Bella nodded. “Cohen?” Li looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Bella said, and when Li searched her face she saw that she really was sorry. “He was … kind.”
Li checked her rebreather gauge instead of answering. She checked her internals, found with relief that at least the basic programs were working, and ran a quick air-use calculation.
“We’ve got to go,” she said. “We have twenty-eight minutes to get to Mirce and the fresh canisters. Maybe less.”
She glanced at McCuen. His face looked shockingly pale, but maybe it was just the lamplight. “I … didn’t see much of anything,” he said. “Just stuck around to pick up the pieces.”
“You didn’t miss much,” she said, hefting her rebreather.
“Catherine?” Bella asked. Where had she picked that habit up? “Can we make it to Mirce? How long will it take us?”
“Less than twenty-eight minutes,” Li said. “Or forever. Let’s go.”
The mine had come alive. It rumbled, rang, sang. The sound resonated in Li’s chest, set her fingers twitching and her teeth buzzing. And along the intraface, beyond her control but still flickering in and out of life according to some obscure rhythm, coursed a bustle and roar of high-speed traffic that shorted out her internals and flashed cryptic status messages across her retinas like tracer bullets.
She probed the intraface as they walked. It seemed to work regardless of whether Cohen was on the other end of it. At one point she almost managed to access the memory palace and its operating systems. But the framework wouldn’t evolve, and she ended up cut off, stranded in a blind alley of the loading program. Cohen himself was a ghost presence: an absence given flesh and substance by her own body’s refusal to admit that he was no longer part of her. That feeling, the sense that he was both there and not there, reminded her of stories about amputees who still kept waking up years later feeling the pain of lost limbs.
They reached the rendezvous at twenty-nine minutes and twenty seconds. Bella’s rebreather, which she had used sparingly, had four minutes to run. Li had already given her own rebreather to McCuen. Mirce wasn’t there to meet them, but as they turned the corner they saw the fresh tanks glimmering in the darkness.
“We’re still one tank short,” Li said, counting the tanks. She strained her ears for the sound of ropes and canisters being lowered, but heard only creaking lagging and the ominous silence of the hung-up roof.
She dropped to the ground beside the nearest tank and began hurriedly booting up the onboard comp and connecting the feedlines.
She couldn’t get the air gauge on the tank to light up, no matter what she did. And she didn’t have time to fiddle. She put the mask to her mouth, sucked at it experimentally. No. It wasn’t just the gauge. She wasn’t getting anything.
“What’s wrong?” McCuen asked. There was a nervous edge to his voice that hadn’t been there even when he’d watched his last tank running down before they reached the drop-off point.
“I don’t know,” Li said.
Then the gauge finally flickered into life. The arrow dropped into the red, quivered and stayed there. She fumbled for the fill valve, and when she touched it, it spun loosely at the touch of her fingers. No pressure.
And suddenly she did know what was wrong. Someone had opened the valve and emptied the tank. All the tanks.
They had no air.
“Mirce!” she shouted, already up and running down the twisting drift.
* * *
She found her twelve meters past the next bend, her hand still on the rope, the final canister of compressed air lying on the ground beside her. Li looked into the still-clear, still-blue eyes, looked at the head turned a little sideways, baring the strong, clean line of her jaw under the stretched skin. She thought, for no reason she wanted to remember, of magpies’ wings.
The cut ran diagonally across Mirce’s throat, from the collar of her coverall to the soft flesh below her ear. She had bled out fast. In seconds, probably. No sign of a fight; the spreading pool around her could have been water or rehab fluid, except for the rich copper-and-rust smell of it.
“Why?” Bella whispered. “Why?”
“To stop us,” Li said, wondering how that calm professional’s voice could be speaking out of the whirlwind inside her.
“What do we do?” McCuen asked.
“We find whoever killed her and take their air.”
* * *
When it finally happened, she was so ready for it that she knew some deep part of herself must have been expecting it. Reading the accumulation of clues, each one insignificant in itself, that told her they were being followed. Listening for the echo that wasn’t an echo. Waiting for the muffled step behind them.
What she wasn’t prepared for—hadn’t even suspected—was the flash of quickly suppressed recognition in McCuen’s eyes.
She’d made a fool’s mistake, she told herself as the hot flush of adrenaline flooded through her. McCuen had betrayed her. Somehow, by some hook she’d probably never know about, Haas had turned him. The proof was right there in front of her, in those wide-open little-boy-blue eyes.
She called a break, drifted to a stop against an outcropping in the passage wall, stretched, and sat down a few feet from him with her back safely against solid stone.
“How could they have known where to find her?” McCuen asked. He talked fast, seizing on the first thought that came to mind, trying to gloss over the footsteps that he too had heard, that he too had been waiting for. “I mean, we were fine before that. She makes the meet, and we all get out.”
“Except Cohen.”
She could see in McCuen’s face that he still didn’t know who she was talking about. He had never met Cohen, she realized, probably never thought of him as more than a piece of equipment. “Well, yeah,” McCuen said. “But … you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” she said. “I know.”
She strained her ears, listening to the darkness beyond the lamplight. Everyone has a weakness, she told herself. And their weakness would be their wire.
A flickering double vision swept over her as she tried to hold streamspace and realspace in her mind simultaneously. It was stomach-wrenching, but she couldn’t afford to drop all the way out of realtime. Not with McCuen three feet away from her and an unknown pursuer waiting at the edge of the lamplight.
She stepped into the memory palace.
The door was broken. The fountain had run dry. A storm howled over the turrets, setting roof tiles rattling and shutters flapping. Whole wings of the palace were open to wind and sky. Locked doors confronted her at every turn, and even when she got past them, she found only rain-strafed ruins behind them.
She couldn’t find the communications programs, couldn’t even figure out which networks they were on. She thought about dropping into the numbers to look, but the memory of the disaster Cohen had averted last time stopped her.
Then she heard something.
Footsteps. Echoing around the next turn in the hall, up the next flight of stairs, across the floor over her head. Footsteps and a mocking quicksilver laugh flickering across the dead link like heat lightning.
She tracked the sound through cold dark halls, across vast, rubble-choked courtyards. She’d almost given up when she stumbled through a half-open door and saw the arches of the cloister, the windwhipped, moonlit tangle of wild roses.
She stepped out from under the arcade, one hand up to shield her face from the wind. Someone was sitting on the bench under the roses. She saw the tarnished copper of rain-soaked curls. She saw Roland’s golden eyes glinting out of the shadows.
She ran.
Both of them were cold and slick with rain, and a dead leaf had blown against his face like a little black moth so that she had to brush it off before she could kiss him. “You came,” she whispered.
And then she was kissing him, searching for him with lips, hands, heart, her mind stripped of everything but her need for him.
He took hold of her
shoulders and pushed her away from him. She looked into the golden eyes and saw … nothing.
“No,” she whispered. “ No.”
“He couldn’t come. I’m supposed to tell you he’s sorry.”
The rain stopped. The darkness around them deepened. She glimpsed tall windows flung open to the lowering clouds, and realized that they stood on the threshold of the hall of doors.
Roland pointed to a door like all the others. “There,” he said.
Then he was gone.
She pushed it open and stepped into a darkness blacker and more storm-charged than the sky outside. “Who is it?” a voice said.
It was not a friendly voice. Not a friendly question.
“Me,” she said. “Catherine. Don’t you know me?”
“Oh, yes. We know you.”
The lights came on. She was alone in an empty room.
“Why did you come here?” the voice asked. It was the walls, or whatever was behind the walls, speaking to her.
“I need to access the AMC station net.” Silence.
“I need to.”
“And why should we help you?”
We?
“Because—”
Another voice spoke. Words she couldn’t make out. Whispers. Suddenly the room was boiling with whispers. She stepped back, feeling for the door behind her. “But Cohen said—”
“Yes.” A new voice now, even colder than the first. “Tell us about Cohen. Tell us what Cohen said to you.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she breathed.
“Wasn’t it?”
She felt for the doorknob again, her hand trembling. She touched something, gripped it. But instead of metal, she felt skin.
Someone shoved her forward into the center of the room, and she fell on her knees, hands pressed over her ears to shut out the hateful, hissing accusations.
“It’s not my fault!” she screamed, over and over again. But she couldn’t block the voices out. It was her fault, they kept saying. It was all her fault. All of it.
* * *
“Are you all right?” McCuen asked.
She looked at him, chest heaving. She glanced at Bella, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Glitch on my commsystem.”
Then she heard Cohen talking to her.
* * *
She opened her eyes in VR to find Hyacinthe taking her hand, drawing her to her feet, tugging her back toward the terrible room.
But this was no Hyacinthe she had ever known. This was a mere memory dump, an interactive tutorial triggered by her entry into the memory palace. It explained how to access networks, bank accounts, corporate records, how to run an empire it kept insisting was hers now. It explained everything except the only thing that mattered: that if she was here, if this program was running, Cohen must be gone.
“I still need to get into the AMC net,” she said when he was done. She felt numb, as if her voice were coming from someone else’s throat.
But the others wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t do it for her. And even with Hyacinthe’s help she couldn’t make them do it. “Cohen wanted this!” she said finally, frightened and furious.
That got a bitter laugh from a voice she hadn’t even heard before: a powerful, saturnine presence who made it clear that he despised her so much he hadn’t bothered to participate before. “Cohen wanted you too,” the voice told her. “And look what that got him.”
As it spoke, she felt a burning jealousy behind the words. A child’s jealousy? A lover’s? Or was this some other thing entirely, some splinter of Cohen’s inhuman soul? But this was no child, she realized. It was Cohen’s old communications AI—the only entity in the shifting ruin of his networks that was capable of controlling its fellows.
She started to answer, to argue. But before she could form a thought, a wave of anger battered her, cold as ice water, and she was cut off, out of the link, kicked off the intraface.
* * *
“Where are you going?” McCuen asked.
“To take a piss.” She forced a grin. “You want to come?”
He flushed. Like a little boy, for Christ’s sake. But he stayed put. And that was all she had really wanted from him.
She stepped into the shadows and slipped her butterfly knife from her belt, relearning its balance, feeling the blade blossom, lilylike, from the cross-gripped handle.
She could smell their pursuer. She could feel him with the hairs of her arms, with her raised hackles, with the skin of her face. She could have found him by touch if she’d had to. She was deep into her own territory now. She didn’t need maps, not even Cohen’s maps. She was about to murder someone. And she’d known how to do that for as long as she could remember.
She eased around the corner, stopped, listened, stopped again. She weighed the dark and the silence, took their measure.
She took her own measure too. Heavy-soled boots that could crunch against grit or scrape on rock. Cloth that could rustle and whisper treacherously. Loose buckles, loose straps, loose bootlaces. And her own breathing, sweating, shedding body, casting off trace faster than her skinbugs could scramble to camouflage it. She’d heard it said that Earth’s extinct carnivores had no scent, but that was a lie, like so many other things people said about the planet. The truth was they’d just known how to hide their scent from those they preyed on—a last, deadly secret.
She found her prey two meters past the bend in the drift. He sat in the dark, back to the wall, rebreather hanging lose around his jaw, infrared goggles laid on the ground beside him. He was eating.
She inched along the wall, arms out, knife ready. Waiting for him to turn. Waiting for the telltale catch of breath that would tell her he’d heard her.
It never came.
He struggled at the last, standing up, trying to throw her off as her left hand grasped his head and stretched his throat taut. But by then it was over.
* * *
“Christ!”
McCuen. With the gun in his hand that she should have, damn her, taken from him. She let the dead man slide down the length of her body to the ground.
“You killed him,” McCuen said, his voice a ragged whisper. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe you’d do it.”
Li shook her head. Her ? What was he talking about?
Bella came around the corner before she could ask him. She saw the fallen guard, gave a strangled cry, stopped and drew back, her hand over her mouth.
“Go up the drift and wait for me,” Li told her. “You’re just in the way here.” And I don’t want you to see this. I don’t want anyone to see it.
Bella started to speak. Then her eyes slid away from Li’s. She turned and walked back up the drift, leaving Li and McCuen alone.
They stared at each other. His betrayal and her knowledge of it hung in the air between them. He made a move, just the slightest flexing of his ankles.
She lunged, still hoping to keep the fight quiet and not alert the other three pursuers. She feinted toward McCuen’s face with the knife, and he threw up his left arm to cover himself, just as she’d known he would. He kept the gun more or less pointed at her while he did it, but he lost time. And in that instant, she reached up, wrapped her left hand around his wrist and broke it.
He screamed. The gun fired high and wild, then dropped from his hand and rattled along the slate floor into the darkness. She heard it come to rest behind her, fixed the point in her hard files, and set a subroutine to track it so she could retrieve it when she needed to.
She cursed her own slowness. That one shot could set Kintz on her before she had time to take care of McCuen. And even if it didn’t, she no longer had surprise on her side. Now they would know she was coming for them.
She brushed her regrets aside to focus on the job in front of her. McCuen was crippled. Not just by his lack of internal wetware or his broken wrist, but because Li could push back her mask and breathe freely, for a few moments at least, while he had to keep struggling to suck air through the
cumbersome mouthpiece. He’d never fought her either. Not for real. He had no idea what he was up against.
Forty seconds into the fight she landed a clean kick, and McCuen’s leg collapsed under him with a grinding snap that told her she’d found her target. She was on top of him before he hit the ground, thumb and forefinger locked on his windpipe.
She lifted her knife hand to his face and ripped off his infrared goggles, leaving him blind. Then she straddled him, got a good purchase with her boot soles, sat on his stomach. As she did it, she had a flash of Voyt doing the same thing to Sharifi, and it turned her stomach.
“Who did Haas send?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play with me, Brian.” She dug her fingers under his windpipe and squeezed. “Who’d he send? Kintz? He the one who cut Mirce’s throat for no fucking good reason? Nice friends you’ve got.”
He was choking. She let up a little—just enough so he could talk.
“I didn’t know they were going to kill her,” he said when he could breathe again. “I would never have …” He swallowed, Adam’s apple jerking. “It’s not like you think it is.”
“Oh? How is it then? What’s Haas paying you?” McCuen’s face twisted in anger. “No one’s paying me.” “Then talk to me.”
McCuen put on a resisting-interrogation face. A little boy playing at cowboys and cybercops. Li could have screamed with frustration.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said. She flicked her knife under McCuen’s rebreather feed, pulling the thin tube taut.
“God, no!” he pleaded. He was panicking, a trapped animal thrown back on instinct and adrenaline. She felt his legs twitching under her as if his backbrain believed he could overpower ceramsteel-enhanced muscles, outtwitch hardwired reflex. “Don’t make me die like that. Please, Li!”
She remembered her father, blue-gummed, drowning in his own bile. The growth had filled 20 percent of his remaining lung when they took the last X ray. The doctor had said it was bigger than most of the babies born in Shantytown that year.
Her knife hand was shaking. She took the information in coldly, as if it were someone else’s hand. Dealt with it. Rerouted. Adjusted. “Then talk,” she said, and let the blade scrape along the thin sheathing of the feedline.
Spin 01 - Spin State Page 48