the crim
Notes: Set after Specials in a world where Diego was defeated and the Prettytime never collapsed. David's last name is adapted from his father's, since as far as I know we never learn it in Westerfeld's canon.
The Bubble Lounge floated above the already-high spires of the city, and it commanded an especially good view of ever-expanding New Pretty Town. From its windows, you could watch the elegant balloon-gondolas of the Hot-Airs drifting from place to place, and the lights of night games at Nefertiti Stadium. Jaid, who had only been out of New Pretty Town for two years, often came to the Bubble Lounge to drink with her friends. Especially when her husband was out of town on business.
Tonight, Jaid had lost track of her friends, just like she'd lost track of how much she'd drunk. Three glasses? Four? She was out on the dance floor now, which was crowded shoulder to shoulder. Nobody was partnering up, though, just dancing in a crazy bouncing mass, like bubbles in a glass. Great-looking guys were drawn toward her, and Jaid bounced off them like electrons, not really interested, but pleased that they were into her. She'd tucked her wedding ring safely away into her little red synth-croc handbag - not that she was going to do anything wrong, of course. But nights out were a lot more fun when guys flirted with you the way they did when they didn't see a ring.
Jaid caught men's eyes, even in a city full of beautiful people. She had a slight resemblance to Tally Youngblood, which she'd enhanced with a few discreet surges. Nothing too obvious - she didn't want her friends to laugh and call her a wannabe. Besides, she didn't like the fierce Special look. Jaid preferred to resemble the pre-Special Tally, the merely Pretty one.
There were plenty of photos that Jaid's surgeon had been able to use as a guideline. Tally Youngblood was famous: commander-in-chief of the military, leader of the Cutters, the woman behind the crushing defeat of the New Smoke at Diego. It was whispered that she all but ran the city-state - which would make it essentially under a military government. Not that you'd know it: the champagne flowed more freely than ever, the minimum age for the Pretty surgery had been lowered to 14, and the city-state was even considering lifting the one-child-per-couple rule, so plentiful in resources was the techno-eco-paradise everyone was living in. If the point to life in the Prettytime was having fun, well, since the Diego war, life had been more fun than ever. Funner? Was that a word? If it wasn't, Jaid thought, it should be.
Yet it was also, in a way, boring. Burke, her husband, hadn't helped matters much in that regard. Jaid had known he was a good choice - smarter than the other guys in New Pretty Town, and now a city planner, rising through the ranks of government. That was why he and Jaid had a better apartment than most of their friends, as well as a hovercar of their own. But Burke didn't like to party much, and he traveled often for his work. So Jaid went out with her friends.
Jaid cast her eyes around, looking for her girls now, but she couldn't see any familiar faces. Why didn't the lounge have a restriction on the number of people it let in? Or if there was one, why wasn't it lower? It wasn't as bubbly when just anyone could be here. Jaid moved off the dance floor, fished in her bag, and re-applied her red lipstick.
"You're an excellent dancer, you know."
Jaid turned in the direction of the low voice. She saw a young man with black hair shaved to a millimeter of his scalp and cheekbones that spoke of the best surgeon's scalpel.
"Thanks," she said, putting the lipstick away. "Did I see you out there?" She was fairly sure she would have remembered a guy who looked like him.
"No, I was just watching."
"Where's the fun in that?"
"Ah, yes, fun," he said. "The new religion." Then: "I didn't get your name."
"Jaid. And you are?"
He looked a little rueful. "Zane."
She frowned. "You mean, like -"
He nodded.
She laughed, because he did resemble Tally Youngblood's husband, the firebrand from New Pretty Town who'd caused her radicalization and, indirectly, her transformation from Pretty to Special. He'd nearly died as a result of their adolescent rebellion, then risked his life in getting the operation that made him nearly Tally's equal, with enhanced cognitive skills and reflexes.
"I do look like him, I know," he said, smiling as if at a private joke.
"You look familiar, that's for sure." But she thought that Zane wore his hair longer, not razed nearly to the skin like this guy. Though how hard would that be to change? Five minutes with a pair of clippers. It wasn't even surge.
A floating tray passed near them and Zane reached out and took a glass of champagne from its surface, then handed it to her without being asked. She liked the casual arrogance of it. But for form's sake, she pretended not to. "Suppose I didn't want another round?"
"Didn't you?" he said.
She shrugged and drank. "Where's yours?"
"My tastes are a little different," he said, and discreetly opened his jacket to reveal several creased paper cylinders.
"Are those-"
"Cigarettes," he confirmed.
They'd been illegal since the fall of the Rusty era, a deadly, dirty habit, the ultimate symbol of Rusty self-destructiveness.
Zane asked, "Have you ever had one?"
"Just once," Jaid admitted. "I'd love to try it again."
That answer pleased him. "I knew as soon I looked at you, that you're a secret Crim."
"Crim?"
"It's what we - it's what Tally's clique in New Pretty Town called themselves, the Crims," he said. Then he said, "You look like her. The pre-Special Tally, I mean."
Had he known Tally personally back then? Jaid hadn't missed the way he'd said "we" about the Crims, before correcting himself. And maybe it was the champagne going to her head, but there was something intense in his gaze, as if he was sending her a coded message, expecting her to get it.
She squinted at him in the club's dim lighting, studying the black hair and golden eyes anew. Surely this couldn't be him. Tally Youngblood's husband, in a nightclub on his own, looking to pick up a woman?
Playing for time, not sure what to do with the conflicting messages she was getting, Jaid leaned back. "Let's talk about the cigarettes," she said. "Are you selling them, or are you willing to share with a good friend?"
"Share, of course," he said, smoothly. "But we'd have to go outside, someplace hidden. Obviously we can't light up here." He looked at her challengingly. "Are you Crim enough?"
"Try me."
Outside, they hid behind a bush of hibiscus whose giant, genetically-enhanced blooms quivered in the warm summer breeze. Zane sheltered the cigarettes with one cupped hand and lit both at once before handing one to her. Jaid took it, inhaled, and immediately coughed. She expected Zane to laugh at her, but he didn't.
"Like it?"
"It's nice," she lied, not liking the taste in her mouth, or the feeling in her lungs.
He drew harder on his, the red tip lightening to orange. Then he exhaled a narrow stream of smoke, almost as if targeting something floating in the air, and said, "Ask yourself this, Jaid: is smoking a cigarette really going to make you a Crim?"
"What do you mean?"
"Very little goes on that the city doesn't know about and approve of," he said.
"You think they're okay with cigarette smoking?" she said dubiously.
"Did you ever wonder why cigarettes are still illegal in a world where within two to three years scientists will be able to grow new lungs for anybody who needs them?" He studied her with his compelling golden eyes. "That renders tobacco smoking essentially harmless, doesn't it?"
Jaid blinked, startled.
"Or what about this?" he went on. "Maybe government scientists have already engineered a new tobacco plant, one with all the intoxicating qualities, but none of the carcinogens."
"Why wouldn't they just tell us that, then?"
He answered her question with a question. "Consider: what do people need in a world this safe? They need to rebel. But rebellion isn't rebellion if it's government-sanctioned. So they keep tobacco cigarettes illegal, and pretend that they hate it that they're available on the black market, but really, they're laughing behind our backs."
"I never thought of that," Jaid said, amazed. "So to really rebel, we'd have to, what? Join the Smoke?"
"There is no Smoke anymore. That's all over," he said, flatly.
"But the Cutters never captured their leader in Diego. He's still out there."
"David? That guy's dead." Zane threw his cigarette to the asphalt and ground it out.
Jaid said nothing, intimidated by his sudden vehemence.
He went on, "It's true that every couple of months some kids get together and pull a few glorified Ugly tricks and call themselves the New Smoke, or I guess it'd be the New New Smoke. Then Tally sends out a couple of her guys to find them, spank them, and send them home to their mothers. For the Cutters, it's not even a challenge. It's like fixing a malfunctioning alarm that keeps going off even though there's no fire."
Realization set in, and Jaid's red-painted lips fell open in shock. This was the Zane. He spoke authoritatively about Tally Youngblood; he seemed to have inside knowledge about the workings of Special Circumstances. Not to mention his real hostility toward David, Tally's ex-boyfriend from her freedom fighter days.
And now that Jaid thought about it, it made a certain sense that Zane would be out in a nightclub, flirting with strange girls. Tally's fame and exploits dwarfed his. Some people mockingly called Tally and Zane "Big T and little z." Surely that couldn't be easy to live with. Even Tally's once-inseparable friend and boss in Special Circumstances, Shay, had reportedly tired of life under Tally's leadership, and was now said to be partying in York, on the other side of the continent. Maybe Zane was equally restless. Maybe Tally called the shots in everything, even in bed - the "touch this, kiss that" type. Ugh.
"Jaid?" Zane said. "You're going to burn your fingers if you hang onto that any longer."
She'd let the cigarette smolder down to her fingertips. Jaid dropped it on the ground and squelched it with her shoe, like he had. The gesture wasn't as sexily confident as his, but then she was new at it.
Uncertainly, she said, "I guess we should go back inside."
He laid a hand on her back. "I think we're a little past that," he said, soberly.
"You mean-"
"Are you here with someone special, Jaid?"
Was this really happening? Maybe she should just tell him goodbye and find her friends. What would Tally Youngblood, military leader of the free and Pretty world, do to a woman who slept with her husband? Jaid had a terrifying vision of wiping away steam from the bathroom mirror to see Tally's gorgeous but hate-twisted face reflected behind her. Yikes.
But this was Zane, a legend. And of all the girls in the city tonight, he wanted her.
More than that, he wanted her to be Crim. Like he was.
"I'm not here with anyone," she said.
At Jaid's place, they got straight down to business. His hands, on her skin, were surprisingly rough. It was exciting. Her husband had soft palms, as did the boyfriends she'd had before him. Jaid wondered if it was some kind of surge. But she didn't wonder it very long, as their pace quickened and she began to breathe hard. Tally's boy has skills, she thought, and then the world contracted to a miniature supernova.
"Wow," she said, when it was over, breathing hard. "Just, wow."
"'God,' a Rusty would have said," he told her. He rolled over, and she heard him rummaging in his abandoned clothes. Maybe he wanted another cigarette, she thought.
She got up as far as her knees, swinging her blonde hair back over her shoulders. "I'm thirsty," she said. "Would you like some champagne, if I had some?"
"Not right now," he said. "I was actually wondering if you wanted to go again."
"Go again? You mean ...?" Jaid laughed. "I might be able to, but you're not ready." Her gaze strayed low, discreetly checking that he wasn't capable of more lovemaking.
He looked at her slyly. "Maybe I'll surprise you."
"Oh, really? How?" she demanded.
He rolled over, and there was a little metal object in his hand.
"Surprise, my name's not Zane," he said, and a blue flash jumped from the metal object to the skin of her leg. It didn't hurt, but suddenly it was as if every cell in her body was fizzing at once, like champagne, and then the floor rushed up toward her.
David discarded the golden contact lenses in her bathroom. Contact lenses were hard to find in the age of instant surgery, but there was a black-market trade for them among people who didn't want the government to be able to track the changes they were making in their appearance. The scar on his eyebrow David hid with a synthetic skin that emergency-medicine specialists used to treat burn victims.
The hair he simply darkened with ink, the way Zane reportedly had in his New Pretty Town days. David also kept it less than a centimeter long, so anytime he wanted to grow his real hair back - brown, rough, and unruly - all he had to do was pick up an electric shaver and get rid of the black stuff. No matter how many changes he made to his appearance, David didn't surge, not even temporarily. He hated that even more than he hated champagne.
David splashed water on his face. The hookup had made him feel dirty. Not that Jaid hadn't been fun, and he'd particularly appreciated her resemblance to Tally, but helping her cheat on her Pretty Dull husband had only been the means to an end. David's real goal was one floor down in the garage: an expensive and wickedly fast foreign-made hovercar.
Still naked, David walked back into the bedroom and looked down at Jaid. She'd have no long-term effects from the stun gun, nor any from the fall: the carpet was thick and padded underneath. Some people always landed on soft surfaces, he thought.
He put his clothes on, lit a cigarette, and exhaled. The Smoke lives, David thought bitterly, watching it dissipate.
A lot of what he'd told Jaid at the bar was true: the Smoke was over. Tally and her Cutters weren't at all threatened by the silly teenagers who liked to call themselves the 'New Smoke'. Right. The Damp Embers, David called them, or the Wisps of Steam. He would have liked to round a few up himself, show them what the wrath of a real Smokey felt like, mostly because of the false hope they gave Maddy. She'd grown increasingly delusional in the past few years, writing manifesto after irrational manifesto. The government wouldn't give her housing or any income support until she officially renounced her anti-Prettytime views, which she refused to do. David took care of her himself, out of the ill-gotten gains of his new career as a thief.
Of all the things he'd stolen, the most satisfying was his repeated appropriation of Zane's identity. How many more times could he do that before word starting getting around? It probably wasn't in the immediate future. It wasn't as if Jaid would be in a hurry to tell this anecdote to her girls from the Bubble Lounge.
He walked around her prone form, sat on his heels, and opened her little red handbag. The wedding ring was inside an inner pocket. He'd seen her tuck it away before entering the bar, watching through a window. David palmed it and considered taking it with him, but then he took pity and dropped it onto the carpet next to her. She'd have enough to explain to her husband as it was.
It didn't take much searching to find the hovercar's keys, hanging on a peg in the coat closet. From there, David descended the stairs to the garage, opened the door, and marveled: He'd seen pictures, but the car was even prettier live. He tossed the last of the smoldering cigarette onto the garage floor, stepped on it, and approached.
Working quickly - Jaid would nearly be opening her eyes to think, what happened? - David disabled the speed and altitude limiters, then climbed behind the controls. The car's sensors automatically opened the garage hatch, and David didn't even wait for it to be all the way up before he shot the sleek little craft underneath the rising door and accelerated steeply up into the stars. Below him, he knew, police hovercars would be gearing up to give chase, but he'd be gone by the time they were aloft. The rozzers had never caught him, and they never would. Because as he'd learned since the second and final fall of the Smoke, David Azarian was a natural Crim.