The outside of the hotel was wall-to-wall people, but no one paid me too much mind as I squeezed through to the front door and into the lobby. I passed through a cloud of smoke, cologne, and perfume and made my way to the front desk.
“Can I help you?”
The hotel clerk sat behind a faintly rippling force field, eyes staring up over a pair of bodega-rack purple sunglasses. A little fan sitting on the desktop next to him didn’t quite dry the sweat on his bronze skin.
“Yeah, I need to get into a room,” I said.
“You need a room?”
“No, I’m visiting someone.”
He turned the handset on the desk around deliberately with one finger. “So call him and have him ring you up.”
“It’s a surprise,” I told him.
He didn’t smile. “You working?”
“Sure.”
“Then call up.”
“It’s as—”
“Nobody likes surprises, kid.”
People around us had started to take notice, and a couple of tall guys with gold chains around their necks laughed. I leaned in closer, until my nose tingled from the force field.
“Look, he knows me.”
“Then have him let you in.”
Appealing to him wasn’t going to work; I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t know what my problem was, and he didn’t care, not even a little.
“What’s it going to take for you to give me a room key and let me up?”
He shrugged. “What do you got?”
“I’ve got some credit.”
“Five hundred.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” He was serious. I didn’t have anything close to that.
“That’s too much,” I said.
“Then beat it.”
“I can’t.”
He stared at me a few seconds longer, and then his heavy brow came back up just a hair. He leaned across the desk and lowered his voice.
“You think I’m stupid?” he asked. “I can see what you got in your pockets, right down to the panties you’re not wearing.”
The ration sheet. He had some kind of scanner aimed at me, and he’d seen the ration sheet. Wherever the emitter was, the angle must not have let him see into the backpack, at least, not yet.
“I’ll give you two punches,” I told him.
“Three.”
“Two, plus fifty yuan. That’s my final offer.”
He sucked his teeth for a minute before a faint smile crept across his thick lips. “What’s the name?”
“Eng, 423.”
He sighed, reaching under the desk and fishing out a key card. He held it between his fingers.
“The tickets,” he said.
I fished out the sheet and tore off two tickets. I passed them under the field, where he made them disappear. I swiveled the desk reader around and touched my card to the scanner, then punched in the amount. The LCD flickered green, and I snatched the key from his fingers.
“Watch your ass. Like I said, people around here—”
“Don’t like surprises. Got it.”
The two guys with the chains were still watching as I backed away, keeping me between the backpack and the front desk until I could turn and push back through the crowd to the elevator. The one on the left opened and a tired-looking woman with red hair stepped out. Fishnet stockings clung to her wiry legs, disappearing up under a miniskirt that barely cleared her crotch. She gave me a knowing glance as I passed her and stepped into the cramped car with a cloud of perfume fumes thick enough to catch fire. I tapped the contact for the fourth floor with one knuckle and held my breath as the car rattled its way up.
“Sam?” a voice said from the ad box speaker in the door.
“Not now.”
“If you want to opt out, you can present your card to the—”
“Look, I don’t want any plastic surgery, okay?”
“I hear that,” the door said, “but the question is, can you afford not to have any? I’m just a virtual construct, but even I can spot at least fifteen correctable imperfections and that’s just your face.”
“I don’t care.”
“Maybe not, but it matters. Believe me, it matters. If you don’t care about your appearance, then how—”
The car stopped and I slammed the button to open the doors with my palm. As soon as they parted enough for me to sneak through, I was out of there.
“BeauVisage!” the elevator called behind me, hammering my 3i with contact info as I stalked away. “The company is BeauVisage! They can fix you!”
The hallway upstairs didn’t smell much better. I passed a few more guys in the hallway, but nobody bothered me as I turned the corner and found the door marked 423.
I waited until the coast was clear, then slid the key card through the slot and waited for the click. The second I heard it, I slipped through and shut the door behind me.
The room was dark except for slits of light that shone in through the closed window blinds on the far side of the room. The air stank of heavy cologne mixed with something else, something edible that hung just underneath it.
The room was empty, and the bed still made. On one nightstand I could see a cell phone, so he hadn’t gone far, but it looked like I had the place to myself at least for a little while. I looked around and saw a pill sheet with six double-cross tabs still in the blisters on the nightstand next to a woman’s handbag. Wherever he was, he wasn’t alone.
I tore one of the pill tabs off, and as I slipped it in my pocket I looked back and saw light coming from under the bathroom door. I hadn’t even thought to check the bathroom.
Holding my breath, I crossed past the closet and back toward the closed door. I shouldered off the backpack and unzipped it, taking out the stun gun before knocking three times.
“Eng?”
No one answered. I opened the door and peeked inside. The overhead light had been left on in there, one of the two exposed tubes faded to a soft gray, and I could see little bottles of man products lined up along the back of the sink along with a stick of women’s deodorant.
As I stepped into the room, I smelled the food smell again and my stomach growled. There was food here, or there had been, and not just ration packs either. The smell came from real meat. Street meat.
I’d lived in a hotel room on the Row for a year before I got grabbed and eventually rescued, and I’d worked cleaning rooms for the old super, Wei, for most of it. I knew where to stash stuff. I lifted the porcelain back of the toilet off with a hollow scrape and laid it against the wall next to the sink. Sure enough, a little metal cooler sat just under the surface of the chemical soup there. I pulled it out warm and dripping, then laid it down in the shower basin and popped the latches.
Inside were more pill sheets, passports, forged ration sheets, and a handwritten order list he’d crossed some names off from. I quickly scanned down the column of names, until one of them caught my eye near the bottom:
Shao, Dragan (sec).
Like a lot of the others, his name was crossed off, maybe indicating he’d already picked up the passports. He had been here.
I thumbed past the stacks of paper and found the edge of a plastic bag with my finger. There were six vacuum-sealed packets in there. Each was filled with cubes of meat, each topped with a square of browned, fatty skin, all suspended in a stew of stock, spices, and rendered fat. Each was labeled with a handwritten sticker.
Scrapcake. Human meat.
“Fucking creep…”
I didn’t even think before I used my pocketknife to slit open the first bag, and then squeezed the glop into the toilet bowl. When I’d pressed out the last of it, I stopped myself a second before unconsciously sucking the grease off my thumb. The smell was intoxicating, making my stomach growl, and making me hate myself for not being able to help it.