Free Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea

alley, Wire checks herself. In addition to no shoes on her gnawed feet, her pockets are empty. No credits, nothing save for the itchy, undersized jumper given to her back on The Sixty. A throbbing ache in her jaw telegraphs an additional misery. Using her tongue to probe, she realizes some enterprising scum has pried loose two of her molar fillings. She lifts a hand to the side of her skull, and it becomes apparent why her vision is muddled. The surface hardware of her ocular implant has been pried free and, like cacti needles, raw frays of ripped-out filaments barb outward.
    A few meters in front of her and on her immediate right there’s a dwarf pushing a bamboo cart on vulcanized rubber tires. The dwarf’s head is strikingly disproportionate to the rest of his small body, and his tattooed skull is speckled with a raised paisley pattern. Laden with sealed packages of homemade candied foodstuffs and several tiered racks of multicolored tubes of super-tea, the cart is an oasis. Wire sways forward and grabs a tube of tea. She twists off the tube’s cap and gulps all the warm liquid down as the dwarf barks.
    Wire studies the raised paisley pattern on the dwarf’s head: a shark and a crocodile circling each other in a dance of death.
    Wire finishes her super-tea and looks around. The larger thoroughfare at the intersection amounts to a street market in full swing: a sweltering bedlam of marquees, makeshift stalls, and oily dung fires that run as far as she can see. Merchandise of all kinds. Reed rugs, repurposed electronics, bone bracelets, pickled baby fire lizards in huge translucent flagons, and hundreds of oversized baskets of rice. The choked ambiance is predatory and chaotic, and suddenly the dwarf gives Wire’s hip a hard push. The hell if she understands the charmless, clickety vowels juddering from his toothy pie-hole, but Wire makes a motion that she’s willing to pay for her tea and then drapes a hand around her back like she’s going for a wallet. The dwarf grins expectantly.
    Wire lets go of the empty tea tube, swings a
shutō-uchi
strike and breaks three cervical vertebrae in the dwarf’s neck. Like a puppet cut loose from his strings, the small man shrivels to the ground.
    Wire’s earlier appraisal of the market’s nature is right on the money.
    No one cares.
    She reaches down and hauls the dwarf up by his soggy armpits. The man’s unctuous frame is heavier than she expects, but Wire sits him on the edge of the bamboo cart without his body toppling over. Wire pats his cheekbones a few times, mimicking an effort to rouse him as if he’s just fainted and then ransacks his pockets. In a right pocket, she finds an electronic credit receiver and a satchel of fiber coins. Wire sets these items aside on the cart’s ledge, and searching the dwarf’s threadbare morning coat she discovers a cheap leather purse. When Wire draws back the talon zipper on the purse a crystal cube the size of a shot glass is activated and rises in the air. Within the cube there’s an image revolving in a three hundred and sixty degree spin—a sickly woman and two children. It’s a family portrait keepsake, and the soft, hollow notes of a bonang kettle can be heard.
    Wire stuffs the cube back in the leather purse and discards it under the cart. Lifting the dwarf from the cart’s edge, she looks for a place nearby to dispose of his body. She sees a pile of wooden pallets being broken down by a man who feeds the split pallet pieces into a fire. Wire props the dwarf against the pile of pallets, and the man doesn’t give her a second glance as he cracks another board over his knee.
    Wire takes up the cart’s cloth-wrapped crossbar. As she pushes forward into the market throngs, her mind races—thinking:
priorities.
    First, she needs to access her personal credit accounts and data stores, and fast. The dwarf’s fiber coins, his electronic credit receiver, plus all the merchandise on his cart should be more than enough to score her