“I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered out, but Lisa didn’t buy it for a second.
“Sure you don’t,” she drawled, her eyes narrowing. “Listen, Taylor, I think you’re pretty great and the more you come out of your shell the more interested I am in what’s hatching, but I know for a fact you aren’t a people person. And yet that’s the second time you’ve known exactly what to say and the exact moment to say it.”
“The second time?” I asked, even as my mind was still flooded with panic.
“In the van. You knew just where to hit to break Alec’s façade. First time I’ve seen a genuine reaction from him.”
“I… I just got lucky?”
“No, you didn’t,” Lisa shook her head. “I’ve gotta say, it feels like you’re stepping on my patch,” she smiled, though there wasn’t much warmth in it. “Kinda hurts.”
I sighed, looking away from her as I realised there wasn’t a way out of this.
“It’d hurt more if you knew.”
Lisa looked momentarily confused, before it was suppressed beneath curiosity. I knew I’d said the exact wrong thing to get her to drop this, but it was the only thing I could think to say.
“Well, now I’m intrigued. I figured it was just a pathological need for control resulting in a whole bunch of doxxing, but then you’d be angry you got caught, not resigned. And you know I’m not going to stop digging. That’s my pathological need, after all.”
“No matter what you find?”
“Knowledge is its own reward,” she grinned. “Especially when it can be used.”
I sighed. “And that’s the problem.” I wanted to think of these people as my friends, but I just couldn’t help pulling on their secrets like marionette strings. Secrets I never should have learned.
“I know you’re from Tír Tairngire,” I tugged on the string, and Lisa’s grin fell slack. “I know more, about you and the others. I didn’t go looking for that knowledge, but I found it all the same.”
“What do you mean you didn’t go looking?” Tattletale almost hissed the words, an angry look in her eyes. “Mean to say my past just, what, fell into your lap? My trauma roll by you at a Kaitenzushi restaurant?”
I didn’t say anything for a few moments, as she just stared at me. I sat down on the table, my arms resting on my legs and my back hunched as I looked at the floor.
“Remember what you said in the Market,” I began, my voice muted, “about how the matrix might well be a new Astral plane? Something big we’re only just scratching the surface of? I brushed you off at the time, but I think you’re more right than you realise.”
“You called it a vision quest,” Lisa said, her eyes widening. “When you dropped off the grid.”
I couldn’t help the half-laugh that came out at her unintentional pun.
“The matrix is a colony,” I explained. “The grids hold it into a neatly ordered shape, walled in and packaged for the convenience of the colonisers, but it’s built on a foundation of foreign land and surrounded by untamed wilderness. The resonance. It’s not magic, I know that much. It’s pure data, without the binary limits of ones and zeroes.”
I sighed, finally looking up and meeting Tattletale’s gaze. The anger was still there in her eyes, but it was muted now.
“It’s alive. Not in any way I understand, but it’s undeniable. To leave the matrix, get off the grid, I had to cross what Faultline’s Technomancer called the Event Horizon. It bombarded me with data; videos and chatlogs aimed right at my damn soul.”
“What did you see?” Lisa asked, her voice quiet.
“Everything. Snapshots of everything you and the others went through, juxtaposed with my own life. From the day you fled the Tír” – Some of the tension seemed to leave Lisa’s shoulders – “to the day I finally left my apartment to go meet with you in person.”
“So what was the message? What was it trying to tell you?”
“Isn’t it obvious? That you’d all taken worse hits than me and come back punching, while I went through much less and broke down. When you persuaded me to come to the meeting, that was maybe the third or fourth time I’d left my apartment in two years.”
“Huh,” Lisa leant back against the counter, more intrigued than mad now. “I gave ‘shut-in’ the highest odds, but that’s a lot longer than I was expecting. Kind of makes me envious how you can stay indoors for that long and still look like you could pick me up with one hand.”
I chuckled, wryly. “I guess there has to be some perks, right? Consider it a trade-off for immortality. The point is, I know more than I should – more than I wanted to know – but when the choice is either giving up on the job or using that knowledge to bring Rachel on board… that’s not a choice at all.”
“It’s a dangerous road to go down,” Lisa said, with something close to a wistful expression on her face, “but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t do the same with access to the same information. Whatever that information was,” she concluded, with a pointed look at me, but I didn’t budge.
Lisa grinned. “I had to try. Look, I don’t pretend to understand what you went through, but I do understand magic. I understand mentor spirits.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I shook my head. “There was no… no entity I could point to and say they were responsible. I don’t think there was any conscious thought behind it at all; it was just a feature of the landscape.”
“Still,” Lisa perched herself on the table next to me, “I think right now you need a shamanic perspective.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, more than a little confused.
“Alec’s a theurge,” Lisa said. “He learned his magic in an academic environment. A school, a coven, a cult, whatever.” I tried not to let anything show on my face. “The point is, that education influences how he views magic. Shamans aren’t educated in schools. We stumble across our magic one way or another, as our mentor spirits find us. Choose us.”
She smiled, her hand drifting unconsciously to the pendant hanging from her neck – the silver snake with tiny green gems for eyes. The same bottle green as her own, I realised suddenly.
“For theurges, magic is a thing that can be categorised and studied, but shamans know for a fact that there are powers out there that are beyond our understanding; things in the world that cannot be explained. It’s why I believe you when you tell me about how the Matrix is just a swimming pool in a very large ocean, even though it goes against everything I thought I knew.”
“Lisa… where are you going with this?”
She flipped the pendant around in her hands, staring into the eyes of the serpent.
“I don’t know why Snake reached out to me, don’t know what she saw in me, but I do know that when something so powerful chooses to take an interest in something so small, you can’t just turn it away.”
Her gaze shifted, looking up into my eyes as she let the pendant fall.
“You’ve got a gift, Taylor. Whatever the cause – whatever it is, really – you can’t just ignore it like it never happened. I might not like that you know so much about my secrets, and the others would probably think the same, but that doesn’t matter. Use this, Taylor. Explore the resonance and figure out a way to make it yours, because you already belong to it.”
I sat silently for a while, contemplating what she said.
“So I should keep going?” I asked, hesitantly.
“Might as well ask me if you should keep breathing,” Lisa replied, her tone serious. “Now go on, get some sleep. Got a big day tomorrow; wouldn’t want to mess up your first time in the driver’s seat.”
She smiled, stood up and snatched a spare glass on her way to the fridge, where she poured herself some filtered water before making her way back to her room. For my part, I was frozen; still thinking over her last words.
My first time in the driver’s seat…
I was terrified, and visions of the thousand different ways I could fuck it up and get Rachel killed played on a loop through my mind until I fell asleep, dreaming of a constellation of flickering stars, high above my head.
The next evening, as the sun had just fallen beneath the top of the skyline, we set out from the loft in Bitch’s van, but with Grue in the driver’s seat. I kept glancing over at Rachel sitting opposite me, dressed in an outfit that Tattletale had picked out for her from thrift stores and milsurp shops in the market.
The result was a look that was a little rattier than her usual fare, but with a few cosmetic additions that made it tatty in the right ways. Her pants were downright ancient US Army issue, no doubt ordered for some draftee in the Ghost Dance War before being sold on to whoever would have them by some logistics officer in the anarchy that came before the treaty of Denver. She’d paired them with a set of steel-toed boots that Bitch already owned, and that were hard wearing more to deal with the wear from her cybernetic legs than anything else.
Above the waist, her mostly-fleshy torso was covered by a black ballistic vest that was practically crying out for some red spray paint to match the Chosen’s colours, but when Lisa tried to add some Rachel countered that turning up already dressed like a member of the gang would just have them single her out for a worse initiation.
Nobody likes copycats and tryhards, after all.
The vest also had the intentional side effect of leaving her arms bare, and the gunmetal grey cybernetics combined with her natural (I assumed) height to give her the perfect air of intimidation that would scare off the weaker prospects and impress the actual gang members.
We dropped Rachel off at the nearest metro station, leaving her to get as close to the warehouse as she could before walking the rest of the way, just to make sure nobody saw their new metaphobe recruit getting out of a van with an ork, a troll and an elf – like the punchline to an off-colour joke.
The moment I pulled the door shut, I took a moment to try and get rid of the terrified expression on my face before turning to Tattletale, who was strapped into one of the seats in the back and dressed in her full shaman gear, trenchcoat and all. She flashed me a reassuring smile, even as her hands worried at the simsense wreath she was holding.
“You’ll be fine,” she said, as she set the wreath on top of her head. I nodded as decisively as I could, trying to reassure her, before buckling myself into one of the seats – using a belt Bitch had put in especially for me.
“Okay, we’re going silent now,” I said to Grue. He was dressed to the nines with a full-face helmet and extensive body armour, an assault rifle resting on the seat next to him. Insurance, in case everything went wrong. Regent was up front next to him, but he hadn’t brought along any extra gear. Mages don’t need to, I supposed.
“Alright,” he acknowledged, keeping his eyes on the road. “I’ll keep the van parked with the engine running, ready for exfil.”
“Okay…” I murmured contemplatively to myself as I began tugging on datastreams, linking the simsense wreath into Rachel’s Personal Area Network, using my own brain as the go-between. Once the connection was stable, I turned my focus away from the matrix for a brief moment, looking Lisa in the eye.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said, before letting the resonance take me.
Rachel’s PAN was a tightly-woven array of connections ordered in neatly-laid paths that nevertheless cut right through the standard routes the software was meant to take, as Rachel had tinkered on her digital consciousness over the years. Control software for her cybernetics and drones were spread out around me, all matched by a digital simulacrum of the organic parts of her brain – a vital part of the interface that allowed meat to talk to metal, and metal to understand meat.
A moment later, Tattletale’s simsense rig appeared among the network, in the space I’d made for it. Right now it was blank, which meant Tattletale was stuck looking at an error screen.
I found the connections for Bitch’s optical and audio input and drew them back from the software, feeding them into my persona so that I could see what she saw, hear what she heard. She’d got off the metro and was walking through the streets of expansive warehouses that spread out from the Trainyard, with groups of overall-wearing workers stepping out into the road in order to get out of her way, even if it meant contending with the steady stream of trucks and autonomous carriers ferrying slab-sided shipping containers from the trains to the warehouses, or the warehouses to the Docks.
“Hey, Bug?” I picked up Tattletale’s voice appearing in the readings from the simsense rig. “I’m just getting an error message here.”
“I’m adapting Bitch’s feed for the software,” I replied. “A few seconds more, then we’re golden.”
“I hate these things…” Tattletale murmured, as I hooked up the audio and optical feeds and overlayed them with enough of Bitch’s brainwaves for the data to be understood.
“How come?” I asked. I’d never actually used a simsense rig myself; there was never any point when it just did through technology what I could do naturally.
“I get a serious case of the uncanny valley every time I use VR. Probably similar to how you felt in the Faraday cage at the Palanquin; it doesn’t matter how well it mirrors emotions and experiences when it’s missing that sixth sense, and simsense can’t process magic. So I stick to screens.”
“I can sympathise,” I replied. The cold-sim connection sounded ghastly when compared to using the resonance. “Okay, linking in Bitch’s feed in three… two…”
“I see it,” Tattletale said, as Bitch hurried across the street. There were a few others with her now who looked like they might be heading the same way – dressed in similarly practical clothes in the right kind of colours. A flashy human kid in obviously new combat gear sidled up to Bitch with a cocky grin on his face and some kind of line no doubt poised on his tongue only to be shoved almost into the path of an oncoming truck – something the more serious prospects found hilarious.
“Can she hear me?” Tattletale asked.
“Not yet,” I said, even as I overlayed a message on Bitch’s optics.
“Okay,” I said, to both Bitch and Tattletale. “Connection is stable, audio is good.”
Bitch was making her way towards an expansive warehouse at the end of the street, its faded paint and rusted chain-link fence out of place amongst the more active buildings around it. Even more out of place were the Chosen waiting by the entrance, dressed in body armour that was at least on par with high-end corporate security and carrying well-maintained firearms of various types. They watched over Bitch and the other prospects – now dozens strong – as they filed through the gate and into the lot itself.
“Have a look around,” Tattletale said to Bitch. “Keep an eye out for guards, VIPs, even just members of the gang on a smoke break.”
Bitch’s eyes darted around with quick, tactical movements aimed at covering as much of the area as she could. As she did, I took screenshots to preserve the images and spread them out in front of me, to get as complete a picture as possible.
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There was another Chosen guard on the roof, lying prone in front of a long—barrelled machine gun. On the ground, a few people were filing past the mass of prospects. They were full members of the gang, judging by their patches and etched cyberware, and from the noise that was creeping out of the warehouse it was clear there were a lot more inside. Music was bleeding out of the building; a pounding electronic dissonance that was almost offensive to my hearing.
“This is as much a party as a recruitment drive,” Tattletale observed. “Which means the prospects are entertainment as well as recruits.”
“Bitch,” I began, her chosen Runner handle still a little awkward on my tongue, “do you have any idea what to expect?”
I knew Lisa had to be curious, but she stayed silent and I was grateful for that. Clearly she’d remembered when I said to be as succinct as possible, for Rachel’s sake.
Ahead of her, a door on the side of the warehouse rolled open. It was easily twice Bitch’s height and wide enough to let through two trucks at once, but it was still miniscule on the enormous side of the warehouse. Red light spilled out into the lot as it opened, accompanied by shouts and music mingling into one discordant din.
The prospects were ushered inside, bunched up shoulder to shoulder as the guards began pushing the human mass forwards, leaving them no other option. Inside, walls had been hastily erected from scrap metal, forming an enclosure that turned into a pen as the door rolled back shut behind the last straggler. It was hard to make out past the crowd – many of whom were taller than Bitch and blocked her view as she looked around the space – but I thought there could be four dozen people in the group in total.
Bitch ignored the hushed conversations and loud boasts of the people around her, focusing solely on studying her environment with her arms crossed over her vest. It meant that Tattletale and I had a clear view when a new face appeared on top of the makeshift wall.
The Chosen lieutenant was a stern-looking woman with scar tissue coating her remaining organic tissue. Her tattered black jeans were full of holes, revealing glimpses of cybernetics, and the sports bra she wore made sure everyone could see the metal laced through the unhealthily pale skin of her upper body. Makeshift armour of spiked metal was bolted to her cybernetic arms, while her shaven head was encased in a cage-like helmet.
She slammed a fist down on the top of the wall, and the noise of metal on metal was enough to silence the crowd of prospects.
“Listen up!” she shouted not through her mouth, but through a speaker built into her throat. Magnifying Bitch’s feed, I could see a long scar stretching out from either side of the cybernetic; someone had cut her throat. Seeing her speak clearly with her teeth gritted in a feral grin was more than a little disconcerting, which I figured had to be the point.
“They call me Cricket!” she continued. “I call you fresh meat, until you show me you’re worth any more! Every one of you has been picked because you’re thinking the right ways, because you want to take action, but in here that doesn’t mean shit!”
“Hold on,” I interrupted, one eye on the matrix. “She’s a Decker. Not much of one, but she has an agent running an identity check.”
Bitch didn’t say anything; this was my area, and she recognised that. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to have that kind of absolute faith in someone else’s abilities, but what I could do was focus on masking the outside connection to Bitch’s system. She didn’t have a SIN, so it didn’t take much to leave the Agent Cricket was using with nothing to find. The programme itself was surprisingly complex, but its direction left a lot to be desired.
Still, I could clearly see it flagging up identities from a lot of the other people in the group, and I filed them all away in a catalogue for safekeeping. About thirty percent of the group were SINless like Bitch, forty-five percent had national SINs, while the remaining quarter had criminal SINs – which meant they had been SINless when they were arrested and were assigned an ID that did nothing but blare out their criminal status to the world long after their sentence ended.
“Normally training lasts a week!” Cricket continued, her voice grating and artificial. “A whole week to sort the wheat from the chaff, drop off the dead weight until only the best are left! But these aren’t normal times! We’re in fucking war measures now, and that means a recruiting drive!”
She leant forwards, a grin spreading across her scarred face as she rested her cybernetic hands on the wall.
“Got a few questions ‘fore we get into the details, though. Raise your hand if the answer’s yes. Question number one; got any ex-military in the group? Corp or country, it’s all the fucking same.”
About seven or eight people put their hands up, which was about what I was expecting. All of them SINners, of course, though many probably didn’t start out that way. For a lot of people, a few years in uniform was their ticket out of SINless poverty, even if it meant being shipped off to fight in this year’s Desert Wars.
“Alright, that’s a good start. If you were a grunt, that’s good. If you had a technical job, that’s even fucking better. In fact, question number two; we got any mechanics?”
“Put your hand up,” Tattletale said, and Bitch complied, along with three or four others – one of them an ex-soldier.
“Fuckin’ excellent,” Cricket muttered, though her voice box still amplified her words enough that I could hear them clearly. “Don’t care how well you lot do in the trials, you come see me after. Always need more tech-heads. ‘Course, if you lied about that ‘cos you think it’ll make it easier, we’ll find out and flay you. We take integrity very seriously.”
One of the prospects who’d put her hand up – a skinny girl with clean clothes – shrank at that, but it wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it.
“Lastly, any of you been in a gang before? A real fuckin’ gang, not just a group of morons sitting on a street corner.”
“Same again,” Tattletale said, and Bitch’s hand went up. The numbers here were a lot larger; twenty of the crowd had done this sort of thing before, most of them either SINless or ex-cons.
“Got a rule for you people,” Cricket said. “Bring your skills from your last crew, but leave your colours at the door. You make it through this, you’re Chosen. That’s all that matters.”
She abruptly turned, looking back behind her and nodding. Moments later, a segment of the pen swung back to reveal a long corridor with a mesh ceiling and rusted spikes jutting irregularly out of the walls.
“Glory’s waiting for you!” Cricket shouted with a grin, as the music increased in volume and the noise of the distant crowd turned rabid. “All you have to do is take it! Now get the fuck in there and prove your worth!”
Once again, the prospects were corralled forwards by guards, but there were more than a few who walked in ahead of the group, either eager or just resigned to their fate. The corridor was cramped, with the ceiling deliberately set just a little too low. More to the point, there were walkways to either side of it that were absolutely teeming with Chosen, shouting down at the prospects as datastreams carried bets through the air.
As Rachel neared the end of the tunnel, the corrugated steel walls gave way to cages full of wild and rabid hounds that snapped at the passing prospects, almost a third of them frothing at the mouth.
“Why are there dogs here?” I asked, unnerved by the sight.
“It’s psychological warfare,” Tattletale elaborated to me, leaving Bitch off the channel. “Supposed to freak out the prospects, but it won’t work on ours.”
Sure enough, Bitch didn’t spare the dogs so much as a glance. She only had eyes for the doors at the end of the short passage, which were pulled open by chains as the first prospects reached them.
Bitch strode out into the arena with her head held high, immediately scanning her surroundings for possible threats. The pit was hexagonal in shape with rolls of razor wire lashed to the salvaged metal walls, while the floor was simply the bare concrete of the warehouse, chipped and stained by heavy use.
A flimsy railing of steel pipes was all that kept the crowd at bay as they pressed forwards, hurling abuse down on the prospects with predatory glints in their eyes and optics. Almost all of them had at least one visible cybernetic modification, and every single one of them was armed in one way or another. In the distance, removed from the crowd on a high platform, a DJ manipulated the pounding music, bringing it up to a crescendo as the gate swung shut behind the group, the guards still on the other side.
“Prospects!” a voice shouted, booming through the speakers hung throughout the cavernous warehouse. “You’re here because you think you have what it takes! You’re here because you want to take a stand against the trogs, halfers and keebs that think they own this city! You’re here” – the voice paused – “because you want to be us!”
As Bitch looked around, I was able to make out the speaker – standing in amongst the crowd, with a microphone held in his hand. He was shirtless, with a tiger part tattooed, part etched on his chest where metal and flesh met. His arms were entirely cybernetic, and his fingers were tipped with razor sharp claws. There was a metal necklace around his neck, and I fought down a vestigial feeling of nausea as I saw the pointed ears threaded through the chain, saw just how large they were relative to his own.
“Unfortunately for you,” he shouted, raising his left arm in a sweeping gesture that took in the whole crowd, “we only take the best! And today, that means only the meanest, toughest sons of bitches are in with a shot! There’s forty seven of you miserable fuckers, and we’ve only taking twenty!”
“That’s a higher margin than I was expecting,” Tattletale said, even as Bitch stopped looking at the stands and started eyeing up the competition. “Guess they’re serious about needing numbers more than quality.”
“So you’re gonna fight!” the announcer reached out with a clawed hand to point at the crowd, the polished metal glinting in the red strobe lights. “You’re gonna bleed! You’re gonna suffer, and maybe you’ll die! But the survivors?! Well, they can hold their heads high and call themselves Chosen!”
The crowd went rabid, while around Bitch people started edging away from each other, the weaker targets moving to the side of the arena but prevented from actually reaching the wall by the razor wire.
“Stay close to the middle,” Tattletale said. “Unless you think it’ll hurt you in the fight.”
“Are you ready?!”
There was a clear divide in the fighters between those who were, and those who very much weren’t. The former were clenching their fists, rolling their shoulders and trying to keep as much of the crowd in view as possible. The latter seemed almost lost, their eyes darting around as the noise and the crowd and the threat of violence flooded their system with panic.
“Fight!” the announcer shouted, his voice reverberating throughout the warehouse, and all hell broke loose.
Bitch wasn’t the first to move, but she wasn’t far off. She swung her fist into the face of a bare-chested man who’d mistaken her for a weaker target – a quick jab that broke his nose and had his hands reflexively reaching up to protect his face, like a boxer.
It meant that when Bitch drove a metal knee into his groin he bent double, putting him in just the right position to take the elbow she drove into his back.
As he fell, Bitch staggered sideways, her vision flickering momentarily, as she caught a mean right hook from another steroid junkie. Rather than retaliate, however, she backpedalled just enough to put the crowd between him and her and turned her attention to a shaven-headed woman who’d pulled a switchblade out of her jacket.
She tried to drive the knife into Bitch’s gut, but Rachel caught the stab on her forearm and grabbed the woman’s wrist with her other hand, pulling her in close before driving her foot into her target’s knee, bending her leg backwards with a snap that was audible even over the chaos.
Tattletale and I were silent observers as Bitch struggled through the melee, ducking and weaving around the harder targets while picking off the weaker ones. I could see her strategy, though I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. There were twenty places, which meant twenty seven people had to be knocked out of the fight before things ended. Why waste time fighting the tougher targets when she could take out three times as many weaker ones in the same amount of time?
It was clear the other fighters were starting to realise that as well. Whether by muscle, skill or cyberware the stronger fighters gradually stopped fighting each other in favour of teaming up on the weaker candidates. It wasn’t a complete shift in the dynamic; paranoia ran rampant among the crowd, and even the strongest fighters weren’t comfortable leaving openings at their back. More to the point, there wasn’t a clear consensus on who, exactly, counted as ‘weaker.’
“You need to impress,” Tattletale said as Bitch broke the arm of a wiry teen who had been trying to crawl away from her after she floored him with a punch to the stomach. “Go for the redhead with the mohawk. He’s isolated enough that the others won’t retaliate.”
He tensed up as Bitch approached him with single-minded focus, figuring out her intention just in time to duck away from a punch aimed right at his head. He retaliated with quick jabs that caught Bitch in the jaw, the force of the blow sending her staggering back into another fighter.
The whole time, she didn’t do so much as make a sound. I could see the impact of each blow, the movement of each muscle and piston in her body through her inbuilt biomonitor, but no matter how much pain it said she was in she only gritted her teeth and dove back in.
She redoubled her efforts, throwing herself right back into the melee in ways that the man just couldn’t match. His organic body simply couldn’t keep pace with her cybernetic enhancements, and his movements gradually began to slow. When Bitch hit him in the head, his jabs became less accurate as his vision blurred and he became concussed. Rachel’s optics, on the other hand, were bolted directly to the subdermal armour coating on her skull and no amount of head trauma would make their software less accurate.
When he finally went down, his eyes had swollen up, his nose had been broken and there were visible dents in his chest from where ribs had broken. Eventually, it all became too much and he sunk to his knees before Bitch delivered a punch to his face that knocked him flat on his back, joining the other failed prospects who were lying wounded or possibly dead on the floor.
It was a horrible scene, with twitching bodies clutching obviously broken bones as the victors stood over them with more than a few wounds of their own. But then it was over, the announcer declaring victory in a voice that was loud enough to cut through the fog of battle.
“We have our victors! Tried and tested in battle! A little bruised, sure, but we’ll patch you up! Then you can join the party! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”
He smiled, leaning against the railing and looking down into a pit even as the blooded Chosen in the audience celebrated their wins or commiserated their losses. Idly, I found myself wondering how many of them had bet on Bitch, and what her odds were.
“As for the rest of you,” the announcer continued, now taking in the broken bodies littering the floor of the pit. “You came here full of piss and vinegar, but that’s no substitute for skill. If you’re still alive down there, we’re gonna scrape you off the floor and drop you off a couple miles away. From there, stay the fuck away from our business.”
“It’s not fuckin’ fair!” a voice growled out from the pit, and Bitch turned to see the man she’d floored propping himself up on his elbows, his face twisted into an angry rictus that was only made more grotesque by the bruising and swelling.
“Bitch’s chromed to the fucking gills! It wasn’t a fair fight!” he snarled, angrily, before the whole room fell silent as someone shouted from the crowd, their voice grating and mechanical.
“Not fair!?”
The crowd parted, hardened gang members casting furtive glances behind them before parting like the red sea before an absolute giant – as tall as any troll – who leapt over the railing of the pit and landed with a booming metal thud on the concrete floor below.
At first I mistook him for a drone, with the amount of metal he was carrying. It seemed like everything below his neck was cybernetic, with a body that could almost be mistaken for power armour if it weren’t for the misshapen proportions that gave away the lack of any flesh beneath. The pale flesh of his face merged imperfectly with the metal pistons and synthetic muscles of his neck, and I caught a glimpse of thick wires stretched down from the base of his skull, partially hidden from view beneath matted blonde hair.
He walked through the prospects with the same callous disregard for where he was putting his feet he’d shown in the crowd, like he simply expected the world to up and move before him. Every step was accompanied by whirring pistons and the thud of metal on concrete, except where it was interrupted by the crack of bone and flesh as he simply stepped over and on those failed prospects who were too insensate to get out of the way.
I felt sick at the sight, but my feelings were nothing compared to the revulsion I could see emanating from Tattletale, captured in the logs of the simsense wreath.
“That’s… that’s impossible,” I heard her mutter. “Nobody can lose that much flesh and survive. His essence has to be hanging on by a thread.”
The monster bent down and picked up Bitch’s opponent by his neck, lifting him in the air with a single hand. This close, I could see designs etched into the plates of his armoured body; all of them scenes of bloody battles between human cyborgs and bestial parodies of metahumanity. His pauldrons angled back and up to create the impression of snarling wolf’s heads, and he looked at his unaugmented prey with cold, dead optics.
“There’s no such thing as a fair fight,” he drawled out the words, mockingly. “Would it be fair if she didn’t have chrome?” he asked, his voice quieter, lower, but still clearly audible. “You’re pushing two metres tall, she’s one-seventy-five. You’re a man, she’s not. You’re not asking for a fair fight, you’re asking for an easy win.”
The monster clamped down on the man’s neck, human hands flying up to claw ineffectively against immovable metal.
“And what if she was a troll!?” he shouted, more to the crowd than to the man he was strangling. “What if she was two and a half metres tall and could break your fucking skull with a single punch!? Who could crush your throat with a flick of her fingertips!?”
As if to demonstrate, he clamped his own hand together and snapped the man’s neck in an instant, blood dripping out from between his fingers before he let the limp body drop to the floor.
“Make no mistake!” he shouted, turning to take in all the people around him. “Our enemies are stronger than us! They’re faster than us! They can use powers we can’t even understand!”
He paused, looking down at Bitch even as she stood defiantly in front of him, meeting his gaze without even a hint of fear visible in the lenses of her cyberneticeyes.
“This wasn’t about finding the strong,” he said. “It was about finding survivors! People who’re prepared to do whatever it takes to live! To win!”
He looked away from Bitch, then, instead paying attention to some of the other winners, the ones who were eyeing his cyberware with nerves clear on their face.
“They call this age the Sixth World!” he shouted to the crowd. “They say there was a time before this, before human civilisation! A Fourth World! They say that dragons ruled that world, that orks and trolls, dwarves and elves were their soldiers! I don’t know if what they say is true, but I do know that they came back to take control of this world! Our world!”
He crossed his arms, standing defiantly in the centre of the ring like some ancient warrior.
“We’re at war! Our enemies have all the tricks of their old world! They have magic, they have muscle and horns!”
He raised a fist into the air, as the Chosen around the pit began cheering him on.
“But humanity has not been idle, waiting for our old masters to return! We have ten thousand years of history, ten thousand years of technology! What is a troll’s strength to armour-piercing ammunition!? What is a mage to a pipe bomb!? What is flesh to steel!?”
His other fist rose to join the first, as the crowd around the pit rose to a crescendo of cheers. The surviving prospects began to join in as well, taken up by the mood, and Bitch cheered right along with them after an instruction from Tattletale.
“Your enemies are the ork, the troll, the elf, the dwarf! They’re Yakuza killers, mafia enforcers, corporate soldiers, badges who think they’re knights! Why should your standards be any lower than theirs?! If you are to represent the true human warrior, you have to have higher standards! You have to be the best!”
He looked down from the crowd, addressing the prospects directly now.
“I am Hookwolf! I will teach you to transcend your humanity, to take our species to a higher level! You are my Chosen! Now go! Join your brothers and sisters in arms!”
I could see in their faces how he’d enraptured them, how he’d brought them here thinking they were the top of the pile, only to give them a new goal, a new purpose in their lacklustre lives. To become monsters. In mind, body, and maybe soul.