How Dark the World Becomes Read Free Page B

second-generation Crack Trash, I called it luxury. Once upon a time a lot of folks did. It was in the old Traak-Amahaat Gor , a high-end residential complex built originally for the Varoki executives of a long-bankrupt pharmaceutical conglomerate. Like a lot of Varoki buildings from around first-contact time, it looked like a gigantic clay pot that somehow just hadn’t worked out right. No matter how many times somebody told me it was supposed to look that way, it never looked good, and the green-black grime that seven or eight decades of airborne mold had left on it didn’t help. Only the thought of a whole bunch of rich folks living in it could have made it attractive, and they were long gone.
    The complex was sort of a landmark, a border-crossing checkpoint. It hadn’t been part of the Human Quarter originally, but times change. Now it was fair warning that Varoki passing the foam-stone buttresses of this massive beehive-ugly insult to architecture were leaving civilization and entering the land of desperate, dangerous savages. But as long as they stood in the lee of the Traak-Amahaat Gor, they weren’t quite there yet. Young leather-heads looking for thrills would hang around the complex and gaze into the depths of the Quarter, breathe in its sour but seductive aromas, listen to the distant tinny music of anarchy, and savor the danger-juice humming in their blood. Later they would dream about what adventures they would have experienced, if only they could have found the courage to cross that invisible threshold. 
    “Jo-Jo. Arriving alone,” I announced to my front door. Jo-Jo was my home security command code for the day. The laser scanner did a quick once-over, my door swung open with a soft chime, and I walked into the wonderfully rich odor of jambalaya. 
    There aren’t a lot of things better than jambalaya, in my opinion, especially with a full-bodied red—it doesn’t have to be expensive, just a good working guy’s table wine. I’m not sure how good you’d consider our local hydroponic red; we don’t call it “Piss-Can Special Reserve” for nothing. But Cinti’s jambalaya was damned good—almost as good as mine—and she’d made it special for me, which was nice. 
    My condo was a corner unit, with no windows—but there’s not much to see anyway. The walls were original stone on two sides and low-density feldspar aggregate foam on the other two. I’d added paneling to those two foam-stone walls—well, composite armor, actually. The condo itself was four rooms—kitchen, den, master bedroom, and a small guest bedroom that did double duty as a home office. A small bath was off the den and a bigger one off the master bedroom, but big is relative; two people had trouble moving around in there at the same time. The open area in the bedroom wasn’t much, either, because we’d put in a couple walk-in closets.
    Cinti and I had painted broad, diagonal swaths of color on the walls—warm browns and dark reds—to damp down the paleo-industrial look of the place, and tie in to the big Persian carpet in the den. Maybe it wasn’t much, but I liked it. The whole thing was maybe 100 square meters.
    We’d been together for six years. Sometimes it seemed like just a couple months; other times, it seemed as if we’d always been together. She’d been Jim Donahue’s girl when I first met her. Donahue ran most of the action in my part of the Quarter, and I sort of worked for him. It wasn’t as organized back then as it is now, but he was definitely higher up the pecking order than I was. Cinti and I hit it off right away—probably because of jazz, blues, and jonque . I loved them all, and she had this amazing vocal range and a smoky, sexy voice that melted my heart one minute and set me on fire the next. At first we were just pals, but Cinti’s a hot-blooded Brazilian, and my blood was plenty hot too. It helped that Jim was a pig. 
    I’m not sure I’d have been able to work out the plan without her on