Chương 67: Deals in The Mist

Luigi pressed his palm to the translucent case. It hissed open. He retrieved the heavy Deadtech sphere and handed it over. Kelly turned the sphere over in her hands. It was a perfect metal ball the size of a basketball, smooth until the light caught it at the right angle. Then the surface broke into moving seams and shifting sections, circuit lines one moment, strange writing the next. Glimpses of inner light slipped through the gaps, and the metal seemed to waver, solid one second and almost absent the next.

It carried that wrongness all relics had, technology that had no business sitting in human hands, some piece of the future ripped loose and dropped into her lap.

"What a cool little nightmare," Kelly murmured, running a finger along a seam that shifted away from her touch. Luigi glanced toward the door.

"Shit. I don't have a lot of time left here. They're already on their way."

"Okay, I'm gonna need more than that," Kelly said.

"Who's coming? And are they about to be a problem?"

"You heard of Obsidian? The gang that ditched the canisters and started pretending to be legit? That almost-overclocked crew trying to spread through the city? Them."

"Alright. What about them?"

"They tax everyone on this side of the market. If you don't pay, you disappear." He gestured at the mess around him, the rattled shelves and scattered stock.

"And I'm a little short on funds right now, thanks to that gravity trick of yours."

"You want me to go biblical on them? I am a time god, you know. A baby one. I could do it." Delusions of grandeur aside, Kelly had been chewing on the Architect's words about her nature. The description wasn't entirely wrong; her looping was beyond the status quo—and her soul was beyond comprehension; partying in another dimension. So she ran with it. It was fun. He nodded, clearly familiar with the general concept of blowing things up.

"Well… your EQ is high. They took the northern gate weeks ago—the one where most of the money comes in. It's been downhill ever since. They get worse every day. They do… strange things in the mist. Rumor is they're 'trying to make some kind of freak mutant.' Idiots. Nothing survives the mist, but they won't stop." He glanced toward the street before lowering his voice.

"The almost-overclocked are insane. Aggressive. Unpredictable. Worse than even you—" He caught himself.

"No offense. They're trying to tax everything. Everyone. And the grunts—the Threshold and Tank types—they're the real problem. They drag people off the street if they can't pay. Nobody knows what they do with them. Use them for parts? Test mist mutations? Try out new filters? Nobody knows." He shuddered.

"I've seen it a few times. Mutating is worse than death. Almost nobody survives it. The ones who do… one in a billion, maybe. And the people whose bodies we never find? I don't know what the buzzbrained freaks do with them, but you don't see them again. Nobody does." Luigi's fist clenched. His jaw worked.

"They take everyone. Men, women, whole families." His voice tightened.

"Kids." At that, Kelly went completely still. Her humor vanished, replaced by a flat, metallic calm. She'd had this conversation back in Rook's apartment, with Dr. Haider—the glorified black-market pharmacist with a Nobel Prize and an arrest warrant in every decent country—whom she'd met in her unfortunate youth and who had stayed, probably because he saw value in her connection to Jellybean. Family mattered to her. Always had. That was a non-negotiable line. Kids were absolutely off-limits.

Especially the ones who had nothing. Especially since she'd had a rough childhood herself. Her time in foster care had been a series of catastrophic misfortunes, kidnap, criminal encounters and two very dead carers—not by her hand. It was something she never spoke about, rarely thought of, and absolutely did not enjoy revisiting. Kelly had never had a real family of her own, at least not until she'd met Jellybean.

"Do the police know?"

"They know exactly what's going on. They just don't give a damn. Their concern stops at cash, critical systems, key infrastructure, things that actually matter—which, I'll admit, they guard like their lives depend on it. Everything else is decoration. The few stationed out here couldn't care less about the outskirts. Especially not here in the mist. They show up only when a paycheck's involved." Luigi's lip curled in disgust.

"A few homeless, addicts, or lowlifes disappearing? Doesn't register. The overclocked are just doing the city a favor, clearing out the trash they pretend not to see." The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"What about the corpos?"

"Venus and Jackhammer went at them once," Luigi said.

"Came close to wiping them out."

"Venus?" Kelly's eyebrows shot up.

"What's Vaughn's princess doing slumming it out here? She grew a conscience, or just got bored? That doesn't add up." Venus was the youngest of Vaughn's children, but, if the press was to be believed, she was every bit as ruthless as her older brothers.

"Who knows? Wasn't a company move, that's for sure. She was off the leash—branching out. Her and Jackhammer were the only ones who almost did something about it. Then they just... stopped; struck a deal. Now they've both got bigger problems." He gestured to the ceiling.

"Until the overclocked start killing tourists, making the death count hard to ignore, or wrecking something that actually matters, the corpos won't so much as blink." Kelly cut him off, her voice a flat, sharp blade.

"Hold on. Obsidian. Weeks on the ground. And they haven't strong-armed the doped canisters, lifted the tech, they haven't caused one massacre? Not even a small one?" That was strange. It almost sounded like they were way past the 'overclocked' stage and were pretending to still be making mostly human decisions. She leaned forward, the movement all kinetic potential.

"Overclocking is a hostile takeover of the brainstem. Like an illness of the mind where the voices in your head not only hated you and your kind, but had a collective IQ that could design a relativistic kill vehicle from scrap metal. Standard procedure is a messy civil war inside your skull. You either bleed out of your ears fighting the invasion, or you lose a round and paint the walls with anyone nearby. It escalates whenever they lose control. It's a rampage until one side wins. Every single time."

Luigi quirked a brow at her.

"You seem to know a lot about the overclocked." She should know. She was raised by one. A dry, humorless sound escaped her.

"I had a very thorough education." This was all wrong. Overclocked didn't do 'restraint.' They did screaming, blood-soaked meltdowns in public squares. But Obsidian? They were playing house. They hadn't stripped the infrastructure for every useful bolt. No massacres, either. Their entire play was a disciplined, two-part maneuver: control the Mistmarket and pressure the Wealth District's air filtration contracts. They showed a complete absence of the typical infrastructure attacks and the public, messy rampages.

You couldn't negotiate a backdoor deal with a hive-mind screaming for cosmic annihilation in your skull. But that didn't explain the core group's discipline. Kelly pondered, then came to a conclusion. The reason was easy to guess. The government and the corpos couldn't care less about the area unless their interests were attacked. As long as they were paid, the body count was low, and nobody important went missing, they wouldn't lift a finger.

"Meh, not my problem, I got bigger fish to fry—but it is yours, though, isn't it?" Kelly looked at the store owner, her gaze calculating. Saving the botanical lab and finding Jennie were her only priorities. But she would still keep her promise to Luigi, no matter what it took.

"I'll help you out today, just once. I will fulfill your wish more permanently on my last 'today,'" the scientist promised.

"When I hit 100. I promise. I never break my promises."

"Your last 'today'? 100 EQ? Are you high?"

"Only on life. It's my retirement from this beautiful day, but not the end of my immortality. Think of it as a promotion with a less predictable benefits package." Once she achieved her goals, she would allow the day to end permanently. By then, she planned to perhaps be capable of controlling the loops, which seemed plausible given nobody else could see them. Luigi had found himself on the short list of people she decided to prevent from a gruesome, albeit somewhat short, death.

She had decided this a long time ago, the very first time the sky had split open and something that broke the rules had killed her. And in the last loop, after stopping the explosion, only to be mentally hijacked by an angel and his asshole god, her decision had only further solidified. Mastering the looping ability fit neatly into the "crack magic" objective. Her goals had not changed at all. She would still find Jennie, hit 100, and she would still crack magic, which meant mastering the loop.

That ability would be a good way to deal with the invaders in the big leagues, like the leviathan and its master. Plus, it'd be a good way to kick the pigeon god and his angel in the teeth, too. Kelly says thanks for the sphere, it'll help me power up, you know.

"Thanks for the sphere," Kelly said, turning it over in her hand.

"It'll help me power up, you know."

"Sure," Luigi said.

"If you can figure it out." Today, the New York East Grid Botanical Lab was especially important to Kelly. She needed to take apart magical staffs and crystals there, especially after seeing what the crystal inside that cube could really do. Keeping the lab from getting crushed was critical. Which made the oversized sphere at Luigi's equally important. Then something Luigi said snagged her attention.

"So this Deadtech paperweight," Kelly said, tapping the case, firing questions in quick succession.

"You test it? How tough are the things it makes? What's it not do? How big can it go? A 'full-scale replica of my ego' big? What's the catch?"

"It can pretty much build any static structure you feed it," Luigi said, polishing the cut glass case with his sleeve.

"Although it needs a little time to charge up and deploy, and it doesn't do moving parts. And the hardlight constructs only last a few hours." He paused for effect, meeting her eyes.

"But like I said, hard as reinforced carbon steel. All light. Crazy, right?" The bridge was massive, but the chunk headed for the lab was only a few apartment blocks' worth of metal and stone—the metal had lodged into the ground, trapping them. One well-placed obstacle could nudge the deadly rainstorm somewhere else. If she told the sphere to hold up a few million tons of bridge, it would actually work, instead of just giving the rubble a nice ambient glow on its way down.

That would buy her the time she needed in the facility before half the city went kaboom.

"Crazy," Kelly agreed, her mind already building a cathedral of brutalist supports and load-bearing structures. Hell, it didn't even need to be complicated—it just needed to work. A few hours was a lifetime. Long enough to keep the GMO plant lab from being buried by a bridge the size of a skyscraper losing parts.

"What's the designs you got in mind?" Luigi asked curiously. Kelly gave him a flat stare.

"The design is called 'Not Getting Crushed.'" It didn't have to be complicated at all. Kelly's encounter with the angel and the thing wearing it like a suit—the Architect—had ripped the world wide and opened her eyes to new possibilities. Namely; Skills.