Necrotech (8 page)

Digo was that person. He had a guy for damn near everything.

Unlike the rest of us, he'd always kept an eye on the team's bottom line. Nanji'd gone with gut, which explained why we'd bonded, but numbers were Digo's love affair. Numbers and information, and Nanjali.

We didn't always gel about the latter.

If anybody knew what was going on, what happened to me and Nanji and how to get to her, it would be Digo. And I knew the club to locate him. Calling him would have been easier, but at the same time, I didn't trust him not to fry my chipset with a temper tantrum – not that it wouldn't be well within his rights to do it.

If it were me, I'd do worse. Even knowing what I knew. Facing Digo in meatspace meant I had a shot at kicking his ass if he came at me.

I seriously hoped he'd hear me out first.

I didn't bother with makeup. My eyebrows were as brown as my roots, my lashes dark enough that compared to my bleached platinum hair, it looked like I made an effort. Besides, makeup smears, unless you have the program to keep it in check, and I didn't. Surprise. More tech I didn't have.

I took a quick glance at myself in the cracked bathroom mirror, turned to make sure the neon pink arrow at the base of my spine shone brightly, and nodded to my reflection. The nanos, fueled by the protein boost I'd inhaled earlier and some much-needed sleep, had finally repaired the damage to my face. The blood was cleaned, swelling vanished, headache gone, and my nose looked no worse for wear.

I was obviously a thug. There was no hiding it. I'd never make a best-dressed list and I wasn't anyone's idea of arm candy, but I looked fierce, lethal, and wired to blow.

I had this. As much as it was going to suck to look Indigo in the eye and tell him I'd watched his sister die, I was pretty sure he'd be all for finding out
why.

The why would lead to the rest of the whys rattling around in my head – why we'd been down there, why I couldn't remember anything.

That data was worth killing for. Hopefully Digo would see the value in that. It was all I had to give.

I hoped it was enough.

T
he Mecca had a distinctly fetishized
Eastern Indian vibe to it, which explained why the Koupras had adopted the place as our unofficial turf. It took up residence in the rack – the district midway between corp gloss and street shine, filled with a metric asston of other clubs. Just one in a long list of too loud, too bright, too full, low-cost, merc-friendly joints. A lotus flower outlined in startlingly bright neon was its only sign, and the clientele usually came out of SINless ranks.

We tend to blow creds like we have the stuff to swallow.

The Mecca was a dance floor, a fully stocked bar, an
over
stocked drug cartel, a brothel, a meeting place, and job forum. It was run by a woman who called herself Shiva – like some old god – and there was a lot of rumor about her original state of being.

Transwoman, fashion savvy man in drag, ass-kicking cis female, it didn't matter to me. I didn't ask. She was gorgeous, soft-spoken to anyone who wasn't
really
listening; mostly Kongtown with some bottom-shelf mix of ethnic markers too muddled to place at a glance. And she had a single rule: unless creds changed accounts
first
, nobody fucked with what was hers.

The woman's dick was bigger than mine in the only ways I cared about – she owned the turf, and had saved our asses more times and in more ways than I cared to admit. For a fee, naturally.

Otherwise, the Mecca was a haven for those of us without a Security Identification Number and the go-to for some of the best highs this side of the Fourteenth Divide.

As I pushed inside the foyer doors, neon popped and flared across the darkened entry. Music slammed into me like a velvet fist, a savage beat that thrust into my chest and twisted. The sticky, cloying heat of the city turned into the slick, hungry swell of writhing bodies, slamming everything they had – flesh and bone, need and naked rage – on the dance floor.

The bouncer inside gave me a cursory once-over, but didn't bother with a full scan. That was Shiva's policy. Anything that damaged her business, she pulled out of skin and favors. It's our own risk to take.

I grinned at the beefy black man perched on a stool that looked ready to splinter underneath his bulk. Unlike Fagan, Jad was all muscle, all the time, and didn't mind flexing it when he needed to. I wouldn't say he was all natural, but he didn't showcase any metal and I'd seen him deadlifting three times his own body weight. That left any number of enhancements that wouldn't ping anything short of a gene-sniffer.

“Hey, baby,” he greeted, his slow, sultry bass booming over the music's beat. “Long time no see. Thought you'd gone and left me for good.”

I grinned, waving that away like the worthless air it was. The streaks of light accenting my ink left thin trails in the dark. “Hasn't been that long.”

A large, thickly groomed eyebrow climbed up his pronounced brow, almost lost but for the neon barrage around us. “You finally here to give me a piece of that action?”

He wasn't talking about
me
. While I was pretty sure Jad liked women fine, I only knew of one thing that made his palms sweat and his eyes light like the inside of a nuclear reactor.

Munitions.

Specifically, my Mantis Industries Valiant 14, one of only fifty ever manufactured and a gift from the man who'd saved my life when I was young and stupid and a cocky little shit. Where Lucky had gotten it, he'd never said.

Although Mantis's reputation wasn't built on arms, the Valiant 14 was a joint experiment between it and rival company TaberTek. It outclassed, outperformed, outravaged everything else on the market, but to hear Jad tell it, true love was never meant to be. Before the Valiant could hit mass production, the corporate world rumbled, the big money maw split wide, and TaberTek crumbled like so much dust.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that my favorite firearm was missing. Thinking about the attached heat baffle specially built for deadly 12mm rounds and included laser sight would only make me tear up. Like my harness, I'd make them pay for its loss.

My smile faded to a grimace. “Man, you are hard on a girl's ego.”

He laughed, his even white teeth brilliantly stark against his dark as a sinner's wet dream skin. “Like you need me on that ass, fine as it is.” He said it the way men breathed; like he didn't even think about it. Jad was a sweetheart.

I'd also seen him tear a merc's head off with his bare hands. So there was that.

“No Valiant, then. You carrying tonight?”

I shook my head, and when he raised his eyebrows, added, “An interceptor in my boot.”

“Not your usual.”

“Aw, Jad.” I blew him a kiss. “You worried about little old me?”

He rolled his broad shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. Go on, girl.” He jerked a thick, square thumb to the beaded curtain behind him. “Digo's in there somewhere, been here hours already.”

Exactly what I wanted to know.

A knot formed in my guts. I bumped my knuckles against Jad's and pushed through the swinging curtain. It clattered, the sound all but lost under the frenetic pace of the trancelike beat.

Whatever else I'd missed, the Mecca wasn't hurting for love. The floor was packed, a writhing, rhythmic sea of skin and neon and metal; just as I remembered it last. Sweat gleamed where the lights skimmed over the crowd, eyes and light tattoos and bits of tech left hanging out reflecting it back in a myriad of colors. The smell – spicy, sweaty, thick with a thousand different base notes and a top shade of lust – slammed into me.

Something kicked in my chest. As if that velvet fist uncurled, it thumped back against the cage of my ribs and begged to be let free.

All that skin. All those naked limbs.

All that hunger.

I flattened my bare hand against my breastbone, teeth clenched as I staggered for a nearby pillar.

The place was full of them, heavy decorative columns twined with reflective fabric designed to catch the light and bend it into diamond glints. I leaned against the support, resting my head back, my throat bared as I swallowed a jagged knot of something lodged there.

What the hell? Maybe my nanos hadn't entirely recharged yet. An emergency recharge and one protein shake wouldn't cut it.

It took me a few, but as soon as I could breathe without feeling like I was going to choke on something, I flagged down a serving girl – a pretty redhead with wide hips and a cute rack. Shiva was obviously on another sari kick. This girl wore enough fake silk to smother a mummy, most of it trailing from the swatches covering her breasts and crotch, and her light tattoos mimicked electric green mehndi designs. She looked like something straight out of a pervy Indian fantasy.

Pretty much what people like me paid for.

She flashed me a smile, cute as hell. “What can I get you?”

“A recharge,” I shouted over the beat, “and Indigo.”

“The drink or the man?”

I'd forgotten the bartenders had named a cocktail after him. Sharp on the tongue, hard on the wallet, and mana on the brain cells. My mouth twisted into a wry grin. “The man.”

She pointed past the dance floor, where one of seven ornate arches carved into the fake stone façade, and vanished back into the crowd. Lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl – or what was supposed to look like it – glinted over the arch, while sheer fabric hung underneath in a semblance of privacy.

Not the usual room. We may have been among Shiva's favorites, but some clients paid more.

I didn't trust my energy reserves on the dance floor yet, so I circled it. The lights flashed and popped, strobed counter to the frenzied beat turning the dark feverish. If I were feeling better, if I had less important things to figure out, I would have been in the middle of all that.

I love dancing. The more aggressive, the better. Thrashing isn't a hobby for the faint of heart, and tonight's crowd wasn't in a drawing blood sort of mood, but the barely contained aggression leaking from the sultry backbeat wouldn't be denied for long. As I passed a couple of girls, one popped a fluorescent purple square into her mouth, licking it off her finger with relish.

Mood enhancers, or maybe uninhibitors. Something to take the anxieties of the day and turn them into something sweeter, usually with a side-effect of temporary loss of all common sense. Memories, too, if you're unlucky.

Good times.

I passed them both, took the opportunity to flash her friend a smile – a willowy girl whose love affair with a razor had turned her hair into a blocky fall of rainbow colors. She grinned back, one stranger to another in the dark, and licked her thumb.

Yeah. I liked the Mecca.

Feeling inordinately better, I sidled around a knot of half-naked guys. One sported a synthetic brace over his forearm, a bridge model. It glowed like a galaxy of neon stars. Another turned his head, showcasing a chrome curve drilled into his brow bone. It framed the plucked arch of an eyebrow.

Fashion slaves. Slumming it, probably. The Mecca was too far down the rack to be any rich kids' first stop.

I didn't see Tashi until she was on me. She was almost seven inches shorter than I was, but it wasn't her build that allowed her to ghost through most places like a cat. Something about the way she walked, the way she bled through a crowd, usually meant she didn't register on somebody's radar until too late.

My smile brightened. “Hey–” I also didn't see the interceptor, serrated twin to my own, until it flashed inches from my throat. “Fuck!” I slammed my stiffened palm against the hilt, smashing her fingers against it and spinning out from her reach at the same time. “What the shit, Tash?” The music drowned me out.

The lights skated over her head, flickering over the white tattoos etched into her hairless brown scalp. Her eyes were flat and dark, the titanium bar framing the underside of her lower lip winking as she set her jaw. The knife switched hands, nearly faster than I could track.

I had height and ordinarily would have claimed reach, but she had a way of moving that made professional dancers look like kids at their first party. Eerily fast, with superior agility boosters and a skinweave designed for flexibility and durability, she was wicked fast with knives and murder on the thrash floor.

A hell of a dance partner. Just
hell
as an opponent.

I bent my knees into a nervous crouch, sweaty hand splayed at my side as I watched her eyes. Not the knife. That hypnotic blur would land me dead. “What the fuck are you doing?”

She'd never been much of a talker.

Like a serpent, she struck out with the knife in her left hand. I caught her arm between mine and my right side, felt my wraparound tear, and wrenched hard. Her shoulder popped upwards, bones sharply defined. I didn't hear it, but I knew the sensation of a dislocated shoulder.

She didn't make a noise, even as lines of pain bracketed her mouth. Unnerving woman. Always had been.

I cracked her in the face with my metal fist – bone crunched. I winced in remembered sympathy. As the patrons moved around us, I stuck my foot behind her ankles and pushed hard. Caught between my foot and my grip on her arm, she hit the ground on her back, blood gleaming like synth rubies in the streaming lights, and didn't move.

Shit. I checked her pulse.

Okay, so I'd only knocked her out. That was good. I did not want to open this subject with Tashi's death. Not when I was already reporting another.

I stepped over her, leaving her to sleep it off away from the dance floor. My teeth clenched so hard, I heard them grit over the brainmelting throb of the Mecca's music. Running a hand over my side confirmed my suspicion. Sure enough, my shirt was torn. I stuck my finger in the hole she'd carved in the wrapped end, measuring by feel how close she'd come to skewering my ribs.

Too close. And for what?

I pushed through the dancers this time, making a straight line for the lapis arch.

Moving through a floor of writhing, gyrating, usually drugged-out dancers is an art form. It requires grace, a certain understanding of the ebb and flow, and fast reflexes. I was good at it, I'd spent a lot of time out here. Earn enough bruises and you wouldn't even feel the occasional elbow in your ribs or knee in your thigh.

A hand slid over my naked back, another caught my arm. I disengaged easily, didn't smile back when a man with shock-blue hair hanging over one eye tried to catch my attention. Didn't even notice when an electric orange boot lodged between mine.

I went down like an amateur.

Eye level on the Mecca dance floor is intimidating enough, but hitting the ground is the fastest ticket to getting your teeth kicked out. Many was the bruised and battered body the staff had carried out at the end of a rowdy night. Some were even alive.

This wasn't the rowdiest crowd I'd ever seen, but down on the floor, trapped beneath a seething mob of sweat and adrenaline, it was unintentional war.

I rolled immediately, collided into more legs than strictly should occupy one space, and struggled to my knees. The ground was gummy – spilled drinks and worse. It crackled, a sticky film clinging to my skin as I pushed myself into a semblance of balance. Elbows slammed into my head, more than one dancer stepped on my calf, kicked my legs and knees by sheer accident or lack of attention. I felt something in my ankle give, hissed and shot my metal elbow back.

The weight on my leg lifted.

An orange blur in my peripheral warned me a nanosecond before the sweaty, careless dancers disgorged a combatant. I dropped, felt the air shift over my head, rolled again. A heavy boot slammed into the ground where my head had been, this one wider, more square than fleshbag feet ever got.

Goddammit. Boone and his wide foundation replacement feet.

Which meant the orange belonged to Fidelity.

Fuck, fuck,
fuck
. Why was my chunking team trying to wreck my junk tonight?

“Lay off!” I shouted, already knowing it was useless. They couldn't hear me over the chaos, and the music didn't care. I tried to get to my feet, but something sharp and mercifully organic slammed into my temple, knocking me for six as a thick hand twisted in my hair. Boone rang my bell with a dense fist, popping my ear and turning my vision inside out.