by Elin Wyn
"Good eye," the woman behind the counter said. "Untun wood, nearly as hard as ceramisteel itself."
"I need to hold it," I murmured, ignoring Davien's laugh.
"Of course," she answered, and brought it over to me.
It fit like a dream in my hand, the balance as if it were made for me.
I turned to Davien. "This one," I demanded.
He frowned slightly. "Don't you even want to see any others?"
I stroked the back of the blade again, down to the satin finish of the wood. "Trust me. You may not have a use for weapons, but I do. I know what I need."
"Then it's settled." He pulled out a credit spike, but the woman only stared over our shoulders, expression distracted. I turned to see what had caught her attention and heard it. The low rumble of a crowd, growing louder.
She took the knife back from me, locked it away in the case. "I'm sorry, we're closing now."
"But, my knife!" I cried indignantly as she shooed us to the front of the shop.
"Please come back for it tomorrow," she answered as she pulled the grate down behind us, then sealed the doorway with a zip.
I sighed. Every so often it happened. A riot broke out, the pressure of life in the dome erupting in the street, sparked off by the smallest of things and then running havoc until the crowd burned itself out.
Anyone with any sense hunkered down, kept inside and away from it all until the streets were quiet.
But I still wanted my knife.
Davien stared down the street, frowning. "Where do you think they're heading?"
I listened, but the way the sound echoed off the buildings, I couldn't get a fix on it. "No idea. Let's go look."
"Are you serious? We've got a job to do tonight. I don't think getting injured in a riot is going to help our cause any."
"As serious as I ever am." It probably didn't help my case when I stuck my tongue out at him.
I didn't mean look from street level. "Up top is safer."
We headed towards the best perch I could think of close by.
At the top, I could see the armbands of Bedrock Core.
"Damn it. I wish they'd stay out of it."
Davien looked at me, appraisingly. "I thought you didn't like how things are run here?"
"I don't. But this is just going to get a lot of innocent people in trouble. Xavis will have informants in the crowd, watching, taking names. Even if people weren't involved before, they'll find life a lot harder now."
"What do you think should be done?"
I shook my head. I'd wondered and wondered how to break the system. “I don't know. I'd like to just put Xavis, Sary, and all the rest of them in a room and let them fight it out.”
“And then?”
“Seal up the door,” I cracked. “But solving the city's problem isn't our responsibility today. Just saving our own asses.”
I slid down the wall, leaned against it and tried to ignore the sound of the crowd, all the fun of our outing long gone.
“Let's go back and see if Rati's done.”
“Even if she's not, a nap wouldn't be a bad thing,” Davien answered.
I shot him a look. "Depends on what sort of nap you have in mind."
Rati was finished when we got back. On a tray in the sitting room were two small devices - a standard looking data chip, and a curved, narrow piece of a thin, flexible substance.
"Try that on, Kara, it should stick behind your ear."
I pressed it against my skin, and it clung, tiny suckers holding fast.
“Now you can hear me anywhere,” came a whisper, almost in my head.
“That's kinda creepy.” I started to pull it off, then thought better of it. What if it didn’t stick again?
"Maybe, but useful. Sound comes through your mastoid bone. And you'll barely need to whisper for me to hear you."
Davien nodded his approval, then picked up the other chip. "What sort of port do you need this put into?"
Rati shrugged. "Pretty much anything with general network access will do. It's loaded with every bit of stealth code I know. As soon as the tunnel is made, I'll be able to contact you on the earpiece."
“Is there anything else we need?” I asked.
“A whole lot of luck - but you've always made your own,” she smiled.
My heart rode in my throat when we entered the lift tube. I had always hated it here in the complex. The oldest building on Neurea, the founders had dug down, safe from the Waste, while their bots built the city and the dome.
The whole complex had an alien feel - unlike the buildings above ground that had been modified, lived in, and usually run down, the founders’ complex had been left alone until the first of the crime lords took it as his fortress. Since then, every successor in the deadly rise to the top had claimed the complex as their own.
It was kept scrupulously clean, but in my mind’s eye, the walls ran with blood.
I checked the chrono. “Ten hours left.”
Damn it. We needed to find a place for Rati’s chip as soon as possible, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure where. Davien’s quarters were a no-go. If anyone suspected interference, I didn’t want the trail to immediately run back to us.
There had to be something, a place everyone had access to… Eyes focused on nothing, I mentally ran through the public areas of the complex, then startled. One panel on the wall of the lift tube had a slightly different sheen to the metal. Maybe…
I caught Davien’s eye, then looked at the panel, hoping he’d catch the idea without saying anything to alert the unquestionably present hidden camera.
At Rati’s, I hadn’t thought about the difficulties of working with someone else. Maybe I had been on my own for too long. But he moved as if in my own mind, nodding fractionally towards the pocket I’d secreted the chip into before he grabbed me, pushed me against the suspicious panel.
“At least if everything else goes bad,” he growled, one hand slipping under my shirt, while the other braced at the panel near my head, shielded from any camera by our bodies, speaking for the microphones, “I’ll have the memory of you pinned under me, screaming my name.”
His mouth plundered mine, and in the reactor blast of his passion, I lost track of where we were, what we were doing. A nip at my lower lip between his teeth, and I opened my eyes to see him wink. He’d found it.
I wrapped tighter around him, running my hand over his arm, twining my fingers with his own and slipping him the chip in the process. My attention divided, I could feel the panel move against my back, and flattened my back just a bit more to try to help hold it in place.
Just a moment, and then he tugged the panel gently from me, and the softest of snaps caught my ear as it clicked back into place.
Both hands ran over my sides now, as if nothing had happened, and he breathed into my ear. “Emergency comm station in case of lift tube malfunction. Good eye.”
We broke apart as the chime signaled the arrival at our floor.
It was strange coming back to Davien's room. I'd only been here once, just three days ago. I'd hated what I thought he was.
Now, I didn't know what to think.
Stop it, Kara, I chided myself. Daydreaming before a job will get you killed.
He went over to the jump bag and pulled out his datapad.
"Anything interesting? I asked, perching on the bed.
“Figured while we wait, I should see if we have anything from that intercept I planted on the Hunter's commtower. Maybe there’s information I can pull about the location of that base, who’s running it.”
“Or even who the hell they're trading weapons with here,” I added.
Davien's eyebrow lifted. “I thought that would be obvious. Sary has my vote. He's looking for ways to get ahead of Xavis, surely he's in the market for new weapons, something no one else has.”
I shook my head. “I don't think he'd be able to get past the communications block on the dome. How would he even know where to look for people, robots, w
hatever, like that?”
“They could both be the buyers,” he said with a smirk, “and end up taking care of each other.”
I laughed, with only a tinge of the black despair I felt most of the time thinking about the screwed up politics of my home dome. “We'd never be so lucky.”
I rolled over on the bed, propped up on my elbows to watch him. “So, what did you get? Answers?”
“Yes and no,” he said, scowling.
“It doesn't seem like a gray sort of question.”
“I have data, plenty of transmissions -- but it’s still decoding. I didn't think it would take so much time to decode.”
I shrugged. “Bring it back with us to Rati, when we're done. She handles that sort of stuff to wake up instead of coffee.”
“You're pretty sure this is going to work out,” he said, slipping the datapad back into the bag.
“I don't have any choice. We don't have any choice. Never do, at this stage of the game. If we start doubting when we're already committed, we'll screw up. Happens every time.
“Does it work out, every time?” he asked softly.
“Nope. I'd rather not think about the times a job went bad. But worrying about it, when the dice are rolled, and we’re in the thick of it, can’t help.”
“Did you ever think we could just get out, the hell with finding the dust or anything else and just get off-planet?” Davien’s eyes searched my own.
“Xavis meant what he said. He'd send every other enforcer he had to bring us in. The reward would be so high half the dome would be on the streets to find us. Unless you have a ship already waiting, we'd never get out.”
Davien shook his head, lips pressed into a thin line.
“Then we stick to the plan.”
“What is this now, plan C, or D? Maybe the plan needs some additions,” he leaned over me on the bed, eyes alight with promises.
“Oh no,” I pushed him away. “Any minute now, Rati's going to break through, and we need to be ready.”
“We're ready now,” he shrugged.
“Do you really want her listening in?” I tapped the earpiece for emphasis.
He sat back on his heels. “Right. I've got a deck of cards around here somewhere.”
It only took four hands of Tonk before I heard a buzz.
"I'm in," Rati's voice was the merest whisper. "Running searches through maps now."
I stood up, tossing my hand down on the bed. "Lousy cards anyway. Time to get ready."
Davien tidied the deck and slipped them into the jump bag. “I'm ready to get out of here.”
“Not planning on coming back?” I nodded at the bag, now thrown over his shoulder.
“I'll be happy to never see this place again.”
“No good memories at all?” I let my eyes rest on the patch of floor that he'd pinned me to three days ago when this mad adventure first started.
He grinned. “Maybe that.” He wrapped his arms around me and nuzzled my neck. “But if I had to pick between here and the Imperial, let's get back to the bunk rack.”
A soft cough. “I have the maps ready, if you two aren't going to be otherwise occupied.”
I broke away from Davien, face flushed.
“Three levels up from where you are, then go left from the stairs.”
We followed Rati’s instructions through the maze of corridors until we stood in front of a locked door.
“Now what,” I whispered.
“You don't have to be so loud,” she complained. “Give me a minute.”
It slid open, and she giggled. “Used Xavis' print in the register. Let them figure that out, when they go through the access logs.”
A wide room, filled with shelves, but instead of the neatly organized inventory I’d imagined, jumbled piles of items spilled from one rack to the next.
“From the records, it looks like he only allows access to this room to one person at a time. And,” her voice choked a little, “it doesn't look like a job with long-term survivorship.”
“Well,” I said, looking at the mess, “that's a great way to mess up your record keeping. Does he even know what's in here?”
“Maybe,” she answered. “But probably not exactly. And, to be honest, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to tell you where to start searching.”
I checked my chrono again. “That's fine, between the two of us, we’ll pull it off.”
We started near the front, with the thought that the most recent tithes would be closer to the door, with less crap piled on them.
“Anything?” I called over to Davien.
“Nothing yet, lots of things that would be interesting another day, but no dust.”
“Damn it,” I muttered. This was supposed to be the easy job.
“Seriously, Rati, in your spare cycles, a sensor wouldn't be a bad thing.”
“I'll add it to the list, I promise,” came the ghostly voice in my ear.
A long, tense few minutes passed before my hand closed on a familiar shape.
“Got one!”
I glanced again at the chrono - at this rate, I didn’t know if we were going to find enough in time.
“Two more over here,” Davien called.
“Come on, Kara,” I muttered to myself. “Let’s go for a big haul.”
The glint of a vial caught my eye. “There we go…. Damn it. Just one.
“If they got handed in at every Tithe, he wouldn’t have been so anxious to make that deal”, Davien reminded me.
“Yeah, but it shouldn’t be that hard to find. As valuable as they are, you’d think he would keep better track of them.”
“Probably he’s already sold or traded the ones that could be found easily. Besides,” he said, and I could hear his smirk even with two shelving units between us, “I thought you liked a challenge.”
“You’re enough of a challenge for me,” I teased back.
I started rummaging through a stack of soft fabric, hoping to find something tucked into its folds.
“Kara,” Rati whispered after a few more minutes of our searching, “there's someone else by the door. I can’t make out who it is.”
“Hide,” I whispered to Davien.
Davien moved silently beside me, between me and the unknown, and we’d barely slipped behind a densely packed rack when the door opened, and a hooded figure walked in.
I bit back a gasp and squeezed Davien's hand. Hard to tell who was under the hood and scarf, but it was the same optical pattern as the guy Hoyt had met with earlier.
He made no pretense at stealth, just moved to the closest rack and started tossing items aside, as if frantically searching for something. He was so intent on the piles of goods that he didn’t notice Davien step behind him and drop a club-like fist on the back of his head.
“What did you do that for,” I gasped, looking at the figure sprawled on the ground.
“He’s not dead,” Davien sounded offended. “And we’re on the clock, right?”
“Well, it makes it easier to see who he is, at least. It bugs me. He’s familiar, but that stupid pattern…” I pulled back the hood and lowered the scarf.
“Oh Void,” I rocked back on my heels. “It’s Juda.”
“Who?” Davien sounded as puzzled as I felt.
“My ex….” Shaky legs straightened up, kept me moving away from his limp form as if on autopilot. “The one who took my savings before the tithe, and disappeared. I didn’t know he was part of Bedrock Core. But what’s he doing here?”
Davien frowned. “And how did he get in? I’ll assume your friend wasn’t helping?”
I shook my head, still stunned that Juda was here. “Rati hated him. And he didn’t have the skills to break in on his own.”
“Then he’s got friends of his own.”
After a long moment of thought, he grabbed a strip of the fabric and swiftly bound Juda’s hands and feet. “I don’t like surprises, and we don’t have time to figure this out.”
He straightened up, dusted his hand
s on his pants. “Plan modification. We have enough for the first stage.”
“What?” Not a brilliant reply, but I couldn’t keep up, knocked off balance still by Juda’s presence, unconscious as it was.
Davien was unfazed. “Like you said, take it back to basics. We don’t need to get Xavis eight vials tonight - just the four.”
“But then, how are we getting off Neurea?” I countered. “We’re relying on that extra dust to buy passage on a ship.”
Davien waved at the storage racks. “Keep searching. There’s gotta be more than just dust in here we can use for that.” He slung the jump bag off his shoulder and handed it to me.
I took it, thinking. He was right. I’d gotten so caught up in the plan, I’d forgotten there was always another way.
“Do you think Rati can get us back in here?”
Davien shook his head. “No need. I’ll meet with Xavis, you stay here and search.”
Relief washed over me. Being in the complex was bad enough, facing Xavis again wasn't on my top ten list of things to do. Hell, not on my top million list.
“Are you sure?” I knew it was ridiculous to worry about Davien, but I couldn’t seem to help it. “I’m not comfortable with us splitting up.”
“Positive. His deal is with me, not you.” Davien’s voice sounded oddly flat. “Makes more sense for you to stay here, find what we can use.”
“I’ll be able to keep an eye on your beau for you, most of the way,” Rati whispered. “Haven’t broken into the hall’s cameras yet, but I can watch everything else.”
My cheeks flamed. Davien wasn’t my beau, not exactly. I had no idea what he was, what we were. And now wasn’t the time to think about it.
Davien moved towards the door without waiting for me. “Have your friend let you know when I’m done, and we’ll get out of here.”
I followed him, confused. Something was off, but I couldn’t get him to face me. “And what should I do about him?”
He paused in front of the door, back rigid. “Up to you.” The door slid open, and he walked away.
“He’s just thinking about the job,” Rati whispered. “You should be, too.”
I nodded, shoving back an unexpected pang. Seriously, I was going to be upset about being separated from him for half an hour? I’d never been a clingy woman, and I wasn’t going to start now.
