by Lisa Smedman
"A broken heart, you mean," Ajax said. "The stress of seeing New Horizons torn apart was what killed him."
Sake splashed out of her cup and onto Alma's fingers as her hand began to shake. She quickly set her cup down and folded her arms so that the hand was hidden under her right elbow. Thankfully the tremor was a light one that lasted only thirty-two seconds. Even though she didn't try to fight it this time, it left her with the same tired feeling she'd experienced before.
Ajax didn't seem to have noticed. He was talking about Aaron—the "oldest" of their batch by virtue of being the first to be born to a surrogate mother. "Ironic, isn't it, that he was not only the first of the batch to be born, but also the first to die."
"I never understood how he could have fallen," Alma said. "What was he doing up there on the roof, all by himself? If he was showing off, who was supposed to applaud him? And why did he fall? Remember the 'floating stepping stone' test? Aaron was always the best at that one—he was as agile as a monkey in freefall."
"You didn't know?" Ajax asked, startled. "No—of course not. How could you? You've been out of the datastream."
"Couldn't know what?" Alma prompted.
"Aaron's fall wasn't accidental. He suicided—his death was what caused the Superkids program to be shut down."
Alma gasped. "No! Why would he kill himself?"
"We'll never know. But Ahmed found something interesting when he hacked his way into one of the Superkids project files that the UCAS confiscated. Our batch—and the batches that followed us—weren't as perfect as they were made out to be. We were flawed. When New Horizons selected for the genes that gave Batch Alpha our unique immune systems and our high tolerance for cyberware, they also inadvertently selected for mental illness. In Aaron, it manifested as a bipolar disorder: manic depression. He was severely depressed when he jumped."
"What about the rest of the batch?" Alma asked. Ajax shrugged. "The data in the New Horizons report was inconclusive. The gene gave us a genetic predisposition toward mental illness, but Aaron seems to have been the only one who went crazy. There was some speculation among the researchers that the defect in the gene may have been balanced by a healthy counterpart, found only in the X chromosome, making you girls no more than carriers. The net effect would be that mental illness only showed up in the boys, in the same way as hemophilia or color blindness." Alma considered this information, searching her memories for anything that would constitute a mental illness. Aside from a slight tendency toward obsessive compulsiveness that all Batch Alpha Superkids shared—the meticulousness that Alma liked to think of as professionalism—she herself was more than stable. She'd survived every knockdown that life had thrown at her and come up swinging. Despite the disruption caused by the closure of the Superkids project and her relocation to a foster family halfway across the continent, she'd come through her childhood without any major depressions. She couldn't think of a single thing that would seem to indicate the onset of mental illness. She caught Ajax's eye. "How are you doing?"
Ajax smiled. "No suicidal tendencies, if that's what you're asking. I've had a pretty happy life, on the whole. Just . . . minor glitches, that's all." His gaze strayed to the holopic of the elf woman as he spoke, and then he glanced away.
"Ahmed also thinks he found out why they scattered us," he added a moment later. "He said it had nothing to do with our well-being—we went to the highest bidders."
"What do you mean?" Alma wasn't certain that she'd heard him correctly.
"It's speculation on Ahmed's part, of course," Ajax added quickly. "But when he was compiling the data on the four of us who managed to stay in touch, Ahmed noticed a peculiar pattern: each of us was placed with a foster family that had links—albeit only distant ones, in some cases—to a corporation that was active in bionetic or cybernetic research. My own foster father was a cousin of the head of Ares Macrotechnology's cybernetics division; Agatha's foster mother was the ex-wife of a prominent shareholder in Saeder-Krupp; Ahmed's foster father's sister was . . ."
Alma had stopped listening. Ahmed's "data" sounded like wild speculation. She found it a stretch that the UCAS government would auction the Superkids off like so much pirated tech—if ulterior motives were behind the foster-home placements, it was much more likely that whoever was responsible would keep the Superkids within the UCAS.
"Everyone in the world is linked to a major corporation, if you look hard enough," Alma countered.
"And every corporation on the planet is involved with cybertech and bionetics."
Ajax took a sip of his sake. "You may be right," he said. "Ahmed's theory sounded a little far-fetched to me, too. But think of the possibilities: if someone else wanted a Superkid, having access to one of us would provide them with all of the tissue samples they needed."
"But would they bother to clone us, if we weren't perfect?" Alma asked. She found the thought that she might be "flawed" irritating. She didn't really believe it, herself. Something other than mere genetics must have caused Aaron to jump.
The possibility that the Superkids might have been cloned, however, made her pause. What if the shadow-runner who had extracted Gray Squirrel was a Superkid clone? But then Alma realized that the full-chromosome DNA scan that Hu had done on the saliva would have picked up one crucial difference between Alma and a clone: the length of their respective telomeres.
As humans age, biological markers on DNA called telomeres shorten. The older the cell, the shorter its telomeres. When cloning was first attempted in the 1990s, researchers noticed that the telomeres of the sheep they had cloned were just as short as those of the sheep they had obtained the genetic material from. When the resulting clone was born, "Dolly" the sheep had cells that appeared to be three years old.
This problem had been solved in the decades since. Today's clones were born with full-length telomeres. And since any clone of Alma would have to have been made after the breakup of the Superkids project, the woman who resulted would be twenty-two years old, at most. Her telomeres would be appreciably longer than Alma's.
The more Alma thought about it, the more she was convinced it had been one of her batch mates who had infiltrated PCI and extracted Gray Squirrel. Spitting on the PCI drone was no mere gesture of defiance. Given the precision the woman had shown in carrying out the extraction, the gesture had to have been a deliberate attempt to frame Alma. Whoever the shadowrunner was, her motivation was personal.
Which, once again, didn't make sense. Alma and her batch mates had been closer than siblings: they'd loved one another. There had been the usual rivalry and petty spats, but Alma couldn't remember a single significant fight in all of the eight years they'd been together. Not one.
Certainly not one that would cause someone to hold a grudge for twenty-two years.
Alma cleared her throat. "We're not the only Superkids in Vancouver," she said, choosing her words carefully. "There's another one of us here from the Batch Alpha: one of the girls. She's been seen around town by people who said she looked enough like me to be my twin. It wouldn't be Aimee or Agatha, would it?"
Ajax shook his head. "Aimee's in space with Zurich-Orbital, and Agatha's on active duty with her unit. She hasn't left the German Alliance in years."
"And Aella—how certain is Ahmed that she's dead?"
"The address he tracked down for her in Chicago was at ground zero. I doubt that she made it."
"Whoever this other Superkid is, I need to find her," Alma continued. "I need to speak to her about something. It's a . . . PCI security matter that I can't tell you much about."
She'd almost forgotten how mentally agile and perceptive another Superkid could be: Ajax immediately scanned between the lines. The conclusion he reached, however, was the wrong one.
"You want her to double for you while you go undercover," he guessed, his blue eyes glowing mischievously. "That's what you meant when you said you were 'on leave' from your job at PCI."
Alma decided to go with it. "That's right. I'd use Aimee or
Agatha, since you're in touch with them—but it doesn't sound as if they're available right now. I thought, instead, that you could help me to track down the Superkid who's been spotted here in town. It could be Abby, or Akiko—or even Aella, if she somehow survived Chicago. Whichever one of us she is, I need to find her ASAP."
Ajax had picked up on her sense of urgency; he had already risen and was walking toward his telecom. "I'll get in touch with Ahmed for you," he said, picking up the telecom's interface cable. "He's an expert when it comes to surfing the Matrix; when I talked to him a month ago, he said he might have a lead on another one of us. If anyone can find out who your Vancouver 'twin' is, it's him."
Alma forced herself to wait patiently while Ajax slotted the telecom cable into the port in his left temple and contacted Ahmed via the Matrix. When he unplugged the jack at the end of their silent conversation, Ajax looked shaken. He sat down and poured himself another sake and then drained it.
"Ahmed's got the goods, all right," he said. "He managed to track down Akiko. It took him awhile; she changed her name to Jacqueline Boothby. She's in the Confederated American States, in a Texas prison. She's on death row."
"How long has she been there?" Alma asked. When Ajax gave her a strange look, Alma realized that it had been an odd question. But he answered just the same: "She's been in prison for two years—throughout numerous appeals. She's due to be executed three days from now, on the twenty-seventh."
Alma nodded. Assuming that Aella really was dead, that left only one of the girls from Batch Alpha unaccounted for: Abby.
"What crime was Akiko charged with?" she asked.
"First-degree murder. She slashed the throat of a man who was convicted of raping her, six years ago. The day after he got out on parole, Akiko killed him."
Alma's heart skipped a beat as she heard how the murder was committed. Involuntarily touching a hand to her throat, she wondered if Akiko had also been framed.
"How do they know Akiko did it?" she asked. "Was she convicted on the basis of DNA fingerprinting?"
Once again, Ajax scanned between the lines. "You're suggesting that it might have been another Superkid from Batch Alpha, right?" he asked. He shook his head. "But that wasn't it. Akiko killed the man in front of a bar filled with witnesses, then sat down at his table to wait until the police arrived. When they arrested her, she presented them with a signed confession she'd prepared in advance—that's what got her the first-degree charge. She's a murderer, all right."
He refilled his sake cup and sighed. "It makes me wonder about the rest of us."
Alma nodded, thinking about the shadowrunner and the gruesome way in which Gray Squirrel had been killed. When Alma finally located the Superkid who had framed her, she wondered what sort of demon she'd find.
4
Treading
So far, so good. Akira Kageyama had bought the excuse, and Night Owl was in. As she rode the elevator down to his underwater condoplex, she cradled the plastic packing case in her hands. She didn't want the contents to break. Not yet.
The elevator was studded with four round portholes, allowing her to look out through the stainless-steel, open-mesh tube that was the elevator shaft. The rain-splattered surface of Burrard Inlet was already high overhead, and the water was rapidly darkening from green-gray to black. Dark blurs that were either large fish or seals swept past the elevator shaft, and a clump of seaweed that had been caught on the bottom of the elevator bubbled its way to the surface. Inside the elevator, all Night Owl could hear was the steady whir of machinery and the soft hiss of circulating air. As she leaned back against the rear wall, the empty holster dug into the small of her back. She felt naked without her handgun—but "naked" was the only way you could hope to enter the dragon's den.
That's what the condoplex was—literally. Built back in the 2050s, it was designed to be one of the many residences of Dunkelzahn, the great dragon who had earned far more than his fifteen minutes of fame after being elected president of the UCAS in 2057. The worm had built the condoplex on a whim, just offshore from the expensive waterfront properties of West Vancouver, after reading in a Chinese storybook that dragons lived in crystal palaces under the sea. This particular whim had cost nearly twenty million nuyen to build, and he never did get the chance to move into it. Just a few months after it was completed, the Big D was flatlined. Later, it turned out that he'd willed the Vancouver doss to one Akira Kageyama, a "financial advisor" who'd been chummers with the big worm.
Street buzz had it that some of the artworks in the condoplex were priceless—and not just because they were old. The first time Night Owl had visited this doss, she'd nearly salivated at the thought of boosting something from the hoard, which was rumored to contain more than one magical focus. She'd been smart enough, that time, to realize that you didn't tread on the tail of a dragon—even one that was five years dead. But now she was going to do just that.
Walls slid up around the elevator as it clunked to a stop at the bottom of the shaft. The door slid open, and Night Owl's ears popped as the pressure equalized. She stepped out onto a plush carpet, between walls of frosted glass.
Night Owl had prepared for this run by popping a hearing amplification plug inside her right ear; she didn't want anyone sneaking up on her when she was boosting the statue. Through the amp, she could hear the distant sound of water dripping. The condoplex was plagued with leaks; Kageyama had spent hundreds of thousands of nuyen over the past five years trying to get rid of them, but as soon as one leak was patched, another appeared. The sound set Night Owl's nerves on edge. Being underwater already made her claustrophobic enough.
All of the interior walls in the condoplex were on rollers and could slide back and forth like the rice-paper screens in Japanese houses. Kageyama had rearranged his entrance hall so that it was long and narrow, leading to double doors that had an elaborate dragon design sandblasted on them. Somehow, the dragon seemed to breathe fire: tiny sparks of red flickered out of its nostrils and spread in a fan shape through the glass, then slowly faded away. Each of its hands appeared to be holding a doorknob that had been set with an enormous pearl.
A drone rolled to a stop in front of her, just outside the elevator. It extended a telescoping pole topped with what looked like an octagonal mirror, framed in red plastic. When the "mirror" reached Night Owl's eye level, the monitor screen shimmered into life as Kageyama's image appeared on it.
The first time she'd met Kageyama, Night Owl had been struck by how ordinary he looked. She'd expected Vancouver's best-known millionaire to be as flamboyant and striking as the condoplex he'd inherited. But Kageyama had a face that would have blended into any crowd. His straight, blue-black hair was neat and short, his face was neither too round nor too narrow, his eyes a nondescript shade of green.
""Konichiwa, Night Owl," he said. "I like the mask you've painted on yourself tonight. The silver becomes you. Does that case hold the egg?"
Night Owl nodded and flipped open the hasps that held the packing case shut. She knew better than to hide anything inside the case; Kageyama might trust her, but he wasn't so stupid that he let large packages into his home without seeing what was inside. Setting the case carefully down on the ground, she opened its lid so that the drone's security camera could scan the contents.
The drone's cameras tilted, allowing the camera to get a better angle of the egg that was nested in a bed of spongelike foam inside the case. About the size of a football, the oval egg had a leathery surface and an iridescent sheen. Lighter patches on the surface bulged outward slightly, like weak spots in an overinflated ball. Waves of heat shimmered in the air above the egg, courtesy of a chemical heat pad Night Owl had placed underneath it.
"What kind do you think it is?" Night Owl asked. "Chimera? Firedrake? Leatherback turtle?"
She glanced up at the drone's monitor screen and saw that Kameyaga's pupils had dilated. Got him, she thought. She already knew what was in the case: the egg of something called a Lambton lizard, boosted from
an illicit apothecary shop in Chinatown that dealt in black-market animal parts. She'd already told Kageyama where the egg had come from. What she'd failed to mention was that it was long since dead. A healthy spray coating of scent-receptor-blocking agents was masking its odor.
"It warrants a closer look," Kageyama said. "Follow the drone."
Night Owl closed the case and cradled it in her arms as she followed the drone. It led her through the double doors—which opened automatically—and into the maze of rooms and corridors that followed.
All of the walls, ceilings and floors in the condoplex were made of glass. Most of the floor was either carpeted or frosted for privacy, but there was the occasional patch of clear glass that gave a view down into the level below. Crossing them was like walking on air. Other clear patches looked down into aquariums filled with gigantic gold and white koi.
Some of the sliding panes of glass were set with geometric chunks of red or green or blue glass that glittered like multifaceted gems. Other walls were constructed from double panes of glass through which swirling currents of plankton-laden water flowed, glowing a soft blue—a living barrier against astral intrusion.
The rooms were filled with antique furniture: enormous, mirror-fronted wardrobes, velvet-upholstered chairs, and tables with elaborately carved legs with claw-and-ball feet. All of the furniture was a deep, polished red-brown or black and was made of real wood: mahogany and teak, Kageyama had told her on her previous visit. Night Owl ignored it, searching instead for anything that looked like jade.
Everywhere she looked, she saw artwork. She passed through one room that smelled thickly of oil paint; it was filled with enormous paintings so dark you could hardly see the people in them. In another room, three marble pedestals each displayed an ancient-looking, chipped clay pot, painted with figures that reminded Night Owl of the Aztechnology logo. One long hallway was lined on either side with stone carvings of multiarmed humans, posed as though they were dancing. Flecks of blue paint freckled their arms and faces. Another hallway was dominated by mannequins dressed in the armor of ancient samurai. Each area had background music, piped into concealed speakers, that was appropriate to the cultural artifacts on display.