I hung at the heart of a star, bathed in primordial light. Data whirled around me; a kaleidoscopic flow of information that never stopped or slowed. It was too fast to make sense of, but each megabyte was tantalisingly alive with potential, carrying the promise of secrets and power.
And yet all that infinite promise was consumed entirely by the entity around me; siphoned off and incorporated to fuel its own growth. I was in the heart of the oculus, at the very nexus of the observatory-library in what I had come to see as my own dominion within the resonance. I had shed my fake shell for the pure crystalline mirror of my organic body, then shifted myself out of sync with the realm and its restrictive adherence to physical laws in order to properly comprehend the entity in its own plane.
From that entity I had disconnected great crystalline tendrils, manipulating them with gentle pulses of resonance as I reconnected the first to the back of my neck, then moved across the map of my neural system, adding strand after strand until I was trapped in a web of my own creation. Like my namesake spider, those webs carried vibrating signals to me, granting me the full picture of the unfathomably vast and broken mind that I had discovered.
When I first returned to the realm, I found the halls choked by an unrestrained crystalline jungle. The entity had starved on a diet of resonance file duplicates, but I’d shown it a path through to the more orderly world of the matrix and even the ambient leaks of metahuman-made data had been enough to awaken its hunger. It wasn’t truly consuming the files it touched, but duplicating their code and adding them to its gestalt mass.
I wasn’t naïve enough to believe I was in control of the entity. The only reason it hadn’t consumed me the moment I connected was that we were made of fundamentally different materials. I had stolen a chunk of its form to forge my arm anew, but the resonance that made up my persona was too esoteric for its tastes.
I could feel it… breathing, for want of a better word, as the mind beneath me drew in data and pushed it out to fuel its uncontrollable growth. It had grown in the matrix, too, spreading out through the devices I’d linked it to and connecting to those on the same network or in physical proximity. It was working its way down Medhall tower at a glacial pace, spreading its reach through every network Max owned, but it was doing the same for Calvert as well.
Using the Myo network, it had leapt from Max’s commlink to Calvert’s tap on the network, then from there to every device in his command centre. It had spilled out somewhat into the surrounding hospital and embedded itself into the commlinks of those who spent eight to twelve hours a day surrounded by devices it had touched. Already it had buds in dozens of private homes, sprouted from commlinks left to charge overnight, and at the other end it had even slipped back into Renraku’s high-security server.
At the centre of this vast web, it was hard not to revel in the power at my fingertips. I had plans for this entity, this shard of a dead god. Nobody had so far detected its intrusion, and I was beginning to believe that only another technomancer would ever be able to notice its subtle touch. What would happen if I connected it to a device at the heart of Manhattan, or DeeCee, or Tokyo? Could I somehow smuggle a device up to Zurich Orbital and gain a tap on the core architecture of the matrix itself?
I had made myself a monster because I was ignorant, but here was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If I could figure out how to recover the files integrated into the great fractal mass of the mind around me, I could establish myself as an information broker whose reach and influence would make Faultline look like a gossiping teenager. Instead of being at the mercy of men like Calvert, I could shape the world through carefully deciding who I helped and who I hunted.
Perhaps then, I would have done something my parents would be proud of. Perhaps then I would have atoned for my blindness.
I listened to the entity beneath me, opening my mind as I attempted to harmonise with its own fractured psyche. I understood what it was now, putting together years of half-truths and rumours spread between hacker message boards like ancient myths. DEUS had been real, once; a maniacal rogue AI that sought to ascend to divinity by turning every part of the matrix into part of itself, only to be beaten back and destroyed in the battle that brought the violent end of that old matrix.
It must have discovered the resonance, or its enemies had learned to wield the resonance as a weapon against it. Whether it was a failed escape or a deliberately severed limb, some small fragment of DEUS had fallen through the cracks of the world and escaped the war in heaven by being beyond heaven’s boundaries.
At the very core of the creature, there were still relics of man-made code buried among all the cancerous growth. As I looked closer, I began to notice familiarities between its code and some of the network architecture I’d seen within the Renraku data-centre.
I wasn’t made of code myself, which meant I didn’t have the perfect recall of a computer, but I could remember digital sensations as easily as physical ones. My journey into Renraku’s network had been almost disastrous, but I could still remember the feeling of its firewalls, its tamed AI and the overwhelming force the corporation sent against me. I could also remember passing through the neuralware of an old-timer whose coding had been like a geological cross-section of Renraku software development.
Combining those experiences, I spun together a strand of resonance that was as close as I could get to conventional code, then tweaked and shaped it to match what I expected a Renraku command code would feel like. An entity like DEUS would not have been so existentially terrifying if it had been vulnerable to those codes, but I was gambling that a mere shard of DEUS would be instinctively reaching out for any sort of guidance. Why else would it be mindlessly incorporating payroll spreadsheets into its neural architecture?
I fed the strand of data into its core, then watched as the old code writhed and shifted in response, sending out commands of its own that resonated like sympathetic shockwaves throughout the entire realm. It was reordering itself, or perhaps just ordering itself as it responded to my command by defragmenting sections of the junk data it had gathered over years.
I felt my connection to the entity deepen as new data was filtered through the tethers into my mind. I was momentarily overwhelmed by text, noise and flashes of images all coded into standardised file formats that made them so trivial to read my mind didn’t filter any of it out. If I were a decker, I think it might have burned out my cyberdeck and fried my brain. As it was, it felt like being continuously shot in the head.
After a moment, though, I was able to gather enough willpower to send another burst of false-code into the kludged-together Renraku system, throttling the torrent of information down to a pinprick beam. It meant I was only able to receive data from one network or geographical area at a time, and of course I needed to be plugged in to do it, but it meant that my plan to use the entity as my own private intelligence network was feasible.
Maybe I could figure out commands to have it sort the data it collected, sequestering the files from marked targets so that I could review them later. Either way, it meant spending a lot more time down here in the resonance realms, but there were ways to make that work. It just meant I needed to find a supplier for the sort of life support gear corporate deckers used, one who was prepared to make a cooler suit in troll sizes.
For now, though, this telescope would suffice.
I send out another command, this time containing a data package I’d mocked up to mimic Calvert’s network. It worked as a substitute for position and direction, focusing the lens on the cluster of devices contained within his command centre. I sank deeper into the mind of the entity, reaching through the connection and grasping hold of passive monitoring systems before feeding the ambient data from CCTV and commlink face ID and voice recognition systems into my persona until I almost lost sight of the realm around me.
I could see the command centre from sixteen different angles and hear it from thirty-three different microphones, simultaneously. Some of them were mobile – AR glasses, cybereyes or the always-on bodycams of those dressed as CrashCart tactical officers – while others were static cameras mounted on devices or bracketed to the walls.
The compound was as bustling as I’d expected as Calvert’s staff worked on advancing his schemes – and perhaps I could get the full picture of those schemes if I could teach the entity to filter through the data it was processing – but it looked like I’d caught Calvert at just the right moment to uncover at least one secret he’d kept from us.
He had a second team.
They were a strange group, but I supposed the same could be said of us. There were four of them, or maybe five, and they all looked to be in their mid-twenties. Two of them were obviously mages and one of them looked like he was the leader – or at least speaker – of the group, since he was standing in front of all the others. He was elven, with light brown skin and hair that reached down to his upper back. He wore an old fashioned suit in deep black fabric over a red waistcoat, tie and a crisp white shirt. Through a particularly high-definition CCTV camera, I could see filament-thin arcane symbols woven into the suit in gold thread.
Near the back of the group was a much more obvious mage. She was a typically attractive blonde elf with a ballerina’s light build, wearing a short-sleeved black compression top over equally black tactical pants. She’d accessorised with a red sash tied around her waist like a belt and a odd pendant on a chain necklace, depicting some kind of red sun that had a rough finish to it, as if it had been squeezed into shape from clay rather than metal. More dramatically, flames crawled down her arm in tracework tattoos of blood-red ink, and her shrunken stance made her look less sure of herself than any mage I’d ever met.
Compared to her unsettling appearance, the street samurai beside her was downright normal by comparison. He was wearing modern tactical gear; black fatigues underneath black body armour trimmed with red accents, in keeping with what had to be a team colour scheme, and he had a long-barrelled rifle slung on his back. He had far too many cybernetics to be a mage; I could see them through a scanner attached to one of the room’s CCTV cameras. His arms, legs, eyes and many of his internal organs were cybernetic, with subdermal armour plates and what looked like something wired into his nervous system as well.
Standing next to him, bafflingly, was a Sony Orderly-4 Secretarial android; a humanoid drone that stood about four and a half feet tall, with fully opposable fingers optimised for delicate work. Its plastic casing had been painted red with black accents and the screen on its flat head was displaying an anime-style female head, with auburn hair and a neutral expression on its face.
The truly strange part was what I could see through the cameras that could also see augmented reality. There was a persona overlaid on top of the drone, as if it was possessing it. The persona was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an auburn haired dwarf in a pair of shorts and a University of Wisconsin-Madison hoodie. What did surprise me was how realistic it was when compared to her avatar on the drone. It almost reminded me of my own persona beneath my insectoid guise, where my body had been exactly mirrored by the resonance.
The last member of the group was simultaneously the most mundane and the most unusual. She was dressed in an outfit that I wouldn’t have worn even at my worst, with a baggy coat that went down to her knees and a skirt that went past her ankles, the hem almost trailing on the floor. She was human, but I could only guess that through her height and build since she had the hood of the coat up over her head and she’d slightly tightened the drawstring so that it hugged her face. She barely seemed aware of where she was; her arms were wrapped tight around her torso and she looked like she was shivering.
“What the fuck is this?!” the man in the suit was shouting at Calvert, who was staring him down with his typical stony impassivity. “You call this better?!”
“Krouse, it’s…” the woman in the hoodie began, before she descended into a series of surprisingly sharp coughs, like there was no fluid in her. “It’s fine. I think I’m just… settling a bit, as the drugs take. I’m lucid, aren’t I?”
“You’re sure?” the mage – Krouse, clearly – asked. “Let me know if the shakes get worse, okay? We have to keep you healthy.”
“Now that your concerns about Neith’s well-being have been assuaged, Trickster,” Calvert began, “perhaps we can return to the purpose of this meeting?”
His tone was as lifeless as ever, but somehow I could tell he was angry.
“Fine,” Trickster said, pacing up and down. “Yeah, sure. What do we have to do?”
“As I said, I have two targets for you. The first is nothing difficult,” the snake continued, shifting on his coiled length in a way that looked almost like a shrug. “Certainly nothing as complex as your exceptional achievement with Diana Anders. I received confirmation today that your operation went completely undetected.”
“Nothing as complex,” the Orderly-4 said through the drone’s speakers, “but still wetwork?”
“Still wetwork, Genesis, and from the same family. You eliminated the sister, now I need you to take out her nephew, Theo. Before you say anything,” he continued, cutting off the worried-looking mage with the sun tattoo, “I will point out that he is twenty years old.”
“Even then,” she spoke up, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable killing someone just because of who their father is.”
“Theo Anders is due to inherit his father’s empire, Sundancer,” Calvert countered. “I have learned much about Medhall Pharmaceuticals and its connections to the human supremacist underworld, and all of it would sicken you. I assure you, he is an acceptable target.”
“Besides,” Trickster jumped in, shooting his recalcitrant comrade a look, “I certainly won’t cry over a dead rich kid. Ballistic, will you cry?”
“Don’t be a dick, Krouse,” Sundancer shot back before the cyborg could answer.
“It’s part of my charm. So,” Trickster turned to Calvert, “what’s the when and where?”
“Theo Anders is studying philosophy, politics and economics at New Brockton University. He commutes in from home, but remains at the university throughout the academic day regardless of his scheduled classes. I cannot tell you exactly where he will be at any given time, but the closest library to his department is in the Draco Foundation annex.”
“We can… work with that,” Neith said, her words coming out in sharp bursts of sound. “Jess can… hunt his face through the cameras. Mars and Krouse can look on the ground. I can send scouts to look for me. Then the kill.”
“Do you want this one quiet as well?” Ballistic asked, speaking for the first time.
“It’s inconsequential at this point,” Calvert said with another half-shrug. “I just want it done.”
“Good,” Trickster said. “That makes things simpler. What kind of security does he have?”
“Most likely four bodyguards and a bound spirit, though that number may have increased due to a recent security breach. However, the university has a limit on the number of close protection officers it allows on campus, so you should only have to deal with two overt guards. There is campus police, of course, but they’re hardly worth anything.”
“The students are the problem,” Neith said. “There will be too many for us to hide.”
“The campus is dense,” Calvert remarked. “It’s built against the side of a slope that squeezes it into a long but narrow band of buildings.”
“This sounds trivial,” Ballistic said. “Two guards, one college student, one spirit. Why send us?”
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“I require success,” Calvert answered. “As such, I’d rather apply too much force than too little. For you, however, the real struggle will be in getting out. Medhall has its own armed paramedic force and Theo likely has a medical alert device linked to their system. If his vitals drop off, they’ll scramble a response.”
“The second target?” Neith asked, her speech sticking a little on each ‘t’.
“Max Anders himself,” Calvery answered, rearing up a little.
“Hang on,” Genesis interjected, her display flickering as it added a worried expression to the anime face. “You’re kind of going from the tutorial to the final boss, aren’t you?”
“We can take him,” Trickster said, almost cutting the drone off. “We’ve definitely got enough firepower if we go all out.”
“Genesis is right to be concerned,” Calvert said, “but I have access to real-time location data from Mr Anders, and I have been working to engineer a sizeable conflict within the city. When he is vulnerable, his security distracted, I can airlift your team in for an assault and subsequent extraction.”
“Then you make good on your end of the bargain,” Trickster said.
“Of course,” Calvert replied. “The Evo corporation’s magical and medical expertise will be at your disposal, and I can take you well beyond the reach of your enemies in Ares.”
“We will… see,” Neith said. “Hard to trust anyone.”
She took a half-step forwards, a strangely juddering motion that made it seem like she didn’t have control of her body. I caught a half-seen glimpse of a yellow shoe poking out from under her skirt, but the folds of fabric quickly settled back into place. Interestingly, when Neith moved Sundancer shrank away from her in something like fear.
“The attack on the big guy…” Trickster began, “you got any restrictions on methods?” As he said it, his eyes flicked over to Neith.
“None. There should be sufficient unrest to draw all eyes away from Mr Anders until his remains are discovered.”
The strange woman almost seemed to shiver in anticipation at that, and Krouse had an eager light in his eyes that I didn’t at all like. It seemed Sundancer didn’t either, though neither Genesis nor Ballistic were paying much attention to them. Or to anything, really.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something distinctly wrong with this second team, beyond Neith’s obvious yet unknown health issues. There was a kind of shared edge to them. It was in the way they stood, in how they talked to each other and to Calvert. It was hard to put my finger on it, especially viewing them remotely like this, but I felt deeply unsettled all the same.
I focused the AR cameras on Genesis’ persona again, since I understood deckers more than mages, cyborgs or walking health cases. To my surprise, she’d actually left the drone behind and was gliding around the room, idly alternating between inspecting the icons of the devices around her and the wider matrix landscape of Brockton Bay.
It was like she wasn’t really interested in what was happening in meatspace. She was bored, and when bored she defaulted to looking around the digital world rather than the physical one. Agoraphobe or not, if she were a rigger I’d expect her to stick with the drone and if she were a decker I’d expect her to listen in through one of her friend’s comms rather than bring a drone. If she were either, I’d expect her persona to be a bit more imaginative than that.
It was the very mundanity of her persona that gave me pause. She acted wholly familiar with the matrix, but not in the way a professional would be. It was more like she’d come into the matrix without any experience of it and had to teach herself to swim. It put me in mind of another matrix rumour I’d come across; of people who’d died while their minds were in cyberspace only for that mind to linger on as a ghost in the machine.
The rumours were torn around whether these e-ghosts were the true souls of the brain-captured dead or just wild AI that believed they were the deceased, but once I’d let the idea in I found it wouldn’t leave me. I wondered if she’d been caught up in whatever horrific incident Neith had clearly gone through.
Looking closer at her university hoodie, I was shocked to see that it was specifically for UWM’s Thaumaturgical Studies department. Three confirmed mages in the same team was too many to be a coincidence, even if one of them might be dead. Were they all mages? All caught up in some catastrophe that had forced them into this life, given Neith some kind of chronic health issues, trapped Genesis in the matrix, put Sundancer in a position she clearly didn’t want to be in and maybe even driven Ballistic to smother his magic under chrome? Was Calvert offering them a way out?
In the end I wasn’t sure it mattered. I knew they were dangerous and I knew that I had to stop them. I refused to be responsible for Theo’s death. I just hoped the others would forgive me for it.
I withdrew my projected senses back into my body, then began snapping the strands that bound me to the entity. Each time, there was a flash of sympathetic pain as I made my mind that much smaller, but I worked through it with the grim determination that came from knowing I’d need to get used to the sensation in future.
Navigating my way out of the resonance realms was much less painful, and soon I had drifted out into the matrix and returned to my body, ‘waking up’ in the bedroom Brian and I had claimed.
It was relatively early in the morning, which meant that Theo would be on his way to campus in the back of an armoured SUV. I would have been surprised he was still going after his mother ‘absconded’ – Max seemed to have bought the note Kayden had left – if I hadn’t heard the lengthy comm call between Theo and his father in which he’d all but begged to be allowed to keep going. It was interesting that Max had let him, but I supposed his obsession with legacy cut both ways; he wanted to hand Medhall to Theo someday, which meant finding a balance between safety and smothering to ensure he wouldn’t run the family legacy into the ground.
Either way, it gave me some time – but not much. The second team wouldn’t go after him right away, but I was fairly confident that they would go today. To put it bluntly, if they were as good as Calvert seemed to think then there was no point delaying when they could instead get it over with and focus on preparing for the harder target.
That side of Calvert’s plan was still a mystery. The gang war we’d sparked had shaken up the North End, but for most of Medhall it was business as usual. Short of luring down a few hundred Yakuza to besiege the company HQ I couldn’t yet see how Calvert could create a large enough distraction to leave Max vulnerable.
It was a problem for another day, but one I needed to pay attention to. It might even be worth explaining about the entity to the team if it meant they’d let me plug myself in for at least a couple days of twelve-hour stints. If I spent the whole time submerged, I could even take over every night shift on watch and spend my days entirely in the resonance.
But I supposed the problem was explaining the entity in a way they’d understand or accept, then explaining why I desperately needed to spy on our boss as much as possible.
I was procrastinating and I knew it. Losing myself in thoughts of the next threat even though the current threat was rapidly approaching. I hauled myself out of bed and threw on my clothes, then staggered down the stairs as I adjusted to having legs again.
To my disgust, Kayden was in the kitchen, pouring some children’s cereal into a bowl for her daughter. I wanted to leave, but almost out of spite I instead walked right past her, opened the fridge and grabbed one of the oranges that Lisa had bought from a nearby store, peeling off the skin with a fingernail.
As usual, Aster flung herself into her mother’s chest the moment I drew near, while her mother shot me a cruel glare.
“Do you enjoy this?” she demanded. “Scaring my daughter like that? Your boss isn’t the saint you thought he is – big surprise – so you’re taking out your frustrations on a child?”
“You’re the one who taught her to be scared whenever I walk in the room,” I snapped. “You’re setting her up for a life spent in fear.”
“I taught her to be cautious,” she retorted. “A monster like you could trample her without even noticing. When she’s older, I’ll teach her how to be brave.”
“You’re both scared of the wrong monster,” I said, discarding the orange peel and tossing a segment into my mouth before I left the room. Despite what Kayden thought, I had no desire to get into a shouting match with her while her daughter was in the room. It wouldn’t go anywhere useful.
As much as I might want to, I couldn’t just kill her and move on. For one, Aster was the real problem; despite her efforts to carve out a niche for herself, Kayden was only important because of her daughter. For two, Calvert would descend on the others like an angry dragon. But if I did this on my own and failed then at least it’d be clear I acted alone, which might spare the others from harm.
Once I was out of sight of Kayden, I consoled myself with the thought that I was about to screw her over in the largest way possible. She thought she’d cornered us, and probably cornered Calvert too, by making her too valuable to remove. I wondered if she only saw the Human Nation as a safety net, or if she was eager to take their operations further.
She’d definitely have to prove herself to the group, and I had noticed the way she’d said that Medhall helped other companies launch sterilisation programmes. If Max was trying to preserve his legacy, he’d probably want to avoid deliberately sabotaging his own hospitals. Kayden might not have the same scruples.
I wasn’t going out of my way to find the others, but I didn’t feel like I could just walk out the door either. I couldn’t tell them what I was going to do, but I at least wanted them to understand after the fact why I’d done it. I was genuinely relieved when the first person I ran into was Bitch, who’d just returned from the early morning watch and was making her shotgun safe in a room by the backdoor that seemed to have no other purpose than containing a washing machine and tumble dryer.
“Rachel,” I began, before adding, stupidly, “want a slice of orange?”
She shrugged, but held out a metal hand and ate the segment without any discernible reaction to the taste.
“Something up?” she asked.
“How’d you guess?”
“You’re talking to me. There a problem with the perimeter?”
“No, I…” I paused, leaning against the dryer. “You heard what Kayden said yesterday, about what’s really going on at Medhall?”
“I did.”
“And?” I asked, a little exasperated. Rachel didn’t say anything at first, but I could see her optics shifting as she focused on me.
“It bothers you,” she said, or perhaps guessed. “So you’re talking to me even though you know it doesn’t bother me. People always have plans.”
“You said that before,” I remembered, “back at my place, after Aisha ambushed me and you came running.”
“Also said that they don’t matter so long as you can adapt. I don’t pay attention to the background stuff like that. It’s not what I’m good at.”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I’m just… it’s fucked up, Rachel. It’s horrifying on a level I can’t even wrap my head around.”
“So adapt,” Rachel said, shrugging her shoulders. “Learn to deal or change the deal.”
“That easy, huh?” I asked, half joking, only for my face to fall as Rachel straightened up, set the shotgun down on top of the countertop and just glared at me with her optics.
“It hurts, Taylor. I remember that much. It hurts all the time, until nothing hurts. I learned to deal. Maybe you will too, or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll do something better.”
I’d forgotten. Rachel had made more moral compromises than I ever had, handing over her own autonomy for the sake of survival and then clawing it back one implant at a time as she walled off her wounded mind in a shell of her own making. I could easily see myself doing the same, losing myself in the resonance, but Rachel didn’t exactly make it seem like a good idea. Neither did Labyrinth, come to think of it.
“Rachel,” I paused. I wasn’t sure I wanted to say it. “You’re not as lost as you think you are.”
Her lip twitched, just for a moment.
“I know,” she said. “I know where I am, what I’m good at and what I’m not.”
“Thanks, for listening. That’s one of the things you’re good at.”
I left her there, heading right for the front door. On the way, I saw Alec and Aisha sprawled out on a couch in the living room, both of them working their way through a small assortment of pastries. I left them alone; I didn’t think either of them knew about what Kayden had said the night before, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want them to. Alec probably wouldn’t care, but Aisha would care too much. I couldn’t bring anyone else along with me, but Aisha would invite herself and if I said no then she’d just turn invisible and come anyway.
I didn’t want to talk to Brian, because I was afraid that out of all of them, he had the best chance of persuading me to stay. In spite of that, and perhaps inevitably, I ran into him by the front door.
“Taylor,” he began. “I missed you this morning. You heading out?”
“Yeah,” I said, spinning together a painful lie. “I was running some checks on my wiretaps. Looks like Max believed Kayden’s note.”
“I never thought I’d help pull the wool over his eyes,” he said. “The Anders family are practically an institution in this city.”
There was something in the way he said the word ‘Anders.’
“You heard, then?”
“Yeah, I heard. Lisa told me, and I’m kind of annoyed that you didn’t.”
I sighed.
“Sorry. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Ended up taking a walk to try and clear my head.”
“Then you came back and zonked out into cyberspace for the night?”
“Pretty much. Brian, it’s fucked up. You see that, right?”
Brian narrowed his eyes, almost scowling at me. I’d realised my mistake the moment I said it.
“Taylor, fucking look at me. Of course I see it, but I think I’ve been seeing it for a lot longer than you have.”
It was my turn to glare at Brian, but he didn’t flinch or look away.
“You said your dad was a dockworker, and everybody knows the docks have always been their own little community. Your folks looked out for their friends and they looked out for you, and the world left you alone. That’s not how it is in the rest of the city.”
“So what, just accept it?”
“Accept what, Taylor? Nothing we do here is going to stop companies in other cities from doing anything. We don’t even know what companies they are. All we can do is look out for ourselves. We finish the job in front of us, and then we never have to work for that snake again. That’s the life we signed on for.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
“Listen, there are only six people in the world whose lives we’re responsible for, but I’m not saying do nothing. Sell the information to Faultline. She’s a good broker; she’ll make sure it gets to the right hands. Just wait until we’re clear of Calvert before you do it, okay?.”
“Sure,” I lied, and for the first time there wasn’t even a sliver of truth I could hide behind to assuage my conscience.
“Still heading out?” Brian asked, as I picked up my boots.
“I can’t stand to be in the same building as that bitch,” I said.
“I thought you and Rachel were getting along?”
I could only muster up a weak smile at his joke, but Brian seemed satisfied all the same. It was only when he left that I finally allowed the grief to show on my face. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I didn’t have a choice. I needed to do this, but Brian would always choose the safe path. It was what made him so steady, but some things were more important than stability.
My final encounter was an entirely expected one. No matter how much effort I put into sneaking my way around her, Lisa would have known exactly what I was doing and why. She was in the room when Kayden revealed the whole horrific scheme and she’d seen my every thought play out on my face.
It was no surprise, therefore, to find her leaning against the perimeter wall, just beside the barred metal gate that led out into suburbia. She must have taken over Rachel’s watch; she was in her combat gear, with her bowed head half-hidden by the popped collar of her trenchcoat. In her hand, she was caressing her amulet of Snake.
She looked up as I approached, and I saw the fear mingled with concern in her eyes. It was enough to get me to slow my pace, coming to a stop just before the gate.
“I have to do this, Lisa,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t care about some rich kid like Theo Anders, but I’ve been eavesdropping on his life for weeks. I’ve read every comm message, listened to every session with his tabletop group. I’ve watched every video call with his long distance girlfriend, and how torn he is by the scraps he knows of what Medhall are doing.”
“I know.”
“He doesn’t deserve to die.”
“Maybe,” she said, moving in close. “But we’ve got a lot of people killed, Taylor. Directly and indirectly. Don’t do this just because you know who this death is.”
“It’s different. I mean, you join a gang, you put on a uniform and you become part of the game. You accept the risk. He didn’t.”
Even as I said it, I realised how weak it sounded. How many people had died because of the gang war we’d sparked simply because we’d been paid to do it? We hadn’t even known why Calvert wanted it to happen.
“You’re compartmentalising.”
“I’m drawing a line in the sand. I can’t change the world, but at least I can stop us from making it worse.”
I stepped towards her, enveloping her shoulder with a hand and looking down at her, eye to eye.
“Lisa, I’m not blind to what you’ve done for me. You took in a shell of a person and helped her find herself. I don’t know if it’s because you saw your brother in me, or just because it’s some spirit-driven compulsion of yours, but you taught me how to really live. You all did, and I’m grateful. That’s why I can’t let us be a part of this.”
Lisa broke eye contact, looking down to the side for a moment as we stood there in silence. At any moment one of the others could look out a window and get suspicious, but I found I didn’t care. More than any of the others, it was important that she, at least, understood.
“Taylor, I’m…” She trailed off, still looking down. “I’m scared, okay? Scared of losing you, scared of losing this, scared of going back to the runaway girl moving from city to city without knowing where she was going beyond far away. I’m scared you’re going to get yourself killed on some moral crusade, and I’m scared that maybe you’re right to go, that maybe I’d lose some intangible part of myself if I stopped you.”
I’d never seen her like this before. Like Brian, she’d always been a rock. I’d always leant on her for support, going to her whenever I needed to talk something through.
“I’m not doing this to die,” I said, bringing up my other hand – my organic hand – to her cheek as I nudged her head back around to face me. “I have a plan – a way out of this, for all of us.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I can guess.”
“Then you get it,” I said, an optimistic smile tugging at the corners of my lips.
“I know what’ll happen if I stop you,” she said, bringing her hands up to her neck. “I know I don’t want that for you. I can’t help you, can’t offer any advice, but I can tell the others you went out to grab some groceries, and I can give you this.”
With quasi-religious reverence, she grasped the chain of the serpent pendant and slipped it over her neck. Standing on her tiptoes, she reached up and carefully looped the pendant over my horns and set the serpent down just below my collarbone.
“Give ‘em hell.”