Neon Grave

Chapter 12 New Atlantis 1/2

Briskly, Jessica zipped along an unknown path without feeling the floor. Eventually, it all stopped. Her motion came to a slow, grinding halt until, somehow, she sensed solid ground mere inches below the tip of her foot. She hung in suspension for a bit, feeling queazy and nervous for lack of vision. Then, blindfold lifted, she found her stuff on the floor of an abandoned filtration pipe. A metallic clang left nothing but a sealed doorway at their backs. They were free, a tense silence flowing at the end of the round tunnel. White daylight awaited, cast on her beleaguered friends. When everything finally stopped moving, she let the gang leader's last words fester. What a rude awakening. Soaked in lower temperatures, the glimmer of the city waiting just outside, she solemnly turned to her friends. 

"Val, are you okay?"

"I'm alive," she answered, caressing her abdomen. "Assholes kept my gun."

"What about you, Shannon?"

"I'm not worried about me," she berated.

"It's over." Jessica strapped her backpack on. Bitter but unfazed, she peeked at the distant sprawl that awaited, a blue gradient with shallow carvings of steel and concrete. "We still have a rendezvous to keep."

"I know you're not fine."

"I don't have to be fine," she murmured, "I have to be functional." Tired yet undeterred, she surveyed where they ended up. Just outside the tunnel, their welcome mat was an urban vignette. A salty breeze held the nostrils. Phantom hands felt around her joints, her steps rattled by the edge of a cliff that threatened them with an industrial trench. They were perched over the edge of a scrapyard. A smaller version of the civil servant bot was rolling through the junk, compiling the materials into stacks of separate elements. Meanwhile, the usual human junkers dismantled each block as they scavenged for usable material. 

"There you are!" Shelled in a leather jacket, Chris "Sushi" Tsushimoto was waiting off the beaten path, an eager and elated look on his face. "I was starting to wonder if you'd make it!"

With all the urban drudgery, Jessica maintained a wedge between her senses and anxiety. She closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke with a toothy grin. "Kept you waiting, eh?"

Down a serrated cliff, away from the tattered sprawl of the shifting city, one housing cluster had seen better days. Too poor to be a terrace, it became a favela, a dead zone from the lack of cyberspace routes or because of the bodies. The village beneath the twirling cliff was centered around a large block structure, the closest thing to a twentieth-century cultural hub.

Chris's hideout had all the trappings of a supermarket... because it was a supermarket of yesteryear, one that saw its share of looting when the Sloane Riots broke out in 2123. Nasty business and all it took was a blackout. Three stories of grocery, smart home, entertainment, and convenience were stripped bare. In the time since abandonment, it was converted into a barracks. Jess had her fill with the security compartments, the many; they came with advanced camera peepholes. Someone had rigged the doors to operate solely on a code input, which Chris had memorized. All the cameras were functional, and the riot control stations were still in place, partially.

"Beelz lent a few of her engineers and electricians to get this place up and running for us," Chris mused. Past the row of automatic checkout stations lay a lounge where Jess pictured all kinds of fashion racks and vanities that projected retail clothes onto customers. Objects in mirror may be fatter than they appear.

"Cool." Jessica's brows pinched. "Who do you mean when you say 'us'?"

"Hello," A woman came dashing over the nearby kiosk. The place was dim, but the burgundy tracksuit and fit physique pegged Haruhi. She looked genuinely pleased to see new people. "I was wondering when you'd show up, Jessica. Chris told me your real name." She winked and flashed an innocent smile." But unlike him, I can keep a secret. So don't worry."