Shadowrun, page 34
Eight years old, at Victoria station. They were all supposed to go on holiday in France, but her parents had gotten some urgent phone call while they waited for the Tube. Her dad told her to wait there, and he and her mum both wheeled their luggage off to go—well, to go somewhere. Lou never saw them again. The luggage she was sitting on, that was the first thing someone stole from her. And later that night, she’d found an unoccupied space behind a bin in a nearby alley and used her teddy bear, Mr. Cotton Cottington, as a pillow. She liked to fancy that her parents were secretly MI6 agents that had gotten called away on some secret, hush-hush business at the last minute, and they had died heroically for Queen and Country.
She’d never told anyone that story, not even Skint. How in the bloody hell did this card know about the most traumatic moment in her entire life? Had to be a trick.
Grimacing, she turned the card back over and flipped it again, but the same angry, accusing face of Eloise Smith glared daggers back at her. Why’d you abandon me?! the eyes accused. You said you’d be right back!
Why?
Why?
Lou fell back against the wall and wept at the memory.
Police sirens went off nearby, but she didn’t care if they fingered her this time. She knuckled her eyes dry and stomped around the corner, holding the case open for Starling and Rook to see.
“What the bloody fragging hell is this?”
But Starling’s eyes stared at nothing. Blood—too much blood—stained the alley floor. Rook was taking cover behind the bin, trading shots with unseen foes somewhere out on the street. Lou flinched at ricochets that zinged and zanged off the masonry behind her.
“Geddown!” Rook roared at her.
Lou did. Sprays of cinderblock and brick from more missed shots showered her as she snapped the case shut and shoved it deep into her inside coat pocket.
“No time to explain!” Rook blind-fired a few rounds around the bin. “Just stay down! Gaaaah! Royce, where the frag are you?”
Her pickpocket instinct told her to turn and scarper. The purse she could pawn for enough to feed her mates for months—but this Rook bloke was the only one who knew why there was a card with her face in her pocket, maybe even why her parents vanished. If he died…
On her belly in the disgusting alley, she army-crawled until she could carefully peek around the bin on the other side from where Rook hunkered. Across the street, two shadowed figures hid behind pushed-over tables and strewn designer clothes.
Lou fixated on one of them, on the snub-nosed submachine gun spraying down the alley. It was big—bigger than anything she’d ever tried to tug with her crude magic before—but if one of those bullets somehow found her—
Reality vanished around her, until the assailants glowed like ethereal swirls of color.
Try or die.
“Come to mummy,” she whispered. Please.
And she tugged.
To her surprise, the weapon wrenched free and cartwheeled out into the street, far from the shooter’s reach.
“Nice one, kiddo!” Rook congratulated. He took careful laser-sight aim across the street, fired a single round. An instantaneous scarlet spray burst from the second shooter’s head, and he collapsed backward into the night.
Lou glanced up, past the tattered remains of the clothing drive, to see two human men in long gray coats descend the temple steps. They looked like rich wanks, just like Starling and Rook had, only something about them filled her with a sense of utter dread, a black feeling that went even beyond that moment when she first realized her parents weren’t coming back for her. These men walked with a purpose, neither fast nor slow, hands down at their sides, brows dark, somehow not caring that a firefight had just happened out here in the street. And they approached, one sure step at a time.
Cars screeched to a halt as the newcomers approached undeterred by traffic.
Lou’s coat pocket pulsed with warmth.
Rook’s ejected magazine clattered onto the cement, and he jammed a fresh one home. Two shots aimed across the street. Both bounced away, as though the enemy pair were protected by some kind of magic bubble.
“Oh, frag me!” Rook pounded a fist on the bin, ringing the whole thing like Big Ben. “Damn it all to bloody hell, Starling! Why’d you have to go and die on me now?”
He turned to Lou. The haunted look of terrified desperation on his face somehow even reached his damaged cybereye. “Run!” he hissed.
He’d just gotten the warning out when his whole body shuddered in a hideous light show of electricity, as though he’d jammed a fork into a light socket, and he collapsed against the bin, now reeking of burned-out electronics and charred meat.
Lou turned and ran down the alley without sparing a glance behind her. She ran like her own insignificant life depended on it.
Those two, they were after the case pulsing with heat in her pocket. The case Starling and Rook had died for, the case holding some secret from her past. Survival instinct told her that handing over the case or simply abandoning it in the alley wouldn’t make them stop chasing her. She had committed some mortal sin just for having seen it. She had to get away, had to get away…
At the t, she veered right and ran like police dogs were after her.
The alley mouth, leading onto some side street, loomed ahead, a seeming football pitch’s length away. If she could just make it…what then? They’d follow her out onto the street, follow her around every corner until they had what they wanted. But if Rook couldn’t stop them, what chance did she have?
The metal casing of the pocketed grenade slapped against her side with every step. Without fully thinking it through, Lou clenched the cylinder with all of her fingers, and yanked the pin with her thumb, squeezing the grenade’s spoon tight so the explosive wouldn’t go off in her pocket. Then, she turned in mid-stride and underhanded the grenade to roll it along the cement without bouncing. With any luck, the shadows would mask its approach and blast those scary goons to a pulp.
She covered her ears and started counting under her breath, like folks did in the movies:
One…
Two…
Thr—
The blast rocked the whole alley, nearly threw Lou off balance from the deafening thunderclap and sudden storm of dust and blinding white showering her from behind. She slammed her right shoulder into the unmoving brick wall of another rubbish bin to her right—that’d leave a right nasty bruise—but kept on going, praying her gamble had paid off.
A fizzling cloud of white smoke hung in the air behind her. The two lodge goons stepped right through it, their eyes deadened and in shadow, smoke whirling around them like demons summoned from hell. And she saw their lips moving, starting to chant something not-quite Queen’s English—
A piercing screech from beyond the alley mouth diverted her attention just as a white car careened to a burnt-rubber halt on the sidewalk, blocking off her only exit. Both alley-facing car doors opened. Two suited men emerged with large, terrifying guns and trained them down the alley.
At her.
Guns in front. Magic behind.
Lou froze. Felt her heartbeat in her neck, in her ears.
The case was moving inside her pocket, wriggling to get free—
From the street came a high-pitched squeal, a flump sound—and a black limo smashed into both the parked car and the two gunmen with a sickening crunch of metal and bone. Broken glass and bodies littered the sidewalk.
The driver’s side window was already down, and a passenger door flew open, even though she saw no one inside to open it.
A dark-complected woman wearing a chauffeur’s cap stuck her head out the window. Cords and wires ran from the base of her skull to somewhere out of sight. “Kid!” she shouted, waving a pistol toward the open door. “I’m Royce. Get in! Hurry!”
Royce fired off a few shots—deafening at such close range—but Lou knew they’d do no good.
Two steps from the open door, something snagged Lou from behind.
Some unseen force was dragging her—no the case was being dragged, pulling her coat and her whole body across the cracked cement along with it. And farther down the alley, she saw the two silent men waiting to collect their prize.
Lou screamed and held onto the case with both hands, for fear it would tear clean through her all-too-threadbare coat. She couldn’t let them have it, couldn’t let them kill her—or worse. Images of hellish torture and demonic spirits flashed before her eyes.
Her gun was useless. The grenade was useless. All her pickpocketing cantrips were useless. Nothing could stop them.
Her shoulder throbbed.
Nothing but a brick wall.
All of her focus shifted to the rubbish bin, until her whole awareness became nothing but shifting unreal colors. The two magicians’ silhouettes and the magical thread dragging her toward them burned like radioactive fuel rods, too bright to look at directly. But she didn’t care about them. She zeroed in on the bin. Probably weighed a ton, but that didn’t matter. Magic—real magic—could do the impossible.
“Come to…mummy…” she whispered, barely able to hear herself over the drumming of her pulse.
The bin shot from one alley wall to the other as though it were made of crêpe paper, crushing the two magicians against the stonework with a resounding metal crunch.
Feeling as knackered as a wrung-out dishrag, Lou managed to pick herself up and stagger to the waiting limo without waiting to see whether her attackers had survived. The moment she got inside, she fell onto the seat, the world spinning into darkness as the car pulled away from the curb.
The limo door closing awoke her with a start.
The posh passenger compartment of Royce’s fancy limousine had been empty, but now an impeccably dressed woman slid into the seat across from her. She wore a friendly face and a forest-green pantsuit that had to cost as much, if not more, than Starling’s outfit. Metal bangles etched with intricate patterns decorated her wrists and neck, and she had an impeccable iridescent green manicure that shimmered in the dome light. Whoever this was, she was loaded. And a quick glimpse of her showed she burned with colors just as bright, if not brighter, than the two creepy magicians Lou had escaped from.
“Hello,” the woman said. She leaned back in her seat and poured some kind of adult drink from a minibar hidden in a side console. “I’m Ms. Johnson. Saint Louise, isn’t it?”
“How did you—”
“I monitored Starling and Rook’s progress during the extraction. They were trying to recover a dangerous magical artifact from a secret organization we call the Black Lodge. They’ve been using the Grand Lodge as a front for years. And it was a good thing you were there to help us out. Otherwise things may have gone…poorly. May I see it?”
Lou removed the case from her pocket and held onto it as though it was her last earthly possession. “What is this thing?”
“Did you look at it?”
She nodded.
“It’s a very special tarot card, one imbued with magic. May I?”
Lou swallowed and handed the case over.
Ms. Johnson snapped open the case. “Ah, the Five of Coins. This card shows you the moment where you were the most vulnerable, the most isolated. It is meant to show the root of your greatest weakness, but also your greatest strength. Seems you’ve been living on the street for awhile now, yes? Unless I’m mistaken, I imagine it showed you the first night you spent away from your folks?”
Something plucked at Lou’s insides. “How—how’d you know that?”
“I’m good at reading people,” Ms. Johnson said. “And I can tell you’re more than just a normal pickpocket. You’ve got some magic in your blood. More than you realize.”
Lou exhaled and hung her head. “Don’t matter if I do. I’m a street rat. Can’t afford to go to proper magic school. And I’ve got pals to look out for.”
Ms. Johnson smiled like she knew some secret. “You’re in luck, Saint Louise. Because the Draco Foundation can teach you all the magic you want to know. You’re still young, but you’d make a great addition to our team. You join us, maybe use your gift to help us find more of these cards…” She waved the case for emphasis. “And we might even be able to help you find your parents.”
Lou’s insides bubbled with delight. But then she thought about Skint, about all her mates waiting for her back at their bolt hole, hoping she’d come back with something—a new coat, a single glove, maybe a pound or two—something to last them the winter. This was an adult-sized world, and child-sized concerns didn’t matter.
Lou straightened in her seat and put on her best negotiating face, like she’d seen adults do. “I’ll do it, but under one condition.”
“Name it,” Ms. Johnson said, not even batting an eyelash.
“My mates, they’re all street rats like me, and I’m the one who takes care of ’em. I can’t just run off and abandon ’em. I wanna make sure they’re okay, do everything I can to help ’em out while I’m away.”
Ms. Johnson nodded. “All right. That can certainly be arranged.”
On the busy street corner, the afternoon London air tasted different somehow. It wasn’t just Lou’s appropriately sized respirator: its fresh, mildew-free filtration cartridge only gave a slight scent of plastic to each hit. She also caught a whiff of synthleather from her new jacket, but that wasn’t quite it either.
No, today she wasn’t just the leader and protector of a ragtag band of orphans, but something much, much more. And that shrank the whole adult-sized city into something far more manageable.
Skint hovered off to her left, sporting a healthy glow from his latest round of respiratory treatment. Gone was his threadbare coat and the shoes with the flapping sole that had nearly torn clean off. The Draco folks had provided Lou more than enough quid to buy all of her mates brand-new, high-quality threads and kicks that actually fit them for a change.
And instead of squatting, Lou’s mates now had not one but three different flats around the greater London area for all of them to share. According to Ms. Johnson’s reps, three potential boltholes was better than just one. Just in case things ever went south.
Because those new clothes, those nice roofs over their heads, they didn’t come free.
Lou inhaled again, glad for the clean respirator scent. “Okay, I’m sending some snaps to your commlink. Memorize ’em, and send ’em to the others when you get a chance.”
Skint was already like an old pro, nonchalantly staring at his cheap-but-new commlink as though absently perusing his text messages, like any normal kid might do.
Lou didn’t need to review the vast collection of known Masonic symbols and suspected Black Lodge emblems. She’d already gone over the images a dozen times. A hundred. Each one had burned into her mind until she could recite the list front to back and give a detailed explanation of each symbol and their known or suspected meaning.
“You or the others see any of these things anywhere,” she told him, “on someone’s ring, a bumper sticker, street graffiti—I wanna know about it. Tail ’em. Eavesdrop. Find out anything you can. And you call me.” She held up her own brand-spanking new commlink, an untraceable burner unit she’d been trained to wipe and ditch at a moment’s notice. “You run into any kind of trouble, you call me. Gangers. Fuzz. I don’t care. You call me. Got it? You think you’ve grown a tail, you bail and head for the nearest safe house. Got it?”
Skint nodded. He knew the deal. No one ever paid attention to street kids—which made them the perfect informants for Ms. Johnson’s little tarot project.
Lou was proud of all her mates, Skint especially. “All right, go do your thing. I’mma check in with you every few days. But until then…”
Concern flashed in the young ork’s eyes. “Where ya goin’, Saint Louise?”
“Me?” She looked down at her commlink and remembered the entry-level magic textbook the Draco folks had also loaded into the device’s memory. Not quite a full ride to King’s College, but it was a start. “I’m gonna go learn magic. Real magic.”
TROMPE L’OEIL
(6 of Cups, 7 of Cups, 8 of Cups, 4 of Coins)
CZ WRIGHT
The nearly empty store erupted in howls. Ed whipped his head around from the news feed to stare, gaping, at Lotus. His shock of black hair with purple ends gave him a permanent back-lit effect, but the glow of the trid feed behind him amplified it. “That’s you!”
“Yeah, yeah, this is what I was tellin’ you about—move over.” Lotus hopped up onto the checkout counter near Ed and sat, transfixed by the news feed.
The corner of the news feed—the corner dedicated to puff pieces—showed a perfect newscaster standing near Lotus, smiling and nodding while the crowd around them whooped and danced.
“Ever since I was a little girl, you know?” The Lotus on the screen was flushed and, the Lotus in the store recalled, a little drunk. “I prayed every night: just this once—just this year, and I’ll never ask for anything again—let me win the Lottery.”
“Prayed to win? That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” A plastic smile from the ’caster.
“No, see, my dad fragging obsessed over that grand prize money. On June first, we started eating Taco Temple every single meal of every single day during Lotto season. Every summer I can remember. I figured it out, once. It came to, like, 1,750 meals before I moved out. Odds were good that a given meal would have been a 3T Special. And yeah, I calculated for the fact that 3T didn’t start until fifteen years ago. It’s a lot of Taco Temple.”
“My, I can picture the baby bottle he must have fed you. It’s not a very pleasant image.” Har har har.
“Yeah, we bought so much Taco Temple, and he kept so many receipts and plastic tokens that Dad had to start cutting new space out of our house for them. He would have been that old crab ass ahead of you in line, demanding they print a paper receipt for him because he ‘needed it for his records,’ you know? Bookshelves all over the fragging place. Little paper notebooks all stacked up in a row, laid on top of the rows, and then just sort of stacked in front at the end. Fraggin’ ridiculous.”
