“Grease is an occupational hazard. So is the mechanic.”— PolyFlex Industrial, Workplace Safety Reference, Vol. 2
The notification was still lit when I looked back down at it, and I gave it a great deal more attention than a single unread line deserved, because the alternative was Roy’s arm, which had stayed across Erika’s shoulders, and Erika, who had done nothing whatsoever about moving it.
So. The quest. Riveting stuff, surely. I thumbed it open.
[SYSTEM QUEST: The Saboteur]Description: You have agreed to disrupt a Bhavsar Inc. vertical-cultivation facility (BVF-TG-04) on behalf of Kallum Inc. The operation requires that you remain unidentified. Should you be caught on-site, you will be detained by parties opposing Kallum. If you accept, you will be alone in hostile ground for the duration.Goal: Render germination a verified loss.Reward/Punishment: It is determined by how long was germination contaminatedDetained: -10 levels0-24h: -5 levels24-48h: Attribute Stone (C-Tier)48-72h: Attribute Stone (A-Tier)Note: Sol Quest point used(Automatically accepted)
I’d gone looking for somewhere to put my eyes that wasn’t the two of them. The System, generous as ever, had handed me a text. It worked technically.
I stopped thinking about Roy’s arm.
In every other respect, it was a tremendous failure, because now I was thinking about Palistra, and the punishment. Behind me, Roy said something I didn’t catch, and Erika laughed, and I kept my eyes on the two glowing words at the bottom of the quest and did not turn around.
I tapped ACCEPT.
The quest folded away, and the freight lot came back. All the rain, lamp, the orange van, the two of them under it. Roy had gotten to the money somewhere in his monologue, a number with Erika’s fingerprints on it. “Six hundred. The chair I throw in.”
[Kallum Operations—disbursed: ¢600]
“Six hundred’s fine.” I keyed it and sent it whole, before he’d finished saying the number, which gave my hands a job that wasn’t the grease handprint he’d left on the shoulder of Erika’s jacket when he pulled her in. His band chimed, and he waved at it without looking.
“Gracias, hombre.” He slapped the van’s flank. “Warm and waiting for tomorrow.”
“Appreciate it,” I said a bit more forcefully. I heard it. Roy didn’t, he was already half-turned back to Erika, leaning in over something about the engine tune, and she was laughing before he’d landed the line, the two of them wrapped into a conversation with a back-catalogue I hadn’t read.
Mi reina. I thought about it over twice and arrived at a strong, negative opinion about it. “Right,” I said, to the lot at large. “I should get back. Big day tomorrow.”
Roy lifted a hand without coming up out of whatever he was telling Erika. I took the gap in the chain-link and the broken path toward the station, gravel underfoot, rain coming down in earnest now.
I had a quest that opened with the words The Saboteur, a farm to poison the following night, and a list with every line crossed off it. What I was chewing on, walking along a freight road in a district I’d never had a reason to learn, was a handprint on a jacket.
Ugh.
“Dash—hey. Wait up.”
I heard boots on gravel behind me. Erika jogged the last stretch out of the lamp-glow and into the dark, hair already flat to her face, no effort spent on the rain at all.
“You were just going to walk to the station?”
“That was the plan.”
“In this.” She tipped her face up at the sky as if it had let her down personally. “My car’s here.” She thumbed back at the fitted cover in the corner of the yard, the low shape I’d clocked on the way in and filed as the only thing in the lot anyone loved. “Get in. I’ll drop you.”
I could look straight at her. “You looked busy.”
“I was watching a man talk to a van for forty minutes.” She was already walking back toward the cover. “Come on.”
Whatever I’d been carrying since the handprint set itself down.
The Vantrel sat low, and the canopy hissed up at her thumb. I dropped into the passenger seat, and the restraints shot out and locked across my chest with the same decisive click as always.
I didn’t move.
Erika paused, hands over the controls, an eyebrow raised. “Huh.”
“What?”
“You didn’t flinch.”
I just grinned, and she accepted that explanation.
She pulled off the gravel, and then we were over the bone-pale rooftops of Aravaca and climbing, rain shearing off the canopy in streaks, the district falling away into a grid of small warm windows. The speedometer passed the residential limit, kept its appointment with the commercial one, and didn’t stop to chat.
“Is this legal,” I said. Not really asking.
“Obviously,” she said and winked.
She put it down on my block, rain ticking on the glass, but I still felt off because of Roy. Ugh, I grumbled again and glanced outside. Central lay out pristine and blue-lit beyond the canopy, the biosculpted trees standing around in the wet like they’d been instructed to.
The restraints clicked off. Neither of us moved, which the inside of this car kept persuading us to do.
“So,” Erika said, eyes on the controls. “Tomorrow I sit in an orange van and wait for you to commit crimes, and then I drive us away from Tago PD very fast.”
“The hope is that you don’t need to.”
She turned, and the grin had something under it I couldn’t name. “You’ll call me if it goes weird in there. Even if calling isn’t the plan.”
I just nodded.
“Good.” The grin came back to full strength. “Get some sleep, Dashi.”
“That’s Natalya’s word.”
She tilted her head at the door. “Out. Go be a corpo heir who needs his beauty rest.”
I climbed out into the rain. The canopy started down, stopped halfway, and she leaned across the seats to find me through the gap.
“Hey, Dash. Come back in one piece tomorrow.”
I smiled weakly at her and nodded. “Yeah, I’ll do that.” As she took off, I couldn’t stop thinking about that stupid Roy.
The compound arrived the next day at half-past eleven, couriered in a padded case by a man who didn’t speak and didn’t wait for a signature.
I’d decided not to find that ominous.
It sat, suited up, on the bench now, looking over the squat amber vial in a foam cradle, far too small for three thousand three hundred sols.
Beside it, the cloner. Coilgun. Slugs. The revolver. The sword where the sword always leaned.
Everything was ready.
Which was the problem, because ready left nothing between me and the evening but waiting. Waiting was normally bad for me, but now my mind went back to a freight lot in Aravaca and a grease handprint somebody had left on somebody’s jacket and not—
The band rang. I have never been so glad of an interruption.
Omar.
“Habibi!” Loud, the way he answered everything. “How are you?”
“Fine. Busy.” I turned the vial a quarter in its cradle, because my hands wanted a job that wasn’t the handprint. “Got a thing later today, actually.”
“Thing? Okay,” he didn’t push. I heard the effort it took. “Yalla, I won’t keep you, then. I’m cooking something of my own anyway. I’ll show you when it’s done, not before—you’ll ruin it if you see it early.”
“What is it?”
“A thing,” Omar said, delighted to hand it straight back.
“Hey—before you go.” I got it in before he could move. “I leveled. Two.”
“Two!” The warmth was instant. “Habibi, look at you. A whole second level. Terrifying.”
“So what do I pick? There’s a skill selection sitting open and I’ve been staring at it—”
“Pick whatever.”
“It’s permanent, Omar.”
“Pick whatever,” he said again, the accent creeping in now. “Listen to me. Until level five, the System hands you lint and calls it treasure. Khalas.”
I should have said something to Roy, but I was so shocked…
“Nothing you pick changes a single thing. Choose the one with the best name. Choose the one that sounds dangerous when you say it out loud. Close your eyes and stab the prompt; I do not care. When you hit five, I sit you down, and we do it properly—and you’ll thank me for not wasting the thinking now.”
Oh, Omar.
“That is deeply unhelpful.”
“That is free, and worth more. One more, and I mean this one.” His voice went mock-stern. “Movie night. Palistra day. You said yes last time, and I need you to mean it.”
How was I supposed to focus on the job, when—
“Dash!” Omar insisted.
“I’ll be there.”
“I’ll believe it when there’s a Dash next to me eating cinema food.” He laughed, and the lightness eased off it. “And—whatever the thing is. Be careful in it.”
I chucked. “You too with your thing.”
He didn’t answer that for a second. “Mm. Go on, then.”
The line clicked off.
I looked at the bench again. Vial, cloner, magazines, the badge, the suit with MIRAGE folded into its sleep. I’d inventoried it twice already.
Ugh, focus me! You’ve got a big job!
I packed the case, slung the coilgun’s strap over my shoulder, and stood for a second with my hand flat on the bench.
Focusing now.
Then I went.
West Corporate District in the evening was a different city than the one I came to in daylight for the Neon Vault.
The rain started again, falling somewhere overhead and arriving as a fine mist the neon turned magenta before it reached the ground.
My hoodie shrugged it off.
The storage block sat three streets off the main street, where the neon thinned and the rents presumably did too; roll-up units stacked four high, lift cages climbing the outside, the whole thing washed in security lighting that helps to feel better rather than to help anyone see.
Natalya had sent a unit number and nothing else. No greeting. True to form.
Unit 3-C stood open a hand’s width, light leaking out the gap. I knocked on the metal anyway. “It’s Dash.”
“I know who it is.” Quiet. Not the comms voice at all. “Come in. Close it.”
I ducked under the half-raised door and pulled it down behind me.
She’d made the unit a nest; flight cases along one wall, a folding table with a rig broken down across it, cable looms coiled and ziptied, two grey hard case of expensive hardware. A camp lantern lit all of it in flat white. White, which over comms she’d called hospital light for losers; here, alone, she’d apparently made an exception.
And Natalya.
She looked like the holo-call, dark hair shoved up off her face, and nothing like it.
On the call she’d filled the entire frame, tipped her chair, swept things off her desk, rotated to angles that didn’t match the rest of her. Here she stood with her arms folded tight and her shoulders rounded in, eyes on a spot of floor about a meter to my left.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” She found my face for half a second and let it go. “You found it. Good.” I waited for the rest, the jab, the patch-note, the kotě. None of it arrived.
She unfolded an arm toward the cases, refolded it, cleared her throat. “Before the van. Can you—could you send me the money? The fee. Now, if that’s. If that’s okay.”
It came out in pieces. This woman over coms sent me to bully a man over a failed exfill. The woman in front of me couldn’t get a sentence about her own pay to the end without it coming apart in her hands.
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Absolutely.” I pulled up the band. “How much?”
She shrugged.
“Natalya. How much do you want?”
A smaller shrug. Eyes back on the floor. “Whatever’s. Fair.”
So I did the one thing I was good at lately, which was letting a man whose job was numbers do my thinking for me. William had given me average for the runner: four thousand.
I sent four thousand.
[Kallum Operations—disbursed: ¢4,000]
Her band chimed at her hip. She looked down and then she looked up at me and held it, both eyes, wide, for the first time since I’d come through the door, and blinked. Blinked again. Said nothing.
“...What?”
“That’s.” She checked the band again, as if it might have misread itself. “What?”
“Is it too low? I can—”
“No.” Fast. “No. It’s the right number.” Still staring at it. “I was going to ask for two and a half. Three, if I got brave.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. “It’s a Kallum op. Kallum pays—it’s not coming out of my tactical hoodie money.” I gave her shoulders back the shrug she’d given me. “You’re worth it. Take it.”
She nodded, and something in the way she held herself came down half a notch.
Outside, the light under the door changed, a wash from above, headlamps swinging down through the mist, then a low settling hum I felt in the floor.
Natalya’s head came up. “That the van?”
I hauled the door up instead of answering.
The orange van sat with rain beading on its dull flank, as forgettable as it had been in Roy’s lot. Stupid mechanic. Erika leaned out the driver’s window, hair already wet, grinning at the weather like the two of them went way back.
“Delivery!” she called.
Natalya stepped past me into the mist and walked the van’s length without a word, one hand trailing the panel. She checked the seams. She thumped the shell once with the side of her fist and listened to the sound die flat against the shielding. She took in the dents, the matte, the total absence of anything a witness could describe an hour after it left.
“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself. “Okay. Good.”
She pulled the rear doors and climbed up, and I came up behind in time to see her. The magenta strip caught her face. The chair sat bolted to its plate, high-backed, lumbar, welded down like it was the most important thing in the rig, which, by her own spec, it was.
She took in the light that wasn’t white, the cooling vents, the throne. And she grinned sideways to herself.
“Dobrý,” she murmured. “Dobrý, dobrý.” Her hand found the backrest and shoved. It didn’t give a millimeter.
When she turned around, the voice was a few clicks closer to the one I knew. “Okay. It works. Help me—I’m not hauling the cases up alone, and zlatíčko, I’m not trusting your driver with the rig.”
“Hey,” Erika said from the front, cheerful, not remotely offended.
“No offense. You drive, I run. Lobbies have roles.” Natalya was already swinging down toward the unit. “Grey cases first. Careful—careful—those are not insured.”
We hauled. The grey ones weighed more than anything that size had a right to, and she tracked every step of their journey with an anxiety that had nothing shy in it. The looms went up, the table, the broken-down rig, all of it strapped to the rack frame Roy had built for exactly this.
Stupid Roy.
By the time the last case was lashed down, she was directing from the middle of the van with a hand on each thing in turn, and the storage unit behind us was an empty box with the door rolled down.
I pulled the rear doors shut and walked to sit next to Erika. “Where to, boss?” she asked with a smirk, she was clearly enjoying this.
Roy’s stupid engines spun up under the floor as rain ticked on the roof.
I took a breath.
“The Bhavsar farm.”