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BACK IN THE CORRIDOR, the cool air chilled the sweat beading on my forehead. The door at the end of the hall led to the Salón de Baile del Pueblo. Ballroom of the People. The Huateng Tower: one of a few downtown skyscrapers still in use, an icon of the disparity evident between one block and the next, or, as I like to think of it, a proctologist’s big middle finger sticking into the asshole of downtown, squeezed all around by cancer. The site touted a banquet room with elegant dining tables, a dance floor, gleaming silver and gold accouterments, and stunning views of downtown Chicago. The Haves arrived in armored limos and were escorted inside through bulletproof glass corridors so that none of the Have-Nots’ cooties would touch them. Ballroom of the People. Yeah, right. What a joke. It should be named Ballroom of the Rich People.
There was no lock on the interior door from the service corridor. A lock would prove too challenging for the Revivant service staff.
Steamy air, smoky griddles, and the shouts of cooks and waiters greeted me on the other side. The kitchen staff barely glanced at me as I wove through them and shoved open the swinging door to the people’s ballroom. Kitchen sounds dropped off, and a solid wall of voices, music, laughter, and clinking silverware slapped me in the face. Wall-to-wall people, elegantly dressed and sumptuously fed, crowded tables draped in linen. They lifted glasses filled with sparkling wine and toasted their mutual success and beauty.
I recognized an A-list actress whose most recent V-Real grossed over seventeen billion dollars. It involved interspecies sex with dolphins, I think.
At another table, a sloshed Democan Senator, Illinois’s very own Hernando Martinez de Soto, eye-fucked the cleavage of the teenage hardbody next to him (I think she was an Olympic Nude Volleyball champion) while his wife glared puñales calientes at him. From the solar eruptions flaring from her eyes, it appeared the Democan Uniparty would have a vacancy to fill next term.
At the far end of the room, a low stage featured a spotlighted podium stationed in front of a blue velvet drape. On the drape, a graph glowed, gaudy white letters in Godzilla-sized font.
Renascentia, Inc. Where Death is but a Stage
Below that, with eye-watering visual effects, the text repeated the phrase:
Congratulations Renascentia Team for 10 years of Revivals and Rebirths. Thanks to you, being dead doesn’t mean you have to stop living.
A table flanked the podium with twelve of the High and Mighty arrayed like a parody of the Last Supper mythos. The Jesus Christ figure in this tableau sat to the right of the podium—my left—and lifted a dainty forkful of veganibbles to his gene-spliced, ultra-handsome face.
Jamil Yamadut.
Twentieth-generation Kanyakubja Brahmin. CEO of Renascentia. Creator of the Revivant Nanobot.
Progenitor of the undead labor force. That stole Chelle from me. And started a chain of events that left me broke, homeless, and alone.
I felt like a Revvie myself, disconnected from my legs and moving in a haze; a shaking, buttery mess sliding around islands of merriment and witty conversation. The gun tugged at my britches; I had to keep my hands stuffed in my pockets to stop it from sliding into my crotch again.
The murmur of conversation bounced off my ears without penetrating.
“—then Daniel said—”
“—that’s a great place. It has an underwater pool—”
“—cute dress! Where’d you—”
At the stage, the guy at the end of the head table frowned at me when I stepped up next to him. He made a sour face and pointed at his empty wine glass. His expression turned to shock when I said, “Get your own damned wine.”
No tip at this table.
Jamil Yamadut never looked up from his plate of organically grown protein slices, sautéed with what resembled lawn clippings from a well-tended garden. The food left on his plate represented more than I’d eaten in a week. My stomach growled, and dizziness fuzzed my eyesight.
I sniffed up a lungful of air and stepped to the podium. As soon as I did, the AV system activated, and doll-sized replicas of me appeared in the middle of every table. The sight froze my jaw in the standby position, like an actor in a home V-Real, paused in mid-sentence.
Is that really what I look like? Hell, a Revivant dragged behind a bus looks better.
Two hundred guests saw a guy in a badly fitting waiter’s tux, pasty white and glistening with sweat, standing at the podium with visibly trembling hands.
“I, uh...” My voice reverberated around the room, bounced back and trailed off into a high-pitched squeal. Unbelievable. Two hundred years of technology and they still can’t eliminate feedback. “I... wait, no.” Concentrate, Joe. “This is a stick-up!”
Grandpa was my live-in babysitter. We must have watched a thousand shows where people rode horses and shot it out in dusty streets or rode smoke-pouring autos and rattled off tommy guns. I steeled myself to be as ruthless and brutal as those long-ago actors—something unheard of in this day and age. Thanks for the education, Grandpa. I repeated it, louder. “This is a stick-up!”
The audience failed to react. A mild titter ran through the room. The clinking of silverware continued, some diners seeming not to notice, so involved in their own conversations even the threat of a man holding a gun...
Oh.
Note to self: Next time, draw the gun first.
“What are you doing?” Jamil Yamadut demanded. He rose partway from his seat, a napkin in one hand. “I did not order a comedian.”
Really? Well, you should meet Larry.
“Laugh at this, Pilgrim.” I tugged the revolver from my waistband after two tries—it snagged, of course—and pointed it at Yamadut’s face. I’d never seen eyes get that big and round. “Now sit back down.” Facing the audience, I said, “This, gentlepeople, is a stick”—I cocked the hammer, which required more effort than I expected—“up!”
I pointed the shiny Smith & Wesson at the ceiling and depressed the trigger.
BOOM!
The gun bucked so hard, I nearly dropped it.
Holy Mother of Unnatural Breeding!
Nobody told me how loud the thing would be. If a pair of brass cymbals had clapped my head, my ears wouldn’t ring any worse. The shrieking and startled shouts of the dinner guests came from a deep pit, though I could read their expressions well enough. Most people looked only slightly less freaked-fucking-out than I.
“Okay, people, pay attention,” I yelled. My magnified voice replicated across the Ballroom of the People, twenty miniature Joe Warrens repeating after me. I retrieved my bit-stick from my pants pocket. The balance reading on the side, in glowing red numerals, informed me I had point-one-six bucks in my account. “Everybody get out your bit-sticks, bit-jewels, and other bit-currency devices. See my stick?” (I choked down a laugh.) “Key your balances over to me. If I don’t see an acceptable number on this screen in ten seconds, the prick with the grass stain on his chin gets the next round through his head.” I pointed the weapon’s dead weight at Jamil’s face again. “My receive code is 115698.” I repeated the number three times.
“Are you insane?” he hissed.
“Yes, Jamil, I’m crazy as glue.” I giggled. Really. I did. Twenty miniature Joes giggled with me. Get control, you idiot. I made an instant change in plan; the guy’s healthy, well-fed face really got under my skin. “Get ready for a little trip, Yama-dope. You’re coming with me.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” I turned back to the audience of stunned diners. Many of them pointed their sticks in my direction and subvocalized instructions. The balance counter fizzed in a red blur, numbers coming in faster than it could handle them. “Come on, get up.”
I snagged Jamil by the fancy dress jacket—the material caressed my fingers like it wanted to blow me—and shoved him to the edge of the stage. Jamil’s husband twitched as if he wanted to say something, maybe even get up. One glance froze him to the spot. Jamil’s wife had already fainted. So much for tonight’s three-way. I stifled another giggle.
The journey to the kitchen across the now-hushed Ballroom of the Frightened People lasted forever and passed in an instant. A few hushed comments drifted from the corners.
“—a real gun!”
“—must be a right-winger. I played one in Die Bad III—"
“—so pale. Is he sick?”
“Rebel scum.”
That last one may have been my imagination.
The kitchen staff had vanished, probably scattering when I fired the Smith & Wesson. Oddly, now that the first surprise had worn off, I wanted to fire it again. I shoved Jamil between the empty grills and steaming dishwashers, propelling him with little shoves until he cleared the doorway into the service hall.
I closed the kitchen door and retrieved a simple wooden wedge from an inside jacket pocket, which I jammed in the bottom of the doorframe. “There you go, Jamil. I think we’re alone now.”
“At least there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.” The urbane Jamil had recovered some of his poise. He stood tall and aloof, sneering without moving a single facial muscle. “What do you plan to do now? You know you’re at the top of a hundred and sixty floors.”
“Please.” I gestured to the end of the hall. “Your chariot, sweet prince.”
The freight elevator promised salvation or destruction. My favorite death trap. At least Jamil would be going with me to meet the Grim Reaper if the thing crashed. Maybe we’d even be revived together, share a trash route.
Only when he’d stepped away did I focus on my bit-stick’s balance indicator. Which had turned from red to gold. I’d never seen it gold before. It took me a frowning-damned-long time to figure out what happened. Had all those rich bastards screwed me over? No, wait...
The reader needed an exponent to describe the balance. That was... that was... a fuck-ton of money.
Holy Mother of Payday.
I followed Jamil on air-cushioned feet and directed him to push the arrow button. Familiar machinery groaned. Hopefully the elevator wasn’t all the way down on the bottom floor.
“How do you possibly think you’re getting away with this?” the CEO of Renascentia stated more than asked. “The elevator will go into security lockdown once the alarm is activated—”
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “Deactivated the locks, cut the passenger elevators, activated the damping field, killed surveillance.”
He sneered and crossed his arms. “All right, Mr. Gunman. What do you plan to do with me?”
I hefted the gun, let him get a good look at it. “You’re along to make sure I get out of here. If I don’t, I plan to use this weapon and blow your brains out the back of your head.”
He blinked and let his arms fall. Some of the sneer left his face. “But... why?”
“Because, you bloodsucker, you invented this damned walking meat.”
“Look... what’s your name? What do I call you?”
“Joe.” Joe the Moron, who is now getting chatty with the Architect of Doom. Insanity beckoned.
The AoD smirked. “Joe. Sure.”
I ran a hand through my sweaty hair and paced the corridor from side to side. Where was that fucking elevator? “You think this was my first choice?”
We watched each other in silence, the elevator humming a one-note soundtrack. Jamil held my stare with coal-dark eyes under trimmed brows. My stomach grumbled, loudly enough that I winced. I jiggled in place and rolled my neck.
What was taking the damned elevator so long? Was it coming from hell?
“Look, Joe,” Jamil said with a sigh, “I don’t see how killing me helps you at all. I pay seventy-five percent of my income in taxes. I support charitable programs for the poor and the sick. I mean look, man, I sponsor a mating pair of humpback whales! I’m not the bad guy here, Joe.”
The gun dragged at my hand, dangling loose, heavy, but not forgotten. He was right, and I knew it. The hate I’d held for Yamadut and his creations was too tenuous to hold on to; an ideal rather than something active and alive. My threats to kill the man were as empty as my head.
But I owed something to Chelle, didn’t I?
The elevator thunked and thudded to a stop; in a second the doors would grind open. I cocked the hammer on the Smith. Click-click. “Let’s go.”
“Joe.” Jamil shook his head, a picture of infinite sadness. “Joe, Joe, Joe. Who am I?”
“Are we playing games, Jamil? Stalling won’t help.”
“I created the Revivants, did I not?” The elevator doors split open. There stood my old buddy, Larry, his creepy grin fixed to his slack face.
“Well, yeah. That’s what this has all been about, hasn’t it?”
A smile I could only describe as condescending slithered across Jamil’s face. “Revivant, code Alpha-Foxtrot-One-Seven-Niner. Execute.”
“Doe-kay.” Larry shuffled toward me and stretched his hands into claws. “Kill.”
“What?” My feet rooted; I couldn’t move. I had never seen even mildly threatening behavior from a Revivant. Larry left mildly threatening at the door and escalated to scary as fuck in the space of a heartbeat. “What is this?”
“I invented the Revivants.” Jamil stepped behind the lumbering undead janitor. “Did you think I wouldn’t build in some safeguards to protect myself? We look out for each other, the Revivants and I.”
Oh. Shit.
I backed a step, leveled the revolver and triggered a round into Larry’s chest.
BOOM!
My ears rang, and acrid smoke burned my nostrils. Larry jolted but kept moving, shrugging off the lead projectile like a mosquito bite.
“Ah, Revivant,” I blathered, “code Alpha Foxtrot, ah, One-Niner-Seven.”
“Wrong code!” Yamadut called out from behind the lumbering Revvie. “And besides, it only works once. The nanobots are dispersed through its body and are programmed to very strict parameters. You should have read the marketing brochure we printed for the Army. Revivant Soldiers. Harder to kill than herpes. So long, Joe.”
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Snap. Snap.
Six shots, Grandpa Warren said. Six shots and that’s it. Show’s over. Larry didn’t have much of a head left. One eye dangled from its socket.
Cold steel greeted my back. The door to the kitchen, which I’d oh-so-intelligently blocked with a wedge. A graveyard chill shivered through me when Larry pinched the wet orb delicately between finger and thumb and pointed it in my direction. I kicked at the wedge I’d planted earlier, but the damned thing was stuck hard and deep.
How the hell had it come to this?
“I see ouuuu.” Larry grinned past bloody teeth. “Braaaiinnnss. Hhnh-hhnh-hhnh.”