It had been years since I’d last travelled this way through the north end of Brockton Bay. I found it hard to keep track of where we were going, as Rachel expertly manoeuvred us through the traffic with a mix of deft turns and sheer intimidation. I knew our destination, and the rough path of how to get there, but the streets themselves had undergone two years of change while I sat in my apartment.
Still, there were some things that time couldn’t change, some fixtures that remained constant no matter how many waves batter against the shore. The signs might be different, as small businesses and franchises rose and fell, but the streets and the people still looked much the same.
The cars were generally small and cheap, and our van quickly blended in with whole herds of similar vehicles as drivers and tradesmen hustled to-and-fro. The skies overhead were quiet and overcast, at least until the din of the road was drowned out by the roar of a VTOL aircraft flying overhead on its own business; a Boeing Commuter with an Ares IFF, probably heading for their arcology by the docks. After a point, the road traffic became almost too dense to bear and our progress slowed to a gridlocked crawl before Rachel pulled us off the road into a multi-storey car park so we could continue on foot.
At one point, Lord Street had run through the entire city, linking it from one end to the other as it curved around the Bay. The city grew up around it, and with that growth the number of vehicles increased. In the end, its four lanes of traffic simply weren’t enough to contain the population of the city, so the city council had agreed to revitalise the city’s road network.
Spearheaded by its founder, Richard Anders, Medhall had part-funded construction, and thanks to their lobbying the new network had been built according to their designs. It flew over neighbourhoods on elevated roads, but around the city-centre it dropped down closer to the ground level, forming a ring road wall between the corporate brain of the city and its beating heart to the north.
Consequently, Lord Street had turned from a city-wide thoroughfare into a disconnected series of still-important roads. Neighbourhoods found themselves rebalancing around the changed state of the city, with some prospering and others declining, and whole junctions and major intersections were left practically abandoned, or reclaimed by new growth.
One of the redundant junctions that had flourished rather than deteriorated had done so because the lack of vehicle traffic opened up new opportunities for pedestrians. Old roads had been cut off from the network, and their wide thoroughfares became rental space for innumerable stalls as enterprising peddlers took advantage of the increased foot traffic.
In time, it had grown vertically to fill the space, with constructions rising up to fill the gap between flyover junctions and lowered underpasses, creating a three-dimensional bazaar in which just about anything could be bought at a price that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. It was a far cry from the boutique stores that lined the more upper-class areas of the city, but it wasn’t completely lawless either. Hired security guards patrolled the space, and the Marche valued the revenue they received from the site too highly to allow any of the other gangs to take root here.
The city’s Board of Tourism called it the Lord Street Market, but to the residents of the north end it was just ‘the market.’
The moment we hit the first stalls, Rachel disappeared into the crowd. I watched her progress as she elbowed her way through the thronging shoppers, her blatant chrome drawing fearful or disgusted looks from most and admiration from a select few.
The press of people on either side of me was almost suffocating, but I was able to deal with it so long as I focused my attention on the AR features that littered the market – hundreds of signs, price lists, trideo feeds and invasive advirals creeping across the walls, bearing slogans cooked up by some algorithm somewhere.
“Right then,” Lisa said, smacking her palms together gleefully. She was wearing black leggings and a red crop-top, with a black backpack slung over her shoulder. She’d pressed a larger backpack into my hands the moment we’d stepped out of the van, though it had taken me a lot of fiddling to get the straps long enough. “Clothes first.”
“Really?” I asked, already weary.
“Of course! You can walk into a gun shop carrying a bag of clothes, but if you walk into a clothes shop carrying a gun they might get the wrong idea.”
“Fair enough,” I chuckled.
Lisa started making her way through the market with determined certainty, only to stop in her tracks and turn to face me with an awkward expression on her face.
“Um, the usual places I go to don’t have a great selection of troll-sized stuff. I don’t suppose you know anywhere?”
I shrugged. “It’s been years since I was last here. But I can have a look.”
Tattletale caught my meaning immediately, fishing her AR sunglasses out of her purse and slipping them on just in time to see me tug on the resonance, spinning threads together until a dragonfly sat perched on my finger.
“That’s surprisingly beautiful,” she observed.
“It’s how I tracked your phone,” I said, before turning to the sprite. “Find me a stall that sells clothes to fit trolls.”
It took flight, its wings buzzing as it weaved its way through the market.
“Do you have to say your commands,” Lisa asked, “or can you command it silently?”
I paused. “I can do it silently, but sometimes I talk to them regardless. I didn’t have many people to talk too, I guess, so some living resonance was the next best thing.”
“And you’ve done it all without any electronics whatsoever,” Lisa mused.
“Not a single wire in my head,” I smiled. “If you’re looking for the answer to that particular mystery, I’d give up now. Enough people have tried in enough horrible ways that we might as well chalk it up to magic.”
“It could be magic,” Lisa said, pointedly, as she leant against the side of a food truck.
“You’re the last person I’d have expected to say that,” I replied. “You’d think a mage would know better.”
“I’m being serious,” she said, with only a little bit of a pout. “Who says the magic of the sixth world has to be the same as the fourth? Maybe the matrix is some new magic; magic we’re slowly discovering like some long-dead mage discovered how to cast fire from their hands, and like that mage we might have tricked ourselves into thinking we made that fire, rather than calling it from somewhere else. Maybe you’re the shaman of a new astral plane.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so it was lucky that the dragonfly chose that moment to return, landing on my outstretched finger before I told it to guide us to what it had found.
We followed the sprite up two flights of stairs and down one, through a built-over car park and underneath an abandoned overpass that now hosted an Aztlan restaurant. In the end, the shop we were looking for was actually found outside, in an old basketball court surrounded by a chain-link fence. A tarpaulin had been attached to that fence at a comfortable eleven feet off the ground, and some of the fencing had been blocked off with boards and corrugated iron sheets to create a more enclosed atmosphere. There was a sign strung over the entrance, with loud yellow letters spelling out “Clothes (For Trolls)”
That no-nonsense message was repeated in the matrix, along with digital price tags attached to each item of clothing. It was a lot cheaper than the stuff I’d occasionally looked at in matrix stores, but I supposed that was because of the combination of delivery costs, online markup, and the lack of a backhand deal with a factory outlet, or a simple “fell-off-a-truck” discount.
Lisa walked through the racks of clothes like she was exploring a whole new world, her contemplative eyes rapidly flicking between me and various items of clothing. The dynamic here was completely reversed from the outside – there were about a dozen trolls in the makeshift shop, as well as the stall’s owner and one employee, and Lisa was the pint-sized outlier.
Really, I was just glad she seemed largely content to look and let me pick out my own clothes. She just hovered in the background, relying on her presence and neutral gaze to get me to try some more adventurous stuff than I normally would. Only occasionally would she spot something she really liked, and I’d find it pressed into my arms.
“So should I be looking for anything in particular?” I asked, brushing my hand over a rack of sundresses before dismissing them. “I mean, aside from stuff to wear around town?”
“Remember the death glare Brian gave you when you showed up to meet a fixer looking like you’d just rolled out of bed?” Lisa asked.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“I had just rolled out of bed,” I pointed out. “I had to stitch my damn brain back together, metaphorically speaking.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lisa said, ignoring what I had thought was a perfectly valid counterargument. “Probably thirty percent of the job is bullshitting people into thinking you’re better than you are. If you’re meeting a client then you want to put your best face forward. Better than best. Bullshit a little; hide your freshly fried brain behind some mirrorshades and a quick make-up job.”
“Right. So what does a Decker wear to make an impression? I’m not sure I could pull off one of those skintight full-body things they wear in films.”
“I don’t know…” Lisa said, her head tilted in interest as she looked me up and down, “you’re tall enough to make it work. But I see your point. Maybe an electrochromatic jacket?”
I snorted. “Sure, because I like the idea of being a walking billboard.”
“It doesn’t have to be blatant,” she said, as I stepped into the curtained-off changing area at the back of the store. “You try on the street clothes, I’ll have a nose around and see if I can find some good runner gear.”
I looked at myself in the mirror as I changed into a succession of dresses, jeans, tops and a couple of raincoats I’d snagged up from the sale rack. None of them really felt like they fit me, with each drifting a little closer to either Lisa or Brian’s style, but I figured that was the point.
Periodically, Lisa would appear on the other side of the curtain, judge whatever I was wearing, and hand me some random item of more practical clothing. The first item she brought was a pair of black combat boots that were almost comically oversized in her hands, but that fit me perfectly and were comfortable enough to move in. More importantly, they’d stop me from breaking an ankle if I stumbled on something. Plus, I kind of liked the way they felt like they’d been specifically made for kicking faces in.
The pants she handed me were aramid-lined, according to the tag, and with their sleek, black texture I could believe it. They were a lot tighter than I’d have picked myself, but felt flexible enough as I did a few experimental stretches, and they definitely matched the boots.
“They’re a bit tight,” I said through the curtain.
“You have to be bold!” Lisa responded, full of cheer.
“In black?” I countered.
“Black is sexy in the light, and blends into the dark. What’s not to like? Besides, they’re probably stab-proof.”
The black t-shirt she passed me, on the other hand, I absolutely loved. It fit closer than what I’d usually wear, but it wasn’t tight, and the v-neck collar fit easily over my horns. The real appeal of it was the design on the front; a yellow scarab. It wasn’t a perfect match for the one on my mark, but I quickly reached into the resonance and fixed that problem myself.
“Okay, this I like.”
“See?” Lisa replied, smugly. “I know what I’m doing. And, speaking of…”
The last item she handed me was a waist-length brown syn-leather jacket with armoured panels not-so discreetly sewn into the lining, making it clear that the jacket was armoured without actually affecting the shape all that much. More to the point, it sang to me in the matrix and I watched with faint amusement as hidden diodes in the seams lit up with electrochromatic light. I shifted the colours until it matched the yellow of the scarab and tried it on, turning to look at myself in the mirror.
I could hardly recognise myself, but I looked every inch the shadowrunner. I had to admit, Lisa had good taste. I headed straight for the shop’s owner, and walked out of the stall wearing that outfit. In my left hand, I carried my other purchases in bags; several t-shirts, vests and strap tops that had caught my eye, a pair of slacks and a button-up shirt, a couple of pairs of skinny jeans, and even a few dresses.
“Next is the gun, right?” I asked Lisa as we stepped back out into the sun.
“Yep. And I already know just the place.”
Lisa set off through the maze of stalls, moving through the crowds with effortless grace even as I struggled to keep up in spite of my massively longer legs. Paradoxically, now that my old clothes were stuffed in the bottom of my backpack, I seemed to be drawing a lot less attention from the crowd. People would still stare occasionally, but the wary looks I’d been getting had disappeared entirely.
I know I wasn’t exactly dressed like the picture of a healthy citizen, but surely I didn’t look that bad?
I followed Tattletale down three flights of stairs and into an old underpass, where a street had once dropped below ground to pass beneath a much larger road. Said road had apparently been built on top of an old building, as there were still rooms down here that had been freshly exposed by and converted into stalls.
We were in the back alleys of the market, and it showed. There weren’t any food stalls opportunistically hovering up the tourist trade, and the larger stalls catered to a much more specific clientele. Rather than clothes, electronics or groceries, there was a very obviously magical store next to a salvage shop, an unlicenced cyberware clinic of dubious legality and a specialised store selling decker gear.
The shop Lisa led me to was conspicuous for its fortifications, even on a street that assigned a much larger value to security than the practically open-air clothes store. Where the other stores had mesh screens serving as windows, the gun shop had plates of flat steel and a security turret that had been embedded into the concrete ceiling of the road above. The sign over the doorway, daubed in blue paint, proudly identified the shop as “Rick’s Guns and Ammo.”
Lisa pushed open the doors with a practiced nonchalance, looking for all the world like she owned the place. I was a lot more hesitant; I’d never been in a gun shop before, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.
What I got was an interior that placed a similar emphasis on security to the exterior. Two gun turrets on either side of the doorway sat idle, but I could feel the software in their cameras tracking my position. The customers – not that there were any at that moment – stood in a cage, surrounded on all sides by walls of guns, and directly in sight of the ork sitting behind the counter.
He had to be the palest ork I had ever seen, with a bald head and greasy skin, and his tank top and shorts showed off limbs that were obviously cybernetic replacements. He was in the middle of cleaning a pistol, his metal fingers moving with exacting dexterity as he worked at the mechanism with a small wire brush. He was wearing an AR screen over one eye, and I watched through the matrix as it matched up Lisa’s face with a list of prior clients.
“Hey, Rick,” Lisa greeted him.
“Tattletale,” Rick said, a moment after the software gave him the name. “Grue not with you?”
“Nah, but he’ll probably swing by later,” she said. “His rifle got mostly cut in half on the last run.”
Rick sighed, shaking his head. “Is it really too much to ask for you runners to start looking after your damn gear?”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about. More broken guns means more work for you, which means more nuyen.”
“Can’t argue with that,” he shrugged his shoulders, the metal moving completely soundlessly. “So,” he turned to look at me, “you’ve expanded?”
“Yep,” Lisa said, stepping back and reaching up to rest a hand on my shoulder, not-so-subtly pushing me a step forward with all the force of a puppy. “Bug is here to buy her first gun.”
Rick looked me up and down, setting aside his tools and resting his palms on the counter.
“Let me guess,” he said, his tone equal parts weary and sarcastic, “you want the biggest gun I’ve got?”
“No?” I replied, uncertainly. “I’m a decker, so really I’m just looking for something for emergencies.”
“Well damn,” he leant back, his seat creaking. “Finally, something interesting. You wouldn’t believe how many trolls come in here full of piss and vinegar, asking for a Krime Cannon or a fucking modified Ruhrmetal SF-20.”
“So what do you do?” I asked, hesitantly.
“I stock extra, of course. But it’s boring fucking work.”
He pushed his seat back and stood up, walking across to one of the racks of guns. Most of them were oversized weapons that looked like they belonged mounted on vehicles, but the oversized triggers identified them as weapons made specifically for trolls.
“For you, I’m thinking you want something more discreet, but with enough stopping power to count,” he mumbled to himself as he looked over the rack before dismissing the guns there, dropping down to one knee as he opened up the drawers below the shelf.
“Slow and accurate isn’t right, because if it’s an emergency gun then accuracy won’t matter half as much as stopping power, or rate of fire…”
He grunted, apparently satisfied, and walked back over to the counter before setting down a boxy black weapon with a troll-sized grip.
“Here. I modified this one months ago, but I haven’t found a buyer yet. The base model is an Ares Executioner, which is technically supposed to be concealable but that’s not going to happen with the new pistol grip. You also lose the stock, but you’re not going to need it. In your hand, it’ll feel like a machine pistol but hit like a submachine gun, because that’s what it is.”
He racked back the slide, looked into the empty magazine housing set just in front of the trigger, and held the pistol out to me grip-first.
“Go on, see if the grip’s right.”
I grabbed hold of it, looked it over uncertainly, and pointed it around the room a bunch – never at anybody, I knew that much.
“I’ve got to be honest, I really don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“I’ll take you out to a shooting range,” Lisa said. “The important thing is whether it fits in your hand.”
“Oh. Yeah, it fits fine,” I said, handing it back to Rick.
“Great. A little training and it’ll be second nature to you. As for the cost, I can let you have it for an even nine hundred, and only because there aren’t many other people who’d buy it.”
I looked at Tattletale, who shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not cheap, for a gun,” she said, “but it’s the kind of purchase you only need to make once.”
“Alright,” I said, “I’ll take it.”
“Well all right then,” the arms dealer said, “but you’ll be wanting some ammo as well.”
He stepped back from the counter, his metal feet clacking against bare concrete as he opened up another set of cupboards and came back with five black magazine, a carry-case full of ammunition and a holster that looked like it was meant to be strapped to my thigh.
“Two hundred and forty rounds of regular ammunition, plus a free holster. No mess, no fuss. The magazines might be a little small for your hands, but I don’t have any extended ones in stock for this gun. That’s another four hundred and eighty nuyen.”
Great. Coupled with the clothes, that’s almost two thirds of my cut gone in a single shopping trip.
“Sure,” I murmured, digitally transferring the funds and unceremoniously stuffing gun, magazines and ammunition into the backpack. As I ducked to get my head through the doorway, I let out a long sigh.
“Well, that’s me cleaned out.”
“Don’t worry,” Lisa said, patting my elbow in commiseration. “I’m sure Faultline is lining up some work for us. She wouldn’t want us looking for another fixer so soon after signing on with her.”
“Here’s hoping,” I muttered.