Chương 65: Mistmarket

Kelly had visited the Mistmarket before, and she told Buster as much while they walked toward the outer gate. Buster padded beside her, fully encased in his vacuum-tight black and translucent gas mask and body suit, his tail swinging low and easy. She had left the truck parked just outside the perimeter, wanting to approach on foot and get a feel for how the place was and see if anything had changed since the last time she'd been here.

"I know this place, Buster. It's one of the main reasons I never even tried to leave the outskirts. Not that I could've afforded it on an intern's salary. That's a whole other racket." This was the city's premier spot for illegal bodywork, a genuine spa for anyone who wanted to walk out with a few extra joints and zero surveillance tags or privacy cookies. Kelly had been using custom parts since she first picked up a physics textbook and realized the factory-issue model was a creative prison.

She glanced down at Buster, whose ears were cocked toward the gate.

"Membership costs an extortionate fee, but I'll take anonymity over a body count any day. It's cleaner for everyone, except my wallet, which whimpers every time." It was always about the money, or the labor, usually whichever one someone else was providing. The government turned a blind eye in every possible sense, probably because the market had slipped them enough cash to invest in a second blind eye for symmetry.

Kelly suspected they were just relieved someone had managed to turn a financial sinkhole into a revenue stream, alchemy with more paperwork and fewer ethics. She tapped the side of her mask as she walked.

"No cops. The cops give this place a wide berth. The few who do swing by are on a first-name basis with the guy in charge—some even have nicknames, which is never a good sign." That arrangement let the place operate under its own rules with total impunity, a sovereign nation in everything but name whose official language was "don't worry about it." As long as the cash kept flowing, nobody bothered asking questions.

The city's corruption ran from the penthouse straight down to the gutter, a perfect pyramid scheme of moral bankruptcy, complete with motivational speeches and absolutely no refunds. Kelly had stopped being surprised around the same time she started thinking of corporate security personnel as a renewable resource. The second Kelly passed the checkpoint on foot, she remembered exactly why they called it the Mistmarket. The fog clamped down, thick and cloying, pressing against her skintight suit.

Her gas mask visor switched to a frequency meant to cut through the toxic soup, and a quick, curious scan of its properties showed just enough oxygen to maybe survive an insult. The air quality had plummeted into one of the worst pockets in the city, a pervasive cocktail of unknown, known, and unidentifiable chemical and biological agents, all irradiated.

The almost-mad scientist could have almost sworn she smelled chemicals and iron even through the mask, a sharp, metallic aftertaste coating the back of her throat. Buster sneezed. A frantic systems check confirmed her seals were intact and filtering. Whatever she was smelling was either psychosomatic or harmless, which just confirmed the raw, aggressive strength of the atmosphere. She wondered what would happen if a portal creature inhaled it. Probably nothing good.

Kelly cranked her mask's filtration to its absolute maximum. Beside her, Buster shifted, his custom mask fogging faintly at the edges. She reached over, tapped the seal, then stopped walking.

"Not worth finding out what this air does to dog lungs. We're going back for the truck." She turned around, and Buster turned with her without hesitation. The walk back was slow, deliberate, and the mist made every step feel like wading through something that wanted to stick. She kept one hand near Buster's back, present.

"There we go. Slow and steady. Nothing out here's worth chasing, and if it is, it's probably already dead or about to be." Buster's ears swiveled, but his tail gave one low thump against his suited flank. The mist passed around them, and he moved through it with the same attention he gave a squirrel from a porch, alert and paying attention.

"See? You get it. The trick is not to let the world hurry you while it's also trying to dissolve you." They reached the truck. Kelly opened the back door, and Buster hopped up onto the rear seat with practiced ease. She shut the door, circled to the driver's side, and climbed in. The sealed cabin came alive around them, its internal environmental systems actively scrubbing that lingering Chernobyl-chemical aftertaste from the air. This was a market that had forgotten it was supposed to be a neighborhood.

Almost every house and three-floor apartment building had fallen into a state of disrepair. Windows were broken, cinder block walls were scabbed with graffiti, some sections crumbling into the street. The place was claustrophobic, narrow streets forming a labyrinth of alleys almost too small for her truck, fire escapes casting everything in a deep shadow despite the daylight.

The few working streetlights flickered weakly, struggling against a thick, shifting smog that colored the world in sickly, iridescent hues of chemical violet and rust-orange. Every piece of metal seemed to sweat a fine, corrosive film, probably due to the acidic pollution eating away at it. Even Kelly, who had seen it all before, felt a cold knot in her gut at the conditions. The streets not crammed with stalls or stores were littered with the homeless.

Dealers openly peddled drugged air filters to people who had been forced to settle here, offering a chemical escape from the bleakness. Some of them eyed her rifle with open greed, while others quickly avoided her gaze when she looked at them. Everyone wore something—gas masks, respirators, second hand tape strapped to their fraying bodysuits, rags tied over and around their already masked faces, as if that made a difference—even the children playing in the toxic puddles.

As she drove, the fog pressed against the windshield and Buster lay across the back seat, suited and masked, his head on his paws and his eyes tracking the slow bleed of shapes outside the glass. A mutated rat the size of a Labrador scrambled across the street and disappeared into an alley. Kelly let it go and drove on, following the road as it curved around a clogged manhole overflowing with chromatic waste. The puddle rippled even though nothing moved in it. Then she saw a corpse.

A woman lay there, emaciated and with the stretched, wrong-angled look of mutation that came from breathing the wrong air too long. Her mask was missing—stolen or just too expensive to keep running. She lay half in the muck near the manhole, her body abandoned to the same toxic shimmer that swallowed the street.

Kelly found herself hoping the woman's death had been quick, that she hadn't had to face the slow, lottery-ticket horror of environmental mutation, ending up with a losing hand and unable to afford the price of a single clean breath. A slight pang of sympathy moved through her, sharp and small, before movement near the body pulled her attention. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it A second rat, this one the size of a Mastiff and just as fast, circled the corpse with its head low. Its hide was mottled and wet, and its tail dragged through the chromatic puddle without disturbing the surface. It stopped at the woman's shoulder and opened its mouth. Kelly reached for the window control.

The cabin's internal pressure shifted the moment the glass began to drop, and a hard rush of filtered air shoved outward through the gap in a steady stream, keeping the outside atmosphere from spilling in. Buster braced himself against the seat, his claws digging into the harness strap as the airflow whipped past the window. Kelly pulled the sidearm from the case on the passenger seat, lined up the shot, and put one round through the rat's skull before it could close its jaws.

The rat dropped beside the corpse, twitched once, and stopped moving. Kelly had seen everything as variables—experiments—made jokes about them, but she couldn't muster the energy for humor after seeing that. She closed the window. The rush of air cut off the instant the seal clicked back into place. Kelly set the sidearm back in the case and kept driving. Kelly keyed the location of the store she was looking for into her truck's satnav: a place called Luigi's Universal Parts.

As her truck turned a corner, a local sidled up to her window, holding a handful of canisters designed to plug into a gas mask port. Each was marked with a different symbol—a stylized eye, a broken crown, a bleeding heart. One was just covered in crude, spray-painted tags, like it had lost a fight with a street artist.

"Filter upgrade? Got the good stuff," he said, shaking them.

"Clarity, Empathy, Cali Crush. And this one," he added, holding up a canister covered in crude, spray-painted tags.

"This one's pure Blue. Unfiltered." The voice faded. They were filled with different drugs, Kelly knew, each symbol representing a different flavor of oblivion, enough to keep a user in a permanent state of bliss until the addictive high wore off—or at least until they remembered they had responsibilities. The price scrawled on a grimy sign was exorbitant. It appeared the end of the world had caused the price of everything to rise—even drugs.

Kelly's truck found LUIGI'S UNIVERSAL PARTS pretty quickly, the vehicle's artificial drive avoiding all obstacles in the thick, cloying mist that choked the street. The store itself was a monument to managed decay: a reinforced shanty built from scavenged shipping containers, heavily fortified, a patchwork of scrap metal and armored plating that had clearly cost someone a small fortune. A flickering sign declared the store name to all close enough to see it.

The 'U' in 'LUIGI'S' sputtered with a cheap, blue desperation, advertising refurbished goods at a markup into the surrounding mist; a lighthouse for bargain hunters who had clearly lost all sense of fiscal sanity. Its universality was undercut by the visible heavy machine gun emplacement on the roof. The battle-intern parked her truck in front of the store and left Buster safe in the back seat, the cabin sealed and the environmental scrubbers running.

She checked his mask one last time through the window, told him to sit tight, and then snapped her monomolecular thick wristband to her left wrist and unstrapped her enhanced rifle—just in case—and walked in.

"Hey, shitheads!" Kelly shouted, entering rudely. The place was a true and well-ventilated wilderness of tools; scavenged parts hung from the ceiling, and flickering glow-panels provided as little light as possible. The store held all manner of things: parts, materials, cheap cybernetics, stolen biomechanics, even a case of swirling broken and scattered pieces of nanotech. Kelly even spotted a glimpse of a few well protected encased schematics buried in dense casing at the back.

The really good and fresh stuff was kept out of sight. The man behind the counter was chubby, balding, and built like a retired wrestler. At Kelly's entrance, he slammed a button. A mounted gun rose from behind the counter, an additional launcher attached to the base, filled with dangerous looking pellets, its barrel tracking her face. In his left hand, a modified revolver held a steady aim. Kelly recognized the model.

"Who the hell do you think you—!" Luigi's shout died behind his gas mask visor. A flash of recognition replaced the anger.

"Oh. It's you. The crazy nurse?"

"Yeah, me!" Kelly said, her rifle still held casually at her side.

"I have a list of demands!"

"Demands?" The shopkeeper nearly choked, the revolver trembling as he aimed it between her eyes.

"You piece of shit, you stole my entire stock of military-grade stimulants from my Otranto outpost! You cleaned me out!"

"I did that?" Kelly asked, her head tilting.

"When?"

"Last year! You bought a single injector, you distracted my cousin, and then you came back that night and took everything! You left me an IOU!" Luigi snarled, his knuckles white on the revolver's grip.

"You said you'd pay me back once you got your goddamn internship!" Kelly said, "Huh. I guess a Pre-loop Kelly would've been capable of that." She'd never been brave, but she'd always been stubborn, and coming from nothing had sanded the edges off her morality. Bending rules was one thing; outright scamming an unsavory middleman with a promise to repay was definitely plausible. She did get the life-changing internship, after all.

"I'm here to pay you back," she said.

"Honest. You'll get paid in full, even if your entire inventory's probably sourced from the city's criminal underbelly." Kelly tried to remember robbing him.

"Um. Well...?" She studied him, trying to pull the memory forward. He seemed vaguely familiar. She stopped in her tracks and tried to pull every ounce of data she had on the event. The hasty end of the last loop had forced a dump of non-critical, inconsequential data, and this memory had clearly been classified as expendable.

"Sorry, I think I might've lost the memories when a god tried to steal my mind. I had to shunt the stuff I could afford to lose. The unimportant stuff." She paused.

"No offence."

"I probably saved a few lives stealing that. God knows the kind of degenerates you would have sold it to." Luigi gave her a look that said you are the degenerate.

"You know what?" Kelly continued, "maybe I did. It sounds like something a younger, almost teenage me would do." Kelly shrugged, her shoulders a picture of nonchalance.

"That was so long ago. I was so innocent back then," she sighed, "barely experiencing the world. Folly of youth, you know?"

"Folly of youth?" Luigi repeated, indignant.

"That was only a year ago!" His face flushed a deep red before settling into a cold, pale rage.

"I can't believe it. You don't even know what you did," he said, the astonishment hollowing out his voice.

"I almost went bust because of you, and you don't even remember." Then Kelly felt bad, just a little, when she realized her actions might've forced him to rebuild from nothing. She instantly regretted the jab.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay? It really did help me get my internship. I'm here to pay you back. With interest. And I need something specific." Luigi froze.

"Get the hell out of my store." The shopkeeper ground his teeth, a low grind of pure rage. He didn't seem to want her money.

"Before I think the wrong thing and turn you into mincemeat."

"Did you even check my EQ?" Kelly retorted. She didn't feel like mentioning her functional immortality.

"You know I'm past the Threshold, right?"

"Doesn't make you bulletproof." He shrugged, the revolver remaining perfectly steady.

"These guns are Elite-grade. That one over there's got Bonebreaker missiles," the man replied, nodding toward the mounted gun with an attached launcher.

"Once it's locked, you're finished. The shatter-round bullets explode on contact with skin and fire smaller, armor-breaching payloads past the entry point." Another gun rose from behind and began winding up a charge that made the air crackle with static.

"It'll turn your Expert, Elite, or Thresholder armor to toilet paper. You too."