“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” a much whinier voice replied from somewhere in the back. “Keep your shirt on, Hilaire! I was in the can. Only gone a minute!”
“The hell you were,” Hilaire retorted. “In there watching porn again, you mean!”
“Well, what if I was?” Marcel demanded with defensive anger. “It’s your shift, and you’re a good five minutes late! Wouldn’t have had to leave the bar to take a dump if you’d been here on time.”
“I wasn’t late—which you’d know if you’d been where the hell you were supposed to be when I walked in the door. I don’t give a damn who your brother is, Marcel. Not anymore. You’ve been warned about this kind of crap a dozen times! Now you get your sorry ass over to Bernadette Street and you tell Gaspar why you weren’t on the bar when I came in.”
“Gaspar?” The self-righteous anger had vanished from Marcel’s tone, replaced by something much more like panic.
“Yeah, Gaspar. And I’m gonna screen him to tell him you’re coming,” Hilaire said, thumping Marcel’s suddenly deflated chest with an index finger. “So was I you, I wouldn’t waste any frigging time getting there. He’s gonna have enough to say to you without adding that to it—understood?”
“Under… understood,” Marcel muttered.
He stood irresolute a moment longer, then headed for the door, his dejected shamble the antithesis of Hilaire’s arrogant saunter.
Hilaire watched him go with a satisfied air before he started around behind the bar. Then he paused in mid-stride as he caught sight of Eloise from the corner of one eye and changed course toward her.
Eloise watched him come and wondered what to say. She was a tutor, not a cop or a trained interrogator. She wasn’t even an ex-Marine like Kevin! What did she know about—?
The question broke off as something glittered in the bar’s dank dimness, and her breathing seemed to stop. The rearing silver unicorn wasn’t huge—barely four centimeters from the tip of its tiny spiral horn to its rear hoofs, and it hung from a leather thong, not the delicate silver chain which had supported it the last time she saw it—but she recognized it instantly. It had once belonged to her mother, and to her mother’s mother, and to her… before she gave it to Estelle on her sixth birthday.
It was Estelle’s only true treasure, worn under her clothing to avoid the acquisitive eyes of the thieves who were all too common in Duquesne Tower.
She straightened in her chair, and Hilaire stopped suddenly, his eyes widening as if in surprised recognition when he got a good look at her for the first time. He stood for a moment, then shook his head and continued until he reached the table behind which she sat.
“Help you, cutie?” he drawled.
“I think you can.” Eloise was astounded by her own calm, conversational tone. “I’m looking for someone.”
Her grip shifted slightly on the baton in her lap, her thumb resting lightly, almost hungrily, on the extender button.
“Now, who might that be?” Hilaire asked mockingly, left hand reaching deliberately to toy with the unicorn and be certain she’d seen it.
“I think you know who,” Eloise said softly, and her knee slammed into the underside of the small, cheap plastic table.
Eloise was not an enormous woman, but she was an extraordinarily fit one and the table was light. Kevin Usher would have been proud of the way her knee hit it, and it rocketed upward. It was far too light to actually hurt or even inconvenience Hilaire in any way, of course, but he leapt at least a meter straight backward, away from the sheer, unexpected violence of its movement.
And as he leapt, Eloise Pritchart came to her feet.
Her thumb tapped the button three times, the baton flicked out to sixty centimeters, and she lashed it across his left kneecap like a whip. The enhanced inertia-loading at its tip boosted the impact energy by a factor of almost two and the sharp “Crack!” of contact disappeared into Hilaire’s scream as the kneecap shattered like glass. He tumbled backward, hands reaching instinctively for the source of his agony, and as he hunched forward, the baton struck again, rising to slash vertically downward. It slammed directly into his left shoulder joint with vicious, premeditated precision, fracturing both the scapula and the head of his humerus, and this time his scream was a shriek.
He hit the floor, trying to curl into an agonized fetal knot, but before he could complete the move that dreadful baton whipped back down once more, exploding across his right knee joint as the leg drew defensively up toward his abdomen.
He screamed in fresh agony, and his right hand scrabbled toward a pocket, only to meet that hammering baton yet again. He slammed back onto his spine again, reeling away from the pain of a wrist reduced to gravel, and then Eloise’s knee slammed down on his chest, something cold and hard pressed the front of his throat, and he froze as he heard the sudden, shrill, terrifying whine of an activated vibro blade.
His eyes were huge, filled with pain and terror, and she pressed the vibro blade’s hilt against his throat. Then she squeezed the button, bringing the actual blade up, letting him hear it whine as it sliced into the floor beside him, and her eyes could have frozen a star’s heart.
“You know exactly who,” she told him, her voice even colder than her eyes. “Now tell me where she is.”
“I… I…”
“I’ll ask you once more,” she said softly. “Then I take off your right hand. Then I’ll ask again… before I take off your left hand. And after that—well, you get the picture.”
“How… how do I know you won’t kill me anyway?”
“You don’t.”
* * *
I should’ve killed him anyway, Eloise thought as she made her way quietly down the alley. And if he’s sent me on a wild goose chase, or if… if she’s not all right when I find her, I damned well will go back and kill him!
She reached the service door and paused. She wore the outsized jacket she’d taken from Hilaire before she’d locked him in the strong room which housed Hankies’ liquor supply. She’d drawn its hood up over her head on her way here and she left it there, hiding her face and hair from any cameras that might be monitoring the alley as she leaned her forehead against the door for a moment.
She blinked her eyes furiously while her right hand touched the hard shape of the unicorn under her blouse. She stayed that way for a handful of seconds before she inhaled deeply and pressed the button under the speaker beside the door. Several seconds passed, then—
“Yeah?” a voice growled from the speaker.
“Hilaire sent me,” she replied. “From Hankies.”
“Oh, yeah? And why’d he do that?”
“He said if I showed you a good time, you’d show me one,” she said.
“Did, did he?” The man behind the voice chuckled. “Well, chickie, we’re always up for a good time around here. Aren’t we boys?”
She heard more laughter and several voices announcing ribald agreement. Then a buzzer sounded and the door slid open.
She stepped through it, left hand at her side, right hand in the pocket of Hilaire’s jacket. It gave access to a very short entry hall, and she raised her left arm and used her forearm to sweep the hood from her head. Then she stepped through into the room beyond.
There were eight men in it. One wore only a pair of none-too-clean briefs and three were naked to the waist. The rest were in various states of undress, and all of them leered at her. But only for a moment. Just long enough for her appearance to register.
It was interesting, a tiny part of her noted. She could actually tell which of them were the quickest. The recognition didn’t come to all of them instantly. It flowed from the fastest on his mental feet to the slowest like some visible wave. The entire process couldn’t have taken more than a handful of heartbeats, but it seemed much longer as she watched. There were more than she’d anticipated. Hilaire had told her there’d be only three or four of them, and that same calm corner of her mind wondered if he’d deliberately lied or truly hadn’t expected the others.
<
br /> She should be terrified. She knew that as she faced them, but she wasn’t. All she felt was… cold. Very cold.
“I’m here for my sister,” she told them.
“Your sister?” The man who’d answered her knock over the speaker was taller and looked as if he were probably older than the others, although none of them could have been any older than Estelle, and he glanced quickly at his companions before he looked back at her. “What makes you think she’s here?”
He kept his hands easily by his sides, but the fingers flicked outward and the other seven began sidling away from him and from one another, spreading out as widely as the room would allow.
“Hilaire was very forthcoming,” she replied, baton hidden against her forearm, the hilt of the vibro blade resting lightly in her right palm. They were going to get in each other’s ways if—when—this turned ugly, that calm inner voice told her. That was good. “He said this is where you brought her.”
“Did, did he?” The leader’s tone was light, almost caressing, but his eyes were calculating. “He tell you we showed her a good time?”
“No, he told me you dragged her in here, and you beat her, and you raped her.” Her voice was still level, but it was no longer calm, and her eyes locked with his, clearly ignoring anyone else in the room. “I’m here to take her home.”
“Well, now, that’s gonna be just a little hard,” he told her, and his lips twisted in a sneer. “See, she’s not here anymore. We already sent her ‘home.’”
His head flicked toward the red-painted hatch of a refuse disposal shaft. The kind that fed trash into the fusion-powered incinerators that served Duquesne Tower.
“Wasn’t any fun anymore, so we didn’t see any reason to keep her around,” he told her, his tone no longer light, and an icicle pierced her heart as his eyes glittered viciously at her.
“Let’s see if you last longer,” he said.
He started toward her unhurriedly, confidently, and the world disappeared.
Later, in the nightmares, she would remember her own primal scream, the fury and the hatred and the grief and the devastating loss. She would remember the sudden alarm in his eyes, the way he stopped in his tracks. And she would remember the baton licking out from her left hand like a viper’s tongue, the vibro blade coming out of her pocket, screaming to life with a fury and hatred of its own as she sent it to its full, illegal length. And she would remember stepping into them like the angel of death herself.
She remembered very little after that. Not in any detail. Not until she caught the last of them halfway out the door. In the end, he’d turned to run, but the vibro blade swept effortlessly through his right thigh and he smashed to the floor, screaming, clutching at the blood-fountaining stump with both hands.
“Please!” he screamed. “Oh, Christ, please! Please!”
She paused, glaring down at him, realizing her stolen jacket was sodden with other people’s blood, feeling it hot and stinking like molten copper, oozing down her face, dripping from her hands. She drew a deep, shuddery breath, glanced over her shoulder, and wondered with a sort of lunatic calm why she wasn’t gibbering in horror.
There wasn’t a single intact body.
She noted a pair of pulsers lying on the floor, one of them still clutched in the fingers of a detached hand, but she had no memory of seeing the weapons or the hand before. In fact, she realized, she didn’t remember actually seeing any of the Hellhounds from the instant the vibro blade came live. But now she did. She saw the severed limbs lying in bits and pieces in thick lakes of blood. Saw a head lying on the floor, staring at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. Another head, split vertically from crown to clavicle. A torso sliced cleanly in half, spilling organs and blood and a sewer stench.
She saw everything, and the vision engraved itself forever upon her memory in the flickering instant before her eyes swung back to the ganger in front of her.
“Please,” he whimpered his voice weaker as the blood continued to pour from his thigh.
“You’re no fun anymore,” she heard her own voice say calmly, conversationally. “No reason to keep you around any longer.”
“No, pl—!” he screamed, and then Kevin’s gift silenced him forever.
* * *
“Do you know what time it—?”
Kevin Usher stopped dead as he opened his door and the doorbell stopped buzzing.
Eloise Pritchart stood there, her dark slacks streaked with something far darker, the cuffs of her white blouse black and stiff, her face still smeared with streaks of dried blood her mopping hands had missed. There was more blood in her hair, under her fingernails, and the nightmare heart of hell was in her eyes.
“Eloise?” he said very, very softly.
“Kevin,” she replied, and his jaw clenched. He’d never heard that flat, cold deadness from her.
He moved wordlessly aside and she stepped past him so the door could close behind her. She looked around his living room as if she’d never seen it before, but he didn’t think she was really seeing it now, either. She simply stood there, hands by her sides, her expression empty.
He touched her shoulder, and she let him steer her as if she were a mannequin as he seated her in one of his well-worn armchairs.
“Eloise?” he said again, and she blinked. Then, slowly, those desecrated eyes focused upon him.
“She’s gone, Kev.” The words were no longer dead, and his heart flinched from the endless ocean of pain that filled them, instead. “She’s gone,” she said again. “Just… gone. I’ll never see her again. Never hug her. Never—”
Her voice broke, her shoulders quivered, and she buried her face in her hands. She jackknifed forward in the armchair, and he went to his knees beside her, wrapping his arms about her, as the sobs tore loose at last and ripped the heart right out of her.
* * *
“Here,” Usher said an eternity later as he handed her the coffee cup.
She accepted it with a wan smile and sipped, then coughed on the stiff jolt of whiskey he’d stirred into it. She managed to avoid spraying any of it across him, then took another, deeper swallow and leaned back in her chair.
“Christ, I’m sorry,” he said, sinking into a facing chair. “I’m so sorry, Eloise.”
“Wasn’t anything you could’ve done.” Her voice was hoarse from weeping, but she shook her head firmly. “Wasn’t anything anyone could’ve done. Except maybe the bastards who’re supposed to keep things like this from happening.”
“How’d you get all the way back to Two Hundred like that?” he asked in the tone of someone trying to deal with his own shock and pain, and gestured at the bloodstains.
“You think anyone wanted to get close to me looking like this?” There was very little humor in her harsh chuckle. “I walked clear back across The Terraces without anyone saying a word. Then caught the lift and came straight here. I doubt the shaft police will worry about the surveillance imagery at all, assuming the cameras even noticed it. Commissioner Juneau might have a few questions, but I don’t expect any trouble from him or Aristide. They… they really liked Stelle, too, you know.”
Her voice quivered, dropping almost to a whisper, on the last sentence, and she took another quick swallow of the whiskey-laced coffee.
“Jesus, Eloise.” He shook his head, his eyes dark with grief of his own. “What’re you going to do now? How can I help?”
“You can help me a lot, Kev.” She looked him in the eye. “You already helped a lot. Without that vibro blade, I’d be dead, too, instead of them. But I need you to do something else for me, too.”
“Anything,” he told her flatly. “Name it.”
“You might not want to be quite that quick about it,” she cautioned him.
“Name it,” he repeated in that same, unflinching voice, and she drew a deep breath, holding the coffee cup in both hands, gazing at him across it.
“A few weeks ago, I was reading a biography of Michèle Péricard,” she said. “It made Stelle nervous
, but it was one my mom recommended to me years ago. I’ve got it in my desk, if you’d like to read it. I think you’d like it. And it’s got some interesting stuff in the appendices. Including the entire text of something called the Declaration of Independence.”
“It does, does it?” He sat back in his own chair, his eyes narrowing in recognition that the seeming non sequitur was nothing of the sort.
“It does.” She nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot since then. Have you ever read it?”
“Never even heard of it,” he admitted.
“Then you really need to read it,” she said. “It’s all nonsense, of course. Any Legislaturalist would tell you that. It talks about the consent of the governed, about unalienable rights, like the right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it says that when a government takes those rights, when it governs without the consent of the governed, that it’s the right—the right, Kevin, that comes from God, not some privilege governments can take away on a whim—of the people to change that government. The people who wrote that declaration launched a revolution over three thousand years ago, one that Michèle Péricard brought here, right here to Nouveau Paris. And the bastards who wrote the ‘Constitution’ we have today took every single one of those things away from us. They took them, Kevin, and they’re never giving them back. Never!”
Tears glittered in her eyes, and her voice shook with her passion.
“My sister is dead because Michèle Péricard’s Republic died before she was ever born. Stelle never had a chance, any more than you or me, to know what the Republic of Haven—the Republic of Haven; not the People’s Republic of Haven—was supposed to be. And I never tried to do a thing about it for her because I was afraid of what would happen to her if I did try.
“But it didn’t save her in the end, did it?” The tears broke loose, flowing down her cheeks, less tempestuous than her early sobs but glittering with the distilled essence of grief and loss. “I never took a stand, never tried to change things not just for Stelle, but for all the other Estelles, all the other sisters and daughters and brothers and sons. But the people who wrote that declaration… they took a stand. They fought. In the end they won, but they didn’t know they were going to—that they even could—when they wrote it. All they knew—all they knew, Kevin—was what every one of them pledged to the nation they helped to build, to the future, to God, and to each other: ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’ That’s what they put on the table: every single thing they had. And now… now maybe it’s time I did, too.”
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