He shook his head. He couldn't believe he was pining for Oakland. There, he'd been sleeping on a rusty cot in a basement room with a damp, cracked floor. He'd become part-dwarf, been fired when he was framed for embezzlement, and every time he had stepped outside there had been a chance someone would try to assassinate him.
Still, it was more fun than the Barrens.
Duster always tried to convince him he was actually having fun. "Isn't this more fun than Temperance?" she always asked. That one time, when the goons ambushed them, they had barely escaped with their lives, and all Alex could think of was his quiet San Francisco apartment and his bland accountancy work at Temperence Investments, and Duster had turned to him, her pointed ears twitching merrily, and said "Isn't this more fun?" And even though he had stared at her in disbelief, and his mouth started to say "You're crazy," part of his mind immediately thought "Fraggin' right it is."
She had dubbed him "X-Prime" right after the attack. He thought the name sounded odd and said so, but Duster just shrugged and said "Sounds better than Alex."
He wished she was here or he was there. He couldn't go back, though, until Saito's people had forgotten enough about him to take the rumored price off her head. And as long as Oakland was the center of the metahuman's rights movement, Duster wasn't going anyplace else.
He was here, on his own. He hated it.
But it was still more fun than Temperence. And he had work – something to think about besides Oakland.
Tuesday, 9:41 pm
"If you do this right, you shouldn't need a bone saw."
Alex sat with his elbows on his knees, his forehead in his palms. Cayman assumed a concerned expression and swiped Alex's shoulder with the back of his hand.
"You okay? Not feeling sick, are you?"
Alex looked up, perfectly composed. "I'm fine. This is how I listen." He turned to Doc Holiday, who was sitting on a dented metal table, distractedly wiping at a bloodstain on the hem of his white (off-white, really – almost yellow) smock. "Go on."
"I think, honestly, the best tool would be something like bolt cutters. But they'd have to open pretty wide. From what I hear, this guy has thick shoulders."
Cayman nodded. "You got that right." Sitting at Doc Holiday's desk, with his salt-and-pepper hair and heavy jaw, he might have looked like a kindly, wise doctor – except for the tattoos, the jagged scar on the right cheek, and the olive vest packed with ammo.
"Let me show you what you need to do." Holiday stepped toward Cayman. "Roll up your sleeve."
Cayman obeyed. Outside the room, in the Mall, someone screamed in pain, and fifteen other voices, speaking in unity, told him to shut the frag up.
"Now, in a lot of cases, the cyberlimb ends about here." Holiday drew a line on Cayman's shoulder with a black marker. It was barely visible in the mass of faded tattoos. "Here, see, you want to cut right here, on the edge of the metal. Don't catch too much metal; if you do, you'll damage the limb. And if you're too far in toward the neck, you'll run into bone, and trust me, that's not something you want to try to cut. Hit the sweet spot, it should come right off."
"In working order?" Cayman asked.
Holiday nodded. "More or less."
Cayman waved a piece of paper. "And these are the specs?"
"That's the ones," Holiday said.
"This is everything?"
"Everything."
"Because this is a custom job. They sometimes slip things in at the last minute, you know."
Holiday's long, stretched face appeared annoyed, like Death waiting for his victim to finish a cup of tea before departing. "I know. Of course I know. I've implanted more arms than you've ever seen. I know."
"Just checking. Never hurts to check."
"Look, you've got everything you need," Holiday said. "It's not that hard, really. Any body man worth a damn could do it."
"Could you do it?" Cayman asked.
Holiday scowled. "Yeah."
Cayman pointed a thumb toward Alex. "Could he?"
"Do I know him?"
"I suppose you don't."
Cayman had been keeping one eye on Alex, looking for a sign of nerves or qualms or any reaction a normal person would have at being asked to cut someone's arm off. He didn't see anything but Alex's forehead in his hands.
"Can you do this? You okay about it?" Cayman asked.
Alex looked up. His face was suddenly harder, grimmer than it had been when Cayman saw him on the street this morning. He had shifted up to X-Prime gear.
"Yeah."
"You're okay with chopping off arms?"
"As a matter of general principle? No." Alex jerked his head toward the picture of Burt the Toad stuck on the wall under a patch of mold. "That guy's arm? Yeah, I'm fine with it."
Cayman stood, and suddenly he seemed to fill half the room. "When you're dealing with a Yak, it's not a good idea to make things personal. They can make it personal right back, which isn't good. This is business. We're being hired – and paid nicely – to do a job. That's why we're doing it."
"That's why you're doing it," X-Prime said (Alex would never talk back to Cayman). "World would be better if we took this guy's arm off, so let's take it off."
Cayman rolled his eyes. He did that a lot when Alex was around. "World would be better," he muttered. "Save us."
Tuesday, 10:12 pm
Alex – X-Prime, for the moment – walked out of the Body Mall with extra energy. He saw people looking at him, and he glared back. He wasn't an out-of-town, unemployed runner anymore. He was part of the scene. He belonged.
Sort of. He knew that Alex wasn't gone for good. He'd probably come back in the morning, filling X-Prime's head with all sorts of worries and second thoughts about the job. For now, though, he felt confident – cocky even – and he was going to enjoy it.
He walked across the Barrens for a while, experimenting with a strut for a block or two and failing miserably, then sauntering until his destination was in sight. The sign for Crusher 495 blinked red neon, except for the burned-out "u" and "9." Back in Oakland, Duster had told him she thought the owners were careful to ensure that at least a few lights on the sign were always broken. It kept the customers who thought they were slumming happy.
X-Prime nodded at the hostess when he walked by her. She didn't acknowledge him.
The club was pleasantly noisy, a content buzz filling the air. The people who had come to drink so they could forget their troubles had succeeded and were settling into the good-natured stage of inebriation. It would be a few drinks more before they moved on to loud and obnoxious.
He walked up to the scarred but clean bar and slapped his hand on it three times, just like in the trids. And what do you know, a stein of ale flew down the bar and into his hand. He whisked it off the bar, spun on his stool, and lifted the stein to his mouth in one smooth motion. He would have felt really good about himself right then except for his dangling dwarf legs, which weren't quite long enough to reach the stool's foot rest. They'd grown shorter about half a year ago (thanks to that fragging comet flyby), and he still didn't know what to do with them half the time.
He drank, and pleasant haze filtered into his brain almost immediately. He remembered he hadn't eaten in about eight hours, then resolved to drink that much more to fill himself up.
An hour and a half later, X-Prime discovered that a normally simple task like listening took real exertion. Words came out of the mouth of the guy next to him – he was sure they did, he could almost see them sliding off the guy's tongue – but instead of going in X-Prime's ears, they slipped this way and that, and he couldn't seize them. He tried to focus, really tried, because the last remaining logical part of his mind told him he should be listening to what was being said.