I was becoming used to the Palanquin, but it felt like I’d never entered it the same way, even if I’d used the same door both times. The first time, I had been too overwhelmed by my new life to really take in the club, but it had been the middle of the day with the building closed to customers and what had struck me was just how quiet and unassuming it seemed compared to the overindulgent neon and AR advertisements of its neighbours.
The second time, I’d felt like an intruder. It was still quiet, but when I wasn’t there for work, I became conscious of how everyone else in the room was bustling around with hurried purpose as they prepared for the night ahead, or held clandestine daytime meetings behind sealed, soundproofed curtains up on the VIP floor. That feeling of intrusion had only increased as I was led practically at knifepoint up to Labyrinth’s bedroom, but it ended with a sort of begrudging acceptance from Faultline herself – one I’d taken advantage of when I submersed myself in the resonance.
When I woke from that submersion and made my way up from the safehouse in the building’s sublevels, it was to the club in full swing. Even then, however, I was separated from the crowds by my presence in the VIP area and by the submachine gun in my jacket. Nor did I have the time to fully appreciate the spectacle, as Tattletale hastily bundled me into a suit and pushed me into the meeting with our last client.
On my third visit to the Palanquin, we approached the club at the zenith of its nightly cycle of life, decay and renewal. Seen in the neon haze of Constitution Hill at night, the plain font of the Palanquin’s white-lit sign and the bare brickwork of its walls came across as a declaration of confidence, rather than any intent to hide. Compared to the strutting peacocks that surrounded it, with jagged font in flashing colours and immense silhouettes of nude women gyrating around halogen stripper poles, it was as if the Palanquin was looking down its nose at them; declaring with absolute confidence that its reputation alone was all it needed.
If it had an advertisement at all, it was in the line that stretched along the front of the building, beneath the glowing sign. My new preternatural awareness of augmented reality revealed that this, at least, was as carefully constructed a façade as anything offered by the buildings around it; there was a camera pointing down at the line with an algorithm that counted the number of people and how far down the building it stretched, comparing that to other systems that measured the number of people in the club and relaying the data to the bouncers at the door.
I realised from the chatter of code that the goal wasn’t just to keep the number of people inside the building in compliance with the city’s fire codes regarding maximum occupancy, it was to carefully regulate the amount of people waiting in the line. The simple programme in the camera existed to make sure that there were enough people outside to make the club look interesting, that they weren’t waiting long enough that they decided to give up, and that the line itself wasn’t so long that it dissuaded passers-by from joining it.
Not that the Palanquin needed the algorithmic help, judging by how the numbers inside the club were very deliberately hovering at barely a dozen people short of the maximum occupancy. I’d only had brief encounters with her, but it struck me as exactly the sort of ploy Faultline would use even when she could have easily thrived on reputation alone. It was a very mercenary approach to running any business, let alone a nightclub.
I found myself looking at the people in the line in the same analytical way I’d started to look at anyone I encountered, whether I was on a job or not. Thanks to spending time in close proximity to Lisa and Alec, I was able to distinguish the rich college students who almost lived in the clubs from the poor college students who probably worked in them, but had eaten enough instant ramen to scrape together the funds to finally enjoy the fruits of their labour.
They were joined by salarymen who’d ridden the metro up from Downtown, still dressed in their similar but not identical uniforms of suits that had been specifically chosen to fit within the minutely different dress codes of hundreds of different corporations, their ties loosened and top buttons undone as they seemed ready to throw themselves into the nightlife with the same crunch-time haze of exertion in which they lived all their lives. Some of them were already visibly high on novacoke, or whatever their stimulant of choice was.
The rest of the line weren’t so easily categorised: there were couples in their best clothes, focused inwards as they shared the moment; groups of friends taking their chances, dressed in the most appropriate clothes they had on hand but without the same painstaking effort of the students; and then there were the loners, dressed in their best but made separate by their isolation even though the whole reason they were there was to meet new people.
Trouble was there, too. Near the back of the line were a quintet of Yakuza made-men and women in short-sleeved shirts and pinstriped miniskirts that both showed off a myriad of glowing tattoos. Whether cowed by the Palanquin’s reputation or just genuinely out to have a good time, they seemed content to wait in the line with everyone else – but they still stood in their own little bubble of space.
Worse than them were the other kind of loners; the small handful of men dressed in the exact opposite of their best with shifty glances on their faces as they ogled the women in the line with decreasing amounts of subterfuge, their commlinks held in their hands for an opportunistic shot. But they were already flagged by the security camera’s algorithm, and those that weren’t filtered out at the head of the queue were dragged out of it part way down by a troll in a black turtleneck.
The ones I was worried about were the ones who didn’t signal their intentions. The ones who smiled, who could hold a conversation, provide an attentive ear, and would still slip something into the drink of the girl they were talking to. They’d be among the richer college students, or the salarymen, with the entitlement that came from wealth and the wealth to put their entitlement into action. They definitely dressed in their best, like a poisonous frog in reverse with vibrant colours so that they blended in by standing out. They dressed, in short, like Alec.
On that grim thought, my attention was drawn away from the line by the arrival of a black and gold SK-Bentley Concordat that pulled to a stop directly in front of the palanquin’s entrance, the AR hazard lights that surrounded a VIP drop-off zone turning green as the car was cleared against a select list of registered vehicles.
A driver stepped out of the front; a stocky human in an ill-fitting suit who moved around the luxury sedan to open the rear door for his patron. The man who stepped out was weasel-faced, wearing a fashionably old-fashioned suit with a golden waistcoat and cravat beneath a grey jacket. The woman who followed him out of the car was far younger; a skinny blonde elf in an off-the-shoulders golden dress, with a yellow paper flower in her hair and a delicate expression on her face as she took the arm of the man she was accessorising.
I was expecting them to be effortlessly waved through the velvet rope that demarcated the VIP entrance to the Palanquin; they looked about as high society as a club like the Palanquin could reasonably expect. What I wasn’t expecting was for Brian to lead us towards that same entrance.
“You’re sure we don’t have to join the line?” I asked, hesitantly.
“It’s a perk of the job,” Brian answered. “Shadowrunners on Faultline’s payroll don’t have to wait in line. It helps when they have a client to meet.”
“It also adds to the mystique,” Lisa said. “Enough people use this entrance that you can never actually tell who’s a runner – and it’s not like any of the clients ever use the front door – but the idea that the person in front of you might be a Shadowrunner is enough to draw people in.”
I darted a glance over towards the line as the bouncer looked us over. Sure enough, we were drawing stares, even if most of them were expectedly reserved for Lisa and Alec. An instant later, however, the bouncer’s smart-linked mirrorshades had matched our faces to Faultline’s database, and he unhooked the velvet rope to usher us into the club.
I forced myself to look forwards as I made my way to the entrance, ignoring the stares of the people in the line more out of a sense of faint embarrassment than any attempt to actually appear cool and aloof. Even though I’d put myself in harm’s way multiple times, it still felt like I was receiving a privilege I hadn’t earned.
Still, I had to admit that the mystique of it all appealed to me. It wasn’t just the VIP entrance or the neon-lit antechamber that waited on the other side, where a young woman sat behind a hole in the wall that led to the club’s cloakroom. It was the people beside me, the way they fit into this world so effortlessly, and how I was starting to feel like I’d managed to capture some of their confidence and make it my own.
Even that, however, couldn’t prepare me for what waited on the other side of the inner doors.
Whatever soundproofing they had was clearly working overtime; as they slid open on automatic sensors, it felt like I was being hit by a physical wall of noise and light. The main floor of the club was an open, expansive space with the same bare brick walls and steel girders as the exterior, creating an almost industrial base layer on which the club’s features and decorations had been layered like an abstract canvas. Lights hung from the ceiling beams, sending kaleidoscopic patterns of strobing beams shooting out in all directions, while wider lights flashed intermittently as they bathed the room in set patterns before intermittently plunging into near-darkness.
All of it was carefully choreographed, synced to the motions of the DJ on the podium at the far end of the room, her electric-blue mohawk whipping around in sharp patterns of light-fibres as she wielded sound like a weapon. I couldn’t put my finger on the sort of music it was, but it moved like a freight train; with the regular, unstoppable motion of pistons and gears that drove the people thronging the floor inexorably forwards.
“I’m gonna get a drink!” Lisa half-said, half-shouted. “You kids have fun!”
She slunk off into the crowd, her red boots disappearing immediately into a forest of legs. Only my height let me keep track of her as she made her way through the crowd, watching her blonde hair as she deftly navigated the press of people. Even that was made difficult by the way the lights turned her hair into a blank canvas to be lit in a myriad of colours. But she had her commlink in the pocket of her long coat, and that meant I knew exactly where she was.
Alec had disappeared as well, his own commlink moving off in the direction of the couches that sat in a half-raised mezzanine level away from the dance floor and the absolute worst of the noise. I didn’t know whether he was going there to score sex or drugs or whatever, and to be honest I found I didn’t much care. I didn’t have room to care; my head was filled with the light and the noise in a buffer overflow that left me deaf and dumb.
“You alright, Taylor?” Brian asked, leaning in closer – a motion that broke me from my stupor even as it left me flushing and silently cursing Lisa for putting these thoughts in my head.
“Yeah,” I managed to say, breathlessly. “Just a bit overwhelmed, I guess.”
“Want to head for the bar as well?” he asked. “Take it slow?”
“You don’t have to stick with me if you don’t want to,” I protested, admittedly half-heartedly. “No need to ruin your night chaperoning me.”
“And if I do want to?” he countered, with a shrug of his shoulders. “It’s not like I mind. I’m new to this scene as well; I like my bars quiet enough to talk without raising my voice.”
I nodded, entirely unwilling to push him away, and together the pair of us made our way through the crowd, avoiding the even tighter press of flailing limbs on the dance floor itself. The crowd in the Palanquin was more diverse than I’d seen in a long time, but as an ork and a troll we still had no difficulty pressing our way through the crowd.
Once we were at the bar, I used my height advantage to flag down a bartender and ordered a drink at random off the list of cocktails I could see floating above the bar in AR, willing myself to ignore the price tag as I transferred the funds before doing the same for Brian’s order – telling myself it was easier than letting him push through the last few people in the crowd.
I reached over an elf in a silk shirt to grab our drinks the moment they were set down. My ‘Flor de Muertos’ came in a square whisky glass with the corners cut off. It was a deep brown drink with a faint orange tint and flower petals floating in the glass, and it tasted like being kicked by a mule – but that was probably because I’d never really drank spirits before.
Brian had gone for a more pedestrian drink of whisky on ice – or ‘on the rocks,’ for whatever reason – and unlike me he didn’t show any reaction to the taste. I took another sip; this time I could almost taste some of the orange beneath the rum – a name I recognised – and the strangely chemical-sounding triple sec.
Inevitably, we were pushed away from the bar by the press of people trying to place their own drinks orders, bowing to some immutable principle of fluid dynamics. The bar itself was placed on a platform a couple of feet above the dance floor, with a railing separating the two. Brian placed one hand against the railing as he looked out over the floor and I leant against it next to him, half-sitting on it as I rested a foot on the lowest rung.
“We should make a toast!” Brian shouted over the noise.
“To what?!” I shouted back, a grin on my face. “To this?! To making it?!”
Brian smiled – that same, honest smile.
“We haven’t made it yet!” he countered. “But we’ve got our foot in the door!”
“To the foot in the door!” I exclaimed, gleefully, as I raised a glass.
We couldn’t actually hear the clink of glasses, but the shifting spirits caught the light wonderfully before I knocked back more of my drink than was in any way wise.
I started coughing uncontrollably, one hand gripping the balcony as I leant over and stared down at the floor. I felt a hand on the back of my top – Brian’s – and saw his face come into view.
“You alright?” he asked, just loud enough that I was able to hear it.
“I’m fine,” I coughed out. “Just another new experience, I guess.”
I leant against the railing again, looking out across the club. On the far side of the room, raised above the dance floor, I could see the mezzanine level of the VIP area. From below, I could see how Faultline had installed a strip of lights just above the balcony edge that made it hard to properly make out the location of her clandestine meetings, and I wondered just how much careful consideration went into the planning of this place, and what kind of money it took to realise those plans.
“How do you feel about one more new experience?” Brian asked, and it felt like my heart stopped.
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When I turned, though, I saw that his gaze was fixed firmly on the dance floor.
“I have to warn you,” I said, finishing off what little of my drink was left after I’d lost most of it while choking, “I can’t dance.”
“That’s okay,” Brian said. “Neither can I. I think we just move about.”
I let out a quick, nervous laugh. “Why not, right? How hard can it be?”
We made our way towards the dance floor, me following immediately behind Brian as he forged a path through the crowd. As I watched his shoulders moving beneath his shirt, I found myself wondering if I saw a subtle nervousness in their motion that his cybernetics couldn’t quite hide. Was Brian as nervous about this as I was; just putting on an unflappable persona because of habit, or because he wanted to come across that way to me? Or was I just projecting my own nervousness onto him?
If stepping into the club felt like entering a whole new world, crossing the threshold onto the dance floor felt like throwing myself into the ocean. Immediately, I could feel people pressing in on all sides, shifting to make space if they noticed and bumping into me if they didn’t. Once again, fluid dynamics had me shifting from side to side, feeling gangly and inconvenient in a way that dredged up long-since buried memories of high school, or even older memories of puberty.
But, as I moved and as the DJ pumped up the volume to such a level that I genuinely couldn’t hear anything else, I found myself growing more and more in sync with the music, my actions less forced and more automatic. I was sure I still looked awful, but I found that I no longer cared. It helped that the crowd was pressed in tight enough that nobody really had the room to do anything but sway and spin with their arms raised above them.
And then Brian was in front of me, that same genuine smile on his face as he raised his hands and danced from side to side. We drew closer together, our steps starting to mirror each other. He laughed, but I couldn’t hear it. All I could see was his expression, and I knew immediately that he was laughing at the sheer joy of losing ourselves in the moment.
We were close enough to touch now, Brian looking up at me as we danced in perfect sync. I grinned, pulling back for a moment to put some space between us and raising my hands high above my head as I spun, not caring how it caused my crop top to ride up and my hips to sway. It felt like there was nobody else on the floor, nobody else in the whole city but myself and Brian.
He'd closed the gap while I was facing away, but I kept my arms in the air in spite of the faint voice telling me to lower them, to hold them tight against my chest and curl back into myself. Instead I simply smiled, my hands held high as I turned my back on him again.
When Brian’s hands found my hips, I was surprised that they weren’t cold. I could still tell they were artificial, but they didn’t feel fake like I’d half expected them to. I turned around, slowly, and Brian kept his hands in place, letting the tactile senses in his fingertips pick up the feeling of my back and stomach as I in turn felt the sensation of the synthskin of his fingers gliding over me. Only once we were face to face did I finally lower my arms, crossing them over his shoulders and holding him in place as we swayed in harmony.
The tempo of the music shifted, dropping from the peak into a softer beat, letting the crowd wind down their energy in preparation for the next crescendo. It meant our slow swaying wasn’t getting in anyone’s way, but the dip in intensity also gave my brain room to consider what I was doing.
I’d never done anything like this before. Not throughout high school, and certainly not in the time since. It was as far as possible from the sterile digital environments of the Matrix, or even the harmonising oneness of the resonance. It was something that belonged entirely to meatspace, some connection that went beyond just the neurons firing in my brain as they reported the shape of Brian’s shoulder blades beneath his shirt, how they tensed and shifted as he held me close.
Gradually, almost automatically, we started to sway out way back through the dance floor, drifting away from the DJ at her podium until we emerged out of the crush. Brian took his hands off my hips, but I didn’t want to unwrap my arms from his shoulders. This place was such a riot of noise and colours that I’d begun to feel like it would all disappear if I did, revealed to be nothing more than a brilliant hallucination.
But in the end I bowed to the inevitable, removed my arms and waited to wake up. When that didn’t happen, my smile only widened.
“Another drink!?” I shouted, as the music rose again.
“I’ll get it this time,” Brian shouted back. “Want to grab us a seat upstairs!? I can’t hear myself think down here!”
“Good idea!” I shouted back, suddenly aware of the weariness in my feet and the clammy feeling of the sweat I’d built up on the dance floor. As Brian disappeared off towards the bar, I took a moment to track down the others through their commlinks. Alec was over on the couches on the far side of the room, whispering into the ear of a dwarf girl with an arm casually thrown over her shoulder, having apparently talked his way into a group of college students. She, in turn, was looking down the plunging neckline of his shirt like she’d won the lottery.
Lisa, on the other hand, was leaning against a pillar with a tall drink in her hand and a supremely satisfied expression on her face as she watched the dance floor. She turned her head to fix me with a knowing stare, raising her glass in a mock-salute. My eyes widened, my skin flushing, but Lisa simply set her glass down on a table and strode down to the dance floor herself.
I made my way up to the VIP area, my status as one of Faultline’s Shadowrunners getting me past the bouncer at the stairs without so much as a questioning glance. Upstairs, the sofas and chaise lounges of the private space were sparsely occupied; the only clientele were a few people in clothing more expensive than anything I’d ever seen in person busy relaxing with tall glasses in their hands, sprawled out as they whispered private conversations to each other.
Of the twelve booths that ran along the length of the wall, five were occupied and four had their soundproof curtains drawn shut to cut out the noise of the club entirely, creating insulated pockets of space for clandestine meetings or an even more private environment than the already exclusive invite-only area.
I knew that, as a Shadowrunner, I was a much better fit for this environment than they were, but I couldn’t help feeling a little awkward in the presence of so much high society. As such, I chose a booth at random and slumped bonelessly into the seat, leaning back and resting my head against the wall as the exhaustion of the dance floor caught up with me.
I gave Brian a weak smile as he emerged at the top of the stairs with a drink in each hand, crossing one leg over the other as I tried to turn my slouch into the sort of elegant lean I’d seen Lisa pull off seemingly effortlessly, though she may well have been trained in how to appear both aloof and beautiful. Besides, she had the advantage of furniture being built for her size.
Brian set the glasses down on the table, then shimmied around the circular couch until he was right next to me. I picked up my drink, holding it up to the light. It was in a taller glass than the last cocktail, and cherry-red for reasons I couldn’t even begin to guess. When I took a sip, the kick was still there, but it was muffled by sweetness. It even tasted of cherry.
“I got you a cocktail with a mixer,” Brian offered an explanation. “Figured you might appreciate a milder taste.”
“Thanks,” I said, before taking another sip.
I set the glass down, drumming my fingers on the table for a moment.
“Tonight’s been a lot better than I thought it would,” I observed, quiet enough that for a moment I wasn’t sure if Brian heard me.
“I don’t know what I was expecting, either,” Brian said. “Like I said, clubs aren’t my scene. But I could be persuaded otherwise.”
“You think Lisa’s doing okay?” I asked. “Regent’s off doing his own thing, we’re up here. Kind of worried she might get lonely.”
Brian shook his head, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
“Normally I’d agree, but Lisa’s a voyeur at heart. I don’t know why, exactly, but back when it was just the two of us scraping for jobs in bars, I’d always catch her sneaking glances at groups of students, co-workers or group dates. It’s not envy; I think she just likes seeing the connections.”
Chasing after what she never had? I wondered.
Brian leant forward, resting a hand on the table.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t set this up from the start.”
“So it’s ‘this’ now?” I asked, hoping I came across as more suave than uncertain.
“It’s what you want it to be,” Brian said, calmly taking a sip of his drink. “I know you’ve been mostly talking to Lisa about your recent past, even if you’ve told me the older stuff, but I can pick up on a few things. I know it’s not just the club that’s new to you.”
“You’ve been… well, this isn’t your first time doing ‘this?’” I asked, but a moment later I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Once or twice,” Brian answered, dismissively. “It didn’t last long.”
“I just…” I sighed, slumping back in my seat. “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. I’ve missed out on so much stuff and found myself about as far as possible from where I thought I’d be. It’s like… you’ve seen the college students down there. If I’d made it to college – if I hadn’t fucked up my grades in high school, if I hadn’t shut down after dad died – I probably still wouldn’t be down there with them. I was too lonely. But when I was a kid, I didn’t picture myself holding a gun for a living.”
“But you’re not upset with the way things turned out.” It was an observation, not a question.
“I’m not,” I shook my head. It felt good to confirm that. “Sure, I’ve been thrown into the deep end, but it turns out I really enjoy swimming. Plus,” I smiled, knowing it was a far more private grin than Brian’s, “it’s opened up whole worlds. Right now, I’m more comfortable with who I am than I think I’ve ever been.”
Brian leant back, slinging an arm over the back of the couch. It was a confident, unguarded pose, but I could see an almost imperceptible tension in his body. He was feigning confidence, or perhaps indifferent.
“So I suppose the question is, what do you want out of ‘this?’”
“I honestly don’t know,” I sighed. “I-”
I was about to say ‘I like you,’ but my voice died as a shadow fell upon us, cutting off the light from the club. I looked up to see the immense mass of Faultline’s shaman, Gregor.
“Faultline wishes to speak with you in her office,” he said, plainly, his voice as deep as the ocean, shaped by his vaguely-Scandinavian accent.
Brian and I shared a look, before he hesitantly stood up. Acting on instinct, I made to follow him as well. I wasn’t sure if it was because I didn’t want to miss out on the meeting, even though Brian was our point of contact with Faultline, or I simply didn’t want Brian to feel like I was pulling away from him.
Gregor didn’t react to me coming along. He simply turned and made his way across the VIP room to the elevator. As I followed, I veered right and looked over the balcony, locating the commlink in the pocket of Lisa’s jacket and setting it to vibrate. She looked up, finding me on the balcony immediately, and pulled out her comm.
As the doors of the elevator closed behind us, shutting out the noise and light of the club with certain finality, Brian looked up at Gregor’s immense bulk of muscle and fat. He was dressed in a button-up shirt of clear plastic, worn beneath a heavy coat, and his cargo pants were held against his considerable bulk by a thick belt that had a heavy silver wolf for a buckle.
“Faultline didn’t want to call?” he asked.
“That was the plan,” Gregor rumbled, shrugging his shoulders. “But when we learned you were in the building, we decided it was more expedient to simply invite you up.”
We rode the rest of the way up in silence, following Gregor down a long corridor that I’d been in once before, when I’d been led to Labyrinth’s room. I glanced at the room in AR, but I couldn’t see her in there. That didn’t mean much; her body might well have been in there, even if her mind was occupied elsewhere.
Beyond the corridor was what looked like a shared living space of sorts, with a lounge and a fully-furnished kitchen. It put me in mind of our loft, but on a completely different scale. For one, it was clear that it had been designed as a living space, rather than converted into one by whoever Grue’s last fixer hired, and the furnishings were all lavish and luxurious; put together by someone with an eye for interior design.
It also looked incredibly lived-in, to the point where I was surprised Faultline was even letting us back here, but Gregor was moving fast enough that we weren’t intruding for long – Grue was having to walk faster than he was comfortable with, to keep up with the troll’s loping strides.
When he finally turned off from the corridor, it was into a room that was unmistakeably Faultline’s office. I didn’t even notice the physical space, at first; it was the epicentre of Palanquin’s network, with access to half a dozen different Hosts concentrated in a scant handful of physical terminals, and the weight of data was almost blinding. Along the back of the wall sat a spread of screens linked up to a myriad of inputs, dormant at present but ready to become a panopticon of information at a moment’s notice.
It was also bristling with firewalls, as spiky as a porcupine and assessing me with a murderous intent that dissuaded simply looking at it, never mind contemplating hacking into the network. That had me shifting my attention back to meatspace.
The screens pulled double-duty as a window, currently displaying the skyline of Constitution Hill as it dropped down towards the ocean, with the docks and the slab-sided pyramidal mass of the Ares arcology just barely visible over the artificial horizon caused by the mid-range tenement blocks and megabuildings of Midtown, where the Bay squeezed the city to a narrow point against the hills.
Faultline sat silhouetted against that vista in a sleek corporate office chair set by a downright ancient wooden desk that had been hollowed out and filled with communications equipment and a holographic display, inactive at present but primed to dance to her commands.
There was already a seat opposite Faultline, but Gregor wheeled over a second, troll-sized version with the MetaErgonomics logo on the backrest before taking up a position on the other side of the desk, looming over Faultline even as he affected the very picture of a loyal lackey.
I couldn’t help but notice the imperceptible nervousness in Grue’s posture as we sat down, especially as he glanced at a suit of grey power armour on a stand in the corner of the room. He looked overwhelmed alone in the office of his employer, dressed in a t-shirt rather than an armoured jacket concealing a heavy pistol.
Of course, that was the moment I realised I was meeting my employer in a crop top and a pair of skinny jeans when it was clear I hadn’t even been invited, and I suddenly found myself every bit as nervous as him.
“Grue, Bug,” Faultline began, generously using our Shadowrunner handles even though neither of us looked anything like Shadowrunners in that moment. “Your last job, it went well?”
Grue gave me a sidelong glance before he answered, though I had no idea what he meant by it. On my part, I was dutifully recording everything Faultline said and sending it in a steady stream of messages to Lisa.
“Well enough,” he answered, plainly. “There were complications, but we achieved our objective.”
“Your client agrees,” Faultline observed with a nod. “He wants to meet with you again, to discuss a follow-up job. He specifically asked for your team.”
“His nuyen was good,” Grue said. “I don’t think any of us will have an issue with a repeat meeting. Whether we accept will depend on what he wants.”
“And what do you think he wants?” Faultline asked. “What’s your read on him?”
Grue frowned, looking a little unsure.
“He’s corporate,” I spoke. “Major-leagues corporate.” I hesitated, a little surprised I’d spoken at all, before deciding to press on. “We suspect he works for Ares. They’d have the most interest in getting a mole into Medhall’s clandestine dealings, and they must monitor anything Medhall-related that comes through your auction house.”
“Suspicions are dangerous,” Faultline replied, “unless you can turn them into certainties. You can run wild chasing suspicions, but the only useful information is that which can be proven.”
It sounded like she was censuring me, and part of me bristled at that.
“You can prove it,” I said, trying not to make the retort sound like a retort. “You must know who he is or else you wouldn’t trust that he’s good for the money he’s promising.”
“I do know,” Faultline shrugged her shoulders. “But I cannot and will not tell you. He’s my client, which means I have a duty to maintain his anonymity even from you.”
“Then why ask?” Grue questioned. “Why encourage us to speculate on what he wants?”
“Because I think this is the precursor for something more. I think he represents change, interfering with the city’s balance of power. Change isn’t inherently bad or good, of course, but I'm both a fixer and an information broker. That means I need to predict change, be aware of it, and plan accordingly to ensure that no matter what happens to the rest of the city, my own operation remains intact.”
She leant back in her seat, her eyes flicking momentarily over to where the suit of armour sat in a corner behind me.
“The most valuable lesson you can learn as a Shadowrunner is that clients lie. They have ulterior motives, hidden agendas, embarrassing secrets or signs of weakness they don’t want you to know about. If you allow yourself to spiral into suspicion over that, you’ll lose focus on the task at hand and lose out on your payment. If you allow yourself to become complacent and fail to verify or deny warning signs, you might lose your life.”
She looked back, fixing the two of us with a pointed stare – first Grue, then me.
“I’ll give you this for free. Your client is something new. Be careful, and be here tomorrow at twenty-hundred hours, after sunset.”
Grue and I shared an uneasy look, as Gregor moved around the desk to open the door to the office. Grue’s features held a conflicted expression, as eagerness at a bigger and better job warred with unease at Faultline’s cryptic warning or lesson. I knew that whatever I felt about us would have to wait; we couldn’t afford to be anything less than focused on the task at hand.