Mumbai Manhunt Page 3

Netta sat on the bed, two long metal needles gripped in her hands as she kicked quickly looped yarn together into stitches on the scarf. The tip of her tongue peeked out between her lips as she stared intently at her work. The look of concentration applied to such a mundane, unnecessary pursuit was the final straw for Joshi's exhaustion, and he gave in to the laugh that bubbled up. "I take it you're okay then."

  She snorted, pausing long enough to give him an effective side-eye glance. "Why would you say that? If there's an okay, I'm in the L3 point on the opposite side of its orbit." She delivered her pronouncement in a single breath and returned to her knitting.

  Joshi sat down in the single wooden chair and propped his feet on the corner of the bed. "I just assumed. Since you were calm enough to start up arts and crafts." The needles ticked in silence. Watching her felt strange, the whole scene too domestic, awakening ideas he could ill afford to entertain. The tip of her tongue sent his brain skipping down entirely inappropriate paths and forced him to look anywhere else.

  The room was as featureless as his own. The same markers on the walls to indicate an extensive augmented reality suite; most everywhere in Mumbai used AR for everything from news to entertainment. No doubt the hotel had set up a selection of faux windows showing some lovely scenery that wasn't the vast docklands that actually lurked outside. He thought about grabbing his ‘net-enabled ARglasses out of the jacket in the other room just to have something else to watch, but his curiosity wasn't high enough to warrant the effort.

  Also the other room felt too far.

  Once Netta finished a row, she slid the yarn deep onto the needle and clipped some kind of protector over the end to keep the project from falling off. She let out a slow breath and rolled her shoulders then turned her baleful glare on him again. "It is because of my 'arts and crafts' project, as you so derisively named it, that I've managed to stay sane at all. Now, since you don't appear to be going away, I can only presume that you want something else. What is it?"

  He couldn't blame her for being prickly. It had to feel all too familiar for her; she’d spent years on the run. Perhaps despite having hired him, she still blamed him for her lot. That would make things easier for him. He could keep his thoughts clear without the distraction, and thinking clearly was the first rule of survival. "Just making certain you're okay. When you're calm enough, you'll want to try sleeping." He pointed at the door to the hall. "Don't open that under any circumstances. There's no windows, or I'd tell you to stay out of line with them too."

  "What if I have to go to the bathroom?"

  "Then wake me up," he said, stunned that she didn't yet understand how her life had changed. "Or wait. Do not go on your own. We've only got the rooms for six hours anyway."

  "Why so short?"

  "Because I don't want our well-dressed friend tracing us down, and the easiest way to prevent that is to keep moving." He gave a rueful smile. "I'm also not a robot, so I have to sleep every once in a while, or I won't be any good to you."

  Her face softened, and she glanced at the bruises on his chest. "I assume you aren't packing healing accelerants."

  Joshi scoffed. "Corporate Services doesn't pay for luxury. They want you to not get hurt and to get the job done. And they don't pay enough for me to get them myself." He pulled the edges of his shirt together, suddenly aware of the way her eyes kept focusing on the bruise.

  She nodded at the tremor in his hand and curled up the half-finished scarf. "When were you diagnosed?"

  "Diagnosed? Or when did I know?" He rolled his neck to one side and the other, feeling it twist and unknot. He’d had concerns about the tremor in his fingers long before the first bone fracture warned him of Implant Rejection Syndrome. "Not that there's much difference between the two."

  "I didn't mean to touch a sore spot—"

  "You didn't." He cut her off too brusquely and couldn't miss the flash of hurt on her face from it. "My IRS doesn't matter if we don't survive this thing. Yes, it's late stage, but I'm still plenty good enough to defend you. You'll get what you paid for." He didn't mention that if he failed at his job, neither of them would be alive to make the payment in the first place.

  After a moment's silence, she spoke. "I don't understand why they're after you as well."

  Joshi scoffed and stood to pace the room. "Because I've outlived my usefulness. At least that's my guess. It's not like CorpServ—Corporate Services, sorry—tell me who's fronting the money for the job."

  "The perfect middleman," she said. It didn't sound like she believed it.

  He had to resist the urge to turn on a radio or otherwise create white noise around their conversation. CorpServ were known to spy on their operatives, and just spy in general. It was the unspoken rule about the organization—all the corporations used them, because they had dirt on everyone. They knew exactly who did what to whom, when, and for how much. It served as excellent leverage to ensure repeat business. "As for who set him after you? Hard to say. It could be you're a target of convenience. It could be BlueGene, wanting to make sure they covered their bases. Just in case you had a harebrained plan to run off with their research."

  She looked down at the knitting in her hands, and there was no misunderstanding the slump in her shoulders. The bottom dropped out of Joshi’s stomach. "You were going to run. Fuck."

  "You make it sound like something awful."

  Joshi shook his head. "Nope. You've got your reasons. I don't need or want to hear them. At the end of the day, you're the wallet, and I'm the hired help." He had to say it out loud. Keep the wall between them. Anything to push away his desire to comfort her. "If you're looking to run, it's my job to get you out."

  Netta stiffened. "Your loyalty only goes so far as your next paycheck, then."

  "Now who's making it sound awful?" She winced, and he resisted the urge to take it back. History or no, they didn't owe each other any explanations. Through whatever fates that mattered, he'd been given a chance to clear one of the negatives on his ledger. It wouldn't be enough to make up for a career of mercenary pursuits, but he'd take what small atonements he could get.

  Netta watched him stand in the doorway between their rooms and tried to fight back the panic that clawed up her spine. He was leaving her in the room. Alone. Without protection from the killer hunting them.

  The rational part of her brain, the one that took pride in all that she'd accomplished over the years, was disgusted by the weakness. Before she’d accepted BlueGene’s offer and the lab in Mumbai, she’d lived on the run for two years. She’d survived, had outsmarted and evaded pursuers both government and corporate. It hadn’t been easy, and the stress of it felt like it would kill her some nights, but she’d done it. She could do it again. She didn't need Joshi's protection.

  But she could admit that she wanted it.

  "Why you?" When he turned and looked over his shoulder, she realized how awful her wording had been. "I mean, why send you to destroy the lab? After…" She let the words hang between them, hoping he hadn't written off their prior time together as just another contract.

  He sighed, the sound as bone-weary as his expression. "Punishment? Sick amusement? They certainly know that the two of us..."

  He let the words trail off, and she wondered how he might have finished the sentence. Bonded. Made love. Fucked. Netta felt a flash of anger at his inability to put a word to it. Something that might give her a clue how he remembered the first time they met. How he felt about it. "The only way they’d know is if you told them."

  "They’d know, because there are no secrets from them. Corporate Services got where they are because they have eyes everywhere. It wouldn't surprise me if they have a camera in these rooms already."

  A flutter of panic tickled between her shoulders. "It's a smaller risk than going outside, where we know they have eyes."

  He nodded. "Indeed. No offense, Doctor. I really need to sleep if I'm going to be at my best."

  "It's Netta."

  "I remember," he said, voice soft around
her name. He turned to pass through the door, arm tucked tight against his side.

  She blurted out another question. "How bad are the fractures?"

  His shoulders slumped again. "I really am exhausted, Doct— Netta." She'd never liked it, the consonants all in the wrong place, but he made her name sound gentle.

  "You've got late-stage Implant Rejection, by your own admission. Depending on what you've had installed, one of the more common symptoms is osteoporosis. If our killer is wired up, and he certainly moved like it, then his fists would have shattered a healthy man's ribs. Yours wouldn't stand a chance." When he didn't say anything, Netta stood and started toward him. "If I'm wrong, tell me."

  "Intercostal ballistic weave," he said after a frustratingly long pause. "Not actually that good against bullets, for the record."

  She turned him back into her room and pushed his open shirt off over his shoulders. "It's not terrible against small arms fire. Actually good against knives."

  "You sound like you read up on it." He looked at her with one eyebrow raised. "Are you secretly thinking of going into Operations?"

  Netta couldn't hold back a smile at that. "Hardly. My sister fought in— She was a soldier." She told herself that he didn't need to know more than that. The lump crushing her windpipe wouldn't have allowed her to say more anyway. The pain abated some as she avoided the topic. It was better this way.

  She distracted herself by examining his chest. Purely out of medical curiosity, she reminded herself. The bruising over his ribs looked horrible, black and vivid purple with streaks of red where the impact had forced the blood away from the surface. The wounds did little to detract from the sculpted musculature of his upper body. Without coming off wiry, each muscle stood out in stark relief beneath the warm umber of his skin. She smirked. If she'd had him around when she was in college, memorizing all those muscles for anatomy class would have been a lot more entertaining.

  "Is it that bad?" He sounded resigned.

  "More like glorious." She rushed to append, "-ly purple."

  He turned his head, eyes narrowed. But she'd still caught the spark of heat behind them. The way they'd dipped to look down the front of her shirt before rushing back to her face.

  "I'm serious. This looks like it hurts." She kept her face down to hide her smile. Other injuries were written in white scars across his skin. The puckered star of a gunshot wound. The straight slash of a blade. A poorly healed animal bite in his upper arm. He'd seen a lot of action, even before the IRS started to take its toll, but something was missing. "I'm not seeing much muscular atrophy. Your implant rejection can't be that bad."

  "That's not what my doctor said." As he spoke, she spotted the mild palsy in his opposite hand, signs of his nerves losing their myelin. "And as for the pain, I've had a dump of beta-endorphin. Pain's easy to shut down."

  Netta gritted her teeth to avoid letting her horror show. "You’re using transcranial stimulation for that?" She already knew the answer but felt like she had to say something. It was a dangerous upgrade, despite how common it was in military mods. "Pain's your warning that things are wrong. It's not healthy to turn it off."

  "If I gave in to the pain, I'd be out of commission, and you'd be on your own. Hardly a good option for either of us."

  Netta ran her hands along his ribs, feeling the telltale bumps of the intercostal armor he'd mentioned as well as the slight crepitus she'd expected to find. The heat of his skin brought back too many other memories, too many other wants, and she forced herself to focus on the clinical. "Definitely two broken ribs here. This one feels like it’s in two places." He nodded, and she moved up to his shoulder. "This arm's not sitting right. Do you have any upgrades, or is the rotator cuff degraded?"

  "Just bio-fiber implants." He winced as she lifted his arm. "Tell me about your sister."

  The movement had to be agonizing for him to feel pain through the beta haze. "I think the joint hyperextended and caught muscle when it relocated. And there's not much to tell."

  "I'd like to hear it anyway. It'll keep my mind off things when you reseat that shoulder."

  She grimaced. Of course he'd realize it was the best way to fix things. "You should probably look at the wall. Read the crawler or something."

  He chuckled. "Natural eyes, remember?"

  Netta checked the detailed AR, finding it hard to believe he didn’t see the digitally rendered decor—the fake window with a view of an unoccupied Chaupati beach, the bright orange Devanagari letters of the news crawler, with Arabic subtitles flowing in the opposite direction. Without AR, the room would be a lifeless, gray space. "This is going to hurt," she said automatically. "Or maybe not, in your case."

  Joshi nodded and stared off in another direction while she planted her back in his armpit. "Sister?"

  "You're persistent." She grabbed above his elbow with both hands and braced her feet on the floor. "There's not much to tell. We were fifteen years apart. She was the firstborn. Mom and Dad had me late." Thoughts about Jada were never quick in coming. They had to wend past all the barriers she'd put in place before they could surface, and they didn't want to shake loose easily. "She fought in the S-A."

  "The Sino-American War gave us a lot of the progress in implant technology."

  "Largely because both sides took advantage of the desperation to legitimize untested technologies and large-scale human experimentation." Netta shoved up into the joint with all the force her legs could muster. He huffed quietly, and she felt his shoulder dislocate and reseat itself. It came apart too easily for her preference. Maybe she'd misjudged how far along his rejection had progressed. The joint felt loose. "Is that better?"

  Joshi stood and swung his arm in a few directions. She noticed he didn't bring it above the line of his shoulder. "It will do. It's better than it was, thanks."

  She stepped in under his arm and laid a hand on his broken ribs. "I'd feel better if we had resin cast available to protect these."

  "I'd feel better if I had a dozen military-grade drone rigs running double perimeters around us. We can't all have what we want." He looked at her mouth, a momentary lapse in his aloof control that brought memories rushing back to her. Frustration slithered in the spaces between her thoughts—wishing he’d stop the tease and tell her if their liaison three years ago had been business or pleasure.

  Or she could just run with the now. She stepped closer and leaned up to kiss him. He pulled away slightly, and Netta could feel his nervous tension. "I'm not some lost girl anymore. I know what I'm doing."

  He nodded with a sigh. She slid her hand up his cheek, feeling the stubble grate against her palm as she tugged his mouth to hers. His good arm slipped around her waist, keeping her tight against his chest as their mouths took turns yielding to each other.

  The patient insistence of his lips matched the quiet, slow-blooming heat that swelled out from behind her ribs and spread along her nerves like a warm blanket. She opened her mouth, inviting more, and he obliged her. Netta curled her fingers in the waves of his hair, keeping him as close as she could.

  When she broke away to draw a breath, he leaned his forehead against her shoulder with a shuddering sigh. She opened her eyes to look at him, but her attention was pulled immediately to her picture on the AR Newscrawler.

  "What is it?" Joshi stiffened and moved away from her. "What's wrong?"

  Netta forced herself to remember that he couldn't see the wall, which was plastered with pictures of both of their faces and someone's phone-cam footage of her burning lab. Her heart pounded against her ribs, desperate to escape, and any warmth the kiss had created in her had turned to icy water. It impressed her that, when she spoke, she could keep her voice stable. "We're wanted. For bioterrorism."

  Four

  His shoulder ached even as it slumped under the weight of her announcement. “Clever,” he admitted. “Harrying 101, really. It cuts off our options for finding help, eliminates a lot of the places we might hide.” He knew full well that Corporate Services under
stood how to break their prey. He’d been one of their preferred hunters and excelled at keeping prey on the edge.

  Not that he felt any pride in the skill, seeing the terror and hopelessness in Netta’s face. For a moment, protective rage blossomed in his chest, and he wanted to find the bastards who had set this up. Do the things she didn't think him capable of. What he was made for. He curled his hand around her arm and led her back to the bed so she could sit down.

  Getting emotionally compromised would only endanger them both. Rule One. Do the job without attachments. Every operator kept their own moral code; it gave them a compass. Kept them sane in the otherwise murky and amoral world of intercorporate warfare. He couldn’t get involved, couldn’t afford to care, or it would limit his choices. Keeping her safe took precedence.

  "But that's not true. That's not what happened at all." Netta's voice sounded far away. She still focused on the gray, featureless wall, and Joshi had to remember that she received more input than he did. He thought again about going back for the ARglasses in the other room; at least then he’d be able to see some of what the news stories were saying. The urge to smile felt out of place, but it was probably the first time in his life he wished he could view the colorful projection of Augmented Reality that overlaid the everyday world.

  He curled his hand over hers. "Of course it's not true. But you and I are the only folks who know that. On the plus side, there are places, even here, where people don't pay attention to what the news is telling them. It's going to take a bit of running first, but we needed to move anyway."

  "What about you?" She shook her head as if clearing it and focused on him. "You needed to sleep."

  "Things have changed. I can sleep later. For now, we move." He walked to the far side of the bed and began to tuck her knitting back into its bag. The softness of the yarn surprised him; he had expected it to be scratchy or itchy. Instead it felt light, almost like spun silk. "Time to break out the cash I asked about."

  Netta rolled over so she was facing him and dug into a pouch on the front of the knitting bag. She pulled out a thin stack of bills, no more than a few thousand rupees. "Will this do?"