Chapter 3 #2
The city’s smells, both bitterly sharp and sickly sweet, resurrected memories of his childhood on the streets. He’d chosen not to have nose filters implanted in case smells triggered more of his recent missing memories.
After another ten minutes and the start of one of Helios’s meandering stories about a jinxed job, Renner reached his limit. He glanced at his wristcomp, then picked up the folded water pouch and stood. “Work,” he said, and headed for the door, stuffing the pouch in his pocket as he walked.
Lunesti stood as well. “Me, too. I have the early shift this cycle.”
It seemed to be the cue for everyone to leave.
Renner didn’t bother pointing out that the members shouldn’t spill out all at once if they wanted to hide their activities, especially since they always met at the same spot.
Outside of the random meeting schedule and the pretentious code names, convenience tended to outrank security with this group.
He pulled his patched raincoat from the holdfast near the door and slipped it on, then patted the long pocket to make sure the modified umbrella was still there.
It didn’t hold a charge for shit, but if the drizzle became a downpour, he could steal a charge from dozens of nearby sources.
Civilization had electrical power everywhere, even in the slums.
“Walk with me to the transport stop?” asked Lunesti as he sealed his rain cloak.
Renner nodded. He’d often daydreamed that if he was ever finally free, he’d talk all the time, like he had as a smartass street rat. Now he didn’t know what to say or how to act. Realistically, he hadn’t expected to live past the death of his former boss.
He and Lunesti made their way through the cluttered aisles of the narrow shop and out into the early evening. Peering up, he pulled on his hood against the drizzle. In a few more ten-days, it would become the bone-chilling sleet of winter.
Out of habit, he checked his surroundings for the electrical signatures that meant biological life or weapons, like the phase knife under Lunesti’s waterproof cloak. People who went unarmed in the Canals were usually known by the technical term “victim.”
Lunesti cleared his throat. “Don’t suppose I could interest you in a hot-connect tonight at my place…” He trailed off and gave Renner a half-hopeful, half-wary glance.
Renner considered it. He had even less experience with free-will sex as an adult than he did with talking. “No.” After a moment, he added, “Thanks, though.”
Like sitting, common courtesy was still a conscious effort for him, not a habit. People often irritated him. Kind-hearted Lunesti was pleasant and attractive, and likely a generous lover, but he didn’t flux Renner’s drives at all. No one had for a long, long time.
Liar, said a sly little voice in his head. He ignored it.
Lunesti shrugged and smiled. “If you don’t ask, the answer is always ‘no.’”
They walked in comfortable silence, then stood with their backs almost touching the thick, pockmarked glass wall of the leaky passenger kiosk. Renner stayed until the rumbling, rolling-tread ground transport took Lunesti on board and lurched away.
The drizzle let up as he walked two blocks to the charity where he often took meals in exchange for cleaning up.
He had no idea why the director called it a soup kitchen.
It was a half-demolished storage facility attached to a half-repaired warehouse, and all they served were scrounged or donated, long-expired self-heating mealpacks.
The covered courtyard in the warehouse part buzzed with conversation, but the mood was more sullen than convivial.
The huge new construction project in town only hired out-of-town workers, so Ridderth’s job market was taking yet another nosedive.
It made no difference to him. His various odd jobs covered his rent and meals. He didn’t need anything else.
Don’t have anything else, either, the sly voice in his head pointed out.
He’d decided it was Neirra Varemba’s voice, another of Davidro’s “pets.” She’d healed him and taught him to be human again, and had loved him like a son.
One of her lessons was the importance of having goals so he could have something to look forward to, something to plan for.
He still tanked at that. He’d loved her, too, but had been too cowardly to tell her.
Now that Davidro wasn’t around to exploit his weakness and she was dead, he could admit he missed her.
Admit he wished he’d learned more from her.
He navigated carefully through the crowd, giving the obviously warped and chemmed people wide airspace. At only a few meters from the cleaning equipment closet, a hand clamped hard onto his forearm, just above his percomp.
“Where-ya be long time, Estienne?”
Renner pushed his hood back and frowned at the beefy, red-faced, drooling man with random clumps of brown hair on his scarred head and jaw.
The startled man let go of Renner, then snarled. “Du no Estienne.” His teeth looked like a picket fence, and his fingers tensed into a claw. “Féi took coat!”
Renner only just barely quelled his instinct to jolt the asshole into unconsciousness. The man who could do that was dead. Faraday Brenner had no talent to hurt or kill with electrical force.
Renner jutted his jaw forward in challenge.
“Féi no méi.” He curled his lip and pointed a thumb at himself.
“Coat minu.” He bared his teeth like a rabid dog at the red-faced man who’d called him a thief.
“No más treffen, less you bored having fingers.” Ridderth’s street polyglot was coming back to him day by day.
“Aksal!” shouted a woman’s booming voice with an Afro-French accent. “Leave homme be. He the janitor, fer chaos sake.”
Aksal flinched and turned toward the voice, wide-eyed. Renner slipped away.
No one with even one working brain cell crossed Director Kooga. The huge ex-Jumper and determined madwoman ran the soup kitchen with tireless compassion. She didn’t tolerate violence in her house and enforced the galactic peace with naked cybernetic fists enhanced with sharp incalloy spikes.
It wasn’t until he hung his coat in the closet that he noticed his wristcomp blinking with the pattern that meant someone had pinged him. Only four people in the galaxy had his ping ref, and three of them had no reason to ping him that evening.
He waited until after midnight to read the message, after he’d pushed the ancient cleaning bot into its rack and folded the empty delivery crates for reuse. He selected the least objectionable mealpack and ate it quickly, leaning against the wall and keeping one eye on the crowd.
The message said the annoying red angel wanted to talk to him about a job.
He had his own plans now and refused to be a tool again. If this was the purpose the universe had saved him for, he planned to tell it to fuck off.
But, he grudgingly admitted, he owed it to the red angel to listen before telling her the same.