Someone was definitely following him, but Finn made a
point not to look over his shoulder. He didn’t have to; he
could tell. Picking up the pace, he pulled his jacket
closer around him and cut across the street.
It happened no more than once a month, but it wasn’t
something a guy really wanted to get used to: Someone
would figure him out…or at least think they had figured
him out. And it wasn’t’ just the B-Ops teams. They were
the least of Finn’s worries. He could track them on his
black-market scanner, even tap into their comms and listen
to them talk on the job.
It was the rest of them—the bounty hunters. And every time
he found himself in this position, there were only two
questions he had to ask himself. Whoever was after him,
did they work for the humans, the vampires, the werewolves
or the demons? And the second question was: Do they know
what I am? Being robbed was one thing. Being revealed,
something else entirely.
The longer Finn lived in the heart of Crimson City, the
more experience dulled his once razor-sharp instincts.
There were so many sensations and emotions competing for
his attention. When he’d first hit the streets and slipped
the Grid, he could hardly think for himself.
The Grid was the network that served as the technological
backbone of Crimson City’s enforcement matrix; it was how
the Ops teams communicated. Ops was Crimson City’s human
government’s intelligence agency. Part FBI, part CIA, part
Special Forces, they were the ones who handled everything.
The Grid was how their Battlefield division out on the
streets connected to the Intelligence division behind the
walls of the base. It was how they supported their comm.
Devices, how they lined up the computer systems…and how
they controlled their mechs. Having escaped the Grid, Finn
might be a wanted man, but he wasn’t traceable and no one
could tell him what to do.
Everything had been instinct, programming, training.
Everything he was supposed to know had been drilled into
his head and body so many times that he’d never thought he
could escape. But then he’d found himself in the middle of
a veritable war zone instead of the antiseptic calm of the
Ops barracks. It had been an assault on the sense…and then
he’d grown to appreciate it.
He’d spent most of his first free days rotating through
the city’s bookstores, attracting little notice as just
another member of the city’s large homeless population;
then, rather quickly, he’d begun to assimilate to the new
world. He wasn’t living any longer on the few fragments of
thought that some faceless organization allowed. Maybe
that made him a weaker soldier, but it made him a better
man.
“Drop your bag, put your hands on top of your head, walk
into the alley, turn around and face the wall.”
Finn froze in his tracks. Hell. He let the strap of his
bag slip off his shoulder and slide down his arm. His
satchel hit the sidewalk with a dull thud. He could just
whip around and have done with it, or he could give the
man a chance to be mistaken. “You’ve go the wrong guy,” he
said.
“I don’t’ think so. Move it.”
Finn stayed where he was. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he
repeated more forcefully. “Understand?”
Something blunt jabbed between his shoulder blades. Finn
stumbled forward into the alley, pulling his hood up
around his head more securely while raising his gloved
hands. He heard the clink of the brass links on his bag’s
strap as the man picked it up and moved behind him into
the dark.
And so it goes. Crimson City was more of a jungle than
ever, the prospect of some kind of peace—real peace—far
off in the horizon. The most anyone hoped for these days
was less bloodshed.
With the kind of detachment that came from experience,
Finn lay down on the ground on his stomach—too slow, of
course, for the bounty hunter’s taste.
A boot came down on his back, shoving him into the slime,
but allowing Finn to hide his hands underneath his body
without attracting attention.
Finn turned his head to the side, listening as the hunter
fumbled with his equipment. Handcuffs, probably. Rope,
perhaps.
It was more the simple lack of trust than a predisposition
to hate that made the streets of Crimson City so very
unpredictable these days. Which, in a roundabout way, was
what had brought both Finn and the bounty hunter to this
moment. In a world of “us” and “them,” the lines of safety
and inclusion were becoming muddy. Terrible things were
happening. and rather than band together, the human,
vampire and the werewolf inhabitants pulled even further
apart, the vampires escaping into their old-world opulence
and endless luxuries atop skyscrapers in the highest
strata of the city, the werewolves burying themselves in a
technological wonderland in the strata belowground, and
the humans locking themselves indoors at street level.
Of course, maybe they were smart to do that. Urban unrest
was the least of what Crimson City’s citizens had to fear.
There were also the demons who had broken through from the
Underworld to launch an offensive on the city. It had
taken three government agencies to put it down, and not
before they’d wreaked a hell of a lot of destruction.
How, in the middle of a problem of that magnitude, anybody
could care about one failed experiment like him was hard
to understand. But they did care.
A sudden weight came down on Finn’s back as the bounty
hunter knelt on top of him. Good now the man was close
enough for him to do something about it.
“Hello? Can you understand me? I said, take off your glove
or I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
“I can’t move,” Finn pointed out.
The bounty hunter shifted a bit, freeing up Finn’s right
hand. Finn brought his hand to his mouth and pulled the
leather glove off using his teeth.
The bounty hunter grabbed him by the wrist. There was
silence. Then: “Holy shit. Holy shit! That’s what I
thought I saw. You are the one.”
The hunter pressed Finn’s arm back down on the ground
above his head. Finn squeezed his eyes shut, working to
master his rage. He didn’t want to do it. He always gave
them an out. Maybe this time, the guy would take it. “I’m
going to beg here, okay? Please. Please, let me go. You’ve
made a mistake. I don’t know what you think you see, but
you’ve made a mistake.”
The hunter leaned over him, his mouth up to Finn’s
ear. “You’re the biggest score in town. You’re the Holy
Grail. Do you even know how much you’re worth?”
Finn frowned. He hadn’t heard anything about that.
“Ops just increased the reward money. Those guys still
want you, man. After all, you’re what started this mess,
yeah?”
They started this mess. I just couldn’t stop it. But
nobody controls me anymore. Nobody. “I’m a human being
like you. Have a little mercy.”
“I wouldn’t know exactly what to call you, but you’re
definitely not human.”
Finn’s temperature instantly spiked, and wrath swept
through him unfettered. “Son of a bitch. I am human.”
The hunter snatched the hood off Finn’s face, grabbed him
by the hair and wrenched his head back, then ran the
muzzle of an automatic weapon across the thin metal at
Finn’s temple. “My god.” A greedy laugh burst from his
mouth. “No dice, metal man. You’re going down, and I’m the
one who gets to take you.”
With uncanny speed, Finn whipped out his left arm, grabbed
the hunter’s ankle and pulled the man’s feet out from
under him. The hunter yelled in terror, releasing an arc
of bullets into the air as he lost control and was slammed
back down to the pavement. Finn rolled to one side of the
alley; the hunter rolled the opposite way. Each man stared
at the other as the shower of metal slugs rained down
between them. As the last slug hit the ground, the two men
sprang forward; the hunter going for his weapon, Finn
going for the hunter and slamming the man’s face into the
cement.
“We’re in a serious bind here, you and I,” Finn said. “Who
told you about me? Who knows?”
“It’s just me.”
Finn slammed him face down into the pavement again. “I’ll
ask once more. Who told you about me?” he pulled the
hunter’s face back off the ground. Blood streamed from the
man’s nose and lip.
“It’s just me! I’m working with someone, but they just
know they want the mech that killed those vampire leaders,
the Dumonts. They don’t know who you are. I swear. I
didn’t saw who you were. It’s the only way I could
guarantee they wouldn’t take the job themselves. Dude, you
gotta believe me. I swear I’ll forget the whole thing if
you let me go. I swear it!”
Finn gently pushed down the hunter’s face and tightened
his grip around the man’s neck. “How do you know about me?”
“A month ago I was taking this guy. Another freelance
jobber,” the bounty hunter confessed in a panicked
rush. “he was on a job. He was my job. And, get this, you
were in the mix. It was a fucking car wreck, with a three-
way-intersection cat-and-mouse.”
“Try making some sense.”
“You hit him before I did the same thing. I watched you do
it. And it was weird. The weapons you used…Dude, that
thing came right out of your arm—I’d bet on it.”
Finn swore. “Who sent you?”
“Does it matter?” the man gasped. “Everybody in this town
would kill for a piece of your bounty money. Kill or be
killed. That’s life in Crimson City, man.”
“You’re right,” Finn said. He stared into the bounty
hunter’s eyes. I can’t let you go.
Under the crush of Finn’s grip, the man’s eyes widened,
and then suddenly his whole body relaxed, as if he were
making a choice. He knew.
“What do you prefer?” Finn asked softly.
“A bullet,” the man said, his voice cracking.
Finn raised his arm, then hesitated. “Like you said, it’s
kill or be killed. I’m sorry.”
The hunter’s lip curled. “You can’t be sorry. You’re not
human.”
The words themselves pulled the trigger. From the weaponry
fused into the flesh of his forearm, Finn let the bullet
fly, his aim true. The blast echoed down the alley. After
a moment, Finn raised the back of his hand to his mouth,
pressing the metal against his lips as he stared at the
corpse at his feet. Leaning down, he gently swept a palm
over the man’s face, closing the eyes and then folding the
arms over the chest.
“Yes,” he replied. “I am.”
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