7

A breeze travelled down the steel-walled length of corridor and sept into Luna’s skin. Someone had left the door at the top of the stairs slightly open. When they reached it, she and Vanderman tapped into the suits and transformed into Freya and Scratch once again.

They couldn’t go around walking like zombies, now could they? Vanderman thought they could at first, but then Luna explained the massive chunk of missing brain matter at his occiput, and he promptly agreed that it was a bad idea.

She pushed the door open, glad that they didn’t need a keycard or facial-recognition pass to get through, and saw what lay ahead. It was an enclosed area longer than it was wide, and on either end stood escalators, one going up and the other going down, joined to a suspended walkway which included the typical range of mall-stores: Pure Overkill – a popular establishment which sold MiliCorp-certified weapons; Feel the Chemistry – a store which sold sodas and a particularly sweet blueberry-flavoured bubblegum; and, from what she could make out, Little Osaka.

She’d seen that restaurant before after climbing out of that shit-stinking sewer. The difference here was that it had been closed. All of them had been, actually. Left to the dogs, as people would say.

They’d each been turned into their own little compartments for the Legion to hang around, perhaps to do whatever drug business they liked to do. This area had also been extremely busy. Compared to what she’d seen before, it was jampacked. A gang member on every corner, on every escalator, on every….

“What is that?” Luna asked.

Above, five storeys above, an enormous spindle-shaped mechanism was spinning quickly, like the jaw of a turret lathe. Its body was divided into more than ten parts, all of which were rotating opposite to one another. The titanium jackets embedded in their long fixtures glistened in the sunlight, while the head moved back and forth, and the octagonal juts pegged with large plasma bulbs pistoned in and out. Wires from all directions connected to the rear which had been stationary, and for a moment they pulsed with an iridescent shine, like the cables in the supercomputer room at Vadchia Plaza.

Her eyes followed the wires and saw that they led to one source: another large object, this one perched even farther above: a giant glass sphere punched with a million holes. Through it Luna saw a webwork of complex machinery, rotating at the cogs and dispensing vapour into the nearby intake vents.

“I’m not too sure,” Vanderman said. “It must be some sort of power system.” He strapped Dick’s rifle around his shoulders and stuffed a hand in his pocket. “Christ….”

“Is this Zinc?” Luna said.

Before he could respond, static coughed from her ear-piece. “Can you hear me?” Liz said.

Luna stopped at a H-shaped screen, looking at the ad which displayed Chyna Deadman’s sixty-something-year-old face, wrinkled with a cloud of grey hair. The new election was two weeks away, and it was something Luna didn’t have any particular good feelings about. The city needed a new leader, yes, because this bitch did nothing but turn the ZLB into a living nightmare, but who was to say that the next person wouldn’t make things worse?

It was scary to consider.

“Yeah,” said Luna. “What happened back there? You were all static.”

“Was about to say the same thing to you guys,” Liz said. “I think this place has a signal jammer underground, or maybe you went too far.”

“A signal jammer?” she said.

“Yuh-huh,” Liz said.

“Why? I mean, why do they have a jammer?”

Vanderman cut in: “’Cause they’re hiding something down there, and they don’t want corps listening in on what they’re saying. Makes sense to me.”

“That means whoever works down there must be keeping it hidden from the others,” she said, and then thought of the cyber doc who stopped them on the way here. And hadn’t there been a lot of illegal activity going on in the other places? Surely the Legion would be worried about those things being heard by corps, too, unless… whatever they had underground was something highly valuable, something stolen from Zinc perhaps. It was just a theory, but it made sense for them to keep it hidden down there, and behind layers of security.

The anti-virus, perhaps. But what else might they have had? She was curious, though she knew better than to go out of her way to steal more than necessary.

Steal what you need. Everything else is greed.

“Can you see us, Liz?” asked Vanderman.

“Nuh-uh,” Liz replied. “You’re in the centre of the mall, and all the cameras there got removed. Either that or I can’t access them.”

Luna looked around, searching for those damned blue lustres, and found that there had been none. None that she could see anyway. “There’s a lot of people here,” she said. “The woman’s name is Silica. Found out through one of her… friends.”

“Did you kill them?” Liz asked.

Luna nodded. “Had no choice. They figured us out.”

“Shit!” There followed a moment of silence. “You guys are in big trouble.”

At the same time, Vanderman and Luna said: “What?”

“There’s some sort of med-team headin’ towards the corridor you just went through,” Liz said. “Did you hide the bodies?”

Luna cursed under her breath. “We couldn’t. There wasn’t any place they could go.”

Liz said, “Then you’ll have to move fast before they clock it.”

“Christ,” said Vanderman, staring up at the second and third and fourth storeys. “So where to, Luna?”

“You’re asking me?” she said.

“I can’t see no red-haired bitch around here,” he said. “Should we ask around for Silica?”

“Hold on,” interrupted Liz. “I might be able to research this Silica person. Might help.”

“We don’t have much time, Liz,” said Vanderman.

“Then go off and look for her,” she replied. “I’ll let you know if I find anything. Also, how do you spell that? Silica? With an ‘E’ or an ‘I’?”

“An ‘I’,” said Luna. “Like silicone.”

“Cheers,” she said.

Luna took a deep breath and, without thinking, began making her way towards the escalator on the far right. She actually quite preferred this area in comparison to the others, mostly because once she caught the ramp up to the next storey she saw that there had been a lot of potted ferns, and she figured that this might have been what the mall looked like when it had been open.

They walked alongside Feel the Chemistry and Pure Overkill and Little Osaka. Her prediction that they were being used for drug business was partially true, though not quite in the way she imagined it. The gang members were actually doing drugs, sticking needles of Afterburner in their thread-wrapped arms, smoking Jade roll-ups and looking high off their kites. Their eyes were glassy and red, but their faces were flat and calm and gaunt. Some were missing a nose, others an ear. Others again were missing entire portions of their head, and Luna thought that even if she and Vanderman stayed as Richie and Dick they would have fit in no problem. Because these people looked like corpses.

“Oi!” yelled Vanderman, whistling at one of the men in Feel the Chemistry. The man was lying back on the counter, head facing the ceiling, a stick of Jade poking out from his mouth. He trudged up and sat astride the counter as she and Vanderman approached.

“Help you?” the man said groggily.

“Looking for Silica, seen her around?” Luna said, her voice deep.

“Haven’t,” he said. “Haven’t even seen you around before. You’re wastin’ your time askin’ me.”

“Know where we can find her?” Vanderman pressed, blowing a cloud of stinking smoke.

“Why you wanna talk to that bitch anyway?” the man said.

“None of your business,” said Vanderman. “All you need to know is that we need to.”

The man chuckled without opening his mouth. He reached back over the counter, pulled open a drawer, and grabbed something small and square. It looked like a radar gun. He aimed it at the two of them and pulled the trigger.

A blue light flashed from the bore, and to Luna’s horror the fibre on her mask began to split and separate, while a small portion of her hair turned dark blue.

She gasped and reached for her weapon.

Vanderman did, too.

“Relaaaaaaaaax,” the man said.

But Luna didn’t. She backed up, holding the gun tight but not aiming just yet. Whenever she felt imminent danger she would get that sense, that hunch, that things were going to go downhill. That she might die if she wasn’t too careful. But for whatever reason, she didn’t get that feeling from this man; he looked so calm, no more worried about the world than a grain of sand, and in a strange roundabout way it put Luna at ease.

“Who are you?” she asked sharply, her fake voice breaking.

He whipped the mysterious gun away and their disguises resumed. “Just a guy with spider eyes.”

Vanderman sneered, exchanging looks between Luna and the man. “You know about us?”

He shrugged. “Do now.”

Luna still didn’t know what to make of him. “So….”

“Street dwellers?” the man asked smugly.

Silence. More looks exchanged.

“What are you lookin’ for?” the man asked quickly. “Gauntlets? Pulse machines? Laser katanas? Heck, we got everything.”

Terror jumped nimbly down her throat. Shit! He has us figured out. But why isn’t he…?

“What’s your deal?” Vanderman said.

He stood and stretched. “Need help breakin’ into the storage facility?”

More confusion. Luna tightened her grip on the rifle. “Listen, who are you and why are you – ?”

“Name’s Beacon,” the man said. He pulled his goggles up, revealing, as he said, eight spider eyes. He smiled. “You know it’s pretty obvious you two are wearin’ those textile suits.”

“Textile suits?” said Luna.

A nod. “Arachnofibre textile synthesis,” Beacon said. “I may be toothless, but I know my stuff. I used to engineer those myself, you know. You probably wouldn’t guess it by the look of me, would you?”

She shook her head. “What makes it obvious?”

He pointed to his left shoulder. “Area around your shoulder is moving. Means the skeleton’s been pierced. Take it you got into a gunfight?”

She looked down at the cloth around her shoulder and saw that he had been right. There was movement, although very small to the point where she questioned if anyone would notice, that resembled the slithering of a million tiny snakes, all desperately trying to plug the gap.

“Is it safe?” she asked.

“Should be,” he said. “No one’ll notice if you don’t bring attention to it. Unless you’re me, ’course.”

Vanderman raised a hand and splayed his fingers. “Why aren’t you rattin’ us out?”

“’Cause this place is godawful, ’course,” Beacon said. “Look what they did to me. You think I like being here?” He ran a hand over his face.

“So why stay?” he said.

“You don’t just get up and leave the Legion once you’re in, you know,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Oh no, only way out is through a bullet in the brain, a knife across the neck.”

Luna felt a measure of relief knowing that he wouldn’t rat them out – although part of her thought he might have been lying, but through no signs of his own. He seemed honest to the bone, she thought. “Listen, Beacon… are you able to help us then? If not, do you know where to find Silica?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know what you want, so I don’t know if I can.”

Luna took a deep breath before responding: “The anti-virus.”

“Mmm,” cooed Beacon. “Ain’t that a surprise? No one ever looks for that.”

“People have tried this before?” she quizzed. “Breaking in?”

Another shake of the head. “Nope, not at all. But HelpMe’s overpriced and you’d either wanna be a CEO or an extremely rich person to want that. Or both. That’s what it was designed for, to protect the rich from supermalware.”

“So how do I get it? I mean, I’ve already figured out where it is,” she said.

“Well you need the key-leader’s face,” said Beacon in a scholarly voice. “And Silica’s your woman, so you got that right, ’course. She’s the one who locks and secures the items, and she’s also the one who gets them, and she’s also the one who takes the pictures and puts them on the dark web as you would already know.”

He’s good, she thought. Smart, like Chip. Less of an asswipe, too.

“Alright,” she said. “So where is she?”

“One of two places,” he said. “Either in the Pitching Yard with the rest of the Class 1 members, or getting drunk somewhere ’round here. But I haven’t seen her pass through, so I imagine the Pitching Yard is your go-to.”

“And where’s that?” asked Vanderman. Luna had forgotten he was standing there, right next to her. His voice was startling. “You’re telling us all this great insight, and I’m not sure we can even trust you.”

Beacon tapped the left side of his head a couple times, and Luna saw his neural wire hanging out from the port. His MD had been damaged, broken. “Even if I wanted to,” he began, “I wouldn’t be able to contact shit. MD’s been gone for years. The Legion are the ones who take ’em out ’cause they don’t want no snitches, no… gosh, what’s the word?”

“Undercover agents?” said Luna.

“Nah, there’s a smaller word for ’em,” Beacon said. “Point is, I can’t snitch on you without being skin-close to you shooting me, and I value my life, ya know. Even if this place is a shithole I’d much prefer it over being sent to God’s cooking pot. Understand?”

Luna understood. “Where’s the Pitching Yard?”

“Hold on,” he said. “One thing about me is I never do nothin’ for nothin’.”

Double negative, she thought randomly.

“What do you want?” said Vanderman.

“Get me outta here,” he said, plucking the Jade roll-up from his teeth and crushing it in the palm of his fingerlessly gloved hand. He tossed the remaining bits on the ground, like one of those magicians pouring sand from a cupped hand. “I’ll help you find her. We get out together. Three of us. You two and Mr Stranger who's from the damn place. What about that?” He smiled.

Luna blushed, if not with heat then with angst.

He might be tricking us, she thought. But why would he want to trick us instead of getting the security or whatever?

She figured it would be in their best interest to agree to his deal, his bargain, because if they didn’t, then he might get mad and sound the alarm.

Either way there was no getting away from him, so she bit the bullet and agreed. Soon Beacon grabbed another Jade stick, rolled it up, and led them across the other mall stores, travelling another five minutes to an open area which Luna thought might have been the Pitching Yard.