In double-fuck-you-news, the chef returns with a sushi boat the length of Zef's arm and sets it down between them.
Zef retracts his arm, stuffing his hand between his knees. He chastises himself. He needs to get that data, and he was trying, but he really can't give into Gray's charms. Can't ignore the fact he comes with a neon yellow warning label.
Zef's stomach snarls so loud it's embarrassing, so subterfuge can wait.
"Bon-appe-fuckin-tit," says Gray.
Then he takes the toothpick out of his teeth and stabs one of the sashimi pieces with it, dunks it in the soy sauce and—Zef nearly stands up and leaves—Gray...smears wasabi over the sushi like it's toast and the wasabi is jam? Like the sushi's a brick and the wasabi is mortar. Then he eats it in one go.
Zef and the chef both stare in horror.
"What the actual fuck is wrong with you?" Zef says.
The chef makes a vaguely distraught noise of agreement.
Gray swallows. Testosterone gifted him an unfairly sexy and prominent Adam's apple, which bobs. Sexily. He tips his head back and sighs. "If it isn't burning out my sinuses, what's the point?"
"Enjoying the actual flavour of the food?" Zef takes some sashimi and eats it with a tiny piece of wasabi and the soy sauce, as God intended. It is actually...pretty delicious. Fresh and meaty. The chef nods his approval and disappears behind a curtain, incapable of watching Gray desecrate his food anymore.
"So, I got a question for you," Zef says. He should really avoid the topic of the car, but if he's going to take Gray down then he'll need to get to know the guy. Know thine enemy 'n all that. "Why'd you take me joy-riding in a stolen car, anyway? Doesn't that like...exponentially expand the chances of getting caught?"
A sardonic chuckle. "You're assuming I care about getting caught."
"You don't care if you go to prison? Or have to pay poverty-inducing fines?"
"What prison could hold me? How are they gonna make me pay?"
Cocky bastard.. "You're confident of that?"
Gray swallows another sushi abomination, leans back on the stool and glances down the row of open windows along the boulevard, each cooking up something different. He lifts a hand, fingers poised to snap.
"Watch this."
The click of his snapping fingers echoes loud by Zef's ear. In response, the long line of lit windows wink out one by one, shutters closing in front of the customers, gasps and a couple shrieks following the wave. Then, just as easily, the shutters open, the lights come back on in unison. A choreographed dance of hijacked technology.
"Stop! Jesus, I didn't need a demonstration," Zef says.
"What?"
Zef half covers his face at the stares they're receiving from those who saw Gray's display. "You're gonna get the wrong kind of attention, messing around like that."
Gray scoffs. "You're so buttoned up."
Now Zef is offended. "I am not."
"You are, look at you." Gray leans in, both intimate and intimidating. "Button down and slacks. Don't drink. Scared of cops and jail and fines. Stockholm syndromed to your nine-to-five after your first day. Here." Leaning closer still, his nimble fingers tug open the top button on Zef's shirt. "Loosen up a little."
Caught between affronted and flustered, Zef tries to play it cool. He's supposed to be flirting with the aim of getting his hands on Gray for a single second, but Gray is doing a better job of disarming him. He wants to argue, but it would mean exposing his throat, his belly, his vulnerabilities. The transition care he can't afford. His dad living in a trailer one technical malfunction away from power outages and heatstroke. The indignity of losing his work and hard-earned ideas to a corporate behemoth.
If Zef is a small fish in the sea, Bionic Capital is a shark—the kind that gets fatter and bigger and hungrier as it cannibalises its own kind. How many smaller companies were absorbed in its makeup? Like corporate body horror. A gross monster made up of mergers and acquisitions instead of vestigial limbs and rotten teeth.
What's Zef? What are either of them, against that?
All he's got are his ideas. And the hope they can fix something. Not everything. Just something.
Gray swallows his wasabi with a side of sushi. "Did I strike a nerve?"
"No." What right did Gray have to judge? Murderer. "Okay. Yeah. I might not match your ideal of an anarchist free spirit, but I'm trying in my own way, all right?"
Gray twists his chopsticks in a please elaborate gesture.
Zef debates telling him. But what does he have to lose? "I've got this idea for an implant. I know it'd work. I know it'd help. But honestly? Don't have the creds for the R&D. Bionic Capital does."
"What kind of implant?"
"You know that one that came out a few years back? They were calling it Tranquility."
Gray nods.
"It's shit. But I've got ideas for a better one."
Gray looks interested. A quiet light of curiosity and uncertainty in his sleepless eyes.
Zef has to be careful who he talks to about his ideas, how much he shares. It wouldn't be hard to take the template to a competitor and bam, Zef's idea suddenly isn't proprietary enough for investors, and then he'll be rendering bionic fleshlights or something, instead. Gray's not an engineer, he's an assassin, but one that works for CyberSuite. So Zef only tells him the basics. How the current implants can't adjust for individual variances, can't integrate with environmental or circumstantial factors, aren't intelligent enough to distinguish between a panic attack and an actual heart attack. "I want something that learns about its user, that teaches coping strategies, reaches out in emergencies, but most of all marries the like...the body and the mind. That connection between mental and physical. To, like, help make people happier and healthier, I guess."
Gray listens attentively. He stopped eating to study Zef while he talks. Self-consciousness sinks its teeth into Zef by the end of his ramble. His hands, gesticulating and shaping the implant from his mind as if it's a physical thing in front of him, fall to his lap. Maybe it's foolish to believe Gray would care. He is, by photographic evidence, a psycho. Empathy probably means as much to him as hieroglyphics. Why would he care about an implant for helping the mental health crisis of the nation?
He'll just dismiss it. Tell Zef he's crazy.
He does neither of those things.
He says, "That's a beautiful idea."
"You...think so?"
"Yeah."
"You're not shitting me for a laugh?"
"Naw, darling." Gray's expression warms. The slow glow of dawn. "Hope you'll forgive my lack of faith. 'S got nothing to do with you. World's just never fair, and often not good neither. But—" A troubled look crosses his features. "I hope you can make it happen."
The anxiety writhing in Zef's guts takes on a different quality. Lighter, fluttering. Gray's knee jiggles restlessly. His index and middle finger tap in time with it on the oxidised copper bartop.
Does Zef make him nervous, too?
The cognitive dissonance hits Zef hard as the car collision that nearly took them out yesterday. This man murdered a bunch of people. Surely murderers don't get anxious.
And, yet.
It's as close to an opportunity as Zef's got. Hesitantly, he moves his hand across the bartop towards Gray's tapping fingers. He intends to still them. A comforting, calming gesture.
If his index finger's print makes contact with the tattoo and downloads the program files, well, that's good too.
Zef's fingers smooth over Gray's second knuckle, over the vine tattoo curling around his pinky. Gray ceases tapping the bartop. Freezes. Just for a second. Just long enough Zef gets a readout that the data transfer started. One percent. Five.
Gray retracts his hand. Not just his hand. His whole body recoils. He's off his stool, standing, and the red in his tattoos flares like the bright colours of a venomous animal. Don't touch. I bite. The worst thing is his expression, morphing from soft and considering to—
Zef can't place it. Cold, closed off and cornered all at once.
"Sorry—" Zef starts.
"Don't touch me," Gray says, voice rough and noose-tight. "Don't ever touch me."
"I'm sorry," Zef says again. "I didn't kn— Are you okay?"
But Gray doesn't answer. He turns and leaves, vanishing into the smoggy streets.
A pretzel of feeling twists in Zef's heart. Fear that he just riled a dangerous man, poked the proverbial dragon in the proverbial gonads. Frustration, too.
How is he supposed to get the data on Gray's implants now?
He's a little annoyed, too, because now he's gotta pay their tab.
There's no bell to ring, but there is a windchime of scrap metal. Zef gives that a swipe. The chef appears from behind his curtain.
He patiently informs Zef the tab was prepaid before he arrived.