Zoey blinked. She had lost consciousness. She found herself lying in a pile of something somewhat soft but scratchy and for the moment, couldn’t remember how she got there. She was staring up at the stars, the sounds of a parade all around her. She was in unbelievable pain.
Ah, now she remembered.
Dirk Vikerness, who it turned out was absolutely alive, had grabbed her by the neck, picked her up, and thrown her like it was an Olympic event. Zoey sat up on her elbows and found she was sitting in a huge pile of fake money. She had landed on the next float down from the Chobb cannibalism scene—if she’d missed and landed on the pavement, she’d likely have split her head open (she didn’t know if this meant Vikerness had failed or succeeded with his throw). She sat up fully and realized that, in fact, she had landed just seconds ago—everyone nearby was staring, trying to comprehend what in the hell had just happened.
She made eye contact with a mostly naked Asian woman and said, “Hi.”
Zoey tried to get to her feet in the waist-deep cash pool and immediately stumbled. She didn’t seem to have use of her left arm or right leg and the back of her neck was wet with what she was pretty sure was blood. She’d banged it off of the edge, or something, when she landed. The Bonobo mask had fallen off at some point.
She heard a commotion from street level and knew that Vikerness was coming, would hop up here with her within seconds. She trudged through the drifts of fake money and looked back, for the first time registering the float she was on.
It was decorated to be an amazingly lavish bathroom, more ostentatious than anything in her estate, or anything she’d ever install there. Zoey had landed in a giant golden hot tub that could probably accommodate twenty people, full of bundled cash instead of water. Across from Zoey was a naked animatronic sex doll with a Zoey Ashe black-and-blue wig. It was mechanically grabbing handfuls of the cash and “washing” with it, rubbing it around its chest and neck. Standing around the tub were four female slaves, all in filthy rags that barely covered their privates, in ankle and neck shackles. They were actual women and had been fanning “Zoey” and acting like they were feeding her grapes.
She didn’t need the backstory explained for this one. She suspected the parade spectators didn’t, either.
Arthur Livingston, Zoey’s father, had for years trafficked women from all over the world. He gave them safe passage to the USA in exchange for their services, sex work jobs they agreed to only in the sense that the alternative was starving in a refugee camp back home. Many of those women were still in Zoey’s employ, because when Zoey had demanded they be freed, Will carefully explained that these women were not prisoners, that they had no other skills and would simply be snapped up by one of the city’s other brothels or, worse, street pimps. Their new bosses would likely be men, likely be less generous with the pay, likely make less effort to keep them safe. They had nowhere else to go.
Zoey had told Will that she’d only agree on the condition that they were given time and money to get trained in something else, to do sales or coding or … something. He’d explained that they already had those programs, that Arthur had said the same toward the end of his life, but few took advantage due to language barriers, or the burden of childcare, or just not seeing the point in training for something that ultimately would pay less money. Words on top of words, the mortar keeping the bricks of the status quo locked into place. And, eventually, Zoey just dropped the issue. The same as her father had.
She yelled to the four slave girls, who were presumably just local actresses or models, “RUN! Get off the float!”
Zoey tried to do this herself, but there was Dirk Vikerness now, climbing onto the float with them. The girls just stared.
Zoey saw his bare shoulders … and there were the surgery scars. When he was rushed away to get help for his stabbed eyeball, he’d apparently decided to get an upgrade while he was in the shop.
Zoey grabbed her necklace and said, “Stop!”
He did not stop. Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t. Still, she tried a string of similar words. No effect.
The giant man stepped forward and then, projecting his voice for the crowd, said to Zoey, “When you die, this city will throw a party. And I think you know it.”
“Is my mother safe?”
He ignored this question, as Zoey had suspected he would. She was still standing in the tub of money, and actually wasn’t totally sure she could lift her dead leg up over the lip. She was trying to stand in a way that would not reveal to him that at least two of her limbs now didn’t work.
“As you can see,” he said, in a tone that suggested a rehearsed line, “I have come back from the grave, stronger than before. When you see your father, thank him for bringing his invention into the world.”
Dirk Vikerness lifted up his eye patch, and Zoey was sure that what she would find there was some kind of laser or plasma pulse thing embedded in the eye socket, something that would fire a beam and incinerate her.
“GO! GET OFF HERE!” she yelled to the four servant girls.
This time they listened, though they still didn’t seem to grasp the severity of the situation. Everyone seemed to suspect this might still be part of the performance. They pulled free of their prop manacles and jumped ship.
Zoey tried to climb over the lip of the tub, struggling to lift her uncooperative leg. She found herself staring at the rows of spectators as they passed. To the tourists, this all must have looked like some kind of highly experimental theater.
Dirk Vikerness put his hands on his hips and Zoey tried to prepare herself to dive away from whatever flashed out of the man’s replacement eye. Instead, his yellow codpiece opened. Out from it flew a length of thin chain, which ended in a wicked bloom of sharp spikes. The chain curled up into the air like a whip and then whooshed down in a blur, making impact right in the center of the tub.
There was a crash of blue energy and a shockwave that split the float in half, spraying a cloud of fake money and animatronic Zoey limbs in every direction. Zoey tumbled over the lip of the tub, then fell off of the float entirely. The float itself skidded to a stop, the axels shattered from the impact of Dirk Vikerness’s electrified crotch whip. The crowd went wild, now certain this was part of the act. This kind of thing didn’t actually happen to people, right?
Zoey landed hard on the pavement and struggled to suck in air. The wind had been knocked out of her. She tried to get up, and found she could not. Her limbs physically wouldn’t respond to her commands, but also … she just couldn’t. There was no energy inside her. Battery Discharge Error.
She lay there, looking up at the sky.
Someone in the crowd said, “Hey, I think that’s her!”
Oh, well, it wasn’t really a stealth mission anymore. Or any kind of mission.
“Yep, it’s me,” she muttered to herself. “Are you enjoying the parade?”
She knew Vikerness was coming. She knew he could splatter her like a beetle. And still she lay there, listening to the rumbling crowd, staring up at the stars, funny money wafting down like a ticker-tape parade.
And in that moment, she gave up.