Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

Suddenly, it hit Amon what had happened. “Mayuko! Listen! He looked at your naked face. The Birlas can afford it. I saw one of them do it to a whole room. That means he knows exactly who you are and there’s no way he’ll believe that I wasn’t there. So just tell him what he wants to know. We’ve got no choice.”

Ignoring both men, Mayuko sat there silently looking into her coffee.

Suddenly, the emoticon man lifted a finger and the tengu kicked her dining table with the sole of his boot. It flipped over, the vase shattered against the back wall, black and white petals fluttered up and cascaded down, and Mayuko’s coffee splashed out of her cup onto the floor. Still holding the wet ceramic handle in her right hand, she used her right arm to cradle her left elbow where the table had struck her.

“I don’t want to waste any money making threats,” said the man, “but I will if you force me to. Where has he gone?”

Don’t you hurt her! thought Amon as he watched through her eyes from the crowded train. He squeezed his duster tight in his fist, itching to draw it on them. But while his eyes and ears were close by, his body was too far away for his dust to reach them. He wanted to get off the train and head back to the apartment, but the next stop wasn’t for some time, and he could do nothing but shake with helpless rage. “Mayuko! What are you doing? Tell him where I am already. Quickly! Before it gets worse.”

Still silent, Mayuko took another sip of the bit of coffee remaining in her cup.

Without another word, the emoticon man went irate. “When I ask questions, people answer! What? You’re too good for my money? I’m making a generous offer here and you don’t have the right to refuse! Speak, damn it! Speak! Tell me now! Where is Amon?”

The tengu plunged his right hand into his left nostril, reached past feathers deep into his nose until his arm was hidden up to the elbow, drew out a small handgun and pointed it at Mayuko. It was a miniature duster. But what kind? Nerve? Arthritis? Fairy? Surely not vegetable? Amon tried clicking it, and to his surprise details of the make and model popped up. He gasped. Access to the specs must have been left open for a reason: they wanted their targets to be afraid.

“Mayuko!” he shouted with urgency. “It’s a piranha duster. Do you understand? Those nanobots will eat your flesh alive. Tell him already, please!” The tengu must have fooled KonTour by strapping the gun to his face and concealing it beneath his digital proboscis. Simply carrying such an illegal weapon incurred fines, and murder wouldn’t be cheap even for the Birlas. But money aside, were these men really willing to go that far?

The emoticon man’s expression was shifting again, but Amon couldn’t make it out, as Mayuko’s eyes were focused on the gun, its barrel and the nose of its wielder oriented identically. “Now you have a choice. Become a heap of bones or a wealthy lady. One or the other and nothing in between.”

For a moment Mayuko’s eye flicked over to the offer window, which still floated there unclicked. “I told you I don’t—”

“Bullshit!” shouted the man. He began to gag as though vomitting, his mouth opening wide and his infrared tongue popping out. The contractions of the inside of his throat were visible at the back of the oral cavity, and his head popped towards her like a lunging snake spewing venom. Gag, deadpan, gag, deadpan. “Don’t think for a second that I can’t afford to kill you. I can and I will unless you tell me the truth right now.”

When Mayuko just kept staring blankly up at him, he grabbed her shirt, shouted “speak up!” and backhanded her across the cheek. A ragdoll in his grip, her head rolled to the side and her eyes fixed on the remains of the vase on the floor. Glass shards mixed with soggy petals lay soaking in a puddle, and the stem, barren but for a few white and black scraps, had rolled almost within reach.

Unable to move with the bodies pressing tight on all sides, Amon stomped his right foot hard into the floor and began to dig his fingernails into his scalp. This was what she got for rescuing him from the brink of bankruptcy. Fleeing had seemed like the only option, but with time closing in as the men rapidly breached the door, he had been too panicked to think clearly. He should have remembered how the activist had sundered the overlay at Sushi Migration and realized that her digimake was far from impregnable for the Birlas. He’d often pondered diminishing the overlay on GATA Tower to check its height relative to The Twelve And One, but this was just a fantasy. Peering beneath the digital veneer was not the sort of thing that regular people actually did. Not even the bankrupts he’d encountered, in their most licentious frenzies. Cost-benefit analysis was so deeply ingrained in all Free Citizens that affordability constructed the borders of possibility in their minds. And through his frugal training, Amon had built a narrow world indeed. Now that Mayuko was suffering for his limiting habits of thought, he saw what he had become and hated himself for it. If only he’d guessed that the men might look at her naked face or that they’d be packing weapons, he never would have left. He wanted to go back and fight—outnumbered, out-equipped, and out-financed as he was—but with the train blasting rapidly away, it was too late, and he bit his lip to fight back the tears.

“Pay attention to me!” said the man, grabbing her chin and forcing her to look into his eyeholes. They had grown so bright, Mayuko began to twitch. The cells had been totally whited out in the glare along with their inhabitants, but she could just make out thousands of tiny, delicate hands reaching towards her and hear faint, angelic singing. The man’s wrinkled forehead expanded and opened like an accordion of mouths, sharp fangs bearing from the roof of each crease. Then his expression flipped back to neutral. The tengu beside him kept his duster sighted on her, and the others, having finished searching the apartment, began to gather around. The bulbous tip of their noses pointed straight at her, the veins that ran along these lengthy shafts pulsating with an aggressive vitality.

This is overkill, thought Amon. All those mercenaries on an unarmed woman. “Please, Mayuko!”

“Speak!” rattled the man, little dots of spittle blurring Mayuko’s eyes as though from the forehead mouths. “Speak!”

“J-just listen,” she said, her voice wavering with fear at last, “I-I don’t know what—”

The man pushed her by the chin and Mayuko grabbed the sleeve of his robe to stop the chair from toppling, but one of the tengu kicked her wrist and she lost her grip, smacking into the floor back-first with a squeal. She tried to get up but a booted foot came down on each limb to pin her down and the tengu with the duster pointed it down at her. As her eyes began to shake, the room was totally blocked out by the muscular bodies looming over her, the ceiling mostly hidden by their canopy of noses. It was too much to bear. Amon wanted to look away, but the overlay followed his eyes and it was unthinkable to abandon her by turning it off.

“If you even squirm, my man will fire and you’ll be nothing but bones. Now lie still! You’ve got one more chance to give me what you know before I take it.”

The tengu beside the emoticon man put away his duster, stepped behind her head, and bent over her with a strange instrument. It was a thin metal rod with a suction cup on one end and thread-thin ectoplasmic tentacles of white neon wriggling out the other. Mayuko darted her eyes between the man and the instrument, her breaths quivering, her shaking body subdued by the four men stepping on her. “Do tell me soon and save me the expense of hacking you.”