I STAY for a while longer to listen in while Sarah hammers out the specifics of her plan for the summit with the others. Rising exhaustion pulls me towards the ground like a black hole. The bar is warm, the lights that perfect level of dimness, the drinks hitting just right. When I pull down a stool and slump over my table to catch some quick shut-eye, Sarah taps my hand and dismisses me for the rest of the night. Her revolver, a battered white-painted Sixer- six o’ clock barrel, like my 6-Teba, better for recoil- hangs in front of my eyes as she comes over to chat during a quick break.
“Last train ran an hour ago. You got a way home?”
Sarah’s shooting range is just two blocks away. My place is twice that and three layers up. Between navigating bridges and public lifts, it’s over an hour of travel on foot. I run through my options and tilt my head towards where Krey sits polishing his Malice rifle on the bar.
“Krey’s got an autobike,” I say, pawing at the corner of my eyes. “He’ll cover me.”
Her eyes trace the wooden grooves in the ceiling. “He doesn’t live here?”
“Nah. Said Dax snores too loud.”
Sarah snorts out a laugh, glancing over her shoulder for a moment. Two of the hundred-credit chits from the table drop into my open palm. “Your cut for today. Eat up and get some sleep. We’ve got work tomorrow.”
“What’s the name?”
“Outracing those ripples we made today. Dynasty is going to want to hit back for our little raid. What they won’t be doing is keeping up a heavy guard around the Orange.” The black heart of the syndicate’s undercity operations, a spider’s web of village-style brothels and electroclubs that covers an entire undercity block. It’s the sluice that every part of their business flows through. A redlight district with a citrus filter on top. Always under heavy guard. On the surface, its lantern lights are curated to appeal to overcity tourists. The real machinations of the syndicate happen behind the scenes, where their covert docks process shipments of indentured slaves, contraband materials, and every drug on the planet.
Sarah’s nothing but nonchalant as she flicks a finger off the binder I stole. I doubt many people would notice the crows' feet tugging at the corners of her eyes. She’s been in this game longer than I’ve been alive. This face she fakes is more real than whatever remains of the woman beneath. It’s the face of a survivor. Cool, cavalier, mean, tough, tenacious, snarky, playful, violent, an act that shifts however it needs to project the image of a woman who can and will do anything to get what she wants.
“…this confirms my suspicions about the uptick in their activity,” she’s saying. “An Executor, one of their seven leaders, is coming to town to oversee the expansion. They want a bigger stake in the game. Maybe even the whole Vents, wouldn’t put it past them. So we’re putting an end to those stakes. And I’ll be bringing an Executor’s head to the summit.” She runs a hand through her hair, brushing it so most hangs longer on the left than right.
“You want me on your six,” I say.
If she’s surprised I knew, she doesn’t show her hand. “Haven’t decided how close. This is a risky run. Executors…”
Seven of them run the syndicate’s operations from around the world. Always on the move, never able to be pinned down in one place, never all gathering in the same location, and swapping names as often as an up-and-comer decides they don’t like taking orders from the big bosses. Even they subscribe to the one constant of our society: only the strongest rule. Only through combat can you take the prestige and power you deserve. It’s the same law of the jungle that drives our gladiocracy. Carve your own place in the world, or you won’t survive long. And to take a place at the top of the largest criminal organization in the Sections? You’d have to be a real special kind of monster.
“We’re a two man outfit. I’m coming with you.” Standing, I palm the credits with a smirk. “Besides, we both know you need the backup.”
“Don’t let it get to your head, kid.”
She sends me skittering towards the door with a slap on the ass. Flushing red, entirely aware of the amusement on Ulysses’ face as he watches the exchange, I grab Krey from the bar and head outside, bristling at the post-midnight cold.
The air stinks of smog and lighter smoke. Skirting around piles of trash, we head for the thin bridges that span the immense chasms between the towers. I lean my head over the edge of a concrete railing, looking down the glittering layers of the Vents. Storefronts and apartments shine neon light across the towersides. The further down the towers stretch, the closer they get to the Abyss that yawns black and empty beneath us all, the thinner the towers grow. Layers more scattered, lights more infrequent, tapering down to a point until all that’s left is a skeleton lattice of half-finished towers and bones of abandoned construction. There they end. Hanging over an infinite nothingness.
Stare too long, and you start to understand why some people jump.
Krey’s autobike, like all autobikes, is completely illegal to run in the undercity. Officially, the only place these things get used is on the glass highways curling above the surface districts. That doesn’t stop Venters from jacking them, overriding their prebuilt taxi programming, and playing loose goose with the pedestrian bridges down here. Not hard to see why. The machines are hot. Smooth, orblike wheels. Oscillating spectrum of running lights. Gleaming black frame, smooth, like a jaguar mid-stride. Electric engine already purring as we saddle up and I open a projector screen on my JOY, using holographic keys to send an address to the bike. The running lights flick on a moment later, and we’re off.
This late at night, there’s little but that strange mix of cold and muggy air, wind howling in my ears, the bike humming between my legs. Clamping my hands along the tail of the bike, I arch back and let my head hang over the rear wheel, hair ripping out of its braid into a peach-colored tail.
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As we race over a thirty-meter bridge between two blocks, moonlight from a seam between twoovercity districts shines down through the jenga tower of bridges and hovertransports and undercity layers. My eyes widen to drink in the stars. The silver orb hanging front and center.
Then it’s gone. We’re in the next block. Hard black roof fifteen stories up, cruising along the layer’s perimeter past closed businesses and beating clubs, bars vomiting groups of midnight patrons, drugged out Shockers slumped over empty bottles next to dumpsters and runoff, small-time thugs smoking on plastic chairs around tiny plastic tables, someone getting their guts punched out into an alley for not paying up on a bet, someone getting shivved, a brown-haired mother hanging her clothes out to dry on a second-story balcony.
Krey never slows or accelerates. Immune to the sights, cruise control on, fingering an old pendant that hangs around his neck. I slowly shift on the bike until I’m facing backwards, legs straddling the rear wheel. Tug my headset back up over my ears, and let the city slide into a neon blur of dreams that never existed and promises never made.
This is the Vents those tourists never see. They come down for a taste of the undercity. Us who can’t escape it, we live further from the lights than they’ll ever go.
My apartment complex doesn’t have a name. Halfway down the Vents on the northwest corner of the Masada block, it’s a rusty tower no different from any other. Not the best block, not the safest, but worlds better than the one I clawed my way out of. And the takeout place two doors down is a pilgrimage site for the rest of the undercity. Krey pulls up on the street beside the entrance, shuttered blast-door steel guarded by a sulfur-yellow halogen and a holoterminal covered in a second skin of graffiti. The frazzled projector in the terminal kicks to life when I swing off the bike, then starts choking when I sit on top of it.
“Got a sec?”
Krey fishes a pack of lighters out of his pocket. Bumps one, glances my way between trying to spark it. “What’s up?”
“Sarah’s job tomorrow.”
“Offing an Executor? She’s mad crazy.”
“Yeah. Exactly my thought.”
“You going with her?”
“Can’t just let her start a firefight in the Orange without backup.”
“She aint’cha mum, Em. Been working the streets since before we were born.” He takes a drag and coughs into his elbow. “If sommat goes south, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of creds on your head. Nowhere in the Vents is safe after that.”
My arms cross over my chest. “I know she’ll pull it off. I’m just making backup plans.” My cut from today, two hundred credits, springs from my fingers into Krey’s lowered hood. “I’ll text you the dock we’re hitting. I want you to post up on the next block over. Discrete. Don’t even need to take a shot unless shit goes down. But if it does…”
He pats the Malice rifle, magnetically secured to the side of the bike.
“Exactly.”
“You don’t trust her?”
I tilt my head from side to side. “Tangling with Dynasty always has strings. They’re bigger than they used to be, too.” I shrug to deflect the curiosity in his gaze. “Gunning for an Executor is another step up from what Sarah’s been doing. There’s no going back if we fuck up.”
Krey’s lips form a thin line. “She’s mad for her dream.”
“Only ‘cause there’s a chance it’ll work this time.” I hop off the holoprojector and hold a fist up to bump. “Things might finally change for us all.”
-
After Krey dips, I scan my JOY at the holoterminal and head inside. Past the scrawny street rats, dirty kids picking through the dumpster who scamper back to the holes they came from when they hear my feet coming. Past the two tech-draped teens airbrushing over day-old graffiti in the lobby. The stream screens squawking recaps from the night’s earlier pro-league fights. News droning on about some press conference held by the Champion, up in his high tower in the overcity. Our gladiator king, an old tyrant with grey hair who only leaves his throne when he needs to defend it in a fight. A master ki fighter, able to manipulate the spiritual energy that exists within all living things. They say his hands broke cities in decades past. That the aura of power he can create eclipses the brightest spotlights.
All that power. And he doesn’t use it to change a thing.
Couple of the people lingering in the bar at the lobby sport a few of the niche classes. Tamers with tiny animals on their shoulders, picked from popular overcity styles for combat companions. Innovators hacking leads from wall outlets to recharge handheld tech. Duelists, the sword fighters, are the most common. Anything with a blade is their domain. Just like anything with a bullet is mine.
My apartment complex is a spiral of fifteen circular rings stacked up like a corkscrew spring. A single crippled lift wheezes its way down to the lobby when I punch a busted keypad there. Rusted gates have to be shoved open so I can get inside, but they snap back perfectly fine.
The lift jitters and shakes and groans as it rattles back up to the ninth floor. Cage-mesh windows that let in the reek of the undercity, the oil-acid atmosphere. Scrap metal floor worn to a dull shine by ten thousand footsteps. Blinking projector screens blare silent advertisements into my closed eyelids as I lean against the rattling wall. Someone shot the speakers out years ago. The entire complex got blackout drunk the day they did.
Trash bags, empty water cartons, and blinking LEDs light the way around the circle. Two old men, factory workers by their overalls, share smokes on a balcony and nod as I trudge around the corkscrew of apartments. Room 904 is mine. A small holopad beside the door- the only new thing in this place, asides from the cyberlock- warns me in electric-blue text of the single digit days remaining before rent is due. I tap my JOY against it, wait for the door to jam a quarter of the way open, then yank it the rest of the way.
My stolen clothes find a new home in the garbage disposal the moment I enter. My stomach growls. I eye the fridge instinctively, even though I know it’s empty. Just like my pockets. Shoulda promised Krey half after the job was done. At least then I could’ve bought dinner.
I shut the blinds and dip into the shower. Room’s not much, just enough for me, maybe even a bit too much. I’ve been living bigger this year. Sarah pays me more with every job, enough to rent a place that doesn’t charge a water budget. The apartment is one small cubicle of a room. A nook for a bed, a plastic window that lets in a constant glow of neon, and a sunken pit walled in by an L-shaped plastplush couch. Soft blue running lights frame the furniture from beneath as I turn off the overheads, slump down against hard plastic under a lukewarm shower for five minutes, then drag myself over to the couch and wrap up in the only luxury I own: a blanket I bought on my last trip to the overcity, three years back.
It was a quick trip. Pavilion district, real rich store, gold filigree type of place. Not my usual scene. I know exactly how I looked; haven’t forgotten the way they frowned at me. Some grimy Vent rat who came up just to buy an ice cream and a blanket. But they took my money. And I got my blanket. Though it’s down to just the threads, now.
Two in the morning. Hungry, stomach empty since noon. No beer left, no smokes, no pills to dull the thump-thump heartbeat of stereo-blasted NeoPop in the next room over, just empty bottles. So I call up an old memory on my JOY. Set the battered little sphere on the table beside the couch, right next to the 6-Teba and its polished barrel. And let the crackling audio and holographic snowflakes lull me to sleep.