In the future, the mean streets means much more than it does today, and yet, there are some decent people who look out for everyone, no matter their gender, creed or make. Let’s meet Adrienne 69…
I: Mech and Meat
“Not bad, all things considered—a little skinny, but busty and blonde and shiny as a new shuttle. Just your type, Clark.”
Clark and Kessel were tailing a mech-prostitute, the area’s most famous (infamous, really), and she’d been making a meandering circuit of the Core’s fringe streets, up and down the sidewalks overlooked by rows of ramshackle houses, many of which were known drug-dens and juice-pits; raking passing traffic with a brazen stare, as prostitutes (human and mech-human alike) were so adept at doing; her long steel legs in her tiny red leather mini-skirt flashing beneath the orange streetlamps, her mech-eye pulsing a cold blue in the valleys of shadow between the light. Her silver arms and neck glimmered, as well as the long continent of baroque neo-epidermal steel that crept upward from her steel throat to crawl across her left cheek and make a wide curlicue around her real-eye. Her platinum blonde wig cascaded down her back, the contrast of this human accoutrement conspicuous against her gleaming mech-body.
“My type ain’t a disgusting machine.”
Clark’s voice had risen from its usual low pitch, and the fury-vein had pulsed its crooked line across his forehead, and even though he’d only looked at her in anger a second before turning away, embarrassed at his outburst, Kessel had felt it all like a physical blow.
“Hey, Clark,” she said, in a softer voice. “Relax. I didn’t mean anything. You know that.” She could have smacked herself for being so thoughtless. She knew how sensitive he was about his mech arms, and here she was, making juvenile innuendo-laced jokes suggesting his interest in a mech-modified hooker. Smart move, Kessel, and way to regress to the kind of macho caveman behaviour she’d vowed to stamp out when she’d started as a Blue and seen just how deeply ingrained misogyny was in the ranks of the city’s police. Spend your days running with Neanderthal and suddenly, you find yourself swinging a club, too; but Clark wasn’t like that, and didn’t deserve that kind of tactless BS from her.
He was nodding in confirmation of her apology, so vigorously that it unnerved her even more because it betrayed just how angry he still was. She was about to say more when he cut her short.
“I got this.”
And he opened his door and climbed out of the car.
Kessel was stunned: Clark had never cut her out of a shakedown, not even when she’d been a rookie. Over the years, their partnership had grown to friendship, and a tacit agreement existed between them: no secrets, and they backed each other up, always. Feeling like a newbie being reprimanded by a superior, she watched helpless as Clark swung around the hood of the car and made for their perp. The mech-prostitute had slunk up the sidewalk almost parallel to their car but, seeing Clark exit the vehicle and head meaningfully toward her, made as if to turn and stroll casually back in the direction from which she’d come.
“You,” Clark said. “Not one more step.”
She turned, cocked an eyebrow at him, glanced briefly at the badge he flashed. “You talking to me-me, sugar-cops?”
“I don’t see any other mech-hooker around here, do you?”
The mech-woman glared at him challengingly a second before saying, “This mech-lady was just going for a little walk-walk to get some air.”
Clark barked a laugh. “Lady, you’re in Cancer City—nobody steps out for the air here. That’s why we both got mech-lungs pumping inside us. Unless you’re all real-deal inside, which, based on the outside,” and he gave her a theatrical top-to-bottom appraisal, “I’m guessing ain’t the case.”
A little elderly Chinese woman, pushing a rickety wire air-buggy crammed with groceries in brown paper bags from the nearby market, hobbled past and scrutinized them with frowning but un-frightened eyes; an expression, Clark thought grimly, that said this old woman was much accustomed to scenes like this in her downtrodden neighbourhood. Nothing new here, just the same old disheartening song and dance. The woman turned away from them, and puttered on her way, her levitating grocery buggy’s engine wheezing laboriously.
Clark turned to the mech-woman, who had her mouth open to say something. “Shut up. One question, which if you don’t answer to my satisfaction will mean I’m going to go to the trouble of bringing you in and booking you. No more business for you tonight. Got it?”
She gave him a proud, bitter look of resignation. “Shoot, sugar-cops. I wouldn’t want you to rough me up none…unless that’s your kink. In that case, I can be your perp all night long.”
He ignored her taunting innuendo, though what she said made him want to retch. Down the street, he could see Kessel’s silhouette in the car, could sense her eyes watching his exchange with the mech-woman in the passenger-side mirror. Why had he gone off on her like that? He knew Kessel real good, and knew what she’d said was just talk, just a playful dig that didn’t mean anything—and yet, he’d nearly taken her head off for it. He focused his attention on the mech-hooker standing defiantly in front of him, small purse swinging off her hip like a pendulum counting off the seconds in their late-night encounter.
“You’re Adrienne 69. Famous mech-whore of the Core. You know all the hookers and pimps and juicers and dealers of all black-market goods in these parts. I got a name you’re going to give me an address and connections for: Auston Davies. Rich kid, university student, popular locally-famous protestor, bona fide fakeman supporter. Also, a good pal of some fakemen I’m acquainted with, but would like to become real close friends with, if you catch my drift. Some call them a group, I prefer cult. Our boy Auston—how can we reach him? Talk.”
Adrienne 69 eyed him in quiet, measured fury before saying, “I don’t know your guy. I guess because I’m more of a babysitter around these parts. What with all the under-agers and runaway kids turning to hooking to feed their juicing habits. But all you Blues wouldn’t know nothing about that problem, would you? Not while you’re busy hunting for your rich schoolboy fakes.”
Clark bit his tongue, though he would have liked to rip hers out. Instead—wondering once again at the quickly rising surge of his anger—he pulled his card from his coat pocket and slipped it into the narrow dark slot of Adrienne 69’s jacket pocket.
“Call me when you recollect anything that might be of interest to me.”
A leering smile spread across Adrienne 69’s face, steel-toothed and sharp. “Aww shit, sugar-cops—I got lots to interest you.”
Clark found his disgust so great that he wanted only to flee from the mech-woman. He managed to play it smooth, giving her a wry grin and saying, “I was thinking more along the lines of if, say, you remember an address where I might call on some More-Than-Men. They’re slippery cats, and we need to get in touch with them as soon as possible. Especially if there are any group members lurking around in town. Call me, or I come find you again.”
With that, Clark turned and headed toward the car, but he’d caught it: the brief but unmistakable mix of recognition and shock that had registered on Adrienne 69’s face at mention of the More-Than-Men (and being able to discern any emotion in a mostly mech face like hers showed just how significant the name was to her). What did it mean? He’d find out soon enough, that much he was reasonably sure about.
Behind him, Adrienne 69 was muttering something under her breath that he couldn’t quite catch, but he thought that was probably a good thing, because it might have pissed him off even more, and that wasn’t something the mech-woman would have wanted to do. In fact, it was to his and Kessel’s benefit, too—nobody needed him to fly into one of his infamous rages, which were known to do more damage than good and that were becoming alarmingly frequent of late.
He found Kessel leaning against the hood of the car, staring at the Cloud-filled sky. He looked there, too, in time to see a particularly violent convulsion of green pulses. Somewhere to the west, thunder rumbled.
“Storm coming?” he said.
Kessel said, “Maybe it’s just the voice of the Cloud. Maybe it talks now. Maybe it thinks. Maybe it has a plan for us all. Maybe it’s God.”
“All of the above wouldn’t surprise me anymore. This city…” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to—his partner was well acquainted with the various forms of madness rampant in the city, so many of which were linked to the great churning mass of the ever-present Cloud.
Kessel only nodded. Then, eyes still in the atomic energy-plagued cumulus, she said, “You plant some seeds?”
Clark said, “That better not be some kind of innuendo, Kessel.”
She turned to him, torn from her distant thoughts, mouth open to refute the suggestion. But she saw him grinning, and shook her head. “Wise guy, huh?”
He chuckled, though without warmth or humour. It was a tired sound. “Yeah and yeah: wise guy and seed planted, both. She’ll call.” A moment of awkward silence between them, and he added, “Didn’t mean to cut you out back there, Kes. I’ve just been…My temper, it got the better of me, but that ain’t no excuse, and…”
“Mm. No worries, Clark. I was out of line, too. Coffees are on me tonight.” She noticed he was absently stroking the fingers of his left mech-hand with those of his right, his eyes looking off Cloudward. She wondered what he was seeing: just the usual angry atomic pulses, or was he looking inward, back to the memory of five years past when he’d came to in the hospital and found his arms amputated, and his replacements waiting for fitting, gleaming inside their sterile glass receptacles like the apparatuses in some unhinged scientist’s nightmarish experiment.
“Well, alright then,” he said, voice distant.
They got into the car and he made a U-turn so needlessly savage that it caused Kessel to give him a wide-eyed look of anger, though she didn’t say anything—she was just grateful her partner hated piloting shuttles; whatever kept him out of the airways kept her that much safer.
Clark gunned it toward the House, conscious of his hopelessly sullied mood.
He only realized a few minutes later, when they were pulling into the underground garage of the House, that the loathing he felt was for himself, and the ineffectual job they were all doing that allowed the state of the city to grow worse every single day.
But Adrienne 69 didn’t call.
Or at least, she hadn’t called by week’s end, and since the intervening days had been filled with a pair of techware company robberies with pretty clear links to the fakeman cult that had been eluding them for months, well, Clark decided to expedite the process; though why he’d neglected to let Kessel in on his plan and opted to fly solo, he couldn’t exactly say. Something about the case felt somehow dirtier than other cases, so maybe he just wanted to spare his partner the filth of it. Or maybe it was something else altogether, though what that might be, he was still figuring out.
He exhaled, hard, clearing his thoughts and focusing on the task at hand. Checking his ment-clock, he saw it was 11:59 P.M.
He waited for her, standing within the shadowed entrance of a long-derelict convenience store on the corner of Turner and Pinker. It was dead-centre in the Core’s ghetto-land, but a known pick-up spot for those seeking higher-end mech-prostitutes and the occasional human prostitute. Sure enough, the nearby Anglican church’s bell had just begun its midnight tolling to send its echoes bouncing from the downtown buildings when he saw her. He couldn’t have missed her if he’d tried.
Her dress was ruby-red and inlaid with rhinestones that sparkled like scintillating points of fire. Her heels, the same ruby-red, clacked like gunshots on the sidewalk. Once again, she wasn’t wearing hose or stockings, showing off her long steel legs. They flashed in the orange streetlights, as did her mechanical arms, neck. He wasn’t sure, but he thought some of this was new steel, especially the long jagged finger of silver that arched boldly over her real-eye like an artificial eyebrow. Her wig this time was neon green, its long tresses framing her face neatly.
Clark stepped out from the entrance and onto the sidewalk.
“Adrienne 69.”
“The one and only-only, sugar-cops.”
She’d been looking away, seemingly examining the multiple layers of colourful graffiti spattering the brick walls and wood-boarded windows, and had turned to him after she’d spoken, showing him she’d been aware of his presence. She smiled a cruel smile, succulent lips inlaid with fine steel gilt-work. Her cheeks and real-eye and the lower half of her right arm were the only visible designations of humanity in her, Clark saw with revulsion. No doubt, her mech-eye had picked him out easily enough in his hiding place in the entranceway.
He watched as she set her small red leather purse down on a dilapidated couch that someone had left at the curb among a litter of waste cans and naked black garbage bags, then seated herself on one of its stained cushions. She looked somehow as regal as she did trashy, seated on her rotting throne like some fabled mech-queen of the ghetto. Which in a way she was, he thought. She waited with a patient expression, seemingly content in knowing that theirs was to be an involved conversation.
“You haven’t called me,” he said.
“I’m a busy lady.”
“I know you are. You’re so busy, it makes you easy to find, and just as easy to toss in the hole every night for the next year.”
She watched him a moment with a put-on look of contempt. Then, she made a show of slowly elongating her mech-eye as she zoomed in to scrutinize him. “Mm-hm,” she said. “Nice and big in those mech-shoulders, and I do stress mech. I like. You don’t mind I snag an image for my ment-catalogue of top johns, do you?”
His words fell slowly, easily, emotionlessly. “I’m not your john. And snag an image, and I rip out that mech-eye right now. Maybe your real-eye, too.”
But Adrienne 69 had played verbal games like these plenty. She pressed on.
“What would you like, big man? You like it rough-rough? You like it weird? Did you want to degrade me? Lots of Core-studs need that. Would you like me to wield the whip? Or do you wanna see why they call me Adrienne 69? Huh? What’s your medicine, copper? You need to cure something or you wouldn’t have went looking for A-69 tonight.”
He watched her a moment through narrowed eyes, hoping she bought his act. He said, smiling thinly, “So you’re a good part-machine, eh?”
A theatrical expression of epiphany came over her remaining human features. She’d found his kink, or so he was leading her to believe. She laughed a coy laugh, uncrossing her legs and placing her feet wide apart on the concrete. Her skirt rode high up her thighs, offering ample view of her upper legs where pallid skin met with silver steel.
Seeing where his eyes went, she said, “That’s machine. All machine down there, sugar. I even got fitted last year with the latest teeth-gate—a girl can never be safe enough in this town. No worries, though, big honey—for you, my gate is open.”
She said it all like it wasn’t a grotesquery. Jesus Goddamn Christ. He felt the places where his own mech-arms fused with his muscles and bones and nerves, and was filled with the old self-loathing he’d never been able to shake. His mech-surgery had been forced on him after some pretty stiff sacrifices he’d made on the job, and so he could only marvel at people like Adrienne 69, who elected to do this to themselves, who chose to diminish their humanity. But Clark called on his experience of decades in situations dealing with all manner of perp, and played it like a pro, making it sound like everything the mech-woman was saying was just what he wanted to hear, hiding real good the fact that it would take a heavy-duty crane to get his prick upright then, especially with visions of the mech-woman’s steel-toothed vagina shredding flesh haunting him.
“Well, before we talk your brand of shop-talk, I need to talk my brand,” he said.
She cocked a steel eyebrow, slowly recrossing her legs. “Well, I am intrigued. Big copper making a lady wait while he talks at her—yeah, I can dig that level of romancing the mech-whore. You want to cuff me too? I promise I won’t fight…unless you need me to.” That practiced cruel smile again. Clark thought the word “romancing” could not possibly have sounded dirtier than it did falling from those moist, steel-webbed lips.
He was opening his mouth to continue the act, to coyly put the question to the mech-woman for which he’d sought her out when, suddenly, they were un-alone.
A small child—Clark couldn’t tell whether she was a street urchin— was squatting near to them on the sidewalk, scratching at the ground with a nub of pink chalk. Where she’d come from, he couldn’t say; it seemed as if she’d materialized from the sultry air. She was totally absorbed in the drawing of a series of cartoon stars and half-moons, and seemingly oblivious to the two of them watching her. Her arms were covered in purple and red splotches, skin flaking—physical evidence of mild Cloud fever, though she otherwise appeared in okay health, at least without any visible tumours and with a full head of blonde hair. Then, pocketing the chalk nub, she leaned forward, nose close to the concrete, absorbed with something on the sidewalk.
Clark caught the mech-woman’s eye, cocked his head away from the child. Adrienne 69 understood and, uncrossing her long legs, she stood from the couch, something in her fluidity of movement reminding Clark of a spider gracefully moving in its web. They began to walk down the sidewalk so that they could continue their conversation away from the girl’s ears.
“It’s okay,” called the girl, halting them, though she never once looked their way, remaining absorbed in her drawing. “I gotta go anyways. It’s late, and if my momma caught me outside, I’d be grounded until the Cloud goes away.” She fiddled a moment longer with something on the cement, then added, as if it just occurred to her, “I have to brush my teeth before bed.”
Just as suddenly as she’d appeared, she scampered off along the sidewalk, turning to dart up a narrow staircase leading into the tenement before which they stood. When she was gone, Clark thought it felt weirdly as though she may never have been there at all.
He turned back to Adrienne 69, found her staring fixedly at something in the street, around where the child had sat. He followed where she looked, saw: it was a child’s Band-Aid, bright white and decorated with tiny pastel pink and blue flowers, presumably placed there by the girl. It stood out starkly against the dirty concrete, among ancient tar-blotches and grime, one corner cutting along a faded line of tire treads. Clark noted also that it had been affixed directly across a sizeable crack that marred the street—something in the innocent and naïve gesture of healing the broken concrete he found depressing. He and Adrienne 69 stared at it a moment, unspeaking.
When Clark looked up, he saw a strange look in the mech-woman’s real-eye that he didn’t quite understand, not that he particularly cared. He suddenly wanted very much to be away from there, out of that tottering neighbourhood so rife with crime and back inside his apartment, listening to Bark murmur in her dreams while he popped his nightly anti-radiation meds and channel-surfed through the endless stream of infomercials and re-broadcasted sports news programs, the ritual achieving its usual effect of numbing his anxiety and making him blessedly sleepy.
“Better a john doing a machine than picking up some underager though, eh, big detective-man? It’s a playground out here for the sickos. Ciao-ciao, for now. Business booms after midnight, and I see there ain’t no interest in my line of work here, you tease, you.”
She sauntered west down the sidewalk, in the direction of the chemically-ruined river, razing a passing car with her practiced, tell-tale stare.
“Wait,” said Clark, holding up a hand. “I want to ask you a question.”
She smiled at him over a gleaming shoulder. “Sugar-cops, questions cost me money at this time of night. You catch me earlier tomorrow and maybe you’ll catch an answer to your question. Or maybe I’ll catch you. We’ll see-we’ll see.”
Clark frowned after her. He felt defeated, and too weary to try to more forcefully stop her. He also found himself absently flexing and unclenching his mech-fingers, and stopped abruptly. Irritated at himself for the habit, which he’d been guilty of doing much too frequently of late, he turned and went on his way; retracing his steps past the drug-dens and juice-pits and long-abandoned hovels falling prey to the elements, that housed the rotating population of squatters who lived out their hopeless lives in those dark, stinking rooms.
He was passing a narrow alley that opened between two brownstone buildings when his eye caught sight of a familiar figure coming toward him. The man happened to be examining something in his hands so Clark was certain he hadn’t been seen, and he instinctively hurried out of sight, and secreted himself in the deep alcove entryway of a long-closed restaurant. He waited, pretending to be busy examining the old receipt he’d pulled from among the paper detritus filling his coat pocket. A moment later, the faint sound of receding footsteps sounded on the sidewalk. Peering around the corner of the entryway he saw him, headed due west down the intersecting street with his familiar lithe walk, head down: the Lieutenant.
Acting on the inner alarm that had awoken, and detesting himself a little for his suspicion, Clark went in pursuit, hugging the row of buildings and ready to take cover within any doorway or alley that presented itself if he needed to. But he didn’t need to, as the Loot never once looked back, only kept up his brisk and determined pace, head low and face buried in his collar despite the humid night air.
Clark tailed the chief to a squat ugly house in the projects that grew like a cancer along the western edge of the Core. Partially concealing himself behind an ancient graffiti-tagged telephone pole in the alley running parallel to the house’s backyard, he watched as the Loot let himself through a gate set in the crooked chain link fence and crossed the small weed-devastated lawn to the door. The sound of his knuckles rapping softly, and a moment later, the door opened.
Adrienne 69 stood framed in the depressing sodium glow coming from within the house.
From where he stood, Clark could hear their voices perfectly.
“Right on time, Mel. You almost beat me home. I had to hurry back from an errand.”
“Hey, Adie 69.”
She reached out a hand and touched the Loot’s face. “You okay, Mel?”
“Yeah, as okay as can be. You gonna let me in?”
Adrienne 69 laughed softly. “You, anytime-anytime. Not just anyone, but you anytime. My man from the moon.” She stepped aside, the Loot entered, and the door whispered closed.
Clark stood rooted to his place, thoughts reeling. His initial suspicion that the Loot may have been involved in some illicit activity as Adrienne 69’s pimp had vanished the moment he’d heard their brief interaction. Friendly, familiar. Most shocking of all might have been Adrienne 69’s tone of voice, so different from her usual contrived manner, the tough and sassy trick-turning language of her trade. There had been something in her voice that it took him a moment to identify, and when he did it left him stunned: emotion; affection; humanity.
He suddenly found himself thinking of the two of them together, in bed, the Loot and the mech-hooker, and the thought filled him with revulsion; he was turning to be on his way when he realized he was doing it again: running the steel fingers of his right mech-hand across his left, which was clenched into a fist. He forced himself to stop, and hurried on down the alley.
He didn’t know what to do with the brew of emotions built up inside him, so he did what he always did when he felt this way, though it never did work to fix anything:
He delivered the hardest right hook he had—and he still had a pretty good one, even after all these years since he’d retired from the ring—and taught that boarded-up convenience store window he was passing a Goddamned lesson it would never forget. He left the window gaping with darkness, like a black eye sullying the dilapidated building a little more, and another bruise on the city that he loved and hated with all of his breaking heart.
One week later.
It was the furtiveness of the knocking on his door just after midnight that made Clark drop the TV remote and snatch his sear-gun from underneath the couch. He lifted himself quietly from the cushion and drifted silently to the door. He could see someone’s shadow beneath the doorjamb so whoever it was they weren’t trying to hide themselves to one side of the entrance. Cautiously, he put his mech-eye to the peep-hole. He stared a moment, shocked and horrified at what he saw framed in the cloudy glass.
He unlocked the half-dozen heavy duty locks and cracked the door enough so that she could see the gun in his fist; his other hand he kept pressed against the door in case this most unexpected of midnight calls proved to be some sort of duplicity and he needed to slam it closed in a hurry.
“How’s your night going, big fella?”
“How in the hell did you find me?”
Adrienne 69 smiled her cocky, steel-lipped smile. The form-fitting black sequinned dress she wore glittered in the dim hallway overheads, sending refractions everywhere, but Clark kept his eyes on her face. She didn’t change her tack. “A-69’s got her ways. Oh come on, copper. Why so angry all the time? How’s it shaking?” She went to run a finger along his hand where his fingers gripped the edge of the door but he shrugged her away.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Aren’t you going to invite a girl-girl in?”
Clark only stared at her in fury and revulsion. It did the trick. It was the first time he’d seen Adrienne 69’s face completely shed its mask of lurid bravado. The expression she wore now—shell-shocked with what he recognized to be naked fear, the kind he’d seen in many a guilty perp while he and Kessel met with them in the Talking-To Room—was much more unnerving than her usual posturing. Indeed, even as she began to confide to him her dark story, he was simultaneously unsettled by something else: he suddenly realized how rough she looked; gaunt-cheeked, her naturally pale complexion blanched to an unhealthy sallow colour, her right forearm emaciated where it fitted to her mech-framework, making the steel surrounding the flesh seem too-large and poorly-constructed to fit her, and giving her a strange bulbous-jointed appearance, like a giant socket-limbed children’s doll. The transformation, especially in the short time since he’d last seen her, was disturbing.
“I need your help.” Even her voice was different, and how she spoke. More human, shed of its showy trashy sass.
Clark wasn’t one to be baited by concern for the criminals of the world, even if they did fall on the less dangerous side of the spectrum. He barked a short laugh. “My help, eh? Well, ain’t you a comedian these days. I had no idea you switched professions at this stage in the game. Where’s the next stand-up gig? Maybe I’ll come on out and heckle.”
She ignored the dig. “I…I’m sick.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Seeing she’d snagged his attention, she said, “I’ve been double-teamed plenty of times in my line of work but never like this double-teaming: the big A and the big C, both. The two apocalypses that been bombing the streets for a long time. AIDS and her evil sister, Cancer. Those sisters are in here deep.” She tapped a pair of steel fingers against her chest.
So she wasn’t that close to being all-mech after all—the fact registered in his muddled thoughts, even as he surprised himself when he said, “I’m sorry.”
As if reading his thoughts, she said, “I’m almost there, copper. I’m well past halfway to being full-machine. But almost isn’t good enough when the bitch-sisters are launching all-out war-war inside here.”
“Yeah? And?”
It was her turn to raise an eyebrow, giving him a theatrical look, the old Adrienne 69. “A bit slow on the uptake tonight, aren’t we, big man?”
He stared at her until she said, “I want to live. And the only chance I got is to get in with the only ones who can help me survive this thing. I been hearing rumours of a fakeman cult for years now. The More-Than-Men. And I guess you had some dealings with them yourself, or you wouldn’t have been asking me about them a while back. And if that don’t prove that I don’t know squat about them and ain’t got no answers for you, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
He knew not to say it but the words came of their own:
“Why not ask your client, Mel.”
He was rewarded with a look of shock so strong that it instantly erased all of the mech-woman’s put-on crassness and attitude. And then he saw it again, but now even more pronounced: true, naked fear taking over her features.
Adrienne 69’s voice was quiet when she said, “Because I love him. And he can’t know what’s happened to me. It’s why I cut him off, a week ago. It’s –”
“Wait—are you saying he’s safe?”
She nodded.
“How do you know? How can you be sure?”
A flash of her old arrogance came into her eyes. “The mech-part of me, honey—and like I told you that’s almost all of me—picked up the disease the moment it came into me. Pardon the pun. That was the Big A. The C, I felt that bitch creeping into me a while back. But she’s a stealthy one, and got her nails hooked in deep before I knew how bad it was. Before I knew it, she couldn’t be cut out nice and clean. ‘One large tumour on the pancreas and a proliferation of smaller tumours on the surrounding organs’, the doc-doc said. Some of the stuff under this hood’s been mech a while now, but the few pieces that are the old me, they got hit hard. But that’s to be expected, isn’t it, considering where we live?”
Clark grimaced, disgusted at the description, though a great weight was lifted from him: the Loot would be okay. Despite his repugnant sexual preferences and illegal doings (pardon the pun, sugar-mech, he thought ruefully), the Loot was safe. He said, distractedly, “You have mech-lungs, right? If so, why didn’t they help fight—”
“Yeah, I got those,” she said, laughing a resigned laugh. “But here in Chem City, it’s super-Diseases we be fighting every day. And not every pair of mech-lungs can fight off a super-D when it won’t take no for an answer. And I got me some high-end lungs. Maybe higher-end than yours.”
It took a moment for it to register. “Wait,” he said, guardedly. “You’re saying you got a super-D in you?” His fingers involuntarily tightened where they gripped the wood of the door.
“Relax, big man,” she said, rolling her real-eye, fine steel lashes glimmering. “The S-D’s just baby-sized for now. They don’t grow as fast in a half-mech as in a full-meat, like you probably know. But I feel her in here, and I ain’t waiting for her to get toddler-sized and decide to find her way out through the meat-and-steel maze, if you catch my meaning. Or for her to…take me over, or whatever you call it when they operate you like they be using a joystick.”
Clark relaxed, albeit only a little. It made him frown. The pandemic of disease around the world, and within their Cloud-plagued city especially, had reached an all-time high this year. And the alarming rise in incidence of super-Diseases—he shuddered as he recalled the handful of horrific physical manifestations he’d witnessed himself—were a red-level indicator that something needed to be done, or else the doomsayers preaching their sermons of Armageddon on street corners all through the Core would be proven prophetic indeed, and pretty damn soon. The fact that in Adrienne 69’s case it was a super-D was clear, now that he thought about it: he’d only seen her a week before, and in that time, she’d lost an alarming amount of weight—S-Ds were known to work fast.
He watched Adrienne 69 standing awkwardly before his door, tried to decide what exactly he was feeling. Pity for her predicament? Loathing, at what she was? Anger, for her seeking him out and testing his compassion? Fear, at what the world was coming to? He realized it was all of these, in a grotesque brew that angered him to no end because why should he be feeling mixed up like this, all because of a mech-hooker?
Clark was nodding, his voice far-away. “This city’s being overrun by S-Ds.” And then he added, “It’s being overrun by all the bad stuff.”
Adrienne 69 said, “‘A nameless city in a distant sea, white as the changing walls of faerie.’”
“What’s this?”
“It’s from my old friend, Willie Morris. A poet from days of yore, yo. His words keep me warm on cold nights.” She laughed emotionlessly, waving her hand in the air as if banishing the nuisance of a fly, said, “You meats can try for your Paradise here in Cancer City. We mechs, we’ll build our Earthly Paradise after your nuclear dust settles, though it’s looking more and more like we might have to share the place with Dee-Dee, because like you say he’s coming on strong these days. But Disease can’t touch a full-mech, so no fear there. It’s really just a waiting game for the mechs. And in my case, well,” she looked down at the carpet, “my future depends on if a meat is going to extend a helping hand to this mostly-mech lady who’s just shy of being a full-mech eternal lifer.”
Clark watched the mech-woman a moment with brooding eyes.
“Stop calling me a meat, and I’ll stop calling you a mech.”
Adrienne 69 looked up, a glimmer in her eyes. “Is that a sign of progress between our species?”
He should have been running her in right now, he thought…and yet he’d known in his heart from the beginning of their conversation that he was going to help her. That much he understood as he said, “Take note of the Beware of Friend sign.” He tapped the plastic sign where it hung from a nail on the wall directly beside the door.
As if understanding her master—and she probably did, he thought—Bark appeared without a sound and sat beside him on her haunches. A low growl emanated from her, and her long steel teeth flashed in the dim hall light. “It’s okay, girl. Hush.” Clark patted the retired police dog’s massive head gently.
Adrienne 69 said, “Hello, beautiful. I love those gorgeous mech-eyes. And what a lovely smile you got.”
The Friend only watched her silently.
Clark stepped aside. “And take off the boots, you ain’t going to track dirt and whatever else in here.”
II: Families
This was the only way, Clark knew, still perturbed that he’d agreed to help her and even more aghast that he’d come up with the mad scheme in question.
Trapping a fakeman, aside from potentially being an impossible feat, was on his list of the more dangerous and idiotic things to try in a lifetime.
And yet here he was, bivouacked in the arms of a black oak shrouded in fog in the heart of the solitary county, peering through the tree’s camouflage of leaves trying to make out any hint of movement in the uncertain terrain below. Flying solo again, no less, because he couldn’t have explained it to Kessel if he’d tried, and he didn’t want to try. Well, he reasoned, the element of surprise will unfuckingdoubtedly be with me. If time hadn’t been of the essence, he might have been able to rig something easier in the city, but as it stood, they had zero leads on fakeman activity in the Core, all of which had vanished in the aftermath of the violence that happened at the university campus protests.
The county had been different, though certainly not easy—he’d spent a good two hours combing through the fields and woods outside the now deserted base of the More-Than-Men that he and Kessel had discovered almost a year before. Finding no signs of recent activity, he’d followed a hunch and drove thirty minutes further south, just past the outskirts of a tiny town called Emerest and into the rural township beyond. Parking his car along a narrow gravel farmer’s road in the shadow of some trees, he’d ventured on foot into the surrounding woods. Sure enough, by the narrow flash-beam of his mech-eye, he’d found the series of tracks in the soil, leading into and out of the woods. The enormous footprints that could belong to only older-model fakemen. Hoping he wouldn’t have to repeat the stakeout come the following night, he’d made his nest in a tree dead-centre in the woods. That had been over two hours before.
He stiffened in his roost: something moved in the shadows. A moment later, and he recognized the familiar shuffling gait of a fakeman, older model judging by its huge size and burly shape.
He’d taken the mech-damper drug as soon as he’d driven within a mile of the cult’s original site, and shot another syringe-full once he’d claimed his spot in the tree, so its properties had no doubt fully taken effect, inhibiting his electrical aura and the mechanical workings of his mech-lungs and -arms. The Science Division boys had cooked up MD in the early days of the Fakeman Revolt, but not soon enough to save the hundreds of Blues and military personnel that got taken out by the dummies. It had been a confused time, of learning exactly what fakemen were capable of, and exactly what it was that the scientists had created.
Now, waiting in the tree, he was grateful for every science-based aid he had at his disposal, though his nerves were buzzing. He remained as motionless as he could, breath pent-up as the figure loomed from the darkness below, the sound of its heavy metal steps a deep thudding he felt shuddering the branches around him.
Waiting until the massive mech was directly beneath his secret aerie—and knowing that his timing was critical for success, and that his life depended on it—he let go the small round silver Sleeper in his hand.
Luck was with him, but just barely—even that most minute movement was detected by the fakeman, which halted in its steps and swung one of its hands upward to cover him in the sights of its arm-gun—but by then, the tiny Sleeper had struck it on its shoulder and sent its instantaneous electrical impulse and message throughout its body.
The fakeman froze in its rigid gun-wielding pose, and then languidly collapsed into a stooped, relaxed posture where it stood, the blue of its eyes dimming, dimming, and then fading altogether. It slept.
Clark, you are a bat-shit crazy moron, he thought.
Quietly, working out the kinks in his neck from his long and tense vigil in the tree, he dropped soundlessly to the grass below, where he crouched a moment with sear-gun drawn, staring into the mist. Sensing no danger, he holstered his weapon and began unspooling the long loop of thick silver cord he’d had wrapped around his shoulder.
Even with the fakeman cocooned like a moth, Clark didn’t trust the resiliency of the mech-steel cord against the full strength of those mech-arms, half as wide around as the black oak from which he’d laid his ambush; which is why he made sure that as the tell-tale electric-blue glow returned into its darkened eyes the first thing the mech saw was the mouth of his sear-gun (and even so, he made sure to be standing out of arm’s reach of the thing).
He waited, allowing the fakeman’s awakened brain to process its predicament.
A second later, its cold mechanical voice declared, “This scenario does not compute. None like it has ever transpired before.”
Clark was taken aback at its archaic speech. “Jesus, you’re an older model than I realized. You sound like a robot in an old B-movie.”
Despite their exchange, he was very aware of the fakeman straining at its bonds, the high-pitched squeal of the resilient mech-cord being pushed to its limits of endurance. Before he could tell it to cease its efforts, the thing spoke again.
“I am much more sophisticated in all respects than standard depictions of mechanized and/or robotic life-forms from human film and television throughout history, particularly those of the so-called B-grade films. Example: I sense the device you have used to incapacitate my operating systems. I sensed it even as you proceeded in your ambush, though my instinctive defense-and-attack mode was halted by said device within 0.1 second of its initiation.”
Cutting it close indeed, Clark marvelled. If he wasn’t so tense, he might have chuckled. “How very literal and precise of you, Mr. Fakeman. But let’s talk movies and such next time—right now, we got some other business to discuss. And you best stop pushing at that steel cord or my sear-gun will have lots to say about it.”
The fakeman assimilated this and said, “Of course, I presumed you have some motivation in entrapping me, and in suppressing my intra-communication voice. I will cease working to break my bonds.”
Ah, so you’ve tried to call your cult-family of fellow lunatic fakemen. He breathed another mental sigh of relief, banking on the thing telling the truth, pleased that the Sleeper had knocked out its com-capabilities.
Clark, never one to mince words, laid it out as straightforwardly as he could (and speaking quietly, because he was well aware that they were deep in rural nowhere, and where one fakeman was there would certainly be many more around—hell, he could be surrounded by the dummies and not know it until it was far too late).
“Someone I know needs your help. She’s what some refer to as a mech-prostitute. A human female that has become mechanized, initially as an enhancement for the sexual trade in which she works. Over the years—and there have been plenty, she’s a very old woman—she’s become more and more mech. She’s at the point where she’s almost all-mech, with a human brain and assorted other internal and external parts. She recently confided in me that she—was that squealing coming from the steel cord you’re still trying to break? If so, stop that nonsense, or I’ll have to shoot you. This is a sear-gun, and I know you’re well aware of what it would do to you. Thanks in advance for complying, dummy—as I was saying, the mech-whore acquaintance in question recently confided in me that she’s contracted a sexually transmitted disease— AIDS. The big one. The disease will naturally kill the human part of her body. Unlucky gal that she is, she also got diagnosed with the big C: cancer. A super-Cancer, in point of fact. She wants to save her life by going full-mech, a thing that’s become urban legend and talked about as some sort of experimental possibility for a human, though naturally tech like that is beyond the means of the illegal mech-upgraders she frequents, if it even exists. I have my doubts, but she believes in it. Knowing my line of work, and my past dealings with your cult of fakemen, she asked me to inquire for your help on her behalf. I’m inquiring. I had to do it this way, of course, because any other way you wouldn’t listen, and I’d probably be dead right now.”
The fakeman said, “You are correct in this last supposition.” Then, “What is the name of the human?”
“She’s a half-mech half-huma–”
“She is human until all humanity has been wiped from her genetic memory.”
If he thought it possible, he would have sworn there was derision in the fakeman’s voice. He said, “Hey partner, don’t kill the messenger. I’m passing along what the mech-woman told me.”
“Her name.”
“Is Adrienne 69.”
“Interesting. A human name coupled with a numerical designation, though in this case no doubt a vulgar vernacular referencing a human form of sexual coupling, and an ironic commentary on the profession of the human in question.”
Clark, surprised, said, “I’m impressed, Sherlock.”
“Perhaps you would be more akin to such a title, detective Clark.”
Hearing his name come from the steel monster sent a chill jolting through him. He instinctually raised the sear-gun. “Impressive indeed, you tin can creep. Jesus fucking Christ, I guess my past dealings with your group gave me a permanent record, eh?”
“What you say adequately sums up my knowledge of you. You will no doubt recall that you and your partner, detective Kessel, have been warned to cease your efforts of seeking out and contacting the More-Than-Men.”
Clark eyed the shadows of the surrounding trees and bushes, his unease mounting, annoyed at the meandering turns of a conversation he needed to make as quick and effective as his best interrogation work in the Talking-To Room. “Let’s get back on track, fake–”
“I will do what I am able to help the human.”
Clark gaped at the fakeman. Before he could muster something, it spoke again.
“Why do you wish us to help this human make its final transformation to an, as you say, “all-mech” form? Do you not, as a species, loathe us fakemen? Have you yourself not, throughout this interview, addressed me continually in a demeaning and racist—a speciesist—manner, though our only crime seems to be our existence itself, a thing for which we cannot be rightfully blamed, as we were created by your species, and became sentient through some means or process we have yet to discover?”
Clark watched the fakeman evenly. He could make no excuses for what he’d said, let alone for what other people were responsible for; and certainly not for what the thing before him referred to as its “sentience”, a claim that Clark still had serious doubts about.
But he only said, “Maybe not all humans are what you think we are.”
The fakeman watched him silently a moment. The inherently accusatory flavour of its next words startled him. “The human is a flawed animal.”
“It’s a Goddamn flawed world.” Matching the fakeman’s condemning tone.
The fakeman thought about this. Then, “You are correct in this statement.”
Clark said, “I’m glad we see eye to eye in some things. And anyways, you’re guilty of plenty of crimes: large-scale theft of millions of dollars in shuttle parts ring any bells in that computer brain? And how about the assorted murders of Blues at these various heist operations?”
“Our situation is a desperate one. We must acquire the tools we need through any means at our disposal. Any violence associated with said acts is not of our choosing, but from necessity in achieving those goals.”
Clark gritted his teeth, knowing the futility of trying to learn what those goals were from the fakeman. If the situation wasn’t what it was, he might have given it the old college try anyways. He said, “I don’t have time for philosophical debates. Back to business: will you really help her?”
Again, the fakeman considered the question a moment before replying. “As I’ve said, I will do what is within my means to help the human. Which is to say that I will return to my commune leader and bring what you ask before him.”
“And what if I don’t believe that you’ll do that for a human Blue, and for a mech-human hooker?”
“I am incapable of lying.”
“Are you incapable of following a pre-programmed protocol that explicitly orders you to deceive a bat-shit human cop in way over his head? And, given your supposed sentience, why the hell would you not be able to tell a lie or two to a meat who’s got you tied up with a gun to your tin can head?”
The fakeman said, “My promise to you regarding the human seeking transformation is genuine and without deceit.”
Okay then, thought Clark, understanding he’d reached the end of his negotiating options. “Okay then. What now?”
They worked out the details between them. It all seemed as sketchy and uncertain and dangerous as the rest of the situation, but then of course, it had to be, given the nature of the deal and the players.
Clark un-trapped the fakeman, popping the Sleeper from where it clung magnetized to its steel shoulder; in the same motion, though the mech could easily have done it itself, Clark wrenched loose the steel cord wound about its torso.
He watched the mech shake itself free of its bonds, and then cock its head and scrutinize him. “Your arms are each different models, both older but both highly regarded. Utilitarian, and reliably constructed to function for an extended period. In all likelihood, they will remain semi-functional even after you have expired and the complex synaptic connections between mech and meat are severed.”
“They’re okay.”
The fakeman turned in the direction from which it had come, though Clark remained ready for deception, his sear-gun raised. But it only lumbered off without further word, its metallic steps loud on the gravel.
He called after it, “Hey.”
The fakeman stopped, swung around to face him.
“Thanks.”
The fakeman watched him a moment. Then, “It is a step forward for your species, that you seek to help this hybrid creature.” Then it turned, and crunched on its way down the narrow path, disappearing a moment later among the willow trees.
Clark watched after it briefly. He wondered whether he’d missed an opportunity not inquiring about Auston Davies, dummy advocate extraordinaire and public menace besides, then dismissed the thought—he’d been pushing things as it was, alone out in the fakeman-plagued boonies. He quickly re-spooled the binding mech-cord, popped the loop inside his bag along with the Sleeper, and slipped off in the opposite direction toward his car waiting among the trees.
He eased the car along the curb of the ghetto-Core street, killed the engine. He got out and drifted down the adjacent alley, silently cursing her for not giving him a number to call. Paying late-night calls at mech-houses wasn’t a duty a Houseman needed to risk doing. And yet, here he was, acting on some idiotic moral sense of duty to stick to a carelessly made promise.
He’d be quick about it, though, he reasoned, as he came up to the back door of the decrepit house. He rapped a quick, quiet one-two-three on the old wood door. A moment later, she appeared, her real-eye eager.
“It’s on.”
He looked around, over his shoulder: the backyard was empty, and the alley beyond the tottering chain-link fence likewise. He turned back to her, thinking how odd it was that she hadn’t spoken a word yet, considering the news he’d delivered.
He stopped short at the sight:
Adrienne 69, unable to speak, haloed in the soft orange light from within the house, with tears flashing like jewels in her eyes, and all down her cheeks. Her mech-eye, even, was beading tears around her steel lid.
He was about to turn away, feeling awkward and confused, when his eye caught a flash of movement within the house. Peering over Adrienne 69’s shoulder, he saw a child peeking out at him from around the corner of an interior room’s wall which led into the foyer. He stared at this girl, about to comment, when a second child’s head appeared behind the first—a boy, of roughly the same age, his dark skin mottled with red lesions, his curly hair thinning; telltale symptoms of Cloud fever. And slowly, one by one, other children peered out at him as well, until a group of about a dozen milled quietly in the hall behind her, watching him with guarded but unwavering stares, as if protective of the woman in the doorway, and looking like some lost child’s tribe of the post-apocalypse.
Adrienne 69, hearing movement behind her and seeing where Clark looked, wiped at her eyes and turned to look.
“Oh, so they creep out to investigate the investigator, eh?” She turned back to Clark. “They’re shy-shy around new people.”
Clark could only stare at the incongruous sight, to which Adrienne 69 offered explanation. “Street kids. I only got room in this flea motel for these, but there’s so much more out there. I see them all the time. You probably do, too.”
Understanding came to him, and a respect for the mech-woman that he hadn’t expected to ever feel. “Yeah. I see them, too.” He’d been one of them, long, long ago.
Adrienne 69 said, “That was the only tough part, you know, with getting sick and then thinking of getting in with the mechs—saying goodbye.” She looked over her shoulder at the children—they were now whispering among one another, and a subdued giggle came to Clark’s ears—and then turned back to the detective. “But I made arrangements. My sister—my street-sister, I ain’t got a blood-sister— she swore she’d take care of them when I had to go away.”
Clark nodded. “Do I know her?”
Adrienne 69 said, “Mary-Anne MacTavish. She owns the corner of Riverside and Dalair.”
He did know her. Riverside Mac. He’d seen her brought in a few times at the House, though he’d never had need to question her himself. She was half-mech, too, as far as he knew. Maybe more mech than human. And for the first time ever, he found himself wondering what the distinction meant.
Adrienne 69, seeing that he recognized the name, was quick to add, “She’s got a good heart, Mary-Anne. A real good heart. These little babies are in good hands.” She gestured to the flock of children behind her in the hallway.
Clark was about to say something—maybe express that it sounded like they were indeed in good hands with Riverside Mac, or to condemn the type of system and city that would allow children to be dumped into its streets of squalor and meanness to begin with, like he’d been dumped himself as a scared orphaned kid—but he wasn’t able. He found himself managing only, “Tomorrow, eleven P.M., Core’s west garage, roof,” before needing to quickly turn away, hiding the naked fury in his eyes, and plunging into the night’s darkness.
*
He’d been careful to not be followed, and in being careful found that he’d had a tagger: Kessel.
He frowned, a little upset at first, but then he chuckled. She meant well, no doubt. Of course she did—she was Kessel. He couldn’t ask for a better partner. She looked out for him like he did for her. It was all really swell of her, to have picked up on his distant behaviour at work and felt the need to scope his apartment and…watch him? See what he was up to? Make sure no one had it in for him when he, for whatever reason, hadn’t wanted to trouble her about it?
Whatever her intentions might have been, he trusted they were good ones. He lost her easier than she would ever have liked to admit, in the maze of the ghetto neighbourhood’s streets and alleys, double- and triple-backing and looping back to the vicinity of the House, and then back out into the fringe Core-streets for good measure. Then he really duped her, and bee-lined it to a small shuttle rental place on the far east side, where he left his car in their garage and, most un-Clarkian move of all—and a master-evasion technique if he’d ever made one—took out a small two-seater shuttle. It was essentially a sky-taxi, but large enough that it looked like a delivery shuttle for some small business, and therefore even more non-descript for his purposes. At any rate, it got up to decent speed once in an airway, and within twenty minutes, he was back in the Core, and settling the vehicle down on the roof-pad of one of the smaller garages off the main drag.
He checked his ment-clock, saw that he was five minutes early. He waited, pleased at his covert plan going off without a hitch, but filled with anxiety at the whole Goddamn situation.
Then, he spotted her: exiting the stairwell and sauntering onto the roof, her steel reflecting the morose sodium light of the roof’s lights with a dull glinting. She kept up the precautionary sashay, playing her part perfectly—the old A-69, up to her usual turning of tricks with the latest john, just some stud with his own shuttle waiting for her on a roof garage, same-old same-old in the Core at night.
She arrived at the shuttle, he eased the door open, and she slipped inside smoothly as a snake.
He lifted the machine from the roof, and they rose onto the smog-filled air on a small cushion of flame. Orienting the craft due south, he fired its engines and they were off to see whether the fakeman had believed the word of a lower life-form.
He’d run a scan before descending and detected no one in their vicinity, no vehicle or roving city-eye or pedestrian. Satisfied that they were unobserved, he’d glided down to the coordinates that had been transmitted him only an hour before, landing the craft in a glade located in the middle of an expansive bush that bordered several lonely miles of farmland not far from where he’d trapped the fakeman only a little over twenty-four hours earlier. It was a foggy night, and the sky was misting, the shuttle’s lights casting an amorphous glow all around them as they lowered onto the sward.
He cut the engine. They sat in the silence and darkness of the cabin, watching the clock in the dash. They looked up at a movement in the darkness, but it was only a skukk shambling through the wild grass. Clark grimaced, felt his stomach turning at the sight of the grotesque thing, disheartened that one should be this far from the Core where it was assumed the species had originated in the aftermath of the Cloud. How long before the Super-Ds migrated this far, he wondered. Maybe they already had? There was no way to conceivably contain them, after all. The most frightening aspect of the scenario came home to him, as it did whenever he ventured into the county: that eventually, the tentative haven of these rural parts would inevitably become just as tainted as the city itself. He thought of the farms in the area, some modern computer-ops, but just as many Old World farmhouses with giant wooden barns that looked simultaneously tatty but dignified. The effects of the Cloud had of course reached the county, infecting many of the crops, in the first few years especially, but despite this fact, the region still held the evidence of people striving to move forward in the wake of the calamity, to reclaim what had once been. In the same way, the scattered wooded lots and deeper forests that fringed the highways and separated the farms were struggling back toward their former natural glory; though the numbers of dead trees, their leafless white husks like bones rising from the greenery, were everywhere.
They were close to the new border even now, and the protective wall erected in the years since the atomic plant disaster had unleashed its experimental energies to form the Cloud that hung perpetually over the city and their American neighbour across the Detroit River; the fifty-foot-tall barrier that ostensibly existed to contain the spread of the S-Ds and related new-fauna, though it was becoming increasingly difficult for citizens to cross over. Everyone and everything posed a potential contamination hazard, was the scientific thinking, and since science was still largely in the dark when it came to understanding the nature of the Cloud and its ramifications, well, any risk was considered too great. The city was its own world now, and Clark found himself liking the world less all the time.
They watched the skukk go without saying a word. A few minutes later their designated rendezvous time had arrived.
She said, “It’s time.”
“Good luck, Adrienne.”
“69.”
He frowned. “Huh?”
“The girl who used to be Adrienne, sugar-cops—she went away a long time ago. She died a death I don’t like to think about. I’m mostly machine now, and I’m going to be all-machine soon. My name’s just 69 now.”
Seeing his hard expression mingle with a touch of horror, she winked at him and said, “Keep doing what you do, detective Clark.”
“I will, 69,” he said.
“And also,” she said, looking into his face. “I’d appreciate it if you could mention to Mel, in passing, that you heard about me, that… that I got out of the Core, decided to move away to the county, and do something better. Something like that. A vague-vague story.”
A story with some hope, he thought, even if weighed down to hell with the ugly truth of the life she’d escaped from.
“I’ll do that, too,” he said.
He watched her open her passenger-side door and slip out of the shuttle and into the misting night. The last he saw of her, she was hobbling in the grass in her bare steel feet, heeled shoes swinging in one hand, toward the uncertain curtain of willow trees fringing the glade, where pieces of the gauze-like fog that hung everywhere moved, lumbered toward her, pairs of eyes pulsing electric blue in the swirling grey.
She became swallowed among them and then she was gone.
Clark, watching the darkness, felt it: something that had been inside him was gone now, too.
END
Read by: David Rix
