by Rachel Aaron
“Yes, please,” I said, digging my poncho’s collapsible charging circle out of the trash bag I’d shoved all my stuff into.
He nodded. “I’ll message Rena then. She should be done with the hand soon if she’s not already. It’s still too hot for us to pick up at her place, so I’ll get us a midway location. Anywhere you prefer?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Somewhere I can get breakfast.” Because if this was ending tonight, there was no point in hoarding my money anymore, and if I was going to make a last stand, I wanted to do it on a full stomach.
Nik nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I smiled my thanks at him as he shut the door.
“Aww, he’s a nice guy after all,” Sibyl said in my ear.
“Shut it,” I growled at her, spreading my poncho’s charging circle out on the bare cement floor. “Just because I decided not to erase you doesn’t mean you’re out of the dog house.”
“I really am sorry,” she said contritely. “What can I do to make it up to you?”
“You could tell me which of my files my dad has rummaged through.”
“Ooo, sorry,” she said. “The admin permissions he enabled explicitly forbid me from giving you that information. But he did leave his current number in case you want to surrender early.”
“Good to know,” I said flatly as I dropped my poncho into the circle and started shoving magic at it. When the spellwork was glowing at what I judged to be the correct level of brightness, I left it to cook and moved on to the rest.
Determined to be a polite charity case, I packed up Nik’s cot and tidied everything in the living room. When no sign of my presence remained, I dug a fresh set of clothes out of the bag, changing out of the soft shorts and T-shirt I’d slept in for my thickest pair of Cleaner jeans and a heavy cotton button-up. I’d nabbed my tall boots out of Nik’s car last night, so I washed them off in the kitchen sink and put them on as well, pulling the protective rubber up to my knees and shoving the legs of my jeans into the tops so that I was completely covered.
I was sweating by the time I finished. From the weather app on my heads-up display, I knew it would be even worse once we stepped outside, but I didn’t change into something cooler. I’d learned the hard way to never leave bare skin exposed when I was dealing with strange magic, and given how much spellwork I’d seen in Dr. Lyle’s places so far, strange magic was a given. I just hoped it was the sort that could be turned around for a very quick profit.
I hated to admit it, but my dad had had a good point about the trouble of finding a buyer. He would know, too, because humans weren’t the only thing he collected. He had a whole lair full of priceless treasures that he was constantly adding to. Years ago, before I’d woken up to the fact that I was being used, he used to take me with him to auctions to train my eye. His logic was that if I couldn’t be beautiful, I could at least be useful, which was how I’d gotten him to let me go to school for art history. I’d fed his arrogance and greed, letting him think he’d be getting a world-class expert to curate his hoard if he’d just take the risk of letting me go overseas. The fact that I was legitimately interested in ancient magical art just gave the story more validity.
It had been such a good plan, but it wasn’t over yet. The DFZ was very different from the international auctions my father traded in. If something had value, you could always find someone to buy it here. Maybe not at the price you wanted, but that was the cost of being in a hurry. First, though, I needed something to sell. I was about to knock on Nik’s door when it opened on its own, and Nik burst into the living room.
Like me, he was dressed for trouble in heavy black jeans and black combat boots. His armored jacket was zipped up to his neck, and he was wearing his gun on his hip rather than hidden under his jacket. He had a messenger bag over his shoulder as well this time, and he walked straight past me to the wood-and-cinder block shelf to start filling it with all manner of things: nylon rope, zip-ties, boxes of ammo, blocks of something gray and clay-like that I really hoped wasn’t C4. Not that I’d say anything if it was. This job had jumped the shark on danger ages ago. If he wanted to bring explosives, the only thing I wanted to know was when to duck and cover.
“That should do it,” he said when his bag was full. “Ready?”
My poncho wasn’t quite done, but I was tired of waiting. “Ready,” I said, hauling the protective spellworked plastic over my head. “Where are we going?”
“I’m not saying in the presence of your spybot,” he replied, opening the door.
“Aww,” Sibyl whined.
“Fair enough,” I said over her, shoving my charging circle into my trash bag before throwing it over my shoulder and following him out into the stairwell. “So long as Rena has our stuff and there are pancakes, I don’t care if we’re going to Canada.”
“It’s not in Canada,” he assured me as we climbed the steps. “But there are definitely pancakes.”
That was all I needed to know.
Chapter 10
Since he refused to give me an address on account of Sibyl, I couldn’t do a thing to help Nik navigate the DFZ’s morning craziness. And it was crazy. In addition to the usual work rush hour, there was some sort of huge dragon event going on, which, in hindsight, was probably the “business” my mom had been referring to when she’d told me my dad was in town. We weren’t even near the Peacemaker’s Consulate, but with so many dragons flying in, every Skyway ramp in the city was choked with rubberneckers gawking as giant monsters of legend flew over their heads. Even Nik poked his head out the window when we drove under a gap in the bridges, his eyes going wide at the winged shadows silhouetted against the bright-blue sky.
I stayed firmly in the car. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the wonder, but after this morning’s events, I was totally fine with never seeing another dragon for as long as I lived.
Thankfully, other than the jam-ups at the ramps, we didn’t have to shove our way through the upper city’s traffic. For someone who refused to use an AI, Nik had a strangely encyclopedic knowledge of the Underground’s roadways. He made a few wrong turns at intersections where bits of the DFZ had rearranged themselves recently, but for the most part he drove perfectly from memory, pulling us into the tiny parking lot of an old-style Americana diner that stood like an island at the heart of a five-way intersection.
“What’s this place?” I asked, squinting at the neon sign, which was so cursive and curly I couldn’t actually read what it said.
“Martina’s,” Nik replied as we got out of the car. “I’m not vouching for the quality of the food, but I know the owner, so I’m pretty sure you won’t get poisoned.”
“A ringing endorsement,” I said, breathing in deep. “It smells good, though.”
It smelled like grease and fried potatoes. Exactly as a diner should, in other words. It was busy, too. We’d gotten the last parking spot in the back by the dumpsters. The place was a wall of noise when we walked inside, but it looked like mostly office workers and maintenance crews grabbing breakfast on their way to work. Plenty of people still looked up when we came in, though, and I moved closer to Nik.
“Shouldn’t we be lying low?” I whispered as we pushed past the crowded bar area toward the booths at the back. “Not that I’ve ever had a bounty on my head, but going into crowds doesn’t seem like a smart move.”
“Depends on the crowd,” Nik whispered back. “This isn’t like where we went last night. These are normal people, which means they’re too busy to care about us.”
He seemed to be right. Every head that had popped up when we’d come in was back down, too preoccupied with food or conversation to care about two more people. What really shocked me, though, was that no one was staring at Rena.
She was sitting in a circular booth at the back, taking up the entire swath of the red-plastic covered seat with various toolkits and bags. Her white lab coat was gone, replaced by a black tank top that only served to highlight the artificiality of her
chased-silver body. I would have stared like crazy if she’d walked into my restaurant, but either she’d been waiting long enough that the novelty had worn off, or the people here really didn’t care. Normally, I’d have bet on the former, but there was nothing on the table in front of her, not even a cup of coffee.
“You’d better have a damn good reason for dragging me out to this grease pit,” she snapped when we got close. “Do you know how hard it is to get the smell of fry oil out of synthetic hair?”
“Can’t say that I do,” Nik said, moving her boxes to make room for us to join her in the booth.
“I know this neighborhood is well away from Kauffman’s sphere of influence,” she went on. “But a diner, Nikki? Really? You never eat out, and you know I can’t eat real food anymore. Why couldn’t we just meet on a corner like usual?”
Nik shrugged. “Opal wanted breakfast.”
I blushed at Rena’s look of scorn. The automatic apology for causing inconvenience was already on the tip of my tongue when I came to my senses and swallowed it back down. This was not my problem. Wanting to eat breakfast was a perfectly normal thing to do, and I refused to let a sleazy robot lady who’d given up food make me feel guilty about what might well be my last meal eaten in freedom. She and Nik could sit there and be weirdos who didn’t eat together. I was going to enjoy my breakfast.
With a belligerent glare at Rena, I grabbed the old-fashioned plastic menu and started thumbing through it. Since we were at a diner, pancakes were right on the first page. After doing some quick menu-fu, I figured out how to work the combos in order to land a full stack of five plus bacon, ham, and coffee while staying within my budget. I even had money left over for the tip, which was good, because the waitress had my coffee out within seconds of Sibyl putting my order into the diner’s AR. No one deserved money more than people who brought coffee quickly. I was sipping in bliss when Nik leaned over the table.
“Do you have it?”
“No,” Rena said, waving at the pile of kits and boxes on the seat beside her. “I just decided to bring my entire installation set to a place that sells nothing I can use for funsies.”
Nik gave her an exasperated look, and Rena rolled her eyes. “It’s been a long night,” she muttered. “I got interrogated by every bigwig in the Heights about who knocked down their ramp.”
I froze mid-sip. “You didn’t tell them about us, did you?”
“Of course not,” Rena said, her electronically augmented voice insulted. “Tight lips are the most critical component of our business. I’d lose all my customers if word got out that I’d squealed, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try.”
“It’ll blow over,” Nik assured her. “People are always getting into fights up on the ramps.”
“Not ones that destroy the infrastructure. The Heights aren’t exactly built to code, you know. You could have brought the whole place down!”
Considering we’d been under fire and no one up there had done a thing to help us, I was having a hard time finding sympathy for the business owners of the Heights. Saying as much to Rena didn’t seem like a savvy move, though, so I kept my mouth shut. At least until my pancakes arrived.
The pictures had not done them justice. My plate took up the whole table, and it was stacked high with five fluffy, golden, buttery pancakes the size of my head. The sight almost made me cry. It felt silly, but I’d been so broke for so long that getting to splurge and eat something I was really excited about felt like New Year’s and my birthday rolled into one. I was painstakingly soaking them in the perfect amount of warm syrup when Rena dug into the biggest bag sitting on the bench beside her.
“Here,” she said, setting Dr. Lyle’s hand on the opposite side of the plastic table from where I was elevating syrup to an art form. “Everything’s cracked and ready to access, as requested.”
“Excellent,” Nik said, reaching out to take the hand. “What does it hook in to?”
Rena’s synthetic lips quirked. “You, I’m afraid.” She reached out to tap the base of the hand where the layer of synthetic skin gave way to the naked circuitry that connected it to the wrist. “The entire point of hard coding something into a cyberwear unit’s VCI is that it can’t be accessed externally. I’ve cracked the DNA lock for you, but nothing can change the fact that that information can only be reached via direct interface.” She slid her silver finger over to tap lovingly on Nik’s own artificial hand. “If you want whatever’s hidden inside, you’re going to have to put a hand in it, so to speak.”
Nik winced. I did, too. “Wait,” I said, swallowing my bite of pancake. “You mean he has to physically put on the hand? Like on his own wrist?”
“That’s why I brought my stuff,” Rena said, waving her hand at the tool kits on the bench beside her.
I paled. “But it was on a dead guy.”
“So what?” she said. “I sterilized it.”
Considering I regularly resold cyberwear I found while Cleaning, I knew there had to be a sterile way to transfer synthetic limbs between people, but I knew where that hand had come from. I’d seen Dr. Lyle’s black, rotting corpse on the floor of his apartment and in the morgue. It wasn’t an image that got out of your head easily, or one you wanted associated with things that were going anywhere near your body, let alone into. From the look on his face, I knew Nik had to be thinking the same thing. When he spoke, though, his complaint was about something else entirely.
“I can’t,” he said. “It’s a left hand.”
My eyes shot to Nik’s synthetic arm, which was indeed his right, but Rena just waved the concern away. “Please,” she said, pulling a small electric screwdriver out of her kit. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? I can put a foot on a head. A left hand on a right arm is no trouble at all.”
“No trouble for you,” Nik said angrily. “But I’m talking about me. How am I supposed to drive or shoot with two left hands?”
Rena shrugged with a soft, mechanical click. “No idea. Not my problem. You wanted the info in this hand, I’ve told you how to get it. What you do with that is up to you, but I still expect to be paid in full.”
My whole body tightened at the mention of money. I’d forgotten we hadn’t paid for Rena’s work yet. Nik had mentioned she’d be expensive, but I’d just spent my last fifteen dollars and twelve cents on pancakes, which meant I was even broker now than I’d been yesterday. I was panicking trying to figure out what I was going to do when Nik’s face broke into a wicked smile.
“Consider it paid,” he said. “You still owe me for what happened last year. This should make us even.”
Rena’s fake eyes went wide. “You’re calling in your favor for this? Really?”
Nik shrugged. “I know how much it costs to run a crack, and you don’t get rich by spending money. Besides, what’s the point of a favor if you don’t use it?”
Rena gave him a nasty look. “And you couldn’t have mentioned this before I did the work?”
“If you’d known you were doing it pro bono, you wouldn’t have worked so diligently. Or agreed to meet me all the way out here,” Nik said, his smile going wider. “Fair is fair, Rena.”
That didn’t sound fair at all to me, but to my surprise, Rena chuckled. “You really are a cheap bastard,” she said, shaking her head. “But fine. Have it your way.” She put out her hand. “Arm, please.”
Nik dutifully stretched out his artificial right arm, and I nearly choked on my pancakes. “You’re doing it here?” I cried. “At the table?”
“Actually, I was planning to do it down on the bench, but anywhere is fine.” Rena gave me a superior smile. “That’s why cybernetics will always beat flesh, kitten. You can switch them out and change them around however and wherever you want without worrying about fluids or infection or any other nasty biology. If you replace enough, you don’t even have to eat. You just keep your batteries full and your nutrient tank topped off and you can go for days.” She reached down to rap her knuckles against her flat metal st
omach. “It’s so efficient. You really should start upgrading.”
“No thank you,” I said, bending low over my half-eaten pancakes, which now seemed more precious than ever.
Rena shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She grabbed Dr. Lyle’s hand off the table and turned around in the bench. “Ready, Nikki?”
Nik nodded and scooted around the circular booth until he was sitting directly next to her. “Just make sure I can get it off again.”
“Don’t worry,” Rena said, pushing his sleeve up and moving her small electric screwdriver into place. “It’ll be easy as one.” She undid the hidden screws that held his hand to his wrist. “Two.” She twisted his hand sickeningly back and forth until it popped off, leaving only the connective stump. “Three.” She fit Dr. Lyle’s left hand onto Nik’s wrist and slid it around until all the electrodes were connected. When things were more or less in place, she put one screw—the only one that would fit in the new configuration—back in.
“Voila,” she said proudly, reaching for a roll of electrical tape, which she used to finish securing the new hand to Nik’s wrist. “It’s not in very tight since I didn’t want to ruin my creation by drilling new holes, so don’t be rough with it. But that should do well enough to reference the information.”
“That was fast,” I said, impressed. Then my eyes went to all the stuff on the bench beside her. “Wait. If screws were all you needed, why did you bring all that other stuff?”
“In case screws weren’t all I needed,” Rena said with a smile. “Always be prepared!”
Considering she had a defibrillator pack in there, I didn’t want to know what kind of disaster Rena felt we needed to be prepared for. I didn’t have time to worry about it, either. Nik was staring at his new hand as if it held the secrets of the universe, and I was desperate to know what he saw.