The rain sheeted over the translucent skin separating me from the outside world. The stars, only faintly visible, tinged purple over my head, and rippled and swam as the water slid past. As tents went, it wasn’t half bad. Adjustable opacity, insulated. Just earlier this week I had fabricated some little beasties to metabolize the smoke from the low fire, and judging from how I wasn’t suffocating they seemed to be taking hold. Gosh, I only had to bend down a little to get through the flap. Bela, on the other hand, practically had to squat.

The woman I had invited into my tent was an experiment. She was far from my first client, but she was by far the best-heeled. The most risky. I wanted information. I was light-years behind by this point, drowning in everything I didn’t and couldn’t know. Bela needed something only I could give her, and I intended to get what I needed in return. She licked her lips, nervously. I smiled as disarmingly as someone like me can manage. Her voice, when it came, was less hesitant than I expected.

“So how do we do this? Is there a way these things usually go?”

“I’m prepared to offer you my service for hardwired browsing access and a flat fee of two freecoin.”

Her face fell a fraction.

“If you find that unacceptable, I wish you luck.”

She blinked. “You didn’t even ask what he did.”

I snorted.

“Usually, folks pay good money for me not to ask questions. But if you’re talking to me, I don’t think I need to ask.”

Bela had the look of someone who didn’t spend too much time around places like this. She had the stink of the city and small manufacturing on her, and traveling clothes that could have been ripped straight out of a fashion magazine- albeit one twenty years out of date. Cream and pink and dangling trails and tassels. Brown with mud now, down near her feet. She wore sandals, even in this weather. She’d’ve had a nice, secure job somewhere, and a stipend on top of that, if it wasn’t all confiscated by the deadbeat she was here about. Because of course that was the problem. Her boss wasn’t paying her, or he was paying her a touch too much of the wrong kind of attention, or her boyfriend had gotten drunk and done something he shouldn’t have, or…

I could go on. The stories start to bleed together- I heard plenty like it before I was cast out from the Folk, and I’ve heard plenty after, too. You get to know the look. Right at that moment, though, she was looking at me with naked suspicion.

“If I get caught handing out access I could be tried, you know. I could lose my job.”

“I’d be more worried about getting caught purchasing the services of an assassin, if I were you. Even y’all folks have hangups about murder without consensus. What did you think I was going to ask for, fresh produce? Maybe you want to help me cross the street?”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. She just pursed her lips, and turned to leave.

I hate when I have to baby the clients.

I sighed, “Sorry. I’ve just had kind of a long few days. I’m aware how I come off.”

I wasn’t, really. I understood that most people tended to find me off-putting and abrasive. I was still figuring out exactly what would offend. It was different for everyone, and keeping track was a chore. Not that I got many excuses to practice outside interactions like these, anyway. The last few days hadn’t really been any worse than the ones previous either, but most of the- …most people will excuse almost any minor social infraction on account of a restless night or a hard week. She blew out her cheeks and turned back to face me.

“No, no- you’re right. I can…” She ran a hand through her hair, tongue flicking over teeny little sharp teeth. Maybe a nervous gesture? I could see her ears now, under the curls. Furred, pointed, pressed flat. “I can make that work.”

I felt the twinge of power in my gut flicker, press itself into my fingertips. I held out the hand. An open mouth.

“I’ll need a name, then. And a deal.”

This was always the touchiest part. The deal was just as much part of the payment for me as the fee and the hardwire, but she didn’t need to know that. Making one gave me a chance to keep that flicker of magic alive for just a while longer while I found some other way of sustaining it. In retrospect, this was where I should have noticed when she hardly hesitated. Took my hand like it was a lifeline and squeezed. But I felt the magic link into the nerves in her hand, felt silver thread around both our wrists, felt a pang of loss and a ravenous hunger, and every one of my senses strained toward the name she would give me.

When she spoke, it took me a moment, but I understood.

“His name is Nathan Dun.”

---

tangerine is waist-deep in a pile of electronic garbage.

Not that she minds this, particularly. It’s how she spends a good portion of her time, especially if you count the workshop itself, which might as well be. Sometimes it seems like she’s the only one who bothers to pick up after herself.

Watch it, tan. You’re not that old yet.

Correction: she usually doesn’t mind. Usually, her companions don’t drop her on her ass into the bin. She can still hear navy chuckling through the walls of the old shipping container, and she vows under her breath to return her kindness threefold. Maybe she can put together a sound gun with some of the stuff in here.

It’s middle of the road. No unused implants or medical gear- she’s still riding that high six months later, and the touch of navy’s signal on the back of her mind is its own reward- but some solid electronics. Hardware with burnt batteries but functioning microcontrollers, old hard drives, plenty of cabling, a few steel tools. Some promising raw material for mar’s autoforge.

She bangs on the side of the bin.

“Y’all get your asses down here and help me with this!”

She’s about halfway out of the container when the signal hits them. Static in the back of their minds and in their bones, a muffling. It still makes her nauseous all these years later.

There are a couple of things that interfere with their comms like that, but it’s another raid. She can tell by the way navy grimaces, glancing though the batch of comms. chartreuse pulls the cable from behind her ear with a yelp, all but confirming tan’s suspicions. She sets down the old processor array she’s fiddling with and starts the process of climbing free of the junk, tuning out the whitenoise screaming from her back of her skull.

“Anything get though this time?”

“Yeah, actually. It’s mar.”

“Fuck. Okay. Where was it?”

She doesn’t bother restarting her own equipment. char’s doing the math, and of the three of them the raid signal hits tan the hardest. “Not too far, actually. Corner of seventy-eight, level four. One up, two over, five across. Might be a chance.” The comms might be down, but tan has known both of them for years. As one, they break into a sprint.

When they arrive, tan knows instantly that she’s too late. The swarm of drones, silver and blinding, flashing the toxin-colors of the police and the brilliance of the sun down into the gulf, is enough to tell her that. None of them move to cross the last gap between this street and the next. navy reaches for her hand, and she squeezes it in hers, and they watch from behind the glass.

It’s the entrance to a school, she realizes. Across the gap, wide-eyed faces press against the glass directly opposite, barely visible with the distance and the obstruction of the swarming drones. maroon must have been here doing…

“…she’s a student, I guess.”

One of the police cars shifts, and now the three of them can see her. Face down on the concrete, thrashing against the bulk of a poldog. It has to hurt. But it’s just in the way, it’s just pinning her down, claws on her wrists. Making sure she can’t pry off the glinting silver drone plastered to the back of her neck. In that moment, tan almost lunges over the railing. She feels it pass through char and navy, too. Each of them calculating how much damage they could do. Each of them deciding they can take more and better revenge if they live though today.

mar, silent till now, screams. A wild sound, furious and pleading at once. It undoes her.

Almost without thinking, she fires a single shot straight through the glass, and though her telemetry is powered down and she can barely see though the tears, it flies true. The poldog drops, dead or stunned, and mar is struggling out from under it, running, reaching up to pull the hateful thing off, tan can see the first inches of blood and wire that mean she’s going to make it- and then mar’s hand drops, and she crumples to her knees. A shiver goes through the swarm as the blood-flecked one rejoins them, and all tan can see is mar’s body, still, blood seeping, and navy and char are pulling her, and yelling, and the lights-

And then they’re running again, and the movement of their bodies is almost enough to distract her from the reason, and from her tears.

---

The alarm chirps and you roll out of your bed, flat onto the ground, right onto your back. The sun’s coming through the windows and the building is humming to life under you, a bass pulse in your skull and your chest. Most nights you don’t remember your dreams, and you’re thankful for that. Both options are unappealing. You close your eyes, pushing back the wave of nausea that threatens to send you running for the bathroom, and sit up.

One more day. One more, and then you’re done.

Of course, you’ve told yourself the same thing every day for a little over two years now. It might actually be true, though, this time. Your life will have to be different after today. There’s not really an option for it to be otherwise.

It took you two years, but you finally did something.

Maybe the fear dies back with time. Or maybe it won’t let you go until whatever it is the assassin is going to do happens. It still doesn’t feel quite real. Habit, you check your hard memory. Pins and needles. The lethargy is leaving you, you can push yourself up, and a poke at your internals tells you they’re just about to hand back over your perms. You make breakfast while you wait. Coffee. Biscuits. Soy protein patties, you’d forgotten you ordered the kind with seasoning this time.

You’re nearly done by the time the rental company actually hands you the rest of your brain back, and you feel yourself come fully alive again. The shock of information, hard memory, your comms, the small tickles of feedback from the other parts of your home network. White walls bloom into your drawings and thoughts, dull and glowing paints intertwined, ceiling vanishing into today’s projection of the sky. The building greets you with its customary gentle tap of acknowledgement. You send one back.

Good morning.

Yesterday’s outing still has a fuzzy sense of unreality, feels more like a dream than everything else around it. You gave the rental company a few extra hours of processing time yesterday- they have the regulatory permissions to delete data, even if you don’t, and they’re typically very thorough. No hard records from the time you handed over the permissions. Critical support to intellectual property rights.

The day’s jobs come in a second later. Nothing massive. A little maintenance, a little sanitation, a little service. Pretty big block on-call. You tap the shade controls for the window to dim them and get dressed, then head out to get to work.

---

You waver between classifying on-call time as the best and the worst part of your day. You can’t relax all the way, but you don’t have anything to do, either. Most of the time you’re just waiting around for some walk-in to come in and mouth off to whoever’s at the front desk. When he does, the rush to get whatever the building needs to fulfill his request is almost overwhelming.

Today, it’s a detailed map and some miniature animatronic figurines for whatever tabletop game is in fashion today. He doesn’t bother describing the setting, or theme. He looks bored, tapping his shoe on the floor, checking his watch. The building gives you a feed of its lobby camera and authorization to access the Network’s information on him as you accept the contract on behalf of yourself and Sunshine Small Manufacturing, Inc. You snoop though the data concerning the game and his friends, mark some to send off to the creatives upstairs. With a more detailed request than he bothered to ask for, of course. Send the exact wording of the request to whoever’s in mechanics, receive back some colorful descriptions of the customer’s character. Ask if he wants something digital, holographic. Paper, he tells you. Like on old treasure map.

You smile and nod, ask him for a few more details, ask him to be seated, walk to the door, then break into a sprint to make it to your workstation. The building’s signaled for it to wake up, but can’t itself operate the controls. Distributed intelligence regulations, or something. You search in the building’s database for something that might fit the bill- if it’s not here, maybe… a flick of your attention tells you that paper was made by pulping cellulose and other plant matter, then drying it in sheets. Not difficult. But there are always details that are difficult to replicate in a project with this kind of speed- inclusions, impurities. The way it feels in your hands. Given time, and customers who order ahead, you can get all those things right.

Today, however, you are in luck. Someone scanned a bunch of old papers into the dataset- books, newspaper, copy paper. Probably they all had important information on them at some point. Right now you’re just looking for the oldest one your can find- a newspaper from sometime a couple of centuries ago is the right amount of yellowed. You pull the data. An impression of the thing is projected onto the surface of your workstation, and you unfold it, removing the creases. Trim it to fit on a kitchen table- the building helpfully provides you with the exact dimensions of the one sitting in the man’s living room, actually- and start isolating the compounds that make up the ink. It only looks like two or thee for this one, plus a few breakdown products. You remove all instances from the structure, and are left with a clean sheet of yellowing paper, like in the media. Mechanics updates you with a couple of prototypes. You glance at them- little mechanical skeletons, zombies, a dragon, a wizard. Some more specific models of- presumably the player characters, based on the sheets attached. Send back a kind of impression of a shrug. They go into production five seconds later, and you poke software to hurry up with the behavior. You can feel the building looking over your shoulder here more than anywhere else.

Then the map design arrives back from creative, and you get to work applying it to the design in front of you, partially tuning out everything but the lobby camera. The ink compounds you removed from the paper earlier come in handy now, they’re still available to place back into the model. You lay down a few layers, fray the edges of the sheet a bit, and the map’s done. You compile the file and send it to the building’s main printing channel, request a package containing both the products from this job and the list of job IDs mechanics sent you.

It only takes about five more minutes to make it back to the vactube nearest the lobby, and the package hisses into the port the second you walk into the room. You pull it out and walk back into the lobby, cheerfully wave him over. He takes it from your hand with a sniff, and the clock in your feed stops. About thirty minutes, all told. You cross your fingers behind your back. The building taps his interface with an invoice, and he sends back his hourly rate. He’s midlevel, the wait only cut about two thousand out of the price. You let out a breath as the payment is processed and you get your cut. More than enough for today’s rent and your food. You pocket the extra, hear yourself telling him to have a nice day. He doesn’t respond, but you weren’t expecting him to.

He’s about halfway to the door when the alarm kicks in.

---