CHAPTER 2
Eliza
◆
Rain on the steel hatch sounds different when you are the one waiting for it to open.
It hits flat and metallic above me, breaking into a slap when the wind shifts off the harbor.
I press into the alcove where the alley jogs left behind the Trace and I count.
Ninety seconds is the bartender's quoted door-time.
Ninety seconds means he has to verify a face on the lens, walk the back hall, unbolt the ladder lock, and decide whether the face is the kind he wants in his bar.
The seconds stack against my ribs, each one a small flat weight I file under manageable. I hold my breath shallow at the top of the lung where it does not show in the shoulders, and let the count be the only thing in my head — forty-two, forty-three, forty-four.
The drive sits in the inside right pocket of my jacket against my ribs.
The amber LED has gone from my problem to its own — a slow, even pulse I have come to feel through the lining when I breathe, like a second pulse running half a beat behind mine.
Thirty-two hours, give or take. I have not done the math twice; I do not need to do it twice.
The cold has gone into the bruise on my right shin where the fire escape at 04:35 caught me below the knee.
I missed the third tread because the rust ate the foot-plate.
My cream-pale skin takes a finger-mark and keeps it for days; by tomorrow this will look like a week old.
My mother told me once it was a courtesy of biology — that bruises are the body keeping its own files.
Your body will remember this longer than you do, Eliza, that's not a bad thing. I have remembered.
Eighty seconds.
I press two fingers to the inside of my left wrist and tap.
Twice. The surgical scar under the pad of my index finger is white and smooth, three inches along the tendon.
My mother put the port in when I was nine and took it out when I was twelve.
I built it wrong, little fish. We're going to take it out cleanly and then we are going to never touch it again. She did.
She never touched it again, and then somebody else made sure she could not touch anything again, and now I am the only one who can keep the file on her body.
Tap, tap.
The hatch unlocks from inside with the dry click of a bolt thrown a thousand times by the same hand.
The Trace's back-of-house code: hatch unlocks, runner lifts it themselves, hatch re-bolts from inside.
The bartender's hand stays invisible from the alley.
Senna's making an exception. She is making it because I asked her to, and because my name has reached her with bad weather already attached to it.
I lift the hatch.
Wet concrete and stale beer.
The smell rolls up at me like a tide going the wrong way.
Underneath it, ammonia where the bartender mops, and the cold copper note of pre-Network plumbing that has been sweating for sixty years.
I have been smelling rain and harbor rust for forty minutes and now I am smelling the inside of a bar at six in the morning, and somehow it is the inside that punches the air out of my chest.
Bars at six in the morning are not for people who want to be unseen. Bars at six in the morning are for people who have already been seen and are negotiating the next part.
The ladder drops ten feet to a concrete floor with a drain at one end. I close the hatch over my head. The bolt slides home on the other side of the steel before my feet touch the floor.
The sound travels up through my heels and lands low in my spine, a flat, deliberate weight. The bartender has chosen the side of his door I am now on. No walking that back.
The back hall is unlit except for the cobalt floor strip that runs along the kick-plate at ankle height, the Syndicate's house signature.
It pulses on a slow idle, the way a banked reactor pulses.
Three doors, all shut. The brewery smell thickens at the second one and I understand without thinking — that is the bar room.
The air leaks under that door because the seal there is older than the seal at the hatch.
I push it open.
The Trace's main bar room is a long box of fifteen high-tops and a poured-concrete bar along the south wall.
The cobalt strip beneath the lip pulses slow and carries the faint sixty-cycle hum that all Syndicate-cut lighting carries, a sound you stop hearing within a minute and start hearing again the second you go quiet.
Overheads off; only the bar-strip lights the room.
Cracked tile floor. The kind of place deliberately allowed to look tired so a municipal inspector writes it off and a corporate scout writes it down as not-worth-watching.
Senna Ortiz is on the customer side of the bar.
She is not standing behind it like the bartender she is not.
She is sitting on a stool at the far end, half-turned, light brown hair tied back in a quick knot, a coat the color of wet slate over her shoulders.
Her eyes have been on the door the way an attentive dog watches a door, which is the most honest version of waiting I have ever seen.
She stays on the stool. She skips the greeting. She turns the stool a quarter, sets her coffee cup down — porcelain, white, no logo — and holds the eye contact across thirty feet of dim cobalt floor.
"Long night?" she says.
Her voice is dry. It does not lift at the question. It is the line and the test in one.
I cross half the distance because I do not want to shout the answer.
"Longer than yesterday."
Senna nods. Once. Small. The bartender, who has been at the back end of the bar with a cloth, moves without being told. He goes through the back hall. I hear a heavy bolt at the far end and the NEON door working on its hinge.
Senna picks up her cup. Sips. Sets it down.
"You look like hell, Quinn."
"Looking like hell is the optimal optic. It tells your fixer you are not trying to manipulate him."
"He'll like you anyway. That's not necessarily good news."
I take the stool next to hers because she has not invited me to and I want to see how she handles uninvited proximity.
She handles it by keeping her eyes on the bottles, drawing one long, even breath across the lip of the cup with the private patience of someone who has already decided what she will do for me and is simply waiting for the door to catch up.
The porcelain clicks faintly against the bar when she sets it down.
Up close she smells of clove cigarettes she does not smoke and old paper from a bookshop two blocks west — pre-Network, the kind that still buys novels.
"You don't owe me," she says, eyes on the bar.
"I know."
"You will."
"I know."
"This is the favor."
"I know."
She turns her head a quarter. Brown eyes, sharp at the corners.
"I cleared a job through you three years ago.
The badge-spoof for the Sector-8 courier-route.
You charged me half what you were worth and took payment in pre-Network books because you knew I had them.
You did not ask why I wanted the badges.
You delivered. You walked away. I have been waiting three years to find out whether you were stupid or worth knowing. "
"Which."
"Worth knowing. " She lifts her cup. Sips. "Which is unfortunate, because the simpler answer would have been stupid. I'd have let you walk out."
"Where. I came in the hatch."
She almost smiles. Her mouth stays flat; only the skin at the corner of her left eye gives. "There is a service door at the south end of the bar room that opens on a courier alley. The hatch was the courtesy. Most people get the alley."
The bartender comes back through the back hall and begins pulling glasses off a rack, eyes deliberately elsewhere, the practiced blindness of a man paid to forget faces.
Senna stands. The wet-slate coat slides off her shoulders into her hand.
"Walk through the back hall. Third door on the right. He is waiting."
"Cade."
"Marcus."
"I have only ever heard him called Cade."
"You have only ever heard him called Cade by people who do not like him. He is Marcus. Walk."
She catches my left elbow as I pass her, light, brief, a grip you put on a friend at the door of a thing you would rather they not go to. Her thumb presses into the bone just below the joint for one beat.
"Quinn."
"Senna."
"Don't lie about the weather."
"What."
"Whatever is on that drive. He has decided in advance that he likes you. That decision will not survive a lie about the weather. Lie about anything else. Not the weather."
She lets go of my elbow.
I walk through the back hall. The cobalt strip pulses slow at my ankles. Third door on the right is steel-faced, dull from contact at the height of a hand, painted with a single line of script that takes a long second to read in the low light.
NEON.
I push it.
The antechamber is a small room — three meters by three — with a low ceiling and a single cobalt accent strip running floor to ceiling along the back wall.
The wet concrete and stale beer follows me through, leaking past the seal at the threshold I have just crossed.
A chair on the side wall. A small steel table.
A recessed weapon scanner above the doorway I am about to walk through wakes as I cross under it: the cobalt strip dims a half-shade while the lens runs me top to boot, then brightens again when it lets me go.
I let it. I know what it finds and what it does not — the metal it expects on a courier, and the chip under my left bra strap it will never see.
The corridor on the other side of the antechamber is a long steel throat. I have not crossed into it. I am still standing on the antechamber side, my back to the NEON door, when the door at the far end of the corridor opens and a man walks through.