“Bad idea, this is heavy shit. Might hurt.”

  “I can take it.”

  “Come on over, it’ll be fun.”

  She sighed inwardly. If it was anything interesting it was probably a bad idea to just feed it to her over the Net. Glitched out as she was it could cause her to blow a neuron or if she really was being hacked then they could just lift it off of her. Besides, Jojran always had good booze. She’d raid his bar and skedaddle.

  “Alright. Be there in a half hour.”

  She kicked it back into manual and revved up to ninety, flying onto the highway and zipping in between the SUVs and trucks, Hathaway chem tankers, minivans, motorcycles, and techie sports cars. Mentally she accessed her account and dropped a few thousand bucks into her exemption fund, just in case a copper was lurking somewhere. Half the fucking cars were ASA vehicles in disguise, and she’d already gone through the hassle once of being caught and having her Caddy seized. She’d had to drop almost ten grand in bribes to get it back—she would’ve let it rust if there hadn’t been about forty grand worth of contraband implants hidden in the snicker case in the fuel tank. A woman in a beat-up go-fuck-yourself-mobile flipped her off as she passed, and the Betty slipped a few centimeters out of its holster. Damn that thing was twitchy.

  First exit to downtown she screeched to a stop and got out. She told the Caddy to go back to the garage and prayed it found its way this time. Last week she’d sent it home and it went exploring instead—a typical GPS fuckup—and wedged itself in an alley ten blocks away with blood all over the grill. The dash cam showed an elzi skipping into the highway. Three grand to clean the damn thing and hammer out the dents. She thought again of plans to round up all the elzi and put them on a barge on the river and ship ‘em to Jersey. Or just sink the barge.

  Jojran lived in a fancy apartment building off Washington Park. The security guard wouldn’t open the door for her.

  “Listen,” she said, pressing the com button and gritting her teeth. “I have an appointment with Alex Ramirez.” She wasn’t sure if that was Jojran’s real name or just an identity he’d stolen for the real world, but it was the name he was using to live in this nice place and she did have every right to be there, and this guy was pissing her off. She could see him through the glass, talking to his sneering compatriot, shaking his head. He wasn’t even responding to her. She knew there was an auto-rifle pointed at her somewhere, loaded with tranqs or rubber bullets or hell it could even be lead. It wouldn’t do her any good to throw a tantrum outside but it might give her some emotional satisfaction. How strong was that glass? Mentally she rifled through the ammo in her holster—she had a few Bob’s Big Boys that were closer to cruise missiles than bullets. Would that do it? She started calculating what her sentence would be. That was the problem with crimes against the rich—they could always outbid you. Not if she solved this case. She could shoot anyone she wanted then. But first she had to get into this fucking building. She called Jojran.

  “These fucking pig men won’t let me in,” she said, wishing she could blame them.

  “I’ll talk to them,” he said, self-important. She got the strange sense that he had arranged this in some ill-conceived plot to impress her. She saw the one guard’s eyes go unfocused for a second, taking a call, and then he reached down to his console and she heard a buzz as the door unlocked. She strolled in and flashed them a smile.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said. It was clear he still thought she belonged on the other side of the glass. The lobby was so clean and bright, and had abstract paintings on the wall. All the copper was polished and shiny, the uniforms crisp and clean. The guards themselves looked like competent men—tall, fit, poised, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and hard eyed—not the pudgy houseplants you normally saw parked behind a reception desk. The guard’s eyes watched her sign in; she saw the twitch in his jaw as her thumbprint came up as Susan Greere, CPA, CFO, Meadow Media. He knew it was fake as a stripper tit but she was a guest. He walked her to the elevator and stood glaring at her. She glared right back and resisted the urge to flip him off just as the doors sucked closed.

  Jojran lived in one of the top quarter suites, an open two-floor affair of dark wood, brushed steel, and wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of the city below—away from the filth of humanity it almost looked nice. The view was a waste as Jojran spent 99 percent of his waking life on the Net—a self-titled super-user, uber, viking, elite, professional masturbator, whatever you called it. He greeted her in a leopard-print silk bathrobe that did little to distract from his height deficit and surplus fat. She hoped to God there were silk boxers on underneath—and why was he wearing just socks?

  “Welcome,” he said, dramatically, squeakily. “To my humble abode.”

  “Lovely,” she said. She pushed past him and went to the bar, an actual bar in the corner, and began rummaging for the most expensive thing she could find. Dimly it occurred to her that if she solved this case then she could afford to live in a place like this, to stare out the windows at the little people below and drink vodka swirling with pulverized diamonds. She poured herself a glass and drank.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked, as she finished the first glass and started on a second. He was following a script, some rehearsed plan of seduction. There was a twinge of pity for him somewhere in her, but that was about it. If he wanted sex he could buy a girl or a guy or a mountain goat if that tickled his fancy. Whatever need made him act this way toward her was something she couldn’t understand—or entirely afford to neglect. Certainly he didn’t help her for the money; he made enough of that stealing IDs and scraping corporate accounts. Nor did she bring him particularly interesting cases, present case excepted.

  “I’ll have this,” she said, now studying a bottle of what looked like potent grain alcohol that had been drunk by beautiful women and then urinated out and distilled again. Would there even be any alcohol left? Worth a shot. She took one. Not bad.

  “Ah, yes. I have the full range of Virile Vodkas—I’m something of a connoisseur. Might I tempt you with this?”

  He sallied over and found a small bottle of clear glass in the shape of a penis. He poured out a generous glass and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed. Her poison detectors found traces of an aphrodisiac cocktail, a mix of designer chems meant to make her horny, but nothing malicious. They’d been tailored to her to increase potency, which she found oddly touching, and she wondered where he’d gotten a sample of untainted DNA. She had a viral shedder that sprinkled taints of gobbledygook throughout her body so genetics were usually useless against her. Had they failed? Or had he spent the time to go through and extract what he could to match her somatic profile? That was a little creepy. The poison sniffer gave her the green; she could disassemble and neutralize the cocktail. It was simple enough that she copied it to study later, maybe she could reverse engineer it, have it secreted from her lips or pheromones and take a stab at Eugene one day. She sipped.

  “Oh that’s very nice,” she said, and commanded her face to blush a little. Might as well play along. She tossed her coat on one of the white leather couches and adjusted her shirt and bra to maximize her cleavage. He noticed. Her scanners swept him, saw the quickening pulse, the anticipation, and the anxiety. For all his skill on the Net he lacked the sophistication of a person-to-person bout and he was naked before her. Another twinge of pity. Oh, well, time to get to the point.

  “So what do you have for me?” she asked.

  “Huh?” Staring at her tits. “Oh, right. Yeah. It’s interesting.” She could tell it was. He was torn between sharing his news and delaying to try…something with her.

  “Oh?” She flattened her tone. “Show me.”

  “Okay.”

  He sat down on the small couch facing the floor-to-ceiling windows and patted the seat next to him. She poured herself a mix of everything at the bar and sat. He clapped his hands and the room went dark. There was the ozone feel of a Net wave and she found herself standing in Jojran’s vik, his virtual kingdom, which appeared to be some sort of spaceship. He sat in the command chair as the electric blue man-leopard, and she sat at his side. In front of them was a screen that showed stars flying by. She’d been in viks before—most people had some form of escape—but they were usually patchy affairs, phoned-in, cardboard-fake theatre sets that did little more than disguise the ugliness of a sad-sack studio apartment. She’d considered building one herself, putting up some virtual wallpaper or a window or two but she didn’t like the viks; they made it too hard to snatch truth from fiction.

  Jojran’s vik was especially unsettling. She knew she was sitting in the dark of his apartment on a too-cozy couch listening to him wheeze. But it took concentration to keep herself there. If she relaxed, let herself drift, she was back on the starship—she could feel the hum of the futuristic engines, the gentle murmur of the virtual crew and the faint blips and beeping. She could see the addictive factor, the power of controlling your reality that made so many poor saps into Net heads, working dead-end jobs, slogging through life just to get enough to pay the connection fee and stay logged in. Here, in this fantasy starship, she could even glimpse the motives that would lead a mind to explore, to push deeper and deeper into the fantasy, into the dark place of the Net that promised to make all dreams come true. What else was an elzi, really, other than a Net head with conviction?

  “Do you like this setting?” Jojran asked, anxiously. “If you don’t we can change it. I have a whole bunch. We could go to a forest or I’ve got some abstracts, and one where we fly around in a big feather bed.” He seemed to be hoping for the last one.

  “This is fine,” she said tersely. Just being here was making her uneasy. She was pretty sure her hardware was glitched but if it was a hack then sitting in an open connection like this was dangerous. Of course Jojran had security measures and he could protect her, but she didn’t know what she was up against. Even Jojran had never gone farther than peeking through another person’s implants. He’d never tried seeding thoughts or mind control.

  “Okay, so I looked up all the girls you gave me.” Their faces appeared in the view screen—their real faces, thank God, from varying IDs, not the mutilated ones. They all had blue eyes. “And it was pretty much a no-go in terms of connection. Different ages, different backgrounds, though nobody especially important. The only connector seemed to be the fact that they had blue eyes.”

  “I know all that.”

  “Right, but then I found this.”

  A sphere appeared on the virtual screen, like a knot of hundreds of pieces of yarn all tangled together. It was absolutely meaningless to her.

  “What am I looking at here?”

  “A program rendered visually, an AI or bot. People use them to scrub the Net, do searches, machine tasks, but this, this is wild. Usually these’ll have one or two strands but this has hundreds, this is a piece of work, like artistry right here. I’ve been trying to unravel it for days and it’s had some pretty nasty surprises. It tried to send electrical feedback at me once and stop my heart, managed to dodge that one. And half of these are to hide it, to mask its presence. But everything leaves a trace.”

  “So, what does this have to do with the girls?”

  “This is the connection,” he said excitedly. This is the link between them. I found this strange, let’s call it a presence, whenever I did a search on one of them. Like I found almost exactly what you would expect to find in a textbook search—the birth records, school records if they went to school, taxes, driver’s license registration, job IDs, advertisements for sexual services, in one case. It was about as ordinary as you could get. Except I saw that someone else had been searching for these women, and after some digging I found this bot, tons of these bots going through, running these searches. And so I followed…that was a trip. And I found where they were taking this info. An uber, like me, someone else searching for these girls.”

  He couldn’t contain himself any more. With an almost audible whoosh the virtual world vanished and they were sitting back in the living room, squinting in the light. Jojran was practically bouncing up and down with excitement.

  “He made a list Saru! A list of these girls. And I found it. I found it!”

  Chapter 9

  There were thirty-seven names on the list—she could cross out six—thirty-one, and there didn’t seem to be one thing these girls had in common other than eye color. Whatever criteria the feasters were using was beyond anything that made sense to her, which itself made sense. She’d made Jojran print the list out so she had something to clutch while she paced back and forth tracking boot marks on his clean kitchen tiles.

  “There has to be a connection,” she said for the thousandth time.

  “Uh huh,” he said, not listening. He was doing the actual work of checking up on the women on the list, prying through their lives, checking to see if they’d gone to the same school, fucked the same guy, used the same hair dye or tampon, if they liked the same music, watched the same feeds, subscribed to the same religion or had any tiny thread that ran through all of their lives.

  She unfurled the list and read it again. Melissa Caton, Emily Brown, Geraldine Fibreria, Fanny Duvak—why did that name seem familiar? She searched her memory, feeling as if she should know that name. Had she seen it somewhere? It was right on the edge of her memory…coming into focus and…lost it. Damn. Too many knocks on the head.

  “Anything yet?” she asked Jojran.

  “What are you expecting here? It took me a week to find this lead, you want me to do it again in three hours?”

  She grumbled something and went back to pacing. The daylight outside was fading, the sunray over the Vericast tower growing faint. The city lights were coming on, thousands of points and squares of visibility in the gray-black evening. She could see right across to an office building where a worker was pissing into a plant by his desk. Was he drunk and desperate? Or was this a grudge? Or just routine, working hard, too lazy to go to the bathroom? She scanned the other windows, hoping to see a couple having sex. The feeds made it seem common, but nothing tonight.

  A thought occurred. Five of the six women had been tortured before they died, but this most recent woman had been killed before they opened her up. Was that significant?

  “Jojran.”

  “Uh.”

  “The woman killed last night that I told you about, Penny Wilshire. Let’s focus on her.”

  “Why?”

  “A hunch.”

  His eyes unglazed and the windows showed images of Penny. Saru didn’t want to go back into his vik. It was draining, and besides, her vision was flickering again, her brain glitching out. Who knew what would happen—and that damn flower was back in her hair again. Penny had been pretty before they’d scooped out her eyes, and before she’d lost her cashier job at Selly’s. She had a son but no husband or boyfriend, and an opiate dependency, which made her about as white-bread plain as you could get. She’d sold herself a few times to feed the kid or buy the heroin she needed—more often than not the latter. It wasn’t a complete record, towards the end her sightings became sparse and were mostly police reports, getting picked up for possession and prostitution—ironically the easiest way to get out of jail. It seemed like the kid had fallen by the wayside.

  “What about the kid, anything on him?”

  His photo came up, only one. He was registered, a real person with a birthright chip, but he never got to school.

  “Not much. He’d be about twelve now.”

  “Can you find him?”

  “Doubtful.” He went quiet and the quiet stayed. She got bored and started pacing again. Fanny Duvak, she knew that name, who was she? She tried to break the case down again and look at all the little pieces. The feasters wanted a girl, and they were guided by an alien evil, maybe. They thought this girl was a host for another alien. So they were killing all the girls that could possibly be the host and luckily they hadn’t found the right one yet. So what made someone a good host? The Gaespora, ElilE, had been vague on that. There was something he was hiding for sure, but not something that would help her find the girl. It had to be genetics, some common trait they shared. A dead end. She didn’t have genetic data, other than they all had blue eyes, and didn’t know where to get it or have the skills to make any use of it. But then there was that other thing…what had Hemu said—if he was even a reliable source—that the other God, no, the other alien liked dogs?

  “Did any of the women have a dog?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Did any of the women own dogs. Or come in contact with dogs?”

  “I’ll…check. Doubt it.”

  She doubted it too. Owning a dog was a luxury of the rich—they had to be kept safe, after all, so the elzi didn’t eat them—and most of these women were in that all-too-common, barely-scraping-by category.

  “No…sorry.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Did any of them have any…dog-like traits?”

  Jojran’s eyes unglazed; he pulled out of the Net and craned his neck to look at her, incredulous.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said angrily. “Did they ever bite anyone? Or have a good sense of smell, or get fucked on their knees?”

  “I think you’re drunk.”

  That was irrelevant. But he was right; it was a stupid question.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Forget it. Find the kid. And see if you can get genetics on any of the women.”

  “Oh I found the kid,” he said. “You’re going to love this. He’s an elzi. He’s in the registry, tagged and everything. You want to question him?”

  “Shut up.”

  Damn, if only Friar was alive she could have. Why did he have to go and die like that? He couldn’t have waited a week to help her out a bit more? And as she thought it her vision flickered like mad and the room began to spin faster and faster so it all swirled around like water going down a drain and taking her with it.

 

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