Digital Plague

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I was going to have to kill a whole lot of people.

“Keep walking, Avery.”

I didn’t like how he kept calling me Avery in that distorted voice, like he knew me. It made me nervous. It was one thing to be sold out by someone in your own organization and sent into a fucking ambush; chances were, when you got sold on a bounty, you were just entering a startling gauntlet of upsells. Eventually you discovered the original bounty had been laid out by some Chinese gangster halfway around the fucking world. And I was big money these days: Avery Cates, cop killer.

This is what happened when you were successful in the System: you wore a target.

It was cold, a strong wind pushing a metallic smell up my nose with prejudice. I estimated ten or twelve people around me, though only two had spoken so far. Both sounded like they were using a digital morpher to mask their voices, which made me wonder if I knew the pieces of shit who’d sold me out. Anger, green and corrosive, bubbled inside me. I didn’t work with anyone I didn’t know, so a friend had sold me out, and it made me angry. If I’d been psionic-even a tiny, microscopic little bit-I would have been able to burn off the blindfold with my thoughts. As it was I was listening, trying to pick up clues. For when I came back and killed every last one of them.

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