Still, I was on the balls of my feet, ignoring the pain in my leg, my wrists and elbows loose and ready. We were all People of Interest. Even Slackjaw here was in for a reason. I didn’t want to find out his reason was because he could pop blood vessels from fifty feet away with his mind; people had always made the mistake of thinking Kev Gatz was a harmless idiot, and that had turned out wrong—at least the harmless part.

“No, Cates,” he finally said in a marble-mouthed mumble. “No.” He started forward, then paused to tug forcefully at his friend’s arm. They both launched into motion, moving rapidly past me. I turned my head enough to keep track of them until they were swallowed by the gloom, and then I looked back at her.

“You okay?”

Her eyes squinted up a little, making her already stern face almost fierce. “Do Gunners with over seventy confirmed murders—at least thirty-seven of them officers of the System Security Force—normally make a habit of saving old women from thugs? Or is being in a penitentiary a tonic of sorts for worthless scum?”

I put one eyebrow up, racking my brain to try and remember where I knew her face. “I save one old woman for every ten people murdered.” I shifted my weight to try and ease off the dull ache in my leg. It didn’t work. “And your numbers are a little out-of-date, lady.”

She nodded. “It’s been a while since I’ve had access to SSF dossiers.” She leaned back a little, letting go of her coat and folding her papery hands on top of the table. “Last time I saw yours was when Marin was pushing his little Squalor project and plumped you as a candidate.”

A memory clicked into place. I pointed at her. “You’re an Undersecretary.” I reconsidered. “Were an Undersecretary.”

She nodded, her face impassive. “Dolores Salgado,” she said crisply. “And I was Undersecretary for the Australian Department.” She shrugged and busied herself lighting a cigarette. “I happened to be in Baltimore when the tricky bastard made his move, and I got caught up in the sweep.”

“His move?” I stepped over the bench and sat down across from her.

“Marin. Your patron.” She looked down at the table. “Worst decision we ever made, raising that half-dead simp from his hospital bed to the directorship.” Her eyes jumped back onto mine, startling, so alive and energetic in the midst of that tired, thin face. “I can still see him, dark and pudgy, broken. Harmless!”

I tried to imagine Dick Marin as dark and pudgy, and couldn’t.

“But we wanted to test the technology, of course.” Her smile was hollow. “He turned out to be smarter than we suspected, eh? First the state of emergency you helped him engineer. His programmed limits lifted, just like that. But he has no budgetary control, we told ourselves. We starved him of funds and poured everything into our shiny new army. Thirty years without a standing army, Mr. Cates, and now we have a huge one, ready to move. But Marin’s still smarter than us. They told us that being digitized in no way altered your natural intelligence or abilities, but I think Director Marin is proving us all wrong.”

I scratched my leg absently, trying to push down hard enough to get at the never-ending ache. “I had a friend once, got turned into a Monk. Not the same thing, but he said it… clarified him.”

She squinted and ticked her head. “Yes, perhaps. Clarified. I like it. Perhaps Marin was clarified. At any rate, he has moved first—thrown the weight of his police against us, without warning. It’s a civil war, Mr. Cates.”

I nodded. Even in here, this was old news, brought in stutteringly by the new arrivals every day. “What do you know about Ruberto? Your counterpart?” He was the only other Undersecretary I knew by name, I realized. Ruberto had authorized a government Spook—a psionic—named Bendix and a team of Stormers to come snatch me up in Paris during the Plague, a lifetime ago.

Tilting her head, Salgado smoothed her coat, studying it apparently for lint. “Not much before his inexplicable rise. He doesn’t have much history. He wasn’t an original Undersecretary—his career’s been guided by powerful friends. He came to significance shortly after we elevated Marin, springing up like a weed in Chicago.” She shrugged, returning her eyes to me. “Aside from sharing a title with him, I don’t have much in common with or opinion of Mr. Ruberto. He is, however, the power broker of the Undersecretaries at the moment. He will no doubt be a very powerful figure in the new army, and the New Order it ushers in.” She sighed, but it was theatrical and there was nothing sad or wistful about it. “I am afraid, Mr. Cates, that the System as we knew it is now a memory, and something new will be taking its place.”

I gave her a small smile. “I’m not afraid of that at all.” I kept the smile simmering in place. “Why are you here, then?”

Her face remained blank, but she lifted one skinny arm and tapped her head. “The same reason we are all here, Mr. Cates. Though I suspect even Director Marin does not know what a treasure my brain will prove to him.” She looked down at her lap and sighed again, and this time I thought it felt real. “I wish I were brave. I could cheat him.” She looked back up at me. “But I am not brave.”

I studied her. I liked her calmness, her poise. “I could do you a service,” I said steadily, keeping my eyes on hers. “If you want.” I shrugged. “I’ve got nothing but time here. And it’s what I do.”

Movement made me turn, startled, and I found Bartlett, bare chested as always and gleaming with a million fresh scars on his massive chest, standing just a few feet away. He looked like he was glaring angrily at us, but he always looked that way and I didn’t pay him much attention. He and Salgado exchanged a stare, and after a moment he snorted and walked off.

“You know him?” I asked.

She nodded. “I know every cop ever detailed to me. Espin Bartlett, Captain, originally Detroit until Detroit got shut down and evacced. A hothead, but a good man. He was on my bodyguard detail for three years some time back. Before the SSF decided it had better things to do than keep Undersecretaries alive.” She shook her head. “Espin’s had a hard time these past few weeks.”

I considered. She sounded almost motherly. I remembered her from the Vids—always painfully erect, those eyes glaring at you from the screen. “You’ve got to be more valuable to Marin than some of the shit kickers we have here. Why let you rattle around here?”

She shrugged. “Marin is still bound by his limitations, Mr. Cates. He’s one man—or one intelligence, I suppose, is more accurate—processing the data streams of hundreds of avatars, not to mention the snail streams of his assistants and secretaries. It’s a volume of information the human mind was never designed to handle, and even if he is operating on clockspeeds, now he’s slow and sloppy.” She shrugged again, putting her cigarette into her mouth and taking a deep drag. “They are pulling tens of thousands of people through facilities like this. He just hasn’t noticed me yet. By the time he does, I’ll probably have been sucked through here and processed, so no harm done, yes?”

She smiled, and at first I thought she was laughing, her face reddening. Then I realized she was coughing. I watched her without moving, and she waved her bony hands at me.

“Damn,” she panted, cigarette wobbling up and down between her lips. “A hundred and seven and I’m on my fourth lung. I may cheat Marin after all!”

“What do you mean, processed?”

She was gasping like a fish, but stole little nips of smoke in between. “Mr. Cates, I have a favor to ask you. I’ve read your file. You’re a man of honor, in your way.”

I shook my head again. “You’re thinking of someone else, mother. Someone who didn’t make it through the Plague.”

Her eyes stayed on me. I didn’t like it and struggled not to let it show. “I’m nearly dead, and high time,” she said. “I’ve done what I could to… never mind my ridiculous justifications. I am a corpse. My brain and heart just haven’t figured it out yet. I’m too cowardly to just end it, so I’m taking my chances here and hoping I keel over before they process me.”

Process. I didn’t like the word. Monks had been processed.

“I hear you’re getting out, you and the Freak Show—the Little Man and his Freaks, yes?”

All of my attention narrowed down to her for a moment. There were no secrets in prison, of course, but this bothered me for some reason. That she would know about it, with her voice so used to command it just oozed out of her, her eyes sharp and disappointed eternally. I decided not to say anything, but she nodded and looked down as if I had and she was satisfied.

“I’d like you to take Espin with you,” she said.

I blinked. “The cop?” I blurted, and then to try and sound semi-intelligent, I added, “Not you?”

She crushed the cigarette out on the table and stood up laboriously, her breathing ragged and rapid. “I am a dead woman, Mr. Cates. Though I may,” she said with a sudden smile that made her look impish and feminine for a second, “live on in this hellhole, yes? Perhaps.” She winked. “If so, look me up someday, Mr. Cates. I may be of some use to you.” She turned and walked slowly away. “I feel I owe Espin a debt, Mr. Cates, and this is my only chance to offer him something. You can trust him, Mr. Cates. You have my assurance on that.”

I watched her inch away from me. The strange thing was, I believed her.

XI

IT’S ALL RIGHT. YOU DID LOOK KIND OF SAD ABOUT IT

“Don’t open your fucking mouth,” I advised Marko with a raised hand. “I might have the urge to put something in it.”

Marko appeared to be trying to push himself into the far wall. He’d gained some weight, his hair had swallowed most of the rest of his face, and his affected glasses had gotten smaller and more stylish. He bent slowly, his eyes locked on me, and retrieved his dropped handheld. Instead of the old Technical Associate jumpsuit, he was wearing a moderately luxurious suit and held the handheld in front of his belly as if it were going to protect him. I gave the device a few extra seconds of my attention—for all I knew about tech it just might shoot energy beams at me.

“Mr. Marko is a friend of the cause,” Krasa said from behind me, slicing my bracelets off with a jerk. “He saved my life.”

I gave Marko a merry wink. “How’s that?”

“He’s been farming the SSF network,” she said, stepping back around me. “Keyword searches dumped to a private net of his that he’s walled off on his own. I was chasing down my partner, trying to figure out what had happened to him, and Marko saw the Worms red flagging all of my Standard Incident Reports and activity logs. He cleaned up my files and passed the word to me.”

“I, uh,” Marko said slowly, licking his plump lips, and then his eyes, tiny in the midst of so much hair, flashed to me in apprehension.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I sighed. “Speak.”

“I’ve been evolving my opinion of the System Security Force.”

I nodded. “Okay. Marko’s a revolutionary. Fucking fantastic. Why hasn’t Mr. Wizard been processed himself?”

“The Technical Corps is still largely untouched, for some reason,” Krasa said.

“Marin’s worried about complex and creative thought,” Marko said. “Worried that the algorithms won’t capture it. He’s afraid to process the Technical staff and some of the higher Worms until he’s more sure of himself.” He licked his pink lips. “Unfortunately, most of the Tech staff is voluntarily working on this for him.”

I pulled the one chair out from the table, and Marko made a low, whimpering sound, putting his hands up a little higher. Krasa lit a cigarette.

“You two know each other?” she asked. She sounded like this was the least surprising thing she’d ever heard.

I grinned. “Mr. Marko left me for dead not so long ago.” I winked at Marko as his eyes popped open. “It’s all right. You did look kind of sad about it, as I recall.” I spread my hands. “Calm down. You had Hense up your ass and what the fuck were you going to do?” I remembered Janet Hense, avatar, sailing around Bellevue, kicking the entire world’s ass. “Okay. Forget it. Zeke, you’re not high on my list, okay? You’re not even in the first volume. Sit down, relax, and let’s help each other out.”

Slowly, he nodded and peeled himself from the wall. I didn’t feel anything for Marko—no hate or anger; although I did feel mean, grim satisfaction that he’d apparently spent the last year and a half terrified that I might come back to kill him. He slowly approached the table, shooting his cuffs and adjusting his collar. He glanced at his handheld and gestured at it before setting it on the table, his hand lingering on it for a moment as if reluctant to let go. Then he pushed his hands into his pockets.

“Okay,” he said, licking his lips. “Okay. Let’s.”

“He was slipped under the door by our mutual friend,” Krasa said.

Marko blinked his tiny eyes. His lips were permanently wet, glistening under the harsh light. “Ruberto sent you?”

For a second, my mind was blank, and then I was irritated. “No one sent me, Mr. Marko. He asked me to come here.” I found my smile again. It felt fake on my face, but I put it on anyway. “He asked me to do him a favor.”

“Kill Marin,” Krasa said, her voice flat. “That’s the fucking favor.”

Marko’s face tightened up, his nostrils, bits of pink flesh in the midst of his jungle of hair, flaring anxiously. “You’re aware of Director Marin’s special… attributes?”

I nodded. “Hard to kill the Man of a Million Avatars, yeah, I know. That’s why I’m here, in this room, Marko: fact-finding. I thought I’d have to look for you—but figured if I could find you, I’d have a source of information.” I nodded, spreading my hands. “I am a genius.”

“Hard to kill,” Marko said musingly. He started to pace. I got the impression he was slowly forgetting there was anyone else in the room. “That’s nice. You can’t kill Director Marin.”

I nodded impatiently. “You can turn the fucking Kremlin into dust,” I said forcefully, trying to will Marko to stop speaking. “I need information, and I don’t think we can just buy it. I’ve been given a target, one of Marin’s key lieutenants —”

“Gall,” Krasa said immediately. “Horatio Gall. Marin’s right hand.”

I glanced at her but didn’t say anything.

“Gall,” Marko said. “Jebus, you mean Gall. Major Gall. Oh, fuck, Cates—why not go for Marin himself? You think you’re saving yourself trouble by going for his fucking right hand?”

I shrugged. “Gall is just the first step. Information, then we make a plan.”

He shook his head, suddenly confident and animated. “You want Gall, you still need Marin. He’s so close to Marin—he’s Marin’s moon. His itinerary, his security protocols, the officer assigned to his personal valet—you need information. Information that you can only get from Marin’s network.”

He smiled suddenly. “Mr. Cates, you don’t need a Gunner, you need a hacker. Marin is a cloud, he’s a network unto himself. What you need to do”— Marko suddenly resumed, twirling his hand again —“is get a world-class Techie type, someone who can understand the algorithms and encryption, the nanotech and spider-busses. Someone who can hack the Prime’s cloud, extract the data without tripping alarms. Sure, sure—nothing simpler. The System is crawling with guys of that caliber.” I found I didn’t like Marko when Marko got sarcastic. “You’d need someone like Squalor. Or Miles Amblen.”

No one said anything for a moment. Every Techie I’d ever met used Amblen’s name half a dozen times in the first five minutes of a discussion—the Amblen Protocol, the Amblen Theorem. Amblen was a typical old-school Techie, like Squalor: Pre-Unification he’d been famous, too, a brilliant academic. After Unification he hadn’t been able to work on the System’s leash and had gone underground.

I leaned forward. “How would you even access the cloud?”

Marko started pacing again, shaking his head. “That’s easy, easy. The avatar architecture is two-way. Marin—any avatar—has to be able to collate new information from his avatars. They have to be able to interact with the control node, to supply information, and the control node needs to be able to take direct control whenever it wants. Any avatar could be made into a two-way gate to Marin’s network. Then you’ll be able to access Marin’s data, including Gall’s file.”

I nodded. This was getting exciting. “So you’d need to snatch one of Marin’s avatars.”

Marko was pacing so fast, tight little bustles back and forth. The fabric of his suit made a distinct dry sound every time his legs scissored. “You’d need to have full physical access to it for some time. I’ve never seen a spec for the avatars, so who knows what kind of fireworks would be waiting for you—it’s quite possible—strike that! It’s almost certain that taking an avatar off-line would cause a panic response, most likely a complete data dump into the pipe and a hard wipe of the memory, probably triggering a scratch and shuffle of the handshake keys. So the chances of being able to put this plan into effect are slim.”

“I assume every Marin avatar has a security retinue?”

Krasa nodded, staring at the thick blue smoke of her cigarette. “Like each and every one was the Emperor himself.”

I turned to look at Marko and tried the grin again. It flashed onto my numb face, trained and compliant. “To get close to Marin you don’t need a hacker, Marko. You need a Gunner.”

He stared at me for a moment and then strode forward so quickly my alarms almost went off. Stopping myself from hurting the Techie, I let him lean down into my airspace, all that heroic hair rippling in the scrubbed air of the Blank Room like grass in a wind. “You’re in for this? Three-fourths of the SSF are avatars by now, more every day. I have one, maybe two people in my department I can trust. Marin’s security is going to be heavy, and I doubt Ruberto can get you any help here.”

I nodded. “We don’t need to do it here,” I reminded him. “There are fucking Marins everywhere, all over the System. Open a drawer and a dozen spill out.”

I should have been thrilled—my heart should have been pounding, my skin electric—this was the ultimate cop kill, this was the King Worm himself. This was what I’d wanted all those years ago, panting outside of Westminster Abbey. This was my revenge—this was bringing the whole damn poisoned System down, and I’d just talked myself into believing it was possible. Get to Gall. Map the security. Find the weak spot and tear it all down. Why not? But I felt nothing. I was calm; I was dry as paper.

Marko started nodding, and it was like his head couldn’t stop. “Okay.” He looked at Krasa. “What do you think, Captain?”

Krasa looked at me for a moment like I was an interesting equation Marko was forcing her to appreciate. She sucked in smoke with a squint and then shrugged. “What the fuck,” she said, smoke dribbling from her lips limply.

This was not exactly the inspirational speech Marko had been hoping for, but he nodded as robustly as he could. “Right.”

I stood up, pulling my Roon from its holster and checking the chamber. “Okay—so where do we get this Miles Amblen–level Techie, Mr. Marko, since you’re apparently not the right man for the job?”

He blinked. And then he smiled. His smile was awful—yellow teeth, one broken, and angry red gums. “Well, why not make it Miles Amblen himself? We’ve got him downstairs in the lab, in a drawer somewhere.”

XII

SOME MIRACLE OF SHITHEAD PHYSICS

I heard her approaching my bunk—her steps light but with no real effort at concealment. I came fully awake and opened my eyes, finding Marlena crouching down so her face was on level with mine, her inked-up skin kind of frightening in the sapping moonlight. We stared at each other comfortably for a moment. It was a relatively cool night, hinting that maybe it wasn’t always broiling in the desert, that maybe, if we lived that long, we might even see a time when you didn’t contemplate suicide every time you took three steps.

Chances were slim we’d last that long.

“You up?” Skinner finally said.

“No, this is a dream,” I said. “You here to seduce me?” The moonlight softened her face a little. I wondered when I’d decided I trusted her enough to let her sneak up on me at night. I tabled the thought for future contemplation. Marlena was easy to talk to, and so far she hadn’t fucked with me. That was enough, for now.

A faint smile eased her face a little. “Not this time,” she said. “The little man’s holding a meeting.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Now? Fucking hell.”

The little man was special, that was for sure. Michaleen was setting a record every day he remained walking around—he wouldn’t say how long he’d been interred, but my best guess from the scraps of evidence I’d been able to gather was several months. I’d asked him how he’d avoided being disappeared like everyone else, and he’d just winked, saying that he knew when to stand still and make like a rock. Whatever the fuck that meant. The average for those of us without mystical rock-making powers seemed closer to three or four weeks, tops.

She shrugged, standing up, her knees giving off soft cracks that sounded loud in the near silence. “Just the messenger, Cates. Maybe when we’re done listening to the midget, we’ll see about seducing you.” She pronounced the word like it was a prim curiosity, the sort of thing assholes said. I didn’t like that, but swallowed it as I sat up and started to push myself to my feet.

Marlena put a hand on my shoulder. She didn’t push, just laid her calloused, bony hand there, and I sat back down, looking up at her. She stared down at me steadily.

“You really think he can get us out? Michaleen?”

I considered, keeping my eyes on hers. Her face was impassive, but her eyes burned down at me. I knew the look: desperation. She was a pro and hiding it well, but there it was.

I pictured the little man. I’d seen him just that morning, sitting in the sun out in the yard, alone except for three rations of water—how he’d gotten them I didn’t know—sipping and sitting still. Perfectly still. I’d watched him for half an hour from the shadows of the dorm walls, and the little man hadn’t moved so much as an eyelid except to drink.

“Yes,” I said honestly. “I think that creepy little bastard can do it.”

She nodded. “Yeah, okay. But I don’t trust him. I think he’s using us.”

I smiled. “C’mon, Lena. Of course he’s using us.” A flare of anger lit up inside me, a tiny ember flickering. The man had invoked my father, had used his name. I knew it was bullshit; I knew it was just to make me soften a bit, old Uncie Mickey from the neighborhood. And yet I hadn’t called him on it. I’d let it sit there between us, unchallenged.

She nodded again, her face still composed. “I think he’ll leave us behind if he can. Don’t let that happen. If he comes to you with some story about how I got left behind, don’t let it happen.” Her mask fragmented for a second and she looked away, the muscles of her throat working. “I don’t want to die here, Avery.”

For a moment I just looked up at her, fully awake now and unsure of what to say. I knew if I made a promise of any sort it would complicate things. You didn’t make promises, you didn’t accept responsibility for anyone else, because in the midst of a plan you were usually lucky to be able to take care of yourself.

“We all get out,” I found myself saying, amazed. “Or none of us get out.”

Without another word, she nodded and turned, walking away. I shook my head and swung myself into motion after her, watching her hips sway under the tight fabric of her short pants—one of the only prisoners who’d ditched the orange jumpsuit, opting for a perpetual sunburn.

“Wait a sec,” I said, turning to cross the dorm, stopping about ten feet away from where Bartlett sat on his bunk, a dark form with a bright cigarette coal dancing in front of it. “You coming?”

Behind me, I heard Skinner hiss, “You have got to be shitting me,” but I ignored her. Bartlett swung his legs off the bed and stood up. I’d never seen the ex-cop sleep. I supposed if I’d been thrown in with a few hundred folks who wanted me dead, I’d probably have learned to do without as well. As for me, my two admirers had been disappeared a few days ago—poof! they were gone, and I hadn’t had any trouble from anyone else since.

Skinner hesitated as we approached, then shook her head and spun away, muttering. She led us into the yard and over to the debarkation area, where a train had arrived and was disgorging a fresh bunch of People of Interest, all of whom looked a little stunned and horrified. Mickey, Grisha, and the fucking Christian were already there, a few feet from the sturdy chain-link, electrified fence. The little man was sitting with his back to the train, cross-legged, eyes closed, hands clasped in his lap.

“Good evenin’, Avery,” he said without opening his eyes. “Thank you, Marlena.”

I watched the newbies being detrained, moving stiffly through the cool air. I startled when I saw him: the bearded fuck, the non-Crusher, my old friend from my first day. I’d seen Bartlett kill him, I knew I had. But there he was, barking at the newbies like he felt better than ever. As I stared, he glanced at me, then did a little double take, and grinned.

I looked at Michaleen and watched him for a moment. He was sitting perfectly still, a statue. I let a few heartbeats go by, watching, but he didn’t twitch or even seem to be breathing.

“All right, Uncle,” I said, stretching, several things in my back popping. “What’s up?”

He opened his eyes to look at me and then closed them again, settling himself. “Somethin’ on your mind, Avery?”

I twitched. It might be true, who the fuck knew. I wanted it to be true. “Not yet,” I said.

He didn’t open his eyes. “Time’s running out, Avery. We need to get a plan in place and start moving, before members of our merry band start vanishing, yes?”

I was irritated and tired. I’d been tired for days, feeling gravity get a little stronger every minute. “Why out here, little man?”

“No bugs out here, Avery. The cots’re full of ’em.”

“You have a pretty broad skill set, Mickey,” I said slowly. “Maybe I’d like to know a little more about who I’m getting in bed with.”

He sighed, producing a cigarette from behind his ear. “I’m nobody, Avery. I was a clerk. I was sent to collect debts. I must have seen somethin’ along the way.” He grinned. “Don’t kick my balls, Avery.”

I decided to let it go, for now. I didn’t know if he was lying to me about my father, about any of this, but I did know I was going to stick next to him when we got out, and if he was lying about anything, I was going to make him eat it. I nodded and shrugged. “O-kee. You’re a clerk who has magical knowledge of the SSF’s listening devices—a clerk in the Listening Device Office.”

He smiled. “That’s the ticket then, Avery. Now”—he nodded past me—“why bring the Pig? He’s not pop’lar here, you know.”

I spread my hands. “He says he wants in, and he can buy a ticket.” I turned to Bartlett, who stood like a small mountain, his eyes bright white. I swept my hand toward the rest. “The floor’s yours, Espin.”

He glanced at me and then back at the group. I sauntered over to sit down next to Grisha, who greeted me with a nod, and then we were all staring at the ex-cop in silence, the shouts and insults of the Crushers unloading their cargo behind us.

“All right,” he grunted, nodding. “You all want out of here. Good. Every single one of these shitheads ought to be digging tunnels with their hands to get out of here. Flappin’ their arms like wings to fly out of here. Fuck the desert, man. Take your chances.”

We stared at him. None of us said anything.

He sighed. “Any of you know what an avatar is?”

I let a few seconds go by. “A mechanical ghost,” I finally said. “A Droid with an uploaded human brain—a digital recording of a human brain. Made to look like the human, so it goes around looking just like whoever it’s supposed to be, acting like him, talking like him.” I nodded, reaching down and taking a handful of still-warm dirt. “Used to be they had no eyes—just cameras for eyes, like the Monks. Same technology. But not too long ago I saw one that could’ve passed for human.”

Bartlett nodded. “One of the new models. A cop, yeah?”

I nodded back without looking at him. I saw Janet Hense, a pretty little thing. I could remember how she smelled. I could remember the stillborn smile on her face when she left me for dead. I could remember her flying through the air, taking bullets, and not batting an eye. “A cop.”

“Reason I’m here, that rat-fuck Marin is replacing cops with avatars. And it isn’t voluntary, you get it? Your partner goes on assignment, comes back, acting a little wiggy—fuck, his brain’s been sucked out of his head and a copy put into storage, a copy put into an avatar. He goes back to the beat; you can’t put your finger on why, but you don’t trust him anymore. Then, a few weeks later, boom! Happens to you. Marin’s doing this on every single cop in the force. That’s why I’m here—I found out; I started making some trouble.” He hung his head for a moment. “Shit, I should have known better.”

I kept studying the dirt. None of us said anything until Michaleen cleared his throat. “I don’t give a fart about the fucking cops getting theirs,” he said amiably. “You got a point?”

Bartlett stared at the little man for a moment and then nodded. “Yeah, I got a point. I said they store a copy, right? Process kills you, but no matter—Marin gets your brain on a quantum drive and it gets stored, and they can make as many of you as they want. Manufacture the body, upload the brain, done. That one gets killed? Do it again. Storage is no problem—you could store the entire force, all seven fucking million cops, in one building.” He paused and took his eyes off Michaleen to look at the rest of us. “Could do the same thing with Persons of Interest, huh?”

A sharp sense of dread bloomed inside me; rusty blood dripped into clear water.

“They’re makin’ avatars outta us?” Marlena said with a snort.

“No,” Bartlett said. “They don’t bother. We’re all here because we all got something in our heads Marin wants or thinks might be useful. We People of Fucking Interest. But he don’t need us wandering around in souped-up Monk bodies, passing for human. He just wants what we know. So he rips your brain, puts it on a drive, and stores it. You die, but whenever he gets around to seeing what you got, he just pops you into the Big Iron and pokes around until he finds it.” The cop grimaced. “It’s called a fucking economy of resources. Us sitting here in this prison, it costs money. It costs resources. Sticking us in a solid state storage brick? Cheap.”

Grisha sat forward. “So they make a redundant brain wave imprint—using Amblen algorithms, I assume?”

Bartlett shrugged. “Fuck if I know that shit. What I do know is, the assholes they have patrolling this place? That pop up out of nowhere and kick balls?” He nodded. “Avatars. You take one out in some miracle of shithead physics, they’re back in an hour, shiny-new. They do real-time incremental backups over the air, so the avatar loses no memory. You can shank the guards here all you want. They’ll make more.”

Michaleen had closed his eyes again. “So we move soon, or we end up quantum ghosts, eh? All right, Officer, I’d be moved to say you’ve acted in good faith and given us valuable information.” His eyes popped open, steely and hard in the midst of his jowly, smiling face. “But how do we know you aren’t here to fuck us? A mole? Undercover?”

Bartlett stared for a moment and then sort of deflated. “I guess you don’t. Sure, could be, if you think that highly of yourselves.” He shrugged. “If that’s so then your little escape plot’s borked anyway, right?”

Michaleen smiled. “Sure, sure—ruined in any event.” He looked around. “I’d take him along. Anyone object?”

The rest were staring at Bartlett but said nothing. The Christian, who I’d never heard speak, shifted lazily, stretching her thin, long limbs.

Michaleen nodded. “All right, Mr. Bartlett—you’re in, on fucking sufferance. I don’t like the way Pigs smell, so stay upwind, y’hear? Don’t irritate me. But you can crawl up our ass when we make the move, providing I don’t change my mind.”

Bartlett didn’t say anything. He just stood there, hands slack at his sides. I wondered what he planned to do, where he planned to go—if there was an Island of Burned Cops out there, somewhere. “Mickey,” I said, dropping my handful of dirt and scrubbing my hands. “Speaking of our move, what’s the plan? Murder an infinite number of avatar-Crushers and die of thirst being cooked and frozen out there?”

Michaleen didn’t look at me, but his flattened face turned sour. “I swear, Avery, if I didn’t have the tenderest feelings for you as if you were my own son—all right. That’s why we’re here tonight, isn’t it? You’re right, we can’t just walk out of here. Even if we scale the walls without takin’ one in the back, we’re wanderin’ the desert like fucking assholes. Won’t work. So we’re not going to walk. We’re going to fly.”

A faint rustle of movement swept through everyone, but it died fast and no one said a word. I studied Michaleen’s smug, satisfied face, old and leathery, and thought again, Who the fuck are you, little man?

XIII

A LITTLE GOD

I twisted my hands in the bracelets, checking them. They’d been put on loosely, but I estimated it would still take me a minute, maybe two due to rust, to get out of them.

“I don’t like this,” I said.

“So you said,” Krasa replied over her shoulder, not slowing her pace. “But fuck you. I can’t explain you running around inside here armed and uncuffed. I’m hours away from being burned as it is. We need to maximize that time, not shorten it.”

I looked around the corridor. Other cops stalked past us, glanced at Krasa, and ignored Marko and me like we were freight. Krasa swaggered ahead of me like she didn’t have a worry, gesturing us through a series of doors with a negligent sort of assumption I admired. She was a cop on the verge of having her file pulled, and she was burrowing into Cop Central with me in tow, unprocessed. She was not fucking herself—she’d been fucked a long time ago. What she was doing was digging up her own body and enthusiastically re-fucking it, and it was kind of exhilarating to watch.

I slid my eyes to Marko, who was holding on to my right arm and trying to look tough. His ID was turned inward inside his jacket, obscuring the blue border that proclaimed him Tech Services. He seemed to enjoy playing the role of ass-kicking cop, though anyone with street eyes would peg him for a paper-pusher at a hundred feet, with his soft posture and off-balance walk, his cheap fucking clothes. He was sweating.

“Tell me about it,” I said quietly.

He blinked a few times rapidly. “What? The technology? What Marin’s doing? It’s elegant.”

He turned to look over his shoulder, the fucking asshole, looking guilty. He leaned in close, smelling like bad cologne, the sort of stuff that went bad in the bottle, getting fishy. “Digitization of the brain used to cause unstoppable neuron-mapping corruptions in about ninety-nine percent of subjects, because the original algorithms were based on the assumption that it was the physical makeup of a brain that dictated how it was wired, you know? Instead of realizing that people’s brains wired up based on a lot of experiences. But it used to be a ninety-nine percent kill rate—digital copy came out as noise, and noise left behind in the host. It scrambled them. When the Undersecretaries worked on the project that eventually gave us Dick Marin, man, they went through like two hundred candidates before they got one that took. Marin was on like the frickin’ tenth list or some shit. They’d hoped for better—Squalor’s project, of course, wasn’t going to work, but everyone wants to fucking live forever. We solved the problem, though. You can’t predict the mapping—you just have to follow every connection, one after the other. Takes fucking hours, but it leaves a perfect copy. The host, uh, well, the host still always dies.”

He sounded vaguely embarrassed, but I suspected he was only embarrassed to have to admit it. “Does sound elegant,” I said. “Sort of a zero-sum equation, huh?”

“It is,” he enthused. “Think about it—four hours and you’re digitized, and you can be slotted into an avatar over and over again, or exist in quantum space as a floating intellect. It’s immortality, you know?” He nodded, his grip on my arm becoming annoyingly tight. I considered teaching him a lesson in shitty fucking police work but decided it would be counterproductive to cause a scene when I was supposed to be wallpaper walking around, just another subdued shithead being escorted to a tune-up.

“What’s the scope?”

Marko coughed, and now I thought he was actually embarrassed. “Global,” he said in a low voice.

“You’re fucking kidding,” I said, frowning. Global. Fucking hell, the whole world, sucked up into a mainframe, dancing to Marin’s tune, the avatars equipped with controlling circuits that would force them to do whatever Marin thought was important. Everyone dead, walking the earth. I wondered why it was that the three or four madmen who’d been tearing shit up the last few years were always intent on killing everyone.

I felt tired for a moment, then realized I didn’t actually feel anything.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said quickly. “Risking my neck. To be fair,” Marko went on in his lecturing voice, “there would be advantages. No more violence, no more disorders. Great minds could communicate and collaborate easily, at faster-than-light speeds.”

My urge to do some violence to Marko was almost blinding. “Captain,” I said in a low voice. “Tell your partner here to shut up, or the prisoner might show him how to break an arm when your hands are secured in front of you.”

“Mr. Marko,” she said immediately without turning or stopping, “shut the fuck up until spoken to or I might give the prisoner permission.”

I didn’t look at the Techie, but I heard the satisfying click of teeth as he shut his mouth. Fucking advantages. I felt him shift away from me, putting some daylight between us, and felt a little better.

We turned a corner and headed down a dead end that terminated with a door that was exactly like the others except for a thin blue border around the frame. Krasa stopped and let us catch up to her.

“How do you find your way around this place?” I asked, twisting my wrists again.

She didn’t look at me. “You memorize everything,” she said flatly. “Mr. Marko?”

I frowned a little. “You can’t open that door?”

She shrugged her coat onto her shoulders. “Colonels and up can,” she said tightly. “Too many lower ranks were barging in and beating the tar out of the Technical Associates.”

We stood there in an odd awkward silence for a moment, and then Marko stepped forward, gestured, and the door popped open with a soft click. Krasa immediately shoved him aside and led us through.

“Didn’t really stop them,” Marko muttered as I stepped past him.

The blue-framed door led to a small room with barely enough floor space for the three of us to stand comfortably. Another handleless door that might have been an exact copy of the first faced us. Wordlessly, Marko stepped forward.

“You got a promotion, huh?” I said to the bush of hair threatening to envelop Marko’s neck.

He half turned his head, looking down at the floor with his hand raised. His jaw muscles bunched. “Hense wrote me up, a commendation,” he said. “I’m assistant director of Technical Services for the Northeast Administrative Division.”

I gave Marko a low whistle, admiring his broad shoulders and impressively curly hair. “Assistant fucking director, huh?”

He snapped his head forward again and gestured the door open. “Fuck you,” he muttered.

My hands twitched. Krasa barked a laugh. “Fuck you, he says, bold as fucking brass.” My arms started upward, and her hand lashed out and took hold of one wrist, stopping me. “Don’t assault the assistant director,” she said, and pushed Marko roughly toward the door. “Technically, he outranks me.”

I put a small, inoffensive smile on my face and offered up the low, impressed whistle again.

The assistant fucking director led us into a lab setup, white walls and floor, black ceiling, counters and equipment lining the walls. It wasn’t a particularly large room. The far wall was dotted with dozens of input jacks.

Marko swept into the room fluidly, stretching and pulling off his jacket, his sleeves already rolled up. He looked bigger suddenly, like a guy who’d found his scale—like the room had been built around him, perfectly proportioned to him. I let my hands rest and just watched him as he crossed over to a bank of cabinets and began searching through them fussily, gesturing open the locked drawers with perfunctory, well-learned movements. His hands looked like they belonged on someone else, like they weren’t really part of his short, chubby body. Like he’d stolen them from someone else.

“Let’s see, I know I had him down here. A copy of him, I mean.”

“An unauthorized copy,” Krasa said softly, sounding bored.

“Yes, yes,” Marko muttered, opening drawers and peering into them in rapid succession. “Ah! Here he is.”

He turned, yellow teeth ugly in the midst of all that hair. He was holding a slim white rectangular box in one hand, thin and stained with several dark fingerprints. A short cable hung from one end, dangling in the air. “Meet Dr. Amblen. Or a simulacrum thereof.” The smile disappeared, snapping off his face instantly. “I’m never clear on the terminology.”

“Uh-huh.” I gave my wrists a twist, feeling nothing. “And what do we do with him?”

“Ah!” Marko snapped his fingers and turned, striding for the far wall. “We plug him in, of course. The bricks are set to go into sleep cycle when disconnected and to wake up on plug in.”

With his back to us, he took the dangling cable in one hand and shoved it into a jack on the wall, apparently at random. Then he took a single step back.

“Dr. Amblen?”

Nothing happened. Marko turned to flash us a politician’s grin, holding up one hand to signal patience. I investigated and found I didn’t have any, but I did have a strap around my wrists so I didn’t do anything about it.

“Dr. Amblen?” Marko repeated, at the same volume.

There was a curious humming sound, tuneless and irritating. It went on for a few seconds, and I wanted to cover my ears or walk out of the room, the sound getting under my skin somehow and scraping along my nerves. Then it was gone, and there was a hollow sense of someone on the line, as if we’d made a particularly long-distance connection to someone.

“Who are you?”

Marko turned around and gave us his political grin again. “He doesn’t retain much from session to session, due to limited storage and low voltage in the brick. We actually didn’t expect any retention when in portable storage—we expected them to boot up back in their initial states every time. But he does remember certain things. He sometimes thinks they’re dreams.”

“I said… who are you?”

The simulated voice was elderly, shaky and dry. It pumped outrage and anger into the room. I immediately formed a mental image of Dr. Amblen, who I’d never seen: white and pale, with skin like paper, white haired and severe, a long, sharp nose cutting through the air disdainfully. I hated him.

“I’m Dr. Ezekiel Marko, Dr. Amblen,” Marko said, still grinning at us as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “We’ve spoken before.”

“We have not,” the voice snapped, swelling up suddenly, as if the bits and bytes inside the brick had finally gotten their shit together and formed up into an actual intelligence. His frail voice quaked through the air as if he were the room, or the shell—but I’d never heard a shell with that much cranky, pissed-off personality. “I’m not feeling well.”

I wondered, for a second, how they came up with the voice—and why. Why bother giving him a voice that approximated his own, or did they just have a generic old-man voice?

“Dr. Amblen,” Marko continued, still grinning, like this was a pattern, something he’d been through many times. “I’d like to ask you a few questions. About the Deva Project. You freelanced on it.”

There was a pause, the only sound the steady hum. “I do not wish to talk about that. Who are you?”

Marko’s smile was painted on, painful to look at. “I’m Dr. Ezekiel Marko, and I need to know infiltration vectors for the consciousness matrix you helped design. I need to know data flow patterns, handshake codes, and security layers.”

That hum again, edging into my organs and making them swell.

“You’re looking to hack, naughty boy,” Amblen said crisply. “Don’t you pups know anything about social engineering? You don’t just ask for such things. You provoke them. You trick, you charm.” He sounded peevish. “Everything went to hell during Unification. Straight to fucking hell.”

Marko nodded. “I need infiltration vectors for the Deva Project, Dr. Amblen. Will you help?”

“All the information I could give you is outdated. Keys changed, numbers resifted, new layers added. This was years ago, son.”

Marko kept nodding. “Yes. Will you help?”

Another pause. “The Deva Project. Hmmph. You’re going after that son of a bitch Marin, yes?” There was a blast of weird static, as if Amblen had tried to make a sound the rendering software couldn’t interpret. “Then yes, by god, I’ll help. Where… where am I? I need my lab. Take me… what… take me to my lab.”

Marko was smiling and nodding, but his eyes were suddenly locked on Krasa. I followed his gaze, studying her for a moment before realizing what he’d noticed: Her gold badge, the pocket-sized hologram that made her a cop, a little god, was no longer gold. It glowed a bloody, rusty red.

“You’ve been burned,” he said to her, his voice somehow containing wonder.

She tore at her coat and stared. I looked back at Marko and smiled at him. “So have you!” I said cheerfully, enjoying it for some reason.

He lifted his jacket and stared at his own ID badge, which had transformed from a soft hazy blue to the same shade of angry red.

“Oh, shit,” he said softly.

XIV

ROLLING ALONG TO SOME INEVITABLE DISASTER

Everything was fucked.

I stared down through smoke and sweat at the body of the Christian—shit, I’d never even learned her name. We were in the yard next to the fence around the arrival area, down in a hastily dug pit that gave some cover from the snipers on the towers. Not enough cover; the Christian’s head had popped in a silent explosion, as if someone had planted a bomb inside her brain when she’d been born and waited, patiently, until the right moment to press the button.

Reaching up, I wiped her warm blood from my face. It was gritty with the sandy dirt we’d been excavating. I blinked my burning eyes and sat back for a moment. The Christian stared at me, one eye red and blown. I still didn’t mind dying. Michaleen’s plan was a good one, and I’d been entertained to take my part in it, but if it all ended with my own skull exploding in a sudden burst of bone and blood—well, I figured I wouldn’t even know it. And no one would deserve it more.

It was a strange, quiet spot—I could hear the roar in the distance, but it was a mile away, distant in space and time, something that was going to happen in five minutes. Shouts and screams and gunshots and a disturbing booming sound I couldn’t figure. Michaleen had been right: starting a riot in Chengara had been about as hard as starting a fire in a gas can. The trick was keeping it going long enough, and the little man had assured me he had his end covered.

I looked around. The yard was blanketed with thick, gray haze pouring from a few dozen smoke grenades. I wasn’t sure how, but the Crushers—avatars with whatever gadgetry came standard—were able to see right through the smoke and nail anyone scampering along the ground. I figured if I stayed low in my little ditch I’d be okay, and a thick, insistent urge to do just that weighed me down. I wasn’t afraid, but the effort of moving just seemed incredible, impossible.

I looked back at the Christian. Her ruined eye glared at me. I’d never spent so much time right next to a corpse—usually I needed to get away as quickly as possible, and most times I’d been dodging bullets and trying to remember floor plans, desperate. Her absolute stillness was fucking annoying. I wanted to stretch out a leg and jostle her a little.

Thinking of my leg made it ache. I looked away from the girl. Michaleen wouldn’t know my end had gotten sticky—he’d be proceeding with the plan, stoking the fire until the walls blistered and peeled, until the Crushers started boiling into gas around us. Until it got so bad they sent in the fucking cavalry. Until the hovers, stuffed full of Stormers or avatars or whatever the fuck Marin sent in the hovers these days, floated down from the sky, death and terror. Our ticket out.

“Never the easy way,” I muttered.

The easy way would be to just lie back and let it wash over me—or, better, to stand up and wave my arms until suddenly—lights out.

I looked over her body at the edge of the chain-link fence separating the yard from the arrival area. We’d feverishly dug out underneath it, bullets and smoke grenades flying, until the fence could be lifted up a few inches, enough for the skinny little girl to wriggle under, our Snake earning her way. The plan had been for us to duck under the fence and wait for the hover that Michaleen guaranteed would land, apart from the others, in the arrivals area. “Standard fucking procedure,” he’d said. Didn’t matter that no one much cared if we all scattered into the desert to die; the SSF had a standard response to prison upsets, and part of it was securing the arrivals area.

“They maybe have shiny chrome brains,” Michaleen had said, “but they’re still the same fucking assholes as ever, and they will follow standard operating procedure.”

The rest had been pretty simple: let the bulk of the crew disperse to their postings, and when the skeleton crew was alone, I kill everyone. The genius details of how that was accomplished were left to me. The hover pilot would lock down his brick, and then our Snake would crawl in through the obscure, vulnerable maintenance hatch under the hover’s belly, release the drop-bay hatch, and I’d finish the job. Then we’d wait for everyone else to crawl in and be on our way.

Simple. Stupid simple. But I’d had nothing better to do.

I eyed the fence. I thought I’d be able to pull myself under it in return for some of the skin on my back and arms. As far as dealing with the hover, that would require just one slight adjustment to the plan: I’d have to kill the pilot first.

Behind me, there was an explosion.

I whirled as the fireball shot upward, swelling and fading, heat and wind pushing against me. I didn’t know what had gone up—if it was one of Michaleen’s little surprises or just a fluke—but it was a sign. No one was looking at my dark little square of the world for the next few moments, and I thought, fuck, I didn’t want to die sitting in a dark hole, unnoticed. I was Avery Fucking Cates. If I was going to die, I wanted at least to tug a bit on Marin’s tail, let him know how I’d gone. Maybe drag him down with me.

I pushed at the dead feeling in my limbs, poking it, testing it. I knew I was just a piece of the machinery, a ball bearing in a machined trench, rolling exactly where the universe wanted me to go. I’d been on a rail, my whole life. I figured, what the hell: if the universe had me on a rail, then it didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do; I’d either die or live or burst into flames or grow wings—whatever the universe had waiting for me was going to happen, probably. So I was either immortal—if it wasn’t my time, nothing was going to kill me—or I was fucked. Might as well cause a little damage while I skittered down the trench, rolling along to some inevitable disaster. Either way I was never going to be free.

The thought got my heart pumping. Why not? I thought, and took a deep breath, diving for the fence, getting my fingers under its bottom edge. It was thick, stiff wire, and getting it up just a few inches was hard, arm-trembling work. I twisted around and pulled my torso through, suddenly desperate to get moving, to start doing something. Months spent drifting fell away, and I was frantic to get some momentum going. The sharp ends of the fence tearing up my stomach and legs, I pulled and wriggled under it and lay on the other side in cool, deep shadows. I lay for a moment, panting, looking up into the smoke-filled sky. I could see lights, the gem of a hover floating above us, and then there were several in the sky, and the distant hurricane of displacement made the cooling ground tremble beneath me. They were beautiful.

As I lay there, they spread apart, five or six of them heading for the yard and, sure enough, one right above me. Fucking Michaleen—whoever, whatever he was, he had good intel. He’d said he could prod the prison into a storm, and so he had. He’d said one hover would put down in the arrivals area, and so it was. Except for not foreseeing the Christian’s head exploding from a sniper’s bullet, he’d been spot-on so far.

For some reason the Christian made me feel better about Michaleen. It was good to know the fucking dwarf could make a mistake.

The hovers dropped like graceless rocks, making me brace for an impact, but then touched down as soft as dust, one after the other, weightless bricks. Mine hit the ground just a foot or two away from me, filling most of the fenced-in space. The drop bay was on the opposite side; I lay very still and listened to the familiar sound of Stormers being screamed out of their hovers. I waited for the universe to tilt the board and send me rolling again. The Stormers poured out of my hover in a brisk, orderly formation, so close they could have smelled me if they’d paid any attention. I watched the majority of them double-time it into the prison area proper, leaving three behind to guard the hover, plus the pilot, unseen inside his shell.

I wondered if these were humans or avatars.

I didn’t know how to kill an avatar. My hands curled up into fists, tight against my bleeding belly. I knew how to kill people, how to make it fast or slow, with their breath in my ear or from across a dark room. It was—had been—my profession. I even knew how to kill Monks —

I remembered someone saying the avatar tech was based on the Monks, a new generation. A refinement, not a new technology. I knew enough about tech to figure they wouldn’t reroute every bus, wouldn’t be able to overhaul the whole design. They’d simply replace the one thing in the Monk design they no longer needed: the brain. A headshot would probably be enough. Do enough damage to anything and it stopped working.

I was no Techie, but I didn’t have time to investigate. Taking a deep breath, I counted to five and slowly rolled out of my shadow.

Noise wasn’t a problem—another explosion made the ground vibrate beneath me as I rolled, and everything else was a formless swirl of noise, displacement and gunfire and shouts. I put myself under the hover in a fast, continuous roll. Stopping and starting was what drew eyes to you; with everything else moving around, the Stormers, even if they were avatars, would be more likely to ignore more motion than they would something that kept jerking to a halt and then moving again. Keep moving—the fucking story of my life. Under the hover, at the bottom of a pool of shadows, I stopped and closed my eyes, listening for any sign that the Stormers had noticed me.

Three, four heartbeats—nothing.

The pilot had to be first. Without our Snake to wriggle in through the redundant maintenance hatch, if the pilot sealed the hover, the big turrets mounted under its nose would pretty much spell the end of our little escape plan. I’d wriggled out of a hover not so long ago, during the Plague, but Ty Kieth had cleared out the hatch by then and gravity had done the rest. Forcing my way up, bum leg and all, sounded like the perfect way to get stuck like a cork and then shot in the ass. Even if it was what the universe wanted, I wasn’t going to shuffle off that way, shot in the fucking ass.

I opened my eyes and counted feet. Six in view, two sets in front with their backs to the hover, one by the drop-bay hatch. I considered human psychology as I knew it—and even if these were walking quantum hard drives they were based on human brains—and figured the Stormer by the drop bay would be a little less on edge, a little less worried; after all, they thought we were all shitheads. We’d all been rounded up and taken here in the first place, right? Soft. No guns. And even if we did manage to make a run on the hover, we’d be coming from inside the prison. He’d assume plenty of lead time.

I rolled as softly as I could to the side of the hover. The Stormer’s boots, shiny and pristine, were an inch or two from my face.

I palmed one of my blades and then lay there, motionless. No tendons to cut, if it was an avatar. For a moment I hesitated, and then I thought: What the hell. I’m on the rail. If my card got pulled, it got pulled, and there was probably no way to stop it. Sucking in a painful, chest-burning breath, I rolled out from under the hover into the open air, pushing myself to my feet just as a third explosion sent another fireball into the air. God bless the dwarf, I thought, and launched myself at the Stormer, knocking him backward into the drop bay and pushing my knife into his face as hard as I could.

There was a little blood—cool and fake, but convincing enough for a second, and then white coolant bubbled up, turning the whole mess pink. It shivered once beneath me and went still, and I lay on top of it, panting, leg aching, vaguely disappointed. I wanted gore. I wanted blood. Fucking avatars.

I held my breath, chest twitching, and listened.

Rolling off the Stormer, I stood up and palmed another of my blades and crept forward toward the cockpit as my eyes adjusted to the gloom of the drop bay. The pilot was still seated, busy working over a digital tablet, her small hands dancing through a series of complex gestures. I didn’t pause to contemplate or admire; I stepped steadily behind her and grabbed her helmet with one hand, jerking her head upward and stabbing up through her chin, hard, something brittle and completely inhuman snapping as I yanked upward with all my strength.

Then silence broken by the thin sound of me breathing through my clogged nose.

I turned and stepped back to the drop-bay hatch, hunching down to sit, with my legs dangling over the edge and the dead—if dead was the right term for an avatar—Stormer next to me. I relieved it of its sidearm—a piece-of-shit generic that felt too light and insubstantial in my hand, like it would peel open and take my hand with it if I ever dared fire it. Not long ago the System Pigs had had the best of everything, and that meant Roon automatics. If this was the shit they were issued now, it was no wonder they were fighting a sudden civil war.

I dropped to my feet awkwardly, my bad leg buckling a little under me, making me wave my arms around to get my balance. The noise rushed back around me, screaming and shouting, gunfire, a rhythmic, steady booming noise I couldn’t identify. The rhythm of it took over and I moved toward the two remaining Stormers using it, feeling ridiculous but not caring—it was the universe, the cosmos pulling my strings, and I was just a fucking puppet flopping my way toward two more murders, although I hadn’t decided if avatars counted as murder. Marin would just pump out four more bodies to replace these, built from spare parts or poured into molds or whatever. I crept forward until I was a foot or two away, the muzzle of my new gun just half an inch away from the back of one Stormer’s head. My hand, I noted without emotion, shook slightly.

Fast. I squeezed the trigger, felt the surprisingly light kick of the gun, swiveled precisely, and squeezed the trigger again, and both Stormers dropped one after the other.

It felt good to be back in the cut, rolling along. I turned and pocketed my gun, heading back for the hover. As I climbed up into it, I pushed the dead Stormer off onto the ground, then headed back for the cockpit. I just shifted the pilot to the other seat, sweat popping out on my brow, the air of the hover getting closer and hotter as I worked. Then I sat in the pilot’s seat and squinted through the windshield, listening as carefully as I could.

I closed my eyes. Why not? The universe was protecting me. I imagined Gleason next to me, her tiny body tucked easily into the copilot’s seat, saying something mean. Oh, Avery’s cold-blooded. Avery’s scary. Or, Avery can pull a trigger. Avery’s a fucking trained monkey. I smiled, thinking of her. She was safe now, at least.

I opened my eyes and was startled to see Michaleen, Marlena, and Grisha running for the hover, the skinny Russian hanging off Marlena, blood from a deep scalp wound covering his face. His glasses hung from his nose and one ear, bent and shattered, but the crazy bastard was smiling lazily, like something wonderful had just occurred to him.

I smacked my head against the low ceiling of the cockpit as I stood and made it to the open hatch as they arrived.

“Damn, son,” Michaleen said breathlessly, grinning the most natural smile I’d ever seen on his sharp, edged face. “You are pretty good dealing the cards, eh? Sure, sure.”

“Grisha here left them some surprises,” Marlena said, grinning.

“Where’s Bartlett?” I asked. Marlena pushed Grisha up at me like a sack of groceries, and Michaleen vaulted into the drop bay like a man of fifty, muttering under his breath.

“He’s back there being an asshole,” Marlena panted, taking my offered hand and pulling herself up. “And probably having his old badge shoved up his ass. The old woman he moons around got snatched up, taken down—under us, man; that’s where all this mystery shit happens. He said he had to go after her.”

I glanced at the cockpit, where Michaleen had disappeared. “You just left him?”

She was dragging Grisha toward the back wall where the safety netting was. “The cop? Uh, yeah, Avery. We left the cop. No one was stopping him from coming along.”

For a moment I just stood there, slightly hunched in the open hatch. I was calm—I had no worries. I was on the rail. “I’m gonna go extract them.”

“What?” Marlena was busy strapping Grisha in. Then she turned and glared at me. “Extract? Them? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I shrugged. “We all get out. The cop’s part of this,” I said easily. I hadn’t made any promises, but you didn’t just leave someone behind because it was convenient. I didn’t say anything about Salgado and our conversation. She’d told me not to worry about her, but I thought it might be good to snatch her back, if only to deny Marin whatever she had in her head. I studied Grisha, who’d gone unconscious. I jerked my head toward the cockpit. “Don’t let that fucking midget take off without us,” I said, giving her a little smile.

She was still hunched over the Russian, head twisted back toward me. She blinked and opened her mouth and then something took hold of my shoulder and pulled, hard, and I was sailing through the air. I landed on my ass, teeth clicking together on my tongue and filling my mouth with blood, pain shooting up my leg and directly into my brain.

My non-Crusher, the bearded one from the train Bartlett had taken out just a few days ago, stepped quickly toward me, snapping out its shithead-be-good stick with a smart twitch of its wrist. Grinning, it swung and cracked the club against my head, spinning me over backward, my skull smacking against the hard-packed ground.

With a sudden roar, the hover lurched up, an ugly liftoff that had it fishtailing, displacers whining unhappily. My non-Crusher grunted, stumbling as the displacement hit it. I stared up, head swimming, as the hover smoothed out and began rising into the hot, smoky air. Marlena’s head had appeared over the edge, staring down, her face a wide mask of surprise, one hand stretched out down toward me.

Then the hover shot upward, shrinking fast. The non-Crusher, fat face bristling with real-looking dark whiskers, appeared in its place. “Welcome back,” it hissed, and swung its arm down again.

XV

A MARKO ORIGINAL

I looked around, the silence so thick and dusty it almost sizzled. “No alarms?”

Krasa shook her head, her eye moving around the room in quick flashes. “No need. Our badge sigs won’t work anywhere, so no doors will open for us anyway. They know where we are.” She removed her badge, tossing it onto the floor without looking at it. It glowed there like a cold ember. “We’re trapped in here until the Worms show up.”

Marko had removed his badge as well and was holding it in front of him, staring at it.

“Guess you’ve been de-promoted,” I said. I twisted my hands and held them out in front of me. “Maybe we don’t need this anymore?”

Krasa glanced at me, her eyes distant. “What does it matter? You’re going to be scooped up with us.”

“Who is speaking?” Amblen whispered, his voice a hiss all around us. “Who is there? Dr. Marko?”

I twisted my wrists, bracing for pain out of old habit, and gave a sharp tug in opposite directions. I felt nothing, though, as one of my hands popped free. I let the bracelets drop to the floor. “We can’t just sit here,” I said, trying to stay calm and reasonable.

“We can’t just let them.” I’d come too far. I’d been through too much. I’d had too many people die on me. I’d killed too many.

“I need to be in my lab,” Amblen whispered.

I looked up at the ceiling, imagining Internal Affairs, fucking avatars, making their way to us, burrowing through the steel and rock of the building, spreading webs of wires apart to slide through, their eyes clouded and blind in the darkness. The Worms come to eat Krasa and do worse to me. An uneasy shiver of fear swept through me. If the cops were scared… shit, that didn’t leave much for the rest of us. “Where’s your lab?” I said to the air.

For a moment there was just the sizzle of that unnatural silence. Then Amblen’s voice: “Who is there? Dr. Marko?”

“Where’s your fucking lab, you dead shit, or I’ll tear you out of the wall and break your brick in half, okay?”

The sizzle again. Marko looked up at me sharply and blinked, his eyes coming back to life. Then Amblen again, sounding stronger, louder.

“You’re a rude person, whoever you are. Dr. Marko? Are you still here? I will not deal with this person.”

I opened my mouth, but Marko waved at me and stepped forward, looking around as if Amblen were in the air between us. “I’m here, Dr. Amblen. I apologize for my… assistant. He’s not very bright, and things he doesn’t understand anger him.” I raised an eyebrow at the Techie, and he flushed, turning his back to me. “We need to know where your lab is, Dr. Amblen, so we can take you there.”

I nodded to myself and decided to forgive Marko the insult. At least the kid was still working it. Walking over to Krasa, I waited until the last second and then flashed my arm up, intending to slap her across the face. Her arm came up fast and blocked me, and for a moment we stood there, our forearms touching, a few inches apart, her breath coming in short snorts through her nose, her golden eye catching the flat white light and blazing at me.

“Oh, are you awake again?” I said. “Sorry. For a moment there it looked like you were going to pull the fucking covers over your head and have a good fucking cry. They’re coming, right? You got, what, a minute? Two?”

She swallowed. “They will take their time,” she said. “What’s the rush?”

“You going to cry, Krasa?” I said.

Her nose flared. I wondered if that fucking eye of hers could beam out lasers or some shit—if there was any possibility, this would be the moment.

She blinked. “How?”

It was a clipped, businesslike syllable, and it gave me some hope. “Mr. Marko?” I said without looking away. “Any thoughts on escaping this building?”

“None whatsoever,” he said amiably. “We’re dead.”

I made fists. I wanted to hit him a little, knock the life back into him. “Well, let’s start small,” I said, pushing the words out. “Can you open the fucking door?”

“Sure,” he said. “Dr. Amblen? Where is your lab?”

A memory bubbled up suddenly—of course I knew where Amblen’s lab was. Everyone on the streets knew that or at least knew where it was rumored to be. “The Star,” I said. “It’s in the goddamn Star.”

“The Star,” Marko said under his breath. “Sure, of course.”

“You might call it that,” Amblen’s voice complained. “Street trash call it that, yes. We called it Liberty Island.”

Corny, I thought. “Marko, open the damn door,” I suggested. “Let’s get moving.”

“Sure, sure,” Marko muttered vaguely, looking like he was happy to just stand there and stare around, absorbing knowledge from the air or some such shit. I strode over to him and took hold of his jacket, yanking him off his feet like he weighed nothing and tossing him across the room toward the door. He spun awkwardly and danced a few steps, arms out, until he caught himself against the wall.

“Open the fucking door,” I suggested again. “Or I’ll beat the beard off you, okay?”

He stared at me and then surprised me by smiling. “Good to be working with you again, you psychopath,” he said and turned to examine the door, one hand disappearing into a side pocket, searching.

I nodded and turned toward the wall of sockets, taking the brick in my hand. “Dr. Amblen, I’m going to unplug you now.”

“Unplug? What the —”

I tore the cable from the wall, and his voice disappeared.

“Don’t do it that way,” Marko called from the door, sounding calm but irritated. “You could corrupt his data profile. Scramble him.”

I studied the brick. I couldn’t feel it, but I had a sense that it was warm. Made me think of someone’s brain inside it, like a compacted Monk, and I wanted to put it down and wash my hands. I slipped it into the pocket of my coat and looked at Krasa, scrubbing my hands against my shirt. “Weapons?”

She looked at me for a second and then nodded, kneeling down and extracting a nice-looking small automatic from her ankle holster and handing it over to me.

Krasa pulled her own auto. “I’m not going alive,” she said to it, eye moving up and down, admiring. “Let’s try, but if it comes to a decision, I’d rather be dead.”

“Speak for yourself, Officer. How do we get out?”

She started pacing, which I took as an encouraging sign. I felt nothing—no rush of adrenaline, no pounding heart, nothing. Prison had burned it all out of me.

“Got any allies?”

She snapped her hand up and waved it at me. “Fuck, allies. We’re all dead. Police. Everyone’s a goddamn robot now.”

I wasted a second or two staring at her. “I thought System Pigs were tough.” I pictured her handling me so easily on the street, calloused hands shutting me down the old-fashioned way. “How’d you become a cop?”

She was looking around as if dazed. “I scored well on a test,” she said, finally focusing on me. “When I was a kid.”

“There,” Marko hissed from across the room. The door sagged open, like it had gotten tired of holding itself shut. “Come on.”

Krasa fell into step next to me. “Drop your badges,” I suggested. “So they can’t trace us.”

“We’re tagged,” Krasa said, her voice firming up as we approached the door. “Subdermal chip. They can track us anywhere in the System.”

We stopped at the door. I wasn’t tagged. And I had Amblen in my pocket—I didn’t need two burned ex-SSF leading every fucking Worm in the world right to me. From this moment forward, I realized, my life would be incredibly simplified if I left Marko and Krasa behind. My finger moved to the trigger on the piece-of-shit auto, and then off—I’d made a deal, of sorts, with Krasa. I could walk away from her, give her fair warning, but to just clip her from behind was weak. Grimacing for myself, I took a deep breath.

“This is your building,” I said, my voice low as we listened to the foyer’s air. “I’m all ears.”

“Morgue,” Marko said immediately, peering through the crack of the open door. “Go out with the bodies. Dumped into transport every night and hovered over to incineration. Hover’s autopilot, all Droid.”

Fucking efficient. I turned back and retrieved Krasa’s badge from the floor.

“They’ll see our tags, asshole,” Krasa complained. “They’ll dig us out.”

“Where are the tags?” I asked.

She moved her eye to me. “Back, over the right shoulder. Deep. You can’t miss the scar,” she said in a low, steady voice, like she was filling up with herself again, slowly firming up. “Why?”

I ignored the question. “Marko, how do we get to the morgue?”

“Easy peasy. All roads in this building lead to the morgue.”

He said it flatly, without emotion, and I got the feeling it was a phrase he’d coined a long time ago, a Marko original. I wanted to twist his nose again.

“All right, get us there.”

We pushed into the little foyer and stood awkwardly while Marko, breathing heavily, worked on the outer door with a set of tiny, delicate-looking tools in one hands and a small, wallet-sized unit that buzzed loudly in the other. He touched the tip of a tool to the door, grunted, and then deftly switched tools in his hands and tried again. After about a minute, his grunt was immediately followed by the soft click of the door unlocking, and he quickly stuffed his little tools into his jacket pockets and pulled it open a crack. I wondered what would fall out of his pockets onto the floor if I was to grab him by the ankles and shake him.

Pushing the door all the way open, he motioned us after him back into the white, antiseptic hallway.

“Keep your coats closed,” I advised, handing the badge back to Krasa, who took it gingerly between two fingers. “Hide those badges. We still need them.”

“What are we doing?” Krasa hissed into my ear, her perfume surrounding me for a second. “They’re tracking us, you fucking street trash. Wherever we go, they’ll find us.”

A trio of cops approached, and I tensed up. They were young guys, wearing identical white shirts with their sleeves rolled up, their ties loose around their necks, black leather holsters jammed in their armpits. They looked like kids trying to be tough, but I’d been tuned up often enough by youngsters just like them, shiny red-faced fuckers with nothing but energy. They didn’t pay us any attention, sweeping past us without even a curt nod at Krasa.

“The Worms don’t bother putting out general alerts,” she whispered.

When we hit the first door, she gestured us through without hesitating—no way to reprogram every door in the building, I guessed. I was lost almost immediately in the white, unmarked halls, but Marko moved confidently, and after a few turns he gestured open a pair of large doors and waved us into a large, dark freight elevator.

I hesitated just a second—the cab smelled like blood, and the floor was… soft and sticky. I decided not to investigate too closely, keeping my eyes straight ahead. Marko stepped in after us and gestured; the doors slid shut, and the air turned a dull red from the weak light inside the cab.

We said nothing. Krasa and I checked our guns as best we could in the dim light and then held them ready. When the doors split open and that damned clean light flooded the cab again, I stepped forward quickly, pushing Marko out of the way and moving to the side in order to get clear of Krasa’s fire, my eyes adjusting to the harsh light immediately, instantly.

It was a large room, aggressively air-conditioned. I couldn’t feel the cold, but I could see Krasa’s breath steaming out of her as we both relaxed. There was a large bank of drawers across from us, each with an impressive chrome handle and a small Vid screen.

Between us and the drawers were piled body bags, shining wetly in the bare light. They were heaped haphazardly, with empty ones mixed in like rotted fruit.

“Anyone we need to actually keep track of, in the slots,” Marko said briskly, moving through the piles toward the opposite wall. “Everyone else just gets dumped in the middle. Our best bet is the bags—no ID on them, they just get dumped and shipped out.” I watched him bend down to pick up an empty bag and inspect it, wincing and jerking back as he got a good smell. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, and then looked up at me. I was amazed at how far Marko had come. He was almost a goddamn grown-up.

“Trip to the ovens is fifteen minutes, give or take; hover leaves every hour or so,” he said. “You got a plan beyond that?”

Every hour—I wondered how many corpses were being generated in The Rock every day. I nodded at Marko. “Chips and badges go into a bag, any bag,” I said. “Then we get into a bag, too. Sure, they’ll trace us here, they’ll find the fucking chips, they’ll know we were here.” I nodded to myself, jamming my gun into my pocket and slipping my blade into one hand. “But they’ll never think we stayed here. Human nature would be to put distance between those chips and ourselves.”

“You can’t be sure they won’t just search the whole room. Or that they won’t just put bullets into every bag,” Krasa said, staring at her gun.

I nodded. “Sure. You’ve got a ten-second window to suggest better options.” I waited, staring at her, and then nodded. “Then take your jackets off.” I examined the knife and its tattered, taped-up handle. “I can’t promise to be gentle.”

XVI

WONDER WHAT HE USES NEEDLES FOR

Someone was singing.

“Hänschen klein ging allein, in die weite Welt hinein,” a woman’s voice lilted softly, far away, coming to me through layers of pain and darkness. A breathy, girlish sort of voice. I thought of my mother for the first time in decades… I remembered little about her, but this voice, for some reason, brought her back to me. I remembered her fat arms, the fine hairs on them, reaching out for me. That was it. That was all I had.

After a moment I realized I was moving, gliding along.

“Stock und Hut steht ihm gut, er ist wohlgemut,” she continued, low and almost sexy, and then drifted into humming, sounding happy.

“You are awake,” she said suddenly. “You’ve been waiting for a long time. That is too bad for you.”

I opened my eyes. A shiny electrical conduit snaked above me, bolted into the rough cement. I turned my head and looked around, and as I did so sound rushed back to me, a sizzling silence broken only by the squeaking wheel of the gurney I was strapped onto.

By tilting my head backward a bit I brought her into view: An old woman, midforties maybe, blond hair unnaturally vivid and face unnaturally smooth and refreshed looking. She was wearing a simple suit of black fabric and a bright white lab coat. She glanced down at me and smiled, nodding once and looking back up.

“Why,” I asked, my throat burning, “is that bad for me?”

Her smile kinked up in the corners, becoming cruel. “The procedure is extremely invasive.”

I tested the straps and found them professionally applied, my arms pinned down so tightly I was pretty sure the circulation had been stopped. I remembered Marlena staring down at me and thought her face had been honestly horrified, honestly surprised as that cocksucker Michaleen took the hover up, leaving me to the dogs.

Leaving me to this.

I still wasn’t afraid. I imagined dying—just everything turning off, suddenly gone, and felt nothing. I didn’t worry about dying; I’d been coasting on fumes for so long I think somewhere in the shadowed parts of my brain I’d already decided I was dead, in a sense.

But I was angry.

The cocksucker had lied to me. About everything—about my father. I’d known—deep down I’d known all along, but I’d wanted it to be true, to have that connection. I was a fucking punk, but I was going to make Mickey eat it. I strained my arms against the straps; they didn’t even budge. I had work to do—it was going to be hell finding one small man buried in the shit of the System, especially with a fucking civil war going on, but if I could just get one arm free, I was going to break this woman’s neck and get started.

“Do not struggle, dear,” she murmured, not looking at me. “You’re quite secure.”

I believed her. Her face was round and plump, a well-fed face, with a ruddy complexion and a cheerful expression. The bitch was smiling as she pushed me toward processing.

“Who are you?” I asked. My voice came out thick and rusty, phlegm pooled in the back of my throat.

Her smile brightened, but she didn’t look down at me. Above her, the conduit streamed along, occasionally bending this way and that. “Now why does that matter, dear?”

I made my face into a smiling mask, even though she wasn’t looking at me. “I’m taking names for future reference, so I can kill everyone who touches me here.” After I find Michaleen, I thought.

She didn’t look impressed. If anything, her face brightened even more. “Oh, that’s charming, Mr. Cates. They told me you were a handful. I’m going to have fun with you!”

I relaxed my neck and stared up at the ceiling, testing my hands and legs again. I wondered if this was where the rail led to, if this was what the universe had in mind for me. Tilting my head forward as much as I could, I got a quick look at some swinging double doors just before we crashed through them, entering a large room, the ceiling suddenly jumping up another few feet. It was bright and cold; the walls were still the same rough concrete but lined with humming boxes of a dark, rough-looking metal, like something that had been fired until it scorched. Cables snaked along the ceiling, suspended by small clamps and wires, running from box to box. The hum immediately got into my bones and made me nervous, like it was vibrating my DNA.

“They’re coming in fast and furious,” a male voice said, out of my field of vision. “Assholes brought the hammer down on them, and there’s nothing for it but to stuff them down here and speed things up. Order is, process them as fast as we can and try to limit kills.”

“Fast as we can,” the woman sniffed, stepping away from me. “The problem with the world is that it is not run by scientists. If Director Marin wants things to go smoothly, he should do a better job of keeping the army away from this site. I can’t work properly if I’ve got to have my bags packed for an immediate evac all the time.”

“It’s a mess, all right,” the man agreed. There was a large, bright light above me, making me squint. “I hear they just took Vegas. Just carpet bombed the hover-port and went in, expecting street-by-street resistance, but Marin pulled out, ordering all SSF into the California Department for re-regrouping.”

“He got caught out,” the woman said with a sigh. “Digital memory storage and synapse replication doesn’t make you any smarter, does it?”

The man laughed but didn’t sound amused. “Be careful, Dr. Kerril. Director Marin has big ears.”

“Tut,” she said. “If he thinks he’s going to process millions of people without me, he’s mistaken. I think he knows that he needs me.” She sighed. “Well, let’s get moving. I’ve got another dozen already piled up in the waiting room. Word from the mountain is to just liquidate the whole population; the army’s too close and the riot’s compromised basic security here. It’s going to be a long night.”

“How close? I don’t relish ending up standing in front of Ruberto’s desk. I hear he’s issued a blanket death sentence to anyone arrested in the field. We might not even make it to his desk.”

There was a sudden, distant tremor, a dull booming noise, and I felt a soft vibration shiver through the whole room. Everything went quiet for a moment, and then three more tremors followed in quick succession. I felt a fine mist of dust spray down onto me.

“How close?” the man demanded again.

“Show some backbone and get to work.”

There were some metallic noises, like metal scraping against metal, and the humming in the air grew in volume, getting thicker. My heart was pounding, adrenaline swelling me, making the straps intolerable. My hat went off to whoever had designed and applied the straps—they were fucking world-class. I made a mental note to find out what the fuck they were made of and have a whole suit made from it.

I swiveled my eyes around, trying to catch a glimpse. “Hey, buddy,” I said, keeping my grin in place. “Hey, what’s your name?”

There was a pause without any noise at all, and I imagined them standing there making faces at each other.

“He’s making a list of people to kill,” she said, sounding amused.

“Well, fuck,” the man said. “In that case I’m not giving you my name.”

She laughed, a delightful, musical sound I immediately wanted to hear again. “His name is Dr. Clarence Hiram Kendall, Mr. Cates. Please do kill him if you ever have the chance. He’s very annoying.”

“You’re a cunt.”

“You’re a cunt, Clarence. Just prepare the cocktail for this waste of skin—just make up kits as fast as you can. I’ve got all fifteen labs humming and they’re still coming down.”

“Lovely.”

I heard her soft flat heels moving away from me, and then the soft sigh of the swinging doors. Moving my eyes and head about, I tried to catch a glimpse of my new friend, but I could only hear him puttering around, clinking things together and muttering something under his breath. I strained my arms until they hurt, grunting softly with effort, but there was no give at all, and I started to wonder if maybe this was where the rail terminated for me. All that bullshit, for this. I’d been wading through dead bodies for years for this. It made me angrier, and I strained against the straps until my whole body was rigid, sweat beading on my forehead.

“Stop that,” the man admonished from somewhere behind me. “You’ll just make it more painful for yourself.”

I relaxed, and he stepped into my field of vision. He was tall and thin, wearing the same white coat as Dr. Kerril. His eyes were pale and gray, and his hair was a very light brown or blond, making him almost colorless. He held in one hand the largest fucking needle I’d ever seen in my life, and without thinking, I froze.

“Thank you,” he said, and without any further hesitation, he plunged the needle into my arm with a professional speed and accuracy I had to admire. I stiffened and then melted, a warm, dreamy syrup seeping into me, soothing my aching bones and slowing everything down. My leg drifted away, somebody else’s problem—I could still feel it, throbbing, but it was like I was hooked to it via wires while it lay a few blocks away. I was aware of the pain on an academic level.

“Okay,” Dr. Kendall said cheerily, tossing the autohypo onto a workbench. The whole room shuddered again, the booming noise louder this time, and a few things crashed to the floor. Kendall stared around, alarmed.

“Well, fuck,” he muttered, spinning and snatching things from the nearest bench. “Better get a move on, eh?”

I nodded. Fine by me. Everything was suddenly fine by me, even the large cordless drill he had in his hand when he turned from the bench. He gunned it once, the small roar revving up into a whine and then going silent, and nodded, stepping out of my field of vision. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I was memorizing names, on the off chance the rail wasn’t ending here, in this underground lab. I wanted to be ready.

“All right, Mr. Cates, I’m going to start drilling. You won’t feel anything, of course. Normally this part would be automated, but the robot labs are all in use. Lots of volume, you know. I’m going to strap your head down now.”

His head appeared upside down as he tugged a strap over my forehead and snapped it into place, holding me pretty motionless. He lingered, staring down at me. “Think of it this way,” he said, sounding kind. “You’re going to live forever. Maybe.”

“I know your name, asshole,” I said, my mouth thick and my words stretched out. “You better fucking hope I don’t live forever.” This seemed funny, so I started to laugh.

He squinted his eyes at me and then disappeared, and a moment later I heard the drill again. Another second, and there was a weird vibration in my head, my teeth, what was left of them, dancing in my mouth. Another deep rumble rolled over us, and everything on the nearby workbench jumped as dust sifted into my eyes, making me blink madly.

“Ah, dammit,” Kendall muttered. “Where’s the damn cops? The army’s here, that’s obvious. I don’t take sides. I’m a scientist. I was hired to do a job, that’s all. Fuck, this is taking forever. There.”

The vibration stopped. I noticed a red light flashing over in one corner of the ceiling, steady and ponderous.

“All right, threading… looks good. You’re a bleeder, Mr. Cates. I would have thought in your profession you’d have evolved better platelet response. Okay, first feed going in.”

Nothing alarmed me. The lights flickered and more deep explosions rippled the dusty air, but I just smiled, my head and limbs held firmly in place. The army was coming. I wondered what that would be like.

“Second feed.”

A rolling rumble of explosions shuddered above us, steady, unending. We were pretty far underground, I thought, lazily judging the timbre and tone of the noise. I realized I could smell blood, my blood, tangy and familiar.

“Third feed,” Kendall whispered, breathing heavily. “There. Okay, running protocols… done, looks clear. Traffic is heavy, but it looks like I’ve got good contact. Okay. Needles… needles…”

Needles, I thought. Wonder what he uses needles for?

A split-second image flashed through my thoughts, puncturing the warm, boozy feeling of serenity I’d been surfing on. My heart lurched in my chest, and I strained every tortured muscle against the straps, tendons creaking. Another explosion pushed some cracks into the ceiling, small chunks of rock hitting me in the face.

“Fuck me,” Kendall muttered in my ear.

The lights flickered, there was a sudden hum of something powering up, and then voices, distant and rushing toward me, a searing invisible knife in my head. The voices were in my head, silent, whispering, a dense knot of words, impossible to pick apart. I felt the table jump under me, a series of loud explosions. One voice resolved for a moment, elderly and amused.

In death, she said in my head, all things are possible.

XVII

FLAMES WHERE THEIR EYES SHOULD HAVE BEEN

The bag smelled like rotted flesh.

After ditching Krasa and Marko’s badges and chips in a few randomly selected body bags and drawers, we climbed into our own personal slice of death and let ourselves drop into the pile, wrapped up in pitch darkness and the oozing cold sweat of previous occupants. The silence was perfect, airtight and greasy.

Belatedly, I thought, Well, shit, if they do a heat scan we’re fucked. And then, even more belatedly, I thought, Maybe we should have just ditched the chips and badges somewhere else, far away from us. Laughter threatened to bubble up out of me, but I reminded myself that Marko’s big brain hadn’t considered that either, or offered any better ideas, and managed to get angry enough to stay sober.

We hadn’t discussed anything beyond getting in the bags, but none of us said anything, and my world became static.

I counted seconds.

Waiting, again. I’d gotten better at it, impatience burned out of me. Sleep wasn’t an option—you never knew what you might say or do while asleep, and a noise at the wrong time would be disaster. So it was the waiting game, the Gunner’s special hell.

I’d gotten better at the physical aspects of it; I didn’t have the aches and pains and jitters I used to—prison’s little gift to me. I knew I could lie in my little pond of pitch-blackness, completely still and quiet, for hours. I had Canny Orel, the legendary Gunner, finally beat—and maybe that’s all it took, a little judicious aging. Some key brain cells removed, and you could just sit in the fucking dark dreaming of the yen you were earning all goddamn night.

They came after an eternity, Marin’s Internal Affairs, creeping, the soft sound of rubber soles squeaking on the polished floor. Four or five avatars, Droids with digitized human intellects, soft-shoeing around us, heavily armed and so damned silent. They found the chips and badges easily and immediately began making noise as they assumed we’d ditched the trackers and gotten as far away as possible—a natural assumption of human nature. They sounded so human—so normal, making jokes and muttering about what a pain in their ass Krasa had turned out to be, calling her a useless bitch and wondering if she was worth even “processing.” The Worms stood around for a long time shooting the shit, occasionally poking a swelling bag or popping open a squealing drawer as they made a show of keeping up the search; all while I lay there breathless, clenching my fists, teeth bared to the darkness. I tried to will Marko to stay quiet.

And then, just when I’d bought the whole aw-shucks-we-give-up routine, the deafening report of a good automatic pistol smothered the oxygen in the room. Two squeaky steps, and then another shot.

I listened to the dead air that collapsed around me. More squealing steps; I imagined thick, black soles, steel-tipped shoes, perfect for kicking people until bloody snot spouted from their heads or for fieldwork, stepping through the rubble of downtown or the wastelands of Jersey without getting your feet wet. I saw them replaced every fucking week—fifty thousand yen a week—unwrapped in the morning, gleaming and perfect, the old ones, scuffed and stained from bone and blood, tossed into the burner without a second thought.

Another shot, right next to me, a fucking bomb going off. My ear didn’t ring or go muffled, and I managed to keep still and not react. A moment later one of them stepped on my leg, putting all his goddamn weight on it. I bit down on my tongue from habit and kept still as the bastard tattooed his tread into my skin; I didn’t feel a thing, but the pressure was intense, and I imagined the bastard leaning down to point his gun at my head, his plastic face smirking.

My hands twitched. I shut my eyes and imagined the bullet, splitting skin, cauterizing as it went, shattering bone, and shredding my brain. I lay there forever, face set in a permanent wince, and all I got in return for my efforts was another few squeaks of their shoes.

“Fuck it,” a man’s voice spat, glass being ground in mud. “They ditched and ran. Fucking cunts.”

I memorized the voice. It wasn’t hard. I just pictured a volcano vomiting up nicotine-tinged phlegm, and it came back to me immediately.

“Boss isn’t going to like it,” a milder, almost human voice responded.

“Boss doesn’t like anything these days. Fuck it. They’re in the building. Tear it up.”

After a brief pause, the second voice said, “You heard the man. Tear this shit up.”

Footsteps then, the door popping open and then closed. I listened carefully, trying to decide if they’d all left—how many? Three? Four? Could have been a fucking dance team standing around with their mouths shut.

The silence felt like heavy gas pumped into the room, settling down on me, pushing the slick walls of my tiny prison against me. I knew what was supposed to happen—within the hour Droids would gather up the bags, and we’d be loaded onto a hover, which would take us crosstown to the incinerators on the East River. Knowing didn’t help me stay still and quiet.

I started to picture myself in a field, my usual trick, forcing all thoughts outside the glass surface of my mental bubble. Just as I was succeeding, the image firming up in my mind, I felt a distant but heavy rumble tremble through the floor. It faded fast, and then I lay there trying to analyze it, wondering what in hell had caused that.

Just as I started to relax, it was followed by another. It felt like the whole building was shaking slightly.

“What the fuck,” I heard Marko whisper, “was that?”

I bit my lip. Responding would be stupid—the idea was less talking and noise.

“Any ideas?” he pleaded.

“Shut up,” I whispered.

“That doesn’t worry you?” he hissed back. “That doesn’t concern you?”

“Fucking hell. Zeke, if you say one more goddamn word, I will crawl over there and cut your tongue out, understood? Say absolutely fucking nothing if you understand.”

Since I hadn’t been shot in the head, however, I had to conclude no one was waiting in the room. Marko stayed quiet for about thirty seconds. I could feel him struggling with his own massive stupidity like a boulder that had rolled on top of him, smothering.

“That is not normal, is all I’m saying,” he stage-whispered.

I prayed for strength, but before I could make my own mistakes, the door popped again, a buzzing alarm announcing the arrival of the cleanup Droids. The next five minutes was noise: clangings and whirrings and the incessant alarm that crawled under my skin and bit at my nerves directly. I imagined my grassy field again, managing to stay still and calm until I was suddenly shoved, knocked roughly into a short roll and then shoved again and again, teeth-chattering impacts that changed momentum every second, smacking me against the floor, the other bodies, and something unpleasantly hard.

I had a sensation of falling, and just as I wondered if maybe I’d killed us all, a terrible sour spike pushing into my belly and curdling me, gravity smacked me into something that tolled momentarily with a metallic, bell-like noise. I slid a few inches and came to a rest, but before I could appreciate the sliver of peace, someone fell on top of me. And then someone else, a rainfall of bloating, dead bodies in bags, burying me. The weight, the pressure built and built in the darkness, pressing me down into the unyielding darkness. I ground my teeth and made fists, but it grew heavier and heavier, bodies pushing down on top of me. I opened my mouth to scream and the bag was pushed into it, the germy slick material and the cold metal zipper.

A shiver stuttered through me. I tried to kick and swing my arms, but I was pinned in like a brick mortared into place. Suddenly I was back in the coffin, being transported into the Abbey in London when we’d gone after Squalor, 90 fucking percent dead and pain flowing through me, burning every thought into ash. Panic took over, swelling in me like a balloon that filled every limb and pushed them into strained rigidity. I pushed with everything I had, with my arms and legs, and slowly managed to make some room, just an inch or two of inky space, all for me. With gagging effort I pushed the rubbery material out of my mouth, working my jaw and tongue until they ached.

I had the sensation of movement as a steady buzz vibrated against me. I imagined we were being loaded into the transport hover to our fiery fate, a split second of heat and then who the fuck knew—but I was in no rush to find out. Maybe everyone I’d ever killed, waiting for me. Maybe everyone I’d ever failed, waiting for me. That was worse. I saw them all. Waiting for me, flames where their eyes should have been.

Trembling, I moved one arm up, inch by inch, and took hold of the zipper. As I slid it downward, the body on top of me sagged to fill the sliver of space I’d created, and I had to reset my back against the floor of whatever I was in and push upward again.

“Krajian!” I hissed. I’d meant to shout. “Marko!” My voice sounded like I’d already been buried.

I didn’t hear anything for a moment, and then there was the roar of displacement springing full formed all around me, the sickening lurch of being snatched from gravity.

“Krajian!”

I struggled, weak without any leverage, trying to at least bend myself into a shape where I could get my legs under me. A sudden roar of noise—an explosion, not far away—compressed everything inside the hover for a second, and I could tell we’d been jogged off course, spinning a few times before the displacers, whining with that familiar rusty noise, compensated and brought us back into the slot. Just as I got my bearings again, two more blasts, louder than the first, and we were spinning again.

“Fucking hell,” I shouted, managing to get one of my legs under me. I surged upward and met the sticky, combined weight of all those bags, giving me inches and then solidifying. I growled deep in my chest, pushing up and up and up—and then things were shifting, getting easier.

“Cates,” I heard Krasa shout. “Hold on.”

Hold on, I thought. A System Pig was telling me to fucking hold on.

Her hand appeared, thrust toward me from between bags, and I snatched it without hesitation, without embarrassment. She hauled me up, and I pushed, and with a sudden slippery, sucking expulsion I lurched free, stumbling into her, getting a noseful of her again, clean and simple with a sour undercurrent of fucking terror, maybe an almondy tinge of anger. She steadied me with both hands on my shoulders just as another goddamn explosion went off nearby in the air, and gravity did some flips for a second or two as the displacers hit a white noise level of sound, disappearing above the range I could hear.

“You okay?” she shouted with everything she had, sounding like she was whispering a mile away.

“Did you just ask me if I was okay?” I shouted back. “What the fuck are those explosions?”

“What?”

“Those are class-C Disruption Shells,” Marko shouted, sounding far away. I turned to find him leaning in, an inch from my ear, surfing with his feet on two shifting body bags and hanging onto a safety strap descending from the ceiling of the cabin. His hair was damp from sweat and plastered against his head, revealing that he actually didn’t have that much hair: his fucking head was freakishly huge. I stared at him as he continued. “Standard suppression procedure. Next come the big boys.” He nodded, raising his eyebrows. “F-90s, field-contained armaments.”

I looked back at Krasa, using her roughly to keep my balance. “Well, fuck,” I yelled, putting everything I had into it. “Who the fuck’s bombing us?”

She frowned. “Your people!” she shouted back. “The army! The goddamn SFNA is knocking on the door!” I just stared at her and she rolled her eyes as we both almost ate some body bag, the hover rolling beneath us. “The siege! They’re making a play for the city!”

“Well, shit,” I shouted, looking back at Marko. “Not our problem, then—Zeke, you can get control of this heap?”

He nodded. “It’s a simple shell running the show.”

“Hit the stick,” I howled. He nodded and turned away, but I lunged for him and caught his sleeve, lurching into him.

“Don’t crash!” I shouted, grinning. “Or I will slit your fucking throat!”

I felt wonderful. Better than I’d ever felt before. Marko sailed off, slamming into the wall before recovering his footing and lurching away, and I thought it would actually feel good to kill someone.

Ooh, Avery’s crossed over, I heard Glee whispering in my ear. For a second I thought I could smell her again, feel her in the cabin. Avery’s not even human anymore.

XVIII

I’D BEEN DIGESTED A LITTLE

It sounded like I was at a party. The flurry of voices overlapped each other, tripping on each syllable and blending together into a buzzing sludge of verbiage that made my head pound painfully. My whole body ached as if I’d been stepped on by a giant, crushing bones and grinding my joints into powder.

Somewhere in the distance there was a grinding, screeching noise, the most horrible noise I’d ever heard in my life.

It advised against opening my eyes.

Every now and then a voice would float up near the surface and break out nice and clear. At first I tried to follow them, make sense of them, but nothing connected; no one seemed to be replying to anyone else, so I gave it up. I remembered the terrible pressure in my head as that jackass doctor had begun processing me, and then —

I froze, jerking upright and then collapsing forward as my whole body cramped in protest, pain rippling up from my legs and slamming into my head, where it laid down thick roots, strangling me. I slumped there for a moment, panting.

I can hear you, goddammit; I know you’re there

… in a stall just off Taitou Alley, second from the left, ask for Shen…

I don’t understand, I just don’t understand

… fifty to you, but if we don’t tell Gerry about it, it’s seventy to you, follow?

… it deepens like a coastal…

They weren’t voices. They were voices, but inside me, in my head. Dozens, maybe more, men and women, kids and geezers, all just shouting constantly. I reached up and put my hands on my aching head, finding it sticky—blood, I thought, recalling something about needles. The swelling balloon of acid embedded in my skull was nearing critical mass, jiggling nauseatingly with every silent bellow from the crowd inside me. Was that what they’d done to me? Sliced my head open, inserted a sac of poison, sewn me back up rough and jagged to wait for the inevitable bursting? It was pushing my eyes out of my head, choking me.

I opened my eyes. The shouting went on.

I’ve never seen one, but I’ve seen clips on the Vids about them

… fucking Pigs fucking fucking Pigs

… the Little Prince’s security wasn’t worth whatever he was paying them

I was still in the lab, still sitting on the slab, but I’d been pushed forward in time—my restraints were torn from the slab, equipment lay smashed on the floor amid a few dead Crushers, men and women in an unfamiliar uniform, and the extremely dead Dr. Kendall (distributed liberally around the room), and the walls were scorched in several places. The smell of gunpowder and blood hung in the air, and I became aware of a slight vibration, irregular and faint, slithering up from the floor into the slab beneath me. Working to ignore the voices, I could hear gunshots and shouts somewhere not too far off.

I touched my head again. I’d been hooked up to the brain-sucking machine, but I was still here. Felt like I’d been digested a little, but still alive—whatever had happened here, it had interrupted my processing before they could take an imprint of me. I swung my legs over the edge of the slab and studied the carnage, bodies cut in pieces, hunks of meat, pools of blood everywhere—shredders, I concluded, and not used with much skill. It was amazing that I hadn’t been cut to pieces by accident, and not amazing at all that I’d been left for dead. Between being hooked up to Dick Marin’s Magical Brain-Sucking Machine and sleeping through a firefight, I’d have left me for dead, too.

… sixteen at twenty-two, thirteen at fifty-one

… his blood was hot, hotter than I would have imagined

Slowly, feeling every inch, I knelt down, blood soaking into my jumpsuit, and leaned in to get a look at the off-white uniform half the bodies in the room were encased in. It wasn’t SSF or ObFu; it was a tough, strangely tacky material that held whatever shape I pinched it into for a few seconds, then slowly resolving into its original composition. With a grunt I flipped a torso over. Over the right breast was a logo that resembled the SSF globe and stars; instead of stars the globe was surrounded by arrowheads, and instead of ssf the initials sfna were knocked out in the middle of the globe.

… System of Federated Nations Army, jackass

I blinked. I listened to the voices for a second, sifting the continuous stream, but that particular voice—young and snarling, angry and rough—didn’t repeat. I suddenly felt watched. As I reached back down to feel the uniform again, the shooting outside suddenly grew louder, underscored by a ripple of small explosions that made everything in the lab jump.

Head pounding, voices screaming, I looked around quickly. Whatever was going on here at the prison, it wasn’t over. Being left for dead could turn into being very, very much actually dead if I was seen staggering around, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, dried blood streaked down my face. Spinning, I dragged my gritty eyes around the lab, spotting a more or less whole Crusher lying on the floor. I limped over, scabby hands tearing at the jumpsuit and peeling it from me like a second skin, the dirty, crusty material coming off me reluctantly. My body was purplish and striped with grime; several of my flesh wounds were obviously infected, and suddenly the aching in my head spread throughout my whole body, sinking into my bones like bright, cold blue veins.

Naked, I shivered and knelt down over the Crusher. I tugged its uniform off, revealing a deep, ragged belly wound out of which a nest of red wires and thick white liquid leaked. I was naked with a mixture of blood and fucking coolant puddled around my feet, taking another man’s pants off. It wasn’t how I’d always pictured I’d go.

I’m so sorry, whatever I did, I don’t deserve this

… accident don’t happen, motherfucker—I got your number, and I’m gonna pull it someday

… it was like six inches long and smelled like a fucking zoo full of animals had died the week before during a heat wave

… Avery, getting shot naked is the least of your worries.

I paused for a second, a sharp spike of pain throbbing behind one eye. Another voice, boiling up from the mess of noise in my head, had seemed familiar. Like I knew it.

You know me.

“Fucking hell!” I shouted, pushing and scampering back to crash into a loose gurney, which went sailing off gracefully. I rubbed my hands into my eyes, hard, making them ache even more as lights flashed inside my head. What revised hell was this shit? I opened my eyes, expecting blood to be dripping from them onto the floor.

I waited, panting, but the voice didn’t rise above again. The noise outside the lab was getting louder, so I forced myself to uncurl and crawl back to the half-naked Crusher. With stiff hands I pulled its uniform off and pulled it on—too big, ridiculous, but I cinched it on me as best I could and tied its boots onto me tightly, my own mysteriously missing. As I stood with some loud popping noises, my head swam as I searched the mess for weapons—six or seven shredders just dropped on the floor. I went through them fast, tossing aside the first three for being gummy with blood and gore. The last was in pretty good shape, with half a clip left. Ten seconds, tops, of ammunition. I stole four clips from the others lying around and did a quick inspection; if the fucking thing didn’t jam on a chunk of some dead asshole when I squeezed the trigger, I might kill a few bastards with it.

Skin itching under the damp, reeking uniform, I limped purposefully for the swinging doors. Anything would be better than waiting for the flood in a room without cover or exits. Holding the shredder in front of me, I considered sending a burst through the doors to cut down anyone standing on the other side, but rejected the idea. It didn’t feel right to kill people before you even saw them, without giving them a chance to form a fucking opinion about it. I stopped and spun around, transferring the heavy weight of the shredder to one arm as I grabbed hold of the gurney. With a grunt and a massive twinge of pain that burned all the way down my back, I sent it rocketing through the doors, snapping them open for a second, revealing the dark concrete hallway and a single Crusher staring at me as the gurney crashed into him, sending him sprawling.

As the doors flapped shut I saw the Crusher’s face: I’d seen it before. Pasty, with a long chin, covered in a thin smear of peppery hair. I rushed forward, unsteady on my stiff leg, and kicked the doors open again, staggering into the hall.

… his name’s Guy he’s a fucking punk

… just a dose. I’m sick I’m telling ya

… je veux juste qu’il tout finisse je veux finir

“You,” I hissed, keeping the shredder in front of me as I stalked down the empty hall toward him. He was getting to his feet, mouth open, eyes wide, the uniform hanging off him as if he’d shrunk five inches in the last hour. The noise of a fight was louder, screams, the heated whine of shredders, bone-rattling detonations that spiked up from the floor into my boots. “I know you.”

A smile flinched onto his face. His eyes danced away from me and kept moving from spot to spot. He gestured at his chest. “Great minds think alike.”

“This,” I said as I got close, jamming the shredder into his belly, “is a Roon Corporation ten-oh-nine model gas-powered explosive shell rifle, commonly known as a Shredding rifle. It will cut you in half so fast you will be alive for a few seconds to marvel at your legs standing there with nothing on top.” He danced back a little awkwardly, letting out a kittenish yip of terror. “Now, I said, I fucking know you.”

His hands flew up, palms out, held up near his shoulders. “I’m Guy Rusbridge,” he panted, eyes dancing from the shredder to my face to the floor, over and over again. “Mickey… I met you….”

I paused, memory flaring, and raised the shredder a few inches. “Right.” I squinted at him, listening to the approaching noise of combat. I felt a strange lack of urgency, as if I had forever to figure all this out. I brought the shredder back up halfway. “What do you know about that fucking midget?”

“Nothing!” he squeaked, shutting his eyes. They continued to move under their lids, jumping around like he could see through them. “He just called me names and made me stand in line for people.” He deflated a little, shrinking before my eyes. “I woke up down here, on a slab. I thought…” He touched the uniform again and opened his eyes again. “Then I didn’t know what to do next.”

I stared at him, and his face turned even whiter. “The only thing… once or twice he said something… muttered something about Europe.” He sank down onto the floor without any hesitation or concern about me. I lowered the shredder as he sat down, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “Mostly he ignored me. When he didn’t ignore me, he insulted me.” He snorted suddenly. “Which pretty much made him my best friend in this terrible place, you know? Because at least he didn’t try to break my ribs every few minutes.”

I stared down at him. He was skinny and short and looked even smaller swimming in the oversized Crusher uniform. His fingernails were bloodied and torn, and he hadn’t looked me in the eye once.

He looked up at me suddenly, aiming for my chin. “Listen, I still have resources, if I could get out of here. I have access to a lot of yen. And a way off the continent, maybe, if we get that far.” He stopped just as suddenly and looked back down at his feet, the sudden flare of hope and energy fading away before my eyes.

“All right,” I said, raising my voice over the steady shriek of shredder fire somewhere nearby. “C’mon, let’s go.”

I pushed him behind me. “Stay back, and if I tell you to do something, do it. Except not in a suicidal way, okay?”

“Should I get a gun?”

… I got two crates of factory-fresh Roon two-two-threes, last batch out of the old Minsk factory

… fucking hell, the food

… she’d had her legs lengthened by that sawbones in Helsinki; she was fucking hot

I shook my head, trying to clear it, as a vision of my limbs flying through the air passed before me. “Just stay behind me.”

I limped up the hallway. Glancing up I could see the snaking conduit I’d followed before. I didn’t remember where it led, but since there weren’t any other doors it didn’t matter—if we were getting out, this was the way. Creeping forward, I stayed near the wall and listened as intently as I could, trying to form a rough count of guns in front of us.

Avery.

I stumbled and avoided blowing my own feet off with some difficulty. I recognized the voice—I was sure I did. An elderly voice, a woman’s voice. And she’d said my name.

You know me, you silly man. Now, listen. Pay attention: I was conscious when they brought me down, I may be able to help. It’s difficult to get through the crush here, so concentrate on me.

I paused just before the hall curved sharply to the right, holding up my hand in the hope Guy wouldn’t crash into me. I closed my eyes, and the voices swelled and pulsed inside me. Taking a deep, painful breath, I concentrated and thought: Hello, Salgado.

XIX

I DON’T HAVE A SCREEN TO REPRESENT PAINFUL DEATH

“There it is,” Krasa said, sounding flat and exhausted. “The Star.”

We were almost directly above it, the screens showing us a nice, crisp image of the potato-shaped island obscured by a haze of gray-black smoke. The Star was on the fat end, a squat lump of gray stone with a small pyramid on top that ended abruptly in a jagged heap of rubble. Outlined in foam was the immense thing that used to sit on the pyramid, torn off its foundation long before I’d been born. I didn’t know what it had been. Maybe someone did. For as long as I remembered, The Star had been a fortress of sorts—not a particularly hard one to storm, maybe, but effective in its way. Techies had been using it as a data haven for decades now, illicit labs and servers buried deep within it, and while the SSF probably could have taken it down at any time with enough manpower and effort, they’d left it alone. Too much trouble, I guessed. And the Techies always had everything rigged to blank and blow at a second’s notice, sometimes even linked to their own vital signs.

And maybe, I thought, someone up on high didn’t mind having an unmonitored data haven, either.

Another concussion just a few hundred feet from us sent the hover wobbling again. I was getting used to it, keeping my balance pretty easily, while Krasa went sailing. Krasa looked like she was unraveling, physically and mentally, with one wide, freaked eye and hair everywhere. On the other side of us a sudden roar of high-speed displacement hit our ears a few seconds after three rusty-looking SSF bricks went stuttering past, pushed to their speed limits.

No one said anything. We’d run out of amazement. Someone on Ruberto’s side had decided to quit waiting around for the System Cops to finish their program of turning everyone on the force into an untiring avatar, and they were making a real push into New York. The new army had been camped out for months all over the System, outside cities, outside strong points, just sitting there cupping their balls and glaring. I’d expected them to just sit there forever, playing games. Like sending me to try the impossible, assassinating Dick Marin, like I was Canny Orel, some legend who killed world leaders by thinking about it.

Marko had wired up one of the unlicensed Vids beaming from the Appalachians, audio only into an earbud.

“Moscow, too,” he said abruptly. “Going after SSF Internal Affairs HQ—where the main Prime is. The SSFA has a fucking tank model!”

Marko was a true geek. He sounded like he was about to stain his pants from excitement.

“Shit, sounds like the snow is fucking them up, though. Fucking trillions in yen, I bet, and they’re all sliding around outside Moscow. Fucked. Wait… Utrecht is down, in army hands—wait, almost. Street-to-street fighting, the tanks are making a difference there. Tanks! I didn’t know they were developing tanks. Model GH-901.”

“Eye on the stick, Zeke,” I said. “Remember what I said about crashing.”

“Right.”

We started descending through a floating minefield, bombs going off in the air around us. Marko called them field contained—the concussion contained in a small area by a powerful, transient force field, concentrating all their power on a small area. The army was pouring them into the air, trying to knock out the SSF hovers, and we’d been lucky so far. Dropping five hundred feet through it didn’t sound like a good idea, but I wasn’t planning to swim out to the island.

At least the System Pigs would have more on their plate than Krajian and Marko. If we survived the drop, we might have some breathing room while Amblen’s ghost gave us the grand tour.

We started to fall as a volley of bombs detonated around us, the hover shuddering and vibrating. A sickening feeling formed in my stomach like a ball of yellowed ice. Marko didn’t move or react; his hands moved in a slow-motion series of complex gestures, eyes fixed on the screens. He continued to relay reports from his earbud as he worked, the hover shaking so hard the displays sizzled with static, blinking on and off.

“The Australian Department’s all clear,” he shouted. “The army doesn’t have much presence there. The Japanese Department’s also pretty much being left alone. The Balkans is going badly for the army; we’re entrenched there and they haven’t gotten any traction. Surprise all around—no one saw this coming. We all figured it was going to be years of stalemate.” He smiled again. “Fucking tanks.”

I left Marko alone with his Techie love for gadgets—even big, skull-crushing gadgets with huge guns mounted on them—while he piloted the hover down. I’d been in enough crashed hovers to never want to duplicate the experience. A trio of SSF bricks buzzed us so close I thought they might peel the metal skin off us, but Marko just kept waving his hands dreamily, and we kept sinking slowly down toward the overgrown little island.

I glanced at Krasa. She was just staring, hanging onto a safety strap limply. I spent a moment considering ways of snapping her out of it, but gave up on that. I wondered how you went from kicking my ass on the street like a pro to having that empty, hollow look on your face, all because your fucking badge turned red. I would never understand cops. They were aliens.

When we dropped under a hundred feet up, everything calmed and stabilized. The noise of explosions and whining displacement was still everywhere, but we weren’t being tossed about like a piece of trash floating on the blackened Hudson River anymore. The last few feet were textbook, smooth and professional. For a second we were all silent, and then Marko glanced around.

“Well, according to scans the power’s off,” he said. “Which the Vids are reporting throughout the city. So looks like we’re going to have to bust our way in.”

“Uh-huh,” I said absently, leaning forward to study the screens. “Unless you can cocktail up some explosives made from dead bodies, Zeke, I’m not sure how we’ll do that.”

He nodded. “Officer Krajian, the SSF has had a Red Code for The Star for years now, hasn’t it?”

For a second she didn’t say anything, and then suddenly snapped around. “What? Yes, of course. We have Red Codes for every major building in the city. In the System.” She shook herself and looked at me. “But I don’t have access anymore. Neither do you.”

“Sure, sure,” Marko said, nodding, hands moving delicately. “That slows us down, sure.”

I raised an eyebrow a precise amount. “Red Code?”

She nodded, seeming to come back to herself as she spoke. “An infiltration strategy in case of takeover. We need to get into a building that’s being held against us, maybe even with some serious force—we have a file of plans to do that. It includes architectural drawings, weak point analyses, and any other usable information. Override codes sometimes for the building shells. If nothing else, it would show us the weak spots we might be able to exploit. But it doesn’t matter, as our access has been revoked.”

As she said this last she deflated again.

“Okay,” Marko said, flipping a hand in the air rapidly. “Call me fucking paranoid, but I’ve had a couple of fake log-ins set up for years just in case. Can’t do much, but the SSF thinks in terms of actions, not data preservation, so grabbing a Red Code file is… actually… pretty easy.”

With a brisk snapping motion, he nodded and stopped gesturing. Krasa and I both stared at him silently until he looked up at us and blinked.

“Uh, give it a minute. That’s a lot of data.”

Outside, the bombing went on and on, each individual explosion blurring into the next. I imagined shrapnel raining down on New York, people already half-starved and worn down by siege running for their lives and probably not finding much shelter.

“Okay,” Marko said, leaning forward and moving his hands. On one screen in front of him a half-dozen smaller boxes popped up. Before I could make out what any of them were, he was waving his hand elegantly, and the little boxes shimmered, replaced by a new set, which he wiped off the screen just as quickly. He flipped rapidly through dozens of screens, too fast for me to follow, eyes dancing, grunting softly with each transition. I wanted to smack him on the back of his head and make his teeth rattle but held myself back, putting it into an account to pay off later. There’d be time to remind Marko of our proper working relationship when things calmed down. When I didn’t need him anymore.

“Sewers,” he said suddenly, jabbing a finger at the screens. One of the smaller boxes expanded to full size—a schematic, blurry and scratched like it had been made from ancient plates. “More specifically, tunnels left over from either constructing the sewers or maintaining them. See—big enough to wriggle up through, most of it dried out. Comes up… here, looks like it used to be a lavatory or something, though it’s fucking huge.”

I leaned forward to squint at the screen. “Fucking sewers,” I said. “There’ll be defenses.”

The Star wasn’t owned by anyone, but Techies had been using it for years now, and in their own loose way they’d run the place. I didn’t doubt if you lacked the secret handshake or the fucking password, the whole place would collapse around you while some Techie in Singapore watched via remote random-packeted Vid feed, laughing their ass off.

Marko nodded, sweeping the schematic off the screen before I could stop him, popping up four more boxes in a neat arrangement. “Sure, but the power’s out. These may not be completely up-to-date, but from what I can see, they have trunk lines, which you can’t cut individually. Good work except you have to add local modulators or else your whole enterprise gets fried. But if the whole grid’s out, they’re out. Major backup generators here, here, and here, but looks like they had to pick and choose what they kept hot in this scenario, so the pipes look clear.”

I nodded, taking his word for it. “Okay. What if the power comes back on while we’re in the pipes?”

He nodded. “I don’t have a screen to represent painful death.”

The urge to smack him returned in force. I suspected it might be something I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. “All right, then. Let’s not wait around for the power to come back online. Let’s get wriggling.” I looked at Krasa as Marko stood up, going through his pockets rapidly. She was staring at the screens again, arms loose at her sides. I knew the expression—exhaustion, ennui, despair. I’d seen it up close plenty of times in my life and every day back at Chengara Penitentiary. With her ten thousand–yen haircut and fancy coat, the expression looked worse, like she’d peeked over your shoulder and seen Death riding up on his pale horse.

I turned and moved for the drop cabin to get her out of my sight. If Krasa was going to self-destruct, I wanted her upwind.

The sewer pipe had been underground, originally, but was now half exposed, a semicircle of rusted pipe big enough for a man to crouch and crawl his way into, then widening until he could stand up straight. I paused for a moment, staring at the inky blackness within the pipe, wondering if I was doomed to spend the rest of my short, unhappy life crawling in and out of narrow, horrible spaces. The tunnel narrowed and split off into dozens of smaller feeds, but Marko had sketched the route for me, and there were no defenses or obstacles to slow us down. The route ended in a small junction, where a rusting ladder embedded in the wall led up to an encrusted grating, dark and foreboding. It popped up easily enough, and I pulled myself up into a dark, damp area filled with broken tile and porcelain fixtures, most of which looked like they’d been torn off the walls and hurled at the floor with force. I smelled mold in the air, and I could hear a thin trickle of water somewhere.

Krasa followed, and I helped Marko up one-handed, lifting him into place, not a stitch of his prissy little middle-class suit out of place. I smiled and brushed him off a little with mocking care as he whipped out a razor-thin little handheld that spread open three different ways, tripling in size instantly. He spun around, holding it up.

“No power, no signals. I can’t get heat sigs, but it’s pretty quiet.” His little eyes, buried among the thick curls of his hair, swiveled around and finally landed on me. He looked five years old suddenly. “The, uh, only way out is, uh, that way.”

He gestured with his handheld over my shoulder, and it suddenly lit up red and started beeping.

“Fuck,” he muttered, gesturing at it. “It’s buggy.”

“All right,” I said, letting my eyes linger on Marko for a moment as he pretended to be engrossed in making his handheld behave. “Follow me, then.” I pulled my gun and turned. The walls of the room had once been tiled white, but most of the tiles were broken up on the floor like a ruined beach, and the walls were bare concrete and silky webs, dust and cocooned dinners hanging everywhere. The only obvious exit from the room was a darkened archway, square tiles hanging from it at crooked angles.

“Take the first junction right,” Marko whispered behind me.

“Don’t whisper,” I said. “Assholes whisper when walking into a bunker wired up with who-knows-what. If they can’t hear us whispering, the tech in this shithole isn’t worth our time.”

I took the first right and the rough floor began sloping upward. Our environment, while remaining infested with webs and dirt—and suddenly, the dried shells of dead roaches like leaves under our boots—dried out rapidly as we rose upward. Marko guided us through a maze of corridors, all cramped and filthy, and we rose steadily until I stepped warily into a wide, open space of rough-hewn rock and uneven floor, unfamiliar shadows formed by mysterious light. It looked like someone had formed the room out of the rock without the benefit of explosives, maybe with a dull teaspoon chiseled against the stone for centuries. Then the shadows resolved themselves into oblong black boxes, linked by thick, winding cables, and large, dead Vid screens fastened to one wall, a bank of inputs and instruments beneath them. Fragile-looking chairs were tucked neatly under the consoles. The light leaked from weak photocells on the wall behind me, emergency disks that clicked on spilling back artificial moonlight, giving the room a pale, terrible glow.

“This is his lab?” I asked, looking around. The shadows formed by the irregular walls were pitch-black, impenetrable. On one wall a square of metal had been bolted. I leaned in, squinting, and saw it was a plaque, the block lettering covering it like squarish bugs. “And what the fuck,” I said, “does brazen giant of Greek fame mean?”

“Wait,” Krasa said, her voice low and phlegmy, like she hadn’t spoken in years.

“We’ll have to ask Amblen,” Marko said, bustling past me and approaching the screen-covered wall. “And for that we need power.”

I opened my mouth to ask the little shit where he thought we’d be getting power from, when Krasa suddenly stepped forward just as a shotgun blast sucked the atmosphere away and made us all crouch down, the silence sucking all the air out of the room and leaving us panting.

“Stay down,” a voice said.

My eyelids fluttered, my brain slowing down again, just a twitch in my thoughts, everything getting gooey and stretched out. I snapped back a moment later, everything rushing to catch up, like I was falling toward the present down a narrow tunnel. The voice had been familiar, a man’s deep voice, and the sound of it was like a nail in my brain. I went still.

“I see you,” Krasa whispered. I turned my head and we looked at each other, her golden eye glowing softly in the washed-out light.

“My Russian friend is behind you,” the voice went on. I heard the scrape of boots to confirm this, and then a second set of feet moving. “He’s honor challenged and will shoot you in the back of the head first and wonder if he should have hesitated later.”

From the deep shadows off to the left of the Vid screens, a man stepped forward, shotgun—an old, wood-stock contraption from a previous, golden age—held easily in front of him. He came into the weak light and we looked at each other, staring.

“You,” Krasa said slowly to the man, swallowing thickly. “You are Avery Cates.”

“The one and only, sister,” the man said. His eyes landed on me—my eyes—and his face stiffened. “What the fuck,” he whispered. Then he cocked his head a little, eyes shifting to the side.

“What?” He looked back at me. It was me. It was my face, my body. “A fucking avatar,” he said slowly. “They made a fucking avatar out of me.”

“Fuck you,” I said slowly, fighting through the weird syrup my mind had fallen into.

Marko was looking from the newcomer to me and back again. “Well, fuck, if you both—whatever you are—got out of Chengara at the same time, where the hell have you been?”

The bastard kept grinning at me. “Took me a while to get off the continent. Then, Venice mostly.” As I struggled for something to say back, his face crumpled, eyes closing tightly as he started to tremble. He brought his free hand up to his face and touched his forehead lightly.

“Shut up,” he whispered in the silence. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

PART TWO

XX

CRAZY WAS GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT

For a second after I spoke to Salgado, the voices faded a little, muting, and I wondered if maybe I’d just gone crazy. Maybe I was in a little room somewhere, screaming and tugging at my bonds, still insisting I could see the ghosts. Then, weak and low at first but gaining in volume, Salgado responded.

You’re in a pickle, son.

I opened my eyes again. I had Dolores Salgado in my head.

Keep talking to me. It’s easier if you concentrate on me.

I smiled despite myself. Am I fucking crazy, Dolores? Even if you’re a fucking figment, I’d appreciate an honest answer.

“Mr. Cates?” I heard Guy say behind me. I turned my head a tick or two.

“Don’t speak.”

The voices swelled up again, swamping her and filling me with a hundred fragments, screams, mutterings, curses. I closed my eyes again and tried to focus my thoughts. I imagined a glass wall between me and the voices, and that helped, for a second.

Don’t listen to the old lady, Mr. Cates. She’s playing you. I should know. She’s been playing me for years.

I shuddered and squeezed my eyes shut tighter. Another voice I recognized. A voice I didn’t want in my head.

Curious, this. You must have been partially through the encoding procedure, hooked up to the network and momentarily two way on the data stream—up and down—when you were disconnected prematurely. Fascinating. There was a white paper on this possibility when we were vetting the original research, but I had to suppress it. The researcher sadly had to be liquidated.

I opened my eyes. “Guy,” I croaked. “If I asked nicely, would you kill me?”

“What?”

His tone of alarm was so sharp and panic-stricken I smiled. “Forget it.”

… five gets you twenty. Twenty gets you killed….

… eu penso I’m inoperante—eu penso I’m inoperante…

It might have been my imagination, but the swirl of voices seemed lessened somehow.

Are you paying attention, Mr. Cates? Undersecretary Salgado—excuse me, former Undersecretary Salgado is a cunning little minx. I wouldn’t follow her lead, I were you.

I tried imagining my glass wall again. Had I gone crazy? Was this what crazy was like? I’d always imagined you knew you’d gone nuts, somehow, that you marveled constantly at the crazy batshit things you were doing.

You’re not crazy, Mr. Cates. I’m here. We’re all here. Though some of us were marginal and are fading. It’s fascinating—I am aware of them fading.

Shut up, Marin, I thought, hard. Shut the fuck up.

Amazingly, they all did, for a second, a blissful beat of silence inside me. And then the crowd rushed back in.

I nodded to myself. Crazy was going to have to wait.

Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward until I could see around the corner. I moved slowly; people had the urge to snap into view fast in these sorts of situations, but jerky, fast movements attracted nervous eyes. Slow was the key. You edged into view and became just part of the background, something static.

Holding my breath and trying to keep the pane of glass up in my head, I edged forward, mouth open.

In the hall around the corner, five soldiers in their weird, off-white uniforms were crouched behind four overturned gurneys, already chewed into twisted sculptures by the shredders. They all had shielded face masks on, giving them each one large eye, with two short flexible tubes popping out from the mouth area and snaking to disappear inside the rest of their suit. Except for the three dead soldiers locked in eternal surprise on the floor, they might not have been human in those things. No one was firing, but the noise was still loud, and I figured this was complex-wide, an invasion. Down the hall was another set of swinging doors, one of which was missing a large chunk of itself. Through the gap I could see the dusty blue uniforms of Chengara’s guards.

Slowly, sweating in my filthy stolen uniform, I leaned back and turned to look at Guy. He stared at me in terror. Turning away, I stepped out into the hall, oriented myself, and launched myself diagonally across its width, eyes locked on the white uniforms. I squeezed the trigger and the shredder jumped in my hands, sending out an invisible wire that chewed up everything in its path. Half a clip of ammo was ten seconds, tops, but the soldiers on the far end were already twisting around to face me by the time I crashed into the far wall, letting my rubbery legs go out from under me. I’d missed one—through the dust and smoke I saw him rolling away, a white blur.

As my ass hit the floor, the wall where I’d been a second before exploded into dust and sharp chunks of concrete. I threw myself forward, smacking flat onto the floor and scrabbling to get my legs under me, lumbering blindly forward with my shredder still in one hand. I saw the soldier sitting on the floor, swinging his gun toward me, and with a yell I tossed mine at him, smacking him in the chest as he fired off another burst.

I veered, staggering into him hard and falling down on top of him, letting my knee get between us and just letting gravity yank me down.

Without pausing, I took hold of the tubes coming out of his cowl and pulled his head up, then smashed it down onto the floor as hard as I could. His whole body twitched beneath me, and I grabbed his shredder, glancing at the glowing ammo count as I pushed myself back to my feet, my leg burning. Panting, I slapped the shredder with my palm and staggered through the gurneys.

Down the hall the Crushers, three of them, pushed open the doors and stood there grinning. They looked like human beings, just regular assholes, and I marveled at the fact that they were all avatars, artificial and creepy. These three would have passed for human anywhere—everything about them, from their flop sweat and unshaven faces to their bellies hanging over their belts, screamed Crusher, second-rate cop wannabe.

The tallest one was ginger haired and looked like his arms were too long for his body, like a fucking monkey, based on some shit kicker whose family had been eating dirt for generations, producing thinned-out genetic material like Bubba here.

I concentrated on moving easily. Avatars didn’t feel pain.

Actually, they can be programmed to feel anything we want, Dick Marin thought cheerfully at me. Pain might be useful under certain scenarios.

Pain is a programming error, a new voice—quiet, annoyingly calm—said above the buzz. Pain should be commented out.

Hell, Cates, Marin snarled. You attracted all the fucking quacks to your brain.

As if on cue, the crowd of voices rose up in triumph, loud and muddled. Slimmer than before, I thought.

“That was ass-kick amazing,” Bubba drawled, his vowels all weird. “We didn’t think any of us were still up and runnin’ back there. These cocksuckers came blastin’ in like hotshots and got cut off. One of ’em was wounded, and they kept tellin’ us they had to get him out for MedVac.”

“Medical evac,” one of the other Crushers spat. “Fucking weak meat.”

“Rules of war or some such shit,” Bubba sighed, shaking his head. “All right, gear up—word is these fucks have broken through and are working their way down. We’re pulling out. Which means we got to claw out of here before we get swamped by these pieces of shit.”

“MedVac,” I repeated, and whipped my shredder up, squeezing the trigger. My last few seconds of ammo spun Bubba into two halves, each tumbling in an opposite direction, the blast sawing through him and cutting down the other two as well. The noise of combat was a little further away now, muffled by some walls and doors and lots of the stiff, scrubbed air.

I limped back to the soldiers and examined them.

You have destroyed these men, the new voice whispered. They are now beyond redemption. The others will live on, as it is meant for us to do.

He’s a lot of fun, huh? Marin sneered. I used to hate taking meetings with him, back when he was corporeal. This kind of prophecy horseshit, all the time. That’s how Squalor talks.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

It might have only been seconds, but stored intelligences operate at incredible speeds, and it wouldn’t take long for you to subconsciously sort us out and grab onto familiar, uh, faces, Marin added. This is fascinating.

Prophecy cannot be —

Shut up! I hammered the thought as hard as I could. For a second, all the voices cleared up again.

Kneeling down I pulled one soldier toward me by her boot. Working with stiff fingers, I undid the weird little clasps that seemed to just cling to each other without any visible fitted parts and pulled her uniform off—it was a single piece of the white material. When I had her naked and bloody before me, I kept my eyes off her and examined the uniform; it was shapeless and limp, heavy and damp looking. With something akin to pleasure, I peeled off the rank blue Crusher’s uniform and stepped into the army kit. The white material flowed around me, stretching here and tightening there, until it was the best-fitting set of clothes I’d ever worn. It felt like a million tiny hands were on my skin, sizing me up, tasting me.

The cowl hung off my neck behind my head. I had a strange feeling it wanted to be lifted into place so it could attach itself, but I was suddenly worried I’d never get it off, that it might seal me off and suffocate me, so I left it hanging.

I found one more corpse that hadn’t been chopped up by the shredders and pulled its uniform off as well. The two dead bodies were pale and shriveled, and I stared at them for a moment. The new army wasn’t avatars; it didn’t feel like that made them the good guys. Something glittered on the woman’s face, and I knelt down with a grunt and a wince to get a better look. Her eyes were silvery, almost with a soft glow. Augments. I looked up and stared at the scorched wall for a second. Fucking Augments—did that still make them human? Was there any fucking difference?

When I limped around the corner, Guy was right where I’d left him, staring blankly at his hands. I tossed the uniform at him. “Change,” I said.

He blinked and picked up the uniform slowly, stared at it for a second, then dropped it and got to his feet with epic, imperial slowness. “How do you do… something like that? Like all those people?”

I shrugged, testing my weight on my bad leg and pulling the sidearm that had come with the uniform. I turned it over in my hands: not bad, I decided. I racked a shell into the chamber and was satisfied.

“Practice,” I said. “You ever kill anyone? To get in here? To survive in here?”

He laughed, staring down at himself as the uniform visibly adjusted itself to him. “I was a broker. I made money. I made money for a lot of cops, and one of them decided I belonged here.” He looked up at me. “Hell, I even had a sponsor, trying to get me out. I almost thought he could. He’s got pull, you know? Deep pockets. I had a lot of his investments, and with me in here he lost control of them. He needed me; I don’t have any illusions—but I hoped he would get me out.”

I nodded absently. “You actually thought you were getting out?” Smiling, I pushed the gun at him and fired a single shot into the meaty part of his leg. The army uniform, I figured, was engineered to be bullet resistant, but at this range there was no such thing as bulletproof, and Guy’s feet flew out from under him as if someone had tugged the floor away. He crashed down, screaming and writhing. I stared at him for a second: he was weeping, big fat tears streaming down his face. I felt sorry for a moment; I didn’t like being the first time this poor son of a bitch got shot.

I holstered my gun and stepped around him to gather a handful of his cowl and uniform and started dragging him behind me, slinging my shredder over one shoulder. As we turned the corner, I saw through the swinging doors on the other end, a knot of white uniforms prowling their way carefully toward us, and I steeled myself, pulling the cowl over my face.

“Sorry, Guy,” I said, my own voice sounding too close and too desperate. “But in a situation where I have to choose sides, I choose the side that’s got MedVac. You ever survive a hover crash?”

He squealed something unintelligible. I was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, I knew. I was used to it.

“I have,” I advised him. “It’s not as hard as it seems.”

XXI

DESPERATE FOLKS, I FIGURED

I kept my grip on the shredder laid across my knees and kept up that posture of relaxed nonchalance that took every vibrating shred of energy I had to make natural. Next to me, Guy had passed out—or died, though I was pretty sure I knew my arteries well enough to not have murdered him—which at least stopped his unsoldierly screaming. But I didn’t relax, because I was sitting in a jelly of fucking wrong.

The noise was incredible. The hover was mostly cargo hold with a tiny cockpit and nothing else. It was fast. The bay doors were wide open, and the ground far below us was whipping past in a vaguely purple blur, all the air in the world scooped up and hurled inside the bay to buffet us, sucking away sound and oxygen, leaving me choking on wind.

But I didn’t dare grab onto the safety straps, because no one else was. I crouched against the rear wall of the no-frills bay, which was just struts and sheet metal, freezing cold, vibrating beneath us like it was coming apart. Bright red packs of fabric were tied to the safety straps, fluttering and jumping manically behind the soldiers. My knees ached and my back burned; my head buzzed with voices and my heart pounded the way it did when I was about to be shot at, but I kept myself stock-still and resisted the urge to look at everything and everyone.

They were looking at me, though. Except for the crazy asshole on the big gun, laughing uproariously as he sent hundreds of rounds down at the ground, the chug-chug chainsaw of it blending into the noise and giving it some rhythm, some bottom. The gun was mounted just inside the bay and moved with oiled ease in response to the soldier’s movements, swinging up and down and side to side to cover any vector you could put eyes on, including straight up or down. He was just sweeping it back and forth with his fingers mashed on the triggers, laughing in great, breathless spasms. I had an idea that if he could have spun the gun all the way around, he would have cut us all to ribbons, and laughed the whole time.

Field-contained armaments—sneak up on you, and then BAM you’re not just dead, you’re dissolved.

Dumdum shells, turn a building into cheese

Mr. Cates, you should have been a poet. You missed your calling.

The fact that Dick Marin could hear my thoughts made me feel nervous and exposed, and every time one of the voices broke through and unleashed a stream of words inside my brain, I had to bite down hard to resist twitching, shaking my head violently to dislodge it, like a bug eating its way from one ear to the other.

All of the soldiers were wearing their uniforms, the same bizarre, clingy, almost sentient white material. They’d pushed their cowls back and they all stared at me with bright, silvery eyes. Augments, for sure; I’d seen glowing eyes like that in various hues plenty of times. Back in the old days lots of hard cases got Augments done in back rooms and sewer tunnels, burning through monthlong infections and endless complications for some advantage over the System.

I didn’t know what their eyes meant, what exactly had been done to them, but I could see it wasn’t the only thing. They each had an identical scar on their temples, like two stylized letter S’s next to each other, pink and angry looking. They were sweaty, red-faced human beings, no doubt—not avatars—but each one had a short black cable running from their cowls into the back of their neck, right where their skulls attached.

I’d left Guy’s cowl in place, hiding his head, but I’d left mine hanging. I stared back and wondered just how badly I was fucked.

There were five men and two women, all kids, fucking children. Hair shaved off completely, sweat glistening everywhere. Each was wounded, red blood staining their uniforms—one girl with an ear that was just a flower of pulp and blood, one guy cradling an arm that looked like it had been completely severed inside the sleeve. None of them complained or winced or looked even close to being in shock. The ones with working limbs still clutched their own shredders, and I was careful to act like my own gun was welded to my knees.

They were skinny and bruised looking. Poor, I figured; I’d seen enough of the type. Hadn’t eaten well, sick all the time. Maybe even jumped at the chance to earn five hundred yen a week getting killed. One of them, a man with a starburst of dried blood on his face and a leaking belly wound that had left him pale and shivery, looked at my hands and then back at my face. He had fine, red eyebrows and a sharp, long nose. He glared at me with fierce, burning eyes—made even worse by their silver, glinting color. It was like an alien looking at me, something I’d never dealt with before.

“Mr. Cates.”

I glanced down at the floor. I could feel the atmosphere around me getting thicker and thicker and had a pretty good idea what was going to happen when we got to our destination. It didn’t involve a conversation.

“Mr. Rusbridge?” I shouted back.

“I’m dying, I think. I am dying.”

“You’re not going to die, Mr. Rusbridge. It’s a flesh wound. You’ll bleed for hours and be in a lot of pain. Trust me. I’m a professional.”

“No, I can feel it. I’m dying.”

“You’re in shock. Although we’re both probably going to be dead in a few minutes, so let’s not spend our last moments of brotherhood and friendship arguing, eh?”

“I’m dying.”

Aside from the crazy Gunner, none of the soldiers had moved. “Okay, Guy, fine. You’re dead. Sorry to have killed you.”

“Listen to me: there is a boat.”

I blinked. “A boat?”

“In Galveston. That is in Texas, Mr. Cates. Speak to a woman named Merris. You’ll need access to my files —”

I looked back at our comrades-in-arms, listening to Guy’s rasping voice with half an ear. It was always amazing what people told you when they thought they were going to die.

I considered my options, which were clarifyingly few. I could not, I assumed, allow the hover to land where it was intended to land. Guy and I stood out, that was clear, so any hope of melting into the fringes and disappearing was out. The cockpit looked pretty secure; I’d been in enough hovers to judge a hatch and this one looked to be magnetically sealed and most probably failsafe—the pilots would starve to death in there before I managed to get it open. So somehow hijacking the hover was impossible, assuming I could manage to subdue seven injured soldiers.

I ran my eyes over them again, licking my lips. Their absolute stillness while they bled, while tendons and shattered bones poked out of their uniforms was fucking terrifying. Even System Pigs screamed when you tore them up.

My eyes shifted to the bright red packs tied off behind them. I turned my head slightly, just enough to catch a glimpse of that color dancing behind me and Guy, and looked back at the soldiers.

“Hey, Ginger,” I said. “If my friend and I wanted to get off before our final destination, would you have a problem with that?”

He stared at me, moving his jaw a little from side to side. “Only if you try to take one of those parachutes with you,” he shouted effortlessly. “Those are property of the System of Federated Nations Army. Otherwise, be my guest.”

A funny one. I gripped the shredder and wondered. For all I knew they were filled with Augments—muscle layers, nerve accelerators, tendon replacements. All apparently legal in the army. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to cut all seven down before one or two of them got up on me—and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that anyway. So far they’d done nothing to impede me.

I considered him, all of them. Where in the world did the Joint Council Undersecretaries get an army in such a short time, men and women willing to have Augmenting procedures and be thrown into a war with the SSF? Desperate folks, I figured. The one resource the System was actually making more of. Food was scarce, energy getting thin, and factories went under constantly—but desperate folks were on an upswing.

“How much,” I shouted, “would two of those parachutes cost?”

The kid squinted at me, the first involuntary reaction I’d gotten out of any of them, and I got optimistic. I had yen. I was still sick with yen. Marin had paid me for the Squalor job, and I’d promptly moved that yen from the original account and spread it across a dozen hidden places, nooks and crannies of the System. Even with the economy in free fall I was fucking rich. Why not make some use of it?

… need a fucking wheelbarrow for all the yen

… I should never have paid you, Cates.

… I’m starving starving STARVING

The soldiers didn’t look at each other, but the kid’s eyes started to move a little, crazy, tiny little circles, and I realized they were talking to each other. Mentally. Not Spooks, though; they didn’t have the look. I glanced at the rugged-looking black cable popping out of his neck and running to the cowl and figured there was an Augment there, too—something I’d never heard of.

“Seventy million,” the kid said, face blank and expressionless. “And you can jump. One forty,” he added with just the slightest hint of a smile, “and I’ll order Gordy here not to shoot you out of the sky when you do.”

“Done,” I said immediately and took my hands off my shredder as a sign of good faith.

The kid nodded and raised his hand to his face, spit into his palm, and held it out toward me. Fucking hillbilly. I did the same and we shook, and then he produced a battered and scorched credit dongle. It looked old.

“Can you scan a print?” I said. “I don’t have a piece on me.”

“Sorry, hoss,” the kid said, his face snapping back into cold, tight expressionlessness.

“Cates,” Guy said, surging up and grabbing my arm. “Here, give it to me.”

I looked at Guy as he slid his cowl up. He didn’t look good, clinging to me like it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He was gray and thin, looking unhappy and stretched. “What?”

“Give me the dongle,” he shouted.

“The man said one hundred forty million,” I shouted back.

He pulled himself up by my arm into a sitting position. “Give me the fucking thing!” he hissed, panting, sweat pouring off his face.

I looked at the kid and shrugged my eyebrows. The soldier handed it over and I held it up for Guy, who stretched out a shaking hand toward it, thumb out. After a moment, the dongle lit up green, and I blinked, startled.

“Subdermal chip,” Guy panted, sinking back onto the floor of the hover. “Oh, fucking fuck me.”

“You have a hundred forty million yen?”

The soldier leaned forward and snatched the dongle back from me before Guy could gather himself to respond. He glanced at it and secreted it in his uniform. “Gordy,” he shouted, looking at me. “Stand down, brother.”

Immediately the crazy asshole on the big gun let go and stepped back from it. He was still grinning like a fucking loon.

The kid glanced at him and then back at us. “All yours.”

I nodded and stood up, tearing two of the red packs off the wall. They hooked right into the uniforms elegantly, the materials almost connecting themselves, almost seeming to move beneath my hands as I worked the metal clips. I rolled Guy over onto his belly, ignoring his screams, and attached his. Then I looked back at the calm, quiet line of soldiers—one of the girls had lost consciousness and might have been dead.

“Make a hole?”

For a second I thought I was going to get charged an extra thousand yen for this, but then the kid nodded and they all shifted a little to their side, opening up a narrow space. I left the shredder where it was, made sure I still had the automatic that had come with the uniform, and knelt down to pick up Guy, holding him in my arms and staggering for the bay door, wind pushing back at me, my body aching and protesting every inch. I stood for a moment at the edge. The ground below was blurry and indistinct; I had no idea where we were. Feeling certain that every extra second spent on the hover would be regretted, I closed my eyes and made sure I had a good grip on Guy, who was dead weight on me. I thought it best if I never met soldiers again.

Mr. Cates, Marin whispered, I know I am legion and all that, but I’d much prefer another of me die.

“I’ll try to arrange it as soon as possible,” I muttered, and stepped off into the air.