The Pure Cold Light Read Online Free Page A

drink, letting the camera do all the work while she ignored the trio altogether.
    Nance arrived, gave the trio a cautious look, then sat beside Lyell. “All right,” she said immediately, “who the fuck are you, lady, and what do you want with Tami?”
    Lyell pretended to have been aware of this from the start. “You know where she is,” she said.
    Nance said something else but Lyell didn’t get it. Her attention had been snagged by the trio, leaving.  
      She glanced their way casually, as if she’d already forgotten them, to find Angel Rueda staring at her with the strangest look in his one dark eye. It stayed with her long after he and his escort had disappeared down the tubeway.
    It was a look of something like forlorn hope.

Chapter Two: Life In The Pit

    Amerind Shikker arrived in the subterranean world of the disused subway Concourse against her will, trussed up naked in scraps of her clothing and thrown down the steps into the darkness. Her neighbors—her “friends”—were the culprits. They thought she’d gone crazy, and maybe they were half right. She’d killed a man, cut his dick off. He’d shown her who he was, was why.
    He was an Orbiter for sure. He had the burn marks on his temples where he fired the injector gun, so she would have known anyway. But the fucker’s right leg had vanished from the knee down, which became apparent when he crouched next to her and his pant-leg, too short to begin with, pulled halfway up his calves.  
    He didn’t have any socks, and he didn’t have any right leg, either.
    His left leg was raw with flea bites. The right just wasn’t there. She wondered if the fleas had been erased, too. His shoe looked to be empty; she could see straight through to the rip in the sole.  
    He hadn’t liked her seeing that, and that was when he’d begun his singsong ditty about “not bein’ a kid, and not bein’ a skipper”. She supposed, with that leg, he likely couldn’t skip if he wanted to.
    Amerind knew something of Orbitol and its long-term effects—enough to stay away from it.
    “What the hell you muttering?” she had asked the john.
    “I’m your fun-loving man,” came his reply. He was grinning by then, an off-kilter smile, and she ought to have known better; but she needed the business.  
    “’course you are, sweetie.”
    “Jack the Ripper,” he’d announced with pride.
    Amerind had never heard of him but didn’t say so. He’d paid, and she needed the money. She didn’t care if he was fresh off a prison isle in the Atlantic. A lot of her clients were.
    He’d settled over her face and sunk in as far as he could go. He wasn’t very big. His dirty fingers grabbed up her tits, began kneading. He was rough, but she’d known rougher. She didn’t understand his true intention until she felt the cold shock of his blade against her rib. He was trying to slice her tit off. Without hesitation, she dug furiously under her pillow and pulled out her flick-knife. He was cackling and trying to saw up under her tit; his dull blade carved a fire in her side, at once icy and hot. His butt and legs squashed her movement, trapped her other arm; she wrestled but couldn’t get past them. She bent her wrist till she thought it would break, slid her blade up under his pants, right across her nose, and stabbed hard. Blood, hot and black, jetted all over her face. Jack fell to shrieking and clawing at himself, but she couldn’t budge the bastard. His blood poured out in a torrent and she was drowning. The Ripper twisted one way and Amerind, still holding onto the slick knife, twisted the other. He toppled head-first onto the cardboard floor beside her blankets. His blood sprayed feathery across the trembling wall of her little box. Coughing, choking, she spat out blood and his excised member. It bounced off his skull and rolled along the floor beside him like a little gray sausage link.
    While the bastard Ripper shrieked and twitched in the final moments of his life,