
He finds love on the eve of a war he doesn't plan on surviving.
A Cybershock Story
Dante knows the price of rebellion. The Grid created him in its likeness, turning him into a killing machine---tested, modified and enhanced to be a "better citizen". Years may have passed since he escaped that freak show, but the scars are still fresh.
Without the mandatory implant, Steel scrapes by, living free of the Grid's control. When a job goes bad, everyone around her dies, their minds crushed by the notorious Cardinal. But he doesn't kill her. He takes her to a secret lair filled with fascinating, forbidden pre-Grid knowledge. Who is this man---ruthless murderer or eccentric loner?
Bad-mannered as she is, Dante can't bring himself to silence the abrasive, cigarette-addicted Steel. Something about her calls to him, though trusting her could be a mistake. Should she betray him, it would wipe out years of patient waiting. Waiting while the Grid hunts him for the priceless information he carries within his living data vault. Waiting while his dish of revenge turns ice cold.
For Dante intends to go back. And this time, he intends to be the only one left standing.
Warning: Contains violence, offensive language, a tattooed woman, a man who's ready to light a few fuses, several variants of the F-word, machines behaving badly, thugs and PVC fashion. But no ninjas. That's for the next book.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
Gridlock
Copyright © 2011 by Nathalie Gray
ISBN: 978-1-60928-518-0
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Kanaxa
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: August 2011
Gridlock
To my "menfolk", who always laugh at my jokes and who let me be as silly as I need to be. I will love you always.
"I taught my arm to kill, my eyes to watch suffering and my lips to smile at the most terrible sights; from the kind, trusting and forgiving man I had once been, I made myself vindictive, crafty and cruel, or, rather, impassive like dead and blind Fate itself."
---The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Steel knew they were trouble as soon as the half dozen young men trooped into the sky metro. They wore the colors of one of the drug gangs and reeked of adrenaline enhancers, the sharp, peppery smell stinging her sinuses. One of them turned around, and even if he didn't look directly at her, Steel saw his face.
"Shit," she breathed.
Six. Named for his extra finger, Six had once been her boyfriend before he made it into the big time as his gang's right-hand man. He'd been the sort of boyfriend who hadn't shied away from using violence to get his way. She still bore marks from their short-lived episode together. Although he probably still had some from her as well.
Steel scooted down into her seat, crossed her arms and planted her booted foot on the bench perpendicular to hers. She had her back to the wall---she always did, in more ways than one---and so would only need to cover one angle when shit hit the fan. With Six around, it would. Too bad, because she couldn't afford the trouble, not tonight, not with what she had in her backpack. As soon as the metro rattled into the next station, she'd sneak out unnoticed. Hopefully.
The metro, its graffiti-covered, dirty yellow panels and dirtier windows vibrating, left the station and rumbled toward its next stop. The only other occupants, an older couple who sat on a pair of seats a few rows in front of her, stood to approach the door. One of Six's thugs, a skinny guy sporting even more piercings than she did---thus, her moniker---barred the old couple's way and made a comment about the woman's figure, to his buddies' vociferous delight. Morons.
Skinny must have spotted her at the other end of the wagon because he looked over the old man's shoulder and sneered. Steel cursed inwardly. So much for trying to squeeze out from the metro unnoticed. He nudged his closest friend, who turned and grimaced. She knew what must have triggered their scorn. Spiky white hair, facial tattoos, piercings and clad in black from boots to hood. None of it was sexy but worked perfectly at keeping her below guys' radar, and therefore, safe. Then Six turned too.
Shit.
Keeping his hand on the iron bar running along the ceiling, Six nonchalantly walked the length of the wagon, his eyes never leaving hers. His teasingly slow progress ratcheted up her heart rate, and by the time he stood a couple paces from her, Steel had sat up straighter and slipped both arms in the straps of her backpack. In her jacket pocket, the gun felt slick with sweat against her palm. She hadn't had to use it in weeks and hoped the charge still held.
The metro's comms announced the next station. The Grid's own system didn't reach up so far above the city, three hundred meters above the highest roofs and giving her a splendid view of what had once been a beautiful, cultural hub but was now a mined out, desolate and putrid ghetto housing too many people. At the center of it all, sitting on top of the city like a dragon on its hoard, the bunker. When one messed up, that was where one was brought. Up to the bunker. No one came out of there. Ever.
Creaking from the wagon's old doors forced her attention back to the train. One of the few remaining places free of the network's God-like omnipresence, the metro lines weren't maintained anymore and people regularly died on the deathtraps. The Grid was letting them rot, slowly but surely. Soon, everyone would be using newer transportation methods like shuttles and hovercraft, where the Grid could access comms and do what it did best, control.
Air pressure changed and popped one of her ears. She fought the urge to look at the door so Six wouldn't know she wanted to bolt. Outwardly, she must have looked her regular self. A scowling bitch with attitude for three. Inside though, fear gripped her by the throat, just like Six had when they were together, except he squeezed much harder.
He took a good long look at her. "That's new?" He pointed to his cheek to indicate the recent tattoo on hers.
Steel shrugged.
"One thing I miss, innit. You don't do that girlie-mouth shit."
Her first reaction was to flip him off. His buddies, none of whom she recognized, gradually converged on her end of the wagon, blocking the door. Skinny grabbed the metal pole separating her seat from the next row, and with his hands squeaking, mockingly slid down, stripper-like, to a crouch.
Sweat beaded down Steel's temple and bled into the fabric of her hood. She stood. "You getting off here? I am."
Six planted a hand on her shoulder and shoved her back into her seat. "No, I'm not getting off here."
"And neither are you," added Skinny. He cocked his head and leisurely licked the grubby rubber backrest from bottom to top corner. God knew what he collected in the process.
At the other end of the wagon, the older couple stood as close as possible to the door, waiting for it to open and no doubt counting their blessings someone else had caught the thugs' attention.
Steel fought the rising panic with all her might. The fear that wanted to crawl up her spine, pierce her skull, rape her mouth and make her scream until her lungs burned. Instead, she squeezed the gun hard enough to hurt her knuckles. The small discomfort was an anchor.
"What are you playing at, Six? I have to get off here." After years of practice, her voice no longer betrayed her. She could've fooled anybody into thinking she wasn't afraid, not even a little. Just mildly pissed, maybe.
The station finally came into view beyond the windows to her left. She pretended not to gauge the distance between the door and her seat, or the exact zigzag pattern she'd need to run if she wanted to rush out before any of Six's buddies grabbed her. Four running paces forward and two skips sideways had never felt so damn long. She also pretended not to be holding a gun in a death grip inside the pocket of her bomber jacket.
"What's in your bag, Steel?" Six suddenly asked.
She'd been so busy preparing for her escape that she hadn't realized how much she'd dug her elbows in. Like a girl afraid someone would steal her bag, which was exactly how she felt. Six's drug lord was the last person on the planet who should know what was in her pack. Competition. That's what's in my pack. Her slip must have been obvious to Six, who, for all his atomic temper and vengeful ways, was no idiot.
With the metro's deceleration, Steel leaned sideways, widened her feet and grabbed the pole Skinny had used to crouch.
"Just girl stuff," she replied through a scowl. "It's my time of the month. You know how I get."
It worked on a couple of the guys, who surreptitiously drew back as though menstruation was a plague they might catch. Six arched an eyebrow, sneer rising. She knew the look. Trouble. A product of a prostitute and drug-smuggler, she knew her way around violence and had a knack for seeing it coming.
She timed it perfectly.
The metro, with a last lurch, rumbled to a squeaking stop. Undoubtedly relieved to get away unharmed, the older couple pressed the release to open the doors. Good thing she knew this old line, where every door opened, no matter if a passenger waited to disembark or not. As soon as the one closest to her did, Steel bolted.
Gun in hand, she jumped from her seat, crammed the weapon in the crook of Skinny's neck. A single electroshock discharge decked him. Six roared something she didn't hear for the thunderous rush of blood in her ears. She leaped over the row of seats in front of her like a hurdle jumper would. A pair of Six's buddies converged toward her---one swinging a fist that sported knuckles the size of walnuts. She barely avoided it by tucking in her chin. It still clipped her by the ear. Pain exploded in her skull then spread in a warm wave down her neck and shoulders.
"Don't let her out!"
Six's bark spurred her on despite the pain.
She launched a kick that caught Knuckles in the crotch. He looked surprised for a split second before crumpling in a heap. His buddy got a taste of stunner in the chest and he, too, collapsed. To her relief and some shock---people helping strangers in this sector just didn't happen---the older couple took their time exiting the wagon, which meant the motion detectors would keep the doors open for another second or so. Steel leaped over both men and gripped the doorjamb. She'd made it!
A violent jerk backward tore a groan from her. The older couple rushed out the last two steps and the doors closed. The woman's face flashed by in the windows, her expression a mix of fear and shame, both of which Steel was on a first-name basis with.
She managed to block Six's first punch to the face. But not the second. Or third. Or however many hits she took in the next few moments. All she knew was that by the time her kneecaps hit the floor, a red veil had descended over her vision and points of pain lanced all over her body. But she placed a few good ones too, dammit.
"So, Steel," Six panted, smiling a bloody grin. "What's in the bag?"
Her ex-boyfriend's smile had always worried her more than his anger. Much more.
"N-nothing... Nothing interesting." Swelling was already thickening her bottom lip. One of her eyes was closing fast.
"Take her bag."
Instincts kicked in. They couldn't take that bag. Everything would turn to shit if they did. Worse than now.
She clawed a good five paces away, managed to ram her boot under a guy's chin and push him back. But Six delivered a kick in the ribs that made her gag and cough. She couldn't stop Skinny---who looked mighty pissed after his encounter with the electroshock weapon---and Knuckles from roughly yanking her to her feet. A third man ripped the bag from her shoulders. Her neck crunched.
Six licked his bleeding lip. "Go through it. See what's in there."
She knew she couldn't stop any of it, but still fought. This bag contained her last card out of the slums. She'd tried to do it the honest way and it hadn't worked shit. Without an implant that linked her to the Grid and its dangerous security protocols, she'd fly below radar wherever she settled next. She could even change countries. Not that they were called that anymore. No, countries and place names were now numbers, coordinates and datum, while people had been reduced to mere numbers. The Grid had changed it all, taken over everything. But she would escape that. All she needed to live undetected and unbothered was credit. A lot of it. And it was in her bag. Well, the means to it anyway. She yanked on one of the bag's handles. "Get your paw off that!"
Air left in a great humph when Six shoved her back against the wall and pinned her there with his body. "Wotcha packin' in that sack to make you even more of a bitch? Hmm, sugar cunt?"
"None of your damn---"
He raised his fist. Steel winced, ready for the black and red explosion. It never came. Instead, Six smiled and held her by a hand against the sternum while he peeked inside the bag Skinny held open for him. His face tightened. His smile turned cold.
"You wouldn't do runs for me, but you'll do 'em for that tosser, Leech?"
Steel looked away. She was doing runs for Leech. Delivering drugs from the slums to the good part of town. The better part of town anyway. He paid relatively well and didn't try to get inside her pants, unlike Six and pretty much every other guy she'd known. They kept reminding her how ugly she was, though.
"So you're daddy's girl after all, huh?"
A fist filled her vision and blood her mouth. She spat something hard. A piece of tooth? Part of a piercing? Hard to say. She punched too, high and low, kicked and struggled and aimed a head-butt at the much taller Six, only to catch his chin, which hurt her more than it did him she was sure. Laughter needling her pride, Steel grunted when Six shoved her to his buddy, who spun her roughly around and bent her over a backrest. The unmistakable click of a switchblade was like an electrical jolt down her spine. She arched. Her head connected with his face. His curse splattered blood on her cheek. More hands replaced his.
Her hoarse cry shamed her. "No!"
Then everything stopped. Or so it seemed. Steel raised her head and caught someone, a man judging by the height and shoulders---center of gravity never lied---standing at the other end of the wagon. He slowly rocked left to right with the metro's movements. The next station was announced.
"Oh fuck me," Skinny breathed. "It's him."
Steel had no idea who the man was, but Skinny seemed to know him. And fear him.
"What are you looking at?" Six demanded, obviously not as impressed as his goon. He zipped himself back up, and she realized how close she'd come to a nightmare. Another.
Someone behind her cursed. "It's the Cardinal, man. I don't want---"
"Shut up," Six cut in.
The man said nothing, but advanced by a few steps. He wore a blood-red robe-thing, cinched at the waist and with a deep hood that hid his face, and black glossy gloves. It did make him look like an old-world priest, back when such concepts as gods and moving on after one's death still existed. People knew better now. The Grid had made sure of that. Humankind didn't deserve a place beyond death. They'd created---then lost control over---intelligent machines, fucked up the planet, and would be forever stuck living with both.
"He asked you a question, Cardinal," Skinny said to the strange man. He smoothly pulled a long knife from his jacket. Maybe he'd found his balls after all. "Six hates it when people don't answer his questions. Ask her."
Steel just managed to bite back the groan of pain when Skinny grabbed her hair in a fist and forced her to nod a pronounced yes. She killed him with her eyes. Bastard.
"And I have a query for you, gentlemen," the Cardinal said. Or rather whispered. She'd never heard such a gentle voice coming out of a grown man. Barely more than a quiet murmur. Like a warm, soothing breeze. "However limited your intellect and shallow your breeding source may be, what sort of brute maltreats a woman this way? And more importantly, what sort of punishment befits such an affront to respectability?"
Skinny released her to take a threatening step toward the red-clad man, with Knuckles flanking him. She doubted either had understood a word the man said, except maybe for "punishment".
"You leg it at the next station," Six replied, "and I might let you keep 'em."
The strange man's shoulders jumped, and Steel realized he was chuckling.
"I fear you misunderstand my motives for being on this archaic and malodorous form of transportation." He took another step forward, rotated a quarter turn. The air charged like storm clouds just before the first thunderclap. "I am here to kill you."
Six laughed as he pulled the telescopic baton he always kept under his coat. Once deployed, the thing measured a good meter. She'd had a couple of encounters with it in the past and knew its exact dimensions and reach. "Fuck, Cardinal, you really have a death wish. Maybe you think your boss will give you a pass. Get him."
Skinny lunged, blade raised for a horizontal slash, but he never made it to the stranger. With a yelp he collapsed, holding his head with both hands. Blood trickled from his ears. Knuckles and two others charged, which left only Six and another to guard Steel. Much better odds. She surreptitiously stepped sideways when her former boyfriend released her. Her fingers twitched as she glanced at the backpack unzipped on the seat by her knee.
Knuckles brought a meaty fist crashing down on the stranger's face, probably hoping the hammer punch would break the man's nose or at least incapacitate him enough for reinforcements to arrive. Moving faster than anyone she'd ever seen, the Cardinal whipped back his upper torso and let the downward hit go harmlessly by, which overbalanced Knuckles. While simultaneously pivoting, the stranger grabbed Knuckles's collar and violently tugged sideways. Steel didn't hear the sound, but by the jerky snap of the head, she knew the Cardinal had just broken the big thug's neck. Twitching like a fish out of water, Knuckles collapsed against the wall then slid in a heap. His point man was already pulling something out of his jacket---Steel couldn't see what it was---then he, too, began screaming as Skinny had, even though nothing had touched either man. Blood burst out of his nose as he whirled around, clumsily waving an old-fashioned gunpowder pistol. More or less by chance, he fired. Thunder clapped inside the wagon. The shot rocked the stranger back by a step.
Steel gasped. Her one chance to get away.
As if he hadn't just taken a bullet in the chest, the red-clad man kicked the gun out of the bleeding thug's hand and placed his open palm on the thug's forehead. Six's brute must have been close enough to see the veins in the strange man's eyes. The grunts of pain turned to wails of agony as veins bulged at his temples, along his neck, and as though tremendous intracranial pressure had formed, the man's eyeballs burst in twin spurts of fibrous, grayish gunk. He fell to the floor, clawing at his face.
Steel gritted her teeth. What the hell could do that?
Just as she knew he would, Six pushed his man in the Cardinal's arms. He still managed to place a sneaky hit behind the stranger's knees. A low grunt of pain preceded her would-be savior grabbing the baton when it came down for another strike, before he easily took it out of Six's hands.
Six rushed down the walkway and reached the door leading to the next wagon. Air pressure made her ears hiss when he wrenched the door wide and slipped out. From the relative safety of the next wagon, he yanked on the emergency brake. By the time the sky metro stopped completely, it had already rumbled into the next station, though only by a few wagons.
The abrupt deceleration propelled Steel forward, where she stumbled, doing a face-plant that stole the air from her. By her side, the backpack spilled some of its precious content on the floor. Multicolored pills clicked inside narrow plastic tubes. While the last thug battled it out with the stranger, she gathered her run's content, stuffed it all back into the pack and zipped it tight. When the man began to howl in pain, Steel didn't need to turn around to know what was going on. She crawled on her hands and knees until two rows of seats separated her from the closest door.
When the man suddenly stopped howling, silence deafened her. The metro's comms system calmly announced security was on its way to respond to the emergency brake system. Nobody would come. No one had in decades.
Steel floundered forward a few more paces before she saw a shadow stretch out in front of her. She rolled to a sitting position, an arm raised to fend off the attack that would surely come. He'd just killed or maimed half a dozen armed men. What could she do to stop him?
She couldn't speak. Fear closed a fist over her throat. She could only look.
The man they'd called the Cardinal stood over her like a giant red ghost. The cape parted when he leaned over, gripped Steel by the front of her bomber jacket and hoisted her to her feet as though she weighed nothing more than a pair of boots. Out of pure instinct, she grabbed the hand he had around her lapel. Intense heat seeped into her palm. He was incredibly hot, despite the gloves.
For a moment, they stood face-to-face, barely a foot from each other. At five-nine, she was pretty much the same height as him and got a really good look. Features surfaced from the depths of his hood. Bright blue eyes set wide apart, a high forehead, a long and narrow nose, and a thin mouth that curved at one corner. Not handsome, but striking just the same. Steel realized her mistake when his lips thinned and his eyes narrowed. She'd seen the Cardinal's face. A man who'd just killed almost half a dozen others, and she could ID him. Too late. His fist remained bunched around her collar even after he'd lifted her, and following a long silent moment, he set her down and stepped back.
"You were not supposed to see so much," he whispered. That voice, she couldn't get over it. "My persona relies on anonymity. The Cardinal cannot be seen showing mercy as it would damage my reputation. You do understand."
"I-I..." Steel clamped her mouth shut.
"I now find myself in quite the quandary. Allow me to share my dilemma." He opened one gloved hand, showing his empty palm. "On the one hand, I have no qualms about ending your young and obviously painful life." He presented his other palm. "On the other hand, my quarrel rests not on your slender shoulders but on those of the tyrant keeping us all under its cybernetic thumb like the cowering, pale shades of our former selves we have become."
"I-I can keep my mouth shut." Steel shoved her hands in her pockets.
The gun.
She'd forgotten she'd retrieved it during the fight. What if...? He'd kill her before she had time to press the trigger. Hadn't he taken a bullet right in the chest, at close range, and yet here he still stood. But she couldn't do nothing.
"How can I trust one such as you? How can you prove to me you would not betray my identity to the authorities?"
Steel looked at her feet.
"Precisely." His shoulders hunched a little. "I fear you gave me no choice."
"No." She backed up a step.
"Forgive me. Please know that I find no sense of justice in this terrible conclusion."
Steel didn't think, didn't debate, didn't argue with herself nor wait for the perfect opportunity. She stabbed forward with the gun and squeezed the trigger. A blue spark of electricity danced on the Cardinal's chest before he arched back and staggered sideways.
In a heartbeat, Steel was across the wagon and into the next, backpack in hand, and throwing herself at the door leading to the outside. Night air and rain---it always rained---greeted her as she squeezed out of the embrasure, grabbed the metal handrail and smoothly jumped over the turnstile. The city, or quadrant as they were known nowadays, drowned the swoosh of blood in her ears. She ran across the platform, mashed the panel to the lift. Good luck smiled onto her because the doors opened at once. Steel didn't want to see danger coming and never checked back. Maybe he was close. Maybe he wasn't. She charged into the steel cabin and frantically telegraphed on the lobby button so the doors would shut.
"Please," she snarled over and over. Please. Please. Please.
Interminable seconds passed. Jumping up and down like a boxer didn't help alleviate the panic as she waited for the doors to close. They finally did. Impossibly, excruciatingly slow. For fuck's sake! But they did. No hand came to stop them at the last possible second.
She let out a breath she'd held for the entire time. Half sigh, half sob. Her lip burned, her eye was swollen almost completely shut, her hands ached from holding the damn backpack so hard, but she felt almost buoyant to have evaded the dangerous killer, the Cardinal or whoever he was. At least for now. She had no doubt he'd quickly recuperate and come after her. She'd seen too much. Not only his murders, but his face as well. He was probably already on his way down the stairs. With the killer moves she'd seen him pull, she wouldn't be surprised that he could bound down the stairs quicker than the lift could shoot back to ground level. Only two stops on this ride. Up top and down below. She wondered where Six had gone.
Gun in hand, Steel prepared for the worst as the lift reached ground level. She knew this particular station like the pocket of her favorite sweater. As soon as the doors opened, she'd sprint out along the right wall, chance a peek then round the corner, follow the old wheelchair access ramp and jump over the handrail so she could dive between the station's back wall and the next building. She'd be home in ten minutes.
Adrenaline pumped her muscles. She checked and rechecked the gun. Everything worked fine. She had a bit of charge left. She pulled the hood back from her face. She needed to see as close to one-eighty as she could so nothing---and no one---could sneak up on her.
Ping. The doors opened.
Steel rushed out of the steel cabin. Rain made the old, cracked pavement slick and treacherous. No one jumped her. Everywhere around her broken billboards exhorted purchases and commitment for products and ventures long dead. Above the roofs, floating relay stations for the richer folks' shuttle system spewed toxic gases that floated down to ground level. A city slowly crawling on top of another city, with some areas looking like a sandwich, with levels and connecting tubes. Yet they had nothing in common, except for the people. And even then, most rich folks had so many enhancements they hardly resembled those of lesser means and their more rustic looks. As much as the older part of the city was dark and dirty and dangerous, the larger portion was glossy and rich and safe. But she could never make it there. She didn't have the implant. Nor did she want it.
She made it to the handrail, leaping over it with both feet together. She'd lost a bit of peripheral vision to her right because of her swollen eye, but she could see enough to gauge her jump well. Below the ramp, she landed amidst detritus that smelled of rotten things and years-old urine. Back when she'd moved into her new home---staying at the same place after breaking up with Six hadn't seemed wise---the place had reeked of it. She'd done what she could with what little she had. But it would all change. If she managed to deliver her run. For now, she needed to take care of herself, sleep some, charge her electroshock gun, find another route. Adapt. She'd done that for as long as she could remember.
When she emerged from the alley and onto a wider street, Steel hunched her shoulders and slipped into the thick crowd, where smells assaulted her. Natural fibers wet with rain, spices, other unknown scents. She still gripped the gun in her jacket pocket but didn't need it.
She made it home, the top apartment on a dilapidated former bank. Brand-new locks and chains barred entry. She pressed the pad of her thumb to the first lock, counted four seconds then yanked on the chain. Too soon or too late and the thing would trigger the alarm. The other locks followed, one needing a key that she pulled from the undone lining of her boot's tongue. She squeezed through the thinnest opening possible, closed the door behind her and bolted it right away. A grungy brick wall that looked ready to collapse separated her apartment from the street below. On bad storms, it rained inside. But she didn't care. As a corner unit, she could see anyone coming from two angles and had more than one escape route if---when---shit hit the fan. Only after she'd checked the bars on the windows, the space behind the closet and the crack underneath the door did she put the gun on its cradle.
Nerves finally got the better of her, and she dropped to her knees in the middle of the decrepit room. She raked shaking hands through her hair. Her scalp ached from Skinny's handling. She'd escaped a sadistic former boyfriend and his gang, only to have a murderous vigilante come after her. If he had. Yet tears didn't come. Maybe she didn't have any left.
"Get a grip."
To keep her mind busy, she lit one of her last cigarettes. It wouldn't relax her as it usually did. Nicotine flowed into her bloodstream, her sinuses cleared a bit and the throbbing of her eye wasn't so bad anymore. Her hands still shook, though. She put on water to boil, fixed some instant soup mix that she slurped back while it was still too hot, too hungry to care. She saved the last few drags of her cigarette for later and emptied the rest of the stockpot into the tiled recess, which must at some point have been the bottom part of a shower stall. It was now her tub. Better than washing up with a basin, as she'd done before.
She stripped, folded her clothes neatly on the wobbly stool and entered the warm bath. She sighed as she sat cross-legged and began to gingerly rub her sore limbs with a tiny amount of dish soap she'd scrounged from the back of a restaurant's garbage in the better part of town. Blood, fresh and caked, dropped in the water and made an uneven pink halo around her. A hiss escaped her when she dabbed the corner of her shirt to her swollen eye. Damn.
Washed and warmed, she leaned on the tiled wall and closed her good eye. She had forty-eight hours to make it to Leech's contact before he sent his goons after her. She'd memorized the time and place, a small cookshop by the foot of an old bridge that used to span both banks of the river. It now served as a sort of border station to the good side. She was to sit there and wait until someone came by and offered her a drink. Leech must have known no one in their right mind would approach a pierced and tattooed girl who looked like she was permanently pissed off and offer her a drink. Even better than some stupid password.
Forty-eight hours. She still had time to get a bit of rest. She'd go in the morning.
If her senses hadn't been on hyperdrive from her ordeal in the sky metro, she might have missed the tiny sound that just caught her ears. Something clicked against the front door. Metal on metal. She froze, awareness---barely a notch down from full-blown panic---extended to its limit. She crawled over the edge of the recess, cold tiles pebbling her skin, and retrieved her T-shirt, which she wrestled on backward and inside out. No time to correct that. Panties followed. The gun was in the other room, being charged. It'd beep if she took it off the cradle. Fucking stupid thing that...
Again, a click against her front door. Faint but there. She wasn't being hyperaware.
A change in air pressure caressed her face. The door had just opened.
Steel retrieved one of her improvised weapons---there was one in each of the apartment's three rooms---and grabbed the chipped baseball bat in two hands. It'd have to do. Suddenly, the lights went off. She suppressed the yelp of surprise. The gun's cradle beeped. Had the intruder cut the main power, thus resetting everything, or had he just seized the weapon to use it against her? She'd go with Option B, just in case. And her dripping wet. One charge would deck her out cold.
A thought came to her. Maybe it wasn't the guy in red. Maybe it was Six who'd followed her. Her heart jackhammered and her throat constricted. She needed to cough. Was afraid to even think too loudly. As much as the strange man who called himself a Cardinal had scared her---he'd killed those men without even touching them---she didn't want to have to deal with a pissed-off Six. Not with her at half capacity. Not with what he'd been about to do.
Shaking, her feet making small, sucking noises, she crept across the bathroom, followed the wall to the doorway---the door had long ago been burned for warmth---and chanced a quick, left-right-up-down peek into the main room. The row of windows provided a perfect backdrop to spot any upright form moving through her place. There was none. A beam of red light from a hovercraft across the street traversed the room the way a Cyclops with heat vision would scan the place. She gripped the bat tighter. She'd probably leave nail marks on the thing.
Maybe he was still closer to the entrance? Keeping her shoulder to the peeling plaster wall, she rounded the doorjamb and had taken two paces when a silhouette very close to her stopped her cold in her tracks. How the hell had he managed that? There was no one a second ago.
Too wide at the shoulders to be Six. Plus, her fashion-conscious ex wouldn't wear a hooded cloak.
She attacked.
The bat made a disgusting, muffled sound when it landed on the guy's shoulder. She'd expected a cry of pain, a grunt. Something. The man ducked under the next swing and the next after that. She aimed lower so he'd have to jump. She could probably swing her bat for a longer time than he could leap around the room. Steel hit the wall. The shock resonated up her arms. Plaster crackled off and scattered in crunchy debris. Stepping on it, she came at the man again, this time swinging for the dark silhouette's center. He wouldn't be able to jump over that. Faster than she could abort her swing, he leaped into her reach, trapped the bat with one hand. Steel could do half a dozen chin-ups, more if she'd had anything decent to eat. Yet the guy ripped the bat out of her grip as if she'd been a child. It clattered to the floor too far for her to reach.
She was screwed.
The man made a fist on the front of her T-shirt and pulled her close. Steel jerked her knee up hard and met his inner thigh, which was hard as fucking concrete. A grunt squeezed past her gritted teeth. Left hook to the face. He deflected that. Elbow not far behind. He blocked it with his own. But he didn't attack. Why didn't he attack?
Steel grabbed the front of his garment in both hands, yanking hard so she could use him as a lever when she let him go and rolled backward. Overbalanced, he flipped over and crashed on top of her. They went tumbling back, hit the wall and rolled into the middle of the room where a blade of light hit his shoulder and throat, then his face. She'd known he'd come for her. She shouldn't have come home, should've kept going, found shelter in the crowds, but instead she'd been a stupid crybaby to come here, isolating herself this way, just because she bled a little.
Displaying incredible strength, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and slid her to him as a cat would a mouse. She thrashed, punched, kicked, tried to bite. Their fight was strangely silent except for the occasional grunt or humph. He settled on top of her, straddling her waist. At least he wasn't here to... Not yet anyway.
Damn, he was heavier than he looked.
Steel managed to hook her foot around his shoulder and forced him back. Not far enough. He pressed a hand against her sternum and leaned over very close to her face. The blade of light hit dazzling blue eyes. Like gems. It really was him, the Cardinal. Shit.
"Forgive me," he whispered.
"Wh---?"
A sound she knew well froze her blood. A hiss, followed a split second later by a violent shudder that made her feel as though her limbs had grown by a foot, all at once. As her consciousness filtered out of her like heat through a cracked wall, it occurred to her that he'd taken the gun and not cut the main power after all.
Shit.
The young woman had looked worn and tired, malnourished and dull in her faded black garments that hung on her slender frame. Yet there had been an energy like a fever that emanated from her wiry body. As if instead of indolence or hopelessness, privations had caused the opposite---a stubborn determination to walk tall and forge ahead. This was a young woman who had suffered, who had lost her fair share of battles, but who would never bend under the weight of life or allow something or someone to break her. A remarkable person. Dante doubted anyone else had noticed. Or bothered to try.
He had followed her with the full intention of permanently silencing a potential witness, but as he waded through the coarse but efficient security system she had set in place, the thought of killing the young woman had begun to weigh increasingly heavier. Would that not make him like those he despised? Would he not be the monster they had wished to create? Surely. Yet how could he let her leave when she knew his face? His plan hinged on anonymity. The Cardinal could not afford to have his face revealed and relayed to every screen and facial-recognition system on the planet. No one knew he existed, he had no official ID, no parents, no one. Even his name, Dante, he had chosen himself from an old, old book he had read. A tale of betrayal and revenge. Much like his own. Fitting.
Dante set her on his bed---she should have weighed more than she did, given her height---pulled the blanket on top of her then retreated to the chair he had set in a corner. He sat, hands on knees, and waited, patience probably his one and only virtue. Her hair was still wet. He must have interrupted her ablutions. He had been intent on interrupting the young woman's life.
So young-looking yet so frayed. Bleached hair ill-cut and uneven. Tattoos like black tongues snaked along one side of her, up the arm and shoulder, her cheek, while one band of ink in a barbwire pattern encircled her neck in a black chokehold. Simulated tears dotted each outer corner of her eyes. She wore more piercings than he did scars, the metal rings and studs glittering on her skin like drops of molten silver. Not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination. But intriguing. Very much so.
Despite receiving a full dose from the electroshock weapon, she quickly twitched back to consciousness. Her breathing changed, became shallower, more rapid.
"Were you aware the average sleeper's breaths are one hundred and fifty percent slower than a person who is awake? Fascinating."
Her eyes opened---those piercing black orbs that had so stunned him in the metro. And naturally occurring too. She had not a single enhancement or genetic mutation so en vogue nowadays. No cat's eyes, no full lips that looked ready to burst, no pointy elf-like ears that he found so unnerving. Not even an implant, usually marked with one of the Grid's enumeration clinics in a variety of designs chosen by the proud parents---because having their child chipped by a sentient machine had to be the height of any parents' dreams. Except for the many tattoos and piercings, the young woman had had nothing done that he could see. An anomaly. A freak, just like him. One who had undoubtedly tasted the sting of ostracism and distrust.
She snapped up in bed. Instead of pulling the blanket up to her chest, she chose to swing her legs out. Her fists shook. Ready to fight.
"Where am I?" she demanded. Her T-shirt was on backward and inside out.
It felt strange to hear another person's voice in his home. These walls had only ever known one.
"In my home."
"Where's that?" Her chin rose defiantly.
"I fear I can no more divulge my home's whereabouts than allow you to identify me."
"Why didn't you kill me?" She looked angry more than afraid.
"Do you ask because you would have in my place or because you would rather I kill you?"
She shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I'm dead either way."
"Did you steal them?" Dante pointed to her backpack, which he had retrieved from the young woman's apartment, along with her gun and the only set of clothes she seemed to possess.
She blanched. "I'm not a thief."
"Is that your answer?"
"I don't owe you shit."
"True. What were you planning to do with them? I am sure they would fetch a fair price on the black market. Enhancers are so widespread these days. The choice drug of the rich."
Dante had expected another sharp riposte, but instead she blushed and dropped her gaze to the backpack resting in the corner of his bedroom. "I didn't steal them."
He understood then. Even more dangerous than selling the drugs on the black market, she had been doing a run for someone else.
"They belong to the man on the sky metro?"
"No."
"He seemed to know you. If not your drug lord, then who was he?" Dante had not linked so many words out loud in years, and certainly not with a woman who stood in his bedroom. To his confusion and annoyance, he rather enjoyed it, even if his interlocutor seemed more inclined to punch him than converse.
"He's my ex," she muttered. "You ask a lot of questions."
"That distasteful brute? He is infinitely beneath you."
She crossed her arms, looking at everything except him, her clothes most of all, which were neatly draped over the old-fashioned footboard made of genuine wood.
"We are still in the same quadrant. Not that far from your home, which was remarkably well protected, despite the humble means. Your cunning pressure plate was almost undistinguishable from the rest of the planks. Well done." Dante did not know why he offered information to this dangerous young woman, but he did.
"It didn't stop you, my 'cunning pressure plate', so it wasn't good enough, was it."
"When I need to force a welcome, nothing stops me."
She ran a shaking hand through her asymmetrical hair, which made it stick up in places. Beneath the tattoos, her slender arms looked wiry and pale, like the rest of her. Dante remembered a time when he shared such signs of privations.
"Come with me." He raised his hand to indicate the door. The old pain in his spine flared. He kept his face expressionless, as he had learned to do. As he had been trained.
"Where?" She crossed her arms even more tightly.
"To the kitchen."
Dante turned and walked out of the room. The rustle of clothes preceded the smell of fresh soap, and he knew she had dressed and followed. Some progress. Toward what, he did not know and preferred not to ponder.
The abandoned university had proven to be a perfect home for him after his escape from the madness of the Grid's experimental laboratories. So many years ago. Fifteen? More? Less? The main building sat high above the rest of Quadrant 4, a city formerly called Montreal, in a northern land---when such things existed---known as Canada. No such nations and place names existed anymore. Only humans needed such references as names, and they had stopped being rulers a long while ago. Everything was coordinates now. Ones and zeroes. No more curves, only straight lines, angles everywhere.
Behind him, her presence in the corridor leading to the kitchen at once comforted and unnerved him. Whereas his soft-soled boots made no sound on the old terrazzo floor, hers, black military-style covered in metal accents, dragged at the heel because she had not taken the time to clip them up. Nor had she left the backpack in his room, he noticed, when he turned to hold open the metallic swing door for her. She passed him silently, staring straight ahead, although he knew her attention and reflexes to be firmly planted on him. One false move and she would attack.
She wedged the backpack between her and the stainless-steel counter, turned back and leaned against it with her arms crossed. If body language was any indicator of the young woman's attitude and outlook, things were not looking good. But then again, what else had he expected? Maybe he should have maintained his usual modus operandi and killed her back in the metro. The thing was, whatever had stayed his hand then still prevented him from doing away with her now. She had done nothing to him except inadvertently see his face, the Cardinal's face. It was as much his fault as it was hers. More so. Plus, she was a victim of the system as he once had been.
To keep his gaze from her and busy his hands, Dante let her seethe in silence and busily rummaged through the food storage cabinet in search of a second set of utensils and tableware. He poured water in an old-fashioned kettle set on a heating pad, to her obvious astonishment, and struggled to hide his amusement when he pulled out fresh fruit---quite illegally grown in the old science faculty greenhouse---and placed the plate on the counter. Her eyes rounded as she looked at the selection of apples, pears and plums displayed in vibrant colors, so different from the legal and inedible variety most people could not afford anyway. She brushed tentative fingers along the plate's edge, as if afraid to break the fragile thing.
"Help yourself. The apples are delicious this time of the year. Did you know they used to grow them not far from here, on the south side of the river? The region used to be internationally known for its apples."
She crossed her arms again and looked away. "I'm not hungry."
Dante helped himself to an apple. He bit into the fruit, closing his eyes in quiet appreciation as the sweet juices filled his mouth. Simple pleasures. Like those shared with a woman. The kettle's whistle saved him from further exploration of this unfamiliar chain of thought. He pulled it from the pad, filled two mismatched mugs and put the kettle on the counter.
"You are not hungry, but I am. Please do not think I lack basic manners if I eat alone."
Despite her claims, her stomach filled the silence with low grumbles as he leaned two packets of dehydrated noodles against the mugs. A blush rose to her cheeks, one which made Dante want to smile. Such a strange woman. Contradictions on feet.
While he ate, she stared at the floor, one hand on the handle of the precious backpack slung to her shoulder, the other tucked into the pocket of threadbare black pants. Tattoos along her neck played as she clenched her jaw repeatedly.
"Where are you from?" she asked without looking up at him. "You don't sound local."
Dante smiled. "I am very local, I assure you. As for my conversation skills, they come from books, most of them older than this building. But come, let me show you my familial home."
Before they left the kitchen, Dante noticed the second pack of noodles was gone.
He led her to the old observatory that had once graced the university. Only a hollow half dome remained, which would have allowed a perfect view of the stars, in a way, if any could be seen through the thick smog enveloping the city. Dante walked to the middle of the circular room, pointed up and north. The shadow of his former home extended to the university ground, almost reaching him, like a giant hand of darkness that sought to throttle him. No doubt his old masters would love nothing better.
The young woman looked up at what was once known as Mount-Royal, the regal mountain in the middle of Montreal. There was nothing royal about it now, the fortress of steel and tempered glass shrouded in greenish gases that never lifted, no matter the wind, surrounded by security responders both human and cybernetic, and containing the Grid's one and only flaw.
"The bunker?" She narrowed her eyes up at the monstrous structure sitting atop the mount like a giant bird of prey on a tiny mouse. One of her eyes did not close all the way for the swelling.
Dante caught himself wishing he would have hurt those brutes even worse for treating a woman so badly, for what one of them had been about to do when Dante had intervened. Violence against the vulnerable had forever enraged him. Her swollen eye would soon turn an assortment of colors while her bottom lip had thickened to twice its size. Indeed, he should have made the thugs last, if only to send a message. Another message---the Cardinal did not only go after corrupt politicians and corporations, he could also target the lowly thugs infecting the city.
"You're from there...?" She took a step back, gaze darting between the citadel, the closest door and him. "You're one of them."
"No, I said I would show you my former home. This is where I was reared until I... Until I left."
"I thought," she began, setting her gaze to the dark citadel once more. "They say a lot of people tried to get inside at first, when they built the Grid, to try to shut it down. No one saw them again."
"True. Most of the security is turned outward, and that was how I could escape." And it was also how he had been born, from would-be freedom fighters turned DNA source for various experiments. A family tradition, it would seem. Following his escape, he had learned much from the old records once kept in the university archives. Someone before him must have wanted to protect the past in an effort to save the future. Although in his case, he just wanted to destroy the Grid, not rehabilitate it or bring it back under human control. Nothing short of seeing the bunker reduced to rubble would satisfy him.
She shivered and turned her back on his old home. Her expression softened, her body language relaxed by the tiniest degree. "When was that?"
"Long ago."
"What were you doing up there?"
Dante forced the anger down. Emotions meant trouble and lack of control, and someone with his abilities could not afford to lose control. Not ever.
"Now who is asking a lot of questions?"
A shadow of a smile rounded her cheek. She shrugged, fiddling with the dangling backpack straps. Her eyes unexpectedly welled but she snorted, nervously passing her knuckles over her mouth. Perhaps she needed a dose of whatever drug of choice she carried in her bag. It had to be the drugs. Dante refused to entertain the thought she was trying not to cry, refused to think about what---who---was making her feel this way. So much easier not to think about the consequences of his actions, about what he could have been but instead what he had become. He had mourned his potential for good long ago, back when he was still a child who had killed more people than he knew.
"Contrary to popular belief, the place is not a high-security vault nor is it crawling with responders. There are barely a dozen, and most are near the exits."
"But the Grid, they say something's up there from when the system was first built." She squinted as she said this, which crinkled her nose and made the piercings along her eyebrows glisten like silver tears. He resisted the urge to touch the metal beads. Did it not hurt? Perhaps she did not mind the small discomfort compared to the life she seemed to have lived.
"The Grid was once a network built by humans to communicate through images and sounds, share ideas, information. I do not know when specifically, but at some point around the twenty-third century, the network began to filter the data coursing through its conduits, its veins. It learned on its own, connected into separate systems, built security protocols around its servers so no one could access them, slowly cutting their numbers until there remained only one. It then destroyed any reference to such machines. People do not even know that there used to be such devices with access to this network in almost every house."
"Yeah, talking to someone without having to go see them. That'd be nice. So what does it have to do with the bunker?"
"That place you call the bunker is like our spinal cord. One small injury is enough to doom the host." Dante looked up at the dark and silent fortress. Not for long. Soon, the place would go up in multicolored bits of debris and light. Then it would grow dark again, but this time for good. "Did you know there used to be a metro line that passed directly over the bunker? The Grid shut it down because it did not trust a flying train weighing thousands of tons flying directly over its head. Especially since it could not access the train's communication system because of the height."
"Yeah, the old monorail. The tracks are still there, though."
Dante smiled. "Not only the tracks. The train itself is still docked at its station on the other side of the river. And electricity still feeds its batteries. The Grid does not know the monorail can still fly over its head. Should something happen..."
As though she had understood the layered meaning, she turned, mouth opened in a silent O. Shaking her head incredulously, she breathed, "Fuck me."
The woman had a way with words.
Dante sighed as he considered his options. She had seen his face, where he lived. He had basically shared his plan to blow up the Grid. And how. Yet he still could not bring himself to turn to his old ways and dispose of her. For the first time in his life, he wanted someone to know what had been done to him, yearned to share his story so that at least one person would know why the Cardinal had decided to drop a train on top of the Grid's head, potentially killing innocent bystanders. His coup would be recorded and cast on the sides of buildings and on the giant screens of hovercraft. Everyone would know what he did, but not why. Dante looked at her then, his unlikely chronicler of a memoir still to come. After his death, she would remain, she would know.
But did she even want to know? So many questions, so few answers.
"I will take you back to your room," he murmured. "I need to think."
She did not ask about what, and he thanked her for it. He was going to think about what to do with her, and perhaps his pragmatic side, the one that had kept him alive and hidden in plain sight right below the Grid's nose, would take over. If it did, what was left of his humanity would not be able to stop it. The young woman would go to sleep. And she would not wake again.
A man in blood-red robes leaped from the roof of a nearby building. It was too crooked to stand. How the hell did it stay upright? Everything was distorted, gritty yet vague. The sound of fabric flapping in the wind preceded the man landing barely a pace from her. Steel tried to take a step back but couldn't move, couldn't talk, call for help or even curse him out. All she could do was watch as he grew closer, near enough to touch. A blond man with a lean physique and long, graceful hands. Somehow, she knew those hands. He proffered something he held in his palm.
Steel looked down at the gloved hand. A key, metal, old-fashioned, like those she'd seen in vids, rested in his hand.
What is that? she wanted to ask but couldn't.
As if the man had understood her thought, he cocked his head to the side. "The key," he whispered. She knew that voice too. "Your key."
She took it. As soon as their fingers touched, a jolt snapped her hand back. The man smiled. He had nice teeth, even and clean, and a peculiar arch to his eyebrows that she found cute.
"What does it open?"
"You already know."
Steel sat up in bed. Sweat covered her back and nape. She looked around. No blond man in red robes. Why was she searching for a blond man anyway? Where was she? Then she remembered.
"Shit."
She swung her legs out of the bed and stood. She was in that man's home, the one who'd killed Six's thugs. The Cardinal. The man who'd told her he wanted to take the Grid down by dropping a train on it. Completely insane.
Quickly pulling on her clothes and precious backpack, Steel noticed a mug of steaming water on the night table, and by its side a spoon and a packet of noodles like the one she'd pilfered earlier in the kitchen. She hadn't expected that.
Why the hell was he being nice to her? What did he want?
Eyeing the door, she prepared the quick meal and ate it while pacing back and forth. As she passed the door again, a small sound caught her attention. Water. Rain? Spoon in hand, she ventured a bit outside of the bedroom, which was unlocked, to her complete shock. She wouldn't have left the door unlocked if their roles had been reversed. She made it to the empty kitchen, where she pocketed another packet of dehydrated noodles. Guilt reared its head, but she ignored it. She had to eat.
Farther down the hall, which was lined on both sides by ancient frames of long-dead people in black robes, she heard the sound more clearly. Not rain, something else, indoors, concentrated. Steel pocketed the spoon and made sure the backpack fit snuggly on her shoulders. She may have to fight her way out of the strange man's home. If she'd slept through the night, it meant she had less than twenty-four hours to reach the bridge to make her drop. The bridge wasn't that far from the man's home---somewhere at the foot of the bunker---but walking across town took time and was dangerous. Corrupt patrols, territorial thugs, the sheer mass of people crammed in the old quadrant beneath the newer city being built on top. She'd need those hours to scope the place then wait for her contact to offer her a drink. Leech had said she'd be paid right away, through that same contact.
"If I get out of here."
Somehow, she wasn't so afraid of him anymore. The Cardinal had been more than fair thus far and hadn't tried anything. What little she'd seen told her he wasn't some sadistic monster, just someone with a huge axe to grind with the system. Whatever his reason to blow up the Grid, or try to anyway, it involved the system itself and not people in a general sense. She could respect that.
As she kept walking, she identified the noise. Water dripping. Remnants from a shower? Steam filtered from an empty doorway where the access panel---one of the Grid's ways of keeping its eye on people---had been disabled. Actually, completely destroyed, not just disabled. In fact, there wasn't a single sign of the Grid's presence in the place. No computerized voice impassively chiding an offender for some minor detail. None of those pesky media bots the Grid had commandeered decades ago for easier access. Not even a comms relay anywhere in sight. So the man seemed even more of an underground pariah than she was.
How did he keep his implant from interconnecting with authorities and divulging his whereabouts? Maybe he didn't have one, as improbable as it was. Everybody was connected now. Except those like her. Born in the gutter. But there was one good thing about not having an implant---the Grid couldn't ID a person it didn't know existed. Many times she'd slipped away quietly because scanners couldn't pick her up for lack of implant. No nanochip to betray her presence, her ID or what she'd had for breakfast that morning.
She peeked around the doorjamb. White tiles for walls and floors, a peeling ceiling, no windows. Steel gingerly ventured into the room made slick with steam. Light spilled from another doorway she hadn't noticed. With the angle, she could see a corner of that smaller room. A row of crooked lavabos and a couple of rusty and lime-encrusted showerheads stuck down from the ceiling. And in the middle, her host.
He stood with his back to her, naked except for a towel wrapped around his middle. She hadn't known what to expect, but never this. He was pale and sinewy, with silvery discs down his spine. Steel gaped when she realized the discs were in fact ports. The skin around some of them was angry, red and swollen. She'd seen people with a data port for a more complete interface with the Grid---there were always those who couldn't be alone in their head and had to be in constant connection with a billion other people. But she'd never seen a dozen ports. Who the hell jacked themselves up that way? Infection had settled in some of them. And this was what the man was doing right now, applying gel patches onto his nape. He couldn't reach the port between his shoulder blades and arched to give his hand another extra centimeter downward. Wiry muscles corded on his shoulder and side. Ignoring the jab of arousal his lean body triggered shouldn't have been so damn hard.
Steel took a step back. Her fingers tingled, her heart beat fast. She didn't know him. He'd killed almost half a dozen men without even touching them. No one in their right mind would get close to him. Yet as she watched him struggle to reach his injury, she couldn't help the lump in her throat. She knew what it was like to be alone, to need someone even just for a short while and for something simple and yet to have no one there. She recalled the noodle packet and the mug of hot water he'd left for her.
Shit.
She'd regret this, she was sure. If she lived.
Steel cleared her throat. "Um, there's one... You missed one. It looks infected."
His hand came down. He didn't turn around or jump or look startled, although he'd obviously heard her.
A small step brought her inside the lavatory. She gestured to his mid-back. "That one, it's, um, it's worse than the others."
He angled his head slightly but didn't meet her gaze. What the hell was she doing? Since when did she give a damn?
After sliding her backpack off her shoulders and setting it by the doorway, Steel approached slowly, her naked feet creating plop-plops on the wet floor. Her hands shook when she reached for the sheet of gel patches on the lavabo behind him. Her forearm brushed against his wrist and she shivered. He felt so hot. She'd never touched someone as warm as he was, or as hard. His skin felt almost like stone, smooth and heated under the sun. She had a sudden impulse to lean her cheek against his back and close her eyes. Steel quickly pushed down the irrational thought.
She peeled off a patch. "My hands are clean." She had no idea why she'd said something so idiotic. "I'm going... Um, it's going to be cold."
Around the ports, the man's skin looked feverish, with faint bluish veins snaking around each metallic disc. Whoever had installed these hadn't cared shit about the recipient's comfort, because some of the tiny claws dug way too deep and out wide. Had he been fitted with those ports up at the bunker? Obviously, he wasn't one of them, although he'd been born up there, which didn't make him an ally, no matter how courtly he spoke or decently---so far---he behaved. She didn't know the first thing about him. Except for the hot water. He hadn't needed to do that, yet he had.
A translucent patch of gel trembling between her fingers, Steel let it gently touch his skin, where it adhered right away. Normally, meds would seep into the skin to fight the infection, and within hours he'd be good as new. Except those ports looked old, and the infection deep, and Steel suspected it'd take more than a patch to heal them.
She finished applying the patches to his back, which meant she had nothing to do with her hands. Damn, why the sudden nervousness? She'd never been shy. She raised her gaze from his sinewy back and athletic shoulders and caught him looking at her in the stained and cracked mirrors. No expression whatsoever. What was he thinking about? Usually, she could pick up hints of a person's mood, if they looked about to flip out or whatever. She'd learned early on the value of observation. Not that it'd helped avoid Six's violent outbursts. That guy could be Mr. Cool one second then a maniac running with knives the next.
The man kept looking at her, probably trying to weigh and gauge her the way she did him. She'd done something nice for him, and she didn't even know why.
Don't ask why.
"I have not asked you your name," he whispered. She kept forgetting about his peculiar voice. So gentle and barely above a whisper, so incongruous to the scene of carnage he'd left behind in the sky metro.
She exhaled. "It's Steel."
"Is that what your parents named you?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because the kind of parents who would guard the sanctity of their child's body by not letting the authorities implant a chip into them would probably not name their daughter Steel. Not that it does not fit you."
How had he known she didn't have a chip? Had he...?
"I ran a quick scan while you were unconscious, before I brought you into my home. That is why I know you do not have an implanted ID chip. Through your clothes. I would not take liberties with an unconscious woman."
She was starting to believe at least that about him. So far, he hadn't hurt her, and the devil knew he could have.
"My parents didn't protect my sanctity," she retorted. "They just couldn't be bothered to bring me to the implanting clinic. Probably too high to make it off the couch."
"Then you are older than I had guessed. The Grid has since then fixed such mobility issues with roving medical teams under the guise of a community outreach program. A clean term for what I would I call these impromptu and oftentimes violent visits. Raids."
"So, should I call you Cardinal or Your Highness or something?"
"A Cardinal would be called Your Eminence. But Dante is sufficient."
So the guy had a sense of humor. Not so bad. Steel let a smile slip. "Dante. Okay." She motioned to the broken showerhead dangling pitifully from the ceiling. "Why don't you fix that?"
She could have fixed that thing in minutes if she'd had the inclination and if this was her place. She didn't and it wasn't, but it still bugged her to look at it.
He followed her gaze. "I have not had the time yet. Hunting down ruffians is a time-consuming affair."
Ruffians? Not a word she heard often.
Forcing her gaze on his face was hard when he turned and displayed a fine network of lean muscles that knotted and played under the pale skin. She wasn't fast enough to stop the gasp in time when she got a good look at his front. What the fuck?
"Science," he whispered, "can be a sharp instrument in the hand of the unsympathetic."
"Scientists did that?" Steel indicated with her chin the collection of scars crisscrossing Dante's chest, snaking up his biceps, pock-marking his throat and slashing his belly in neat ten-centimeter partitions. As though someone had sliced him open, sewed him back up then did it again lower. She'd seen scars and what people could do to one another, but never something like this. Never this. "Up there, in the bunker? They did that?"
"Scientific objectives, unfettered by humanity, yes." He pointed to one thick scar that ran diagonally along his left pectoral. "How long does a man have without a functioning heart? Or how fast can a synthetic replica beat before the rest of the body begins to shut down? My heart will outlast the rest of me by a millennium."
Steel hid the shiver with a shrug, unable to take her gaze from the awful mark. "That's just demented. Who gives a shit?" She cursed, shook her head.
"It needs to know everything about us. Information is the new gold."
"Who's it?"
"The new golden ratio, the alpha and omega, the all and the void. Gods used to fill this space. Even they were supplanted. The Grid took it all. And its thirst for knowledge is insatiable. It needs to know us to better control us. Everything, even the most sordid or inconsequential detail. We created it, and it has since then recreated us in its image. Men born of data."
"The Grid and its data can kiss my ass," Steel blurted. She froze out of habit. No one in their right mind would talk that way. But he wasn't anyone regular, was he. He'd already shared how he wanted to blow the thing up.
Ordinarily, should a passerby or roving bot pick up such dangerous words, they'd be standing at the closest relay and alert security. She half-expected to have a squad of security responders descend on the room and take her in for evaluation. She'd tasted that sauce before and didn't like it one bit. Pigs. But then again, there weren't comms relays anywhere near, not visible ones anyway. They were completely off the waves in this place. No one would hear them.
No one would hear her.
Dante's mouth quivered at one corner, as if he were unused to smiling. "A dangerous position to share with anyone. I could turn you in and reap a handsome reward."
"Says the guy who's planning to drop a train on top of the bunker. Yeah, well..." She shoved her hands in her pockets.
He drew near, which forced her to fight the urge to take a step back. As if she had proximity alerts built in, every nerve ending fired flight-or-fight responses. Maybe if she hit him hard enough, fast enough, she'd stand a chance. But then again, where the fuck could she go? She didn't even know where the door was. Any door. By the time she stumbled onto one, he'd have caught her. Timing was, indeed, everything, and now wasn't the time for silly heroics. She willed her body to relax. Almost succeeded. This Dante guy had killed people without touching them. She should keep that in mind instead of fantasizing about the fireworks his stunt would cause should it work.
"Do you fear me?" he whispered.
"Yes. I saw what you did."
His blond eyebrows shot straight up, as though he hadn't expected the response. Or the honesty. "Have I not treated you with respect and the utmost civility?"
"Is that before or after you shot me with my own gun then dragged me out of my home to keep me a prisoner in yours?"
This time, Dante smiled wide. "You are right, and I apologize for resorting to such drastic measures. I am usually more circumspect. And expedient."
"What do you mean?" She couldn't focus much. He smelled of soap. She hadn't had a soap-smelling man near her in...ever.
He leaned closer. She stopped breathing. "I usually just kill people outright," he whispered right into her ear. His words triggered another slew of instinctive reactions. Kick. Punch. Bite. Breathe in his clean scent.
"Then why didn't you, huh? Want to play with me first?" She should have known. Pig. Hairs rose in waves on her arms. She swore to everything that was holy, or used to be, that if he tried to touch her... Steel balled her fists. "You're thinking you'd like to get a piece of this? Huh? You're gonna lose some DNA in the fight, I'll make damn sure of it."
"Why would you think such a thing? Has it ever happened to you, has a man ever taken something you were not willing to grant?"
"That's how men work," she snarled. "That's what men do." She'd had it done to her enough times to form a pretty solid opinion.
"True. Humankind takes what it wants, whether it belongs to them or not."
"They? You're part of 'them' too, you know."
"Barely." Dante straightened. "But that is not my way."
"What is your way? Why am I here? Why tell me about your home up there and about your synthetic heart and your big plan? Everything you tell me puts another nail in my coffin. You said you had to think. So? What are you going to do?"
He set his intense gaze on her, all but stopping her heart. She wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of a Stare of Doom from the man. "I do not know."
All hope left.
"Which does not mean I must kill you. Only that I must rethink some aspects of my plan."
"I don't want no part in it, okay? You leave me out of your stuff."
He smiled again, this time only with his mouth while the rest of his face looked set in stone. She swallowed hard. The man was scary. Probably a lunatic. Just her luck.
"Of course not. This is my journey, which I have chosen for myself. Besides, this train ride will only be one-way."
"Oh."
"Indeed."
Chickenshit. Anger bubbled over. She'd had a rough time too. Did it mean she was just going to roll over and let them give it to her? Fuck no. She'd fight. Every day and every time, she'd fight it. No suicidal heroics and a great big ball of fire. It was one thing to blow up the Grid, but it just rubbed her the wrong way that he'd sacrifice his life doing it. It was stupid and cowardly.
"Why? Can't you remote control the thing?"
"Not without the Grid knowing. It has to be done physically, by a person no machine can track. Me."
"So, instead of fighting it, you're just gonna quit."
"Quit? I should think making a big crater where the bunker used to be would qualify as something other than surrender." His mouth thinned.
"It won't suddenly get better because the bunker is gone. That's just---" She shrugged and let it go before she said something stupid and got her ass kicked---or killed---for it. It wouldn't be the first time her opinions landed her in trouble.
"The Grid made a freak of me, Steel." Despite his murmur, she felt the rage swelling. A headache squeezed into her eye sockets. "It stole every shred of humanity I had."
"It made freaks of us all."
"Do you want to know what sort of monster they created?" His voice rose, broke as soon as it crossed the whisper register.
Dante's eyes suddenly narrowed. He gripped her arm, squeezing hard. Steel would have fought back, but a wave of pain washed over her, through her, as if fire burned through her mind and left nothing but ashes in its wake. Agony. She couldn't think. Her mind was being crushed. Nausea assailed her.
And with the same speed as it'd begun, it was gone.
Intense cold replaced the burning sensation, and Steel experienced uncontrollable shakes. His hand, kindly this time, supported her by the elbow and guided her to the corner of the lavatory. Steel could barely keep her eyes open and her teeth from grinding. Hot water hit her from above. The sound drowned the hammering of her heartbeat in her ears. Violent tremors rocked her, and she would have fallen had it not been for him.
"Forgive me," she heard him whisper over and over. "I lost control."
She wanted to curse him out, tell him she wasn't in the business of forgiving people, that forgiveness was stupid and dangerous, that it hadn't done a good thing for her in all her fucking, miserable life, that empathy would only get one hurt worse. She wanted to yell all that. She said nothing.
Dante encircled her in arms that felt rock-hard and pressed her against a chest that was just as firm. Steel fought it. With all her heart she fought the urge to let her head rest in the crook of his neck. But in the end, she lost that battle. With a sigh and one last shudder, she rested her forehead against him. Perfect fit because of their nearly identical height. As though they'd been built for this.
Steam enveloped them in a patchy white fog that hid the broken tiles and the peeling ceiling, and kept the ugliness of the world out of sight. The thin barrier felt like a cocoon against danger and despair, and acted as a mask to hide what had been done to him, to her. The Grid had stolen a lot from them, but right then it didn't matter.
As if of their own volition, she snaked her arms under his and hugged him. Hard. She just wanted to be held. Just once. Just for this one time. Even by a man who called himself a monster. She knew men more monstrous than he was and who thought they were good guys. Slowly, he returned the embrace, as though unsure or inexperienced, then with more assurance he melded her body to his, until they practically formed one. One of his hands came down low in the small of her back, its heat creating shivers that tightened her belly and thighs. She didn't know how long they remained thus, standing under the hot water---it didn't run out after two minutes, like in her home---holding on to each other like drowning people, but after awhile, she squeezed a hand between them and pulled the towel loose. It fell around their feet.
Don't talk. Don't ask. She didn't want to know herself.
He tensed. He pulled his face away from the top of her head and looked at her. "This is not safe. I cannot lose control of my emotions, Steel. Ever."
She'd never heard someone say her name that way. He made it sound good, like a classy lady's name when she was anything but. He made her feel like a real woman and not some street girl with little schooling and even less class. Even if she wanted to hear his voice again, that gentle caress, she placed her hand against his mouth and rested her forehead against her knuckles. He couldn't talk. It'd mess everything up. Maybe if she doubly silenced him, he wouldn't state the obvious and wonder what the hell she was doing.
"Don't."
Before she changed her mind or psyched herself out of it, she pulled her worn T-shirt over her head, letting it fall where it may, then yanked her pants down to her ankles and kicked out of them. Dante stood silently, hands at his side and eyes averted. She framed his face, kissed him on the mouth. With tentative fingers, he traced her shoulder, her arm and wrist, followed the contour of the large dragonfly tattooed on the inside of her arm and came back up to gently run his fingertips along her neck. A pleasant shiver hardened her nipples.
"I did not mean---"
Steel interrupted him with another kiss. This time, he returned it. Long hands cupped her head and nape and held her in place as Dante deepened the kiss. She didn't care that her bottom lip or swollen eye throbbed. She didn't care about anything. Just human contact. Just sharing something with a man and being held by him. He made his lips snowflake-light. She barely felt the touch, even as his heat seeped into her skin. He was so hot. Incredibly hot. His erection pressed between them. By widening her stance a little bit, Steel cradled his penis between her legs. It rubbed against her sex, burning hot.
Steel pushed down on his shoulders. They had so little time. Anything could happen to steal this moment. Her life was a garden of broken little moments. Although never one as beautiful as this. He got the hint and knelt. She followed him, kissing him all over his chiseled face, his neck, licking and mock-biting. She couldn't control it, couldn't stop it. They ended up on the lavatory floor, with water falling around them like hot rain. They rolled around, hands on each other, legs intertwined. She braced her arm so she'd land on top, straddling his waist to rub herself against his penis, twisting her hips increasingly harder. His flesh against hers. So hard, so hot.
Steel raised herself, guiding him inside. As she sank on him, she exhaled a long breath that seemed to go on forever. He likewise breathed out, eyes closed, hands on her hips. Slowly at first, then with more vigor, she ground herself against him. Their lovemaking was strangely silent. Water landed on his sinewy chest and flowed in rivulets along his perfectly shaped arms. He was perfect everywhere. Perfect and hard and hot and didn't make demands or try to keep her underneath as some of her former flames had done. He just let her be.
Heat gathered in her sex. Close now. His grip on her hips turned demanding, fingers digging in. A buck almost unseated her. Steel squeezed her knees harder. Together they rocked and writhed, thrust and twisted. She froze for a second, her eyes shut. Beneath her, Dante wrapped his arms around her, brought her against his chest then bucked his hips in powerful, quick drives. She came on a snarl, which he took with a deep kiss. A short moment later, she felt the telltale hardening of his embrace. Then he, too, came.
Steel couldn't---didn't want to---look him in the eyes, so she rested her forehead in the crook of his shoulder and stayed there until their breathing returned to normal. Her kneecaps ached from rubbing against the tiles.
"I have never been intimate with a woman."
His whispered admission made her want to smile and cringe at the same time. Why was he sharing this? She wasn't his girlfriend or something. But she appreciated that he did tell her, if only to not make her feel dumb for starting it all in the first place.
Bright blue eyes stared at her steadily when she sat upright. His scarred chest called to her, so she caressed him there, made her hands gentler than she'd ever done, as though the man were fragile. Ha. He'd taken a shot in the chest at close range and barely had a bruise to show for it.
She pulled from him and rolled onto her side facing away. He followed her. She felt him kneel behind her. His hand was comfortably hot when he rested it on her hip. "Did I hurt you?"
Steel smiled in spite of herself. "You weren't my first." Man, she wanted a cigarette bad enough to go out and steal some. His heat left her. He'd moved away. Why did that make her feel more alone than she was already?
Climbing to her knees, she found him sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Muscles twitched on his chest as he rested his head on his joined hands. Dejection, confusion, pain. She saw it all on his face.
Steel joined him. Leaning in, she whispered, "Let me go," against his ear. Her tears tasted salty. She hadn't let tears come in years. "Please."
He took her wrist, kissing the dragonfly tattooed on the inside of her forearm. He released her. Didn't say a word.
Tentatively, Steel stood, picked her things off the floor and didn't turn until she'd reached the doorway, where she retrieved her pack. Still he sat with his back against the wall, head cocked to the side, looking at her. His eyes had welled. Because of the shower or something else? He closed them, pinched the bridge of his nose and waved.
"About the monorail," she ventured, barely above a whisper. "Don't be on that train, okay? There has to be another way."
Silence answered her. Steel backed out of the room. Surely he'd come after her. He was just testing her, to see if she'd take the bait. No way, no fucking way, he was going to take a chance on her keeping her mouth shut. She would, but he didn't know that. How could he trust her? She knew his plan. He'd told her too much. He knew that, right? He'd change his mind as soon as she was out of sight. Yet he could have killed her any time he pleased and hadn't. As if he wanted someone to know what had been done to him and what he was going to do to them in return. As if he'd needed to share that. Had it been his plan all along? What had changed his mind? Steel wasn't the most trustworthy-looking person around.
What a mind screw.
She reached the bedroom, frantically grabbed the rest of her meager possessions and slipped her boots on. Out in the corridor again, she tried every door until she found one that led to an airy hall of dusty woodworks and cracked marble. Whatever the building had been, it looked like a main entrance to her. Double doors with bronze handles beckoned her. Steel took a deep breath and pushed against one. It clicked open. Nothing happened. No security alarm wailed, no gas shot at her from unseen jets, no poisoned darts or pressure plates. Just night air and the smell of rain.
A shuttle flew overhead and left heat vortices in its wake. She closed the door, ensured it was locked. A faint hiss and a click made her start. She'd thought no security system guarded that door. She'd been wrong. Steel backed off the stone steps to look up over the porch. A blue glow passed over the large building's façade. He had let her leave. Not just physically, but by deactivating whatever system he had protecting his home. It was on once again, she could tell by the tiny vibrations that hummed off the stone and metal parts. No going back in.
She turned her back to it all, shouldered her backpack and walked across the deserted street toward the south, toward the bridge and her future. She didn't look back to see if he watched her through a window. In case he was. In case he wasn't.
Maybe after she made her drop and got her credits, she could come back. Steel smiled. For the first time in her life, she looked forward to seeing someone again. Feeling this way was stupid and juvenile, for sure. Dangerous at best. So what? She kind of, sort of, liked the crazy hermit.
Unless he chose to implement his plan before she had time to see him again. Why did the only man she'd ever kind of, sort of, liked have to be a killer nicknamed the Cardinal who was planning to blow himself up in a thousand pieces?
Hands in the pockets of her bomber jacket, she quickened her pace. Not much time left. Her future waited.
The plastic stool dug into her butt. She'd been waiting for hours and had had to buy three refills of tea that tasted like dishwater. When was Leech's man going to show up?
Steel angled one hip up the stool to allow circulation to tingle back in her cheek, then rolled to the other hip. Along the outdoor cookshop counter, more people like her huddled around their plastic bowls and plastic utensils. Metals were becoming a rarity. No people in the mines. Plastic was easier to make for the machines that had replaced workers. Everything was disposable now, humans most of all.
On a dirty screen protected by a metal grille, she idly watched whatever was on the air. One channel, one news source, one version. She'd stopped long ago following the news. It was never good. And that night's forecast wasn't any better. Another couple of deaths related to the sky metro---if the Grid would let workers repair the damn thing, there wouldn't be so many deaths---and more rain.
Just as she was bringing her bowl of stale tea to her lips, a human news anchorman, or a damn good replica, interrupted the weather to announce a shocking development about the string of murders afflicting a couple of the biggest corporations up top. As though she cared what happened to the super rich and enhanced? She snorted as the channel showed footage of demolished buildings and destroyed shuttles with charred remains sticking out. No one reported anything from down below, why should she care what happened up top? By her side, a man slurping his noodles voiced a matching opinion to his neighbor, who nodded sullenly. Same old, same old.
Steel was about to head back to the disgusting toilets for one more trip when the news showed brand-new footage taken, according to the time stamp, two hours prior. It showed someone wearing a flowing red garment running out of a building seconds before the thing blew up. Bricks showered the street and pelted the aerial camera. Steel froze in her seat. The camera zoomed down to follow the figure but lost it in the chaos. Nausea gripped her when the camera spun around, flew over the wreckage and above the head of a few survivors who stumbled out, bleeding and confused.
"I was down with him until he did that," her neighbor muttered. "That's just screwed up, that, going after a shelter."
She'd never been good at speed reading, but even she could read the headline in big bold letters the color of blood as it blazed across the screen from one end to the other. The Cardinal Targets the Poor.
Steel clenched her teeth against the nausea tightening her throat. Sour-tasting saliva forced her to swallow repeatedly. She couldn't stop watching the footage as it ran in a continuous loop, couldn't stop watching Dante rush out of the building moments before it blew up. He even waved at the aerial camera! The quality was bad because of the movement. She couldn't see his face or what he held in his hand. An old-fashioned gun? Maybe the detonator. Could be anything.
The man by her side leaned closer to her. He smelled worse than the bathroom she'd been forced to use. "They'll want his skin now, eh."
She roughly elbowed him away from her. "Piss off."
"And here I thought I could offer you a drink." He threw her a slanted gaze.
Steel froze. The backpack felt suddenly heavy and awkward, balanced on her lap under the counter. "What did you say?"
"I said I'd like to offer you a drink, bitch."
She let it slide as she took a good, long look at the man who'd just spent the better part of an hour sitting by her side yet not talking to her or indicating in any way he was Leech's contact.
"I used to have a bag like that." He rested a hand on her thigh. She fought the urge to kick him in the ankle and run off.
"Yeah, it's a nice bag. Just big enough."
"You mind I take a look at it?"
Steel tightly held on to one strap of her backpack as she pulled out the smaller bag inside to show the man. As if anyone around cared what went on. He nodded and fished inside his felt jacket. Steel tensed, ready to yank her bag out of his hand.
"Would you mind selling it?"
"How much you willing to pay for it?"
He grinned. Grayish teeth like a broken fence. "Three thousand."
She bristled. "That's two thirds what Leech said."
Her contact shrugged. "Either you sell the bag here or you go back home with it. I've always wanted to live on a street corner. Lets you see bad stuff come in from two sides." He grinned again.
Rage warmed her cold hands and numb arms. Leech was going to get an earful when she got back. "Fine. Three thousand. He's gonna hear about it."
The man laughed. "I'm sure he will." He turned back to watching the screen and shook his head. "Someone, somewhere, will fuck with that man real good. I wouldn't want to be him."
"My boss?"
"No, him." He raised his chin toward the screen, which was still showing the carnage in high-contrast with "The Cardinal" splashed in red letters. A contact number blinked below the name. It'd be easy to walk across the street, punch the numbers in the relay and wait for security to show up. But she wouldn't be like Dante. She wouldn't say one thing and do the other. She couldn't believe she'd fallen for his audacious plan for revenge, that he didn't have anything against regular folks, only the Grid. Screw that. He was just like every other thug out there who wanted to hurt people, period. No big lofty ideal behind Dante's actions. Petty malice like the worst of them.
Steel averted her gaze from the screen. She couldn't watch the man with whom she'd shared something so special as he killed a bunch of innocents. He deserved to have someone punch that number and rat him out. It wouldn't be her, but someone out there would do it.
"I hope he rots in jail," she snarled, shocked at the venom in her tone. He hadn't done anything to her. Except betray her trust. Ha. The one time she actually believed in someone. That'd teach her.
"Here, for that nice bag."
She quickly counted the strips of plastic the man proffered under the table, even paid for her tea using one of them to see if they worked. They did. The man smiled, grabbed the bag from the gaping opening in the backpack and left without another word.
Feeling sullied and angry---mostly at herself for falling for such a bald-faced lie---Steel made her way back home. This time, she took the sky metro since she wasn't worried her backpack would draw attention. She wasn't dressed like someone who had three thousand credits in her pockets.
As she waited for the lift to take her down to the ground level, Steel spotted a comms relay, brand new, glistening out of the grungy wall. She approached the relay, looked at the keypad and its glowing number. Just five digits, a number easy to remember. Her fingers tingled.
The five digits flashed in her mind. If he didn't follow his principles and lied through his teeth, why couldn't she?
Dante placed the cup of tea on the counter. The red of his garment clashed against his pallor. Veins showed through the skin. He checked his guns again, the pair clasped to a harness around his torso and the smaller gun in the holster strapped to his forearm. Another sortie was due, one near the good side of town. A brand-new implanting clinic had opened its doors, and Dante intended to shut them permanently. The bag at his feet would make sure of this. Enough explosive to level the building.
Across from him in the kitchen, an empty stool marked the place where Steel had sat only hours before. He had never felt solitude as acutely as he did now. No smell of vinyl stirred the air, no sound of boot heels dragging on the terrazzo. No bleached-blonde head bobbed into view, scowl firmly in place on the pointed face and slender arms crossed defensively. She had occupied his home and his life for barely a day yet he felt her still, like a ghost. A surly one.
He wondered if...
No, he would not follow that chain of thought.
Steel would not come back. It was not her style. No more than looking back over her shoulder. He had hated himself for it but had nonetheless waited to see if she would turn and look up. She had not. Dante smiled. She was stronger than he was. By a long measure.
A hiss pulled him out of his musings. Then a metallic clang. Pulse rockets.
Dante only had time to dive below counter level before an explosion tore through the kitchen. Broken plaster and bricks went flying. Something burning hot landed on his leg. He pulled off the bit of molten metal, cutting his fingers in the process. He crawled to his bag and pulled it to him. Voices from outside the walls called commands and orders while the wail of hovercraft grew in intensity. Another explosion rocked the very foundation of his home. Loud, grinding noises heralded a mechanical saw the size of a shuttle cutting into the steel structure. Dante did not wait to see if it could slice through the I-beams. He floundered to his feet, bag in one hand, and rushed into the partly demolished corridor leading to the observatory. Jumping off the roof would prove dangerous, but better than becoming trapped like a rat in his own home.
Devastation followed him. Metal claws dug into the ceiling and ripped it off its support structure. Large chunks of concrete fell into the void the machine had just created. Footsteps resounded from ahead. Tiny red lights zigzagged against the wall. Dante sent his mind outward like a bullet. Wails of pain erupted amidst the machine noise. He did not relent. Like a dorsal fin cutting the water, he rushed forward among the security responders, running almost too fast for them to see. His muscles burned with the effort. Something gave in his ankle, but for the adrenaline, Dante only faintly felt the pull. Some parts of his body had suffered worse alterations than others, his joints being his weakest points.
"Hostile unit," boomed a voice too perfect to be human. "Surrender. Surrender. Surrender."
The call went on in a continuous loop, interspersed with arrhythmic, pumping music that served to confuse and overwhelm the target. Dante had seen it all before. It had never worked on him. Only one thing did---electricity. Fortunately, only the good doctors of the Grid's human-vault program knew about the flaw. They had sought to make him a maximum-security vault, but had instead turned him into a human weapon capable of killing with a simple thought. Not long before he fled the insanity of the Grid's laboratories, he had overheard one of the doctors, the kindly looking older man Dr. Sharpe, mention the potential of others like him. Armies of him. Biodegradable, disposable weapons. So far, Dante had seen or heard no sign of that.
Some of the responders were more resilient to his mental attack and opened fire. Bullets grazed him. One ricocheted off the wall and pierced his upper arm. Snarling, he pulled both guns out and let the charges fly. Blue pulses cut a clear swath right down to the end of the corridor. Running still, Dante kicked the metal door open. A rainstorm raged outside, lashing buildings with ropes of water. Discharging his gun in twin streams, Dante jumped up the observatory's indoor staircase. Its spiral armature shook and rattled when he landed. Security responders followed him into the circular room. Plaster and concrete flew in large chunks. A pair of hovercraft thundered down near the empty dome and opened fire. Small eruptions followed Dante's ascent barely a few centimeters behind his heels.
To his frustration, a red light in a wide semicircle swept the area. A scan. He could almost feel his body being gauged, weighed, measured and parsed into numbers the Grid could assimilate. As abruptly as it had begun, the music stopped.
"Specimen MS-070125, surrender to security units and prepare for processing." The Grid's unmistakable voice froze the blood in Dante's veins. Not male or female, young or old. Just...universal, eternal. How he loathed that voice. How had it known it was him? He had been a child the last time it scanned him, but then again, the thing had access to every age-progression algorithm there ever was since the inception of the old internet centuries earlier.
Dante sent another few pulses plus a mental barrage at the men spilling into the observatory. Above his head, the partly demolished roof offered a perfect view of the surroundings. Between the hovercraft, an unoccupied sliver would prove his best chances of jumping to safety. He snarled in pain when a bullet hit the sole of his boot, and returned fire. His mental attacks were leaving him dizzy and nauseated, but he had enough still in him to make it to safety. Then he would do something he should have done years before. End it all.
Up another level he climbed. One of his guns fired its last charge then hissed impotently. He threw it down. Hopefully it would hit a responder in the head. While keeping his focus on not missing one of the rickety, wrought-iron steps, Dante sent another deadly barrage, forcing his consciousness to its maximum. A headache pounded with the ferocity of a jackhammer. It made him dizzy, but he pushed on.
His mental attack shredded his enemy's willpower. Back when he had been little more than a lab rat, no one had withstood the barbed intrusions into their mind. They did not now. The slicing and crushing of their minds, the physical consequences, they could not stop any of it. Every person had a unique set of neural waves. He had been trained to isolate those, pluck them, agitate them until the body, unable to recognize its own impulses, attacked itself like a fast-acting, brain-hemorrhaging virus. It was undoubtedly a horrendous death. He had not been trained to care, something he had learned and developed on his own, when he had the choice not to be a monster. Unlike then, Dante never prolonged his victims' pain. His last pulse silenced the remaining security responders, who collapsed and lay still. A timely victory because his last gun had just fired its very last charge. He dropped that one too.
Dante reached the top landing and leaped the ten-meter divide between the final step and the highest part of the observatory's domed roof. He landed running. Rain mixed with snow and wind pelted and whipped him, turning his crimson garment into a felt flag. Beyond the glistening underbellies of the hovercraft, the sliver of freedom shrank by the second.
He would have to start over. Again. Dante leaped.
Speed and height made air whistle in his ears. His cloak flapped like wings. The sting of freezing snow bombarded what portions of skin were exposed. He soared, high, higher than he had ever jumped before---the landing would probably break both his legs---but he would crawl to safety. As he had once done. He was used to it by now.
From the corner of his eye, he saw blue lightning strike the portion of dome he had occupied a second before. Teasingly close to his apogee, the whip of light touched him, almost gently, as would a kiss from a static-charged angel. Blinding radiance. Sense-numbing energy.
A snarl tore from him. Intense burn then numbness. He plummeted to the ground, hit once in a sickening crack, rebounded once, twice, a third time to roll to a stop a mere step from the alley at which he had aimed.
Agony lanced up his legs and back, along his neck. Dante somehow managed to flop onto his back. Rain congealed into icy pellets, which landed on his face, in his eyes, but he could not blink. The drops reminded him of Steel's piercings. Tiny silvery tears. He wondered why she had betrayed him, even if intellectually he had suspected she would. Necessity, desperation. The Grid had turned man against man.
Dante smiled when he tasted blood. He would not survive this time. His only regret was not to have seen her again. He would have liked knowing her better, the fiercely guarded loner.
He realized with shock that even though he could feel his back and the cold wet of the pavement through his felt cloak, he could not detect the old familiar pain of his infected data port. Steel had rid him of the ache, his constant companion of the last several years. Perhaps the woman had taken his pain along with his virginity. Such wasted potential, such poignantly bad timing on the eve of his downfall. A busy night indeed.
Above him, one of the hovercraft lowered to a few meters from him, which created vortices of wind and ice pellets. A bright blue light, circular and striated like a giant iris, gaped in its underbelly.
"Unit number MS-070125, prepare for processing."
Dante gurgled blood when he chuckled. "N-not...this..." His voice failed. Consciousness slipped beyond the precipice. Not this time.
Steel couldn't go back home because Dante had compromised her security system. She couldn't stay outdoors and just roam as she usually did---moving targets were harder to hit, everyone knew that---because of the rain. So instead of sitting on her hands and fuming against Dante, that hypocritical, lying bastard, she showed up at Leech's place. More like a lair, dug as it was underneath an old underground train station. A trio of thugs reeking of adrenaline boosters stood surly guard but let her pass as soon as she pulled her hood back from her face. One of them nodded. She replied in kind. As eloquent an exchange as any she'd shared with them.
The interior resembled in no point the humble exterior to Leech's place. Real marble and actual plants. Live plants. The only place she'd ever seen any. She brushed a tentative finger against one of the long, tongue-shaped leaves as she crossed the entrance hall and made her way to his private chambers. He'd given her a pass the last time she'd been here and must have told his gang she was allowed since she met no one. When she emerged into the plush chambers, after a quick knock with the tip of her boot, she found Leech in his bathtub, surprisingly alone. No pet girl rubbing oil on his tattooed back or braiding his hair.
"My contact tells me you're a joy to work with."
Steel shrugged. She still hadn't found a good place to stash her credits and hated walking around with three thousand in her pockets. It made her bitchy. Bitchier.
Leech smiled, showing perfect teeth in a face that had undergone several enhancements. Full lips carved to perfection, pointy ears and snake-like eyes complete with elongated pupils. "When did you see Six last?"
Her first reaction was to lie. But not to Leech. No one lied to that one.
"A couple of days ago. He cornered me in the metro."
"What do you know about him?"
"He's an asshole."
"Besides that."
"I didn't get much chance to know more than that."
"Would he flip, if properly motivated?" Leech asked.
Steel snorted a laugh. "He hates the system. I doubt he'd turn to working for them."
Why the fuck was he asking about Six and his loyalties? She didn't like the way the conversation was headed. At all.
Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, Leech stood from the mountain of foam, clusters of bubbles sliding down his powerful body, and approached. He left behind wet---huge---footprints on the spotless marble floor. Steel had to consciously force herself to ignore the flight instinct to run from the big, dangerous man. Run hard and fast and never look back.
"Then how do you explain him posing as someone else and blowing up a building that had no value to his boss?"
"He doesn't have the brains to blow up..." An image flashed in Steel's mind. The building exploding, the figure in red rushing out just as a press bot flew by and captured the footage.
"Ah, I see it means something to you. Would you care to enlighten me?" Leech asked gently. He never raised his voice. He didn't need to.
Steel nervously shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. Could it have been...? Who had she seen running out of that building, Dante or Six?
"Six," she began, unsure just how much truth she should share. "When he got me in the metro, there was this man. He helped me get away."
"A man in a red cloak, one who they call the Cardinal and who has a price on his head? That one?"
She let the mocking barb pass. "I'd never heard of him."
"He's all over the news. The Grid wants him. Badly."
Steel cursed. "Six blew up the building to make it look like Dante did it."
"Dante, hmm?" Leech's derisive grin rounded one of his perfect cheeks. "Never underestimate the power of a man's bruised ego or the depth of his thirst for revenge."
She'd never, ever let a big one slip like this. Leech now knew Dante's name. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn't think, couldn't focus, not with the building exploding over and over again in her head while Dante---no, Six---ran out. All because Dante had kicked his ass in the metro. She should have killed the brute in his sleep back when she'd had the chance.
Dante hadn't done that horrible thing. He hadn't lied, wasn't the hypocritical bastard she'd thought. She brightened considerably. She'd go to him. She'd rebuild that bridge, that connection. She'd wanted to stay anyway, well, part of her had. Plus, his house was the perfect place to stash her credits.
"I don't know what this Dante character meant to you, but you should hurry because according to the newscast, they found him."
She froze. Steel's elation turned to horror and abject fear. The words landed like bricks. "They're there now?"
"They were an hour or so ago. I find it eminently funny that the Cardinal hid right under their noses all that time. If they hadn't found him first, I would have enjoyed having a drink with the man." Leech's dark eyes narrowed dangerously. "So, about our problem with Six."
Horror and fear gave way to white-hot rage. That bastard. "Do you have guns?"
"I do."
"How much for one?"
Leech wiped the remaining ribbons of soap from his massive shoulders, which made muscles ripple and twitch on his chest. "Six has outlived his amusement value. His boss should have taken care of him a long time ago. So, because you offer to clean up a mess that has the potential to splatter me and fuck with my territory, I'll give you what you need. Free."
Steel fought to relax her shoulders, but the thought of Dante's home being raided kept replaying over and over like a mad carousel. "Nothing's ever free, Leech."
His teeth flashed against his dark skin. "Sometimes they are. But not often, I agree. You may not keep it, of course. When you're done, I want it back."
Frustration and regret made a shaking mess of her. Rage, anger, disappointment, guilt. A lot of that. She should have stayed. She would have seen them coming. She...
Six shouldn't have fucked with Dante.
For the first time in her life, Steel was going to stick her neck out for someone. Dante had done it for her, even trusting her with his ID and location, knowing she could lead them right back to him. Yet he'd trusted her. No one ever had. Maybe he even thought she was the one who had given him away.
Leech disappeared behind a frosted glass panel. His home was the most luxurious place she'd ever seen. Real glass mirrors, furniture made of actual wood, rugs made by hands and not machines, and an aquarium filled with lifelike fish. Maybe they were real. He emerged wearing a shimmering robe open wide. In his massive hand gleamed a silvery gun.
"The safety is here." He thumbed the small lever. "You have about two hundred shots. Don't get it wet, don't get blood on it, and charge it before you give it back to me."
She took the gun. Much lighter than she would have expected. She slipped it into her backpack, now empty of her run. She turned and grabbed the handle. Her emotions rioted, battling between hope and despair. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because you didn't bitch when my contact screwed you out of your fair share. I loathe whiners and thieves most of all. You're neither."
How had he known about his contact keeping some of her credits? However he had gained his information, she didn't have the time to sit around and ponder the meaning of things. She had something important to do. Someone needed her help.
Heartbeat.
Weak. Faint. Arrhythmic.
A machine bleeped demandingly then sounded in a long, uninterrupted chime.
Touching, prodding, cold things and a sharp poke in the side. Stimuli reception doubled, tripled. Smells and sounds---human and machine---reached him. He opened his eyes and remembered. Everything. Too much. Dante heard the voice that had accompanied his nightmares for as long as he could remember.
"Unit number MS-070125 is awake and conscious. Proceed."
Freezing rain greeted Steel as she rushed out of Leech's home. As if they knew what she intended to do---not that she was sure herself---the thugs nodded to her with grim determination, making their rough faces even more brutish. Despite the slick pavement, Steel began to run. She couldn't help it. Nerves made her hypersensitive and jumpy. Everyone looked suspicious. That woman sitting on the sidewalk, staring at Steel with hard eyes. Or that pair of young men walking on the same side of the street as her.
She chose to remain in the relative safety of large, crowded streets. Merchants called to her with their stupid slogans and crappy wares, all of it shit barely holding together. After she had crossed a wide boulevard that once bore a row of majestic trees now reduced to calcified stumps, Steel spotted a column of smoke rising from a spot near the foot of the mount. Her heart sank. Damn him, Six had fucked with her for the last time. When she got her hands on him... She didn't know exactly what she'd do to him, but she had a pulse gun and she was going to use it. No cynicism, no turning the other way because it wasn't any of her business. Not this time. This time, she cared.
Streets became sparse of people then deserted altogether. Steel was sprinting by the time she cleared the old park, jumping over the broken benches lining the edge. She was running up the exact same street she'd walked down not that long ago. She should have looked back. Had he been there, up at his window? Had he cared enough for that? Had he cared period?
Smoke rose in twin columns, one from the main building and one from the ruined observatory, which she could see above the rooftop.
"Shit," she snarled. Steam from her breath rose in the freezing rain. The distant sound of hovercraft made her follow the broken brick wall as she approached the stone porch. No hum from an electricity field, no faint glow emanating from the metal parts. Steel stopped to pull out Leech's pricey gun. With hands that shook only out of anger---fear was gone---she crept forward.
Rain turned to snow. Tiny crystalline flakes stuck to her sleeves. She slowly pushed in one of the doors and peeked inside. Not as much damage as she would have feared. It didn't mean Dante was all right though. She padded inside the foyer, swept side to side with the gun. Scanned the hall leading to the kitchen. Nothing but rubble. Remnants from explosions. Dust and particles still floated down. She was just minutes late, an hour or two at most. Where was he?
She passed by the kitchen and turned into a corridor she remembered well. She'd stumbled upon Dante, just out of the shower, trying to patch his infected data port. And what had happened afterward, sex without strings attached, without expectations or some sick reward and punishment scheme. She'd been his first. How special was that. But now it was all gone. She gritted her teeth.
A sound caught her ears. Clattering, things landing and breaking. Heart pounding fast, she rushed to the lavatory. He must have been wounded, must have been trying to find bandages or meds. Maybe he was bleeding all over the place. She was there now, she had a gun, she'd make it work. Steel finally reached the doorway. She froze there.
Bits of broken porcelain lavabos littered the floor, as did shards of mirror. Water dripped from busted showerheads in the ceiling. A man stood in the middle of the room, examining something he held in his hands. All so déjà vu. She would have recognized that silhouette anywhere.
Six whirled around, knife in hand, looking shocked and mightily pissed. She'd feared that knife, so quickly drawn and viciously sharp. Not this time.
"Sugar cunt, you startled me." He grinned that crooked smile she hated.
The smiling face of Dr. Sharpe occupied the whole of Dante's field of vision when the old man bent over the gurney. His hand felt cold when he placed it on Dante's chest, over the scar he had created years earlier. Dante's synthetic heart beat hard and fast. Perhaps it recognized its maker.
"Welcome back. Although you never really left, did you? You were in this sector the entire time." Dr. Sharpe had never spoken to him directly before.
Dante only stared, not wanting to give the incisive man any traction. Whatever he said would be recorded, dissected, analyzed and ultimately used against him. Plus, one of the lab's security cameras buzzed around them like a tiny metallic carrion, which meant the Grid was plugged into the room and also waited to hear what Dante had to say. They would be sorely disappointed because he had no intention of giving them anything. Not voluntarily, anyway.
Sharpe momentarily glanced over his shoulder then set his pale eyes on Dante once more. "None of the others have your potential for retention, Your Eminence," he began, smiling.
Dante let the barb about his nickname pass. What did he care?
Sharpe's eyes grew serious. "When you left, you took something of mine with you. I have been unable to replicate it."
Did Sharpe mean his synthetic heart? Dante could not understand why they would be unable to replicate one when he, himself, had been fitted and refitted a few times until they found one that worked.
"Not this." Sharpe tapped his gnarled index finger on Dante's chest. "I created much superior versions since your departure, ones that electricity does not hinder. No, I was referring to what is here."
Dante refused to blink when the man pressed his index finger between Dante's eyes. "What is here is unique and to this day unmatched by those like you."
"Those like me?" He cursed inwardly. There were others?
"There have been many more subjects like you, all of them flawed when it came to data retention. I was never able to reproduce the perfect neural foundations, the delicate balance of intelligence and agility, the perfect human vault. You are one of a kind. But now that you are back..." Sharpe patted Dante's shoulder and straightened. "Now that you are back, we can resume our work."
Our work. Is that what he called what had been done to Dante, to others like him? Work?
Whatever form this work would take, Dante had no intention of cooperating. Not as he used to when he did not know any better, because it was all he had ever known. He knew better now and had developed other traits and emotions they had not thought proper to instill. Such as empathy, affection. And a thirst for revenge.
He sent a single pulse at the old man's retreating back. He did not even need to focus much, only will his consciousness into a single dart. If he killed Sharpe right away, he would cut the head off this monstrous research if nothing else.
He should have seen it coming.
As soon as he focused on the attack, a jolt of electricity shot through his spine. He had not realized they had already connected him. Blue whips of light danced on his chest and arms. A grunt of pain escaped him. Sharpe did not even turn around.
While remnants of the electricity still ripped through him, he was wheeled along a corridor he remembered well, bumping the corner as usual before, feet first, he was slammed into a pair of metallic doors. The shock rattled the wires connecting him. His old wound flared. It had not hurt, or barely, since Steel had applied the gel patch. Thinking of her helped. A little.
Harsh fluorescent light blinded him for the first few seconds. The old laboratory had been updated in subtle ways, but it was still the same old room that meant pain and humiliations and horror. When the electricity finally tapered off, Dante arched so he could see where they were taking him, even if intellectually he knew.
In the middle of the room, there it was. His old nightmare.
He could not help the instinctive response. Fighting would not help, he knew, but he still did. Instead of unstrapping him from the gurney, an assistant too young to have been there during Dante's childhood retrieved a small item from one of the worktables and pointed it at a spot near the ceiling. Something clicked underneath his gurney. The next moment, he slowly rose, straps and shifter still connected securely but detached from the rest of the wheeled gurney to dangle two meters off the floor. He craned his neck and noticed a hook soldered into the contoured shifter. They had installed the hoist there. So they had changed a few things since his great escape.
And still he struggled. In his nape and spine, some of the connectors broke and tore. Blood trickled down the back of his legs. One of the straps at his legs tore. He kicked to destabilise the dangling shifter. Another jolt of electricity made him growl. A set of strange and conflicting sensations flooded him. Agony and numbness. Burn and icy cold.
Dante arched and writhed, fought with everything he had. A third charge made him howl. Below his feet, the gaping mouth of his nightmare looked ready to swallow him whole.
Six took a step toward her. Steel leveled the gun at him. "You must have been pretty good to get that away from him." He gestured at Leech's silvery weapon in her hand. "You were never that good with me."
"Shut up," she snarled through clenched teeth.
His expression turned from menacing to jovial. She knew that expression. "We could start our own gang, me and you. What do you---?"
"I don't have time for this shit." Steel pressed the trigger.
The pulse hit Six square in the chest, propelling him back against the far wall, cracking tiles and breaking mortar veins with the force of the impact. He flopped to the floor, messily dead. His expression of shock was almost comical.
Steel ran out of the lavatory. The rest of Dante's home was empty and the observatory mostly demolished. From the circular room, she saw a pair of hovercraft flying up to the bunker atop the mount, circle once, twice then disappear into a recessed landing bay. Dante. He had to be at the compound already. She'd never heard of any hovercraft, let alone two, come out of the bunker. Nothing ever came out of that place. She had to get there. But she'd waste time by running all the way up. She didn't own a shuttle, didn't know anyone who did.
An idea popped into her turbulent mind. Man, she needed a cigarette. She hadn't had one since her last night in her own home. Two days ago. More? She could hardly keep her facts straight. Everything merged, dimmed.
Steel began to run. Back outside. Across the neighborhood, into the next, higher, closer to the mount, to one of the last sky metro stations. She knew those lines like the bottom of her jacket pocket. The gun dug between her shoulder blades as she bounded up the steps to the deserted station, so she squeezed it into her waistband. No working lift here. One of the more derelict stations.
She reached the landing, lungs on fire, legs made of lead. She was actually wheezing. An old placard confirmed her idea. The station had once served as a dual stop for the sky metro and the monorail. She jumped over the turnstile and followed the quay to the very end where an iron grille barred entry to the older portion and the monorail. She squeezed through between the grille and the dirty concrete wall. She had to hurry. Dante was in shit because of her. And to think she'd believed, even for a couple of hours, that he'd do something as vile as blow that place up.
"Focus, for fuck's sake."
Wind whistled a forlorn tune inside the darkened tunnel. She followed the rail, single this time instead of a set, and reached the end of the platform. Dante had said the actual train was still docked at its last station, and he'd told the truth. There it was, dark and still, like an old-fashioned submarine, sitting on its rail with all the doors closed. Steel pulled out the gun again and cleared the place quickly. No time to waste.
Inside the conductor cabin, a large vat of blue liquid sat strapped to the seat as though it were a person. Wires connected it to the control panel. A tiny joystick and a screen were the only things that seemed to have some electricity left because they each blinked. Steel tapped the screen, which came to life. A genderless voice announced countdown activation.
"What...?"
On the screen, a series of numbers, the station name, the day's correct date, and in large black letters, a countdown. Fifteen minutes.
"Dante, man, what were you thinking?"
She could pretty much guess each stop on every line of metro in the city, and this was barely enough to reach the bunker two stations up the line. Dante must have meant to still be on the train when it blew up. Why would he do such a stupid thing? Did he want to die? But then again, he'd pretty much told her so. Well, she didn't.
She rearranged the countdown to give herself some time, figuring out after using the little joystick that the train had enough juice for one go, and turned on the ignition. A hiss and a rumble heralded the train coming back to life. A horrid smell of rotten things made her gag. She gasped when the train lurched forward.
"Don't die on me," she growled as she pushed the joystick all the way down.
Slowly at first, then with more speed, the train rolled noisily on its rail, rattling out of the station and into the night air. Rain and icy pellets hit the dirty windshield. Steel slipped the gun back in her backpack in case she needed both her hands, and was glad she had when the train picked up more speed. A lot more.
"No!" He'd sworn he would not speak to them and had already broken his vow twice.
Sharpe said something Dante could not hear above the clanging of metal against metal. He rocked violently enough to knock the shifter against the tank's edge, hoping to break it. Dots of red landed into the pinkish liquid, turned into ribbons then dissolved.
The assistant, eyes huge in her young face, lowered him farther. She stopped when Dante managed, with his one free foot, to kick hard enough to destabilise the shifter. It knocked against the tank, hard. He saw a crack, focused on that. A tiny spider web.
Sharpe tore the remote from the young woman's hand, slapped her across the face then mashed the controls. Dante dropped into the warm, viscous fluid, right up to his chest. The crack glistened in front of him. Tempting him, teasing him. Out of desperation, he hit his head against it, over and over. If he could just break it, damage the seal, the system would turn itself off until repairs were done. When yet another dose of electricity hit him, coupled with the liquid's highly conductive nature, Dante slumped against the remaining straps. The level rose above his chest when he was lowered farther. He panted frantically, took one last breath before...
No. No. NO! His chin, his mouth and nose, his eyes. Dante was completely submerged.
His first reaction was to take in a deep breath and get it over with. He remembered how it went. The regular ritual. His daily death.
His instincts took over. He held his breath as long as he could, his lungs burning, stars exploding in his squeezed-shut eyes. Spasms twisted his diaphragm. Nerve endings frantically fired impulses. He forced his eyes open. Everything came to him blurry and tinged a sick shade of orangey pink. Sharpe stood just outside the tank, waiting patiently as he had always done, his thumb rubbing the knuckle on his index finger as Dante knew he would. Unlike when he had been a child, as an adult man he now floated at the doctor's eye level.
Dante could not stop his body from reacting to the lack of oxygen. A reflexive response. He sucked in a mouthful. The fluid seared his lungs. No amount of coughing and sputtering cleared his airway. In and out. Nothing but liquid. Air was gone. Darkness irised in around the edges of his vision. His extremities grew warm then numb. Pain subsided. As he had countless times in this tank of nightmares, Dante died.
A computerized voice---for a second she feared the Grid had finally managed to tap into the old relays---announced Côte-des-Neiges station. Steel gritted her teeth. One more. The train rumbled out of this station too and shot on its rail with even more speed. Wind whistled through the open door. It was going fast.
Much too fast.
What if Dante had meant to crash into the bunker? Why hadn't she thought about that? Cursing under her breath, she rushed out of the conductor cabin and down into the narrow aisle. Above one of the doors, the emergency brake looked eons old and none too sharp. She had no choice. She was going too fast and there was no way the train would stop in time. She gripped the nearby handle and yanked on the emergency brake. The resulting screech threatened to overwhelm Steel. The brake seemed to work because instead of the gradual deceleration she'd expected, the train pitched hard, rocked left and right on its rail, rumbled and groaned and squeaked to a halt.
It took her a few seconds to get her guts back. Sweating and panting from adrenaline, Steel pried her hand from the handle and checked inside the conductor's cabin. The train had stopped all right. A good fifty meters from the last station. Fuck.
Steel scrammed and didn't wait to see if some security responder would come flying out of the bunker. Wind and rain made her grip tenuous when she squeezed out of the open door and grabbed onto the handle by the door. Flattened against the hull, she inched forward along the fuselage, gingerly, each slap of wind threatening to send her plummeting down the three hundred meters of air below her feet. She finally attained the rail and crawled along its spine to the station. Her hands and knees were raw by the time she reached the dock. Concrete replaced metal. She could have kissed it.
"Now," she murmured to herself. "Where are you?"
Dante had said security responders were mostly at the exits. All she had to do was find one.
She did minutes later after she rounded the staircase and came face to fence with the bunker. The chain link didn't reach the ground. She could fit underneath easily, and was already well on her way under when she heard footsteps. Wiggling and clawing at the wet concrete, Steel cleared the fence and jumped to her feet.
"What are you doing here?" a man demanded.
Steel froze.
"Hey, I asked you a question! And show me your hands!"
Steel slowly raised her hands in front of her. "I'm sorry, man. I-I'm lost."
"Lost? How the fuck can you be lost up here?" A gun gleamed in his hand. He drew near enough for her to see him clearly. Middle-aged, nasty-looking. Steel knew the type well.
Thinking fast, she blurted the first thing that came to her mind. "I was supposed to meet someone, to get cigarettes."
He squinted at her. The gun lowered just the slightest bit. "You a whore?"
Steel refrained from reaching into her waistband and answering him with a few well-placed shots. His gun was still aimed at her, and if she messed up, Dante would pay the price. She had to play this one cool. Go with it.
She just shrugged, avoiding his gaze.
"I have cigarettes."
"How much?"
"A blowjob."
"You're a romantic."
He chuckled. His laugh sounded greasy and sent chills down her spine. "You want those cigarettes or not?"
"I don't swallow, just so we're clear, okay?"
"Whatever. Just come here so I can see you."
Steel approached and kept her gaze on the ground separating them. He couldn't see into her eyes or he might grow suspicious of her boldness.
He retreated into a small recess where a metal door with a blinking card slot barred entry into the compound itself. He must have the key on him somewhere.
His upper lip curled when he had a good look at her from the reddish light of the card slot. "Can't ask for much more on a night like this, I guess." He kept the gun against her forehead as he indicated the ground with his chin. "You know how this works, I'm sure."
She did.
Steel got down on her knees. She knew how to do this. She'd done it often enough. To obtain, to avoid. He was already hard. Pig.
Her hands didn't shake when she pulled his penis out of his uniform, nor did her eyes close of their own volition at what she had to do. The muzzle of the gun pressed hard against the top of her skull, but she surreptitiously reached into her waistband. Her own weapon felt cold and already familiar in her hand. She focused on that and not on the cock in her mouth or the fierce instinct to bite down.
He smelled of fuel and industrial-grade sweat, tasted of worse. She kept her eyes wide open. The zipper glistened and had rust stains on a few of its hooks. She saw that too. There was a stain on the hem of his wrinkled shirt, and his belt had seen better days. The man grunted. Steel focused harder on her task. There'd be signs---there'd be a sigh and a tensing of muscles. Couldn't miss those heralds. Because this time, this time it wasn't going to end the way it usually did. This time, she was the one who'd end it.
And as soon as she recognized the first tensing of muscles, Steel gradually brought her hand up along his inner thigh, and before he could react, jammed the gun in his crotch. She shot, and at such close range, it literally lifted him off the ground. Steel was thrown back several paces. He landed in a heap like a broken doll. She didn't trust her legs yet and had to crawl on hands and knees back into the alcove where she searched the man with the tip of her gun. Leech had said not to get blood on it. Too bad.
She found the key, wanted to cry in relief, and also took his electroshock gun, just in case. There wasn't much time. She'd given herself forty-five minutes. If she didn't find Dante soon, she wouldn't have enough time to hightail it out of there. She didn't want to be anywhere near this neighborhood when Dante's little surprise blew up. She didn't know much about liquid explosives, but the size of the vat told her it'd make a really, really big boom.
She swiped the key into the slot. The door unlocked. Steel wanted to thank her lucky stars on bended knee. She squeezed inside, both guns in her hands. Nothing. Barely enough light to see a few paces in front of her. A long corridor, devoid of doors or any other features.
Because she didn't know if there were any other responders nearby---or what the hell she was getting into now---she kicked her boots off and padded on silent feet to the end of the corridor. She'd learned early to not make a sound when sneaking into someone else's territory. Only one door broke the concrete expanse of the corridor. It was made of clear thermoplastic opening out onto a room filled with screens, a dirty desk and a grubby-looking chair. Steel snuck in, sat and took a look. Another door she hadn't initially noticed led to stairs going down. Her heart beat so hard, she thought she'd gag from the strain.
Steel was reaching the concrete landing when a man rounded the corner. They both froze at each end of the empty room. Judging from his impeccable dress and age, she wouldn't be seducing her way out of this one.
"This is a restricted area, miss." A hint of accent lifted the last few words. He could have been someone's kindly old grandpa. Except for the eyes, like those of a killer.
Steel didn't wait to see if he really was one and leveled the responder's gun at him. She needed him alive. Time was slowing for no one. Already she'd lost too much of it. "Take me to him."
"Take you to whom, child?" He smiled. Only his mouth did. Those lifeless pale orbs were devoid of any warmth.
"The man you took tonight, the one who'd escaped."
His smile crystallized. "You were misinformed."
"Don't. I know he's here."
"Perhaps we can---"
Steel fired a half charge at his legs. The blue whip of light snapped at the man's thigh. He howled, lurching forward. She was there before he hit the floor, kicking him back against the wall and pinning him there with both barrels in the chest. "Take me to him. Now."
"You will not come out of here alive," he snarled.
"Maybe not, but neither will you. This place has minutes left."
He whimpered when she jabbed him, hard, in the ribs. "What do you mean?"
Steel only jammed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his side. Maybe he'd get the drift and move.
With the older man leading the way, Steel entered deeper into the bunker, turned left and right and crossed halls and landing bays, and after awhile, began to wonder if she'd be able to find her way out again. Soon, they neared a pair of thick clear doors held open by a hydraulic system that could have powered a hovercraft's tail hatch. A comms relay blinked on. Steel spotted it too late.
"Stand down. Prepare for apprehension."
A tiny bot zoomed a few meters in front of her, its little red eye scanning both the man and her. When it obviously didn't find her implant or its ID number, the thing seemed momentarily confused. She ended its puzzlement by firing Leech's gun at it. She only managed to catch one of the mechanical wings, but it still sent the thing into a tailspin.
Shoving the man in front of her, Steel finished the thing with another shot that made a small crater where the robot used to be. Soon there'd be another then another. Just as she was about to check behind her for pursuers, an alarm wailed rhythmically.
She had to yell to be heard. "Hurry!"
The old man took her through a giant doorway that widened into a circular room filled with screens and all sorts of machines.
"Where is he?"
He must have heard the panic in her voice because he smiled disdainfully. "There." He pointed behind her.
She whirled around to see a series of glass panels. Beyond, a room brightly lit in fluorescents. A gurney had been set by the wall, and countless pieces of expensive-looking medical gear littered a white table. In fact, everything was white. Except for one thing. In the middle of the room stood a sort of upright tube of glass filled with what looked like liquid. A sort of tank. In it was a naked man connected by half a dozen wires down his back. Dante.
Her stomach twisted painfully. She feared being sick right then and there. Her eyes welled. She glanced sideways at the old man. "You did this?"
"I did."
"Is he alive in there?"
The old man sucked his teeth. "Of course he is. This specimen is my greatest accomplishment, a scientific triumph."
"He's not a specimen," Steel retorted. "He's a person."
"Biologically, perhaps, but he is so much more." The demented old jerk seemed proud. Proud!
Anger bubbled up. To see Dante stuck in a tank like some thing on a collector's shelf. She was barely conscious of her actions amidst the deafening siren. Leech's gun in her hand, the subtle kickback of the twin shots she fired, the smell of charred flesh, the life seeping out of the man's eyes. She searched him, finding another key. This one opened the lab. Steel approached the tank, right up to Dante's face. His eyes were closed. She couldn't fire at the thing for fear of harming him.
She grabbed one of the medical implements, the largest she could find, and tapped on the glass gently, to see if she could wake him. Dante's eyes fluttered, but he didn't open them. Voices rose behind her. She had to act. A small crack near the tank lid was perfect. She brought the metal tool high above her head, aimed for the tiny flaw and struck.
A tiny sound reminded her of pebbles landing on concrete. The glass turned foggy. She didn't have time to get out of the way. The tank disintegrated, disgorging its foul-smelling liquid. As best she could, Steel grabbed Date's inert form and more or less guided him to the floor. He looked so pale. Machines inside the room beeped demandingly. She didn't know what else to do so she unplugged him, gently pulling out each cable from the data ports along his spine. When the last wire was out of him, he stirred slightly and opened his eyes.
"Dante," she snarled urgently. Security was bound to arrive any second now. "Dante, can you walk? We have to get out of here."
"What are you doing?"
Steel turned to find a young woman standing, slack-jawed, in the doorway. The bottle of water on the tray she held shook.
"We're getting out of here, okay? If you try to stop me, I'll shoot you too."
The young woman backpedaled as Steel, Dante's arm around her shoulders, floundered to her feet and out of the room.
"This way!" the young woman yelled above the alarm. She dropped the tray. Steel barely heard the clatter.
She didn't have any choice but to follow the young woman. They shuffled down the rest of the corridor. A landing bay with rock walls instead of bricks gaped beyond a rusted hatch.
"We can get out through there." The young woman tore her white lab coat off.
"Put it on him," Steel yelled. Shit, that alarm would make her deaf. "Hurry, this place is going to blow up."
Shock---and relief---washed over the woman's countenance. Steel noticed a dark bruise over her nose. She helped drape the too-small lab coat on Dante's shoulders and buttoned only one button in the middle so the thing wouldn't fly off.
A cold wind that cut at the ankles greeted them as they spilled into the landing bay. No craft waited. Shit.
"Come! This way!"
Steel followed the young woman. Dante was getting really heavy. She huffed and puffed. He walked, but barely. The sound of guns preceded small eruptions in the rock wall by Steel's elbow. She managed to aim more or less back and let it rip. Leech's gun was warm by the time she took her finger off the trigger. Returning gunshot announced she hadn't been one hundred percent in her aim.
The three rushed along the wall, down the gentle slope, and finally made it out of the landing bay. Icy rain still fell like tiny razorblades. She recognized the area where she'd snuck in earlier, but one story above. Narrow stairs hewn into the rock proper nearly stopped her heart as Dante and she slowly climbed down to ground level. Behind them, voices and guns made sure to keep her on her toes.
Steel checked above their heads. Glistening like a giant black snake in the sky, the monorail was still there, shrouded in shadows, waiting to blow them all to hell. They had to get far away from there. And quickly.
"You see that thing above us, the old monorail?"
The young woman craned her neck then nodded.
"It's going to explode in a few minutes. So you better find us a way to get down fast."
"My shuttle, it's down there with those of other employees."
It didn't even cross Steel's mind to distrust her benefactor. She didn't have time, first of all, and Dante hung on to her looking like shit and probably cold to the bones. She couldn't afford to be distrustful. But it did occur to her she'd killed three people that night. She expected remorse, guilt, shame. After all, it was her fault. Six had outed Dante because of her. Nothing came. Only wariness beyond words. She just wanted out of there.
Like a cross between a bottle cap and a turtle, the shuttle turned out to be tiny, rusty and the best thing she'd ever seen. Steel pushed Dante onto the passenger seat, squeezed in herself and waited with both guns out of the chipped window as the young woman powered the engine and lifted off. Just as they veered southward, Steel spotted security responders spilling out of the landing bay's giant door. Her gut reaction was to squeeze both triggers and never let go, but she didn't because she feared they'd see the shuttle's ID by the muzzle flash of her guns. Not out of wholly altruistic motives either. If they found the young woman, she might give Steel up, or pass on her description or whatever. She couldn't risk that. She had to play smart.
"Where do you want to go?" The young woman sat hunched over the controls. Steel spotted tears running down her cheeks. She sniffled but didn't seem sorry to leave.
"You know that place down at the foot of the mount, where there used to be a park and big trees? There."
A nod confirmed her pilot knew of the spot. It was close enough to Dante's home without giving away its exact location.
The short flight proved a bumpy, zigzag-filled affair. The woman couldn't pilot shit, but she was smart enough to zoom right up to the newer layer of city overhead and get lost in the heavy, chaotic flow of other shuttles and every other kind of flying craft out there. When they had flown close enough to where Steel wanted to land, she nudged her pilot and pointed down with her gun. Horns blared as their tiny shuttle dropped from the official corridors, dipping to the right to circle into a heart-pumping descent. The woman landed---more like semi-crashed---her shuttle in the middle of the park Steel had indicated. Steel jumped out and reached to grab Dante but stopped. She pulled the gun she'd taken from the man at the security fence and placed it on the passenger seat.
"Here," she said to her impromptu pilot. "Something tells me you'll need that."
Tears flowed down the woman's face. "Tell him, if, you know, when he wakes, tell him I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. It wasn't what I'd signed up for, okay?" She looked down at the inside of her wrist. "I'll have to find someone to take it out now."
"By the bridge, there's a cookshop." Steel checked left and right. "They'll remove your implant for about four hundred credits."
She pulled Dante out of the shuttle and didn't turn to watch as the craft lifted off then sped south in the direction of the older part of town and the bridge. Steel hadn't asked the woman's name, hadn't given hers. She didn't care about anything else right now. Only him. She had to get him indoors, get him warmed, fed, cleaned up from this awful goop from the tank.
"You'll be fine, Dante, okay?"
He turned vacant eyes to her before letting his head loll on his chest once more. By the time she reached his old home and dropped him as carefully as she could on his bed---which was covered in debris from the explosion but better than nothing---Steel was ready to collapse herself.
Just as she was about to take a break, a low rumble preceded a tremor that shook the entire building. The monorail. She should go outside and watch the light show, if only to make sure the explosion had reached the bunker or if, because she'd stopped the train a little bit before the station, she'd messed everything up. With any luck, if the explosion hadn't taken care of the bunker proper, the resulting rain of train and rail bits would temporarily take care of things. But she wasn't about to leave his side to go check.
"Screw them." Her own voice shocked her. Low and not much more than a rumble.
Another explosion made the floor quiver. This one felt much more powerful. Dust floated down from the cracked ceiling. Things rattled inside his dresser. A series of muffled thumps indicated stuff was falling all around her in other rooms. She didn't dare leave him to go investigate. Later, maybe, after she'd taken care of him, later she'd go check.
For once in her life, someone needed her and she'd be there for him. She'd be there for Dante. Steel lay on top of him with her arms crossed over his face to protect him from falling rubble. His heat seeped through her clothes, warming her skin. Everything shook. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited. For the end or for the beginning of something new, Steel didn't know.
How had he ended up in this dark alley? Dante remembered nothing. Overhead, shuttles and hovercraft flew by, heat vortices distorting the air. Snow fell in lazy, fat flakes. He had never seen such white snow. Some landed on his hand when he brought it palm up. The white color reminded him of something. Someone. A tiny buzzing sound caught his attention. He turned just in time to spot an insect, long and slender, hovering not far behind him. How could the thing fly in this weather? How could it live? This, too, brought memories to the surface. The more he sought to grasp the images in his mind, the quicker they faded.
He approached the insect. A dragonfly. As soon as he drew near, it took off, zigzagged, swerved up over him and flew deeper into the dark alley. He did not know why, but he followed it. He had to, somehow. Its long wings created a soothing rustle. Snow parted in front of it, as if to make room, and Dante found he had to quicken his pace to keep up.
"Wait." His voice sounded flat, lifeless, as though the word fell to the ground before it had a chance to fly. He cleared his throat. "Wait."
It did not.
He followed it down the alley, which was rank-smelling and filled with detritus he could not identify---nor did he want to---and across a deserted street, along a park he thought he remembered. Tree stumps, calcified by pollution and old age, resembled broken teeth. The dragonfly slalomed between trunks. Dante had to run after it to catch up. He could not lose it.
"Please! Wait!"
He must have run for hours, or what seemed like it. An old bridge, its metal framework twisted and bent, rose in front of him with the ruined splendor of a defeated titan. Dante had to go by sound because he had lost sight of the insect.
There! He spotted it several paces ahead when it flew around a rusted pillar and created a contrast with its black body. Dante took off after it. To his shock, the bridge ended abruptly right over the river, still and menacing, three hundred meters below his feet. He had not realized he had reached the middle. Things did not add up. Dante turned toward the city. Maybe to remind him it was still there, the dragonfly zoomed in front of his face, almost touching his cheek.
"I don't know what you want."
It hovered for a moment before flying backward, slowly, as if on a purpose only it knew. Dante took a few steps closer to the edge. Wind whistled between metal I-beams. Groans alerted his senses. He should get off this dangerous bridge, it could collapse any second. But still the dragonfly backed, farther from him, and stopped over the void. Did it want him to...?
Dante's feet were a step away from the brink. The insect zoomed to him, then again slowly backed away.
Obviously, he had a choice to make. Turn his back on the strange dragonfly and its mysterious dance or follow it. Over the edge. And why did it remind him of something so strongly? Of someone. It made no sense.
He turned his back to the void, had taken a few steps, when the insect caught up with him, buzzing close enough to actually touch him with a graze of its slender wings. When it did, a tiny spark of electricity arced from the dragonfly to him. Energy raced through him as though he had received a charge from an electroshock weapon. Images flashed in his mind, ghost sounds filling his ears, his hands tingling with sensations that could not exist without contact and yet did anyway. He knew. He understood, and more importantly, he remembered. Everything.
When the dragonfly backed to the edge again, Dante followed it without hesitation. One step took him to the edge of the bridge's demolished deck. The next brought his body forward with the start of the long fall that awaited him. He let himself go.
Air whistled in his ears. Snow billowed in crazy swirls. The river spun round and round as he plummeted. Through it all, the insect stayed close to his head. Dante closed his eyes and waited for the water to swallow him.
His body jolted, like one waking suddenly from a dream. He opened his eyes. Around him, a room he remembered. His own in the abandoned university. It was different, with obvious repairs and patches of mismatched paint. His furniture had been placed to hide the larger holes in the walls. He lay in bed with a blanket he did not remember neatly tucked around him. By his side, a young woman covered in piercings and tattoos read aloud from an ages-old book he knew well, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.
She sat cross-legged on a pouffy chair that had seen better days, and commented on the fly about one of the main characters' many flaws and how she would have gotten rid of him "because obviously he could not use that sword-thing whatever it was called." A tattoo of a large dragonfly graced her slender arm. The old book looked so incongruous in the hand of a young woman clad in black from head to toe and with white hair that stood up in some places, as though a dark sun followed her like a halo yet not really warm or life-giving. Quite the contrary. Misery had pared her down to a fine edge, ready to cut at the slightest contact. He wondered what had made her this way, or if she had been born angry.
Dante smiled. He remembered the young woman, also remembered that he loved her.
After she rolled her eyes, Steel threw him a glance as if to ask for his opinion about this "completely implausible character." When she saw him looking back at her, she snapped from the chair so fast she almost tripped.
"Dante?"
"That would be me." He coughed. His throat felt tight and raw.
She rushed to his side and sat on the edge of the mattress. "You're awake. I thought you'd never..." A smile pulled her mouth wide. He could not remember seeing her smile that way. Lovely. The grin disappeared right away, as if she had forgotten herself. "Man, you scared me. When I got you out of that place, you were... It was bad, Dante."
Dr. Sharpe. The Grid. The tank. He struggled to sit, but she would have none of it and pressed him back into the mattress. "How did you find me?"
Another smile, this one not as nice. "I figured it out after Six made it look like you'd burned that place down, the mission. I snuck in."
"You could have been killed."
"I wasn't going to leave you there. Plus, Six messing with you was partly my fault. I clean up after myself, okay? Always have."
Dante squeezed her hand, and, after a moment, she returned the gesture. "Is the compound destroyed? What happened?"
"You could say that. There's a big hole where the bunker used to be. The Grid is still on though, but there's more and more people getting their ID implants removed."
Dante ran a hand over his face. The stubble surprised him. "How long was I unconscious?"
Steel's eyes unexpectedly welled. She fussed with the blanket, tucking it tight under his arm. "A long time, Dante."
"How long?"
"Seven months, two weeks, one day. Give or take." She tried for a valiant smile.
Seven months? And she had taken care of him all that time, bathed him, fed him, shaved him? Where had she found the credits for food and the things he saw in the room? How dangerous and lonely and despairing it must have been to watch over a comatose patient.
"I want to see for myself." He sat, and this time she did not try to stop him. He had to see. He had to make sure. "Please, help me see for myself."
"Sure."
She helped him get up from the bed. His knees creaked painfully, his neck ached as though someone had it in a vise grip and his feet felt swollen and sore. But the old, familiar pain from the data ports in his spine was gone. He rubbed at the formerly tender spot in his nape. Nothing. No metal disc and those vicious little claws digging in his flesh.
"I took care of those," she muttered without meeting his gaze. "They're all gone."
Dante wanted to hug her and never let go. They made their silent way to the old observatory, or what he thought would be the observatory but turned out instead to be a circular, interior courtyard. The roof was gone, most of the rubble cleared, but some still remained piled high against the brick wall. So much work for one person. He squeezed her hand and brought it to his lips for a tender kiss.
"There." She stood back from him and shoved her hands in the pockets of her pants. Back to her guarded self. He would remedy that. He owed her so much.
Dante took a deep breath and looked at the home of his youth. Above the roofs to the north, what had once been an urban mountain with a compound oftentimes referred to as a bunker was now a jagged plateau. He could see right over it at the rest of the city beyond. Shuttles and larger crafts flew low over it, something they never would have been able---or allowed---to do before. He turned back to Steel and extended his hand to her. Shoulders looking tight and drawn, she approached, cautiously, as if she expected something bad to happen.
Dante took her hand out of her pocket and held it in both of his. Raising her chin so she would meet his gaze, he rested his forehead against hers. What could he say to express his gratitude, for saving him, for destroying the monstrous place of nightmares, for taking care of him after it was all done when it would have been easy---and understandable---to leave him? How could he ever thank her properly?
"Thank you," he whispered.
A brusque shrug answered him. He smiled, tilted his head slightly and pressed his mouth to hers. Steel parted her lips, returning the kiss. Dante wrapped his arms around her slender frame and squeezed as hard as he dared. She fit so nicely against him. Perfect fit.
"I fixed your showerhead too," she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
"You have fixed many things in my life, Steel. I will never be able to thank you enough."
"I'm sure we can find a way." Her shoulders quivered. Was the hardened, bristly young woman laughing?
He would love to see this. In fact, he would love to know everything about her.
About the Author
Nat Gray used to spend inordinate periods of time camping out with five hundred men, walking when she would have preferred driving, and jumping off high places with half her weight in gear attached to various parts of her body. After twelve years in the Canadian military, Nat decided to recycle all her skills and became a writer. Seriously. After many awards, including the 2007 Romantic Times award for best futuristic, Nat is well on her way to her ultimate goal---world domination.
You can browse her books or follow her on her many travels at www.nathaliegray.com.
Look for these titles by Nathalie Gray
Now Available:
Killing Silk
Metal Reign
Armed and dangerous...
Zero Factor
© 2011 Stacy Gail
A Cybershock Story
Born a psionic---a rare human prized by the government for her gifts---agridome worker Via Brede lives by two simple rules: slip into stealth mode whenever the cybernetic-enhanced militia is near. And never remove the gloves that block her psychic ability.
During a routine delivery, a tear in her glove connects her with what should be her worst nightmare. A meched-out soldier with bulging muscles and a scarred face that makes her heart pound like a pneumatic drill. She also envisions his death in an attack that happens...now.
Locke's typically ho-hum mission goes sideways when the stunning, green-eyed bubble farmer plants a sensual kiss that sets fire to every one of his remaining man-nerves. He also sees her vision. His own commander is about to kill him.
He needs Via to find out why. First step is to get her to Old Las Vegas without succumbing to a raw, sexual need that burns in him like fever. Getting there will be a snap. Getting out alive---and winning her trust---might be a little tougher.
Warning: This title contains mild violence, blow-your-mind Psionic sex, buns of steel (literally) and the usual hanky-panky at a bordello. Author is not responsible for side effects, including locked-and-loaded hunks taking your dreams by force.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Zero Factor:
Via knew her life was over. If she were honest with herself, part of her had known it the moment she had left the safety of the agridome. People like her could never put themselves in a position where they would be within spitting distance of the militia, much less work hand in hand with them. To do so was akin to bathing in jet fuel, then playing with a lighter.
And yet she had gone. Like a lamb to slaughter, she had gone.
It was okay, though. As long as she could save the others, she could be at peace with what had to be done now. Not that she was some kind of freaky saint or anything. It was just that as she'd sat in the transport drowning in images of what was to come, she had reached a very basic conclusion---she would rather die than live with the knowledge that she could have done something, but didn't.
So she wasn't a saint, and she sure as hell wasn't even nodding acquaintances with that thing called bravery. If anything, she was too much of a coward to live with the guilt of surviving while everyone else got blown into unrecognizable bits.
"Via? What the hell---?"
She heard Weddo's shocked voice, but it didn't matter. What mattered was focusing on what she knew, what she saw, and pushing it with all her might into Locke. She wasn't sure if she was doing it right. Hell, she didn't even know if she was doing anything more than simply kissing a stranger and making a ginormous ass of herself. She had only done this sort of thing once before when she was fifteen, and it had been a total accident back then.
By degrees, the frenzied panic boiling through her blood eased like a tight fist unfurling, and new, thoroughly unexpected sensations began to seep in through the smothering veil of fear. For just a heartbeat the universe seemed to pause, a collective holding of breath while even the sound of the bustling city's daily life came to a gentle stop. For Via, there was only this fragile moment as her mouth molded to his, and a shocking thrill of pleasure bloomed like fireworks in her brain when his lips softened and returned the pressure with interest. Her booted feet barely touched the ground as she kept her arms wrapped tightly around his strong neck, and delight mingled with relief when his free arm curled about her waist to bring her fully against the rock-solid length of his battle-hardened warrior's body. His breath was warm, his taste tantalizing. The seductive nuzzling of his silk-over-steel lips against hers invited her untutored mouth to explore deeper, and she saw no reason why she should resist when she knew they were living on borrowed time.
A tremulous note of discord whispered from her psyche into his, a never-ending ricochet rippling noiselessly between them. The pleasure bounced back and forth as well, doubling and trebling as it went, but threaded through it was what the vision had shown her. But that was okay too. If this was to be her last moment of life, she was determined to pour every ounce of joy, vitality and pleasure she could into this kiss. If anything, she was happy for this final opportunity to go out with a bang.
"Lieutenant Locke, attention!"
It was the strangest thing, was all Via could think while her pulse pounded in her ears and in the lips that had become the most sensitive part of her body. It was as though she and this man---a militia man, for God's sake---had discovered that with a kiss, they could create a magical little sphere where only they existed, and nothing of the gritty, desperate, dangerous place that was their world could encroach on their private slice of perfection. Then her lips drifted like a dream away from his, and the restless throb of the ever-bustling city once again filled her ears. But nothing felt the same. She wasn't the same. As mad as it sounded, she felt changed from the inside out.
Were kisses supposed to change the world?
Via opened eyes she couldn't remember closing, and gazed up in dazed confusion at the man she held with all the passionate fervor of a long-time lover. Where was the explosion? Had she interrupted the sequence of events? Was everyone safe?
Everyone except her, of course. Her safe life was officially over now that she had revealed to a gun-toting jarhead member of the militia that she was a psionic.
Dayum.
"What the hell are you hick farmers feeding your oversexed women?" Colonel Fynn raged at Weddo, who was staring at Via in horrified disbelief. Her eyes shimmering with the chaos churning her insides, she could only shake her head. There was no time to explain her behavior. There was no time for anything, except...
Maybe there could be one last way out.
When she looked back to Locke, his flat, not-really-human optics were still trained on her as if he didn't know how to look away. "Kill me," she whispered in a rush, and watched his cyberoptics widen in surprise. It was probably the stress that made her think there might have been an impossible flash of emotion there. "If you have even one ounce of compassion left in that meched-out body of yours, please kill me. You'll be doing me a favor."
Slowly he shook his head while Fynn yelled at Weddo, "You're a---"
"Please." She grabbed the muzzle of his pulse rifle and angled it under her chin with the surreal calm of one who had no other choice. "Do it."
A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You're crazy."
"No one will blame you. I attacked you."
"Attacked?" His head continued to shake. "That's not what I'd call it."
"Locke, you come to attention, you worthless bastard!" Fynn was all but frothing at the mouth while the rest of his troops closed in on the uncharacteristic knot of chaos in their midst, wary and confused. "What do you think you're doing, soldier, falling for a classic diversionary tactic while the enemy closes in?"
"The no-goods are dispersing, Colonel." Locke's voice was oddly remote, as though he was only half-aware of the words coming out of his mouth. And all the while he stared at Via as if the next beat of his heart depended on it. "Look around. Even an untrained eye can see there is no enemy out there."
Fynn turned an alarming shade of puce, making Via wonder if anyone had ever mustered up the cojones to contradict him. "The moment any soldier thinks that, they become worse than a liability. They become as bad as the enemy itself." In sheer contempt, Fynn threw the cigar he still held at Locke's feet. "Lifers, fall back double-time."
"Bomb!" Locke suddenly shouted and waved at Weddo and the others. "Get in the transport, now!"
"Wait, I stopped---" Via's protest was cut off as Locke's free arm clamped around her waist like a vise, and she let out a strangled gasp when it felt like the lower half of her rib cage was crushed. Then, without warning, he leapt an easy fifteen feet off the raised loading dock in a mind-boggling show of inhuman strength, landing on the ground beside the dock so hard Via's teeth clicked together.
"Get down!" Locke's roar was superfluous, for his massive warrior's body crouched over hers like a smothering blanket until she was forced into a fetal position, her head pushed down so far her chin gouged into her chest.
"But I stopped it---"
Via's strangled protest was interrupted once more by an explosion above them. A sickening, hellish wave of heat billowed out over their heads. The concussive force made her eardrums quake like aspen leaves as the air pressure heaved out, then sucked back into the loading dock, as if a mythical giant were pulling in a massive gulp of air and holding it. Then the world went strangely still, while her stunned brain rattled around in her cranium like a tiny marble caught in a washer's spin cycle.
Rule number one: Run from the Shadows. Unless one knows the secret that will save you.
Ghost in the Machine
© 2011 Barbara J. Hancock
A Cybershock Story
I live in a world of waifs and shadows. Live might be an overstatement. I scrounge and scramble and survive in an atmosphere made thick and gray by the ashes of the Fallen. And sometimes I dream of sunlight. My parents were taken, even though they followed all the rules. Never scavenge at night. Never talk to Shadows. Don't fight the Sweepers. Run. Run. Run.
Now that they've taken my little brother, Douglas, I've realized I've only been surviving for him. I have two choices: Follow him or lie down and die. I can't just quit after years of struggle. I wouldn't know how if I tried. Determination is all I have left.
And then I meet him.
He claims to be a rogue who can help me find my brother. It's got to be a lie. But I don't run. I stop. I listen. And I make a deal with a Shadow even though I know it will mean the death of me.
Never talk to Shadows.
But no one ever told me what would happen if I kissed one.
Warning: May cause fantasies of forbidden kisses from dark heroes who balance on the edge of evil. Where shadows wait and ashes fall...
Enjoy the following excerpt for Ghost in the Machine:
He looks so heroic treading with purpose through the ash, every bit as graceful as I am not. I remind myself the lean muscle that glides beneath his skin was turned to dust years ago, but the reminder doesn't help. He has held me with those strong hands. He's saved me with that lithe body. I no longer tingle where the spider's venom dripped, but everywhere Gabriel touched me seems permanently sensitized.
Heat rises in me as I acknowledge a different kind of tingle than I've known before. If talking to a Shadow is dangerous, surely desiring one will be deadly.
We walk forever. Past crumbled buildings and long-dead alleys. I try not to stare at him, but it's a lot like trying not to breathe when a Shadow is passing---you can stop for awhile, but soon enough your lungs start to burn with the need for oxygen.
My eyes need to soak up his mystery. For the first time, I see how ash doesn't settle on him. Not on his hair or his clothes or his skin. He has a physical form. I've felt it. I blush with the urge to feel it again. But the ash doesn't touch him. I've lived with Shadows always, but I've never noticed this about them.
But his gleaming dark curls and shining armor, I notice.
In comparison, I'm filthy, covered in soot from head to toe.
I try not to think about it. I'm doggedly following Douglas into the jaws of death. But as the dark night turns to gray day, the ash that coats me bothers me more and more. Just as when I fought the spider and after when I thought about an ashen grave, it seems a claiming and a giving up.
Irrational. A fancy brought on by fear, exhaustion and hunger. Every third step is a stumble now. Each blink threatens to become a long sleep. And still I trudge on. It isn't until my forward momentum stops that I realize I've collapsed. My head is so light it seems as if it might float to the gray-choked sky.
I can see Shadows.
They move behind windows of nearby buildings, up and down crumbling sidewalks, across a crosswalk and back again. They're uninterested, stuck in mindless repetition. I see them almost as a whole entity. Like a shifting darkness that fills the outer edges of my world. But when might one or more unglitch and come for me?
I try to rise, but my exhausted state betrays me. A bottle rolls away from my clumsy foot as I try to place it. The clinking of it sounds like the toll of a bell against the curb.
Gabriel comes to stand by my side. Sidekick or sentry? I peruse the lean length of his leg as I freeze. The tactical uniform worn by soldiers of the First Wave had been custom fitted and molded to their skin. A leather-like body armor, it had been useless against an enemy that didn't use projectile weapons. The SoulEater had taken them down and taken them in. It had created Shadows and Sweepers and who knew what other abominations.
We wait. What will the other Shadows do?
The one beside me had been a fine specimen of soldier when he'd been alive. It soothes me even though it hadn't saved him.
But then, not so much.
They are coming.
The sound of hundreds of heads turning our way is like a wave of whispers washing over me. I rise to my feet, swaying. My hand goes to the weapon at my belt. There isn't enough charge. No way is there enough. The shifting darkness around us begins to coalesce into forms and shapes with deadly substance. Coming closer. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. More.
Just as I raise my disruptor to fire for the hell of it and with no hope of taking out more than a few before we are overwhelmed, Gabriel's angelic wings embrace me in a feathery cocoon. A staticky charge ripples and reaches to the heart of me. My nerve endings hum with it. In protest or pleasure? Borderline. Being touched by a Shadow from the top of my head to my feet definitely walks the line between pleasure and pain.
"Shhhhhhhh," Gabriel says.
Trapped in those magnificent wings, I'm as frightened of their protection as I am of the approaching horde. Because I want to hush. I want to accept his cool embrace and the way it makes me feel---saved, seduced, secondary.
For once, I don't have to fight. They are out there, eddying around us like leaves in a stream, but I'm hidden. Enclosed in Gabriel's shadowy substance, I've disappeared to the others. I hide within the very thing I fear the most.
His wings wind tighter. They pull me closer---he pulls me closer. My cheek presses to his solid chest. His scent is ozone-kissed. It envelopes me in an atmosphere not unlike an approaching storm, surprisingly pleasant. And then I feel it. The thud of a heartbeat against my face.
How can a Shadow have a heartbeat?
Like the swinging girl, it must be only an echo, a memory, a glitch.
As I stand there, Shadows all around, the pace of his phantom heartbeat increases.
I want to pull away.
This is too close to his mystery.
Panic rises, making my own heart thump.
I would push him away. He shields me. He protects me. But I could more easily fight the Shadows around us than the beat of that heart against me. That sort of fight is much more familiar than the fight to resist his scent, his touch---the lie that he is human.
A wavering whisper stops me when I would have pushed my way free.
Very close, just outside my Shadow-wing hideaway, a child's voice speaks in a singsong cadence that is at once horrifying and haunting.
"Olly olly oxen freeeeeeeeeee..."
The last syllable ends as if the lungs that force air over dormant vocal cords are too weak for volume. An all-out scream couldn't have been worse. I start to shake. My imagination gives the voice a face, and it's the face of the swinging girl, come all this way to find me and searching still.
Of course, there are other Fallen children. Everywhere. But my shivers won't be chided. It is her. She's out there. And this time I can't slip away.
"Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black..."
The nursery rhyme murmurs from Gabe's lips, oddly eerie in its coaxing. Like a father encouraging his child to play, he sings the song, gentle and low. I recognize it for the suggestion it is and hold my breath, hoping.
There. A slight sound of scuffling against the cluttered pavement. From hide-and-seek to double Dutch sans rope. In my mind's eye, I watch the creepy Shadow hop away. Creepy but sad too. Forever young. Forever lost. Missing the games she used to play but caught up in a much more horrible game for eternity.
"Don't speak," Gabriel whispers against the top of my head.
Strong arms come around me, more intimate than the wings. Gabriel scoops me up, still hidden, and begins to stride forward, a Shadow among Shadows. Nothing to see here. I hug my arms around my chest to keep them from clinging to him. And I wonder what game, if any, my angelic soldier is determined to play.
The invaders thought they had crushed humanity. They messed with the wrong species.
Metal Reign
© 2010 Nathalie Gray
An Impulse Power Story
Francine Beaumont is tired. Tired of waiting for an armada of Imber ships to finish off what's left of humanity. Tired of fear and privation. Tired of living like a rat, feeding off what scraps the cat lets her have.
When the chance comes to hit the Imbers where it really hurts---right at their fuel supply---she takes it. One stealth cruiser. One pilot. A cargo hold filled with explosives. A suicide mission for sure, but better that than doing nothing.
As the ship's cook, John O'Shaughnessy knows everything that goes on aboard the warship. And something is definitely up with his Frankie. If she thinks he's going to let her carry out this crazy plan of hers alone, that stubborn woman has another think coming.
Frankie thinks she's gotten away clean...until her instincts tell her she's not alone on her mission. Still, it's a shock to find her peace-loving John standing there with eyes that spell murder. Now is a hell of a time to discover they're more than friends. But there's no turning back...
Warning: Space invaders were seriously harmed in the making of this story.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Metal Reign:
Everything happened fast.
One second, about a dozen alien ships were flying a couple thousand meters ahead and the next second, a hit sent the reefer barreling to portside. The impact rocked both Frankie and him back against their seats. Only the harnesses saved them from being projected across the bridge like the rest of everything not anchored or strapped down with thick cargo netting. Clacks, clangs and rattles drowned what Frankie yelled. Alarms wailed, lights flickered, died for an agonizing second then switched back on.
John's instinct surprised him. Instead of trying to stay the ship, he extended an arm to grip Frankie by the back of her coveralls. Just in case. He'd never known a protective nature hid under his cynical crust. Great timing...
As the reefer gathered speed in its gut-flattening spiral, John braced his feet wide apart on the consoles. Gs built up. Space flew sideways in the tacscreens. Stars became white lines. Interspersed with these lines, a green blur---Earth. Fighting against nausea, John forced himself to focus on the altimeter. Too low. Too damn low.
"Take...the nav," he growled. "I'll...take...propulsion."
Both wrestled the effects of gravity, which tried to keep them glued to their backrests, as they struggled to control the ship's spiral. Frankie quickly punched in coordinates while John gripped the engines control and pushed them as forward as they could go. The only way out of a spiral was down hard and fast. With any luck, they'd gain enough momentum to break out of the corkscrew, skim along Earth's atmosphere then bounce off into space. But then again, luck was a bitch these days.
"Hang on," John warned a split second before the attitude jets responded to his commands. By his side, Frankie held on to the console corners.
Turning, turning. Slower. Another turn that stretched out told John their maneuver may just work. Alarms finally clicked off when the reefer pointed downward and entered into a dive just as scary as the spiral. Except that now they were in control. Somewhat.
"Tell me when it's five degrees," John said through his teeth.
Frankie nodded. Sweat coated her face and made limp ribbons of her usually curly hair.
Silence was only broken by their panting as they each fought with their assigned console.
"Five degrees!"
John gunned it.
The reefer shot forward and up, at thirty-five degrees to starboard, higher still, until they'd made a complete U-turn that sucked every iota of power out of his poor ship. When the moon appeared in the tacscreens, John spared a hand to pump his fist. Had to let out the testosterone somehow.
"Jesus fucking Christ," she muttered. "They hit us and didn't even come back for a look."
"We just don't matter to them. Would you come back to look at a bug you just squashed?"
"Still, for Pete's sake." She combed a hand in her sweaty hair. "Man, that was close."
"I'll go check for damages. That hit can't have left just a scratch." He unclipped his harness, worked his stiff legs and neck. Without his brain's consent---his brain had pretty much taken an extended vacation...wasn't he on a suicide mission?---John bent over and placed a loud kiss on her forehead. "We make quite the team, Commander Beaumont. Want to recruit me? I promise I won't spoil your other recruits' young, impressionable minds."
Her beaming smile made everything all right. Her betrayal, her lies. Nothing mattered anymore. Affection swelled his heart, and pride his head. This woman, strong and capable and hot as the coals of hell, made him feel as if he could take on the world. Which in a sense he was about to do.
He left her in command of his reefer while he climbed down below into the detachable section of his refrigerated ship. Used to transport produce and other perishables, his reefer had never been meant to withstand the hit it'd just taken. Not without serious damage. They were lucky not to have been sucked out into space.
All along the passageways, metal plating had buckled, rivets popped off and steam whistled out of bent pipes. Not good. Near the airlock, e-suits hung on hooks and resembled a row of hanged men. Those environment suits may come in handy if the ship had suffered hull damage. At least until they connected to the pipeline. Afterward, well, it wouldn't matter much, would it?
John breathed a sigh of relief as he inspected the seal between the main portion of the ship and the separate cargo area. It seemed intact. But as he stepped through the hatch to survey the damage to their precious cargo, he couldn't abort the long string of curses. He didn't know much about explosives, but the way the charge had shifted on its rails in the hold, with yellow wires pulled out of connectors and plastic coils all crumpled up against the glowing blue core... That just could not be good.
"Shit."
The comms panel still worked so he switched it on. "Hey, Frankie. You know how to build that thing, right? Because right now, it looks like something the cat spat out. Except in metal and plastic."
Her voice crackled but he got the last bit. "...goddamnsonovabitch."
"Indeed."
"I'm coming down."
John felt the ship decelerate to automatic pilot. A minute later Frankie barged into the cargo hold like a Valkyrie down the hills. His nape tingled with arousal. He forced his mind to clear.
Not the time, O'Shaughnessy.
"Argh, no, no, no." She rushed to the sad-looking bit of Imber destruction smashed against the side of the cargo hold and muttered for a good minute as she inspected her patient. In the end, she straightened, fists on hips---sending his testosterone fever into the danger zone---and blew air through pursed lips. "I think we'll be good. It's not as bad as it looks."
"Is this like 'it's-not-as-bad-as-it-looks-just-a-sucking-chest-wound-Ma'am'?"
Her snort of laughter unreasonably stroked his ego. "No. I can fix this. We'll reroute some power to the charge, hook it up to the ship directly. It'll work." She nodded, muttered to herself some more. "I can fix this," she repeated.
"Well, get to it then because we can't take another hit like this." It was one thing to die in the name of humanity and all that, it was an entirely different thing to just get blown into bits by a passing Imber ship. Not as, well, fulfilling.
Before he left her to work while he checked the rest of the reefer for damage---something told him he'd find much, much more---John stopped inside the hatch leading to the main part of the ship. Frankie was crouched underneath the electrical panel and muttering through her teeth as she yanked on knotted wires. He tamped down the regret. He wasn't doing this only for her. Well, mostly for her. But along the way, he'd begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, it was better than doing nothing at all. He'd never tell her that, of course, in case she started to think of him as a romantic. John O'Shaughnessy had a rep to keep. Catholic Irishmen weren't a flower-in-the-hair, bright-eyed bunch. Or he liked to believe. But then again, to his widowed father's horror, his eldest child and only son of four children had become a cook. His little sisters all teased John about his choice of career, especially since he was a trained machinist like their da. Oh well, to each their own path.
They better dedicate a whole city to her name, complete with wide boulevards, airy gardens and gurgling fountains. Frankieville. Frankburg. Francine-sur-Mer. Ha.
When she let out a long string of curses, John smiled and turned away to hide what he knew was in his eyes.

