THE SURFACE—NORTHAM
MANHATTAN/CENTRAL PARK ZOO OUTLIER TOURIST REGION
Drow’s brief flirtation with jogging had had an acrimonious breakup with his knee joints a good twenty years before. Attempting to run now should have been begging for an extended stay in an orthopedic ward …
… except, of course, I’m #triaged. No joint replacements for Daddy …
When Allure tried to chase Frankie Barnes off the side of the building, Drow found himself lunging forward. His hand snaked out, acting on long-forgotten reflexes. He grabbed her arm … and held on.
It was only a moment, long enough to keep her from getting out on the ledge herself, long enough for Frankie to clamber into the cherry picker Crane had sent for her.
Allure broke free. Knocked Drow on his ass with an enthusiastic but clumsy right cross.
Then Robin lunged in, snarling, catching her trouser leg.
I can’t believe that worked.
It’s the Superhoomin.
Allure snatched up a scalpel, whirling to face Robin.
Drow dialed up the dose …
… and his pulse, and his blood pressure …
… he scrambled to his feet.
“Mitts off the dog!” He took another blow but managed not to fall. Catching Allure by the arms again, he spun her—less by design than by brute force, dumping her and her scalpel into the pod that had been vacated by an elder who was, even now, cringing by the window.
Drow slammed the lid, almost catching Allure’s fingers.
“Saints be fucked,” he panted. He could hear his pulse, bass drum hammering his temples. Allure was hitting the off beats, pounding on the pod from inside. “Googirl, bring me that sash. Rope. Curtain pull.”
Robin nosed it over to him, a long velvet rope. Drow wound it into the pod’s safety lock, clumsily sealing it.
“Let me out!”
“Won’t hold long,” he said. “She didn’t hurt you, did she, baby?”
Wag, wag, wag. Bright eyes. He choked on a sob, spat it up with a bit of bile.
A toon of Allure appeared outside the pod. “You!” she bellowed at the elder.
Drow got moving, hustling the elder out of their own private room, locking that down, too. “Find somewhere to sit this out,” he advised, fleeing for the emergency exit.
More stairs.
He still had a bad feeling about down.
Could be a paranoid fantasy. Indecision shimmered, vibrato on his skin. The sweat on his temples sizzled, like hot oil.
“Come on, Robin, up we go.” They took the stairs at a trot … and ran right back into the Setback, at some point on the Neverending Tour.
Drow blinked at the hallucination of himself aglow on smartdrugs, singing his new artstorm to scarecrows.
“We still had poverty and homelessness then,” he started to say, before he remembered Frankie had left him.
Writing, singing, having a screaming fit during one show, when an audience member got onstage and hugged me …
Everyone back then was wild-eyed and desperate, gigging on carbon-banking ops, fighting to roll back the excesses of the past. Slaving away, hungry. The calorie ration, everywhere but Beijing, had dropped to 900 a day.
The scene shifted. He was in a lineup in blistering sun, daily queue for a half-liter of purified water. Then he heard some @bloodhound claim that drone-mounted guns—with bullets, not tranqs—had been deployed to wipe out evacuation resisters in Dayton.
Footage or it didn’t happen. Drow stepped out of the water line and made, on foot …
… up the stairs …
… no, for Ohio. He wrote and uploaded songs on the way. He lost his shoes, wrecked his feet.
His dads had been health-crazed. They’d raised him to tend his body like a church. Then Tala Weston had tattooed crawling white maggots and rot all over him. Ever after, the idea had lurked: if he mortified, if he scraped, burned, and blistered enough skin off, he’d find baby-fresh Drow underneath.
He found Dayton in the care of strippers, undergoing orderly evac and shrink-wrap. There was no sign of drone-slaughtered bodies. He hallucinated mass graves all the same, piled corpses covered in flies.
Someone licked his face, dispersing old nightmares. Robin.
Dayton had been Drow’s first @bloodhound fail. Instead of footage, he got fingerprinted. Deputized quarantine-enforcement giggers marched Drow to a locked car, hosed him down, tested his blood, and then sent him all in one shot—no meds, no food, no piss breaks—to Kingston Penitentiary for what turned out to be his first stretch.
Smartdrugs were a hazy area of legality by then—everything was getting deregulated. Instead, they got him for being a @hoaxer and encroaching on reclamation zones.
“Some people never learn,” he muttered now, flying on his new Superhoomin wings, practically tap-dancing into the roof garden, a glassed-in greenhouse filled with life: lavish cushion of lawn, a fat pair of Canada geese to crop same, flower beds, apiary, trees, benches, and smartchair berths, all pointed at Old Central Park.
A toon of Tala Weston, the Cannibal Queen herself, arose from a foam of hallucinated larvae. She was wearing a gymnastics uniform. Looked about fourteen.
“Looking for me, handsome?”
Drow felt ashamed, as he sometimes did, of his body: old, unshaven, smelly, covered in white ink and the scars from all the times when he’d been cutting.
She had drugged him, tattooed him, molested him. She’d convinced him to experiment with chemotherapy, and hacked Crane.
Memories shimmered, more or less in order, slivers of transcript and visuals, things he’d told the police, things his lawyers and minions had failed to pull out of the still-new, still-fallible Haystack.
But these weren’t memories, not exactly. They were footage. Proof of an illegal Chamber archive.
Pay dirt.
Could he get the evidence out unhashed?
Drow ran one hand over a rose marble bench. Robin, still at his side, panted alertly.
“Drow,” Tala said. “Sweetness. I don’t want any trouble.”
That was so unlike her, so unexpected, it was like a snap of whip. “What did you say?”
“We can come to an agreement.”
No part of Drow’s subconscious would ever imagine her de-escalating. Which meant …
Drow knelt, hugging Robin. Breathed. “We’ve got this,” he said. “Who’s a goo?”
Golden silk, adoring eyes. We are.
“What’s it going to take to get you out of here, handsome?”
Drow ran what he knew, twice, through his hyper-tuned mind. Came up with the same answer both times. “If you don’t want trouble, it’s because you think Allure can deliver. Make you a polter and print you a body.”
“What’s that to you? You’ve been a legend your whole life long, thanks to me. I defined you, dear heart; I gave your story a villain. Bled you for your art. I inspired you. I mused you.”
Drow ran a thumb over the scars on his forearm. “You’re taking credit for my career?”
“The Woodrow Whiting legend. It all springs from that notoriety, doesn’t it? You’re the last of the lost Setback lambs.”
“So … what? You’re on the edge of living forever and I should walk away out of gratitude? Thanks for the rape, lady; I monetized the hell out of that?”
“Dear heart. Still so uncouth.”
Drow scratched his ass.
“It’s why you came looking for this matchup, isn’t it? A true legend needs a grand finale.”
“Don’t he just.” Drow pottered over to a pane of greenhouse glass overlooking Columbus Circle. He could feel … or was it remember … no, feel, her hands on him. That scaly, lizard skin. Her breath had always been chocolatey, a bit sour. Memories of enhanced muscles, her fingers pressing his face into a pillow as the tattoo rig danced fire on his shoulder blades …
“Think. A blaze of glory and you live forever!”
“You’ve always been confused about the difference between immortality and posthumous fame.”
“How long can you continue rotting in place?”
He swallowed. The burst of vitality from the Superhoomin—the sudden absence of pain, the freedom of movement—was a vicious reminder of his day-to-day pain load: bad eyes, bad knees, bad hips.
That assumed that mixing the Superhoomin with the Leonardo hadn’t already tanked his kidneys and liver.
“Your daughter deserves to be free of you.”
Maybe. But—“Time’ll take care of that.”
“Think,” Tala said. “How perfect this is. Together again, after all these years, you and I—”
“I’ll concede a certain circularity to our reunion.”
Enjoy the strength while you’ve got it, right? He slammed his cane against one of the glass panes, peering out as he did to take in the sheer drop to the street.
It splintered, barely.
“Don’t give up, handsome. Show us you’re a closer.”
Blam. Blam. Blam. Burst of triumph, glee of destruction. Glass crunched and his cane punched through. “Are you already loose in Sensorium, Tala? Like Luce?”
The cane was stuck.
Luce like loose. Loose of Luce. Lucy loosey goosey …
“Corpse copse, corpse copse, corpse copse,” he muttered.
“I’m third in line behind a cancer victim and a cat,” Tala said. “Your young Mer Barnes is so upset about the tiger cub that we have to make restitution.”
“How unconscionable of them to make you wait on a cuter predator.” He yanked his cane free, swung again. The hole got bigger.
Robin whined. Drow put a hand on the dog, let her sense him, smell him.
After a second, Robin sat.
“Who’s a googirl?”
Tail wag.
Drow yanked the cane out of the hole he’d made, nearly throwing himself off-balance.
“There’s a shard,” Tala said helpfully.
Drow fingered it. Stuck it in his arm, just enough to bring an upwelling of blood. More than he meant to, with his pressure skyrocketing. The ghost’s expression brightened as crimson dribbled into the roof carpet and got eaten by nanos.
He let himself stare, mesmerized by the flow. “I used to do this … a lot.”
She crooned agreement. Footage, stacked files, various cuts from an array of scavenged sharp objects, flitted through his visual field.
“But this bit’s too small,” he said. She almost yelped as he tossed the fragment.
He slammed the window three more times, laboring to create a decent gap.
“That one that one that one there!” A jagged sliver, size of a steak knife.
“Too big.” Drow dragged his cane in a circle, widening the perimeter of the hole in the glass. “And is that really how this story ends? Wouldn’t you rather I flew away?”
She straightened up, cooing.
“Oh, yes, handsome. Do jump, do.”
The hole was big enough for his body now. Drow stepped back, as if to gauge the distance. Flexed his knees.
Robin’s tail thumped.
“Any last words?” Tala said.
“Only uncouth ones.” Drow crouched, opening his arms. Robin piled in, warm golden fur against his chest, licking his stubble in a rasp, rasp, rasp.
“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not suicidal, Tala. Haven’t been, not for years.”
She frowned. Tilted her head.
The first of the journo drones buzzed through the hole he’d made.
“The furrows you dug in me, they were deep. But I haven’t been leaving ’em to fester.”
Tala’s toon morphed. She became the spidery, pervy, toxic ancient that Drow remembered. She shrieked as camera after camera buzzed in through the breach, hunting up footage before the Chamber could delete it, exhuming the digital corpses.
“We’re under hash,” Tala shrieked. “You can’t legally copy any of this out!”
“You gonna threaten me with jail?” Drow said. “Me?”
“Handsome, I swear—”
“Begone!” Drow said, throwing up a hand. “Fiend! I expunge, I reject, I comms-block you!”
Like that, Tala Weston’s toon vanished, leaving only the bots, the two geese, and the overgrown splendor of Central Park within his view.
Drow bent to retrieve his cane. Raising it, he gave a victory pirouette, there on the rooftop, enjoying the temporary looseness in his joints, the sense of strength and flex.
Right answer, Drow, you got it, Drow. What a clever boy you are!
Chuckling, he sat his old bones down on a bench, called his dog, and turned his face to take in the tawny twilight sun.