XXII

EVEN THE HUMAN ONES

“Mr. Rusbridge?”

I blinked, wondering if I’d been talking again, accidentally responding to the few dozen voices that still clung, tenacious, to my brain. Most of them had faded, but a few lingered and three—Salgado, Marin, and Dennis Squalor—had firmed up and become my own personal ghosts. Marin theorized that because I’d known the three of them, in some sense, I’d subconsciously concentrated on them and kept them “alive” while the rest were being dismantled, brain cells being cleaned out and reused for more important things, like drinking and trying not to throw up simultaneously.

Kept alive? Marin whispered archly. I’d hate to think we have to rely on your concentration skills for that.

Shaking my head, I tried to focus. The dented and rusted metal cup of—well, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, though it was harsh stuff and I was pissing drunk after two of them—seemed to float just above the rotten, damp wood of the bar, up and down, up and down. Behind the bar was Bheka, tall, skin so brown it was almost black, skinny as hell and always grinning. Bheka was leaning on the bar with his arms spread wide, squinting at me with a worried expression.

“You okay, Mr. Rusbridge?”

I slipped one hand into my coat pocket, finding my lucky charm. The charm was perpetually damp and cold, slick and slimy. I’d paid some yen to a twitchy geneticist to have it preserved, but it still felt like it was rotting.

Savage, Squalor hissed.

Pay him no mind, Avery. Salgado sighed. Being in Mr. Squalor’s bad graces puts you in my good ones.

I pushed them all aside, something I was getting better at as the number of voices dropped. “No,” I answered, truthfully enough.

The bar was above the waterline, and that was about all you could say for it. It floated on the edges of the city, softly rising and falling, everything sliding first this way and then the other, nothing firm, nothing solid. I hated it. I hated it more than anything I’d ever hated before in my life. Which was saying something since I’d recently spent over six weeks hating a tub of roaches named The Goose, an ancient salvaged hull more rust than metal refitted with whatever its crew—a group of dour Scandinavians who claimed to speak no English and who seemed to resent my presence despite my yen—had been able to steal. Which wasn’t much.

Bheka’s eyes flicked over my shoulder as someone walked in behind me, and I spun, hand closing over the gun in my pocket. The newcomer was a short, thin man obscured by layers of oiled coat and a huge hood, water running off him in sheets as he inspected the damp seats. I turned back and Bheka looked back at me.

“Need something, Mr. Rusbridge?”

I shook my head and Bheka moved away, disappearing through a tiny door behind the bar, and I forced myself to raise up the cup and take a deep drink of the horrible liquor, sweet like fruit juice but slimy and bitter. My stomach clenched up in protest; I didn’t want to think too hard about what it was or how it was made.

I kept one hand in my pocket, on my gun.

Savage, Squalor whispered.

I heard the new customer behind me get up and slosh out of the bar, which was hitched up to a long, ramshackle pier made of rotting wood and rusted brackets, the whole thing moaning and shuddering under you as you walked. The thing went on forever, encircling what was left of the city and occasionally sending a spur of rotted wood meandering inward to connect up with some submerged building or other permanent-temporary piece of floating real estate. I’d been in Venice about half an hour, and I hated it already.

I was alone in the place, and liked it that way. Trying to breathe through my mouth to suppress my sense of taste, I took another gulp of my drink.

Revenge, I would have told myself a few years ago, didn’t pay well. Not worth it. Here I was a few months in trying to track down Michaleen Garda, and all I had to show for it was a fever, feet that hadn’t been dry in weeks.

The door opened behind me again, and I spun, bringing the gun up, clicking back the hammer. It was still wrapped in tough, transparent plastic, protected from the endless damp.

The man standing in the doorway looked local, based on the expensive and neat-looking rain gear he was wearing. He looked fucking dandy, with a neatly trimmed beard and nice, white teeth, clean fingernails held up for my inspection.

“Ah! You must be Mr. Rusbridge, no?” he said, inclining his head a little. He’d been met with guns before; he was careful to keep his hands up and in clear view no matter what else he did, and he didn’t seem at all insulted by its presence. “Welcome to Venezia, Mr. Rusbridge. It is good to finally meet you face-to-face after so many years of correspondence.”

“Mr. Faliero?”

“Of course!” He looked at his hands. “May I?”

I nodded, stuffing my gun back into its pocket. “Sure. Buy you a drink?”

Faliero dropped his hands, water streaming down his sleeves onto the floor, and made his face into a cheerful mask of horror. “In here? Mr. Rusbridge! Please be friendly.” He let his square face shift back into a smile—a loose, easygoing face, plump, his skin shining with something beyond health, his beard expertly groomed. The mustache was bushy and had devoured his upper lip, making it seem like he spoke without opening his mouth. “I’d like to introduce my bodyguard, Horatio.”

Faliero stepped in and a tall, slightly younger man shouldered his way into the bar, sending the whole place rocking as he added his weight. He was expensively dressed in a shiny black suit that glistened as he moved and a sumptuous leather topcoat that seemed to repel the rainwater away from him. His arms looked like tiny little oak trees inside the coat, and his hands looked like two hands each. I looked down at him, though, and he glared at me with the pissed-off stare of the man born short.

I sniffed the air. “You brought me a fucking Pig, Faliero?”

Kill him! Squalor suddenly shrieked, making me flinch.

Gall, Marin said musingly. I never understood why he wastes his time on shit jobs like this. Yen, I suppose.

Faliero’s grin leaped back onto his face. “Oh, call me Mari, Mr. Rusbridge. Everyone does. And Major Gall here, while, yes, an officer in the fine System Security Force, is, for tonight, here as my bodyguard.”

Gall reached up and removed a metal toothpick from his mouth. “Calm down, old man. I won’t run you for outstandings.” He leaned against the bar, keeping me in a line of sight clear of his employer, and made a big show of cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick.

“Okay?” Faliero said, wagging his bushy eyebrows at me, mustache wriggling as words magically appeared in the air. “Cops make you nervous?”

“Nauseous,” I corrected. Gall glanced at me and then back at his fingers, and I felt better. A major. I’d never met one of the demigods of the SSF before. It was disappointing. “Aren’t you assholes busy with the fucking civil war?”

Gall appeared engrossed in something he’d discovered under his thumbnail. “That shit’s being taken care of, no worries, Mr. Rusbridge.”

“Now, Mr. Rusbridge,” Faliero said, looking closely at me. “You do not look well.”

I nodded. “Boats do not agree with me, apparently. No matter how old I get, Mr. Faliero, I never stop learning something new about myself.”

Faliero’s eyebrows, which were impressive, shot up. “You traveled here by… boat? You can actually do that?”

“During time of war, when getting an intercontinental hover might as well be getting a hover to the fucking moon, yeah, they do that. Neither the army nor the SSF is checking the water, yet.”

“Yet,” Gall murmured.

“The Goose,” I added. “Out of Galveston, Texas. Sixty-five thousand yen for a berth, which was a wooden pen in the hold, a jar of n-tabs, and free rein to piss or puke over the side any time I wanted. Took me to Liverpool, and I’ve been hitching rides on boats ever since. I fucking hate boats.”

“Yes. This is…” He trailed off and looked back at me. “Should I continue to call you Mr. Rusbridge? Guy is dead, isn’t he?”

We all are dead.

I glanced at Gall again, but this time the cop didn’t react. His coat hung open and I could see two holsters, one under his shoulder and one on his hip. A fucking cowboy. I made a mental note to run first and worry about him later if things got sticky. Then I nodded, looking back at Faliero. “Yes.”

“Did you kill him, Mr…. Cates?”

I smiled, heart pounding. Being famous was a tremendous pain in the ass. I turned back to the bar and retrieved my drink, determined to act like it was the best-tasting swill I’d ever had. I took a deep pull and nodded, turning and leaning back against the bar. “Not on purpose.”

“Ah.” Faliero nodded, looking amused. He looked down at his shiny shoes. His pants were gathered a few inches above the ankle and tied off with extravagant ribbons. When he looked down like that, his whole face disappeared, becoming two eyebrows and a mustache. “But you have control of Guy’s identity and accounts. As you contacted me under his secure account. You have access to his funds?” He looked up, and there was no more smile. For a second it was a very hard, unhappy man looking at me. “Much of which are my funds, you understand?”

I drained my drink, which immediately tried a jailbreak. I swallowed with effort, squinting through sudden tears. “I understand that Guy managed funds for people. I understand some of his clients were heavy hitters—police, politicians.” I winked. “Anonymous men of means. Men who make their living keeping their ear to the ground and profiting from information. Mr. Faliero, information is what I’m looking for, and you’re the local expert—at least the only expert I found in Guy’s address book.”

He nodded his head like I’d given him a compliment.

Prick, Marin snorted. He looks like a prick, doesn’t he?

“Poor Guy had an experience that didn’t agree with him —”

I will never get that image out of my head, Salgado said quietly as someone unknown hummed tunelessly in my head. Disgusting, and so cruel.

“— And—and—I happened to be on hand, and we’d developed a sort of bond. Plus, I was the only other person alive within a hundred miles, so Guy didn’t have too many choices. I also understand that when Guy was arrested, he was in the midst of a major transaction for you, and his disappearance has left a large amount of your yen outside your control.” I smiled. “And you’d like it back.”

“Yes,” Faliero said, looking up again and smiling. “You understand everything. You can understand my joy when I received a message from Guy. You can understand my continuing interest even when it became clear that the person contacting me was not Guy. And thus you can understand why I would think to bring Major Gall here.” He looked around the place again. “Well. Shall we repair someplace more appropriate? I have a boat waiting.” He frowned. “The smell in this place, Mr. Cates, will settle into my clothes and I will have to destroy them.”

I considered. On the one hand, my murder would be tempting to Mr. Faliero, I was certain—I’d met enough men just like him, rich and ruthless, and they were usually hiring me to kill someone. On the other hand, he didn’t know how I had access to Guy’s information, and he wouldn’t take any chances until he knew more. It wouldn’t preclude him from grabbing me by the ankles and shaking me until something interesting fell out of my pockets, though. I’d survived a lot of cops in my time, but they still scared the shit out of me. Even the human ones.

“Okay,” I said.

“It’s all about money,” Faliero said as we made for the door. I hung back, encouraging Gall to step in front of me, and he did so with a knowing half grin, rolling the pick around his mouth again. “You know how many people are still in this shithole?”

He paused outside the bar, letting me look past him at Venice, a shallow spot in the ocean with a few dozen tops of buildings jutting up, mossy and crumbling. Most of the city was underwater these days. Bridges going from rooftop to rooftop had been thrown together decades ago and left to rot; some had already sagged back into the water. In the near distance, a tower still thrust up a few dozen feet over everything else. A huge Vid screen had been attached to it, silently beaming cold light out onto the water. The whole place smelled like piss.

Some of the buildings had additions built onto their old roofs, shiny modern boxes strapped onto these rotting old buildings, and some of the folks had tugged big floating platforms next to their buildings and built on those. Weak, wet lights flickered everywhere, like tiny nearby stars. It all looked ready to be washed away.

“About twenty thousand,” Faliero said, answering his own question. “It costs. Pumps, boats, manpower, importing supplies. You live here, my friend, you need yen. And Guy managed my yen.” He turned and started walking down the plank toward the pier. “Ever since those cocksuckers invaded fucking Russia—Russia! If there’s a short list of places you do not bother to invade, Russia is fucking top three, no? Does no one read history? My yen is worth half of what it was a month ago. And dropping. The funds you have under your thumb, they are necessary.”

As I stepped onto the pier behind them, there was a painfully loud roar behind me and then a punishing, hot wind pushing against me, making me stumble as it shoved me this way and that. The whole night lit up, and a second later there was a crazy rhythm of hollow drumbeats as chunks of debris rained down from the night sky. I twisted around, squinting. The bar was a fiery wreck, black smoke billowing up from what was left of its floating base.

Well, shit, I thought. That’s fucking strange.

“It’ll sink, fast,” Gall said conversationally.

“Perhaps I forgot to mention,” Faliero said with a sigh. “Mr. Cates, rumor has it that someone has bought a contract on you.”

XXIII

YOU’RE GONNA NEED THE HAND

The sun had come out, and I deeply regretted it.

The sky was cloudless and immaculate, a sheet of blue over our heads that took sunlight bounced off the dark, dirty water and sent it right back at you. I could feel my skin getting red and purple, blistering, my brain baking inside my soggy clothes, sending stinking steam into the air around me. For two days I’d been living with Faliero while he and Gall tried to gather up my price for release of Faliero’s money: information on Michaleen Garda, his present location, and anything else they could give me. Two days of queasy, rolling life, the whole world bobbing up and down around me. Everything damp, everything smelling like sewage, the rotten water getting everywhere and hanging in the air heavily, soaking into you. And me reluctant to take off my coat, to sever ties with my lucky charm, so I kept bloating with stink and damp, soaking it up and turning into one walking rash. Faliero said it took yen to live in a place like this, and I believed him. I just didn’t understand why you’d want to.

Faliero’s place was opulent enough, in its way. The platform on top was just a landing point and outdoor space; below there was one whole floor—huge, fifteen rooms and each one bigger than any apartment or crash pad I’d ever lived in—and below that were two floors. The first floor, above water, was relatively comfortable. Below that everything was dark, lit by harsh white light, and damp. And I mean fucking damp. I woke up in my little room—watched, of course, on closed-circuit video that had been inexpertly hidden behind a mirror—in a puddle of myself every morning.

I leaned over the railing and stared down at the inky ocean. For a few feet you could see the city beneath us, the crumbling stone facades from centuries ago, old shit. It was being eaten up by algae and seaweed, disappearing into theory and speculation maybe four or five feet down, the cloudy sea its own atmosphere.

Touma was supposed to do something about this twenty-five years ago, Salgado muttered darkly. Incompetent piker. Twenty-five years ago there were options to salvage Venice.

Why in the world would we save it? Marin snickered. Because it is old? Dolores, I expect a higher level of thinking from you. I’ve got sixty million people starving to death because of you jackasses from the Joint Council, and you want me to spend one hundred seventy trillion yen to stop this pile of shit from sinking?

No, it’s much better spent turning us all into monsters.

I pushed them away, opening my eyes and blinking. I heard steps and glanced at Gall just as Faliero joined me at the railing. The cop looked fresh and comfortable, wearing a new suit of deep purple fabric that looked like it breathed well. He was smoking a real cigarette, making a show of paying me no attention, and I longed for a gust of breeze to send some smoke over to me.

“Do not be fooled, Mr. Cates,” Faliero said. He spoke perfect English with no hint of an accent, which meant it was probably the second or third language he knew. “As I said, it takes money to live here, now. A few years ago the Joint Council decided not enough people remained here for it to be a maintained System Subdepartment. The bribes we paid to forestall that! You would be impressed.” I felt his eyes on me for a moment, and then he turned away. “Then again, perhaps nothing impresses you. Those who are bored, it is said, are boring.”

I ignored this. He was standing inches away and if I’d wanted I could flip him over the railing. He’d probably clip the stonework of the original building his new complex had been built on top of—an impressive thing, from what I could see, one of the few buildings that managed to rise a little above the waterline—and then smack into the water painfully. The trick was to pull your limbs in close and stay aerodynamic, and Faliero looked like a guy who hadn’t had to think physically in years. It was always good to know where you were, to imagine scenarios.

I knew my escape routes. Two days of being Faliero’s guest hadn’t changed my opinion about him or his bodyguard: they’d both shoot me in the head as soon as they were done with me. I kept gazing out at the sea. The whole city was a series of platforms connected by narrow footbridges here and there. Each of the buildings was ringed by a wooden pier of some sort, and boats drifted past us constantly.

“Most of us have a level or two below water,” Faliero went on, impressing me. “That must be pumped constantly to be usable. It is… costly. So you see why I am eager to transact our business.”

I watched a small boat, huge solar panels like wings spread out in the back, inching its way around the corner of a far-off building, smaller and less opulent than Faliero’s. Some of the structures were sad, ramshackle affairs of rotting wood and sprung nails, dirty and even sinking into the water. Some, like Faliero’s, were marble and gilding and looked solid, like they would last forever, being built up one level at a time to stay ahead of the rising sea. All of the exposed roofs, every flat surface, was red in color, like drying blood. It was hard to believe that anyone had ever lived here in numbers, that people had been born here. The air was rotten and the sun reminded me of prison, and the idea of a whole dark city beneath my feet made me nervous.

“Then transact it,” I said tiredly, blinking the dazzle out of my eyes. “And quit talking about it.”

“A bad habit of mine, I know,” Faliero said cheerily. I wanted to put my boot in his mouth, make him taste it. “I will be up-front with you: we have been unable to discover the current location of this person, this Michaleen Garda, you desire to find.”

“An alias, you know,” Gall said quietly over the lapping waves, flicking his cigarette—half-smoked—into the air. My eyes followed it as it sailed down to the ocean and noticed the boat with the solar panels, bumping into the pier just below us and cutting engines. “I pulled a few favors even—but nothing.” He shook his head. “I ain’t giving secrets away when I tell you the SSF is going through some strange fucking times.” He shook his head again and extracted a black cigarette case from his coat. “Anyway, I put together a dossier on Garda. You ain’t gonna like what’s in it. But we can’t tell you where he is exactly now.”

I nodded, eyes on the little boat. A short, thin figure emerged from it, holding a line, glanced up at us, and then bent down immediately to tie the boat off. “Sure, I get it. You’re selling a load of shit, and now I’m just waiting to hear what the price is.”

“Now, Mr. Cates!” Faliero exclaimed. “Please, be calm. We do not come to the table empty-handed. We do have information.”

I watched the figure on the pier, my heart rate kicking up. Off in the distance rhythmic cries rose up on the thick air.

“The market,” Faliero said softly. “You can buy almost anything down by the Campanile, if you have the yen.”

I looked up and squinted at the tower that still poked its nose up out of the water, adorned with the largest Vid screen I’d ever seen. It was peaceful standing there with these two strangers, with the sun baking me to sleep. I thought I might just let Gall sneak up behind me and slit my throat. It would be easier than raising my arms. I flashed to Pickering’s, me on the floor, laughing as the Pigs came in, waiting to be killed and wanting it.

I shivered and looked down at the pier. The distant figure was walking away rapidly. I watched, my heart rate picking up again. I looked back at the boat, which was almost directly below us. I looked back at the person running down the pier.

“We will tell you what we know,” Faliero said smoothly. “As a sign of good faith. Then you can decide whether the information is worth payment. You are known as a man of good judgment and fair dealing. Major Gall?”

I translated this in my head: We will tell you what we know in the hopes that you give up your advantage, and then we can tie something heavy to your feet and drop you into the water. I didn’t hold it against them. I turned around and pushed my hands into my pockets. I saw Gall straighten up and orient on me but ignored him. He was just doing his job, and I had people on the list before him.

Gall stepped forward, producing a small data cube and holding it up so it glinted in the sun. “He was in Europe. Vienna, to be exact. And Dublin, London, and Nuremberg.”

I shook my head. I’d been to all those places.

“SSF has a standard Observe Order on him and any of the aliases he normally uses. But things are a little… disorganized now, and he slipped past us.” He took his eyes from the cube and looked at me. “You don’t know who the fuck he is, huh? Why in fuck are you after this guy?”

I spat, watching the glob plummet into the water. “He left me for dead. And he played dirty, and broke the rules,” I said. I saw my father again, that missing-tooth grin. For a few weeks he’d been closer. Now he was almost gone again.

With a snort, Gall tossed the cube toward me. I twitched but held myself in check and watched it land about a foot away, bouncing once and then coming to rest right next to Faliero’s feet. Gall smiled slightly, turning back to the railing as the older man leaned down to retrieve it.

“We offer no tricks, Mr. Cates,” Faliero said, holding the cube and a small reader out to me. I freed my hands and accepted both, snapping the cube into place and glancing down at the tiny bluish screen. I saw the boat below us in my mind and swallowed back an upswell of panic. He was being honest enough; a bullet in the ear was not exactly a trick.

“You won’t like it,” Gall said as I quickly scrolled through the data, which seemed legitimate. “We can’t get much more on him, aside from the fact that he’s been exclusively using the Garda name for a few years now and doesn’t appear to have shed it, so any current records will be under that tag—I doubt you’ll find anything on him under any other name.”

I didn’t like it. I stared for a moment, shock shivering through me, and then looked up, pocketing both reader and cube and touching my charm for its soothing effect on me. “You’re sure?”

Gall nodded, sending a plume of white smoke into the heavy air. “I’m sure.” He stared moodily into the distance. “Fuck it all.” He glanced back at me. “By the way, rumor is you’re in New York. All the cop nodes are buzzing that you showed up in New York a few days ago. Speculation is you’re either putting up your shingle for work in the old neighborhood, or you’re back to hunting cops.” He looked back at the water. “I hear you killed a lot of cops.”

He didn’t seem particularly outraged. “A few. I still got a bunch on my list. Along with your boss and an Undersecretary someday. Ruberto. Anyone who fucks with me, I’ll get around to.”

Gall smirked, picking tobacco from his lip. “My boss. Ruberto. Fuck, Cates, don’t you know who Ruberto is?”

I shrugged. “Just another asshole who thinks he can make me dance. Anyway, I haven’t been to New York since I got pinched to Chengara, though. Your intel’s fucked.”

He shook his head. “Then someone’s using your name.”

“So, fair payment,” Faliero interrupted, sounding impatient and annoyed. A man unused to being made to wait while his employees chatted shop. “That which is not even yours, Mr. Cates?”

I nodded, turning back to Faliero and picturing the pier, the gap between the ancient building and the wooden walkway, the boat tied off almost directly below us. The Venetian was grinning at me in his fatherly way, a fucking asshole, thought because he could spell yen and didn’t have to wear the same damp clothes every day he was a fucking prince.

I brought out my lucky charm, holding it carefully in front of me, close to my body, for a moment. Through the thin, transparent material, it looked fresh and new, almost exactly as it had the day I’d cut it off Guy’s dead, sunburned body in the Hill Country of Texas. The fingers were curled slightly, but you could see every fine hair, every wrinkle, every splotch of dried blood.

Tossing the hand at Faliero, I spun and pulled myself up onto the railing. I didn’t see any point in hanging around to see how they were going to react. I looked down past my grimy boots; I probably had a five-foot margin between me hitting the water and me breaking every bone in my body on the pier. The idea of that brown, greasy water on my skin, soaking into me, made me cringe, but I had a strong suspicion I was very quickly going to want to be anywhere but up on Faliero’s roof.

“What is this?” I heard him whisper behind me.

“There’s a subdermal chip under the thumbnail,” I said, closing my eyes. “Trace the ping, and you’ll find his servers. Everything’s keyed to his DNA and fingerprints, so you’re gonna need the hand.” I took as deep a breath as I could manage, my chest burning. “You’re gonna want to run now,” I added. I didn’t much care for Mr. Faliero and his pet Pig, but I thought fair warning was in order. “Looks like my friend with the explosives is back.”

“What?”

Mr. Cates, Salgado whispered, you do know how to swim, yes?

It does not matter, Squalor said. He is dead already.

Feeling strangely comforted by that, I stepped forward and allowed myself to drop off the railing. Faliero’s shout followed me down. I kept my legs together, arms at my sides, and looked down just as the water leaped up at me, sending a jolt of searing pain up my back as it closed around me, water pushing up into my nose. Everything went silent for a second as I sank down, an ancient, hidden street somewhere below me.

Above me, the world turned into fire and noise, flames flowing overhead like a second ocean, and I was slammed back into the building beneath Faliero’s home by the shock wave.

XXIV

FLOAT BACK TO SAFETY ON MY BLOATED, BUOYANT CORPSE

Breaking the surface, vomiting thick, black water, the first thing I felt was the heat, close and immediate. I clung to the pier in the desperate hope that it wouldn’t collapse immediately, and twisted around for a moment, snuffling in air and blinking. Faliero’s building had taken a shot; the area of the roof where I’d been standing a moment before was a memory, the charred flower of a stalk of fire that still licked the building. The water where the boat had been tethered was burning, and the pier was collapsing in slow motion, sections of it sinking down under the water every few seconds.

I have been trying to decide, Marin said jovially, if you are incredibly brilliant or incredibly lucky. Right now, I am leaning toward lucky.

Fuck you, I thought. I’d been avoiding speaking directly to them, in hopes of discouraging their presence, but I couldn’t resist. You were dying and they vacuumed your brain into a hard drive, and now you’re the King Worm. That’s fucking lucky.

Hanging on weakly, I sputtered and dragged in wet, foul air. I thought of Marlena, almost felt her next to me, almost heard her snoring. I could smell her, her skin and hair. I saw her face, peeking out at me from the hover as it shot into the air. The expression on her face stayed with me. I knew she’d been horrified, knew she’d been tricked just as I’d been tricked, and I realized Lena had been the first person I’d felt was a friend since Kev Gatz.

I turned my head, water burning my eyes, the slippery, greenish wood of the pier vibrating under my arms like a living thing thrashing against restraints. I froze, blinking; the hooded figure from the boat stood not too far down the pier. The motherfucker had stopped to watch. I stared back at him, rage licking up my arms like electricity, setting my hair on end and drying me off magically. Revenge had been keeping me alive for months, and now it lit me up from the inside like a small sun.

“Motherfucker,” I hissed, dragging myself up onto the pier, which continued to shake and sink, sections of it sliding under the greasy water even as I pulled myself up onto it. The hooded figure startled, hands flying up before he caught himself and spun, launching into a run. Unbidden, my face spread into a grin, and I reached into my coat to extract the piece-of-shit auto wrapped in plastic. I hadn’t killed anyone on purpose in months.

Managing a tortured, staggering gait, I began to run, almost falling over, arms windmilling. I imagined what I looked like, Avery Cates the Gweat and Tewwible, awesome in his deadly skills.

After a few seconds I started to warm up, getting loose, and picked up a little speed as the man in the hood veered to his right and leaped up onto one of the ladders that hung down from the buildings. I considered taking a shot at him, but he was too far for any kind of accuracy, and with me staggering about it would be useless. Already breathing hard, I kept my eyes on him.

When he was halfway up the ladder, he stopped and stretched out an arm in my direction, and I realized he was going to take a few long-range shots at me.

The shots sounded puny at this distance, and I just put my head down and kept running, see if the cosmos wanted to kill me off just yet. I wasn’t back on the rail yet, but it was close. For the moment, at least, I had a clear path in front of me and just one choice: forward or back. I liked that. It brought me back to the good old days of scratching out survival in old New York, everything easy, everything white and black.

One slug hit the pier ahead of me, sending up a spray of splinters, but my new friend had given up and was laboriously pulling himself up the ladder. I was gaining on him. Venice was going to be a hard place to hide from me, I thought. The pier—if it didn’t get sucked down into the water by the ongoing collapse creeping along behind me, the planks under my feet still humming and popping as I ran—was just a straight line looping around the place, with stairs or gangplanks or ladders reaching down from the various man-made islands toward it. Bridges made of rope and wood had been slung in a few spots, looking about as sturdy as spiderwebs, but mostly connected one building to another. There was no cover, no alleys or shadows, the sun falling down onto us like heavy gas and getting sucked up by the black water, everything glare and sparkle, impossible to focus on.

I reached the ladder just as he disappeared over the top. I skidded to a stop, my feet trying to go out from under me on the slick wood, catching hold of the ladder with one hand and bringing the gun up. Panting hard, I squinted up into the omnipresent sunshine and tugged at the ladder, making it shake.

Two, three seconds—and there the cocksucker was, appearing over the edge with his peashooter, thinking he’d have a safe shot down at me. All I could see was a backlit hood. I squeezed off two shots, the plastic sheath around my gun dissolving in my hand, melted plastic burning into my skin, and the head whipped back.

Putting the gun between my teeth, breath whistling in and out of my nose, I leaped up onto the ladder and began pulling myself up, wishing fervently that I’d thought to grab a pair of sunglasses somewhere, somehow. I’d been squinting into the sun for so long I thought my pupils had to be gray and pale by now, bleached.

As my head came level with the edge of the roof, my lungs bursting and my hands rubbed raw, there was nothing for it but to throw myself up over the edge awkwardly, scraping skin off my face as I landed bad and rolled. Spluttering, I sat up, swinging the gun around in a sloppy arc.

This was a much smaller platform, and was obviously used mainly as an entryway to the rest of the building; the city stretched out around it, the sky everywhere. A lone structure stood about twenty feet away, and a sloppy trail of fat blood drops led straight to it, almost lost against the rusty color of the roofing. Great stagnant puddles of water were everywhere, incubating future species and pumping damp rot into the air just in case you wanted to breathe today.

Coughing, I heaved myself up, tearing the plastic bag from my wrist and lurching forward. I could hear myself panting, hear the scrape of my boots and the constant muffled flutter of the wind. I hit the wall of the little shack and rolled to my right, one hand up to shade my eyes and the gun up by my belly. He was almost to the opposite end of the roof, clutching his side and giving it a lopsided roll that would eventually lead him in circles, if uncorrected.

I stretched the gun out and stared down its nearly useless sight. I could have blown his head off at this distance, but I put one into the roof near his feet instead as a warning shot, bracing myself for him to spin and throw some shots back at me. Instead, he didn’t pause or hesitate, running pell-mell for the edge and leaping off. I saw his arms windmilling briefly before he dropped past my line of sight.

Scrambling the last few feet, I threw myself down flat and tried to see everything all at once. It was a straight drop down into the water below, but the shallow outline of a submerged building spelled broken legs. I couldn’t see him anywhere—I twisted my head around, breathing hard, the sun pounding on my neck and pushing me down, crushing me flat.

I felt my chances slipping away. Faliero was probably dead, and while I had my data it didn’t tell me where the dwarf was, only where he had been. If this cocksucker was connected to the midget and he slipped away, it would be months or years before I found the thread again. He might just be some random fuck who wanted me dead… but I had a feeling he wasn’t.

Jump. Marin chuckled. Why not?

I forced myself to stay put and keep looking—impatient assholes would take the leap, letting adrenaline and desperation guide them, but I was fucking ancient and I knew better. It was bitter, but I fucking knew better about just about everything. I stood there with a half-dozen weak, dim voices buzzing in my head and kept my eyes on the water, the glare slicing into my brain and setting it on fire. Two, four, six heartbeats, the wind fluttering around me—and then he popped up, twenty feet out, just a head that sank below the surface again immediately. He popped up again and began thrashing about, doing something he may have thought was swimming but looked a lot more like drowning.

I whirled, lungs on fire, and managed a lurching run back toward the ladder. I half fell down, landing hard on my ass on the pier, the huge yellow sun leaping into my eyes and blinding me. Rolling, I pushed myself up and started running again, running in the uncanny silence of this fucking dead city, one big open sewer where the people were just too stupid to move the fuck away.

As I cleared the building I saw him, shouting and flailing. I stumbled to the edge of the pier and dropped my hands to my knees, sucking in the fetid air and watching him drown. Then I closed my eyes, listening to his choking, phlegmy cries. Fucking hell. You walked up to a man, shot him, slit his throat—you took action and you did it on purpose. You didn’t stand idly by while they fucking smothered.

“Fucking hell,” I panted. My heart was thumping hard in my chest as I straightened up and peeled off my coat. I hadn’t been dry in weeks. Why start now? I dropped onto my ass again and yanked my boots off with two savage pulls, sucked as much of this disgusting, heavy air into me as I could manage, and rolled forward into the water like I enjoyed it.

I’d learned to swim, like I’d learned everything else, running from the System Pigs in old New York; sometimes diving into the East River had been the easiest way to get out from under a pack of cops bent on assfucking you. It wasn’t pretty, but I could move myself through the water without drowning, and that was all that mattered.

When I got to him, he grabbed onto me like I was a vision of the messiah and tried to push me under him, figuring he could float back to safety on my bloated, buoyant corpse. I got my hands on his head and shoved him down, holding him under until he started to get a little weak, then let him pop up, took hold of his hood, and began towing him back to the pier. He just floated there behind me, spluttering. At the pier I pulled myself up and reached down to grab his arm, guiding his hand to the edge of pier and holding him there until he took hold. I got to my knees and pulled him up, rolling him onto his back. His hood had fallen back, revealing his white, round face. I sat there, staring for a moment, and then looked away, panting.

“Hello, Grisha,” I said. He looked worse than when I’d last seen him in Chengara, and he’d had a head injury then. Now he was thin, his face tight against the bones, and wet like a drowned rat.

“Fuck.” He coughed. “You. Let me catch my breath, and I will continue killing you.”

I wanted a cigarette badly. I thought of Gall on Faliero’s roof, all those good cigarettes, blown up. “Why have you been trying to kill me, Grisha?” I managed, dropping onto my back and just breathing, eyes closed. If the skinny little bastard had enough oomph left in him to shiv me, so fucking be it. I’d been stabbed by worse.

“Why?” He dissolved into painful-sounding coughs, the kind that usually brought chunks of bloody pulp up. “Why?” he repeated hoarsely. “You betrayed us. The little fucker explained it to me. When I discovered you were alive, I thought that unfair. You being alive.”

The little fucker. “You mean Uncie Mickey?”

Grisha spat black water onto himself. He looked darker than I remembered, baked. “I don’t know this term Uncie, but yes, Michaleen.” He sat up and spat oily water onto himself, panting. I sympathized. With a bellyful of that swamp, vomiting was a step up. He snorted. “The great Avery Cates, eh? Now we know how you have lived so long. You abandon your friends whenever it is convenient.” His face was dark and impassive. “I awoke bloody and alone in the drop bay of the hover. No Marlena, no you. I took up a spanner from one of the tie-down boxes and crept into the cockpit, where I found the little man, furiously ransacking the console for spare tech.” He looked away and spat again. “He explained all to me, about the great Avery Cates.”

I sat up a little, a sizzle of electricity animating me. “No Marlena? What happened to her?”

Grisha slumped down again, breathing hard. “Do not pretend, Avery. Have at least that much courage.”

I went cold, and began dragging myself onto my feet so that I loomed over the Russian. Staring down at him, I let my hands curl and uncurl. “What did that little bastard tell you, when you surprised him with a weapon in your hand, huh?”

He lifted his head again and squinted at me. The sun had warmed my damp clothes, and steam was starting to rise from us. Behind me, a small secondary explosion made the fragile pier shimmy under us. Grisha considered me for a long moment, not looking afraid at all. “He told me you had betrayed us. That when you had taken the hover as planned, you killed the Christian and then attempted to leave without us. That when we arrived, you killed Marlena and took our hover. That only sheer luck had provided us with another in the chaos.” He nodded. “I told you once that I do not forget, Avery.”

I stood breathing hard over him. I’d been happy to track down the short fuck because he’d betrayed me, because he’d left me to be mechanized, because he’d used the ghost of my father against me. If he’d killed Marlena, too, I was prepared to kill him twice. Without warning, anger swelled up and took hold, and I dropped to my knees and grabbed Grisha by his coat, yanking his face up close to mine.

“You don’t forget, you stupid fuck? You don’t think, either. You get the drop on Michaleen and he spins you a story, you let him walk away, and he’s fucking laughing at you. That little bastard played us all. The only reason you’re alive is you woke up before he got around to killing you.” I let him drop, his head smacking into the wood. He just stared up at me. I leaned back onto my legs, breathing hard. My voice quavered slightly and I swallowed something thick and bitter back. “He fucked us, Grish. And I’ve been trying to pay him back the favor.”

We stared at each other for a few heavy breaths. Grisha hadn’t twitched. He was like no other Techie I’d ever met. “All right, Avery,” he said slowly. “All right. I have no strength left. While I regain strength, explain to me.”

I reached into my pocket and produced the data cube, holding it up to the sun. “I’ll explain it all to you on the way to New York.”

PART THREE

XXV

SURVIVES THROUGH MYSTERIOUS MEANS

Shut up, I thought, and for once, they did.

I opened my eyes and looked around The Star again. The cop with the golden eye looked like she was going to fall asleep; she just sagged there like there was no point to resisting gravity anymore. Mr. Marko—Mr. fucking Marko, who I’d been plotting to kidnap for days now—kept staring from me to the avatar like he was afraid we’d explode if we touched each other. The avatar—my avatar, with my thoughts in its head, my ugly mug on its face—looked short to me, like they’d gotten my specs from some old SSF jacket and a number had been blurred.

Behind them, Grisha stood calmly, autos in each hand. Grisha was a Techie in some ways, but he was a Techie who’d somehow learned how to survive in the world.

Survival is not permanent. You all will wither from the earth.

I shook my head a little and waited a second, but Squalor declined to say anything else.

“Mr. Marko,” the avatar said, sounding like me, like how I’d say it. “Have any light you can shed on this bullshit?”

Marko started to reach into his pockets, and Grisha stepped forward to push one of his guns into the Techie’s back. “Do not forget me,” the Russian said, his face impassive.

“Be careful, Zeke,” I said. “Make me regret being nice to you and I will shave you bald, understand?”

Marko closed his eyes. “I’m just reaching for some equipment.” He opened his eyes again. This was a slightly older, thicker Marko than I remembered, like he’d picked up a few years since I’d last seen him. “To scan… them.”

Grisha glanced at me, and I shrugged my eyebrows. I’d come to trust the skinny Russian, despite the fact that he’d spent a few months trying to kill me. Grisha was a man after my own heart in a lot of ways—my long-lost brother, just smarter than me.

Michaleen. Thinking of the short little old man made my hands clench into fists. I’d found out plenty about little Michaleen Garda while I’d been hunting him—enough to be pretty sure if I ever found him, my chances of walking away from the meeting were pretty slim. But I wanted my shot at revenge just the same. Fair play or no, I had my doubts that Gall had given me everything the SSF had on the dwarf, and I wanted to dig into the police servers and see where it might lead. And so back to New York we’d come, for the one man I knew of that was the perfect combination of plugged in to the SSF databases and terrified of me: Ezekiel Marko.

Marko, I thought, owed me—he’d pretty much left me to die in Bellevue all those months ago. He owed me, and if he didn’t see it that way, experience told me I could make him see it that way. Like a gift from the cosmos, here the motherfucker was.

I looked back at the avatar, tightening my grip on the stock of the shotgun. The avatar was silicone and alloys, circuitry and nanotech. It was fake and controlled, and it was me. I wanted to destroy it.

“You have an Ambient Analyzer?” Grisha said, prodding Marko in the back. “You have multi-signal sweep?”

Marko nodded. “Left pocket. Model TR-998.”

Grisha snorted. “Nine-nine-eight is trash. Nine-nine-six last decent version.”

Marko nodded, smiling slightly. “I know! It was a forced upgrade. They literally confiscated all our originals and replaced them.”

Grisha snorted again. “Sure, I know the procedure. Go ahead, scan.”

Marko reached slowly into his pocket and pulled out a small, thin square of metal that looked like tarnished silver, a small, bright screen embedded on one side. He made some tiny gestures over it with one finger and then held it up, squinting. Behind him, Grisha leaned forward and mimicked the squint, his whole face puckering up as they examined the readout.

Marko swallowed and looked at me. “Holy fuck,” he said simply. “It’s an avatar. He’s an avatar, I mean,” he added, pointing at the other me in the room. “You’re human,” he added, looking back at me.

The cop closed her eye. “I know.” She opened it up again and looked at me, glowing in the dark room. “No heat signature. Ruberto sent it. To kill Marin.”

Marko stared at her. “Well, fuck me then, right? You were going to tell me this, when? Don’t answer.”

I’d never seen a System Pig look so useless and beaten. During the Plague, I’d seen Nathan Happling covered in blood and tied down in a hover after being burned out of the SSF, and he’d been ready to crack heads and call people names. This one looked like she might curl up and go to sleep.

Marko looked at me. “Are you going to kill me?”

I tore my eyes from the avatar and looked at him for a moment. “Mr. Marko,” I said, “you’re too useful to me at the moment. Besides, as far as killing you goes, you’re so low on the list you’ll probably die of natural causes before I get to you.”

He nodded. “I will certainly try to.”

“Kill Marin,” I said, stepping out of my shadows. The whole place was dark and damp and felt like it had been carved out of bedrock despite the machined look. It smelled of sulfur and piss, a place that had been used as a hideout for decades now. My voice sounded muffled and flat in my ears, as if it had nothing to bounce off of, buried under tons of rock. “Good idea, but I’ve got more pressing things right now, so Marin is going to have to wait.”

The avatar frowned. “Wait a fucking sec —”

I brought the shotgun up like a club and swung at it, hitting it with everything I had, the whole thing vibrating in my hands as the gun made contact with my face. The avatar went down like a real person would have, but I’d seen avatars in Chengara take bullets. I’d seen Janet Hense fly around the room taking on a Monk and come out of it without a scratch. I leaped down onto the avatar and brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and again, arms aching and breath searing in and out of me like fire.

At first it played dead, sputtering up its fake blood and twitching limply. My fourth shot rewarded me with a thick cracking noise, and then the white coolant started to bubble up, and the avatar went into some sort of automated defense mode, reaching up and taking hold of my neck with surprising, painful force. A second later it altered its grip and I couldn’t breathe, pain stabbing up into my head. I swung the shotgun down again, smashing the stock into its face, and with a final twitch that came close to snapping my windpipe it settled back into a gurgling, gently twitching pool of liquids. A faint smell of ozone made me gag as I sat back and struggled for breath.

“Oh, fuck,” Marko groaned. “That’s Avery Cates, all right.”

I stared at the wreckage while I sucked in air. The technology was amazing; aside from the coolant staining everything, it looked like a human being, broken and bloodied. I’d felt better, for a moment. But I knew that an imprint of me was still out there. Whoever created this one could pump out another avatar, or a dozen more, any time he wanted. And there I’d be, doing things I’d been programmed to do, and people would think it was me, really me.

“No Marin,” I said, climbing to my feet. “Not yet.” The King Worm was on my list, of course, but Michaleen was first. Michaleen had punched the throttle. Michaleen had left me behind. I leaned against one of the dark, cold control consoles embedded in the rough, clammy rock of the space, breathing hard. “I mean, that’s a fucking year of planning, minimum. What were you geniuses going to do?”

For a moment the cop and Marko stood there, staring. I gave them their moment—they’d been following a fucking android around, after all. Finally Marko looked at the cop, but she didn’t look back. She just stared at the floor, chewing her lip like she was trying to figure out how, exactly, she’d come to this—standing in some old, wrecked data haven, having a conversation with a man she thought she’d met days ago.

“Okay,” the cop said. “Tell him.”

Marko started speaking. It was, as always, one of those plans that would never work, filled with death-defying holes and plenty of blanks where you might as well write in Avery is shot at by an infinite number of people but survives through mysterious means. When I heard Gall’s name I twitched, but I didn’t let Marko finish—I waved my hand, and he shut up instantly.

“Like I said: fuck Marin for now. Grisha and I, we’re after someone else.” I pointed at Marko. “That’s why we came to New York. To grab you.”

His little eyes blinked in the midst of his hair. “Me?”

I nodded. On the floor, the avatar continued to twitch and gurgle. The distant rumble of explosions above was faint but audible, and the console vibrated slightly under my hand. “I’ve been searching for someone for months. I’ve tracked the little shit all over the fucking System, but I don’t think I’ve been within a mile of him the whole time.” I’d realized that Michaleen was probably the biggest fish I’d ever gone after. And I wasn’t even getting paid to kill him. I pointed at Marko. “My mark is connected. I’ve been chasing shadows, so I need data—I need to know what the SSF has on him. They had him in Chengara, so they’ve got a line on him.”

“Avery tells me you are old friend,” Grisha said, grinning at the back of Marko’s head. “He says you will be happy to help us take a look at the SSF databases.”

Marko squinted at me. He looked like a man who hadn’t known what happy meant in years. “How’d you find me here?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t. We came here to use it as a base of operations.” I smiled, spreading my hands. “You found me.” I looked at the cop again. She was still staring at my avatar, chewing her lip. She worried me. She was police, but the general lack of contempt and violence was unusual and made me anxious.

Marko shook his head. “Mr. Cates… I’m not sure…” He sighed. “Officer Krajian and I… we’ve been burned. We barely got out of The Rock alive.” He glanced uneasily at the cop. “And… it’s got to be Marin. He’s got to be stopped. What he’s doing —”

I considered this, looking past Marko at Grisha, who rolled his eyes at me in disdain. I struggled to keep my face straight. “Mr. Marko, you’re telling me you won’t help me?”

The Techie suddenly took a step forward. “No!” He swallowed, bringing his arms down with care. “I’m just warning you it won’t be as easy as plugging in. I’ll have to exploit my way in, find a back door. It might take a little time. And I’ll need some equipment.” He glanced over his shoulder at Grisha.

Marko was a pain in the ass but knew what he was doing, and if he’d been burned, if the Worms were after him as well, then he was motivated. When properly motivated—usually by serious fear of his own demise—Marko had done some pretty great things. I eyed the brick that Marko claimed contained Miles Amblen, supergenius. I’d heard the name, of course—I’d heard Ty Kieth say it enough times—but it didn’t mean anything to me. If a magic voice was going to help us, then so be it. I had magic voices in my head. What was one more?

Maybe everyone’s crazy, Salgado suggested quietly. Everyone hearing voices.

“Don’t mind Grigoriy,” I said, panting as I forced my leg to straighten out despite its emphatic desire to not do so. “He’s been living out of his coat for a little too long. You can relax, Grisha,” I added. “I don’t think Mr. Marko is going to cause any trouble.”

Grisha nodded. “And her?”

I looked at her. I didn’t trust cops. Marko and my… twin had trusted her, at least this far, but I wasn’t inclined to do the same. Before I could say anything or make a move, however, she straightened up, seeming to bloom back to life right in front of us.

“I will help,” she said slowly, putting that horrible Augmented eye on me. “Call me Krasa,” she said. “I’ll help. I have nothing else.” She smiled at me, and I found I didn’t like her smiling. “Maybe I will get lucky and be killed in the process.”

I smiled back. “Sure. Most people who work with me do.”

XXVI

A FUCKING PERSON OF IMMENSE INTEREST

I listened to the low roar of a war going on outside. It was like something deep in the earth below us was struggling upward, ramming its giant shoulders against the bedrock every few seconds. Every now and then dust sifted downward onto us, making me blink.

It still felt like the most peaceful place I’d been in months. It was dark and cool, and for the moment it was just me and the cop, sitting in the dark.

“I worked you, once,” Krasa said suddenly.

I didn’t look at her. “Every cop I meet says that.”

“For a while you were a priority,” she said, voice low. “After the Monk Riots, when all those creepy cyborgs went apeshit and we had to put them all down. Cops started getting killed in New York, and for a year or two Marin had us running double teams on you, trying to track you down.”

Smiling faintly, I shrugged. “Marin made a mistake. I guess he thought I’d just retire and drink myself to death.”

It was strange, having a quiet conversation with a System Pig. She sat stiffly, staring at the floor, her hands limp.

“We got close to you. Flushed you out of some rathole downtown. That was years ago—when things were normal. Now, I don’t even know what it means to be a cop. Most of us aren’t even human anymore. My partner was a great fucking cop, a legend. Used to be very high up, got some very swanky assignments, bodyguarding Undersecretaries, shit like that. Knows people. But he kept fucking up. Was always pissing people off, not obeying orders he thought were bullshit.” She looked at me. “But a great cop. If we’d had a dozen more like him, things would be different. He never thought much of Director Marin. And when all the orders we ever got started coming only from Marin, my partner didn’t like it. He started digging, looking to see what had happened. And what did that get him? First, broken back to captain and assigned to me, to street level. Then he kept digging into things, no matter who warned him… and now he’s gone. One of the best cops we had, just gone.”

With a sudden hum, the lights faded back on. All around us, consoles started clicking back to life, surprisingly loud in the enclosed space.

I groaned, pushing myself up onto my aching legs. She looked up at me, and for a second there was a glint of something alive in her eye.

“If my partner had been there, that day we flushed you,” she said, nodding, “we would have nailed you.”

We stared at each other, each of us with a pleasant, near smile on our faces. As Marko and Grisha stormed back into the room, I watched the light in her one eye fade, like whatever piece of her that had just flared up was burning off, disappearing back into darkness.

“We good?” I asked without looking away from her.

“We’re hot,” Marko replied. “Good is a whole other category. Let me get my bearings. I’ve never been in the fucking Star before.”

I turned away from her to look at Grisha. “You?”

He shook his head. “No. Give us a few moments, Avery, to familiarize ourselves.” He shrugged. “Most of this tech, I would think, was stolen from SSF and other government agencies anyway. We should be familiar with most of it.”

Marko sat down in one of the thin chairs, and I waited for it to collapse under his fleshy presence. He began gesturing.

“Most of the data in here is seriously encrypted—some is even being shredded off the drives as I speak. But access to the comm ports is not restricted, so we can still use this as a dummy terminal.”

“Sometimes when you talk,” I said cheerfully as the wash of jargon swept past me, “I just want to pinch you, you know that?”

He half turned to speak back at us. “I should talk slow and in small words, huh? Basically, you’re welcome to use the tech here as long as you don’t try to touch anyone’s stuff. It’s a hacker’s code—free for all as long as you play by the rules. So I think tunneling out to the SSF servers won’t be a problem. Getting into those servers and finding what we need—that will be the problem.”

I studied the Techie. “You’re surprisingly… happy, Mr. Marko.”

He nodded. “You know what, Mr. Cates?” he said without pausing in his work. “My whole life I’ve wanted to walk away from the job. Ever since I tested into it in the first place. I never wanted to be police, even TA police. I’m ten fucking years old, they give me a test, a bunch of silly questions, a bunch of stupid games, and suddenly they announce I’m going to be a TA in the SSF. So I was. And I have fucking hated it—except playing with the tech. I wanted to ditch. But I was afraid. And now it’s happened—I’ve been forced out—and I’m not dead. I didn’t immediately explode or have an aneurysm or anything like that. I’m free.”

I thought about pointing out how often free turned into dead in my world but decided not to rain on Marko’s parade, since he was busily gesturing at the console before him. Grisha’s wire glasses—still cracked—reflected the dim screens as he followed along.

After a moment, Marko started talking again for no reason I could discern. “Like any self-respecting Technical Associate, I have several exploits carefully set up for just such an emergency. Fake accounts, open nodes, that sort of thing.”

Grisha nodded. “Very nicely done, Mr. Marko.”

Marko smiled as a familiar logo of a globe surrounded by stars sizzled on the screen in front of him. “And here we are: the System Security Force.” He leaned forward. “Okay, we don’t have a lot of time. The network speeds are terrible—looks to me like a major conduit has been cut, probably by the army—and my back door won’t stay open for long. We’ve got maybe five minutes before they start back tracing.” He spun suddenly in his seat and looked at me. “Who are you looking for, Mr. Cates?”

I walked over to him, stepping over my avatar, which had finally gone quiet a few minutes before. “The name he gave me was Michaleen Garda. He was in Chengara.” I grimaced. “I don’t know much else you can search on.” Gall had said he’d been using that name exclusively, that any records would be tagged with that.

“Okay. Chengara was its own data island… here,” Marko said and began humming tunelessly as he moved his hands. “Okay, cross-referencing on the name. Varying the spelling. There he is—crap.”

Grisha and Marko looked at each other for a moment.

“Crap?” I asked. “Is that a fucking technical term, Mr. Marko?” I hated Techies. They always knew things ten seconds before you did.

“Michaleen Garda is just an alias, I can tell you that,” Marko continued, looking back at the screens. “Because the name is an empty reference with a pointer tag. That means his actual file is referenced under something other than that name. But they purposefully filed him under Michaleen Garda in Chengara. Because he must be a fucking Person of Immense Interest.” He pointed at a screen as if it were supposed to mean anything to me. “His actual file is attached to the private physical drive of the Director of Internal Affairs.”

“Marin,” I said, frowning. I glanced back at Krasa, but she was staring at the floor again as if it held the answers to all her problems. “So you have to get into his data.”

Grisha snorted, and the two Techies exchanged another look. “This is the private physical drive of the Director, Mr. Cates. His Prime. The Director. If anything in this world can be said to actually be Richard Marin anymore, it’s his Prime unit. The Prime has a huge database that is physically separated from the rest of the network. I’ve never seen specs, of course, but there are rumors, and the main rumor is that it contains a complete copy of the entire SSF database, plus his own private data. It is not connected to the SSF nodes, so… well, I simply can’t get into it. Not without physical access to the Prime. Which is in Moscow.”

He said this last with the calm serenity of a man who was pretty sure he’d made his point. I just kept staring at him. “You’re telling me Marin has a database no one else can access?”

“This is Marin’s brain. Okay? He’s got hundreds of avatars pumping data at him every second. He accumulates data at an amazing rate. Most of it can just be pushed back at the SSF servers for storage, and he can call it up any time he needs to, but a lot of it needs to be his eyes only, you know? The Prime is always in Moscow because that’s where his fucking servers are, and they are the size of a very large building.”

I thought about this. One way to secure data was certainly to deny any access to it whatsoever. “Marin talks to his avatars,” I said. “Get to it through one of them.”

Grisha and Marko looked at each other again, and Grisha straightened up. “Not impossible, Avery,” he said slowly. “But difficult. Marin is on own network, yes? Proprietary protocol. The avatars are capable of pushing data up to the Prime and accepting data and commands downstream from the Prime. They cannot, by design, push commands back to the Prime, so you cannot somehow forge a packet that would cause the Prime to simply transmit this data to you. Such packets do not exist in his protocol. You can request data through an avatar. If we could acquire a Marin avatar and somehow keep it from triggering its own panic codes—which would remove it from Marin’s network immediately—and then somehow bypass its internal security to induce it to make such a request, we might fool the Prime into delivering specifics on the little fucker.”

“I assume,” I said slowly, “that the Prime is pretty well defended in Moscow?”

Behind me, Krasa snorted, but I just watched Grisha and Marko both break into wide smiles.

“Oh yes, Avery,” Grisha said. “The Prime is very well defended. Aside from well-armed units and fortifications, there is also Internal Affairs, yes? His Worms. Avatars, very fast, very strong.”

“Not to mention,” Marko said with a happy cheer I wanted to smack off his face, “this little war you might have noticed. Moscow’s been under siege for weeks now. They’re fucking eating each other in that burg, they’ve been cut off by the army for so long.”

“I have heard this, yes,” Grisha said, shrugging at me. “I would not recommend going to Moscow.”

I nodded, just to see the look of dismay flash onto Marko’s face. “We’ll go if we have to, but let’s try the easier way first. If we got a Marin avatar, could you hack it?”

The smiles faded, and they looked at each other again.

“We do have Miles Amblen,” Marko said slowly.

Grisha blinked at him and then looked at me. “Probably not, Avery. But we could try.”

“Then let’s try that before we steal a flight to fucking Moscow of all places.”

“Okay,” Marko said, exhaling an explosive breath. “We have Amblen and his lab. How do we get a Marin avatar?”

I smiled. “I’m Avery Cates, standing here with two recently burned System Cops,” I said. “Let’s go get arrested.”

XXVII

STILL STANDING IN DEFIANCE OF THE KNOWN LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

Getting arrested was proving more difficult than I would have imagined.

There was a war on, of course, and the spanking-new army that the Undersecretaries had lavished yen on for the last year or two was building pontoon bridges across the Hudson and East rivers, not to mention bombing the fuck out of what was left of New York. Which wasn’t much to begin with. A year ago I’d been a Person of Interest, number two on the SSF Wanted List behind Cainnic Orel. A year ago getting one of Marin’s avatars to show up to personally—well, sort of personally—put a boot in my ass wouldn’t have been that hard. Now, Marin had bigger problems.

I kicked at a chunk of rebar-sprouting concrete and squinted through the smoke rising out of what was left of The Rock. The night before had been an endless carpet bombing, and I’d spent it huddled in the goddamn sewers with Grisha, Krajian, and Marko, listening to the Techie whimper every time the whole world shivered and rained dust down onto us. Grisha had gone to sleep, breathing deeply, calm and unconcerned, leaving me and the cop to stare at each other from across the narrow strip of oily water that flowed down the old pipes.

“You okay?” I’d asked, shouting over the concussions.

She’d stared at me for a moment like she’d forgotten I was there. “No” was all she said. I wasn’t sure if I liked her way of saying absolutely nothing and staring at walls like they were moving just for her. On the one hand, it made conversation difficult. On the other hand, I’d never really wanted to talk to System Cops anyway.

We’d come up in the morning covered in white dust to find the whole fucking island beat to hell by Ruberto’s forces. As I’d stood there near the old Stadium, coughing up a small ton of dirt, a line of Stormers, four across and shining in their white uniforms, turned a corner and jogged past me, paying me absolutely no attention as they ran.

When I’d turned, I’d found Grisha next to me, stretching and yawning like a man who’d slept well. He blinked and nodded. “Fucking war, eh?” he said with a nod. “Center cannot hold.”

That had been the morning. We’d migrated uptown, finding our way blocked by rubble twice, Midtown decimated. I’d seen downtown torn to pieces by Marin after the Plague, all the old, narrow streets razed, letting sunlight and oxygen into spaces that had been richly rotting for decades, putting down invisible roots. But that had been methodical, one block at a time, flushing the population that had clung to life and tearing down their ancient nests. This was overnight, the core of the city flattened, Cop Central reduced to dust and smoke. I could feel the heat thrumming up from the melted ground through my battered boots.

Across the field of pulverized city, the fucking old church was still standing. The beat-up Monks used to hang around it all day begging, and it looked exactly as it always had, two spires of blotchy stone, delicately carved circular windows above the three massive doors. It was as if the church had been built right after the bombing.

“Just think of all the cops flat like paper under this,” Grisha said, spitting prodigiously onto the rubble. “That must cheer you, no, Avery? Man who once tried to kill every cop in New York.”

“Fucking hell,” I muttered, gesturing around. “There won’t be much for Ruberto to run if he keeps this shit up.”

“The System is big,” Grisha said somberly. “You’re stuck in New York too much, you think Manhattan is all there is.”

I grunted. Marko was struggling toward me, picking his way across the ruins like he had the ankles of a little girl.

“Mr. Cates,” Marko panted, his hair waving gently, majestically in the wind. “I have a suggestion.”

I nodded. “Well, looks like we’re not going to destroy any civilizations today, Mr. Marko, so I have some unexpected time on my schedule.” My lungs burned from the bitter smoke, and I convulsed into a coughing fit, bones rattling and blood stopping up in my head like jelly.

You won’t destroy it, Avery, Dolores Salgado said. Everything must be organized somehow. Tear this down and what then? A hundred little Systems separated by imaginary borders, like we had forty years ago. That wasn’t working out too well, either.

Shut up, I thought back. It was my standard response.

Marko was panting, the fat bastard. Sitting behind a desk while I’d been roasting in the desert. It made me want to pull his card a little, have some fun. “Look, you’re playing by old rules,” he said. “This is a civil war, right? Marin’s avatar or avatars—they’re not going to be worrying about law and order. Maybe a year ago you were a priority of some sort, but fuck, look around—the King Worm doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you. We’re going to have to go to him.”

I squinted at the damn church. The Techie was probably right. I looked him over and then glanced at Krajian. She walked around like the living dead, like the glowing red badge she’d lost had been her soul, now withered and blackened. But she still walked. She put one foot in front of the other and cleaned her gun every night, and once or twice when she’d been spooked by something, I’d seen her display the sort of reflexes that still made me fear the System Cops. My avatar had been impressed with her and had trusted her to a point. But she stumbled around in a daze and gave me one-word answers to every question—what was she doing? She didn’t seem to give a shit about anything, about killing Marin or getting revenge, or anything. When I’d asked her point-blank why she was still with us, she’d chewed her lip for a long time and then sighed, saying simply, “I’ve got nothing else to do.”

I just hoped when bullets started to fly, old instincts would kick in.

“Avery?”

Blinking, I looked at Marko. His face was eager, cheerful—this was, I realized, Marko’s Happy Place. He was support staff through and through, and it didn’t matter much to him really who or what he was supporting. He was happy just to come up with helpful ideas and supply needed information. “Go to him,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. We need to get on the offensive. We know where one of him will be—the front. He’s the general. He’s leading the police, and he can afford to be on the front line getting mauled because he can always send in a replacement, or maybe he’s got a fucking warehouse of himself somewhere in the city. So let’s go to the front—I’d suggest the Battery, where they’ve got some guns set up against the army’s air force. There’s a big concentration of SSF there, because it’s a likely place for a landing. If a Marin is anywhere on this island directing things, it’s there.”

I looked around. It seemed reasonable.

“Makes sense,” Grisha said over my shoulder. “He will be well protected, of course. We may have to wade through many layers of his Worms to get close to him. Once we are close, we have small field-limited Electro Magnetic Pulse device—this is easy, this is schoolboy project—knock the avatar off its feet before it can self-destruct or dump its core to the wire, and then we drag it to our lovely home where Dr. Amblen can help us dissect and reprogram it. Better plan than wandering city, dodging bombs, and starving to death, no?”

I kept my eyes on Marko. I liked Grisha’s mix of tech-savvy and common sense—rare in a Techie—but sometimes he got nervy. I didn’t think I could twist his nose like I did Marko—at least not without getting my hand slapped—but I was occasionally sorely tempted to try.

The Battery had been a melted-asphalt stub at the southern tip of Manhattan ever since I could remember, a patch of glassy black land lapped at by the oily bay water. The Star was almost a straight line south from it, the city rising up to the north like weeds reaching up for the sky.

A few hundred feet from the SSF’s position, we crouched behind a rusting chassis of some prehover vehicle, a baked-on brownish red frame of metal that some enterprising souls had used as a shelter from time to time, leaving behind a faint smell of piss and some of the usual debris—rotting, half-dissolved nutrition tabs, broken knife blades, plenty of old blood almost the same color as the rust. Getting down this close hadn’t been difficult—the cops we did spot on the deserted streets weren’t interested in us. I had a feeling we could get surprised heisting a safe out of a building or murdering some uptown Vid celebrity in cold blood and the Stormers would have just hustled past us. We had a good view of the operation, which was impressive. I’d never seen so many cops in one place—but then it was easy when you could manufacture them.

We were pressed in behind our cover. I could smell Mr. Marko, and I did not enjoy the experience.

The SSF officers were still not uniformed, though they wore armbands with pips to denote rank. The Stormers were everywhere, and most appeared to still be human—smoking cigarettes with their cowls slumped down around their shoulders, squinting in the clear, thin sunlight that spilled down around us. Off to my right and south, far away, a thick plume of black smoke was rising into the air, rippling and twisting as it went. I wondered why so many of the Stormers were still human but figured Marin had started with the officers and would work his way down.

The guns had been erected in a loose semicircle just above the yellowish stain of high tide. They were huge, scuffed gray contraptions, their barrels big enough for me to crawl into if I’d been inclined, and they moved with greased ease, up and down, side to side, spinning on their bases to cover 360 degrees of sky, all in response to the subtle weight shifts and gestures of their operators, who wore black uniforms and heavy shielded helmets. If Ruberto tried to take Manhattan from the south, he was going to get a kick in the balls.

“I don’t see Marin,” I said quietly, the wind in my ears. “But he’s got to be there.” I pointed at a temporary shelter that had been erected just behind the guns, a hard-shelled dome with a single entrance guarded by two identical-looking men with solid, wide builds and wraparound dark glasses.

“Yes,” Grisha said, squinting. “Of course—with a full detail of his Worms packed in there like insulation.”

I scanned the Battery again. “A hover—we’d need a hover.”

“Maybe,” Grisha said. I settled back down and leaned against the steel frame, feeling limp. We were just a few hundred feet from the most SSF I’d ever seen in one place, but there was a strange lack of urgency. It was like we were watching a Vid, comfortable and safe somewhere far away. “But there would be no pursuit, I think. The EMP”—he held up a fist-sized sphere of bright, chromelike metal—“will knock avatars within a few feet off-line for some hours. Even if we prevent the Marin unit from self-destructing and blanking its drives, once off-line it will be deleted from the security database and thus will not be able to handshake with the system again, and will probably dump core and self-destruct when it comes back online—all things we hope Amblen will be able to help us resolve. As a result standard procedure dictates pursuit is unnecessary.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “We still need transport. We’ll need —”

“What you need,” Krajian said suddenly, standing up next to me and drawing two automatics from shoulder holsters, “is a distraction.”

I stared up at her. “What the fuck are —”

She stood there for a moment and then slammed the guns back into place. She glanced down at me, and her face had lost its tightness. I hadn’t even realized how twisted and cramped her face had been until she looked down at me, half-smiling. She looked happy. “Your window won’t be long. Don’t miss it.”

I stood up. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anything about her beyond thirty minutes of combined conversation and the fact that my avatar, a version of me, had trusted her. She just smiled back at me while I stood there, my mind a blank. I didn’t have any words for her.

“This is fine,” she said, and a shiver went through me. “Everything is fine.”

Without another word she leaped up on top of the rusted hulk and then down onto the ground. I jumped after her, coming up halfway before Grisha’s hand on my shoulder pulled me back down. I whirled and had a hand on his throat without even consciously thinking about it.

“What the fuck,” I hissed at him.

“She is going,” he whispered back, choking. “And I do not think trying to stop her will be useful. Think, Avery: We have the EMP, and I do not doubt Officer Krajian’s distracting abilities. We should perhaps try to exploit this.”

I clenched my teeth. “No. We can’t —”

“She is police. Stop her is what we cannot do, Avery. Be ready!”

Everything is fine, I thought, my hands balled into fists.

The cop was striding down toward the mass of cops, her coat thrown back, her head held high. She was a little grubby, but she looked like a cop. She was all perfect, arrogant confidence and wound-up violence, marching down toward them all without a second’s hesitation. She veered toward the shelter and no one seemed to notice her or be alarmed at her approach—here was the cop I’d kept expecting, here was a woman to worry about, to keep in sight. I watched over the rim of our rusted shelter as she strode right up to the twins guarding the shelter. None of the other cops paid her any attention.

Stopping in front of the two guards, she paused for a few seconds, turning her head to look around quickly—getting all the players fixed in her mind. Then, just as the two guards were rousing themselves to tell her to go fuck off, she reached across herself, drew both guns, and shot them both in the face.

“Ah,” I heard Grisha grunt appreciatively.

She spun, putting her back to the door of the shelter and picking off three nearby officers with exactly three perfect shots. The door behind her snapped open, and she spun back again, firing six times into the dark maw of the entrance before throwing herself into a neat roll, coming up on her feet like a dancer a few feet away, guns extended.

The cops still hadn’t reacted. She took out three more with quick, precise shots, her face impassive, her eye glowing.

“Now, Avery,” Grisha said. “Now, Mr. Marko.”

The two Techies stood and moved a few steps away, but I found myself transfixed by Krajian. Everything is fine, I heard her say, echoed by my own voice.

The cops were finally moving, taking cover where they could find it. It was chaos—most of them weren’t sure where the shots had come from, and even the ones who had an eyeball on Krajian couldn’t be sure she was alone.

Grisha was back at my side, panting. “Avery!” he shouted. “She has chosen this! We cannot do this without you!”

I allowed myself to be pulled up and staggered after him, pulling my own gun from my coat. The glassy ground made a strange, hollow thump as we picked up speed, running for the temporary HQ. The world bopped up and down as I limped as fast as I could, breathing in short, painful gasps, trying to keep her in sight as we scrambled. She was still on her feet as we made it to the open entrance, but two more of Marin’s remarkably similar bodyguards emerged as we skidded up to it. They were locked onto Krajian and she might have taken a few to the head, but they didn’t see us and putting one each in their ears was like old habit, reflex, an easy rut to fall back into.

Marko and Grisha pasted themselves against either side of the entryway while I faced outward, watching. Krajian had been winged, blood soaking one sleeve of her coat, but she didn’t seem to notice, rolling a few feet to her left and coming up in a perfect crouch, spitting shots at a group of cops who were hiding behind a tall pile of barrels and crates just above the high-tide mark. Her smile was still dreamy, pleased, happy.

Somewhere nearby, I heard the familiar warming-up whine of Shredding rifles.

“Now,” I shouted over my shoulder, “would be a good time.”

Grisha shouted back, “EMP in!”

There was a soft, barely audible ding from within and then the sound of anything running on current shitting the bed and hitting the ground.

Then, Marko’s voice over my other shoulder: “Three… two… one… ah, shit, here I go!”

His voice disappeared inside the shelter. Good luck, Zeke, I thought, hoping Marko found a space filled with deactivated avatars and not pissed-off human beings. I spied two Stormers creeping up behind Krajian, who was still standing in defiance of the known laws of the universe, and I took the opportunity to help her out by putting them both down, boom-boom, easy at this range and with no one realizing I was there yet.

“Down!” Marko’s voice emerged from behind me. “Give me a hand. Marin weighs a fucking ton.”

“Faster, please,” I shouted, taking a useless shot at the officers crouched behind the supplies. Shredders suddenly leaped to life, but miraculously Krajian didn’t turn into a vaguely pink jelly as their roar screeched around us; they were aiming in the wrong place.

Krajian took the opportunity to limp over to the piled-up supplies. As I watched in disbelief, the grunts and curses of the two Techies emerging behind me, she calmly stepped around behind the cops kneeling there and shot them all in the back, steady shots, rapid and exact.

“Hurry up, now,” Grisha shouted as a hand tugged at my shoulder. He sounded winded. “Time to go!”

I started moving backward. No one had even noticed us. Krajian stepped from behind the shield of the supplies and looked in our direction for a second. I couldn’t see her eye. Her face was blank, bloodied from a gash in her forehead. Her arm hung limp at her side, the sleeve drenched in blood, and another wet-looking stain had swollen up in her midsection. Her skin was white, drained and ghostly, like she’d died five seconds before but hadn’t noticed yet. I imagined we locked eyes.

“Everything is fine,” I whispered, and imagined she could hear me.

I stumbled backward, gun held uselessly before me. The ground in front of her erupted as if underground explosives had suddenly gone off—the shredders finally finding the mark. Just before the shredders cut her into three almost equal pieces, she took a bead on a white-uniformed Stormer running across the field and sent him sprawling face-first with one easy shot.

I turned and ran after Grisha and Marko, who were carrying an inert Dick Marin between them, like hunters returning with their prize.

XXVIII

I THINK OF HIM AS LITTLE DICK

I sat shivering with my back against the cold, damp wall of the old sewers. A small nova lamp gave us some bleak white light and harsh shadows, and the walls shivered at irregular intervals as the F-90s dumped destruction down on Manhattan. My lungs burned, and I was shaking a little, feeling feverish. I kept seeing Krajian, pouring every coming decade of energy and violence inside her into one five-minute spread. I counted twenty-three cops. Twenty-three dead, most from near-perfect headshots. She’d walked onto a field filled with hundreds of cops—officers of her own rank and skill level, Stormers with their shredders ready—and killed twenty-three before they’d taken her down. For those last moments, Krajian had reminded me of Janet Hense, whom I’d admired as sort of the patron saint of hardass, emotionless bastard cops until I’d found out she was an avatar, one of the earliest ones. Maybe. Who knew how long Marin had been quietly grinding his force through his big avatar machine?

I looked down at my avatar. My face was bloated and ruined, slack and damaged. Grisha said it was still functional; they’d put it into a “stasis” mode. I wanted my imprint burned out of it, destroyed, and Grisha kept telling me it was low on the priority list. Looking up, blinking Krasa out of my eyes, I guessed I agreed.

A dozen feet down the tunnel, Marko and Grisha were hunched over our second avatar, the Marin. Three voices drifted back to me—Grisha’s throaty growl, Marko’s soft, rounded words, and Amblen’s artificial, generated voice that still managed to come off dry and unamused.

Marin’s avatar was a perfect copy of him. Or a perfect copy of the avatars I’d already seen—who knew what the hell Marin had actually looked like before he’d been converted into a digital intelligence. It lay there with its chest torn open, a slight grin still on its smooth, waxy face.

I looked back down at the muddy stream running through the old tunnels. I felt terrible—raw and scraped and shivery, like I’d spent too much time out in the open eating nutrition tabs and drinking runoff, gritty water scratching at my teeth. Shortly after our raid on the cops down at the Battery, the army had thrown another carpet-bombing party, and The Star had been turned into a smoldering crater right in front of our eyes, the heat wave intense enough to reach us across the fucking river. So we’d hunkered down in the sewers, the good old familiar sewers, clogged with shit and mud.

I thought of Marlena. I’d gotten used to having her warm body next to me at night, crowding me. I thought of her less and less as days went by, but she still popped into my head now and then. I wondered where she’d gotten to, if she’d even survived. If Michaleen hadn’t just shot her in the head when they’d cleared Chengara and pushed her out the drop bay.

A particularly thunderous round of distant, muffled explosions sent a rain of grit down on us. Marko and Grisha threw themselves over the sliced-open chassis of the avatar, cursing. The Russian stood up as far as he could in the tight tunnel, rubbing the small of his back, and turned to stumble over to me, sitting down hard right in the muddy stream and shaking his head. My ruined avatar lay between us.

“You are maybe hoarding cigarettes I do not know about?”

I shook my head. “I’ve quit, until I can find more.”

He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand that had a thin layer of dried white coolant on it. “Me as well, yes.”

I glanced at Marko, who was staring into the Marin avatar’s guts like it might hold the secrets of the universe. “How’s it going?”

“Ah, not well, Avery. We have managed to keep unit from damaging itself and have disabled internal security. We have been able to reprogram the implanted algorithmic intelligence—Marin—to take orders. This is easy. We cannot, however, do anything with the external security requirements. Encryption I have not seen. Encryption Amblen has not seen. So we cannot connect it to its network, or it will simply be remotely disabled. Useless. Amblen says there are ways to solve this using molecular memories and reverse compression routines, but we do not have the equipment or the power lines or the”—he paused to throw his hands around in frustration—“conditions for such work.”

I nodded, feeling nothing in particular. “So it’s a bust.”

Grisha shrugged. “Not completely. We have the unit in working condition. Another stored personality could be implanted into it, and no doubt Marin who was functional until a few hours ago has useful information, yes? And we may yet find ourselves in better conditions, able to continue trying to crack it.”

I smiled again. “Better conditions? Sorry, Grigoriy, but in my experience the conditions go in one direction: fucking downhill.”

He smiled, teeth white in the gloom. “Yes.” He looked back over at Marko and the avatar. “How does some… thing like that become most powerful… thing in System?”

That’s easy enough, Dolores Salgado suddenly spoke up in my head. As she told me the story, I translated it for Grisha.

“Easy: You take a broken, half-dead failed System Pig and test a frightening new technology that’s pretty much fatal ninety-nine point nine percent of the time on him and make him into the first avatar. Then you put programming into his digital brain to make sure he behaves, and you make him Director of Internal Affairs because you’re scared to death of your own fucking police force and terrified to give anyone that kind of power—but you can secretly control him through his programming. Then he figures out how to engineer a crisis that allows him to suspend his programmed limits. Then he forgets to terminate the state of emergency, forever. Easy peasy.”

Easy peasy, Marin echoed in my head. Unlike what you’re attempting over there, which won’t work.

Grisha smirked. “So what does this creature do with such power? Free the slaves? Make reparations? No. He —”

Marko suddenly stood up and stomped over to us, squatting uncomfortably next to Grisha, careful that his pants remained dry. The ground beneath me shifted violently for a second or two, and more dirt drifted down. Marko’s glasses caught the glare of the nova lamp and appeared to be made of white light.

“It’s, uh,” he said, nodding his head once in a definitive way. “It’s asking for you.”

I squinted at him. “Excuse me?”

“Marin. The, uh, avatar.” He pulled his eyes up to mine for a second and then looked back down at the ground. “It’s asking for you.”

“The fucking avatar,” I said, “is asking for me.”

I looked at Grisha, who shrugged his eyebrows at me. “The fucking avatar is asking for you, Avery. You afraid of the fucking avatar?”

I pushed myself to my feet, leg and back barking, and winced. “Fuck yes,” I said, staggering off.

The avatar looked just like him, or at least as I’d seen his avatars look, except for the torn-open abdomen, the wires and black boards spilling out of it, and the pool of off-white coolant around it. As I approached, it grinned and turned its head toward me in a stiff, jerking motion.

“Hi, Avery,” it said, voice melted and distorted.

I squatted down and reached out, took hold of its glasses and pulled them off, revealing a pair of perfectly normal-looking green eyes. They immediately crinkled up as it grinned at me.

“New model, of course,” it said in the now-familiar gurgle of a damaged Monk or avatar. “The eyes are made from a special polymer we actually can’t make anymore. They’re in short supply, and we’ve been forced to have a strict recycling policy.”

I put a smile on my face. I’d been making my face smile for so long it was automatic and meant nothing. “Whose are these?”

Its grin snapped on in the familiar, sudden manner. “Original issue, Avery.” It cocked its head a little, a spurt of coolant drooling out of its chest. “You know, I was told you were dead. I wasn’t surprised. I am surprised now. Are you seeking revolution, still? Is this another scheme to destroy the world? Tell me otherwise, Avery. Don’t be a striver.”

Do I really talk like that? the Marin in my head said.

“I’m looking for someone.”

Its smile widened. “Who?”

I shook my head. “I need you connected to your central database, your main unit. The Big Iron. I need real-time information, and I need you to be able to reach out your whole long arm and sift it all for me. Besides”—I tapped my head—“somehow I have you in my head, after you tried to process me in Chengara. I think of him as Little Dick. He’s actually kind of chatty and answers questions. I guess he doesn’t have your programmed restrictions in place.”

Marin said nothing for a few beats. If it hadn’t been shielded and torn open, I’d have thought it was listening to its own data stream, collating real-time data from a thousand sources a second. Then it cocked its head again. “Little Dick. That is amusing, Avery. But I know what you’re going to ask me. You are sadly predictable—after our last transaction—in which I honored our agreement, I’ll remind you, you spent much time and energy prosecuting revenge against me. Revenge is in your genes. And I can tell you even without being whole that I don’t know where they are.”

I nodded. “Sure. But you have the whole SSF. You have every fucking System Pig in the world. Every SSF database, scan check, snitch, and paid informant. When I have you connected, and persuaded, you can find him.” I reached out and put its glasses back on carefully. “I like you better this way.”

“Even if you somehow communicate successfully with my Prime, Avery, and somehow compel me to help you—which would require a degree of ruthless efficiency I have yet to observe in you—there is no guarantee that I will be able to locate him.”

With a grunt and a loud pop from my knees, I got to my feet, ducking my head. “Director, you don’t know everything. And I know a little more than you think.”

It twitched, its whole chassis undulating in one quick movement. “Why, Avery—incompetent, yes, but as always, full of surprises.”

I walked over to the two Techies. “Well, boys,” I said. “Pack that fucking thing up and let’s make some plans. We’re going to Moscow.”

Marko looked up at me with a pained expression. “Ah, shit.”

XXIX

AN ESTIMATED LIFE SPAN OF UNTIL THE UNIVERSE CONTRACTED INTO A HEAVY DOT

“What is that smell?”

As was becoming my standard policy, I ignored Mr. Marko and kept the avatar between us. Marko had a dispiriting habit of stepping into my line of fire at awkward moments, so I liked bouncing him off obstacles.

“Come,” Grisha said without looking around. “I know of a place.”

I hugged myself tighter against the endless wind and tried to remember the last time I’d sat in a heated room, comfortable. Shit, before the Plague. Me and Belling and Glee in the back room at Pickering’s, sweating our way through a bottle of gin and collecting gold badges. Then one day I’d been snatched to Newark, and I’d been freezing, burning, aching, and bleeding ever since.

I glanced at the avatar. It was grinning. Motherfucker couldn’t feel cold.

Stay strong, you’re doing god’s work, Squalor muttered.

I shut my eyes and pushed them all back, re-creating my mental bubble. Even then I could feel them grumbling, pressed against its glassy walls, watching me. I opened my eyes again and took one last look around.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” the avatar said in my voice. “Very old, those walls.”

I didn’t look at it, keeping my eyes instead on the red brick walls across the square, impressive enough except for the two big gaps where the bricks crumbled away, like a shell had exploded, revealing white rock beneath. Hauling two man-shaped lumps of alloys and silicone, one functioning and one basically luggage, halfway around the world hadn’t been easy. The hardest part was listening to this one prattle on and on, liking the sound of my voice.

I didn’t want my imprint functioning. The idea of another me… of me, floating around out there, separate and becoming alien with each passing moment, was unacceptable. Grisha and Marko had argued hard against it, but I’d forced them to rip the brains out of my avatar. We’d kept the physical unit, though; I didn’t care about that. They could make all the dummies that looked like me that they wanted, and I wouldn’t care. It was the me inside that made me angry.

Dick Marin was famous, so we’d switched his imprint into my avatar and we’d been carting the Marin unit, empty and lifeless, around in the large metal cube that floated behind us, its mini-hover engines sputtering and jerking, making the cube drift wildly, a few inches up, a few to the left, then settling down again. It still made almost no noise as it floated, though.

Shivering, I stamped my feet into the crusty yellowed ice that coated the cracked pavement, looking around. It was an impressive sight, so much open space being wasted. Five hundred people could live on this space, I thought, though why they’d ever want to escaped me. Moscow was more or less deserted, as far as I could tell anyway. I looked to my right.

“What’s that?”

It was a ruin, the remnants of a colorful facade hanging onto the walls for dear life. Several intact spires sprouted from it, topped with half-destroyed domes that rose to a strange point at the top.

“A church, Mr. Cates,” the avatar said. I admired the workmanship on the avatars—this one actually looked bruised and beat-up, like a real human being that looked just like me had taken a few shots. Its mouth didn’t work so well anymore, so it spoke with a rubbery tone. “We keep meaning to tear it down. The locals get ornery when we try, though, so it’s been easier to just leave it.”

I looked around the square, thinking, Locals? We’d seen signs of people actually living in this frozen hell, but I still refused to believe it.

Fuck, it was cold. I stared at the ruined church for a while, an inky outline against the rotted ice of the street and the rotted atmosphere beyond, all subtle shades of yellow, some of it almost white. Russia made me think fondly of Chengara, of the endless baking sun that stayed with you even at night, radiating out of the sand and stone.

I looked back at the ruined red walls. An impressive tower sprouted up across from us, soaring up and ending in another jagged edge. From what I’d heard the Russians hadn’t gone into Unification willingly. “So this is the center of the universe,” I said. “Why here?”

The avatar cocked its head slightly, as if listening intently to someone else, someone invisible. “It’s a fortress, of course,” it said. “It’s been here for a very long time, Mr. Cates. And —” It paused, a slight smile pasted on its fake face. It was strange to see my own face and body doing things I’d never do. I kept wanting to smack myself. “There’s no reason to believe it won’t be here long after you’re gone,” it finally finished, turning on a sudden, unfortunate grin. “Besides, it’s got a nice history of autocracy.” The avatar’s smile inched up a bit on the annoying scale. “That’s —”

“Don’t,” I said, holding up a hand, “fucking define it.”

The avatars were made by the System, so naturally they were a fucking nightmare, filled with all sorts of technological chains, overrides, and surveillance. All the System Cops, their meat bodies long ago burned in huge, nighttime incinerators, were not much more than robots in a lot of ways—the brass could flick a switch and shut them down anytime they wanted to, or beam commands into their virtual underbrains and make them march up and down, whatever. With Amblen’s help, Marko and Grisha, muttering to each other and sweating like pigs, had taken my avatar apart and put it back together again with a new brain—still a slave, but a slave to us.

“Come!” Grisha shouted, further away than seemed possible. “It is not safe to stand here, in the open.”

“Seriously,” Marko echoed. “What is that smell? It’s like… like…”

“Quickly!” Grisha shouted, giving the Techie a shove.

I fell in behind them, the avatar doing likewise. The crusty ice cracked and crunched beneath me as I limped through the abandoned streets. Moscow had the look of a deserted corpse, licked clean long ago.

You are an insect. I am an insect. Scuttling about. But you and I have time. You killed me? Yet I am here. Time. We are masters of it, and thus can do anything, if only we have patience.

I closed my eyes for a second. I had a working relationship with two of my ghosts. I wished Squalor would stop popping up to preach every half hour, snippets of the Mulqer Codex whispered in my inner ear, like a line of ants crawling up my auditory nerve.

I imagined the glass walls again, me on one side, everything else on the other. After a few blessed seconds with only the sound of our feet tearing into the snow, I opened my eyes again and turned my head to look at the Kremlin as we crawled past it. Yellow ice like scum clung to the roof of the building rising above the walls.

We’d started smelling Moscow before we’d seen it; a char smell that clung to everything, greasy and thick. Getting back into Europe hadn’t been too hard—I’d done it often enough now—especially with everything gone to shit with the war. Getting from Europe to Moscow had been a fucking death march. The old rust bucket SSF hover we’d boosted out of Liverpool had never been intended to operate in this kind of cold, and three hours out of Dover it had frozen solid and dropped us just outside of Helsinki, just a few miles from the front line of the civil war. The army had swept through northern Europe, Marko’s weak, staticky Vid reports told us, and then hit the snow and the gathered might of the SSF Northern Europe and Russian departments, and there things had stayed for weeks now, everyone cheerfully freezing their nuts off with half a mile between them, each line spread so thin we’d had no trouble at all slipping through them. No trouble stealing one of the army’s fancy troop transports, either, a huge hunk of metal with tracked wheels like a tank that chewed up the ice and moved at the stately pace of twenty miles an hour, at best, without heat. Crunching through northern Europe, we’d come across more abandoned matériel than seemed possible, pristine tech and vehicles just left on the sides of roads like presents. Grisha had driven, and I’d had to send Marko up front every now and then to clear the frost from Grisha’s eyes.

Now we’d made it, and I thought we might freeze to death before we got any work done.

The avatar liked to remind us that it had an estimated life span of until the universe contracted into a heavy dot and crushed everything down to infinity, and I liked to remind the avatar that we were working on changing that. So far all I got was that fucking smile, so goddamn familiar, even on my face.

Grisha led us along the river heading west for a bit, then turned north again, circling around the walls of the Kremlin. He turned onto a wide road, filled with rotting barricades from riots past, everything encased in layers of cloudy ice. The buildings on each side were gray and brown boxes, mostly windowless, some half-destroyed by explosions. This wasn’t age; this wasn’t time. This was recent, and violent. Moscow hadn’t been a happy city not too long before. Now it appeared to be an empty city, though Marko assured me that Marin’s Prime, step one in an exhausting chain of events that would lead me to Michaleen Garda so I could strangle the old man, was still in the Kremlin. You didn’t up and move a server farm the size of an entire neighborhood just like that. At least not with half the SFNA deployed a few hundred miles away.

Most of the buildings sported complex graffiti, usually in red paint. One stylized group of words repeated constantly, several times per wall. I studied them as we crept past. To me they looked like neogeon. They were paired with drawings, surprisingly beautiful and detailed anatomical studies of human body parts: a severed head with veins and tendons dragging beneath it, eyes up and mouth open as if in an expression of dismay; a foot, long white bone jutting from the ankle and tapering to a jagged edge; an eye, muscles and nerves trailing behind it like a squid. The art was all fresh and skilled. The fucking Ivans liked their art.

“Hey, Grisha,” I shouted, my voice echoing grandly down the canyonlike road. “What does this mean?”

Moscow was huge but felt tiny. Every move you made came right back at you, amplified, like we were under a glass that moved with us, keeping us exactly in the center.

The skinny Russian stopped and spun on his heel, storming back toward me, face red, snot running freely from his nose as he crunched and struggled. When he was just a few feet away, he raised his hands.

“Be quiet, Avery,” he hissed. “Fucking hell. It is not safe to draw attention to us.”

I looked around: ice and air, dead concrete. The whole city was made of frozen rock and empty spaces, it was just a bad, burned-fingernails smell held together by habit. “Grisha,” I said easily. “Don’t tell me what to do, okay?”

Grisha stopped suddenly, his breath panting out of him. He stood there for a moment and then spun away again. “Quickly,” he muttered, his voice carrying easily on the thin air and bouncing off the buildings. “Quickly.”

We crossed a wide, gray stone bridge over the river, the wind howling and underscoring the creepy silence of this almost-abandoned city. Where exactly an entire city of people disappeared to when everything around it was fucking wasteland, I didn’t know. I walked as fast as I could, feet sinking into the crunchy ice and leg aching, and caught up with Grisha, sending Marko fading back to join my avatar—my face, dented and mashed from our first meeting in The Star, with Dick Marin’s brains inside—with a look.

All the buildings were massive, huge square hulks rising up on either side of the street, all with complex, fancy facades, columns and fluting, and intricate masonry everywhere. They’d all been brightly colored at one time, with flecks of yellow and red paint still clinging here and there, but time had worn them down to a near-uniform gray and brown. The streets were paved and in good shape, the only sign I’d seen so far to prove that this city hadn’t been abandoned decades ago. But I’d been to Newark and Paris; I knew what a dead city looked like. Moscow was too clean, too neat. Buildings hadn’t collapsed, and there weren’t fields of debris and trash the size of city blocks. It was sterile, clean and neat, as if everything and everyone had been plucked up and teleported somewhere else, instantly. Burned out. The ice clinging to every surface, dripping down like teeth from the vacant windows and cornices.

The streets were too wide, too. They didn’t offer any cover.

As we crossed another huge, empty intersection, the distinct noise of gunshots startled us. After the absolute lack of noise, the three shots froze us all in place, heads whipping around just in time to see a group of people, distant to the north, like tiny shadows flitting past us. They kept coming and coming, bursting from behind one monolithic building and disappearing behind the next. As we stared, a small group stopped and stood in the street, staring back at us.

“Fuck,” Grisha growled, rushing back toward us. “Move, move! Come, come! This is not good, Avery. Not good.”

He turned and marched off, and Marko, the avatar, and I slowly turned to follow him. The dim figures were too far away to be of immediate concern, and I had no desire to actually meet people who lived in this dead fucking city. My nerves were sizzling, and I spent the next ten minutes twitching this way and that, spinning at every sound of cracking ice and almost murdering Marko every time he cleared his throat. The Techie was thin and sweaty, and had been for days now, looking like some sort of prototype of himself.

Outside an abandoned cube of a building behind a sagging chain-link fence, Grisha stopped and flagged us to follow him. Over the narrow and uninviting front door the awning still held rusting letters: . In my mind I pronounced it rock-hila.

“This was hotel,” Grisha said as he pulled the creaking, rusted door open. “Back when there were visitors to Moscow.”

Back when there were people, Salgado suddenly whispered.

I took his word for it as I stepped inside, smelling mildew and rust. Maybe before the civil war there’d been visitors, but now with the System of Federated Nations Army locked down a few hundred miles away across the snowy desert, it was just an empty box without power, heat, or charm. And the SFNA was making sure it stayed that way.

We entered a small foyer of some sort, a grimy-looking desk front and center. Spikes of ice hung from the desk, evidence that in the warmer months our hotel leaked like a gutshot. The walls were all peeling green wallpaper, brittle and frozen, and the floors were bare concrete with a million tiny tacks in place where carpet had once been. I realized bitterly that I was going to have to keep my boots on all the time, my feet turning into white mold within them. Getting shocked out of sleep and running down here onto this would be a fast way to infection and amputation.

“Close the door!” Grisha snapped as the floating cube struggled in behind us, scraping the walls and making my skin crawl. “Quickly, we must explore and fortify.”

I turned and walked deliberately back to the front door, slamming it shut. It banged loosely and jumped back at me. It was a good, heavy metal door, but the lock had been torn out and there was no obvious way to secure it. “Who are you worried about getting in here, Grisha? Those nice folks we saw running?”

“The good people of Moscow, yes,” he snapped. “Come, let us explore. We must find a strong room.”

Before I could say anything else, he strode purposefully out of the room, his rough bag slung over his shoulder, his fingers poking out of his black gloves like sausages. I looked at Marko, who stood blinking by the desk, running his hands over the console embedded in it as if it spoke to him.

“You have a spot welder kit?”

He nodded, eyes locked on the dead console. “Of course.”

I took two steps and grasped him by the shoulder, spinning him around roughly, getting a spluttered grunt as a reward. “Seal up the door, Zeke. Be useful. That should be your fucking motto, you know. Be fucking useful.”

I found Grisha in the next room, which was a small office, windowless and tight, crammed full of a desk and a large black cube from which cables snaked to and from the walls.

“Why don’t they just bomb the shit out of Moscow?” I wondered aloud. “Why starve it like this, freeze it out? A couple of hours of dumping ordnance on it, and it’s not here anymore.”

Grisha was looking at the walls critically. “They wish the Marin Prime as a prize, maybe,” he said. “Or maybe the SSF big guns keep their hover fleet at bay, who knows?” He stopped and looked at me. “You have a plan, Avery? For getting to the Prime? You get in, we find a way to access the data, we find the midget. Very good. But how?”

I wanted a cigarette in the worst way, even if it made my lungs bleed. Instead I rubbed my cold hands together. “We’re going to walk in.”

Grisha leaned forward, squinting at me. “Using Marin avatar? Will not work, Avery. Even assuming we can reconstruct damaged security modules in unit—which I doubt since even with Dr. Amblen’s help we barely managed dirty hack we did in New York—there is no doubt it has been listed out of commission and is no longer on trusted list. We will not bluff our way past automated systems that way.”

I nodded. Blue light began flashing into the room from the foyer, and I could hear Marko muttering angrily. I knew if I could hear him clearly, I’d be forced to hurt him. “We’re not going to bluff automated systems. Marin’s got a weak spot, whether he realizes it or not.” I stopped to beam a smile. “The Technical Unit.”

He blinked. “Yes?”

I started to pace. “Marin’s been afraid to process the Techies into avatars, right? Afraid they’ll lose whatever spark humanity gives them that lets them innovate and hack, right?”

Grisha nodded slowly, eyeglasses shining and making him look blind. “Yes. The Technical Unit is largely unprocessed.”

I snapped my fingers. “Social engineering, Grigoriy. The Techies in the fucking Kremlin are humans, and they can be conned. Fuck all his security. We walk in, looking like a bunch of hardass System Pigs, dressing the part, with Director Marin himself in tow, and we fucking snow them under. The usual tap dance—you’ll be cleaning toilets in Chengara this time tomorrow, you piece of shit; you want me to contact your supervisor? Shit, we’ll have them crapping their pants, and they will let us in.” I smiled, putting it on my face like a tool. “They will guide us to his office.”

“Perhaps,” Grisha said slowly, nodding. “We will need luck in who we encounter, but… perhaps. Marko with his SSF contacts can maybe do some research for us, find out who is on duty here and who might be a wise choice for confronting. Then, maybe.” Grisha raised an eyebrow and looked at me. “Who will… populate the avatar? Marin himself?”

I scowled. The light suddenly stopped. “Fuck no. Who knows what tricks that bastard has up his sleeves. He stays out of his own unit.”

Very wise, Avery, Marin chuckled. Very wise.

Grisha’s face folded into a slight, subtle smile. “You?”

I held up a finger. “I thought I made it clear that my imprint be destroyed, Grish—if I find out —”

Grisha put up his hands, his smile blooming. “I tease you, Avery. It is easy.”

I kept my hand up. “Do it again, Grisha.”

His smile faded. “I apologize, Avery. If not you, and not Director Marin… ?”

I lowered my hand slowly. “We’re going to ask Dr. Amblen a favor.”

Grisha cocked his head, considering, and opened his mouth to say something when a hollow, heavy booming noise filled the air. We heard Marko’s startled squawk from the other room. I exchanged a look with the Techie and retreated back into the foyer, where Marko was slowly backing away from the door, which was shaking and vibrating, the fresh welds still glowing in places. He still held the small gun in a limp hand at his side.

“That’s a good weld, Zeke,” I whispered.

“Thanks,” he whispered back. “What is that noise?”

From outside, a sustained howling had begun, a crowd of people shouting at the same time. It was loud and angry and unintelligible, and it almost seemed like the noise was battering the door, a living thing pounding on it.

“Grish,” I said slowly, reaching into my coat and pulling out my gun.

Grisha nodded for no reason. “The war has been hard on Moscow,” he said quietly. “Moscow is starving.”

“Who the fuck is out there?”

He shrugged, wriggling out of his bag and pulling out his own gun, checking it professionally. I loved Grisha. I was going to marry him. “The good people of Moscow,” he said. “Cannibals.”

XXX

I WAS FOURTEEN AGAIN

“Wait,” Marko said, slipping his torch into his pocket. “They want to eat us?”

“That explains the smell,” my avatar said.

That explains the smell, Marin echoed in my head.

“Come,” Grisha hissed. “This hotel is good place, but I have not been here in a very long time. We must secure it. I recommend we remain on the first floor and block the escalator and elevators. Not functioning, of course, but still access points. Come!”

A whole city cut off from the rest of the System by an entire army. Nothing in or out. The undead Director of SSF Internal Affairs and his zombie staff sitting in a fortress with dozens of emergency generators underground, keeping him warm and sizzling on the network. Everyone’s last stash of nutrition tabs gone weeks ago; people sent out to find supplies disappeared forever. We’d gotten in, of course, but then the army’s whole idea wasn’t keeping small parties of assholes from getting in or out, it was all about keeping huge shipments of supplies from getting in, or a huge server farm from getting out.

The limitations of meat, Squalor whispered, a worm in my brain, chewing. Better that they pass, so that the saved may inherit the earth.

I checked my gun quickly and felt myself up for ammunition. “Grisha, give me the layout, fast.”

He didn’t hesitate as he dug through his bag. “Five rooms on first floor: this entryway, small office in rear you have seen, to left and right are escalator and elevator banks, and also behind us supply closet. Closet has two windows, high off floor.”

I nodded. “Fuck the soft spots. Back in the office and make a choke point.”

He shook his head. “You are good at slitting a single throat, Avery, but if we do that we will only be able to fire one at a time and we will be overwhelmed—the door to the office is too wide. We do not know how many are out there.”

Eyeing the office door—wide enough, indeed, for two or even three people to push through in a pinch—I listened for a moment. It was one blurred noise, rising and falling, like fingernails on my spine. “No more than five hundred,” I offered, blank faced.

“You take one bank,” he panted, standing up. “I take another. Mr. Marko takes the storeroom, and we sincerely hope the welds on the front door hold.”

Marko spun around. “What the fuck? You’re kidding, right?”

Grisha stepped forward suddenly and slapped Marko across the face, a hard backhand that spun the Techie around, making him stagger until he found the wall to catch him.

“You have a gun, you fucking complainer,” Grisha shouted. “Make use of it.”

I found I was smiling broadly. My heart was pounding, and I felt like my thoughts were lasered in, ticking along at a million miles a second. It had been a while since I’d had some easy, guiltless fucking carnage. I’d felt complicated for years. It all fell away, and it was just me, a gun, and the determination to survive. I was fourteen again.

I spun and jogged over to Marko, who was leaning against the wall rubbing his chin with a look of such stupid amazement on his face that my cheer doubled, swelling inside me. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him with me, making for the storeroom door with him limply in tow. I kicked the door open and peered inside: rows of shelves reaching up to the ceiling, the two windows grimy and dim squares of feeble, icy light. Anyone coming in would first have to smash what looked like thick, robust panes of glass and drop a good ten feet to the floor, where they would be momentarily blind and off balance.

“Look, Zeke,” I said, forcing myself to speak slowly. “In this case a choke point—the door—will work; it’s a narrow opening. They’re going to hit the floor shaky and blinking. They’re going to have glass in their hands where they steadied themselves.” I took his arm and raised it up, bending it at the elbow, positioning it. “Be relaxed, accept the recoil. Take your time—they can only come at you one at a time. Don’t be fancy, just hit them. You don’t need headshots, you don’t even need to kill them. Writhing bodies on the ground will actually be to your advantage, and despite what you might think, most people when shot—even in the fucking leg or arm—go down like pussies and start screaming. It hurts. Okay?”

Marko’s eyes were wide. There was a particularly loud boom against the front door; and he flinched, then nodded, taking a deep breath. He looked down at himself and fumbled in his pocket for a moment before bringing out the Roon I’d let him have. Wasted on him, of course, but it wouldn’t jam, and the smooth action would help him stay calm. “Okay. I think.”

I took the gun from him, just reaching out and plucking it from his grasp, which worked more often than you might imagine. I popped the clip out and checked it: full. Slapping it back, I handed it to him. “Make sure you have clips. Don’t forget to reload. Don’t wait to be clean out; pick a moment of slack when you can pause for ten seconds. Don’t forget to reload, okay?”

He nodded again, accepting the gun. “Okay. I have five clips in my pocket.”

“Make sure you can reach them. Make sure they’re the only things in that pocket. Be calm. Take your time. Don’t be picky.”

“Okay.”

I nodded and stormed away. “I’ve got the bank on the right,” I said. “If you get swamped, scream.” I glanced at my avatar, grinning at me with Dick Marin’s evil energy. “You don’t fucking move. Stand in front of the door, be an obstacle.”

Dick winked at me with my own eyes and stepped forward.

Can’t eat me, the Marin in my head said.

“Can eat me,” I reminded it.

As we passed each other, heading for the opposite elevator banks, Grisha and I exchanged a stiff, curt nod. Breath steaming from me like exhaust, a light grit crunching under my boots, I stepped out of the foyer into the elevator and escalator banks. Two grim, dented brown elevator doors were on my left, pocket doors that slid into the walls. I ignored them. Even though it would be trivial to open the door once inside the cab, getting from the second floor down into the elevator cab and then triggering the emergency release on the doors would be slow and difficult. If I were starving, half-mad, and ready to tear some people apart for sustenance, I wouldn’t be in the frame of mind to go through that kind of trouble, not when I could scramble down the wide-open escalator.

It was a risk, but I moved past the elevators and stared up the escalator. It was new looking, free of rust. It looked like you could just fire it up, scrape the ice off, and press a button, and it would begin to silently and endlessly rise up and sink down forever. Each track was wide enough for two people to stand abreast or one person and their luggage. I didn’t think this leaky hellhole was the sort of place to have a few Droid bellhops to haul your crap up to your room. The tracks rose up on a fairly steep angle, leaving a lot of dead space on the sides. I dashed around the side of the far escalator and pressed myself into the hollow formed between the rising escalator rail and the rear wall. Crouching down, I’d be completely out of sight to anyone tearing down the steps until they were in my line of fire. It was risky; if any of them proved to be calmer than expected, they might make their way down the elevator shaft and hit Grisha and Marko from behind, or if they were faster than expected, I might miss one pouring down the escalators.

I bent down as much as my back would allow and gripped my own Roon, forcing myself to wait. A professional, one that lived past his teen years, learned how to fucking sit still and make like a rock. It was usually the main difference between survival and death.

I made like a rock.

The noise outside had taken on a different flavor, echoing distantly with the tinge of murder, as if the crowds of people had floated up into the air and hung there, snarling and dripping sizzling spittle down onto the street. They were everywhere, all around me, encased in concrete and harmlessly terrifying.

I imagined my glass shield in my head, even though no one had spoken inside me in a long while. I didn’t dare hope that they might have gone away, been flushed down whatever drain stole my memories and made it possible for me to sleep. I concentrated on my breathing, counting seconds and trying to slow myself down a little at a time, fighting the urge to suck in gasps of air.

Up above me, unseen, there was a hollow crash, and the howling was suddenly all around me, echoed back and forth, bouncing off the walls. I took a deep breath and put my finger on the trigger, blinking once, deliberately.

The first two came down the escalator in huge bounds, three steps at a time, landing on the floor in front of me at a run. They were just blobs, wearing heavy winter coats that were like gigantic, blubbery exoskeletons, ripped and torn in places. I exhaled and squeezed the trigger twice, and all I got were two silent puffs in the backs of those pillowy coats. The two Howlers went down, belly flopping onto the rough floor and skidding a few feet.

Three more were right behind them, windmilling their arms and screeching as they invaded. I took the first two bam-bam, right in the square of the back, but the third—not even noticing the bodies on the floor—almost made it around the corner before I managed to orient on him and catch him down low, knocking his feet out from under him.

I reminded myself of my advice to Marko: Don’t be fucking fancy. I didn’t have time for fancy.

One more, wearing what looked like several suits of thin clothing, maybe every stitch he’d been able to find. He was skinny, his head looking way too big for his body as he stumbled to a halt at the bottom of the escalator as he almost tripped over the bodies lying there; a quick shot and he dropped, weightless, floating to the floor.

A wave of them then, six at once, all bunched up as they leaped downward, howling, crashing into each other at the bottom. There were two men in the bubblelike winter gear, seeming to float along, and four women in multiple layers of rags, their skin gray, their hair falling out. As they bunched up, startled, at the bottom they whirled to face me, snarling. I fired twice out of reflex, knocking the two men onto their asses, blood spurting up from the floor in a weak fountain, and then I hesitated; the stretched, skeletal faces of the four women were scabbed and stained with dried blood, their teeth greenish and jagged.

One of the girls shouted something, and they launched themselves back toward me. I forced myself to stand still, hitting each one in the abdomen, their howling transforming suddenly into a keening scream. I found I preferred the former but didn’t have time to think on it anymore: Three more Howlers were already racing down the escalator, the lead one screaming something and gesticulating at my hiding place. I skipped forward, spinning to run backward just before they vaulted over the side to land right where I’d been, each of them filthy, dried blood all over their faces and the fronts of their ragged clothing. Their fingers were blackened and curled into permanent hooks, and none of them looked particularly hearty or energetic as they struggled to their feet after the fall.

The first one up took a second to find me as I glided as best I could in a wide curve away from them, lining up with the escalators. He was older, maybe my age, with a severely broken nose and a thick white beard under all the scabbed residue. His eyes were dull, landing on me and just sitting there like bugs, no spark of surprise or joy or hatred. They simply registered me and stayed with me. He said something, and the three of them came at me with no art, no creativity. They just staggered at me, running dead on, and I hesitated. I watched them run, mouths open, tongues lolling. Then I saw shadows up at the top of the escalators, the next round, and I put three bullets in them, the old man dropping just four or five feet away from me, his feet sliding out from under him as his face exploded.

Staring at him, I dropped my clip and fished a fresh one from my pocket. I realized everything had gone quiet.

I looked up, bringing the Roon up with me. I had a clear line of sight up the escalators; all the way at the top was a knot of them, gray and rail thin, some enveloped in the huge, puffy winter gear, some just wearing every scrap they’d found, looking like scarecrows. My breath piled out of me in thick white jets as we stared at each other. I counted fifteen.

Fucking hell, I thought. I’m about to be fucking swamped.

One of them took a slow, careful step down. She was tiny, short, her limbs stubby. She would have passed for a child from behind; from the front she passed for about a century old, with a leathery, tanned face and limp, gray and white hair that had grown wildly, frizzing out at the ends. She had the same dull, empty eyes as the three I’d just cut down, eyes that just sat there, dumb and implacable.

She said something in that blurry language. Russian, fucking hell—no one could be civilized and speak shit like this.

I didn’t move or say anything.

She squinted down at me, gestured with one arm toward the bottom, and repeated herself. Then she closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. When she popped them open again, she stabbed a black finger at the floor.

“Bodies,” she said in her reedy, weak voice. It sounded like boh dees.

I blinked and glanced around again. One of the trio who’d just come for me was dragging himself toward me by his fingers, leaving a thick trail of blood behind. Everyone else was still. I took a step back from the escalator and nodded once.

“Da,” I said. Grisha had taught me that much. I held up five fingers, and the crone nodded.

Well, it’s easier than bracing you, Marin chortled inside, seemingly loud and crisp after so much interior silence. Hell, Avery, you just fed these folks for a week.

This is modern man, Squalor chimed in. This is the disease in action. When we are all freed, there will be no need for food, and thus no need for sin.

Five of them came, limping down the escalators while the rest stayed up top, staring at me listlessly. The silence was complete, suddenly. As the five reached the floor, I began backing away on a curve, angling my way so that they stayed in front of me until I was in front of the doorway back to the foyer. They each took a corpse, getting their hands under their shoulders, and began dragging them back up the escalator. As each made it back to the top, a new recruit would glide down and retrieve one more.

When they finally got to the crawling guy, he’d managed about six inches. They just grabbed him under the shoulders like everyone else, and he let out a long, raspy moan, then fell into silence as he was dragged up the escalators. When all the corpses had been collected in this way, the rest of them just turned and walked off, disappearing into the shadows of the second floor. I considered going up there to make sure they’d left the building but turned instead and headed for the foyer, where Grisha was already standing.

“They just faded back,” the Russian said. “They just gave up.”

I nodded. “Let’s barricade the elevator banks,” I suggested, moving my finger from the trigger to the side of my gun. “And set up in these three rooms. Though I think our friends the Howlers are going to have a little party these next few days; we shouldn’t get much trouble from them.”

Grisha spat on the floor. “Yes, unless there are other Howlers, eh?”

I shrugged. What could you do? “Come on. We’ve got to shave Marko’s head.”

Grisha blinked. “Why? Will not help with Optical Face Scan.”

I nodded, heading for the storeroom, where Marko still stood in the doorway, his gun up and ready. “Just in case some human Techie in the Kremlin recognizes the infamous Ezekiel Marko.”

Marko jumped a little and turned, momentarily pointing the gun right at me. I sidestepped a little and reached out, pushing his arm down.

“No one came through the windows,” he said, sounding tired. “I didn’t shoot anybody.”

I winked. “That’s okay, Zeke,” I said. “I did.”

XXXI

THEY ALWAYS CAME BACK

Moscow was the future.

The city hummed around us like an open line, background static and white noise. You could wander the city for hours and not see anyone, not even a sign that anyone had ever been there, and then suddenly turn a corner and find dead bodies, blood frozen around them like melted red plastic, neat fillets cut out of them, their organs gone.

Eventually, when Marin had converted everyone into his little puppets, this would be all the cities, just empty corridors. Would Marin even need everyone to be turned on and moving around? Or would it be easier to just have everyone shut down into power-saving mode? Or stored on the Big Iron, nothing more than programs?

Shit. It would be like an eternal prison, locked down inside yourself. I was on the rail too much as it was, but at least I wasn’t a damn Droid.

We crept along the frozen river. It would have been better to arrive in a hover, like the most powerful… thing in the System actually would, but getting a hover into the wasteland between Ruberto’s army and Moscow was not within my feeble powers. So, we improvised. The only thing I had going for me was the as yet uncharted stupidity of your average highly trained System Techie.

As the Kremlin came into view, a collection of distant spires and walls on top of an icy white bump in the landscape, I stopped suddenly, cocking my head. Grisha, Marko, and Amblen—inhabiting the Marin avatar with a sullen lack of grace—caught up to me, all of them looking like new and better people in the expensive suits we’d scavenged from stores, all abandoned and icy, their wares left undisturbed since, I assumed, you could not eat them. My own avatar, empty and dead, we’d left in the hotel. I found myself picturing it, staring up at the ceiling with my ruined eyes.

“Problem, Avery?” Grisha asked, looking around with his sharp eyes.

I pushed my eyes around the landscape, the rotting buildings and snow-choked streets. There was nothing there, no movement, no shape that shouldn’t be there. But I’d… heard something? Smelled something? I wasn’t sure, but my underbrain had twitched. I’d learned to listen when that happened.

“No,” I finally said, turning back. “I’m imagining things, I think.”

We started off again, soft crunching and wind, four black figures. I felt small. Moscow, so huge around us. The System so huge around Moscow. And both decaying, falling apart. As we stepped past a row of collapsed buildings, rubble and ice, I wondered if anything I’d ever done—Mitchell Kendish, Squalor, the cops in New York, the Plague, everyone directly or indirectly murdered by me—mattered. If we all weren’t going to be erased, not only killed but plowed under by a million years of slow growth, sandpaper winds, and dry rot turning everything we do into an indistinct mush. I’d been plotting for years, with nothing to show for it—Pickering’s gone, Glee gone, everyone I’d been trying to kill for years still moving around as they pleased.

Grisha faded back to match my pace. “I see it, too, Avery,” he said. “We are being followed.”

I startled; I hadn’t seen anything. “Fucking hell, Grisha,” I muttered. “Where were you ten years ago? We could be running this whole world by now, you and me.”

“Ten years?” He smiled slightly. “Ten years ago I was in tiny office, designing nanocircuits. I never knew what they were for—I received only as much spec as needed for the part.” He shook his head. “No, I would not have been of much use ten years ago.” He cocked his head. “Three years ago, perhaps. You do bring a certain something, do you not?”

I allowed myself a smile. “A tolerance for pain, so far, seems to be my only marketable skill.”

He shrugged. “Do not underestimate that. But it is your inability to cheat which makes people follow you.”

Bullshit, I thought.

Bullshit, someone echoed in my head.

“Marko,” I said softly. “Any ideas who’s back there?”

He pressed a finger against the bud in his ear, a habit I hadn’t had time to break him of. No matter how often I’d slapped him, he still did it and might as well have placed a bright sign on his head saying earbud with an arrow. “I’m getting a single-step pattern. One person, I’d say. Light-footed, knows how to move quietly. Not heavy. One fifteen, one twenty pounds. If I had —”

As I looked at him, a pink puff appeared briefly behind his right shoulder. He jerked and cried out, hitting the icy ground hard.

I reached out and took hold of Grisha’s shoulder, dropping down onto the ice and pulling him down with me. “Sniper!” I hissed. “Stay down!”

Grisha hissed something into the snow I didn’t catch, wriggling to flip over onto his back. “Worms?” he panted. “More of Marin’s little robots?”

I started to shake my head when I noticed that Amblen, in Marin’s avatar, was still standing. As I pushed myself toward him, reaching out, the side of his coat silently exploded into a jumble of frayed threads. He didn’t even flinch. Dick Marin’s body stood there in the street like a statue, a slightly constipated expression on his square face.

“Down!” I hissed. “Dr. Amblen, down!”

“I’ve been shot,” Amblen said. “But I don’t think it matters.”

I finally hooked a hand onto his ankle and pulled, sending the avatar crashing to the street. “Override code sixty-forty-tenner-forty-alpha,” I panted. “Stay the fuck down.”

“As you suggest,” Amblen whispered back.

I rolled onto my back and pulled out my automatic. “Mr. Marko, you okay?”

“No, I am not okay,” he complained, his voice strained and tight. “But I won’t bleed to death immediately, which experience tells me is all you fucking care about at the moment.”

“Good,” I said. I pictured the street, the river, our little piece of the city. The collapsed buildings we’d just passed gave way to a group of semicollapsed ruins, but the first floor offered decent cover and small chance of being buried alive in crumbling masonry. The silence that smothered us when we stopped talking was immense, thick, like a gas. “Can you move?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, damn you, you fucking… fuck.”

“On our left, building with no facade,” I whispered. “Stay down. We need cover. Amblen, override code sixty-forty-tenner-forty-alpha, stay down and follow us.”

“As you suggest,” Amblen said amiably.

We crawled, tensed for the next puff of snow or fabric or blood that would be our only indication of another shot fired. The sound of scraping ice and our breathing seemed incredibly loud as we wriggled over the ice and rubble, finally finding shelter behind a semicrumbled wall of cinder blocks and the last vestiges of a stucco facade. I lay there for a moment, leg aching, and stared at the thin trail of pinkish blood Marko had left behind.

You see how existence is a wheel. You put death into the engine, and death comes out of the engine. You have killed so many as they begged for their lives, no doubt this is how your own end will be. Now or later.

I closed my eyes. Shut up, I thought.

As usual, when one of them woke up and started talking, the others were roused. I didn’t understand it. They were walled off—I couldn’t examine them or see their thoughts. I could speak to them, in a sense, and they to me. They could answer questions, and usually did. And I couldn’t stop them from talking to me. I could ignore them, push them back until they were so far away I could almost pretend they weren’t there, but they came back. They always came back.

Well, Mr. Cates, I can’t say I’m surprised. You’re a quarter mile from my seat of operations! You didn’t expect I’d never find you, did you?

Shut up, I thought again.

Death, the first one whispered, is not inevitable. But you may have missed your own path to immortality.

“Avery?”

I opened my eyes and looked at Grisha, whose face had the familiar expression of worry. I was losing my mind. I didn’t blame him, and struggled to concentrate. “Sitting here waiting is a death sentence,” I said. “I’m going up and out to take a look. You stay here and keep these two alive.”

“Now you want to keep me alive?” Marko panted.

“There may be more than one,” Grisha advised. “They may have spotters. You may be shot the moment you poke your head out.”

I nodded. “Maybe.” I gestured at Marin’s avatar. “He was standing there for what, ten seconds? Sounds like a single shooter reloading a precision weapon.”

Grisha chewed on that for a moment and nodded. “Yes. But there may be others without precision weapons, yes?”

I nodded back, checking my auto. “In that case, no problem.”

I stood up and ran my eyes over the interior of our little shelter. Fragments of a second floor were still in place, supported mainly by the rubble beneath them. I saw daylight not too far above that and judged I could get up there, even with my leg feeling like someone had jabbed an ice pick into the nerve. As I moved upward onto a small mountain of stone and rebar, I heard Marko coughing behind me.

“Well, shit,” he spluttered. “This plan’s going perfectly.”

I found the climb up easier than I’d expected—the rubble was at a decent incline and was stable enough that after a few wary seconds I threw caution to the wind and just started pushing myself up, my leg complaining. I was standing on the scrap of floor left on the second story in just a few moments, and on the side of the building, miraculously, was an almost perfectly preserved balcony, crusted in dirty ice. I stepped onto it slowly, senses straining for any sign of collapse, and then crouched down so that my eyes just cleared the railing. I had a good view of the road we’d been following and the river. I scanned carefully, blinking the glare out of my eyes, and then froze.

Unbelievably, a single figure was making its way rapidly along the road, jogging with something long and thin in its hands. I stared for a moment, wondering at the existence of someone skilled enough to even get a shot close to us at that range but stupid enough to come jogging up the road in plain view.

No one on my payroll would be that stupid, Marin said in my head. I had no idea how old the imprint of the King Worm in my head was, how recent its information was.

“You’re right,” I whispered.

A second later, a creak of the blasted roof above made me freeze.

“Don’t move,” she said.

The voice was so familiar it was as if months hadn’t passed since I’d last heard it. I saw her face again, twisted up in horror, in regret, in emotions I wasn’t even sure I could identify. My heart lurched into a furious pounding. I opened my mouth to say her name, but my tongue was too thick and I just hung there.

“Drop the cannon.”

I doubted Grisha or Marko could hear us below. I could make noise, but she might get hurt in the ensuing chaos. I set the automatic down on the balcony floor, wind whipping up and spraying ice dust around me. I swallowed what felt like a rock in my throat. “Marlena,” I said, my voice raspy, unwilling. “You’re —”

“Shut your fucking fake mouth, you fucking robot,” she hissed. I heard a hollow popping noise and then the unmistakable hum of something powering up. “They told me what you were. They told me this would shut you down pretty good.”

Here we go, I heard Dolores Salgado whisper. Clench your teeth, or you’ll bite your tongue off.

I started to say something else when she smacked something against my back and pain ran into me like electric current, setting every individual cell of my body on fire.

PART FOUR

XXXII

STARTING TO BLACKEN ON THE EDGES

I awoke to a sensation of movement—rapid and bumpy, my stomach lurching against gravity, my shoulders biting into tight straps painfully. A sizzling echo of pain remained under my skin, dull and fading but hinting at something terrible, as if whatever had been used on me had singed my cells, my atoms.

It took me a moment to realize that my eyes were still closed.

I was inside a small vehicle, something I’d never seen before. We were ground level, the landscape streaking past the windows that lined the sides. The interior was divided into two halves separated by a sturdy-looking metal cage; my half contained two hard chairs outfitted with straps and handcuffs—one of which was my current perch—and nothing else aside from the smell of piss. The front was filled with a huge bank of controls, all backlit blue and red, glowing in the dusky light of the interior as if the vehicle were burning within, and a single seat situated in front of a round stick that turned smoothly from side to side. Sitting in the seat was Marlena.

I studied her for a moment. She looked as I remembered her—skinny as hell, without a curve to her name, but graceful in her way, compact and minimal. I hadn’t seen her since the hover had lifted off from Chengara, leaving me lying there about to have my brains sucked out of my skull, her face leaning out over the edge of the hover’s hatch. I could picture her in that moment, her exact expression, and I still thought it was completely raw shock and horror. She hadn’t wanted to leave me behind. Her ink looked like shadows clinging to her skin.

“What the hell is this thing, anyway?”

She didn’t react. After a moment she said, “Ground transport. Solid fuel cell.”

Inefficient, Squalor grumped in my head. Ancient tech.

I turned my head to watch the world rocketing by. “What is this, the fucking dark ages?”

She shrugged, her shoulders moving under her skin. “Hovers have a tendency to get shot down these days. Things are pretty hairy out there, Plastic Man. Once we hit the shore I was given this thing to stay under the radar, you know? Right now the fucking government is knocking everything out of the sky.”

“So Marin gave you this?”

Hell, I didn’t even know we had stuff like this! How long have I been off loop, anyway?

“Fresh out of the factory. I think there’s only five or six of these in the whole System. It’s all-terrain—you can drive underwater in it if you have to. The Pigs are cranking out some seriously amazing shit because of this war.”

I waited a few seconds to see if she was going to start talking, but she just moved the wheel a little this way and that, course correcting. “Why?” I finally asked.

She didn’t answer right away. The off-rhythm thump of the ground beneath us was soothing. “Because you’re a fucking robot that looks like someone. Because you shouldn’t be shopping his face around. And because they’re paying me a lot of money to scoop you up and offered me a full walk, my file deleted.”

She said it all in a bland, flat voice.

“I’m not an avatar, Marlena.”

Sure you are, Avery! Marin barked cheerfully. We all are!

She snorted. “You’re a fucking Droid. A new model of Monk. They…” She paused for a second or two. “They ripped his brain out of him, and they made… you.”

She’d been sold on me as an avatar, and I didn’t think there was much I could say from my present position to change her mind. Of course I was dead—just about everyone processed into an avatar died. Surviving the experience almost never happened.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand perish, Squalor breathed.

Almost never, Marin agreed.

“Who hired you?” I said instead of arguing.

“Marin’s people,” she said immediately. “They’re paying us an immense amount of money to gather you up. It hasn’t been easy. Don’t you stay in one place for any length of time?”

“Not anymore. I don’t have any place to stay.”

We rode along in silence for a while. I mulled it all over—that last night, the chaos of the riot, the hover lifting off without me, the underground lab, Ruberto’s soldiers busting in. I let the atmosphere in the cabin settle down, get calm and smooth, and then asked her my question.

“Do you know where Michaleen is?”

“That fucking piece of short shit,” she spat immediately. “No. Wish I did. Filled Grisha with sunshine about you betraying us, but I knew better. Set that hover down in Mexico and said he was stepping out to check on the displacers. I gave him five minutes and went out to maybe beat the truth out of him, and the motherfucker was gone, like a ghost. Like he’d dug a hole and climbed in. Fuck, if that son of a bitch showed up in front of me now, I’d slit his throat twice without thinking. He killed you. Just like he’d pulled the trigger himself.”

I tested the straps a little, seeing if they had any give. They were pretty advanced, though, giving when the vehicle lurched and I was carried along by momentum, but refusing to move at all if I just tried to lean forward. My hands were bound in the usual silicone bracelets I was already almost free from, twisting my wrists out of her sight. I tested the straps again and realized their variable give was tied to momentum—if I tried to move slowly, carefully, they gave a little, and I could spool out enough slack to duck under.

“I’m not dead, Lena,” I said with an involuntary grunt. “I’m not an avatar.”

One hand popped free from the bracelet, and I let it drop to the floor of the cage.

“Keep saying it,” she replied.

I squinted at her through the cage, making sure her eyes were locked on the instruments and the windshield, and began to slowly stretch out the straps, pushing them away from me with care. Keeping my eyes on her, I ducked my torso under one, then the other, letting them slide back into the seat. Bending down a little, I freed my feet from their strap and sat up again quickly, trying to stay still and stiff as if I were still strapped in. I traced her shoulders with my eyes, remembering what she smelled like, sweat and something sweet underneath I’d never been able to place.

I wasn’t going to hurt her if I could help it.

You can’t help it, Squalor hissed. Insects destroy. Consume each other.

I ignored him, ignored them all, chattering away. I sat still for a few moments, looking around. I was free, but I was still in the cage. As discreetly as I could, I put my hands into my coat, feeling around, wondering if she’d been lazy about patting me down, too. She hadn’t left me my gun, but she’d left my blade in my boot—she’d rushed, maybe worried over voices in the rooms below, maybe anxious to get me in the cage before I came to. Maybe, in the back of her mind, knowing that for people like us having something—anything—to defend yourself with made all the difference. I slid it from the boot carefully and sat up again slowly.

Her eyes flicked to me and then away. I cursed under my breath and tried to brace myself just as she wrenched the wheel all the way to the left, sending the vehicle into a spin. I was torn from the seat and slammed against the side, cracking my head against the roof, the blade flying from my stiff fingers and rattling around on the floor.

Suddenly, we’d stopped, silence smothering me, and I sagged down onto the floor, one leg hooked on the second seat painfully. She looked back at me, and for a second our eyes were locked on each other. I thought, suddenly, that I saw something there, some softening, some flicker of doubt.

Then she leaned forward and slapped a big red button on the control panel.

Instantly, my whole body lit up in orange, ragged pain. Everywhere my skin touched the interior of the vehicle, I sizzled and spat like someone was running live current into me. My teeth clicked down hard onto each other, my tongue slid back into my throat, and my lungs seized up like rusty motors.

“You’re half-smart,” Marlena said, unstrapping herself and turning around to watch me twitch. “This heap’s designed for transporting avatars. I’ve been working this for a few months now, shacking up at the facility when I’m not out snatching a list of artificial folks they’ve lost track of. I’m getting good at it. That’ll fry your systems good, but you’ll come back online in a bit good as new. And when you come back online, Averybot, you’re going to be secured again, and I suggest you just enjoy the ride this time, unless you want to go through this again.”

The facility. It didn’t sound hopeful.

I couldn’t respond. Black spots appeared before my eyes as all my muscles felt like they were going to snap at any moment. Marlena was in my line of sight; she stared back at me, her face tight and annoyed. After a moment she leaned over and slapped the red button again, and I gladly shut my eyes and passed out.

I woke up strapped into my seat again, but without the sensation of motion. I squinted my eyes in an attempt to focus; Marlena wasn’t in the front half of the cabin. I was alone in the vehicle, still sizzling in perfect silence, my whole body feeling bruised. I considered trying to move, but my muscles felt like they’d been melted into glass, brittle and liable to snap. I considered speaking, but my tongue felt like it had swollen to about six times its normal size.

I considered just sitting still and seeing what happened, and liked that option.

Disappointment and frustration filled me like pus. I wondered if Marko had lived, where Grisha had gone. I’d been so close, so goddamn close. Standing right outside his fucking house, ready to go in and get some answers.

It drained away a second later. Fuck it. It would have ended in disorder and disappointment anyway. With me half dead and everyone else all the way dead. With nothing changed. With Dick Marin still on top of the pyramid, with me still on the rail, with no idea where Michaleen was.

With a soft hiss the back door of the vehicle was pulled open, and a moment later the straps snapped open and retracted, letting me sag forward in the seat. Hands reached in and pulled me out, rolling me roughly out the door and onto my back, where I lay on the hot, dry ground, the thick air pushing down onto me in a terrible, familiar way. Eyes closed, I could feel the sun on my face, burning, and I imagined myself turning red already, starting to blacken on the edges.

I opened my eyes and struggled onto my belly, raising my head up. I squinted through the clear, painful glare and saw it, the train tracks half buried in sandy dirt, the arrival pen still holding the weirdly eternal bodies of several Stormers, their white uniforms tattered and flapping weakly in the wind, their silicone skin and alloy bones untouched, perfect in their ruin.

“Welcome back to Chengara, Averybot,” Marlena said. I turned my head to glance back at her and saw the stick, the Taser, coming down. I shut my eyes and made sure my tongue wasn’t between my teeth.

XXXIII

AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT UNTIL A FEW MOMENTS AGO

I opened my eyes slowly, imagining I could hear the seal that had formed over them breaking open, a tiny ripping sound. My vision was hazy at first, all painful bright spots and murky shadows, but after a few blinks the small world around me clarified.

Dick Marin—or a version of him or maybe the real deal, the Prime; who the fuck knew?—sat in a simple metal chair across from me, smiling. I imagined he’d been sitting there for hours with that smile in place, just a holding pattern, taking up a tiny percentage of his total consciousness as it monitored this one node on the network a thousand times a second.

“Hello, Avery,” he said.

He was wearing a snazzy black suit, the fabric shining in the dim light, tailored perfectly to his body. His hair was cut severely short and parted with razor accuracy, and his sunglasses were custom jobs, thin and delicate, wrapped around his temples like a visor embedded in his skin. In his cold, plastic hands he held a prop: a digital clipboard, thin and gray, its screen of digital paper shimmering.

I tried to speak and found my tongue too swollen at first. I worked it around, looking for some saliva to get things moving.

Marin waited patiently, his eager smile seeming to encourage me. As I struggled I looked around—we were back underground, I was sure, based on the sealed feeling of the room, the texture of the half light around us. Something about the way the air smelled, too, reminded me of those terrible moments after my failed attempt to escape.

“You’re looking well, Dick,” I managed to mumble.

He laughed, the same sudden release of noise I remembered, and then he stopped, just like that. “My goodness, we’ve gone through a lot of trouble to get all of you Averys back under control. I’m glad to see your sense of humor made the transition across the singular divide.”

I nodded. “I get it,” I slurred. “I’m an avatar, right? I just think I’m human.”

Marin cocked his head. “You doubt it? Of course you do. You’ve always been an egotist, haven’t you, Avery?” He made a show of referring to the clipboard. “Let’s see. You’re one of thirty-two released into the wild. We’ve retrieved twenty-seven and destroyed four.” He looked back at me, his smile adjusted down a notch. “That leaves you, the last one. And of course, you’re the unit we need.”

I blinked. “Released by who?”

“By your esteemed former boss Ruberto, of course. He obtained your unfinished imprint from this facility—where you died, by the way, just a few hundred feet from here—when he took it by storm in the action last year. We have since reclaimed this facility, but he did claim a great deal of valuable intelligence from it. One such asset was you. He created thirty-two of you and sent you all out to cause disruption—your one definite skill. Some to try and assassinate my Prime, some to simply set off bombs and recruit other troublemakers, assassinate high-ranking police, et cetera.” His smile brightened a few clicks, lighting me up. “You all thought these plots were your own idea, of course. You’re skilled at what you do, Avery, and you were difficult to contain. We even had to consider and engage freelance talent.”

He’s lying, Dolores suddenly whispered to me.

Always am, Little Dick confirmed, sounding cheerful. You just never know about what.

I nodded slowly. “Marlena.”

Inexplicably, Marin made a gun shape with one hand and pointed it at me. “Exactly. We didn’t think much of her, either, but talent is short in these desperate times, and she certainly got the job done. I assume she had… intimate knowledge of you and exploited it. Took the job cheap, too, apparently as a grudge. She didn’t appear to like the idea of you as an avatar.”

I tried to shift in my seat, but I was tied down to it too tightly. My feet and hands both burned with the phantom fire of limbs long gone numb. It was a much better job than Marlena had done on me. “So why am I the special one?” I asked. I didn’t know what Marin was doing with this you’re-an-avatar bullshit, but the ache in my hip and the razor slice I got every time I took a deep breath argued against it. Having few other options, I thought I’d play along a bit, see what the King Worm spat out at me.

He leaned forward a little. “Something odd happened to you during processing, didn’t it?” he said quietly. “Because of data corruption and severed transfer lines, there were actually several imprints of you on file, which isn’t supposed to happen. You are the only unit created using the first imprint. The other imprints, numbered two through seven, are degraded copies and contain varying degrees of neural information describing the personality and data of ‘Avery Cates,’ ranging from sixty to ninety-six percent completeness.” He glanced down at his clipboard. I wondered if these tics were on-purpose showmanship to act human or if they were remnants of the time, decades ago, when Marin had been a real live person. “Two of those partials were functional enough for Ruberto’s use in creating his Cates units. His people apparently didn’t know how to use refining algorithms to round off the missing spots and used the imprints as is, with even their date and inception stamps intact.” He looked up at me again. “Now you, you’re from imprint one. Imprint one scans out at one hundred and fourteen percent complete. Which is, of course, impossible.” His grin disappeared. “My Techs didn’t even know the Amblen Rating went beyond one hundred.”

I tried to grin experimentally, and it seemed to go well. “So I’m smarter than you thought?”

Marin let out another sudden, barking laugh, his expression unchanging as he opened his mouth and threw his head back. It was disconcerting—a blank, unhappy expression and this harsh, braying laugh. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and he snapped back to staring at me blankly.

“No, Avery, you’re not smart. Look where you are! Dead, and you didn’t even know it until a few moments ago. In my power simply because I ordered it. No, smart is not the concept I was looking for. You are… saturated.”

I nodded. “Fuck you, Dick. I’m not an avatar. So you’ve either made a huge mistake here, and boohoo for you if you did, or this is the weakest trick you’ve ever tried.”

“Why?” he said immediately. “Because you feel pain? Because you bleed? Because you feel human? Hell, Avery—you’re programmed to feel these things. I could program you to feel like an elephant, if I wanted.”

A cold spike sent ripples through me. It might be. I might be an avatar, convinced by programming and firewalled data that I was human. My heart lurched into motion, pounding in terror—was I a fake? A copy of a copy? A Monk without even that last shred of humanity left to him? A fucking puppet?

My heart pounding. Even that might be faked, a data stream feeding into a processor loop, sending operation codes to activate subroutines and functions.

That’s all you are now, Squalor suddenly whispered at me, sounding almost sane for a change. That’s all any of us are. The only difference is the hardware.

Don’t believe it, Salgado repeated. A trick. A technique. If Squalor were coherent, he would tell you this is impossible.

I am coherent, you terrible woman, Squalor huffed. I see more clearly than you. Certainly it is not possible. The human mind is infinite. The intelligence and personality matrix is artificial and will not accept an imprint of over one hundred percent. The human mind has endless capacity. That is why I rejected Amblen’s designs and integrated the brain into my design.

I closed my eyes and imagined what Gleason would have said, her soft, sarcastic voice so real I wondered for a second if I had her inside me, too, or if maybe I’d finally gone bonkers, resurrecting everyone inside me: Oh, Avery’s going batshit, she would have said. Avery’s cracked under the pressure.

I opened my eyes and put a blank expression on my face. I nodded. “Go ahead. Prove it to me.”

He didn’t move for some time, just staring back at me with a half smile on his face, perfectly still. I wondered if he was conferring with his Prime or gathering data from hundreds of other Marins throughout the System. I could ask him about Michaleen, but I had no way to compel him to answer me or to verify that the answer he gave was accurate. And I didn’t like him knowing anything about me.

He stood up suddenly. “I don’t need to prove it to you, Avery. Your belief in your own reality is immaterial to my needs. You’re back here as the only inmate of Chengara Penitentiary. This facility was designed and maintained as a place where people who knew things could be warehoused until we could extract their consciousness and peruse them at will. A database was being built from all these combined minds, you understand, and eventually—thirty, forty years from now—we would be able to simply search and find out everything you people knew on some subject or other. You were here because you knew things that might have been potentially useful, Avery. But others were here because they knew specific things. Because of Ruberto’s raid, this project was terminated prematurely, and we did not secure all of the information we’d planned on.”

He turned and started walking briskly away. “You, Avery—this specific unit—are here because somehow when you were processed, something went wrong and you ended up with something extra, didn’t you?”

I think he means us, Avery, I heard Little Dick whisper in my head.

“You’re back here, Avery,” he said over his shoulder as a heavy-sounding metal door snapped open on his approach, “because now you know something specific. You certainly don’t know what it is, but that is why you’re here. So we can extract it from you… or whomever we need to extract it from.” He stopped short of the door, standing aside as a second figure stepped into my roomy cell. “I’d like to introduce you to your interrogator, Avery.”

The newcomer turned to approach me, and a shiver went through me. Not surprise, because while I hadn’t considered the possibility, it now struck me as perfect, the obvious choice. I saw my own face approaching, with a perfect little hitch to his stride as if his hip bothered him—it was me again, sprouting up like a fucking mushroom whenever I tore him out of the ground. Another goddamn avatar of me, walking the System.

He looked clean and well rested, the artificial bastard. I couldn’t move my numb hands, or I would have clenched my fists. Instead I watched him pick up the chair Marin had just vacated, spin it around, and sit down in an easy motion with his arms crossed over the back. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a grin and a wink. If I could have moved, I would have launched myself at him, biting and tearing.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Marin said flatly, stepping out. The door swung shut automatically behind him, ending in a deep, echoing click that hinted at a magnetically sealed portal.

I looked up at myself. The avatar leaned back and reached into its coat, producing a small black case. It popped it open and set it down on the floor between us with a deliberate, slow movement. I glanced down at it, surprised, somehow, to find a single shiny-new autohypo and a large clear bottle of slimy-looking liquid. I looked up again, and my avatar had rested its chin on its hands, a hint of a smile—my smile—on its face.

“Tell me,” it said in my voice, a perfect replication except for the complete lack of fear, panic, and desperation, “about System of Federated Nations Undersecretary Dolores Salgado.”

XXXIV

THE BEST IDEA I’D HAD IN YEARS

I drifted in and out.

I opened my eyes to find myself sitting in front of me, with that same static smile as if it’d been in low-power mode for hours. Cold water dripped from my nose and hair, the shock of my revival rippling down through me, humming in my bones. The grunt with the bucket was just stepping out of the cell, so I figured I’d been out about a minute.

I shook my head, feeling my brain rattling around as if it had become unglued. I was naked. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been naked—decades ago, at least. I watched the avatar put down the electric prod it had been using creatively and sat there struggling to suck in enough air to survive on, waiting for the next round.

The rounds tended to end with me passing out.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the avatar said. It was amazing, and terrible, to think how perfectly it imitated me. I thought of the unit back at The Star, how beat-up it had been, so believably bloody and bruised—no wonder everyone had bought it as me, prowling around New York again, covered in shit and trying to find a way to kill someone. This one was so shiny and perfect no one would have believed it for a second.

“You’re thinking you don’t know what we’re trying to get out of you, right?”

I didn’t react—or didn’t think I reacted; my nerve connection to my face had been shut down in self-defense a long time ago, and I may have been making faces and weeping openly for all I knew. I’d tried asking Salgado—or the version of her somehow locked up in my brain—what they wanted, but she’d gone mute, refusing to answer. Which was typical. When I was trying to act sane in front of everyone, she’d chattered on and on. Now that her voice in my head might actually do me some good, give me something to barter with, she was gone.

“The answer, brother, is that you appear to have a near-complete imprint of Undersecretary Salgado in your memory somehow, and while you may not know what we’re looking for, she does. And we believe that whatever we do to you, she will experience also. You don’t have enough memory capacity to house complete imprints—the people living inside you, Avery, are using your own subsystems. They exist as separate intelligences only in the abstract, in the higher level operations. So, for example, if I do this —”

It suddenly leaned down and plucked the electric prod from the floor, spinning neatly and jabbing it into a well-worn area approximately near my crotch. Pain flooded me, intense and jagged, but only for a second, not long enough to knock me out or make me shit myself again.

“She experiences it as well. So, you see, we’re torturing you to torture her. Eventually, even though you don’t know the information, she will tell you, and then you will tell us.”

I tried opening my mouth to say something, but this proved more difficult than I’d imagined.