Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome (21 page)

It was at times like this, when I was physically tired but mentally curious, that the Resonance called to me most strongly. Sometime I found myself having to fight the urge, but now, luckily, I could simply let it take me. And it did. The reality around me shifted, and though there was a brief moment of reorientation, it quickly felt like I belonged there, perhaps more so than the physical world. There, I was
part
of the world, and it was a part of me. I was not bound by the frailty of my form, nor the aches and pains that had collected like driftwood along the shore. Here, I was free to go where I would, unfettered.

I bent myself to my task, sifting through tera after tera of news releases, images, blogs, vlogs, memory uploads. I took each of them and played them against the others, building the pieces of the puzzle first and then, one-by-one, piecing them together until the picture began to form.

Finally, twelve hours after entering, I found it.

Eight years ago, an Aboriginal girl named Sindala Hendesa had, with the consent of her parents, joined a drug trial to restore her failing kidneys. It was a process that was advertised as costing half as much as growing a new one, and since it was a final-phase trial, it was subsidized and would cost them even less. Cylestra was administering the program through a loosely veiled partnership with the Northern Territory government.

Bathurst, and especially Sindala’s village, was not wealthy. The doctors were subpar, as was the nearest hospital, which was where Sindala would have been taken had the Cylestra medical team not offered their services, so it was natural that Sindala’s parents would jump at any small increase in their daughter’s chances. The treatments continued for several months, and Sindala showed signs of improvement.

But then there was a reversal. Sindala’s organs—not just her kidneys—began growing at an alarming rate. By the time they decided to drop her from the program, her lungs had enlarged by thirty percent; her heart was twice as large as it should have been, and her kidneys had tripled in size. Within another few months, many of the subjects began experiencing similar issues, forcing Cylestra to abandon the trial altogether. Shortly after, Cylestra simply picked up and left, sidestepping the repeated requests for follow-up visits.

Sindala’s father, of course, was my Mr. Macquarie—real name, Koorong Hendesa—and her mother was Allora. As Sindala’s health deteriorated, Koorong and Allora fought in the courts for Cylestra to pay for new organs. Their lawyer, one of the few that would agree to take on a small-stakes claim against a Double-A corp, tried to argue that the side effects were much more damaging than had been accounted for in the initial discussions with the Hendesas. The judge, in the end, ruled for the plaintiffs, but it was a sham—the Hendesas were awarded the exact sum of money they had paid to Cylestra, an amount that would fail to even dent the mounting bills and future treatments that Sindala would need.

After the trial, with Koorong and Allora’s savings drained, the village chipped in, but they could afford little more than an ancient dialysis machine.

Sindala died two months later.

An alarm from the lobby of my apartment complex broke my train of thought. I tapped into the intercam and found Koorong speaking feverishly into it.

“Please, Mav, let me in, we need to talk.” He pressed on the button for my apartment feverishly. “Mav—”

“I don’t appreciate clients following me home, Koorong.”

He paused at the use of his real name. “Can I come up?”

I let him in, and a minute later he had reached my apartment on the 132
^nd
floor. He gave Skittles a look of consternation that I couldn’t quite interpret. Perhaps the bite earlier...

“We have to leave,” he said, “Now.”

Skittles measured an extremely high heartbeat from him, and I could tell just from the sound of his breathing that he was anxious.

“What’s happened?”

He glanced back at the door, then Skittles, and finally back to me. “I’ll explain it all later. But please—”

His eyes widened as he looked over my chair to the windows beyond. Shadows were playing among the shutters—something large obstructing the sunlight. The entire apartment was soundproofed, but there was the telltale whine of jets could be heard.

I triggered the windows to drop their shields. The kevmesh armor shot downward from its recessed compartment above the windows, fast, but not fast enough.

Guns opened fire, stitching bullets across the apartment. The windows shattered, spraying glass over the confined space. The whine of the jet engines became suddenly and overwhelmingly loud. Bullets stitched a trail across the wall, in a heartbeat eating up the distance from the yellow acacia in the corner to Skittles’ chair.

I had already begun rolling to the floor, but before I could even touch the carpet I felt something burn along my upper thigh and then my backside. Then something hotter than I had ever felt in my life bored deep into my lower torso. As the shields finally slammed into place, I looked down to find blood welling from a hole in my gut, not the bright red one saw against their skin after a small cut, but blood of the dark and deep and deadly variety. I knew just from looking at it that I would soon slip into shock, but that knowledge seemed to slow time down, seemed to sharpen my senses, not deaden them.

Koorong was on the floor, looking at me with wide eyes and a worried face as bullets tore viciously into the shielding. Skittles was barking and running around in a circle. She nipped at Koorong’s arm until I found the presence of mind to call her away.

The guns ceased firing, bringing a relative silence, but the change in volume felt deadly because it made me think that the only reason they had stopped was that something more powerful was on its way. Koorong must have sensed this as well, because instead of tending to my wound he moved behind me and picked me up under the armpits and dragged me toward the front door.

We made it halfway before an explosion tore through the shielding. The armor did not completely give way, but it was close. Fire rolled across the apartment, the force of the blast threw us backward.

Koorong was up again in a moment, dragging me, though not nearly as quickly as he had moments ago. Still, we made it out into the corridor as the second blast came in. Skittles followed us, flames and smoke licking at her heels. The door slammed shut with an almighty boom and bowed outward, but it held.
It’d better hold
, I thought in a moment of insensate humor,
or I’d be asking for my money back
.

The heat of the wound in my side had ebbed, replaced by a cold, tingling sensation in my fingers and cheeks and nose. When we made it to the lift, Koorong pressed the button marked 150 instead of the one that would take us to the lobby.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Ignoring my question, he pulled up his pant leg. Underneath was a simsilk leg sheath with a myriad of small pockets. From one of these he took a yellow wad of sticks and mud, which he squeezed tightly in one hand. The thing cracked and popped like miniature fireworks. He pulled my shirt up and placed the balled up wad onto the wound, and like a spider unfolding its legs, the thing expanded until it covered the wound completely.

Skittles, surprisingly, only watched.

The wound began to burn white, blazing hot. I stifled a scream as he repeated the process on the other side, where the bullet had exited—or was that where it had entered?

I passed out momentarily.

When I woke, he was dragging me up the stairs that led to the roof’s access door. Normally it would be secured, but for some reason it opened for him.

Skittles launched herself past him.

“Come back, girl.” My voice was weak, and Skittles paid me no mind.

Outside, it was dusk. The sun seemed to have broken into a galaxy of lights that lay golden against the landscape of the sprawl.

“Where are we going?” I asked again, unable to form a more coherent thought.

Koorong pulled me to the edge of the building, mumbling words under his breath as the immensity of the sprawl came into full display beneath us. I grew dizzy.

The whine of the jets intensified. They knew we’d escaped to the top and were coming after us. Skittles was barking so fiercely I thought she might damage her voice box. Koorong pulled me up to the lip of the building as the jet’s roar increased sharply.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw, cresting the edge of the building, a four-engine tilt-wing with a cluster of serious looking weapons fixed to the belly. Within the partially mirrored surface of the cockpit’s windshield were two pilots, one sitting higher than the other.

Then they were lost from view, for Koorong had taken a step forward, pulling me with him. We fell, slowly it seemed to me. I looked up and saw Skittles, looking down, barking madly, the transparent blue concrete at the edge of the building ablating from a hail of bullets.

“Skittles!”

No sooner had I said her name than she was whisked off the building and into the air. She followed us down as the wind began to roar. In my terror I thought the sound was due to the speed of our descent, but it soon became clear that the airstream was rushing upward so quickly that it was slowing us down. Then it was
carrying
us.

We began slipping sideways, at a slightly downward angle, through the byways of the sprawl, passing building after building as the people inside them stopped and stared. We went two klicks in less than a minute, Skittles floating close behind us, silent for once.

We came down near a small park. The pain in my abdomen returned as we fell to the ground. Koorong lay next to me, panting heavily in between hard coughs. Despite the wind, he was sweating profusely. Skittles hobbled over—she’d picked up a severe limp, though whether it was from a stray bullet or the landing I didn’t know—and began licking his forehead until he defended himself.

And then I passed out for good.

•
•
•

I awoke in a Spartan room with strips of lights running along the ceiling. I was lying on a gurney. Every part of me ached—the bullet wounds especially, but they were less painful than I would have guessed. I tried to access the net, but failed. Already my skin was beginning to crawl at the realization that I could not feel the Resonance. I tried to reassure myself, reasoning that we were in an insulated bunker of some kind, but this did nothing to calm my growing sense of anxiety.

I turned my head and saw a cage in the corner of the room. Skittles was inside, but for some reason I couldn’t sense her through my normal connections.

“Skittles?” I said, hoping she would wake.

She didn’t move, and my heart sank.

“Skittles, dear?”

Then she did move, though it was slowly, as if she’d been sorely wounded. As she stared through the wires of the cage, a great sense of relief washed over me.

“There, there, girl—”

I stopped as the sound of an opening door echoed dimly into the room. The click of footsteps came softly at first, growing louder. I turned my head, that simple motion painful. Against the far wall was a hallway that took a shallow angle up and into the darkness. Koorong stepped into the light with an unreadable expression on his face. I wished Skittles’ sensors were working. I felt naked without them.

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“Nearly a day, but the sedatives I gave you should have kept you under for at least another twelve hours.”

“Where are we?”

He paused. “We’re safe.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He pursed his lips, and the chocolate skin over his eyebrows furrowed. “For now that’s the best I can offer.”

“Then tell me this, or I’m getting up and hobbling out of here. How did Cylestra know I was investigating them? I hadn’t so much as touched the tunnel
or
the packet you sent me. I was only searching for information about them, about you, passively.”

He glanced toward Skittles. I followed suit, my eyes thinning, an uncomfortable feeling forming in my gut. “What did you do to my dog?”

“She’ll be fine.”

“Tell me!”

“It’s a virus, low level, innocuous. It gathers information and transmits it to my wife, in the Matrix.”

I thought back to the kafé, when Skittles had bit him. He had done that on purpose, and I’d completely missed it. “Why?” I asked. “Why monitor
me
?”

“It’s well known what you can do.”

I shook my head. “I gather data, for the right people, for the right price. How’s that going to get your daughter back?”

His face screwed up in anger. “I’m not trying to get her back, I’m trying to make them pay!”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Allora needs to know how you do the things you do.”

“There are dozens of technomancers around Sydney.”

“You’re more than a simple technomancer, and you know it.”

“You think she can learn what I know in a few hours?”

“No.” Koorong began pacing across the cold concrete floor. “We’ve been studying you for months. We learned much by simply watching, and even more during the hours Skittles was feeding her data. She only needs the last few pieces of the puzzle.”

“What can she possibly hope to do with it? I
read
data.”

“It is by knowing how data is read that data can be planted.” His face grew angrier as he talked. “Allora will take Cylestra down, bit by bit, brick by brick, until there’s nothing left.”

“And the Tamanous list?” I asked, thinking of Liam. “Does it even exist?”

“It might.” He seemed to deflate as he spoke. “I don’t know.”

I tried to sit up, but the bullet wound flared like a red-hot iron. It was only pain, though. I sat up, grunting through gritted teeth as stars danced before my eyes. I nearly fell back, but managed to prop myself up, breathing heavily, sweat tickling my brow and armpits.

“Please, lie down. It’s not safe to move yet.”

“I’m leaving, and I’m taking Skittles with me.” Despite those words, I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I knew I would simply fall if I made it to the concrete floor; I certainly wouldn’t make it to Skittles’ cage.
Maybe in a few minutes
, I told myself.