Escapology (11 page)

Petrie and Cassius stand atop the captain’s crow, watching through the ’scope as they collapse into the sea, flaring distress. Petrie’s heart sinks with them. He knows these schooners, their colours are only too recognizable.

“They’re from the
Ark
,” he says.

Cassius leans in for a look on another ’scope, spits furiously on the deck.

“
Shit
.”

“Pentecost likes to keep his crew close. Our window is tiny. They’ll be no more than a day ahead, thirty-six hours at the most,” Petrie says, trying to keep the fear from his voice. Usually they avoid ships like the
Ark
. It’s the safest way to get on and there’s a whole ocean, plenty of opportunity to steer clear.

They’ve arrived at smoking wrecks the
Ark
’s just left behind or seen them way out in the distance, but thus far they’ve managed to avoid contact and therefore conflict. There’s no way to avoid it now. The
Ark
will come for its schooners. It will come for whatever sent them down. And it will keep coming until it catches them. What if Pentecost remembers him? What if this ship, his home, is taken?

“
Ark
’s fast,” agrees Cassius. Leaning back from the ’scope as the second schooner disappears beneath the waves with a drawn out groan of metals, he says, “No way we’re going to outrun it, not even with two days’ head start, and they’ve got what… fifty, maybe sixty plus schooners?”

“Shoulda let the drone sink.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

The question gives Petrie pause for thought.

“Reckon not. They followed it here because they wanted it. They’d assume we had it and attack anyway. We were screwed from the get-go.”

“That we were. Bad day. We’ll head out, find a hub to hide beneath.” Cassius looks out to the ocean, already working out which is closest. “Figure out what to do with that drone once we’re secure. Bring Volk in on it.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Her damn name’s on it,” Cassius says. “I want to know why.”

“I don’t know about trusting her to tell the truth.” Petrie’s talking more about his own gullibility here. He desperately wants to have been right about her, because if he was wrong…

“I don’t intend to give her license to lie,” his Captain tells him, with a look grim enough to convince. Cassius is rarely angry, even more rarely violent, but when his crew are endangered you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of him. “Now what say we get this ship to safety? Nearest hub is sou’east and five hours at full knot.”

“Cape Town Hub. Aye, Captain.”

Petrie jumps from the lookout, yelling before he’s even hit the ropes, calling the orders for the course adjust and full speed ahead. They don’t have a lot of time. The schooners successfully sent their distress flares, small robotic units designed to shoot high and transmit location, condition, and a call for back up.

Doubtless Pentecost has the
Ark
turned in their direction even as the
Resurrection
turns to run. Petrie tries not to think about what’ll happen if they’re not signal dark and out of scope-view quick smart. He knows Pentecost well, and he’s never stopped being afraid of him.

If he weren’t wearing his Bengs, Shock would be dragging his feet like a six-year-old on the way to the dentist right now. This bit right here, this whole delivery in person, face-to-face, in the
physical
dimension as it were, is the reason why he sits up later than usual some nights in the redolent fart stench of old men sleeping, the snores like land ships scraping rock from the crust, and contemplates the positive values of starving. The general pros of homelessness. The benefits of possible mutilation and/or horrific death versus the warmth and safety of his cage. And often finds the margin of cons temptingly thin.

This time Mim wants to meet at a detox juice bar. Beyond bizarre. On a par with those nutbag conspiracy theorists hollering on street corners about the breaking of the world being aliens, or illuminati, or Japanese schoolgirls or some shit. Mim would never go on a detox in a million years, unless they changed the definition of the word entirely to somehow mean “filling your body with crap”. He used to marvel at Mim’s appetite for bad things. That was before he realized that those appetites were a litmus test for the acidic rot sloshing about on her insides.

The bar she’s chosen is one of those godawful kawaii-themed fishbowl places, so much pop-eyed, cutesy, frilled-and pastel-coloured crap plastered in every direction it’s like a giant amuse plushie walked in and exploded. Mim’s waiting outside, leant up against the glass, her suit reflecting garish bubblegum-coloured lettering in eye-watering kaleidoscope. Shock groans and covers his eyes.

“Fuck’s sake, Mim, turn it off. Going blind.”

“Hell no, wear these.” She hands him her sunnies.

He plonks them on. Normally he wouldn’t, but this is life-and-death shit. Points at the shop, unable to wipe a sneer from his face.

“You wanna actually go in there? For real?”

“Sure. I’m thirsty.”

“I was hoping this was an elaborate joke at my expense.”

She grins. “How you know it’s not, Shocking boy?” And she struts on in, a tiny, shapely mirror ball of kawaii cute.

Being Mim, she goes for the most obnoxious drink on the menu, a pink-and-yellow confection packed with edible glitter and sugar. If there’s any actual fruit in it, he’ll eat her sunglasses. He goes for the safe option: more of his favourite bitter green tea whizzed together with sharp apples and biting lime, tart enough to wake the dead. They take a quiet corner, padded with sheepskin and hidden by drooping silver nets. Soon as his arse hits fluff, Shock’s ready to shoot stats to her IM, but Mim’s IM is on lock. What?

“Unlock and let me dump this shit.”

She blinks at him, all innocence.

“This is not just a drop off. When have I ever had you drop off anywhere as tasteful as this?”

And here it is. There had to be something. Mim can never just be straightforward.

“What’s the job, Mim?”

“How do you know I have a job for you, Shocking boy? Could be I want to say hi, catch up, see how you’re doing. You still look frankly cadavarish. Could be I’m worried.”

He gulps down his drink, wishing the shots of caffeine were liquid bumps.

“Not you, Mim. You only ever want one of three things: flim, a fuck, or my help on a job. Considering how much you paid for the horror you’re currently ingesting and how broke you know I am, this is probably not about flim. I hear you’ve been hanging off Johnny Sez and he’s a man-whore, so that’s your fuck sorted. Only thing left’s a job.”

She hisses between neat little teeth hiding too well behind plump lips. So untrustworthy, the bite hidden behind the bark like that. Why didn’t he see it? Why does he still want the bite?

“Ooooh, harsh. But you happen to be a-one. I have need of a Haunt. And damn me if you ain’t the spookiest spook I know.”

“And?”

“This Olbax gig. Ostensibly I’m rumour milling. Spreading dissent. Call me Chinese Whisper etcetera etcetera, buuuuut, I might also be causing mayhem as a diversion. Gotta hunt down a little inside info some Olbax Corp is hogging to themselves and really shouldn’t be. It’s nice to share. I’ll need you to snag that info out. Eaaasy flim.”

“So. Olbax again.”

Mim’s eyes flick away, reflecting everything.

“Not exactly.”

“Where then?”

“Paraderm.”

She’s spoken so quietly it takes a moment to burrow through ear holes and hit brainmeat.

“You can go fuck yourself.”

Which is rude enough to piss her right off, but he’s too fucked off to care. Paraderm are major Corp. Make big cheese look like crumbs. Guarantee she’s working for someone who wants him dead. Probably why she called. Mim loves nothing more than to poke a wounded animal. Needing her is such bullshit, his kingdom for another option.

Mim stirs the jaunty plastic spoon left in the nauseating crap in her glass and smiles.

“Douse your panties, Shocking boy; calm any thoughts of imminent death. This is Office Fauna only. Level seven, eight at a push.”

He’s not convinced. “Really? Sure now?”

She shrugs. “As much as I can be. Going on good intel.”

Fauna levels in Paraderm are nothing; Shock could do it in his sleep. Doesn’t necessarily mean he should. Sleepwalking can be dangerous. So it comes down to what it always does. And here’s him pretending he has a choice, just to avoid showing his desperation.

“How much?”

“Five K.”

Shock chokes. “Are you kidding me? For hitting
Paraderm
? What percent is that?” Knowing her it’s likely to be far less than fifty, which is another gyp, way worse than the last, considering she can’t do shit without his in.

She looks defensive. The only time you ever see anything like convincing emotion on Mim’s face is when money is involved. Rather, the unpleasant task of her giving money to someone else, even for a job well done. He imagines it pains her, which makes him want to smile.

“Thirty,” she says eventually, unwilling.

He bets himself fifty flim she was thinking about lying. Why didn’t she? Maybe she’s realized that he’s getting tired of this. Tired of her. Or maybe she just really needs this job done. Who the fuck is she working for? Ah well, not his problem. All he has to do is snag the info, hand it over, take his flim and go. And he can afford to push a little too, because no way anyone else will take so little, they’ll want 60/40 minimum for a Paraderm job.

“If thirty’s it, you can look elsewhere.”

They lock gazes, and if he’s not mistaken Mim wants to argue, but he can smell the ball in his court already. Sure enough she rips the spoon out of her drink, snaps it in two, and chucks it on the table.

“Fine. Have it your way. Fifty/fifty. Eight K. You’re killing me here. Fucking homicide.”

“You want those stats now?”

“Give. Your flim’s in the usual box. I do wish you’d be sensible and get a cred account.”

Refusing to dignify that with a response, he flings the stats into her drive and tries not to laugh as it snaps locked behind them. Rare that he ever gets one up on Mim. He should be suspicious, instead he’s hoping with all his heart she’s tit-deep in the same shit she forced him to drown in. Black hearted that might be, but that’s all he’s got left after loving her—a torso full of necrotic meat.

Besides, she’s long overdue on collection of all the bad karma she’s accrued. Gotta be a mountain of that somewhere with her name torn deep into the core, ragged and bleeding foul waters. So casual, his Mim, in her malice. “
Crime’s where the money is
,” she’d said, trailing her nail down his cock. “
You want to get enough to get back to Sendai, Shocking boy, you’re going to need to commit to crime
.”

Translated from Mim-speak this meant taking a job from one crime lord and undercutting. Easy, right? Well, yeah. Unless said crime lord happens to be Li Harmony, who’s not just a raving psychopath but an Archaeologist. You can’t cheat an Archaeologist; their speciality is forensic exploration of info. If there’s an info needle someone needs to find, there’s not a haystack large enough to hide it from an Archie.

He’s a Haunt though, right? Figured he could use his own ghosty skills to hide shit from her. Piece of piss. So yeah, he did the job, liberating the San Sebastian locked data-nodes the Grey Cartel were planning to smuggle up to Chicago Hub. Weeded out a few odd-numbered stacks Mim said he could sell on for, quote “a fucking fortune”—and got caught.

Woke up one morning to a knock on the door of his apartment-share with Mim, the bed empty and cold beside him. And why didn’t he wonder about that right away? Because he’s a fool. Opened the door to find Li Harmony standing there, picking her nails with a stiletto knife, those black, empty eyes incurious. She started quoting serial numbers and asking dead polite, more dead than polite to be honest, where they might be. Thing is, he’d already sold them on, had the flim hidden in the apartment behind him. Cue major panic. When she stopped picking her nails and made to step over the threshold he lost it; every last iota of common sense.

Slammed the door in her face and started grabbing everything he could to shove in his bag, the door making these hideous fucking grinding noises with every pound of her boot. Last thing he did before splitting was to go fetch the flim from its hiding place—but it was gone. Stupidest thing right there is that, at the time, he thought nothing of it. Supposed Mim had taken it to put in a cred account, aggravated as ever with his obsession for physical flim. He still trusted her then.

He escaped out the back window just as the door slammed open, and hit the streets. Home free, because even Archies can’t hack a Haunt’s location when they don’t have a Mim to spot them by. He searched for Mim for days. Even snuck back to the apartment, hoping to catch her there. Finally found out she’d taken a two-week job on a hub the day before Li came for him. Could’ve been a coincidence, of course it could. Except it wasn’t.

He saw her in one of her favourite clubs when she came back, decked out in brand-new Imp gear, doubtless bought with the flim he’d made from those stolen nodes and laughing it up with one of her Imping cronies. Went over to talk and found her blithely unconcerned. Yeah she knew about Li, bad luck right? Had he seen their apartment? What a mess. She knew he’d get away though; she had faith in her baby’s survival instincts.

That’s when he clocked the reason for the cold bed. That’s when he
got
it. You can’t describe hurt like that, it has no boundaries. He finished with her then and there. The only bit of dignity he managed to scrape out of the whole thing.

He’s lost it since though, having to work with her, aware the only reason she doesn’t go to someone else is because she won’t have to pay him as much. And all Mim’s ever said about almost getting him killed, when he IM’d the question, too fucked on Bumps and alcohol to do the sensible thing and leave it all alone?
You’re alive, aren’t you?

No point trying to explain to her the mere seconds between that statement being true and being false. It’s not that she doesn’t care. She can’t. Mim is all about Mim, and though he’s made several of his own unbelievable mistakes since, stuff so stupid he can’t even begin to parse how he came to do it, his dearest Mimic, Mim the Merciless, has had both hands deep in the cards he’s been dealt. Maybe one day he’ll stop letting her deal them, maybe one day he’ll get smart, care enough about himself to say
enough
.