Bethany grinned at him, flickering her forked tongue. “I’d have expected less outrage from one of the most notorious party-boys from the Hollywood scene.”
“I did a lot of crazy stuff, but I never ate anybody,” B said. He left the car.
“Sorry to make you uncomfortable,” Bethany said as Marla sat back down. “I didn’t expect the subject of my eating habits to come up.”
“Right,” Marla said. “But if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the benefit? If you’re mostly eating people who want, in their deepest hearts, to be prey animals, then it can’t be the usual contagious-magic thing where you devour the flesh of brave and noble adversaries in order to take their strength for your own.”
“True,” Bethany said. “It’s complicated, magically, but the gist of it is that I’m now at the absolute pinnacle of the food chain. I am the uncontested apex predator of San Francisco. I can eat anyone, and nothing can eat me. I run the Tenderloin, the most dangerous part of the city, and being the best predator in a neighborhood full of human predators is essential. You see?”
“Yeah,” Marla said thoughtfully. No mugger or killer or rapist would be able to take Bethany out in a dark alley or something, in part because she literally did eat people like them for breakfast.
“Plus, I like the taste,” Bethany said. “So now we wait?”
“I guess. Do you have a deck of cards?”
Bethany inclined her head toward the television monitor and the humming black electronics. “I’ve got some good video games.”
Marla’s entire experience with video games began and ended with a brief period working as an enforcer, many years before, when she’d had to occasionally beat protection money out of a pimp who ran a video arcade on the side. “You mean like Pac-Man?” Marla said.
“I think I can do better than that,” Bethany said. “Dalton made a game for me, set in San Francisco, where an avatar based on motion-captures of me goes on a rampage to kill off all the other bosses in the city—except Dalton, of course. It’s pretty good, and there’s a great chaos engine, so there’s a lot of randomization every time I play. Dalton calls it my hostile-takeover tutorial, because he made the AIs that run the enemy sorcerers base their behavior as closely as possible on the real thing. He said in five or ten more years he’d have fully sentient in-game avatars who really believed they were Finch, Umbaldo, the Celestial, all of them. Once we got to that point, it would be trivial to magically link the avatars to their real-life counter-parts, so I could hurt them at a distance—like versatile voodoo dolls that really work. Guess I’ll never see that version of the game now.”
Marla, who had pretty well followed the drift of that, said, “That’s funny, since Dalton believed this world was just a computer simulation, with all of us being self-aware avatars.”
“He had some strange ideas. But, to his credit, the irony didn’t escape him. Care to play?”
“How about I just watch you—”
The lights flickered, and the train slowed noticeably. “What the fuck?” Bethany muttered, rising and going to the control panel, which had gone dark. She pressed a few buttons and tugged a steel lever, which didn’t move. “Shit,” she said. “The controls are dead, and all my surveillance is out.” She jerked her head up, eyes widening, goat-slit pupils narrowing nearly to the point of vanishing. “And there’s somebody on the stairs.”
“That’s our Mutex,” Marla said, standing up. “Better get your Taser spray up and running.”
“It’s offline,” Bethany said. “I control it from here!” She slammed her hand against the control panel. “Fucking Dalton! This all used to be practically fail-safe, gears and wheels, pistons and engines, parts that moved, and I knew them better than I know the articulation of my own skeleton, it was a perfect retro-scientific steampunk wet dream, with magic filling in for the places where engineering broke down, but Dalton convinced me to upgrade to something modern and digital, all run with computers, and now somebody else has cracked my security, and they own my train!”
“Take it easy,” Marla said. “I’m surprised Mutex is so technologically savvy—I figured obsidian knives were about the pinnacle of his tool-using skills—but we’ll deal with it. So we don’t have aerosol-mist Tasers. We’ll improvise. You’re an apex predator, and I’m no defenseless bunny rabbit myself. We know he’s coming. He moves fast—blurry-fast—and he’s got a lot of poison frogs and surprisingly invincible hummingbirds, but we can beat him, if we get our shit together.”