Tails You Lose

by Lisa Smedman

  No one had—her guess had been wrong. But not by much. On a hunch, she'd made a second round of calls, this time to local automotive dealerships that specialized in luxury cars. A clerk at the third dealership she called remembered the man who had walked in off the street and paid one hundred and thirty thousand nuyen for a Jaguar Z Type—a man with strange, all-white eyes. The Jag had come fully equipped, with global positioning system, cyberterminal with satellite uplink, surround sound and telecom built into the dash. And yes, the clerk was happy to give Night Owl the vehicle's telecom number, especially after she identified herself as Alma Wei, second in command of PCI's security force.

  Night Owl repeated the sequence of calls she'd used with Blondie, telling Strange Eyes that she'd boosted the coin from Kageyama and was ready to sell it. Just as she had done earlier this evening, she faked a bidding war, this time driving the price to eight hundred K. When the Malaysian Independent Bank called to confirm a third anonymous donation to the Cybercare for Kids account and to let her know that another four hundred thousand nuyen had been deposited in trust, Night Owl called Strange Eyes and IDed the spot where she would meet him and turn over the coin: the middle of the Lion's Gate Bridge.

  She had to reassure him that yes, he'd heard that right. She explained that she'd kleen-tacked the coin to the bridge in a place where only somebody with her amazing agility and strength could reach it. She'd be waiting for him near the south tower of the Lion's Gate, on the west sidewalk, in five minutes' time. If he didn't show within fifteen minutes, the deal was off. That should set his tires squealing.

  Pulling away from the darkened street corner where she'd made the call, Night Owl turned her Harley toward the northbound Stanley Park causeway—one of two long tunnels that pierced the park's biodome. She wasn't wearing a watch, but according to the cellphone's built-in clock, it was nearly 4:30 a.m. This time of night, and with a storm pounding the city and flooding its low-level roads, there was barely a car in sight.

  The biodome's grow lights were dimmed; the glass-enclosed tunnel was illuminated only by normal streetlights. They strobed past overhead as the Harley roared its way along the causeway, the full-throated growl of its engines echoing off the empty tunnel's walls. As the night-dark end of the tunnel hove into sight, a curtain of rain obscuring the bridge beyond it, Night Owl smiled grimly at the metaphor. She was moving along a tunnel of light, toward darkness and death—hopefully not her own.

  The rain and wind hit her the second she exited the tunnel. Most of her body stayed warm and dry, thanks to the waterproof suit that she wore under her street clothes; it covered her from her neck down to her ankles and wrists. Her night-vision goggles kept the rain out of her eyes, but rain pounded against her bare forehead, cheeks and chin like sprays of ice water. Her fingers were cold despite her fleece-lined riding gloves. The temperature seemed to have dropped dramatically in the last couple of hours—or maybe it was just the chill that came with riding headlong into the wind.

  She passed the two massive concrete lions that guarded the south end of the bridge and roared onto the bridge proper, climbing its gentle slope. Above her, the wind howled around the massive suspension cables that stretched high overhead. When she drew close to the first of the bridge's two towers, Night Owl pulled the bike to a stop. She propped it up on its kick stand, next to the sidewalk, and swung down from the seat.

  Now that she was off the bike, the force of the gale blew her back against the railing at the outer edge of the sidewalk. After lifting her goggles away from her eyes, she gripped the railing and leaned out over it, peering down at the wind-churned waters of Burrard Inlet, sixty meters below.

  She saw what she was looking for near the base of the tower: the red and green running lights of a boat that was being tossed by the waves. She hoped it was Skimmer, with his garbage scow. He'd promised to drop anchor and wait for her there; she hoped he'd be willing to ride out the storm for just a little longer. He was an essential part of her plan—the only one who could get her safely to her bolt hole.

  Lightning flashed overhead, throwing the twin towers of the bridge into sharp relief. A second or two later, thunder boomed. In the bright flash of light, Night Owl thought she saw a series of small dark shapes winging their way across the sky—and a larger, serpentine shape. Shivering, she told herself that it was just a twist of cloud. A moment later, in the flash of lightning that followed, the smaller shapes were revealed to be storm crows. They landed, one by one, hunkering down like a string of beads along the cables of the bridge. Night Owl had the distinct feeling that they were watching her with their jet-black, unblinking eyes.

  A pair of headlights in the causeway tunnel caught her eye. As the vehicle drew closer, she recognized the long, lozenge-shaped car as a Jag Z-Type.

  Tearing off her gloves, Night Owl flipped open her cell and hit the icon that would automatically call the two numbers she'd preset: Blondie's cellphone, and the telecom at the Triple Eight Club where she'd contacted Wu earlier. As soon as she saw that the connections had been made and that the text message she'd input earlier had begun to transmit, she kleen-tacked the cellphone to the tower. The aperture of its lens was already adjusted to wide angle; the vidcam built into the cell would capture both the ladders that connected the deck of the bridge with the suspension cable above and the spot where Strange Eyes was most likely to stand. Then she turned and braced her back against the railing, just in time to see the Jaguar glide to a stop beside her Harley.

  A gull-wing door swung open, and Strange Eyes stepped out of the vehicle. He stared at her with his bulging white eyes and held out a hand. Despite the rain that was pounding down onto the bridge, soaking Night Owl's hair and trickling down the back of her neck in icy rivulets, not a drop of water collected in his cupped palm. Strange Eyes seemed encased in an invisible, protective bubble that shielded him from both wind and rain. While Night Owl's jacket and pants flapped like banners in the heavy wind, his clothing hung perfectly still.

  "The coin, please," he hissed in a voice that carried clearly, despite the roar of the wind. She wondered if his telepathy was at work.

  Night Owl gave him a mock bow. "Just a moment." She turned and sprang into the air, letting the howling wind slam her into the steel-cable ladder that was just overhead. Then she climbed.

  As she spidered up the rain-slick ladder to the place where she'd kleen-tacked the last of the I Ching coins earlier, the wind whipped her hair into her eyes and numbed her bare fingers. She didn't care. She felt a warm glow as she mentally played back the text message that her cellphone would be transmitting to Blondie and Wu. The same memo would also be appearing on Strange Eye's telecom monitor—the one inside his car. By the time he saw the message, however. it would be too late. He would have already completed the buy.

  HELLO, SUCKERS, it taunted. TONIGHT I SOLD A COIN OF LUCK TO EACH OF YOUR MASTERS: MANG, LI AND CHIAO. YOU'LL SEE THE FINAL TRANSACTION LIVE IN JUST A MOMENT. OBVIOUSLY, SINCE THERE IS ONLY ONE FU COIN TO SELL, TWO OF YOU HAVE BOUGHT FAKES. HAVE FUN FIGURING OUT WHICH ONE OF YOU BOUGHT THE REAL ONE!

  Night Owl reached the halfway point of the ladder and felt around for the patch of kleen-tack she'd used to secure the last of the I Ching coins. She took her time, pretending that it was harder to locate than it actually was, in order to ensure that the cellphone below would have switched over from text-only to voice-and-visual transmission before she climbed down again. As she peeled the kleen-tack free from the ladder rung, holding the coin tightly so the wind wouldn't snatch it from her grasp, she smiled grimly, proud of herself for stealing Ryomyo's idea of pitting the dragons against one another and going him one better.

  Each of the dragons, when it found out the coin it had purchased was nothing more than an ordinary coin cloaked with an illusion, would have to assume that one of the other coins was the genuine item. It couldn't afford to do otherwise and wouldn't believe the other dragons if they said their coins were also fake. The Red Lotus had already fired the opening shots
in the war for the Fu Coin, by taking out Strange Eyes' limo. Night Owl could only imagine the escalated chaos her message was going to cause.

  She peeled the kleen-tack off, popped the coin into her mouth, where she held it clamped between her teeth, and climbed back down the ladder. Just before she reached the bottom—and just as she'd suspected—she felt a command from Strange Eyes whisper into her brain. She didn't even try to resist it.

  Show me the coin.

  Night Owl parted her lips in a grin, giving Strange Eyes a good look at the coin. The man seemed far away; although his eyes were still white and blank, Night Owl knew he wasn't seeing anything on this plane anymore—he was looking into the astral. His mouth twitched into a smile, and Night Owl knew her plan had worked. He issued another mental command—without pausing to think about the circumstances.

  Give it to me.

  Night Owl spat the coin out of her mouth. It landed at Strange Eyes' feet, began to roll, and then was caught by a gust of wind and sent spinning toward the edge of the bridge. Strange Eyes dived after it, sprawling with his hand outstretched over the edge. Night Owl laughed, thinking he had missed it, but then he picked himself up. Between two of his long fingers was the coin.

  Strange Eyes looked up at her, an expression of pure hatred on his face.

  Frag. Time to get out of here.

  Night Owl frantically began to climb again, the right side of her face twitching. Her bare hands were nearly numb from the rain and wind: she slipped and nearly lost her grip. Only a meter or two more, and she'd be lost in darkness and out of range of Strange Eyes' spells . . .

  The command came before she made it.

  Jump.

  Night Owl hurled herself from the ladder and felt the wind catch her. She fell, arms and legs flailing, tumbling like a spinning coin toward the water below. She had a brief glimpse of Strange Eyes peering over the bridge, watching her plummet to her death with a satisfied smirk as lightning flared overhead, and then he was gone. The wind roared in her ears, and the bridge spun off into the distance. From somewhere high above, she heard a chorus of cawing crows.

  At the last moment, as the starboard running light of Skimmer's garbage scow flashed past, Night Owl twisted violently and forced her arms above her head. She hit the water in a dive and felt it smack into her body like a wall of cold cement, slamming into the top of her head, shoulders and chest. Then she was down in its icy depths. Although she'd flattened out her dive as much as she could as she disappeared beneath the surface, she plunged onward, downward, for what seemed like an eternity, until her brain was buzzing. Only when her descent had at last slowed could she begin the long, slow struggle to the surface. Red static was crackling across her field of view and her cyberears were roaring by the time she saw a green light dancing above her. A moment later she broke the surface and gasped in night air filled with pelting rain. Incredibly, the raindrops actually felt warm against her ice-cold face.

  The rest of her body, although bruised, was still dry, protected by the drysuit she'd put on underneath her clothing. She owed her life to that drysuit—and to her incredibly augmented muscles, which had diffused the crushing blow of her sixty-meter dive.

  As the choppy waves bobbed her up and down, Night Owl saw Skimmer leaning over the low railing of the scow, extending a pole-handled salvage net in her direction. She gripped the net with numbed fingers and clung to it as Skimmer hauled her up into the boat.

  As she lay on the deck of the scow, gasping like a landed fish amid the bags of trash, Night Owl silently congratulated herself. Her plan had worked beautifully, down to the last detail. She'd tricked all three dragons' representatives into buying a fake coin, and by revealing that trick had ensured that the dragons themselves would be at each other's throats for some time to come. Best of all, she had "died" in a live cellphone transmission. That ought to stop them from looking for her.

  Now all she had to do was wait out the coming storm. She knew just the place to do it, too: the last place any of the dragons would expect her to bolt to.

  Forcing herself to sit up, she gave Skimmer his sailing orders.

  11

  Change

  Alma woke up suddenly as fingers touched her hand. Her move-by-wire system kicked in immediately, and in one smooth motion she whipped the blankets off her body, yanked the hand that had touched hers away and down, and drew her legs up. A split second before she lashed out in a lethal kick, her mind registered the fact that it was Akira Kageyama who was leaning over the bed, wincing with pain at the pressure-point hold she was using to force his hand back against his wrist. Letting him go, she sat up in the unfamiliar bed and looked around.

  The last thing Alma remembered was lying down on her own bed and activating the REM inducer with a prime-number countdown. She was no longer in her apartment. Instead, she had awakened in a room with walls and ceiling made from frosted glass. The bed she was in had a massive mahogany headboard and footboard, carved with entwined dragons; a matching bedside table stood next to it. One of the pillows was smeared with what looked like gold and black paint; Alma also saw a smudge of gold on the back of her hand. She touched her cheek, and her fingers came away streaked with gold.

  There was one door out of the room; beside it was a long, low table that held a collection of tiny bonsai trees. A chair near the opposite wall was draped with a pair of pants and a jacket that dripped water onto the floor and a rubbery black garment; after a moment, Alma recognized it as a diver's drysuit.

  "Where am I?"

  "In my home." Kageyama stood beside the bed, rubbing his wrist. He wore only black silk pajama bottoms. His feet were bare, and Alma could see that he had only four toes on each foot. "You came here, early this morning, asking for sanctuary. I have granted it."

  This morning? Alma activated her cybereye's clock and stared at the glowing red numbers that superimposed themselves over Kageyama. It was 6:22 a.m. Where had the last eight hours and twelve minutes gone? The only thing she could remember was a fragmented dream about riding through the night sky on a motorcycle and then falling from it, tumbling endlessly down into a cold, wet, dark place . . .

  Her cyberear picked up the faint sound of trickling water coming from another part of the building. She realized where she must be: in the underwater condoplex that Kageyama had inherited from the dragon Dunkelzahn: Vancouver's most famous "leaky condo."

  She had no memory of coming here or of asking Kageyama for sanctuary. Looking at him now, noticing that his chest was bare aside from the pi stone that hung around his neck, she wondered what else was missing from her memory. His smile was just a little too knowing, a touch too sensual. She realized that she was naked and pulled the covers back over her body.

  "How long have I been asleep?" she asked.

  "About fifteen minutes. You fought to stay awake as long as you could, but toward the end you were doing more yawning than talking."

  Alma seized upon the one thing she was able to understand: the fifteen-minute sleep. It must have been REM induced, since she felt as refreshed as if she'd slept all night. She couldn't have been sleeping for the past eight hours, since clearly she'd spent at least part of the evening traveling to the condoplex and talking to Kageyama. The only conclusion she could draw was that something must have gone wrong with the REM inducer—some glitch that caused her to move around and talk in her sleep, without any memory of having done so. She wondered if this was the first time it had happened.

  "Was I sleepwalking? What did I talk about?"

  Kageyama sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for her hand. Alma's first instinct was to jerk away, but the feel of his long, slim fingers holding hers was somehow reassuring—and disturbingly familiar. She could see from the expression on his face that he was searching for the best way to tell her something he thought might upset her. She braced herself for bad news.

  "You arrived at my door just after five o'clock this morning, pleading with me to let you in. You said you had important news fo
r me, that you knew what the three dragons were after: a magical coin."

  Alma shook her head in disbelief. What would have possessed her to do that? Her subconscious mind had obviously been dwelling on Night Owl's offer. "I must have been talking about the coin that Night Owl mentioned in her message to me on the cell," she said, thinking out loud.

  Kageyama stared at her, his eyes filled with questions. "Night Owl?" He paused, then tried again: "You're talking about her as if . . . but she said you knew . .

  He shook his head in wonder. "She was wrong. You don't know, do you?"

  "Know what?" Alma asked, exasperated.

  "That you and the shadowrunner Night Owl are the same person—that you share a single body. As she so eloquently put it, you're two sides of the same coin." Alma felt suddenly lightheaded, as if the air had been sucked from the room. It was difficult to take a full breath, and her stomach felt cold and loose. With the detached awareness of a person who has just gone into shock, she noticed that her breathing was very shallow and that her left hand was trembling.

  "No," she whispered. "Night Owl is Abby, one of the other Superkids from Batch Alpha."

  Kageyama released her hand and stood. He walked over to the wet clothes, unzipped one of the jacket pockets, and pulled a flat square of plastic from it. He turned it upright as he walked back to the bed, and Alma saw the familiar human pyramid of a dozen Superkids materialize above it. He handed the holopic to her.

  "Night Owl wanted you to have this," he said. "She said to remind you that she's been a part of you since you were eight years old and asked me to plead with you to reconsider your decision."

  Decision? Alma had no idea what Kageyama was talking about. She stared at the holopic, feeling as disconnected from the here and now as she did from the eight-year-old girl who flipped off the top of the pyramid and landed in a handstand in front of the other children, over and over again. Like the girl in the holopic, Alma's mind kept looping through the same cycle—question and denial, question and denial—as her eyes darted back and forth between Abby and herself, trying to sort out which one really was Night Owl.