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They did, but they weren’t happy. Seems they’d back-tracked the money—and I was good at hiding my tracks. Unfortunately, the man they had on staff was better.
“Hey!” I said, when the light of teleportation faded, and I found myself in an iron-barred cage.
“Hey, yourself.” The voice came from behind me, deep, male, and very nonchalant, and all I wanted to do was take down whoever owned it.
I turned.
“What is the meaning of this?” I asked, indicating the cage around me. “I paid the fee.”
The guy on the other side of the cage was big, as in he was taller than me and broader than me, and he didn’t look impressed.
“Money wasn’t yours to pay,” he said. “Company wanted it back.”
I stared at him in surprise, then said the first thing that came into my head.”
“But they didn’t know it was gone.”
And that was when he smiled, which was when I knew that I’d been had.
“Gotcha.” His smile said it all.
“You sonuva...”
He took a step toward the cage, and I took a step back, fetching up against the bars on the other side.
And that was when I got my third surprise for the day: the bars were electrified. Current jolted through me, and I jumped forward, stopping just short of the bars on the opposite side. The big guy just watched, head tilted to one side as I shimmied to a halt, and kept myself from touching the bars in front. I found my balance, settled myself in a comfortable stance, and waited.
It didn’t take him long to figure I was done talking.
“You’ve got some skills, girl.”
I folded my arms, and slouched a little. If the bars hadn’t been so zappy, I’d have leant on them and yawned. As it was, there was nowhere to lean, and I wasn’t either bored or tired. That didn’t stop me from trying to give an impression of both.
“So?”
I dropped my chin to my chest, and looked past my fringe at him.
“I could use someone with skills like that.”
I tilted my head, a little, so I could see him, more easily.
“Uh, huh.”
He came right up close to the bars, and stood in front of the cage.
“You have any plans?
There was something behind that question, a lot of something, and I didn’t like the idea that he knew a lot more about me than I wanted him to.
“Plans,” I said, and that was when he dropped the fourth bomb-shell of the day.
“Well, you haven’t asked me to call Odyssey, yet...”
I backed up, hit the bars a second time, and stepped smartly forward, again. I wanted to pace. I wanted to bolt. I wanted to do so many things, and I couldn’t do jack. I never did handle being helpless very well.
With nowhere to run, and the elephant in the room being given a name, I reached both hands through the bars, grabbed the man by the front of his shirt, and pulled him hard up against the cage.
Like I said, he was bigger than me—and he was stronger than me, and he was acting like he thought he was smarter than me, too. Well, I figured I’d see what happened when he got a dose of his own medicine. I might have laughed when the current arced through him, except he stretched an arm through the bars, and pulled me in close.
“Two,” he gritted through clenched teeth. “Canplay. Atthat. Game.”
But I was not going to be bested by some asshole that couldn’t live up to his business agreements. I focused on keeping my hands curled in his shirt, and wondered which one of us would let go first, which was when I discovered what it was like to grab a tiger by the tail, or a bear by its chest hair, whichever analogy fits this better.
He pulled away from the bars.
But he kept me pinned against them.
Bastard.
“Increase the current,” he said, and I let go of his shirt.
Just... Not. Fast. Enough.
“You son—”
Yeah, I lost the rest of that when the pain hit, and then the big brute unhooked his arm, and I managed to pull away from the bars. Of course, I tumbled into the ones on the other side of the cage, and then bounced forward, again. I was reaching out to ward off the cage in front of me, when the guy spoke again.
“And... Off.”
I grabbed hold of the bars, and lowered myself to my knees, resting my forehead against them.
“Had enough, yet?” he asked, and I nodded.
I was panting, my breath coming in harsh gasps, edged in sobs.
“Want us to call Odyssey?”
I shook my head.
“Care to tell me why?”
“No.”
Apparently, that was the wrong answer. He snapped his fingers, and current surged briefly up the bars.
I don’t know how long I was out for. I only know that I wasn’t in the cage when I woke up. Beside me, someone moved—and that was all it took. I pushed away from them before my eyes were fully open, before I had registered the light sheet covering me, before I worked out I was dressed in nothing but my bare skin.
“Sonuva—”
“You say that a lot,” said the man I’d seen outside the cage, as I got tangled in the sheet and fell off the bed.
He didn’t try to catch me, just watched me fall, wincing as I hit the deck.
“I’m gonna take it you don’t mean anything by it.”
I lay on the floor, looking under the bed at his feet. He was sitting on a chair, and he hadn’t shifted. I pulled the sheet close around me, and sucked air between my teeth, as bones grated in my wrist.
“I take it that’s not a happy sound,” he said, as I rolled carefully to my knees, cradling my forearm against my chest.
He waited, which I know, now, was nothing short of a miracle. Mack is not a patient man. Back then, though, I didn’t know squat, and I didn’t know his name. I pushed slowly to my feet, using the bed for support.
“What do you want?” I asked, leaning on the thin frame sticking out of the wall.
I watched as he noted the way I was holding my arm, even as I tried to keep the sheet around me. He probably saw a change in the color of my face, too. I don’t know. There wasn’t a mirror, but I reckon I went several shades of grey with the pain.
Either way, he ignored my question, and came around the bed to scoop me into his arms. I was a bit surprised when he held the sheet around me, more than unnerved when he carried me past the bed to the door.
“Where are we going?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions for someone in your position.”
“Someone in my what?”
Normally, I’d have fought to get free, but I hurt. My wrist really hurt, and the rest of me felt like I’d gone ten rounds with a bull-dozer... or maybe Ax on an exceptionally bad day. The guy carrying me looked at me, serious-faced, and just a bit cross.
“Well, according to the official reports, you’re dead. Drowned in a sewerage pond, or some such. Nice job, by the way. And then there’s the matter of our fee; we don’t accept stolen funds.”
I stiffened at that, and he stopped.
“What? You gonna try and tell me the money you paid us wasn’t stolen?”
I shook my head, wondered exactly what he was planning on doing about it.
“Good, because Tens don’t like being called a liar.”
Whoever Tens was, I didn’t expect he would. I waited, and the man started walking again.
“Care to tell me why you don’t want to work for Odyssey, anymore?”
I stared at him.
“No.”
It was worth a try, and it made him smile. It was not a happy smile, and it worried me. He stopped and turned toward the nearest door, nudging it open with his boot.
“Gonna have to tell me, some time,” he said, then lifted his head and shouted into the room. “Oskar! She fell out of bed.”
The man that appeared in the doorway at the end of the room glared at him.
“Well, of course she did, Mack. What did you do? Push her out?”
I stared at the face above me, and then turned my head to look more closely at the man sassing it.
“No. I moved.”
“Let me guess: she was just waking up, you were sitting beside the bed, you moved and startled her, and she went over the other side.”
“Something like that.”
“I told you to leave her in the med box.”
I felt my eyes widen. He had? Wait. I’d been in a med box? On being greeted with silence, the doc sighed, and started again.
“What did she do?”
“Looks like she broke her wrist.”
“Bring her through.”
“Mack, huh?” Even to me, my voice sounded tired and creaky.
“Yup.”
“Is there any more to it?”
“To what, my name?”
“Yeah.”
He dumped me down on a hard, metal surface.
“Mack will do.”
“Give me your arm.” The doc.
I watched as he took my forearm and laid it on the metal top of a nearby table. He ran a scanner over it, keeping an eye on the monitor beside him as he did so, and then he ran the scanner over the rest of me.
“Huh,” he said, and Mack moved around to stand beside him.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the screen
“Looks like some sort of tracking beacon.”
“Is it live?”
“Wasn’t, until the scan hit it.”
And Mack lifted his head, his eyes taking on a far-away look.
“Tens,” he said, speaking out loud, although he probably didn’t have to. “We’ve got a tracker on board. Jam us, and then get your ass down here.”
He winced, as though someone was shouting in his head, which, I guess was pretty much right, and then he came and sat back down beside me. He was still sitting beside me, when Tens burst through the door, a short time later.
“And how in Hades is that thing live, after the juicing it got?” Tens wanted to know.
By that stage, Doc Oskar had sat my forearm in a nanite bath, and Mack was sitting on the edge of the bed, one great forearm resting across the top of my chest, his hand holding my injured arm in place.
Tens took one look at us, and glared at Mack.
“You have got to stop breaking the new staff,” he said, before turning to the doc. “Show me.”
It might have been funny, if I didn’t hurt so much.
