THE VENTS is a nocturnal society. During the day, when half the labor force is at work in the overcity and the entire overcity is at their jobs, every kind of business takes the chance to rest, clean, and prepare for the next night’s onslaught. Even the criminal ones.
Dynasty is no exception. Though the syndicate only started seriously expanding into the Vents in recent years, the Orange, their main base of operations, has exploded in popularity since its inception. I’ve only ever seen it from a distance. It’s in a prime layer close to the surface crust, just close enough to one of the most popular clusters of descension lifts, and run by foreign bastards who don’t give a second thought to churning through Venter bodies like butcher meat. The whole place is a giant orange-tinted brothel. Styled after the traditional villages outside the capital, it stole their paper-wood architecture, their pre-era red-light districts, their pre-era culture, and perverted it into a product. It established itself as the place to go for all the degrading shit people think of when they hear the word Vents. From lap dances to personalized orgies to cages where you can see the prices of indentured sex slaves change in real time according to market value. The usual. And for the real rich fucks, there’s a hell of a lot worse that goes on behind closed doors.
Crossing into their territory is like stepping into a different world, one that’s at least a few centuries out of date. Robe-sporting enforcers in black and orange cover the major bridgeways, fleecing tourists to make sure no weapons come into the block. Huge, tattooed beasts who break bones on Dynasty’s dime. Next are the rows of popular electroclubs- surface level stuff for the squeamish and the partiers who came down with their bosses or uni peers. Then the lantern-lit brothels where lithe silhouettes fuck and moan behind paper walls. Rickshaw carts pulled by workers with rice hats and bowed heads.
It’s all an illusion, as fake as it gets. A hyper-optimized fairy tale everyone who enters willingly plays along with. And it’s a perfect cover for the syndicate’s true operations.
Even before my most recent stunt, Sarah and I have caused the syndicate enough trouble that walking under their tori gates to visit the clubs would see our heads plated on silver platters in about five minutes, give or take. We also can’t just walk around the blocks near the Orange. Like every block of the Vents, a chasm to the Abyss surrounds it on all sides, and Dynasty keeps the bridges covered at all hours of the day. Informants, street rats, and other local businesses in the nearby layers are all on their payroll, feeding a constant trickle of information back to the nest. Like little lights attached to the syndicate lamprey.
Traveling anywhere near the Orange on foot would be bad news. Which is why I’m curled up almost a mile away, high in the rafters of a well-lit bay where a constant stream of hovertransports from the overcity ferry foodstuffs and designer liquor to their undercity middlemen. I’ve been working on my coffee from the earlier breakfast trip over an hours-long stakeout. Watching heavyset men and women mingle, crack jokes, grunt, lift heavy things, smoke, drink, laze off, smoke again, and sign paperwork. All while transports flow in and out on a clockwork schedule.
I stifle a yawn as I double-check the stolen binder. Though Dynasty keeps their biggest illicit dealings in house, basic economics has them running their mundane supplies through the usual Venter routes. Their clubs aren’t exactly exclusive, either. They keep a tight guard on the stuff that regular people don’t see. But not even the syndicate is going to bother running deepscans on every middle-of-the-afternoon drink shipment for the front-façade clubs.
Hard part’s gonna be getting from those clubs to wherever it is the real action is going down.
My finger traces the manifest of the shipment that’s running to our target dock today, double-checking it against the completely normal transport that’s just started loading down in the bay. I pull out my JOY and have it enhance a view of the individual crates, beaming it on a discrete projection close to my face. Everything’s lining up. Twenty bottles of Nirvalian blue, five bottles of Gage’s Virtue, fifty kilos of A2 cube steaks, thirty kilos of caviar, and a laundry list of other things I don’t need to read. It’s the one. Firing off a last message to Krey, I open a link to Sarah and connect it to my earcom, then pocket my JOY and start working my way down the maze of ladders.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Berth eight. They’ll be done loading in five minutes, tops.”
Her voice purrs straight into my ear. “Got our smoke break ready?”
I drop to the floor of the bay unnoticed. Hidden behind a shipping container, right next to the fire alarm.
“On your go,” I say, once I find the controls.
I can almost hear her revolver cock.
“Punch it. Let’s not keep our Executor waiting.”
-
Outside of the hovertransport, the Vents drifts by like a lazy neon river. Massive lifts from the overcity make regular stops to dump out floods of day shift workers. Smog, thick in the air, forms condensation on the two tiny windows at the back of the hold. A rare beam of sunset cutting through a scar in the surface world turns the droplets to rainbows for a brief moment. It shines over a bridge where small children play, tagging each other with harmless powers from their JOYs.
Sarah nudges my shoulder. “Wasn’t so long ago I found you on a bridge just like that. Though it wasn’t quite as sunny.”
The bridge fades from view as we descend another layer.
“Hey. Emilia.”
I glance over to find her still staring out the window. “Hm?”
“What Dax was talking about last night, about you kids and the universities…”
“Not you too,” I groan. “Don’t start trying to be a mom.”
“Listen, listen,” she demands, wagging her revolver at me like an index finger. “I’m not your mother. I’m no one’s mother. But I’m not a pit boss, either. Not like Ulysses or The Anvil. I help people. Sometimes that help involves shooting things. Sometimes it means talking to them.”
A shudder runs through the deck, rattling the bottles.
“I’ve taught you a lot of things over the years, kid. Most everything I know. Don’t get me wrong- I liked doing it. I liked… raising you.” Her voice takes on a softer edge. “You put something back in me that I’d lost for a long time. And you’re becoming your own woman now. I see it every time we argue.”
“You’re talking like this is your retirement run.”
“It just might be, if everything works out right.” Sarah smirks at some private joke. “I want you to think about it. We’ve had some good runs together. But this… I guess it’s not another lesson. Just something I learned a little too late for myself. It’s about time you learned it, too.”
Orange light suffuses the darkness outside.
Silently, we slip into the lair of the beast.
Sarah’s eyes trace the clubs we drift past. “Good runs are all there is to the Vents. Those, and bad runs. One after the other, scraping together what you can, surviving another day just to wake up again in a world without the sun.” The transport slows. Bright floodlights of the receiving dock draw closer. Her hand tightens around her revolver. “I know how you think,” she chuckles. “All kids are the same. You were born down here, that there’s no life waiting for you up top. Just the one you make for yourself in the gutter. But there’s a whole world out there, Mori. And this is just one city in it. Don’t make the mistake I did.”
She looks to the stars, to a sunset she can’t see.
“Do better than survive.”
Beneath our feet, the deck rattles and the engines dim as we settle onto the floor of the dock. Harsh white lights and open shipping containers surround us; no other transports. I start easing the 6-Teba out of its holster.
Sarah catches my arm halfway.
“Promise me,” she says. Iced-blue eyes bore into me. “After this job, you’ll think about moving to the overcity, Mori.”
My mouth works in silence, half a dozen responses starting and stopping before I settle with a nod. “I’ll think about it.” I shake her arm off, leaving the gun in its holster. “Talk like that is bad luck.”
“There’s no such thing as bad luck, kid. The only luck we have is the one we make.” She punches me lightly in the shoulder. “Gunslingers make ours one pull at a time.”
We look forward together as boots and voices begin making their way to the back of the transport. Locks turn outside. Sarah steps up to do the honors, chambering an electrolytic cylinder in her Sixer. Twenty paralytic rounds that’ll put anything less durable than a Guardian-classed fighter into a day-long coma. She turns back to wink as the rusty doors screech open.
I brush my poncho back into place, fingers ready to draw. The doors creak open. And the world explodes from the inside out.