2

They activated cloak-mode and made their way towards the bottom of the plaza. They opted not to take the elevator – that was just too risky – and instead went down the stairs. The power was up and running again, but this section of the plaza had been dark. Beside the stairwell was a series of windows which ran all the way to the bottom. Through it, Luna saw cars moseying away from the plaza and vanishing into the metropolis. She thought that somewhere, in one of those black dots, Sarah and Chip were being kidnapped and brought to an isolated location. A place where she might never see them again.

Luna didn’t know where Glitch’s hideout had been, if he had one at all, so even if they managed to make it out of here she would have no leads and, more importantly, no help. Vanderman wasn’t good at finding people, and neither was she. Grimes Paolini had been a lucky fluke which died down to nothing more than that old adage of Right place, right time. They had also known the right people to talk to back then. Now she was alone. Too many enemies in Zemon, a rep of being a lying bitch on every corner. She’d hacked into almost every business and stolen more than two hundred thousand dollars over four years. Who wanted to help someone like that?

They made it more than halfway to the bottom when she heard the sound of footsteps come thumping up the stairwell. She gazed down the centre and saw lights circling towards them. Officers, each armed with tactile rifles.

“Shit,” she whispered.

“Luna,” said Vanderman in a low voice. He hopped over the railing and hung off the edge.

She got the message, pulling herself over the bars until her legs dangled. She snatched another look at the officers, saw that they had spiralled closer, and sweat began to creep down her neck. She was scared not that she would fall – although that was a hair-raising thought too – but because one of the officers might have had a pair of infrared goggles. Those could detect anything, even invisible objects. Thankfully, the officers rushed past them, likely heading towards Floor 18, not stopping once.

Luna and Vanderman pulled themselves up.

“I'm gettin’ too old for this shit,” he groaned.

“You're telling me,” she said, and they continued down the steps.

Along the way, she got a pop-up on her MD, and for once it wasn’t a pair of silicone-pumped tits. the words on the window read. .

“Might wanna pick up the pace,” she said.

“Low suit?”

“Yup.”

“Aw Christ,” he said.

When they reached the bottom, Luna was out of breath, hot, and swelling with worry. How close were they to being spotted? How close were they going to be? She didn’t know. Going through with this heist was the worst decision she could have possibly made. Everything had gone to shit. Glitch was supposed to have made a deal with the Legion at ten or eleven at night and be back at around one in the morning. Chip was supposed to have found the real set of gauntlets. And Sarah was supposed to be at home, alone, watching TV or doing whatever it was she did when Luna wasn’t around. Now she had to do everything within her power to put things right.

I will, I promise.

She couldn’t wait to taste fresh air. It was becoming increasingly more challenging to breathe in this thing. She wanted out, but she couldn't, not now. Freedom was still a great distance away.

She crept behind Vanderman and followed him into the parking lot lit by blue sodium arc lamps. MAKE ROOM FOR CARS held steady on its pole, but it should have read MAKE ROOM FOR SWAT VEHICLES, because they were everywhere. The police were waiting with their weapons aimed at the exits, including the one she and Vanderman had come from. By the grace of something supernatural the invis-suits managed to hold up long enough for them to slip around the corner and sneak through to the maintenance section.

Her heart was racing and her mind was spiralling darkly. If the police managed to see them, if they managed to hear them, then they would open fire. She would be dead in an instant. She imagined her own funeral, and how nobody but Sarah would show up to it; she would be cremated like her mother, and that would be it. Darkness, nothing. What then?

Nothing, Luna. There is no God, and there is no afterlife.

“Up here,” whispered Vanderman. He led her across a stretch of cars and stopped upon seeing a single red door. The paint was worn, exposing layers of grated metal, and to the right of it was the keycard slot. Another problem. How were they supposed to open it without that lady’s voice yelling “Access granted” and alerting the nearby officers?

“What now?” Luna asked.

“Think you could disable the voice?”

“In front of the guards?” she said. “Are you nuts?”

“Can you do it?”

She checked her battery level:

“Luna?” he said.

“Fuck me,” she groaned. “Alright, gimme your screwdriver.”

He did. “Just keep quiet.”

“No shit!”

She snuck out into the open, made her way to the door, and unscrewed the keycard slot. She injected her wrist-wire into the undersocket and began hacking into the console. Twice she looked back with panic, once because a new swat car entered the parking lot, twice because something stomped out of it. A seven-foot-tall, red-and-white robot. Its head was shaped like a welding mask, with a green lightstrip splitting the face in two. Its arms and shoulders were dotted with blue bulbs, and its fists were thick and heavy. Printed on the chest was the number 001. An android, big one at that.

“Not often I see these,” said one of the guards. “They ship it in from Zinc?”

“Damn right they did,” said another. “Human eyes can only offer so much against what’s out there nowadays.”

Shit.

She continued hacking into the console. After another thirty seconds she managed to disable the voice system, and she quickly screwed the covering on. At the same time she heard footsteps slinking from behind. Vanderman. She slid her keycard through the slot, praying that the hack would work and, to her relief, it did. The door opened soundlessly. She and Vanderman crept inside before gently closing it behind them.

Luna tapped into her MD and deactivated her cloak, which had fallen to a measly . “Thank God,” she gasped.

“Told you it would work,” he said quietly.

“We got lucky. Did you see that thing?”

“First model of Zinc’s advanced human protection androids,” he said. “HPAs, if you wanna save the air.”

She rubbed her chest and took in her surroundings. The maintenance room was small, the walls were brown, and there was an enormous oil tank sitting on the left side, cobwebbed and coloured with small snatches of graffiti. The musty-smelling floorboard creaked under her shoes, and when she looked over at the opposite end she saw a narrow hall lit by a single bulb. Another door, this time wooden, and with no access control; just a basic knob.

“This way,” he said, and Luna followed him down the corridor, through the door, and into a dark space smelling of sewage. Down a flight of grated stairs until everything was pitch-black. Luna turned on her night-vision and saw a utility vault, no bigger than a kitchen, and at the very bottom lay a table-sized valve hatch.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“Should be,” he said, stepping in front of her. He bent down, clutched the rusty handwheel, and started twisting. He grunted and cursed, but try as he might, the hatch wouldn’t budge. It was simply too tight. He took a deep breath.

“Need help?” She knelt beside him.

“I got it,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “You don’t have a hope.”

He groaned. “And you do?”

“With these arms?” She clenched her cybernetic fists. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

He went back to trying.

“Vanderman,” she said.

“I said I got it.” But he didn’t get it.

Luna nonchalantly placed her hand on the valve and turned the handle. She could tell she was the one applying the most force.

Vanderman let go, astonished. “That easy, huh?”

“You need to work out more,” she said.

“Or I can be like you and install my strength,” he said. “But a real man doesn’t do that.”

“Being a real man doesn’t mean shit out here,” she said. “Survival of the fittest, and the fittest always have the most upgrades.”

“Not always.” He pointed at her. “Zinc’s militia were like me once.”

“So? They make the most powerful tech in the world now,” she said. “Sooner or later you’ll have to join the club.”

“Not happening,” he said primly.

She half-laughed. “Whatever, Mr Man.”

Silence, and then he said, “Now comes the hard part.”

“The shit?” she said. “I can smell it from here.”

A laugh. “You ready?”

“Guess so,” she said.

He backed away, beckoning her forward. “Ladies first.”

She gave a low moan of disgust, let her legs dangle in the hole, and then dropped. When she hit the bottom sewage splashed her suit; already the stench caused her to hunch over and retch.

“You alright?” Vanderman’s voice echoed through the tunnel.

“How far is the Zex Market? Time-wise?” she managed.

“Oh – ” He hopped down and splashed more crud over her. “ – about an hour. I don’t map out places like this.”

“And you know about this place how exactly?”

“Where else would people’s shit and piss go?”

A sick-bubble formed in her throat. She burped. “Good point.”

“Follow me then.”

They walked for more than an hour that night – well more. By the time they reached the centre of town and they could see the city’s lights sift through a zinc-coated manhole, it had been quarter past one in the morning; a whole two hours more than what Vanderman said. Along the way Luna tried calling Chip. She didn’t expect anyone to pick up – and no one did – but in her mind it was worth the try. She was pissed, terrified, worried, sick, tired, everything. She wanted to know if Sarah was okay, but right now it seemed like she had no way of knowing.

What was there to do? She couldn’t just call the cops and tell them about a missing person. She was wanted! This sucked, really sucked, and it didn’t help that she had a Tier-1 virus picking away at her little by little, bit by bit. Glitch said she had about a month to live, but the truth was it would probably be much less than that; at some point her MD would cause serious, irreversible damage to her brain.

They climbed the rungs until Vanderman popped the manhole open and rolled it off to the side. They exited the sewer, and Luna witnessed the kiosks roofed with palm-oil polymer tarps, the merchants with their cybernetic pieces, so upgraded they might as well have been robots, and the pedestrians bustling through the alley. Electric signage hung at the forefronts of twenty-four-seven businesses: a stripclub called Magma Mood, a drink-and-sleep motel called Saffron Cloud, and a Japanese fast-food restaurant called Little Osaka.

Luna thought: I wouldn’t mind a visit to these places.

But she only had a hundred bucks on her; the remaining four hundred was at her apartment in L’illian, stashed away in her cybersafe.

“Take a shower!”

“Fucking mutants.”

“Stay away from me.”

The people kept their distance from Vanderman and Luna.

Luna felt a touch of embarrassment, told Vanderman to get a move on, and then they hurried through the alley, walking fast, almost running, until the crowd thinned out and they saw an open street. Quieter here, much quieter, like Antarctica during the summer.

She pulled off her helmet slowly. For the first time in what felt like an eternity she could breathe fresh air. “What now?”

Vanderman took his helmet off, too. “We call a cab,” he said.

“No. I mean after that. What about Sarah?”

“We do what we can,” he said.

Luna thought he was going to expand, but when he didn’t, she said, “What does that mean?”

“Exactly what I said. We keep our heads low and figure out how to get that virus out of your system.”

She sneered. “Glitch might be the only guy who can stop this.”

He shook his head and tucked the skull-helmet under his arm. “Not true. There’s people with smarts out there, more smarts than you, Luna.”

“So what if there is?” she said. “This is Tier-1. Who do you know that can handle something like that? Not to mention, we have no way of paying anyone for anything right now.”

“We can try some of the virus-sweep services,” he said. “There’s a couple near L’illian.”

“Those won’t help,” she said defiantly.

“It’s your best shot,” he said.

“I want to find Sarah,” she said sternly.

“That can wait – ”

“No it can’t!” She tossed the helmet, turned, and ran her fingers through her hair. “... It can’t just wait, Vanderman,” she said softly. “She's just a kid.”

“I understand that,” he said hotly, “but we needa focus on making sure you live.”

“No,” she cried, her voice breaking, “I want to know where Sarah is. I want to know if that bastard didn’t kill her.”

“Don’t think like that – ”

“He wouldn’t kill a child, would he?” She faced him. “I mean, he has no reason to, right?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“Then what are they gonna do to her?” she said, panicked.

He shook his head. “Listen, Sarah’s fine. I have a gut-feeling, and my gut never lies, you know that. No one in their right mind would hurt, let alone kill, an innocent kid over something they didn’t even do. You understand?”

She nodded quickly.

“Right now we needa focus on getting that virus out of your system. Once we do that, we can focus on finding Chip and Sarah. We’ve done it once with Grimes Paolini, we can do it again with them. Alright?”

She sniffled. “Alright.”

A moment of silence passed between them, and rain came dripping down. She looked up at the full-dark sky, and then back at the alley.

“Let’s call a cab,” he said apologetically. “We’ll head back near L’illian, get some help – and I promise, I’ll get us all the help we can get – and then we’ll figure out what to do. Together.”

“We can't head to L'illian,” said Luna, struck with the sudden realisation. “Glitch knows where I live. He'll send the police there now that they have the inside scoop.”

Vanderman's face tightened, his expression flat and thoughtful. “Then we head to mine, not a problem. So long as you don't mind sleeping on the couch.”

She did mind, but what choice did she have? “This is one hell of a fucking day,” she said, plodding away to grab the helmet off the curb.

“Shitty day would be more accurate,” he said, chuckling at his own wit.

They both walked towards the bollards. Two foul-smelling criminals running from one problem to the next.