by Rachel Aaron
That was when I knew that Rena’s face was as artificial as the rest of her, because while her eyes were immediately disappointed, it took the rest of her expression a full second to catch up. “That’s too bad,” she said, looking at me. “It’s so rare that I get to work on a virgin canvas.”
It’d been a long time since I was a virgin anything, but I had the feeling saying as much would make this situation worse, not better, so I kept my mouth shut, digging into my bag instead. “The job’s not for me,” I said, pulling out Dr. Lyle’s hand. “We need the information that’s locked inside this.”
Never taking her eyes off mine, Rena reached out and took the hand. Her silver fingers were the same temperature as the air when they brushed mine, which was a lot creepier than I expected. Usually, cyberwear keeps itself at normal body temperature so it won’t feel false, but Rena’s touch felt like an inanimate object. Like she wasn’t there at all.
“Do you have the security key?” she asked, petting my fingers one last time with that dead touch before I jerked them away.
“No,” Nik said. “No security question answers, either. Just the hand. There’s a location hardcoded into its VCI. We need it out.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a tall order,” she said, turning the hand over to look at the connectors on the wrist. “And speaking of orders, the boss wants to see you, Nikki.”
“Tell him to wait,” Nik said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’m doing this right now.”
Rena snorted. “You can tell him to wait. My head might be replaceable, but that doesn’t mean I like having it bitten off. It’ll take me a few minutes to give you an estimate on the hand, anyway, and he’s already seen you on the cameras, so you might as well go up. I’ll keep an eye on your little Opal.”
The way she said that made my skin crawl, but the boss thing must have been legitimate, because Nik sighed. “Fine,” he growled, looking at me. “I’ll be right back. Don’t leave this room.”
He didn’t have to tell me that. As creepy as Rena was, I’d watched enough crime dramas to know that anywhere they called their boss “the boss” was not a place you wanted to go exploring by yourself. I’d already glued my back to the parlor’s padded wall, pulling in just enough magic to activate my wards before pulling my arms inside my poncho to keep as much of my body inside the protective shield as possible. Sibyl was on high alert as well, running her full suite of security protocols and keeping my cameras moving so that I had a 360-degree view of the room.
Given how much machinery she was packing, I was certain Rena noticed me locking my doors, so to speak, but she was either too polite to comment or couldn’t be bothered to care, because she went on as though nothing had changed. She just gave Nik a wink and turned around, carrying Dr. Lyle’s hand to the back of the room, where she pushed the padded curtains aside to reveal a wall of equipment.
“So,” she said, placing the hand inside a device that looked exactly like—but couldn’t possibly be—a microwave. “Where did Nik pick you up?”
“I’m the one who picked him up, actually,” I said, ignoring the blatant innuendo in her voice. “He wanted in on my job, I needed someone with a car, so we teamed up.”
Rena’s head snapped around to gape at me over her shoulder. “Wait, Nik let you ride in his car? For real?”
She sounded legitimately shocked, and I shifted uncomfortably. “It’s just for tonight. My tires got slashed, so—”
“There is no ‘just’ when it comes to Nikola Kos,” she said firmly. “He never lets anyone into his stuff. Not unless they’re paying enough to buy him an upgrade.” She pursed her lips. “So what’s he charging you?”
“He’s not charging me anything,” I said. “As I already said, we’re working together on a job.”
“Must be some job,” she said, turning back to punch a few buttons on the couldn’t-be-a-microwave. “So you two aren’t…”
“No,” I said firmly, angry that my face was heating up.
Rena chuckled. “Pity. And here I thought he’d finally gotten himself a girlfriend.”
I shook my head so hard it made me dizzy. “He’s all yours.”
“Oh, I’m not interested in Nikki,” Rena said matter-of-factly. “I don’t like men, and I don’t take lovers who don’t have at least as much cyber as I do.”
That must have made her choices severely limited. I’d never even heard of someone with as much cyberwear as Rena who wasn’t a military cyborg.
“Nik’s just a client,” she went on. “I do all his cyberwear.”
My head shot up in confusion. “Nik has cyberwear?” Because I hadn’t seen it. I mean, I knew he was fast, but all the cyberwear I’d encountered had been obvious: huge muscles, leg extenders, metal skin like Rena’s, stuff you couldn’t hide. But I’d been sitting next to Nik all night, and other than his quickness, which could have just been a combination of training and paranoia, I hadn’t noticed a thing.
“Oh, honey,” Rena said, giving me a wink. “He’s got features. Not surprised you haven’t seen them, though. Nikki likes to keep his cards hidden, but I’d bet he’d show you if you asked nicely.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It could be if you wanted,” she said with a smile. “He’s already let you into his car, so he must like you. You should give it a try.” Her eyes flicked pointedly to my warded poncho. “Aren’t slumming rich girls like you always looking for the bad-boy experience?”
I didn’t know what part of that statement to be more insulted by, the implication that the life I’d killed myself to build in this city was slumming or that I was only using Nik as a tourist attraction. Not that she could have known any of that, of course. I was just someone Nik had brought in, and I was wearing a magical security garment normally reserved for diplomats and the children of politicians. I should have given her the benefit of the doubt, but it had been a very long, very stressful day, and I wasn’t in a mood to be charitable to someone who felt comfortable insulting me to my face.
“I don’t know why you think I care,” I said in a voice that was a perfect mimicry of my father’s. “If you want to antagonize Nik, do it on your own time, but I’m on a deadline. Now how long will it take to get the information out of that hand?”
I braced for Rena to explode after I finished. Most people did when you talked to them as if they were beneath you, which was one of the reasons my father and I didn’t get along. But while I would have—and had—blown up over being dressed down like that, Rena started to giggle.
“Oh, you are too precious!” she cried. “Look at you, trying to be scary. Like a hissing kitten!”
I rolled my eyes as she dissolved into laughter. Honestly, though, I wasn’t pissed it hadn’t worked. Even when I did manage it, I’d never liked being scary. I was getting really annoyed, though. So much so that I was considering just walking out when Rena finally got herself together.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes, which were completely dry. “I’ll stop teasing you, and the hand will take at least eight hours.”
I blinked. “Seriously?”
“It takes time to crack a safe,” she said, tapping on the door of the device where the hand was being scanned. “Cyberwear is made to be secure. Even the cheap stuff is nearly impossible to crack. If it wasn’t, no one would use it. And before you ask, no, I can’t do it faster. I have to fake a DNA sequence just to get the thing to turn on, and that’s not counting dealing with whatever additional security might be inside. If you want your information, you’ll just have to be patient.”
I cursed under my breath. I didn’t know enough about decrypting cyberwear to say if eight hours was reasonable or not, but it was a lot longer than I’d expected. If things had been normal, I would have welcomed the chance to go back to my apartment and crash, but if Kauffman had paid thugs to watch Dr. Lyle’s empty house for a month, he’d definitely have someone camping my door. That meant home was out, but I didn’t have money to go anywh
ere else.
“Aww, you look so sad,” Rena said, reaching out to snag a lock of my hair before I could jerk away. “Don’t worry, kitten. If Nikki isn’t taking care of you, you can always stay with me. I don’t have any more appointments tonight, and there’s nothing I love better than easing newcomers into the joys of cyberwear.” She tilted her head, looking my body over like an interior decorator deciding which pieces of furniture had to go first. “We could start with your eyes. I just got a pair in that would look gorgeous on you, and you could get rid of those bulky goggles.”
“No, thank you. I like my eyes the way they are.”
“Are you sure?” she purred, reaching up to stroke the skin at the top of my cheekbone. “I can give you a fantastic deal.”
“Very sure,” I said, backing over to the door. “I’m just going to wait outside for Nik.”
She looked supremely disappointed, but she didn’t try to stop me. I almost wished she had. Eight-hour wait notwithstanding, I really didn’t want to abandon Dr. Lyle’s hand in a strange place, and Nik had told me specifically not to leave the room. But I didn’t like the vibe I was getting one bit, and while I was confident in my ability to defend myself with magic if it came to that, frying the person who was getting us our information was not how I wanted this job to end. So instead, I removed myself from the situation, slipping into the dark hallway to wait for Nik.
I didn’t have to wait long. I’d only played two rounds of Monster Poker on my phone before I heard Nik coming down the hall. I hadn’t even realized I could recognize his footsteps until that moment, but Nik had a very specific way of walking—full speed and straight ahead—that made him easy to pick out. I already had my game shut down and my phone back in my pocket when he came around the corner and froze.
“What are you doing?” he hissed frantically. “I told you to stay in the room!”
“You left me with a creepy lady!” I hissed back. “My choices were magic or hallway. Since she’s the one decoding our hand, I chose hallway. You can thank me later.”
Nik didn’t look surprised. “Sorry about her,” he said. “As you can tell from her body, Rena doesn’t know when to stop. But she’s reliable when it comes to work. Is she decoding the hand?”
“That or microwaving it,” I said. “She said it’d take eight hours.”
I expected him to balk at that, but Nik actually looked relieved. “It’ll be safe with her for a while, then. We’ve got bigger problems.”
I cringed. “Something happened with the boss, didn’t it?”
“What?” Nik said, surprised. “No, no, Jonsey’s solid. He’d never sell out a client. Bad for business. He just called me back to warn me that Kauffman’s put a bounty on our heads.”
“Wait, really?”
He nodded, and my eyes went wide.
“For how much?”
Nik cocked an eyebrow at me. “Does it matter?”
Not particularly, but I’d never had a bounty on my head. “I just want to know how much we’re worth to him.”
“Twenty-five grand each.”
“Is that a lot?” Because it sounded like a lot.
“Enough to draw a crowd from the people who saw us come in,” Nik said, pulling his gun. “Which is why we’re going out the back.”
He pushed past me down the hall, which I’d thought was a dead end. But when Nik reached out to touch the black-painted wall, it turned out to actually be a black-painted door leading out onto another suspended walkway. A much, much narrower one than the route we’d taken to get here.
“Stay close and keep your head down,” Nik whispered, keeping his gun ready as he crept outside. “We follow this until it dead-ends. There’s another stair we can use in the—”
He never got to finish. At that moment, the door he’d been easing open was ripped out of his hands. Standing behind Nik, I couldn’t see our attacker’s face, but I could see the machete in his hand, its gleaming blade already flying low toward Nik’s stomach.
Chapter 7
After that, a lot of things happened at once.
I screamed. The man with the machete screamed. Someone outside screamed a demand to know what the hell was going on. The only one who didn’t make a sound was Nik. He simply lowered his gun and shot his attacker in the foot.
The man dropped his machete with a roar of pain. He was reaching down to pick it back up when Nik kicked the weapon away and slammed the man’s hand against the metal grate of the suspended walkway. Then, faster than I could follow with my eyes, Nik whipped a heavy plastic zip-tie out of his pocket and looped it through the bloody metal grating. He wrapped the other end around the man’s wrist just as fast and yanked it tight, zip-tying his would-be attacker to the floor.
“There,” he said, kicking the trapped, disarmed man to the side so we could get past. “Let’s go.”
I followed silently, eyes wide. I’d never seen anyone take down a knife-wielding maniac so efficiently. Of course, before tonight, I’d never seen anything like this situation outside of the movies. It was a lot messier in real life. As we stepped over him, I realized I could actually see the blindingly white bones of the guy’s foot through the bullet wound. It was so mesmerizingly grotesque that I didn’t notice him making a grab for me until his bloody hand snagged the edge of my poncho.
I kicked automatically, slamming my foot into the wound I’d just been staring at. Sadly, I was wearing my sneakers, not my metal-toed cleaning boots, so it wasn’t as good as it could have been. Getting kicked on a gunshot clearly still hurt like crazy, though, because the man let me go with a wail, setting me free to run after Nik, who was already several feet ahead of me.
The narrow walkway we were running down must have been the crazy suspended version of a back alley, because all the stores we’d passed on our walk here also had hidden doors that let out on this side. I knew this because several of them were opening as people stuck their heads out to see what the commotion was about. Unfortunately, the doors were all the same width as the suspended railing, which meant each one was a block in our path.
“Move!” Nik yelled at me, slamming his shoulder into the door that had opened in front of him, which sent it slamming back into the face of the man who’d pushed it out. “Get down!”
I was opening my mouth to tell him to pick one when something slammed into my back. It was the same pressure I’d felt back in Dr. Lyle’s kitchen, but it was still so new that I didn’t recognize the feeling of my wards catching a bullet until the force sent me flying on to my face.
I was back on my feet a heartbeat later, covering my head as I ran to join Nik behind the door he’d ripped open again to use as a shield. “Are you all right?” he yelled at me. When I nodded, his face was relieved. Then it grew grim. “How many more of those can you take?”
“None,” I said, pointing at the spellwork on my poncho, which was no longer glowing.
Nik cursed and pulled off his jacket. “Here,” he said, dumping it over my head.
The weight almost sent me back to the ground. I’d already seen Nik’s black leather bomber jacket bounce a bullet, so I knew it was armored. I just hadn’t realized it was this armored. The thing felt like a dead body made of lead. It also struck me as something you definitely shouldn’t take off in a gunfight.
“Don’t you need this?” I asked, pushing the dead weight up just enough to look at Nik, who was now standing beside me wearing only his jeans and a short-sleeved black T-shirt.
“Not as much as you do,” Nik said, pulling down his shirt at the neck to show me the metal underneath.
There was a lot. Rena hadn’t been kidding when she’d said Nik was packing. The entire top of his torso was metal: a scratched-up, flesh-colored steel alloy that covered his chest down to at least the collarbone. I couldn’t see if the metal plating extended to his back as well, but from the way he didn’t even flinch at the bullets that were ricocheting off the edge of the steel door inches from his ribcage, my guess was that he had pretty full cov
erage. I just wished I was as protected.
“So what’s the plan now?” I asked, clutching his jacket over my head.
“Same as before,” Nik said, grabbing another zip-tie from his jeans pocket so he could tie the handle of the metal door to the walkway railing, locking it open and blocking the path behind us. “Get to the end, get down the stairs, get out alive.”
“Good plan,” I said. “But how—”
I cut off with a hiss. Directly in front of us, at the end of the walkway we were supposed to be fleeing down, a tall man with spellwork tattooed all over his bare arms was coming out of one of the doorways. The markings looked like Socratic Thaumaturgy, which meant I could have read what the spells did given enough time and a few searches, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Whatever they did, I didn’t want it, so I didn’t wait for him to cast. I just grabbed all the magic I could and shoved it at him.
The wave of my magic hit the other mage dead in the face. I’d been in a hurry, so I wasn’t sure how much I’d thrown, but what I lack in finesse I make up for in volume. He hadn’t even finished lighting up the spellwork on his skin before I knocked him flat. I slammed him again to make sure he stayed down, taking the extra step this time to form the surprisingly dense magic floating through this place into a vaguely hammer-esque shape before I dropped it on his head.
“Good job,” Nik said, lowering his gun as the other mage began to spasm on the walkway, bleeding profusely from his nose. “What did you do?”
I shrugged. “Punched him, I guess? It’s not really a spell in the technical sense, but mages can only handle so much magic at once. Overload that limit and they drop like flies. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Hell of a punch,” he said appreciatively. “Does it work on non-mages?”
I’d never tried it on a non-magical person, so I wasn’t sure. Before I could explain that, though, something crashed into the steel door we were using as cover, nearly ripping the handle off as the zip-tie strained to keep it attached to the railing.
