Escapology (12 page)

But today is not that day.

“So what about the deets for Paraderm?”

Mim shrugs. “Lucky for you I’ll be in Olbax. Sez’ll be in touch when I have the location. All you have to do is wait until he chimes you.”

“Fine.”

It’s not fine. Of course it’s not. Last thing he wants in the world is to have that lanky no good streak of piss Sez in his IMs, but he holds his tongue. Leaves the juice bar without a backward glance and heads for anywhere else. Just walking and walking, because it beats standing there and screaming until his throat explodes.

He walks until his legs ache, until he’s so hungry his spine feels like it’s being throttled, until he can’t think in coherent sentences, until his skin is cold and numb, his face hurts, his feet burn. Only then does he go home. Slams a handful of bumps into his neck, ignoring the clamour for something more substantial and dives into sleep.

And this time as the darkness hits, he wonders if he’ll even try to wake up.

Dropping to the floor between the multi-coloured jumble of her kitchen and the living area, Amiga kicks off her blades and shrugs out of her jumpsuit, sweaty skin gasping for air. Out for hours tracking some new J-Hack brat Twist wants done over for trying to jack his home servers, she’s bad tempered, too hot, and starved half to death. In just her underwear she sinks cross-legged to the floor and reaches across to the cool box, snagging out a surprisingly luke-warm beer. She offers the uncaring walls of her hovel a heartfelt groan.

“Don’t tell me, half power.”

Being vagabonds and pirates, the Hornets of Jong-phu steal their electricity from the building’s generators. On the one hand this means they never pay for that shit; on the other it means that when the ’rise power level bottoms out, as it often does, they end up with little or no power themselves.

She slams the cap off her beer and necks it, her head pressed back into the plastic edge of her sink unit, trying to ignore how synth-beer when warm tastes exactly like spit. Thanks to zero food in twelve hours, the paltry two percent alcohol hits her starved bloodstream like an overexcited jackhammer and, her bones buzzing pleasantly, she begins to think about the positive. Well she would, if there were any.

Half power means that for sure her cool box has defrosted, so there’s a damn good chance the piece of fish she got for tonight’s dinner has curled up necrotic toes and gone to food heaven. She sighs, chucking the empty across the room in a perfect arc to her overflowing bin. It bounces off two take-away boxes stuffed onto the top and hits the floor with a bang. Amiga throws up her arms.

“
Score!
”

Head craned to peer at sparsely populated shelves she contemplates her food options, dismissing them with a snort.

“Dandy. Just mother-frackin’ dandy. Guess that’s noodles for me tonight.
Again
.”

She has a hate/hate relationship with noodles, but they’re cheap, nutritious, and she’s a beggar who can’t afford to choose. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. She had plenty of flim. Fact is she’s stuck with noodles because she spent a spit-load of it on a customized crossbow, but a girl’s got to have her toys and oh my she can go a lot of days sucking up noodles to play with that puppy once her weapons guy, Janosz, delivers.

Her wall rattles with the syncopation of knuckles dancing in all too familiar patterns.

Deuce.

“Amiga?” Muffled, and with a distinct flavour of neediness that makes her wince. All she wants to do is eat, chuck her cringing skin under a chem shower and sleep. “You in? We have a problem.”

Amiga groans again, grinding the heels of her palms into tired eyes.

“Please don’t tell me it’s the drone coming back to bite us in the arse.”

“No, that went like clockwork. I’m a fucking pro, Amiga. You know this.”

Amiga knows. She relaxes, her back slumping against plastic and sticking slightly.

“What is it then?”

“It’s EVaC.”

Of all the Hornets hidden in Jong-Phu, EVaC is perhaps the least normal and most insular, meaning he’s the one Amiga has somehow managed to become firmest friends with. Friendship’s easy when there’s no pressure to do anything but sit and
be
in each other’s presence. Her other Hornet friendships are more fraught and complicated and often make her feel aggravated.

As fond as she is of them, there’s so much she wants to live up to and simply can’t, and it doesn’t help that they seem to think she’s better than she is whilst berating her for being an idiot. What do you do with that level of fuckery?

If Deuce is calling her over for EVaC, she assumes the daft bastard’s been buying home-made bumps again to try to restrain the clamour in his skull and needs talking down from wherever it is he’s ended up. Boy’s not good on medication. None of his type is, and yet they’re forever taking it. Genuinely annoying. Her rage rises again, a swarm of angry wasps boiling behind her rib cage. Deuce is interrupting her me-time for
this
?

“What’s with him this time? More bump drama?” She can’t quite nix the aggro from her tone—it fairly sizzles.

“Please. You need to come see this.” He sounds quietly desperate. Okay, that does not sound like a trip gone bad.

She sighs. “Fine. I’ll come.”

“Thanks, Amiga.” Way too relieved. “And put blades on it, yeah? It’s urgent. For reals.”

“Okay, okay, Deuce. Shit’s sake. Gimme a sec, I’m
indecent
.”

Deuce chuckles through the wall.

“I like you indecent.”

The silence that follows is epic, full of acute embarrassment, unspoken half-excuses and inarticulate dissembling. He’s probably kicking himself in the nuts that he couldn’t quite catch that one fast enough. She can’t catch her smile either. Lucky he’s not here to see it. Maybe he can sense it though, fairly snapping through the wall.

“Just hurry the fuck up, Amiga.”

“Cold, Deuce. Real cold.”

Somehow, despite her calling time on what was a super good thing, they’re still mates, but they suffer from occasional, often excruciating, lapses into old familiarity. Lately he’s getting real uptight about those. Been seeing a fairly antagonistic Chinese chick, Fen Maa, from Hangoon’s Miso District, home of the soup. The girl’s a Tech-Grad, bound for big things, and Amiga thinks he’s making a huge mistake. As far as she sees it, the only way this ends is with Deuce’s heart in smithereens. Having dismantled it herself only a year ago, she finds she’s unwilling to watch some other girl do the same.

Snagging a slippery green mini-dress from the pile of laundry on the table she swears she’ll do tonight, or maybe tomorrow night, Amiga yanks it over her head. Sneaks out the hatch good and quiet, booting Deuce with a bare foot, hoping to scare him, or maybe scare up some of that oh-so-amusing shit he was holding back after his little Freudian skid there. But he’s either too preoccupied with whatever’s up with EVaC, or too accustomed to her shit, because he only offers her a relieved smile, peeling his lanky frame away from her wall.

“Lead on, compadre,” she snaps, even more irritated with him now, just because. “And hurry it up, will you. I’m hungry. Haven’t eaten in twelve. Got to nuke me some noodles before I start chewing on the furniture.”

“Thought you had a fish supper waiting tonight?” he asks, walking off through lights dimming under the obvious power fail.

“Cool box defrosted, dumbass. If I eat there’s a possibility I end up seeing the contents of my stomach up close and personal until Sunday. Not chancing it.”

He grins over his shoulder, casual-like.

“We have some
gyudon
spare. KJ’s been cooking.”

“Is that a lame invitation?” she asks, thawing slightly. “Because you know I never turn down free food. Consider me following with chop sticks in hand.”

“Metaphorical chop sticks,” he says. “Messy.”

“Like your attempt at jokes. I think Fen Maa stole your funny bone.” It comes out loaded with a little more spice than she intended.

“Don’t start, Amiga. Please. Or you can put your metaphorical chop sticks in the actual fucking bin.”

Amiga rolls her eyes. He’s getting sensitive. He never used to be. Or perhaps he was and she didn’t notice before now, the possibility of which irritates her, because the last thing she needs is actual evidence of her inability to act like a real human being. She chooses to back off, maybe for the first time ever. Shit, is that maturity? Where the hell did
that
come from?

“Fair enough. So what’s up with EVaC I have to see so fucking urgently?”

He stops outside the hovel he shares with EVaC and Wi Ji Lin, and turns to stare at her. She can’t read his face in the darkness but feels the waft of uncertainty clear as the wind before a hurricane, like he used that annoying little trick of his and sent it whipping down through his IM link to hers.

“I really can’t explain. You have to see for yourself.”

Inside, Wi Ji, or Knee Jerk, KJ as he’s more generally known, stands by the door to EVaC’s room looking crazy worried. Considering he’s forever this worried about
something
that’s not saying much, so she wends her way around piles of junk to push past him into EVaC’s dump. He’s curled up on the bed, his long tangle of anemic red hair obscuring his face. That’s not unusual at all. But he’s silent, which absolutely is. And that’s when she starts worrying too.

EVaC’s a Patient Zero. A freak. A
kyõjin
. He downloads virads into his neural flash and jacks into the Slip to distribute them amongst unsuspecting and unwilling punters. It’s a dangerous job. Virads are catchy for a reason. Designed to hunt out and infect avis in the Slip to spread the good news about some shit avi users wouldn’t otherwise want, they’re even stickier at the source, the Zero. Outcome is Patient Zero’s suffer permanent infection from all the virads they’re paid to spread.

Logos leak into their speech patterns, and their buying habits become littered with the often pointless products they’ve promoted, hence the piles of junk in the boys’ house. Zeros like EVaC, who’ve been in the business for a good while, never fucking shut up. It’s like Tourette’s; portions of jingles, catchphrases and sound bites leaping from overstuffed neurones to their lips like coins from a keno machine jackpot. They get seriously twitchy if they hold them in for too long, so they tend not to. In other words, silence in a Zero like EVaC is unheard of.

“EVaC? Buddy? You okay there?”

He curls up harder, and she sits on the bed, pushing aside his hair, her worry escalating when he doesn’t fight to stay hidden. He’s the only
gaijin
in the whole Hornet crew and shy about his complexion, even with her. Every memory she has of chilling with him involves his endless jabbering coming out almost disembodied from within a cave of hair.

Amiga sucks in a harsh breath as she cops a load of his face. It’s a frickin’ pane of glass, veins standing out in stark relief, bright blue and red. The capillaries branching between are oddly shaped, almost logical in their curves and lines, as if attempting to form letters or numbers.

He feels too moist, not sweaty exactly, more waterlogged from the inside somehow, and his irises, whilst still that astonishing shade of light blue, reminding her of sky reflected in windows, are almost as see-through as his skin. She swears she can see the meat of his optic nerve behind them—that complicated umbilicus of wetware connecting back to the brain.

“Shiiiiiiit.” She traces the shapes on his cheek wonderingly. “How long has he been like this?”

“A few days. Since his last big job,” Knee Jerk says quietly, guilty. He should be. Frankly she is too, because she’s EVaC’s best bud and she’s not seen him in over two weeks. Fail. Major, stinking friend fail.

“Seriously?” And all her anger at them and herself comes out in it.

KJ shrugs. “He wanted to keep working. We’re not his caretakers for fuck’s sake.”

Holy middle of the conversation, Batman. Amiga feels like she’s just missed out on a chunk of explanation.

“From the beginning, asswad,” she snaps.

Deuce takes this as his cue.

“Zero’s have been avoiding work,” he says quietly. “We got wind of the why: something going down in Slip, but no deets, so none of us particularly bothered.”

“Explanation, because ignoring trouble in Slip is downright dumb and you know that even if these two screwballs don’t. Aren’t you supposed to be their Jiminy Cricket or some shit?”

He shrugs it off. “Look, Zero business has gotten mad organized in the last two years. You know what BS such structural rejigs create. EVaC’s not Guild, he hates the whole re-org, wants no part of it. Doesn’t want to answer to Mother Zero, despite proper respect for her, and digs not the notion of being affiliated. Being strictly freelance, and therefore in a position to ignore BS, he started taking the jobs other Zeros were refusing. He was making a bundle.”

“So when did he get sick?”

“Round about two weeks ago. We didn’t think much of it then. It was just a virus. Y’know, sneezing, runny nose, all that good shit. Then it changed…”

“To this?”

“Not straight away,” KJ says. He’s beside the door, arms crossed hard against his chest. “He’s only been this bad since that last job coupla days ago.”

Amiga rounds on them, too furious to feel bad when they retreat as far as they can, blank and guarded. Knee Jerk in a karate stance he couldn’t possibly hope to defend himself from.

“And you only just thought to call for help?”

“He told us he was okay.” Knee Jerk again, in a tone as pathetic as the excuse. Fitting.

“
Riiiight
. So you thought you’d what… just wait and see until his shit got serious? Because I think it’s serious guys. I think it’s definitely fucking serious now.”

“What do we do?” asks Deuce.

He hasn’t argued with her on the stupidity of leaving it this late, she can see by his face that he knows. Obviously KJ’s been kicking up a stink. He’s not really an asshole, is KJ, but he’s got a pure talent for making a jackass of himself when he gets The Fear, and he gets it a lot. He’s a jumpy son of a gun, for good reason. Before joining the Hornets, KJ ran drugs for the Harmonys.