by Ren Warom
He looks for Volk. She’s on the other side of the corridor, automatic weapon in hand and laying down fire. If he calls her, they’ll know where to shoot. He needs Breaker. Right now. Puss takes the initiative, tapping in to the building’s systems and scouting this floor and the two above, looking for anything that feels like Breaker’s signal. Finds faint traces in a penthouse on the floor above.
Shock leans in close to Petrie. Murmurs, “I need to go. My drive’s not going to hold. Puss found Breaker on the floor above. Going to backtrack and make my way there.”
“Go. We’ll keep them occupied.”
Puss clinging to his torso as he clings to the wall, Shock retreats to the terraced area, closing his eyes to scoot around each pot on the way, sure a stray bullet will end him before Emblem does, almost welcoming the idea. He calls the shoot. Could be locked by now, could be he’s stuck here, but it isn’t and he’s not. He steps in, unsteady on his feet and the shoot moves off, gunfire fading to a distant patter like rain. Soothing. He misses it when it fades away altogether, leaving him alone in silence. Puss tightens her grip on his chest.
We’ll be okay.
I hope so, he says, but he remains unconvinced. Puss is reliant upon him, clever as she is, and he’s not strong. He’s never been strong. He has no idea how he’s still standing. Odds were against it from day one.
There’s no terraced area on the 499th floor, only a large, echoing lobby with a single feature. A biome tree, leafless and massive, its roots and branches contained beneath glass and stretching all the way out to the walls. There’s something melancholy about it, stranded up here so far from earth and sunlight, so far from where it belongs. It shouldn’t be alive, trapped in all this steel and glass. That it is feels like an affront.
The centre of the trunk is hollowed out into a walkway, and through it Shock sees the short, cul-de-sac corridor containing the staff entrances to each penthouse, double doors with a scan pad for the passkey. The penthouse with traces of Breaker’s signal lies to the left, but he has no passkey to get in. Puss, who’s been scanning them, puts his mind at ease.
They’re not on the mainframe.
Really?
Jumping into her scan, he offers fleeting thanks to the code jockeys responsible. Whoever they were, they’ve assumed that with all the layers of Heights VA surrounding them the software and systems for these doors need not be overly complex. They’re not stupid simple, but Shock and Puss together are a formidable force. It takes minutes for them to smash past, and then they’re in, stepping from polished stone to that echoing white wood floor he remembers from his meeting with Breaker. He tries not to give in to relief. There are only traces here; Breaker himself may be long gone.
Taking the gun from his pocket, Shock closes the door behind him, soft as he can. Fuck but he loathes firearms. He knows the mechanics of shooting, but he’s a crap shot. Seems hacking and coding skills requiring excellent hand/eye coord don’t necessarily translate IRL. His don’t anyway. Puss connects to his jack, and they scan the penthouse for body heat. Find one faint signature in the foremost room, the one he recalls from his meeting with Breaker, with the window curved around the outside edge. The lounge. Someone, possibly Breaker, is sat on one of the large white sofas. Such a thin sliver of heat. Breaker’s either not much bigger than Shock, or he’s dying and losing body heat fast.
“Fuck.”
Shock makes his way through the enormous penthouse as fast as he can. Not fast at all considering the state of him. He’s physically wrecked, hurting in every cell, and then there’s Emblem, on the verge of implosion. He can feel it moving in there. Rolling from side to side like mercury in a jar, bringing a sensation of liquid sickness to his gut that yaws dizzily with every movement. He’s staggering by the time he reaches the lounge. Making his way to the sofa, he sees the back of Breaker’s head. Statue-still. Gingerly, he reaches out and pokes his shoulder with the gun.
“Breaker?”
The slight figure damn near elevates out of the sofa, reversing at speed into the window, hands raised, eyes so wide the pupils look like islands in the white. Shock’s first thought, after “Fuck, I hope the window holds” is “Scarecrow”. Breaker’s taller than Shock, though not by much, and skeletally thin.
Splayed against the window he appears somehow pinched in, as if cringing, and far too tense, his entire frame shaking so hard he looks like he might fly apart. His face is all bones, the eyes already huge within that hollowed wasteland. Oddly, the clothes are all wrong. Corp gear. Grubby and threadbare from what looks like continuous wear, but expensive. Haute couture even.
“Breaker?” Shock asks again, more gently.
The hollowed head shakes frantically.
“Lakatos. Josef.” His voice is cracked. Trembling. “You can’t be here. You shouldn’t. Why are you here? He promised me he’d keep you away.”
This is Josef Lakatos? This is the owner of Fulcrum? Somehow Shock had imagined him taller, more like a movie villain, Dracula in a hundred-thousand-flim suit maybe. At least the clothes make sense now, but nothing else adds up. What’s with the state of him? And why is he here? Word was Kamilla moved to one of the wealthier hubs decades ago. She certainly had no need to stay, Fulcrum could be run from anywhere. Shock would love answers, really, but Emblem won’t wait for that and Breaker is not in this room. Shock and Puss scan again, briefly, for Breaker’s signal. Still there. Faint, fading traces of it. They aren’t anywhere else. He has to be here.
“Where the fuck is Breaker?” Shock demands, too scared to be kind, despite Josef’s horrific, enervated state. “He was here. I know he was.”
Josef nods, shaking so hard his features are blurring.
“Was. Gone. They took him.”
Shock circles the sofa on unsteady legs.
“Who? Where?”
Josef points toward the far exit.
“My floor.”
“There’s a shoot?”
Josef nods. “Internal.”
“Protected?”
“No. Only I use it.”
Gathering energy from a body determined to quit on him, Shock makes his way out. Somewhere behind him, he hears Josef say something desperate, pleading, but he hasn’t time to stop and listen, his time is almost up.
It takes forever to get through the lounge. The shoot is just outside, rising in the middle of a circular hallway between the rooms of the penthouse. It’s a glass shoot, and for a moment he thinks the capsule is missing, then he sees it, glass against glass, and waves the door open to step in. This shoot is warm inside. Hums as if singing. He finds he’s humming along, his counter-melody an endless moan, low and miserable. The sickness in his gut is spreading to his bones, and his head pounds and pounds, a hot weight thudding into the top of his spine.
The shoot opens into another hall surrounded by rooms. Where should he go? Breaker could be anywhere here.
Puss slides her tentacles into his jack, carefully, wary of Emblem and they peer through the walls, seeking out a heat signature. There’s something twisted back over one of the sofas in the room behind, a puddle of cooling heat around it that can only be one thing. Poised above, like some ravenous bird about to pluck out an eye, curls a wiry, voluptuous shape.
Li Harmony.
Ho’s by the window, watching her as he always does, the soft glow of his ever-present psy stick apparent in one elegant hand.
In his desperation to find Breaker, Shock had forgotten them. Thought they’d be with their troops. Foolishness. The Harmonys are never predictable. And here they are, with him. Fear dumps adrenaline across Shock’s entire system, a toxic amount, shuddering in his bones, torquing his belly and guts into a single throbbing entity of aching nausea. Spinning back to the door, he tries to get back into the shoot, only to find it gone. His mind disconnects, the weight and heat of Emblem combining with fear to steal comprehension. Puss squeezes his midriff.
Calm, she advises. Remain calm. Inevitability has its own median. Find it.
He realizes he’s listening, waiting for their feet to follow him. Tries not to think about that cooling shape. Has to be Breaker. Gone. And his only chance to be rid of Emblem gone with him.
And Shock realizes he’s not ready to die. He’s been holding on to hope for dear life, and now it’s gone. Everything’s lost, and Li Harmony this close to him is the culmination of a thousand nightmares.
He’s halfway through the opposite room, a gallery of sorts, filled with erotic art formed from bold swirls of hypnotic colour, when he hears them after him. They’re not running. He doesn’t need to look to see that. On these wooden floors he can hear the resonant clack of Li’s strutting and Ho’s strolling as if they’re a drumbeat tapped out on his skull, counting down the seconds.
“Do stop, Shock,” Li says. She’s still a way behind but she doesn’t bother shouting. The high, vaulted ceilings of these rooms carry sound perfectly.
“Fuck off,” he replies, more forcefully than he meant to, putting up a middle finger missing its top joint.
He’d forgotten until now how many of them Pill cut off. It makes him giggle. Li will have to go a long way to beat Pill. She doesn’t like being outdone. He laughs harder at the thought, hearing Li’s disapproving tut somewhere behind him. Fuck, why is this making him laugh? It’s so not funny. Ah, he’s fucking terrified. That makes sense. Inappropriate humour are us.
Seconds click down to zero. Ground zero. A hand touches his shoulder, fingers like hooks digging in. Pulling him backward until Li’s mouth is at his ear, her soft breath caressing his lobe.
“Did you miss me, baby?”
“Not even,” he says, cursing his inner cocky bastard even as he forces Puss to slither down and away, to get clear. Puss goes reluctantly, radiating fury Li probably can’t sense.
Spinning him around to face her, Li drives him backward into the wall, right up against a painting depicting some sort of bacchanalian orgy between swirling rainbow figures. As if eager to recreate the scene, she crowds in close. Too close. Body to body. Grinding his broken ribs against each other. Snapping him into that too-clear space pain can invoke. Strange thoughts can strike in those moments—he thinks about how you couldn’t slide a blade between them right now without cutting them both, and how much she’d like that. It makes him shudder.
Cold and flat, her eyes stare into his, almost as deep as Volk’s, but without any of that distance. She’s got nothing in her, so how is it she can be this intimate? Her eyes practically caressing the insides of his skull. Curious. Seeking.
“Where is it in there?” she murmurs. “Right now I’m wondering do I want it more than I want to kill you? I don’t know.” She sighs. “What do I want, Ho?”
Ho blows out a long stream of smoke. Considers the question with utmost solemnity. He’s not Li’s shadow. He’s her reflection. That’s where their likeness rests. Twins with different faces, identical hearts and minds. Cold, dead and little more.
“You expressed a definite interest in killing him. But you wanted to fuck him first,” he responds in the end, speaking with careful slowness, each word a morsel.
Imagine a half-circle crack in the ground, that has more personality than Li Harmony’s smile.
“So I did,” she says, and tilts her head to look down at his body against hers. “You’re gay, aren’t you, despite the packaging? The package. A girl that likes girls, wearing a boy suit. Cute.”
Hatred coils like heat from his bones, steals sense from his head, and he reacts, snarling into her face, her stupid, waxy, fake, fucking blank face, “I’m not a fucking girl.”
“Oh really? But you like fucking them. Like your little Mim.” She fixes a faux-concerned look to her face. It sits there like it’s been painted on plastic. Gross. “Hey, did you know your Shark ate her? Fun fact of the day. Well, I found it funny.” She leans in and sniffs his eyes, as if expecting him to cry.
He can’t cry. Not for Mim. Not any more. If Shark ate her then she was after him. If Li knows it, then Mim was after him for Li. No prize for guessing what she was after doing. She didn’t deserve to die, not really, but he deserved better than her. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe they deserved better than each other.
Disappointed by his lack of response, Li whispers in his ear, “Did you ever pretend you still had your pussy when you fucked her?”
Using his whole torso, Shock shoves her back. It hurts so fucking much, but goddamn it feels good. He snarls into her face, “I was never a girl. Understand? Sometimes, the body lies. Like yours does.”
“Mine?”
“Yeah. You look like a human being.”
Her face smooths out like oil.
“Very clever. Now I think I just want to kill you. But I really, really want to hurt you first.”
She turns her head to look at Puss. He sees nothing in her eyes but Puss’s reflection, and he wants to scream at Puss to flee. Disappear. Go back to Shark down there in the station. Anywhere but here. Why is he so scared for Puss? She’s a hologram. Li can’t touch her. Li blinks in slow motion, the movement cutting off his view of Puss in her eyes.
“Guess what I made?” she asks him.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
She turns her head to look at Ho and they share this little laugh. It makes Shock’s skin crawl.
“Oh, you will,” she murmurs to Shock, leaning right in to his ear, her body crushing his into the wall again, bringing that awful clarity back.
He doesn’t want it. Wants to be anywhere else but here with her body pressed into his, making him nauseous. She raises one hand. There’s a thin mesh on it, with plain metal circles facing outwards on the fingertips and palm. Oh so gently, in a movement of over-familiar sensuality, she slides it round his neck, under his hair, until her hand rests where his jack lies, over the part of his brain holding his neural drive. Li pulls back from his ear so they’re face-to-face, close enough for him to smell her breath. Sweet mint. If she kisses him, he’ll throw up.
“Boom,” she whispers.
White light flashes across his whole vision, flares through his body; forked lightning arcing from nerve cluster to nerve cluster, lighting his body from head to toe. Instant agony. In his mind he hears Puss: screaming. Puss is a haptic hologram; she’s connected to his drive, his nervous system, and Li’s flooding it with pain, disruption. What she’s hoping to do he doesn’t know. Can’t know. His whole body is aflame with pain, his mind’s bursting with it. Overloading. Too much sensation at once. He flickers between consciousness and unconsciousness, trying to find peace in oblivion, but he can’t switch off. Whatever Li’s made it’s overriding his body’s impulse to shut down.
In his drive, bloated and massive, molten with its own incredible heat, Emblem picks up the impulses as it throbs and rolls within him. Begins to vibrate in tune. The sensations grow and intermingle; pain becomes light, vibration becomes thunder, and behind Shock’s eyes, blinded by white pain, by black flickers of unconsciousness, the complex knot of Emblem swells, straining the very limits of his drive, and bursts out, exploding across his mind, that heat lapping into every corner, burning everything in its path.
Lost in nerve-agony, and deafened by the screams of his avi, Shock experiences the pyrotechnics from far above himself, watching almost incuriously as the tidal wave sweeps across his brain. It steals pain, then thought, then screams, then Shock himself. Sweeping him away momentarily until the tide turns, sweeping him back in. And like the sea engulfing the spaces between rocks at the cliff’s edge, he re-fills his own mind, but it’s no longer just him. It’s Emblem. He and Emblem mixing together. One in the other. No tangles, no knots, no seams. He’s still here, still him, but pain free and
different.
He looks at Li, who has yet to realize something’s wrong. His body’s still shaking, responding to the effect of her continued attack on his nervous system, but he’s outside of it, and inside of her, seeing directly into her like Puss vision. He can see into her drive. Beyond it. View her other self, floating in Slip, waiting for her. Golden and vile that other self is. A huge distortion of flesh, tentacles and teeth, holding all the hunger she hides; such polluted, grotesque hunger he feels violated to witness it. Yet even as he recoils he sees the link between Li and her avi self. Invisible until now, but always there.
Casually, he realizes he can cut it.
So he does.
Li snaps away from him, screeching, a high noise without form. Tears mindlessly at her head. The thing on her hand makes her body jerk like a marionette, and blood begins leaking down her neck, onto her shirt, mingling with a stain that can only be from Breaker. She spins away down the corridor. Disappears into the room beyond, that dreadful animalistic screech punctuated by the crash of objects smashing to the floor. Ho lowers his psy, staring after her with empty eyes. For a second or two it looks like he might smile, but he takes off at a run, calling her name. He sounds like a child.
Shock tries to move. His body’s still scrambled by Li’s glove, by the sudden explosion of Emblem and the subsequent info-overload. Nothing’s working properly; whatever synergy enabled him to look into Li is gone for the moment. He can’t even panic, his senses and reactions short-circuited. Fused out. He can hear though, and the sound from the room beyond resounds loud as trucks colliding, breaking the standoff between his senses. But it’s too late. There’s Ho, at the end of the gallery, body rested languidly against the wall.
“She flew,” he says, careless, emotionless, leaving Shock wondering what he’s done. “She always flew. Now she’s flown away. Such a pretty picture.”
Shock has no idea what to say. Anything could provoke Ho, and he’s one of the few people who’s never dismissed Ho. He might have bought that drugged-up demeanour wholesale if he weren’t an addict himself. Being is knowing. He’s always known Ho’s addiction was a front. Ho can give or take those expensive psy he constantly sucks on. He’s been hiding behind them, aware of Li’s need to take centre stage and clearly too smart to let her kill him easily.