Escapology (15 page)

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 world’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!”

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.

“Well, well, look who blew back in on the west wind,” he says, flicking the long black tail of a deathhawk out of eyes alive with malice.

“I’ll blow right through your fucking torso if you don’t let me in,” she says, smiling pleasantly. “Would you like your name to become a descriptive noun?”

He steps back, malice dulling to fear, and she thinks,
You should never have thrown me out. I might not have had to be
this.
I might have had a chance
. She pushes past into the club, already scanning for the man she needs.

Old Saint Jimmy.

Spies him in his usual place, clinging to the bar like some detritus-feeding arthropod, surrounded by his gaggle of GarGoil girls. Much like birds, GarGoils migrate every September, replaced by girls in their last year of Tech or Cad. It still stuns Amiga how many girls battle to revolve in Saint Jimmy’s orbit for a year, screaming out tracks written so long ago, and repeated in so many different incarnations, they’ve become parodies of themselves.

“Saint Jim,” she calls out, offering him the benefit of all her teeth in a wide, half-angry grin.

There’s history between her and Saint Jimmy, none of it entirely pleasant. He tried to rope her into being a GarGoil back in the day. She couldn’t sing for shit, but she played a mean guitar. He tried to grease her up with that oil slick pouring off his tongue like a deep-sea spill, but Amiga was not interested. To her the whole GarGoils thing is slightly ghoulish, though she digs the music. He took her rejection personally, leading to some serious nastiness until graduation when Amiga was glad to be free of the ever-loving stench of the man. Which is why she’s not so fucking chuffed to be back in it.

She shouts at Jimmy, who’s not paying attention.

“Oi, talking here. Do me the courtesy of listening, or I’ll rip your ears off.”

He makes a big show of just having seen her, making him look like a demented ostrich.

“Well screw me! If it ain’t my Amiga, all grown up!” Pogoing off the bar, he comes swaggering over and envelops her in a stinking hug, eau de BO and alcohol.

Amiga levers him away, just like scraping barnacles with a knife.

“You hate me, Jim.”

He lights up a smoke.

“There is that. You’d ’ave been a top-class Ratchet Anne. And look atchoo. Fackin’ Fail now. Coulda had a glimpse o’ the high life, my lovely. Shouldn’ ’ave been so darn resistant. Unshackle the chastity belt, an’ all that.”

“Do I have to maim you? I presume you’ve heard whispers about what I do for a living?”

Jim sniffs. Disgusted.

“I ’eard. No, you don’ havta maim me. Whaddo ya wan’?”

“You recall Maggie Joust, yes? She was Peroxa Bland. The original. I need to find her. Does she still hang DethRok? Where would I look? Is she here? The Batcave? Boris Karloff? BodyHorror?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, love,” he says, raising hands like she’s storming his barricades. “Thas’ a lil more’n one question, innit. Can’t ’spect a fellah to jus toss it all out there without a lil
incentive
.”

He gives her a meaningful glance. It makes him look about seventeen times seedier, like the ancient, slick-haired weasel he is. Ugh. Amiga hangs on to her instinct to carve his face off by the merest wisp. Same as all things, there are ways of doing this. Good ways and bad. Amiga hasn’t time for Cockney fun, she wants a name and location, that’s it. When she steps into his space, she
devours
it. Shrinks him to an insignificant wrinkle of skin on a bollock by her mere presence.

“Incentive? Really? Perhaps you forgot my job already? Perhaps you forgot the intense pleasure I would derive from tearing out your organs through your fuckin’ anus?”

Having been busy sucking on his smoke in what he thought was a suggestive manner, Jim chokes on a lungful.

“Jeez. Jeez. Jeez fuck’n shit. Awite, awite,” he splutters as he comes up for air. “Maggie Joust. Maggie fuckin’ Joust. ’Angs at the BatCave far as I know. At least thas the place ta start.” He eyes her up with red-veined peepers watering profusely, still sparky despite his obvious lack of advantage. “You got proper fuckin’ nasty, love. I admire that. Can’ say I don’. Take it easy, awite.”

He smooths back his hair with both hands and backs away to the bar, eyeballing her as he goes. Amiga allows it for one reason only: they both know who’d die if she stepped up to the challenge.

Anxious not to spend too long in this awful get-up tonight, she leaves the club the way she came in, sneering at ScarCrow as she goes. If she never sees this place again it won’t be a hardship. Parts of her heart she’d forgotten about are aching. There’s that longing she thought she was rid of, to start afresh, to try again. The one she had for weeks after she Failed. Lost inside and out. Lost and yearning to be found.

She’d sat in her micro apartment staring at the walls for the majority of every twenty-four hours in those weeks, hurting from head to toe, but mostly in the heart, and wondering why it’s
such a fucking crime
to have your own mind. She found no answers. But by the end of those weeks she knew the cracks in that wall as intimately as the lines in her palm. They told her future. What was waiting if she didn’t get off her arse and hustle. So hustle she did. Turns out hustling’s dangerous. Turns out, so is she.

BatCave, as the crow flies, is a couple hundred metres from Bauhaus, or Boris Karloff, or BodyHorror, the quartet of DethRok clubs collectively known as the B-Movies. BatCave was never a regular haunt of hers. She was a Bauhaus devotee, through and through. Of the various clans of DethRokers from the Cads, Techs and office blocks, some congregate in particular establishments, whilst others roam. All depends on your flavour of DethRok.

Her lack of roaming means the doorman at the BatCave, some miserable-looking dude in a full-length duster and sad clown make-up doesn’t know her from Eve, and she gets in via eyeballs halfway up her thighs. If she weren’t in a hurry, she’d do him a favour and remove them permanently. Thanks to the name of this place, she’s expecting bats, or at least something vaguely vampiric and possibly verging on the Gothic. The BatCave is nothing like.

Sleek and sophisticated, it gleams, muted lights casting soft focus on delicately ruined neo-Romantic splendour and enough backcombed black hair to fill a sinkhole. Amiga heads to the bar. Start where the drink is, and therefore the loosest pierced tongues, and work back toward the door. It takes her over two hours of teasing answers and buying a ridiculous array of pastel cocktails with melodramatic names before she stops hitting tats and strikes information.

According to a slender whip of a fop in ripped pants and braces, who goes by the name of Marquis De Hard and drinks some sort of foul-smelling blood-hued synthetic absinthe, Maggie Joust stopped coming to the BatCave over three months ago. These days she hangs at Mollie’s, a fancy new Burlesque joint opened by her girlfriend, the eponymous Mollie. Relieved to be able to take her leave—the soft focus is giving her the grandmother of all headaches—Amiga gets directions, steals his drink for curiosity’s sake, and skedaddles.

She throws the beverage away halfway to Mollie’s. It tastes like violets and sadness. Why the fuck do DethRokers gotta court misery all the goddamn time?

“Life’s a blast, don’t they know?” she mutters, pulling the tatty edges of a barely-there leather jacket across her chest.

It’s early morning, the deep profound black of those nothing hours before dawn, and the Gung is chilly. Knife-like winds arise from the vast, surrounding ocean and hunt the streets for flesh to ripple with goosebumps, mostly hers tonight. Very few other souls about. When the DethRokers leave the clubs, they’ll go in murders. Safety in squawking numbers. She stops for a moment in the light of a biome tree, revelling in the emptiness. Tonight, at this moment, there’s only her and the city. If she could keep it this way…

“There’d be nothing, you daft bitch. Make yourself an island. Go ahead. Think the ocean will keep you company? It doesn’t even know you exist.”

She walks on, shivering, a combination of existential unease and barely-there skirt. She finds Mollie’s, bright and raucous, exactly where the skinny fop said it would be, in Fountain Square. Named for its rebellious lack of fountains.

Mollie’s is a pile of candy dropped on grey concrete, a dolly mixture of gaudy pink lights and jaunty music, lifting her spirits, although she imagined them all but bolted to the floor. She hums as she sails past a tag-team of temptresses in tight dresses and Moll make-up at the door who throw smiles like pick-up lines. She can feel their eyes on her arse all the way to the bar, but resents it less than the duster-wearing clown at the BatCave. It feels less invasive, more genuinely admiring.

“That’s right, girls,” she says to herself, smiling. “All my own work…”

“You must be a hard worker.”

The voice is low, sultry, but with a tightly wound undercurrent of suspicion, which the speaker seems desperate to hide. Amiga turns to find a tall, voluptuous woman in the most extraordinary orange-striped pantaloon and corset set, peering at her through a be-ribboned monocle that is most definitely not just a monocle.

“This a gay club?” Amiga asks curiously, ignoring the woman’s obvious mistrust.

The woman lowers her monocle and taps it on the creamy back of a slender wrist. Amiga immediately thinks,
It’s not working.

“Sadly not,” comes the reply, sounding, if anything, even more suspicious than before. The woman is trying to suss Amiga out. Look into her. She’s no Club Hostess or mere scene pro—she has
history.
Amiga can’t tell if she’s Maggie Joust or not. In the vids she obsessively watched back then Peroxa Bland was a skinny pre-grad with a skinhead and a taste for tramp-chic. If it
is
her, she’s changed one hell of a lot. “If I had my way, then maybe… But this isn’t my place.”

“So you’re not Mollie.”

“Bingo.” The word is bitten out.

“Do you know her?”

“
Intimately
.”

“Would that make you Maggie Joust?”

The hardening of the eyes tells Amiga yes, and she squashes the fluttery surge of fan-girliness. Maggie’s aura of suspicion has warped to wariness, no, beyond that. There’s fear there, and anger too, deep and sharp, like the gulp of air before the fight.

“Who wants to know?”

Amiga’s instincts are razorblades. They have to be. Right now they’re telling her this is not the time to lie. Whatever’s going on with Maggie Joust, what she thinks she’s seeing in Amiga is making it one hell of a lot worse. She gives Maggie the benefit of her most open and serious face.

“Amiga. My name’s Amiga. And I’m looking for Maggie Joust because I need to find a friend of hers. It’s important. Melodramatically DethRok as it might sound, a life is infact at stake.”

The monocle rises again to frame a kohl-laden eye with a gleaming green iris, bright as a gemstone. Amiga reckons the monocle is a data-scan, a good one by the looks. Top notch. So she lowers her firewalls and allows it in to digitally fillet her, wondering why it couldn’t before. Maybe it’s not rigged for the sorts of firewalls she uses, but although high spec they’re fairly common. Amiga’s no Tech—she just buys the best. Best is no good with scans like that though. Funny goings on here. Real funny.