Read Escapology for Free Online

she’s on board would be foolhardy.
    “Well, okay,” he says to Volk, “I can see you’re in some kind of trouble, but you aren’t trouble yourself, so welcome to the family.”
    She nods, but her relief is like a tidal wave, it almost knocks him over.
    “Thank you.”
    “Don’t prove me wrong.”
    “I’ll do my very best.”
    “Do better.”
    “Aye, aye Bosun.”
    Aye, aye, indeed. He watches her go, clutching her bag so tightly he knows for a fact her hands are going to hurt for a week, and hopes he hasn’t just made a very big mistake.

Fed to a Joon Bug
    A neural drive is like a mind, there’s no switching it off, no running from it. You can mute it, sure. You can even do as Shock does and fry your brain on bumps, wiping as many clear seconds as possible from the clock. But much like a persistent thought a drive will let you know by hook or by crook when you’ve a million and one messages backed up and pounding on their horns like angry drivers in a ten-mile tail-back.
    Shock’s had his on mute since speaking to Mim, which was dumb knowing her pro-stance on harassment. Now his drive’s buzzing away with angry message wasps, sending ripples like the after-effects of ECT to bug up his beleaguered brain meats. Cutting straight through the messy high of cheap bumps. He’d delete them all without reading if he hadn’t once taught Mim a way to circumvent that. Why did he do that?
    “Because you’re an idiot,” he says to himself, sucking up coffee in desperate gulps and trying to ignore the clamour in his head, drown it with anger and caffeine.
    Shock has zero inclination to listen to Mim haranguing him about this freaking Olbax job ad infinitum, but he does want the buzzing to stop already, before his head does an impression of a melon on the receiving end of a baseball bat. Can’t have one without the other, and the resulting rebellion paradox is giving him more of a headache than Mim’s messages, or a baseball bat. Maybe.
    “Not enough coffee in the world,” he snarls, giving up rebellion as a bad job. She’ll only keep on sending them. Mim’s
tenacious
. Like herpes.
    The first message, from thirty-six hours ago, is fairly calm, more of a query. He’s not fooled. Calm before the storm, that shit is. And here’s the storm, from message four onward, ear-bending as feedback, full-on rant-mode and he’s cringing, trying to whip through them all without really listening.
    If only Mim’s voice when she’s annoyed weren’t drill-like in its ability to put holes in his skull. By the time he comes to the last, sent roughly two hours ago, he’s ready to tear his drive out with his bare hands and stamp it to dust, but the last is a surprise.
    Hey, Shocking boy, there’s a party tonight. You need to get out and about before you turn into a pumpkin. See you there.
    He listens to it twice in swift succession, wondering who’s taken over Mim and what it is they want from him. She sounds almost
nice
. He shudders, full body.
    “Gotta be a reason,” he mutters, staring furiously at his coffee cup. The dregs are grinning at him. What in the hell is so funny? “You’re
empty
. Bastard.”
    Wallowing in suspicion, he plays the IM again. Nope, that’s her all right. Saccharine mode. He can tell by the level of rot in his brainpan. On the back of the IM rides an info-shot, holding all the party deets. Shock wants to delete it on principle. Mim’s never been anywhere near as pleasant as this, even when things were sort of good, but she always dragged him to parties, to people, especially when he was most disinclined, which was most of the time.
    He’s not averse, or allergic, nor even introverted, he’s just
reluctant
. He’s tried and failed so many times to explain that. Truth is, he hasn’t got a clue. It’s like the part of him that makes him a Haunt leaked out and infected everything else, stole his links to the world at large and the people in it. His idea of heaven would be to nest up in some