Burning Chrome Read Free

ill.
    â€˜You, ah, want maybe a quarter-million to give me that and take a walk?’ A fat hand came up to stroke his pale, lean face nervously.
    â€˜What I want,’ she said, snapping her fingers so that the unit spun and glittered, ‘is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist. But a quarter’ll do for a retainer.’
    Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn’t been kept up to the Christian White standard. Then she turned the disruptor off.
    â€˜Two million,’ I said.
    â€˜My kind of man,’ she said, and laughed. ‘What’s in the bag?’
    â€˜A shotgun.’
    â€˜Crude.’ It might have been a compliment.’
    Ralfi said nothng at all.
    â€˜Name’s Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare.’ She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.
    And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets. I saw my new face twinned there.
    â€˜I’m Johnny,’ I said. ‘We’re taking Mr Face with us.
    He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm’s most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the bartender. And the pimps and thedealers would leave him alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and careful with his credit when he was.
    The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament.
    Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemed to know them. I heard the black one laugh.
    I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I’ve never got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above them. Maybe that saved me.
    Ralfi kept walking, but I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he’d already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.
    I looked back down in time to see him explode.
    Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping toward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls off. It’s a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lightning yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cutsso fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.
    Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched sections rolling forward on to the tiled pavement. In total silence.
    I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.
    It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She’d just edged one mirrored eye around