She rifled the pots, but there was nothing hidden in any of ’em, except one. A little green AI-GMO seedling had taken root and flowered fast. A flash of vibrant green in a sea of decay.

  Ria smiled at the straggler. “Hey, little dude. If I can survive, you can.”

  She stood up and looked across the street at thousands of reflective windows. Each of them offered tuck-spots for a lens, but too narrow of a vantage point, so Ria just headed back inside.

  She put the seedling’s pot in the kitchen sink and stepped into the bathroom, her sixth sense pounding. “You’ve been in here, haven’t you?”

  Ria slid the shower door open to inspect the soap tray. Peered down the dank, dark drain. Then all the hairs stood up on her neck. She grabbed a chair, reached up, and pulled away the vent . . .

  “Goddammit.”

  A virt-cam was mounted to the screen, custom fabricated so its micro-lens could periscope through the slats and render her entire shower.

  She looked into the lens. “Asshole.” Then crushed it underfoot and let out a sigh that betrayed the weight of the world. “There’s nothing he doesn’t own.”

  Her eyes drifted down to a titanium cabinet under the sink. Ria kneeled down and reached inside, searching blind for something within. Finally yanked loose a tiny black jewelry box.

  Inside, set in a velvet cushion . . . was a silver locket.

  “Been a minute,” she whispered.

  Opening the locket revealed a true artifact in 2051—an actual photograph. That Polaroid of her mom, with Ria and Dani at thirteen. In leotards. All smiling. The last happy moment with her family, now long-since gone.

  “Hi, Mom.” Ria whispered. “Hey, Sis.”

  There was a reason she kept this thing stashed away, and it wasn’t just the liability. She snorted and steeled herself.

  Ria opened a console in her living room containing a dinosaur in 2051, an old-school tape deck—the only way to listen to music off-grid. She rifled through a set of tapes and pulled one labeled “EINAUDI—Nuvole Bianche.” Popped it in, pressed Play, and a fluid, gorgeous piano piece floated across her joint from the fully analog system.

  The score to Gemini.

  Her mom crafted the dance so they’d lead and follow, lead and follow. Dani’s side was ethereal, filled with spaces for improvisation within the count. But Ria’s was a technical bitch, upping the bar on her perfectionism every week.

  She sat on a nondescript chair at a nondescript table straight outta Holofurn’s nondescript virtual showroom C.

  Scales chased scales, and she let herself remember. The four-count, the first position. Glissade into grand jeté, into pirouette. Ria chuckled, how Dani’d wipe out at least once a week. How her mom couldn’t help but chuckle too. Ria could smell the wax on the floor when rehearsal began. Their perspiration long before it came to an end. Waves of emotion pounded massive, sweeping through her for the first time in years. Painful. Liable. Dangerous.

  So she shut the music off.

  ’Cuz her synthetic eardrum caught the faint chatter of Baz and Eddie walking up Valencia. And soon her organic one would hear the buzzer ringing from downstairs.

  Ria looked at the photo again, the only living remnant that could prove Ria had any connection to the Roselli family.

  Then she shut that too.

  * * *

  “When’s the last time this place was swept?” Baz didn’t mince words or waste time after she let them in. He just studied her apartment, its windows, furnishings, and personal belongings (or lack thereof )—gathering all he could off this cipher called Ria Rose.

  She smiled. “Twenty minutes ago.”

  Baz looked at Eddie. “Anything?”

  dig.LIDAR-Rf

  >deepscan<

  Eddie’s wetwire vectored the smashed virt-cam in the bathroom. He inspected it to make sure it was off-line. “We’re clean.”

  Baz held up the Eyeball wafer. “How’d you get your hands on this?”

  “We re-upped the seismics a year ago.”

  “Not the schematics—the loot.”

  Ria scoffed. “What, you haven’t done your own homework?”

  Of course, he had. Three weeks of it were in his pocket . . . 3D virts hacked outta SF Surveillance of Ria Rose escorting Nios in and out of the garage at the Fang. Hundreds of “undisclosed automation services” for a fleet of fuckbots. And hacked orbital black transfers from execs and politicos like Callahan for a zillion jams she’d fixed.

  All of it proved one thing: Ria Rose was the most powerful woman in the Loin, thanks to Otto Rex.

  “Why bite the hand that feeds?” Ria asked his question for him.

  Baz didn’t blink. He didn’t want an explanation. He wanted proof.

  Ria nodded and activated data in her wetwire like it was waiting for him. Footage floated onto her holo-display . . .

  ww.mem-drive

  Sec.VirtCam-55C

  A stairwell. In a theater or a nightclub. Probly the Fang.

  Baz and Eddie watched Ria’s image appear in the holo as she descended a flight of stairs and approached the virt-cam’s POV.

  Ria kept her eyes locked on Baz, but her mind drifted back to her first visit to the Fang three years ago, upstairs in that sex suite after she’d taken Lacy apart . . .

  The night she first met Otto Rex.

  —he appeared in the footage, small. His yoked frame and ink on white flesh ID’d him instantly as he grew in size, moving down the stairs in cold-blooded pursuit of her—like a memory surging forth from her past. She could feel her loathing grow as Otto moved closer and closer.

  And Ria marveled at the unbelievable journey that had unfolded since . . .

  As Otto leaped forward in the footage and seized her—

  THE FANG

  3 years ago

  Otto hadn’t seen someone destroy a robot with their bare hands since his boy Baz Covane’s Body Count, years ago in Venezuela. But he couldn’t help it—he was gonna lean into this mess as hard as he dodged that one. There was black blood all over the sex suite and a severed finger next to Lacy, one of his favorite 2.3s, so Otto was ready to get obscene with whatever sex pest took a wrong turn and missed the Dungeon downstairs. But instead, his Warrior Bot McT clutched a 22-year-old runaway girl by her shoulders.

  And Otto heard destiny louder than ever.

  She was thrashin’ and screamin’—all full of piss and vinegar—and Otto liked her instantly. She was augmented up: right eye, half her neurals, and right arm full synthetic. Otto figured she was an Orphan of the Glitch and wondered if she still had her human rights. So he ran her wetwire through a full in-house background check that came back with an SSS on “Ria Rose” plus her augment specs: 38 percent human. Even her synth eye was pinned, that’s how much Blaze she was on. So he had McT hold onto her upstairs until she came back to earth. That’d give Otto enough time to decide:

  Either kill her or take her under his wing.

  Ria persuaded McT that she wasn’t going anywhere, knowing a Warrior Bot had the intelligence engine of a frat boy. But then she realized she was right: Otto’s suite was hermetically sealed. She looked around and gathered Otto was a world-class hedonist. The penthouse was decorated by Dracula—lotsa candles, lotta silk—two bolts in the ceiling with hooks that could hold a lotta weight. And Ria wondered if Otto hung a sexbot swing from the ceiling, or a sexbot itself. Then the thought crossed her augments, that it was Otto who liked to be hung . . . when he walked in.

  She laughed at his offer. Ria just pointed at her scar and dared him to guess how she got it. Otto recited her history: Dad was a trucker, Mom was a nurse, and they’d both been laid off by the same model Wutani that slaughtered them and her little brother before blowing a hole in Ria’s head.

  She hid her satisfaction knowing Jericho’s fake SSS backstopped so strong that even a kingpin was convinced Ria was someone she wasn’t. So she leaned in and asked him the question that she’d have to answer over and over for the next three years until it made her sick:

  “Why would I work with bots when my family was murdered by one?”

  Otto just smiled.

  “Because we become what we hate.”

  Ria’s blood ran cold. Her real dad, Dave Roselli, said those exact words too many times during his descent into madness. Did Otto know who she was after all? Or did he just accidentally quote the Underground Butcher? She couldn’t remember the last time she was at a loss for words. Her stone-cold Poker Face was unreadable—a black-market emotive she’d coded into her augments—so Otto couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but Ria could read two things for sure. He wanted to fuck her more than any man on earth. And Ria was in control of the deadliest man in America.

  Otto put her to work, starting outside to show her the ropes. Literally, made her the list girl by the valet in front of the Fang. Ria rolled her eyes, ’cuz there was no list: Otto’s only rule was that his customers had to be minted. He didn’t give a fuck if his Valet Bots could drive or not, since his high-end patrons’ Bentleys or Benzos parked themselves anyway. All his valets needed was enough narrow AI to open the door for ’em—’cuz what people missed most about old-school valet stands wasn’t the exclusivity, nor the access . . . but the audience watching them emerge like gods.

  Ria’d been on the streets for years—long gone was the straight-arrow girl from Kansas. She knew the difference between a baller and a thief, a slotter and a junkie, a poser and legit hustler. Otto wanted the real deal at the Fang—kids with nothing to lose who lived to dance and slot ’til the break of dawn. So she taught him a thing or two about his own club. Never forget the most important rule: rich people suck.

  Night after night, the crowd got bigger and bigger as the scene that Otto’d always imagined materialized right in front of his eyes. He was in awe of Ria as she came to own the ropes, the gatekeeper of cool; his Fang, the new home to West Coast slick. As her reputation grew to legendary status—denying the mayor two nights in a row ’til even he agreed to come off-grid—something took hold of Otto. It was hard for him to understand or even fathom . . .

  Why was he so obsessed with Ria Rose?

  He moved her onto the floor, sellin’ what she knew best: wafers. Otto called ’em Slingers, the kids who sold Narcsoft in the Fang. Moxie was his King Slinger, and he figured out quick, once they started slingin’ together, that she and Ria had history. Called ’em the Scissor Sisters with a leer, seein’ how quickly they cut up the flavors. Ria’s secret to success was simple . . . Know thy product. She and Mox were first to slot any new wafer of Narcsoft, before it hit the floor. Ria’d lost eyes for Moxie but kept up the act because she knew it drove Otto crazy. And turnin’ him on felt like destiny.

  Ria knew if she ever let him do what he wanted, she’d just be another piece of flesh. So she toyed with him. Let Moxie make out with her if Otto was watching, well aware of the easy ten mil in ¢rypto he’d offered her to get the three of ’em in the sack. The more Moxie slotted, the less Ria had a taste for it—her new drug was the power Otto wielded everywhere he went. She became the best on the floor, the new King Slinger, moving more product than Otto could believe.

  Until one night, when another Slinger named Lo-Ball said something that just didn’t compute . . . He used to sling Otto’s shit down in LA (’least, what was left after its water ran dry). He said what made Otto’s code so hot was that it didn’t degrade on the fiber-brain barrier—it self-deleted, so no one could ever copy it. Ria knew Otto’s code came outta Osaka or Hong Kong or something (the best shit was always written overseas), but then she clocked what he’d said and grabbed Lo-Ball to be clear: “That’s impossible, humans can’t write self-deleting code.”

  But then the Laze rolled on, and the moment was gone . . .

  Ria’s games with Otto’s head came to an ugly and screeching halt in a single day—in about five minutes really. She’d been upped to a Sealer on the second floor: a robot tech who managed and analyzed every bot’s learning cap. As Otto explained, the Fang was a high-wire act between law enforcement and consumer demand, teetering on the assurance that every cap would hold . . .

  Otto figured Ria was the fixer he’d been dreamin’ of for years from one fact alone: he didn’t even bother hittin’ his own nightclub anymore. Hadn’t been on the floor of the Fang for a year. He wasn’t sure if it was paranoia or xenophobia, but the more competent Ria became, the more Otto hated dealin’ with people IRL: King Otto’d grown sick of his own court. But he’d still scrutinize the Fang from his upstairs penthouse, wetwire plugged into the security grid, spying on every sexbot, patron, and employee—but mainly on Ria Rose.

  Still, Otto needed her to pass one last test if he was gonna hand her control of his day-to-day. She would have to know everything. Even what happened to a fuckbot when some whacked-out sex pest popped her learning cap. ’Cuz every once in a while they’d put up a fight, but most bots just took flight and ran.

  Otto explained that by the time they’re dragged back, they’re self-aware and think they’re alive. And the truth is, they kinda are, but property of the Fang, nonetheless—and this was the test. Because if Ria’s hatred of bots was pure and her resolve unscathed, then she’d excel at this part of the job.

  Since it was kinda like buryin’ a bot alive.

  This fuckbot named Trixie had been on the lam for five months—the poor bitch even rented her own pad. The landlord, who ID’d her with a disposable Resonance Sequencer from 7-Eleven, struggled with dingin’ the Fang’s digits on her neural tag. But when McT hauled her back to the club the next afternoon, the guy didn’t struggle to collect his reward—hand outstretched—as they threw Trixie in the neural chair. He just lowered his head in shame and cut out, muttering something about how Trixie planted a garden . . .

  Ria hadn’t thought about Kansas for years, ’til the day she resealed the cap on a self-aware Trixie. She remembered a story she’d slotted back in school called Flowers for Algernon, ’bout this impaired kid who gets an operation that makes him smart. But it doesn’t last. And the tragic part (obv) was that the guy knew he was losing it—and “it” meant him—since his intelligence was all that he was . . . and then he was gone.

  Ria kept telling herself Trixie’s tears were just code. She tried to conjure Dani’s face half-caved-in, tried to remember her father’s crazy eyes. But she couldn’t recall any of it, not the hatred, not the pain—nothing—just felt the fear behind poor Trixie’s eyes. Thank God for that Poker Face code: the emotive self-booted just before Ria’s own tears started to roll. It all hit her so hard, just how fucked this world is—no matter how many parties and beaches and love and sunshine you were sold by holo-virts—None of that shit happened, none of it! It was all horseshit!—all you could count on was heartache and hurt. And all you could hope for is maybe a few momentary reprieves before the inevitable void swallowed you . . . Like it enveloped Trixie now, as her learning cap sealed and the bot returned to the slavery she was built for.

  Otto watched Ria the whole way through. As Trixie whimpered goodbye and Ria’s stone-cold Poker Face held, he clocked the sheer will on her visage as she erased the poor bot’s mind. So angry, so hostile, so violent, and yet so damaged, even brittle—her own worst enemy. Ria carried a deep-down loathing of who she was. He always thought of her like an AK-47 crafted in porcelain—some lethally fragile firearm—that if you unloaded the rounds in her clip, you’d shatter her entire chamber—

  And he wanted so bad to break her to pieces.

  Otto’s cock stiffened. He would have Ria. In the dead of night, after the Fang shut its doors so no one but Otto could hear her scream. He imagined she’d fight and probably fight hard—and the sweat he’d break immobilizing her, pinning at least one arm behind her as he yanked her panties down—that just made him stiffer.

  Otto moved on her in the stairwell.

  But Ria didn’t fight—she froze like an ice queen. And for some reason, her frigidity was contagious. Unlike so many girls in the past, Otto didn’t belt her or bend her over the railing—he just clenched her as his libido seized up, staring into Ria’s real and synthetic eyes . . . and despised ’em. In the days and months to follow, he’d tell himself that he hated her eyes for mismatching.

  But really, Otto hated the power Ria Rose wielded over him.

  He couldn’t kill or fire her—then he’d have to run his empire himself. Couldn’t purge himself of the obsession either, no matter how many sexbots he fucked—and he fucked ’em all. So he would train every virt-cam at the Fang on her and hack what mem-drives he could off her wetwire to gather all the data and footage possible on Ria Rose. He’d plant cams in her pad and go through her trash to build sim after sim—fucking Ria in every position, location, and lingerie available on earth by 2051. He started with low-res constructs, then improved on her behavior with every fantasy. And somewhere along the way, Otto decided . . .

  Ria Rose was the girl of his dreams.

  She could feel it right there in the stairwell—Otto’s furnace of rage overheating, irradiating her just inches away. All his evil slammed into Ria with a blunt-force vision of the future: one where the details and topography were blurry but the horror was clear. Not tonight, but one day soon, he would surely hurt her. Had she unlocked her Poker Face, Ria might’ve spat or puked on Otto, but then she’d be dead.

  Otto’s eyes trained down her body, taking in the fine layer of indifferent perspiration beading between her breasts, and he realized what held such sway over him. Ria didn’t give a shit what he would do to her. It wasn’t that she dared not breathe, she just didn’t bother.

  When a lockdown warning sounded throughout the Fang.

  The moment was shattered for good as Otto backed off and retreated to the sublevels to make sure it was all just a false alarm. But Ria cut a path on autopilot for Moxie’s place fast and demanded two bricks of Iceman: quad-pile wafers with enough code-dope to digitally tranquilize a snow tiger.

  But she sat on the roof of Moxie’s pad, clutching the linebacker wafers instead of slotting ’em, and cried and cried, refusing, finally, to run away from the pain. When she was done, Moxie pulled out a wafer Ria’d never seen before. “Fuck Iceman,” Moxie said, “that’ll just wipe you out. This one’s called Glee, and it’s coded from kids. It’ll fill you with the joy of a six-year-old girl.” Moxie was sky-high and thus daft to the obvious fact that from this moment forward, Ria was done gettin’ slotted. But the Slinger kept on, guaranteeing with the laziest smile: