The All-Consuming World Read online

  The All-Consuming World

  Dedication

  Ayane

  Pimento

  Rita

  Elise

  Maya

  Bethel

  Constance

  Ageship

  Verdigris

  Interlude

  Rochelle

  Introductions

  Ambush

  Repairs

  P6

  Reveal

  Butcher of Eight

  Ghosts

  Deal

  Sacrifice

  Comeback Queens

  Acknowledgments

  About-the-author

  Copyright

  Guide

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Ali, Avery, Kyungseo, Linda, Olivia, Shoma, and Tara, my darling siblings, my chosen family, my beloveds.

  Ayane

  “The fuck am I doing here, Rita?”

  Her voice is the boreal wash of moonlight upon the bulwark of their ship-in-orbit: a reduction of the fantastic, tepid when it could have been of a devouring temperature. It is modulated, disinterested. But like fuck Maya is going to complain. Any contact with Rita is superior to the absence of such.

  “Getting Ayane home.”

  “Home?” Maya grins like a hunting dog, all peeled-back lips and a shine of teeth. For a joke, she’d had the points of her canines filed about three years ago, when there’d been nothing to do but mug retirees, those poor fucks who’d wanted nothing but to jolt their marriages out of hospice with a hit of no-gravity space. Instead, what they got was Maya, Rita, and their tin-can private liners cleaned out of valuables. “You’re getting soft.”

  A hiss of static. “You’re getting distracted.”

  “Fair,” says Maya. Don’t want to have this party cleared out before it even gets started. She looks over the tableau. Cross her dollar-store heart, there’s nothing Maya loathes more than this shoulder of rock she’s ascending, which is saying a lot given her sentiments about the asteroid itself. She recalls when this place was moondust and noxious ice-melt, inhospitable by every interpretation of the adjective. But no one cares when it’s just clones on ground zero. Work, die, mulch the corpses, brine the proteins in the appropriate solution, bring them back. Rinse, repeat in the name of capitalism, amen and all that crap.

  “Wish we still had Johanna,” says Maya. “She could have walked Ayane right into the ship and none of us would have had to lift a fucking finger.”

  Usually, Maya has a laugh like something that needs to be put down. Today, though, it arrives in a casket, a few little croaks escaping the lid. No, no thinking about Johanna, Maya tells herself. Easy to let the memory of Johanna—she of the “don’t even fucking worry about this,” the “I got this,” the “no need to take risks when we could just sit back and settle this from afar, let’s just get a drink, y’all,” “I’ve got this”—effervescing through their lives burn away to the image branded on the backs of Maya’s eyelids. Easy to see meat instead of a smile.

  No, no. Fuck that .

  And still:

  “Fuck. Do you miss her? I do.”

  No answer.

  “I’m fucking talking to you here. Say something.”

  But Rita doesn’t answer.

  Well, fuck her, Maya thinks, walking her attention away. No need to defibrillate that dead horse. She studies her environment. This place was better when it was a refinery, when it was still being reworked for human occupation. At least, it had been honest. Now? The slope she is standing on is leprous with non-union brothels, casinos, back-alley chop shops, tenements so thick with the unloved and the underserved, their laundry drips from thin windows like foam along the maw of a rabid animal.

  “Fuck you,” Maya mutters.

  Light—blue-white, like the pith of a neutron star, like hope, like the halogen eye of a surgical lamp glaring into the wet nook where Maya’s heart is housed—suddenly flares through her overlay, searing patterns into her retinas. Maya ducks around a pillar before the cerebellum attempts to strategize. Half a second later, a surveillance bot lopes past, Doberman ears astride a trumpet of a muzzle, no teeth or tongue in sight, only a violent light belling from an octagonal aperture. Maya locks her breath in place until the clicking of its needle-point feet evanesces.

  “The first rule is you never talk about it,” giggles a man’s voice, so close to the curve of Maya’s voice, she almost jumps.

  “Fuck. Right. Off.”

  Maya snarls, propels herself from the wall, the cracked masonry flaking under the impact of her palms. Fuck Rita and fuck the ghost she’d saddled Maya with. Explosives don’t need personalities. Least of all when they come with such baggage. But there he was anyway. Same fucking smile with one corner craned unnaturally high. Same eyes, gleaming jellyfish-blue-green. Same heft, same shoulders. Same as the day that Maya found him in Rita’s quarters, grinning like a cat. Fuck everything, Maya thinks to herself. Her fingers find her holsters, thumbs cocking the safety back, fists closing over enameled grips.

  There we go.

  Breathe, Maya.

  Can’t believe that bot almost got the jump on her while she was caroling her grievances, blathering at Rita like the two of them were gene-patented starlets sitting pretty for the camera. If Maya had just gotten the mods Rita offered her, traded up from her repository of wetware, this wouldn’t ever have happened. The somatosensory implants were triple-tested, lab-approved, and it’s not like Rita would have installed bottom-of-the-barrel shit in her brain. They need each other. Mad scientist and mad-dog mercenary. Like jam and cheese, guns and their holsters, god and glory. Forget that it would mean Rita acquiring unmitigated access to her grey matter. It’s not like Maya can hide anything from her.

  Onward she goes, Maya practically somnambulating down the narrow lanes. How many times had she died in one of these alleys? How many times had she been jumped, carved open, split open so someone could harvest organs for the rich and the sick? She keeps her fingers at the triggers as she strolls along up until she halts in front of a door six feet wide and twice as high. Maya lets go of the hand-cannons and digs the heel of a palm into the door, considers being discreet for about half a second, before she laughs coyote-shrill and goes fuck it. She kicks the door in.

  Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck everything for the umpteenth time.

  A man, massive like an iceberg and twice as cool, looks calmly up from his terminal. He drums a finger against the plastiglass screen. Loose windows melt—holo-vid playlist, a two-for-one pizza advertisement—together into a plain, cold, ivory payment app. He takes no notice of Maya’s ghost, just makes a moue of his thin mouth. Maya wonders about the shit he’d seen. Those eyes are deader than hers.

  “Sixty bucks for latecomers.”

  Johanna would have had him fight for us, Maya exposits through a private com-link. Rita doesn’t take the bait, but that’s okay. Behind Maya, her crypto-geist keeps gibbering, unperturbed, hotfixed to ignore all interruptions. His image lightbleeds for a second, stutters, then stops: an infinitesimal failure that nonetheless curls Maya’s lips in simpatico. You can’t trust tech these days.

  “If this is your first night,” says manifest destruction, “you always have to fight.”

  Rita and Maya sitting on a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. If there was a schoolyard, that’d be what the kids would be singing. It’s fortunate that this day and age has surrendered homophobia to the firing squad of basic human decency, because Maya would have had to gun down the bigots otherwise. Not that she wouldn’t have shot them up anyway for being terminally wrong.

  Rita and her, they don’t have that kind of relationship. Never did. In another place and world, where the air isn’t spuming
poison and toddlers aren’t bar-coded, who knows? Not in this life, though. Not even close. Maya has never been that kind of anything and Rita can’t stand being touched.

  But the two are tight as thieves on death row, knife and vein, gun and bullet. Maya will do anything for Rita, and she’s reasonably certain that Rita will break at least a few cardinal laws for her in return.

  Which is more than anything Maya deserves right now, and they both know it. That’s why Maya is strutting into the bobbit worm’s jaws, with nothing but a ghost for backup, riding on a wing, a prayer, and enough combat know-how to win all four world wars.

  “Next contender!” an announcer howls.

  Maya grins like a shark. Oh, she thinks, the sound unspooling between neurons like a tendon snagged on the tooth of a Great White. Oh, yes. That she can do.

  But it is still so strange to her that they built this chapel to archaic media, to offer their sweat and their worship to a fictional credo, an analogy for poison, no more sacrosanct than the urine crusting on the walls outside. Men can sail through constellations, for fuck’s sake. Do they need a god cobbled from lobotomized debris of retro cinema?

  She tosses her head like a bull. The venue stinks of piss and blood and sour sweat, of mutual admiration expressed by men who’d never been taught how to love. A wound dug into irradiated basalt, the place is seven kinds of building violations, with only one way in and out. No accoutrements. No fire exits. Just a vending machine pregnant with ancient soda and naked bulbs snaking across the ceiling, bleeding black wires over their heads.

  Maya remembers when they grew vat-kids here, the inflorescence of viscera; arms and legs fruiting along wire; skin like sails closing over naked skeleton. The ones who didn’t make it would be clumped in the corner, waiting to be reprocessed. She remembers waiting, watching with her nose compacted against cold glass, wanting, hoping, yearning; sick with prayer as she counted each attosecond, dead fucking certain such vigils weren’t worth shit, but what else was she supposed to do? Back then, her emotional health was the only currency she possessed, and she would have bankrupted herself to make sure Rita came back for another round of living.

  “Quick and easy,” comes Rita’s voice again. “Just like we planned.”

  Crack.

  Maya hears the sound of a jaw being broken, seconds before the crowd detonates into screaming. She prowls closer, already squirming out of her jacket and kicking off her shoes, a grin cocked like a loaded shotgun. Her data banks wake up at the influx of noradrenaline in her bloodstream, presenting options, triangulating opportunities. That grin of hers swells until it is like the last church standing at the end of days and inside, the parish is worshipping war. Maya smooths both hands over the velvet of her skull.

  “Yeah?” she says under her breath.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” says Rita, proving she doesn’t really know Maya at all.

  She’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Maya dismisses her overlays, sets her notifications on silent as Rita’s messages began to pile like a six-car crash. Oh, she’s pissed. Maya can tell. But she doesn’t care. All she can hear right now is the holy-holy-on-high hymn of violence singing through the strings of her being. All she can process is its siren invocation. It has its hook in her, pulling her onward, and she is so okay with where they’re going.

  Since she’s here, she might as well have some fun.

  The light drags fingers along Maya’s muscled frame, reads out a scripture of scars and stitches, the places that only Rita has touched, scalpel carving sonnets into sinew. Illuminated by bloodlust, Maya shoulders past two skinheads and out into the ring. The men—they’re always men, she thinks with a scream of a laugh—go quiet.

  “Well?” Maya says, slamming a fist into the square of an open palm.

  “No shirt.” The guy who speaks up is a pot-bellied twerp with jeans that don’t fit his ass, goggles welded to cherub-cheeked face.

  Maya spreads her arms wide. “You want to see my tits? Is that it? That what you’re saying? You wanna see my tits? You want to motorboat that mess?”

  She knows it’s not, but she loves taunting shitheads like him. No one ever knows what to do when she shows up, avenging angel constructed in the micro. Five feet two when she deigns to have good posture, all tight lines and a helmet of black hair cropped close to the skull, face like a veteran’s tall tale. Maya’s countenance is a gossip reel of cicatrices, indentations where the skull stoved in and was shoddily rebuilt: you repair what you can when you can’t justify buying new.

  Sometimes, Maya wonders if she’s ever been “conventionally beautiful,” ever had a shot at the fantasy of domesticity, the white picket fences on a blue sky–tumbled planet, a kid who wouldn’t mind a clone for a parent, but fuck that and fuck this especially.

  The man—someone’s dad, Maya is so sure of it, someone’s dad looking to reinvigorate his middle-aged spirit—exchanges looks with his peers, nervous. “I meant the guns.”

  “You want them?” She doesn’t give him warning. She doesn’t charge exactly, but she does accelerate, going from zero to fifty in three strides, closing the gap before he can process what’s about to hit him. She winds a punch, biosynthetic muscles bunching in a hallelujah of intent, and slams reinforced knuckles into the man’s nose. “Come and get them.”

  Maya turns as the man drops first to one knee and then the next, hands over his face, blood ribboning down his front. She slaps her chest a few times, like some unmodified ape, some babyfresh human without a security protocol in the world, and walks a winner’s swagger around the circle of waiting faces.

  “Come on. Who the fuck is next?!”

  The fourth rule is simple: only two guys to a fight.

  And yeah, okay, maybe old cinema isn’t that bad because hand to mass-market heart, this is Maya’s favorite rule in the world.

  Maya is wiping the detritus of someone’s face from her hands when she walks in, the click-click of her stilettos as familiar as that old ventricular jingle.

  “What the fuck, Maya?”

  “Needed to get your attention somehow,” Maya grins through bloodied teeth. Someone’s gotten lucky. But Maya heals fast enough that it doesn’t matter and fuck, does it feel good to feel. Letting go like that is a blessed act. It’s been years now since she could chart a room in blood and broken bodies, groaning heaps of meat all around. Maya’s missed this so much, crypto-geist bearing witness or not.

  Ayane looks like the last cold gulp of water before the sun goes supernova, taller and leaner even than Rita, so pretty that it actually hurts to look at her. Every inch of her is federally sanctioned, independently purchased. She could stop a truck with a punch. She has. But you couldn’t tell. Not with that dress filigreeing her curves, the material a gold so pale it is practically ice, diamantine along the hems and where the fabric sits along the small of her perfect back.

  “You could have called,” says Ayane in her exquisite contralto; woman couldn’t do ugly even if you paid her in hope.

  Two hundred twenty-five point three seconds, a notification tells her. Two hundred twenty-five point three seconds until the dogs come howling. Guess Rita didn’t care for the silent treatment.

  Good. Maya’s got time to kill then. She grinds her heel into the back of a man’s hand, enjoys his groan, the way the metacarpals sag under the pressure. She adjusts the set of her feet. Crunch. Phalanges pop from the palm. “You wouldn’t have answered.”

  “No.” Ayane flips a curl of dark hair over her shoulder, her smile gone savage. The light doesn’t just love her, it obsesses. How else to explain the way it wraps her up in a champagne nimbus so she, for one shining moment, looks like some goddess come to salvage the day.

  Either way, Maya knows better, and Ayane knows better, and anyone who has ever heard of the Dirty Dozen knows better than to pray to Ayane, Badass Bitch-Goddess of Automated Ballistics, because sure as hell, the only thing she holds holy is metal.

  The two meet eyes.

  “Probably
not,” says Ayane, as though Maya needed the clarification. “Get the fuck out of here, Maya. I’m just trying to run a business.”

  “This really what you want?” A staccato gesture at the night’s losers. “MCing for paunchy old men, keeping them entertained for the rest of your life. I remember when you were retro-fitting ageships, Ayane.”

  “That never happened.”

  “Fine. Okay. Technically, it didn’t happen. But you’re probably the closest anyone’s ever gotten to doing such. Why give up glory for these middle-aged freaks?”

  “It’s a life,” counters Ayane. Her casual numinosity is frankly offensive. It is empirical, how stunning she is, a fact that exists external to the hypothesis that beauty is qualified by the beholder. Maya had not consented to having her breath shanked from her by something as egregious as Ayane retreating into a halo of artificial light, and she is pissed at this misstep by the universe, pissed she hasn’t become inoculated to such bodily treason, that Ayane after all these years still could have such an effect.

  No wonder Audra picked her.

  “Fuck that.”

  “Fuck you,” says Ayane.

  “You really going to be a bitch to me without fucking asking why I’m here? You know I wouldn’t fucking be here unless it’s important.” Her gesticulations are no longer modulated, broad and cartoonish. Maya exerts just that much more pressure on the man’s limp wrist: the bones might be dust but there are still nerves to grind. “You know that. You know I don’t get up in the morning unless it’s paid in planets.”

  “Or if Rita said so.”

  “Yeah.” A shrug. “So?”

  “Is she alive?”

  “The fuck you think?”

  “If she is, then whatever you gotta say is fucking worthless,” says Ayane, beginning to leave, her postural language clear: Maya and her mission have already been dismissed. “If she’s alive, I know she’s got you on a leash and I am done, Maya. I don’t want to have anything to do with that fucking junk-cunt.”

  “Not even if I told you we know the Minds are coming after ex-con—”