by eden Hudson
For a few fumbling seconds, I couldn’t remember how to trigger the front tire’s ReFlate option. Then I realized the Notification of Wreck had popped up on my wristpiece with the option to initiate ReFlate.
Everything was so yellow. I shook my head, trying to dispel the weird tint from my vision. It started to fade from the edges inward.
Sirens. The FirstMedix were coming.
I hit the Confirm Reflate icon on my wristpiece.
Some components of ReFlate have been damaged. Continue?
I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t going to be there when the FirstMedix showed up, and I wasn’t going to leave the ’Shan there all by itself.
The front tire inflated, but the hissing got louder. It couldn’t keep its air pressure up.
I shut the engine down, climbed off, and started wheeling the ’Shan down the sidewalk. People yelled at me and honked, but I didn’t look back.
It was a miracle I hadn’t been flattened by that cargo carrier and simultaneously vomited and shit my internal organs all over the road. Or worse, woken up with an asphalt rash where my beautiful face used to be. I should’ve realized this could happen, should’ve prepared for it after my first PCM fit.
Mobility was part of my job. It was the difference between a noose made out of sheets in an ultra-security prison cell and living in the oversexed lap of luxury far away from pursuers.
There was my Culebra. That thing was the infant love child of a cargo carrier and a ghetto cruise ship, and it handled slightly better than a monolith. If I wrecked the Culebra, it would probably vaporize anything I smashed into, but at least I would be alive and undamaged.
I ran my fingertips across the scales acid-etched into the ’Shan’s handlebars. I enjoyed the knowledge of my other rare and valuable vehicular acquisitions, but the ’Shan I loved. The ’Shan was my baby.
What do you do when your baby can kill you? The same thing any other parent would do—lovingly abandon it, pay a manufacturer-approved repair and detailing shop to nurse it back to health, and then put it in storage until you’re safe for each other again.
A black pit opened up in my chest as I pushed the ’Shan into a covered alley out of the elements and messaged Crotalinae Assistance. Their customer service representative assured me that they were on their way to my location.
It was just for now. It was just until I cured my PCM. Just until I was sure I wouldn’t kill us both. Then the ’Shan and I would be back together.
But my heart wouldn’t stop pounding as if it knew something I didn’t.
***
Needless to say, I was in the mood for some cheering up when I walked into the diner an hour later.
As soon as the door closed behind me, I stripped off my dripping helmet and ventilator and shook them vigorously at the young couple passing me on their way out.
“Hey, watch it!” the guy snapped.
I shot him a wink and a finger gun with my throbbing hand. “Hey, I was.”
“Asshole,” his girlfriend grumbled, shoving her boyfriend toward the door.
I grinned. That hit the spot.
It wasn’t hard to find Nickie-boy in the evening diner crowd. Even in Taern, with its ubiquitous knightly presence and the prevalent dark skin tone that evidenced the Guild’s genetic tampering, he stood out like the proverbial meat grinder in the glory hole contest—wider than any of the other patrons by twice at the shoulder, physically and mentally denser by a factor of at least three, encumbered with more muscle than any one human being would need in four lifetimes, and still wearing that barbwire bracelet on his wrist. He was also sitting at the four-top we’d sat in last time I took him and Carina out for biscuits and gravy. Since the diner was mostly deserted tonight, that pointed to him desiring some measure of the familiar in this situation.
As soon as his eyes landed on me, his massive shoulders relaxed the tiniest fraction. He’d been worried I wouldn’t show.
My grin stretched wider as I tracked acid sleet across the diner’s grimy floor.
“What happened to you?” he asked, staring at my knees.
I followed his gaze down to black asphalt-swipes on my pants leg that matched the scratches on the ’Shan’s tank.
“Clearly, khakis were a mistake,” I said, making a fruitless attempt to dust them off.
Understanding dawned behind Nick’s dull gray eyes. “Did you wreck?”
“I am the best driver in this hemisphere, Nicholas.” I pulled out the seat opposite his and plopped into it. Pain throbbed down my left side. I shifted my weight onto the right side of my butt. “I don’t wreck. Some chum-sucking siltbrain tried to wipe me across the road with his cargo carrier.”
Nick checked the time on his wristpiece. “It’s only been an hour since you messaged me. How’d you get the FirstMedix to release you so fast?”
“A gentleman never tells,” I said. I sat my helmet and ventilator on the table. There was a chewed-up spot along the left side of the helmet.
I could feel Nick staring at me, but I ignored him. I took my time angling my helmet until I could see everything behind me reflected in the wraparound visor.
Finally, Nick gave up on trying to puzzle through what I’d said. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. It groaned under the strain.
“I need to hire you to find someone,” he said.
I raised my hands, palms facing him. “Whoa, Nickie-boy, I’m not your future wife. Let’s warm up a little bit first, maybe try some sensual massage or dirty talk before we jam it in and start ramming away.”
Nick’s nostrils flared and his thin lips twitched toward a snarl. “Look, breaker, I don’t have the time to waste on your little games. I need to locate a missing person. If you’re too incapacitated to do that right now, then I need to get back out there on the street and find somebody who can.”
“I can find anybody and anything in the Revived Earth, Nickie.” I sat forward, mimicking his posture, but letting the smile on my face slide toward smugness rather than his almost-snarl. “Even with severe brain damage, I would be operating at a level most geniuses can’t match on their best day. The question isn’t can I find someone; the question is will I?”
“Well, will you?”
The answer was no I wouldn’t, not for him, not if he was on fire and the last person on the planet who had to piss was standing right next me.
However.
However, he had called me here to discuss this missing person while Carina was fully immersed in a VR game and conveniently couldn’t ask why the two most important men in her life were meeting behind her back. Which meant the missing person in question could only be the woman Nick had boned while Carina was imprisoned in Soam.
I took a deep breath while I pretended to consider it, then blew it at his face. “I kind of doubt it. I’ve seen your Guild-issued, one-bedroom cell, Nicholas. FYI—I rake in more per job than you and your fiancée cleared on that sunken city contract combined.”
“This is more important than money—”
“Not to me.”
“Someone’s life is at stake.”
I giggled. “You obviously don’t understand who you’re talking to here, Nickie.”
“Will you stop that?” he snapped. “Saying my name over and over again? It’s annoying.”
I nodded and leaned back in my seat. “Nicholas—Nickie—Nick? May I call you Nick?”
He clenched his fists, then with visible effort, forced himself to relax them. The tines of his barbwire bracelet had popped new holes into his skin near the scabbed-over ones. Most of them slipped back out when he relaxed his hands, but one of the tines was still stuck halfway in.
“How does anyone stand you long enough to hire you?” he asked.
“I’m nicer to rich people,” I lied. Then I pointed at the bracelet. “Still flagellating away, huh? How much longer are you going to wear that thing?”
“None of your business.”
“Everything is my business,” I said. “If
it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be trying to hire me to find a simple missing person—a missing person that your future bride would gladly help you hunt down and murder the shit out of—I can only assume that’s her idea of an aphrodisiac—if you weren’t too scared to ask for her help.”
Nick glared down at his barbwire bracelet. “I’m not afraid to ask Carina to help me.”
“Ashamed, afraid of getting castrated—whatever you want to call it.” I waved my hand at the semantics. “You don’t want her to know that you’re trying to track down the girl you screwed while she was locked up down in Soam.”
His baby gray gaze snapped up to meet mine, eyebrows raised for a fraction of a second in surprise. Then his surprise mutated into self-loathing as, I assume, even he realized how obvious it was.
“It’s not exactly cyborgcromantic science, Nickie. What I want to know is what you want with this chick. Another round of nasty-wasty-frosting-blasty? Carina’s only been in Tsunami Tsity for a day or two; this chick must be incredible in the sack. Or is it that Carina won’t put out the kind of kink you’re looking for? What is it? Is it diapers? Mystery lady gets hot changing your enormous baby pants?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with sex,” Nick growled. “It’s just…she stole something from me. Cheated me out of it. I want it back.”
I nodded. “The ol’ screw and grab. You woke up alone and some beloved family heirloom was as gone as she was. Or was it something Carina gave you? I’ve been known to dabble in the fuck-and-shuck myself when the target’s hot enough.”
The waitress showed up then. Nick stared down into his coffee cup.
“Three orders of biscuits and gravy per man,” I told the waitress. “And a bottled water for me. Nickie-boy?” I pointed at his cup. “Can she bring you something palatable to wash down that fake chicory sludge?”
Nick shook his head and told the waitress, “The coffee’s good. Really.”
She smiled at him.
“I know for a fact that’s not true,” I said, shooting him a finger gun. “But I accept your terrible decision because there’s nothing I can do about it.”
When the waitress left to put our orders in with the line cook, I turned back to Nick.
“So, you were describing how this chick screwed you metaphorically after screwing you literally,” I prompted.
“I told you this isn’t about sex,” he said.
“Then what’s all the self-castigation about?” I asked, pointing at his bracelet. “People who aren’t ashamed of something don’t wear barbwire bracelets.”
Nick scrubbed his shovel-sized mitts across his face, then sighed. “She told me she could bring Carina back from the dead.”
“But Carina wasn’t dead.”
“Everybody told me she was.” The story came pouring out as if he had been waiting to confess: “Everyone was saying she was gone. Her wristpiece wasn’t online. Her last known whereabouts were in Soam, but the Soami government denied that she’d entered the country—which is the first thing they always do when they’ve already executed the person in question. I went down there trying to find some trace of her, and the best I could do was two chopper pilots from a big game company who swore they saw her fall to her death—” He glared at me. “—after you pushed her.”
“They’re welcome again, by the way,” I said. “And you can skip the recriminations. Even if I could feel guilt, Carina and I already went over all that and decided that I just did what she would have if she’d had to make the choice. You can ask her when she’s done playing Tsunami Tsity.”
Nick took a deep breath. His expression stayed angry, but his mountain-bayou accent deepened. “The love of my life—my best friend—had just run off with some faithless Judas to do a job she didn’t trust me enough to talk to me about. Then on top of it all, everybody was telling me she was dead. What was I supposed to do?”
“Well, if you’re a retard—or a necrophiliac—a necrotard?—you hire a necromancer.” My nose wrinkled at the thought of Carina’s vibrant mahogany skin turned zombie-ashy and those green daggers she called eyes all filmed-over and gooey with decay. A shudder started my bruised shoulder throbbing again. “Gross.”
“Not a necromancer,” Nick said. “I didn’t want a zombie. I wanted Carina back. The real her. Alive. Herself. So I talked to a friend who’s working undercover in the Forsaken.”
He paused and looked at me as if to make sure I was following.
“I know who they are.” I had floated their gang the occasional illegal item—left hands of executed criminals, mummified vestigial tails, and a bulk shipment of fetal skulls I got my hands on a few months before my PCM diagnosis—basically anything you could get burnt at the stake for possessing. The Forsaken weren’t your average witchcraft wannabes; they regularly stuck their naughty bits into the dark waters of the deep end and screwed around with demons. Their symbol was a fat black pig in honor of their patron antisaint, a First Earth mambo who supposedly still talked to them.
“This friend,” Nick said, the slightest inflection just cautious enough to let me know that he and probably every other knight in the Guild had been warned never to give away any identifying information about the undercover knights, including gender-specific pronouns, “suggested a smoke bar on the north side where some of the gang’s big shots hang out. Turns out it was actually a front for a Forsaken chapel. It took some work to convince them I wasn’t there to arrest anyone. I had to buy some uhashi as an offering to their antisaint.” He glanced up at me. “But I didn’t burn it or leave it on their altar. I gave it to the witch.”
“The Forsaken don’t have witches,” I said. “If you made a deal with one of them in exchange for a spell or a curse, then you were talking to a vocor.”
“Fine,” Nick said as if he couldn’t be bothered with the subtleties. “I gave it to the vocor. She took it as part of the trade. But I didn’t offer it to their antisaint.”
“Got it. I’ll put you down as only half apostate. Your God doesn’t mind if you worship anyone else, as long as it’s only a little bit, right?”
“Look, I get that I messed up,” Nick snapped. “I thought I couldn’t live without Carina. I wasn’t thinking straight. Half of that time nothing even seemed real, like I was walking around in a nightmare or—”
“That’s good.” I nodded, tapping my index finger on the tabletop. “Fugue states are well-documented in cases of extreme grief. Way more believable than temporary insanity.”
“I’m not trying to cover my ass.” Nick’s fists clenched. The tines of his barbwire bracelet bit into his wrist, and he relaxed his hands. “I was stupid. The Forsaken wi—vocor—said she could bring Carina back.”
I grinned. “God wouldn’t answer your prayers, so you found someone who would.”
Nickie-boy scrubbed at his face again. Clearly this was a tic of frustration. “You don’t have to sound so happy about it.”
“I just remembered that saying you and your Guild buddies have—‘Nobody’s dead until we have a body.’” I cackled a touch hysterically. Must’ve still had a little leftover adrenaline from the wreck lingering in the plumbing. “There’s actually a lot of wisdom wrapped up in that little nugget.”
“Are you done?”
“Ah.” I wiped my eyes. “For now, yes. Let’s get back to it. You met with the vocor and she said she could bring Carina back. You jumped all over that, probably so eager that you didn’t even ask what she wanted in trade, right?”
“I asked,” Nick said.
“And she happened to be having a sale on resurrections.”
He glared down at the bracelet that had dug those bloody lines in his wrist. Old scar tissue had built up beneath the new, red scratches, slightly paler than his dark skin. Physical proof that Nickie-boy was a slow learner.
He muttered something I couldn’t quite catch.
“Speak up, big boy,” I said. “Some of us don’t have aural upgrades.”
“Nothing,” he said, looking up at me.
“It doesn’t matter. She wanted a piece of my soul, so I gave it to her.”
I didn’t think Nick had the mental capacity to speak metaphorically, but I asked for clarification just to be sure.
“Literally? A literal piece of your soul?”
He nodded. “She did a ceremony. Drew on my chest. Then there was a spell or something that…fractured it, I guess. Then she trapped a piece in a jar.”
“Are you sure it worked?” I asked. “That she wasn’t just putting you on?”
“I felt it,” Nick said, eyes dropping to the barbwire again.
I let out a low whistle. Soul traps went a heathen mile beyond anything I’d known the Forsaken vocors could do. This missing person job was starting to sound more like a retrieval of an infinitely valuable artifact from a deadly source by the second.
“And I take it you want that soul jar back,” I said.
“Carina wasn’t even dead. The deal was a fraud and—”
The waitress returned then, dropping off my bottled water and our biscuits and gravy at the same time.
I dug in. Nick picked up his fork, but didn’t do more than push his food around.
When the waitress left again, Nick continued. “She cheated me, and she knew it. The day after the deal went down, the Enforcers’ gang task force had a mass raid of the known Forsaken hangouts in Taern. They cleaned out the smoke bar and—”
“And your vocor was gone without a trace,” I finished for him.
He nodded. “She wasn’t in with the arrestees and none of them would talk about her. I’ve been through every database I’ve got clearance for, but nothing.”
“Why didn’t you just do a track-back on all of the wristpieces that had been at the smoke bar’s coordinates in the last twenty-four hours?”
His eyebrows drew together in his thick forehead. “That violates basically every privacy law in Emden. The Guild’s not allowed access to info like that except in child abduction cases.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Carina.”
“Besides,” Nick said, continuing as if he had already gone over this a hundred times by himself, “even if I could’ve tracked them back legally, and I’d found out within a reasonable timeframe that she screwed me over, it wouldn’t have helped. She didn’t have a wristpiece.”
