27 – Faded

  Addie’s finger tightened almost imperceptibly on the trigger of her needler. It had a very light pull, and the gun nearly fired, but she caught herself—her rational mind catching up to the gut-punch emotion of hearing the stranger threaten her father. She was standing in the parking lot of the warehouse; if this man and his associates had taken her father or were holding him, who was to say there weren’t other eyes on her? Even as the thought crossed her mind, she heard a drone humming far above; it might be a coincidence—it might not.

  “Where is he?” she asked, her voice dangerously even.

  “Safe, ma’am. You have my word.”

  “Means nothing to me,” she growled, imagining how Tony would react.

  “That’s true, I s’pose. Anyway, if you’ll allow it, I’ll send you an address where my employer is waiting to speak to you. Just so you know, I’m an independent, and I don’t mind telling you we’ve been instructed not to harm your old man, so long as you cooperate.”

  “We?”

  “Well, sure. I’ve got a team, ma’am.”

  “Stop saying ma’am!” Addie hissed, some of her calm beginning to erode. She could picture her dad, with shrink-cords around his wrists, squeezing the vessels so his hands swelled up. He’d be angry, confused, and worst of all, worried about her.

  “What would you prefer? Ember?”

  “I’d prefer for you to walk off a tall building.” Addie lowered the needler, suddenly glad she hadn’t used her Dust abilities; maybe they didn’t know what she could do.

  “Well, I’m not going to do that—today, anyway.” He tapped his temple. “Sending you the address. Word to the wise: leave anything you don’t want her goons to take in your vehicle.”

  “Thanks so much.” Once again, she wished she could pull off Tony’s mannerisms—she wanted to spit on the pavement, but it just didn’t feel right for her. Instead, she turned without another word and climbed back into her van. Meanwhile, JJ updated her map with a new destination pin. Addie gripped the wheel, staring out her window at the stranger. Was she being stupid?

  “What’s at that address, JJ?”

  “It’s an office building—largely vacant, but with a few tenants: Horton’s Dermatology, R and H Customs, Levant and Associates Accounting.”

  The man was just standing there, hands in his coat pockets, breath steaming out as he watched her. “Pull up the warehouse security footage, JJ.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. It’s offline, and the cloud backup is empty.”

  Addie put her window down. “Is my dad comfortable? He’s got bad joints.”

  “We dosed him with a tranq—a really mild one with a mood enhancer. He’s dreaming happy dreams.”

  Addie scowled. “Let me talk to him.”

  He paused, reaching up to tug on his ridiculous little goatee. “Can’t do that. He’s not on site. I’d send you a pic or some footage, but you know anything like that could be faked.” He shrugged.

  Addie hissed a wordless growl of frustration and put up her window. She engaged the van’s AI, and as it pulled out of the parking lot, she said, “JJ, search the SOA database and every message board on the city-net for any descriptions matching that guy.”

  “On it, Addie.”

  As the van hummed down the wet streets, en route to the meeting place, she initiated a call with Glitch. As the call window flashed with each ringtone, she looked at the mini-map: 27 minutes to the destination. After half a dozen rings, a message came through on her AUI: Good afternoon, this is an automated message from Xyna Corp to inform you that the owner of this Xyna Corp messaging address has taken it offline. This may be temporary; Xyna Corp recommends waiting a few minutes and trying again.

  “What the heck?”

  Glitch suddenly going offline sent Addie’s mind reeling down paranoid avenues—had the netjacker ghosted her? Was she splitting town with the fortune from their heist? It was a legitimate fear, after all, how well did Addie really know her? Sure, they’d done some jobs together—been in life-or-death situations more than a couple of times with each other—but Glitch had a lot of pre-Addie history. Addie wasn’t totally stupid, though; she’d made sure the bulk of the bits from the Dust sales were in an account only she had access to. A quick check showed they were still there, all 187,000 Sol-bits.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t check on the equipment so easily; most of it was at Glitch’s place. There were other possible explanations for Glitch taking down her messaging address: what if she’d sold Addie out? The timing was too perfect—right as Addie was confronted by Mister Goatee, Glitch goes dark? It didn’t pass the sniff test. Addie, ever the optimist, didn’t want to believe her friend would do that, though. Instead, another possibility rang true in her mind: they’d taken Glitch, too.

  “Call Beef,” she said.

  This time, the call window only flashed once before her old friend’s face appeared. He looked awful—eyes puffy, black and blue, nose smashed and cut, forehead gashed and stapled. “Yo, Doll,” he said, his voice garbled by his swollen lips.

  “Beef! What happened to you?”

  “Some corpo-rat losers jumped me. Big mistake.”

  “Corpos?”

  “Boxer’s. Got one of them to squeal before I broke his pissant neck.”

  “Are you—”

  “All good—drugged pretty cherry. Gonna need another new knee and a left hand, though.” He held up a bloody stump, tied off with a shrink-cord. As she saw the gleam of bone, Addie felt bile tickle the back of her throat. She looked away, eyes filling with hot tears.

  “I’m so sorry, Beef!”

  “Why are you sorry? Trust me, those suit-lickers are the sorry ones.”

  Sudden hope flared in Addie’s chest—what if Glitch took herself offline so she could be with Beef, undistracted? “Is Glitch with you?”

  “Nah. Can’t get through to her. I’m at Doc Peters’s clinic, but he’s pretty busy.”

  “Do you know why they jumped you? You didn’t, like, start a fight—”

  “Hell no! Those fuckin’ roaches were waiting for me—” He broke off, gasping for air as his eyes squeezed shut in pain. “Damn ribs,” he grunted.

  “Take care of yourself—I’m going to come and see you as soon as I can.”

  “Yeah, I’m good, Doll. Got a few of my old boys watching the clinic.” He lifted his remaining thumb and then cut the call.

  The pieces continued to fall into place, and Addie felt her blood go cold as she got a better look at the picture. Everything happening at once screamed coordination. She would have guessed it was Tony’s enemies trying to get at him from another angle, but Beef had apparently confirmed that his assailants were from Boxer, not Cross—not mercs either. Did that mean she was on her way to meet with someone from Boxer? Why, though?

  The only thing she could think of that made any sense was that their actions against Kwon and, subsequently, his handler from Boxer—Ross—had finally caught up to them. The only other run-in she’d had with Boxer had been with Zane, but she’d gotten clear of that, hadn’t she? He’d been acting alone, off-books. “It’s gotta be Ross.” But Mr. Goatee had implied her meeting was with a woman—maybe Ross’s assistant or partner.

  As the distance on her mini-map steadily shrank, she racked her brain for a plan, but all she could come up with was to see what was going on. She had some aces up her sleeve; nobody really knew what she could do with Dust. The most Ross might know is that she could generate an electrical attack. There was no footage of her fading, no footage of how she’d gotten the jump on him in his sedan. Sure, there were defenses against Dust empaths, but this meeting was in an old office building. Could they have set up disruption fields? She sorely wished she could get ahold of Glitch; the netjacker would know.

  “He told me to leave what I don’t want to lose in the van. It kind of implies I’m going to be allowed to leave, right? Was he just talking like that to put me at ease?”

  “I’m not an expert on reading human intentions, Addie, but I can try—”

  “No, I’m thinking aloud.”

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  A sudden realization hit her out of the blue, and tears sprang into her eyes again: they’d tried to kill Beef. Was Glitch taken…or dead?

  When the van drove past the building, she saw people entering, which gave her a small glimmer of hope and a little relief; she figured she was probably walking into a trap, but maybe not an overwhelmingly thorough one. The meeting place was only four blocks from the NGT tower and had an attached parking garage that was nearly full—the building might have vacant offices, but there was always demand for parking in that part of the district.

  When she finally found an empty space, she drew her needler and put it on the center console, then patted her pockets, making sure there wasn’t anything else she might want to leave behind. They were empty. Addie sat there for a minute, thinking. She felt stupid, but she couldn’t think of a way out—not without learning more about what was going on. She had to find out where her father was being held. Along those same lines, she had to find out what was going on with Glitch. Did they have her?

  She figured that if they knew about her Dust empath abilities, even a little, they’d slap a dampener on her—expensive, but cheaper than setting up a field on-site. “And,” she whispered, “if they try that, I’ll go to plan B.” Of course, she had no idea what plan B was, only that it didn’t involve letting herself be made helpless.

  She exited the van and started toward the stairs leading down to street level. “JJ, what’s a Dust dampener like? Is it small? I’m talking the kind they put on sparks to limit their abilities.” Addie had heard of the things, but never seen one.

  “My search indicates they’re quite bulky—conductive cuffs, and a halo linked by high-voltage lines to a capacitor array and battery bank. The system converts active Dust into electricity and stores it in the battery.”

  That was good—it meant she’d see it coming. She kept her head on a swivel, looking left and right constantly as she walked. The pedestrian traffic wasn’t as heavy as it might have been if the weather had been nicer, but she still felt secure in the crowd. When she entered the office building, her eyes were drawn to a man in a dark trenchcoat standing near the elevators. He wore a matte-black visor and had a shaved head. As soon as he saw her looking his way, he nodded and motioned her across the lobby.

  Addie walked toward him but didn’t allow herself to go tunnel-vision; she scanned the lobby, ensuring no one approached from either side. When she was just a few steps away, he said, “Miss Jones?”

  She supposed it wasn’t surprising they knew her name. They’d taken her dad, after all. “Yeah.”

  “Fifth floor, suite 521.”

  “Not gonna search me?”

  He tapped his visor. “Already did.”

  “Huh.” Addie touched the call button, and the elevator opened immediately. She stepped inside, careful to keep the corpo goon in her peripheral vision the entire time. After she selected the fifth floor and the elevator began moving, she subvocalized, “JJ, alert me if you lose connectivity.”

  “I will, Addie.”

  The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and Addie peered out. A dimly lit hallway lined with the dark windows of vacant offices greeted her. As she stepped out, a faint pinging sound hit her ears, and a line of recurring static rippled across her vision.

  “Addie, there is a jamming field in effect here.”

  “I figured.”

  She turned to the right, reading the suite numbers as she went. When her destination came into view, she saw that the windows were lit up. “Guess this is it.” She pulled the door open, saw an empty expanse of office carpeting with hallways opening to the left and right, and a door straight ahead behind a vacant reception desk. A man cleared his throat, and she spun to see another goon lurking in the corner. He could have been a twin of the one downstairs.

  “Left hallway, first door on the right.”

  Addie frowned at him, but followed his instructions to the hallway. No other men in suits barred her progress; a door, slightly ajar, stood waiting. She walked up to it and pushed it open, revealing a sparsely furnished office—a glass-topped desk and a single plastic chair in front of it. A woman sat in an executive chair behind the desk. She was one of the fanciest ladies Addie had ever been that close to—the kind who took town cars everywhere and didn’t mingle with the public.

  Her hair was layered in rich, chocolate-brown curls. Her skin was smooth, butter-rich, and glowing. Her teeth, when she smiled, gleamed like diamonds, and her eyes, key-lime green, sparkled with inner amusement as she looked Addie up and down. “Come in. Sit down. We’ve a lot to talk about.” She gestured with polished, inch-long nails, but Addie hesitated, looking left and right, into the corners of the room. She didn’t see anyone else—no cams, no arrays, no devices of any kind.

  The woman didn’t seem to have anything to hide, either; her form-fitting, gray executive dress didn’t leave much to the imagination. “Please, Adelaide. I don’t have all day.”

  Scowling, Addie stepped into the office and pushed the door closed. She stepped over to the plastic chair and pulled it to the side, kitty-corner to the desk, so that when she sat down, she could watch both the woman and the door. “I’ll talk to you, but first I want you to let my father go.”

  “We’ll get to that. You’ll talk to me first, however, because I have all the leverage here. That’s business negotiations 101, Miss Jones.” When Addie only continued to scowl, she added, “My name is Janet Dawkins. You can call me Janet.”

  Addie continued to stare, gripping the chair’s plastic arms, wishing she had Tony or Beef with her, wishing Glitch was in her head, telling her she was this close to breaking into the local net.

  “Well, I can see by the lack of any sort of reaction that you don’t know who I am. You may not know me, but you’ve caused me quite a few headaches this last year or so. Most recently, you disrupted a project I had a stake in and made a business acquaintance of mine into something of a gibbering idiot.”

  Addie tilted her head, trying not to show any expression, but furiously puzzling things out—her acquaintance had to be Ross, and the project Kwon’s work.

  “Despite my getting the upper hand on you today, you’re clearly quite talented—you and your little band of criminals. If you’re wondering, they won’t be coming to your aid. The muscle’s been dealt with, and the netjacker is in hand.”

  “Dealt with?” Addie hissed.

  “Sorry, dear, but I couldn’t have a lunatic on the loose; too much of a wildcard. I’ll provide the muscle for the work you’ll be doing.”

  A small smile betrayed Addie’s thoughts—Janet Dawkins thought she was pretty cool, but she didn’t know her corpo hit squad had failed to deal with Beef. To cover the expression, she said, “I’m not looking for work.”

  “Well, darling, I have a bit of hard news for you: you work for me now.” She stared at Addie for a minute and apparently decided she saw despair in Addie’s eyes—maybe she wasn’t too far off the mark. “Now, now, it’s not going to be all that bad. I’ll keep you relatively busy, but you’ll have much time to yourself, too. You’ll be able to take on side jobs, maintain your friendships—I’ll even provide a nice apartment for you and your father.”

  Addie’s brain was reeling; this wasn’t what she’d expected. To give herself a moment to think, she asked, “Why?” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed awkwardly.

  “Why? Because you owe me, and I’d rather get some work out of you than kill you or hand you over to Boxer so they can abuse you and let your talents go to waste. Prove yourself useful, and you’ll find I’m a generous employer.”

  “So, you want me to work for you? For Boxer?”

  “Just me, sweetheart.” She gestured toward the hallway. “All of my operators are off the books—not Boxer employees. You’ll going to be one of my aces. No need for my peers to know about you.”

  Addie slowly nodded, the situation finally becoming clear to her. “I’ll need Glitch.”

  “She’ll be getting the same offer. You should know I found you through her; that hair of hers is rather distinctive. Ross’s brains were pretty thoroughly scrambled when you yanked his PAI, but he remembered that girl’s hair, and with a little digging, a little brain massaging, we got a decent image of her face out of him.”

  “She’s here?”

  Janet smiled, clicking her tongue. “What are you doing, Adelaide? Don’t you understand it’s over? I’ve got you. I’ve got that netjacker—I have too many resources; you’re not going to disappear on me. We’ll install some new PAIs and some watchdog firmware, and that’ll be that. Glitch is a slippery, clever girl, but we’ve got excellent tech.”

  “I just want to see her. I want to…” Addie desperately hunted her brain for the right words, and Janet indulged her with a smug, gleaming grin. “I just want to…” Addie forced a sob—and though she told herself it was fake, it felt real. “I want to see she’s okay, and let her know I’m okay. Please? It’ll make things easier with the, um, watchdogs.”

  Dawkins waved a hand dismissively, apparently bored by Addie’s plea. “Relax. We’re setting up an auto-surgeon in this office. You’ll both be fitted at the same time.”

  “And my dad?”

  “He’s fine. Be a good girl, sign the contracts, let us install your new hardware, and I’ll have him released.”

  “Can I see an image of him? Please? That man, the one who sent me here, he made it sound like my dad put up a fight…” She trailed off, sobbing.

  Dawkins frowned, drumming her nails on the glass desk—click-click-click, click-click-click. “Here,” she flicked a finger toward Addie, and a share prompt appeared on Addie’s AUI. She selected it, and a vid window opened, displaying security footage with the current date and time clearly visible. It was a familiar scene: her dad’s little apartment in the warehouse. He was lying on the couch, snoring away, and a heavyset man with chrome arms was sitting beside him, slurping cereal out of a bowl.

  “Thank you,” Addie said. She leaned back, took a deep breath, and began to draw Dust out of her reactor. “Will you please explain how this is going to work? What kinds of jobs will you make me do? Can I ever buy out my contract? I’d feel a lot better knowing there was some light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Listen, Adelaide. I’m a busy woman, and I’m only going to go over this once...”

  Addie tuned her out, nodding along, but not listening. She was working on the most challenging thing she’d ever done with Dust. At first, she’d thought she might just use hands-up or blast Janet with a jolt of electricity. The problem was that the woman was a high-level exec; she likely had a hardened PAI, and it probably had protocols for what to do if she was incapacitated. It might call for help or activate a dead-man protocol that would spell doom for Glitch and her father.

  The real problem, though, was that as long as Janet Dawkins was alive, she’d be a problem. Even if Addie got the upper hand and forced her to let her dad go, she didn’t have any way to get her off her back permanently—no convenient dirt—and she didn’t have time to find any. Besides, it didn’t seem like Janet was the kind of person to form uneasy truces.

  It turned her stomach, what she was doing, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep going. This woman was planning to make slaves of her and Glitch. She was using her father’s life as leverage. If she had her way, she’d permanently install spyware in their skulls, and that would be the end of any plans to help Tony. They’d surely lose their illicit funds, and they’d never be allowed outside the district. No, Janet had to go.

  “…have arrangements like this with quite a few other—”

  “I’m sorry about this, Janet.”

  At the interruption, the woman frowned, her beautiful eyes narrowing beneath her perfectly sculpted brows. “What?”

  “Didn’t you ever stop to ask yourself how?”

  “How what?”

  “How I got the upper hand on Ross—how I’ve been so successful. Did you just think I was exceptionally talented with a needler?”

  Dawkins stared at her, a hard glint entering her eyes. “We’ll have to work on that attitude—”

  “This isn’t something I’d ever want for anyone, even an enemy, but I can’t risk anyone finding you or, you know, your tech somehow getting in the way.”

  “What are you—”

  Her words were cut short as Addie finished weaving a mesh of Dust around the woman and then pulled her through the fabric of reality, depositing her firmly in the veil. It was the first time Addie had ever sent anything into the veil while she remained in the real world, and her eyes widened in surprise as Janet’s figure shimmered and then was gone. It was sudden, and it felt disturbingly final.

  Addie could still feel the thread of Dust running from her reactor and into the veil. Holding her breath, she severed it and watched the empty executive chair. It remained empty.