by Jeff Somers
“Listen to me,” I advised softly as he bucked under me. “If I picked you up by your feet and shook you, a million yen would fall out of your fucking pockets.”
Five hundred grand was about a month’s survival, these days—if you lived light and weren’t picky, and if you could even get people to accept yen as payment. Your chances of spending yen were better in the cities—in Potosí you could scrape together enough folks willing to take yen to get by. Any smaller than Potosí, you either bartered or you had precious metals—gold or platinum, mostly. Heavy to carry, hard to come by.
“If I pinch your nose for two minutes,” I went on in a whisper, “you’re dead and whatever I find in here is fucking mine, so think again about our arrangement and what you owe me. I’m going to let you think for another ten seconds and then I’m going to take my hand off your mouth, and there’s a right answer and a wrong answer to the question: Are you going to pay me my fee?”
His eyes were wide and he’d stopped struggling. Guys like Morales had never encountered a professional before. They were born into a backwater like Potosí, and they thought Gunners were employees. We were the people with the guns. Guys like Morales, they worked for us.
I waited another moment and chanced a glance up. Remy had two guns in his hands, covering the guards, who both stood like newly erected statues, gaping. I stifled a sudden unwanted giggle. I should have picked up a protégé years ago.
I looked back down at Morales, whose eyes were taking on the dreamy, this-isn’t-so-bad glaze of someone about to pass out. I snatched my hand from his mouth and let it hover an inch or so away as he took a deep, coughing breath.
“Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, you fucking—”
“Avery Cates!” someone shouted from outside the tent. “Come and be judged!”
I closed my eyes, a shock of adrenaline pulsing through me, quickly regulated by my limping augments. Never a moment’s peace, I thought. The Angel we’d spotted in the street had gotten tired of waiting for me to come back out.
“We should have killed himout in the street,” Remy said. But then Remy wanted to kill everybody.
I looked down at Morales. “Stay put. We’re not finished,” I said, and then the tent exploded silently, fluttering up into the air.
II
HARD AND NOISY WAS HIS ONLY WAY
I rolled off Morales and scrambled toward what had been the corner of the tent, hooking my elbow under the taut hemp rope, tight as a guitar string, that held the white tent fabric to the rusting stake driven deep into the frozen ground. Tele-Ks, I’d found from boring experience, basically had two attacks: They either tossed heavy things at you, or they tossed you high into the air and then let you drop. For some reason they always thought being able to do these two things gave them the advantage in a fucking gunfight.
I tried to scan the crowd quickly to find the Angel before he spotted me; Tele-Ks had to see you, or at least have a good mental picture of where you were in relation to them. Just as I picked him out, though, the world jerked under me and an invisible hand tried to toss me up into the air. My shoulder popped painfully out of its socket as I jerked upward, but I grimaced and kept my arm clamped around the rope. Ever since Hong Kong, my shoulder slipped out of its socket like it wanted to be free, and I’d gotten good at ignoring the grinding pain and just popping it back in at my earliest opportunity. I fluttered there like a piece of trash caught in the wind, and I tried to swing my gun around to throw a few ill-advised shots at him before he started pelting me with buckets or rocks or people. The fucking Telekinetics were all the same. All the power in the cosmos and the best they could do is throw shit at you.
Morales’s two guards had unslung their rifles and crouched down, but didn’t know what they were looking for. As I swung around trying to orient on the Angel, they both flew into the air, screeching, their careers ending more or less as expected. I spotted Remy, crawling toward me, staying low.
“Stop!” I shouted, the invisible hand slapping me into a spin. “Stay still!”
“Avery Cates!” the Angel shouted as a large rock shot past my head. “You have been judged! The world is broken! Men are vanished! The human race is barren, and we are sent to make final judgments!”
His voice was rough and throaty, a rasp. As I jerked this way and that, clinging desperately to the thrumming rope, I saw a crowd gathering behind him, eager for some entertainment in a place like Potosí. I didn’t blame them. If I wasn’t the unlucky bastard constantly being batted around by these freaks, I would have been pretty amused, too.
My arm burned with the effort of keeping the bulky rope pinned under my armpit, and my shoulder ached, the pain blasting into a sharp jab with every jerk. I watched Remy crawling for another moment and then raised my arm and swung it around until I was more or less aiming in the general vicinity of the Angel, who stood there in his dark, mud-stained suit without flinching. The crowd behind him let out a rolling, chaotic roar and split into two, moving rapidly to either side of him. Fun was fun, but nobo wanted an errant bullet in the face. I couldn’t get a bead on him as he tugged violently at me, trying to dislodge me from my anchor.
Below me, Remy had crawled, unnoticed, almost directly underneath. Lying on his belly, he carefully took a bead on the Angel and squeezed the trigger, but the revolver was so fucking huge it bucked in his hand as usual and all he did was tear up a spray of mud at the Angel’s feet. An instant later Remy shot up into the air, getting caught in the fluttering fabric of Morales’s tent. I swallowed and pushed Remy out of my mind, didn’t think about being responsible for him sailing up into the air and the last moments of his life being high-velocity ones. I concentrated on the Angel on the ground, his round face and full cheeks and big, dark eyes. I brought the Roon around with a grimace and spent some seconds trying to hold a steady bead on him.
This is why, Dolores Salgado, who had once been an undersecretary, one of the most powerful people in the world, whispered in my head. She’d been dead a long time, and I was tired of carrying her around and ignoring her. This is why we collected all the Actives and trained them. Because of this.
He noticed what I was doing before I could get a shot off, and with a tick of his head a rusting metal barrel hosting a garbage fire sprang from the ground and sailed toward me, spitting flaming chunks of grease and sparks, smacking into my upraised arm and spinning me wildly.
When I stopped spinning, he had raised an arm to point at me.
“Avery Cates!” he shouted. “You have been judged! You have killed your fellow man! You have fomented chaos and violence everywhere you have dragged yourself! You have killed thirteen members of my order, for which only god can judge you, and it is my duty to make this arrangement!”
The Angels reminded me of the old Monks, those tortured cyborgs that used to prowl the System when there was a System and try and convince everyone that they had to live forever to get into fucking heaven. The Monks had generally wanted me dead, too.
Fuck aim, I thought, and shot my arm out in the Angel’s vague direction, squeezing off eight shots as fast as my finger could twitch. Two or three went wide, but two managed to chew up the frozen ground at his feet, making him stumble backward. For a second, the invisible hand tugging me up disappeared as his concentration was broken, and I dropped to the ground, managing to curl up and throw my arms around my head just before I smacked down. My Roon went off on impact, and the air was suddenly filled with screams.
Head ringing, my HUD flickered, broken status reports sliding past me as the immediate pain from the impact was washed away. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself up. The market had turned into chaos, the crowd slurring this way and that. I couldn’t see the Tele-K—he’d been swallowed by the panic—but I did see a body lying near the edge of the market, just a pair of tattered brown pants and two bare, brown feet sticking up. Nothing like an accidental kill to get the crowd stirred up.
I checked my gun over quickly, opening the chamber and dropping the clip,
then slamming both home again. It seemed fine, but I’d have to strip it later. I heard a soft grunt behind me and spun to find Remy, enveloped in the white tent, fighting hiway toward me in the freezing mud.
“You okay?”
He made a face. “Embarrassed.”
I grinned, because I knew it would irritate him. “Move. Get in the crowd, under shelter so he can’t send us into orbit.” We moved to split up and I pulled up short, grabbing Remy’s arm and spinning him back to me. “Try not to kill everyone who gets in your way.”
He turned without a word and sprinted toward the crowd, and I trotted at an angle to him, dashing around the muddy tents. I didn’t know where the Angel had gone, but I wanted him out of my hair. I didn’t need him popping up with his speeches and freaky powers every time I tried to get some business done. Stepping over the corpse, I merged into the foot traffic with my gun down by my hip, my finger alongside the barrel. Things were already getting back to normal even with the poor guy still lying in the mud a few feet away—there was still a buzz of excitement, but everyone was getting back to their own business. There was no law. No one was going to come and find out what had happened, who did it. No one was coming to process the body. If he had anything on him worth stealing, it was already gone, and with that, so was everyone’s interest until the shooting started again.
I stepped back onto the main road and stopped to look around. Remy appeared a few dozen feet back from me and did the same, glancing at me and then advancing across the road and into the line of carts. At least in there he’d have something to anchor himself to. Although I’d been smashed against walls over and over again, too, so there was definitely nothing stopping them from kicking your ass anyway.
There was a tug on my sleeve. I looked down and found half a man staring up at me. He was young, or had been, and had no legs, his midsection just ending on a filthy skid that had been designed to let him slide through mud or snow pretty easily. He held two blocks of wood in his hands for self-propulsion. His face was half normal and half a red mask of cold burns, one eye socket just a rubbery mat of pink flesh. The other eye was bright blue and glared at me with force, as if daring me to challenge him. A soldier, I decided. Someone pressed into a unit just like I’d been, but not lucky enough to get sold out of the army—if you called getting fucked over by Cainnic Orel and Wa Belling for about the fiftieth time and being left for dead—also for the fiftieth time—as lucky.
“I saw ’im,” the cripple said in a hoarse voice. “What you got for it?”
I studied him. “I could not shoot you in your good eye.”
His smile was the worst thing I’d ever seen. I would have paid him just to stop. “Naw, you won’t. I hearda you. C’mon, make me an offer.”
Hearda you. A deep pulse of anger went through me. That was how people got killed, especially old people like me, staring forty down and waking up every day with a new set of aches. Word got out you were soft, that you could be safely fucked with, and it was only a matter of time.
Time’s what I didn’t have, though; every moment made getting surprised by the Tele-K more likely, so I swallowed my irritation down. <
“Five hundred yen,” I said. “Paper. And I don’t find you later and finish what the war started, one arm at a time.” I leaned down, fishing a wad of notes from my coat. “And if you haggle, I swear I will tip you over right here and step on the back of your head until you stop struggling.” I put some grin into it, and he blinked, reaching out with one calloused hand and snatching the bright green notes.
“Third building down from here,” he said, hurriedly putting some back into sliding away. “The barber’s.”
I watched him make impressive speed through the mud, then looked up and over at the building he’d indicated, where someone had painted a swirling design in red, white, and blue. It was a heavy-looking building, big slabs of gray stone with the delicate carved facade still clinging to the doorway, an archway of faux bricks and tiny carvings I couldn’t make out. The rest of the building was like a scar, like someone had peeled the outside off, leaving just the bones.
I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled. A moment later Remy was at my side, his revolver down at his hip, his face blank.
“There,” I said, pointing. “Go around back. Count to fifty, then come in hard and noisy.”
I didn’t really have to tell Remy that. Hard and noisy was his only way.
He hesitated for a moment like he was going to argue, then shrugged and sauntered down the narrow alley between the buildings.
I checked the Roon again and then held it out as I walked, finger on the trigger. I crossed behind the line of carts first and approached the door from the side, keeping my exposure low. I couldn’t see anything inside the doorway. When I was a foot or so from it, I took a deep breath, my HUD fading for a moment and almost disappearing, and then took three quick, long strides and entered the building.
My eyes adjusted immediately, thanks to my old, damaged augments. I was in what had once been the foyer of the building, now sporting a single large metal chair bolted to the bare concrete floor and several scratched and dented wooden tables. A large mirror had been balanced against the wall on top of one of the tables, and the rest of the tables sported a scattering of jars and tools, brushes and razors. The floor was almost as wet and muddy as the street outside.
The barber stood behind the chair, one hand tilting his customer’s head, the other holding a razor that looked like it had started out life as a thin metal file. He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at a spot on the wall above the mirror, stock-still. Standing against the rear wall, next to a closed, heavy-looking wooden door, was the Angel, hands in the pockets of his elegant coat. The second I saw him, I was enveloped in the invisible fist, unable to move.
“Fuck me,” I gasped, finding it hard to breathe. “You’re not going to make another fucking speech, are you?”
A slight smile kinked up the corners of his mouth, and he took a breath. The invisible fist tightened in one eye-popping jerk, and my HUD flickered off in my eyes.
“widve been—”
The door next to him crashed inward, smacking into him in a bit of luck I knew the cosmos would bill me for later. Remy stood in the doorway, eyes everywhere, long hair disheveled. The fist melted away and I crouched down slightly, putting three shells into the door. I looked up.
“Check him.”
Remy slammed the door shut with one authoritative shove and fired his cannon twice into the crumpled form of the Angel, each shot damaging my hearing.
The sudden stillness was creepy, after that. Slowly, I straightened up and looked at the chair. The barber and his customer were gone. Then I looked at Remy and smiled. Remy stared back, expressionless, and slid his gun back into his hip holster, wiping his hands on his muddy coat.
I sighed. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s find that fat fuck.”
Morales was sitting on a recovered chair in the midst of his ruined tent, belly spilling out over his knees. He was smoking what looked and smelled like a real cigar, pre-war. He watched us approach, with squinted eyes, affecting calm, but the sheen of sweat on his brow and the way he fidgeted told me otherwise. He was terrified, and for good reason: He probably had more muscle on tap, but they weren’t here yet, and if I chose to slit his throat in front of Potosí, no one was going to stop me.
“I am glad to see you triumphant, Mr. Cates,” he said with fake cheer. “Those crazy Spooks should be opposed.”
That sounded sincere enough. I stopped in front of the fat bastard while Remy circled around behind him. Morales cocked his head to track him for a second, then smiled at me and spread his hands.
“I was not lying, Mr. Cates,” he said. “I do not have the funds I owe you.”
I nodded, pursing my lips, and when I reared back and kicked him over in the chair, he didn’t seem surprised. Feeling tired, I just walked over to where he was and put my gun on him, cocking the hammer just in case all he needed w
as some extra encouragement.
He put his hands up, the sheen of calm cheer gone. “Espera!” he shouted. “Wait! I have a counteroffer. I have five thousand yen in notes in my pocket. It is all I have, liquid.”
I waited without moving. “And?”
He licked his lips and fucking smiled. “I have information you have been seeking. I can tell you where the man named Wallace Belling is. Where he is right now.”
I stood there for a moment, a cold shock settling into my bones. My mouth watered and I had to blink rapidly to clear my vision. It had been years. I’d last seen Belling in Amsterdam, when he delivered me to Cainnic Orel—known then as Michaleen Garda—after buying me out of the army. I’d last been in Belling’s presence weeks later, in Hong Kong. I’d been dreaming of killing them both for years.
I nodded, stepping back and clicking the hammer back down. “Deal.”
III
YOU JUST HAD TO LET HIM DANCE
I reached out and pulled Remy back. He resisted for a moment and then let me shove him down into his chair. I leaned against the bar and let my coat hang open, showing off the Roon in its leather holster. The big, hairy guy who was sweating in the unheated bar looked at it and then back at me.
“I apologize for my friend,” I said. “Let me buy you a drink.”
The bar only sold something mysteriously sweet and disturbingly red. I didn’t know what they made it from, and didn’t want to know. Our first night in Potosí I’d made the mistake of having a third.
The big guy was probably seven feet tall. Old, older than me, but still a lot of muscle. His beard was gray and black and long, tied off every few inches with bits of leather. He settled back into his stool. “All right,” he said in an accent I couldn’t place. “Tell your friend he should not pick fights.”
I nodded at the bartender and pointed at the big guy. “He wasn’t picking a fight,” I said. “He likes to shoot people.”