CHAPTER 23

S uspicion wraps its fingers around my gut and clenches. Hard. Something about seeing Vince emerge from the banking establishment, standing straight and alert and purposeful, is just… off. Like Mitchell said. Something about the way he moves, it’s not in character.

Or at least, it’s not part of whatever character he’s been playing for me and Tori.

I shrink back behind the group of Sevvies, grateful for their tall, hairy coverage—and for the bright bulb jutting out from the bank’s facade, casting Vince in a spotlight and leaving me and my Sevvie shields in shadow.

I watch him through the vertical, fur-framed sliver between two jostling Sevvian torsos. Vince turns left and strides intently down the street, past Dr. Reid’s office, past Singh & Sons Prosthetics. I lose him for a second, then catch a glimpse of him turning right down a side street.

I’m in front of the bank now. Desperation to access my funds urges me to forget Vince and enter the building. But instinct tells me to follow him. I hesitate only a moment before continuing down the street, throwing one longing glance over my shoulder at the bank. I’ll backtrack later .

The Sevvies aren’t moving my way, so I dart behind a trio of humans hanging a right at the corner Vince just took.

This is more of an alley than a street. It’s so narrow that if Tori and I held hands and stretched our arms, we could touch the storefronts on either side. Pitch blackness fills the long stretches of dead space between small neon signs in rarely used languages. I recognize Doo-hai, Sevv, and even one sign in Varunese. I learned to speak it from Sana, but I can’t read the flickering text.

My human shields guffaw and banter and take up nearly the entire width of the alley. I trail behind them until they stop, hovering by a doorway with a small sign advertising Massage Male Female Both. They mutter to each other as they peruse some kind of poorly lit menu framed and bolted beside the door.

I pass them and melt into a pool of darkness between far-set signage. At the blackest point, I cross my arms and lean against a grimy wall, watching Vince’s silhouette move through a patch of orange neon farther down the alley. I need new cover.

Someone passing in the wrong direction glances at me with triple irises glowing moonbeam bright—a recent Delirium user too high to care what I’m about. My aural mods pick up the liquid trickle of someone pissing against a wall down the way.

No one’s going the direction I need them to.

If I keep waiting for live smokescreens, I’ll lose Vince. I peel myself from the wall and hurry through the shadows, hunching and turning my face away from the light whenever I hit a patch of neon.

Ahead, Vince has reached the end of the alley. I stop in a dark alcove near a doorway and watch him. A background of bright lights from the busier thoroughfare ahead silhouettes his tall frame and the blasters at his hips. He’s not moving. It’s like he’s waiting. Listening. Both hands hover over the blasters.

Something brushes the ankle of my boot. A tiny quadruplet of eyes glows red, staring up at me. I shake my foot hard. The creature flies off with a high-pitched squawk and scurries away.

My eyes shoot back to Vince. He stands still, but his position has changed. Like he started to veer onto the street but froze. I jam myself back into the alcove as he turns to look over his shoulder.

The door in front of me bangs open. A group of females parades out, chattering and tugging on overcoats to cover scanty costumes.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

I hang against the wall by the door as the women light their cigarettes, then trail them to where the alley meets a street that reeks of urine. Trash is humped in foothills against the bases of storefronts that advertise Cash for Organs and Real Human Hair and We Buy Horns & Tails.

A man walks my way, gait unbalanced. Cheap eye implants roll in his head, seeming too big for the sockets, until I realize it’s an illusion caused by his lack of eyelids. One unblinking eye turns toward me as he brushes past, the pupil dilating open-shut-open-shut like it’s trying to focus but glitching. The other stares ahead.

An insectoid Calla, normally six-armed, sidles past in the opposite direction. Two of her arms have been removed and replaced by dirty bandages that seep something yellow.

I see why Mitchell and Vince said we were in the “good part of town” before.

I remain at the entrance to the alley, hesitant to cross the threshold.

On the far side of the street, prostitutes call out to passers-by. They’re all missing something—an arm, an eye, a breast, half a scalp. There’s a boy among them who can’t be all that much older than Sam. His caved-in lips don’t look right on his round, youthful face. I glance past the child, scanning for Vince, then do a double take as I process the meaning of the sign that dangles from around the kid’s neck: Toothless Blow.

Oh my God.

I breathe through the nausea that threatens to overtake me.

I’ve got to keep on Vince.

I scan the street, catching sight of his dark hair and square shoulders in the stream of moving bodies. He ducks into an unmarked doorway. I step out of the alley and make my way diagonally across the street through the flow of foot traffic, heading for the building Vince entered.

The facade is windowless and dark. I stop to inspect the entrance. An unlit sign in the alcove next to the door reads Suites 200–218. Apartments? The spider dancer’s place, maybe?

I glance around, then dart for another doorway embedded in a recess farther down the same facade. Another unlit sign tells me it leads to Suites 219–237. There’s just enough space in the alcove for me to stand next to the door without blocking it, and it’s a deep enough depression to hide me from Vince’s view when he emerges from the other door. I’ll be able to see him, but he won’t see me unless he walks directly past. I wiggle the doorknob. Not locked. If he does come this way, I can duck inside.

I wait, pressed against the wall, watching.

Minutes tick by. Booted feet click-stick, click-stick in grime as they pass.

A gust from a low hover above rustles the trash around my feet.

Anxiety builds. I tap my blaster fast and staccato against the metal wall behind me. It responds with a tinny drum, like distant machine-gun fire.

A strange movement on the opposite street corner catches my eye. Through the foot traffic, I see a boy in battle gear weave his way among the garbage and loitering prostitutes. The top of his helmet gleams dully like a battered shell as he kneels to lift something from the refuse edging the street.

Oh God. It’s an arm.

One of the boy’s blue hands grasps the severed limb by its camo-clad bicep. The other grips its stiff, dead wrist. The palm protruding from the wrist ends in twisted, reaching digits. On the singed ring finger, a wedding band gleams, way too bright.

The boy looks up, raising the blackened, burned arm in both hands. He looks straight at me through the crowd.

I gasp. My heart slams into an uneven gallop. There’s no mistaking that smooth-cheeked, childlike face.

It’s Sam.

I’ve got to get him back to the ship. I start to step out of my hiding place, then hesitate, cocking my head as I squint across the street. He looks like Sam, but something isn’t right.

The boy blinks, lids lowering over whiteless aqua eyes like Sam’s. When his lids lift, his eyes glow bright silver.

Not-Sam’s lips cave in, sunken like the skin of an old fruit. A sign swings from a chain around his neck. Toothless Blow.

I press back against the wall, heart slamming in my chest.

It isn’t real.

I blink.

It is not real.

Not-Sam opens his caved-in mouth, still staring straight at me. His jaw hinges unnaturally. A waterfall of gold gushes over his slack tongue and sunken lips, glittering as it falls, reflecting a neon rainbow of city lights.

It’s not real not real not not not real.

When the gold hits the street, it turns dark. Turns to deep, glistening red. My gaze shoots from the blood pooling on the street to Sam’s face. He’s frozen, blue skin turned to veined white marble. He’s a statue. A war monument. A wide-mouthed fountainhead spurting golden blood into a gurgling, sculpted pool.

A work of art.

How lovely.

I’m shaking, gasping for air as I cower back into the alcove, pressing against the wall.

Passers-by glance at the blood-spurting monument. Their whispers ring in my ears.

“Federation dope-whore. Poor kid.”

“Could you ever forgive someone responsible for that kind of evil? That much blood?”

“No… Never. I… I couldn’t.”

It’s not real.

Not real.

Not real.

Stomach twisting, heart racing, lungs straining, I squeeze my eyes shut.

I breathe in.

Breathe out.

“Need quick cash?” a way-too-close alto voice asks.

I blink.

A humanoid with large, puffy lips pushes her face close to mine, blocking my view of the street. Her features are stiff and over-exaggerated, like she’s made one too many visits to a bad plastic surgeon.

“I can get a good price for those pretty eyes of yours.” She winks a long-lashed lid. “Stains or no.”

I press the blaster into her chest, between balloon-like breasts. “No thanks.”

Unnaturally wide eyes widen further. She backs away, then turns and hurries down the street.

My eyes dart to the opposite corner. Prostitutes still loiter on the streetside, ankle deep in refuse. Not-Sam is gone.

Dammit. Distracted by my own crazy yet again.

I glance back at the dark, recessed door. There’s no way to know if I’ve missed Vince’s exit.

Just as the humanoid who attempted to buy my eyes moves past the door, it bangs open. Vince emerges with something strapped to his back—a long-barrelled blaster. Even from here, I can see that the two at his hips, the ones that were stuck on stun, have been replaced as well .

What a waste of time. Vince was only buying weapons, something I’d do, too, if I were in his position. I sag, relieved, and blow air slowly between pursed lips.

But another movement in the doorway catches my eye.

I stiffen, suck in the breath I just released.

A lean, scar-faced man emerges behind Vince. A man I’d know anywhere. Carlson. My father’s bodyguard. The one who held Tori at gunpoint. The one Vince knocked off the hoverbike in the Underground.

Carlson’s as heavily armed as Vince.

I press back hard into the wall.

This is just another fucked up hallucination.

It has to be.

Carlson moves to Vince’s side, and they continue down the street together, perfectly in step. Carlson turns toward Vince, mouth moving. Vince nods. His lips move in response.

Oh, fuck.

If Vince is interacting with him, then Carlson’s very much real.

Real and talking to Vince.

What the hell is going on?

My mind races as fast as my heart, trying to access the pieces to a puzzle stored somewhere deep and foggy.

Even now, embarrassment makes me want to cringe, to flee. But I force myself to think. The morning after Vince and I—I wince—the morning Mitchell and Vince argued over me, Vince said something to Mitchell. Something about the nobility. Something I didn’t expect him to know.

Something he shouldn’t have known.

I scour the corners of my mental inventory. It’s somewhere behind the gut-twisting shame and the pounding headache and the regret of that morning. Vince and Mitchell, standing over the table. Vince and Mitchell, right up in each other’s faces.

“Underage for a week. For one fucking week.” Vince’s words. But how did he know? I never told him my age. Tori could have told him, maybe, if that’s all it was but—

“She might look sweet and innocent, but trust me, it’d be quicker to count the nobles under thirty that girl hasn’t fucked than to count all the ones she has.”

Not even Tori knows my history with the nobility… She knows I’m from a House, but there are hundreds of minor Houses. And me and Tori have always had a tacit agreement to never ask details about each other’s pasts… Just like I never asked who abused her, even though it would have to be someone well-known to be one of her mother’s clients, Tori never pushed me about which House I’m from. She knew I had a history with boys, but I never mentioned details. She doesn’t know they were all nobles. She doesn’t know the kinds of details Vince seems to be perfectly aware of.

Oh God .

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

Vince knows who I am.

He’s been working for my dad this whole time. Working with Carlson.

At the rave, the night I met him, Vince was already dressed to ride a hoverbike. Before he supposedly took out the other guard and stole his clothes. There never was another guard. It was always Vince.

And… God. Beth. Vince found us so easily outside Beth’s Cleanery because… he’d been there before. He’s the one who killed her. Probably got our expected location at the rave out of her first.

I bite back a self-loathing scream.

I’m so stupid.

But as much as I want to curl into a ball and let this alcove take me, I have to think fast. There’s so much more than me at stake, here. I’ve put them all in danger, and they have no idea. I control my breathing, keeping my eyes on Vince and Carlson. They move farther down the street as my mind speeds through possible courses of action.

Would Mitchell help me now? Help me get away from Vince?

No.

I’d have to tell him who I am. I’d have to watch the welcome in his eyes morph into disgust as he realizes I’m responsible for everything Sam has lost, for the suffering on Varus, for the millions of deaths that cause him so much pain.

He said he couldn’t forgive someone who was responsible for the things my family has done. He’d hand me straight over to Vince.

I’ve got to run.

But Tori… I can’t leave her. They might put a gun to her head and use her to get me to cooperate, like they did in the Underground. She’s in danger because of me.

I’ve got to get back to the ship, grab Tori. We’ll run. There are millions of people here in Hack Town. It’s massive, unstructured, unregulated. We’ll disappear.

I just need to get past Vince and Carlson.

I keep my body pressed into the shadows, feeling cold metal against my bare lower back. A block down, Vince and Carlson stride across the street. They move like killers.

People get out of their way.

I could shoot one of them in the back. Right now, through the break in the crowd, I could do it. But they’re fast. The other would turn and fire at me before I could get in a second shot.

Someone innocent could get in the way. More blood on my already bloody hands.

The hole in the crowd closes and my chance is lost. Vince’s dark locks and Carlson’s sandy crew-cut head toward the alleyway. They could very well be heading back to the ship to collect me right now.

I’ve got to get there before they do.

But they’ll see me if I take that alley. I assess my inner catalogue of images, building a mental map of what I know about the city streets. This one has to connect to the main thoroughfare where I saw the street fight, just farther down.

The moment Vince and Carlson fade into the shadows of the narrow alley, I start running.

I’m fast. I can beat them.