by S. C. Jensen
“What the hell were you doing up in the rafters?”
“Night watch,” he said. “Cookie should be on his way up right now.”
I eyed the barrel of the gun warily. “Did he show you how to use that thing?”
“Nah,” Dickie said. “It’s not even loaded. Sal stuffs it with blanks before my shift. Figures I’m more likely to shoot my own foot off than top a feeder.”
I smirked. “He’s seen you in action?”
“Says the chick with the metal fist.” He grinned over his shoulder at me. “How’d you lose the fleshy bits again?”
“Ha, ha,” I said.
“Makes a good club, though. I’ve been practicing my swing. If you’da given me any trouble, I’da hit you on the head with it, caveman style.”
“Solid plan, Dick.”
The kitchen was in only slightly less disrepair than the main restaurant. Dust and grime smeared the walls, and the metal cabinetry was dented and discoloured by whatever chemicals had been used in the bottle bombs. Swirls of blue and gold and purple tainted and warped the once shiny silver surfaces.
“Check this out.” Dickie opened a big metal door to reveal an industrial sized freezer. Dozens of sodden containers oozed onto the shelves and a reek like the dumpster behind an organ grinder’s chop shop wafted out across the kitchen.
I gagged. “Close it! What are you, crazy? That’s disgusting.”
Dickie swung the door closed, lifted a hidden panel in the white tiled wall next to the freezer, and punched in a code. Then he gripped the handle again and pulled. I lurched backward and covered my face, braced for another wave of death stench. Dickie giggled like a deranged hyena I’d seen in an Old Earth nature documentary. I narrowed my eyes at him. Some creatures are better off extinct.
But when the door swung wide this time, the rotten food was gone. Instead of the inside of a freezer, I stared into the depths of a hidden staircase. This one, blissfully, was lit by tiny bioluminescent lanterns that cast an eerie blue-green tinge on the steps.
“Huh,” I said. “I haven’t seen this one before.”
“I’ve learned a new route every day I’ve been here,” Dickie said. “Sal’s got a warren of secret tunnels and staircases connected to this building. We’ve been using them to harry the feeders that keep coming around.”
He motioned for me to follow him into the dimly lit corridor. I squeezed through with the bag held out front and pulled the freezer door closed behind me. A locking mechanism churned closed, and when I pushed on the door again, it was solid.
“No going back that way,” Dickie said.
I followed him down the stairs. “It was those Feeding Frenzy freaks then? I knew we weren’t done with them yet. Something is going to have to be done about that Valentia vetch.”
“Naw, Bubs,” he said. “It’s all silk. You’ll see. Lorena Valentia has done us a service, and she doesn’t even know it.”
The air cooled as we descended the stairwell, and the biolights seemed to pulse gently, creating an underwater effect on the walls. My eyes itched with the need to sleep and I stifled a yawn. I’d gotten a few hours rest on the bangtail, but the drama of the last few days was catching up hard and fast.
How long had it been since I was last in Sal’s restaurant? It felt like years. Counting back on my fingers, I realized with shock that it had only been about four days. Five at the most. No wonder I was so faded. It had been less than two weeks since Patti had first contacted me—incognito—about finding her “sister.” I felt like I’d been on a rollercoaster ever since. Tainted drugs, rogue androids, Patti who was human at first, and then a plug, and now might be human after all . . . and behind it all, Libra playing saviour to HoloCity while they pulled strings behind the scenes to doom us all. Me and Tom, Rae and Jimi, Dickie and Sal . . . Patti and Johanna? Maybe. Even Gore, the poor lab monkey. It was like somebody had flushed the cosmic toilet, and we were all swirling around getting sucked into a composting cassette tank with Libra’s name stamped on the side. Welcome to Shitzville, pull up a chair and a non-alcoholic cocktail of your choice.
“Bubbles?” Dickie was saying. “What do you think?”
“I’m beyond thinking at this point,” I said. “What were you saying?”
“The gators!” He practically jumped down the last couple of steps. “Sal says they’ve always lived in the sewers, but I don’t know. I bet Libra has something to do with it.”
“They probably flushed them down the toilet with the rest of us,” I said.
“Huh?” Dickie glanced over his shoulder at me and cocked his head. When I didn’t answer, he shrugged and said, “Okay, here it is. Sal’s secret hideout. Ready for the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life?”
I didn’t want to burst his bubble by telling him I’d been in Sal’s secret hideout with Rae only a few days earlier.
But when Dickie unlocked the door at the bottom of the stairs and pushed it open, I realized I was wrong. I hadn’t seen anything like this.
Counters covered in bits of metal and wire and high-tech-looking gadgetry covered one wall. The electric zap of soldering irons and the pinging of machines was the last thing I’d expected to see in Sal’s hideout. The last time I’d been here, he took me into the sewers, and I’d almost gotten eaten by one of his reptilian pets. A group of black-clad kids hunched over the workbench, engrossed in whatever they were doing. A short, thickly muscled woman with two blades crossed over her back stood at the back of the room, watching them work. Oki nodded at me. I raised a hand to wave at the guard and was about to shout a greeting when a shadow fell over me.
Cookie loomed large in the doorway, his curly black hair slicked back on his head like he’d dipped it in the grease trap. His dark sepia-toned skin had the texture of moon rock, an effect that was heightened by the fact that grease from his hair seemed to ooze down to coat his cheeks. The ridges of each pockmark gleamed in the eerie blue light of the biolamps, and he grinned at me with a big mouthful of perfectly white teeth. The eyetooth on the left side sparkled as if it was made out of synthetic carbon crystal.
“If it ain’t Miss Marlowe,” he boomed into my face. “I was starting to think the feeder freaks had squished the noobie. Just on my way up to check.”
“Just on your way, about ten minutes late for your shift.” Dickie sidestepped Cookie, pressing Sal’s shotgun against the big man’s chest. “You were watching her beat me up on the spy cams, weren’t you?”
Cookie winked at me and the grease on his cheek pooled in the crease next to his eye and ran down his face like a tear. Was it possible to sweat grease? A smell similar to the rotten stench of the freezer upstairs seemed to cling to the man. He said, “I was rootin’ for you though, little Dick.”
He flicked the brim of Dickie’s homburg with a fat finger.
“Hey now, I might be small,” Dickie said. “But I’m still standing. Which is more than can be said for your—”
“Enough,” Sal’s voice bellowed from somewhere in the room. “Get up there, Cookie. We don’t have all day for the penis jokes, yeah? You both have tiny, flaccid penises, okay? Then we’re all happy.”
Dickie repositioned his hat. “Speak for yourself.”
“More energy for smashing feedreelers when all that blood not doing detour through the crotch all day, yeah?” Sal materialized behind the sous-chef and clapped Dickie on the shoulder. His once-white apron stretched over his expansive belly and was now stained an alarming shade of red. Thick forearms covered in a mat of black hair crossed over his chest, resting on the belly as if on a shelf. “Those feeders be back soon. I want the next one for chum, you know? My beautiful girls get hungry.” He waved his huge hands at Cookie as if shooing away a bad fart. “Get out the way, now. Let me see my favourite customer.”
Cookie leered at me as I moved out of the doorway, and winked once more. I kept the body b
ag between us as he squeezed his bulk past me and into the narrow staircase. Once I was sure he wasn’t going to pop back out again, I pushed the door closed behind him and shuddered.
“Don’t mind Cookie,” Sal said. “He was never socialized as a pup. He not so bad as he smells, though.”
“I can’t believe that’s the man behind my favourite noodle bowls,” I said.
“Is best not to think about these things.” Sal gripped me by the arms and shook me until my teeth rattled. “Where you been? You look thin, wasting away. What do you eat when I’m not feeding you?”
“It’s been green protein and NRG drinks since the last time I saw you, Sal,” I said. “Feel free to fatten me up. What happened up there anyway? Is all that because of those feeders who attacked me in your restaurant?”
“Come, come.” Sal took my bag from me and waved me farther inside the room. One half seemed to be dedicated to some kind of tech workshop, overseen by Oki. This must be the band of tinkers who’d spoofed a tattler for Rae when we had to stay off Libra’s radar. I was surprised by how young the tinkers-in-training were—a couple in the group didn’t look like they’d seen the ugly side of puberty yet—but their little fingers flew deftly over the devices they were building, and they worked with the focus and efficiency of child-sized machines.
The other half of the room must have been Sal’s. An armoury of ancient firearms lined one wall—not a computer chip or a plasma charger between them—and the back corner was dedicated to a collection of freezers as big as the false one upstairs. All the essentials of a commercial kitchen had been crammed into a microscopic floor plan that barely left room for Sal to squeeze his bulk between the stove and the sink. Sal dumped the bag on the floor and motioned for me to sit down at a booth that looked like it had been salvaged from upstairs after the restaurant had been firebombed. Scorch marks seared the top of the table and the synthetic easy-clean material on the chairs had bubbled into a landscape of blackened lumps. Sal busied himself with preparing something to eat.
Dickie sat down across from me and grinned. “What do you think?”
Oki brought us a couple of glasses of water—filtered rainwater from the taste of it, and not half bad—and took out a small handheld scanner.
“Mind if I take a look?” She indicated the bag.
“Sure,” I said. “My bag is the little one inside. I don’t know what the rest of it is, though.”
She opened the bag and shuffled through the contents, scanning each object with the handheld device. It made some little blips and whirrs but nothing that seemed to concern the tinker. I shrugged and turned back to Dickie.
“How’d you get into Sal’s inner circle so quickly?” I asked. “I’ve known him for years and I’ve never seen this place.”
“The man knows raw potential when he sees it,” Dickie said.
Oki slammed a silver disk onto the table between Dickie and me hard enough to make me jump. She said, “Sorry to interrupt the reunion, but where did you find this?”
“It’s not mine,” I said. “I don’t know about anything but what’s in my backpack. I didn’t want to leave it behind when . . .”
Oki pulled the blade over her left shoulder and whipped it over Dickie’s head. The tip pressed against my throat enough that I could feel it dig in when I swallowed. She said, “Not good enough.”
I put my hands up slowly and my eyes flashed to the kitchen area. “Sal? A little help?”
“You want help, yeah?” Sal had a fat soba noodle hanging from his lip. He slurped it up and ladled more noodles into two bowls sitting on the little counter. “You tell Oki what she wants to know. We help. Eat noodles, tell story. We all get fat with food and knowing.”
Sal carried the soup over to the table and set the bowls in front of Dickie and me. Dickie stared at the sword with his eyes bulging almost as big as his apple-cheeks. The hand holding his water glass hovered in front of his mouth and his jaw hung open, but he sat as frozen as a corpse in a meat locker. Sal crossed his hairy arms over his chest and smiled at me with the few blackened teeth left in his head.
“Oki, put that away for couple minutes. To kill a guest with an empty stomach?” Sal shook his head and tsked. “Bad manners.”
“Why does she want to kill me, Sal?” I tried to lean away from the tip of the blade. Oki hesitated a moment and then sheathed the sword over her back again. “I thought we were friends.”
“Sure, we’re friends,” Sal said. “But when she says someone is gator chow, she chop- chop-chop, and I don’t ask too many questions, yeah?”
“I don’t want to be gator chow,” I said.
“Then eat your noodles and get talking,” Oki said, and spun the disk on the table between Dickie and me. It made a high-pitched whirring sound as it twirled in place. “Because you’ve endangered this entire operation by coming here with this, and you’d better have a damned good explanation.”
I rubbed my hands over my face and groaned. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Eat, eat!” Sal gestured expansively with his hairy paws, as if I should be excited enough about the noodles to guzzle my last meal. “Tell from beginning.”
Dickie furtively picked up his bowl and slurped his noodles. I kicked him under the table.
“What?” he yelped. “I’m hungry. It was a long shift, okay? Oki’s not going to kill you. I’m sure you have a perfectly good explanation for dooming us all to . . . what exactly?”
“This is a tracking device,” Oki said. “I’ve neutralized the signal, but whoever tagged you knows you’re here.”
I groaned and rubbed my hand over my eyes. How could I have been so stupid? Whoever had clobbered Gore must have stuck the tracker in the bag knowing I would take it. My stomach flip-flopped. Or had Gore sold out to a higher bidder and been leading us into an ambush? I couldn’t trust anyone, but I had to trust someone. And despite the fact that Oki wanted to kill me, and we might have Libra or LunAstro on our tails at any moment, my churning stomach growled again.
“Is it safe to talk here?” I asked. “Or should we go to a quiet box?”
“Is safe, is safe,” Sal said. He shuffled over to the kitchen and dished up a bowl of noodles for himself. “Oki knows her trade, yeah?”
“Talk,” Oki said.
Sal bustled back and squeezed into the booth next to Dickie. He said, “Stories always give me appetite, you know?”
He picked up the bowl and tipped it toward his face, noisily sucking up noodles as if I had just popped into his restaurant on my lunch break, like I used to do when I worked for the HCPD. He grinned at me encouragingly, with a noodle dangling through the gap where his front teeth should have been. He slurped it back and motioned at me to join him.
Reluctantly, I pulled the bowl toward me, picked it up, and drank some of the broth. Warmth and comfort flowed through my body. This was as close to home as I was going to get with Tom held captive by one of Libra’s monsters and Rae trapped in her own head with another. At least I still had Dickie and Sal. I had to tell them what had happened. I had to tell them everything.
So I explained it all. Patti and the Mezzanine Rose androids, Libra’s hit list, Jimi and Rae’s secret involvement with the android project. I told them how Dickie’s warning had come too late and I had thought Tom had betrayed me. How Urqhart nearly fouled up the whole plan by double-crossing LunAstro and trying to steal the flash drive and sell it back to Libra, and how Rae had sacrificed herself to save us.
With my voice hitching in my throat, I described the video Nathanial Price had sent of Tom. Just let me die. Of the changes I had seen in Rae, the way I’d had to knock her unconscious in order to save myself and the others. Patti’s disappearing act. LunAstro’s assignment for Gore and me, including Gore’s mysterious connection to Tom. The android and the cyber-witch hijacking the shuttle and demanding our compliance in their escape from th
e asteroid. Rae hacking into Patti’s brain. How Gore and I left them behind. How Gore left me behind . . .
By the end of it, my shoulders shook and tears streamed down my face. Trying to hold on long enough to finish my request, the last words tumbled out of my mouth in a rush. “So I have to break into Libra to save Tom and I don’t know what I’m doing and if I can’t do that I can’t save Rae. I didn’t know where else to go for help, Sal. You’ve helped me before and I know you have connections, I just thought . . .”
Sal pushed his empty bowl away and crossed his hairy arms on the table in front of him. Thick black eyebrows came down over his nose like furrows of dirt behind an old-fashioned plow.
“I am honoured that you think of me in your hour of need.” He let the sentence hang between us like a white flag of surrender flapping over a battlefield strewn with dead soldiers. “But even I am not a worker of miracles, yeah?”
My heart sank. I wiped my eyes and looked at Dickie. He pushed his homburg back on his head with one hand and swirled a few remaining noodles around the bottom of his bowl. A tinge of green had crept around the edges of his mouth. Without looking me in the eye, he said, “This is pretty bad, Bubs.”
My throat constricted against the flood of tears I’d only just managed to hold back. My entire body shook, and I felt cold all over. “So you can’t help me?”
“Oki?” Sal said. “What you think?”
“As far as excuses go, it’s pretty good.” Oki narrowed her eyes and stared at the table. She picked up the disk and said, “Kymani.”
She flipped the tracking device toward one of the kids at the bench. He snatched it out of the air one-handed and immediately dug into it with a long, skinny screwdriver. Oki toed the body bag and said, “I want to look at all of this before I commit to anything. And I need to scan everything on your person.”
“I don’t have much,” I said.