Tracer (3 page)

Darnell marches across the Air Lab, his heavy footfalls ringing out across the metal walkways. He doesn’t need to check that Reece is following him; the guard is always close by, always there when Darnell needs him. His footsteps are as silent as his boss’s are loud.

There are algae pools lined up along the walkway, each one thirty square feet, with surfaces like murky glass. Darnell
leans over one of them, idly running a finger along the slime.

“So what’s so urgent you had to pull me away?” he says.

Reece stops a short distance away, his arms folded. He glances left and right. There are plenty of other techs on the floor of the cavernous Air Lab, tending to trees or crossing the floor in tight groups, but there’s nobody close to where he and Darnell are.

“Well?” Darnell
says, staring intently at the viscous water.

“What’s going on, boss?” Reece says.

Darnell says nothing.

Reece unfolds his arms, hooks his thumbs in his belt. “This isn’t some gangster who hasn’t paid us his water tax,” he says.
“That was one of your employees. I can cover for you on most things, but even I might struggle to square that one.”

Darnell swings himself upright, pointing a finger
at Reece. A tiny thread of algae comes with it, swinging back and forth. “You getting scared, Reece?” he says, stepping away from the tank. “You think I’m going too far?”

The guard doesn’t flinch, just refolds his arms.

“If I’m going too far,” Darnell says, “then maybe you should stop me. How about it, Reece? Want to try?”

Reece’s cool eyes look back at him. Despite his anger at the insubordination,
a part of Darnell marvels at Reece’s refusal to get scared. It’s why he’s kept him around so long.

“You’ve been distracted, boss,” Reece says. “For like a month now. And I’ve never seen you flip out on one of your own techs before, not like that. Whatever’s going on, you should tell me so I can—”

“
Should?
”

Reece stops dead.

“You just make sure that shipment gets here,” Darnell says. He sweeps
his arm around to indicate the rest of the hangar. “Isn’t that what you do? I’m in charge of the Air Lab, Reece. I’m responsible for every molecule of oxygen that you suck into your lungs and every molecule of CO
₂
that comes out of them. You need to make sure I have everything I need to do it. That’s what you need to do.”

“I’ll handle it,” Reece says.

“Excellent,” Darnell says, resuming his
march towards the control room, his mind already elsewhere. He’s got bigger things to worry about, like the other shipment: the little package Arthur Gray is supposed to deliver. If someone diverts that, they’ll have a lot more to worry about than his shitty knife-throwing.

It’d be nice to say it’s a beautiful blade. It’s not. The handle is patched and frayed, and the steel is laced with rust. If the cut doesn’t kill you, the infection will.

Tattoo holds it up, the metal catching the edge of the light. “You know,” he says, “we just wanted a score. We weren’t really planning on killing you.”

He rotates the knife, angling the point towards my eyes. “But now,
we have to take something back. You can’t hurt one of us, and not expect to get it back in return. You understand, right?”

I try to say something, but I can’t look away from the blade. He leans in close. The point is now inches away. “What’ll it be? Left ear, or right?”

“Let me go,” I finally say. It’s almost a snarl. But the knife remains steady, its tip hardly wavering at all as it creeps
towards my face. He starts flicking it gently back and forth. I can feel sweat soaking my shirt at the small of my back. I yank my body to one side, but the Lieren holding me are too strong. One of them plants a hand on my forehead, pinning me in place. “You might want to stay still,” he says.

Left, right, left, right
.

There’s a yell from behind Tattoo. He straightens up, irritated, and looks
back over his shoulder. One of the other Lieren, tall and gangly with sallow skin, is holding my pack. It’s open, and he’s frantically beckoning his buddies over.

With a sigh, Tattoo drops the knife from my face and walks over to him. “And now? What’s the matter with …”

His voice falters as he looks into the pack. He turns, blocking my view, holding a whispered conversation with his partner.

I don’t have the first clue about what’s in my pack. We never do. It’s one of the reasons why my crew gets so much work. You can send whatever you want, and you can trust us to never know about it.

I feel a flicker of hope: for the first time, it looks like it might just save my life.

After a minute of hissed back-and-forth with his friend, Tattoo signals to the ones holding me against the wall.
Abruptly, they let me go. I collapse against the wall, try to rise, but my legs have stopped listening to me.

Tattoo is staring at me with an odd look on his face. He walks over, leans close, whispers: “This isn’t finished.”

He holds up a battery, bringing it as close to my face as he did the knife. “And we’re keeping these.”

The one who opened the bag lets it fall, and it lands with a thump
on the floor. With a gesture from Tattoo, the Lieren set off down the corridor. One of them grabs the man I took down with the pressure-point strike, swinging him over his shoulders like a crop bag.

I don’t want to, but I stay down until they’re out of sight. I’m shaking, and it takes a minute for me to steady myself. Then it takes me another minute to rise – I nearly lose my balance when I do,
and some blood droplets patter onto the floor ahead of me. My face is humming with pain, and my eye
socket is on fire. But I can’t worry about that now. I’ve lost too much time already.

As I move to grab my still-open pack and zip it shut, I can’t help but see what’s inside. It’s the box Gray gave me to deliver – barely the size of a fist, like something you’d keep a small machine part in. The
top of the box has been opened up by the Lieren. Inside is something wrapped in layers of opaque plastic padding – a blurred shape, vaguely familiar.

And from the bottom right corner of the box, slowly leaching into the protective foam, I can see a thin trickle of blood.

I want to close the bag, to zip it shut and finish the job and not think about the thing in the plastic, but my hands falter.
The blood is still there, pooling on the foam. The corridor is deserted.

I have to know.

Slowly, I push a finger into the plastic wrapping. It’s thick, clammy-cold against my skin. The wrapping is tight against the cargo, the edges catching as I lift it up. But then my fingers brush against something soft and slick, and the blurred shape in the bag leaps out at me.

I’m staring at it, willing
myself to look away, but there’s no mistaking it.

It’s an eyeball. I’ve been carrying an eyeball.

Darnell has a table at the back of the darkened control room, surrounded by battered chairs. Every tech who works there knows not to move them, not even an inch, or to say anything about the suffocating temperature their boss likes to keep the room at.

He’s sitting at the table, going through reports, when Reece brings the storage technician in. The man hovers off to one side, a small
box under his arm, waiting for Darnell to notice him.

Eventually Darnell waves him over. The tech scurries across the floor, holding the box out in front of him like a shield. The heavy lettering on the front reads AIR LAB CONSIGNMENT 6/00/7-A MOST URGENT.

“Found it, Sir,” he says. “Just got misplaced, that’s all. Temporarily.”

Darnell barely glances at him. “And the knife?”

The man swallows.
With a trembling hand, he pulls the knife out of his pocket, careful to hold it by the blade. He places it flat on the table, lined up next to the box.

Darnell tilts his head. “You got fingerprints on the blade.”

“I …”

“You sharpen it, like I said?”

“Yes, Sir. Like you said.”

An urge takes Darnell then, hot and demanding: the urge to test the knife’s sharpness by sliding it into the man’s
stomach. His fingers twitch. It would take less than a second. In and out.

Instead, he waves the man away. The tech backs off, nodding like his neck is already broken. Darnell returns to his reports, scowling. As much as he hates to admit it, Reece’s words have stayed with him. He needs to be more careful. He’s worked too hard and waited too long to get distracted now.

He tears the top off the
box, wiggling his hand inside. His fingers brush machined glass, and he pulls out a tab screen – smaller than the regular units, with a bulbous antenna poking out the top. He switches it on, flicking through the menu options. A smile creeps across his face like oil moving through water. His connection in Tzevya sector did his job.

The storage tech nearly trips over the door as he leaves the control
room, and the thunk of his foot on the metal lip makes Darnell look up. He’s pleased with himself for not giving in to his urges. Besides, the tech will get what’s coming to him soon enough. Along with Reece, and the other techs, and everyone else on Outer Earth, if he can just keep it together. Discipline, that’s the key. Control.

A dry heave builds in my throat, boiling up from my stomach. My hand jerks, and the box is jolted sideways. It slips out of the pack, and the thing slides out of the plastic and hits the floor with a muffled plop.

It rolls in place, the trailing optic nerve stuck to the floor on a meniscus of blood. It’s not looking at me, but I can see the iris, dark blue, surrounding the inky-black
dot of the pupil. I have to force myself to look away, and as I do the heave becomes a full-blown retch. Doubling over, I push it back, forcing it down.

You will not throw up. Not here
.

Never look at what you carry. It’s the one big unbreakable, the one thing Amira has told us over and over again. There’s a reason for that: it gets us work. People trust us. We’re not going to steal your cargo,
or even care what it is.

Plus, not knowing keeps us alive. Tracers, us included, sometimes carry bad things. Weapons, contraband, drugs concocted somewhere in the Caves and destined for sale in a distant sector. Be nice if we could live off doing hospital runs, but we can’t. It’s better if we don’t know. Realistically, I know I could
have been carrying severed eyes for years and never known.
But actually seeing it, touching it …

Crouching, I use a corner of the plastic to grip the nerve, gently tugging at it. The iris rolls towards me, and I force myself to look away. The retch comes again, and I have to close my eyes and inhale through my nose for a few seconds, before looking back. More details begin to jump out. Tiny, milky-smooth clouds in the pupil that I hadn’t noticed before.
Thin arteries, running off the iris like fine pen lines.

Movement. Voices. Without thinking, I grab the eyeball. It’s soft and pliable in my grip, like putty.

Don’t squeeze it too hard or it’ll pop
.

I have to force back another heave. I shove it back into the box and zip my backpack shut as the owners of the voices come round the corner.

Two stompers. They’re officially known as Station Protection
Officers, but nobody calls them that any more. I’m surprised to see them; there aren’t too many around these days.

A few times a year, you hear stories about gang bosses joining forces, declaring open season on any stomper foolish enough to walk into their territories. It always ends up with plenty dead on both sides – but when it comes to new members, people always seem to be more willing to
join up with the gangs. The sector leaders do their best, showing face in the bars and the market and the mess halls, looking for recruits to the stomper corps, but they always have to go back to the council in Apex with bad news.

The stompers walking towards me are dressed in thick grey jumpsuits with the station logo – a stylised ring silhouette – stitched into the top pocket. The noise of
their boots is heavy in the cramped space. On their hips rest specially modified pistols: guns with ammunition designed to go through flesh and bone, but not metal. We call them stingers.

I’ve seen the one on the left before – Royo, I think his name is, a bear-like man with dark skin and a shaved head. His partner is just as big, with a shaggy beard. In different circumstances, he’d probably
look jovial, but as he locks me in his gaze I see that his right eye is glass, dead and inert in its socket.

Left, right, left, right
.

They take in the scene. A blood-splattered floor, and a tracer who looks like she just had a head-on collision with an asteroid. “What’s going on here?” says Royo, but even as the words are out of his mouth I’m bolting past him. His partner makes a grab for me,
but I’m too quick, slipping under his arm. “Cargo delivery!” I say over my shoulder.

I’m expecting them to give chase, maybe even draw on me. But they don’t follow, and I heave a sigh of relief. Maybe they figure a beat-up tracer isn’t worth their time. Good news for me. I have a lot of ground to make up. My collarbone seems OK, but my face is throbbing again, and prickly waves of pain are spreading
out from where I got punched.

A million thoughts are crowding for attention. Part of me wants to drop the box somewhere and run, pretend that I’d never taken the job. I turn that option down in seconds – I don’t even want to think what will happen if Darnell doesn’t get his eyeball. He’ll probably use one of mine as a replacement. And if he decides to take revenge on the Devil Dancers …

But
can I really deliver the cargo? Pretend I never saw the eyeball, walk away, and hope everything goes back to normal? Is that even possible now? Every time someone hands me cargo, or asks me to turn around so they can put it in my pack, I’m going to be thinking about today.

But it’s not a choice. Not really. I have to finish the job. There’s a chance that Darnell will find out that I saw my cargo,
but it’s a lot less risky than abandoning the job completely.