Under Dark Sky Law (32 page)

Argon was trying to look disgusted at her
plan to extort everyone for a lot of money in exchange for
something so necessary, but she could see those same dollar signs
floating through his imagination, curling the corners of his mouth
into a smile. He wanted it just as much as the rest of them.

“It’s not the most altruistic of plans, but
it could certainly work. Only problem is, we’re going to need
access to the dome so you can get in contact with Sanchez, and I
assume we still want to kill Xed and try to prevent all of this in
the first place,” Argon said.

“Xed’s gotta be dead—we don’t kill him now
and this shit will all get messy as hell. Xed was our ticket into
the domes before, but we can’t let him know we’re coming. We’ll
need some time to set everything up, and he can’t know that we’ve
made contact with Sanchez. We’ll need some kind of coming and going
privileges,” Xero said.

Calavera bit her lip. “My hands are a little
bit tied right now. I’ve got skeletons looking for me all over the
place. When I tried to rendezvous with you in El Paso, you saw what
happened. Xed wants me dead real bad so that I can’t tip you off.
Lousy job he did of that,” she said.

She thought through all of her known
connections, but none of them would be able to get her the dome
access that they really needed to make this thing happen. Then she
thought back to the satellite she’d spotted floating around space
earlier. Her mind drifted into the past, when she’d been with Evan,
before he died. He’d been so clever, so brilliant. He taught her
about things she never would have learned otherwise. At the time he
had told her how it was possible to hijack one of the satellites if
you were able to get any kind of information about where it was
traveling. There were decommissioned trains that still ran
underground from the Tohono territory because the government didn’t
have the authority to enter their lands and completely remove them.
If she could use her language skills to talk with the computers and
the native peoples, there just might be a chance of getting the
thing running again.

“I think I have an idea,” she said.

CHAPTER 33

Xero banged her fist against the door of
Xed’s upscale office in downtown Phoenix. “Ding dong,
motherfucker,” she said.

A surprised Xed opened the door, and he
struggled to get his facial expression under control. “What
happened to my secretary?” he said.

Xero folded her arms across her chest. “She’s
taking a nap. Can I come in?” she said.

Xed bit his tongue but gestured for her to
come inside. She walked ahead of him and plopped her ass down
behind his desk in the nicely upholstered chair. She slid backwards
a few inches and threw her feet up on the desk, smudging red
Sonoran desert clay all over his papers. “Why don’t you have a
seat—lay down on the couch if you’d like, tell me about how your
mommy and daddy never loved you enough,” she said.

He hesitated, but actually obliged her by
taking a seat on his patient’s couch. “What do you want?” he
said.

“Like I just said. Tell me about your
parents. What happened to make you so goddamned fucked up that
you’d want to kill several million people?” she said.

“Calavera,” he said. “She found you.”

Xero didn’t respond. “I’m waiting. I can help
you free associate if you want. I did a whole psychoanalysis cycle
in graduate school,” she said.

Xed cocked his head to the side, thinking.
“If you really must know, my parents were born in the domes, but
they were kicked out when they had a child that was marked for the
flats. They lived for awhile, suffering, but eventually they died.
I grew up struggling to survive in the flats without a family. So
yes. You could say that I hold some animosity towards the domes and
how they like to handle things like basic human rights,” he
said.

Xero pulled her feet off the desk, dragging a
stack of ruined papers with her. “Funny how a guy like you could
talk about something like human rights. You’ve got an odd way of
expressing humanitarian efforts. Mass genocide hasn’t been
considered humane since the time of the old world Nazis,” she
said.

“New World Order. Nothing will change unless
we make drastic changes. Sometimes, there has to be sacrifices. You
should know that better than most,” he said.

Xero shrugged. “I may not make the most
ethical of choices myself, but I’ve never claimed to be a
humanitarian. I do what I do for selfish reasons, and I’m okay with
that,” she said.

“We’re not so different, you and I. And yet,
here you are, pretending like you’re better than me,” he said.

Xero clucked her tongue and wiped her feet on
the light grey carpet. “No, I’m not better than you, and I can see
that we are indeed a lot alike. With a few key differences—I’m not
a mass murderer and a narcissistic despot. Something’s gone
kablooey in your head man, you’re over the edge and
under-medicated. And more importantly, you’ve fucked with my
friends, and that’s something I can’t forgive,” she said.

“You haven’t even heard my offer. I was going
to ask you to join me here to talk about another business
proposition, but it seems that you’ve jumped the gun on me. Would
you consider being partners? I admire the way you run things down
in Tucson. The way you’ve implemented sustainable energy practices
and a justice system that actually has some amount of justice in it
still. That’s what we need in the domes. We need a world where
people’s parents don't get tossed out into the open atmosphere to
die just because they or their children have a genetic advantage,”
he said.

She stopped and actually seriously considered
his offer. Those were in fact things that she agreed with, and
despite the relatively cushy life she’d set up in the pits, she too
had been thrown out on her ass to die at one point, and she had a
roiling hatred for the dome governments with all their arbitrary
rules and inhumane regulations.

“Your offer is somewhat tempting, I must
admit,” she said.

“Judging from the timing of your visit, I’m
guessing you used the skeletons to find out what I had planned for
this afternoon. As you’re considering my offer, I will tell you
that if you decide to kill me, it won’t stop a thing. Everything is
set to go off automatically, whether I’m alive or not. You won’t be
able to escape in time. However, I have a spray that you can use.
It will coat your skin and keep the gas from penetrating your
nervous system. If you agree to certain things, then I will let you
use the applicator machine before the gas is released,” he
said.

She stuck an index finger in her mouth,
pondering her next move. She pulled out the finger and used it to
beckon him towards her. He smiled, knowing that he’d won. She stood
up, leaving a weak trail of mud on his carpet like an old skid
mark. His tie today was red against a white shirt, and she used it
again to pull his face into hers for another sloppy kiss.

“You always have such a convenient handle
with these ties,” she said after releasing him from the kiss.
“Which is nice, because I like to keep my dog on a leash.”

He started to say something, but the rest of
his air went into a strangled cry. Xero grunted as she stabbed him
five times in quick succession, using her hold on his tie to keep
him from escaping. Kidneys, stomach, liver, intestines, lungs.
Everything but the heart. He would die, but just not as
quickly.

“Damn, Xed, you fail the final exam. Couldn’t
read my eyes, could you? Psychiatry 101—never trust a sociopath.
Part of me will miss you, but I will enjoy the piles of cash I made
selling the antidote to a few major cities. Thanks for helping me
set up the underground supply chain—that netted me a nice extra
chunk of change. Oh, and it will save a bunch more lives, too. Nice
side effect,” she said, letting go of his tie but keeping hold of
her knife. Never let your weapon go prematurely.

Xed stumbled a few steps and fell backwards
onto the couch. It still had a stains from when Xero had sat there
bleeding a few weeks prior. They were faint, but they were there.
Xed’s fresh blood covered the old stains in a new blanket of dark
red. Xero thought the splash of color looked rather nice,
actually.

Xed was choking, gasping for air through his
punctured lungs.

“Suffocating to death isn’t fun, is it?
Fortunately, most of this city won’t have to die that way, thanks
to the antidote we cooked up. Science is neat, isn’t it?” she
said.

He was having weak spasms and grasping at his
throat, hoping to get air. It was a little more suffering than she
had planned, and she raised her knife to help finish the kill a
little more humanely, but it was too late. He went still before she
could give him a hand. She looked down at him with some authentic
sadness. She kissed two of her fingers, and put them against his
pale lips. One last one for the road.

“Good night Xed. The first one’s always free,
but eventually we all have to pay the piper. Better luck next
time,” she said.

CHAPTER 34

“Strike!” Xero said. “Looks like I’ve still
got it.”

Neptune had restored the lanes that Milo had
cratered, leaving a smooth and shiny surface for their balls to
glide down. After the pins cleared she ran down to the end of the
lane to make sure that they would reset correctly.

“No one wants to beat their boss anyway,”
Trina said. “At least we don’t have to pretend to lose.”

Radar put down a neon green bowling ball that
matched the color of Xero’s hair. “Trina, do you really think you
should be exerting yourself like that? Are you sure you’re feeling
okay? I know that this takes awhile to get used to,” he said.

Trina ran a hand through her freshly bleached
hair and puckered her bright red lips as she looked down at the
long scar that ran down her chest. A full four inches of it were
visible before it disappeared into the cleavage of her shirt.

“I think being part robot is kind of fun. And
Milo said I’m cleared for moderate activity now. Right Milo?” she
said.

Milo stood up from behind the snack bar
counter holding a plate of hotdogs and a few bottles of beer.
“Emphasis on the moderate activity. You’re one of only a handful of
people to have lungs like that. You’re lucky to have a doctor and
the original mechanic in-house, but don’t push your luck,” he said
sternly, but he was smiling from ear to ear. Xero had never seem
him so happy. Sometimes you had to lose all hope to truly
appreciate your blessings in life.

Neptune returned from examining the pin
resetting mechanism and went to help Milo behind the counter. “I’m
with Milo on this one. If you try to die again this fool right here
is going to flip his shit, and I’m going to be really sad if I have
to put him out of his misery Old Yeller style,” Neptune said and
pointed at Milo.

Radar tried to stifle a laugh. “Being a robot
does have it’s benefits. I’m not just the owner, I’m also a
client,” he said.

Xero leaned over and smacked him on the ass.
“That’s for being cheesy,” she said, but he caught her wrist and
pulled her into his chest. He planted a kiss on her open mouth.
Instead of fighting, she let herself melt into it. Maybe it was
something about killing Xed, or maybe it was finally pulling off a
complicated technical move on her own by getting the old trains
running again via that satellite, but forgetting Evan was beginning
to look more and more possible. Plus, dating a robot was pretty
cool.

“Hey, aren’t we here to have a strategy
meeting?” Calavera said from Argon’s lap as Milo handed them both
beers.

“Fuck it dude, let’s keep bowling,” Xero
said. She picked up the neon green bowling ball and she hurled it
down the lane. It rolled in a perfectly straight line down the
greased wood, gaining momentum as it rumbled down towards the pins.
Strike.