9 – Recruiting

Addie’s sack of food from Manuel’s swung in her grip as she hurried through the district, aiming for Aurora Park where she’d asked Beef to meet her. It was just past midday, and the traffic on the sidewalks and in the streets was heavy, but she preferred that—it meant bangers and other trouble makers wouldn’t be as likely to bother her as she passed through neighborhoods less familiar to her.

She wanted to think about Tony. She wanted to sit down and really evaluate her feelings about him and why, exactly, she’d felt like her heart would burst when he’d begun to open up a little about his past. She’d already come to the conclusion that he liked her—a lot—but something was holding him back, and it wasn’t anything she could force out of him. Something told her she had to be patient or she’d lose him. She had to let him figure out that keeping her at arm’s length wouldn’t make anyone’s life better.

She touched her chest where her new reactor sat. It was sore, but not terribly so; Doc Peters had given her an antiseptic cream that numbed the inflamed tissue around the device. “JJ, Dust status?” A window appeared, and Addie smiled at the numbers, still struggling to believe how much of an upgrade she’d gotten:

Dust Purity: Impure -

Dust Capacity: 73/200

Before she could think any more about Tony or her new reactor and what she’d do now that she had so much more Dust available to her, she saw the park and turned her thoughts back to the matter at hand: recruiting Beef.

She’d chosen the park to meet for a couple of reasons. She wanted to get Beef out of the neighborhood, and she was curious to see the new construction going up on the south side—a corporate office for Echelon Labs, one of the megacorps in the final bidding phase for the Royal Breeze property. She supposed someone in their central office thought they would win, or at least come away with enough property nearby to capitalize on the strangely uncontaminated Dust.

Getting Beef out of his neighborhood was essential. The banger enforcer was a different guy when he didn’t think his lackeys were hanging around—when he wasn’t in his element, forced to wear the demeanor that had made him successful and, to a degree, safe for the last ten years. He’d argued a little when she’d messaged him the location, but Addie knew he’d give in; he’d do just about anything for her. Hadn’t he proven that?

She felt a little guilty using his feelings for her like that, but she wasn’t doing it to be cruel. She wanted to stay friends with him, and, more than that, she wanted to help him get out of the banger life.

When she reached the park—four city blocks of hyper-genned trees, grass, and a few smart jungle gyms—she walked toward the memorial for the Blast, or, more specifically, the tens of thousands who’d died when Aurora Gate fell out of the sky and sheared the NGT building in half.

Boxer maintained order in the park; their corpo-sec officers could be seen in every direction, and their drones hummed high overhead. That was another reason Addie had chosen to meet at the park. Beef could come out of his element without fear of other bangers seeing him and starting trouble. Nobody caused trouble in Aurora Park, not unless they wanted a quick flight to a Boxer holding cell where odds were good you’d never emerge.

The memorial was a plasteel model of the NGT tower, though the sides were coated in engineered black marble and engraved with so many names it would take days for someone to stand there and read them all. She saw Beef right away, his enormous figure hunched over as he sat on one of the concrete benches, chin in his fist, staring into the high boughs of the nearby trees, green and leafy year-round. Addie wondered what he was thinking about. Had he been to the park since their field trip at Boxer Secondary?

“Hey,” she called as soon as she was close enough to be heard. He looked up, and she hoisted the heavy plastic bag. “Let’s sit at a table!” She waved her other hand, pointing to one of the picnic tables under the trees.

Beef got up and walked toward her, limping noticeably on his right leg. While he approached, Addie unpacked their lunch. A half-liter-sized pouch of cola for them each, two of Manuel’s famous “everything” burritos for Beef, and an order of street-style tacos for her. As she twisted the knob on her soda pouch and waited for it to stop hissing, Beef arrived and sat with a grunt on the bench across from her.

He leaned close to one of the paper-wrapped burritos. “Smells good, at least.”

Addie snorted. “That’s how you say hello?”

“What? I’m sweaty and my damn leg’s throbbing. Still trying to figure out why you dragged me all the way out here.”

Addie frowned. She hadn’t considered that he’d probably walk, which meant limping for nearly twenty city blocks. “Oof, I’m sorry, Beef! I’m so dumb! I didn’t think about your leg. Tell you what, I’ll spring for a cab to get us back to the neighborhood.”

Beef waved a hand, dismissing her concern. “What, are you rich now?”

Addie pushed the burritos and his drink closer, ignoring the question. “Dig in! You want hot sauce?” She shook the sack with all the little salsa containers and extra napkins.

He nodded. “Yeah, ’course.” He unwrapped one of the burritos and then offered an almost sheepish, “Thanks, Addie.”

“I owe you a lot more than a lunch now and then, don’t I?” She opened the styrofoam container, revealing her street tacos. They smelled amazing—spices, onion, cilantro. She took a wedge of lime from the sack and squeezed it over the top of one, then she dug out a packet of red salsa, drizzling it into the soft, corn tortilla. Beef was busily chewing a massive bite, so she gave him something more to think about while his mouth was full. “I really hate that you’re a Helldog, you know?”

Beef’s eyes narrowed to a scowl, his heavy brows squeezing them down to pinpoints as he chewed. Addie smiled and took a bite of her taco, enjoying the heat of the salsa and the tang of the lime combined with the savory filling. After a few seconds, Beef swallowed, sipped his cola, then asked, “You bring me out here for some kind of intervention?”

Addie cocked her head to the side and shrugged. “Kind of.”

Beef sucked his teeth, shaking his head. “Unless you got a ticket out of the Blast and a million bits sitting in a vault somewhere, don’t waste my time.”

Addie took another bite, smiling as she chewed, watching his face. When he finally stopped glaring and tore off another considerable chunk of his burrito, she said, “Is that all it would take? A ticket out of here? Some bits to say you ‘made it?’ Because, if so, then I think you might want to hear me out.”

Beef washed his bite down with a gulp of cola and stared at her, this time with only one narrowed eye. “What’s going on with you, Ads? You gonna, like, propose to me or something? ’Cause I gotta warn you, I’ve got a couple of side—”

“Oh, hush!” Addie laughed. “I’m talking about working with me and Tony. I’m talking about working your way out of the Helldogs and making some decent money, building some rep as a legit operator.”

Beef blew out his breath in a “pfft,” trailing it off slowly like a leaky tire as he unwrapped his burrito to add another pack of hot sauce to the inside. “I should be giving you an intervention. Did that corpo reject get you hooked on yellows?”

Addie sighed. “Yellows” were a type of chem-stick known to alter a person’s personality through profound hallucinations. “No, Beef—Randal—I just want you to have a chance to be something greater than a gang enforcer with a short life. You’re a smart guy and you’ve got a good heart. You deserve to be something—”

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Beef violently shoved his burrito away from him, toward the middle of the table, then pushed himself to his feet with a grunt of obvious pain. “Thanks for the thought, doll, but I am what I am, and this ain’t doing either of us any good.” With that, he turned and started limping toward the street. Not so easily deterred, Addie jumped up and ran to him, grabbing his arm. He jerked it, but not hard—he’d never hurt her—and Addie maintained her grip.

“Stop it, Beef! Just hear me out and enjoy the food. It’s not like I can force you to do anything. I’m sorry if my words hurt, but—”

“Hurt? Words? C’mon. You’ve known me since I was nine. You ever seen me get hurt by words?” He stopped pulling his arm, and Addie tightened her grip around his wrist.

“Yes, you great big dummy! I saw you get hurt a hundred times, though you put on a brave face and never showed it. I know what you were feeling, though. I know you have a heart in there. Why else would you stand up for me? Why else would everyone in our neighborhood like the big, mean enforcer for the Helldogs? Because you try

! You try to be kind, even though you put on a tough act. Come on—” She tugged his wrist, and he gave in, following her toward the table. “—just sit down for a while.”

Beef sat and Addie pushed his food back toward him, then she started talking, trusting him to listen while he ate. “I think you’ve accepted your lot in life because when we grew up, you didn’t have any kind of role model, and the Helldogs filled that void. You feel like you owe them something, and maybe you did, but you’ve paid it back, Beef. You’ve earned the right to do what you want with your life.”

“Addie, I’m not an operator. I’m a big fucking thug. I—”

“That’s a bunch of baloney! You’re smart! You know how to read a room like nobody else. Remember when you took me to lunch and you had to meet with that guy? Remember how you knew it was a bad idea to let him see me because he’d think of me as a way to get to you? You have good instincts. You’ve helped Tony and me twice now, and both times, you pulled off solid operations with almost no planning. You were the one who made them happen. I would have been in trouble if I tried to help Tony without you, and how well do you think things would have gone if Tony came after me alone?”

Beef snorted, willing to smile at Tony’s expense. “He would’ve been kissing concrete.”

“Exactly!” Addie smiled, watching him get back to eating. “The point I’m making is you’re already doing what an operator does, but you’re working for a criminal organization and you’re forced to rely on people like Reject and Runt to pull off jobs that—”

Beef interrupted, speaking around a mouthful of food. “Hey, don’t knock those guys. They’d eat lead for me.”

“Yeah, but that’s because of who you are, not who they are. Don’t you see that? Come on, Beef! We have a job coming up. You can work freelance—no operator license or anything—and see how it goes. I think you’ll like it, and if you don’t, you can go back to your normal day job. Heck, you could take it real slow, moonlighting with us and maintaining your Helldog rep until you’ve saved up some bits and you’re more sure about things.”

Addie hadn’t meant to get to her pitch so fast, but it just came out, and now she was forced to watch Beef think things over as he ate. She supposed it was a good sign that he was still at the table—still eating. She ate another taco while he continued to chew, breathing heavily through his nose. After a couple of minutes, he asked, “What’s the pay?”

Addie smiled. She wasn’t sure what possessed her, but she leaned forward and whispered, “Five thousand. Tony said to offer you thirty-five hundred, but I’m sure I can talk him into five. He likes you, even though he acts like he doesn’t.”

“Five K, huh? For how much work?”

“Shouldn’t take more than a day for the actual job, though we’ll need to meet a few times for the planning. Tony says there will probably be some, um, loot to split, too.”

Beef’s eyebrows shot up. “Loot, huh? We gonna ice somebody?”

Addie shook her head, smiling ruefully. “Not if we do things right, but we might have to incapacitate some corpo-sec. Tony says it would be irresponsible to leave their guns behind.”

“You know, for an ex-corpse goon, he’s kind of an all right guy.” Beef leaned over the table, reminding Addie just how large he was. “Don’t you dare tell him I said that.”

Addie’s eyes squinted with amusement. “Only if you promise not to tell him I said he liked you.”

###

Tony looked at the building, frowning. “You’re sure this is it, Nora?”

“I’m certain. According to the city registry, apartment 3C is on the basement level. You can reach it via the steps to the left of the stoop, there.” She highlighted the opening in the sidewalk with bright yellow lines. The reason Tony had asked was that the building looked abandoned. The windows were broken or missing from the third floor up, many boarded over, and a few covered with black plastic.

He continued down the sidewalk and peered over the metal railing into the stairwell. Nothing but trash lurked in the shadows, so he quickly descended. When he stood before the black-painted metal door, he pressed his thumb to the call button on the security panel. He couldn’t hear a buzzer or anything and began to wonder if the button worked, but then a low, feminine voice crackled through the speaker. “Shepherd?”

“Yeah, uh, Glitchwitch?”

The door clicked, and he heard a couple of bolts slide open. “Come in.” Tony pulled the door open and stepped into a dimly lit, single-room basement apartment. It was crowded with tables and shelves that were, in turn, crammed with all sorts of stuff that looked like mostly junk, with a few expensive pieces of tech intermixed—coils of wiring, deck components, things that looked like CB radios with old-school antennas, and lots and lots of display panels, some working and some clearly defunct. “Over here!”

Tony looked past the tables near the door to see a small woman with a wavy white mohawk sitting in a recliner, her feet up, and her eyes obscured by a pair of immersion goggles. She was wearing a netjacker suit—that or she was getting ready to go scuba diving. He’d seen similar getups but didn’t know enough about them to discern whether it was a “good” one. He moved through the maze of shelves and tables until he stood before her.

The woman—Glitchwitch, he supposed—pursed her bright red lips, wrinkling her upturned nose, clearly concentrating on something. Her hands flexed and her fingers twitched, and Tony waited, not wanting to get off on the wrong foot by interrupting something that might be important.

Unlike most netjackers he’d met, her skin wasn’t deathly pale. She looked like she actually saw the sun rather frequently. Her cheeks were dotted with freckles, and Tony could just see the tail end of some kind of tattoo, which was mostly covered by her goggles. “Don’t stand there staring at me, creeper. There’s a chair behind you.”

Tony clicked his tongue, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and flopped down in an old, well-used recliner. The cushion absorbed him comfortably, but he didn’t lie back. He could see every corner of the room, so he wasn’t afraid of an ambush, but he also didn’t want to come off as an idiot.

Glitchwitch didn’t keep him waiting long. After another minute or so, she groaned and pulled her visor off, revealing bright, baby-blue irises that stood out like headlights against her tan skin, especially on the right side, where a black dragon tattoo coiled around her orbital bone, framing her eye as it glared out over her eyebrow. “Thanks for waiting. Failed, but it wasn’t your fault.”

“Failed?”

“Was trying to crack something. Forget it.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “So, you got a job for me?”

Tony shrugged. He kind of liked her blunt disposition, but he wasn’t going to be steamrolled. “Peters tell you that?”

“Well, yeah. Why else did you think I let you in here?” She reached up to run her palm over her mohawk, confirming Tony’s impression that it was soft. It flopped back as she rubbed it, but when she put her hand down, it slowly stood back up—synthetic hair and not the cheap, plastic-looking stuff, either.

“Well, yeah,” he replied, mimicking her language, “I might have work for you. Probably ought to know what you can do first, don’t you think?”

“Sure. I did a little digging on you, Shepherd. Showed up in the Blast a couple of months back, and you’ve been making a bit of a splash. Don’t have much of an SOA rep, though. Don’t have much of a history prior. What’s the story? Corpo-muscle that got sick of the suits calling the shots? Kind of a weird shithole to pick for a fresh start, don’t you think?”

Tony chuckled, his lips curling into a half smile. “I thought I was doing the interviewing.”

“Okay, you want my resume? I’ve got daemons that can handle some of the best ICE. I’ve got jammers and I’ve got a custom neuro-link that lets me jack in three times faster than off-the-shelf chrome. Means I don’t sit there drooling while you need me to move. I can spoof cameras, rewrite creds, and crash drones mid-flight. Need me to hack a corpo’s wetware? I can make it happen. I ain’t got an immersion rig, but in the Blast, I’m probably the best someone like you is gonna find.”

As she finished her little spiel, she arched a white eyebrow, and Tony nodded. “Sounds good. ’Course proof is in the pudding as they say—”

“Who says that? Pudding? The hell are you on about?” She grinned and winked one of her pale blue eyes, and Tony realized she was messing with him. “Anyway, it’s my turn. Why the hell would I want to work with a scrub like you, Shepherd?”

Tony decided this woman wasn’t someone he should try to be coy with. “You ever met someone my age who only existed for a couple of months?”

“Now we’re talking. Spill, Mister Shepherd. Who are you?”

He leaned forward, flashing a bright, white-toothed smile. His high-end, silvery iris glimmered in the dim light as he said, “I’m someone you want to get to know, Glitchwitch. I might be unranked on this SOA ID, but I climbed pretty damn near the top before I fell down here, and I mean to climb up again. You wanna come along for some of the ride, or not?”