I lift her head by the hair of her mohawk. "She's breathing, that's about it."
"That's all I need," Pinkie says, "Patch me through to your visor." His voice creeps through the headphones, layers upon layers of it.
His presence alone is enough to induce a regular street-thug, a young punk, into a quivering mess. But, once he talks? There's a darkness that flows from him that few can handle.
I nod to Conrad, and she punches a few buttons to patch Pinkie through.
A shiver runs down my spine. "What do you want me to do?"
"Stay quiet while I fire up the circuits, read the smoke."
The tunnel's silent other than the creak and moan of broken infrastructure, and the sound of Pinkie huffing on the Shroom, doing what he does, going down the path only he knows. Deep down, somewhere dark, somewhere none of us ever want to visit, or, when necessary, from which we fight to break away. He took me there, once, when I joined the clan, that's the way he knows if you'll make it. I never want to go back.
Pinkie's different. He treads that line; he walks to the edge of the abyss when we all scramble to escape it. He uses the Shroom to see things, to see into things, into people, and now, he's going deep.