Escapology

by Ren Warom

  Unable to muster up a shout, Shock stands at her table and stares, waiting until she notices him, trying to ignore how much like the old days it is. This is his choice, not hers—and it’s all business. There’s nothing personal in it. When she clocks him, her headlights flare, and she throws down a serious grin, like a challenge.

  “Shocking boy, long time no spy.” She makes shooing gestures with tiny hands tipped with nails like talons. She-bird. Bird of prey. “Skeddadle, dickheads, my boy is here. We have business.”

  “I’m not your boy,” he says with infinitely more calm than he feels, sliding in beside her and slamming her drink down next to a half-empty flute of what looks like liquid purple glitter and smells bad as candy-coated burnt rubber. “What’s the job?”

  “What, no time to reminisce?”

  She tries for a hurt tone, but it falls light years short. Sounds like she’s asking a bug she’s got under a magnifying glass if the sun burns yet. The fact she still gets to him as easily as when he thought they were a going concern makes him despise her even more. Or maybe he just despises himself?

  He should quit the habit of her. Quit this vicious cycle, a viscous cycle, clinging to him like she still does, out of convenience, and he lets her. More fool him. He takes a deep breath, feeling like he’s sucking the whole club down into his lungs.

  “Job, Mim, or I’m out.”

  Her teeth flash, blinding, making him dizzy.

  “Tetchy,” she drawls, and he knows that she’s feeling his discomfort and loving it. Fuck but he hates her. “I need a bullseye, close as dammit to my stats as you can hit. Two K flim.”

  Mim is an ID sniper, an info clone, an Imp. She hunts, copies, and temporarily replaces for the purposes of theft. Pretty good at hacking bullseyes on a basic level, Mim’s proficiency dive-bombs to below useless with any kind of VA, Virtual Armament.

  Her current fuck, Johnny Sez, an L-plates hack, can only crack up to level 6. For anything above that, she has Shock, her reluctant hacker on call. It’s a crap job, and far too intermittent, but it’s flim and really he’s in no position to be picky. He wishes he were. Whenever he works for Mim, she always wants delivery in person. Maximising his discomfort is one of her favourite pastimes.

  “I need the company you expect me to phish in before I Y or N.”

  “Olbax Corp.”

  Olbax. Great. Could be worse though. Could be Paraderm.

  “That’s a pretty mean amount of VA for Two K. Two K barely even covers my fucking rent.”

  “Take it or leave it, sport. Not running a charity here. Or maybe you don’t think you need it?” She gives him the sly look, up and down. “I’m guessing that’s why you’re looking so swell. Corpse-chic suits you.”

  Shock tries not to react, it costs him way too much dignity and temporary control of an eyelid.

  “Fine.”

  She reaches out and pats his hand.

  “Good Shocking Boy. Info in your IM as we speak.”

  Sliding out of the booth, the back of his hand tingling like it’s been stung, he makes for the Risi District and enough alcohol to drown a land ship the size of the Gung. Maybe this time it’ll be enough to drown out the ugly mix of hate and need he gets from too close proximity to her.

  He makes a concerted effort to forget about the job before he’s even halfway there. At some point his IM will blip and Mim will squeak a reminder. Until then, fuck her, fuck everything. All he wants to do is drown.

  Ask Me Why I Do This Again

  Cleaners should never have to run, they stalk and sneak and snatch their prey when least expected; anything else constitutes a heinous insult to their skills. Ducking under the corner of a brightly striped awning, Amiga slams through the crowd in pursuit of the wiry, wired-up Streek who until about thirty seconds ago had no clue about her presence at his back.

  Goddamn kimchi merchant chose literally the worst moment ever to howl in her ear: “Beautiful Kimchi, just like halmeoni makes it—super cheap!” Before she had time to put a dart through that loudmouth’s neck, her target had turned, spotted her and was away like a streak—haha—of piss.

  If she didn’t fucking adore kimchi she’d boycott it from her diet to make a point. Maybe she’ll go back to the market and buy from the seller three stalls down. Yeah. That’ll feel good. Probably a better option than killing the guy who busted her, and definitely less harmful to her karma. Although if it’s karma she’s got to be worried about then she’s already royally screwed.

  Bursting out from between the last row of stalls in the market place, she finds herself in the middle of a tight-knit group of Hindi ladies in jewel-bright saris. They shriek, slap at her like she’s a bug. With their multitudes of rings, it’s like being pelted with tiny, stinging stones. No, this is not at all humiliating.

  “Ow, come on!”

  Charging out of their reach and down the street, she spots the skinny little shitbag clambering up a fire escape along another alley to her left.

  “Fast,” she murmurs, half impressed, and sets off after him, sweating like a five-hundred-pound rikishi in a sauna. This jumpsuit works for blading, especially way up on the mono where it gets super cold, but it does not work for a frantic pursuit down tiny, stinking overcrowded alleys, and up ramshackle fire escapes. At least she changed out of her bladers. Small mercies.

  Amiga reaches the top in time to witness his wild leap to the next roof. As he lands, the skinny little shitbag looks back and has the audacity to laugh. Unsurprising. Streeks are fucking crazy, and usually fucked up. They’re Cad students, socially engineered within a stifling constriction of class schedules, minimal flim, and claustrophobic Pod hotels for maximum lunacy in order to thin the herd before graduation.

  Around seventy percent of these fuckers don’t live to sit their Psych Eval—all the better to keep the competition for Corp roles to a manageable minimum. Doesn’t mean she’s not going to beat that smile off his idiotic rat face when she catches him, but it adds a certain pathos to the situation.

  He laughs again as he takes off sprinting across the roof, that crazed Streek cackle, and an aggressive need to pop a dart in his idiotic skull wrestles its way into her fingers. Growling, she backs up and takes a running leap, digging for self control. Popping his head like a pus-filled cyst would be satisfying in the short term, but she’s on strict instructions. Her delightfully violent and unforgiving boss, Twist, wants this little fucker alive. Failure to meet this condition would mean a very swift change of conditions for her. The Cleaner would be Cleaned. Thoroughly. Twist always makes a particular example of favourites.

  And there’s a thought she very much wishes not to be having.

  She follows her irritating target around the corner of a cooling unit and runs headlong into an unexpected reason for his reckless amusement. Streeks. About a dozen of them. She slides to a halt, considering. They smile at her. Like vultures with mouths and teeth. Thing is, she’s not carrion. She is in fact the very furthest thing from that, and this is the single advantage of being Twist’s favourite. Amiga smiles back.

  “I don’t want to spoil your fun,” she says gently. “All I’m here for is that little rat.” She points at said rat. “No one else has to get hurt today.”

  Giggling, the Streeks fan out. Of course they’re not going to listen. Of course they want to play. Why wouldn’t they? This is what they’re made to do. So be it. They can see what she’s made to do. Amiga relaxes. Taking that as a cue, they come at her hooting and cackling, switchblades and shoge flicking into their hands, into the air.

  Amiga breathes in deep as the first one nears, spinning his shoge a trifle wide but with definite skill. Stepping under the chain, she slams her palm into his face, full force. His head flies back, a high spray of blood rising above it, bright as a mohican.

  Snatching the front of his jacket to hold him steady, she scoops his arm into hers and spins him, applying pressure until the joint pops out. He screams, cut off to gurgles as she plucks the shoge from limp
fingers and slits his throat.

  Stunned by her speed, too stoned to react with anything like the same, the others howl at her. But she’s calm, ready, spinning the shoge in skilful arcs and already moving. Sends it whipping out into their flesh before they can find a response beyond rage, cutting gaping holes in arms and thighs, in the taut flesh of their bellies.

  She’s a quiet storm scything through them, blood spiralling around her like red snow. Bodies fall in swift succession until there are only two left standing: Amiga and the rat.

  Market sounds drift up from below. Somewhere a pigeon coos softly. The rat’s face is a study. Rage and terror. He keeps looking down, as if eyes alone can undo the wreckage of his crew. They look so vulnerable now, these walking statistics, no more than the sad fact of their numbers in a graph. The first lesson Amiga learnt when she started to kill was how easy it is, and how utterly horrifying that can be.

  She tosses the shoge aside, feeling tired. She really wants to punch something hard, something that will hurt. Anything to shake the sensation of not quite being human.

  “Are you going to come quietly now?” she asks.

  He screeches, thrusts his face forward and laughs high and loud. Then legs it.

  “Bollocks.”

  Lifting her arm, Amiga sends a dart from her wrist-bow through the back of his knee. Watches impassively as he collapses to the rooftop, clawing and screeching.

  “Should have done that first and saved some energy,” she says to herself, walking over to snatch him up by the scruff of the neck. She zip-ties his hands to his belt to stop him flailing at her like an angry toddler. “Man, I need a drink.”

  * * *

  Hauling the rat down from the roof turns the puddles of sweat forming under her jumpsuit to a small lake. Comfy. Halfway down she IMs Twist, and he tells her to wait for a car. What choice does she have? It’s not like she can drag this fucker through the streets.

  Her mood falls from not amused to downright pissy. Back in the alley, which is both stenchy and freezing, they wait. Terrific. Her boss is being a pain in the arse lately, this business with Haunts stealing all his attention. Whatever it is he wants, he’s ploughed through three of them already—literally, since they died in Slip—and he’s still not satisfied. Other crime lords are beginning to notice, and it’s making Twist act pretty damn weird.

  Take that Haunt he’d sent her after, Shock Pao, idiot extraordinaire. Pao screwed him over and Twist wanted him creatively filleted. She was doing her level best to make that dream come true, despite catching a Haunt being hella high on the difficulty scale, then bang, Twist pulls the contract. Twist never pulls a contract. Out of character much.

  The car takes an age to arrive, by which time Amiga’s lost the feeling in her toes. Once inside the vehicle, the Streek starts up a horrible racket, so she knocks him out and settles back into the cool leather of the seat. Real leather, of course.

  Traffic’s terrible and in the endless void of time, the quiet broken only by the soft snoring of the rat and the purr of the engine, Amiga starts to think. Inevitable really, and always a mistake. By slow degrees thought becomes a mire, sucking her in until she’s struggling to find air.

  Those Streeks were so young. Younger than her, and she’s not yet twenty-three. Now they’re just empty bags of flesh and bone, leaking blood. Wasted potential. How does she justify being their ending?

  It should be simple. Do your job. Killed or be killed. If she hadn’t then sure, she would have died. But to her the equation is incomprehensible. Her or them? What kind of a trade-off is that? Her life is worthless. By extension, so is she. Or perhaps she was worthless to begin with and life had to run to catch up?

  “Shit!” Amiga punches the seat, furious with herself, with the day, with that stupid kimchi merchant. This is not a good place to be. If she goes to Twist carrying all this fucking weak bullshit in her head, she might as well hand him a knife and expose her throat. Only she can’t stop. Can’t breathe. Can’t shake this feeling she always gets, that it wasn’t fair, wasn’t honest—that the blood on her hands is beyond cleaning. That she’s the sum of the stains and nothing more.

  Reaching out with a shaking hand, she runs a finger down the glass of the car window. The screen reacts: fading the black through pale grey to clear glass, so she can see light, colour. They’re on a main arterial road to the centre of the Gung, surrounded by other cars. Choked in.

  Either side of the road ’scrapers rear their endless backs like giants, their shoulders swathed in cloud. Some of these are residential, their myriad tiny windows and slim, useless balconies draped with clotheslines and trailing plants, all tied into chicken wire. She remembers with a bitter twist of the stomach how as a child she’d fold back the wire and lean out, trying to find air.

  Her baa-baa, Michiko, might be making maki, or perhaps steaming nikuman on their tiny two-ring stove, the warmth of the steam a familiar comfort. Above her head, on the sleeping platforms of their ten-foot-square family cage, her mother, Indira, and her aunties would be arguing over their sewing machines.

  In the sound of their voices, in the steam, in her tiny crack of open window, counting ant-sized cars as they funnelled past below, Amiga could breathe. She’d wish those moments could last forever, because when they stopped, when Michiko took whatever she was cooking in a box to Amiga’s father on the dock, Indira and the aunties would turn their vitriol on her. They wouldn’t dare be cruel in front of her baa-baa.

  Born eighteen years before the world broke, Michiko died at the grand age of 233, when Amiga was six. A hard woman, sharp of tongue and wit, any softness was reserved for her little Amiga-chan, her little dopperugengã. And she is. Amiga has a photo in her drive of Michiko as a young woman, back when Japan still existed. She’s sat on a wall, dressed in torn jeans, loosely tied boots, a Mickey Mouse zombie tee and a baseball cap, sticking her tongue out.

  They are mirror twins: piercing amber eyes, a pointed face, knife-straight black hair, too many sharp lines for beauty. A hard face to hide. Harder yet to live with. It reminds Amiga of how her mother never forgave her for being Michiko’s favourite. But you can’t choose who loves you. Or who doesn’t.

  The car turns, taking a ramp up into a huge ’scraper, to the car parks on the lower floors, their light made cold by reflection through narrow windows onto stark, white stone. Nothing built on this last scrap of solid land goes underground; everyone’s too scared of what might happen.

  Most who could recall the breaking of the world and its subsequent drowning are dead now, like Michiko, but the horror is a kind of race memory and there’s not one soul on the Gung who’d dig into the earth for any reason. Not even to plant a flower. Look at the base of any building in the Gung erected after the breaking and you’ll find them laid on plascrete, bound in to the earth. All the better to hold it together.

  Shaking her rat awake, Amiga hustles him into the nearest shoot. She knows this building, knows exactly where Twist will be: the revolving restaurant near the top. It’s his favourite place to eat. Amiga couldn’t even afford the garnish on an entrée. Oh well. Probably tastes like crap anyway. In the shoot the rat starts giggling compulsively, so she gives him a slap. Shuts him up for maybe five seconds, then he starts again. Louder.

  She leans toward him and says sweetly, “Shut up or I’ll plug your mouth with your eyeballs.”

  The rest of the journey upward is silent.

  They’re met by the maître d’, who’s clearly unhappy about a bloodied Streek in her restaurant but escorts them to Twist’s table nonetheless, her hands clasped, white-knuckled, in front of her belly. Twist lounges in his chair, waiting. He’s a small, slender man; oriental grace in a Scots package. His cool brown eyes don’t look through you, but into you. All the way in. Sometimes Amiga is terrified she can’t hide anything from him at all.

  He dismisses the maître d’ by ignoring her and offers Amiga a smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes. This man holds his cards so close to his chest they’ve
fused into the flesh.

  The rat starts to struggle, making a very annoying whimpering noise. Pinching the soft flesh between nose and lip, Amiga forces him to his knees, making a pretty mess of the polished stone floor. Twist raises his brow.

  “Amiga,” he tuts, “you’re not usually so clumsy.” In his soft Scottish drawl every lilting note can harbour a false sense of security but Amiga is reassured. He’s feeling magnanimous, she can tell by the playful tone behind his words, the slight crinkle at the corner of his right eye. Amiga’s learnt to read Twist like land ship Captains read the sea. Basic survival 101.

  She sighs. “Kimchi seller outed me. Long story.”

  He flicks a finger at her. “And that’s all from one little knee?”

  Amiga looks down at herself and pretty much dies of embarrassment. She’s in a top-class restaurant in a pea-green jumpsuit absolutely drenched with blood. Her life: for real awkward at all times.

  “No. Well. I may have encountered some of his friends too.”

  “I see.”

  Twist turns his gaze on the rat, who’s giggling compulsively again and shaking, his bloodied leg jerking against the floor like he’s being electrocuted.

  “We’re going to have a little talk, you and I,” he says gently. “About your friend Nero.” He flicks a look up at Amiga. “Go get cleaned up.”

  She nods and heads for the back, where a discreet granite-lined corridor leads to the bathrooms. Their opulence offends her, but she makes extravagant use of the soap and towels, scrubbing her face clean and removing the blood from her bodysuit as best she can. The attendant gives her the filthiest look ever. Normally that would make Amiga feel guilty, but today she’s pretty much at tilt.

  When she goes back, the Streek’s where she left him, and although Twist hasn’t so much as moved, the rat’s pissed himself and he’s been crying.

  Twist looks up as she approaches.

  “According to our mutual friend here, you wiped out half of Nero’s crew today. Who’s getting a bonus?”