People like Hardy.
It was also a good harvesting site for the tests nobody would volunteer for. People went missing, but weren’t missed.
He closed his eyes again to check her silhouette. She was just ahead, fifty feet or so, fumbling with something he couldn’t see. Maybe a doorknob or a lock. She stepped back, and a gunshot shattered the near-silence of the street.
“Dammit!” He ran toward her, darting around the brick corner of a building. He only had a second to take in the scene. The girl running. One of Jack’s thugs pointing a gun at her, finger flexing over the trigger. A bin with a heavy pipe sticking out.
He shouted and the man turned his head, then his gun. Too slow. Hardy had already grabbed the pipe, connected it with the thug’s bald head. His gun fired wide and he fell to his knees. Hardy swung one more time and the man fell to the ground, unmoving.
Hardy looked around the alley, but the girl was gone. A camera stared down at him from the corner.
“Dammit!” He blinked and saw her outline two corners over. She wasn’t Jack’s. If she was, there had been a falling out. A hell of a falling out. Guns weren’t Jack’s style.
He closed the distance between them, still holding the pipe. The ache in his mind was stronger now. He’d have to get another breath—her breath—or he’d be hurting.
She looked up from against the brick wall, black and pink curtaining over one eye. He took a seat next to her on the pavement and leaned his head back. She didn’t say anything, so they sat in silence as his heart beat back to a normal rhythm. He wasn’t used to getting shot at. Even when he worked for Jack, he’d managed to avoid that.
She exhaled, and a hint of it drifted up to him, numbing the pain.
“You got a name?” he asked.
She smiled. “Yeah. You?”
He considered a fake name. The name he went by was fake anyway, taken from an old OS distro, but it was who he was. He decided against it. “Hardy.”
The smile never left her lips. It was an odd look—half joy, half resignation.
“You don’t have to tell me your name. I really don’t care. I just want to know what you did to me. Why are you in my head?”
Her smile faded. She nodded back toward the door. “You want to know why, take a look.”
He turned to look around the corner, but she caught his arm. “Not like that.” She closed her eyes, and he got the picture. He closed his own and looked through the building behind them. There was another white shape, like the one beside him, but smaller, distant. Someone was curled up somewhere deep in Jack’s building, one floor up from ground level.
“What did you do to me?” He stared at her, tasting the faint breath coming from her lips. “Who is that?”
She rose and dusted off her synthetic clothes, then offered her hand. “I tested you. You passed.”
He stood without taking her hand. “I did, huh?”
“Call me Mara.” The name clicked somewhere in Hardy’s mind, but no memories came with it. They were probably locked back in Jack’s place. He’d been right about knowing her.
There was shuffling around the edge of the building, and he turned, fearing an armed man with a headache. It wasn’t the guard. There were three people—two men, and a girl dressed in your basic technotrash attire. The tallest, a man with short blond hair, glared at him.
Mara put her hand on Hardy’s shoulder and nodded at the newcomers. “Meet the Narcs. They want to hire you.” She patted his arm and joined the group. As one, they turned away from the alley and Jack’s.
Hardy watched them leave and thought about going the other way, but still felt the ache in his mind. No breath should be so sweet. She’d done something to him, and he had no choice but to go along with it.
“A test,” he said, tasting the lie as sure as her breath. They’d got his face on Jack’s camera. He could already feel Jack’s eyes crawling over him, trying to determine his part in this. Whether he liked it or not, he was involved now.
He cursed at his feet and followed.
They’d better have a damned good reason.
3
BY THE TIME THEY GOT to the Narcs’ hideout, Hardy’s head was splitting. The idea behind breath was a breakdown of barriers: it was an excuse to get into someone’s personal space and stay there. Easy enough with people you know well. Not all that difficult with strangers, in the anonymity of the dance floor.
Mara was different. He felt like he should know her, but he didn’t. She was an odd mix of friend and stranger that made it impossible for him to get close, and he was suffering for it. Moreover, he didn’t trust her.
The Narcs, it seemed, were just some punks who hated Jack and wanted to take him down. He couldn’t argue with that. Jack had a pretty tight hold on the area, and nobody was very comfortable with it. Going by the quality band they had collected, nobody much was very willing to do anything about it either.
“So who’s inside Jack’s?” He could still see the white silhouette from where they were, though it was smaller than before.
Mara stood back as the tall one opened the door. “Lynn,” she said. “My sister.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Jack wasn’t a pleasant man to work for, but it was worse to be one of his guinea pigs.
“She knew what she was getting into. She’s got a lot of information in her head that would help bring that place down. Too much for Jack to let her go.”
Hardy stood back as the others filed in, and Mara smiled at him. She waited for the door to close before she spoke.
