Tails You Lose (6 page)
"I'm impressed," Night Owl said. She was already on her feet and moving to the front door. She had every reason to believe the kid—if he had tried to snag a few more nuyen by selling her out, she'd already be dead. So would most of the other poor fraggers in the restaurant. She tossed a small-denomination credstick at the waitress, telling her to keep the change, and peered out through the restaurant's front window. The kid pointed out the car—a turbocharged Saab Dynamit convertible that looked like it could crank some serious Ks. She didn't see anyone lingering near the sports car, and none of the people who were scurrying along the Drive under umbrellas looked like the gangers the kid had described.
"Stay inside until I'm gone," Night Owl warned him. "I don't want you in my way."
The kid grinned. He'd understood what she really meant.
Night Owl pulled on her gauntlets and positioned the night-vision goggles on her forehead, ready for use. Then she pulled the door open and slid outside, moving low so the parked cars hid her. She swung up into the bike's leather seat, keyed in its ignition code, and rocked the Harley forward, taking it off its kick stand in one smooth motion. The engine's loud rumble filled the street, echoing like thunder off the buildings to either side.
Just as she was wheeling away, Night Owl caught a glimpse of a running figure in her rear view mirror. He was young, Asian and armed—and looked pissed as hell. He ran out into the street, heedless of honking traffic, and leveled the Uzi he was holding. Its barrel flared red. Bullets punched into the parked cars behind Night Owl, shattering windows and exploding tires. Pedestrians on the sidewalk dived for cover.
Night Owl wrenched the bike right and disappeared around the corner onto
She was weaving in and out of traffic when she heard the squeal of tires behind her. The bike's rear view mirror flashed her a glimpse of the Saab, hot on her trail. The ganger in the passenger seat was leaning out of his window, trying to line her up in the Uzi's sights, but there seemed to be too many cars in the way. He ducked back inside.
She swung onto
Side streets and red lights flashed by, and somehow both bike and Saab managed to miss clipping any of the cars that they rocketed past. Rain stung Night Owl's bare cheeks like ice-cold shotgun pellets, and her wet hair streamed out behind her. The water-repellent jeans she'd tucked into her Daytons fluttered like tarps in a hurricane, and her leather jacket pressed back against her chest. Wind roared in her ears.
When she reached the southernmost end of
Bullets
spanged
off a sagging light fixture beside the motorcycle as Night Owl flashed across the bridge. Even with her night-vision goggles, she had to rely on luck to find her way—rubble and holes flashed past so quickly that only her instinctive, last-second swerves got the Harley around them. At the last moment she spotted a gaping hole in the deck of the bridge that hadn't been there last week and deked around it in a tight swerve. Then she was below the crest of the bridge and zooming down the other side. In just a few seconds more, she'd be in the ruins.
The Saab behind her was still accelerating; the driver must have managed to avoid the hole, too. As the car shot into view in her mirrors, Night Owl took the first offramp and blasted down onto what was left of
The road was intact for a few meters beyond the offramp, but then it became chaotic. Abandoned cars lay crumpled under the light fixtures that the earthquake had toppled on them, and long-dead electric wires snaked in tangles across the street. The road itself looked like a jigsaw puzzle that had been punched from below by a giant's fist: jagged pieces of asphalt reared up at odd angles, with weeds filling the gaps. On either side of the road were the dark shadows of ruined buildings. Some had collapsed into piles of rubble; others had tilted into the air like sinking ships when the earthquake liquefied the ground beneath their foundations. Only one in ten was still intact.
Night Owl knew every centimeter of the ruined road by heart. This was one of her favorite bolt holes. Alternately revving and braking, she skittered her way across the largest and most level slabs of asphalt, leaping the bike from one to the next as if they were stepping stones.
Behind her, she heard the twin thud of car tires hitting an obstruction, and then the screech of metal grating on concrete and an engine revving into the red. The Saab's engine stuttered into a rough idle, and then car doors slammed. For a moment, Night Owl thought she was clear. Then the Uzi roared. Bullets hissed through the night and ricocheted off debris all around her. One tore a crease across her front fender; another slammed into the seat, just behind her thigh.
Night Owl skidded around a corner into the shadow of a ruined warehouse. She looped around the back of the property and entered what remained of the building through a motorcycle-sized hole in its rear wall. Braking to a stop, she cut the engine and slid off the bike, and then picked her way to the front wall of the warehouse to peek out through a rockworm hole.
She nearly laughed at what she saw. The Saab was hung up on a twisted telecom pole several hundred meters back, rear wheels spinning in the air. It wasn't going anywhere. One ganger was standing on the broken roadway, Uzi in hand and eyes searching the night. He shouted something at the driver, but Night Owl was too far away to hear what he said. The driver shut the car down and climbed out of the vehicle. Both of them stood tense and silent, as if listening. The chase had suddenly turned into a game of cat and mouse—and neither one of the gangers knew where Night Owl was hiding. Behind her, the motorcycle made faint
tic-tic-ticking
noises as its engine slowly cooled.
Night Owl was surprised they'd followed her this far. Even the hardest-hooped gangers balked at entering the Richmond Ruins. The suburb had been leveled by a quake a year ago and left to rot ever since. Rock-worms had made Swiss cheese of the concrete apartment blocks and office towers that still stood, making much of the terrain so unstable that the vibrations from someone walking along the sidewalks out front could tumble them. Devil rats had bloated themselves on the tens of thousands of people who had died when the quake leveled the 'burb, and now they roamed the ruins in swarms. But most fearsome of all were the ghosts of the dead. There were a lot of restless, angry spirits in Richmond—and none of them knew who it was, exactly, that they ought to be pissed at.
Everyone agreed that the quake had been magical in origin—the silty ground under Richmond had been jackhammered up and down by what looked like an earthquake of more than nine on the Richter scale, but just across the river in Vancouver, the seismographs hadn't even twitched. Street buzz had it that a gang of secret Feng Shui masters had miscalculated the "straight-arrow" formed by the two-kilometer-long suborbital runway on neighboring Sea Island and accidentally triggered the quake. But nobody really knew for sure—and that was the scariest part of living in the Awakened world.
Outside on the ruined street, the Red Lotus boys were having a shouted conversation. After a few minutes of cursing, they turned and jandered back in the direction of the
Chuckling, Night Owl walked back to her bike. She was just swinging a leg up over the seat when someone kicked her other foot out from under her. She went down across the bike, and her weight overbalanced the heavy machine. The Harley slammed onto its side on the rubble-strewn floor, sending broken bits of concrete skittering. Night Owl twisted just in time to avoid getting tangled in it and landed face-up. She kicked against the floor, sending herself sliding backward, at the same time twisting and reaching behind her back for her Predator.
Something heavy landed square on her chest, slamming her back onto the ground and trapping her left arm underneath her. She tried to shift the weight, but invisible arms locked around her torso, hugging her tight. A musky animal odor filled her nostrils, and she felt coarse hair pressing against her skin. Something magical was holding her, making it impossible to move. She heard a creak and felt a sharp pain under her breasts as the magical arms squeezed tighter. She couldn't tell if the sound had come from her leather jacket creaking or her ribs straining to the breaking point.
A shape suddenly appeared in her night-vision goggles: a troll twice her size, with Asian features and two spiraling horns that angled out from his temples, giving his forehead the shape of a V. His long hair was gathered in a bun at the back of his head like that of an ancient Chinese warrior and was tied with a wide band of cloth that she guessed would have been red in daylight: the hallmark of the Red Lotus. A bear's claw pierced the lobe of each ear. The troll had dropped the invisibility and silence spells he'd used to sneak up on Night Owl, and now he rose to his feet, lifting his knee from her chest. One cartilage-crusted hand was balled in a fist; he held it over her. maintaining the magical spell that pinned her to the ground.
"You're a dead woman," he said in Cantonese.
"No . . . I'm not," Night Owl gasped. She knew better than to believe his threat. Entertainment trids to the contrary, gangers didn't make speeches before killing someone. They just greased them. "You . . . want something."
She could feel her right eye twitching—an annoying quirk that cropped up whenever things got too close to the edge. She suddenly realized that there had been three gangers in the Saab—not two. The other two men had only pretended to leave. She could hear their footsteps outside even now, as they circled back toward the ruined warehouse—or maybe that was just the rain, starting up again.
"You have angered Eldest Brother by cheating him," the troll said, eyes blazing. "You sold him property, then told the original owners where to find it again."
"That . . . wasn't me . . . who told. Someone . . . else." It was the truth—she and Wharf Rat had probably been sold out by that
"You agreed to the contract," the troll continued in a grim voice. "You bore the ultimate responsibility." Night Owl pretended to be listening, but all the while she was testing her strength against the invisible arms that held her. She could rock back and forth slightly, although it felt as though the weight of a grizzly were on top of her. And she could still move her fingers. If she could just hook one of them around the Predator, she might be able to roll over and pull the trigger. With luck, she might hit the troll in the leg—if she didn't shoot her own hoop off first. As she strained her hand closer to the holster in the small of her back, she stalled for time.
"I can pay . . . your boss back . . . twice what . . . he gave me," she lied. "There's twenty K on registered credsticks . . . back at—"
The troll clenched his fist tightly, causing his bony knuckles to crack. Night Owl's vision swam with stars as the magical arms that were holding her squeezed the last of the air from her lungs. She fought to take a breath, but it was as if she were underwater, with no air to breathe. Dimly, over the pounding that filled her ears, she heard the troll's final pronouncement—and realized she'd been wrong about the trids. Sometimes real-life gangers liked to make speeches, too.
"Your death will be a lesson that the other shadowrunners will remember."
Night Owl's world dimmed to a dull red. Static filled her ears, and in her chest she could hear her heartbeat, so frenzied a moment ago, slow and falter. She was dying . . .
A voice floated into what remained of her consciousness—a voice that sounded as ancient and wet as rotted silk tearing.
That
will
be
enough
,
Wu
.
The invisible bands of steel that had been tightening around Night Owl's chest were suddenly gone. Something cold dripped on her skin—rainwater leaking in through what remained of the roof? Eyelids fluttering, she took a ragged breath. Somehow, she forced herself to sit up. When her eyes could focus again, she nearly fainted.
