I followed the gesture, and my jaw tightened as I realized the man Carmouche had been talking to was none other than Charles-Henri DeRosier, the Dolist manager responsible for Morocco. And she was right about him. He set the tone—and the example—for the scale of graft which wouldn’t hand over the basic medical services my baby brother needed to stay alive without extra payment. They were there. They were available and they came free of charge…officially. Even the Legislaturalists insisted on that. But no one actually got them in Morocco Tower without paying off the right people. And they—and he—got away with it because he was one of the heavy hitters among the managers. Morocco wasn’t the only tower whose votes he controlled. He’d never be a Legislaturalist, but in his own way, he had more power than anyone outside the very highest reaches of the Legislaturalist dynasties. Enough that it actually made sense for someone to find him allied with someone like Carmouche. God alone knew what the two of them might be cooking up over there.
Whatever it was, there’d be credits in it. Lots of credits.
The familiar rage burned inside me as I recognized him, but I choked it down. You learned early to live with your anger in Morocco Tower, assuming you wanted to live at all.
“Go,” the woman said again, and this time there was an additional edge in her voice. An urgency that could almost have been anxiety…but wasn’t quite. “Get out of here. Go home, climb out of that dress, and go talk to outreach. I know somebody who can put in a good word for you before you get there.”
“But—” I began.
“No buts, girl! Just turn around and walk—”
She broke off suddenly, her lips tightening, and I looked a question at her.
“Too late,” she said very softly, reaching into that purse again. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at the electronic mirror behind the bar. The one that showed the enormously tall, broad-shouldered man who’d just walked through the corridor door. He was as well-dressed as she was but at least thirty centimeters taller than her, and he carried a fashionable shoulder bag.
“Get off the stool,” the woman told me in that same soft voice, never looking at me, never looking away from the mirror. “Go into the lavatory. Close the door. Don’t come back out.”
“But—”
“Be as smart as you look, child! Now go!”
I looked at her for an instant longer, then slid off the stool, turned, and walked away as nonchalantly as someone whose nerves had just been turned into tuning forks could manage. Unfortunately, she’d waited a moment too long to give me my marching orders.
I’d almost reached the arch between the bar and the lavatories when it happened.
The doorman said something to the big guy. I couldn’t hear what it was, but it was obviously the wrong thing, because an enormous left hand reached out, twisted itself into the front of his tunic, and hauled him up onto his tiptoes.
“What the hell did you just say to me?” the big man demanded, and everyone heard him. The doorman started to say something, and got shaken like a toy before he could.
“Of course I’m sure it’s the right place, idiot!” the big man snarled. “What? You want to see my invitation?”
His right hand delved into his shoulder bag while he continued to shake the hapless doorman with his left, and I realized I’d stopped moving. The confrontation had drawn my attention, and I paused, staring at it like every other set of eyes in the place.
And because we were all staring at him, no one noticed her when she toed off those high-heeled shoes, slid from her stool, and started casually towards table ten.
“All right, here’s my invitation!” the big man announced, and his right hand came out of the bag.
With a pulser.
A very big pulser, with a long barrel. Much too long—and probably too powerful—to carry concealed like Call-Me-Hercule’s.
I froze. I admit it. I flat out froze, staring at him in disbelief. If every eye had been attracted to him before, they were riveted to him now, and I saw Call-Me-Hercule twisting around towards him, his hand darting into his tunic.
It was an unfortunate decision on his part.
The pulser seemed like part of the big man’s hand. He didn’t even look at Hercule, not really. He only swung the weapon to the side, pointing it as naturally as he might have pointed his finger. And then it whined shrilly and the back of Hercule’s head exploded in a gory fountain of red, gray, and white bone splinters.
The screams began then. You could tell which patrons’ brains were faster than others. The really quick ones had started out of their chairs when the killer first raised his voice. Now they dived for the floor, and the next quickest launched themselves to join the early starters. The rest of the patrons simply stood or sat, as frozen as me, while the other bodyguards scattered around the room went for their weapons.
Pulsers shrilled, and the doorman’s scream died in a cloud of aspirated blood as at least a half-dozen darts sliced into and then out of him. Blood and bits of tissue sprayed across the big guy, and the solid darts were hitting him, too. But unlike the unfortunate doorman, they seemed to have no effect on him. He went to one knee, his face and the entire front of his head disappearing behind some sort of opaque-looking shield, and laid his pulser across his forearm like someone on a pistol range. It snarled, and I realized he was firing single shots, not the full automatic spray coming back at him.
And as I realized that, I also finally realized the woman from the bar was moving. In fact, she was racing towards table ten on her bare feet.
The bodyguards around the table had whirled to face the threat out of pure spinal reflex. The closer of the two came together, planting themselves between the big man and their charges as they brought their own pulsers into play. One of the men they were protecting saw her coming, though, and pointed at her with a shout of alarm.
“Get down, you idiots!” she shouted back at the people seated around the table. “Get down!”
The man who’d seen her stiffened, then started out of his chair in obedience to the authority in her shout as she came within two or three meters.
And that was when they discovered what she had in her left hand.
I’d seen vibro blades before. The floor police don’t much like them, but they tend to wink at them, even in Morocco Tower. Not because they approve of armed Dolists, but because self-defense is a practical necessity, especially on the rougher floors, and they’d rather see us armed with weapons with a maximum range of thirty centimeters, the legal limit on any civilian vibro blade, rather than with pulsers like the one in the big man’s hands.
But this vibro blade was different. The woman was still a good two meters from the table, passing between the two nearer bodyguards, when the first security man’s head suddenly flew from his shoulders in a spray of blood.
The man who’d seen her coming stepped back in shocked disbelief as her hand came slashing around and the second bodyguard went down as instantaneously as the first, and then she was flying through the air. She landed in the center of the table, barefooted and incredibly graceful in her high-vented gown, and another severed head bounced across the tabletop and onto the floor.
She twirled like a dancer as Senator Carmouche exploded from his chair. He started to leap away from her, but he’d made the mistake of coming to his feet rather than simply dropping to the floor. That brought him into reach of that impossibly long, illegally silent vibro blade, and he went down without even a scream as the blade sliced diagonally downward, completely through his skull and out the other side.
The Lisbon was a madhouse. Screams and shouts were everywhere. The gun battle at the door continued, although the big man had already dropped three more of the dispersed bodyguards. He ignored the last one for a moment, and picked off one of the two remaining close-in bodyguards, the ones on the far side of table ten, with a perfectly placed headshot from at least twenty meters. The last bodyguard, unfortunately for her, was still distracted by the gunfight. Her attention wa
s obviously split between that and the carnage closer at hand, and she hesitated—ever so briefly—trying to decide which threat was greater.
The woman from the bar settled the question for her. She continued across the table, almost as if it were a trampoline, and landed in a crouch—right leg bent sharply under her, left leg fully extended—and spun. The vibro blade hit the bodyguard at knee level, and she shrieked as her legs were sliced out from under her. She went down screaming, twisting in pain and trying vainly to reach the damage, and the woman finished her with a single, economical thrust, then bounced back to her feet and towards the table.
DeRosier had gotten his chair shoved back from the table, but he was tangled up with it. Or maybe it was just panic that made him so clumsy. Whatever his problem might be, though, it was like watching a guépard take down an Old Earth sheep. She moved with deadly, flowing grace, and he bleated in terror, just like a sheep.
Until the vibro blade slashed across his torso at an upward angle and spilled his vital organs across the floor.
He went down, and she continued her trajectory back across the table. Another of the men flew backward. His head was still attached, but only by the spine, and blood spurted everywhere as his heart continued to pump frantically.
She spun, cutting down a fourth man, then a fifth.
I couldn’t believe it. I literally could not believe my eyes. She and the big man by the door had taken out all nine of the bodyguards, and as I watched, she killed a sixth man from the crowd around the table.
But it wasn’t random, a corner of my brain realized. She passed up easy kills, bypassed the people between her victims. She wasn’t a homicidal maniac out to kill everyone in sight to make a statement. She was taking targeted kills, exactly the ones—and only the ones—she wanted.
And then I saw something else. Something she didn’t see.
The plainclothes floor cop came out of his chair to one side of the lavatory arch and his pulser was in his hand. I saw it rising, lining up on the woman in the black dress, and I knew it was none of my business. I knew exactly what I needed to do, and that was what she’d told me to do: head for the lavatory, lock the door, and not open it for anyone until the uniformed cops got there.
I knew that…and I didn’t do it.
I didn’t recognize the sound I made. It was deep, guttural, primal. It came from the pit of my belly, from a heart filled with hatred for the system that had taken my parents, was killing my brother by centimeters. It came from deep down in the soul of me, and the other modification I’d inherited from my great-great-grandmother popped out of the tips of my fingers.
I hit his back, keening like a fifty-five-kilo banshee, and my hands reached around his neck. But I didn’t grab it. No, the curved two-centimeter claws sank into the front of his throat, pulled in opposite directions with a horrible soft, dragging feel, and something hot and slick—and far thicker than I’d ever thought blood was—exploded across my hands.
The floor cop went down with a gurgling scream, and I found myself kneeling on his spine, looking up through a tangle of purple hair, as the woman from the bar spun towards us. Her eyes narrowed, but then she shook herself, scooped up the cop’s fallen pulser, and turned back to the bloodsoaked survivors cowering around the table.
“On the floor, all of you,” she said in a cold, flat voice, beckoning with the barrel of the pulser, and they fell over themselves obeying her, going to their knees and—without instructions—clasping their hands behind their heads.
“This is your lucky day,” she told them then in that same icy voice. “None of you have made it onto the list…yet. I’d recommend trying really hard to keep it that way. If you see me again, ‘lucky’ is the one thing you won’t be.”
She held them for two or three heartbeats, more paralyzed by her merciless eyes than by the pulser’s muzzle. Then she took two steps back and looked at me, still crouched on the body of the man I’d killed, trying to comprehend what had just happened.
“We’re going now, girl,” she said. “I think you’d better come with us.”
I stared at her, my brain mostly blank. But it worked well enough to tell me the one thing I couldn’t do was stay here. I scrambled to my feet, trying not to think about the stickiness dripping from my hands, of the blood spreading across the floor, and stumbled towards her.
“Good girl!” she said encouragingly, tossing the pulser away and tucking one amazingly strong arm around me. “This way!”
I don’t really remember crossing the room. I do remember that she had the presence of mind to scoop up her discarded shoes. And I remember she paused in the vestibule long enough to grab a fashionable evening cloak from its hanger, and I remember the big man reaching into his bag again, pressing a small device of some kind against the outside of the power door between the vestibule and the club itself.
“Got it,” he grunted, and punched a button.
“Security systems?” She’d already slipped back into her shoes. Now she swept the cloak around her, concealing the blood which had splashed across her gown, and another small unit came out of her evening bag. She tapped a control, and I gaped as a cloud of dust seemed to envelop her ever so briefly. It cleared, drifting away like smoke, and the black hair was platinum, the complexion darker even than mine in spectacular contrast, and the eyes…the eyes were the most brilliant topaz I’d ever seen.
“Don’t gawk,” she told me with a chuckle, and I noted that the mole had disappeared, as well. “Nanotech. And getting rid of it takes the bloodstains with it.”
She looked back at the tall man, whose handsome and regular features had vanished. Now he looked like someone had used his face for a punching bag—more than once. But it was a very, very tough-looking, competent face, and he was even bigger than I’d thought he was.
“Security systems, Kev?” she repeated, a bit louder.
“Down and done,” he reassured her. “The worm took out everything they’ve recorded for the last three days. Don’t know what they might’ve downloaded to InSec or the floor cops before Carmouche got there, but they haven’t got crap from the moment you walked in the door. Locked down their net connection, too. They are off the web and out of coms until we say different or they get a really good cyber tech in there.”
“Good. Door?”
“Not opening it without cutting gear for at least a couple of hours. And”—he tapped the unobtrusive earbud in his right ear—“the other teams locked down the other doors. We’ve got at least half an hour before anybody in there figures out how to get the word out.”
He’d been stripping off his expensive—and bloodsoaked, courtesy of the unlucky Paschal—tunic as he spoke. Now he reversed it, pressed something, and it reconfigured into a totally different cut and color. He unfastened something from around his neck and dropped it into his shoulder bag, then grimaced as he touched his side gingerly.
“Remind me to tell them they need better kinetic damping,” he said. “Wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got a couple of busted ribs.”
“That’s what quick-heal’s for,” she told him. “And it seems to’ve kept the darts out of your hide just fine.”
“Only because they aren’t allowed to load explosive darts inside the tower.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” She shook her head. “I swear, Kev, you’d complain if they hanged you with a golden rope!”
“Nah. Gold’s about right for me…assuming they couldn’t get platinum. Maybe a few diamonds set here and there.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Rubies, you think?”
“Oh, shut up!” She chuckled and shook her head again.
“Gotta say, this pop-up face shield’s really neat,” he continued, patting the shoulder bag. “Wish we could get our hands on more of ’em.”
“Be grateful for what we’ve got. I don’t know who our ‘mysterious benefactor’ is, but he’s got a Beowulf accent. There’s a limit to how openly Beowulf can risk antagonizing the People’s Republic.”
He nodded. Th
en both of them turned to me, and I realized they’d been chattering with each other at least in part to give me time to stop hyperventilating.
“Hold out your hands,” the man said. I extended them shrinkingly, and he sprayed them with an aerosol from his bag. It felt cold, like an alcohol spray, and then it tingled. When I looked down again, the sticky, drying blood had disappeared.
“Useful little solvent,” he said, putting the aerosol away again. “Won’t fool a good forensic sniffer—too many traces left—but the trick is to look so innocent nobody runs a sniffer over you.” He cocked his head, examining me critically. “Can you program that dress to a darker color?”
“S-sure,” I said.
“Then do it. The darker the better.”
I keyed up the app on my uni-link and tapped icons. The dress turned a darker purple even than my hair, and I looked back up at him.
“Good!” He nodded approval. “Solvent’s good for getting blood off skin, and you managed to keep most of it off your dress. But not all of it. That’s dark enough nobody’s likely to notice before we get you off-corridor again.”
“Off—off-corridor?” I repeated. “Where?”
“Well, I guess that sort of depends on you,” the woman said. “Kev says the worm killed the security systems, and I’m sure he’s right about that. But it can’t do anything about human memories, and a lot of people saw you in there, honey. And, pardon me for saying so, but your coloring’s even more…memorable than mine. Odds are InSec can get a pretty decent working description of you, and I’ll bet you’re from right around here, aren’t you?”
I nodded numbly as I realized how right she was about how easy I’d be to find. God. What was going to happen to me and Cesar now?
“So, you’ve got to disappear. Drop completely off the grid.” My eyes widened, and she shook her head quickly. “Don’t worry. We can do that. Have to move you to another tower, but we can do that, too.”
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