Lawrence Watt-Evans - Nightside City

But he lost me somewhere over the dayside. His eye couldn't take the UV and the wind and the heat.

The tracers should have been all over me, though, so he hired himself a ship and went looking. He found the cab, which still had some tracers in it, and they'd managed to assemble into a strong enough group for his equipment to pick up the signal, but I wasn't there. The wind had blown my tracks away, so he couldn't follow visually, either.

He was too damn stubborn to quit, though. He knew I'd gotten out of the cab alive, and he figured I'd head west, since anything else would have been completely idiotic, and he started running search patterns.

And obviously, since I'm here telling you this, he found me.

But do you want to know what led him to me? It wasn't the tracers; my symbiote had decided they were benign, but it had eaten them anyway because it needed the fuel, so they never got a transmitter built. He didn't find me visually, with all that dayside glare in equipment that had been designed for the nightside, and my heat signature got lost in the sunlight, indistinguishable from a stray rock.

It was when I tried to call for a cab right before I passed out. The transceiver had a safety feature I didn't even know about, and when I tapped and neither called nor cancelled, it checked my pulse, and when that came up weak it called for medical help. The only receiver in range was aboard Mishima's ship, and it picked up the call and told Big Jim.

He figured it had to be me. I had to be the only person on the dayside who could be calling for help. And besides, even if it wasn't me, refusing to answer a medical emergency call can get a ship's operating license pulled.

So he found me there, unconscious, half-buried in drifting sand, my skin in sunburnt shreds, blind, with a bad case of radiation poisoning-besides the stuff from the cab I'd walked right across some of the richest unmined ore on the planet.

He'd picked me up and brought me back to Nightside City and registered me in the city hospital under a false name, and he'd set up a credit account against his assets to pay my bills; then he'd called on 'Chan to see if he knew what the hell I had been doing that got me so close to getting killed.

'Chan didn't know anything, of course, but he was still interested in seeing me, seeing that I was all right. We still check on each other sometimes. Ever since Dad bought the dream and Mama shipped out, 'Chan and Ali and I had been all the family any of us had. We weren't really close -I think we're all afraid that if we get too close we'll just get burned again-but we stayed in touch, all three of us until Ali left, and then just 'Chan and me. So he came and took a look at me and then went back to his work. He was a croupier at the time-I'm not sure which casino, because he moved around, but it was obviously one of the better ones if it used human croupiers, right?

Anyway, Mishima had a lot of bucks invested in me, and it wasn't because he actually expected me to pay him back for the eye or anything else-he knew how broke I was. At least, he said he did, but I suspected he'd underestimated it a bit. In any case, he knew I couldn't reimburse him for anything. No, what he said he really wanted was just to know what the hell was going on. He said that was worth more to him than the money.

I could understand that. I wasn't sure I believed it of him, and I thought he might be gambling on buying a share of a lucrative bit of business, but I could understand his curiosity. Even so, even if it was just curiosity and there wasn't any admixture of greed, I still wasn't too sure I really wanted to tell him everything.

I said so.

I thought he'd be pissed at that, after he'd gone and told me that whole story, but he wasn't, or if he was he didn't show it. He was calm and reasonable instead.

"Look," he said. "You're in trouble, Hsing. Somebody tried to kill you. The only reason they didn't manage it is because I got myself involved. Whoever it was, and whatever you did to them, if they find out you're alive, they'll probably try again. And this time, if you don't tell me what's going on, I won't be there to help."

"I know that," I said. I tried not to sound defensive.

"Do you?" He pantomimed spitting in disgust-if he'd really spat the hospital would probably have thrown him out. "Look, I can tell people where you are and leave you to take care of yourself, or if you play along, I can keep my secrets to myself and even get you some guards. My treat-I won't put them on your bill."

"Generous of you," I said sarcastically.

He ignored that. "Look, you know, you've impressed me. When you caught that grithead at the Starshine it ticked me off, I admit-I thought you'd been lucky, cutting in ahead of me, and that you'd been poking in where you had no business. It didn't look ethical, where I was already on it. But it was a good piece of work. And you've been surviving out in the burbs on nothing for years, and that must be damn near impossible. And now you've latched onto something big and you can't handle it by yourself."

"Who says I can't handle it?" I snapped.

" I say so," he snapped right back. "The guy who found you frying on the dayside. Sure, you'd crawled halfway back, but you weren't going to make it, Hsing, and you know that as well as I do. You were dead if I hadn't found you."

He paused for a minute, staring at me, and then added, "Hell, most people would have been dead already. You're tough, I'll give you that. Your symbiote died, for chrissake! I've seen them pump healthy symbiotes out of miners dead for a week, but you walked yours to its death and you're still breathing! Damn!" He shook his head in apparent disbelief. Then he took a breath and went on. "You got me off the subject, though. What I was going to say was that I can see where you don't want to tell me everything and then let us go on separately. You'd be worried I'd be screwing you over, and I'd be worried about what you were doing, too. I don't want that. Instead I want to offer you a partnership on this case of yours, whatever it is-the two of us working it together, instead of competing. We split everything even, and we forget about the eye and the medical bills. Hell, if it works out maybe we can keep it going-Mishima and Hsing, Confidential Investigations. How's that sound?"

"Like a cheap vid entertainment," I said, but I didn't mean it. The truth is that it sounded pretty good. I was tired of trying to do everything on my own all the time, and as Big Jim's partner, I figured, I'd be able to work in the Trap again.

But then I remembered that unless Nakada's scheme worked, there wouldn't be any work in the Trap in a few years. There wouldn't be any people in the Trap. It would all be in daylight.

I'd had enough daylight to last me forever. I didn't need any more. I wanted the city to stay on the nightside. The only chance I had of getting that had nothing to do with Mishima; it was up to the Ipsy.

And I still didn't know why Lee and Orchid and Rigmus had tried to kill me. And I didn't know whether Nakada's stunt had a chance of working.

And I didn't see any money in the case, no matter what happened. If I went any further with Mishima, I had to let him know that.

"Hey," I said. "I'll let you in on one secret, anyway. I'll tell you how much my fee is on this job that's nearly gotten me killed and cost you a few dozen kilobucks. Then you can tell me whether that partnership offer is still good, whether you want a piece of the action, or whether you'd rather just dump me back on the dayside."

"All right," he said, nodding. "I'll log on. What's the fee?"

"Two hundred and five credits. Flat fee, no expenses, no contingencies." I kept my face deadpan.

He stared for a minute, then slowly grinned at me. "Charity work, Hsing? For those squatters? Is that what all that crap about rent collectors was about?"