Mumbai Manhunt Read online

  He'd leave. Again. And he'd be right to. The sudden pain that dug its nails into her heart made her gasp. Not over fear for herself; she refused to believe he'd turn her over to Bao. He'd simply leave her to fend for herself. More painful was the idea that in doing so, he'd be condemned to die alone. It wasn't love. Just sympathy. And hormones. There was no need to assign lofty words to a purely biological reaction.

  Which didn't make the way she'd responded to him, the way she still wanted him, any more logical. It's concern, she told herself. Knowing you can save him.

  But that required her to tell him the truth first. Before he decided that what his imagination had concocted was bad enough and left anyway.

  Joshi moved to the next shelter, which seemed to have been built to protect a bird's nest of wiring, connected together for God alone knew what purpose. He pressed close to the wall and, after a moment's effort, slid out part of a broken brick. As soon as the brick had cleared its socket, Joshi shot his hand inside and gave a sigh of relief.

  He held a grenade in his hand when he pulled it back out, and very carefully returned the pin from the back of the brick he had removed. Once it had been disarmed, he looked at her. "Low yield incendiary. In a brick and steel tunnel. The fire would have destroyed everything I'd hidden in there, but it wouldn't have spread. I wouldn't endanger the Zone like that."

  It still sounded an awful lot like a risk to her, but she refused to argue with him. He was talking to her again, and she didn’t want to take the chance that he might stop. "What's inside?"

  He set the grenade down, then reached back in to the hole. This time he pulled out a plastic-wrapped stack of actual, paper rupees. She spotted the distinctive green of the 500 rupee note and did a quick calculation. Three bundles, at one hundred notes each. Not a huge sum, but in cash it would be plenty to bribe people and grease their way out of Mumbai.

  "About my sister," she started. "I want to clear the air between us."

  "Your secrets are your own. You're not paying me to carry them." Joshi removed an identification chip nestled in a sheet of artificial flesh stretched across an aluminum frame.

  She was, technically, not paying him at all—something he'd no doubt figured out by now. She tried to ignore the fact that he only had a single identity card. "I don't want you to get the wrong impression from what Bao said. Don't want you to be curious and find out something that will disappoint you later."

  "Value judgments, like a conscience, are a hindrance in my line of work." He pulled out an antistatic bag, which no doubt held a touch tablet.

  "That's bullshit," she spat. Her frustration boiled past her concern. "If you were the heartless automaton you claim to be, you'd have done the job you were asked to do. You'd have turned me over to Bao, when that didn't work, because at the end of the day it's about doing the job and getting paid." She stomped forward and slammed her mouth against his, thankful that she was tall enough to leave little distance between their heights.

  His lips melted against hers, reacting immediately as molten honey rolled through her blood. His fingers dug into her ass, pulling her tight against the unyielding muscle of his chest.

  It was all Netta could do not to strip his shirt open in the alley. It had been less than four hours since they'd made love the last time, and she wanted more already. Like a drug, she only wanted more of him.

  Before she got further distracted, she pulled herself away. "If you didn't give a shit, you wouldn’t have kissed me back. You wouldn't be watching me now, wondering when I'd kiss you again." She hoped she’d read his signals correctly. Honestly, it'd been so long since she'd spent time with another person, she could just be imagining it. Reading what she wanted into ambiguous data was, after all, an occupational hazard.

  He stepped back from her, and sorrow rushed in to fill the place where his warmth had been a moment before. "You underestimate your effect on the opposite sex." He coughed quietly and stretched his neck to each side. "And you are a damn sight more than tempting to me. Happy to hear me say it out loud? But I also know what keeps people alive. Trust isn't one of those things. Trust isn't rewarded in my line of work. It's exploited. It's just putting blood in the water."

  "You trusted Yashilla once."

  "And numbness was better than being with a monster that did the things I did." He chuckled and slipped the brick back into place on the wall.

  "There's a difference this time."

  "What's that, exactly?"

  "We have the same stakes—both our lives are at risk. You heard Bao, he's going to come for us." She turned and paced up the narrow alley and almost lost her footing on a piece of broken paving.

  "Assuming I don't turn you in," Joshi said, and she waited for the conclusion of his thought. "Which is why you're so excited to tell me your secrets. You want to reassure me that you're not as bad as Bao implied. That or you're counting on your seductive skills to keep me close against my best interests."

  Netta's cheeks flared. She hadn't considered herself experienced, let alone skilled. It didn't surprise her that he'd divined her motives. It wasn't especially hidden, she supposed. The clean way he laid it out made it sound almost underhanded. That or he genuinely believed that whatever she'd done couldn't be as terrible as had been implied.

  She took a deep breath. "I murdered my sister."

  Silence filled the alley, and she couldn't bring herself to turn around. She didn't want to see the disappointment on his face. Or worse, the realization that she was a monster and ridding himself of her would best be done as soon as possible.

  "I told you, you didn't have to tell me."

  "And I said you deserved the truth." Netta closed her eyes against the flood of memory, but all it did was burn the images into her eyelids. "She had IRS, that much is true. She was in full rejection at that point, stage five. I was working on a gene therapy to treat her symptoms."

  "You found a solution." She could hear the moment of hope in his voice, tempered by suspicion and mistrust. As well it should be.

  "I thought I had a solution," Netta said. "You don't know what it was like. I could watch her slipping away, as her body destroyed itself from the inside out. They wanted to drag the tests out for months—"

  "You went ahead on your own."

  "Yes. Because she asked me to try. Because if it had worked, she'd have her life back." She could feel the wet on her cheeks and screwed her eyes shut in an effort to keep the tears locked in. The last thing she wanted was for him to be able to say she'd bribed him with emotions. "It didn't work. Obviously. But it did succeed in breaking down her body's interface with the implants and destroying the fibroid encapsulation, rendering them useless."

  "And that’s why BlueGene wanted you, why they kept you on the run until you had no choice but to agree to work for them. So you could make a weapon for them. One that directly attacked the implants a person carried. They wanted a silver bullet to take down enhanced operatives." There was the disgust she'd been waiting for. Finally. Despite her expectation, part of her was sad that it had surfaced. It didn’t matter that she found what they’d hired her for to be just as repugnant as he did. She'd vainly hoped that somehow he'd see the truth and not be horrified.

  She should have known better.

  Behind her, the pistol cocked, and a casing clattered musically on the pavement. "Anything else?"

  There was more. One more thing that Netta wanted to tell him, but couldn't. Not until she knew for sure. She resisted the idea that he couldn't be trusted and that's why she held back. After taking a moment to wipe her face clear, she turned back to him.

  Joshi stood halfway down the alley, a stack of green notes in one hand. He tossed them to her. "Tuck those in your knitting bag. We need to go if we're going to make it out before nightfall." When she didn't follow him, he sighed. "You paid me for a job. Morality is flexible, but the contract is sacrosanct. I finish the job. Always. You could have told me you killed a thousand people, and I'd still be obligated to protect you. The
life of one person whom I never met? I understand your sister was important to you, but frankly, people die all the time. Now let's go." He turned and stalked down the alley and deeper into the warrens of the Blackout Zone.

  Joshi pushed toward the edge of the Zone, trying to ignore the disorientation that struggled to send him to his knees. Despite the treatment, the pain in his shoulder blurred his vision. Still, assuming his sense of direction hadn't failed him, they should be heading toward the ocean. Unlike other areas, the layout of the Zone shifted from day to day, even at the best of times.

  Stay away from the place for six months, as he had, and almost all the nonpermanent markers had changed. The old brick seawall remained, and as long as he moved perpendicular to it, he reasoned, he should be heading toward the ocean. Or back inland, but he trusted himself to not be that lost.

  "You're not going to turn me over to him?" Netta's voice still carried a note of disbelief, despite his reassurances.

  He stopped and spun on one foot to glare at her. In the half-light of the Zone, she seemed more fragile somehow. Her eyes were wide beneath the unruly mess of dark curls that framed her face. Lips that would have been thin in harsh light looked timid and half-hidden in shadow. Like everything else, it was an illusion. The trick was to look past the imagery to see what lay on the other side of the curtain.

  It was why he'd never had his eyes done—there were lies enough in the world. He didn't need modded vision to add more.

  Joshi sighed. "I'm in no position to judge you on some moral ground. I abandoned my own morals a long time ago. Around the same time I stopped believing in talking animals and happy endings."

  "That makes even less sense then. Your survival is at risk protecting me. Why not just turn me over?"

  It was like she wanted to be punished for her transgressions. Now that she had revealed them, she expected him to be the scourge that gave her penance she felt she deserved. "Because I got rid of my moral compass and replaced it with pride." Her brow furrowed in confusion, the shadows darkening around her eyes. "I've never failed a job. That's why the Corporations ask for me, even though I won't do wetwork. I don't fail, and I don't abandon the job when a higher bidder comes along."

  "So you refuse to take a better option, just because I hired you first."

  He shrugged and walked down the alley. "Call it a twist of fate, if you like." A rat glared at him from a pile of garbage, refusing to back down from the interlopers in its domain.

  She caught up to him, her flats scuff-scuffing across the wet pavement. "Then why didn’t you capture me when you were hired to do that?"

  "That wasn’t what they hired me for." The smell of sea air began to cut into his nostrils, carried on the faint breeze. "My job was to destroy your data. Prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Given that you were working with BlueGene to kill me and anyone else with combat upgrades, that also happened to be an act of self-preservation."

  He rounded a narrow corner and found himself looking out at the ocean framed by ramshackle buildings. It was the choppy brown surf of the west coast, rather than the idealized blue of the Maldives, but it made his heart catch all the same. Part of the reason he had such a difficult time leaving the Zone, and why he always returned during his down times: nowhere else put him as close to the water. At least not unless he suddenly found himself part of the glitterati, a fact that grew more unlikely each day.

  The fingers of his left hand did a staccato dance against his thigh. Joshi willed himself to still the renegade limb and hoped Netta didn't notice. At least it was his off hand, and not the right that was going out first. Once he'd gotten her out of the city, she'd be—well, not safe, but at least harder to track. The seagoing anarcho-communes might even be able to protect her for a while.

  It surprised him how much the idea of letting her go hurt. It wasn't affection, whatever Yashilla had implied in their talk. More like a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome. Imagining a time without her felt as scary as imagining his own inevitable death by slow paralysis.

  Her fingers brushed his shoulder, and he could feel her warmth leach into him as she pressed against his side. She kept the words soft, pitched so not even the rat would hear her. "It's not a weapon."

  "You developed a vector that directly attacks a person's implants and renders them useless. I don't know what else you'd call it."

  "No you're right. That would be a weapon. And you're right in that it's exactly what BlueGene wanted me to make. But I couldn't do that to Jada's memory. To her sacrifice." Her voice cracked on the word, and Joshi had to resist the urge to comfort her. She needed to carry her own burdens. She allowed him to see her scars, but he couldn't heal them. "That's why I continued my own research right under their nose."

  He blinked as the words sank in. "Are you saying you were working on a cure this whole time?"

  "Using their funding and their facilities. Yes. It's amazing how much weapon and cure look the same on paper. How understanding the mechanisms of IRS is required for both." She nodded and took a deep breath.

  And he'd destroyed it. A cure to IRS, and he'd blown it apart before setting it on fire. Because Palashkulum Joshi never failed at a job. Not even when there was a higher bidder.

  Not even when the higher bidder would have been himself.

  He let out a slow breath. "I'm sorry. If I'd known, I would have tried to save your research." His fist clenched, and dug the nails into his palm. Let her think it a sign of his disappointment, instead of another spastic twitch of his dying nervous system.

  "It's a setback, certainly." She shoved her fingers between his, forced his hand to open. Her voice, when she spoke again, stayed low, a breath against his ear. "When Jada died, I had to go on the run. The American government called me a traitor. I spent the next eighteen months hiding. I didn't sleep in the same bed two nights in a row for weeks at a time. When I did feel safe, it was only a matter of time before something surfaced that put them back on my trail."

  Joshi gritted his teeth and let her warmth soak into his back. "They never quite caught you, though. Just kept you running. Kept you off balance, from sleeping normally, from forming relationships with anyone. Then a representative from BlueGene offered to make it all go away."

  "Right, but how did you—?"

  "It's a modified acquisition tactic for unpredictable targets. It's highly effective. You've got nothing left, and they offer you just a taste. And then they own you."

  She slumped against him, and he couldn't fight his need to hold her anymore. He held her to his chest and hated himself for not telling her the whole truth. Knew she deserved it, but couldn't give up these few stolen moments of peace with her in his arms.

  "I always suspected they were behind it from the start," she said after a pause. "Too often it felt contrived. I could rest long enough to catch my breath, but not enough to get my feet under me. They always seemed to know where I was, but I somehow managed to spot them in time to start running again."

  "I'm sorry." Joshi was surprised that he meant it. Not just for what she'd been through, but for his contribution to the harvest of misery CorpServ had piled up in people's lives.

  "You shouldn't be. The lack of connection? The feeling that I couldn't trust anyone? That made me paranoid, and a paranoid person is going to do whatever she can to keep her knowledge safe. Even if a Corporate Services operative shows up and destroys her lab in broad daylight."

  She sounded almost smug in the revelation, and he had to keep his expression neutral as he pulled back enough to look at her. The pieces snapped into place, and he finally allowed himself a smile. "The scarf."

  "My mother tried to teach me knitting when I was a little girl, but I couldn't get it. For her it was art—this thing she did without thinking about it because she knew, intrinsically, how it should look. It wasn't until her father—my grandfather—pointed out that it was all basic math that knitting made sense. Once you understand the math, you can do anything with it."

  "It's the
universal language after all." Joshi chuckled and shook his head.

  "Unfortunately, it also means you failed at your assignment. I hope you aren't too disappointed."

  "Letter of the law—I destroyed your computer. Not my fault that I didn't know about your…" he searched for the best word, "…analog backup system." He slipped his right hand into the unruly curls of her hair. "You are so full of surprises."

  Her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, and for a moment he hoped she would kiss him. When she didn't, he leaned forward slightly and gave her the excuse to close the distance. The smell of her skin surrounded him, as familiar as a favorite meal. It was so easy to get accustomed to her, he admitted to himself. So easy to lose himself in her, forget his past, and live out his remaining months with someone who knew what he had done and didn't care. Except she didn't know. And she would absolutely care. Which is why he couldn't tell her.

  She broke the kiss and stared at him through half-lidded eyes. "We don't have time for this now, right?"

  He nodded, though the gesture killed him inside. "We do not. We have to get to someplace that can keep us safe."

  "Where's that exactly?"

  He let out another long sigh. There was no point in lying to her. "I'm not sure, but I've got a plan."

  Six

  "Are you sure this is safe?" Netta stayed as close as she could to him, close enough to touch him. Out of fear, she told herself. If he leaves me in this warren, I'll never get out. The endless rows of stacked shipping containers turned the dockside into a claustrophobic maze that made her long for the roominess of the alleyways and tunnels of the Blackout Zone. Despite his perfectly human eyes, Joshi had no problems negotiating his way between the crates in the near darkness.

  She didn't fare as well. The dark had forced her to rely on low-light augmentation, which flattened out distances and kept confusing her sense of depth. Worse, even with her filters cranked all the way up, she couldn't override the AR warning signs attached to every container they walked past. Swirling triangles in green, red, or yellow spun just in front of each container, topped with corporate logos and labeled with a number code she couldn't decipher.