Seventeen results. I scrolled down the page and there she was. Number five: Eon Ibarra. The picture in the POM database was a mugshot from an NSPD station at the edge of Magenta. She looked like a hot mess. Her bobbed green hair was tangled and her cheeks were sunken, with deep bags under her eyes. The live mugshot played a few seconds on loop, and I saw her eye and cheek twitch in that way everyone on the street knew. Vector withdrawal. But it was her, there was no mistaking it. Her eyes gave her away.
Maddox leaned down over my shoulder. “Look, Cy.” He pointed to the corner of the screen, where her record was marked with a black hexagonal symbol. Electroteknik. I’d never met another. I thought about that perfect face she had made when I’d shocked her. Not pain, but resonant pleasure.
“No wonder you liked her.” Maddox was giving me a shit-eating grin. I ignored him. I ran my fingers over my Vysor. I had just gotten it back from tech support a few hours ago. They’d had to replace a whole board—couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.
“She must have used her Flux on my Vysor. I didn’t even notice,” A half-truth, good enough for Maddox. “This bitch is good.”
Maddox swiped through her profile, his non-interest clearly forgotten. “Dropped out of Elysium University. Was studying data restoration. She a cyberrunner?”
“What’s her arrest record for?” I asked because Maddox was apparently driving this now. He scrolled back up to her mugshot.
“Picked up on…solicitation?” Maddox read off the screen while I’d been staring at her face.
“Solicitation?” I thought about that sweet pussy and the act she had put on for me. God, I was so fucking dumb. Of course she was a shofu.
“Charged with solicitation and assault of an officer. There’s a station vid.” Maddox pointed to the corner of the screen. He didn’t have to tell me twice.
The vid was from the security camera in the corner of the interrogation room. She was cuffed, which wasn’t surprising, but it was surprising how. Normally, detainees were cuffed to the table in front of them. They’d moved her back and cuffed her hands behind her chair, so she was more exposed, and her tits were pushed out.
“Surprised they kept the vid of this,” Maddox said, observing the same breaks in procedure I saw. We did it all the time, but there was never any evidence left behind.
“Pigs. How they get anything done is beyond me.” Maddox grimaced at that, but he had left that life behind. I knew better than some how that didn’t really matter.
“Why do they even have her cuffed?”
“Always underestimating women, huh? Watch, bud.”
“This coming from the guy who got completely pussy-blinded by a Magenta whore.” I almost laughed at Maddox’s unusual profanity, but his assertion was too correct for me to respond.
“Just watch the fuckin’ vid.”
A couple of the officers were in there with her, obviously trying to intimidate her. Her face was pulled tight, the mask of fear and naivety that she’d used on me. One of the officers got close and ran his finger down her cheek. Maddox grunted in displeasure, but I was just watching her. That poor fucker.
He got close enough that she was able to swipe his feet out from under him before standing up and swing the metal chair she was cuffed to around and into his face. She slammed it into him again before the other officers in the room managed to grab her, and the vid feed finally cut off. The last shot was of her face contorted in pure rage, her eyes glowing with Flux. It made the hairs on my arms stand on edge and my cock twitch.
“She’s a tough one, huh? Surprised she survived what came next.”
I grunted at that. She’d looked more used there. More like the working girls I knew from home. Not the same bright, flushed face I’d seen at the bar. Even with her skills, if she’d looked like that when I’d met her, I would have known what she was. Something had changed between then and now, something that had brought her back to life. The arrest was from eight months ago. I sighed.
“What?” Maddox asked.
“I just can’t believe I went down on a sex worker from Magenta.”
“You did what?!” Maddox gasped.
“Cyanos, I thought you were working, not gossiping.” Tex stood behind Maddox, leering down at my terminal. His eyes darted around Eon’s profile, his lips setting into a hard line. Something dark swirled in his eyes as he observed her, and it was unnerving.
“Got a lead on one of the girls, boss,” I said.
“And this is the work you are prioritizing?”
“She is related to the bombing, boss. I’m sure of it.”
“We cannot handle any distractions, Cyanos,” Tex interjected.
“Boss, no one should know who we are.” That’s what made us alpha-level assets. We didn’t exist. Ghosts in a city where everyone else’s identity had been turned into a set of consumer profiles. “I can handle—”
“Let me be perfectly clear.” Tex turned to me, and the dark eddies of his eyes swirled like a storm unraveling in slow motion. My stomach dropped. “You are to cease all investigation into this woman. You are right—no one knows who you are. You cannot be a target. All your focus is to be on this Renard case, and if you have any spare time, perhaps you can ruminate on how to not let yourself be led around like a dog chasing scraps.”
