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Rubik had made a promise to repay the favor someday. And vowed to keep a phone with him for the rest of his life.
Rubik cleared his throat. “I just… my workspace is in lockdown. Every one of my team is sworn to… I don’t understand…”
As the stuttering continued, Daniel had to shake his head at how weird fate was. He hadn’t thought of his old street friend in years, but the idea had come to him while he was in Gus’s former office and Phalen had picked up that cube. And he had remembered the phone number. And the boy on the other end, who was now a man, had still kept to an agreement between street kids.
All things considered, he was surprised he hadn’t thought about it before. Then again, he’d been a little busy dying.
Daniel interrupted the panicked stream of consciousness coming through the connection. “Look, clearly you have your own kind of problems, and I appreciate they’re a big deal for you. But right now, I need to know if there’s anybody else making these cyborgs, Tim. And then I’m going to have to ask you to put your issues on pause, and talk me through a couple of things about its operation.”
“You… wait, you have one of my units?”
“I do.” As there was another stretch of silence, Daniel shook his head, even though they weren’t on FaceTime. “No, I can’t tell you the hows and whys of anything. You’re better off not knowing, trust me. I just need to know… how do I turn it on?”
NINETEEN
BACK AT CLUBBasque, Xhex sat in her office alone and listened to the bass line of the music pumping through the concrete walls of her little slice of privacy. The rhythm was like a heartbeat, reverberating through the building, pulsing across the floor, vibrating up through her chair and the desk. Though she wasn’t consciously aware of tracking the rhythm, she noticed that every time the song switched, she looked up from what she was doing and waited to find the new tempo.
Not that there was much variation.
In front of her, the laptop she used to monitor the feeds from the security cameras was open and she was leaning forward toward the screen—but like that could make this hunt-and-peck go better? Then again, nothing could improve the experience of searching black-and-white images of people for the mutilated gray face from that cold slab. Still, there was something hypnotic about watching the humans churn by, their individualcharacteristics of coloring, height, and weight, blending into an anonymous mash-up. She decided her detached ennui must be how actuaries felt, the forest subsuming the trees—
And there he was.
“Fuck,” she breathed as she slowed the video speed down.
The male she’d killed the other night had the kind of swagger that went with an exaggerated pride in one’s low-hangers, and that arrogance carried over into the proprietary way he looked at the females around him. He had a buddy with him, a sort of not-quite-there who had a clear case of hero worship going on: While the male was assessing his options, his pal was far more focused on his idol, that weak chin and rapt eyes locked on a guru who didn’t seem to give two shits about him.
As time passed, and they moved around, she had to flip between cameras to keep the male in view—and she knew the moment he ID’d his prey. The arrogance slipped and the aggression came out. No more jocular neutral. Now he looked like he wanted to eat something.
Someone.
The target was a small blond human woman—at least, Xhex gathered she was a human because of the way he tight-smiled in front of her. So that the fangs in that mouth didn’t make an appearance.
It didn’t take long before the pair were dancing,and his hands traveled to places the woman clearly didn’t feel comfortable with, her body always moving back, his always moving forward. As soon as she could, the woman shook her head and broke free of him—but he followed.
As Xhex viewed the interactions, she dubbed in the lines.You’re so pretty, baby. Just one drink. Sorry, I can’t fight it. I want you, but I respect you… nah, don’t worry, he’s just my boy. C’mon, I’ll buy you a drink.
The woman ended up over at the bar with the male, and when her friends came across to check in, the vampire shooed them away with a flirtatious floor show.
“Superficial charm,” Xhex growled. “You sociopathic sonofa—”
And there it was. The spike of the drink. The move was so smooth, only a practiced eye would have caught it, certainly not a woman who was treading water next to what she assumed was a guy who was attractive, but coming on too strong: He waited until she’d taken two sips, then he pointed out to the dancing throngs in front of them—and as her face turned in that direction, he stretched his arm behind her and dropped something into the open plastic glass.
His friend saw it happen… and, yeah, the smirk. That fucking you’re-my-hero smirk.
Chinless was in on this game.
As a wave of nausea crested, Xhex rubbed her eyes and cursed: On the backs of her lids, all she saw was that suave drugging on repeat, the extension of that arm, the drop, that punk-ass smile on the other male’s face. It was like being in a live action horror movie where she wanted to yell at the character on the screen.
Refocusing, she checked the time counter in the lower corner of the screen.
The woman’s affect changed about ten minutes later. All of a sudden, her posture was looser, and she stopped looking over toward her friends, stopped squirming as he put his arm around her, stopped… twitching like she was trapped and couldn’t find the way out.
And then came the exit. The two males led her down the hallway, past the bathrooms… and right out into the darkness.
Xhex stopped the footage. Then switched to another screen. Scrolling down the incident reports for the previous night, she knew what she was going to find and it just killed her. She was supposed to be keeping people safe…
The log entry was the third up from the bottom: A police report of a rape, filed this morning, by a woman named Samantha Hoste who claimed she’d been drugged, taken out to a car, and forced to havesex with two men. Afterward, she was rolled out of the backseat and left under the bridge, in the frigid night.
