Sym walks out the back of the bar about two weeks later for a smoke break, and finds Kandi waiting for her. She cringes at the look on Kandi's face.
"I heard—" she starts, rapid and hushed, darting a glance around. "I would never have sent the job your way if I'd thought there was anything up. Never. Trust me that much, Dots."
"Yeah?" Kandi flexes her jaw. "And what did you hear, exactly?"
"Maxi was trying to badmouth you," Sym says. "Anyone with eyes could see he was trying to blame you for spotting the job going sideways early and bugging out." She pauses. "Nobody's heard from the others on the job," she adds. "Know if they got out okay?"
Kandi says nothing.
"I swear, Dots," Sym says. "Look, I don't know if this is related or — about a week ago, someone came in here with a description that could maybe be you? Maybe you some cyberware ago. Asked about the name Sphinx—"
She starts violently at the click of an unfolding blade, and the careful sting of a razor point through her shirt.
"You tell me every single thing she said, word for word," Kandi says in a flat, dead voice. "And you tell me every single thing you said. And if I don't trust what you're telling me, I gut you."
"Dots," Sym says, choked and wide-eyed.
"Talk," Kandi suggests inflectionlessly.
"Was expecting you hours ago," Whisper says, from the Happi-Nite bed, eyes closed.
Kandi grunts, closes the door behind her, and over-carefully puts the last fifth of a bottle of shitty domestic vodka down on the flimsy table-desk surface bolted to the wall. She lowers herself into the attendant chair, watches out of the corner of her vision as Whisper opens her eyes, the apparently relaxed line of her arm still holding a pistol under the blanket.
"Got a new theory about the blackwipe," Kandi says, voice aiming for toneless, landing somewhere bitter.
A few seconds longer; Whispers thumbs the safety on, lets go of the gun, and sits up, blankets pooling around her waist. She rests her outstretched arms on her drawn-up knees, skin hairs sweeping upright in the room's unheated nighttime chill.
Kandi looks at her, skinny and weary and wearing a ragged tank top of Kandi's, and she looks back at Kandi, expression blank.
Kandi draws a breath to begin, holds it for a moment, lets it out explosively. She picks up what's left of the vodka and unscrews the cap.
"My first ever op," she says, "was a run on an agrigenetics lab set in a couple hundred acres of deep rural experimental crop fields. Turned out it also had an antipersonnel minefield." She dilutes the taste of the memory with another mouthful from the bottle. "No, scratch that. Six months before that, I was boosting cars and hustling pool and waiting tables in a grope-me skirt in a mafia-run club to get by, and I caught someone's eye. Said I had potential. Wanted to mentor me into the scene." She takes another swig. "Never told me a name. Everyone called her the Major. Might even really have been in somebody's military, back in the day. She was the hottest shit I'd ever seen, and she said I could be hot shit too, and it — sounded less like a line from her than it would have from a guy. Or maybe I just wanted it."
She laughs. Something like a laugh, anyway, not looking at Whisper.
"Fast forward. Op goes sideways. I wake up in a private hospital in a city I don't know, no legs, but they've — already bolted the root armatures for these babies onto the stumps of my femurs. While I was out. Because she said so. Just the hardware, that much of it, is like ten times as much money as I've been worth in my life, sum total. Of course she was already fucking me and feeding me dreams, but after that it really set in — working on the idea that I owed her my life and literally my body. And I was a kid still, and—" she stops herself.
Whisper stays quiet, listening, and Kandi drains what's left of the vodka.
"Fast forward," she says. "Couple of years. There's a job. The brief is to split up and lay low for a while afterwards; I peel off, drop off the grid, hit the road instead of waiting for the rendezvous. Pretty sure she looks, looks hard, but she did teach me, and I did learn, after all. Fall in with a crew down on the Mexican border, do some jobs. Pick up a rep. And then I get spooked, even though I think I'm probably jumping at nothing, and take an unscheduled road trip without telling anyone, call the team from the road—"
She tilts the bottle, remembers it's empty.
"Can't get hold of any of them. Spook bad, run. Figure out later that they're all dead, and I don't know that the Major did it out of some obsessive slighted-honour if she's not under my thumb, nobody gets her bullshit, but—" she sits forward far enough to drop the empty bottle into the dollar-store plastic trash can without standing up.
"Obsessive?" Whisper says.
"She picked me out of a grab-ass club," Kandi says. "I was nothing. I wasn't notable operative material. She made me from the ground up in her little one-recruit oh god yes ma'am boot camp just because she saw me and, fuck, I still don't know, Whisper. Saw something she wanted. And—" she grimaces. "Took me a while to admit that I knew it, but she was too smart, too experienced, too professional for that first op to have gone so bad by surprise. She pointed me into a minefield on foot, Whisper, so that she could be the philanthropic mentor-lover-boss who bought me new legs. Bought me. Refurbed everything left into — me."
"Obsessive enough to still be looking for you. Obsessive enough to blackwipe our team for — poaching you?"
"Wrong logic," Kandi says bitterly. "Not poaching, Whisper. Wifebeater logic. Look what you made me do to them by whorishly attracting their eyes to you, sweetheart, you bitch logic."
"Give me a description," Whisper says. "Aliases."
Kandi drones through height and build, colouring, apparent age, visible chrome. "The Major," she says. "I told you. Just the Major."
"She was sleeping with you," Whisper says, "and still just the Major?" and all Kandi can do is screw her eyes shut in reply.
Whisper picks at her nails in the silence, then: "Drink some water," she says. "Get some sleep."
Kandi opens her eyes again to look at her, all solemn and tired and competent.
"Little spoon," Whisper says, and lets it dangle, with just a little hesitance. "Unless she—"
Kandi squashes the impulse to flatly laugh and say: Foot of the bed. Dog crate sometimes. Handcuffed to a shower rail a few times, when she was angry — "That's fine," she says, and drinks some water, lies down, falls asleep listening to Whisper's controlled breathing against her back as she makes whatever careful electronic enquiries.
Be careful, she wants to say; but Whisper doesn't need to be told.