They ascend two storeys, Alice still able to hear and feel the thump of music from the venue on the ground floor. There are three doors on the landing. Nikki opens one of them, which leads straight into a tiny combined kitchen and living area with two other doors off it. One of them is open to her right, allowing Alice a view into a combined toilet and shower cubicle, the head one of those automated foldaways that flip up into the wall when you’re done, giving an extra meaning to the word flush. Adjacent to that is presumably the bedroom door, currently closed, Nikki taking position defensively in front of it.
Alice feels a twinge of something, maybe guilt, maybe embarrassment. This is Nikki’s home, and the whole place must be a fraction the size of her digs back at the Ver Eterna.
Nikki stands with her back to the bedroom door, redundantly pointing Alice towards the bathroom. She gets the impression she is being anxiously ushered there, which implies she is being directed away from someplace else.
“Okay, you go use the shower,” Nikki says. “I’ll go to my closet, see if I can’t find something for you to wear. I’m taller than you but I probably got a shirt you can borrow, long as you don’t mind looking a little scruffy.”
“I’ll take scruffy over blood-drenched.”
Alice steps into the cubicle and closes the door. She begins to tug at the sticky shirt when she realises something is missing.
“Hey, do you have a towel, or is it one of those …” she begins, stepping back into the living area.
Nikki is standing in the bedroom doorway with her back to Alice. She spins around, pulling the door closed with a slam and standing in front of it in a hopeless attempt to appear halfway natural.
She looks guilty and cornered, and she knows it.
“What? A towel? No, it’s an air-dry system.”
“What’s in the bedroom, Nikki?”
Her eyes dart around.
“That’s my personal space. You got no right to go in there.”
There is a moment’s stand-off, the two of them silently staring at each other. Then Nikki makes a lunge. Alice senses it a fraction of a second before, picking up on micro-gestures. She flinches, anticipating attack, but it’s flight not fight. Nikki runs straight out of the apartment and disappears down the stairs.
Alice doesn’t give chase. She’s been burned by that already. Instead she steps to the bedroom door and turns the handle, half expecting it to be locked. It isn’t. She pushes it open very gently, slowly revealing another tiny space. The bed is pushed tight against one wall, barely clearance on the other side to stand and reach into the shallow closet.
On the bed is the reason Nikki didn’t want Alice to come here. She tried to bluff it, must have thought she could still get her showered and out again without seeing this. And maybe she would have but for the want of a towel.
There is a woman lying on the bed, her eyes bulging in a permanent horrified stare. Livid marks ring her neck, bruises and cuts marring her face, blood spattering the pillow. She’s been beaten and strangled in the last few hours, while Alice was being kept out of the way by Nikki’s careful arrangement.
CdC now has two homicides, and one suspect.
CONTAMINATION (I)
Nikki has only opened the bedroom door maybe half a second when she hears Alice unexpectedly re-emerge from the shower closet. A lot happens in that half-second; a lot changes. It’s time enough for a hundred things to run through her mind, as though this old second-gen mesh implant could accelerate the speed of her thinking, instead of simply helping her understand a few Chinese phrases or the street layout on some never-visited quadrant of Wheel Two.
It’s Giselle. She’s been murdered right here in Nikki’s bedroom. Beaten and strangled and dead. Girl was twenty-eight years old.
Girl was pregnant. Ducking Nikki because she owed her money and she was saving to pay for a ticket home.
Half a second is not time enough to process the shock, to even begin to contemplate the loss, but it is enough for her to sense the jaws closing and understand that she is being set up. At that point, instinct takes control, the lizard brain acting decisively before her deeper cognitive processes have even booted up.
She pulls the door closed, too fast, too hard.
She’s usually got a damn good poker face, but how do you front out a moment like that? Her expression might betray little, but that counts for shit when her body language is screaming in panic. It sure doesn’t help that as they face off, she is beginning to suspect that Alice already knows what is behind the door she just slammed.
What was all that about, she had been asking herself, this sudden desire to take a shower at the home of someone she openly despises? She must have gotten a message telling her to engineer this visit. She could be lying about her lens not restarting too. Even if Alice didn’t know about the body, dispatching her here had to be part of the set-up. Was Kinsi in on it somehow? She was the one who made the suggestion. No, it was Alice, being cleverly manipulative. She mentioned needing a shower and a change, prompting someone to suggest it. Alice must have known it would be common knowledge that Nikki lives nearby. In fact, she should probably assume there is little Alice doesn’t know about her at this point.
It’s also possible that Alice coming here right now was just dumb luck, but either way, she doesn’t have any time to waste.
She runs.
There are things she could have taken from the apartment, but she doesn’t know what Alice might be secretly packing. She can’t afford to risk getting taken down by an electro-pulse or a resin gun if she heads for the living area instead of out the door.
Nikki hurdles the banister rather than running down the stairs, thus dropping the two storeys in three bounds. She is out in the alleyway in a few seconds, racing back towards Mullane.
She sees the shuffling figure of Mrs. Pang up ahead, and checks her stride so she can squeeze past. Pang hears the footsteps though, turning around and putting out a hand to indicate she wants to talk. She’s a strange one. Fell out with her family about something that makes no sense to Nikki, and moved up here as a fuck-you to all of them. Eighty-two years old and lives for her job at a firm developing lightweight radiation shielding materials.
“Can’t stop, Mrs. P,” she warns, skipping past her sideways in the tight passage.
“That girl back at your apartment,” Pang calls after her. “Yeah, I saw her here before, except her hair was different.”
Like much of what Mrs. Pang says, Nikki doesn’t know why she’s telling her this, but the implications are a kick to the gut. Mrs. P is a witness. She’s saying she saw Giselle come here earlier, and that she saw Giselle visit here before.
Giselle was here lots of times: sharing a bottle together, watching movies, sleeping together; sometimes just actually sleeping, but together.
Her hair was different. Nikki pictures Giselle in that pink wig she favoured. She must have worn it every time she came around. It was part of how she dealt with what she did, how she compartmentalised sex work: she had this hooker get-up, a means of inhabiting a different persona.
Nikki knows there are girls who work in Mullane to save a nest egg, then pay for memory removal at the end of it, thinking they can go back to Earth with no recollection of the specifics of what they have done. The jury is out on whether it works. Giselle sure wasn’t for going down that path. Instead she maintained a border between where Giselle ended and Gillian Selby began, and in truth Nikki only got to see the former.
She told herself they were friends. She told herself that when they went back to her place it wasn’t only because she offered protection and opportunities, or lent money, but who was she kidding? Just because it was payment in kind doesn’t mean it wasn’t payment. It doesn’t mean she liked Nikki at all.
Nikki told herself she liked Giselle, but if that were true, wouldn’t she have been interested in knowing Gillian Selby? Now Gillian Selby is dead, along with the baby she was determined to keep.
Motherfucker. Who woul
d do this? Why would they do this?
She runs out of the alley onto Mullane and barrels into a big guy in overalls, spilling the Qola he’s slugging.
She apologises, not making eye contact, keeping her head down as she strides away.
It has to be a means of taking herself out of the equation, she reasons. Could it be Julio and his new allies? If they think she killed Omega, this would be both payback and an effective way of neutralising her, as simply killing a Seguridad officer would bring down too much heat.
She needs to get off the street. Even if Alice isn’t lying about her lens not reconnecting, it won’t take her long to call this in. There is going to be an APB out on Nikki in no time.
She crosses Mullane and ducks into a place called Red Shift, which she knows is always dimly lit. It’s a lone-drinker hang-out, with a predominantly male clientele, but even as a woman she is unlikely to get a second look. People go there to be alone, in a way they can’t be simply by staying in their apartments.
She slips through the back and takes the stairs down to the sub-surface level, turning off location-signalling on her lens and changing her ident so that she is auto-tagged as Hayley Ortega, a propulsion systems researcher. She wishes it was truly that simple to drop off the radar.
She’s scanning Seguridad comms, text streams and audio channels, looking for the first clues that the starter gun has been fired on her manhunt.
It comes when she is peremptorily logged out, the police feeds disappearing all at once. She’s had her credentials revoked: credentials that literally opened a lot of doors.
She reaches the main concourse, the sub-level Mullane, sticking her head around the corner to scope out the landscape. She sees Carlos, the officer who helped her after her “fight” with Fernando and Julia, staged so that “Jessica” wouldn’t realise Nikki was behind her abduction. There is another cop alongside him. Carlos is talking while looking at nobody in particular, which means he’s in communication via his lens and sub-vocal. He’s probably requesting confirmation of what he’s just been told. “Arrest Nikki Fixx” is not an order he was expecting to get on this patrol.
She ducks back into the passageway leading from Red Shift. She’ll have to hold her position until he disappears.
It gets worse, though. On her lens she sees the rapid refresh of multiple public feeds that indicates a breaking story. They aren’t saying what she did, because Boutsikari and the like will still be debating whether they can keep the truth from reaching Earth, but it’s already official that she is a fugitive. Changing her ident isn’t going to make so much of a difference now that her picture is flashing up on everybody’s lenses. And there’s no comfort in assuming it will flash off again as soon as some other piece of trending tittle-tattle pops up to replace it. There’s a reward being offered, so a lot of folks are going to keep it in the corner for reference, and saving it to primary.
Everybody’s suddenly a concerned citizen when there’s a dollar value attached to it.
At least the cops can only be ordered to “apprehend immediately,” as opposed to “shoot on sight.” If this had happened to her back in LA, she’d be lucky to survive the hour.
Killing her isn’t the play here, though. If somebody wanted her dead, they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of murdering Giselle and framing Nikki for it. The fallout from this, particularly coming on top of the Omega killing, is going to be too overwhelming for the local authorities to contain. There’s a far more elaborate game being played here, one much bigger than pawns such as Yoram and Julio suspect.
She has to get out of Mullane, away from residential and entertainment areas. If she wants to stay hidden, she needs to head for the industrial and manufacturing zones, where there are fewer people on the streets. Problem is, she can’t take a static. Too many people, not to mention the automatic facial scanning on the cars. The transport itself is free, but they like to keep track of who is going where. It’s not even sinister: just a hundred different kinds of logistical audit for the crunch-heads to pore over.
There is another way of getting around though: the mag-line. In theory it could transport you anywhere on the wheel—as long as there’s enough air in the crate for the duration of the trip, and that there’s somebody waiting at the other end to let you out before you get auto-stacked in storage and the lid trapped shut beneath five more boxes.
The nearest control and access point is beneath Sin Garden. With a shiver she reflects that it is the one most recently used to abduct the new Principal of the SOE, via a means they occasionally deployed to dispose of particularly unruly drunks and other undesirable customers.
At the time Nikki thought she was abducting Jessica Cho, not Alice Blake. She had felt kind of bad about doing this to some young intern, but in Nikki’s defence, even as Jessica she kinda had it coming. She was annoyingly self-righteous, and needed to understand that Auntie Nikki was an ally to make friends with, as opposed to a suspect to be ratted out.
It would have made the kid look good to her bosses too: being abducted because she saw something the crooks wanted erased would suggest she had an instinct for getting to the heart of things. That’s what Nikki had told herself, anyway.
The passageway leading back to the underside of Sin Garden is only about twenty yards from where she’s standing, but that’s a long way when there are dozens of people walking back and forth or simply hanging, laughing about the shit they just did or saw. Not to mention the two cops actively searching for her.
She can’t hide out in this alleyway for ever either. Sooner or later, somebody is going to come up this way, heading for Red Shift or because they want somewhere quick and convenient for a blow-job or a knee-trembler.
She looks at the news feeds. Her face is still up there, a recent shot too. Whoever is behind this must have got somebody to snap her sometime during the past twenty-four hours.
Fuck them. They may have revoked her credentials remotely but they can’t wipe her memory, and as an ex-cop she is adept at remembering call signals and codes. Using her lens, she navigates to the neighbourhood’s publicly accessible environmental monitoring and emergency systems, entering the authorisation code to trigger a localised airborne contaminant alert.
Lights begin flashing in panels on the walls, matched by similar oscillations in everyone’s lenses. There is no panic: people know these things are usually a false alarm, but they will take action, meaning she can pull an air-filter mask over her face without being conspicuous, because everybody else is doing the same.
CONTAMINATION (II)
Alice is gripped in a momentary paralysis as she stares at the body in Nikki Freeman’s bedroom. The impulse to give chase is stayed by her realistic appraisal that it would be futile. This is Nikki’s turf, she’s got a head start, and in the unlikely event that Alice did catch up with her, she doesn’t like her chances of physically apprehending a woman who may already have chalked up two kills in as many days.
What is also keeping her in stasis is a horrified fascination at the sight of the victim. Alice doesn’t have a name for her, due to her lens remaining stubbornly on the fritz, but it is not the dead woman’s identity that is asserting a hold strong enough to pin her in place: it is what the body tells her about who Nikki Freeman truly is.
With a shudder she surmises that she may have gotten off lightly. Jessica Cho was only intended to lose her career as a price for getting in Nikki’s way. What measures might she have taken had Alice proven a more formidable obstacle?
Alice has seen plenty of murder victims both in the morgue and at crime scenes, in cities all across the Earth. Nonetheless, something about this one gets her in the gut, more even than the floating carnage in the Axle. That was too weirdly abstract to even relate to on a human level, its victim broken down into constituent parts that made it impossible to imagine the whole. This, by contrast, is intimate, immediate, heart-breaking. It is an affront, an insult to everything she wanted to believe about CdC. It was supposed to be a place w
here new futures were imagined and constructed. Instead she is looking at a healthy young woman who should be walking around right now: a million possible futures choked off in one ugly act.
Alice is stirred from her frozen solitude by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. She turns, half expecting to see Nikki bounding back, perhaps to tie up a very large loose end. Instead she sees an athletic-looking and sharply dressed man stride towards the doorway.
“Is everything okay? I just saw Nikki high-tail it out of here like the place was on fire and oh Jesus Christ.”
He has seen the body. Alice reaches to close the door but she knows it’s too late. He has already looked at it for a lot longer than the micro-second glimpse she needed to understand the situation.
He clamps a hand over his mouth, his eyes wide, staring at Alice almost accusingly in shock and growing fear.
“Wait,” she says, but it functions only as the cue for him to flee.
He takes off, running down the stairs, and she knows she has no chance of catching him any more than she could have tailed Nikki. Even if the guy tripped and broke his ankle at the foot of the stairs, she is not empowered to detain him, and certainly has no way of preventing him from communicating.
There is no containing the situation like there was in the Axle. There’s a witness on the street, possibly in possession of a grabación, and she doesn’t even know his name.
This just went public.
DEAD ON ARRIVAL
Nikki feels the crate come to a smooth but rapid stop, the deceleration rate not designed with human passengers in mind. There is a subsequent lateral movement, shunting her on to another track perhaps. She braces for the next jolt of acceleration, hoping it comes soon. She was held in a bottleneck for a worryingly long time quite early in her journey, eating into her limited air supply. Another wait like that and it’s going to be touch and go.
Places in the Darkness Page 21
