Gods of Risk

  The screen jumped, and Hutch was there, scowling into the camera. He was naked from the waist up, his pale hair messy. The hardness in his expression was clear, even through the connection.

  “Yeah?” Hutch said. It was a noncommittal greeting. If security had been watching over David’s shoulder, they wouldn’t even be sure that he and Hutch knew each other.

  “We need to meet,” David said. “Tonight. It’s important.”

  Hutch was silent. A dry tongue ran across the man’s lower lip and he shook his ragged head. David’s heart was thudding like little hammer blows against his rib cage.

  “Don’t know what you mean, cousin,” Hutch said.

  “No one’s listening in. I’m not busted. But we have to talk. Tonight,” David said. “And you have to bring Leelee.”

  “You want to say that again?”

  “One hour. The usual place. You have to bring Leelee.”

  “Yeah, I thought maybe you were giving me some kind of order there, little man,” Hutch said, his voice buzzing with anger. “I’m going to tell myself that you burned this number because you got a little drunk or some shit. Out of my deep fucking kindness, I’m going to pretend you didn’t forget yourself, yeah? So you get yourself back to bed and sleep until you’re sober.”

  “I am sober,” David said. “But it has to be tonight. It has to be now.”

  “Not going to happen,” Hutch said and leaned forward to shut off the connection.

  “I’ll call security,” David said. “If you don’t, I’ll call security. I’ll tell them everything.”

  Hutch froze. Sat back. He pressed his hands together palm to palm, index fingers touching his lips like he was praying. David squeezed his hands into fists, then released them, squeezed and released. An uncomfortable creeping moved up the back of his neck and onto his scalp. Hutch drew in a long breath and let it out slow.

  “All right,” he said. “You come to me. One hour.”

  “And Leelee.”

  “Heard you the first time,” Hutch said, his voice cool and gray as slate. “But anything smells like a setup, and your little girlfriend dies first. You savvy?”

  “You don’t need to hurt her. This isn’t a setup. It’s business.”

  “So you say,” Hutch said and cut the feed. David’s hands were trembling. He shouldn’t have said that about going to security, but it was the only leverage he had. The only thing that would make Hutch listen. When he got there, he could explain it all. It would be all right. He stuffed the hand terminal in his pocket, stood silently for a moment, then shifted the wall to the still from Gods of Risk. Two men facing each other with the fate of everything in the balance. David lifted his chin and picked up the satchel.

  When he came into the common room, Aunt Bobbie frowned.

  “Going somewhere?” she asked.

  “Friend,” he said, shrugging and pulling the satchel closer to his hip. “Just a thing.”

  “But it’s here, right? In Breach Candy?”

  A new tickle of anxiety lifted the hair at the back of his neck. Her tone wasn’t accusing or suspicious. That made it worse.

  “Why?”

  Aunt Bobbie nodded toward the monitor with its red border and earnest announcer.

  “Curfew,” she said.

  David could feel the word trying to get into his mind, trying to mean something that he didn’t let it mean.

  “What curfew?”

  “They put the whole city on first-stage lockdown. No unaccompanied minors on the tube system or service tunnels, no gatherings in the common areas after seven. Doubled patrols too. If you’re heading out of the neighborhood, you may have to send your regrets,” she said. Then, “David? Are you okay?”

  He didn’t remember sitting down. He was just on the kitchen floor, his legs folded under him like some kind of Zen monk. His skin was slick with sweat even though he didn’t feel hot. Hutch was going to meet him and he wouldn’t be there. He’d think it was a setup. And he’d have Leelee with him because David had told him to. Had insisted. Threatened even. Without thinking, he pulled out his hand terminal and requested a connection to Hutch. The address came back invalid. It had already been deleted.

  “David, what’s the matter?”

  She was leaning over him now, her face a mask of concern. David waved his hand, feeling like he was underwater. No unaccompanied minors. He had to get to Martineztown. He had to go now.

  “I need a favor,” he said, and his voice sounded thin and strangled.

  “All right.”

  “Come with me. Just so I can use the tube.”

  “Um. Okay,” she said. “Let me grab a clean shirt.”

  They walked the half kilometer to the tube station in silence. David kept his hands in his pockets and his satchel on the other side of his body so that Aunt Bobbie might not see how full it was. He hated this. His chest felt tight and he needed to pee even though he didn’t really. At the tube station, a red-haired security man in body armor and carrying an automatic rifle stopped them. David felt the mass of the drugs pulling at his shoulder like a lead weight. If they asked to see what was in the satchel, he’d go to prison forever. Leelee would be killed. He’d lose his place in Salton.

  “Name and destination, please?”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper, MCRM,” Aunt Bobbie said. “This is my nephew, David. He just got his placement, and I’m taking him to a party.”

  “Sergeant?” the security man said. “Marines, huh?”

  A shadow passed over her face, but her smile dispelled it.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The security man turned to David. His expression seemed friendly. David tasted vomit and fear at the back of his throat.

  “Party?”

  “Yes. Sir,” he said, “yes, sir.”

  “Well, don’t do any permanent damage, son,” the security man said, chuckling. “Carry on, Sergeant.”

  And then they were past him and into the tube station proper. The white LEDs seemed brighter than usual, and his knees struggled to support him as he walked up to the kiosk. When he got the tickets for Martineztown, Aunt Bobbie looked at him quizzically but didn’t say anything. Fifteen minutes to Aterpol, then a change of cars, and twenty to Martineztown. The other people in the car were grubby, their clothes rough at the edges. An old man with an exhausted expression and yellowed eyes sat across from them with a crying infant ignored in his arms. An immensely fat woman in the back of the car shouted obscenities into her hand terminal, someone on the other side of the connection shouting back. The air smelled of bodies and old air filters. With every passing kilometer, Aunt Bobby’s expression grew cooler and less trusting. He wanted to be angry with her for thinking that he wouldn’t have friends in Martineztown, for being prejudiced against the neighborhood just because it was older and working class. It would have been easier if she hadn’t been right.

  At the Martineztown station, David turned to her and put his hand to her, palm out.

  “Okay, thank you,” he said. “Now just stay here, and I’ll be right back.”

  “What’s going on here, kid?” Aunt Bobbie asked.

  “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Just wait for me here, and I’ll be right back.”

  Aunt Bobbie crossed her arms. All warmth was gone from her face. A bright flare of resentment lit David’s mind. He didn’t have time to reassure her.

  “Just wait,” he said sharply, then spun on his heel and hurried off. A few seconds later, he risked a glance back over his shoulder. Aunt Bobbie hadn’t moved. Her crossed arms and disapproving scowl could have been carved into stone. The LEDs of the tube station turned her into a black silhouette. David turned the corner, and she was gone. His satchel bounced against his hip, and he ran. It wasn’t more than fifty meters before he was winded, but he pushed on the best he could. He didn’t have time. Hutch might be there already.

  And in point of fact, he was.

  The crates had been rearranged. All them were stacked against the wal
ls, packed tight so that no one and nothing could hide behind them. The only exception was a doubled stack standing to Hutch’s left and right like bodyguards. Like the massive sides of a great throne. Hutch stood in the shadows between them, a thin black cigarette clinging to his lip. His yellow shirt hung loose against his frame, and the muscles of his arms each seemed to cast their own shadows. The brushed black pistol in his hand made his scars seem like an omen.

  Leelee knelt in front of him, in the center of the room, hugging herself. Her hair was lank and greasy looking. Her skin was pale except right around her eyes where the rash-red of crying stained her. She was wearing a man’s shirt that was too big for her and a pair of work pants stained by something dark and washed pale again. When David cleared his throat and stepped into the room, her expression went from surprise to despair. David wished like hell he’d thought to stop at a bathroom.

  “Hey there, little man,” Hutch said. The insincerity of his casualness was a threat. “Now then, there was something you wanted to see me about, yeah?”

  David nodded. The thickness in his throat almost kept him from speaking.

  “I want to buy her,” David said. “Buy her debt.”

  Hutch laughed softly, then took a drag on his cigarette. The ember flared bright and then dimmed.

  “Pretty sure we covered that already,” Hutch said, and the words were smoke. “You don’t have that kind of cash.”

  “A quarter. You said I had a quarter.”

  Hutch’s eyes narrowed and he tilted his head to the side. David dropped his satchel to the floor and slid it toward Leelee with his toe. She reached out a thin hand toward it.

  “If you touch that bag, I will end you,” Hutch said to Leelee, and she flinched back. “How about you tell me what that’s supposed to be?”

  “I cooked a batch. A big one. The biggest I’ve ever done,” David said. “Mostly, it’s 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine. I did a run of 5-hydroxytryptophan too since I didn’t need to order anything extra to do it. And 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine. Some of that too. I got all the reagents myself. I did all the work. It’s got to be worth more than four times what I put into it, and you get all of it free. That’s the deal.”

  “You…,” Hutch said, then paused, bit his lip. When he spoke again, he had a buzz of outrage in his voice. “You cooked a batch.”

  “It’s got plenty. Lots.”

  “You. Stupid. Fuck,” Hutch said. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you just handed me? How am I going to move that much shit? Who’s going to buy it?”

  “But you get it free.”

  Hutch pointed the gun at the satchel.

  “I flood the market, and the prices go down. Not just for me. For everybody. You understand that? Everyone. People start coming up from Dhanbad Nova because they hear we’ve got cheap shit. All the sellers up there start wondering what I mean by it, and I’ve got drama.”

  “You could wait. Just hold on to it.”

  “I’m going to have to, right? Only it gets out that I’m sitting on an egg like that, someone gets greedy. Decides maybe it’s time to take me on. And boom, I got drama again. Cut it how you want, kid. You just fucked me.”

  “He didn’t know, Hutch,” Leelee said. She sounded so tired.

  Hutch’s pistol barked once, shockingly loud in the small space. A gouge appeared in the floor next to Leelee’s knee like a magic trick. She started crying.

  “Yeah,” Hutch said. “I didn’t think you wanted to interrupt me again. David, you’re a sweet kid, but you’re dumb as a fucking bag of sand. What you just handed me here? It’s a problem.”

  “I’m…I’m sorry. I just…”

  “And it’s going to require a little”—Hutch took a drag on his cigarette and raised the pistol until David could see him staring down the black barrel—“risk management.”

  The air in the room changed as the door behind him opened. He turned to look, but someone big moved past him too fast to follow. Something quick and violent happened, the sounds of a fight. David was hit in the back, hard. He pitched forward, unable to get his hands out fast enough to stop his fall. His head bounced off the sealed stone floor, and for a breathless second, he was sure he’d been shot. Been killed. Then the fight ended with Hutch screaming, crates crashing. The crackle of plastic splintering. David rose to his elbows. His nose was bleeding.

  Aunt Bobbie stood where Hutch’s crate shelter had been. She had the pistol in her hand and was considering it with a professional calm. Leelee had scooted across the floor toward David, as if to seek shelter behind him. Hutch, his cigarette gone, was cradling his right hand in his left. The index finger of his right hand—his trigger finger—stood off at an improbable angle.

  “Who the fuck are you!” Hutch growled. His voice was low. Feral.

  “I’m Gunny Draper,” Aunt Bobbie said, ejecting the clip. She cleared the chamber and grabbed the thin brass glimmer out of the air. “So we should talk about this.”

  Leelee pressed her hand against David’s arm. He shifted, gathered her close against him. She smelled rank—body odor and smoke and something else he couldn’t identify—but he didn’t care. Aunt Bobbie pressed something, and the top of the gun slipped off the grip.

  “What’ve you got to say to me, dead girl?” Hutch asked. His voice didn’t sound as tough as he probably hoped. Aunt Bobbie pulled the barrel out of the gun and tossed it into a corner of the room, in the narrow space between some crates and the wall. She didn’t look up from the gun, but she smiled.

  “The boy made a mistake,” she said, “but he treated you with respect. He didn’t steal from you. He didn’t try to track the girl down on his own. He didn’t go to security. He didn’t even try to sell the product and get the money.”

  Leelee shivered. Or maybe David did and it only seemed like it was her. Hutch scowled, but a thoughtful look stole into his eyes.

  Aunt Bobbie plucked a long, thin bit of metal out of the gun and then a small black spring and tossed both behind a different crate. “You’re a tough guy in a tough business, and I respect that. Maybe you’ve killed some people. But you’re also a businessman. Rational. Able to see the big picture.” She looked up at Hutch, smiled, and tossed him the grip of his gun. “So here’s what I’m thinking. Take the bag. Sell it, bury it. Drop it in the recycler. It’s yours. Do what you want with it.”

  “Would anyway,” Hutch said, but she ignored him.

  “The girl’s debt’s paid, and David walks away. He’s out. You don’t come for him, he doesn’t come for you. I don’t come for you, either.” She tossed him the empty top half of his gun, and he caught it with his uninjured hand. From where David was, hunched on the floor, both of them looked larger than life.

  “Girl’s nothing,” Hutch said. “All drama and easy to replace. Boy’s something special, though. Good cooks can’t be swapped out just like that.”

  Aunt Bobbie started working the bullets out of the magazine with one thumb, dropping each one into her wide, powerful palm. “Everyone’s replaceable in work like yours. You’ve got four or five like him already I bet.” She took out the last of the bullets and put them in her pocket, then passed him the empty magazine. “David’s the one that got away. No disrespect. Not a risk to the operation. Just worked out until it didn’t. That’s the deal.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “I’ll kill you,” Aunt Bobbie said in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I’d prefer not to, but that’s what happens if you say no.”

  “That easy?” Hutch said with a scowl. “Maybe not that easy.”

  “You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse. And David is my beloved nephew. If you fuck with him after this, I will end every piece of you,” Bobbie said, her own smile sad. “No disrespect.”

  Hutch’s scowl twitched into a flicker of a smile.

  “They grow ’em big where you come from,” he said and held up the disassembled pistol. “You broke my gun.”

  ??
?I noticed the spare magazine in your left pocket,” she said. “David, stand up. We’re leaving now.”

  He walked ahead, Leelee holding him and weeping quietly. Aunt Bobbie took the rear, keeping them going quickly without quite making them run and looking back behind her often. When they got near the tube station, Aunt Bobbie put a hand on David’s shoulder.

  “I can get you through the checkpoint, but I can’t get her.”

  Leelee’s eyes were soft and wet, her expression calm and serene. Filthy and stinking, she was still beautiful. She was redeemed.

  “Do you have somewhere you can go?” David asked. “Someplace here in Martineztown where he can’t find you?”

  “I’ve got friends,” she said. “They’ll help.”

  “Go to them,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Stay out of sight.”

  David didn’t want to let her go, didn’t want to lose the contact of her arm against his. He saw her understand. She didn’t step into his arms as much as flow there, soft and supple and changing as water. For a moment, her body was pressed against his perfectly, without a millimeter of space in between. Her lips were against his cheek, her breath in his ear. She was Una Meing for a moment, and he was Caz Pratihari, and the world was a heady, powerful, romantic place. She shifted against him and her lips against his were soft and warm and they tasted like a promise.

  “I’ll find you,” she whispered, and then the moment was over, and she was walking a little unsteadily down the corridor, her head high. He wanted to run after her, to kiss her again, to take her home with him and fold her into his bed. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. He had an erection.