Escapology (27 page)

Mim smiles to herself.

“I have a good memory.”

She might be smiling, feeling that little dart hit home in Johnny’s sudden, pointed silence, but it’s true. Shock did smell like that. It’s unnerving how extraordinarily clear her recollection is, as though his naked skin is under her nose: warm and covered in a light sheen of sweat, like disco glitter. He fucked like he danced. Dancing with him was her favourite thing once. She never told him that. Never give the enemy ammunition.

Mim scans the inner city again, zooming in, on the hunt for that flash of green hair she knows so well. Not many of her contacts and none of her friends, not even Sez, know that Mim’s got a lot more in these eyes of hers than a simple glamour mod. No point having surgery done for the one thing, so Mim had pretty much everything available, including what the surgeon called “sniper-vision”. It’s so precise she can count the feathers on a pigeon strutting drunkenly down the sidewalk five blocks away.

Her drive connection is wide open too, in hopes of his block being comped so she can sniff out the signal she imagines will smell uniquely like Shock, because she was only half joking about that. That’s Mim’s secret superpower, or so she likes to call it, stealing the phrase from Shock and his so-called Slip superpowers. She smells signals. Her drive has a form of synaesthesia—a glitch in all honesty, one that’s turned out useful—transmuting all signals in her immediate location and any she hunts for into scents.

Sez is like copper, giving her a constant reminder that he’s not for keeps, just a transition. An easy stop between Shock and… what? Where exactly does a girl go after cutting off the only S.O. who felt like a limb? It was supposed to be a swift, painless amputation. Intention versus reality; always surprising when they diverge.

She looks at the ground, hundreds of feet below her overhanging bladers, and swallows a smile whole, like bad medicine. Synchronicity. When she met Shock she was perched in a window at Tech, smoking a purple psy, her favourite, for the sharp edges of the buzz, the clarity of the visions. Her bladers were red then. They matched her bodysuit. Used to be her favourite thing to wear.

Who the hell was she then? And who is she now? Hard to tell. She wore those selfsame bladers the other day, to the party. Was that on purpose? Was she trying to remind him for him or for her? Mim carefully examines the motivation, and finds it exactly as she suspected. She grimaces into the bitter wind. Ugh. Humiliating.

“Messy,” she mutters around the psy, spewing smoke into an uncaring grey sky, and caramel invades her incipient attack of self-approbation. The faintest whiff. Trailing behind it is the winsome bouquet of shy violets.

Both there, brief and all but intangible, then gone.

Mim tilts her head, throws her connection open even further, the tissue around her drive singing pain. She ignores it. Strains. There. Again. A ghost of scent, little puffs of it, like smoke signals. Fitting for a Haunt. He’s still in Slip, just out of Hive most likely, and already broadcasting. Way to go Li and Ho. She realizes she’s grinning. Not for her victory, scenting him, or theirs for cracking the block. For his. He did it. The crazy bastard did it. He hit Hive, cracked Core, jacked Emblem. Survived the Queens.

“You crazy cunt,” she yells into the wind. “You crazy fucking awesome cunt. Fucking
hell
but I hate you!” She chucks her psy down between her feet and mutters furiously, “Don’t you realize I’ve got to screw you over again now.”

As if in answer, his scent comes back at her, sharp and clear. Like he’s standing next to her.

She shouts over her shoulder, “Sez, get a shake on. He’s out.”

From her belt she unsnaps a mobile rappelling clip. It’s a small, matt-black, tear-shaped unit with a folded grapple hook and integral wrist-strap, concealing a long reel of nylon wire strong enough to carry three times her weight. She whips the grapple open and flicks it at the edge, securing it; shoves one hand through the loop and vaults.

Over the side, as the wire reels out, Mim aims her bladers at the wall and braces, whooping as she picks up speed. Sez flies over the edge before she’s a fifth of the way down, his blue psy careening past her ear. Bastard.

By the time they hit the floor, side by side, Mim’s got a lock on her boy.

“Gangway,” she says to Sez, setting off in that direction.

He looks impressed.

“Not far. Good call to wait here.”

Mim smiles to herself. Self-satisfied. It doesn’t last. Now she’s adjusted to having Shock’s signal clear in her feed, it’s obvious something’s very wrong. She’s never felt a Haunt before today, only smelt one, but Haunts aren’t this different. She has proof. Context. Up there on the roof, catching the first clear shot of his signal, he was normal. The usual bright, strong signal anyone of his Tech level might project. Now he’s going bug-eye and fast, scary fast. A mixture of interference and high-pitched feedback from some sort of pressure, gradually mounting.

With every pound of her foot on the sidewalk his signal becomes more scrambled and unstable, almost like her rhythm is compounding it. For a second she wants to stop running, until logic face-punches stupidity, leaving her free to wonder what in holy hell is going on in his drive. Is he about to explode? He’s vibrating hard enough. If he blows he takes her ticket out of Shimli with him.

“
Shit!
”

“What?”

“Shock’s in trouble. His signal’s gone bug-eye. Massive internal reverb. I think he might blow”

“Emblem?”

“Doubtless.”

“What do we do?”

“Find him, shut him down. If he’s unconscious his drive will go into sleep mode.”

Sez nods and they kick it up a gear, Mim’s bladers resounding like bullets. She’s listening hard as they run, following Shock as he reels down the street. Until he stops. Locked as she is into his signal, Mim stops dead with him.

Sez clocks it ten metres ahead and spins on his heels. Yells, “What’s up?”

“I… don’t know.”

In her head she feels Shock’s pain, his surprise, as it reels down the signal feed. There’s so much pressure; his signal’s inflating like a balloon, fit to burst. In unintended sympathy, Mim braces, waiting for the explosion.

It never comes.

His signal stills. Calm as water. And begins to unravel. Two small portions reel away, like thread, and rebuild into two alternate signals. Separate but the same.

Not one Shock: three, all interconnected, their signal reverberating between them. Not in ugly feedback blare. Symphonically. Three melodic lines forming to a song. Got to be Emblem’s work again, some sort of fracturing of Shock’s personality. Drive D.I.D. So perfect though, not the insane mess she’d expect from this sudden, wanton breakage.

“
Mim!
”

Mim realizes Sez is shaking her shoulder, calling her name. She goes to shout at him, furious. Stops, seeing his face. He points at the ’scraper screens.

There’s Shock, in full HD. Swimming around him is Shark, his self-made killer avi. Seventeen feet of ferocious Great White. There’s Puss too, slithering up his leg toward his chest. Avis out of Slip, golden hologrammatic ghosts, as bizarre IRL as a land ship would be in Slip. Unreal. For a moment Mim’s convinced it’s the psy, rolling out hallucinations inside her eyeballs, then sound explodes in her ears as she stops listening to Shock’s feed and focuses on the screen.

People are screaming, shouting, a storm of hysteria with Shock the frozen centre. Finally, he seems to grok the impressive fuckery of his situation, and with Shark punching an escape route through scattering bodies, he runs for it, his face white, those baby blues shoved aside by pupils the size of plates. The camera zooms in, dramatic, making black holes of them and falling inside.

Drone sirens enter the mix, high up, and the screams of the crowds converge into bedlam. Full-on riot. Some trying to go after Shock, most running in any other direction and falling over each other. There’s blood on the sidewalk, discarded shoes, a couple of bodies collapsed like puppets, unconscious. Casualties to the chaos.

Mim and Sez share a look, and they’re off, Mim tracking Shock like a blood hound. Shock just became a bullseye, and if he’s not in their hands soon, he’ll be in the wrong hands, and the Harmonys will remove theirs. They burst out onto the street Shock exited a mere five minutes ago, awash with onlookers flooding the scene to rubberneck now the drama’s over.

Above them the screens replay the same scene over and over. Mim pauses to watch, having missed the moment of truth. It’s beautiful. He’s beautiful. Golden eyes weaving sea creatures into the rain-speckled air like some Tech Freak wizard. She wants to touch them, experience their golden skin crackling like static against her palm. Of course, after she does what she’s got to do, he’ll never come near her again. But at least she won’t be in Shimli.

Teeth bared, she turns from the screens and elbows on through the crowds, shoving aside well-dressed inner-city socialites like ninepins. Nips into the tight maze of alleys between ’scrapers, too far behind Shock for comfort, and there are no short cuts here, no easy way through, even if they rappelled up and used the roofs.

“What direction?” Sez shouts from behind, muffled as he lights another psy.

“None particular. He’s freaking out.” Bitten out. She’s mad at herself for stopping to watch the screens. Time wasted. Fucking stupid.

“Can you feel it?”

Mim nods. His signal’s like a beacon to her now. Port in the storm. Clear enough to differentiate between the parts of his new triumvirate signal. Shark keen as a knife blade, dangerous in her mind, its part of the signal has teeth, no surprises there. Puss is complex, a cat’s cradle of interweaving lines, a puzzle. She wants to hold it in her hands and play with it. But there’s something else in that complex weave. Gobsmacking. It makes her laugh aloud.

“Oh, Shocking boy,” she mutters. “What will you do?”

In the midst of Shark and Puss flares her Shocking boy, sulphur-bright and familiar as his face, his skin. His signal is a riot of panic, confusion and fear. He’s struggling to adjust. She can’t judge. She’d be the same. Avis IRL for fuck’s sake. It’s something out of an anime V-sim. Crazy. Abandoning the idea of catching him up in this warren of streets, Mim simply keeps track as he veers from one narrow alley to another. He’s lost his pursuers for the time being, they’re searching all the wrong places.

“Why don’t they track his signal?” Sez shouts as the drones come close and fly off, apparently having found no sign.

“Two important facts they’re missing,” she yells, patient for once with Sez’s inability to think laterally. “One, he’s a Fail. Unregistered. No ID to find unless they think to look in the Fail records, and they won’t. Two, he’s a Haunt, and this is the first time he’s
ever
been signal loud. To them his signal’s diffuse, spread over a wide area, I only found him because I knew what to look for to pinpoint him. Pretty sure other interested parties will home in soon, but we’re in the front of this race. All we need to do is keep following, and catch him when he stops.”

It’s like Shock’s listening in, because the moment she says that, he does. Mim tries to triangulate the easiest route to his position. There isn’t one. So she just keeps running. They’ve got a little time. With all the Slip shops in the Gung to pick from, the others would assume he’d go somewhere like Korea-town. One of the cheaper shops, hidden in the labyrinthine innards of the blocks. Or maybe somewhere in Sakkura’s malls. They don’t know him like she does.

Shock keeps tabs on every Slip shop in the Gung, including several high-profile outlets in the inner city. Unadvertized. Rarely used. Mim knows they exist because he told her, and her instinct to wait here has given her the advantage. It won’t last long, not with Shock on every news feed, every channel, but it’s enough she hopes to land their fish and his surprising new companions.

At full speed, Mim veers into the alley where Shock’s sheltering, in time to see him disappear out the other side, way in the distance.

“
Fuck!
”

Should she call out? No, Shock would run faster. Besides, he’s gone. All she can do is follow. Then it registers. Where’s Puss? Where’s
Shark
? Back in his flash? Recalling the footage from the screens Mim discards that option wholesale. Nothing comes out of your flash that catastrophically only to be so easily forced back in. And his signal is still odd. Out of key. Warped. Pushed out of true by the presence of Emblem. Probably there’d be no room left for avis even if he could put them back. In which case, why is she still running?

Way past the inlet Shock was using as a hidey-hole, Mim slams on the brakes, trying to go from sprint to dead still before she ends up shark bait. Bladers aren’t as easy to control as normal boots, and they’re categorically not meant for running. She slides, falls hard on her arse, the impact clacking her teeth together. Her bodysuit, slippery enough as it is, skids on the rain. Frantic to stop and hide, Mim slams her hands down, shredding skin, biting out a curse as several fingers pop out of their joints, and slithers to an ugly halt.

“
Madre de dios
,” she breathes, dredging up long forgotten words from her early childhood, when her father’s father was still alive and trying to keep something of his heritage present in his grandchildren.

Rising to her feet, she carefully wipes half-denuded palms on her thighs, smearing rain, filth and blood all over them. Her popped fingers hurt like hell, but they’re a small price to pay. She turns, gesturing at Sez to stop, stay put. He’s way behind. Sailor boy still isn’t up to speed on dry land. The look of confusion the stupid psy-baked donkey rocks at her frantic signalling deepens to horror as sirens wail in the near distance and Shark surges out of the inlet.

Casting a bright golden glow that swallows everything in sight, Shark powers straight at her, its mouth ever widening. Why can’t she run? She tries to run, tries so very hard, but her legs don’t seem to work. They’ve quit on her, the skiving fucks. From somewhere beyond Shark’s tail, she hears Sez shouting, but she can’t work out what he’s saying over the roaring in her head. Probably “run” “get the hell out of there” “fucking
move
” everything she’s saying to herself, until it’s too late to act any more. Shark’s upon her.