The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  I was not secretary, Salgado suddenly said in my mind. For years she’d been mostly silent, hiding, and now she was ready to talk and showed no signs of stopping. I drew my salary from the State Department, but I was no damn diplomat.

  “Those were the days, yes?” Grisha suddenly interjected, shaking with suppressed coughing. “When there were such things as formalities like official directives?” He sighed, swallowing phlegm and bile. “Civilization.”

  We were all seated at the tight wooden table, and I’d finally accepted a cup of coffee, which sat in front of me like regret in lukewarm liquid form. I tried to concentrate, but I kept seeing Remy, thinking back on it. Trying to see where I should have anticipated a trap, protected the kid. Belling telling me he was bait. The old bastard still clinging to some hope that he’d come back, get back on top—that he’d survive. Otherwise he might have tipped me off. Belling and I weren’t friends, and I’d come there to kill him, but we were both professionals.

  “She was processed through Chengara Pen and never heard from again, but so were several thousand other people, not to mention the people who churned through the other five EOT installations Marin had built around the world.” He paused and cocked his head. “There may be cold iron under those prisons with thousands of human minds burned onto them, come to think of it.”

  I shook my head. “My impression was they uploaded as fast as they cracked us open.”

  Lok leaned forward slightly. His hair was long but stiff and slightly curled, standing up from his head in a glossy black wave that shifted gently like grass when he moved. “So, you were really there? You really got seventy-nined?”

  I cocked my head and squinted at him, duplicating his own expression, and then I leaned forward, slapped both hands onto his head, and smashed his face down onto the table. He bounced up and back, ending up sitting perfectly straight and staring at me in complete shock for a moment while his nose sent out a thick stream of dark blood.

  “Avery!” Grisha shouted, his tone almost amused. “You are among friends, you animal.”

  I pointed at Lok. “That’s for the rod, back there,” I said, leaning back and extracting one of the cigarettes they’d been good enough to give me and sticking it between my lips. It was like I’d never gone several years without smoking. “That’s today’s lesson: You cattle prod someone, you better keep them down.” I smiled as Grisha handed the still-stunned Lok a rag. “Be happy, comrade. We’re even now.” I picked up the communal lighter from the table. “You done with the history lesson?” I looked around. “I’ve got Dolores Salgado in my head, yeah. Years ago she told me she knew about Marin’s codes, sure. I forgot, because people kept shooting me and arresting me and pressing me into the fucking army and I always had better fucking things to do than worry about Director Marin. I got processed. Or almost processed. They got, like, eighty percent of me, and I got a head full of psychic backwash.” I lit up and sent a plume of smoke into the air. “Only three of them still talk to me, though.” I decided not to mention Marin or Squalor’s ghosts; this bunch might get excited and gang rape me on the floor if those names started floating about. “You want to tell me why the Angels decide to stop trying to execute me and send a Pusher to kill my… kill my friend and follow me around?”

  Lok, holding the rag to his nose, half stood, swayed a little, and sat down heavily. I watched Grisha, who was clearly in charge. He looked at Lok and sighed, then looked back at me, his pinched face cheerful behind his stupid glasses.

  “They know, somehow, of Salgado inside you. They realize that even if you were a man who submitted to torture—and all men have a breaking point, Avery—that you likely do not even know the information they seek. There is a theory that Salgado would feel all your sufferings if you were handled correctly, but this is theory. They might torture you until death and still get nothing useful, if she is walled off and impervious to your own sufferings.” He smiled. “They believe a prolonged exposure might yield results. Subtle Psionic pressure over weeks or months might reveal to them what Salgado knows, or allow the Pusher to access Salgado directly. They did not count on your propensity for being kidnapped and sold on the black markets, however.”

  I shook my head, sucking in smoke. “She doesn’t know the codes. She knows who has—or had—them.” I shrugged. “This was years ago, and just about everyone who was alive years ago is dead now, I think.” I winked at Lok. “Or will be soon, eh?”

  “That scans,” Lok said, his voice muffled by the rag. I’d knocked some of the insane cheer out of him, at least, and I was impressed that he was still conscious and able to speak. “These codes would have been created when the Joint Council was still conscious and in control. As an undersecretary, she would not have clearance for the information. This likely emboldened Marin; he probably thought no one had his overrides. No one still alive.”

  We sat for a moment, quiet. A smog of cigarette smoke had filled the container, making everything hazy. Grisha cleared his throat and sat forward. “Avery, have you asked her?”

  I blinked. I’d spent years trying to shut the fucking ghosts up, to keep them at bay. The idea of purposefully asking Dolores Salgado a question seemed… crazy. I stared at Grisha for a moment and then closed my eyes, taking a deep drag on my cigarette.

  Well, Dolores? I know you can hear everything. You got anything to tell me?

  She didn’t respond for a moment, and when she did she was loud and clear, like she’d been living in my head, a turtle in its shell. You won’t like it, Avery.

  I don’t like anything anymore, Dolores, I thought. Just tell me who has these fucking codes so I can get on with it.

  If you thought about it, you’d guess, Avery. It’s Garda, of course. You didn’t think he was just an assassin, did you?

  For a second, I went calm and cold. Without effort I slammed down an imaginary glass shield, trapping Salgado outside, giving me a second of perfect silence. Michaleen Garda. Otherwise known as Cainnic Orel, the legend. Otherwise known as the last person I was going to kill before shuffling off.

  I opened my eyes. “It’s Orel,” I said. “It’s Canny Orel.”

  Grisha nodded, frowning. “Orel,” he breathed, coughing once, twice, and then breathing again, leaning back. “That is… unfortunate.”

  * * *

  I found Adora outside SPS’s cluster of interconnected shipping containers, leaning against one of them and smoking, staring off into the distance. She’d cleaned up a little, her face and hands were free of grime, but her hair and clothes were almost pitch-black, hanging off her with greasy weight. She was as beautiful as ever, though, her still, calm face all delicate lines that somehow came together into a perfectly asymmetrical pattern, a fine mouth pursed to blow smoke into the air, her green eyes slitted in the light.

  When I was close, she turned and smiled at me, her face opening up and turning bright. She reached out with one hand and squeezed my shoulder. I found that after being pressed against her chastely for weeks on end, her touch was comforting.

  “Cigarette?” she said, holding up a case. “They are rich with them here. I did not smoke much before, but this is my fourth one in half an hour. I am dizzy.”

  I shook my head. “They gave me a bunch, too.”

  She frowned down at her feet. “I am sorry about… about your friend. For all of it. I—”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” I snapped. I didn’t want to talk about Remy.

  “What will you do?”

  I leaned against the wext to her and pushed my hands into my pockets. “What I came here to do.”

  She snorted. “Kill everyone.”

  I nodded. “For starters.”

  She tossed her cigarette away and pushed herself from the wall, shoving her hands into the pockets of her filthy overalls. My arms jerked spastically as I almost reached out to touch her, pull her back. I didn’t know if it was just being cooped up with her for so long, or if she was the first woman I’d met in a while who wasn’t a murderous robot
or cyborg, but I suddenly didn’t want her to be anywhere but next to me.

  In the end, though, I held my arms tightly against me and said nothing. She took three steps and stopped. She didn’t turn around.

  “I go north,” she said. “Toledo. My people are from there, back in the mists of time.”

  I nodded, thinking back on our long evening in the Daniel Krokos. “I remember.”

  “I think I would see it. Perhaps you will come find me when you are finished.”

  I smiled at her back. “You’d want me to?”

  She started walking again. “There is no one else left.”

  PART III

  XIV

  YOU GET AROUND

  “Try not to kill this one,” Grisha complained, flicking his cigarette to the street even as he pulled another from behind his ear and placed it between his lips. “At least not immediately, yes?”

  “We got what we needed from that ancient piece of shit in Cadiz,” I said easily. Grisha had been complaining for a week about shooting the Pusher. His grousing had gotten familiar and I almost enjoyed it, the way he sawed on and on about things you couldn’t change. It was like rain. You just took it for granted and forgot it was there. “You’re lucky I gave you three days.”

  He grunted in dissatisfaction. I got the feeling Grisha didn’t get disobeyed too often these days. He liked to sigh on and on about how SPS was a communal organization without a leader, but Grish had four Techies who followed him around like puppies, and I’d seen him snap his fingers and bring some serious resources to bear. I’d been everywhere over the last few years, and there were whole cities, whole regions where no one had any control, where things were fucking chaos. Grisha and SPS had resources. First there had been the efficient and kind of satisfying torture of the old Pusher, who’d squealed like a pig with just a tiny Push, terrified at finding himself, for the first time in his life, without his usual power to make assholes like me dance. Grisha had produced some nightmare-inducing devices, applied with a clinical and emotionless efficiency that was worse, somehow, than the devices themselves. There’d been a ragged-looking black box with several thick cables sprouting from it like some terrible plastic and silicone plant, each terminating in a copper clamp that was attached to the old fuck’s head in various places, and which made him just scream and vibrate while Grisha stood over him, smoke leaking up in a thick stream from his mouth and nose. There’d been a small, shiny black capsule inserted into the old Pusher’s ear, making his eyes bug out, blood streaming suddenly from his nose. He hadn’t screamed that time, but that had been worse, because I got the feeling he wanted to but couldn’t.

  There’d been four-wheelers to take us from Cadiz into Italy. There’d been more SPS members to act as muscle and lookouts. There’d been yen when yen was being accepted, and there’d been barter when that was the best they could do. Grisha snapped his fingers and things got fucking done. I hadn’t seen much of that recently, and found I liked it.

  “We know, what? That he does not know what an Angel is. He had no mark, yes. That he works for the remnants of the SSF.” He laughed humorlessly. “I am thinking, good, this is good. We will ask him who his contact is with the System Pigs. We will get details. Perhaps he knows things we do not even know to ask about! I go into the room and there is Avery, there is a dead Pusher, and there are no more questions.”

  I shrugged, picturing Remy on the floor of the hospital in Mexico City, picturing me stepping over him. “What was he going to tell us, exactly? The cops want Marin’s override codes because in a few weeks their avatars are going to shut down and they’ll hibernate until the fucking sun swells up big and red and eats this fucking hellhole. That’s easy.”

  Grisha grunted again, irritated, but let it drift. He’d developed a stoop, moving with the slow, oiled grace I remembered but bent over, his shoulders up and his head low, hands perpetually in his pockets. Getting old, I figured. Apparently that’s all anyone was doing—those of us the old Monks used to call meat just aging away, and even the Avatars in the world had an expiration date just a few weeks away. He’d developed a little cough, too, a wet-sounding gurgle that punctuated every other sentence. I stole a glance at him as we moved along opposite sides of the square, the sun beating down on the top of my head; he was just strolling, hands deep in the pockets of his jumpsuit, glasses glinting in the light and cigarette bouncing in his mouth. It was like one eternal cigarette, always there.

  I looked across the square again. A group of fat, shirtless old men were sitting outside a dilapidated old bar, fanning themselves and shouting simultaneously in Italian. It was a tiny little town, a speck; one second we’d been bouncing along in the four-wheeler Grisha had summoned out of the thin air, thick brush and ragged-looking trees everywhere, and the next we’d been creeping up a shadowed, cool stairway, emerging into a tiny village of faded stone buildings that looked like the System had forgotten about it. A few dozen feet from the group, a man in a showy white suit sat alone at a tiny table, a small cup of what was passing for coffee these days steaming in front of him. His suit looked light and cool, but was wrinkled and grimy, stained. He was just sitting there with his eyes closed, hands folded peacefully on his belly, but that didn’t mean anything.

  I looked around, scanning rooftops and balcnies, places I’d put lookouts and snipers if I were going to sit in the middle of an open square drinking fake coffee like nothing could touch me. The town was all pale, yellowed stone and red slate roofs missing tiles, half crumbled. But you got the feeling the buildings had been half crumbled for a thousand years, unchanged. The central square was big and roomy but once you stepped off you got trapped in narrow, winding little roadlets; Grisha had Lok and four other members of SPS, each armed with oddball single-action rifles they’d scrounged from somewhere, positioned at several of the side streets, but we couldn’t man the entire square.

  As we approached, the old men stopped talking and looked at us; I wondered if their silence was a signal to our guy that someone was coming. I’d been in Italy before, but it had been a different world: damp, buried by water, everything salty. This little scrub of a town was dry and warm, everything dusty. An old monastery overlooked the square from a mild hill rising up behind us, looming.

  We walked past the group, and when we were a few dusty feet away from the man in the white suit, he spoke up.

  “You must be lost,” he said without opening his eyes. “Because no one in the whole history of the world has ever come to Fiesole on purpose.”

  I froze for a second, my hands in the pockets of my coat, which had been cut to let me pull my gun directly from the hip holster I’d started to favor. “I know you,” I said without thinking, amazed. “I’ve seen you before.”

  He was made of a melty red plastic, his skin scaly and angry everywhere. His hairless head was a mass of scarred tissue and rippled, ruined flesh, and he was the cop I’d met in Hong Kong when I’d been there hunting the God Augment, the one organizing resistance to everyone, the one who told me he’d be King of Hong Kong before it was all over. He opened his eyes and looked up, grinning.

  “Avery Cates,” he said. “Holy shit, you get around.”

  “You have met?” Grisha said. One thing I liked about Grish: He never felt the need to pretend he knew more than he did.

  “Couple times,” the cop said, grinning. His teeth and eyes were startlingly white and clear in the midst of his ruined face. His hands were gloves of twisted, scorched flesh, too, and I felt itchy and painful just watching him as he picked up his cup of coffee just to show us how unconcerned he was. He sipped his coffee with his eyes on me. “What’s the matter, Cates? Don’t recognize me? You did have someone else on your mind when we met.” He set his cup down and extended his scaly hand. “Horatio Gall, former major, System Security Force.”

  I was surprised into a smile. “Gall,” I breathed. “You were in Venice, working bodyguard for that old asshole.” Slowly I pulled my hand from my pocket and reached out to take
his; it was dry and hot, which was probably my imagination. “You took a bomb there.”

  He nodded gaily, indicating his face with the other hand. “Ain’t that the fucking understatement of the century. Don’t worry, I don’t hold grudges. That little incident clarified things for me.” He took his hand back and raised it into the air, gesturing at the silent group of old men up the street. “That’s whI’m sitting here in my own skin, instead of a silicone robot.”

  There was movement behind us, and I whirled to find three of the fat old men hauling another table and two more chairs over to us from the interior of one of the two-story buildings along the square. They moved silently, leaving behind another two steaming cups and walking away without a word or glance our way. The fucking System Pigs—even burned-up, resigned ones like Gall—never fucking changed. Everywhere they went, they put under the boot.

  Grisha and I looked at each other, and then he shrugged and sat down. “You have expected us, then?”

  Gall nodded. “Just for the last few hours. You were spotted bouncing along in one of those wheeled vehicles.” He shrugged. “I don’t have satellites and wireless power anymore, men, but I’ve got fifteen old coots who call me padrone and who can sit on a roof with an old sniper scope and give me a warning.” He spread his hands. “Okay, Fiesole has about thirty residents and one business, which you’re sitting in. So you didn’t come here for the wine, which tastes like fucking vinegar, or the food, of which there isn’t any, or the sights, which you just saw on your way in. So,” he said and spread his hands, “you came to see me.”

  I shrugged at Grisha, and he plucked his cigarette from his mouth as I shook one of my own out. “We need to make contact with the SSF, the police, up in Berlin. We do not have any routes of communication with them anymore, and even entering central Europe is a chancy thing.” He pointed his cigarette at Gall. “I understand you have maintained some presence within the SSF.”