A Treasure Left on the Street
This is exhausting. God, this is exhausting.
The exo-suit I had pushed past its limits had already drained its battery dry, nothing now but dead weight, and a body wrung out with accumulated fatigue felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. To make matters worse, the duct tape slapped over my cracked gas-mask goggles blotted out half my field of vision.
The fact that I had finished off a Stalker under conditions this miserable was, I had to admit, pretty damn satisfying. And the farming had not been half bad either.
GRAAAAAAAAH!
Ah. Right. That thing.
The horrific roar that tore through the air again as I sprinted for the facility exit made my skin crawl. I was only on my second Darkzone deployment. I was not some legendary hero dragging around an epic narrative that justified this much hardship this early.
If I had known it would come to this, maybe I should have just used the gun.
Most of the Stalker's gear had been ballistic-rated, so I had figured a pistol would not do a damn thing and deliberately left it holstered. Which meant I had burned extra time going at him hand-to-hand. That much was true.
No. Not using the gun had been the right call. The second you pull the trigger, a firearm becomes used goods.
And what does "used" mean? It means someone else's fingerprints are already on it, so you will never get full price. I was not some buy-at-the-knees, sell-at-the-shoulders, safety-first(?) trader. I was going to be a god of commerce — the kind who scooped loot off the floor and flipped it from the rooftops. Korea had more con artists per capita than just about anywhere on earth, so you could even call what I was doing an act of national authenticity.
If only that thing were not here.
Big Bob smashed straight through the corridor's glass wall and heaved into view, dark crimson blood caked around its maw, snorting like a bellows. It had probably stuffed itself on the poor bastards who had not made it out of the facility in time. But as if I had been the target from the start, it sacrificed another spore sac and lashed out with a long, thick tentacle.
People like you get chewed out in polite society, you know. You have got to know when to back off. Or was this something else? Had failing to catch me driven it into regret, obsession, the whole miserable spiral?
The tentacle punched a massive hole in the wall where I had been standing a second earlier. Yeah. This thing was serious. It genuinely wanted me. I understood the urge to take one big, fresh bite out of a charming specimen like myself. Unfortunately, I had my own reasons not to get caught.
After a honey-farming run this good, dying before I extract? That would be the shame of my entire life.
Getting knifed by some nobody I had never even heard of would be less pathetic. So I ran, dodging the incoming tentacle volleys by a hair, pouring every last ounce of strength I had toward the exit. The exo-suit's battery had been dead for a while, though, and I could not push any faster than my own two legs would carry me. That part stung.
But I had Crazy Clock.
The moment you pass the temporary decontamination chamber twenty meters ahead, I will initiate a mass disinfectant spray.
"What, you planning to melt that filthy bacteria pile with disinfectant?!"
For all I knew it was a virus pile. Maybe both.
Ethanol-based disinfectant is an extremely volatile and highly flammable substance.
"......!"
I dug through my pack and pulled out a disposable lighter and an industrial spray can. White-tier junk anyway — they would not fetch any real money. I duct-taped the lighter and the spray into an unbalanced pair of conjoined twins, then flicked the safety off my pistol. Sorry I could not sell you as a mint-condition original, pal.
NOW.
The instant I cleared the wrecked temporary decontamination chamber, Big Bob lumbered in a beat too late and took a full-body bath of disinfectant. True to form for a walking sack of filthy contaminants, the stuff seemed to hurt just by touching it — the thing thrashed even more violently, and its footsteps slowed as a bonus.
"Not being able to take a tissue sample off you is going to haunt me for the rest of my life."
It was a named Primordial from the early story. A biological tissue sample would have been a jackpot for sure. I swallowed my tears and hurled the flammable conjoined twins at it.
"That's about the price of one bulgogi lunch set."
Not a bad trade, all things considered.
I pulled the trigger. A bright flash filled my vision.
"Inmate number 26644. Per the results of your value assessment, 6.5 million won has been deposited into your Prison Banking account."
A female guard with a Smartlink and full implant conversions on both arms and legs kept her rifle trained on the prisoner's back as she delivered the assessment. Inmate 26644 toweled the water from her hair and frowned, puzzled.
"Those scraps are worth that much in here?"
The prison's exclusive currency paid maybe a hundred to two hundred thousand won on a good General Duty shift, and on a bad one you were lucky to see fifty thousand. Pulling 6.5 million off a single Special Duty run was more than enough to make any inmate raise an eyebrow. Outside, 6.5 million won was a middling sum thanks to murderous inflation. In here, it carried real weight.
"The assessors said you only brought back the good stuff. Everything from research-grade materials to equipment the military might want to trial."
"Glad they didn't skim any off the top. Or is that the fair part, since they have to throw more inmates at Special Duty?"
"Who knows what the people upstairs are thinking. More to the point — you've never touched Special Duty before. What possessed you to sign up now, Elena Blavatsky?"
The white-haired inmate with the bob cut twitched at the name. She squinted under the towel, then went back to scrubbing her hair.
"I was curious. There was a rumor that some brand-new Orange got thrown into Special Duty the day after intake and pulled in over ten million won."
Ten million won. She had just earned 6.5 million for the first time today, but ten million was a figure she had not heard in years. The veterans who knew Special Duty inside and out were almost all death-row inmates, lifers, or long-termers — and even they needed a mountain of experience and a mountain of luck to scrape together that kind of haul.
And it was not some stubborn survivor from the sub-20,000 numbers who had been clinging to life in this place for years. It was a wet-behind-the-ears Orange in the late 70,000s. Did that not seem a little strange?
So she had gotten interested, and she had applied for Special Duty — something she would never have gone near until her sentence was up. Of course, to keep her identity under wraps, she had cobbled together a pickup team of nobodies who did not know who she was, and dropped into the same zone on the same day as the rumored Orange. If luck held, she might run into him during the run. If it did not, she could always try again next time. She had that kind of power, and that kind of leisure.
"So. Did that scratch the itch?"
"He definitely had the skills to back it up. Which only made it weirder."
The results spoke for themselves. The rumor was true. That new Orange had moved like he knew Special Duty from top to bottom. He had clocked that the nobodies were using her as a meat shield and were about to throw her out as bait, pulled her out of it, and then cheerfully explained how to squeeze every last drop of profit from the run.
Situational awareness, reaction speed, the hunger to survive, and that obsession with money. No matter how you looked at it, he did not look like a prisoner.
The odds were better that he had been dumped here for some other, unjust reason than that he had actually committed a crime that landed him in a place like this. Or maybe he had put himself here on purpose. If that was the case, he was genuinely insane.
She rode the elevator up with the guard, and what came into view was the women's cell block — H-203, Basement 1st Floor (B1). Dozens of multinational women inmates were waiting for her in front of the elevator. In a Republic of Korea that had thrown its borders wide open to immigration, this was, surprisingly, one of the most ordinary sights you could find.
The guard snorted and prodded Elena Blavatsky in the back with the muzzle of her rifle. Some of the inmates' eyes turned ugly, but Elena waved them off like it was nothing. By Russian standards, that kind of shove was about as gentle as handling a newborn.
"I've told you this a hundred times. Don't start anything. I don't care if you stew each other or stir-fry each other in here, but until your sentences are up, you stay on the right side of the line. Don't forget — your human rights have an expiration date."
"How kind of you. Guess today's not that day."
The guard ignored the sarcasm and shut the elevator doors.
As long as the inmates here kept to that minimum line, they were, strictly speaking, assets of the Korean government and the corporate consortium. Of course, there would come a day when even that stopped being true — but if there was no problem right now, it was not worth losing sleep over. In any case, it was no exaggeration to say that the General Duty and Special Duty these people were thrown into every day kept both the light and the dark sides of the Korean economy humming.
And among them, certain inmates were valuable enough to keep using for a long time. There was nothing to gain from picking a fight, so the guards knew when to back off. Any inmate with a little seniority already knew that. Which was why they were careful not to cross the forbidden lines — mass riots, killing a guard, escape — and focused on stretching their lives as far as they would go.
A Latina inmate with a solid build of muscle stepped up, took the wet towel from her, and murmured in her ear.
"Boss. The guards have been acting weird lately."
"I know. Orders from upstairs, most likely. Don't take bribes. Don't get more involved with the inmates than you have to."
"Just like you said — the guards suddenly stopped taking bribes, started acting strictly by the book, and began keeping their distance. We looked into it. Supposedly it's the Warden's directive. Something's going to happen soon."
A full cell-block inspection for the first time in ages, or a Summary Execution of select inmates as an example — some kind of big event could be coming. In a prison, what you watched was not the inmates' mood. It was the guards'.
"Have the kids make sure we don't leave anything they can pin on us. And if that new Orange comes back today, put in a request with Cuckoo to keep a separate watch on him. He's a male inmate, so that's better than us trying to tail him ourselves."
"Watching for what, exactly...?"
"How much he pulled from this Special Duty run. Where he spends the money. Whether he's building a faction inside his cell block. And if he isn't, how he's living. All of it. Don't make it obvious, though. For now, just watching is enough. I'll move on this myself if I can, and get a read on him."
"Yes, ma'am. I'll take care of it immediately."
Her subordinates' careful hands tended to her from head to toe, and she thought about that man. An interesting, capable new Orange — with an attractive secret buried underneath. She had assumed a person who checked every one of those boxes only existed in her imagination. Then he had shown up right in front of her, and she could not get him out of her head.
So, if she could help it, she wanted him close. Leaving a treasure to rot alone in the street was a waste. Letting some other nobody snatch it up was a waste too. A treasure only shone in the hands of someone who understood what it was worth.
More than anything, I need to get my hands on him before those irritating old fossils start sniffing around.
Origin Numbering — inmate numbers under ten thousand that had never once been transferred to another person. She had had more than a few ugly entanglements with those old fossils going back to her Ground Floor days, and she wanted as little to do with them as possible. Not because she was afraid of them, or even because they made things difficult. She just hated the hassle.