Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (36 page)

Zoey said, “Are you close to your father?”

There was a long moment before Will said, “No.”

Silence. Zoey looked out the windshield, scanning the pedestrians wandering around outside the entrance to Livingston Tower, looking for anyone who could be the Molech henchmen she was to meet.

She said, “I've always been close to my mom. She had me so young. I would say she was more like a sister, but most sisters I've been around don't get along.”

“My father had a length of chain he would hit me with if my shirts weren't pressed to his satisfaction. And he enjoyed it more when they weren't. The first girl I ever brought home, he made her leave and told me I could do better. He told her she was too fat for me.”

“Ugh. I've been there. With stepdads.”

Will gave her a very brief look and said, “I know.”

Zoey said, “You wake up in the morning and dread going to school because the other kids torture you, then at the end of the school day you dread going back home, because of what's waiting for you there.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

On the screen, Armando was quietly but forcefully shoving open a roof access door. He stepped out into harsh wind and sunlight, the flickering torsos of Tabula Ra$a skyscrapers looming silently around him. The roof of the casino was dominated by a massive empty swimming pool, containing only puddles of melted snow and various debris that had blown in over the months. Zoey saw at least one dead bird nearby.

Will nudged her and she looked up from her phone. There was a commotion outside the main entrance of Livingston Tower:

Three men had pulled up, riding tigers.

Or so it appeared. As they got closer it became clear they were on customized motorcycles, each with a snarling tiger animated across the bodywork, their feet swiping the ground as they rolled along. Incredibly, these were only the fourth most ridiculous vehicles Zoey had seen since arriving in the city. The motorcycles ripped through the yellow caution tape and parked in nearly perfect unison. Three muscular, shirtless men in leather pants stepped off, each wearing motorcycle helmets that they did not remove as they strode up to the main entrance of Livingston Tower. The revolving doors were locked, but one of the men simply grabbed one and yanked it off its hinge, tossing the four attached doors out onto the sidewalk behind them, glass shattering on the black decorative stones of the entryway. The three men vanished into the lobby.

Zoey tried to follow Will's breathing advice and said, “You never did show me that coin trick.”

“You should go. There's no reason to keep them waiting.”

Zoey glanced down at the feed, one last time. Armando moved across the roof of the Ice Palace—alone, as far as Zoey could see. The view bounced along as he jogged toward the arched exit that led to the glass swim bridge, which would take him to the roof of the former Fire Palace and Molech's HQ, about fifty yards away.

Zoey took a deep breath and said, “All right. Promise me that if I don't make it back, you'll take care of my cat.”

“I promise … I will hire someone to do that.”

Zoey stepped out, and tried to appreciate that she could be about to die in a way she never would have expected as recently as one week ago: spectacularly, and inside a skyscraper that she owned.

 

THIRTY-NINE

Molech's three henchmen were standing right in the middle of the massive lobby, directly on top of the giant gold mustache that was inlaid in the black marble tile. The lobby was silent aside from the timid squeaks of Zoey's tennis shoes.

She got as close as she was willing and said, “Hello.”

They didn't answer.

Zoey pulled out her phone and summoned the translucent projection of Will Blackwater, then said, “I hope you don't mind, Will didn't trust me to do this on my own.”

None of the men removed their helmets, each of their expressions hidden behind dark tinted faceplates. But then a face appeared in the visors of all three—the same face on each. The facemasks were screens, each displaying the pale face of Molech, a live feed from his hospital bed.

On three simultaneous feeds, a chorus of three Molechs said, “Well, well, well, look who brought a pussy to a dick fight. We're taking a walk.”

Zoey had been prepared for this, and took a step back toward the front doors when a hand clenched around her arm. That ring of bruises flared up, that throbbing band on her upper arm that rough hands kept latching on to. Zoey bit her lip, and thought of just how very tired she was of all this.

Molech's video faces said, “Whoa, where are you goin'? Paulie, walk this ham mannequin over to the elevator.”

This possibility hadn't been discussed. From her phone, Will said, “Where are you taking her?”

No one acknowledged his question. They entered the elevator, and Zoey found she was looking at the street again—the elevators were glassed-in pods that ran up the exterior of the building. One of the men punched a button and Zoey watched with despair as the pavement dropped below them, feeling the ascent in the pit of her stomach—all of the people in the world who could help her were now plummeting below her feet. Up and up they went, all the way up, until the jagged, half-finished city was like a sprawling architect's model below her, flickering towers jutting up through the haze. She imagined reaching out and just sweeping the buildings aside with her hand. Just … wipe it all away and forget it was ever here.

The elevator door opened on the top floor and they headed down a hall until they reached a pair of ominous black doors.

They were locked, but from the phone, Will said, “Should be updated with your voice commands, just say ‘unlock.'”

She did, and the locks clicked open automatically at the sound. Inside the room was a black granite conference table, etched into the surface of which was the Livingston Enterprises logo done once again in inlaid gold, complete with that stupid cartoon mustache. And that was the least ridiculous feature of the décor.

Three of the walls formed one big wraparound aquarium full of little two-foot-long sharks (Zoey decided once and for all that subtlety was not Arthur Livingston's thing). One of the henchmen went up and put his finger on the glass, and one of the sharks came over and started ineffectually biting at it. The remaining wall was a huge curved window overlooking Tabula Ra$a. Zoey imagined Arthur and his Suits hammering out deals while looking out over the insignificant ants who scurried around the city below. It occurred to Zoey that this was where Will had wanted to meet with her two days earlier, when she had led them all to Squatterville instead. He had wanted to sit her down in this menacing black room in the clouds, surrounded by sharks. The same man she was now trusting with her life, for some reason.

From the henchmen's facemasks, the three Molechs said, “Alrighty. Since you're so big on negotiation, Mr. Blackwater, I figured I'd take us up to the room where Arthur made all of his sleazy backroom deals, dreamin' up the little loopholes designed to screw over the honest folk like me. So here's my opening offer, and there's no fine print. Zoey hands over the gold. Zoey's mother goes free. I sever Zoey's spinal cord, paralyzing her, then bury her in a coffin with a camera and ten thousand cockroaches. I broadcast the results on the Tabula Rasa skyline for the next month. I use Raiden tech to rule the Earth forever and ever.”

The hologram of Will Blackwater said, “Well, I suppose we had to start somewhere. I—”

“Stop right there, lollicock. I need proof she brought the gold before this goes any further.”

“Sure. It's right here.” Will's hologram pointed at Zoey's head. “It took us a while to figure it out, but a few months before Arthur died, he got wind that something bad was coming his way. So he made a secret appointment for little Zoey here. She was taken to the doctor, where a series of complicated brain scans were performed. Isn't that right, Zoey?”

Zoey was completely lost, but said, “Yes?”

“What neither Zoey nor the rest of us knew was that Arthur was performing a neural etch. He was imprinting the schematics and software drivers for the Raiden exoquantum hypercapacitor right into her brain tissue. The gold code is right there inside her cranium—Arthur turned her into a living hard drive.”

Zoey was pretty sure this was a lie, unless she had zoned out during an important conversation at some point, but couldn't for the life of her figure out where Will was going with it.

Molech said, “You just made that up, didn't you?”

“Think it through. Arthur did not want Zoey's life endangered—and the only way to extract the information from her neural tissue is via her willing cooperation. Kill her, and those signals go dark and the data vanishes from the universe forever. Distress her, and the emotional activity will cloud the signal and make it impossible to retrieve. This is all by design, in case of a situation just like this. The girl must be placed into a perfectly relaxed state, while conscious, while the data is retrieved. It can be done instantly with any quantum data scanner capable of reading 3-D neural etching.”

Molech said, “And you brought one of these gadgets with you? Zoey's momma certainly hopes so.”

“Unfortunately the only one Arthur owned was destroyed in the warehouse blast.”

“How convenient for you. But
inconvenient
for Zoey and the owner of the baby hatch she crawled out of.”

“But there is another way to extract the data, it just takes a bit longer. Zoey, lie on the table.”

Whatever Will was going for here had in no way been shared with Zoey beforehand, which alarmed her more than anything. Still, she had to assume the man had a plan, since his brain did nothing but generate plans twenty-four hours a day. She climbed onto the conference table, then lay awkwardly on her back.

Will said, “Make sure your henchmen are close enough to record clear audio, and make no sound to interfere. I'm going to remotely activate the neural upload, and Zoey will begin to broadcast the data in the form of an audio waveform from her vocal cords. Record the sound, and decode it to binary. You'll have your data. Now, the waveform will to your ears just sound like Zoey is making a series of high-pitched screeching noises. The process will take about sixty minutes. I'm activating the audio waveform now.”

Zoey stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what Will wanted her to do next.

He said, “All right, I've initiated the process. You should hear the sound of the transmission from Zoey momentarily.”

Zoey waited, in silence.

“Any moment now.”

Zoey finally realized what Will wanted from her and, taking the cue, said, “
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
”

From the masks of his three henchmen, Molech watched this happen in dull silence.

After a moment he said, “All right, while we're waiting for that, I'm going to check in with what's going on up on my roof.”

The henchman on the far left's mask cut away from the feed of Molech's face, and brought up a view of a group of shirtless men loading machine guns. They were on a roof, one very similar to the one Zoey had just watched Armando cross a few minutes earlier.

Zoey stopped screeching and sat up on the table, suddenly unable to breathe. She was also unable to stop herself from muttering, “No…”

Responding to a command Zoey couldn't hear, the gunmen crouched and jogged across the Fire Palace roof, dodging between a pair of black and yellow cranes Zoey thought looked like a couple of robotic giraffes. Zoey counted six—no, eight—men, buckles and straps jingling and clacking as they hustled toward the glass bridge that connected their rooftop to the Ice Palace. They threw their bodies up against the curved wall of the empty pool, peering across the dry swim bridge where a single speck in a black suit and red shirt was striding toward them.

Armando, walking right into their ambush.

Molech said, “Kools, can you hear me, bro?”

The facemask of the henchman on the far right blinked away from Molech and brought up the feed from Colorado, where Zoey's mother was in mid-laugh at something her captor had said.

Kools said, “Loud and clear, boss.”

“Bury that bitch.”

Without a word, the man reached out and roughly yanked Zoey's mother by the wrist, pulling her toward a clearing in the woods. She laughed again, still sure her new friend was just fooling around, so very familiar with men grabbing and pulling as a form of flirtation. Then she saw the clearing, and the grave-sized hole in the ground, and the open pine box lying nearby. In mid-laugh, she started shrieking.

Zoey jumped down off the table and screamed incoherently into the henchman's facemask, as if her mother could hear her. On the screen, Zoey's mother tried to rip her arm free, but the captor's hands were well-practiced at this, effortlessly anticipating and countering all of the jerking moves of the frantic woman. With his free hand, he pulled out a little gadget shaped like a curling iron. He pressed it to his hostage's spine and it made a pop and a whine, like an old-timey camera, and Zoey's mother collapsed into the frozen mud and dead leaves of the forest floor. She fell onto her back, her eyes wide open and twitching in terror, her body a useless rag doll.

Zoey screamed again.

“Don't worry,” said Molech from the faceplate of the middle henchman. “That'll just stop her from thrashing around. She'll be awake, and aware, the whole time.”

Zoey said, “We'll give it to you! We'll give you the gold! It's in a coin! A silver coin! There's a chip in the coin! Will, tell him!”

Will's hologram, perfectly calm, said, “Now, let's all take a step back and make sure we understand each other's positions…”

“
WE ARE NOT STILL DOING THE SCAM!
Give him the coin!”

Zoey heard the muffled rattle of gunfire. The sound was coming from the facemask on the far left, carrying the rooftop feed. On the screen, four machine guns were spitting fire. The four gunmen had advanced out onto the curved glass half-pipe of the swim bridge, crunching through ankle-deep slush, brass shells bouncing and clinking off the glass walls.