“Dixon?” Hwa looked around. Nobody perked up. “Dixon here?”
Above her, an arrow in the ceiling came to light. It was a soft, minty green, and it pointed back and to the right, around a corner wall that Hwa guessed was the washroom. The washrooms were generally all in the same spot, in these places. Otherwise the pipes wouldn’t line up. It was the same with the central air ducts. It was part of what made Tower Four so easy to build—you just printed the same unit, over and over, without any need for customization. Hwa followed the green arrow past the people on cushions. To the right was a nook with a window. A man sat watching the feeds in his eyes. He’d cracked the window, a little.
“You nervous about that shit getting in your lungs?” Hwa asked.
He jolted. His legs and arms flailed for a moment and he struggled to stand. Dixon Sandro was a tiny man, bald, with a head too big for his body, with Liefeld muscle definition on a frame two sizes too small. That was the actual brand name for the regimen: Liefeld. Hwa knew other guys who had taken it. Like Dixon, all of them had the worst acne imaginable. You had to, if you were fucking around with your testosterone like that. Dixon’s acne was everywhere: his face, his shoulders, in the creases of his neck, in the cuts across his muscles. Awful, cystic, painful pustules. For a moment, Hwa almost felt sorry for him.
“What the fuck happened to your face?”
The moment passed.
“Kripke sent me,” Hwa lied.
Under his acne, Dixon went pale. It made the red spots seem redder, like little eyes embedded in his skin slowly going bloodshot. “What does he want?”
“He wants you to do something for me.” Hwa slung her pack down from her shoulder and opened it. Out came her old shoes, in a vacuum-sealed bag. “He wants you to take a sample from the blood on these shoes, and tell me about it. Now.”
“Now? Like right now?”
“Yes, like now. Like right fucking now.”
Now he got petulant. “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”
“What’s in it for you is you don’t need your jaw reprinted. Again.” Hwa looked at the shoes, and then at him. He really did have a lot of equipment. And he was surprisingly neat about it. The scanners weren’t at all dusty, and the big live-cell imager was still gleaming, no dents. He was probably the real deal, once. Maybe even had some education, and a real degree, until he did his version of the thing everyone did that brought them to New Arcadia. “You do this, we leave you alone. You can’t come back to the gym, but we don’t come around anymore.”
“For real? You swear?”
Hwa made a show of examining the room and its inhabitants. “I think there’s enough business for you in this tower, don’t you? Don’t think you need to go looking for work.”
“Yeah.” He licked his lips. They were peeling. Blood seeped out from the cracks. “Okay. Got it. Just … run the sample?”
“Aye.”
“Am I checking for anything specific?”
“Whatever you can find.” Hwa waved her hand over a cushion and plucked the air with her fingers. The cushion inched over to her. “I have time.”
Dixon got right to work. He took a scraping from the soles of her shoes, activated it in vital serum, and ran it through the imager.
“Been dead a while,” he said, looking at the screen.
“Aye.” Hwa stood up. “She has.”
“You know the sample?”
“I’m the one asking the questions,” Hwa said.
“How long was she sick for?”
“Sick?”
“Yeah. Her white count was through the roof.”
Hwa thought of the last time she’d seen Calliope’s face. If she was seriously ill, that might explain a suicide attempt. But the witch under the bridge had said it was murder. And the bloodstains in the stairwell didn’t look like a gunshot wound. They looked like an explosion. Someone had popped Calliope’s body like an over-full balloon.
“She wasn’t sick.”
“Fine. Just making conversation. Not like I’m an expert, or anything. Come look.” He gestured for Hwa to lean down and look at the image. On the display were a series of schooling machines. As she watched, the machines trembled for a moment and then divided. Each looked just like the other. They swam off in different directions. After a moment, they divided again.
“That’s…”
“Illegal.” Dixon leaned back in his seat. He picked his jawline, squeezing a cyst that seemed unready to burst. He continued anyway, digging at it with his fingernails. “Really, really illegal. And I know from illegal. This is it. Bio-nano is strictly subscription-only in Canada. No replication. No copying.”
“Um…” Hwa scratched the back of her neck. “I don’t have any … You know, implants, or augments, edits, or whatever. So, I’m kinda in the dark, here.”
He groaned, like he was explaining something to his dotty old grandmother. “The copyright,” he said. “You want the augment, the subscription, you gotta pay the licensing fee. Or your provider does, if you’re covered.”