In spite of all my efforts, the entity hadn’t yet reached Medhall’s networks by the time the breakthrough came. I could feel the tendril brushing against Max Ander’s commlink, forming an impossible bridge from the resonance to the matrix. It was too thin to be noticed, or so I hoped. Such a direct bridge to that alien realm would draw megacorps like flies if they found it, allowing them to bypass both the resonance’s metaphysical event horizon and the man-made firewalls that insulated the matrix from its host.
I knew that Calvert’s systems hadn’t picked it up, even as the entity’s first questing tendrils began to probe his own mousehole into the Myo network. Interestingly, it ignored my connection entirely. It seemed the pattern in the realm below held true above; the gestalt AI fragment had no interest in the resonance or its creations. I’d probably give it indigestion.
I was out of the loft, watching the world go by through the mesh window of a city bus with a rucksack on my back that was about a quarter full of groceries. The bus was quiet, with only a couple of warehouse workers, a few pensioners near the front and a trio of Yakuza small fry near the back. One of them, a cocky ork whose bare chest carried the absolute worst dragon tattoo I’d ever seen, had whistled at me when I got on board, then pretended not to see me when I let my jacket drift open far enough to show my gun.
It amazed me how I could take that sort of thing in my stride now. Growing up it had been a constant fear driven both by real experiences on the way to school and mom’s healthy yet mercilessly blunt education in the realities of being a young woman in a big city. It still stung, of course, but it was a lot easier to sting back. I wasn’t going to shoot him, but I did pass the time by hacking his comm and sending everyone in his contacts list the dick pics he sent to the girl he slept with last night – including his dealer, his boss in the yakuza, his dad and the girlfriend he’d cheated on. Then I drained the comm’s integrated credstick and wired the cash to a women’s shelter.
I was debating whether his friends needed a lesson in speaking up when my tap on the Myo network flagged an incoming call to Kayden Anders’ comm. It was from a private number, but that wasn’t anything unusual in and of itself. It wasn’t even difficult to tease apart the encryption on the other line, especially when I realised I already had access.
Calvert was calling her.
My eyes widened in shock as I reflexively dialled every member of the team at once, patching them all in on my tap as I sent out a message telling them to listen in. At the same time, I was reading the telemetry data of the bus’s GridLink system as it monitored the driver’s progress. There was only one stop between me and my destination, but that was still too slow. I needed to be back now.
Kayden picked up the comm, as I flung a resonance spike at the bus and battered down its firewalls, overriding the GridLink system and shutting out the driver’s controls.
“Hello?”
The bus lurched forwards, the three gang members almost falling off their feet at the sudden acceleration. I was the only one unaffected, my fist wrapped in a death-grip around one of the poles. I’d already knocked out the cameras.
“Mrs Anders, my name is Thomas Calvert. Tell me, are you happy with your life?”
“I don’t take marketing calls.”
She tried to hang up, but I’d already turned my tap into direct control over her commlink, even as I made my way up to the front of the bus, where the driver was frantically hitting the tablet-sized screen that was his window into the screen.
“My people control your commlink, Kayden Anders. They have done for quite some time; I know you made three calls last night, and I know who to. I know you bought a dress for the party you and Max are attending this Saturday. I know you sent a message to your paediatrician because you’re worried that Aster might have a cold.”
“Fuck off. You think you’re the first stalker I’ve dealt with? I’ve got a personal protection detail, moron. They’re already tracking you down to whatever shitbox apartment you’re calling from, then some big angry guys are going to come round and knock some sense into you.”
She’d minimised the call and opened up a panic button app on her comm that was supposed to trigger an automatic IP trace – part of the security features included in her contract with Renraku. I smothered the transmission. The bus had almost reached my stop.
“I understand this must be stressful, Mrs Anders, but there’s really no reason to panic. If my question alarmed you, I apologise. I do not intend any malice. Not towards you, nor, in truth, towards your husband. There is no ill feeling in what I will do to him.”
Kayden let out a short, angry laugh.
“Of course this is about Max. Is this where you threaten me to get to him?”
The three Yakuza were edging closer to the front, angrily shouting at the driver. I drew my submachine gun, levelling it at them even as I slammed on the brakes, throwing them to the floor.
“It is not. Max Anders’ empire will fall with or without your cooperation. It is an inevitability.”
I pulled open the doors, leaping out into the street and hitting the ground running as I drove the bus out of view before relinquishing control back to the driver.
“He’s tougher than you think.”
“The strongest man in the world cannot overcome the will of one of its largest corporations. My employers wish to gut Medhall for parts and it is impossible for one man to stand in their way, no matter how tough. The Anders dynasty will fall – it is an inevitability – but you don’t need to fall with them. You… and your daughter.”
“Aster’s a child! Whatever you’re planning, leave her out of it!”
“She carries her father’s name, Mrs Anders. Both you and she are solely dependent on your husband’s income, which will soon be… significantly reduced, along with his political capital.”
Kayden’s silence lasted until our building was in sight. Only a few moments, but I was already burning with exertion.
“What do you want, Mr Calvert?”
“I have a different perspective from my superiors. I want to exceed, not merely succeed. And I want you and your daughter to be safe and comfortable, far from this city.”
I threw open the door, slowing a little to catch my breath as I crossed through Rachel’s workshop to the stairs leading up to the loft.
“Don’t bullshit me. What do you want in return?”
“I know there is no love lost between yourself and your husband. You have come to realise, as I have, that his relationships are transactional; give and take. Security for control. Once the world realises what he’s done, he will have nothing left to give. His life will be threatened by both his enemies and his former friends, trying to silence him before they can be implicated as well. In such circumstances it would be useful to have an heir with an… agreeable guardian who could lead her company until she came of age.”
He paused, letting the implicating sink in.
“I have no interest in Medhall’s destruction when I could instead gain my company a valuable subsidiary, with Kayden Anders as its CEO.”
Kayden was silent as I climb the stairs, emerging into the living room to find the others already sprawled out across the couches, listening with rapt attention to the audio coming from five different commlinks resting on the coffee table. I sat down, my chest heaving as I caught my breath, right before Kayden continued.
“Who are you? Who’s coming for Max?”
“The Evo Corporation,” he answered, surprising me with his bluntness, “though, of course, we would deny it if you went public.”
Kayden sighed.
“I should have guessed it would be you. Max is an asshole, but if you think I’m going to help you undo all his good work…”
Lisa raised an eyebrow at me. It seemed our client was making a habit of swaying supremacists.
“Ideology is a secondary priority to survival,” Calvert retorted. “I’d argue it’s a secondary priority to comfort as well. You have to make a choice, Kayden Anders, about the life you want for you and your daughter. Evo still has its traditionalist factions; it would be trivial to provide you with a penthouse in a gated community with an overwhelming human majority. A fresh start, where you can live your life on your own terms. Where your daughter can flourish, rather than wilt in her father’s shadow.”
“You’re wrong about me. I may not be a patriot, Mr Evo, but I do love my home. I want this city to flourish, which doesn’t mean handing its most important industry over to Russo-Japanese globalists. Especially not when you’re run by an ork.”
I scowled, as Aisha rolled her eyes and flipped off the air. Brian simply took it in his stride, listening with stony-faced intensity.
“All the more reason to take what I am offering. If Medhall’s assets are acquired by Evo directly, the corporation will be broken down, its constituent parts sold or repurposed. If Medhall becomes a subsidiary, however, our ‘globalist’ approach means that we have little interest in how it is run, provided that it remains profitable and does not bring its parent corporation into disrepute.”
“I’ve seen your ads,” Kayden retorted. “Don’t expect me to believe you’ll give me a free hand.”
“Look up Yamatetsu Naval Technologies. Note the shared humanity of their board, their overwhelmingly Japanese names. Every one of them opposed Yuri Shibanokuji’s ascension to CEO because of his metatype and nationality, but they remain an integral part of our corporation, with the liberty to run their subsidiary as they see fit. If we permit them to manufacture warships and operate our navy, why would we begrudge you a pharmaceutical company?”
“It’s not just the company itself, it’s all our outreach work.”
“If that was an oblique reference to Medhall’s connections to organised crime and its direct oversight of Justin Hammond’s disbanded policlub then you have reached the limits of our tolerance. It’s an unconscionable reputational risk; we can accept a human-dominated subsidiary, but you know as well as I do that Hookwolf is a monster.”
Kayden was silent for a few moments, and Calvert seemed intent to let her stew.
“It’s important to keep people like that under control,” she eventually said, but I doubted they were her words.
“Perhaps, but not as important as keeping the rest of the city healthy and employed. You run your own business; you understand that you never get everything you want in negotiations. All you can do is reach a mutually acceptable compromise, and I would say a few dead cyberpsychos is a very easy concession to make.”
“In a real negotiation I’d be able to change the terms, and I’d have time to think. You’re trying to browbeat me into this.”
There was silence from Calvert’s end of the line, until Kayden broke it.
“If you’re serious about wanting me to run Medhall until Aster comes of age, extend me that courtesy at least.”
“Very well,” Calvert said, after a moment. “I will leave a contact number in your commlink. You may have some time, but I require an answer soon. I cannot delay my deadlines, I can only decide my methods.”
Kayden tried to hang up again, and this time I let her. Simultaneously, I reached through my connection to her comm and switched on the microphone, forwarding the tap to Calvert even as I turned my attention back to meatspace. She didn’t immediately shout for the guards, so that was something.
None of us spoke. We all sat there in stunned silence, each of their faces carrying the same shock that I was sure showed on mine. I knew Calvert would make a move eventually, but I never expected this.
In the end, it was the serpent himself who broke the silence.
“Spider, I presume you heard that.”
“We all did,” I answered. “Routed the call through to the whole team. It’s a risk, isn’t it? Giving her time to decide?”
“She’s already decided,” Calvert counted, dismissively. “She’s just soothing her ego; asserting whatever control she can. That same ego is why she will accept my deal.”
“What’s your play here?” I asked. “Where do we fit into it?”
“My ‘play’ is none of your concern. Business matters are beyond your purview, but I need you to prepare to extract Kayden Anders and her daughter.”
“She can’t dismiss her hustle and skip town?” Brian asked through his cybernetic commlink.
“Much like her data plan, her family’s security contract was bought and paid for by Max Anders. Her security would leave at her request, but they’d report their absence to her husband.”
“She’s at a party this weekend,” Lisa remarked, grinning like the cat that got the cream. “That’s what you’re building up to, right? Security at her condominium would report her movements as well, same with her car, but the party’s in a hotel, which means she’ll just be a guest among many.”
“Precisely. Aster’s minor illness provides an adequate excuse to bring her along; Kayden can rent a room for her and her au pair. She’s done it before.”
Calvert pauses for a moment.
“I leave the details of the extraction up to you. I have already rented a safehouse in which she can be held until I can arrange her extradition overseas. Once Mrs Anders is done asserting her ego, you may contact her directly to secure her cooperation in your scheme. It should go without saying that any harm to the woman or her daughter is unacceptable.”
With that, he hang up, leaving us to stew in our silence for the few moments it took Aisha to speak up.
“What the fuck? We’re divorcing racists now?”
Alec chuckled, leaning over to give Aisha an exaggerated and deliberately patronising pat on the shoulder.
“We’re not helping her, ma louve sadique, we’re trapping her in a different cage,” he drawled, even as Aisha elbowed him in the arm. He cast his eyes over to Lisa, his mouth abruptly widening into a sardonic grin as he shifted forward in his seat, the picture of rapt attention.
“Come on, you smart-mouthed serpent. I know you’ve figured it out, snake to snake, so spill. How’s that viper going to fuck her over?”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Lisa blinked, giving Alec a wry smile in return as her fingers idly brushed over her shamanic necklace.
“He could have sent her anywhere and kept her under his control, but he specifically said he wanted to take her to an Evo compound. My guess is that it won’t be quite as human-dominant as he promised. He’ll surround her with people who were raised by Evo and fully buy the corporate peace and love bullshit.”
She paused, her thumb idly brushing the head of the metal snake.
“What’s important is that in Evo territory, she’d be subject to Evo laws. I’ll bet megacorporate definitions of an ‘unfit parent’ can be pretty fucked up. Aster will attend an Evo school, where she’ll say exactly the wrong things to the teachers and the other kids because she doesn’t know any better, while Kayden will be starting trouble with every neighbour she’s got.”
“He’ll have her custody revoked,” I said, my eyes widening.
“Handing the kid and the company over to whatever guardian Evo wants, and giving them her whole childhood to turn her around to their way of thinking,” Alec remarked, nodding in approval. “It’s a long con, but clever.”
“What he does next doesn’t matter,” Brian said, cutting the conversation short. “Lisa, what’s this party?”
“It’s a coming out party,” she said, before adding “not what you’re thinking,” in response to Aisha’s amazed grin. “There’s a girl called Heather Gilbert who’s recently turned eighteen, so her daddy is throwing a big party to show her off. It’s an old money thing, usually before a debutante ball where you get a whole bunch of these girls together to make their first formal appearance in high society.”
“It sounds a bit… transactional,” Brian remarked.
“Because it is,” Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. “Goes back to when Euro nobility would meet up and sell their daughters for political capital. These days you don’t need to tie deals to marriages, but if your business partner has a son who’s about the right age then what’s the harm in introducing them while you talk shop by the bar?”
I suspected that even the others could pick up on the bitterness in Lisa’s tone, even if they didn’t know where it’d come from. She ran away from the Tír before she was old enough for her own debut, but I was sure her education had been building towards this sort of party and, from what she’d told me, the Tír nobility might have a more medieval view of their purpose.
“So what can we expect?” I asked.
“Two types of guest; the young and their parents,” Lisa elaborated. “The young will be a mix of Heather’s friends from school and the family of her father’s acquaintances. More of the latter than the former, probably, but she’ll still have enough to make her feel like a princess if she doesn’t think too hard about it. Beyond that, miscellaneous escorts, staff, entourages, friends of friends of friends.”
“So,” Brian began, leaning forwards and lacing his fingers together, “we’re looking at hotel security, plus any private hustle the host brings in for the event. The guests will have brought their own people as well, but they can’t bring too many. Probably they’ll wait out the party in the parking lot. If we can get Kayden to rent a room for Aster, her own detail will wait in there with her.”
“Maybe just outside?” Lisa countered. “Leaving Aster and her au pair to play without armed goons hanging over their shoulder.”
“How are we going to handle her?” I interrupted. “The guards are one thing, but a nanny’s not… in the game, I guess?”
“Stunbolt,” Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. “Or a chemical sedative. Maybe tie her up and leave her in the closet. We just need to make it so she can’t raise the alarm the moment we’re gone.”
“We can’t figure out the particulars without knowing who’s going to be where,” I said, already reaching out through the Matrix. I knew from Kayden’s calendar that the party was taking place at the Republica Palace, a twenty-storey space that capped off the top of the Raleigh Building. It was a decent-sized tower just north of the Downtown grid, where its height gave it a commanding view across the bay. The building was laid out like a typical mixed-use tower with commercial floors at the base, then office space, residential and finally the hotel fulfilling the role of the ultra-luxury vanity project at the top of it all.
I couldn’t dive into the hotel’s host without dipping into virtual reality, but I could still access their front-facing webpage, scrolling through the site’s metadata as I built up a portfolio of useful images and room plans. The actual layout of the building wasn’t available, of course, but it was trivial to spin together a messenger sprite and task it with trawling through geotagged social media posts in order to build up a complete picture through the selfies of the high and mighty.
The volume of data was varied enough that I had to spin together a second sprite in order to make sense of the files, allowing me to piece together snapshots of the hotel structure. I only had partial results, but I knew that a lot of the hotel would be a repeating pattern of standard room layouts, with wings mirrored on each side. It was enough to fill in most of the blanks, giving me a skeleton to work with even if I couldn’t fill out the flesh.
It was child’s play to manifest that map in AR, projecting an image of the tower as I understood it in the centre of the room, overlaid with the most useful images I’d found. Aisha proved surprisingly helpful in filling out the likely internal areas of the hotel where there were only scant social media posts from staff members who liked to overshare about where they worked. Some of them didn’t exactly paint a flattering picture of the hotel guests, so I presumed their employer was unaware.
Aisha had never ventured as far as Downtown, but she’d made a living committing burglaries for hire, which meant becoming familiar with the sort of passageways and utility spaces needed to keep the rich comfortable and the mechanisms of their comfort out of sight.
From there, it was just a matter of planning. It was nothing new, nothing we hadn’t done before, except for the sheer scale of it all. We each had pieces of the complete whole, whether it was Aisha’s burgling expertise, Brian’s third-hand gossip on how extractions were supposed to go, Alec’s experience in infiltrating high society or Lisa’s experience living in it.
With me stitching it all together, we were able to collaborate to put together a plan that seemed workable, for all that it relied on a dozen different variables and – of course – the cooperation of the corporate royalty we were supposed to smuggle out of there. I knew enough of how Calvert operated at that point that I had no doubt Kayden would return his call – he wasn’t the sort of person who’d make that sort of move without being absolutely certain of success – but it was still a tense hour and a half before she finally accepted Calvert’s deal.
Of course, I wasn’t willing to just leave it to my assessment of Calvert. Kayden’s phone had stayed on her the whole time, with her microphone and GPS trackers both on. I knew that she was at home, knew that she’d moved from her lounge to her balcony, where she’d presumably spent some time staring out at the city and imagining what it would feel like to know that every Medhall building she could see – every truck and employee and advert scrolling along the side of an airship – might soon answer to her.
Maybe I was being uncharitable. Maybe she was weighing up the enormity of a decision she felt she’d been forced into making for the sake of her daughter, but that meant breaking away from a man she’d presumably had genuine feelings for once. One she might still feel for; enough to stay until now, but not enough to do what she has to.
Either way, she still called.
“Alright, I’ll take your deal,” she began before Calvert had a chance to speak. “What’s the first step?”
“Regime change could be… difficult. My first priority is therefore to get yourself and Aster to a safe location before I escalate the situation any further.”
Kayden laughed. “An extraction? Like a bad action flick?”
“If you like. My people are experienced professionals well used to both covert and overt action.”
“This damned gang war was your business, wasn’t it?” Her tone was accusatory. “The Chosen are monsters, but you’re the one who took off their leash.”
“I did, and your husband sacrificed eight Medhall employees solely to create a narrative, while other employees at other sites piled drugs in the back of unmarked company cars and delivered them directly to Hookwolf’s lieutenants.”
I hadn’t heard of the vans, just the raid. It annoyed me that Calvert was getting intelligence that I wasn’t, but I doubted he’d be willing to let me listen in on the testimony from his pet vampire and whatever other moles he’d found since then.
“Those are the stakes, Mrs Anders. Those are the tools of my trade. I have a team of Shadowrunners on retainer who will be handling your extraction. With your permission, I will connect you to them now.”
Kayden acquiesced with another put-upon sigh, and I gave Lisa a pointed look.
“Good morning, ma’am,” she began. “You can call me Sarah. I’m speaking for the extraction team.”
“Are you the one who hacked my commlink?”
“No ma’am.” Lisa’s tone was serious, but she grinned wildly at me. “I’m a mage by profession. Our current plan is to use your party on Saturday to conduct the exfiltration. It’s the next available window when you won’t be in close proximity to your security detail.”
“And Aster?”
“You’ll bring her with you. Rent a room for her and her au pair. Say that you’re being overprotective over her cold.”
Kayden was silent for a moment – long enough for me to wonder if Lisa had mis-stepped by reminding her of how much we knew about her personal life.
“Her protection detail can’t go any further than one room away from her, and the door between them can’t be locked. It was Max’s idea after the non-human riots started, in case they decided to target us.”
“We can account for that,” Lisa said, seemingly nonplussed. “We’re professionals, ma’am. We’ll get you out safely, but it’s important you understand your role in this. It isn’t too dissimilar to the evacuation drills I’m sure your security detail have talked you through.”
“My guards… they work for Max, but they’re decent people. I don’t want them hurt.”
Lisa paused, giving Brian a glance and waiting for him to nod.
“Understood. Now, if there are no further concerns?”
Of course she had more questions, but Lisa was able to walk her through more of the plan with each answer. There were some answers she couldn’t give, like the address of the suburban home Calvert had secured as a safehouse, or where she was heading next, but gradually she managed to bring her back to the here and now.
From there, it was a matter of careful preparation. I secured a promise from Calvert to bankroll our expenses for this mission, then we set about tallying up the cost of what we needed and how we could possibly get it in such a short span of time.
Lisa went off to secure a rental on a BMW Teufelskatze SUV, while Rachel disappeared into the Market in search of two dozen boxes of Stick-N-Shock ammunition – specialist non-lethal ammunition with an underpowered charge and a needle-like bullet that delivered an electrical current to the target – chambered in the hodgepodge of different calibres our weapons used.
Aisha led Brian and I to Midtown, where she continued to break every assumption I had of her by introducing us to a genuinely classy gnomic clothier who catered to high-end corporate bodyguards. He had the two of us stand stock still while he measured us with an analogue tape measure, then rifled through his stock of unclaimed and cast-off suits before finding a pair that he could tailor to fit us.
They were standard corp-sec wear; utilitarian black suits and shirts made with a ballistic weave that couldn’t hold a candle to actual body armour, but that’d still be able to turn away a knife or light shrapnel. If everything went according to plan we wouldn’t need that scant protection; we were getting the suits for the authentic look.
By the time we returned to the loft, Lisa had already returned and greeted us in Rachel’s workshop, where she sat perched on the hood of a deep red vehicle that looked like a cross between a luxury SUV and an armoured. Rachel had made her way back as well; she’d taken off the steering wheel and much of the dashboard and had half-buried herself in the internals as she rigged up her own drone software in place of the manufacturer’s GridLink system.
I reminded myself to wipe all history of our transaction with the rental company, and Calvert might appreciate it if I clawed back his deposit as well; it was highly likely we would end up dumping the car under a bridge and setting it on fire when we were done.
The next day – the Friday before our mission on Saturday evening – Lisa, Alec and Aisha all departed on a mission to a number of different high-end fashion boutiques, while I dove back into the matrix and Brian and Rachel busied themselves preparing our equipment for the mission.
On the way to her shopping trip, Lisa made another call to Kayden and I listened in as she ran through the plan once again, making sure our target understood her role and whether she knew of any last-minute issues that had arisen. She’d had no difficulty in securing a room for Aster, and I wasted no time in plotting the room’s location and sending it out to the whole team. Our plan had been in flux up to that point, but now it was set in stone. We knew where we had to go, how we had to get there and how we were going to get out once it was done, with secondary and tertiary extraction routes in case we were made by security.
When the others returned late that afternoon, we shared a nearly silent dinner of burgers that Aisha had grabbed on the way back, carrying the Stuffer Shack bag in the same hand as a box of luxury heels. None of us talked much; our minds were all running twenty four hours ahead of our bodies.
We all knew that our last two jobs had gone wrong for both predictable and unpredictable reasons, and that the same could very easily happen on this one. What’s more, we’d have soft cargo with us. Soft, living cargo that could become very difficult in an instant.
I couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard I tried. In the end, I left the city behind and submersed myself in the resonance realms, spending the night wandering beneath the entity’s forest of crystalline neural matter before returning to my body the next morning feeling as refreshed as if I’d slept through the night.
The morning passed in a haze, before it was time for me to retreat back into my room and put on the armoured pantsuit, holstering my submachine gun beneath the jacket. The suit pinched slightly and the armoured fabric felt tough and a little constricting, but when I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and looked at myself in the mirror I saw a severe professional looking back at me. It wasn’t just in the suit; somehow the lines of my face seemed different now, like I’d aged since joining the team.
The look was only enhanced by a completely redundant earpiece, complete with a wire disappearing into the collar of my suit, and a pair of augmented reality sunglasses made from one-way adaptable glass that always appeared dark from the outside even while adjusting to light conditions for the benefit of the wearer.
Rejoining the others in the lounge, I was met with Grue in an identical suit to mine – looking every bit the professional bodyguard – and Imp in her concealing yet figure-hugging chameleon suit, with its leering demonic mask.
Regent was the centrepiece of our pantomime, and he was dressed to match. His pants were made of a shiny silver fabric that glowed under the light, while his blazer had been textured after black marble run through with silver veins. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he’d looped necklaces all around his neck. I’d suggested to him that it was a little daring for a party being thrown by a parent for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday, but he’d just smirked at me like I was missing out on a joke.
Every part of him looked like it had been made to stand out, from his hair and subtly made-up face to the glossy black polish on his shoes. He didn’t grab attention, he outright demanded it. It was refuge in audacity; all the other guests would be dressed at least as extravagantly, except they’d have dedicated stylists for their clothes, hair and make-up.
Tattletale was no less eye-catching, but in a very different way. She was a difficult prospect; none of us believed there was much room for an elven socialite in Max Anders’ social circles, so we were gambling that nobody would begrudge Regent for bringing an escort even if nobody quite knew who he was or who invited him.
The centrepiece of her outfit was a short, backless bodycon dress made of a sleek, almost glossy red synthetic fabric, with a hem that ended just above mid-thigh and a neckline that went all the way down to her waist. Between the halter neck and the straps crossing her back was an integrated shawl of golden chainmail that covered her shoulders and upper arms but left most of her back exposed.
She carried no purse, but she’d accessorised with golden jewellery – bangles, high-heeled sandals, and a trio of clip-on earrings in each ear, one of which held a concealed commlink that could relay sound through vibrations, paired with AR linked contact lenses and a small transparent patch inside her lower lip that functioned as a microphone. Regent was wearing similar jewellery, earrings and all.
“Well, what do you think?” Tattletale asked, tilting her head in a motion that caused her earrings to shift.
“I wish I had half your confidence,” I answered with blunt honesty. She looked incredible. Not because of the outfit – or not just because of the outfit – but because she could stand there with effortless grace and confidence while in impractical heels and showing more skin than not.
“Aisha picked out the outfit,” Regent interjected. “She’s got a good eye for joy girl fashion.”
“Lot of my friends were in the trade.” Imp said, giving her… whatever he was a pointed look. “Whirligig could do better; she turned that shit into an art form.”
She paused, as a conflicted look crossed her face.
“Hope she got out. Prolly wasn’t even there. She was a real courtesan; could work her way into the lives of her clients, not just their beds.”
“Same thing we’re doing,” Regent remarked. “So long as you can get past the front door and act like you’re supposed to be there, nobody’s going to bother to ask.”
“Just got a ping from the target,” I interrupted, my attention flicking across to cyberspace. “She’s on the move, the kid too.”
“Then let’s go,” Grue said, as he fished his own glasses out of the pocket of his suit.
Downstairs, in Bitch’s garage, the SUV sat in immaculate condition, looking completely unchanged from the outside. In the matrix, however, I’d hacked apart the vehicles digital licence plate and RFID tag to create the illusion of a vehicle that was owned, rather than rented, and that had been owned for at least a year. Beyond that, however, the vehicle remained wholly intact. Mine and Bitch’s modifications hadn’t touched the skin, but I knew that both of us could feel the SUV as clearly as if it were a limb; every gauge, readout, control and the frankly excessive array of defensive countermeasures.
Bitch herself was waiting beside her van, freshly repainted in the colours of the Saeder-Krupp subsidiary that held the city’s road maintenance contract, with an appropriate forged ID of its own. Where paint was insufficient, Bitch had sourced and applied electrochromatic strips and chevrons for the sides and rear doors, completing the look with a bar of orange hazard lights mounted on top of the van. It should be enough to let her park wherever she wants, especially with her own hi-vis uniform.
I clambered into the front of the SUV, stamping down the flash of claustrophobia as I hunched myself over to make sure my horns didn’t scrape against the ceiling, all the while thinking that this would have been debilitatingly terrifying just a short while ago. The Teufelskatze wasn’t as cramped as Grue’s Ford Americar; it had been built for security personnel, which meant that the designers had considered that a troll might have to fit into it at some point. Beside me, Grue slipped into the driver’s seat, checking his pistol one last time before tucking it into his suit jacket.
Behind us, through the partition, I watched Imp, Tattletale and Regent clamber into the expansive back of the limo, Imp sitting herself down in the centre of the long couch that ran across the passenger compartment, with Regent and Tattletale on either side of her. Only the latter two buckled in, while Imp simply disappeared as she activated her suit.
The engine sprang into life with a muffled whine as Bitch took control, the host of monitoring systems switching from passive to active use as a heads up display appeared on the windshield in lines of red light. Another mental ping from Bitch raised the shutters of her garage, before we rolled out into the rapidly dwindling daylight, towards a world that was utterly alien to me.