Tails You Lose

by Lisa Smedman

  Suddenly, everything was quiet. Behind Alma, the robot receptionist on the wall monitor was asking the "new client" to sign in, please.

  Alma bent down to tug Kageyama free, only to start back in surprise as he suddenly wriggled out of the blank-eyed man's grip himself. Kageyama staggered to his feet, and for a moment Alma wondered if gamma scopolamine had any effect on him at all. Then she saw his dilated pupils and heard the slur in his voice.

  "Thanksh, Ni-howl." He stared around groggily, as if uncertain what to do next.

  His uncertainty matched Alma's own. She glanced back and forth between Kageyama and the man who lay on the floor, blank eyes bulging and muscles rigor-mortis stiff. She was strong enough to carry both of them out of the arcology, but there were several securicams on the way. She'd never make it. She had to choose one or the other—and Kageyama was at least mobile.

  He seemed the logical choice. According to the message on her cell this morning, the blank-eyed man was looking for the rogue Superkid and knew what she looked like. But he didn't seem to have mistaken Alma for her when he had stared at her through the door. He'd discounted her, as if she was an innocent bystander. He didn't know the rogue Superkid that well, it seemed. Kageyama, on the other hand, had just thanked Alma as if she was his friend. Perhaps . . .

  One of the examining-room doors was opening. Despite the soundproofing, someone must have heard something. That decided Alma. She scooped the blank-eyed man up and shoved him into a chair, and then grabbed Kageyama's arm and steered him out of the clinic, toward the elevator.

  The elevator doors opened, and she shoved Kageyama inside. The three passengers already on board drew back slightly and wrinkled their noses, as if discreetly sniffing for alcohol. Alma punched the icon for the rooftop.

  Kageyama might have shaken off the physical effects of the gamma scopolamine in record time, but he had succumbed to the drug's "truth serum" effect. He looked at Alma as trustingly as a puppy, but his eyes were rapidly clearing. She could see that it wouldn't be long before the drug wore off entirely. Despite the other passengers, she had to start asking some questions.

  "Do you recognize me?"

  The high-speed elevator surged upward, causing Kageyama to stagger slightly. "Of coursh," he answered with a sloppy grin. "You liberay . . . liberay . . . shtole the dour f r us. And you shtole my shtashue. Wha'd'ya do that for?" He waggled a finger at her, then giggled when he noticed that his cybered little finger was moving back and forth of its own accord. He watched it, fascinated.

  The elevator stopped at the eighteenth floor. Two passengers got off—but five more boarded. Just before the doors closed, Alma heard an alarm begin to peal in the corridor. She shifted position so that an enormous troll stood between her and the securicam mounted near the elevator's ceiling and then did the only thing she could think of to conceal Kageyama's face. Grabbing his head with both hands, she yanked him forward and kissed him.

  He kissed her back with a skill she hadn't thought possible from someone whose lips were numbed by gamma scopolamine. A rush of sexual energy filled her, flushing her skin. Her hands began to tremble—both of them.

  She held the kiss until the elevator reached the rooftop. As the doors opened onto a glass-enclosed walkway beside the helicopter landing pads, Kageyama at last broke away and blinked. "That was ni—"

  She hurried him out of the elevator, consulting the clock in her cybereye. It was 10:32 a.m.—despite everything that had happened, her extraction was only two minutes behind schedule. All she had to do now was find the right sky cab, assuming the shadowrunner had bothered to show up on time . . .

  She spotted the yellow and black helicopter—Black Chopper number fifty-one—and ran across the rooftop toward it, dragging Kageyama by the hand. A door in the side of the helicopter sprang open, and they clambered inside, both of them soaked with rain from their brief dash across the roof.

  Buzz—a dwarf with a crewcut and puckered pink scar tissue on his face and throat where his beard should have been—cocked his head to listen as Alma and Kageyama settled into the back of the cab. His eyes were fully cybered: twin fiberoptic cables were jammed into the "pupil" of each, connecting him with the helicopter's internal and external vidcams.

  "Where to?" he growled in a voice like a strangled pit bull's. Whatever injury the shadowrunner had suffered had nearly taken his voice as well as his beard.

  "Circle over the city," Alma said. "I have a few questions to ask our passenger before we drop him off."

  Buzz nodded. The rooftop sank away beneath them as the helicopter rose smoothly into the air. Alma breathed a sigh of relief. She'd pulled it off: she'd extracted Kageyama. Now she just had to decide what to do with him.

  She was startled to hear Kageyama's voice beside her, clear and crisp, the last slurrings of the drug gone: "I have a few questions for you as well."

  Alma turned slowly and saw that his pupils were back to normal—which only served to confirm her suspicions about him. Gamma scopolamine would freeze up the muscles of an ordinary human or meta for an hour and would linger in the body for an hour more after that. Kageyama had shaken off the drug entirely in . . . she consulted her cybereye . . . just under fourteen minutes.

  She hoped that the man with the blank eyes wasn't capable of the same thing.

  She stared at Kageyama a moment, trying to decide if he was the sort of man who would succumb to a threat. The helicopter wouldn't touch down until she authorized Buzz to do so; Kageyama was a prisoner inside it. But even with his jacket gone and his shirt torn open and soaked with rain he seemed composed. His bright green eyes sparkled with curiosity—there wasn't a hint of fear in them. Alma suddenly realized that he knew he was being extracted—and was actually enjoying it.

  "I'll trade you," she said. "Question for question, and answer for answer. All right?"

  Kageyama nodded. "Please—you first."

  "Do you know my real name?" she asked.

  "Of course." He smiled, not volunteering one word more.

  "What name did you call me, back at the clinic?"

  "Sorry, but it's my turn to ask a question," he teased. He thought for a moment. "Who hired you to kidnap me?"

  It was Alma's turn to be coy. She recalled Bluebeard's speculation about who—or what—was behind the Komun'go Seoulpa Ring. She had a fifty-fifty chance of being right.

  "A dragon," she answered.

  Kageyama's eyes widened. "Ah." Before he could say anything else she fired off another question. "Who do you think I am?"

  He frowned. "Quit joking with me, Night Owl. You've changed your clothes and hair—even disguised the way you move—but I know your aura."

  Alma froze. If Kageyama was indeed Awakened, then he could read her aura. Was it really possible that Kageyama knew one of the Superkids intimately enough to confuse her aura with Alma's? And could that one Superkid be the very woman Alma was searching for?

  Alma could hear her heart pounding in her chest. Her breathing was suddenly very shallow.

  Center, she told herself. Center and balance.

  Her cyberears picked up the whine of a lens adjusting, and she noticed that the vidcam with its built-in microphone was aimed straight at her. Buzz was listening in. For all Alma knew, the shadowrunner might be a friend of this Night Owl.

  She glanced down at the city. "Buzz," she said to the vidcam, "we're far enough from the arcology now. Set us down on the closest landing pad. Pick one that's not too busy."

  "You got it."

  As the helicopter sank toward the ground, Alma realized that she was taking a chance. Once they landed, Kageyama might just turn and run. The only thing she could count on was his curiosity. He wanted answers as much as she did.

  The helicopter came to a feather-light landing in an almost empty parking lot, in front of a large cement building that looked like a college. Alma tossed a credstick to Buzz, who caught it without even turning in his seat. Then she cracked the helicopter's side door.

  "You want
me to wait?" Buzz growled. "You still got cred remaining."

  Alma shook her head. "You can go. I'll handle it from here."

  She climbed out into the rain, followed by Kageyama. She led him to the shelter—a glass-walled enclosure with a black plastic roof that rattled under the heavy rain. Yanking the door shut behind them, she did a quick scan. Good—they were alone, and the waiting area's securicam was out of order. They'd have privacy.

  She turned to Kageyama as Buzz's sky cab lifted in a wash of downdraft that smeared raindrops sideways across the enclosure's windows. "I'll make a deal with you," she told him. "I'm not who you think I am. My name isn't Night Owl, even though I resemble her closely. I want to find her. Tell me how to do that, and I'll tell you everything I know about who hired me to extract you, and why."

  Kageyama thought about that one a long time. "Why are you looking for her?"

  "She committed a crime," Alma answered. "The people she stole from mistook the two of us, just as you did, and I was blamed. I want to prove my innocence. After that . . ."

  She paused. After that the rogue Superkid would be questioned at length by PCI security and then turned over to the tribal police to stand trial for the murder of Gray Squirrel. Like Akiko, she'd probably wind up on death row.

  As for Alma herself, she would be forced to retire—permanently. Although her superiors at PCI knew that she was a former Superkid, she hadn't fully explained to them what this meant: that there were others out there who had the same genetic makeup as she did. She'd failed to recognize and disclose this potential security risk, and now she'd be lucky to keep a job—in any capacity—with PCI. But at least she could prove her innocence to Mr. Lali.

  "I can't tell you where Night Owl is, because I don't know," Kageyama answered. "My—friends and I—hired her via an intermediary, a fixer named Hothead. He can probably point you in the right direction." Alma struggled to keep her expression cool and professional as Kageyama described the fixer and told her how to contact him. She was finally getting somewhere—she was within one degree of separation from her target.

  "Describe Night Owl for me."

  "She could be your twin," Kageyama said. "Her aura is even like yours: a large number of dark shadows around the eyes, ears and neck that must come from implanted cyberware. Her body language is entirely different, however, and she doesn't have your grace. In fact, she's quite clumsy—sometimes she winds up with egg on her face."

  He winked at Alma, but when she failed to return his smile he shrugged, as if she had failed to get a joke.

  Everything Kageyama had just said confirmed Alma's guess: Night Owl must be the Superkid who had framed her for Gray Squirrel's extraction. The woman not only had the same aura but also the same amount and type of cyberware as the others in Batch Alpha. The move-by-wire system that was standard on all Superkids should have made her as graceful as a cat. If Night Owl was clumsy, she was either faking it or her move-by-wire had shorted out. Or she'd had it removed. Maybe the move-by-wires that the Superkids had been fitted with were faulty . . .

  Alma forced her mind back to the here and now. "Can you tell me anything else about Night Owl?"

  Kageyama spread his hands and shrugged. His cybernetic little fingers were working properly again, in sync with his real fingers. "All I can tell you is that her 'crimes' aren't motivated by greed, but by compassion. She—"

  Alma had heard enough. "She's a killer," she gritted. She felt her cheeks blaze as a vision of Gray Squirrel's mutilated throat swam before her eyes.

  Kageyama lowered his hands. His voice dropped to a whisper. "You'd know that better than I."

  The rain had soaked into the shoulders of Alma's suit jacket, chilling her skin. She started to shiver before her move-by-wire system shut the involuntary motion down. She noticed that Kageyama was also soaked. Several buttons had been torn from his shirt during the fight with the blank-eyed man, and his chest was bare, save for a small circle of blue stone that hung on a gold chain around his neck. The pendant trembled against his nearly hairless chest as he shivered.

  Kageyama noticed her staring at it and touched a finger to it. "Pretty, isn't it?"

  Alma realized what it was: a pi, a good-luck token traditionally given to Chinese children. It was just one of the traditions that had jumped cultures; half of the people in Vancouver had one, regardless of their ethnic background. Obviously the custom had become just as popular in Japan.

  "You promised to tell me who hired you to kidnap me," Kageyama reminded her. "Do you keep your promises?"

  Alma couldn't see any reason not to. She now had the name of the woman she was looking for and the name and description of a man who could tell her where to find Night Owl. She'd made contact with two shadowrunners—Bluebeard and Buzz—who could attest to her authenticity when she went to speak with Hothead. She'd gone through the motions of a shadowrun.

  There was no point in completing the extraction now. At midnight, when she still hadn't heard from Alma, the blond-haired Seoulpa member would assume that the extraction of Kageyama had failed and would look for someone else to do the job. As for Tiger Cat, Alma would have to stall him with a partial payment of the credit that PCI owed him. That should stop him from blowing the whistle on the fact that she wasn't really a shadowrunner. If all else failed, she could try to pick up the trail of the blank-eyed man who was looking for the rogue Superkid and track his movements in the hope that he would lead her to her target.

  Alma had strayed far enough into the world of the shadowrunners in her attempt to find the woman who had framed her. She didn't want to cross the line by actually committing a crime. Kageyama was an innocent victim—just as Gray Squirrel had been. Alma owed him an explanation.

  "Your extraction was ordered by a Seattle-based Seoulpa Ring: the Komun'go. They wanted to question you about something—what, I don't know, but it sounded as though they're looking for something." Kageyama feigned dismay. "How distressing: that makes three dragons who have tried to kidnap me or steal from me."

  Alma had no idea what he was talking about. "Three dragons?"

  He counted them off on his fingers. "Mang, the dragon whose associates hired you to kidnap me. Chiao, who hired you—"

  He paused to correct himself. "Who hired Night Owl to steal the statue from my condoplex. I recognized him at once when he came to collect his prize, although why he went to such pains to acquire a simple jade statue remains a mystery. I'm surprised he didn't just send one of the Red Lotus to steal it instead."

  Alma nodded, recognizing another piece of the puzzle: the Red Lotus—the gang members who were after Night Owl, according to the message that had been left on Alma's cellphone this morning.

  Kageyama continued: "The third dragon, Li, also wishes to kidnap me, it seems. That was his Number One who attacked me in the clinic."

  When Alma looked blankly at him, Kageyama added, in a low voice: "The 88s, a triad whose bloody reach extends all the way back to Dragon Eyes' master in Singapore."

  "What do they all want?" Alma asked.

  Kageyama shivered and pulled his wet shirt across his bare chest. "I honestly don't know. They must think there's something of great value in my condoplex, since it used to be owned by a great dragon. Perhaps they don't realize that I was the one who furnished it—Dunkelzahn died before he had the chance to move in any of his treasures. Yet Li, Chiao and Mang think there's something extremely valuable inside—something worth fighting over. Whatever it might be, each one is willing to risk the dissolution of a very powerful alliance to get it for himself."

  Alma's mind whirled as she tried to slot all of the pieces together. Kageyama had three dragons after him, each with an associated gang, Triad or Seoulpa Ring. One of them—the dragon Mang, who controlled the Seoulpa Ring—might also, according to Bluebeard, have ties to the Eastern Tiger Corporation, a powerful player in the Pacific Prosperity Group. Alma wondered if the PPG was the "alliance" that Kageyama had just spoken of—if the other two dragons also controlled cor
porations in that group. If so, the combined firepower of the dragon's gang members, the nuyen controlled by their corporate subsidiaries and the dragons' own magical capabilities would produce a security nightmare she wouldn't wish upon anyone.

  There was just one thing she didn't understand. "Why are you telling me all this?"

  From above came the sound of rotors overhead as a helicopter descended; both Alma and Kageyama glanced up. It was a black and yellow sky cab, but it wasn't Buzz's machine. Alma glanced at the floor and belatedly realized that the concrete underfoot had a pressure-sensitive pad that automatically flagged a cab once the shelter was occupied.

  Kageyama reached into a back trouser pocket and pulled out a small leather case. Then he bowed slightly and presented her with a rectangle of plastic: a personal calling card. The blue stone around his neck swung forward on its chain and settled back against his chest as he straightened.

  "Ms. Lee—or whatever your real name might be—you seem to be a very capable woman," he said. "If it wasn't for you, Li or one of the other dragons would have me in his clutches. I have decided that it takes a thief to protect one from thieves. I would like to hire you to provide me with additional security."

  He gave her such a knowing look that for a moment, Alma wondered if he knew who she really was. "Thank you," she stammered, tucking the card into a jacket pocket. "But I have . . . another engagement . . . at the moment."

  Kageyama paused with his hand on the door. "An engagement that I suspect is in jeopardy, unless you can clear your name—is that right?"

  Alma kept her emotions in check, despite his too-accurate guess. The helicopter touched down outside the shelter, its rotors throwing a spray of rain against the glass.

  Kageyama inclined his head as he opened the door. "If you change your mind, let me know." Then he strode out into the rain and climbed into the cab.

  8

  Great Possession

  Night Owl rumbled down the street on her Electroglide, watching for the address she'd looked up on the telecom. The streets in this part of the downtown core were quiet this time of night. The antique shops, retro clothing and music stores, and thaumaturgical supply shops were closed and dark, and only a handful of people scurried along the blustery sidewalks, hunkered down under umbrellas to shelter from the incessant rain.