“Inglés?”
“Yes,” said LizAlec, smiling with relief. She could do English.
“Honey, you got anything anyone can actually use?” The woman was thirty going on three hundred and then some. Her blue eyes were washed out with enough background to plot-line a thousand newsfeed novelas.
“You don’t take cards?” LizAlec looked startled. The holos promised HKS was universal, one of the ads even had a grizzled miner on Io or somewhere happily swiping an HKS gold through his belt in return for an improbably large opal. “What do you use?”
“What you got?” A young boy in combats and a goth T-shirt crowded in at her shoulder. He looked about fourteen and had the most stupid haircut she’d ever seen. Fuck it, thought LizAlec. She needed some smart-arse kid like she needed killer PMS. Actually she needed gut-rot more than she needed the kid.
“Yáyase,” snapped the woman and the boy stepped back. But he didn’t go away, and it didn’t look like he intended to.
LizAlec glanced over to a table near the door hoping for back-up, only to find Lars wasn’t there. Typical. Maybe she should have left the freak out at the base. But she couldn’t. Not after what she’d seen in his head. All those empty tunnels, all that blood. No wonder he was...
Actually, LizAlec didn’t know what he was, she was still trying to work it out. As for exactly what Lars lacked, she’d given up on that one after she’d ticked off two lungs, a normal human set of teeth and a spiralling list of other things starting with a basic knowledge of what it was to be normal.
At least, what LizAlec considered normal.
And anyway, leaving him wasn’t an option. He had Lazlo’s black ring, the one that kept her face from exploding. She couldn’t wear the bloody thing herself, could she? Not without closing the circuit. Which meant keeping Lars close by her for company.
That hadn’t been too difficult to date, because he’d been safely punch-drunk when she’d bundled him into the back of the buggy and still groggy when she’d dragged him after her into the bar. Maybe that was the problem, LizAlec decided. Dragging a staggering freak behind her was bound to draw attention.
“I’ll take the bracelet,” the woman said, nodding to the silver band wound tight round LizAlec’s wrist. “And I’ll even give you some change.” Without waiting for LizAlec’s reply, the woman hit a key and pulled a couple of dead presidents from an old bell, lever and clockwork till. Rococo scrolls of gold fluttered up the side and “Industrial Business Machines” was written in script over every flat surface. It looked original.
LizAlec shook her head. “The bracelet won’t come off, I’ve tried.” And that was true. LizAlec wasn’t sure exactly when the bracelet had woken up, but in the last hour it had wound itself so tight onto her arm that her flesh had puffed up around it.
“No problems.” The kid in the combats dipped his hand into a knee pocket and came up with a vicious-looking pair of pliers. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”
The woman frowned, the shake of her head so slight that at first the boy didn’t notice it — until he saw her stare over his shoulder and turned to find Lars standing behind him, a clutter of talismans round his thick neck, arms slung loosely at his side, mouth half open. The sandrat’s balloon suit was open to the navel, the flesh below it maggot-white and hairless.
“How you do that?” He was talking to LizAlec, the boy and the woman so far out of his interest they might as well not have existed. “How?”
He meant how did she knock him out, she knew that. LizAlec shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You must.”
She didn’t. Ripping out someone’s memories wasn’t one of her regular party tricks. But then, no one had ever tried to rape her before, whatever Lady Clare might think. LizAlec watched the sandrat stare into her eyes and then saw him shiver. “Drink,” he demanded, noticing where he was for the first time.
The woman nodded towards LizAlec. “She already got dos. Nada money. Only an HKS. Sweedak? She raised her eyes, inviting Lars to admit how dumb that was.
“Here.” Lars ripped a silicon square from the clutter of talismans around his neck and dumped it on the wooden bar. Reaching under the bar for a reader, the woman striped Lars’s stolen chip through the slot and took the price of two tubes. It put the cashchip into negative, but not enough to argue about, at least not with a sandrat. With a sigh, the woman tossed the empty cashchip into a bucket under the bar.
LizAlec looked on, baffled. Not understanding why Lars’s cashchip was good while her own swipe card had been rejected. But even if he understood her unspoken question, Lars didn’t have words to explain that empty&fills were good because they were finite, while a card that drew a credit stream through a proper orbiting bank was no use to anyone operating on the edges of legal finance.
“Need to sit,” said Lars and pushed past the boy without looking at him. The sandrat stopped at an occupied table right next to an over-chromed Cadillac jukebox and stared pointedly at two backpackers sitting in front of almost empty bottles of Kirin. When the grocks didn’t take his point, Lars up-ended their metal table with a crash, shattering glass.
Behind the bar, Jude sighed... It was going to be a long day. Reaching for her stun gun, the woman began to lift the flap.
But her presence wasn’t needed. Lars was already helping the tourists through the door and out into noonday heat hot enough to disgrace a hyperactive sauna, if only there’d been an inkling of humidity to go with it. The backpackers left without protest.
Jude figured it was the open lock-knife that helped the sandrat clinch his argument: though it might have been his bared teeth or the blood clotted down his chin that convinced them to try another bar.
Lars glared at LizAlec. “Drink,” he demanded, pulling the table upright.
Yeah, right. LizAlec passed him the tubes, watching as the sandrat ring-pulled both, ice crystallizing like frost down their silver sides. He killed one with a single gulp, then swallowed half the second tube before passing it back to the girl.
“Thanks,” LizAlec said sweetly, but it was sarcasm wasted.
LizAlec started to wipe the edge on Laughing Boy’s battle-dress and then gave up. The cloth was probably as germ-infested as the can. Besides, she’d had shots for every virus and infection known on Luna. The school had insisted. It was just a pisser she hadn’t taken that menstruation shot when it was offered: her gut was cramping so fast she didn’t even want to think about it.
The electric soup was cold as glacier meltwater, and thick like syrup. Sweet, too, but with a chemical aftertaste that should have warned her. LizAlec was taking a second gulp when the effects of her first swallow cut in, flicking the light level up a couple of clicks and putting glass-hard edges to the blades of the ceiling fan rotating slowly overhead.
Lars grinned as he took the tube from LizAlec’s unprotesting fingers and tipped the dregs down his own throat. Wizz, pop and bang — crystalMeth, seratonin and amyl nitrate. She didn’t yet know the effects, but she would.
LizAlec gasped, watching the room flick in and out of focus before it settled back to a hard-edged glow. A couple more of those and she’d either stop fretting altogether or go out and kill someone.
“Need power.” Lars told her. “For Ben...” The sandrat stood up, brushed matted brown hair out of his eyes and shambled for the door, metal lung banging noisily against his hip. Out of his tunnels, the sandrat was less fluid, less graceful than usual. As if he was only used to moving up surfaces rather than across them.
Lars was gone longer than she expected. And when he reappeared in the doorway his face was white under the dirt and dried blood, his brown eyes suddenly panicked.