I couldn’t get anything else useful out of the spirit—its report was all screams and discordant auras and an overwhelming sense of panic. Whatever was happening had been intense enough to blow the circuits of its low-watt brain. Knowing it wouldn’t stick around too much longer, I was about to order it to lead me where it was showing me when Bug’s bright, hard voice cut into my concentration. “Got it!”
I spun away from the spirit to face the monitors, and Tonio hurried over to do the same. Bug had hacked into the traffic cameras across the street from a two-story building, just as she had with Uncle Mason’s lore shop. The difference this time was that the building was wreathed in an inferno of flames and smoke licking up into the night sky. Already the flashing lights of fire trucks and Knight vehicles spread out around it, but the smoke and haze was too heavy for me to recognize it even if I’d seen it before.
A harsh lump rose in the pit of my stomach. “Where is that?” I asked Bug, my voice dull and nearly colorless. I was afraid I already knew.
Her reply, equally flat, confirmed my fear: “Dax and Mimi’s place.”
Four
I slammed my fist on the table, making Bug’s deck jump. “I am not staying here!” I yelled, voice shaking with all the rage and grief and guilt that I couldn’t control—that I wasn’t trying to control— any longer. “You try to make me, I’ll blow you out that fraggin’ window!” It was probably an empty threat, but maybe not. I felt like my whole body was going to explode from the inside out, and my magic might just do the same thing.
Bug looked up, her tough-grrl persona slipping a little as tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “He’s right, Tonio,” she said. “We gotta do something.” She focused on me, as if waiting for orders.
The doglike spirit was gone now—sending it off to search remotely had used up its allotted services, and it had taken off for wherever spirits hang out when they weren’t on duty. Before it left, though, I got it to confirm the thing that all three of us were terrified to find out: that Dax, my childhood friend and protector— my brother—and Mimi, who’d been the other half of his life ever since he’d met her, were both dead, burned to charred ashes in the ruin of the building they’d only just moved into a couple of months ago.
I wanted to slam my head into the nearest wall, repeatedly, until I stopped feeling like my heart was ripping apart in my chest. It wasn’t just the grief. It wasn’t just the shock of losing the only other people I had left in the world who gave a damn about me. Those were bad enough, and if I got through this alive I knew it would be a long time before I got a decent night’s sleep again. But they weren’t the worst.
The worst was the guilt. Why the hell hadn’t I just gone to KE when I’d found Uncle Mason at his shop? Why hadn’t I just called them and handed the whole thing over to them, instead of freaking out and rabbiting like a coward? So what if they suspected me of the murder—either they’d figure out I didn’t do it or they’d put me away as a scapegoat, but either way Dax and Mimi would still be alive, and their little girl—
My head snapped up. “Katie!” I hadn’t asked the spirit about anyone else in the apartment. If they’d gone home to check on her before they went to their meet, then—
Bug paled, but Tonio shook his head. “I think she’s with Mimi’s mother,” he said. “Unless they—“
Bug’s hands were already dancing over her deck again. In a couple of minutes her whole posture slumped in relief. “House is okay,” she said.
For now, I thought.
Somebody pounded on the door. I jumped, but Tonio seemed to be expecting it. He flung open the door on one of the ork pair he’d been talking to before. When he came back, his face was grim. “We gotta go,” he said. “You got any plans, kid, now’s the time. C’mon—I’ve got a van here.”
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“Company,” he said, pulling an Ingram from inside his coat and checking it. “Downstairs. We’ll go out the back.”
I swallowed. “I should go,” I said. “I already got Dax and Mimi killed with this mess of mine. No reason for you to get into it, too.”
“We’re already in it,” Tonio said, and Bug nodded. “I’ve worked with Mimi plenty of times on jobs. She was good people, and so was Dax. They wouldn’t run out on me. I ain’t runnin’ out on them. Now let’s get the hell outta here before they figure out we’re gone. I already made a couple of calls to some chummers—we can meet up with ’em if we make it fast.”
Twenty minutes later, I was still seething.
I sat in the back of Tonio’s van, which was getting pretty crowded by now. In addition to the dwarf behind the wheel and Bug in the shotgun seat, we’d stopped at a shady corner bar on the edge of Redmond to pick up three more members for our little group: a smallish troll guy with one horn sticking out of the middle of his forehead, a dark-skinned human guy sporting a cyberarm that looked like it was put together from spare parts, and a scarred elf woman with purple hair and an eye patch with a hazardous-waste emblem on it. All of them had battleworn armored jackets and the wary, vigilant look of people who expected to be jumped any second and planned to be ready for it.
I was starting to realize that there’d been a lot more to Mimi than carbonating horny trolls’ hormones on the stage at Big Dreams. I wondered what else I didn’t know.
“Your show, kid,” Tonio said. The others turned to look at me, their faces impassive. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking at all. I started to protest that I had no idea what to do next, but that was wrong. I did know.
“I want to find out why these guys killed Uncle Mason,” I said. “Do you think it’s safe to go to his house and check it out, if we do some recon from a distance first?”
“What makes you think we’ll find anything there?” the elf woman’s voice was a husky red-orange, like a longtime smoker. Clearly Tonio had filled her in on the op.
I shrugged. “Those guys are still looking for me. They killed Dax and Mimi just for getting involved. If they just wanted to make an example of Uncle Mason, why come after me, or kill anybody else? Why else would they break into my place? I’m guessing they were looking for something and they haven’t found it yet.”
“Wouldn’t they look at his place first before yours?” Bug asked. As usual, she was jacked in and only halfway paying attention, her combat-booted feet up on the van’s dash.
“Maybe, but he’s got some hiding places they might not have found,” I said. “I don’t know what he keeps in ’em, but if they missed ’em, we might find something there.” I gave Tonio the address. “Stop a few blocks away, so I can check the place out astrally, and Bug can use the cameras. There’s a security system at the house, so if she can hack that—”
“Damn right I can hack it,” she said, indignant.
Tonio shrugged. “You get anything on the fire?”
“Press release says it was a gas main,” she said without looking up.
“Bullshit,” Tonio and I said at the same time.
“What’re you gonna do with this thing if you find it?” the troll unicorn asked. “Set up a meet and let ’em have it, to get ’em off your back?”
My anger rose again. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do with anything I might find at Uncle Mason’s house, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let these drekwipes have it. As bad as what they’d done to Uncle Mason was, and as pissed off about it as I was, it was biz. What they’d done to Dax and Mimi was unforgivable.
“Hell, no,” I growled, surprised at how confident I sounded, and how pissed. “They killed my uncle. They killed my friends. If we find anything, the only meet I’m setting up is one to show ’em why doing that was a really bad idea. Anybody want to back out?”
Tonio twisted his head around to look at me, and I saw a respect on his face that hadn’t been there since I’d met him. “Nah, kid. We’re not backin’ out. You do what you need to do, and we got your back.”
So yeah, just to recap: these
guys were willing to put their lives on the line for some punk kid they’d never met before tonight, for no other reason than that Dax and Mimi had put in a good word for me.
I didn’t get to screw up anymore.
Uncle Mason might have had a successful business, but he didn’t like people very much, and trusted most of them even less. Which meant when he wasn’t working, he wanted to be as far away from the sprawl masses as he could get. His old Victorian house on the edge of Snohomish used to be part of one of those white bread, 2.5-kids-and-a-Labrador neighborhoods not quite far enough out to count as suburbia. Now, it was the only residential property remaining on his street after the rest of the neighborhood had been torn down to make room for some mini-corp’s complex. The corp had gone belly up, the complex never got built, and Uncle Mason’s house remained like the last soldier standing after a bloody battle. I’m sure he could have afforded something in a better area, but he was more interested in being separated from what he called “the great unwashed” by a vacant lot on one side and an abandoned warehouse on the other. He had to watch out for the occasional drifter or squatter, but as he’d told me many times, it was better than having nosy neighbors poking into his business all the time.
We parked the van a couple blocks away and made our various preparations to make sure nobody was messing with the house or waiting to ambush us before we went in: Bug settled in with her deck in the front seat, the elf woman (who hadn’t given her name, and I wasn’t going to ask) pulled a series of small drones from a hard-sided case, and I made myself comfortable in the back seat as I prepared to go astral. Nobody talked, but the mood was clear: nobody wanted any surprises.
As it turned out, the only surprise was that nobody was waiting. When we returned our attention to the van a few minutes later, all three of us had come up blank.
“Wards on the house look fine,” I said. “Didn’t see any spirits or anything near the place.” That was another reason Uncle Mason liked the little no-man’s-land around his house: it made it harder for anybody to sneak up on it without his security measures—both magical and mundane—catching on.
“I hacked the house’s net,” Bug said, “and the cameras around the area. Couple of cars drove by, but they kept going. Strings?”
The elf nodded. “Yeah, the drones aren’t seeing anything either. I’ll keep ’em up for overwatch, but if anybody’s hidin’ somewhere, they’re doin’ a damn good job of it.”
Tonio, who had been keeping watch along with the other two members of our group, weapons ready, nodded. “So we go in?”
“Let’s do it,” I said. “Shouldn’t take long. Just want to look in a couple of places I know he hides stuff. Should be in and out in ten minutes.”
Yeah, I know. But I was new at this, okay?
It’s strange: I thought I’d be more nervous.
We moved the van in closer, parking a block away around the corner from the warehouse. Tonio took the lead, directing us to our jobs: Bug and Strings would remain here, staying connected with us via our ’links. The unicorn, whose name was Chunder, would take a position at the other end of the warehouse with his long-barreled sniper rifle, keeping an eye on both the van and the rest of us who were going to the house. The human guy, Junkyard, would come with us and stay outside, while Tonio and I went in and looked for—I have no idea what. I hoped I’d know it if I saw it, if it was even there.
“You okay, kid?” the dwarf asked as we got ready to move. He held his blocky SMG at the ready, and I’d seen him stashing a couple of other smaller guns under his coat.
“Yeah.” I didn’t understand it, but I wasn’t scared anymore. Sure, I knew this could be dangerous: I knew if anything jumped us, I might even get myself cacked. My heart pounded, but it was more with anticipation than fear: the same sort of feeling I’d gotten back at school, right before an important test I knew I was going to ace. I wondered what the me from a couple of days ago—the me who spent his time chasing data points in boring rituals, playing too many trideo games, and worrying that I’d catch a stray Friday-night round through the wall of my doss—would think of the current me. I still felt like the grief from my uncle’s and my friends’ deaths would catch up to me any minute, but right now it was walled away; all I had now was my anger, and a strange exhilaration I didn’t understand at all. “Want me to make us invisible?”
“You can do that?” Tonio’s squinty head-tilt added the nuance: You can do something else useful?
In answer, I paused a moment, muttered some Latin under my breath, and faded from view. So did Tonio. I didn’t know that many spells, but you tell me: what other one would your typical horny, teenage-guy mage be in a hurry to learn? That one and Detox (to deal with the aftermath of all those wild college parties) were universally popular.
I’d used the downtime to summon up one of my little air spirits a couple of minutes ago; I sent it a mental command, telling it to patrol the perimeter around the house and let me know pronto if anybody got too close. It wagged its tail and took off, tongue streaming out behind it like some kind of flag. And then it was our turn.
In all the trids I’d seen featuring shadowrunners, they never managed to convey just how long it takes to cross the space of maybe fifty meters when you’re expecting somebody to ventilate you with a rifle round or a spell with every step. Real life doesn’t come with cuts for the boring stuff when nothing’s happening. I still wasn’t scared, exactly, but those kind of thoughts were close to the surface.
“Nothing on the cameras,” Bug’s voice said in my ear.
“Drones aren’t picking up anything either,” Strings added.
“Good from here,” said Chunder.
Maybe we were just overthinking the whole thing. Maybe nobody was here. If they knew where Uncle Mason’s shop was, they probably had plenty of time to hit his house already and be out, if that’s what they wanted. I started to feel a little stupid for treating this like it was some kind of big-deal shadowrun.
And then comes that moment when you realize that everything you’ve tried to do doesn’t matter a fragging bit, because the team that’s after you is paid by a dragon, and probably takes down people like you for light entertainment.
One second I felt Tonio next to me, gliding along on silent feet. The next, something warm and wet splattered over my hand and arm. I heard a soft gray whump as the dwarf’s body appeared out of nowhere next to me, pitched forward, and collapsed. The blown-off part of his head flew further forward than the rest of him, settling to a stop against the front door of Uncle Mason’s house like the worst package delivery ever.
I’m not too proud to admit I shrieked like a little girl, flinging myself to the ground and rolling toward the corner of the house. At least I remembered not to drop my invisibility spell. “Bug! What the frag—”
“Get outta there!” her frantic voice came too late, right at the same time as my ears lit up with a spray of discordant colors from the others: Junkyard, Chunder, and Strings were all calling out warnings at once, and even my little air spirit was in my mind link, barking out badbadbadbad! The inside of my head was like a riot in a paint factory.
Nobody had shot me yet, which was a good thing. That was about the only good thing, though. All around the perimeter of the house the auras of the concealed team winked into being. Junkyard, who had still been invisible, since I was still maintaining the spell, flared into sight, his body doing a stuttering little dance as rounds hit him from two different directions. From my hiding place around the corner of Uncle Mason’s house, I saw a shadowy figure leveling a gun at something; it jerked as it took a hit from Chunder’s sniper rifle, but that didn’t take it down.
Holy frag, that didn’t take it down!
Then I heard Chunder scream: I didn’t think a troll could make a sound like that, big and bright and so red it was almost pink.
“Get out of here!” I hissed over the comm. “Bug! Take the van and get out. It’s an ambush!” I don’t know why I was trying to play the
hero—it’s not like I wanted her to take off and leave me to die.
My anger rose again, and I flung a spell at the shadowy figure at the same time something high above us let loose with a stream of light fire aimed in the same direction. I couldn’t see the guy very well, but I got enough of a glimpse to launch off one of the few offensive spells I know: one designed to stun, but not to kill. When I’d been prowling around Magicknet and talking to Dax’s friend all that time ago, I hadn’t wanted to learn anything designed to kill people. Now all I wished was that I could fry that guy’s brain like a Nuke-It Burger. He staggered and dropped back out of sight, but I didn’t think I’d taken him down.
“Cody, if we bring the van in, can you get to us?” Strings said in my ear. It was a lot quieter in my head now with two of the voices silenced.
“Don’t know,” I replied. With my invisibility spell still up, I moved around toward the back of the house, figuring most of the action was out front. I sent a message to my spirit through the link, telling it to keep an eye on the area and let me know if anybody was getting too close to me. I was afraid to announce my position to Bug and Strings over the comm—if these guys were good enough to hide their presence from all of us, they were good enough to hack our channel. I thought about trying to get inside the house—I knew the code—but threw that out as a bad idea: too easy to get pinned down in there, and they’d shown no reluctance before about blowing up houses to get to people. I was suddenly feeling very alone back here.
“Cody?” Bug, this time. She sounded scared. In the background, I could hear the pounding, bright-silver metallic clanks of rounds hitting the side of the van.
“Get out, Bug!” I hissed. “Don’t wait for them to kill you too!”
“Ain’t leavin’ you,” she said. The engine rumbled. “Coming in. Be ready.”
Drek. I was going to get more people killed.
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