Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

I should have kept walking-I should have-but in the end I was curious about him, about his story. What had driven him into the sprawl to find me? What wrongs did he hope to right? And who stood to get hurt once the scales had been balanced?

Why Cylestra? I asked after reopening the channel.

He shook his head. I'm not paying you for that.

You're not paying me anything, as I recall.

The database means nothing, then?

I bit back my reply. You could get anyone to use an open tunnel. Why me?

There can be no traces of the drop. I can't leave this to an amateur.

Since the moment I'd heard the word Tamanous in the kafe, my mind had been feeding me memories of Liam I'd long since thought forgotten-the brain had a funny way of squirreling those things away and bringing them back when they were the most unwelcome. In my thirst for revenge, I'd contacted over a dozen shadowrunners, paying them what little I made to search for his killers. They'd found nothing. All of it had been wasted money. Then came the crash of '64 and along with it my newfound gifts as a technomancer. What I had viewed as a blessing quickly became a curse as I failed to master even the simplest of techniques to manipulate the Resonance I could feel all around me, every minute of every day. It seemed like the harder I tried and the more I focused upon my goal, the further away it became. After several frustrating years, the anger became too much to bear, and I gave it all up.

In the months that followed, without even trying, my abilities began to soar. I'd taken it as a sign that searching for Liam's killers was, in the grand scheme of things, fruitless. Strange that now, when I thought I'd finally managed to leave all of it behind, an opportunity to exact some revenge was presenting itself. Karma at work, I told myself.

A troll shouldered his way through the tunnel, nudging both me and Macquarie aside. Skittles barked at his retreating form.

Will you do it? he asked.

Give me the key and the package.

The tunnel's good for another three days, he said while transferring the data through a secure socket.

Come to the kafe in two days, and I'll let you know how it went.

He nodded, a curious look on his face, and then he turned and walked away, moving through the crowd as if he'd been living in the sprawl all his life.

Before I lost sight of him, I tagged him and sent a request to SkySec, who in addition to straightforward security dabbled in surveillance-they leased time from the city's traffic cameras for just this purpose. With any luck, I'd know where Macquarie was holing up by the end of the day. • • •

I returned home and released Skittles from her carrier. She circled around the room several times before jumping up to the beaten brown chair she'd long ago claimed as her own. She barked several times-no doubt still excited from all the goings on-before finally settling into the familiar curves of her hopelessly matted pillow.

No sooner had I sat down on a recliner and ordered the windows to shutter themselves than I received a message from SkySec: they'd lost Macquarie. I sent back a request to provide details-I needed to know how he could do such a thing-but my hopes were small that a useful answer would ever be returned. The pretty penny I paid every month was worth it, but SkySec was not known for value added service.

After swiveling the chair away from the windows, I reclined and gave my aching knees a rest. It was time to find out what I could about this deal.

I was curious about the Trojan, but given how Macquarie had lost SkySec, the possibility of finding out more about him was simply too tempting, so I decided to have a little look-see before getting down to business. I knew a probable place of origin, and I knew he had a beef with Cylestra, so that's where I began.

It was at times like this, when I was physically tired but mentally curious, that the Resonance called to me most strongly. Sometime I found myself having to fight the urge, but now, luckily, I could simply let it take me. And it did. The reality around me shifted, and though there was a brief moment of reorientation, it quickly felt like I belonged there, perhaps more so than the physical world. There, I was part of the world, and it was a part of me. I was not bound by the frailty of my form, nor the aches and pains that had collected like driftwood along the shore. Here, I was free to go where I would, unfettered.

I bent myself to my task, sifting through tera after tera of news releases, images, blogs, vlogs, memory uploads. I took each of them and played them against the others, building the pieces of the puzzle first and then, one-by-one, piecing them together until the picture began to form.

Finally, twelve hours after entering, I found it.

Eight years ago, an Aboriginal girl named Sindala Hendesa had, with the consent of her parents, joined a drug trial to restore her failing kidneys. It was a process that was advertised as costing half as much as growing a new one, and since it was a final-phase trial, it was subsidized and would cost them even less. Cylestra was administering the program through a loosely veiled partnership with the Northern Territory government.

Bathurst, and especially Sindala's village, was not wealthy. The doctors were subpar, as was the nearest hospital, which was where Sindala would have been taken had the Cylestra medical team not offered their services, so it was natural that Sindala's parents would jump at any small increase in their daughter's chances. The treatments continued for several months, and Sindala showed signs of improvement.

But then there was a reversal. Sindala's organs-not just her kidneys-began growing at an alarming rate. By the time they decided to drop her from the program, her lungs had enlarged by thirty percent; her heart was twice as large as it should have been, and her kidneys had tripled in size. Within another few months, many of the subjects began experiencing similar issues, forcing Cylestra to abandon the trial altogether. Shortly after, Cylestra simply picked up and left, sidestepping the repeated requests for follow-up visits.

Sindala's father, of course, was my Mr. Macquarie-real name, Koorong Hendesa-and her mother was Allora. As Sindala's health deteriorated, Koorong and Allora fought in the courts for Cylestra to pay for new organs. Their lawyer, one of the few that would agree to take on a small-stakes claim against a Double-A corp, tried to argue that the side effects were much more damaging than had been accounted for in the initial discussions with the Hendesas. The judge, in the end, ruled for the plaintiffs, but it was a sham-the Hendesas were awarded the exact sum of money they had paid to Cylestra, an amount that would fail to even dent the mounting bills and future treatments that Sindala would need.

After the trial, with Koorong and Allora's savings drained, the village chipped in, but they could afford little more than an ancient dialysis machine.

Sindala died two months later.

An alarm from the lobby of my apartment complex broke my train of thought. I tapped into the intercam and found Koorong speaking feverishly into it.

"Please, Mav, let me in, we need to talk." He pressed on the button for my apartment feverishly. "Mav-"

"I don't appreciate clients following me home, Koorong."

He paused at the use of his real name. "Can I come up?"

I let him in, and a minute later he had reached my apartment on the 132nd floor. He gave Skittles a look of consternation that I couldn't quite interpret. Perhaps the bite earlier…

"We have to leave," he said, "Now."

Skittles measured an extremely high heartbeat from him, and I could tell just from the sound of his breathing that he was anxious.

"What's happened?"

He glanced back at the door, then Skittles, and finally back to me. "I'll explain it all later. But please-"