by Jeff Somers
When I looked at her, she flinched. I winked.
We were gliding down from the rooftop hover dock to the seventy-fifth floor, where the government had seen fit to lease space for the Regional Office of Waste Disposal. Recently the civil government had been spreading its wings, eating into the System Pigs’ budgets and taking back some of the jobs traditionally done by the SSF. Word was the cops weren’t happy about it. Technically any citizen of the System had access to local government offices, appointments appreciated but not required-all very friendly. The funny thing was, buildings like this one didn’t have any street access at all-you had to take a hover to the roof and worm your way down. It was a neat way to keep the riffraff out without having to post so much as a sign.
The elevator smelled like the Wasp, a pleasant mix of cigarette smoke and perfume that always made me think of women, especially the high-end hookers down on Bleecker Street, fifty thousand yen just to chat them up. Gleason was spit-shined, her long red hair pulled back in a neat tail, her face scrubbed clean. She wore the hell out of the black suit and coat, although the coat was long for her and pooled around her boots. She looked older than her fifteen years, her face bland and her eyes murderous. I felt a strange sense of pride, looking at her.
“Quit it, Avery,” she said softly. “You’re giving me the heebies.”
I turned back to face the doors of the elevator. The collar of my shirt was scratching me and my neck throbbed, the tiny wound on its side refusing to heal and still leaking pus. As we sank, I considered the well-hidden security camera embedded in the cab ceiling and calculated its coverage, deciding that it didn’t really afford any hiding spots at all.
At the eightieth floor, the doors snapped open and the elevator’s shell spoke softly around us: Eightieth floor, thank you. Eightieth floor, thank you. The Wasp edged her way toward the doors, her bright, clear eyes-a little wider and rounder, I thought, than was natural-locked on me. For some reason, even in an expensive suit, forty thousand yen of synthetic fabric itching me something fierce, I still made people nervous. It might have been the wound on my neck. Or maybe it was just the blood under my fingernails.
As the doors snapped shut again, Glee cleared her throat thickly and dragged one of her sleeves across her nose. Spitting a glob of something green and thick onto the cab floor, she grimaced.
“I don’t know what I picked up,” she muttered, her voice a little hoarse, “but it fucking sucks.” The deep voice and the suit made her look older, and I didn’t like it.
I sighed. “Mind your manners,” I said. We were playing a role, and eyes were on us.
She grinned a little. “Uh-oh. Avery’s embarrassed. Avery’s mortified.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little. Gleason always got to me. “Fuck you, kid.”
She dragged her sleeve across her nose again. “Tell me why we’re visiting the fucking Waste Disposal office again?”
The doors snapped open to reveal a long hallway carpeted in a deep, green pile, the walls a uniform white. Identical doors lined the sides, each marked with a small plastic sign. Cloudy white bubbles on the ceiling housed cameras that tracked us. You couldn’t take a piss uptown without being monitored. There was no smell to the air at all. I never got used to the scrubbed air.
“We’re here, little one,” I said as we stepped out of the cab, “because I have a burning need to know who in fuck thought they could snatch me off the street and fuck with me. I have a good asset here.”
“Ooh, Avery’s angry. Avery’s pissed off.” She kept pace with me as we walked down the hall. The first-name bullshit had started a few weeks ago, and I was letting it ride for a while, see if she figured out that it was a liberty before I had to smack the lesson into her. “In the Department of Waste Disposal?”
Glee didn’t get uptown much and was used to a more direct approach to things. “Everybody’s got shit to get rid of, kid,” I said, stopping in front of one of the doors. “And it all goes through here at one point or another.” The door snapped open and I pushed her in ahead of me.
The door admitted us into a tiny reception area, the carpet sucking at my feet as we let the door shut behind us. The Droid behind the white for-show desk was vaguely humanoid, with a feminine torso, an oval head, and two spindly arms. When you got close you could see it was attached to the desk and was just a visual aid for the office’s shell.
“Welcome to the Office of Waste Disposal, North American Department, Local Office Five-five-six,” the shell breathed gently around us. “Do you have an appointment?”
I paid it no attention, stepping around the desk and striding down a shorter hallway lined with unmarked doors. At the third one on our left I turned and stopped, smiling into the tiny camera mounted in it, Glee hidden behind me. After we stood there for a few seconds the door whisked open; I took hold of Glee’s arm and pulled her in with me quickly, the door zooming back into place a second or so after she’d cleared the threshold.
“Hello, Reggie,” I said, smiling in what I hoped passed for friendliness. “Due for another treatment, I see.”
The office was so small Glee and I had to stand very close to each other, hips touching. A foot or so in front of us was a tiny desk with no obvious way for anyone to get around it, and entombed behind the desk was a fat, dark-haired man in his shirtsleeves. He was wedged in behind the desk so tightly it made me feel uncomfortable in sympathy. A half-burned cigarette dangled just below his pencil-thin mustache, its smoke sucked up aggressively into the crank air and never even reaching my nose. A paper-thin screen between us displayed several smaller boxes of information just inches from his face. As I spoke he started forward and gestured violently, the screen going opaque in an instant.
“Hell, Avery, you scared the shit out of me,” he gasped. “Who the fuck is this?” His tiny little eyes were buried in flesh, but I could see them roam up and down Glee’s body, pausing blatantly at chest level. I clenched my jaw and pushed my hands into my coat pockets. Glee just stared down at him, her cheeks red and her forehead a little damp.
“This is my associate,” I said. I gestured at the fat man. “This is Reggie, my contact here.”
They stared at each other for another few seconds. Reggie liked to eat, and every year he had a fat-sucking procedure performed that shed two hundred pounds in an hour, followed by a series of skin-tightening treatments. These were expensive procedures, and in me-or, more precisely, my yen-Reg had found salvation. In January he was svelte and tanned, and then slowly expanded over the months until by December he was a goddamn beach ball.
“You’re not supposed to bring anyone else with you,” Reggie said slowly, his eyes settling lazily on Glee’s chest again. “It’s dangerous.” He brightened without looking up at me. “Unless this is for me?”
I flared my nostrils and leaned forward to slap him lightly across the face, not hard enough to hurt. “Eyes on me, Reg,” I said easily, stepping back. “Eyes on me.”
He blinked and gave me a piggy little stare. “Fuck you, Avery. This is a bad time. You’re not popular with certain people, you know, and the Optical Facial Scanners seem to be under the impression you’ve been seen on security cameras in government offices.” He shrugged. “So I have to ask you to leave.”
I ignored this, pushing my hands into my pockets. “I need info on Newark, Reg. I took a little involuntary trip out there recently and I want to know who’s got fingers in that trash heap, who’s carting shit out there or from there, who’s bribing you to let it happen.”
He tried to lean back casually, lacing his hands behind his head, but his girth pushed his belly into his desk and made him grunt in discomfort. I noticed his cigarette was nearly all ash and watched in fascination, waiting for it to shake off. “I just told you, Avery, this isn’t a good time.”
I glanced at Glee, who looked back at me and shrugged. For a second I was aware of how grown-up and poised she’d become, apparently overnight. I looked back at Reg with my grin in place, calibrated to c
onvey amusement. This fat piece of shit thought he was in charge. I realized I could smell him, Reg’s brand of sour sweat too much for scrubbers.
“Reggie, let’s be friendly. Let’s have a conversation, and when we’re done you say, Ave, this one’s on the house, on account of I was a fucking asshole when you showed up. And then I say, Shit, Reggie, I surprised you, so maybe you weren’t in top form, and we part friends. Okay?”
He kept trying like hell to look relaxed even though it was obvious he was straining to hold his position. “Get out. What are you going to do, slap me again? You’re unarmed, Avery. You didn’t get through rooftop security with a gun.” He raised his eyebrows. “You think stories about you scare me. Fuck off.”
He was right, I didn’t have a gun. Getting past security in a building containing even a pissant government agency could be done-anything could be done-but it was troublesome, and unnecessary.
“Glee,” I said. She took a half step forward and snapped her arm out stiffly, a homemade bone blade leaping into her hand. I had a similar one in my boot. With practiced ease she whipped it across his face, producing a tiny red wound on the tip of his bulbous nose. She grinned down at him, her blue eyes wide and lit up.
“Ear to ear, fat man,” she said, coughing wetly. “If Avery says so.”
Reggie quivered, his loose skin rippling unnaturally as a tiny drop of bright red blood formed on his nose. His eyes moved from me to her and back again. Licking his lips, he squinted at me. “What, you’re going to murder a government official in his fucking office, Avery?” He shook his head. “Never gonna happen.”
I shrugged. “You’ve got ten seconds, Reggie, and we’re gonna find out.”
Next to me, Glee sighed softly, an excited, feminine sound. Reggie stared at her for a moment and then seemed to deflate like he was undergoing his fat-sucking process as we watched. “Fucking hell. You’re still gonna pay me, right?”
“Reggie,” I said, leaning forward and pulling my portable shell cube from one pocket, “we’re just going to have to think on that.”
Glum now, he accepted the cube and slid it into his desk unit, hands working deftly. Glee stepped back and leaned against the wall, a coughing fit racking her.
“Okay, okay,” Reggie muttered, all business now, his thick-fingered hands moving quickly, his screen flashing through records. “Newark. Nothing officially in Newark, of course, so there won’t be any front-line records-nothing so easy, eh?” He grinned at me in a flash, trying to be my friend again. “But there’s always a record.” Ash finally fell off his cigarette, leaving him with a burning stub in his mouth and a pile of soot on his belly. “If they’re moving anything substantial to and from Newark, someone’s got a record. You got a time frame? Any other parameters I can search on? If it’s just WD records it’d be a few seconds, but if you want me to cross-check data points on the entire NE Department, it’ll take a while.”
I shrugged. “I’ve got time.”
He nodded, sweat appearing on his brow. Behind me, Gleason had recovered and was completely silent, chewing her hair like she was ten again. For a few seconds there was no sound whatsoever, and I watched the smoke from Reggie’s cigarette rising thinly from his mouth. When the red box appeared in the lower corner of his screen, I saw it immediately and tried to read the backwards text printed in it.
“Oh, shit,” Reggie said just before the building shell cut in around us, a ridiculously soft-spoken artificial voice.
“Attention: By order of the Department of Public Health, New York Department, under Joint Council Resolution Eight-eight-nine-a, this building has been sealed. Please remain in your current location. Attention…”
It was strange to hear Joint Council in every announcement, since the JC was a bunch of mummified old corpses beneath London, their Undersecretaries the only legally incorporated government left in the System. Most of them had been appointed almost thirty years ago and had been running things since the council had tried for immortality and ended up crazy instead. Until Dick Marin had muscled in. Every time I heard the words Joint Council I thought of those dusty old men under Westminster Abbey and shooting Dick Marin in the face, knowing there were dozens of him waiting to step into the vacuum.
I glanced back at Glee, who had gone still, one end of her hair still in her mouth, her off-white blade perched under one fingernail. Her nose was running, and her expression had suddenly lost the cocky assurance of a moment ago. I winked. “Cops,” I said, simply. I turned to smile down at Reggie. “Reg, I hope for your sake you didn’t just sell me out.” I leaned down to put my knuckles on his desk. “Because it will not go well for you.”
He smiled at me, but it was such a cadaverous and hollow grin I chose not to be offended. “Shit, Avery,” he said, sagging in his chair. “We’re going to wish it was fucking cops.”
III
Day Three: Good Luck with the Folks from Public Health
Making an effort to keep my adrenaline under control, I studied Reggie’s face for a second or two and concluded that I saw real fear there, but whether it was because he was caught breaking some laws or because he was afraid I was about to have Gleason slit his throat, I couldn’t tell. “Who’s coming, then?”
“Aren’t you listening? Public Health.” His piggy little eyes danced on me and he reached up to take the last stub of cigarette from his mouth and toss it onto the floor. “But it doesn’t matter what fucking department. It means Spooks, Avery. Psionics. The fucking Spooks have sealed the building. Oh, fuck me.”
I turned and nodded at Glee. She turned and tried the door, but it didn’t respond.
“It won’t open,” Reggie almost wailed. “The building’s been sealed. Oh, fuck you, you fucking piece of trash. I’m fucking ruined.”
I turned back to Reggie and pointed at the door.
“Open it up, Reg,” I said.
He shrugged, a massive fleshquake that went on and on. “I can’t, Avery-the building’s sealed.”
I nodded. I had a suspicion this would turn out to be System Pigs no matter what the shell announcement said, and if I was right that meant they were coming for me. “If I twist your nose, Reggie, I will break it. I won’t really mean to, but it’ll happen. You’ll stain your shirt and, knowing you, probably piss your pants. And then you’re going to hit the panic button wired into the door and let us out anyway. So save yourself the trouble.”
Reggie looked at Glee, but didn’t seem to like the blank expression on her face. I snapped my fingers under his nose, making him jump. “Damn, Reggie, you take your Health Department actions pretty fucking seriously, huh?”
He wiped a hand over his face. “You don’t-”
I made a feint at his nose, and he slammed back against the strangling wall of his office.
“Tell me I don’t understand again.”
Keeping his eyes on me, he reached forward and gestured, fat hands moving with surprising delicacy through a complex series of positions. Behind us, the door opened with a snick. I scooped my portable shell from its dock and dropped it into my coat. “Good luck with the folks from Public Health, Reg,” I said, turning. Glee spun with me and let me move ahead of her.
None of the other doors were open. I imagined people in each one, in their tiny offices, like beetles tied to pins. In the entryway, the Droid spun its blank oval head toward us in a creepy, doomed attempt to appear human.
“For your safety, please return to your office,” it said, projecting its voice over the building shell. “Your face has been scanned and transmitted to the System Security Force for reference. One citizen and one unknown. For your safety, please return to your office.”
Glee strode forward toward the entry door, but it didn’t budge for her. “Don’t bother,” I said. “You’ve got to release each one separately.” I started trying to replicate the gesture Reggie had made in his office. As I tried to will my hand into the right series of positions, I glanced up at Glee, who’d flashed out her blade again and stood ready, bouncing
a little on the balls of her feet. She looked incredibly young, but then I’d been doing shank jobs in the street for food money when I’d been fifteen.
My third guess at the gesture snapped the office door open. Glee poked her head out into the hall and nodded, glancing back at me. “All clear.” She looked pink and shiny, like something very hot was inside her, melting.
“Attention, HD lockdown violation on seventy-fifth floor,” the building shell announced immediately. I pushed myself toward the door.
“Get back!” I shouted.
She spun to face me, walking backward into the hall, flipping the blade over her knuckles and back again. “Ooh, Avery is protective. Avery is a father figure,” she said, grinning. I lumbered as fast as I could at the doorway and slammed into her, knocking her down onto the floor and pinning her blade arm under one elbow. I looked up, panting, as she squirmed beneath me.
“Avery, what the fuck?”
The hallway was empty. Glee was frowning up at me, her face flushed, her hair matted damply to her forehead. I lifted my arm and thrust a finger under her nose.
“What the fuck, kid, is-”
A loud crash made us both whip our heads around in time to see ceiling panels drop to the floor as two plump spheres appeared from above.
“-Security Droids,” I finished. “Get up slow and stay behind me.”
“Citizen,” the building shell boomed through the hallway, “please lie facedown on the floor and await security personnel.”
I held a finger against my lips without looking away. “Pretty harmless. They just herd the taxpayers as long as the taxpayers don’t do anything wonky. But you were never registered, kid-you’re a blank, and they don’t like blanks, okay? They will fire on you. And your blade won’t do anything against them.” I patted her cheek. “So stay behind me, okay?”
She nodded, nose runny, eyes wide. “Okay.” She looked fifteen again.
