2. Lemon

2 – Lemon

Grando heaved an enormous sigh and reached up to wipe his forehead. “Thank the dog’s balls! I was hoping you’d be able to see reason. For a minute there, I thought maybe your deck got scrambled from too much time in space…”

Hector tuned him out as he assessed his body. Everything ached, but his left leg felt numb. He turned the blaster on Grando and reached down to rub his thigh.

The crime boss started to step around the desk. “You okay? Did you wreck the skin?”

This skin is fresh. It wasn’t ready for all that aura. “Aura overload.” Hector scanned the room, looking for a place to sit. He’d ruined the only chair other than Grando’s, so he moved that way, pushing past the man to flop into the creaky, wobbly, old desk chair. All the while, he watched Grando and kept the blaster trained on him.

“Balls, man! Take a drink, and I’ll get you some pants.” Grando moved toward the two bodies.

“Don’t.” Hector partially depressed the trigger, making the blaster whine.

Grando chopped his hand in a negative gesture, shaking his head. “Don’t shoot, dammit! I’m just making sure Orin’s alive, and then I’ll get Pelo’s pants for you.”

If he were dead, I’d see his potentia leaking out. Hector watched, eyes narrowed, as the man stuck two of his thick fingers against the big goon’s neck.

“He’s still got a heartbeat. I’m glad, honestly. He’s smarter than average when it comes to my employees.” The crime boss straightened with a grunt, then he moved to the other thug, the one whose neck Hector had snapped. Again, he stooped, straining the seams on his tailored suit pants. He untied the drawstring on the thug’s baggy canvas pants and pulled them off. “You’re in luck. He didn’t shit himself.”

When he tossed the pants to Hector, he pointed to the door. “I’m just gonna call in one of the girls. Don’t worry”—he gestured to the body and the unconscious goon—“they see stuff like this all the time.”

Hector arched an eyebrow. The movement felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. His body wasn’t his body. Sighing, he shook his head, banishing the thoughts as he pulled the pants on over his naked legs. He knew he’d get used to his new skin eventually. If I keep it. He winced as he tried to make a fist with his right hand. The muscles and tendons all felt torn, never mind the fractured bone in his wrist. Even so, he clenched his jaw against the pain, tying the drawstring on the olive green pants.

“Hector, this is Lemon, a dancer here.”

He looked toward Grando’s voice and saw him standing near the door with a young woman. She looked like a doll—the kind soldiers in the guard would fight over, desperate to win the right to leave the bar with her contract. Even so, she had a certain quality, a certain presence, that warranted a second glance. Hector figured she was a lot older than she looked, but it was hard to tell with her smooth skin.

He guessed she’d been successful enough to afford a rejuvenation treatment or two. Still, you could always tell with a rejuv; even when they looked like they were barely out of their teens, there was an air about them that gave away clues toward their real age. Lemon’s first tell was her walk. She just moved too damn gracefully, too damn confidently, to be a young dancer at a place like that.

“Hector, huh?” She stared at him, taking him in just as he was doing to her.

“He’s a new employee.” Grando chuckled and pointed to Orin and the corpse. “Things got a little rough during the interview.”

“And what do you want from me?” Lemon took a step toward the door, shaking her head. “Something’s not right about him. Something in the eyes.”

“You wanna earn an extra hundred bits for a few nights or not?”

Lemon slowly turned, peering at Grando under angled, white-blonde eyebrows made all the more threatening by the sharp layer of her bangs. “For what?”

Grando shrugged. “I need you to put him up. Give him a place to crash. He’s starting from zero, but we’ve got big plans.”

“Two hundred a night.” Lemon held out a ring that blinked with tiny purple LEDs. Grando stared at her, his thick lips twisting as he contemplated her words. She tried another angle: “He’s young. He’s tall. He’s gonna eat a lot.”

Grando’s expression concerned Hector. He looked like he was a roll of the dice away from smashing her teeth out. After another moment of Lemon staring and Grando scowling, the tension finally broke, and the boss said, “One-seventy-five, and don’t think about countering again. Also, I’m leaving, and I need you to get him a bug pack. Something for—” Grando looked at Hector, adjusting one of his big gold rings. “What’s wrong with you, Hector? What kind of bugs should she get?”

“Regen—bone and tissue.” He paused, inhaling heavily, then added, “Aura conditioner too.” Unless you want me to fry this skin from the inside.

Lemon tapped her little ring. “That doesn’t sound cheap. Where do I even buy an aura pack? We don’t have ’em here.”

Grando sighed and pressed one of his rings against hers. Hector figured they were bit-lockers. Why weren’t they using an online encrypted bit-vault? Was that how things were done at that level? Physical bit-lockers?

As he pulled his hand away, the boss said, “That should cover it. You can get the aura bugs at Pete’s. A lot of the fighters have systems.” He looked at Hector and added, “Shitty ones.”

“Okay, but he, like, needs shoes and—”

“Check the lost and found. There’s a bunch of shit in there.” Grando looked at Hector again. “I’m out of here. Just go with Lemon. She’ll bring you to me tomorrow, and we can start talking about our plans.” He paused and nodded at the blaster. “I wouldn’t carry that around. The peacekeepers in this district are real bastards.”

Hector scowled at the man, contemplating an objection. He shook the idea off, though; he wasn’t in a position to bargain. It sounded like he’d get fixed up at least, and if he decided Grando was more trouble than he was worth, he’d ditch him in the morning. He nodded.

Grando frowned, but he nodded too, pushing his way past Lemon, but not before saying, “I’ll send Jam in here to take care of Orin and Pelo.” Then he slipped through the door and was gone. Lemon looked at Hector and clicked her tongue, walking closer. Her skirt and blouse were semi-transparent, just enough to reveal the shape of things that lay beneath the fabric. Hector studiously focused on her eyes.

She arched an eyebrow, flashed him a sardonic smile, and then some hidden device beeped, and her clothes shifted to solid black. “Better?”

“What?”

She scoffed. “Nice try, but you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to look so guilty. It’s not like I wasn’t trying to get noticed.”

Hector shrugged. I’m fresh off the deck, and you’re trying to make me say something dumb.

“You don’t talk much.” When Hector didn’t respond, she gestured to his bare feet. “Can you walk? We can go up to the front office and check the lost and found.”

He gingerly stood, wincing as the tendons in his feet and ankles screamed at the burden. He tuned the pain out, then looked at Lemon and nodded.

“Follow me, then.” She turned and sauntered to the door. Hector looked at the blaster, then set it on the desk. It was a clumsy, shoddy weapon anyway. It looked more likely to blow up in his hand than hit a target. He followed Lemon, focusing on the cold concrete pressing into the soles of his feet, letting the pain wrap itself around him like a red blanket as it mounted with each step.

Lemon looked over her shoulder, her straight, short hair dancing with the movement. “We’ve got a bug dispenser here. I’ll get you a pack while you put on a shirt.” She pushed open the door, and the music and lights of the club washed over him. Whatever else might have changed while he was on ice, strip clubs apparently hadn’t. Lewd holo-projections decorated the walls in garish reds, pinks, and blues. Women and men danced on pedestals all around the enormous space, and the crowd, writhing to the music, pressed close to their favorite performers.

Hector was surprised by the clientele, if not the décor; the clubs he’d been to in port cities, even on Luna and Europa, tended to be packed with spacers. Here, Hector saw a healthy mix of young and old—men, women, and other. One thing was constant, though: these were the dregs, the baseborn, the underclass—the silent masses, as Drake Conti once said over a tumbler of Venetian bourbon. How Esme had scowled!

“Hector?”

He blinked, realizing he’d already followed Lemon through the crowd to the front office, and she was holding the door open. “What?”

“Go look through that cabinet.” She pointed to a tall cupboard on the far wall of the office. “I’ll go fetch you an aid pack.”

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He nodded and pushed past her. When she closed the door and the music got a little quieter, he let out a shaky breath and braced his hands on the cabinet, leaning into it while he focused on his heart. It was racing. There was a half-empty bottle of soda on the counter, and he drained it. It was flat and warm, but his throat wanted more.

The thing about a new skin was that it did funny things to your brain. Hector’s old body had been genetically engineered for strength and endurance, and that was before he’d poured thousands of aura potentia into it—

Breathe the air, you’ll taste the spark, but hunt the rifts to light the dark!

The old rhyme about potentia drifted through his mind, a childhood memory summoned by the system printing familiar patterns into his new brain, no doubt. Aura was everywhere, but potentia was the refined, semi-conscious stuff everyone fought over. He tried to remember why he was thinking about it, and couldn’t. He held out his left hand and watched it tremble. Focus.

He opened the cabinet and rifled through the clothes, looking for something that would fit. He finally found a dark gray, pullover-style sweatshirt. It had a hood and a little pouch in the front, and it was comfortable. What more could he want? He pulled it over his head, and the scent of the previous owner’s deodorant wafted into his nose—spices and cedar.

He opened the next cabinet and found a dozen or so pairs of shoes. He had a hard time believing people were leaving shoes in a club, but then he remembered it was a strip club run by a criminal named Grando Scrim. Are Pelo’s shoes going to end up in this cabinet? He pulled out a promising-looking pair of well-worn black work boots.

Sitting on the little desk chair, he tugged them on. They were made of some kind of breathable, moisture-wicking fabric that conformed to his feet. They were comfortable, and the pressure felt good, supporting his throbbing tendons. The chair pulled him in, and he closed his eyes, adjusting his position until most of the pain in his body was just a distant throb. The lack of acute agony was so nice that he found himself drifting into a doze.

His rest was short-lived; Lemon opened the door after just a few minutes. Hector’s eyes snapped open, and he watched as she carefully pushed it shut and twisted the little lock, muting the throb of the club’s music. “Here,” she said, pressing a silver-foiled squeeze tube into his hand. Hector looked at the label: Fossbone Emergency Nanite Pack.

He wrinkled his brow. “Fossbone.” The word felt strange in his mouth.

“What? I mean, they’re no BioEuropa, but I haven’t heard of any lawsuits recently.”

Hector shook his head. How do you explain that you’ve been dead for two centuries and there were things that were familiar and yet disturbingly foreign?

He ripped the pull-tab off the tube and stuffed the nozzle into his mouth. As he squeezed the berry-flavored paste out, his new skin’s prodigious hunger reared its head, and his stomach gurgled. “I need to eat.”

“I know. Didn’t you hear what I said to Grando? I’ll buy you food.”

He nodded as he kept squeezing the tube into his mouth. When he finished, he held out his right hand to Lemon. “Pull on it.”

She tilted her head. “What?”