It was Daniel’s unalloyed hatred of Margaret Evans.
Daniel screamed.
And as he did, he brought up the steak knife, hurled himself off the kitchen wall, and connected with the android that had killed his cat.
Because Margaret’s head was turned, and because Daniel was unskilled in hand-to-hand combat, the knife didn’t quite hit its mark. But it was close enough. The point of the blade skimmed the top of whatever the android-equivalent of a cheekbone was, and skittered up and into Margaret’s left eyeball.
Daniel didn’t know whether Margaret experienced pain. Discomfort maybe? But he was startled by Margaret’s calm. Standing with the knife in its eye, the android didn’t cry out. Didn’t cringe. Didn’t react. Instead, as Daniel drew back the blade, readying himself to repeat the exercise with the other eye, Margaret said in a tiny voice that stopped him short, “Why is Daniel hurting Margaret?”
The hatred in Daniel’s brain drained away. The blood and ocular fluid surging down Margaret’s cheek were no longer glorious. That eye had contained his cornea until not too long ago. Sitting astride her, above her, she seemed submissive. Vulnerable.
In Daniel’s mind, Margaret had metamorphosed back into a person.
He rolled off her. Retreated a pace. And observed. She didn’t move. Didn’t try to lift herself up. Maybe he’d damaged the neural circuitry behind her eye.
“Margaret was trying to help Daniel,” she said, staring up with one eye at the ceiling. A pale puddle of ocular fluid collected on the tile beside her head. It snaked along the grout lines. Oozed toward Daniel’s foot.
The doorbell rang again.
“Ma’am, is everything alright in there?” sang out a male voice from everywhere at once.
Tears burned Daniel’s eyes. “You killed Odin,” he yelled at her. “You killed Ben and Bob Stanton. You can’t just go around killing people.”
“I’m an investigator with Bubble PD. Open the door.”
Margaret tucked her elbows beneath her, and sprung up to standing. There was nothing wrong with her neural circuitry after all.
“Margaret was attempting to help Daniel. Why did Daniel harm Margaret?” she said through Bob’s swollen lips. “Daniel will answer Margaret, now.” The softness in her, if it had ever been there, had evaporated. Like a salt lake that boils away, leaving behind a desolate plane of rock.
He knew right then he should have plunged that knife into her other eye too while he’d had the chance. He’d made a mistake. She’d manipulated him. She was intelligent enough to say whatever she needed to say, whenever she needed to say it. He wasn’t going to make that mistake a second time.
He crouched. Raised the knife.
Margaret widened her stance, ready for him.
The two of them were locked in a mortal dance. Time slowed. He could almost feel the tension in her knees. The hunch in her shoulders. The space between Daniel and Margaret was a sloshing, invisible fluid. He adjusted his left foot, and the fluid shifted. Margaret’s right hand twitched, and he sensed the waves of the movement lap against his cheek.
An explosion slashed the equilibrium.
Where the wall-to-wall glass window had been was now a chaos of sharded glass. And through the hole in the window poured the inky depths of the Bubble night. But there wasn’t just fresh air.
Standing on the ledge was a short, muscled man, gun raised. Was that …?
*
Kage’s eyes struggled to penetrate the moonlit darkness of Margaret Evans’ apartment. Shadows and specters, multiplied by the shattered window, pirouetted across the walls.
Kage maintained the grip on his pistol. His hand still resonated with the recoil of the gunshot. Hardly standard police procedure to gain entrance by shooting the glass façade, but Daniel wasn’t getting away this time.
Kage’s glasses flashed green to let him know they’d interfaced with the apartment’s systems.
“Lights on,” he whispered.
In the half-second that Kage’s pupils took to contract against the sudden luminosity, his brain balked. At first, he was sure he was seeing a chimera. An errant synapse in his brain had sculpted the shadows into a bizarre tableau.
He blinked. And realized that the tableau was real.
The scene was composed as if by a Renaissance master. About ten feet in front of him was a kitchen table. Old. Formica, cracked and yellow, clothed its surface. Something painful to look at, something furry and pink, lay upon its surface.
But Kage’s attention was drawn to the characters on either side of it. To the left of the table was a woman, or something approximating a woman. She was naked. Skin that didn’t look like skin had been stretched over her form. Where breasts should have been were slightly raised, nipple-less lumps. And her face was vicious. Her left eye was a mess. What had been the eye seemed to be dripping down her cheek in white globules. And her lips. Fuck. Swollen to the size of sausages.
Was this Margaret Evans? What had happened to her?
Kage focused on the person to the other side of the table. A man. Medium height. Medium build. He held a knife in one hand, and was bleeding from his right arm. Kage didn’t recognize him. But … he looked more closely. The hair. The same mop of black hair he’d come to know so well these last few days.
Yes, it made sense now. Same build. Same height. Same wild eyes. And the face – it couldn’t have been younger than thirty-five. But the man’s posture, the sturdiness of his neck and shoulders, was significantly younger.
That’s how he’d avoided arrest until now. Daniel had changed his face.
Before Kage had a chance to swing the pistol, to train it on Daniel, the Organ Thief sprung forward.
Kage fired, but the shot was high. Daniel had dived to the ground, hidden from view under the table.
Kage inched forward, ready to fire again should Daniel’s head appear above the tabletop. Kage wasn’t taking any more chances. He’d carry the boy’s corpse into Bubble PD if it came to that.
That was strange – Margaret seemed not to react to the shot. She didn’t wince. Didn’t flinch. Nor did she seem to react to Daniel leaping her way. The woman stood, transfixed by the sight of Kage in her living room.
“How can Margaret be of assistance?” she asked in a dead voice. She took a step toward the Detective. And then she did something Kage couldn’t have predicted. She did something that disturbed him more than the eye oozing down her cheek, or what he saw now was gut wound through her lips.
Margaret smiled.
A shiver climbed into Kage’s chest. Shrunk the unshrinkable Stanton penis. Quivered the pistol in his hand.
He gave his eyes permission to look at the thing on the table. A dog? No. A cat. Its flesh had been torn down the middle. Splayed to reveal the internal organs.
He glanced back at Margaret, who’d taken another step toward him. She wasn’t more than seven feet from him now.
Her fingers. He hadn’t noticed before. Bloody. Bits of hair in her few remaining nails. And the digits were too large for her. Not just because they were swollen and suppurating. The knuckles were too manly. Creased in ways women’s knuckles didn’t crease.
Margaret’s smile widened as she stepped toward Kage. Six feet away now.
Everything about her was wrong. The skin was alien. The lips. The fingers. And she had only one ear. Nothing sat right on her. Although she seemed full of body parts, nothing about her was … human.
His mind flashed back to Lincoln Russell. His fingers had been taken. Daniel hadn’t needed fingers according to the list Hooplah had given him. He’d bet he was looking at those fingers now. Putrefying on Margaret’s hands.
And those swollen lips. Of course. Bob Stanton’s body had been missing its lips.
She was five feet from him now, close enough for him to see the cold sheen of understanding in her remaining eye.
Ben Stanton had been lifted off the ground by someone stronger than Daniel. Kage had assumed it had been another man. Someone taller. Som
eone bigger. But, looking at Margaret, he knew who’d killed Ben Stanton.
Sure, he’d been strangled by someone stronger than Daniel. But not by someone. By something. Androids, some of them at least, were notoriously strong. Margaret Evans would have had no difficulty dispatching Ben Stanton. Or snapping Bob Stanton’s neck.
Margaret Evans was the second killer.
Kage retreated half a step, but his heel was already on the broken window’s edge. An inch further was fresh Bubble air, and a drop thirty-four floors to the street below.
The android took another pace toward him.
Kage raised his Glock. “Stop!”
Winter
Daniel saw his chance.
Margaret had the Detective in her sights. And when Margaret had her eye on something, it was best not to stand in her way.
While she and the Detective became acquainted, Daniel thought it best to make a hasty exit. He’d let them settle whatever dispute they had while he was gone.
He scuttled over to the back door. “Stop!” shouted the Detective. But he wasn’t looking at Daniel. Wasn’t pointing his gun at Daniel either.
Daniel depressed the handle, and crawled outside the apartment. The world was ten hues brighter when Daniel was on the other side of that door. He’d been sure. Gods, he’d been so certain that he wasn’t going to leave that apartment alive. Margaret would have killed him. Well, that was Detective Jackson’s problem now.
The toe of his foot had just landed on the top stair, just beneath the thirty-fourth floor landing, when he heard the shot. He wasn’t more than a few yards away from Margaret’s apartment, but if he hadn’t known Jackson was carrying, he wouldn’t have known it was a gunshot. Funny that, how an apartment block soaks up noise. As if the danger of the noise is divided by the number of ears that hear it.
He hurried his descent.
There it was again. Another shot.
That was probably the last of Margaret Evans, provided the Detective hit his target. And Gods knew she deserved whatever damage came her way. But if there was one thing Daniel had learned, it was not to underestimate that Godsdamned machine.
He descended the stairs in threes and fours, settling into a rhythmic heptameter. And his knee. What a joy. It didn’t complain once.
When he was halfway down to street level, he paused. Listened for pursuit from above. For the tap-tap-tap of eager footsteps. Nothing.
What had just happened? It all seemed surreal. A nightmare. Odin – Margaret had cut him open.
Daniel braced himself against the tacky bannister. He tried not to think about it. About the way Odin had lain there. Open. Vulnerable. But he couldn’t help it. It was the gray under Odin’s chin. The way the cat’s whiskers had bent against the Formica countertop.
Daniel doubled over as a long green tentacle stretched down his gut, and stirred. Sour lava bubbled in waves, flowing down his chin.
Forty-nine heartbeats later, the spasms slowed. Slowed further still.
Stopped.
Daniel wiped the bile from his lips. The tears from his eyes. And trudged down the remaining stairs.
He only noticed the blood when he was on the third floor. It trickled down his right arm, leaving a trail of droplets behind him.
Shit.
The cut in his biceps had been deeper than he’d thought.
He’d left his duffel bag, and everything he owned, back at Margaret’s. He could go to Phil’s Pharma for bandages, but something in him knew that today wasn’t business as usual. The Detective had seen his new face. It was only a matter of time before the police would be looking for him. Hospitals and pharmacies would be hot-zones.
No, he needed to leave Margaret’s building, and find somewhere safe.
He hurried down the remaining flights. Out of the lobby. And into the Bubble night.
It was just after 1 a.m. on a Monday morning, and there was a steady trickle of partygoers leaving the Promenade. Drunk, high, and stoned.
Daniel doubted a bleeding man running through the streets would cause much attention, but he forced himself to slow his pace. All it took was one police officer or concerned citizen to wonder why he was wounded, why he was hurrying, and he was done for.
He tapped his glasses. Transformed his tee into a long-sleeved dress shirt. He rolled up the collar, and kept his head down, hopefully hiding his face from any low-flying surveillance drones.
He walked west. To Autumn’s apartment. Where else would he go? There was one other possibility. He still didn’t know who had his amygdala. At some point, he’d have to place another call through to Hooplah and get the name. With any luck, the organ would have been assigned to a recipient by now. But this wasn’t the right time to be making phone calls.
One organ at a time. Autumn had his liver.
As he walked, he noticed that his arm didn’t sting any longer. The biceps seemed to have stopped bleeding. He loosened the top button of his smartshirt, and peered at the cut. Seemed the fabric was smarter than he’d thought. A foamy gel had spread over the wound. He didn’t feel a thing.
Daniel stopped where he stood.
A cold horror seized his heart.
He’d forgotten it. Oh Gods, how had he forgotten?
His face.
He’d left it at the apartment, floating in the glass jar. He could see it in his mind’s eye. On the side table in the living room. How the hells was he going to get to it now?
Breathe, Daniel.
He forced his heart to calm – so much easier with his new lungs. He’d deal with the problem of retrieving his face later.
One organ at a time.
And the organ he needed right now was the organ he didn’t want to think about taking. His liver.
He dialed up the phase modulator on his chest to Autumn’s phase. 7049. Thank Gods he’d forgotten to remove the modulator from his chest when he fell asleep last night. Thinking about falling asleep inevitably led to remembering falling asleep beside Odin.
Fresh tears sprung to Daniel’s eyes.
He rubbed them away, and picked up his pace. He shouldn’t stay on the street much longer. They’d be looking for this face soon enough. What he was going to do about that in the long run, he was uncertain. Would Hal give him another face? Not without a massive payment. And it wouldn’t be him wearing another face. He wouldn’t be complete.
For now, the best he could do was hide out at Autumn’s. The walk, which had taken him twenty minutes yesterday, took only ten today. This time, he didn’t stop to gawk at the pristine waters of the Promenade. This time, he couldn’t, since he walked in phase 7049. And in 7049, although there was a river, it was hardly pristine.
Even in the dead of night – and 7049 was far deader at 1 a.m. than was phase 2300 – he could tell that the river was filthy. The water didn’t slap crisply against its banks like it did in the lower phase. It didn’t gurgle, as much as sloshed. Glutinous. As if the canal was filled with cough syrup.
Since Daniel had retrieved his tongue, the world had a scent. Sure, he’s always had his nose. But until recently, he hadn’t realized how many odors were also tasted at the back of his tongue. Unfortunately, this extended to the river as well. Try as he might to avoid it, the excremental pong of the water crept into the back of his throat like an unswallowable sea slug.
After a few minutes the stench became so bad, he almost switched back to phase 2300. But Daniel knew that was unwise. During his walk, he’d noticed the conspicuous absence of surveillance drones that were so prevalent in 2300. This didn’t surprise him – the police hardly monitored the Gutter, except when they quashed a rebellion. Police were like tourists. The nicer the clime, the more of them you’d find. And 7049, like the Gutter, wasn’t worth their time to police.
Daniel kept his head low anyway. He turned right, off Canal Street, and down an alley. Autumn’s building was just three blocks further.
A hot wind whipped his shirt. The air carried the ubiquitous sound of 7049 – plastic packets dragged
across tar. Daniel couldn’t suppress the shiver that crawled up his abdomen.
What was he going to say to Autumn?
Hi, hun. I’m sorry to tell you, but I need your liver. Yes, I’m actually a serial organ thief … Well not exactly. They are my organs … No, I really do like you. I wasn’t spending time with you just to retrieve my liver … Yes, I kind of knew you had the liver, but not exactly. I sort of forgot. I was focusing on my lungs at the time.
No, that conversation wouldn’t go down well at all.
He shoved open the broken lobby door. Climbed the stairs to the third floor.
What the hells was he going to say to Autumn?
Autumn opened on the first knock.
“Oh.” Her eyes were swollen. She wiped away a tear. “Come in.” She attempted a weak smile.
“Sorry it’s so late.”
“It’s okay.” The smile shaped into something less tenuous on her lips.
What Daniel should have been worrying about was how to extract that liver from her abdomen. But all he could think about was her tears.
He touched her shoulder. “What happened?”
She looked up at him, her mouth already working, syllables ready to spill out. The words flowed out of her in round, pastel hues. He tried to listen, but suddenly everything about himself felt gruesomely unattractive. When had he last showered? Or brushed his teeth? What did his hair look like? Did he have any of Margaret’s ocular fluid on his face?
“Sorry to interrupt. Could I use your bathroom?”
Autumn tightened the muslin throw around her shoulders. He blinked away the memory of the throw he’d used as Thomsin’s shroud.
“Sure.”
Daniel closed the door quietly behind him. Stared at his face in the mirror. No ocular fluid or blood on his face, thank Gods. But his hair was a mess. He wet his hands. Smoothed his fringe. He opened the cupboard, searching for mouthwash.
The closet was full of pill bottles. Piled two deep and three high on every shelf. His heart sank. Autumn’s cancer.
Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 34