Alice has little difficulty finding her way back through the passageways beneath Mullane, reached via the secret underground exit from Klaws. She is headed for Trick’s workshop, retracing the route she took after escaping it. She has always had a gift for navigation: if she visits a place once, she is able to draw upon a vivid mental map and an infallible sense of direction. It’s almost as though she’s got a photographic memory.
As she steps into the narrow corridor outside the fight club, she closes the door behind her and has a look at the wall. When she first came by here, the door was all but invisible, and she would have had no means of opening it were it not for those guys happening to come out when they did. Now when she gazes at it through her lens, she can see the hidden door picked out in an overlay, the name of the premises stated above an input-request icon. If you know the password, you’re good to go.
She knows she could put out an APB and have Trick brought in if he is to be found at all, but the truth is she doesn’t want the Seguridad involved. Trick constitutes an asset she would like to keep to herself. Finding him without anyone else’s help is likely to prove difficult, but having a valuable contact who is not ultimately answerable to Ochoba makes it worth the effort.
The Seguridad would not be much help anyway, she reasons. She doesn’t know Trick’s real name and even if she did, she doubts it would show up in anybody’s lens in response to them looking him in the face.
If she’s being honest, she has no idea how she is going to track him down, but figures this is the obvious place to start. She wends her way back down the passageway, scanning the walls for more hidden entrances. She sees none, but the door to Trick’s lair is easily found on account of still being unrepaired since it got busted open. It remains slightly ajar, though there are no insignia or input icons overlaying it through her lens.
Out of curiosity, she switches from her FNG profile back to Wendy Goodfellow, the first one Trick gave her. Instantly the door becomes picked out in gold trace against the wall, a virtual doorknocker appearing in the centre.
Alice nudges the door further open, catching a glimpse of the chaotic scene she left behind, upturned tables and all manner of electronic debris scattered about the floor. Trick hasn’t been back, and neither has the cleaning service.
She takes a tentative step inside and something moves in swiftly from her right. In half a second she’s staring at the muzzle of a resin gun, Trick’s wary gaze looking along the barrel.
He’s got an electro-pulse in his left hand and not one but two flechette pistols hanging on his belt. He is looking a lot better prepared to deal with surprise visitors this time.
Alice holds up her hands.
“I’m alone,” she says.
Trick lowers the resin gun slowly, reluctantly. There are multiple swellings and contusions on his face, purples, reds and pinks glistening against the dark brown of his skin. One eye is almost closed, and despite the initial rapidity of his movement, he seems lopsided. He limps slightly as he shuffles backwards, beckoning her to step further inside. He seems physically tremulous too. Alice knows she’s looking at a man who has recently been tortured.
“What can I do for you?” he asks, his weary tone indicating that he has no intention of being helpful.
“Anything I ask,” she replies. “Unless you want a one-way ticket south. You were working for Nikki Freeman, weren’t you? Nobody dropped me off here before: you collected me from wherever that crate delivered me on the mag-line. She paid you to wipe my grabs.”
“And yet you ain’t here with a squad of Seguridad. So I’m guessing you can’t prove anything.”
“I can prove you hacked the central database. That would be more than enough to get you a jump seat. But I prefer the idea of keeping you here, where you can be useful. Trouble is, I’m not the only one who knows how useful. Who were they?”
Trick reels at the mere mention.
“Uh-uh. Client confidentiality,” he adds, unconvincingly.
“Clients, huh? I was there, remember? If they were clients, why did they abduct you?”
“They wanted my immediate attention. Beating the crap out of me got it for them. It also served to convey the importance with which they regarded their stipulation that I refrain from telling anyone what they needed me to do. I strongly intend to adhere. So if that’s what you came here for, you’re shit out of luck, because they scare me way more than you do.”
“How did you get away?”
“They let me go. They were finished with me.”
“If what they wanted was so secret, why did they let you walk?”
“Same reason you haven’t had me arrested. They might need me again.”
“They’re not the only dangerous company you’ve been keeping, though.”
Trick looks quizzically at her, not following.
“I forget you’ve been busy, not to mention you’ve had a few bangs on the head. You must have seen the feeds, though.”
“You mean Nikki?” he asks. “That she offed some goon who ran with Julio and then murdered that girl Giselle who worked out of Sin Garden? Yeah, it sounds like bullshit to me.”
“I can confirm first-hand that it’s true. I saw both bodies. I was in Nikki’s apartment: she ran because I saw Giselle lying strangled on her bed. The autopsy puts Giselle’s time of death during the period when I was conveniently out of Nikki’s way, strapped to your table.”
Trick leans against said table, wincing slightly as he aggravates one of his many injuries. He has a troubled look, like he can’t argue with what Alice is telling him but can’t quite believe her either.
“Nikki could use her fists when she needed to, but this shit makes no sense.”
“Nobody is a killer until they kill somebody.”
“See, that’s just it though. People don’t get murdered up here. Yeah, there’s rumours Seguridad covered up some things, made sure they weren’t classified as homicides, but we’re not talking about a whole lot of cases: not over all these years, these decades. People come here to escape the bad stuff. Sometimes they’re gonna fight, sometimes they’re gonna get crazy, but we don’t make it easy to kill each other on Seedee. There’s no guns. No real guns, anyway. All we got is stun restraint weapons and home-brew plastic dart shooters that we make in our fabricators. So much of what we do here is about keeping everybody safe. Keeping everybody alive.
“Nikki’s here fifteen years, part of this culture, keeping the peace. Okay, we both know she’s no angel, but keeping the peace nonetheless. Then suddenly she’s butchering some gangster and killing this girl in the space of two days? I ain’t buying it.”
“There’s a way you could help me find out for sure. That’s why I came here.”
Trick looks sceptical, but she knows he’s intrigued. They also both know she has him over a barrel.
“You can amend the CDB. Does that mean you could access someone else’s private grabs? Theoretically,” she adds, to let him know she isn’t asking him to incriminate himself.
“No. It’s impossible.”
“Says the guy who told me only a god could hack the CDB. You were able to wipe my grabs for Nikki, so I’m assuming you could have copied them too.”
“I had first-hand access to your unit. I couldn’t have done it remotely. I can exploit loopholes in the part of the database governing how an individual is identified, but clearance levels are a tougher beast. I can’t give you a fake profile with clearance levels above your own, for instance, and I can’t access profiles above my clearance level. But that isn’t the problem. The reason grabs are perfectly protected is that individual profiles can only be accessed by a single user. Two people can’t log into one account simultaneously. If you tried, you would get like what they used to call a busy line.”
“You’re saying you were able to mess with my grabs because I was disconnected from the system at the time? I wasn’t using the line?”
“Correct.”
“So could you remotely access a low-clearance profile as long as the person isn’t using it?”
“In theory. Except that nobody is ever not using it. People are permanently connected.”
“Dead people aren’t.”
It takes about an hour. Trick enters a state of trance-like concentration, occasionally muttering with frustration or satisfaction, then suddenly Dev Korlakian appears as one of Alice’s available profiles. She copies the grabación to her local cache, then deletes the original, so that she has sole control of the file. Until she knows what it shows, she doesn’t want Trick accessing Korlakian’s profile later and viewing it for himself.
“Got what you wanted?” he asks.
“I’m about to find out.”
She takes a seat against a wall and begins running the grab.
It’s always jarring, the view from inside someone else’s head, especially when you’re looking at it double-lens, cranked to maximum opacity. The outside world disappears and is replaced with another person’s remembered reality, which can feel creepy enough at the best of times. There is a temptation to sub-frame the image and reduce the audio, in order to provide the comfort of distance, but Alice doesn’t want to miss any potential clues. Also, if the killer does turn out to be Nikki Freeman, she doesn’t want to flinch from the reality, so having it thrust at her this way would make the truth impossible to ignore.
Alice is glad she took a seat before she set the grab running, as the moment it starts, everything in her vision lurches and swirls. It shows the view as Omega recoils from a blow, tumbling and clattering against a wall before hitting the floor.
Blood runs into one eye, causing it to close. An arm comes up to wipe it, tattoos on the forearm. Omega is reeling but this moment is also a lull in the assault, and he recognises it as such: his only chance to take action before the next wave. Alice sees activity play on his overlay. He is trying to broadcast. He is calling out, breathless, desperate.
“Help me. Anybody. Please. Get to this location as fast as you can.”
Something moves past, a pair of legs, too quick to focus on any detail.
“Please. Please.”
It’s not clear at this point whether he is saying this for broadcast or saying it to his assailant. Nobody is listening, however. The overlay warns that no signals are getting out.
The view shunts suddenly, like he is being dragged. A hand appears, reaching for his forehead, pressing down, holding it in place. Alice hears a metal clunk that she recognises. He is being restrained.
She hears more clunks, but all she sees, all Omega sees, is the ceiling, grey and blank. He can turn his head left and right a little, but can’t look up or down.
Activity on the overlay indicates one of his hands is working the lens: hurried, desperate, making slips and mistakes. He is trying to access the sharing protocols. The recording is stored locally, and he must know it will upload the moment it gets clear of whatever is blocking the signal. He’s trying to tag it so that it can be accessed by his comrades.
In his panic, he’s gone into the wrong menu sector and the only option visible is to allocate legacy status, meaning the grab would be shared with his named executor.
It’s his last act of free will, the only one open to him.
There is movement, the ceiling coming closer. Whatever he is strapped to is being elevated: a hydraulic gurney, perhaps. It was a stretcher, now it’s a table.
An operating table.
Alice isn’t sure she can watch any more, but she knows she must. She slides down the opacity just for a moment, reminding herself where she is by way of minor respite. She knows he is going to be tortured. She recalls the bag of skin, wonders with a shudder at what point he was flayed.
He is choking, breathless from the effort of his screams, and above it Alice hears another voice. His killer is speaking to him. It is a whisper, barely audible over his groaning and panting, but unmistakably the voice of a woman.
“Let’s talk about Project Sentinel,” she says.
A shadow passes over the field of view. A laser scalpel is held up so that Korlakian is forced to view it. Then the killer leans over, staring at her victim.
Which is when Alice sees her own face looking back.