Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(47)

“Bring it anyway,” she demanded.

The guard grunted, went off, and came back five minutes later with a rolling table and a platter with enough prime rib to choke a horse, as well as a ton of side dishes and wine in a white plastic bottle with a screw cap.

“I wouldn’t drink the wine,” the guard warned them. “It’s been making the other inmates real sick.”

“Sick?” said Greyson. “What do you mean ‘sick’?”

Purity kicked him under the table hard enough to activate his pain nanites. That shut him up.

“Thanks,” said Purity. “Now get the hell out.”

The guard snarled and left, locking them in again.

Purity then turned to Greyson. “You really must be dense,” she said. “The thing about the wine was our hint!”

And, upon closer inspection, the bottle actually had a biohazard sign, for patrons who were even denser than he was, he supposed.

Purity unscrewed the cap, and immediately a caustic stench that made Greyson’s eyes water filled the air.

“What did I tell you!” said Purity. She recapped it and left it for the end of the meal. “We’ll figure out what to do with it after we eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.”

As they ate, she talked with her mouth full, wiped her lips on her sleeve, and doused everything in ketchup. She was like the date from hell that his parents would have warned him against, if they had cared enough. And he loved it! She was the antithesis of his old life!

“So what do you do?” she asked. “I mean, when you’re not clubbing? Are you gainfully employed or do you just sponge off the Thunderhead like half the losers who call themselves unsavory?”

“Right now I’m on the Basic Income Guarantee,” he told her. “But that’s just because I’m new in town. I’m still looking for work.”

“And your Nimbo hasn’t been able to find you anything?

“My what?”

“Your probational Nimbus officer, dummy. The Nimbos promise everyone a job who wants one, so how come you’re still looking?”

“My Nimbo’s a useless bastard,” Greyson told her, because he figured it would be something Slayd would say. “I hate him.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“And anyway, I don’t want the kind of job the AI would give me. I want a job that suits me.”

“And what might suit you?”

Now it was his turn to give her a licentious grin. “The kind that gets my blood pumping. The kind that my Nimbo won’t ever offer me.”

“The boy with the puppy-dog eyes is looking for trouble,” Purity teased. “Wonder what he’ll do when he finds it!”

She licked her lips, then wiped them on her sleeve.

? ? ?

The wine turned out to be some sort of acid. “Fluoro-flerovic, is my guess,” said Purity. “Explains the plastic bottle. It’s probably Teflon, because the stuff eats through anything else.”

They poured it around the base of several of the cell bars. It started to eat away at the iron, releasing noxious fumes that taxed the healing nanites in their lungs. In less than five minutes, they were able to kick out the bars and escape.

The cell block was a study in mayhem. Now that a good number of the evening’s “inmates” had finished their meals and escaped, they were tearing the place up. Guards were chasing them, they were chasing guards. There were food fights and fist fights—and whenever someone fought with the guards, the guards always lost, no matter how brawny they looked and how well they were armed. Half of the guards ended up locked in cells themselves, to be taunted by the unsavories. The remaining staff threatened to call in something called “the national guard” to put the riot down. It was all great fun.

Greyson and Purity eventually made it all the way to the warden’s office. They kicked out the warden, and the instant the door was locked, Purity got back to what she had begun in the cell.

“Private enough for ya?” she asked, but didn’t wait for a response.

Five minutes later—when she had Greyson at his most vulnerable—she turned the tables on him.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, whispering into his ear. “It’s no accident that you ended up in my cell, Slayd. I arranged it.”

Then a knife that seemed to come from nowhere appeared in her hand. He immediately began to struggle, but it was no use. He was on his back, unable to move—she had him pinned. She pressed the tip of the blade to his bare chest, just beneath his sternum. An upward jab would go right through his heart. “Don’t move or I might slip.” He had no choice. He was completely at her mercy. If he had truly been an unsavory, he would have seen this coming, but he was too trusting. “What do you want?”

“It’s not what I want, it’s what you want,” she said. “I know you’ve been asking around for work. Real work. ‘Heart-pounding’ work, as you called it. So my friends brought you to my attention.” She looked him in the eyes, like she was trying to read something there, then tightened her grip on the knife.

“If you kill me, I’ll just be revived,” he reminded her, “and you’ll get your hand slapped by the AI.”

She put pressure on the knife. He gasped. He thought she’d push it in all the way up to the hilt, but instead she barely broke his skin. “Who said I wanted to kill you?”