Company Town (14 page)

“You selfish little
bitch
.”

Andrea Davis was skinny where her wife Calliope wasn't. She was a tiny twig of a woman with a cluster of rusty red straw where hair should have been. It trembled on her head. She vibrated rage.

“Andrea—”

“Shut up!”
Andrea directed a sharp kick at Hwa's shin. “Stand up! Stand up and face me!”

The guy on the karaoke stage now sounded a little less certain about seeing a million faces and rocking them all.

Master control room,
Hwa reminded herself, as she rose to her feet. She was taller than Andrea, but not by much. She kept her hands at her sides.
Master control room. Press the big buttons. Hear the doors locking behind you.

“What's happening, Andrea?”

Andrea slapped her in the face. She'd obviously not done it very much, if ever. Her fingernails scraped awkwardly across Hwa's nose and mouth. Hwa mentally gave her mother points for at least developing some proper technique over the past twenty-three years. Even with half her body held together with polymer and prayer, Sunny could have broken Andrea in half by now.

“I don't think there's any call for that kind of behaviour, Mrs. Davis.” Rusty sidled around the table. “I'm sure there's a reasonable—”

“She killed my wife!”

Andrea pointed a shaking finger at Hwa. Hwa breathed through the adrenaline. Calliope? Killed? When? How?

“I was just talking to the police,” Andrea whispered. “And they said
you
were supposed to be on Calliope's detail. She had a date. And she had to go out there alone. Because you quit. You
quit,
so you could work for
them
.”

Andrea pointed out the window at the rig. There was a shiny new Lynch logo on the biggest smokestack, now. That fat L winding around a pool of black like a lazy serpent slowly choking its latest victim. Hwa turned to the other women in the bar. Half of them she'd worked with in the past. They were all looking at her very differently, right now. As though they'd suspended their visual subscriptions and were seeing her true face for the first time. As though they finally knew how ugly she really was.

“Calliope's dead?”

Andrea's knobby fingers pushed hard at Hwa's shoulders. She was stronger than she looked. Rage could do that. She kept pushing, trying to knock Hwa over. Hwa's stomach muscles lined up against her spine; she stood straight and still and let Andrea punctuate her words with her fingers. “Yes! She's! Fucking! Dead!
She's! In! Fucking! Pieces!
”

Hwa shook her head. “Andrea, I didn't know—”

“Fuck you!”

Andrea threw her bony little elbow right into Hwa's solar plexus. Pain opened a point of super-dense space behind her ribs: a wormhole of breathless, gasping panic. Hwa stumbled back onto the table. Cups rolled over and clattered to the floor. No wonder she was off her game. She wished desperately and stupidly that she could be sober. She slid off the table and onto the floor. Peanut shells poked up into the palms of her hands. Andrea kicked her hard in her side.

Hwa tried to sit up. Andrea grabbed a mostly full bottle from the next table over and swung it straight for Hwa's head. Hwa ducked and blocked, but Andrea had some crazy-fu going on and the bottle returned on the backswing to connect with her temple. It felt cold and foamy and resonant; Hwa heard the beer slosh against the plastic as it met her skin of her temple and broke it.

“Stop,” she said, blocking her head tight with her outer forearms as Andrea slashed and swung. “Stop, that's my good side—”

“You don't
have
a good side, you ugly goddamn traitor.”

Andrea lunged for her again, but her feet kicked uselessly in the air as Nail lifted her up, gently. He held her there above the ground as she wrestled.

“He cut her up,” she whimpered. “Oh God, he cut up my baby.”

*   *   *

Rusty and Nail made their way back to Séverine's place. “MMD,” Rusty said, grabbing his coat. “Put some ice on that.”

The barback at the Crow's Nest gave her a towel with some ice in it, and a measure of middling bourbon, and shooed her on her way the moment she finished it. The folk in the elevator did everything they could to avoid staring while also taking her in: the stain, the fresh blood, the slashes in her sleeves, the ragged peanut shells clinging to her tights. Her arm throbbed. She thought it might be bleeding again.

The union would be initiating its MMD protocol, short for Missing, Murdered, or Dead. It was right there in the USWC handbook: obtain and verify all facts, alert membership, stress safety, in public statements separate the incident from the work and humanize the victim (use first names, make reference to family and pets), at no point imply that the victim did anything to deserve it. It was the same everywhere, in every Canadian city, even the ones on dry land.

A sex worker hadn't been murdered in New Arcadia since before the Old Rig blew.

It came with the decriminalization, and the bodyguards, and the communication between workers. If a client was bad, everybody knew. There was a rating system. Creepiness was a metric. So was violence. So was respect for boundaries. You could take a poorly rated client, if you wanted. But you knew what you were getting into. Had Calliope? Had she read a bunch of reviews, and decided to make the date anyway? And who could be that dangerous? Hwa let the question roll around in her skull as the elevator descended to the cheaper levels. Faces tumbled up. Angel. Benny. Shit, even Moliter, a little bit. And, of course, sometimes the riggers took things to keep them awake, and some of them were on off-label mods, the kinds of things Wade was taking, and Christ, anything could happen there.

Hwa pushed herself into her apartment. It was only the one room, the kitchen things against one wall and her bed against another. What little she owned was still in boxes and piles. Only Tae-kyung's trophies had any pride of place. Now she wasn't sure she could really afford any of it.

“Prefect, show me Calliope Davis.”

“Access denied,”
Prefect said, crisply.

Well, that was quick. Lynch had wasted no time cutting her out of their systems. Not that she could blame them. Him. Síofra. Probably his call to make. For a moment she thought about contacting him. No. Bad idea.

“Get me Belle du Jour,” she said.

The client-facing side of the terminal came up. Here, too, her log-in was no good any longer. Still, she could call up Calliope's profile. There she was, in full makeup, sporting her tattoos, promising her specialties. She wasn't Hwa's best student, not by a long shot, but that didn't mean she was bad. Just unmotivated.

Eileen's call came just as Hwa was about to check the news.

“I heard what happened,” Eileen said, and Hwa didn't know if she meant Calliope or the fight with Andrea. “It's a sin,” she said thickly. “Just a sin.”

“Have you looked at the news?”

“Aye, and I wish to God I hadn't.” Eileen blew her nose. “Some fucking botflies took the footage. Pieces of her. Just floating out there. Just … shreds.”

Maybe it was an accident. Maybe, somehow, in a city with a suicide barrier on every causeway, Calliope had fallen down into the water and gotten herself chopped up by a propeller. It had happened—usually if someone went down below the causeways themselves. The trolls—the people under the bridges—they died that way. But why would she go down there?

“And, of course, they're saying it's a suicide,” Eileen said, as though having read Hwa's mind. “The NAPS, I mean. They said they put it through the Matchmaker and that's what it said, and so that's how they're investigating it.”

Hwa found the footage. They had identified her by her tattoo. That was what had drawn the botfly's eye. A Greek cross, floating on the waves. From a distance it looked like some sort of flag. Or maybe a jersey. But it was Calliope's skin. The skin of her breasts, ragged at the edges, the cross still clear despite the bloating and damage.

“Christ,” Hwa said. “Eileen, give me your log-in. Your BDJ log-in.”

There was a long pause. Too long. “Hwa, I shouldn't do that…”

And then Hwa knew that she knew. That what Andrea had said was real. That Hwa had an appointment to look after Calliope, and it hadn't been filled when Hwa took the job with Lynch. Her lips felt hot. Her eyes burned.

“Change the log-in in an hour,” Hwa said, forcing some iron into her voice. “One hour. Just give me one hour. I just need to see where she was.”

“The police are looking into it—”

“The police aren't me.”

 

8

Exit Wound

“What's your mum at?” Eileen whispered.

Hwa looked back over her shoulder at Sunny. Her mother was circulating through the narthex of St. Brigid's, making small talk and dabbing carefully at her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief.

“Networking,” Hwa said, and turned to face the altar.

It was a closed casket. Obviously. Hwa wasn't even sure why they'd bothered with a full casket, when the bits and pieces that were left of Calliope would've left extra space in a child-size model.

“Did you find anything?” Eileen asked. “I mean, with the…”

“No,” Hwa said. “Everything's clean. Normal.”

Which was the problem. She'd downloaded all of Calliope's calendars, reviews, metrics, notes, and forum posts. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. No complaints about past clients. No bad reviews from them, either. She showed up on time, always checked in, followed protocol, and filed complete reports after every encounter. A model member of the organization, really. There was nothing to indicate that she'd either had a problem with someone, or had a personal problem that would drive her to throw herself into the dark, frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

She needed more information. The hot list. Surveillance data.
Prefect's
data.

“What about the appointment?”

Hwa shook her head. “He cancelled, last week. Emergency firmware upgrade on a spinal implant. Even if he could kill someone with a slipped disc, he was at the hospital during the time slot. That's why he cancelled. He left a nice note and everything. Even sent a gift card, to say sorry for bailing. Cops cleared him straightaway.”

“So she never told Andrea he cancelled?”

“I guess not.” Hwa sank down further in the pew. “Maybe she didn't want her knowing she was going off-book.”

“And without a bodyguard, too,” Eileen said. “Why would she do something like that?”

Hwa watched as mourners streamed into the sanctuary. A host of sparkling flies hovered near the lectern. Occasionally, one would buzz past the arrangements of lilies and wreaths to scan a card. Calliope's people, whoever they were, were prepared to drop some bandwidth on a remote live stream.

“Maybe it was short notice,” Hwa said. “Maybe she just couldn't find somebody in enough time.”

Eileen fidgeted a little. She kept scrolling through the funeral programme, up and down, back and forth. It took her a moment to speak. She touched the valve in Hwa's arm gently. “You won't do something like that again, will you?”

“Something like what?”

Eileen's right hand landed on her left. Hwa turned to look at her. Eileen's eyes were wet. Her lips trembled. “Something really fucking stupid,” Eileen said. “Like go up against a psycho with a shotgun all by yourself.”

Hwa's mouth worked. She didn't know what to say. Eileen pointed up at the casket. “That could be
you,
Hwa. You could be
dead,
right now, and it's like you don't even care.”

I don't,
she wanted to say. Because she didn't. In the grand scheme, the loss of Go Jung-hwa from the world wouldn't be too remarkable or noteworthy. It wasn't like she provided some special service to the world. She was hired muscle. That was all. If she died, she could be replaced.

“It's not that big a deal,” Hwa said. “And anyway, I quit.”

Eileen looked absurdly hopeful. She wiped her eyes. “You did?”

“Yeah. They were assholes.”

“Oh, thank goodness.” Eileen threw her arms around Hwa. She hugged tight. A twang of pain resounded up Hwa's right arm; she yelped and some of the other mourners turned in their pews to give her a
ssh!
face.

“Sorry!” Eileen slackened her grip somewhat. She pulled back a little and held Hwa's hands. “That's great news! Are you going to come back to work with us?”

Hwa glanced around the sanctuary. Mistress Séverine was sitting in the second row back, with Rusty and Nail on either side of her. “Yeah, I'll probably try to, after the funeral.” She winced. “Japrisot really wanted me to stay in school, though. She'll be pissed.”

“Hwa, you got
shot,
” Eileen said. “I think she'll understand if you tell her you bit off more than you could chew.”

Hwa caught herself frowning. She sat up a little straighter in the pew. She smoothed the sleeve over the valve in her wounded arm. “More than I could chew?”

“Of course! They had completely unreasonable expectations of you!”

Hearing someone else make the same excuses for her that she'd made to Joel made them sound even worse, and made her sound even weaker. The real problem was the fact that they'd lied to her, that Daniel Fucking Síofra,
her boss,
had lied to her, that they were all manipulative bastards who couldn't even keep track of their own goddamn bullets.

“Well, I could do the job. If I wanted to. But I don't want to.”

“Damn right you don't.” Eileen crossed her legs primly. “You're much safer with us.”

Hwa nodded at the coffin. “Tell that to Calliope.”