Bitstream

13.7

The idea is risky, but given that this whole infiltration has been a complete mess, it's about our best option. Call the cargo elevator down and catch it up to the loading bay. From there we have no choice but to brute-force our way through any hazmats and chimps. I make a note to Fingers that I'm still not in a position to kill anyone who's just trying to do their job, even if it might come back to bite us later, but that's about where I draw the line. If any apes come my way, they best believe I'll show no mercy, and we have something, or somethings, to help us: a pair of electric batons, more so for Fingers, just in case they all swarm her at once. She's got them stashed in her Chroma-Skin pockets, like twin thunderbolts hidden in the dark, ready to kick holy ass.

She slams the elevator button, slides in a fresh magazine, cocks her pistol, and we wait as the lift groans its way down. "How many hazmats did you see heading up earlier?" she asks. "Two, right?"

"Not sure," I reply briskly. "To be honest, I was so nervous I barely noticed. That big ape… Christ, so maybe I do have a fear of 'em."

"What did I tell you?"

"That I have to get over my fear," I say, more to myself than to her. "But in my defence, that was huge, disgusting, and completely messed up."

Moments later, the elevator grinds to a complete stop, and Fingers pats me on the back, saying, "Seems to be a noticeable trend."

I nod. This whole city's a noticeable trend.

We step into the elevator and Fingers slams the button for up this time. The lift lurches, groans, then starts dragging us skyward. The lift is empty except for a couple trays and that ripe tang of monkeydoo – Dance's word, not mine. It makes me think of what he said not too long ago: Apes are monkeys, monkeys are apes. What's that? Monkeys aren't apes? Fuck yoooooouuu, mate.

And as if the man had plucked the thought straight from my skull, just to spit his opinion on it, static hacks through the holo-room, and his is the first voice to break out:

"Zktttt—hear me—zrtttttt—Fingers?"

"Thank God," Fingers says. The words are pious; the sigh underneath isn't – it spells 'Not this guy again.'

"Thought you bloody died, mate," Dance says, clearer now. "We were just about ready to pack it up. You've been down there for nearly two hours."

"Terld you it was worth the wait," Vander adds. "I see you er tripped the alarm."

"Didn't," I say. "That asshole Carrow did."

Dance hums curiously. "He dead?"

"Very. Along with most of his posse."

A low whistle. "Crikes, you really cut loose down there, eh? Look at Miss Morals finally growin' a backbone."

"I didn't kill anyone," I snap. "Look – this is stupid. Have the jeep ready. We're exiting out through the loading bay."

"Heading up the er elevator?" Vander asks.

"As we speak," says Fingers.

"Good lerk," he says. "There are some cameras on the outside, look infrared, so you might wanner be careful."

"Trust me," Fingers says. "That's the least of our worries." And she presses the Echo chip in her neural display, as do I, muting the conversation.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the pistol, but I also have my mantisblade cocked, because I have a feeling I'll be needing both.

Eventually, the elevator comes to a complete stop, and the metal barrier slides up from the bottom, revealing the loading bay on the other side. It's much larger than it had appeared from the outside, though nothing special; looks more like a mechanic's workshop than anything you'd expect to find tacked on to a tech facility. The shutters are down, as expected, with huge ribbed steel, and two hazmat workers stand in front of a pallet stack, safety goggles washed green by the industrial lights. Also as expected, there are about twenty or so furless cybernetic chimps lounging around, already having prepared the pallets for the haul.

They snap their heads towards us.

Their subtle 'ooh-oohs' suddenly turn into wild, alerting screeches, and I suck the fear down my throat with so much gall it almost gets lodged in my esophagus. I bare my blade, my pistol, and before the hazmat workers can turn to see what all the commotion is about, I hit them each with 'Black Iris', and they stumble into one another, shouting and falling in a great heap of panic.

"—I can't see—!"

"—What the fuck is going on?—"

The quick-hack timer begins ticking down from thirty seconds.

And we march out of the elevator.

The chimps' eyes flash red, as if detecting intruders, and they swarm us. The first to come immediately gets a bullet to the brain, and those that follow don't get a second chance. Fingers is a blur: two steps, a pivot, press of a baton into an ape's jaw, and then the sharp crack of lightning as it blurs into the air and catches a great bundle of them in a splashing web of electricity. She moves so effortlessly as the chimps come in screeching, dancing to the beat of her own drum, and just when one's about to catch her off guard, I come in and slice its head clean off with my mantisblade.

"Intruders," one of the hazmat workers shouts as the Black Iris starts to wear off. Before it can recover I preempt them: two quick hacks back-to-back. Military-grade quick-hacks cool down almost instantly, thank God, courtesy of Arden.

The onslaught runs through several re-hacks until the remaining chimps start to fold: ten, then six, then three. We don't bother finishing them off.

I get an idea, one last kick to Calyx Ward's nuts. I stride past the scrambling hazmat workers, hit the metal shutters, and run a Manual Override: Open. The shutters grind up, revealing the Lumina trucks parked beyond. The sky's bleeding into evening and a thin rain slants over the concrete, tugged by a welcome gust. After those hours in the nightmare, the cool, windy air feels almost obscene, proof I'm still breathing, still very much alive.

I let the last chimps scurry out onto the concrete; they'll draw attention, maybe even enough of a distraction for us to reach the Fragment Roamer. Fine. If the public starts asking questions, it could wreck her image, especially once investigations start. And once the questions start, they'll never stop.

"Please don't kill me," one of the hazmat workers pleads, up on his knees with his hands in prayer, though he's facing the wrong way.

"I won't," I say. "But you should ask yourself who you're choosing to die for. She's not worth it."

"Thank you," the man says, slumping with relief and turning to me, eyes still black with the quick-hack. "Thuh-thank you."

Fingers grabs me by the shoulder and jostles me out. "Don't have all day – move!"

But I stop her in place, right before the exit, remembering what Vander said about the cameras. I peek my head out and quickly disable them with 'Manual Override'. Fingers says it's a good thing I remembered, because she'd completely forgotten, and I don't blame her.

I never want to see this godforsaken place again.

We hurry out into the rain, follow the long stretch of corporate wall to the parking lot, finding that people are indeed distracted by the three furless chimps we'd let loose, and use that opportunity to make our way over to the Fragment Roamer, where Vander is waiting in the driver's seat, and Dance is right next to him, both still dressed in their grey electrician overalls. We waste no time getting into the back seats, and immediately Vander puts the jeep in gear and takes off, out of the parking lot and onto the main road, where we catch the freeway north towards Sector Eight.

I half-expect sirens in the rearview, but the evening stays calm – just the low hum of the engine and rain drumming the roof. I roll the window up, and the world outside collapses into a seashell murmur, the storm reduced to a distant, hollow roar. Not an animal this time, not a mutant. Just peace.

We did it.

"Had a couple goonies come down to see what the electrical problems were all about," Dance says, reaching into the centre console and pulling out his brickie.

"Did Vander give them a quick one-two like you promised?" Fingers asks.

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He shakes his head. "Knocked 'em out with a couple of these bad boys." He reaches into the glove compartment, pulling out a syringe of red liquid, the same one he'd used to knock out those men in The Ghost in Satin.

"Resourceful," says Fingers.

He places it back in the glovebox. "This was messy. Can't say I blame you, though, mate. This is Ward's infrastructure and industrial technology. Tell me: what happened down there? Chimps get the better of Mono, after all?"

"No," Fingers says. "She actually did pretty good. There was a giant mutant ape down there. She clamped it between a pair of doors."

"A muternt ape?" says Vander.

I nod. "Some messed-up experiment. I think Calyx Ward has a lot more than Lumina cooking down there. Probably some growth hormones and gene-splicing."

"Should've brought bananas," says Dance. "Can't say I'm surprised, though. Big budget, lunatic scientist with a dream, and an investor the size of a fire-breathing dragon. It would be weird not to see a giant monkey or two."

"Not monkeys," says Vander.

Surprisingly, Dance ignores him and looks back at me directly, his furry eyebrows cocked in suspicion. "Did you get the shard?"

I nod, reaching into my pocket and pulling it out. It's large, rectangular, and has a little strip of blue light coasting beneath the engraved letters T.O.K. "Would be one big waste of time if we didn't."

Dance hums and reaches out his hand. "Pass it here."

I stretch out over the second row of seats and hand it to him. He dusts it off and inserts it into the side of his brickie.

"Uh, what are you doing?" Fingers asks ruefully.

"Runnin' it through my malware sniffer," Dance says. "And also makin' sure Monkey Bloke didn't load this thing up with a tracker. Wouldn't be surprised given Ward's fine eye in the sky. Monkey see, monkey do, mate."

"Goosemonkeys," I say humorously, though he does have a good point. Given that gangs like Steel Moon had trackers embedded in their weapons (way back when I first woke up in Neo Arcadia), I wouldn't be surprised if she had half the technology in that subsector marked on a radar.

It's also a worrying thought.

But Dance shakes his head, lets out a satisfied grunt, and says, "Nah, clean as. Flat as a tack. Guess she really thought that dungeon was unbreachable. Corporate ignorance extends to Paxson too, it seems."

"Yer," says Vander, "until she re-codes the Luminer trucks once she realises the shard's stolen."

"Won't be a drama, mate," says Dance. "Shards can't be hacked, but the protocols can. If Mono tweaks the truck's data to line up with the shard's code, she'll have her way in. We all will."

"Don't remind me that we still have to deal with Harrow," I say.

Fingers pats me on the back – absentminded, like she doesn't even notice she's doing it. Her eyes are fixed on Dance and Vander instead. "We oughta lay low for a bit. This'll get tagged as terrorism, maybe even rebellion. And there's no way the full story makes the headlines, not with the kind of filth she was running down there."

"Too right," says Dance – words we don't hear often from him these days. "Reckon Sloan Harrow won't be a walk in the park, either. Logistics hub's sittin' right by the Capital, and she's already hit the papers, standin' next to Ward like some hired gun. Looks kitted out to the eyeballs."

"You have a picture?" I ask, curious.

I want to know what we're up against, to be perfectly frank. Carrow didn't have too much publicity, given that he was a bit of a cave-dweller.

Dance hums briefly and hands the brickie back to me with a fine stretch. I take it and look at the screen; the photo's grainy, clipped from some newsfeed, but there's no mistaking her. Sloan Harrow stands like a walking tank, steel stacked up so high there's barely a scrap of flesh left to call human. Plated shoulders jut like battering rams, arms the size of jackhammers ending in hands that could crush a skull with virtually no effort at all. Her face – what's left of it – peers out from a nest of black alloy, one red optic glaring while the other half is sealed under mesh plating. Guns bristle across her frame, some grafted right into the bonework, others mag-clamped along her back.

And, strangely… something feels familiar about her, like I've seen her before.

But I'm probably imagining things; I did just come close to death, and by all accounts my brain is fried, and I'm tired, and I'm weak, and I just wanna… sleep. I hand the brickie back to Dance without a word and slump against Fingers' shoulder.

She doesn't push me off – just shifts a little, steadying me against her. The jeep hums along the freeway, rain streaking the windows like static lines across a dead channel. Nobody talks for a while. Not about the shard. Not about Harrow. Not about the chimps still raising hell back at the compound.

The only sound is the road, the rain, and the thought I try not to hold onto: that this was the easy part.

About an hour later, we make it back to The 404, virtually wrecked to the high heavens. It's late now, teetering on complete dark, and the motel's quiet save for the chirp of crickets sounding out through the thin pitter-patter of evening rain. I take pleasure in dumping my sweaty Chroma-Skin suit into the laundry basket and having a brisk and comforting shower. When I step back into the room, steam curling off my skin and the air still humming faintly with the ghost of hot water in the pipes, I catch myself staring at the sagging mattress, thinking of nothing but sleep. Before I can even collapse into it there's a knock at the door, soft at first and then a little firmer, like someone working up the courage to disturb me.

I already know who it is.

Fingers.

Sure enough, when I open the door, she's there, and the moment hits me with déjà vu. My chest tightens; after everything that went down, we never had the chance to really talk it through. One look at her eyes tells me she feels the same.

I don't wait for her to ask. I step aside, and she slips past me. I shut the door behind her.

She walks over to my bed and slumps down onto it with her hands stuck in her pockets. For a moment, neither of us says anything. The rain fills the silence.

After some time, she says, "Look… about earlier."

My stomach knots. "Yeah."

Her eyes flick up at me, then away just as quick. "I wasn't expectin' that. Not from you."

"I wasn't expectin' it either," I admit, sitting down on the chair by the desk. My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "It just – happened."

She smirks, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "You don't 'just happen' to kiss someone like that. Not the way you did."

I rub the back of my neck. "So you're mad?"

"Nah." She shakes her head, lips pressed tight. "Mad's not the word. Just… caught me off guard, is all. And hell, we were both half-dead, adrenaline pumpin'. Could've been anything."

"Yeah," I say quietly.

That makes her look at me again, properly this time. There's a pause, her shoulders tense like she's weighing a dozen different answers. Then, softer: "I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but uh… ah, shit."

My eyes shoot wide. "What is it?"

"This – look, it's difficult. We're both fighting for something big and this complicates things a lot."

"Yeah," I say, nodding stiffly. "I agree. And like I said, it just happened. But never again. And I won't say anything to Vander or Dance or—"

"No," Fingers says, looking at me directly. "It's okay."

I blink at her. "... Okay?"

She shrugs, but it's awkward, her hands still buried in her pockets like she's holding herself together. "I'm not sayin' it makes sense. It doesn't. But I'm not gonna pretend it didn't mean anything, either, know?"

I sit back, unsure whether to feel relieved or even more tangled up. "So what, then? We just… ignore it? Pretend we're still the same?"

Her mouth quirks, not quite a smile. "I dunno if we are the same, Rhea. Maybe that's the point." Some more silence, the awkward sort, and then she beckons me with a nudge of her head. "C'mere."

I hesitate, thinking that this might not be the greatest idea given the whole dynamic of the group, but step forward anyway, sliding down next to her on the bed.

"You've… completely changed my life," she says, the words coming slow, like she's testing them as they leave her mouth. "Not in the sense that I've given up crime, obviously – let's not kid ourselves. But… emotionally. Before you, it was just jobs, scraps, and trying to make it through another day without getting burned. Surviving, not living. Then you came along, and something shifted. At first it was you helping me, sure, but that's not what stuck. Helping you… that's what did it. And now that we're pulling each other through…" She trails off, shakes her head. "I'm no good with words." Her gaze drops to the floor, fingers flexing against her knees. "That kiss… it lit something up. Caught me off guard, yeah, but it wasn't just heat of the moment. It meant something. And if I'm being completely honest…" She hesitates, biting down a smile that doesn't quite make it. "I've always liked you. Maybe more than I wanted to admit."

"I wouldn't have guessed," I say. "Especially since you told me you were straight."

She huffs out a laugh, rolling her eyes. "Yeah, well… so did I. Life's funny like that. Guess I was wrong."

I study her face, the way her shoulders tighten as if she's bracing for me to laugh it off. Instead, I just say, "You're serious."

"Dead serious." Her voice drops, softer now. "Look, I don't want this to blow up the crew, or get in the way of the job. But I'm not gonna sit here and pretend it's not there either."

My throat feels tight. "So what are you saying?"

She shrugs again, though this time there's the faintest curve of a smile tugging at her mouth. "I'm sayin'… let's not put labels on it. Let's just see what happens. If it works, it works. If it doesn't – we deal. After all, it's gonna be a long few months waiting for Calyx Ward to clean up this Lumina mess."

"What about the others?" I ask.

"Vander's half a cigarette away from having a proper stroke and Dance is just all-around a clown."

I snort. "Can't argue with that. Though, let's be real: we screwed up plenty along the way."

She throws her hands up. "Ay, leave me outta your disasters. That's all on you."

"Pftt. You know I wouldn't have cared if you killed that lunatic Carrow instead of just knocking him out? I spare everyday workers, not monsters."

She chuckles. "Well, let's just say you've changed my outlook on things, in terms of killing, maybe too much. As much as I like to hide it. Is what it is. Anyway, you… okay with this? Hope I'm not getting ahead of myself. I haven't dated in a long, long time. I sound like a damn highschooler right now."

"Oh, absolutely not – I don't mind, that is." For the first time, I place a hand on her shoulder. It feels rather uncanny, but not awkward. "Given that you've pretty much saved my life, gave me a job, helped me get my old life back – and kill that bitch Cierus Marlow – I'd say you've earned the right to sound like a highschooler in front of me. And, well, I don't know. I'm not good with words either. After spending so much time with you I just... yeah. I can't explain it. I don't think it's something that can be explained. "

For a beat, she just looks at me, eyes flicking between mine like she's searching for some tell. Then she exhales through her nose. "Guess we're both stuck with each other now, huh? Corny as that sounds."

"Guess so."

We sit there like that, rain whispering against the window, the air heavy but not uncomfortable. For the first time since the job went sideways, it feels like we're not running or fighting – just… here.

She nudges my knee with hers. "One mess at a time, Rhea. We'll figure it out."

And somehow, I believe her.