Necrotech (23 page)

H
e was seriously pissing
me off. But what could I do?

Play the cunting game.

I raked a hand through my hair in sheer frustration. “You are such a bastard.”

“Your counteroffer left much to be desired.”

“Your face leaves much to be desired,” I shot back. Childish, but he could blow me.

Malik shrugged, an effortless roll of his shoulders that tightened the shirt across his tapered chest. Personally trained into shape, I'd bet. Not like me, or the people I ran with. We were all beaten into shape by the life we led.

A life he wanted to screw with.

Ass.
He was right. I had no options.

I bared my teeth. “Fine,” I snarled, and gave it a shot. “A general exam only.
No
invasion.”

His expression didn't change as he turned away, idly brushing at the fading stain the water had left on his sleeve. “I assure you,” he said, “I have zero interest in invading you.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

Wait. Was that it? That seemed remarkably easy. Much easier than I thought it was supposed to be. And, oh, yeah, now I was back to wanting to rip his throat out.

“Once you have the exam data,” I told his back, pushing and I knew it, “I get to review it.”

He didn't even hitch. “Follow me.” He also didn't wait for me to get my shoes.

“Spunkmunch,” I grunted, abandoning the boots to follow before he vanished into this corporate jungle. Not because he ordered me to, no way, but because glaring at his back and imagining all the creative ways I could tear out his spine and beat him to death with it provided enough entertainment to get me past raw anger and into sulky resignation.

A long elevator ride, a handful of corridors and an interminable silence later, and he halted outside a wide set of double doors with
Authorized Personnel
emblazoned on the front in bloody red.

We'd gone from open, airy halls to enclosed walls, harsh lighting, and the occasional blocky text imprinted on the corridors we passed. Eerily – uncomfortably – familiar.

“In there,” he said, nodding. “Ms Ramsay has already taken the liberty of requisitioning your gear to Mr Koupra's specifications.”

“Why don't I get to specify?” I frowned at the doors, trying very hard to ignore the fact that the hair on my arm had lifted. A low, thrumming warning simmered underneath my skin.

It felt wrong to go marching back into the same kind of place I'd escaped from. Wrong on so many levels.

“The obvious answer is that he's going to be reasonable about it.”

I shot him a hard glare, briefly jarred from my trepidation. “You're a judgmental bastard, aren't you?”

“I appreciate that you're attempting to stick to apparent facts,” he said mildly, “but I do know who my parents are.”

It surprised me that I wanted to laugh. His level retorts – delivered with the same polite command he delivered everything – should have annoyed me, but I couldn't help a brief affair with his wit. It was there. Buried under ice and irritation, but there.

I did not want to find him amusing. It annoyed me.

“Do I at least get to req my own weapons?” I asked instead.

“If you have specific tech needs according to your synthetic model, then the lab will let me know.”

“That is
not
an answer.”

“Not true.” His gaze touched mine. “It's simply not an answer you want.”

It didn't help that I couldn't make up my mind. Laugh at him or kill him? Chuckle, or eviscerate? Decisions, decisions.

I'd play it cool. If I made it through the next hour without losing my shit, I'd take it from there.

Squaring my shoulders, I stepped closer to the doors, bracing myself for the
whoosh
of activated servos and the faint blast of sterilized air as it washed over me.

The back of my neck tightened. Cramped.

Afraid. I was
afraid
.

“One last thing.”

I hesitated, my palm already damp with the effort I was making to ignore the instincts screaming at me to get out, get away. Run far and fast.

I glanced at him, teeth gritted. “What now?” I bit out.

Way harsher than even a second ago.

He didn't blink. “This isn't a game,” he said, like I was a six year-old who needed the reminder. “One wrong move – you so much as twitch a nanometer out of line – and I'll pull the plug.”

I turned slowly, stepping backwards into the cool air and out of the sensors. “Malik.” My voice was steady; thank you, pride. “When this is all over?” I smiled. “I'm going to tear your throat out and shit in your chest.”

The doors came together, sealing him on the other side before I could register anything but the answering glint in his eyes.

Amusement? Anger?

Whatever. He could take his line and shove it.

I turned around, fear a sour taste in my mouth, and faced a large room filled with monitors, machines, and a handful of staring personnel in white coats.

I guess they'd heard that. Way to go, first impressions.

It'd work. “I'm here for an exam,” I said by way of greeting, loud enough to send my voice echoing back through the austere lab. “Just a friendly warning? Go beyond a basic scan and I'll start breaking limbs.”

One of the employees in white, a copper-haired woman with a mass of freckles that did for her what they didn't for Malik, approached. “You must be Riko,” she said cautiously. “I'm Orchard.”

“Orchard?”

“Yeah, I know. If it helps, my last name is unpronounceable by nearly everyone.” She smiled uncertainly at me. “If I offer you a hand to shake, will I get it back?”

I showed her my teeth.

“Right.” Her smile turned a little sickly. “Let's just get you checked out, then.”

“Will it take long?”

“Can I say anything that would make you happy
and
let me keep my job?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Then yes.” She pointed to my right. “Yes, it probably will.”

I admired her honesty. And her general sense of survival. “Basic exam, Orchard. Very basic.”

“Oh, trust me.” She gestured me ahead, her pale blue eyes filled with wry humor. “I need my arms to work.”

“Funny.” I shrugged my dimly aching shoulder. “I said the same thing.”

Her glance fell on my arm. Sheepish dismay filled in all the spaces behind her freckles. “Sorry.” She showed me to a curtained section of the lab – white plastic drapes on white tile – and I stripped out of my still-damp clothes. “This is pretty easy stuff,” she called as I tossed my clothing through the seam in the privacy drapes. “Nothing invasive.”

The whole damn thing was invasive. Malik's insistence on getting a read on my stats, the scans, the corporate prison I'd woken up in, all of it.

I shivered. It had nothing to do with the chill in the cool lab. Anxiety seized my throat, squeezing down until I wasn't sure I could breathe without gasping for it. I'd been here before. Different, but close enough that it didn't matter.

Pristine white. Cold, sterile air.

Blood on pale tile.

Time of death: 14:37.

Naked and shuddering, I crouched down on the balls of my feet and wrapped both arms around my head to block out the light. Clenching my eyes shut didn't help.

All that white searing my retinas turned to gray. My vision went spotty around the edges.

“We're looking at a general scan and basic MRI,” Orchard continued, completely unaware of me as I lost my shit in here. Her cautiously cheerful tones collided with the rabid panic clawing at my chest.

Fight or flight was an instinct every saint learned. The lucky ones, the ones that survived, learned
fast
. I'd honed mine into a killing edge, but there was nothing here to fight. Nothing to bleed and take down.

“We're also going to make sure your arm is working up to spec, though we can't deal with any recalibrations if we've got to keep it basic.”

Her voice juddered through my ears, triggering a flood of adrenaline that tore my balance out from under me. My hand dropped to the tile, scored a flat echo that cracked through the quiet lab.

Orchard halted mid-explanation. “Riko? Are you okay?”

Shit. “Fine,” I grunted.

I lied. I wasn't fine. Every breath lodged the sharp needle of disinfectant into my brain. With it, I heard voices. Some quiet. Some yelling.

My head throbbed – a fierce knot of pain that started in my forehead and spiked through the rest of me. I blew out a hard breath.

Hands grasped my shoulders.
Sedate her, quickly!

I reached up, fingers clenched in white fabric, and shoved myself upward as I pulled hard and fast. Gray and white faded to a streaming halo of carrot red, and Orchard's surprised shriek as she went sailing over my shoulder cracked through my waking nightmare.

The curtain swayed, the plastic wall she collided with juddered, and I gasped for breath in a lab that wasn't the same as the one I stood in.

I wasn't stupid. Just... fucked.

Very slowly, eyes closed, I put up my hands and waited for my shit to settle.

A
second lab
tech handed Orchard another ice pack. I winced as she tucked the flexible pad between her ass and her chair. Her tailbone would be sore for a little while, at least until the nanos eased the bruising that over-the-shoulder takedown gave her. She struck me as the delicate type. Landing on unforgiving tile sucked.

I didn't remove my hands from under my legs. I wasn't sure if my right hand would shake, and I didn't want to risk damaging anything with my left. The paper gown I'd put on did nothing for the cold air, but at least my fingers warmed beneath my bare thigh.

“I'm really sorry,” I said again.

Orchard let out a long, slow breath as the ice did its job. Her sky blue eyes weren't quite so wary now as she studied me from what I'd still call
too damned close
. The tech had no sense of self-preservation.

I expected some kind of lecture or even an insincere, “Don't worry about it,” like I'd given her. Instead, I got a long, slow appraisal. Unlike Malik, she didn't rely on projections. The tablet in her lap was clear, lightweight. She glanced at it once.

“Have you considered seeing someone, Riko?”

I almost laughed, but managed to clear a cough at the last moment. Landing her on her ass was one thing, but hurting her feelings was just mean. “You mean some kind of therapy?”

She nodded.

“No,” I replied, my lip curling. “I get all the therapy I need on the job. Nothing like filling a shitwagon full of bullets to make a girl feel like she's on top of the world.”

My levity rounded her eyes. She shifted, wincing a little.

Ouch, my guilt. “Look, I'm sorry I scared you,” I admitted, a resigned kind of sincere. “But I don't need therapy. I just don't like being poked at.” The back of my neck still felt like fingers had clamped into the muscle, and all I wanted was to get out while I could. Instead, I sat very still on the pullout table, fingers flattened under my thighs.

Orchard nodded, like that wasn't a load of bullshit. The girl was sweet, but I couldn't call her stupid. I was getting the impression that Malik Reed did not hire brainless people. “Can you tell me what you experienced?”

Not if she put hot screws under my nails. I held her gaze silently.

She nodded again, like she expected that. She half-turned. “You guys take a quick break, would you?”

Both techs – including the round brunette who'd slanted me a wary stare as she handed Orchard that ice pack – stood up. “Are you sure?” the tall blond guy asked.

I met his inquisitive study with a shrug.

“Give me ten,” Orchard replied. Her smile was cute. Earnest, too.

They left, but I doubt they went far.

Chair creaking, Orchard spun back to face me, sneakered feet dragging along the tile. It squeaked loudly. “Look, no witnesses,” she pointed out. “It's just you and me.”

And more tech than I had trust.

I cocked my head. “You think it's that easy?”

Her smile faded. “I think you need to talk to someone.” Not really an answer. “I promise you, there's nothing recording here. Just us and a bunch of silent machines. Mr Reed doesn't allow recording devices in here, it's too easy to lose control of footage like that.”

I wondered if he'd told her that himself. Somehow, I didn't think so.

“Riko.” Orchard leaned forward, flinching when the ice shifted underneath her. “Ow. Ignore that,” she added quickly. “Look, it seemed like you were going through some kind of re-living process. Classic anxiety, hyperventilation, vertigo. You weren't
here
.”

My back stiffened, hiking the hem of the paper robe higher up on my thighs. “It's none of your business.”

It said a lot about the company I kept that I expected her to argue that, even force the point. She nodded. Again. “I know that. And it's not like you know me. I mean, I'm the enemy, right?”

The cutest, most freckled, most impish looking enemy I'd ever had. I rolled my eyes at her.

“I just think that you're showing signs of post-traumatic stress,” she continued gently. “I want you to know that you're not alone, okay? If you don't have anyone to talk to, you can talk to me.” Her sincerity practically hammered at me, she was so serious.

Where the hell had Malik picked this one up?

And why hadn't life broken her yet?

Except for the fact that I knew jack-all about living in C-Town. Sure, most of the sinners I saw were the lower class mutants who wandered around pretending everything was exactly the way they wanted it, long as they could get the latest limited edition cereals and fashions and whatever the hell else, but word was it got pretty good up here.

Insurance, doctors, nice condos, guaranteed pay, sunshine that didn't burn... Security looked a lot like Orchard's gentle smile, and it pissed me off that I thought so.

I removed my hands from beneath my thighs, scraped them both through my hair. The shorn sides were soft against my flesh fingers, getting longer every day. I'd have to decide to cut it back or let it grow soon.

Too bad that wasn't the worst of my problems.

“You're very good,” I said, as diplomatically as I knew how. Her mouth pulled to one side, skewing the freckles on her cheek to a blotch of pale brown. I bit back a sigh. “And maybe you're right,” I added, before I made myself shut the hell up. “Maybe I do need to talk to someone.” Because if I wasn't dealing with screwy tech, I was dealing with fucked-up brainmeat. That seemed somehow worse.

Orchard stood. The chair didn't make a noise, but her sneakers kept catching on the tile, sending shrill reverberations through the lab. “You just can't do it now,” she finished for me.

Surprised, I braced my weight on my tech arm. I didn't bother to hide my blatant study.

She flashed me a faint, sheepish grin. “You're not my first... what do you call it? Fighter? Agent?”

“Mercenary.” Also known as
illegal fuckhead
in corporate speak, in the same way coordinators were corp versions of linkers and enforcers their muscle. There was no word for splatter specialist – fuck-all if the suits would publicly admit to using trained killers – so I defaulted to mercenary.

“That, too.” Orchard waved the distinction away with the clear plastic tablet. “I've worked with a lot of your type. No weakness before a job, right?”

Something like that.

She gestured behind me. “Lay down so I can get the scans started.”

I obeyed meekly enough, but my eyebrow climbed. “You going to tell your boss?”

“Tell him what?” Orchard leaned over me, her figure shapeless beneath the white coat and a loose blue sweater. Unlike me, she dressed for the sterile lab air. “Assuming you check out physically, I don't have the authorization to do anything more invasive.” She keyed in something to her tablet, then swiped at thin air. Over my head, a projection screen lit a square of empty space.

I grinned at her. “You're okay, Orchard of the unpronounceable last name.”

“I'm going to tell everyone you said so. My… What do you call it? Rep?”

I snorted. “Cred.”

“My cred should shoot right up, right?” And mine would probably tank even farther.

I didn't even engage.

The tech's spindly fingers slid through the light screen at precise notes. “Now, prepare to hate me for the next hour.”

I groaned. “This thing takes that long?”

“No, it only takes five.” She patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “It's the physical you're going to hate.”

She was right.

Any goodwill Orchard managed to foster vanished. By the time I'd been measured, poked and prodded on the outside, bent to test my arm joints, scanned, put through a few paces, and otherwise examined to death, I was fed up with her, the other techs, the lab itself, and Malik Reed.

Most of the exertion stuff he could have gotten from his damned readings at the Key. Dick. The whole thing. Every last one of them. A composite of dicks.

The only thing that made it even remotely tolerable was Indigo. Which surprised me. He came in for his physical halfway through mine, which meant by the time I was done, I got the pleasure of watching his systems tech – a tall guy named Gunner Leto – put Digo through his paces.

“Go away,” Indigo growled, sweat gleaming on his chest as he ran the stationary track I'd already completed. Like me, he'd been given a pair of shorts and a tanktop. Both white. The sensors hovering around him flickered green periodically, clocking his vitals.

I grinned at him, leaning against a bank of monitors. “Can't. I've got a bet with Orchard.”

“I'm not interested in beating your time, Riko.” He spoke with effort, but he wasn't panting. Not yet.

“You're not?” Damn. I wasn't counting on that. I sighed, already calculating the cost of a good lunch. Orchard didn't bet cheap.

He glanced at me, blue eyes flashing in irritation. “You bet I would?”

“Hell, yeah, I did.” I could hold my own in a fight like nobody's business, but Digo was a natural runner. Pound for pound, meter for meter, he'd outstrip me in stamina and speed any day.

“Hunh.” With that mystifying sound, he turned his attention back to his run and said nothing else.

I watched him for a moment longer, not sure if I should say something else or leave him alone. This was weird. Normally, I'd stay and tease him. Now, I was pretty sure that any attempted flippancy would push him right back over into prickly anger.

I'd never actually been at odds with him before. Short of punching him until he stopped being so angry, I didn't know what to do.

It didn't seem the right time to give him the flowers. I mean, the detective.

Right now, he seemed to be tolerating me okay, focusing on his numbers rather than on how much he hated me. As he ran, his swarthy skin rippled with lean muscle – a fact I had no trouble admiring from this distance.

Rocky ground or not, I could appreciate a good physique. I still thought he'd lost too much weight, but the scrappy jackal frame was starting to grow on me. Ropey muscle flexed in his back as he rolled his shoulders. It wasn't the same kind of attraction – I'd never considered throwing down with Indigo, not honestly – but I liked looking at him the same way I liked looking in general.

The fact that nothing was the same between us really blew chunks. I missed our easy camaraderie. Now, I couldn't look at him without being reminded of everything I'd lost.

Ignoring the pang in my chest, I turned away. “I'll leave you to it,” I said lightly.

“Hey, Riko.”

I glanced over my shoulder. “What?”

He didn't look at me, brisk pace steady. “What was your time?”

“Fourteen, twenty-seven, twelve.”

I couldn't see his expression from the back. His braid bounced against his shoulders as one hand lifted. “Noted.”

He said nothing else.

As the door closed behind me, I shook my head. Why he wanted to know, I had no idea. Except Indigo was a tricky bastard.

A fact cemented by the personal note tucked into the file Hope delivered to my quarters the following hour. “Briefing on the helo,” she told me, “wheels up in ten. If you want first pick on reqs, you'll be on time.” She left me to get ready. I sat on the surprisingly comfortable couch and scanned the tablet, checking my numbers for anomalies. Everything seemed more or less the usual. Orchard expressed some concern for my shoulder girdle's structural longevity, but signed off on the exams.

At the bottom, she left an additional note.

00:14:28:07. You owe me lunch.

One second? One chunking second. I slammed the tablet to the coffee table beside me. That son of a bitch. Compared to the fact I'd lose a bet with an outsider, his loss of face by losing to my time was nothing. That I'd have to shell out to pay it off was probably just frosting.

Oh, yeah. He'd just flipped me an Indigo finger.

I glowered at the tablet. Kicked it out of reach when it said nothing to soothe my rankled pride. It slid off the table edge and thudded twice.

Reaching for my boots, I couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or kick him square in the ass I'd admired.

It wasn't a truce. Not even close. It was just another subtle bit of calculus in his version of war.

And to think I'd even gotten him a blue bouquet.

What a cunt.