Sugar Skulls (10 page)

I’m the one who looks down, barely able to make out the small plastic bag, the single green translucent tab. The promise of heat glows bright in Damon’s hand, and though every bit of me is screaming on the inside, I reach for it.

He sucks in a breath when my fingers brush over his wrist in search of salvation. “Oh my god, Vee—” He starts to protest, but I’m already ripping the bag open.

The applejack dissolves on my tongue and melts all the snow inside me by the time I close my eyes, count to three, make a wish. When I open my eyes, everything comes into focus. Edges are sharp again, hot knives all around me.

When Damon pulls me to my feet, I wonder why I don’t cut right through him.

“I’ll get you through this concert,” he mutters, “and then we’re cleaning all the crap out of your system. We just have to keep you going until Friday.”

When I kiss him, I leave a perfect heart-shaped blotch on his cheek. “Whatever it takes, right?” I don’t wipe it off before leading him to the door. “Come on. It’s time to throw the meat to the lions.”

M

The Carlisle is at least three stories higher than any apartment building in the neighborhood. So if, say, you wanted to peek in on the high society rabble glad-handing and schmoozing in a rock goddess’s penthouse suite, your best option would be the soaring edifice known as the Cyrene Clocktower.

And if your ribs allow for it, there are some monstrously large gears inside that make for easy climbing.

Perched on one of the maintenance catwalks that grant interior and exterior access to the Clocktower, I can see half the city from up here. The various districts are aglow with their hedonism-fueled lights and vidscreens, but my eyes are locked on a particular floor-to-ceiling window of a particular penthouse.

I wish I had binoculars on me. Then I could see more than the distant blacks and grays of tuxedos and business suits strolling about the ultramodern furnishings, all hard angles and glass tops. There are occasional flashes of other shades, cerulean blues and emerald greens, the gowns and formalwear of wives, girlfriends, husbands, boyfriends, and hangers-on of both sexes.

The girls themselves must be lost among the monochrome monotony, their flair and style tempered by the presence of Corporate.

I can’t see Vee, but I can picture her, draped in crimson elegance that suits her despite her objections. Fielding questions and compliments with equal aplomb, but desperately counting down the minutes until everyone’s gone.

She’s a caged songbird. Why hasn’t that occurred to me before?

In a place like the Carlisle Building, she’ll be on 24/7 lockdown. If I want to see her again, hear her again, and possibly steal a moment’s attention, I’ll have to brave the Dome somehow.

Which is an insane idea. Sneaking into the Dome would make today look like child’s play.

I settle in for a bit, scanning the penthouse, hoping to spot her. Hoping against hope that she might somehow spot me. A flash of brilliant red catches my eye, flickering between the masses of black-clad interlopers.

I lift my hand, a first overture she can’t possible see. Her voice finds me, though, lyrics from the mall rolling over me, warming me despite the evening’s chill.

V

With the applejack in my system, I burn hot and bright enough to make everyone believe I’m the most charming bitch in the universe. But offering my hand and letting dozens of people kiss me on either cheek tests my last bit of self-control.

If one more person touches me, I might just scream loud enough to shatter all the windows.

I have to keep it together, hold up my end of the bargain. Sasha manages the music while Jax entertains a few of Corporate’s teenage tagalongs with wild-ass stories and that pound of strawberry cough she ordered this morning.

Damon has me on a short leash, introducing me once again to the men and women who own my soul. He remembers every one of their names. Asks the visitors about their accommodations and jokes about the Cyrene-withdrawal they’ll suffer after returning home. Smiles and shakes hands and eases me along, careful to keep me moving so I don’t burn a hole in the carpet. Every time we pass the bar, I exchange an empty glass for a full one.

Doesn’t matter what I’m drinking; everything tastes like apples. And just about everything reminds me of Micah. When I catch a glimpse of blond hair and blue eyes, I think it’s him and feel the floor drop out from under me . . .

Of course it’s someone else.

Don’t be an idiot. Micah won’t come within ten miles of this building, not with security swarming everywhere.

The attractive not-Micah approaches, but Damon’s right-hand lackey cuts through the crowd, a seven-foot-tall wall of muscle effectively blocking us off from the rest of the room. You can tell this is an important event because they’ve managed to pry his aviators off for once.

“There’s someone here to speak with you,” he tells Damon. “He’s out in the hallway.”

Instead of barking back, ten kinds of pissed, Damon scowls and checks his phone. The second-long flash of the screen tells me he’s let ten calls and as many messages roll to voice mail. “Go up to your room, Vee. I’ll be right there.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, I take the unexpected chance to escape, to catch my breath. Drifting up the stairs on a cloud of applejack and Pennyroyale, I hear the unmistakable strains of Damon’s ire—
I have enough on my plate already. It’s handled!
—because the front door is standing ajar—
We’ve tripled security and upgraded everything to your specifications. It’s buttoned up tight!
—but one teetering step at a time I put it all behind me—
Stop bothering me. Just go home to your lab and get back to work.

His voice fades out, dialed all the way down to nothing as I retreat to the bathroom. It doesn’t feel nearly far enough. I can’t breathe, and it has nothing to do with my dress or the climb up the stairs, so I push open the window. Boost myself off the marble sink. Out to the ledge. Up onto the roof. There are easier ways of getting up here, but this is my way.

The night air slams into me, cutting through the thin layers of red, tempering the applejack heat building up inside me. I skirt AC and heating units, tiny piles of debris and bigger piles of bird crap until I reach the ledge on the other side.

Facing the Clocktower, I watch the minutes pass, every one of them fresh and sharp as a razor against my skin.

Where are you tonight?

The taste of him is tangled up with the drugs still candy-coating my mouth. Funny, you’d think Adonis would be in there, too, but he’s long banished. When footsteps fall behind me and hands find my bare arms, I know without turning that it won’t be the person I’m looking for.

CHAPTER SEVEN

M

Spending half the night in the cold didn’t do my ribs much good, but as I bandage them up for the busy day ahead, I have no regrets. In fact, I feel energized, raring to go despite any number of unforeseen complications that will no doubt leave me tenderized and ready for market.

At least I’ve got fresh clothes, free of lavender and unpleasant associations. I feel like a new man. A new man with the lung capacity of an elderly asthmatic. Nothing to be done about that, so I grin and bear it. I lace up my sneakers and gaze up at my Sugar Skulls picture.

Good morning, Vee.

It’s strange, to have a name for her now. For days, she’s been Her. The Voice. The Girl with the killer pipes, with the magic words. The Siren. More force of nature than woman. I steal one more glance at her and head for the exit, primed for a day of careful prep and recon.

As I climb down from my piece of privacy, I reflect on yesterday’s madness.

It’s more by luck than skill that I managed to make it home without being spotted. I basically ignored everything I’ve learned in the last six months to chase her around the city in broad daylight.

Would I do it again?

In a heartbeat.

But that doesn’t mean it was smart.

That kind of carelessness gets you caught, gets you hurt. Gets you killed. Gotta be smarter, play to my strengths.

It’s difficult, though, when the objective has changed. It was easy to run around Cyrene, hunting down leads and chasing bad guys. It was the mission. But now I’m risking all of that, tossing it aside.

For her.

Because deep down, I know yesterday was about more than hearing her in person again, more than understanding how her words slip inside me with such ease.

She kicked open a door I thought was locked tight and bricked over long ago. And I can’t be sure where that door leads anymore.

I exhale, releasing a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, before crossing the bridge at a light jog. There are occasional twinges, but nothing worrying. I feel better than yesterday, but I can’t be certain if that’s a sign of healing or it’s just because I felt like freshly stomped grapes by the end of the day.

Either way, I’ll take it as a win.

At a reserved pace, it takes longer than I’m accustomed to, but I finally arrive at my destination. Equipment is being processed through the Dome’s loading area. With all the public transport around, there’s not much call for parking spaces between those giant doors and the edge of the property.

I sneak up to the fence behind the loading dock. The place is positively electric with activity. Worker ants of every size, shape, and jumpsuit shade unload cases and cases of equipment from box trucks galore, all of them streaming in through the corrugated roll-up door. Plenty of it is what you’d expect: lighting rigs packed with color-scrollers, lasers, and strobes; pyrotechnic flares, mortars, and other setups; high-capacity thrum-collectors to make the most of the sold-out crowd.

But then there’s the small fleet of black vans off to one side. I loop around, careful to keep plenty of distance between me and the Facilitators patrolling the Dome’s perimeter. The greyfaces are using a side entrance, and I’ve never seen a band use the kind of gear they’re hauling into the building: giant versions of those portable scanners at the Palace and other high-end joints, the ones that log your profile in the system.

That could be a problem. If they can remotely scan for a nanotech signature or a concertgoer’s energy output, they’ll track me down fast, demisemiquaver fast.

Okay, so all I have to do is get into the building without a ticket, bypass private security, Dome security, greyfaces, and top-of-the-line scanners, steal two seconds with Vee, and then get the hasty fuck out of Dodge.
No problem.
Maybe they’ll have attack dogs, too; that would make this a good and proper suicide mission.

At least one thing evens the playing field:
none
of us know what Vee will do.

As I head out, slipping away from the Dome and back onto the main roads, I pull the business card from Maggie’s envelope out of my pocket. They might have just what I need.

V

Humming along on the applejack’s clean-burn, I’m out of bed in time to watch the sunrise with a cup of coffee in hand.

Damon offered not once but twice to stay when we’d come down off the roof. Radiating heat and light, longing for someone to touch me, to run their hands over every square inch of me, it would have been easy to say yes. An enjoyable way to pass the night. But there’s no room in my head for him right now. No room for anything except a new song, brewing like storm clouds. The new song, and the mental slideshow of stolen moments in the Palace alcove with Micah.

Hard to believe I chose to sleep curled up with pillows and memories, but it’s true. With any luck, the song will coalesce into something worth singing by the time the sound check rolls around.

I have more time than expected. After two late nights, I have to pry Jax out of her bedroom. It’s a scene of total chaos and destruction, with a wall-to-wall carpet of tangled limbs and exhausted teenagers. Damon joins me at the door; I think he’s pleased she showed Corporate’s precious children such a good time. Hard to tell for sure, because he won’t meet my eyes this morning. He’s wearing a different suit, but I have the suspicion that he brought it with him and slept here, either in the guest room or the studio space.

I broke whatever trust there was between us with the shenanigans at the mall. I’m under surveillance now.

“Sleep all right?” His query is polite, but under it are other questions I don’t want him to ask.

“Well enough,” I say, already headed for Sasha’s room. Jax grumbles behind us, threatening to cut off our favorite appendages with rusty saws as payback for waking her up. She steps on arms, legs, and worse as she stumbles to the door.

Sasha, as it turns out, snuck someone back into the Loft. Seeing as I expected her Pretty Goth Boy, the curvaceous form and copper hair of the Redheaded Mini come as something of a surprise. She and Sasha curl around each other, two kittens in a basket. I hesitate to wake them, if only because very few in this world get to sleep with that sort of blissed-out peace on their faces, but Damon doesn’t share the sentiment. He slams the lights to full and starts throwing clothes at them. Sasha jumps out of bed like she’s been shot in the ass and is dressed before the Redheaded Mini sits up on her elbows and drawls, “You’ve got my Cyrano link. Use it.”

She’s gone by the time we head into the elevator, and the ride to the Dome is quiet. Jax wears sunglasses and sucks down her second electrolyte-replenishment pack. Sasha smiles to herself, humming under her breath.
Smitten.
The kitten is smitten, with all the adorable squishiness of a child bounding across a rainbow-strewn field of daisies.

And over a girl, no less. Shows how much I actually know about her.

Let her have her love song. Not all of us get to sing something that special.

But Damon’s temper is already approaching boiling point. I can tell by the way he keeps checking his phone for messages—probably from the same Corporate dipshit riding his ass at the party last night—that we’re in for a screamfest of colossal proportions the moment something goes wrong.

Once we’re inside the building, Jax and Sasha head straight for their gear. All our stuff is already in place onstage, but everything has to be adjusted. Equipment tuned until it cycles the music through the systems without a single hiccup, pause, or glitch. They won’t need me for a while yet, so I get parked on the sidelines with a cup of tea and a stern warning to stay put.

“Rest your voice,” Damon adds. “I need you at one hundred percent for sound check.”

“Not a problem,” I tell him, wrapping my hands around the cup and appreciating the heat of the ceramic. “Go put the universe in order.”

With a last dark look in my direction, he disappears into the sea of black-clothed stage ninjas. Sipping my tea, I watch them load in extra thrum-collectors, banks of video equipment to broadcast the concert live across the city . . . and more. A swarm of greyfaces bring in energy readers and ID scanners, placing them at every entrance.

The moment Micah steps into the building, he’s going to be the only dark spot in a spectrum of thrum output. Easy to spot. Easy to bring in.

Stay away, Micah. Just . . . stay away.

I shudder, then realize the tea in my cup has gone cold. Everything is cold. I count back and realize I didn’t even make it twenty-four hours this time before burning most of the applejack out of my system.

Damon was in a hurry. He probably got a weak tab off some street dealer. That’s the only way to explain it . . .

“Vee, get your ass onstage!” Jax yells. “You’re up.”

I set the mug down and take the stairs as quickly as I can. Three steps up, my depth perception wavers. One heel finds a hole in the metal grating, and I pitch forward.

Damon’s there to catch me before I crash face-first into the stage. The moment his hands meet my skin, he knows.

“Fuck.” It’s all he says. All he has to say.

I twist away from him and run for the microphone. “What do you want to start with?”

“‘Screams and Whispers’ is loaded in,” Sasha says, checking her screens, “then transition to ‘Little Dead Thing.’”

I nod and wait for the synthesizers and computerized downbeats to take over. Stage techs test the projection screens behind us: clips from old monster movies, footage from our other concerts, still photos of various Sugar Skull makeup variations that slowly morph into real skeletons. The light show kicks into high gear, firing green and pink and orange beams of light out into the audience. I jump when the first of the pyrotechnics fires off, missing my intro.

Everything fizzles to a halt, leaving us in the half dark, projections frozen, light beams wavering, golden sparks dying on the floor.

“What the ever-loving fuck, Vee?” Jax glares at me, cuing the music back up to the proper place. This time, I hit the first note but mess up the lyrics in the second chorus.

By now, Damon’s pacing in the wings, having a low and very serious phone conversation that ends when I try to start the song for the third time and don’t get out a single note. Before I can call for a reset, he has me by the elbow and tows me off the other side of the stage.

“Take a ten-minute break,” he barks at the girls. “I’m going to get this sorted out.”

My feet barely touch the floor as he hustles me along. “Damon, I’m fine,” I say, trying to reassure him, but it’s all lies, lies, lies. “I just need to concentrate.”

“Like hell. You never miss a cue. You
never
forget lyrics.” More furious tapping against the touchscreen. “I was afraid of this.”

Even before we hit the dressing room, I’m a broken-down windup doll. He sets me on the chaise, covers me up with a furry gray blanket, and checks his phone again. No telling how much time passes before there’s a quiet knock at the door. A muttered conversation between Damon and three Facilitators.

A golden jungle cat pads into the room, his smile all teeth.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Adonis says. “If you wanted to see me again, all you had to do was ask.”

“She burned through the tab you gave me already,” Damon mutters.

Not a weak-ass street dose, then.

I won’t give either one of them the satisfaction of looking away, but I’m still the first to blink.

M

I make a quick run to the Eadlin District to hit up the north-side supply depot for Cyrene Medical Services. The code on Maggie’s business card grants me a few minutes’ access off the books, and once the card is scanned and shredded, I’ve got the run of the place.

Stocking up on the necessities—bandages, antiseptic, gel-packs, anti-inflammatories, the works—along with a few special items that could come in handy tomorrow, I’m in and out in less than five.

Good
. I try to spend as little time in the Eadlin as possible, since a good chunk of Cyrene’s central authorities and other higher-up mucky-mucks haunt its streets. I keep my head down and my pace slow but steady, since I’m too deep into the district proper to hightail it somewhere safe if things go all shit sandwich on me in a hurry.

But soon enough, I’m back in relatively safe territory, headed off the beaten path toward a brick-and-mortar storage shed of Maggie’s, tucked away among the city’s maintenance garages and material depots.

I stroll to the roll-up steel door and knock twice. The door flies up and back, and one of Rete’s boys—a fuck-ugly kid built like a fire hydrant—waves me in before closing the door behind me. The screech of poorly maintained casters rips through the place, and even Fire Plug winces as he releases the chain.

Making a beeline for the back wall, I realize I’m not alone. The warehouse isn’t exactly sprawling, maybe half a soccer field long, a little narrower, and I hear him behind some pallets before I see him. In the back corner, hunched over a few plastic-wrapped crates of over-the-Wall whiskey, is another runner, scrawny yet scrappy. Someone whose name I’ve never bothered to learn. And he’s here for the same reason I am.

Rivitocin.

Scrappy has the injector to his neck, and with a soft hiss, he doses himself. Closing his eyes and clenching his fists, he steels himself for the proverbial ton of bricks about to fall on him. And does it ever. His muscles start twitching, limbs flailing as the Rivitocin races through his system, disrupting his nanotech and temporarily kicking him off-grid. The perfect way to move around the city without pinging sensors all over Cyrene, it’s another valuable over-the-Wall import.

Obviously I’ve never needed any, but no need to spread that knowledge around. After Scrappy recovers from the injection and heads out, I ask Fire Plug to grab me a quick restock: six doses of Rivitocin, plus injectors.