In the strange mix of moral ambiguity and corporate propriety in post-AI-war human society, the term “dollhouse” had come to be accepted as the socially appropriate description for all manner of places catering to sexual gratification for pay. The place Angel guided Juliet to, where Leo was likely in dire trouble, was called Echoes of Eden. It wasn’t in central downtown, but the streets were busy, and there wasn’t any available parking in front of the establishment, so Juliet pulled her bike onto the sidewalk, nudging through the pedestrians until she was in the narrow alley between it and the neighboring business.
People gave her looks, even cursed at her in surprise, but she stared them down from behind the opaque black visor of her helmet, revving the fake engine noise, and they moved out of her way. She dropped the kickstand, armed the security systems, and stepped off the bike. Considering why she was there, she opted to leave her helmet on. Either urgency or a subconscious desire to rely on her sword kept her from digging the Texan out from under her seat, and she hurried back around the corner to the establishment's front door.
It was a high-end-looking place—plasteel and smoky glass with embedded neon feminine figures flashing through various poses. They tossed their hair, pirouetted, hung from neon poles, or performed little, demure dances. When she stood before the doors, Angel’s pin on her mini-map showed Leo several meters above her and about forty meters ahead.
Juliet stepped forward, the doors swished open, and she stepped into a dimly lit lobby and the thumps of a bass beat. Advertisements hung on the walls, promoting performers, high-end escorts, and an upcoming reduced-rate membership drive. A bouncer stood before the club entry, and the exit behind him shimmered with holographic, neon-purple curtains, obscuring Juliet’s view.
“No helmets, no blades,” the bouncer said, jerking his thumb toward a “coat-check” desk on the left manned by a scantily clad woman in a pink bra and skin-tight black, synthetic leather leggings. She was playing with her digital fingernails, changing colors, and didn’t look up, so Juliet turned back to the bouncer. He was close to two meters tall and had to weigh nearly 130 kilos. He was shaped like a barrel, with enormous plasteel, piston-driven legs, a left arm equipped with some sort of auto-shotgun, and a long, prong-shaped device probably designed to deliver incapacitating zaps of electricity. His head and neck looked like a single, thimble-shaped unit, and he glowered at her with red and chrome eyes.
Juliet stepped closer, putting herself just two meters in front of him. “I’ve got reason to believe my friend’s in trouble in there. You’ve got thirty seconds to bring him out, or I’m going to cut my way in.” She pushed up her sleeves as she spoke, ensuring her new tattoo was visible. She knew anyone’s PAI could translate the kanji, but she didn’t really think it would mean anything to a random bouncer. Still, Tanaka had told her to warn people, so she was doing it. As she rested her hand on the hilt of her sword, waiting for the man to respond, she briefly wondered when she’d decided to go in hard rather than snooping around, but something in her chest said things were urgent. Leo was in trouble; she was sure of it.
“You better think again, bitch,” the bouncer rumbled in his scratchy baritone. The prongs on his left arm began sparking with blue electricity, and Juliet nodded.
“Remember you said that later when you’re wondering what happened.” Then she moved. Her sword was out in a flash; its holographic edge flickered too fast for the bouncer to follow, and in the next second, his arm fell to the floor with a sparking thud, and he fell backward like a toppling tree. His legs, from the knees down, remained where they’d been, spurting hydraulic fluid from their shiny stumps. Before his brain had registered what she’d done, before he could even cry out, Juliet darted past him through the holographic curtain and into the club.
Angel slowed her down as she hurried through the open floor section, saving her bio batts for whatever might come next. Juliet scanned the area as she went, following the dotted line on her mini-map. She saw bars and lounge areas to the left and right, many holographically-curtained private booths, and similarly obscured hallways leading to other parts of the club. The music was omnipresent, seeming to thump out of the floor and ceiling, but Angel tuned it down to a muted background hum as Juliet scanned the clientele. It was surprisingly crowded, considering how quiet the lobby had been.
“You’re going to have more security on you in seconds; the girl at the coat-check counter saw you take out the bouncer,” Angel warned.
Over the heads of some patrons sitting with scantily clad “dolls” in one of the lounge areas, Juliet saw a seamless door in the burgundy-painted rear wall open and a man step through. He wore a tactical visor and carried an SMG, and his gaze, scanning left to right, said he was looking for her. Juliet ducked down, slipped into the open bar area to her right, and worked her way around the long counter and racks of liquor bottles, aiming to come around on the security guard’s left flank. She made it within a few meters before he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and spun toward her.
Angel ramped up her speed, and Juliet took decisive action; her monoblade flickered with red light, and Juliet put the many months of intensive training in blade discipline to the test. She lunged forward and slashed. Using just the top few centimeters of the blade, she severed the man’s gun arm cleanly above the elbow. She stepped back, flicked the blade, ensuring no blood remained on its edge, and then sheathed it. The guard’s brows narrowed angrily, and she saw his shoulder twitch as he grimaced; he thought he was squeezing the trigger with the hand attached to the arm that was just, at that moment, thumping onto the worn, burgundy carpet.
When no gunshots sounded, and his brain finally realized something was amiss, the poor guy looked at his arm as droplets of blood began to shower out of the stump. His mouth opened in a stunned wail, and he jerked his head back to Juliet, but she was gone, having slipped past him to the door in the back wall. It was latched shut, and she didn’t have time to mess with a code, so out came the monoblade, and she performed a perfect overhead chop, slicing along the doorframe through whatever bolts were holding it shut. It felt like cutting a sheet of paper with a sharp knife. Juliet opened the door and slipped into a dark stairwell leading up.
She didn’t hesitate, gliding up the stairs, sword still out, and when she’d climbed a single level, confirming she was closer to Leo, she sliced the next door in the same manner. It pulled open noiselessly, and she saw she was in a twenty-meter, black-painted hallway with only two pale LED bulbs illuminating the far end, where another closed door waited. It was the worst kind of scenario for someone with a melee weapon in a gun-wielding society. If someone came through that door, they’d have time to shoot her before she closed with them.
She instantly processed that thought—it was part of the training Tanaka had drilled into her. When you recognize a bad situation, you don’t linger in it; you change it. Juliet broke into a sprint, driving forward with the sword leading the way, focused on that door; if someone were going to catch her in a kill zone like that, they’d have to be on the ball.
She noted the flickering of her optics and knew Angel was trying to scan through the door, but she moved fast and was already just a few meters from the barrier before some orange silhouettes began to take shape. Then unmistakable booms started to sound, and the cheap polymer door puckered outward in several spots as hot lead blasted through it. Juliet felt like someone hit her in the gut with a sledgehammer as one of those rounds, maybe a shotgun slug, hit home.
Her jacket ate a lot of the damage, and her subdermal armor absorbed the rest, but she knew she’d have some nasty cuts and bruises on her stomach. The impact took her breath away, but she’d trained for just that sort of thing—first with Grave, then with Tanaka, and she knew she didn’t need to breathe, not for several minutes. Even so, the urge to crumple into a ball and groan with the shock of it was intense. A corner of her mind told her to run while she could, but Juliet growled, gritted her teeth, turned off the panic, focused on that door, and, as Angel ramped up her reflexes, sliced along the right side, severing all the hinges.
Juliet kicked her booted heel against its surface, sending it flying inward. She saw a man right inside the door stumble to his left. He barely avoided the flopping, ruined door, dropping some shotgun shells in the process. Juliet’s blood was hot; he’d just shot her and still held the gun he’d done it with. As his eyes opened wide, and he reached to pull back the charging handle, Juliet quickly and elegantly slipped her red-flickering blade through his neck. He fell with a thud, and his head rolled further into the room, accompanied by the shrill scream of a woman Juliet had only just noticed.
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By then, Juliet’s diaphragm had stopped rebelling, and she could breathe normally, so she turned to the woman and barked, “Shut up!” As she did so, she took in the rest of the scene. It looked like she was in some kind of manager’s office for the club. A big desk sat in the far corner, and the wall to Juliet’s right was a bank of one-way glass or maybe display panels that showed the club down below. Plush leather couches lined the other wall, and, on a rug in front of those couches, beside a displaced coffee table, lay Leo. The woman who’d screamed was standing near him, and Juliet finally registered the fact that her hands were bound behind her back.
“Angel, jam this place,” she said. A faint vibration in her left forearm, along with a flicker of static on her optics, told her that Angel was on it. Her Tightbeam wireless data jack could produce a pretty large jamming field, not nearly enough to cover the club, but it would blanket a dozen meters in every direction around her with enough interference to block out most comms. Anyone close, like the woman in front of her, wouldn’t even be able to record any coherent video or sound.
Juliet quickly moved over to her and, before kneeling to check on Leo, gestured toward the couch. “Sit down.” She was dressed in a short, metallic-pink, sleeveless, backless dress, and she looked at Juliet with wide, beautiful, utterly panicked turquoise eyes. She glanced at her flickering red monoblade and stumbled backward, nearly tripping on her high heels as she collapsed onto the couch, unable to catch herself with her bound hands.
Juliet squatted beside Leo and hissed, “Shit, shit, shit!” He was pale as a ghost, and she saw no sign of breathing.
Angel confirmed things were bad, saying, “Thermal scans indicate he’s been dead less than an hour.” Juliet felt her throat tighten, felt her mind start to spiral as echoes of Mary Moon taunting her when she’d killed Nick played through her mind, but Angel snapped her out of it. “He has good nanites, Juliet—the temperature discrepancies between his body and brain aren’t natural. Get him to a trauma center! I’m alerting Frida and the others, and I’ve already ordered a town car; it’s two minutes away.”
Spurred by Angel’s quick thinking, Juliet stood up and barked, “Get over here.” The woman stood, tears streaking her cheeks, her high-end makeup unbothered by the moisture. “I want you to help me get him downstairs; turn around.” As soon as Juliet indicated she needed help, perhaps giving her a glimpse of hope that she wasn’t going to suffer the same fate as the headless corpse near the door, she hurried over and turned around so Juliet could see her bindings.
As she deftly sliced through the shrink-cord and then sheathed her sword, Juliet said, “Get his ankles. I’ll get the heavy end.”
“O-okay,” she stammered, hurrying to comply. “I thought he was dead . . .”
“He is, but his brain’s not. If we hurry, he might not suffer too much permanent damage. What’d they do to him?”
The woman grunted as she lifted with Juliet, struggling to stay upright in her heels under the strain of holding up Leo’s legs. “Some kind of injection, trying to get him to talk.”
“Take off your shoes!” Juliet growled, straining under the bulk of Leo’s mass. It wasn’t that she couldn’t deadlift more than that, but it was an awkward load. “You know what, forget it.” She squatted low, used her cybernetic arm to turn and hoist Leo’s body onto her shoulder, then, with a grunt, stood and began stomping toward the door. “Come with me, though. I mean, unless you want Leo’s friends to track you down and kill you.” She didn’t wait to see if the woman followed, jogging down the dark, black-painted hallway toward the stairwell door.
Angel managed her optics, helping her to look out for more trouble. Either the door was too thick, the distance too far, or some combination of the two because Juliet was still ten meters from it when it burst open. A man in a black suit, wearing optics just like the guy she’d “disarmed” earlier, stood in the opening. Juliet clamped her left hand on Leo’s back, pressing him into her shoulder as she whipped her monoblade out with her right hand. She’d managed two long strides, sprinting toward him, before the gunman pulled the trigger on his SMG, and Juliet’s world exploded with pain.
He started low, using the gun’s natural inclination to climb from the recoil to pepper her with nine-millimeter, anti-personnel, shredder rounds. Some instinct made Juliet tilt to the left as she continued charging, shielding Leo’s body with her own. She took two hits in her right thigh, the next blasted into her hipbone, another three slammed into her abdomen, and then one hit her right in the chest, smashing into her breast. Considering her burden, she was sprinting as hard as she could so her chin was already tucked, causing the next three rounds to impact her motorcycle helmet. One cracked her visor, and the others dug deep grooves in the ablative material. Then she was on the shooter.
Adrenaline and nanites were a hell of a combo. She barely slowed as she dropped her monoblade in a one-handed chop, splitting the merc from his shoulder to his groin, sending his two halves to the ground, spilling guts and . . . everything onto the floor. Juliet whirled, checking to see if the woman was still with her. She was, standing a meter behind, crouched to make herself small. “Are you hit?”
“N-no, are, um, are you okay?” Juliet didn’t answer; she just turned and walked through the doorway, stepping over the messy corpse. Was she okay? She was surprisingly unbothered by taking ten or more hits from an SMG. The bullets had hurt, but her nanites had dulled the pain, and she knew they’d repair any superficial damage. She paused at the top of the stairs to glance down at her chest and stomach, sighing with relief when she realized the tough material of her jacket had done as advertised—stopped small-arms fire. Her jeans were soaked with blood, but her leg was working fine. Her subdermal armor had kept the damage away from her arteries and muscles.
Leo’s dead weight reminded her of her urgency, and Juliet recklessly descended the stairs, grunting as she took two or three at a time. Leo had to weigh 90 kilos, but she held up; her bones were strong, her muscles used to abuse, and she had Angel managing her nanites, keeping her moving, blocking whatever signals her body might naturally send her, trying to get the punishment to stop.
The music continued throughout the whole affair, but when she stepped through the door, Juliet walked into chaos. There might have been a hundred patrons and half that many dolls and other employees in the place, and now most of them were jammed into a queue, trying to get out the front door. Bartenders and floor staff were trying to calm people down, but apparently, a man losing his arm and the door bouncer getting sliced up had set things off. Some patrons didn’t seem to care, too drunk or jaded to leave their seats. Juliet scanned the room, saw a few dolls moving through a back door behind one of the bars, and hurried that way.
“I’m redirecting the town car to the alley entrance,” Angel said, guessing Juliet’s intent.
The woman followed her out of the stairwell and stammered, “C-can I just, like, leave?”
“Hell no!” Juliet growled. “I need to figure out what you had to do with this.” She pointed to the door she was closing in on. “Does that lead to a back exit?”
“Yes.” Her voice was soft and demure, and Juliet couldn’t tell if she was putting on some kind of act.
She glanced at her, saw her cheeks were still wet with tears, and said, “Stay with me, or things will get very bad for you very quickly. Any other security around here?”
“Luis on the door, and, well, you cut Zero in half. I’m not sure if AJ is working.”
“Does he dress like Zero? Carry an SMG?”
“SMG?”
“A gun like Zero had.”
“Yes!”
Juliet breathed a sigh of relief as she kicked the door open, startling a woman dressed in a too-short skirt. She yelped and hurried ahead, slipping through a door labeled PRIVATE. Juliet continued straight; she could see a glowing EXIT sign ahead. She glanced back at the woman behind her. “Who was the guy in the room with you? Also, what’s your name?”
“I’m Belinda, and that was Ronnie Honda; he runs this club. Ran.” She choked out another sob, stumbling in her heels and falling toward Juliet. She caught herself before bumping into her.
The sound of a door crashing open and closed several times told her she wasn’t the only one slipping out the back exit. When she rounded the corner and saw the door, Juliet picked up speed, wishing she could shift Leo’s weight to her right shoulder for a while but wanting to keep her sword arm ready. When she crashed into the alley, she found a sleek, high-end black town car waiting, but several club employees and patrons gathered around, pulling on the door handles, pounding on the roof, and hollering to be let in.
In a strident, clarion voice, the cab projected, “Step back from this vehicle, or I will release a crowd-control EMP and sonic burst. You have five seconds to comply. Five, Four . . .”
Juliet stood there, mouth agape, amazed to see an autonomous car service threatening a crowd. It seemed to work; the people backed off, hurrying toward the alley mouth, and Juliet approached the vehicle. She didn’t have to say anything; the town car must have been talking to Angel—its rear passenger door opened noiselessly as she approached. Juliet grunted with the strain as she lowered Leo’s body into the back seat, then she looked at Belinda. “Get in with him. I’ll meet you guys at the trauma center. I’ve gotta get my bike.”
Belinda blanched and started to stammer an objection, but Juliet wasn’t having it. She pulled on her sword hilt, exposing an inch of blade, and the young woman, choking on another sob, climbed into the car. Juliet slammed the door, and the vehicle sped off. As she jogged down the alley, she said, “I wonder how close LCS is to responding to the scene.”
“Not close. I’m monitoring their channels. You have seven messages from Frida, two from Tanaka, and one from Dora Lee.”
“Play ‘em after I get on my bike. You’re keeping tabs on that cab, right?”
“Of course. Don’t worry, you’ll outpace it if you split lanes.”
Juliet nodded, smiling grimly as she caught sight of her motorcycle waiting near the mouth of the alley. Its ground projection holograms were flashing, spelling out threats, and the bike growled while static electricity flashed over its surface, threatening the people standing too close. “Damn right, I will.”