Grando heaved an enormous sigh and reached up to wipe his forehead. "Thank the dog's balls! I was hoping you'd be able to see reason. For a minute there, I thought maybe your deck got scrambled from too much time in space…"
Hector tuned him out as he assessed his body. Everything ached, but his left leg felt numb. He turned the blaster on Grando and reached down to rub his thigh.
The crime boss started to step around the desk. "You okay? Did you wreck the skin?"
This skin is fresh. It wasn't ready for all that aura. "Aura overload." Hector scanned the room, looking for a place to sit. He'd ruined the only chair other than Grando's, so he moved that way, pushing past the man to flop into the creaky, wobbly, old desk chair. All the while, he watched Grando and kept the blaster trained on him.
"Balls, man! Take a drink, and I'll get you some pants." Grando moved toward the two bodies.
"Don't." Hector partially depressed the trigger, making the blaster whine.
Grando chopped his hand in a negative gesture, shaking his head. "Don't shoot, dammit! I'm just making sure Orin's alive, and then I'll get Pelo's pants for you."
If he were dead, I'd see his potentia leaking out. Hector watched, eyes narrowed, as the man stuck two of his thick fingers against the big goon's neck.
"He's still got a heartbeat. I'm glad, honestly. He's smarter than average when it comes to my employees." The crime boss straightened with a grunt, then he moved to the other thug, the one whose neck Hector had snapped. Again, he stooped, straining the seams on his tailored suit pants. He untied the drawstring on the thug's baggy canvas pants and pulled them off. "You're in luck. He didn't shit himself."
When he tossed the pants to Hector, he pointed to the door. "I'm just gonna call in one of the girls. Don't worry"—he gestured to the body and the unconscious goon—"they see stuff like this all the time."
Hector arched an eyebrow. The movement felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. His body wasn't his body. Sighing, he shook his head, banishing the thoughts as he pulled the pants on over his naked legs. He knew he'd get used to his new skin eventually. If I keep it. He winced as he tried to make a fist with his right hand. The muscles and tendons all felt torn, never mind the fractured bone in his wrist. Even so, he clenched his jaw against the pain, tying the drawstring on the olive green pants.
"Hector, this is Lemon, a dancer here."
He looked toward Grando's voice and saw him standing near the door with a young woman. She looked like a doll—the kind soldiers in the guard would fight over, desperate to win the right to leave the bar with her contract. Even so, she had a certain quality, a certain presence, that warranted a second glance. Hector figured she was a lot older than she looked, but it was hard to tell with her smooth skin.
He guessed she'd been successful enough to afford a rejuvenation treatment or two. Still, you could always tell with a rejuv; even when they looked like they were barely out of their teens, there was an air about them that gave away clues toward their real age. Lemon's first tell was her walk. She just moved too damn gracefully, too damn confidently, to be a young dancer at a place like that.
"Hector, huh?" She stared at him, taking him in just as he was doing to her.
"He's a new employee." Grando chuckled and pointed to Orin and the corpse. "Things got a little rough during the interview."
"And what do you want from me?" Lemon took a step toward the door, shaking her head. "Something's not right about him. Something in the eyes."
"You wanna earn an extra hundred bits for a few nights or not?"
Lemon slowly turned, peering at Grando under angled, white-blonde eyebrows made all the more threatening by the sharp layer of her bangs. "For what?"
Grando shrugged. "I need you to put him up. Give him a place to crash. He's starting from zero, but we've got big plans."
"Two hundred a night." Lemon held out a ring that blinked with tiny purple LEDs. Grando stared at her, his thick lips twisting as he contemplated her words. She tried another angle: "He's young. He's tall. He's gonna eat a lot."
Grando's expression concerned Hector. He looked like he was a roll of the dice away from smashing her teeth out. After another moment of Lemon staring and Grando scowling, the tension finally broke, and the boss said, "One-seventy-five, and don't think about countering again. Also, I'm leaving, and I need you to get him a bug pack. Something for—" Grando looked at Hector, adjusting one of his big gold rings. "What's wrong with you, Hector? What kind of bugs should she get?"
"Regen—bone and tissue." He paused, inhaling heavily, then added, "Aura conditioner too." Unless you want me to fry this skin from the inside.
Lemon tapped her little ring. "That doesn't sound cheap. Where do I even buy an aura pack? We don't have 'em here."
Grando sighed and pressed one of his rings against hers. Hector figured they were bit-lockers. Why weren't they using an online encrypted bit-vault? Was that how things were done at that level? Physical bit-lockers?
As he pulled his hand away, the boss said, "That should cover it. You can get the aura bugs at Pete's. A lot of the fighters have systems." He looked at Hector and added, "Shitty ones."
"Okay, but he, like, needs shoes and—"
"Check the lost and found. There's a bunch of shit in there." Grando looked at Hector again. "I'm out of here. Just go with Lemon. She'll bring you to me tomorrow, and we can start talking about our plans." He paused and nodded at the blaster. "I wouldn't carry that around. The peacekeepers in this district are real bastards."
Hector scowled at the man, contemplating an objection. He shook the idea off, though; he wasn't in a position to bargain. It sounded like he'd get fixed up at least, and if he decided Grando was more trouble than he was worth, he'd ditch him in the morning. He nodded.
Grando frowned, but he nodded too, pushing his way past Lemon, but not before saying, "I'll send Jam in here to take care of Orin and Pelo." Then he slipped through the door and was gone. Lemon looked at Hector and clicked her tongue, walking closer. Her skirt and blouse were semi-transparent, just enough to reveal the shape of things that lay beneath the fabric. Hector studiously focused on her eyes.
She arched an eyebrow, flashed him a sardonic smile, and then some hidden device beeped, and her clothes shifted to solid black. "Better?"
"What?"
She scoffed. "Nice try, but you don't have to worry. You don't have to look so guilty. It's not like I wasn't trying to get noticed."
Hector shrugged. I'm fresh off the deck, and you're trying to make me say something dumb.
"You don't talk much." When Hector didn't respond, she gestured to his bare feet. "Can you walk? We can go up to the front office and check the lost and found."
He gingerly stood, wincing as the tendons in his feet and ankles screamed at the burden. He tuned the pain out, then looked at Lemon and nodded.
"Follow me, then." She turned and sauntered to the door. Hector looked at the blaster, then set it on the desk. It was a clumsy, shoddy weapon anyway. It looked more likely to blow up in his hand than hit a target. He followed Lemon, focusing on the cold concrete pressing into the soles of his feet, letting the pain wrap itself around him like a red blanket as it mounted with each step.
Lemon looked over her shoulder, her straight, short hair dancing with the movement. "We've got a bug dispenser here. I'll get you a pack while you put on a shirt." She pushed open the door, and the music and lights of the club washed over him. Whatever else might have changed while he was on ice, strip clubs apparently hadn't. Lewd holo-projections decorated the walls in garish reds, pinks, and blues. Women and men danced on pedestals all around the enormous space, and the crowd, writhing to the music, pressed close to their favorite performers.
Hector was surprised by the clientele, if not the décor; the clubs he'd been to in port cities, even on Luna and Europa, tended to be packed with spacers. Here, Hector saw a healthy mix of young and old—men, women, and other. One thing was constant, though: these were the dregs, the baseborn, the underclass—the silent masses, as Drake Conti once said over a tumbler of Venetian bourbon. How Esme had scowled!
"Hector?"
He blinked, realizing he'd already followed Lemon through the crowd to the front office, and she was holding the door open. "What?"
"Go look through that cabinet." She pointed to a tall cupboard on the far wall of the office. "I'll go fetch you an aid pack."
He nodded and pushed past her. When she closed the door and the music got a little quieter, he let out a shaky breath and braced his hands on the cabinet, leaning into it while he focused on his heart. It was racing. There was a half-empty bottle of soda on the counter, and he drained it. It was flat and warm, but his throat wanted more.
The thing about a new skin was that it did funny things to your brain. Hector's old body had been genetically engineered for strength and endurance, and that was before he'd poured thousands of aura potentia into it—
Breathe the air, you'll taste the spark, but hunt the rifts to light the dark!
The old rhyme about potentia drifted through his mind, a childhood memory summoned by the system printing familiar patterns into his new brain, no doubt. Aura was everywhere, but potentia was the refined, semi-conscious stuff everyone fought over. He tried to remember why he was thinking about it, and couldn't. He held out his left hand and watched it tremble. Focus.
He opened the cabinet and rifled through the clothes, looking for something that would fit. He finally found a dark gray, pullover-style sweatshirt. It had a hood and a little pouch in the front, and it was comfortable. What more could he want? He pulled it over his head, and the scent of the previous owner's deodorant wafted into his nose—spices and cedar.
He opened the next cabinet and found a dozen or so pairs of shoes. He had a hard time believing people were leaving shoes in a club, but then he remembered it was a strip club run by a criminal named Grando Scrim. Are Pelo's shoes going to end up in this cabinet? He pulled out a promising-looking pair of well-worn black work boots.
Sitting on the little desk chair, he tugged them on. They were made of some kind of breathable, moisture-wicking fabric that conformed to his feet. They were comfortable, and the pressure felt good, supporting his throbbing tendons. The chair pulled him in, and he closed his eyes, adjusting his position until most of the pain in his body was just a distant throb. The lack of acute agony was so nice that he found himself drifting into a doze.
His rest was short-lived; Lemon opened the door after just a few minutes. Hector's eyes snapped open, and he watched as she carefully pushed it shut and twisted the little lock, muting the throb of the club's music. "Here," she said, pressing a silver-foiled squeeze tube into his hand. Hector looked at the label: Fossbone Emergency Nanite Pack.
He wrinkled his brow. "Fossbone." The word felt strange in his mouth.
"What? I mean, they're no BioEuropa, but I haven't heard of any lawsuits recently."
Hector shook his head. How do you explain that you've been dead for two centuries and there were things that were familiar and yet disturbingly foreign?
He ripped the pull-tab off the tube and stuffed the nozzle into his mouth. As he squeezed the berry-flavored paste out, his new skin's prodigious hunger reared its head, and his stomach gurgled. "I need to eat."
"I know. Didn't you hear what I said to Grando? I'll buy you food."
He nodded as he kept squeezing the tube into his mouth. When he finished, he held out his right hand to Lemon. "Pull on it."
She tilted her head. "What?"
He needed to straighten the bones in his wrist before the nanites fused them. "Pull. Straighten it." When she hesitated, Hector stood up, and she flinched back. He limped over to the door, gripped the knob, ignoring the searing pain the movement generated, and pulled.
Lemon looked away, grimacing. "Oh, God. Doesn't that hurt?"
"The pack had a painkiller." Not a good one, but don't tell her that. He grunted and put his weight into it. After a few seconds, the fiery lances of agony crescendoed as the bones began to shift. He slowly rotated his wrist, guiding them into place. When the relief overtook the pain, he gasped softly and let go of the doorknob.
He held his arm up, squinting at the swollen wrist, and when he couldn't discern any unnatural bend, he nodded, moving back to sit down.
"That was disturbing." Lemon frowned, looking him up and down. "How's the rest of you? Can you walk?"
Hector assessed his pain and shrugged. "A few minutes."
She reached into the little purse she had clutched under her arm and pulled out a small cylinder. A moment later, she was smearing on some two-toned purple-and-gray lipstick. "I don't have any plans. We'll walk by Pete's to get you the other pack you wanted. The, um, aura bugs." When Hector just grunted, she asked, "What's the deal with your system, anyway?"
Hector looked into her light gray eyes and shrugged.
"No comment, huh?" She frowned. "I mean, I'm not an idiot. I don't live under a rock—plenty of the bangers and corpos who come into the club have systems. Is yours fried or something?"
"Aura overload. Burned up the pathways."
Lemon narrowed her eyes. "That can happen?"
Hector nodded. "Yeah. Skin wasn't ready for the boost."
"Skin?"
"My body."
Her eyes flew wide as understanding dawned on her. "You have one of those things—a ghost chip?"
"Neurodeck. Yeah."
"So this isn't you?" She gestured to him—his body.
"It's me now." Hector closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. His body was tingling, and blissful numbness had replaced most of his acute pain. The nanites were doing their work.
"But the, uh, skin had an aura system?" Her tone rose at the end of her question, incredulous.
"No." He tapped the back of his head. "Neurodeck."
She mulled his words over for a moment, then her eyes widened and she leaned forward. "Aura systems can go on neurodecks? Grando didn't know, did he?" Her amusement was a little contagious, and Hector grinned crookedly.
"Nope."
She stuffed her lipstick into her little bag and took out a small object, popping it between her lips. A pill? "Can we walk a little? You're not a great conversationalist."
He stood, ignoring the comment. His legs and feet were more numb than sore.
"Follow me." She paused at the door, looking over her shoulder at him. "Let me guess: Grando wants you to work for him because of what you did to Orin and Pelo, right?"
"Maybe."
Lemon whirled on him, narrowing her eyes. "Come on!"
"He didn't want me to kill him."
Lemon's eyebrow arched. "Seriously? You're that good?"
Hector grunted noncommittally. Enough chatter, girl. I need to eat.
Nobody bothered them as they passed through the club, and a few seconds later, they came to the exit. A bouncer with metallic limbs and glaring, angry-looking red eyes held the door for Lemon, glaring at Hector as they passed through. Outside, Hector had to squint against the bright glare of the yellow sky. The blast of warm, iron-scented air on his face felt good at first, on the heels of the club's chilly AC, but after only a few seconds, he could feel sweat beading on his forehead. "Where?"
"I told you, we'll go get your bugs." Lemon took his uninjured wrist and pulled him along the sidewalk, weaving through the heavy pedestrian traffic. The street wasn't for cars; tracks ran in parallel lines on a lower platform, and he could see trains rushing to and fro. One flew by while he watched, and he marveled at the lack of safety measures.
Hector looked up, frowning at the faded, graffiti-covered towers on all sides. Most were the default blue-gray of plasteel, but some were muted shades of orange or pink, red, and yellow. Some had sharply angled corners, and some were smooth and rounded. They were all tall, but in the distance he saw true megastructures—buildings that made the nearby ones quaint. Shaking his head, he asked, "No. Where is this?"
Lemon looked at him sideways before replying, "Helio! About twenty blocks west of the spaceport."
"Helio?" No slang, girl.
"You're not familiar?" She stopped, turned, and arched an eyebrow at him. "Seriously? Heliopolis?"
Hector's vision tunneled for a moment as his heart rate spiked and a small burst of adrenaline entered his system. It wasn't that he was stunned to learn he was on Mars; it was more that he'd so thoroughly assumed he was on Earth that it had given him a momentary sense of vertigo when his mental image of himself shifted planets.
Something's still not right. Hector looked at the dozens of plasteel skyscrapers again. "Too big."
Lemon shrugged. "Well, I'm not making things up. How long were you out of it, anyway?" She grabbed his wrist again and pulled, continuing down the sidewalk. As they turned a corner, she must have decided he didn't plan to answer because she asked, "So, how well do you know Grando?"
Hector smiled, his lip curling up a bit higher on the right side. New skin, same old mannerisms. "Well enough." Obviously, he didn't know Grando, but he knew his type.
Lemon looked at him over her shoulder, staring long enough that Hector began to wonder if she'd run into someone. She was nimble, though, and avoided collisions as she steered him beside a mural of a white-winged angel standing over huddled children. The angel had golden skin and pale blue eyes, and she grasped a blood-drenched sword.
Hector stared at the art as Lemon spoke. "If you think Grando's dumb—don't. If you think he hasn't found an angle that puts him on top in your little arrangement, then reconsider. I'm just saying, don't make the mistake of trusting that man."
Hector nodded. "I don't trust anyone." He looked down at his unfamiliar, young body. "Even this skin."
Lemon shook her head, frowning. "So strange. So…creepy." After a couple of seconds, she shrugged, taking his wrist again. "Come on! Pete's is just around the corner."
Hector allowed her to pull him. She wasn't wrong. There wasn't anything clean about getting a body like the one he was wearing. When he'd been a royal, he'd had vat-grown clones, conditioned for superior strength and endurance. They weren't all his clones, but he was always himself. Everything about him—his memories, his personality, even his aura system—was part of his neural print, his engram. What about my soul, though? Is that in there?
He tried to silence his thoughts by asking, "Who's Pete?"
"He's a chop-doc, but he also runs fights." She shrugged, turning down a narrow street that felt more like an alley. "I guess it works out because he has trauma equipment on the premises."
"Huh."
"Don't worry, Grando was right: he'll have the bugs." She stepped around a woman trying to sell glass jewelry on a blanket. Hector followed, stepping momentarily onto a bike lane. It was evident that in that city, "bike" meant pretty much anything with two wheels. Batt-powered vehicles beeped constantly as they moved through the crowds. One of them rode up right behind Hector, horn blaring. He stopped and turned as his old temper—a constant, silent companion that always chose the worst moments to make itself known—heated the back of his neck.
The bike rider stopped his rig with the front tire an inch from Hector's knee, and then he stood on the pegs and jammed the horn button: beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep! He was wearing a dingy gray jumper with no shoes, but he had a chipped-up red helmet on his head. Hector balled up his fist, tensed his muscles, and then felt cool fingers in his other hand and a gentle tug. When he turned, glaring, he was met with Lemon's too-pretty face. She cocked a blonde eyebrow and tilted her head, clearly askinghim what he was doing.
He allowed himself to be moved, giving in to her pull as she continued through the crowd. She turned again, and when they were a few steps from the busier, noisier thoroughfare, she said, "I'm not sure where you used to live, but around here, everyone's pretty rude out in the streets. So, like, if you go around fighting everyone like that, you're never gonna get anywhere."
When she slowed and looked at him expectantly, he exhaled a pent-up breath and nodded. "Ghostwalk." He shrugged.
Her left eye narrowed as she slowly shook her head.
"Echo?"
Again, she shook her head.
Hector felt the old irritation rise again, but he inhaled deeply and kept his voice calm. "It's when you forget you're in a new skin—act like you're still your old self."
Lemon smiled, nodding. "I get it, I think. Pretty weird, though. Sorry—I've never met anyone with a ghost chip. I've known a few people who were on the other end, though."
Hector nodded. The poor bastards who gave up their skins.
Like she'd read his thoughts, Lemon tapped his chest and clicked her tongue. After a second's pause, she pointed across the street to a large, two-story plasteel and concrete building with open bay doors along the sidewalk. "Pete's."