Chapter Thirteen - Actually Cool

“A ground-based city is a city whose infrastructure isn’t--yet--designed to accommodate sky-based traffic. These cities require that hover vehicles use ground-level commercial and public traffic lanes and are generally accessible for people on foot, or on self-powered vehicles (i.e.: bicycles, roller-blades, scooters).

As Mega-cities continue to become more popular, living in a ground-based city is seen as something less desirable and more mundane. People living in these places are often called Dirt, or Ground Pounders.”

--Modern Dictionary of Modern Slang, fourth edition, 2045

***

The city past Downtown wasn’t all too different from the city within the barricades. It wasn’t like they’d stopped right on the edge of the high-rises. Though the further out I walked, the shorter the buildings became. Most of them were older constructions, the kinds of building styles that were popular in like, the early bit of the century.

These were pre-Antithesis buildings. Cheaper, designed to be prettier. They’d been retrofitted, of course. All that flat space on their sides was wasted if it wasn’t plastered full of ads.

The place was a mess now. More windows were broken than not, and I suspected that had more to do with looters than any alien presence. A couple of places had gone up in flames, and I stepped over the hood of a car that had merged into a few others in what was obviously a spectacular pile-up.

Burlington, it seemed, was very much a ground-based city.

She’s to your right, around the intersection and one floor above ground level.

“Thanks,” I said. I looked around for any signs of the antithesis and found a whole lot of nothing. Strange. I would have expected them to be swarming almost non-stop. Wasn’t that what happened in New Montreal?

Why was it so different here?

It couldn’t have been Manic. She was alone and still relatively new. The area around the city had been culled, probably, but... no, I had a worrying feeling in my gut that said that something was off here, and I couldn’t place exactly what it was yet.

The missing aliens was part of that, though.

I poked my head around the next intersection and scanned the space. A shopping area? There was a music store, an aug clinic, and a few chain restaurants with flashy ads competing for attention. Or they would have been if they weren’t off. Neon wasn’t nearly as impressive when it was powered down.

The second floor on the music store was blown out, the entire facade missing. Music was coming from there, which... was a little strange. The street seemed entirely unpowered, so what was making the noise?

After checking for stuff that might shoot at me and finding none, I stepped around the corner and started towards the store.

The music continued. It was just a guitar being strummed, something acoustic, if I had to guess (and I did have to guess, I didn’t know jack-shit about musical instruments). The sound carried well across the empty street. Without half a hundred air conditioning units and neon tubes humming along and no cars passing by or catchy ad jingles competing for ear-space, the street was a nice, echoey place for a haunting, slow song to linger in.

I didn’t know music, but I knew emotions, and that song was as melancholic as any.

I stopped in the middle of the street in front of the music store, head tilted back to watch the player.

She was older than I’d imagined, somehow. A 30-something woman with pale blue hair tossed up in a pompadour and shaved on the sides with a clean fade. She was aug’d to the tits (Which were, admittedly, fantastic), with shockingly blue eyes and a few wires just under the skin of her face.

Her jacket, a thick black thing which was definitely Protector-made, with little spikes on the elbows and shoulders and a teal interior that matched her hair, was rolled up to let her hands free.

She was half-bent over an old guitar, one of those wooden ones with a starburst pattern inlaid into the grain. Manic continued to pluck at the strings, and the song turned a little less sad, and a little more... inquisitive?

“So, who the fuck are you?” she asked.

“Stray Cat,” I said. “You play well.”

“You don’t know shit about music, Stray Cat.”

She stopped. It was the wrong place to stop the music, though I couldn’t explain why. With a sigh, she stood up from the pile of rubble she was using as a bench and carefully placed the guitar back on a rack next to a few others which didn’t look like they’d weathered whatever destroyed the wall as well.

Then she walked out of the store’s second floor, coat billowing out and legs straight until she crashed into the ground with a grunt and a hard bend of her knees. “Fuck. Knees aren’t as smooth as they used to be,” she complained.

“Buy new ones,” I said. “You’re Manic?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Glad introductions are done. What do you want?”

Well, I was either going to get along with her or we’d end this in a cat-fight, and there was no middle ground. I figured we’d both be finding out which it was sometime in the next five minutes.

Manic was sizing me up. Her hands were in the pockets of her pants, real close to a pair of large handguns hanging off her belt. I couldn’t tell if she was being casual or if that was some sort of threat.

I took a deep breath and considered what I was going to say next. I didn’t have a lot of time to do that considering in, though. “I heard you were a gigantic bitch,” I said.

That was a nice opener.

She scoffed. “Wanna see it for yourself?”

“I’d love to,” I said. “There’s a hive nearby. Whole fuckload of aliens that need killing. Actually, there’s a bunch of them. You can pick.”

“What is this, some sort of test shit?” she asked.

“Do I look educated?” I asked.

She shrugged and pulled a hand out of her pocket to gesture vaguely at me. I supposed I was wearing some pretty fancy shit instead of my usual less-than-fancy thrift-store chique.

“Alright, fair enough,” I said. “Want to come or not?”

“I don’t like working with people. They’re cunts.”

“Can’t have a band with just one player,” I said.

“Bitch, you don’t go making music analogies at me.”

I laughed. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist. But really. If you want, hit up the hive yourself. I can stand back and blow shit up when you can’t handle it anymore.”

“Girl, I’m too old for that kind of double-think trickery,” she warned.

I shook my head. “One way or another, we’ve got hives to explode. You can work with me, you can go at it alone. Either way, we have work to do.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” I said.

“And you’re the boss of this place?”

“Literally, yeah. Some fuckwit who’s never seen the outside of his little beige heaven assigned me to protect this backwater shithole of a city. Trust me, I’d rather be back home wearing a lot less and frying my brain out on my media feeds while fondling my girlfriend. But no, instead I’m out here giving orders that I hope won’t get anyone killed and trying to lead around a bunch of noobs who don’t know any better. So yeah, either work with me, or work for me.’

“Those are my two options?” she asked. She stood taller, and I realized that she had a good half-head over me. Still, something about her posture, the way she crossed her arms and scowled... yeah, we were on the same page, more or less. At the very least, we were in the same book.

“Well, you can go back to practising your guitar.”

She tilted her head to one side, the cybernetics in her neck poking out of her skin in a disconcerting way until her spine cracked, then she did the same on the other side. “Yeah, alright, show me what you can do, Stray Cat. You some sort of top-tier samurai?”

“Not even close,” I said. “Just been at this for a little longer than you have. Long enough to figure out which end of the gun goes bang.”

“Hm.”

“Myalis, nearest hive from here?”

Difficult to confirm. With local surveillance networks mostly down, I can only point you in the general direction. There are a few potential locations to visit. One is a botanical shop on the other side of the city, the other a sewage treatment plant, another--and this is the nearest, is beneath the Burlington museum of Natural History.

“Cool,” I said. “I love museums.”

“Museums?” Manic asked. “Are we talking about the tallest cabinet thing?”

“What?” I asked.

“Yeah, nevermind.”

I frowned, but didn’t ask. “Come on, it can’t be too far from here. You can tell me your sob story as we walk.”

“Fuck you.”

“Only if you’re real okay about threesomes,” I replied.

***