As I straightened up, the scale on my cheekbone began to ache.
Then sting.
It felt hot to the touch, like a recent burn.
I stood for a moment, confused, thinking of Wombebe.
It was as though the little feral thing hung around my neck, picking at the edges of my scale to get my attention.
Stupid fancy, Parrish. Get moving before someone sees you.
With a final look around, I made my way back to the entrance. The guard was back at his post wearing a portable vreal mask and picking his teeth. Not a lot of entertainment up here after dark.
As I slipped behind him I silently promised him a show tomorrow night.
The climb down to the party dais took the rest of the night - and most of the skin off my knees.
Crouched behind the cover of Monk’s manicured bushes, I checked the layout for the party by the light glancing across from the nearby cabins.
The roof was a cathedral-high imitation thatch with roll-down sides and a circulating bar. The nanos were at work, polishing the floor and gobbling specks of dust from it. I could see them spark and burst every now and then. The faintest translucent glow from the open sides of the dais warned me against walking straight in. Security was on and humming.
I crept through the landscaped bushes and rockeries until I found the sleek lines of Monk’s private transport. Then I traced the path back to the dais, counting the steps and memorising the curves several times over. The last time I walked it backward with my eyes closed, hands out like a blind person.
A few metres short of the line I heard a new noise.
My skin prickled. Someone was watching me. I turned and forced myself to walk slowly back to the main line where I rang for the cable car. I waited while it descended from a few stations above, feeling my watcher’s stare right between my shoulder blades.
I pressed the panel for my cabin and sank low into the seat, out of sight. As the car moved off, I crawled along the floor and jumped out on the other side into the dark.
I slid down the embankment until I reached the dais station again. On a hunch and with painful care I crept to Monk’s private transport lines where I lay on one side of the track in the darkness to wait.
After a time a figure emerged from the path, stooping into the shadows.
Monk’s private luge slid silently alongside me with a warm rush of air. The watcher walked towards it, stepping over me. A boot scraped my face.
I felt rather than saw the person pause and peer back into the dark as they sensed a wrongness.
I held my breath and clenched my fists, ready to use them.
Then a voice resonated from the comm inside the luge.
‘Where are you?’
My watcher sank into the seat. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ Velvety voice. Female.
‘Get back here. Now.’ Monk.
A sigh. ‘Yes,’ she said softly and closed the hatch. The luge slid away.
I lay for a long time staring at the stars and wondering why the velvet voice sent echoes across my memory.
The climb back to my cabin took for ever. I didn’t dare use the cable car and the terraces seemed steeper and slipperier than earlier.
In spite of that, my inner rage welcomed the real strain. Too little exertion always made me stale and jumpier than usual.
Leaving the lights in the cabin off, I bathed again and put some healing skins on my hands and knees. Then I threw away the lid of a bottle of something green and covered with warnings. I settled in front of the big screen in the living room.
‘Show me a map of Monk House.’
I swigged from the bottle and got a rush. The map wavered for a second, then came back into focus. I studied the detail closely, working out the distances from the dais to the helipad.
‘Which cabin is Mr Monk in?’
The map stubbornly refused to answer anything about its owner or the other guests.
I went over the layout again and made some guesses.
‘Now a map of Viva.’ It enlarged. ‘Now the greater environs.’ I avoided saying Tertiary Sector. It enlarged again.
I told it to download the maps into the cabin’s complimentary palm-pad.
When I’d learned what I wanted I took another few swigs until the absinthe numbed my nerves enough for me to wireless in.
I slipped Merv’s mystic star from its chain and held it against the base of my neck. The sensors reacted to my body heat and I felt the uncomfortable prickling of the polymer interface budding.
Monk House’s local vrealspace was conventional and image-based. A sunny island of blue skies, salt breeze and beachcombers. The launch pad was a yacht moored just off a long jetty. I borrowed a bikini-clad avatar from the guest register and dived straight into water that was the same colour as the absinthe.
I swam inexpertly to the jetty and climbed the steps. At the top of the steps the housekeeper presented itself. It looked uncannily like Mal - monstrous biceps, face like a rampaging bull.
While it verified my ID, I ran the gamut of the menu and blew a hole into Monk’s armament inventory. The alarms tripped and all the virus-breakers swarmed the hole. While they patched madly, I slipped unnoticed into the transportation section and preprogrammed the luge. I was in and out without a ripple and back in my avatar just as security caught up with me.
The jetty dissolved under my feet and dumped me in a tidal rip. In a flicker of net-time I was swept out to sea. I struggled to stay afloat, telling myself that this was just high-definition vreal. But my brain couldn’t cog the difference.
Panic took over and I began to sink. Under the water I could see dark virus shapes pursuing me. Sharks and rays.
I kicked out at them.
They wouldn’t have to worry about eating me, I thought: I was going to drown in a figment of my own perception.
Too stupid. Too vreal.
Teece.
Help.
But Teece wouldn’t hear me in this little corner of paradise.
Water forced its way into my lungs and everything began to drift away.
I only vaguely noticed being shot from the water and caught on a broad hard back. On the third bump I snorted sea water out of my nose.
Air rushed in and I collapsed, clinging to the slippery creature underneath me. My vision cleared a little.
Snout.
She bobbed her head as if to say It wasn’t my idea and started cutting through the waves back towards the island.
Sharks converged, biting chunks from her skin. She raced them and I clung on, helpless as her blood streamed behind us like a veil.
Save her, Merv.
Her avatar began to disintegrate underneath me, lasting just long enough to dump me in the shallows. I struggled to the beach and looked back. Snout had fragmented under bloody froth and dark moving shapes.
I found the exit under the beach umbrella and crawled underneath it, surfacing into realspace.
The absinthe bottle beside my ankles was smashed and my skin prickled in the air-conditioning, wet with booze and sweat and real blood. The gashes were small but messy.
Back in there, Snout was bleeding to death. Savaged.
I started to cry.
Stupid Parrish. Stupid vreal world. Stupid life.
I sat and watched the glass and its potent liquid absorbed by the nanos and wondered whether, if I died right here on the expensive mat, they’d do the same thing to me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Glorious would know what to wear. I’d palmed forward and back through the catalogue until my eyes watered. Monk House’s range didn’t account for my fashion taste. Could I wear a dress as the house protocol required?
No. I don’t think so.
In desperation I closed my eyes and stabbed my finger on an image. Without looking at my choice I gave my size and shut the page. The housekeeper told me it would be delivered in an hour.
Problem solved.
I called for the cable car and asked to visit Mal.
> She was still in the clinic up near the helipad. I found her sitting in front of One World, unseeing. One side of her face was still unresponsive.
I walked her out into the garden and started throwing rocks into the water feature to upset Monk’s listening bugs. I didn’t need to tell Mal to keep the conversation cryptic. She still couldn’t talk much.
‘You OK?’
She nodded. She’d lost weight in a couple of days. The blackness under her eyes told me she still wasn’t sleeping, due to the paralysis withdrawal.
‘Can you fly?’
Mal thought about it for a few seconds and nodded. The good side of her mouth crinked and a spark lit her eyes.
‘Can you deal with trouble?’
She flexed her good arm and wiped the saliva away from her lips. ‘Wh-en?’
‘You’ll hear the commotion.’
‘Whe-re?’
I handed her the palm-pad in which I’d flagged the coordinates. ‘Tourist route.’
She looked at the map and wiped her chin. ‘Fu-n.’
I went back to my cabin and got ready. The suit I’d ordered had arrived. Halter-necked, emerald glitter sequins, gaudy and revealing. I felt like one of the babes on the Shadoville strip. The only extra I wore was Merry 3 # on my wrist.
I took the cable car down to the dais and let security scan me.
By midnight the night sky was alight with ’copters. Most of them were queuing for the helipad on the dais terrace. The cable car worked furiously up and down the lines, ferrying those who chose the scenic route from the top.
I recognised some of the famous faces as they arrived. Manatunga Right-woman, Laidley Beaudesert, Chaos Left: the media’s most famous anchors - Prier pilots like Razz Retribution had been. I realised now how Daac had met his patron.
What struck me, though, was the uniformly healthy colour of their skin and their easy laughter. In The Tert laughter was both rare and dangerous. In the ’burbs it was a kind of watered-down response.
Yet these people spent it so carelessly.
The circulating bar became crowded with them - extravagantly attractive galahs riding above each other’s noise. Intimates lined the shadows edges, silently waiting on the whims of their owners.
It should have been glamorous to me. I should have been awed or impressed. Something.
Instead I felt hollow and grim.
The gulf between the haves and the have-nots was no new stain on life’s fabric but I’d never had my nose rubbed in it like this before. I understood more clearly why Loyl had become such a zealot, so obsessed with making a better life for his own. He’d spent time among these people as paid meat. He’d also spent time in the inland mines.
To him the economic divisions in life were raw wounds.
Suddenly I wanted to see him, overwhelmed by a need to be with someone who knew my life. Knew me.
The memory of his scent lingered on me still.
‘What are you wearing?’
I jumped as the subject of my thoughts spoke in my ear. I felt myself flush. He was damn near perfect at bursting my bubble.
When I didn’t answer, he cut to the chase.
‘And what are you doing here?’ Loyl persisted. ‘Why did you run out on me in The Tert?’
‘You lied to me.’
He stiffened. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t change.’ I kept my tone flat and measured as if we were swapping directions to the nearest drinks waiter. ‘You thought that if you told me what you did then I’d toe the line . . . you thought I would . . . need you.’
Now I turned to him, heat radiating from my skin. ‘Let’s get one thing straight, Loyl. I will never need you. I will NEVER toe your line.’
We eyeballed until a waiter broke the tension with a tray of drugs.
I gulped a fizzy yellow liquid that bubbled in the back of my throat. Loyl reached into a bowl labelled ’Phets’.
‘They’re bad for performance,’ I remarked.
He didn’t attempt to hide his sneer. ‘Performance, Parrish, is one thing I never have a problem with.’ He buttoned his suit coat to hide the patches of sweat on his shirt.
I’d upset him and the thought gave me powerful satisfaction.
Loyl glanced into the crowd, smiling his best at someone. ‘I don’t know what you’re planning. But it had better wait until after this party. I’ve got business riding on this. Understand?’
‘You’re chasing an investor to replace Razz, aren’t you?’ I accused.
‘You didn’t think I would just stop, did you?’ he said, softly. ‘Now you’ve seen what they have, surely you understand?’
Someone in the crowd signalled to him and he stepped in among the crush of elegant shoulders. A hand gripped my elbow before I could follow him.
Monk stood at my side, suited and handsome enough.
Boy, was I over handsome men.
‘I told you to get your face fixed,’ he said, furious.
I touched my still-swollen nose. ‘Your medic didn’t have enough beauty gobblers to go around.’
‘Fortunately for you, I have no alternatives. You’re about to meet Lat Lindstrom, a Northern Hem business associate here for the Pan-Sat screenings. You will entertain him to his satisfaction or I shall find you a very quiet place to live.’
The threat was delivered with his trade-mark boyish smile.
He steered me into the crush of bodies yet nobody brushed against him. The crowd melted back as if his personal space was sacred.
Or contagious.
We made our way to the raised dais at the edge of the dance floor where he touched lightly on the shoulder a tall, athletically built man in an expensive evening suit.
I felt a sliver of relief. If I had to pretend to entertain someone, at least they weren’t shaped like a toad. The man stepped back to accommodate us into his circle. Behind him stood a short, round guy wearing a floral suit and snappy heels.
It took only an eye-blink to realise that I’d made a mistake. The athletic suited body belonged to a woman. As she turned my back stiffened and a chill pimpled every last piece of my skin.
Kat. Little sister?
I automatically put my hand out to touch her. She took it, her grip stronger than mine. Unsurprised to see me, she turned my reaction into a handshake.
‘Good evening . . . Jales, is it? Your services were recommended.’
I returned her handshake, ‘And you are?’ Tell me, Kat. For chrissakes. What are you doing here?
‘I’m a convalescing athlete—’
‘You were an athlete,’ interrupted Monk. ‘Katrilla is now my best hound-in-training.’
I looked between them, confused.
Kat dropped her head. I saw her fingers curl into her palm. ‘James means I am noviced to him as a Prier pilot. A temporary change of profession.’
Monk snorted with derision. ‘Your running days are over, Kat, face it.’
You. You took Wombebe to get me here.
She saw my expression, my sudden comprehension and swiftly changed the subject. ‘I’d like you to meet a dear friend of James’s and mine, Lat Lindstrom.’
James’s and mine. Three little words that continued to burn into me. A warning and a crucial item of information all at once.
Don’t let them know about us, Parrish, they told me. Don’t for a second let them know.
I let go of Kat’s hand. She looked amazing. Lean and magnificent, skin sheen courtesy of the best nutrient supplements and the perfect muscle tone of the physically elite - how easy to believe she could leap tall buildings and outrun a fire.
And sexy, her breasts swelling in the vee of her suit coat. She wore nothing underneath it, the material so fine that you could see the sculpting of her muscles, the curve of her back.
Only the slightest tell-tale yellowing of her eyes told me that her liver was under stress. The tightness around her mouth indicated duress of a different type.
In one choreographed movement Kat tore her hair free
of its tight braid and let it spill down over her shoulders. The highlights glinted with obscene health.
I suddenly knew why I hated narcissism.
It had come between us always - beauty and self-interest before sisterhood.
Just look where those different values had gotten us.
I definitely had it wrong.
Kat interrupted my silent musings with a sharp nudge to indicate I should make room for Monk.
I glanced across at Lindstrom.
He eyed me greedily and I wondered what he’d been told I could - or would - do.
‘Lat, I must apologise for Jales’s appearance. She had a most unfortunate accident, tripping and falling from the cable car. It hasn’t, of course, dampened her spirits. Jales?’
I nodded, still incapable of getting my tongue to play the seductress. My mind was too busy making sense of events; accepting that Kat must have recommended my ‘services’ to Monk; and that it was Kat who had stepped over me last night. Kat with the new silky, cultured voice. What had she been doing these last few years? And why was she with Monk?
I had to talk to her.
‘I like it. It’s so butch. Come stand next to me, Jales. Tall women always make me feel so safe.’ Lindstrom gurgled like a baby.
Kat and I exchanged glances, brief, innocent enough: a collusion of tall women - not sisters.
Before I could reply, our happy tête-à-tête grew by two.
‘Laud.’ Monk’s voice had a tighter edge. ‘I hope you are content.’
The ex-musician of the media-famous ménage à trois stepped into the circle, bringing his dance partner along.
Loyl.
If this got any more ridiculous I’d laugh till I died.
It did.
The band started up. Garter Thin and the VBs.
I kept my back to them . . . just in case.
Introductions led to more talk. More drugs. Around us the crowd loosened, lubricated by whatever they needed to lower their inhibitions. But wherever our circle drifted on the dais the invisible barrier kept them at bay.
‘You kidnapped the kid to get me here,’ I said quietly to Kat when I got the chance.
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