Page 2 of Neon Flux

“Professor Tanaka told me you were a wiz in cyberspace. After what you showed me yesterday, this should be byte-sized.”

“That’s not all I heard she was good at.” A light-haired man—well, really not much more than a boy—leaned in on my other side. He was cute, his dirty-blonde curls falling onto his pale face, but he was also caught up in all this rebel shit, so I knew he was an idiot.

“Heard you work down at Hellfire. You gonna give me a dance after this is over to celebrate?” he asked.

I eyed him up and down. “You couldn’t afford me.”

He’d been smiling, but his face went blank immediately, refilling with anger.God, start something, please.But before he could move, Taos shoved him away.

“Shut the fuck up, Lock. She’s my co-runner. Show her some respect.”

Lock shrugged and turned away.

Deacon was still droning on. “We’re about to show those corpo bastards they can’t control us—they can’t keep us down. POM has developed world changing technology and locked it behind paywalls for too long, but no longer!” Whooping and cheering from the crowd. I rolled my eyes. Deacon was eating this little speech up. “Once we have the Kinetic Shield tech, it will completely reshape this city—no, the world! Shield tech will no longer just be in POM’s hands, but anyone’s. Just think, our citizens, protected from the gun violence that plagues this city. We will fix the rising death rate the cops and corps have ignored.”

As high as I was, something in that twisted my heart.I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sorry it’s too late.I pictured my mother’s slack face, tubes running down her throat as the bullet wound in her head oozed steadily. A harsh prickling sensation rose in my eyes. I fumbled in my pocket for my VaPurr again, but before I could grab it, Taos was tugging me to standing and dragging me to the center of the room.

“You stick by my side, okay?”

We gathered around the table at the center, and Deacon pulled the tarp off of it with a dramatic flourish. Guns of every make and model lined the surface. I was no expert, but they looked pretty banged up. Guess their entire budget went to that ICE breaker.

All the boys scrambled for their perceived best options. Taos moved in slower, checking the barrel and trigger action of a few before settling. I didn’t move, and across the table, Deacon’s facetwisted. He stepped around the table, picked up a small pistol, and held it out to me.

“Take this,” he ordered.

I held his gaze, not even looking at the weapon. “I don’t want it.”

It had played over and over in my mind since that night.Bang.My mother dropping to the ground. Blood everywhere. Footsteps—endless, uninterrupted footsteps as no one stopped to help, an endless stream around me.

“If you get caught without one—” Deacon started.

“I said, I don’t fucking want it.” I shoved his hand away. He looked like he might hit me with the gun when Taos wrapped her arm through mine again.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got her.” She grabbed the pistol, holstering it efficiently.

“Don’t fuck this up, new girl.” He turned away, but I heard him mumble, “Probably best to not give a junkie a weapon, anyway.”

I was high, not deaf. Deacon was playing tough, but I saw the panic underneath. He was a rat trapped. He couldn’t do this mission without me, and a man like him would never back down—never injure his pride. Even if that meant working with a junkie sex worker. He thought of himself as a hero, and that idiocy would seal his fate in this city. All I could hope was my skills were enough to get us out of there alive—or that he pulled me down with him.

“Full spectrum, captain.”

It was still pouringrain outside, but maybe that was a blessing, obscuring our presence from the infinite cameras lining the citystreets. Taos still had me in her iron grip as we forced our way through the late-night crowd.

Neo Stellaris was divided into five major districts, and we had traveled to the richest of them all: the Tech District. The Stellarium here was the purest and glowed with white light—so pure it was completely colorless. But what most people didn’t know was that the light we could see was overpowered by what we couldn’t. A thick band of infrared that our eye couldn’t interpret painted every image ever taken here in a colorless, dead wash. Fitting, really, for this soulless temple to technology and capitalism.

Every step brought us closer to our destination—the very gates of hell themselves. If my paranoia had been bad before, it was worse now. All I could focus on was the tower that loomed bigger and taller than anything else, even in this city of skyscrapers.

A steady, florescent glow lit Taos’ face as I took a long drag of Vector. I was already so high I barely noticed the look of horror on her face.

“Are you going to be able to work like that?”

“Trust the process,” I replied.

She gave me a look of disbelief, but it was probably the most honest I had been with her. Vector enhanced Flux. Anyone could access cyberspace—the heart of the Net that connected all of humanity—but almost no one had Flux like mine. Electromagnetic Flux. The second rarest, and therefore the second least understood. Even at twenty-six years old, I was still learning how to use it, control it. It gave me an edge in the virtual world. It had earned me a scholarship at Elysium University. At least, it had a lifetime ago.

The frequencies that always slept in my blood hummed, hungry for more Vector, more power. I normally tamped itdown, only letting it out when I was in cyberspace. Tonight, maybe it would finally taste the freedom it craved so badly.

We rounded a corner, and our target came into view. POM Enterprises, its sides lit with Stellarium pipes bigger around than an air-car, and 108 stories tall. They spiked up at the very top of the building, framing the huge logo of our corporate overlords. I thought of the angel statue I’d seen earlier.This is the real god of Neo Stellaris.Even a fool could feel the power thrumming off that place—and we were about to break in.