Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick E-Book

David Wong

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Zoey Ashe, suddenly in charge of the most decadent city in the world is just trying to cope with nightmarish superhuman villains, an all-seeing social network; mysterious, smooth-talking power players; and her very, very smelly cat. But when a disembowled corpse rampages through her house and accuses her of murder, Zoey has to work out what she owns, who works for her, and if she was responsible... 

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by David Wong and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

Thirty Days Later

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

Afterword

Also Available from Titan Books

ALSO BY DAVID WONG AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

John Dies at the EndThis Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch ItWhat The Hell Did I Just Read?

TITAN BOOKS

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.co.uk

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Print edition ISBN: 9781789090741

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090758

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP.

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: October 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2020 David Wong. All rights reserved.

This edition published by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayedin this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission ofthe publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover otherthan that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposedon the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

IN A FUTURE IN WHICH EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE,IN A CITY IN WHICH ANYTHING GOES...

1 Zoey Ashe surveyed the carnage and said, “Sorry we’re late, it was my cat’s birthday.”

The man who greeted her on the sidewalk was named Hank Kowalski. He was bald and had the eyes of a man whose favorite joke is just a shrieking child falling down a flight of stairs. He wore a jacket with a flashing logo that said ASHE SECURITY—WILL USE DEADLY FORCE.

Looking a little too amused for the occasion, Kowalski said, “So, the good news is, the hostage taker knew to ask for you by name.”

“Why is that good news?”

“If it’s somebody you know, that raises the chance this ends in disaster and creates a cool scene for when they eventually make a movie about my life. Maybe the guy’s an old boyfriend? You like psychopaths, right?” He stuck a finger into the air. “He’s up there.”

Zoey looked up and then down, then up again, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. All of the buildings downtown were skinned with display panels and synced so that a giant, obnoxious ad could scroll down the whole block. For example, right now an animated banner was hopping from building to building promoting the beginning of Halloween Month in Tabula Ra$a, warning/promising that the city would not be enforcing public nudity laws for the duration of October. But the panel on the building in front of her was dead, leaving a dim gap in the display. That was presumably because of the ragged hole in the glass a few floors up, like a Godzilla had stooped down and taken a bite.

Directly below the hole at ground level, the main entrance was blocked by an overturned food truck. Zoey was familiar with the truck, just by its shape. It sold lightly charred strips of Korean barbecue on little sizzling, self-heating metal plates with a side compartment of melted cheese for dipping. It was one of the five best food trucks in the city, so this incident had already taken a terrible toll.

“Did . . . the food truck fly into the building?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kowalski replied. “A guy knocked over the truck with his bare hands, then shoved it across the door there, to barricade it. Then he ripped a parking meter out of the ground, jumped straight up, and, while dangling from a ledge with one hand, smashed out the glass on the fourth floor, using the parking meter like a club. Then he entered the building and declared that everyone inside was his hostage.”

Then, Zoey thought, he’d demanded to speak to her. This time last year, she’d have been restocking the muffin case at the coffee shop where she’d worked for minimum wage plus tips.

“Oh. Well, that’s, uh, pthththhbb,” said Zoey, fear causing her mouth to just give up halfway through.

“I agree,” said Kowalski. “I’m thinking either he’s gotten some implants to make him stronger or else he’s really pissed off.”

“Not an old boyfriend, then. I don’t think I could make somebody that mad.”

“Maybe you gave him a disease.”

Kowalski took a bite of a hot dog. There was a nearby vendor who was doing brisk business with the crowd of gawkers who’d shown up to watch the hostage situation unfold. The hot dog guy, who’d apparently acted quickly to seize the Korean BBQ truck’s territory, had a grilling apparatus strapped to his torso, complete with a rack of condiments. He wore a beat-up metal exoskeleton to help him carry it all and Zoey thought he looked like an old-timey one-man band. On the side of his grill was a looping animated logo of a smiling, sentient hot dog happily taking a bite out of a smaller, regular hot dog. Zoey tried to puzzle out the grossly unfair rules of the society depicted in the hot dog logo, then realized she was still a little bit high.

In words filtered through chewed hot dog, Kowalski said, “Nice outfit.”

He didn’t mean it. She was still wearing her party clothes, a black pleated skirt that an asshole at the party said made her look like a table lamp (he was right) and a black T-shirt bearing a symbol of a Jolly Roger, only the skull was replaced with a cat’s face, and the two crossed bones were a pair of fish skeletons. Her black hair was in pigtails because she had thought it was funny earlier, but it now seemed inappropriate for the situation. She had arrived in a leopard-print BMW convertible, though she could never put the top down as it made her huge, fat head a target for snipers, according to Will Blackwater and her other advisors, who did nothing but sit around imagining worst-case scenarios all day. The car could be any color she wanted (she’d sprung for the programmable skin) but she’d left it leopard print for the last month only because it seemed to annoy Will, who at the moment was emerging from the driver’s side. Will was an unreasonably white man in his late thirties wearing a suit the color of a wet sidewalk and the expression of a man who’s just realized the wetness is piss.

Will “suspiciously fake-sounding menacing surname” Blackwater shot an annoyed look at the crowd of gawkers behind him, each one representing a potential complication, and asked, “How many hostages?”

“Sixty-eight employees,” said Kowalski, “and fifty-two sad-sack customers.”

Those numbers punched Zoey in the gut. It would not be good if she got sick here in front of the onlookers and their many cameras. Not good at all. It should be noted here that no one involved in this conversation was a police officer and none were coming. In Tabula Ra$a, you got the policing you paid for. And sometimes not even that.

The building the pissed-off guy with superhuman strength had smashed his way into was the Night Inn Cuddle Theater. For $250, an attractive member of your preferred gender would curl up with you in pajamas and watch a movie in a small private room with a wet bar, snacks, and a fireplace. There was no sex. That theater was down the block and they actually charged a lot less.

Kowalski took another bite before speaking, as if he preferred to talk while he chewed. “Entrance from the parking garage is blocked, too, from the inside. We can unblock it, but the guy says he’s got a sonic device that will scramble the brains of everybody in the building if we try.”

Zoey, utterly failing to sound unsettled by this, asked, “Is that a thing?”

“Who can say? They’re inventing new things all the time. I even remember an era when a guy couldn’t jump thirty feet in the air carrying a parking meter he’d plucked from the concrete like a dandelion. Are we waiting for the rest of your people to get here?”

Will said, “They’re getting into position.”

They were all in the process of executing a plan that had been hastily thrown together after they’d gotten word that the hostage taker would talk only to Zoey. Will had advised against her coming to the scene at all and the sensible part of Zoey’s brain enthusiastically agreed. But then a key piece of information had been relayed to her: much to her surprise, she apparently owned the Night Inn Cuddle Theater. Thanks to a large inheritance, Zoey owned a lot of things she still wasn’t aware of, some of which were just incredibly illegal. So this was in fact her problem and there was just no getting around it. Still, they intended to stretch the guy’s “Only talk to Zoey” rule as far as possible. Will said hostage situations were like bad marriages, one party trying to subtly force the other to surrender, inches at a time.

Kowalski said, “I’m gonna finish my hot dog and then go supervise crowd control, unless you want me to climb up and shoot this guy real quick.”

Will and Zoey both glanced back at the gawkers. The crowd was being kept in check by large men in suits with black pants and bright yellow jackets. They weren’t Zoey’s people, they were from a popular security service called the Vanguard of Peace, its logo a glorious sunrise over the silhouette of a waving child. They’d been called in to help control the crowd and billed by the hour. They also were quick to get brutal with anything they arbitrarily deemed to be a “riot” (those yellow coats really showed the blood). The prospect of this turning into a night of car-flipping chaos was part of what was turning Zoey’s insides to jelly.

Will said, “Yeah, control the crowd. And the VOP.” Will noticed something over Zoey’s shoulder and said, “He’s here.”

A second vehicle pulled up, a panel truck with an animated ASHE DEVELOPMENT logo on the side, cartoon workers assembling the letters out of girders. The truck parked and the rear door lowered like a drawbridge, revealing its cargo to be a gleaming black metal object roughly the size and shape of a crouching rhinoceros. A butterfly-sized drone buzzed in front of Zoey’s face, bearing a tiny camera that was probably one of five hundred tiny cameras watching her at the moment. If you enjoyed livestreamed human tragedy, Tabula Ra$a was an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Zoey smacked the drone aside with her hand and said, “Can everybody hear me? Are you all in your spots?”

From a nearly invisible earpiece in her right ear, four voices spoke at once, rendering all of them an indecipherable jumble until one person finished their sentence with “hot link.”

Zoey said, “Let’s try that again, one at a time. Budd?”

A man with a Texas drawl said, “The hostage taker’s name is Dexter Tilley. Twenty years old. Frequent customer of the Night Inn. You’ve never met him. Inherited a house from his gramma, sold it a week ago, and used the cash on bootleg skeletal and musculature Raiden implants. Can’t find anybody who’ll admit selling him a brain zappin’ contraption but they do exist.”

Will said, “We’re obviously going to assume he has it.”

Budd said, “Echo’s with me.”

The voice of Michelle “Echo” Ling chimed in. “Every time Tilley came here, he requested the same girl, a nineteen-year-old named Shae LaVergne. She is currently in the room with him. So you’ve got over one hundred hostages but it’s looking like this is about her.”

Oh, god, Zoey thought. The guy fell in love with one of the professionals. She now feared the sheer awkwardness of this encounter more than death.

“Well, that all sounds terrible,” said Zoey. “Where are you now?”

“Budd and I are both inside. Trying to keep the inn’s staff calm.”

“You are? How did you get in?”

Zoey had been told they were waiting at the scene, but didn’t know they were, like, in the scene.

Budd said, “We were here before Tilley. Been tailing him all day.”

“You were tailing him, but arrived before he did?”

“You do your homework,” Budd said, “and you can tail from in front.”

“All right, way to earn your paycheck. Wu, you in position?”

Wu was Zoey’s personal bodyguard, who the hostage taker had specifically demanded not accompany Zoey to the meet. Again, they intended to push the envelope as far as possible on that demand.

A hushed voice in her ear said, “I am.”

“Where?”

“The fourth floor of the Hyatt, across the street.”

Zoey turned and looked behind her, the front of the hotel flashing an animation of a waterfall cascading and breaking over the main entrance. There was a world-class seafood joint on the top floor and there were animated fish swimming around up there. Occasionally one would go leaping out of the “water” and a shimmering silver tuna would break the boundary of the roof and soar into the actual night sky, a projected hologram picking up the animation as one smooth motion. The tourists loved stuff like that.

Wu said, “When you turn to look at me, anyone watching will immediately know why, that you are looking to your sniper.”

“Oh. Right. Andre?”

From her other ear, she heard, “I’m right next to you, getting a hot link.”

She turned and there he stood, a large black man with a shiny bald head, squirting mustard onto a sausage he’d just bought from the one-man band.

He said, “See, now you’re giving away my position. Already this thing is a train wreck. And did you see that Halloween Month ad that ran up there? Since when has this city had public nudity laws?”

Andre actually was in position. His job was to remotely pilot the shiny black thing in the back of the panel truck.

Zoey looked it over. “I thought you were supposed to get the scariest drone you could find? This just looks . . . fancy. It’s piano black. It looks like a sculpture some old rich guy would have in his parlor.”

“It’s scarier in motion. SWAT teams in Israel use ’em for hostage negotiation all the time. Well, they don’t really do all that much negotiating . . .”

“So the hostage taker can talk to this thing and I can talk back through it?”

Will said, “Even better, it’ll display a live hologram of your face to the front end there, that way he gets facial expressions, too. That’s important for building rapport. When I talk, it’ll switch to mine.”

It sounded like Will had used one of these before. Zoey would have to remind Will to never tell her that story.

There was a scuffle in the crowd behind them, some of the spectators getting roughly shoved back by the yellow jackets. The agitators were mostly guys in their twenties, and they were mooing at Zoey, like cows. Zoey was well known in the city, but not necessarily well liked, and at some point her detractors had decided she was a cow. They sold T-shirts and everything, depicting her head on a cow’s body, only drawn to mimic Zoey’s in cartoonish yet hurtfully accurate ways (they even included her missing tooth). The first time she’d seen one of the shirts, she’d been eating at a cafe with her mother and bodyguard. She had rolled her eyes and snickered and actually made it all the way back to the car before she burst into tears.

Zoey said, “Can we push those people farther away or something? And by ‘something’ I mean have Kowalski shoot them? In the crotch?”

Will looked surprised. “I’d bring them closer if I could. If the guy is near that opening, I want him to hear the chants.”

She thought about asking why, but ultimately decided against it. Will liked to hear himself explaining things a little too much, so she tried to ration it out.

From her earpiece, Budd said, “Get to a screen, looks like the hostage taker is about to make a statement.”

As Will went for his phone, Wu spoke from Zoey’s earpiece. “He has reentered the room. He has the girl with him. He just moved behind the window frame, trying to stay out of view.”

Will brought up Blink, a searchable network of just about every running wireless camera on Earth. The top trending stream was titled “Night Inn Hostage Crisis, BIG Death Toll Assured—ALERT: POSSIBLE COW SLAUGHTER!”

Dexter Tilley appeared on-screen. Well, sort of. He was using a digital “mask” to cover his face on the feed and it replaced his head with a fairly realistic animated skull. Unless the guy actually was a talking skeleton, which if so, Zoey thought it was weird that Budd and Echo left that out of their summary. When Tilley spoke, his voice had been filtered, too. It was a high-pitched, taunting tone, about what you’d expect from a skeleton possessed by some kind of evil spirit.

“I see you down there, bitch! No negotiation, no tricks. You hear me? I’m ready to die, I’m ready to take everybody with me. Are you?”

Reading the concern on Zoey’s face, Andre said, “I think they all say that.”

Will said to her, “I’m in contact with a rapid entry team, they’re ninety percent sure they can take him out before he triggers whatever device he’s got, if he even has one at all. They don’t even want to get paid, they’ll do it for the exposure. Last chance.”

“Ninety percent? Would you board a plane that had a ten percent chance of crashing?”

“I once boarded a plane that barely had a ten percent chance of not crashing because, like now, my other options were worse.”

“And what are the odds the hostage makes it out of a raid intact?” Shae. That was her name. “I’ve seen what those ribbon guns do. No, this requires finesse. Andre, send in the giant robot monster.”

Andre tapped some icons on his phone and the shiny black thing in the truck blinked to life. It whirred and beeped and birthed itself from the cargo hold on unseen wheels. Once free, eight mechanical legs sprang from the sides, lifting its body six feet off the ground. Every inch was covered in that reflective black shielding, like it had been sculpted out of a moonless night. It was the most terrifying thing Zoey had ever seen.

Andre said, “It’s patched into your phone. It’s calling you now.”

Zoey dug out her phone, then physically recoiled when a full-color hologram of her face appeared where the spider’s head would be.

“Holy god.”

Andre said, “Whoa, that’s actually even creepier than I intended.”

“Private military groups also use these things to take out tanks,” said Will. “The two front legs have plasma cutters that will slice through two inches of armor. It can take a direct hit from a railgun. Skin will heal itself from damage, you could riddle it with fifty-caliber fire and watch the holes disappear in ten seconds.”

Zoey stared at the thing, transfixed. “Wait, where did you get this thing, again?”

Andre said, “Rented it from a friend. Though you wouldn’t know he was a friend based on the deposit he demanded.”

“Do I want to know how much?”

“Can you really put a price on something like this?”

“Oh god. All right. Let’s do it.”

2 The piano-black Zoey-ghost-face spider-drone monster clicked along the pavement to oohs and aahs from the crowd. It hopped onto the overturned food truck and then, without hesitation, skittered right up the building’s darkened facade, toward the ragged opening in the fourth floor. It pulled itself into the room with a quick, jerky movement that was much more arachnid than robot.

Zoey held her breath.

Even from street level, they could hear the terrified shriek of a young girl from inside. Well, Zoey thought, we’ve already traumatized the hostage.

She watched the machine’s camera feed from her phone, and saw a brief, blurry glimpse of a young woman before a figure stepped into view and the screen went dark.

“What happened?”

Andre said, “He covered the drone’s camera. Threw a blanket over it or somethin’.”

“Can we uncover it?” If not, Zoey thought that seemed like an inexcusable design flaw.

Will said, “We can, but won’t. We don’t need to see him, not yet. As long as he can hear us, go ahead and let him think he accomplished something. Open the line. I’ll do the talking.”

Zoey found a “Speak” icon and pointed the phone toward Will’s face. Drones swarmed around them and just about every bystander had a Blink camera pinned to their clothing. Everything they said was being streamed to an audience of maybe millions, from dozens of angles, everyone watching their follower counts tick upward. Zoey saw several people in the audience with Gadflies, the little drones everyone had been buying this year that hovered around their shoulders, livestreaming their lives in a way that could also get their face in the shot.

Will asked, “Can you hear me?”

From the phone, a normal human voice—the dumb skeleton filter only worked on Tilley’s own camera—said, “Who’s this? Put the cow on.”

“My name is Will Blackwater. I work for Zoey Ashe, solving the problems that aren’t worth her time. Listen closely, because I’m not going to repeat myself. Each breath you draw from this moment forward is a precious gift granted to you by Ms. Ashe. After each said breath, I want you to silently thank her and appreciate the grace she has bestowed upon you. Her patience, however, is not boundless. I am not here to listen to your demands. I already know your demands, your true demands, even if you do not. You demand to remain alive and to be forgiven for your trespasses.

“If you leave immediately, we will all return to our respective homes and I will plead to Zoey on your behalf for a reasonable punishment. I cannot offer any guarantees as to what her response will be. If you do not leave immediately, however, the machine before you will cut off your head and rip those implants off your bones. It will do it so quickly that you won’t even register the movement—the speed of its limbs is restricted only by air resistance. This is an A-8 Disruptor, made in Germany. It took exactly three of them to disable an entire division of Iranian tanks during the Blue Sky Raids. So let me be absolutely clear. You can still win here. But only if you define victory as leaving that building with your body intact.”

Will stopped talking and muted their end. No response. Zoey wondered if his attempt to paint her as a cruel, omnipotent overlord was undermined by her outfit. She had wanted to change clothes, but Will had advised against it for reasons that he hadn’t had time to explain. She needed to remind herself not to accidentally press the spot on the seam of her T-shirt that would make the cat start singing a sea shanty consisting entirely of meows.

Zoey said, “If he tries to detonate the sonic gadget, or do something else stupid, how are we going to fight back if we can’t see him?”

Andre said, “The Disruptor’s own AI will take over and kick his ass. A human operator would just slow it down anyway.”

In Zoey’s ear, Wu said, “I do not have a clear shot, the A-8 is between me and the target. I can just make out movement beyond the—whoa! I, uh, think the negotiation phase has ended.”

There were crashes from inside the building. The crowd gasped. Some people even backed away, realizing that there was, in fact, no reason this conflict couldn’t spill out of the building and wipe out a dozen of the gawkers before they even had time to crap their pants. Zoey, realizing she’d made their same mistake, took a step back from the noise.

“Uh, just to be clear, the brain-melting device he said he had, it can’t penetrate the walls of that building, can it? We’d be safe out here?”

Will looked surprised. “Who ever said that?”

From inside the building came a noise like a car being stomped down a manhole by an angry giant. The battered carcass of the 8-8 Disintegrator or whatever Will had called it came flying out of the hole in the wall. The crowd below screamed and scattered. Zoey ducked. The mangled black monstrosity crashed onto the sidewalk and rolled into the middle of the street. A self-driving bus detected the obstacle and braked in time, then a cherry-red human-driven convertible on monster truck tires rear-ended the bus.

A boo went up from the crowd and there was a brief euphoric moment when Zoey thought they were booing Tilley, having come around to her side. Then she figured out that they were mooing. Will stood up and straightened his suit, standing in the spot where he’d quickly placed himself in between Zoey and the wreckage. Zoey took a long breath to steady herself and pushed her bangs out of her eyes.

To Andre, she said, “So, do we just lose the deposit, or do we now have to pay for the whole thing?”

“I think it’s important to remain calm in these situations, so I won’t go into detail about the exact financial toll of tonight’s operation until it’s all said and done.”

Tilley’s animated skull appeared on the Blink feed again and in the silly skeleton voice said, “My patience is done! I want the cow. Not her lawyer, not her bodyguard, not her pathetic toys.”

Will shot a quick, almost imperceptible glance at a nearby drone before saying, “Wu, do you have the shot, or is he back behind the window frame?”

“He is behind the frame and also I have the shot. These rounds can penetrate the steel beam and then detonate in a spot of our choosing, perhaps inside one of Tilley’s eye sockets. The problem is the female hostage is sitting right next to him.”

Zoey said, “Plus if you miss, or just hurt him, he’s going to activate his brain gadget for sure. You’d be giving him no choice.”

“If he has it,” muttered Will, casting an annoyed glare at the building.

Zoey followed his gaze and said, “Look, I know how you say you hate unknown variables more than Abe Lincoln hated ceiling fans—”

“I’m sure I’ve never phrased it like—”

“But I’m obviously going in there. Everybody wants something; we’ll make him an offer. It’s by far our best chance of this not ending in utter disaster.”

There was nothing in the world Zoey wanted to do less than she wanted to do this. At this point in the night she was supposed to be extremely drunk and full of sushi, sloppily hitting on some high-society kid who was looking to do something his parents wouldn’t approve of.

“Zoey, if you give in to this guy, next week you’ll have another one just like him holding up another of your joints making bigger demands. You’d be laying out the welcome mat.”

“Well, tonight I’m worried about tonight. Now how do I get in there?”

“I’m going with you,” said Will, never taking his eyes off that ragged hole in the building. “He has to know that only I can make the kind of decisions he wants made.”

This wasn’t true, but Zoey knew why Will had said it. If Dexter Tilley was watching literally any feed about his own hostage situation, he also was listening to everything they said right now, including the exchange with Wu moments ago. Being on camera every moment you were outside your home meant every conversation, facial expression, and mannerism was a performance. It was an adjustment that Zoey found difficult, because only a psychopath would find it easy. Of course, Tilley himself had to know that Will knew Tilley was listening in, and would thus deduce that this could be a performance on Will’s part. But he also knew that Will knew that he knew, so maybe Will’s performance was intentionally inauthentic, so that Tilley would think Will was lying, when in reality, he was telling the truth. Zoey was starting to get a headache.

Will looked her in the eye, getting serious now. “You know what to do?”

“I’ve been in a hostage negotiation before, Will. Multiple times.”

“As a hostage, yes. This end is more complicated.”

“Sure. So, again I ask, how in the hell do we get in?”

It turned out their method for reaching the busted-out hole in the side of the building was, in fact, just a big-ass ladder. The fire department was on hand (they always came when called but would send a bill later) and they had one that could extend from the top of the overturned food truck up to the opening. Unfortunately, nobody had a second, smaller ladder to get them from the ground to the top of the truck, so Andre rolled over a trash can they could use as a step stool. Zoey stumbled six or seven times on the way up, even with Will awkwardly trying to help her. It was almost like Andre had picked the single clumsiest option possible. The crowd loved it.

Will then led the way up the ladder, disappearing into the spot where most of the floor-to-ceiling window had been bashed away. Zoey followed, the rickety ladder shaking with every step. She was coated in cold terror-sweat before she was even halfway up. There were drones swarming below her and they probably had a great view of her black-with-white-polka-dot underwear (the pervs who zoomed in would find the white dots were tiny skulls). Live female wardrobe malfunction. Blink also never lacked for content or audience.

Finally, she climbed through the opening into the room, tumbled across an end table, and thumped to the floor. She stood, brushed broken glass off herself, and smoothed down her skirt. She accidentally brushed the wrong spot and the cat on her shirt started meowing to the tune of “Blow the Man Down” (“meow-MEOW meow-meow-meow . . .”) until Zoey found the off switch in the seam about two full minutes later. When she finally looked up, there were three sets of eyes staring back at her.

Zoey said, “Uh, hi.”

Huddled in the corner was a weeping woman Zoey assumed was Shae LaVergne. Thin, pale skin, huge brown eyes, auburn hair cropped into a pixie cut that swooped down across her forehead. She had ears that stuck out a little, giving her an elven look. Silk pajamas with little cartoon bunnies. Zoey suspected the Night Inn Cuddle Theater kept Shae very, very busy.

Sitting on the ornate bed was a chubby guy who didn’t actually look twenty years old, which was the age Budd had given her for Dexter Tilley—she’d have guessed an awkward fifteen or sixteen. Slumped shoulders, acne, hair he’d buzzed off, presumably after realizing he couldn’t do anything trendy with it. He had a wispy failed mustache. On his hands were black armored gloves, designed to let an overpowered person punch through metal without pulping their fists.

Along his shoulders and elbows were ugly, inflamed surgery scars. The aftermath of an in-and-out back-alley procedure with no post-op care. Zoey had seen body scans and, in one case, the actual skeleton of a guy who’d gotten the implants. It was a super-strong black mesh woven through bone and tendon, like their innards were wearing sexy fishnets. Somewhere in there was also a little thumb-sized device driving it all, the tech that made the whole thing possible, called Raiden. It could generate enough power to bring down a building. She’d seen it.

Will, softening his tone so radically that it physically startled Zoey, said, “You’re Dexter, right? How are you doing?”

“Not good.”

She had seen Will do this before, adopting a manner that implied he’d entirely forgotten a vicious conflict that had occurred just minutes earlier. Someone told her the technique was called “gaslighting.” Zoey assumed they called it that because it really confuses people, just like if you stopped in the middle of a conversation to suddenly light a fart.

Will nodded. “Let’s see what we can do about that.” He turned to the girl. “And you’re Shae? How are you holding up?”

In a tragically hopeful voice, the girl said, “You’re with the police?”

Zoey said, “No, I actually own this business, much to my surprise. I’m Zoey, this is Will. He works for me.”

“What? Where are the police?”

Zoey said, “Ah. You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

Dexter answered for her. “Shae moved here in the spring.” He turned to Shae and said, “Ain’t no laws in Tabula Rasa.”

Zoey said, “I’m new myself, I got here less than a year ago. This actually isn’t even technically a city. And the laws do exist, whatever is illegal in the United States or the state of Utah is also illegal where we’re standing. But it turns out laws only mean something if there are flesh-and-blood people around to punish the bad guys. Most of the police here stopped showing up to work a long time ago, so security pretty much falls to whoever owns the property and, like I said, I’m told I own this place. Mr. Tilley here apparently knew that, so, here we are.”

Will went to the wet bar and poured himself a scotch.

Without looking up from his glass, he said to Tilley, “You seem to know who Zoey is; do you know who I am?”

“I know enough. You’re one of her people.”

“One of her people? Open your eyes. Zoey is twenty-three and is wearing a cat shirt and a necklace with a pendant that says MY EYES ARE UP THERE. You don’t wonder how she ended up in charge of an organization that owns buildings like this and has ‘people’ like me?”

“I don’t think I give a shit.”

“You should,” said Will, in his eerily friendly voice. “You see, before Zoey came along, this, and many other establishments, were owned by a man named Arthur Livingston. He helped build this city. This was all a bunch of dusty construction sites just twenty years ago. A whole lot of people tried very hard to stop him at every step of the way. None succeeded. Arthur passed away last year, unfortunately, leaving his fortune and businesses to his daughter, Zoey, who prior to that had been living in a trailer park in Colorado and working as a barista. Some parties who had previously known better than to cross Arthur wrongly decided that his passing was the time to strike. They have since found out otherwise. Do you understand?”

“You people say ‘business,’ when you mean organized crime.”

Zoey said, “It honestly isn’t that organized.”

A swarm of camera drones buzzed outside the hole in the glass behind them. Surely tens of millions were watching by now, waiting to see if this situation would explode. Hoping it would.

Will sipped his drink and seemed unimpressed. Zoey didn’t know if he was annoyed that the bottles were too watered down, or that they weren’t watered down enough.

“Do you mind if we sit?”

Dexter shot a glance outside. “We’re not staying here.”

“We’re not?”

“You think I’m an idiot? My general intelligence is in the ninety-eighth percentile. Look it up. You have a sniper on the fourth floor across the street, behind the fish. Room 412. Chinese-looking dude. Do you not see my people out there, on the street? Do you not hear them? They tracked him all the way up to his perch, reported back to me every step, listening to every word he whispered in your ear. So we’re moving to another room, away from that opening, away from your sniper, away from those cameras.”

Tilley picked up a backpack that looked like it’d never seen a day in the wilderness. If his lethal brain scrambler existed, it was presumably in there, though it looked to Zoey like it was bulging at the seams with clothes, like the kid had packed everything he owned.

“You’re coming with me,” he said to Zoey. To Will, “You’re going to turn your ass around and take the long, sad climb down that ladder. This is between me and her.”

Will said, “You don’t want that. You’re not negotiating with her, you’re negotiating with me. She doesn’t even know what she has to negotiate with.”

“Stop with all that. I know all about this bit, the negotiation, you saying you’re going to do all the talking. I’ve seen the streams, I know what you’re trying to do. And if you say one more word in that direction I will punch your balls into space.”

Will stared down Tilley and in a horribly casual voice asked, “Wu? You have the shot?”

Dexter’s eyes went wide. He snatched Zoey by her shirt and yanked her over to him, his arm around her neck, using her as a human shield. Shae screamed. Zoey didn’t, but did think she was going to piss herself.

Will, calm as wind chimes, said, “Wu, if you hit Zoey two inches below her rib cage and one inch to the right of her spinal column, you’ll punch a hole through her abdomen that she’ll likely survive. Set the round to detonate about six inches later, inside Mr. Tilley’s torso. It will blow him in half, implants or not.”

Zoey said, “We’re not doing that! Wu, do not shoot through me! Don’t shoot at all! I’ll go with him. Will, stay here, that’s an order.”

Dexter Tilley apparently didn’t have too much faith in Zoey’s unquestioned authority over her organization, as he kept her in the human shield position and quickly dragged her backward toward the door leading out of the room. He picked up the backpack and called for Shae to follow.

Zoey thought this would have been a perfect time for the hostage to hurl herself out of the window, jump down to the food truck, and sprint off into the crowd, leaving the problem to Zoey. Instead, Shae climbed to her feet and voluntarily followed them into the hall. Zoey couldn’t blame her. When push comes to shove, almost everyone complies.

3 Tilley slammed the door behind Shae. Will did not follow them through. Zoey knew he wouldn’t.

Tilley asked Shae, “Where are the showers?”

“W-what?”

“The employee showers. In the lounge, you mentioned it before.”

“Th-thirteenth floor. It doesn’t show on the elevator but I can make it stop there with an eye scan.”

“Let’s go.”

Zoey spent the elevator ride up filling her mind with wild guesses about what this guy wanted to do in a group shower setting. She nervously fidgeted with her necklace. They arrived to find the employee lounge was locked behind a sturdy door that wouldn’t even open for Shae—probably some automated lockdown system—but Dexter calmly tore the door off its hinges and tossed it aside. Inside was a break room with a few sofas and vending machines and a huge framed list of staff reminders on one wall. (“If a hand goes under your clothing, GENTLY resist and remind the guest of Rule #4. BE NICE.”)

A couple who appeared to have been hiding out in the room recoiled at the sight of them. The guy was in a white suit with a white cowboy hat perched above unkempt eyebrows, the girl was a stunning Filipino woman half his age.

The woman, whom Tilley apparently did not recognize as Zoey’s associate Echo Ling, screamed, “Oh, my god, don’t kill us!”

Zoey thought it was . . . fairly convincing. The guy in the hat, Budd Billingsley, acted like a man who was frantically trying to size up the situation while remaining cool, which probably wasn’t a performance.

Dexter nodded toward the door and said, “Out.”

Zoey was hoping he’d demand they stay, as Budd and Echo both had way more experience with this kind of thing than she did. Apparently Tilley thought that’d be too many hostages to control. The couple hurried out of the room and Echo, in her “panic,” left her purse behind. That purse, Zoey was sure, contained some kind of weapon or gadget she could use to disable Dexter in an emergency. Right as they reached the door, Dexter said, “Hey, you forgot your purse.”

Nice guy.

Echo hesitated, but went back and picked it up. Her eyes met Zoey’s, just for a second. Echo’s look seemed to ask if Zoey was okay, if things were under control. Zoey tried to project confidence, but guessed that her own expression only communicated that she’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. Both of them left and Dexter led Zoey and Shae into a connected tiled room with a half dozen private shower stalls.

Tilley drilled his gaze into Shae and said, “You told me they have showers. I never asked you why. I want you to tell me.”

“Tell you . . . what?”

“Why do you have showers?”

Zoey didn’t understand the question and it was obvious that Shae didn’t, either. The other thing Zoey didn’t know at the moment was if Tilley was livestreaming this encounter himself. The cameras could be as tiny as you wanted—he could have one embedded in his belt buckle, or anywhere. It would help to know if she was still performing for an audience.

Zoey said, “Let’s not get sidetracked. The clock is ticking before somebody on the outside, either my people or some other group looking to make a name for themselves, tries to storm this place. Let’s work out a deal and then I can go back home. I think my party guests have left but there should still be food.”

“Answer my question.”

Shae looked pleadingly back and forth from Dexter to Zoey. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. The showers are for the staff. ”

“You work up a sweat doing this? Lying there, watching movies?”

“Not always, but—”

“But sometimes you want to shower after doing it. After having to lay there with some damp fatass for two hours. Got his BO all over you. Right?”

Shae didn’t answer.

Dexter said, “Or maybe you just need a shower anyway. Because you just feel gross inside, having some ugly guy rubbing up against you, his bad breath in your face. A shower, to try to put it out of your mind.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

Still locking eyes with her, he asked, “Did you ever shower after our appointments?”

“No. No.”

Zoey didn’t know if Tilley could spot the lie in Shae’s eyes, but Zoey could.

Without a word, he went to one stall after another, turning on the water. While he was distracted, Zoey surreptitiously pulled out her phone and typed in a search:

HOSTAGE NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES

In the thirty seconds she had to browse the list before Tilley returned, she saw something about reassuring the guy that any previous actions were easily revocable and making a big show of listening to demands. Then there was something about extracting concessions in exchange for meeting lesser demands, like food deliveries, finally just delaying until the bad guy got tired and gave up. God, she was going to be here all night. She heard his shoes coming her way and quickly put the phone away.

“There’s recording gear that can penetrate walls,” he said, “but it shouldn’t work this far in and it can’t handle that background noise. That means it’s just us.”

Dexter put his arm around Shae and pulled her close. She tried to suppress her tears, but failed. He said “Shh” and kissed the top of her head.

Zoey said, “First of all, the fact that this city is a lawless clown orgy works to our advantage here. Nothing has happened so far that can’t be easily fixed. Nobody’s been hurt or killed, and insurance will patch up the window. That’s the big thing we all need to keep in mind. If we want, we can all go back to normal.”

Dexter held up a hand to stop her. “See, here’s the problem with that. Your ‘normal’ is my Hell.”

“Okay. So, tell me what you want.”

This stopped Dexter. It was like he actually hadn’t been expecting this question. He suddenly seemed nervous, like he’d been put on the spot. Zoey thought that where most guys had at least a little confidence, this one only had a dark cellar where he stored his shame.

“So, every weekend I’m here. With Shae. I buy back-to-back sessions when I can. We talk, we hold each other, I pour out my heart to her. We cry. The first time in my life I’ve had this. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ve been invisible my whole life, until now. I feel her pressed up against me and I become real, for the first time. So two weeks ago all I did—all I did—was ask if I could see her outside of the sessions. If we could go have coffee. She says no, and that’s fine, no big deal. Next time I come, they tell me I have to go with a different girl. Shae has blocked me.”

Zoey knew without having to consult the hostage negotiation guide that this was not the time to tell a crazy man he’s being crazy. Women get their faces smashed in doing that. Anything she said that challenged him, or made him feel small, would just be seen as an attack. So what in the hell do you say?

Zoey said, “That must have been hard.” There, that should do it. “But you know that’s not the fault of any of the hundred other people in the building, so how about you let us move the snack truck that’s blocking the front door and start getting those people out of here. You don’t want to hurt them.”

“And what do I get in exchange for doing that?”

“What do you want?”

“I want Shae.”

“You want them to let you make appointments with her again?”

“No. I want Shae. My only possible life is with her. If I can’t be with her, I have no life, and I’m taking as many people with me as I can.”

Zoey started to tell him that perhaps the terrified girl standing next to him should have some say in how she spends the rest of her life, then stopped herself. Zoey didn’t have much of a filter but sometimes it did kick in during emergencies.

She thought for a moment. “Wait, if that’s all you want, why did you ask for me? Why didn’t you just grab her and go?”

“You have to let her out of her contract. The slave deal you made her sign.”

“I’m sorry, the what?”

“You made her and all of the other hosts sign a deal that they have to work out their yearlong contract, or else your people track them down. She can’t go with me unless you release her from it. We want that, plus some money. Enough to get away. Ten million.”

The contract thing didn’t sound right to Zoey. It’s entirely possible some of her businesses had been run that way at one time, but that was the kind of thing she’d put a stop to. Then her eyes met Shae’s and the obvious truth hit her: that had been Shae’s lie to stall Tilley. She hadn’t been expecting him to actually call the owner to get it voided.

“Ah. Right. But if you didn’t find that out until you got here, it means you didn’t come here planning to stage a hostage crisis. So what’s really in your backpack there? Your lunch?”

That, it turned out, had been the wrong thing to say. Dexter pushed Shae aside and flew across the gap between him and Zoey. His fingers, coated in segmented metal, were instantly around her throat. He pushed her back against the cold tiles. He then swung his other fist and it exploded into the wall next to Zoey’s head, leaving a hole the width of a bowling ball and sending ceramic shards spraying across the room.

Zoey’s ears rang from the impact. Shae screamed.

“You know what these implants can do,” hissed Tilley. “I can smash your skull against this wall, like cracking an egg. You know that, right?”

Zoey clawed uselessly around her neck. Then she reached down frantically with her left hand, digging into her pocket.

He said, “So it doesn’t matter whether or not I have the device, not to you. Because you know I can smear these tiles with your brains without breaking a sweat. Right?”

Shae begged him to stop, told him she didn’t want this, any of it.

Zoey’s lungs burned, trying to pull in breath through her compressed windpipe. Her hand found her phone. She brought it up with her right hand, holding it so the screen was visible over Dexter’s left shoulder. With a shaking thumb, she tapped the browser and brought up the list of hostage negotiation tips again. She found what she thought was the relevant sentence.

She croaked, “I . . . can take that request to my people. But . . . it will take some time . . .”

Dexter squinted in confusion, glanced back at the phone, then let her go. Zoey collapsed to the floor.

He said, “You’re dumber than they told me you were. I know you own this place, I know you’ve got the money. Whatever I want done, you can do it with a word.”

Zoey struggled to catch her breath. Her throat was throbbing. “I’m sorry . . . I’m used to being on Shae’s end.”

Shae said, “Can we please talk to that other guy instead?”

“I want half of the ten million in dollars,” said Tilley, “and half in Spoils, transferred to my Hub account.”

Still sitting on the tile floor, Zoey folded her legs under her and let out a sigh. Her neck was burning and she was starting to feel clammy all over from the shower steam. She pushed her hair out of her face.

“You know I can’t let you take her.”

“You can’t stop us.”

“‘Us?’ You’re acting like you’re running off together. You think she wants this? Look at her!”

“So what. For almost all of human history, this right here is how it was done. You wanted a woman, you acquired her, no different from livestock. I understand why, now. Women don’t know what they want. I can make Shae happy. She doesn’t know it now, because society has told her it’s shameful to be with a guy like me. All we have to do is push through that. In time, she’ll see.”

Zoey found herself wishing someone had in fact activated a device to melt her brain.

“I, uh, understand where you’re coming from, Dexter. And it’s good that you’re . . . honest about your desires—”

“No. You don’t even live in the same universe as I do. You notice ninety percent of the customers here are male? All of us, starving for this.”

“Yeah and ninety percent of the employees are girls, same as the sex workers in any of the thousand brothels in this city. You think they wouldn’t prefer to be doing something else? Meanwhile, I have to do boring meetings with rich CEOs every week and guess what—they’re mostly guys. That’s the world.”

Zoey had several vices in her life, perhaps none more dangerous than her addiction to pointless arguments.

“No,” said Tilley, trembling with the anticipation of finally putting all of this into words. “Look at you. You’re as fat as me and your face is nothing special, but even if you lost every penny you could always find a guy to take care of you. Men have wanted what you have since before you even knew what it was, begged you for it, done you favors. Meanwhile, I was treated like a slug on a sidewalk, told every day that no one wants me. You’ll never know what that’s like. So no, you won’t talk me out of this. We’re not even speaking the same language.”

“I just came from a party, a bunch of people there I barely know. This gross old rich guy was hitting on me the whole time. Do you know what he liked about me?”

“Your tits? That you look like you have no respect for yourself and will do anything in bed?”

“He liked that I’m twenty-three. How many years can pass before that window closes? All that humiliation you went through in school, all those cheerleaders getting treated like goddesses, I get it, I was there, too. But each and every one of those girls is praying they can get their lives to a solid place before society declares them invisible. Meanwhile, a guy can get old and ugly and still pick up prom queens as long as he’s got his life together. That can be you! Let Shae go, maybe we can work something out. Turn your whole situation around.”

Dexter reached over and grabbed Shae, roughly this time. He pulled her in front of him. An arm around her neck, a gloved finger stroking her collarbone.

“I’m not giving her up to some fraternity douchebag. You have five seconds to tear up her contract, or I’ll crush her windpipe.”

Zoey’s hand instinctively shot up to her own neck.

“There is no contract. She just made that up, to stall.”

Tilley scoffed and shook his head, as if he was annoyed with himself for falling for it. “So we don’t need you at all.”

“Well, you do now. There’s almost certainly a trigger-happy army waiting for you out there and your implants don’t make you explosion-proof.”

“Then they’ll take out Shae, too. We’ll die together. If that’s how it’s destined to happen, so be it. I still want the cash. We’re done talking.”

He raised his hand, putting his fingers around Shae’s throat. Zoey reached up, touching the MY EYES ARE UP THERE pendant, rubbing it between two fingers.

Zoey said, “Stop.”

“I said WE ARE DONE TALKING!” The shouts ricocheted around the tiles.

“I agree. Let go.”

Tilley loosened his grip.

His eyes went wide. Confusion. Doubt.