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Authors: Marianne de Pierres

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BOOK: Crash Deluxe
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Start what?
I didn’t want to start anything. ‘Don’t you wanna take some time to . . . um . . . recover?’
Something about Glorious made me trip over my words.
Maybe because she was cultured. Maybe because she was inordinately beautiful - I’d always maintained that beauty fucked with people’s minds. Or maybe it was that she was soft and feminine and polite and I didn’t know how to deal with that.
She shook her head. ‘Thanks, but I need to think about something else.’ She smiled shyly.
I tried hard to tell if it was practised or real and came up with nothing.
‘So when you’re ready . . .’ she finished
Try never.
She left me and I paced the room in agitation.
I badly wanted to have a wash but not with an audience. I was allergic to strangers watching me naked.
‘Merv,’ I called.
‘Yes, Jales?’ A thin disembodied voice came back.
‘I’m going to wash. You eyeball me and I’ll flush Snout down the san. Understand?’
I took his silence to mean clear-as-Viva-water.
It would have to do.
Before I thought about it any more, I stripped, dumped my clothes in the separate cleaner and jumped into the san. When I’d finished, I repacked my kit and sat it by the door. I wanted out of here the moment I could. I certainly wasn’t settling things neatly in drawers.
Hell, I
never
put things in drawers.
I paced again until the indecision of what I should do next made my limbs heavy with fatigue. The entertainment unit told me it was late afternoon of what already seemed like a very long day.
Now I was here I had to wait for Merv to find the information I needed. Frustration sandpapered away under my skin. I hated having to do anything slowly. Impatience was my virtue - my curse. I wanted to tear the fabric of Viva apart and make someone answer for Mo-vay.
And Roo.
And Wombebe.
But I couldn’t do that with my fists. I had to be smart for a while. I had to learn.
Calmed a little by that thought, I lay down.
Not meaning to, I slept. Dreams crowded in, worse than ever before, semi-waking dreams full of blood and the deep ache of unfulfilled orgasm.
Sometime later the bed got too soft and I woke finally, on the floor, twisted up in the sheet in a corner of the room. The sky through the window polariser looked like morning. The Entertainment Unit said five a.m. when I asked it. I stretched and disentangled myself.
‘What time is breakfast, Merv?’
‘Morning, Jales. Were you comforable on the floor? I didn’t like to wake you.’ He sounded weary, like he’d been up all night.
‘Fine,’ I lied.
‘Lam will show you the way to Breezas for breakfast when you’re ready.’
‘Thanks.’
‘They often run out of bacon by seven,’ he added casually. ‘I always like to be there before that.’
I took his hint and nodded at nothing in particular. I-bugs made it odd to have a conversation with him. Not even a camera lens to look into.
‘Where can I exercise?’
‘Delly doesn’t allow the
Amoratos
to leave the building. But three doors up from Glorious there’s an aerobics glove.’
Aerobics glove. Uugh.
The memory of Gigi’s vreal set was fresh in my mind and this sounded like something you might get buried in.
‘I think I’ll settle for bacon,’ I replied.
Lam was waiting in exactly the same position that I’d left him, cross-legged chewing something that looked like last-century biltong.
‘Don’t you get cramp?’ I sniped.
He gave me the benefit of his perfectly bland smile again and sprang up, immediately limber and agile.
Obviously not.
‘Lead me to the bacon,’ I said.
He turned on his heel toward the lift.
I tried a couple of times to lure him into conversation as we whizzed up two floors and made our way through some heavily glazed security doors and an ID check.
The Korean wasn’t biting.
We stepped through into an abyss. The transparent walkway gave me instant vertigo as though I was flying without an engine or wings. Annoyingly, Lam didn’t even seem to notice the drop of thousands of feet to the pavement.
My thoughts of a hearty breakfast faded.
How on earth did people eat up here?
Others walked behind us, emerging from other floors. They were suits, mainly, with a smattering of clergy dressed in their brocade robes and snazzy sandals.
We marched a step ahead of them until we reached the middle of the bridge where the sides curved outward into a bowl shape. Lam waved me into the entrance of a jungle-decor café, complete with animal noises and a bio-robotic python slithering among the fake tusk stools.
Merv sat in the corner under the jungle vines, drinking coffee through a straw and stroking Snout. Caked orange dribble on his collar told me he was dry, but only just.
I ordered tea and something that resembled sugar dough.
Lam nodded at the waiter, to confirm that my request was on the house. Then he sat himself at the counter.
I picked up my order casually and made for a table under the vines. I sat with my back to Lam, blocking his direct vision of Merv.
‘C-can’t talk for long,’ Merv muttered. He fingered the chocolate roll in front of him.
‘Have you found anything?’
‘Not yet. Snout’s been digging b-but there’s a quiver. I had to bring her in.’ His hand shook as it lifted the roll to his mouth. ‘Y-you go out in a quiver, y-you don’t come back. No matter how good you are.’
I sighed. A
quiver
was a hack’s equivalent of an earthquake - major shake. It spooked them all. The paranoid ones believed that it was a rogue surveillance program. But nobody knew who wrote it and nobody knew who sent it. Maybe that was what Honey meant about Merv being scared of shadows.
‘How long does a quiver last?’
Merv shrugged. ‘Not long. M-maybe.’
I swallowed a surge of impatience and tried another tack. ‘What is Brilliance?’
The fear put there by the thought of the quiver didn’t fade from his voice. ‘An AI.’
‘How does it work?’
‘
Sh-she
edits everything we see on the screen. I mean everything that is supplied to her.’
‘How do you mean?’
He tapped the bitten end of his roll into his plate as though he was stubbing out a cig. ‘She relies on r-raw feed from the Priers. All the Priers are owned by the big three.’
‘Monk, Bau and Laud?’
He nodded. ‘M-monk feeds her sport. S.K. Laud feeds her lifestyle. And Sera Bau c-cams everything she needs for DramaNet. Brilliance edits and p-programmes, depending on her gauging of the v-viewers’ response.’
I stared down through the transparent floor. Breeza’s. Good name. You could almost feel the wind licking between your toes.
‘Sounds like Brilliance has a lot of say.’
‘Her original program was designed just for multimedia editing. Programming selection is something that seems to have evolved.’
Merv hunched his shoulders in a way that told me there was more.
Behind me I heard Lam clank his plate on the cafébar. I stretched and looked around. He was staring at me with an empty expression that made me nervous.
I turned back to Merv and spoke quickly. ‘Who else figures in the big time stakes around here?’
‘The b-banking royalty, I guess. They m-manage the money still but they don’t have much p-personal wealth. Information is p-power and they don’t own it.’
He looked away from me suddenly - just before Lam slapped me across the ear.
I jerked upright, fists clenched.
‘What’s so interesting?’ Lam said in perfect Australian.
The surprise of hearing him finally speak stalled my gut reaction to hammer him. I used the moment to tell myself that a full-scale brawl probably wouldn’t further my cause.
‘Well, you’re not exactly scintillating conversation,’ I snapped, rubbing my ear.
He laughed. A breathy snort.
Before I had a chance to reconsider my passive line
Amoratos
from the Luxoria spilled in, chattering and laughing, as beautiful in the daylight as they were in the dimness of the club. Glorious was among them.
Merv got up and left as they approached. They ignored him as though he was invisible.
Glorious came over to me, glowing with beauty - a combination of effects created by her incredible hair, her amber-tinged skin and some early-morning exercise.
‘You look better,’ I said spontaneously.
‘We have to keep in shape for our profession. But then, you’d know that. You have an exceptional body.’
The others giggled and made rude noises at her. They settled at tables around me, calling for food and coffee. Lam resumed his bland expression and withdrew to the counter.
Glorious’s compliment made me squirm. I didn’t like social chat, and I didn’t like the direction of the conversation. She was flirting.
She sat on the stool next to me, leaning in close as if we were good friends.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘When you didn’t call me last night I thought something might have happened. That you’d left.’
I grunted. Non-committal. My heart accelerated, though, disturbed by her easy manner.
‘Look at your bruises. I’ll put something on them when we go back.’ She reached up and stroked my face.
‘What are you doing?’ I growled, glancing around.
The others didn’t seem to notice - only Lam, who watched from a distance over the lip of his cup.
Glorious stared at me, eyes wide with innocent interest. ‘There’s something about you, Jales. I’ve never met anyone who . . . Delly said you are an
Amorato
. I can sense desire in you but there’s resistance too. It’s not usual for someone of our trade to be divided.’
Divided?
It described exactly how I was feeling. She’d forgotten to add
confused, crazy and infected by a lustful, violent parasite.
What else would explain this femme turning my stomach to liquid and my legs to purée? Doll Feast was the only woman I’d been with before but that had been more about survival and need.
Women weren’t to my taste in that way - they got competitive about all the wrong things when sex came into it. This . . . attraction was something I’d never experienced before and it was freaking untimely.
I pushed her hand away. ‘You got a degree in mind-reading?’
Glorious looked puzzled. ‘Applied Endocrinology, Sexual Alchemy and Bio-Communication, actually. But you must have similar qualifications?’
‘Er . . . yes, though things are different in the west. We train on the . . . er . . . job.’
She brought her face closer to mine. ‘I can work out most people within a few minutes of meeting them. After that, their inhibitions are easily overcome. But I cannot find the beginning of the thread with you.’ She whispered the last, her sweet breath fanning my lips. ‘You frighten me.’
This was not the sort of conversation I was used to having at breakfast - sophisticated and loaded with sexual undertones. I was usually too busy stuffing in hot dough and cursing Teece.
I turned my mouth to Glorious’s ear, careful not to touch her flesh. ‘Be frightened,’ I whispered, hoping to put her off.
She gave me a wicked smile. ‘Fear is exciting.’
Without warning she locked her arms around my neck and slipped her tongue straight into my mouth. An explosion of taste hit me - sweeter than jam, tangier than lemon.
Desire sprang loose like a wild thing. I wanted to reach under her clothes and feel the texture of her skin.
‘I still haven’t shown you my room,’ she breathed.
‘You should,’ I said.
We left with Lam trailing behind, smirking discreetly. Whatever his instructions from Lavish, they didn’t prevent me
fraternising
.
As we walked back across the bridge Glorious wound and unwound her fingers through mine, tickling and pinching the flesh of my hand.
By the time we got to her room my self-restraint had failed completely. A haze fell across my vision. I wanted her so badly that it hurt.
Or maybe it wasn’t
her
. Maybe I just wanted
it
.
My hands trembled on her shoulders as she keyed in her door code.
We stumbled inside and I snatched Glorious against me, forcing a leg up between hers. Our kiss wasn’t tender or loving. It was something far cruder.
I rolled her on to the bed and tore her shirt open. My mouth fixed onto the length of her nipple. I sucked roughly, without any expertise, only need.
Glorious seemed to like it. She freed the other nipple from her opened shirt so that I could squeeze it between my fingers.
Then she reached down to my pants and slid her fingers inside the waistband. I loosened them and wriggled them down over my hips.
She trailed her fingers from my navel downwards, so lightly that I thought I might die from the teasing agony of it.
‘Please,’ I groaned. ‘Hurry.’
In the back of my brain I registered that she’d barely touched me and yet I was out of my mind with desire for her. No one had ever done this to me before - not even Loyl. The flesh hunger denied the existence of anything else.
Glorious’s fingers probed and stroked, finding the entrance to the moist slit where she could slip inside me. I arched, ready for it, but she suddenly pulled away, climbing off the bed to put some distance between us.
Confused, dizzyingly so, I watched as she picked up a small spray from her Alkem module and doused herself with it. She returned and sprayed it on me as well.
I went to touch her but her flesh felt different, almost repellent. Somehow, in a few seconds, the heat had gone from my lust. The sight of her breasts was no longer erotic. My near-orgasm faded back to a troubled urge.
BOOK: Crash Deluxe
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