I closed the log. Four minutes and fifty-two seconds. Hundreds of entries in under five minutes.
Sasha was still waiting for an answer. Her fingers had suddenly stopped moving in my hair.
"I'm…" I started, and then I had nothing to put after it.
"Okay. Different question." She shifted under my head. "Was that them? Did they get into your system? Did Biotechnica follow me here?"
"No." That one I knew. "It's not Biotechnica."
"You're sure?"
I looked up at her. My eyes wouldn't focus without me squinting.
"I'm sure. Nobody followed you. Or me."
Some of the stiffness slowly went out of her legs under my head.
"Is it a virus? Something I can catch?"
"No."
"Is it a cyberpsycho thing?" She said it lightly.
"No."
Fuck if I know, actually. I feel like myself. Still better than saying maybe.
"Then what is it?"
Every honest answer started with SC. Oh, there's a growth in my head that calls itself a function and can control my body, nothing to worry about. Yeah, no.
"I don't know how to say it yet, but I will," I said.
There must be a way to explain it that causes the least trouble. SC can answer me, and with time I will pry out every little piece of information I need.
She was quiet for a while.
"Okay," she said finally. "That's still better than what I had in my head."
Then she took her hand out of my hair and put it in her lap.
"Bit by bit," she said. "Right."
I tried to sit up. The meds were still in the car, she was burning up, and there was a list of things I needed to do. I couldn't remember half of it, but I knew I couldn't stay down at a time like this. I got as far as my elbows.
Sasha put her left hand flat on my chest and pushed me back down.
She didn't even push hard. I put absolutely everything I had into getting up, and her hand didn't move. That hand just sat on my sternum like it was bolted there.
Her hands are chrome, but nothing past her wrists is built for strength. How can she be that strong? Frustrating.
"Stay," she said. "Good boy."
Normally I'd have a comeback. I had nothing. She didn't even smile at her own joke. She wasn't letting me go anywhere.
"Meds," I said instead. "Car. Passenger seat. Medkit's under it."
She didn't move right away. She was looking intently at my leg. Just above the boot the leg of my undersuit had gone dark and stiff, and a fresh wet patch was spreading over the old one.
"What's that?"
"Shotgun pellets. It's nothing to worry about for now."
"Nothing to worry about," she repeated flatly. "Okay. That's coming out. All of it."
"Sasha-"
"Fucking dammit. Just stay here. I got it." She took her hand back slowly, watching me the whole time. When I didn't move, she got up.
I raised my head to look over and the blood began dripping from my nose again.
It wasn't pretty. She used the wall, then the tire shelf, and her legs locked a second before the rest of her was ready. But she stood. Trailing one hand along the shelf, she walked over to the Quadra and reached inside.
She came back with the pharmacy bag, the medkit and the taco bag hooked on one finger, and carefully lowered herself down next to me in stages.
She went through the bag one item at a time. Then she snapped a cooling pack and stuck it behind her own neck with a long hiss through her teeth. I reached for the second pack to help, and she moved it out of my reach without even looking.
"I got it. Lie still."
"You shouldn't. You're the one with the fever."
"So are you." She pressed the back of her fingers to my forehead and pulled them away. "Ooh. You're hotter than me, actually."
"What?"
"Temperature, dummy."
I checked. The biomonitor agreed with her hand.
///CORE TEMPERATURE 38.4°C///
Great. Fucking fantastic. But the readings showed little to no load on the cyberdeck itself. It can't be that. It is a fever.
Sasha opened the medkit and looked over my legs.
"Fuck. Where were you hit?"
"I don't-"
"Boots first," she said.
The laces had soaked up days of grime and dried stiff, and the knots wouldn't give. She picked at them with her fingers for a few seconds and gave up. Then the tip of her index finger split and folded back, a single claw slid out, and she cut the lace with one pull.
Bracing the heel of the boot against her hip, she pulled.
My own toenails were long again. They grow like bamboo shoots no matter how close I cut them. The two synthetic ones still had the same neat little nails they came with. Next to the others they looked civilized. Fake, but in one piece.
I should get new legs. Something to improve my mobility.
Her lip twitched, and she moved around to my other boot.
The jacket I got off myself, one arm at a time, sitting up just long enough for her to pull it out from under me. Something rattled in the inside pocket. A spent casing? I forgot it was in there.
Then the undersuit. It doesn't come off. It peels.
The seal runs down the middle of my back, from the nape of my neck to the base of my spine. I reached back for the tab at my neck. My fingers found it. They just wouldn't close on it. I tried three times. What the fuck.
Sasha watched me try. Then she simply reached past my hand, hooked one claw under the tab and ran the seal down my back in one long pull.
"Arms," she said.
You can't pull a suit like that off. You roll it down, inside out, slowly, an inch at a time. The sweat from the fever had glued it to my shoulders, and she had to work it loose with her thumbs before it would go. She rolled it over my arms and down my chest. The mesh over my ribs still had the small round dents in it from the rounds it stopped this morning. She ran her thumb over one of them and didn't say anything.
At my thighs it stuck.
The dried blood had glued the fabric into two of the holes. She pulled once, the skin came with it, and I yelped.
She opened one of the bottles of Real Water and poured it slowly over the fabric. Medical edition, and she was pouring it on my legs. Then she waited patiently, pinching the fabric between two fingers, until it let go on its own.
Further down, the suit was stiff where the mesh had caught the pellets and spread them out instead of letting them through. When she rolled it past my shins, something clicked on the concrete. Then again. Then three more. Little gray balls of shot, flattened on one side, falling out of the mesh where they had been stuck since this morning.
Under the mesh my shins were yellow and purple. That was all. The skin weave took the rest. Worth its money.
She sat back on her heels and looked at me.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what?"
"Whatever you're about to say."
"I wasn't going to say anything." She was already wiping her claws with an antiseptic pad, one at a time.
The pad came away brown. Dried blood, packed into the seams where the claws fold away. Mine was still wet. The claw on her left ring finger was gone, snapped off at the root. She dropped the pad, took a fresh one and did them all again.
"You're very pale. How much blood did you lose?"
"I feel fine. Not that much."
She put two claws together and folded the rest back. Forceps.
"Hold still," she said. "Or don't. Up to you how many holes you want. I'll be quick. Promise."
I nodded.
She pressed around the first hole with her thumb until she finally found the hard little lump under the skin. Then she went in without hesitating. A twist, a pull, and it came out with a wet click and went into the lid of the medkit with the others.
The second one was deeper. I pressed my palm flat against the floor and held my breath through it.
"You can scream if you want," she said. "I won't tell anybody."
"I'm good. It's nothing."
"Mm-hm."
Fuck, that hurt.
She found the third one completely by accident, higher up on my right thigh, where I didn't even know I had one. The hole had already scabbed over. A hard little crust with a pink ring around it, over a pellet that went in just a few hours ago.
She looked at me. I looked at the ceiling. I don't understand how it works and I will not give it away.
She opened it back up with the tip of one claw and took the pellet out anyway.
Then she packed the holes with gauze and wrapped both thighs, tight and fast, the way somebody does who has done it before. Her hands were perfectly steady the whole time. The second she tied off the last bandage they started shaking, and she put them under her arms.
"Thanks," I said.
I'd pay her back. I didn't know with what yet. I promised her a custom gun before.
She wet the washcloth I bought for her fever with what was left in the bottle and wiped the blood off my lip and from under my nose. Short little strokes, frowning the whole time. It can't be that bad, it's just a little blood.
"Did you take the pills?" I asked.
"I'm literally holding the box, Caelen."
I looked. She was. I didn't remember seeing it in her hand, but there it was.
She went back to my face. Her claws quietly folded away into fingers again. My eyes kept trying to close. I kept making them open.
"Did you take your pill?" I asked.
Her hand stopped.
She looked at me for a long second. Her eyes did the thing where they couldn't hold still, jumping to the side and coming back.
"Yes," she said slowly. "I did."
I didn't remember asking before. From her face, I had.
Shit.
She didn't say anything about it. She folded the washcloth, put it on the medkit and pulled the taco bag over.
The tacos were ruined. The shells had gone soft on the drive, then soggy sitting in the car, and the sauce had soaked through everything, including the bag. Sasha opened it and stared inside for a while.
"Rest in peace," she said.
"I was going to bring them to you warm."
We ate sitting on the floor with our backs to the wall and our shoulders touching, because neither of us could sit up straight on our own. I finished my first one in four bites. My body wanted more before I even swallowed. They tasted awful.
I ate the second. Then the third. By the fourth I could actually feel the heat going out of my face. The biomonitor said 38.0. Food in, numbers down. Correlation or causation?
Sasha ate half of hers.
She chewed slowly for a long time and swallowed hard. Then she put the other half back on the paper and wiped her fingers.
"Thanks," she said quietly. "For these. Really."
"They taste like shit. Explains why that choom was selling them so cheap."
"Agree." She leaned her head back against the wall.
I ate her half too, and the one at the bottom of the bag that had fallen apart completely. My stomach was full, and I was still hungry.
I dug the electrolyte powder out of the pharmacy bag. One sachet per liter, it said. The bottles were half a liter, and she had already poured one of them on my legs. I tore a sachet, tipped about half of it into a fresh bottle and held it out.
She took it and drank half of it in one go, then made a face.
"You didn't shake it."
The pill was clearly getting to her. Her head would tip forward, she'd pull it back up, and it would tip again a little further.
"I can carry you," I said. "To bed. Then I'll do the tires."
"What tires?"
"The Quadra's. They're low. I could hear it on the way back."
She looked at me.
"And I have to adjust my…" I thought about it. "Yes. My automatic connection protocols."
"Caelen."
"You're lying down."
"I've got stuff to do."
"You just told me your stuff. It can wait."
She got her hand around my wrist and stood up, wall first, then shelf, and pulled. I tried to stay on the floor. I got up anyway.
In my old room she pointed at the mattress.
"Lie down."
I lay down. She pulled the blanket over me, all the way up to my chin, like that would keep me there. Then, instead of lying down next to me like this morning, she sat at the foot of the mattress with her back against the wall and her knees pulled up. As far from me as the mattress allowed.
"You're not lying down?"
"I'm watching you."
"That's creepy."
"Close your eyes."
"You close yours."
"I'm watching you. Don't do anything."
Her head slowly tipped forward. She pulled it back up. It tipped again. Somewhere around the fourth time she slid sideways down the wall and ended up curled on the corner of the mattress by my feet, one hand resting on the blanket over my ankle.
I waited.
I counted to three hundred to be sure. I lost count somewhere in the forties and started over. Then again, in the forties. Forty-two, forty-three.
Her breathing went slow and even. Her hand slid off my ankle on its own.
I eased out from under the blanket.
I pulled the door almost shut behind me, leaving a crack about two fingers wide. My work coveralls still hung behind the storage room door, where I'd left them. I stepped into them and tied the arms around my waist. Then the jacket, over nothing.
…
The garage was quiet. My head was quiet too, and I didn't trust that one bit.
Any noise would wake Sasha. She needs to rest. I can't.
For weeks there was always something back there, constantly. A complaint about food. A word. Something. An hour ago it was a hundred people screaming over each other. Now there was nothing at all. Dead fucking air.
So what else is gone that I don't know to look for? I can't search for a file I don't know I had.
I opened the log again and read it properly this time, from the first line, the way I used to read crash logs back home. Slowly. Every line.
The lights. The shutter. The Quadra. Engine, headlights, horn, both doors. A Delamain booking to 1420 Daniels, Unit 4B, cancelled, fee charged. A message to David didn't go through. The calls. Vik. Vik. 4746666364749393: caller ID invalid. Vik. Stella, cancelled. Yoko. David, cancelled. Shoto, cancelled. Mom: caller ID invalid. Mom: caller ID invalid. Mom: caller ID invalid.
The number starts with a four and a seven. Same as the voice said. I read it twice and moved on. No use even deleting it.
All of that I expected. It went through me into everything I own, so of course it's all in there.
What I didn't expect was everything in between.
///NEURAL INTERFACE: CHANNEL LOST///
///NEURAL INTERFACE: CHANNEL REMAPPED///
Over and over. Every few seconds, for the whole four minutes and fifty-two seconds. I stopped counting at three hundred entries.
My deck reads me through the mainline. That's basically all it does. When Vik put it in, I spent five hours lying on my stomach while it learned where everything in my head was. It maps you once and done. That's the whole point.
I remembered the words. The ones from the back of my skull, under all the voices. Adjustment. Continue. Cull. Search. Copy. Integrate. Resist.
Cull. As in cut out what you don't need.
So how do you talk to something like that?
You can't talk to it like a person. Every time I asked it why, I got nothing. When it does answer, it's one word. Food. Adjustment. Continue. So no why. One question at a time. Something it can answer with one word.
And no threats. It had my arm today. It had my voice. Threatening it from inside my own head would be stupid. No begging either.
So I didn't ask it anything. If it can hear me, it heard me read the log. No reason to tell it what I figured out.
And it does the heavy work while I'm asleep. That's when the copies always came. If that was the rushed version, I didn't want to find out what it does with eight hours.
The rest of my messages were waiting too. Yoko first.
"Done. Building's wiped, street's looped. Your car was never there. Pay up."
"Also you called me and breathed into the mic. Don't fuckin do that ever again. I will end you."
"Sasha is still not answering me. Make her."
Sasha was asleep in the next room. If Yoko knew she was here, Yoko would come here, and I didn't want anybody here.
"Misdial. Here you go," I wrote back, and transferred the money. "About Sasha. I'll see what I can do."
I had no plans to see Yoko in person for now, and I wasn't putting where Sasha was into a message. Not over comms nobody could vouch for.
"Misdial? And you landed on a Y? Totally fucking believable. Ok."
Vik was next. He kept it short, as always.
"Three calls. Nobody on the line. Are you dying?"
"Misdial. All good."
I'll recover from this all on my own.
"Don't mess with the old man's heart like that. You know how it is with you. Still on some sparring this Saturday? You can bring David so I can take a look at him again. Jackie can go easy."
Not happening.
Delamain has a record of me booking a ride to Kurosaki's door and cancelling it. Delamain is supposed to be an independent entity. If that information ends up in the wrong hands, I'm fucked.
Tech Orthodoxy already bought my car and my old face from Shoto's people. Biotechnica wanted her alive, and they know she got out. And the school I'm sending David back to belongs to Arasaka. What can I do?
Fine. Do things. Things I can check.
I went to the console by the shutter. I've had admin on this place since Sasha rebuilt the security, and today that meant the thing in my head had it too. No account, no access. I don't trust myself with any of it anymore. I took my account off the shutter, the front door and the lights. If it wants the shutter open, it can walk over and press the button like everybody else.
Then I checked that it took. Then I checked again. Then once more, because fuck it.
The front door. I turned the lock back and forth twice and listened to it. Then once more.
My Unity was still empty. I couldn't reload it this morning with my fingers the way they were. I should do it now.
I stood next to the car for a while. Limiting my own access to the remote controls is too big of a limitation. Add a double security measure later.
Then I opened the passenger door by hand and sat down sideways with my feet on the floor outside. The box of .45 was in the glovebox. I loaded the magazine one round at a time, because my fingers still weren't right. One slipped and rolled down between the seat and the door. The same gap David's round fell into today. I dug it out, slapped the magazine in and let the slide go.
Now what can I do? My gaze shifted all around the garage.
Sprocket's receipt book was under the bench, where it always was. SC reads my messages. It can't read paper. Probably. She wrote on the front of every page, so I used the backs. 1420 Daniels, Unit 4B. Friday, usually. A camera, a better one than mine. The Quadra stays ten blocks out. Or even just walk all the way there in disguise. Nobody sees me, and if somebody does, they don't get to describe me. At the bottom I wrote "check Dee" and underlined it twice.
Then I sat down on the floor next to her door, with my back to the wall and the Unity in my lap, facing the shutter. From there I could see the front door, the shutter and the crack in her door. Three ways in. One gun. Eleven rounds.
If they come for her, the first one through the front door gets two in the chest before the door finishes opening. The second one I keep alive long enough to tell me who sent him.
I planned it four different ways. Then again with my legs not working. Then with my hands not working. More proximity mines. I need more.
The strip of daylight under the shutter crawled maybe an inch across the concrete.
Somebody hit the shutter.
Three times. An open palm, by the sound of it. The whole shutter rattled in its rails anyway.
"Hello? You open or what?"
The Unity was up before I even decided anything.
I pulled up the outside camera. One guy. Forties. A work jacket with a logistics logo on the back, the kind they give you for free and then take out of your pay. An old Mahir Supron made a noise I could hear through the shutter. A sort of grinding whistle.
I quickly scanned him. Name, a pile of parking fines, a warehouse job in Watson. No bounty. No record. Nobody.
Nobody is exactly who I would send.
I went out through the front door, opening it slowly by hand, with the Unity behind my back. All the while I watched the camera for any moves.
"Oh, hey! Hey, man. You're open?"
"No."
"Lights are on, though."
"Closed."
"Oh. Okay. Okay, it's just, I came here like, a while ago? Brakes? The old hag did them in like forty minutes, and it was super cheap, like way cheaper than the place on the corner saying I need new-"
"Fuck off."
He laughed. He honestly thought I was joking.
"Ha. No, but seriously, listen to it." He pointed at his car with his whole arm, in case I missed it. "It's doing the thing again. Like a whistle? But grinding?"
"Fuck off," I repeated, slowly this time.
"Okay, but, like, tomorrow then? What time do you guys open?"
"We don't."
"Is the old lady here? She'll do it, she likes me. She said I was the only one who ever-"
She doesn't like anybody. She'd throw him out for talking this much.
His hand went into his jacket pocket. My finger was on the trigger behind my back before I thought about it. I'll shoot him in the heart.
He took out a pack of gum and held it up to where I was staring.
"Want one?"
"Fuck. Off."
He finally actually looked at me. My face, my bare chest under the jacket, the blood soaking through the coveralls at both thighs, my bare feet. Something in his head connected for the first time all day.
"Okay. Okay, jeez. I'm going. I thought we were chooms and all that crap. Guess you hate getting money."
He got back in. The car ground and whistled all the way to the corner. Then the car stopped, the window rolled down, and he leaned out.
"Hey! You know anywhere else that's cheap? A referral maybe?"
I stared at him.
"Okay! Bye!"
Cheap and quick. He's lucky she didn't come out here herself. Saying that shit to her does nothing but piss her off.
I went back inside, shut the door and turned the lock back and forth twice.
She'd want to know. She always wants to know who came by, even the ones she throws out.
I turned toward the back of the shop.
"Sprocket, some idiot with a Supron says you did his brakes. Did you hear that stupid bastard, he-"
Sasha was pressed flat to the wall next to the door, right where anybody coming in would walk straight past her. I didn't hear my door open, or her feet on the concrete, or anything at all. Her left arm hung low and away from her body, and the monowire ran from her palm almost to the floor. I only saw it because it caught the light every time her hand shook.
And it was shaking. All of her was. Her eyes were on the door behind me.
If I'd come in fast, she'd have taken my head off.
Behind her, both lifts were empty. The bench at the back was empty. Sprocket's arms were wrapped up on the shelf where I left them, and the rest of her was in cold storage somewhere in town, still waiting for me.
Sprocket is dead.
"Hey," I said. "Sasha?"
She didn't move.
"Some guy. Just a customer. He's gone."
Her eyes went to me. The Unity in my hand. My old coveralls. My bare feet. I must have looked like a lunatic.
The wire began going back into her palm, slowly, in little jerks, catching every few inches. When the end of it disappeared, her knees went.
I caught her with one arm and put the Unity on the shelf with the other.
She didn't let me hold her for long, though. She got her feet under her and pushed off my chest to stand on her own, wobbling.
"You waited," she said quietly.
"What?"
"You waited until I was asleep."
I didn't say anything.
"Why would you even open the door? Alone?"
"It was one guy. I scanned him."
"You scanned him." She looked away. "I was right there. You could've woken me up."
"You needed the sleep."
"So did you." Her voice went flat. "You don't tell me anything. You just go."
Her left hand was still balled up in the front of my jacket. She looked down at it for a second, at her own fist, and didn't open it.
"Bed," she said.
"Sasha-"
"Bed."
I went. She walked behind me the whole way and she didn't take my arm when I held it out.
"Lie down."
I lay down.
This time she lay down too. There isn't much mattress. We ended up face to face, close enough that I could feel how hot her breath was. She found my hand without opening her eyes, pulled it in against her collarbone and held it there with both of hers.
"So I'll know," she mumbled.
"Know what?"
"Shut up. Sleep."
I closed my eyes and let my breathing go slow and even, the way hers had gone the first time.
Her pulse ticked under my knuckles.
Whatever SC was going to do while I was out, it was going to do it with her holding my hand. That's not good. I could slide my hand out a finger at a time. I'd done it once today already.
I started with the little finger.
"That's not how you sleep," she said.
Her eyes were still closed.
I stopped.
She let go of my hand with one of hers and laid her forearm across my face, over my eyes, gently. The inside of her wrist rested on my forehead.
Her arm stayed where it was.
In the dark under it, the log was still up on my HUD. 4746666364749393. I closed it. I opened it again and read it one more time. Then I closed it for real.
Seventeen minutes to David's ping. I told myself he'd still be in 106 when I woke up.
Then I was out.
…
I woke up and knew where I was. Good start. Moldy ceiling, scratched-out name on the wall. Her side of the mattress was empty and cold. No.
00:12.
///CORE TEMPERATURE 37.4°C///
Almost twelve hours. Absolutely nothing. No dreams, no other convulsions, no words from the back of my skull. I sleep four hours a night. Every night. Half a day of black, and I woke up feeling better than I had all week.
I didn't like that at all.
The Unity was on the floor by the mattress. I'd left it on the shelf. She must have brought it in.
My head hurt, a dull pressure behind both eyes, and I was hungry enough to feel it in my teeth. I can work with that.
Two pings from the kid had come in while I was out. Same inn. He hasn't moved. I looked at them longer than I needed to.
But where is she? Where is Sasha? She can't have left. No.
I sat up and the door was wide open.
"Where are you?" I wrote.
The answer came almost immediately.
"on the roof"
I fell back again on the mattress. Then I did what I should've done this morning and scrolled up.
Her messages from last night were all still there. The first one was from 03:41.
"u up? :3"
"theres 2 avs outside my window"
"like RIGHT outside. its not ncpd"
"caelen"
Three calls after that. All went unanswered.
"ok theyre in the building"
"they want me alive lol"
"worse for them"
I exhaled through my nose. She was making jokes through it all, god fucking dammit.
"if this goes bad i wiped u from all my stuff. they wont find u through me"
"dont be weird about it (¬`‸´¬)"
"i had fun btw"
"bye dummy <3"
Somewhere around the AVs I'd stopped breathing. I didn't notice until the last one.
03:58. The next one came at 05:51. One hour and fifty-three minutes.
"nvm alive somehow"
"becca and pilar bringing me to urs. let us in."
Every one of them was marked as read at 06:33.
At 06:33 I was still under. I didn't open my eyes until 07:13.
That piece of shit read her goodbye and let me sleep.
And this morning, when she asked why I didn't answer, I told her nothing can wake me up. Real smooth.
Fuck.
I read them all a second time, slowly, then lay there with my arm over my eyes for a bit.
Getting up was worse than I expected. My body wanted that mattress back and let me know about it in my knees, my lower back and somewhere behind my eyes. Whatever. I've walked on worse.
The garage was dark except for the console. The storage room door was open, and cold air was coming out of it.
I've known about the hatch since my first month here. It's in the storage room ceiling, behind the computer. A fold-down ladder, chained up to a hook in the ceiling, and two old padlocks on the hatch itself. The kind with actual keys. Sprocket kept those somewhere. Her car keys turned up in her apartment. These never did.
The ladder was fully down.
The chain lay on the floor under it. Both locks were open. I picked one up to check it, and the keyhole poured out tiny bits of metal. Its internal mechanism was broken.
She did all of that for what? To get up there?
I didn't know what to do with that. So I climbed.
…
It was comfortably chilly here, and the city noise was coming from everywhere at once.
Sasha was sitting in her underwear near the edge on the old tar, knees pulled up, arms around them, looking out at all of it. She didn't turn around when the hatch creaked. She'd heard me on that ladder long before that anyway.
"What's with the locks?"
"Dunno. They were in my way," she answered flatly. One of the claws slid out of her index finger, reflecting the light, and was retracted a second later.
Okay. Fair.
I sat down next to her. I didn't care about the view, I'd seen it. I looked at her instead. Her hair was even more of a mess. The plate along her thigh was scuffed dull from hip to knee, with two bright gouges where rounds had hit it at an angle and skipped off. A scorch mark ran across the wiring under her collarbone. Her knees were scraped raw. She hid it.
"How long have you been up here?"
"I don't know."
"Aren't you cold?"
"A little."
I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders. The cold air brushed against my chest.
She didn't say anything. She didn't take it off either. After a while she pulled it closed in front with one hand.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
Sorry I didn't answer. Sorry I wasn't there. Every version of it ended with me blaming SC, so I said nothing.
"Are you feeling better?" she asked.
"I'm all fine now. Are you?"
"Not sure. Did you read the messages?" she said.
"Yeah," I said. "I did."
She nodded. I couldn't get what she felt about it. Is she regretting sending them?
"Want to talk about it?"
For a while I really thought she wasn't going to answer.
"Yeah," she said. "But it's a trade. You're talking too. The real version." She glanced at me, just for a second. "Not later."
A trade?
How much can I give her without the rest coming with it? SC, some of it. Not the copies, not the voices. Arasaka leads to the kid. The kid leads to Gloria. So SC, the light version, and make it sound bigger than it is. Let her go first. Once she's spilled everything about last night, she won't have it in her to dig. I give her my part, she feels like we're even, and we both go to bed.
Good plan. It would have been better if I had time to optimize.
Sasha shifted over and leaned her shoulder into mine. She didn't look at me. She was burning hot against my bare arm.
An AV came in low over the rooftops a few blocks east, lights blinking, engines humming deep enough that I felt it in my chest. Sasha's head turned with it. She kept it in sight all the way across the sky until it went behind the towers in the distance.
Cargo hauler. A big ugly box with running lights and a logo on the side.
Her shoulder had gone stiff against mine, and her right hand was clamped around her left wrist hard enough that the metal creaked under her fingers.
"How long do you have?" I asked. "It's a long one."
She let go of her wrist.
Then she turned to me.
"I got all night. I'll go first. You'd take forever."
"Yeah."
I waited.
"So," she said. "Two AVs. Right outside the window. Big ones, the kind they fly elite squads around in. MaxTac has the same model." She held up two fingers. "Two of those, just to grab one netrunner in cat pajamas."
She waited for me to laugh. I didn't, and she didn't make me.
"Yeah," she said. "Not funny yet."
Down on the street a siren started up. It wailed past two blocks over and faded out, and neither of us said a thing about it.
"I woke up because the floor was humming," she said. "I thought it was the fridge. I lay there hating the fridge for a while." She pulled the jacket tighter. "Then the lights came through the blinds. Red, white, red, white. I counted them like an idiot. Eight on the one I could see."
"You know who I texted?" She wasn't looking at me. "You. Didn't even think about it. I mean, what would you have done?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
"I called you three times. It just rang." She breathed out through her nose.
"Then I got it. Whoever I call, that's where they go next. So I stopped calling, and I wiped you." She picked at the zipper of my jacket. "Chats. Calls. Everything with your name on it. The sketches." Her thumb stopped. "I had like forty versions of your face. Those really got me worried."
"And then I wrote you a bye." A short laugh, with nothing in it. "I've been writing those a lot lately."
"You say sorry, you say bye, you go," she said. "It's easy." She made a little flicking motion with her fingers, like getting rid of a crumb.
She went quiet.
"And then they came in."
Her right hand went back to her left wrist. The same grip as before, the metal screeching around her fingers.
"The first one through the door had this…" It was her gig voice, starting it the way she started all of them. It got that far and died.
She looked out over the edge for a while.
"I heard my claw go," she said. "It made this sound, like-"
She stopped. She didn't finish it.
I'd seen the stub this afternoon. I'd seen what was dried into the seams of the others.
"Somewhere in the middle, I figured something out," she said, and then she didn't say what.
I waited.
"Then it was quiet and I was still there." She shook her head at something. "I don't remember the stairs. I remember Becca's voice, telling me to shut up and stay awake at the same time. Pilar carried most of me. The truck bed was freezing."
"Last time I was ready."
She said it to the city.
"Biotechnica. I got what I went in for when I saw the documents. There wasn't anything after it, and I knew that. So I said sorry to whoever needed one, and I told you no, and that was supposed to be the end." Her jaw worked. "You came in anyway."
"This time…"
She stopped. Started again.
"This time I really didn't want to go."
Her voice caught on the last word and went flat again, like she'd stepped on it.
"I was on the floor and all I had in my head was not yet. Not yet, not yet." She swallowed. "I've never cared about tomorrow in my life, Caelen. Tomorrow was somebody else's problem. And now I'm up here worrying about it like some hopeless gonk."
"And if they come again, you're in the room."
She stopped there.
I looked at the plate on her thigh, at the gouges, at her knees.
"Why'd you hide all that?"
She looked at me like I'd asked something stupid, and didn't answer.
I'd spent the whole day doing the same thing to her. My reasons were worse.
The plan was still where I'd left it. Part of the reason she wanted to live was sitting next to her, doing math.
I let go of the plan. It didn't put up a fight in my head.
She was getting the real version. All of it. I could feel it lining up behind my teeth, ready to come out in one go, Gloria with it-
Room 106.
A kid with a revolver he loaded himself, in a motel I picked for him. If I told her about Gloria, it wouldn't be mine to carry anymore. It'd be hers too. One more person who could take his whole life apart with a sentence.
Yes?
Yes.
I pushed it down where I keep that stuff and waited until the gnawing subsided.
Everything else, then. Everything but that.
She was the one who broke the quiet. She turned my hand over in hers, like she was checking it for something.
"Hey. When this is over-"
She stopped.
"Yeah, okay," she said. "Whenever."
"Whenever what?"
"Give me a few hours sometime. I want to drag you somewhere." She made a face at herself. "My mom. Her niche, I mean."
"…Why?"
Sasha looked up at the sky.
"It's dumb. I want to introduce you to her."
An image of Gloria's urn popped up in my mind and I bit my tongue.
"Deal," I said. It came out too fast. "It's a promise."
"Thank you."
I didn't have anywhere to put it.
We sat like that for a while.
"Your turn," Sasha said.
My gut turned over. Fuck it.
"It's a ridiculous story."
Sasha looked at me.
"I said the real version."
"It is." I didn't know what to do with my hands. "You're gonna think I'm a psycho."
She blinked.
"We'll see."
She put her chin on her knees and waited, her shoulder still against mine.
No promises, then.
I looked down at the street.
"I died before," I said. "A previous life."
I didn't look at her. If I looked, I'd catch her deciding whether this was the cyberpsycho talking, and I'd never get to the end.
"It goes a little more every day. The details. But I remember being somebody else. Some guy with a desk job and nobody shooting at him." I was smiling, which was stupid. "I used to wake up to clean air. Sun through the blinds. Birds singing, every morning, loud as hell. I hated them."
I kept going before the quiet could turn into something.
"It wasn't here. About fifty years back, give or take, and a different fifty than yours. No Arasaka. Our tech didn't go into people." I heard it out loud. "Yeah. I know."
Nothing from her. Not even the jacket rustling.
"I had a sis- brother… No. Sorry, I-"
I went for it and came back with nothing. I didn't even know which one I'd had.
I didn't stop long enough for Sasha to ask.
"Anyway. That stuff goes. The night it ended doesn't."
My hands found a loose thread on the coveralls and started on it.
"Some guys walked into my house in the middle of the night. I woke up with one of them standing over the bed. They wanted money I didn't have. Had me mixed up with somebody else, and I couldn't make them believe it."
"They didn't even tie me up. Didn't need to. I sat on my own kitchen floor and did what they said. One of them went through my fridge and ate my leftovers standing at the counter while his buddy asked me the same question again. And again. I told the truth every time, and every time they hit me for it."
Wind came up the side of the building. I didn't feel it much.
"I kept waiting for someone. Police, neighbors, anybody. I said please instead. A lot. Didn't know I had that many in me. Heh." I pulled the thread tighter. "They thought that was funny."
"When they finally believed me, they just got bored. Took whatever they could carry. One of them shot me in the legs on his way out, and the other one was already at the door, complaining about the time they wasted on me."
The thread snapped.
"They didn't even bother to close the door behind them."
I didn't know what my face was doing, so I kept it pointed at the city.
"I got as far as my chair. Sat there and bled into it. It got cold, then it got colder, and nobody came. Nobody knew to. I didn't see heaven or hell. Just nothing."
"They didn't have to kick that door in on the way in, either. I forgot to lock it."
I made myself look at her.
"That's how I-"
Sasha stared at me wide-eyed, completely unblinking.
No. Please no.
"What year?"
Her work voice. Flat and quick. Not the voice I'd been bracing for.
"What?"
"Fifty years back, you said. What year?"
Nobody asks a cyberpsycho what year it was. Good sign?
"I said it was blurry," I said. "I don't know the exact one. Ended on an odd number. Maybe?"
"That's not a year."
"It's what I've got."
"A different fifty, you said. Different how?"
"Same history, mostly. Same wars, same presidents. Little things were off before that, like you had Arasaka and we didn't. But the big split is somewhere near the end of the last century. After that yours goes off the rails, and mine just kind of kept going."
Her eyes did the sideways jump they'd been doing since the raid. I didn't like how often it was happening.
"So how are you alive?"
"What?"
"Are you a robot? A clone? A nutjob who really, really believes he remembers his previous life?" It came out like a checklist. "Whose body is this?"
"No idea. Came with the chair."
"What chair?"
"Lawn chair. I woke up in it on the roof of the monorail station in the Glen. Jeans, a T-shirt. Nothing strange about them." I thought about it. "No underwear."
Her mouth opened and closed again.
"That's it? Nobody there? No ripper, no van, no suits? No clues?"
"I looked around. Just the chair."
"Who leaves a chair?"
"I've been asking myself that for a while."
"A while is how long?"
"Couple months now."
My shoulders came down.
"Does anybody else know?"
"No."
"Vik?"
"No."
"Yoko?"
"God, no," I scoffed.
"So just me."
"Just you."
She didn't say anything to that. Her hand found the collar of the jacket and held on to it.
"Then how'd you know?" she said. "Biotechnica. You showed up at a good time."
That one I'd planned to keep. Who cares.
"It wasn't timing," I said. "Where I'm from, this place was a game. Cyberpunk 2077. I played it."
"A game. Wait, 2077? That's two years from now."
"That's when it's set."
"A game like a sim?"
"Kind of. You play as one person through the story. Using buttons."
"What was the game about?"
"Fighting Arasaka, mostly. Doing merc work."
"Who do you play as?"
How do I even describe V?
"Right now? Just nobody, I suppose."
"Was I in it?"
"No."
Something in her face dropped an inch.
"Then how?"
"There was a show too. About Maine's crew."
"A show."
"Animated. Ten episodes."
She looked at me like I'd switched languages halfway through the sentence.
"Drawn," I said. "Moving pictures. Like a BD you can't feel, and somebody drew all of it."
"Somebody drew Maine?" She thought about it. "By hand?"
"Computers, mostly."
"Who's in it?"
"Maine. Dorio. Pilar. Becca. Falco. Kiwi."
She waited for the rest of the list.
"Not you," I said.
It took her a second.
"So I'm dead before it starts."
"That was my guess. And then you told me on the BBS that you weren't going to die."
"That's it?"
"That was enough for me."
She let go of the collar and took hold of it again.
"Do you know what happens to them? The rest of the crew."
"Some of them."
I could have said more. I didn't.
"With your help we can change it," I said.
She didn't ask which parts.
"Doesn't that scare you? Breaking it?"
"No. Butterfly effect or not, you're sitting here. That's what matters."
She held my eyes for a second, then looked down at the street.
"Who's it about? The show. Just my- them doing gigs?"
"A kid. Some street kid who ends up with them."
Instead he got Raf.
"Caelen." She had a look I didn't like. "Becca's bed."
"What about it?"
"Did that have anything to do with her being in your show?"
"Not really."
"Not really?"
"I don't know either. Most of that night is gone."
"That's annoying."
"Tell me about it. I've got more holes in my brain than I've got answers. At least I can blame alcohol on that one."
She was quiet, and then she sat up a little.
"Our fixer," she said slowly. "The creepy one. Four eyes."
I nodded.
"Is he full of shit?"
"He's going to bring them a job that looks too good," I said. "It's bullshit."
"Then we tell them."
"If he is how I remember him, he won't let them go easy."
She clearly didn't like that.
"And the rest of it's accurate? You know the future and sat on it?"
"It's been wrong about a lot. You're not in it, and yet you're sitting right here."
"Preem."
"And the cult," I said. "Tech Orthodoxy. They're not in the game, they're not in the show. Nowhere. A whole church, with drones and jammers and a guy who knew my name before I knew his." I rubbed my face. "When I found them, I figured half of what I know is probably bullshit."
"The religious guys."
"Those."
She looked back at the city.
"So you wake up in the green chair-"
"I never said green."
"You didn't."
She smiled, small. She'd been running me like one of her newbie sims.
"Did I pass?"
"Hmm. We'll see."
She let go of the collar, and the questions got worse.
"You touch your port when you lie."
My hand was halfway to it before I caught it.
"You don't," she said. "But you checked. Gotcha."
"That's not fair."
"It's a test. They're not supposed to be fair."
She took a pause.
"Then what's with you? You heal in a day. You eat like a garbage disposal."
"The body," I said. "It's great until it isn't. Everything runs fast. I heal fast, I burn through food, I sleep four hours and wake up fine. Some days it's the best thing about me. Some days it's trying to cook me from the inside. No fucking idea how."
"I noticed," she said. "I figured you were on something. Or Vik put something in you and you didn't want to talk about it."
She reached over and pressed the back of her fingers to my forehead.
"Still hot," she said, and took her hand back.
"Braindance?"
"Movies. You just watched them on screens. Filmed with actual cameras."
"I know what movies are." Sasha looked personally offended.
"Real food?"
"All of it."
"Real meat?"
"Every day, if you wanted."
"You had real meat every day and you complained about birds being too loud. The nerve."
"I know. I was a dick."
"The Net?"
"Everybody had it. On their phones, all day."
"ICE?"
"Passwords."
She waited for the rest. "Like… typed?"
"Half the planet used one for everything."
"I'd have been a god."
"Nothing to hack, though. Our guns didn't talk to anything. Same calibers."
"Huh. Boring."
"What did you do? With all that?"
"Wrote software. For companies that sold software to other companies. I was considered good, too."
"Okay. Say something in your language."
"I've been speaking it all night."
She closed her eyes for a second. "Not English, dummy. Computer code."
I wrote a line in the grime on the tar with my finger. A loop that printed hello forever, the first thing anybody ever learns.
She leaned over and read it, tilting her head at it.
"Nobody writes like that," she said. "Not even the old guys from before the Krash." She sat back. "That's the saddest thing you've told me tonight. Boring-ass corpo job. I called it waaaay before."
"I got murdered, Sasha."
"Yeah. Still."
She tucked her chin back on her knees and squinted at me.
"So you know Maine's whole crew," she said. "What do you know about me?"
"Nothing."
"Good answer."
"Why?"
"A liar would've said something nice."
"Tell me something that happens soon. Something I can check."
"I can't. I don't know anything small enough to check, and the big stuff keeps being wrong. The game's two years out. I barely know anything about right now."
She studied me. I couldn't tell which way it went.
"How long have you been here?"
"About three months."
"You said a couple."
"A couple. Plus some."
"Mm."
"You say choom."
"I picked it up."
"People take years to stop sounding like tourists. You did it in three months."
I didn't have an answer for that one.
"Were you better looking?"
"Than which one?"
She frowned, then counted it out. The face I died with, the one that came with the chair, the one Vik cut onto me. Three.
"The first one."
"Pretty similar. Maybe even better."
"Than this one?"
"You designed this one. I'm not answering that."
"I did good," she said, and looked at my face like she was checking her work.
"Did you have a girl?"
I went for it. There was a space where something had been. Clean edges. Nothing in it.
"I think so. It's gone. I don't know if it matters."
"Good."
"Wow. Don't you want to know if I want to come back?"
Sasha sighed.
"I already know the answer."
She bumped me with her shoulder, hard enough that I had to catch myself on the tar.
"My turn," I said. "Something dumb."
"No."
"Where are the cat pajamas?"
She shut her eyes for a second. "Biotechnica's got them."
"Bastards."
"They were my good ones."
"What was it?" she said. "Your name. Before."
"Gone too."
"So Caelen is-"
"Made up. Somebody asked me my first night here, and I panicked."
She gave me the wide-eyed stare again. This time it was a lot worse.
"You named yourself in a panic."
"Yeah."
"And it came out Caelen."
"It's a good name. I've grown to like it."
"And Rafael?"
"Somebody else picked that one."
"I'll stick to Caelen."
"I sure hope you stick to me."
She looked at me like I'd stepped on her foot.
"That's so bad."
"You're smiling."
"I'm not." She put her forehead down on her knees, and the jacket slid off her shoulders. "Say it again."
"I sure hope you-"
"No. Stop."
Then she went still all at once. She pressed the heel of her hand to the back of her head, and her eyes jumped sideways, twice, and came back. She breathed through her teeth for a few seconds.
"Keep talking," she said into her knees. "Anything."
She lay back on the tar, and after a second I lay down next to her. The sky did its usual dirty mix of colors from the holographic ads. You don't get stars here.
I couldn't think of anything to say. She picked for me.
"Who else," she said to the sky. "From your game. Who have you met?"
"Vik."
"The nice old guy?"
"Same guy. In the game he always had the main guy's back, no matter what came through his door. Here he's had mine. If it wasn't for him, I'd be dead. More than once."
"So when you walked into his clinic, you already knew him."
"Enough to trust him with my life."
She thought about that.
"Who else?"
"Jackie. Big guy, used to run with the Valentinos. Does small-time merc work. Boxes at Vik's and beats me up for fun."
"Is he a good guy?"
"In the game he's the main guy's partner." I watched an ad loop on the tower across the street. "He dies."
"Will you stop it?"
"I don't fucking know. It's two years out there."
She didn't say anything for a while. Neither did I.
"His girl's in it too. Misty. She read my cards once. I didn't like them."
"Who else?"
"Wakako."
"Yoko's Wakako?"
"Same one."
"And Yoko?"
"That's why I walked into EdgeNet in the first place. I remembered it. The guy on the screen went there all the time." I thought about the Yoko I'd actually met. "She turned out pretty different."
"Different how?"
"Meaner."
"That's just Yoko."
"Mhm."
"What about the big stuff?" she said. "What happens in two years?"
"The Emperor dies. Saburo. His son does it."
She sat up fast.
"Don't ever say that out loud again," she said. "To anyone. Ever."
"You asked."
"I'm serious. People get flatlined for knowing way less than that." She lay back down, slower. "Arasaka hasn't had a bad year since the tower went up in '36."
"'23."
"What?"
"The tower. '23. Silverhand."
"Mm," she said, and didn't say anything else about it.
"The birds," she said after a while. "What did they sound like?"
I tried. It came out like a car alarm with a cold.
"Did they have names?"
"No, Sasha. They were birds."
"I meant what kind," she said, and closed her eyes.
"Sparrows. Jays. Some other loud ones. Never cared."
She kept them closed long enough that I thought she'd gone to sleep.
"The garage," she said.
"What about it?"
"The lights. Your car. The shutter." Her eyes stayed shut. "Was that you?"
No way around it.
"No," I said. "That's the other big thing."
She opened her eyes.
"There's something in my head."
"Chrome?"
"Meat. Tumor. It grew into me. Vik saw it on a scan once and called it tissue." I watched the sky so I wouldn't watch her. "It talks."
She sat up. She stayed close, but she sat up.
"Talks how?"
"In my head, mostly. Sometimes in dreams. It looks like me there. Skinnier, worse hair, nobody behind the eyes."
"Worse hair than yours?"
"A lot worse."
"Does it have a name?"
"SC. Search and Copy."
"That's a terrible name."
"Agree. Doesn't mean much."
"What is it? Chip, daemon, something somebody left in you? Schizophrenia?"
"Best guess? A little schizophrenic voice that's actually an AI. Made out of meat."
She didn't blink.
"A biological AI," she said. "In your head. Grown."
"That's what it looks like."
"Caelen, nobody can do that. Nobody." She was talking faster now, the way she did when a job got interesting. "That's not chrome. A scanner wouldn't even know what it was looking at. Do you know what people would do for that?" She stopped herself. "It says that? That it's an AI?"
"It says it's a function. 'A creation of man.'"
"So what about it?"
"It said it saved me."
"And you listen to it?" She lowered her voice, the way netrunners do, like NetWatch might be in the room. "Rogue AI?"
"I don't know. It's all meat. Not sure that's even possible."
"If it is, they don't just burn you. They burn everybody who touched you."
"I know," I agreed.
I'd run that one every night for weeks. It always ended with her on the list.
"Who made it?"
"Don't know."
"Corp?"
"Maybe. If you can count any corp as a human."
"Is that why you eat like a pack of dogs?"
"Some of it."
"What does it want?"
"It gave me a list once. Sleep. Eat. Learn. Silence. Search. Copy. Escape."
I left out Cull.
"Escape what?"
"It didn't say."
"And the copying?"
"It goes looking for something and puts it in me. Skills, sometimes. Sometimes memories."
"Whose?"
"Me? Other me? Something like that."
"So that's how you learned netrunning? I wasn't any help at all?" Sasha asked, her voice turned sour.
"Opposite. It cannot even compare."
"Still. Something like that isn't free."
She got there faster than I wanted her to.
"That's what it costs," she said. "Your sister. Your brother. Whichever it was. Your name."
"I think so."
"So it's eating you."
"Mostly the old stuff."
"Mostly."
"Does it hurt?"
"No. I just notice the holes."
"Physically. Like earlier."
"Nothing like that before."
"The tracker," she said. "You told me you didn't delete it."
"I didn't."
"It deleted my tracker?"
"I think so."
"So it's not just a voice then."
Then her face changed.
"Who opened the door, Caelen?"
"Not me. I was trying to close it." I didn't have anything left to do with my hands. "I heard voices. They all felt so familiar."
"Is it listening now? The AI."
"Probably."
She looked at my forehead like she could see through it. Then she reached down for my jacket and pulled it back over her shoulders.
"So it heard all of that. Did it say anything?"
"It doesn't say much."
"Ask it something."
"Great minds think alike. Let me try. SC."
Nothing.
"SC. Say something. Anything."
"..." Sasha remained quiet.
"Nothing."
"Convenient," Sasha said.
"Yeah."
"Or somebody hacked you and your head's filling in the gaps. Or you went psycho and made yourself a really sucky friend."
"I know how it sounds. You must understand how tough it is to explain."
"That's what a psycho would say."
"I know that too. Do you think I am?"
She looked at me for a long time. I couldn't read any of it.
"My scanner," she said. "Tomorrow. I'll set it up and take a good look around."
"Not with your head like that."
"It's a scanner. I point it at you."
"Okay."
She reached over and knocked on my forehead. Twice, like a door.
Nothing answered.
She left her knuckles there anyway.
After a while she took her hand back.
"What else," she said. "What are you in right now? All of it."
I thought about where to start, and started with this morning.
"I went to get pizza for breakfast."
"Of course you did."
"The place had a freezer, and under the freezer there was a whole floor nobody was supposed to see. Cages. People in them." I kept my eyes on the sky. "And the owner. Suit, rings, talked like an old-school gangster. Even by my standards, and my standards are fifty years out of date at the least."
"So why did you go?"
"I wanted my pizza. I got shot at instead. Was a lot of people. I won though." I faked a confident smile.
She didn't pry further.
"What else?"
"The cult. Tech Orthodoxy. They've got drones that cloak, jammers, and they make EMPs by the crate. Most of them don't have a single piece of chrome, so there's nothing to hack. They hit the garage once, back when I still lived here. They know my name. They bought my car and my old face off somebody."
"The religious guys." Her voice went careful. "I secured their net in Westbrook. That gig."
"I know."
"You told me to drop it. You didn't tell me why."
"No. I didn't."
"I built their walls, Caelen."
"They'd have found somebody else."
"That's not the point." She pulled the jacket tighter. "I know how I built them. Where I'd leave a door, if I was me. I could-"
"No."
"No? Didn't you listen to me? You can't just say no."
"I believe they have netrunners of their own. And hitmen. It can wait. Please."
She glared at me, and she didn't argue.
"What else?"
"A Tyger Claw. Pretty high up. We have a deal. Loose."
"How loose?"
"He made me Rafael."
She went still against my arm.
"I drew that face," she said slowly, "for a Claw identity."
"Yeah."
"Who sent you to them?"
"Yoko."
"Yoko." She said it like she was checking it for poison. "So Yoko knew."
"Some of it."
"And Sprocket?" she asked, quieter.
"I think it was the cult."
She didn't say anything to that.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I could have made something up. I was tired of that.
"I wanted to keep it separate," I said. "You and me. The software nights, the walls, you hacking my snack orders. If you were in all of this too, it'd turn into work. I don't want to ruin it."
She looked at me like I'd said it in the code I wrote in the dirt.
"I don't get that."
"I know."
"No, I really don't get it." She sat up straighter. "The people I work with are the people I trust my life with, Caelen. That's the whole thing. That's what a crew is." She shook her head. "Imagine how much easier all of it would have been if you'd just let me help."
"You'd have-"
"I'd have secured your car. I'd have run your scans. I'd have done it right." She looked at my legs, at the bandages under the coveralls. "And don't think I didn't notice how convenient it is. Everything keeps working out for you, for somebody that meaty."
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment."
She was quiet for a bit.
"I'm still mad," she said.
"Okay."
"I don't know how long for."
"My turn," I said.
"You had your turn."
"I answered plenty. Now I ask."
She narrowed her eyes at her own rule coming back at her. "Fine."
"Why do you track me?"
"I told you. I just want to."
"That's not an answer."
She played with the zipper on my jacket, up and down again.
"So when you stop answering, I know where to look."
I didn't have a joke for that one.
"Then why ask me all this?" I said. "You track me. Just look."
"I only look when I'm worried."
That time at my hideout? Yeah. She was the same.
"And this morning?"
"You walked out like you knew exactly what you were doing." She shrugged. "I didn't feel like I needed to."
I'd walked out of this garage this morning and straight into a freezer full of cages.
She got there a second after I did. Her hand stopped on the zipper.
"From now on I'll look," she said.
"And the messages," I said. "Six thirty-three. That wasn't me. I was out. It read them. The function. I'm sorry."
She didn't move.
"That's probably for the best."
"How so?"
"You wouldn't have survived."
I am still weak to her. My tongue clicked in annoyance.
"My ears are really sensitive," Sasha pointed out.
"Let me be."
"How's your head?"
"Fine."
"I said that too. Earlier."
She held it for a second, then I gave up.
"It hurts a little. Dehydration likely. You can't be much better."
"Different league, I am an edgerunner."
"After the scanner, we find you a ripper. One who does house calls, or I carry you there, edgerunner."
"You'd drop me."
"Haven't yet."
Down the block somebody's car alarm went off and was promptly silenced. Another carjacking.
"You talked to her today," Sasha said. "In the garage. When you came back in."
I knew who she meant. Sprocket.
"Did you go see her yet?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Things keep popping up. No time."
"That's not why."
It wasn't.
"I found her hanging from her own ceiling. Next time she'll be in a drawer." I rubbed my face with both hands. "I keep picking neither."
"I'll come with you."
"You don't have to."
"You're meeting my mom. I'm meeting Sprocket. That's the trade."
"She'd hate you. Loudmouth."
"Everybody's mom hates me."
"She wasn't my mom. Don't be weird."
"Sure."
I didn't argue, but I did have an argument in store.
"She kinda saved you, you know," I said.
Sasha turned her head. "What?"
"The hospital wanted a deposit before they'd touch you, and I didn't have it. So I texted her. Twenty-five hundred hit my account a minute later. 'Let me sleep in peace, annoying little shit.'"
Sasha looked at me for a second. Then she put her face in her knees and laughed. It came out wet at the edges, and she didn't let it turn into anything else.
"Then I owe her," she said into her knees.
"She'd charge you triple. She only paid so I'd shut up."
"Annoying little shit," she said, trying it out. "That's a good description for you."
"She had everybody figured out."
"Okay." Sasha sat up. "Recap."
"Oh no."
"You died in a chair."
"Yes."
"Woke up in another chair."
"Correct."
"There's a roommate in your head who deletes my trackers and reads my mail."
"To be fair, it does follow some basic commands like 'shut up' sometimes."
"Oh, good. A polite one." She leaned into my shoulder. "Does it sort junk data?"
"It eats me from the inside out."
"So, no."
When that ran out, I checked David's ping out of habit. Nothing new. I put it away, and when I looked up she was closer than before. I hadn't heard a thing.
She came in until I could feel the heat coming off her and stopped there. An inch out. Waiting, and smug about it.
"Don't you dare forget me."
I closed the inch.
Her mouth was hot like the rest of her. She got a hand in my hair and held on.
She pulled back first and wrinkled her nose.
"You gotta brush your teeth."