by Ren Warom
“You stole my goggles?”
“Borrowed.”
He sighs. “Right. Borrowed.”
“Figured you could use them back now.”
He shakes his head in disbelief, turning back to his post. Has he run out of patience with her at last? She’s been coasting on the certainty it’ll never happen when he’s only human, and she’s pushed him further than anyone she knows. Even now, long after dumping him, when he’s in a new relationship he should be able to focus on, she’s pushed and prodded at his limits. Fuck. He must hate her.
Deep down, she thought she wanted that. Thought it would be easier. It’s not. Heart in her throat, Amiga concentrates on firing, but with each hit her throat tightens, threatening tears, the very last thing she needs.
Taking heavy fire, they move onto a main district freeway. They’re more open here, more vulnerable to attack from side roads and junctions. Amiga tries to keep eyes both behind and ahead, but it’s impossible, and seemingly out of nowhere, tyres shrieking, dozens of new vehicles slam into them.
Two of the Hornet’s trucks careen out of control, falling behind and crashing through the trail of cars at their rear. Explosions like chain reactions follow in their wake. At the wheel, Raid, a Hornet Amiga barely knows, fights to keep their truck under control and stop it from running into the limo, where Ravi’s still trying to save Shock.
With nothing to hold onto, KJ is thrown away from his console at the second impact. He hits the side of the truck and falls into Vivid’s lap, out cold. The only other truck with EMP capability is now a fireball and the drones, realizing the threat is gone, swoop in and begin peppering them with laser fire from above.
Hanging on to the slot next to hers for stability, Amiga fires back at them, clinical shots aimed straight at their ocular processes. Bullets won’t damage the reinforced carapaces much but her crossbow bolts slam right through minute eye-screens, tearing out huge chunks of vital hardware as they exit. She takes out eight drones in swift succession and, as they spiral out of control, the rest fall back. Smart tech indeed. Or else the Queens have called them off.
Take that, you bitches, she thinks, hoping they hear it somehow.
Their earlier pursuers have fallen back too, though they’re still firing intermittently. Mostly they’re waiting. What do they know that she doesn’t? Amiga runs a swift visual check on the remaining Hornet trucks. They’re riddled with bullet scars and dents from impacts, and five out of seven bear long melted runnels from drone laser fire. At least two of them are running on tyres trying to self-heal significant hits, and the newcomers are herding in close, keeping the Hornet formation tight.
She can’t see who these newcomers are, all of their trucks are as dark as these, with blackened glass, and no one’s firing. That worries her, especially with the others hanging back. Unbidden, the thought occurs that the Hornets had to carry EVaC out of Jong-Phu. Where is he now? Is he in one of those fireballs behind them? There are members of the Hornets she’s never met, and losing them before she’s had the chance is bad enough. Losing him though…
“Tell me EVaC isn’t in the middle of this,” she shouts over at Deuce, her heart actually aching.
“Of course he’s fucking not. We sent him in another direction, with some of the n00bs. He’s almost at Shin, almost safe. How the fuck we gonna get there?”
Helpless, she shakes her head.
“Don’t know. Any word from Ravi on Shock?”
“None. Reckon he’s too busy for updates.”
“Sorry about this,” she blurts out. “It’s my fault. Should’ve kept you all out of it.”
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” he snaps. “You’re family, Amiga. If I found out you got yourself into this kind of shit and didn’t ask for our help, I’d come kill you my fucking self.”
“You could try,” her smart mouth whips out before she can catch it, and he smiles. Properly.
Jeez but it’s good to see him smile like that so soon after she thought she’d lost the right. Funny how happy his death threat made her as well. Probably down to the fact he doesn’t mean a word of it. These Hornets of hers are tough as hell, but they’re not killers. They’re the only people she knows who wouldn’t kill her without blinking. There’s safety in that. A safety she thought she didn’t want, because it felt too raw, too personal, too intimate. She was kidding herself. She not only wants it, she needs it. Knew it as soon as she thought she’d lost them.
The end of the freeway looms, the road narrowing to two lanes. Metal screams as the surrounding echelon slams inward in concert, and they go into a sideways skid, belching black smoke as they burn rubber on the road. Vivid, busy supporting the unconscious KJ loses hold of her firing slot and Amiga grabs for her jacket before she’s thrown against the other side of the truck.
Across from her, Deuce skids on his arse, legs akimbo, into the front seats, wrapping his arms around the back of the passenger seat as Raid and the other drivers swerve madly to steer clear of the limo. This is what was planned, crash the Hornets, single out the limo.
Get the hell out of here! Amiga screams at Puss as the trucks slide on, colliding with each other to keep out of the limo’s way.
“Raid!” she yells, her right hand aching as she hangs on to the nearest slot, pulled by the doubled weight of Vivid and KJ. “Don’t let any of those fuckers past!”
“Done,” he shouts back not even thinking to argue. All the Hornets know what’s at stake here, but their unthinking commitment to help some guy they’ve never met and probably only heard bad things about still impresses her. He starts to turn the wheel. Yells wildly instead, “Brace!”
Amiga cranes to see the nearest Hornet truck bearing down on them at speed, one of the enemy trucks practically welded to its rear. The crash deafens, metal against metal, metal scraping along tarmac. Sparks shoot upward like fireworks, and the side door wrenches away with a hideous screech of torn hinges, dragged under the truck as it skids.
Another truck slams in on that side, flipping them from one extreme to another. Jolted by the impact, Deuce loses his grip on the seats and slides across the floor of the truck. Both hands occupied and utterly helpless to prevent it, Amiga watches him flip out onto the road through billowing smoke as the trucks slam together and come to a screeching halt.
A scream tears out of her, raking her throat, “Deuce!”
Making sure Vivid is secure; Amiga struggles upward out of the wreckage. Aching all over from the impact, and clumsy with only the one leg working properly, she turns to help Vivid with KJ, but Raid shoves her away.
“Go! I’ve got this.”
She nods thanks and scrambles awkwardly back up on to the truck, stuck on its side in a tangle of others. Scanning desperately for Deuce through the smoke, she spots him lying off to the side of the road. There’s blood, a small pool of it, and his arm’s twisted behind him at an unnatural angle.
“No.”
Dropping to the road, Amiga limps toward him, her entire body numb, remote. All she can see is Deuce, but she can’t focus on him properly. Can’t see him. Is he breathing? Why isn’t he breathing? Please let him be breathing. She tries to move faster, her injured leg leaden, alight with pain. Swearing, she drags it through every step, determined to reach him.
Remotely, she registers the sound of a door opening, the click of heels on tarmac, and someone steps into view, one arm out, pointed at Deuce. She focuses on the hand, bewildered. There’s a gun. There’s a gun pointed at Deuce. Alarm floods her system. Rage. She can’t get to Deuce in time, but she can kill the fucker threatening him.
“Amiga.”
Focused on getting to the gun, she stumbles as the voice registers, and stops.
“Twist?”
She looks up and it’s him. Standing there with a gun pointed at Deuce. His gaze is pitiless. Disappointed.
“Would it really be this easy to punish you? Hmmm? Have you gone soft, Amiga, as well as stupid?”
“Try me,” she snarls.
He looks her over, those cold eyes of his calculating, missing nothing.
“Forgotten something?”
“Don’t need a weapon to kill you.”
“You’d have to get to me first. Let’s see how fast you can run.”
He fires the gun.
Amiga yells, incoherent, and lurches for her boss, knowing that, if Deuce was alive, Twist’s just changed that for the worst. She cannot bear it. Doesn’t want to look at Deuce, literally could not stand to see him lying there, his head blown apart, but she can’t stop herself, and she looks anyway. That’s when she knows that Twist is being especially cruel. The first bullet struck the lower leg, midway along the calf. Twist laughs softly.
“Come on then, Amiga, run,” he says.
Sobbing, Amiga tries to run as he fires again, hitting the knee. She’s screaming as the third shot fires, impacting Deuce’s thigh. That’s when all hell breaks loose. The roar of heavy engines fills the air and several large trucks burst through Twist’s cavalcade, punching a hole in his circle of vans. Behind them follow what seems like a hundred cater-bikes, whipping through and spewing bullets at Twist’s troops.
From the look of their clothes, their weather-beaten faces, these newcomers to the fray are land-ship folk, far from the ocean. One of the truck drivers, an ugly bald man, aims at Twist, punching the gun from his hand with precise shots that tear off two fingers and a chunk of palm. Amiga dives, hoping to take her ex-boss off-guard, but he’s already running back to his truck, calling a retreat, and she full-lengths the tarmac, feeling it grind into every inch of her.
Sprawled out like a spider, squashed and bleeding, Amiga tries to get up. Her leg refuses to cooperate. She yells fury at it and crawls toward Deuce instead. His leg is a wreck, there’s so much blood. And she still can’t tell if he’s breathing. Can hardly breathe herself as she reaches him and fumbles for his pulse with desperate fingers.
There’s a moment in which everything stops. The background falls away. Sound roars into the distance, swallowed by silence. Breath halts, suspended as the heart in its sling of muscle, paused and awaiting the responding thud of another heart. That pulse of life. The reassurance required to continue beating.
Her fingers are cold against his neck, numb. She’s caught in the moment for what feels like a lifetime, waiting, just waiting, and hoping to feel something, anything. Fearing there’s nothing to feel, that his heart is done with beating, and hers will be too.
The first flutter is indifferent. Almost not a pulse at all. The second the same. But they’re there, one faint flutter after another and the world roars back in. She’s surrounded by strangers, pulling her away. She screams, lashes out, but there’s Vivid, shouting in her face, the sound of the words delayed, like thunder after lightning.
“They’re here to help! They’re helping! Let them help him!”
Slipping IRL and Breathing Problems
Consciousness calls close by, loud and insistent as the klaxon of a vehicle reversing, and behind it, like fifty tons of truck behind a klaxon, waits pain. He’s not afraid of pain. Not usually. But this pain is special, unavoidably personal. Not remotely physical. He’s not sure he’s strong enough to face it unmedicated. He’s not had to since he was nine years old, bar a few slim-in-the-pocket moments he’d rather forget, and some recent times he’s had carved into his skin. Now he’s been stranded in his head without means to distance himself, stripped of the ability to use his coping mechanisms.
Some bastard’s gone and cleaned his system out, left it scrubbed brand new, de-scaled, everything shining in hundred megawatt beams, clean enough to see your face in. Some people don’t fucking want to see their own face. Some people dirty the mirror on purpose. Or smash it to pieces. That’s a personal choice, and no one but the person involved has the right to gainsay it. There are, however, substances called “cold cures”, used to do that very thing. Most often without permission.
Cold cures are used to purify WAMOS who don’t deal with addiction as the system expects them to. They travel through the body hoovering up whatever sordid crap the addict’s drugs of choice lay down amongst the wetware to ensure continued reliance upon them. Once they’re done, cold cures have eliminated every single impulse left behind, including the mental impulse.
What makes the cold cure so effective is what it does to that impulse. Ring-fencing it. Locking it away. Reducing it to a shout echoing in a box, going nowhere. That’s all Shock’s addiction is now, and he doesn’t want to wake up. He’s afraid of the pain.
Fear or no, his choices have dwindled to one, and he gradually rises through levels of consciousness, surrounded by the din of memories he’s silenced too long, all fighting for dominance. The result is overload. White noise so loud it becomes deafening, cancelling itself out, leaving only agony behind, and Shock surfaces fast, like breaking out of deep water, his ears ringing, lungs crying for air.
Finds himself laid out in the front seat of the limo, stuck inside a body riddled with pain from the damage done by Pill, a head full of bad memories all determined to be heard at once, and perhaps worst of all, the awful weight of Emblem, ever growing. Using one against the other, Shock breathes in the scream of amputated fingers and cracked bone, the cringe of cut flesh and hollowed gums, the moan of muscles bruised all the way to the bone; breathes out everything else. It won’t stay suppressed for long though, and the thought terrifies him.
Puss slithers into his lap, sliding her tentacles around his neck and, once again, her presence eases the clamour of his mind. He’s still not at ease with the fact of her, despite their powerful connection, always present and growing stronger, but he’s glad she’s here. Glad of Shark, too, floating behind the glass screen, the wall of his furious hunger something to lean against. They make him feel like he could be safe, sane. Whole. Funny that he had to be split into three to feel like he’s capable of coming together.
A face looms into view. Pimp-styled black hair flopping majestically over energetic brown eyes. Can’t be more than twenty-two this guy, but looks like a character from the Mahabharata, complete with giant handlebar moustache.
“Name’s Ravi,” he says in a musical voice that doesn’t come close to matching his appearance. “Sawbones to the Hornets. Also put you back together. How do you feel?”
Ah, so this is the bastard with the cold cure.
“Like hell,” Shock rasps through a throat so dry he could grow cacti in it. “Too clean.”
Ravi appears unmoved by his anger.
“Yeah, man. You were one sorry mess. Don’t think there was an organ in your body your little habit hadn’t fucked with. All good now though.” He places a hand on Shock’s shoulder, enough pressure to mean business. “Gonna have to deal with the shit you were avoiding. I have no apology for that. Can’t have an addict hauling Emblem around in his bonce. We need you focused. Cruel to be kind etc. etc.”
“Without the bumps,” Shock says, opting for the same level of honesty, “I’m pretty much fucking useless.”
“Matter of opinion, man, and I don’t share it,” the sawbones says, maintaining that hideous level of cheer. “We’re almost to Shin. Left my friends behind in some serious shit for you y’know.”
Shock immediately feels guilty. Responsible. Fuck, but that’s the worst feeling ever. Why didn’t anyone ever tell him?
“Sorry.”
Ravi nods. “Just do me a favour and stay still. You’re nowhere near good to go physically. I ran out of C-Gen early on. Ended up gluing most of you back together. Have no idea how long it’ll hold if you get feisty and, frankly, you haven’t enough blood left to safely lose any more.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. You can thank your golden friends here for keeping you with us long enough for me to stick you back together. That fucking Shark, though, tried to eat me until Puss told him to back the fuck off.”
“He’s very protective.”
Ravi raises a brow. “That what you call it? You know, most people d
eal with their anger instead of making seventeen-foot-long killing machines.”
Shock wants to laugh but it hurts too much, so he smiles instead. Thinks about those friends Ravi left behind, how it is Ravi came to be in the limo with him instead of Amiga. He wonders if Amiga counts as a friend to this guy. Cleaners don’t have friends. They’re like him. Solitary. Unburdened. They have to be. She seemed different though. Less frosty, more like a human being. Odd quirk for a Cleaner. He wonders if it was new. She didn’t seem to know what to do with it. With herself. Only looked certain when she was killing.
“Amiga a friend of yours?”
“Yup.”
“Really?”
“No shit. Amiga’s good people.” Ravi’s checking the side mirrors as he talks, his face tight with concern.
“I’m sure they made it out safe,” Shock offers, not sure why he’s trying to reassure the guy, but needing to anyway.
Ravi nods absently, smiles much the same.
“Yeah. Yeah they probably did.”
Uneasy silence grows between them. Shock doesn’t like it. Unsure of how to break the silence, he looks out of the window, and blinks as it jumps away from him, receding down a black tunnel. Before he can react, his mind leaps after it like it’s base jumping, parachute-less, into an abyss; gung-ho and knife-edged.
He thinks he’s moving forward until he passes what can only be the complex knot of Emblem, this massive byzantine cluster of code enmeshed within him and shifting amongst itself. Growing incrementally with every movement, a tumour out of control. Unchecked. Uncheckable. It makes a noise like the distant roaring of monstrous wheels and then it’s behind him, and he’s squeezed through a too-narrow link and dropped onto a sheer white floor, lit from below and warm against his skin.
Dazed, and beyond confusion into disorientation, he peers up through the tangles of his hair. It’s gold. Blinking, he stares down at his arms, his torso, his knees against the white wood. Gold. All gold. How the hell?
