“Then what do you want?” he asked. “I’m sorry, Cody, but we need to be getting on with—”
“What are you gonna do with it if I tell you where it is?” I cut him off. “Once you have it, then what?”
He tilted his head. “Then we arrange a meet to hand it off. I’m afraid I don’t understand—”
“I want to go along,” I said.
“Come on,” said the guy with the ponytail, rising. “’Hawk, this is bulldrek. We need to—”
The British man held up a hand to silence him, but his expression was grim. “That’s out of the question,” he said, shaking his head.
“Why? Because it’s dangerous?” I leaped up and got in his face. I didn’t care if this guy and his friends were some kind of hot-drek operators who could take me out with a gesture. That had long since ceased being a factor in anything I did. “You haven’t been paying attention. My whole life has been fragged over because of this thing. I have literally got nothing to lose, except my life, and maybe I don’t give a drek about that right now. So either kill me right now, or take me along on this meet. Those are your choices. Take ’em or leave ’em.”
“Or I could just take the knowledge from your mind,” he said, eyes narrowing. “There’s that, too.”
I didn’t flinch. “You can try,” I said. “Go ahead. I’m sure you can do it. But you might as well kill me after—it’ll be easier for me than looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”
The man named ’Hawk sighed, spreading his hands in a gesture of frustrated acceptance. “All right,” he said. “You can come along. But no promises after that. I don’t see what you expect to gain from it, but if that’s what you want, fine.”
I knew he was right: it wouldn’t change anything. I’d still probably have to get out of Seattle and go into hiding after this. But at least I’d see it through to the end before I did. I felt like I owed that much to Uncle Mason and the others.
Retrieving the dragon embryo was downright anticlimactic after everything else that had happened so far. I’m not sure if it was because the people coming after us had been slowed down by having a good chunk of their number taken out earlier, or if the people I was with now were good enough that they could hide our activities from prying eyes. Either way, we made it in and out without incident.
Well, mostly without incident.
The ironic thing about the whole situation was that if the original team who’d taken Uncle Mason apart had paid a little more attention, they’d have found what they were looking for at the beginning of their evening, and most of the deaths that came after—including theirs—could have been avoided.
When we eased into the shop, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It was a lot stronger than it had been earlier.
“They haven’t found Uncle Mason yet,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Ya think?” asked the man with the ponytail. On the way over, they’d introduced themselves: he was Ocelot, the ork woman was Greta, and the British mage who seemed to be running the show was Winterhawk. They’d assured me they had others at their disposal as well, including a decker coordinating things in the Matrix from some undisclosed location. I guess I hadn’t been wrong before: when you were working for a dragon, the resource budget sprouted a lot more zeroes.
Winterhawk was subvocalizing into a throat mic; in a moment he switched his attention back to me. “All right—let’s make this quick. Where is it? One of those hidden areas in the back?” He’d already done a thorough astral scan of the place from the car before we’d gone inside.
“Nope.” I was glad I didn’t have to go into the back room: I didn’t want to look at Uncle Mason again, especially not after he’d had a few more hours at room temperature. Plus, if nobody’d been back since my last visit, that meant my little contribution to the scenery was still festering on the floor, too. Yeah, all in all I was glad Uncle Mason was all about misdirection.
See, any talismonger worth the name kept his valuable stock locked up in the back behind protections both magical and mundane, where every slot who wandered in off the street couldn’t get an eyeful. In order to get your hands on the good stuff, you had to know what you wanted and prove you could pay for it. That meant that when lore shops got broken into, the back storeroom—including any secret hidden areas it contained—was the first place a smart thief looked. And Uncle Mason did have a couple of secret nooks back there.
However, he also had one out front, hiding in plain sight, that he didn’t think I knew about. I glanced over toward the front door, where Ocelot was keeping a watchful lookout, and then moved to the rearmost display case. It was full of trinkets, fetishes, and other tourist-quality objects that Uncle Mason didn’t even bother putting away when he closed up for the night.
“If it’s still here,” I said, “this’ll be where it is.”
Winterhawk came over and crouched down next to it, his expression going remote as he assensed it. “Not magical,” he stated. “But then, it wouldn’t be, would it?” He examined the area for a few moments, then felt around under the lip where the glass met the counter’s pedestal. After a moment, the whole upper part of the case swung forward.
“Is it there?” I asked, leaning forward to look, curious in spite of myself. A heavy stone lid covered a rectangular area about a meter long by half a meter wide. When Greta bent down and lifted the lid off, the space beneath it extended below the level of the pedestal, dug about half a meter into the earth.
Winterhawk smiled, raising an eyebrow, and nodded in approval. “Simple, but effective.” Inside the little nook were several boxes and other items wrapped in cloths. He ignored all of those and went immediately instead for a larger, cylindrical package on the far end. With a wave of his hand he levitated it out of the case and settled it gently on the counter.
“Care to do the honors?” he asked me.
I unwrapped it, forgetting to breathe. I hoped to hell I was right that if the old “dragon model” had been important and was still here, this is where Uncle Mason would have stored it. I didn’t know what I was going to do if it wasn’t, or what Winterhawk and his team would do to me. Sure, they seemed like the good guys—relatively speaking, anyway—but I was learning fast that trusting anybody completely without a whole lot more knowledge about them than I had was a fast way to get yourself screwed over. Maybe I wasn’t in as much of a hurry to die as I thought I was.
I needn’t have worried, though. The cloth fell away to reveal a heavy jar. Inside, a small curled creature floated in a bath of yellowish liquid. It looked like one of those fetus sims they show you in health class, only instead of a half-formed metahuman it was reptilian, its tiny tail curled protectively around it. It was closer to a third of a meter than half, and its half-formed eyes were closed almost as if it was asleep. I kind of felt sorry for the little guy.
Winterhawk went glassy-eyed for a second again, examining it, but snapped out fast when Ocelot called him from the door. “’Hawk, that it? We gotta move. Scratch says we got friends comin’ in.”
“Yes,” he said, re-wrapping the jar and gathering it up. “Let’s go.” Friends.
So whoever else was after the dragon baby, they were still active.
I hoped my new chummers were better at dealing with them than my old ones had been, or this was going to be a real short alliance.
We didn’t go back to the house I’d woken up in; Ocelot drove in a different direction, out toward Everett. Winterhawk sat in the shotgun seat with the pickled wizworm and once again appeared to be talking to someone on his commlink, leaving me in the back with Greta. As usual when I was nervous and didn’t know what else to do, I made small talk. “So—do you guys usually work together?”
“Those two have,” she said in her bright pink voice, nodding at the front. “Me, I’m local, but I do jobs for the same Johnson.”
I nodded. They really do call their boss ‘Mr. Johnson.’ Idly, I wondered how she—how any of them—had ended up as shadowrun
ners, but didn’t ask. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing you just asked somebody when you’d barely known them for an hour. I’d wondered about Mimi and Tonio and the others, too. I mean, “shadowrunner” isn’t one of those things you put on your “what I want to be when I grow up” essay in school. Even if it was true, which I’d imagine it was for a whole lot of kids. “How long you been doing this?”
She gave me a sideways grin. “Long enough. You sure are full of questions.”
“Long night.” I twisted around to look out the back window, irrationally convinced that someone had to be following us. It was raining again, distorting the cars’ headlights into smears of brightness.
“Chill, kid,” Ocelot said from the front seat. “We got it covered.”
“You can relax for now,” Greta added.
I noticed that she kept her hand on her rifle, though. “Is that why we’re not going back to the same place?”
She looked approving that I’d noticed. “Never use the same safe house twice,” she said. “We won’t be there long, though. Soon as Winterhawk sets up the meet, we’ll be heading out. The sooner we ditch that thing, the happier I’ll be.”
“You and me both,” I said. But I still wondered what was going to happen to me once the handoff was done. Maybe I should have taken them up on the relocation offer.
I wondered if it was too late, but I figured maybe I should wait and see if I lived through the night first.
Just like Greta had predicted, we didn’t stay long at the new safe house. We dropped off the car in a locked garage, where another one was waiting for us along with a sleek sportbike, then hung out inside while Winterhawk arranged the meet. I noticed he never let the jar with the dragon embryo out of his sight. Greta spent the time checking her weapons, while Ocelot prowled from window to window and appeared to be communicating with the team’s decker. Five minutes later, Winterhawk came back out.
“We a go?” Ocelot asked.
He nodded. “The drop is in half an hour. We’re to meet up with their driver, who’ll deliver us to the location.”
I frowned. “I thought you guys worked for these people. Why the secrecy?”
“They don’t want the meet location getting out ahead of time,” Greta said. “Easier to avoid gatecrashers that way.”
I supposed that made sense. I started to get up when Winterhawk waved me back down. He came over to me, looking serious. “Now then,” he said. “Before we go, a couple of ground rules. I don’t like bringing you along, but since you insist, this is how it will work. You’re an observer, nothing more. You watch, but you do not participate. Understood?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, fine. I’ll keep my mouth shut. What else?”
He glanced down at the wrapped jar. “It’s unlikely that anything will go wrong, but of course we’d be fools to count on it. If anything does go unexpectedly, do your best to stay out of the way.”
“He means it,” Ocelot growled. “We don’t babysit. You do something stupid, we won’t take risks saving your ass. Got it?” From his expression, he was even more against the idea of me coming along than Winterhawk was.
“Hey, I’m in no hurry to get shot,” I told him. “I want this whole mess to be over as much as you do. I’ll keep my head down.”
“All right, then,” Winterhawk said, nodding as if that was settled. “Showtime.”
The rendezvous point was the parking lot of a small office complex in Auburn. The place kind of reminded me of ManaSure, where this time yesterday I’d been just another faceless drone with nobody trying to kill me. Hard to believe that had been less than a day ago.
It was only an hour or so before sunrise, so the lot and the building were both deserted: even the most dedicated wageslave at a place like this doesn’t make a habit of working at the crack of dawn.
We didn’t go directly there, of course. Greta, who was driving now, stopped the car a couple of blocks away and Ocelot, following on the motorcycle, pulled up behind us. I sat in the back seat, watching and listening while the three of them coordinated with their decker and what sounded like a drone rigger, and then Winterhawk slumped into the corner of his seat to step out for an astral jaunt. He’d also summoned a spirit, though I don’t know what he’d ordered it to do. I thought about joining him in the astral, but decided that would violate my “look, but don’t participate” deal. No point in getting them pissed at me when we were this close to the end of this mess.
Winterhawk returned five minutes later. “Anything?”
“Scratch isn’t picking up squat,” Greta said.
“Drones are in place,” Ocelot added. “All clear.” He got back on the bike and fired it up.
The waiting vehicle in the parking lot was a gray van with blacked-out windows. “I don’t like this,” Ocelot grumbled.
Winterhawk didn’t look happy about it either. He was listening to something on his ’link. “Sounds like Cody and I will be in the van. Greta, you take the car. Both of you stay close to us,” he said. “Scratch and Spassky will be running overwatch.”
I looked back and forth between them. They didn’t mess around—I wondered if all this preparation was the way all good shadowrunner teams operated, or if they were all just suffering from a troll-sized case of paranoia.
Greta pulled the car up next to the van. Winterhawk got out, motioning for me to do likewise, and slung the carefully padded pack containing the jar over his shoulder.
The van’s back door slid open, revealing a bench seat. The driver, a buff human with short-cut brown hair, nodded to us and waved us into the seats, then closed the door and drove off when we were settled.
I was relieved to see that the windows weren’t actually blacked out, just heavily tinted. I guess they figured that secrecy was one thing, but putting the guys delivering the goods inside a metal box with no way to see out the sides was a little much to ask for.
“Everyone in position?” Winterhawk’s voice came through my tiny earpiece. They’d fitted me with one and a throat mic at the last safe house, so I could be in on what was happening.
“Right behind you,” Greta’s voice responded.
“So far, so good,” said Ocelot.
“Cameras showing nothing suspicious on projected route,” said another female voice I didn’t recognize—must be the decker, Scratch.
“Same with the drones,” said a gruff male with a dark-brown Russian accent. “Got ’em deployed up ahead along projected route— adjusting as necessary.”
“Good,” Winterhawk subvocalized next to me from the seat closest to the door. “My spirit doesn’t see anything interesting, either. Keep your eyes open.”
I sat back and watched out the window. The van headed north toward Renton, hopping on the 169 for a short distance before exiting again toward Tacoma.
Then I glanced sideways at Winterhawk; he seemed relaxed, but I suspected otherwise. He’d unslung the pack from his shoulder and held it protectively in his lap. His eyes were constantly moving. Every couple of minutes, reports would come in from the others: still no sign of anything suspicious.
Wondering how far we had left to go, I glanced at the driver. He didn’t look rigged, which seemed odd to me, but a quick astral glance showed me that there wasn’t much of him left there. That meant he had to be wired up good, with plenty of reaction to deal with anything that might go south. He kept his eyes on the road, driving smoothly at or near the speed limit. Not attracting any attention.
The other thing that seemed strange to me was that we were driving so far from where we’d gotten in the van. If they wanted to keep their location a secret, it would be easy enough to do in the sprawl, even if it was fairly close to the rendezvous point. I was pretty sure we’d already driven several kilometers away from where we’d joined up.
I looked out the window again: we were driving through what looked like a warehouse district, the buildings rising up on either side of the street to make the road into a kind of metal canyon. The streetlights here were inte
rmittent.
I took another look at Winterhawk, assensing him. He still looked outwardly calm, but he was letting me see the slight concern that touched his aura. He didn’t like this any more than I did.
“I wonder how much farther…” I murmured.
“Are we close?” he asked aloud to the driver. “We hadn’t planned on taking the scenic route.”
“Not far now,” the driver said without turning around. “We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
I froze.
His voice was dark orange with streaks of purple.
And electronic enhancement or not, I never forgot a voice.
The last time I’d heard this one, it was when its fully-armored owner was screaming at me back at Uncle Mason’s house.
Six
I had maybe a couple of seconds to figure out what to do. I was afraid to say anything over the comm—afraid they might have been monitoring everything we’d been saying to each other since we’d started. Instead, I let my instincts take over.
“Drek, I’m tired,” I said, yawning, counting on Winterhawk to look at me, since it was the first thing I’d said since we’d gotten in.
He did, raising a questioning eyebrow. I cut my eyes toward the guy in the front and then made the tiniest headshake. “Haven’t slept for almost a whole day. I’ll be glad when this is over so I can crash.”
“I don’t doubt it,” he agreed. “I suggest you check out the Mockingbird.”
I had only a second to register that what he’d said made no sense, and a second after that to realize it had to be a code word, but at that point things all started happening at once and I didn’t have time to worry about it.
The guy in the front seat stabbed a finger on a control on the van’s console.
A panel slid into place with a solid gray snik-thunk between the driver’s section of the van and the passenger compartment.
A hissing sound issued from somewhere up near the ceiling. I looked up in panic and saw a fog of green gas beginning to waft downward from several places at once.
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