The door open chime sounds, and Zif glances sideways at the monitor for the cam that covers the entrance, puts her elbows on the counter, tips her face into her hands for moment, and just breathes.
Nominally, this place is a hardware store, kinda small-town family-run shithole that feels as much like monetised hoarding as a business. The aisles are narrow and the shelves are tall and overstuffed, and a lot of the stock is old past the point of usefulness, or just kinda weird.
February sidles past a crate of UV-faded camo-print lawn flamingos, rounds the final corner in the obstacle course to the counter, and gives Zif a little grimace. "Hi," she says, with a quaver in it that gets worse every time she comes back.
Zif's is just far enough outside the city that there's no municipal camera autotracking who comes and goes. Far enough out of the local town that nobody gets out-of-the-ordinary nosy about the out-of-town footfall she gets. Behind the counter there's a trapdoor and a ladder and a cellar full of the other stock: Quebec-Sep surplus AK knockoffs, printable ceramic pistols invisible to previous-gen weapon screening, fell-off-an-Army-truck GSW nanomedicine splat-patches, laptops with desoldered TrustWorthy Enduser Authenticated Computing chip and rooted bootloader.
And there's the word-of-mouth jobs board, which lives entirely in the unhackable meat recesses of Zif's brain.
"February," Zif growls, "get out of here."
"I need—"
Zif started working here under Old Man Willis when she saw twenty-five. February Jones was fifteen. Zif saw her around town and paid her the same attention as any teen: about none. Old Man Willis paid a personal visit to one of his good friends and suppliers down in Mexico when Zif was twenty-nine; they turned out to be the kind of old friends who'll mail a couple of ripped-out fingernails as an invitation to renegotiate their pricing structure.
Zif waited a couple days, then wrote back to say that Old Man Willis was the kind of friend who had a scanner-invisible biospliced pouch in his chest, on a deadman switch wired direct to his heart; and they should be seeing the symptoms of an untreatable lab-cooked haemorrhagic fever about then, and what a shame it was when negotiations broke down, particularly between old friends, but maybe she'd be able to find a new supplier when their organisation were all piled into a quarantine morgue.
Zif let out around town that Willis had a heart attack on holiday, died drunk and happy. Took over the business. The whole year after felt like autumn: cold and ready to kill you, hard times ready to roll, but clear enough to see for miles. Beautiful, if you could take the chill. Space for possibility.
She saw February Jones get kicked out of The Only Gay Bar This Side Of The City, next town over, a couple of times, leggy and nervous and with a fake ID not worth the plastic it was printed on. Didn't give it a thought.
When February Jones was twenty-three, she came into the store and asked to buy one of the guns from the cellar.
What for, Zif had asked, after a long, long, suspicious stare at her.
What for, February had said, all dead-toned and matter-of-fact, was that her Daddy had been selling pictures of her online to certain collectors since she was twelve, and she wanted a gun; and Zif told her that no, she didn't, because that would wind up with February arrested and then she'd be February Jones who shot her Daddy because of that thing he did for ever. How much of Daddy's money could she lay hands on, in one lump, if she didn't have to worry about consequences from him for taking it?
Half a mil, cash, from Daddy's run from the cops emergency bag, February said, still matter-of-fact, and Zif sucked her teeth and told her: you want to take that and hand it to me, and then Daddy has an accident sometime that in no way brings you into it, understand?
February's Daddy had a boat on the lakes (which, if you squinted, he maybe couldn't ever have quite afforded, on his job). After his tragic lone fishing outing oopsie-whoopsie and funeral, February came back to the shop, all black dress and mascara runnels, and offered—
"I can have a woman go down on me any day of the week, for no reason except she fucking loves it, who actually knows what she's doing," Zif said coldly. It sounded like a thing to say, when she said it, enough to shoot down any possibility she didn't mean it.
She thought, afterwards, that it sounded — along with the cruelty, which she'd meant — also a little like bragging. A little less like no than it should have, a little too much I only use girls like you if they impress me.
And maybe — maybe — that has nothing to do with why twenty-five-year-old February Jones has spent an increasingly panicked fortnight with her assets frozen by the generalised suspicion of an AI suspicion-bot at BillBuddy, and corporate profile integration has automatically leached the taint of suspicion, of maybe we'll just unaccountably terminate your account, into so much of her life it ain't even funny to watch. If she wants to go to her dentist for a checkup right now, she had to take three pieces of ID, at least one biometric, at least one verifiably linked to her home address. You know, if any of the entitites who can link it to her address will while she's under a cloud of algorithmic side-eye.
Falling through the cracks in the system tends to be a bumpy, rapid, and one-way trip to the gutter.
"I need a job, Zif," February quavers.
"You're too hot for a job right now." Zif hardens her expression. "Get out of here."
This, this here, is why skulking in the shadowy interstices between the corporations, a freelance extralegal knight of the road, isn't the romantic option; not a job for kids who don't know what they're doing.
"I'll do anything," February says, for the third time in a week, fourth time ever, and Zif grips the edge of the counter hard.
"Do you think you know hurt?" she says, acid over gravel. "Because of what he did? You don't know shit. Not like I'd hurt you, kid."
February wasn't looking at her to begin with; doesn't start.
"I'm not in this line of work because I'm a good person," Zif spits.
"I haven't eaten since Tuesday," February says. "I'm hurting either way. If you're a bad person who'd like it, you'd rather it was you doing it, right?" and she looks up, then, through her lashes at Zif. "Maybe you want me hungrier, first. Maybe you want the utility companies to get in on it, cut me off, you want me starving and unwashed so you can look down at me over that counter and sneer you stink, along with everything else. You can't give me job, fine, but hurting? I can always do that for you."
They look at each other, Zif's pulse an angry buzz.
February pushes off the counter.
"Maybe I'll be faint with hunger, when I say it tomorrow," she says, bright-eyed and taunting. "Swaying on my feet while I say anything. Fall over, maybe. Would you like that? Will that be fun?"
"Get. Out," Zif grates.
