She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  “I said I would.” I tried not to sound irritated. Barlowe’s eyebrows, such as they were, had risen to dangerous heights. “We can’t stay here without bringing them down on you. They might find you anyway.”

  Barlowe waved a horny, callused hand. “I’ll be somewhere else. I’ll even look different.” A pause. “About Egress.”

  “What about it?” I was raw all over. That made twice I’d almost gone at the old man. I kept expecting — maybe even hoping for — a betrayal, Barlowe thinking he had a good chance to make some cash. Someone wanted this kid, bad.

  Of course they did, he was worth a lot. His organs might be regenerative; even if he wasn’t useful for replacing worn out corp exec’s warmbody failings he’d make a fine soldier.

  Why did they have him stashed in that bare, sterile house? Perfect cover, but no place for a kid.

  Did it matter? When a corporation controls you, it’s not an enlightened despot. You’re fungible. I hunched my shoulders, trying not to feel terribly exposed. A lot depended on the next few minutes.

  Barlowe poked through the piles on the countertop. Blue neon fizzed outside. “This will get you through Station. You’ll have to figure out how to break out of the train in the Waste. You sure you want to do that?”

  “Another City will be just as bad as this one.” I shrugged. “Get out from broadcast range for killcodes, scavenge enough tech to… I don’t know. There’s settlements. Some of them might not even be completely owned.”

  “Optimist.” Barlowe made a few of the bits on the counter vanish. I’d brought him little shards of Facilitator kit he could sell, too. They would be hot, and they wouldn’t last long, but if anyone could turn a profit on them, he could. They lulled any suspicion he might have. “Next you’ll be telling me you believe in Nikor’s Rebels.”

  You don’t know what I believe. I glanced down at Geoff. Figuring out how to get him what he needed to… eat… was going to be difficult at best. “I’m as clear from Dismiss implants as you can make me, right?”

  “You’ve been clear for a while now. I take pride in my work.” Barlowe grumbled a bit more. He reached over the counter, motioning for Geoff to press his thumb on the plasma impress. “So, Sarah… any last request?”

  The kid glanced at me, and when I nodded he licked his thumb and made a good stamp. It sealed onto the fresh identicard, and I did the other one. Two brand-spanking-new passes with nice safe code on them. I slipped both in my pocket. “Got a coat for the kid?” Thankfully, the bead curtain had stopped clashing and slithering behind me.

  “He does,” Geoff piped up. “I’ll get it.” He was gone behind the counter like a shot.

  I was glad. I didn’t want him to see what happened next.

  Still, when he came out, very slowly, clutching a ratty parka two sizes too big for him, I didn’t care for the look on his face.

  “They would find him,” I managed, a bit lamely. “And you… you need to… drink.”

  Geoff’s mouth was slightly open. The tiny sharp points of his canines showed, and any idiot could see they were subtly modified. The scar wasn’t surgical, the flesh separated naturally so the jaw could crack wide and get good purchase.

  “He’s fresh.” I sounded harsh even to myself. “Don’t waste it.”

  Barlowe’s body twitched, too, when Geoff sank his small fangs into its wrist. I held him there, a railprobe right through the old man’s forehead, and listened to the sucking sounds.

  * * *

  He was quiet until the train’s doors closed. I was turning over the problem of how to get off a sealed train in the middle of a wilderness inside my mostly-invulnerable skull.

  Geoff sat between me and the wall. “Your name’s not Abby.”

  I heard trains once had windows, before the Cities sealed up and Egress became a dirty word. Everyone on a train keeps their distance. There were only five in this sixteen-seater compartment, and if we kept it down, none of the others would hear us over the noise of repellers waking up and gears grinding.

  I settled into stillness. We weren’t past the walls yet.

  The Waste was either a radioactive desert or a lush Eden swarming with flesh-eating insects and brain-fried cannibal rebels. At least, so they told us in school.

  Right now I had my doubts, and I hoped they were good enough.

  “It is now,” I answered, finally. Names don’t matter. Not for me.

  “Why did you do that? He was nice. He wanted to help.”

  “I told you, they would have found him. That’s what they do, the people I thought I was working for. The people who made me.” And believe me, this was cleaner than what they’d do to him.

  The identicards had gotten us this far. Had Sam been thinking he would flee with the kid? Was he working for another City? Corporations were largely interCity; the Agency has offices in every hub, of course. Sam might have been expecting a warm welcome somewhere else. I’d probably never know.

  Geoff was silent. Why did it sting? Why was I also feeling the need to explain myself? “You wanted to escape. We’re going to. I had to kill him, kid.” Aren’t you grateful? You should be.

  I wasn’t being exactly fair. He probably didn’t know if I’d take care of him as a proper investment… or not.

  The lights dimmed, the train jerked forward. When I derailed it I’d have to scavenge through the cargo cars for anything useful.

  “Are you gonna kill me now?” Very quiet. I caught a breath — copper, fear and whatever lingered in his mouth from his meal. He was looking a little rosier, but that could have been the dim light. If there weren’t mammals out in the Waste he could survive on I was going to either have to think of something else or watch him starve to death.

  I’ll find something. I have to. “Of course not. What do you think I am?” I thought about the doctor, and the sucking sound as tech pulled a bundle of multiplying cells out of me. My feet in the stirrups, and the cold. Why do you want implementation, Miss?

  Another long pause. Then, surprising me, his small fingers — so fragile, so easy to hurt — threaded between mine, lying discarded on the armrest. He squeezed, almost painfully hard, and I was very gentle.

  “Mom?” he said, testing the word.

  For the second time, an audible laugh caught me by surprise. The sound of the train gathering itself as it lurched out of Station covered the noise. “I’m not the maternal type, kid.”

  The stench of the lavatory behind us was why nobody had chosen this pair of seats, but I could shut off that band of nasal receptors. He probably couldn’t, but he didn’t complain.

  “That’s okay.” There it was again, the wistfulness. “I’m not a real kid.”

  I took a deep breath. Another. The scraping inside me, and my own fierce determination a sourness in my warmbody mouth. A baby in the Projekts was an anchor, and runners needed to be light and fast. The cash I’d skimmed from several shipments was spent to cut and cauterize the deadweight away, and knowing they would catch me when the accounts didn’t balance. There was a way out, in a doctor’s chance observation, instead of the desperate jumping around I’d been working over and over inside my warmbody skull.

  Bright white light, the cold, and the hideous cramping that only lasted an hour. Eight years ago. Funny, that.

  “Yes, you are.” I had to work to make the words audible. There was an obstruction in my throat, even though all my autonomics were flatline. “You’re my kid, now. Better be quiet and rest.” I glanced over the interior of the car again, and a plan began to form.

  He didn’t take his hand away. I didn’t take mine away either.

  “We’ve got a long way to go,” I told him, and held his fingers as the train slid through the City’s walls.

  Chapter One

  Sealed Train

  “I told you, a wolf’s head can still bite.”

  -Lady Iboshi, Princess Mononoke

  I thought derailing — or just plain getting off — a sealed train in the middle of the Waste would be di
fficult, but not impossible. Otherwise I might have been reduced to commandeering a corporate thopter somehow, and though “agent” means “theoretically invulnerable,” the idea of a crash from that height, smoking and twisted wreckage, and being tracked by other thopters while on foot and carrying a maybe-damaged kid wasn’t pleasant in the least. As it was, all I had to worry about was when to start moving, and how to keep said kid from being splattered all over the landscape when we leapt from something going as fast as an interCity magtrain.

  Geoff dozed next to me, rosy-cheeked even in the dim glow from cheap redscreen bulbs, canned air soughing over us both. This close, the pearly glimmer of his teeth was even more startlingly alien. They were shaped differently, like his cheekbones, and the thick vertical scar on his chin looked surgical.

  It wasn’t.

  Still, our costumes were pretty perfect — Geoff’s ratty parka a shade too big for him, a blue, long-sleeved Static Rebe T-shirt, dungarees, and judicious amounts of stat tape reinforcing his boots; me in a tailored plasleather jacket with plenty of pockets and dungarees just a little too designer to be plebe but not designer enough to be high corporate power. We sat quietly, the very picture of single mother locked into low-level corporate servitude by her Special Needs brat but smart and vicious enough to both keep the kid and qualify for travel privileges. The observant onlooker would think courier, and if they were innocent, that would be the end of it.

  If they weren’t, they’d be looking for my cargo. Funny how this was my protective coloration — courier was how I’d started out, long ago, a runner dodging bullets and static-bolt ammo in the Projekts.

  Before I was implemented. Before I was agent.

  Our five fellow passengers hadn’t moved much since the train jolted out through stat-veiled clockwork gates and into the inimical wasteland outside the cities. Cannibals, flesh-eating plants, and radioactive sludge creating massive hideous beasts were supposed to be the reasons for sealing every City and every Egress Train. Some quasi-rebels — creeping in corners, holding muttered meetings in fauxsmoke-filled bars — inside the walls whispered that if we knew what was really outside the walls, we wouldn’t stay in the perpetual twilight, under smoggy or UV-domed skies with the weight of every breath owned by one corporation or another.

  We were going to take our chances. I was just hoping Geoff could live off any mammal, or that we’d find enough relatively healthy cannibals for him to get what he needed. The prospect of radiation poisoning worried me, but there was only so much I could do about it.

  The subroutines over my autonomics kept clamping down, and I had to pop another one over my glandular balance to stop the cortisol and adrenaline from swamping me. It wasn’t a good time to start getting jitters, only two and a half hours out of the gate. I kept staring at the front of the carriage we were in, blinking every so often, turning everything over inside my head, searching for the missing piece.

  It bothered me. No, not Barlowe’s body hanging from a railprobe — that fell under the rubric of “necessary casualty,” not to mention “insurance.” It was a cleaner death than any corporation or the Agency would have given him, too.

  Also on the did-not-bother-me list: pieces of my handler dumped in a vat of caustic sludge. They would fish Sam out, clean him up, and he’d have a lot of explaining to do, both to the Agency and to the corporation looking to reclaim Geoff. Unless Sam had a helluva good story and a reason to use it, the Agency would start digging; in a little while they would come after me to recoup their investment in my implementations, or to just-plain-Dismiss me as a bad loss.

  It was only a matter of time, but I’d take all I could get. That didn’t bother me either. Well, not much. About as much as the likely bacterial content on the thin nyla-covered cushion underneath me, which had soaked up who-knew-what from however many warmbodies. There used to be a lot more traffic between Cities before the big transports went airborne.

  No, what was bothering me was the house I’d found Geoff in. His white bedroom too bare, and the corporate bodyguards acting as “parents” too neglectful. On the other hand, the kid was… different. His facial structure was off by a few millimeters, or maybe it was his expression. That scar on his chin, the set of his thin shoulders, and his eerie stillness made normals… uncomfortable. Like the other kids at his school, although they could have been responding to his general air of disrepair.

  Kids can smell when one of their own is already weak. Humans: perfect predators before they’re socialized. Then they mostly get old and tired.

  Not always, though. Some of them keep that perfection all the way to the grave.

  The kid twitched, waking from his doze. “Abby?”

  It’s an okay name, I told myself, wishing I hadn’t given it to him. I was stuck with it now. “What?”

  “Where are we going?”

  You didn’t ask earlier. “Out.”

  He still hadn’t left go of my right hand. No longer tentative, he sometimes squeezed, and I surprised myself by squeezing back, but very gently. Such a small hand, and he was running warm now. Slightly above 38C, as if he had a low-grade fever. His galvanic skin response was fine, though, and the rest of him seemed okay to my scans, despite its slight differences from warmbody norms. They weren’t obvious, glaring variances. Whoever had designed him had done a good job.

  “Then where?” he whispered. Big dark eyes in that wan face, like a holo of a genegrown puppy on an advert for candies or skinshield.

  I was about to tell him I didn’t know, that I’d figure something out, when the train lurched crazily. Stress-harmonics went up into ultrasonic, sending a spike of pain through my head before a reflexive filter dropped into place over that intake channel, and my arm was a bar of solid steel diagonally across Geoff’s chest, bracing him into the seat as I dug my heels in against sudden deceleration.

  The train had stopped, but everything inside it was still going.

  Physics is a cold, heartless bitch. Geoff folded forward around my arm, just like a spider flicked into a static seal-field. At least he wasn’t in freefall across the carriage, but if he ended up with whiplash or internal bleeding I was going to have to get creative with my field-medical training.

  The back of the carriage lifted high, the car behind us doing its best to keep humming along the tracks. Squeals of tortured metal, crunching and snapping sounds, a sharp stink from the lavatory. Geoff’s piping little cry as air was forced out of his lungs, but I’d already broken the force of the deceleration enough for him to stay put, clinging to his seat, and was on my feet as the entire carriage tilted crazily. The stress-sounds were highest along one of the welded seams, and the buckling floor had popped up one end of a bench seat. A quick strike to break the seatback free, then my fingers curled around the horizontal support bar under the nylacushions, the patient bearer of so many asses, now torn free with a shriek lost in the general chaos. Crumpled bodies — someone had lost control of their bowels, the common warmbody response to sudden trauma.

  Everyone shits when death comes calling. Except agents, because the colony of nanos we carry is too efficient at stripping anything we ingest of any nutritive value and using every scrap.

  Move. Now I had a metal bar that would have to serve as both tool and weapon. I arrived in front of Geoff, who flinched at my sudden blinking through space too fast for warmbody eyes to track — but his gaze had stayed unerringly on me all through the split-seconds, with more-than-human accuracy. Perched up in our seats, now high on a buckled mountain of metal, he wrapped his arms around his middle and stared. I hefted the bar experimentally as a sliver of rancid golden light speared the dim red-lit hell that had been a train carriage hauling a sparse contingent of losers from one City-warren to the next.

  Yet another reason I’d chosen the seats back here — any sudden magtrain problem of enough severity tends to accordion the cars, and they bust like overripe stathydroponic fruit.

  Screaming. The distant rumbling of explosions — a fuel core had be
en breached, by the sound of it. I filtered that out, because under the chaos was another noise — the snap-crackle of static-bolt rifles, the pop and ping of projectile ammo from handhelds.

  Looked like I was saved the trouble of derailing or bursting a welded seam. Now I was a lone agent with a chunk of subpar metal and a big-eyed kid to protect.

  I got to work.

  * * *

  Dust. More screaming, and a narrow band-frequency around us was suddenly alive with commchatter. I popped a subroutine on that intake feed, standard record-and-flag, and swung the bar one last time. The warmbodies largely didn’t know what hit them. Dazed by the sudden crash, some with broken bones, I caved in their skulls like hydroponic plasma bags. Splatters of blood and brainmatter, glints as chips fell free — two of them were standard-issue implemented, probably secretaries with subvocals and recording capability. I tore the throatboxes out of both and crushed them, just to make sure.

  Geoff, trembling, clung to his tilted-forward seat even though a tide of nasty blue chemwash flooded downhill from the lavatories. At least the organic matter wasn’t crawling with bacteria, but the smell was horrific and I wasn’t filtering out my nasals anymore, I needed all the information I could get. I hopped up the few still-bolted seats to avoid the slippery bits just as shadows filled the crack torn in the side of the car.

  Shit. Thought I had more time. ”Come on,” I mouthed, and Geoff scrambled to obey. He went on my back, arms and legs locking around me, and I had to adjust his grip around my throat a little ungently. It was hard to turn my head, but I’d switched to panoptics anyway. The shaking going through him was worrisome.

  So was the idea that he might think I’d’ve been coming up the car to pop his skull, too, instead of just cleaning up anyone who could possibly remember us. It would be a natural response on his part.

  The irony of expecting anything resembling natural response from this corp-created kid wasn’t lost on me, but I had no time to think about it because the sputter and hiss of stat-fueled cutters sent a red spike through all my intakes, and my skin roughened before I brought the response back down to precombat levels, saving all my energy for a sudden burst of frenetic motion. The crack widened, superheated metal singing as it separated, widening the hole.