Escapology (35 page)

“Go! I’ve got this.”

She nods thanks and scrambles awkwardly back up on to the truck, stuck on its side in a tangle of others. Scanning desperately for Deuce through the smoke, she spots him lying off to the side of the road. There’s blood, a small pool of it, and his arm’s twisted behind him at an unnatural angle.

“No.”

Dropping to the road, Amiga limps toward him, her entire body numb, remote. All she can see is Deuce, but she can’t focus on him properly. Can’t
see
him. Is he breathing? Why isn’t he breathing? Please let him be breathing. She tries to move faster, her injured leg leaden, alight with pain. Swearing, she drags it through every step, determined to reach him.

Remotely, she registers the sound of a door opening, the click of heels on tarmac, and someone steps into view, one arm out, pointed at Deuce. She focuses on the hand, bewildered. There’s a gun. There’s a gun pointed at Deuce. Alarm floods her system. Rage. She can’t get to Deuce in time, but she can kill the fucker threatening him.

“Amiga.”

Focused on getting to the gun, she stumbles as the voice registers, and stops.

“Twist?”

She looks up and it’s him. Standing there with a gun pointed at Deuce. His gaze is pitiless. Disappointed.

“Would it really be this easy to punish you? Hmmm? Have you gone soft, Amiga, as well as stupid?”

“Try me,” she snarls.

He looks her over, those cold eyes of his calculating, missing nothing.

“Forgotten something?”

“Don’t need a weapon to kill you.”

“You’d have to get to me first. Let’s see how fast you can run.”

He fires the gun.

Amiga yells, incoherent, and lurches for her boss, knowing that, if Deuce was alive, Twist’s just changed that for the worst. She cannot bear it. Doesn’t want to look at Deuce, literally could not stand to see him lying there, his head blown apart, but she can’t stop herself, and she looks anyway. That’s when she knows that Twist is being especially cruel. The first bullet struck the lower leg, midway along the calf. Twist laughs softly.

“Come on then, Amiga, run,” he says.

Sobbing, Amiga tries to run as he fires again, hitting the knee. She’s screaming as the third shot fires, impacting Deuce’s thigh. That’s when all hell breaks loose. The roar of heavy engines fills the air and several large trucks burst through Twist’s cavalcade, punching a hole in his circle of vans. Behind them follow what seems like a hundred cater-bikes, whipping through and spewing bullets at Twist’s troops.

From the look of their clothes, their weather-beaten faces, these newcomers to the fray are land-ship folk, far from the ocean. One of the truck drivers, an ugly bald man, aims at Twist, punching the gun from his hand with precise shots that tear off two fingers and a chunk of palm. Amiga dives, hoping to take her ex-boss off-guard, but he’s already running back to his truck, calling a retreat, and she full-lengths the tarmac, feeling it grind into every inch of her.

Sprawled out like a spider, squashed and bleeding, Amiga tries to get up. Her leg refuses to cooperate. She yells fury at it and crawls toward Deuce instead. His leg is a wreck, there’s so much blood. And she still can’t tell if he’s breathing. Can hardly breathe herself as she reaches him and fumbles for his pulse with desperate fingers.

There’s a moment in which everything stops. The background falls away. Sound roars into the distance, swallowed by silence. Breath halts, suspended as the heart in its sling of muscle, paused and awaiting the responding thud of another heart. That pulse of life. The reassurance required to continue beating.

Her fingers are cold against his neck, numb. She’s caught in the moment for what feels like a lifetime, waiting, just waiting, and hoping to feel something, anything. Fearing there’s nothing to feel, that his heart is done with beating, and hers will be too.

The first flutter is indifferent. Almost not a pulse at all. The second the same. But they’re there, one faint flutter after another and the world roars back in. She’s surrounded by strangers, pulling her away. She screams, lashes out, but there’s Vivid, shouting in her face, the sound of the words delayed, like thunder after lightning.

“They’re here to help! They’re helping! Let them help him!”

Consciousness calls close by, loud and insistent as the klaxon of a vehicle reversing, and behind it, like fifty tons of truck behind a klaxon, waits pain. He’s not afraid of pain. Not usually. But this pain is special, unavoidably personal. Not remotely physical. He’s not sure he’s strong enough to face it unmedicated. He’s not had to since he was nine years old, bar a few slim-in-the-pocket moments he’d rather forget, and some recent times he’s had carved into his skin. Now he’s been stranded in his head without means to distance himself, stripped of the ability to use his coping mechanisms.

Some bastard’s gone and cleaned his system out, left it scrubbed brand new, de-scaled, everything shining in hundred megawatt beams, clean enough to see your face in. Some people don’t fucking want to see their own face. Some people dirty the mirror on purpose. Or smash it to pieces. That’s a personal choice, and no one but the person involved has the right to gainsay it. There are, however, substances called “cold cures”, used to do that very thing. Most often without permission.

Cold cures are used to purify WAMOS who don’t deal with addiction as the system expects them to. They travel through the body hoovering up whatever sordid crap the addict’s drugs of choice lay down amongst the wetware to ensure continued reliance upon them. Once they’re done, cold cures have eliminated every single impulse left behind, including the mental impulse.

What makes the cold cure so effective is what it does to that impulse. Ring-fencing it. Locking it away. Reducing it to a shout echoing in a box, going nowhere. That’s all Shock’s addiction is now, and he doesn’t want to wake up. He’s afraid of the pain.

Fear or no, his choices have dwindled to one, and he gradually rises through levels of consciousness, surrounded by the din of memories he’s silenced too long, all fighting for dominance. The result is overload. White noise so loud it becomes deafening, cancelling itself out, leaving only agony behind, and Shock surfaces fast, like breaking out of deep water, his ears ringing, lungs crying for air.

Finds himself laid out in the front seat of the limo, stuck inside a body riddled with pain from the damage done by Pill, a head full of bad memories all determined to be heard at once, and perhaps worst of all, the awful weight of Emblem, ever growing. Using one against the other, Shock breathes in the scream of amputated fingers and cracked bone, the cringe of cut flesh and hollowed gums, the moan of muscles bruised all the way to the bone; breathes out everything else. It won’t stay suppressed for long though, and the thought terrifies him.

Puss slithers into his lap, sliding her tentacles around his neck and, once again, her presence eases the clamour of his mind. He’s still not at ease with the fact of her, despite their powerful connection, always present and growing stronger, but he’s glad she’s here. Glad of Shark, too, floating behind the glass screen, the wall of his furious hunger something to lean against. They make him feel like he could be safe, sane. Whole. Funny that he had to be split into three to feel like he’s capable of coming together.

A face looms into view. Pimp-styled black hair flopping majestically over energetic brown eyes. Can’t be more than twenty-two this guy, but looks like a character from the Mahabharata, complete with giant handlebar moustache.

“Name’s Ravi,” he says in a musical voice that doesn’t come close to matching his appearance. “Sawbones to the Hornets. Also put you back together. How do you feel?”

Ah, so this is the bastard with the cold cure.

“Like hell,” Shock rasps through a throat so dry he could grow cacti in it. “Too clean.”

Ravi appears unmoved by his anger.

“Yeah, man. You were one sorry mess. Don’t think there was an organ in your body your little habit hadn’t fucked with. All good now though.” He places a hand on Shock’s shoulder, enough pressure to mean business. “Gonna have to deal with the shit you were avoiding. I have no apology for that. Can’t have an addict hauling Emblem around in his bonce. We need you focused. Cruel to be kind etc. etc.”

“Without the bumps,” Shock says, opting for the same level of honesty, “I’m pretty much fucking useless.”

“Matter of opinion, man, and I don’t share it,” the sawbones says, maintaining that hideous level of cheer. “We’re almost to Shin. Left my friends behind in some serious shit for you y’know.”

Shock immediately feels guilty. Responsible. Fuck, but that’s the worst feeling ever. Why didn’t anyone ever tell him?

“Sorry.”

Ravi nods. “Just do me a favour and stay still. You’re nowhere near good to go physically. I ran out of C-Gen early on. Ended up gluing most of you back together. Have no idea how long it’ll hold if you get feisty and, frankly, you haven’t enough blood left to safely lose any more.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You can thank your golden friends here for keeping you with us long enough for me to stick you back together. That fucking Shark, though, tried to eat me until Puss told him to back the fuck off.”

“He’s very protective.”

Ravi raises a brow. “That what you call it? You know, most people deal with their anger instead of making seventeen-foot-long killing machines.”

Shock wants to laugh but it hurts too much, so he smiles instead. Thinks about those friends Ravi left behind, how it is Ravi came to be in the limo with him instead of Amiga. He wonders if Amiga counts as a friend to this guy. Cleaners don’t have friends. They’re like him. Solitary. Unburdened. They have to be. She seemed different though. Less frosty, more like a human being. Odd quirk for a Cleaner. He wonders if it was new. She didn’t seem to know what to do with it. With herself. Only looked certain when she was killing.

“Amiga a friend of yours?”

“Yup.”

“Really?”

“No shit. Amiga’s good people.” Ravi’s checking the side mirrors as he talks, his face tight with concern.

“I’m sure they made it out safe,” Shock offers, not sure why he’s trying to reassure the guy, but needing to anyway.

Ravi nods absently, smiles much the same.

“Yeah. Yeah they probably did.”

Uneasy silence grows between them. Shock doesn’t like it. Unsure of how to break the silence, he looks out of the window, and blinks as it jumps away from him, receding down a black tunnel. Before he can react, his mind leaps after it like it’s base jumping, parachute-less, into an abyss; gung-ho and knife-edged.

He thinks he’s moving forward until he passes what can only be the complex knot of Emblem, this massive byzantine cluster of code enmeshed within him and shifting amongst itself. Growing incrementally with every movement, a tumour out of control. Unchecked. Uncheckable. It makes a noise like the distant roaring of monstrous wheels and then it’s behind him, and he’s squeezed through a too-narrow link and dropped onto a sheer white floor, lit from below and warm against his skin.

Dazed, and beyond confusion into disorientation, he peers up through the tangles of his hair. It’s gold. Blinking, he stares down at his arms, his torso, his knees against the white wood. Gold. All gold. How the hell?

“You’re out of Slip, so it took me a while to fix a way to talk to you.”

Real voice? How?

The voice belongs to a thing. A converging of shadows, blurred and continually changing. Form melting into form. It looks nothing like a person but it’s not the Queens. Nowhere near big enough. Who the fuck, or what the fuck is it? More importantly, what the fuck is this? He’s never Slipped this way. Never knew it was possible.

“This is not J-Net,” he says.

“Correct. We’re IMing face-to-face, well your face to my distortion-algorithm. It’s a little… different, with you out.”

Shock gets up from the floor. There’s no pain. Of course, this body is only a representation. He can control it. He finds he wants the pain though, and so he lets it back in, gritting the remaining teeth in his mouth as nerves flood his body and mind with pain alarms. That’s better.

He breathes out slow, checking his surroundings. Interesting. A huge room with a circular wall of windows, filled with slender glass tables and white leather couches shaped like conch shells. The only colour in the room comes from a firepit in the centre, flickering with holographic green flames. He’s never been to this place, but he’s seen similar to it in pictures, on adverts in plush Corp room vid-feeds.

“This is the Heights.”

“Yes. I tried to form a makeshift J-Net, but in the end it was easier to bring you here as an avi. You’re Slipping IRL. Never been done and likely won’t ever be again.”

Shock offers a moment’s silence for that feat, couldn’t prevent himself if he tried. He’s a Hack and he knows Hacking history when he’s making it. Three times in one day, too. Gotta be a record. He also knows a fucking full-on genius when in the presence of one.

“Breaker, right?”

“Right.”

“Why am I here? Why are you?”

The shifting shadow briefly looks human, before fading back to an amorphous shade.

“I underestimated the Queens. I didn’t realize what they were, and now I’m stuck. Look, they’re distracted at the moment, playing shoot ’em up games with those drones, but I don’t have long. They need you here, and I know you want to stay away, normally you’d be right to do that, but not now. You need to come. It’s important.”

“I don’t think so.”

Whatever Shock does now, it will not include taking Emblem anywhere near the Queens. He’s not brave, just tired of being used, and those Queens, they’ll use him; use Emblem to use everyone. No way he’s being party to that. No way. He’s a loser and an idiot, not a fucking arsehole.

“You don’t understand. We need Emblem out of your head…”

“Out of my head?” Shock’s just seen Emblem. That’s a whole different thing to feeling it. Everything he thought about it and worse was confirmed in that moment. “You can’t get it out of my head. It’s hooked in. Stuck solid. I’m pretty much a dead man walking.” And as he says it, he accepts it. Nothing else he can do. He thinks about Amiga and her friends. Guilt is one hell of a bitch. “A lot of people are risking their lives for me today. Pointlessly as it happens. Kinda done with that level of suckage.”