[02] Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier Page A

resources with far greater daring.
    It’d got him killed in the end, but still.
    Something
, she remembered muttering,
to think about.
    On the way back to the
The
she’d found ‘Deathstare’ Dan hiding in the shitter. Once he’d got the tedious business of self-defence out the way, hair-eradicating skull-implanted lasershot and all, she’d given him a calculating glare and made up her mind.
    ‘You’re coming with me,’ she’d said.
    Back in the now the mortician poked his head round the door.
    ‘You nearly done?’ he grumbled to the frozen air. ‘Only they’ll be wanting a report, and if h—’
    ‘Piss off or I’ll shoot you in the crotch.’
    ‘Rightio.’
    She finished removing the datachips from the camlens interior and crammed it messily back into the socket. And spared a final glance for the face of ‘Deathstare’ Dan Megrith. Minion #1.
    ‘New life,’ she’d told him, the day she cut him loose. ‘New name. My gifts to you.’
    ‘Wh-wh-what’s the catch?’
    She’d smiled. This was back when that was still a thing she sometimes did.
    ‘Constant vigilance.’
    She’d told him what to look out for. She’d named the prey. She’d provided the strange and senseless human ‘
who
’, though of course had said nothing of the ‘
why
’. She’d given him a tiny iron clip, a magnetised earring he was instructed to wear at all times. ‘To stop the runner,’ she’d said, tapping her head, ‘from making you hers. To make you immune.’ She’d suggested he take work as an info-narc, a cop, a crim, a journalist. Someone, anyway, with big ears. She’d told him she’d implanted an extremely expensive micro-beacon into his snazzy new livestreaming biocamera, and she’d told him it would unfailingly auto-ping the
The
in the event of its removal. Or of his death. Or, critically, of him whistling aloud a specific little ditty, which she then proceeded to teach him.
    (
He managed two out of three
, she thought.
Not bad, Deathstare Dan.
) But for the nullzone of the whispering room she might even have received the message in time.
    In the years since engaging the man’s service she’d accumulated – at last count – a total of twenty-one patsies under similar circumstances. Twenty, now.
    Favours owed. Fears displaced. Lives extended unexpectedly.
    ‘Teesa,’ she told them all. ‘Teesa #32A[M/Tertius]. Formerly owned by Madrien Axcelsus.’
    They nodded. They repeated it back. Every time. They sweated and willed her to leave them alone, to go away. Each one of them, she was sure, was convinced she was insane.
    ‘Find her,’ she’d told them. ‘Find her and every cred I’ve ever earned is yours.’
    (Some of them, she liked to think, believed her. She’d meant it.)
    ‘But let her get away …’ She meant this part too. ‘I will come for you.’
    In the morgue she slipped the data-chip into a pocket and headed for the door.
    Deathstare Dan, at the very least, had spared her the trouble.
    An hour out from the station, watching the camlens footage for the fifth time, SixJen chewed mechanically at a nutripack and wondered if it was supposed to taste of anything. Above her, as broad and invasively close as the
The
’s imagers could manage, Teesa #32A stared directly at her, hollow snout of her pistol yawning black, and said:
the freedom to do exactly what the fuck I like
.
    A flash. A noise. And the footage looping back to the start.
    ‘You ask me,’ Lex chirped, adopting a tone SixJen had long ago learned to recognise as his Cautious Bullshittery voice, ‘she has sad eyes.’
    (‘Bullshittery’, that is, because of course he –
it
– had no more capacity for understanding the notion of ‘sad’ than any other electrical puzzlebox mimicking empathy. Particularly when perceived in the magical emo-twinkles of a psychopath’s vid-recorded eyes.)
    (And ‘Cautious’ because,
well
—)
    ‘I
didn’t
ask, Lex.’
    ‘No, but—’
    ‘So shut up.’
    ‘Right.’
    She finished the