Free Katja from the Punk Band by Simon Logan

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    Kohl shouts for Misha and the woman barges in, hooks Nikolai cleanly and catches him before he falls to the ground. She holds him up so Kohl can sneer into his face.
    “You bring me the rest of what you owe me by tomorrow night, Nikolai. Then we can talk further.”
    And then Misha drags the little piece of shit away and the door slams shut and Kohl slumps back into his seat.
    And it’s not until later that he realizes how stupid he has been.
    But he does realize, eventually, as he’s still sitting in his workshop stewing over being forced into helping Szerynski when all he wants is for his life to be calm, controlled, ordered. To make sense.
    He realizes that there’s no need to risk anything at all.
    Szerynski wants the vial. He wants Kohl to get it for him.
    He didn’t specify, however, that it should be Kohl personally, who gets it.
    Szerynski is getting Kohl to do his dirty work so why shouldn’t Kohl do the same? Dog eats dog eats dog eats dog and so on, and Kohl says to himself, as he walks away from Nikolai’s run-down apartment building: “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
    Nikolai, he realizes, has his place.
    The joystick junkie fitted neatly into the socket Szerynski created, as easily as a lithium ion battery would clip into the motherboard of a games cabinet.
    So Kohl, he’s back at the arcade now but not hidden away in his workshop, instead knee-deep in pixel-air and gamer-shouts. Bathing in the buzz generated by a room full of spaced-out kids and groggy old timers who can no longer play because their fingers have become too gnarled.
    Many know who Kohl is, many don’t. But he’s not after recognition.
    The glow of the machines bleeds into the air before him, a strange side effect of the goggles he wears, and at times he is walking through these colourful tides and swears he feels them wash over him. And he is smiling because he is thinking about Nikolai bringing him the vial in return for a pittance of product, risking his itching junkie neck for a couple of hits.
    And he is thinking about then calling Szerynski and giving the vial to him and in return getting whatever reward the chemical lord has in mind with little real risk to Kohl himself.
    And he is thinking about rearranging the cabinets sometime soon, giving them a fresh sense of order, organizing them by height or age or game-play style.
    He sits on the ledge created by the high backs of the booth seats, watching the gamers, listening to the cries of joy and annoyance and waiting, just waiting for Nikolai to come back to him with the vial, and he has no idea how wrong things are about to go.

PART FIVE
BEFORE THINGS WENT WRONG

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     
    He uses the tattoos as guides and presses the end of the scalpel blade into his skin where the design curves from one tribal spike to another. Drags the blade along the arc, drawing a line of blood that rises through the cut and chases the implement like fire running along a kerosene trail.
    He pauses, wipes the blood away, then starts again at another part of the design. He’s in lab 34, one of the smaller rooms toward the back of the complex and away from the permanent partying that takes place in the main warehouse where he would, later that night, put on a display of either suspension or kavadi. It will depend on how he feels nearer the time.
    The room is dark, save for the surgical light he points down at his arm, laid out upon an empty instrument tray. He wipes away new blood as it rises to the surface, then with his free hand picks up a bottle of India ink and offers it to the girl sitting on the worktop beside him.
    She’s made a vague attempt at putting her clothes back on after that afternoon’s activities but looks as if she got bored after a few minutes or perhaps hadn’t had full control of her limbs. She’s missed one of the arm straps of her t-shirt and one of her stockings has slouched back down to calf-level, like a half-shed skin. She doesn’t