by Jack Dann
"Oh, yeah? Well, what are you doing right now, Andy Harco?"
She drifted across the room toward me. Her brown eyes were intense and deep. She held her hands out toward me. I'd forgotten that she'd had artificial nails installed years ago, to break her nail-biting habit. They shone whitely, moon-colored.
"Everything you've done for the last eight years has been a reaction." Her voice was low and soothing. For years, I'd dreamed of it, and awakened with a feeling of utter loss when I found that she was not really beside me.
That feeling washed over me now, stronger than ever before. I raised the Glock. "Justice," I said, "is not reaction."
She stopped, six feet from me, facing me, fearless.
"You going to take me in, Lieutenant?"
I no longer had my op-eds, but I was pretty sure what the Option 4 junk would tell me. If I pulled the trigger, I could never be a cop again.
"This is my town, Lieutenant. My town. Do you think I'll get punished? Do you think I'll spend more than a night in jail? Andy, my brain is part of what runs the jail."
"I could take you with me. I could drive us to Atlanta."
"I'll call every cop in the metro area to stop you," she replied. "Illegal extradition. You know that."
I raised the Glock, took aim at her forehead. "It would be an accident," I said. "Or you resisted."
"City is recording every second of this conversation."
"I just don't give a shit," I said. "I think this is what you are failing to comprehend."
"Don't you, Andy? Then blow me away." She lowered her arms. The child's sad face, those incredible lips. The silver on her arm. The fanatic zombie glow in her eyes.
I lowered the Glock. "It was jealousy, wasn't it?" I said. "Politics didn't have anything to do with it."
Abby let out a long sigh, then said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"He loved Birmingham more than you. And he was a better lover, too."
"Don't be absurd. Jealousy is for, well, nobodies. For individuals."
"The City chose him, Abby. I know it for a fact."
"No," she said. It was almost a whimper.
"You did it yourself, didn't you?"
She smiled, sadly. "Andy, when are you going to understand, really comprehend?"
"There is no you."
"The I you used to know is changed and better."
"Good-bye, Abby." I turned to leave. My eyes were misty, though I felt numb inside.
"Just a minute, Andy," she said. I felt the cool touch of her hand on my shoulder, my neck. So soft, so small, her hands had been. I could almost cup them within mine. God, I had loved her so completely. Then a prickle, a sting.
Oh, shit.
The breaking of glass, a stifled scream. I spun around with the Glock at ready.
Trina stood over Abby, a broken bottle of bourbon in her hand. Abby had slumped to the floor, one side of her face webbed with glass cuts. I lowered the Glock once again, took a long breath. A blast spider crawled out of Abby's relaxed palm and began working its way up her arm. Over the silver bracelet and the lily-white skin. Toward her shoulder, toward the porcelain curve of her neck where her spinal cord lay, a pinprick away. There was no put-back routine that could restore a mind after the kiss of a blast spider. Even the mind of a node.
"God, Andy, she was trying to do something to you!" Trina said, unable to take her eyes off her own handiwork. Her op-eds sat skewed on her nose.
"You did the right thing, kid," I said. "The right thing."
I reached over and worked the broken bottle from Trina's hand. She had a damned good grip on the thing.
"I don't think I can stay here anymore," Trina said. "She killed Thaddeus."
Then she started crying, really crying, like she hadn't before. I pulled her toward me, but I didn't want to hug her on account of the dried blood from my chest wounds. I stroked her face with the hand that didn't hold a gun. I righted her op-eds.
"Come on, kid," I said. "Let's blow this town."
"Yeah," she said tentatively, then, "Yeah."
The blast spider was past Abby's elbow now, working its way over her armlet. I could almost hear the little crank's tiny feet clinking against the metal. It was nearly to her shoulder. . . .
We stepped into the sultry night, Trina and I. I opened the passenger side of the Saj and helped her inside. She sat there gazing up at me, trembling slightly. I leaned down and kissed her, lightly, but on the lips. Then I reached into my pocket and took out Thaddeus's lighter.
"He would have wanted you to have this," I said, and folded her brown palm around it.
As I closed the Saj's door, I glanced up into the sky overhead.
The Vulcan was leering down on me, as big and bright as the labor of a hundred thousand ironworkers, a hundred thousand watts of city power, could make him. His red torch mocked me as surely as his idiotic all-knowing god smile.
I could shoot the fucker out.
I could. I leaned against the Saj and took aim. But without my op-eds, I would never hit a target that far away.
I pretended to. I pretended to pull the trigger, and in my mind's eye, I hit that damn torch. I hit it dead-on. But instead of blowing the death light out, in my mind's eye, the bullet changed the flame from glaring red to vivid living green.