by Jeff Somers
They still didn’t move, so I shrugged and brought the Roon up, cocking the hammer with a dramatic click. That got them both out of their seats, Remy shifting gracefully to his left to keep Garces covered.
For a second we just stared at each other. Then I sighed theatrically. “If you’ve never jumped out of a window before,” I offered, “the best advice I can give you is to take a running jump—it’s easier that way, instead of leaning out in excruciating increments—and protect your head.”
Red still stared at me. “You’re… not serious.”
Remy laughed, a cold, sudden snort. Remy hadn’t known me back in New York, before the Plague. He knew only the new Avery. The new Avery wasn’t as kind and gentle as the old.
I ticked my aim downward and put a shell at Red’s feet, making him jump and yelp. The pair scampered backward toward the windows and I turned toward Garces.
“Remy,” I called out. “Make sure they jump.”
Garces was relaxed, a smile on his face. He stared back at me with his hands folded in his lap. At the sound of one of the windows scraping open his eyes flicked over my shoulder and then immediately back at me. He pushed his grin into overdrive and raised one hand to point at me.
“Avery Cates,” he said.
I shrugged. “You’re Psionic. Read my mind and shit, huh?”
Garces shrugged back as a pair of yowling screams pierced the air behind us, suddenly cut off. “You’re the only gringo Gunner with a Bottom working and here.” He ticked his head toward the windows. “You cost me money, there.”
“Fuck your money,” I said, easily, taking a seat in one of the busted leather chairs.
He took that in stride. “I’m guessing I’m down four men, too.”
“Just two. The other two will live, unless they die of shame.”
He nodded. I could see how he’d clawed his way to the bottom ladder of the post-System world. He was smart enough, and he stayed calm under pressure. “All right,” he said, his accent subtle, giving his words a round feel I kind of liked, like every word was linked to the last by a thin line of silk. “Let’s negotiate.”
I shook my head. I had the Roon aimed at his face, my arm resting on the arm of the chair. “We’re not negotiating. I just have a question I have to ask you before I transact my business. Something I ask everyone these days.”
The office was damp, I realized. It smelled moldy. If I looked up at the ceiling, I’d probably find a deep brown water stain, but I didn’t bother looking. Garces was a two-bit neighborhood boss—the world had tens of thousands of assholes at his level, now, shitheads who thought having a dozen big guys sending up tribute to you made you important. I’d known really important people. I’d been in the same room with them, made deals. Garces was a nobody, and I was about to remind him of the fact.
“By all means, Mr. Cates,” he said, spreading his hands to indicate compliance. “If I can answer, I will. And then we can discuss who has hired you, and what it will take for you to go and kill them instead.”
I didn’t react. Every asshole in the world thought he was brilliant, that no one had ever had such a brilliant idea before. And there were probably Gunners who made deals like that, starting bidding wars, waking people up in the middle of the night to announce the latest bid, and would you like to bid higher or take a bullet to the face? But Gunners like that usually ended up dead sooner rather than later. The one thing people wanted in a Gunner was reliability. You didn’t like to think that hiring me was just opening up a fucking auction.
“My question is, have you ever heard of men named Michaleen Garda, Wallace Belling, or Cainnic Orel?”
Garces squinted at me, cocking his head. “Orel? Everyone knows of Cainnic Orel, Mr. Cates. He has been dead for twenty years, I hear.” He smiled. “Or do I hear wrong?”
I nodded. “And the other names?”
He leaned back in his seat. “Never heard either one.”
I nodded again. I never expected any kind of shocking answer, but we’d traveled half the world since Hong Kong and I’d made it a standard thing, just asking. It was surprising what you could find out just by asking. I looked around the office. Chances were I was never going to have my revenge on Michaleen, aka Cainnic Orel, the most famous Gunner in the short, doomed history of the System, or on his lieutenant Belling. Both of them deserved to die, and I deserved to be the one to kill them, but I wasn’t goin to get any closer to that crawling around the wreckage of civilization killing little shits like Garces for pennies.
Wallace Belling had told me, three years and forever ago, that the fat times, as far as contract murder was concerned, were back. And he was right. I had more work than I could handle. The whole world was boiling, everyone grabbing what they could and riding the bull until it bucked them off, and the easiest way to skip your wait in line was to hire someone like me and delete a few people from the queue. I wasn’t working Orel and Belling’s legendary level, the Dúnmharú, a stupid fucking name that still made people lie awake at night with a gun in their hands, but I was sleeping indoors every night when most people were experimenting with a diet of dirt occasionally supplemented with their own fingers, and I was still alive, despite the odds. It was the best deal I was going to get, and every day I didn’t get an interesting answer to my questions, I got happier with my lot in life.
Standing up, I pushed my gun into my coat pocket. “Nice place you got here,” I said, walking toward the door. I felt good. My augments weren’t as effective as they’d been when the military had first implanted them, making me feel like a kid with perfect balance and endless energy, but they kept my leg from aching and my lungs from burning, and I slept like a baby at night, just a black stretch of peace and recuperation. I spun and walked backward for a few steps, feeling light and lively. “Too bad it’s going to be someone else’s tomorrow.”
His sudden expression of pale horror was hilarious. “You said you were not here to kill me!” he shouted, veins bubbling up under his skin. I got the impression that Garces was a screamer, when you didn’t have a gun on him. That made me feel good. Screamers deserved to be shut up.
“I’m not,” I said, hooking a thumb at Remy, who stood in front of the desk with his cannon held calmly in front of him. “He is. He really enjoys this part.”
PART I
I
VERY HIGH ON THE LADDER
The mud sucked at my boots and splattered all over my pants and coat as we walked through downtown Potosí. I didn’t know what Potosí had been like before the civil war, but Potosí today was a pimple where trash collected, a scab of a city where nothing had been rebuilt, just repurposed. It was a town of blue tarps, thick plastic sheeting laid over destroyed roofs, stretched to form rippling walls, used in architectural ways I’d never imagined. Who even knew there was so much blue tarp in the world, just stockpiled everywhere, ready to be deployed after the field-contained armaments had churned your city into a maze of rubble and bloody mud.
“Do you see him?” Remy asked without looking at me.
I nodded. The sun was incredibly bright and had absolutely no warmth; it was just a huge pale disk in the sky reflected off of every iced-over pool of water and sheet of frozenoff-white snow. The streets had been churned by a thousand feet into pudding that wanted to pull you down into the earth and hold you there, absorbing you. Some of the more enterprising people had laid down wooden slats outside their buildings, but for the most part it was just the sucking mud and a hundred assholes shoving you this way and that. Potosí had never been a big town, but it seemed empty all the time, half the old ruins unoccupied, no one hurting for space.
Even so, a walk downtown always got on my nerves.
I stopped and pretended to examine some knives on a fragile-looking cart that had no wheels. The proprietor was an extremely thin black man with a puffy white beard exploding off his face in several contradictory directions; his beard looked like a parasite that was sucking him dry. He didn’t move as I fingered his merchandi
se, good knives that looked pre-civil war, machine-made.
“Looks like a Tele-K to me,” I said, picturing the broad-chested kid in the dark black suit, trailing us by twenty feet or so.
“Does he have a mark?”
I shook my head and turned away from the cart. “Not that I saw, but I can’t get a good look.”
We kept slogging through the mud toward the market. “You’d think by now the Angels would have figured out that Tele-Ks don’t scare us,” Remy said in his flat voice.
The Angels. The fucking Angels. For years the System Pigs had kidnapped every kid who showed even a spark of Psionic ability and kept them all safely bottled up in special schools, training them to be the ultimate civil servants. Then the Joint Council undersecretaries made them into their intelligence staff, and then the whole fucking world broke and the Psionics had come wriggling up through the cracks. Half of the Spooks were just in it for themselves, bad enough when the guy horning in on your business could snap you in two from across the room. The other half called themselves Angels. They were Psionic Actives under no one’s control, and they were convinced that they had been created by god to rule the world—whether they were supposed to kill the rest of us or just tell us what to do wasn’t very clear. What was clear was that step one of their brilliant plan was to eliminate “evil men and women” by drum trial and summary execution, and I was on their list of bastards in need of some punishment. Every few weeks, one or more of the crazy bastards found me and tried to put me on trial.
You could tell an Angel from a regular run-of-the-mill Spook—assuming they weren’t trying to squeeze your brains out through your ears while making a speech about god and evil men, which was a dead giveaway—because they liked to ink themselves up, usually on the neck right over the jugular. A Tele-K got a stylized fulcrum, a triangle with a line balanced on top, and a Pusher got a small black crow.
I fucking hated the Spooks.
“I’ll handle him,” Remy said, turning away. I shot out a hand and grabbed his collar, pulling him back to me.
“You stay with me and back me up,” I said quietly. Remy’s death wish was fucking exhausting. He thought he knew how he was going to die—via random augment disconnect in his brainnate “endom encounter with former SFNA officer with a blackjack in his pocket—so that somehow made him immortal. “We’ll handle him when he requires us to handle him, okay?”
Remy didn’t say anything, just fell back into pace at my side with a smirk and a shrug of his shoulders. I didn’t say anything else. I was responsible for Remy. If he hadn’t been glued to me back in Englewood, years ago, he wouldn’t have been pressed into the army at the height of the civil war. Wouldn’t have had military augments sliced into his brain, wouldn’t have been shipped to Hong Kong and made into a hardass, wouldn’t have walked away without an official discharge, his augments still active in his skull, ticking away. Remy was on me. So far, everyone I’d tried to keep safe—few and far between—was dead. I didn’t like my odds.
I thought of Glee, and had to force myself not to smack Remy in the back of the head. I liked Remy. I’d liked Gleason, too. It made me angry to think about her.
We walked in silence, then, between the sagging carts selling beat-up old tech and dying batteries, solar collectors, and, occasionally, tiny reactors promising near-endless energy. Such reactors existed, sure, but I doubted any of them had migrated to a cart stuck in the muddy streets of Potosí. Batteries were about the most valuable things in the world, especially if they came with solar collector hookups, and the cart had four big guys working security on it, all of them lounging around a few feet away, looking bored and sleepy. The sleepier and dumber security looked, the more I kept clear of them.
The buildings behind the carts were jagged remnants, rounded off by blue tarp and occasional attempts at renovation, raw wood rotting away again. Piles of cleared rubble popped up at regular intervals, courtesy of bombing runs by the System Pigs on one day and the Joint Council’s army on the other; Potosí had switched hands a dozen times during the war. There were still unexploded shells buried in the ground or lodged in the cracks and crevasses of the buildings. Every other day someone triggered a proximity sensor and got turned into a bloody fog. Potosí was a fucking paradise.
The market was a grandiose term for a small field of semipermanent tents. Most of it was real food, pulled from the ground or slaughtered right there in front of you, a dirty, disgusting mess. Once you’ve seen a goat killed and cleaned in front of you, you paid whatever they wanted for the dwindling supply of N-tabs and considered yourself lucky. The smell was suffocating, the air thick with smoke, but the paths were laid out with flat gray stones that made walking easier, and everyone got out of my way as I led Remy toward the center of the field, where a bright white tent fluttered, topped by a splashy red pennant. There were two short, stocky men standing on either side of the open slit in the front of the tent, looking cold and pissed off, which was how I liked my guards. The one on the left nodded at me as we approached, and neither one twitched as we pushed past them into the tent. We were expected.
Morales was on his feet the moment I ducked under the flap, his belly preceding him, his arms thrown open. Two women holding beat-up old shredding rifles stood on either side of the flap, young girls with scars on their faces who didn’t look at me once as I breezed past them.
“You magnificent bastard!” Morales bellowed, grinning. “You did it! You killed them all, you fucking maniac!”
Morales was a big sloppy kind of guy, a guy who was always sweaty, a guy who kept the interior of his fucking tent uncomfortably warm and his shirt undone down to his navel. He wore jewelry, thick ropes of gold and numerous rings. He was flashy and he grinned a lot and laughed a lot and when I’d first met him I’d thought he was a joke.
I put my hands up. “Try to hug me and we won’t be friends anymore.”
He laughed, but shifted his body and contented himself with a soft hand on my shoulder, guiding me to the large wooden table set up in the center of the tent. This was where Morales did all his business, all day, every day. He sat and ate constantly, nibbling and sipping, and a stream of folks came and went. I sat down without being asked and picked a grape from a platter. Morales wanted everyone to know he was rich, that he had juice, so he let food rot on his table every day while half the people around him were starving. Remy moved behind me and positioned himself with false casualness in a spot where he had all four of us in his sight, and leaned against a pole so his coat slid open, revealing his improbable revolver hanging low on his hip.
“Eight men,” Morales said, laughing as he dropped into the other seat. “Eight men stood between me and Potosí, and now they are all dead. Garces last night. You are a genius, Mr. Cates. You have made me master of Potosí.”
I swallowed the grape and decided against telling Morales what I thought being master of a lump of mud with no electricity or sewage was worth. “You owe me five hundred thousand yen,” I said. “Paper notes, as we agreed.” Since the cops were holding together something that resembled the System, yen remained the only currency worth anything at all. And paper was the only way to carry it around these days; even if banks still existed somewhere you couldn’t touch the servers anymore, at least not in fucking Potosí, which must mean “nowhere” in Spanish.
Morales folded his hands across his belly, and with a sinking feeling I realized the fat bastard wasn’t planning on paying me. “Mr. Cates, you have made me a man worth having in your debt,” he said cheerfully. “What would you say to continuing our partnership? I am offering you a post as my security chief. Very high on the ladder.”
I sighed, picturing the tent in my mind while I kept my eyes on Morales’s mesmerizing chest hair. “I would say you owe me five hundred thousand yen.” I didn’t tell him that the thought of staying in Potosí one more minute was about as appealing as shooting off my own foot, or that the fact that he’d had the wisdom to hire me instead of some drunk from the local ar
ena didn’t make him the genius he thought he was. I at least showed up with my own gun.
Morales lost his smile. Grunting, he sat forward. “Mr. Cates, I have made you a very good offer.” He put the smile back, like flicking a hidden switch in his mouth. “These are hard times! Unsettled times. Here you would have the best of everything: a nice house, servants, women—or whatever it is you enjoy.” He leered, and I resisted the urge to jump forward and smack him. Whatever you enjoy in-fucking-deed.
Morales liked keeping things polite, so I made an effort and smiled back at him. “All I need,” I said slowly, “is five hundred thousand yn.”
We stared at each other with our frozen smiles for a moment, and then Morales leaned back and spread his hands, closing his eyes. “I am afraid, Mr. Cates, that cash flow difficulties prevent me from paying you at this moment. However, I do not intend to, as you might say in your charming New York vernacular, rip you—”
I launched myself out of my chair and onto him. Behind me, I knew Remy already had his revolver out and aimed at the two guards—my only worry with Remy was whether he was going to kill everyone he met without a thought, not whether he was capable. The kid had learned all about death before I even got him back.
We landed on the dirt floor of the tent, my legs straddling Morales’s swollen belly and pinning his arms. I clamped one hand over his mouth and pinched his nose with the other, making his eyes instantly bug out as he tried to roll me off.
