Tracer (7 page)

I have to fiddle with the 9 for a bit before the number appears on the display: the unit’s old, salvaged from a discarded piece of machinery, and although Carver works hard to maintain it, it’s slowly wearing down.

The keypad soon gives two welcoming beeps. I push on the door, but instead of swinging open, it remains locked shut. Frowning,
I look at the keypad. Right before the display resets itself, I catch sight of the code I entered. It was correct.

I do
not
have time for this.

I punch it in again, but still the metal door refuses to budge. I’m about to enter the code a third time when I realise exactly what the problem is.

“Carver, open this door!” I shout, not caring if there’s anybody in the passage below to hear me. I
hammer on the metal, and the sound sets my ears ringing.

There’s movement from the other side, and then a voice: “That kind of tone won’t get you anywhere. Say please.”

The attempt to control myself lasts perhaps two seconds. “I swear, Carver, if you don’t open this door right now, I will tear it off the wall and make you eat it.”

I hear muted laughter, and then the click of the lock being
released. The door opens, and as I step through into the Nest I reach for the first thing I can see – in this case, an old battery lying on a nearby chair – and hurl it across the room at Aaron Carver. As much as I wish it wasn’t the case, his reflexes are as good as ever. The battery smashes harmlessly into the wall with a clang before bouncing out of sight.

There’s a small box in his hand,
and I can see the thin wires snaking across the floor to the entrance. He’s perched at his workbench, a mess of something black and spiky on the table in front of him. We have him to thank for our super-light backpacks. They’re better than the canvas packs we used to use – with those, the cargo would be shaken to pieces inside of ten minutes.

None of which stops him being incredibly annoying.

There’s a gasp on my right. Then a voice, high and musical: “Who beat up your
face
?”

I look round to find the Twins: Yao Shen and Kevin O’Connell. Yao is on the right, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring goggle-eyed at my bruises. She’s a wispy, elfin thing, with curious eyes and a tiny bud-shaped mouth. When I first saw her, I thought she was way too young and fragile to be a tracer, but
she’s got some serious moves: the bigger the jump, the harder she throws herself at it.

Kev is seated next to her. While Yao is tiny, Kev is enormous: a bruiser with upper arms that look like thick steel cables. There’s a book next to his knee
– the
book, rather, a copy of
Treasure Island
that we’ve each read so many times the jacket has disintegrated and most of the pages are torn.

The Twins
take jobs together, run together, fight together. From what Amira has told me, they aren’t lovers, but sometimes I find it hard to believe. I once referred to them as the Twins for a joke, and the name stuck.

I rub my eye socket absently. “Got in a fight,” I say, in answer to Yao’s question. “Where’s Amira?”

“Out on a job,” says Carver. He’s also staring at my face, his eyes narrowed. As usual,
he’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt – red today – and his blond hair is perfect, the goggles on his forehead positioned just so.

“Who’d you get in a fight with?” Yao asks, squirming to her feet. “Everyone on the station? Did you win?”

“I’m fine.” Now that I’ve stopped running, the anxiety has come rushing back. Does Darnell know which crew I run with? Does he know where we live? If they get here,
can we fight our way out? And Prakesh …

“Don’t look fine,” says Kev, his voice rumbling. He starts to get to his feet. It’s like a crane arm on a construction ship unfolding, with heavy joints locking into place.

“We should go find ’em,” Yao says. “Who were they, Riley? I’ll tear their legs off and play catch with their kneecaps.”

“Yao, be still,” Kevin says, without looking at her. Yao pouts
and subsides, but she’s still looking at me, anger and worry on her face.

“Leave her alone, kids,” says Carver, turning back to his workbench and picking up a soldering iron. “She’s good. What’re a few bumps and bruises to someone like Riley Hale? It’s all part of the job.”

I’ve put up some pretty thick walls in my mind to keep it together today, but Carver’s words go right through them, like
they’re nothing more than cloth. Without another word, I walk over to his workbench. He’s set a bunch of parts to one side, neatly arranged on the scarred surface, and I slam my fist down right in the middle. The parts scatter, jingling as they bounce off the bench.

“The hell—” Carver says.

I get right in his face. “Do you know what I’ve been carrying
all day? An eyeball. Ripped from someone’s
skull. I’ve gone through ambushes and assassination attempts, and I’m a little wired right now. So do me a favour, and don’t tell me what is and isn’t part of the job.”

Carver is looking at me like I’ve gone insane. Kev are Yao are staring, open-mouthed.

“Well,” says a voice. “I’m so glad things didn’t fall apart while I was gone.”

Amira Al-Hassan is standing by the door, her arms folded, her
eyes locked on mine.

If she hadn’t spoken, none of us would have noticed Amira come in. She’s deathly quiet, always has been, and runs as if her feet aren’t touching the ground. The jumps that I stumble and crash on, she lands with gentle ease, soft and hushed as a kiss.

She has to bend her head slightly to come through the door. Amira’s older than me by a good ten years, and is dressed simply, in a grey
tank top and cargo pants. Around her neck is a faded red scarf, the frayed ends falling down her back. Her pack hangs loosely from one hand.

She walks over to Carver’s bench, taking in my bruises. “This is a story I have to hear,” she says, before reaching inside her pack and pulling out a box of protein bars. “I got these from the job. Let’s have some breakfast.”

“Yeah,” says a dazed Carver,
getting to his feet. “Good idea.”

I sit down on the pile of mattresses in the corner. It was a little hard to stay standing – my body seems to give up all at once, the strength flowing out of my legs. My dad’s flight jacket bunches up around me, the sleeves pushing down over my hands.

The Nest doesn’t look like much. It’s just two narrow interconnected rooms, low ceilinged, with hissing pipes
scaling the walls. The room that houses Carver’s workbench is where we tend to hang out – the other one has an air shower and chemical toilet, which he’s hooked into the main system. People who come here say the place smells. It probably does, what with five Devil Dancers living right on top of each other – the Nest being the size it is, it’s not really up to holding a lot of people. But I don’t
think I’ve noticed a smell for years. It’s home.

My gaze strays to the colours on the wall by my head. Abstract shapes in shades of red and green and black and gold. Yao’s mural. None of us are really sure what she’s painting – sometimes, I don’t even think she knows. The homemade tattoo ink she traded for might have been too old and toxic to go into skin, but it works great on the walls – even
if Carver did complain that he’d been wanting to trade for a new wrench instead.

Amira tosses me a protein bar, and I catch it without thinking. “So, Riley,” she says, arranging herself on Carver’s chair. “Let’s hear why you’re carrying body parts. And how you
know
you’ve been carrying body parts.”

The gummy, chewy protein slabs taste faintly sweet and stick to the teeth in stubborn little clumps,
but they keep you going forever – after even one, you feel like you’ve had a full meal. They’re hard to come by, so we dig into them, washing them down with gulps of water from our stash. We prefer food we can get ourselves to anything from the mess halls; the food there is barely edible, cooked into mush, and some of the workers won’t let you eat if you don’t have a sanctioned job. Being a
tracer doesn’t count.

Between bites, I tell them what happened – the chase, the ambush, Darnell, all of it. Amira doesn’t speak while she eats, using her left hand to take large bites of the protein bar. Her
right hand rests on the workbench, and I notice that the stumps where her index and middle fingers used to be are raw and red. She’s been rubbing them again; most of the time, she doesn’t
even realise she’s doing it. Her little souvenirs from the lower sector riots, years ago. From running the Core without a thermo-suit, going from Apogee to Apex via the sub-zero hell of the fusion reactor, carrying a bomb on a delay timer. Anarchists had set it up, but she managed to pull it free and run.

Frostbite might have taken her fingers, but after she jettisoned the bomb from the dock
on the other side, Amira was a hero. She was offered a seat on the council, where her parents before her had sat. But I guess after running the Core, council politics don’t do it for you.

Hence the Dancers. Hence, us.

After a hundred years, it’s got a lot harder to replace or fix anything on the station, so transporting objects and messages is tougher than it used to be – especially with gangs
waiting to snatch them. Tracers are the network that allows it to happen, and the Devil Dancers are among the best crews on Outer Earth. There are plenty of others, but under Amira’s leadership, we’ve developed a pretty solid rep.

When I finish my story, the crew sits in silence for a moment, and then everyone tries to talk at once. Carver and Yao are angrily demanding we bring the fight to Darnell,
but Amira raises a hand, and they reluctantly calm themselves. Carver, muttering obscenities, turns back to his bench, grabbing his goggles and pulling them down roughly over his eyes, making his hair stick up in strange directions. Amira just stares at me, and this time there’s a flash of reproach in her eyes.

“Not good,” Kev says to Amira, giving an uncharacteristic shudder.

Yao agrees, nodding
furiously. “There was that woman who went missing a while ago. She worked in the mess. And I did
that run to Chengshi and heard about a sewerage tech who went missing. I didn’t think about it before, but what if it’s the guy who gave you the cargo?”

We all stare at her. She has a damn good point.

“Imagine if we caught the guy,” she says, her eyes glittering.

“Are you insane?” The goggles have
been yanked off, and Carver is staring at Yao as if she’s grown an extra head. “Are we actually talking about going after someone who sends eyeballs by special delivery? No. Hell no. I like breathing. And by the way, nice work Riley. I always enjoy ending my day with a fight to the death against the minions of a psychotic lab boss.”

“I
wasn’t
followed,” I say. It’s almost a snarl, covering up
the uncertainty I feel.

Amira has remained silent, her hands clasped before her, tilted back with the fingertips just touching her lips. She looks at me. “We’re not supposed to know what we carry,” she says. “That’s the job. That’s the only way we survive, and you know it. You should never have looked in your pack – I trained you better than that.”

A hot flush comes to my cheeks, but I hold
her gaze.

She shrugs. “You got us into this, Riley. What do you think we should do?”

I take a deep breath, trying to push my thoughts into some sort of order. “Darnell’s going to want revenge,” I say. “The man he sent after me won’t be the last. That means everyone here is at risk.”

“So what? We can take ’em,” says Carver. Amira raises her hand, silencing him.

“It’s more than that though,”
I say. “We shouldn’t have to do this. We shouldn’t have to be a part of whatever … sick game this is.”

“Mmm,” says Amira. “So what do you suggest?”

“Right now, we’re the only people outside of Darnell and the guy who gave me the package—”

“Gray.”

“Right. Gray. Outside of them, it’s just us. So we bring the fight to them. Let them know we don’t go down easy – starting with Gray.”

“Why not
hit the big bad guy first?” says Yao, but Amira interrupts. “No, Riley’s right,” she says. “This merchant – this Gray – he picked us because he knew that we do not wish to know what we carry. He took advantage of our trust.” She shakes her head. “I won’t allow that. Attacking Darnell isn’t the answer – not right now, anyway – but we can take care of Gray ourselves. Send a message.”

Yao is gagging.
“I think I ate one of his onions the other day. What if he fertilises them with
human blood
?” Carver rolls his eyes.

Amira glances at me. “We’re probably going to have to deal with this head-on at some point. Riley – you’ve dealt with Darnell more than the rest of us have. Anything we need to know?”

I let out a long breath. “He’s nasty. Keeps a low profile, but he practically runs some of the
gangs up there. Water points mostly – he’s got connections, so he shuts them down until people have something worth trading.”

“So it won’t just be him we’re facing?”

“Probably not.”

“Stompers?” says Kevin, echoing my earlier thoughts.

Carver throws his arms up. “Great idea, Kev. Because we have such a great relationship with the stompers anyway.”

“No stompers,” says Amira. “This is our problem.
We’ll deal with it.” She turns to the Twins. “We’ll need as much intelligence as we can get. I want you to go to Gardens and find a way into the Air Lab. Observe Darnell, see what he’s doing,
and report back. If he really is going to come after us, we need to know about it.”

With only the briefest of shared glances, the Twins head out, dropping through the hatch. I can hear their soft footfalls
disappearing down the corridor.

Amira turns back to us. Her eyes are cold slits. “We’re going back to the market. Time to meet this Arthur Gray.”

She jerks her chin at my bruises. “Are those going to be a problem?”

I shake my head. “I’ll live.”

“Good.”

When we drop out the hatch, the corridor is quiet, with no sound save for the rumble of the station. But as we start jogging towards the gallery,
there’s a shout from the far end of the corridor. Someone yelling my name.