Blind and weaponless.
Disadvantaged.
I was turned on by the dizzies and worried by the knowledge that Tulu was in the crowd and gunning for me and I couldn’t see a damn thing.
The sensations warred inside me.
To make it worse the Custodian had left his posse at centre stage to stalk me with his probe.
‘Perform, bitch,’ he murmured as he rubbed it up against me.
The voice-over recited the ridiculous made-up personal history that Ibis had created for me. Transparent lies.
And yet the wall screen to my right flicked up a bid.
Guess who? My favourite Voodoo Mama.
Maybe it was the effect of Marinette so close but the dizzie began to wear off abruptly. Cheap house shit.
Its withdrawal left me dangerously pissed off with the whole charade. Make that the whole world.
Oh, oh. Comedown.
I suddenly stopped parading and strode right to the end of the dais, where I stood belligerently, hands on hips.
The indifferent background buzz instantly dropped a few decibels. Meat didn’t eyeball the buyers. Meat simpered and pirouetted and coquetted to attract the highest prices.
I felt the probe sting my buttocks and begin to prod between my thighs.
I spun on instinct and booted it right out of Listrata’s hands. He swore softly and drew a shok from his coat pocket, smiling at the crowd as if my reaction had been choreographed.
‘I should have picked you,’ he said under his breath. ‘Faux bitch.’
‘Pick this.’ I head-butted him in his cadaverous stomach. He folded like a shawarma wrapper and we catapulted off the stage, taking out most of the front row.
I recovered before him, tearing my cheap high heels off to use as weapons. Behind me the wall screen started flickering, going crazy with bids.
Seems the buyers liked a grrl with attitude.
Suckers.
Knowing that I’d blown my chance with Monk, the least I could do was salvage some dignity . . . and run.
I clocked the exit just as Tulu’s two bodyguards ploughed through the upended chairs and buyers toward me.
I evaded them as far as a vreal-sex booth.
Muscled and fit, they jumped me together. One pinned my legs while the other punched me hard. I felt my nose crack.
Pain and then welcome numbness.
I kicked out hard and furious. The strength in my still-sore legs bounced one of them back on to an advertiser’s sensor pad. A cloud of Happy granules pumped into the air around him. He gobbed a mouthful, slowing him down to a giggle.
I spat blood and roundhoused the other guy. He collapsed back on top of his partner. The two of them wallowed about in slow motion, caught in a fug of free powdered bliss.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet, breathing blood bubbles out through the split in my nose.
Compound fracture. Crap.
Tulu approached me from one side, Listrata from the other.
I wondered if Marinette would show herself again. She seemed to have a bit of a thing for me.
I really had to do something about the calibre of the people I attracted.
Security materialised, wearing uniforms and jewellery. They formed a ring around me. I looked for a sign of their allegiances but couldn’t see a Lash or an Axe, or Monk’s Running Man.
Mercs. That was a good thing.
I took Listrata low and dirty, grabbing for his genitals. At first I thought that he was padded well but then I suddenly knew the reason for his hatred of Meat. Someone else had beaten me to the mutilation.
‘Eunuch,’ I spat and reached for his throat.
He pinged me with the probe on full charge and I collapsed into convulsions.
As he untangled himself from my twitching and salivating, Mal burst out of the lift, taking a line of pretty Security with her. She waded towards me with a determination that warmed my shuddering body.
I watched her go down an arm’s length from me under a paralysis net.
Out stares met.
Nice thought, Mal, mine tried to say.
Stupid, hers replied.
Me or her?
Security closed in for the clean-up while Listrata stood astride me with the arrogance of a slave trader.
I couldn’t stop shaking and dribbling to do anything about it.
The Custodian lifted the probe to jab me again when the bidding chimes pealed and stopped him.
He froze mid-probe, glancing around at the screens. The one above me on the ceiling had blanked, pumping out Caribbean music to entertain the crowd.
Someone was engaged in an off-line negotiation.
Someone with money was buying.
Me? Please.
I craned my neck back to look at Mal. Hope lit her eyes, the only part of her able to move.
A voice-over announced the end of bidding for me, and a closing of the deal.
Security shoved Tulu aside to come and get me.
Listrata knelt down close to my ear, a hand up to shield himself from my spit.
‘I’ll be watching for you,’ he whispered.
Then he was up and striding back to the stage to quiet his dissatisfied crowd.
I dragged myself over to Mal and flopped my arm over her.
‘M-mine,’ was all I could make my lips say.
Security tried to drag me off her and roll me onto an inflatable stretcher. I concentrated everything to make my fingers grasp her.
‘They’re together,’ someone in the audience called out. ‘I saw them in the lift.’
‘You’d better take them both,’ another called out.
Security hesitated while they conferred quietly. After a few moments one of them ordered in another stretcher.
The crowd gave a little cheer, too busy with the conclusion to my drama to engage with the newest selection from Listrata’s Meat-tray.
My appreciation of their intervention was silent but intense.
Security floated us to the lift. In a minute or so we were on the roof. I sucked in a lungful of clear air, thankful to be out of the markets.
A ’copter landed within the hour. With relief I saw the Running Man emblem on the side.
The pilot folded the seats back and security laid Mal and me side by side behind him.
The trip took longer than any other ’copter flight I’d been on, the pilot finally bringing us in steep and quick, landing on a promise.
Beside me, Mal was still immobilised by the paralysis net. The pilot refused to disable it before arrival.
‘Y-you leave her too l-long, she’ll g-go b-berserker,’ I pointed out when I regained some power over my tongue.
He didn’t care.
Nor did he care about the blood still bubbling from my broken nose onto the plush carpet on the floor of the ’copter.
So much for the cosmetic surgery. A whack on the cheekbone, a few new scars and a change of clothes and I’d be back to my old self.
Sometime during the flight I stopped twitching but parts of me still felt numb and heavy. I’d swallowed so much blood that it felt as though my tongue and throat wore a coating of warm metal.
The abruptness of the landing got me vomiting.
I managed to sit up and peer out of the window. My misery vanished for a few seconds as I absorbed the vista.
Where had I been expecting James Monk to live? In Hi-Tel luxury?
I stared in naive wonder. This was luxury, yes, but not the high-rise sort. Or the antique-obsessive Gerwent Ban sort.
This was something else.
A mountainside of sweeping lawns and flat-roofed white buildings dotted in between waterfalls and ponds. Tropical landscaping bursting with frangipanis and passionvine that made Viva seem bare and ugly.
Nobody could afford this much space on the coast. It just didn’t exist.
But it did. Monk owned a flat-topped mountain and a whole coastal plain in Northern Viva, complete with pollution sweepers kiting about in the sky and giant wate
r-filters rolling about in the waves breaking on the beach.
I thought of Fishertown and the slick, oily grey of the water there. It was impossible that this could be the same ocean.
Tears smarted in my eyes at the sheer beauty of it - and at the sheer selfish greed. No one should have that much.
I hated Monk already.
North and south of where I stood, neighbouring mountains repeated the pattern.
Not just Monk but others.
I’d heard talk of a place where the mountains jutted up from the ground like teeth. As I watched the cable car speeding up the mountain towards us, I tried to think of the name.
Chalice?
I’d learned about it in net-school, a national park in another era when such things existed. That meant that I was at the northern tip of Viva, over five hundred klicks from The Tert.
The thought alone gave me vertigo.
As we landed an Intimate appeared on the pad and opened the door. The pilot disabled the web spread over Mal and the Intimate began plucking off the tendrils.
‘Be careful—’ I warned.
The big woman regained feeling in and control of her muscles in an uncontrollable rush.
I scrambled for the door but she swiped at me with one hand, shoving me out so hard that I somersaulted across the tarmac. Dissatisfied with that, she turned on the Intimate and kicked its abdomen so hard that the bio-plas skin covering split.
The pilot panicked and lifted the ’copter up a few metres, tipping Mal out. She landed on the pad with a sickening whump.
It didn’t seem to have any ill effect. She stood up like a beast shaking off flies.
‘Mal. You know me?’
She had a think about it. After a moment she nodded.
‘Your senses are freaked. It’s how everyone feels if they’ve been webbed for too long. It passes.’
She grunted, whirling her huge arms as if she was getting the circulation back in them.
I hopped back, wary.
The Intimate righted itself and, holding its stomach together, politely invited us into the waiting cable car.
I stumbled straight in. Mal might be the best back-up I’d ever had but right now I figured that she was Monk’s problem.
I shouted at the Intimate, ‘Move before she pulverises us.’
It had enough smarts to see my point and back-tracked quickly, leaping into the cable car as Mal came after us.
I slammed the door and the Intimate hit the button to get us moving. We rattled downwards, leaving Mal to vent her aggravation on the oleander bushes around the edge of the landing pad.
Still holding its innards, the Intimate introduced itself and welcomed me to Chalice Two.
‘Where’s Chalice One?’
It pointed north to the next mountain.
‘Who owns that?’
‘Sera Bau.’
Figures.
I leaned against the cable-car window and took in the Intimate’s denims, shiny shoes and a clean white long-sleeved shirt with the buttons missing where its guts hung out. Despite the injury it launched into its programmed tourist blurb.
‘Monk House extends over many levels. Your accommodation is situated on the twenty-fifth terrace. Terraces twenty to thirty are reserved for employees. You are permitted to visit certain areas of the beach, the dais and the gymnasium. The rest of the estate is restricted.’
‘What’s that?’ I pointed at a huge structure midway down the mountain.
‘The Orchid Cage is a restricted area. The plants are easily disturbed. The gardeners will choose flowers for display in your cabin on a daily basis should you wish. A mellifluous version of the oncidium’s cultivation is available to you on Channel Sunshine of your in-house entertainment. A medic has been requested to attend to your wounds.’
I cleared my throat. It still tasted like blood. ‘No medic.’ I said. ‘Just painkillers.’
‘Painkillers will be available to you via the service chute located near the bathing pavilion. Perhaps when you have had time to reflect on your appearance you may wish to request further assistance. In that case, please call the housekeeper.’
I glared at the Intimate, searching for signs of intended insult, and found only a bland expression. If it was trash-talking me, it was very subtle.
‘Mr Monk’s personal assistant will contact you in due course. Please feel free to make use of all the accoutrements and services provided in your cabin.’
Whew. I’d never been spoken to like that. It was downright freaky. And what the hell did mell-if-luous mean? I delved into my language infusion and inhaled a snort of laughter.
Well, mell-if-luous orchid-song probably beat the hell out of Tert homebake.
The cable-car trip was nearly as bad as flying - the car flapped about on its cable like washing in a cyclone. It took all my powers of self-control not to jump ship and climb.
That and the sealed, bulletproof safety doors. Maybe I wasn’t the first person to have that urge.
I stumbled out of the door and felt the woosh of air as the Intimate rattled away. It seemed an archaic way to get up and down a mountain but there was no accounting for a rich boy’s tastes.
The doors to the cabin were all open and I wandered around inside like a burglar in the wrong house. Lavish’s club had been luxurious but it was still a club. Gerwent Ban’s palace had been a show-piece - a mausoleum of useless antiques. The sort of thing you’d expect from a King.
This was something else altogether. All the little touches of wealth: the telescope and viewing lounge on the deck, the translucent walls shimmering with high-density art, the crisp white sheets, the crackle of the bug net safely collecting and delivering stray insects back into the world unharmed.
Why would Monk care about keeping bugs alive, I wondered?
I wandered through, searching for the chute with the painkillers. It was between the san and the bedroom. I sucked down twice the recommended dose, then continued taking a tour as though the cabin was the dark side of the moon.
‘San’ was hardly the word to describe - what had the Intimate called it? - the bathing pavilion. I stood, torn between wanting to wash and get the blood off my face and the need to check the place out.
The recce option won.
I couldn’t lie naked in the bath until I’d checked out what might be looking back at me through the untinted windows.
From the balcony the gardens dropped away steeply into jungled terraces, each with its own white-topped cabin. No tell-tale goat tracks for hikers. James Monk’s guests weren’t encouraged to wander.
Not convinced that everyone on the mountain couldn’t see me, I climbed into the viewing lounge and peered through the telescope.
Maybe I could see them too.
I swung the telescope through several full arcs until I felt satisfied that I was currently unobserved.
Fatigue began to take over. I forced myself into the bath (Teece’s tub was never gonna feel the same), thinking that the water offered some privacy at least, and was almost asleep when Monk’s PA contacted me on the wall screen.
It told me it would come in a short time and that, in view of my hurried departure from the Markets, I should avail myself of the wardrobe provided for guests, and of the light refreshments that were also supplied.
A tray of unrecognisable food was waiting in the bedroom. I roamed around it, stuffing the strange tastes in my mouth and pondering a whole range of things.
In between mouthfuls I tried on clothes and stripped them off again. I spared a moment to look in the reflect. My nose had stopped bleeding but was more than a mess. Gaping skin and chipped cartilage.
Not exactly a good appearance for an Amorato.
The why-had-Monk-hired-me question surfaced again and bobbed about.
I climbed into a pair of tight pants and, despite the warm temperature, a high-collared silk coat. I’d had more than enough public nudity for one lifetime. Monk was out of luck.
As promised, another Intimate ar
rived to escort me to the boss’s pad somewhere in the middle gradient of Chalice Two. I saw figures in their transparent cabins all the way there. Monk was obviously keen on entertaining - and on voyuerism.
Must be a media thing, I mused.
For what it was worth I’d tried to reassume the mantle of the haughty Amorato again, twirling Glorious’s dizzie ring on my finger. As the Intimate gave me a mell-if-luous travelogue, Glorious occupied my thoughts, until the car wobbled to a stop outside a pagoda. The outside reminded me of Lavish’s club. A stern mixture of opulence and extreme cleanliness. Or maybe I was too accustomed to filth and poverty.
After MoVay most things were hard to digest.
The Intimate walked me through a detector and into a sparsely furnished room with doors and solid walls and banks of screens. In fact, all the walls in the boss’s pad were opaque.
Seemed that he liked to look, not be looked at. Even the view over the sparkling beach was through tinted shutters.
‘Jales Belliere? I’m James Monk.’
Finally. Let’s get this over.
He stared at my nose and for a moment I thought he was going to laugh.
Then I thought I was going to.
Monk was actually not much older than me. I stifled my reaction immediately. One thing that living with my stepdad Kevin had taught me: never let age or physical appearance deceive you. People who blew your expectations were dangerous because they nearly always had a point to prove.
Hell, I should have known that - I was one of them.
‘Your public fotos are fake,’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t do for everyone to know what the most powerful man in the Southern Hem looked like.’
‘Are you?’
He stared moodily out to sea while I appreciated his deep tan, sprinkling of freckles, and thick brown hair. If Loyl Daac had cornered the ’zine-centrefoldonly-barely-tainted-with-the-slums appeal, Monk owned the sophisticated-gangster look.
Even the flat metallic plug behind his ear glinted style. I figured the guy was getting live sport while we talked.
‘Man? Yes. Person - soon enough. You don’t appreciate what comes to you too quickly,’ he said.
This time I couldn’t hold back my laugh or its derogatory edge.
Crash Deluxe Page 17
