Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “The suit. Half the planet wants me dead; I never take it off.”

  “Says Lady Godiva.”

  “Who?” She wobbled a glance in his direction.

  His teeth peeked through a grin. “Failed history?”

  “Dropped out of school when I was eight.”

  He gawked. “Your parents let you―”

  Risa’s glare stalled his words. “Some UCF marines gave my father a whole bunch of incendiary grenades for his birthday. Guess they didn’t know he had a kid in the apartment.”

  Pavo slouched. “Shit. Sorry. I didn’t realize you were so young when it happened. I heard he was a hero.”

  “Yeah.” She caved in on herself, arms dead in her lap. “A real hero.”

  He kept silent for a moment. “I know a guy that should be able to help you. You’re twitching.”

  With the food gone, she padded to the bed and fell on her front. Her body hit the Comforgel pad with a dull slap like someone dropping raw steak on metal floor. “I’ll be okay. I just need a week of sleep.”

  “You’ve been hiding out here for three days already.” He sat on the edge of the bed with a hand on the back of her left thigh.

  “It’s been three days?” Her eyes clamped closed with a moan. Noises of discomfort grew louder as he massaged his way to her ankle. “This would be almost romantic if it didn’t hurt so much. You bought me dinner. You might as well get something out of it.”

  “Do you feel your leg shaking?”

  “It’s shaking?” Her entire body swam with a mixture of pain and numbness.

  Pavo let go, her foot slapped into the Comforgel pad. “This isn’t gonna get better on its own. Get your suit on. I’m taking you to a doc.”

  “I washed it an hour ago, it’s still wet inside.”

  He gathered her, towel and all, in his arms and flipped her over on her back. She brought her hands together at her chest and gave him a look mixed between a plea for help and displeasure at being manhandled.

  “Would you rather go out like this?”

  She wanted to say something, but the Narcoderm fog in her brain reduced it to a babble. A moment of inspiration came on, but her epiphany emerged as a belch. Pavo leaned his head back and cringed.

  He set her on the bed again and peeled off the sheets, wrapping her to the armpits in dingy white linen. The presence of a soft mattress drained the consciousness from her head. The next thing she knew, she floated down the street. Tattered sheets fluttered in recirculated air laced with the flavor of silt. Rag-clad people clung to the edges of a subterranean passage, a living, breathing, begging plaque on the Martian rock. Solar pumps fourteen feet above lent an amber heat to the narrow corridor, creating a chaotic atmosphere similar to that of a bustling Indian street market. Voices surrounded her, too indistinct for meaning. The sounds, like hummingbirds, hovered outside her ears, afraid to come in.

  Narcoderm slowed the world to a blur. Unlike when she used speedware, Risa did not exist apart from time. She clung to the cheap motel linen covering her from breast to thigh, gathered in a bundle that trailed from Pavo’s arms. The black bag slung over his right shoulder brushed her foot in time with his stride. She assumed it contained her armor and weapons.

  She held her arms out as if flying, arching her back so she stared up at the ceiling. Black smears of grime painted the ancient plastisteel; every so often, an insect skittered across a patch of light.

  “I think I took too much Narco,” cooed Risa. “I don’t weigh enough for this dose.”

  Filthy, wide-eyed urchins emerged from the crowd, the only ones to show any visible reaction to a serious-faced man in a long, black coat carrying a woman wrapped in a bed sheet. Perhaps, unlike their parents, they were not wise enough to fear what such a man might do to those who noticed him.

  She glanced at her feet, rubbery legs bouncing with his gait, met the stares of several curious children, and let her head thump against Pavo’s shoulder. He hurried to the left as a two-person car parted the crowd. A toothless older woman’s yell broke her fog. The elder raised a fistful of squat hydroponic carrots, shaking them at the driver. Risa averted her eyes. Harsh artificial light formed a painful gleam upon the waxy leaves and flashed from the rear window. Another young man of dark complexion, an obvious recent immigrant from Earth, ceased his shouted sales pitch for ‘meds’ as they neared. He receded into shadow, seeming eager to avoid Pavo’s gaze.

  In the back of Risa’s mind, desire formed. A spark leapt a synapse, hopped on a thread of platinum that carried it screaming into the tiny computer on her brainstem. It wound through her Neural Interface Unit, which routed it to an implanted wireless interface. Three-tenths of a second after she wanted, five transparent blue dots appeared in the upper right of her field of view. Four dim, one bright, they cycled back and forth above the word ‘calling.’

  The dots moved from a horizontal line to a spinning circle, and expanded to a frame around Pavo’s face. His eyebrow cocked up.

  「Your lips are six inches from my ear, but you’re calling my head?」

  To the outside world, his expression remained stony.

  She let gravity hold her tight to his chest, every part of her as limp as a corpse. 「This is private. Don’t you find it strange that no one looks at us? I’m practically naked. Not even the pickpockets are checking us out.」

  「This deep in Elysium, one feels safer not knowing why the fallen angel is carried from the wreckage. They know you.」

  In her mind, she laughed. The NIU reproduced the sound over the implanted comm link. 「I’m hardly an angel.」

  The virtual Pavo in her vision softened, gazing down. 「You’re as much a victim of this war as anyone. You were an angel once, until they burned your wings.」

  Darkness fell over them as he headed down a side street away from the solar pumps. Out from the shadows, the eyes of a pimp and his thralls gleamed. The girls scowled at her, as if her presence marked Pavo off limits.

  Her hand slipped from the sheet, squeezing into a fist around his coat. 「Get me out of here. I can’t move. I don’t like feeling this vulnerable.」

  「You could’ve gotten dressed. I got a friend at EMC, not sure he can put your wings back on, but he can get your legs working again.」

  Virtual Risa grumbled. The broken figure in his arms didn’t move, offering a somber mask of mourning. 「Vulnerable because I can’t fight, and getting into that suit requires cooperation from muscles I’m no longer on speaking terms with.」

  She lifted her head to glare at the source of a voice discussing stealing her from Pavo. When the man saw her violet eyes, recognition set in and he backed into the dark. 「Why did they name this hellhole Elysium again? Seems like a bad joke.」

  Pavo smiled in the real world, laughed in his head. 「This part of Mars was named that before humans ever set foot on it.」

  He reached the end of the narrow beggar-filled tunnel and shouldered his way through a thick crowd to the plastisteel curb of a major thoroughfare. At the sight of a PubTran booth riddled with bullet holes and laser scoring, he sighed.

  “Hey mate,” yelled a snowy-skinned man in dusty brown shreds that might once have been clothing. Six bright colored plastic Nicohalers stuck out from his thick afro, somehow not slipping loose as he bobbed about with enough energy to make Risa’s head hurt. The man leaned over the roof of a small six-wheeler sporting a taxi placard. His broad nose flared as he grinned. “Those automatic bitches don’t come around this part of town. You need to get somewhere”―he tapped his car twice―“let Weezl ferret you there. I work cheap. Unlike those other bastards, I won’t stop in the back end of nowhere and stuff a gun up your nose.”

  Pavo eyed the pair of pistols on the cabbie’s belt, and the relative lack of bullet holes in his car. “You come up with that pitch all by yourself?”

  “Yep.” Weezl wiped at his chin with nervous hands while emitting a sound halfway between chuckle and being offended. “So, uhh… Where you need ta be?”


  “Elysium Med Center, utility entrance.”

  Weezl waved a hand across in a straight line. “Fifty, flat.”

  「PubTran would cost ten,」 she said.

  “Deal.” Pavo moved closer to the car.

  Weezl grinned again and pulled a Nicohaler from his hair. He wagged it at Pavo before taking a drag on it and stuffing it back where he got it. “Hop in.”

  Pavo ducked the rising side door of the microvan. 「Yeah, and they haven’t worked properly in thirty years. Great on Earth where they maintain the network, up here… it’s like playing Russian roulette. Even when they aren’t shot to shit, half the time you take one, hackers reroute you into ambushes.」

  Tears leaked out of Risa’s eyes as he slid her onto the rear bench. Pain screamed in her limbs, but it hurt more to fight than let herself be moved. With each shift in weight, her muscles burned, as if they peeled away from her bones. She shuddered from the inescapable agony. Pavo tucked the sheet in place around her and climbed in alongside. Weezl hopped into the single front seat as Pavo pulled the side door closed. For a moment, the men locked eyes via the rear-view.

  “You look like MDF,” said Weezl.

  “You’re perceptive, pal. Relax, I’m off duty.”

  Weezl lifted an eyebrow. “You bought?”

  Pavo’s face remained stony. “If I was, would I admit it? If I wasn’t, would you believe it?”

  Risa’s head bobbed up, two dots of violet light peered through strands of ink. “Some questions are healthier than others.”

  “Holy shit…” Weezl’s gaze shot straight ahead and he rammed the lone joystick forward.

  His cab’s attempt at sudden acceleration nudged them against the seatback. Four small rear wheels moaned in protest. Electric motors pushed them forward at a touch over thirty miles per hour. Thumps clattered across the roof as pedestrians occupying what was supposed to be a road pounded their fists against the car. So few vehicles navigated the streets of Elysium―at least in this part of the city―that the citizens regarded them little different from large walkways.

  She curled on the seat, tugging at the sheet more for something to do with her hands than for modesty. Like the rest of the city, a thick layer of grime coated the windows; even a determined pervert would have trouble seeing anything worth touching himself over. The heads-up display faded away as their cybernetic vid call dropped. Risa slipped closer to sleep, unsure whether to thank the rhythmic side-to-side sway of the cab as it dodged pedestrians or Pavo’s shoulder.

  An instant later, a rush of clean air chased away the stagnant dimness inside the taxi. The door was open and Pavo stood by the driver’s window, swiping his NetMini over a reader. She gathered the sheet and scooted closer to the exit. Pain wracked her muscles as she extended a leg to the cold metal ground. She wobbled in place for several seconds before the numbing chill in her bare feet brought her nerves to full protest. Her hands refused to release their grip on the cloth to grab the car. Her legs gave out. An explosion of white agony blinded her two seconds after her knees slammed into the ground. She careened over sideways. Repetitive patting on her cheek told her she convulsed.

  All the screaming happened in her mind. Wirepaths burned within her flesh, as if the neuralware was cooking her from the inside out. She hadn’t activated it, but her nerves remembered. Pounding in her head grew faster and faster until her heart seemed ready to burst. Seconds before panic overtook her, the pain subsided. With the return of her senses came the realization Pavo once again held her. He carried her across a small open space behind Elysium Medical Center. The sour, clingy stink of rotting trash traded places with an almost-pleasant aroma of grilled street meat whenever the wind shifted. Workers in thin strength-boosting exoskeletons carried boxes from two large trucks into a loading bay. She drifted past four large garbage crushers, finding enough energy to lift her head as a stout woman in black security armor challenged Pavo with a stare.

  “Hang on a few more minutes, okay?” he whispered.

  She bit her lip. The sight of the guard triggered a primal need to flee, but she couldn’t move enough to run. Her fingers clutched his shirt. She whined with a failed attempt to pull herself up.

  “No…” Risa writhed. “Away… Get away.”

  He stopped walking to hold her until she stopped squirming. “I got this.”

  She held her breath for two seconds before whispering, “You sure this doctor won’t just turn me in when he sees my face?

  His raspy chuckle struck her as cute. “Yeah, we go way back.”

  “What’s going on here?” asked the guard.

  Pavo shifted her weight onto one arm and pulled something out of a pocket. “Can’t go into details. Sergeant Aram, MDF.”

  “Have a nice day, sir,” the guard said, moving away.

  Pavo cradled her, navigating a narrow door by a loading dock and making his way across what looked like a warehouse or storage room. Risa closed her eyes, taking advantage of an unexpected break in the pain to catnap. It felt like she had barely blinked, but when she looked again, the hallway shone with bright light and buzzed with people in white medical scrubs. A heavyset man with puffy cheeks and tiny, round optic lenses in front of his eyes pointed them to a door.

  “Almost there,” Pavo whispered.

  Gravity felt strange for a few seconds, as if she fell at the pace of a feather. Pavo’s hands pulled away from her. She tried to grab for him, but neither arm obeyed.

  “What? Pavo?”

  Glare made her squint when she looked down at silver metal. Awareness of being cold pierced the haze in Risa’s mind. Subtle at first, it grew toward paralytic, seeping into her body from the hard, uncomfortable surface upon which she sprawled. The blur of her surroundings lessened. Intense light reduced anything beyond arm’s reach to an ethereal shimmer of moving colors, as if she had awakened inside an impressionist painting. Arms crossed over her chest as she looked down. The image of bare flesh upon a squat pedestal of mirrored steel filled her eyes. Blue spots and black streaks traced erratic lines along her legs, as if a maniac with an ink brush had attacked a woman made of snow.

  The floor was only six inches away.

  A voice shrieked in the back of her mind: Shit! Cold. Get me off this thing. All that managed to slip out of her mouth was a faint “Mmmrh,” as one arm reached for a Pavo-shaped blob. A warm spot spread over her left shoulder. Her brain acknowledged the soft hiss of an air hypo seconds after the fact.

  A hand braced the underside of her chin, lifting her head until a dark-skinned man in a white jumpsuit solidified from the surreal world. A spot of red, a small caduceus, marred the painful brightness on his left breast. To its side, a silver strip contained letters. Their meaning and pronunciation felt far from what her mind was capable of grasping, though she knew it must be a name.

  “I gave you something for the pain.”

  Risa closed her eyes as his breath puffed at her hair. Coffee, bacon, eggs… She felt at once hungry and ready to vomit. He tried to put something in her mouth. Out of instinct, she wanted to recoil, but could not summon the ability to resist. The taste of plastic crossed her tongue, then sweet air. The rest of what the man said degenerated into a wave of reassuring wordless sound, and she relaxed. An elastic strap passed over her head and something pressed to her face. An explosion of white came from where Pavo stood. At the far end of the room, he gathered up the sheet she had been wrapped in.

  The man backed away. The half-face mask forced purified air into her lungs. Her flat throne vibrated from unseen mechanisms. Four seconds later, a clear barrier rose out of the ground and touched the ceiling, trapping her in a tube. Her brain picked that moment to shrug off the grip of the Narcoderm. Medical tank. Fear of being caged dueled with relief. She wanted to stand, and pawed at the clear barrier, but slipped back into a heap.

  Viscous green liquid welled up from vents in the base. The goop rose up over her legs in a matter of seconds, embracing her in merciful warmth. Risa surrendered he
r body to it, floating limp as the substance engulfed her and took her weight from the ground. She closed her eyes, relieved of control. Gelatin flooded her ears, muting the sound of the outside world. With her eyes closed, the slow rasp of her breathing became the only stimulus reaching her brain.

  Her vision blurred as a sense of falling came on. As if catching herself nodding off to sleep while standing, her head jerked back up and her eyes opened. A slender black cord slithered past her vision, coiling around her body through dark, bloody clouds within the gel. White Japanese kanji repeated in a pattern along its length, the English translation―‘Nippon Shōgyō Kumiai/Japanese Trade Consortium’―floated beneath. She tracked its path around her body to a point where the goop was darkest and watched it burrow into the exposed muscles of her right thigh. Her legs had split open from hip to ankle, skin and muscle peeled back to the bone. Burned-looking wires stranded out of the tissue, collecting in a mass that resembled a pile of smashed spiders. Somehow, she didn’t feel a thing. The scene played out as though she watched video of it happening to someone else.

  “Oh, my,” said an unfamiliar male voice, permeating the gel from unseen speakers. “Your toxin arrestor is filtering out the anesthetic. I’m so sorry, miss. You shouldn’t be awake to see this.”

  Before she could scream, she blacked out.

  She regained consciousness in what felt like an instant. Pale, unbroken skin existed where once had been massive, gaping wounds. An uneasy sensation undulated within the muscles of her arms and legs. Something moved inside her flesh.

  Her body hung straight and vertical in the gel, toes a few inches from the bottom. Pain had fled, replaced by flaccidity. Risa put a hand on the tank, staring at Pavo. He un-leaned from the wall by the door, twisting sideways to pass the medic without bumping him, and placed his gloved hand on the cylinder to meet hers. Narrow serpentine forms writhed beneath her skin, stretching down her arms and legs.

  Pavo leaned to his right, closer to a console. He pushed a button and his voice came over the tank’s speakers. “Hey. Good to see you awake. Doc says that speedware of yours was some cheap scavved shit. Astounded it worked at all. Whoever rebuilt it used the wrong connector; the wires always had juice in them. You almost burned out your CNS. I got good news, and I got some bad news. Which do you want first?”