Five . . .
Kris swung around in a slow circle, the zapgun held out in front of her. Five . . . She held her breath, listening to the woman crying as she tried to sit up. Five . . .
Six: a step and a growl behind her. An arm grasped her roughly around the neck from the rear, another slapped the zapgun from her hands. Kris twisted against the pressure of the arm around her neck, turning so he couldn’t close off the windpipe and choke her into unconsciousness. It was Redface. His other arm was on her now, and he smiled—a gap-toothed, smug grin. The birthmarked skin was tight and shiny, spreading over his nose and around one eye. “Now you’ll get treated the same way as that Altered cunt,” he told her, his face so close to hers that she could smell the decay in his teeth and feel the spray of saliva as he spoke. His hands were fisted in the fabric of her jacket, starting to lift her so he could throw her down.
Altered . . . The word shocked her enough that she hesitated, and Redface applied more pressure. But the caradura kid was stupid, a bully who would grab someone without worrying that her hands were free. “Asshole,” she grunted. She clenched her hands together as if she were praying, then brought the doubled fist up hard between his hands. His jaw snapped abruptly shut, and she saw a chip of tooth fly away. Before he could react, she grabbed the back of his head and smashed his face down against her rising knee. His nose broke with a snap and a gratifying spray of blood. She kicked him in the floating rib as he went down in a fetal heap, then snatched up the zapgun and stood over him. “Son a bitch,” she said, and pressed the trigger once, then again, and yet again.
He screamed as bright sparks crawled his body, as his muscles seized and locked. The smell of ozone overlaid the odor of his bowels letting go. With the last of her anger and fear, Kris kicked Redface a final time and went to the victim.
She was an Altered. Kris saw that immediately. The pupils of her eyes were extraordinarily large, rimmed with a startling violet color. The silvered, almost reflective skin was darkened with bruises that turned the silver dark gray. The blood that trailed from one nostril and a cut on her upper lip was the color of cooking oil, and her face itself was pale and elongated, almost snouted around the mouth, and hairless. The hands, trembling as they reached toward Kris, were long, the fingers thin and delicate. At least two of them on the left hand were broken, also, bent at angles that made Kris grimace. The caradura had cut her clothing open; underneath, her breasts were small and hard in appearance; the slim body rounded with the slack, gentle musculature of someone not used to a planet’s savage gravitational pull, the age impossible to tell. She sat with her legs pressed together, and the strange blood speckled her silver thighs. What the hell were you doing here? she wanted to ask the Altered. What were you thinking, walking into Walltown looking the way you do? “We have to get out of here. Can you stand?” Kris asked.
“They hit me, said they were going to kill me,” she said. “They . . . they . . . raped . . .” She sobbed with deep gasping cries, hugging herself and rocking.
“I know,” Kris said, softly. “But it’s over now and we need to leave. They’ll wake up soon, and the ones who ran will come back with their friends. Do you think you can walk?”
The woman closed her violet eyes, wiping at them with her right hand. She bit her lower lip and nodded. “I think so,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and alto, the words touched with a hint of accent that sounded Mediterranean, or perhaps Near Eastern. She let Kris help her up, her legs unsteady. Kris tried not to look at the smears of pale blood and semen over her inner thighs. The woman pulled at the remnants of her torn clothing, trying to draw the cloth around her breasts, her hips. The garment might have been loose and flowing like a sari, once, but the sky-blue fabric was shredded and raveled, slashed down the center. She saw the wings, then . . . no, she decided, these weren’t wings, but rather small, stiff sails standing out from the shoulder blades to about the height of a hand: ribs of metal with circuited fabric between. Several of the ribs were broken, and the webbing was torn. She wondered what the hell the sails were for—with an Altered, it could be anything. “What’s your name?” Kris asked.
“Serena.” A sniff. She spat blood. Her eyes rolled backward and Kris thought she’d fainted, but then she blinked and came back.
“All right, Serena. Let’s get the hell out of here, then you can rest. Put your weight on me . . .” Kris draped one of Serena’s arms over her shoulder, holding her under the arms. Serena was still wearing her shoes—real leather, probably as expensive as they looked. Even if she’d looked like a unmod, the caradura would have come after her for the shoes. Kris shook her head, and guided Serena toward the ramp. Outside, there was the hiss of brakes and an electric hum, followed by footsteps. The last dregs of the adrenaline left her then, and Kris started to shiver.
“Kris!”
“Up here, Pauli.”
Pauli ran up the ramp. He was armed, a ripper socketed in his wrist plug. He saw Kris and the Altered and stopped. “Jesus—” he said, then glanced around the level at the four caradura sprawled on the oil-stained floor. “—Fucking Christ,” he finished. He rubbed at short, black hair with his unsocketed hand. His too-wide mouth twisted. “Not too shabby, Kris. Should I finish ’em?” he asked.
“Not up to me. How about it, Serena? Should we kill them the way they’d have killed you?”
The woman gaped at Kris, eyes widening under the darkening bruises in horror.
“I thought so. You really don’t belong here, do you? Leave ’em,” Kris told Pauli. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Kris sat on the kitchenette’s counter and watched from across the room as Doc fitted a medical collar over Serena’s neck, squinting at the display. He grunted once, almost angrily. “I’m going to release the neural block now,” he told Serena. “It’ll take several minutes for full feeling to come back, so be grateful.”
He tapped at a fingerpad on the collar, then released it with a click. “Lift your right hand, as high and fast as you can,” he told the woman.
Nearly everyone in Walltown knew Doc, one way or another, but no one called the man a friend. He was solitary, living alone in an apartment in what had once been City Hall. If he had vices, they were also of the solitary variety.
Grimacing with effort, Serena raised her right hand a few inches above the sheet, then her face twisted and she cried out in pain, letting it drop again. For an instant, Kris saw a smile crease the man’s face before it fell back into his habitual frown. It didn’t matter that his entire training had consisted of watching hospital drama vids—Doc was willing to live and work here, to be paid in occasional cash but usually barter and promises; he kept what he saw to himself, and his patients didn’t die too often. If he was gruff, if he didn’t particularly care about his patients, if he was sometimes vulgar and obscene, that didn’t matter. He had a singularly ugly face; one leg was visibly longer than the other, giving him a characteristic, twisted gait that everyone in Walltown knew—none of that mattered either. Unmods were what they were, and they learned to live with it, or not.
“Stop whining,” Doc told Serena. “You’re going to hurt a lot worse when all the feeling comes back. That’s normal after what you went through.” There was little sympathy in his voice, but also no irritation: only a dry recitation. He glanced at Kris. “Don’t know why you bothered,” he said. “The mechs are doing what they need to do inside. Her ribs are half-healed already, and using BoneKnit tabs on the fingers would be a waste—they’re already back into position. Same with the leg. Bad cut on the cheek, but skinglue won’t hold on mechflesh, and the stuff’s hard enough that I snapped my goddamn needle halfway through sewing it up, so to hell with it. I don’t see anything life-threatening, but I don’t know Altered biology well enough to know. See your gynecologist when you get back to the Port; you were torn there, too, but that’s exactly not my expertise. I figured it could wait.” He slapped two amber bottles down on the night table and looked down at Serena. “NoPain tabs, an
d a NoRegrets just in case they got you pregnant. Don’t know if either will work for you. And I also didn’t touch those things on your back, whatever the fuck they do.”
Serena reacted to the obscenity as if the man had just slapped her face.
“They’re decorative,” Kris answered for her.
Doc sniffed in Kris’s direction, unsmiling. “Right. Like your tits.” His wide, mismatched features glanced back at Serena. “Any questions?”
Serena’s head moved from side to side. She looked frightened, her gaze moving from Doc to Kris. Doc swung around to Kris again. “You plan on getting her out of here before the caradura or the Port heat come to find her? Pauli would have dumped her at Rhine Gate, called security anonymously, and been done with it—but then Pauli’s smart. She’s your goddamn responsibility. If you weren’t so damned obsessed with the Altered, all that watching the ships coming and going in the Port . . .”
Kris interrupted too loudly and too fast. “You pulling Asian philosophy on me, Doc? I don’t believe that shit about being responsible for a life you save.”
The man gave one large, noisy sniff. “I’m telling you that now you’ve put a fucking exotic hothouse flower in Antarctica. Get her out: she can’t survive here.”
Kris shrugged. “Yeah. I will.”
“Hope she appreciates how goddamn lucky she is. Not many people here would have bothered. especially for an Altered. I know damn well I wouldn’t have. Now, my fee . . .”
“On the table by the compad. In the envelope.”
Doc got up from his chair, limped to the table, and peered into the envelope before stuffing it into an inside pocket of his soiled white jacket. He nodded to Kris, and left the apartment, the door locks clicking shut after him. “Got a great bedside manner, the Doc,” Kris said to Serena.
“How long . . . ?” Her voice was hoarse and ragged.
“You were out maybe four hours. Couldn’t wake you up, so I called Doc. Gotta say, though, that the stuff they built in your body makes you heal fast—maybe that’s why you were out so hard. Need to see?”
Serena nodded. Kris got up and padded away into the bedroom. She returned with a mirror. “It probably looks a lot worse than it is,” she warned. She held the mirror up in front of Serena.
Serena stared into the mirror for several seconds before Kris saw her throat pulse: a strange motion under the too-rigid silver skin. The sob came from deep inside the Altered woman, pent up and demanding. Kris pulled the mirror away from her, and returned with a soft, warm cloth, patting Serena’s face gently, blotting away the tears, which were tinted with gold, like her blood. She said nothing to Serena, letting her cry without comment, only touching her shoulder now and then: hard, and colder than flesh should be. When the tears finally subsided into sniffling, Kris sat back again, her hand stroking Serena’s arm. “Why?” she asked the woman. “Why would you walk into Walltown looking like you do?”
Serena wiped at her tears with graceful fingers. “I don’t know. I thought . . . I just wanted to see . . .”
Kris felt her face twist into a scowl; Serena’s eyes widened impossibly at the expression on her face. “You wanted to see the animals in their natural habitat,” she spat out. “You wanted to see the poor, unwashed unmods, rooting in the filthy earth you left behind. That’s what it was, wasn’t it?
“No.” She was shaking her head, trembling. “It wasn’t that.”
“Then why? Why do such a fucking stupid thing? Are you an idiot? Why would you give a shit about anything down here? Ain’t it enough that you Altereds get to have all the rest?”
She stared at Kris as if she’d just been slapped. “I wanted to know . . .” she began, and stopped. “Out there, everyone’s the same and everything’s sterile and safe, and no one talks about or remembers what it was like before we changed ourselves. But I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know . . . didn’t want . . .”
The tears began again, and Kris grimaced, tight-lipped. Serena. She seemed young, no more than Kris’s age. Not that it mattered: She’d look the same when Kris was a wrinkled, bent-spine crone. Still, there was a vulnerability to her that surprised Kris—it wasn’t an attribute she associated with Altereds. She crouched alongside the bed and stroked the metallic skin. She put her head alongside Serena’s and cried with her, tears of clear water mingling with tears of pale gold.
She stayed with Serena until the Altered woman fell asleep again.
“You gotta get her out of here, Kris,” Pauli said. His shirt was stained with circles of perspiration around his neck and under his arms.
“I know that. I will. It isn’t going to hurt to let her sleep a bit first.”
“Right. You just want to stare at her and pretend you can look like that too. Well, you fucking can’t, not unless you forgot to tell me about some billionaire grandfather that made you his only heir. Look at the dump you live in, Kris. People in Walltown don’t get Altered. Even if you were young enough and rich enough—”
“Shut up, Pauli.”
“How many times they beat you up ’cause they found you prowling around out in the Port, Kris? How many times you come back here all banged up and lucky you managed to get back in here before they caught you? There’s no Out There for unmods; there’s just Down Here. Forever and always. You ain’t never going to get to be one of them. You ain’t never going to see what they’ve seen. You want to be like them? Hell, when they’re finished working on the Altered, they ain’t even human any more. More metal in ’em than meat . . .”
“Are you finished?”
“Are you listening?”
“Say something worth my attention.”
Pauli scoffed. “Look, the caradura will have figured out who ended their little party soon, if they haven’t already. Redface would love another crack at you, I can guarantee it. And Port Security’s gotta be looking for her too—there ain’t no poor Altereds, so the heat there will be all upset. Either way, you should lose yourself for a bit, and she’s ain’t a pet you can drag along, and you can’t crawl into her skin and be like her. That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
“Shut up, Pauli.” She pushed at him, and he spread his arms.
“Your problem is that you don’t like it when someone calls you on the truth. You can hate yourself all you want, Kris, and you can watch the shuttles leave all you want and imagine yourself going with them, but it ain’t none of it gonna happen. Not never.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Pauli, and you make a shitty psychologist. Yeah, I’d love to see some place other than Walltown and cities just like it. I’d love to smell the air somewhere where it’s clean, but there aren’t places like that here anymore, are there? The Altered fucked up this world but they got to leave the mess behind, and us with it. I’ll bet they hate looking at us so much because we remind them of what they were themselves, once. I don’t blame ’em, either. All I have to do is look in a fucking mirror . . .”
Kris stopped. Serena’s eyes were open, and Kris wondered how long she’d been awake, listening. “You hungry, Pauli? I’ll fix something. Tomorrow morning, I’ll take her back. I promise.”
“Move!”
Kris heard the shout simultaneously with the crash of her door. A trio of figures in dark helmets and body armor pushed through the remnants of the door and into the apartment. Kris stood up from the chair on which she’d been sleeping—it was a mistake. The lead apparition swung hard at her with the butt of its weapon, and the impact sent Kris’s head flying back and to the side, spraying white-hot sparks over her vision. The room reeled around her; she felt herself slam into the side of the desk, then the floor; she tasted thick blood. She heard Serena’s frightened wail and a helmeted, hidden head swiveled away from Kris toward the sound. “We have her, Sarge,” one of the creatures said. Its amplified, mechanical voice managed to sound relieved. “Still alive . . .”
Kris started to push herself up. A booted foot stomped hard on her hand; she heard fingers snap a
nd she tried to scream with the pain but her jaw wouldn’t open and the effort only made the room whirl underneath her. She heard a metallic click next to her ear, felt cold steel press against her temple, and knew that the next breath would be the last she’d remember. Her universe condensed down to the single worn floorboard in front of her right eye; the left was closed. She could see a flake of ancient varnish still clinging stubbornly to the wood, dust flecks caught in the otherwise unpolished grain, and a drop of her blood soaking slowly into the oak. She coughed more blood, waiting.
Her breath swirled the dust, a galaxy spinning.
“No!” That was Serena’s voice. “Stop it! Stop! She saved me . . .”
The muzzle was still pressed against her skull. “Get Serena out of here,” she heard the one called Sarge say. “Move! If anyone tries to stop you, blow them away. Go . . .”
Serena was still protesting, but her voice faded as they took her away. The muzzle pushed down on Kris. “Have a great life, unmod,” the voice said, then the pressure went away and she heard him thrash his way out of the apartment.
She lay on the floor for a long time, watching the galaxy of dust shudder under her breath, watching a slow nova of fiery red soak into a universe of dry oak.
“More NoPain tabs,” Doc said, shaking the bottle in front of Kris before setting it down on the table. “You keep sucking them down the way you have been and you’ll end up addicted. If that happens, I can get you a supplier, but it’ll cost. The splints on the fingers stay on for another week until the BoneKnit implant’s done. I still don’t think your jaw’s broken, but I’ll bet you’ll have problems with it for a hell of a long time, and I had to pull that cracked molar. You should be able to try solid food in a few weeks; meantime, your straw is your friend.”
Man Vs Machine Page 20