Escapology

by Ren Warom

Mim Makes a Deal

  “You sleeping, Sez?”

  Back from her Imping vacay as Unity Jo-Charbonneau, Mim closes the door of her apartment and strides through into the bedroom. Beholds Johnny Sez, cuddled up to his pillow, snoring and drooling. Urg. She is not sleeping in that bed until every scrap of linen has been boil-washed. Bodies. So goddamn gross. Why do they leak so much? She lifts a deliberate leg, clad in a sleek, black blader, and kicks him in the head.

  “Wake up.”

  Johnny groans, shoves her away without opening his eyes.

  “Shit, Mim,” he slurs, “you have appallin’ timin’.”

  “For real? I have appalling timing? Wow, you need to wake up.”

  She reaches down and grabs his leg, yanking him half out of bed. He tries to pull back, shake her off. Mim hisses and tugs again, hard, until his arse thumps onto the floor.

  “Ow. Fuckin’ ow, bitch. What, no hello?”

  Mim leans down right to his ear.

  “Who’s been in my house, Sez? Someone’s been in my fucking house who shouldn’t have been. And I’m not talking about you, you freeloading little fucking donkey shit.”

  He rubs his face, still half asleep and obviously on the come down from some serious trippage. He better have used his own money this time or he’s going to find himself homeless. Possibly skinless.

  “What you sayin’?” He blinks up at her stupidly.

  His eyes are bright blue. Almost periwinkle. That’s what she liked about him. Never as blue as the first blue eyes to slaughter her. She had to make them bluer in the end to preserve herself, and that was a mess. Mim hates mess. She hates cleaning it up, getting her hands dirty, and you can’t cleanse the filth of emotional mess. That’s why this time she chose the eyes, and not the boy behind them. She grabs his chin and forces him to look through the archway at the rest of her apartment.

  “See that?” she snaps. “Do you see?”

  “See what? It’s clean. I cleaned.”

  Mim raises a brow, scanning the room with cold, mirrored eyes.

  “That’s a whole other story, slim. But your paltry efforts don’t hide the fact that people were here who shouldn’t have been.” She turns back to him, moves her hand from chin to ear and tweaks until he squeaks. “Who were they?”

  “Fucking hell, Mim.” He yanks his ear out of her pincered fingers. “OW!” He glares at her, all his hurt in those ocean-blues. Good. Hurt she knows. Hurt she can deal with. “Harmonys, okay? It was the Harmonys. And I woulda told you anyway. They want a word.”

  Mim laughs out loud.

  “About time. I’ve been flirting about as hard as is possible without clueing in Twist.”

  “What?”

  “Not very bright this morning, are we? This thing I helped Twist with. Everyone’s interested in it. I want to find out why and I want in, and Twist doesn’t do partnerships. The Harmonys do, if you don’t get on the wrong side of Li.”

  Johnny struggles up from the floor.

  “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Dullard.”

  She strolls off to the kitchen, bladers thumping the floor. She has this thing about cleaning, except when it comes to boots on feet. Therein lies a trade-off. Worry about dirt from boots, or worry about bare feet or worse, sweat-drenched socks, all over the damned floor? Either way she’d get the hideous twitchies about what might be growing in the cracks of her floor, adhering to the soles of her feet, growing, maybe getting into her blood stream and multiplying—so boots it is.

  The compromise balances on one hard clean at the end of a day and various low-level tidies if boots trample more dirt than the mind can handle. That’s how she knew uninvited guests had been in her apartment. Sez vacuumed, sure, but he didn’t vacuum. Their dirt is everywhere.

  Shoving his feet into untied boots because he knows the house rules, Sez traipses after her.

  “You’re gonna fuck Twist over?”

  He’s flabbergasted, jaw hanging and everything. He looks as gormless as when he drools in his sleep and Mim looks away before it puts her off the coffee she’s brewing, or him, which would be worse.

  “Where’s the harm? He’d fuck me over in a heartbeat. Less. Besides, I’m done now, and he did not stipulate silence in my contract. Fine print, Sez, you should read it.”

  Sez grabs a string of twisted blue candy from a jar on Mim’s kitchen shelf. If she took a moment to appreciate the themes in her life, her apartment, she might hate herself, which is why Mim never thinks about it. You act and you move on, or you grind to a halt. Mim has no time for baggage. Not even her own.

  “He’ll have you Cleaned.” Sez takes a cavalier bite of the candy and raises a brow at her. “You’re not invincible. Not invisible like Shock. You won’t escape.”

  Mim snatches the candy and bites a mouthful from the other end.

  “I’ll be working with the Harmonys, idiot. They’ll protect me.”

  “Only as long as you’re useful.”

  “I’m always useful.”

  * * *

  Li is addicted to coconut cake, which is why the Harmonys hold court at one of Shimli’s tiny, secret coffee houses. Apart from them, the place is deserted. Mrs Tan, the coffeehouse proprietor, doesn’t seem to care. With her prices, why would she? As Mim strolls in Li waves her cake enthusiastically, spilling crumbs everywhere.

  “There you are! Look, Ho, she came.”

  Ho nods, eyes on his long fingers, busy constructing a purple psy. From the sheer, painstaking concentration on his face, he could be attempting to construct an origami lotus small enough to fit on the head of a pin.

  “I see,” he murmurs.

  Li switches so fast it gives Mim psychological whiplash, shooting Ho a glance that could strip the skin from an elephant and burn it.

  “You don’t. You don’t see. You’re not even looking. Brat.”

  She switches again. Lightning fast. Beams at Mim.

  “Sit. Have cake.”

  “Coffee?” shouts Mrs Tan from behind the prow of her gargantuan service desk, magnificent walnut with marquetry depicting a war between dragons over a glowing ball of wisdom. The whole cafe is decorated the same. It gives Mim migraines.

  “Please,” Mim yells back. “Triple shots. And don’t give me dregs this time, old woman. Last time I was picking grounds out of my teeth for hours.”

  Mrs Tan throws back her head laughing as she disappears into the kitchen, and Li shakes her head, sharing a conspiratorial glance with Mim.

  “That woman,” she says. “Wicked. Wants me to whack Yang for her. In good time I might, if I’m feeling playful. Isn’t life grand?”

  “If you say so,” says Mim, taking a forkful of the cake Li generously served her and groaning as she eats. “Dear heaven, that’s perfect.”

  “Usefulness,” Li responds, running as ever completely off piste. “If you can be useful, you can get away with a great deal. But if you can be indispensable, oh then my dearest Mim, you can get away with anything.”

  “Which am I?”

  Li considers her for a moment, lips pursed.

  “Verging on useful, if you’ve come here for the reasons I’m assuming.”

  “This business with Twist,” Mim replies, thanking Mrs Tan as she plunks a cup of thick, black coffee at her elbow and another beside Li’s plate, taking her empty cup away. “I’ve been watching his almost profligate use of Haunts and wondering what on earth he’s been using them for. Then he asks me to contact my Shocking boy for him, get him to help me on a job so Twist can tag him. Twist obviously wants him for whatever these other Haunts have failed to do, but he sounds confident, which makes me think Shock is his eureka.”

  “Correct. What pains Ho and I so very much is that Twist isn’t going to share, and we don’t like children who won’t share their toys.”

  “And what toy would that be?”

  Li drops a cube of sugar in her coffee. Considers the ripples for a long moment, smiling.

 
“The prize in Twist’s Haunt tombola, my dearest little Mimic,” she says eventually, “is Emblem.”

  Sipping slowly at her coffee, Mim searches for signs of amusement in Li’s face, or Ho’s. Trouble is, both are psychopathic, thus have no facility for real emotion. Expressions on those stone-like countenances appear worse than disingenuous, they inspire real horror: Oh look the spider is trying to smile. Mim licks her lips, worried. How does one anticipate a test when one is sat opposite what are, despite all that human meatiness and blood, automata?

  Disadvantage doesn’t suit Mim, it makes her itchy. If this is not a joke, then she’s into something huge. This could be it, her break into the big time. Her ticket out of Shimli. Mim wants everything, including a penthouse in the Heights, the most exclusive address in Foon Gung. Nothing less will do. She never understood Shock settling for Sendai. The biggest names, the very wealthiest, the WAMOS elite, they don’t do the Garden District. It’s not expensive enough.

  “The Emblem?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But Emblem’s in Core. Core’s unbreachable.”

  “It would seem Twist has found a way.”

  “Why now?”

  That’s the jackpot question for Mim. Emblem’s been a holy grail for as long as it’s been in Core, holding in the Queens, holding Slip and Hive together. Until now no one’s been stupid enough to try to boost it. After all, who the fuck wants to mess with the Queens in their Hive?

  Li looks at Ho, who shrugs.

  “An interesting development,” she says. “After Kamilla finally succumbed to mortality.”

  “Oh?”

  “Josef Lakatos mysteriously hires Breaker, starts working with him and that J-Hack collective of his, the Movement. We were aware of them buzzing around Fulcrum when Kamilla was alive, but she swatted them rather effectively and rightly so. We found it quite striking that Josef did not follow suit.”

  “Seriously? Fulcrum hiring in Fails?” This is deeper shit than Mim supposed. Downright meaty shit. Her teeth are tingling.

  Ho speaks up, his voice dreamy as he lights his blunt. “That’s not the most interesting part.” He takes a long, blissful toke. Coughs. “The most interesting part is that Breaker went missing not long after. AWOL. MIA. Poof.” Ho blows out a huge stream of velvety smoke and Mim watches it, enchanted.

  “Presumed dead?” she asks.

  “Uncertain; though a good deal of the Movement went signal dead at about the same time, and the rest have scarpered. Signal dark all around.”

  “What?” Mim’s lost.

  Li sips her coffee. Smiles. Knowing. Mim shudders. “The underground is hidden in plain sight. We know the movers and shakers, all of them, just as they know us. Transparency is important. The Gung is rather flammable with all of us essentially pressed cheek to jowl as we are. When the Movement suffers a mass loss of personnel and the rest go signal dark, even Agen-Z, who does not do hiding, then anyone with half a brain knows things have become desperately interesting.”

  “What do they know? What’s going on?” Ho slurs out, and then sings off-key, “We want to know.”

  “But before we can do anything, before any of us can do anything,” Li says, her voice soft but filled with enough cold menace to make Mim’s feet twitchy for finding the door. “There’s Twist. Suddenly in the game and gunning for Emblem no less, going through Haunts like no tomorrow as if he’s certain one can actually manage to steal it. We thought at first it was his customary delusions of grandeur, but it quickly became obvious he has information we are not party to.”

  “Frustrating.” Ho, blank faced, spat out like a cherry pit.

  Li pats his hand, without looking at him. Eerie, how synchronized they are.

  “After the loss of Feng Ho,” she continues, “Twist ups his game. And here we arrive back at you and your Shocking boy. We assume Twist’s found a way past Core defences—”

  “Five percent margin of error either way,” Ho interjects through a cloud of smoke.

  “—And is sending Shock into Core to steal Emblem.”

  “Which you want to take from him,” says Mim, hanging on to the thread of conversation for dear life.

  “Bingo. Ten points to that girl,” says Ho, his finger in the air like he’s asking for more coffee. It seems he is, because Mrs Tan comes over with a re-fill. “Twist in control of Fulcrum just doesn’t have the same ring as Li and Ho Harmony in charge of Fulcrum.”

  Secretly, in the very back of her thoughts, where she hopes it can’t be seen even by the gimlet eye of Li, Mim thinks any of them in charge of Fulcrum is a super-bad idea, but hey she’s angling for a life upgrade and as long as it doesn’t affect her, they can have whatever the hell they like.

  “You want me to get to Shock before he delivers.”

  “Catch or kill, we don’t care, we only need his drive,” Ho singsongs. Mim really wishes he wouldn’t; it’s as creepy as one of the mannequins or dolls in those horrendous fucking J-horror movies Sez tries to make her watch.

  Li reaches over and places a finger over his mouth.

  “My brother is a touch enthusiastic. We may actually need your Shocking boy alive. All you need to do is catch him for us.”

  “He’s not going to respond to my IM again. Not now.”

  “He won’t need to. Whatever Twist’s given him to help him get into Core, it’s making him noisy. Twist has him blocked at the moment, but we can crack that. We presume your boy will make a move very soon. Given a margin of prep time, and Twist’s awareness of our interest in that block, we think no less than a day or two. You know him better than anyone. What shops he’d use for a job like this. Which area he might be in. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ll be waiting for when he comes out, and you will catch him. I don’t care how. Bullet. Taser. Boomerang. Just take the boy out when he exits Slip and bring him to us, avoiding Twist’s people, or anyone else who might be after him. Can you do that?”

  Li stares at Mim. It’s like being in the sight line of a hungry anaconda.

  Mim holds Li’s gaze, her mind working so fast it aches. Throwing Shock to the lions is heatless malice, her version of making him live in interesting times as punishment for tangling her so effortlessly around him. For making it impossible to forget how much it hurt to excise him from her life.

  She doesn’t feel bad about giving him to Twist. Twist won’t kill him. He might threaten to, might hurt Shock enough to make him think he’s going to die, but Shock’s too useful to kill. So he won’t. She shies away from other things he might do. That might make her feel guilty, and Mim’s not a fan.

  Li though, she doesn’t care how useful anyone is, despite what she said. Li kills because it makes her happy. And she wants to kill Shock. He outwitted her, no one gets to outwit her and live. Giving him up to Li, therefore, is malice aforethought. It’s signing his death sentence. Can she do it?

  “I can.”

  She’s not sure if she’s lying. But saying it makes it real, whether it’s truth or not. Means she has to do it. So there it is, isn’t it?

  “So you’re in?” Li sips her coffee. Offers inquisitive eyes over the brim.

  Mim experiences a moment of uncertainty.

  “How much?”

  Li sends her a closed IM rather than responding verbally. With extreme caution, after hitting it with every sneaky malware and virus-nuke she has, Mim opens it. The amount is staggering and comes half before and half after the job is done. Her uncertainty vanishes. This is it. Her financial passport, the first step toward the Heights, whether she aces this task or not.

  Fuck you, Shimli, it was shit knowing you.

  “I’m in,” she says.

  Everything’s Eventual

  Head throbbing like a rotten tooth, Shock takes the coastal mono around the slummy, cage-apartment blocks of the Alley, one of which he calls home, and the narrow slick of poorly built ’rises spooning Cash Corner. An equally grim collection of slighter larger, less cage-like
hellholes. He can’t afford those, so he has to bunk in the Alley with the oldsters. Going down in the world. No prizes for what’s on the next rung below this. Six feet under. Or it would be, if the Gung buried its dead.

  Sat in a window seat, Shock watches the gulls wheeling far below, between the cliffs at the edge of the Gung and the equally steep sides of ’scrapers built along the cliffs with no regard for safety or regulations. Their calls sound like screams, like they’re crying for help. He can relate. Everything inside of him is screaming, a whole colony of gulls from pelvis to collarbones, lining his ribcage in messy, shit-shellacked disarray.

  Over the cliffs, even further down, a furious sea slams white-capped shoulders into jagged rock, the waves huge to his eyes even from here, hundreds of feet above the ground. For some reason it puts him in mind of the land ships. He can’t imagine how he’d bear that proximity. Those massive waves smashing too close for comfort, spewing salty spray into his face. Leaving his clothes, his hair, his skin, stiff with salt. Leaving him beleaguered and bedraggled, and probably suicidal. In which case the ocean would constitute endless temptation. He shudders.

  The mono weaves along the coast, in and out of the ’scrapers, blocks and ’risers, for twenty-eight minutes, chased by guillemots and angry pelicans, dogged by gangs of gulls; stalked by the occasional sec-drone. Shock resists the urge to duck down every time. Way to look suspicious. Instead he gazes casually at his boots, allowing his shock of hair to fall over his face. Instant camouflage. He’d like to say that’s why he grows it, but he just prefers it this way.

  Long hair was the only thing he dug about being a girl. The rest of it he’s glad to be rid of, glad too that he managed to get the lot removed before the spectre of periods, tits and hormones rose up to torment him. If he’d ever seen blood in his underwear, or any swelling of his flat chest, he’d have come to a mono platform and taken a dive. There are some things a person can’t live with.

  The mono screeches to a halt, the noise drowning out the shrieks of the gulls in its wake. Shock takes the elevator down. He doesn’t normally, having little trust for these rickety things, all squealing lines and clear, plastic-looking shells giving a 360-degree of the ground too damn far beneath your feet. He’s not afraid of heights—he’s afraid of losing his life to shonky engineering, so he sighs genuine relief when it touches ground.