Escapology (25 page)

Fucking come
on
!
he begs, still hoping he’ll make it out before his skin fails.

Through the stacks, just ahead, one of the Queens looms from between the outer towers. Large as life. Larger.

Tall as her fortress, she’s the same shade of black, but her skin glows with yellow phosphorescence. She’s scintillating. Gorgeous. Like gold dust in oil on black marble. Vast feelers prodding at the ground, she moves gracefully toward him. Shock closes his eyes as the line speeds him toward her. She can’t see him yet—he’s not been scanned, would’ve felt it. Just coming in his direction, that’s all.

Then her shadow falls across him, and he feels her in his mind. She’s bright white light, she blinds, engulfs. Her voice is a tidal wave of sound, obliterating thought, drowning the feel of Emblem’s hooks.

Shock Pao.

It’s not a question. She knows. No scan, no nothing. Just seen straight the fuck through him like this skin’s not even there. He scuttles on, half insane fear, half pure insanity, hoping to outrun her, knowing he can’t. Her shadow goes on forever. She’s in charge here. Hive can be whatever she wills it: a labyrinth, a trap, a coffin.

Do you have it?

Shock can’t breathe, which is stupid, no need in here. He’s not even real, just a collection of data thinking its way into a preset, pre-paid, supposedly state-registered form that if anything feels like it’s more terrified than him. Fear’s got his voice in a box.

I see it. Keep it safe. Do not take it to Twist. We no longer require his services.

What the holy fuck? Twist was working for the Queens and now they want to cut him out of the deal? Any chance of surviving this madness shrinks to a pinpoint and pops out of sight.

I can’t keep this from Twist!
Shock doesn’t know if he’s speaking to her, or to himself.
He’ll kill me.

We will deal with Twist. You will deal with us.

The threat is implicit. Also insane. Twist is not to be fucked with, not even by these crazy ant dames. He’s not in their Hive, they can’t touch him. He can get Shock though, oh yeah he can, and Emblem with him. Then see what that crazy Scots fucker does to their Hive, their home. He’ll crush it. Surely they know that. Surely? Shock drops his common sense like a handful of bad trips.

Are you crazy? Twist won’t walk away from this like a good dog. He’ll take this shit from my head by any means necessary and he will
shut you down.

He feels her censure as hellish pain, like every tooth extracted at once, twelve-inch drill bits churning his lobes, a head full of flash bombs. Queenie could crush him without thinking. That she’s put so much thought into making him hurt this bad without killing tells him how far he’s crossed the line. And a message rides atop the pain.

Shock’s her errand boy. He’s alive because she needs him to be, no other reason. It’s human/ant dynamics reversed and she’s wearing big fucking boots. He vibrates apology, sends it out on all frequencies, praying to whatever God they bothered to replace the last with that she’s in a forgiving mood.

Bring Emblem to the Heights. Do not delay. You will be signal loud, and there will be others after you, but they are far behind. Once you are at Heights, you will be safe. We can remove Emblem. Then we will help you run, Shock Pao. We will ensure your survival.
Her voice is a tornado in his mind, howling and roaring. Still pissed. So not good.

The exact address, a penthouse number so high even thinking about it gives him vertigo, drives into his flash with diamond-tipped power. Adds several powerful dimensions to the pain already bleeding out in concentric circles from where Emblem squats, leaden, and spiked with unexpected armature. Feels as if it’s damn near decapitated him.

Go. We will be waiting, and we will be watching you, Shock Pao.

Her weight, her voice, her shadow, disappear. He opens his eyes. He’s outside the Hive, beyond the Daddies, the barcode field and the Firewall maze, at the mouth of the trough running back to Slip. In terms of an expression of absolute power it’s as convincing as a bullet to the cranium.

He recalls with a disbelieving laugh what Twist said about choice, incredulous that he assumed that was the worst he could face. What ignorance. Throwing his drone skin aside like so much junk, Shock dashes in to the gusher. Doesn’t so much as think back, let alone look. Wakes in the cell a few minutes later, breathing hard, head pounding and aching, body drenched in sweat, nerves jumping like ECT, and wondering what the hell time-bomb he’s got hooked in his skull that it gets to hurt this bad.

Back out to drizzle, aiming for casual, Shock’s striking out on all levels, freaking hard enough to bust a fit. Freak should be over by now. Adrenalin should have frog-hopped that fucker and be running rings ’round his veins like victory laps. But there’re two things in the way.

One: he just got spoken to by a genuine, honest-to-goddamn-hell Hive Queen. Moreover she and her kind are watching him. Watching
him
. He’s stuck in the spotlight. Hell for a Haunt, even one so signal loud he’s no longer anything like.

Two: Emblem’s toxic, deadly,
inside his skull
, and he’s no option but to carry it where the Queens want it to go. Talk about your human garbage disposal.

Feeling distinctly used and abused, Shock makes for the Heights, thoughts of Twist dimming beneath the
need
to get this out of his head before it reduces his grey matter to mush. Those hooks are hurting as if they’re real, not mental manifestations of security protocol, and he can feel Emblem pulsing in there like a freaking heartbeat.

Thing is, the Heights, that well-protected jut of prime real estate, is over two blocks away, through more people, more traffic, than you could safely cram into the centre of the moon. If Shock blows before he gets there he’ll be all over the daily news on every flash in the Gung, as well the soles of several hundred thousand feet. Bodes so far from well it’s in a different fucking dimension.

Only option here is to keep moving, and he’s got that all sewn up from here to kingdom come. As he enters the inner city, drizzle picks up to the point where it earns the right to be called rain. Looks like drops of mercury in the glaring light of scrolling neon and sulphur-bright street lamps. Silver pools collect across polished concrete, splashing his genuine-as-dammit Beng boots. Clearly today has not reached its optimum shit level and his freak cranks up to DEFCON 1, because the inner ring is a whole different ball game.

Between outer and inner city, it’s like the difference between Slip and Hive. Buildings that look big as dammit suddenly dwarf next to gargantuan monuments that rise into the sky like God’s own fingers. This here’s money territory, claustrophobic and exposed all at once, and surrounded by sec-drones. Luckily they belong to Fulcrum, are controlled by Hive, and therefore should leave him alone, considering the Queens want him at Heights.

Embalmed in pain, Shock stumbles on, foot following foot, eyes fixed like Araldite on the Heights, that neo-gothic pathway to heaven’s colon, lit up bright enough to form a neon halo. He tries to ignore that
ka-thump ka-thump
in his bloated flash, but it’s beginning to sound like the drum beat to the end of the goddamn world. Bomb trails arcing over the brain horizon, pretty and all-out deadly as a meteor shower aimed at your window. He could do with dropping a handful of blockers, just to shut out the screaming migraine before it drops him, stone cold, to the sidewalk.

He reels on, clutching his skull. Just gotta keep going until he’s home free from this shit but as the crowd surges around him,
ka-thump
becomes full-on jungle trip-hop track and the missiles, thus far arcing silent and splendid across the cranial horizon, slam into his lobes. The resulting explosion is like a sun going nova in his brain, sound hitting long after light, deafening, then the shock waves, cranial earthquakes, blast reason to oblivion.

It’s painless but leaves no room for anything but itself, and Shock pushes on blindly, shoving folk aside, stumbling like a drunkard. Screaming at nothing and nobody. Blood wells, thick and choking, in his nose, drips for a second in globes large as cherry-bombs, then all-out gushes, and he’s a walking gore-factory, neoprene jacket streaked with thick, clotted rivulets. They hit the pavement: mini paint-balls dyeing the rain red as gochujang sauce, and not one soul’s clocked his condition, walking on oblivious or uncaring. Probably have him down as some loser trip-whore or liver-hound on a one-way journey to flatlines and ash. Oh the irony.

Cranial aftershocks become pain again at last; deep, grinding pain, and somewhere in there, a siren begins to go off, although the blitz has already been and gone, leaving his brainscape flattened and burning. This sound, rippling as it does through raddled nerves on some low, undeniable frequency, unseats whatever control he has over his stomach and he throws up the siu bao he choked down for breakfast in one heave, blood from his nose dripping into the brownish slew like undigested ketchup.

The siren simultaneously builds and quietens until it’s less sound than pressure pounding against the inside of his skull and Shock’s sure this is the big goodbye. Breadbox implosion. Skull-scattering fireworks. Instead, as pressure reaches max, golden lights burst from his eyes.

The whine snaps off. Snaps everything. His connection to Slip severs clean as flesh under a blade. He feels it go, just like those moments as a child when you walk into a room at night and the lights snap off, leaving you lost in darkness with only the sound of your breath coming faster and faster as fear crawls upward from your toes on spindly legs. Marooned in silence, Shock finally stops moving. He’s forgotten how. Every atom is focused on what was lost, what’s been broken.

Held in a vacuum, he’s captured, hypnotized, by the light beams shining from his eyes, their reflection in the rain-soaked sidewalk. Obviously he’s honest to goodness tripping out, or maybe dead. Dead would be good. Shock stares at his face in the muddled mirror of a puddle, astounded. He looks like a degenerate God. Around him, there’s a ripple of reaction at last. A murmured crescendo. Sounds like voices. Who’s talking to him? He can’t answer, his eyes are headlights, and he’s frozen inside them.

Threads of brighter gold, like nano-necklaces, trickle down the gold beams, begin to weave together and, from golden threads, before his bomb-blasted, God-bright, dissipated peepers, two shapes begin to form. Avis. His avis. Shark, cruising in circles around his head, coalescing closer to 3D with each circuit. And Puss, ghostly tentacles swirling on the sidewalk as it turns toward his leg and slides up. He can feel it there, against the material of his trousers. Solid. But the material doesn’t move.

Dead. He has to be dead. Except he feels them, both of them, right there in his
mind
. Distinct and present as his own consciousness. Not an illusion as he thought, but real.
Real
. Sound fades in, the world on its heels, and Shock finds he’s not dead. Not dreaming. He’s stood in the middle of the street, Puss clinging to his chest, Shark swimming hungry circles between himself and a crowd of people who look as stunned as he feels. Mouths agape, pupils blown wide.

Shock watches the shark, the crowd, not knowing what to think, to say. They’re real. They’re
real
. And they’re with him, within him, listening in to his every thought.

Then a woman on the edge of the crowd snaps.

Terror ignites in her eyes, blazes across her face. She begins screaming, her bag dropping from her hand, sumptuous grey leather soaking up gore-spattered rain. The impasse breaks with her, people exploding away like flocks of hysterical gulls colliding and screeching, bags flying like feathers. In the mayhem, feeling Shock’s spike of panic, Shark powers forward, creating a pathway. Quick on the up-take thanks to their connection—intimate in ways he’s still struggling to adjust to—Shock races away from the scene, unable to feel his feet.

He runs until his legs give out, and he staggers to a wall, gasping for breath. With every attempt for air a tight knot of tears rises in his throat. Slip is gone, its absence absolute as a slammed door. His avis,
real
and locked out with him, are vulnerable. Helpless. They need him to be together, but he’s not, he can’t. Everything’s wrong, and Emblem’s still stuck in his drive, no longer painful but so fucking
big
and growing now, filling it bit by bit. What will happen when it reaches the edges?

Focused on the Heights before, he’s all but forgotten that objective. It flits into his mind now, so tempting, but the thing inside of him that’s no longer
him
but
them
, Puss and Shark made real, alive, and separate, shies away from heading toward anywhere the Queens might find them with such vehemence he’s running in the opposite direction almost before he realizes it.

Shock’s hands tangle in his hair, scraping at his skull. In the distance he hears screaming, sec-drone sirens. The wail of security vans. They parallel his internal alarms. Twist is coming. Every fucking crime lord in the Gung will follow. He has to scramble. Find a bolthole, somewhere safe. He has no idea where to go. Tears finally find their way through, coiling hot paths down his cheeks, capturing locks of his hair, dripping onto his chest, through Puss, who clings there like a child.

“What the
fuck
do I do? Just what the fuck do I
do
?”

Stumbling to the temporary safety of a refuse-bay, the deep, square cubby designed to conceal huge refuse bins for the recycling plants, Shock huddles in the damp and the darkness. Listens with growing despair to the hubbub boiling in the inner city. The muffled thud of footsteps can be heard nearby as security forces, guided by sec-drones, hunt him down in the maze of service-alleys between ’scrapers.

They come close then veer away, making him lightheaded, a potent brew of fear and anxiety. If it gets any worse he’ll pass out, and then what will happen? He’s got to get the hell away, right now. Find help. How exactly does he do that? He’s probably on every screen and feed in the known world, and his avis are unmissable.