Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

blood. Danae had hundreds of names buried underneath that simple alias, but there was none that she could call herself anymore.

While the train hummed onward into the scorched lands once called California, another nameless person sat cross-legged on a softly rocking corrugated steel floor somewhere on the ocean, enclosed in her nest of colored wire and glowing holographic panes. She’d learned the value of anonymity the hard way once. Since then, it had been her policy to use a different pseudonym for every transaction, with only enough of a common thread between names that she could still build a reputation. To one of her clients she was Vera Cruz, to another Jo Burg; to the only living person who had ever really known her, she was Kat Mandu.

Barely diverting her attention from the half-dozen other streams of data flowing liquidly across her vision, she called him again.

“Are you with me,” Alexei answered. She could hear the rasp of pain in his voice.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“The plates caught it.”

Her cringe was audible in her voice. “God damnit, Lex.”

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh. You’re fine like I’m a sun-tanned extrovert.”

“I have a favor to ask,” he said. “I need to know whether anyone might be developing nanobots for . . . medical, or cybernetic applications. Like Gray, but able to safely reside within a human body. Leaks, rumors, anything you can find.”

Kat snorted. “I can ask around, but I can tell you right now the answer is no. Nanobots are about as friendly to living tissue as sulfuric acid. All they’re good for is turning people and things into glittery pudding. Why?”

“But in theory—”

“In theory, lots of things. Programming nanobots to do much of anything at all besides eat and multiply is decades out. Teaching them to play nice with human flesh, long-term? You’re looking at centuries.”

He sighed. “Never mind, then. See if you can find out anything about a group called the Keepers. Variations on that name, especially with religious connotations. Anything you can learn.”

Kat sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I’m on it. And in reference to the last favor you asked me for, your party guest isn’t on any VIP list. Name’s Serena. Classic back-alley fare. No link to Medusa Clan. As far as I can tell, the guy who hired her either didn’t know what the hell he was doing or didn’t have the right connections to hire someone better.” She studied the face in the video log she’d pulled from Serena’s shard: those jowls, that blue corporate tattoo. “He looks like somebody’s frumpy uncle, not some kind of underworld power player.”

“You found him? Who is he?”

Kat needed a moment to put her thoughts in order before she could answer. The information strewn around her pod was making her head spin. “Buckle up for this one, Lex. Until recently he was a fourth-tier logistical stooge for the Glass Corporation, high in the running for the most boring man on Earth. No connections to anything, no interesting communications, avowed pacifist, hadn’t left the company housing block in years. Then about a month ago, out of the blue, he cleaned out all his own bank accounts and went missing. His data trail ends there without a trace. It doesn’t pick up again until yesterday . . . when suddenly he appears in a bunch of Medusan surveillance scans, planting a half-dozen improvised explosive devices near Dahlia’s keep.”

Alexei’s voice in her ear was uncharacteristically disheveled. “He . . . say that again?”

“That’s right,” Kat said. “That ‘lone wolf’ Duke told you about—the guy the Medusas think assassinated the Empress of fucking Epak—is the exact same guy who hired a bargain-bin assassin to kill you and abduct your client. That, or somebody is trying extremely hard to make us think that’s what happened. I don’t know which idea makes less sense to me.”

The whole thing was even more surreal now that she’d heard herself say it. She slapped her hands to her forehead and yelled, “Precisely what the fuck have you gotten yourself into, Lex? Who are you guarding?”

There was something ominous about his hesitation before he responded, “That’s the question, isn’t it.”

This is a story about the nameless—and there is one more nameless person I’m condemned to remember. He was back in the passenger terminal of Bloom City’s land port, slumping against the refugee fence: a heavyset bald man with a blue corporate tattoo on his right cheek.

I would give anything to forget him completely, but I can’t. Not just because of everything that happened, or the role he played in it. I remember Luther, and the thing he had become, because even now some small part of him is part of me too. It hurts me to know it always will be.

BORROWER

This is it, I thought to myself, again and again. I felt my blood-caked lips chanting these words like a mantra. This is it, this is it, this is it. Anyone nearby in the crowd must have thought I’d gone mad. My eardrums had both burst; I could only feel my voice, not hear it. Even before my hasty decompression, I’d been too close to the last bomb when it went off. I stabbed a second injector of Pascalex into the inside of my forearm and felt the warmth of the shot move through me. It was a fatal overdose, but it would take time to kill this flesh, and the flesh was dying anyway. Better to squeeze as much functionality out of it as I could.

I was in an ecstasy of fear: I was going to face real death. This wasn’t something I’d prepared for. How can a person prepare to surrender his immortality? I had incorporated the measured possibility of my death into the plan—I was only the gamma copy, after all—but it was something else to face the reality.

But it was worth it. I had done it. This was it. My plans so achingly long in the making were