we’ve got him. If he doesn’t, we have Imsen reach out. But for now, let him have his moment. I don’t mind him thinking he’s won this round.”
I doubted myself long before Fate made contact.
I’m not arrogant enough to think I am infallible.
I freely admit that I don’t know what goes on inside a man like Randall Fate’s mind. I can try and guess. I can make assumptions, some even based on past experiences we’ve shared, but I can’t ever know. So waiting for that call was hard. I expected him to try and fuck me. He had no reason to keep his promise. I certainly wasn’t naïve enough to think he was an honorable man. But that only served to make him less predictable, not more so.
All I could do was wait.
I hate waiting.
I’m a man of action.
And, I’ll be honest, I’m happiest when I’m fighting. That’s my deepest darkest secret. My flaw. I am therefore I bleed. I bleed therefore I am. If I’m not bleeding, I’m not living. And no one wants to go through this life dead. That’s just the way it is.
I did a trick with a coin rolling it across my knuckles first one way, then back again before making it disappear. It was a habit I’d picked up from Swann, I think. He was always doing it back when we first got together. It wasn’t exactly high art, but the manual dexterity involved in it was good for close control, and for a little while it made me feel close to my old friend. In truth, it wasn’t that much different from the old exercises Martagan used to do with her knife, but I was less likely to bleed if it went wrong. It took thirty seconds for one pass in one direction, a minute between flourishes. There’s an element of insanity in doing the same thing over and over again. Say the same word often enough, and it will lose all meaning. Repeat the same action often enough, and it becomes part of your muscle memory. It’s why we practice loading and reloading our weapons, stripping and rebuilding them, so we know each and every motion and can repeat them in pitch black conditions where our lives might just depend upon getting it right the first time, no fumbles.
The one thing I wasn’t worried about was him not being able to find me.
On the fourth day, he came knocking.
It was a curt four-line message, each sentence truncated for maximum brevity. It came delivered inside the takeout boxes containing our food order:
Communication lines insecure. Make contact via the Dead Drop. You have twenty-four. No word I am out of here.
The dead drop.
I knew where he meant.
We’d used it back in the old days. Choosing it now was a homage to the past, surely? He was hoping I’d remember it, why it was significant to us, and think back on those days fondly.
He should have known better.
I don’t have a sentimental bone in my body.
I approached the dead drop on foot.
I’ve painted a pretty picture of the world, I know. It’s deceptive. Life isn’t all towering glass super towers and too-bright neon lights, even if it isn’t the air-cars vision of the future our ancestors had, it’s a modern world, everything connected and interfaced and online and, well, for want of a better word, alive. But not all of it. Some stuff didn’t fare so well in the transition to a corporation governed landscape. Of course, the rise of the corporations was brutal. We’re not just talking espionage and dirty tricks, either. There are dead places, too. Places from before, places that suffered.
The dead drop is in the heart of a dead zone.
It’s as if the outside world stops existing as you roll up to the Barrenlands.
You’re no more than a hundred klicks from civilization, but you could easily imagine you were walking on the moon. As far as the eye can see there’s nothing but irradiated earth and twisted metal, the occasional plinth of concrete with steel rebar poking out through the wounds in the stone like ribs exposed by the vicious slice of an arc-blade. It’s an inhospitable landscape. It should be. After all, they dropped not one but two bombs on it to be sure nothing could ever grow back. Not the vegetation, not the population. Sometimes you forget about these dead zones that still litter the countryside, blinded by the bright, shiny towers of the cities. You forget that hundreds of thousands of people lived and died here. Of course, the corporations help us forget, too. Everything is bigger, brighter, better. They pump out slogans like ‘Look to the Future!’ and we swallow them whole. For people like us, those dead zones are a godsend, though.
Gant waited in the vehicle. I wanted to go in on foot. I didn’t want to spook anyone.
It was brutally hot. Worse than Africa.
Beyond the plinths more broken walls slowly come into sight, covered with anti-war sentiment and ironic graffiti that is out of place with no real audience to appreciate it. The walls made up a place called The Labyrinth. Once upon a time, The Labyrinth had housed twenty-five thousand ordinary people with ordinary lives and ordinary hopes and dreams. Twenty-five thousand. Nowadays it feels like they cram that many into one of their damned Super Towers, but back then it had been an entire community. Now The Labyrinth houses the by-blows. Those poor souls spawned with the deformities of a radiation-fueled decade to fuck with their genetics. We’re not talking third legs or second heads poking out of bellies or anything quite so grotesque, but I’m sure there’s the odd third nipple and the like out there amid the blisters. Most of it is sickness and truncated lives, but there are slipped muscles and dropping faces that leave you with the impression that you’re face-to-face with an imbecile. Of course, it just so happens to be an imbecile that’d gut you like a fish and chow down on your gonads for starters and fry your sweetmeats for dessert. Never underestimate the afflicted.
Where I needed to be was in the heart of The Labyrinth.
I moved quickly, but cautiously, listening for sounds that I was being followed. The by-blows would know I was in their territory. Nothing escaped their notice. It was just about getting out unmolested. I should have brought offerings. If I’d been more organized, I would have come bearing gifts—bits of burned out tech they could scavenge, circuits they could fuse and resistors they could bring stuttering back to life in some weird new form. They were wizards with dead technology. There wasn’t anything they couldn’t do—or at least it felt that way to the untrained eye. It was like stepping back a century in time to days when anything was possible, and nothing was regulated, the big corps nothing but a twinkle in the rich men’s greedy eyes.
It didn’t take long for me to hear them moving about around me, out of sight but definitely not out of mind. “Just passing through,” I called. “No need
to get excited. I’m not staying. I honor the treaty. I am not interested in your treasures, okay? I’m dropping off instructions at the dead drop, then moving on. Pass the message back to the elders, let them know I’m no threat.”
I have no idea if it helped, but it never hurt to invoke the treaty—an accord that went back the best part of fifty years now, brokered by men like Fate who knew a good thing when they saw it. I heard some muttering followed by the sound of scampering feet, so the message was certainly being carried back to the den.
I scratched at my thumb.
I hadn’t realized how hard I raked my other thumbnail across the skin until I drew blood. I knew what was going on. Withdrawal. It had been a long time since Fate had found me in the Beetle den. I wasn’t quite climbing the walls, but there was no denying the hollowness inside me that was normally filled by that particular narcotic. And of course now I was thinking about it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I scratched harder. Not just my thumb this time, but halfway up the inside of my forearm, leaving angry red welts behind. I promised myself a few hours of blissful ignorance in a Beetle den before the final confrontation with Fate. I didn’t want to go in half-assed, and to be honest, I was always at my best when I was climbing slowly down from a really good high. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s something to do with the chemical rush. Maybe it’s all in my head, and I’m absolutely fucking useless and only think I’m like some golden god.
An engine roared in the distance. It didn’t sound healthy. Was that Gant leaving? I hoped not. I didn’t want to be faced with having to evac under fire without blazing chariot waiting to carry me out of hell.
I passed under a broken arch, entering The Labyrinth proper.
Across the way I saw two men walking, one leaning heavily on the other, head down, with the uneven gait of a slipped pelvis and bowed legs. Neither looked my way. Both were barefoot with skin like leather. I could smell them from a mile away. One raised a hand for me to follow. The elders had sent out guides. I did as I was told.
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