Necrotech (38 page)

Amusement faded as he straightened in his seat again. “So.”

“So.” I studied him from across the nicked expanse of synthetic wood. The glasses between us, filled with the remnants of emptied alcohol, clinked gently as I rested my weight on my folded arms. “You really feeling okay?”

Indigo studied me for a long, silent moment.

I waited him out this time. I needed to hear it.

When he finally answered, it came on the heels of a sigh. “I will be.”

I wasn't sure I could ask about the specifics. What had Hope said? Something about non-disclosure ending in somebody getting smeared?

I didn't want to drag Indigo back in to a bloody mess, so I resolved to find out more before I made the call to fuck Malik's contract. Subtly, of course. I switched gears. “So, is now a good time to tell you I got you a cop?”

“You what?”

“A cop,” I repeated. “In my roster. I've got him combing all the tickets and citations in the Vid Zone, notably outside the chopshop. I figured I'd start a database.” A beat. “Well, I'd give you everything and let you do what you do.”

His mouth twitched. “Is that all?”

I flicked the ends of my hair from my cheek. “I owe Jax an epic favor.”

“Oh, shit, you don't.”

“Yeah.” I pursed my mouth to the side for a second more. “Oh, and I'm freelancing for Malik Reed.”

“Fuck.”
Thud.
The glassware leapt as Indigo's forehead hit the table. “That doesn't leave this room, Riko.”

“No shit.” I grinned at the black crown of his hair. Blue streaks gleamed in the inky mass, caught up in his thick braid. As he groaned in abject exasperation, I cupped my chin in my tech hand and waited for the shock to wear off.

Things were... not quite back to normal. I don't know that they would ever be again. Fuck It Jim had provided the launching point – thanks to Jax's timely favor
.
I'd lost almost everything, even myself, but hell, I had to keep going forward. Figure out what – who – was behind it, what exec had okayed the weaponizing of necro cunting
code.

Whatever the corps were playing – whatever Malik's stake was in the game – it didn't matter. I intended to focus on my part in this mess. One job at a time.

The red-eyed waitress sashayed through the curtain, and I listened to Indigo order enough drinks to put down a small army. “I'll have what he's having,” I told her when her demonic eyes turned to me. She flashed a grin and left with more than a fair shake of that ass.

Like I had before him, I caught Indigo admiring the view.

My grin faded as he glanced at me with a gaze gone deadly serious. “How are you going to balance your cred?”

A question I hadn't figured out yet. “For now, it's all need to know,” I told him. “My only real job is to track down those other chopshops before they turn into...” I gestured at nothing between us. “
That
. If they haven't already.”

Goddamn, that was a scary thought. If they turned, there'd be more necros to spread like fire.

I shuddered even thinking about it.

“I'm monitoring the feeds like you wouldn't believe,” he assured me, tapping his fingers against the table. “And I'll keep your secret, for now. Don't fuck this up, it's my cred on the line, too.”

“It doesn't have to be.”

“Six years, Ree.” His smile canted sideways. “Yeah, it does.”

Crap. Why did all my relationships have to be so complicated? I perched one fist on top of the other, resting my chin on both. “We're not really good, are we?”

He hesitated, gaze flicking to the rhythm his fingers tapped out. Then up again. “I don't know.”

“Yeah.” I returned his regretful smile with a sigh. “Me either.”

I don't know that we'd ever be
good
again. Not as long as the ghost of Nanjali Koupra haunted him. We'd achieved something I never expected to accomplish in all my years as a runner – we'd stormed a necro quarantine and come out with more data on the subject than ever collected. I'd found Nanji. I wished I hadn't, not like that, but I knew that she was dead, not some tormented puppet for a necrotech virus. It helped.

There were still questions.

What happened to me down in that place? Both before I woke up, and during the run? Was I somehow infected and that's why I got all... messy? Messier than usual, anyway.

But Orchard said I'd missed catching a case of the necros. Indigo hadn't.

Bad luck?

But then, why did I get so jacked up when tearing them down?

Was that what Nanji had felt when she went after those sec fucks? If so, I hoped they'd pissed their pants with fear.

I tilted my head, chin still balanced on my fists. “Hey, you ever consider working with necro code?”

Indigo looked at me like I'd sprouted a second head. Relief unfurled in my chest, loosening a knot of tension so tight I hadn't realized how bad it hurt until it eased.
There
was the linker I knew. “Are you shitting me? After the mess in the Vid Zone, I don't think I'll ever look at tech the same way again,” he replied, shaking his head so emphatically, his braid slid over his shoulder. “Hell chunking no. I'll walk into the wasteland first.”

I shrugged. “Just asking.”

Maybe Malik could pull what he needed from the data. Maybe he'd slip, and the next necro infection I cleaned up would be his.

Fucking A.

“I have a bad feeling about all of this,” I admitted.

His gaze slid to the curtain, and the stacked figure of our waitress as she carried the first of our drinks in. I followed the line of his stare.

Shiva did hire them pretty. I guess things weren't working out with Laila.

Or maybe Digo was every bit the horndog he accused me of being. I was banking on the latter.

“Yeah, it sucks,” he agreed, sparing an appreciative smile for her before passing me a genuine Indigo concoction, blue liquid in a narrow glass. “The more you know, the more you have to ask what the fuck is even the point. Welcome to my world.”

“Your world blows.”

“So do you, Riko.” He tapped his glass against mine. The clink barely registered before the dance floor's bass cranked up high enough to send the glasses beside us shuddering. “So do you.”

“You only wish you knew how true that was.”

He laughed around his mouthful of blue liquor, and for the first time since waking up in Malik Reed's medlab, I let myself let it all go. Here, now, I could laugh. I could drink, I could hit that gyrating floor and thrashdance until I staggered out of here, bruised and bleeding. I could pretend like Indigo and I were okay. That I didn't just sign my shit over to a corp exec with only twelve percent of a plan.

Maybe everything had gone to shit, yeah, but at least I had this moment.

Today, I could be zen. Tomorrow, I'd deal with the rest – the answers I needed, the problems I needed to bleed, the teeth I was itching to start kicking in. If one of those chopshops was going necro, that was tomorrow Riko's problem. All I knew for sure was that I
lived
.

Whoever fucked with me, they should have killed me when they had the chance.

S
ome books come to you
, in whole or in pieces, filling your head with delicious plot and wicked characters. Some ooze out like a leaking pipe, until you have no choice but to write it in hopes of staunching the creative flow.

Necrotech
, and Riko, erupted from me like a xenomorph on steroids. It changed
everything
.

Without Stephen Blackmoore, who saw something in Riko when she was just the shadow of a person, this book would not exist. Cathy Yardley turned a half measure into determination, and Lisa Rodgers at JABberwocky Literary Agency refined that determination into a weapon.

Mike Underwood and the Angry Robot team embraced the crazy. Phil Jourdan's vision brought clarity and before I knew it, we'd all come together to give the baddest bitch in necro-town a voice.

Delilah, Stephen, Kevin, Cathy, thank you for always believing. Chuck, thank you. You know why. Kyle, your knowledge and brain is aces. Murderfriends, I've always got your tarps. Janae, you got me through tough times; thank you. Jordan, you can burn the earmuffs.

To all of you constantly told that “real [insert label here] don't…” – yes, we fucking
do
.

K
C Alexander
is the mostly human, occasional Outer God, and author of
Necrotech
– a transhumanist sci-fi called “a violent thrillride” by award-nominated noir urban fantasy author Stephen Blackmoore. Previous writing credits include a critically acclaimed stint as Karina Cooper, where she won an RT Reviewer's Choice Award for her steampunk urban fantasy series and contributed to well-received collections such as
Fireside Fiction Magazine, Protectors 2: Heroes
, and
Last Night, a Superhero Saved My Life.

After peeling off sixteen layers of outer chitin and hiding the evidence across dimensional planes, K C Alexander is now indistinguishable from the rest of the human species. She intends to make the most of this by writing transhumanist sci-fi, epic fantasy, and speculative fiction of all stripes.

A
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n Angry Robot
paperback original 2016

C
opyright © KC Alexander 2016

K
C Alexander asserts
the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A
catalogue record
for this book is available from the British Library.

U
K ISBN 978
0 85766 623 9

US ISBN 978 0 85766 624 6

EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 625 3

S
et by Epub Services
.

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ll rights reserved
. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

T
his book is sold
subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

T
his novel is entirely
a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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