Escapology (3 page)

She’s a quiet storm scything through them, blood spiralling around her like red snow. Bodies fall in swift succession until there are only two left standing: Amiga and the rat.

Market sounds drift up from below. Somewhere a pigeon coos softly. The rat’s face is a study. Rage and terror. He keeps looking down, as if eyes alone can undo the wreckage of his crew. They look so vulnerable now, these walking statistics, no more than the sad fact of their numbers in a graph. The first lesson Amiga learnt when she started to kill was how easy it is, and how utterly horrifying that can be.

She tosses the shoge aside, feeling tired. She really wants to punch something hard, something that will hurt. Anything to shake the sensation of not quite being human.

“Are you going to come quietly now?” she asks.

He screeches, thrusts his face forward and laughs high and loud. Then legs it.

“Bollocks.”

Lifting her arm, Amiga sends a dart from her wrist-bow through the back of his knee. Watches impassively as he collapses to the rooftop, clawing and screeching.

“Should have done that first and saved some energy,” she says to herself, walking over to snatch him up by the scruff of the neck. She zip-ties his hands to his belt to stop him flailing at her like an angry toddler. “Man, I need a drink.”

* * *

Hauling the rat down from the roof turns the puddles of sweat forming under her jumpsuit to a small lake. Comfy. Halfway down she IMs Twist, and he tells her to wait for a car. What choice does she have? It’s not like she can drag this fucker through the streets.

Her mood falls from not amused to downright pissy. Back in the alley, which is both stenchy and freezing, they wait. Terrific. Her boss is being a pain in the arse lately, this business with Haunts stealing all his attention. Whatever it is he wants, he’s ploughed through three of them already—literally, since they died in Slip—and he’s still not satisfied. Other crime lords are beginning to notice, and it’s making Twist act pretty damn weird.

Take that Haunt he’d sent her after, Shock Pao, idiot extraordinaire. Pao screwed him over and Twist wanted him creatively filleted. She was doing her level best to make that dream come true, despite catching a Haunt being hella high on the difficulty scale, then
bang
, Twist pulls the contract. Twist
never
pulls a contract. Out of character much.

The car takes an age to arrive, by which time Amiga’s lost the feeling in her toes. Once inside the vehicle, the Streek starts up a horrible racket, so she knocks him out and settles back into the cool leather of the seat. Real leather, of course.

Traffic’s terrible and in the endless void of time, the quiet broken only by the soft snoring of the rat and the purr of the engine, Amiga starts to think. Inevitable really, and always a mistake. By slow degrees thought becomes a mire, sucking her in until she’s struggling to find air.

Those Streeks were so young. Younger than her, and she’s not yet twenty-three. Now they’re just empty bags of flesh and bone, leaking blood. Wasted potential. How does
she
justify being their ending?

It should be simple. Do your job. Killed or be killed. If she hadn’t then sure, she would have died. But to her the equation is incomprehensible. Her or them? What kind of a trade-off is that? Her life is worthless. By extension, so is she. Or perhaps she was worthless to begin with and life had to run to catch up?

“Shit!” Amiga punches the seat, furious with herself, with the day, with that stupid kimchi merchant. This is not a good place to be. If she goes to Twist carrying all this fucking weak bullshit in her head, she might as well hand him a knife and expose her throat. Only she can’t stop. Can’t breathe. Can’t shake this feeling she always gets, that it wasn’t fair, wasn’t honest—that the blood on her hands is beyond cleaning. That she’s the sum of the stains and nothing more.

Reaching out with a shaking hand, she runs a finger down the glass of the car window. The screen reacts: fading the black through pale grey to clear glass, so she can see light, colour. They’re on a main arterial road to the centre of the Gung, surrounded by other cars. Choked in.

Either side of the road ’scrapers rear their endless backs like giants, their shoulders swathed in cloud. Some of these are residential, their myriad tiny windows and slim, useless balconies draped with clotheslines and trailing plants, all tied into chicken wire. She remembers with a bitter twist of the stomach how as a child she’d fold back the wire and lean out, trying to find air.

Her baa-baa, Michiko, might be making maki, or perhaps steaming nikuman on their tiny two-ring stove, the warmth of the steam a familiar comfort. Above her head, on the sleeping platforms of their ten-foot-square family cage, her mother, Indira, and her aunties would be arguing over their sewing machines.

In the sound of their voices, in the steam, in her tiny crack of open window, counting ant-sized cars as they funnelled past below, Amiga could breathe. She’d wish those moments could last forever, because when they stopped, when Michiko took whatever she was cooking in a box to Amiga’s father on the dock, Indira and the aunties would turn their vitriol on her. They wouldn’t dare be cruel in front of her baa-baa.

Born eighteen years before the world broke, Michiko died at the grand age of 233, when Amiga was six. A hard woman, sharp of tongue and wit, any softness was reserved for her little Amiga-chan, her little dopperugengã. And she is. Amiga has a photo in her drive of Michiko as a young woman, back when Japan still existed. She’s sat on a wall, dressed in torn jeans, loosely tied boots, a Mickey Mouse zombie tee and a baseball cap, sticking her tongue out.

They are mirror twins: piercing amber eyes, a pointed face, knife-straight black hair, too many sharp lines for beauty. A hard face to hide. Harder yet to live with. It reminds Amiga of how her mother never forgave her for being Michiko’s favourite. But you can’t choose who loves you. Or who doesn’t.

The car turns, taking a ramp up into a huge ’scraper, to the car parks on the lower floors, their light made cold by reflection through narrow windows onto stark, white stone. Nothing built on this last scrap of solid land goes underground; everyone’s too scared of what might happen.

Most who could recall the breaking of the world and its subsequent drowning are dead now, like Michiko, but the horror is a kind of race memory and there’s not one soul on the Gung who’d dig into the earth for any reason. Not even to plant a flower. Look at the base of any building in the Gung erected after the breaking and you’ll find them laid on plascrete, bound
in
to the earth. All the better to hold it together.

Shaking her rat awake, Amiga hustles him into the nearest shoot. She knows this building, knows exactly where Twist will be: the revolving restaurant near the top. It’s his favourite place to eat. Amiga couldn’t even afford the garnish on an entrée. Oh well. Probably tastes like crap anyway. In the shoot the rat starts giggling compulsively, so she gives him a slap. Shuts him up for maybe five seconds, then he starts again. Louder.

She leans toward him and says sweetly, “Shut up or I’ll plug your mouth with your eyeballs.”

The rest of the journey upward is silent.

They’re met by the maître d’, who’s clearly unhappy about a bloodied Streek in her restaurant but escorts them to Twist’s table nonetheless, her hands clasped, white-knuckled, in front of her belly. Twist lounges in his chair, waiting. He’s a small, slender man; oriental grace in a Scots package. His cool brown eyes don’t look through you, but into you. All the way in. Sometimes Amiga is terrified she can’t hide anything from him at all.

He dismisses the maître d’ by ignoring her and offers Amiga a smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes. This man holds his cards so close to his chest they’ve fused into the flesh.

The rat starts to struggle, making a very annoying whimpering noise. Pinching the soft flesh between nose and lip, Amiga forces him to his knees, making a pretty mess of the polished stone floor. Twist raises his brow.

“Amiga,” he tuts, “you’re not usually so clumsy.” In his soft Scottish drawl every lilting note can harbour a false sense of security but Amiga is reassured. He’s feeling magnanimous, she can tell by the playful tone behind his words, the slight crinkle at the corner of his right eye. Amiga’s learnt to read Twist like land ship Captains read the sea. Basic survival 101.

She sighs. “Kimchi seller outed me. Long story.”

He flicks a finger at her. “And that’s all from one little knee?”

Amiga looks down at herself and pretty much dies of embarrassment. She’s in a top-class restaurant in a pea-green jumpsuit absolutely drenched with blood. Her life: for real awkward at all times.

“No. Well. I may have encountered some of his friends too.”

“I see.”

Twist turns his gaze on the rat, who’s giggling compulsively again and shaking, his bloodied leg jerking against the floor like he’s being electrocuted.

“We’re going to have a little talk, you and I,” he says gently. “About your friend Nero.” He flicks a look up at Amiga. “Go get cleaned up.”

She nods and heads for the back, where a discreet granite-lined corridor leads to the bathrooms. Their opulence offends her, but she makes extravagant use of the soap and towels, scrubbing her face clean and removing the blood from her bodysuit as best she can. The attendant gives her the filthiest look ever. Normally that would make Amiga feel guilty, but today she’s pretty much at tilt.

When she goes back, the Streek’s where she left him, and although Twist hasn’t so much as moved, the rat’s pissed himself and he’s been crying.

Twist looks up as she approaches.

“According to our mutual friend here, you wiped out half of Nero’s crew today. Who’s getting a bonus?”

“This bitch,” she pokes a thumb at her chest, hoping she looks way more casual than she feels.

He smiles, and this time it reaches his eyes. Her violence always delights him. She used to be proud of that.

“I’m done with this now. You Clean the rest ASAP. This little shit gave up the whole op. It’s in your IMs.”

She nods. “What do you want me to do with him?”

“Toss him. And leave the others where they can be found. Be creative. I want Nero to understand the full import of his mistake.”

“You want Nero for your collection?”

“Of course. He wants some notoriety, he can reside amongst others who shared the same delusion.”

“Understood.”

Back in the shoot, Amiga calls for the top floor. The Streek’s pretty much given up fighting. He’s slumped in her grasp, whimpering away to himself. He fucking stinks. Probably he’s shat himself as well. Being on the unpleasant side of her boss will do wonders for your digestion first, and then your mortality.

Amiga is as afraid of Twist Calhoun as everyone else is. She’s a Cleaner; her job is all about swift, discreet violence, but he’s not one of those crime lords who employ Cleaners because they themselves can’t clean house. She’s seen him commit violence with brutal, cold efficiency. Needless cruelty. He’s something else, her boss. He gets his hands good and dirty when he wants to, and these days working for him fills her with a blank, all-consuming loathing. But a girl’s got to eat, and once you work for someone like Twist, you don’t just walk away.

At the top floor she hustles the rat up a flight of stairs and out onto the roof. Over to the edge. He gains some fight back here, struggling and wailing. She yanks him close enough to speak right into his ear.

“I do not enjoy this. It’s my fucking job. We all do our jobs, don’t we? Sometimes there’re consequences for that. This is yours.”

And she throws him over the edge, listening impassively as that final scream fades away. Somewhere down there, over a mile away, he’ll hit the ground and shatter into a wet heap. That’s what bodies do from this height.

Maybe someone will witness it and start screaming. Maybe he’ll hit a passer by, crushing them as he splatters. Fuck but she hopes not. This is her job, and she does what she’s paid to, and this is what Twist means when he requires someone tossed. That’s the rat’s consequence. Hers never seem to end.

The price you pay for doing a job like this is just about everything.

Petrie doesn’t trust calm seas. In these vast waters, calm is a face without expression, hiding its true intent. A mirror for pirates to catch you unawares, for sea creatures grown monstrous large without the limit of land to contain them to sneak up and drag your ship to impossible depths. He’s seen it happen, even to land ships bigger than the one he calls home. No, a calm sea fills him with nothing but dread.

Hollering instructions to his crews via IM, he makes his way to the pinnacle of the central crow to keep a better look out. Just ahead, the Tri-Asian ranges breach the serenity of the surface in snaggle-toothed clusters. Beyond them lies the Gung, so close now he can almost smell it on the air: heat, dust and sweat.

The people of Foon Gung like to call it the last land on earth. Plain ignorance. They imagine the great ocean mountain ranges as nothing but underbelly; exposed innards of earth and rock. In truth the earth broke ugly and whilst some lands shattered or drowned, others were lifted to precipitous heights, and if you look, you can find land everywhere.

Tiny islands of green clinging to the bottoms of harsh ranges. Continental shelves tilted at unnatural angles, carrying the remains of cities, their buildings collapsed to a mass and broken but still usable. Ripe for looting and for the occasional group of desperate folk, home. They share their craggy dwellings with huge colonies of raucous seabirds, herds of sea lions and seals, all under the shadow of great albatrosses with wingspans so wide they resemble dragons in the fire of dawn.

And then, of course, there is the land that sails. Land ships. Great chunks that floated away in the first quakes 200 years ago and did not immediately crumble into the sea, held up by a fortuitous grasp on oxygen, stowed away in great pockets in their depths. Miracles of the ocean, some people call them. From the tip of the crow, Petrie looks down to survey his home,
Resurrection City
.