by Mel Odom
I shook. The gate rose. And I stepped out into the blinding sunlight a free man.
I took a deep breath and considered my prospects. Thanks to the work I’d done inside (a pittance from CATCo and some substantial cred from the bodyguard jobs), I wasn’t hitting the streets with nothing in my pocket. A pocket of the cheap business suit CATCo gave all of its released prisoners.
A Shark with blacked-out bulletproof windows waited at the curb. The car belonged to Picabia Retrievals, a bounty hunting outfit specializing in black bag operations around the world. They were a small but affluent operation. I’d watched over one of their guys inside lockdown. A job offer had been made for when I got out. I’d said I’d consider it, to be polite, but I wasn’t a team player.
Especially not after getting sold out to CATCo on my last run.
However, I also wasn’t going to walk twenty kilometers to the sprawl or wait at the bus stop three kilometers away for a long, sweaty ride with people who would know me because of the cheap suit and the proximity to the prison.
I walked toward the car and the liveried driver got out to open the door. It was a touch of class, and I appreciated it.
I sat in the back of the car in air-conditioned comfort and looked at the prison with a different perspective. The building was huge, twenty stories tall, and honeycombed with cells. Razor wire surrounded the rooftop that held the exercise yard. High above me, Big Gus stood behind bulletproof transplas and watched me with a pondering look. I figured he was wondering how long it would be before I was back. Or locked down somewhere else.
That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to be locked down again. Ever. I’d die first.
“Feels good to be out, hey?”
I turned and looked at the guy in the rear seat as the driver got us underway. Bryan Watteau was a good-looking guy, and knew it. Blond, buff, and bio-engineered. He wore a suit that had been made for him.
“It does,” I said, to fill in the blanks.
“Have you thought about the job offer?”
“I have. I want to think about it some more.”
Watteau nodded, but his smile turned a little artificial. He’d been sent there to close the deal. I wasn’t cooperating. “Of course. Would you like to talk about it over lunch?”
“Dinner,” I said. “I’ve got things I need to tend to.”
The smile grew a little tighter. “Dinner is acceptable. We’ve made arrangements at a hotel in Montreal that I think you’ll be happy with. Mr. Picabia is picking up the tab.”
I nodded and sat back in the seat, enjoying the luxury, but not much liking the chains Watteau had come bearing as gifts.
Chapter 2
“The Past Is Just a Story”
After eight years spent in lockdown, most people would have a lot to catch up on.
I didn’t.
Ten years ago, I’d stepped away from my last family to run the shadows. I hadn’t been able to fit into the life Raymond Black had guided me toward and Duncan had enjoyed. The old man was too rigid, too law-abiding to suit me.
Except for the execution of the man who had run him off the road the night I met him, I’d never known the old man to do anything other than run a noodle shop and a small repair business for collectible gear-driven devices. He had shelves of clocks and automatons that he’d bought, repaired, and repainted exactly as they had been hundreds of years ago. He made more credits selling bowls of noodles.
Losing Duncan had hurt, but he wasn’t the small kid I’d tried to save anymore. He was grown. And he was an ork.
Turned out the fever I thought was going to kill him was just Goblinization presenting. Unexplained Genetic Expression started in 2011 and reintroduced the world to metahumanity in the form of elves, dwarfs, trolls, and orks in newborns.
Goblinization hit people of all ages, but a lot of the time it came around puberty. Duncan had been thirteen. When he’d started getting bigger than me really fast, he thought that was pretty wiz. The tusks took some getting used to, but he adapted. He’d always adapted better than I had.
Probably still did.
I didn’t know. Even before I’d gotten locked down, I’d cut ties with Duncan and the old man. They had expectations of me. I just wanted to run, party, and see the rest of the world. If the old man had had his way, I would have never left Seattle.
So when I got to the hotel room, which was large and spacious and stocked with every comfort I could want, including a cutting-edge trid and a view of Quebec’s neon-splashed downtown, I didn’t hook up to a jackpoint and call family or scroll through bulletin boards for information. I had a fixer I got jobs from, someone who could put me with the people I needed to be with. He was waiting on me to come looking. He’d hook me up.
I liked the hustle and the danger of the shadows. I liked living on the edge, clinging by my toenails.
I’d gotten locked up because of a mistake I’d made in picking the wrong person to run those shadows with. When she’d gotten caught, she’d screamed to everybody who’d listen who her partner was. Even then, I’d almost gotten away. I had a ticket to a suborbital in my hand when they’d taken me down.
I was SINless before I went into lockdown. Part of the intake for prison was assigning a System Identification Number to any inmate who didn’t have one. So I had a name that wasn’t my own, but it was still an identity that could be tracked. Not even Duncan or Raymond Black knew my present name.
Eventually I’d have to lose that SIN, but getting rid of it would cost more credits than I had access to at present. That was another reason I didn’t want the bounty hunter job. Those guys had to be licensed. Heavy-duty SIN, and even harder to scrape off when you needed to vanish.
Alone in the world for the first time in years, I took a shower by myself and slept in a bed people could have farmed on.
I woke in the quiet darkness of the room, and for a few moments forgot I wasn’t in lockdown. I lay still and listened for the breathing of my cellie. When I realized no one was in the room with me, I figured out that the quietness of the room was probably what had woken me up. In lockup, noise constantly filled every inch of space.
I checked the time and found there were still three hours to go before dinner with Watteau.
Unable to go back to sleep, I got up, made a cup of oolong tea in the pricey kettle that came with the room, and hooked up my commlink. It was a cheap MetaLink model without all the bells and whistles, a use-and-lose device that clipped over my ear. I’d been meaning to get an implant, but hadn’t found anyone in the shadows who I trusted and could afford. All those credits I’d dreamed of raking in had never happened.
Using the room’s deck, I hit up some of the bulletin boards where my fixer posted. It didn’t take me long to catch up with some of the runners I “knew.” You don’t ever really know another runner. Most of the time you got a street name, and maybe some sense of what the runner was all about. But you didn’t get personal with each other.
That was my mistake with Buttons. We’d gotten personal, but I never knew her real name, and she never knew mine. But she’d known enough about me to give me up.
The first message was a straight up job offer from a fixer named Cooper. He used to be a rigger back in the day, before he’d blown out of the sprawl after his nephew got killed by another runner crew. One of the guys back in the cellblock must have given him my info.
>Hey, I’m reaching out to find out if you’re up for a run. I know you just got out, but I’ve got something I think you’d be perfect for. I’ve got part of a crew together already. A hermetic mage who calls himself Chaos and loves to take on the megacorps. And a street sam named Brix. He’s human, so he presents a low profile. If you’re interested, the run will be led by an elf named Isabella. She used to be head of security for a megacorp, so she’ll have the inside track on this. I’ll vouch for her.
The job sounded interesting, so I saved the contact info.
It didn’t take long to cycle through the chaff, and the
re was little I really wanted to know or get involved with. I liked keeping to myself. That was one of the things about me that Duncan and the old man had never gotten used to.
The old man told me I’d suffered too much damage to ever trust anyone again. Maybe he was right. But I’d surprised us both by staying as long as I had.
He’d known I was going to leave at some point, though. And he’d prepared for it by setting up a private comm account we could both access. In case I ever wanted to get in touch with him and be circumspect about it. Which meant whatever slotted up mess I’d gotten myself into wasn’t supposed to be dragged back to Duncan.
I’d agreed. Over the years before I’d been locked down, I’d accessed it maybe half a dozen times. There’d only been one message from the old man. He’d wished me well and told me that, if I ever needed it, I always had a home.
I hated hearing that message. But I was glad it was there.
After eight years of silence, I wondered if the account would still be there, if the message would still be the same. I guessed part of me just wanted to know the old man was still alive. If he wasn’t, if the noodle place was still in business, I figured Duncan was managing it. Or maybe it had been sold, and the new owner had kept the old name. Noodle places get a lot of customer loyalty.
I sat there in the darkness for a while, watching the trid showing a soccer game I didn’t care about but enjoying the three-dimensional presentation in the room all the same. It was a lot better than the re-education productions shown in lockdown.
Then I accessed the site.
“You have one message,” the electronic voice told me. The recording was recent, too, dated only a couple days ago. There was no vid, just the aud component, but I could hear the years in the old man’s voice.
“Hi. It’s Raymond.”
I sat quiet and still, because I’d never heard him sound so hopeless. He’d always driven Duncan and me, never accepting anything less than our best.
“I hope I have the right number.”
I took a breath, wondering how he wouldn’t have the number, since he was the one who’d set up the account.
“Look, I know we haven’t spoken in a while, but I need your help.”
I stopped breathing for just a moment. For as long as I’d known him, the old man had never asked for help from me or anyone else. Where was Duncan? Had something happened to him? I worried instantly, then a suspicious part of me—that part that’s worked to keep me alive—wondered if the old man was calling me because he needed something Duncan wouldn’t do.
I also wondered why there was only the one call. If the old man had been truly desperate, he would have called again.
Unless he hadn’t been able to.
“Remember the day I took you and Duncan in from the street? I told you the past is just a story. That if you could just accept that, your past loses all power over you.” He paused. “I was wrong.”
Admitting he was wrong was something else I’d never heard the old man do. A chill ghosted through my body. I couldn’t help wondering what the old man had gotten himself into, and whether he’d dragged Duncan into it as well.
“I’m on my way to Hong Kong now to face something I should have faced a long time ago.”
The old man had never mentioned Hong Kong to me. I didn’t think he’d ever told Duncan anything like that either. But I knew he had some kind of past. I never forgot those two men who’d been trying to kill him. Even after I’d looked into it, I never discovered anything. He was a cipher, but I knew something had been waiting out there. The things you do in the shadows? They never go away.
“I need you with me. I know we’re not blood, and we didn’t leave things in a good place, but you and Duncan are the only real family I have.”
My gut unclenched. You and Duncan are… Duncan was still alive. I hung onto that more tightly than I thought I would.
“Please…if our past means anything to you…meet me in Hong Kong right away.”
The old man’s pleading cracked the hard shell I’d put on during lockdown. I’d promised myself nothing would ever touch me again. I resented him in that moment more than I ever had. Having to rely on him when I was younger had made me feel weak. That was part of the reason I’d left home; I couldn’t afford to be weak.
But now, hearing the fear and frailness in his voice, I felt vulnerable again, like I’d felt while protecting Duncan, when it had been just the two of us.
“I’m almost out of time...” His final words drifted away.
I waited for him to continue, but that was the end of the message. Not even a goodbye. I played it over again, but there was nothing new, and his words weighed on me like boat anchors.
There was a link at the end of the message. I pulled it up and discovered that the old man had wired nuyen to an account I’d had access to under the SIN I’d carried when I’d lived with him. That identity was still valid. When I checked the amount, I discovered there was enough in it to buy suborbital passage with credits left over. I guess the old man figured I’d come out of lockdown busted and flat broke.
Then I wondered why he’d left the message two days ago. My release date was a matter of public record.
Had the old man not known?
Or had something already happened to him?
I sat with that thought for a while. The old man wasn’t invincible. Nobody was. I’d never even thought I was.
I tried calling the comm the old man had used to reach me, but it was disconnected. So was the comm at the house and the noodle shop.
For a minute, I thought about trying to call Duncan, but I didn’t know what he’d done with his life. In the end, I decided that if he wasn’t involved in whatever the old man had gotten locked up in, that he didn’t need to know. To me, Duncan was still that kid I found in the alley, and the disciplined teenager who worked in the noodle shop. I couldn’t imagine anything that would have prepared him for whatever the old man was facing.
I figured I was on my own, and that was fine. That was how I liked things.
I left the hotel room and took the back way out of the building. Watteau never knew I’d left till I was in the wind.
Chapter 3
Care Package
Victoria Harbour
Hong Kong Free Enterprise Zone
August 2056
I’d heard about Hong Kong. You can’t live in Seattle or probably anywhere along the Pacific Rim and not run into constant reminders of the corporate-governed statelet. South East Asia left its mark on most sprawls in all culture: food, music, cyberware, magic, and other things.
I used most of the old man’s credits on a suborbital ticket and landed at Chep Lap Kok. The airport was full of people in a hurry, all of them lacquered by neon lights from the various businesses where hawkers cajoled everyone that passed by. Since I didn’t have any luggage, I got out of the airport as quickly as I could, and aimed myself at a bus station.
After being in prison, with cells all around me and on top of and below me, I’d thought there could be nowhere worse on the planet when it came to overpopulation and harsh circumstances. I was wrong. The sprawl was a mass of people packed as tight as maggots on a corpse. And many of them smelled about as bad.
A squall had risen up over the ocean and sailed inland. I’d heard about monsoon season before, even seen it in simsense games, but being in it was different. Angry black clouds drenched the street in heavy curtains of acid rain that floated refuse and threatened to lap over the curbs. I stepped across a dead rat racing with the new tide and was already soaked to the bone.
The double-decker buses were bisected in red and yellow, with the name of the line in English and Pinyin and bar code. I managed to jam myself into a narrow seat and waited restlessly to get underway.
Even though the suborbital had rocketed around the world in only a matter of hours, all of those hours had been spent worrying about the old man. And I worried about Duncan, too. If he knew the old man was in trouble, he’d be there
.
Worrying about someone other than myself was strange. Even while running the shadows, risking my neck on my skills, seeing a whole other world, in the back of my mind I’d known the old man and Duncan were safe. I’d hung onto that thought in lockdown, too.
Finally, the last passenger boarded and we took off, barely making headway through the mass exodus of humanity leaving the terminal for a short time. We rolled through the neon-lit streets, past bars and joygirls and -boys standing under protective awnings. Nobody looked festive.
After a bus ride to Victoria Harbour, I bought a water taxi ticket and took a seat inside. Water dripped from the other passengers and their umbrellas, collecting with the pools of rainwater that sluiced across the open deck.
The ride across rough waters caused the taxi to pitch and yaw wildly. At the stern, the young, green-faced pilot clung to the controls, and I wasn’t sure if he was seasick or coming down from mind-altering drugs.
Long minutes later, the taxi thudded into the tire-bumpers along the pier so hard that some of the passengers spilled onto the deck.
An old woman in expensive clothing landed near me and cursed loudly. Three sec guys in black suits hustled to her as I helped her up.
“Stand back,” the oldest guard ordered in Cantonese.
It took a moment for the language to come back to me. The old man had used it in the house, and I’d picked up more during my days in the shadows.
“Hey,” I responded in English while backing away and holding my hands out in front of me. “I was only trying to help.”
I turned and bumped into one of the guards behind me. He was so concerned over helping his superior that he didn’t notice me lift the Savalette Guardian from his hip holster and shove it in my waistband.
I kept moving, slipping into the throng daring the rain that pattered against the taxi and the concrete pilings. The taxi’s fiberglass hull squealed as it rubbed against the roped tires, but the pilot kept the craft mostly steady.
