Dualed (8 page)

So I do. “I’m looking for the Strikers.”

Doing what he asked only seems to make him angrier. He shakes his head, still glaring at me. “The Strikers are only suitable for a more … mature audience. Those over the age of twenty, when chances of assignment are nil. You gotta be a complete, you getting me?”

I stifle a wave of panic. It can’t gather steam, show in my eyes or words. Panic would be a sign of weakness. “The card says nothing about that,” I point out.

“Hey, it’s only common sense, girlie.”

“Neither did the person on the phone when I asked for Dire. The person who told me how to come find him.”

“That woulda been me, and if I’d known you were a teenager, I woulda just shut my mouth.” A loose, thick-lipped smile. “Now, this band. Their music can be a bit graphic, understand? Too much for a little chicky like you.”

To have it so close—I can’t let it slip away now. For a second I tasted the promise of numbness, the safety and relief of it. I was only able to get out of bed this morning because of this chance to quiet the storm in my head.

“Five minutes,” I tell him. “You can give me that at least.”

“Nope. Can’t. Dire’s a busy man. I can’t be wasting no time of his by sending him some
idle—
”

“I’m not leaving until I talk to him.” I growl the words because I’m dangerously close to begging. And the idea of begging this person, who surely can’t be more than a token guard, a gatekeeper—

“Get out.” Hestor’s eyes flick once to the left, then to the right, aware of the other customers on the floor. Obviously this is not a conversation he wants them to overhear. “Before I make you get out.”

“No, I’m not leaving,” I say again. “I want to see him.”

“Well, we’re closed. So get your useless self outta here.” He starts to put his hand on my shoulder to turn me toward the door.

It happens fast. Faster than I would have ever thought possible. All those hours, days, years of practicing, and for this, at least, it’s enough.

My arm swings out, knocks his hand away. Then thrusts hard at his chest. That such a thick man falls back so easily is due more to his utter shock than my strength, though.

He stares at me from the floor, his face red and squashed. And absolutely murderous. “Okay, that’s it, I’m gonna—”

My hand, dropping down to the gun in my pocket, digging for it—

“Hestor.” A deep riptide of a voice, like sand scraping over gravel. “What’s going on out here?”

I turn to see a man who’s very tall and very wide. Small eyes the color of blue jeans, hair a short scrub of dirty blond, chin covered by a goatee the same shade.

With one glance I can tell his heft doesn’t come from fat like Hestor’s does. It’s pure muscle. And he’s positioned it to hide the three of us from view from the rest of the store. Which leaves me boxed in, away from the door.

“This—this little
brat
came here to see you, Dire,” Hestor sputters. “Asking about
the band
.” These last two words are an indignant hiss. “But when I saw how old she was, I said no way, nothing doing. And then she goes and makes a stink about leaving.”

Dire’s openly assessing me. I can’t get a feel for what he’s thinking, and it’s unnerving. Whether or not he’s going to give me a chance, kick me out, or do something I haven’t even let myself imagine—whatever’s usually done to those who have learned too much.

“Do you always move that fast?” he asks me. The words are blunt scratches.

I don’t know. “Yes. Always.”

A few seconds of silence, then a curt nod. “Fine. But downstairs. Not here.” Dire eyeballs the store, seems satisfied no one has been listening. “Hestor, back to work.”

Hestor is finally struggling to his feet. “Dire, this is a crazy, stupid idea. The girl is so green she might as well be a—”

“No greener than I would want.” Dire turns to me, gestures. “This way.”

The stairway is a skinny, dark slant of space in the back corner. Each step I take furthers my descent into a world that is suddenly all too real, no longer a game.

The same concrete walls are down here, but there’s a dampness to them, a kind of dank earthiness. It reminds me of how a garden smells when you dig really deep, turning over soil that has never seen the sun. There are no windows, just three naked, swinging bulbs slung across the ceiling. A handful of metal chairs and a dented metal table are placed on the concrete floor. Incongruous to it all is an assortment of sleek tablets wired to machines I can’t begin to recognize.

And a woman. She’s sitting at the bare table, watching me as I enter the room. She looks just as tough as Dire and about as pleasant as Hestor. Black-haired and dark-skinned, with sharp green eyes. On the table in front of her is a cardboard box.

Dire pulls out a chair across from the woman, scraping it along the floor. He holds it out. “Have a seat,” he says to me.

“This is the one from Baer?” The lady’s voice is soft. She continues to stare at me as I sit down. Her appraisal isn’t like a mother’s would be, but a snake’s right before it pounces. “I didn’t know we were taking them this young now.”

“We’re not.” Dire sits down next to the woman, frowns at
me, and rubs his goatee. “What’s your name and how old are you?”

“West Grayer.” My words are bullets. Have to be. Being turned away is still a possibility. “I’m fifteen, and I’m not too young.”

He grunts. “So you haven’t completed your assignment yet?”

“No. Not yet.” My hands are clenched on the table in front of me, so I pull them off the table and sit on them.

“Why would you want to become a striker when you could go active any day now? Kids your age are too busy getting ready to kill their own Alts to care much about someone else’s. And rightly so. One screwup during a striker contract is just as fatal as one during your own assignment.”

I nod. “I know that. I came here to get as strong as I can. And because—” I stop myself. The two faces in front of me are masks, hard and already halfway toward dismissing me, and I know my pain will mean nothing to them. It might even make them think I can’t handle it. “Well, like Baer said, for the training …”

Dire shakes his head, his mouth a thin line. “Baer. He should have known better than to send me an idle.” His blue eyes glitter like glass beneath the lights. “But this is the first time he’s bothered to acknowledge I still exist—and what I do. So what does he see in you, Grayer, that would make him break his silence?”

I blink, unsure what he wants to hear. “I don’t know.”

The woman smiles. It makes her beautiful, and more frightening, too. “What
I
know is that you have no idea what you’re getting into,” she says.

“I know that you recruit strikers for Alt assassinations,” I say stiffly. “I know that no one really dares to talk about you, especially the ones who actually hire strikers to kill their Alts. I also know that you’ve managed to avoid the Board so far, and that no strikers have ever been captured. Otherwise they would have killed you, or them, and the Board would have made sure we all knew about it.”

“And yet you can’t tell us about your own Alt, your own completion. What you would do when it comes down to either killing or being killed.”

Except she’s wrong. I know all about Alts and completions. When they’re happening to everyone around you, they might as well be your own.

“See, that’s what got me wondering,” Dire says. “If you haven’t completed, how do we know how you’ll react? There’s just as much chance you’ll make the hit as there is of you running—or worse, leaving behind a mess that will get the Board pissed off enough to do something about it.”

“I didn’t know I had to pass some kind of test to become a striker, or answer a whole bunch of stupid questions.” My voice turns flinty. “And I think that Baer being the one to send me here should be enough.”

Baer’s name has Dire’s expression going dark, and it makes me wonder why they’re no longer friends. Both of them oppose the Board and assignments, both give Alts their best chance of survival, even if they do take their own stance on it. Is that why they hate each other now? Baer thinks Dire goes too far, and Dire thinks Baer doesn’t go far enough?

“There’s no test you have to pass,” Dire says finally, just as
coolly. “And you don’t have to tell us your reasons why. It’s just because I’m curious.”

“Fine. I need the money.”

“You’re lying,” the woman says instantly.

“No, I’m not. It pays better than any job I could get right now, since I haven’t completed.” Two parts to this, and only one I know for sure to be true. What’s fact is that idles get paid less than completes for doing the same job; what’s rumor is that striking pays better than most jobs, period.
If
you’re good at it.

“What would a girl like you need so much money for?” Dire asks. “Elite training? Makes no sense if you’re going to be a striker.”

“What difference does it make, as long as you still get the finder’s fee for each client? If I have to stop when I get my assignment, it’s not like I’ll continue to get paid, either. And if this works the way I think it does, you’d just hand a new job off to another of your strikers.”

He nods slowly. “True enough. I guess I want to be absolutely sure
you’re
sure. We’ve never had an idle or active Alt even come in before, you know.”

A few seconds of silence as we all digest his admission. The realization that I’m the first is not heady so much as unnerving.

“Baer says that you do this because you don’t agree with the Board,” I finally say. “That you don’t think the system is always right, why one Alt is supposed to die and not the other.”

“Just because an Alt doesn’t think they’re capable of killing someone themselves doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a chance to live.”

“But that’s how Kersh has stayed as strong as it has. By getting rid of the weak.”

“It’s strong in the way of soldiers and war. But what about things that make us more than machines, keep us human? Balance is good. If being weak means not being able to live with the memory of killing someone with your own hands, then maybe we should all call weakness good. Being worthy should mean more than just being able to use a gun or hold a blade.”

“If you’re really just trying to screw with the whole thing, so that the stronger Alt doesn’t win and the weaker one does, why do you still make the weaker Alt pay?” I press him.

Dire’s face goes tight, his eyes filling with derision and emptied of anything else. As if he’s caught himself just in time and now has to regain his footing, step back into anger where there’s no room for guilt. Who could he have lost to make him see things this way, and how bad must it have been?

“Hey, either you live or you die,” he says. “Kill or be killed. Unless you want to leave behind your dead body for your family to deal with, pay up. I’ll take the money every time.”

Will it be the same for me? Will I end up as hard as him for using striking to fend off whatever ghosts haunt me, the way he uses his strikers to fend off his own? Will it matter, as long as I can keep going on?

“Do you understand all that, Grayer?” Dire asks, snapping me back. “Understand and accept what comes with becoming a striker?”

“Yes.” I meet his gaze. “To all of it.”

“They’ll hate you if they find out, you know.” No beating around the issue, just a factual breakdown of my life from this point on. “Not only the Board, but also idles, actives, completes—and deep down, even some of the Alts who end up hiring you themselves, simply for reminding them of what they couldn’t do. Everyone who sees your marks will know you’re cheating the system. That you’re not killing for the greater good, but because you choose to.”

“Yes.” It’s all I can say.

“Good. Don’t screw up.” And with that, it’s done.

I’ve been accepted.

“You got the equipment ready?” Dire asks the woman.

She nods, and I can tell she’s not happy with Dire’s decision to sign me on. I’m a new kind of animal with a slew of unknowns, difficult to classify: a teenaged striker who has yet to complete her assignment. Am I just a waste of their time, caught up in the initial adrenaline rush of being an actual striker, only to balk at the first sign of danger? Will I go hog wild, made hungry by opportunity and a distorted sense of impunity? Will my eventual assignment handcuff me or empower me with newfound perspective?

Dire leaves the room as the woman slides the cardboard box over so it sits between us on the pitted tabletop. She lifts the lid and I peer inside, knowing what I’m going to see and bracing myself anyway.

A tattoo gun. No bullet to fire into my flesh, but something else instead: the marks of a striker. Payment, just like Dire said.

“This gun will accomplish two things,” the woman says to me. “First, the laser will score your skin beneath the surface
and clear out a path for the mark. Then it will flood the path with the particle ink. The ink’s properties are what will allow us to keep track of you, in case the finder’s fee slips your mind and we need to contact you. Our own shadowing system, if you will.” The corners of her lips curl. Not to reassure me, but to let me know she’s enjoying my submission, whether she agrees with it or not.

“Get on with it,” I tell her.

Her smile slides off like grease from a pan. “It will hurt. Scream and I will have to gag you.”

I don’t scream. But tears come all the same, streaking my cheeks. Hot as flame, my first trial by fire.

When she’s done, the smell of burning flesh is not just in my nose but in my clothes, my hair. I rotate my wrists and study my striker marks.

Two curling swaths of faded gray ink, the color of worn battleships. I touch one with a finger, sure it’ll hurt like crazy, although she told me they would heal almost instantly. Because it’s not just ink and tracking chips that she’s injected into my skin, but a hefty dose of binding agent as well—supercharged particles that heal injuries from the inside out.

I frown. The sudden lack of pain is surprising, but even more surprising is that there’s almost no feeling at all. The numbness has spread down to my palms, too.

I flex my hands, squeeze them into fists. I poke harder this time. Still nothing.