Necrotech (34 page)

A chunk of armor took flesh with it from my side. My leg reopened; I didn't give a fuck, tearing the arm that slashed me from its socket and spinning to slam the shoulder joint into another's head. They came again and again. Clawed for my vital organs.

I ripped one off my shoulders. Another one replaced it. I staggered, unable to tell if it was my blood pumping to the brightly lit street or theirs.

I was losing.
We
were losing.

I threw my head back, narrowly avoided losing my eyes to a bony swipe. Blinding white light filled my sight; burned out my vision. My foot came down on something that rolled, gelatinous and slippery, and I went down. Indigo tried to catch me, tangled up in my footing and fell on me instead. Something sliced through my chest.

The world went nova.

I'd been shot, stabbed, burned, caught in shrapnel, and – more recently – clawed up by necros. I never expected a trip and fall to take me out. That was fucking embarrassing.

Pride demanded I get up off the ground and shake it off. I struggled to open my eyes, to move, but all I saw was red and black. I couldn't breathe. I sucked in air, choked, coughed. Agony tore open my chest, bubbled from my lips.

“Lay down cover fire!” I heard. Real voices, not comm chatter. “Get them on board.”

“Hang on, Riko.” Something sharp punctured the skin on my neck, just over jagged furrows throbbing at my collar bone. I wanted to give the speaker the same courteous digit I'd extended to the helo, but my eyelids turned to lead weights.

“The burn team is sending orders for quarantine, sir.”

“Tell them,” Malik said, his voice sounding extraordinarily clear, “to go fuck themselves.”

I
sat
on the edge of an examination table, rotating my synthetic wrist and listening for the telltale sound of servos in the joint.

“I replaced a lot of the mobility parts. Pretty great, huh?” Orchard, the redheaded tech I'd threatened with a broken arm, had repaired mine. The irony. It slays. “I had to make a few enhancements to the overall model, but you should feel back to normal in no time.”

If “normal” meant feeling like an intruder inside my own skin, then yeah. I could fake that. As long as Orchard kept her pink fingers off my brain, I could probably go on faking indefinitely.

But I knew. Blindsided as I was, I knew that I'd lost my shit down there. That I'd nearly killed Indigo with my choices – killed myself – and I couldn't even say why.

I bent my arm. The matte plating looked a little worse for wear, but I couldn't find fault with the connectors.

“We had to reinforce your shoulder girdle,” Orchard was saying, scrolling down a projected screen wide as one arm and ticking off the salient points. The floating numbers looked like gibberish from this side, but the fact she'd defaulted to a widescreen projection said she'd gone through a metric shit ton of data. “Your biceps bracing needed total replacement, so since we had pretty much full run of the budget, we fitted your whole arm and shoulder with a custom muscle weave that should make future separation more difficult to achieve.”

I looked up. “Trust me,” I said dryly. “I never plan on reaching that particular achievement again.” Once was more than enough. Metal was durable, sure, but it didn't matter how strong the tech was if the flesh couldn't cope. I'd found the breaking point against that security door, and the memory of it sent fingers of oily sweat skimming down my spine.

And I didn't even have a SIN registry to score the achievement. Shitting bloody irony.

Orchard nodded. “I'd appreciate that. Your chipset was showing some serious wear and tear, so we replaced it entirely with an updated model. Don't worry,” she added when I shot her a narrow-eyed stare, “I didn't mess with anything else. Promise. I patterned the new tech off your previous specifications. I added some upgraded filters that I'm not supposed to give non-employees, so
shh
.”

I bit back a growling sigh. Leave it to Malik dicking Reed to take advantage of my unconscious state. I'd wondered who I'd go to for a full recalibration, and as it turned out, I owed him. Lucky me. I didn't trust Orchard far as I could fuck her – all signals were coming back at no-go – which meant I'd have to play this as cool as I could manage. “How bad was the chipset?”

“Hard to say for sure.” Orchard flicked aside an array of screens until a multihued splotch in various primary and secondary colors filled the projected square. She tucked three fingers into the bottom edge and rotated it deftly. The projection flipped. “This is an average picture of your brain during most of the mission.”

I eyed it, bracing my hands on the edge of the examination table to study it closer. “It looks like a mess.”

“Brains are funny that way.” Another flick, and a new picture took its place. She jabbed a finger into a large patch of brilliant yellow at the base of the blotch. “That's what was going on around your chipset right before you lost your helmet.”

“It went supernova.” I lifted my hand to the base of my head, testing the skin now covering the replaced set. No scars to show for it. No bumps. “Like it caught fire.”

She framed the yellow glare with her hands, cupping the blotch through the screen. “Whatever was going on, it turned on every communication center in your brain. Like it was trying to account for some other handicap. It's no wonder you lost consciousness for a while.” She looked up over her cupped hands, orange eyebrows high. “Anything to add here?”

Not unless I wanted to spend the next ungodly amount of time holed up in this stinking lab with its glaring white façade.

“What about corruption?” I asked.

She blinked at me, sky blue eyes crystal clear. “No signs. Your nanos needed a boost like whoa, but I suspect any oddness you felt was due to this.” She gestured at the colorful brain scan. “So...” A pointed pause. “How do you feel?”

I folded my shoulders into a casual shrug. “I feel fine.”

“How'd you feel
then
?”

“Like a cranked out teenager high on colordust,” I told her. “How do you think?” I tried not to take offense when disappointment replaced eager curiosity in her features. “If it changes, you'll be the first to know, okay?”

You'd think I offered to clean her damn lab. She perked right up. “Great.” Another one of those practiced gestures, and the screen swapped back to her chart. “I also took the opportunity to replace your netware applications.” Another pause. “Uh, don't tell Mr Reed. The rest is good to go. You're in remarkably good shape, given everything.”

I looked down at myself, checking my ink for any new scars. The fact I was wearing plain white underwear and a cropped tank bra bothered neither of us. Like I said, she'd been stunningly indifferent to my flirtations. “Any other good data getting pulled from the helmet feeds?” I asked.

“Don't know,” she said, but without the same focus she'd given my brain. “That's another department's job. As for you and that other guy, the fact you came back from this mess at all is kind of fascinating, don't you think? I mean, we've never seen a necrotech spread like that. It's crazy interesting!”

“That's
a
word for it,” I acknowledged, dry as bone. She grinned, but if she'd meant to ask any more questions, the double doors across the lab hissed open and cut her off.

Malik strode inside like he owned every piece of tech in it, Orchard and me included. Control freak.

He wore gray. Again. Surprise. This suit was darker than the previous, a single-breasted jacket over a matching vest. His dress shirt was a shade he probably convinced himself was
light red
but which I called pink. Again, a tie. Also gray. In one hand, he held a duffel. Black, though, not gray. Surprise.

Orchard launched herself from her stool. “Mr Reed, sir! Just running over the diagnostics with the patient.”

I didn't bother sliding off the end of my table. I swung my bare feet idly, leaning back on my hands and well aware of what that did to my physique.

A girl didn't get killer abs by being soft.

Malik's gaze flicked to me, but didn't linger. “I've got it from here, Dr Gearailteach.”

“Yes, sir.” Slanting me a wide-eyed apology, she swiped the projected screen back to her desk's anchor unit. “Bye, Riko,” she said cheerfully. “Don't forget lunch!” Without waiting for confirmation, she fled the scene, red ponytail bobbing.

Traitor.

The doors closed behind her, leaving me alone with Malik Reed, suited exec and all around cardholding member of the gaping assholes committee.

I owed him so much emotional backlog, I honestly didn't know where to start. Or if it was even worth it to bother. It annoyed me that I didn't hate him as much as I thought I should. I guess a near-death experience with ambulatory tech did something for a girl's perspective.

I eyed him. “Her last name is what?”

“Ask her yourself.” He tossed the bag at me. Without thinking, I caught it with my tech hand. It was heavier than I expected. “Good reflexes. How do you feel?”

I peered inside the bag to find an indistinguishable mass of black. “Like someone that should feel like hammered shit and doesn't. What's this?”

“Clothes.”

I couldn't wait to see this. Ignoring him, I rifled through the pile of black, fishing out a pair of black pants that would fit like a wet dream with none of the imagination. Underneath, a halter top similar to the one his team had ruined at Plato's Key. Also black.

Malik Reed was a one-color-per-customer kind of tool.

I found a pair of black boots under it, sporting a two-inch tread and a four-inch, street-ready heel.

I raised an eyebrow at him. “What's this for?”

“Your other apparel was damaged.” I noted he didn't claim responsibility for that one, either. “I took the liberty.”

I eased off the table, my bare feet hitting the cool tile, and snapped open the pants. “Indigo get the same treatment?”

Again, I was hit with a lingering sense of déjà vu.

Malik made no effort to turn away. He watched me the same way he always did, unreadable as stone, arms folded over his chest. “Mr Koupra's nanoshock symptoms were too early to be of import. His wounds were also less...
extensive
than yours.” Goddamn, they liked to underplay it around here. “He responded well to the treatment, his various injuries healed without scarring, and he was released two days ago.”

I appreciated the detail. While Orchard had made it a point to fill me in when I'd finally been pulled out of the recharge tank, she'd kept it to “doing just fine” and “already headed home”. As the med staff hosed nutrient-rich slime off my clammy skin, she'd told me that a four-block radius in the Vid Zone had been razed to the ground. Farther, even. With the burn team's proficiency and the chemical napalm used in a controlled burn, the structural integrity of the place hadn't stood a chance.

By the time anyone had gone through it, there was nothing left behind but a slagged crater. Indigo and I were the only witnesses to whatever went down in that hellhole.

So why the pause?

“Then to what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked mockingly. “Are you here to lecture?”

His dark head tipped, fluorescent overheads carving harsh planes into his implacable features. “You owe me a conversation, as I recall.”

“Yeah, that's not going to happen.”

“Why?”

I shot him an impatient shrug as I wriggled into the pants. I was right. They fit like a second skin, which made them sexy club wear and worthless everywhere else. “What do you want me to say? My whole team nearly died down there. I lost my cool, like the brain scans say.” A mild stretch. “You set me up. Oh, and I cost you four enforcers. Don't you have a lot to say about the value of resources and shit?”

“You returned with data from the infested lab. That in itself is valuable.” If the loss of his team bothered him, I couldn't tell.

And Digo called
me
cold.

“Are you going to tell me what you've learned?” I prodded. “Or am I going to have to do this dance for the next hour?”

He gave in with surprising grace. Damn it. “According to Mr Koupra and the footage taken from the suit cams above ground, the surge of necrotech infection spread to one-fourth of the quarantined population.”

Ouch. That was a lot of walking necros. A whole lot of normal folk gone real bad, real fast. I zipped the pants up and stripped off the modest bra without looking at him. “Everyone said conversion only works via wire, and it's rare.”

He didn't afford me the same courtesy. “It will take time to sort out the data.” Without letting me pursue the topic, as though deciding it was done, he added simply, “You have questions.”

I wasn't sure I did. Not the same ones I'd gone in there with. I frowned. “Did you pay Digo for his…” What would I call it? Selling me out?
Ugh.
“Blood price? For meeting your demands.”

His head cocked, the glaring white lights turning his shorn hair to a dark shadow on his swarthy scalp. “What do you intend to do if I confirm that?”

“Thank you.”

There. A flicker of his short, thick eyelashes. I'd surprised him. Finally.

The emotion didn't linger. “Mr Koupra has been compensated accordingly.”

“Good.” I was happy to leave it at that.

This time.

I shrugged into the halter, wrapping it around my ribs with deft ease. He must have modeled the shirt after my yellow one. The material was softer than I remembered, nearly sheer but for the layers. A good printer could reproduce the pattern as many times as needed, but I liked this quality fabric.

He wasn't inclined to let me get away with that. He raised his eyebrows, his full mouth hiking up ever so faintly at that crazily endearing corner. “You were saying?”

Oh, for all the fucks in the world. I shrugged my bare shoulders. “Thank you for paying him,” I said, and slanted him a hard eyebrow from beneath the fringe of pale hair flopped over my forehead. “Next time you put a bounty out on my head, make sure it's to kill me.”

The smile, small as it was – smug bastard – didn't fade. He switched gears without confirming my unspoken threat. “I understand Mr Koupra located some footage.”

I stilled, black cloth stretched taut in my fingers. My gaze pinned not on him, but somewhere beyond his right shoulder. Desks, computers, examination grids flickering faintly between stations. I didn't see them.

I saw myself, negotiating with a man in black security BDUs over Nanjali Koupra's unconscious body.

I swallowed hard. “Yeah.” A rasp. I cleared my throat. “But it might be fake.”

His dark brown eyes searched my face. “Might be?”

I forced myself to loosen my grip. To finish wrapping the material and tie it in place. I wasn't sure how to frame my thoughts in a way that didn't sound desperate.

How did I explain that I was haunted by a memory that unfolded more like a vid screen recording than a recollection?

Echoes of panic still haunted me when I looked at white tile. The smell of disinfectant cramped inside my guts and chest and stole my breath. I didn't make that up.

Malik didn't cut me any slack. It wasn't his style. “Riko.” His deep voice wrapped around the name I'd heard for ten years, and I shuddered. Regret? Aversion.

Who was I, really? What had happened to me in those four months?

What the shit was I becoming?