There was very little that scared Aisha, and none of what did was dangerous to her life. It didn’t matter what she was doing – whether she was fighting for her life, running from rooftop to rooftop or just walking down the street – she moved through the world with an easy, natural confidence. Every motion flowed gracefully into the next as she drifted through the packed streets of Japantown.
Aisha had always had trouble focusing – she was sure she’d been that way since birth and certain what caused it. Information slipped out of her mind as soon as it came and – in another age, when she still went to school – she’d always sat at the very bottom of the class. But when it came to her body, when it came to the raw magic that flowed through her every sinew, she was as steady and focused as a rock in the middle of some zen garden; part of the pattern, but tough enough to take on everything around her.
Even the rain didn’t faze her, though it was more like dozen streams and three small rivers by the time it had filtered down through the layers of gantries and bridges that linked the two buildings above her, all of them filled with chattering people, or the electric hiss of neon signs in a dozen different languages and at least five different alphabets.
Aisha wasn’t dressed like a fighter; she didn’t need chrome or armour or guns. She’d gone out wearing a shimmering pink plastic raincoat over a golden bralette and black vinyl pants, with a purple handbag over one shoulder and a pair of thick platform heels on her feet – because, Aisha always thought, what’s the point of perfect poise if you don’t show it off? The heels also let her see above the crowd, which was something she appreciated in a neighbourhood where the average height was so much taller than the rest of the city.
From what little Aisha knew of the city’s history, she knew that Japantown was always a metahuman district. It began with Japanese exiles, but the balance shifted over decades as more orks and trolls made the district home. It was somewhere people drifted or were pushed to in search of a place that wouldn’t think less of them because of the way they were born, but that didn’t mean it was a paradise. It just meant that Aisha was surrounded by more orks and trolls than she’d find anywhere else in the city.
Crowds were one of the things that weren’t dangerous, but that scared her all the same. It was easy to feel lost in them, so she dressed to catch the eye; never caring about blending in or going with the flow no matter where she walked because every stray glance sent her way was a reminder that she existed, that she was worth looking at. That she was more than the people around her. That she mattered.
It made the mass of people easier to bear; made it easier to keep her head above water as she came down from the rooftops, stepped away from her circle of may-be-friends and swam among the metahuman shoals that flooded every street, alley and path of the densest district in the city.
Along with perfect control of her own body, Aisha had a perfect awareness of the people around her; her senses tuned to the point where she could pick apart individual smells, sounds and even the taste of the smoke rising from a streetside food stall. She could pick apart the individual footfalls of the people around her, pick out how confident they were in their stride, what they’d been drinking from the smell of their breath. Could even pick out the pickpockets picking their way through the packed street and deftly avoid the knives that probed out to slice open her anachronistic handbag.
It was a dangerous game they were playing; the Yakuza sometimes liked to play cops and robbers in Japantown, which meant slicing off a hand from any pickpockets they could catch out on the streets. But the pickpockets were all young, with a lean hunger to their bodies that Aisha recognised, so she didn’t lash out at the ones who tried to make her their mark.
For all her body’s easy confidence, Aisha’s mind would much rather cross Japantown via the rooftops, leaping from building to building with the city spread out all around her and the crowds shambling in the canyons below. But business was business, and she knew that if she showed up to this meeting looking like hot shit in a taksuit and mask it’d just end up screwing her over.
Aisha left the flow of people, leaning against a corrugated metal doorway as she pulled the cheap commlink out of her handbag and opened up the map. It was an older model, but older models were all Aisha could use without paying someone to crack the SIN registration requirements. She’d never been good at memorising routes – not that the multilayered shantytown was easily navigable for people who were – and without anything that could patch into the city’s GridLink, a digital map with a GPS tracker was the best she could do.
It didn’t help that when she finally reached the pin she’d placed on the map, it took her another half an hour to actually find her destination inside the maze-like corridors of an old office building that had been turned into many smaller offices, shops, restaurants and probably a few apartments tucked somewhere off the main streets – which would once have been corridors cutting through the middle of endless cubicles.
The office she wanted was on the eighth floor, up a stairwell that had stalls on every landing, and it didn’t have a name in a language Aisha could read. What it did have was four kanji running in a line down the door to what would once have been a private office used by the owner of whoever was renting this floor. Aisha knew the kanji spelled out the name of the Clan of Dragons, but even if she didn’t the dwarf with the submachine gun standing next to the door would have given away that this was what she was looking for.
He was clearly in the gang, wearing a vivid red biker jacket over a bare chest that was absolutely covered in glowing tattoos, the centrepiece of which was a roaring dragon’s head. He also clearly wasn’t Japanese, but that wasn’t anything unusual; Lung’s Clan had formed from the nonhuman exiles of the actual Yakuza clans, all of them as conservative as mainstream Japanese society, and they’d become a pan-metahuman gang when they moved to Brockton Bay.
It wasn’t some great act of solidarity in a human supremacist city, they’d just killed the leaders of the city’s three largest ork and troll gangs and replaced them with their own people, forcing in a few elf and dwarf gangs later on.
The floor was quieter than most of the others in the building, probably because it was all workplaces rather than shops. Aisha counted two call centres and three pocket sweatshops before her attention wandered back to the queue next to the dwarf, a line of a dozen people waiting to be let into the Yakuza office. Most of them looked local and varied from poor to destitute. Some of them were still dressed in the aprons they’d worn to work. Aisha guessed that they were either there to pay their protection fees or try to negotiate lowering the amounts. She wished them luck.
Others, she suspected, were there for the same reason she was. They were an eclectic bunch in everything from shoddy suits to long coats zipped up tight over next to nothing, but they had one thing in common. Whatever they needed, they couldn’t find it in Japantown.
Aisha bit the bullet, joining the end of the line and leaning back against the wall. Within three minutes, she was tapping her foot against the floor. Within five, she’d started taking a half step forward, then another back, conscious of the woman who joined the line after her and who’d leap at the chance to take her spot. Her only relief came when the line moved forward, before the waiting began again. She knew the dwarf was looking at her, idly fingering the grip of his gun.
Prolly thinks I’m tweaking out. Aisha thought, before a dark voice inside her followed up with guess I am. Still coming down from whatever mom was on for nine months, eighteen years back.
Aisha could do impossible things; striking with pinpoint accuracy, scaling the sides of tower blocks, dodging blows and walking with the perfect confidence of a catwalk model, but only as long as she was moving.
When Aisha meditated, she did it by picking a wall and climbing it, or finding someone who was willing to spar. When she moved, it was like she was pushing through all the clouds in her head and out into the clear skies beyond. When she was still, the clouds thickened until she saw ghosts; getting antsy and distracted by the littlest things.
But then it was over. The last person in front of Aisha shambled out of the office with a dejected look on her face and the Yakuza dwarf ushered her in with a flick of his gun.
Inside, the former manager’s office had been refurnished with deep red carpets and metal blinds over the window, closed almost all the way so that only narrow slits of electric light bled through from the outside. The only furniture was a desk made of some dark synthetic wood with a chair on either side. The one behind the desk was high backed and padded with a red leather pattern, while its opposite number was made from the same dark wood, but without the height or padding.
The woman sitting at the desk was taller than Aisha with a pair of long, twisted horns jutting out of her forehead and tusks pointing up from her bottom lip. She wasn’t a troll, however. She wasn’t that large and her red skin marked her out as an oni; a Japanese subtype of orks.
Her suit jacket was white with black pinstripes, her hair was brushed back into a neat bun and she was busy typing on an AR keyboard – though, as Aisha wasn’t wearing anything that’d let her see into AR, it just looked like her fingers were fiddling in the air a centimetre above her desk.
She was ignoring Aisha, her gaze fixed on the invisible display. It was a dangerous move even when opposite the browbeaten locals who were waiting outside, but that was why the other person in the room hadn’t taken his eyes off Aisha from the moment she walked in.
He was a troll, leaning against the wall with a confident smirk seemingly locked onto his face. His horns were thicker than the oni’s, their length knobbled and covered in sharp spurs as they curved back from his forehead. His silvery shirt and black slacks were stretched out by his oversized musculature, and there was a revolver on his belt. Aisha was confident she could take him, but Aisha was confident she could take anyone.
The oni turned and said something in Japanese to her bodyguard. He chuckled, replying in the same language even though from his skin tone and accent he was probably as American as Aisha; either he’d taken the time to learn the language, or he had a linguasoft running on some cyberware in his head. Aisha didn’t have any cyberware and she’d never been able to focus enough to pick up new languages beyond Or’zet – even that had been more difficult than it ought to, since it was basically in her blood – so she had no idea what they were saying, but she could guess.
“Here to buy a SIN,” Aisha interrupted, leaning back in her seat.
The oni paused, an annoyed look on her face. She swept a hand to one side, no doubt dismissing the keyboard, and rested her elbows on the table, meshing her fingers together.
“That right?” she asked, her voice carrying the slight accent common to those who’d grown up in Japantown. “And why do you want that?”
“Got biz in Midtown, need to get past the checkpoints,” Aisha answered, already pissed off. “What does it matter?”
“’Cause I say it does and I’ve got what you want.”
Aisha clenched and unclenched her fist, using the movement to try and get her head back into shape. She was fucking this up and she knew it.
“Gotta deal set up. Buying something from there.”
“Are you an entrepreneur?” the oni asked, grinning sardonically as she looked Aisha up and down.
“It’s just clothes shopping,” Aisha answered with a half-truth. “Need new threads to keep up.”
“Ahh,” the oni signed, leaning forwards and looking at Aisha, yellow eyes lingering on her body. “I see. Well then, I believe we can do business. You’re so clearly in need.”
She thinks I’m a joytoy, Aisha thought. A strung-out joytoy. It took a moment for her anger to fade. Fuck it, let the stuck-up bitch think what she wants. Strung-out joytoys don’t carry much cred.
“So how much?” Aisha asked. “For a SIN?”
“Not just any fake will do,” the oni leant back, her features twisting into a salesman’s smug expression. “With the humans kicking off, Knight Errant are running deeper checks. Could give you one for twenty-five hundred nuyen, but the data would be random; could say you’re an eighty year old German dwarf. Basic age, ethnicity and sex match is no good either; they’ll check for supporting data.”
“So you’re saying you’re gonna frag me on the price?”
“You knew what this was when you walked through the door. Don’t exactly got a lot of options, do you?”
Aisha scowled, crossing her arms and looking away. She knew the oni was right, but she still hated it.
“Ugh… Go on.”
“Seven thousand five hundred. No negotiations, no compromises. We’re not the only SIN forgers in the city, but we’re one of the few who’ll sell to people with chompers like ours.”
Aisha was pissed off. Once again, it didn’t matter how much control she had over her body, how tuned in she was to the world around her, that same world still managed to find new ways to fuck her over. Someone kicks the hornet’s nest and sends the Chosen off on a killing spree, then Knight Errant puts up checkpoints in the streets to contain the killing to the parts of town nobody cares about. Then the vultures crawl out of the woodwork to rub it in, right to her face.
She sighed, placing her handbag on her lap and opening it up. Inside was a small collection of short, thumb-length sticks with amounts scrawled on the side in sharpie. People who actually existed in the eyes of the world mostly paid through their commlink, tied to their SIN and unable to process payments that weren’t made in their presence, verified by a code or just their biometrics, but that wasn’t the only way to pay.
Certified credsticks contained pre-loaded amounts of cash up to a certain amount, depending on the make of the credstick, and – more importantly – the cash on them was completely anonymous. They belonged to the owner of the stick and could be spent anywhere that took them – which was most places, since even the most uptight districts understood that sometimes people wanted to pay anonymously, or were paranoid about fraudulent readers draining their entire current account.
For people without a SIN, who couldn’t open an account at any bank that wasn’t on the black market, credsticks were the only way they had of interacting with the modern world. Aisha kept her current account in her handbag, with a savings account – which had been reduced to just a single stick with a little over one thousand on it – tucked behind a loose brick in her room in the Troupe’s place.
Most of the credsticks in her bag were stolen. Some of them had come from hotel rooms, lifted before their owner had the chance to waste them on a mid-rate joytoy, while others had come from random pickpocketing when Aisha was bored. The highest value one – a full fifteen thousand nuyen on a silver-rated credstick – had been payment for a job, earned by stealing a piece of art from some public art gallery and handed to her by an asshole suit in a penthouse apartment.
She left that one where it was, struggling for a moment as she tried to get the numbers to fit together in her head before putting five credsticks on the table, with a combined value that was probably somewhere near eight thousand.
The oni gave her a pointed look, her eyes flicking down to the credsticks as if to sarcastically ask where Aisha found them. She opened a drawer on her desk, pulling out a credstick reader and slotting each stick one by one, draining them of their funds and handing the empties back to Aisha.
“How much left on that one?” Aisha asked as the last credstick was placed in front of her.
“Don’t have a commlink to check?” The oni asked, as the troll in the corner of the room chuckled to himself. “Sixty eight. You were almost short.”
Aisha didn’t answer. She just took a sharpie out of her bag, crossed out the number on the stick and wrote the new one next to it. It, along with the others, was swept into her handbag, which weighed the same despite being seven and a half thousand nuyen lighter.
“Now then, one fake SIN.” The oni pulled up the keyboard again, poking the air as she selected options Aisha couldn’t see. “Sex, female. Metatype, ork. Ethnicity, African American. Age,” the corner of her lip curled up past her tusk. “Eighteen, right? Wouldn’t want to be barred from any clubs.”
“I am eighteen,” Aisha answered honestly, though she sometimes had trouble remembering. It had been years since she’d last done something to mark a birthday. For the last two years, she’d only realised she was a year older a few days after it happened.
“Whatever you say, kid. It’s a hundred nuyen for a commlink.”
“Huh?” Aisha asked.
“A commlink. A SIN’s no good if you’ve nothing wireless to broadcast it. Got a box of Meta Links in the back for people who don’t got their own.”
“Fuck, fine,” Aisha snatched another credstick from her handbag, eyeing the sharpied number in disgust before tossing it onto the desk.
“A pleasure doing business,” the oni smiled, waving a hand at her bodyguard.
The troll lumbered over to a doorway and pulled it open. Aisha caught a brief glimpse of the room beyond before it was blocked by the troll’s back as he ducked his head through a doorway that absolutely wasn’t designed for someone his height.
Inside was a darkened space lit by dull red lights, with a reclined metal and syn-leather seat set against the wall, surrounded by wires and computer towers with blinking blue status lights flashing out in an unreadable pattern. A woman was lying down on the seat, dressed in the sort of skin-tight cooler suit that let deckers work in cyberspace upwards of a dozen hours without coming up for air, the suit keeping their neuralware cool as it manipulated their muscles to prevent sores and – on the really long-term models – provided inflow ports for IV drips and outflow ports for bodily waste.
Aisha once had a nightmare that she was plugged into one; locked in place while her mind was stuck in a virtual world that had none of the real-feel of the real one. She’d never used the matrix, not properly. Even before everything went wrong, her family could never have afforded cold-sim gear. Even so, the idea of being lost in that world had always frightened her; it was a fate worse than death.
“How long will it last?” Aisha asked, turning back to the Oni as the troll conversed in Japanese with someone in the next room.
“Hard to say,” the oni shrugged her shoulders. “You try walking into the Ares docks, it’ll last until you’re face down on the floor with fifty guns pointed at you. For normal use… maybe a year, until they refresh the system enough times to make our backdoors obsolete. It varies.”
“So it lasts until it doesn’t?”
“Basically,” the oni replied, a grin spreading across her red face.
The troll ducked his head back through the doorway, a blocky plastic commlink held between his thumb and forefinger. He passed the comm to the oni, who held it out for Aisha to grab.
As Aisha’s fingers drew near, however, the oni made to pull the commlink back. Aisha decided then and there that she’d had enough of being screwed, of forking over too much money to slip around a meaningless government leash, of the oni’s smug face. She abandoned restraint, her fingers flying forward as magic flowed through her muscles, pumping down her veins with every heartbeat. She snatched the commlink out of the Yakuza woman’s hand, tossing it up in the air before swiping out to flick it into her handbag.
“We’re done, right?”
The oni’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t lash out like Aisha was half expecting – like she half wanted her to.
“We’re done,” the oni replied instead, nodding in the direction of the door. “Get out.”
“Yeah, fuck you too…” Aisha grumbled as she stood, turning her back on the two Yakuza without so much as a twinge of unease; she didn’t need to see them to know what they were doing. Annoyingly, they didn’t seem to be doing anything; the troll was watching her with just as much disinterest as he had when she’d walked in, while the oni had already gone back to typing on her AR keyboard.
As Aisha stepped out into the corridor and saw that the line now stretched all the way down to the stairwell, she realised why they didn’t care; she was just another desperate face to them. They didn’t know she was an adept, didn’t know she’d abseiled off the side of the interstate or climbed up the side of a twenty-five story tower block to burgle the penthouse. It was what she’d planned, but Aisha still hated it.
That hate turned into discomfort as she navigated her way through the packed market-corridors of the old office building and out into the no-less-packed streets of Japantown. She picked up the pace, striding with ease through the crowds as she let herself flow like a fish through a river of metahumanity. She drew more attention that way, but she didn’t care. It was better than being nobody.
As she drew closer to Archer’s Bridge and its underslung metro line, the character of Japantown changed. It was a narrow band of prosperity, the same converted office buildings only imitating the genuine shantytown architecture seen deeper in the district. They were full of kitschy restaurants, anachronistic Pachinko and Mah-jong parlours, and offensively Japanese souvenir shops selling cheap clothes and cheaper swords.
Aisha knew from experience that if she slipped past the outer layers of that office building, with its code-compliant modifications and basic SIN checks for reservations in mid-range restaurants selling sushi for upper-mid-range prices, she’d find a tight warren of lightless apartments inhabited by the people who worked to preserve the tourist traps, or the hidden brothels and bunraku parlours that high-class clients would be ushered into to give them the experience of crime without the actual risk.
Checking the time on her new commlink, Aisha hurried up the stairs to the metro station, pushing past the downward flow of office workers looking for somewhere to relax, couples looking for somewhere romantic and rowdy high schoolers who’d go as far into Japantown as they dared in search of someone who’d sell them drugs or alcohol.
At the turnstile, a light flicked from red to yellow as it detected the fake SIN in Aisha’s commlink. It was the most basic level of security – checking whether she even had a SIN, rather than who it said she was – but Aisha was still glad to know she hadn’t been sold a dud. When she slotted a credstick into a port just below the pad the light went green before the bars swung out, letting her push her way through onto the platform just as a train had finished loading its cargo of passengers.
Aisha squeezed through the doors, twisting her body to fit through the closing gap. It was quiet by the standards of the metro, which meant it was still far too crowded for her tastes. The line only became busier as it passed through Midtown; dozens of middle-class passengers arriving with every passing stop and only half as many leaving. There were no internal doors between the carriages, which meant Aisha’s heels gave her a commanding view right down the length of the train.
It meant they could see her too, especially given that orks and trolls were very much in the minority. She saw an elven mother cast a disapproving look at her outfit, then pull her school-age children in closer. Further down the carriage, a man in a suit with a Medhall logo on his tie clip elbowed the woman next to him – maybe a coworker – and shared a joke that had them both chuckling.
Aisha heard exactly what they said, even over the din of the carriage and the squeal of the metro making a turn. She grinned, showing plenty of tusk, and flipped the pair of them off. As she’d expected, they just scowled and looked the other way; wageslaves were too browbeaten to ever consider kicking off on public transport.
They got off three stops later, but the looks never entirely stopped. More people were constantly flowing in and out of the carriage until it passed beyond the tall residential buildings of Midtown, dashing over the river before dropping down into the antique skyline of the old city centre.
The buildings in that part of the city – protected for their historical value, though Aisha didn’t see what was so valuable about them – were mostly made of red bricks or white stone, with the very tallest only reaching fifteen stories high. Here and there, the last-century cityscape was broken up by sleek modern towers, where planning permission had lapsed and allowed the modern age to intrude on Brockton Bay’s Fifth World reservation.
Aisha’s stop was on a modern platform that was suspended above the old street on spindly struts, putting her in mind of a spaceship hovering over a primitive civilisation. There was no staircase down, just four glass-walled elevators mounted at either end of the platform.
There were two Knight Errant officers standing beside each set of elevators, with rifles held in their hands as their impassive full-face visors looked over the disembarking crowd. A drone hovered above them, a circular reconnaissance unit that was giving them a bird’s eye view of the crowd.
Aisha knew that even if she couldn’t see it, they were currently watching everyone on the platform on a far deeper level than just the visual. Their visors concealed a suite of AR-linked sensors that, in combination with the drone, were tracking and scanning the SINs of everyone who was attempting to get into Midtown.
It was worse on the ground – which was why Aisha hadn’t even considered walking. With violence spreading throughout the northern half of the city, Knight Errant had set up checkpoints all along the boundaries between Midtown and its neighbours, Japantown and the North End. SINners got searched, unless they were too important to touch, while the SINless were being turned away. Rather than two bored transport officers, Aisha would have faced half a dozen if her fake had failed.
The result was that the old streets were quieter than usual, with the homeless population forcibly moved on with more aggression than normal. It meant Aisha stood out even more, but she didn’t care; her SIN was holding, and she’d almost made it there.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Still, she sighed with relief as she pushed open the glass doors of an eight-storey brick building, gliding purposefully past a half-asleep security guard into an elevator and thumbing the button for the sixth floor.
‘Naranjo Secure Clothiers’ looked pretty much how Aisha had expected it to, at first glance. The elevator opened onto a tastefully furnished reception area with brown syn-leather couches, a deep green carpet and faux-wood panelled walls. At least, Aisha assumed it was all synthetic; this deep into the city, it could well be the real deal.
The elf behind the reception desk was certainly real, looking at Aisha with a practiced smile on her made-up face as she gestured in AR. The smile became imperceptibly strained at whatever she found, though Aisha would have doubted anyone but her would have noticed it.
“I’m sorry, miss,” she began, her tone the very essence of politeness, “but we have no reservations under ‘Jasmine Olsen.’”
Aisha chuckled, sauntering towards the woman as her hand began to drift towards a button underneath her desk. Aisha wondered what it did; would turrets drop out of the ceiling? Security drones walk out of hidden alcoves in the wall? A team of heavies storm in from the next room? Explosives in the couch?
“Yeah, you wouldn’t. Appointment’s under ‘Imp.’ Here to see the boss.”
The secretary’s eyes darted to the left as she checked something. Aisha wondered if she’d gone for an eye implant, but decided that she was probably just wearing AR lenses. She seemed like the type who valued their all-natural appearance for entirely different reasons than Aisha.
“I see,” she blinked. “Apologies, ma’am. He’ll see you now. Please,” she gestured to a wooden door behind her, with a brass handle and an old-fashioned keyhole that Aisha was sure she recognised as a high-end lock mocked up to look antiquated.
“Ma’am, huh?” she murmured to herself as she passed the secretary. “Classy place…”
Beyond the doorway was an expansive studio, far larger than any creative space the Troupe had. Parts of it were set aside for work, with mannequins, assembly machines and dozens of other obscure tools arranged on neat wooden shelves, while other parts were made for the business, with comfortable furniture, a richly-decorated desk with equally fancy seats and an entire wall just for swatches of different fabric. The windows – five of them – stretched up almost to the ceiling, though Aisha could tell from the faint distortion of the light that the glass was armoured and could darken at the touch of a button.
There was an android standing by the window – some high-end model with a metal faceplate sculpted into a distinguished, masculine look. It had been dressed in an old dinner suit, with a black bow tie and a red sash around its waist, while its metal hands ended in a variety of different manipulator digits meant to serve the needs of its owner.
The owner – Naranjo himself – was standing beside the window, looking down on the street below. He was a gnome, barely able to look over the windowsill at only eighty centimetres tall, and he was dressed in a suit that was as anachronistic as his robo-butler, with a high-necked white shirt and a red scarf-like necktie tucked into his waistcoat.
“Miss ‘Imp’,” he began, turning away from the window. “You’re late.”
He didn’t sound as angry as Aisha was expecting – or, he did, but there was something else to it. She’d never been good at reading people.
“Midtown’s locked up tighter than a dragon’s vault,” she replied by way of an explanation. “I had to buy a fake SIN just to make it here.”
“Indeed?” Naranjo asked. “Yes, I suppose that would cause some difficulties.”
Not something you think about, is it? Aisha thought to herself. Bet the pawns nod and call you ‘sir’ whenever you walk past.
“So… is it ready?” she asked, a hand reaching into her bag. “Because I have your money.”
“Please,” the clothier waved a hand dismissively. “Let us not discuss something as gauche as payment when you haven’t even laid eyes on what you’re paying for. I was, after all, working on measurements I did not take myself.”
“Did I miss any out?” Aisha asked, worried. She’d pestered a tailor in the Troupe to measure her, using a list she’d jotted down as a guide, but maybe she’d missed out some vital measurement.
“No, nothing like that,” Naranjo shook his head, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his lip. “I was simply worried that you may have made a mistake in writing the numbers down.”
He looked Aisha up and down. It wasn’t like when the oni had stared at her, but there was something similarly clinical in his gaze.
“But I can see that my worries were unfounded,” he spoke, openly smiling. “You’re quite the beauty, and it looks like every measurement was exact. I must admit, I’m a little surprised.”
“Your husband know you like eyefucking the customers?” Aisha asked, gesturing to a framed picture on the wall of the gnome, a dwarf in a pair of chinos and a young girl in a sundress.
Naranjo openly laughed, his carefully-composed manner breaking entirely.
“You misunderstand. It’s rare I get to meet someone who’s won the genetic lottery, but the prize is worth a lot less in this day and age. I more commonly deal with a sculpted aesthetic that is as much a work of art as my own creations. After all, why deny yourself beauty simply because of random chance? The same odds that fell so much in your favour put me in the wrong body entirely, but nature’s mistakes are easily fixed.”
If you have money, Aisha thought, her mind drifting back to familiar faces in Circus’ weird little quasi-gang. If not, could take a lifetime to get even close to comfortable in your skin.
“But I digress,” the gnome said, shaking his head as he gestured towards a pair of couches. “Please, take a seat. I will have your attire collected.”
Aisha sat, tapping her foot impatiently as Naranjo sent the android off to rummage through the cupboards. Idly, she looked around the room, taking in the half-finished garments meant for the clothier’s regular customers.
Most of them were suits – their seams opened to reveal pieces of armoured fabric halfway through being stitched in – but others were stranger. An elegant ballgown sat on a mannequin, while there was a neatly folded heap of transparent material sitting on a table that put Aisha in mind of a snakeskin.
“Most of your clients are bodyguards?” she asked.
“They make up my bread and butter. It’s a delicate balancing act that depends more on who they’re guarding than the bodyguard themself. They’re meant to accessorise, in a sense. Never to overshadow their principal or even their principal’s more intimate employees. What’s more, they follow them everywhere.”
He gestured towards the heap of transparent material.
“That’s for a client whose principal is holidaying in the French Riviera next month. It’s called ‘Second Skin,’ and I am one of a handful of clothiers in New England who’s licensed to fit it. It’s an armoured bodyglove; entirely transparent and fitted so closely to the client’s body that if she were to gain or lose as little as half a kilo, it would become useless. Perfect for accompanying your principal as she sunbathes on a beach or the deck of a yacht, when paired with appropriate swimwear.”
Aisha didn’t reply; her attention snapped over to the android butler, who was returning with a grey bundle held in its arms. She stood up, striding over to a long table as the butler set the bundle down and unfurled it, revealing a one-piece taksuit made from a grey material patterned with tiny, almost indistinguishable hexagons. It had a scarf-like hood of black fabric attached to the neck, a belt and several pouches circling the hips, and it ended in flexible boots – all of them coated in that same pattern.
At the centre of the bundle, hidden until the android had unwrapped it, was a white-grey mask of armoured ceramic, though that too had the tell-tale hexagons stretched across its surface. The mask had been sculpted to look like a grinning demon with bared, pointed teeth – including prominent fangs – and swept-back horns jutting out of the forehead. The eyes were black from cover to cover and stylised to look fierce; more animal than human.
“Oh that’s fuckin’ beautiful,” Aisha murmured as she picked up one of the arms of the suit. The material was smooth beneath her fingers, slick enough that it felt like water would run right off it almost without touching. As she moved down the arm, she felt the faint padding over the elbow and the reinforced patches over the gloves; armoured pads over the knuckles and grip-fast patches on the underside of each finger.
“The base fabric is Evo’s SoftWeave,” Naranjo said, moving up to stand beside her. “It’s lightweight and flexible enough that it should not prove a barrier to any motion whatsoever, while also acting as a very adaptive baselayer. The coating is ruthenium polymer, of course. The highest grade I have.”
He reached over the table, grabbing the mask and handing it to Imp, who held it up in front of her face and stared deeply into the featureless black lenses, seeing her own eyes reflected back at her.
“The mask is a more conventional ceramic. Like the rest of the suit, it won’t hold up under fire, but it’s good for blunt force trauma. The lenses cover a standard optic suite; the entire inner surface above the mouth is a screen. Below that is an integrated respirator. With the hood up, that creates a CBRN-rated seal. It also has a built-in commlink, of course, though that can be switched off to allow it to function entirely offline.”
Aisha looked around the room, half-considering throwing her clothes off then and there. It was perfect; she wanted to wear it now.
“Ah, over there,” the gnome gestured to a tasteful set of panelling on the other side of the room. It came to Aisha’s shoulders, but it’d be enough. She bundled the suit up in her arms more carefully than she’d ever held anything in her life, then darted behind the modesty screen, leaving her handbag on the table.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” the gnome began as Aisha kicked off her heels and shrugged off her top, “what have you been using until now?”
“Just a basic chameleon suit,” she answered. “The mask was custom, but the suit itself was second hand. Had them paired together by a guy I know. I could get it to change colour, but nothing like this.”
Naranjo scoffed, but Aisha didn’t feel like he was directing it at her. “Basic camouflage, nothing more. Good for soldiers and hunters, but not professionals. You’ll find your new suit much more appropriate.”
Aisha only half heard him. She was kneeling down with the suit in her hands, trying to figure out how exactly she put it on. It took her a moment, but eventually she found a zip on the back of the suit, just to the left of a raised strip of grey material that ran down the length of the spine. It was probably meant to house the electronics that allowed the suit to function, but to Aisha’s eyes it looked like a spinal column that had grown out and broken through the skin. She very much approved.
Hitting the button that disengaged the teeth of the zip, Aisha stood and slid her legs down into the boots, pulling up the waist of the suit before slipping her hands down the arms and pushing her head through the hood. The boots tightened automatically around her ankles, as the zip magnetically locked itself on her back.
The fit was perfect; sleek and snug from head to toe, yet – as Aisha flexed her arm – with enough give that moving shouldn’t be any issue whatsoever. Hanging the mask on the modesty screen, Aisha quickly went through the motions of a kata Circus had taught her, one that mixed conventional fighting moves with acrobatics and contortionist stretches that would leave most people lying on the floor in a puddle of broken bones.
When she sprung back to her feet from a one-handed handstand, she saw that Naranjo has stepped around the side of the screen to see what the noise was. He had his hand on his chin and was nodding to himself.
“It seems the measurements were correct.”
“It’s fucking wiz,” Aisha grinned, snatching the mask from where it was hanging and sliding it on over her head. She reached back, grabbed the hood and pulled it forward until it connected to the mask with the click of more mag-locks.
For an instant, her world was pitch black, before colour swept down the inside of the mask as the optics came online.
He was right, Aisha thought. It’s like it’s not even there.
Another fraction of a second and the integrated commlink connected to AR, suddenly marking out a dozen different elements floating throughout the room; part of the creature comfort systems Naranjo kept around to adjust the heat and humidity, raise or lower the shutters and even open the windows altogether if he was so inclined. Aisha blinked in irritation; the illusion had been broken.
“So how do I turn it on?” she asked, looking down at the gnome through the mask’s featureless black lenses.
“Through the HUD,” he explained, turning his right hand palm up and furling and unfurling his fingers. “This motion will bring up the menu.”
Aisha copied him, watching as a small AR window of red letters appeared just above her palm. She skimmed over the list of options before landing on one that was in a larger font than the others, and accompanied by a big red button.
She hit it, and the word ‘Activate’ lit up brighter for a moment before being swept away by new letters reading ‘Deactivate.’ She held up her arm in front of her face, the interface disappearing as her arm passed through it – along with all the other AR elements in the room as the suit throttled its Matrix connection – and watched as vivid red lines spread out across her arms – a digital overlay, she realised after a second – while the fabric itself gradually shifted until it had become completely transparent.
“What’s with the overlay?” she asked.
“It’s necessary for hand-eye coordination,” Naranjo explained, still looking at where she had been standing even as she walked around his back, miming picking his pockets and smiling as he didn’t do so much as flinch. “People don’t need to see their hand to know where it is, but they expect to. If you want to ‘see’ yourself, look over there.”
He was pointing towards a tall, gilt-framed mirror in the corner of the room – large enough that even a troll could see their reflection from head to toe. Aisha paced up to it like a predator; with slow, deliberate steps, keeping herself just out of frame. Only when she was close enough to touch it did she take a single step to the left, putting herself in full view of the mirrored surface.
There was nothing there. No distortion, no haze or static. Not even a gradual shift as the ruthenium polymer adapted to the change in position. Aisha swiped a hand up and down in front of her face. She could see the AR outline over each finger, but in the mirror itself there was still nothing. She moved faster, flicking her hand like she was throwing a punch, and finally saw a visible haze of distorted air as she outpaced the suit.
I can’t move too fast, she thought to herself, but it’s still so much better than I hoped.
“How long does the charge last?”
“Four hours of active stealth,” Naranjo answered. “There are charging ports at the top of the spine and the left side of the mask – both inside the suit rather than outside, to preserve the polymer layer.”
Aisha shifted her hand, bringing up the menu again. Her eyes darted quickly over the option to shut off the commlink, taking the suit offline, before she hit the ‘Deactivate’ button and watched as the AR lines faded away and her arm swept back into existence.
She reached up, pulled back the hood and removed her mask, then whooped and jumped a meter and a half into the air.
“This is fucking nova, chummer.”
“Worth the cost?” the clothier asked, his grin widening in the face of Aisha’s infectious joy.
“Pay for itself ten times over,” Aisha said, darting over to her handbag and upending it onto the table, spilling out the cluster of credsticks, her fresh-bought commlink, a collapsible combat tomahawk made of composite metals and polymers, and a meticulously maintained – but rarely used – Ultimax 70 machine pistol.
She reached for the pouches that ringed the hips of her suit, filing away credsticks and the commlink into smaller pouches while tucking the pistol and axe into the holsters that had been specifically built to match them.
“Remember to always close those,” Naranjo interjected. “They’ll be slower to draw, but the stealth coating is useless if people can see a pistol grip floating in mid-air.”
“Got it,” Aisha answered as she tucked away the last of the bag’s contents. She still had plenty of pouches to spare, which was good; plenty of room to fill them with chips, jewellery or whatever else she could find people to pay her to steal.
She grabbed the silver credstick and held it up between two fingers.
“Fifteen kay, as asked.”
Naranjo stepped forward, reaching for the credstick, only for Aisha to flip it back into her palm.
“I’ve gotta ask, though, why’d you go for this in the first place? Whirligig has a John who knows you, hangs out in the same circles, I know that much, but what do you get out of selling gear to street scum like me?”
The clothier smiled, leaning against the back of the couch as he looked up at Aisha.
“It isn’t my normal work, true. The design theory behind it is an interesting paradox; a stealth suit that stands out. That intimidates. Can I ask a question for a question? Why the mask? It seems a little too close to a caricature.”
Aisha set down the credstick and picked up the mask, eyeing the fangs, the horns. She didn’t answer at first; she’d always had trouble putting her feelings into words.
“You don’t need a stealth suit to be invisible,” she answered, glancing out the window, where the rain was sputtering out, leaving only occasional droplets to run down the panes. “Out there, nobody can see you anyway. Nobody knows who you are, what you do, what you want or why you want it. It’s true for me and it’s true for you, but in here you’ve got your sign, your fabrics, your girl at the front desk. You’re somebody.”
She turned to face him, flipping the mask around and holding it up by her face, side by side.
“I’ve gotta be invisible to do my job, but I don’t want to be invisible off it. I want to stand out, build a rep. Hire a thief in a baggie hoodie and sweatpants, you’ll forget them by the end of the hour. Hire this?” she struck a pose, spreading her hands and cocking her hips. “Like you said, I won the genetic lottery. The mask just adds to it; freak ‘em out and they’ll just remember you more.”
Naranjo chuckled to himself, shaking his head.
“Then by all means, burn your mark into this city, Imp. As for me? You said it yourself; here I’m somebody. My worth to society is tied to my business, my worth as a person is tied to my family, my friends. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into all of them and it’s tied me down to one way of living. Rooftop escapades are beyond my reach, but through this work I can get as close as I possibly can to a genuine adventure.”
Utterly satisfied, Aisha left the clothiers completely invisibly, with a genuine spring in her step. She passed through the crowds of the city centre as fast as the suit would let her, deftly moving around couples and salarymen and anyone else without leaving a trace of her presence beyond the small amount of air each motion displaced. Briefly, she considered falling back on her old tricks; sliding watches off wrists, lifting commlinks or picking earrings right out of the skin while leaving their wearer none the wiser, but then her invisibility would break.
It's time to put away the kid shit, Aisha thought to herself. This suit’s for bigger and better.
When she reached the metro platform, she climbed over the ticket barrier in full view of a Knight Errant cop. The commlink with her fake SIN on it was stuffed into a pouch, but she’d left her old clothes behind alongside her fifteen thousand nuyen payment; she didn’t want anything to get in-between her and using the suit in public for the first time.
Aisha hung back from the edge of the platform as the train pulled in, keeping clear of the flow of passengers as she tried to find somewhere to stand where people wouldn’t run into her by accident. The platform was for trains heading back towards Midtown and the North End, which meant that the crowd were almost universally workers on the way back from twelve hour shifts manning cubicles in offices, or staffing museums, shops and galleries that they’d never be able to afford to visit.
She was afraid of that, as well; it was another fate worse than death. Aisha often thought to herself, looking in on society from the outside, that no matter how bad things got, at least she was still free.
As she climbed up onto the roof of the train moments before it left the station, Aisha’s mind drifted back down old paths. She often wondered what her life would been like if she’d gone with her dad in the divorce instead, if her mom had taken the amnesty and reregistered their SINs rather than drifting through ‘sixty-four in a haze of drugs and shit boyfriends.
If they hadn’t drifted from flophouse to flophouse, her mom paying rent under the table to sketchy landlords, or squeezing Aisha into some small space in the corner of a new boyfriend’s apartment so that she wouldn’t dampen his mood just by being around. If they hadn’t gone from there to one squatters den after another, Aisha spending more and more time out on the streets until she came back to the junkie’s den to find her mother had gone; disappeared somewhere into the shantytown mass at the city’s northernmost point, where ghouls lurk in the dark places and the people shuffle through the streets like they’re just as dead.
Lying back on the roof of a speeding train, watching a city full of registered SINners drift by in its endless pattern of shift work, rent and a million other screws holding it in place – keeping the machine turning along – Aisha knew with absolute certainty that even though it had been hard, even though every new stage of her childhood had been a new nightmare, it was still better than the alternative.
She was a better person because of it. A stronger person. She’d become someone that little Aisha Laborn, nine year old UCAS citizen and elementary school underperformer, could never have become. She was an adept, capable of putting real magic into her every move. She was a master thief, able to sneak in and out of anywhere she wanted to. The suit was just the final brick in the wall; it didn’t make her invisible, it made her invincible.
That feeling carried Aisha through the North End as she leapt from the train to a low rooftop, her suit shimmering as she sprinted across the rooftops, walkways and balconies of a dozen different tenement buildings on her way to the Troupe, her bed and her tiny horde of petty cash tucked behind a loose brick.
It lasted until her ears started to catch the sound of gunfire reverberating through the canyons of buildings; until she saw the smoke rising in the distance.
As she drew closer to her home, Aisha began to see signs of carnage on the streets below. There were bodies lying by the side of the road, some of them dressed in normal clothes, some wearing the red and black colours of the network of smaller gangs that paid tribute to the Chosen, while far too many were dressed in an eclectic riot of colours and styles. Far too many wore familiar faces.
Aisha’s pace slowed, creeping over the rooftops rather than dropping down to street level for the final approach. She was glad of the filters in her mask keeping the smell of the smoke out, glad of the invisibility itself as she risked occasional glances down into the street, seeing packs of humans under the command of cybered-up Chosen members gathering in their dozens.
In the places they’d stopped to gather, they’d also stopped to make examples; bodies were strung up from lampposts, small pop-up stores without licenses or insurance had been looted and defaced, their owners nowhere to be seen. An off the books pharmacy was being meticulously dismantled, the drugs within carted out and catalogued by a woman with a voice box stitched into her throat and a metal cage mask around her head.
Aisha lay flat on the very edge of the building and peered over the side, looking down on about a dozen men and women throwing firebombs at the densely-packed tenement block, cheering every time one of the bombs broke a window and landed inside the building. She could hear the sound of feet running through the corridors just below her, as families fled their packed apartments in terror.
Panic gripped Aisha then. Not fear for her life, but fear for the closest thing she had to a home. She sprung off, running directly towards the sound of gunfire even as her heart pounded in her chest. She had no idea what she was doing; she’d never killed anyone, never fought in a gunfight. That wasn’t the lesson shantytown kids learned.
The runners survive. The fighters die.
When the makeshift township came into view, it reminded Aisha of movies she’d seen of castles under siege. Twin machine guns had been set up on top of Trainwreck’s makeshift wall, firing down the length of the street at an up-armoured bulldozer that was relentlessly grinding its way down the length of the road, pushing aside cars and trucks that had been hastily turned into yet more barricades.
The Chosen advanced behind it, using its massive bulk as cover. Not the bottom-feeders hanging around the outskirts of the fight, but real, blooded Chosen with their naked cybernetics and military-grade gear. Every now and then, one of them would dart to the side, take up a position behind one of the cars and start firing at the machine guns on the wall. Aisha saw one of their shots land, saw a tall woman with half her face painted blue fall back as the top of her skull was shorn off in a spark of subdermal armour, only to be replaced a moment later by a horned satyr with shamanic symbols dangling from necklaces over his bare, hair-covered chest.
Aisha saw movement on the other side of the street, as Chosen gunmen moved from window to window, trying to find a vantage point from which they could see over the wall. She didn’t know tactics, but she knew they’d be trying the same in the building below her.
Struck by the sudden urge to do something more than just run away or huddle up behind the barricade and wait to die with the rest of them, Aisha knelt down on the very edge of the building, gripped the lip of the roof and swung herself down onto the wall, dropping from windowsill to windowsill until she found a broken one three stories down.
Aisha swung herself through the frame, her boots crunching on the broken glass that littered the floor of the semi-abandoned unit, with only a sleeping bag and a gas burner in the corner of the room showing that someone was living there, while the upturned bowl of canned soup suggested that they’d left in a hurry.
Trusting in her invisibility, Aisha stepped out into the narrow corridor that ran the length of the tenement building just in time to find herself face to face with a pair of Chosen wearing ballistic vests and carrying assault rifles, their cybernetic optics twitching as they edged down the corridor with more confidence that she was expecting.
As one of the Chosen paused, turned and fired a quick burst of shots through the wall beside him, Aisha realised it was because their optics were cutting through the flimsy plasterboard like it wasn’t even there, letting them see anyone in the building who wasn’t wearing a high-end stealth suit.
Following them into one of the apartments, once home to a family of four crammed into two rooms, Aisha drew the tomahawk from her belt. When the Chosen split, one to each window, she picked her target – a man with a human skull spray-painted onto the back of his armoured vest – and swung her axe into his neck, following up the blow with another under the shoulder before grabbing him by the back of the head and reversing the axe to drive the spike through his right optic and into his skull.
Blood sprayed over Aisha’s suit as his comrade turned, but she was already drawing her pistol with her other hand. Without even looking, she lined up a shot on his head and pulled the trigger, dozens of hours of practice paying off as a three-round burst passed right through his skull.
Shots were being fired from the building opposite, drawing Aisha’s attention away from the blood pooling from the Chosen’s skulls. Eclectically-dressed gang members were moving from room to room, killing any Chosen they found but not yet firing down on the main force in the street below. Aisha felt her chest tighten as she watched them; she wasn’t sure if it was in fear or in relief.
Once they were in position, the Troupe attacked in a shower of gunfire and spells, the air almost reverberating with the force of the magic being thrown down into the street, sending Chosen scattering from glittering arcs of electricity, roiling tongues of fire and an absolute barrage of conventional weapons.
The barricade creaked and groaned as an immense armoured figure clambered up to the top, firing down the length of the street with twin assault rifles mounted on the shoulders of the oversized exoskeleton he wore to counter his paraplegia.
Trainwreck leapt down off the barricade, landing on the asphalt with a crash and a whirr of servos that sounded exactly like his namesake. He was followed by more of the Troupe; lithe adepts and cyborgs on elegantly-sculpted metal limbs who rushed forward to fight the Chosen with blades and spurs and blunt sledgehammers. Trainwreck stormed right through the middle of them, leaping up and driving both his oversized metal fists into the engine of the dozer, before pulling one back and punching the armoured cabin so hard that the piece of armour dismounted from its frame, jerking back and crushing the driver beneath a solid metal sheet.
Aisha grinned beneath her mask, her grip tightening on the axe as she edged closer to the window. She wanted to help, but she found herself more and more hesitant the closer she drew to the window. Trainwreck was in among the Chosen, sweeping aside three at a time with each swing of his fists, and a few of the Troupe’s awakened members were able to keep pace with him, but the rest of them weren’t doing so well.
For every Chosen they managed to kill, three of the Troupe were dying. Aisha had never been part of the gang, in as much as they even were a gang. They were artists, sculptors, prostitutes, actors, thieves, dancers; exiles from society who plied their trade on street corners for slightly more than beggars made and crawled back to their sort-of-commune so that they had somewhere to sleep at night.
She was one of the drifters, someone who came in and out of the district as she pleased, knowing the faces of the people around her but not really knowing them. She was good, she knew that, but she wasn’t a soldier. Not like the Chosen.
Each one of them was a born-again killer, living for nothing more than learning new ways to murder her people, or just people like her. Even when surrounded by an absolute riot of fighters desperate to defend their home, they managed to stay cool and controlled. Their shots were still accurate, their forms able to parry incoming blows with the spark of steel on steel. Without the advantage of surprise, without her suit, they’d gut Aisha without a second thought and rip out her tusks as a trophy.
And then she saw the reinforcements, and Aisha was struck by an almost physical wave of raw, primal terror.
Another two dozen Chosen were advancing down the street, moving in pairs with one firing as the other darted up to the next piece of cover only to drop to one knee and cover their partner. Their fire was unrestrained, trusting in their training and their linked neural network to guide their shots away from their comrades in the melee. Aisha didn’t see them; all she could see was the monster at the head of the crowd, striding down the street like the gunfire all around him was nothing more than a gentle rain.
He was as tall as any troll Aisha had met and was carrying so much chrome it seemed impossible. Everything below the neck was metal, thick enough that it could almost be confused for power armour if it weren’t for the obviously inhuman proportions. As an incoming shot sheared the synthskin off his temple, Aisha saw that even his head was nothing more than a metal shell given a cosmetic coat of flesh.
If there’s anything ‘ganic in there, it’s buried deep, some small part of Aisha’s mind thought, almost buried beneath the overwhelming fear. She had to fight herself not to throw up.
The cyberpsycho began to jog, then run, then sprint down the street at an impossibly vast speed, leaving his followers behind as he ran directly into the melee. From his shoulders, micro-missile racks emerged and fired their payload, sending a dozen rockets twisting through the air before detonating all along the length of the building opposite Aisha, pulping the Troupe’s firing positions and shearing off whole swathes of the building’s façade where they hit load-bearing supports.
The backblast shattered the windows of Aisha’s building, as she reflexively raised her arms to cover protect her face from the glass shrapnel. The shards, some centimetres long, skidded off the armoured fabric of her suit, the few that made it past her arms peppering uselessly against the armoured surface of her mask. She risked a glance through the broken windows, only to see the cyberpsycho – moving faster than anyone, chromed or no, had any right to – drive his fist into Trainwreck’s armoured chest and rip out the flesh within in a spray of blood and viscera.
Aisha fell back in shock, scrabbling backwards on her hands and legs as some deep, primal unease twinged at the part of her brain that was awakened to the magic of the world. He was wrong. Wrong in a way that was impossible to explain, wrong in a way that made Aisha sick to her stomach.
The noise pouring through the blown-out windows was only getting louder, the gunfire and screams becoming more and more real to her. She realised the Chosen had broken through; that their cyberpsycho and their reinforcements had killed everyone on the street and broken through the barricade, storming through the market and into the closest thing she had to a home.
Aisha pulled herself to her feet, held her hand up in front of her face to check she was still invisible, and ran as far and as fast as she could, leaving the massacre behind her.