Escapology (6 page)

Sighing, Amiga shoves down the sick feeling and strolls after her. As she draws alongside, she takes the woman’s arm as if they’re close friends. The woman jumps, violently, and Amiga hugs her in to conceal it as best she can, carefully steering her away from curious eyes.

“Can’t blame you for trying to buy a seat on a transport,” she says, trying to be kind. “But your boss made the mistake of crossing my boss. That’s not something you run away from. You can’t shake Twist Calhoun.”

“A minute earlier and I would’ve,” the woman replies, her voice steady despite the pallor of her skin.

“Twist would still send me up to finish the job. He likes all his loose ends neatly tied. Better that you just let it be over and done with instead of always looking over your shoulder.”

“You wouldn’t say that if it was you.”

“No. But it isn’t, is it? And there’s nowhere someone like you can hide from something like me.”

Amiga’s IM chimes softly.

It’s not Twist, he wouldn’t chime, he’d just start talking. Whoever it is can bloody well wait. This woman was just a liaison, innocent really, and she’s minutes away from having to kill her gruesomely enough to satisfy her boss’s particular tastes. She doesn’t want to talk to
anyone
.

Her IM chimes again.

Does she imagine the insistent note? She opens the link, feeling super impatient.

Busy,
she snaps.

Amiga, you’re always busy. Look, I need to talk to you about that job. You promised you’d at least hear me out.

Shit. It’s Deuce, her ex. Her choice not his and, oh boy, is there a whole fucking novel of unspoken words between them about
that
. He’s also one of the leaders of the Hornets, a J-Hack crew of Fails and dropouts who let her live among them.

Despite making her home with them, Amiga will never be a Hornet. Because if she wants to work with them, she has to stop working for Twist. No negotiation. But there’s no fucking chance of that. They think hating a job makes it easy to walk away. Amateurs.

Given all that, Deuce wanting to talk about a job is super suspicious. Means their job must have something to do with Twist, and that makes her pissy. How is it fine for them to judge what she does, but okay to take advantage of what she does if it’s useful to them?

Fuck. That. Shit.

Yeah, yeah. Later. Working. Bye.

Cutting him off, she pops in a quick temporary block—he’ll only call back if she doesn’t. The woman seems to have taken Amiga’s silence as a reason to relax. Why are people so stupid?

“You could let me go if you wanted to. Please,” she says now, low and urgent.

Amiga can’t stand it when they start bargaining; it always ends with her hunting down a bar and getting categorically wasted. And doesn’t that go down well with her adopted family? Not like the Hornets never get drunk is it? But no, when
she
gets drunk, that is one hell of a subject for endless discussion. She’d rather eat her own face than discuss any of this with anyone, including her target.

“Your boss would never have to know. I’d just disappear. Board a land ship,” the woman continues, pleading.

Oh
hell
. Amiga closes her eyes briefly, they’re gritty, all sting and itch and feeling far too big for the sockets. Tired or sad? Either. Both.
Enough
. She has so had enough. Dragging the woman into an alley, she takes a small blunt metal bar out of her jacket and simultaneously rams the woman into the wall and the bar into her temple. It’s a precise way of killing, quick and clean—but you’ve got to do it with enough force to hear that crunch of bone shattering, driving deep into delicate brain matter.

The woman jerks, begins to twitch. Amiga holds tight until her body falls still. Slotting the bar back into her pocket, Amiga pushes two fingers into the pulse point at the woman’s neck. Irregular flutters. She closes her eyes again. Hugs the woman’s limp body against her chest and holds one hand firm over mouth and nose.

Counts to a hundred.

At thirty she feels the extra weight drop into the bones and viscera. Tension is all gone. Life is gone. But she holds on, counting, more for herself than anything else. When her stomach’s settled, and it will, she’ll take out her knife and do what needs doing.

Her IM opens.

You’re blocking me now?

Fuck! I’m working, Deuce.
Why does her life keep doing this?

I’m sorry, but this is important.

This is hella awkward is what it is.

The dead woman is a dead weight, haha. Her arms are already aching. Whatever. She should hurt. She should feel something.

Amiga.

She leans against the wall, giving in. What the hell. It’s not like she’s got anything she’d rather do and this alley is not a short cut, it’s a filthy, stagnant dumping ground. No one will accidentally stray down here to catch her holding a corpse. She has time.

Fine. Talk.

Thank you. I think you know why we need you on this job.

Yup.

I think you also know we wouldn’t ask unless it was important.

She sighs.
I do.

It’s for Da Fellows.

Slip activist numero uno? I thought he’d gone signal dark?

So did we.

So now she’s intrigued. The Hornets know all kinds of stuff they don’t tell her. For safety—theirs, not hers. As if she’d ever dream of breathing a word about them to Twist.

He’s been involved in some deep shit and he needs our help.

Hornets specifically?

Yeah.

Because of me?

Mostly. Also because we’re damn good and he can trust us.

Right. So what does he need from me? Or rather, what does he need from my boss?

We have to catch a drone and re-program it. You can help with that.

Um…
Why is he stalling? That’s not like Deuce at all. He’s a straight-talker, not a dissembler.
What does Fellows need
me
to do, Deuce?

Deuce makes this sound like a throat clearing.

He needs you to break into Twist’s vault and retrieve a data packet.

She bursts out laughing.

What?

The laughter carries on until it suddenly clicks that she’s for real standing here, leaning on the wall, busting a gut, with a dead body drooping in her arms. Disrespectful much. That sobers her up good and quick, which puts the right emphasis on the only logical response.

No. Categorical. You can absolutely fuck off, Deuce. Fellows can fuck off. Twist caught me doing something like that I’d end up in the vault myself, in the display tanks.

I get that it’s a lot to ask, but…

No, you really don’t,
she interrupts because, wow, he hasn’t a clue what he’s asking because if he did, she cannot believe he would.
I won’t do it. Do not ask me again. Now I have work to do, so do me the courtesy of leaving me the hell alone.

There’s a hurt silence, she knows he’s hurt because she knows Deuce. She hates that she knows him so well, that implies investment, and admitting how she was once invested in ‘Amiga and Deuce’ as a thing aches like cold in the bones high on the mono. He doesn’t bother to reply, he’s just gone, which also lets her know he’s deeply disappointed in her too.

She’s surprised to find how much that upsets her, but the weight in her arms gives her a convenient patsy for unwanted emotions. Of course she’s upset. Why wouldn’t she be? Amiga hefts the dead woman, wondering if she can still do what she needs to. She was ready, but now she’s edgy,
emotional
, she’ll make a damn mess of everything. Surely she could just leave this poor bitch here instead of carving her up?

“Twist won’t know,” she whispers to the woman, who can’t hear, of course she can’t. “Will he?”

She’s never been brave enough to test the theory of Twist’s power to see through her. Maybe she could, sure, some day, but today is not that day. Today she has no energy for any more, and testing Twist’s patience is way beyond more. It’s too much. So she’s going to get this over and done with instead, like a good little Cleaner. Then she’s going to go the hell home, cry a lot, get drunk on that shitty beer slowly going lukewarm in her dodgy fridge and sleep for about a thousand hours.

And she’s definitely not going to talk to Deuce.

* * *

Fine as a rice noodle from a distance, the Mono writhes its way around the towering pinnacles of the city in what looks to the uninitiated like an incoherent tangle. Mono trains are slender and efficient. Operated by computers overseen from the Hive, the central nervous system of Slip, where the Hive Queens have absolute authority.

Amiga likes ants in general, but she hates the Queens. Theoretically they’re locked in Hive by Emblem, the key holding Hive to Slip to RL, but they’re clever and determined and every now and then they manage to find a way around Emblem into Slip. It’s never pretty. Before she saw for herself what they can do, she used to think it was some kind of cliché—the mad AIs. Now she knows better. A cliché is not so trite when it’s right there in the distance, huge enough to give you a nosebleed just looking at it, and trashing everything in its path.

Exhausted, she waits for an empty shoot and changes as it carries her up to the platform. Slipping into a streamlined, double-thickness orange jumpsuit and a pair of peacock-blue Bladers. Her work gear she stuffs into her empty backpack. She’ll have to chuck the damn thing like always. You can wash blood out in cold water but you still know it was there.

At the platform she waits under sputtering lights in the evening chill for the .351 to arrive. She’d have been on the track already given the chance, but with only minutes before this mono hits platform that’s asking to be catapulted off and thrown to the ground several hundred feet below. Not exactly how she wants to spend her evening, smearing her innards all over the pavement. She’s fucked up, not fucking suicidal.

The mono’s approaching whine fills the station, setting off a scramble for readiness that’s guaranteed full-on entertainment. Monos are sardine cans from five forty-five P.M. to eleven P.M. at night and this mass of straining idiots might as well be clamouring for mummification as the .351 comes haring into the station in a whirl of wind and leaves.

There are no trees this high up. The mono brought them all the way from Sendai, where trees are everywhere, and almost all of them real. Amiga loves how wind has a mind of its own, how it seems to pull the leaves along purely for fun. There’s a stampede for the doors, a scuffling and thumping as passengers fight for a place to sit or stand before the whine builds, accelerates, and the mono explodes out of the station in a burst of stunning speed.

Amiga’s ready.

She leaps, catches the back draft and, as her blades touch down on the track and the magnets activate, she’s crouched, her legs moving fast, keeping her within sight of the mono’s red-and-white striped backside as it practically flies to the next station. Between the faceless visages of bright ’scrapers and dull ’rises, too fast to see her reflection in the glass as anything more than a blur, she holds steady in the mono’s wake through Hangoon and Norii, neither station on the .351’s stop schedule.

Next stop is Ginzo, but Amiga’s not going that far. The track runs through Sakkura, right through the middle of several ’scrapers, disappearing with hollow pops of sound into long, dimly lit and treacherously narrow tunnels lined with the grimy windows of cramped apartments. The mono does this all over Foon Gung, where it couldn’t go around or between, it goes through; and some tunnels hide secrets. Her ’rise, Jong-phu, is one of them.

Under the rails, in the secret space between mono and building, are a series of squats cobbled together by the Hornets. Home. Reaching out, her hand encased in a thick, plastic cast with a catchlock set into the wrist, Amiga hooks onto a zip wire as she flies past, whipping off the track and spinning down into the waiting arms of a webbed sling, curling her body to minimize impact.

Unhooking herself, she grabs the bottom of the sling and vaults out, heading through cramped walkways to the hovel she calls her own. On the way she yanks at the velcro fastenings of the glove, dying to get it off. It’s like welding steel around your arm, but it’s the only safe way to get off the track.

All the homes here are assembled from huge 3D-printed parts and brightly coloured, though it’s hard to see in the meagre lighting. The brainchild of a design genie called Liberty, printed homes have become ubiquitous amongst under-mono communities, transforming them from shantytowns to neat, albeit crowded plastic villages. Everything modernizes eventually.

Amiga’s cabin is bright yellow. Neon in fact, to match her personality—a joke she regrets every time she sees it practically glowing in the dark. Sometimes she’s too full-on snark even for herself. She hops up on to the side ladder, scrambles to the roof and opens the hatch she never remembers to lock, throwing her backpack and then herself down into darkness. Terrific.

“Oi, on. I’m home.”

Her lights are supposed to be movement activated but her sensors are on the fritz and she hasn’t the flim for new ones just yet, nor has she quite gotten round to twisting the arm of a fellow Hornet to fix them for free.

Turning to lean on her kitchen and take her bladers off, because she might need to cry and get drunk right now but there’s no way that’s happening with these clunky-arse things still on her feet, she finally looks at her meagre half lounge, and groans before she can stop herself. Sat on her sofa, a thinly padded ugly old green thing she can’t quite believe cost as much as it did, is Deuce, his arms crossed and his least impressed face welded on.

Tall and broad for an Asian thanks to some Nordic blood on his mother’s side, he’s got his father’s poker face, with eyes like a hundred flim chips, and his mother’s blonde hair. When they were together she called him her Viking Samurai.

“So,” he says, “wanna tell me about your day?”