Necrotech (12 page)

“Four on one,” I gritted out. “Fuck you.”

“Excuses.” He leaned back in his chair, propping one leg up on the other knee, and studied me with calculated scrutiny.

I didn't fidget. Seven minutes had mended my knee, but breathing was like sucking hot air through a tube. I met his gaze with a glare of my own. “I can go anywhere else for this.”

“Unlikely.” Not so much as a twitch. “You would have already.”

Fuuuuuuuuck
. He was right, and we both knew it. “Fine,” I snapped. “I'll get you your evidence. And then I damn well want my team.”

“If it's worth the resources, you will have your team, and then some.”

The barest concession, and probably the only one I'd get out of him. “I'll hold you to that.” I rose, my knee pinging once as the joint popped into place, but he remained seated. Charming guy.

Instead, he slid two fingers into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a thin black square. He held it out.

“What do I want that for?”

He didn't sigh. I'll give him that. I bet I got on his nerves, though. “It's a card. It holds the frequencies you can use to contact me.”

“Frequen
cies
, huh?”

He didn't rise to my snide bait. “I'm a very busy man.”

“So am I,” I replied, and turned my back on his offering. “Indigo'll be in touch.”

I tried to walk like I wasn't favoring my ribs, but I knew I wasn't fooling him. He probably had every broken bone catalogued, right down to the second it'd take my nanos to seal the remodeling.

At the base of the recessed pit, I turned. “Who the fuck is Jane Eyre?”

The glow of his digital screen lit his face in ghoulish shades of blue and gray. He didn't look up. “Read a book,” was his only dismissive-as-fuck answer.

Who the hell had the patience to slog through one?

Setting my jaw, I jumped up the two steps to prove I could, and didn't see any of his security detail as I crossed the dance floor. Maybe they bugged out.

Maybe they were tracking me to make sure I didn't turn around and make good on my threat. Hell, if security was my gig, I'd practically glue myself to my ass.

The lights pulsed in my eyes, slammed in time with the music I seriously was starting to despise.

No. I could have enjoyed the scuffle, but I wasn't stupid. The odds weren't in my favor, and I didn't want to get my ass handed to me a second time. Once was embarrassing.

Even if his team split, the man was an unknown. I hadn't seen any traces of tech, no signs of enhancers of any kind, but it didn't mean he was all flesh. And though it pissed me off to admit it, he was right. I wasn't exactly at optimum right now.

But I would be. Next time, I'd be at better than optimum.

With my heartbeat thudding in my reknitting ribs, and visions of ritual massacre dancing in my head, I left Malik Reed alone.

The bouncer, on the other hand, was fair game.

This asshole had known exactly what I'd been walking into – had probably been paid to keep everyone else out while the suit inside sicced his goons on me.

Eye for an eye, fuckface.

The door slid open – miraculously unlocked – and I didn't give him any time to pull his dreadlocked beard out of the slank he was snorting on the podium. Ribs protesting every move, I darted in before the door closed behind me, chopped out with my right hand and caught him under his Adam's apple as he raised his head.

He choked, caught somewhere between trying to stand and trying to protect his stash.

I grabbed his beard with one hand, palmed the back of his head with the other, and slammed him face first into the pile of golden dust. He shrieked as bone crunched.

The slank bloomed like a piss-stained cloud. I sucked it in on a hard breath, coughed it out when the taste burned my tongue. “What is with people today?” I demanded through my teeth. “Did you all wake up and decide to fuck me over?”

He flailed, snorting out gobbets of spit, blood and half-dissolved drug.

I slammed his head again.
Thud!
Another flare of yellow. I turned my face away. Then echoed his curse when one of his sledgehammer elbows caught me square in the busted ribs. Nerves detonated.

Briefly blinded, I missed the glint of light on steel. Didn't miss the sparks as he swung up a long curved blade with a hooked edge at the tip. Fortunately for me, he hit my tech arm. And his form was shit. He probably kept it back there for show.

I shoved him hard against his podium, heard the fake wood snap under his bulk, and seized the sword-holding wrist in my metal hand.

He froze. I squeezed.

His screech cracked on slank-induced gibberish.

“That's right,” I purred, false sympathy oozing in every note. I could feel the burn outside my senses. That press of wicked heat testing my resolve.

I didn't have much. Just rage. Naked, hungry,
needy.
Not ideal ground to take slank on, if you valued your wellbeing. Or waking up in the morning.

Not that it mattered. I was beyond caring.

“Yell some more,” I coaxed. “Come on. Let me hear it. You drew the short straw, didn't you? All alone. No one to come running now. Was the pay worth it?”

The boundaries of the scene sputtered black, edged with painful bloody red. My ribs had broken again. This guy had a swat like a cement hammer.

He grated out a guttural protest as I flexed my fingers. I could barely understand him. A shame. It meant he might not remember this tomorrow.

I wanted him to. I needed him to remember this. Screwing me over. Then paying for it. That's what passed for cred on this street. That's what losers needed to know.

Don't.

Fuck.

With.

Me.

My focus narrowed. The numbers in my lateral display turned red.

He screamed, jerking like a fat fish on a golden hook. What I could see of his thick neck above his shirt mottled red and purple where slank-streaked drool hadn't smeared it.

I leaned against his back, jerking his arm up, up, farther than a man of his muscle and build could handle. “You ever,
ever
mess with me again,” I breathed into his ear, “and you will lose more than your shitting stash. What's my name?”

Sweat and fear rolled off him in waves. Underneath his blotchy skin, nanos were gathering, hustling to the damaged sites – snapping ligaments, crushed wrist. Only they'd be inhibited by the slank we'd both inhaled. Slower.

I could practically smell them amassing. Iron and meat.

My fingers closed another centimeter. Squeezed another fraction of an inch.

His whole body jerked. His babbling took on an inhuman squeal.

“What's my goddamn name?” I snarled.

I could visualize it. As if it played out right in front of me, I could see the tendons tearing. See the bones crack, splinter, and then erupt from the skin in a spray of gristle and bone.

I could squeeze until the veins broke and the blood pooled and he would scream and scream and never forget me.

What the
shit
was I doing?

I sucked in a breath that tasted like rancid sweat and jerked back, letting go of his bone-white, still-intact wrist. Agony rippled through my side.

He sobbed, lost in a drug-addled haze of pain and fear and a really,
really
bad high.

Had he been sober, I doubt I would have handled him so easy. Then again, had he been sober, he may have thought twice about messing with someone like me. Maybe.

The fact he hadn't – the fact everybody was taking me on like I was some kind of chumhead fresh off the SINburn – was starting to eat at me.

As my head threatened to split open, my guts churning, I staggered out the front door, slammed into an overwhelming wall of heat, light, sound and ads. Faces turned, neon popped. My eyes widened, senses going nova. The slank wasn't great. I'd have gotten better quality at Shiva's.

Totally fucked, I ran into someone, fell, was pushed into someone else. Flesh and metal and plastic and neoprene. It all blurred.

The city folded in on itself. My brain turned inside out.

T
he worst of
the slank wore off in a back alley, drenched with humidity and reeking of urine. I huddled, hands fisted in my hair, as I breathed in and out. In and out. Good mechanical habit there. Air in. Air out.

I was intensely aware of the people wandering out of sight. I could hear them, smell them, taste them like a pulse on the back of my tongue. I could hear my own heartbeat, loud and too fast.

I wanted to rip it out of my chest and inhale its luscious, bloody fragrance.

Slank can fuck a body up. Whoever ran Plato's Key ran a damn sloppy ship. That would never have played out at the Mecca.

I needed to get somewhere safe. Somewhere out of reach and quiet enough that I could rest.

My nanos had already been strained after fighting Indigo's team – I couldn't bring myself to call them mine anymore – and the suit's goons just made it worse. I shouldn't have gone after that bouncer. I shouldn't have stretched it.

Why had I tried?

Because my goddamn cred would take a beating if word of today's idiocy got out.

Because I was too angry – no, what a lame word for it. I was too
enraged
to let the bouncer who screwed me get off without payback.

My breath shuddered out.

Slowly, using my elbows against the alley wall, I scraped myself off the ground. Upright. I didn't fall. Good.

The stench of shit and rot assailed me. My senses reeled; my guts twisted, splashed back and forth. Swallowing hard, teeth gritted, I pushed away from the wall and staggered for the street.

I made it three feet from the alley mouth when my knees turned backwards, spilling me to the rough ground. The Cellular Sunset I'd swallowed down came back up in an acid tide of purple and brown, punctuated by the thicker remnants of the recharger. I heaved, choked on my own vomit and hacked it all out until my guts were empty and tears of effort streamed from my straining eyes.

Gasping, I wiped a shaky arm across my mouth and rolled away from the cooling pool.

This was not the way I'd hoped to spend the night.

Draping my metal arm over my eyes, I sniffed back iron-rich mucous, cleared my throat. I struggled to form my thoughts into a cohesive plan.

Slank had never screwed me up so badly. It had to be the combination of the Cellular Sunset, the straining nanos, and the stuff I'd inhaled.

Or it was something else. Something malfunctioning in my chipset? I'd be annoyed if I had to go back and tell Indigo he was right. But maybe, just maybe, he
was
.
Maybe whatever the fuck was wrong with me was in my brain. Enough imbalances in the wiring, and permanent vertigo could set in. The odds of corruption increase with every fuckup in the system. A scan couldn't hurt.

And if I was corrupted – if I
really was fucked by that lab – only one man would give me a shot before he, well, fucking shot me.

As my head hummed, snapping back on fried synapses of pain, frustration, anger and anxiety, I closed my eyes and activated the projection protocols. The haptic note shoved up against my brain smegging
hurt
when the bandwidth opened.

In the space of nanoseconds, I appeared in a plain white room. Same table, same chairs. Baseline stuff.

I didn't have to wait long.

“Riko, is that you?” My mentor's voice was cranky on the best of days, and downright inhospitable the rest. I'd factor this one somewhere near grumpy, with a side of annoyance.

Same old Lucky. He'd figured out that receptors in the projection calls correlated avatars with connections. The programmers had decided, early in testing, that everybody who could make the ideal persona would. Who wanted to be a nobody?

This meant that Lucky, a nobody, wouldn't trigger the ad blast. Win-win.

Illegal, but whatever.

I didn't know where to look, so I settled for straight ahead. “It's me.”

“Screw this box,” was his greeting. “Where are you?”

Yeah. Same old Lucky all the way.

“Alley near Plato's Key, I think,” I said. The room flickered around me, and I managed a wan smile. “I might be losing consciousness, so–”

“Goddammit, girl,” he grunted. Then silence.

Would he find me? I didn't know. I couldn't ask. Here and gone again, not a kind word in between. Lucky was harsh, but fair. And the best street doc I'd ever known.

He didn't owe me anything.

As the room turned to gray around me, I let go of the projection and came back to myself. Nose deep in street sweat, vomit inches away from my face reeking of acid and sugar.

Ribs aching. Head pounding. Limbs twitching.

I rolled onto my side. My ribs shifted.

I clenched my teeth over a shriek of startled agony and fell back, gasping.

Not healed yet. Not good. There was no reason why my nanos wouldn't be remodeling the bone, even while I puked my guts out.

My vision turned black, speckle by speckle. Nanos. Love them or hate them, all they want is to keep your bits operational. Even if they have to steal your own resources to do it.

Everything has a price.

This one insisted I lose my shit in a back alley of the rack. Just another day, right?

Fuck this.

“
D
amn it
, girl.” A sharp pain through my chest bowed my back, frissons of pins and needles slicing through my limbs to explode in a net of electrical shocks between my eyes. “Wake up!”

I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep. I groaned. “‘S' a sec,” I slurred.

“No.” Another slam of currents that peeled the enamel off my back teeth. A scream lodged in my throat.

My eyelids flew open.

Tired brown eyes hazed into a struggling focus above me. Worn lines bit deep into a skeletally thin face, cheeks and bridge of his crooked nose spiderwebbed with broken capillaries. Lucky's predominantly Kongtown features didn't match the harsh gruffness of his street-worn way of speaking. Idiots always expected him to sound like some vidscreen Asian stereotype. Didn't matter which one. Any of them.

Lucky wasn't the type. Any type.

“One more,” he said tersely, “
then
you sleep while I see to your chipset.”

I tried to lift my hand, but it wouldn't obey me. Struggling only made it worse. I was trapped. Restrained. I sucked in a breath. “Lucky?”

“I'm right here.” A thin, work-rough hand wrapped around mine. “Zen it, this is going to suck.” That was Lucky's version of comfort.

I licked my parched lips. “Get this working fast,” I rasped. “I have to… I have...” My breath twisted in my chest.

“I said
zen it
.” I heard metal clink, heard the hum of a charge building. A needle slid into my neck and burned. “You been taking shit care of yourself.”

“Not dead yet,” I croaked.

“You sure about that?” His silhouette faded into bleary dark. “This much heat will take some time. Bite down.”

There was no bracing. The spark gathered, lit, and every limb, every digit, every cell seized. My head was strapped down, I wouldn't break my own neck, but whatever Lucky was doing, it stripped me of my own kinesis.

I think I screamed. Then it all went white.