Archon's Queen (5 page)

His armored potbelly brushed against her as he leaned in to kiss the back of her neck, leaving a sticky fruit-scented imprint of the most recent victim of his gluttony. “Neither am I, luv.”

Anna looked up past the cuffs at her reddening hands, wishing her payment of tax to be over as fast as possible. He fussed with his belt and she closed her eyes. Terror pierced the haze in her mind; images of men writhing in pain on the ground came back to her. The urge to do the same to the man behind her grew, but popped like a bubble.
Wouldn’t help; his mates would kill me before I got loose.

Rough hands grasped her hips. The reality of what was about to happen banished calculated thought. She had no chemicals in her system to detach from reality; she whimpered, begged, and squirmed, but her protest only drew forth amused sounds from him. She stopped moving and tensed, waiting for it. Anna swallowed the urge to beg him not to; if he got the feeling she hated it, he’d make it worse. Heat drew close between her legs, an inch away. Without conscious thought, she lifted herself up to buy an extra fraction of a second before contact. Something on his uniform blew up in a shower of small arcs.

He let off a yelp.

“Constable Brown! What’s this then?” A loud man’s voice rang off metal walls.

Anna jumped at the sound, and strained to look at an older man in police armor standing in the doorway. Short silver hair gleamed, backlit from the outdoors, a military cut. He shot a dour frown at the pudgy constable racing to put himself back into his pants. She hung motionless; trembling as if she was the one caught doing something wrong. All she wanted to do was cover herself, but could not lower her trapped hands.

Despite her fear, she felt relief.

“Sergeant.” Constable Brown coughed. “Just doin’ a routine search of this scrubber for contraband.”

“With your John Thomas?” he barked. “I already told you twice, if I catch you at this again, I’ll have you shuttled off to the Orkneys. Get your slovenly arse out of here this instant. That’s the last straw for you, Brown. Out of my sight!”

The heavyset man scurried off like a hound with its tail betwixt its legs. Annabelle looked away, struggling for a way to keep her composure. The frown on the Sergeant’s face poked at a long-dead sense of dignity. He walked up to her. She cowered, expecting he wanted to take his turn with her first.

“You all right, luv?”

“Yes, guv’na. No complainin’ from me.” She pouted at the floor.
Better a dishonest whore than a dead one.

“Don’t lie to me, girl.” He shook his head with a scowl. “Bugger all. These twats take advantage of you Covs so much you roll over for it. Well, s’pose I’d rather you play possum than shoot at us.”

The snap of a rubber glove made her jump.

“Calm yourself, lass. Since you’re already in the posture, I might as well check for illegals, unless you’d like to request a lady constable?”

“Beggin’ your pleasure, Sergeant. I ain’t hidin’ nothin.’ I got a zoomer in me coat, but that’s all.”

She felt his stare for a full minute before he spoke. “You’re not lyin’ ta me again, are ya?”

Her voice sank back to a pathetic squeak. “No, Sergeant.”

He took the plastic sheet from her jacket. A strip of light gleamed across it as he turned it over. Annabelle squirmed, trying to get her hand on it. He glanced between her desperate eyes and the small, pliant patch.

“This ‘ere is why you’re stuck in the dustbin.” He flapped it at her. “Never understood what drove you young people to this crap. Most of you are on the tit, and you spend it on this. Are you on the tit, Miss Morgan?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Well then, this bit of illegality belongs to the taxpayers.”

He made a sharp heel turn and walked around the desk, slapping the sheet down at the corner. Anna jumped at the hollow metallic slam. Her lifeline was too far away to grasp with her toes, even if she didn’t have boots in the way. Without the zoom, her mind would run away.

Things she could not control would happen, and
they
would find her again.

The Sergeant fell into a chair and waved a hand over the terminal. A rectangular panel of hologram appeared in midair. The part facing her looked opaque black, while reflected amber light crawled over his face from whatever was on the display.

“Please guv’na, that’s me last one and I don’t have the money for treatment to be off it.”

He didn’t look up, continuing work at the terminal. A Cov speaking to the police out of turn was a risk; one wrong word could bring disastrous consequences, and she’d wasted them begging for drugs rather than dignity. She frowned at the tight, clingy skirt wrapped around her stomach and lifted a leg in an attempt to cover herself.

At least he’s not staring at me.
Her head sank.
Prob’ly thinks I’m dirty.

Anna stretched, trying to will her arms longer to allow more of her weight onto toes that barely reached the floor. Shifting, she hoped a plaintive mewl of discomfort would send him a hint she’d had enough of being chained to the roof, but it had no effect.

Minutes passed in silence. Again, she glanced up at the shiny metal around her wrists, twisting and pulling in a futile effort to get her crimson hands out. The sound of the latex glove peeling from his fingers scared her motionless.

He asked her name again; she recited it. The panels of light on his face shifted, brightening. She imagined a picture of her in front of him.

“Says ‘ere you’re twenty-three?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Looks like your father died eleven years ago…” His voice trailed off as he read, an eyebrow lifted. “Faulty food reassembler?”

The drugs could not suppress the shiver that time. The Sergeant’s terminal erupted in a flurry of blue sparks, making him swat it twice. Anna looked away, muttering at the wall. “Yes gov’na. He got a right nasty zap from the thing.”

His chair squeaked when his weight left it. She struggled, pedaling her legs, as he swiped the derm from the corner of the desk and carried it toward a trash disintegrator.

“Gov’na, beggin’ your pardon, please don’t. I’ve been on it too long, comedown could kill me.”

“Zoom withdrawal can’t kill, though you’ll be wishin’ it did. You’re better off without it, girl.”

At a wave of his hand, a panel slid open in the wall. Beyond it, the steel interior of a chute glowed yellow from light deep within. In slow motion, the plasfilm flew through his fingers, drifting like a snowflake toward its conversion to a lump of beige matter. Her mind’s voice screamed inside as if he had taken a kitten away from her and murdered it before her eyes. The thing in the back of her head rose up, but she clamped her eyes shut and focused on staying calm. A police checkpoint was the
last
place a display of her talent needed to happen.

He was behind her before she realized she was crying. With no strength left in her legs, her body jerked about as he fixed her skirt back into place. Beeping above her head signaled her imminent release from the restraints, but even with warning, she fell when they no longer supported her. The Sergeant caught her and carried her over to a chair by the wall, folding her arms in her lap and shining a small light in one eye and then the other.

“Shall I call for an ambulance?”

Annabelle glanced at the red marks on her wrists, thankful her ‘gate tax’ had taken the mild form of sore arms and lost time.
That’s what you get for storming off alone.
The nicety of this policeman seemed unusual, exacerbating her sense of being cheap and dirty. She considered the blame for the shamble of her life was as much hers as it belonged to society. Most constables thought of people in her social strata as meat puppets for their personal amusement. The men became occasional victims of police combat training and the girls… well, the girls did whatever the constables wanted. Anna had no idea how to handle a cop who treated her like a person.

It hadn’t much happened since she was twelve.

She ventured a dazed smile and shook her head. “I’m all right.”

“Are ya then? You look ‘orrible.”

“I just got out of bed, and…” She shivered. “The zoom’s wearin’ off.”

He made a face of condescension and disapproval. “Cannae hide forever, girl. Sooner or later, you’ll need to confront your demons. I’ll git started on the incident report then.”

“Incident?” She looked up, wide-eyed.

“That berk, Brown.”

She swallowed hard. “It’s no bother, Sergeant. I don’t want trouble. His mates’ll give it to us twice as bad.”

“Aye, suppose’n they would at that. I’ll deal with ‘im then, an’ leave your name out of it. G’won, yer free ta go.”

He walked her to the door. Anna hesitated, glancing down at the portable metal steps between her and the rain-soaked street.

“Sergeant?”

“Go on.”

Anna shivered, grasping the doorframe for support. “Thank you.”

He nodded, a motion she caught from the corner of her eye. Wind whistled past as she gathered her jacket tight and walked away. The Sergeant leaned against the opening with folded arms, watching her leave the puddle-laden mud of The Ruin behind for the intactness of London. Half a block away, she glanced back to smile at him, but he had gone back inside. In the distant grey, the dull shadow of Coventry tower traced a smudge through the sky.

Annabelle continued through a bustling crowd that scarcely noticed her. More people were out and about today, drawn by the rare lack of rain. A world apart from the tower, London brimmed with jostling bodies, flashing lights, whizzing advert bots dancing through the sky, and random smells of food.

A young man collided with her. His hand swiped through her pocket, but there was nothing to take. She offered a disbelieving glare at the astounded look he gave her, as if she was being rude by having nothing to steal. The crowds thinned as she got farther away from the nicer areas, toward where people closer to her level congregated.

She sped up to an uninspired jog past the tramps and street gangers who shifted out of their lazy rest to get a better look at her. Anna did not glance back until the glow of a giant pair of holographic breasts came into view above a black-painted door. It looked so old and battered she often wondered if it was real wood. Each time she would knock on it, the same thought waltzed through her mind as if it was the first time she had laid eyes on it. Today the zoom was weak; the texture of bubbled plastic looked obvious in one of the gouges.

The door was as fake as most of the tits behind it.

Her trembling hand reached up and knocked again. A panel, eight inches by two, shimmered away from the appearance of paint to a pass-through screen. The club manager’s bushy black eyebrows scrunched together as beady grey eyes glared at her.

“You’re late.”

“Sorry, Mr. Blake. Old Bill kept me for a minute at the border.”

lashing lights thrummed in time with the oppressive music vibrating through Anna’s body. With each twist of her figure, the capsule-shaped cage jostled on the three chains holding it off the ground. The six-foot enclosure of polished plastisteel weighed less than she did, bucking and swaying as she went through her routine. Faces massed into an ocean of lustful eyes at the level of her feet. Men stared at her with alcohol on their breath and sex on their thoughts.