Falling

by Debbie Moon

  Long muscular fingers bit into Jude’s shoulders, tearing the velvet as they dragged her upright. She felt the warmth of his stale, amphetamine-soured breath against the back of her neck. ‘Let’s go outside.’

  The freshening room had emptied in record time, leaving an array of abandoned lipstick, powder and assorted stimulants. It looked like the aftermath of a police raid, waiting for the photographer.

  Maybe one of the evacuees would have the consideration to hit an alarm button on the way out. And maybe not. Fitch must have heard something, at some point, or she wouldn’t have made it out to the alley in time to see –

  But Jude was here to change her past, not relive it, and she couldn’t rely on things happening that way again. Maybe she needed them not to. Maybe being half-dismembered by MultiLegion was the price she needed to pay to swing her future away from that present-time suicide drop.

  As the giant’s hand fell upon her shoulder, turning her towards the exit, Jude found herself praying fervently that it wasn’t.

  It was only twenty metres from the freshening room to the exit. Twenty metres of people, squeezed body to body by the slow serpentine currents of the crowd, disguising furtive caresses as accidental collisions of hand and body, relishing the excuse to press closer.

  No way even to crawl through their legs, or duck under the tables – wrought iron, too heavy for the average brawler to throw around, but Jude had a feeling that MultiLegion wouldn’t have too much trouble with them.

  Miyahara was still at his table, but he was too busy flirting with a couple of heavily made up Filipinos, fluttering those yard long eyelashes, and there was no way to attract his attention without MultiLegion noticing.

  She was trapped. In deference to the assassin’s sheer size, the crowd was parting before them; but it was a token movement, a couple of inches at most, and she knew there was nowhere to go.

  For a moment, the nodding heads and animated hands dipped out of sight, and she caught a glimpse of Fitch; using some hidden foothold under the bar to pull herself up and snatch a banknote from some drunk who’d obviously been taunting her diminutive stature. Being Fitch, she clawed him across the face before dropping back out of sight again.

  Looked like her best hope of rescue was a short, skinny barmaid with a nice smile. Oh, and cartilage enhanced nails, sharp as razors. Jude had been on the receiving end of those once, and removing the scars had been expensive.

  Come on, Fitch. Stop hiding tips down the front of your dress, or exchanging bad jokes with the punters in five different languages. Stop doing your job, sweetheart, and look this way…

  MultiLegion’s hand tightened on her shoulder, and they were at the door, trying to ease out unnoticed as a gaggle of tourists wearing Afro-Rap-star bodies pressed crumpled bills into the doorman’s hand.

  This was her last chance.

  A squabble somewhere behind them sent a shock wave through the crowd; the tourists hesitated and stumbled against one another in the doorway, and an elbow caught Jude in the ribs, pushing her against the doorframe.

  Her fingers closed on the twin layers of metal, found the crack between them, touched the sensor strip for the main alarm. Then another impact shoved her out into the night, and she stumbled, off-balance, down the steps and into the street.

  Well, that explained how Fitch found out.

  Club Andro was in East Cross, one of the quieter districts. Trendy, of course: on Millennium Avenue, three streets away, where the ground fell away from under you and teenagers committed rollerblade suicide freewheeling downhill towards the Artists’ Quarter, there was something resembling overcrowding. Which, these days, meant that more than one floor in any building was occupied.

  But East Cross had never recovered from the Migration; its residents had been wealthy and left en masse, and looters had wrecked most of the buildings even before fire swept in from the abandoned suburbs. The rest of the block consisted of forlorn piles of bricks, softened by patches of buddleia and emaciated gorse. Even the hastily whitewashed walls of the Club, seen in daylight, revealed an undercoat of soot and heat-bubbled paint.

  Of course, none of the would-be clubbers queuing at the door for a credit check had ever seen the place in daylight. Nor had the huddle of teenagers who’d been refused admittance, and now loitered across the street, blowing on their cupped hands and scowling hostility at the flickering neon facade. They knew better than to look at their dreams under so harsh a light.

  Jude didn’t bother to look surprised as MultiLegion steered her into the adjacent alley, a jumble of firebombed recycling bins, broken glass and long-lost underwear. She had a reputation for being undemonstrative, even unemotional. In fact, like most ReTracers, she made a point of hiding her initial reaction to any situation; it made life easier if she had to come back to it at any point.

  In fact, just like the first time, she was practically shitting herself.

  Harchak was waiting in the shadows at the end of the alley, exactly the way he had before.

  She found herself comparing details, looking for the things that had changed, the clues to which way to push the situation. The broken bottles arrayed along the top of the low wall, catching the moonlight like lanterns; the way the ivy had punched through the crumbling brick, curling lustfully towards the dim reflected neon. A drainage channel crossing the alley – she’d stumbled there the last time, had to be careful not to do that again – and there was the fragment of red satin, probably a suspender belt, tattered by crows looking to line their nests in style.

  And something else.

  The way MultiLegion shambled along behind her, the snuffling of his breath, the way his fingers on her shoulder had seemed more like claws. Okay, he’d never exactly been Mr Civilised – not exactly a prerequisite for the job – but now…

  The boy, quite obviously, ain’t right.

  Her heel skidded down the shallow incline of the drainage channel and, startled by her inability to prevent the obvious, she let herself fall. MultiLegion snatched at the small of her back, tearing the coat still further, but she was already on the ground, blinking up at Harchak’s luminous grin, rainwater seeping through the knees of her slacks.

  ‘That’s where I like them,’ Harchak smiled, stopping his blade absently across the silicised surface of his jacket. ‘On their knees.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck you too –’

  Something was breathing on her cheek.

  Turning her head, slow and unthreatening, Jude found herself staring into the wet, red maw of something neither animal nor man.

  The eyes were human, blue and clear and infinitely sad, but the head was long, lupine, the skin grey and peeling around enlarged nostrils. It stank of piss and amphetamines and acrid, human sweat.

  She turned – on one knee, grinding her best slacks into the mud – and saw the same animal glint in MultiLegion’s eyes. The same eyes, the same smell. Variations on the same species.

  Miyahara was right. The clinics had gone insane –

  And this was definitely not how things happened before.

  ‘Say hello to the nice lady, Fenris.’

  White teeth glistened in an ironic smile.

  It was a wolf, or it had been once. New, strange things were woven into it now; intelligence and obedience and the cold, clear self-interest that formed the foundations of human cruelty. She wondered briefly, madly, what was going on inside that head, now crammed with artificial understanding of a world it could never actually share.

  ‘You kill me,’ Jude rasped, unable to tear her gaze from those cold, tragic eyes, ‘and GenoBond will hang you out to dry.’

  ‘Credit me with some intelligence, Jude.’ Harchak offered her a hand up. ‘If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have you extracted from the finest rumour-mill in Europe, in front of hundreds of witnesses. I just want a little chat, that’s all.’

  Spreading her hands in acquiescence, Jude backed off a step.

  MultiLegion three paces behind her, the man-wolf to her right, Harch
ak in front. The wall of Club Andro at her left shoulder, pulsing with transsexual anarchy; to her right, the glass-topped boundary wall, and a wilderness of collapsed cellars, open sewers and twisted pillars of metal and rust.

  The skies were empty and a police helicopter wouldn’t set down in East Cross anyway. Not just for a backstreet squabble. The best she could hope for from them would be a gas grenade to break up the fight. She was on her own.

  The man-wolf hissed softly and began nuzzling the pocket of her coat.

  Harchak raised an eyebrow. ‘You didn’t leave her armed, did you?’

  ‘Shock-net’s only good for one charge,’ MultiLegion observed, ‘and she done that. Got some trank darts, that’s all.’ A wicked soprano giggle, close and vicious. ‘She go for them, Fenris bite her hand off.’

  ‘That seems reasonable.’

  Jude wrung water from the hem of her coat. ‘That depends on how you look at it,’ she muttered.

  ‘I confess to being a little surprised.’ Harchak rubbed his gloved hands together, apparently more from habit than the cold. ‘Aren’t you ReTracers supposed to hop back in time and extricate yourselves from any dangerous situation before it even happens?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘So, why are you still here?’

  ‘It’s not that simple. I have to know what to undo.’

  ‘You could simply not come to Club Andro tonight.’

  Jude shook her head. ‘Then you’d come to my place, or catch me another night. No point in delaying things. I need to solve this problem, not avoid it.’

  Harchak smiled. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  In the blue neon reflected from the rooftop sign, he looked tired and old. He’d been a petty vicelord since Jude was a child, a name warily admired by teenagers all over Little East Bankside. His heart had never been in it, though. He’d been a scientist, once, back when that still had some meaning. There’d been a big house and a good pension and invitations to all the right places.

  Then things went wrong. People talked about grudges, official disapproval, enemies in high places. Or maybe it was drugs, or a woman, or prison; no one knew, or really cared. It was the fall that mattered.

  Suddenly, he was just a hood in a shabby suit, running unlicensed gene clinics south of the river. The Migration had thrown the city entirely into the hands of his kind and there’d been all-out gang war for years, driving out yet more of the civilian population.

  Harchak had survived, but he hadn’t prospered. Rumour said he had a few blocks of Victoria Bridge East now, old skinhead territory. She’d heard some stuff about new regening techniques, cornering the marketing in this and that, but everyone in the business claimed they were one step away from the next big thing, didn’t they?

  What all that had to do with Fenris here, or ReTracers, was entirely another matter.

  ‘Come on, then, let’s hear it. I’m missing the entertainment.’

  Harchak drew a breath, wincing in the cold, and said, ‘I find myself in need of a friend inside the hallowed halls of GenoBond.’

  ‘A spy.’

  ‘Such a harsh word. I was thinking more – someone with her ear to the ground. Her finger on the pulse of government policy. Someone who could pass on anything of interest to a man in my position.’

  The wind was biting through her damp clothes, chilling her to the core. She folded her arms around herself, shivering to reinforce the point. It didn’t take much acting ability. Fenris growled, but didn’t move.

  The spare battery connection for the shock-net was under the left arm and it only took an authorised fingerprint to connect it.

  ‘Look.’ Keeping her tone low, cooperative. ‘I’m not saying this can’t be arranged.’

  ‘Good. That would be a very unwise thing to say.’

  ‘But if GenoBond ever trace any leaks back to me, I’ll spend the rest of my brief and agonising life strapped to a bench in Internal Investigations, being – investigated internally. And yes, I appreciate that you can hurt me as much as they can. But where does that get you? You want a mole who’s not going to get caught. I want to keep you happy, and GenoBond happy, and stay alive. Make sense?’

  Harchak nodded.

  ‘So. What kind of information do you want?’

  A siren wailed, somewhere out in the night, and the man-wolf snarled. Harchak patted its head to quiet it and it shifted closer to him, resting its head against his leg.

  That left Jude a clear leap at the boundary wall. If she was prepared to thrash around in the overgrown, ice-bound bombsite beyond, fighting off a four-hundred-pound assassin, a sentient wolf-thing, and whoever else Harchak had stationed out there to ensure they weren’t disturbed.

  ‘I’ve been hearing rumours,’ Harchak admitted. ‘That people in high places have taken a dislike to bioteching. People changing identity every five minutes, messing up the paperwork. No way to tell who or what you’re sleeping with. No way to be sure if the police officer or the judge is who they appear to be, or some underworld crony in a duplicated body.’

  ‘Hardly a new problem. Anyway, there are always ways to tell. What’s this got to do –?’

  ‘I heard they’re planning to send a ReTracer back to Year Zero, to stop bioteching techniques from ever being discovered.’

  Jude went cold with shock. Just for an instant, the quick fierce revulsion of seeing her world crumble about her. And then it hit her, and she almost laughed in relief.

  ‘That’s a pile of shite, Harchak. A conspiracy theory to get the underworld scared. A ReTracer can only travel back through their own past, to a time and place they’ve been earlier in their life. And there were no ReTracers before Year Zero – because we were created out of a genetic anomaly in one of the earliest clinics. By definition, none of us were alive – even in the womb – before the first clinics opened.’

  The lights of a passing taxi-bus glittered in Harchak’s black eyes. For the first time, Jude saw the remains of real intelligence there, and wondered if she was out of her depth.

  ‘Can you honestly assure me,’ he murmured, ‘that GenoBond aren’t trying to train ReTracers to go back beyond their own lifespan?’

  ‘Of course they’re experimenting. Going back further into the past, or places they’ve never been. I don’t see how it can work – we travel back into our own bodies, and if our bodies aren’t there, where will we end up? – but of course they’re trying. They’re scientists. That’s what scientists do.’

  ‘They try. And sometimes they succeed.’

  Somewhere down in the Artist’s Quarter, where people still had a modicum of civil pride, the newly restored city clock struck one.

  Fitch.

  On the very stroke of one, just like before. A shadow on the fire escape overhead, a sharp intake of breath, the flash of a gas spray. Harchak staggered, clutching at his face. Stun rounds raked the wall as MultiLegion exploded into action, but Fitch was already gone, dropping into the shadows behind the club. Light reflected from the blades implanted across the back of her hand as she jumped, a glitter of silver falling into the abyss.

  MultiLegion, she was ready for. But from up there, Fitch couldn’t have seen the creature crouched at Harchak’s feet – the creature that hadn’t even been here last time, the creature whose teeth were appearing, slow-motion, in a hungry snarl –

  Jude must have screamed her name. She was halfway through screaming something, certainly, when the back of MultiLegion’s hand caught her across the cheekbone, a casual slap that sent her sprawling. As she clutched for a handhold, her fingers raked fur, and something warm and squirming broke her fall. She gave it the full charge of the shock-net and it screamed like a child.

  As she jackknifed, panic-stricken, off the man-wolf’s body and back into the shadows, she heard the slow hiss of its final breath, a sound of profound relief.

  A snap of elastic as MultiLegion settled infra-red goggles over his face, and he was gone. Into the rear alley, where Fitch had taken shelter. No way
back up to the roof, and no way out.

  Blinking away the bright flashes of a fledgling concussion, Jude made it to her feet and slithered across the wet stones to Harchak.

  The old man was kneeling in a puddle, moaning; hands clenched into fists as he fought the impulse to rub his eyes and drive the irritant further in. He whimpered as Jude ripped open his coat and started going through his pockets, but made no attempt to resist.

  There was a knife in the inside breast pocket, tangled among a wad of mixed currencies. Extracting it, she released a shower of notes into the alley, filling the water with what rapidly became paper pulp.

  She pressed the flat of the blade against the side of Harchak’s neck, just under the chin, where she could open an artery with a flick of the wrist. ‘Call him off.’

  Harchak coughed like a dying man.

  ‘Call him off and we’ll make a deal.’

  A sigh of exasperation; then, sharp and clear despite the gas, ‘MultiLegion! You’re recalled. Take Fenris back to the car and wait for me.’

  Silence. Jude pressed the blade in a little harder.

  ‘Now!’

  Shambling out of the alley, stun-cannon dangling from one hand, MultiLegion glanced indifferently at them, and turned to obey.

  ‘Fenris,’ he observed, pausing beside the body, ‘is dead.’

  ‘I know.’ Harchak glared at Jude as if she’d murdered some innocent puppy. ‘Brittle bones. Must take another look at the sequencing… Just take his body back to the car and wait for me.’

  Crouching, MultiLegion slung the carcass over one shoulder. His eyes glittered; with anger or tears. As he straightened up, Jude thought she heard him whisper, ‘Poor doggie.’

  ‘Poor doggie, my arse.’ For someone who’d been chased up and down an alley by a four-hundred-pound psychopath with a stun cannon, Fitch looked pretty good. She’d changed out of the skimpy bar uniform into a plain red stretch dress, and her hair was brushed back and lightly curled. One shoe was still in her hand, stiletto heel poised for use as a weapon, and the other was missing; her bare legs were splashed with mud and she’d lost an earring. Somehow, it all just added to the charm.