by Noah Rain
“Is Nina’s potion really something that can take the system down?” I asked, reining my voice in a bit. “If you want to take something down, why would you try to control it first? Why not cut it off at the pillars?”
Scarlett crossed her arms and looked out over the city.
“Sascha doesn’t want to burn it down, Scarlett,” I said. “She wants to take it over.”
“Same difference.”
“You don’t believe that.”
Scarlett didn’t say anything to that, and I didn’t press her on it, finding that I now had something else to feel guilty about.
“Anyway,” Scarlett said. “Sorry.”
“About what?”
“Getting you involved in this shit.”
“I was already involved,” I said with a shrug and a sigh. “I’d have been dead two days ago if it wasn’t for you.” I looked at her, and she kept her chin pointed out over the rooftop but let her eyes meet mine. “Thank you.”
Scarlett nodded once.
“So, then,” Scarlett said. “Are you joining us tomorrow?”
“For the mission? Not sure what else I’d be doing.”
“I’m sure one of the girls can find a use for you,” Scarlett said, her tone making it difficult to tell how she felt about that.
“You leading the mission?” I asked.
“Carmen.”
“Do you agree with that—”
“I’m a better fighter,” Scarlett said. “Carmen’s more suited to these sorts of things even so. She’s … direct. I tend to give chances, and Sascha’s made it clear that this squad’s out of them.”
“Sascha, or whoever she’s marching to,” I said. Scarlett didn’t argue with me, but she didn’t shout me down either.
“For the record,” I said without meeting Scarlett’s gaze, “you score high.”
“On what, the Konnor Scale?”
I didn’t answer, and she didn’t ask again. Instead, we both looked out over Silk City, and while Scarlett might have been thinking about how to burn it all down and remake it for the good people, if there were any left in the world, I was only thinking about her.
It had been a strange 48 hours, but now that I had some quiet moments to think, I thought it hadn’t been all bad.
Chapter 12
Knocking Heads
The glitz and glamor of Silk City wasn’t nearly as pronounced on the street level as it was from the top of the Vixens’ tower.
Up in the sky, the pink, blue and neon green lights from the various logos and corporate sigils were lost in the haze of yellow and white streetlamps, headlights and the mist of a slow-drifting haze.
I found myself in the back of an unmarked black stretch vehicle with silver alloy rims. The leather seat had clearly cost whoever bought it more credit than I had ever been worth. Hell, even the backlit cupholders on the doors were probably gilded with something people used to pass around as real money, when it wasn’t all threats and promises.
To my left, Nina sat framed against the streaked window as signs and blurred people streamed past. She was typing on a fold-up screen, the glow reflected off of her glasses. She was entirely focused on the task at hand, either directing Darla, who was in the driver’s seat, or performing some sort of advanced reconnaissance on the target of our operation.
As for the figures flitting past, some of them wore suits, and others dresses. Some wore suits cut into dresses, and others wore dresses with ties and bows, reminiscent of suits. None of these were the Suits and Pearls who ruled the companies of Silk City, and by extension, the surrounding lands like regal lords and ladies in their brimstone keeps. These were their loyal sycophants—people who had either been born into credit, or scraped by long enough or fortunately enough to earn a place among the gutters and glittering lights of the Silk City night life.
It was natural to be a little jealous of them, even if the streets of Silk City were only a bit more clean than those across the river in Jaxton. But I smiled as I reminded myself that, no matter if it was in Silk City or Jaxton, shit on your shoe smelled the same.
Nina was wearing short shorts and a white button-up that reminded me of a scientist’s lab coat, only more form-fitting. She had foregone the tactical gear adopted by Carmen and Scarlett. Carmen was in the front seat, directly ahead of me, tracing trails in the condensation, utterly relaxed. As for Scarlett, she was on her motorcycle, scouting ahead and essentially running point on the operation. Nina had a direct line to those of us in the car, while Scarlett’s coms were tuned to Sascha, unless something went wrong.
I was beginning to suss out the hierarchy of the Vixens, here, which wasn’t so much a meritocracy as a commune, with each member of the team relinquishing or claiming control of the situation depending on her particular brand of skills. Of course, Sascha sat at the head of the table, and thus, as was the case with every organization, large or small, she removed herself from the mission itself, and I wondered how many more Vixens-in-waiting she had earmarked for a call up to the big leagues if she should lose any of her precious angels tonight.
Carmen was wearing the same sort of black tactical gear that Scarlett and Darla had been wearing when I had chanced upon them under the Jaxton bridge. She leaned forward and unzipped a duffel bag, and I watched her through the outside mirror as she strapped on dark blue gloves with metal links around the wrists and silver ringlets over her first knuckles.
Carmen looked over her left shoulder, ignoring me and staring at Nina. She rolled her eyes when Nina ignored her, continuing to type away.
“Nina.”
“Mmmm?”
“I need a charge.”
Nina looked up and pushed the center of her glasses up, frowning at Carmen. Her eyes tracked down to the gauntlets Carmen presented.
“How much?”
“80%,” Carmen said.
“Car,” Darla said from the driver’s seat. “Don’t you think that’s overkill? Sascha doesn’t want us killing any of the DyNo’s. Just knocking them around a bit. Making a point.”
“79%, then,” Carmen said.
“I’ll give you 60%,” Nina said. She looked back down at her screen and started tapping away. Carmen continued to face the back seat and held her hands out, palms out and fingers splayed. She winked at me playfully as she waited for whatever it was Nina was doing, expectant.
Nina muttered something to herself, then struck a key with finality. As I watched, the rings on Carmen’s gloves started glowing, going from platinum to white. She curled her hands into fists and examined them front and back. I kept expecting sparks to jump out, but there was just a dull buzzing sound emanating from the gloves.
“Someone want to tell me what that’s about?” I asked.
“The gauntlets pick up kinetic energy and redirect it,” Nina said. “The faster the gloves move and the harder their wielder strikes, the more the damage compounds.”
I nodded. I knew the upper-level Guilders and Synners had high-level tech. Semi-lethal toys the Suits used against each other’s soldiers when it came time to send messages, or take down rivals without getting actual commandos involved. Still, I didn’t know we were dealing with damn magic gloves.
“Any for me?”
Nina laughed and Carmen turned back around, looking out the window and sighing in exasperation as the trip wore on past the edges of her patience.
As for me, I was wearing my karate gi. Well, not just that. Scarlett had insisted that I wear a Kevlar vest underneath it, and I was wearing tactical boots. I didn’t fancy trying any of my better kicks in them, but straight-line techniques should be fine. Guilders usually didn’t have lethal weapons, but Sascha had given us the impression that this dispute went beyond your usual territorial, credit-based spat. This went high up, which meant it would be settled down low, under the gutters.
I felt distinctly uncomforta
ble rolling through the Silk City night in one of the same fancy cars I would sneer at or spit after if they chanced a pass through Jaxton. It wasn’t so much that I felt like one of them, but rather that I felt like a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
“Isn’t it a risk, having me along?” I asked as we passed by U-Night, the largest credit bureau in the city and home to the most powerful cabal … err, company board left in the country.
“How so?” Carmen asked. “You seem to be able to handle yourself well enough in a fight.”
“Not that,” I said. “But, Silk City has more cameras than any other twin city settlement in the world. They have the most accurate facial recognition software around. I won’t pretend I know how the game works over here, and I know most Synners are zeroed out of the system entirely, but I’m not. I’m still in the system. Getting into a dust-up with a Syndicate like the Shockers isn’t going to change that. If they make me, they’ll be able to track me down, and by extension, you.”
I saw Darla and Carmen exchange a look in the front, and Nina scoffed, but otherwise continued her typing, undeterred.
“Did you think we were zeroed out?” Carmen asked, turning back around to face me.
“Well … you are a Syndicate, aren’t you? I thought all Synners had zeroed out of the system.”
“And you think being zeroed out means facial recognition software no longer works on you, or that the powers that be can’t still track you?”
I must have looked like an idiot, with my jaw hanging open.
“Oh, Konnor,” Carmen said as Darla giggled. “I’ll try to make this simple, because I know Nina’s incapable of doing so.”
I leaned back against the leather seats and crossed my arms, prepared to absorb the information.
“The Suits of Silk City—the companies—can find any Synner anytime they want. Nobody’s ever totally outside of the system.”
“Then … why—“
“Why don’t they track them all down, sic their Guilders on them and bring them to heel?”
I nodded, again feeling stupid.
“Because, Konnor, there are still, and always will be, more of us than them.”
“More Synners?”
“No,” Carmen said. She nodded out of the driver’s side window. I didn’t really know what direction we were heading in, so I didn’t know what to make of it. “More people. More peons. More slaves to the system they’ve solidified ever since the last great war and the resulting rebellion.”
I swallowed and tried not to let my expression show anything. My parents had died in that rebellion. The same one that had destabilized the already-weakened world government. Then the companies had swooped in, taken the heavy burden of enforcing peace and law among the populace to aid the government they already owned, and solidified their silent, watchful reign. Most people—most governments, for that matter—had been willing or unwilling slaves to the international credit system and its curators for a century before the war and the rebellion Carmen spoke of. But now their order was complete. Their system seemingly impenetrable. There was no going off grid. No escaping debt and servitude, unless you happened to be born among the elite of one of the twin cities, or showed enough cunning, calculation and ruthless ambition to pull yourself up from the slums that had become of the middle class.
Carmen knocked on my forehead. I winced, recognizing that she was still wearing her charged gauntlets, but the ringlets were no longer glowing. She must have been dampening their effect.
“Hello? Anybody home?”
“Yeah. Go on,” I said.
“So then,” Carmen said, settling back into her chair. “The companies have their Guilds because they’ve weakened the military and police forces to the point where they’re glorified security guards. The police stop petty crime, when they feel like it, and as long as it’s not perpetrated by a Syndicate or a Guild, while the military sits back and waits for one twin city—and by extension, one cabal of Suits—to make a move on another. Every twin city is a synthetic, symbiotic relationship. There’s the low-class warrens, and then the high-class experiential, glitz and glamor playground. The former funds the latter, even if they’re only aware of it in the same way every drunk uncle curses the companies and their damn, amorphous corruption when he has four or five of the nightly beers he can afford.”
Now that she wasn’t in a ring either trying to knock my head off or fuck my brains out, it was astounding to me how articulate and seemingly sharp Carmen seemed. I guess that was my ignorance talking.
“In the end, it’s all a game, Konnor,” Darla said. We had come to another stop light. There seemed to be one every few dozen feet, but there were fewer lights on this side of the city. Fewer attractions and fewer people. “The companies allow the Syndicates to rule in Jaxton, while the Guilders keep them out of the city. The real warfare happens in the computer system, with Suits bidding each other’s stocks up and down, short selling and putting. The real intrigue happens between the Pearls, who’ve mastered the art of corporate espionage and blackmail. Well, these days, corporate espionage may as well be classic, old-school spy craft. The stakes are just as high.”
None of it should have surprised me, and in a way, none of it did. Everyone knew the game was rigged, just like everyone knew it was a game. Something the elites played with their numbers on a screen. They had already accumulated all the real wealth. They owned all the land in the wastelands, and had automated all the farms twenty years ago. They owned the credit system, and by extension, the people.
Still, it made me angry, but I pushed that to the side. Not too far. I might be needing it shortly, after all. But far enough to allow me to think.
“And you girls—Sascha—is she trying to win the game, or break it?” I asked.
Even Nina looked up from her work for a moment, turning the question over. In the end, she shrugged and went back to her own numbers on a screen. Carmen and Darla were silent.
“Scarlett wants to bring it down,” Darla said after a while. Carmen shot her a look.
“Anyway,” I said. “What’s this all got to do with my credit rating? Am I zeroed out or not?”
“Show him, Nina,” Carmen said. She was checking the straps on her gauntlets. We must be getting close to the target.
Nina sighed and leaned over toward me, tilting her screen so I could see. There was my name, and my credit code. She didn’t need my PIN to see my score.
I squinted and then leaned back like an old man, wrinkling my nose to try to figure out why there were so many numbers where there should have been so few.
“Courtesy of Sascha,” Nina said. “She’s pleased she didn’t have to have you killed.”
Nina said it with a straight voice and an even tone. I only hoped she had a dry sense of humor, but I couldn’t help but wonder if one of the Vixens would have been the one to do the honors if Sascha had decided I wasn’t an asset so much as a liability.
“I thought the Vixens were a Syndicate,” I said. “Do all of you have such high credit scores?”
“Sascha’s network has grown substantially in the last few years,” Nina said. “We may be a Syndicate, but the Suits don’t have to know that.”
I slapped a palm to my forehead. It was so obvious it should have hit me like a truck. The Vixens were a Syndicate, but in name, they were a Guild. Which meant …
“Sascha is a Suit,” I said, cursing myself as an idiot for not figuring it out sooner.
“Sometimes she plays a Pearl,” Darla said with a shrug, nonchalant, like everything else about the Vixens.
Of course she was. No matter how talented, coercive or cunning she was, there was no way some unconnected Syndicate-leader could attain the position she did without backing. Now that she had said backing, it seemed the Vixens were her way of climbing higher up the ladder. Maybe she really was planning to take over U-Nighted or one of the major companie
s and bring power back to the people from there. Somehow, I doubted it.
It made me feel at once giddy and sick to my stomach to see all those digits next to my name. In some ways, it meant nothing. No real change to my life. In others, it meant everything. I wouldn’t be barred entry from any establishment—reputable or otherwise—in Silk City. I could go anywhere, buy anything, live anyplace.
“Which Guild are we hitting, anyway?” I asked.
“The DyNo’s,” Nina said, annoyed. They had mentioned it earlier.
“Which tells me absolutely nothing,” I said. “Who do they represent? How many are there? What kind of tech do they use? Are they good fighters?”
Carmen scoffed at the last part, but that didn’t mean a whole lot. Fighting, just like any other trained skill, was all relative. The DyNo’s might not be as good as Carmen, Scarlett or me in the ring, but they might be good with certain weapons, and they might be heavily armored. In any event, I guessed they would be tougher to take down than Vash and the Jaxton Shockers, whose light sticks were probably just cheap military equipment they’d stolen from a Silk City shipment.
The DyNo’s and other Guilds like them were funded, consistently and handsomely. They were in charge of guarding each company’s debtors prisons that weren’t actually called prisons, just as they were charged with guarding the actual Suits who employed them.
“DyCorp is the company,” Darla said. “And as for what they do, think of them as the same as a dozen other Silk City companies. They move imaginary money from one account to another, from one Suit to another, and sometimes from one city to another. And they’re paid imaginary money to do it securely. In essence, they hide money from people whose job it is to sniff it out, and they only let them catch a whiff if they pay more to find it than the hiders, as long as it doesn’t throw their reputation completely off.”
The cities were like lighthouses to the national and international cabal of companies. They didn’t always get along, but they helped each other keep the lights on in their jurisdictions, and off for the people who were brave or foolish enough to live completely off the grid.
