6.5

  Dance’s mapping device tells us the convoy is only three minutes away. No sudden stops, no deviations. Just a straight shot towards the bridge.

  Now or never.

  Dance keys in the command on the panel, and the system hesitates, just for a second. I tap into the spider-bot and scurry along the outer edge of the rooftop, careful not to lose control, and watch as the two sides of the bridge begin to lift once again. Little by little, second by second. A little too slowly for my tastes, but it will do.

  No traffic, of course. The whole route had been cleared for them, wiped clean of obstacles, the way the corps like it. No unexpected cars, no wandering drunks, no chance of some clueless civilian rolling through and ruining their perfect little procession.

  When the bridge parts fully, I move to the opposite edge of the rooftop, zooming in on the main street, searching, waiting. And there. Three Techstrum Armadillo jeeps. Black, smooth, polished enough to please the corporate eye but built tough enough to take a hit. Boxy frames, reinforced plating, sliding air vents lining the roof for heat regulation. Not massive, not military-grade, but armoured enough to say the cargo matters.

  Down below, the southsiders pause, turn their heads as the convoy rolls towards the intersection, creeping up slow. The roads on either side are already blocked, redirecting festival traffic away. Then, as expected, the convoy stops.

  Wasting no time, I scurry the bot along the apartment wall, heading down, legs locking and unlocking, sharp little limbs clicking against the red-brick. I skip around the exposed piping, gripping tight to the corroded metal before shifting to the next section of wall. Air vents jut out at uneven angles, some old, some spewing weak streams of recycled air. I adjust, climbing over one, ducking under another, quick, careful. Oh-so-very-careful. A narrow balcony ledge below. I jump for it, land hard, then push forward, across the graffiti, across a row of loose electrical conduits, and down, farther, farther, but not too far. I keep from dropping into the pedestrians and head for the junction, sideways, wait for the path to clear, and...

  Now.

  I drop off the apartment wall and pitter-patter along the cross walk, keeping close to the barriers blocking off the right exit of the junction, manoeuvre around the railing preceding the drawbridge, and hide behind one of the metal posts, looking.

  The three vehicles are stopped past the checkpoint, sitting pretty in the dead space before the bridge, right where we want them. Engines humming low, a steady mechanical purr, headlights washing over the asphalt, throwing long white streaks. No movement from inside, no rush to push forward. Just idling, waiting. Then, a door creaks open, and someone steps out, boots clacking against the pavement. He turns his head towards the bridge. A broad man, thick beard, large bullish neck. Goes by the name of Kevin Blunt, sergeant, and he’s sure dressed the part. His armour is pure corporate tech, midnight black with a subtle iridescent sheen, layered in overlapping composite plating, built to absorb impact, built to break bone on contact. A spinal device hums at the base of his neck, small status lights blinking in cold blue, probably feeding him live system diagnostics, tactical overlays, maybe even heartbeat readings from his team. His gloves are thick, steel-knuckled, the kind that can fracture skulls like that.

  My spoofer runs another scan, trying to peel him apart, trying to find the weaknesses, but there’s too much going on. Too much hardware, too many unreadable subroutines, things I don’t recognise, things I don’t want to recognise.

  I do not want to alert this guy. Not even for a second.

  Kevin presses a finger to his temple, and his eyes pulse yellow. After a moment, he says, “The damn is goin’ on here? This bridge hasn’t risen in over fifteen years!”

  The other units step out of the vehicles, but not before locking them down tight. No risks, no openings. All NACP officers, all wrapped in that insectoid armour, faceless behind those soulless visors. Some carry pistols, casual, sidearm-ready, while others hold full-on rifles, grips firm, fingers near the trigger but not quite on it. I have to admit, Raze had a point: this is a hell of a lot of firepower for a simple delivery. But now I get it. They’re not just hauling visors. They’re hauling information. Or, at the very least, access to information.

  A voice crackles through the holo: “You can slide in through the ventilation window on top.”

  Fingers. And yeah, I know. I’d already been considering that. The other possibility would be manually overriding the lock, but something tells me that would be hidden behind a firewall. Likely a pretty strong one, too, and I’m not sure Dance will have a whole lot of time to crack each individual code before they begin to notice.

  Another voice: “You ready, New Girl?” Raze, of course. I can hear the cigar through the damn intercom.

  I take a deep breath, creep around the metal post, remaining hidden under the side of the bridge. “Ready.”

  Fingers juts in: “Make a start, and please, for the love of God, don’t be stupid.”

  More static. “Don’t worry about a thing, madame.” Cormac. “I do find myself to be quite the actor. Oh yes.”

  I wait. One breath, two, three. Nothing happens. Then, from the far left, I catch movement: a slow weave through the festival crowd, a ripple in the sea of bodies. Two figures stepping out of the neon, masked, poised, walking like men who forgot how to move their legs. Cormac and Raze. Each wears half an Oni-mask, one red, one blue, split clean down the centre, leaving their mouths exposed, letting the world see their easy, sloppy grins, the loose sway of their heads, the dull glaze in their dotted eyeholes. Raze is decked out in a pair of slacks, a white dress shirt untucked, sleeves pushed enough to show ink along his forearms, his build lean, relaxed, like a man who hasn’t thrown a punch in years but never forgot how. Loafers scuff the pavement, his steps slow, heavy, a half-second delay between thought and motion.

  Arm in arm with him, Cormac matches his sway. Same semi-formal get-up, a little too polished for a man this drunk, but the right kind of dishevelled. They lean into each other, stumbling, overcompensating, laughing at something neither of them actually said.

  A pair of drunks, loose, harmless, drawn by the flashing lights, the sudden disruption, the raised bridge, the blockade. A couple of guys looking to see what all the hubbub’s about.

  And the enforcers?

  They’re already looking.

  “Awwwwww, here we fuckin’ go,” Kevin says. He removes his finger from his temple. “Damn southsiders are gonna swarm us like rats.” He points at one of the officers. “You. Contact the maintenance sector and find out where the override controls for the drawbridge are. Clearly, there’s been some malfunction.”

  “Got it, maaaaaan,” he drawls, leaning against the bonnet of the jeep, sounding more like a surfer waiting for the next wave than a cop responding to a critical infrastructure failure. His face is mostly shadow, only the beardless bottom visible, lips curved in something between amusement and mild irritation. “Just so you know, man, bridges don’t just lift up on their own. There’s, like… a process. A request. A whole chain of authorisations. Even if maintenance did screw something up, we would’ve seen an alert.”

  Another enforcer smacks him on the back of the head. “Just do your damn job, private.”

  Kevin turns to Cormac and Raze, who just about cross the line separating the beginning of the bridge from the intersection. “Move along,” he shouts. “This route is off-limits.”

  “Now, what is all this commotion?” says Cormac, exaggerating his British accent. “A raised bridge? In N.A.? It’s been so long, I do say!”

  “Tell me I ain’t seein’ this,” yells Raze, pointing at the bridge. “You guys raised the bridge for the festival? Love the effort, but defeats the whole point of a road. Thought you guys had this entire...” Hiccup. “... place closed off for your vehicles, like you’re a special parade or somethin’. Those don’t look like no floats to me, and I’ve seen floats. Lots of ’em.”

  All the NACP officers close in, bodies shifting towards the disturbance, not attacking, but focused enough for me to move. I climb over the ledge, drop down light as a whisper, and scurry toward the nearest jeep. The bot pads along the wheel, scaling the smooth black plating, claws hooking into tiny gaps in the armoured exterior. I slip past the side mirror, press low against the door frame, then stretch the legs wide and pull myself up, flattening against the roof. The ventilation window is right there. Small, vulnerable. I scan it, flick through my options, then trigger ‘Manual Override’. A hiss. The panel slides open. I creep forward, limbs curling, body folding, slipping through the opening in perfect silence.

  And just like that, I’m in.

  A little dark, but the light through the windows and shaft give me a good idea of what I’m looking at, and strangely, it’s not only an assortment of neatly secured cargo; there’s a wooden coffin with a glass strip down the middle, and inside of it there’s a golden android. Not the blocky, utilitarian kind meant for factory work or heavy lifting. This one is refined with thin, elongated limbs folded neatly against its metallic torso, head tilted slightly to one side as if caught mid-thought. The chassis gleams a burnished bronze, polished to a mirror finish, and it’s smooth despite the segmented parts. The face is smooth, too. No nose, no mouth, no features carved into the metal. An unbroken surface of gleaming gold alloy that curves from its high forehead down to where the mouth should be. And where the eye slit should sit, there’s something else: a visor, a thin strip of deep, unreadable black cutting across the face like a surgical incision. The M-Gate. I know by the shape. And even though the visor is dark, unlit, the whole thing powered down and lifeless, I swear I can feel it watching me anyway.

  I activate ‘Spin’ and ease the bot down over the coffin using the web. Careful now. Don’t want to cause too much noise. I can still hear the enforcers, can still hear Raze and Cormac. Shouting. Slurring. Falling over. As long as they keep them busy, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

  It’s locked behind a basic mag-seal, nothing heavy-duty, nothing military-grade. A corporate-standard biometric latch, the kind that expects a technician’s handprint or an encrypted signal to verify access. Good thing I don’t need either. I activate ‘Manual Override’, which prompts another firewall, but this one is different.

  (Authentication Required)

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Some of the letters are missing. Interesting. I snapshot the cipher and upload it into the cloud room, and Dance takes some time to solve it.

  “Ahh... this one’s a bit clunky mate,” he says. “Give me a second, will ya?”

  I wait, slightly nervous, listening to the outside chatter. Everything is a bit muffled so I can’t exactly make out the words. Too far, and this bot doesn’t have the greatest receptors.

  After a couple minutes, Dance reads out the solution, slowly: “Right, you ready? It's N5, R4, I1, K4, A1, O9, C3, M0, I1, U8.”

  I input the selections. Sure enough, they flash green on the firewall, and the seals pop open.

  “It worked,” I say, relieved.

  “Thank goose monkeys for that, mate,” says Dance.

  I climb up to the ceiling of the jeep, web down, latch the spider’s pincers under the rounded edge of the seal, and ascend. Slowly, the coffin opens, and I can see the entire body.

  I place a finger to my temple, tapping into the holo. “In. But where’s the access port? Bit hard to see in here. And the bot is made of gold. Actual gold.”

  Static. “Under the er actuator,” says Vander. “Back panel, left side. Should be a er recersed pert. Might have a er security latch.”

  I ease the bot over towards the left side of the android’s head. Luckily, it’s already rotated towards the right, so I don’t have to tilt it that much. Right there, as Vander described: there’s a panel that looks like a cross between an external hard drive and a ventilation slit, designed to blend in, I’m sure. No screws, no latches—at least, not from what I can see. More of a thin indentation, meant to be accessed only by the engineers who know it’s there.

  Good thing Vander is one of those engineers.

  I reach a pair of tiny pincers into the access slot and slowly pull out the data shard, keeping it suspended on one leg for a moment. I reach under the bot’s rectangular abdomen and release the spoofer card, using two legs to pass it forward and another to lift it up. Sticky grip. Makes things simple. In the card goes, right through the access port. Swapped, in and out.

  Success.

  I place the data shard into the spider-bot’s underpouch and scurry up the ceiling. Down I go with the web again, pulling the coffin lid back over the android’s body, locking it with ‘Manual Override’. Click. The mag-seal is shut.

  “Done,” I say.

  “Two more,” Fingers says quickly.

  Ideally, one should be enough, but as Dance argued, there’s always a chance one of these bots might not be used, or that they might malfunction. Just because it’s fancy tech doesn’t mean it’s immune to deficiencies.

  I climb out through the ventilation shaft of the jeep, keeping low, shutting it behind me with ‘Manual Override’. And Fingers tells me to wait, that there are enforcers blocking the path I need to travel in order to access the next jeep. I slowly crawl towards the edge in a prone, then slip down one of the doors and hide in the shadow underneath, looking, always looking. I see Cormac and Raze standing unsteadily next to one another.

  “We’re not doin’ anything, officer,” Raze says, still keeping that clipped, hiccupy drawl, the kind that slurs. “Just a couple of curious citizens. Ain’t seen the bridge raise in years.”

  “Yes,” Cormac adds smoothly, placing a cold, unsettling steel hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “And how very curious we are.”

  Kevin doesn’t hesitate. He shoves Cormac hard, sending him flying backwards, but Cormac catches himself like it was nothing, metal arms flexing, absorbing the momentum like an elastic band snapping back. He straightens, smooth as ever, brushing himself off like Kevin had barely touched him.

  Kevin’s hand shoots up, finger jabbing the air, face twisting with rage. “Any closer and I’ll crush your fucking—”

  But then he stops, like something short-circuited in his head. His expression shifts, not anger, not suspicion. Something cold as if he’s scanning old memory files.

  Then, in a low, deadpan voice, he says:

  “I know you.”

  “Indeed,” Cormac says. “It’s so very nice to meet you again... Kevin.”

  I speak out loud, but not to anyone in particular. “They know each other?”

  “Uh, sir,” the officer with the surfer drawl says, stepping off the hood. “They flagged the nearest maintenance company. Apparently, OneGrid sent a couple of bots to the performance hall across the canal, but they, uh… they lost signal. Haven’t heard a thing back. Guessing it’s a technical fault. Reception desk says a pair of human workers showed up to fix a technical fault in their maintenance tunnel. Something like that. There’s some confusion, so the company’s sending a replacement crew to check it out.”

  Shit. That tightens the clock even more. And I still can’t move. Not yet. Three enforcers stand in my way, blocking the path from this jeep to the next. No gaps, no easy openings. I could try slipping past, but the second I climb up, one of them is bound to—

  “Cormac O’Cormac....” Kevin tilts his head back, eyes locking onto him like he’s spotted a ghost.

  “Uh, man,” the officer mutters, shifting awkwardly. “Who the hell is this guy?”

  Kevin’s shoulders start to shake. At first, a low chuckle, then a full, sharp, wheezing laugh that comes straight from the gut. “I can’t believe it,” he says, wiping at his face. “Cormac O’fuckin’Cormac. I heard you were dead. Heard you lost it, went coo-coo and started spinnin’ yarns about how Techstrum was trying to control the NACP with some device. Shit, what’s the name?” He snaps his fingers a couple times. “Sarah Device? That it? Tell me.”

  Cormac doesn’t blink. Doesn’t flinch. Tilts his head slightly, like he’s hearing an old story told wrong. “Seraph Device,” he says. “That night, when that woman lost her child, I admit... it changed me.”

  “Changed you?” Kevin laughs. “You were a legend among the force. Scary motherfucker. I used to look up to you back when I was a private. Scared shitless of you. But look at you now. Some half-baked, metal-armed ghost in a cheap button-up, slumming it with drunks and thieves. You’re not a legend anymore, O’Cormac. You’re another broken-down has-been, clawin’ for scraps in the gutters of the south.”

  The enforcers laugh, moving away from the jeep.

  Static. “Now!” says Fingers.

  I scurry down the side of the vehicle while their backs are turned, heading for the next jeep, up along the rightmost wheel, over the top, and into the ventilation hatch. This one is already open, so it’s a clean entry. I get to work on unlocking the coffin and inserting the spoofer into the M-Gate.

  All the while, I can hear everything outside.

  “Tell me, Cormac,” Kevin says. “Why is it you quit and abandoned your platoon? Was it really that old folktale?”

  “Your ignorance was always your greatest misdemeanour, private,” says Cormac.

  “It’s sergeant now,” Kevin says. “And you don’t get to tell me about ‘misdemeanours’. You cackled every time you put a cyberpsycho down and crushed their brains with those bitch-mittens you like to call ‘snakes’.”

  “You have a fair point,” Cormac says. “And yet…” he continues, voice even, conversational, as if they’re discussing the weather instead of the past. “There are things even a man like me cannot unsee.”

  Kevin snorts. “Oh yeah? A little death? As if you didn’t see that every Tuesday of the week.”

  “You asked me why I quit,” Cormac says. “I suppose I could tell you it was the bodies. The orders. The weight of it all. Maybe that’d be a pretty lie you’d swallow. But no, sergeant.” He says the word flat, worthless in his mouth. “It wasn’t any folktale. It was a job. Another corporate wet cleanup. Same as all the others. Merc work. Quick, efficient, sanctioned. Go in, put down the problem, clear the scene.”

  Some silence as Dance cracks the code again and I unlock the coffin.

  “I never knew her name. The little one. Didn’t need to. She wasn’t the target.” A pause. “A cyberpsycho got access to Shine, yes. Though back then it was uncontained, unstable. They sent us in to clean it up, wipe out the threat.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Kevin. “Get to the point.”

  “A mother called on me to help,” Cormac says, and for once, his voice doesn’t dance. No lilting rise, no slow, curling cadence wrapping around each word. Steady now. Cold. Creepily still, like a pendulum that’s finally stopped swinging. “And I... ignored her. Had I known, had I listened, my platoon could have dealt with the threat, and I could have saved her.” More silence. Then, in a low, rasping voice: “And her face.... The mother....”

  Kevin scoffs. “You’re telling me that’s what did it? One civ casualty and you lost your mind?”

  Cormac says, “No, sergeant. I’m telling you that the woman will never forget it. What I done to her, to her child. That kind of grief lingers, stays, grows into something monstrous. Rots. Becomes something else entirely.” He sighs. “And one day, sergeant, I’ll answer for it. And you will, too.”

  That’s it, done. Second spoofer’s inside. I move the coffin cover back into the place and creep outside again, down along the side, underneath the vehicle. One more to go, in the back, past all the enforcers, past Cormac and Raze.

  Kevin cracks into abrupt laughter. “So, you’re telling me it wasn’t the Seraph Device? It was some dead child? Some mother?”

  “You better watch your fucking mouth,” a voice cuts in, sharp and low. It takes me a second to register that it’s Raze, and he doesn’t sound drunk anymore. No slur, no lazy drawl.

  Kevin cocks an eyebrow at him, folding his arms. “And who the fuck are you? Don’t recognise your voice, don’t recognise that pansy crewcut buzz. You’re not military, are you? Never were. Just some low-life out on the bottle.”

  I tap into the holo. “Fingers, we have a problem here,” I say.

  Static. “We’ll need you guys to distract the enforcers away from the jeep in the back,” says Fingers. “Then you can climb along the right side, Mono. There’s an opening near the—”

  “Too many children die in the south because you bastards sit on your ass,” says Raze. “Signing death warrants with a fuckin’ stylus, calling it ‘progress’ while their bodies wither into nothing. You really think dead children is a joke? How about sick children, you thick cunt? How about instead of transporting golden androids, you transport some medication to Aegis Node? ‘Protect and serve’ my ass.” Raze takes off his mask, looking the sergeant straight in the eye, and unlike Cormac, he doesn’t back up. And the way he speaks, so low, so rasping. “You don’t serve anyone but the suits who pay you to look the other way. You’re not a soldier, Kevin. You’re a fuckin’ errand boy for men who’d sell your corpse before they’d pay for your funeral. You are, and always will be, nothing but a spineless little bitch.”

  Oh shit...

  There’s some quiet, the unnerving sort. Then, footsteps. Light, unbothered. The surfer-sounding private steps forward, rubbing the back of his neck like he walked into the middle of a family argument. “Hey, so, how did you know there were gold—”

  Kevin moves. Fast. Faster than he should for a man his size. His hand snaps out, clamps around Raze’s throat in a crushing grip, and in the same motion, he sweeps a leg forward, hooks it behind Raze’s knee, and drives him down hard.

  An arm swings: long, metal, even faster. It shoves Kevin clean, and he goes flying, body slamming into the side of the jeep with a heavy, bone-shaking thud. The spider-bot stumbles back from the force, tiny metal limbs skittering to stabilise.

  The enforcers all raise their weapons, and they shout, “On the ground!” at choppy intervals, pressing forward, away from the jeep in the back.

  Raze, still on the ground, grits his teeth, coughs once, then smiles. “Touched a nerve, did I?”

  Then, to my surprise, Kevin shouts, “Lower your weapons.”

  What is he doing?

  I watch as Cormac’s metal arm releases Kevin, servos whirring as it retracts back into place. He reaches up, fingers brushing the edge of his Oni mask, then tips it off. And suddenly, as the enforcers lower their weapons and close in, forming a loose circle, I feel like I’m watching one of those pit fights at the bottom of the apartment complex: the ones where the crowd roars, the blood hits the floor, and no one steps in until a body's stopped moving.

  Only this time, there’s no commentator. No ref. No one to stop things before they go too far.

  “I’ve always been interested in seeing what those arms could do.” Kevin brushes himself off. “And I guess now I did. But I’m not entirely satisfied. I think we should have a little fun while we wait. What do you think, boys?”

  The NACP officers are reluctant at first, but little by little they start to clap before cheering.

  “What’s going on down there?” says Fingers.

  Cormac cranes his neck creepily, and there’s that eerie smile again. “Been so long,” he says, raising his steel arms into a boxer’s pose.

  “Hope you oiled those snakes well,” Kevin says, and he raises three fingers. “Three knocks. Down on the floor three times, you lose, and I book you for assaulting an NACP officer.”

  Raze picks himself up off the ground. “And if he wins?”

  “Then you both walk,” he says. “I’ll cut you some slack, given that you clearly had too much to drink and I do not want to go through the process of booking you into a cell. I wanna get across this bridge, deliver the goods, and be done with it so I can fuck off home. Not wasting time on two no-life drunks who are better off dead.”

  Raze snorts, rubbing his throat where Kevin’s grip had crushed in. “Real generous of you.”

  The enforcers spread out, boots scraping against the pavement, voices rippling with low laughter and half-mocking jeers.

  Kevin steps forward. “Alright then.” He cracks his neck, exhales deep, then rolls his thumb along the back of his collar. And I see it again: a thin blue light pulsing along the ridge of his spine, slow at first, then faster, faster, until it flares bright enough to cast faint, ghostly shadows along the road.

  For a second, Kevin is still, then—

  Gone.

  Not disappearing, not teleporting, but moving so fast my brain struggles to track it. The spider-bot's optics lag a full fraction of a second behind reality.

  Cormac shifts. Too slow.

  Kevin is already behind him, standing a little too close, a little too still, like he was always meant to be there. And then, in a voice smooth, low, almost amused:

  “Try to keep up, old man.”