Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) (23 page)

She started crying as I was speaking. It wasn't because I had rejected her conversation. She was reading me, seeing my pain and anger and guilt. She was feeling it, and feeling for me. Empathic. She slid around to my side of the table and put her arm over my shoulders.
 

"You don't know what you'll have to do to protect the ones you love. To take care of your House. You don't know the decisions you'll have to make. I'm a ghost. I might not be a threat to you today, but what about in the future? Who knows what jobs I'll work, or who I'll do them for? Who knows what alliances you'll make? That's the life we've fallen into, the world we belong to that's supposed to keep the rest running smoothly. You know... the only thing that keeps me sane is when I sink money into my ex-wife's account, and I know I'm doing something to take care of them. It's the least I can do, after I failed them in the worst way a man can fail his family."

Damn it. I didn't want to talk about it, and I found myself letting out every painful guilty thought I fought so hard to bury all of the time. She was careful with my wounded shoulder when she pulled me close, and held me while my own tears fell.
 

I was thankful for the soundproof walls. I was glad Dannie wasn't here. Whatever the new Red was, she was reaching parts of my soul that I had tried really hard to kill. Part of me hated her for it, and part of me found itself feeling a little too much.

"You were right about the food," I said after a minute. I turned my head, my teary eyes finding hers only a few inches away. "We should go back to the hotel."

"The hotel?" She was staring into my eyes, unblinking, her expression soft.
 

"To wait for Amos and Dannie. They missed out on a good meal."

Her face turned red, and she pulled away, looking down and smiling.
 

"It is good fish," she said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Ghosts in the Machine.

"Baldie!" Amos' bellow echoed in the hotel room, and he waddled over to greet me when Jin and I got back.

"You're happy to see me?" I couldn't see past his bulk, but I could hear the wheels on Danelle's chair gliding over the carpet behind him.

"I threatened to cut something very dear to him off if anything happened to you," Jin said behind me.
 

"I wasn't worried. The wound was clean. Did you get to go outside? Holy shit, some of the girls here... biggest-"

"Amos!" Danelle snapped, at the same time her chair rolled over his foot. He shut his mouth.

"You've never been to the Greens before?"
 

"Oh, I have. Try to get here whenever I'm in the Northeast. Damn shame it's run by dir- hooooo! Fucking amazes me every fucking time."

I knelt down and wrapped my good arm around Danelle. "It's good to see you."

"We figured you'd be back soon, and I grabbed a dog from a vendor down the street. I'm glad you're up. You worried the shit out of me. How's the arm?"

I stood up and flexed it. The motion hurt, but I needed to get back into fighting shape. "I'll be fine. Like Amos said, the wound was clean."

"I got you something while we were out. I left it in the bedroom."

"I already have a good supply of sex toys."

She smacked me on the arm. "Don't be an asshole."

"Did you get some time in the Machine?" Jin asked.
 

Amos reached into the inside pocket of his duster. "Ta-da!" He was holding two credit-card shaped pieces of gold plastic. "Two hours each. We had to pawn half the armory to get it done."

Danelle sighed. "We had to do the golden tickets. They were booked for the next two weeks." The gold cards meant no reservations, and no waiting.
 

"I didn't know the Machine was getting that popular."

"In a place like this it is. According to the owner, the sovereignty of the Greens means they don't have to lock down any mods. If I had known that beforehand, I would have brought you somewhere else."

"Do you think you can get what you need in two hours?"

Danelle shrugged. "Let's hope so. We're going to be out of guns otherwise."

That reminded me. "What happened to Evan?"

Amos made a sound like he was puking. "Ugh. I'm putting carrying a half-decayed corpse at the very top of my list of the most disgusting things I've ever done. Number two is -"

"I don't want to know what number two is," I said, cutting him off.
 

He started laughing. "Fine. Trust me when I say it was really fucking gross. Anyway, he's back in his cooler in the van. Head's hanging a bit cockeyed after the werewolf tried to pull it off."

I could only hope the damage wasn't too bad; bodies like his were hard to find. "Thanks for collecting him, and for getting me loaded up and out of there."

"Like I said, she threatened to cut my balls off if anything happened to you. After what she did to my nose, I didn't doubt it." He ran his hand along his face. "Beautiful mug like mine. Damn shame."

I looked back at Jin and mouthed a thank you. She smiled in return.
 

"I think we've lost enough time. Let me go grab my stuff and we can head back to the Machinery. Every minute we waste gives whoever is behind this shit another minute to solidify their position."

I moved past them, hitting the bedroom first. I wasn't that surprised to find a black wool trench coat laid out on the bed. It was an oldie but a goodie, maybe a little too heavy to be practical and not the best suited for rain, but I didn't care about that. It had two deep front pockets, and two deep inner pockets, and was big enough that it would hide any kind of weapon I wanted to stash under it. I could always upgrade when I had a chance to do some real shopping.

I put the coat on and slipped my hood up, and then walked across to the attached bathroom to check myself in the mirror. The hood was casting a nice shadow, and the trench did what I wanted it to do. I found the safe and put in the code. All of my stuff was organized in the front, and I withdrew it and stuck it in my various pockets. Everything but the cell... the battery was dead, and the only person I ever called was already here. I noticed Jin's necklace was sitting all the way in the back, and I wondered if I should pocket that, too. Some part of me didn't feel like this safe was all that safe.
 

I stared at it for a few seconds, and then took it.

"I'm ready to rock," I said, joining the others in the living room. "Thanks for the coat, Dannie. It's perfect."

"You needed it. You looked like a stiff wind would knock you right over."

"Here, take this." Amos offered me a shoulder holster with one of the guns resting in it. "Place like this... you never know."

"Are you kidding me? There are armed guards everywhere."

"Safe enough in the streets. Can't say the same for the Machinery. Get a big enough crowd of assholes, you never know what could happen."

I shrugged off the trench and took the offered gun, slipping it on and burying it beneath the wool again. "Thanks."

"No problemo."

We headed out of the hotel again, with Amos in the lead. The big man was useful for clearing a path for us to move through, his massive girth threatening to knock aside anyone who was careless enough to get in our way. He brought us straight through the gathered crowds, past barely dressed men and women both showing off their assets, past goblins hawking baubles and necklaces, and dwarves playing up their mythos, dressed like they had fallen out of the Lonely Mountain to sell handmade axes and daggers. There was even a pair of elven magic users here, a pyro and an aqua who were wowing the crowd by dancing through rings of fire and water, crisscrossing them, or pulling them into one another to bathe themselves in mist and steam.
 

All the while, my eyes stayed on the guards. There was at least a pair at every corner, leaning back and taking it all in. From the size, most of them had to be ogres, or maybe trolls. From the armament, they could have annexed the rest of Brooklyn from the United States before morning if they were so inclined.

"When we get there, just stay quiet and let me set everything up," Danelle said. "Tony is an okay guy, but he doesn't have much patience for newbies."

"I've been in the Machine once before."

Danelle looked up at me and rolled her eyes. "You're running a stock avatar with no mods."

"I don't know what that means."

"Exactly."

We walked another block and turned right. The Machinery was up the street. It was easy enough to find, with massive LED lettering beaming out past mirrored windows and a huge installation of gears, pulleys, and winches taking up a hundred feet of walkway in front of it.
 

The Machine was created ten years ago by a technomancer named Aldred Jones. He had this idea that it would be an awesome business and great fun to create a world that couldn't exist anywhere but inside a computer. A world that looked, felt, tasted and smelled like it could be real, but had no solid laws, no solid rules, was completely anonymous, and no one could ever actually get hurt.
 

The first iteration was a disaster.
 

Not because the interest wasn't there, but the whole idea of lawlessness worked a lot better on paper than it did in reality. When anyone could do anything without consequence, it quickly became a race to see who could come up with the grandest scheme of depravity. From what Dannie had told me, V1.0 got shut down when someone forced all of the avatars to do some pretty nasty things with one another, and locked down the active accounts so that nobody could get out. The only reason Aldred had escaped prison was because nobody knew who he was, or where to find him.
 

Version two had a lot more inter-avatar safeguards in place, and maintained a basic ruleset that kept that bit of history from repeating itself:

1. Keep your shit in its zone. Penalties for acting out-of-zone, or 'oozy', were the harshest penalties in the Machine. Banned for a year, all of your in-Machine credits lost, and your name on the Slime List.
 

2. If you died in-zone in the Machine you got kicked off, and you couldn't come back for a week.

3. If you killed someone in-zone, with the exception of the war zone, in the Machine, and another machinist or the bots got you, you were kicked off and couldn't come back for a month.
 

That was it on the inside. Three simple rules. On the outside, it was a little different. The Machine was under constant scrutiny from governments around the world, and while the Houses had seen to it that it was never outright banned from use, it was typically subject to any number of regulations, with certain activities and mods illegal to users depending on their node of origin.

That was what Dannie had suggested made the Greens so popular, and so expensive. Here, anything and everything was allowed.
 

She had owned an account ID for years, but she'd gone into the Machine only rarely, using the anonymity to meet with other ghosts, make some connections, and practice her stealth and combat in the war zone.

 
That was before she lost her legs.
 

Since then, she went in as often as our finances would allow. She could walk in the Machine. She could run, jump, kick, dance... everything she'd lost was returned, if only for the hour or two that she could afford each week.

 
Dannie had told me stories about Ivan Ilyn, a Russian billionaire who had been diagnosed with ALS, and now lived in the Machine full-time. He was strong and healthy inside, even while his body wasted away to nothing outside.

We passed through the sliding glass doors into the main lobby. It was massive, taking up the entire breadth of the ground floor, and broken up only by support beams, elevator shafts, and a small desk near the center. The outer shell was a single massive wall of video screens, where thousands of streams ran from the inside of the Machine, and hundreds of onlookers loitered in voyeuristic fascination, their eyes shifting from one feed to the next.
 

Most of the action was occurring in the war zone, where avatars crouched behind blasted out shells of buildings, or charged through bullet-ridden streets. They were mainly human, though a good portion had mods to give them chameleon skin, or a cannon for an arm, or other craziness like that.
 

There was one machinist, recognizable only by his ID number, who seemed to have a following in the building. He was a beast of an ogre, in electric blue combat armor and carrying only a glowing chainsaw. He ran through the debris, taking massive leaps ahead and somehow avoiding all of the incoming gunfire his armor was attracting. He landed on a platform twenty feet up, where a sniper was scrambling to get a bead on him.
 

The chainsaw took care of that.

Danelle followed my eyes to the action. "14596. He's famous in this circle. He calls himself Abe."

"He's been around a long time." The IDs were sequential. The only person in the Machine who wasn't anonymous was '1', though most believed he had a few accounts.
 

 
"Or she," Dannie said. There was no way to know.

We kept moving, until Danelle rolled up to the desk. "Hey, Tony."

"Back again already?" the goblin asked. He cracked a wide smile and held out his hand.

Amos dug the golden tickets out of his coat pocket and passed them on. Tony looked them over and then glanced down behind the desk. "Room 1214 is open. Who's going up?"

Dannie pointed at me. "The two of us. Can you run a feed to a private viewing room?"

He shook his head. "All the viewing rooms are full. It's nuts in here tonight. I can run the feed to the hall?"

"No. Just keep it closed."

"You got it. Follow me."

He turned and headed straight back for the elevators.
 

"We'll be back soon," I said.

"Good luck," Jin replied.

Amos didn't even notice. He was staring at a feed on the far wall, his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging slightly from an open mouth.