Escapology (21 page)

“
The
Emblem?”

“That’s the one.”

“But Emblem’s in Core. Core’s unbreachable.”

“It would seem Twist has found a way.”

“Why now?”

That’s the jackpot question for Mim. Emblem’s been a holy grail for as long as it’s been in Core, holding in the Queens, holding Slip and Hive together. Until now no one’s been stupid enough to try to boost it. After all, who the fuck wants to mess with the Queens in their Hive?

Li looks at Ho, who shrugs.

“An interesting development,” she says. “After Kamilla finally succumbed to mortality.”

“Oh?”

“Josef Lakatos mysteriously hires Breaker, starts working with him and that J-Hack collective of his, the Movement. We were aware of them buzzing around Fulcrum when Kamilla was alive, but she swatted them rather effectively and rightly so. We found it quite striking that Josef did not follow suit.”

“Seriously? Fulcrum hiring in Fails?” This is deeper shit than Mim supposed. Downright meaty shit. Her teeth are tingling.

Ho speaks up, his voice dreamy as he lights his blunt. “That’s not the most interesting part.” He takes a long, blissful toke. Coughs. “The most interesting part is that Breaker went missing not long after. AWOL. MIA. Poof.” Ho blows out a huge stream of velvety smoke and Mim watches it, enchanted.

“Presumed dead?” she asks.

“Uncertain; though a good deal of the Movement went signal dead at about the same time, and the rest have scarpered. Signal dark all around.”

“What?” Mim’s lost.

Li sips her coffee. Smiles. Knowing. Mim shudders. “The underground is hidden in plain sight. We know the movers and shakers, all of them, just as they know us. Transparency is important. The Gung is rather flammable with all of us essentially pressed cheek to jowl as we are. When the Movement suffers a mass loss of personnel and the rest go signal dark, even Agen-Z, who does not
do
hiding, then anyone with half a brain knows things have become desperately interesting.”

“What do they know? What’s going on?” Ho slurs out, and then sings off-key, “We want to know.”

“But before we can do anything, before
any
of us can do anything,” Li says, her voice soft but filled with enough cold menace to make Mim’s feet twitchy for finding the door. “There’s Twist. Suddenly in the game and gunning for Emblem no less, going through Haunts like no tomorrow as if he’s certain one can actually manage to steal it. We thought at first it was his customary delusions of grandeur, but it quickly became obvious he has information we are not party to.”

“Frustrating.” Ho, blank faced, spat out like a cherry pit.

Li pats his hand, without looking at him. Eerie, how synchronized they are.

“After the loss of Feng Ho,” she continues, “Twist ups his game. And here we arrive back at you and your Shocking boy. We assume Twist’s found a way past Core defences—”

“Five percent margin of error either way,” Ho interjects through a cloud of smoke.

“—And is sending Shock into Core to steal Emblem.”

“Which you want to take from him,” says Mim, hanging on to the thread of conversation for dear life.

“Bingo. Ten points to that girl,” says Ho, his finger in the air like he’s asking for more coffee. It seems he is, because Mrs Tan comes over with a re-fill. “Twist in control of Fulcrum just doesn’t have the same ring as Li and Ho Harmony in charge of Fulcrum.”

Secretly, in the very back of her thoughts, where she hopes it can’t be seen even by the gimlet eye of Li, Mim thinks any of them in charge of Fulcrum is a super-bad idea, but hey she’s angling for a life upgrade and as long as it doesn’t affect her, they can have whatever the hell they like.

“You want me to get to Shock before he delivers.”

“Catch or kill, we don’t care, we only need his drive,” Ho singsongs. Mim really wishes he wouldn’t; it’s as creepy as one of the mannequins or dolls in those horrendous fucking J-horror movies Sez tries to make her watch.

Li reaches over and places a finger over his mouth.

“My brother is a touch enthusiastic. We may actually need your Shocking boy alive. All you need to do is catch him for us.”

“He’s not going to respond to my IM again. Not now.”

“He won’t need to. Whatever Twist’s given him to help him get into Core, it’s making him noisy. Twist has him blocked at the moment, but we can crack that. We presume your boy will make a move very soon. Given a margin of prep time, and Twist’s awareness of our interest in that block, we think no less than a day or two. You know him better than anyone. What shops he’d use for a job like this. Which area he might be in. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll be waiting for when he comes out, and you will catch him. I don’t care how. Bullet. Taser. Boomerang. Just take the boy out when he exits Slip and bring him to us, avoiding Twist’s people, or anyone else who might be after him. Can you do that?”

Li stares at Mim. It’s like being in the sight line of a hungry anaconda.

Mim holds Li’s gaze, her mind working so fast it aches. Throwing Shock to the lions is heatless malice, her version of making him live in interesting times as punishment for tangling her so effortlessly around him. For making it impossible to forget how much it hurt to excise him from her life.

She doesn’t feel bad about giving him to Twist. Twist won’t kill him. He might threaten to, might hurt Shock enough to make him
think
he’s going to die, but Shock’s too useful to kill. So he won’t. She shies away from other things he might do. That might make her feel
guilty
, and Mim’s not a fan.

Li though, she doesn’t care how useful anyone is, despite what she said. Li kills because it makes her happy. And she wants to kill Shock. He outwitted her, no one gets to outwit her and live. Giving him up to Li, therefore, is malice aforethought. It’s signing his death sentence. Can she do it?

“I can.”

She’s not sure if she’s lying. But saying it makes it real, whether it’s truth or not. Means she
has
to do it. So there it is, isn’t it?

“So you’re in?” Li sips her coffee. Offers inquisitive eyes over the brim.

Mim experiences a moment of uncertainty.

“How much?”

Li sends her a closed IM rather than responding verbally. With extreme caution, after hitting it with every sneaky malware and virus-nuke she has, Mim opens it. The amount is staggering and comes half before and half after the job is done. Her uncertainty vanishes. This is it. Her financial passport, the first step toward the Heights, whether she aces this task or not.

Fuck you, Shimli, it was shit knowing you.

“I’m in,” she says.

Head throbbing like a rotten tooth, Shock takes the coastal mono around the slummy, cage-apartment blocks of the Alley, one of which he calls home, and the narrow slick of poorly built ’rises spooning Cash Corner. An equally grim collection of slighter larger, less cage-like hellholes. He can’t afford those, so he has to bunk in the Alley with the oldsters. Going down in the world. No prizes for what’s on the next rung below this. Six feet under. Or it would be, if the Gung buried its dead.

Sat in a window seat, Shock watches the gulls wheeling far below, between the cliffs at the edge of the Gung and the equally steep sides of ’scrapers built along the cliffs with no regard for safety or regulations. Their calls sound like screams, like they’re crying for help. He can relate. Everything inside of him is screaming, a whole colony of gulls from pelvis to collarbones, lining his ribcage in messy, shit-shellacked disarray.

Over the cliffs, even further down, a furious sea slams white-capped shoulders into jagged rock, the waves huge to his eyes even from here, hundreds of feet above the ground. For some reason it puts him in mind of the land ships. He can’t imagine how he’d bear that proximity. Those massive waves smashing too close for comfort, spewing salty spray into his face. Leaving his clothes, his hair, his skin, stiff with salt. Leaving him beleaguered and bedraggled, and probably suicidal. In which case the ocean would constitute endless temptation. He shudders.

The mono weaves along the coast, in and out of the ’scrapers, blocks and ’risers, for twenty-eight minutes, chased by guillemots and angry pelicans, dogged by gangs of gulls; stalked by the occasional sec-drone. Shock resists the urge to duck down every time. Way to look suspicious. Instead he gazes casually at his boots, allowing his shock of hair to fall over his face. Instant camouflage. He’d like to say that’s why he grows it, but he just prefers it this way.

Long hair was the only thing he dug about being a girl. The rest of it he’s glad to be rid of, glad too that he managed to get the lot removed before the spectre of periods, tits and hormones rose up to torment him. If he’d ever seen blood in his underwear, or any swelling of his flat chest, he’d have come to a mono platform and taken a dive. There are some things a person can’t live with.

The mono screeches to a halt, the noise drowning out the shrieks of the gulls in its wake. Shock takes the elevator down. He doesn’t normally, having little trust for these rickety things, all squealing lines and clear, plastic-looking shells giving a 360-degree of the ground too damn far beneath your feet. He’s not afraid of heights—he’s afraid of losing his life to shonky engineering, so he sighs genuine relief when it touches ground.

This is the IndoChinese quarter, the very outskirts of it. A slum called Pimchi. The only J-Hack collective Shock’s had dealings with works out of this district. They’re the “Quạ”. The Crows. Who descend en masse and leave chaos in their wake. The number of Quạ hospitalized, deceased, arrested or disappeared in the seven years they’ve been a going concern is sobering. Of the original members, only five remain, surrounded by an ever-shifting, ever-changing murder made up of some 175 Quạ recruits, Fails and non-Fails alike. Out here, no one gives a shit. Not really.

Of those remaining five originals, one is Shock’s connection, Heng. Or Well Heng, if you’re a close buddy. Anyone not within his inner circle tries to call him that ends up less Well Heng. Shock calls him Aitch, just to be contrary. Heng has a workshop in whatever dingy, well-hidden hole the Quạ call home, but he also has one in the local high-rise shopping mart, for paying customers, which is what Shock intends to be.

Inside the shopping mart, a block-like tangle of shops and stalls, crowded and filled with the hysterical squawk of live poultry, it’s like midday in high summer. Humid air clinging stickily to the skin, tempers rising, the deranged buzz of flies courting the food stalls. Although exhausted and in serious pain, Shock takes the stairs, fully aware that stepping into an elevator here is basically asking to be mugged, or worse.

He finds Heng, a slightly overweight, classically handsome Cambodian sat at his monitors, goggles down, deep into a chat with some girl in a pink “YO! Takei!” j-pop band tee, who pops gum more than she talks and radiates boredom toxic as nuclear waste. Trust Heng to go old Tech. The guy knows as much about new Tech as Shock does, maybe more now and then, right on the cutting edge of what’s going down in the community, but he’s always dabbling in this ancient crap. Who wants to face-to-face on a screen when you can do it all mind-to-mind?

“Girlfriend?” Shock asks, when Heng spots him and dials off.

Heng looks disgusted. “No, jerk. Cousin. She’s got some problem at Cad. My mak told me to give her some advice. I’m sure you noticed her high levels of interest.”

“The enthusiasm burned.”

“Damn right. So what brings you to Pimchi, Shock? Usual shit?”

Shock collapses into a rickety-looking chair next to Heng’s desk and nods.

“Usual shit.”

“Can you pay?”

Shock grins. He likes Heng. Zero BS.

“I have flim. Enough for what I need.”

“And what is it you need?”

“Need a full quota of scums and the code specs for a Hive drone.” He winces as he says the latter. Not only is the request stupid, because no one is daft enough to try cracking Hive, it’s also probably going to be difficult to find. Shock may end up owing Heng a serious favour or three, if he lives…

Heng heaves forward, staring.

“Hive? You’re going in to
Hive
?” He seems genuinely concerned, which is a thing. Heng doesn’t much care for Shock. No one of sense does.

Shock shrugs. “For my health.”

“Flim? Or breathing?”

“Make a wild guess.”

Heng makes a face. “Ouch. My condolences.”

“I’m not dead yet. And I don’t intend to be.”

“Well, we all have the best intentions…”

“That we do,” Shock agrees, liking the direction of this conversation less and less. “Do you have what I need?”

Grabbing a set of keys from in amongst the metric tonne of crap cluttering his desk, Heng gets up, scraping his chair back, making it scream against the floor. Everything’s screaming today. It’s lucky Shock’s not sensitive to signs and portents, or else he might get worried.

“Fifty grenades do?”

“Reckon so.”

It only takes ten minutes for Heng to return, which is a surprise. He’s got two flash keys, the types that jack directly in. One has those scums; the other holds extensive,
beautiful
, specs on the Hive drones. Shock can’t quite believe his luck. So he doesn’t.

“Where the hell you get these?”

Heng screws up his face. J-Hacks have this bullshit code preventing them spilling info that might be damaging to the collective. Fuck knows they get into enough scrapes to make it necessary, but this is important. Twist said trial and error, which basically means dead Haunts. And here Shock comes to his old connection, sort of a mate—if someone who doesn’t like you much can be called any such thing—and lo and behold he’s got this shit right to hand. Suspicious.

I mean, okay, Shock needed it right to hand, he’s got very little time. But he’d expected to wait maybe six hours, a little more, for something this tricky to obtain. Expected Heng to have to go around those with an interest in Hive and cajole or bribe the specs out of them. Yet here it is. How involved is Heng in all this shit? Collectives do work for the Gung’s criminal elements but unless he’s got Heng seriously wrong, he’d not be an active participant in the wholesale slaughter of Haunts.