As I stepped out of the apartment building for the sixth time in the last few weeks, and the seventh or eighth time in the last two years, I was almost run down by an ork on a scooter, with an insulated box on the back of the bike displaying Stuffer Shack's logo. Instead, the teenage driver just about managed to swerve around me, skidding through a puddle leftover from the rain and spraying my legs with water.
But I was wearing the aramid-lined pants Lisa had persuaded me to buy, so the water just ran down their surface without penetrating the material and I got to see the guy's eyes widen in shock as he looked up and up and up at who he'd just drenched, so I actually ended up feeling more self-confident than annoyed.
The metro station was two blocks from my apartment, the line running down the length of the docks before joining a spiderweb of routes that stretched throughout the North End. It was old infrastructure, built in the twenties to meet the needs of Brockton Bay's growing population and the sudden, phoenix-like resurrection of the docks as the UCAS found itself cut off from all its remaining West Coast ports. If you didn’t want to pay a premium on each container you trucked or trained through the disparate Native American Nations, the only option was to go East rather than West.
The trouble was that the metro line – at least those lines North of the middle of the city, where Brockton Bay was squeezed against the coast into an hourglass shape by Captain's Hill – had largely gone unnoticed by successive decades of infrastructure programs, receiving only token support from Richard Anders' remodelling of the city's transport networks.
So the trains were old, and the lines older still, but they worked and were a lot faster than the often gridlocked streets below, provided you didn’t mind the much more pedestrian gridlock that filled their packed carriages.
I very much did mind, but I didn’t have a driver’s license and I doubted I’d ever be able to learn without having some kind of breakdown. So it was the metro for me.
I’d never had much reason to pay close attention to the time of day over the past few years, so I was momentarily surprised when I found the carriage packed full of dockworkers in uniformly drab blue-grey overalls, on the first stop of a long commute back from the docks.
It meant that the one comfort of the last few journeys – that I stood head and shoulders over everyone else, so could look over the press of people – no longer applied. The Dockworkers still had a larger proportion of orks and trolls than any other industry in the city, and so the carriage suddenly felt incredibly claustrophobic. It didn’t help that the whole crowd felt achingly familiar.
I edged to one side as best I could, leaning down once I was up against the wall to look out of the window rather than back at the packed carriage full of such an achingly familiar crowd. Instead, I focused on the buildings drifting past the window.
The line ran over the city’s streets, in some places hugging the side of wide thoroughfares or passing over elevated overpasses. At other points it turned off, passing over low rooftops before turning to follow the length of a much narrower street – one it covered like an awning. The buildings here had grown up and out, and in places had extended so far that the residents of those tightly-packed tenements could stick an arm out of their windows and brush the passing carriage if they were so inclined.
In other places, the tenements had grown so high they’d bridged the gap over the street, and the metro briefly turned into a subway as it passed into the dark tunnels, lit by moments of light from apartment windows or the flickering orange bulbs of corridors-turned-streets.
I saw the people who lived there in snapshots as we passed each light source; an elderly couple watching a film on an old flatscreen television, a younger couple in the middle of a shouting match, a child curled up under the stairs at the back of a corridor, her eyes entranced by a commlink that didn’t belong to her.
“Taylor?”
A hand on my shoulder shook me out of my reverie, and I flinched – drawing myself up to my full height before turning to see a middle-aged human woman looking up at me with confusion in her eyes. She wasn’t dressed in overalls, but I could tell she was a dockworker all the same. It was in her muscled physique, and the hard-wearing style of her office clothes.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked, pulling her arm back.
I didn’t recognise her face, but I didn’t need to when she was carrying her commlink in the pocket of her cargo pants.
“Hi… Lacey,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
“It’s been years,” she replied. “What are you doing back in the Bay? I thought you went to live with your grandmother.”
“I… did, yeah,” I lied. “Came back to Brockton Bay a short while ago.”
I forgot I did that, I thought to myself.
Lacey and her husband, Kurt, were both close friends of my father, which meant I’d seen a lot of them when I was growing up. When dad was killed, they reached out to his lawyer asking if they could take custody – because they knew I didn’t have anyone left.
Except the message never reached dad’s lawyer, because I intercepted it first. I just wanted some time to myself, and I had the power to make that happen so I fabricated a message from the lawyer saying that I’d already gone to stay with a grandmother out of State. I pulled a similar trick with the lawyer, disappearing myself from his notice and leaving our home in my possession.
“So how was Brooklyn?” Lacey asked, manoeuvring herself a little closer in the packed carriage so we weren’t talking over the head of an increasingly irritated looking dwarf.
“It was nice,” I lied. “I think I needed the space, and I liked being somewhere so big. Sometimes it felt too crowded, though.”
“I’ve never been,” Lacey admitted, “but what brought you back to the Bay?”
“Work,” I answered, thinking on the spot. “I’m a software engineer, and when an opportunity came up I decided I might as well come back and see what’s changed.”
Lacey sighed, turning to look out the window.
“Quite a bit...” she murmured in a melancholy tone.
“Me and Kurt are doing okay,” she continued at a normal volume. “I’ve actually been promoted over him, which is… interesting, to say the least.” She was smiling, but it seemed strained. “Oh, and we have a son now!” At that, her smile turned genuine, and she fished her commlink out of her pocket. She fiddled with it for a few moments before turning the screen to show me a picture of an ork in tanktop, his tusks proudly displayed by an ear-to-ear grin as he held a baby in his arms.
“Congratulations,” I said, putting on a smile. “What’s his name?”
Lacey looked a little sheepish at that.
“Daniel. We named him Daniel.”
“Oh.”
“Your father did a lot for the city, Taylor,” Lacey continued. “He helped keep a lot of people in work, helped coach them for interviews and gather references so they could get what they wanted out of life. It was a tragedy what happened to him.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I was saved from having to respond as Lacey’s eyes flicked back out of the window.
“Ah damnit, this is my stop. Stay safe out there, okay? Things aren’t as dangerous as they were back when you were last here, but it’s still bad.”
“I will,” I lied again. “Good luck with your kid.”
I watched as Lacey pushed her way through the carriage and out onto the equally packed platform, joining the flow of other workers descending the stairs down to street level.
I didn’t know what to think of the encounter, so I shrank back into myself and just stared out the window for the two remaining stops before I reached the one closest to the others’ hideout. As I disembarked, I realised that I hadn’t given Lacey any contact details, and she’d forgot to ask. I felt… maybe not relieved, but okay with that.
The encounter had shaken me enough that I almost forgot I’d promised to pick up some drinks, so I ducked into a small corner shop and grabbed a whole box of beer cans before making my way through the streets to the loft.
Inside, the only signs of our recent excursion were the freshly-patched dents on the side of Rachel’s van, where we’d taken a few shots from security as we pulled away. It was quiet down there, and dark too, but light and noise was bleeding down from the staircase up to the loft itself.
Everyone was up there, sprawled out on the couches in the living room and picking at a whole feast of pizzas that had been scattered across the coffee table. WBBF was on the trideo, but it looked like they hadn’t got to Garcia yet – they were still on the national news.
Rachel was the first to notice me coming up the stairs, but she just nodded as she munched on her slice – a plain margarita. Brian was the second, and the first to speak up.
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“Taylor! Glad you could join us!”
I smiled, holding up the beer before setting it down on the table with a heavy thunk.
“I brought refreshments.”
“A little cheap for my tastes,” Regent said, glancing at the tins before catching Grue’s eye as he fixed him with a pointed look. “But I guess I won’t notice once I’m a couple cans in,” he conceded. “C plus for effort.”
“I’ll take it,” I said, deciding not to make an issue of it as I sat down next to Rachel. “My grades were shit anyway.”
“Well you’re in good company,” Lisa smiled. “Brian dropped out but got a GED later, Rachel never went and I’m pretty sure Alec didn’t either.”
“Not to anything you’d call a school, at least,” Alec shrugged, then fell quiet. It seemed like that was all we were getting out of him.
“What about you?” I asked Lisa, pointedly. “Left yourself out of that little summary.”
Lisa smiled, taking her time before answering as she took a bite out of her pizza – artichoke and anchovies, by the look of it.
“I finished with straight As, of course. Anything less would be unacceptable.”
It might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn there was a slight flash of anger in her eye as she said that last word. If it was there, it quickly disappeared.
“Not that it’s done me much good, of course. You know what the difference is between a teenage runaway with a high school diploma and a teenage runaway without one?”
“Not much?” I guessed.
“Sweet fuck all,” Lisa confirmed, finishing her slice and tossing the crust into the half-empty box.
“This is it,” Brian spoke up, gesturing at the trideo screen. Sure enough, the ad break between the local and national headlines was finishing up, and the network’s logo – an old-fashioned radio tower rising over the dockyard skyline – spun briefly onto the screen before wiping away to reveal an attractive dwarf in a business-like dress sitting behind a desk.
“You’re watching WBBF, Brockton Bay’s First choice for news,” she began, her tone that unique blend of chipper and professional used by newscasters and salespeople.
“Tonight’s leading headline” – there was another wipe, as the anchor was replaced by a very familiar face. Andrew Garcia was looking a little worse for wear in an orange jumpsuit, his eyes shrunken and desponded. It didn’t look like the burly Knight Errant cops surrounding him had worked him over, which surprised me a little.
“A cold case closed after seven years, as fugitive from justice Andrew Garcia was tracked down by Knight Errant officers and arrested for the murder of the investigative journalist Jess Montrose.”
Alec jeered at the screen, while Lisa and I shared an amused smile. Brian, on the other hand, seemed engrossed by the report. We watched as Garcia was bundled into the back of a van, before the clip ended with another transition. This time, the footage was that of buildings in flames and bloody street fights, with the dead journalist’s face held up on placards and signs.
“The arrest marks the close of a dark chapter in the city’s history,” the anchor continued, “but analysts have raised concerns that the city may see a return to the violence of the Montrose riots of twenty sixty-three, that saw Metahuman rights activists and human-supremacist counter-protestors clashing in the streets.”
The shot lingered on a young elf for a moment, propped up on the pavement with blood soaking through her T-shirt. The graphic on the shirt was an old campaign poster, with the instantly recognisable face of the country’s shortest-lasting President half-visible through the spreading red stain. Below his draconic maw, the maple leaf and the stars, the text read ‘Dunkelzahn ’57, A New Golden Age.’ WBBF’s editing team knew what they were doing.
The wipe faded back to the newsroom, though there was still a picture behind the anchor of Garcia in his prison jumpsuit.
“Commissioner Piggot has promised that her department are taking all necessary precautions to minimise the fallout from this arrest, but has declared that Knight Errant must put the pursuit of justice above political concerns.”
“They’re certainly trying,” I observed. “Notice how all the officers are human? Garcia’s face was a symbol before; they don’t want to give the Chosen a picture of him being manhandled by some big troll.”
“It won’t work,” Brian observed. “You’ve seen the mood out there. The Chosen are itching for a fight. More so than usual.”
“And it doesn’t help that we might have cut off their supply of dopadrine…” I observed.
“You sold the data?” Lisa asked. “That’s the good news you mentioned?”
“Yep,” I smiled. “Twenty five thousand, minus Faultline’s twenty percent.”
“Fucking hell!” Brian exclaimed, his eyes wide.
“Nice going, Taylor,” Lisa leaned back in her seat – looking to all the world like the cat that got the cream – “you just doubled our paycheck.”
“So you pull that much money and you still get cheap corner shop beer cans?” Alec asked, seemingly unaffected by the sudden windfall.
“Who’d you sell it to?” Lisa interrupted before I could respond.
I shrugged my shoulders. “No idea. Some anonymous buyer who was rich and busy enough that I was able to persuade him to spend a stupid sum of money to outbid an Agent that I’m pretty sure belonged to Medhall.”
“You weren’t curious?” Lisa pushed, but she was still smiling.
My eyes darted towards Brian before I answered, but I was thinking about our last client and how I exposed her identity.
“Can’t get curious about everyone on the Matrix,” I answered. “It’s too big. Besides, I didn’t want to piss off Labyrinth.”
“Labyrinth?” Brian asked, immediately curious.
“Oh, right,” I snapped my fingers as I remembered that none of the others had met her. “She’s” – another technomancer, I almost said, but that wasn’t my secret to tell – “Faultline’s tech support girl. She set up their network architecture, and runs their Matrix security.”
“A good contact to have,” Brian observed, leaning over the coffee table to grab a can. “But we’re not here to talk shop. This is a celebration, so grab a slice, okay?”
“No arguments here,” I eagerly agreed, looking over the still-hot pizza before grabbing a slice of the locust pepperoni with extra cheese. Brian nodded at my choice – he’d gone for the same thing – and conversation started to flow a little easier as we cracked open the beer.
After another couple of slices, Lisa gave up in defeat and slumped back into her seat with a groan. Her hair had fallen over her face, and she brushed it aside to give me a pointed look.
“I guess you’re not the type that gains weight,” she said, eyeing the already half-finished pizza in front of me.
“I have to work to put it on.”
“Damnit,” Lisa grumbled, eyeing another slice but unwilling to commit.
“If it’s any consolation,” I said after taking another sip of beer, “I bet it costs a lot more to feed me than it does you.”
“Eh,” Lisa waved her hand in a so-so gesture, “it depends. I like expensive food – expensive everything, really – when I can get it, but I’m used to getting by on minute noodles when I need to.”
“What about you?” I asked Rachel, partly because I’d noticed how quiet she was and partly because I was curious how her cybernetics affected her metabolism. The idea of getting augmentations had never appealed to me, and I’d heard cyberware didn’t play nice with Technomancers anyway.
She just shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t know. I just eat what I can find. Couldn’t care less about keeping my meat good.”
I don’t know what I expected, really.
“Enough of this girl talk,” Alec drawled, one of the pizzas drawn protectively close to him. Not that he needed to bother protecting it, given that it was some absolutely ungodly mix of tofu’d tuna and pineapple.
“What do you want to talk about then?” Lisa asked.
He shrugged, grabbing another slice.
“More girl talk it is, then,” Lisa snarked. “Taylor” – she leant forwards, her hands resting on her knees as she fixed me with a serious expression – “I can’t help but notice that you’ve been wearing that exact same outfit every time I’ve seen you, even though I know you bought more clothes than that on our little shopping expedition.”
I looked down at my clothes in case they’d suddenly sprouted mold – even though I’d washed them the night before – but I just didn’t get what she was talking about.
“Um, yeah? These are my Shadowrunning clothes? We’re Shadowrunners?”
“We’re not Shadowrunning now,” Alec pointed out. “Unless you were expecting a gunfight on the way over?”
“In this city?” Brian pointed out. “I’m not sure that’s the ‘gotcha’ moment you think it is.”
Lisa let out a short, sharp laugh before continuing. “What I mean is that you shouldn’t be afraid to live it up a little. It looks good on you, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help noticing that it’s also the most practical outfit you bought. If I hadn’t been there with you to help pick the style, I bet it’d look exactly the same as what Brian wears.”
“Hey!” Brian protested, half-heartedly.
“Which is fine,” Lisa quickly corrected, “for a guy who punches people for a living.”
“Honestly, I just don’t really think much about what I wear,” I admitted. “I used to. Back when I was in school, I’d second-guess and stress over the clothes I was wearing even if I was just going to the corner shop near my apartment for some milk and bread. I wanted to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.”
“And how did that work out for you?” Alec asked. His tone was innocuous, but rather than looking at me his neck was craned back to look at where my eyes would be if I were standing up.
“Not great,” I admitted. “The thing is, I stopped leaving home so I stopped caring. The last two years, I’ve basically just worn the same three or four sets of comfortable clothes because I didn’t have to care anymore about how people saw me. Always kept them clean, though. I’m not an animal.”
“Stopped leaving home… completely?” Brian asked.
“Pretty much,” I shrugged my shoulders. “I mean, I’d go out in the Matrix but I’m sure you’d say that doesn’t count. When you dragged me out to meet Faultline’s guy after our first job, that was the first time I’d left home in… about a year and a half, I think.”
“I had no idea,” Brian observed. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more upfront about it.”
“Don’t be,” I shook my head. “Sure I was pissed, but if you hadn’t sprung it on me like that then I probably wouldn’t have taken the job. And this? It’s been good for me so far. It might only be one outfit, but it’s more adventurous than I’ve been in years.”
“In that case,” Lisa piped up, sounding genuinely enthusiastic, “why not add a few variations on the same theme and get some more runner gear? Sure, in those trideo shows you saw the runners probably wore the same outfit all the time, but that’s because the characters are so bland you need clear outfits to tell them apart.”
“This coming from the girl who’s worn the exact same trenchcoat every time we’ve gone into a fight?” Brian pointed out.
“It has sentimental value!” Lisa countered. “It kept me company on a lot of long nights. Plus it’s cool, in an old-school private detective kind of way, and it has loads of pocket space.”
As we talked and ate and drank into the evening, I reached out and took control of the trideo screen, linking it up to the extensive collection of pirated media I kept back in my apartment. We ummed and erred about what to watch, before eventually settling on a film about a team of Shadowrunners – largely so we could point and laugh at it.
As the film rolled on, I couldn’t help noticing that Lisa was smiling in a way that seemed completely different from her usual expressions. There wasn’t any sarcasm in it, no sense of smug glee. It was just the genuine smile of someone who was happy and content, and after a while I found that my own lips curled up to mirror it.
This is better, I thought to myself.