Crash Deluxe (22 page)

The Meat and Primp-ers saw the hardware out and started screaming and running around.

I pushed my Primp-er off me and hit the floor, crawling behind the line of chairs to get a better view.

From between a whole lotta legs it looked like security had some non-meat baled up in the corridor.

The leather-coated Custodian stepped from his booth, bearing his own spectacular piece of hardware: a twelve-gauge shotgun with a modified-choke barrel. Old but immaculate - ultimate close-range stopping power.

The place went into hush mode.

‘I want to pre-buy her,’ a voice demanded.

I recognised the deep guttural.

I had more than a few scores to settle with Leesa Tulu, but if she got in my face before the parade I might not live to see my plan out.

I kept my head down and prayed that the bouncers didn’t like her attitude.

‘Mad-dame Tulu, as a frequent buyer you know that the regulations of the Fair are quite clear. No one may procure stock from the green room before the parade.
No matter who they are.
Otherwise we would cease to be able to operate a fair system,’ said the Custodian. ‘The rules of bidding are immutable.’

‘If I lose her because of this, Listrata—’

‘If you lose her it will be the result of equitable bidding,’ the Custodian interjected. ‘Happy Pan-Sats, Mad-dame Tulu.’

I could see the relief in Mal’s profile. She backed away from the corner of the door and returned to where she’d left me.

I made sure that the door had closed in Tulu’s face before I stood up.

‘Why did she want you?’

‘Long story,’ I said. ‘And grisly.’

‘
Jales Belliere
?’ My
Amorato
name pinged off the walls of the green room like gunshot. I adjusted my expression to innocent and approached the Custodian, my head lowered.

‘We don’t like troublemakers at our Fair. If you cause the slightest problem during bidding I will sell you privately.’ He slapped the shotgun painfully against my ear. ‘
Comprends
?’

I didn’t doubt him at all. He had no respect for the people he sold off like cuts of meat. Not surprising, really. Most of them didn’t have respect for themselves.

But then they were here for practical reasons. If you could get a regular income and better working conditions, who’d be stupid enough not to take them?

I stood mute in front of him, fighting down the anger. The Custodian took my reaction as fear and moved off, satisfied.

My number chimed and another Primp-er hustled me straight to the service lift. I didn’t get to speak to Mal. There was only time enough to snatch the mask from my face.

In the lift the Primp-er squirted a vial of diz up my nostrils. I stared at his bare shoulders and hairless, over-painted face, wondering what he might look like naked.

Thankfully the partitions lifted before lust overpowered sense.

 

 

 

 

T
he spotlights warped my view of everything except Listrata, the Custodian, who stood centre stage, his stance provocative and arrogant.

The man surely dug what he did.

His honeyed voice was a lure that he used to maximum effect as he talked up the success of the markets.

I made three trips up and down without generating a single bid.

I felt naked under the lights. Not the bare-skinned kind of naked. The unsafe kind.

Blind and weaponless.

Disadvantaged.

I was turned on by the dizzies and worried by the knowledge that Tulu was in the crowd and gunning for me and I couldn’t see a damn thing.

The sensations warred inside me.

To make it worse the Custodian had left his posse at centre stage to stalk me with his probe.

‘Perform, bitch,’ he murmured as he rubbed it up against me.

The voice-over recited the ridiculous made-up personal history that Ibis had created for me. Transparent lies.

And yet the wall screen to my right flicked up a bid.

Maybe it was the effect of Marinette so close but the dizzie began to wear off abruptly. Cheap house shit.

Its withdrawal left me dangerously pissed off with the whole charade. Make that the whole world.

I suddenly stopped parading and strode right to the end of the dais, where I stood belligerently, hands on hips.

The indifferent background buzz instantly dropped a few decibels.
Meat
didn’t eyeball the buyers. Meat simpered and pirouetted and coquetted to attract the highest prices.

I felt the probe sting my buttocks and begin to prod between my thighs.

I spun on instinct and booted it right out of Listrata’s hands. He swore softly and drew a shok from his coat pocket, smiling at the crowd as if my reaction had been choreographed.

‘I should have picked you,’ he said under his breath. ‘Faux bitch.’

‘Pick this.’ I head-butted him in his cadaverous stomach. He folded like a shawarma wrapper and we catapulted off the stage, taking out most of the front row.

I recovered before him, tearing my cheap high heels off to use as weapons. Behind me the wall screen started flickering, going crazy with bids.

Seems the buyers liked a grrl with attitude.

Knowing that I’d blown my chance with Monk, the least I could do was salvage some dignity . . . and run.

I clocked the exit just as Tulu’s two bodyguards ploughed through the upended chairs and buyers toward me.

I evaded them as far as a vreal-sex booth.

Muscled and fit, they jumped me together. One pinned my legs while the other punched me hard. I felt my nose crack.

Pain and then welcome numbness.

I kicked out hard and furious. The strength in my still-sore legs bounced one of them back on to an advertiser’s sensor pad. A cloud of Happy granules pumped into the air around him. He gobbed a mouthful, slowing him down to a giggle.

I spat blood and roundhoused the other guy. He collapsed back on top of his partner. The two of them wallowed about in slow motion, caught in a fug of free powdered bliss.

I climbed unsteadily to my feet, breathing blood bubbles out through the split in my nose.

Tulu approached me from one side, Listrata from the other.

I wondered if Marinette would show herself again. She seemed to have a bit of a thing for me.

I really had to do something about the calibre of the people I attracted.

Security materialised, wearing uniforms and jewellery. They formed a ring around me. I looked for a sign of their allegiances but couldn’t see a Lash or an Axe, or Monk’s Running Man.

Mercs.
That was a good thing.

I took Listrata low and dirty, grabbing for his genitals. At first I thought that he was padded well but then I suddenly knew the reason for his hatred of Meat. Someone else had beaten me to the mutilation.

‘Eunuch,’ I spat and reached for his throat.

He pinged me with the probe on full charge and I collapsed into convulsions.

As he untangled himself from my twitching and salivating, Mal burst out of the lift, taking a line of pretty Security with her. She waded towards me with a determination that warmed my shuddering body.

I watched her go down an arm’s length from me under a paralysis net.

Out stares met.

Nice thought, Mal
, mine tried to say.

Stupid
, hers replied.

Security closed in for the clean-up while Listrata stood astride me with the arrogance of a slave trader.

I couldn’t stop shaking and dribbling to do anything about it.

The Custodian lifted the probe to jab me again when the bidding chimes pealed and stopped him.

He froze mid-probe, glancing around at the screens. The one above me on the ceiling had blanked, pumping out Caribbean music to entertain the crowd.

Someone was engaged in an off-line negotiation.

Someone with money was buying.

I craned my neck back to look at Mal. Hope lit her eyes, the only part of her able to move.

A voice-over announced the end of bidding for me, and a closing of the deal.

Security shoved Tulu aside to come and get me.

Listrata knelt down close to my ear, a hand up to shield himself from my spit.

‘I’ll be watching for you,’ he whispered.

Then he was up and striding back to the stage to quiet his dissatisfied crowd.

I dragged myself over to Mal and flopped my arm over her.

‘M-mine,’ was all I could make my lips say.

Security tried to drag me off her and roll me onto an inflatable stretcher. I concentrated everything to make my fingers grasp her.

‘They’re together,’ someone in the audience called out. ‘I saw them in the lift.’

‘You’d better take them both,’ another called out.

Security hesitated while they conferred quietly. After a few moments one of them ordered in another stretcher.

The crowd gave a little cheer, too busy with the conclusion to my drama to engage with the newest selection from Listrata’s Meat-tray.

My appreciation of their intervention was silent but intense.

Security floated us to the lift. In a minute or so we were on the roof. I sucked in a lungful of clear air, thankful to be out of the markets.

A ’copter landed within the hour. With relief I saw the Running Man emblem on the side.

The pilot folded the seats back and security laid Mal and me side by side behind him.

 

The trip took longer than any other ’copter flight I’d been on, the pilot finally bringing us in steep and quick, landing on a promise.

Beside me, Mal was still immobilised by the paralysis net. The pilot refused to disable it before arrival.

‘Y-you leave her too l-long, she’ll g-go b-berserker,’ I pointed out when I regained some power over my tongue.

He didn’t care.

Nor did he care about the blood still bubbling from my broken nose onto the plush carpet on the floor of the ’copter.

So much for the cosmetic surgery. A whack on the cheekbone, a few new scars and a change of clothes and I’d be back to my old self.

Sometime during the flight I stopped twitching but parts of me still felt numb and heavy. I’d swallowed so much blood that it felt as though my tongue and throat wore a coating of warm metal.

The abruptness of the landing got me vomiting.

I managed to sit up and peer out of the window. My misery vanished for a few seconds as I absorbed the vista.

Where had I been expecting James Monk to live? In Hi-Tel luxury?

I stared in naive wonder. This was luxury, yes, but not the high-rise sort. Or the antique-obsessive Gerwent Ban sort.

This was something else.

A mountainside of sweeping lawns and flat-roofed white buildings dotted in between waterfalls and ponds. Tropical landscaping bursting with frangipanis and passionvine that made Viva seem bare and ugly.

Nobody could afford this much space on the coast. It just didn’t exist.

But it did. Monk owned a flat-topped mountain and a whole coastal plain in Northern Viva, complete with pollution sweepers kiting about in the sky and giant water-filters rolling about in the waves breaking on the beach.

I thought of Fishertown and the slick, oily grey of the water there. It was impossible that this could be the same ocean.

Tears smarted in my eyes at the sheer beauty of it - and at the sheer selfish greed. No one should have that much.

I hated Monk already.

North and south of where I stood, neighbouring mountains repeated the pattern.

I’d heard talk of a place where the mountains jutted up from the ground like teeth. As I watched the cable car speeding up the mountain towards us, I tried to think of the name.

I’d learned about it in net-school, a national park in another era when such things existed. That meant that I was at the northern tip of Viva, over five hundred klicks from The Tert.

The thought alone gave me vertigo.

As we landed an Intimate appeared on the pad and opened the door. The pilot disabled the web spread over Mal and the Intimate began plucking off the tendrils.

‘Be careful—’ I warned.

The big woman regained feeling in and control of her muscles in an uncontrollable rush.

I scrambled for the door but she swiped at me with one hand, shoving me out so hard that I somersaulted across the tarmac. Dissatisfied with that, she turned on the Intimate and kicked its abdomen so hard that the bio-plas skin covering split.

The pilot panicked and lifted the ’copter up a few metres, tipping Mal out. She landed on the pad with a sickening
whump.

It didn’t seem to have any ill effect. She stood up like a beast shaking off flies.

‘Mal. You know me?’

She had a think about it. After a moment she nodded.

‘Your senses are freaked. It’s how everyone feels if they’ve been webbed for too long. It passes.’

She grunted, whirling her huge arms as if she was getting the circulation back in them.

I hopped back, wary.

The Intimate righted itself and, holding its stomach together, politely invited us into the waiting cable car.

I stumbled straight in. Mal might be the best back-up I’d ever had but right now I figured that she was Monk’s problem.

I shouted at the Intimate, ‘Move before she pulverises us.’