Escapology (7 page)

Stellar. She’s so not up to dealing with this shit right now.

“It was work. That’s it.”

“Uh-huh.”

He doesn’t look convinced and Amiga has this unbearable urge to rifle through her pack and chuck the jacket she was wearing earlier in his face. Blood would probably make her point, but that would be petty. Beyond petty in fact. Especially as she’s fully aware that’s not what he means.

This is part of that whole novel between them, the one she put an abrupt The End to, imagining having all this fall apart and go away would make it easier to breathe. Why it hasn’t is a mystery she’s yet to begin trying to figure out. People give up on you when you fuck up, don’t they? They give up on you when you push them away. Why hasn’t he? Why haven’t the Hornets?

“Look, I don’t want to talk shop, it only gives you an excuse to bug me about my job, and all that’s going to do is piss me off, so can I get a rain check on the heart to fucking heart?” He opens his mouth but she holds up a hand, unnerved by how hard it’s shaking. “No more about Fellows either. It’s no. That’s it.”

“Amiga. It’s important.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Deuce. Why? Why is it important that I put my life on the line for some fucking hack I don’t know?”

“Fellows needs this thing in Twist’s vault. Twist doesn’t even know it’s there. He needs us to send it to someone, and if they don’t get it… Bad shit, Amiga. Bad shit.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes.”

“And you believed him?”

“
Yes
.”

“Idiot.”

He leans forward, holding her with those black eyes. So fucking sincere.

“You know I’m not. Fellows is legit. If he says bad things, he means
bad
, Amiga. He’s been signal dark. Someone of his calibre does not go SD for nothing.”

“But he won’t tell you the nature of the bad shit?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t do it.”

“Then we will.”

Amiga gapes at him, utterly aghast.

“Are you
kidding
me? You wouldn’t stand a fucking chance. You’d all die!”

He sits back and ugh, he’s looking at her like she’s gone and been an arsehole again.

“So you do it then. Either way it’s happening. He needs this and we’re going to get it for him.”

Amiga turns around and punches the wall, which is a dumb idea. Turns out 3D-printed walls really fucking hurt.

“Fuck’s sake. Amiga!”

Deuce leaps up and grabs her hand and holy smoke coming out of her ears that’s too much up close and personal for her to handle right now. She yanks her hand away and backs up into the kitchen, but that dumb as a stump ex of hers just keeps on following. Starts rifling over her head for any kind of first-aid kit, which he finds in seconds despite her looking for two whole hours the other week and finding sweet FA.

Slamming the kit down on the counter, his mouth set in a grim line, he sets to cleaning up the gash across her knuckles and gluing it shut. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t breathe the whole time.

“Could you, just for once, not be you?” he asks when he’s done.

She folds her arms, closing off.

“No. And you’re not doing the job.”

He folds his arms, mirroring. Bastard.

“I am.”

“No. I am.” And she only says it because he
can’t
, they can’t. “You,” she pokes the air viciously, “are going to make sure I come out of it alive.”

He says nothing at first, just holds her in that black gaze, suspended. Space would probably be kinder to her lungs.

“If you’re sure,” he says finally, quietly.

“I’m sure.” She’s only sure that
they’re
not doing it, but that’s sure enough.

Deuce nods. “Thank you.”

He heads for the table, no doubt eager to go and get the Hornets et al up to speed on her involvement. She better get free meals after this shit.
Lots
of them. Never mind that she already does. They all make sure she’s looked after when she lets them. Especially Deuce, who has a new fucking girlfriend and probably shouldn’t be so considerate. And there she is, all pissy again.

“Don’t thank me,” she snaps as he leaps for the hatch and starts to climb out. “I’m only doing it because I think you’d fuck it up.”

He looks down at her, his face half in shadow, but there’s that disappointment again, blazing away. The bridge smoldering behind her.

“I know.”

Stuck on a sidewalk swarming with meat suits, Shock stalks the edge for a safe place to cross a freeway locked into insanity mode. He’s about ready to commit genocide. Mothball pockets require austerity measures, cheap-ass Slip shops whose only option to jack the Slip is manual and likely to fry half his workable neurones. Unlucky for him, the cheapest Slip shops are in Hanju, his home district, a place he expends considerable energy avoiding. To top it all off, he has to run this one unmedicated. Too risky otherwise. Dandy, just freaking dandy.

He sneers into the traffic, earning a particularly rigid middle finger from some ugly-freak-looking taxi driver. Shock flips the finger back, because the bastard likely deserves it, then throws himself across the freeway, frantically dodging bumpers and praying he can dodge anyone he shares DNA with.

In Hanju proper, he’s surrounded by familiar narrow streets and dwarfed beneath calamitously high warrens of apartments. Built too close for comfort, the Hanju apartment blocks have been knocked together over the years, street by street, transforming their innards to some sort of over-populated rabbit warren. Even where they span the road, makeshift—and often residential—bridges have been constructed, joining the blocks together into one gigantic habitation maze; home leading into home with almost no privacy whatsoever.

Shock grew up cheek to jowl with neighbours as far as his eye could see. He still recalls the postmaster walking through his bedroom at six A.M. on the dot, yelling “
annyeong-haseyo
” to his mother in the kitchen and tossing her the morning paper and mail. Remembers struggling to survive in neighbourhoods of corridors crawling with other Korean brats who hated the very fact of his existence. Made it their business to corner him at every opportunity and pound their disapproval into his flesh.

He went to school with those selfsame brats in a schoolhouse created from thirteen apartments knocked together on the seventeenth floor, under the iron rule of their form teacher, Eun-ji, a forty-something mother of seven who was perpetually furious with the world and the most unnatural mother he ever met bar his own.

Pulling shaking hands through messy bi-coloured hair, he aims for the strands of memory beneath, attached by sinewy strings of scar tissue too tender to sever, too raw to bear. Growing up in the warren was the nine circles of hell and then some. If he could, if the future were populated by wonders the past promised and never fulfilled, he’d wipe the whole memory of his childhood clean away.

Back then he was considered some sort of demon-child. A pariah. As if centuries of once-forgotten superstition found a new home on his shoulders. A Min-seo who wanted to be a Min-jun, refusing to wear the sprigged cotton dresses her mother, Ha-eun, sewed from fabric bought from Cheongparo blockstreet market, and wondering what the hell her body was doing growing all the wrong goddamn parts. No one else understood the parts were wrong, they thought it was the mind.

Ha-eun spent a frightening portion of the meager wages she made washing floors and sewing clothes on quacks and crooks all over Korea-town and beyond, none of them Korean, all of them liars who promised to sweat, bleed, chant or coax by whatever means the demons from Min-seo’s mind. A good deal of the memories between three and twelve are coated in the sticky stench of incense and shot through with pain sharp as the scalpels used to carve egress for bad spirits.

It’s not hate he feels for Ha-eun precisely—the drugs deal with that—more a low-grade, seething sense of abandonment. Of having had the right to expect more and never getting it. His father, Hoon, was never more than background noise, a disappointed shadow haunting the corners of their rooms. Not a talkative man, he stopped trying to communicate altogether when his daughter insisted she was his son.

In the end, Min-seo was left to deal with the problem alone. That’s where luck, that arbitrary twister of chance, came in. Blessed with ability above the top 0.5% in Tech, little Min-seo was hired at nine by Fulcrum’s Outreach Programme, a sure-fire highway, barring any Psych-Fail issues, into Corp work. Such an achievement would have earned the forgiveness of her family if she hadn’t spent her wages on a gender reassignment.

Thing is, you learn a lot in the city; you learn that drugs can hide the worst hurts and exchanging wrong parts for right is only a matter of flim or cred. So that’s what little Min-seo did. At a mere twelve years of age, after two years of secret hormone treatment, and earlier than most surgeons would allow, Min-seo became the boy he always knew he was, re-christening himself Shock in an ironic nod to the reaction of the entire community at Hanju’s Songpa blockstreet.

Ha-eun refused to speak to her daughter-son ever again. Shock didn’t care; like father, like mother. It made no difference, just removed an aggravating frequency of motherly white noise corrupting his head. Having the right parts, being able to bear living inside himself, was more important. Even suffering to live in Korea-town after the change was a walk in the goddamn park by comparison to the alternative, but that didn’t stop him saving to get out.

Paid less than a tenth of the salary full-time adult employees could boast, and flat broke after the surgery, it took him another three years to escape the maze. He relocated to Sendai District, amongst the trees and towers, when he was fifteen and five months. He ended up there by sheer chance, a Slip search, but it was revelatory. Not only in the obvious ways: a room to himself, no postmaster, no beatings, no incense-triggered bad memories or accusatory silences. It was the sense of finally being at peace.

Sendai is where Shock discovered happiness, and even though he could only afford to be there two years in total, they were the best of his life. At seventeen, too old for the programme any more, he was transferred from Outreach plus PT Tech to FT Tech. His savings kept him in Sendai for six months, but then he was forced into student digs.

He’s been trying to get back to Sendai ever since.

Being back in Korea-town, too close for comfort to Songpa, not only unleashes feral pain locked deep inside his bones, it makes him feel a failure. And he is, in more ways than one. Sighing, Shock speeds up. He’s a long walk from his destination and doesn’t have flim to spare for a bus.

“Why in fuck did I have to go to that party? I fucking hate parties,” he mutters, huddling further into his jacket and pulling the tangled wreckage of his hair over his eyes, too recognizable by half. He often wanted to ask Ha-eun what the hell he’s doing with bright-blue eyes despite his oh-so-K parentage, but she’d have cried, and he’s never been able to stomach his mother’s tears.

Naebu blockstreet is where the good Slip shops can be found, deep within the maze of housing. It’s a little cold outside, enough for Shock to be shivering after such a long walk, and he’s almost relieved to be able to step into the muggy confines of the block. Almost.

Two seconds after pushing in through the crooked blue entrance, the shrieking objection of rusty hinges barely discernible over the varied noise of living within, and he’s suffocating, wishing he had enough flim to walk right back out, take the mono back to Henzu District and one of his usual shops. Walking into Naebu’s complicated labyrinth of corridors, staircases and home warrens is a lucid nightmare.

He expects to see his mother gazing at him from one of these slender staircases, ripe with all her simmering recrimination, never spoken but always present. It tainted the air around her, a miasma of bitterness like sweat, souring as it dried on her skin. He shudders and hurries forward into the maze.

Clueless as to where the Slip shops might be, he solicits the help of the first elder he encounters. An old man, too old to gauge, narrow eyes sunken into layers of deeply wrinkled fat, sat outside his door on a chair whose red plastic protests the weight of wide buttocks. Shock asks directions in Korean, the old Uncle responds in Engrish.

“Third floor, punk. Take blue stair, go right, first left, follow arrows. Whole row of Slip shops there.”

“Many thanks, old uncle.” Shock bows, on his manners, not wanting to invite undue attention.

The old uncle sticks out a trembling hand.

“Two flim for information.”

“Everyone’s on the make,” Shock mutters as he races up the blue stairs, already missing those two flim he really can’t afford. Fuck Mim, fuck Joon and fuck his idiotic goddamn self.

Shock finds the arrows as promised. Gaudy neon, they point to a row of Slip shops lit so bright he has to fumble out his shades to look at them. He chooses the shop whose name amuses him most: Na-ho’s Slip-porium.

“Help you?” Comes from a skinny little Gothster at the desk, chewing on a strand of green liquorice and maintaining the most outrageously complete air of disinterested cool.

“Need a cell.”

“Huh,
obv
. How long?”

“Five standards.”

“That’ll be eighteen eff.” Dangerously cool Gothster holds out a slim hand, fingers jointed in steel, the mesh under the skin of his palm clear in the strip lighting of the shop. Slip-gamer. Not a Master, his gear is nothing special, but Shock’s less interested in that than what Gothster just said. He’s not sure his ears are quite working.

“
Eighteen
? You’re shitting me, right?”

Cool Gothster stares.

“Where you been, down a hole or something? Fulcrum upped the price again the other week.”

“Ah.”

The other week Shock was still in a sling with tubes in every orifice. Might explain why this is news to him, and why his flim packet was so much slimmer than he’d thought. Fuck Fulcrum. Always and forever. Kamilla Lakatos created Fulcrum after the world broke, amidst the chaos of a vast population split between hubs, land ships and this last miserable piece of dry land.