She turned away from his coat and looked at her room. Bobbi could have afforded an apartment. Several. Hell, a house somewhere, if she’d wanted. She still maintained the warehouse she used to live in when she worked for Stadil, on the other side of the industrial pier on which the Temple sat. But there had been too many memories there for her now, and she let Scalli bunk there instead.
She had enjoyed the sparseness of the quarters there, however, and while it wasn’t filled with packing crates or hanging sheets of plastic, the room was fairly empty. Her platform bed, small but very soft, taking up the center of the back wall. Pale gray and ivory bedsheets, real Egyptian cotton. The overstuffed black duvet. The long, squat slab of a Marco Almai dresser with its face like a single piece of ink, the lines between its shelves so thin as to be imperceptible to the eye. The little bathroom and its shower booth with its variable-tinted walls, which she always kept clouded white. Color was kept constrained to her closet, which she’d converted the remainder of the lounge into. The only real decoration was Tom’s coat on the wall; she had thought about adding more, and certainly had intended to, but she just hadn’t taken the opportunity. She couldn’t say why.
Bobbi dropped onto the bed again, drew a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Maybe, when she opened them again, some sort of revelation would come to her.
Instead, there was a knock at the door.
“Yeah, come in,” Bobbi called. She sat up. The door slid open to reveal Scalli’s massive frame there, blotting out the light from the still-glowing display panels beyond him. He looked somewhat like a terrible djinn there, lit up as he was at the edge of Bobbi’s darkened room, and his expression was grim.
“Hey,” Bobbi said, her voice signing her fatigue. She wished he’d just leave her alone.
“Hey,” he replied. Scalli looked over his shoulder at something for a moment. “You doing all right in here?”
She shrugged. “I’m all right. Just had a bad date.” Bobbi rubbed at one eye with the back of her hand. “Listen, baby, can you…”
“Hey, don’t you ‘baby’ me.” Scalli’s expression darkened, made even more terrible by the blue light behind him. “I’ve known you too long for that shit to work. What’s going on?”
Bobbi stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. “Look,” she said, “don’t worry about it. It’s just a thing I had to go do, that’s it.”
“You never just go do ‘a thing’, either.” Scalli reached for the light, but Bobbi raised her hand to stop him.
“Look,” Bobbi said, her voice taking on an edge as she did so. “You’re one of my oldest friends, Scalli, so you should know better than to poke me when I don’t want to talk about something.”
But Scalli would not be denied. “It’s that dude again, isn’t it? That Fed of yours.”
Bobbi’s eyes narrowed, and her voice turned to lead. “Back off, okay?”
“Not even by a goddamned foot,” Scalli rumbled. He filled the doorway entirely now, arms crossed over his chest as he stared down at her. Bobbi shrank a little despite herself. All that stapled-up muscle of his made him look very much like some kind of hornless minotaur; all he needed was a ring through his nose and a pair of brazen hooves. “Now you listen here. I’ve been around, you know? Every time you go around trying to find out something about that man, you come back sadder and sadder – and I’m tired of seeing it, you know? I’m real sorry that he’s disappeared, I am, but –”
“Scalli, you really need to –”
“But you need to back the hell off and leave it alone. Who the hell knows what’s happened to you? He could’ve gone back to them. They could’ve put him under protection, gave him a new face! Hell, for all you knew he could be –”
“Okay, you know what?” Before she knew it she was on her feet, trembling with anger. “You know what? You need to shut the fuck up, Scalli. Shut the fuck up, because you don’t know a damned thing about this whole situation. You hear me? You don’t know shit. So why don’t you go back downstairs and leave me the fuck alone?” She’d never bothered to take off her dress, and standing there in its punk lines and her green eyes boiling with rage amongst the red ruin of her makeup, the little woman was every bit as fearsome as her massive friend. Waves of brilliant anger radiated from her like heat from baking concrete, expanding her presence as if to fill the room. Bobbi heard her voice, the snarl in it like a beast’s, and she actually managed to frighten herself.
She was used to going off these days; the cheerful, Devil-may-care girl she had been had faded dramatically in the last two years. But she had never screamed at Scalli, not even at his most smothering. He didn’t shrink from her when she exploded, but the look on his face was all she needed to know that she’d gone too far. “Well all right, then,” he said with a slow nod, and his face had become blank. “I guess I’ll head out for the night.” Then he was gone, leaving her standing there like the furious little punker she was – and it was that fury which drained out of her as the big man made his exit.
“Well, shit,” she muttered, and fell back onto the bed. “Things just get better and better.”
Three days passed in which Bobbi found herself hard-pressed for society. She didn’t hear from Freida, which she wasn’t certain was either good or bad, and Scalli had become quiet and businesslike as he went along his business downstairs. It was very discomforting to see her friend suddenly morph outwardly into an employee, and she felt like a real bitch about it. Which she should, she knew. Bobbi had no business blowing up on someone who had her best interests at heart, however ham-handed they might be in expressing it. Scalli hadn’t deserved it, but he wasn’t hearing anything more than job orders, or at the very least he wasn’t acknowledging anything else she was saying – apologies, that sort of thing. She felt pretty damned miserable.
So on the fourth day, stuck between angry silence from Scalli and no word at all from Freida Kelley, Bobbi found herself in a thoroughly black mood. She didn’t get up until late in the evening, content to lie in bed and stare at Tom’s coat hanging on the wall. And feel sorry for herself, of course. Couldn’t forget that.
When she rose, Bobbi eschewed her usual ‘morning’ ritual and called up a giant-sized monitor panel in order to watch the news. The far end of the room was suddenly aglow as the enormous screen leapt into place, the panels of light that usually made up her data wall melting into one. NewsNetNow’s local feed came on, and Maya Frail’s poreless, perfect face looked down upon her like a stern maiden goddess. “ … the former Nissan-Sterling assembly plant in the Renton sector of the Decommissioned Suburban Zone. It isn’t certain as to her involvement, but once again the individual known as Redeye seems to have once again thrust herself into the spotlight.”
The picture behind Maya displayed what was billed as live feed from a NewsNetNow VTOL circling a scene of destruction at a distance. The factory complex was a hexagonal structure in the middle of a vacant, walled-in lot, large enough to have housed several assembly and fabrication centers. Before the Collapse it must have been a magnificent industrial structure, but it had died and long since begun to decompose in earnest. What had been left of its corpse had now been transformed into a pit of smoking embers as the feed now showed, its bones roasting on camera amid the glow of fires rising out of its shattered roof, and columns of smoke twisted slowly from within toward the evening sky.
“Civil Protection representatives have refused to comment on the explosion, which took place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening. Though authorities had proclaimed it to be an accident, NewsNetNow has obtained footage depicting a party of individuals on the scene soon after the incident took place.”
As she spoke, the camera zoomed in to focus on a group of people sitting on a collapsed section of the wall that marked the borders of the old factory complex. It had been easy to miss them at first; they were dressed in scrounged and faded clothes, a mass of dark and dirty cloth and flesh in the shadow of the carnage. Most of them looked in various stages of crazy, fr
om the way their faces were lit up with ecstasy at the sight of the factory’s flames. All, Bobbi noted, except for one. A woman sat to one side, her face in profile, her expression grim but victorious as she stared on at the ruined factory. Her features were sharp and pretty, and unlike her disheveled companions her dark hair was sleek and clean as it poured over her shoulders. It was surprising; for some crazy bomb-queen like the news was making her out to be, she sure looked like she had her shit together.
One of the others turned and called for her attention; she turned to look at him, and Bobbi found herself jumping slightly at what she saw. The girl’s eyes were surrounded by what looked at first like tattoos, but were in fact starbursts of thin scars around her sockets. One eye was dark, maybe brown or hazel, but the other was a livid, burning red. That baleful iris wasn’t just tinted – it actually glowed, a dim point of light that shone like the cherry end of a cigarette as she stared back at the one who called to her. Words were exchanged, and then the knot of them were up and moving, disappearing into the dark with a speed that Bobbi had very rarely seen. She recognized it in the ferals of the Old City, in the skittering human horrors that too often populated its crumbling blocks. Bobbi remembered the blood that had coated Tom’s car and shuddered.
“Though it has yet to be confirmed that she or her group had anything to do with it, the urban terrorist figure has been present for the destruction of four other locations in the DSZ, and is suspected of being involved in the murder of what Civil Protection has described as illegal salvage crews operating in the area. What significance could this act have? And who is Redeye? Professor Manuel Gonzalez-Ortega of Santiago University says he has the answer. “
Bobbi wrinkled her nose at that. Illegal salvage indeed – this is what you got when you had poor folk squatting in the big bad place that was the Old City. Why had they not gone and rebuilt the place yet? She thought of the profits to be found in urban redevelopment, especially so many years since the collapse. The New City was rich enough, wasn’t it? Why not rebuild in earnest? Now the Professor’s head appeared on the screen, weathered and urbane. “It seems obvious to me,” he began, “yhat the individual known popularly as Redeye is simply one more in a long line of provocateurs symptomatic of the greater cultural consciousness. She is called a terrorist, but what crimes has she truly committed? The acts of her group – those that have been proven, those that she has allowed herself to be recorded in attendance of – these are very clearly more for attention than any real violation of the law. One must –”
As Bobbi watched, the system chimed and a mailbox window appeared superimposed over the Professor’s face. She saw another stampless, anonymous message appear in her mailbox, and her heart leapt. After three days of being ignored by Scalli, dangerous mystery was a welcome creature with which to distract herself. The message appeared to be from Freida, requesting that Bobbi meet with her on her private server once more; thrilled to have something other to do than dodging Scalli and listening to Professor Snore drone on about the red-eyed girl, Bobbi plugged herself in straight away.
Bobbi replied as Brain Mother.
There was a pause, seconds which felt like hours through the strange alchemy of the link. Caution flooded through Bobbi as she waited for a response, and she quietly prepared her defenses once more.
Bobbi allowed herself the grimmest little inward smile.
More silence. Tonight, Kelley/Mysteron felt as old as the machine she was operating from, some ancient computer program that required whole jarring seconds of processing before formulating a response.
At this, Bobbi felt a sting of vindication.
Kelley/Mysteron said.
A flash of impatience shot through Bobbi’s spine. Kelley might be a woman now, but she sure as hell was thinking like a man.
A sigh-icon from Mysteron/Kelley.
Well, that sounded suspect, Bobbi thought.
An hour or so later Bobbi was working at her desk, approving expenditures for the bar downstairs and working on her third cup of coffee. It was prime operating time, and the crowd on the floor was deep into its cups as they did business among themselves; Bobbi had briefly flirted with the idea of setting up listening cones in the maze of exposed ductwork that ran over the club floor, but she had ultimately decided against becoming The Man in her own right. She glanced at the security monitors; the bar was lined with people, boys and girls in leathers and street clothes jockeying with each other for Scalli’s attention. Punks and street creatures, underground intelligentsia all. Heaven help the human race, she thought, when the smartest folks are the ones crammed into bars at night plotting all kinds of larceny.
“Bobbi.” Scalli’s voice sprang forth from hidden speakers in the room. “Are you up there?”
Bobbi reached for a display and keyed the intercom. “I’m here,” she replied. “What’s up?”
The big man’s image shifted behind the bar; he had been serving a drink to a girl in ancient monobike racing leathers, black with faded yellow warning stripes spray-painted on the shoulder and elbow pads. A thick cable of black hair hung down her back. Now he looked straight up into Camera Seven, and grim irritation was plain on his face.
“I got a visitor down here for you,” Scalli growled, and nodded toward the dark-haired girl. “Says she’s expected.”
“Have her turn around,” Bobbi began, but as she said this the girl did just that. Grinning up at the camera was Freida Kelley. “Ah. Nevermind. Send her up.”
“Sure.” Scalli waved Freida on toward the back door, and now looked positively stormy. Bobbi sighed and shook her hea
d – they were going to have to talk about the whole thing soon.
Bobbi had enough time to look back toward the elevator and take a sip of coffee before it opened, and Freida appeared. “I’m here,” she announced, giving Bobbi a bit of a nod. “Sorry if I made you wait. Had to get tarted up a little.”
Bobbi’s lips quirked into a lopsided smile. “So I see,” she said, amused. “Do you change your looks around a lot?”
“I do if I’m visiting a hack dive in the middle of the Verge,” Freida said with a chuckle, then walked across to drop herself into one of the chairs that Stadil had set up in front of the desk for visitors. “My usual look’s a little Sally Ready, don’t you think?”
Bobbi snorted. “Yeah. You like your boutiques, that’s for sure.”
“Says the girl who showed up in Miri Bendis – or whatever was left of her.” Freida’s blue eyes seemed to sparkle when she smiled, which she did so in earnest now. “I read a lot of fashion magazines – they suggest you do so in therapy. When you go through the change, I mean.”
“Ah.” Bobbi paused, looking down at her own brick-colored jeans and her ancient Red Cross tank top. She was suddenly very aware that there was a hole in it near her navel. Self-conscious. “Well, you definitely got the New City look down, that’s for sure,” she said, looking back up to Kelley, “so good for you. We’re all street beasts down this way.”
Kelley gave her a look of playful exasperation and laughed. “Yes, well, you looked amazing the other night. You can’t beat a lady’s innate style with study, you know. At any rate, you got something you wanted to show me?”
Bobbi wondered at the shift in Kelley’s personality from the other night, but she chalked it up to Kelley having her game face on. “Yeah,” Bobbi said. “You want it visual, or do you want to wire up?”
“I’ll take it directly,” Freida said with a nod, and reached up to extract the dustplug from a socket that Bobbi now saw gleaming behind her ear. She plugged the short, blunt cone of a wireless receiver into the socket and nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 4
