BIG DREAMS

By R.L. King

1.

I screwed up again today. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the worst, but this was the day when it finally caught up with me.

Just so you know: getting fired sucks drek. Even if you hate your job. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

So does making the walk of shame down to your pathetic little car, carrying your soggy box of meaningless personal crap while your former co-workers watch. At least most of them tried to make it seem like they weren’t looking, which I guess was something. It wasn’t like they hadn’t all known it was coming. Hell, I’d known it was coming, and my skill at office politics didn’t get much past making nice with the admins so they’d let me raid their candy dishes.

It was raining. What else is new, right? My car’s wipers made sort of a wheezy brown whick-klunk sound like they were going to walk off the job any second now. Actually, the whole car was like that. You can say a lot of wiz things about magic, but it doesn’t help you remember stuff like routine vehicle maintenance.

I’d probably have to sell the car anyway, since I had next to no savings. After the reaming I got this afternoon, I didn’t think any employers would be tripping over each other to hire me.

I jammed on my horn, sending a jagged red blast of  “Hey, drekwipe!” at the Aurora that cut me off. The guy flipped me off and kept right on going. Yeah, some things never changed, whether you were in the worst part of the Barrens or fighting your way through Downtown at rush hour: people were assholes, and people behind the wheels of vehicles were special assholes. The only difference was that in the Barrens, sometimes you got a bullet instead of a finger.

Uncle Mason didn’t answer his comm.

That was weird; I mean, okay, sometimes he let it go to voicemail when he had a client in the shop, but not too many people had his private number, and I can’t remember the last time he didn’t pick up when I called. Still, I just chalked it up to another crappy thing that was happening to me during my exceedingly crappy day and headed over there anyway. I don’t know why, exactly, since the lecture I was sure to get from him would be ten times worse than the one I got from that old windbag Bonner, but I guess I figured maybe it was better coming from family.

And maybe I was feeling a little bit like I deserved it.

Uncle Mason was pretty much it for my family these days, since my mom fried her brain on a bad BTL a couple years back. Like it was for a lot of kids who grew up in the Barrens, “dad” was more of an abstract concept than an actual part of my life. According to Mom, he’d made himself scarce as soon as he’d found out she was hosting another mouth to feed. Mom hadn’t exactly been my biggest fan either, since having a kid around tended to cramp your style when your favorite pastimes were watching trid soaps, slotting chips, and sleeping around to prove you weren’t getting old.

Uncle Mason was Mom’s older brother, and I’m guessing he got the full allotment of ‘sane and responsible’ genes for the family, since there sure as hell weren’t any left by the time Mom came along. I guess this was a good thing, because he helped her out when he could—at least as much of my childhood had been spent playing in the cluttered back room of his lore shop as in the crumbling doss that was all Mom could afford. When I got older, he let me spend afternoons there helping him catalog the collection of weird stuff he took in. When my magic made a dramatic appearance at school during one of my frequent run-ins with the local lowlifes, he took me under his wing, helped me get my talent under control, and when the time came, put me in touch with the right people so I could score a scholarship to U-Dub and a ticket out of a dead-end life.

All that, and here’s how I repay him: getting my ass fired from my first job for letting my mind wander and fragging up a critical ritual. Again.

Yeah, I’m a real prize. Twenty-two years old and already a failure.

The disappointment on his face would be bad enough, but his voice would be worse. Normally, Uncle Mason’s got this gravelly growl, all dark reds and grays with little jagged spikes. When he gets disappointed with me, the gravel turns to mud, the spikes to shapeless lumps of clay. They don’t hit me—they just ooze over me, engulfing me in a kind of cocoon of worthlessness. “Again, Cody?” he’d say with a sigh.

The sighs were the worst. Those sighs burned.

I guess I should say something about what I mean by all this color stuff I keep tossing off. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been able to see sound. It’s not something I do on purpose or have to work at—it just happens, like breathing. For a long time I thought everybody could do it, until this ork girl called me a freak when I was twelve and nearly kicked my ass for telling her that her voice was wiz: all sort of yellow with bright little blue waves. It was a long time after that before I found out that what I have has a name—synesthesia—but even before my magic showed up, it made listening to music pretty fragging awesome. Combine it with what you see on the astral during a really good concert, and it’s way better than drugs. It’s probably the main reason I made it out of the Barrens without some kind of monkey on my back.

The shop’s front door was locked.

This was getting weirder. It was only a little before 1900 hours; Uncle Mason was one of those types who couldn’t rub two brain cells together before noon and sometimes kept the shop open until close to midnight. I tried his comm again, and again it went to voicemail.

I decided against taking an astral look-see for two reasons: first, leaving my body unprotected around here was asking for trouble, and second, I’d never bothered to ask how to get past the wards he kept up, and he’d never volunteered the info. I had the door code, so it wasn’t like he didn’t trust me. I punched it in and slipped inside, closing and locking the door behind me.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

The shop had its usual odors, stuff so familiar I barely registered it: musty old paper, a little bit of the preservatives Uncle Mason used for some of his reagents, and whatever he’d had for lunch that day. All of that was there, but there was something else, too: a sharp, coppery tang.

That wasn’t good. You didn’t grow up where I did without learning what blood smelled like. My heart beat faster.

I froze, listening. The shop wasn’t big—just the showroom out front and the little combination workroom/storage area through a door in the back. I didn’t hear anything: if anybody was still here, they were keeping quiet. A quick assensing showed no glowing auras. That meant either nobody here, or they were better at hiding than I was at finding them.

I headed toward the back, not bothering with a light; I could have done it blind. The door to the back room was cracked open, which was another red flag: Uncle Mason never left the storeroom door open, because that was where he kept the good stuff. He even kept separate wards around it.

I braced for the familiar tingle as I eased the door forward.

It didn’t come.

That meant the wards were down, and that was very bad.

Right about now would have been a great time to just step back to the front, pull out my ’link, and whistle up Knight Errant to come check things out. That’s what most of the good citizens around here would do.

I’m not most good citizens, though. For one thing, I trust the Knights in Black about as far as I can dropkick them, since as a rule they tend not to be best chummers with people like me. You can take the boy out of the Barrens, but the Knights were great at sniffing out the Barrens in the boy. If anything was up, they’d be more likely to arrest me first and ask questions later than to try to figure out what had really happened.

Mostly, though, it was because I knew how long it would take them to get here, and Uncle Mason might be in trouble. I didn’t know what I was going to be able to do if he was, but after today’s disappointment, I felt like I owed him at least a try.

I reached out to pull power to me, feeling the familiar ripple settle over my body as I faded into invisibility. Then I pushed the door the rest of the way open.

And I stopped.

“Oh, frag…” I whispered, the invisibility spell slipping from me as I staggered back into the wall.

The storeroom was lined with shelves, each one stuffed to bursting with bottles, jars, books, rocks, plants, bits of creatures, and stacks of yellowing, old-style paper. A scarred wooden worktable about a meter and a half square dominated the middle of the room; I couldn’t count how many school assignments I’d finished at that old table over the years. It was usually cluttered with whatever project Uncle Mason was working on.

Right now—oh god no—it was cluttered with Uncle Mason.

I didn’t want to see. I wanted to run, to get the hell out of here as fast as I could and pretend I’d never seen any of this. Instead, I forced myself to take a closer look.

He’d been—dissected. That was the only way to describe it. I remember reading one time about the old pre-Awakening days, when kids studying biology had to cut up real frogs, carefully pulling out their organs and cataloging them with labels. Uncle Mason didn’t have any labels, but that was about the only difference. I swallowed hard, taking a step closer.

He was stretched out spread-eagled on the table, each limb tied to a wooden leg with some kind of cord. There was surprisingly little blood. He’d been neatly opened, his inner workings laid bare in a way that was far more obscene than if he’d just been left there naked.

The skin of his torso was pulled back and pinned to the wooden table surface. On either side of it, things that should still have been inside of him were arranged with the sort of care they’d tried and failed to drill into me at ManaSure. This was the stuff the people who cared about you should never see. When people referred to your “intimate parts,” they were usually talking about things like your junk or your ass, but in a normal life how many people would ever get a good look at your kidneys?

They hadn’t touched his face. If I just focused on him from the neck up, he looked like he was sleeping, like his sharp bushy-browed eyes would pop open any second now and he’d ask me what the hell I was staring at. But I couldn’t just look from the neck up.

I felt the soyburger I’d had for lunch taking the express elevator up, and barely spun to the side in time so I didn’t yarf all over my dead uncle. My heart pounded, my breath rasping like a freight train in my ears. “Uncle Mason…” I whispered. “What did they do to you—”

Right about then someone knocked on the door out front: a bright orange bolt against the jagged blue of my breath.

I froze, paralyzed. My thoughts raced around my brain, whacking uselessly against the inside of my skull: What do I do? They can’t find me here! They’ll think I did it! But if it’s the Knights and I run, they’ll catch me, and—

The knock came again, harder this time. A male voice called something I couldn’t make out.

I took another look at Uncle Mason, at his spread limbs, at his yawning gut, at his familiar face with its lines and wrinkles and that silly walrus mustache of his.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Mason,” I whispered, and bolted for the back door.

As I left, my mind registered something I hadn’t noticed before: Aside from Uncle Mason himself, nothing else in the storeroom looked like it had been disturbed.

2.

As usual when I was in trouble, I turned to Dax. Some things never change.

I didn’t tell him I was coming—figured it would be safer for both of us. I knew where he’d be, even though I hadn’t seen him for months.

I always felt a little wrong about meeting up with Dax at Big Dreams, where he’d worked the last couple of years as a bouncer. The place was one of the hottest scenes in that corner of the Barrens: a combination bar, strip joint, and dance club that pulled crowds from as far away as Fort Lewis. Its main draw was that it was one of the few venues outside the Underground that catered to trolls, orks, and anybody who loved them. That was why I felt wrong: not anything to do with racism, but more like an overwhelming sense of being different.

That, and I could never get used to being the shortest guy in the room.

The joint was in full swing tonight, the pounding beat and wild orgasmic colors and patterns of the latest goblin-rock act refusing to be held in by mere walls. I adjusted my ’link to tone down most of the AROs trying to point me at everything from super-sized drinks to backroom lap dances, though there wasn’t much I could do to filter out the stares from the rest of the clientele. I wasn’t the only human here—I’d found out a long time ago that there were actually quite a few norm guys who liked the ladies with more to love—but we weren’t exactly a majority. I felt like a jockey at a linebacker convention.

I was just trying to figure out how to deal with the small knot of troll ganger wannabes giving me the stink-eye from the bar when a hand the size of a devil rat fell on my shoulder and a voice the color of fresh earth rumbled, “Hey, look who’s slummin’!”

Even though I recognized the voice (I never forget a voice—another perk that goes with the pretty pictures in my head) I still would have jumped if I didn’t have about fifty kilos of pressure holding me down.

Dax Nash wasn’t just a troll: he was a troll that other trolls looked up to. Literally, I mean. Three meters tall, inked on every patch of exposed skin, front-facing horns honed to sharp points, and enough piercings to make him think twice about ever going near a metal detector, Dax looked like what you got when a tank and a brick wall got together and made a baby at a scrapyard.

He was also the closest thing to a brother I had.

As soon as I turned around to face him, his grin faded and his lumpy brow furrowed in concern. “You look like drek, chummer.” The music was so loud he had to yell even though he was standing right next to me.

“Uncle Mason’s dead, Dax. I need help.”

He got me out of there fast, clearing a path through the twisting crowds like some kind of spike-studded bulldozer. We passed in front of the stage, where a grinning, limber troll lady almost as tall as Dax was making the crowd dance to her tune. I followed in his wake and tried not to catch any elbows.

He took me to the back and into a small office littered with beer cans, sequined bits of strippers’ wardrobes, and crumpled McHugh’s wrappers. “Talk,” he said, plopping down on the reinforced desk.

So I talked. I told him about getting fired, about heading over to talk to Uncle Mason and get the lecture over with, and how I’d found him cut up into spare parts in his workroom. I realized both my voice and my body were shaking: whatever rush of adrenaline had driven me this far was wearing off, and I was only now starting to realize what kind of drek soup I was in. I hadn’t even had time to mourn Uncle Mason yet. Part of me still refused to believe he was really dead.

Dax listened without saying anything. He was always like that with me. Sure, he could pull off the “big dumb scary troll” routine with the best of them, but I knew better: the guy was as smart as me, and a lot less lazy. When I finished, he blew out a blast of air that sent the nearest McHugh’s wrappers fluttering. “Drek…”

“What am I gonna do, Dax?” I asked. “I can’t go back there—not now. Hell, they’re probably already analyzing the puke I left and figuring out who it came out of. They’re gonna think I did it. And who the hell wants to cut up my uncle?”

 Dax reached into a little fridge behind him and tossed me a beer the size of a small fire extinguisher, then got one for himself. He was looking spooked too: he hadn’t seen Uncle Mason in a lot of years, but he’d always appreciated the fact that my uncle didn’t treat him like Barrens scum. “Anybody see you when you left?”

“I don’t think so.” I sagged in the oversized chair. “Frag, Dax, Uncle Mason’s dead. They cut him up like some kind of science experiment!” I couldn’t help it: I tried not to lose it, but the images kept coming. I couldn’t shake that vision of my uncle’s guts all over that table. I felt like I was going to puke again.

Dax’s big hand came down on my shoulder. “Hold it together, bro,” he said, his deep earth-brown voice full of sympathy. “You can’t freak out yet. We gotta figure out if anybody saw you.”

I nodded, miserable. “I need to get some stuff from my place. You think it’s safe?”

“Hang on. Lemme go do something. You stay here.”

I waited in the office, closing my eyes and letting the muted colors from the band pummel me. Dax came back a few minutes later with a skinny ork girl who looked too young to be in the club. She wore a CrimeTime T-shirt and had a deck slung over one shoulder.

“This is Bug,” Dax told me. “I had her do a little checking, and I got some sorta good news.”

“Yeah?” Good news, even of the ‘sorta’ variety, was better than anything that had happened so far today.

“Whoever was at the front door,” Bug said, “it wasn’t the Knights. I hacked a couple street cameras around the shop, and there ain’t nobody there.”

I stared at her. Maybe things weren’t quite as fragged as I thought. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Cops’d be all over that place if they found a body inside. I even checked the recordings—saw you go in around 1900, and then some other guy showed up at the front door a little later. He waited a couple minutes, then left. That’s it. Nobody there now.”

“So maybe nobody knows I—” I started, then had a brainflash. “Hey,” I said, “Did you maybe see who—”

“Way ahead of you, chummer.” Bug shook her head. “Somebody wiped the feed before that. I only got about a half-hour before you showed up. Pro work, too,” she added. “Whoever cacked your uncle, they made damn sure nobody’d see ‘em doin’ it.”

Dax gave me a ride over to my place on his old Scorpion. “You’re gonna have to make it quick!” he yelled over his shoulder, his voice carrying over the throbbing gray thudthudthud of the engine. “I gotta get back before the late show starts.”

I didn’t answer, just hung on to his synthleather jacket and tried not to bounce around too much on the wide seat. The Harley had been ancient when he’d gotten it, back before I headed off to U-Dub, and apparently Dax thought that having suspension was an admission that your ass couldn’t handle the ride.

I hoped he and Bug were right about nobody seeing me. Trying to keep my mind off my protesting backside, I thought some more about what had gone down, and realized I had no reason to think anybody was after me just because they’d killed Uncle Mason. As much as my stomach felt like it was full of plascrete and my heart ached at the loss of the last blood relative I had left in the world, the whole thing had probably just been a business deal gone bad.

I wasn’t born yesterday: even though he didn’t talk about it, I knew Uncle Mason had his thumbs stuck in some pretty sketchy pies. Some of the stuff he sold wasn’t technically legal, and I’d seen more than one shadowy figure show up at the shop’s back door while I was studiously polishing rat skulls and pretending not to notice. If that was the case, then this whole business was probably over. Not a happy thought, but at least a somewhat comforting one.

I let my mind wander for a minute, fantasizing about tracking down whoever had done it and getting even with them, like I used to do when I was a little kid. Back then, I used to daydream all the time about being some kind of combat monster in a flashy longcoat and mirrorshades, slipping in and out of evil corp installations like a ghost and helping out the deserving people in my neighborhood. It was a nice dream, but it didn’t survive contact with the real world for very long. Right now I was painfully aware of the hard truth: I wasn’t some shadowrunner or trid action hero. I was just a poor slot who’d gotten fired from his first real job because he couldn’t focus on what he was doing long enough not to frag up one simple ritual. Sure, I knew a few spells (including some I wasn’t really supposed to know, courtesy of Magicknet and an old friend of Dax’s back in the day) and I was actually halfway passable at slinging the mojo when I could keep my mind on track, but Bug had said these guys were pros. Dreams were one thing, but delusions got you killed.

My doss was in an old building just south of Renton. Not the swankiest end of town, but I couldn’t afford much on my entry-level mojodrone salary, and at least it wasn’t the Barrens.

Dax parked the Scorpion across the street and a block down. I thought he’d just wait for me, but he climbed off the bike and stumped after me, looking around like he expected to see somebody getting ready to jump us.

I noticed he had his Ruger stuck in his belt. “You expecting trouble?”

He shrugged. “I always expect trouble. That way I don’t get surprised.”

Inside, the lobby was dim and empty except for a homeless guy curled up under a blanket in the back. My place was upscale enough that we got a better class of bum: you could usually count on finding at least one sleeping it off somewhere on your way up, but around here they didn’t piss in the corners or hassle you for smokes.

We took the stairs up, for two reasons: I didn’t trust the building’s pair of elevators because it was a coin toss whether they were working on any given day, and they weren’t designed with three-meter trolls in mind.

I’d made it as far as the second floor before something worked its way up to the front of my brain. I stopped and held up my hand.

“What?” Dax whispered. He could actually make a good try at a real whisper, which was saying something for a guy with lungs the size of garbage bags.

“Get your gun out,” I whispered back. “Cover me for a sec.”

After all these years he didn’t ask questions, just did as I asked. I stepped down the hallway a little and sat against the wall. “Back soon. This is probably a dumb idea, but I want to check something.”

Of all the things I could do as a spellslinger, astral projection was one of the best. Growing up where I did, there were a lot of cages. Some of them were real, like our cereal-box-sized apartment and the institutional depression of classrooms where nobody, not even the teacher, gave a frag about what they were doing. Others were more metaphorical, like the knowledge that, at least before my magic showed up, the odds were strong I’d end up dead before I was old enough to drink.

Getting the mojo was like hitting the lottery for a Barrens kid: it held the keys to all the cages. It meant that, even as a skinny little snot who couldn’t fight worth drek, I could escape. The drab, gray-brown world of Redmond was nothing compared to the vibrant pulsing life on the astral plane. Sure, I knew it was dangerous there, but I didn’t care. When I spent most of my days dodging gangers and trying not to get eaten by devil rats, the weird, brilliant beauty of the astral was my own private oasis. My meat body might be stretched out on a musty, secondhand mattress in my microscopic closet of a bedroom, but my real body, the only one that mattered, could soar. You have no idea how liberating that was.

Right now, though, I was doing less soaring and more sneaking. My astral form slipped free of my body and I took a moment to orient myself, looking down at Dax standing guard over me. His big body glowed brightly: I guess he hadn’t been able to scrounge up the cred yet for the ’ware he’d been wanting. His aura looked calm but wary; his hand was on his gun, but he hadn’t drawn it yet.

Moving at the speed of thought, I zipped up the stairs toward the fourth floor. Mine was the last flat at the end of the hall, near a boarded-over window. I slowed down as I got near it.

I knew I was probably being stupid, acting like a nervous kid. There was probably nothing wrong. Never mind that the homeless guy’s blanket downstairs had looked a little too clean for the usual class of lowlifes that lounged in my lobby; never mind that the boots sticking out from beneath it were a little too nice for a guy whose every spare nuyen went down his throat or into his chipjack. That by itself didn’t prove anything. Even bums got new shoes occasionally. Couldn’t hurt to check, though.

My door was closed, just as I expected. Still feeling stupid—Dax was going to laugh his ass off at me for being such a chickenshit—I slipped my head through the wall for a look inside.

I saw him just as he looked up: he was on the other side my front room, crouched down and going through a couple boxes of my stuff. Human or elf, from the look of it—his aura glowed brightly like Dax’s, and like Dax he didn’t seem concerned. Then he glanced up. His eyes met mine and he stiffened, leaping to his feet.

I didn’t react as fast as I should have: I wasn’t used to things spotting me when I was astral, at least not things that weren’t astral themselves. He was already heading toward the door. I got the hell out.

Barely two seconds later I slammed back into my body, jumping up before the momentary disorientation faded. “Dax!” I yelled. “We gotta get out of here. Now!”

Once again, he didn’t ask questions. “Stay close,” he rumbled, already starting back down the hall toward the stairs.

Someone was coming up the stairs just as we reached the top. I had only a second to register that it was the homeless man, now free of his blanket—his long coat and SMG matched his boots a lot better than the blanket had.

“Hold it, kid!” he ordered. His voice was muddy green with streaks of black.

I heard footsteps pounding behind me. Dax must have heard them too, because he flung himself down the stairs toward the guy. When you’re as big as Dax, a flight of stairs built for humans to take in ten steps—or maybe five if they’re in a big hurry—barely constitutes an obstacle. From the look of the guy, he didn’t expect to end up with a faceful of high-speed troll. Dax grabbed the guy’s gun arm with one massive hand and spun him by it, slamming him back into the wall. I heard something crack, and the guy let out a big bright red shriek.

“Come on!” Dax yelled at me.

I was right behind him. My heart thudded, cold sweat running down my back. I pelted after him and got to the door just as the guy who’d been inside my place appeared. Without thinking, I pulled mana to me and flung a spell back over my shoulder. If it hit, it would knock him over, at least. I didn’t wait to see if it worked, but just followed Dax through the lobby doors.

Outside, the street was quiet. I half-expected to see more guys lying in wait, and with every splashing step toward Dax’s Scorpion, I anticipated hearing the staccato buddabudda of SMG fire and feel hot metal ripping into me, but it didn’t happen. I risked a glance over my shoulder: no sign of anybody.

I threw myself onto the back of the bike, which Dax had already fired up. He took off, the back tire spinning, flinging up water before it found traction on the wet road. “Go! Go! Go!” I yelled, grabbing big handfuls of his jacket.

What the frag was going on?

3.

Dax took me back to Big Dreams. “You sure about this?” I asked as he edged the Scorpion past the crowd milling out front and into a hidden parking area behind the club. “Whoever these guys are, I don’t want them coming after people here.”

He waved me off. “We gotta talk,” was all he said. He wouldn’t say more until we got inside.

This time we didn’t go through the main club, though the music’s bright pounding colors still wound around my head to form a surreal background to my increasingly freaked-out thoughts. He led me down a back hallway, up some stairs, and into what in any other club might have been a VIP room. It had a large table, several trid units, big comfortable chairs just right for plus-sized private dances, a small bar, and a one-way window looking out over the seething crowd below. But there were no fashion-victim trolls or half-naked ork dancers in here. Even the ubiquitous AROs you’d expect to see all over the place in a room like this were absent. a small white mushroom-shaped object squatted on the middle of the table.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Safe, I hope,” Dax said. “Hang out for a minute. I gotta go find a couple people.”

“Safe? If those fraggers have magic, it won’t take ’em long to find me.”

Dax shook his head. “It’s warded. Be back soon. Stay put, okay?” And he was gone.

I examined the room in a new light. Warded? I guess it made sense if this was some kind of VIP room: the last thing a rich troll cheating on his spouse wanted was some mojo-slinging PI tracking him down, or an enterprising club-goer recognizing him and deciding to play a little paparazzi blackmail.

I sank down into a chair, letting the adrenaline from the last half-hour ebb away, along with the slight drain from casting the spell back at my building. I pummeled my tired brain, trying to figure out what was going on: somebody had been inside my doss, going through my stuff, with at least one other guy (with an SMG!) waiting for me in the lobby. What did they want?

It was possible they were just robbing me—my little apartment wasn’t exactly in a triple-A zone, and just last week the guy downstairs had his place tossed. But it didn’t add up. For one thing, if the guy downstairs had been a lookout, why didn’t he call up and tell the one in the doss to bail out when he saw me coming? He hadn’t done that—in fact, it seemed like he’d let me and Dax get past him so they could surround us.

And why didn’t he shoot? He had a clear bead on me, even before Dax had fragged up his arm. And when we ran, they both had more than one chance to plug me. Why hadn’t they?

Then, naturally, came the most uncomfortable thought of all: did this have something to do with Uncle Mason? I couldn’t think of any other reason why guys with guns were suddenly interested in me, unless it had something to do with work. Given that the sec-guys at ManaSure had just about been standing in my pockets while I gathered my gear before I left, I didn’t see how they could think I’d stolen anything. So it was back to my uncle.

The door opened and I nearly jumped. Dax came in, followed by three other people. I recognized two of them: Bug, the young ork decker, and Mimi, Dax’s girlfriend. The other one was a dwarf a few years older than me, with a long gray coat and dark blue hair and beard. Dax closed and locked the door, and the dwarf came over and flipped a switch on the mushroom-shaped object in the middle of the table.

“What the hell?” I asked, taking them all in.

“Hear you got yourself a little problem,” Mimi said, her husky voice the color of honey. She was a troll too, not quite as tall as Dax or nearly as wide, but almost as inked. You know that expression “built like a brick drekhouse”? That was Mimi. She was still dressed in her “work clothes” of sequined bikini top, G-string, and spike heels; the open coat she’d thrown over the ensemble did nothing to dim the effect. Mimi was the kind of chica who owned any room she entered, and she knew it.

“Dax, what—?” I began as my gaze darted between them. Bug already had her deck out and was fiddling with it, ignoring us.

“We gotta figure this out, Code,” Dax said. “What those guys were doing at your place. Thought we could use a little more help.”

I studied them as they settled into seats. It was about then I realized what the thing in the middle of the table was: a white-noise generator. People used them when they didn’t want anybody to listen in on their conversations—I’d seen versions of them a couple of times in meeting rooms back at ManaSure, though my pay grade was way too low to need one at any meeting they’d let me attend. I swallowed. Yeah, Dax and I hadn’t seen each other much over the last couple of years, but it looked like his life had changed as much as mine. “I don’t—”

Dax pointed around the table, where they’d all settled themselves. They were all looking at me. “You know Mimi,” he said. “And you met Bug tonight.” He indicated the dwarf: “This here is Tonio. He hangs around here ’cuz he likes his ladies big, but he’s also a wiz with anything that goes bang.”

I frowned. “Okay,” I said. “But how are you gonna help me figure out what’s going on?”

Mimi shot me a fierce grin, making me glad she was on my side.

“Just tell ’em what happened,” Dax said.

So I did—what’d I have to lose at this point? I told them the same story I’d told Dax, starting with my firing, then my uncle at the shop, and finally the attack at my place. They all listened intently except for Bug, who might have been, but you could never tell with deckers. Her eyes were kind of rolled back in her head and her fingers flashed over her deck so fast I couldn’t follow their movements.

“So, you don’t know why anybody would want to kill your uncle?” Tonio asked. He had a blue voice, almost the same color as his hair. I wondered what he’d say if I told him that.

“No clue. Maybe a bad business deal, but that doesn’t usually get you dissected, does it?” I struggled to keep my tone even; right now I couldn’t afford to lose my head. I didn’t want to end up like Uncle Mason.

Bug’s eyes came up, and she pointed at one of the trid screens. “You know this guy?” she asked. The screen lit up with the image of my apartment lobby. The vid was jumpy and it was hard to see much in the dim light, but I did get one good look at the guy with the SMG before Dax made him one with the wall. He looked human, moved like he had some ’ware, and dark shades covered his eyes.

“Nah,” I said. “Never seen him before. You know him?”

The others shook their heads. “I’ll run some searches,” Bug said, and dropped back down into her decker trance.

Dax stood. “Okay,” he said. “Cody, you stay here with Bug. Tonio, you keep an eye on the place till we get back.”

The dwarf nodded and stood.

“Where are you going?” I asked, rising in my chair.

“Me and Mimi’re gonna do a little legwork,” Dax said. “Put out a few feelers, see what we can find.”

“But those guys saw you, too,” I protested, getting up. “I’m coming along.”

Dax shook his head. “You stay put,” he said. “If this does have something to do with your uncle, we should know what you’re up against before you put your ass out there. We need to find out what they wanted to kill him for.”

I stood up and crossed to the other side of the room, motioning for Dax to follow me. “Don’t be an idiot,” I whispered, glaring at him, with a sideways glance at Mimi. “Don’t get yourself in drek for me. You and Mimi got Katie to look out for now.”

I looked out the one-way window, into the writhing mass of oversized bodies getting their freak on downstairs as two hot orks—one male, one female—shimmied on the stage, and then over at Mimi again, who wore her skimpy outfit like some kind of armor. “It isn’t worth it, Dax. Listen, with Uncle Mason gone and my job in the drekker, I got no ties here any more. I’ll just sell my car and get a bus ticket out. Start over somewhere else. Maybe down in CalFree. I’ll buzz you guys when I’m settled.”

Dax’s face was stubborn, and maybe a little hurt. “You got ties, Cody. You got us. You’re family. We won’t be gone long—just need to talk to a couple people who only do in-person meets. You stay here, or I’ll have old Bella downstairs sit on you till we get back. And she ain’t had a bath in a week. So ka?”

I studied my feet, miserable. “Yeah. So ka.”

He thumped me on the shoulder. “Back soon. We’ll get this handled, chummer.”

I sat slumped in the chair across from Bug as she twiddled with her deck, and tried to not feel like the world’s biggest piece of crap.

Back a few years ago, when Uncle Mason had helped me get my foot into U-Dub, my main motivation was to get as far away from the Barrens as I could. It wasn’t because I felt too good for my roots—believe me, I’d woken up plenty of times in the middle of the night wondering what the hell I ever thought I was doing, thinking a street kid like me could make something of myself when most of my friends were still trying to figure out where their next meal was coming from. I wasn’t proud of the fact that I’d lost contact with Dax over the years, and it hadn’t been because I’d particularly wanted to—in fact, the first couple of years of school I’d made an extra effort to meet up with him, to invite him to parties, to come back to the old stomping grounds and try to get something going like the old days. But that saying about not being able to go home again had some truth in it, and eventually I think we both realized our lives had just drifted in different directions. The last time I’d seen Dax before this had been six months ago, when he and Mimi had invited me over to their place to celebrate their daughter’s third birthday. I’d known they had a daughter, but I was so busy with school and work and being a self-centered slacker ass that I hadn’t made it over to see her until then. Oh sure, I always had a good excuse: exams, working overtime, or some project I had to finish. I always sent a little gift—sometimes late—but I never made it over there myself. Dax never said a word about it, just kept sending me the notices and the invitations.

And then, I get myself in over my head and the first thing I think to do is call my old chummer. And he was right there for me without hesitation. You know, like a real friend is supposed to be.

“Hey.” Bug’s speckled-magenta voice invited itself to my pity party, startling me. I’d forgotten she was there.

I sat up. “What?”

“Think I got something,” she said, leaning back and stretching her arms up above her head. I heard little bright blue pops. Then she poked at her deck again and the trid screen lit up. “You said your uncle had a lore shop, neh?”

“Yeah. Has for years.”

She nodded. “Got some hits on my searches. Your uncle ever deal in dragon parts?”

“Dragon parts?” I stared at her numbly, not sure I’d heard her right. “Why?”

The trid switched to what looked like an internal report delivered by a dour-looking human male in a Lone Star uniform. Not here in Seattle, then. “There’s a few of these,” Bug said. “Same thing like you said, last month or so. Talismongers getting cacked—sometimes cut up like your uncle—for sellin’ scales and claws and teeth from dragons. All over the place. Seems like the wizworms are getting fragged off about people selling pieces of ’em, so they’re makin’ examples of the poor slots doin’ it.” She hit a key on her deck and another one popped up. “The cops are keepin’ ‘em under wraps, though. This stuff isn’t gettin’ out to the public. I got these from callin’ in a couple of favors.”

“Wait a tick,” I said, leaning in to get a closer look. “You mean somebody’s cutting up talismongers? Dragons are involved? And the cops aren’t telling anybody?”

Bug shrugged. “Don’t want a panic, I guess.” She was only half-looking at me; the other half of her attention was on something inside her head. “It’s gettin’ worse, too. Rumors that whoever it is, they’re not just goin’ after current ’mongers. Even some of the retired guys are disappearing.”

“Disappearing?”

“Yeah. Or—” The small sharp tusks poking from her lips twisted in disgust. “—here’s a couple reports where the ’mongers and their people look like they’ve been chewed on. Eaten.”

Icy beads of sweat popped up on the back of my neck. This was unreal. My uncle had been in business for years—since before I’d been born. Aside from a few attempted break-ins, I’d never heard him mention anything about anybody being after him. And I’d never seen any pieces of dragons in his shop, either, except for a model of a baby one he kept in a jar on a shelf as kind of a mascot. Certainly there hadn’t been any claws or scales in any of the stuff I’d catalogued, and since Uncle Mason was kind of cheap about hiring help once I got old enough to do the job, I’d seen a lot of what had come through there.

I slowly let my breath out. “Are you getting anything about who might be behind this? Nobody’s claiming responsibility?”

She shook her head, her fingers still flying over the screen. “Not that I can find. I—” She stopped, going stiff.

“What?”

Bug didn’t answer. Her whole body had tightened up like somebody had stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Her eyes were wide open, her face rigid. She jerked and rattled in her chair like she was driving over rough road.

“Bug? You okay?” I grabbed her shoulder and shook it. Her fingers were still moving, faster than ever. The image on the trid screen flickered and went to static.

Heart pounding in panic, I stared at her. Everything I knew about deckers I knew from watching the trid. I’d never actually met one up close and personal before. I knew they could access the Matrix wirelessly, or else they could plug themselves into their decks using a wire. That was what Bug had done: it snaked from her deck on the table up to a jack on the side of her head. Should I just pull the plug to disconnect her? I knew enough to know that was a bad idea unless it was an emergency, but was this an emergency? She looked bad, but her fingers were still moving. If I jacked her out too soon I might hurt her, but—

She flung herself back in her chair, panting hard and yanking the plug from her datajack. “Frag me sideways!” she growled. “That was close!”

“What? What happened?” My voice shook, high and bright red with fear.

“Somebody caught on to what I was doing,” she got out between breaths. “Musta been watchin’ for activity, anybody lookin’ for info on the killings.”

“Watching?” Oh, drek, this is bad. I went to the bar, snatched an oversized bottle of water from the mini-fridge and brought it back to her. “Did they follow you? Did they figure out where you were?”

She popped the water and chugged half in one long swallow. “Don’t think so,” she said. Her face was ashen, dotted with sweat. “Oh, frag, that sucked. Head feels like somebody clubbed me.” She looked up at me. “Chummer, you got yourself tied up in some bad news. Worse than we thought, it looks like.”

I took that in for a minute, trying to get my mind around it. Whoever these groups were that were killing talismongers, one of them had killed my uncle. Now they were after me—and I had no idea why. And there were dragons involved. Maybe more than one. For guys like me, dragons were something you heard about on the trid, sort of like the President of the UCAS or Maria Mercurial—and that was just fine with me. Back when I was at U-Dub, a couple of my classmates had mentioned that they’d love to meet a dragon someday, but I knew better. When you were talking about something as big, strong, powerful, and magically potent as a wizworm, it was safer if you just stayed well under their radar. Just the thought that somebody related to me might have caught the attention of one (or more than one, my helpful brain offered) was enough to make me almost drek myself.

This wasn’t some random thing—as horrible as it sounded, I’d been halfway hoping it would turn out to be some obscure gang who got off on cutting up their victims. That wouldn’t bring Uncle Mason back or make his death any less awful, but at least it would mean it was over.

Instead, if Bug was right, whoever this was they weren’t content to settle with killing my uncle. They wanted me too. And if they had the resources to cover their tracks as well as they had, and to pick up on Bug’s signal to try to follow her back here, then— 

“Oh, frag…” I whispered.

Dax and Mimi were out there, and they had no idea what they were up against.

“No way. You’re not goin’ anywhere.” Tonio, the blue-haired dwarf, crossed his short, powerful arms over his barrel chest and shook his head. “Dax said you stay here.”

I glared at him. “Frag it, I can’t just sit here!” I protested. My anger and frustration at being watched like some kind of toddler added jagged red lines to my normally mellow green tones. I held up my ’link. “I can’t reach ’em. That’s bad. It’s just like with Uncle Mason.”

Tonio looked at Bug, but she just shook her head. “Can’t find ’em,” she said. “Tried to hack their ’links, but no go. Just goes to voicemail.”

I scrubbed at my face, pacing around the room. “I can’t just do nothing!” I yelled. Guilt rose inside me like an overflowing drekker: I’d let Dax down. Again. It should have been me out there, not him. This was my problem, not his.

“They can take care of themselves,” Tonio said.

I spun on him. “These guys are out of their league, and they don’t even know it,” I growled. I thought about trying to just bull my way past Tonio and out the door, but I knew that wouldn’t work: he was short, but he was wide. Even if I managed to get past him, one call downstairs would put a whole crowd of ambulatory brick walls between me and the outside world. And besides, what the hell was I gonna do if I made it outside? I didn’t even know where Dax and Mimi had gone. How was I supposed to—

I nearly smacked myself in the head. “Stupid!” I yelled. “I am such an idiot!”

Bug and Tonio just glared at me.

I stalked back over to the table and threw myself into a chair. Honestly, sometimes I wonder how I ever managed to make it this far in life. What the hell had I been doing all this time? I was a mage! Okay, sure, maybe not a very good one, and maybe one who’d spent the last year focusing on the being a second assistant mojo-monkey for setting up experimental rituals, but frag, I must be spooked if I was acting like this much of a moron. Without stopping to tell Bug and Tonio what I was doing, I made a few hand gestures in the air and murmured some Latin under my breath.

An instant later, a shimmering form appeared in front of me, on top of the table. Looking vaguely like a large overeager dog, it hovered there and waited, watching me with spectral drool dripping from its lolling tongue. I’m not sure why exactly most of my summoned spirits look like dogs—I think it’s a subconscious thing, because I’d wanted a dog all the time I’d been growing up, and Mom had never gone for it because dogs cost nuyen, and nuyen was better spent on more important things like BTLs and booze.

Bug and Tonio didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see it; in fact, something like approval flashed across the dwarf’s face, like maybe he didn’t think I was completely useless after all.

I looked into the spirit’s doggy face and sent it clear impressions of Dax and Mimi. “Find them,” I told it, using the mental link I had with it. “Find them and tell them to call Cody now. Then come back here. Got it?”

The spirit nodded, tongue flapping, and loped out through the wall.

The waiting’s always the hardest part. Bug dug her deck out again and plugged in; she sent the images to the trid screen and I watched as the view flashed from one unknown location to another. I wondered if she was checking places where she thought Dax and Mimi might have gone. Her face didn’t betray much, but her aura did: she was worried.

Tonio, meanwhile, was making calls on his comm. I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying, but I did catch a couple of snatches of conversation during my pacing rounds that suggested he was contacting some unknown associates and asking them to come to the club. As far as I knew, the dwarf was just another patron of Big Dreams, but he sure seemed to have some pull: twice a pair of beefy orks came up to the room where we waited, consulted under their breath with Tonio, then nodded and headed off. I wondered if he was telling them to keep an eye out for any potential trouble arriving on the scene.

My spirit came back in fifteen minutes, and from the moment it appeared, skidding across the table like a real dog, I knew something was wrong. Its aura, normally a placid blue, flared bright red with agitation. Bad! Its voice in my head wasn’t really a voice, per se—it didn’t have a color like real voices did—but more of an impression. Badbadbad!

“What?” I demanded aloud. Dimly I was aware of both Bug and Tonio’s intent focus. “Did you find them?”

Bad, it said again through our link. Fire. Lots of fire. Big boom. I got the impression of the dark form of a building, smoke and flame rising up from its interior.

“Where? Show me!” I ordered. That was tricky: spirits—or at least my spirits—weren’t the greatest at pinpointing locations in the physical world.

Fire. Boom. Pain. Screaming. The spirit practically oscillated, like one of those annoying little rat-dogs right before it pisses all over the rug.

“Show me where!” I yelled. I was panicking now. If Dax and Mimi were in trouble, I couldn’t help them if I couldn’t figure out where they were. I didn’t take my eyes off the spirit, but gestured to my left. “Bug! Any fires or explosions around this area recently?”

“Drek…” she whispered, but in the periphery of my vision I could see her pounding something out on her deck. Tonio had his ’link out again.

I couldn’t get anything else useful out of the spirit—its report was all screams and discordant auras and an overwhelming sense of panic. Whatever was happening had been intense enough to blow the circuits of its low-watt brain. Knowing it wouldn’t stick around too much longer, I was about to order it to lead me where it was showing me when Bug’s bright, hard voice cut into my concentration. “Got it!”

I spun away from the spirit to face the monitors, and Tonio hurried over to do the same. Bug had hacked into the traffic cameras across the street from a two-story building, just as she had with Uncle Mason’s lore shop. The difference this time was that the building was wreathed in an inferno of flames and smoke licking up into the night sky. Already the flashing lights of fire trucks and Knight vehicles spread out around it, but the smoke and haze was too heavy for me to recognize it even if I’d seen it before.

A harsh lump rose in the pit of my stomach. “Where is that?” I asked Bug, my voice dull and nearly colorless. I was afraid I already knew.

Her reply, equally flat, confirmed my fear: “Dax and Mimi’s place.”

4.

I slammed my fist on the table, making Bug’s deck jump. “I am not staying here!” I yelled, voice shaking with all the rage and grief and guilt that I couldn’t control—that I wasn’t trying to control—any longer. “You try to make me, I’ll blow you out that fraggin’ window!” It was probably an empty threat, but maybe not. I felt like my whole body was going to explode from the inside out, and my magic might just do the same thing.

Bug looked up, her tough-grrl persona slipping a little as tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “He’s right, Tonio,” she said. “We gotta do something.” She focused on me, as if waiting for orders.

The doglike spirit was gone now—sending it off to search remotely had used up its allotted services, and it had taken off for wherever spirits hang out when they weren’t on duty. Before it left, though, I got it to confirm the thing that all three of us were terrified to find out: that Dax, my childhood friend and protector—my brother—and Mimi, who’d been the other half of his life ever since he’d met her, were both dead, burned to charred ashes in the ruin of the building they’d only just moved into a couple of months ago.

I wanted to slam my head into the nearest wall, repeatedly, until I stopped feeling like my heart was ripping apart in my chest. It wasn’t just the grief. It wasn’t just the shock of losing the only other people I had left in the world who gave a damn about me. Those were bad enough, and if I got through this alive I knew it would be a long time before I got a decent night’s sleep again. But they weren’t the worst.

The worst was the guilt. Why the hell hadn’t I just gone to KE when I’d found Uncle Mason at his shop? Why hadn’t I just called them and handed the whole thing over to them, instead of freaking out and rabbiting like a coward? So what if they suspected me of the murder—either they’d figure out I didn’t do it or they’d put me away as a scapegoat, but either way Dax and Mimi would still be alive, and their little girl—

My head snapped up. “Katie!” I hadn’t asked the spirit about anyone else in the apartment. If they’d gone home to check on her before they went to their meet, then—

Bug paled, but Tonio shook his head. “I think she’s with Mimi’s mother,” he said. “Unless they—“

Bug’s hands were already dancing over her deck again. In a couple of minutes her whole posture slumped in relief. “House is okay,” she said.

For now, I thought.

Somebody pounded on the door. I jumped, but Tonio seemed to be expecting it. He flung open the door on one of the ork pair he’d been talking to before. When he came back, his face was grim. “We gotta go,” he said. “You got any plans, kid, now’s the time. C’mon—I’ve got a van here.”

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“Company,” he said, pulling an Ingram from inside his coat and checking it. “Downstairs. We’ll go out the back.”

I swallowed. “I should go,” I said. “I already got Dax and Mimi killed with this mess of mine. No reason for you to get into it, too.”

“We’re already in it,” Tonio said, and Bug nodded. “I’ve worked with Mimi plenty of times on jobs. She was good people, and so was Dax. They wouldn’t run out on me. I ain’t runnin’ out on them. Now let’s get the hell outta here before they figure out we’re gone. I already made a couple of calls to some chummers—we can meet up with ’em if we make it fast.”

Twenty minutes later, I was still seething.

I sat in the back of Tonio’s van, which was getting pretty crowded by now. In addition to Tonio behind the wheel and Bug in the shotgun seat, we’d stopped at a shady corner bar on the edge of Redmond to pick up three more members for our little group: a smallish troll guy with one horn sticking out of the middle of his forehead, a dark-skinned human guy sporting a cyberarm that looked like it was put together from spare parts, and a scarred elf woman with purple hair and an eye patch with a hazardous-waste emblem on it. All of them had battleworn armored jackets and the wary, vigilant look of people who expected to be jumped any second and planned to be ready for it.

I was starting to realize that there’d been a lot more to Mimi than carbonating horny trolls’ hormones on the stage at Big Dreams. I wondered what else I didn’t know.

“Your show, kid,” Tonio said. The others turned to look at me, their faces impassive. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking at all.

I started to protest that I had no idea what to do next, but that was wrong. I did know. “I want to find out why these guys killed Uncle Mason,” I said. “Do you think it’s safe to go to his house and check it out, if we do some recon from a distance first?”

“What makes you think we’ll find anything there?” the elf woman’s voice was a husky red-orange, like a longtime smoker. Clearly Tonio had filled her in on the op.

I shrugged. “Those guys are still looking for me. They killed Dax and Mimi just for getting involved. If they just wanted to make an example of Uncle Mason, why come after me, or kill anybody else? Why else would they break into my place? I’m guessing they were looking for something and they haven’t found it yet.”

“Wouldn’t they look at his place first, before yours?” Bug asked. As usual, she was jacked in and only halfway paying attention, her combat-booted feet up on the van’s dash.

“Maybe, but he’s got some hiding places they might not have found,” I said. “I don’t know what he keeps in ’em, but if they missed ’em, we might find something there.” I gave Tonio the address. “Stop a few blocks away, so I can check the place out astrally, and Bug can use the cameras. There’s a security system at the house, so if she can hack that—”

“Damn right I can hack it,” she said, indignant.

Tonio shrugged. “You get anything on the fire?”

“Press release says it was a gas main,” she said without looking up.

“Bullshit,” Tonio and I said at the same time.

“What’re you gonna do with this thing if you find it?” the troll unicorn asked. “Set up a meet and let ’em have it, to get ’em off your back?”

My anger rose again. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do with anything I might find at Uncle Mason’s house, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let these drekwipes have it. As bad as what they’d done to Uncle Mason was, and as pissed off about it as I was, it was biz. What they’d done to Dax and Mimi was unforgivable.

“Hell, no,” I growled, surprised at how confident I sounded, and how pissed. “They killed my uncle. They killed my friends. If we find anything, the only meet I’m setting up is one to show ’em why doing that was a really bad idea. Anybody want to back out?”

Tonio twisted his head around to look at me, and I saw a respect on his face that hadn’t been there since I’d met him. “Nah, kid. We’re not backin’ out. You do what you need to do, and we got your back.”

So yeah, just to recap: these guys were willing to put their lives on the line for some punk kid they’d never met before tonight, for no other reason than that Dax and Mimi had put in a good word for me.

I didn’t get to screw up anymore.

Uncle Mason might have had a successful business, but he didn’t like people very much and trusted most of them even less. Which meant when he wasn’t working, he wanted to be as far away from the sprawl masses as he could get. His old Victorian house on the edge of Snohomish used to be part of one of those white bread, 2.5-kids-and-a-Labrador neighborhoods not quite far enough out to count as suburbia. Now, it was the only residential property remaining on his street after the rest of the neighborhood had been torn down to make room for some mini-corp’s complex. The corp had gone belly up, the complex never got built, and Uncle Mason’s house remained like the last soldier standing after a bloody battle. I’m sure he could have afforded something in a better area, but he was more interested in being separated from what he called “the great unwashed” by a vacant lot on one side and an abandoned warehouse on the other. He had to watch out for the occasional drifter or squatter, but as he’d told me many times, it was better than having nosy neighbors poking into his business all the time.

We parked the van a couple blocks away and made our various preparations to make sure nobody was messing with the house or waiting to ambush us before we went in: Bug settled in with her deck in the front seat, the elf woman (who hadn’t given her name, and I wasn’t going to ask) pulled a series of small drones from a hard-sided case, and I made myself comfortable in the back seat as I prepared to go astral. Nobody talked, but the mood was clear: nobody wanted any surprises.

As it turned out, the only surprise was that nobody was waiting. When we returned our attention to the van a few minutes later, all three of us had come up blank.

“Wards on the house look fine,” I said. “Didn’t see any spirits or anything near the place.” That was another reason Uncle Mason liked the little no-man’s-land around his house: it made it harder for anybody to sneak up on it without his security measures—both magical and mundane—catching on.

“I hacked the house’s net,” Bug said, “and the cameras around the area. Couple of cars drove by, but they kept going. Strings?”

The elf woman nodded. “Yeah, the drones aren’t seeing anything either. I’ll keep ’em up for overwatch, but if anybody’s hidin’ somewhere, they’re doin’ a damn good job of it.”

Tonio, who had been keeping watch along with the other two members of our group, weapons ready, nodded. “So we go in?”

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Shouldn’t take long. Just want to look in a couple of places I know he hides stuff. Should be in and out in ten minutes.”

Yeah, I know. But I was new at this, okay?

It’s strange: I thought I’d be more nervous.

We moved the van in closer, parking a block away around the corner from the warehouse. Tonio took the lead, directing us to our jobs: Bug and Strings would remain here, staying connected with us via our ’links. The unicorn, whose name was Chunder, would take a position at the other end of the warehouse with his long-barreled sniper rifle, keeping an eye on both the van and the rest of us who were going to the house. The human guy, Junkyard, would come with us and stay outside, while Tonio and I went in and looked for—I have no idea what. I hoped I’d know it if I saw it, if it was even there.

“You okay, kid?” the dwarf asked as we got ready to move. He held his blocky SMG at the ready, and I’d seen him stashing a couple of other smaller guns under his coat.

“Yeah.” I didn’t understand it, but I wasn’t scared anymore. Sure, I knew this could be dangerous: I knew if anything jumped us, I might even get myself cacked. My heart pounded, but it was more with anticipation than fear: the same sort of feeling I’d gotten back at school, right before an important test I knew I was going to ace. I wondered what the me from a couple of days ago—the me who spent his time chasing data points in boring rituals, playing too many trideo games, and worrying that I’d catch a stray Friday-night round through the wall of my doss—would think of the current me. I still felt like the grief from my uncle’s and my friends’ deaths would catch up to me any minute, but right now it was walled away; all I had now was my anger, and a strange exhilaration I didn’t understand at all. “Want me to make us invisible?”

“You can do that?” Tonio’s squinty head-tilt added the nuance: You can do something else useful?

In answer, I paused a moment, muttered some Latin under my breath, and faded from view. So did Tonio. I didn’t know that many spells, but you tell me: what other one would your typical horny, teenage-guy mage be in a hurry to learn? That one and Detox (to deal with the aftermath of all those wild college parties) were universally popular.

I’d used the downtime to summon up one of my little air spirits a couple of minutes ago; I sent it a mental command, telling it to patrol the perimeter around the house and let me know pronto if anybody got too close. It wagged its tail and took off, tongue streaming out behind it like some kind of flag. And then it was our turn.

In all the trids I’d seen featuring shadowrunners, they never managed to convey just how long it takes to cross the space of maybe fifty meters when you’re expecting somebody to ventilate you with a rifle round or a spell with every step. Real life doesn’t come with cuts for the boring stuff when nothing’s happening. I still wasn’t scared, exactly, but those kind of thoughts were close to the surface.

“Nothing on the cameras,” Bug’s voice said in my ear.

“Drones aren’t picking up anything either,” Strings added.

“Good from here,” said Chunder.

Maybe we were just overthinking the whole thing. Maybe nobody was here. If they knew where Uncle Mason’s shop was, they probably had plenty of time to hit his house already and be out, if that’s what they wanted. I started to feel a little stupid for treating this like it was some kind of big-deal shadowrun.

And then comes that moment when you realize that everything you’ve tried to do doesn’t matter a fragging bit, because the team that’s after you is paid by a dragon and probably takes down people like you for light entertainment.

One second I felt Tonio next to me, gliding along on silent feet. The next, something warm and wet splattered over my hand and arm. I heard a soft gray whump as the dwarf’s body appeared out of nowhere next to me, pitched forward, and collapsed. The blown-off part of his head flew further forward than the rest of him, settling to a stop against the front door of Uncle Mason’s house like the worst package delivery ever.

I’m not too proud to admit I shrieked like a little girl, flinging myself to the ground and rolling toward the corner of the house. At least I remembered not to drop my invisibility spell. “Bug! What the frag—”

“Get outta there!” her frantic voice came too late, right at the same time as my ears lit up with a spray of discordant colors from the others: Junkyard, Chunder, and Strings were all calling out warnings at once, and even my little air spirit was in my mind link, barking out badbadbadbad! The inside of my head was like a riot in a paint factory.

Nobody had shot me yet, which was a good thing. That was about the only good thing, though. All around the perimeter of the house the auras of the concealed team winked into being. Junkyard, who had still been invisible since I was still maintaining the spell, flared into sight, his body doing a stuttering little dance as rounds hit him from two different directions. From my hiding place around the corner of Uncle Mason’s house, I saw a shadowy figure leveling a gun at something; it jerked as it took a hit from Chunder’s sniper rifle, but that didn’t take it down.

Holy frag, that didn’t take it down!

Then I heard Chunder scream: I didn’t think a troll could make a sound like that, big and bright and so red it was almost pink.

“Get out of here!” I hissed over the comm. “Bug! Take the van and get out. It’s an ambush!” I don’t know why I was trying to play the hero—it’s not like I wanted her to take off and leave me to die. My anger rose again, and I flung a spell at the shadowy figure at the same time something high above us let loose with a stream of light fire aimed in the same direction. I couldn’t see the guy very well, but I got enough of a glimpse to launch off one of the few offensive spells I know: one designed to stun, but not to kill. When I’d been prowling around Magicknet and talking to Dax’s friend all that time ago, I hadn’t wanted to learn anything designed to kill people. Now all I wished was that I could fry that guy’s brain like a Nuke-It Burger. He staggered and dropped back out of sight, but I didn’t think I’d taken him down.

“Cody, if we bring the van in, can you get to us?” Strings said in my ear. It was a lot quieter in my head now with two of the voices silenced.

“Don’t know,” I replied. With my invisibility spell still up, I moved around toward the back of the house, figuring most of the action was out front. I sent a message to my spirit through the link, telling it to keep an eye on the area and let me know if anybody was getting too close to me. I was afraid to announce my position to Bug and Strings over the comm—if these guys were good enough to hide their presence from all of us, they were good enough to hack our channel. I thought about trying to get inside the house—I knew the code—but threw that out as a bad idea: too easy to get pinned down in there, and they’d shown no reluctance before about blowing up houses to get to people. I was suddenly feeling very alone back here.

“Cody?” Bug, this time. She sounded scared. In the background, I could hear the pounding, bright-silver metallic clanks of rounds hitting the side of the van.

“Get out, Bug!” I hissed. “Don’t wait for them to kill you too!”

“Ain’t leavin’ you,” she said. The engine rumbled. “Coming in. Be ready.”

Drek. I was going to get more people killed.

Boss! The spirit’s frantic voice in my head. Behind!

I spun to see another dark figure coming around the other side of the house. Frag it, did they ever give up? This one looked like a dwarf; I thought of gruff, blue-haired Tonio, who’d died trying to help some punk-kid friend of his teammate, and my rage flared again. I gathered mana to me, fighting to keep the invisibility spell up at the same time. I was sweating like a pig, my skull pounding in rhythm with my heartbeat: I wasn’t used to throwing around mojo like this. In fact, I’d never used magic to hurt anybody in my life before tonight. It was kind of like martial arts: once I got some training, knowing I could had always been enough to boost my confidence so I didn’t need to get into fights.

This time, though, I didn’t use my stunning spell. It hadn’t taken down the other one—at my power level, maybe I just didn’t have enough juice to take out this level of opposition. If I was going to make it out of this, I’d have to use my brain, not my power.

“Eat this, motherfragger,” I whispered, pointing my hand at the guy just as he spotted me (how had he spotted me? I was invisible!) and brought his gun around.

I wasn’t close enough to see his expression when his feet lifted off the ground and he sailed upward, but I imagined it must be pretty amusing. He yelled something I couldn’t make out and tried to get a bead on me as he continued rising, but I used his confusion to scramble behind cover again.

I didn’t take any chances: I sent him up as far as I could while still keeping him in sight, and then pulled the rug out. He plummeted, shrieking bright red (I was learning tonight that shrieks of terror were almost always some shade of red, no matter what color the voice was normally) and crashed with a dull brown thud. He didn’t move.

I wondered if I’d killed him. At this point, I didn’t care. “Bug? Still there?”

“We’re moving,” Strings said. “Taking fire. Where are you?”

I ducked low and looked around. I couldn’t see anybody else nearby: either they were invisible too, or they were still out front. “How many more?”

“At least two,” Bug said.

“We got more comin’ in,” Strings broke in. “Drones picking up two more vans from the south and west.”

Oh, frag. Things just kept getting better.

I knew I needed to get my ass back out front if I had any chance of making it out of here alive. My spirit didn’t have any more services left, but at least it was still following its last order to look out for threats. Ahead, I could still hear gunfire, and wondered if the drones had managed to take anybody else down. With Chunder and Junkyard out of action, we were woefully low on offensive capability. Basically we had Strings’s drones, and we had me.

At least Strings knew what she was doing.

I decided to risk a quick message to Bug so she’d know where I was. Coming out. East. Invisible.

“On our way,” she replied. “Hurry.”

I picked up the pace. I hadn’t been scared before, but I was now. If Bug and Strings left without me, I was meat and I knew it. My only chance was to get to the van. Even then, with two more coming in fast, odds weren’t looking good for the home team.

A cry of pain—or whatever spirits feel that passes for pain—over my mind-link, and then the little air spirit’s presence was gone. Somebody’d taken it out. That meant they had magic. Oh, this was not good…

I’d almost reached the front of the house and was starting to scan the area for the van when something hit my legs and they stopped working right. I completed an unceremonious faceplant onto the scrubby ground before I realized somebody had snared me with some kind of bola that had wrapped around my ankles and dropped me like a sack of rocks. I only had a second to consider that, twisting around to try to spot whoever had hit me, when a figure that hadn’t been there an instant ago loomed up in my vision.

He was big: a large human or an ork, but I couldn’t tell for sure because he was clad head to toe in some kind of matte-black security armor. His helmet was black too, even the visor, and he held an assault rifle in his right hand.

“Bug! I’m caught!” I hissed into the link as the man reached his beefy left hand down and grabbed me by the front of my jacket. I fought to formulate a spell, but I had no experience with this kind of combat casting, and he was shaking me so hard my teeth were rattling.

“Frag it, kid!” His voice behind the helmet was an electronic growl, dark muddy orange shot through with streaks of purple. I’d never heard a voice that color before. “Just tell us where the hell you stashed it, and nobody else has to die!”

I gaped at him. At this point, I’m not proud to say, I’d have handed over anything I owned just to get these guys off our backs. Yeah, they’d killed Uncle Mason. Yeah, they’d killed Dax and Mimi. Maybe they were even going to kill me. But I’d be damned if I was going to get whoever remained of my team—of Mimi and Dax’s chummers—killed to hold on to some thing, no matter how valuable somebody might think it was.

The problem was, I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about. “Got what stashed?” I yelled, infusing all of my anger and frustration into my voice. “What the hell are you talking about?” 

In the periphery of my awareness I thought I heard an explosion.

Oh, no.

Oh, frag, no.

The guy in the black armor shook me again. “Don’t frag with me, you stupid kid!” the featureless helmet screamed in my face. I could barely make out other figures approaching from behind him. “You damn well better—”

He didn’t get a chance to tell me what I damn well better do, because suddenly the air was full of sound. Something hit the guy from behind and pitched him forward, driving us both back into the house. Of course I hit first, and then he hit me. He was no lightweight—I gasped as the impact forced my breath out of me. My mind spun: Maybe Bug and Strings had—

Was that a helicopter?

And then the whole house and the yard in front of me were bathed in light so bright it burned my eyes. I sagged back against the house and squinted up, trying to make sense out of what was going on. The black-armored guy had dropped me and backed off, and somebody in the chopper was firing on him. I watched him turn tail and retreat so fast I could barely follow his movement, weaving back and forth toward the back yard. I tried to throw a spell at him, but he was gone before I could gather my thoughts.

And then the yard was full of people, and they were all shooting at each other. Mostly the new group was shooting at the old group, because as near as I could tell, the old group was trying their best to get their asses out of there as fast as they could. Which wasn’t very fast: the new group was mowing them down like a pro Urban Brawl team taking out a herd of street kids.

“Bug? Strings? You there?” Even as I called their names into the ’link, I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer. I didn’t have a good view of the front part of the house, but the orange nimbus-glow and the smell of burning rubber and oil (and worse) told me what I needed—and desperately didn’t want—to know.

I had to get out of here. Nobody was paying attention to me right now. If I was careful, I might be able slip out before they—

A woman in armor appeared around the corner of the house, looking right at me. “Come on,” she called. “We’ll get you out of here!”

I might be new at this, but I wasn’t an idiot. I raised my hands, head throbbing, and pulled the mana to me again.

She whipped out a small gun. It fired with the tiniest of little baby-blue thwips, something stung the side of my neck, and that was it.

5.

When I woke up, I wasn’t dead.

That was seriously the first thought that popped into my head when I opened my eyes: I’m not dead. Why am I not dead?

“About time,” said a voice, gruff but not unkind.

I blinked. I was lying on something soft, in a dim and mostly featureless room. Seated next to me was somebody I’d never seen before: an ork woman in an olive-drab tank top, her whole upper body assembled from big slabs of muscle. I jumped, trying to jerk to a sitting position. My head felt woozy.

“Easy,” she said, putting aside the newsfax she’d been reading. Her voice, oddly, was bright pink. “Easy, kid. You’re okay now. You’re safe.”

I stared at her. I was right: I’d never seen her before. Where the hell was I? “Why aren’t I dead?” I demanded. My voice slurred a little, and I finally caught on: they’d drugged me. My hand flew to my neck where the sting had hit me.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “Things were a little chaotic. We had to get you out fast. Couldn’t have you fighting us.”

“Who are you?” I scrubbed my forehead like I was trying to hold my brains in. This night just kept making less and less sense as it went on. “What do you want? Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”

She handed me a bottle of water. “Here. Drink this. And if you feel up to it, come with me. There’s some people you need to meet.”

“I’m not going fraggin’ anywhere!” I yelled, slapping the bottle out of her hand. “Not until somebody tells me what the hell’s going on!” I felt my control, which had held up remarkably well over the course of everything that had happened to me tonight, at last starting to slip its moorings. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to do anything. Everybody I cared about—everybody who’d trusted me—was dead now. At this point I didn’t give one frag what happened to me. I was thoroughly out of frags to give.

The ork woman nodded, and there was sympathy in her small brown eyes. “Yeah, I get it,” she said. “You’ve had a pretty rotten night, from what I heard.”

“Are they dead?” The question came out of me without any mental filters to hold it back. I had to know. “Bug and Strings, and the others—are they—?” A last glimmer of hope struggled to stay alive inside me, that maybe they’d managed to get out, or that somehow they’d just been injured, instead of—

Her expression was all I needed to see.

I sank back down to the bed, rolling over away from her. This was it. I couldn’t take any more. “Just go away,” I told her. “Or kill me, if you’re going to. I don’t care any more.”

There was a long pause, silent except for her breathing and mine. I heard her chair creak as she got up, and her footfalls as she left the room. The door shut with a gentle click. I didn’t even bother to roll over and try to see if there was a way I could escape. That was how much I didn’t care.

I wasn’t sure how much time passed before the door opened again. I didn’t turn back toward it. “I told you to go away.”

“We can’t do that, Cody.” It was a different voice this time: male, soft, deep blue shot with purple. It had a British accent.

I still didn’t roll over. “Get out, whoever you are. All of you.”

“Don’t you want to know what all of this is about?” the man asked.

I froze, curious in spite of myself, and hating myself for it. At least if they were going to kill me, I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what was so important that all these people were willing to commit this many murders over it.

I rolled over.

The man sat in the same chair the ork woman had been in. He was human, maybe late thirties, with dark hair and a suit that probably cost more than my monthly salary back at ManaSure.

“Look,” I said, letting out a loud sigh. “I don’t know who you are, or what you want. I don’t care. My friends are dead. My uncle’s dead. Maybe you’re connected with the people who killed them. Maybe you’re not. But either way, I can’t help you.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” he said. He stood. “Come out front when you’re ready. There are things you need to hear, and then you can decide what you want to do.”

And he left, just like that, closing the door behind him again.

For a couple minutes, I thought about just staying where I was, but part of my mind wouldn’t let me do that. Some part of me had to know, even if it was just for the short time before they killed me.

I swung my legs off the bed, making a quick detour to take a leak before heading out. I stared at my image in the small mirror, realizing I hadn’t gotten a good look at myself all night. My eyes were huge and sunken in my pale, thin face, my mousy-brown hair hanging in lank strings over my forehead. I looked like some kind of war survivor.

Come to think of it, I guess maybe that’s what I was.

When I showed up in the front room of what looked like a featureless rental house, the ork woman was there, along with a lean, leather-jacketed human man with a dirty-blond ponytail. The British man came back in from the kitchen, where he’d been conversing with someone on a commlink. All three of them looked at me, waiting.

“Well?” I demanded, throwing myself down into the nearest chair. “Start talking. What the hell’s going on, why is somebody killing all my friends, and what are they looking for? I know it’s got something to do with my uncle, and some dragon. Maybe more than one. And they think I’ve got this thing, whatever it is. So what is it? And while I’m at it, who the hell are you?” I glared at them in challenge, one right after the other. As bad as I felt right now, it felt good to get that all out.

The British man answered. He didn’t look at all ruffled by my outburst. He paced around the room as he talked. “You’re quite likely correct. The people who killed your uncle and your friends want you because they think you have something they want. The question we need to answer is: do you?”

“Don’t you people listen?” I yelled. Whatever patience I might have had at some point—and I’d never been high on the scale even at the best of times—had gone right out the window a couple of hours ago. I spoke in slow, distinct words, like I was talking to a toddler: “I. Don’t. Have. Anything.”

“I’m not so sure that’s true,” he said. “Since you don’t know what it is, you might have it and not even know you have it. Or, as I suspect, you might know where it is, or at least have seen it. That’s what we’re needing to determine.” He paused and seemed to catch on that I was building up another head of steam, because he continued: “They—or rather, the people they’re working for—are looking for a dragon embryo. And so are the people we’re working for. The difference is, our employer doesn’t want to kill anyone who’s ever been associated with it. He’s—somewhat more forgiving of past transgressions than his counterpart.”

I gaped at him. I wasn’t sure I’d even heard him right. “A—dragon embryo? You mean like a baby dragon? Some kind of egg?”

“Not an egg,” he said. “A preserved embryo. Probably around a third of a meter long.” He pulled out his commlink, called up an image, and held it up. It showed a page from a scientific textbook, depicting a small, grayish creature that did look quite a bit like the beginnings of a baby dragon. It also looked very dead. “It would likely be stored in some kind of solution. It’s very old.”

I studied it for a moment, then looked up at him. “That’s what everybody’s after? My uncle doesn’t have any—”

I stopped, a sudden chill crawling up my spine as a long-ago memory from my childhood came back to me.

“What?” the ork woman asked, leaning forward.

I let my breath out. “I thought it was a fake…” I said, talking more to myself than to any of them. “A model, or something. That’s why I didn’t think of it, even after Bug—“ I hadn’t seen the thing for years, but I could picture it clear as day in my mind’s eye now: back when I’d first gotten my magic and spent most of my free time helping Uncle Mason in his shop, it had been there in the back room, sitting on the shelf in a jar, next to a couple of other, similar specimens. I think one of them had been some kind of Awakened chicken, and one was a monkey-looking thing. When Bug had mentioned “dragon parts,” it hadn’t even occurred to me that Uncle Mason might have had a whole dragon sitting in his storeroom.

“You know of it?” the British man asked, excitement layering a flash of red over his blue-purple tones.

I glared at him. “Okay, just a fraggin’ minute,” I protested. “You’re gonna tell me the rest of this. I’m done being some kind of pawn in everybody’s little game. You want what I know, you tell me what I want to know. That’s the deal.”

He made a small shrug. “Fair enough, then. But be quick. If you know where it is, we need to move soon. They won’t stop looking.”

“So there’s some dragon out there who’s pissed off because talismongers are selling their parts, right?” I asked, leaning forward in my chair. “That’s what Bug found when she did some digging online.”

He nodded. “Yes. There’s discord among the dragons these days, as well as between the dragons and what they call the ‘young races’—that is to say, us. Some of the more militant among them have decided that anyone who’s been trafficking in dragon reagents needs to be punished with extreme prejudice. And then there are others who want the reagents back merely so they can give them a proper draconic sendoff.”

“Who are you working for?”

“That, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“A dragon, though.”

“It’s probably safer if we don’t tell you that.”

An answer without being an answer. I mulled that over. “And these other guys are working for one of the dragons that wants to kill everybody who’s ever had anything to do with a dragon reagent. Even if it was years ago. Even if they didn’t mean to, like my friends.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s to say they won’t kill me if I tell you where this thing is and you take it away?” I demanded, anger seeping into my voice. “You take it and go off wherever you’re from and give it to this other dragon, and I’m stuck here in Seattle. My friends are dead. My uncle’s dead. I got nobody any more. They’ll pick me off like gangers on a devil rat.”

He considered. “We could—arrange a relocation, I think.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want a relocation. That would just move the problem to a different city. At least here I know my way around.”

“Then what do you want?” he asked. “I’m sorry, Cody, but we need to be getting on with—”

“What are you gonna do with it if I tell you where it is?” I cut him off. “Once you have it, then what?”

He tilted his head. “Then we arrange a meet to hand it off. I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

“I want to go along,” I said.

“Come on,” said the guy with the ponytail, rising. “’Hawk, this is bullshit. We need to—”

The British man held up a hand to silence him, but his expression was grim. “That’s out of the question,” he said, shaking his head.

“Why? Because it’s dangerous?” I leaped up and got in his face. I didn’t care if this guy and his friends were some kind of hot-drek operators who could take me out with a gesture. That had long since ceased being a factor in anything I did. “You haven’t been paying attention. My whole life has been fragged over because of this thing. I have literally got nothing to lose, except my life, and maybe I don’t give much of a shit about that right now. So either kill me right now, or take me along on this meet. Those are your choices. Take ’em or leave ’em.”

“Or I could just take the knowledge from your mind,” he said, eyes narrowing. “There’s that, too.”

I didn’t flinch. “You can try,” I said. “Go ahead. I’m sure you can do it. But you might as well kill me after—it’ll be easier for me than looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

The man named ’Hawk sighed, spreading his hands in a gesture of frustrated acceptance. “All right,” he said. “You can come along. But no promises after that. I don’t see what you expect to gain from it, but if that’s what you want, fine.”

I knew he was right: it wouldn’t change anything. I’d still probably have to get out of Seattle and go into hiding after this. But at least I’d see it through to the end before I did. I felt like I owed that much to Uncle Mason and the others.

Retrieving the dragon embryo was downright anticlimactic after everything else that had happened so far. I’m not sure if it was because the people coming after us had been slowed down by having a good chunk of their number taken out earlier, or if the people I was with now were good enough that they could hide our activities from prying eyes. Either way, we made it in and out without incident.

Well, mostly without incident.

The ironic thing about the whole situation was that if the original team who’d taken Uncle Mason apart had paid a little more attention, they’d have found what they were looking for at the beginning of their evening, and most of the deaths that came after—including theirs—could have been avoided.

When we eased into the shop, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It was a lot stronger than it had been earlier. “They haven’t found Uncle Mason yet,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Ya think?” asked the man with the ponytail. On the way over, they’d introduced themselves: he was Ocelot, the ork woman was Greta, and the British mage who seemed to be running the show was Winterhawk. They’d assured me they had others at their disposal as well, including a decker coordinating things in the Matrix from some undisclosed location. I guess I hadn’t been wrong before: when you were working for a dragon, the resource budget sprouted a lot more zeroes.

Winterhawk was subvocalizing into a throat mic; in a moment he switched his attention back to me. “All right—let’s make this quick. Where is it? One of those hidden areas in the back?” He’d already done a thorough astral scan of the place from the car before we’d gone inside.

“Nope.” I was glad I didn’t have to go into the back room: I didn’t want to look at Uncle Mason again, especially not after he’d had a few more hours at room temperature. Plus, if nobody’d been back since my last visit, that meant my little contribution to the scenery was still festering on the floor, too. Yeah, all in all I was glad Uncle Mason was all about misdirection.

See, any talismonger worth the name kept his valuable stock locked up in the back behind protections both magical and mundane, where every slot who wandered in off the street couldn’t get an eyeful. In order to get your hands on the good stuff, you had to know what you wanted and prove you could pay for it. That meant that when lore shops got broken into, the back storeroom—including any secret hidden areas it contained—was the first place a smart thief looked. And Uncle Mason did have a couple of secret nooks back there.

However, he also had one out front, hiding in plain sight, that he didn’t think I knew about. I glanced over toward the front door, where Ocelot was keeping a watchful lookout, and then moved to the rearmost display case. It was full of trinkets, fetishes, and other tourist-quality objects that Uncle Mason didn’t even bother putting away when he closed up for the night. “If it’s still here,” I said, “this’ll be where it is.”

Winterhawk came over and crouched down next to it, his expression going remote as he assensed it. “Not magical,” he stated. “But then, it wouldn’t be, would it?” He examined the area for a few moments, then felt around under the lip where the glass met the counter’s pedestal. After a moment, the whole upper part of the case swung forward.

“Is it there?” I asked, leaning forward to look, curious in spite of myself. A heavy stone lid covered a rectangular area about a meter long by half a meter wide. When Greta bent down and lifted the lid off, the space beneath it extended below the level of the pedestal, dug about half a meter into the earth. Winterhawk smiled, raising an eyebrow, and nodded in approval. “Simple, but effective.” Inside the little nook were several boxes and other items wrapped in cloths. He ignored all of those and went immediately instead for a larger, cylindrical package on the far end. With a wave of his hand he levitated it out of the case and settled it gently on the counter. “Care to do the honors?” he asked me.

I unwrapped it, forgetting to breathe. I hoped to hell I was right that if the old “dragon model” had been important and was still here, this is where Uncle Mason would have stored it. I didn’t know what I was going to do if it wasn’t, or what Winterhawk and his team would do to me. Sure, they seemed like the good guys—relatively speaking, anyway—but I was learning fast that trusting anybody completely without a whole lot more knowledge about them than I had was a fast way to get yourself screwed over. Maybe I wasn’t in as much of a hurry to die as I thought I was.

I needn’t have worried, though. The cloth fell away to reveal a heavy jar. Inside, a small curled creature floated in a bath of yellowish liquid. It looked like one of those fetus sims they show you in health class, only instead of a half-formed metahuman it was reptilian, its tiny tail curled protectively around it. It was closer to a third of a meter than half, and its half-formed eyes were closed almost as if it was asleep. I kind of felt sorry for the little guy.

Winterhawk went glassy-eyed for a second again, examining it, but snapped out fast when Ocelot called him from the door. “’Hawk, that it? We gotta move. Scratch says we got friends comin’ in.”

“Yes,” he said, re-wrapping the jar and gathering it up. “Let’s go.”

Friends.

So whoever else was after the dragon baby, they were still active.

I hoped my new chummers were better at dealing with them than my old ones had been, or this was going to be a real short alliance.

We didn’t go back to the house I’d woken up in; Ocelot drove in a different direction, out toward Everett. Winterhawk sat in the shotgun seat with the pickled wizworm and once again appeared to be talking to someone on his commlink, leaving me in the back with Greta. As usual when I was nervous and didn’t know what else to do, I made small talk. “So—do you guys usually work together?”

“Those two have,” she said in her bright pink voice, nodding toward the front. “Me, I’m local, but I do jobs for the same Johnson.”

I nodded. They really do call their boss ‘Mr. Johnson.’ Idly, I wondered how she—how any of them—had ended up as shadowrunners, but didn’t ask. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing you just asked somebody when you’d barely known them for an hour. I’d wondered about Mimi and Tonio and the others, too. I mean, ‘shadowrunner’ isn’t one of those things you put on your ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ essay in school. Even if it was true, which I’d imagine it was for a whole lot of kids. “How long you been doing this?”

She gave me a sideways grin. “Long enough. You sure are full of questions.”

“Long night.” I twisted around to look out the back window, irrationally convinced that someone had to be following us. It was raining again, distorting the cars’ headlights into smears of brightness.

“Chill, kid,” Ocelot said from the front seat. “We got it covered.”

“You can relax for now,” Greta added.

I noticed that she kept her hand on her rifle, though. “Is that why we’re not going back to the same place?”

She looked approving that I’d noticed. “Never use the same safe house twice,” she said. “We won’t be there long, though. Soon as Winterhawk sets up the meet, we’ll be heading out. The sooner we ditch that thing, the happier I’ll be.”

“You and me both,” I said. But I still wondered what was going to happen to me once the handoff was done. Maybe I should have taken them up on the relocation offer.

I wondered if it was too late, but I figured maybe I should wait and see if I lived through the night first.

Just like Greta had predicted, we didn’t stay long at the new safe house. We dropped off the car in a locked garage, where another one was waiting for us along with a sleek sportbike, then hung out inside while Winterhawk arranged the meet. I noticed he never let the jar with the dragon embryo out of his sight. Greta spent the time checking her weapons, while Ocelot prowled from window to window and appeared to be communicating with the team’s decker. Five minutes later, Winterhawk came back out.

“We a go?” Ocelot asked.

He nodded. “The drop is in half an hour. We’re to meet up with their driver, who’ll deliver us to the location.”

I frowned. “I thought you guys worked for these people. Why the secrecy?”

“They don’t want the meet location getting out ahead of time,” Greta said. “Easier to avoid gatecrashers that way.”

I supposed that made sense. I started to get up when Winterhawk waved me back down. He came over to me, looking serious. “Now then,” he said. “Before we go, a couple of ground rules. I don’t like bringing you along, but since you insist, this is how it will work. You’re an observer, nothing more. You watch, but you do not participate. Understood?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, fine. I’ll keep my mouth shut. What else?”

He glanced down at the wrapped jar. “It’s unlikely that anything will go wrong, but of course we’d be fools to count on it. If anything does go unexpectedly, do your best to stay out of the way.”

“He means it,” Ocelot growled. “We don’t babysit. You do something stupid, we won’t take risks saving your ass. Got it?” From his expression, he was even more against the idea of me coming along than Winterhawk was.

“Hey, I’m in no hurry to get shot,” I told him. “I want this whole mess to be over as much as you do. I’ll keep my head down.”

“All right, then,” Winterhawk said, nodding as if that was settled. “Showtime.”

The rendezvous point was the parking lot of a small office complex in Auburn. The place kind of reminded me of ManaSure, where this time yesterday I’d been just another faceless drone with nobody trying to kill me. Hard to believe that had been less than a day ago.

It was only an hour or so before sunrise, so the lot and the building were both deserted: even the most dedicated wageslave at a place like this doesn’t make a habit of working at the crack of dawn.

We didn’t go directly there, of course. Greta, who was driving now, stopped the car a couple of blocks away and Ocelot, following on the motorcycle, pulled up behind us. I sat in the back seat, watching and listening while the three of them coordinated with their decker and what sounded like a drone rigger, and then Winterhawk slumped into the corner of his seat to step out for an astral jaunt. He’d also summoned a spirit, though I don’t know what he’d ordered it to do. I thought about joining him on the astral, but decided that would violate my “look, but don’t participate” deal. No point in getting them pissed at me when we were this close to the end of this mess.

Winterhawk returned five minutes later. “Anything?”

“Scratch isn’t picking up squat,” Greta said.

“Drones are in place,” Ocelot added. “All clear.” He got back on the bike and fired it up.

The waiting vehicle in the parking lot was a gray van with blacked-out windows. “I don’t like this,” Ocelot grumbled.

Winterhawk didn’t look happy about it either. He was listening to something on his ‘link. “Sounds like Cody and I will be in the van. Greta, you take the car. Both of you stay close to us,” he said. “Scratch and Spassky will be running overwatch.”

I looked back and forth between them. They didn’t mess around—I wondered if all this preparation was the way all good shadowrunner teams operated, or if they were all just suffering from a troll-sized case of paranoia.

Greta pulled the car up next to the van. Winterhawk got out, motioning for me to do likewise, and slung the carefully padded pack containing the jar over his shoulder.

The van’s back door slid open, revealing a bench seat. The driver, a buff human with short-cut brown hair, nodded to us and waved us into the seats, then closed the door and drove off when we were settled.

I was relieved to see that the windows weren’t actually blacked out, just heavily tinted. I guess they figured that secrecy was one thing, but putting the guys delivering the goods inside a metal box with no way to see out the sides was a little much to ask for.

“Everyone in position?” Winterhawk’s voice came through my tiny earpiece. They’d fitted me with one and a throat mic at the last safe house, so I could be in on what was happening.

“Right behind you,” Greta’s voice responded.

“So far, so good,” said Ocelot.

“Cameras showing nothing suspicious on projected route,” said another female voice I didn’t recognize—must be the decker, Scratch.

“Same with the drones,” said a gruff male with a dark-brown Russian accent. “Got ’em deployed up ahead along projected route—adjusting as necessary.”

“Good,” Winterhawk subvocalized next to me from the seat closest to the door. “My spirit doesn’t see anything interesting, either. Keep your eyes open.”

I sat back and watched out the window. The van headed north toward Renton, hopping on the 169 for a short distance before exiting again toward Tacoma.

Then I glanced sideways at Winterhawk; he seemed relaxed, but I suspected otherwise. He’d unslung the pack from his shoulder and held it protectively in his lap. His eyes were constantly moving. Every couple of minutes, reports would come in from the others: still no sign of anything suspicious.

Wondering how far we had left to go, I glanced at the driver. He didn’t look rigged, which seemed odd to me, but a quick astral glance showed me that there wasn’t much of him left there. That meant he had to be wired up good, with plenty of reaction to deal with anything that might go south. He kept his eyes on the road, driving smoothly at or near the speed limit. Not attracting any attention.

The other thing that seemed strange to me was that we were driving so far from where we’d gotten in the van. If they wanted to keep their location a secret, it would be easy enough to do in the sprawl, even if it was fairly close to the rendezvous point. I was pretty sure we’d already driven several kilometers away from where we’d joined up.

I looked out the window again: we were driving through what looked like a warehouse district, the buildings rising up on either side of the street to make the road into a kind of metal canyon. The streetlights here were intermittent.

I took another look at Winterhawk, assensing him. He still looked outwardly calm, but he was letting me see the slight concern that touched his aura. He didn’t like this any more than I did.

“I wonder how much farther…” I murmured.

“Are we close?” he asked aloud to the driver. “We hadn’t planned on taking the scenic route.”

“Not far now,” the driver said without turning around. “We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

I froze.

His voice was dark orange with streaks of purple.

And electronic enhancement or not, I never forgot a voice.

The last time I’d heard this one, it was when its fully-armored owner was screaming at me back at Uncle Mason’s house.

6.

I had maybe a couple of seconds to figure out what to do. I was afraid to say anything over the comm—afraid they might have been monitoring everything we’d been saying to each other since we’d started. Instead, I let my instincts take over.

“Drek, I’m tired,” I said, yawning, counting on Winterhawk to look at me, since it was the first thing I’d said since we’d gotten in.

He did, raising a questioning eyebrow. I cut my eyes toward the guy in the front and then made the tiniest headshake. “Haven’t slept for almost a whole day. I’ll be glad when this is over so I can crash.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he agreed. “I suggest you check out the Mockingbird.”

I had only a second to register that what he’d said made no sense, and a second after that to realize it had to be a code word, but at that point things all started happening at once and I didn’t have time to worry about it.

The guy in the front seat stabbed a finger on a control on the van’s console.

A panel slid into place with a solid gray snik-thunk between the driver’s section of the van and the passenger compartment.

A hissing sound issued from somewhere up near the ceiling. I looked up in panic and saw a fog of green gas beginning to waft downward from several places at once.

Winterhawk reacted instantly: snatching the backpack containing the dragon, he pointed his hand at the window next to him and blew it outward in a hail of armored glass shards. A couple of seconds after that, he had lifted off the seat and was zooming out through the opening he’d made. “Out, Cody!” he called over his shoulder.

I was already feeling woozy from the gas, but I was expecting something to happen and moved fast enough to avoid the worst of it. Casting my own levitate spell, I flew out the window behind him. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder in time to see the driver’s face, red with rage as he watched us slip his trap. His window was coming down. I didn’t wait to see what he had planned.

“Hostiles ahead,” Spassky said over the comm. “I’ll get my toys on ’em.”

Everything was moving so fast I was having a hard time keeping track of what was happening. Winterhawk had hit the ground and rolled—I wasn’t surprised he looked a little pale after taking out that armored window. I kept my levitation spell up and zipped over toward one of the warehouses, trying to find cover. Spotting a junker car missing its wheels, I ducked behind it and tried to get a view of the scene.

Voices chattered in my ear, getting off clipped reports one after the other. Greta was yelling for ’Hawk and me to get back to the car. I crept along behind my junker trying to get closer—I’d just gotten a glimpse of Greta’s car screaming up toward us when a loud brown crack split the air and something huge and impossibly bulky rose up out of the street in front of it. Holy drek, that was the biggest earth spirit I’d ever seen in my life! It was bigger than Dax!

As I stared in horror it tore itself free of the street, flinging chunks of plascrete in every direction. Greta tried to stop the car but it was too close: she succeeded in slewing it sideways and hitting the spirit with the passenger side instead of head-on, but it raised a rocky fist and slammed it down on the car’s hood. The thud echoed through the air and bounced off the warehouses on either side. Greta scrambled free of the wreck, clutching her big gun, and backed off.

I fought to get my breath and my heartbeat under control. This wasn’t some small battle like at my doss, or even at Uncle Mason’s place. This was the big time, and if I didn’t keep my wits about me, I’d get flattened like roadkill. For a second I thought about just firing up my invisibility spell and getting out—Winterhawk and his team didn’t owe me anything, and I didn’t owe them anything.

Except I did. They’d saved my life at Uncle Mason’s place, and that little dragon in a jar was what had gotten all my friends killed. Even if I didn’t owe my team anything, I was damned if I was gonna just take off and let those asswipes on the other side have it.

I popped my head up again, carefully. Winterhawk wasn’t in the middle of the street anymore: he’d gotten behind some cover on the same side of the street as me and was currently trying to deal with the earth spirit, which, after it had destroyed the car, was looking for a new target. Something spanged into the car he was behind with a metallic blue pop, and he moved quickly around where I couldn’t see him.

“Sniper on the roof,” came Spassky’s voice. “Marking it. I’ll see if I can take it out.” I had no idea what he meant by “marking it,” but I glanced around anyway. I couldn’t see any snipers.

It occurred to me that for a team as well organized as our opposition, they didn’t seem to be attacking with the kind of coordination I’d expected. It only took me a second to realize why: we’d fragged up their plans! Or rather, I had. They’d set up some kind of ambush for us, and we’d almost reached it when I recognized our driver’s voice and tipped Winterhawk off. That meant whatever they’d set up was still ahead of us. It couldn’t have been far, though, not if snipers were shooting at us.

Ocelot zoomed by on his motorcycle, back toward Greta’s car. There was a high-pitched whine and something exploded just behind it. He reacted quickly, but not quickly enough—the bike bucked and flung him off. Without thinking, I threw off a levitate spell and grabbed him, lowering him to the ground. He leaped up, unhurt, and dived for cover. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to toss off too many more spells before I tired myself out, so I had to make them count.

“Sniper’s down,” Spassky’s voice came over the link.

I took quick stock again, popping up like some kind of urban prairie dog. Greta had left the earth spirit to Winterhawk and sprinted off behind cover on the other side of the street, where she was exchanging fire with the driver of our van. Winterhawk himself, the backpack still securely slung over one shoulder, was focusing on the spirit. He waved his hands in an intricate pattern and something formed in front of him, pulled from the piles of garbage, trash cans, and other bits of the street and whirling around until it formed a vague humanoid shape as big as the earth spirit. He snapped a harsh syllable at it and pointed toward the dirt creature, and it rumbled off with a series of metallic clangs and clatters to engage it.

At the other end of the street, the one we’d been heading toward, something else was approaching. I couldn’t get a good look at it because it was staying close to the wall, but it didn’t move like any kind of metahuman I’d ever seen. “Something’s coming,” I said over the link. “Fast.”

Ocelot had seen it too. “On it,” he said, leaping out from his cover and sprinting off. He looked like he was pulling something small from his pocket, but I couldn’t make it out.

Something slammed into my junker car. I dived sideways, eyes wide, realizing I’d just been shot at—and almost hit! Okay, so much for my theory that they’d leave me alone because I was a nobody. I was in the fight, so I was a target. Panting, I flung up my invisibility spell and headed for fresh cover. The shots weren’t repeated, so I guess whatever had fired at me couldn’t see me.

A bright red-pink scream through the comm snapped my head up. Greta! I watched, helpless, as a round from the driver’s assault rifle found a space between her armor. Blood erupted from her and she spun to the ground. A second later, one of Spassky’s drones stitched him with automatic fire and he fell too.

The thing that had been heading toward Ocelot was close enough to see now. For a moment I just stared. What was that thing? Was it a dragon? Couldn’t be—it was too small to be a dragon. But it was definitely something reptilian, and it moved every bit as fast as Ocelot. Their bodies blurred as they slammed into each other, darting in and out like a pair of jungle cats. I thought about trying to help, but I was afraid I’d aim wrong and end up hitting Ocelot. Instead, I moved off toward where I’d last seen Winterhawk.

The two spirits were still taking each other apart, their large-scale urban renewal sending up clouds of dust and hunks of ’crete and dirt. They seemed evenly matched—there was no way I wanted to even try getting into the middle of that. Trying to get a bit of perspective on the scene, I levitated up to the roof of the nearest warehouse. After verifying that nobody else was there, I dropped the invisibility and settled down in a crouch, panting. Combat casting was hard when you weren’t used to it!

From up here I could see better: Winterhawk had located the other team’s spellslinger, a dark-skinned woman crouched behind a dumpster on the other side of the street, and the two of them were flinging major mojo at each other. Like the spirits, they seemed fairly equally matched, but I knew from experience they wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. They were stronger than me by a long way, but they were also throwing a lot bigger spells. Fortunately, Spassky had seen the battle, too—I could see one of his small, armed drones moving into position. It let loose a barrage of fire at the woman, who was forced to duck back behind her cover. Winterhawk did the same, puffing with exertion.

And then, from the corner of my eye, I saw something zooming fast toward him. I couldn’t even get a warning out before it was on him. It was another guy on a small, fast bike, crouched low over its tank. Instead of hitting Winterhawk, though, it appeared to just zoom past him. It was halfway down the street before I realized what the guy had done: He’d sliced the strap on the backpack holding the dragon embryo!

“He’s got the dragon!” I yelled into the comm.

He was moving so fast, though, that none of our team was close enough that they’d be able to stop him. Ocelot was still tied up with the dragon-looking thing. Greta was down, probably dead. It was out of Winterhawk’s line of sight, and his spirit was busy beating up Dirtman. Spassky might be able to get it, but it was moving so fast I couldn’t count on that.

It was up to me.

I acted without thinking. Gathering mana, I focused on the fast-moving bike and used a spell that I’d used a lot at work, but never in the wild. I’d fantasized about it a few times, but usually throwing up mana barriers in front of people in public is frowned upon by polite society.

Frag polite society. This asshole wasn’t getting away with Uncle Mason’s dragon.

The glowing barrier shimmered into existence in front of the bike, so perfectly placed that I figured for once in my life maybe the gods figured they owed me one. The guy had no time to stop—I doubt he even saw the barrier before he slammed into it. The bike, being inorganic, went right through, but the rider was stopped like he’d hit a brick wall—which he sort of had. The guy hit the ground with a splat, and the backpack skittered away.

By that time Spassky had caught up. One of his little drones dropped down and neatly snatched the pack. It hesitated for a moment, then soared up and dropped the pack into my lap as I sat there panting on the roof. It dipped its rotors in salute, then scooted off again. I clutched the pack and listened as the fight raged on below me.

At this point I really hoped we were winning, because I was so exhausted that I didn’t think I could be any more help.

Saying the restaurant where we got back together that evening was the nicest I’d ever been in would be like saying trolls are kind of bumpy. The only reason I didn’t feel completely out of place was that we had a small back dining room to ourselves, so I didn’t have to put up with all the beautiful people giving my cheap suit the stink-eye. I didn’t want the meal to be over, but too soon it was.

Winterhawk waited until after the waiters had cleared away our plates and made themselves scarce before turning to me. “Before we leave,” he said, “I just wanted to say: well done. And thank you.”

His words hit me like I hadn’t felt in years, since back when Uncle Mason used to give me rare praise for getting a spell just right. “Thanks.” I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t have a choice, really. My ass was on the line back there, too.”

The dragon baby had been safely delivered earlier that day. Winterhawk had introduced me to a tall, dark-haired man he called “Quicksilver,” who had assured me that the little guy would be given proper respect. I liked him instantly, though I wasn’t sure why.

“I guess it’s over, then,” I said. “Do you think they’ll come after me now?”

“Hard to say,” he said. “Knowing what I do about who was funding them, I doubt it. It’s not good business, and he’s not quite as fanatical as some.”

I nodded, looking down at my plate. So there it was. They’d be leaving, and I’d be back to being Cody the Slacker. Except now I was Cody the Jobless, Friendless, Family-less Slacker. Great. Even Greta, the only one of them who’d admitted to being local, was dead.

“There is the matter of your cut, though,” Winterhawk was saying.

My head snapped up. “Cut?”

He nodded. “You’ve got a knack for this sort of thing. Without your quick thinking, that job would have ended quite badly. I’d say that’s worth a cut of our payment for it.”

I looked at him, then at Ocelot. He was expressionless, but he nodded. “Damn right,” he said.

’Hawk held up his commlink so I could see the number on it. “Is that acceptable?”

I stared. Swallowed. Swallowed again. The digits showed more cred than I’d seen all at once in my life. Almost as much as I’d have made in a year at my job back at ManaSure. It would be enough to get me set up in some other town until I could figure out what I wanted to do with myself.

Except I knew what I wanted to do with myself.

I took the plunge. “Tell you what,” I said. “How about I take half of that amount? And something else.”

His eyebrow crept up. “Something else?”

“Yeah. I got nothing left to hold me here anymore. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do with my life. Now I do. I want to do this.”

Both of them looked surprised. I wasn’t sure what I expected: laughter, scorn, contempt? I got none of that. They glanced at each other, then Winterhawk shrugged. “We could arrange to introduce you to some people, if that’s what you want. You understand it would be a bit more—prosaic—than this?”

I had no idea what “prosaic” meant, but I got the gist. “If you mean I’d have to start at the bottom, I figured that.”

Winterhawk nodded. “Done, then.” He switched a number on his ’link and finished the transfer. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, rising. And then they were gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

I looked down at the number on my ’link for a moment, then initiated another transfer. I didn’t need much to live on. The rest would make sure that Dax and Mimi’s daughter Katie and her grandmother would get by, at least for a while.

I got up, took one last look around a place I probably wouldn’t see again for a very long time, and exited onto the rainy Seattle street. I was pretty sure I’d get a good night’s sleep tonight.

Hey, you gotta be well-rested when you’re starting a new job.

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