Anthology - From the Street

"A job," Cayman interrupted. "You're still looking for work, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, I am."

"Well, I've got something. Right up your alley – hardware drek. Give me some time tonight, I'll tell you about it."

"Okay. When?"

"Nine. Can you be at the Body Mall?"

X-Prime hesitated. "That's… near Glow City, right?'

Cayman sighed theatrically. Alex had a newbie's fear of the radiation from the old nuclear plant. It would take a few runs before he'd start to understand that any one of a thousand possible deaths would get him long before radiation had its way with his body.

"Yeah, it's near Glow City. There's a guy there you need to talk to."

"Okay. Nine o'clock."

"See you," Cayman said and walked away, mentally cursing Duster, trying to decide if he could finally tell her that they were even, and wondering if he should rethink his policy of using the cheapest crew capable of doing the job.

Tuesday, 3:16 pm

Alex tried to hold his head up as he walked away. Cayman made him nervous. He was pretty sure the older man enjoyed mocking him – he just didn't know which parts of the conversation were mockery and which were serious.

Still, though, it had turned out okay, he figured. It was a good time to get work. Not only did Alex need the money, but he had no idea what to do with the time when he wasn't working. He couldn't be a part of legitimate society anymore, but illegitimate society didn't seem quite ready to accept him. By his count, since he lost his job and SIN, the longest he'd ever gone in a conversation without saying something stupid was 10.3 seconds. It had only gotten worse since he came to Seattle. He'd have to endure it for at least two years, he figured, then maybe he could think about going back to Oakland. Maybe.

He shook his head. He couldn't believe he was pining for Oakland. There, he'd been sleeping on a rusty cot in a basement room with a damp, cracked floor. He'd become part-dwarf, been fired when he was framed for embezzlement, and every time he had stepped outside there had been a chance someone would try to assassinate him.

Still, it was more fun than the Barrens.

Duster always tried to convince him he was actually having fun. "Isn't this more fun than Temperance?" she always asked. That one time, when the goons ambushed them, they had barely escaped with their lives, and all Alex could think of was his quiet San Francisco apartment and his bland accountancy work at Temperence Investments, and Duster had turned to him, her pointed ears twitching merrily, and said "Isn't this more fun?" And even though he had stared at her in disbelief, and his mouth started to say "You're crazy," part of his mind immediately thought "Fraggin' right it is."

She had dubbed him "X-Prime" right after the attack. He thought the name sounded odd and said so, but Duster just shrugged and said "Sounds better than Alex."

He wished she was here or he was there. He couldn't go back, though, until Saito's people had forgotten enough about him to take the rumored price off her head. And as long as Oakland was the center of the metahuman's rights movement, Duster wasn't going anyplace else.

He was here, on his own. He hated it.

But it was still more fun than Temperence. And he had work – something to think about besides Oakland.

Tuesday, 9:41 pm

"If you do this right, you shouldn't need a bone saw."

Alex sat with his elbows on his knees, his forehead in his palms. Cayman assumed a concerned expression and swiped Alex's shoulder with the back of his hand.

"You okay? Not feeling sick, are you?"

Alex looked up, perfectly composed. "I'm fine. This is how I listen." He turned to Doc Holiday, who was sitting on a dented metal table, distractedly wiping at a bloodstain on the hem of his white (off-white, really – almost yellow) smock. "Go on."

"I think, honestly, the best tool would be something like bolt cutters. But they'd have to open pretty wide. From what I hear, this guy has thick shoulders."

Cayman nodded. "You got that right." Sitting at Doc Holiday's desk, with his salt-and-pepper hair and heavy jaw, he might have looked like a kindly, wise doctor – except for the tattoos, the jagged scar on the right cheek, and the olive vest packed with ammo.

"Let me show you what you need to do." Holiday stepped toward Cayman. "Roll up your sleeve."

Cayman obeyed. Outside the room, in the Mall, someone screamed in pain, and fifteen other voices, speaking in unity, told him to shut the frag up.

"Now, in a lot of cases, the cyberlimb ends about here." Holiday drew a line on Cayman's shoulder with a black marker. It was barely visible in the mass of faded tattoos. "Here, see, you want to cut right here, on the edge of the metal. Don't catch too much metal; if you do, you'll damage the limb. And if you're too far in toward the neck, you'll run into bone, and trust me, that's not something you want to try to cut. Hit the sweet spot, it should come right off."

"In working order?" Cayman asked.

Holiday nodded. "More or less."

Cayman waved a piece of paper. "And these are the specs?"

"That's the ones," Holiday said.

"This is everything?"

"Everything."

"Because this is a custom job. They sometimes slip things in at the last minute, you know."

Holiday's long, stretched face appeared annoyed, like Death waiting for his victim to finish a cup of tea before departing. "I know. Of course I know. I've implanted more arms than you've ever seen. I know."

"Just checking. Never hurts to check."

"Look, you've got everything you need," Holiday said. "It's not that hard, really. Any body man worth a damn could do it."

"Could you do it?" Cayman asked.

Holiday scowled. "Yeah."

Cayman pointed a thumb toward Alex. "Could he?"

"Do I know him?"

"I suppose you don't."

Cayman had been keeping one eye on Alex, looking for a sign of nerves or qualms or any reaction a normal person would have at being asked to cut someone's arm off. He didn't see anything but Alex's forehead in his hands.

"Can you do this? You okay about it?" Cayman asked.

Alex looked up. His face was suddenly harder, grimmer than it had been when Cayman saw him on the street this morning. He had shifted up to X-Prime gear.

"Yeah."

"You're okay with chopping off arms?"

"As a matter of general principle? No." Alex jerked his head toward the picture of Burt the Toad stuck on the wall under a patch of mold. "That guy's arm? Yeah, I'm fine with it."

Cayman stood, and suddenly he seemed to fill half the room. "When you're dealing with a Yak, it's not a good idea to make things personal. They can make it personal right back, which isn't good. This is business. We're being hired – and paid nicely – to do a job. That's why we're doing it."

"That's why you're doing it," X-Prime said (Alex would never talk back to Cayman). "World would be better if we took this guy's arm off, so let's take it off."

Cayman rolled his eyes. He did that a lot when Alex was around. "World would be better," he muttered. "Save us."

Tuesday, 10:12 pm

Alex – X-Prime, for the moment – walked out of the Body Mall with extra energy. He saw people looking at him, and he glared back. He wasn't an out-of-town, unemployed runner anymore. He was part of the scene. He belonged.

Sort of. He knew that Alex wasn't gone for good. He'd probably come back in the morning, filling X-Prime's head with all sorts of worries and second thoughts about the job. For now, though, he felt confident – cocky even – and he was going to enjoy it.

He walked across the Barrens for a while, experimenting with a strut for a block or two and failing miserably, then sauntering until his destination was in sight. The sign for Crusher 495 blinked red neon, except for the burned-out "u" and "9." Back in Oakland, Duster had told him she thought the owners were careful to ensure that at least a few lights on the sign were always broken. It kept the customers who thought they were slumming happy.