“You’re the one who told me this job was risky when I signed on.” I said.
Ryan nodded. “That’s right, and I also told you how important it was that we work together to make sure the girl stayed safe once we found her. ‘Her survival. . .’ ”
“ . . is critical.’ ” I finished for him. “Yes, I read what Dunkelzahn said, too. And I handled it. She’s safe.”
“You got lucky this time. Next time you might not be.”
“I can handle myself.” I said hotly. “I’m not Miranda.” Ryan winced at the mention of his friend’s name like I’d struck him. Miranda had been the Assets mage before I came along. She’d died a few years ago during the messy business with the Dragon Heart, the same run that eventually brought me into the group. I knew when I mentioned her I’d made a mistake, but it was too late.
“No.” Ryan said slowly, “you’re not Miranda. She worked and died for this team and didn’t play lone wolf when it suited her. If you can’t handle the way we do things, then maybe you should think about why you’re still here.”
We stared at each other a long moment, and I realized that I’d been almost shouting. Everyone else was standing around, quietly watching us.
“Trust me.” I said to Ryan. “I am thinking about it.”
I turned and walked out of the heart of Crosetti’s would-be ant colony. To their credit, nobody tried to stop me.
2
There was guilt in the brown eyes looking back at me from the rear-view mirror as I spun the Eurocar Westwind out of the overgrown parking lot of the factory complex. I glanced up at my reflection again as I turned onto the main road. What the frag are you looking at? I thought and sighed. It was late and there was no one out on the road. No one to vent at. I really had no idea why I blew up at Ryan like that. It wasn’t his fault. It was me.
I ran one hand absently through my hair, brushing some short, damp strands back from my forehead. It had been a couple years already and I still wasn’t entirely used to it. My hair used to be long, just past my shoulders, a style worn by all the wiz young magicians years ago. I’d cut it short a little less than six months after I joined Assets,
Ryan had taken one look at it and laughed. He said it made me look totally corporate. I glanced at myself in the mirror again and he was right. The only thing that broke the image was the silver hoop through my right ear, and even that was conservative enough for any corporate suit these days. Gods, what the hell had happened to me?
I used to be quite the wild kid, living on the streets, learning magic, becoming a shadowrunner. Now I’m thirty years old, an age when most shadowrunners are either dead or retired. Running the shadows was a young person’s game. I knew deckers who were considered washed-out by the time they were twenty, and wiz-kid mages who’d given it up, or burned out, long before thirty. When you started to slow down, you hoped to hit the big score and get out of the game. Those who didn’t usually ended up dead sooner rather than later.
I was the exception. I’d hit the big time in a way I could never have imagined. I joined Assets, Inc. for one run because they needed a mage and because I had a reputation in the shadows, one I’d built up with years of some of the nastiest runs around. Assets warned that everything I’d seen before was nothing compared to the run they were planning, but that didn’t stop me. They were right. Nothing on the streets of Boston, L.A., or Seattle prepared me to take on elf wizards who claimed to be immortal, a powerful spirit possessing a cyborg capable of taking out a battalion, or saving the world from a threat from the depths of astral space. It was like some kind of Hollywood simsense production, a grand adventure, and I became part of it.
Assets, Inc. was the big time. They were pros in the truest sense of the word, the best shadowrunners I’d ever worked with. They had friends in the highest of places and the backing of an organization with the power of a megacorp. I would have been a fool to turn Ryan down when he offered me a permanent place on the team. It was a chance to achieve all I’d ever wanted: to step out of the shadows and into the light, to become legit without really having to leave the action behind. The best part of the deal was that we were the elite troubleshooters for the Draco Foundation. It was like going from street scum to high-class super-spy.
I lightly caressed the wheel of my sleek new Eurocar, bought and paid for with the nuyen I’d earned working with Assets. Driving it fast like I was slotting a simflick that made me James-fraggin-Bond. It was a long way from where I came from. So what the hell was I so mad about?
The red icon of a bell interrupted my thoughts, flashing in the upper right-hand corner of my vision; an incoming call. That was another change I never expected: the cyberware. When I was young and first working the shadows, I would never in a million years have gotten anything implanted in my body. Street samurai and other muscle relied on the power cyber gave them. It made you stronger, faster, tougher, but it also made you less human. Some of the street-muscle I’d known were more machine than man.
If you were a magician, cyber had other consequences. It was well-known that artificial implants of all kinds inhibited the use of magic, and most of us magical types avoided it like the plague. But the streets are hard, and time takes its toll. A lot of spell-slingers needed more of an edge, so they got a little cyber to keep them on top. When it weakened their magic, softened their edge, they got a little more. Then a little more, and a little more, until they were burnt-out shells stuffed with machines and their magic was gone. I used to look at burnouts like that and feel pity for them. It was a sorry sight.
It’s different with me. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. After working with Assets for a while, I picked up a little cyber. Nothing major. Just enough to make life easier and, honestly, because I thought it was chill. My magical abilities were as strong as ever, stronger even with all the practice and the new things I’d learned in the past three years. Like I said, Assets had friends in high places, and some of them knew magic like I’d never seen before. So, a cyberware virgin at age twenty-eight, I got a datajack. Then some memory chips to store data and download it into my head. A display link to project it onto the retina of my eye and a comm system to keep in touch with the rest of the team silently in my head, and finally some data software to manage it all. It wasn’t much hardware, so it didn’t really affect my magic that much, especially considering how much more magic I’d learned since joining Assets. The implants were just conveniences. They didn’t make me all that different. Or so I told myself.
The red bell icon flashed insistently. I mentally keyed the channel open and heard a faint click as it connected. Suddenly I caught sight of a figure sitting in the passenger seat next to me out of the corner of my eye. I knew it was just an optical illusion, the result of tiny lasers hitting the retinas of my eyes, but at first glance it was very convincing. Jane’s new toys and tricks were always impressive.
She was dressed entirely in tight red leather today, including a wickedly short miniskirt that I’m sure wouldn’t have been possible if her appearance were bound by the laws of physics. I didn’t bother looking over at her. It wasn’t like she could see me anyway. The image was just for show, to give her some physical presence. She must have known I was in the car, otherwise the image would have appeared right in front of me, which would be a real problem on the highway.
“Hello, Jane.” I said.
The image turned to look at me (nice touch, that). Her red lips, matching the color of the leather, moved in perfect sync with the words I heard in my head through the subdermal speakers. “What’s this I hear about you ditching out on the end of the Tyre run, chummer?”
“What’s to tell? It was done. I did my job and now I’m going home, like a good little team member.”
“Talon . . Her tone sounded like a parent who’d just caught a wayward child in a fib.
“Look, Jane, I don’t really want to talk about it, okay?”
“No, it’s not. Something’s been bothering you for a while and I want to
know what it is. I’m worried about you, Tom, and I’m not the only one.”
I almost turned to look at her as I shifted lanes to get closer to the exit that was coming up. The Eurocar's scan-system wasn’t picking up any police radar or laser scans along the highway, so I was making good time.
“Has Ryan said something to you?” I asked.
“No, he didn't have to. I heard you blew up at him.”
“Not his fault. He was only doing what he thought was right.” That’s what Ryan always did.
“I didn't say it was, but you don’t do something like that for no reason. You’re too responsible for that, Tom. You’re too professional.”
“Maybe that’s it.” I said, as much to myself as anyone else. Having a conversation with Jane over my headlink was almost like talking to myself sometimes. “Maybe I’m just a little too professional these days. It just feels . . . confining. I’ve worked with teams before, but not like this. On other teams I was always the hotshot, the wiz-kid mage who knew how to handle anything. Now . . . now I feel like I’m out of my depth, Jane. All the things I’ve seen, all the things I know about what’s out there . . .
Do you know I still have nightmares about all that drek involving the Dragon Heart?”
There was a moment of silence over the line. “No, no I didn’t.”
“I nearly died, Jane. Hell, I did die out there on the bridge, and Lucero brought me back from the other side. I don’t know what the hell to make of that. When I was running the streets, I was sure I’d be history before I hit twenty-five. Then twenty-five came and went and I never thought I’d see thirty. Now, here I am. I used to think I knew how it all worked: life, death, magic, but now nothing makes sense.”
Jane remained silent, so I continued. “It used to all be about making the next score; finding another run, another deal to make enough nuyen to get me through another few months. I didn’t think about the future. It was all about keeping it together in the here and now. Now I am thinking about the future, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m not sure I can handle all of this.”
“You’re not giving yourself enough credit, Talon.”
“Maybe not.” I said quietly. “But you worked for Dunkelzahn, Jane, worked for a fraggin’ great dragon for years. I never even met him. Hell, the only time I met a dragon before Assets, it scared the hell out of me. You were practically friends with one.”
“Not friends exactly.” Jane mused. “I don’t think dragons really have friends like other people. But I do think Dunkelzahn appreciated us in a way other dragons don’t.”
Yeah, like as something other than lunch, I thought. “What I’m saying is you and Ryan and the others got used to all of this weirdness . . .”
“And you will, too. It just takes some time.”
“How much time, Jane? Where do I go from here?”
“Wherever you want, chummer.”
I thought about that for a long moment, watching the road zip past as I came up on the exit.
“I want to go home.” I said. “Only I don't know where that is anymore.”
I slid the Eurocar gently to a stop at the end of the ramp to wait for the light to change. I turned and looked at Jane’s image. She was beautiful, one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. The virtual projection was something of a statement for Jane; one part fantasy and one part sarcasm, since in real-life Jane-in-the-Box looked nothing like the seductive she-devil in red I saw before me. She was a stellar decker and computer programmer. To her, everything was all light and shadow, bits that could be manipulated with the right programs, the right toys, to make it into anything she wanted. Right then, I envied her control and composure.
“How’s the girl?” I asked, changing the subject. The light turned green, and I pulled out onto the street.
“She'll be fine. We’re evacing her to a private clinic in Maryland. They’ll take good care of her and we can make sure she's returned to her parents when she’s ready.” While we were talking, Jane must have been monitoring communications with the rest of the team, coordinating things with the clinic, and preparing data for the mission debriefing, all at the same time. Her ability to multitask was uncanny.
“That’s good.” I said. I didn’t know what else to say about it. It was good. Mary Beth would soon be back with the parents who loved and missed her, but how would she handle being away for the last nine years? And how would her parents handle the almost-woman who would return to them in place of the little girl they lost?
“You know.” I said to Jane, “she’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about.”
Jane paused a beat before responding. She was probably handling another call at the same time. Or else the cell-net was baffled for an instant by the masses of ferro-crete and metal as I cruised down the street.
“How’s that?” she asked.
“Hundreds, hell, thousands of kids disappear every year, gone without a trace. Some of them get found, but most don’t. They vanish into the sprawl and get swallowed up.” I was almost one of them, I thought. “Most parents can’t afford to hire shadowrunners to track them down. The only reason we looked for Mary Beth is because the dragon told us to. Dunkelzahn’s last will and testament, the driving force of our existence.”
When Dunkelzahn was assassinated following his successful bid for the presidency of the UCAS three years ago, Assets was left without an employer. The dragon was smart, though. He left a will, dividing up his vast fortune. His money set up the Draco Foundation and provided Assets, Inc. with enough resources to continue operating nearly forever. And his will left very clear instructions on what the dragon wanted done.
“The will said ‘her survival is critical.’ What the hell does that mean?” I asked. “What did Dunkelzahn know about Mary Beth Tyre? Why is she so important?”
“I don’t know.” Jane said, “but he had his reasons. Dunkelzahn usually turned out to be right in the end.”
“Yeah? Then how come he’s dead?”
Jane didn’t have a reply to that. There was silence over the line for a moment.
“I’m sorry, Jane.” I said. “I really seem to have a talent for saying the wrong thing today. You knew Dunkelzahn, I didn’t. . .”
“Null sweat.” she said, her voice quiet. “Sometimes it seems like an age since he died. Other times, it’s like it was yesterday.”
“Look.” I said, “tell Ryan that I’m taking some time off. I need to be alone for a while to think, just to get away from the whole thing and get some perspective.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. A few weeks, a month, maybe more. I’ll let you know.”
There was another long moment of silence. “All right.” Jane said finally. “I’ll tell him, but I think you should talk to Ryan yourself before you go.”
“I’m not sure I’d go if I did that. We can talk when I get back.”
“If you get back, you mean.”
“That too.”
“Okay, Talon. If you need anything . . .” She left the offer incomplete. That was Jane, always playing the team organizer. It was more than that, though. I think I was one of the few people in the world whom Jane considered a friend. I felt honored by that. Jane didn’t have a lot of friends. Neither did I.
“I’ve got the telecom numbers.” I said and tapped the side of my head. “And I’ve always got access to a phone.” Jane couldn’t see the gesture, but she got my meaning. “Take care of yourself.” she said and broke the connection.
I glanced over to see the expression of sadness on the phantom figure sitting next to me before she faded out. “You, too, Jane.” I said to empty air. “You too.”
3
I’m not much of a believer in premonitions, even though I’m a mage. But when I saw a woman sitting in my favorite beaten-up easy chair in my apartment, I just knew she was Trouble, with a capital “T.” Granted, I had just finished a long and exhausting run and a fight with Ryan, and finding unauthorized persons in my home i
s generally unnerving, but there was something else about her that I found disquieting. Maybe it was the gun she was pointing at me.
She was rather small, actually, but the gun made her more than imposing enough. Her long, midnight hair was swept back and caught up in a ponytail that fell over her left shoulder onto the forest green of her shirt. Silver gleamed from the datajack behind her right ear and from the Celtic-style necklace she wore. Black pants, a short black jacket, and black boots completed the outfit. She wore no makeup or other complement to her somewhat pale complexion, and her hooded, deep blue eyes never wavered as she stared at me over the massive barrel of the Ares Predator. It looked like the end of a train tunnel from where I was standing.
“Hello.” she said in a voice as calm and controlled as the hands holding the unwavering gun. “You must be Talon. I have some business I’d like to discuss with you.” Moving slowly away from the door I took off my broad-brimmed black hat and hung it on the door hook with exaggerated care, gathering my thoughts, considering my options. They were none too good at the moment.
“Most people call when they want an appointment.” I said.
She smiled slightly, but it was a cold smile, without humor. I got the feeling that for all her outward calm, this young woman was feeling cornered right about now. I would have to handle things very carefully so she wouldn’t panic and do something that I would very much regret. “This is a matter of some urgency.” she said.
“So I see. Do you think you could stop pointing that thing at me? I’m willing to talk reasonably, but it’s a little hard to concentrate right now.”
She shook her head slightly. “Not yet. At least not until we've gotten to know each other better.”
Great. Just what I needed, a burglar with an insecurity problem. I’ve had dates that went a lot like this, except without the gun.
“Well.” I said, “as long as you’ve got my undivided attention, why not tell me what this is all about?”
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