no, she messages back. 

We’ll be there in three minutes. Get up.

no find someone else

Zao sits up on the couch. Still in her clothes from last night, so that saves some time. It’s 7:19AM. She’s slept for four hours, might still be drunk. That plumber.

That stupid fucking gymnast.

She splashes cold water on her face, brushes her teeth, stares at herself in the mirror. She checks her account and yes, she has indeed lost one devastation’s worth of cash. She closes her eyes and there he is again, spinning too slow.

May the ashes of this earth have no memory of us. 

Fuck.

Of course this happens when she puts her rent on easy money. 

Downstairs.

1 min, she replies. 

She throws on her jacket, holsters her gun, and bounds down the five million stairs to the street where a beefy black SUV idles. The back door lifts open. Her partners Maso and Stefan sit in the front, facing her. 

“Kill me,” she says, clamoring in. 

“Coffee?”

She nods and Stefan hands her a hot cardboard cup from the passenger seat. 

“It’s from Luna.”

She’s too hungover to joke about his obsession with obscenely expensive coffee, this maladjusted rich kid saving the world on hundred dollar soy lattes.

“So who killed who?” she asks, blowing into the lid hole.

“Check it out,” says Maso, gestures to send her the video.

She stuffs her hands in the jacket’s pockets: pack of cigarettes with three smoke left, lighter, crumpled tissue paper. Jean pockets: phone, house key. Back pockets: empty. Small breast pocket that’s just for show, just for show: nothing.

“Shit,” she says. “I forgot them. Driver, turn around.”

“Ignore that Driver,” says Maso.  He’s got a brooding quality this morning — always a little menacing coming from such a huge creature. “We don’t have time. This is active. Here.” 

He hands her his pod. She makes a show of wiping off the earbud before squishing it into her right ear.

A screen overlays in the center of her vision. Footage from a dash cam, Golden Gate Bridge, dawn. The witness’ vehicle slows as it approaches a van stopped directly under one of the huge red pylons. There’s an individual in black tactical gear and mirrored face-shield directing traffic with a large semi-automatic gun. As the witness passes, two men in black sprint from around the pylon. A moment later, the van accelerates past. The video is twenty seconds long. 

“And where’s our body?”

“Patience,” says Stefan, swiping her another video. 

Drone footage. Above the Golden Gate Bridge, dawn. The camera zooms in on the outer side of the red pylon, adjusting the focus until the image is clear: a nearly naked older man splayed in an X. Ropes synched tight from his wrists and ankles hold him fast against the red pylon. Something’s very wrong. He wears black loin cloth, the same color as the heavy serif text tattooed on his chest. The focus adjusts.

Prepare for the coming.

Then she sees it: his head. He’s missing the top of it. She’s looking directly into his open scull, wiped clean. She squints, blinks, takes a breath.

“Well, shit,” she says. “I think you could eat a bowl of soup out of this guy’s head.” She tilts her head. “Actually more like stew.”

“They found the van they were driving at the bottom of a parking garage twenty minutes ago,” says Maso, no funny business this morning. “We’ll be there in seven.”

The Driver is taking them to the absolute limit around the corkscrew, the left side of the van just about to lift off like a kite and send them hurtling out into the fluorescent light of the empty parking garage.

Zao’s doing everything she can to not heave up last night, which — if she’s being honest — is pretty much the fault of US Men’s Gymnastic Two Time All-Around Champion, Rayno Richard. Guy was giving this monster performance on the rings — his iron cross motionless, his maltese flawless — when he went for a triple back dismount and ruined everything. Landed on his head. Injured. Out of the US Men’s Gymnastic team qualifications. 

Which means, according to WagerDome, Zao’s lost roughly one rent. Rayno was meant to be her climbing back onto dry land — a conservative, blast-the-fish-in-a-barrel type-bet. A recovery bet. 

She tries to make a note to visit Ralph, her landlord, and ask for an extra week or two — but she’s not wearing her pod, so she’ll have to remember with her own dumb brain, which means she won’t.

“They must install something in these vans that allows one to cry ‘uncle’,” says Stefan when they finally get to the bottom and stumble out. The three of them have dropped into fisherman’s squats, waiting for the spins to subside.

“You think Baljit would let Driver take us at an unsafe speed?” says Zao. “Unfathomable. He would never.”

The officers spread out into the garage. Zao does a quick round. It’s strange. Almost every parking spot is taken. Hundreds of people choosing the least convenient floor, the absolute bottom of a ten story parking garage. It’d take them ten minutes to get out, at least. 

Or maybe this is valet parking? She goes to review the background on the skyscraper but alas, no pod. Her brains feels gunked with sludge — or more accurately a half dozen lemon drops, a whisky nightcaps, half a pack of smokes, a long conversation with that hot lady plumber who nursed her through the Rayno Vag Kick, another whisky nightcap, then one more nightcap, and one light refreshing beer to round off the night. Maybe the perps had a Driver, too, dropped off the crew somewhere on the corkscrew and they’re hiding out under a car upstairs until morning rush pours in — but the perps would have to have known that they would rope it off, right? She has Stefan join the team tearing apart the van and dispatches the bikecops back up to search the floors above with heat goggles. But why would you put valet parking at the very bottom of a garage when it’s empty? She cranks open a service panel near the main column. 

Something’s off. Colors or spacing. Not that she’s an expert with parking garage electrical panels but the thing is wrong. She touches a few of the switches, looks at the faded text. She presses on a spot where the color’s been worn off, to the left of the switches, and it moves, the panel. 

The whole thing’s loose. She presses harder and the entire panel swings open.

Stairs down into the dark. 

Finally, something. 

“Guys?” she shouts, drawing her weapon. “Got something. On me.”

She’s stepping down the stairs, scanning the concrete hallway with her gun’s flashlight. It’s almost normal looking, if this was a nuclear power plant, post-apocalypse. 

“Hold on, Z, once sec,” Stefan’s voice. “We’re nearly there, one — ”

“Get here,” she pans the stairs with her flashlight, the lip of light catching the bottom. Sixty-six steps.

Stefan’s exasperated. “Recall what we discussed — ”

“When you thought I was dead and started blubbering?” she shouts over her shoulder. “Just get here.”

“Would you prefer that I — ”

“Stefan,” barks Maso.

At the bottom, she finds a long empty hallway strung with lights. Totally normal, if they were in a mine. A dull rumble comes from the darkness.

“Fun,” she says. “What a fun morning.”

Maso and Stefan come banging down the stairs behind her, not a bone of stealth in either of them.

She holds out a hand to still them. “Hear that?” 

The bouncer is unfazed. 

“Tickets,” he repeats. 

The guy is huge — bigger than Maso. More synthetic than muscle. A few more years and juice’ll start bleeding into his bones. He stands in front of a huge blast door with a heavy handle, hands crossed over his crotch. There’s a stool for him to sit on, next to a small cocktail table lit by a tiny spot. This is the light at the end of the tunnel that they’ve been seeing.

“What are you talking about, tickets?” asks Zao. “For what?”

Guy just stares past her, off into the mine, perhaps imagining his life as his great grandfather, when a pickaxe could be your best friend.

“Agency.” Zao flashes her badge in his face. “Anyone come through here twenty minutes ago?”

The bouncer shrugs. A muffled roar comes from the blast doors.

She realizes she doesn’t have the guy’s detail overlay — no name, no list of friends awaiting trial, no girlfriend’s name to drop. Old school then. She locks eyes with the bruiser.

“Look, we’ll fuck with your mom,” says Zao. “I don’t have your name right now because whatever place is, is blocking network — which is almost certainly illegal, but I don’t care. Really. I’m here about a murder — I’m after these sick fucks who strung up some old guy on the Golden Gate Bridge like a trophy. That’s a story that’s gonna be everywhere in —” glances at her bare wrist “— right now, which means I’m going to have my boss’s-boss’s-boss crawling up my asshole in five. What I’m saying is: you get in my way and I fuck you up — and I fuck up your mom. And your girlfriend. And your boyfriend. Whatever you love, I’ll come for it and we will ruin your shit. Understand.”

Bouncer sighs. “Yeah, they came through. Four guys, right?” 

“When?”

“Half an hour ago.”

Zao nods at the blast doors. “What’s behind door number one?”

“Rodney’s Robot Pit?”

“The fuck is Rodney’s Robot Pit?”

“They fight robots.”

He lifts the heavy handle on the door and pushes it open, cacophony flooding out into the mineshaft. Concrete stairs descend from the door’s threshold to a metal cage doused in floodlights. Two truly terrifying bipedal robots stalk each other, splashed in a gruesome amount of blood, visibly panting. They’re at least fifteen feet tall. The blue one is missing an arm, the stump sparking. Operators must be exhausted. The crowd roars as the red one attacks. 

“Are there other ways in and out?” It’s a huge space, ceiling somewhere overhead in the dark. 

“Five,” he says. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”

“We don’t know anything,” says the bouncer. “Look, I don’t give a shit about this place. The pay’s fucking garbage. You guys hiring?”