Escapology Read online

  “Unlock and let me dump this shit.”

  She blinks at him, all innocence.

  “This is not just a drop off. When have I ever had you drop off anywhere as tasteful as this?”

  And here it is. There had to be something. Mim can never just be straightforward.

  “What’s the job, Mim?”

  “How do you know I have a job for you, Shocking boy? Could be I want to say hi, catch up, see how you’re doing. You still look frankly cadavarish. Could be I’m worried.”

  He gulps down his drink, wishing the shots of caffeine were liquid bumps.

  “Not you, Mim. You only ever want one of three things: flim, a fuck, or my help on a job. Considering how much you paid for the horror you’re currently ingesting and how broke you know I am, this is probably not about flim. I hear you’ve been hanging off Johnny Sez and he’s a man-whore, so that’s your fuck sorted. Only thing left’s a job.”

  She hisses between neat little teeth hiding too well behind plump lips. So untrustworthy, the bite hidden behind the bark like that. Why didn’t he see it? Why does he still want the bite?

  “Ooooh, harsh. But you happen to be a-one. I have need of a Haunt. And damn me if you ain’t the spookiest spook I know.”

  “And?”

  “This Olbax gig. Ostensibly I’m rumour milling. Spreading dissent. Call me Chinese Whisper etcetera etcetera, buuuuut, I might also be causing mayhem as a diversion. Gotta hunt down a little inside info some Olbax Corp is hogging to themselves and really shouldn’t be. It’s nice to share. I’ll need you to snag that info out. Eaaasy flim.”

  “So. Olbax again.”

  Mim’s eyes flick away, reflecting everything.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Where then?”

  “Paraderm.”

  She’s spoken so quietly it takes a moment to burrow through ear holes and hit brainmeat.

  “You can go fuck yourself.”

  Which is rude enough to piss her right off, but he’s too fucked off to care. Paraderm are major Corp. Make big cheese look like crumbs. Guarantee she’s working for someone who wants him dead. Probably why she called. Mim loves nothing more than to poke a wounded animal. Needing her is such bullshit, his kingdom for another option.

  Mim stirs the jaunty plastic spoon left in the nauseating crap in her glass and smiles.

  “Douse your panties, Shocking boy; calm any thoughts of imminent death. This is Office Fauna only. Level seven, eight at a push.”

  He’s not convinced. “Really? Sure now?”

  She shrugs. “As much as I can be. Going on good intel.”

  Fauna levels in Paraderm are nothing; Shock could do it in his sleep. Doesn’t necessarily mean he should. Sleepwalking can be dangerous. So it comes down to what it always does. And here’s him pretending he has a choice, just to avoid showing his desperation.

  “How much?”

  “Five K.”

  Shock chokes. “Are you kidding me? For hitting Paraderm? What percent is that?” Knowing her it’s likely to be far less than fifty, which is another gyp, way worse than the last, considering she can’t do shit without his in.

  She looks defensive. The only time you ever see anything like convincing emotion on Mim’s face is when money is involved. Rather, the unpleasant task of her giving money to someone else, even for a job well done. He imagines it pains her, which makes him want to smile.

  “Thirty,” she says eventually, unwilling.

  He bets himself fifty flim she was thinking about lying. Why didn’t she? Maybe she’s realized that he’s getting tired of this. Tired of her. Or maybe she just really needs this job done. Who the fuck is she working for? Ah well, not his problem. All he has to do is snag the info, hand it over, take his flim and go. And he can afford to push a little too, because no way anyone else will take so little, they’ll want 60/40 minimum for a Paraderm job.

  “If thirty’s it, you can look elsewhere.”

  They lock gazes, and if he’s not mistaken Mim wants to argue, but he can smell the ball in his court already. Sure enough she rips the spoon out of her drink, snaps it in two, and chucks it on the table.

  “Fine. Have it your way. Fifty/fifty. Eight K. You’re killing me here. Fucking homicide.”

  “You want those stats now?”

  “Give. Your flim’s in the usual box. I do wish you’d be sensible and get a cred account.”

  Refusing to dignify that with a response, he flings the stats into her drive and tries not to laugh as it snaps locked behind them. Rare that he ever gets one up on Mim. He should be suspicious, instead he’s hoping with all his heart she’s tit-deep in the same shit she forced him to drown in. Black hearted that might be, but that’s all he’s got left after loving her—a torso full of necrotic meat.

  Besides, she’s long overdue on collection of all the bad karma she’s accrued. Gotta be a mountain of that somewhere with her name torn deep into the core, ragged and bleeding foul waters. So casual, his Mim, in her malice. “Crime’s where the money is,” she’d said, trailing her nail down his cock. “You want to get enough to get back to Sendai, Shocking boy, you’re going to need to commit to crime.”

  Translated from Mim-speak this meant taking a job from one crime lord and undercutting. Easy, right? Well, yeah. Unless said crime lord happens to be Li Harmony, who’s not just a raving psychopath but an Archaeologist. You can’t cheat an Archaeologist; their speciality is forensic exploration of info. If there’s an info needle someone needs to find, there’s not a haystack large enough to hide it from an Archie.

  He’s a Haunt though, right? Figured he could use his own ghosty skills to hide shit from her. Piece of piss. So yeah, he did the job, liberating the San Sebastian locked data-nodes the Grey Cartel were planning to smuggle up to Chicago Hub. Weeded out a few odd-numbered stacks Mim said he could sell on for, quote “a fucking fortune”—and got caught.

  Woke up one morning to a knock on the door of his apartment-share with Mim, the bed empty and cold beside him. And why didn’t he wonder about that right away? Because he’s a fool. Opened the door to find Li Harmony standing there, picking her nails with a stiletto knife, those black, empty eyes incurious. She started quoting serial numbers and asking dead polite, more dead than polite to be honest, where they might be. Thing is, he’d already sold them on, had the flim hidden in the apartment behind him. Cue major panic. When she stopped picking her nails and made to step over the threshold he lost it; every last iota of common sense.

  Slammed the door in her face and started grabbing everything he could to shove in his bag, the door making these hideous fucking grinding noises with every pound of her boot. Last thing he did before splitting was to go fetch the flim from its hiding place—but it was gone. Stupidest thing right there is that, at the time, he thought nothing of it. Supposed Mim had taken it to put in a cred account, aggravated as ever with his obsession for physical flim. He still trusted her then.

  He escaped out the back window just as the door slammed open, and hit the streets. Home free, because even Archies can’t hack a Haunt’s location when they don’t have a Mim to spot them by. He searched for Mim for days. Even snuck back to the apartment, hoping to catch her there. Finally found out she’d taken a two-week job on a hub the day before Li came for him. Could’ve been a coincidence, of course it could. Except it wasn’t.

  He saw her in one of her favourite clubs when she came back, decked out in brand-new Imp gear, doubtless bought with the flim he’d made from those stolen nodes and laughing it up with one of her Imping cronies. Went over to talk and found her blithely unconcerned. Yeah she knew about Li, bad luck right? Had he seen their apartment? What a mess. She knew he’d get away though; she had faith in her baby’s survival instincts.

  That’s when he clocked the reason for the cold bed. That’s when he got it. You can’t describe hurt like that, it has no boundaries. He finished with her then and there. The only bit of dignity he managed to scrape out of the whole thing.
/>   He’s lost it since though, having to work with her, aware the only reason she doesn’t go to someone else is because she won’t have to pay him as much. And all Mim’s ever said about almost getting him killed, when he IM’d the question, too fucked on Bumps and alcohol to do the sensible thing and leave it all alone? You’re alive, aren’t you?

  No point trying to explain to her the mere seconds between that statement being true and being false. It’s not that she doesn’t care. She can’t. Mim is all about Mim, and though he’s made several of his own unbelievable mistakes since, stuff so stupid he can’t even begin to parse how he came to do it, his dearest Mimic, Mim the Merciless, has had both hands deep in the cards he’s been dealt. Maybe one day he’ll stop letting her deal them, maybe one day he’ll get smart, care enough about himself to say enough.

  But today is not that day.

  “So what about the deets for Paraderm?”

  Mim shrugs. “Lucky for you I’ll be in Olbax. Sez’ll be in touch when I have the location. All you have to do is wait until he chimes you.”

  “Fine.”

  It’s not fine. Of course it’s not. Last thing he wants in the world is to have that lanky no good streak of piss Sez in his IMs, but he holds his tongue. Leaves the juice bar without a backward glance and heads for anywhere else. Just walking and walking, because it beats standing there and screaming until his throat explodes.

  He walks until his legs ache, until he’s so hungry his spine feels like it’s being throttled, until he can’t think in coherent sentences, until his skin is cold and numb, his face hurts, his feet burn. Only then does he go home. Slams a handful of bumps into his neck, ignoring the clamour for something more substantial and dives into sleep.

  And this time as the darkness hits, he wonders if he’ll even try to wake up.

  The Problem with EVaC

  Dropping to the floor between the multi-coloured jumble of her kitchen and the living area, Amiga kicks off her blades and shrugs out of her jumpsuit, sweaty skin gasping for air. Out for hours tracking some new J-Hack brat Twist wants done over for trying to jack his home servers, she’s bad tempered, too hot, and starved half to death. In just her underwear she sinks cross-legged to the floor and reaches across to the cool box, snagging out a surprisingly luke-warm beer. She offers the uncaring walls of her hovel a heartfelt groan.

  “Don’t tell me, half power.”

  Being vagabonds and pirates, the Hornets of Jong-phu steal their electricity from the building’s generators. On the one hand this means they never pay for that shit; on the other it means that when the ’rise power level bottoms out, as it often does, they end up with little or no power themselves.

  She slams the cap off her beer and necks it, her head pressed back into the plastic edge of her sink unit, trying to ignore how synth-beer when warm tastes exactly like spit. Thanks to zero food in twelve hours, the paltry two percent alcohol hits her starved bloodstream like an overexcited jackhammer and, her bones buzzing pleasantly, she begins to think about the positive. Well she would, if there were any.

  Half power means that for sure her cool box has defrosted, so there’s a damn good chance the piece of fish she got for tonight’s dinner has curled up necrotic toes and gone to food heaven. She sighs, chucking the empty across the room in a perfect arc to her overflowing bin. It bounces off two take-away boxes stuffed onto the top and hits the floor with a bang. Amiga throws up her arms.

  “Score!”

  Head craned to peer at sparsely populated shelves she contemplates her food options, dismissing them with a snort.

  “Dandy. Just mother-frackin’ dandy. Guess that’s noodles for me tonight. Again.”

  She has a hate/hate relationship with noodles, but they’re cheap, nutritious, and she’s a beggar who can’t afford to choose. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. She had plenty of flim. Fact is she’s stuck with noodles because she spent a spit-load of it on a customized crossbow, but a girl’s got to have her toys and oh my she can go a lot of days sucking up noodles to play with that puppy once her weapons guy, Janosz, delivers.

  Her wall rattles with the syncopation of knuckles dancing in all too familiar patterns.

  Deuce.

  “Amiga?” Muffled, and with a distinct flavour of neediness that makes her wince. All she wants to do is eat, chuck her cringing skin under a chem shower and sleep. “You in? We have a problem.”

  Amiga groans again, grinding the heels of her palms into tired eyes.

  “Please don’t tell me it’s the drone coming back to bite us in the arse.”

  “No, that went like clockwork. I’m a fucking pro, Amiga. You know this.”

  Amiga knows. She relaxes, her back slumping against plastic and sticking slightly.

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s EVaC.”

  Of all the Hornets hidden in Jong-Phu, EVaC is perhaps the least normal and most insular, meaning he’s the one Amiga has somehow managed to become firmest friends with. Friendship’s easy when there’s no pressure to do anything but sit and be in each other’s presence. Her other Hornet friendships are more fraught and complicated and often make her feel aggravated.

  As fond as she is of them, there’s so much she wants to live up to and simply can’t, and it doesn’t help that they seem to think she’s better than she is whilst berating her for being an idiot. What do you do with that level of fuckery?

  If Deuce is calling her over for EVaC, she assumes the daft bastard’s been buying home-made bumps again to try to restrain the clamour in his skull and needs talking down from wherever it is he’s ended up. Boy’s not good on medication. None of his type is, and yet they’re forever taking it. Genuinely annoying. Her rage rises again, a swarm of angry wasps boiling behind her rib cage. Deuce is interrupting her me-time for this?

  “What’s with him this time? More bump drama?” She can’t quite nix the aggro from her tone—it fairly sizzles.

  “Please. You need to come see this.” He sounds quietly desperate. Okay, that does not sound like a trip gone bad.

  She sighs. “Fine. I’ll come.”

  “Thanks, Amiga.” Way too relieved. “And put blades on it, yeah? It’s urgent. For reals.”

  “Okay, okay, Deuce. Shit’s sake. Gimme a sec, I’m indecent.”

  Deuce chuckles through the wall.

  “I like you indecent.”

  The silence that follows is epic, full of acute embarrassment, unspoken half-excuses and inarticulate dissembling. He’s probably kicking himself in the nuts that he couldn’t quite catch that one fast enough. She can’t catch her smile either. Lucky he’s not here to see it. Maybe he can sense it though, fairly snapping through the wall.

  “Just hurry the fuck up, Amiga.”

  “Cold, Deuce. Real cold.”

  Somehow, despite her calling time on what was a super good thing, they’re still mates, but they suffer from occasional, often excruciating, lapses into old familiarity. Lately he’s getting real uptight about those. Been seeing a fairly antagonistic Chinese chick, Fen Maa, from Hangoon’s Miso District, home of the soup. The girl’s a Tech-Grad, bound for big things, and Amiga thinks he’s making a huge mistake. As far as she sees it, the only way this ends is with Deuce’s heart in smithereens. Having dismantled it herself only a year ago, she finds she’s unwilling to watch some other girl do the same.

  Snagging a slippery green mini-dress from the pile of laundry on the table she swears she’ll do tonight, or maybe tomorrow night, Amiga yanks it over her head. Sneaks out the hatch good and quiet, booting Deuce with a bare foot, hoping to scare him, or maybe scare up some of that oh-so-amusing shit he was holding back after his little Freudian skid there. But he’s either too preoccupied with whatever’s up with EVaC, or too accustomed to her shit, because he only offers her a relieved smile, peeling his lanky frame away from her wall.

  “Lead on, compadre,” she snaps, even more irritated with him now, just because. “And hurry it up, will you. I’m hungry. Haven’
t eaten in twelve. Got to nuke me some noodles before I start chewing on the furniture.”

  “Thought you had a fish supper waiting tonight?” he asks, walking off through lights dimming under the obvious power fail.

  “Cool box defrosted, dumbass. If I eat there’s a possibility I end up seeing the contents of my stomach up close and personal until Sunday. Not chancing it.”

  He grins over his shoulder, casual-like.

  “We have some gyudon spare. KJ’s been cooking.”

  “Is that a lame invitation?” she asks, thawing slightly. “Because you know I never turn down free food. Consider me following with chop sticks in hand.”

  “Metaphorical chop sticks,” he says. “Messy.”

  “Like your attempt at jokes. I think Fen Maa stole your funny bone.” It comes out loaded with a little more spice than she intended.

  “Don’t start, Amiga. Please. Or you can put your metaphorical chop sticks in the actual fucking bin.”

  Amiga rolls her eyes. He’s getting sensitive. He never used to be. Or perhaps he was and she didn’t notice before now, the possibility of which irritates her, because the last thing she needs is actual evidence of her inability to act like a real human being. She chooses to back off, maybe for the first time ever. Shit, is that maturity? Where the hell did that come from?

  “Fair enough. So what’s up with EVaC I have to see so fucking urgently?”

  He stops outside the hovel he shares with EVaC and Wi Ji Lin, and turns to stare at her. She can’t read his face in the darkness but feels the waft of uncertainty clear as the wind before a hurricane, like he used that annoying little trick of his and sent it whipping down through his IM link to hers.

  “I really can’t explain. You have to see for yourself.”

  Inside, Wi Ji, or Knee Jerk, KJ as he’s more generally known, stands by the door to EVaC’s room looking crazy worried. Considering he’s forever this worried about something that’s not saying much, so she wends her way around piles of junk to push past him into EVaC’s dump. He’s curled up on the bed, his long tangle of anemic red hair obscuring his face. That’s not unusual at all. But he’s silent, which absolutely is. And that’s when she starts worrying too.