“Livery’s got a damn sense of humor.” She sized me up again, and Geoff peeked over the top edge of the bar. I dropped my weight and threw a hip, and the man crowding in to see if he could get a handful of breast on my left stumbled back, losing his place at the bar. “You got hard bit?”
Cautious relief warred with nebulous unease inside me. “I do.”
“And what else?”
Nothing you’ll subtract from me. I gave her a sunny, feral smile. “A deep desire for peace and quiet.”
“Ha. Show me.” She slapped a shiny key fob down on the bar, I slapped down a round bit of circuit-etched hard currency, and she grinned at me, revealing implemented teeth filed to sharp points under those bright-green eyes. The teeth were only half as pointed as the intelligence moving around inside that warmbody skull, and if not for her metrics — I was cataloguing everyone around me out of habit — she would have had a shot at implementation. She was probably Waste bred and born, though, if her mane was any indication. It had none of the sleek lifelessness of hair that’s never seen real sunshine. The Waste-bred weren’t allowed into Cities. The risk of a stray bit of mutation left over from the Wars laying waste to a City’s screened genetic pool was just too high.
That’s also why Egress trains are sealed. One of the official reasons, that is.
We exchanged the little bits of metal at the same instant, and I didn’t twitch when she spun the bitcoin and made it disappear. Which made her pupils dilate unsteadily for a moment, and that interest in her gaze sharpened, bright as a runner’s payday. “That your kid?” Her chin jerked down, indicating Geoff, who balanced on the brass rail some of the men rested one foot or another on.
My right hand ruffled Geoff’s hair without any conscious direction on my part. “Yes.”
“Don’t look a thing like you.” She studied him, studied me, and opened her mouth to ask another stupid question. My face changed slightly, my left cheek twitching by a single millimeter’s worth, and maybe she decided discretion was the better part of valor, because she thought better of it. “The girls will love him. Hey, Skye!”
A tangle of arms and legs on the dance floor birthed a tall, lightly implemented woman, her breasts threatening to break free and run amok from the strips of leather she wore in place of a shirt and her long legs lost in a fluff of pastel skirts that showed bits of unbronzed skin. She moved with a knifefighter’s supple grace, and the blades on her were plasilca — they carried a stat charge if you handled them right, were wicked sharp, and held that edge better than metal. Their habit of flexing during a fight meant you needed implemented reflexes to even begin to handle them right. The hair-thin scars she’d covered up with bronzer on her arms showed where she’d tried to swing them around as a warmbody. She was lucky she hadn’t opened an artery doing that, and when I scanned a little closer I found out her implements might be light, but they were quality work and her reflexes were probably at half-agent speed.
Even more interesting.
“This is Skyedawn,” the owner-bartender shouted, over the noise. “She likes kids. Room Eight, Skye. Be nice.”
The woman rolled her eyes, her hands busily arranging the froth of skirts she wore — once-vibrant spincotton faded from repeated chemwashing and probably hung to air in the volcano of daylight. She cocked a hip and beckoned as another man stumbled for the bar, his mouth wide open and working under the brim of a hat studded with circuit wire and bits of bone probably from the little furry creatures we’d been living on as we traveled.
“MADAM B!” he roared. “I GOT CREDITS!”
“Oh, damn it all,” was the owner’s reply as she waved me away.
We followed the tall woman up the stairs, and that was how we arrived in Township Vega.
* * *
Geoff curled on his side in the bed, knees drawn up and face slack with exhaustion. The place had chem and waterwash, a luxury I wanted to spend at least a half hour in but I settled for just a quick sluicing. Running our clothes through the ancient stat-cabinet got most of the crusted dust off; neither of us sweated like ordinary warmbodies. One more thing to be grateful for.
I tucked my damp hair behind my ears, smoothed the ancient, threadbare blankets over him. Below, the throbbing of crowd noise and tinkling of the synth merged into a heartbeat. The room was small, the wooden furnishings patched-together and handmade instead of metal and mass-produced. If not for that, the shuttered window, and the smell of fresh desert air working its way into every corner, it might have been a womblike little warren in the Projekts, the pulsewaves of flying ammo and the crackle of adverts on loop providing the background instead.
I let out a long breath. Straightened, scanned him from top to toe. The longer we were out of the City, the more his scans changed. You could have mistaken him for a human kid before, if you just glanced, but now the shadows of the internal organs were…different.
He seemed okay, though. He blinked, slowly, those big dark eyes distant and the scar on his chin pale instead of flushed.
He’d need feeding soon.
“You thirsty?” I touched his hair again, smoothing the dark, rough silk. I’d trimmed it as well as I could a few days ago, with a pair of scissors found in the cannibals’ loot pile, and he looked far less unkempt.
He shook his head, his cheek soft against the rough linen pillowcase. “Not yet. Are we going to stay here?”
“Just for a little while.” I touched his temple. A non-implemented skull, so fragile. Thin bone, with no reinforcement. “We’re going to have to keep moving.”
“For how long?”
As long as we survive. “For a while. Don’t worry about that right now.”
“Okay.” He closed his eyes, snuggling into the pillow. “Abbymom?” A whisper, barely audible under the music downstairs.
“Hm?” I couldn’t stop stroking his hair. Each strand moved differently, a fascinating interplay of light on the keratin sheaths. He seemed to enjoy the touch.
His eyes, half-lidded, gleamed. “Will you kiss me goodnight?”
I hesitated. “Did they used to do that? At the institute?”
“I saw it on holos.” His own hesitation, a shadow of hurt on that transparent face. He pressed against the bleached linen pillowcase. “You don’t have to.”
I bent and pressed my lips to his cheek. It was plumper now, not so gaunt. The Waste agreed with him, I guess. “Goodnight, sweetheart.” The word felt odd. Not because I shouldn’t have said it, but because I’d never done so before. “I’ll be downstairs for a bit.” If I ever needed a drink, it’s now. The alcohol wouldn’t do anything, but the slight flush from metabolizing it sounded wonderfully soothing.
“Okay. ‘Night.”
I passed my fingertips on the scanpad for the rickety metal tensor lamp standing on the small, indifferently painted nightstand. It dimmed, and when I pressed the second pad near the door the room became yet another dim cave. His breathing was already evening out and deepening.
I closed the door before I could say something even more absurd and headed downstairs.
* * *
The next day passed slowly, Geoff so deeply asleep he was barely breathing. I cycled through rest and REM, stretched out on the thin carpet. Even though they had statfields over every door and window, the sand still worked its way in. My hair would get full of grit, but that didn’t matter much.
The nanos can get rid of toxins, renew cells, and keep the body going virtually indefinitely. It’s the mind that needs sleep — the skullmeat itself or whatever consciousness nestles inside it, they haven’t been able to figure out. Even the nanos keeping fatigue poisons out of the brain didn’t halt the need.
The vulnerability of surcease is balanced by alarms and subroutines built in through both implementation and hypno-training. The hypno’s for when you’re a warmbody, to prep you for the transition. For some reason, agents don’t respond to hypno once implementation’s started. Your first dose of nanos cures you of subliminals.
Which is good. Who knows what mental Dismiss switches they’d put in you otherwise? Besides, over-susceptibility would rob any agent of the required flexibility and moderately rebellious streak. You can’t think on your own or do creative problem-solving if you don’t have both.
There’s a lot of below-conscious thinking that goes on when you’re cycling. Most of the time, it’s where you do… well, not all the planning, but all the stuff that makes the planning possible, and a lot more effective.
Breathless-hot dusk settled over the township, the sun sinking. It was nice to not be hiding in a pile of rocks, and really nice to be able to get my full complement of cycles in without jerking into wakefulness every few hours as an animal scratched inside my scanrange. The noises of people around me were just comforting enough to lull, not a wrong breath, nothing out of place.
We’re social creatures. Even agents. What woke me was Geoff’s slight stirring, his padding into the bathroom to stand in the chemshower. When he was done, it was time to get some calories in him.
The downstairs, empty at this hour, looked a little forlorn. Nevertheless, the tables were ruthlessly scrubbed, the worn-glossy floor swept and polished, and smells of cooking bubbled through the entire edifice. Wooden shutters clasped the large cornglass windows, and the bars of westering sunlight poking through were enough to give the whole picture a surreal golden glow full of floating dust.
Grain alcohol is just as useless to me as ersatz, though the nanos like the carbs and give me a pleasant all-over flush metabolizing the poison. Agriculture out here depended on watermakers scavenged or leased from City corporations, but the end result was real bread, some of it from maize-mash. Plenty of fermentation byproducts in the starches to add vitamin value. Protein that wasn’t vat-grown — which meant there was some kind of system for raising and slaughtering livestock, good news for Geoff since we’d figured out his liquid nutrition didn’t necessarily have to be human. There was very little in the way of vegetables, but lots of fruit harvested from the spiny plants fourpads liked so much. Their sweet, semisolid insides packed a great deal of nutriment in a small space.
All the warmbodies and heartbeats around me in this building were female — dancing girls who earned on the side in the usual way, the owner, the three women who scrubbed floors, mopped, and collected laundry. The ones that were implemented had light, high-quality work, and they were a disparate bunch. After a little observation, I decided Madam B had probably helped finance no few of them, and her little saloon was turning a tidy profit that kept being reinvested.
She was, by far, the most humane corporation I’d ever seen.
The man who had been torturing the synth last night shuffled in, yawning, just before full dark rose. Evening heat simmered off him as he shrugged out of a few long, loose layers, revealing a New Orthodox cassock underneath, its top unbuttoned a little to show a threadbare spincotton shirt and those much-mended red suspenders. One of the dancing girls brought him a bowl of stew, and he brightened considerably. He reeked of metabolized alcohol, staggering to a table not far from the shadowed corner I’d picked.
Skyedawn brought a tall, crooked plasilca glass flu of a pale, slopping fluid, setting it near Geoff’s bowl of corn mash and fruit. “Drink.”
A quick scan showed an emulsion, proteins and sugars and acids. Geoff peered at it, his nose wrinkling. “What’s in it?”
She stared at him for a long moment before flicking a quick judgmental glance my way. “Milk.”
“I’ve heard of that. It’s like calc tabs.” I relaxed slightly. “It’s safe, Geoff.”
He reached for the glass, tested it, and his expression went through several odd little shifts before settling on cautious approval.
“What do you say?” I prompted.
“Thank you,” he mumbled, looking back down at his bowl.
The tall woman’s judgment visibly shifted a few degrees. “He your kid?”
What do you care? “Yes.” There was a block of salt on the table; you shaved off bits carefully with an eating implement or a weapon. I’d read about a time, far before the Wars, when it was used as currency, but out here they probably had vaults full of the stuff.
“Don’t look nothing like you.” She made a quick movement, and I almost twitched. She probably didn’t guess how close she came to choking on her own blood, she just crouched, folding her arms on the table to put herself at Geoff’s level. “Cute. What’s your name, chiquito?”
He glanced at me, I nodded fractionally. “Geoff.”
“I’m Skyedawn.”
“I know.” He took another drink. “This is Abbymom. She rescued me.”
“Rescued you, huh?”
That’s enough. ”I’m sure the nice lady has work to do.” Calm and polite, but a warning nonetheless. Geoff looked back down into his bowl, but he didn’t turn pale or flinch.
Progress. I might have felt just a little absurdly proud.
“I’m off.” Skyedawn’s teeth were implemented, reinforced for durability and in some cases replaced. Looked like the same work the owner had. Maybe there was a dentist in town, too. Who knew the Waste would have good implementers wandering around, as well as the necessary tech? “Just making conversation. You come from City, don’t you.”
Is it that obvious? Of course it was.
I set my spoon down very carefully, heavy potmetal scrubbed free of tarnish and reasonably germ-free. “Convoy route passes through here. Lots of City people.” I didn’t try to mimic her accented Spanics, but when we next hit civilization anyone who heard me would swear I was from this little burg.
“Oh, sure. But convoy stays at the depot. Not many waltz right into Livery between arrivals.”
Just fishing, or more? No hint of anything in her autonomics, her pulse normal, her respiration even. Not even a stray dilation of her pupils to show a lie, nothing off in the chemicals tainting her sweat. I contented myself with a noncommittal noise.
She waited, but I didn’t react. When she unfolded herself, drawing up to her considerable height, it occurred to me that her bosom held no implementation. It was a natural wonder, so to speak.
Lucky girl.
“I’ll bring you some more nophala, Geoff,” she announced. “And if your Abbymom isn’t nice to you, all you have to do is tell us.”
Geoff gave her a long solemn look. His free hand crept across the table and touched mine, our fingers interlacing, and I didn’t move as she swung away, maybe satisfied, maybe not.
Instead, I watched the stat-veiled door, every inch of me pulled tight against itself as if I was in the City again. There was something familiar in scanrange.
A subroutine clamped over my autonomics, squeezing my pulse back down, copper adrenaline laid against my palate before the nanos started soaking it up, leaving just enough to prime me for action. I squeezed Geoff’s hand very gently, then freed my fingers, squashing the urge to reach for the rifle in my lap.
It wouldn’t do any good.
The door swung back and forth, its statrepeller field fluorescing — warmbodies wouldn’t see it, but when a buffered body moves through, the lumens spike-cycle predictably, and an agent watches that range as a matter of course.
Tall, wheat-haired, his eyes piercing gray. For some reason nanos won’t touch iris pigments, even though lots of other things are pretty plastic if you can get enough fuel for alterations. He stepped in, brushing fussily at his sleeves, in worn-down bleached-out clothing that managed to look halfway local, just like mine.
I was already on my feet, the rifle left carefully on the bench.
I could mark “ramming a lectric shivprobe through his chest and popping his Dismissal switches” as the last time I saw the new arrival, or “dumping pieces of his stripped and trussed-up body in a vat of caustic sludge.” Choices, choices.
It was Sam, in the flesh, just walking in the front door as if this was a normal meet, him giving me the Agency’s marching orders. Winding me up and setting me in motion.
And
if my Agency handler had shown up here, who else could be not-so-far behind?
Chapter Four
Sam
He marched right up to the long cobbled-together bar, a loose limber stride just a touch too long to be natural. It kept him out of strike range, and the peculiar grumble of subaudible — standard for meets — thrummed through my audio intakes.
“Hullo, Jess.”
It would be ridiculous of me to stand near the table. Besides, the further he was away from Geoff, the better. Nothing else in scanrange, everything as it should be. Had they cordoned off the entire township?
If they did, I’m going to have to get creative. ”Sam.” My own subaudible grumble, none of the warmbodies around us would pick up anything amiss. I stalked to the bar as well, just out of physical range. If he was walking in like this, he obviously wanted to talk. Or to delay me.
Which meant I had time. Not a lot, but some.
A small grimace went over his bland face, just a fleeting expression. Other than that, he was flatline as usual. Just the messenger, passing the news along. My own autonomics were the same. He was handler, I was flex liquidator, and I’d already killed him once.
Time would tell if I could do it again, now he knew I was capable of attempting it.
“Whiskey, please.” In audible range, sunny and polite, he may have even winked at the owner. I could have told him charm wouldn’t work.
Madam B eyed him for a long moment, and he sighed theatrically, fingers flicking and a flash of hard bitcoin sparkling on the bar. It magically produced a drink; she gave me a long considering look, glanced at him again.
My lips curved in a facsimile of a smile. “One for me, too.”
“Sure.” She poured, a long amber stream of liquid, and I took the shot, cracked the bottom of the glass against the bar with just the right amount of force. Her eyes narrowed as she sized both of us up. “No trouble inside, folks. It’s the standing rule.”
She Wolf and Cub Page 7
