Opposition Shift

by Sarah Stone

  There was only one place this could be going and they both knew it. He spotted the bed behind her, a thin mattress stripped bare of all but a single sheet. Hayden angled them that way, trying to lead despite her hands still on him, his fingers splayed over the skin of her stomach as they went. Her tongue tasted good and so did her neck.

  They turned somehow, so that Una was steering him. Bedsprings seemed to spear his spine when he fell back onto the mattress, but Una fell with him and the pain made him grin. They pawed at each other's clothes, like animals desperate to sink their hungry muzzles into flesh, and soon they coupled with a blend of passion and need, that grew in a crescendo until they collapsed into each other's arms, panting and slick with sweat.

  He felt half-crazy and still full drunk when he woke, his head filled with far too many thoughts despite the drinks he’d downed. Una was a solid weight against his back, her breath stirring the hairs at his neck. He stroked one hand along the arm that had fallen across his middle and rolled to face the ceiling instead of the wall. It looked just as bad, water-stained and cracking. If it rained, it was sure to pour water down on the badly positioned bed.

  The room, from what he’d seen of it, was empty of personal effects and he was convinced that Una didn’t live here, not full time. Perhaps the club was one of many safe-houses and the apartments upstairs, some of them at least, were kept open for resistance members. Then again, they may have just been rooms that the club’s patrons visited when they were too trashed or too horny to head home.

  There had certainly been time enough for the bartender to hand Una the key, the bar was dark and filled with enough distractions that he may have missed the actual exchange.

  Letting his eyes drift closed again, he tried to let himself sink back into the sleep he’d found earlier. Unconsciousness was certainly preferable to having to awaken and face the consequences of his last twenty-four hours, yet he found he could not get down all the way.

  He raised one hand to his shoulder to feel the shallow scratches left there from last night, smoothing over them like a good-luck charm. His hand had begun to slide down, his muscles beginning to relax, when the bed shifted beside him, the shitty mattress creaking loudly as it dipped down.

  Half-awake by then, Hayden blinked his eyes open slowly and turned his head. If neither of them could quite fall back asleep, he thought, he wouldn’t be opposed to another round. Not opposed at all. Sure beat the alternative of full wakefulness and responsibility.

  The bed creaked again and his back grew cold in her absence. He rubbed his eyes and looked.

  And froze.

  Una’s legs and part of her waist lay in the bed beside him, a swath of bloody, ripped flesh marking where bits of bone were visible, the hollow, cylindrical end piece of a spine. Her legs were brown and smooth and still against the red smeared sheets.

  A noise of horror and revulsion rose in his throat but Hayden made no sound. He stayed quiet because of the shadow moving toward the apartment’s entrance.

  He looked through slitted eyes, not daring to move a muscle despite the uptick in his heartbeat and nausea tugging at his stomach. Stillness amidst the danger, at least, was something Laine had managed to teach him over the years.

  The shadow was the upper half of the woman he'd been lying next to. There was nothing holding her up, no logic to explain her suspension in midair. no matter how his mind tried to deny the sight. Intestines dangled from the shredded torso, the white of her ribs showing through in places just as they had when he knelt over her in the alley.

  There was no doubt that it was Una, but her face was horrifically different, a yawning mouth with jagged teeth, her features distorted.

  Her eyes looked insanely bright and they kept watching.

  He slammed his eyes shut as his mind desperately sought to exorcise the terrible image from it

  When he opened them again, there was a line of light beneath the bathroom door and the bed beside him was empty.

  He’d had too much to drink. He needed his balance pills. Yeah, something in the palm wine, had to be. He let them stay shut, counting his own slow breaths in the darkness and...

  When he woke, for good this time, his head was splitting and light was beating its way through the tattered curtains that hung in front of the windows and Una was breathing steadily beside him, her eyes closed and her lips just slightly parted. She’d thrown on a shirt at some point, though the rest of her was still bare.

  He could see the skin of her middle where the shirt had ridden up as she shifted in her sleep. There was no carnage smearing the sheets or dangling below her exposed ribcage. One half was attached to the other and there was evidence of any trauma he could see, not even any scars from the wound she’d suffered in the marketplace.

  Whatever was in that last drink must have been strong stuff. He didn’t generally suffer from nightmares, and the only ones he could remember having had occurred when he’d been under the spell of the strange medicine the old man and Una had given him.

  Grudgingly, rolling to his side to face her, he admitted that it was more than likely the effect of too much time spent in the datascape this past week, and not offset by the usual dosage of chemical restoratives.

  Goddamn, it had felt real though, he argued with himself, and then he began to grow truly concerned that all the trauma from the datascape was pushing him towards a fracture. He rubbed at the temple he could easily reach and wondered idly if the apartment had any painkillers stocked. He was betting on no, with the temporary, little-used nature of the sparsely decorated space.

  If he was lucky, perhaps he’d spend the day unplugged, that might be all he needed. And, looking at Una’s relaxed sleep slackened face, he could think of other ways to spend his time.

  There was a sort of gentleness that accompanied the thought, and Hayden knew then that he might be in trouble.

  Chapter 7

  He should have been focused on the resistance, but instead, he found his attention straying to Una, and did not want to rise from the bed or disturb the beautiful creature that lay with her head upon his chest.

  She’d woken not long after him, remained in position for a moment, then given him an easy smile that held nothing deeper than polite friendliness before rising to shuffle into the bathroom.

  It wasn't the pleasant-yet-detached manner of the high price escorts he kept company with in New LA, and yet Hayden could not shake the suspicion that last night's embrace, even if passionate, had been somehow transactional.

  She came out fully dressed, with her hair pulled back somewhat messily, though Hayden could not help but find it charming. She wasn't putting on a show any longer, and that certainly was different than he was used to.

  Escorts tended to do their best to rise from bed and make their exit with the same allure and poise as when they fell into it. There was a casual familiarity to Una's behavior, and it made the slinger want her all the more. It was something he did not realize he missed, a connection between two people that had no place in the high-speed world of the Union elite.

  Hayden pulled on the same clothes he’d worn the previous day, and his explanation of: “It couldn’t look like I was headed on vacation” seemed to be enough for Una, who told him they could probably scrounge up some spare clothes that fit at one of their safe-houses. They didn’t have the time to go shopping or the cash to afford Union level threads.

  They walked. Una didn’t mention any specifics and just assumed they were headed to one of the safe houses or perhaps the HQ of the resistance if they had one. Standard defiance patterns were usually decentralized, with disconnected resistance cells operating independently of each other.

  He kept his fingers crossed for a detour via cab. His feet were throbbing and he was well and thoroughly lost, but Una showed no sign of stopping.

  Manila was a vast mega-city, typical of the low grade developing world. Very soon, Hayden had lost all sense of place as they moved through apartment stacks and narrow alleyways that seemed
to have no central planning to their layout. They were somewhere near the city’s center, that much he knew, though a different part than Hayden himself had seen, with buildings that looked a bit taller than the haphazardly stacked habitation units and storefronts.

  He found himself wondering if they might contain some form of functioning high yield network access. He was mildly disconcerted when Una led him down the stairs in the entryway instead of up and the fate of his last HQ jumped into his mind. As he descended to the basement, he already felt just a touch walled in. Surely Una wouldn't take the time and energy to get him liquored up and laid only to kill him in some basement Hayden insisted to himself, marginally succeeding in calming his nerves.

  “Who are we meeting exactly?” Hayden asked, his steps echoing on the concrete steps.

  “There are implant bootleggers here, standard black-market stuff, but the resistance usually has at least one slinger folded into their operation. They cover for us and we keep them off our list of enemies, for now,” she answered. “Maybe 8 is here if you’re lucky.”

  “You don’t know?”

  She shrugged. “The less our individual members know, the safer we all are, you've seen the lengths that E-Bloc is willing to go to for a win.”

  Smart, thought Hayden, and maybe not so different from the defiance patterns of other low- grade regions after all. Complicated as the mechanics of such a non-system must be to manage any sort of coherent strategy, it would keep anyone who was compromised from being able to burn more than a handful of their comrades and strongholds.

  There was a recessed door at the bottom of the staircase, making for something of a miniature patio. A man sat in a hard-backed chair that might have been borrowed from someone’s kitchen. There was a bandana masking the man's face, the swirling hand-stitched patterns of it reminding Hayden of a toothy grin.

  As Una and Hayden reached him, the man appeared to recognize Una, and lowered his bandana, revealing a strong jaw and flattened nose, a harsh face that only became more so at the sight of them.

  “Una,” the man said, his hand now resting on the handle of a pistol holstered on his hip, “I see you brought company.”

  When his eyes focused on Hayden and lingered, they didn’t like what they saw. Even with a covering of his own for his face, Hayden would not have looked the part. He didn’t move like they did for one thing, and though Manila was a rather multi-ethnic city most of the Akiaten he'd seen were of Filipino descent.

  Outside of the datascape, Hayden was struggling to keep his confidence up, wondering again, if he'd just made the worst mistake of his possibly soon to be ended life.

  “Who’s this?”

  “New slinger,” she answered. “The one from the Union,” she clarified and the man’s face only darkened further.

  “Don’t see why we need outside help,” the man muttered, not lifting his glare from Hayden, but not blocking their way as they stepped through the door either.

  Una turned back as they went. “8 was outside help once, remember?”

  Hayden was too absorbed in taking in the sight of the room they stepped into to get a gauge of the man’s expression. He only heard the door close behind him.

  This room was much larger than the impression the building above gave from outside, like the bottom floor of a warehouse. It was long, wide, and dark, the artificial light coming from a few lone bulbs screwed into the ceiling in addition to the screens of various rigs set up within the space, which cast the occupants in the hypnotic off-white glow of active screens. It was not by any means a crowded space, but there were enough people inside to give Hayden the impression of hustle and bustle.

  There were a few Akiaten milling about, mixing with a handful of tough looking types Hayden assumed were the bootlegger enforcers. They were sitting in the ramshackle collection of chairs, playing cards at a table below the single slit of a window high on the back wall.

  There were slingers at the rigs, but only a scattered few, and Hayden was mildly dismayed to see more rigs than there were slingers. Perhaps some of the resistance fighters were technologically inclined, but he wasn’t holding his breath. Aside from the nervousness that had pervaded since he awoke and realized that he was actually in this now, entrenched in the movement he’d been trying to, with the help of the rest of Americana, stamp out, he was also filled with a sense of nostalgia.

  It made him think of when he was a kid, just wading into the slinging scene, not even for the fast cash or the street swagger one earned from such status, but simply for the thrill of dipping into the code and seeing what he could do, learning to weave it to fit his desires. It reminded him of sitting in similar basement black sites alongside his friends and acquaintances, perfecting his strategies and sometimes performing small-scale stealth or theft operations for no one but himself.

  Shitty rigs with homemade routers and underground techs willing to install a temporary jack that crapped out almost as often as it was successful for next to no cash. He’d had that doctored up and replaced once he’d joined the Union for good, but he’d been lucky with his, and it had served him well until then. In Hayden’s opinion, he’d done some of his best work back then, or at least some of his most interesting. The familiar atmosphere was almost intoxicating.

  He moved past a longer table, eyes scanning over a group of techs, young ones, not quite kids, making bootleg tech implants like the ones he’d had himself so long ago. It looked like good work too, as their movements were meticulous and skilled. While the materials weren’t top of the line or just passable substitutes, the techs were doing a fine job of making lemonade out of lemons as it were. It wasn’t the sloppy, dangerous work that one usually encountered in such underworld operations, and Hayden found himself impressed at their efforts.

  It was majorly fucking illegal, of course, probably in Americana where regulations were tighter, but even in the developing world, there were significant corporate interests and patent holders that would drop the hammer on these kids if they could. Then again, who cares about consequences when you’re already based out of a blacksite? These people had already made their choice, so might as well go all the way with it.

  Hayden’s arrival there seemed to be considered by those inside as rather unremarkable, compared to the door guard, with the few individuals who did look up to take note of his entrance nearly immediately returning to their tasks. There were a few surreptitious whispers that could be heard among the general buzz of busy people at work on various projects, but nothing more. A younger man gave him a tired, if somewhat skeptical smile, and returned to doing something with a circuit board that was reminiscent of what Nibiru used to control the drones. Hayden was immediately curious but fought back the urge to engage, as he imagined it wouldn’t be the best first impression. He might come off as condescending even if he didn’t intend to, besides, if this was a mixed group of resistance members and black market hustlers, there was no way to know, for sure, who he was talking to unless directed by Una.

  Una, still beside him despite how much he’d slowed to take in his surroundings, nudged him with her elbow, in what he assumed was a bid to get him to pick up the pace. Obligingly, Hayden did so, moving in the direction in which she’d nodded her head to where a man seemed to have just jacked out of CodeSource.

  He had the half glazed over eyes and flexing fingers of a slinger who’d been in for too long. The man looked tired, with lines around his steel grey eyes that had probably etched themselves a bit deeper these last few weeks, with the activity between the resistance and the corporations only mounting.

  He did not appear much older than Hayden, but at the moment, he looked it. He didn’t look sick though, there was no gaunt, hunted look that dominated Lunatic 8’s features the few times Hayden had glimpsed her, so at least he was able to unplug long enough for some modicum of food and rest. He had the look of a professional level slinger, with dual jacks that indicated he could slice in MassNet, which certainly set him apart from everyone else in the ro
om.

  He was stocky for a slinger, Hayden thought as he took a second look at the man who moved with the same feral grace as the other Akiaten, of which he certainly was one. Hayden could not help but feel that the man had perhaps taken up slinging out of necessity, not so much a passion for the way of the code, and without that burning flame, it was unlikely he'd be anything but second rate compared to the high-end operators of E-Bloc, Asia Prime, and the Union.

  Una’s introduction was far from complex. She simply stopped walking when she stood adjacent from the man’s chair, her abrupt stop snapping Hayden out of his reverie and re-focusing his attention on her.

  “This is him,” she said, tilting her head back at Hayden, though she did smile at him slightly when their eyes happened to meet.

  “The Union slinger?”

  He nodded. “Hayden Cole.” He introduced himself, trying to sound as friendly as the other man did and probably failing. Hayden did his best not to visibly react to the sudden silence in the room at the mention of his name and managed not to smile with pride at the weight his name carried in slinger circles or to wince at how ridiculous he felt that even now his ego still craved even that morsel of praise.

  “I’ve seen your work, company man. You've earned your rep, sure as sure,” He nodded several times in quick succession. His hair was buzzed short and his eyes were bright with enthusiasm as the glaze of hours spent in CodeSource began to fade. Maybe there was indeed passion for the datascape in this odd slinger, underneath all the fatigue, Hayden considered. “They call me Glitch.”

  As handles went, it was a good one, and Hayden felt himself smirk warmly in response. It fit the man’s enthused but vaguely unpredictable mannerisms.

  They exchanged a handshake that lasted several pumps longer than Hayden was expecting. Una coughed to hide a chuckle, though it seemed more fond than mean-spirited. It wasn't every day one met a worldwide, even if underground, celebrity, of any industry or skillset, and Hayden had been slicing on Overdog's team for so long that he'd forgotten that this was how most of the other slingers acted when Overdog first brought him on board.