7.5

  Dance might’ve dressed it up like a stroll through a sunlit park, but the truth is uglier: there are a hundred different ways this could all go sideways. First thing we have to figure out is who plays what role if we’re going to sell the illusion properly. From what Dance dug up, the usual setup’s simple: one buyer, some hired muscle, maybe a negotiator or an investor tagging along to look important. Dance talks smooth, no denying that, but he’s got a bad habit of running his mouth when the air gets tense, and if Cierus insists on speaking only to the buyer, as she probably will, giving him that job is like handing a loaded gun to a drunk. Vander’s got the heart for it, sure, but the way his words catch in his throat wouldn’t stand up to the kind of scrutiny we’re walking into, especially not with a fake foreign accent in the mix. Fingers could outthink a chessboard blindfolded, but charm isn’t her game. And Cormac—well, Cormac’s Cormac: all menace and polished chrome, not exactly the face you send to close delicate deals. So when we lay it all bare, it’s obvious. If anyone’s going to have a shot at sniffing out where my memory’s buried, if anyone has the right to sit across from Cierus and smell the truth burning under all that rot, it’s me. Like it or not, if we want this to work, I have to be the buyer.

  Then there’s the other problem Arden hinted at: what if Cierus recognises my face? I mean, I’ve supposedly been dead for forty-odd years, so there’s a good chance she wouldn’t remember me, unless, as Cormac puts it, I was important. Important enough to have my memory scrubbed, my body buried with a pile of dead androids under an old bridge. We have to move carefully, tighter than tight, which is why Dance suggests using Oni masks, the high-grade kind designed to block out every scrap of data tied to a person's signature I.D. I remember them; hell, I remember Fingers wearing one when she conned that bastard Sergeant Kevin Blunt at the drawbridge. Still, it feels risky. If Cierus or Rhythm of Rhythm demands to see my face, and there’s a real chance they might, it’s better if I don’t look like a ghost from her past. So we agree on a backup plan: dye my hair black, maybe even shift the colour of my optics if we can manage it. Anything to look sharper, colder. Pure business. Someone Cierus wouldn’t think twice about until it’s too damn late.

  And, of course, our names need to be buried under Gossamer Sig, too. That’s where things get even messier, because now we’re talking about choosing a real name, a real buyer, someone far enough away that no one in Paxson would blink. But if Cierus or one of her lapdogs decides to run a credibility check, calls the buyer directly, and gets the wrong answer, we’re cooked. Someone like her is bound to have connections stacked up to her tits, and probably a few cyber-ghosts on speed dial, too. But Dance says not to worry, that it’s not a problem, not really, just a question of time and cash. We’ll need a deep-web netrunner, someone sharp enough to slip into the marketplace records, locate a buyer’s profile linked to a defunct number, and then spoof that line to match mine. If they cross-check it, it’ll look legitimate. In a business where everyone’s always swapping names, burning contacts, and ducking the law, there are bound to be plenty of abandoned profiles lying around. It’s not impossible. Just another dirty trick in a city built on them.

  Seems iffy, sure, but Dance has been running games longer than I’ve been breathing clean air, so I take his word for it. No use second-guessing when you’re already halfway over the cliff. After that’s discussed, we split up: Dance and I head east, towards the black-market sprawl in Sector Seven to find a netrunner, where the real dirt gets moved behind fake ramen shops and plastic surgery clinics, while the others cut north into the city centre to stock up on disguises. Nothing flashy or stupid but the kind of clean, quiet professionalism that wouldn’t look out of place in a trade deal: sharp coats, muted colours, subtle armour where it counts. Just enough polish to pass, not enough to get stabbed over. Something that fits the industry, so Fingers says.

  It’s midafternoon, and the sun’s burning bright enough to bleach the rust off the rooftops. This side of Sector Seven’s a little cleaner, the buildings punching higher into the sky, stitched together by glinting skywalks and holo-ads. We move through the alleyways shadowed by all that stretched metal and glass, the air heavy with the low, dull thump of buskers trying to beat some rhythm into the concrete, their drums echoing off crowds too fast and too broke to care. People look different here, too: leaner, meaner, with chrome stacked up their arms and across their faces. One quick-scan tells me most of them are carrying enough black-market hardware to start a private war. Makes sense. Sector Seven’s where the tech surgeons live, where the netrunners cut their teeth, where the fixers and the desperate come to shake hands in the dark. We’re bound to brush up against a few gangs before the day’s done. As long as we keep our heads down and our hands loose, we should be all right. Should be. But trouble doesn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it creeps up quiet, puts a hand on the shoulder, and when you turn to face it, knocks you flat on your ass.

  Dance follows the pulsing arrow on his brickie, leading us into a tight, circular sprawl where the storefronts curve in a smooth, lazy arc. Japanese bunting is strung from rusted posts, kiosks packed shoulder to shoulder, shoving and jostling. And the smells: scents that don’t belong together but somehow do: smoky yakitori charred on open grills, thick Mexican chocolate dusted with chili, the sharp vinegar bite of Korean pickled cabbage, the syrupy sweetness of Middle Eastern honeyed figs, even the cold metallic scent of machine oil bleeding from somewhere under the stalls. I guess it’s a cocktail of the world’s back alleys, all stitched into one loud, greasy heartbeat. You don’t breathe it so much as chew it. And for some, that’s the smell of home. For the rest of us, it’s just another reason to keep moving.

  And we do, cutting across the flow of bodies towards the far-right store at the end of the sweeping arc: a squat little building with windows tinted just enough to make you wonder what's inside, but not dark enough to hide the slouching shape of the receptionist behind the desk. The sign hanging above the door says Snarepoint in crooked letters, like the place itself is half-daring you to come in. It’s dead quiet when we step through, the kind of quiet that hums in your ears after too much noise. Only one other customer inside, a woman in a battered coat, who snatches a data shard off the counter, jams it into her neural port without so much as a hello, her eyes flaring hot pink before she’s even out the door.

  The shelves here are all locked up behind smudged glass, packed tight with the kinds of tools that don’t get sold out in the light: ZennTek Spectra visors with cracked seals, quick-hack lists pre-loaded and ready to fry a traffic grid, brickies stacked, some buzzing faintly if you listen close. The displays aren’t labelled; if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. I half expect the woman behind the counter to be dressed up nice, clean and pressed, like Jin back at Dr. Maelstrom’s clinic up north. But this isn’t the north. Here, the woman’s wearing a threadbare army jacket with the patches torn off, heavy boots scuffed to hell, a couple of copper piercings glinting in the hollow of her throat. No smile, no welcome. A tired look that says she’s seen a thousand hustlers walk through this door and she knows exactly how most of them end up.

  “No visors allowed,” she says, voice flat as a levelled shotgun, one finger lazily pointed at me.

  I reach up, unlatch the sides with soft clicks, and slip the visor off, tucking it into the swallow of my coat pocket. “Sorry. Force of habit.”

  “Can’t blame you, though,” says Dance. “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust her either.”

  “You’re new around here,” the woman says. “Her, I’d believe. But you? You’re a far way from Australia.”

  Dance clicks his tongue. “That the truth, mate. Feels like I took a wrong turn at Perth and ended up in someone’s bad dream. But monkey see, monkey doooooo.”

  “What can I help you with?” the woman says, arms crossed.

  “Need to talk to your netrunner,” Dance says, easy as you please.

  “You two have an appointment?”

  “No,” he says, “but I know damn well no one else does either, and one-arm here’s got plenty of scratch to cough up if he’s interested.” He jerks a thumb at me like I’m a busted ATM about to start leaking bills, and the worst part is, he’s right.

  The woman doesn’t move right away. She breathes slow and heavy through her nose, then taps a finger to her temple. Her eyes flicker electric blue for a second, little sparks dancing in the whites. “Two people want to see you,” she mutters to whoever’s listening on the other end. “No appointment. You free?”

  A long silence, thick as bad soup.

  Then: “Alright,” she says. “Through the back. But make it quick.” She presses something under the counter with a mechanical clunk, and a heavy door buzzes to life and slides open, exhaling a breath of stale, recycled air into the shop.

  We don’t waste a second. Dance tosses her a cheeky “thankie-doo” over his shoulder, and we slip through, into the guts of the place. The back corridor’s dark, the lights sputtering sickly against the walls, which are scabbed over with peeling paint and exposed wiring. The smell hits first: a bitter stench of chemical cleaner fighting a losing war against the deeper reek of hot plastic and fried circuitry. It’s the kind of place where deals are stitched together in the dark and secrets are rinsed down the drains with yesterday’s blood. Not large by any means, barely the size of a dingy dentist’s surgery, the room feels even smaller thanks to the clutter. Cables snake across the floor, old monitors stacked in the corners, their screens whiting with the low, ghostly light of dead code. There's a makeshift surgical bed bolted to the floor, probably to give the illusion that something clean and clinical could ever happen here. Sitting on it and wired up is the netrunner. An olive-skinned man, lean to the point of looking starved, his skin rugose and puckered like something that had been left out in the sun for too long. His arms are littered with old needle scars, and there’s a strange, alien calm about him, as if he’s been living a hundred lives in the machine and barely remembers how to be human anymore. A visor clamped across his skull pulses blue every few seconds, mapping out whatever twisted corner of the deep-net he’s wandering through. When he turns his head to look at us, it’s slow, almost mechanical.

  “I don’t reckon it’s very usual for folk to walk into my business with urgent needs,” he says, voice low and papery, skipping the pleasantries. No handshake, no name swap, no grin. Just straight to the meat. “Which tells me you’re not from around here. And you’re not the regular sort.” He unstraps the visor from his skull, wires peeling back with little sticky pops, and when he blinks up at us, his eyes are twisted and glassy, filmed over like he hasn’t seen daylight, or reality, in weeks.

  “That a braindance rig?” I ask, more to fill the stale air than because I don’t know.

  He shifts upright on the surgical bed, leather creaking under the scrape of bone, and gives a sharp nod. “And you’re definitely new.” His lips twitch into something that could almost be a smile if it weren’t so dead. “Rhea Steele and Dance Fletcher. My rig doesn’t like you, Rhea. You’re... something of a ghost in the system.” He taps the side of his head once, lightly. “But never mind that. What can I do for you, seeing as this is so urgent?”

  “Need a sig-swap,” says Dance.

  “Classic.” The man peels a wire off his wrist with a dry snap. He leans back against the wall, visor dangling from his fingers. “You got a ghost lined up already, or you need me to dig one outta the graveyard? ’Cause if you’re here yourself, I’m guessin’ it’s gotta look real. Not just some throwaway to dodge a bounty. Probably big buyer creds, foreign number, high-shelf clearance. Maybe someone important enough that if a fixer calls, they don’t ask too many questions, yes?” He looks at Dance, then at me, eyes narrowing like he’s already piecing the whole thing together without us saying another word. “You want the buyer to breathe just long enough for a deal, then flatline again before anyone smells the rot. That about right?”

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  He’s good, but how did he…?

  “Close enough, honestly, mate,” Dance says quickly, smoothing it over before I can open my mouth. “Need you to find a defunct number, swap it on the market records for maybe a couple weeks, just to be on the safe side, and match it up to two things: our number, and a made-up foreign signature number, so that if they call the foreign number—”

  “Fifty thousand eddies,” the man cuts in. No hesitation. No smile.

  The answer hits so hard and fast it takes me a second to even register it. Finally, I manage, “Bit expensive, don’t you think?”

  He leans forward slightly, visor clutched in his hand. “What you’re asking for’s a pretty serious sig-swap,” he says. “People don’t use this for simple things. This is the kind of job where there’s real money moving, and when there’s real money, there’s real connections. And when you slip up with real connections?” He taps the side of his head, once, slow. “It’s not just you they erase. It’s me, too. I’ll be the one changing my name, my number, and probably my face if I’m lucky enough to afford it. Frankly, you’re getting a steal.”

  Hell, he’s right. Even if we pull this off and Cierus doesn’t catch it right away, there’s no guarantee she won’t dig up the roots later and send a bullet after anyone who so much as breathed on the con. Every move in this city costs you something. Every mistake leaves a mark.

  I sigh, thinking it over. We could go door-knocking around the city for a better quote, burn a few more hours, maybe haggle another fifteen thousand off somewhere. But the more noise we make, the closer it echoes to Cierus’ doorstep, and right now, we can’t afford to leave a trail.

  “That your best deal?” I ask.

  “Do I look like the sort of man who accepts hagglers?” he says, voice cold.

  He doesn’t. Not at all.

  So, after a moment, seeing no other option, I extend my hand.

  He clears his throat, shakes it once—rough, quick—and then wipes his palm off on his grimy sleeve like the deal itself left a stain.

  And who knows? It might have.

  “Pleasure doin’ business,” he says.

  “Question for you,” I say, feeling the dry edge of desperation in my voice. “You sell auto-crackers?”

  He says, “It won’t work with your software.”

  I cock an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

  “Same reason I knew your names,” he says, pointing to his eyes. “You’re running an older-model operating system, an Arotoshi PLX Mark 2. You need at least a Mark 4 or higher to use an auto-cracker.”

  “So, how much for a Mark 4?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  If I had any water in my mouth, I’d be spitting it all over the floor, but as it stands, all I can do is gape at him, wide-eyed and stupid. Two hundred and fifty thousand, just for an operating system? I guess it makes sense: higher-tier netrunning tech would naturally bleed you dry, especially when the market it’s aimed at is already swimming in black money, but still. Two-fifty? No thanks. Maybe someday, when I’ve got a small empire rotting away in my back pocket. For now, I'll make do with Dance, my own half-broken understanding, and a lot of praying.

  I wire the fifty thousand across and hand over our contact details. He tells us the process’ll take a day or two; he’s got to sift through hundreds of dead names from a dozen different countries, hunting for the cleanest corpse to crawl inside. Some might look dead but pop back up later, and that’s the last thing we need. We need something that’ll stay buried long enough for us to slip in, do the damage, and ghost out before the ground even settles. And if anyone could do it, it’s this guy: the one who read our plan like it was printed on our foreheads. So now all we can do is wait and turn our attention back to the other pieces of the plan.

  We step back out into the sprawl of Paxson and cut west towards the city centre, only about a fifteen-minute walk, and by the time we get there, the sun’s already losing its nerve, slipping behind the skeletal high-rises and stretching long, dirty shadows across the cracked tarmacadam. The temperature drops sharp, a bite to the air that whispers rain’s not far off. Sure enough, a thin drizzle starts to patter down, sweeping in low, brushing across our cheeks like wet sandpaper. Even with the rain, the market by FACE THE MONSTER, SPEAK NO NAME is still going: new faces pouring in, old ones draining away into side streets and up the patchwork steps of the rustic south, under faded canvas tarps where couches and bottles of cheap suds promise shelter and worse decisions. It takes a while to find the rest of the crew, picking our way through the crowd, until we hear the cheering, high-pitched, sharp, and see something huge shouldering its way down the boulevard.

  An elephant, of all goddamn things.

  Lumbering, the grey hide draped in patchwork silk the colour of blood, metal trinkets clinking from the ears and tusks, carrying a platform stocked high with bundles of woven mats, water jugs, crates of who-knows-what. Kids dash daringly along beside it, hooting and laughing, and the streetfolk lean in from the sides, tossing flowers, coins, even scraps of bread like it’s the beast of God and it’s here to save them. And on top of it, there’s an old-looking Middle-Eastern man, barefoot and draped in a red-gold sash over a worn tunic, a battered straw hat slouched low over his face, tossing candy bags to the children, and that’s when I notice the words written across the platform: Happy Luminara.

  Must be coming around one last time, or leaving. Not that it matters. I think it’s nice. Funny, even, because I feel a little like that elephant myself: moving forward because there’s nothing else left but the ghost of a hand still pulling my strings.

  We catch up with Fingers and the others a little farther down, tucked into the seam of a food stall spewing out the smell of burnt soy and old oil. They’ve stocked up pretty heavy. Enough to pass for the part we’re trying to play. Business suits sharp enough to fool anyone who doesn’t look too close, tough enough to pass for private security. Vander went a little off-script and bought himself a pair of Grade-3 Blowout gauntlets, thick bastards that go all the way up to his elbows, black with fine little gaps where the launcher ports sit hidden. Technically not part of the plan, but he explains that he’s been hunting a set for months. They’re bulletproof, can be rigged with explosives, and can be fired off his arms like twin battering rams. I don’t argue. Not with hardware like that. Fingers tosses me a bottle of hair dye (Scorcher’s Black, the label promises) and tells me Rhythm of Rhythm’s running a concert at the end of the week, this Sunday. Perfect timing. Far enough away that we won’t stumble in half-cocked, but close enough that I won’t have to spend the next six nights tearing myself to pieces with nerves. Time enough to get ready. Time enough to make sure that when we step into the Spindle, we’re not the ones who get spun.

  Fingers got something for Dance too. An upgrade, if you could call it that, for his beloved brickie. A control shard, slim and wired for minor overrides: cracking simple locks, hijacking code gates, bypassing low-level firewalls without having to drag me into it every time. No more snap-shotting and scrambling to upload into the Cloud Room, no more me feeding him answers by hand. Might not seem like much, but in a pinch, it could save our skins. Especially since an auto-cracker’s still out of reach for now. Dance takes to it like a kid handed a new toy at Christmas. Figures. Him and that damned brickie have always been joined at the hip. Might as well call it his kid the way he looks at it.

  After that, we head back to the motel, finding the sun to dip a little too low for out liking. That and, well, I’m sure we’re all tired.

  A couple days later, the deep-web netrunner from Snarepoint pings my phone from an anonymous number, still not bothering to give a name, as though that would somehow make him harder to find if things went sideways. The whole spoof’s packed neatly into one file. Turns out I’m stepping into the skin of a long-gone buyer named Ruelle Castane, out of Sunreach Colony, United Kingdom, born 2067, vanished clean off the radar after her last big buy in 2097. Not too dead, not too fresh. Plausible enough that she ducked the law, went dark, stayed breathing just under the surface. No photos floating around, no stray connections except the ones tangled up back in Sunreach. Best part? It’s not too foreign. I won’t need to jam a language chip in my skull just to fake knowing Russian or Portuguese. The netrunner had brains, no doubt about it. He saw the angles before we even finished asking. I send a thanks, knowing full well he’ll never read it.

  Far as I or he is concerned, we never met.

  After that, we kick off the first real step of the plan: contacting Omari Lune, because buyers don’t just show up on someone's turf like lost mutts sniffing around the wrong garbage pile. Real business rolls in clean, like machines built to say hello and shake hands and bleed you dry without scuffing their shoes.

  Dance pulls the guy’s number off the dark net, thumbs it into his brickie, and we all crowd around as the line starts to ring.

  And it rings.

  And it rings.

  Long enough that I start thinking Dance must’ve snagged a ghost number. No one on the other end but static and bad luck.

  But after maybe thirty seconds, just when the doubt’s starting to chew at my gut, the line clicks, and a male voice cuts through, medium-pitched, sharp enough to nick your ear if you weren’t paying attention:

  “Don’t recognise this number. You better be worth my time.”

  “G’day mate,” Dance says. “Name’s Fletcher. Speakin’ on behalf of Miss Ruelle Castane. We’re lookin’ to move some serious weight. Word’s floated ’round you’re the man to see if we’re after somethin’ a little more... bespoke.”

  There’s a crackle of background noise: music, voices, something whining in the distance. Then a voice, half amused:

  “Wha? Ruelle who?”

  “Castane,” Dance says, unbothered. “Big name. Bigger wallet. She’s not here for alley scraps. She’s lookin’ for top-shelf stock. Bulk purchase. High cash, no trail.”

  The line goes quiet for a second longer than it should. Then the man laughs, low and throaty. “Big buyer, eh? How big we talkin’?”

  “Eight hundred thousand on the table,” says Dance. “Stretch it to a million if you got what she’s hungry for.”

  Another small hum through the static. “You speak in riddles, Aussie man. I like that. What sorta material’s your collector after?”

  Dance shifts a little, leaning into the performance now, putting just a hint of crispness in his voice. “You Omari?”

  Another chuckle, a musical one this time. “In the radio waves, baby.”

  Dance chuckles right back. “Old runs. Original prints. Stuff dating back to the early to late ’40s. Authentic pieces. She’s not in the market for third-gen junk that’s been passed around. She wants originals. Untouched. Priceless.”

  Silence again. Then a flick of keys: click, click, click.

  “How do you spell Ruelle?” Omari asks, voice a little tighter now.

  Dance spells it out clean and slow.

  There’s another beat, heavy with the sound of checking databases, old registries maybe. Then Omari’s voice slides back through the speaker, sharper now:

  “Nothin’ on a Ruelle Castane. You fakin’ me?”

  My heart skips a beat, just for a second.

  “That’s why you don’t check a surface-web browser, mate,” Dance says, breezy as ever. “Dark net. Private ledgers. Thank me later.”

  The sound of Omari’s typing crackles through the line, sharper now, more aggressive, the frantic, uneven taps of someone digging deeper than they meant to. Then comes that hum again, like a bad habit he’s too bored to break.

  “Ahhh-riiight,” Omari drawls. “I see her. United Kingdom. Off-grid a while, but still breathin’. Lookin’ to get her hands dirty again. Okay, okay... sounds good.” A pause, the kind that carries a smirk you can hear but not see. “But listen: I’m not takin’ some random choom’s sweet words over the holo. You wanna deal, you show up. You and your buyer. Face to face.”

  “Perfect,” Dance says. “Where and when, mate?”

  “The Pulseworks,” he says. “West end, Sector Six. Nine P.M. Bring your money. Bring your buyer. Don’t bring trouble unless you wanna leave in pieces.”

  “Wouldn't dream of it, mate,” says Dance. “My collector will really appreciate your interest.”

  “Yeah, well we'll see if she appreciates mine. Later, whatever-your-name-was.”

  The line goes dead before Dance can even spit out a “cheers,” leaving us staring at the cracked screen like it might say something else if we waited long enough. Dance slips the brickie back into his pocket with a lazy flick of the wrist, but I catch the way his fingers tighten, just for a second, like maybe he feels it too, that tight coil winding up somewhere behind the eyes.

  We stand there, all of us, in the motel room, listening to the soft tick of rain starting up again against the old tar and steel overhead.

  The Pulseworks.

  The name sounds wrong in my head, something pulled from a dream you try to forget but can’t. West end. Sector Six. Only a few days to get everything right—or screw it up so bad we wouldn’t even get the chance to know what killed us.

  All we have to do is get in there, see what she has stocked in the vault around the time I ‘died’ and purchase it. Ask additional questions where needed. It can’t be less than two hundred thousand for some serious braindance bundles, and I’m sure she’ll be happy with that. Smooth business, in and out, no problems. We get in there, be very precise about what we want, she gets it for us, pay whatever, and we’re out. Done. Everything lines up well.

  And hey, if she has nothing, she has nothing. But either way, I'll buy the entirety of the stock relating to The Scrubs if I have to, or anything within that time period.

  All we have to do is not mess it up.

  But lately that’s proven to be the hardest part.