Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

line. She had a face they constantly referred to as “sweet” and legs that made them stare. She’d blushed hard when she had gone topless for the first time, feeling ridiculous in an outfit constructed of rhinestones, sequins, and feathers, all built upon a soft bedrock of black nylon. But she’d done it, and she’d kicked and strutted her way onto the stage.
    Holly didn’t mind the dancing, after the initial shock of baring her breasts in public. She’d always kept in shape and found the job easier than dealing cards for hours on end. At least it went by faster.
    But trouble quickly came again. This time, it was a murder that interrupted her life. There had been a growing number of strange killings in town. When they weren’t talking about boyfriends, bragging about big tips or snaking each other with gossip, the showgirls talked about little else. One rumor that made her a little sicker than the others was the story of a tourist from Boston. According to the coroner, he’d fallen from twenty stories up and pulverized every bone in his body—but somehow he’d landed in his own hotel room. They’d found him splattered on the bathroom floor. She’d discounted the story as too incredible to believe.
    Then came the night Holly found Lavita, a showgirl who claimed to be from Jamaica, but who was rumored to really be from Houston. Holly found Lavita dressed in her sequins and feathers, facedown under the makeup table. Holly described her as resembling a roadkill pheasant, with her tail feathers pluming up from her head and butt.
    Holly made the mistake of turning her over, thinking maybe she could help. There was blood everywhere, and Holly should have known Lavita was dead, but she had to check anyway.
    It was horrible. Face smashed in, the front of her body flattened as if she’d been crushed in a trash compactor—but only the front of her. Holly let go of the body as if she’d been stung, but instead of flopping back down into the pool of blood, the corpse had rolled slowly over onto its back in a grotesque, boneless fashion.
    By this time, Holly was screaming her head off. Cooling blood ran down her fingertips. She’d thought of the man from Boston who had apparently fallen from a great height onto a bathroom floor. This was similar, if not quite the same. People soon flooded the room and asked her questions she couldn’t answer. The police talked to her at length, but she had nothing useful for them. They stared at her with hard-eyed irritation. The killings were freaking them out, she thought. Like mean dogs, they had turned their fear into anger and suspicion.
    The rest of the dancers had shunned Holly after that. Somehow, finding her there with blood on her face, having obviously disturbed the corpse, had put her into the untouchable category. She learned then what it must have been like to be declared the village witch when the crops failed.
    When new girls came to audition, the bosses treated Holly like old meat. She’d pushed away their grasping hands on many occasions and she thought they’d come to accept she wasn’t going to go for that kind of thing…but she was wrong. When the new girls were hired, no one had a kind word for the girl who had found Lavita. They dropped her off the list. After less than two months as a showgirl, she was back on the street again.
    Her next job took longer to land. Money was tightening up around town as it headed into the cooling, windy period that passed for autumn in the desert. Her rent money came due and she found herself hiding in a dark apartment, listening to hammering and threats from outside her door until her landlord gave up and stomped away, muttering curses. She knew eviction was coming, as relentlessly as the desert winds.
    Holly had headed down to the end of the Strip that night—to the seedy side—then walked a few blocks away from the boulevard. There she found bars with patrons who didn’t want to be identified. The streets were dimmer, as every other pale orange sodium-vapor streetlight had been knocked out. She walked into the first strip club she found, which turned out to be Tony’s place. She found the Pole Dance Palace discouraging, but she was desperate. The establishment specialized in something called “friction dancing,” and after a ten-minute audition followed by a five-minute training, she found herself out on the floor.
    Friction dancing was just what it sounded like and she was having a hard time with it until