Page 46 of Antihero

“Why?”

“Because I help people.”

The door pulled open, snapping the security chain taut, showing a sliver of face. Intense light blue eyes, sweat-tangled bangs, permanent-markered expletive scrawled on her cheek. “Why do you help people?”

“It’s just what I do.”

Her eyes flicked down. “There is blood. On your shirt.”

He followed her gaze. Sure enough, a thin trailing pattern of crimson drops marred the side of his shirt, elongated downward in the direction it had erupted from Osman’s nose.

“Yes,” Evan said. “Sorry.”

She studied him. “Can I trust you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you trust me?”

Her stare picked across his face. “My condition forces me to have radical trust at inconvenient times. But I’ve never experienced a time this inconvenient.”

He wondered at her condition but now was not the moment to ask. He shuffled through acceptable responses, but his repertoire had nothing for this. He considered the little speech he sometimes gave, found it just as useless. It came apart like the last two Commandments, but he reassembled it, turned it on its head.

“Ms. Dumitrescu,” he said, softly. “I’d like you to look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look dangerous?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Dangerous to you?”

She didn’t speak but he felt the sharp intelligence of her gaze as it X-rayed him. She was looking straight through the mask of his features right into him. She searched. Searched some more.

The door closed firmly in his face.

The chain unhooked.

It opened.

Anca stepped forth.

21Disembodied

Taz Kinley seemed like a quiet kid but no one understood that he wasn’t quiet at all, not on the inside. They had all sorts of names for what went on in his head—ADHD, oppositional-defiant disorder, conduct disorder, Asperger’s.

He had his own term for it, too: MDB.

Modern Dude Brain.

His favorite diagnosis that they’d saddled him with was NOS. Not Otherwise Specified. Which meant, of course, that they—the schools, the social workers, the court-appointed shrinks, the parole officers—couldn’t figure out what the fuck he was.

The thing was, all these creaking old people and institutions and IRL meat puppets were sawdust and rot. They were long past their expiration date and didn’t even know it. What was real was what was happening in cyberspace right now beneath his thumbs.

His favorite porn site had been using AI lately to play with eye width and lash length of the skanks to maximize that hentai look, getting it just right so middle-aged normies wouldn’t be sure whether they should fuck them or protect them and man, if only you could do both. His favorite underground MMA fighter had bitten off the nose of a Bulgarian challenger in an unregulated match broadcast on an onion link on Tor, unleashing a world of meme-ery: THE NOSE KNOWS! OH NOSE! VALDEMMART! Taz hadn’t seen original footage yet, was still chasing it around behind the content regulators but, in a way, if you’ve seen the memes you’ve seen the real thing.

He was hungry, wanted Chipotle, the most chow for the cheapest price. Money was running low again—it always did—which is why he’d assembled the posse.

Finn-Finn stuck his phone under Taz’s nose and snickered, breath like baloney. “Check it, man.” He tittered. “Check it, check it.”

They were on a street, dodging pedestrians and shooting through scaffolding sheds on the sidewalks because Manhattan was forever under construction, tearing itself apart and putting itself back together.

Huddled between his phone and Taz, Finn-Finn banged into one of the uprights with his shoulder, spun around, bulled through a baby stroller, found himself on the receiving end of a stream of mama-bear invective in Korean. Cost of doing business in the big bad city.