“I said pay up,” the guy with the cigarette said.
He took out his cash reader, and I slipped the card into it. Sure enough, the extra had been covered. I watched the account drop down to zero.
“See anything else you like?” the guy asked.
I started to make a snide remark when a pair of devices resting in the trunk’s corner did catch my eye—two palm-sized oval remote controls, each fashioned of shiny white plastic or metal. I recognized them. I’d seen Nix use one before.
“Holy shit, are those free-standing gate remotes?”
The guy smiled and plucked one out. He held it up and turned it under the red light so I could see. It had a button in the center, another button to activate a holodisplay, and dials on either edge. Even two years ago they had been on the restricted tech list. The haan made them part of the last package, but only for security personnel, and even then only for the heavies.
“These don’t come cheap,” he said.
“How much?” I asked. Not even Dragan had one of these. Something like this could be handy for quick escapes, especially if I wasn’t paying for it.
“Hundred thousand,” the man said.
He chuckled when he saw my face fall. His friend laughed again.
“That gonna mean a lot of dick sucking,” he said.
One hundred thousand was high, but the truth was that Dao-Ming was funding this little shopping trip and Dao-Ming was pretty loaded. I figured it didn’t hurt to ask.
“How do I know it even works?” I asked.
Still chuckling, the guy took the remote from me and aimed it at the wall behind him. He activated the holoscreen, and a bright point of white light appeared there. He messed with the dial, and a hole opened that looked directly into the adjoining room.
I crossed in front of him and peered through the opening. I pushed my head through, feeling the familiar lag of gate travel as I did, and then it came out on the other side. I looked to my right and saw an ugly, sweaty man sitting naked on the bunk there, looking up at the ceiling with a cigar sticking up from his lips like a smokestack. A topless woman with her silver stretch skirt hiked up over her bony hips bounced up and down in his lap with a blank, distant expression on her face. I could see the track marks on her arms as she gripped his freckled shoulders.
I quickly retreated, and he closed the gate.
“Satisfied?” the guy asked.
“Thrilled,” I said, making a face.
“Her card’s reading zero,” the pockmarked guy said. “Quit wasting time.”
“I’ll give you fifty thousand for it,” I told cigarette guy.
“Fuck you. One hundred thousand.”
“Seventy,” I said. “One hundred is bullshit.”
He rolled the cigarette between his lips.
“Ninety.”
“Eighty,” I told him. “That’s as high as I can go.”
“She’s broke,” Pockmarks said. “Would you quit fucking around?”
“You get me eighty,” he said, “it’s yours. If you’re pulling my chain, though, you’re gonna wish you didn’t.”
“Hang on,” I said. I got Dao-Ming back on the chat.
They’ve got a gate remote, I told her. Could come in handy.
What does it do?
They can open free-standing gates. You can store endpoints, too. They’re good for getting around in a pinch.
She thought for a minute.
How much do they want for it?
80K.
The pockmarked guy had started to chuckle along with the other one, when the cash reader, still holding my card, beeped. The number flipped from zero to eighty thousand.
“Holy shit,” the one with the cigarette said under his breath, leaning closer to the screen as if making sure he hadn’t hallucinated it.
“That cover it?” I asked him.
They both looked from the screen to me, and their eyes had turned predatory. Without saying anything to each other, I could see they’d both come to the same idea that if I had that much money at my disposal, how much more might they be able to squeeze from me.
The guy with the cigarette accepted the cash, knocking the balance back down to zero. I took the remote, and slipped it into my pocket.
The two looked at each other in a way that I didn’t like. I grabbed Dao-Ming’s container, which was heavier than it looked, and slipped it through the Escher field.
“Nice doing business with you,” I said. The guy with the cigarette nodded, but his partner had eased himself behind me, standing between me and the door in the cramped space.
“How’d a stray like you get so much cash?” Cigarette man asked.
“How’d you get your hands on a gate remote?” I asked. He took the cigarette from his mouth, and dropped it on the floor where he used the toe of his shoe to grind it out.
“I killed a haan,” he said, “and took it.”
He didn’t kill any haan. No haan would wander around in the Row and if one had and this guy jumped him, he probably wouldn’t be standing in front of me now.
“Where’d you get the fucking money?” his friend asked. “You someone important?”
“Not really.”
“You got a rich daddy or something?”
They hadn’t expected me to pay what they asked. Too late, I saw that neither of them expected anything like that much money, and the smell of it had turned them dangerous.
“We keep her,” Pockmarks said, “and we keep the cash and the remote, plus the money for selling her off.”
“Try it,” I said, trying to push past the guy. “Nice doing business with you, asshole—”
He never telegraphed the punch even a little bit. One second he stood with his hands by his sides, one open and one holding the gun. The next his free hand jerked out and creamed me right in the cheek hard enough to knock me back. I staggered, and fell back onto my butt.
“Motherfucker…” I muttered. Blood ran from my nose, and trickled down over my lips and chin. They both laughed.
“Grab her,” Cigarette guy said. The one who hit me reached down to haul me back up, and I whipped the palm pistol around, snapping the butt down on his gun hand as hard as I could.
He barked out a cry of pain and the gun fell onto the floor with a clunk as he pulled back, holding his wounded hand out in front of him. His index and middle fingers both jutted out at odd angles, broken between the first two knuckles.
“You fucking bitch!”
I stood, sticking the pistol up toward his face and he backed away as I started toward him. His back had thumped into the door, when I heard the click behind my right ear. The cold metal of a gun barrel pressed against the back of my head.
“Take it easy,” Cigarette guy said.
“Tell him to take it easy,” I said, still pointing the gun.
“Drop the piece, and I won’t blow your brains out.”
I could feel the barrel shake as it dug into my head. He’d was so amped one bad shake might make him fire without even meaning to. I lowered the gun, pointing it at the ground.
Something hit me in the ribs, and I fell to the floor next to the trunk.
“Grab her, you useless piece of shit!”
The guy with the gun lunged. His heel came down and I rolled to avoid it, knocking over a stack of boxes. One of them popped open and sent loose bullets scattering all over the floor around me. I still had the pistol in my hand and jammed the barrel down on the guy’s foot where he’d tried to stomp me. Before he could move it, I pulled the trigger.
At first he didn’t react, but a beat later blood began to pool around his shoe and it registered in his drug-fried brain. I aimed the pistol toward him, afraid he’d shoot, but he didn’t even try. His mouth dropped open, and he fell to the floor. He pushed his palm over the hole to try to stop the blood coming out.