Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

As the sound of pattering debris filled the room, I slowly got to my feet and brushed away the powdery white bits of wall that had fallen over me. I coughed as I waded through the cloud, looking for Koorong.

I found him lying in the closet, dead, three bullets-red on white-stitched across his chest. I turned away immediately, unable to look upon him like that.

I turned to the gurney. Allora was still there, but when I touched her neck to find a pulse, I found nothing. I stared at her for long moments, feeling like a sister-in cause, if not in blood. Sadness welled up inside me and begged to be let out, but it was not something I could allow to happen. Not now. Not here.

I left the apartment quickly and wandered in a semi-random path toward the nearest exit from The Blax. I found no resistance. I hitched a ride on an old-style water ferry and took it to the north side of Sydney. Then I paid for a coffin hotel with anonymous cred. Several hours of sheer terror followed where I was sure I would be found and shot dead where I lay, but eventually it became clear that I wouldn't be followed. Not today, at least.

And finally, hiding in that small, darkened space, I allowed myself to cry.

I didn't dare get a new SIN in Australia, and I didn't dare keep myself anywhere near Cylestra's sphere of influence, so I headed for Tokyo. I set up shop and began taking very simple jobs-data scrubbing and the like-and then one day I was sitting in a seedy bar drinking a truly horrible cup of kaf when a Japanese man in a black suit walked in and headed directly for my table. The look on his face as he wove through the tables was one of serious intent.

Seven months had passed since the devastation in Blaxland, but I knew immediately he was somehow connected to it. I hadn't had the heart to get another dog after Skittles. I had, however, picked up a gun. I reached into my purse, but before I could wrap my shaking fingers around the grip, the man slipped one hand inside his suit coat and pulled out a chip the size of a thumbnail. He set it carefully onto my table, then turned and left.

I grabbed the chip and held it tight in my fist. Only after the attention of the others patrons had returned to other things did I slip the chip into a reader inside my purse.

It contained, I found, a SIN. Fiona Douglass. Born within six months of me in Scotland. Her parents had moved to Brisbane when she was twelve, and after graduating early with a degree in datalytics, she'd moved around Australia-not surprisingly to many of the places I had been, both before and after Liam. I could tell already that it was a consummate job; Fiona Douglass had no doubt died recently, but I had few doubts that it would be difficult to tell that without speaking directly to people who'd known her.

I was now Fiona Douglass.

Before I knew it, tears were welling in my eyes. I sniffed and wiped them away, sipping the bitter kaf to camouflage the outward signs of my utmost joy.

Allora had made it. She hadn't died in that apartment in Blaxland, she'd jacked in. Permanently. A ghost in the machine.

I tapped into the net and began sifting-in an extremely passive manner-the history of Cylestra over the past few months. It was something I had avoided since leaving Australia, but with the arrival of this news it felt sufficiently safe to have a look. What I found was a series of events-communication leaks, misplaced orders, a downtick in sales-that made it clear that Cylestra was on a slow and steady decline toward a death of its own. Corps the size of Cylestra could not truly die; if it performed poorly for too long, it would be swallowed, in whole or in part, by another corp, but when that happened, Allora would be there. She would be absorbed as part of the merger, and she would hound the new corp until the biotech wing was deemed too inefficient to justify its continued existence. She would eventually, inevitably, exact her revenge.

After sitting back in my uncomfortable seat and savoring these realizations, I got up and left the bar.

It was time to get a real cup of kaf.

And then it was time to find a dog.

Steve Kenson's first published work for Shadowrun was an essay in the second edition of The Grimoire. This led to writing the adventure "The Masquerade" in Harlequin's Back and working on over two dozen books, including Awakenings, Magic in the Shadows, and Portfolio of a Dragon. Steve has written seven Shadowrun novels, including Crossroads and the first Kellan Colt trilogy, beginning with Born to Run. He maintains a website at www.stevekenson.com and a LiveJournal at xomec.livejournal.com.

You move down the corridor confidently, not striding, because striding implies a sense of arrogance, not humble duty and responsibility. Still, it's a confidence born of power, of the certain knowledge you can handle anything that might come at you. You know-deep down-that you are up to the challenge, that you were born to be, made to be.

Although you are humble, this place is still beneath you. You step over loose piles of garbage in the hall with the barest sniff of disdain. The place reeks, the stench of human filth and misery is strong in your nostrils, almost threatening to choke you, but you push it aside. You flex your fingers inside their close-fitting, black leather gloves; feel the fine leather creak slightly, the steely strength in your tendons and muscles.

The background noise in the corridor is a mix of broadcast programs and sprawl music barely muffled by cheap, particleboard doors and sheetrock walls worn paper-thin. The noises coming from behind the door ahead and to your left are grunting, animalistic, matching the filth and desperation of this setting. They're tantalizing and disgusting at the same time. Is it distaste for them or for what needs to be done that wells up in your throat? Tasting the flat, metallic bile, you grab hold of it, turning disgust into anger into power.

[LOWER: EMO_TRACK]

Your booted foot blurs as it lashes at the door. You barely feel it as the jamb disintegrates from the strike, splinters of formerly glued wood-substitute flying. The flimsy chain on the inside tears off, still stubbornly holding onto the fragment of the frame it's firmly screwed into, as if to proclaim it is the weakness of the structure and not it that had led to this. Things seems to drop into slow motion, and a part of you watches the splinters and fragments fly, detached, fascinated.

The door flies open, banging against the inside wall, but rebounding only slightly. You're inside before it can do so, the world around you moving so slowly you can pick out every detail. You savor it: the shocked, startled looks spreading across the faces of the man and the woman locked together on the ratty sofa against the wall, the man simultaneously pushing back with his arms to rise while reaching for the crumpled mass of clothing strewn on the floor. Vivid tattoos crawl along his muscled chest and arms: blue-green dragon scales, golden carp, there, between his shoulder blades, a blooming lotus.

Then you have him by the throat, lifting him off the woman, pinning him against the wall next to the couch. Cheap paint and sheetrock chip and crumple where his head hits. He has enough air to grunt once in pain before your fingers close his windpipe and he starts to choke. As if your hand was around her throat as well, a scream arrives stillborn from the woman's mouth as little more than a hiccup or faint yelp. She starts to move, but there's a gun in your other hand, and you level it back in her direction without even looking. The sounds of her movement stop and there's only a faint whimpering.

The man you've pinned glares at you with dark eyes, slight epicanthic folds betraying a mixed heritage that strikes a momentary chord of familiarity, but elicits no mercy or slackening of your grip. You watch with a certain fascinated detachment as a full range of emotions play across his face in just a few seconds: surprise and shock give way to rage at your intrusion, a furious desire to strike out at you, then puzzlement at the inability to escape your grip. Hands claw at the leather sleeve of your coat, feeling more like caresses through the thick material. Confusion starts to give way to panic, a desperate need for escape, for air. The man's face starts to redden. There's a slight ache along the length of your arm, but you savor it, the burning in your muscles as your grip remains, unrelenting, tightening. You do not look away, still aware of the faint whimpering from the couch behind you-gun leveled there-but no other signs of movement. The man's feet bang against the wall, just centimeters off the floor. Someone bangs back from the neighboring apartment and you stifle a laugh: are they hoping to quiet the noise or do they think they're playing a game? They might think it is more foreplay, and not the main event.