Two days before she'd skirted a coven of do-gooders who'd been live-trapping derelicts as though they were field mice, forcibly injecting them with some kind of gene cocktail. Xanthoplast recipes, probably. Since then, she’d managed to avoid seeing anyone. She moved only at night, when her marvelous eyes gave her every advantage. She steered clear of the local headquarters and territorial checkpoints with their burning oil drums and their light poles and their corroded, semi-functional Ballard stacks. There were traps and hidden guard posts, manned by wannabes eager to make their way up the local hierarchy; they seeped slight infrared, or slivers of light invisible to mere meat. Lenie Clarke noted them a block away and changed course, their attendants never the wiser.
She was almost through the zone when someone stepped from a doorway ten meters ahead of her; a mongrel with dominant Latino genes, skin the color of slate in the washed-out light boosted through her eyecaps. Bare feet, shreds of sprayed-on plastic peeling from the soles. A firearm of some kind in one hand; two fingers missing. The other hand had been transformed into an improvised prosthetic, wrapped round and round in layers of duct tape studded with broken glass and rusty nails.
He looked directly at her with eyes that shone as white and empty as her own.
"Well," Clarke said after a moment.
His clubbed limb gestured roughly at the surrounding territory. "Not much, but mine." His voice was hoarse with old diseases. "There's a toll."
"I'll go back the way I came."
"No you won't.”
She casually tapped a finger against her wristwatch. She kept her voice low, almost subvocaclass="underline" "Shadow."
"Funds transferred," the device replied.
Clarke sighed and sloughed off her pack. One corner of her mouth curled the slightest fraction.
"So how do you want me?" she asked.
He wanted her from behind, and he wanted her face in the dirt. He wanted to call her Bitch and cunt and stumpfuck. He wanted to cut her with his homebuilt mace.
She wondered if this could be called rape. She hadn't been offered a choice. Then again, she hadn't exactly said no, either.
He hit her when he came, backhanded her head against the ground with his gun hand, but the gesture had an air of formality about it. Finally, he rolled off of her and stood.
She allowed herself back inside then, let the distant observation of her own flesh revert again to first-hand experience. "So." She rolled onto her back, wiping the street from her mouth with the back of one hand. "How was I?"
He grunted and turned his attention to her pack.
"Nothing you want in there," she said.
"Uh-huh." Something caught his eye anyway. He reached in and pulled out a tunic of black shimmering fabric.
It squirmed in his hand.
"Shit!" He dropped it onto the ground. It lay there, inert. Playing dead.
"What the fuck…" he looked at Clarke.
"Party clothes," she said, getting to her feet. "Wouldn't fit you."
"Bullshit," the mongrel said. "It's that reflex copolymer stuff. Like Lenny Clarke wears."
She blinked. "What did you say?"
"Leonard Clarke. Deep Sea Gillman. Did the quake." He nudged the diveskin with one gnarled toe. "You think I don't know?" He raised his gun-hand to his face; the barrel touched the corner of an eyecap. "How you think I got these, eh? Not the first groupie in town."
"Leonard Clarke?"
"I said already. You deaf, or stupid?"
"I just let you rape me, asshole. So probably stupid."
The mongrel looked at her for an endless moment.
"You done this before," he said at last.
"More times than you can count."
"Get to maybe like it after a while?"
"No."
"You didn't fight."
"Yeah? How many do, with a gun to their heads?"
"You're not even scared."
"I'm too fucking tired. You gonna let me go, or kill me, or what? Anything but listening to more of this shit."
The mongrel took a hulking step forward. Lenie Clarke only snorted.
"Go," the mongrel said in a strange voice. Then added, absurdly: "Where you headed?"
She arched an eyebrow. "East."
He shook his head. "Never get through. Big quarantine. Goes halfway down to the Dust Belt." He pointed south, down a side street. "Better go 'round."
Clarke tapped her watch. "It's not listed."
"Then don't. Fuck lot I care."
Keeping her eyes up, Clarke bent down and picked up her tunic. The mongrel held her pack out by the straps, glancing down into its depths.
He tensed.
Her hand lunged into the pack like a striking snake, snatched out the billy. She held it underhand, pointed at his gut.
He stepped back, one hand still gripping the pack. His eyes narrowed to opalescent slits. "Why didn't you use it?"
"Didn't want to waste a charge. You're not worth it."
He eyed the empty sheath on her leg. "Why not keep it there? Where you can get it?"
"Now, if you'd had a kid with you…"
They regarded each other through eyes that saw everything in black and white.
"You let me." The mongrel shook his head; the contradiction almost seemed painful. "You had that, and you let me anyway."
"My pack," Clarke said.
"You—set me up." Dawning anger in that voice, and thick wonder.
"Maybe I just like it rough."
"You're contagious. You're a bughumper."
She wiggled the baton. "Give me my things and maybe you'll live long enough to find out."
"You stumpfuck." But he held out the pack.
For the first time she saw the webbing between the three stumpy digits of his hand, noticed the smooth scarless tips of the stubs. Not violence, then. No street-fight amputation. Born to it.
"You a pharm baby?" she asked. Maybe he was older than he looked; the pharms hadn't deliberately spread buggy genotypes for decades. Sure, defectives spent more than healthy people on fixes, but the global ambience was twisting babies into strange enough shapes on its own by then. Without the risk of consumer backlash.
"You are, aren't you?"
He glared at her, shaking with helpless fury.
"Good," she said, grabbing her pack. "Serves you fucking right."
Snare
The voice in Lubin's ear had lied.
He hadn't been outside N'AmPac since landfall. He hadn't been in Sevastopol or Philadelphia for years. He'd never been in Whitehorse, and from what he knew of the place he hoped he never would be.
But he could have been. The lie was plausible one, to someone who knew Lubin but not his current circumstances. Or maybe it hadn't been a deliberate lie. Maybe it had been a flawed guess, based on God knew what irrelevant stats. Maybe it had just been a bunch of random words shoveled together with more regard for grammar than veracity.
He wondered if he might have started the rumor himself. Before he left for Sudbury, he put that hypothesis to the test.