“Yesanyase Skont.”
“Heard of it,” I said grimly.
“The other two children, however, are not eligible for government-sponsored deportation. If you wish to assume the cost …”
Still lost in horrified speculation about what kind of cannibalistic dystopia the children might have been born into, I stared blankly at the asylum agent as she continued to spout her bureaucratese. Eventually it clicked. She was saying that I was responsible for Jan and Leaf. If I didn’t pay for them to be deported, they would be given asylum willy-nilly. They would receive care, shelter, and schooling—ironically, just what the three kids had yearned for.
“But we don’t want to stay here if Pippa can’t,” Jan shouted, grabbing the mic on their side of the glass. “We want to go with her.”
“How much is it?” I said dazedly.
The agent named a figure I would blush to charge my most credulous client for a full load.
“You gotta be kidding,” I said.
It was all too much to take in, and I was almost grateful when my phone rang. It was Dolph.
“Yo,” I said, turning away from the asylum agent. “You’re not gonna believe what just happened.”
“Whatever,” he cut across my voice. “Where are you?”
I glanced around the bleak visiting room. “In hell.”
“Phone says you’re in the, what’s this, detention center—”
“That’s what I said.”
“Whatever,” Dolph said again. He was worked up, talking fast. “How quick can you get here?”
21
However quick I could get there wouldn’t have been quick enough for Dolph, so I told him to tell me what had happened as I drove.
“It was Kaspar Silverback.”
“Who’s he?”
“He came to pick up the toy fairies.”
I slammed my palm on the horn. I was queueing at customs to get off Space Island. Twenty lanes, and my queue seemed to be the only one that wasn’t moving. “Yeah, but who is he?”
“Kaspar Silverback,” Dolph crackled. He was somewhere ahead of me, on Space Highway, following this Silverback character back towards Mag-Ingat. He would be using the wireless headset built into his bike helmet, which always had poor sound quality, although you couldn’t tell Dolph that. He had built it himself. Had to, as it’s illegal to use a phone while operating a motorcycle.
It is not illegal to use a phone while driving a truck, since even a janky old truck like mine can drive itself. I knelt up on the seat and stuck my head and shoulders out of the window to see if someone ahead of me had got nabbed by customs, which would explain the delay. “Silverback sounds like a gorilla.”
“He’s a gorilla like Seagrave is a walrus,” Dolph said. Fair point. Neither Irene nor Rex were marine Shifters; it was just that someone in Rex’s ancestral line at some point had been, and their descendants kept the name. If you don’t like your family name, you have the option of renaming yourself something like Starrunner.
“So this Silverback is a what?”
“He’s a fucking idiot,” Dolph cackled. “He’s driving at five miles under the speed limit. Cars are screaming at him. He’s probably the reason you’re stuck in traffic.” At that moment my queue finally got rolling. I cruised towards customs, a gigantic building spanning the outbound lanes of the highway before you get to Space Bridge. Twenty green arches and ten red ones, all of them as black as the pit of hell in the blazing sunlight. “He’s a bear, of course,” Dolph said. “None of that gang can drive for shit.”
“He works for Mujin Inc?”
“He had corporate ID. It checked out on Bizlinks and everything. He was plenty pissed that I made him wait.”
“Did he notice that one of the crates had been opened?”
“If he did, he didn’t say anything about it.”
“I assume he went through customs with them?”
“Green lane. I was right behind him.”
“Hang on,” I said. “I’m going through now.”
The pit of hell swallowed my truck. All outgoing traffic must pass through customs, no exceptions. Weak light revealed a short tunnel with a metal floor and ceiling. The customs AI took over the controls of my truck and edged it forward into scanning position. “Please wait,” a voice announced from the truck’s speakers, and then I heard two heavy, clanking booms as automated portcullises slammed down in front of the truck and behind it, trapping me in place. A high thin whining noise filled the cab. I knew that scanners were non-invasively inspecting me and my truck down to the atomic level.
“Thank you,” the AI’s voice droned. The portcullis in front of me rose into the ceiling. I got control of the truck back, and drove out onto Space Bridge.
“OK, I’m through,” I said to Dolph. “What were you saying?”
“Silverback cleared customs with no issues. But that don’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Yeah.” The customs system is very high-tech, but for every high-tech system there is an equal and opposite hack. Everyone knew that Parsec occasionally, or frequently, managed to sneak contraband through customs. We suspected he had a contact in there who would turn off the scanners for him in exchange for a kickback. Amateurs hack systems; pros hack the humans operating them.
“There could be anything in those crates,” Dolph said. “Data is my guess. We know Parsec has pulled that kind of heist before.”
“Yeah.” Data is the most valuable kind of contraband, and the easiest to conceal. For that, they wouldn’t have even needed to hack the customs.
“Split the IP into nine thousand pieces. Hide it in the toy fairies’ operating systems …”
I remembered that moment in the cargo hold when I had been illogically convinced that something was looking back at me from that toy fairy’s plastic eyes. I had almost pulled my gun on the damn thing. I pushed the memory away. No doubt Dolph was right. All that the fairies contained was portions of some insanely valuable, illegally obtained IP that Parsec had been planning to sell, through his front company, to Rafael Ijiuto, who’d then have sold it on to some damn gang of aliens.
I merged off the bridge onto Space Highway and picked up speed. The thrill of the chase kicked in. The wind from the open window whipped my hair.
“OK,” I said, thinking aloud. “So we’ll pay a little visit to Mujin Inc. Let Parsec know we’re onto them.”
“And give his minions a scare,” Dolph crackled. “Those bears have had it coming for a long time.”
“Where you at now?”
“Gillietown. Gonna take all freaking day to get back to the city. This guy thinks he’s driving a schoolbus.”
“I’ll catch up with you.” On my left, the jungly heights of Cape Agreste raked back from the road, steep and verdant. On my right, the bay sparkled. Mag-Ingat reared at the distant head of the bay, the tallest buildings of uptown seeming to spear the sky, coming in and out of view as the highway curved around the natural irregularities of the headland. Overhead, a stream of flying cars zipped along the air corridor that tracked the highway. I would normally consider myself an air person, not a ground person, and I was jealous of anyone who could afford a flying car. But sometimes a drive was just what the doctor ordered. The deathly gloom of the detention center faded behind me as I gunned the truck faster.
Back in Mag-Ingat, Kaspar Silverback exited onto Upperway. By this time I’d caught up with him and Dolph. I stayed way back—my truck was as generic as they came, a dirty white bullet like a million others, but Parsec would probably recognize it, which meant Silverback might, too. Dolph, anonymous on his bike, kept Silverback’s truck in sight.
“He’s turning onto Bonsucesso,” Dolph crackled.
“Roger.” I took manual control and spun my truck around an arched claw of reinforced concrete dug deep into the bedrock. Most of the uptown skyscrapers stand on legs, like old-fashioned rockets. This permits more buildings to stand under them. The four-legged base of this building, Bonsucesso T
ower, sheltered a drab cluster of three- and four-storey office blocks. People wandered in and out of mom ‘n’ pop ramen joints and dry-cleaning places at street level.
“He’s indicating,” Dolph said as I emerged out of Bonsucesso Tower’s shadow into the sunlight. “He’s going into the tower.” As he spoke, I saw the small shape of Dolph’s bike zoom up a curving ramp, like the opening of a nautilus shell, into the bowels of Bonsucesso Tower. One of the trucks ahead of him would be Silverback’s.
I turned onto the ramp and drove up into the parking lot. Dolph guided me to the third level.
We hid behind my truck and watched Kaspar Silverback, at the other end of the floor, unload the familiar crates of toy fairies onto a dolly. He had no robotic help. Nor human help, come to that. If Silverback was a Parsec minion, he had to be the most peripheral and poorly-equipped of all the Bad-News Bears … “or the most dispensable one,” Dolph hissed. “I’ll Shift. You stay human. That way we got all the angles covered.”
I glanced uneasily around the parking lot. “Too many normies. Wait until we get upstairs. Then we’ll Shift and kick their asses until they talk.”
We got into the elevator and rose up, up, up. Some people got on and off at the mall levels. After that we rose alone, first through blackness and then through air. The Bonsucesso Tower elevators travelled on the outside of the building’s core, so we had a dizzying view of the other spires of uptown, and beyond that, the hills speckled with suburban communities like the one where I used to live. I felt a pang of wistfulness. The sunlight on the hills had turned red-gold. It was getting on for evening, and in Shiftertown Lucy was waiting for me to come home. I’d promised her a table-top barbecue for supper, just the two of us.
The elevator stopped at the 121st floor.
We stepped into a dim, mirror-walled hall.
Touch-sensitive flooring tiles changed color when we trod on them, so we left a trail of rainbow squares.
There was no sign of Kaspar Silverback, or anyone else, in the hall, or behind the black sweep of reception desk we could see through doors at the far end of it.
“I don’t like this,” Dolph muttered. His voice echoed so loudly, through some trick of the acoustics, that we both jumped.
“Crappy corporate décor is a matter of personal choice,” I said. Choice … choice … choice … the echo repeated.
We walked into the lobby. On the reception desk sat a large civic award trophy in the shape of a frosted glass Ponce de Leon. There was also a bell to summon a receptionist. I shrugged, and rang it. Echoes travelled through the lobby and bounced back from the hall.
A door behind the end of the long desk opened, revealing a glimpse of brightly-lit office activity. A woman in immaculate business attire came out. “Can I help you?” she said.
The inside of my head went blank.
It was Sophia.
22
Sophia. She didn’t seem to recognize me. I doubted my own sanity for an instant. “Can I help you?” she said again. Then I knew for sure. That low, musical voice, now tinged with impatience … it was her.
Her hair—that fascinating shade of dark brown that’s almost black—curled around her white neck. It was cut shorter than it used to be. A rose tattoo curled up the side of her neck to her jaw. The ink was new; perhaps it was a legacy of her time with the Travellers. Her wrap dress, made of some stiff fabric that looked like dull green paper, accentuated her cleavage with a deep V-neck. Her waist was so tiny, you’d be forgiven for assuming she’d never given birth. She was as stunning as ever.
And she didn’t recognize me.
I clutched the edge of the reception desk, desperately trying to get a handle on my emotions so I could think, instead of just feeling all the pain and anger she had left in my heart.
Dolph shot a worried glance at me, and then smiled at Sophia. If you knew him, that smile would make you run. But she never had known him that well. “Long time no see,” he said. “Why’s a nice girl like you working for a sketchy outfit like this?”
Sophia looked irritated. “I knew you’d track me down sooner or later,” she said. “Mike, I guess this was your idea?”
So she hadn’t forgotten me. She just … didn’t care. To her, I was no more than an annoying former acquaintance.
“You owe him an explanation,” Dolph said, making it worse.
“I don’t owe him anything,” Sophia said. “And if you’re going to go all Shifter on me, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
The threat jarred words out of me. “I heard you left the life.” As soon as the words were out, I could have kicked myself. There was no need for her to know I’d been talking to Zane.
But instead of asking where I heard that, she glanced back at the door she’d come through. “Yeah, it wasn’t for me,” she said, using the exact same words Zane had. Her expression betrayed a hint of discomfort. My brain started working again, and I realized that her coworkers didn’t know about her fling with the Travellers. And she would not want them to. I had something I could hold over her head. “But discussing ancient history probably isn’t something you want to do,” she said, in a classic Sophia move: attack to defend. She was referring to the early days of Uni-Ex Shipping. Believe it or not, I used to do really dirty shit. That was before I got married. Before Lucy. Sophia knew about a lot of that stuff.
“So now you’re working as an uptown receptionist?” Dolph said, with a glance around the sparsely decorated lobby. “Guess money isn’t everything, after all.”
Sophia laughed. “Office manager, actually,” she said. “We’re light-staffed. Just getting off the ground. But you’re right. Money isn’t everything. I know you understand that, Dolph. You never cared about the money. You’re only in it to punish … yourself.” Jesus. Maybe she knew him better than I had thought she did. She stuck that knife in with a little smile, and turned to me, leaving Dolph spluttering. “But you still don’t get it, do you, Mike? Newsflash, honey.” She had never called me honey while we were married. It had a distancing effect. “Money can’t buy you what you really want.”
I cleared my throat. “Money’s nothing to me,” I said. “Nothing. Lucy is my everything.”
“Who?” Sophia said.
I couldn’t believe it. “Lucy. Your daughter.”
“Oh. Of course. I always think of her as Elspeth.” Sophia’s jaw tightened in irritation at her slip.
Elspeth had been Lucy’s middle name, chosen by Sophia. I’d had it deleted from Lucy’s ID after the divorce. That was a matter of public record.
Sophia had never even bothered to look it up.
My anger came out in a soft, wondering tone. “How could you abandon your own child? It’s not about me. Jeez. I don’t matter. How could you do that to her?”
Sophia’s mask of forgetting clicked back into place. “If you don’t get it, I can’t explain it to you. There are more important things in life, OK? Being a mother was not my—my destiny.”
“Well, whoopsies,” I said. I was getting really angry now. I leaned over the desk. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you said yes.” There were no rings on her fingers now. Not even a tan line where my ring had been.
“People are allowed to make mistakes, Mike! Jesus!” For a minute, I saw the old Sophia fire that had fueled endless arguments between us. Passionate arguments, that ended in bed … at least to begin with. Mostly about money, and what was permissible to do to get it. But we had both moved on from that now. She was right about that, anyway. She switched back into professional mode and took a step sideways. “Are you going to leave, or do I have to call the police?”
Dolph flinched. “C’mon, Mike.”
But I had seen something else. I was leaning on the desk, my whole body angled towards Sophia, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen it. Her hand stole towards a shelf under the desk. On that shelf, a dull glint of metal.
She was reaching for a gun.
I straightened up and took a step back. “You know what, I
almost forgot why we came up here in the first place,” I said.
Sophia froze. “Why?”
“We were trying to get a taxi,” I said, breaking out my professional-grade smile. “This is a taxi company, right, Dolph? My truck broke down, and we need a ride back to Shiftertown.”
“You still have that old truck?” Sophia said.
“Yup, still holding it together with elastic bands and spit. But I feel like taking a ride in a flying car today.”
“You can’t afford our cars,” she said. But she moved away from the desk. From the place where the gun was.
“Maybe I’m doing better than you think I am,” I bullshitted. “How about it? We’re customers; you gonna turn us down? That ain’t the start-up spirit.” I wanted to know what they were really doing here. I didn’t believe there was a single taxi in the place.
But I was wrong about that. “All right,” Sophia said. “If that’s what it takes to get rid of you.” She marched to a door at the far end of the reception desk and flung it open.
Daylight flooded in from a garage. And what a garage. Taking up half of the whole 121st floor, it had three huge bays open to a stunning view of downtown Mag-Ingat and the bay. People pay millions for uptown condos with this kind of view, and Mujin Inc was wasting it on taxis.
Six taxis, to be precise. The gleaming SUV-sized vehicles stood here and there on the concrete floor. The garage was practically empty.
Except for our—that is, Mujin Inc’s—crates of toy fairies, which were stacked to the right of the door, still on the dolly which we had seen Kaspar Silverback load them onto.
Of Silverback himself there was no sign.
“Take your pick,” Sophia said. “And if you come around here again, I really will call the police.”
Dolph shrugged. He told me later that he just wanted to get out of there before Sophia followed through on her threat to call the cops. He had not seen the gun under the reception desk, which proved that she was never going to call the cops—she was just bluffing. He walked into the garage, and I followed slowly, looking all around. Sophia stood behind us in the door to reception with her arms folded.
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