The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  Rhye has her guns drawn before the other Ganymede fuckers can twitch, but it's way too late — the damage is done and smeared across the walls and floor and ceiling. Synthetic blood and bone look exactly the same as the real deal. She puts three shots into the flesh slab that did it (he's dead he's dead gods fuck it no nononono) and then the rest of his pals are on her like the three-times-fucked human jackals they are, pulling her down. The room stinks of blood and gunsmoke and fear-sweat. For the first time in her life, those smells make Rhye want to gag. Her ears are ringing — whether from the gunshots or god knows what else — and it feels like the floor is falling away beneath her motorcycle boots.

  She's still struggling against their meaty fingers to reach Rack when the head goon breaks her nose with a squared-off fist the size of the moon he's from. She barely feels the bone snap. He's dead. He's dead and the world is grayscale, all the color leaching from it to pool around her feet in a red puddle.

  “He was trying to crack it, you fucks. The fuck is wrong with you? He was coming out, he was going to try again, it was just a fucking hiccup! Jesus fuck, do you think you're going to get your cunting kid back now?” Her throat hurts from screaming. Blood from her nose is backing up into her sinuses, half-choking her. She doesn't care. “I'll kill you, I'll fucking kill all of you. You're fucking dead, do you hear me? Let me go, let me fucking go — ”

  “We hired you and your partner to finish job. Nothing was ever said about quitting,” the man says. His voice is heavily accented, breath reeking of onions and vodka. “If pretty boy couldn't bring what we need out, pretty boy is useless, like tits on bull or useless cyborg bitch. His consciousness can stay inside box and rot for all I care. But! — ” he pokes Rhye in the forehead with one of his blunt fingers — ”I think you care. I think you care very much, yes? Yesyes?”

  “I'm going to kill you, you fuck.” She says it slowly, pronouncing every word with deathly clarity. “I'm going to shove my gun up your ass and blow a hole so fucking wide a whale's prick wouldn't fill the gap.”

  “Not if you want partner back,” he says, throwing an uplink cable at her. “Plug in, get data out. Get pretty boy, too, if you like. Fail, and you die together. Is very simple.”

  And because she does care, cares too fucking much, cares, and the sight of Rack slumped over in the chair with a neat round hole scorched into his forehead is squeezing at the heart she's always claimed not to have, Rhye spits blood and hate in their employer's face and jams the jack into the port at the base of her skull.

  The first time she meets Rack, Rhye's fresh out of the army and fresh back from one of the meat-grinders the humans pay her kind to fight in. The children of wires and circuits aren't worth a tinker's fuck compared to the children of real flesh and bone, so far as the world's concerned. The recruitment agents pluck her off the streets when she's twelve and send her to a training camp and she's good with linguistics and better at killing, so they keep her hands busy until she's twenty-five and then they spit her back out again like a mouthful of cum. She has gray curly hair cropped short and gray dead eyes and calluses on the inside of her palms worn hard and horny from years of holding pistol grips. She's small and lean, which makes people underestimate her, but she's cool enough and don't-fuck-with-me enough that most know to jump the fuck out of the way when they see her coming. The ones that don't get flashed a warning glimpse of her teeth and holsters.

  There's nothing funnier than watching some drunken fleshsack piss his drawers when that happens. One minute he's trying to grab a skin-job whore's ass, the next he's looking his own death in the face and wetting himself like a goddamned baby. It never fails to tickle the shit out of Rhye.

  She bums around the city looking for something to do, gets in a moderate amount of trouble in every district she lands (her and the cops are on a first-name basis; it's touching), and finally ends up at the deathmatches, fighting her own kind for a quick buck in front of a bunch of screaming yahoos. Rhye doesn't really do it for the cash, although money for smokes is always nice. She does it because killing is the only thing she's good at, and quite frankly, she enjoys it. If the poor fucks she gunned down didn't want to be there, they wouldn't be. They're all fucked, everything is fucked, and the pain at least makes her feel something.

  Then one night in the arena her foot slips and the hulking musclebound mountain of nano-technology she's peppering with shots catches up and busts three of her ribs and one of her wrists. Rhye still manages to take him down one-handed, but even with the purse prize she doesn't have enough money for a fixer. They toss her out into the alleyway behind the joint like a kid's broken toy and there she lies, soaked to the skin from the oily rain that never seems to stop falling in this fucking gray ashtray of a city.

  And that's where Rack finds her, that clean-fingered, mild-mannered motherfucker. Why he's even there in the first place is beyond her. All she knows is that one minute she's huddling in a puddle, exhausted and hurting, and the next there's a hand extended her way and a pair of sad brown eyes looking down at her (fucking puppy-dog expression, clean-shaven and thoughtful and for fuck's sake he was wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase, can you believe that shit) and no matter how hard she glares at him, he won't fucking go. Rhye shows him the grips of her pistols and he just looks at her, just fucking looks. That surprises her; she's not expecting young Mr. Salaryman to be stubborn.

  “Fuck off, White Collar,” she says. “Do I fucking know you?”

  “No,” he replies, exasperatingly patient, “but I know what it looks like when somebody needs a hand. C'mon. Let's get you out of the rain.”

  She's hurting too bad to put up much of a fuss. He loops an arm beneath her own and together the two of them limp back to his flat, her getting oily water and blood all over his nice white shirt the entire way.

  If he had been smart, he would have left her where she lay. Fucking dumbass. Stupid fucking noble idealistic kind-hearted dumbass.

  Outgoing Connection detected!

  Initializing Connection Handoff to Interpretive Interface…

  Handoff Completed!

  (Hey, Rhye, c'mere. I made you something.)

  It's like floating in black static, and all the pressure is sitting on top of Rhye's head sumo-style, pushing her further down. Lines of code play across the insides of her eyes. Floaters are annoying; this is fucking maddening. And it hurts. She can't keep a straight thought, scalpels of pain are slicing through her brain over and over and she fucking hates this cyberspace bullshit. It's Rack's thing, not hers. Rhye likes her shit concrete. Rhye likes having a body. North, South, East, West. You use your feet to walk in a direction and then you shoot some motherfucker at the end of it. Finding Rack in here is gonna be like finding a seed in an elephant's ass, especially if he's tangled up with the security system. He had sounded scared shitless over the comm-link before that waste of jizz up top had done what he did. Thinking about it makes Rhye's currently non-existent asshole clench.

  So. Find Rack, get him out of whatever pile he's stepped into, and also somehow free up the data their employers want. Piece of cake. No problem. As soon as Rhye figures out what form any of that is gonna take, how to move forward, and which fucking way forward is, she'll go ahead and do that. Should've paid more attention in school. Should've actually gone to school.

  (It looks like a chip, a tiny little chunk of plastic and wire no bigger than a .22 shell. He drops it into her palm, looking like a cat that's just robbed a canary store at gunpoint. She glances down at the thing, then back at him, the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and the pride in his eyes.)

  (The hell is it?)

  Establishing parietal operculum loopback… SUCCESS

  Establishing posterior parietal cortex loopback… SUCCESS

  Something about the script is nagging at Rhye. A memory half-clouded by booze, disinterest, and the obscuring fog of being so embarrassed by something she had willed her brain to forget all about it. Good god, had sh
e actually blushed? Like a fucking schoolgirl with a Valentine?

  Rhye never has been good at accepting kindness. Being loved doesn't suit her.

  (It's art. It's art and it's one-of-a-kind and it's all yours. It's an interface, like mine, but I cut out all the rendering hardware and installed a direct path to the somasensory cortices of your brain. You interpret the stimulus naturally, like poetry, or music, and — Rhye, there are no words for this. Here, hook yourself up to the test deck. Log in with me. You need to see for yourself.)

  (Just say what it does in fuckin' English, Rack, baby.)

  (It develops metaphors for abstract environments. I put it together just f — )

  (Oh. Huh. Well, that's somethin'. You're a sharp motherfucker, Rack. You want a drink?)

  And she had slotted the thing away in one of the ports beneath her hair so his feelings wouldn't be too hurt (not that she cared, of course) and turned away so he wouldn't see her blush (fuck) and promptly gotten herself so completely fucked up on the cheap whiskey they kept in the fridge that the rest of that night was an indistinct blur. That he had wanted her to plug in with him was not something she dwelled on, not something she had let herself dwell on. Fucking sentimentality. It was that sort of shit that got you killed.

  But it sure as fuck seems to be coming in handy now, this little gift of Rack's. The static shudders and flashes and things begin taking shape. She has a body again, and guns, and she thanks her brain for that because she'd rather hop around in here on fucking stumps and hooks than be without some representation of her weapons. Another twist of the big empty and there's dirt beneath her boots, a gray sky above and a river ahead, and —

  Enhanced local motor/sensory homunculi detected, offloading rendering tasks… complete!

  Filling input buffer… 60%… 85%… 100%!

  Rendering buffer contents…

  Dead trees, dead grass, and a skeletal ferryman in a boat, cowled and waiting.

  Joining up with Rack hadn't stopped her from doing much of anything, at first. She played the part of the hired gun on whatever jobs he asked her to — beneath that quiet boy scout front was a mercenary mind the criminal underworld would spread their cheeks and wallets for, if and when they needed his skills — but Rhye's time was her fucking time, and if she wanted to spend it getting blackout drunk or fighting in deathmatches until the street sweepers came out to mop up the hobo piss, that was none of his fucking concern. And, to Rack's credit, he never gave her any shit about it. He just bundled her into her bed when she came staggering home stinking of bourbon and sweat, sewed up her cuts and swabbed out her wounds, and watched. Always with the fucking watching.

  Maybe she got a little reckless (more so than usual). Reckless or sloppy. The outcome was the same: She went into the ring with two good eyes to fight some knife-throwing motherfucker and came out a cyclops, blood and goo leaking from the sliced-up socket like candle wax. She's never been able to remember how the fuck she made it back to the apartment that night on her own. There's a big “scene missing” card and then she's perched on the bathroom counter while Rack dabs gently at the hole in her head, tight-lipped and trying so fucking hard not to let his concern show.

  Neither of them says anything for a while. But a question is gnawing at Rhye, and she's drunk enough and light-headed enough from losing all that blood to finally just ask.

  “Hey. Rack.”

  He wrings the washcloth out and a slaughterhouse swirls down the plughole. “Yeah?”

  “Why the fuck do you care? About anything, I mean.” She shakes her head. Bloody water and antiseptic splatter the walls. “You know what humans say about us? We're just fucking garbage to them. God created their ancestors, but ours were made by Tom, Dick, and motherfuckin' Turing. We don't have souls and they can just use us and throw us out” — she snaps her fingers, bang — ”like that. Better than ruining a real person's hands in the factories, right? That kid on the assembly line, she's just a goddamned piece of synthetic trash, she doesn't dream about getting the hell out of the slums to somewhere better. So why give a fuck if that's all the world expects out of you?”

  A beat. “Do you believe them?”

  “Fuck no. For one thing, there's no such thing as their fucking God. Load of horseshit. The only things you can rely on are these babies.” She pats her guns, solid and safe in their holsters. “But they got one thing right. Our lives ain't worth shit in a sewer, and mine least of all. So I'll ask again: What's with the caring act? What's in it for you? You think you're gonna fix me or something?”

  “No, Rhye. I don't think that.”

  “Then why? Why give a fuck?”

  He shrugs, shooting her that wry little smile that never reaches his eyes.

  “Hey,” he says, finally. “Everybody needs a hobby, right?”

  That was the last deathmatch Rhye ever fought in. She kept the empty socket, got an eyepatch, and aimed just as well with one eyeball as she ever had with two.

  She pays him in spent brass, the kind that gathers in your pockets and shirt cuffs after a day at the range or a night spent turning people into raw red meat. No reaper in Rhye's head would ever bother asking for fuckin' pennies. He stretches out a bony hand and the empty shells clatter into it like beer cans bouncing off a fence post, ting ting ting. Lead on, motherfucker, lead on. Down the river and through the woods and if the Big Bad Wolf jumps out, you give him a lead tampon in his pisshole before he can say hey baby, what's shakin'.

  It looks like all the rivers and canals she's ever known, choked with old shopping trolleys and used condoms and rafts of yellow-brown foam. Styx by way of The City, stinking, oily-slow, full of shit and bodies and about as good a metaphor for life as you could find. The only difference here is that all of the faces beneath the water belong to people Rhye put there. She's not guilty — most of them deserved it — but it's still a little fucked up. They stare at her with accusing, fish-nibbled eyes. Some claw at the bottom of the boat. She doubts shooting them again would help anything, so she saves her bullets, lighting a cigarette instead. The smoke is warm and fuzzy inside her chest, comfortingly familiar, like sucking down a carcinogenic teddy bear.

  “Do many of those fuckers get out?” she asks Reaper Man. She can be fuckin' polite, no problem. But Mr. Skullhead doesn't give her a second look, not even when she offers him a smoke (less out of kindness and more because she's curious to see how the hell something without lungs would manage the trick), so she scowls and stares across the water with the coffin nail dangling moodily from her lips, chin in hand. To entertain herself she starts trying to identify every dead person she sees.

  There are foot soldiers and foreign agents, low-level punks and pirates and even a police officer or two. Other bounty hunters. Cartel bosses. The kid that couldn't have been older than fifteen that tried to stick her up that one time, not recognizing Rhye for what she was. And yeah, even her first kill, the kiddy-diddling adoption agent with the wormy smile and the good-looking face. Nobody had suspected a goddamned thing. As long as they're good-looking, they never do. Who the fuck were they supposed to believe, the street rat skin-job with a rap sheet at age nine? It had been his blonde-haired, blue-eyed word against hers.

  He wasn't fucking pretty with all that blood spurting out of his mouth, though, and he sure as fuck ain't looking too good now with half his chin rotted off. Real or not, it gives Rhye some satisfaction to see him stranded like a rat in the aftermath of a wrecked ship. She reaches down, avoiding the grasping hands. Her cigarette hisses and sizzles as it grinds into his bloated forehead. He sinks back into the water like one of those poor amusement park androids, stuck on a rail with a beam up their ass.

  “Waste of a fucking cigarette,” she says, and lights another. She actually feels kind of good after that, at least until she sees Rack's face down there too. The drag curdles behind her ribs and sticks like grime clotting a gun barrel.

  He's not real. She knows that for a goddamned fact. But R
hye can't tear herself away from those sad eyes, the round hole dribbling black blood and river water down his nose. She watches him as they pull away, until the distance between them stretches and he's just another face in the crowd her hands have made.

  The river goes along, as rivers do, and then, out of fucking nowhere, like cockroaches circling the last can of cat food before a paycheck, suburban neighborhoods begin popping up along the banks. They stare down the bluffs with broken window eyes, yards gone to weeds and dog shit and strips of old paint. Who would have thought Hell had pink flamingos?

  The ferryman lets Rhye out on a shore made of splintered bone and more spent brass. Why the fuck he needed that shit for a toll when there are dunes of it lying within easy reach, Rhye doesn't know. She sets out for the houses without looking back. They'll meet up again soon enough for real, she figures. No need for handshakes when she'll be probably be back in the boat before her shelf life hits forty.

  Keep moving. Keep searching. Wading through drifts of dead leaves and candy wrappers, glancing into doorways, further up and further in, uneasiness growing with each SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign passed and bombed-out, rotten-tired station wagon peered under. Rust, dust, plaster, Styrofoam. Two-story brick hulks sagging at crazy angles, their multi-car garages gaping like slack-jawed drunks at a nudie bar. Shadows everywhere: beneath grimy windshields, in the alleyways, stacked thick behind brokeback venetian blinds. Rhye's been in friendlier combat zones; at least there you'll spot the occasional buzzard or scuttling cat.

  She's being followed by something, but that's not surprising. A good sign: If she's suddenly interesting enough to be getting the hairy eyeball, maybe it's the security system crawling out from under its rock to do some territorial pissing. She puts up with the peeping for another couple of blocks, then stops in her tracks.