The Eye scoffed. “It’s only fifteen thousand credits.”
“It’s more than I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The crunch of the gravel beneath her from her next landing, Marcie said, “The Eye’s right, it’s not enough. Nowhere near.” She cleared another gap.
“Oh, shit,” the Eye said the second Marcie’s time ran out.
Still on the rooftops of Prime City, still at a flat-out sprint, Marcie said, “What?”
“You thought the collar was bad.”
“Stop being so cryptic, will ya?”
“You’ve just been put on the public GPS. You’re now a large green dot inviting every bounty hunter in the vicinity to chase you down. Like with the collar, the longer they hold you—”
“The more I’m worth to them.”
“And the bounty goes up much quicker with the implant.”
“Shit!”
At minus seven minutes, Marcie landed on the roof of the final building between her and the immigration gates. They were guarded by seven guards. “There’s more than ever down there,” Marcie said.
“Maybe it’s a busy time of day?” the Eye said.
“Or maybe they’re expecting me?”
“Maybe you’re not that important to—”
The Eye lost his words when Marcie got to the edge of the building and gasped, her eyes lighting up with so many red targets they dazzled her. They encircled the bounty hunters waiting on the ground. About six storeys separated her from over one hundred jocks and crewcuts. “You were saying? Just how much is the bounty on me right now?”
“You don’t need to focus on that,” the Eye said.
“Give me something to focus on, then,” Marcie said. “This isn’t going to work if you don’t start trying to at least give me some solutions.”
“Fight them?”
The men with their crewcuts, the jocks with their cameras and garish clothes, Marcie’s entire body rocked with her slamming heartbeat. “Hijack another drone and put the lights on.”
It took just a few seconds for a flashing blue drone to shoot over Marcie’s shoulder with a whoop, whoop!
Many in the crowd watched it. None moved. A large crewcut pointed up, his face alive with malice. “We won’t fall for that again.” Then to the crowd, “It’s not a police drone. It’s a fake. We haven’t done anything wrong. We’re just here to claim our bounty. They used this trick once to steal a bounty from us. No way will we let her do it again.”
The roar from the crowd drove Marcie back several paces. “There’s no way those gangs will work together.”
“What are you planning to do?” the Eye said.
Marcie raised her hands in surrender and called to those below, “I’m coming down. Let me get to the fire escape, and then you can take me in.”
The crewcut who’d called out the police drone said, “You owe us forty thousand credits.”
Marcie spoke beneath her breath. “Forty thousand?”
The Eye said, “I told you you didn’t want to know.” The police drone still hovered over the crowd.
The crewcut said, “We intend to take our bounty.”
“Your bounty?” said a female jock with half her head shaved and dressed in a black tracksuit. She then added, “Ro Jo was our bounty. She stole him from us.”
“And there it is,” Slip said.
The crowd of bounty hunters charged around the back of the building to the fire escape, both factions racing to be the first to get her. Before Marcie had crossed the roof of the building, the tap of feet hit the metal ladders and walkways as they ascended.
A crewcut reached the roof first. Of course he did, the jocks were less than useless. Several more crewcuts followed him up. Turning to face the ladders, they drew their blasters and opened fire on the climbers.
The Eye took the hijacked police drone to the fire escape, hovering high above them. “It won’t be long before there’s only crewcuts left.”
The crewcut who approached Marcie wore a wicked grin and gnashed his teeth. He took his time to enjoy the moment as he stalked her across the roof. The longer he took, the larger the bounty.
Marcie backed away from the approaching man towards the edge of the building she’d addressed the crowd from. She raised her hands in the air. “I’ll come quietly if I can have a guarantee you’ll do me no harm.”
“You owe us forty-two thousand credits, bitch.”
Marcie continued backwards. “Tell me you’ll do me no harm.”
“You’re not exactly in a position to be striking deals. But your bounty depends on you being alive. So we won’t kill you, but we sure as hell will bankrupt you, and …” He grinned again. “Well, let me just say that when we’ve finished with you, you’ll wish you were dead.”
“What are you going to do, Marce?” Slip said. He might have had street smarts, but occasionally she was reminded of his age.
When Marcie stopped, both of her heels hung over the edge of the building.
The crewcut threw his head back with a laugh, forcing his stomach forward. He glanced over his shoulder. They still had control of the roof, the line of crewcuts firing less, but still shooting down.
Slip might not have worked out Marcie’s plan, but the Eye clearly had. His drone still at the fire escape, he said, “Now!”
Marcie jumped backwards from the roof, spinning one hundred and eighty degrees so she faced where she landed, her legs absorbing the fall, the street clear of bounty hunters. The crewcut’s smile had fallen, his jaw slack as he peered down on her. She winked, flipped him the bird, and ran for the entrance to the Black Hole. The second the crewcut opened fire, a loud tonk sounded from where the Eye used the police drone to slam into the back of his head, knocking him from the roof.
The crewcut’s scream ended with a thud!
Chapter 37
The monoline sent a deep rumble through the entire building as it shot past the hotel. Marcie groaned while lying in bed. She remained on her back and stared up at the yellowed and cracked ceiling. A spider as big as a saucer walked across it. Maybe it had grown so large on all the cockroaches in the room. How many bugs had crawled across her while she slept?
Clackety-clack. The Eye typed away on his laptop, his skinny frame hunched, his back bent. His long limbs and pointing elbows made him look like he should also be crawling across the ceiling. Marcie’s lumbar ached just from watching him. “Do spiders eat cockroaches?”
The Eye stopped typing and fixed her with his crimson and bloodshot gaze. He looked up at the spider, studying its slow walk. “Who knows. Big though, ain’t it? It might try its luck with us if it gets desperate.” He raised his eyebrows while sipping on a mug of coffee. His hand shook as he put it back down, and his words quickened. “I’ve been up all night—”
“It looks like it,” Marcie said.
“And I’ve managed to upgrade the mapping I was sending to your augmented reality. It’ll be much more detailed when you need it again. The arrow was a bit basic. So what are you going to do? You’ve got just over forty thousand credits, right?”
“Thirty-nine thousand five hundred and eighty. Remember I got fined nine hundred by the guards last night for overstaying my welcome in Prime City.”
“At least a bounty hunter didn’t bring you in.”
“Tell me about it. I wonder how many enemies I’ve made of the crewcuts and jocks? It’s going to be interesting the next time I go into the city.”
“So you are planning on going back in?”
“I need one hundred thousand credits to get Sal’s lungs.”
“I thought they were fifty thousand?”
“If I take them from some poor bastard who’s so skint they’ll sell their still-living body to be harvested. I don’t want to contribute to that.” Marcie sat up, a cockroach scuttling beneath the bed. “I can’t spend any more time than I have to in this room. I’m going to go and see Slip. You coming?”
Clickety-clack.
“Yo! You coming?
”
The Eye frowned at her. “Coming where?”
Marcie sighed as she slipped her shoes on and waited for the rumble of another monoline to pass. “I’m going to see Slip.”
“No, you’re all right.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll try to bring you back some food.”
If the Eye heard her, he hid it well. On her way out of the room, she slammed the door so hard the wall shook. A yip from the albino man from where she’d clearly given him a fright and maybe dislodged the spider from the ceiling.
About one in every three of Marcie’s steps were tacky as she descended the hotel’s carpeted stairs.
“Morning,” the man at the desk said.
“Do you ever go anywhere?”
“Who would look after my hotel?”
“It can’t be healthy working all the time.”
The man twitched as if he’d picked up electrical interference from some of the devices around him. “Earning a living isn’t healthy in the Black Hole, sweetheart.”
If he called her sweetheart again, she’d drag his limp and greasy body over the counter and kick him toothless.
The outside of the hotel as tatty as the inside, the walls cracked, the windowsills bloated with rot. Marcie stood on the top step and inhaled the cold morning air. The crowd on the street as busy as ever, everyone in a rush to get somewhere. Vehicles filled the skylanes, weaving through the spindly legs of the stilted apartments. What a different world to the one on the ground.
Youths loitered at the entrances to the alleyways. They wore blue caps, red scarves, yellow hoodies. No black jackets.
Glow-in-the-dark graffiti streaked across most of the walls, some of the murals outshining the neon glow of commerce on the shopfronts. A lot of the scrawls aimed insults at the black jackets. They called them the army against the people.
Every time Marcie had met Slip, he’d come to her. There hadn’t been any cause to know where he lived. As if answering her need, a gang of five black jackets emerged from an alley, her eyes encircling them. All of them had a tight screw to their features, glaring at those who passed as if fishing for a fight. Three girls and two boys, they turned their rage on Marcie when she approached them. “Hi. I’m looking for Slip.”
It took for the ginger girl in the group to step forwards before Marcie recognised her. The one who’d accosted them when they first arrived in the Black Hole. For a second, the girl worked her jaw as if chewing back her aggression. After she’d dragged air in through her nose and let it go, she said, “Mads has made it clear that you’re to be left alone. Know that we’d have all your possessions otherwise.”
Marcie raised an eyebrow. “That’s like saying you’d kick my arse if your mates weren’t holding you back. You should thank Mads. He’s saved you from making even more of a fool of yourself.” The girl opened her mouth to reply, but Marcie cut her off. “Slip? Where does he live?”
The girl’s jade eyes narrowed and her freckled nose scrunched. She paused for a second before she stood aside and pointed away from them. “He’s down there on the left. The house with the blue door.”
Marcie smiled and left, the collective focus of the gang boring into her back as she walked away. She didn’t give them the satisfaction of turning around again.
The woman who opened the blue door had the same features as Slip. A few inches shorter than Marcie, she had a curvy frame and bags beneath her eyes. She might have looked like a synth-fiend, but her pupils weren’t dilated. From the sag of her frame, she was exhausted. She also lacked the twitchy paranoia of a user. A small child, no more than a toddler, on her left hip, she had an even smaller one on her right. The one on her left played with her thick dreadlocked hair.
“Uh …” Marcie said, “is this Slip’s house?”
“You mean Trout?”
Marcie clenched her jaw so she didn’t laugh.
“You can blame his dad for that one.” The woman smiled, her maternal kindness shining through. “You must be Marcie?”
“Yeah.”
“I would shake your hand.” She shrugged and the two babies lifted with it. “Trout’s told me a lot about you. Come in.”
Marcie stepped through the doorway. It led immediately into their front room. Their only room. Mattresses covered half the floor space. Three more children from the ages of about four to seven sat around playing. Like the babies on her hips, they were immaculate. Clean and smartly dressed. Maybe their presentation might have hidden their poverty on the streets, but in the house, damp hung so heavy in the air it tightened Marcie’s chest. The eldest of the small kids, the only girl in the three, had a slight wheeze.
“Slip … uh, Trout’s helped me a lot,” Marcie said, removing her credit card from her pocket. “I’d like to give him a share of my bounty. I wouldn’t have been able to get it without him, so I wanted to say thanks. I hope three thousand credits is enough?”
The two kids on her hips were too young to understand the gesture, but the ones on the mattresses all gasped and looked up. The eldest broke into a coughing fit.
After hissing for them to be quiet, Slip’s mum shook her head and lowered the larger of the two babies to the floor. The toddler stumbled on wobbly legs and fell down beside her siblings. “Mads pays Trout for the work he’s done, so you don’t need to.”
“I’d like to.” And before she could refuse, Marcie said, “Please?”
Slip’s mum nodded and her eyes glazed. “Thank you.” She pulled a dirty credit card from inside her top next to her left breast. It had just three credits remaining. Not even enough for a drink to share between them. Marcie typed in the number of credits and sent them over.
“Uh,” Slip’s mum said, her hand shaking, “you’ve paid me too much.”
Marcie shook her head. “No, I haven’t. It’s what I want to give you.”
Although Slip’s mum worked her mouth, she didn’t get any words out. She put the card back inside her top as tears ran down her cheeks. She pressed the back of her hand to her nose and coughed to clear her throat before she managed a strangled, “Thank you.”
Marcie hugged the woman, who turned board-stiff in her embrace. A second later the groaning hinges of the opening front door cut through the awkward silence. Marcie let go and stepped back as Slip walked in. A long strip of brown fabric hung from his grip. “Mum, I got it finish—”
“Hi, Slip.”
“Marcie? How do you know where I live?”
“I asked around. What have you finished?”
Slip hid his hands behind his back and then clearly thought better of it, holding the garment towards Marcie. “Here.”
When she held it up, Marcie gasped. “You made me a flying suit! Wow.”
“Mum made it.”
Slip’s mum had wiped away her tears. “Trout said you were amazing when you ran through Prime City. He wanted to help you. He said you were kind. He’s a good judge of character. We had to make sure we got a strong enough fabric so it could do the job. It’s both resilient and light.”
“What do I owe you?”
Slip’s mum shook her head. “Nothing. It’s a gift.”
While holding up the suit again, tugging on the wings to test the stitches, Marcie smiled. “This is better than the suit I had in Scala City.” Although, it was as brown. Sal was going to piss himself when she told him about it. She needed to get back to him soon. “This will really help with claiming my next bounty.”
“You’re going out again?” Slip said.
“I need to get one hundred thousand credits together. I have to. It’s why I came here. When’s the next fight?”
“Soon,” Slip said. “You want me to take you?”
“Yes, please. The less time—” But she stopped herself. How could she complain about her hotel with his family living as they were? “Yes, please. I’m anxious to get the lungs and get back to the Blind Spot as soon as possible.”
Chapter 38
They’d taken the same route to the arena they
took previously. Through the chilled abattoir, the fresh carcasses hanging on either side—an omen for what could happen to Marcie at the end of this. Out the back of the abattoir, they descended the ladder. Just before Marcie shoved open the steel door, Slip rested a hand against her back. “Thank you for the money you gave to Mum. It was very generous of you.”
Marcie shrugged. “I’m hoping the flying suit will help me make more bounties quicker. It was no more than an investment.”
“But you didn’t know we’d made that suit when you gave her the money.”
Heat flushed Marcie’s cheeks. What could she say? That she felt sorry for Slip and his family? They didn’t need her pity. “Your mum’s a kind person and a good mother. I wanted to help.” Before the conversation could go any further, she handed the flying suit to Slip. She then removed her glasses, upping the glow of her red eyes. “Can you look after these for me?”
The boy took her possessions and hugged them to his chest as if it sated his need to do it to her.
The thick door had blocked most of the sound, so when Marcie shoved it wide, a wall of crowd noise hit her, lifting gooseflesh on her skin and quickening her pulse. The spectators surrounding the cage were as wild as before. But unlike the first time, she now saw the bloodlust in their raucous animation. She gulped, her stomach tense. When it came to her fight, she’d be leaving them wanting.
At the end of the eighth fight and the eighth death, Marcie leaned close to Slip. “I can’t sit through any more of this. I think I might come—”
“And next up,” the commentator’s voice rang out in the arena, “is the bounty fight.”
Adrenaline snapped Marcie tense, and the crowd grew even louder. The lights on the ceiling strobed like when she’d entered the ring for her previous fight. Three black jackets hosed down the arena and swept away the pink water, spraying the crowd in the front-row seats. “They wanted blood,” Marcie said.
Even though she kept her distance, the heat from the large circular fan descending from the ceiling pushed against Marcie, drying the arena in a matter of seconds. Once it had pulled away, several more black jackets dragged a large gridded roof over the top of the cage, penning in the next fighters.
Prime City: A Science Fiction Thriller (Neon Horizon Book 2) Page 17
