I wake on the third buzz that shakes the couch. Still in the darkness, all lights off and all doors shut. My eyes creak open, crust in the corners. Sheets scatter nearby as Cal jolts upright a moment later, muttering curses while she paws around blindly. Her crawling brings her closer my way, drawn to the next pair of buzzes that emanate from somewhere nearby. Her hands pat their way along the cushions, over my face, then back away and down into the gap between our lounges, before she finally straights up with her JOY in hand, silhouetted by a fire alarm’s faint bead of illumination.
My eyes slam shut just as she makes the mistake of flipping open a projector screen.
“Fuck!”
Flashbang brightness. The light dims to a lamprey glow once she navigates to the brightness controls. Blue colors illuminate just her face from the neck up, squinting and bleary-eyed. I roll over onto my side with a groan, so much more groggy than I should be. “What time is it?”
“Four… in the afternoon,” she yawns, now paging through her messages. I can see them in reverse through the translucent holoscreen; most left unread. “You passed out while we were watching vids.”
I flop back onto my back, hair pooled around me like water. Run my real hand through my bangs to move them away from my eyes. “…I’m gonna miss my fight.”
“Good. We’ve got bigger problems than which Venter’s ass you’re going to kick tonight.”
Scooting from her couch to mine, Cal nudges me over with her hip, then wiggles her way down into a comfortable curl. Her screen floats in front of us split right down the center. I use my elbows to start sitting up. Side by side, eyes jumping between the two halves of the screen.
“My query came back from the M,” she says, pointing at the left side. A sea of file names and types scrolls slowly downwards, dissolving at the bottom of the projection. “Looks like Jolie had an idea we’d go poking around. She gave my intern ID access permissions to all of her personal files. She’s got a lot of stuff in here.” Her voice trails to a murmur as she keeps scrolling, using casual thumbstrokes on her JOY’s shell. I squint to read the files in the dark. Too many to count. They scroll past in a blur. Photo albums, something called ZONE A, digital libraries of her books to read while abroad. Then folders stuffed with spreadsheets for every year she’s worked in the M, dating all the way back her earliest days as a clerical intern for Greggus Rebun. Over twenty years of history.
The query already pulled up a docket nestled deep inside Jolie’s records, beside a folder called CHIMERA. Inside the docket is a personal list of every Relic she must have known of, each logged with a timestamp and exact geographic coordinates of each device’s current, or then-current location.
“Huh. There’s mine,” Cal says, paging through the list. “JOY suppression, bracelet style, owned by yours truly. And look, right below it. There is another Relic in the city. Not a lot of details on it, though.” She squints. “I knew she was hiding another one.”
“Maybe not hiding it. Those coordinates, the y-axis is-”
“-negative, which means it’s-”
“-in the Vents, yeah.” I start to sit up while she pulls up the specific coordinates. The screen displays a map that’s a flat black square. “That can’t be right.”
“It’s right, alright,” Cal sighs. “It’s in the Abyss.”
She zooms out, pages around in search of some recognizable part of the undercity, sees nothing, then eventually shifts the 2-D map of the Vents upwards, slowly drifting towards the crust like an x-ray scan. Grey, indistinct charts of undercity layers begin slowly blooming in the darkness. She scrolls further. The undercity layers grow and pass by with each thumbstroke before hitting the metal crust of the city, then continuing up into the Electric Town. Dead in the center of the ring of streets that swirl outwards from the Metro Blockhouse.
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“Half a mile beneath the M itself,” she mutters. Her scrolling takes us back down to those undercity layers. “It’s hours away from us through the Vents. Shit. And not even in settled territory. It’s out in the Shocks. Somewhere way back where people used to live.”
Goosebumps rise along my shoulders. Still. “Shouldn’t be a problem for us. Pack your stuff and let’s get out there.”
Her head dips towards the unread side of the screen. “Us, is what I’m wondering about.”
On the other half of the split screen wavers a text chat between Cal and Valance, with the latest exchange just a few minutes prior. An invitation- a pointed request, really- for Cal to attend some gathering up in the Electric Town where the Shadows will be welcoming some new members. Tonight.
“Nah. You can bail on them,” I growl.
“And you can police your own life,” Cal casually snips back. “Fortunately for you, we’re in agreement this time. I’ve been avoiding the other Shadows for weeks now. Valance already knows something is up. But I wasn’t talking about the party.” She glances over, half her face lit in blue. “If all the Shadows are going to be over in E-Town for the night, the Imperial Complex will be wide open. It’s the perfect chance for me to spring Jolie.”
“You to spring Jolie?” I emphasize the singular.
“Stealth isn’t exactly your thing, and you know it. Springing Jolie became a solo job the moment she got sent to the Imperial Complex. Lucky for you that you’ve got an expert assassin with a soft spot for you tucked somewhere deep inside her cold, murderous chest.” She leans back, resting her weight on her hands. “We can waive the usual fee if you do me a favor tonight too. I make a move for your aunt, and you go get me that Relic.”
“Not going to do it out of the goodness of your heart?” I jokingly ask.
“Since you apparently need another reminder, Tay,” She leans over, so close her hair drapes over mine, close enough to breathe for each other. “I was never helping you out of the goodness of my heart.” Her breath grazes my lips like the edge of a knife. Deadly and daring to as she says, “And I don’t work for free. We just happen to want the same things.”
I arch an eyebrow. “Seems to happen pretty often, if you ask me.”
“I wasn’t asking.” She focuses on the cut on my nose, eyeing the healing scar. “You really give my intentions too much credit. Or did you suddenly forget who my family is?”
I scoff quietly. “You try so hard to seem like you’re just like Thane, but you two are nothing the same.”
She smirks back. Meaning well, but I can see her suddenly going cold to me in real time. She leans away quick, about to escape the conversation until I put a hand on her wrist.
“You don’t have to keep faking it around me,” I say. “I mean it. What’s the harm in saying what you’re really thinking?”
Cal snatches her hand back a little too quick, not meeting my gaze. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I’m not really in the mood to open my heart to you, Ms. Altruist.”
Slipping off the couch, she pads over to her gear and starts rummaging through the miscellaneous equipment we’ve scavenged over the weeks. A pack of credit chits gets shoved in her pocket as she jogs up a pair of tight black pants, secured with a double-cross belt over top. Already focused on the coming night. Though she’s turned away, I can see the conviction in her slender shoulders. The same I remember so vividly from Thane, when I’d watch him wake on the morning of a tournament.
Letting her have the separation, I swing my legs over the couch and fish my bag out from beneath, tossing it atop the blankets. “If Jolie gets hurt, I know where you live.”
“I haven’t forgotten how important she is to you, Tay.”
“Just making sure.”
We keep preparing, back-to-back. I pull up Nabuna’s contact info on my JOY and start it ringing, still replaying the last exchange in my head. “You promised not to lie,” I say, letting the wall rebound my voice. “I’ll find that Relic tonight. But when we get back, I want to know what you’re holding out on. I want to trust you. Not just the parts of you I know.”
“You’ve seen the best parts already.” Coldly professional, Cal throws on her jacket, straightens the collar, then reaches for a threadbare scarf. “I doubt you’d like the other ones.”