Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

32 - Rogue Missile

Alright, Cassie, Piper thought. Looks like it's just you and me.

An agreeable arrangement.

So long as you don't start advertising to me.

Why would I do such a thing?

Never mind.

Still a little work to be done on sarcasm, apparently. Piper smirked and kept walking. No-one had tried to stop her, and given her current mood, she was grateful for that.

For the first time since she'd walked out the door of the safe house, Piper let herself feel a stab of grief for Mattise's death. It didn't bring tears to her eyes or a lump to her throat, but the uncomfortable knot in her stomach told that she cared. She remembered the first day she'd walked into his office – the ultimatums he'd given, the brutal speech of what her life was to become.

Looking back now, Piper realised she should have thanked him for it. Mattise kept her out of the hands of those who wanted to cut her open, carve out her implants for themselves and dump her on a scrap heap.

Now she could fend for herself. She would fend for herself.

But the biggest thing Mattise had given her, was the lifeline to her past. Niall Casimir, her real father. Without Mattise she never would have known the name. Someone who, despite his brusque, abrasive demeanour, wanted to do something right. He wanted the world to succeed.

He'd gone up against the evergrind of Hadrian, and it had rolled over him.

Anger made her implants twang. Even her friends at AmpCore were getting swallowed up in it now, corporate warfare where there would be no real winners. Time to wash her hands of it all.

She didn't have any crypts of her own now, cut off from her corporate overlords, but that didn't bother her unduly. Arrow had taught her enough tips and tricks in Logistics to hack into the data-stream transactions that flowed all around her. Piper kept her amplifier beneath her jacket as she walked through the street, gravitating towards the thrum of life.

The safe house wasn't quite in the corporate heart, but it was close enough to feel the backwash, with its own thriving ecosystem of boutique shops, high class eateries, sleek tech emporiums and home decoration bazaars. Piper knew that if she wanted to get out of this place without some faction or another accosting her, she needed to blend in. At least a bit.

Her amplifier tingled as she reached out, thinking back to the lessons – lessons she would never finish. She just had to hope she'd been taught enough.

Crypts flickered like well ordered insects in the data-stream above her. She brushed against it gently, diverting tiny slivers of the flow off into a false account ID. It wouldn't stay hidden very long from anyone hunting for it, but she didn't need long. Just enough to get out of the heart.

Once she'd carved a decent slice of disposable income, she sidled into a clothing kiosk, an automated little store operated by Etheria Textiles. Inside, sleek, glass-fronted display cases showed a rotating arrangement of elegant corporate clothing, a lot of stuff she normally wouldn't have gone within a million miles of if given the choice.

But needs must. Wrinkling her nose, she ran her eyes over some of the garish fashions of the Heart. Most of them glittered and swam with inlaid tech, sending shimmering patterns through the fabrics.

She eventually managed to find an outfit that would do the job: a sleek, casual dark dress with a subtle trim of cobalt, with a robust-looking set of boots and a smart black jacket. Even these – at the low end of the spectrum – were eye-poppingly expensive for what they were, but Piper didn't have a much choice. She added a crescent-shaped satchel of dark faux leather, and gathered her long dark hair into a long ponytail knotted on the top of her head. The style didn't suit her, but anything to make a set of prying have to look twice.