Escapology Read online

  “He may find it uncomfortable. I’m very augmented.”

  “He’ll cope.”

  * * *

  They enter the workshop to find that Scratch has been working on the sec-drone all night. Trying to fix it, connect it to the ship’s systems so they can use it as a scout and a weapon. Cassius reckons the Ark’s schooners had the same sort of plans. Considering the difficulty of bringing this package to such a specific location, he’s assuming the existence of other drones—other drones that the Ark may have captured already. They have to be prepared.

  On the captain’s instructions, Scratch has removed the memory node containing the package so he doesn’t accidentally damage it whilst working. Still attached by a fine, see-through wire, it sits on the shelf innocuously, as if it’s no trouble at all. Odds are against it though. Trouble doesn’t come in threes, it comes in waves. Tsunamis. Hurricanes. Trouble attracts trouble to itself, like a dying wasp attracts other wasps.

  Volk offers Petrie a small smile.

  “Ready?”

  “Not really, but let’s go.”

  Her IM is prickly with static, makes him rub the back of his head to ease a sensation that isn’t real. Her drive is worse, heavy with noise and riotous emotion. He’s never been in contact with an augment. He was expecting her to feel less human than this, but she’s deeply vulnerable, as if every patch and implant she’s added has only served to heighten her humanity. Now he understands her concern for his comfort.

  The second she connects to the node her relief crashes over him. He has to breathe through it like pain.

  She pauses. Sorry.

  I’m guessing it’s not Queens?

  Definitely not. This is J-Hack work. Unfamiliar. I don’t understand. If it’s not from Queens, it should be from Breaker.

  The person you left your contact details with?

  Yes.

  She pokes at the node. He watches, fascinated: this is the closest he’ll ever get to hacking. Volk hums, impressed.

  Well, whoever this is, their crypt is excellent work. Bomb proof. Only top five percent could crack this.

  Can you?

  I can. But it may take a while.

  It takes almost an hour before Volk can get to whatever’s locked inside. Stuck in her drive, he’s all but drowned in her dismay as she reads it through, making him swallow and swallow again to keep that damn breakfast roll down.

  What? What is it? he asks.

  Volk turns to face him—a strange sensation with him inside her drive. She’s a never-ending reflection of herself, of him. A fractal. A paradox.

  We were right, she tells him. They found a way. Breaker says Twist will send a Haunt in before the week’s out. That gives us seventy-two hours. We have to stop him. The Queens cannot have Emblem.

  How the fuck does anyone stop a Haunt?

  Emblem’s signal will make him visible. He’ll be easier to hunt down.

  Hunt? Breaker wants to kill the guy?

  Volk’s reaction is immediate. Visceral.

  Kill him? No!

  What then?

  Breaker’s stuck, the Queens have him at Heights. It’s taken a lot to get this message to me. He needs my help. Something only I can make.

  Explain.

  I’m a Pharm, like I said. I developed a drug called Disconnect to help in the battle against the Queens. It severs the link between user and avi, Breaks Fulcrum’s control. The intention was for people to see the truth and force Kamilla to accept help.

  I don’t get why that’s a bad thing.

  Volk turns away.

  Because our avis aren’t representations, she says. They’re us. Made from us. Sever that connection and you sever sanity.

  Immersed in her drive, Petrie can feel the truth of what she’s saying. Extraordinary. All this time, he and his avi, one and the same. How is it he’s never felt it? He thinks of how it is inside Slip, the freedom of floating, the connection. Tries to imagine that broken. His mind gone. Goes cold from head to toe. He can’t fathom how she could allow such a drug to exist.

  Why didn’t you destroy it?

  Breaker insisted we keep it, so I did the next best thing. I destroyed all but my personal notes and had him hide them in Twist’s vault.

  What? Why in hell would you hide it with him?

  Safest vault in the Gung, and he had no idea it was there. Even if he did, he wouldn’t know what it was. We’re not daft, Bosun.

  So Breaker wants you to use it on the Haunt.

  Yes. Her reluctance is clear. As is her resolve. Once he’s disconnected, they can’t touch him. Ergo they can’t touch Emblem.

  And what if we can’t get you to the Gung? We’ve got the Ark on our tails.

  She reaches out and grasps Petrie’s arm, her hand surprisingly strong.

  You have to try. Trust me, Bosun Petrie, you do not want to live in a world in which the Queens have possession of Emblem.

  So either they help her help Breaker or they end up, what? Queen bait? So what now? There are no easy options here. The drone carrying Breaker’s cry for help has put them directly in the path of danger and may have erased any chance of them being able to respond. Petrie looks over at his captain, watching them with wary, angry eyes.

  I have to talk to Cassius.

  Of course. Will he be amenable?

  It’s not that simple. The Ark’s faster, equipped with more schooners, actual soldiers. I’m not saying we’ll lose—we’re heavily armed, skilled at warfare, and we’ve defeated many other ships, though none quite so vicious. If we can’t beat it, we can likely cripple it. But if the Resurrection is too badly damaged, we’re not going anywhere.

  Volk’s silence is eloquent. She remains silent as he explains the situation to Cassius. Cassius doesn’t much like any of it, but he accepts that refusing to help would be insane, considering the stakes. His concern is the same as Petrie’s—how the hell do they get to Gung with the Ark on their tail?

  All they can do is try, and live with the consequences if they fail.

  “So do we hide or do we run?” Petrie asks his captain.

  “Considering how far we are from the Gung, and this Breaker’s suggested timeline, we don’t have time to hide. We’ve made ready every weapon we have, couldn’t be more primed for a strike. I say we set loose at full clip for the Gung. Lure the Ark out.”

  The last time Petrie ran, it was in terror, an act of self-preservation that felt like cowardice. Looks like he’s come full circle, running away to pull the past back toward him. And what will happen when it comes? Devastation. Isn’t that always the way? Especially when the Ark is involved. Sometimes the past really is best left behind. What he wouldn’t give for the luxury.

  Johnny Sez Has a Bad Day

  “Johnny Sez copped a sweet ride when he hooked up with Mimic, that’s for sure,” murmurs Li Harmony to her brother, Ho. She’s got Johnny curved back out of his apartment window like a fishhook, her blade to his neck. “Remember those pigs on our nai nai’s farm?”

  Ho giggles. “Sure. Piggies.”

  “They made such a pretty sound when I slit their throats. He’s making the exact same sound. Makin’ me itchy for the feel of hot blood on my skin. So silky and sticky.”

  Johnny is afraid that if his eyes get any wider, they’ll explode out of their sockets. He tries to silence his throat, but it’s too busy vocalizing the panic currently stampeding through his frontal lobes. For a first face-to-face with his bosses, this is not going as well as he’d like. Mind you, these are not the sort of bosses you want to have any kind of face-to-face with. Johnny’s only been working for the Harmonys for about six months. He’s heard a lot of stories about them and their family history—all of it ludicrous, or so he thought. Rumour, of course, is always exaggerated, but currently Johnny believes every word of it. This family is fucking lunatic.

  Ho leans against the side of the window-frame looking down at Johnny. He takes a long pull on his purple psy stick. His eyes are dreamy, which is worrying for
poor Johnny, because Ho’s generally not very sane, and a paucity of sanity filtered through psy smoke produces worrying results.

  “Maybe he forgot who he runs bumps for?” Ho slurs out thoughtfully. He blinks. “That would concern me. Lack of proper respect makes my skin break out. Breakouts distress me in the same way as wearing brown shoes with a black suit distresses me. I tore the face off this stupid salaryman cunt last week for that. Sartorial ignorance, pure and simple, it ruined my day.”

  “Oh my poor baby,” Li whispers, and her glassy eyes sheen with tears. Digging in her blade, she licks her lips as a thin drool of blood slides down Johnny’s neck, dripping to the meagre courtyard below. “Hey, look at that,” she says conversationally, smiling at Johnny as if they’ve known each other forever. “That’s a long way down, Johnny. Anyone ever tell you how high you’re living? I wouldn’t like to fall down there.” She jerks him a little, smiling at the high-pitched shriek that whistles out through the constriction on his throat. “I’m not bothered by heights. Am I, Ho?”

  Ho shrugs, delicate as a flower and slender as a stalk in his bespoke silk suit.

  “I’m not fond. You pushed me off a ledge once. That’s when I had my face redone. I look so much prettier now.”

  Li sniffs. “I was asking about me. Idiot. And I apologized for that.”

  Ho smiles, whisky-brown eyes filling with mischief.

  “I know what the fuck you were asking, bitch. And I accepted your apology, surgery only made me prettier.”

  Li chuckles, a full-throated sound which could almost pass for normal amusement, and which scares the shit out of Johnny even more than the imminent prospect of a blade slicing across his throat. Her torso is pressed against his thigh, but there’s no warmth where her body touches his.

  “You’re lucky I decided you can be prettier than me,” she tells Ho fondly. “So what do we do with Johnny here?”

  Johnny cringes away, worsening his already precarious position. Li’s eyes are expressionless, an odd see-through amber, and where they alight on him, they burn.

  Tilting his head, Ho stares down at the courtyard intently, as though the answer might be spray-painted on the flagstones in ten-foot-high graffiti.

  “I get bored of watching you explain what we want. Having suits steam-cleaned is such a chore,” he says gently.

  She raises a brow, drawn in a perfect arch.

  “One does not simply allow one’s girlfriend to go and work for a rival gang-lord without informing one’s employers. That’s impolite.” Li’s hand tightens on Johnny’s t-shirt. His face feels fit to burst. “It’s sad,” she muses. “Such a waste. But wasting people is so much fun.”

  His pupils wide as lychee pits, Ho taps the ash from his psy stick into Johnny’s face.

  “Don’t we rather like this one? You were saying only yesterday how much more profit we’re making in the West Blocks.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “You know how tiresome it is to find a new middle man who understands the finer points of marketing…” Ho leaves it hanging. More due to the fact he’s drifted off into contemplation of the wallpaper than any attempt to be meaningful.

  Growling her irritation, Li yanks Johnny right up, until his nose is all but pressed to hers.

  “I was going to carve your face off,” she says. Her eyes go as dreamy as Ho’s, and the knife slowly pushes deeper into Johnny’s neck. He whimpers. “I’m my Baba’s daughter; I do enjoy a good joke. Don’t you?” She gives him a ravenous grin, and Johnny nearly shits himself. “But I guess my brother here is right, so I’m going to offer you a little chance to save face. Nod if you understand.” Johnny nods, barely noticing the rivulets of blood slipping down his chest.

  Ho’s still staring at the wallpaper. He murmurs to it as intimately as a lover, so it takes a moment for Johnny to clock he’s asking a question. “What’s the nature of Mim’s job? We know it’s for Twist, and we know it’s her usual bag. What we don’t know, which is somewhat aggravating, is the target.”

  “P… P… Paraderm,” Johnny wheezes out.

  “Hmmm. Interesting.” Ho flicks an acute glance at his sister. Is he stoned or not? Johnny doesn’t want to know. “So who’s cracking it for her?”

  “W… what?”

  Li leans over Johnny.

  “I don’t think this blade can go much deeper without severing something important. I’d enjoy that, but I doubt you would. That was a simple question. Who is cracking Paraderm for Mim? We know it isn’t you, lover boy. You haven’t the skill.”

  “Pao,” Johnny spits out swiftly, feeling his bladder wanting to give way and fighting it with every last scrap of strength in him. “Shock Pao.”

  “Shock Pao?” Ho has such a look of bewilderment on his face Johnny catches himself feeling sorry for him. Fucking hell. “Mim managed to hunt Shock down? Jiejie, I thought if you couldn’t find him, no one could.”

  Reaching out to pat his hand, Li says gently, “Don’t fret, bao bei. They have history.” She rolls the word around on her tongue like it’s a particularly delicious piece of steak. “She’s sly that one. Sly and sneaky, two of my favourite things. I was going to kill her for encouraging that boy to steal from me, but then I realized how amusing it all was. I like her, and I just know she’ll want to play with us. She likes our style. We can work this to our advantage.” She purses lush lips and says, “I’d like to fuck Shock, just once, before I kill him.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want to see how well the surgery went.”

  “What?”

  Li offers her brother a wide-eyed stare.

  “You know he was a she, right?”

  “No!” Ho’s plain stunned. “How’d you know that?”

  “Hacked his private files when he first worked for us. I got in for long enough to get a good look.”

  “My dearest jiejie, you never cease to astound me.”

  “Naturally, you were never the brightest pea in the pod.”

  “Only the prettiest.”

  “For the moment.”

  Li drops Johnny to the carpet, scraping half the skin off his back on the window frame. Wiping her blade on Mim’s curtains, she says in a tone that makes Johnny’s anus contract, “You be sure that high-strung fuck of yours knows we’re interested in dealing with her, there’s a good boy, or I’ll have to remove some of your more interesting features so you can never see yourself again without remembering to behave. And, next time she does some work for a rival of ours, don’t neglect to inform us, and by inform I mean spill your guts, or loss of face will be the least of what I do to you. Okay?”

  Holding onto his neck to try to stem the flow of blood, Johnny nods.

  “Okay. Done.”

  Li beams at Ho.

  “See, I do like him! We can keep him for a while.” The knife disappears into a sheath hidden somewhere in a suit almost identical to Ho’s bar the generous amount of cleavage on display. “I’m hungry. I want noodles. Ho, buy me noodles.”

  Ho pushes away from the wall and steps over Johnny to take his sister’s arm.

  “Jiejie, I have no flim on me.”

  She snorts, an elegant little sound, like a tiny elephant.

  “You need to be flexible. You know I always get hungry when I cut piggies.”

  Ho sighs. “I’ve been smoking too much. It makes me forget. Forgive me?”

  She squeezes his arm. “Idiot. I forgive you. Steal me some noodles. You can still steal, can’t you?”

  “Jiejie, how long have you known me?”

  Ho flicks the psy stick behind him. Still lit, it lands in Johnny’s lap. He squeals, jerking himself to the side to get it off his leg. A look of horror ground deep into his face, deep enough to become permanent, even if the wind doesn’t change, he watches the two of them stroll out of his digs.

  “You did not sign up for this shit, Johnny,” he mutters, picking up the stub of Ho’s psy stick and taking a long toke. “Those two are barkin’. Bad enough you’re fucking the wor
ld’s biggest bitch, you had to go and get yourself tangled up with psychopaths. You shouldn’t ’ave left the ocean. Land.” He snorts, coughing over a lungful of smoke. “I’d rather pissin’ well drown!”

  The Neon Angel

  Tugging at the tattered, uneven hem of her skin-tight black micro-skirt and thinking she probably looked better in this get-up three years ago, Amiga squeezes through the queue outside the Bauhaus Club, deep inside Shin District. Turns the deadeye on any fucker who dares to moan. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t have to be here.

  “Fuck memory lane,” she snarls to herself, slamming through a wall of DethRokers decked in torn fishnet, barbed chokers and scorn. They turn the latter on her, but her scorn is cranked to eleven and they wither beneath it, fading away like hair dye in the wash.

  Why in hell did Deuce have to give her a name that ran into history she’d rather leave locked away in vaults deeper than the one Agen-Z currently calls a hide-out? Even worse, now those boys know she used to hang DethRok they’ll never quit bugging her about it. She’s already found wigs tied to her hovel hatch. Black lipstick scrawled on the walls. Which makes her madder than she could begin to express with a knife and three days alone with their naked bodies. This information feels too personal for them to have, and yet she’s aware she’s overreacting. She should find it funny. She should be normal. Why isn’t she? Trouble is, all these memories are pain.

  DethRok, the beautiful, dark and bold, the Gothic peacocks of the Gung. Amiga was at home here once, until she Failed, and found out what the term “fair-weather friends” really means. Not their fault they’re just as enslaved to the system as every fucker else, but it still hurts.

  Now here she is again, face full of kohl and red lipstick, hair Frankenstein’s monster might lose his heart to, and dressed head to toe in garb that even in her most generous mood she no longer finds remotely wearable. It used to be her favourite outfit, now she feels like an idiot in it—a fake.

  Reaching the doors, black with splashes of too-convincing fake blood, and covered in a rusty steel grid, Amiga finds to her complete lack of surprise that ScarCrow is still manning the guest list.