It was her wicked pride in my work that sustained me, far more than all the squid she paid. She gave me what the Major had taught me to need, what I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else since the fall of the Republic. I relished every hand-written paper scrap the Medusas passed to me from Dahlia’s throne room—and when I’d made corpses of the names on those notes, I relished every brothel token they appended to my pay—and in the triumph of an orgasm or an inhale from a pipe, in the moment of ecstatic ego-death, I lived for the certainty that I was a tool serving its purpose well.
I remember the first orders Dahlia allowed me to receive from her directly—the first time Duke ushered me through those dark velvet doors into her dim sanctum. She kissed me on the mouth and bit my lower lip until it bled, then handed me a hit list of ten names, including the third-in-command of the entire Norpak governing syndicate. A bomb would’ve been the simplest option, but she wanted me to do it all in person, cleanly. Bombs were too loud, she said. She wanted her surviving enemies to lie sleepless, associating silence itself with the promise of certain death.
It took me ten days of travel, twenty days of reconnaissance, and twenty minutes of infiltration and combat to finally stand inside the throne room of Fujiko the Third, watching the lifeless body of her last personal bodyguard crash against the metal floor and finish twitching. I knelt to collect a tissue sample from the monarch’s jewel-heavy corpse to authenticate it, but just when the steam inside her skull finished its residual sizzling and the room fell into perfect silence, I was startled to hear a voice.
“Trade,” it said.
I whipped around, ready to dispense one more death at a microsecond’s notice, but the voice wasn’t coming from a person. It crackled from a small pane set along the wall.
“I want to make a trade,” it said, in an old-fashioned sort of American English. “I save your life twice. You save mine once. Call it a bargain. Call it commerce. You’re a mercenary. You like commerce, right? Say something, damnit! I know you can hear me, and I know you speak this language.”
The pane had an inset DNA scanner, and there was a seam in the wall to indicate a door. With my limited handle of written Japanese, I couldn’t ascertain what was behind it.
“Fine,” said the voice. “Don’t say anything. Just listen: I’ve been watching you. I know you thought you disabled all the security in here with that wimpy JSX-94 tapeworm. You didn’t. That was all me. You’re here in one piece because I let you in, at great risk to my very own ass. That one’s free. If you want to get out of here alive, that will cost you extra. Nod your head if you understand.” When I hesitated, the voice said, “Don’t look at the door. Nod your head, asshole.”
I nodded, once.
“Good. Here’s how it works, Assassin Man. There’s a box under Fujiko’s throne. Go look at it. Hurry.”
Against my better instincts, I lifted up the red silk and looked under the throne. There was a cube there. It was fashioned from some strange, lustrous, inky black material, bound in a cage of metal and circuitry. I’d never seen anything like it—but I could guess what it was, if I could believe it.
“That’s Gray,” said the synthetic voice. “It’s a metalvore strain, but it’ll settle for flesh and bone. It was wired to a dead-man’s switch on Fujiko’s heartbeat, but right now I’m tricking it into thinking she’s still alive. If you kill me, the box opens. If you try to leave here without me, I’ll open it myself. We’re leaving this place together, or not at all. Nod if you understand.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m behind this wall. Fujiko’s thumb opens the door. Hurry!”
I cut off the thumb and pressed it into the scanner. The corroded metal wall screeched and rolled itself open, revealing a cramped space full of red light and bad smells. It took me a moment to recognize the human being tied up in the middle of all those wires and pipes and humming technology. Her head was encased in scuffed plastic and metal. Intravenous lines ran to gauntlets clamped onto her pale arms; waste tubes ran to something encasing her pelvis. I understood. A technical servant. A nodespace slave.
“Free my arms first,” said the voice. Her throat didn’t move—and I understood why her voice had sounded synthesized when I unlocked the cuffs on her wrists and watched her pull the grotesquely long feeding tube from her throat. I stood back and watched as she pried herself out of the rig, and every part of her body that she liberated revealed a new bruise. I thought I saw traces of matted blood in her hair.
“Look away,” she croaked, in her own strained human voice, but I already had. She took my coat and my wave rifle and ordered me to carry the deadly Gray box ahead of us as we made our way back the way I’d come in, stepping over the bodies
