Harsh Lessons (40 page)

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If you have questions or suggestions, check out my blog,
All About Leeth
.  If you're interested in self-publishing, take a peek at my other blog,
A Toe in the Ocean of Books
. 

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As with Vol.1, if you’re one of the first twenty people to find a previously-undetected error in this book, and notify me (trusting me with your email address), I'll send you a free copy of the sequel as soon as it's ready.  I reserve the right to decide if something is a genuine error and not just my peculiar style, though!

Finally, if you’d like a sneak peek of what's in store for Leeth, I’ve included a very early draft of the 1
^st
chapter of Vol. 3 of The Leeth Dossier:
Shadow Hunt.
(Though it needs re-writing: Leeth took me by surprise.  Again.)

Luke Kendall, June 2016.  @LukeJKendall
 

SHADOW HUNT, CHAPTER 1

From the new heights of Bayview, she followed Preacher down into the wrecked streets of the Hunters Point Dumps, skirting black puddles of ash-laced rain water.  Far below, a fog had rolled in off the Bay to partly cloak the smashed and charred houses, shops and offices that stared slack-jawed into the desolation.  She kept to the middle of the old main road, where rusted and burnt out wrecks were fewest, and visibility – backlit by the night-glow of New Francisco – was best.  The Big One of '44 had thrust this whole region up, making a terraced ruin cut off from the city proper.  Still following Preacher, she paused for a moment to look back and up at the first escarpment now hulking over her.  Six more of the cliffs stretched below.  Far in the distance on the bottom-most terrace, a few dotted orange firelights glowed.

She stretched her arms wide, wishing she could grab the ruins and the darkness, the
reality
of the broken landscape, and just hug it.  She shivered in delight.  Far ahead, the sound of Preacher's soft steps faded. 
Stop being silly
, she berated herself. 
This isn't a game!
  But she couldn't keep the grin off her face as she trotted on again.

At the fourth tier, a rusted wreck told her she'd crossed into the inhabited part of the area.  It was the first one she'd seen that'd been stripped of everything combustible, where the tires had been crudely hacked away – to use for shoe-soles, her crammed lessons had said – and where every part that could take an edge, or serve any useful purpose, had been unscrewed or prised off and taken away.  A carcass stripped to the bone by ants.

She looked around.  Even the street had less rubbish on it.  What was left was only the burned, the ruined, or the absolutely worthless.  She shook her head.  These people must really be desperate.

Below her, she heard Preacher call a distant greeting as his pace sped up.  She couldn't make much sense of the words that followed as she quietly increased her own pace, but thought maybe they meant "hello."  She frowned.  She hadn't realized Preacher spoke
Street
so fluently.  She stopped, head tilted to one side, and concentrated.  From the sounds of their movement, it sounded like she was now following a group of four people.

As she continued on she began hearing other movement.  Sometimes far behind, sometimes off to the sides.

By the time she'd descended to the seventh and final terrace, she was into the clammy fog, and visibility had dropped to fifty meters.  Far off to her right and up on a higher terrace she heard a distant rumble, growing quickly to a thunder of internal combustion bikes, skidding and careening down an impossibly steep rut of dirt between tumbled concrete blocks, then along a rusted metal girder, before dropping to the merely rough ground. 
Juice, they could ride!

She leapt to the roof of a van, flattening herself out on the rusted surface, and watched the outlandishly dressed figures sweep past.  She'd thought she'd hidden, but one hooked his fist up into the air in greeting as he sped past.

She frowned at the disappearing forms, then hurried to close up within earshot of Preacher and his friends.  They were heading left now, northwards along the Bay.

From a long way behind she heard the sound of several sets of heavy, running feet approaching.  As they got closer she backed off into a collapsed office, waiting tensely.  Out of the smog a group of men pounded into view.  One saw her and they all slowed.  They wore armor jackets, one with a bandolier of .⁠44 shells across his body –
idiot
– while another carried the biggest gun she'd ever seen.  Their expensive, sleek cyberware labeled them complete outsiders even to her unpracticed eye.  Mercs, maybe, looking to recruit local talent.  The chrome eyes of the leader swept over her, and she heard his whispered words as he summed her up for his men.

'Null cyber.  Sticker left sleeve.  A halfdeck.'  Without a further glance they pounded past.

She ground her teeth at the casual insult, and moved on.

Fifteen minutes later, the trickle of people scrambling through the rubble had swelled to a stream, and a carnival fever laced the air.  There were so many people, she'd had to close to only ten meters to keep Preacher in sight.  Oops.  To keep "Dad" in sight – she'd better start thinking of him as Dad, or she might accidentally call him by the wrong name.  She grimaced.  That'd be so bad.

From up ahead, then, the smell of smoke, and a massive building with flickers of orange red firelight from the lower floors.  Music beat out in waves, with a heavy, driving rhythm that sped her pulse.  Warmth radiated from it, pushing back the fog.

She stopped at a darkened side passage, remembering her briefing: how the Truce only applied to the lit areas.  Down this passage, down in the private places of the people and things who lived here – that's where she'd get a real Test.  Maybe a better test than the Fest itself.

Stepping closer, she parted the stinking and decaying curtain screening the dark fissure from passersby.  Though the sounds were hard to pick out over the heart-thumping beat of the music drumming behind her, the sudden cessation of movement was a warning.  Her sight adjusted, and in the unlit passage she saw the hungry eyes of something badly Altered, maybe even a Melt's offspring.  Another like it eased from an opening down the passage.  Huge, hunched.  Claws and tusks.

She'd be quite visible, she realized, standing with the parted curtain and the light behind her.  She flinched, imagining Father's reaction to such a stupid tactical move, and the sudden thought brought her to her senses.  She wasn't here to
play
.  This was practically a mission.

With one last wistful look, she stepped away, letting the curtain fall back into place.  Maybe she'd have time later.

Turning back, on tiptoes and craning her head, she sifted through the crowds to pick out Dad. 
Funt!  He was gone!
  Food stalls to her right; up ahead, crowds.  Further ahead…. A glimpse of him and his companions brought instant relief.  One of them, a tall, weedy guy, was nodding earnestly as Dad spelled something out to him, with hand gestures that made her think Dad was describing some woman.  She met his eyes and he froze, then spoke something under his hand.  The thin guy went to turn toward her but she'd swear Dad stopped him.  Like he was protecting her identity. 
Huh
.  That was more than she'd expected; but all the same, she wasn't going to let her guard down.

The weedy guy moved off and she nodded a reluctant "thanks" to Dad before sinking back down off tiptoe.  Dad and his other companions continued on ahead.  It wasn't too hard, now, to follow them along the fire-lit walkways, through the lingering wisps of fog.  She even started to relax a little.

It really was like she'd stepped into a bizarre dreamworld.  At least half the people were mutants.  Trolls, ogres – all victims of the terrible Melt retrovirus, in all their strange combinations.  Quite a few of the Altered, too.  She saw Furries of all sorts:
Bast
ean, Dogmen, Wolven, and others she couldn't name.  People strode or sneaked or staggered around, singly or in groups, dressed in leathers or chromes, kevlar or rags.  Smoking, drinking, popping or chipping.  Dancing, talking, buying, selling.  She passed a juggler of blue-flamed acetylene burners, whose crowd half-blocked the passageway, and a male and female artistically coupling further on.  A smaller crowd were throwing tokens and suggestions in equal numbers.

Leeth smiled and moved on. 
These
people weren't sheep!

The central atrium of the plaza had long been open to the sky, and four bonfires threw flames and sparks up soot-stained walls.  A portable phasion furnace mounted higher up poured a more powerful wall of heat into the open central area.  She knew from her recent studies it would’ve been pumped by an energy raid sometime recently, a group of Dumpers tapping the nearby city's power grid for as long as they could for tonight’s event, hauling energy cells back before the citycops or one of Phasion Corporation's tactical response groups located them.  She looked around.  Streams of people continually added to the crowds seated on the steps leading down to and surrounding the entertainment dais, while food sellers and intoxers moved through the area screeching their sales.

Six floors rose up from here, all overlooking the same courtyard, each balcony crammed with people.  Here, the jungle beat was strong, pounding, insistent.  At the edges of the plaza, eyes gleamed from former shop fronts, now draped or barricaded to turn them into homes.  The small shapes of almost-feral children played and hunted at the edges of the crowd.  She watched them with envious eyes.

Across the way, she spied Pr-
Dad
seated in a good position, arms draped around two young but dirty-looking women, laughing and grinning with the people around him.  She looked around, trying to decide her next step.

A puff of smoky wind wrapped around her, carrying scents of fat and other things she couldn't recognize.  Her stomach growled, and she realized she was starving.  Meaty smells were coming from a food stall pressed in under an overhang to her left.  A lean male approached, some small creature grilled and jammed onto a stick he held.  He bit into the crisp skin, tearing off a hunk of succulent flesh as he pushed past her.  Leeth licked her lips and forced her way over to join the small crowd buying the food.

Smoke rose from grease-streaked stainless steel vats where fatty oil simmered, while trays of fried insects and spiders were racked above to keep warm.  A small girl exchanged a token for a scoop full, dumped rattling into a dirty styrofoam cup. 
Eww.
  Leeth saw a slot for her cashstick and jammed it in, caught the cook's eye and pointed to one of the small animals turning slowly on a spit.

A minute later she was gingerly biting into it.  She stopped abruptly, fatty juices running down her chin, as the smoky, gamy flavor saturated her mouth. 
Wow!
  She blinked in surprise, then began moving again, picking more delicately around the small bones.  A whine and a wet nudge against her bare shin made her look down into the furry muzzle and pleading brown eyes of a rangy, thin dog.

'No way,' she told it, trying hard to ignore the hopeful, begging expression.  It whined again as she forced her way back into the main press of people.

She wondered what Faith was doing tonight; briefly, indulged in a small fantasy in which her friend was by her side here, the two of them working as a team. 
That'd be so cool.
But Faith
really
wouldn't fit her cover: a weaponized security dog would probably make a lot of people uncomfortable.  It'd make it hard to move undercover, and hard to explain how they’d teamed up.  She sighed, and moved on.  She wondered if Faith still missed her.  Her eyes went misty.

She tossed the small carcass to her hopeful four-legged shadow, and was licking her fingers clean when a throaty voice spoke at her side.

'Cool skins.'

'What?'  She looked up, and up, into a high-cheekboned face half-hidden by a cascade of auburn hair.  Dark eyes and red, red lips.

'’Miring your covers,' the woman explained, sliding her fingers just under the edges of Leeth's tight-fitting shorts, feeling the soft leather.  She looked deeply into Leeth's eyes.  'So young.  So diff.  Where you from, special-girl?'

'Nowhere you'd know, obviously,' Leeth retorted, forcing down a shiver of attraction.  She shoved past.  When she looked back, the tall woman was gone.

Around her, near the food stalls, the crowd was thinner.  People jostled, surging, laughing and shrieking, in amazing variety. People of every color of the rainbow, in skin or hair.  Children, too, both human and Melt, darting and diving like pixies and goblins through the shadows between the adults.  Hawkers and hustlers and arters and toxers, all doing feverish business.

She was standing there, absorbing it all – the confusion of sounds and smells, shadows and movements – when she realized a man had stopped to stare at her.  For just a moment, he thought his expression looked calculating, but then he smiled in frank approval and pushed his way closer.

She checked him out as he approached, especially to make sure he wore no markings of Dad's gang.  He didn't, so he probably wasn't an actual enemy.  Stockily built, he had a mostly-short fuzz of brown hair, apart from a long braided rats-tail draped over one shoulder.  His clothes looked several steps up from the locals' usual scavenged and pieced-together coverings.  His teeth, as he smiled, were filed to points.

They looked chill.

'You're new here, aren't ya?' he said.  'I would'a marked ya fore now, else.'  She thought he was going to ask how she'd come here, but instead he said, 'Name's Crack.  Show ya round?'

'I guess,' she agreed, not letting him see how grateful she felt.

'C’mon.  Follow close ’hind me.  Show ya the best roost in the house.'  He began forcing his way through the still-increasing crowds.  Leeth looked around at "Dad," and saw he'd just been handed a hunk of some sort of food.  He looked solidly in place.  She turned away, following the man.