than interesting under other circumstances.
“Hot, kitten?”
She fans her face. “God, yes.”
I pull off my tank and loop it through my
waistband. “You can take that off.” I nod at
her top. “No one’d complain.” Since I don’t
think she’s wearing anything under it,
particularly not me.
She smiles and shakes her head at me.
“You’ll want that back on in a minute. The
Snatchers keep their tunnels colder than a
meat locker.”
But each tunnel we turn into keeps getting
hotter. I can hear Ape puffing and muttering
behind us. Kez is moving faster and faster
until she breaks into a jog. I follow her,
noting her growing frown.
“What’re you looking for?” I ask as we
trot along.
“The signs don’t make sense. The
Snatcher marks are here, but a lot of them
have been overwritten. I don’t understand
it.”
“Admit it, Kez, you’re fucking lost,” Ape
growls from behind us.
“No, I’m not—”
“Then they’re not fucking here—”
“Ape, shut up. You couldn’t read the
Downer marks if they were written in Uni, so
just shut up.”
“Call Penny.”
Kez pulls up short and turns to face her
brother. “Part of the test is finding them, you
idiot. If I can’t find them, I’m not worthy of
making the pickup. Don’t you get it?”
Ape mumbles something but looks away.
Kez turns away from him and takes a
moment to scan the graffiti-ed walls
carefully. “There. It’s not too far. Come on.”
She runs down a side branch, patting a
picture of a little girl holding a teddy bear as
she runs by it. The teddy bear’s eyes flash as
I pass. Mirrors, or viewies, I’m moving too
fast to be sure.
“We’ve only got three minutes!” Ape
shouts from behind us in a mixture of
frustration and humiliation. Kez ignores him
and runs down the dark passage.
The branch ends in a dark, round room.
Damp, like it used to be a cistern. The walls
are heavily graffiti-ed. Some of the pictures
look familiar. The same dark-haired little
girl. Now she holds the string of a red
balloon. The balloon is a funny shape. Looks
like an inverted pyramid.
Kez walks up to the picture of the little
girl. She knocks on the balloon three times. I
move up close to her. Watch as her breath
appears in small puffs of vapor. Feel the
cold seeping through the wall.
A voice booms through the cistern. “Who
goes there?”
“Don’t be an ass, Tank,” Kez says,
looking up at the wall. “You know me. I’m
here to see Penny.”
“How do I know it’s you?”
“Tank—!”
“Show me a titty so I can be sure.”
I raise an eyebrow. This I want to see.
“I’m going to show you my foot in your
ass if you don’t stop fucking around. Don’t
make me late.”
The panel with the girl and her balloon
slides to the side.
“Disappointing,” I whisper to Kez.
She shakes her head. “Men.”
Beyond the sliding panel, there’s a series
of rooms, each opening off each other
without any door or partition. They’re
golden-lit, full of strange, skittery shadows,
and freezing cold. I pull my top back on.
Kez moves quickly through the first room
and into the second, where several men wait
for her. At second glance, men might be too
inclusive a term. Each of them have replaced
body parts with metal – steel caps welded
onto their heads, blades bristling from
shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, knees,
toes. How do they sleep? One of them has a
blade hanging between his thighs, through a
slit in his loincloth. My balls twitch and try
to climb up into my stomach.
“Freeney,” Kez says to the one with the
“Kezra,” he responds. The steel goggles
welded into his eye sockets telescope as he
examines each of us in turn. “You’re late.”
“It’s midnight,” Ape puffs behind us.
“Atom says you’re late.” Freeney lifts his
chin towards the wall behind us. I glance
over my shoulder. A mech clock covers the
entire wall, exposed gears revolving
majestically. At the center of the clock, the
local time: eleven-zero-one and thirteen
seconds. Above the timepiece, circles within
circles show the movements of Kuseros’s
binary star, four planets and their thirteen
major moons. Below, another set of orbs, the
central one gleaming like gold, shows the
time and orbits of the eight planets in the
Core System. Human figures and arcane
symbols move in their own separate, silently
turning circles, crossing, eclipsing,
obscuring each other. The whole
construction is so elaborate it’s impossible
take it all in at once. It needs an interpreter, a
prophet, and after a moment one emerges
from the shadows to the right of the clock. A
monstrosity in genSkin and steel.
Kez bows her head. “Penny.”
“Kezzy, honey,” says the monster, black
lips curling back from teeth so white they
fluoresce. Her voice is like molasses. Thick
and dark and sweet. Totally out of place in
this palace of metal. “It’s been a while.”
Kez nods. “The Valley’s getting harder to
cross—”
“Even for you, Lightfoot?” the monster
asks, a pair of surprisingly pretty hazel eyes
glinting under eyebrows that are slashes of
mirror inset into her pale skin.
Kez smiles, as she’s meant to. “Even for
me. I brought you something, though. Just like
I always do.”
“Yeah, what’d you bring me?”
Kez takes off her backpack and pulls out
several packages. “This is for your boys.”
The wrapping is crinkly. Plaz that won’t
stick to what’s inside. Whatever it is is
round and lumpy. Squishy. My guess would
be the hallucinogenic fruit hyale, native to
Kuseros and wholly black-market due to its
unfortunate side effects. But anything that
looks like these Snatchers probably doesn’t
give a shit about psychosis. Steel-dick
moves in and takes the crinkly package from
Kez.
She holds out a flat box to the monster.
“This is for Jeffries. He around?”
The monster shakes her head, the chrome
ribbons of what used to be hair clinking.
“He’ll be back tomorrow. Are those the
calibrators he’s been looking for?”
“Better. Marla made these for him
special.”
“He’ll
like that. I’ll tell him.”
Kez smiles and holds out the last package
on her palm, a small tube. “I’ve been saving
this for you.”
The monster reaches out. Her hand
trembles. “Kezzy, what’d you find me?”
“It’s got both, mirror and glitter.”
The monster sighs, takes the tube and
uncaps it. Runs her fingertip around the
bottom. A blunt spear of silver rises out of
the tube. The monster runs the spear across
her lips. Presses them together. Liquid silver
turns her mouth to mirror, a shade brighter
than her chrome eyebrows, cheekbones and
hair.
Kez taps her viewie, turning it into a
mirror, which she angles toward the monster,
who checks her reflection and smiles, a
knifeslash across her pale skin.
The monster nods. “Very nice.”
“I’m really sorry I’m late.”
The monster touches Kez’s shoulder with
her steel-tipped fingers. It could be the cold
that makes goose bumps rise on Kez’s arms,
but I don’t think so.
“You know how I feel about punctuality.”
“I do.” Kez hangs her head. “I’m sorry.”
“It was here at midnight. Now it’s not, so
you’ll have to go collect it.” The monster
pauses. “You sure you want it, honey? It’s
got Company written all over it. Some
fuckers you don’t steal from.”
“I’m not stealing.” Kez holds up two
fingers. “Honest.”
“Your funeral, honey.”
Kez nods. The monster beckons and one
of her minions, his face hidden behind an
antique gas mask, comes forward. He holds
out a small metal contraption on the palm of
a hand that bristles with hypodermic needles
in place of fingernails.
“This gives you one hour free passage
into the Deeps. The Pack will want the two
hundred you promised me for it,” the monster
tells Kez.
Kez holds out her hand. Hypo Boy passes
the machine over it. Kez flinches and a red
welt rises, bright against her pale skin.
The monster reaches out and runs a steel
claw down the edge of Kez’s cheek. “Still
not into pain, honey?”
Kez turns her head slightly, meets my
eyes, and winks. “Never learned to like it.”
I give her a grin – she liked the spanking
well enough – and hold out my hand to Hypo
Boy.
He turns toward the monster, who shrugs.
“You said two, Kezzy.”
Kez points to herself and then to me.
“One, two.”
The monster glances at Kez’s brother,
who remains wisely silent. “Sorry, I just
assumed your monkey would be going in
with you. Mark the man, Owl.”
Hypo Boy passes the machine over the
back of my hand. After a second, I
understand why Kez flinched. The pain’s
intense. Fucking dermal laser. I bear down,
endure it, and the worst passes. I tilt my hand
so I can see the mark. It’s an inverted
pyramid within a circle. Same as the graffiti
on the door. Looking closer, I can see the
circle’s actually a ring of tiny dots, and as I
watch, one dot fades back into my skin. A
timer.
“Fifty-eight minutes, fifty-one seconds,”
the monster says to Kez. “Do not be late this
time. The price for passage if you’re late is
one strip of monkey hide per minute.” Those
pretty hazel eyes flick to Ape, and she gives
him a whetted smile.
Ape says nothing, raising him a little in
my estimation, and silently hands the bag he
carries to his sister. Kez smiles at him and
starts to sling the bag across her chest. Her
backpack’s in the way. Before she tangles
the various bags and straps, I take the bag
from her. Nod at her to get her moving.
She takes my free hand and starts back
the way we came. “Thanks, Penny.”
“Beware the lastminute angebot,” the
monster says. Glancing at her, I see that her
eyes are fixed on the clock, and I wonder if
she’s warning us or prophesying.
Kez nods and breaks into a jog. She
releases my hand at the exit to the Snatchers’
lair, where the panel slides aside for us
silently, and the heat hits us like a blast
furnace.
Kez sneezes and wipes her nose ruefully.
“I hate how cold it is in there.”
“Yeah, what now?”
“Now we have fifty-seven minutes to find
the Pack, pay them.” She nods at one of the
bags slung across my back. “Get the case,
and get the fuck out of here.”
Sounds good to me. It’s her brother’s
hide that’s on the line, but I’m not interested
in being on the sharp end of any of the
Snatchers’ blades, either. They carry more
blades than I do. Anyone who can cut you
with his dick . . .
Kez leads me back into the tunnel with
the little girl and her mirror-eyed teddy. She
turns the other way at the mouth of the tunnel,
pushes through sheets of hanging plaz onto an
empty platform, and drops onto an old
maglev line. Scurryings in the darkness say
the line’s unused, but not deserted.
She holds a hand up to me and I jump
down next to her. “That explains some
things,” she says as we trot down the track.
“How’s that?”
“The Snatcher marks were overwritten
almost right to their doorstep. The Pack is
honing in on their territory. They’ll have to
move the clock soon.”
“Can they?”
Kez shrugs. “They haven’t since I’ve
known them, and that’s going on six years.
But they change these tunnels around all the
time. I never get in the same way twice. If
they can reconfigure the tunnels, maybe they
can relocate the clock. I don’t know.”
I nod, quietly impressed by who and how
much she knows. I’ve been flying into Kuus
for the better part of a year and I’ve never
even heard of the Snatchers and their
cybernetic prophet.
“Who’re the Pack?”
“Deep Downers. Seriously hard-core
underground. Most of them haven’t been
above ground in decades. Some of them,
never. Don’t be surprised by how they look.
It’s just bad geneering. And don’t make the
mistake of thinking they’re blind. They’re
not. Don’t let them touch you. Some of them
have poisoned claws.” She slows, checks the
graffiti. There’s less scribble here. More
pictures. Some of them carefully and
beautifully crafted. One shows a mermaid
rising out of a sea of luminescent foam. I stop
and look at it for a long moment, capturing it
in my mind’s eye.
“That’s C.J.’s work,” K
ez says. “First
Deep Downer I met. I only know two others
well and I heard that Java was killed a
couple of weeks ago, so I’m hoping Nacht or
C.J. is around. Otherwise I’ll be flying blind
with these guys.”
I lift an eyebrow at her.
“I told you this could go wrong.”
“Way I remember it, you said you’d
signal if anything went wrong. What’d you
think I was gonna do, fly down here and
rescue you?”
“Would you?” She gives me that
mischievous grin.
Still not knocked back by anything. I
shake my head at her.
She begins trotting down the line again.
“The Pack is okay. They can be nicer than
the Snatchers. Especially one on one. C.J.
made this for me.” She shakes her wrist,
jangling the viewie. I have to admit it’s a
nice little piece of tech. I wouldn’t have
guessed what it was until she put it together.
If I’d been searching her, I’d have dismissed
it as jewelry. “I haven’t had to deal with
more than one at a time before, though.”
A Pack. With poisoned claws. While not
as ball-clenching as Steel-dick back there,
the bad feeling I have about this gets steadily
worse as we continue down the line.
The growing smell doesn’t help. The reek
of meat left to hang for too long. And of
scavengers who aren’t picky about eating it.
“Kez—”
“I know. It’s not far now.”
Chapter 4
Not far at all, as it turns out. The line
bends around to the left and waiting just on
the other side of the turn are a group of men.
Eight by my quick head-count. And men may
be too inclusive a term again. They’re all
furred. Clawed. Four sets of eyes luminesce
in the light from Kez’s dreads. The others’
eyeballs are scummed over with a thick layer
of cataract, a side effect of black-market
geneering. I can see why they’d be mistaken
for blind. I’m glad Kez warned me they’re
not.
Kez pulls up short. Puts out a hand and I
stop next to her.
“I’m the runner,” she says. “I’m here for
the pickup.”
“We know who you are, Lightfoot,” one
of the blind-looking ones says, in an accent
so round and perfect that he should be
teaching at one of Kuseros’s academies, not
scuttling around in its sewers. “Nacht sent
us.”
Kez smiles at the rat-man. “How is he?”
“Hungry. As we all are.”
Kez’s chin rises. “Nacht will have told