“Listen, had you waited to appease your gluttonous appetites, we might not even be having this conversation. The truth is I need to be somewhere in a few minutes so it would be better for us both if you just admit out loud what you’ve done. Forthrightness could bode well for you in regards to this evening’s disciplinary measures.”
Britch glooms. “Fine, whatever. So I shook that bounty agent down for a few thousand credits. Big deal. I bet half the security staff on The Sixty are guilty of worse chisels and then some.”
“That may be true, but those malfeasances are not my concern.”
“Sheesh, so now that I’ve admitted it, do you think we have time for one last drink?”
Demurely as a debutant Riche pats his chest. “Oh my, you mean the quadruple-distilled rum? Well, I really shouldn’t, but yes. Thank you for offering.”
Britch looks at the two security novices. Declining, the two steely-eyed men shake their heads, so Britch trudges over to a nearby table where the bottle of expensive Himalayan rum sits. He makes Riche a drink and when he comes back and hands it over Britch removes his glass from Riche’s other hand and glugs out a hefty four fingers of rum for himself.
“This hardly seems fair,” Britch complains. “I mean, so I went ahead and bent a few rules. This bounty agent, she’s the real criminal if you ask me. I swear, the CPB and SI management’s priorities are all out of whack getting upset over something like this.”
Riche jerks the bottle out of his hand and rum splashes all over Britch’s shirt.
“Seriously, you don’t remember the quality control brief circulated last week? It outlined a new zero-tolerance policy.”
“Zero-tolerance?”
“Mmhm.”
The two novices draw their sidearms.
Britch barely registers the split second before the two open fire and his body bursts into flames.
Back at the camp, Trick leaps up onto a set of the mortared bricks half buried in the ground, and the rest of the gathered de-civs settle down. Weary, bloodshot eyes abound, and more than a few of them pick at festering facial lesions.
It takes Grum some effort, but he climbs up onto the half-buried blocks and takes up a bodyguard pose behind Trick. When Grum is set and Trick is sure he has everyone’s undivided attention, only then does he begin.
“All right, I’ll keep it short. As you know, our southin’ has been longer and more difficult than most of us expected. After that storm, I bet lots of you probably flat out thinkin’ just how much more of this southin’ you can actually take. No lie from me. Be months yet likely, right-right, and I bet more than half of you will die.” Trick passes his gaze over the sunken, diseased faces and holds a moment for dramatic effect. “So, here we be, in the godforsaken wasties and what do we goon here on this little pit stop on our journey south? Truer-than-true, I’ll tell you what. A settlement, right smack in the middle of a place not supposed to have a livin’ soul for a couple hundred years plus. Like you, when I gooned them walls, I thought, this can’t be good. Best move quick, right-right?”
Trick is spouting gospel as far as the rest of the de-civs in the camp are concerned. There are more than a few sickly, bobbing chins.
“Yeah, we’ve known fortifications back north. Them and their paramilitary lapdogs, treatin’ our kind like we ain’t even human. Starvin’ us, huntin’ us down, some of you’ve even been kicked out of their so-called assimilation locales and damn well know what kind of hell those places be. Shit, it’s why most of us lit out for Sin Frontera in the first place. I swear, this mornin’ with that place I half expected armed squads roustin’ us up, but no-no. Here we be, here we be.”
A few heads turn to look at each other, but no one says anything. Trick pauses again, and when one finally raises a voice Trick is not at all surprised by who speaks up. It’s a woman he’s been keeping tabs on for a while now—a gap-toothed, former tar-sand pitter named Shirley.
Shirley claims she used to jockey an extraction crusher before she got reclassified as de-civ, and she’s made no bones about how she’s been gaming for Trick’s leadership slot. Despite her coarse, corn-cobbed looks, Trick knows the woman has that unctuous, politicking charisma about her. Lately Shirley has been going on and on about how they’re on the wrong track, arguing that their group should move off the coast altogether and head east for the mountains. When she brutes her way to the front of the group, Trick tenses.
“Judas Priest on a strat-sled,” Shirley cries. “What we waitin’ for then? We need to get a move on now while we still gots ourselves a chance.”
Trick turns to Grum and gives him a calibrated look that he should keep an eye on Shirley before he turns back to address her.
“And where do you think we should go, huh? To the mountains? Oh, I know that’s what you’ve been campaignin’ for. Oh me, oh my! Run for the hills! Run for the hills! Be safer up in the mountains.”
“Damn right,” Shirley says. “We pack up now we could make them foothills by sundown. That compound? We got no idea who they be and that means trouble.”
Trick takes his jackknife from his waistcoat and unfolds it.
“Okay, okay… let me ask you a question then, Shirley. Do you know why walls like that be built?”
“Hell, man, I don’t know and don’t really care.”
“Well, you should,” says Trick. “Other than prisons, walls are for keeping things of value in or for keeping those seekin’ those same things out.”
“So?”
“So, if them got it in for us do you really think we could outrun them to the goddamn mountains?”
“Maybe they’re fixin’ to now the storm’s passed.”
“Doubt it. Grum and me, we be just up there and gooned no natty-like or corp-o logos. Not only that but we gooned no weapons neither. No logos or weapons? That compound might be independents, like down Sin Frontera.”
Shirley glances back at the others. “Thinkin’ like that could mean our lives, Trick.”
“Oh, dry up, Shirley. Did you goon them up close? No, you be back here sucking down grackle-bone porridge and dandelion tea. I’ll put it to the rest of you. When was the last time you ever heard of anythin’ remotely natty-like with corp-o be unfortified?”
Someone else in the camp, a woman gathering a child close to her side, raises her voice.
“But they could be hidin’ their guns.”
Trick laughs. “Oh, c’mon! Hidin’ their guns? Why’d they do that? Tell you what, though, they looked clean and well fed, that’s for damn sure. If them people ain’t armed and are independents, I say we jig that to our advantage.”
Shirley says, “How?”
“Send out some of the runts to beg for supplies.”
“Them?! Out there on their own? For all we know there be concussion mines surrounding the place.”
Trick looks to the others. “How many of you be hungry?”
A lot of murmuring now and belly rubs.
“Yeah, me too,” Trick says. “Stretchin’ mealy oats with whatever creatures we can catch, washing it all back with bad water killin’ us slow. Yeah, I know you think it be better to protect them runts, but this be about their survival too. We be dyin’ out here. Them runts could goon the place out and get a drift of what’s what.”
Shirley steps closer and jabs an accusatory finger up at Trick.
“You. You’re nothin’ but a bald-faced, scheming liar. I knew you were a weaselly little prick the minute I laid eyes on you. Hell, you want to beg? You want to get killed or blown up, maybe you ought to do it your own damn self.”
Trick has had enough. In a screaming burst, he launches himself off the bricks and tackles Shirley to the ground. At first there are so many thrashing arms, kicks, bites, and punches, it’s hard to see who has the upper hand, but soon Shirley starts to buck as if she’s having a seizure. When everyone sees Trick jiggling his jackknife across her neck, the entire camp lets out a collective gasp.
It’s been some time since Trick took someone’s life, and the great runny necklace of blood that pours out of the carved gash startles him. Stumbling backward, he catches his wind as Shirley desperately tries to stem the hot flow of life leaving her throat. When she finally goes still, Trick wipes the jackknife on his pants.
“Well, now. I guess that settles it then,” he says.
After Dr. Corella hands over the medical materials she demanded, Koko checks in on Flynn once more and finds him snoring peacefully. She needs him well so they can make tracks as soon as possible, so she leaves him and steams out of the infirmary and administration building to clear her head.
Once outside, Koko crosses the courtyard. Finding a low granite bench and with the data plug with mirroring information shoved into one of her pockets, she sits down and begins sifting through Dr. Corella’s printouts.
All in all the medical nomenclature is insipidly dry, and it’s difficult to make sense of the curative mumbo-jumbo. Subcutaneous and intramuscular dosage amounts, perplexing nano-surgery and grafting procedures, flesh mending accelerants, and lengthy compound descriptions that read like numeric and alphabet soup. When Koko demanded to know why he gave Flynn a shot in the eye, Dr. Corella quickly explained that the sepsis from Flynn’s wound had swollen a forward portion of his brain and to relieve the pressure within, an invasive craniotomic procedure needed to be performed to relieve the edema. The doctor guaranteed Koko that, despite the slight discomfort, Flynn’s eye was not affected by the injection. Koko doesn’t like it (or Dr. Corella, for that matter) but in the end, in the cold light of day, she supposes the plus is in the upside: it looks like Flynn is back from the brink.
Taking a break from her reading, Koko raises her head and notices a group of twenty people walking in two lines several hundred meters away across the compound. It’s a solemn procession and at once she realizes it must be the burial for the dead girl. A self-propelled wheeled plank bears a shrouded body, and there are about six in the lead portion of the procession, with Sébastien in front along with a bereft-faced man and woman. Middle-aged, Koko figures the couple must be the dead girl’s parents. Born in the collectives and technically hatched in laboratory conditions, Koko’s biological progenitors were nothing more than a deliberately selected helix cocktail of genetic code. Searching, Koko comes up short on sympathy.
Recent emotional growth spurts with Flynn notwithstanding, she still finds she cannot break free of some deep-seated personal convictions, one of which is that she utterly despises funerals. Death—she’s seen more than her fair cut, inflicted much more for her bread and butter, but the archaic necessity of such ceremonies escapes her. Sure, she admits, you grieve for the loss that someone’s death tears into your life, but she’s always been of the mind that you beat the ground privately and you keep the orb of your sorrow brief. Taking the whole ghoulish spectacle public moves into some sort of maudlin narcissistic realm, so go ahead and ask the dead. If the dead could speak they’d probably look at you askance and say, why bother? Dead is dead, and gone is gone. They’re not coming back. Let them get back to the primary six elements as quick as possible. Whatever… at least they don’t draw things out here.
A voice, calm and observant, speaks beside her.
“Such a sad thing…”
Koko looks up. It’s the t’ai chi instructor she met earlier, the tall woman who introduced herself as Pelham. Koko brushes a nonexistent piece of lint off her pant leg and folds up the medical printouts of Flynn’s treatments. She stuffs the papers into one of her pant pockets, the one with the data plug.
“I wouldn’t know,” Koko says.
Pelham motions to the granite bench. “Do you mind?”
Koko makes room and Pelham sits down. “She was a rosy, creative spirit in every sense. Vivacious and wicked smart… her mother and father were some of the first to join the Commonage, back during the recruitment phase. Sébastien was her tutor.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. And she was an only child too.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s all such a mystery,” Pelham continues. “Honestly, why would she be out along the cliffs during such bad weather? We’d all known for days the storm was imminent. Her parents are heartbroken.”
“Got a name?”
“Didn’t Sébastien tell you? Her name was Kumari.”
“Pretty. I guess I owe her.”
“Owe her? In what way?”
“Well, the search party. If they hadn’t been out looking for her, Flynn and I might not have made it.”
“Ah, I see. I suppose fate does present its roundabout gifts now and then.”
Koko suppresses a short laugh, and Pelham turns.
“What’s so funny? You’re not the type who believes in fate?”
“Gee, whatever gave you that idea?”
Pelham looks back and regards the procession. “There’s no need to be so cold, you know.”
Koko composes herself, and together they watch the procession move off between two larger, oblong Commonage buildings.
Cold? What would you know about being cold?
If Pelham wants to see Koko cold she should try a stint looking into her eyes when she’s really good and mad.
Still, however casual, Pelham’s observation irks. Is she really that insensitive? Life has schooled Koko in harsh truths. Her thoughts skating back to Flynn, Koko supposes Flynn’s outward considerate nature is similar to Pelham’s. Always thinking about others, always flexibly giving people the benefit of the doubt. She’s a little ashamed to admit it, but Koko has never been so taken with someone with such naïve convictions before. With Flynn (well, at least before that stupid bounty hunter showed up and everything went straight in the proverbial shitcan) it’s been different. Real different. With Flynn it’s as though everything in Koko’s life has suddenly fallen into place somehow. Despite his softer gullibilities, life with him actually felt good for a change. She wonders if she was unhappy before Flynn dropped into her life. She doesn’t think so, and frankly, she isn’t sure what real happiness is. Weighed against everything that has fallen apart for her before, she imagines the ease she feels with Flynn could be called happiness. Hell, all the damages she’s endured, the years of inexplicable destruction and horror, all for nothing but a stingy paycheck. But now with Flynn it feels like going through all that has been somehow worth it.