by Noah Rain
He had noticed. I knew it the second he came in the next day. He wasn’t that old, now that I look back, but he had seemed old to me at the time. He always wore one of those old country-style hats. The kind I imagined shepherds wore unironically. He had walked in with his head down as he always did, and he’d glanced at the ring, and then at the mirrors, and finally tapped his knocking knuckles on the heavy bag in the center of the workout space before heading into his office.
He did all that again, but he hesitated just a hair of a breath longer beside the heavy bag than he normally would, his stride hitched ever so slightly. Jackie Sullivan didn’t need to twist the bag around and see the strip of duct tape covering the tear in the rubber. He knew the bag had been split just by the touch of it, by how easily it gave under those gnarled, callused knuckles.
I had expected him to kick me out, and I grew more bitter with him as the hours passed and he left me to stew amidst my mopping and sweeping and polishing while he poured over stacks of old billing files in the smoke-filled room he called an office.
When Jackie finally had come out of the office, the gym was closed, and the fighters had all gone home. I knew he was going to reem me out then, and tell me to find some new floors to sweep and some new mirrors to polish, as well as a new box to sleep in. Only he hadn’t. Instead, Jackie Sullivan had tossed a pair of old, green boxing gloves at me, and told me to put them on and show me what I’d learned.
‘I don’t use gloves,’ I had told him, then, without a shred of humor. I had always been pretty dry, even as a kid.
Jackie could have slapped me across the face. Instead, the old man had only smiled. Of course, he did punch me in the face, sent me sprawling across the gym floor in a sniffling, bloody heap, but I’d had that coming. It was the first of many private lessons I received from a man I had never known was a world champion in his day, and by the time I was fifteen, I was winning golden glove tournaments throughout Jaxton.
I worked my way up the ranks, and all the while, I kept my shins weathered, winning boxing titles while honing my other martial skills as I kept my eye on the pro martial arts world. When I turned 18, I entered the Prime League, and won the title three months later.
Konnor Kayde. Youngest champ in history. Six straight knockouts. The prince of Jaxton, and the pride of Jackie Sullivan’s gym.
The pain had started as I was putting pen to paper to sign my first extension with the league. It was something of an industry secret that fighters only make real money after they’ve won the belt. It was no problem to me. I planned to hold onto that title for years on end. I’d grown up poorer than poor, so I had no problem telling sponsors to shove it and managers to pound sand, but I must admit, the prize money looked good, as did the ladies at cage side.
I signed that contract, but I was never able to see it through. A rare nerve condition, likely brought about by some combination of genetics and overtraining—if not poison—resulted in eighteen months of agony in the form of lancing pain in my spine, arms and legs. Basically, everywhere. It had receded over time, and I regained some sensation and always kept full control of my body, but the league had strict rules that barred unfair advantages. Apparently, not being able to feel pain—not being able to feel too much at all—was an advantage too clear to ignore.
I can’t say I blamed them for their decision, but by the time I had wasted my money on a team of lawyers that did little more than string me along, the ordeal had left me a washed-up fighter with all of his faculties, a taste of true success and none of the money that should have come along with it at the tender age of twenty-one. That, and Jackie had died. I could just barely drink legally, and yet, I was already retired. Washed up. Done.
Only I wasn’t done.
Which brings us back to the present.
To understand why I had been fighting a dude in a mix of Kevlar and high-tech resin armor with sparking batons, you need to understand exactly how things work around here.
After all, you didn’t get a generation of orphans like me without some pretty batshit economic stuff going down. They always said the markets would rebound after Rock Bottom, an economic calamity brought about by a credit-based system that had long ago ground the currency into mush, and hopes with it. After Rock Bottom, we had our glorious reset. New money was printed, regulated by a joint treaty formed by Big Tech and the former Bankers, who were now … Bankers again, which really made you wonder if it wasn’t all a big setup from the get.
The only thing with a reset was that people without hard assets to exchange—land, commodities and the like—in other words, people who rented, which was ninety percent of the population at that time, were on the outside looking in. The rich got richer, and the poor. Well, you know.
In this new economy, where corporations controlled the flow of money and information, and where even governments were second fiddle, prize fighting entertained the masses, but crime was where the big money was, and crime-stopping was the only thing that came close to it.
You may be a bit confused. Guilds. Syndicates. What about the cops? Well, as it turns out, when the entire economy of the world’s nations goes down, so too does its law. Now, cops were a formality. Enough to dissuade street punks, but not enough to interfere with the all-out war being waged from the streets to the tops of the skyscrapers in Silk City. With no real governments to speak of, companies had taken over. Companies and contractors. Organized crime had never been so organized, ostensibly out of necessity, as those with skills and the will to use them set their sights on the new leaders of the free world.
The corporations needed to get organized to fight back, since they couldn’t rely on the cops. They instituted a credit system, of course. Guilds, which was their answer to the freelance Syndicates. All it took was a Capture Card stamped by the police themselves—yes, the cops filled the niche that a notary might have in ages past—and you could get an interview with any bank … err, any Guild you wanted to. After a generation of violence, the Syndicate and Guild leaders had organized enough to establish themselves as franchises. But there was one ground rule, enforced by the System Collective known as, well, the Enforcers. The only law that was in place was a strict one. No guns. Use a gun, and you upset the balance. Upset the balance, and you die. It was one thing both Synners and Guilders … the corporations could agree on, lest they need to prop up a government or two to be powerful enough to take on more than a mediating role between the disparate sides.
Jaxton was blue collar. By that I mean people actually worked here. As such, it was rare to see Syndicates or Guilds operating on this side of the river. The real action. The real money was in Silk City, where the Syndicates did their damndest to rob the rich, and the Guilds did their best to … well, to rob the rich by defending their money.
In some ways, Synners and Guilders were the new celebrities, the former because they stood up to the vile socialites in the corporations, and the latter because they defended everyone’s favorite actors, actresses, comedians and, yeah, celebrity CEO’s. Some in society—more than a few—still believed the companies had actually bailed everyone out, rather than enslaved them in their new paradigm.
I had never really experienced a free market like the ones you read about on history boards. But I believed in the concept. Take your skills into the wild, and see what they could buy you.
Well, I’d been doing just that in my prize fighting days, and now, I was doing just that, staring up into a sliver of night sky between two stained brick buildings in the middle of Jaxton. I guess the market had spoken.
When my vision cleared and my teeth stopped chattering, I found myself looking up at two tired faces wearing blue police caps. One was sipping on a cup of coffee. Neither looked overly concerned with my condition.
“You Guild or Syndicate?” one asked. He was young. Fresh to the force. The other—the coffee sipper—was older, with a gray mustache.
“Does it mat
ter?” I croaked, reaching inside of my lapel to pull the deactivated spider off of my shoulder. I tossed it clattering across the pavement, and the young cop watched it, frowning.
“Well,” the young cop said. “Matters a bit. See, if you’re Syndicate, we’ve got to bring you in and process you. Send your report to the requisite authorities.”
“Aren’t you the requisite authorities?” I asked. Of course, I knew they were talking about the corporations in Silk City. They only paid the cops to keep Syndicate underlings in prison if they didn’t have Guild potential. After all, why let an asset rot in jail when a corporation could hire you to protect their turf and maybe grift onto a few others. Guild Wars weren’t unheard of, even if they were kept hush hush.
“And if you’re Guild,” the cop continued, ignoring me, “then we’re supposed to document the loss. Who was it you lost to?”
There’s the credit system. Even by stepping outside the new societal norms and turning vigilante, you couldn’t escape some sort of rating system.
I sighed and the older cop laughed between pulls on his steaming thermos.
“What?” the younger one asked.
“He’s a Rook,” the gruff officer said. “He’s no Syndicate. If he was, the Guilder who kicked his ass all over this alley would have brought him in to get his Capture Card. If he was a Guilder, he’d have gear. Tech. You know all the baubles the Guilders have these days.”
“Syndicates too, apparently,” I croaked, pushing myself up.
“Looks like you picked a tough target for your first try,” the young cop said.
“Looks like it,” I agreed.
“We’ve been seeing more Guilders and Synners around these parts lately,” the young cop said. He talked a lot. “None of the Suits hang out here. Not sure why they’re all in town.”
“Competition’s fierce over in Silk City,” the veteran replied. “Synners can’t grift off the Suits if the Guilders are all over them. Lot of advanced tech being used. The Syndicates are getting out-spent. In a few years, the only ones robbing the companies are gonna be other companies.”
“You need a ride home?” the young cop asked as I wobbled toward the mouth of the alley.
“Nah. I’ll walk.”
I left the two glorified referees dressed in blue to snicker at my back. I figured I’d take the long way around. A jaunt toward the bridge. I liked looking at the lights of Silk City this time of night, even if I hadn’t been there since my last fight. My last real fight.
Who knows? Maybe I’d find some excitement along the way.
Chapter 2
Midnight Stroll
The twin cities really wasn’t the best name. Twins implied similarity, if not identical appearances and dispositions. Now, the name only stuck because the surrounding suburbs had fallen into such disrepair as to be colloquially known as the Wastelands by most … even the peons like me scraping a living beneath the smokestacks and smog of Jaxton.
But then, that was the system for you. Designed to perfection. After all, would Silk City, with all its towers and neon lights look half as beautiful if it wasn’t bordered by its ugly sister, and surrounded by a countryside that looked like an actual war had swept through rather than an economic collapse?
Maybe Jaxton and Silk City had been the same once, but now, as I walked along the half mile-wide river separating the one from the other, it almost seemed laughable to suggest it. To my left, Jaxton loomed like a clinging shadow. It was all browns and clay reds, and a constant smog hung over it, making it difficult to distinguish between storm clouds and pollution.
To my right, there was an expanse of black water that the obscured moon did its best to illuminate. The result was less a glittering surface and more a slick, shining river of oil and sludge. They dumped cleaning chemicals into the water over in Silk City, making sure the bars, restaurants, clubs and functions on the Ruby Bay were up to the Suits’ liking, but by the time the stuff reached the rocky, algae-caked shores of Jaxton, it had turned into a slow, mired sludge.
I hated Silk City, and I hated that I envied it. It was always bright over there. Tall silver towers with glass windows. The Company buildings were the tallest, emblazoned with bright, blinking neon displays—blue, green, red and pink, and occasionally a sunburst of yellow. The Companies also owned the condos and lofts, any one of which would have been the tallest building in Jaxton if they built it on this side of the bay.
It was strange to think about the children born to the Suits over there. All they would know was those neon lights at night, those beautiful people. They’d know bright sunshine during the day and emerald-colored parks with manicured lawns and perfect white fountains. They’d be tucked in at night by the maids and butlers from Jaxton, and warned by their parents about the Synners who patrolled the streets at night, attempting to steal credits back from them, the people who had worked so hard to prop the system up after they had brought it down in the first place. They’d be told about their brave, noble Guilders, who mommy and daddy paid to keep the Synners at bay. Men and women of high credit and impeccable skill, selected for their quality and groomed for excellence.
Of course, they’d never let the Guilders past the decorated lobbies of their ivory towers, but they put them up in nice apartments, and even gave some of them pensions, assuming their credit remained impeccable.
Silk City was an eggshell covering a nest of lies. A miniature nation of perfect teeth and perfect credit, which only served to illustrate that they were simply better at keeping their sins a secret, or hiding them from the very algorithms they had designed to keep them at the top and the rest of us working to climb up each agonizing rung of the societal ladder.
At least dingy, soot-stained, stinking Jaxton was honest. At least the Syndicates on this side of the bay had the honesty to admit that they were only in it for themselves. And most of them left the good people alone. Synners were unlikely to perform shake-downs on the local mom and pop businesses because they knew they had no credits to give. They went after the Suits, wringing ID numbers and passwords out of them to get in and funnel credits over. Of course, most Suits had dummy accounts set up in case a Syndicate got to them, and since they had—quite by design—weakened governments, and by extension, law enforcement to the degree that local precincts could no more stop a high tech Syndicate fighter than a tank, they had been forced to turn Synners to their own ends, transforming them into Guilders. The most powerful Suits in the biggest companies trained their own Guilders from the ground up. These days, you weren’t really a company to be talked about unless you had a Guild, and fancy cars, clothes and even tech was seen as less of a marker of status than the quality of your Guild.
As a kid, I had wanted nothing more than to leave Jaxton, join one of the Guilds of Silk City, and see what the penthouses looked like. I had wanted to swim in pools that looked out over the Wastelands, and bed the most beautiful women. I had wanted to be famous. Of course, as we’ve been over, I had learned quickly enough that you couldn’t just knock on a company door and ask to be a part of a Guild, no matter how skilled you were. They would take ex-military quickly enough, but local street roughs from Jaxton? Fat chance.
That was why I’d decided to build my credit and my cred, entering the Prime League, which, again, was the only thing both sides of the bay could seem to agree on enjoying. Win enough, get enough adoration in the Twin Cities, and I’d be in the system. The Guilds would come calling to me.
Only they hadn’t. I was a flash in the pan, from Jaxton-raised to Jaxton-chained.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. All my best memories had been made in Jaxton. Hell, all of my memories had been made there, except for those brief, glitz and glamour-colored ones in my time spent in the Prime League, which I pushed aside. And not all bad was a hell of a lot better than most of the people in this god forsaken world had going for them.
I tried to keep that in mind
as I walked, and tried for the thousandth time to figure out why I was so repulsed by the idea of joining a Syndicate, telling the system to go fuck itself, and taking whatever credit I couldn’t build. Everyone’s got to eat, after all.
The rational part of my mind knew the Guilds were just Syndicates with permission. And part of me knew that made them even worse. Still, childhood dreams and all that. Sometimes they took their time in dying. Sometimes they just took the right push at the right time.
I started feeling a little nauseous, and only realized I was walking crooked again when I teetered on the edge of the sea wall. That was the trouble with feeling invincible and being anything but. It wasn’t until I bent over and hurled, spilling sick onto the wet rocks on the Jaxton shore, that I knew old Vash had landed a few better shots than my nerves had had the wherewithal to tell me.
It didn’t last too long, and I was already feeling a little less foggy when I straightened and wiped the spittle from my chin. I dug at my left ear, trying to get the wet sounds out of it, thinking there must be some blood stuck in there. My finger came away dry, and I still heard the sound.
It was rhythmic, and wet, and it wasn’t coming from the water splashing along the sharp rocks. It was coming from the bridge.
I squinted, looking at the Jaxton side of the bridge. It was unlit on this side of the bay, and lit bloody red halfway across the span. Silk City had such a grudge against lowly Jaxton that they couldn’t even share some of their gawdy light with us.
I’d have given it up for animals rooting at some trash along the shore, but then I heard what sounded like breathing, and a minute later, a bubbling, trilling giggle that undoubtedly came from a woman. I strained my ears, and now that I was listening, the sounds were unmistakable. There was that giggle again, and a grunt, and a short while later, a satisfied sigh.
