by Jay Posey
Without waiting for an answer, the agent produced a translucent green card and swept it through a slotted device, which clicked once and beeped cheerily. He extended it to Three.
“Hard, actually,” Three replied, hands in his coat pockets.
The agent’s slight shoulders slumped almost into non-existence.
“I don’t keep that kind of Hard just layin’ around. No more than a thousand any given day.”
The pointcard trembled in the agent’s still-outstretched hand, in vague hope that this strange man from beyond the wall would take it and disappear. Three could tell he disturbed the agent. The wrinkled old man stared at him like he didn’t belong there, like he was some alien thing wedged in the wrong reality. The agent shivered.
“I’ll take the thousand now, and come back for the rest.”
The agent pushed the card a little closer.
“Might be a day or two.”
“I’ll wait.”
The agent let out a weary sigh. He rummaged in, under, and around the electric clutter of his office, until he located an ancient lockbox, secured with physical biometrics. After running his bent and knobby fingers over the touchpad, the box hissed open. The agent opened it just wide enough to slip his hand in, counted out twenty nanocarb chips, and handed them over to Three with some reluctance. Three glimpsed more Hard in the box, but made no comment, sized the agent up instead: dilated pupils, thin sheen of perspiration, colorless ring around tensed lips.
“Sorry I frighten you,” Three said without apologetic tone. He leaned his head to one side and cracked his neck audibly, watching the old man carefully. The agent laughed, too suddenly, too loud.
“What? I ain’t scared of ya, don’t ya worry about that.”
Lie, Three thought.
“I lived plenty enough years to see things a lot worse than you, friend.”
That was true. Three lowered his head in the barest hint of a bow. Whatever the agent’s reason for withholding a portion of his stash, Three decided, he was an honest dealer. Probably owed someone. The agent got back to business.
“Gimme your SNIP, I’ll pim ya when I get the rest.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow.”
The agent’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Be easier if you just gimme the SNIP.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Figgered that,” the agent snorted. “Well, gimme two days, I’ll have the rest for ya then. Late afternoon.”
Three unfastened his coat to pocket the payment, revealing a mammoth pistol crouching in a holster on his vest, coiled like some predator hungering to pounce. The agent’s eyes bulged at the hardware, but he quickly diverted his attention. He kicked at the coffin.
“’Preciate the work you done,” he said half-heartedly. “Dunno why you had to do him like that, though.”
Three adjusted the pistol, then refastened his coat, concealing it once more.
“You will when you open it.”
Three nodded to the agent, and swiveled back down the stone corridor. As Three walked away, the agent watched him briefly, then, on a sudden whim, picked up and aimed the humming rod at his back. The agent frowned slightly, shook the rod, and pointed it again, more purposefully. His frown deepened, eyes narrowed with some undefined emotion. A thought occurred, and wide-eyed he fumbled over himself to seal the flexiglass cube, as Three stepped back out onto the street.
The honey-colored liquid swirled gently in the finger-smudged squat glass on the table in front of Three. It was his fourth of the afternoon. Still he waited for the comforting blanket of alcoholic haze to embrace him. He leaned forward, resting his face in his hands, and his elbows on the table, felt it shift slightly to the right, and wondered briefly if it were the table or himself that had wobbled. Was this the wobbly table? Or had that been yesterday? Yesterday? Yesterday. It was the second day since he’d met with the agent. Payday.
Three let out a weary sigh, ran his hands back over his shaved head, feeling the stubble of a few days’ growth, then massaged his temples, probably throbbing though he couldn’t be sure. It was like this when he didn’t have a job; something to find, someone to bring in. The restlessness was setting in, the need to move. To hunt. It was the third day in the same town. Might as well have been a month. There were benefits to being a freelancer, but down time wasn’t one of them.
From his corner booth, he had a commanding view of all the critical angles. The booth itself was U-shaped, tucked in the front corner of the bar, a natural blind spot from the entrance. Temprafoam, covered in some cheap imitation of a much sturdier textile, it was adequate comfort and gave him all the room he needed, and best of all required no reservation, deposit, or record of stay. He sat with his feet propped on the bench opposite, with his coat bundled around his hardware on the perpendicular seat that completed the U. His eyes involuntarily swept around the bar, taking stock of his surroundings, the way they had two minutes before. Habit.
But everything was the same. Same hazy atmosphere. Same chattering regulars. Same bartender. The bartender was a lean man, lean like he’d been a foot shorter and stretched to his current height, and fidgety. He was never completely still, fingers always working the air when they weren’t cleaning glasses or pouring drinks. Three guessed the bartender was splitting time between customers and some fantasy app, but didn’t want to guess the type.
He took another swig of his drink, then casual interest in the door. Instinct. A moment later, a woman entered pulling a small boy along behind her. She was bent at an awkward angle, clutching her long coat closed tight around her with a balled fist pressed hard to her side. Colorless, sweating, desperate. Damp shoulder-length brown hair plastered to her forehead. Wild brown eyes darting around the room. The boy was blond, vibrantly pale, with eyes deep sea-green and natural, the mesmerizing kind the Money would’ve paid top Hard for at the height of the market. Three guessed him perhaps five years old. The boy trembled with the frightened silence of a child who’s been told everything’s alright, but knows it isn’t. His shocking innocence swept through the bar: fragile, beautiful, a snowflake drifting amongst ash.
Three lowered his eyes back to his glass, kept the woman and boy in his peripheral awareness. She moved from patron to patron, urgent, pleading, waved off impatiently. Three shut his eyes and drank deeply the remaining honey-liquid from his glass. He set it back on the table with a dull crack, felt the table shift again.
Good, he thought with a half-smile. Table, not me.
When he opened his eyes, she was there.
“Please…” she began. Three’s gaze flicked to the door behind her. In the next instant, it swung open, and she whipped around to face it, inhaling sharply. Whoever she was expecting wasn’t there. Just a pair of teen Skinners blowing in off the street. She clenched her eyes, bent over Three’s table, dropped a fist to support herself. Three watched her hazily, felt his eyes float to the boy. The boy ran his hand slowly, methodically, back and forth along the edge of Three’s table, tiny fingers wrapped around some scavenged plaything: a model of an ancient shuttlecar with a few flecks of yellow paint where bare metal hadn’t yet worn through. He fixed Three with a wet, penetrating stare, and never looked away.
Three reached in his vest pocket and flicked a pair of nanocarb chips onto the table, a hundred Hard. The woman opened her eyes, stared down blankly at them, then back up at him, shaking her head.
“No,” she practically whispered, teeth catching her bottom lip for an instant in an almost imperceptible struggle to maintain thin composure. “We need help.”
“You lose something?” Three heard himself ask heavily. The fog was settling nicely now.
“What?”
“Did you lose something?” he repeated, with overemphasized precision.
“No, I—”
“Looking for someone?”
“What? No, we’re just—”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The woman straightened, and looked back to t
he door, but didn’t leave. Three glanced to the boy again, found himself staring into deep green pools, fascinated. The boy seemed equally intrigued by Three. The woman made one more attempt.
“I’m not asking you to help me,” she pushed the boy to the front. “Look, will you help him?”
“I’m not being rude, ma’am. Just honest.”
Three tilted his glass on the table, signaled to the bartender for another. Still the woman stood, chewing her lip, pressing her fist to her abdomen, while the bartender jerked his way over and refilled Three’s glass to the brim.
“Take the money,” Three said, sipping from the glass, feeling the warmth roll down his throat, filling his chest with dull flame.
“Mama,” a small voice peeped next to the woman. “Mama, let’s just go.”
The woman stared vacantly, at the door, at the table, at the Hard.
“Go on,” Three said. “I’ve got plenty.”
“Mama, please, can we go now, can we go?”
Without a word, the woman swept the two nanocarb chips up off the table and into her pocket, then whirled and tugged the boy along behind her to the bar. She spoke animatedly with the bartender, who directed her with various twitching gestures towards the back. The boy never took his eyes from Three, not until he vanished with his mother into a back room and, Three assumed, out again into the streets.
Three downed a good half of his glass, felt a faint satisfaction waft through, like the smoke-wisp of a just snuffed candle, knowing he’d helped some local skew and her runt, and hadn’t even been annoyed when she hadn’t thanked him. A hundred Hard was probably more than she’d make in a week of nights under sweaty Joes who couldn’t afford even C-grade sims.
“Hold my table,” Three called to the bartender, hauling himself out of the booth to take care of the growing pressure in his bladder that he’d just noticed.
In the stall, he watched in a sort of drunken lucidity the stream splashing onto the stainless grate, knowing somewhere below it was being absorbed, filtered, broken down into useful parts for biochem batteries, or solvent, or cooking. He chuckled aloud at the thought of his fellow patrons out there drinking his recycled urine.
But then the sudden image of the boy’s sea-green eyes cut short his personal amusement, and Three couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something in them he should’ve noted, something he missed that was important, or would’ve been if he’d noticed. He was still rolling it over in his thickened mind when he stepped back out to the bar and felt the twinge, the automatic heightening of senses he’d learned to trust even when he didn’t know why.
He continued to his table smoothly, seemingly unconcerned, knowing any change of intent might draw unwanted attention, and slid into his booth, absorbing at a glance the altered environment. The adrenaline surge burned away all traces of the alcohol-induced mist he’d spent the afternoon cultivating. The bar was nearly the same; same hazy atmosphere, same regulars, same bartender. The regulars weren’t chattering now. The Skinners had a new companion.
He was tall; taller than the bartender, broad-shouldered, with long, stringy dark hair like tendrils down his back. His face was skullish, skin stretched taut across sharp features, unnaturally smooth despite other, more subtle signs of age. Thin hands, tapering to long, dexterous fingers. The eyes were the key: a slight wrinkling at the edge, with thirty more years of life in them than the rest of the man’s build suggested.
Genie, Three guessed. Dangerous.
He’d run afoul of a couple of Genies before, humans who through extensive genetic engineering, or outright tampering, had attained preternaturally advanced talents or skills. It was a mistake Three didn’t plan to repeat. The trouble with Genies was you never knew what about them had been enhanced. The eggheads were never a problem. Others, though, could be lethal. Judging the tall man at the bar, Three guessed he was a strength tweaker. Could probably crush a man’s skull in his massive hand.
The man spoke few words, but each brought forth a torrent of information and gestures from the Skinners, as they tripped over one another trying to convince him of their eagerness to help. They both looked terrified. Three hadn’t drawn his notice, but the newcomer wasn’t interested in him anyway. One of the Skinners motioned to the back of the bar, and shortly after, the tall man exited by way of the front door, without so much as a glance in Three’s direction. After several tense moments, one of the regulars mumbled something that drew laughter from the others at the bar. Normalcy rebooted, a programmatic hiccup resolved.
Three reached for his glass, half-empty when he left, now half-full. The boy’s eyes burned before him, innocent, unaccusing. There was no doubt the tall man was after the woman; the boy. Veins in the tall man’s temples had bulged slightly as he left the bar. Anger. Three knew in his heart that the tall man meant harm to those two. He shook his head: not his problem.
A hundred Hard, Three thought. That’ll go a long way, if she’s smart.
He picked up his glass, swirled the slightly viscous liquid. Unappealing now. He wanted to want to drink it, but instead just watched it spin and settle. Over the rim of his glass, on the far side of the table, something caught his eye. A small model shuttlecar with chipping yellow paint.
He left the glass.
“How much do I owe you?” Three called to the bartender, standing and gathering his things.
The bartender looked his way, puzzled.
“For the drinks,” Three explained.
“Your woman-friend already paid,” the bartender answered. “Nice tipper, too.”
Silence descended upon the bar as Three made ready, patrons goggle-eyed at this last brazen assault on their day-to-day routine. They’d all assumed Three was a drunken drifter. Now, he was checking the cylinder of his pistol and holstering it, sliding a slender-bladed short sword into its sheath at his lower back.
Three threw his coat on over his hardware, and wordlessly flowed out onto the street, in pursuit of a deadly man he didn’t know for reasons he couldn’t understand.
Two
Cass leaned hard against the wall of the narrow alley, trying to catch her breath.
“Mama?”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t wanna go down there, Mama.”
She glanced towards the far end, where a single steel door, painted dull, flat black yawned like the mouth of a cavern.
“It’s alright, it’ll be fine.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“We have to, baby. It won’t take long.”
“Mama—”
“Wren, enough!” she cut him off, irritated. His spirit crumpled, and she took a breath, softened the best she could. “You can wait here if you want. I’ll just be a second.”
Wren stared at his shoes: cheap pull-on low-cut boots. There was a hole where his toes would be next year. He shook his head slightly.
“OK,” she said. “We’ll go together. Real fast.”
He didn’t look up, but pushed his small hand into hers. As Cass slid along the alley, tugging him behind, Wren wiped his eyes, hoping she didn’t notice. At the door, Cass straightened, ran her hands over her face, slapped her cheeks to color them. She exhaled, tried not to wince. When she pounded on the door, the dull thuds died off almost instantly inside. At first, nothing.
Then, just as she raised her fist to pound again, a heavy clank sounded from within, and the door cracked open. Cass pushed in warily, felt Wren’s fingernails dig into her palm. She squeezed back.
There was a soothing hum inside, a deep vibration like machinery running up against a wall, but no electric lights; the afternoon sunlight filtered in from a high slot-window, casting the dank interior in dusty gray. The walls were bare concrete; stagnant water pooled in one corner. A single stainless steel table lay in the middle of the room, with a pair of stools nearby.
“It smells,” Wren whispered.
A shuffling noise sounded from near the entry, and Cass spun around as the door clanged shut. A bent old
man peered at them with pupil-less ice-blue eyes.
“Are you a doctor?” Cass asked.
“Depends on who’s asking, and whatfore,” the old man croaked.
“I need quint, three tabs. I’ve got fifty Hard.”
He sucked air in through his teeth, and shook his head slowly.
“I ain’t made no quint in months, darlin’. Can’t get the greeds for it anymore. Duff be alright?”
Cass shook her head.
“Gotta be quint.”
The doctor shrugged.
“’Fraid I can’t help ya with that,” he said. “Are you sick or somethin’? Hurt?”
Cass glanced down to Wren. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying. He wouldn’t look at her.
“You’re sure you don’t have any? Not even a couple?”
“Sweetheart, if I had ’em, I’d sure sell ’em to ya,” he said kindly. “Ya don’t look so good. Why don’t ya sit down? I’ll see if I can find something else for ya.”
With unfocused eyes, Cass gazed at the top of Wren’s head, his hair, his perfect, fragile features; he stared off to one side at the wall, the corner, nothing. The pain in her side burned like a firebrand through her liver.
“I know you’ve got ’em.”
She said it without looking up, felt the doctor tense, air suddenly electric.
“I’m not looking for trouble. I just need the quint. I can pay you fifty. That’s a good deal for you.”
She ran slender fingers through Wren’s hair, then down gently over his eyes, closing them. Hot tears dripped.
“But I already told ya—” the doctor started.
He didn’t finish.
Cass whipped her hand with inhuman speed, driving the edge into the right side of the doctor’s neck, crippling nerves, rupturing the carotid and jugular. The old man twisted, collapsed to the floor, a bag of meat and loose bones, neck bearing a spray of deep purple beneath the unbroken skin. Silently, Cass bent down, hooked the doctor under the arms, and dragged him towards the back of the small room. His head lolled awkwardly, unnaturally.
Wren stood still as a statue, eyes closed, tears streaking his face. Cass went to him, took a knee, placed her hands on his shoulders.
