by S. C. Jensen
I stood rooted to my spot on the stairs, watching in morbid fascination as Mama Adesina hunched over the walkie with her shoulders tensed like she wanted to tear the thing in two. The nurses approached cautiously.
The walkie crackled again.
“Rae?” Her voice trembled in a way that I hadn’t noticed on the other side of the intercom. “Is that you?”
A lump ached in my throat. I pushed Dickie ahead of me up the stairs, and we followed Cosmo through a door at the top of the landing.
Cosmo closed it behind us. Hundreds of blank-faced heads stared at us. Mannequin busts topped with wigs in every shape and style, and every colour of the rainbow. Cosmo reached out toward a wig covered in thick, black ringlets. He tugged on a strand, pulling it straight and letting it bounce back. He breathed out with a hiss through his teeth. “That was close.”
Rae’s mother had a tongue that would tear a strip off a rhinoceros, but her memory hadn’t been the same since Rae’s father had died. I was grateful that Cosmo had taken the old crank under his glittery wings when Rae was in trouble, but I wondered now if the disruption to her routine would be harmful in the long run. My eyes stung with tears as I realized I might never be able to make her understand if Rae wasn’t coming back. I sniffed and said, “Has she been suffering from agitation?”
“I am suffering from agitation.” Cosmo bugged his eyes at me. “That woman is a menace. Have you ever had your nipple twisted by a senior citizen, Pinkie? They’ve got nothing to lose. They go for the whole-body twist, like they’re gonna rip it right off and take it with them when they die.”
“Holy Origin.” I crossed my arms over my own chest and winced. So much for my pity party. Mama Adesina was a mean one, all right. She probably wanted to track Rae down so she could tell her off about not finding herself a man yet. Or for wearing the wrong shade for her complexion. Still, I felt guilty that she was so out of sorts here. “I’m suddenly glad she hates my guts. Should I arrange to have her sent to a care home? I should be able to get the holocreds—”
“You will do nothing of the sort.” Cosmo lifted a hand above his head and snapped his fingers aggressively. The sound was magnified by his tattler, rang out across the room, and repeated through speakers in the adjacent rooms. “She is a menace. And she is my muse.”
Dickie nodded sagely. “I had a friend who got off on purple nurples too. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I disagree,” I said. “Getting your nips cranked by the elderly is up there on the list of completely legitimate things to be ashamed of.”
Dickie frowned at me from beneath the brim of his homburg. “We don’t kink shame where I’m from.”
“Well no,” I said. “You’d be out of business.”
“If only it were that simple.” Cosmo sighed, his hands fluttering above his chest like a virgin experiencing the first flush of true lust. “Then anyone could provide me with the pain I require to create. Alas, my muse is one of a kind. It is the emotional cruelty that I am drawn to. She has a way of cutting to the bone, right? Cutting you down until only the truth remains.”
I remembered all the horrible barbs the old crone had thrown at me over the years. I could never understand how a woman like that had a daughter like Rae. I said, “I’d rather she didn’t.”
“Did you see the splendiferous gown she was wearing? I designed that gown after she called me a ‘glitter poof with a god complex.’ Isn’t that divine?”
I blinked at him. “You like it when she’s mean to you?”
“I like it because it is true,” Cosmo said. “And she’s the only one brave enough to say it. A god complex. Well, why shouldn’t I play god?”
“If any of her vitriol contains a fraction of truth,” I said. “I’m nothing but a drunk and I’ll never be anything but a drunk. So I’m going have to disagree with you, Cosmo.”
Cosmo pursed his lips and snapped his fingers again. This time a tall man dressed head-to-toe in black came rushing into the room with sweat gleaming on his copper-coloured forehead. He said, “Sorry boss. I had to run interference for—”
“Take this.” Cosmo tore the black comm off his belt and tossed it to the security guard. “And if you’d like to keep your job, I suggest you not leave it unattended again.”
“The old lady sucker punched me in the gonads and took it off my belt!”
Cosmo waved him away impatiently. “I cannot have the muse spilling her truths to every vagrant who buzzes at the gate.” He turned to me. “No offence. It disrupts my creative balance when she is too free with her gift.”
“None taken,” I said. “I’d rather she was less free with her truths too.”
“Keep her away from the security comms,” Cosmo said to the guard. “I traded her for my own unit. It should keep her distracted.”
The guard grumbled and left the room, and Cosmo waved for Dickie and me to follow him. Over his shoulder he said, “You’re looking at it all wrong, Pinky.”
“How so?” I asked.
He stomped through the varicoloured sea of tresses and approached a gold-marble statue carved to look like a coquettishly posed window dressing mannequin. It simpered down at us with a finger crooked suggestively. Its egg-shaped face seemed to leer. The mannequin wore nothing but a pair of dangling magenta and gold beaded earrings. “You are a drunk and you always will be a drunk.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks, and the familiar burn of disgrace boiled in my stomach. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to cry or to string him up on the beckoning hand of the statue to hang by his tight, pink trousers until Mama Adesina found him. Cosmo tugged on one of the earrings, and the statue swung aside to reveal a narrow staircase.
“Your past shapes you, right?” he said. “You get to choose whether or not it shapes you for the better or the worse. Your past may be a weakness or a strength. It’s all on you.”
“That’s how I felt about my wrinkles,” I said. “But you wanted to erase them.”
“You can be who you are without wearing it all over your face, girl.” I could hear the eye roll in his voice. He took a moment to glare at the skin I had not put a lick of moisturizer on since I’d last seen him, then he began to climb the stairs. His voice bounced down the stairwell at me like I was in some kind of “hard truth” echo chamber. There used to be a feedreel channel dedicated to stunts like that. Stick a person in a box and then tell them the truth about themselves until they had a nervous breakdown. It had always made me feel queasy, and I had to flip to something a little more cheerful. Like the horrorfeeds.
“I am a Grit District nobody with aims far beyond my station,” Cosmo said. “It’s who I am. It’s my brand. Doesn’t mean I have to keep wearing third-rate pro skirt hand-me-downs from my fashion-forward auntie, right? If you want to wear those scars like a badge of honour, so be it. You are a survivor. You’ve earned the right to be as ridiculous as you want to be—wrinkles, intimacy issues, bad attitude, whatever.”
“I’m proud of being a survivor,” I said. “But sometimes I wish people would forget the old me and see me for who I am now. Everyone remembers the way . . .” My voice cracked and tears spilled out of my eyes.
I remember, is what I meant to say. I wiped at them with my hands and leaned against the wall of the stairwell. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I stop all this emotional-rollercoaster crap and focus on helping Rae and Tom?
Cosmo spun around and stomped back down the stairs and took me by the shoulders. “Listen up, Pinky. How other people remember you is none of your damn business, you hear me? Why do you care?”
“Because I’m afraid they’re right.” The words came out in a pathetic whimper. I cringed. “I’m afraid that whatever was broken in me then is still there, just waiting to find another way out. Tom and Rae are relying on me, and I am afraid I won’t be able to save them.”
“They aren’t just relying on you, Bubs,” Di
ckie said from behind me. He hovered over Cosmo’s shoulder like a nervous parent trying to talk to their emotionally unstable teenager. “They’re relying on all of us. You don’t have to do this alone. You never did.”
“You don’t have to,” Cosmo said. “And even if you wanted to go all super-cyborg and do it on your own, we wouldn’t let you have all the fun.”
“Fun?” I sniffled. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You’ll see,” Cosmo said. “When all this is over it will be the kind of story you tell over and over to everyone who will stop to listen, right? Or we’ll be dead.”
“Uh,” said Dickie. “Where are we going, exactly?”
“To meet the rest of the crew,” Cosmo said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“The crew?” I wiped my eyes.
“Everyone’s here,” Cosmo said. “You’ll see. Then maybe you’ll learn to trust the rest of us a little and include us on your next interstellar espionage racket, huh?”
I laughed nervously and followed Cosmo as he led us up the remaining stairs.
The room at the top of the staircase was like something out of an old-fashioned spy movie. Holoscreens projected against white walls. Men and women dressed in tight, white bodysuits sat in circular stations with VR headsets wrapped around their faces, waving their arms in the air as they moved invisible data around invisible screens. Some, with their headsets off, took notes on handheld devices that looked like tiny gaming consoles.
In the middle of the room, a round, white table was surrounded by rolling chairs and the chairs were filled with familiar faces. Sal, Oki, and her collection of whiz kids all sat around the table looking bored and a little forlorn. Sal spun his chair toward us when we came in the room.
His face lit up and he stood. “You made it!”
“Where the hell were you?” Oki’s brow furrowed into a collection of deep creases between her eyebrows. “I waited.”
“I worried,” Sal said. “You had little trouble with the girls?”
“We did have a little trouble,” I said. “Your reptilian girlfriends were only the start.”
“When you didn’t show I came back here,” Oki said. “What happened?”
“We must have gone the wrong way in that tunnel.” I glared at Sal. “You didn’t think we might want to know which direction to turn at the bottom of the ladder, noodle boy?”
“It should be obvious.” Sal shook his big hairy head. “Follow the water, yeah? Away from nesting grounds.”
“Why would that be obvious?” I said, my voice strained. “What nesting grounds? Where do the gators come from?”
“Somewhere in the Burn.” Sal shrugged. “We don’t go there—” His eyes widened. “You go there?”
“We came up in the Burn, all right. Couldn’t get any connection to the satnav systems. Hammett died. We’re lucky we made it out at all. I can’t believe you didn’t think to tell us which way to go.”
Oki pushed back her spiky black hair with one hand and wrinkled her forehead. “You’d have had to come through the old grinder network. Nobody gets out of there alive.”
“That collection of abandoned apartments?” I said. “Dickie calls it Creep Stacks. We had no choice. Weird place, but we didn’t run into any trouble.”
“On foot?” Oki narrowed her eyes at me as if she thought I was lying. “On the surface?”
“How the hell else would we get through?” I huffed and pulled up a chair. I dug in my pocket and pulled out Hammett. “What’s this about grinders?”
“I’ll find a charger,” Dickie said, and took the sphere from my hand.
“I read through the files in your bag,” Oki said. “You know about the black-market organ harvesting that goes on in the city. A lot of it filters through those apartment stacks.”
I shook my head. “I’ve heard all kinds of stories about that place. But there was nothing there. No people. Nothing but rats and garbage.”
“Who makes the garbage?” Oki crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. One of the whiz kids snickered.
I cast him an evil look and he shut up. I said, “Could have been there for decades. We saw no signs of active habitation.”
“That’s because it’s all underground,” Oki said. “Tunnels lead into those buildings from all over the city.”
“So there were people in there?” Dickie’s voice cracked. “Watching us?”
“Thousands of people,” Oki said. “Most of them aren’t watching much anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Living people, or dead?”
“The latter, for the most part,” Oki said. “The organ grinders run the meat through the tunnels. A small but deadly effective network. Anyone caught snooping around in there goes directly on ice.”
“Urban legends.” I shrugged and put my hands up. “I’m telling you we walked right through, and nobody hassled us.”
“I won’t try to tell you what you know.” Oki opened her hands to let the comment slide. “But could be they had orders to let you pass.”
“Orders from who?” I said. “For what purpose? Libra’s organ racket is nothing to do with me. I just want to get Tom back and find help for Rae.”
“This mess you’ve dragged us into is a real rat’s nest.” Oki sighed and rubbed the top of her head like a good luck charm. “I can’t figure out who is doing what for whom. Or why. None of it makes any sense.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is that Libra has Tom, and we have to get him back. Dickie said you have a plan.”
“We have a plan,” Cosmo said, snapping his fingers in front of my face. “I am going to make you into the most beautiful corpse HoloCity has every seen.”
“Someone will be a corpse,” Oki said. “I don’t know about her.”
“What do you mean you don’t know about me?” I said. “This is my mission. I’m the corpse. That’s the plan.”
“That was plan,” Sal said. “But you not going in alone. We think you not going in at all.”
“Without Gore we don’t have much of a chance,” I said. “Sure. But I still have to try.”
Oki’s eyes slid toward Sal. “Do you want to tell her? Or should I?”
“Tell me what?”
“We found your friend,” Sal said with an apologetic shrug. “This Gore.”
“You found Gore?” My body went suddenly cold. “Is he okay?”
“I send you two into the tunnels,” Sal said. “Then I go to check out this pick-up point. You know? Where they pick up the bodies for the chop-chop.” He made a slicing motion with his hand. “Oki knows about these places.”
“A body drop,” I said. “Where the organ grinder comes to get their black-market meat. I know about them too.”
“Yeah.” Sal made a so-so motion with his hairy hands. “HCPD, they know some.”
“You know more, I guess?” I frowned. I didn’t like where this was headed.
He nodded emphatically. “Sure we do. Police, they like disinfectant. Wipe out the bad bugs on the surface. But infection is deep in city, it contaminate every place.”
“What about Gore,” I said. “You found his body? Or is he okay?”
“He was at this body drop,” Sal said. “Like crown on top a pile of rotten meat. Not moving, but still fresh-dead, you know? Not old meat.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. A numb sensation crawled over my body. If Gore was gone, this plan was doomed to fail. I’d held out hope that we could do it alone, but knowing Gore was dead made that hope shrivel up in my chest. Sal and his team might think they were up for breaking into Libra, but there was no way we were going to pull this off without SecurIntel behind us. I said, “Are you sure it was him?”
“I recognize him from the files,” Sal said. “But you
can come look if you want make sure.”
My heart stopped. “He’s here?”
Sal stood and lumbered to the back of the room. The backs of his arms were matted with thick black hair and poked out of the dirty sleeveless shirt he wore like sausages that had been rolled over an unswept floor. He led me to a cot, hidden by a white privacy screen that blended seamlessly into the white walls. The screen and the walls displayed gruesome images from the file LunAstro had provided Gore and me about the organ-harvesting rings in HoloCity.
Gore’s body was stretched out on its back on the cot, toes pointing up and to the side, eyes peacefully closed. His clothes had been removed, revealing an oversized body stuffed with too many lumpy muscles. Jagged lines carved up the sides of his torso and had been stitched back up hastily with thick black thread. It looked like the grinders had already been at him.
Then the corpse’s chest rose and fell, and I stumbled back into Sal with my heart in my throat. “He’s alive?”
“Oki get him fixed up,” Sal said. “Spare parts, you know?”
“No,” I said, stammering. “I don’t know. Spare parts? Sal, are you and Oki organ running? Is that why you know all of this stuff?”
“Is not what you think,” Sal said. “Come, we talk about it. Okay.”
Just like that. Everything settled. No big deal.
Except my heart was threatening to jump right out of my chest. And if it did that, Sal and Oki might be tempted to sell it on the black-market. I willed it to stay in my body. I took a deep breath and followed Sal back to the table. Whatever this explanation was, I needed to hear it if I was going to make a decision. But I couldn’t think of any way that Sal could be involved in black-market organ harvesting in a wholesome way.
Maybe Gore was right. We aren’t the good guys. There are no good guys.
But there are good people.
My guts twisted with the hope that Sal was still a good person.
Hammett perched in Dickie’s lap at the table, wearing the pink homburg and pinstriped suit. It beamed its cartoonish grin at me as I shuffled, in a daze, back to my seat.