by Kai O'Connal
Cao nodded. “Of course. But since I don’t have cash, we’ll have to make an arrangement.”
The shopkeeper grunted.
“So, you don’t have a bank account. Do you know someone who does? Send me to them and I’ll pay him double.”
The shopkeeper’s eyes somehow got narrower. “Double.”
“Yeah. Twice what it’s worth.” Cao looked at the rubble on the ground. “Half a nuyen.”
The shopkeeper slowly, slowly pulled the hammer back on his shotgun. “Funny,” he said. “Funny dog.”
Cao went right to the heart of the matter. “I estimate your goods there are worth twenty-five nuyen. Send me to someone with a bank account, he’ll get fifty.”
The keeper was silent for a moment. Then spoke. “If I send you out the door, I’ll never see you or your money again.”
“Then come with me. Or send someone with me.”
There was a heavy thud on the ceiling above Cao, then the sound of footsteps.
The keeper grinned. “Okay. Someone is coming.”
That “someone” turned out to be a tired-looking man with a sunken chest visible under a loose grey tank top. He ran thin fingers through his short hair, switching it from one pattern of disarray to another.
“Is this her?” he said in Portuguese.
The shopkeeper responded in English. “Yes. She will be paying sixty nuyen.”
Cao knew better than to argue about the price. She only smiled and nodded.
The tired man nodded too. “Okay.” Then he looked at the keeper. “Am I allowed to kill her if I need to?”
“Yes.” The keeper then grinned, exposing mostly discolored gums. “But I wouldn’t recommend touching her.”
In the end, the process wasn’t too bad. Cao made her payment, got escorted to another place, was thoroughly searched (though not as thoroughly as someone without the virus would have been), then led into one of the few buildings in the favela with a basement. The walls were wood-paneled, the light was dim, and the air was cool—or cooler than the air outside, at any rate. And there, standing in the room with her, was Kobold, along with a few people tasked with the job of keeping him alive.
Kobold wasn’t meta. He didn’t have the virus. He was human, plain and simple. He didn’t look particularly monstrous, either—no implanted horns, no artificial fangs, nothing like that. Not on his face, at least. He had cold, metal eyes that he usually covered with sunglasses, a square face, and tattoos that memorialized each person he’d had to kill in the course of his work. By this point, his body didn’t seem like it had much room left, which gave Cao an odd kind of hope. So she decided to mention it, by way of greeting.
“Looks like you’re running out of space for your tributes.”
Kobold smacked his ass, hidden at the moment by olive drab pants. “There’s still some left. Special real estate I’ve been saving for some truly special memorials.”
“Good to know.”
“So.” Kobold stood a little straighter. “What can you do for me?”
“Don’t you want to know what I want from you first?”
“No. Everybody wants something from me. They are all alike. The only thing that makes them different is what they can do for me. Before we talk about anything else, I need to know that.”
“I can give you a glimpse at something so rare that only a few people have seen it. And most of them would kill for it.”
Kobold shrugged. “And I can give you a sharp stick in the eye. Doesn’t mean you’d like it, though. Or find it useful. No. What else?”
“I can give you money.”
Kobold’s rigid pose relaxed again. He took a few steps here, then there, then started pacing the basement in a loping, wandering fashion. Occasionally he raised and arm and brushed his fingertips against the wood walls.
“I have money. But I can always have more. To make it interesting, though, you should give me enough that I can do something that currently I cannot do. And with my money, right now, there are few things I cannot do.”
“Is there something you would like to do?”
Kobold stopped walking and looked at the room’s one window, high up on the wall opposite him. It had red curtains that were parted enough to provide a view of the dirty street outside.
“I would like an island. A place where I could get away from it all, be on my own, be at peace.”
“Yeah, that sounds nice. Look, whatever I might offer you, it’s not going to be island money.”
Kobold still faced the window, though his eyes were unfocused. “That is a shame.”
“But if it’s peace you want, well, maybe we can talk about that.”
Kobold’s eyes now were focused—focused right on Cao.
“You think you can offer me peace?”
It was a wild, spur-of-the-moment idea, but it was all she had. “Maybe a little bit. Yeah, I think so.”
“Then you may talk some more.”
It took about half an hour, and Cao grew more confident with each passing minute. The hook had gone in, firm and deep. Kobold had resisted being landed, like any good fish would, but there was no way he was going to dislodge the hook. He had been caught.
But then again, so had been Cao. She realized this when she told Kyrie about the bargain she had struck, and even though she didn’t have a visual on the elf, the sound of the woman breathing as Cao related the bargain she had struck told her all she needed to know about the incredulity and anger building at the other end of the call.
Had there been any doubt, Kyrie’s first words would have removed them.
“You said we would do what?”
“Oh, relax. It’s not as bad as all that.”
“Right. We’ll see if you still say that when it’s done.” Kyrie broke the connection.
Cao thought Kyrie was being overly dramatic. It might be nice, bringing peace to someone for a change. Sure, that “someone” was a gang leader and drug lord who once killed a twelve-year-old boy because the boy had been distracted by a street futbol game and had been slow in delivering a packet of novacoke to its intended destination, but if you only worked for virtuous people, then you’d never work at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The next day, the shadow of a dragon appeared over the favela.
This was the cause of much discussion and dispute in the slums. As soon as people started talking about seeing the shadow of a dragon, contrary voices emerged. It was not a dragon, these voices said. Dragons just do not go flying openly here and there. Maybe the witnesses were imagining things. Or maybe—likely—they were mistaken. A bird, if it was flying high enough, would cast a long shadow, and though Metropôle was a vast sprawl, the nation’s ecological efforts meant that there were now significant numbers of animals and critters mixed in with the metahumanity. Some of the birds that lived in the sprawl had fantastic plumage, including glorious tailfeathers that could cast long shadows behind the bird’s body. Something, the skeptics suggested, like a dragon’s tail.
Most of the witnesses would have none of this explanation. There was an old woman named Isobel who sat on her porch every day (what she called her “porch” was, in truth, two square meters of packed dirt in front of the door of a shack that leaned precariously to the left), and she knew what she had seen. She put her teeth in when she told people about it, because she knew that made her easier to understand.
“Who will tell me I didn’t see what I saw?” she asked to anyone in earshot. “Do you think, after sitting here day after day, that I do not know what the shadow of a bird looks like? I know birds! And let me ask you this: When birds fly far overhead, do they come with a sudden hard gust of wind? Is there a roaring in the air as they pass by? Of course not! When I tell you that I saw the shadow of a dragon, it is because what I saw was the shadow of a dragon!”
Talk of this sort then led to conversation as to which dragon it might have been. The name that came up most frequently was Hualpa, of course, but each mention of this theory was greeted with heavy
skepticism.
“It was not Hualpa,” Isobel said. “Hualpa is brilliant and cunning and knowledgeable, in the way of all dragons, but he cares little for us, in the way of all rulers. I doubt he could find his way to the favela, vast as it is, without a map. And the favela has no maps.”
There were occasional muted suggestions that perhaps it might have been Sirrurg, but there were few who wanted to mention the Destroyer’s name, and fewer still who wanted to entertain the thought that he might be among them, so that theory gained little traction.
The speculation was not helped by the fact that, while many people had seen the shadow, no one seemed to have gotten a good look at the dragon itself. They could say nothing about its color, its facial features, or any other identifying characteristics. In fact, there was so little direct visual contact with the dragon that some began to speculate that maybe that shadow was all there had been—no substance, only shade. But then they found the claw mark.
It was long, deep, and narrow, and it passed directly over the door of one of the most sturdily built structures in the favela. That was a good thing—had any other building in the area been hit by the swipe of a passing dragon, it likely would have collapsed in a heap, and there would still be no physical evidence of the dragon’s passing. Now they had this furrow, and Isobel proclaimed it was far more than evidence.
“It’s a warning, that’s what that is. The dragon has marked the building, and whoever is inside should be scared. Very scared. Because the mark means the dragon knows who they are, and he has come looking for them. And it’s never good to draw the attention of a dragon. I don’t know what this dragon intends, but I’ll tell you this—he don’t intend to drop off his hoard there!” After she said this, she cackled loud and long.
Isobel was not alone in this belief. True, there were some who claimed there was no way of knowing that the furrow had been caused by a dragon’s claw, but the shadow had been seen passing directly over that building, so it seemed like both a reasonable assumption and a more interesting story than any of the alternatives floating around.
So belief in the dragon’s mark became accepted fact, and that soon had a number of effects. Many people knew the building was one of the headquarters of a drug lord named Kobold. Some of the people who knew this were Kobold’s rivals, and they snickered to themselves about their rival’s looming fate. Kobold had become too big, too grandiose, and the string of addicts he left in his wake had finally got the attention of those at the top. Since these competitors had no desire to step on the toes of a dragon, they withdrew any plans they might have had to hit Kobold’s operations. The dragon had claimed him, so the dragon could have him.
The men and women of Metropôle security felt much the same way. It was never hard for them to come up with an excuse to stay out of the favela, and this seemed like a particularly good one. Not only was it a good idea to stay out of a dragon’s way, but if the dragon in question was Hualpa, then his knowledge of Kobold could very well have come from DISA, and no one wanted to go anywhere near a DISA operation, if only because their operatives were sometimes terrible tight-asses when it came to cherished traditions like police bribery. It was best to stay far, far away from the whole thing.
Even the locals who knew of Kobold and his riches, and who were thus always petitioning him for some favor or another, stayed away. The claw mark was something everyone, literate and illiterate alike, could read, and though its precise meaning was debated, no one took it as an invitation to come closer.
Fortunately for Kobold, one thing did not change. None of his sales actually took place at this building, so no customers were scared off. Most of them, in fact, didn’t know that Kobold was their ultimate supplier, and if they had, it wouldn’t matter. Their need for what he sold was too great to allow something like the slight chance of being devoured by a dragon to change their habits.
All this meant that when the small, dog-like woman came to call on Kobold again, he was in a most receptive mood.
Kobold had been much easier to find this time, mainly because Elijah now had a spirit watching him. Finding him, though, was only the first trick. The second trick was getting him to allow admittance to someone he didn’t expect. Cao wasn’t about to just walk unannounced into the club where he was holed up, since that would be a very good way to get shot. She’d have to start with the underlings and hope for the best.
She knocked on the club’s exterior door. The furrow above the door gleamed, as if it had been freshly polished. An ork with one broken, jagged tusk opened the door, glaring over Cao’s head. Once he had adjusted to her height and had seen who she was, his expression brightened.
“You’re back,” he said. “The boss is happy with you. Good dog.”
Ah, the comforts of home, Cao thought. Where compliments always come with a slap.
The ork turned and walked into the building, and Cao assumed she should follow. So she did.
Soon she was back in the basement, with a surprisingly serious-looking Kobold, who spoke without a word of greeting or small talk. He was on his feet, pacing, a sweaty glass full of ice and rum in his right hand.
“There will come a time when I will miss it.”
Cao didn’t reply, mainly because she had no idea what he was talking about. She hadn’t been invited to sit down, but she took a place at an empty table anyway.
“Perhaps I am nothing more than an addict,” Kobold continued. “Maybe I was an addict when I started in the business. Maybe it was the business that made me an addict. Who knows? But I will go back into it, because the chaos, the rush of it all. I’ll miss it if I don’t.”
He waved his glass toward the exterior door.
“It wouldn’t last forever, anyway. Your little trick. If threats aren’t acted on promptly, they lose their power. People forget.” He sipped at his rum. “I learned that early.”
Then he smiled, a big, toothy grin, and some of the bright tattoos on his chest shook in an unnervingly jolly fashion. “But it worked for now. God above and devil below, it worked for now. I have to thank you.”
“You’re welcome. But I sincerely hope that you’re prepared to give me more than just words.”
Kobold’s non-drinking hand fluttered in the air. “Of course, of course. We will talk. But one question first.” He placed his drink down near Cao, then leaned forward, both palms resting on the dark plastic tabletop. “The old woman. Isobel. She was tremendous for you. She will be taken care of, yes?”
“Already happened,” Cao said. “She has a credstick with more money than she’s made in her entire life.”
Kobold smiled. “What, all of fifty nuyen?” He laughed, then his face became serious. “She is old, and has lived all of her life in the favela. I hope she will buy herself a place to live out her remaining years.” He tilted his head. “Or perhaps I should talk to her. I could introduce her to pleasures in her late years that she never felt in her whole life.”
Cao managed to keep her hand from reaching for her gun. She might be able to get a shot off at Kobold before anyone reacted, but she would surely die in the aftermath, and she was not willing to give the world the gift of one less cockroach if the price of that was one less Cao.
She managed not to try to kill him, but she couldn’t bring herself to smile when she spoke. “I believe we were going to talk about how you will express your gratitude.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was like Christmas, except that instead of walking downstairs to open presents, you had to drive by a bunch of dilapidated buildings full of people who wouldn’t mind killing you. But Elijah had sweaty palms and a twitching urgency in his stomach that kept him from being able to focus on anything but their destination. He restrained himself from asking “Are we almost there?” at least half a dozen times.
They actually appeared to be leaving the favela. Elijah had spent so much time there recently that he had forgotten there were other parts of the sprawl. But he was passing buildings that had actual foun
dations, and some of them had concrete or even brick walls. There were even people walking about who did not appear to be armed.
He tried to distract himself with thoughts of the spirits he would summon once they arrived, and of the meticulously worded instructions he would give them. But he was not in the mood for meticulousness, which was odd for him. He was in the mood for rushing, for chaos, and for the surging thrill of discovery. He was so excited by all this that he was not at all worried about the enthusiasm, or lack thereof, of the rest of his group for the day’s activities.
Cao finally stopped in front of a warehouse. The crew got out and started doing the jobs they were supposed to do. They divided into two groups, Pineapple leading one, Kyrie leading the other, both of them looking carefully at the building and noting all the possible entry points, both intentional (doors) and unintentional (windows, gaps in masonry, etc.). Leung was with Pineapple, Cao was with Kyrie, and they scanned the area for any interesting nodes that they maybe should pay attention to. That left Elijah, walking with Kyrie, to scan the astral for anything notable. This job he could concentrate on, since he knew that without good security, he wouldn’t have the time and privacy he needed to open his present.
When they met back, they quickly compared notes.
“No wall holes,” Pineapple said. “A few small windows, but only someone rat-sized, like Cao, could get through them.”
Then Leung. “Matrix doesn’t suck here like it does in the favela, but not much is happening here either. We’ll put up a shield, I’ll erect a firewall, we’ll be free to talk with each other all we need.”
That meant Elijah likely wouldn’t have access to Matrix resources for any research he might want to perform, but it was no big loss. Most of the Matrix was noise anyway, and those sources he trusted were regularly downloaded and copied onto his personal storage. When you were in the wild as much as he was, it was foolish to depend on reliable Matrix connections in order to do your work.