Like a match and gasoline, baby
Cooper looked over at her and all the memories, of sex and screaming and calling her a thousand times, fell out of her face and rolled around in the car. He ignored them. Something else was burning in the center of his mind now, like hot coals given fresh air by the text message.
Darla. Her face, her voice, her motions and the noises she made. And all the rest of it. That hollow world that had somehow eclipsed this one. The first time he had ever flown. The first time he had sold a memory, the feeling of worthlessness that followed. Every disappointing “night” in the Allclub.
An echo broke through it.
“Baby, what are you doing with that knife?”
“Making sure I don’t forget, baby.” He spat the last word and pressed the blade into his forearm.
Celeste had been reaching her left hand towards the gun stashed in the door. She froze and watched him cut a circle in his arm but couldn’t speak. After that came a cross shape, then one long cut joined with two smaller ones. Then four slashes forming a W.
“Baby,”
“You can cut that lovey-dovey shit out now, Hardworlder. You want the coin? You’re going to have to deal with me on the level.”
Two lines for the r and a quick cut for the l. The tip of the knife twisted his skin around as he cut the D and she looked away.
“Baby, there’s a first aid kit in the glove box.” She was crying now, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t an act. He tried anyway, and stared at the word bleeding in his arm.
Othrwrld
****
EP flicked her eyes across the screens in practiced patterns. Separate video feeds from her day drones, (generally, smaller models with sky-colored bellies and urban camo tops) were filtered and distilled in her head into a complete visualization of the ground below. Some part of the back of her mind tracked the movements and locations of the various actors and suspicious vehicles.
The scare with Celeste and the knife had been handled with less panic than she expected (the text tracked to a virtual number with no leads, surely the work of some other team unrelated to the crash dummies), and she realized she was starting to fall out. The feed felt more and more like something distant, a livestream or a game, something that could never touch her. The longer she stayed in the Hardworld, the more she felt she was really all alone in a box, the world outside only a simulation. The images on the screens became the echoes of ghosts. The people less than characters.
She had come to see it as her penalty. Every Hardworlder had one, usually specific to their job. Operators got bogged down by the fear of their Self, always placed in danger by the Spirit. Sages got caught in the tangle of their own connections. Charms, like Celeste, often became too attached. Overlords and Spiders, like herself, became more distant, less connected to their friends and partners. It followed a predictable process, usually. She probably had about three more days before it would become severe and dropping out would be a constant risk. Funny. It used to happen a lot faster. She really was becoming a veteran.
Radio chatter overlapped itself in her ears. She could set one channel to priority and still have up to three others active in descending volume under it, her mind automatically picking up choice words while her hand flicked one or another to the top of the list to single it out. At the moment, she was cycling between walkie-talkies and burner phone calls, intercepted by one of her drones, and all talking about the same thing. The VW beetle moving down the road.
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“What the fuck is this, bait car?”
“Moving down Henderson. Fuck are they going? Back to the dude's house?”
“I aint touching that shit.”
Then something stood out.
“-type like ass, dude. Can you—” “Shut the fuck up!”
The hairs on her neck stood up. The voice chats were cover for an encrypted text chat. Shit. These dummies weren’t so dumb. She scanned the vehicles linked to the phones and radio chatter for any wi-fi or Bluetooth that looked promising and found a few. She set a few choice programs loose and turned her fractaled yet focused attention to other things.
The road Celeste was on crossed over the river via a bridge and continued onto a rectangle of land with the river on three sides, north south and east. It was a sad industrial area the city was trying to drag into something else, with towing lots, buildings repurposed into trendy gyms, a big sheet metal roofed flea market, a disused police training center now stuffed with records and desk cops, and a massive construction area in the center where disjointed streets were being twisted into two new half-completed cement avenues that had just begun their leap over the train tracks that bisected the slab, running northwest to southeast. It was a cluster fuck.
At least two vehicles were following the VW; A sedan and an SUV. She was moving some micro drones in for a closer look at, when movement from across the river to the east caught her eye, on the old main street peninsula formed by a bend in the river. A region of bare foundations and vacant buildings that she noted, sadly, would have been a much simpler place for a shootout.
A squad of dirt bikes flew out of the partially built condo complex across from the abandoned power plant and took off towards the river. She alerted the team.
“Hostiles moving out on Main street. Crossing the river.”
“How?” said Luke.
“Dirt bikes, pedestrian bridge to the south, part of the park trails.”
“All right,” he said. In the dash cam, EP saw him sit up and slip the bottom of his mask from under his baseball cap, ready to pull it into place.
She looked back to the other feeds and tracked the dirtbikes as the descended the grass berm that served as a flood break to the river.
So, they had at least one ambush set up beforehand, and now that they knew the Beetle’s direction, they were consolidating their forces. But how many other routes had they covered? And how many operators did they have converging on the beetle right now? What if Celeste had taken the highway, would they have—
Something tightened her chest and put tension behind her jaw. She had become so trained at sensing danger and developments by distilling a platter of various senses, that it took her brain a bit to catch up.
In the center of the cluster fuck zone, a white Toyota pickup with a canvas top had driven into the construction site and turned up the half-built ramp with its back aiming down the road, toward the beetle, now under four hundred yards away and stuck at a light. She froze watching the truck for a second, expecting gunfire to erupt out of the back of it at any instant, trying to form the words to tell the team, when that sixth sense drew her eyes to a small sedan speeding out of a gas station across the intersection from the beetle.
“Heads up!”
*****
Cooper found that the silence was, for some reason, unbearable, so he tried to break it.
“Remember the first time we fucked?” He smiled at her but she didn’t look over.
“That wasn’t us.” She had gotten ahold of herself, and her voice was now cold. The jig was up. Now that it was gone, he missed the game. He tried to bring it back.
“It looked like us. And we both remember it, so, wasn’t it us?”
The light turned red before she could get through. Of course it did. She scowled at the intersection.
The cross street coming from the left dead-ended into a building on her right that had once been a motel but was now some kind of charity housing. The half a street was the only reason for the light, barely went a few hundred meters back before cutting another left behind some body shop, and there wasn’t a single fucking car on it. It was the most pointless red light she had ever been stuck at.
And Cooper wouldn’t shut up.
“So where are you really taking me? Gonna let some big guy dunk my hand in acid till I tell you where the coin is?” He watched his blood blot the gauze.
Celeste winced at that, or maybe her Self did.
“No, if I was gonna do that, I’d have the big guy here with me.”
“I wouldn’t have gotten in the car.”
“I’m gonna take you someplace safe. To talk.”
Cooper scoffed just like he used to, and it still infuriated her.
“What? You’d rather be somewhere else? There really are people out there who would dunk your hand in acid.”
“Ok, then what? You gonna fuck me until I tell you where it is?”
The light turned green and she floored it, but it was no good. He was still in the seat next to her.
EP’s voice broke in on her line, shrill and panicked.
“Heads up!”
It was a second too late. She been trying so hard not to look at Cooper, she didn’t see the car ahead swerve into her lane until it was already crunching all around her.