I could swear Sophia looks happy and relieved when we walk in, but then she shakes it all off, acting all tough girl. “Well, looky what the cat dragged in,” she says, standing up unsteadily from a green-and-orange-plaid couch. She strolls toward us with a challenging gaze in her glassy eyes. The woman who invaded my mind, stole my memory.
I beeline to her, grab her lapels, and push her up against the dark-paneled wall. “Did Otto hold my eyes open?” I ask.
“Justine—” Packard says.
“I want to know!”
“He didn’t hold your eyes open. I did. Otto held your arms; he held you still.”
A queasy feeling comes over me. “And I saw it? I saw him shoot Avery?”
“Seems so,” she says. Her breath is boozy, and faint dark lines of mascara drool track down her cheeks. I guess she’s been crying, though you wouldn’t know it from the proud, smug look she’s got on her face now. Even in here, she’s wearing one of her crisp, beige safari-looking outfits.
“Did you see it?”
“Nah. I came after.”
I want more. More than this.
“Hey.” A hand on my shoulder. Packard pulls me off and I let him, regarding Sophia with disgust, avoiding her eyes.
She straightens her jacket.
“We need her sane,” he says.
“That stench alone is going to drive me crazy,” she says. “You guys been down in the Tangerlands again?” She doesn’t get the word quite right.
Shelby comes and links her arm in mine, surveying the moth-eaten, mood-lit 1970s-era party room Sophia’s imprisoned in. A half-full bottle of brandy stands on the counter. “You deserve worse. However, this step goes in right direction. Is right start.”
I give Sophia a hot, hateful look. “You’re lucky Shelby’s glorying.”
“I’m not the only lucky one here.” She squints at Packard. “Glad to see you’re alive.”
Packard nods.
“Gotta say, accommodations on the side of evil were way better.” In the new light you can really see her puffy eyes, her red nose; she’s definitely been crying. Her proud look can’t erase those things. “And you busted the revise. Out of professional curiosity, Justine, was it the quality of the replaced memory, or was it emotional nonalignment?”
Crying or not, I want to slap her. I want her to act more sorry.
“Never mind.” She waves her hand, like she’s drying nail polish. “Don’t tell me. It doesn’t matter. I’m done with revision. I deserve this, and worse. I know. God, look at this place. Hey! I need you to get a message to someone. I know you don’t owe me—”
“What? What else happened that day on the waterfront?”
Sophia picks up her glass and sips with a pinched look on her face. Maybe if I had to sit in here forever, I’d be drinking too. “You were happy to see me for once, I’ll tell you that. You were fighting with Otto when I walked up. Avery dead on the rocks. You told me Otto shot him.”
“Then what?”
She swirls the liquid. “I said, Maybe he shouldn’t have had that antihighcap chip implanted in him.” I feel Shelby tense at this. Sophia looks at her. “I’m not proud of that. I know that following orders isn’t a decent excuse.”
“Then don’t use it,” Packard says.
“Do you have any idea what you took?” I snap. “Do you even care?”
“I don’t review the memories, my friend, I just revise them. Look…” She sits, clumsily crossing one leg over the other. “I took something from all of you and I’m sorry for it, okay? I really am. I’m telling you straight. Hell, I lost something too. Have you supersleuths detected that I’m stuck in here, likely forever?” She stares into her glass. “Whatever,” she adds. I get the feeling she says that to herself a lot.
“I tried to make it right, afterwards,” she continues after a bit. “I know that’s no decent excuse, but I wanted to warn you. I was starting a new life with somebody, and I left him in a hospital bed especially to go and warn you.” She raises her glass. “As you can see, Shelby, I got detained on the way to our fateful meeting. Otto had a telepath checking on me, and he knew I’d turned against his whole…” She waves her other hand to indicate Otto’s plan. His vision. His everything, I suppose.
She doesn’t seem too sorry, but I tell myself she tried to do the right thing and now she’s paying for it. I walk over to the window and push aside the avocado curtain, just enough to get a look at the street, in case people followed us, but nothing looks amiss, though I don’t know what amiss would look like out here.
“I really would like you to get a message to somebody for me.”
“How about Shelby and Simon?” Packard says. “He’s got somebody watching them both. Does he know they’re with me, or is it just insurance?”
“If he knew they were with you, they’d be in the fun house. You know that’s where—”
“We know,” Packard says.
Sophia shrugs. “He’s wait-and-see about Shelby, but Simon? No-go. He’ll put Simon away after the wedding, if only because of the way Simon’s always losing whoever’s tailing him. But, Justine, you’re his blind spot.” She seems to have trouble focusing on me. “Oh yeah, you do what no doctor could do; you can make him feel okay when he’s…” she flutters her hand around next to her head. “All messed up. You know that? You make him feel A-okay.”
“He’s not the least bit worried?” Packard asks. “She’s not exactly his fiancée of her own free will.”
“He sees it as…what?” Sophia takes a thoughtful sip. “Her original free will, I would say. Her original path restored. You remember, Justine, back when you and Otto thought of yourselves as soul mates? Vein-star soul mates?”
Of course I remember it. The excitement of finding each other, being able to confide in each other. We had said something like that.
“But it’s not as if she’s got total immunity,” Packard says. “If he suspects her of betrayal—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sophia says. “That wouldn’t go well. But you, dude, you’ve got more heat after you than you think. ’S the day before the big wedding right? You oughta get in your car and drive. Away.”
“Why?” I cross my arms. “Because you turned a bunch of guys into killing machines and set them after him? Your stupid Escape from New York bit?”
She raises her perfectly shaped brows. “Hey, I tried to warn you all.” She squints at Packard. “So you also know, these last hours, the guys will be desperate.”
“That creepy operation memory?” I press. “A man’s head exploding? How do you even look at yourself in the mirror?”
Sophia sighs. “Oh, righteous, righteous Justine, struggling valiantly to be normal. I don’t expect you to understand. Sure, I regret it now, but at the time, it was the mad challenge of it. When you revise, plant something new, the whole key is plausibility—creating a false memory that will weave seamlessly into existing memory. The idea of revising so many with such an extreme tale, and causing them all to focus on a common and utterly outrageous goal—it’s never been done. I wasn’t even sure if it could be; it was like my own personal Himalayan Mountains or whatever. I could see nothing but the mad challenge of it.” She turns to me. “There are some people in life, Justine, when you put a mountain in front of them, they climb it, whereas others just pop a few aspirins and hope it goes away.”
“And your mountain was them sawing off Packard’s head.”
“The head was Otto’s idea. Anyway, I figured you’d survive, Sterling. You always do. And, well, Otto was going to have people after you whether I helped or not. I know, I know—” She holds up her hand to forestall any commentary. “Bad excuse. You’ll be happy to know that after that…that orgy of revision…I was disgusted with myself. Disgusted! Barely wanted to be in my own skin. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t happy to revise you, either. But doing all those highcap creeps was the last straw. I did it successfully, scaled my Himalayas, but I was sick inside after. Enough, I said. It was my last revise for
Otto.” Her face is looking pinched again; only this time, she hasn’t taken a drink.
“I don’t understand,” Packard says. “That was your information for Shelby? You risked a meeting with us to warn me to be careful?”
“Not just that. For one, Otto’s tracking these guys. The chips in their heads don’t exist, but they’ve got trackers in their shoes, because Otto’s planning on rounding them up after the wedding. I thought, if you can tap into that tracking, you can stay safe. Guess that was probably more valuable intelligence last week. But here’s this—something big’s going to happen at the wedding.”
“Does it have anything to do with my severed head?”
“Your head’s the pre-party. All I know from bits and pieces is that the wedding is a big public game changer for Otto. You know the Felix Five is trying to get Otto thrown out of office?”
“Everyone knows that,” I say.
“They recently got a sympathetic judge. Otto’s not supposed to know, but he does. Let’s face it, the tide will turn, and Otto knows it. For now, most Midcitians will give up their rights for safety—hell, they spent all last summer hiding in their houses thanks to the Brick Slinger, so a curfew isn’t a big deal—who wants to be out with the cannibal sleepwalkers anyway? At least they can walk in the daylight, and there are soldiers at the ball park, in malls, the places that matter to people, and they accept that. And there’s the hero worship thing people have for Otto. But eventually it will wear thin. Because, look, he’s acting like a dictator.” Sophia frowns out the window; for a moment she seems lost inside her train of thought. “He’ll lift that curfew after the wedding—I know he plans that. And when the dust settles, there will be a lot less crime. Right now he’s using the curfew and police powers to sweep the city, grab baddies of different sorts, highcap and human. He picked up most of you disillusionists too, huh? He’s getting the city shipshape for his next phase.”
“Why has he not caught cannibals, then?” Shelby asks. “Cannibals, they move so slow, come out at night—”
“Strange, huh?” Sophia says. “There’s something up with the cannibals and that Stuart.” She twists up her lips. “But here’s the thing—after the wedding, Otto thinks nobody will be able to throw him out. Something big happens and he comes out the hero, buys himself another six months of adoration. Slides from there into a safe prosperous city, beloved mayor and first lady, no more crime. New port. Ton of new construction coming.”
I squint at a dried-up lava lamp, thinking of all the times Otto assured me the trouble would be over soon.
“A televised wedding,” Sophia adds. “A live, televised, massively-watched wedding, and everyone who’s everyone will be there. The wedding is the turn.”
“Except the wedding won’t happen,” Packard says.
“Unless it has to happen,” I say.
Sophia looks from Packard, to me, to Packard. “So, have you figured out yet that he can’t be killed, zinged or attacked in any way?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Personal force field.”
“Like a suit of armor,” Sophia says. “Man’s unkillable. No way to stop him now. No way to break through his personal force field. Unless you had a pair of those antihighcap glasses, of course.”
“All destroyed,” Shelby says.
“Which brings us to part two of my message.” Sophia’s smile is catlike. “Or maybe it’s part three. I know it’s not four.” She looks at the ceiling. “Anyway, according to records grabbed in the factory search, there was a pair of those glasses shipped out in some deluxe kit that’s still unaccounted for. Otto’s PIs have not found the guy with this last pair of glasses, and I’ll tell you, they’re frantic to—considering Otto’s personal force field is rendered null, void, and nugatory if somebody’s standing there wearing those glasses. One pair still out there. Some guy named Miles Pinbocker.” She sniffs. “Who would name their kid Miles Pinbocker?”
In the silence that follows I catch a glow of recognition in Shelby’s eyes. Shelby knows who Miles Pinbocker is.
“If you can find Pinbocker and his glasses and get to Otto, Justine can zing the fuck out of him and he’ll cash in these force fields so fast.” Sophia snaps. “So fast. Maybe add a dash of grimness, and some of Simon’s crazy, too.”
“We know how to reboot a man,” Packard snaps, and he grills her on the PIs and a few other things about Otto’s security operation.
“If you do get the glasses, you can’t let Otto get killed,” Sophia says. She doesn’t want to be in there for eternity, either.
“We’ve got people trapped too,” Packard reminds her. “What’s the latest on Fawna?”
“Who’s Fawna?”
It turns out Sophia doesn’t know Fawna. Not surprising.
After promising her we’ll get a message to Robert, who Packard apparently knows, we get out of there and head into the gloomy stairwell to start the ten-story trek down. None of us trusts the elevator in this building.
“You know Pinbocker,” Packard says to Shelby once the door shuts. More a statement than a question. So he noticed too.
“Pinbocker is Avery’s ninja identity,” Shelby says.
“What? It’s Avery?” Of course, there’s no question Avery is dead. We all saw the body.
“Not Avery, but one of his identities, yes.”
Somehow I’m not surprised he created alternate identities.
Shelby grabs a metal banister pole and whirls herself around to the next set of steps. We follow. “He wrote entire book about this, how to build new identity for emergency. Build Your Ninja Identity Before It’s Too Late, that is title. For lights-out scenario. I have book.” She whirls around to the next staircase. “We were working on my ninja identity when Otto murdered him.”
When Otto murdered him. I’m amazed she can say that so evenly, so factually. “Is a ninja identity different from a false identity?” I ask.
“Oh, yes. False identity is on surface. Ninja identity runs deep. You disappear into new persona. You need all regular identification, of course, driver’s license, birth certificate, these things. But, Miles wore different clothes than Avery—jeans and jerseys, with sports team here.” She points to her chest. “Miles was bowler, and Avery hated to bowl. We once bought bowling trophy at garage sale for Miles. Miles was from Kentucky. Avery always said, if you wait until you need false identity, is too late to make one. But, Miles, he would want safety too. Miles had some PO Box, and this is where deluxe kit would have been shipped.” She grabs the next banister and whirls slowly. “Miles Pinbocker.”
“Did Miles have an apartment?” Packard asks.
“No, because he is not real. But his things are somewhere. Book tells how to hide things for your ninja identity, so we must read book. I did not get that far. We had only just ordered false driver’s license. For Genika Shogun.”
“Genika Shogun?” I ask. “That’s your ninja identity name?”
She frowns up at me from the set of steps below. “Avery thought of it.”
“It’s nice,” I say.
We come out of the building, careful as cats. Empty sidewalks run bone dry through dirty snow, past empty parked cars. Packard looks up at the gray sky—I can feel his relief every time we go outside. His need to reconnect with the open sky. To know he’s still free.
He and I jump in back of Shelby’s car, and Shelby starts it up and pulls out, heading southeast. Now and then she drives around a random block to make sure we’re not being followed. I get the sense she’s coming off glory hour.
My phone vibrates as we’re heading past the railroads. It’s Max, the bodyguard. I tell Shelby to flip on the radio to cover the car sound, and then I answer.
Max sounds mad. “You coming down anytime soon here? You and Otto are due to depart from the condo in an hour, and I hear traffic’s a holy bitch at the moment.”
Max is still outside Shelby’s apartment, of course, thinking I’m still inside.
“Crap,” I say, thinking fast. “My hair is sti
ll wet, in rollers!”
“Are the rollers going to prevent you from driving across town?” Max asks.
“The future first lady isn’t driving around in rollers. Just tell Otto I’m running behind.”
“How behind?”
“I don’t know. It’s a bride’s prerogative to be running behind on the day before her wedding. I’m indecent and in rollers. Do you want bridezilla in rollers to come out?”
He tells me he doesn’t want bridezilla in rollers to come out, and I click off before he can add anything more.
Shelby eyes me in the rearview mirror. “Your hair. If this is the result of rollers…”
I don’t need to look in the mirror to know my long brown hair lays limp and flat along my face, and that it’s smelly and probably has gunk in it from this morning’s jaunt through the Tanglelands. “I’m going to need nine showers.”
“And I cannot just drive up and park,” Shelby says. “I have one way to sneak back in, and it is not quick.”
“Take your time,” Packard says. “Most men will cower before your bridezilla bit. Deep down, most men are frightened of a bride. Even their own. You can use that.”
“And I’m his blind spot,” I say. It hadn’t really struck me, the crazy position I’m in, until Sophia had said that. He needs me, and it’s making him less observant, less shrewd around me.
“You’re his blind spot until you’re not,” Packard says. “That’s what I don’t like. We have to find those glasses. We have to stop this today.”
“Otto’s downfall is coming,” I remind him. “The danger comes from his inner circle.”
“And the ground will run red,” he adds quietly.
“Is there anything that can prevent a prognostication from coming true?” I ask him. “You were messing with Vanderhook. You changed his view of the future.”
“Vanderhook was a short-term prognosticator. Short-term prognostications are just the details. Long-term is the destinies. To shift the long-term prognostication, you’d have to shift the very currents of fate.”
“What changes the currents of fate?”
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