Edge of Nowhere Read online

  “Of course,” Kit said. Monday would be a regular re-up for Carl’s stash of out-of-state medicines. An inanimate parcel, no sedation required. “See you then.”

  He walked out of the warehouse to his bike. Technically, he could have been home in an instant, but only if he wanted to collapse on the floor as soon as he got there. Three jumps in a day was a lot, and it had been a long week. He needed food and rest. His stomach was already rumbling.

  Besides, the bike looked cool. He had his priorities.

  He’d always loved to get away, to go fast, to come as close to flying as possible. Lots of kids were fascinated by motorcycles and cars and planes, so at least in that sense he’d been normal. Most kids didn’t channel their need for speed into learning to teleport, but then again, most couldn’t. No one knew exactly why some people could jump into the Nowhere at will. The speculation was that it was a rare genetic mutation. People like Kit were such a tiny fraction of the population that it was hard to study them. Sure, there was an official corps of Nowhere runners working for the federal government—making deliveries to the space stations that needed to get there faster than the elevators could and whatever else they were tasked with—and they all had to give blood samples and shit. But there were only a few dozen of them, and Kit stayed far away from that. He’d rather mix with Carl and Miss Tallulah than some faceless, soulless government agents. As a rule, he didn’t join things. He was just a courier, but he had enough money to do what he wanted and he was nobody’s lab rat. Kit was free.

  He took the ramp up to the freeway and accelerated until it almost felt like he was flying through space again.

  Kit parked his bike in the alley behind Zin’s bar and walked in through the kitchen. A pot simmered on the stove. Lime and Thai basil wafted through the air. He was starving.

  “Is that you, baby?”

  “Yeah, be right there,” he called, then forced himself to hurry up two flights of stairs so he could dump his disgusting jacket and t-shirt into the hamper and change into something clean. He stuffed the cash into the hole in the wall where he kept the rest of his earnings, then shifted a pile of clothes until it was hidden from view. He pulled out another black t-shirt, this one with diagonal slashes across the chest. Slashes of color, that is—intentional ones, not terrified-animal-claw ones. The t-shirt was made of smart fabric, and the slashes subtly changed color in response to heat. Right now they were neon green.

  When he came back down, his legs were already beginning to shake with exhaustion. He paused at the bottom of the stairs to catch his breath, but he ran his hands through his hair to make it look like he was messing it up just right. Zin was sitting in one of the booths in the back corner of the long narrow bar, smiling at him. “So vain.”

  “I learned from the best,” he told her. She beamed. The green in his t-shirt clashed magnificently with the brilliant walls of the bar, one of which was yellow and the other a different shade of green. Zin loved color as much as he did.

  He went into the kitchen and collected a bowl of pho from the giant pot on the stove. At least once a week, on a day she knew he was coming back from a run, Zin ordered it special from a restaurant down the block. They probably thought she was hosting a party. Kit scooped some sprouts and cilantro into his bowl and went to join her in the bar.

  Too hungry for conversation, he sat down and shoveled the entire bowl—noodles, brisket, herbs, bean sprouts, and broth—into his mouth.

  “The way you eat, boy, I swear,” Zin said. “It doesn’t make any sense. You oughtta be my size at least.”

  Zinnia Jackson was gloriously fat. Her gorgeous, unusual combination of brown skin, freckles, and red curls—not to mention her ample breasts and hips—had won her brief pop stardom in her youth, but money hadn’t followed fame. Now she ran this bar in the undercity with her wife Louann and made it her hobby to keep Kit alive. They’d known each other since Kit was eleven years old. He’d lived here as an adolescent, then moved out after he started earning enough to pay for his own place, then moved back into the third floor apartment last year when Zin and Louann had needed a tenant to stay afloat.

  “Running makes me hungry,” he said between mouthfuls of pho. “You know that.”

  “You can know a thing and still not understand it,” Zin said. “And Laila’s fat and she’s a runner.”

  Kit made a noise with his mouth full. That was true, and he couldn’t explain it, but Laila had run out on him and he wasn’t going to talk about her.

  “You gonna tell me what happened to your face?”

  “Dog,” Kit said. Eating was more important than words.

  “Not sedated, I take it,” Zin said. “You do get into some trouble.”

  He shrugged and kept eating. Louann came down the stairs carrying a toolbox. She nodded at Kit, which was about as talkative as she ever got, and then disappeared into the basement, no doubt to fix something structurally essential to the crumbling building.

  “Hello to you too, sweetie,” Zin called. She was grinning.

  Louann had an effortless, stoic butchness to her. She kept her greying brown hair buzzed and she always had an oil-stained bandana somewhere on her. She’d never worn anything designer in her life and she thought Kit and Zin were endearingly silly for caring about clothes, and yet somehow she was still the coolest person Kit had ever met. Louann was quietly competent at everything, whether it was plugging leaks or propping up doorways or repairing Kit’s bike or coming by his apartment with groceries and medicine when he was sick. Louann did all that without ever being asked, and Kit was grateful. Zin would have come for him, but she’d have been melodramatic about it.

  “I worry about you,” Zin said, which was exactly the kind of thing Louann never said, thank fuck.

  “Well, stop.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do, Christopher,” Zin said. As far as either of them knew, his real name was Kit, but Zin had taken to calling him Christopher as a private joke whenever she scolded him. “I will worry about whatever I damn well please, and if it happens to be about how you work these wild, quasi-criminal jobs all the time, wearing yourself down to the bone crossing some unknown void full of fuck-knows-what, and you don’t ever see another soul—”

  “It’s not full,” Kit said. “It’s a void.”

  “You hush when I’m scolding you. I don’t care what’s in there. It’s not good for you to run all the time like you do. Every time you come home starving—and mauled by animals!”

  “It’s a scratch, Zin. From a lap dog.”

  “Don’t back-sass me when you’re supposed to be listening. You need something in your life that’s not work. Go out and make friends! That young runner Aidan hasn’t been here this week, and he comes by all the time—did you hurt his feelings?”

  “I can only hope.” Kit hadn’t done anything. He didn’t know why Aidan had stopped showing up, but he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. However it had happened, he was grateful that Aidan Blackwood had finally gotten the message that Kit didn’t care about his stupid crusade. Kit would rather take a trip through the Nowhere with an un-sedated alligator than have a conversation about comradeship. He’d never joined anything in his life and he wasn’t about to join a runners’ union.

  Zin made a disapproving noise, then continued. “I haven’t seen Laila, either, and she’s just about your only friend. Or I guess there’s that other one, the tall, handsome one you work with sometimes, but I haven’t seen him either. But anyway, there’s the sweetest little waitress at the pho place and she always asks after you. And a young woman who does those fancy light-up manicures down the street. They’re magged out, so I hear—”

  “No one has ever said that,” Kit interrupted, ready to tell her that no one even said mag anymore unless they were being ironic, but she waved him off and kept going.

  “Well, they seem like exactly the sort of thing you like, and besides, my point is you could go get yourself one and get to know her.”

  Inst
ead of responding, Kit got up and went into the kitchen for a second bowl. He didn’t want to meet anyone new. Laila had flaked on a job this week, as well as their standing post-run appointment at Winfield’s barbecue joint—Kit knew because he’d waited in a booth by himself for an hour—thus proving once again that friends were a waste of time. She hadn’t answered any of his messages or the door of her Detroit apartment when he’d knocked. He’d jumped into her living room, too, but she’d been out and none of her roommates would tell him anything. Kit wasn’t going back for more humiliation. He and Laila were done.

  And if Zin happened to be right that “tall, handsome” Travis Alvey wasn’t around, Kit wouldn’t be the one to tell her. She wouldn’t approve of his arrangement with Travis, one where they appeared directly in each other’s bedrooms if either of them had an itch to scratch.

  “Oh, you are so difficult,” Zin said. “For the record, I’m not bothering you to get a girlfriend. Just a regular friend. And how am I supposed to know what you like when you never talk to anyone or go anywhere unless you’re getting paid?”

  Money was reliable. Things were reliable. People let you down and got you hurt.

  Kit came back and ate his second helping while Zin talked.

  “Anyway, if you don’t want women, you know that won’t bother me. Why don’t you get on Elevate and message that nice boy who delivers the booze, Kit? What’s his name? Antonio or something. He always smiles at you.”

  He stopped slurping down broth for a second so he could say something. “No girl or boy, no matter how nice, will make me any money.”

  “Money’s not everything, Kit.”

  He looked at her, mouth pulled to one side, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Sure, it makes life a lot easier,” Zin said, gesturing at the cracks in the plaster, the taped-up windows, and the rips in all the upholstery. “But it won’t make you happy.”

  Kit shrugged. “Who says I’m not happy?”

  It was Zin’s turn to raise her eyebrows at him. He didn’t want to deal with that, but he did want more food, so he went in for a third bowl. As he was dipping his chopsticks in, Zin said, “If you’re running yourself ragged to pay rent on that room, I just want you to know that you don’t have to.”

  “Zin.” The question of rent always made them argue. Zin and Louann had convinced him to move back in by saying they needed a little help. An understatement. They were deep in debt, and so was he. Kit owed them for years of his life. The least he could do was pay rent. “I’m not strapped for cash, you know that, right? I work because I want to.”

  And the money made him feel safe.

  She tried and failed to hide her frown. “Okay, baby. Like I said, I just want you to know.”

  He shook his head. “I’m fine, Zin. I have you and Louann and enough work to buy whatever I want. I don’t need friends.” Once, he’d had a few, but they’d all up and vanished. Aidan only came around to bother Kit about his stupid union and Travis only showed up when he wanted sex, and now neither of them was around. He’d thought things were different with Laila, but he’d been wrong. He shouldn’t be surprised. That was what people did. Everyone except Zin and Louann, anyway. He didn’t need to meet anybody new—he already knew how it would go.

  Kit went upstairs to check his messages in private. His third-floor apartment was a studio with a kitchenette along one wall and a mattress taking up most of the rest of the space. He almost never used the kitchen to cook, since Zin and Louann were only one flight of stairs away and they were much better at it than him and always willing to feed him if he washed dishes afterward. But he couldn’t live without food nearby, so all his cabinets were overflowing with snacks. Louann would never have said so, but Kit knew she was horrified by the amount of processed junk in his apartment. She was always quietly heaping vegetables on his plate when he went down for dinner, and she never listened when he explained that he ate vegetables all the time, because he ate everything all the time, because he was a runner and he was always hungry. Zin always laughed and told him he was “like a little animal storing food in its den.” Kit always rolled his eyes at her fox joke, but it was true enough. He’d been hungry a lot in his life. Keeping his cabinets well-stocked made him feel safer. He’d even started keeping the gross candy that Laila and Travis both loved—chocolate-covered wafers called Zings that looked good on the outside but contained some kind of red-dyed, cinnamon-and-cayenne-flavored syrupy goo that made your mouth go numb—but he supposed he could throw them away now.

  Food wasn’t the only thing he saved. Every spare corner was stuffed with clothes. There were two free-standing racks forming an L-shape around his mattress and piles of folded and unfolded clothes everywhere. He knocked some aside, flopped onto the bed, and looked up at the ceiling.

  He flicked his wrist and a display appeared above him in large print. He checked Elevate first, not for social purposes like Zin wanted, but for business proposals. Elevate was too public and easily surveilled for real business, but Kit liked to keep track of who was messaging him there. Incompetent criminals and, judging from the misused slang in one message—almost as cringeworthy as Zin saying magged out—at least one undercover cop. Kit deleted those unanswered. The cops couldn’t hold him without resorting to sedation or starvation, both of which were currently illegal, but still in practice. This cop was probably after Akins and associates, and if Kit led him to them, he’d never work again.

  More reliable proposals came in through an encrypted messaging service he used. There were twenty-two messages in his inbox, and the display scrolled with the motion of his eyes. He sorted through them and began to dictate his responses. Ten of them he rejected outright. Kit was running a business and he didn’t have time to be fucked with. Those people would come back with a real offer if they were serious. There were six offers he immediately said yes to—clients he knew, small parcels, short distances, easy money—and arranged his schedule accordingly. There were a few more that required some thought.

  And one very strange request.

  It was from a new client, which was always tricky. Kit preferred to meet people before he agreed to work for them. It was a common-sense precaution, since his work often led him to skirt the law. Or break it, if you were dead-set on getting technical. But this client, some company called Quint Services, wanted him to show up for a job tonight. That was unusual, too, the short notice. And the address was somewhere far out of the city. No details on what he needed to carry, or their final destination.

  But the offer was enticing. No—arresting. Jaw-dropping.

  It was a buy-yourself-a-personal-spaceship kind of offer. A silk-sheets-and-champagne-for-the-rest-of-your-life kind of offer. Or more realistically, a pay-Zin’s-debts-and-go-the-fuck-on-vacation kind of offer. Although the silk sheets sounded like his kind of indulgence, come to think of it.

  Kit normally played it safe and kept to one job per day. Zin might worry about him getting ambitious or greedy, but he wasn’t a complete fool. Preserving his health was an investment. It made working six or seven days a week possible.

  That offer, though.

  He ran a quick search for Quint Services and almost nothing came up. Some kind of private research firm. It was the latest venture of a billionaire named Oswin Lewis Quint. He was white and cookie-cutter handsome in the promotional photos. Nothing too scary. Come to think of it, he looked vaguely familiar. Kit scanned the search results again. There were a few brief, friendly profiles of him, all talking about how he was going to change the world. No details. These tech companies were just secretive, that’s all.

  If he was going to make it on time, he had to leave now. Kit was sitting up and grabbing for his helmet before he’d even finished replying to the message.

  3

  A Qualm or Two

  He rode out of the undercity and up onto the freeway, past blinking, chirping ads for everything orbiting the sun. Normally, if you were alone on the road, the ads changed if they recognized your buying
history, so you had to drive past personalized billboards hawking whatever shit you’d bought last. Kit kept all his communication encrypted and paid for whatever he could in cash, so even at night he saw the usual, rush-hour nonsense. He had to drive past a campaign ad for Dawson Ellerby, a local politician trying to pitch himself as macho, that said the only thing that stops a runner is a bullet. The slogan was probably effective with voters—it would be a lot less so if they knew that Dawson Ellerby was a regular customer of Carl’s, which meant his addiction to real was effectively financing Kit’s wardrobe.

  Kit had to give the man credit, though. Real—the short name for a drug that was officially called virtual reality enhancement—could fuck you up, and so far Ellerby was keeping it together in public. Bigoted billboards aside, that is.

  Kit passed another billboard with the face of a smiling, handsome man and the slogan for a safer world. There was a logo on it, one that looked like an O with a curlicue tail on its right side, and Kit was far down the road by the time he pieced together that it was meant to represent a Q entwined with an S. That face belonged to Oswin Lewis Quint. Kit knew his search hadn’t been tracked—he was always careful—but a shiver went down his spine anyway. He couldn’t say why. It was an innocuous enough slogan.

  The sun set while he was riding. The city was awash in light all hours of the night, but an hour out of town and off the freeway, Tennessee was still dark. It was like driving two hundred years into the past. What the hell did Quint Services do out here? What was here except old barns?

  He almost missed his turn onto a country road. He’d had to consult a map to get to this place, and it was a lot to remember even with his strong sense of direction. He could have programmed the coordinates into his bike, but he kept the guidance feature turned off. Too easy to track. And boring. He avoided self-driving cars for the same reason. Luckily, Louann specialized in old bikes, ones that weren’t self-driving, and she’d fixed this one up for him.