Wraith (Debt Collector 10)

by Quinn, Susan Kaye

  “I was hoping for something a little different.” Madam A’s still studying me. “Lirium has the skills to do this work. You have the life energy. If you transfer to him instead—”

  “What?” I lean away from her.

  “I know you’re not fond of interaction with other debt collectors, Wraith—”

  “I don’t interact. Ever.” The mere idea of it brings up a sour taste at the back of my throat. Debt collectors killed my father. My mother, too, even though that was a long time ago. Objectively, I know Lirium wasn’t one of those collectors. But it doesn’t matter. I want nothing to do with them. Any of them. And I’m certainly not going to pay out to one.

  “Wraith…”

  “I’ll pay out to the kids.” My voice hikes up and echoes around the church’s hard-polished floors and white-plastered walls. “But I’m not going anywhere near him.”

  “I was afraid you might say that.” She looks disappointed. In me. And that’s more than my stomach can take. The life energy sloshing around inside me, haunting me with its stolen lives and splintered souls, needs to go somewhere. The torment stirs up a sudden, desperate need to get out of Madam A’s brothel. Before I heave out the contents of my stomach or find a way to vent the burden from my veins. I have to go somewhere, find someplace to pay out that’s safe. That doesn’t involve debt collectors. Somewhere I can think clearly about what I’m going to do from now on… now that the one good thing in my life, the one way I can pay for the sin of who I am, has suddenly be taken away.

  “I have to go.” I turn and rush down the stairs. My soft-soled boots slap against the steps, announcing my retreat in no uncertain terms. I shove my way through the door to Grace’s room and tear out the back. I forget the three steps on the stoop and tumble down them, falling until my face smacks the pavement. Pain shoots up my leg as my wounded shin scrapes the filthy alleyway. Tears blur my vision, pierced only by the electric white light of the streetlamp. My stomach heaves, once, twice, but nothing comes out. The night air is slightly cooler, giving me some instant relief from Madam A’s brothel-turned-hospice… and now miracle cure center.

  A place I no longer belong.

  The need to pay out grows stronger knowing that I can’t. It’s a volcano trapped inside me, slowly building to a pressure that’s going to blow me apart. I crawl up to my hands and knees. I’m plastered in muck, all over my hands and suit and face. The nearby junkie rustles under his box, turning over and grumbling. I haul myself to my feet and stumble toward him.

  He’s huddled up against the corner of the wall and the street. When I lift away his box, he yelps and scuttles back from me, grinding through the grime. His hands fly in front of his face, his incoherent mumblings taking a higher, more terrified pitch. I can’t get a good shot at his forehead, so I simply grab his two hands and hoist them into the air. I stand over him, straddling him like I did Odel, only this time my hands are laced with the junkie’s, making contact palm-to-palm. He protests, but I’ve got a grip on him. I trickle in life energy before he can decide to fight me too strongly.

  The frenzy inside me quiets as the energy starts to flow from my palms to his. A clean burning fire sparks deep in my chest. It’s not the rush of energy and righteousness that I pulled out of Odel. This mercy hit is good in a clean way, a pure way—it burns bright at my core. For a moment, feeding life energy into this hapless junkie on the street blasts away all the dark spots on my soul. It empties me in a way that fills me with goodness.

  With as many times as I’ve been to that glory place, I know the fine line when I’ve paid out too much. I ease back, pulling the junkie up from the ground. He’s the jittery one now, so I wait until he’s steady, then release him. The dark shadows are gone from his face, and his eyes shine with their own light. As if he’s had a solid meal, a good night’s rest, and all he needs now is a shower to look respectable again.

  I step back and nearly go down when the nausea hits like a linebacker.

  I double over, heave, and this time I’m sick all over the wall of Madam A’s brothel. The junkie comes to my aid, but I wave him off. The sickness will pass. I’m still burning with righteousness on the inside, and that’s all that matters. Even though the shakes are worse than before, the agitation is gone. The sloshing pool of life energy inside me has quieted. I straighten and lumber away from the alley, the addict, and Madam A’s house of lost opportunity. I’ve only paid out a fraction of what I took from Odel, but it’s enough to hold me. I’ve bought myself time to figure out what the hell I’m going to do next.

  I hold my stomach with one hand as I hail a cab with the other.

  I need to get home before I do something even crazier than a random payout on the street.

  The view from my office is disturbingly similar to Odel’s. Same hundred-floor rise above the smog. Same city laid out at my feet. The early-morning sun gives a flash of brilliance to the mirrored high-rises of the city and a pink hue to the cancer-inducing pollution that curls below. The symbolism doesn’t escape me: it’s easier to paint the impoverished streets in a rose-colored light than to face what really happens down there.

  Damn, I’m tired. I’m starting to get maudlin.

  Normally, I pay out a collection and ride the high of the mercy hit all the way home. Then the nausea and shakes take hold, and I’m out until the next morning when my driver rings the bellman to see if I’m dead. This time, there’s no rest for the wicked—holding all that energy inside is like riding a windstorm, all jitters and turbulence. And no sleep. The small mercy hit last night only took the edge off. By morning, I was shaking so badly, I could barely dress myself. I look like a street junkie in a corporate uniform: pencil skirt and designer blouse by someone famous out of Taiwan, heels that are ill-suited for hunting but perfect for corporate games, and the hand-jitters of a palsied ninety-year-old woman. My collector suit sits in a bag on my desk, a shadow puddled at the bottom. The scrape on my leg looks like I’ve been mauled by wild dogs—it took a whole box of Nu-skin to cover it. The wound itches like crazy, but it’s nothing compared to the spine-cringing need to pay out the energy inside me.

  I’ve never carried a collection this long. And it’s seriously messing with my plan to get my shit together enough to do the things I need to do. Important things, like putting right the multitude of wrongs that debt collectors have wrought… including the one that killed my father. I need to stay even to stay in the game. Collecting was supposed to get me back to level, but as of the moment, I feel like I’m still on the cusp of drowning.

  I hold up my left palm and tap it to activate the screen implanted in my hand. It’s one of Sterling Cybernetics’ latest models, with a built-in encryption mode for non-traceable calls. I upgraded shortly after my father’s death, thinking my nighttime activities needed another level of security. The itch inside me won’t wait, so I tap in Jax’s number, the one I keep only in my head and use only when necessary.

  The message is short. Need to meet. Looking for private charity.

  Jax has a business card that says Private Investigator, but she’s more like a fixer with connections to the east side mobs and a talent for slashing into secure government records. She used to work for my father. She started working for me the day I killed my boyfriend Glenn. The day I discovered what I was.

  Jax is the only one who knows everything. Which would be dangerous if I didn’t keep her flush with untraceable debit cards and have a mile-long list of her involvement in the illegal life energy market. Of which I’m part. We keep each other honest. Or dishonest, as the case may be.

  I watch my palm screen, waiting for a response, but it doesn’t come. It’s still early, and Jax does her work at night, but the jitters are making me a wreck, and Sterling’s executives are starting to trickle in. I thought coming into the office might distract me, but the need to pay out won’t leave me alone. I swipe the bag with my suit off my desk and head for the elevator.

  Sterling Cybernetics fills the entire building: floor afte
r floor of designers hololinked with their screens and massive banks of computers powerful enough to run a small nation. The first floor contains the prototyping facility that turns all that brain trust into electronics, sinews, and the biomechanical interfaces between them. Production occurs all over the world, but the mechanical beating heart of the cybernetics industry is in LA… along with the life energy industry that competes with it to save and enhance lives.

  I watch the floors tick by. What I want lies below all of that, in the restricted-access basement where the cutting edge inventing happens. And not a small amount of work that isn’t strictly approved by Sterling corporate.

  When the elevator stops, a swipe of my palm opens the code-locked doors, revealing a second set with the company slogan: Working today for a brighter tomorrow. A retinal scan gains me access into the lab. It’s crammed with the usual assortment of cybernetic limb testing stations, electronics-strewn benches, and micro-implant bio-containment hoods. Even though it’s early, the lab-coated cyberneticians are abundant. The acrid stench of electrical work is mostly swept out by the over-pressured vents. It’s only a Class Three clean room, but the sterile feel and stark lighting always makes the lab seem like a hospital—only the new creations birthed here are biomechanical rather than human. At the same time, it feels like home. I practically grew up here, watching my father revolutionize an industry and battle the rise of debt collectors as the solution to the nation’s medical crises.

  I stride past workstations filled with crates of mechanical fingers, bins of micro-circuitry, and jars of bio-electric gel until I reach the small, unmarked silver door in the back. I tap a code into my palm screen and hold it up while I speak into the embedded security camera.

  “Alexandra Morgan Sterling.” I pray the shadows under my eyes and the sunken craters of my cheeks won’t throw the recognition software. But I’ve come in looking worse plenty of times, usually after a full payout. It should be trained by now.

  With a soft tone, it grants me access. A gentle puff of air brushes my face from the vent overpressure, bringing with it a wash of relief at seeing Miral already working. She’s bending over the micro-manipulator and peering through her telescoping goggles. Her full electric-white bunny suit makes her look three times her normal size, but her short legs and small white-bootied feet dangling below the stool show her true, petite size. She looks up, cocks her head, then puts down her micro-tools to shove up the goggles. They sit like mechanical horns on top of her head.

  “What are you doing, Alexa?” she scolds me. “You think I wear this for my health?” Her ink black eyes are not pleased. Probably because I’m shedding minute dust particles all over her ultra clean room.

  I cringe. “Sorry, M.” I glance back at the door, wondering if it’s too late to retreat.

  She heaves a sigh. “Well, you’ve contaminated it now. I’ll have to do a full purge. Might as well come in all the way.”

  She gestures me over while she pushes back her hood and pulls off her gloves. Miral’s petite east-Indian face is lost in the billowing fabric of her suit, and the bronzed skin of her hands is a vibrant contrast to the sterile-white. While I was growing up, my child-self couldn’t understand why she and my father never married—either to each other or to someone else. My mother died shortly after I was born, Miral had never married, and she and my father were both top-flight inventors. My adult-self understands it now: they were both married to Sterling’s secret inventions and the Lifetime cause. My father’s non-profit group advocated against debt collection through protests and politics, while Sterling fought it with new, innovative technology. It was an all-consuming, relentless war that left little room for anything else.

  “It’s good to see you back, Lexy,” Miral says more gently. It stabs a little, the nickname my father used, but I don’t protest. I’ve only seen her once since the funeral, and back then, I tried to put on my best face while I picked up the suit.

  “I’m afraid I’ve wrecked one of your toys.” I hold up the bag with the suit. It’s one of our secret projects that stays off the balance sheet.

  She takes it and peers in, then runs her gaze over me. “If it had malfunctioned, you wouldn’t be standing in my lab. What did you do, put it through the wash? I told you, no water.” She scowls at me, and it brightens my day.

  “Just a rough landing,” I say, while I hold back a grin. “Worked great in the field though.”

  She lifts it out of the bag, making a face for the shredded leg. The misty fabric is so light it billows in the small breeze of the clean room vents.

  “Can you fix it?” I ask. I don’t strictly need it for collecting, but it’s part of the total package. And I’m already looking forward to the next fix, once I get things sorted on the payout side.

  Miral slips her telescopic goggles down over her eyes and inspects the wreckage. “Of course I can fix it. Maybe not for a couple of days, though.”

  “A couple days is good,” I say, even though my heart sinks with her words. “Tomorrow’s better.”

  She snaps a look to me, then shoves the goggles up again. “In a hurry to jump off some more buildings, are you? Why can’t you have a normal sport? One that’s actually legal. And safe.” She’s tucking the suit in the bag, but her hard stare is all for me.

  I swallow. She’s never questioned it before. “It’s just… a hobby.”

  She squints at me. “A hobby.”

  “Recreation.” Heat’s building in my face. If she knew… well, the only person who hates debt collectors more than Miral is my father. Hated. Past tense.

  She locks me in a gaze that lasts for seconds. Finally, she looks away. “Tomorrow then.”

  My chest sags with relief.

  The door clicks behind me.

  Wyatt steps through the threshold, his bunny-suit hood blowing back in the air curtain, leaving his neatly-styled hair mussed. He ducks but doesn’t have a hand free to fix it—he’s juggling his open palm screen, a larger hand-held screen, and an insulated cup that’s steaming something into the air.

  Wyatt’s my assistant. Actually, he’s my father’s assistant, but I inherited him, along with a controlling share of Sterling Cybernetics, a seat on the board of Lifetime, and a host of other things I don’t want, but can’t give away. He’s my age, ridiculously overqualified for his job, and just the kind of man I’d date, if I actually dated. And if he wasn’t my employee.

  He knows all my secrets except one.

  “Alexa,” he says, chastising me from the door. “You didn’t tell me you were coming in early.”

  I give a one-shoulder shrug, but my insides clench. “How did you even find me down here?” He worries about me, which is generally fine, unless he’s tracking me now. That would be a serious problem.

  Wyatt gestures with his palm screen before closing it. “I get an alert every time you swipe into Sterling?” His look says this is something I should remember, and he’s probably right. A lot of things have been slipping through my mental cracks lately. As he picks his way through the boxes of electronics strewn across the floor, I give Miral a slant-eyed look. She drops the bag with my suit discreetly to the tiled floor and slides it under the bench with her foot.

  I turn back to Wyatt as he arrives at my side. “Had a late night.” It’s a reasonable excuse for my scattered state. Also true. “If that’s a coffee, I’ll give you half my shares of Sterling for it.”

  “Half?” He scoffs to me while giving Miral a charming chin-lift hello. Wyatt has two degrees from Ivy League schools, a natural talent for politics, and an easy-going nature that makes people like him anyway. He showers me with that sexy smile he has, the one that makes the women in the office fan themselves when his back is turned. “Half is only twenty-four percent, and with Saffron Industries holding twenty-eight, and Triton Electronics and Origin Entertainment in merger talks, I’d be a fool to give it away for less than thirty-two.”

  It’s early, but I can still play. “Triton and Origin will get shot down by t
he DOJ, and Saffron is about to break into holo-imaging and leave hardware behind. Twenty-nine. But I’m keeping my car and my driver. And access to the lab.”

  “Thirty, no driver, and you pick up your own dry cleaning from now on. That guy at the InstaPress is hot for me.” He makes a face of mock horror.

  I grin. “Everyone is hot for you.”

  He feigns an elaborate I know, right? look. I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have survived the last three weeks without Wyatt. He kept Sterling running while I wrestled with the abyss. Plus he’s gorgeous and brings me my coffee.

  He hands me the cup, and says, “Double latte, that dark roast you like, plus a shot of espresso.”

  I sip it, and the aroma alone calms some of the shakes inside me. “I need to give you a raise.”

  “You gave me one yesterday.”

  “That was brilliant of me.”

  “It would have been, if you’d thought of it.” He misses my smirk because he’s already pulling up something on his screen, moving on to whatever he has lined up for me today with his usual efficiency.

  “You have two interviews this morning,” he says. “One with the LA Times, the other with Cybernetic Life. Both are holo so you can take them in your office. I’ve blocked some time for lunch, but after that, the board wants you at one.”

  I take another sip and sigh. “Tell them I’m busy.”

  “You’re not busy.”

  “I’m extremely busy.”

  Miral flicks her hands at us. “I am extremely busy. Take your corporate nonsense out of my lab.” She slips her goggles down over her eyes, turning her into a petite, telescopic-eyed menace.