10 – Fade

“JJ, initiate dust link.” As her body tingled slightly and her sense of self expanded to include her little drone, Addie sent it up, out of her hands, and into the air behind her.

“JJ’s your PAI?” Tony asked, eyeing the softly humming egg-shaped device.

“Yep. He’s kind of out of date but does everything I need.”

“I do my best, Addie,” JJ said. The first time he’d said that, back when she’d gotten him for her sixteenth birthday, she’d been impressed, but it was his go-to response whenever he heard Addie talking about his capabilities, nothing clever.

“And the egg? You have a name for that fancy piece?” Tony leaned closer to her drone, peering closely at its smooth gray-black surface. “Where are the cams?”

“I haven’t settled on a name. I called it Humpty for a long time, but that was when I was a kid.”

“Oh, right. Bert told me you got this from your granny, yeah?”

“My grandma, yeah.” Addie sniffed, made nervous by the tender subject, and pointed to the drone. “The cams don’t show until I start using them.”

Tony turned back to the street and pointed to the messenger shop on the far side. “So, how’s this work? You gonna do the talking, or just me? I mean, are you really just reporting, or are you in on this with—”

“It’s all you, Tony. Try to pretend I’m not here.”

He sighed, and Addie wished she knew him well enough to tell if it was an irritated sigh, a tired sigh, or just a resigned sigh. Regardless, he put his hands in the pockets of his tracksuit jacket and started across the street. Addie flicked her attention to the drone and felt her world expand further as she looked through its ring of high-definition cams. She sent the drone ahead, watching Tony from a relatively close forty-five-degree angle. She had to flick back to ensure she didn’t get smashed into paste by the traffic as she hurried across the street.

In her drone’s feed, she could hear the chime as Tony pulled the door open, and she focused partially on the cam feed, carefully guiding the drone inside with him. He walked up to the counter where Sheila Krantz—a woman who babysat Addie a time or two back in the day—sat waiting to take messenger orders. “Can I help you, hon?”

Addie stopped outside the shop, leaning her shoulder against the wall beside the door as she listened in. Tony, hands still in his pockets, sauntered forward and shrugged. “I’m supposed to help Rene with a fade. I guess it’s in the alley?”

“Oh? You’re the guy working for Bert?” She narrowed her eyes. “Is that Addie’s drone following you around?”

Tony chuckled and nodded. “Yeah. She wants to get some footage of the fade.”

“Well, Rene’s in the back room with some lady who came in here freaking out earlier. I guess she’s related to the fade.” Sheila swiveled in her chair and touched a button. A buzzer sounded, unlocking the door that would let Tony through to the backside of the counter. “Hurry, or it’ll lock again.”

Tony snatched the door open and slipped through, holding it for the drone. He stared at it for a couple of seconds, but Addie couldn’t see through the shades to guess what he was thinking. He nodded to Sheila, then walked through the gray, metallic door, down a long, dim hallway, past a cluttered office, and into a back room where half a dozen e-bikes were in various states of repair. Rene stood near the alley door, talking to a woman who appeared to have been recently crying.

“This is so weird, JJ. I feel like I should be asking questions, but I’m trying just to let events unfold, you know?”

“Absolutely, Addie.”

Addie snorted. “I hope Tony can loosen up his tongue a little. I’d like to interview this woman, but—” Addie stopped talking as Rene turned to regard Tony.

“Can I help you?” She didn’t sound happy to have a stranger walking into her shop. Her eyes drifted to the drone, and her frown deepened.

“I’m Tony. Here for the, uh, fade.” He nodded to the woman with the bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Sorry for your, uh—”

“Oh, save it! Murderer!”

“Uh-oh,” Addie said, wondering if she would need to intervene after all.

Tony didn’t react to the woman’s indignation, but he turned to Rene, and as Addie moved the drone to capture a side view, she saw he had his eyebrow arched questioningly. Rene cleared her throat and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Now, I already told you, I don’t want anyone to get killed.” She looked at Tony. “What, um, what are you planning to do?”

“Well, Addie showed me an abandoned building a few blocks from here—a, uh, ‘skeleton’ building.”

“What?” The woman looked at Rene, her eyes wide, a little uncertainty sapping the anger from her expression.

“That’s what the kids call those buildings that are just plasteel girders and floors. You know, the ones that were under construction before the Blast.”

Tony nodded. “Right. I guess the rads and dust are pretty bad in there.” He stepped closer to the two women and hurriedly added, “Which won’t hurt your, uh, relative—”

“Sister!”

“Right, well, it won’t hurt your sister. She should be able to transition without harming anyone if I can lure her in there.”

“But I don’t want her to transition!” the woman wailed, holding her hands up to her ears and squeezing her eyes shut as though she could block out her problems. She wore a dirty pink sweater, and the cuffs hung over her hands, making the improvised earmuffs look all the more sad—pathetic but sweet in a way. Watching her made Addie wonder how her dad would react when she got close to fading.

“I’m real sorry, ma’am,” Tony said, and he sounded perfectly sincere.

“Who talks that way?” Addie muttered.

Tony continued, moving closer to the grieving sister, “It’ll be better for her if I lure her away from here, don’t you think? You don’t want her to hurt anyone, do you?”

The woman sniffed and shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “I just, I just wish I hadn’t chased her out. She could still kind of reason back then. I told her the screams were keeping me up, and they were, but I should’ve just…” She trailed off, sniffing and softly sobbing.

Rene saved Addie from crawling out of her skin with curiosity by asking, “What screams, sweetie?”

“When she first started fading, she said it burned like she was on fire. I think the pain is what made her lose her mind, not the fades.”

“Now, this is getting interesting!” Addie said. “Okay, I need to get in there and ask some more questions.”

“But, Addie,” JJ tried to object, “I thought you were only going to observe—”

“Hush! You’re not my producer.” Addie hurried into the shop and waved at Sheila. “Let me back there, Sheila—I gotta talk to a witness.”

Sheila rolled her eyes but pushed the buzzer. “Don’t piss Rene off.”

“Nope!” Addie hurried through, still watching the drama unfold through her drone. Tony was inches away from stepping through the door, but he was having trouble convincing the sister to stay back.

“If I’m going to get her to chase me, I gotta make sure nobody else distracts her,” he said as Addie entered the room.

“Hey, Rene.”

Tony turned to regard her, but his face was, as usual, very hard to read. Rene looked at her and sighed. “I didn’t really want to get the whole circus here when I talked to your dad.” She jerked her thumb at the drone. “Is that necessary?”

“Don’t worry; I’ll only use pertinent footage.” Addie stepped closer and reached out to gently rub the grieving woman’s shoulder. Her pink sweater felt exactly as she’d imagined it would: soft and smooth—some kind of poly blend. “I’m so sorry about your loss, ma’am. Do you think you could tell me your name?”

“Bonnie,” she sobbed, sniffing noisily as she opened her eyes to regard Addie. “Who are you?”

“I’m an investigative reporter, Bonnie, and I’m trying to shed more light on the troubles fades and their families go through. It’s an issue that’s been ignored for far too long, don’t you think? I’m assuming none of the corporate clinics offered you any aid?”

“None! They turned us away, even when her troubles first started, and Deirdre still had her…faculties.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“And you said your sister—Deirdre, right?—was in a great deal of pain?”

“Yes! Every night, she’d scream and scream. She said it felt like her flesh and bones were burning away.” While she spoke, Tony sighed and leaned against the door, reaching up to adjust his shades, pushing them higher on the bridge of his nose. Addie guessed he was probably irritated to have her steamroll in there, but this information was too interesting to let slip away.

“How frequently did she fade at first?”

“A few times a night, but it was just parts of her—sometimes her feet, sometimes her fingers. I think the first time her head faded was when things really went downhill. She said she saw things.” Bonnie shuddered, and her brows narrowed. “You say you’re a reporter? Where the hell were you when I was walking from one Boxer clinic to another, getting turned away for meds? Deirdre was a Boxer employee, and they wouldn’t help at all!”

“I’m so sorry to hear that, Bonnie. I’m an independent journalist, and I didn’t know about your plight. I’m spread awfully thin down here—there are a lot of problems in the district, as I’m sure you’re aware. Can you tell me what meds you were trying to get?”

“Anything! Everything! Mostly, I was trying to get something to help Deirdre sleep—something for the pain would’ve been nice. They just kept denying our request.” She switched into a nasally mocking voice, “‘There’s no known treatment for fades, sorry, ma’am.’ Well? If they can’t treat the fades, couldn’t they treat the symptoms?”

“That’s an excellent question. Did you ask them?”

“Of course, but you know how the corpos are. As soon as I got a little heated, they had me escorted out. I never got a good answer. I suppose it’s the same old story; if there’s no profit, there’s no point.”

“Considering the corporate deductions Deirdre no doubt paid, I don’t think you were unreasonable in expecting a little help. Can you tell me how long Deirdre’s been fighting this condition?”

“Next month, it’ll be a year. I remember because it was just after the anniversary of my Robbie’s death when she had the first fit.”

Addie nodded, noted Tony stifling a yawn, and said, “Bonnie, thank you so much for letting me interview you. Do you mind if I ping you for your contact information? I’d like to follow up on some details, but I think Tony here should help your sister find a safer location. We don’t want someone to get hurt while she’s loose in this alley, right?”

“Yeah.” Bonnie sighed and scrubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “Yeah, I guess so. I just wish I could say goodbye—hug her one more time.”

“But that could get you killed, sweetie,” Addie said, accidentally slipping out of her ‘reporter’ persona. Bonnie’s shoulders started to shake and quiver up and down as another bout of sobs slipped out of her, and Addie couldn’t resist pulling her into a hug. The poor woman started weeping in earnest as she collapsed into her.

“Oh, dear,” Rene said, putting a hand on Addie’s back as though she could lend more support. “Oh, my.”

“Go, Tony,” Addie said over the top of Bonnie’s bedraggled hair. As he nodded and slipped out the door, she called, “Hold it open for my drone!” The door opened a little, and then her drone slipped out. With most of her consciousness, she watched Tony look up and down the alley while, with her body, she comforted Bonnie.

***

Tony scanned the alley, his eye skimming over the dumpsters, piles of plastic containers, and stacks of crates. He wished he had a PAI to interface with his optics so he could analyze the shadows and look for patterns, but he didn’t. “Don’t even have optics, really, just an optic,” he chuckled.

When he didn’t see anything moving, he stepped out of the shadow of the building into the center of the alley to get a better view. A cat yowled, and he heard the clatter of empty cans on concrete, drawing his attention to a large dumpster a little further into the alley. He started for it, wondering what to look for. Would the fade just look like a person? He’d asked Addie, and she’d said yes; the pictures she’d seen on the net looked like people, but Tony didn’t quite buy it. How did people know it was a fade, then?

A shadow on his blind side made him jump and whirl, but it was just Addie’s drone humming softly in the air above him. He almost flipped her the bird but restrained himself; she was a sweet kid and definitely hadn’t meant to startle him. “Kid,” he chuckled. How old was she? Not too much younger than he was, but she gave off a certain vibe, almost like a quixotic idealism, with all her talk of saving the world with her news stories. It was sweet, but it was also more than a little naïve.

Another clatter from the dumpster ahead brought Tony back to the present, and he focused on the shadows beyond the big plasteel container. He supposed he didn’t need to be sneaking, not if he wanted to get the thing’s attention, so he whistled and called out, “Yo! Who’s there?”

“Hmm?” a high-pitched, breathy voice replied, and then, a woman stepped out from behind the dumpster, and Tony took a step back. She made him think of speed fiends, the way she moved, all jerky and twitchy, with fingers splayed and her back in an awkward, painful-looking twist, angled one way at the hips and another at her neck. Speed fiends always had tell-tale bloodshot eyes, jittery fingers, missing teeth, and stained lips, but this lady just looked…wrong.

Her dark brown eyes darted left, right, up, down. She worked her mouth like she had a wad of rubber in there, and she couldn’t quite chew it down to swallow it. When she moved away from the dumpster in her loose, thigh-length T-shirt, hanging in ragged strips, she seemed to skip a step—one second, a foot from the dumpster, the next, three feet. The weird, jerky movement startled Tony to the point where he cussed and started backpedaling. He tried to remember the fade’s name. “Uh, Deirdre?”

Addie’s drone hummed as it swooped past him, circling the woman, no doubt getting some sweet three-hundred-sixty-degree shots. The fade started toward him, jerkily stepping, her ankles and knees bending and unbending at all the wrong moments. One of her rolling, constantly moving eyes seemed to settle on Tony, and then, like a switch being thrown, she focused on him, falling utterly still as she crouched, staring. “Warm?”

“Hey, uh, Deirdre, let’s get you out of—”

“Warm!” she wailed, and then she charged. Tony’s eyes flew wide when she closed the gap between them in less than two seconds, flickering through the space like she was blinking in and out of reality. He backpedaled so frantically that his sneaker slipped on a smashed, discarded pouch of moldy nut spread, and he almost fell on his butt. Deirdre’s ragged, grime-stained hand windmilled toward him, and he felt it go through his knee. It felt like someone injected ice into his femoral artery.

“Fuck!” Tony shouted, no longer trying to play it cool for Addie’s camera. He pushed with his legs, twisted at the waist, and then, like hell was opening up behind him, he sprinted for the alley opening. He could feel her behind him, hear her weird clacking teeth and strange hissing breaths.

Tony had been chased before. He’d been chased by guys who wanted him dead, so he wasn’t a stranger to the adrenaline madness of it, but this was another level. The fade was just not right. Just the sight of her had given him chills, and hearing her behind him while he strained to break every world-record sprint in the history books was enough to send chills up and down his spine while adrenaline slammed into his muscles almost like a back-alley wire-job.

He slid around the corner, saw some kids on the street corner ahead, and screamed, “Fade! Look out!” They looked at him, saw him hauling ass with the weird, flickering, clacking, moaning woman behind him, and made tracks away from the corner. Tony cut across the street, slid over the hood of an AutoCab, and gained a few seconds' lead on the fade as it slammed into the yellow, domed vehicle. When Tony reached the sidewalk, he slid to a halt against the building and whirled to see what was happening.

The Fade was halfway through the cab, flickering and jerking, moving inch by inch as it seemingly popped in and out of existence. There were other people around, but only a few. Still, Tony didn’t want the fade to get distracted and follow another person, so he stood and waited, his eyes locked with the crazed, staring gaze of the creature formerly known as Deirdre.

The cab wasn’t faring well; whatever weird thing the dust corruption did to her, whatever it was that made her flicker out of this reality and back, was apparently anathema to the circuitry of the AI driving the vehicle. It was stopped, lights blinking, and, as Tony watched, it began to broadcast strange, broken messages like, “Redmond and Everly, forty-three Sol-bits. A beverage would quench your thirst! Try a Spark Drizzle today! Please fasten your safety belts!”

Then the fade was through the cab, and Tony was sprinting away, following the route he and Addie had planned out before going to see Beef. They’d purposefully chosen a path that primarily stuck to alleys and vacant lots, not wanting the fade to get distracted by other people. He wasn’t sure what rules governed the fade’s speed, but it felt like it caught up to him easily, and he could feel those weird cold infusions as it stretched out its hands to grasp at his back. Each time it happened, he wondered if he was going to die, but he didn’t.

Addie said she’d researched fades as much as she could on the city net, but there wasn’t much info out there. She said the harm they did was by phasing into existence inside another person. Tony was pretty sure the fade was just touching him while it was phased out. If it phased in while it touched him… He didn’t want to think about it.

He bought himself time by leaping over obstacles. In his third alley, he hopped a dumpster, vaulting it with a pull of his mechanical arm, then sliding over the closed plastic flaps. The fade slammed into the garbage-filled container, and Tony ran to the end of the alley, pausing there to watch it work its way through. When it emerged, it waited for a moment as though Tony had been forgotten, but he whistled and locked eyes with it again, and then the chase was on.

He liked how that had worked, so he used that strategy two more times on the way to the skeleton buildings, giving himself lots of time to catch his breath as the fade struggled with the obstacles. All the while, Addie’s drone swooped around the two of them, and he figured she was loving the footage.

The last alley ran all the way to the chain-link fence that blocked off the four unfinished high-rise apartment buildings. He delayed the fade by vaulting a stack of old, greasy pallets, and as it struggled to phase through, Tony leaped onto the fence. He cleared it in seconds, scrambling up and hanging on the far side to drop down, facing the fade as it worked its way through the pallets. “Come on, beautiful. Come and get me.”

“Warm!” it wailed, and then it was through the pallets and flickering toward him. Tony turned and ran for the soaring building skeleton behind him. Addie said the rads in the place were unhealthy, but only if you hung around for a while. He didn’t intend to, but he wasn’t worried, anyway. His cheap-ass dust reactor couldn’t do much to clean rads out of his blood, but his nanites could. Even only working sporadically, they could handle a minor exposure; it wasn’t like they had much else to do at the moment.

He dodged around piles of rusty fencing, half-fallen scaffolding, and abandoned construction materials—weather-ruined drywall, pallets of industrial laminate, and a hundred other things that might be valuable to the right kind of desperate individual. It spoke volumes that it was all still there; people were afraid of the rads and the other bogeyman stories. Addie said fragments from the Blast had landed there—pieces of the Aurora Gate. She said weird animal sounds came from the skeleton buildings at night. Tony figured it was just kids messing around, but who could know for sure?

When the first set of concrete steps came into view, Tony looked over his shoulder to ensure the fade was still coming, then bounded up. He ran through sheets of hanging plastic, leaped over waste barrels, slid under a collapsed scaffolding, and then jumped off the edge of the building, aiming for a twenty-foot pile of sand. It wasn’t as soft as he’d hoped—decades of rain and wind had added some dirt to the mix, and tiny plants were taking root, but he broke through the crust and cushioned his fall on the mushy pile well enough.

He slid down the far side, pausing at the bottom to stare at the skeleton he’d abandoned. He didn’t see any sign of the fade, which was what he’d hoped; it meant it was wandering through the derelict building looking for him. Tony leaned forward, hands on his knees, catching his wind, and that’s when he saw Addie’s drone drifting down toward him, coming in for a close-up. He lowered his shades and winked his eye. “How was that for a chase scene?”