by Jay Kristoff
From the look of things, most of the work in the Hub was being done by logika now, or Rim dwellers looking for residence beyond the Wall. Apart from robot servitors and patrols, the streets were empty. He wondered where all the citizens were—it was a Friday night; this part of town used to be filled to bursting. Hands shoved in his pockets, he wandered into the grooves of the red-light strip, past a dozen OUT OF BIZ signs, until he found his answer.
The club was called Bliss. The two slabs of meat bouncing on the door looked like they were cut from the same bolt of Kevlar, but the name above the door was his kind of promise, so he stalked inside, ready to get his drunk on.
First thing he noticed was there were no windows. No way to tell night from day. The ground floor was a broad, circular bar, thudding to the tune of some almost-subsonic drum dub. Twenty-nine flavors of ethyl lined the shelves. Preacher slapped down his personal stik and ordered a dozen shots. This place, at least, was crowded, thumping, loud. But looking around the room, Preacher quickly realized it wasn’t the liquor bringing folks in the door. Not the music, either.
Immersion booths lined the walls, four stories high, filled with citizens. Holographic posters for the latest VR realms were projected on the walls: ATLANTIS. EROS. CHAOS-DOME III. Groups sat around on circular couches, plugged into communal VR hubs. Couples retired to private booths and plugged in; other folks gathered around to observe on voyeur accounts, or just watch the proceedings projected onto the walls in close-up, pristine high-def.
The crowd was young—kids of Corp big shots, probably. Preacher guessed most of ’em had no idea what life was like outside the Hub. Their faces were slack with the kind of happy only their wildest dreams could bring.
Daedalus Technologies won the CorpWars. They were the greatest power in the Yousay. And this, apparently, was what victory looked like. Rim dwellers and logika doing all the work—serving the drinks, driving the cars, guarding the streets. And with nothing else to do with their time, Daedalus’s accredited citizens were spending their lives living in worlds that weren’t their own. When faced with the option of an existence in which every dream could come true, it looked like many of Megopolis’s citizens now preferred virtual reality to the regular kind.
Preacher shook his head, slammed back another glass.
This is what I spent all those years protecting?
He looked to the mirror over the bar. He could see himself: hunched over his drink, black hat, black coat. Shadows under his eyes, crow’s-feet at their edges. Gray at his temples. His cheeks were hollow, his skin like leather, patches of stubble at his chin a suspicious shade of gray.
Face it, cowboy.
You got old.
He never saw it coming, talking true. Wasn’t something he ever thought about. He didn’t feel any different. Oh, maybe the few flesh-and-bone joints he had left were a little creakier than they used to be. But he never felt different inside. Redundancy was something that happened to other people. Old was something everyone else got. Not him.
Beside him, a CorpKid in an expensive suit ordered a round of the house’s best. His friend nudged Preacher and asked him for a light, but the bounty hunter grunted he didn’t smoke. The music thumped in his head. The liquor burned in his veins. The name was poison on his tongue.
Drakos.
That bastard.
Didn’t he know what he was taking away?
Preacher slammed down his last shot, all stomach for it gone. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he climbed off his stool. And turning to walk away, he collided chest-first with a tray of top-shelf liquor. The shots flew, the glasses hit the floor and shattered, bright lights strobing in the spilled booze.
“Hey, watch it!” a CorpKid shouted.
“Goddammit, sorry,” Preacher mumbled, tipping his hat. “Lemme get—”
“Sorry?” the kid glowered, wiping the spill off his jacket. “You ruined my suit, you defective Rim-scum!”
Preacher raised his eyebrow. “Said I was sorry, son. Most folks don’t even get that. So whyn’t you take your friends and—”
“Is there a problem, sir?” someone growled behind him.
Preacher turned and saw a two-meter-tall chunk of human brick in a black suit. He had the bent nose and the cauliflower ears of a man who liked to box, top-line optics and a Memdrive behind his ear loaded with combat softs.
“This idiot Rim-runner is making a scene, Errol,” the CorpKid said. “This used to be an establishment with standards. Why don’t you take out the trash?”
The goon clapped his hand on Preacher’s shoulder. “Let’s go, old man.”
And there it was again.
Old man.
Preacher clenched his jaw. Glanced around the room. The Kevlar boys on the front door were watching but not stepping in—the bouncers obviously didn’t want to upset a wealthy customer. And kicking off with a goon packing this much hardware wasn’t the smartest play. But the liquor had the reins now, and the anger was whipping it on, and sometimes when you’re aching, all that matters is making someone else ache, too. And so, Preacher tongued the implant in his upper right molar twice to kick in his combat augs and punched the goon right in the face.
Preacher’s strike broke Cauliflower’s already crooked nose, his metal fist smudging it all over the bigger man’s cheek like a burst balloon. His second punch found the goon’s jaw. Adrenaline roaring in his heart, methaline and phencylamide in his veins, and sweet red rage roiling behind his eyes.
But the goon didn’t go down.
Folks were shouting now. Yelling to take it outside. Preacher’s boot found the goon’s crotch, a vicious, heel-first kick that would have killed any normal man’s chance of making a family. But instead, he heard a dull, heavy thunk. He mashed the goon’s teeth against his lips, smiling as blood sprayed. Everything was forgotten, all his sorrows finally drowned beneath the rush of it all.
And then security stepped in.
A Kevlar boy grabbed Preacher from behind, which freed up the CorpGoon to land a couple of good shots. He felt a bottle breaking across his metal skull. The goon buried his fist in Preacher’s gut, and Preacher heard the sound of meat ripping over the doofdoofdoof. He tried to break free. But even jacked up on combat stims, he still had most of a bottle in him. And badass as he was, there were more of them than him. His repairs in Armada hadn’t been top-of-the-line. Truth was…
I just ain’t what I used to be.
He felt another head shot, warm blood on his face. Boots colliding with his skull, his ribs. Dull, thudding impacts now, pain just a blur under the booze and stims, the pulsing music, the yelling CorpKids. He lashed out, anger giving him one last push—it wasn’t fair, this wasn’t fair. Unconsciousness beckoning. He felt another kick, pushing him toward its open arms. He fought as it took him, kissed his brow, held him tight. But in the end, it wasn’t enough.
He wasn’t enough.
He sank down into darkness.
But at least he took his sorrows down with him.
“This is a terrible plan,” Diesel declared, lowering her binoculars.
“It’ll work,” Grimm replied, taking the ’nocs off her. “Trust me.”
“When have any of your plans ever worked, Grimm?”
He peered through the binoculars, squinting at their target.
“First time for everything, mate.”
They were sprawled belly-down on a rocky outcropping, overlooking a stretch of broken desert. Far across the expanse of miserable scrub, the shattered freeway overpasses and broken roads, they could see the east coast of the Yousay. A slow, choking river spilled into the polluted ocean beyond. And there on the shoreline, rising into the sky, was the BioMaas CityHive.
Squinting through the ’nocs, Grimm realized he’d never seen so much green in one place. The stronghold’s tall, beautiful spires and graceful thorn-topped
walls were all crawling with plant life. It was a tiny slice of beauty: a flower blooming on the grave of a broken world.
But pretty as it was, there was something unsettling about it. Maybe the swarms of menacing shapes circling above. Maybe the strange, asymmetrical uniformity, or the fact he’d never seen most of these plants before, even in nature sims or books.
Or probably just because these berks had his girl locked up in there.
His girl.
Grimm blinked to catch himself thinking of her like that. Lemon hadn’t made any promises to him. They’d only known each other a couple of days. But just like the city waiting across those sands—the city she was imprisoned in—Lemon Fresh was like nothing Grimm had ever known. She was rusted steel around the edges but pure gold on the inside. Smart and determined and funny and punchy. Pretty without trying to be. Kind without needing to be. He still remembered the way she felt pressed up against him. The way she melted in his arms when he kissed her for what he thought was the first and last time.
He hadn’t died in New Bethlehem. Which, of course, raised the possibility that it wouldn’t be the last time—a fact that had consumed entirely too much of his thoughts on the sixteen-hour drive across the desert to the coast. But looking down on the stronghold of BioMaas Incorporated now, the behemoths guarding its flowering walls, the swarms of Lumberers and Hunter-Killers in the skies above, he had to admit the possibility of more kissery seemed a distant one.
“We cannot possibly sneak in there,” Deez declared.
“No chance,” Grimm agreed.
“And we can’t fight our way in.”
Grimm nodded. “We’d be dead before we got close.”
“So, run me through this terrible plan of yours one more time?”
Grimm scratched at the radiation symbol shaved into his scalp.
“Look, it’s dead simple,” he sighed. “Abraham can review everything that’s happened in CityHive over the last three days on the satellite footage. He can tell us exactly what building they took Lem into. So, we don’t sneak. We don’t fight. We just move quicker than they can. Rift in. Rift out. Gone.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way,” Diesel said. “I can’t Rift someplace I can’t see. Whatever building Lemon’s inside, I can’t get us in there.”
“Get us up on the roof, then. From there, we steal our way inside, find Lem, get back up, Rift back here to the truck, and fang it.”
Diesel sucked her paintsticked lips thoughtfully, toying with a lock of dark hair. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. This is not a terrible plan.”
Grimm glanced at her sidelong. “It’s not?”
“Nope. In fact, as far as I can tell, this is not a plan at all.”
“Nobody likes a smart-arse, Deez.”
“Are you serious?” she scoffed. “Everyone likes me.”
Grimm scowled and spoke into his sat-phone. “Abe, do you copy?”
“Not…ery well,” came the soft, crackling reply. “We go…ted coverage. I might…strengthen the…but I’ve only been working—”
“Yeah, yeah, righto,” Grimm interrupted. “Just to confirm, they’ve got Lem stashed in the biggest spire, yeah? The tallest one?”
“Grimm, the sat…lometers above the earth,” said an exasperated-sounding Abraham. “I’m looking directly down. I can’t tell how fu…tall it is.”
“But it’s the central spire, right, Brotherboy?” Diesel demanded, her temper flashing in her eyes. “The one with all the spokes coming off it?”
A long silence filled the line, broken only by faint static.
“Affirmative,” came the eventual reply.
“Cheers, mate,” Grimm said. “Get the bacon on the fryer, we’ll be back for breakfast.”
“Gri…feel it’s my duty to inform…nothing even remotely close to bacon.”
Grimm switched off the radio, stowed it at his belt. After one last glance through the ’nocs at CityHive, he stood and brushed the dust off his cargos. But Diesel was still just sitting there, squinting up at him, dark shades over dark eyes.
“You waiting for an invitation?”
“We can’t go in there, Grimm,” she replied simply.
“ ’Course we can,” he said. “We’ll be in and out before—”
“Look, I know you care about this girl. I know it burns you to think about what might be happening to her. But we need a better plan than ‘Rift inside and blunder about until we find her.’ This is a CorpState stronghold, Grimmy. Think about what’s waiting for us past those walls.”
“We move fast enough—”
“Fast won’t matter,” Diesel said. “We’re going in blind.”
“But not empty-handed,” he said.
Diesel frowned. “Meaning what?”
He pursed his lips, resigning himself to the fact Deez wouldn’t play along unless she knew the whole tune. “Meaning did you notice the way I burned that Goliath the other night? Or cooked those Daedalus troopers?”
“…Yeah, so what?”
“So the flames I made were hot enough to melt metal, Deez. I cooked that Goliath from the inside out. I’ve never been able to do that before.” He shook his head, looked down at his hands. “I dunno what the score is. But ever since I soaked up the fire from that nuke…it’s like…” He shook his head again, searching for the right words. “It’s like I absorbed the blast, but somehow I didn’t let it all out of me. Like there’s a part of it still inside me.”
“Part of a nuclear explosion?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged. “It’s weird. But yeah. Maybe.”
One of Deez’s slender eyebrows crept slowly upward. “That doesn’t sound healthy for you, Grimmy.”
“…Are you serious?” he asked, bewildered. “Who gives a toss about ‘healthy for me’? Lemon’s in that hole, and she’s in trouble, and I’ve got more firepower at my fingertips than I’ve ever had.” He snapped his fist shut, and the air around it rippled like it was scorching. “We run into trouble, it’s bloody ash, mate.”
Diesel stood slowly, put her hand on Grimm’s shoulder and spoke with the tone of someone delivering bad but much-needed news. “Look, I know you like this girl. I like her, too, annoying as she can be. But we’ve already lost one of our crew to these BioMaas bastards.” She swallowed hard, squared her shoulders. “I’m not going to lose more. We’re the future of the human race.”
Grimm shrugged her hand away, anger rising in his chest like fire. “You gonna spit that survival-of-the-fittest crap at me here? The Major was full of shit, Deez! He lied to us! He betrayed us!”
“Doesn’t mean some of what he said can’t be true. Lies get swallowed better when you hide them between a couple of slices of truth.” Diesel shook her head. “I’m sorry. But I’m not taking us in there blind, Grimm. It’s suicide.”
“You got another idea? Or did we drive all this way for nothing?”
“We wait,” Diesel said simply. “Brotherboy can monitor the city from orbit. Those satellites are sharp enough to pick a walking redheaded disaster out in a crowd of bugs and boneheads. They’re gonna move her at some point, Grimm. Transfer her to another facility, or take her to an interrogation, or even let her out for fresh air. As soon as she’s in the open, we Rift in and grab her.”
“And you call my plans terrible?” Grimm raged. “Maybe that building is a jail and she’s locked down for good! Maybe she’ll never see the light of day again!”
“Maybe,” Deez said. “But she’s supposedly important to these people. They didn’t want her dead, or she already would be. Maybe they’re not going to treat her like a prisoner.” The girl folded her arms, her own temper fraying. “And if they do have her locked down in some damn dungeon? Chances of us busting her out are next to zero. This is the capital of the second-largest CorpState in the whole damn Yousay, Grimm. And I’m not go
nna let your wang drag us to certain death.”
“Hell with you, then.”
“Wassat supposed to mean?”
Grimm closed his hands into fists, boiling with anger. He was so furious, it was almost a physical sensation—like a chunk of burning coal inside his chest. The air around him rippled, like a heat haze on a furious summer’s day. He spun on his heel, spoke through clenched teeth.
“It means I’ll go in alone.”
Deez reached out to stop him leaving, fingers sinking into his forearm. “Grimm, don’t be an— OW, GODDAMMIT!”
Diesel’s voice rose into a shriek, and she pulled back her hand with a gasp. Her face was twisted with pain, and she was clutching her wrist, hand held out in front of her. Her palm and fingers were red raw, like they’d been charbroiled.
Grimm heard a faint sizzling sound, looked down to where she’d touched him. He saw the faint impression of a handprint outlined on the muscles of his forearm, realizing with awful horror it was a layer of Diesel’s skin.
“Deez, are you okay? I’m so bloody sorry, I didn’t know, I didn’t—”
“Just stop!” she shouted, backing away. “Stay back, you’re too h…”
Her voice trailed off into nothing as she looked up at him.
“Jesus, Grimm, your eyes…”
“What?” he asked, pawing at his cheeks. “What about them?”
Face still twisted with pain, Diesel reached with her good hand into the pockets of her cargos, fished out her eyeliner, her paintstick, finally producing her little compact mirror. She backed off a few more steps, held it up in front of him. Grimm’s breath caught in his lungs.
His eyes were glowing. Wisps of what looked like flaming plasma spilling out from between his lashes, trailing up into the air like burning smoke. He could feel the anger in his chest, the heat of it. He could feel it raging, like that heat, that awful, burning doomsday that had split the skies above the New Bethlehem desert. For a moment, he almost lost himself in it. But he looked at Deez, at the burn on her hand, horror welling in his chest. He closed his eyes again. And breathing deep, he forced it back, that fire, that rage, like shoving a beast back inside its cage.
