The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Rhye never has been good at accepting kindness. Being loved doesn’t suit her.

  (It’s art. It’s art and it’s one-of-a-kind and it’s all yours. It’s an interface, like mine, but I cut out all the rendering hardware and installed a direct path to the somasensory cortices of your brain. You interpret the stimulus naturally, like poetry, or music, and—Rhye, there are no words for this. Here, hook yourself up to the test deck. Log in with me. You need to see for yourself.)

  (Just say what it does in fuckin’ English, Rack, baby.)

  (It develops metaphors for abstract environments. I put it together just f—)

  (Oh. Huh. Well, that’s somethin’. You’re a sharp motherfucker, Rack. You want a drink?)

  And she had slotted the thing away in one of the ports beneath her hair so his feelings wouldn’t be too hurt (not that she cared, of course) and turned away so he wouldn’t see her blush (fuck) and promptly gotten herself so completely fucked up on the cheap whiskey they kept in the fridge that the rest of that night was an indistinct blur. That he had wanted her to plug in with him was not something she dwelled on, not something she had let herself dwell on. Fucking sentimentality. It was that sort of shit that got you killed.

  But it sure as fuck seems to be coming in handy now, this little gift of Rack’s. The static shudders and flashes and things begin taking shape. She has a body again, and guns, and she thanks her brain for that because she’d rather hop around in here on fucking stumps and hooks than be without some representation of her weapons. Another twist of the big empty and there’s dirt beneath her boots, a gray sky above and a river ahead, and—

  Enhanced local motor/sensory homunculi detected, offloading rendering tasks . . . complete!

  Filling input buffer . . . 60% . . . 85% . . . 100%!

  Rendering buffer contents . . .

  Dead trees, dead grass, and a skeletal ferryman in a boat, cowled and waiting.

  Joining up with Rack hadn’t stopped her from doing much of anything, at first. She played the part of the hired gun on whatever jobs he asked her to—beneath that quiet boy scout front was a mercenary mind the criminal underworld would spread their cheeks and wallets for, if and when they needed his skills—but Rhye’s time was her fucking time, and if she wanted to spend it getting blackout drunk or fighting in deathmatches until the street sweepers came out to mop up the hobo piss, that was none of his fucking concern. And, to Rack’s credit, he never gave her any shit about it. He just bundled her into her bed when she came staggering home stinking of bourbon and sweat, sewed up her cuts and swabbed out her wounds, and watched. Always with the fucking watching.

  Maybe she got a little reckless (more so than usual). Reckless or sloppy. The outcome was the same: She went into the ring with two good eyes to fight some knife-throwing motherfucker and came out a cyclops, blood and goo leaking from the sliced-up socket like candle wax. She’s never been able to remember how the fuck she made it back to the apartment that night on her own. There’s a big “scene missing” card and then she’s perched on the bathroom counter while Rack dabs gently at the hole in her head, tight-lipped and trying so fucking hard not to let his concern show.

  Neither of them says anything for a while. But a question is gnawing at Rhye, and she’s drunk enough and light-headed enough from losing all that blood to finally just ask.

  “Hey. Rack.”

  He wrings the washcloth out and a slaughterhouse swirls down the plughole. “Yeah?”

  “Why the fuck do you care? About anything, I mean.” She shakes her head. Bloody water and antiseptic splatter the walls. “You know what humans say about us? We’re just fucking garbage to them. God created their ancestors, but ours were made by Tom, Dick, and motherfuckin’ Turing. We don’t have souls and they can just use us and throw us out”—she snaps her fingers, bang—”like that. Better than ruining a real person’s hands in the factories, right? That kid on the assembly line, she’s just a goddamned piece of synthetic trash, she doesn’t dream about getting the hell out of the slums to somewhere better. So why give a fuck if that’s all the world expects out of you?”

  A beat. “Do you believe them?”

  “Fuck no. For one thing, there’s no such thing as their fucking God. Load of horseshit. The only things you can rely on are these babies.” She pats her guns, solid and safe in their holsters. “But they got one thing right. Our lives ain’t worth shit in a sewer, and mine least of all. So I’ll ask again: What’s with the caring act? What’s in it for you? You think you’re gonna fix me or something?”

  “No, Rhye. I don’t think that.”

  “Then why? Why give a fuck?”

  He shrugs, shooting her that wry little smile that never reaches his eyes.

  “Hey,” he says, finally. “Everybody needs a hobby, right?”

  That was the last deathmatch Rhye ever fought in. She kept the empty socket, got an eyepatch, and aimed just as well with one eyeball as she ever had with two.

  She pays him in spent brass, the kind that gathers in your pockets and shirt cuffs after a day at the range or a night spent turning people into raw red meat. No reaper in Rhye’s head would ever bother asking for fuckin’ pennies. He stretches out a bony hand and the empty shells clatter into it like beer cans bouncing off a fence post, ting ting ting. Lead on, motherfucker, lead on. Down the river and through the woods and if the Big Bad Wolf jumps out, you give him a lead tampon in his pisshole before he can say hey baby, what’s shakin’.

  It looks like all the rivers and canals she’s ever known, choked with old shopping trolleys and used condoms and rafts of yellow-brown foam. Styx by way of The City, stinking, oily-slow, full of shit and bodies and about as good a metaphor for life as you could find. The only difference here is that all of the faces beneath the water belong to people Rhye put there. She’s not guilty—most of them deserved it—but it’s still a little fucked up. They stare at her with accusing, fish-nibbled eyes. Some claw at the bottom of the boat. She doubts shooting them again would help anything, so she saves her bullets, lighting a cigarette instead. The smoke is warm and fuzzy inside her chest, comfortingly familiar, like sucking down a carcinogenic teddy bear.

  “Do many of those fuckers get out?” she asks Reaper Man. She can be fuckin’ polite, no problem. But Mr. Skullhead doesn’t give her a second look, not even when she offers him a smoke (less out of kindness and more because she’s curious to see how the hell something without lungs would manage the trick), so she scowls and stares across the water with the coffin nail dangling moodily from her lips, chin in hand. To entertain herself she starts trying to identify every dead person she sees.

  There are foot soldiers and foreign agents, low-level punks and pirates and even a police officer or two. Other bounty hunters. Cartel bosses. The kid that couldn’t have been older than fifteen that tried to stick her up that one time, not recognizing Rhye for what she was. And yeah, even her first kill, the kiddy-diddling adoption agent with the wormy smile and the good-looking face. Nobody had suspected a goddamned thing. As long as they’re good-looking, they never do. Who the fuck were they supposed to believe, the street rat skin-job with a rap sheet at age nine? It had been his blonde-haired, blue-eyed word against hers.

  He wasn’t fucking pretty with all that blood spurting out of his mouth, though, and he sure as fuck ain’t looking too good now with half his chin rotted off. Real or not, it gives Rhye some satisfaction to see him stranded like a rat in the aftermath of a wrecked ship. She reaches down, avoiding the grasping hands. Her cigarette hisses and sizzles as it grinds into his bloated forehead. He sinks back into the water like one of those poor amusement park androids, stuck on a rail with a beam up their ass.

  “Waste of a fucking cigarette,” she says, and lights another. She actually feels kind of good after that, at least until she sees Rack’s face down there too. The drag curdles behind her ribs and sticks like grime clotting a gun barrel.

  He’s not real. She knows that for a goddamned fact. But Rhye
can’t tear herself away from those sad eyes, the round hole dribbling black blood and river water down his nose. She watches him as they pull away, until the distance between them stretches and he’s just another face in the crowd her hands have made.

  The river goes along, as rivers do, and then, out of fucking nowhere, like cockroaches circling the last can of cat food before a paycheck, suburban neighborhoods begin popping up along the banks. They stare down the bluffs with broken window eyes, yards gone to weeds and dog shit and strips of old paint. Who would have thought Hell had pink flamingos?

  The ferryman lets Rhye out on a shore made of splintered bone and more spent brass. Why the fuck he needed that shit for a toll when there are dunes of it lying within easy reach, Rhye doesn’t know. She sets out for the houses without looking back. They’ll meet up again soon enough for real, she figures. No need for handshakes when she’ll be probably be back in the boat before her shelf life hits forty.

  Keep moving. Keep searching. Wading through drifts of dead leaves and candy wrappers, glancing into doorways, further up and further in, uneasiness growing with each SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign passed and bombed-out, rotten-tired station wagon peered under. Rust, dust, plaster, Styrofoam. Two-story brick hulks sagging at crazy angles, their multi-car garages gaping like slack-jawed drunks at a nudie bar. Shadows everywhere: beneath grimy windshields, in the alleyways, stacked thick behind brokeback venetian blinds. Rhye’s been in friendlier combat zones; at least there you’ll spot the occasional buzzard or scuttling cat.

  She’s being followed by something, but that’s not surprising. A good sign: If she’s suddenly interesting enough to be getting the hairy eyeball, maybe it’s the security system crawling out from under its rock to do some territorial pissing. She puts up with the peeping for another couple of blocks, then stops in her tracks.

  “Look. You wanna ask me to the fuckin’ dance already instead of trying to peek up my skirts?”

  Nothing. Not a big talker, her stalker.

  “ ’Cause, y’know, if you’re too chickenshit to give me an invitation, I’m just gonna go with the football captain, that motherfucker is dreamy and I hear he’s got a dick like a goddamned science experiment.”

  Nada but tree shadows, all the way down the block. Nothing—and then, three or four houses down, a shape stepping out into the street. It stands there on the curb, watching quietly, silhouetted against the ashtray sky. The sharp, familiar scent of a lit cigarette punches through the stale air.

  “Rhye? Is that you?”

  But it’s not the figure speaking to her. This voice comes from behind, one she’s been wanting to hear ever since she plugged in. Her breath snags barbed wire. She half-turns to look back over her shoulder, against her better judgment.

  “Holy shit, Rack! Where the fuck are you, man? I’ve been looking all over the place for you! Are y—”

  “No, look, look, Rhye, you need to get out of here. You need to get out of here right now. I made a huge mistake, I underestimated the security protocol, and she’s going to come after you, too, if you don’t go. Don’t worry about me. Rhye?”

  The shadowy shape is walking towards her. Rhye’s pretty sure it’s not out selling cookies or spreading the word of the Lord. “That’s assuming I know how to fucking get out of here without you, man,” she says. Her hands are already on her guns. “And what the fuck do you mean by she?”

  The purposeful walk has turned into a wolf-trot. The light still isn’t great, but she can see now that it’s a girl. About her height, about her build, same hair color, same way of moving—

  Wait. Wait just one fucking minute.

  “Rack? This security program. I’m just, like, seeing my subconscious or some bullshit again, right? Right?” The other woman is running now. “Because if you’ve done what I think you did—”

  “I, uh . . . ”

  Motherfucker.

  “. . . I may have cribbed heavily from existing source material, yes.”

  The woman grins as she sprints. Still has both of her eyes. Four years ago, maybe? A copy of her at her most bitter and burned out, thirsty for blood and not caring whose.

  “Let’s do this, then,” she says, sighing, and then there’s no time for talk anymore.

  So there’s this skin-job kid that gets adopted by one of those high muckity-muck Ganymede mobsters. He isn’t exceptionally bright and he sure as hell ain’t a looker, but Don Whoeverthefuck has a bug up his ass ’cause his biological clock is tick-tick-ticking away like a block of C4 is tenderly bearhugging his testicles. Old fart needs an heir. All those years of pushing baby carriages into traffic ain’t gonna count for shit if he doesn’t have an heir to pick up the slack when his heart valves do their last dance with the extra-lard pork belly. He throws some money around, which is how he’s solved every other problem in his bloated life, and hey voila, instant son. The boy is dumber than a sack of skullfucked squirrels, but that just makes him fit in with all the real Mafioso squirts that came from ballsacks and bad decisions.

  Things go on swingin’ as they usually do. Little Johnny Electronuts gets in his share of trouble, but Daddy is always there to yank his ass out of the fire with greased palms or greased dicks or a carefully administered dose of goon muscle to somebody’s knees and groin. Then, one day, kiddo gets the idea that he’s some kind of fucking hacker. He’s nineteen and he’s better protected than the Virgin Mary’s holy of holies and he’s got a chip on his shoulder and a hard-on in his lucky rocketship underoos just crying to fuck something up. He tries to bust his way into a rival family’s black box so he can crow about it to all his knuckle-dragging script kid buddies. This is what is known in the business as a Giant Fucking Mistake, ’cause the security system in this motherfucker was set up by another motherfucker by the name of Rack, and Rack is a goddamned super genius when it comes to that sort of thing. It grabs the kid by the short hairs almost as soon as he plugs in and slams the door behind him, and when the Don’s cavalry comes busting in to save his ass, their nuts land squarely in a bear trap. His consciousness is all locked up like a gold bar inside a treasure chest. They’ve got the box, but nobody seems to be able to get through to the toy inside.

  Nobody but the motherfucker who designed the system in the first place, that is. They offer him money. They offer him a lot of money. And less because of the money and more because he likes a challenge, Rack bites.

  And that’s where things get fucked up.

  Dodge for dodge and feint for feint and bullet for bullet they come together, the woman that was and the woman that is. The Not-Rhye is laughing like a kid at the circus as she spins her hand-cannons, laughing and twisting and breathing in that gunsmoke that turns your snot black like she’s a barracuda and it’s seawater. She doesn’t give a shit whether she lives or dies and Rhye knows this because it used to be her, and she suddenly realizes, with something like shock and something like mild disgust, that this is no longer a truth that applies. Something inside Rhye wants to make it out alive, wants to go home to the shitty-ass flat with the bullet holes in the air conditioner, wants to taste bourbon and cigarettes and go right on living alongside that dumbfuck brainiac like she has every day for the past five years. Dangerous. Very dangerous. The moment you start wanting is the moment you slow down. And the moment you slow down—

  Not-Rhye lands close enough that Rhye can smell the burning wire and ozone stink of her over the reek of cordite and hot metal. She flicks one of the pistols like a gecko lapping up a mosquito and it coughs emphysema and tuberculosis and Rhye’s cheek is laid open to the bone even as she rolls behind a row of trash cans, ears ringing like pulled fire alarms. She’s a fucking idiot. She should’ve been scrapped at construction. She’s going to die here, soft and stupid as a human cop, and Rack is going to be trapped inside this box forever. The mobsters are going to be fucking pissed when nobody comes back. Good. Fuck ’em, and fuck their wives and moms and childhood pets for good measure.

  “Were you trying to hit me, or did on
e of those pink flamingos do something to piss you off?” she says. If she can irritate Not-Rhye into making a mistake she might have a chance. Anything is worth a shot. “The neighbors are gonna talk, y’know.”

  No response. Too smart for her own good. God damn she wishes Rack had held a less flattering view of her when he programmed this fucker. “Oh well. We’d have made shitty Home Owners Association members anyway. Rack! You alright?”

  “I think so. I wasn’t exactly expecting this to happen when I went in. I thought—”

  “That was your first fuckin’ mistake, Rack baby. You do too much of that anyway.” She rubs her blistered, lead-stained fingers clean on her cargo pants and digs for a fresh magazine. “Is there any way for me to disable her easier than giving her brain airholes?”

  You could hear a gnat fart in the pause that follows.

  “Rack, say something before I come over there and do some kinky shit to your ass with this gun barrel, please.”

  “. . . I don’t know,” he says. “I think I can do it, but you’ll have to free me up first.”

  “Fuck a row of baby ducks, is that all? Lemme send Little Miss Red Rover a fuckin’ engraved invitation to move her psycho ass to a new neighborhood and I’ll be right over with a bundt cake and a goddamned meat loaf.”

  But she’s already tensing to spring back into the line of fire, because of course she is.

  Up and at ’em, knocking the bins over clitter-clatter like a fuckball of feral cats, and sure enough there’s her shadow racing to greet her, four years younger, one eye richer, and meaner than a limp-dicked drill sergeant. No time to fire off a good shot; she says fuck it and goes ahead and launches herself straight into the other woman’s knees and down the two of them tumble in a muddy heap of fists and flailing motorcycle boots like a pair of overturned shot glasses, the world reduced to rubber soles squeegeeing shins and knuckles glancing off grittywet concrete. Rack’s yelling something. Little-known fact, though: It’s pretty fucking hard to focus on anything but the task at hand when the task is trying to club your teeth out with the handshake-end of a pistol. She dodges the blow and it glances off her temple instead with a hollow thwonk. Gasoline stars and flat-tire sparks shimmy-shake across her vision.