Page 25 of Scion

“For tokens,” I emphasise, slightly offended. “It’s my job.”

“It has to be more than that. Surely.”

I frown. “You don’t hire an exterminator because he hates roaches. You hire him because you do. Maybe he hates them too, but he kills them because that’s what he’s paid to do. It’s what he’s good at. It’s his role in society.”

“So you see lifers as cockroaches?”

“I don’t. Society does,” I emphasise.

Old Woman gestures, a little disbelievingly. “You make it sound so simple, Azure. But you are an assassin. You cannot be unaware of the moral culpability of your job.”

“Ten-O-Ten kid here, remember? Your generation created the problem. My parents’ generation, and then mine, overwhelmingly voted to solve it.” I’m no saint, but this outdated line of thinking annoys me. “Or maybe everyone with enough credits should be allowed to live forever, while the rest of the world deals with pop-control restrictions? With two-thirds of us crammed into megacities, and everybody else trying not to starve on the Lat-60 belt? Hell. Morally culpable? I may do this job for the tokens, but if anything, I’m an extension of morality. Not yours, maybe. But the real world’s.” I’m not heated. I’m not. Just firm. Really, really firm. And maybe a little loud.

Old Woman says nothing as I finish. Eventually, she nods. Not agreement or approval, just an acknowledgement. “You intend to keep doing it, then?”

I shrug. Irritation passing. “How many lifers on record, now, worldwide?”

“About seven thousand?”

“Enough to keep me in tokens for a while.” Seven thousand. Seven thousand out of one and a half billion. And they wonder why people like me exist. “Of course, if things—”

I cut off as the container shivers.

There’s only that moment of warning and then I’m suddenly sliding forward with the abrupt arresting of our momentum. I throw myself to the side, barely managing to avoid slamming into Old Woman and instead hitting the container wall with a forceful, and mildly painful, thud. The light bar does the same, but with far less success. It shatters.

“I think we’ve stopped,” I groan into the sudden, and absolute, darkness.

“I think you might be right. Thanks for dodging.”

“My pleasure.” I roll my shoulder, feeling at the point of impact and looking around vainly. The container’s sealed airtight. Even my ocular revs won’t be any use in here without the light bar. “Don’t move until the lid cracks. That glass will be everywhere.”

There’s a few seconds of silence. Then a few more.

A jolt, and the container starts to move again.

“Um.” I shift. “Wouldn’t this be the point where the bot lets us out?”

“It’s alright. We’re probably just in a queue.”

Another few seconds. We’re still moving. Slower than before, but definitely moving.

A faint sound ahead. A kind of crackling and zipping. “I’m not sure we want to be in this queue.”

“I marked the container for storage, not disposal.” Old Woman’s voice is almost more protesting than concerned. “I’m sure! I told the bot to—”

“Maybe let’s talk about your coding skills later.” The blade I took from Fish Boy is in the satchel. I rummage around until I find it. If we were still in the Loop, we wouldn’t be able to hear whatever it is up ahead. Breaching the container probably won’t result in our suffocation. “Hold still.”

“Why?”

I grip her with my left hand, holding her firmly out of the way. “Because there’s a reason people use the phrase ‘stab in the dark.’ ”

“What? Oh.” I feel her go very still beneath my hand. “Alright.”

I activate my somatics in my arm, torso, waist, and legs.

Swivel, and slam the knife as hard as I can into the plastic.

The titanium blade is well-made and sharp but the toxic waste container is, well, a toxic waste container. Shock ricochets up my arm but there’s no time to shake it off; I rip the metal out of the wall and stab again, and again, and again in a frenzy of power and precision. There’s a slit of light as I successfully hit in precisely the same place several times in a row; as soon as I have that, my ocular revs enhance everything.