by Eliot Peper
ALSO BY ELIOT PEPER
“True Blue” (A Short Story)
Neon Fever Dream
Cumulus
The Analog Series
Borderless
Bandwidth
The Uncommon Series
Uncommon Stock: Exit Strategy
Uncommon Stock: Power Play
Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Eliot Peper
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542044592 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542044596 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542044615 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542044618 (paperback)
Cover design by The Frontispiece
First edition
To all who wrestle with hard questions instead of settling for easy answers.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
AFTERWORD
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
Emily Kim admired the exquisite control with which the food-stall vendor prepared teh tarik. Reaching one stainless-steel cup high over his head, he poured the hot milk tea in a steaming arc and caught it in a second cup by his knee. Then he extended his arms and threw the liquid sideways from cup to cup. The next stream flew right past his ear. He accelerated, contorting his body and flinging the liquid between the cups from impossible angles, his speed and skill turning the simple maneuver into a dance, crosshatching the air between them with flickering curves of fluid amber before depositing the entire frothy flow into Emily’s waiting mug.
He didn’t spill a single drop.
Emily took a sip, savoring the creamy sweetness.
“Better than KL,” she said.
“Even Filipinos need their roti canai.” He handed her the flaky flatbread, hot to the touch and folded around an egg.
“You ever miss Malaysia?”
“Same same but different.” He shrugged. “Camiguin’s got everything.”
Emily looked around, trying to see the tiny island she’d called home for a dozen years through fresh eyes. Elegant timber-and-glass buildings lined the waterfront with tropical cumulus clouds massing above the turquoise sea beyond. The center of the island was a protected nature reserve, thick jungle covering the slopes of the three volcanoes.
Camiguin was beautiful and offered all the amenities tourists might desire, but the engine that drove the local economy wasn’t diving lessons or honeymoon packages. Instead, the lax laws and even laxer enforcement made this a premier destination for those looking to escape the overeager eyes of more demanding governments or seek an illicit thrill. Its location in the southern Philippines was just far enough away from megacities like Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore to avoid undue attention yet close enough to be convenient.
Emily wasn’t the first person who had come here to hide.
Summoning her feed, she paid the vendor and moved on. She hoped the afternoon snack would take the edge off her burgeoning anxiety, dull the anticipation of imminent violence that made her so twitchy. But soon she held nothing more than an empty mug and a greasy square of wax paper, and her nerves were still as raw as ever. It was like public speaking. No matter how many times you did it, the butterflies never went away.
Javier had always hated public speaking, preferring to craft algorithms in the safety of his feed, where mathematics could soar unimpeded by the mess of everyday life. She pulled up the stream from this morning to watch him deliver an impassioned commencement address to the assembled graduates of UC Berkeley. A protest demanding that Commonwealth intercede in the Russian civil war had delayed the talk, and a counterprotest demanding they remain neutral delayed it further. But the commencement had finally commenced, and in a conclusion that had taken the headlines by storm, Javier invoked his role as a Commonwealth board member to publicly pressure the conglomerate that ran the feed to tackle the enduring problem of global inequality.
Emily had to admit, it was impressive what Commonwealth had accomplished since the feed blackout a decade before. After the US government had tried and failed to nationalize Commonwealth in a misguided attempt to establish a global empire, the conglomerate that ran the feed had declared itself sovereign, making its ubiquitous information infrastructure even more integral to the global economy as it secured its independence and later its quiet dominance in the new world order.
Javier’s arguments reminded her of countless late-night debates fueled by fervent idealism and ample quantities of Bordeaux. How they had both loved that heady rush. But now Emily didn’t dissect Javier’s ideas as she would have all those years ago in front of the fire at their sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest. Instead, she listened to the familiar inflections of his voice, noticed the streaks of gray running through his dark-brown hair, and smiled when he fiddled with his long fingers as he always did when he was nervous. She imagined that he was speaking directly to her, that this was a live video conversation instead of a recorded speech, that this was real, real, and she could interrupt to tell him how proud she was of him, how much he and Rosa meant to her, how much she missed him.
Emily dialed back the opacity on her feed, and Javier faded into an apparition. The setting sun transformed the clouds into piles of blood-soaked wool. Flocks of drones and bats vied for aerial dominance overhead. This island was a candy apple with a rotten core, a paradisal parasite that fed on corruption and sheltered those broken souls who found solace only in pain.
She crumpled the greasy paper and threw it away in disgust.
Souls like hers.
Her feet had carried her through neighborhood after neighborhood until she reached that liminal zone that seemed to exist in every city, the place where shadows thickened, where you could score whatever your sordid heart desired and people minded their own damn business. A pair of junkies were draped across a bench, murmuring in blissed-out oblivion. Someone had carved an ejaculating penis complete with hairy balls into the wooden wall of a low-slung warehouse. Down the stre
et a woman screamed obscenities—whether to someone in her feed or to the universe at large, Emily couldn’t tell.
Emily slapped at a mosquito and examined the gory smudge its carcass left on her palm. That was all she might amount to after tonight. Time to get her head in the game.
Dismissing Javier, Emily cycled through her playlist and jacked up the volume. Big bass wrapped her in a reverberant embrace. High-pitched loops and flourishes added spice and texture. And then the lyrics hit, raging against the broken system, glorying in rebellion, asserting identity in the face of oppression. Classic hip-hop was a forgotten genre, detritus from a previous century, its aesthetic subsumed into the intervening stages of musical evolution. But it was also raw and angry and the truest thing Emily knew.
Emily looked down at her hands. The dying light caught the puckered flesh of the scars, the thickness of the calluses, and the crooked hitch in her thrice-broken pinkie. She couldn’t do this forever. She was too small, too old, too amateur. One day soon, it would all end. That was the whole damn point.
The narrow gate recognized her and popped open as she turned into the alley. She stepped under the barbed wire and over shards of broken glass. Rizal really needed to work on the ambiance. Then again, maybe this was the ambiance he was going for.
Beats thrummed through her and the song ascended to its fiery climax as she reached the battered concrete stairs leading down into darkness. This island was shit. This world was shit. And she deserved nothing less. The sweet aftertaste of the teh tarik was suddenly nauseating. The vendor hadn’t spilled a drop. Not a single drop. Perfection. That was what this fucked-up universe demanded. That was what she hadn’t been able to deliver.
Emily squared her shoulders and descended into the fight club.
CHAPTER 2
A hush fell over the crowd as all the lights went out.
Emily welcomed the silence and darkness. She wiggled her bare toes in the sawdust, adjusted her leotard, and felt the current of electric bloodlust running through the eager spectators. Every cell in her body screamed at her to run, to hide, to yield. What was she doing? Why would anyone subject themselves to this? From what dark recess of human nature did such horror stem? The abyss yawned before her, terrifying and enticing.
The stillness reached its apex. The bets had been placed. It was time.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between.” Rizal knew how to read a room. The darkness made his low growl feel intimate and otherworldly. The audience held its breath. “Society has forgotten the hard truths that ancient civilizations took for granted, truths written in blood and steel. We have grown soft. We have grown comfortable. We have grown weak. But not you.” The syllable came out harsh and guttural. “Your presence here tonight proves that you are among the special few prepared to face the darkness. After we are done, as you go forth from this hall, look around you, and know those timid people too scared to attend this ritual for the sheep they are. This contest is more than entertainment—it is sacred.”
A single light snapped on, its beam transfixing the boxing ring and Rizal standing at its center, head bowed. Emily suppressed a snort. Sometimes Rizal was such a showman. A retired mixed martial artist, he’d opened this joint after aging out of competitions, and taught Emily what he could after she washed up here more than a decade ago. Rizal looked up, gray dreadlocks cascading around his broad shoulders.
“And now,” he said, “let me introduce this evening’s heroes.”
A spotlight speared through the darkness to illuminate her opponent as he approached the ring. Emily ignored Rizal’s spiel and focused on the man she would fight. Niko. He wore nothing but a loincloth, displaying the extensive tattoos that turned his skin into a tapestry of Maori mythology. His stride betrayed a certain bluntness, a tendency for compensating for insecurity with aggression. He had been a rugby player before trying his hand as a fighter, a middling athlete in a sport where his short, stocky build was an asset. As Rizal sang his praises, Niko stomped through the crowd, pulled apart the vinyl-sheathed ropes, and stepped into the ring.
Rizal paused to allow for a round of fevered applause.
Then the spotlight found Emily, blinding her as it shattered off the iridescent glitter that covered every centimeter of her skin and leotard. Even after all these years, it took ages to prep in the greenroom. She would sit in front of the mirror applying every shade and hue of glitter into interlocking fractals that resolved into finer or coarser resolution depending on the distance of the observer.
Every time she went through the painstaking ritual, she entered a kind of fugue state that orbited around Dag. He could have been sitting right there with her, illustrating her as if her flesh were one of his beloved sketch pads. She had spent so many years scraping data from his feed, distilling the results into insights and hypotheses about why he did what he did and testing those hypotheses through subtle manipulation of his digital universe. Rinse and repeat. To bend him to her will, she’d had to know him better than he knew himself. That took more than dedication. That took obsession. In the process, Dag had become a part of her, his instincts and intuitions fusing with her own until she was able to exercise ever-finer control by tweaking his feed, knowing what would work through internal reflection as much as external analysis.
Such intimacy made her betrayal unforgivable. She had overreached, and fate had whipped back to strike her down into this hellhole. It was precisely what she deserved.
Before each match, Rizal would pound on the greenroom door with a five-minute warning. She would emerge from the trance to see a psychedelic daemon staring back out of the mirror. Hot-pink capillaries spiraled out from her eyes, neon-green tendrils grew from her navel, and everything laced together into a riot of color that was dazzling and absorbing, running the eye through a roller coaster of strange loops and generating a gravity well for attention.
Reeling herself back to the present, Emily curtsied and pushed her oversize lucky glasses up her nose.
The crowd howled.
Rizal launched into his pitch and Emily skipped toward the ring, careful to keep her movements loose and childlike, throwing in the odd pirouette to enhance the whimsical aesthetic. It was as if she had leapt from the pages of a fairytale that, like so many of its ilk, was about to turn gruesome.
CHAPTER 3
“May fortune favor the bold.”
Emily closed one eye to protect her vision as Rizal fired a blank from his antique Colt .45 to start the match. Fighters sometimes charged right off the gun, hoping to use the element of surprise to catch their opponent unawares. Emily had lost a fight that way once and suffered a severe concussion that had resulted in six months of unpredictable attacks of vertigo, dizziness, and nausea. She would never again let the afterimage of the pistol’s flash impede her view of her adversary.
But as Rizal slipped out of the ring, Niko kept his distance. Maybe he’d heard stories about the crazy girl that prowled Camiguin’s fight club, or maybe he just wanted to suss her out.
They circled each other.
Emily had watched game after mediocre game of his rugby career, looking for clues that might indicate what made Niko tick. He didn’t distinguish himself through skill or athleticism, and he never had a chance to advance to the big leagues. But there were certain times when he made unexpected plays. During the first stage of a tournament when a sleet storm had turned the field into icy muck, Niko had tackled a fly-half with surgical precision at a critical juncture. In the last few minutes of a rout, Niko had rucked like a maniac even though his teammates had already given up. Once, during a scrimmage in the off-season, he repeatedly plowed through the defensive line with vicious and almost inappropriate tenacity. Emily had stitched the segments together in her feed and let them loop again and again as she tried to work out what connected them, what particular catalyst transformed Niko from a lackluster prop into a raging bull.
Now what she saw behind his deep-set brown eyes confirmed her hypothesis. His thick muscles an
d heavy bones were nothing but a reactor vessel for the nuclear fuel rod that was his slow-burning ire. He excelled only when weather, imminent defeat, or certain victory set off a chain reaction that sent him into emotional meltdown, loosing his fury on an unsuspecting world. She could feel the vibrations every time his feet hit the mat, as if he were trying to pound the earth into submission. He was a mastiff straining against the leash of self-control.
Emily would sever that leash.
“They told me you were going to be so big and strong,” she said in a singsong voice pitched to carry. “An all-star athlete turned gladiator, they said, a man who could strike down enemies with a single glance.” She giggled brightly. “Can you, really?”
She paused as if waiting for his gaze to smite her.
“Here, I’ll try too.” She pushed her glasses up her nose again and squinted at him with feigned intensity.
The audience tittered.
Niko’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
Emily sighed. “No luck. Well, I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. When I dug deeper, I discovered that all-star might have been overstating it just a teeny tiny bit.” She held up her thumb and forefinger. “I mean, the only record you hold is for the second most consecutive losses of any player in the league. Second most.” She shook her head sadly. “You can’t even win at losing.”
A laugh rolled around the room. Emily covered her mouth and opened her eyes wide. “Oh shoot, Rizal told me not to mention that in front of everyone. Eek, my bad. It’ll just be our little secret, okay, Nikito? Cross my heart.”
Muscles bunched along his jawline, distending the facial tattoos.
“Cunt,” Niko spat, the word dropping like a brick from a second-story window.
“Ooo!” Emily waggled her eyebrows. “Is that what you’re here for? To eat me out instead of beat me up? That’s so very thoughtful of you.” She lowered her voice into a stage whisper. “I don’t normally go in for the whole exhibitionist thing, but if that tongue of yours is as well developed as those biceps, it’s possible that maybe, just maybe, I could be convinced.” She was careful not to expend too much oxygen as she talked, timing her sentences to match the natural ebb and flow of her breath. “I’m just sayin’, a girl’s gotta—”
