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*waves*
Finally, i know! Sorry about that, guys. Anyway - i'm also working on my fanwork auction fics - never fear! Well, on two of them. Still need a prompt from one person, but yes - they're happening!
'Tis the season here for my favorite flower in the world - the chicory flower. *happy sigh* Chicory and Queen Anne's Lace - love 'em! (For those who aren't sure what chicory is like... :) Lovely stuff.
And now...the fic. Thanks for staying with me, guys. :) All praise and thanks heaped upon![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darkhavens for her ever-perfect beta'ing.
Also at AO3.
So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,
Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,
Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible…. - Rupert Brooke, ‘Hauntings’
Axis was an old station - oldest in that system - and Jensen remembered it, and that was a problem. He remembered it when it was nothing but girders and temporary panels and empty echoes. Remembered high-liners, up in what would become Carousel, sending down fountains of sparks as they welded and riveted the armature together, sending crazy echoes bouncing down and down to the core.
Axis was smaller then, and brand-new, and not even a sure thing, and the Tiamat had been sent there on a routine patrol, keeping pirates and looters at bay until they could establish enough of the station to lock things up and out.
Being in it now - seeing it go from skeleton to teeming - was disorienting. Was downright frightening, because Jensen had no idea what else he’d missed, in his years shipboard. It hadn’t mattered there where he was safe with his Angels, all together in quarters, in mess, moving like a single organism on mission after mission. New vids or new music or new drugs filtered in, and news sometimes, if Five was feeling particularly antsy, but all of it was so...far away. Unimportant. Even on Reveille, they’d kept that kind of stuff to a minimum - ‘limiting the stressors’, they’d called it.
But here in the new Axis - the now Axis - it felt like the stressors were killing him. Every light was too bright, every sound was too much: percussive, invasive, deafening. Even the food was overwhelming; so many variations, so many spices. They made his lips tingle and his gut heave until he gave up on most food altogether and stuck to the stuff in the automats, wedges of cold sandwiches and chilled fruit, everything simpler, plainer.
He had to deal, though, because what he needed was mostly only for sale in Carousel. Sure, there were suits and tourists palming little glassine baggies of this and that in white-tiled heads all over the station, but that was by appointment only stuff. That was this is my friend stuff, and there weren’t that many suits on Axis that wanted rough cut, and that was all Jensen had to trade to those arrogant bastards.
And fuck that, he was no whore. Not for the likes of them.
No, he had to have the shadows for what he needed; had to have the dealers with the illegal cautery knife and hired muscle; had to have the ones who cooked up in stills cobbled together in maintenance tunnels and service bays - ones that could be moved in a minute’s notice. He needed what they sold, and they only sold on Carousel.
So here he was, trying not to look too fucking crazy, ‘cause the dealers weren’t stupid and they didn’t want trouble. Problem was, Jensen was crazy. He felt crazy. He felt like everything around him was moving just a few degrees off from him - a little too fast, a little too loud, a little too much. He wore heavy mining pants and layers of shirts, half-gloves and eye shades and even a long, dun strip of cloth he’d stole from a vendor, winding it around his head and neck and face. Wrapping up and hiding more and more every week, and he figured in another month he’d just be a moving lump of cloth, no eyes, no fingers. He sweated and shivered and flinched even in his ‘armor’, jumping at every noise and exhausting himself with endless, repetitive security checks. Everybody moved around too much, so fucking careless and random. He had to keep the most suspicious of them in sight, had to keep them all in place so he had to keep moving, moving, moving.
And he couldn’t do that without the drugs, and he couldn’t get the drugs without the drugs, and if he didn’t get the drugs he couldn’t eat the bland, chilled food and drink the nothing-tasting water and he couldn’t fucking sleep... Fuck, that was the worst, when he hadn’t slept for two or three days and everything seemed to vibrate and nothing made any fucking sense.
He’d fled to the core - they called it Axis Mundi, which meant nothing to Jensen - catching a ride on the top of the shell of a maintenance mag-lift, clinging in the safe dark to the hand-holds welded there for the fixer crews. Down in the core were kilometers of access tunnels and conduits, built big enough for two men to walk through, that had been abandoned as Axis had grown out, pushing her skin wider and leaving hollows behind. They were mostly on power-save, kept warm by the residual heat flowing through water mains and banks of circuitry, and the tiny chemical heaters scattered here and there that marked places and spaces and no-go private niches.
Jensen had his own place, an alcove under a heat exchange, warm and softly humming, dry and defendable and safe. An access ladder went up into the exchanger and eventually out, a secondary exit if he was ever trapped. He’d lined the space with wads of hemp pulp stolen from the recycler on level 23, and, a rare find, a left-behind medical blanket he’d found shoved under an overturned locker in an abandoned first aid station. But best - oh, best of all - were the markings. The dense, flowing lines and angular sketches, a rare and private code of symbols and shapes and traceries. Same as on the Tiamat, same as anywhere any Angel had spent any time. Jensen thought maybe even one of his, from that long-ago port call, had found this alcove amongst the construction bustle and spent a little time leaving this behind. ‘Hello’ and ‘safe’ and ‘good hiding’. ‘Fuck’ and ‘fly’ and ‘angel, angel, angel’.
When the nightmares and the come-downs were worst, they kept Jensen grounded - helped him get his shit together so he could face another trip up top. He’d even added his own name, painstaking and shaky, just like inside his clothes, making it his, a secret just for him.
Right now, Jensen was curled up in his alcove, knotted and shivering and sick. Coming down, sure, but something else, too. His body was still rejecting the ‘net - agonizing cramps all through his muscles, and his nerves firing off, random and hot, sizzling under his skin. His head was splitting and his skin felt too tight and he couldn’t get his head on straight, he couldn’t get himself grounded. His vision kept flashing, from the amber and red of the security lights to something flat and dead, corpse light, grey-blue and hideous. Every time it happened, his head went to static, the nothingness of an empty channel, no words and no thoughts.
Wherever that was was cold, and stank, and it made his belly ache and his teeth and oh, fuck, he hated it there, he fucking hated it, he had to get out of there, get something, get high and get gone before he, before….
Jensen already had his sweater on, over a tee from Reveille, and he forced himself up and dragged on two more shirts - long-sleeved, oversized - and the coat he wore on top. He wound the cloth around his head and found his eye shades, patting them where they rested in a pocket. He inched out of his nest and stood with a low groan of pain and then, slowly, so slowly, shuffled away down the corridor.
Tick-Tock would help him. He’d owe him, but that was what Tick-Tock worked in: favors and debts and IOUs. And better Tick-Tock than anybody else. Better than...the no-place. Tick-Tock would get him a taste - a hit - just enough to get him settled, so he could go topside and get what he really needed. Tick-Tock would spot him the credit for that, too, and that was fine, that was good. Jensen would pay him back later, when the drugs were kicking in good and hard and he was flying again, wings not clipped.
Tick-Tock ran the fights that happened up in Carousel every few nights. They were bloody and ugly and desperate, but winner take all and give half to Tick-Tock, and that would set Jensen up for a week, solid, let him get himself back into a groove so he could get another runner job, ferrying product or collecting kickbacks. He didn’t have his suit anymore, didn’t have his Angels, but he could still gut you six ways before you could scream, and sometimes somebody needed that. Jensen didn’t much care, so long as it bought him free of the no-place, and the pain, for another day.
So this was him, on the edge of not-quite-enough, moving jittery and too tense. Fuck only knows what was in that hit of Tock’s, some shit he’d made himself in his spare time, or scrounged - Tick-Tock was straight-X, never took nothing, so he was no judge.
And fuck if someone wasn’t on Jensen’s tail. He’d noticed before - a few days ago, a couple nights - somebody watching, shadowing him. There was always too much going on - on Carousel and in Jensen’s head - for him to really have a good picture of his watcher. Jensen just knew he was tall, and quick, and pretty damn good, but not as good as an Angel, and it was starting to piss Jensen off.
But he had a deal to make, and a fight to get to, so he put the tail out of his mind and concentrated on casing out his route, on finding his hit. Sticking to the edges, dodging careless walkers, trying hard not to snarl and snap at every idiot who got too close. His guy was set up at the back of a noodle-soup kiosk, this time, and Jensen got ‘dust and Blue and a twist of foil with an ugly little dab of stuff called icing in it, grey-green and glistening. He got a bowl of soup, too, ‘cause he’s gotta have something to burn, and ate it fast, noodles going down slick and nearly tasteless, broth mostly just salt. Perfect food for a junkie in a fix, and that’s the beauty of that set up, you can sell to ‘em before and after.
By the time he’d drunk the last of the broth, he was already soaring, just like a rocket - higher and higher - and if he timed it just right he’d hit apogee in the ring, and Tick-Tock’d really get his money’s worth. He got another ladleful of noodles, ‘cause he could - scrounged credit Tick-Tock had no notion of - and slipped a squeeze-bottle of some flavored water under his coat when Tay wasn’t watching.
He wandered off, then, slurping the noodles down and drinking the water that was full of sugar with a chemical kick, dodging the crowd and sliding into the shadows around a corner, crouching down out of sight and waiting to see…. There. His tail, slouching by, all casual-like, hands tucked into pockets and long hair hanging anyhow, looking like some miner, broke and sad, or maybe hungover as he wove in and out of the crowd. And Jensen still couldn’t really see his face, just shadow and light and edges, things moving that probably shouldn’t move. Maybe he shouldn't have had the icing on top of it all, but fuck it.
His tail moved on, probably panicking now, having lost him, and Jensen pushed himself upright, empty bowl and bottle abandoned, and dodged away, into the service corridors behind the kiosks, all the places nobody was supposed to go but he had a key that Tick-Tock had cloned, so Jensen could get to the fights.
He wondered if it was really such a big secret. Surely Axis knew, with her thousands of digital eyes, what they did. Surely the bodies that slid down into the big incinerator weren’t a surprise. Probably she looked on it like pest control: thinning the herd. Not one of them would be missed, after all.
Jensen found the storage bay in fifteen minutes, following the little phosphor-glow arrows painted down low in the corridors; following the low, surging noise of a crowd of people too high to be scared, and too scared to be straight. He gave Tick-Tock a head’s up nod and climbed up on top of a pile of abandoned shelving, only a head or so higher than the crowd, but it settled his nerves, at least a little. He settled into an easy crouch to watch and wait his turn, back to the corner and a bar of steel-plex propped under his hand, a palm knife made from a wedge of ground-down alloy nestled in his glove. Safe, for the moment, cocooned in chemical strands; 1-(1-phenylcyclohexyl)piperidine, (5α,6α)-7,8-didehydro-4,5-epoxy-17-methylmorphinan-3,6-diol diacetate…. He could see the formulas in his head, arcane scratchings over Kane’s bunk, memorized over time. Kane’s favorites, or so he said, but who fucking knew, Kane was...Kane was….
Jensen snapped his head to the side once, hard, solid crack into the wall there, dislodging Kane and Angels, concentrating on the muffled pain. It was almost his turn. When Tick-Tock gave him the nod, Jensen stepped down off his perch and moved to the little roped-off area for the next in line. Stripped down, out of his layers, to nothing at all, because that was the rules in Tick-Tock’s fights, so nobody could hide a weapon or a bio-limb. He watched the last of the fight still going on, two men close to motionless on the floor, arms and legs wrapped around, blood spattered over the spray-painted circle they fought in.
After a long, long moment of seemingly nothing, the one behind - dark-skinned, thick-chested - made a sharp movement of arms and hands and there was a muffled crack. The other went limp - neck jerked clean through - and the noise of the crowd surged like a wave, echoing off the overhead. The winner staggered upright and limped to the ready-box, giving Jensen one long, dazed look as he passed. Jensen just bared his teeth, bouncing on the balls of his feet, skin tingling in the chill. He dipped his fingers into the can of machine grease Tick-Tock kept ready and slicked it back through his hair, so as to keep his opponent from getting a grip and using it against him.
The woman he was fighting was a couple inches taller than him, muscled and big in the chest. She’d used some of Tick’s bandage tape to tape down her breasts and she had welder’s scars on her knuckles and forearms, a dappling of spots where sparks and molten metal had landed. She had other scars, too - marks up the inside of her arm and along her throat, some drug she took through the vein. She gave him a blank look from under her lashes, her light hair a weird, pale green from the grease. Fucking desperate, to fight him - had to be.
Then Tick-Tock was calling them in and Jensen stalked into the ring, rolling his head on his shoulders, flexing his hands, feeling himself slide into that place in his head, that place of nothing and nowhere, a pre-fight bubble that let him breathe - let him just be. The crowd’s noise was nothing, just the rolling growl of an engine, background to the steady rush of Jensen’s breathing, to the thump of his heart.
He crouched slightly, hands easy at his thighs, ready-steady and...go.
When he surfaced again, the noise of the crowd was an animal thing, raw and nearly hysterical, and Jensen blinked down at the woman’s body - at the shredded flesh of her throat and the spreading pool of blood around her. He blinked and swallowed and almost brought it right back up, the iron-salt slick of blood in his belly. Instead, he breathed, spat and spat again, and then walked, stiff-legged, out of the ring. His throat hurt - must have been screaming. There were wads of damp hemp pulp in a plastic bin and Jensen used a couple to haphazardly wipe himself down and then dress, layer after layer. He was shaking now, falling fast, and he looped the cloth around his throat, yanked on his gloves, and turned to find Tick-Tock looking down at him.
“Good show,” Tick said, tall and skeletal and weirdly grey from some illness that had leached color and texture from his dark skin until he looked like something left to disintegrate under water. His couple of dozen chronos laddered his bone-thin forearms and were looped around his neck and across the lattice of his ribs, ticking and chiming and flashing, all different times, none of them right.
“Gimme my cut,” Jensen said, teeth gritted hard against chattering, and Tick fished in one pocket for a cracked reader, then in another pocket for a blank debit card. He programmed something into the reader and then zipped the card through and handed it to Jensen. It would work - they always did - and he could even get hard credit off a bank machine, if some truly paranoid dealer demanded it.
“Code’s here,” Tick-Tock said, and Jensen put out his arm - suffered through Tick pushing up his sleeve and writing a five number code onto the skin of Jensen’s wrist, the slightly squishy tip of the surgical pen cold against his skin. The ink was a lurid sort of purple, almost fluorescent. “Next week, then?”
“Dunno. Maybe. I gotta - I g-g-g-ot-”
“Yeah, you go,” Tick-Tock said, and Jensen shoved the card in under his coat and walked jerkily away. His legs felt leaden, and yet as hollow as blown glass at the same time - apt to shatter at any moment. All his bones were too thin, he could feel them fracturing under the weight of his momentum; stress lines climbing his shins and crazing his femurs. He had to get through the crowd, snarling and snapping at the few who reached out, who tried to congratulate him, pull him into some celebration. Sweating under his layers, he was cold as ice, his ribs too small and too tight, crushing down around his lungs.
He staggered out into the warmer air of the corridor and sagged there a moment, leaning against the wall and breathing hard, cursing under his breath. Fucking ‘dust. Fucking Blue. Never should put them together like that, and then the adrenaline rush and the alien cocktail of icing - some adreno-endorphin-pituitary thing cooked up from the unformed offspring of one of the three alien races out there. They laid eggs by the thousands so a handful could survive and didn’t care what anyone did with the leftovers. Trust humans, Jensen thought, to turn ‘em into something to get you high.
Not-quite-babies in embryonic sacs and the twilight of the birthing labs and the low, endless moaning because they were dying, all dying, no doctors anymore, so many babies and all of them dying-
Jensen made an inarticulate, agonized noise and slammed his head against the corridor wall, making his head sing and his vision blacken and wow, was that bone, was his skull shattered now?
“Idiot, fuck, not glass, got to move, got to go….” Pressed against the wall, he stumbled forward, sliding along, eyes mostly shut and his head leaving a swipe of blood behind, slippery. Made it easier to move, blood always did, hot inside, cold outside, slick and salt and it made your teeth a funny color after a while, never forget that corpse-grin-
He cracked his head again, welcoming the pain - the distraction - and dragged himself around a corner, and another, the light flickering - bad fixture maybe - dark and light, dark and light, on and off.
Jensen’s knees went to water and he almost went down, barely saving himself on an inset emergency hold, the kind that were scattered here and there, in case the power went - zero-g in Carousel a nightmare nobody wanted to consider, three stories high and nowhere to hunker down.
He hung there, gulping in air, fingers pressing tight against his eyelids, and when he looked up, someone was there, dark against the light, tall, watching him. Jensen pressed his hand against his thigh, sliding his home-made blade into his palm and trying to just fucking stand up.
“Fuck off,” he grated, throat stinging, and the figure moved closer, coming clear. Man - tall man - his fucking tail, and Jensen felt fear-flight crash through him, shock of hotcold and his belly went tight, his knees locked, braced for whatever came next. “I ss-said fuck off!”
“Jensen?” the man asked, and Jensen recoiled, staring. He blinked rapidly to clear his gaze, fuck, who was this? He had to see, figure this out, nobody knew him, nobody, he’d been so fucking careful. The man inched even closer, bending just a little, and light fell across his face. Pretty face. Broad forehead under long, dark hair, pointed nose, and eyes that tilted up, just a little. Hazel eyes, so familiar...familiar.
He’d seen that face. Nearly that face. Fuck, what was it? He knew, he knew, somewhere...younger, thinner, but that face, that face….
The knowledge crashed down on him, like a wall, like a wave. It crushed him to his knees, it was suffocating him, and Jensen could hear himself saying something - screaming something - swinging his body out and back again, into the wall, head ringing, blood like water down his cheekbone, again, again, because he remembered that face, he remembered and he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to, no please don’t fucking remember, don’t go there, don’t go, don’tdon’tdon’t go there!
The last thing he saw was the face, him, him bending down, reaching down, and then a sting in the side of his neck and he was down, done, gone, boom.
Part Seven.
Finally, i know! Sorry about that, guys. Anyway - i'm also working on my fanwork auction fics - never fear! Well, on two of them. Still need a prompt from one person, but yes - they're happening!
'Tis the season here for my favorite flower in the world - the chicory flower. *happy sigh* Chicory and Queen Anne's Lace - love 'em! (For those who aren't sure what chicory is like... :) Lovely stuff.
And now...the fic. Thanks for staying with me, guys. :) All praise and thanks heaped upon
darkhavens for her ever-perfect beta'ing.Also at AO3.
So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,
Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,
Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible…. - Rupert Brooke, ‘Hauntings’
Axis was an old station - oldest in that system - and Jensen remembered it, and that was a problem. He remembered it when it was nothing but girders and temporary panels and empty echoes. Remembered high-liners, up in what would become Carousel, sending down fountains of sparks as they welded and riveted the armature together, sending crazy echoes bouncing down and down to the core.
Axis was smaller then, and brand-new, and not even a sure thing, and the Tiamat had been sent there on a routine patrol, keeping pirates and looters at bay until they could establish enough of the station to lock things up and out.
Being in it now - seeing it go from skeleton to teeming - was disorienting. Was downright frightening, because Jensen had no idea what else he’d missed, in his years shipboard. It hadn’t mattered there where he was safe with his Angels, all together in quarters, in mess, moving like a single organism on mission after mission. New vids or new music or new drugs filtered in, and news sometimes, if Five was feeling particularly antsy, but all of it was so...far away. Unimportant. Even on Reveille, they’d kept that kind of stuff to a minimum - ‘limiting the stressors’, they’d called it.
But here in the new Axis - the now Axis - it felt like the stressors were killing him. Every light was too bright, every sound was too much: percussive, invasive, deafening. Even the food was overwhelming; so many variations, so many spices. They made his lips tingle and his gut heave until he gave up on most food altogether and stuck to the stuff in the automats, wedges of cold sandwiches and chilled fruit, everything simpler, plainer.
He had to deal, though, because what he needed was mostly only for sale in Carousel. Sure, there were suits and tourists palming little glassine baggies of this and that in white-tiled heads all over the station, but that was by appointment only stuff. That was this is my friend stuff, and there weren’t that many suits on Axis that wanted rough cut, and that was all Jensen had to trade to those arrogant bastards.
And fuck that, he was no whore. Not for the likes of them.
No, he had to have the shadows for what he needed; had to have the dealers with the illegal cautery knife and hired muscle; had to have the ones who cooked up in stills cobbled together in maintenance tunnels and service bays - ones that could be moved in a minute’s notice. He needed what they sold, and they only sold on Carousel.
So here he was, trying not to look too fucking crazy, ‘cause the dealers weren’t stupid and they didn’t want trouble. Problem was, Jensen was crazy. He felt crazy. He felt like everything around him was moving just a few degrees off from him - a little too fast, a little too loud, a little too much. He wore heavy mining pants and layers of shirts, half-gloves and eye shades and even a long, dun strip of cloth he’d stole from a vendor, winding it around his head and neck and face. Wrapping up and hiding more and more every week, and he figured in another month he’d just be a moving lump of cloth, no eyes, no fingers. He sweated and shivered and flinched even in his ‘armor’, jumping at every noise and exhausting himself with endless, repetitive security checks. Everybody moved around too much, so fucking careless and random. He had to keep the most suspicious of them in sight, had to keep them all in place so he had to keep moving, moving, moving.
And he couldn’t do that without the drugs, and he couldn’t get the drugs without the drugs, and if he didn’t get the drugs he couldn’t eat the bland, chilled food and drink the nothing-tasting water and he couldn’t fucking sleep... Fuck, that was the worst, when he hadn’t slept for two or three days and everything seemed to vibrate and nothing made any fucking sense.
He’d fled to the core - they called it Axis Mundi, which meant nothing to Jensen - catching a ride on the top of the shell of a maintenance mag-lift, clinging in the safe dark to the hand-holds welded there for the fixer crews. Down in the core were kilometers of access tunnels and conduits, built big enough for two men to walk through, that had been abandoned as Axis had grown out, pushing her skin wider and leaving hollows behind. They were mostly on power-save, kept warm by the residual heat flowing through water mains and banks of circuitry, and the tiny chemical heaters scattered here and there that marked places and spaces and no-go private niches.
Jensen had his own place, an alcove under a heat exchange, warm and softly humming, dry and defendable and safe. An access ladder went up into the exchanger and eventually out, a secondary exit if he was ever trapped. He’d lined the space with wads of hemp pulp stolen from the recycler on level 23, and, a rare find, a left-behind medical blanket he’d found shoved under an overturned locker in an abandoned first aid station. But best - oh, best of all - were the markings. The dense, flowing lines and angular sketches, a rare and private code of symbols and shapes and traceries. Same as on the Tiamat, same as anywhere any Angel had spent any time. Jensen thought maybe even one of his, from that long-ago port call, had found this alcove amongst the construction bustle and spent a little time leaving this behind. ‘Hello’ and ‘safe’ and ‘good hiding’. ‘Fuck’ and ‘fly’ and ‘angel, angel, angel’.
When the nightmares and the come-downs were worst, they kept Jensen grounded - helped him get his shit together so he could face another trip up top. He’d even added his own name, painstaking and shaky, just like inside his clothes, making it his, a secret just for him.
Right now, Jensen was curled up in his alcove, knotted and shivering and sick. Coming down, sure, but something else, too. His body was still rejecting the ‘net - agonizing cramps all through his muscles, and his nerves firing off, random and hot, sizzling under his skin. His head was splitting and his skin felt too tight and he couldn’t get his head on straight, he couldn’t get himself grounded. His vision kept flashing, from the amber and red of the security lights to something flat and dead, corpse light, grey-blue and hideous. Every time it happened, his head went to static, the nothingness of an empty channel, no words and no thoughts.
Wherever that was was cold, and stank, and it made his belly ache and his teeth and oh, fuck, he hated it there, he fucking hated it, he had to get out of there, get something, get high and get gone before he, before….
Jensen already had his sweater on, over a tee from Reveille, and he forced himself up and dragged on two more shirts - long-sleeved, oversized - and the coat he wore on top. He wound the cloth around his head and found his eye shades, patting them where they rested in a pocket. He inched out of his nest and stood with a low groan of pain and then, slowly, so slowly, shuffled away down the corridor.
Tick-Tock would help him. He’d owe him, but that was what Tick-Tock worked in: favors and debts and IOUs. And better Tick-Tock than anybody else. Better than...the no-place. Tick-Tock would get him a taste - a hit - just enough to get him settled, so he could go topside and get what he really needed. Tick-Tock would spot him the credit for that, too, and that was fine, that was good. Jensen would pay him back later, when the drugs were kicking in good and hard and he was flying again, wings not clipped.
Tick-Tock ran the fights that happened up in Carousel every few nights. They were bloody and ugly and desperate, but winner take all and give half to Tick-Tock, and that would set Jensen up for a week, solid, let him get himself back into a groove so he could get another runner job, ferrying product or collecting kickbacks. He didn’t have his suit anymore, didn’t have his Angels, but he could still gut you six ways before you could scream, and sometimes somebody needed that. Jensen didn’t much care, so long as it bought him free of the no-place, and the pain, for another day.
So this was him, on the edge of not-quite-enough, moving jittery and too tense. Fuck only knows what was in that hit of Tock’s, some shit he’d made himself in his spare time, or scrounged - Tick-Tock was straight-X, never took nothing, so he was no judge.
And fuck if someone wasn’t on Jensen’s tail. He’d noticed before - a few days ago, a couple nights - somebody watching, shadowing him. There was always too much going on - on Carousel and in Jensen’s head - for him to really have a good picture of his watcher. Jensen just knew he was tall, and quick, and pretty damn good, but not as good as an Angel, and it was starting to piss Jensen off.
But he had a deal to make, and a fight to get to, so he put the tail out of his mind and concentrated on casing out his route, on finding his hit. Sticking to the edges, dodging careless walkers, trying hard not to snarl and snap at every idiot who got too close. His guy was set up at the back of a noodle-soup kiosk, this time, and Jensen got ‘dust and Blue and a twist of foil with an ugly little dab of stuff called icing in it, grey-green and glistening. He got a bowl of soup, too, ‘cause he’s gotta have something to burn, and ate it fast, noodles going down slick and nearly tasteless, broth mostly just salt. Perfect food for a junkie in a fix, and that’s the beauty of that set up, you can sell to ‘em before and after.
By the time he’d drunk the last of the broth, he was already soaring, just like a rocket - higher and higher - and if he timed it just right he’d hit apogee in the ring, and Tick-Tock’d really get his money’s worth. He got another ladleful of noodles, ‘cause he could - scrounged credit Tick-Tock had no notion of - and slipped a squeeze-bottle of some flavored water under his coat when Tay wasn’t watching.
He wandered off, then, slurping the noodles down and drinking the water that was full of sugar with a chemical kick, dodging the crowd and sliding into the shadows around a corner, crouching down out of sight and waiting to see…. There. His tail, slouching by, all casual-like, hands tucked into pockets and long hair hanging anyhow, looking like some miner, broke and sad, or maybe hungover as he wove in and out of the crowd. And Jensen still couldn’t really see his face, just shadow and light and edges, things moving that probably shouldn’t move. Maybe he shouldn't have had the icing on top of it all, but fuck it.
His tail moved on, probably panicking now, having lost him, and Jensen pushed himself upright, empty bowl and bottle abandoned, and dodged away, into the service corridors behind the kiosks, all the places nobody was supposed to go but he had a key that Tick-Tock had cloned, so Jensen could get to the fights.
He wondered if it was really such a big secret. Surely Axis knew, with her thousands of digital eyes, what they did. Surely the bodies that slid down into the big incinerator weren’t a surprise. Probably she looked on it like pest control: thinning the herd. Not one of them would be missed, after all.
Jensen found the storage bay in fifteen minutes, following the little phosphor-glow arrows painted down low in the corridors; following the low, surging noise of a crowd of people too high to be scared, and too scared to be straight. He gave Tick-Tock a head’s up nod and climbed up on top of a pile of abandoned shelving, only a head or so higher than the crowd, but it settled his nerves, at least a little. He settled into an easy crouch to watch and wait his turn, back to the corner and a bar of steel-plex propped under his hand, a palm knife made from a wedge of ground-down alloy nestled in his glove. Safe, for the moment, cocooned in chemical strands; 1-(1-phenylcyclohexyl)piperidine, (5α,6α)-7,8-didehydro-4,5-epoxy-17-methylmorphinan-3,6-diol diacetate…. He could see the formulas in his head, arcane scratchings over Kane’s bunk, memorized over time. Kane’s favorites, or so he said, but who fucking knew, Kane was...Kane was….
Jensen snapped his head to the side once, hard, solid crack into the wall there, dislodging Kane and Angels, concentrating on the muffled pain. It was almost his turn. When Tick-Tock gave him the nod, Jensen stepped down off his perch and moved to the little roped-off area for the next in line. Stripped down, out of his layers, to nothing at all, because that was the rules in Tick-Tock’s fights, so nobody could hide a weapon or a bio-limb. He watched the last of the fight still going on, two men close to motionless on the floor, arms and legs wrapped around, blood spattered over the spray-painted circle they fought in.
After a long, long moment of seemingly nothing, the one behind - dark-skinned, thick-chested - made a sharp movement of arms and hands and there was a muffled crack. The other went limp - neck jerked clean through - and the noise of the crowd surged like a wave, echoing off the overhead. The winner staggered upright and limped to the ready-box, giving Jensen one long, dazed look as he passed. Jensen just bared his teeth, bouncing on the balls of his feet, skin tingling in the chill. He dipped his fingers into the can of machine grease Tick-Tock kept ready and slicked it back through his hair, so as to keep his opponent from getting a grip and using it against him.
The woman he was fighting was a couple inches taller than him, muscled and big in the chest. She’d used some of Tick’s bandage tape to tape down her breasts and she had welder’s scars on her knuckles and forearms, a dappling of spots where sparks and molten metal had landed. She had other scars, too - marks up the inside of her arm and along her throat, some drug she took through the vein. She gave him a blank look from under her lashes, her light hair a weird, pale green from the grease. Fucking desperate, to fight him - had to be.
Then Tick-Tock was calling them in and Jensen stalked into the ring, rolling his head on his shoulders, flexing his hands, feeling himself slide into that place in his head, that place of nothing and nowhere, a pre-fight bubble that let him breathe - let him just be. The crowd’s noise was nothing, just the rolling growl of an engine, background to the steady rush of Jensen’s breathing, to the thump of his heart.
He crouched slightly, hands easy at his thighs, ready-steady and...go.
When he surfaced again, the noise of the crowd was an animal thing, raw and nearly hysterical, and Jensen blinked down at the woman’s body - at the shredded flesh of her throat and the spreading pool of blood around her. He blinked and swallowed and almost brought it right back up, the iron-salt slick of blood in his belly. Instead, he breathed, spat and spat again, and then walked, stiff-legged, out of the ring. His throat hurt - must have been screaming. There were wads of damp hemp pulp in a plastic bin and Jensen used a couple to haphazardly wipe himself down and then dress, layer after layer. He was shaking now, falling fast, and he looped the cloth around his throat, yanked on his gloves, and turned to find Tick-Tock looking down at him.
“Good show,” Tick said, tall and skeletal and weirdly grey from some illness that had leached color and texture from his dark skin until he looked like something left to disintegrate under water. His couple of dozen chronos laddered his bone-thin forearms and were looped around his neck and across the lattice of his ribs, ticking and chiming and flashing, all different times, none of them right.
“Gimme my cut,” Jensen said, teeth gritted hard against chattering, and Tick fished in one pocket for a cracked reader, then in another pocket for a blank debit card. He programmed something into the reader and then zipped the card through and handed it to Jensen. It would work - they always did - and he could even get hard credit off a bank machine, if some truly paranoid dealer demanded it.
“Code’s here,” Tick-Tock said, and Jensen put out his arm - suffered through Tick pushing up his sleeve and writing a five number code onto the skin of Jensen’s wrist, the slightly squishy tip of the surgical pen cold against his skin. The ink was a lurid sort of purple, almost fluorescent. “Next week, then?”
“Dunno. Maybe. I gotta - I g-g-g-ot-”
“Yeah, you go,” Tick-Tock said, and Jensen shoved the card in under his coat and walked jerkily away. His legs felt leaden, and yet as hollow as blown glass at the same time - apt to shatter at any moment. All his bones were too thin, he could feel them fracturing under the weight of his momentum; stress lines climbing his shins and crazing his femurs. He had to get through the crowd, snarling and snapping at the few who reached out, who tried to congratulate him, pull him into some celebration. Sweating under his layers, he was cold as ice, his ribs too small and too tight, crushing down around his lungs.
He staggered out into the warmer air of the corridor and sagged there a moment, leaning against the wall and breathing hard, cursing under his breath. Fucking ‘dust. Fucking Blue. Never should put them together like that, and then the adrenaline rush and the alien cocktail of icing - some adreno-endorphin-pituitary thing cooked up from the unformed offspring of one of the three alien races out there. They laid eggs by the thousands so a handful could survive and didn’t care what anyone did with the leftovers. Trust humans, Jensen thought, to turn ‘em into something to get you high.
Not-quite-babies in embryonic sacs and the twilight of the birthing labs and the low, endless moaning because they were dying, all dying, no doctors anymore, so many babies and all of them dying-
Jensen made an inarticulate, agonized noise and slammed his head against the corridor wall, making his head sing and his vision blacken and wow, was that bone, was his skull shattered now?
“Idiot, fuck, not glass, got to move, got to go….” Pressed against the wall, he stumbled forward, sliding along, eyes mostly shut and his head leaving a swipe of blood behind, slippery. Made it easier to move, blood always did, hot inside, cold outside, slick and salt and it made your teeth a funny color after a while, never forget that corpse-grin-
He cracked his head again, welcoming the pain - the distraction - and dragged himself around a corner, and another, the light flickering - bad fixture maybe - dark and light, dark and light, on and off.
Jensen’s knees went to water and he almost went down, barely saving himself on an inset emergency hold, the kind that were scattered here and there, in case the power went - zero-g in Carousel a nightmare nobody wanted to consider, three stories high and nowhere to hunker down.
He hung there, gulping in air, fingers pressing tight against his eyelids, and when he looked up, someone was there, dark against the light, tall, watching him. Jensen pressed his hand against his thigh, sliding his home-made blade into his palm and trying to just fucking stand up.
“Fuck off,” he grated, throat stinging, and the figure moved closer, coming clear. Man - tall man - his fucking tail, and Jensen felt fear-flight crash through him, shock of hotcold and his belly went tight, his knees locked, braced for whatever came next. “I ss-said fuck off!”
“Jensen?” the man asked, and Jensen recoiled, staring. He blinked rapidly to clear his gaze, fuck, who was this? He had to see, figure this out, nobody knew him, nobody, he’d been so fucking careful. The man inched even closer, bending just a little, and light fell across his face. Pretty face. Broad forehead under long, dark hair, pointed nose, and eyes that tilted up, just a little. Hazel eyes, so familiar...familiar.
He’d seen that face. Nearly that face. Fuck, what was it? He knew, he knew, somewhere...younger, thinner, but that face, that face….
The knowledge crashed down on him, like a wall, like a wave. It crushed him to his knees, it was suffocating him, and Jensen could hear himself saying something - screaming something - swinging his body out and back again, into the wall, head ringing, blood like water down his cheekbone, again, again, because he remembered that face, he remembered and he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to, no please don’t fucking remember, don’t go there, don’t go, don’tdon’tdon’t go there!
The last thing he saw was the face, him, him bending down, reaching down, and then a sting in the side of his neck and he was down, done, gone, boom.
Part Seven.
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