Chapter 3: The Lift

One moment Ivo had been looking at the towering buildings closing him in on all sides, and the next he was plunging into the abyss below, unable to make sense of the shapes rushing past him, the breath flowing out of his lungs with a silent scream.

It was all so sudden he didn't even have time to be afraid of dying.

When water exploded around him on all sides he didn't register what was happening until he sunk. The water rushed into his open mouth greedily, filling all the empty space left behind by oxygen.

Ivo broke the surface of a large pool gasping and sputtering, struggling to get the water out of his lungs.

Moments later, two other shapes fell next to him, diving into the choppy water cleanly.

"Fucking bastard," Ivo gasped, aiming his anger at the back of Davi's head.

Davi gave him an amused half-smirk over the shoulder, and swam to the edge of the pool, hoisting himself over it with feline grace and into a lush patch of trimmed grass. Alina did the same next to him, her wiry arms straining to pull her wet weight out of the water. The two of them stood in the grass shaking off water and then turned with an expectant look towards Ivo, still threading it.

He cursed them both under his breath, and made a much less graceful exit out of the pool.

"Couldn't you have just told me to jump?"

Davi pushed the wet strands of his dark hair away from his face, pale eyes cutting a lazy arc over Ivo's figure. "Would you have done it?"

That brought him up short. Alina laughed in the face of his indecision.

Her laughter was interrupted by a loud screech.

They all turned towards the sound and found a woman in a wide glass doorway, clutching a towel under her arm. The woman was only wearing bikini bottoms, gold to match her arms and the extension of her neck and collarbones. Her eyes were cartoonishly large, proportionate only in relation to her breasts.

This time, Ivo didn't even flinch when Davi raised his gun and fired a perfect shot right into the woman's open mouth, splattering the glass doors and wall behind her in red.

"No one was supposed to be here," he said to Alina, making his way towards the open doorway. "Yunmi said the penthouse below the labs would be clear all day."

Alina followed after him, coming to a stop over the dead woman. From the distance, Ivo saw the green glow of her eyes. He came closer too, disgusted and enthralled at the same time by the ruin the bullet had made of the woman's face.

If Alina was scanning her, Ivo didn't know how she'd get any useful information out of the gaping red mass that was left.

"One of the husband's mistresses," she announced, just as her irises stopped spinning. "She lives just four apartments down. Well, lived."

She clicked her tongue. "I guess her apartment didn't have a pool."

They were standing in the large gardened terrace of a luxurious condo. The outside was dominated by a huge pool which went right up to the edge of the building, two smaller hot tubs, and a few elegant triangular sunshades. The space was artfully decorated, decadent and inviting even if the day wasn't particularly sunny.

Ivo looked up from the woman with the gold mods up to the blood splattered glass leading into the apartment, and in the reflection saw his face for the first time.

It was startling to realise he had no memory of what he looked like.

The face looking back at him was as unfamiliar as Davi's or Alina's. He had whiskey-coloured eyes, framed by thick lashes, a nubian nose, and red lips, the upper lip was fuller than the bottom and carved by a deep cupid's bow. Hair fell into his eyes and around his ears in loose brown waves. The smattering of freckles on his cheeks was a surprise, as was the complete absence of any mods or implants anywhere he could see.

Davi's voice startled him out of contemplating his reflection. "Comms still down," he said, stepping right into the condo.

The inside of the apartment was as luxurious as the outside. The ceilings were impossibly high, even though there were more floors above it. The floor was a milky marble speckled with silver veins, mahogany furniture fit in modules inside the walls, making the huge living room and open kitchen seem even more ample.

Alina whistled loudly. "These lux fucks never stop finding new ways to surprise me. Imagine having all this space and just leaving it empty." She kicked a flimsy looking silver sidetable, just for the pleasure of toppling it.

"That's the point. Having so much free space when so many live packed like sardines, or go homeless," Ivo said, moving through the room with propriety. He stopped in front of a wide refrigerator and opened booth doors with a tug. "Almost no food. They must eat out or order in every meal."

Alina had scrounged a large hexagonal backpack from somewhere and started shovelling the fridge's contents into it with her forearm. "We'll take it anyway."

Davi watched her in silence, eyebrows drawn in concentration. "How are we going down?" He nodded towards Ivo. "We only have two maintenance uniforms. It's going to call too much attention if he just trails after us barefoot and wearing a shirt as a skirt."

Alina dropped the backpack to the ground after emptying the fridge. She eyed Ivo up and down with a contemplative look while chewing on her thumbnail. "I have an idea, but you're not gonna like it." She clapped Davi on the shoulder and walked deeper into the apartment's bare guts.

---

"You're right, I don't like this," Davi hissed into Alina's ear while the three of them where stuck inside the apartment building's elevator with two other people.

Alina's idea had been for the three of them to wear something out of the condo's many closets, and go down the elevator and walk out the building's lobby's pretending to be residents.

She found floor-length dawn coats for the three of them -- completely unnecessary even in the thick of winter in São Paulo, but the cooling system built into the lining made them all the rage among the lux.

Davi proclaimed them good enough after confirming they hid all of their tattoos and other identifying marks. He got a pair of huge wrap-around silver sunglasses to hide the implants on his face, while Alina and Ivo wore fashionable air-purifying face masks that hid the lower half of their faces.

Ivo wished he'd gotten sunglasses for himself too, because it would make it easier to handle the scrutiny of the man currently giving him a suspicious look.

He was tall and bald, his appearance almost unremarkable compared to everyone else Ivo had seen, if not for his see-through neck. The entirety of it seemed to be made of glass, and the mechanical parts inside it, including the silver spine that connected to his head, were fully visible.

Maybe the man thought Ivo had been staring too long at his flashy mods because he gave him a derisive look and said, "I don't think I've ever seen any of you."

When that got him no reaction he pressed on, "Why the masks? The air quality today is fine, or do you have something to hide?" he asked, thin lips curling into a snide smirk.