The car slid through Hadrian's streets with startling quietness. The engine purred; she didn't feel so much as a bump as the slums rolled by. All the seats were sheathed in sleek, ink-dark leather, and she could smell some kind of pine-scented freshener wafting through the interior. This thing was probably worth more than her house ten times over.
Travelling in corporate luxury might have been nice if it had actually been her idea.
Piper sat sullenly in the back seat, arms folded as she watched the city fly by through the tinted windows. In the driver's seat, Toran directed the vehicle with deft, effortless movements, while Odiye lounged on the passenger side.
She thought all kinds of nasty thoughts, about ramming a boot into the back of Toran's smug head; about slashing throats with the flick-blade she'd managed to hold onto through the whole mess. They hadn't searched her before bundling her into the car; the smug bastards didn't think she was a threat.
"Piper," Odiye said quietly as the car rose up a shallow incline. "I know you are confused right now but please, do not do anything foolish."
"Like what?"
"I know you still have your knife."
She blinked in surprise. "What about it?" she managed after a moment.
He craned his neck leaning around to look at her with an attempt at a reassuring smile. "We are not your enemies here, and I do not wish to see you hurt."
"Yeah, what a shame that would be," Toran muttered. "Just keep your little sticker to yourself and we'll get along fine."
Piper bristled, but in the end she relented, sliding the flick-blade from her pocket and placing it down on the seat beside her. She gave Odiye a pointed look.
"Happy?"
"Happier."
She pulled a face at that, and Odiye turned back around. Piper folded her arms again and shifted in her seat, still seething. Her mind snapped back to Arden and her mother getting carted off to god-only-knew where by these spivs. Could she really trust these corporate bludgeons to protect them if the codewraiths came back?
Then, like a thunderbolt, someone else exploded into her mind and she jerked upright in shock. With everything that had happened he'd slipped out of her mind
"Oh, shit!" The guilt hit her like a punch in the face. "We've got to go back!"
"We're not going back," Toran grunted, accenting the point by lazily swinging the car to the right around the next bend.
"No, you don't understand, when the wraith came after me I wasn't on my own!" The words came out in a torrent. "Please, my boyfriend, he wasn't at the house. One of those things smashed him clean through a wall. He needs help – a doctor! God, I don't even know if he's alive!"
"Piper, slow down-,"
"We can't go back." Toran shot Odiye a frustrated glance.
Odiye waved a dismissive hand at his comrade, keeping his eyes on Piper. "What is his name?"
"Kirk! Kirk Balfour."
"And where is he?"
She raked her hands through her hair, trying to think. "I... we were on our way back up on the docks. We were at... err... Cannington Rig Way, then the first one of those things jumped us."
Odiye bit his lip; glanced at Toran. The other operative gave an exasperated shrug.
"We can't go back for him," Odiye told her, his voice tight. "We have to take you to AmpCore."
"So you're just doing nothing?!"
"I think you've confused us with a couple of slum-cops," Toran snapped, and she felt the car accelerate.
"But-,"
"Our orders were to deal with the wraiths." His eyes flashed back at her irately. "And then we found you, and I really don't think you understand the mess you've made. I don't give a shit about your boytoy. If he's hurt he can find a doctor."
She reached for the flick-blade then; thought she was quick enough.
Odiye was faster. Before she could grab the weapon, it was yanked away from her grasping fingers by an unseen force, and thumped into Odiye's open palm. In his other hand his rod glowed faintly. She stared at him for a moment, mind racing as she thought about lunging into the front seat and just taking her chances with her fists.
In the end, the rational part of her brain won out. She'd be no help to Kirk if she got herself locked in a cell or killed. Gritting her teeth in frustration, she contented herself with kicking the back of his chair.
"I'm sorry," he said, wincing. "But Kirk is not important right now."
"Maybe not to you."
He turned back around, stuffing the blade into his pocket. "Not to the people that matter."
The words should have been an insult, but she caught an undercurrent of something else in Odiye's voice – a kind of resignation, as though he didn't matter either. Silence seeped into the car again, with only the hum of the engine to keep them company. The slum buildings outside began to give way to larger structures with firmer foundations; solid steel and blast-hardened rigging.
Billboards started glaring at her, assaulting her eyes with neon promises she could never pay for.
Protect your home with Skiltron Fireware, the only home defence package that cares as much as you do!
Level up your gameplay with a Ness-Net Ultraport!
Choose Ardenne Industries personal protection sheathes: because you have the right to defend yourself.
Real-Raid Pharmaceuticals – take yourself to greater heights with our Olympus subscription!
A world she existed in but could never touch. She felt her face twitching. A million ways to drive yourself into a happy, early grave, provided at every expense by the vampires that had Hadrian bought up under lock and key.
She tried to calm herself down. Tried to convince herself. Kirk was tough. He would still be alive, and they would find each other again. She just needed to play this corporate game for a little while.
"You say I have these implants," Piper murmured eventually. "So what are they, exactly? Is that how you use those... magic wand things? Are you two cyborgs?"
"They're called Amplifiers," Toran replied smoothly. "And cyber augmentations are outlawed. AmpCore uses corporate sanctioned skeletal grafts."
She raised an eyebrow. "Sounds a lot like augmenting to me."
"Well, it's all in the fine print isn't it?" he said, flashing her a sly smile.
Typical corporate snake, she thought bitterly. Since the calamity that destroyed Hadrian South all research and development into artificial intelligence and human augmentation had been banned, but she was hardly surprised to find that the corps had their own little work around.
"And these grafts do... what, exactly?"
"It's complicated," Odiye said, casting a warning glance at his partner. "But at bedrock, they allow the manipulation of matter."
"Oh, is that all?"
"Think about it." He looked around at her. "You said you felt a connection to the wraith, and that you wanted it to die. Then it did. You made it happen."
"I don't know what happened," she snapped back. "And I think I'd know if some corp butcher crammed a bunch of circuits into me."
"Well, it looks like somebody did," Toran muttered.
Piper shot him an acid look and sank back into her seat. It was demented. She'd be lucky to scrape together enough crypts to score some basic painkillers, let alone the cutting edge of corporate tech. If she had that kind of money she would have left Hadrian far behind years ago.
A sudden flare of blazing neon signwork gushed through the car's tinted windows as they looped left onto a broad highway that cut through the centre of Hadrian. A blizzard of cars surrounded them, humming their way at blistering speeds across the mag-metal lined roadways. Toran flicked a switch beneath the steering wheel, locking the car to its auto trajectory.
Through the front window, Piper could see exactly where they were going. The great cluster of spires that symbolised everything she hated about this place. The dark heart of the world.
It took them five minutes to zip along the highway before they hit Hadrian's centre. As they plunged into the clumped, crypt-lathered district, she could have been sick just looking at it.
Decadence spilled from every orifice, with whole buildings dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. Men and women flooded by, all crisp, glittering suits and body-hugging dresses, smoking elegant cigarillos and brash, black cigars. She saw more than one articulated limousine snake by, all watched over by pristinely uniformed corporate security officers. No walk-the-beat, knuckle-dragging cops for this part of town, no.
Only the best.
Toran guided them through it, retaking control of the car and sliding through the flow. Between the revellers there were swarms of serious-looking people, haloed by glittering data streams, accompanied by floating data screens and chattering into internal comms, eyes shielded by tech visors that danced with market projections, stock holdings and profit-loss margins.
"You guys live out here?" she asked. "Must be a fat packet AmpCore pays for the hired help."
"We don't live here," Odiye said sharply, a shooting a hostile glance back at her. "We live at the academy. AmpCore is supported by corporate sponsors. Not everyone outside of the docks lives a life of luxury."
Cry me a fucking river.
"Dear, oh, dear," she chuckled, shaking her head. "Even the secret police are bought and paid for around here, eh?"
"I'm glad you've still got your sense of humour," Toran replied breezily. "But you'd do well to remember who you are, and where you are. If we're right about what's under your skin, you shouldn't even exist. You're a glitch in the system, Piper."
She gave him a derisive snort. "Meaning what, exactly?"
"The people that run Hadrian don't like glitches. If they want to remove a problem, they will." He glanced back at her with a thin smile that sent a shiver up her spine. "Just keep that in mind next time you start running your mouth."
That was enough to shut her up. Piper swallowed hard, nervously tucking her hair behind her ears. As corp threats went, that one was pretty explicit, and it set her stomach turning when she realised just how easily her life could be extinguished out here. No friends, no family, just the corporations looking down on an anomaly; calculating whether she should be solved or erased.
She gnawed a thumbnail and decided to keep her insults to herself until she knew just what the hell she was about to walk into.
The car swung out of the main district down a bustling side street, the great ziggurats of the corporations vanishing from view. Toran's fingers flashed at something on the right side of the steering wheel that she couldn't see, and then twisted the vehicle to the right into a downward spiral of dark mag-metal roadway.
They were descending, and fast. Light faded away above them before they levelled out and depositing them into a narrow, cylindrical tunnel. She saw something glowing at the far end.
"What's that?" she asked as the glow grew in size and intensity.
"Security field," Toran grunted. "Relax."
"You relax." Piper bristled, eyes fixed on the approaching light. As they drew close she realised it was a lattice of cobalt coloured lasers. Neither of her chaperones seemed concerned, but she couldn't stop herself tensing as they passed through it.
She felt the invasion of privacy. The beams slid formlessly through the car, but she felt them sting her bones, scanning her. For a gut lurching moment her mind seemed to jump out of her body, following one of those streams of light up and up, riding the wave of sensor data through the labyrinth of circuit pathways overhead.
Then she slammed back into the back seat of the car. Fire blazed behind her eyes and she let out a gasp of pain, clamping her hands to her forehead.
"What the hell?"
"Piper?" Odiye's voice was more confused than anything else. "Are you alright?"
"Yeah – shit – yeah, I think so." She blinked several times as the pain began to recede, trying to figure out what had just happened. "What is that thing?"
"It's just a security scanner, Christ," Toran drawled.
Odiye frowned. "It shouldn't create that kind of reaction in anyone."
"Well, apparently I'm all special," Piper muttered bitterly, massaging her temples. "Are we there yet?"
"We are indeed."
Ahead of them a circular door at the end of the tunnel irised open and the car shot through. Piper straightened up, leaning to look between the front seats.
Her jaw dropped.
Beneath the streets of Hadrian's heart, a vast, hemispherical cavern had been excavated, like a whole world under the one she knew. It could easily have encompassed the entire slum of the docks, spanning hundreds of meters in diameter, and at its centre a massive structure jutted out of the cavern base. Piper peered closer, her chest heaving in the constricting embrace of fear and anticipation.
Shaped like a stepped pyramid, the building climbed up out of the earth, its matte black walls plastered with rolling corporate logos. Smaller structures were clustered around it – a whole satellite village that thrummed with activity. Flares of light erupted in open spaces outside the main building, and she could see tiny figures darting back and forth. Sleek unmarked cars like the one she currently sat in zipped back and forth, and she could see the spindly structures of guard towers that formed a grid across the cavern floor.
Piper's stomach lurched as the car suddenly dipped downward, mounting a wide ramp-road that cut straight down towards the neon temple. As the academy drew closer she shrank against the seat back, unable to tear her eyes away. She couldn't wrap her head around it. This couldn't be her life. She couldn't be here.
"Piper," Odiye murmured. "Welcome to AmpCore."
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