by Ren Warom
“Well, well, look who blew back in on the west wind,” he says, flicking the long black tail of a deathhawk out of eyes alive with malice.
“I’ll blow right through your fucking torso if you don’t let me in,” she says, smiling pleasantly. “Would you like your name to become a descriptive noun?”
He steps back, malice dulling to fear, and she thinks, You should never have thrown me out. I might not have had to be this. I might have had a chance. She pushes past into the club, already scanning for the man she needs.
Old Saint Jimmy.
Spies him in his usual place, clinging to the bar like some detritus-feeding arthropod, surrounded by his gaggle of GarGoil girls. Much like birds, GarGoils migrate every September, replaced by girls in their last year of Tech or Cad. It still stuns Amiga how many girls battle to revolve in Saint Jimmy’s orbit for a year, screaming out tracks written so long ago, and repeated in so many different incarnations, they’ve become parodies of themselves.
“Saint Jim,” she calls out, offering him the benefit of all her teeth in a wide, half-angry grin.
There’s history between her and Saint Jimmy, none of it entirely pleasant. He tried to rope her into being a GarGoil back in the day. She couldn’t sing for shit, but she played a mean guitar. He tried to grease her up with that oil slick pouring off his tongue like a deep-sea spill, but Amiga was not interested. To her the whole GarGoils thing is slightly ghoulish, though she digs the music. He took her rejection personally, leading to some serious nastiness until graduation when Amiga was glad to be free of the ever-loving stench of the man. Which is why she’s not so fucking chuffed to be back in it.
She shouts at Jimmy, who’s not paying attention.
“Oi, talking here. Do me the courtesy of listening, or I’ll rip your ears off.”
He makes a big show of just having seen her, making him look like a demented ostrich.
“Well screw me! If it ain’t my Amiga, all grown up!” Pogoing off the bar, he comes swaggering over and envelops her in a stinking hug, eau de BO and alcohol.
Amiga levers him away, just like scraping barnacles with a knife.
“You hate me, Jim.”
He lights up a smoke.
“There is that. You’d ’ave been a top-class Ratchet Anne. And look atchoo. Fackin’ Fail now. Coulda had a glimpse o’ the high life, my lovely. Shouldn’ ’ave been so darn resistant. Unshackle the chastity belt, an’ all that.”
“Do I have to maim you? I presume you’ve heard whispers about what I do for a living?”
Jim sniffs. Disgusted.
“I ’eard. No, you don’ havta maim me. Whaddo ya wan’?”
“You recall Maggie Joust, yes? She was Peroxa Bland. The original. I need to find her. Does she still hang DethRok? Where would I look? Is she here? The Batcave? Boris Karloff? BodyHorror?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, love,” he says, raising hands like she’s storming his barricades. “Thas’ a lil more’n one question, innit. Can’t ’spect a fellah to jus toss it all out there without a lil incentive.”
He gives her a meaningful glance. It makes him look about seventeen times seedier, like the ancient, slick-haired weasel he is. Ugh. Amiga hangs on to her instinct to carve his face off by the merest wisp. Same as all things, there are ways of doing this. Good ways and bad. Amiga hasn’t time for Cockney fun, she wants a name and location, that’s it. When she steps into his space, she devours it. Shrinks him to an insignificant wrinkle of skin on a bollock by her mere presence.
“Incentive? Really? Perhaps you forgot my job already? Perhaps you forgot the intense pleasure I would derive from tearing out your organs through your fuckin’ anus?”
Having been busy sucking on his smoke in what he thought was a suggestive manner, Jim chokes on a lungful.
“Jeez. Jeez. Jeez fuck’n shit. Awite, awite,” he splutters as he comes up for air. “Maggie Joust. Maggie fuckin’ Joust. ’Angs at the BatCave far as I know. At least thas the place ta start.” He eyes her up with red-veined peepers watering profusely, still sparky despite his obvious lack of advantage. “You got proper fuckin’ nasty, love. I admire that. Can’ say I don’. Take it easy, awite.”
He smooths back his hair with both hands and backs away to the bar, eyeballing her as he goes. Amiga allows it for one reason only: they both know who’d die if she stepped up to the challenge.
Anxious not to spend too long in this awful get-up tonight, she leaves the club the way she came in, sneering at ScarCrow as she goes. If she never sees this place again it won’t be a hardship. Parts of her heart she’d forgotten about are aching. There’s that longing she thought she was rid of, to start afresh, to try again. The one she had for weeks after she Failed. Lost inside and out. Lost and yearning to be found.
She’d sat in her micro apartment staring at the walls for the majority of every twenty-four hours in those weeks, hurting from head to toe, but mostly in the heart, and wondering why it’s such a fucking crime to have your own mind. She found no answers. But by the end of those weeks she knew the cracks in that wall as intimately as the lines in her palm. They told her future. What was waiting if she didn’t get off her arse and hustle. So hustle she did. Turns out hustling’s dangerous. Turns out, so is she.
BatCave, as the crow flies, is a couple hundred metres from Bauhaus, or Boris Karloff, or BodyHorror, the quartet of DethRok clubs collectively known as the B-Movies. BatCave was never a regular haunt of hers. She was a Bauhaus devotee, through and through. Of the various clans of DethRokers from the Cads, Techs and office blocks, some congregate in particular establishments, whilst others roam. All depends on your flavour of DethRok.
Her lack of roaming means the doorman at the BatCave, some miserable-looking dude in a full-length duster and sad clown make-up doesn’t know her from Eve, and she gets in via eyeballs halfway up her thighs. If she weren’t in a hurry, she’d do him a favour and remove them permanently. Thanks to the name of this place, she’s expecting bats, or at least something vaguely vampiric and possibly verging on the Gothic. The BatCave is nothing like.
Sleek and sophisticated, it gleams, muted lights casting soft focus on delicately ruined neo-Romantic splendour and enough backcombed black hair to fill a sinkhole. Amiga heads to the bar. Start where the drink is, and therefore the loosest pierced tongues, and work back toward the door. It takes her over two hours of teasing answers and buying a ridiculous array of pastel cocktails with melodramatic names before she stops hitting tats and strikes information.
According to a slender whip of a fop in ripped pants and braces, who goes by the name of Marquis De Hard and drinks some sort of foul-smelling blood-hued synthetic absinthe, Maggie Joust stopped coming to the BatCave over three months ago. These days she hangs at Mollie’s, a fancy new Burlesque joint opened by her girlfriend, the eponymous Mollie. Relieved to be able to take her leave—the soft focus is giving her the grandmother of all headaches—Amiga gets directions, steals his drink for curiosity’s sake, and skedaddles.
She throws the beverage away halfway to Mollie’s. It tastes like violets and sadness. Why the fuck do DethRokers gotta court misery all the goddamn time?
“Life’s a blast, don’t they know?” she mutters, pulling the tatty edges of a barely-there leather jacket across her chest.
It’s early morning, the deep profound black of those nothing hours before dawn, and the Gung is chilly. Knife-like winds arise from the vast, surrounding ocean and hunt the streets for flesh to ripple with goosebumps, mostly hers tonight. Very few other souls about. When the DethRokers leave the clubs, they’ll go in murders. Safety in squawking numbers. She stops for a moment in the light of a biome tree, revelling in the emptiness. Tonight, at this moment, there’s only her and the city. If she could keep it this way…
“There’d be nothing, you daft bitch. Make yourself an island. Go ahead. Think the ocean will keep you company? It doesn’t even know you exist.”
She walks on, shivering, a combination of existential unease a
nd barely-there skirt. She finds Mollie’s, bright and raucous, exactly where the skinny fop said it would be, in Fountain Square. Named for its rebellious lack of fountains.
Mollie’s is a pile of candy dropped on grey concrete, a dolly mixture of gaudy pink lights and jaunty music, lifting her spirits, although she imagined them all but bolted to the floor. She hums as she sails past a tag-team of temptresses in tight dresses and Moll make-up at the door who throw smiles like pick-up lines. She can feel their eyes on her arse all the way to the bar, but resents it less than the duster-wearing clown at the BatCave. It feels less invasive, more genuinely admiring.
“That’s right, girls,” she says to herself, smiling. “All my own work…”
“You must be a hard worker.”
The voice is low, sultry, but with a tightly wound undercurrent of suspicion, which the speaker seems desperate to hide. Amiga turns to find a tall, voluptuous woman in the most extraordinary orange-striped pantaloon and corset set, peering at her through a be-ribboned monocle that is most definitely not just a monocle.
“This a gay club?” Amiga asks curiously, ignoring the woman’s obvious mistrust.
The woman lowers her monocle and taps it on the creamy back of a slender wrist. Amiga immediately thinks, It’s not working.
“Sadly not,” comes the reply, sounding, if anything, even more suspicious than before. The woman is trying to suss Amiga out. Look into her. She’s no Club Hostess or mere scene pro—she has history. Amiga can’t tell if she’s Maggie Joust or not. In the vids she obsessively watched back then Peroxa Bland was a skinny pre-grad with a skinhead and a taste for tramp-chic. If it is her, she’s changed one hell of a lot. “If I had my way, then maybe… But this isn’t my place.”
“So you’re not Mollie.”
“Bingo.” The word is bitten out.
“Do you know her?”
“Intimately.”
“Would that make you Maggie Joust?”
The hardening of the eyes tells Amiga yes, and she squashes the fluttery surge of fan-girliness. Maggie’s aura of suspicion has warped to wariness, no, beyond that. There’s fear there, and anger too, deep and sharp, like the gulp of air before the fight.
“Who wants to know?”
Amiga’s instincts are razorblades. They have to be. Right now they’re telling her this is not the time to lie. Whatever’s going on with Maggie Joust, what she thinks she’s seeing in Amiga is making it one hell of a lot worse. She gives Maggie the benefit of her most open and serious face.
“Amiga. My name’s Amiga. And I’m looking for Maggie Joust because I need to find a friend of hers. It’s important. Melodramatically DethRok as it might sound, a life is infact at stake.”
The monocle rises again to frame a kohl-laden eye with a gleaming green iris, bright as a gemstone. Amiga reckons the monocle is a data-scan, a good one by the looks. Top notch. So she lowers her firewalls and allows it in to digitally fillet her, wondering why it couldn’t before. Maybe it’s not rigged for the sorts of firewalls she uses, but although high spec they’re fairly common. Amiga’s no Tech—she just buys the best. Best is no good with scans like that though. Funny goings on here. Real funny.
The monocle drops, swinging jauntily on its ribbon. The woman offers a small smile. Amiga sees bewilderment in it. And curiosity. And the real clicker… relief. What’s all that about then?
“Okay. I’m Maggie. Who is it you need to find?”
“Agen-Z.”
Maggie flinches, so subtly that anyone not skilled in reading body language would miss it, or misinterpret what they saw as no more than a twitch. She knows where Agen-Z is, that much is obvious, but Amiga doesn’t hold her breath. There’s something deep going on here. She’s crashed quite the paranoia party.
“Look,” she says, cutting her losses before they become terminal. “My friend’s a Patient Zero. And he’s ill. Verge of death shit from the look. She’ll know what’s wrong and how to help him, if he can be helped. I presume you saw he’s J-Hack? He’s no danger to you. I’m not.”
Maggie’s unmoved. “There are problems around helping you that you don’t fully appreciate.”
Amiga tries again, though she’s pretty sure she’s on a hiding to nothing but EVaC’s RIP.
“I see that. So maybe an exchange of help? We’re good for it. The crew I’m involved with, the Hornets, we’ve been doing work for Fellows…”
She trails off as the temperature changes, cold to hot in a flat second. Maggie was stone, now she’s engaged. Snared. Involved. Grabbing Amiga’s arm, Maggie ferries her through the throngs of sartorial elite to a small, red door at the back of the club. She waves her hand as they approach and the subliminal click of the door unlocking is like an itch in Amiga’s drive, unreachable and aggravating. Hefty security here. More than required to be sure. Yeah, Maggie and Mollie are in trouble all right.
Maggie shoves Amiga through and follows her, closing the door behind them. Then rounds on her.
“You’re working for Fellows?”
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible,” Maggie snaps. “You can’t be.”
Amiga’s amused. “Why? Fellows is signal dark and all, but it doesn’t mean he’s not working with anyone.”
“Fellows is dead.”
This is not what Amiga was expecting to hear.
“You what now?”
“He went signal dead months ago. Drive dark, you understand?” Maggie grabs Amiga’s arm. “What exactly is it that you’re doing for Fellows?”
Still a little nonplussed, Amiga replies unsteadily, “We caught a sec-drone, and I stole something from my boss, Twist Calhoun. A package. All I know is that the package went on our drone and several others to a specific location, to ‘Volk’, whoever the hell that is.”
Maggie falls back against the wall.
“Holy hell, he’s sent for Volk,” she breathes out. “He’s alive. And you have means of contact, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Then you just got lucky,” Maggie says.
Oh now. Amiga’s radar goes into overdrive. This is interesting. This is most interesting.
“You need to contact Fellows?”
“Not Fellows. Like I said, he’s dead.”
“So who is it we’re working for?”
“Breaker.”
Fucking hell. Amiga’s face goes numb. Breaker. Shit. What in hell have the Hornets gotten themselves involved in?
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. He’s been missing, presumed dead. We couldn’t find his signal or safely travel to old safe houses to look deeper. Now I find he’s not just alive, he’s still active, still fighting. You have no idea…” Struggling with emotion, Maggie presses a hand against her chest, catches her breath. “Come with me,” she tells Amiga.
Maggie leads her to two steel doors. They slide open to reveal an elevator. And all the buttons go down. Maggie enters as if it’s nothing at all, no big deal. Refusing to follow, Amiga stares open mouthed.
“You dug into the earth?” she says incredulously. “Are you crazy?”
Maggie pulls Amiga into the lift, ignoring her protests, and presses the basement button. The doors shut soundlessly, trapping them in a tiny, vulnerable box heading deep into the ground. Amiga stands dead centre, legs locked, knees trembling. She can’t breathe, there are fragile walls closing in around her, and beyond them… all of the earth, ready to crack apart and fold in on her. When it comes to the breaking, the official story is that the earth’s crust became unstable, suffered massive quakes, and broke into pieces.
Logically Amiga knows this isn’t entirely true. Rumours of Corp involvement sprung up centuries ago—a much more logical explanation of the devastation of broken continents spiking the ocean than any natural disaster. If the earth broke itself so completely, so catastrophically, why is the Gung still stable? Why the land ships? How did they know when to build hubs? How they’d have enough time? It makes no sense. Her mind knows this, but he
r body’s thrown logic to the wind. Run headlong into panic.
“Breathe, girl,” Maggie says softly, without looking round at her. “You’re J-Hack, you know what’s truth and what isn’t. This is truth. It is safe.”
“I know,” Amiga mutters through teeth clenched so hard her jaw is shaking. “I just don’t want to be down here. If this thing triggers an earthquake, I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Maggie chuckles. “You have no idea how amusing that is,” she says.
Amiga has no response, all she can think of are those jagged continental teeth, and how it was they were hidden before the earth was broken. How the earth might reasonably be considered to be angry. Hungry.
The lift stops with a jolt, shaking them both so hard they struggle to remain on their feet. Amiga shrieks, flailing her arms out to the walls, and then screams as it drops suddenly, more swiftly than before, the whir of whatever machinery drives it letting out an unending high-pitched whine. Amiga finds herself humming along with it, at the end of her control, about ready to flip into major hysterics. Maggie lays a hand on her back, between the shoulder blades.
“Keep breathing, hon. We’re not done yet. You want to see Agen-Z, you come this way. No other way to come. This goes deep, real deep. It’s old but secure.”
Desperately sucking air, Amiga chokes out an incredulous laugh, says, “You gotta be shittin’ me.”
“Not even. C’mon, take my arm. You wait. You’re going to feel a bit weird about all this huffing and puffing in a moment. Then you’re probably going to get angry. Hold on to that. Remember it.”
The next time the lift stops, the transition is so smooth Amiga only knows it by the cessation of the mechanical shrieking. The doors slide open onto darkness.
“Out you go,” says Maggie.
The first step out raises lights. They flicker into life throughout a gigantic, circular chamber. Skinned in metal, it glints with a complex maze of circuitry like an optical illusion, the eye pulled from junction to junction, dizzying. Rising from the floor to the roof of the chamber is a huge flared central tower bristling with Tech only Deuce would be able to name. She closes her eyes. Maggie’s right. She’s angry.
