possible for them to understand what it’s like to be me, but they’ll never know.
Vilaris and Blaylocke approached as Chaz—née E. Chester Wheatley—was opening up my various compartments to investigate my insides. My wounds from the fall were smarting something awful. I could tell I’d taken at least one flecker shot to the lower back and a laser in the butt, but I’d get those tended to later.
“You asked before why we decided to bring you into Pyras,” Vilaris said. “We don’t allow visitors often, but we need help.”
I smirked. “I could’ve told you that.”
“No, I mean we need your help.”
“Sorry, I don’t do the ‘helping people’ thing.” I air-quoted the words, keeping my wrists together like I was making a shadow puppet, while Chaz held a bundle of polymer fibers aside and peered into my thigh.
“This is unbelievable,” Chaz was saying. “The way the synthetic flesh and the augments are so seamlessly blended together. I never thought I’d get such a hands-on view of a techsoul’s body. The amalgamation of humanity and technology is astounding. This is going to change the course of my experiments for years to come. You have an array of neurosensors and twitch gyroelectrolyzers that are barely above detection, which I assume are intended for smoothing the interactions between the various brain-body-tech circuits. How does it all wire up, I wonder? How’s it all connected? Oops. Did that hurt? How do you feel?”
“I feel close to either falling asleep or having an orgasm, depending on which one of those things you jab.” I also felt weird having another guy’s face six inches away from my crotch.
“If I tell you why we brought you here, will you at least consider helping us?” asked Vilaris, annoying me.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Unless there’s chips in it for me, in which case I’d be working for you, not helping you.”
“We can probably pay you a little for your trouble,” Vilaris said.
“Well why didn’t you say so? Or better yet, why didn’t you just use the phrase ‘work for us’ instead of ‘help us’?”
“Because you don’t have a choice in the matter. We know you killed those miner thugs.”
Chaz stopped fiddling with my leg. He shrank away, and I saw him gulp. “Killed?”
“It’s not like it sounds, Chaz. They jumped me, and I—”
“Why are you lying?” said Blaylocke. “First our gravstone buyer ends his contract with the city. Then we hear the Civvies’ chattering on the bluewave about so-and-so who’s wanted for murder and attempted larceny. Then to top it all off, the Civvies come down into the nearflow and risk having their boats dashed to pieces to find said murderer. They were looking for you, Muller. You told us yourself you weren’t far away from being the most wanted outlaw in the stream.”
I gave Chaz a pleading look. “Chaz, I’m not a lunatic. You gotta believe me, I was minding my own business when—”
“Tell me the truth,” Chaz said, shrugging out of his apparatus.
Why do I have to be such a bigmouth? “Okay, I stole something,” I said, throwing up my bound hands. That made Chaz flinch. “I hid the haul on some floater and went to a tavern, planning to pick it up later in my boat. Gilfoyle and his goons found me first and said they’d kill me if I didn’t show them where it was. I did, but Gilfoyle decided he wanted me dead anyway. They put me on a beat-up old hovercell and sent me to the Churn to die. If Gilfoyle isn’t buying from you anymore, you should consider yourself lucky and find someone else to do business with. Someone who isn’t a lying sack of crap.”
“What did you steal?” Blaylocke asked, as though he already knew.
I hesitated. “Gravstone. A pretty big haul.”
“And where do you think that gravstone came from?”
It hit me, and I knew where this was going. “At the time, I thought it was from the Churn mines. It wasn’t though, was it? It was from Pyras.”
Blaylocke shot me a look. “Do you know how we keep this old city so sparkling new? Why we’re so wealthy even though we’re humans? Because gravstone is our chief export. Every trade we make, every deal we strike, has to be done in secret. That’s how we keep Pyras under the radar. In the case of our gravstone, it’s by only dealing with one buyer. A buyer you tried to steal from. Who, after losing four of his men, a hovercell and a pair of hovertrucks, says it’s too dangerous around here. He’s packing up his operation and shipping off to friendlier nearflow, and he never paid a single chip for that entire truckload. That was almost half a year’s output. You just scared off the only person keeping Pyras funded.”
I’d ruined the economy of an entire city, and they wanted to pay me to fix it. I had to hand it to myself.
“We brought you back here because we want to give you the chance to make it right,” Blaylocke continued. “Now that you know how many innocent people depend on the exports from our ore veins, you must feel some compulsion to help.”
If I had said I felt one iota of compulsion, I’d have been lying. They were the morons basing their livelihood on the sale of a single element. Just because it was the most valuable element in existence didn’t make it okay to put all their eggs in one basket. Besides, it’s not like I had known I was screwing them over.
“So that’s what you wanted to pay me for? You were going to throw some arbitrary number of chips at me and say ‘Make it right’? ‘Fix what you didn’t know you broke’? What happens if I go out and tell the whole world about you instead?”
“Good luck finding us again, first of all,” said Vilaris, running a hand through his long oily locks.
“And second of all,” said Blaylocke, “that’s going to be hard for you to do with the device Chester is about to install, which is the reason we brought you down here to the Department of Innovation.”
“I’m doing what, now?” Chaz was so gullible and easygoing, I’d started to like the guy.
“Sorry for the short notice, Chester,” Vilaris said.
“The old ‘Do what we say, or we’ll kill you’ routine, huh?” I said. “I expected better from you guys.” I’ve always liked making people think I’m one step ahead of them. I also like being a wiseacre, so… two birds with one stone, there.
“Not quite,” said Blaylocke. “We prefer to reward rather than punish. The device lets us keep tabs on you.”
“A bluewave beacon? No thanks.”
“It’s not on the bluewave. It’s a sub-signal. We’re the only ones who can trace it. The device will let us listen in on everything you’re saying. If we get wind of you doing anything that could jeopardize your task, you’ll get a shock just like the ones from the magnetic cuffs and the cracklefields on our bikes. Keep it up, and we’ll come find you.”
“That’s your idea of a reward?”
“The not-killing-you part was the reward.”
“So I have no choice in the matter. You’re forcing me to do this.”
Blaylocke shrugged. “We were hoping it wouldn’t come to that. We thought you’d want to help.”
“Surprise, buttholes. I’m not a humanitarian. I don’t work for free. How do you expect me to do this, anyway? Why don’t you just do it yourselves?”
“We will do it ourselves, if you fail. But even as a wanted man, a techsoul can get around in the stream easier than a human could. You said you’re an outlaw. Don’t outlaws know how to sell things under the radar? When you stole all that gravstone, did you plan on selling it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“To one person?”
I looked at him like I thought he was dumb. Wasn’t hard, since I did. “Highly unlikely that I could’ve found one person who could afford all that gravstone. Probably would’ve had to find a dozen.”
“So all you have to do is pretend you have enough gravstone to sell to a dozen people. Then find us those people.”
“That could take months, if I’m lucky. I’d need a boat to haul it in, and a crew to protect it.”
“As human as we may be, we do have brains,” Vil
aris said. “We’re not gonna give you the gravstone in advance. That’s how Gilfoyle burned us. You find the customers, we ship the goods.”
“With the kinds of people I tend to deal with, asking them to take delivery after payment is as good as spitting in their faces,” I said.
“There is one other option,” said Blaylocke.
I waited.
“You could convince Mr. Gilfoyle to pay us back.”
I laughed out loud. “The guy keeps a whole crew of thugs on retainer. If you think I’m ever getting within a mile of him by myself, you’re delusional.”
I wanted that medallion—the one I’d tried to trade away from Gilfoyle for his own truckful of gravstone. But I wasn’t stupid enough to go near him again.
“What if you weren’t by yourself?” Vilaris said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, leveling my gaze at him.
“Blaylocke and I will come with you. There isn’t time to build a streamboat, but we can charter an airship from the city.”
Blaylocke disagreed. “This is his problem, Clint. Let him figure it out.”
“A crew of humans?” I said. “Please. Spare me the fairy tales. If anyone gets wind of me riding around with a bunch of primies, we’ll all be dead before dinner.”
“You’re forgetting what kind of primies you’ll be riding around with,” Vilaris said.
“The kind with cracklefields and magnetic cuffs?” I said. “Ooh. The techsouls will be so scared, they’ll forget to bring their skin augurs.”
“You think we don’t know how dangerous it is for us up there?