Silverback’s door was closed.
At the far end of the hall, a soft red light shone from the nurse’s station around the corner. Despite the interior renovations, this was still a 200-year-old colonial mansion, and the halls were all corners. We couldn’t see the nurse on duty, and he or she couldn’t see us.
We listened at the door for a good sixty seconds. Not a sound came from within. Silverback was alone.
Dolph rose on his hind legs and pushed the door handle sideways with his nose until he could get a paw around it.
No locks on hospital doors.
It slid soundlessly open.
Dolph flashed through and leapt onto the bed within.
I followed, taking the time to paw the door closed behind me. I heard a grunt, a cry, and I jumped up and hit the light switch—it was in the same place here as in Ijiuto’s room, a floor above.
Kaspar Silverback lay in the bed, his face fixed in a grimace of terror, eyes closed. Dolph stood on his torso. He let out a low, liquid growl and clawed gently at the bandages wrapping Silverback’s right shoulder and chest. Silverback opened his eyes and saw me.
“Hello,” I said. “How’s the flying taxi business?”
If we were going to get any information out of him, we would have to ask questions that gave away our own identities. And he’d probably guess anyway. There are all too many wolves in Shiftertown, but not so many jackals, and fewer jackals and wolves that work together.
“You offworlder cunts,” Silverback said. “San Damiano nobs. Venison-eatin’ bourgies …” He went on in this vein. It was kind of impressive how well he could swear with a jackal standing on his chest.
He had not yet exhausted his store of invective when Dolph got impatient and yanked at his bandages with his teeth. A patch of self-sealing gauze came away with a ripping sound. Silverback let out a shriek. “Doesn’t look that bad,” Dolph said. “Sure you’re not just faking to get off work?”
Silverback moaned.
“What do you do, anyway?”
“I’m a driver. Just a driver.”
“So you don’t know anything, huh? You’re just a driver, huh? They never tell you shit, huh?” With each question, Dolph ripped more of Silverback’s bandages off. The skin underneath was stained with antibacterial wash, the gunshot wound an open, oozing mouth. Silverback started to wheeze. I remembered that he had a lung injury.
“So you drive for Mujin Inc?” I said.
“No! Yes!”
“Yes or no?”
“I work for Trident Overland. But I’m on contract to Mujin Inc.”
“What’s your regular route?”
“Just in the city, out to the spaceport, whatever needs doing,” Silverback gasped. He had turned the corner. He was now eager to cooperate. “I don’t drive the inland routes. I got a family. Please, guys.”
“Most of the inland routes are self-driving, anyway,” Dolph said to me.
“You go to and from the spaceport,” I said. “So you pick up cargoes and take ‘em through customs? Pay the duties?”
“Right, that’s right.”
“That’s what you did with that cargo that got returned to Mujin Inc?”
“Yeah, ‘course.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You took that through the green channel without paying jack.”
“Parsec’s gonna kill me,” Silverback whimpered.
“Not our problem,” Dolph said. He panted into Silverback’s face, teeth bared. Silverback groaned and thrashed in terror.
“All right! All right! Yeah, our guy killed the scanners that time! Figure there was something in those crates.”
I stiffened. If it was data, they would not have needed to kill the scanners. That meant our first guess had been wrong. The contraband was something else, something that would show up on the scanners … if they were working.
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know!” Silverback said. “Coulda been drugs. That don’t take up much room. Or electronic components! Ms. Hart was buying all kinds of shit for the lab.”
I surged forward to the bed. “Hart?” That was Sophia’s maiden name. “Where does she come in? How’d she end up working with you?”
“I dunno, man! We registered the company, she showed up. That’s all I know!”
“What lab?” Dolph said.
Silverback tried to answer, and coughed. I saw bright flecks of blood on his lips. Shit, we might end up killing the guy. I didn’t want that.
“She’s a computer scientist,” I said to Dolph. “That’s what she used to do, remember? She got her doctorate in AI.”
“So she was building AI for you?” Dolph said. “To do what?”
“I don’t know! I told you all I know!”
I thought he probably had. But Dolph wasn’t satisfied. Nothing would satisfy him now except blood. “You ain’t told us shit.” He set his teeth into Silverback’s uninjured shoulder. Blood trickled onto the sheets.
Silverback panicked. He started to scream for help. I pounced on him and physically clamped his mouth shut with my jaws. I tasted the fresh blood from his lungs.
The door slammed open.
I leapt off Silverback’s bed, twisted in the air, and landed facing the door.
Instead of the duty nurse, there stood Buzz Parsec, large as life and three times as ugly. He was wearing a raincoat that made him look even larger, its shoulders dark-dappled with rain. As he stared at us, he shrugged it off. “Found them,” he growled.
34
“Help!” Silverback squawked. He coughed blood. “Help me, sir! Get these dogs offa me!”
Dolph had already leapt off the bed and ducked behind the curtains. I faced Parsec, stiff-legged, my fur bristling, my ears flat to my skull. Visceral hatred swamped my thoughts, and trickled out of my mouth in a continuous low growl. Parsec folded his raincoat and hung it over one arm, his face as motionless as a lump of bread dough with holes poked in it for eyes.
“That one’s Starrunner,” Silverback burbled, as if Parsec wouldn’t have already guessed who we were. “The other one’s his jackal buddy.”
“Take ‘em down,” Parsec said, turning his head slightly to speak over his shoulder, without taking his eyes off me. “Try and not make too much noise. There’s patients trying to sleep.”
I sprang at Parsec.
He was already moving, bringing up the arm with the coat folded over it. He flapped the coat in my face, so I couldn’t see anything for a second, and my teeth snapped on air. As I fell, I bumped against Parsec, knocking him into the wall.
A grizzly bear shouldered into the room. He was the size of a small minivan. I knew it was one of the Kodiaks. The monstrous bear surged past Parsec, straight at me, his head stretched out on his neck, jaws snapping.
My claws scrabbled on the floor as I reversed my momentum. I felt the Kodiak’s hot breath on my back. I gathered my haunches and bounded over Silverback’s bed, putting the bed between me and the bears.
Cornered.
I focused on Parsec, who was hanging back near the doorway. I didn’t care about the Kodiak, except inasmuch as he was in between me and Parsec. If I was going to die, I wanted to take Parsec with me.
Behind the curtains at my back, the window slammed open.
Dolph had worked the catch. Jackals are good with their teeth.
Hot, wet air blew into the air-conditioned room.
The Kodiak started to climb over the bed to get at me, disregarding Silverback’s cries.
Thoughts of suicidally attacking Parsec melted away as my animal instincts zeroed in on escape. I turned tail, fought with the curtains for a nightmarish instant, and got my front paws up on the windowsill. I looked out into pitch blackness. Rain needled into my face. Dolph had already jumped.
I launched myself into the dark.
For a split second I fully expected to die.
I knew we were only on the second floor. I knew that my wolf could fall better than my human form. I knew Do
lph had survived, because I could hear him barking below.
All the same, it felt like spacewalking without a tether, freefalling towards the end of reality. Lucy’s face flashed into my mind, and then I struck a bush. It broke my fall. I scraped through foliage and twigs and thumped to wet grass, landing on my feet.
Dolph yipped piercingly. I saw him standing in the night, his nose pointing up at the window we had jumped from. The Kodiak’s head poked out.
“Oh my fucking God,” I said, scrambling onto all four feet. “How did they get here? Silverback must’ve alerted them.”
“Naw,” Dolph said. “It was probably someone saw us waiting in the cloister. Ring, ring, oh hello Mr. Parsec, guess who’s here? Shifters are such tools.”
It was raining. There’s a joke that we don’t have weather forecasts on Ponce de Leon, we have weather timetables. This time of year, we usually get a shower around nine PM, and then at three AM it rains heavily, sometimes until morning. Water flattened my fur and ran into my eyes.
The Kodiak disappeared from the window.
“Front door’s locked, so they didn’t get in that way,” Dolph said. “Musta got in through the ER. They’ll come back out that way. Come on!”
“Ijiuto,” I said.
“Martin’s there. Anyway, they won’t start a fight inside the hospital.”
“They just did,” I said. But there was no way we could get to Ijiuto without going through the ER, short of jumping back through that damn window, and even wolves can’t leap that high, so I followed Dolph through the wet garden.
Neither of us knew that at that very moment, Martin was facing off with the other Kodiak twin in Ijiuto’s room. Whatever little furry bird told Parsec we were at Dr. Zeb’s had also told him that we’d brought a patient in. While Parsec stomped upstairs to check on Silverback, he had sent the other Kodiak twin to search the rest of the in-patient rooms.
So Larry Kodiak—or maybe Gary, Martin said he couldn't tell—had poked his nose around the privacy curtain and found a fifteen-foot python coiled on the foot of Ijiuto’s bed. Martin had Shifted when we did, in hopes of catching some Z’s.
When his flickering tongue caught the scent of the Kodiak, Martin poured his body off the bed and wriggled across the floor. Snakes can move fast. The grizzly bear jumped back and swiped at him with a paw the size of a trashcan lid. While the bear’s claws scraped along Martin’s scales, which are not really scales, because he is not a reptile, but some trick he’s figured out involving the Shifting of skin cells into pseudo-keratin, Martin struck. He wrapped a muscular coil around the grizzly’s neck, threw another coil around his chest, and started to squeeze. The grizzly rampaged around the room, trying to shake Martin off. The monitoring unit beside the bed hit the floor with a crash. Alarms shrieked.
Meanwhile, Dolph and I were in even worse trouble.
We had flowed through the wet grass, beneath murder oaks, through the neglected shrubbery, and reached the ER entrance in Building B at the same time as Parsec and the other Kodiak twin did. They spilled out of the automatic doors, with an orderly chasing after them, and parted to go around a parked ambulance. The Kodiak paused at the edge of the light that bled down the drive, the rain sparkling on his fur. He sniffed the dark.
He was only about two meters from where we crouched in the cover of some rhododendrons.
“Just a little bit closer,” Dolph breathed. “Come on, come on, you fat sack of shit …”
I was smelling the Kodiak twin, but I was watching Parsec. He walked towards his sidekick, and although he was still in human form, his shoulders rolled bearishly, and his little piggy eyes glared into the rain. “Starrunner,” he yelled. “Starrunner. You want information, you ask me.” He thumbed his chest, as if he knew I was watching him. “I came to you, but you’re what, too fucking scared to come to me?”
He had half a point.
“Come to me,” Dolph echoed, jackal-laughing under his breath.
The Kodiak twin lunged towards us. He had smelt us out.
Dolph was ready. He exploded out of the rhododendrons and launched himself at the grizzly’s throat.
He never got there. A dark, wet shape rose up out of the bushes to our right. It shambled swiftly forward in that terrifying ursine lope, and snapped at Dolph’s neck. I heard a high thin bark of pain from my friend as he hit the ground with one shoulder and rolled sideways.
I was already moving. As the grizzly reared up to pounce on Dolph, my feet left the ground. My forepaws grappled the grizzly’s head, boxing it, and my muzzle dug into the thick fur at his throat. I caught skin between my teeth, tasted blood. The grizzly crashed back to the ground with me still hanging on.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dolph and the other bear skittering around each other, lunging and snapping. The other bear was Canuck. I knew because he was calling Dolph a rabid dog and breathlessly describing how he would fuck him in the ass.
Dolph didn’t waste breath talking. Faster than the bear, he darted around Canuck and hurled himself onto Canuck’s shoulder. He clung on, snarling and gnawing at Canuck’s fur, as the ginger-tinged bear rose onto his hind legs in an attempt to shake him off.
The Kodiak clawed my back. He didn’t break the skin, but he knocked me loose. I dropped to the ground, snarling. The Kodiak made a rush at me. I dodged and got my teeth into his flank. The long wet grass tangled my legs and impeded my agility. But now I had a hold the Kodiak couldn’t dislodge me from. I clawed my way onto his back, savaging him with my teeth. The smell of blood and fur and fear maddened me. His agonized roars were music to my ears.
Parsec must have seen that his bears were in danger of losing the fight. Right there in the rain, he Shifted.
He dropped his trousers and stepped out of them as his hands reached for the ground, fingers transforming into claws, the palms of his hands thickening into pads. His shoulders swelled. Fur burst through the ripping seams of his shirt. His human forehead shrank away and his jaw lengthened into a muzzle. The extra meat on his torso, which made him look overweight as a man, transformed into the sleek-pelted bulk of a brown grizzly bear.
He Shifted faster than anyone I knew, except one person.
His fur was still growing as he leapt at me, his teeth bared.
I spat a mouthful of Kodiak fur out, slithered to the ground and danced away, past the rhododendrons. I stopped beside the tented roots of a murder oak.
Parsec rose on his hind legs. He strutted towards Canuck and Dolph, his arms extended as he prepared to sweep Dolph into his deadly, bonecracking hug. Dolph didn’t see him. He was intent on shredding Canuck’s meat off his bones.
I dragged breath into my lungs and howled.
Dolph’s head jerked up. He dodged Parsec’s hug just in time. Abandoning his victim, he leapt sideways.
The Kodiak lunged at him, forcing him to dodge again.
It all seemed to have been going on forever: the rain, the growling and snarling, the awful slippery footing, the jolts of adrenaline hitting increasingly tired muscles. In reality, of course, it had only been a couple of minutes.
Dr. Zeb burst out of the hospital, carrying a shotgun. Orderlies at his side turned high-power flashlights on the battle, blinding us all.
I assumed Parsec would put his tail between his legs—not that he had much of a tail, just a bear’s stub—and apologize to Dr. Zeb. I was on the point of doing so myself.
But he didn’t. Silhouetted in the flashlights, he reared on his hind legs, roaring. Then he dropped back onto all fours and charged straight at me.
I had no room to maneuver. I had allowed myself to get trapped between the bushes and the murder oak. I had two choices: face Parsec’s attack head-on, or run.
35
I ran.
Deeper into the garden.
Away from the light, away from the failing patches of terrestrial shrubbery, into the tangle of invasive vegetation from all over the Cluster.
Every time I flattened myself to crawl under a shr
apnel bush or pufferplant, I heard Parsec crashing through the undergrowth behind me.
He wasn’t going to quit the chase until he had his teeth in my hide.
I fetched up against another murder oak. I had no idea where I was now, but I figured I must be pretty close to the end of the garden. This could be one of the murder oaks that overhung the garden wall.
Its trunk was tapered, not sheer, but branchless for the first twenty feet. I couldn’t climb it.
So I Shifted again.
It was a big risk. Parsec was only a few seconds behind me. But the only person I knew who could Shift faster than him was … me.
I willed my wolf away. The pain I had told Christy about washed along my nerves. I shuddered and kicked the air, lying in a grotesque knot of half-formed limbs and heaving flesh among the murder oak’s roots. Twenty seconds later, I regained my feet as a jaguar.
Jaguars are excellent at climbing trees.
I scrabbled and clawed my way up that trunk in nothing flat, and stopped in the first big crutch for a breather.
Unfortunately, bears are good at climbing trees, too.
Parsec reached the murder oak. He sniffed around the roots, detecting my scent. Then he rose on his hind legs and began to climb. His claws punched into the wet bark, tearing it off in chunks. Relentlessly, he hauled himself upwards.
I could’ve stayed where I was and knocked him off the trunk when he reached me.
I didn’t even think about that until later.
I clawed my way higher, from branch to branch, knocking down twigs and ripping lengths of strangler vine away from the trunk. The foliage was so thick it was almost dry in here, although the rain drummed noisily on the canopy. I sneezed on bark dust. At last, glimmers of streetlight penetrated the foliage. I could now see where I was: at the edge of the garden, as I’d guessed. I looked down—way down—at the sidewalk.
Parsec’s head thrust through the strangler vines, level with my dangling tail. “Treed ya,” he said, and broke off in astonishment on seeing that I was now a jaguar.
His surprise saved me. I frantically started climbing again. Higher I went and higher, until I reached a branch that bent under my weight.
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