by J P Carver
I accessed my medi-implant and tried to slow the bleeding, but my system kept winking in and out, so it was hard to tell if the implant still worked. I sighed and applied pressure to the cut on my side and flinched at the sudden shock of pain. There was at least one bruised rib, if not more.
The floors continued to count down to the lobby on the holographic plate above the door. They’d be waiting by the time I got there. Probably a whole firing line. I started to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Before, the most trouble CES had given me were a few cops who gave me crap about my hardware and software licenses.
“Ragdoll? You still breathing, right?” The little static-filled box finally cleared to show Ziller shoving his face into the camera.
“You ever think about getting a skin treatment?” I asked, my breath shuddering because breathing hurt like hell. “You still monitoring CES?”
“They are right pissed at you. They got practically an entire squad of grunts en route. I’ve been trying to get a SAT image of that building and the surrounding block, but you know how big everyone is with changing their protocols daily.” He scratched at his cheek with a thick finger. “From Annie, I’ve gathered they have the building locked down now and are trying to crack your I-Dent wipe.” He paused and a smile split his lips. “Some asshole wants to bathe in your blood. You broke a few of her teeth, from the sound of it.”
“Yeah, well, she and her partner put a few holes in, too. I’d call that pretty damn even.”
“I doubt she’ll see it that way.”
I bit down on my tongue and pulled it along my teeth while glancing around the elevator for some other way out. “I’m about a floor away from the lobby. Should we say our goodbyes now?”
“I ain’t done with you quite yet, girl. Have some faith in old Ziller.”
I pushed off the wall and stopped the elevator between the second floor and lobby. “I’m gonna take the second floor and see if I can find a way out, maybe break a window or something.” I turned around to find a small pool of my blood shining on the tiled floor.
“Your blood?”
“You cracking in on my visuals?”
“You opened the door earlier, sweetheart. Please tell me you got spray.”
Digging into my bag, I found the small canister. “I don’t know what else I may have bled on—”
“Don’t matter. Take care of what you can.”
With the can I sprayed anywhere there was even a speck of blood. The spray was a simple mix that erased DNA and turned the blood yellow. All us Crackers carried some in case we got cut. CES and their ilk needed only a microscopic amount of blood to get a DNA match. The wonders of technology.
“I got a heat map of the office building. It don’t look good, Raggy.”
“Color me surprised.”
He sent me a copy of the map. The entire lower floor looked like a lake of lava with all the heat from the troopers and their equipment.
“What the hell is going on, Ziller? This is way above the line just for some ad changes. Way, way above.”
“They’ve been coming down—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. It’s like they knew I’d be here. Ain’t no way they all showed up in the last ten minutes.” I jumped onto the handrail that went around the inside of the elevator and pushed up on the hatch. It took a bit of force to get it to move, which had to be some kind of fire hazard. I pulled myself onto the roof of the elevator car.
Tiny pinpricks of white light lined the walls, all the way to the top of the building. The elevator doors were a few feet up in the double shaft. I walked to the one in front of me, got up on the tips of my toes and pushed my fingers into the groove.
Something popped in my shoulder as the doors started to open. The patch-up job was gonna cost a fortune—that was if CES didn’t kill me.
A quick survey of the hall showed it empty. Just before I started to pull myself up, the lights flickered, and then they turned off.
CES had cut the power, which meant they would be trying to track my heat signature.
Behind me, the shaft went dark, and the car in the other shaft was called down. The one I stood on followed closely behind, disappearing from under me, and I dropped, hitting the bottom of the doorway.
My fingers dug into the short carpet of the hallway. There was nothing to grip. I slipped and fell, my fingertips burning.
I slammed into the top of the elevator car with a grunt that took my breath away. My hurt rib screamed and felt as if it shifted. My neural went haywire and then winked out, leaving me in darkness.
A few seconds later, the car stopped. Below me, troopers piled in. The thuds and thumps of their heavy boots made my head pound. My eyes were closed, and it was a long time before I pushed myself up and looked around. The elevator cables squealed and thrummed as the car was pulled quickly past the now-closed second floor doors. Comm chatter sounded below me as we stopped on the third floor, and a few troopers made their way out.
The car made two more stops before it was sent back to the lobby. Once there, someone stepped in and pushed the stop button. The emergency bell rang out, painfully loud.
The hatch beside me sat skewed. I pulled myself over to peer into the darkness below. The one trooper in the car stood out like a blinking raver in a club. Friend or foe markers dotted their armor in blue. With just one, I had a chance. If there were more—and there were probably going to be more—that chance dwindled.
But waiting held its own perils. It wouldn’t be too long before they found me.
As I dropped down, he stumbled back, a silhouette in an outline of blue LEDs. My baton connected with the side of his head before he could react. The helmet easily held, but he cried out, dazed.
He recovered quickly and pulled me back just before I made it out the elevator doors. We hit the back wall with a thud as he screamed for backup and squeezed me to him in a bear hug.
Pain ballooned in my chest, my lungs cried, and the wounds that had been healed by my medi-implant reopened, creating new rivers of blood that dammed at the waistband of my jeans. He pulled me in tighter, his fingers biting into my skin.
I kicked back and connected with his groin, but I only hit pads. It loosened his grip enough that I could get my hand with the baton free. I swung at his thigh, and he grunted and shifted his weight, which allowed me to reach his hand and arm. I hit both and caught the bottom of my jaw. The tip tore through my skin.
He let go. I pivoted and kicked him squarely in the stomach, followed up with my baton to the open front of the helmet. He dropped face-first onto the carpet of the elevator, and I turned away.
Two troopers were already moving toward the elevator from the entrance. My heart sank, and I searched in panic for something to defend myself with. The rifle was lying beside the trooper. I stumbled over and picked it up. Placing my hand over the trooper’s so it could read his glove, I aimed and pulled the trigger twice. The smart-bullets both found their marks. The two troopers toppled backwards with their brains as pillows.
It had been a long time since I’d actually killed someone. My stomach twisted and pushed up the meal from earlier that night, and for the second time I swallowed against vomit. There was no time to puke.
I wiped at my bottom lip and looked at the open doors to the outside. The rain turned to steam on the asphalt. A car went by in a grumbling wave of water. The wind smelled crisp but tinged with blood. I dropped the rifle and took off into the night.
My clothes clung to me like some hot and itchy skin as I ducked into a subway station and took the stairs two at a time. With each thud of my heart, it felt as if more blood seeped out my wounds and into my gray T-shirt. I pulled my hoodie a little tighter around me and slipped into the crowd on the platform.
My head swam. I was not a combat-trained soldier or anything even close to that. I was a goddamn cracker. I broke into computer systems, stole info, and invaded computers for money. I was a nerd who had learned to defend herself, but how the hell could anyone dea
l with an organization like the CES gunning for them? It would be easier and probably a lot less painful to just jump in front of one of the trains.
A holographic sign for a bathroom waved at the top of my vision as it stood out from the wall in neon green. I turned into the small hall and into the unisex bathroom.
The lights trembled in a ceiling that was missing most of its tiles, leaving the pipes and wires naked. Vizea screens on the right wall flickered their ad images as a sickly voice crackled on about the newest implant from Rentena Industries. Graffiti practically hid the pale yellow walls with their depictions of government women and men in various sexual poses. Slurs against them and the CES filled in the blank space in bold letters and colors. Some of them were even sort of funny, if you could get past the anger.
The person who stared back at me in the mirror looked ghostly. I pushed back my hood to show my face. It was a sickly pale, and not helped by the white concrete dust that coated me. Gashes on the side of my cheekbone and lower jaw had stopped bleeding, but the bruises on them looked much worse than they felt. My lips were badly chapped, and my eyes were bloodshot. The areas around my implants had turned a deep pink, almost like sunburns, with maroon lines radiating out around my ears and forehead.
I unzipped my jacket and started to lift my shirt, but it stuck like glue. I tentatively touched the skin around the raw red of the bullet wound on my side and hissed through my teeth. At least my medi-implant still worked and I wasn’t in danger of bleeding out, but the wounds needed attention, and not from me. I checked my arms and then dropped my pants. The gash on my thigh was the same color, and blood had dried in thick trails down my leg.
A woman came in as I wiped the blood up and cleaned what I could from the cut. I looked up, and she froze in the doorway, staring at me with wide green eyes with her purse clutched in front of her like a shield.
Our eyes met, and I smiled at her. “Date got pissed at me,” I said. “You know how it is.”
She made a croaking noise and bounced off the wall as she rushed out. I laughed and felt a little lighter as I finished up. Dressed again, I slipped back into the crowd. My neural booted up on the first try, and Ziller was still on the line.
“Shit, Raggy, I was about to zip you from the system.”
“So little faith in me, Ziller?”
“No, but I didn’t—Forget it. You good?”
“I’m wonked. I don’t think I can make it back even without CES on the hunt for me.”
“But you lost them for now, right?”
“Near as I can tell.” I paused, felt a million years older. “I think I scrubbed two of them.”
I went up to a ticket terminal and cracked myself a pass for the train. What the hell was TransCo gonna do? They’d just be able to pick up the pieces left behind. Ziller still hadn’t responded by the time the train pulled up, and I was starting to get a little nervous at the silence.
I entered the train as the door slid open and took a seat near the back of the car. “I did what I had to.”
He wiped a huge hand over his face and then through his thick black hair. He dropped it to the table with a slap. “I know… but—shit, Raggy, did you have to kill them?”
“They’re the ones that had their bullets looking for a kill, not me. The only reason I ain’t floating in a pool of my own blood in some corporate hallway is because I could jam them some.”
He grimaced. “Sorry, it’s just—this was supposed to be simple.”
“It wasn’t. I got the missing chunks to prove it.”
“I’ll contact Merigold. You comfortable with telling me where you are?”
“Are you?”
His gel chair crackled as he swiveled around to another screen, but his shoulders blocked what he was doing. I curled up on the bench and tried to ignore the wave of pain that kept trying to slosh over the blockers. A few passengers were trying hard to hide their staring, but they were failing. I gave an old guy the finger as he looked at me in disgust. He turned to the front of the car with a huff.
“You still with me, Raggy?”
“Barely. I want Merigold.” I felt a little annoyance at the pitiful whine in my voice.
“The signal is as secure as I can get it. We gotta take the chance, girl. What stop you want to meet at?”
“Coster Ave, I guess.” I dropped my head to my arm but jerked back up. “Make sure you warn Crow, all right? If it wasn’t a fluke for me, then they’re smacking hard for us. Tell her to set off for a time.”
He nodded. “I wouldn’t worry too much about her. She’ll be fine. I’ll let her know you still care, though.”
“Okay… Tell Merigold she may have to carry me.” My eyelids drooped, and I tried to fight the feeling of sleep as it wrapped around me. The bench was so comfortable, which anyone who rode the subway probably wouldn’t believe. I felt as if I could just take a quick nap and everything would be better when I woke up. It was a nice fantasy.
“No sleeping on the job, or I get to keep your credits.”
“I’d wipe your system before that would happen.” I stuck my tongue out at him even though he couldn’t see it. I sat up and stared at the flickering lights above me while waiting for my stop.
Two
A Room of White
Merigold stood on the platform like a sun-drenched flower in a sea of grey and black weeds. Her thin blond hair was pulled into two tight braids that reached down past her shoulder blades. Her clothes were loose and bright, and she smiled the moment she saw me through the window. She walked up to the door, waited for the chimes, and then made her way to me. Before I could stand, she pulled me into a tight hug. I cried out at the pressure.
She grinned at me and stood straight. “You’ve done a number on yourself this time, Ragan.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Mm-hm.” Her hand dropped to my wrist, and she pulled me to my feet. I didn’t even notice her other hand moving until I felt her insert something into the port at the nape of my neck. The diag-bridge sent my vision fuzzy as she took a read from my neural.
I grimaced. “Dammit, a warning would have been nice.”
“Fractured wrist. Open wounds on the left side and left thigh. Another on the arm and a minor concussion. A set of bruised ribs on your left side. Two cuts on your face, which I don’t need the diagnostic bridge to see. Lost a good amount of your blood… I’m amazed you can still stand. Shoulder tendon torn. Shoulder batteries are mostly drained.” She paused reading out the information in a dry tone and gave me a sweet smile. “Elevated levels of dopamine. You were enjoying yourself.”
“N-no, I was not.”
She placed her arm around my shoulder and rubbed my arm, the smile growing. “Let’s get you back to my place and get you fixed up.”
“I don’t know if I’ll make it.” I fell against her as we stepped out onto the platform. The lights were painful, like shards of glass slipped under fingernails. A shiver ran up my spine at the thought, and Merigold squeezed my shoulder.
“I’ll get you there.”
We took the escalator, thankfully, and stepped out onto a steam-flooded street. The rain had slowed to spitting on us as we walked along the sidewalk. Beams from the overhead streetlamps showed in twirling strands of fog. I started to think about the old twentieth-century films that Ziller would stream from time to time. Usually some monster would be stalking us right now.
One was, in a way. CES wouldn’t let this go. They’d be on the hunt for me, for killing two of them, and they would bring the entire city down on my head if they found me. An eyeful of what they were already doing greeted me on the crosswalk of Coster and Joseph.
On the other side of the street a large TV, sitting behind the glass and the steel folding gate of a small store, showed a woman speaking silently from an Omni. Beside her a picture that looked suspiciously like me appeared, my hood hiding my face from a street camera I had missed on the way into the alley. Below her, a text box scrolled: “Local officials looking for �
��Cop Killer’.”
I stopped Merigold and jacked into the sound.
“—Are saying that the woman is between the ages of twenty and twenty-four and very dangerous. A wipe of her I-Dent chip has, for the time being, made her untraceable. Authorities are stating that the wipe wasn’t complete, and they are on their way to identifying her. It has been reported that she was there to assassinate Morgan Park, the CEO of MicroManagement Systems, a rising implant and bridge company. He was found dead in his office with injuries consistent with a Burner pistol. The pistol itself was recovered at the scene and is being processed. Mr. Park leaves behind a wife and two children.
“We will keep you updated as we receive more information from our sources, but for now our hearts and minds are with the victim’s family and with the families of the slain officers who were only doing their duty to keep our fair city safe. If you have any information regarding this crime, you are asked to contact the Central Electronic Security’s hotline.”
A commercial started to play, showing a hologram band concert downtown. I didn’t even hear it. I continued to stare at the screen but saw nothing as my head reeled at what would be coming for me.
Merigold reached out and pulled on my arm. I turned to her, my eyes wide and searching her face.
She just gave me a small smile. “We shouldn’t stay here.”
“Right. Okay.” The words came out on their own.
She led me down the street, the sound of my feet on the wet pavement the only thing that felt real. Occupied with my thoughts, all my ache disappeared.
Were they really close to breaking the I-Dent chip wipe? The idea seemed impossible, but CES had tricks and tech that I could only dream of, so maybe they could. Other Crackers had their I-Dent chips removed or replaced with blank ones, both of which were highly illegal and led to a one-way trip to prison and having your neural ripped out. A person was nothing more than a veggie after that.
I couldn’t find someone to remove mine, so I had set up a way to wipe it and rewrite it with false info. CES knew the tactic, but it worked without fail—if you did it in time, because it still had to be checked. Maybe that wasn’t enough anymore.
