“Fuck you!”
Andrea threw her bony little elbow right into Hwa’s solar plexus. Pain opened a point of super-dense space behind her ribs: a wormhole of breathless, gasping panic. Hwa stumbled back onto the table. Cups rolled over and clattered to the floor. No wonder she was off her game. She wished desperately and stupidly that she could be sober. She slid off the table and onto the floor. Peanut shells poked up into the palms of her hands. Andrea kicked her hard in her side.
Hwa tried to sit up. Andrea grabbed a mostly full bottle from the next table over and swung it straight for Hwa’s head. Hwa ducked and blocked, but Andrea had some crazy-fu going on and the bottle returned on the backswing to connect with her temple. It felt cold and foamy and resonant; Hwa heard the beer slosh against the plastic as it met her skin of her temple and broke it.
“Stop,” she said, blocking her head tight with her outer forearms as Andrea slashed and swung. “Stop, that’s my good side—”
“You don’t have a good side, you ugly goddamn traitor.”
Andrea lunged for her again, but her feet kicked uselessly in the air as Nail lifted her up, gently. He held her there above the ground as she wrestled.
“He cut her up,” she whimpered. “Oh God, he cut up my baby.”
*
Rusty and Nail made their way back to Séverine’s place. “MMD,” Rusty said, grabbing his coat. “Put some ice on that.”
The barback at the Crow’s Nest gave her a towel with some ice in it, and a measure of middling bourbon, and shooed her on her way the moment she finished it. The folk in the elevator did everything they could to avoid staring while also taking her in: the stain, the fresh blood, the slashes in her sleeves, the ragged peanut shells clinging to her tights. Her arm throbbed. She thought it might be bleeding again.
The union would be initiating its MMD protocol, short for Missing, Murdered, or Dead. It was right there in the USWC handbook: obtain and verify all facts, alert membership, stress safety, in public statements separate the incident from the work and humanize the victim (use first names, make reference to family and pets), at no point imply that the victim did anything to deserve it. It was the same everywhere, in every Canadian city, even the ones on dry land.
A sex worker hadn’t been murdered in New Arcadia since before the Old Rig blew.
It came with the decriminalization, and the bodyguards, and the communication between workers. If a client was bad, everybody knew. There was a rating system. Creepiness was a metric. So was violence. So was respect for boundaries. You could take a poorly rated client, if you wanted. But you knew what you were getting into. Had Calliope? Had she read a bunch of reviews, and decided to make the date anyway? And who could be that dangerous? Hwa let the question roll around in her skull as the elevator descended to the cheaper levels. Faces tumbled up. Angel. Benny. Shit, even Moliter, a little bit. And, of course, sometimes the riggers took things to keep them awake, and some of them were on off-label mods, the kinds of things Wade was taking, and Christ, anything could happen there.
Hwa pushed herself into her apartment. It was only the one room, the kitchen things against one wall and her bed against another. What little she owned was still in boxes and piles. Only Tae-kyung’s trophies had any pride of place. Now she wasn’t sure she could really afford any of it.
“Prefect, show me Calliope Davis.”
“Access denied,” Prefect said, crisply.
Well, that was quick. Lynch had wasted no time cutting her out of their systems. Not that she could blame them. Him. Síofra. Probably his call to make. For a moment she thought about contacting him. No. Bad idea.
“Get me Belle du Jour,” she said.
The client-facing side of the terminal came up. Here, too, her log-in was no good any longer. Still, she could call up Calliope’s profile. There she was, in full makeup, sporting her tattoos, promising her specialties. She wasn’t Hwa’s best student, not by a long shot, but that didn’t mean she was bad. Just unmotivated.
Eileen’s call came just as Hwa was about to check the news.
“I heard what happened,” Eileen said, and Hwa didn’t know if she meant Calliope or the fight with Andrea. “It’s a sin,” she said thickly. “Just a sin.”
“Have you looked at the news?”
“Aye, and I wish to God I hadn’t.” Eileen blew her nose. “Some fucking botflies took the footage. Pieces of her. Just floating out there. Just … shreds.”