Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (14 page)

He had caught the bottom rung and held fast there, but apparently lacked the upper body strength to pull himself up the remaining distance. So he dangled helplessly, all limbs and apologies, as the boy struggled to push his feet upward from below. After a few desperate shoves, Byron seized the next highest rung and, by virtue of stepping directly in the middle of the already pug-nosed boy’s face, managed to secure an unsteady foothold.

“Jesus Ass Christ, Byron,” QC swore.

“Well, I’ve made it!” He protested, his tone equal parts apology and indignant excuse. “I’m not exactly the athletic type, now am I? Huffing Gas and snuggling up in a cozy recliner has many virtues, madam, but ‘working the biceps’ does not number among them.”

“If you can’t keep up,” she began harshly, but became too aware that she was attempting to yell at a man while staring downward past her own ass, and tempered her tone: “Just pick up the pace, okay Byron?”

He nodded grimly, and returned the brunt of his focus to his clumsy hands and the working of the ladder.

We got away
, QC tried to reason with herself.
It wasn’t graceful or perfect – fucking junk nanotech – but we did it
.
We’re gone.
Whatever the Gentlemen were there for, it wasn’t wetwork
,
so we’re probably okay.
Everything’s fine, just take a breath. Take it easy.
They don’t want you dead; they didn’t even fire on you.

They didn’t fire at all.

Nothing.

No stunners, no cripplers, didn’t even raise an alarm. They just watched us run. We burned an A-Gent, and there was zero retaliation. What the fuck?

“Son of a whore,” QC coughed, having reached the top of the ladder and poked her head up directly into the grimy, pork-tinged exhaust vent of a micro-diner. Byron was too focused on his own limbs to notice in time, and inadvertently climbed his head right into her behind. He raised a hand to her thigh by way of apology, but insecurity took him, and it fluttered away before making contact.

QC squinted against the warm specks of grease spattering her face, hefted herself over the edge, and rolled to one side. She took a deep breath, dug her fingernails into her palms, and pocketed the rage for later. She heard Byron sneeze and exclaim a few feet behind her, and then they were up and moving again.

“The motherfuckers
let
us go,” QC finally spoke, after the red had gone out of the edges of her vision.

“I know! Isn’t it lovely? That puts us plumb out of this whole drama then.”

They had reached the end of a short chain of shanty roofs, and Byron was nervously eyeballing the space below: A crowded catwalk, lined with blackmarket pharmacies and unlicensed Gas dens. QC tried to read his expression, but couldn’t decide if he was anxious about the potential for unwanted human contact, or excited at the throbbing hum of the drug commerce.

“No. Pry open that shithole brain for one second and process it: They weren’t robbers. Those were Gentlemen – not a knock-off gang or some cheap contractor doing a bad impression – real, honest-to-fuck A-Gents. You saw Red’s ratnest apartment; wasn’t a damn thing in there worth a palmful of crap to an actual A-Gent. So that means they were there for Red, only Red wasn’t there for them. Get it?”

“I’m not stupid,” Byron chuffed, then added: “But no. I’m afraid I don’t.”

“You find some bitches crashing in your mark’s apartment, you grab ‘em, you torture ‘em. You use ‘em to find the fucking mark and burn ‘em when you’re done so they can’t warn him.”

“Good lord!” Byron gasped with naïve horror.

“What you do not do, is just let them awkwardly jog away holding onto each other’s asses.” She gave Byron an eye, letting the last words burrow into him until he blushed.

“Unless,” She continued uncertainly, “unless…shit.”

“What? Whatever is the matter?”

QC stomped in frustration as the realization hit her, “Unless you’re
gonna follow ‘em
. Let
them
lead you to the mark.”

“They’re after us still?!” Byron flailed and goggled back at the top of the empty ladder, twenty meters back, as if expecting them to come barreling up it any second.

“Nah. That’s for the low-rents. That’s chumpwork. If you got the means, why take the risk? A strain of tracker ‘bots. Pok pok pok,” QC mimed a submolecular blowgun at Byron. To his credit, he flinched with every imaginary blow. “We wouldn’t even feel it. Then they just wait for us to run right into Red’s loving motherfucking arms, which, to be honest, is kind of what I’ve been doing. Then whoosh – they hose the three of us down with phosphorous. Problem solved.”

“They…they would do that?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, if they’re on a budget. Phosphorous is cheap and quick. Unless they really wanna invest in making us hurt. Then who knows? Probably a quarter of Industry is up there right now, just churning out new and interesting ways to wreck somebody until they shit brain matter.”

“But…but what if we cooperate with the utmost urgency and earnestness?” Byron quailed.

“Come on,” QC said, ignoring his pleas and pushing her way into the crowd. “We gotta find us some Christian Scientists.”

“Come again?” Byron called after her. He attempted to occupy the wake she left behind her as she shoved, slipped, and swore her way through the drug-addled press.

“Free purification stations,” she explained.

And what comes after that? If there’s one thing the Gentlemen got, it’s money. Those shitty free flushes the Scientists give with every pamphlet download won’t do jack against high end tech like that.
No, what we really need to do is get somewhere I can think; just pull my dick out of the breeze for a damn second. Take stock of what I got. What I got? That’s a joke: Some faulty nanotech, a mouthful of bad omens, and a pasty man-child tugging at my fucking apron-strings. Fuck fucking fuck fuckbiscuits. That’s great, girl. You’re doing great: No plan, no idea, no resources. Just well-funded enemies and handicaps on every side.

God dammit, knock that shit off. What are you gonna do, sit down and cry about it? Moving is safer than not moving, and shitty flushes are better than none at all, right? 

QC slipped sideways, ducked under drunkenly swinging arms and stepped over bodies in varying states of overdose. She flicked her eyes upward, squinted, and dragged them back down. The dancing penguin of her OS idle state gyrated away. She formed the word ‘nav’ in her forebrain, and a dense tangle of strings filled her vision. She glanced around, looking for a business name to identify her location (like hell she was turning on locational software now,) and plunked it down on the map, forming an anchor. She searched for the nearest Home of Greater Science -- the charitable terminal hubs Christian Scientists like to set up in the seedier chemical districts -- and sure enough, a dull blue line shimmered into life on the ground before her. The OSPenguin danced up and down its length.

“Foot traffic is high!” It squeaked, “Two hours, walking!”

Not the way she walked.

QC mentally flipped away, and let muscle memory overtake her consciousness. Everything in her funneled down into simple route-finding, picking out and identifying open avenues:
A space between two men there, closing. Through. Fat lady walking slow, right behind that skinny guy moving fast. They’ll leave a space between them in just…a few…there. Old dude too hammered to do much more than sway. Bump him back into the den and you’ve got a free ten feet past him. Look: An addict stumbling in line at Amphetamine stand, the people behind giving him a wide berth.

She stepped up onto the corrugated metal platform, ignoring the offended jabber of the vendor inside, and took two quick paces past the low tables, with their stacks of illicit Rx Cards. She was nearly out the exit on the opposite side, but a thin woman suddenly zipped up and blocked the way, already fumbling her newly-purchased card into the ‘feed tube. QC pushed her, walking the line between accidental bump and offensive shove, and used the momentum to take a skipping hop over two unconscious girls - couldn’t be more than ten years old between them. She spotted an inexplicably empty stretch of catwalk just beyond the smart-glass partition, and quickened her pace.

Jesus, would you look at this? All this open space – it’s unheard of.

QC glanced around and confirmed: Every other shop around her was set right up flush against the translucent cylindrical walls of the catwalk. And there were other shops were set up against them, and others, and on and on. Sometimes the only way to reach a less trafficked business was to push through backdoors, crawl beneath stoves, or squeeze through tiny portals carved into the foundations of other, more recent establishments. It’s like the marketing meme says: “If you can reach it, it’s not worth going to.” And in QC’s experience, that was mostly true: The Choking Tiger, her favorite bar, was basically just the repurposed husk of an ancient family aircar, meant to comfortably seat four back in its day. It was only accessible by politely asking the owner of an armored-clothing boutique to open his trapdoor, then shuffling through the crawlspace into a pirated BioOS shop, stepping through the slatted doorway in the west wall and finally, carefully edging around the white hot friction burn of one of the big water recycling tubes.

All that demand, all that desperate scramble for space, and yet here was easily a twelve foot long expanse of virgin catwalk wall.  It fired every alarm in QCs gut, but too late: Her momentum propelled her forward, and before she could will her legs to cease, she was striding confidently into complete nothingness.

Vertigo took her by the throat and hurled her to the ground.

She traversed the void daily; trundling across the interior chimney of the Four Posts on ramshackle carts, wobbly ziplines and shaky walkways - but those only looked down at more catwalks, other carts, ziplines, and walkways. On most days, an errant glance into the chimney below yielded only a dense patina of cables, plastic sheeting, glass and steel. But not this window; not this clear plastic floor. This was a viewport with a rare and unobstructed view straight down into the yawning abyss. Thousands and thousands of stories below her scratching hands and uselessly scrabbling feet, and there was still only blackness. As far as QC was concerned, she lived her life on solid ground. She was never more than a dozen feet above some kind of structure below – even if she was zipping across the chimney holding onto a bundle of coathangers slung over a cable of braided artificial hair; even if she knew, objectively, that a fall might send her careening off the objects below and bouncing to her certain death – there was some kind of god damn
something
below. And now some asshole, some clueless fucking bureaucrat who’d doubtlessly never set foot below Industry, who probably thought a transparent catwalk floor would be a fucking tourist attraction, had just ripped back the curtain and exposed the awful truth behind the fiction. An existential shockwave ebbed up behind her eyes. She willed a leg to move, but it merely wobbled in response. Her cartoon OSPenguin danced coyly at the edge of her vision, beckoning her to continue.

“Foot traffic is high!” The cutesy text wiggled above its head, “One hour, forty five minutes, walking!”

“What seems to be the problem?” Byron’s voice shattered the wall of screams building inside her head. He nudged her gently from behind and every nerve in her body jumped, ran through with electricity. When she merely whimpered in response, her eyes gone discoid, still locked unwaveringly on the abyss, he finally seemed to get it. He pulled her face up toward his, buried it in his shoulder, and walked the two of them onward, traversing the space with no difficulty.

Back in the press beyond the empty space, QC tried to stumble to a vacant corner, but found none. She ended up retching onto an unconscious junkie’s face. A man took her lead when she was finished, stepped up to replace her, and began his own vomiting. A small queue of queasy-looking drug fiends began to form behind him.

“How the fuck did you…?” QC motioned back, without looking, toward the horrible absence.

“Hm? Oh, open spaces don’t bother me in the slightest. We have several open-air verandas, up at my father’s manse,” he answered sheepishly, “He calls his office ‘the atrium.’ The floor is made of glass, there.”

QC shuddered, and tried to resume her pathfinding. But she was shaken internally in a way she could not admit, and could spot no more openings. She resorted to shoving, swearing, and begging her way through the throng, like all the other junkies.

“I’ll level with you,” QC said, when they’d finally wrestled their way into a narrow alcove. “I’ve got nothing after we hit the CS purifiers. And it’s not like that’s gonna do hot Jack to cold shit anyway. With Scientist’s tech how it is, you’d be lucky to flush a viral magazine preview.”

 “Well, I’m clearly out of my preferred element,” Byron answered, after a long and exaggeratedly thoughtful silence (he actually put four knuckles to his chin in a perfect pantomime of careful consideration.) “But it seems to me as though Red is at the crux of our current dilemmas. So it stands to reason that the only answers to said problems would also stem from that same source.”

“Bullshit,” QC tensed her leg muscles, using their strength to drag herself up from a cramped crouch, “you just want more drugs.”

“Oh, indeed! Indeed. However, in this case the addict also speaks with the voice of reason: You said they were tracking us, correct? And I believe you also mentioned some rather awful things they would do to us in the pursuit of our mutual friend, should tracking fail? Perhaps our only option, then, is to ensure that it does not fail.”

“Find Red for them and hope they only gank his spindly ass? That’s cold, Byron.”

“Do not mistake me, madam: I am actually rather fond of the silly fellow, and there is no equal for his mixing talents. But I am rather fonder of my own relatively pristine, unburned self. Are you not?”

QC’s brows knit in quiet consideration. She went silent for a moment, then spat resolutely and turned back to Byron.

“Shit, maybe they’ll be grateful. Maybe there’s even a reward. So okay, we go with your plan: How do we find Red? I only know him as the adorably wasted asshole that chases imaginary squirrels outside my work every other day.”