It was strange; I had crossed the event horizon and submerged myself in the resonance realms twice, and both times I had emerged from the experience as if waking from a deep sleep. In the matrix, the longer I spent online, the more tired I was when I left. My body might have been stationary – though, thanks to my physiology, I didn’t have to worry about bedsores like other deckers – but my mind was hard at work that whole time.
But in the resonance realms, it felt like I was asleep; my activities nothing more than lucid dreams. I woke up refreshed, and perhaps something more. The first time, I had emerged with the fireflies nesting in my core, waiting to be unleashed. This time, as I staggered out of my bedroom, I found myself hyper-aware of the matrix-capable devices in my apartment. I was aware of them before, of course, but only of the fact that they were there unless I chose to focus on them. Now, I knew what they were doing and what they were going to do at all times.
Being able to see the process of the clock on the fridge as it prepared to display the next minute wasn’t immediately useful, but if the same predictive analytics could be applied to smart-weapons, or cyberware, then it’d help keep me safe if I was ever caught in another firestorm like the Garcia job turned into. In my new line of work, it was a distinct possibility.
More than that, I found that my awareness of the devices around me had extended. I was consciously aware of the devices in the apartments around me, of the positions of desktop terminals, commlinks left lying on kitchen countertops, games consoles nestled beneath trideo sets. It didn’t extend a fraction as far as my awareness in virtual reality, but virtual reality also meant that someone could just walk up to me and stab me in the face and I’d never be able to see it coming if they weren’t carrying anything wireless.
I shook my head at the thought, idly fishing through my cupboards as I tried to take stock of the amount of food I actually had available. The payment for the Chosen recon had come through, but with the amount of time I’d been spending at the loft, my fridge was still more or less as bare as it had been before I signed on with the team.
As I fished a glass out of the cupboards, full of enough crockery and glassware for a family of three plus the occasional guests, for a moment I thought about ordering in again – a quick check of the time showed that I’d been in the resonance for about eighteen hours, and my stomach was protesting at the neglect. My throat was certainly straining in agony as I drank two whole troll-sized glasses of water in quick succession.
But ordering in felt a lot like falling back into old, bad habits, so I ducked into the shower for long enough to feel vaguely clean, threw on a pair of new jeans that I’d picked out with Lisa, along with a tank top and a backpack for my shopping, and made my way down the hall to the elevator.
As the lift slowly crawled its way down through the building, I found my mind drifting back to the realm I had found beneath the resonance. Ever since I decided to track down Lisa’s commlink for the promise of a few thousand nuyen, it felt like I’d fallen through the rabbit hole and found that the world was a whole lot stranger than I’d ever expected.
Growing up, I thought I had the world all figured out, thought the information I’d picked up by osmosis from dad’s work and mom’s activism meant that I knew how everything fit together, knew all the nasty truths behind the spin on the trideo. After they died, I stopped caring about the world. I didn’t want to understand it.
But then I’d found the shadows, and walked hesitantly into the darkness. I’d fallen into a wonderland of corporate espionage, organised crime and schemes within schemes within schemes. Where a near-megacorp kept a murderer on its payroll out of pity, or charity, or whatever, and a victim had to hire professional criminals to bring him to justice.
But even that paled in comparison to the true wonderland. The resonance was so much more than just a secret. It felt like I finally understood. Like I finally had the explanation for why I was the way I was, finally had proof that I wasn’t just some glitch in reality.
Far below my feet, below the boundaries of the matrix, every scrap of data ever produced within the city was being duplicated and drawn down into the resonance, where it was duplicated again and again as it was filed off into whichever realms found it interesting. One of those realms was watching my city even now; cataloguing my image through the recorded footage of the security camera in the corner of the elevator, but the thought didn’t unsettle me.
I didn’t feel like a fly caught in a web; I felt like a spider.
The nearest convenience store was on the corner of the block, across the street from a rented-out office building and sandwiched in-between a sandwich place and a cheap burger joint. From the outside it looked like a local, family owned business with a tatty but welcoming red and white-striped cloth awning over the entrance. It was a fiction, but a pleasant-looking one. In reality, the business was one of a seemingly infinite number of franchised shops that took on a mom and pop aesthetic, right down to sometimes employing someone’s actual mom and pop, while being owned by one megacorp or another.
I bought groceries at the checkout for the first time in two years, forcing myself to not even glance at the price tags as I focused solely on the things I wanted to buy. Even then, habit had me buying cheap with one notable exception.
Back home, I put some rice on the stove and threw some soy chunks, frozen vegetables and curry spices into a pan, enjoying the resulting meal on the plastic garden furniture we kept on the balcony for family dinners when the weather was nice. As I had done since I was tall enough to look over the railing, I watched the running lights of ships creeping in and out of the Bay as I ate.
One of the things I’d learned quickly when I’d started living on my own was that recommended portion sizes were meant for people who were six and a half feet tall at most, but even with extra ingredients I still felt like the meal had only just managed to fill the gap left in my stomach by the past eighteen hours.
Nevertheless, with the biological necessities taken care of, I flicked the switch on the electric kettle and grabbed my treat out of my rucksack, fishing a teabag out of the small box and placing it in the bottom of a ceramic mug with the logo of ‘Wyrm Talk’ on the side.
The teabags had been made from real leaves, harvested who-knows-where and shipped all the way to the UCAS before being displayed behind the counter of the convenience shop, next to the cigarettes made from real tobacco and above the small fridge containing a few packets of genuine meat.
I watched as the boiled water was stained brown as I poured it over the teabag, aiding the process along with a spoon before I reached back into my backpack and pulled out a small bottle of soymilk, bringing the colour to the exact right shade on muscle memory alone. Then, almost reverentially, I took the small squeeze-bottle of honey from the shelf next to the sink and added the slightest drop to the mug.
When dad died, there were nine teabags left in the box in the cupboard. I drank three in the first week, before I realised how dire the situation was. After that I rationed them out as much as I could, sometimes going a whole month between cups, but the remaining six still disappeared before the end of the first year.
Sitting on the balcony with a warm mug of tea in my hand and a comfortable sweater thrown over my tank top felt like coming home. For a moment, I found I could completely understand Lisa’s insistence on her cafetiere and ludicrously expensive supply of real coffee beans that she kept back in the loft. I’d stolen the taste of tea ages ago, had it stored in a file somewhere on dad’s computer, but mentally flavouring water – even warm water – to taste like tea just couldn’t compare to the real thing.
It wasn’t a matter of taste, just like how the resonance wasn’t purely a matter of data. It was the meaning attached to the taste, the colour, the time spent preparing it and the environment it was prepared in. It was living, not just existing.
Maybe after the next job I’d splash out for skimmed milk, rather than soy, and if we ever hit the ‘one last job’ that pop-culture suggested I was now supposed to be chasing and found ourselves set for life, I’d buy a small glass jar of honey that was made by actual bees. But even then, I suspected it wouldn’t be as good as the way I’d always had it, precisely because it was the way I’d always had it.
The view was similarly comforting; the ache I used to feel when looking over the docks had softened with time, leaving only fond memories behind. Idly, I wondered if I could see the A2B freight warehouse from my first job, the pharmaceutical plant from my second or the rooftop from which Bitch and the Chosen hatchet-man had looked out over the Ares arcology.
After a moment, I realised that I absolutely could if I used the resonance to overlay their addresses onto my vision. Unfortunately, the freight warehouse was buried in a forest of taller buildings, and there was one particularly large megabuilding that blocked my view of the Chosen’s warehouse.
As for the plant, that was far behind the field of view offered by my balcony, up on the slopes of Charter Hill. I still turned to look at its approximate location in AR, and as I did, my new awareness of the icons around me left me with a strange feeling somewhat similar to noticing a friend out of the corner of my eye.
I called Lisa’s commlink, and she picked up after just a second.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing in my elevator?” I asked, as I watched her commlink’s icon slowly creeping up past the fourth floor.
“I’m sure it’s not your elevator,” Lisa retorted. “It belongs to everyone.”
“Everyone who lives in the building,” I countered as I set my mug down on the table. “I’m pretty sure you don’t.”
“It’s like I told you, I don’t want to live in a loft my whole life. I’m apartment hunting.”
I sighed. “Listen, Lisa, I know you’re waiting for me to ask how you found me, but I’m just not going to. Besides,” I smiled. “I found you first, remember? Tracked you down across the whole city with just a message post to go on.”
“Feeling a little mellow today, huh?” Lisa asked, with mirth clear in her tone. “A nice, smooth psychedelic trip through the net to unwind all that tension you carry with you?”
“How’d you guess?” She’d reached the tenth floor. Three more to go, I thought.
“Because you’ve been uncontactable for somewhere between eighteen and twenty hours and you woke up too chilled out to check your messages even though they’re literally going straight to your brain.”
“Ah, fuck.” Sure enough, I’d missed more than a few messages and calls. I didn’t even look at the ones from Brian or Lisa, but there was also one from Elle.
I compiled a quick response, as Lisa stepped out of the elevator on the thirteenth floor.
“Hey, Taylor?” Lisa asked, as she stood in the corridor. “I know you live on either the thirteenth or the fourteenth floor because they have higher ceilings, but which apartment is yours? I didn’t get that far, but to be fair I’ve only been at it an hour.”
“Thirteen-nine,” I answered as I left the balcony with my cup of tea in one hand, using the other to pull the door shut. “On the left, near the end of the hall.”
The moment I set my mug down on the dining table, I was suddenly struck by just what was happening. Lisa was here, inches away from my door. The first person to visit my apartment in two years. My apartment that was full of every surviving memory of my family, from the baby pictures I’d never taken off the wall to mom’s dusty old books.
And the dust! When was the last time I dusted?
The doorbell rang, before Lisa started hammering on it with a dainty fist.
“C’mon, already, let me in. I’m assuming you’re decent.”
I stamped down on my nerves, dismissing them as something that would have paralysed me before I started Shadowrunning but that I now needed to get over if I was ever going to stay Shadowrunning, and opened the door.
To my surprise, Lisa was dressed for a night on the town in a silver-sequinned minidress, tall red boots and a knee-length black PVC jacket topped with a fake white fur collar that flared up into lilac at the top. She’d put on make-up, and she took in my cardigan and jeans with a knowing smile on her face before she beamed up at me.
“Better than I was hoping for,” she observed. “I was expecting you to be more… bedraggled. Those are some of the jeans you picked out, right? They look good.”
“Thanks,” I chucked, genuinely unsure what to do about the compliment as I idly rubbed the back of my neck with my hand. “You’re looking good yourself,” I observed. “What’s the occasion?”
Lisa waved a hand, dismissing the question entirely. “We’ll get to that later, and not in the doorway. Mind if I come in?”
“Sure, sure.” I moved my bulk out of the doorway, letting her past. “I just boiled some water. You want some tea? Or I think I have some soykaf powder in the cupboard…. Might be expired. Does it expire?”
“Soykaf is already undrinkable when it’s in date,” Lisa observed as she looked around the open-plan main room of my apartment – try as I might, I couldn’t quite work out what exactly her expression was. She smiled again, as her gaze landed on the box of teabags.
“Made from real leaves, eh? So you do have some creature comforts that aren’t digital. I’d love to try some. The same way you take it.”
“Sure, no problem,” I answered, flicking the switch on the kettle and watching as it lit up for a few seconds before the water returned to the boiling point. “Soymilk and a dash of honey.”
Lisa took the mug I offered her – one of mom’s Columbia University mugs from her own days as a student there – and looked around the room once again before sinking into my armchair, giggling as she sipped from her tea. I couldn’t stop myself from chuckling either; it was a hilarious image.
“I feel like Goldilocks in this thing,” Lisa remarked, as I retrieved my own cup of tea and took a seat on the couch. “Like any second now it’s going to swallow me up.”
“I feel like Goldilocks all the time,” I shrugged my shoulders. “Except my porridge is always too small.”
“Still, this is a really nice place.” Lisa looked around at the pictures on the walls, the books on their shelves. “It feels lived in, you know? I think this is the perfect size for a family; any larger and people start to live separate lives.”
I sighed, taking a long sip of my drink. “Yeah, I… uh, inherited it, I suppose. Not formally, I just kept paying rent.”
“That can’t have been easy. A place this big? It’s a lot of floorspace for one person to pay for.”
“I’m a technomancer,” I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve got low overheads. Back before, if I cut out the tea and the fancy stuff I didn’t need, I was able to get through the month. Now, I’ve got money for both rent and fancy stuff I don’t need.”
“I’m not going to ask why you didn’t downsize,” Lisa spoke, slowly. “But the thought has to have crossed your mind, right?”
“This is all I have left of them,” I shrugged my shoulders, looking away. “I’ve never understood why the rich spend so much on a hole in a field with a carved slab of rock. There’s nothing in a body; if people live on, it’s through the memories they leave in digital and biological files, and this place is full of them.”
I leant forwards, stared at the floor.
“I took dad’s ashes down to the docks, tossed them in the Atlantic – figured it’s what he would have wanted. In the moment, I thought about walking in after them. That was the last thing I did before shutting myself away for two years.”
Lisa just sighed, setting her mug down on the end table next to dad’s armchair.
“I honestly don’t know whether to feel sorry for you or envy you.”
I looked up at her, confused.
“This place… I get it, I really do. It’s homely. It’s full of memories – good memories. You know where I’m from, but you don’t know what it was like. I didn’t have anything like this.”
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She stood up, crossing the room to sit gingerly down next to me on the couch, with maybe half an arm’s distance between us.
“The name on my birth certificate is Saraye Liaran, daughter of Duke and Duchess Liaran. I’m not just from the Tír, I’m Tír nobility. I was about as rich and privileged as a rich, privileged girl gets, but I’d still have given it up in an instant for what you had.”
She shook her head, a pained expression on her face. Surprisingly, it was one I recognised; the look of someone who was really unsure whether saying what they were about to say was the right decision. She was choosing her words with extreme care, and I wasn’t sure why.
“You’re not a person in the nobility. You’re a surname, a symbol, a resource. Your whole life it’s drummed into you that your words and actions don’t really belong to you, because the slightest misstep would hurt your family’s station, its reputation. And that won’t change, ever, because you’re not going to die.”
Those last words were said with an almost manic, wide-eyed smile.
“When I was in prep school, my homeroom teacher told us that nobody knew how long we were going to live because no sixth world elf had yet died of old age. It’d be centuries, at least, and our parents would live for just as long. There’d be no freedom after you graduated, or after university, or fifty years after that, because the head of your family still decided your usefulness and when you had a hundred years of life on you they’d have a hundred years more.”
In that moment, I felt incredibly sorry for her. She still looked beautiful, her elven grace visible even as she held back tears, but crying shouldn’t be beautiful. That was a curse in its own right.
“My brother… he took the step you didn’t, and I think that was why he did it. I think he saw everything he was doing for our parents, for the dynasty, and he realised that it wasn’t ever going to change. So he thought about it, for a long time, and eventually decided that there was only one thing he could do to prove that his life was really his own. End it.”
She shifted on the couch, turning so that she was leaning against me as she tucked her legs into her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
“I couldn’t understand it, had no idea why he would ever do something like that, but I didn’t even have time to grieve. We had to keep up appearances, you see. For the dynasty. And the longer it went on, the more I hated it. You can’t imagine what it’s like knowing your parents are weighing the political capital that can be gained from your arranged marriage against the monetary value of your dowry when the very thought of sex disgusts you.”
“So you ran away,” I said, softly.
“I found Snake first,” Lisa remarked, her hand drifting to the pendant around her neck, “when I figured out why Reggie did it. She guided me onto the right path. Tír Tairngire is a closed country; it’s not easy to get in or out except through Cara'Sir – Portland, I mean. Even there, it’s strictly regulated, unless you happen to be guided to a Salish trucker who follows the same mentor spirit as you.”
Abruptly, Lisa shook her head and moved back over to the far side of the couch.
“Jeez, I’ve never told anyone that. I don’t think I’ve ever even said it out loud. My point is, I had a privileged home life that was rotten inside, and you had a good home life that ended. This place… it’s like it’s frozen in time. I know you have to have seen it yourself.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I know. I can’t help but look back over the last two years and wonder what the hell I was thinking.”
“The same thing I was, before I ran,” Lisa answered. “Keep your head down, keep going, and lose yourself in memories of the way things were, back before your family stopped feeling like a family. I’m sure Regis felt the same way, but he picked a pretty shit way out. My way out was running, and your way is with us. So,” she reached up and brushed at the fur of her jacket, “Brian was wondering if you wanted to come celebrate our last job. We kinda left things on a quiet note on account of the whole vampire thing.”
“What sort of celebration?” I asked, nervously eyeing Lisa’s outfit.
“There was some debate about that,” Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. “A meal, bowling, a bar. In the end, we settled on meeting up at this Caribbean bar Brian knows and then moving on to the Palanquin.”
“Is Rachel coming too?” I asked.
“To the bar,” Lisa answered. “I doubt she’ll make it to the club. You, though, you should definitely go.”
I fidgeted in my seat, as nerves crept back into my body.
“I’ve never been to a club. Well, not as a customer.”
“And that’s why you should go,” Lisa retorted. “It’s another new memory. I know I got you some stuff that wasn’t just practical. Get properly dressed up for the first time in your life, spend too much money on some weird-coloured cocktail you’ve never heard of and gain the confidence to dance terribly in a room full of people.”
I chuckled at the image, which seemed to settle the issue in my mind.
“Alright,” I said, standing up, “I’ll go. Just don’t expect me to stay for long.”
Suddenly, I paused. I’d been to the Palanquin when it was in full swing, staring out across the packed floor of the club before Tattletale handed me the expensive suit that still hung in my wardrobe and ushered me into the meeting with our last client.
“Want me to help pick out an outfit?” Lisa guessed what was on my mind.
“Please,” I said, relaxing.
“It’s why I came round,” Lisa answered. “Figured you might need a little coaxing and an expert eye.”
“So you’re an expert now?” I asked. “I had you pegged as a gifted amateur.”
“You’d be surprised what they teach would-be debutantes,” Lisa snarked back as she followed me into the hall. I paused at the threshold of my bedroom door, my hand resting on the handle as I looked back at Lisa just in time to catch her sneaking a glance at the door on the other side of the hall; the one to my parents’ room.
“Promise you won’t say anything?” I asked as I pushed the door open.
“Not a word,” she answered as she stepped through into my room, before her face lit up with a smile that said whole sentences.
She graciously didn’t comment on all the flotsam and jetsam of my childhood that littered the room, from the band posters that had been up on the walls since mom died – and I was still a teen, with a teen’s taste – to the eighteen-year old teddy bear sitting in my wardrobe on a shelf above where my Shadowrunner outfit was hanging because I’d never had the heart to get rid of it.
Instead, Lisa simply began flicking through the various clothes I had hanging up in there – most of which I had bought with her in the market – and fishing out a few likely prospects before tossing them onto the bed.
“Well, you don’t have anything that I’d call dedicated club clothes,” Lisa cast a critical eye over my wardrobe with the practiced ease of someone who had swindled and pickpocketed her way through the nightlife of a dozen different cities, “but that’s not a bad thing. You need to feel confident, not embarrassed, and that means building up to it.”
“No skirts,” I said, flatly. “At my height, anything as short as yours becomes dangerous.”
“Pants, then,” Lisa said. “You like the ones you wear on jobs, right?”
I nodded. The aramid-lined pants fit closer than anything I’d worn before, but there was something I really liked about their sleek, black texture. They felt dangerous.
“Then here,” she said, handing me a pair of black skinny jeans that I’d picked off the rack as a way of proving to Lisa that I was willing to be daring. “And pair it with…”
She looked along the tops, brushing past the handful of blouses before picking out a blue spaghetti-strap top that had turned out to be shorter than I thought it was when I bought it.
“Spaghetti straps are the right call,” Lisa said as she held the top up against my torso. “They’ll show off your shoulders, and those dermal deposits on your skin.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. Back in middle school, I’d been fiercely embarrassed by the calcified growths that had started to poke through the skin around my shoulders like the world’s hardest warts.
“Definitely,” Lisa answered, surprising me. “They give you a bit of a freckle-like effect. Like the grey skin, it’s rare, and rare is good in the right circumstances.”
I snorted. “Yeah, it’s not going to be winning me any favours in a Humanis club.”
“Which the Palanquin very much isn’t,” Lisa retorted. “Now, as for shoes…”
“I don’t have any heels,” I said, with a glance down at her own footwear. “Frankly, I don’t know if they make any that can take the weight.”
“They do,” Lisa mused. “Especially if the stiletto is there to conceal a stiletto knife, but I see your point. Just wear whatever feels right.”
“Should I wear my jacket?” I asked, glancing at where it was hanging behind the door of my wardrobe.
Lisa brought her hand up to her chin, spending a moment in thought before answering.
“No. I want Brian to see your shoulders in that top.”
I flushed, my eyes widening.
“Listen, Taylor,” Lisa said, placing a hand on my arm. “I know Brian finds you attractive, and I know you find him attractive, but it’s only ever going to be up to you how far that goes. If you want to try it, try it. If you don’t, don’t. Either way, tonight’s about new experiences.”
She looked up at me, all the sly needling gone from her expression.
“But if you’re worried, let me tell you that I’ve known Brian for a while, and he isn’t the kind of guy who’ll think less of you for making the attempt, or turning down his attempt, if he makes one. Honestly I’d half expect both of you to fumble at the first hurdle out of mutual awkwardness.”
I paused, frozen in a moment of deep thought. I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted a relationship at all. I didn’t know if I was the right person for relationships, if I was even really into Brian or I was just crushing on him because he was near and hot and the first guy I’d seen with my naked eyes for years. Despite Lisa’s assurances, I didn’t know if he was into me.
“I’ll see how I feel when I get there,” I said, gently ushering Lisa towards the door with one massive hand on the back of her jacket. “But for now, I’ll dress nice for me.”
“Atta girl,” Lisa answered, as she meekly accepted her exile from my bedroom. “Oh, and here,” she reached into her jacket and tossed me something, which I caught with ease. It was a tube of lipstick, in royal blue.
“I’m assuming your mother taught you how to put that on?” Lisa asked, before pulling the door shut behind her as I nodded.
A few minutes later I had thrown off my jeans and tank top and thrown on my new outfit, carefully applying the lipstick before finally giving in to curiosity and examining myself in the long mirror tucked inside the door of my wardrobe. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognise the girl in the reflection, but – just like when I’d first seen myself in my Shadowrunner gear – all the same features seemed to carry a completely different appearance when shaped by a wildly different outfit to what I usually wore.
I’m going to have to get used to looking in the mirror and liking what I see, I thought.
I straightened up a little, surprised to see just how confident I felt, how the gangliness of my height had become almost statuesque. Sure, whenever I focused too hard on the tight jeans, the wide strip of exposed midriff or the calcified deposits of rock-like bone circling above the top of my top, some of the familiar nerves and embarrassment crept into me, but when I saw myself as a whole it all seemed to fit together.
When I opened the door to my bedroom, I had a genuine smile on my face. Lisa matched it with her own as she looked me up and down.
“Looks like I’ve done it again,” she remarked. “You should be grateful; I’m practically a trained stylist.”
“Really?” I drawled. “You were tutored in clubwear?”
Lisa chuckled.
“Oh no, not at all. But I can absolutely rock a diaphanous white dress. After all,” her tone changed completely, becoming light, airy and infuriatingly whiny, “I am but a delicate and mysterious elven maiden, my beauty ageless and graceful. Shall I play the harp for you?”
I burst into laughter, leaning against the wall as Lisa beamed at me, all her airs and graces disappearing behind her familiar grin.
“One last thing, though,” she said, pulling back her bottom lip and pointing at her comparatively tiny incisors. “You’ve got some lipstick on your right tusk.”
“Ah, shit.”
Once I’d licked off the stray fleck of blue, I followed Lisa out of my apartment and onto the metro. We drew a lot of looks, even if Lisa still drew the majority of them – I’d made an effort, but her dress was simply stunning – as we made our way uptown to the bar that Brian had picked out.
The closer we got to the Caribbean joint, the more self-conscious I felt. I was throwing myself into the deep end without a lifejacket – or even a regular jacket – but I stamped down on my nerves. I’d begrudgingly accepted that I looked alright, and I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter if Brian – if the others – didn’t agree.
The bar was somewhere between up and down market, nestled as it was on the edge of Constitution Hill. It was extremely narrow fronted, with just enough room for the set of stairs that would undoubtedly lead down into the basement, but they’d made up for it with a flashy AR presence that overwhelmed the Common Denominator franchise that leased the rest of the first floor, its displays of practical, urban clothing closed off for the night behind grated shutters.
I got the feeling it was the sort of bar the people who worked in fancier bars would drink in. Down the stairs, a door opened up into a cosy space with a faux-wooden floor and bare brick walls covered in photos and memorabilia from the owner’s homeland, with pride of place given to a polyester Cuban flag.
Brian was leaning against the bar, slotting a credstick into the bar’s cash machine as the bartender poured out three pints of beer. He was wearing a tight-fitting steel-blue t-shirt, dark jeans and comfortable sneakers. He’d combed out his cornrows, tying his hair back in a long, loose ponytail that sort of poofed out below the elastic.
I couldn’t help but look down and glance at the blue of my own top, glaring at Lisa for an instant as I wondered whether she’d picked it out deliberately. She simply smiled back at me, before disappearing off towards Brian.
I don’t know if it was the clack of her heels on the floor, some street samurai instinct of his or the pounding of my own heart that gave us away, but Brian turned at our approach. He glanced at Lisa – who wouldn’t? I supposed, without bitterness – before smiling as he turned his attention to me.
It might have been because of how much I’d been exposed to Lisa’s own sarcastic, slightly defensive grin, but I found myself focusing on that smile. Brian had a wide, genial smile that looked out of place when set atop that much real and synthetic muscle. It was a smile that hid nothing, more honest and unguarded that anything I would expect to see from someone in our profession – or someone who’d been in our profession for as long as he had.
“Taylor,” he greeted me as he looked at the beers, his eyes momentarily flicking back to me. “It’s my round, want something to drink?”
“Sure, thanks,” I said, as I moved up to the bar and leant my hip against the countertop. Lisa had disappeared off somewhere, something that should have been impossible.
“I’m glad you made it,” Brian said, after nodding to the bartender. “You dropped off the face of the earth.”
“It was worth it, though,” I said, darting my eyes around in case anyone might overhear. There were a few people who were pretty close to us, so I leant in and lowered my voice. “Every time I go under, it feels like I come back stronger, with more tricks in my arsenal.”
“You’re looking a lot more confident too,” Brian observed. “Finally adjusting to this life?”
“I think so,” I answered honestly even as my mind burned in the effort of figuring out whether there was a double meaning in the compliment. “I think it helped that the last job played to my strengths so much.”
“You did good,” Brian said as he paid for my drink. “Especially with Rachel. It can’t have been easy getting her to cooperate.”
I shrugged my shoulders, then inwardly winced as Brian noticed the motion. “I’ve got a backdoor into her head, I guess. We think in similar ways.”
“Really?” Brian asked, seemingly confused, but my drink had been poured and there was an old man waiting to get to the bar. I moved to grab a couple of the drinks, but Brian had already picked up all four and my hand just brushed against his arm instead.
The synthskin of his cyberarm felt real enough, but it would never be mistaken for organic with the rigid layer of solid metal and plastic beneath it.
“Sorry,” I murmured, quiet enough that I wasn’t sure Brian heard it as I followed him away from the bar.
With my height, I was more than tall enough to see over the other people in the bar to where my teammates had set up. Rachel and Alec were leaning against a standing table built around one of the steel girders that supported the floor of the clothes shop above us. The table already had a few empty glasses on it, and the pair of them looked almost comically mismatched.
Rachel was dressed, as always, like she’d just walked out of a garage, with hard-wearing, wipe-clean overalls worn over a stained tank top that left her cybernetic arms bare.
Alec, on the other hand, could have been on Lisa’s arm in the fancy socialite club of choice. He was wearing a light blue, floral pattern button-up shirt – though he’d only done up the lowest button, leaving the rest open – tucked into business-like charcoal grey slacks, with strings of long necklaces looped over his chest. The whole ensemble looked like it cost more than a month’s rent.
Lisa herself had made her way to the table with a tall, narrow glass of some unidentifiable green cocktail in her hand.
“Look who made it to the party,” Alec drawled at me, raising an empty glass in a mocking toast.
“Be nice,” Brian said back, his tone soft but with an undercurrent I quite liked.
“Yeah, I figured I might as well come with you guys,” I answered, as nonchalantly as I could manage, though I still couldn’t help the twinge of unease at Alec’s tone. I knew he had to have changed, but I could still remember how he’d acted in a nightclub back in the event horizon. “What are you hoping to get out of this, anyway?” I asked, with a pointed look at his shirt.
“I’m not hoping to get anything,” he answered. “Plans make for boring nights. I much prefer to just go with the flow; that way, I might actually be surprised.”
That fit with the impression I had of him. I couldn’t help but compare his attitude to what Lisa had told me about her time after her brother’s death, or my own time in isolation. He’d escaped his family, then decided to coast along with the life he’d found. The order of events was different, but it was the same sort of situation.
“How about you?” Lisa asked Brian. “What are you hoping to get out of this?”
I froze, glaring at Lisa before I realised Alec might notice the look and smooth out the expression.
“I’m not normally one for clubs,” Brian answered, “but I figure we could all use a chance to de-stress after how the last job ended.”
“Being nearly eaten by a vampire, you mean?” Alec retorted. “I’ve got to admit, that was a new one for me.”
“We came out alright,” Lisa said as she leant against the table, nodding to me. “Thanks to a bit of quick thinking, we even got paid for it.”
“Either way, I figure we could all use a chance to blow off some steam,” Brian said as he finished off his drink. “So what do you say we head on over there?”
“I think it’s about time,” Lisa said, looking around. I’d already finished my drink, but a pint wasn’t the same amount for me as it was for them. “We don’t want to be there when it’s too busy.”
I followed them out and up into the street, ducking once again as I made my way through the door up the stairs to the first floor. Most of the team set off in the direction of the Palanquin, a couple of blocks walk from where we were, but Rachel turned to make her way back to the metro station.
“Taylor, you alright?” Brian asked, once he noticed I wasn’t coming.
“I’ll catch you up,” I answered, before hurrying over to Rachel.
She looked at me, her expression unreadable behind her featureless optics.
“Hey, I just wanted to say that I was really impressed with how you handled yourself back in the warehouse. You’re a braver woman than me, by far.”
She stopped, turned and leant against the wall, either waiting for me to continue or just to see if I was done.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with?” I asked. “Even if it’s not your scene, you’d still be with friends.”
For a moment, it looked like she was going to just brush me off. To be honest, I was expecting a curt dismissal, but I felt I had to ask. She was stuck in the present more than anyone else on the team, maybe almost as much as me at my worst.
Instead, she looked me in the eye and shook her head.
“It’s too loud,” she said.
“Fair enough,” I smiled. “Have a good night, Rachel.”
“Yeah,” she answered, a little hesitantly. Her optics flicked away from me. She was looking down the street, at the backs of the others. They flicked back, meeting my gaze. “You like him.”
I was about to deny it, but I knew that lying to her would destroy whatever tenuous connection existed between us.
“…Yeah, I think I do.”
Rachel simply nodded, like I’d just confirmed that I have horns, before she turned and walked away. I wasn’t sure what had just happened. The idea that Rachel also ‘liked’ Brian crossed my mind for a brief moment, but it didn’t fit at all. I wondered if she was testing a hypothesis; if she was using me to verify whether what she’d seen was the way things actually were, because she trusted me enough not to lie to her.
Maybe she’s not as stuck in her head as I thought?