The Heist of Hollow London, page 13
Nadi spent the shift picking through what had once been a quaint-looking Korean restaurant, using a cutter-extractor to glean metal and plastic from its kitchen. She had music on while she worked, which was another thing she liked about the job. Securit work involved a lot of long, boring hours looking at nothing, but you weren’t allowed to have anything distract your attention. Here they didn’t care as long as you hit your targets. Nadi’s love of music had baffled her securit colleagues, none of whom cared about music, nor could they understand why anyone would.
Nadi was about done in the kitchen when she noticed that the three people who’d been stripping it with her had vanished. She paused her music, but could hear little more than the rain. Her first thought was she was due for some hazing ritual, being the new kid. They were probably going to lock her in the building and she’d have to cut her way out before the shift ended and the truck train left. She’d been through several such rituals after joining the securit team in Frankfurt. It only stopped when someone new arrived and they targeted him instead.
One of the other harvesters appeared at the doorway. He was a smallish, wiry guy. Nadi didn’t know his name, no one who worked here ever seemed to introduce themselves. He indicated she should follow him. “There’s a vague upstairs.”
Nadi didn’t know what this meant, and she said so.
“Fucking what?” the man said incredulously. “Vague. Unhabitant. Squatter. Living here without permission.” He seemed exasperated she still didn’t understand. But she did understand. She just didn’t know what he expected her to do. Maybe people were running out of the building because they were worried the “vague” would attack them. That seemed logical.
“Okay,” she said. “So what? I’m not afraid of them.”
“Fuck’s sake”—and here he adopted a tone as if speaking to a simple child—“come with me and we can catch them and get ourselves a bo-nus.”
No one had told Nadi about bonuses for getting rid of anyone still living here. She wondered if it was legit. But it was very much within her skill set. She had done exactly that kind of work during events, moving on the homeless to keep the sponsorama clean and clear. So she went with him.
“We work together, yeah?” said the man. “Share the bonus if we get it.”
“Okay,” said Nadi. She’d be doing most of the work, being taller, stronger, and heavier than him. That was why he’d come back for her instead of tackling this person on his own and claiming the entire bonus for himself. Nadi wanted allies inside the plant, so she’d do this with him. She asked him what his name was.
“Gregg,” said the man, evidently irritated she was bringing up such trifles now.
“Pris. Nice to meet you.”
They started ascending the stairwell near the entrance of the restaurant. Then Nadi heard a noise coming from the kitchen she had just left. She called up her mental image of the kitchen layout and remembered there was a dumbwaiter for sending food to the upper floor. Someone had been waiting for everyone to leave the kitchen so they could use it to come down that way.
“They’re in there,” Nadi said, pointing toward the kitchen.
“Shit!” said Gregg and began running back the way they’d come. As he reached the door, it opened quick and hard, pinning him against the wall. His head hit it with a smack and he slumped to the floor, a thin line of blood following him down the cinders like a snake.
The young woman who had opened the door glanced up, saw Nadi blocking her way, and ran back inside the kitchen. Opening the door in Gregg’s face hadn’t been a convenient accident. She’d been waiting.
Nadi dashed after her. There was another door at the end of the kitchen that led to the storerooms, the manager’s office, and the staff toilets, but no sign of her quarry. When Nadi got to the rear entrance, she found the back door hanging off its hinges and rushed through it into an alley—
—which was deserted. No footsteps, no sign anything had been disturbed. The rain was still very heavy, lowering visibility, and someone could vanish into it quickly—but not that quickly.
Over the sound of the rain, Nadi heard a noise inside the restaurant. The fucker had done it again. She must’ve hidden in one of the other rooms. Smart: she’d calculated that in a straight chase Nadi would catch up with her, so was trying some misdirection to give herself the advantage.
Nadi returned to the kitchen, where she found the door that led through to the restaurant swinging. She heard Gregg cry out in pain. The pattern of events was easy to read: the woman had run back through the kitchen, encountered Gregg again, and assaulted him again.
As Nadi burst onto the restaurant floor, the woman was trying to dodge around piles of debris—she was running in an odd way, as if she’d injured her leg. Nadi raced across the floor, her long strides eating up the distance in a couple of seconds. Nadi was going to reach her before she reached the exit. The woman obviously realized this because she stopped, turned on her heel, and pointed a small, rusted flick knife at Nadi.
Nadi also stopped. The woman was much younger than she’d initially thought—fifteen, sixteen perhaps. She was also pregnant—she looked to be about seven months, but she could be further along and malnourished. Her face was grubby, her eyes were hard. She smelled terrible.
“Drop it,” Nadi said. She’d done this a hundred times and always started by giving them fair warning. If they had a weapon and you didn’t, they usually thought they had the upper hand and wouldn’t want to give it up, but there was a chance you could save yourself the trouble of disarming them. It also gave you a moment to size up the situation, and you could tell a lot from how they reacted: some were scornful, others would assess their chances. This girl seemed angry, either with Nadi for cornering her or, more likely, herself for getting cornered.
The girl glared defiantly and brandished the knife at Nadi. The sequence of moves that would deal with the situation opened up smoothly in Nadi’s mind, and then all she had to do was make them. She took a diagonal step to make the angle of attack awkward. The girl tried to plunge the knife sideways, which was predictable. Nadi was ready and punched her hard in the elbow. (Most people aimed for the obvious target of the head or the larger target of the torso, but elbows and kneecaps were excellent weak points if you could land the blow accurately: painful and any injury to them inhibited movement.) The girl cried in pain but didn’t drop the knife. Nadi used her other hand to grab the girl’s wrist and then brought her fist down on the girl’s shoulder. The girl yelled incoherently but still didn’t drop the knife. Nadi pushed her backward and slammed her hand into the frame of the door.
Finally the knife fell.
Nadi felt satisfied. She’d subdued the target without breaking any bones. More importantly in this case, she had not struck anywhere near her belly.
The girl looked up at Nadi furiously, tears welling in her eyes.
“You shouldn’t be living here,” Nadi told her. “It’s not good for you or the baby. What are you eating?”
The girl spat in Nadi’s face.
Nadi wiped it away with her sleeve and pointed to the girl’s belly. “If the kid’s healthy, you could sell it. Lots of people with money want one, not enough to go around.”
The girl gave a bitter laugh. “No one here would ever let someone take their kid. Not after what you did to us.”
“Me?”
“You’re Oakseed.”
“Yeah, I know. What did we do?”
Before the girl could answer, the other employees who’d been clearing the restaurant with Nadi appeared. They’d brought a securit, who cuffed the girl.
“You claiming the bonus for this one?” the securit asked Nadi.
Nadi pointed at Gregg, who sat on one of the restaurant’s few intact chairs while he dabbed at his bleeding skull with a rag. “He helped. We did it together.”
Gregg looked up. “Sorry, what? We did what together?”
“You helped catch this unhabitant?” said the securit.
“Oh yes,” said Gregg. “Absolutely, we both—Yes.”
17
FAMOUS BEACH BALL
Kline caught the clockwise overline carriage round the east side of London and down to the NiZCO corpurbation, walked up to the rooms where Arlo and Drienne were staying, and knocked on the door. He could hear their bickering voices coming from inside.
Arlo came to the door, opened it just enough to see out, and didn’t invite Kline in.
“Sorry,” Arlo said. “Could you come back in half an hour?”
“What?” said Kline. “I told you I was coming—”
“Yeah, I know—”
“It’s just taken me almost an hour to get here—”
“I know, I know—”
“How are you not ready? Seriously—”
“Who are you talking to?” said Drienne from somewhere inside the apartment.
“Sorry,” Arlo said to Kline, “we’re just having a tiny problem.”
“Is it someone who knows me?” said Drienne. “Can they help?”
“Please,” Arlo continued, ignoring her. “She’ll be fine—she just needs a bit of time.”
“What’s wrong with her?” asked Kline.
“Nothing!” said Arlo brightly.
Drienne’s face appeared over Arlo’s shoulder, glaring at Kline. “Oh it’s you,” she said. “You know a lot of shit you don’t say. I bet you know me.”
Arlo put his arm across to stop Drienne walking through the doorway. “I think you should lie down,” he told her in a mild voice.
“I bet you’re involved,” Drienne said, still addressing Kline. “You’ve been involved all along.”
Arlo pushed himself in front of Drienne and said to Kline, “Sorry—half an hour, she’ll be fine.” Then he closed the door.
Kline lingered outside the door for a moment, unsure how to react. He could hear Drienne in there, speaking loudly and sharply, and he wanted to know what was going on. He needed to know, it was wired into him, and he wanted to hammer on the door and demand answers. But sometimes the way to get to the bottom of these matters was not to push. If you pushed, they only hid it more. So he went down to a coffeehouse on the ground floor of the block and bought a dish of sweet-and-salted beans and a coffee. He ate and drank these slowly, and then returned to the apartment. The moment thirty minutes were up, he knocked on the door again.
This time Drienne answered. “Hi—sorry about that, I wasn’t feeling well. It’s a travel thing.”
“A travel thing,” said Kline.
“Yes.”
“But you’re all right now?”
“Fine, yes. Come in.”
Drienne seemed genial and welcoming, and it was impossible to relate her manner now to the person who’d spoken to him before. Arlo greeted Kline and apologized, and he and Drienne both acted like the whole incident was trivial and embarrassing. Kline had a job to do here, and he would do it, but he would not simply leave this hanging.
Before leaving Vancouver, Loren had made their way into RookDivest’s system and ensured the debranding of Kentish Cyc was made super-low priority. This meant RookDivest wouldn’t send their own people in to do the job anytime soon. Now Kline needed to send notice to Kentish Cyc that two debranders from RookDivest would be coming to work on the plant at 18:00 on Friday. The evening shift was likely to have the least xec oversight, especially with the team being two xecs down. For security reasons the plant would require at least twenty-four hours’ notice, but Mia had said to give them barely any more than that—the less time passed between Kentish Cyc learning the visit was imminent and the visit actually taking place, the less time there was for something to happen to reveal the subterfuge.
Kline had his terminal with him, which also contained a spoof of RookDivest’s portal. When he logged his request with Kentish Cyc, it appeared to the plant’s system that it was being routed via RookDivest’s offices in Boston. This was the main reason he’d come over to NiZCO to do this: had he done it from his rooms near the plant, the system might have spotted that the connection was being made from within the corpurbation. Arlo and Drienne then connected to the spoof portal with their alt-id slates and told the system they were coming. The plant’s security system recorded their physical form, which it would use to identify them on arrival. A notification was sent to the plant’s management.
They waited a few minutes, with Kline poised to intervene if there was any pushback from the plant. He was prepared to pose as a RookDivest employee, intercept the contact, and smooth things over. But they duly received an acknowledgment from an actual human, saying they looked forward to welcoming Annie Clarke and Roland Fernandes to the plant, with no follow-up queries. The whole process took no more than ten minutes, and then Kline packed the terminal away.
At Drienne’s suggestion, the crew had agreed to convene at her apartment for one last meeting tonight at 8:00 P.M. Kline felt it was a bad and unnecessary idea, but Mia approved, so it was happening. That was a little over three hours away. Drienne declared she was still wiped from yesterday’s flight and was going to have a nap, and went to the bedroom.
“Yeah,” Arlo said to Kline, “I might actually do the same, so—”
“What was that about before?” said Kline in a lowered voice.
Arlo exhaled heavily. “Don’t mention it to her, please—she doesn’t remember.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“It’s fine, she—” Arlo glanced toward the bedroom. “She suffers from duplisychosis.”
Kline raised his eyebrows. “Oh, is that all? It wasn’t on her record.”
“We kept it off her record.”
“And you didn’t tell Mia, or the rest of us, about this because…”
“Because it’s not a big deal—”
“Because Mia wouldn’t have taken her on.”
“It’ll be fine. I know how to keep her on the level.”
“Mm. It looks like it.”
“It came out just now because she was tired—look, trust me, it won’t be a problem. We’ve made the plan now, it’s too late to change it.”
“If it happens while she’s inside the plant, you need to know what you’re going to do about it.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. Please don’t tell Mia.”
Kline thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. I’ve registered you both, we need to go ahead, there’s no point changing anything now.”
“Thank you,” said Arlo, nodding gratefully. And then he said again that he wanted to take a nap before the meeting, and Kline took the hint and left. Kline didn’t particularly want to hang around NiZCOval for three hours, but he also didn’t want to travel back to his apartment and then back again. He returned to the coffeehouse.
* * *
NiZCO had been the frequent butt of jokes back home in Shanghai, not unlike the offensive jokes British people used to make about the Irish. To Oakseed’s brand ambassadors NiZCO was a byword for second-rate, cheap, tacky, behind the trends. They used to mock the ambassadors from NiZCO and delighted in stealing their customers.
Arlo recalled this as he shaved in the bathroom of the apartment after a shower. In the window, NiZCO’s “beach ball” logo caught his eye flapping on the banners that hung from the lampposts. (It wasn’t supposed to represent a beach ball, it was meant to represent NiZCO’s expansion in all directions across the globe, but it looked like a beach ball and everyone referred to it as the “beach ball.”) He considered the simple truth that NiZCO was still around, and Oakseed was not. So NiZCO must be doing something right. Maybe there was no real difference between the two companies. Arlo never thought he took the NiZCO jokes seriously, but now it seemed obvious those jokes had been inserted into the culture deliberately, to give the cynical retained workforce something to bond over, and he’d gone along with it. Oakseed had made a fool of him. As he gained more and more distance from the company, his whole existence increasingly seemed like a sick prank.
Arlo wanted to talk to Drienne about this, because for all she was better than him at resisting this stuff, he was sure she’d made those jokes too. He walked into the living room and started to speak, but quickly realized Drienne wasn’t there.
She’d been there when he’d gotten in the shower. They’d napped on the bed for an hour—well, Drienne had napped, Arlo had stared at the ceiling—and then she’d gone to lie on the sofa and play Goth Opera on her slate. He’d even heard her singing an aria not ten minutes ago.
He looked in the bedroom and the kitchen. Nothing. None of her stuff had gone.
In a terrified flurry he composed a message to Drienne, demanding to know where she was and telling her not to move. Then he pulled some clothes on and went out looking for her. Hopefully she hadn’t gone beyond the boundaries of NiZCOval—the overline carriages were so slow and infrequent, she probably hadn’t. But what if she’d had another episode and just wandered away?
She wasn’t at the overline platform and the last carriage departed twenty-seven minutes ago, so Arlo found it unlikely she’d gone that way. He walked the perimeter of NiZCOval and ducked inside several shops and eateries, resisting the temptation to ask anyone if they’d seen her—he didn’t want anyone in London to remember his face or hers, if he could help it—
Then he saw her. Sitting outside a garish little cocktail bar. With … Loren?
Loren caught Arlo’s eye and pointed him out to Drienne as he strode over. Drienne looked up and smiled at Arlo. “Ah, you decided to join us.”
“What?” he said. “I didn’t know you were here. I was looking for you, I was worried.”
“I sent you a message,” Drienne said, checking the back of her hand and tapping it. “Oh! Didn’t send. It wanted me to tone-check it.” She laughed. “Sorry, new slate. All the stupid defaults are on. Get yourself a drink.”
