by JC Hay
Na’im looked around and nodded. “How far?” His eyes picked out the exits and the most obvious chokepoints where they could be ambushed.
Rather than nod her approval, she concentrated on getting out of the car. “There’s a club a few blocks over. You have a liquor license?” He looked panicked, and she chuckled. “Relax. It’s no big deal. You’ll be my designated, if anyone asks why you’re not drinking.”
“And I can just go in there like this?” He gestured at the swim trunks. In the Burj he could get away with it. Out on the streets would be a different story, where the police tended to keep a sharper eye out for morality violations. Especially among the dispossessed migrants that served as the majority of the city’s workforce.
“Of course not. I’ve also got a friend with a flat right there.” She pointed out the window. “He’s about your size, and should have something you can wear.” After she paid him off. Kaniraj never said no to money.
“Fine, I’ll throw in the car too.” She snapped the fob off her belt and tossed it onto Kaniraj’s table. It landed with a plastic clatter next to the handful of actual cash bills she’d piled there.
“It’s a Corpse-Car. It’s got so many chips on board it would be traceable from lunar orbit.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “Of course it does. You’re a resourceful bastard. Do something about it.”
He opened his mouth to say something else when Na’im walked out of the bedroom, and whatever retort he’d planned died in a choke.
As it turned out, she had vastly underestimated their similarity in size. Na’im had tried his best to squeeze into the more wiry man’s clothes, but Kaniraj had never filled out one of his outfits so well. The jeans Na’im had selected framed his ass nicely, but the t-shirt could barely contain his chest and shoulders. He’d grabbed a jacket, common enough against the night air, but Elise was certain he’d be carrying it. There was no way he’d be able to get his arms inside without it feeling like a straitjacket.
She gave him an appreciative once-over. “You look great. Ready to get moving?” He took a deep breath, and she wondered how the shirt stayed in one piece. Not that it’d be much difference. It left little enough to the imagination.
“As ready as I’m likely to be.”
“I hope the shoes fit better than the shirt.”
“Ai, you didn’t say anything about that chooth taking my shoes! What am I supposed to use to get around?” Kaniraj stalked across the small living space in his apartment, hands curled in outrage.
Elise shrugged. “Try the car. If nothing else you can sell it for a new pair. Or ten.”
“Maaf kijiye.” Na’im’s mumbled apology surprised Kaniraj as much as it did her. Maybe he actually was from downspire. People in the Quarter became multi-lingual by default. Immersed in a soup of languages, one ended up using whichever felt right for the moment. Of course, if he hadn’t been multi-lingual before the implants, Zaahir certainly would have made sure he was after.
“The shoes will be fine. We should go.” Na’im turned to Kaniraj and offered a contrite “Thanks,” before heading through the door.
Kaniraj looked after him, then turned to her and narrowed his eyes. “I wondered when you’d get tired of Ty. If you were in the market, you should have come to me. No strings. Easier that way.”
She winced at Ty’s name. She’d never been careful to keep what happened off the radar, but Kaniraj spent most of his time hustling and indulging in the hashish bars that dotted the Quarter. She shouldn’t be surprised he didn’t know. Her teeth ground together, as though she could crush the memories between them. “It’s not like that. He’s cargo, not ops. I just need to hide him until the drop.”
“He’s too pretty to lay low. Get rid of him quick. He sticks out like a whore in a mosque.”
Elise chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m rid of him by Fajr. Just remember, you never saw us.”
“Until they trace those clothes back to me, then I feed you to the jackals.” He collected the cash and fob off the table with a smile. “We’re square. Watch yourself.”
She nodded and gave a dismissive wave as she walked out the door. “Obviously. Thanks, Kaniraj.” Elise turned to Na’im and grabbed his hand. A teenaged thrill shot through her, just from touching him. In spite of her own advice, her smile was real when she beamed at him. “Come on, stallion. Take me dancing.”
“What?” Na’im had to shout to hear himself over the noise in the nightclub. He had no idea how Elise could hear him. She’d swapped out her belt for a thin sash of silver material that complimented her bodysuit. Combined with her jacket from the tower, it changed her outfit from business-like efficiency to the understated elegance of Dubai’s club-going nightlife. Or maybe I’m finally seeing the real her. The club—88 Bang New York—seemed to be her element. She moved like an organic extension of the thundering techno beat.
She grinned and leaned close enough for her breath to warm the skin of his ear. “I said smile. You’re in a club, at least seem like you’re having a good time.”
He chuckled at the admonition, as though going out dancing was a perfectly normal capstone on a day that featured the death of his boss, his transformation from personal servant to someone else’s paycheck, and his pursuit by the authorities for murder. At least the music, heavily influenced by Bangalore’s aggressively synthetic pop scene, was to his liking. He grinned and turned his head, catching a whiff of her hair beneath the smells of the club. “So, do you come here often? Can I buy you a drink?”
“You don’t have to pick me up, you know. I’m not going anywhere.” Her laughter lit her entire body as it spilled out. It was the first truly unguarded moment he’d seen from her, and he felt a sudden sense of privilege that she’d shared it with him.
No. Don’t even think like that. She is, at best, a thief and possibly a murderer. You’re nothing but data storage for her. Twenty-four hours from now, she’ll have forgotten you existed. The thought sobered him. He studied the table and tried to make sense out of the years of letters gouged into the veneer surface.
She grabbed a stool and sat on the window side of him, glancing outside as she settled. She flipped a switch on the table and a noise-cancellation speaker started. It didn’t shut out the pounding thrum, but it lowered it to a less deafening level. “What’s bothering you?”
He glanced around the bar and, not seeing any obvious police, grabbed her glass and drained it. “You’re kidding, right?”
She shrugged and made a gesture that roughly equated to good point. “Okay, apart from the obvious, what’s the matter?”
“I can’t stomach uncertainty.” He shoved the empty glass across the table before someone saw it and asked to scan his chip for a license. Jalila hadn’t been much of a stickler for Islamic prohibitions, but she never drank. He had never bothered to find the right trail of people to bribe to acquire a license for himself, since there seemed little point in drinking without her. “I don’t know what happens next, and that’s enough to drive me crazy. It’s difficult to plan when I’ve got no clue where the future is headed.”
She nodded. “Not much I can do to clear that up for you, sadly. If everything goes according to plan, then I’ll hand you off in a few hours and they’ll get to work picking the locks on your storage matrix.”
“See, there’s the problem in a nutshell. ‘If everything goes according to plan.’ It’s like you don’t even trust your employers.” Na’im sighed and leaned forward. It didn’t help that he hadn’t slept in close to a day, courtesy of Jalila’s random sleep schedule. Exhaustion always fanned his pessimism and made him moody.
“Of course I don’t trust them. They’re paying me money, they’re not my family.” She chuckled. “Not that I trust my family much either. I mean, did you trust Miss Zaahir?”
He nodded at the window. “I used to live here, in the Quarter. I shared a room with seven other non-Emirati men. Like everyone else, we came here because there were jobs. The money was worth being treated l
ike second-class citizens, but it was never enough to buy your way out.” Despite the official rule, vice was easy to buy in the Quarter. Between black market prices and the mandatory bribes to get anything done, it created a self-consuming economy of near poverty. “Jalila spotted me on the street, where I was helping lay rails for the Metro line expansion. She made me an offer, and I accepted.”
“She bought you.” There was no judgment in her voice, just a statement of fact.
“In a sense, yeah. I suppose she did. She bought me from myself. The thing is, when she had me modified to be her personal assistant, she made sure to hardwire in trust and affection for her. You ask me if I trusted her? I didn’t really have any choice. Every emotion I had, she’d pre-programmed. Am I even melancholy right now, or is this just because I’m supposed to be sad?” The fingers of his left hand started to twitch spastically and he tucked it behind his right.
She laid her hand across both of his. The warmth of her skin soaked into him and slowed the dance of his fingers. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. My hand does that sometimes. It’s just a nervous tic.” My implants are fine. It’s not IRS. It’s not IRS. He repeated the words in his mind like a mantra, as much to ward off the possibility as to convince himself of their validity. “So there’s the whole sordid tale, in a nutshell. She lifted me out of poverty, and I had no choice but to love her.”
He looked past Elise to focus on the street. Like most nightclubs in Dubai, 88 Bang New York was located inside a hotel. Then the owner could say they had to provide alcohol for foreign guests, the sort of polite lie that helped grease the wheels of commerce and allowed something as immoral as a bar to operate in plain sight. In this case the hotel was a very small two-story establishment boasting less than twenty rooms. Still, the streets outside were crowded with the normal fare that surrounded hotels: curio shops, tourist traps, high-end fast food and a gym. A shawarma restaurant just across the street from them already had its lights on, despite the early hour.
“How long has it been going on?” She still watched his trembling hand, her concern obvious. His heart warmed in response to the care, not used to someone fawning over him as anything more than an investment.
“Since I got my mods.” He knew how it sounded, what she had to be thinking. Implant Rejection Syndrome—IRS—was a threat that gave most of the first-world nightmares. When even simple transactions couldn’t be done without use of an implanted chip to carry credit history, the person who couldn’t have implants lived as an outsider.
She nodded, as though she seemed to understand. “Did you get a nerve job?”
“The usual. Sensation-enhancement upgrade. Perception re-wire. Mostly tactile nerves, nothing too serious.”
Her brows knitted and he had a sudden urge to reach out and smooth them. “Strange. You sometimes see those kind of shakes with a combat rewire. I’ve never heard of them with pleasure mods before.”
“Who’s Ty?”
Her hand froze on his, then withdrew to her lap. Despite the heat in the club, the air felt cold where she’d been touching his skin.
“Kaniraj mentioned the name, and it upset you at the time.”
She looked out the window, watching their reflection in the glass. “Ty was...we worked together.”
“And played together.” The signs of her pain were written in plain type to him. His programming made assessing her moods easier the more time they spent together. “Until something happened. He was killed?”
She barked a cold laugh. “I could be so lucky. No, Ty had some debts built up, and had an easy offer to repay them. He just had to give my head to a corporation I’d crossed.”
He reached across the table to fold her hand between his. He could see the scars the betrayal had left on her soul—the tightness in the corners of her eyes, the way she looked out the glass rather than meet his gaze. Even the controlled stillness of her fingers showed her pain. He had a sudden urge to find Ty and hurt him in return. “What happened?”
“I shot him.” The corner of her lip twitched in an involuntary smile. “Twice. Right through his twenty-thousand-dinar lung. And once in each knee. He hasn’t come looking for me since.” She tried to sound aloof, but every micro gesture told him how hard it had been for her, how much Ty’s betrayal had hurt her.
She watched the street outside, then whispered, “Damn.”
The muscles in her temple twitched, the skin behind her ear taut. Something outside did not meet her expectations, or indicated trouble.
His pulse sped up in response. “What is it?”
“There’s a problem with the drop.” She flipped off the speaker on the table and the wall of Hindi sound crashed over them like a wave.
He blinked and tried to adjust to the new noise level. “What do we need to do?” He surprised himself at the offer to be included in her plans. After all, he owed her nothing. And yet something about her makes you reluctant to send her to the wolves.
She stood up and tucked in her stool. “You need to wait here. I’d rather they not see you yet.” She turned and headed toward the street.
Chapter Four
E
lise cycled her vision over to tactical as she crossed the street. The weight of her CZ 75 rested between her shoulders with comfortable familiarity, and she resisted the urge to draw it now, just to be ready. She could feel the endorphins in her blood prepping her body for combat, confirmed by her pulse and blood pressure readouts in the corner of her view opposite the chrono.
The sun had barely lifted, but already the air had begun to warm. Still too early for anyone to be at the shawarma shop where the exchange was supposed to take place. Except she’d already seen a half-dozen people head inside. Something was definitely wrong. Then again, that had been her reason for suggesting the diner as a drop-point. She knew she could get a good view of the place all night from right across the street.
She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with a chaotic mélange of flavors—petrochemicals, rotting food and the constant stale smell of overcrowding mixed with spices of every description. Already she felt better. Coming outside to investigate helped calm the knot of worms that started writhing in her stomach the moment Ty’s name had come up.
She couldn’t believe she’d opened up like that to Na’im. It had felt good to get it off her chest, certainly, but she should know better than to fraternize with cargo. Or anyone else, for that matter. She shook her head, as though she could knock loose his image from her brain. When he talked to her, he made it feel like she was the only person in the room.
“Of course he does. Zaahir’s not going to shell out the big bucks for someone who ignored her.” She gritted her teeth as she muttered to herself. Ty had never been so focused on her. They’d been two people with the same agenda, and she’d mistaken his love of a good business arrangement as affection for her. When Corporate Services offered him a better deal, he’d taken it.
Then I made him an even better offer—he could keep breathing, mostly unassisted, and I could go my own way.
Elise leaned against a car and tried to look like a drunk club-goer. The window went dark, and for a moment she thought the lights in the shop had been turned out. Then she realized it was the shadow of a man. Her belly went tight at the sight, ice pooling in her chest as her brain announced a single concept.
Janitor. Someone designed to clean up the mess, no matter how many bodies that took.
She scanned the window, trying to parse what information she could from the little she could see, and tried to ignore the screaming voice in her brain that told her to run. If CorpServ had brought in a janitor, then things had already turned ugly. She might have incidental wetwork when she did a job, but that was self-defense. Janitors were brought in to clean up messes, which meant Corporate Services had decided she, or someone, needed to be killed.
The image of Zaahir, sheets tangled around her throat, floated through her memory. They couldn’t have sent a janitor after her target. Na’i
m still being alive effectively proved there hadn’t been a hit placed on her. Plus there’d be no reason to send her in after the fact.
Unless CorpServ needed a scapegoat.
Elise cursed Ty for making her triple-guess every interaction. At least she’d done the smart thing and let Na’im go. Cute as he was, he’d land on his feet with some other glitterati. Now that she suspected the double cross, there was no way she’d turn him over. Much as it pained her, Mars would have to wait.
She wrapped her hand around the pistol’s grip. The comforting green circle of her targeting sight flared to life in her vision as she tugged the gun out of its holster. She hated that the weapon made her feel safe, but holding it relaxed her all the same.
A knot of club-goers stumbled by, arm-in-arm-in-arm. One of them called out an invitation to her in slurred Malay, but she ignored it and leaned more heavily against the car. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. She hoped she gave off the right vibes to keep one of them from trying to help her. The last thing she needed was for one of them to spot her pistol and start screaming. Things were bad enough without losing what little edge she had.
No such luck.
One of the men broke off from the group and took a step toward her. She waved him away with her empty hand, and then collapsed against the car with a retching noise.
It worked. He paused, then turned and hurried to catch up with his friends. Good Samaritan instincts sufficiently stomped out.
The light had returned to the window across the street. The only shadows she could see were smaller than the janitor. She switched her vision to thermal and checked the rooflines, hoping to keep the killer from getting the drop on her, but nothing showed. According to the tactical readout, her pulse had accelerated. She stifled a chuckle at the understatement.
She ran the thermals across the storefront. The janitor was definitely gone. She had a small window to act before he got into position. With a deep breath, she shoved away from the car and jogged across the street to the door.
