SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) (14 page)

Trip could fall, but the empire he’s built would remain. The goons know enough to replicate the success of this operation without him, and will move forward just as eagerly under the control of another. Criminals are so predictably fickle that way.

Silver makes a mental note of their faces. You never know when it might come in handy to have a reliable source of explosives.

Without warning, Trip lays his hands against Alice’s flesh and shoves her down into the tattoo chair.

“Sit,” he barks afterwards. “Relax. It’s easier if you relax.”

“You have pain killers,” Silver reminds him. “Don’t your clients get the courtesy of that, at least?”

“We try our best not to kill them. That’s about as courteous as it gets.” He motions for another man to come closer. “Prep her,” he orders.

The man, a middle-aged scruff with an electronic collar around his neck, does as he’s told and ties Alice’s wrist down to the chair, against her will. The collar, pried from the neck of a dead Jade, no doubt, marks him as Trip’s property. While he swabs Alice’s inner wrist with a solution of watered down iodine, Trip inserts the crusty black tag from the drawer into a slot in a laptop computer. The portable tag programmer is plugged into the laptop on the other side, through a USB cord.

With a few swift hacks, Trip changes as much data on the tag as he’s able to. That includes: name, age and photograph. That’s the only data on the tag not safely tucked away behind an Omega firewall and the most sophisticated encryption software known to man. For the picture, he tilts a webcam in Alice’s direction and snaps a quick shot of her startled face. Exploiting his knowledge of computers, he digitally alters the image to a neutral expression and changes the background to the standard Omega mottled grey backdrop.

Alice reaches for Silver’s hand as the owned scruff bends over her with a scalpel. He tries to steady a badly shaking hand by clamping his other hand around his wrist, but it does little to help. Silver hopes he just had one cup of coffee too much, but fears it may be one shot of heroin too little. Could be nerves, she supposes, but he must’ve done this a thousand times before, and the scalpel’s blade testifies to that; still covered in the remnants of those who have passed along its edge before.

He makes the cut, a bead of sweat appearing on his brow. Alice squeals and turns away, tears and fear in her eyes. Spreading her skin apart between his thumb and forefinger, her blood begins to spill out over the arm of the chair, dripping down onto the floor at the scruff’s feet.

Right on cue, Trip hands him the newly programmed tag and the scruff has to try three times to push it inside Alice’s wrist. The first time, he misses the slit completely. The second time, he pokes a tendon with the corner of it and makes her fingers twitch. The third time, he gets it inside and slips it into place, almost nicking her main artery.

Silver realizes she’s been holding her breath, and she’s not the only one. The scruff lets out a sigh of relief that could’ve put out the great fire of London, and Silver shoots him a look of incredulity—only now realizing that he’s completely blind in one eye.

Watching him struggle to thread the needle to suture Alice’s wound, Silver stops him.

“No, let me.”

Afraid he’d cause more damage than good, and counting entirely on her limited field experience to get the job done, she takes the needle and the makeshift surgical thread out of his hand.  He seems relieved, and somehow that makes it worse.

It’s only a few stitches, anyway, and she’s done in a handful of seconds. Finishing off, she cuts the thread with her teeth. Not hard to do, given that the Fringe District’s idea of surgical thread is nothing more than hemp string, coated with bleached and sterilized Chimeran rectal tissue.

Alice isn’t sure, because the nerve endings in her wrist are shocked to hell—stinging and burning with a fury—but she thinks she feels the faint touch of Silver’s lips against her skin.

A kiss?

Maybe.

She’s just relieved it’s all over. Silver releases her from the leather strap tying her into the chair, and reacts just in time to catch a balled up roll of gauze hurled at her by Trip.

“Tape her up and get out.”

Done deal.

Both Silver and Alice are eager to escape the stench and all the morbid weirdness of Trip’s warehouse, and the old dirt track beside Fresh Kills Creek is a very welcome sight. Before the long walk back to Mid Town, though, there’s the next step in Silver’s plan …

Concealed beneath her jeans, and taped to her boot with electrical tape, is a two-way alphanumeric pager. While Alice’s back is turned, Silver types a quick message.

TURN ME ON, CUPCAKE.

Alice catches sight of the device on its way into Silver’s pocket, but before she has even the first chance to ask about it, Silver is ready to change the subject.

“Hungry?”

Alice’s eyes perk up, “Hells yeah. You have food?”

Silver digs in her pockets and finds half a biscuit, covered in lint. She hands it to Alice anyway, even though it’s possibly the most unappetizing thing on the planet.

“All yours.”

Alice takes it, despite her open disappointment. “You got me excited …”

“I oversold it a little bit.”

Alice picks as much fluff off the biscuit as she can before taking a bite out of it.

“You’re just trying to distract me from that thing you put in your pocket.”

“Is it working?”

Alice shrugs. “Somewhat.”    

“The quicker we get home, the quicker we get food,” Silver entices.

“You’ll tell me later?”

“I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

That sounds reassuring. It’s reassuring enough to Alice, at least, and she’s more satisfied with that than she is with the fluffy biscuit.

Simple Works

Sun has set on the Fringe District.     

Silver never did talk to Alice about the device in her pocket. She took her home, fed her, and waited patiently for her to fall asleep on the bed so that she could slip away unnoticed. In the deserted street outside the theatre, she’d sent another text message and hurried to make a meeting in North Town.

Thirty minutes later, cold autumn rain beating relentlessly down on the Fringe District, Luka finds Silver by the edge of Silver Lake. She’s hiding out in a poorly constructed boat house attached to a crumbling wooden jetty, trying to shelter from the rain. Sitting on an uncomfortable chair molded out of sandbags, she watches tiny waves lap at the entrance to the boat house, the surface of the water speckled with tiny raindrops.

“Are we playing hide and go seek?” Luka shakes rain water off his Police Division jacket. “I thought we were meeting by the dead oak tree that looks like an angry beaver?”

“I improvised, on account of the climate,” she smiles over her shoulder. “Did you get Trip?”

Luka plants himself down beside her.

“He didn’t put up much of a fight, after I shot him in the knee. That was a clever ruse you pulled.”

Silver shrugs. “Simple works, sometimes.”

“Who was the girl?”

“I’ve no idea.”

That’s almost true.

“She needed a tag, I got her one,” Silver explains, without telling one word of a lie. “Everyone’s a winner.”

“If he’d have scanned the bag he would have found the tracker—you could’ve been shot.”

Silver checks herself for bullet holes. “I seem to be okay.”

“Are you, though? Really okay, I mean?”

Silence.

Silver doesn’t quite know how to reply to that, and she really isn’t in the mood to try. She can’t explain how her chest feels heavy and empty, all at the same time. Hollow, yet full of anger. Like every artery and vein in her body is shrinking, building the pressure inside. Her lungs take in less air, and her breaths are shallow. She’s lost her appetite, and she feels that her stomach could fit on a pin head.

Her bones feel as if they’re made of titanium, and every rise and fall of her chest is like heaving up a stiff, metal cage. Her heart is just drowning in its own fluid. Ventricles are swelling with blood, barely pumping, too damaged to see any point in making the effort.

Her head feels heavy, and it’s getting harder to stay awake. Every minute, another memory turns to stone and crumbles away into nothing.

The life she had before is fading fast behind her, and there’s no point hanging on. Nobody makes it out of the Fringe.

Ever.

Piece by piece, she starts the process of letting go. Willing on the swift progression of her Medusa complex, she’s trying so much to forget. The more she hardens herself, the less the pain matters.

Or so she keeps telling herself, though she says nothing of this to Luka. Instead, she just stares out at the rain while he picks nervously at the dirt under his fingernails.

He knows, though.

He can see it in her eyes.

“This wasn’t your fault,” he tries to assure her.

He’s speaking of her imprisonment, and she becomes instantly frosty.

“No? Then whose was it?”     

Luka doesn’t have an answer for that.

Before an awkward silence sets in, he tries to deflect it. “You haven’t lost
everything
, El.”

If her eyes weren’t so pathetically dull and lifeless and begging for a bullet or some sweet poison, the glare she casts upon him now would be fearsome.

“Home, job, self-respect, sense of purpose, freshly brewed coffee, filtered water …” she lists.

Lover, she thinks, but keeps that sad thought to herself.

“You still have people who care about you,” Luka insists. “People who love you.”

Alex?

Maydevine?

Himself?

Either way, “Maydevine’s going to go stir crazy in the Police Division.” Silver shakes her head. “It’s a mistake.”

“He’s only trying to do the right thing.”

Silver throws her head back against the sandbags, frustrated. “Then maybe he shouldn’t have talked them out of enforcement.”