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Chapter 51: The Infection

  When Amelia and I walked out the doors of her father’s secret horror lab, straight past the lingering shadows, androids bleeding tar, and the torn-apart bodies of security guards, I expected… something.

  Not sure what, mind you. Maybe confetti? Fuck, I’d take confetti!

  It was a monumental moment. I mean, I’d broken away from the man who had turned the slums inside out just to get his hands on me. But the occasion just didn’t seem to have the cosmic weight I’d expected.

  It was still fun. I was still leaving behind the burning wreckage of what used to be an evil little empire. But did the skies open up to shit rainbows down upon me in a clear display of favor? Sadly, no.

  I was also kind of ignoring several important problems.

  Like, for example, the fact that I had no clue at all where I was. Sure, I’d stepped out of the good doctor’s murder lab. But that left me standing in a long stretch of hallway and just… looking around in bewilderment.

  Part of it was sheer disbelief that I was still alive. A much bigger part of my confusion stemmed from the fact that the asshole who’d had me hunted down had chosen to rent out several floors of a megabuilding, just to ensure he had as much space and privacy as he pleased.

  I was surrounded by empty rooms. It was such a flagrant waste of money and resources… seriously, I had no words.

  Of course, my other major problem was the simple fact that the good doctor was still alive. The father of the girl whose arm was tucked into the crook of mine was out there somewhere, which meant that he was very likely to try and come after me again.

  You know, since I’d all but razed his lab to the ground and stolen all his data besides.

  There was also the small matter of me stealing his daughter away. But did that really count, if he was mistreating said daughter already and she was the one who had helped me break out and escape?

  No. No, it didn’t.

  “You have no idea where you should be going, do you?”

  A scoff sounded from beside me, and I turned my eyes in the direction of the doctor’s aforementioned daughter.

  Staring back into my obsidian orbs, whose only source of color came from glowing, blood-red irises, were the amused green eyes of one Amelia. Surname still unknown.

  Actually, I never did catch her father’s name, either. Funny how you can hate someone with every ounce of your will without ever learning their name.

  “What happened to being too terrified of me to talk to me properly?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever you end up doing to me, it’s sure to be infinitely better than my future if I stuck with my father. Also… you lost that deadly mystique when you spent half an hour gushing over a shadow you stuck inside my scroll.”

  “Okay, now that’s just mean. My shadow buddy is the best buddy you could ever want. Ain’t that right, friendo?”

  I slipped into shadow-speak at the end there, a language not meant to come from a human mouth or be heard by human ears. I’ll admit I took a tiny bit of pleasure from the way she suddenly winced and looked ready to bolt at the sound.

  Her scroll’s screen flickered and briefly shifted into a grainy image of eyes identical to mine, which blinked and turned into happy crescents before fading quickly away.

  D’awww, my friendo was just adorable!

  “See? He’s the best shadow a man could ask for!”

  “Or an overgrown child could ask for,” Amelia groused. Then she looked me up and down slowly. “Okay, I take that back. You’re obviously not an overgrown anything.”

  “Ugh.” I resisted the urge to clutch at my heart.

  It wasn’t my fault, okay? Genetics probably shafted me from the start, and the malnutrition definitely didn’t help. Nor did the naturally soft and, yes, kind of… girly? Childish? Bleh. Whatever word you might use to describe the lines of my face.

  So, yes. I was short. Whatever. She was still shorter than I was.

  Besides, we were both taller than her father. It was honestly hilarious to think of the good doctor, dressed in his butcher-like outfit, intimidation dripping off of him as he pranced about his lab… all the while, he was shorter than his own daughter.

  “If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me where we should go, then?”

  I said the words more just to keep my mouth busy as I tapped into my deck and sent out a ping quickhack. Still, I was surprised when she started pulling me in the direction of a set of double doors. My ping assured me they led to an elevator, even before we reached them.

  I frowned as we packed ourselves into the elevator. “Didn’t you say your father kept you on a short leash? Inside the lab?”

  “Well, sure,” the doctor’s assistant uncomfortably confirmed, hitting the button for the bottom floor. “Doesn’t mean he never let me out, though.”

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  The elevator shook, but failed to move. I tapped into my deck with another frown, then sighed as I came face-to-face with a shadow in the digital realm.

  Apparently, the batch of eldritch monsters I’d unleashed on the buildings weren’t planning to make it easy for anyone to escape. Luckily for us, the shadow recognized me immediately. Without any effort, I convinced it to let us descend.

  The elevator started moving with a jolt. The further we got from the lab, I could see the tension leaving Amelia’s body. I wondered how much that had to do with the lab itself and how much it had to do with the shadows infesting it.

  For her sake, I hoped it wasn’t the latter. It wasn’t likely for shadows to be absent from our lives in the future.

  I turned to her with what I hoped was a teasing smile. “So, what would the good doctor take you out on excursions for?”

  “Well… as I mentioned before, whenever a job was ‘beneath’ him, he’d foist it off on me. And most jobs were ‘beneath’ him, unless they could help him test one of his experiments or bring in significant funding.”

  “Okay… just, how did he even manage that?”

  “He always insisted his patients be anesthetized and waiting for him in the operating room. It’s not like they could figure out who was operating on them. And it’s not like you get a stamp of guarantee that the person you hired to design your cybernetics actually did it himself,” Amelia grumbled.

  I could tell this was bothering her. Not just because she had been used, either. There was a fierce pride hidden underneath the ‘mousey assistant’ fa?ade. I had seen it come out several times before, mostly when she began complaining about her father. So, I could only assume she was rather cross about her efforts going unrecognized, rather than the ethical principle of the thing.

  Then again, I could just ask.

  “Is it because he was lying to people that you’re so pissed off? Or is it that no one knew it was you who did all the work?”

  She just stared at me. My lips threatened to twitch into a grin. I loved how off-balance she looked to have me just come out and ask that.

  “I… neither. It’s…” She squeezed her scroll closer to her chest, the way she did when she wanted to hide behind it. Funny that we’d seen so little of each other, and I was already picking up on some of her habits. “It’s like he raised me to become his shadow. A convenient replacement he could roll out when needed, then just pack away for later.”

  I nodded. Yeah, that would piss off just about anyone.

  Then I forced my face into a lighter expression and faked some cheer. “Well, hey, at least you’re free from him now!”

  “For now, sure.” She rolled her eyes, but she did smile. “We’re going to have a whole lot of work on our hands if we want to stay free.”

  “Ah. Yeah. That.”

  I grimaced. I was trying very hard not to think about that, actually. Or the fact that I didn’t even know where we were.

  The madman had incited not one, but two all-out gang wars in the slums, just to flush me out. The second had featured enough drugs pumped into the gangers to have them rampaging through the streets on the mother of all benders.

  Honestly? I didn’t even know how much of the slums was still standing.

  “Yeah. That,” she echoed, mocking my tone. “Got any plans, oh wise one? Or are you just going to keep cracking jokes and spreading an eldritch plague? Which, by the way, we’ll be killed on sight for, if it’s discovered we did it.”

  “Well… You wouldn’t happen to know where we are, would you?”

  She turned to look at me slowly, squinting as if to gauge how serious I was. A long silence followed.

  I had never been more keenly aware of just how stupidly large megabuildings are. How many floors had we passed already? And I was still stuck in this elevator…

  “Okay. That’s fine. Clearly, I’m going to need to be the brains of this operation,” she mumbled to herself, shaking her head. “Kind of planned that from the start, so that’s fine. I mean, what can I expect from the guy who brute forced the block B maze?”

  “Oi, what’s that supposed to mean?” I let go of her arm to cross both of mine dramatically over my chest.

  “I mean, there’s a logical way to test all the passages. You pick one side, typically left, and —”

  “Listen, it’s a lot harder to think clearly when you have a death countdown literally buzzing behind you from all the electricity it’s going to zap you with. ’Sides, it’s not like I could just double back and keep checking the passages. And there’s the traps to consider, and —”

  “Listen, I understand.” She smiled sweetly and gave my head a condescending pat. That did make me smile, since she had to stand on her tiptoes to accomplish the gesture, but still… rude. “Just ‘cause you don’t have the brain cells for it doesn’t mean you need to come up with excuses. I’ll do all the hard thinking for you now.”

  “Oh yeah? Well then, tell me, Miss Assistant: how are we going to get out of this mess?”

  She glared at me, but before she could answer, the elevator finally pinged open.

  Freedom! I ran through the door with my arms above my head, only to blink and freeze.

  Somehow, already, there were two shadows loitering around the massive lobby. The floor was wet with blood. Turrets were firing at a couple of standard megabuilding security guards, who were hiding behind a receptionist counter. A woman was screaming in a corner and clawing her own cybernetic eyes out. A guy was getting choked by his own cyber arms.

  And then there were all the bodies.

  Some had been killed by their own cybernetics. Some had gotten torn apart by the security turrets. Others were clearly failed attempts to convert people into more shadows, their desiccated black bodies lying in pools of tar.

  All in all, it was a proper mess.

  I felt right at home.

  “You were saying?” I cast a glance back at Amelia, who had frozen up.

  She let out a string of gibberish. Then she shook her head resolutely and strode right across the carnage towards the front doors of the building.

  I hurried after her, quickly tapping into my deck. The shadows knew to lock the building down and contain all this chaos inside, but I sent all the automated defenses a request to designate myself and Amelia as friendlies. Thankfully, the shadows that had corrupted them quickly pinged me back that we’d be safe.

  Really, had it not even occurred to the reckless woman that she might get shot? I was kind of growing fond of her…

  “I have been planning for a potential escape for some time now,” she rattled off as I caught up to her. “I have a place where we can lay low for a while. Some cash I’ve put aside, too.”

  “That sounds great! You know, aside from how easily identifiable I am. And it’s not like you’re unmemorable, either. Could have lost the lab coat way earlier, if you ask me.”

  She paused and looked down at herself, like she was seeing her clothing for the first time. I mean, if she really had been kept in the lab for so long, I couldn’t blame her. The baggy ensemble looked like she’d just grabbed something comfy in the morning and thrown it on. Again, no casting shade. At all.

  It wasn’t like I was doing any better. I’d barely paused long enough to scavenge some clothes off a dead guard before we left the lab. That meant I was wearing a slightly awkward set of black clothing that threatened to drown me, even after I’d rolled up both the legs of the trousers and the sleeves of the shirt.

  Amelia groaned. “We’re going to get caught so quickly, aren’t we?”

  “I mean, maybe?” I shrugged and grinned. “But I bet we can cause a ton of chaos before then!”

  Somehow, she didn’t look relieved at my flawless logic.

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