Fade to Black

39

Minx hesitated and looked away, a faint smile curving the comer of her lips. When she did that, Monk now knew, she was listening to radio calls or maybe getting a telecom call over her implanted headware. She had once been a sort of messenger. Now, she mostly took calls from friends.

The change didn't affect that, the implants. After the change you couldn't get stuff like that put in, for various reasons that Minx hadn't yet explained, but anything you had before the change went on working just like before.

Which was good, Monk thought.

Now, Minx looked at him and smiled.

"It's time," she said.

"Uh-huh."

They ran-ran and ran-down stairs, down a long tunnel, more stairs, through a door, then onto the elevated walkway beside the lanes of a transitway. They had to run because they had what Minx called "only a small window of opportunity." That meant they had to be fast. They had to be "on time."

The red-hued darkness didn't slow them down. Monk could see just fine. Better than in full daylight, in fact.

A huge stepvan with flaring strobes and flashing lights came screaming around the comer of the transitway and screeched to a halt right in front of them. The passenger door banged open. Minx tugged on Monk's hand and they scrambled inside.

The truck roared and raced ahead. The slag at the wheel in the Omni Police Services uniform looked at them and grinned. His eyes glared a fiery red. He laughed. Minx covered her mouth and swayed with silent laughter. Monk couldn't resist a grin, though he wasn't exactly sure just what he was grinning about.

Minx had this sort of private joke between her and her friends that wasn't entirely clear. Monk guessed it had something to do with what they were, or what they had become, or the change, or something, but he hadn't quite figured it out.

Minx didn't seem to mind.

"You're so booty," she told him. "You'll scan it. Just give it time."

The stepvan roared out onto some ground-level street, and everything got hazy and foggy. The haze and denser patches of fog all looked kind of reddish. Everything did.

Abruptly, they came to a halt in what looked like the middle of a war zone. Police cruisers everywhere, flashing strobes, slags in uniforms, slags with guns. Minx grabbed Monk's hand and pulled him from the stepvan. There was a body on the pavement just a few meters away. The body of an Asian woman.

Minx smiled and nodded, urging him with her eyes, her whole expression, to go ahead.

Monk knelt down. The Asian woman might have looked dead, just at a glance, 'cause there was a lot of blood, but she wasn't really dead, not quite yet. The subtle radiance of the living lingered about her body. It was hard to see, and Monk had only just recently begun to notice this kind of thing, but now that he knew what to look for, now that Minx had pointed it out, he could see it and see it clearly, as long as he took a moment to look.

He leaned down and put his mouth over the woman's mouth, then slowly inhaled. He kept inhaling till he felt a tingling suffuse his whole body. With that tingling came a pleasure even better than sex, at least in his limited experience. It was more than just physical pleasure. It made him feel full, strong, powerful, almost indomitable. If he let his imagination run wild, a danger Minx had warned him about, he could almost see himself possessing such great power that almost anything…

Minx squeezed his shoulder, and bent to kiss him. They exchanged breaths, exhaling into each other's mouths, then inhaling that sweet, sweet breath.

"Now it's my turn," she said softly, smiling.

Monk nodded. "Sure."

There were other bodies waiting.

They were at Chimpira when the call came in L. Kahn took it via the telecom at his booth. Ravage, sitting beside him, heard the entire exchange. An informant reported that the runners who had been hired to bust Ansell Surikov out of Maas Intertech had just been ambushed up in Sector 9. Police were at the scene, but the informant believed the runners to be dead.

L. Kahn broke the connection, sat still for a moment, then softly cursed. "I hired backup in depth and what happens? Daisaka Security gets them with a gunship. There's no justice. No justice at all."

Ravage agreed, and reached over and picked up L. Kahn's drink, drew it to her mouth and had a sip. L. Kahn frowned and looked at her. It was his unhappy frown. Intolerant

"I've had enough problems lately," he said. "Don't test my patience."

"I get these impulses," Ravage replied.

"You'll have to learn-"

If he had more to say, he didn't get it out. Ravage splashed the drink into his face. As he began reacting to that, she slashed her hand across his throat. The razors protruding from under her synthimplanted nails tore through flesh like a knife through air. No significant resistance.

As the first blood came pumping, pulsing, spraying out through the wounds, she reversed direction, making a fist and slamming it back into L. Kahn's face, shattering bone and gristle and driving his head against the back of the booth. The man bled, banged backward, and slumped in little more than an instant.

Then Ravage hopped up and away, before any of the blood and gore could stain her clinging silver-hued bodysuit.

The pair of orks L. Kahn had hired as extra guards turned to look, then just looked at her and waited. These particular orks had no illusions about their place in the Newark underworld. They understood that when orders came from above, the good soldier simply nodded and obeyed. In this case, they had accepted nuyen from her, from her new employer, before nodding and pledging obedience. With a quick gesture she indicated that they should take charge of the body.

"Toss it in the Ditch."

Sanitation would cart it away.

On her way out of the club, Ravage stopped at a telecom and dialed the number her new boss had given her. The boss' helper answered, a dark-skinned elf. He looked a question at her.

"It's done," she told him.

"Muy bien," the elf replied.

That finished her biz for the night.

The sunlight seeping through the dark, grime-smeared window swelled and faded away. Days were passing, but Rico hardly noticed. He lay on a bare mattress on the floor of a squalid room in an abandoned building. He had a bottle by his side and some food. He had bandages wrapped around his chest and covering more cuts and gouges than he had interest in counting. Some fleeting instinct for survival had compelled him to find a street doc and go to the safest refuge he knew.

When he finally woke up in that alley, he'd gone back for Piper, but by then the streets were deserted, the bodies gone. Even the wreck of the van had been removed. It took the heart out of him. Maybe it had cost him his soul.

Little things came to mind now, how. Piper used to smile or laugh, the way she cast her eyes down when something embarrassed her. For all the razor-edged skill she'd had as a decker, she had been and would always be in his memory a reticent Japanese, a soft-spoken, loving, and loyal woman, more beautiful than any he had ever known. It occurred to him that this crumbling building wasn't far from where they had first met. This very apartment was where they had first made love. The place hadn't been such a wreck those few years ago. It had been tired and worn, but safe. Quiet.

How many months had they lived here? He couldn't remember. He'd been surprised to find the building still standing.

It was all he had left. He hadn't been smart enough to save anyone. He'd let them be used by the megacorps. Sure, they got Farrah Moffit together with the real Surikov-and had turned the pair over to Maas Intertech, but so what?

What did that matter now?

In the night he smashed the bottle and brought the jagged end to his neck, and held it there a couple of minutes. He felt the jagged knife-edge of glass grazing his skin, but he knew that this was futile. He didn't have the strength to do it. He didn't care enough to end it. He lowered his arm and let the broken bottle roll away. It was over. He was already dead. He would just lie here till the final fragments faded into the night.

Hours passed. He became aware of some soft sounds, faraway creaks and squeaks. He thought of rats and devil rats and the other creatures that inhabited the darker corners of the plex, and then the door to the room slowly swung inward.

A pair of dark figures appeared in the doorway, silhouetted by the deeper black of the hall. One looked small and seemed curved like a female. The other one had the heavy build of a big male, big enough even for an ork. "I knew I would find you here."

What the frag… The voice was Piper's. Slowly, Rico sat up, shifting his Jikku eyes to low-light to better scan the doorway. To his astonishment, he saw Piper standing there, and Shank. They looked battered and bloody, but they were standing there alive. Rico struggled to speak He couldn't manage anything coherent He couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"One short sleep past and we recycle endlessly, jefe," Piper said softly. "And I'm going to prove it to you, my love, but first you must let me kiss you."

She shifted closer, smiling warmly.

Her eyes glowed a fiery red.