Jani slipped the strap from her wrist and hurled the ax-hammer. It hit Lescaux high in the chest—his shooter arm jerked up, the momentum curving him backward. He cried out as he tumbled over the railing.
Jani sagged to one knee, then down on her side. The room tilted, spun, darkened around the edges. She could see the ax-hammer from where she lay. It had fallen near the edge of the scaffold, the handle and part of the head coated with Lescaux’s blood. What bare metal remained reflected the light from a safety illumin. The shine drew Jani’s tunneling stare, fading and flaring as a tremor shook her body and her eyes closed.
She heard. Hearing was the hardiest sense, and she heard. The squeak and flex of the ladder. Footsteps approaching, the scaffold floor shuddering beneath their weight. She tried to get up, to move away. It was Lescaux. Had to be. He had survived the fall and come to kill her—come to make sure—
She opened her eyes when she felt the hands. Gold-skinned and long-fingered, they ran along her body from her head down, probing shooter-burned tissue and dislocated joints and cracked bone with the sure touch of a medic.
Then the probing ceased. The hands disappeared from Jani’s view, then returned to pick up the ax-hammer. The last thing she saw before she blacked out were the hands bundling the weapon in a length of patterned brown cloth.
“Look at the light.”
Jani raised her grudging gaze. “Didn’t we just go through this a couple of days ago?”
Calvin Montoya glared at her over the top of the lightbox. “Humor me.”
Jani stared into the blackness that hid the rest of Montoya’s body from view. She gripped the edge of the bed as the first red lights flickered, then weaved from side to side as the progression continued.
“Oh, you’re tailing quite nicely on your own. No takedown for you.” Montoya shut down the lightbox and rolled it to the far side of the examining room. “Although I really wish you would reconsider this takedown-avoidance method of yours. Being attacked twice in three days is a bit much, don’t you think?” He wore casual trousers and a pullover instead of eveningwear. A quiet night at home with his girlfriend was all Jani had disrupted this time.
Jani stared down at her stockinged feet, flexing her toes and knocking her heels together. The orderly who had prepped her had confiscated her blood-spattered boots, but had let her keep her socks. He had also made her exchange her bloodstained coverall for a set of bright purple Neoclona work clothes. She looked like a walking bruise, and judging from the stabs and aches that radiated up and down her left side, she’d feel like one in a few hours. But at least I can sit upright and bitch about the fact. She glanced up at Montoya, who downloaded data from the lightbox into his recording board. “How’s—Roni McGaw?”
Montoya didn’t look up. “I don’t know.”
“So why don’t you find out?”
“Because you are my concern right now. After I take care of you, I will visit Neuro and find out what I can about Ms. McGaw.” Montoya looked up and sighed. “All right?”
Before Jani could respond that, no, it really wasn’t all right, the door swept aside and Val blew in like a lake breeze. He wore dark blue trousers and a green and blue patterned sweater and looked like he had been somewhere spreading charm. “’Lo.” He sidestepped over to Montoya and peeked over his shoulder at Jani’s chart. “How is she?”
Jani waved at him. “She’s sitting right here and can answer for herself, thanks.”
Val stuck out his tongue at her, then turned back to Montoya. “So?”
“She brained herself on the edge of that tool trolley. Scan’s negative. I closed the gash with glue before anything important leaked out. I’d label that the least of her injuries.” Montoya answered Jani’s glower with one of his own. “Fractured clavicle—I injected bone sealer and reseated the arm. Minor burns in the same area caused by the shooter pulse. First degree—I applied that new salve the Pharma group developed, and it took the reddening and pain right out. Three cracked ribs, all on the left side. I taped them. We can leave the rest to augie. Had to refill the carrier in her left leg and close up forty-seven assorted hacks and gashes—according to Niall Pierce, she fell on a pile of building fasteners after she was shot.”
Jani perked up. “Niall’s here?”
“Oh yes.” Montoya gazed up at the ceiling, begging respite. “They’re lined up waiting to see you. Mainline colonels and attorneys and parents—”
“My folks are here!” Jani slid off the scanbed, but as soon as she tried to stand, the room tilted and wobbled. She grabbed the edge of the bed to keep from falling, swallowing hard as the acid bubbled up her throat.
“Yes! Now sit down before you fall down!” Montoya pushed Jani’s chart into Val’s hands and hurried to her side. “They’re in the VIP suite in the penthouse, receiving the royal treatment.” He helped her climb atop the scanbed and held her while she steadied. Only when he felt sure that she wouldn’t tumble to the floor did he return to his chart entries.
“We had to flee to the North Bay compound after…you know.” Val shuffled guiltily to her bedside. “But as soon as we got the call that you had been brought in, we piled into skimmers and made the trek back down, breaking all existing speed limits along the way.” He eyed Jani sharply. “We made the assumption that the danger is probably passed at this point.”
Jani shrugged, and regretted it immediately. “Probably.”
“Good, because I don’t think those poor people can take much more of this.” Val leaned against the bed. The vivacity vanished—he yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Hell, I can’t take much more of this.” He boosted upright. “We stopped by your flat on the way in, just to check things. Steve and Angevin were there, going not-so-quietly mad. Lively pair, those two.” His bleary gaze sharpened. “They told me you threw out Lucien.”
Jani examined her hands. An abrasion encircled her right wrist, courtesy of the ax-hammer strap. “I did, but I think I made a mistake.”
Val shook his head. “No, you didn’t. Not even close.”
Jani watched him grow still and dull. “Can you tell me how Roni McGaw is?”
Val looked back at Montoya, who nodded. By the time he turned back to Jani, his shiny air had tarnished completely. “She was dying when the ambulance brought her in. We had to install a DeVries shunt to halt the brain damage caused by the prolonged reduction in blood flow. Right now she’s in induced coma while we try to fix what broke. We won’t know how she is until we drain the regen solutions and test functional levels.”
Val’s every word struck Jani, one blow after another. It never changed—she never changed. She was slow. Stupid. She didn’t think. Delays, and more delays. Her past dictating her future, defining it, predicting it. Yolan died because of her slowness. Borgi. The other Rovers. And all she could do to honor their memories was steal them a place on someone else’s monument. “I should have gone in there as soon as I felt something was wrong, but I waited too long. Again. I wait—”
Val’s face flushed. “You stepped in front of a shooter to get her here. If that shot had been a little lower and to the left, you’d be lying in the room next to her and that’s only if you’d been damned lucky. So I don’t want to hear about how this is all your bloody fault, do you understand!”
Jani looked away from Val and stared at the blank wall until her eyes stopped swimming. “Can I see her?”
Val and Montoya shook their heads and answered as one. “No, your parents want to see you—Niall—calls from Registry—Dolly—John—Loiaza has some questions—”
Jani raised her hand, and the babble ceased. “I want to see her.”
Montoya wouldn’t let Jani attempt the long walk to the Neuro wing on her own, so Val volunteered to play skimchair navigator. He pushed her slowly, and made a few wrong turns along the way. Jani knew he wanted to tire her out in the hope that she’d change her mind and postpone her visit. One would think that after all they’d been through together, he’d have known better.
As they turned down
Neuro’s hushed main corridor, Jani eyed the nurses’ stations and looked into every open door. “Who’s guarding her?”
“Ours.” Val looked cowed as Jani twisted around to stare at him. “They’ve been briefed by Niall. You don’t need to worry about them.”
They pulled up in front of a door bracketed by a man and woman wearing street clothes and packed holsters. Jani took a deep breath, then nodded to Val. He edged the skimchair forward, and the door swept aside.
The room was lit with soft background illumination. Silent, but for the soft murmurs of the assorted instruments that surrounded the bed.
Roni McGaw didn’t take up much space. Her bedclothes barely seemed to rise above the level of the mattress—Jani had to squint in the half-light to assure herself that a person really lay there.
Then she looked more carefully, and her breath caught. Roni looked mummy-like, her head swaddled in a white wrap that shielded her eyes and left only her nose and mouth visible. Her head and upper body lay slightly elevated on a wedge-shaped pillow. Her hands rested on her stomach. Tubes everywhere—nasogastric, catheter, IV. The apparatus for the DeVries shunt filled the wall behind the bed like a vast and complex headboard, a multicolored array of blinking indicators and scrolling displays.
“That was you last summer.” Val pushed Jani close to the bed. “Eamon installed some improvements when he visited last month, as well. The shunt inlet and outlet are fixed inside the pillow assembly. Roni’s head is immobilized within a light restraint cage that’s attached to the pillow. The last thing we want is for any of that plumbing to shift.”
Jani reached up and touched the back of her neck, just above the hairline. She could barely feel the thread-fine scars that marked the sites of her own shunt jacks. “Did you shave her head, too?”
“Yes. We have no choice, what with all the relays and monitors we attach. But hey, your hair grew back. Hers will, too.” He grasped one of Jani’s curls and gave it a tug. “I’m going to check in with John, give your folks an update. I’ll stop back in, say, fifteen minutes?”
Jani nodded. She felt Val’s hand on her good shoulder, the increase in pressure as he squeezed. Then it was gone. She heard the muffled tread of his shoes on the lyno, the hush and whisper of the door.
She sat, silent. She’d never possessed the gift for knowing the right words, but what could one say at a time like this? I’m sorry I missed the cues…I’m sorry I lost sight of your back. How many people over the years did she have reason to say that to? Yolan. Betha. Sasha. You’d think the words would come easily to her—she’d needed them often enough.
“I had the same thing you’ve got now.” Jani paused to clear her throat. “A DeVries shunt. Eamon DeVries is a creep of the first press, but he designed a good shunt.” She fingered the crease of her grape-colored trousers, feeling like an inkblot amid the light-colored surroundings. “You’ll have a headache after they bring you out of coma. It lasts for a few days—you think your brain is going to burst out your ears every time you move your head. But you get over it.” She looked to the wall opposite. No window, not even a nature holograph. It irked her that they would assume Roni wouldn’t need any diversions. Jani recalled many details of her own hospital room, things she confirmed after she regained consciousness. She made a mental note to discuss the matter with John.
“Did it catch you by surprise when you realized Lescaux had spearheaded the letter? It did me; I never thought he had it in him. And he didn’t, really, he only wished he did. That made him doubly dangerous.” She recalled the Lescaux she had seen at the idomeni embassy, his barely suppressed rage when he caught Anais gazing longingly at Lucien. The jealousy had shown itself then—she should have known it would matter. “I’m sorry. I should have realized.” She switched her attention from the still figure in the bed to the blinking illumins above, on the alert for any signs of trouble.
“After you get out of this….” She dug a thumbnail into the arm of her chair and waited for her throat to loosen. “If you’re going to continue in this line of work, you need to learn a few rules. Laws of survival. They’re simple, but they’re not always intuitive. One, remember that trust is earned, not bestowed. Two, travel light and travel armed. Three, don’t write anything down—sheer hell telling a dexxie something like that, I know, but it’s better for you in the long run. We wouldn’t have had a thing on Lescaux if that idiot in Helier hadn’t written down the details of that meeting. Up until then, all signs pointed to Lucien.” Thoughts of Lucien intruded, and she quieted until they went away.
“Back to the commandments. Use public whenever possible. That applies to comports and transportation. Lescaux must have had a snoop on your office line—that’s how he knew you were meeting me somewhere tonight. All he had to do was get into his skimmer and follow you. If you’d stuck to the L’s and people-movers, you and I could be sitting right now in my flat setting up our case against him and he’d be stuck on a train to Minneapolis wondering what the hell happened.” She smiled at the thought, but it faded quickly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to you sooner. But Nema came out of nowhere and Cèel will execute him if he gets any sort of chance. I had to make sure he got back to the embassy. Then Dathim wouldn’t leave me alone.” She thought of long-fingered gold hands evaluating her wounds, reclaiming the ax-hammer, and wondered if she had hallucinated them. “But then, if he hadn’t given me the ax-hammer, I wouldn’t be sitting here jabbering at you now.” She relaxed, a little, as the truth of the statement settled over her. “That chock wouldn’t have had the same effect, no matter how hard I threw it. And I could only have thrown it once. I would have saved so much time if I had a shooter. This bioemotional restriction is a pain in the ass. They’ll probably pin one on you, too, until you show them to their satisfaction that you haven’t gone over the side.” She slumped in her chair. Her entire body ached.
“You’re too nice for this sort of work. You need to be a bit of the bastard. Like Niall. Like me. I’m not saying that you have to…stop caring—do that, and you become a monster. I think we both know a few names we could plug into that category.” She thought of Lucien again, and paused for a time before speaking. “But caring too much freezes you, hangs you with targets that everyone one else can see. It makes you vulnerable, and you can’t afford that. Not in this city. It’s a delicate balance. Difficult to achieve. I can’t quite seem to get the hang of it myself.” Her voice dropped in volume, dwindled to nothing. She felt useless and stupid talking to the air.
“Get well, Roni, please.” She fell silent, her eyes on the door, and listened to the soft clicks and hisses of the shunt pumps and the faint hum of the monitors.
CHAPTER 31
“And the worry, Janila. When we could not speak with you. When Dr. Parini told us we had to flee Chicago, but that we could not take you with us.” Jamira Kilian broke off a piece of breakfast cake and dipped it in her side dish of maple syrup. “Then we get the call that you had been in a fight, that you had been hurt.” She grimaced at the sodden tidbit and set it down on her plate. “Your Dr. Shroud drove us back. The speed! I wondered if we would make it back here alive.”
Jani stirred the dregs of her soup. Chickpeas and rice in a tomato sauce spicy enough to make her eyes water—not her usual morning fare, but someone must have thought she needed an olfactory kick in the pants. “He’s not my Dr. Shroud, Maman.”
“Hmph.” Declan Kilian eyed her over the rim of his coffee cup. “Remember that white tiger they kept at the park preserve when you were little? The one that spent all his time pacing the grounds and standing on the highest points, watching everyone? The one where you felt better knowing that a very wide moat separated the two of you? Shroud reminded me of him. I would not like to be the person who makes him angry.”
Jani pushed her bowl aside, then tried to appreciate the view as she avoided her parents’ probing looks. They sat in the dining room of the Neoclona VIP suite, seventy-five stories above Chicago. Tinted windows formed
the exterior walls, allowing well-filtered views of the sunrise over Lake Michigan, the Commerce Ministry compound, and the skyscraper jungle of the deepest downtown. Tiger John’s stalking grounds. She looked at her mother. “I thought you didn’t like him.”
“I do not. Not really. He did not think things through where you were concerned. Now he spends all his time trying to play catch-up, and it is you who pay the price.” Jamira held out her hand, her eyes shining. “Ma petite fille, it was not you that I yelled at that night.”
Jani brushed her fingers with her own. “I know, Maman.”
Jamira chuffed and fussed with the napkin on her lap. “No, you don’t know. But you won’t talk about it, either, so we are left where we were.” She exhaled with a frustrated gust. “I want you to be happy, and healthy, and live without pain. Ridiculous things for a mother to ask for her child, I know.” She sat back, a cup of jasmine tea cradled in her hands. “Two things I can say in Dr. Shroud’s favor. He never left us alone, even when we wanted him to. He made sure we were safe. And he worried about you so—I could tell.” She inhaled the fragrant steam that rose from her cup. “And as your father said, better a man like him as a friend than as an enemy. In this day, the way things are, it is good to have friends.”
Jani pushed back her chair and walked to the window. The grandness of the dining room made her restless. So had the plush gold and white bedroom where she had spent what little had remained of the night, and the eerie way that the staff seemed to know what she wanted before she asked for it. I was not born to the purple, royalty’s or Neoclona’s. She longed for her flat, her piled desk. Her own bedroom. I must be feeling better. She could already raise her left arm level with her shoulder, and scarcely felt any twinges in her ribs when she breathed. All the little factories must be running full-tilt.
“What are we doing today, Janila?” Her mother had adjourned to a couch by the lake-facing window, tea and the day’s Tribune-Times in hand. “Dr. Parini made lists for me of things to do in Chicago—sheets and sheets. Parks and museums and shops. If I stay here until I am one hundred, I will not be able to do all he suggested.”
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