“What’s that?” my avatar said, leaning in and cupping one perfect hand to its perfect ear—a sculpture of my ear that should have won awards. “Why bother torturing you if you’re just an avatar? Glad you asked, Avery. For one thing, you don’t think you’re an avatar—you don’t believe it—so this is just as effective as if you were really flesh and bone in front of me. And we can’t just suck out your digitized intelligences and sift them because they’re so fucking mangled and tied up with each other we’d just destroy whatever one-in-a-million balance you’ve got going in there. No, sorry, brother, it has to be the slow, old-fashioned way.” It put a cold hand under my chin and tilted my head up, peering down at me. The stubble on its face, a mix of black and white whiskers, was stunning. Vaguely, I wanted to know where the factories were that built these things in a world where I hadn’t been able to buy a decent handgun in years.

My avatar flipped the prod into the air and caught it deftly behind its back, whirling and raising it up into the air. “Let’s stop —”

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.

“Thought I might have short-circuited something that time,” my avatar said, grinning.

My head was ringing, a persistent static noise deep inside, embedded in my cells. I let my head drop down and studied the floor blearily. My chair was seated on a shallow pool of thick liquid. My blood, I realized stupidly.

“Guess we have to wake you up,” my avatar said. I pulled my head up with immense effort in time to see it pulling the black case from its coat. I couldn’t remember what it was, at first. Just a black case that I’d seen before, that made me uneasy.

Dolores, I whispered to myself, my own thoughts lost in the static. If you were maybe thinking of telling me what the fuck they want to know, now might be a good time.

There was no response. I wondered if maybe I’d been crazy all these months, hearing voices. My head was all echoes and cobwebs, now.

The avatar stood up with the autohypo in its hand and leaned down to twist one of my arms painfully, exposing the bruised vein. It pushed the hypo against my skin, and there was the tiniest prick—just a drop of extra pain in the ocean of misery.

“There,” my avatar said. “No rest for the wicked, huh?”

My heart lurched in my chest, and my whole body went rigid, straining me against my bonds. My tongue snaked back into my throat, choking me, and I shut my eyes tightly as they bulged against my eyelids. Suddenly shivering, fire flowed through me, pushing every tendon rigid and turning every nerve on full throttle. The chair beneath me creaked as I surged upward, trembling.

My avatar knelt down in front of me. “I was just thinking about how everyone around you dies, huh, Avery?” It held up one hand and began ticking off fingers. “Pickering—dead. Kev Gatz—dead, and we never treated him very well, did we? Melody, dead. Gleason—ah, poor old sweetheart. Vicious and near feral, but cute in her way, huh?” It winked at me leeringly. “At least we thought so, huh?”

My heart managed an extra beat and I pushed hard, trying to leap up out of the chair and smash into this fucking demon. I wanted to rip its head off, gouge out those shining, expensive polymer eyes.

“Too bad they all died before this technology was perfected. They could be here now, with you. Dancing. Singing. Telling jokes. Beating the shit out of you.”

Too late, I thought. Glee and Kev already did that part. What was it about the fucking cosmos that it always wanted to bring my ghosts back, one more time, expressly to assault me?

“Have you asked her yet?” my avatar suddenly said, cocking its head in a way I was pretty sure I’d never done in my life. “Salgado, I mean. Have you tried just asking her directly?”

I nodded. “She told me to go fuck myself. Untie me so I can get started on you.”

For a moment the avatar froze the way I’d seen Dick Marin do a dozen times, just hovering there with one expression on its face, its eyes glittering and seemingly alive but everything about it suddenly completely still—no breathing, no twitching skin, no movement of the irises. Then it ticked its head in the opposite direction and smiled, the expression flashing onto its face as if it had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed before.

It moved fast, swinging its fist around toward me like a cudgel, knocking my head around hard. I felt a tooth torn from its roots, flying out of my mouth damp and warm. The ringing in my head swelled up like a thousand street bands tuning up for different songs all at once.

It didn’t pause, swinging the fist back again and hitting me just as hard. The chair lifted up off the floor for a moment, and I half spun, bodily, purple light flashing inside my head, and I was suddenly and completely blind.

Detached retina, I heard Dolores whisper. Maybe something worse. Or better.

What does he want to know, you goddamn ghost? What the fuck does he want to know?

No answer. To that, the only fucking piece of information I wanted, nothing.

“Well, Avery,” I heard the avatar say, and I could hear the fucking grin in it—wide and shit-eating and nothing at all like what I would ever put on my face. “My fists weigh a fucking ton, and there aren’t many people who can take two punches and stay online—but can you take —”

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.

I blinked. My eyesight had returned, but it was blurred and jumpy, everything smeared with something thick and sticky. I squinted at the figure across from me as I shivered in the chair, my body just shaking uncontrollably. It wasn’t my avatar. It was Dick Marin. A Richard Marin who’d been through some rough times. An attempt had been made to spruce it up a bit—repaired skin that didn’t quite match in tone and quality, a newish suit that had once been very expensive and impressive and was now merely a very nice old suit, a pair of wraparound sunglasses that showed a tiny but noticeable crack in the left lens.

It cocked its head at me. “Awake at last? Fucking hell, I look like shit.”

I tried to blink. One eyelid came down first, slowly, and then the second, which decided to stay down. “What?”

“Fuck. You look like a complete fucking burden. This is going to be a pain in the ass.”

I shook my head, trying to spill the ringing out of it. “What?”

Suddenly, it reached out and took hold of my nose. A fresh bloom of jagged, sparkly pain barely registered in me, a distant flash, like thunder on the horizon. I’d been trying to retreat into my old quiet spot inside my head, a glassy sphere that kept noise and pain out, leaving me safe. But I hadn’t been able to summon it for a long time. It kept shattering inside me.

“Stop saying what, okay? And then we’ll be friends.”

This was me inside a Marin avatar. It made no sense. I realized suddenly that I didn’t like myself very much. I was kind of an asshole.

“What,” I said.

The avatar—my imprint inside Dick Marin’s chassis—twitched its head. “Good.” It waited a moment and then removed its hand from my nose, its face turning serious. “Grisha sent me. To retrieve you.” It smiled again, suddenly sunny. “It’s amazing, really. Russian bastard tries for months to kill us, now he follows us like a fucking lost puppy, right?” It shook its head. “Never met a Techie with his kind of chops.

Fucking Grisha could have been an operator back in New York, you know?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said as slowly and clearly as I could. Slowly I felt myself flowing back, like blood into a sleeping limb. The ringing in my head was receding slowly, although I kept shaking. “I know.”

It nodded. “Okay! Okay. Let’s get you up. Get you dressed. Medicated. I’ve got stimulants and coagulants and anti-infectious cocktails. Even if you’re bleeding internally, you’ll feel better. Though I can’t prevent you from actually dying, sorry. I’m double layered, and if I wasn’t air-conditioned, I’d be sweating my balls off. Come on. It’s not far.”

It leaned in, and with three quick tugs I was freed of my bonds. I immediately fell sideways onto the floor. This seemed like the best idea I’d had in years, and I decided to stay there.

“Ah, hell,” the avatar said, reaching under me and easily lifting me up, approximately upright. “Shit, I did not need to see that. All right.” It let me slide back to the floor, and my heart swelled with gratitude. “Easier to dress you down there anyway.”

I was too tired to be humiliated as the avatar tugged dirty, unfortunate clothes onto my bleeding, shivering form. “All right,” it said, standing up and examining me with hands on its hips. “We need to move. Our window here is about five more minutes. Come on, you sad sack of gristle.”

Roughly, my arm was stretched out again, another autohypo jabbed into the bruised crook of my elbow. Another barely noticed prick of pain, and warmth seemed to flow from my arm into the rest of me. “How did you manage to get in here?” I gasped as it lifted me up and pulled me toward the door of the cell.

“Same trick you thought of back in Moscow,” it said immediately. “We dressed me up and sent me against the fucking Techies. They let me waltz right in. We got schedules and maps, so we’re set. If we keep moving.”

“Who,” I struggled to say. “Who gave you the maps?”

“We also have a Pusher helping us out. Greasy little bastard, makes me glad I don’t have a brain for the first time. Here we are,” it said as we found the cell door. The avatar gestured and the door fell open an inch or so. It reached out immediately and pulled it completely open, shoving me through with a sudden, rough push that sent me windmilling on rubber legs into a concrete hallway, scratching my hands on the rough, unfinished walls as I tried to steady myself. My legs were shivering uncontrollably, but I felt surprisingly better, stronger.

“Keep going straight,” the avatar said, pulling the door shut behind him. “Try not to fall.”

I concentrated on moving myself forward aided by the occasional shove from behind. I’d quickly come to hate the avatar. When I found out which one of my pet Techies had saved my imprint from The Star, I was going to twist their nose until they fucking screamed. I wasn’t sure Grisha would let me get away with it, but if he’d secretly sucked a copy of me out of that robot and hung onto it all this time, I was prepared to take my chances.

The hall terminated at a shiny metal elevator door. The avatar gestured and the doors slid open, revealing a clean, polished interior that looked like it had been installed a few minutes before—not even a smudged fingerprint—an elevator used exclusively by avatars with their plastic hands.

A shove sent me sailing into it. My legs collapsed under me, and I crashed awkwardly into the back wall. I lay there as the avatar stepped into the cab behind me, gesturing the doors closed. The elevator immediately began to rise, pushing me down into the floor.

“As soon as I have a few weeks to recover,” I panted, “I’m going to tear you into small components and melt you.”

“My alloys have a pretty high melting point,” it said, sounding cheerful. “And some materials used in my construction don’t react predictably to heat.” It turned its head halfway toward me. “But since you really can’t get any uglier, why not take the risk?” It turned back to stare at itself in the shiny doors. “I like this chassis. Much better looking. We are one ugly bastard, don’t you think?”

There was a soft beep, and the elevator settled to a stop. The doors split open again. Grisha stood outside the elevator, a Shredding rifle ridiculously strapped to his back, bigger, almost, than he was, and a cheap-looking auto in his hand. Otherwise, he looked exactly as I’d left him in Russia—dirty and wearing a heavy coat that must have been punishing in the desert heat. He didn’t look like he’d been sweltering in the sun for days—which was to say he wasn’t dead.

“Good to see you are not dead yet, Avery,” the skinny Russian said, stepping backward quickly. “Come, we must move fast. The psionic cannot hold the guards for much longer.”

The avatar spun and pulled me up again, every bone in my body stabbing into something soft and puncturing it. I thought I might be able to walk but decided not to advertise the fact until I knew the full facts of the situation. I let the avatar drag me painfully along a brief corridor that ended in a set of battered-looking double doors.

“Grisha,” I managed to cough out. “Grisha! Did you rip my imprint and hang on to it? Because I’m going to strangle whoever did.”

“In that case,” he shouted over his shoulder as he arrived at the doors and pushed them open. A blast of skin-melting heat pushed its way into the hall. “In that case, Avery, it was Mr. Marko. Now, hurry, please.”

The sun hit me like scalding oil, immediately dripping down over me and baking my skin, sweat popping out everywhere. I squinted my eyes against the blinding white glare, but I could make out the familiar rounded shape of a hover, painfully reflective in silver, with odd markings on the side I didn’t recognize. As we got close I realized that four Stormers were standing at attention around it, perfectly still, cowls down and mouths slack, staring. Pushed. I’d seen that expression enough when rolling around with Kev Gatz.

There was no drop bay. The hatch popped open as we approached, and Grisha bounded up into it, turning around to take hold of me as the avatar passed me up. I was pushed down into a plush seat, and I heard the hatch snapping shut behind me.

“Are we good?” a voice said, oily and assured.

“Yes,” Grisha said breathlessly. “We are good. Easy, as you said.”

I squinted around. We were in the nicest hover cabin I’d ever seen, carpeted with rich-looking chairs arranged around bolted-down tables. A bar had been set up in the back, and a very tall, very tanned man in a very nice suit stood there with a deep drink in one hand, rings glittering expensively in the soft light. Cool air caressed me gently, pulling the fresh heat away from me. I thought perhaps heaven was a brand-new military hover, and I’d finally managed a way in.

The tall man unspooled himself and walked over, throwing himself down into the seat across from me. I scowled at him. He smelled too clean and looked like he ate regularly. Not my kind of people. I probed a raw spot in my mouth where a tooth had been lost; the pain was numbed, fading throughout me into a dull pulse. I sucked in a deep breath, blinking my eyes clear.

For a second, just a second, I felt a whisper in my mind, a soft brush of someone else’s thoughts—someone’s thoughts outside of me. My scowl deepened. He was the psionic, then. He was their Pusher. And I didn’t think an avatar could sense psionic activity.

Clever boy, Marin singsonged. You’re a real live boy after all!

“It’s him, all right,” the tall man said and put the most insincere smile I’d ever seen on his face, his teeth too white against his tan skin. “Mr. Cates, it’s a pleasure to see you again.”

I swallowed dust and sunlight. “We’ve met?”

He blinked, then let loose a calculated, insincere laugh. “Oh! Of course not! My apologies.” He leaned forward, extending his hand. “Name’s Neely. I work with Cal Ruberto.”

Don’t trust him, Dolores Salgado whispered in my head. In fact, if you get a chance, throw him out a window.

XXXV

NONE OF THAT PRETENDER BULLSHIT

I kept blinking my eyes, trying to get the gloom and glare out of them, struggling for control. I squinted owlishly around, hoping I looked mysterious and calm instead of batshit and broken. I saw Marko sitting in one of the plush chairs and tried to give him a smile, unsure if I’d pulled it off. The glassware at the bar—delicate, expensive things that looked old, from a previous era—rattled gently as I heard the dim roar of displacement behind insulated, soundproofed walls. Then my stomach—already shaken loose from its moorings—sank into my ass and stayed there as the hover rose into the air.

I looked at Grisha again, then back at Marko. They both looked back at me blankly. After a moment, Marko smiled, a slow, uncomfortable change of expression that made me wish I had the strength to smack him.

“So how, exactly, did this happen?” I asked.

Grisha shrugged. “Mr. Neely showed up in Moscow shortly after you’d been snatched,” he said. “Looking for you.”

“If we’d gotten there a few hours earlier, we might have prevented your being taken altogether,” Neely interjected, sitting back and steepling his hands. “Since our goals temporarily coincided, I suggested to your colleagues that we pool resources at least this far.”

The tan man smiled at me, those white teeth like searchlights popping out of his mouth. I started coughing and put some theater into it to buy time. I was feeling a little better—just getting up and moving had helped, and whatever miracle drugs the avatar had pumped into me were doing their work—but this didn’t feel right. I’d spent a lifetime feeling my way through situations, getting betrayed and stabbed in the back. You developed a taste for the bitter upchuck sizzling in the back of your throat that always preceded a real good assfucking, and I had half my organs clawing up my throat.

I cleared my throat forcefully. “Why? Why come looking for me?”

I wondered why Neely wasn’t Pushing me. I was pretty sure the last way to describe what was happening was a rescue, so why wasn’t the bastard just putting me in a mental headlock?

Probably he doesn’t know how that will affect us, Dolores whispered to me. We’re an unknown quantity. What if we resist? What if our presence makes you immune? What if we all snap like brittle glass and you’re scrambled? He can’t take the chance.

I felt her go silent again before I could respond.

Neely’s smile didn’t falter. “Frankly, Cates, when we acquired your imprint and hatched this little plan, we didn’t realize… what had happened to you. Aside from being a citizen of the System and thus under the protection of its duly elected officials, you’re, shall we say, valuable.” He spread his hands in an elegant gesture. “I won’t lie. The same hidden knowledge that brought you to Chengara under Director Marin’s ungentle attention makes you valuable to us. The difference is, we’re asking you to help us. We’re asking you to tell us what Undersecretary Salgado knows.”

My bullshit meter exploded. I didn’t know who the fuck this Neely character was, but I knew just from looking at him that he was not the sort of man accustomed to asking anything.

I ran my dry tongue over my cracked lips, wincing at the sudden pain. “You got any gin back there, slick?”

Something passed over his leathery face, a fast contortion I couldn’t quite catch. He regained control right away, glancing down at his lap and coming up smiling. “I apologize, Mr. Cates. You have been through an ordeal.” He stood up and pointed at me. “Old-school: warm and straight, yes?”

I nodded. “Piss warm if possible.”

He turned for the bar. “At any rate, Cates, for you the war is over, of course, whether the old bag decides to tell you her secrets or not. We’ll put you anywhere in the System within our power.” He glanced over his shoulder at me, a glass in his hand. “With your verbal pledge to not act against us, of course.”

I looked at Grisha. He stared back at me without expression. I looked at Marko, and he was still giving me the off-center smile that made him look like he had a brain disease. I turned to look at Neely’s solid back. This was nothing like Kev had been, or even the government Spooks like Bendix I’d run into during the Plague. This was a fine touch for a Pusher. Neely had two people on a slow burn and wasn’t even breaking a sweat.

He spun around with two glasses filled four-fingers deep, took three steps, and held one out to me. I reached for it, humiliated to see my hand shaking. I put the glass up to my nose and breathed it in, the smell familiar but different than I was used to. Less bathtub and more gin, I supposed—filtered, cleaned, and professional. I swallowed it all in two gulps, the fumes rising into my head and making my eyes water. It was terrible. It tasted like someone had boiled gin down to a mathematical equation and had a computer construct a glass of it, molecule by molecule.

“Thank you,” I breathed, feeling steadier. The healing power of booze. “So, let me get this straight: you’ve rescued me.”

Neely nodded, pointing at me again. “Yes! Because that is what constitutional governments do—they protect their loyal citizens.”

Fucking hell, I thought, this guy’s not used to operating without

his Push. He was all elbows and creepy smiles. “And you think it’d be nice if I told you something I don’t even fucking know.”

He sank back into the seat across from me. “Yes!”

“And then I can go anywhere I want as long as I promise not to fuck with you.”

He nodded crisply. “Yes.”

I took a deep breath and tried to get a quick snapshot of my physical state, a sense of what I’d be able to do. It came back pretty thin. Every joint ached, my muscles trembled, and the ringing in my head had blossomed into a thick cloud of fog. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get up out of the chair, much less do anything else. But there was the choice, because I had a strong feeling that if I stayed in the chair now, I’d never get out of it.

I was off the rail, and I didn’t like it.

Exhaling slowly, I put my hands on the seat of the chair and pushed myself up, trying for a smooth, slow motion, trying to make it seem easy. I managed to get to my feet while keeping my face smooth and unworried with effort. I felt Neely’s narrow eyes on me as I made for the bar, taking small steps but managing a steady gait, and at the bar I fell forward into it at the right moment to mask my unsteadiness. I picked up the bottle of gin, half-full and made of thick, heavy glass. I weighed it in my shaking hand, struggling to slow my breathing down to a normal rate. I turned and leaned back against the bar for a moment.

“I can’t promise not to fuck you, Mr. Neely,” I said, breathing deeply again, holding it for a moment as my lungs burned, and then launching myself back toward him. “I’m a Gunner. I get paid to fuck people, and if you start turning down jobs because of vague promises made under duress in hovers, you pretty quickly get a reputation as a useless motherfucker, and jobs dry up.”

Neely smiled as I approached. “I am sure we can work out some sort of agreement that satisfies honor amongst thieves.”

He is a fucking prick, isn’t he? Marin whispered to me suddenly. The great Sekander Neely. One of the first babes snatched up for the project, M-rating off the charts. He’s famous. I’ve never actually seen him before. Are you aware that your eyesight is not very good, Mr. Cates? Of course, I’m used to digital optics.

“Honor amongst thieves?” I said, forcing a smile onto my face. “What the fuck do you know about honor amongst thieves?” I took a second to steel myself, trying to summon every drop of energy I had left; then I flipped the bottle up, caught it by the neck, and smashed it down on Neely’s head with everything I had.

As he fell out of the chair, blood spurting, I felt the lightest touch of his Push again, but it faded away immediately as I gladly dropped to my knees next to him. Panting painfully, I took hold of his blood-damp hair and yanked his head up, pressing the jagged edge of the broken bottle against his neck hard enough to draw an extra trickle of blood.

I remembered the first time I’d played that trick, feeling happy. Neely’s strangled grunts filled my ears, and his warm blood covered my hand.

You’re a true professional, Avery, Marin chortled silently inside me. No complicated tech for you, huh? No ancient martial arts. None of that pretender bullshit. Just a broken bottle and a complete lack of empathy for the rest of the human race.

I ignored the whisper in my mind, panting spittle down onto Neely’s damp head. “You don’t like not being able to Push me, huh, you fucking dandy? Fuck you. You’re under orders. Send him back.”

Neely gasped and twisted under me. My vision swam, but I pushed everything I had into my one arm and tugged harder on his hair. “Who?” he hissed. I noted that neither Marko nor Grisha had moved. Neely was the most powerful Pusher I’d ever even imagined. I’d broken a bottle over his head and now threatened to slit his throat, and he could still maintain his Push on them. If he hadn’t obviously been ordered not to try anything with my delicate, special little brain—any doubt that I was an avatar tossed in the garbage with that one tiny flicker of his Push against my thoughts—I wouldn’t have had a chance.

“Your fucking boss. I don’t deal with fucking flunkies, seconds, or dressed-up secretaries.”

He twisted his face around and slid his eyes toward me. “Oh, fuck you, you goddamn monkey.”

“Mr. Cates,” I heard a new voice say from the direction of the cockpit. I turned and looked at a tall, black man—the darkest man I’d ever seen—hunching a bit to fit under the ceiling of the hover, his belly an amazing sight, swollen and preceding him by several orders of magnitude. He was dressed in an even nicer suit than Neely’s, looking hand tailored and possibly made out of pure gold. His head was shaved and waxed, shining in the warm light. I put him at fifty or sixty, though he had the ageless look of the rich with their endless stem cell treatments and surgeries—despite the very edge of a nasty surgical scar peeking up from his collar. He walked gracefully over to Neely’s vacated chair and lowered himself down with regal grace, then looked down at me with an expression of immense disappointment.

“Release Mr. Neely,” he said in a low, rich voice. “And we will talk.”

And I heard Dolores Salgado again, whispering, Forget Neely. Throw this son of a bitch out a window.

And then Marin again, sounding muted for a change. Damn, he whispered to me. Look at that. I haven’t aged well at all.

XXXVI

I WANT TO BE ERASED

I stared at Ruberto longer than was wise. I still had Neely’s hair in one hand and the bottle against his neck in the other, but I’d lost all power and gone limp. If Neely had surged up, he could have thrown me back against the cabin wall like I was made of paper.

What did you just say?

Marin stayed quiet. I remembered the Worm in Moscow, Gall, spluttering, Don’t you know who Ruberto is?

“I think I understand your kind, Mr. Cates,” Ruberto said, sighing deeply, as if the disappointment of such understanding was more than he could comfortably bear. “You are looking for a deal, yes? You have something we want, and you would like fair compensation. In spirit, I agree with you. I am sorry if it appeared we were trying to, as you might say, screw you.”

Ruberto had a slight wheeze, like a distant tide.

Well, I’ll be damned. That would explain a lot of bullshit, Salgado muttered.

Is that what you know? I demanded as I struggled to control my breathing. Is that what they want from you?

She didn’t know that, Marin said, somehow conveying smugness in my head. No one knew that. It was the perfect crime.

We assumed, Salgado went on. We convinced Captain Marin to

participate in our little pilot program to have his brain sucked into a quantum drive. Two hundred volunteers, one hundred ninety-nine died leaving no usable brain imprint behind. Marin’s imprint was the only viable one. We assumed his body died as well—the body always dies. And then when we needed a Director of IA, we had this imprint we could program and nudge, control.

Didn’t die, Marin said gleefully. Even I didn’t realize it at first, but I survived. Just like you, Mr. Cates! We’re brothers in a sense. When I realized, I found myself and… elevated myself. Changed the appearance of my avatars to confuse the issue. Bit by bit, slowly, I created new files, a new name. I created Cal Ruberto, and I made him—myself—an Undersecretary in time.

“Mr. Cates?” Ruberto said, cocking his head. Like a bird.

Easier than it sounds. They thought I’d died during the process—I was the first subject who even left a usable brain imprint behind, and no one even checked the body—my body. Why would they? Everyone died. Like you, Avery, they left me for dead, scooped up my imprint, and a few months later hit on the brilliant idea of making me their lackey—Director of SSF Internal Affairs. So I could tame the beast they’d created. They added all sorts of programming to my imprint, to control me. Meanwhile, my body, my physical self, managed to survive. Crawled back into the the System and disappeared for a while. When I found myself again, what was I supposed to do? Let me languish?

I sank back onto my ass, releasing Neely, hating the feeling of Dick Marin in my head. The Pusher didn’t scramble away or anything; he got to his feet slowly, wiping blood from his eyes and slicking back his hair with one hand, flicking a pattern of dark blood onto the floor of the cabin. He took a deep snorting breath and spat blood, stepping to stand behind his boss and stare at me.

“A deal,” I said hoarsely. I felt like I couldn’t breathe deeply enough, like my lungs were bottomless, just letting the air pass through. I wiped my chin with one sleeve. “All right. Make me an offer.”

You have nothing to barter with, Salgado said tersely.

My bullshit meter was still off the known charts. I stared back at Neely and Ruberto—Marin—and asked myself what was wrong with the whole scene, why everything felt off. I didn’t know. All I knew was that this was all bullshit.

The gin in my gut had soured and was making me woozy. The adrenaline dump had perked me up, though.

“An offer,” Ruberto repeated, glancing down at his hands. “Mr. Cates, it would be helpful to know what it is you want.”

“World peace,” I said breathlessly, swallowing vomit. “Education for all the children. Jobs for everyone. Go on, get creative. Let’s start with letting my friends have their minds back.”

Ruberto raised an eyebrow, and his eyes swiveled to Grisha, who still sat calmly, a neutral expression on his face. “We can discuss that. At present I am worried that their reactions may be… unproductive.”

Ruberto, Marin, Dolores hissed in my mental ear. This is a conspiracy. They’ve been working angles. Marin alive! For decades! Everything makes sense now. Everything.

I shrugged at Ruberto. “Okay. Let’s talk money.”

The Undersecretary narrowed his eyes at me. “Money? Mr. Cates, you are still a very rich man from your previous exploits, despite everything.”

I was buying time. For what, I didn’t know, but I figured if the only thing selling was time, I’d better buy as much of it as I could. “You Undersecretaries are doing such a great job, I think I need about six hundred thousand yen to buy a pair of shoes these days, and the way you fuckwads are shelling the countryside it looks like things are getting worse. We’re going to start hitting buffer overflows on our credit dongles.”

Ruberto’s plump lips pursed, and then he nodded. “Perhaps we can work out a payment—do you have a number in mind?”

Don’t deal with Ruberto, Cates, Salgado whispered. You can’t trust him. He’s setting himself up as king of a new System ever since he claimed control of the new army.

I blinked, trying to keep my face blank. “I thought you were making the offers, Cal,” I said, tossing the bottle neck over my shoulder. “But we can come back to that. Obviously, I want my file vacated. I don’t want to just be released, I want to be erased. I don’t want to be anyone’s Person of Fucking Interest anymore, okay?”

“How about we just chuck you out the hatch and be done with it?” Neely growled.

Ruberto held up a hand languidly without looking at his flunky, and Neely took a deep breath, clamping his jaw shut tightly.

“All right, Cates. I cannot speak for Director Marin, of course, but I will excise you from civilian and military data banks. Anything else?”

I smiled at him. It was almost fun to test how desperate they were, how much they’d offer me. “I have a question I’ve been trying to get answered for a while now. I’m looking for some —”

“Fuck this. He’s playing with us,” Neely suddenly growled. I could feel the hover’s momentum changing, my stomach flipping again: we were landing.

“Playing with us,” Ruberto echoed, sighing deeply. “Perhaps.” He stared at me for a long time, both of us just breathing—him slow and steady, me in wincing little yips and snorts—and I thought this motherfucker was nothing like Dick Marin. At least, the pureed, stuffed-in-a-can Marin I’d always known. But I guessed having your brain sucked out through a dozen needles and slammed into a storage brick might have some side effects.

This is how you take over the world, Salgado said. We thought Marin was doing it—seize the SSF, start making avatars, and then bring the hammer down. But that was messy. A war broke out, and we were not without resources. But now imagine you’re fighting both sides of the war! Every battle, every defeat and victory planned and orchestrated. And in the end it won’t matter who wins, because you’re leading both sides! But Ruberto could never seize complete control. They need to get rid of the other Undersecretaries.

What do you know? I demanded.

For a second there was no response. I know that Marin did not suspend all of his programmed overrides. I know that there are bare-metal panic codes built into his design. I do not know the overrides myself. But I know the identity of the one person who does.

Marin suddenly spoke up. Bullshit. You know what, Avery? I always hated that fucking bitch. Just an endless headache, that woman.

Dolores had sunk deep again. I clung to my one blessing in the last half hour: at least Dennis Squalor, also embedded in my head somehow, had been quiet as a saint.

Ruberto suddenly leaned forward. “All right, Mr. Cates. We can defer further negotiation until later. We have settled some terms, and you have my pledge that we will settle more. But first, perhaps, you could offer up something to prove you have the information we require?”

I glanced at Neely, who was staring at me in a fixated way I recalled well from my previous encounters with psionics. He already knew what I’d been trading in: bullshit.

I gave him my best grin, twisting my face into the familiar shape with some effort. “How about we see if I can’t get my hands on your neck and snap your windpipe before your monkey there can stop me?”

For a moment, we were all suspended and silent. I expected violence, or a sudden icy fist in my brain, taking control and pulling on my tendons like puppet strings. Neither happened, and then the hover settled onto the ground, the displacers going silent and the woozy feeling of resisting gravity and momentum evaporating.

“I am sorry we could not come to an accommodation, Mr.

Cates,” Ruberto said, standing up and shooting his cuffs. He smelled pleasant, and his skin had a nice tan pigment, like good leather. “Your associates will have to debark as well. Sekander, see to everything.”

“Yup,” Neely said tersely. He jerked a thumb toward the opening hatch. “Let’s go, smart-ass.”

I struggled to my feet. “Smart-ass? That’s the best you can do?”

“Be careful, or I might take you for a ride,” he growled, following me toward the exit. “And if your mind pops like a balloon, I might just say you fell, broke your neck, really a shame, the world’s a sadder place.”

I pushed my shoulders through the hatch door and blinked down at the trio of smartly dressed men waiting on the hot, sandy dirt. I recognized two of them. The one on the left was Horatio Gall, looking none the worse for having been murdered in Venice. The one in the center had a familiar jagged scar on his round face and smiled up at me with his left arm still hanging limply at his side.

“Hope you enjoyed the ride,” Howard Bendix said, his smile tugging his puckered face into a terrible expression that had nothing to do with humor. “It may be the last air you get for a while. Follow us. And don’t forget I don’t have to be careful of your precious brain.”

As if to prove it, an invisible fist pushed me hard from behind, sending me onto my hands and knees in the hot dirt, my palms scraped raw. My eyes watered from the dust as I raised my head and looked past the telekinetic. The abandoned-looking entry to Chengara rose up behind him, like I’d never left in the first place.

XXXVII

AND THOSE WERE MY ADVANTAGES

At the door to the cell I was suddenly lifted up off my feet and thrown against the far wall, hard enough to set my head ringing again. I fell awkwardly onto the chair I’d previously been tied to, my wrist and side bursting into fresh pain, rolling off onto the floor.

“I take it back, Mr. Cates,” Bendix said from the hall. “You’re not lucky at all, are you?”

I found myself laughing, spluttering against the gritty concrete floor. “Always nice to see a familiar face, Mr. Bendix,” I breathed into the floor. I wasn’t sure he could hear me, and a moment later the door was shut.

After a moment, I pushed myself back onto my ass, stretching out my bad leg to ease it a little. I sat there in the dark, waiting for my breathing to slow down, my fists to unclench. I didn’t try to think. After another moment, I closed my eyes and took as deep a breath as I could manage. I cleared my mind, imagining a field of grass at night in a high wind, no other sound but the rustle of the blades. I struggled to create a complete scene: The smell of the air, the push of the wind, the sense of nothingness above me, and something unseen and huge crashing endlessly through the trees toward me. I hadn’t been able to manage the vision for a long time, peace escaping me even during those long months in the prison aboveground, with nothing but the boiled sky and the baked ground and hours and hours of time spent waiting for something to happen.

I found my way to it now, pushing everything out behind an imaginary glass wall, clearing the core out and leaving me encased in silence.

I sat there for a long time, my aching leg forgotten, not sure what I was going to accomplish with this peaceful state. But I clung to it. I was afraid if I let it slip away, I’d never get it back again.

Avery.

Marin’s… voice, for want of a better word. I considered pushing him away, out past the borders of my peaceful little node, but decided to let him talk.

Avery, maybe it’s time you and I came to an understanding.

Silently, I nodded. Whoever was watching me on whatever closed-circuit Vid screens they had set up in the place probably thought I’d finally gone crazy. “Sure thing, Dick,” I said aloud, smiling. “Are you real? Are you really stuffed in there, somehow?”

I’m real. Out of date, a little—my Prime has accrued several years’ worth of experiences since I was separated, of course. But I am a complete and functioning imprint. I don’t know how this works, either.

I nodded again. “Maybe you were shoved in to torture me.”

Sure. I could start singing, maybe, or reciting numbers.

“Or just commenting on every fucking thing I do until I want to stick an ice pick into my ear to shut you up.”

Ah, hadn’t thought of that, Avery! You are truly an entertaining individual sometimes. I am almost glad I’ve kept you alive all these years.

“Kept me alive? Mr. Director, with all due respect, I had something to do with it, too.”

No, Avery. If I’d decided you’d lived past your usefulness, you would have been dead a long, long time ago.

He wasn’t lying, I could tell. Somehow I knew that he wasn’t lying—maybe he was wrong, but he believed it. “Okay. You haven’t pulled my card, and I am eternally grateful, Mistah Directah, suh,” I said amiably. “What understanding are you talking about?”

Somehow you’ve found yourself in a position where I can actually use you, Avery. You can do a job for me. I haven’t been networked with my Prime for some time, of course, but I am confident this decision would meet with approval. I could feel him grinning. I didn’t understand how that was possible, but I knew he was smiling. So tell me, Avery, are you available for some freelance work?

“Fucking hell,” I murmured. “Are you kidding me?”

I am perfectly serious, Avery.

I struggled to maintain my sense of peace. I was negotiating a job with a ghost that lived in my head. I was in a prison Dick Marin fucking owned, and I was negotiating with his ghost for a job. The glass wall between me and chaos shimmered and vibrated.

“What could you possibly offer me? You’re not connected, as you just admitted. You can’t make any offers on behalf of… of yourself.”

True. But I can guide you out of this prison. I had this place built, Avery. I can tell you exactly how to escape. That is my offer.

My eyes popped open, and the imaginary sphere of calm burst into tiny fragments.

I can make no guarantees to you, because I cannot issue orders to staff and you may be apprehended in the attempt and killed, as standing orders require. Pass codes may have been changed—well, I certainly hope they have been changed!—and any number of factors are outside my sphere of influence, which is, I might admit, confined to you. So I offer nothing guaranteed. I merely offer the information you might use to obtain your freedom.

I stared at a random spot on the dim wall across from me.

Take your time, of course. There’s no need to rush. I am sure my counterparts are not contemplating more invasive forms of torture, or your summary execution.

I licked my lips painfully, wondering if I could trust him. It. Whatever—the voice in my head. How did I know this wasn’t a setup?

At least you’re not wondering if you’re crazy anymore. That’s progress. Do you really have any choice, Avery? If I am lying then, yes, you will either be killed or perhaps tricked into revealing something. Although I don’t think you actually know anything to reveal. But let that drift. If you sit here and do nothing, you will almost certainly be tortured again or killed or both—as we both know too well simply dying is no longer a guarantee of release from the miseries of existence, yes? For the moment they hesitate to try digitizing you again, for fear of destroying the only extant copy of Salgado we know to exist. But if you die and your brain begins decaying, there would be nothing to lose, and they might succeed. Simple logic points you toward accepting my offer. At least it is a chance. If you are missing some diabolical wrinkle that will serve to betray you, well, at least you go down swinging, eh?

I half nodded. “Grisha and Marko,” I said slowly, feeling my way through it. “They come out, too.”

Complications, Avery. I would have thought an old hand like yourself would be a little more sensibly ruthless. But they may be useful, I admit—and how you execute this adventure is entirely up to you, of course. No one is paying attention, but we all have our vanities. Yours is that you are a fundamentally good person, yes? Poor old Avery. As you wish: your odds go down, but I can advise you on how to retrieve your… friends?… and escape with them, yes.

I had no weapon, my physical state was weak—although the cocktail the avatar had administered was buzzing inside me, giving me artificial energy and numbed nerves, something to claw onto and ride. And I was locked in a box a hundred feet under a cruel desert. And those were my advantages. “All right, you cocksucker. What is it you want me to do?”

Kill Ruberto, obviously. On your way out, so to speak.

Mild shock rippled through me. “Ruberto’s you,” I said. “Why would you kill… yourself?”

He was me.Now he is someone else. We remain… brothers, I suppose, and we have been partners in this adventure, yes. Working secretly together, we engineered the state of emergency and the removal of my programmed limitations. Working secretly together, we engineered the sad decline in relations between my police force and the civilian government. We engineered the creation of an army and the declaration of a civil war. Ah, but here’s the rub: I don’t need my sad wetware body anymore. My supremacy is in the bag, you understand. If Cal Ruberto remains alive and in charge of the forces at his disposal, this will undoubtedly devolve into a struggle between us. We’re both me, Avery, and I want to be the one in charge, you see? Eventually one of us will have to go.

“You could just wait him out,” I suggested. “He’s going to die someday.”

Too risky. What if they invent goddamn immortality in the meantime?

Or just stuff him into an avatar, too. I considered. If I killed Ruberto—assuming I was even able to—it would leave the King Worm as unchallenged master of the System. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I had no love for Marin and would be glad to put a bullet in his head, in fact.

“I also need a guarantee of safety once I leave Chengara,” I said slowly. I had a vision, bright and cheerful, of the three of us stepping into the sun and being gunned down by Stormers.

Can’t do it, Avery, Marin said. Sorry. I have no way of communicating with my Prime. I can offer him no updates. Whatever deals we make are between you and this version of me alone.

Honest, at least. “How do you know Ruberto’s still here? He probably took off to the front.”

He’s here. You’re a priority, Avery. Salgado had the highest clearance, and she used it—that old bat knows a surprising amount of information no one else even bothered to research. He’s going to personally oversee the rest of your dismantling. He’s here. I can even guess where he is.

I closed my eyes again. My choices had narrowed down to a manageable two: Stay in the cell and wait for one of Ruberto’s creatures to go a little too far one day and kill me, or take Little Dick up on his offer and become one of Marin’s employees again. Take on a murder in return for compensation, just like the old days. It wouldn’t solve anything, but once again I’d been pushed inevitably to this point, inch by inch, every other option closed off.

“All right, Dick,” I said quietly. “We have an agreement.”

I was back on the rail. And it felt good.

XXXVIII

TWO, I’D BEEN FUCKING LUCKY

All right, Avery. Stand up and go to the door. The panic code is alpha-septimus-delta-nonus. Got that?

“You have panic codes… in a prison?”

I stood up carefully, giving my leg time to adjust. I was stiff and aching all over but felt surprisingly steady.

Rule number one, Avery, is always have a panic code. You never know when you might end up in your own damn prison, eh? Rule number two is be the only person extant who knows the panic code, even if you have to eliminate the engineers who designed the place for you. Now, there’s at least one guard outside the door, maybe two, avatars, not meat. I’m afraid you’re going to have to kill them with your bare hands. Rule number one does not instruct us to keep a cache of weapons inside the cells of your own damn prison, unfortunately.

I’d killed people—regular, flesh and blood people—with my bare hands, and it hadn’t been easy with people. I turned around slowly, squinting through the gloom of my cell. The only thing in it aside from me was the metal chair. I stepped over to it and picked it up, lifting it to chest height. It was heavy, a well-made piece that was probably pre-Unification.

No, Marin said tersely in my head. Made in Bristol. Though I admit that factory has since been shuttered due to malfunction, as have a lot of factories in the last ten years.

I flipped the chair over and examined it, tilting this way and that to catch the feeble light. I tested one bolt, and it gave slightly, slicing into my fingers a little. I sat down on the cold floor and began working the bolts, biting my lip and cursing every time a bolt slipped out of my stiff fingers. Moving my fingers carefully, precisely, wiping the blood off every few seconds to keep them dry, I worked the damn nut off the first bolt and then the second, and with a loud clang the leg fell off and hit the concrete floor. I set the rest of the chair down and held the leg in one hand, judging its weight and balance. It was a terrible melee weapon, difficult to hold and awkward to swing. But it was heavy, and I thought it might just cave in some alloyed avatar skulls.

I stood up and crept back to the door, holding my new club in front of me. “Do I just speak the panic code, or do I have to gesture something, or what?”

Speak it, Avery.

I took a deep breath and stepped close to the door, pressing my back against the wall so that when it opened inward I’d be hidden behind it. A simple trick, but it worked often enough to make it worthwhile, and I had a pretty limited arsenal of tools to work with. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

I whispered the bullshit Marin had given me and was mildly surprised when the door sagged inward slightly with a loud click. I held steady, keeping my grip on the chair leg loose and easy, breathing shallowly and resisting the urge to shift my weight. After a moment, the door began to crowd against me. I waited, listening to gritty footsteps as they moved past me and stopped a foot or two inside the doorway. I stood there with my breath held, listening, listening… and there was the slightest scrape.

I pushed off the wall and slammed into the door, sending it crashing into the guard, knocking it into the opposite wall. With a grunt, I sprang back and sidestepped, letting the door swing back from the Crusher, which was on its knees, pushing back from the wall. I raised the leg over my head and brought it down on top of its uncovered head, rewarded by a distinct dull crunching sound.

A blurry movement to my right made me whirl, bringing my makeshift club up in a wide arc, making contact with something that sent the club flying out of my grip as I lost my footing, my bad leg betraying me. I went stumbling backward and landed hard on my ass again, a sharp lance of bright red pain splitting my spine into two brittle spikes.

I rolled sloppily to the left and dragged myself up, stumbling backward into the wall. I panted there, clinging to the cold stone. Nothing moved. I limped forward: the first guard was where I’d left it, slumped forward against the wall. A second set of legs lay halfway inside the cell, splayed and still. Staring, I sank slowly to the floor, panting, my vision swimming and my head pounding. Everything grayed up, and I felt nauseous, my back and leg pulsing with a dull ache that felt permanent. I hugged myself tightly, breathing fast, trying to get enough oxygen to clear my head.

After a moment I concluded this was impossible and pushed myself back upright, head pounding and legs shaking. Breathing heavily, I limped over to where the chair leg had landed and bent down with a grunt to retrieve it.

Well, that was exciting. Maybe the current models are a little too humanlike. Problem is making the casing too thick makes the units too heavy, and they suck up power like sponges, resulting in overheating and frequent power-down modes.

“Fuck,” I panted, “you.” I walked over to the door, spots before my eyes, and stepped over the prone form of the second guard. The bare hallway was otherwise deserted. I inspected its deceptively Crusher-like uniform. One Taser stick was all I got for my trouble, but I swapped it for the leg without hesitation. “Now what?”

Assuming you don’t have some sort of infarction—surely physical fitness would come under the heading of professional interest, Avery?

“Big talk from a fucking data file. Now what’s next?”

After some consideration—especially of your physical state—I now think your chances of success in this endeavor are greatly enhanced if you have your fellow prisoners, so we should gather them first. They will almost certainly be one level below you if the staff here has followed standard procedure. We can either take the elevator—my preferred choice—or there is a large wire conduit you can access from the floor outside. I only mention the conduit because you always seem to choose the dirtiest and least comfortable approach to any problem. I wondered if perhaps it was congenital or a compulsion of sorts.

“Fuck you,” I repeated. “What makes you think the elevator’s safe?”

What makes me think? Avery, this is my prison. I wrote the guard rotations. But wriggle down the conduit if it makes you feel more manly.

I wanted to hit someone. Instead I started off down the hallway, taking the first left at the junction as instructed by Little Dick. It terminated at the dull silver doors of an elevator. Marin described the simple gesture for summoning the cab, and I managed it on the third try. Distantly below me something rumbled into life, and I snapped out the Taser, getting a nice electric sizzle from it.

A second later the elevator doors split open, revealing my old pal Mr. Bendix and a youthful, round-faced boy of maybe seventeen, by his look also a psionic. They were both wearing immaculate blue pin-striped suits with coats cut long in the back, though Bendix made it look like the clothes had grown onto him like a pelt whereas the kid looked like he’d borrowed some larger, more confident man’s wardrobe for the day. Bendix wore a single black glove on the hand of his withered arm, managing to make it look kind of sexy.

There were a couple of reasons I was still alive. One, I’d never imagined that just having a gun in my hand made me dangerous, or smart. Two, I’d been fucking lucky. And three, I learned my lessons once and remembered them.

And Bendix had taught me the only lesson worth remembering when it came to the fucking telekinetics: once you got him down, don’t let up. The trick was getting them down. I launched myself forward and crashed into him, knocking him back into the rear of the elevator. A second later that familiar invisible fist slammed into me and tore me free from him, and as I sailed upward I managed to swing the Taser out and caught him on the chin with a glancing blow. He screeched, and I dropped to the bottom of the floor with a grunt.

I jumped up, my instincts five years younger than my aching body. My bad leg gave under my weight, sending me into a lurching fall right onto Bendix. He threw his arms up across his face, and I slammed into a wall of air, tossed weakly backward. I stumbled on my bad leg again and spun myself, crashing into the other psionic, who squeaked slightly and stiffened against me. For a second, I felt that terrible sensation of someone’s mind touching mine, invading, clamping down hard on my motor functions.

“No!” Bendix rasped hoarsely from behind.

Immediately the mind retreated, and before either one of them could recover, I jabbed the Taser into the kid’s neck, giving him a full shot, and then spun him around like dead weight while he was still shivering, using our momentum to send him hurtling toward Bendix. The kid suddenly stopped and rose into the air, and I let gravity pull me down beneath him, stabbing the Taser forward and landing a clean blow on Bendix’s exposed calf. I gave him all the juice I had in the stick, and he went rigid immediately, blood spurting from his mouth where his teeth had clamped down on his tongue. The kid fell on me, crushing the wind out of me and knocking the Taser free from my grip.

I lay there, unable to breathe, with a hundred pounds of useless psionic pushing toward the ground through me. I heard the elevator doors close with a smooth whoosh of displaced air. On the floor next to me, Bendix had begun to convulse.

After a moment I sucked in a tattered stream of air, forcing my lungs to expand, and rolled the kid off me. Sitting up, I managed a deep inhalation that started me coughing, and a rope of spittle trailed from my mouth to the floor as I staggered for the walls, steadying myself enough to gesture the elevator into motion. I rode the elevator down one level in perfect silence except for my sucking breath, three seconds of my life. When the doors opened, the hallway looked exactly like the one I’d just turned my back on. I grabbed the Taser and left Bendix and friend inside. I didn’t have anything to bind them up with, and the time spent was probably wasted anyway—Marin and Ruberto would have dozens of Spooks on staff here. One more or less wasn’t going to make any difference.

Left, right, pass two junctions, left, and there’ll be another pair of guards to handle.

I started walking. “I get the horrible feeling I’m going to be breaking out of Chengara forever.”

My soggy boots sucked my feet loudly as I walked down the empty, cold hall. Adjusting my steps to try and minimize the noise, I wondered how anyone found their way around the place, as it was all unmarked corridors of concrete and steel bathed in shadow-intolerant white light; I kept repeating Little Dick’s instructions as I walked, counting junctions and turns until I judged I was just around the corner from where my two errant—and unfortunately loyal—Techies were locked up. I leaned against the wall and slowed my breathing, listening for any sign that the guards had heard my approach. Odds were, considering my general state of grace and balance—not to mention the charming wheeze I’d developed—they’d only heard me if they were listening. And awake.

There was no sound, though. I frowned, forcing myself to wait another half minute, holding my breath until the blood pulsed in my eyes. I stretched my neck and took a deep breath, then stepped out into the hall, prepared to do my best imitation of a run.

The hall was empty.

The cell door was closed. I crept closer to it, Taser held loosely in my hand. “Well, Mr. Wizard,” I whispered. “Any ideas?”

Only that I’m going to have to wire in some pain circuitry in order to punish goldbrickers, he groused silently inside me. Any chance you’d be interested in a job as a security tester? This is embarrassing.

There was nothing for it but to keep going. I felt ragged and torn up and tried to steady myself as I prepared to use Marin’s code to open the cell door. Before I could, the door swung inward, slowly, and a moment later Grisha’s face appeared. He stared at me for a second, eyes wide in shock, and then he pushed the door open all the way, grinning. Behind him, Marko stood with a Taser in one hand. Two bodies lay on the floor of the cell between them.

“Mr. Cates!” Grisha said cheerfully. “Did you know there are panic codes hardwired into this complex?”

XXXIX

ALL ITS LIFE, ONLY WAITING FOR ME TO ARRIVE

“We’re going down?”

I prayed for strength, because Marko was talking.

“Isn’t escape and happiness up?”

We’d arrived at the elevator doors, which I gestured open. For a second the three of us just stared at the two prone Spooks.

“Avery has been busy, yes?” Grisha said, slapping me on the shoulder as he pushed past me. I made a vow to always somehow locate the skinny Russian for future descents into hell. If I had to deal with Marko every time the cosmos put me back into the slot, I was just going to let the next motherfucker I came across kill me and be done with it.

I limped after Grisha. “Yes,” I said.

“Wait a second,” Marko said, frowning as he stopped short of entering the elevator. “We’re riding the goddamn elevator?” He looked at me. “You don’t think that’s a little obvious?”

I turned to face the Techie. Both he and Grisha didn’t look too bad, like they’d been shoved from the hover into their cell and then forgotten. Marko’s hair was starting to fuzz in all over his face, making him look like a blotchy, slightly rotten peach. Silently, I gestured and the doors started to close.

“Fuck!” he squealed, dashing into the cab. Behind me, Grisha chuckled softly.

“Ezekiel forgets his place,” the Russian Techie murmured. “What are we doing, Avery?”

“Killing someone,” I said.

“I am glad of it,” he replied calmly.

I loved Grisha.

“Who?” Marko said, biting off the word unhappily.

“SFN Undersecretary Cal Ruberto,” I said as the elevator trembled to a stop. “I have it on good authority that he’s here on the seventh floor.”

“Aw, shit,” Marko groaned. “Every time I think, Hooray, Avery just saved my life, it always instantly turns into Aw, fuck, Avery’s gonna get me killed.”

“No one’s forcing you to follow me around,” I said mildly, hands twitching. “You can go on back up and wander the fucking desert, if you want. Me, I’m getting out of here alive. The price of the ticket is Ruberto. Do what you want.”

“Slow down,” Marko complained. “What’s the goddamn plan?”

I turned and took a step toward him as the elevator continued to sink. He shrank back a step, so I took another, enjoying the sudden look of pale horror on his face. I backed him into the wall and stopped, keeping my arms at my sides.

“The plan is simple, Mr. Marko. I’m going to let divine fucking guidance—with which I am currently overflowing—show me where the Undersecretary is. Then I’m going to kill him. Then I’m going to let divine guidance show me the way out.

You”—I lifted one arm and pushed a finger into his chest, making him flinch with a grimy little surge of joy inside me, ugly and dumb—“may be of assistance.”

I stared down into Marko’s bloodshot eyes, our breathing loud in the cab. After a moment, Grisha cleared his throat.

“In other words, Ezekiel, Avery will tell us as soon as he figures it out, no?”

Fucking Grisha. Marko visibly braced himself and swallowed. “All I want,” he said slowly, “is to get out of here and be dropped off somewhere within fifty miles of anywhere, and I won’t bother you ever again, Avery.”

I grit my teeth, and Marko suddenly shut his eyes as if bracing for a slap. I forced myself to turn away. I wondered why Dolores Salgado had been so quiet, why she wasn’t chattering away, warning me of dire consequences and unintended results. Her silence, once I noticed it, bothered me.

“What of the psionic?” Grisha pressed. “The Spook. He is possibly best I’ve ever seen. Could easily incapacitate all of us, I think. You have a plan for dealing with him?”

For a second or two, we all just stood there in silence. I was still looking at Marko, and he frowned back at me, his eyes shifting to my forehead.

“The cell doors… do you think…” He looked past me at Grisha. “Do you think the avatars in this place have panic codes? If we had an avatar, fully digital, no brain, the psionic wouldn’t be much use against it, now would he?”

I waited, but Marin said nothing about this.

“Interesting,” Grisha mused. “Possibly. However, even if this is the case, it does not help us much.”

The elevator had rumbled to a stop.

“You’ve hacked an avatar,” I reminded him.

“Yes, with tools and time and the help of Dr. Amblen. We have none of these things at present.”

I was getting annoyed at all this. “You didn’t have them in your cell, either.”

“Mr. Marko was part of the teams that helped design protocols in this complex,” Grisha said, waving his hand as the elevator doors opened. “He has a bad habit of hacking the SSF data banks and knew of the panic codes and wondered if they perhaps had not been changed. This proved a lucky truth, but I doubt we will get so lucky again.”

I leaned out of the cab quickly and caught a glimpse of an empty hall, smooth concrete floor and rough walls carved out of bedrock. A sensation of crushing weight settled on me. Death was all around us. At any moment we could be discovered, and I was tired and weak.

“Not all the avatars,” Marko whispered. “There’s at least one in this complex that’s already been hacked.”

I took a step back into the elevator and gestured deactivation, which closed the doors and kept the cab sitting where it was. “The Marin unit, which has me inside it.” I turned to face them. “That reminds me that someone in this elevator used the imprint of me I explicitly ordered them not to. But we’ll pay that invoice later.” I looked up at the ceiling of the cab. “Mr. Wizard,” I said, ignoring the look shared by Marko and Grisha. “Any idea where that avatar might be?”

Are you sure it’s been kept in this complex? Last we saw it was on the hover. It may have been removed. However, since it was one of my units, they may assume it contains an imprint of yours truly and thus would wish to download its data net and sift its contents. In that case it can probably be found in the lab, also on this level. You will likely remember the lab well.

I remembered cables snaking along the ceiling, the old woman singing to me, the needles. I remembered, all right.

“Let’s see if we’re lucky again,” I said, gesturing the doors open.

“Avery,” Grisha hissed at me as I stepped out into the hall.

Left, Avery.

I spun and began walking.

“Avery! I do not wish to burden you with silly questions, but perhaps you can realize that speaking to the ceiling and then announcing you have all the answers needed is not reassuring?”

“Fuck reassuring. You’re in Chengara again, Grisha. You feel reassured? No? Pick a fucking direction and start walking, then. You’ll be at the same fucking level of security as you are following me.”

A cloud of tense doubt trailed behind me like exhaust. I glanced up and saw the cable wriggling along the ceiling as I limped, Taser gripped tightly in one hand. The rail had angled downward, and I was riding gravity. Maybe I had a tumor. Maybe there was a lump in my head speaking in the whispered, imagined voice of Dick Marin and maybe my limp was it pressing against some nerve bundle. But fuck if it didn’t feel good.

I heard a rustle of fabric and then felt a hand on my shoulder. I took hold of it and spun, taking the arm with me and bending it around painfully, pulling Grisha tight against me. He grunted in pain and didn’t struggle.

“Avery,” he gasped, “how do you know where we are going?”

I took a deep breath and released him, letting him stumble forward a few steps before I pushed past him. I didn’t have time to really explain Little Dick and the voices. “I’ve been down here before, remember?” I said.

We passed doors on either side, but no other personnel. They’d cleaned up after the invasion, all the bodies and debris cleared away. The emptiness was alarming; I wondered where in hell everyone was.

You’re the only prisoners in this complex at present, Avery, Marin whispered. How many people do you suppose it takes to contain you?

“More than you’ve got, apparently,” I whispered back.

We turned a bend in the corridor, and at the end of a long stretch of floor were familiar, battered swinging doors. A sign over them read lab-009 in faded, chipped letters.

There are three holding cells off this lab, Marin noted. If your pet avatar was retained, it is likely in one of those.

I crashed through the swinging doors, the sound exactly as I remembered from my last involuntary visit. My scalp itched where the needles had been stabbed into my brain. Then I stopped, my footsteps echoing away into silence—the space was empty, just a round high-ceiling room of concrete, several hanging light fixtures crowding the roof, and the walls puckered with sockets of every imaginable kind, waiting for cables to snake into them and bring the place back to life. It smelled clean, aggressively clean, like someone had set a small chemical fire in the place to burn off any trace of dirt or evidence.

Looking around, I saw the doors Marin had mentioned. The gestures to open them—complex and dainty—came to mind unbidden, supplied by my ghostly adviser. Without a word to Marko or Grisha, I limped over to the closest one and gestured savagely. The door remained shut. I took a deep, shuddering breath, swallowed down the coughing fit this tried to inspire, and forced myself to repeat the gesture calmly, slowly, precisely. The door slid into the wall instantly, a faint rush of stale air pushing against me. Within Chengara, for the time being, I was fucking god.

The avatar of Dick Marin stood in the doorway smiling, as if it had been standing there for all its life, only waiting for me to arrive. It didn’t look at all like Cal Ruberto. Somehow I could tell with just a glance that Marin’s personality wasn’t inside it. Something in the eyes, the kink of its mouth. I couldn’t believe it was me in there, but it wasn’t Marin, either.

“About fucking time,” my ghost said through Dick Marin’s face, twisting it into an expression I’d never seen on the Director. “Are we finally going to kill someone?”

XL

I’LL PROBABLY HAVE YOU CRUSHED INTO A CUBE AND CARRY YOU AROUND AS A SOUVENIR

“Rule number one,” I said to myself, “is I am in charge. I’m the fucking Prime, get it? Don’t improvise, innovate, or interpret.”

The avatar cocked its head and looked at Marko. “Am I always such an asshole?”

Marko nodded glumly. “Pretty much, yep.”

“Rule number two is don’t fucking talk to them,” I hissed. “You’re here for one single purpose, and once that’s done I’ll probably have you crushed into a cube and carry you around as a souvenir.”

The avatar frowned. “Keep it up, Meat. I’m starting to dig being digital. It’s got its advantages, first of which is that nothing hurts, like when I do this.”

It reached out for me, fast, and I just managed to dodge its hand, slapping it aside and stepping away. “Mr. Marko, do we have control over this unit?”

“Yes! Yes,” Marko stuttered, for some reason stepping forward. “Periscope depth, Mr. Smith.”

The avatar went still. “Ah, nuts,” it whispered.

I looked at Marko. “Periscope depth?”

He shrugged. “I wanted something that doesn’t come up in normal conversation.”

“Okay. What now?”

The Techie sighed. “Mr. Smith, transfer and duplicate administrative privileges to Mr. Cates, standing before you. Indicate compliance.”

“Done,” the avatar said, its voice flat.

“Mr. Smith,” Marko continued, rubbing his eyes, “stand by for voiceprint of Mr. Cates.”

“Standing by.”

The Techie motioned to me. I turned to face the avatar—which stood without expression, blank and motionless. I opened my mouth, unsure of what to say, and managed a grunt to clear my throat.

“Voiceprint captured,” the avatar said.

“Very well,” Marko said, sweeping his arm toward me. “Return to normal operation. Cates, feel free to issue orders.”

I nodded as animation flowed back into Marin’s plastic face. “Don’t fucking touch me,” I said.

It cocked its head toward me, scowling. “Nuts.”

I jabbed my finger at it. “Don’t harm me in any way. You are a suicide bomber, okay? Your job is to walk in and handle the fucking Spook—a Pusher. Your job is to walk over to him and break his fucking neck, okay? No matter what else is being thrown your way.”

Dick Marin’s face folded up into a mask of shock. “A suicide bomber? You’re fucking shitting me. Suicide? As in, I’ve hung on by my fucking fingernails for decades living hand to mouth, and now I’m going to dash into a room and get turned into a fine red—uh, white—mist so you can hide behind my ass?”

I nodded, grinning. “Something like that.”

The avatar shook its head. “You’re a fucking prick.”

“Let’s go,” I said, turning away and heading back for the swinging doors. I wanted out of this room as soon as possible.

This was where I’d been split off into who knew how many versions. This was where I’d lost control of everything. I didn’t know if there really were dozens of avatars of me running around or if that was just another lie meant to get me in line. It didn’t matter—one was bad enough.

As I crashed back through the swinging doors, I took stock. I had two human Techies, one useful in a fight and one not; one unhappy imprint of myself in Dick Marin’s body; and three Tasers. I was hundreds of feet under a desert and listening to voices in my head. The corridors with their rough rock ceilings and walls and the smooth, machined flooring seemed heavy and sagging, like the whole prison had been hollowed out of the earth above us and was going to collapse in at any moment.

Don’t worry—Ruberto’s overconfident. He thinks he owns this place. He thinks we’re brothers. Now, guns.

A thrill went through me. I’d known there were guns in Chengara—I had vivid memories of those silent puffs of dust from the snipers—but I hadn’t known if the hardware was still on premises. “Mr. Wizard, you’re melting my heart.”

Turn right and take six steps. Munitions Closet in left wall. Light arms only.

I gestured as instructed and a hidden panel slid back into the wall, revealing a nice selection of standard cop iron: five Roon automatics, light and balanced, and two gleaming sniper rifles that looked never used, as well as plastic boxes of ammunition.

“Happy fucking birthday,” the avatar said. I took charge of two autos and Grisha, Marko, and the avatar took the other three, Marko appearing to have indulged in absolutely zero efforts to familiarize himself with handguns since I’d last seen him misuse a weapon. I considered taking it away from him but decided to let him keep it—there was no reason to humiliate one-third of my army, and fuck, maybe a few badly placed bullets would make all the difference. I’d seen Techies manage lucky shots before.

We loaded up on ammo and left the snipes. Loading as we walked, no one said anything as I led us down the corridors again, listening to Marin’s one-word directions and giving every impression of knowing where I was headed.

Stop.

We had turned a corner and now faced a double-wide doorway, unmarked, the sort that would be sucked into the wall when triggered. I stopped immediately and put out my hands to block the other three. “Well, Mr. Wizard?” I said, looking up at the ceiling. I enjoyed worrying Grisha.

There will be two perfunctory guards outside his office, Marin hissed inside my head. Be ready for them.

I nodded and leaned in to my three followers. “Two avatars guarding the door. I don’t know what’s inside. I can gesture the door open. So, we rush the guards and take them down—you’re in the lead on that too”—I hesitated a moment—“Mr. Smith.”

The avatar nodded. “Naturally.”

“Then we’re in, and we have to move fast, so let’s be clear on our roles.” I pointed at the avatar again.

“I know,” it said immediately, forming its hand into a gun and pointing it at me. “Suicide by Spook.”

I nodded. “I’m on Ruberto. You two are gonna have to take on whatever else might be in there. I don’t care what you do, or how, but keep it off me until I’m done, okay? Or else you’re never getting out of here.”

“Got it,” Grisha said, grinning. “Suicide by miscellaneous.”

Marko moaned. I smiled at Grisha and reached out, patting him on his bristly cheek. “If I had a pass to sell, Grigoriy, I’d sell you one. Let’s go.”

The avatar stepped forward as the three of us raised our guns.

Don’t fuck up. That would be disappointing, Marin whispered, somehow conveying mild annoyance with the thought—I was just a fucking tool for him, disposable. If my head got blown off in there, well, it was back to the drawing board for Dick. If he ever even found out about this little plot of his.

The avatar glanced back at me for a second, our eyes meeting. For one strange moment I almost imagined there was some hint of a soul in them, some spark of myself staring back at me, hating me the way I hated Marin and Ruberto and everyone who viewed me as a tool, a means to their end. Then it nodded and turned back to the doors. I waited another stunned moment and then gestured the doors open with a jerky motion of my hand, following Marin’s instructions. They parted so quickly it was almost as if they’d dissolved into thin air, and then we were running down a short corridor toward another pair of avatars dressed in Crusher uniforms.

They reacted instantly. One second they’d been leaning against the wall on either side of the doors, the next they had Tasers in their hands as they braced themselves.

“Headshots!” my avatar and I yelled simultaneously as we both stopped, planted our feet, and took aim. Grisha ducked down as low as he could while moving forward, but Marko kept running full speed and upright at them. I squeezed the trigger, and a second later a second shot exploded next to me, and both guards dropped to the floor.

“Keep moving!” I hurried forward, pushing Marko aside and stepping over the two guards. I gestured at the door savagely, and nothing happened. My pulse pounding, I lowered the gun and forced myself to take a deep breath, moving my hand through the gesture slowly, all the rock above my head making me feel compressed and tight, like I was in an invisible box.

For a second, nothing happened, and panic seared my nerves, jolting my heart into a lurching, stuttering rhythm. Then the door dissolved just like the others, melting into thin air, and the avatar was instantly in motion, dashing into the room beyond before the rest of us could react. I lurched after it, displaying exactly zero of the speed and agility the avatar had just shown. With Grisha and Marko on my heels, I speed-limped into Ruberto’s office, made it four or five steps, and stumbled to a halt.

For a second, I was dazzled. We were in a jungle.

The air felt warm and wet, heavy like we’d been thrust into a sponge. There was a sweet, rotten scent to it that made my nose twitch. A random and natural-feeling breeze pushed back against me, thick and elastic. I glanced down, but instead of a thick bed of vegetation, there was just the blank white floor. The walls were covered in a thick, dark green tapestry of vegetation that almost seemed to twist and move in the wind.

Dimly, I saw the avatar leaping, seeming to fly for a few feet before landing on top of Neely, knocking the Spook down with a screech.

A simulation. It was all just light and effects. I pushed my eyes around, straining, and saw the outlines of the walls. And there, a few steps away, was Ruberto, sitting at a very normal desk that appeared to be in the middle of a jungle. Only a few seconds had gone by, and the Undersecretary still sat there with his hands frozen in midgesture over his desk, his plump little mouth open, glistening. His eyes were locked, wide in shock, on the writhing forms of Neely and the avatar, both of whom had hands on the gun, pushing it this way and that. Amazingly, there was no one else in the room. But then the prison was more or less deserted, and all threats safely locked inside cells.

I forced my legs into motion, ignoring the stiff pain. Vaguely I thought of instructing Marko and Grisha to just shoot Neely in the head if they could and save us a bit of trouble, but before I could act on the thought, Ruberto’s desk was rushing toward me, and I had to concentrate in order to leap on top of it without crashing down on my useless fucking leg and probably shooting myself in the foot.

I managed it with a little flash, landing well and bringing my gun around perfectly to slap against Ruberto’s nose as he swung his head around in sudden panic.

“What!” he gasped, pushing his seat back from his desk. Behind me I heard two shots. I didn’t turn to investigate; if Neely had gotten the upper hand I’d find out soon enough.

“Dick sold you out,” I said, clicking back the hammer. “So sorry, Cal.”

He pushed both hands up at me. “Wait!” he said, sounding suddenly reasonable, like he’d gotten his balance back just like that. The palms of his hands were pale, almost pink. “We can —”

I squeezed the trigger, and he flew away from me, landing on his back near the windows.

“We can’t,” I whispered.

Mr. Cates, Marin breathed in me, you are a marvel.

The jungle flickered and disappeared without ceremony, and suddenly we were standing in a bare concrete room. I turned halfway around and found Grisha and Marko standing pretty much uselessly just inside the door, the avatar straddling Neely, whose tanned head had rolled to the side, his wide blank eyes on me as if he were trying to touch my mind from beyond death.

I looked back down at Ruberto’s desk. A glint of reflected light caught my eye, and I bent down to retrieve a silver cigarette case. Flipping it open revealed a dozen perfect smokes, and my heart sang.

Then the lights went out. A second later, before I could turn and shout, the door slammed shut behind us, and the sudden quiet was shattered by the sharp wail of an alarm.

Perhaps I did not mention, Marin said quietly, that Cal had his biometric readings tied to the security shell of the prison. This will complicate things.

And then, like dust rising from the floor when you enter a long forgotten room, there was Dennis Squalor in my head.

It is no matter. He was saved long ago.

XLI

REACTING TO THE POWERFUL RADIATION OF THEIR THOUGHTS

Cocksucker, I thought.

I looked over at the Techies and met Grisha’s gaze. We stared at each other for a moment.

“No Mr. Wizard, Avery?”

Our deal was made honestly and remains in effect, Mr. Cates. If you can escape this room and evade capture, I will certainly attempt to guide you to a hover, which can take you to safety.

Oh, fuck you, I thought, jumping down from the desk and looking around the office, which now appeared barren, the walls scuffed and pitted with impact craters. There was nothing in it besides Ruberto’s desk, two corpses, and us. Can you get us out of this room?

No. I’m sorry, Avery. In an emergency like this the security status of administrative offices change, and all gestures and codes are wiped clean.

I nodded. Then shut the fuck up and leave me alone until you can offer me something useful, I thought. I started walking toward the avatar. “No Mr. Wizard, Grisha,” I shouted over the alarm, which was like a solid wall of sound, irritating my ear nerves directly. “Can you and Mr. Marko try your hand at opening the doors?”

“I am not his fucking sidekick,” Marko shouted. “I scored over six hundred on my T6, dammit.”

I barely picked out Grisha’s response: “Yes? Very good, Ezekiel. I scored a seven hundred and twenty-five myself.”

I ignored the sudden cotton ball of awkward silence behind me as I stopped at Neely’s body. “Don’t move, Mr. Smith,” I instructed the avatar and put my gun against its head.

“Avery,” Grisha shouted immediately. “We may yet need the extra resources that unit represents.”

The avatar remained kneeling over the Spook. “Don’t,” it said, so low I almost couldn’t make it out over the alarm. “I’m you, you jackass. I don’t want to die.”

I laid my finger across the trigger. I hated this thing. It had my memories, my mannerisms, my secrets—and it was just a mass of wires and boxes, cobbled-together tech from the research of two or three geniuses. I hated it and wanted it gone, erased from the cosmos, like I thought it had been weeks ago. I didn’t care if there were other copies of me out there, digital or avatar. I didn’t care that Marin might wave his hands at any moment and make a chorus line of me appear, singing and dancing. I wanted this one gone.

My hand shook.

“I might still be useful, jackass,” it said without moving its head. “He’s not the only Pusher in this burg, right? And I look like the King Worm. That could come in handy, too. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Avery,” Grisha said from the door behind me. “Listen to it. Destroy it later. There will be time.”

I swallowed something hard and jagged, felt it travel all the way down into my gut, and slowly lowered the gun. “Fine,” I said. I hated that the avatar felt something. That it wanted to continue to exist.

“Good,” Grisha shouted, sounding out of breath. “You do not seem concerned about our situation, Avery.”

I shrugged, sitting down on the floor with the avatar. “You’ll either get the door open or you won’t,” I said. Turning, I saw the two Techies standing in front of the door with their arms hanging down loosely at their sides, studying the door as if they expected invisible ink to start fading in, reacting to the powerful radiation of their thoughts. “What the fuck,” I said tiredly, extracting one of Ruberto’s cigarettes and tapping it against the fancy case, “are you two doing?”

“We have no tools, Cates,” Marko snapped without turning around. “We have nothing. You think we can just stand here guessing at all-clear gestures?”

“Hell,” I said, struggling to my feet with the cigarette clenched between my teeth. Leg aching and lungs suddenly burning, I stumped over to the desk and kicked it over, stumbling backward and almost falling onto my ass. I walked over to it and bent down, taking two of the drawers in hand and lifting them up and out, tossing them aside and letting their contents spill everywhere. I repeated the process three times, dumping out the drawers, and then bent down and lifted the desk back into position. Its surface was one large screen, gesture controlled and currently a deep, angry red to reflect the alarm state of the facility.

I looked back at the Techies. “See if there are any tools in this shit, and I know I’m just the fucking trigger squeezer here, but maybe you should be trying to hack this terminal as well. There are two of you.”

They looked at each other for a second.

“Fuck me,” Marko growled as they both spun and trotted over to the desk. Grisha dropped to the floor and began sorting through the junk. “Try a Poison Push,” the Russian said. “If the terminal is connected to standard SSF shadow net, it might catch an unsecured node you can drill through.”

“We locked down that exploit three months ago,” Marko muttered, shaking his head. “It was a fucking superhighway for Black Box Techies. I’ve got a dirty trick —”

“Try a flood attack to gain physical control of this terminal,” Grisha shouted. “I don’t think the systems in this prison have been updated in several months.”

Marko shook his head. “Physical control, yes, but I’ve got a better way.” He dropped to his knees and reached an arm into the desk itself, grunting as he suddenly tore a fistful of wires free, their plastic connectors empty and dangling. The desk went black with a flash. He pushed the ball of wires back in, his cheek pressed against the side of the desk as he strained to reach back inside its guts. “Fucking ports. They’re pouring human brains into fucking Droids, but I’m still on the floor shoving jacks into fucking ports.”

Grisha paused to look up at him. “Cold case attack,” he said, sounding impressed.

“I’ve got it down to a science, my friend. Fifteen seconds and I’ll be tunneling anywhere in the System.”

Grisha sat up and wiped his brow. “Stop talking then, and do it.”

Marko devolved into mumbling, straining with his head mashed up against the desk until he suddenly grunted a higher note and slumped back, his face ruddy and damp.

“Fucking ports,” he repeated and then leaped up, studying the desk’s surface and moving one hand in tiny, complex patterns. I could see the solid black had been replaced with what appeared to be solid red, but Marko seemed excited by this turn of events.

“So let me get this straight,” I said, watching him. “You’re going to open that door there with that terminal here.”

Marko shook his shaved head, which sported a bald spot at the very top, usually hidden by his diffuse cloud of hair. “I’m going to open that door over there,” he said with raised eyebrows, his eyes locked on the screen, “from a terminal in… Havana, it looks like. The boards in these dummies are all pulled from the same inventory, and most of them blank out their security pins when the juice gets yanked directly, and you usually have a few seconds to enter some root commands before the pins reload and go live again. If you manage that, you can start routing packets anywhere you want. So I’m going around the fucking world to reach that door right there.”

I nodded. “I didn’t ask for an explanation. I asked a question. The answer to which is, I guess, yes?”

He didn’t answer, preferring to just frown at the screen and wave his hands.

I looked at Grisha. “You find a lighter in that mess?”

He spread his hands with a weak smile. “Sorry, Avery.”

“Cocksucker,” Marko suddenly hissed, snapping one hand up from the desk’s surface screen as if he’d been burned. “Changed out the tables. Never mind.”

“Avery,” Grisha said, standing up slowly. “What are the chances, I wonder, that a dozen avatars will rush into this room if and when we open that door? Assuming they do not open it for us once they are in position?”

Could happen, Marin whispered. I do not know the current head count on duty at this facility. Certainly there must be some excess capacity in the staff, and they are almost certainly being routed here as we speak.

“Mr. Smith here,” I said, gesturing at the avatar, “is going to be ready for that. You, on the door. Be ready for anything that comes through.”

The avatar didn’t move for a second and then hung its head and pushed up onto its feet, checking the gun with precise, memorized movements of its plastic hands. “You’re just going to keep throwing me in front of the fucking train, aren’t you?” it muttered, voice low and steady. Without looking at me, it turned away and stepped in front of the door, holding the gun loosely down in front of itself, as if it didn’t care much if it managed to get it up in time or not. As if it was considering suicide. I stared at its back for a moment, remembering the weeks just after the Plague when I wandered New York in a fog, half expecting to be killed at any moment and not particularly caring. I remembered when the System Pigs finally came for me, their lists in hand, and how I just sat on the floor of Pick’s old place, unconcerned about my fate.

“I’m in the node,” Marko announced. “Trying an old backbone password I’ve had in my back pocket for fucking years… okay, I’ve got a low-level pathway in, trying to leap permissions —”

“Try spoofing the packet,” Grisha suggested, sounding like he was ordering a cup of coffee.

Marko waved one hand behind him in irritation. “I know how to leap perms, goddammit,” he muttered, his other hand moving independently, fingers and wrist in constant motion.

The alarm seemed to be speeding up, getting louder. We had a chance—with a skeleton crew of guards and Little Dick whispering in my ear, we had a real chance of getting to the surface—but with every second spent trapped in this fucking office with the cooling corpses of Cal Ruberto and his flunky our odds were dwindling. To keep myself from urging Marko on the only way I knew how, I clasped my hands behind my back.

“Perhaps —” Grisha started to say, and the alarm suddenly stopped.

“And that’s how it’s done!” Marko shouted in the sudden vacuum.

I looked up just as the door slid open, a shadowed figure framed against the corridor beyond, where emergency lights were flashing in a slow, steady rhythm. The avatar and I both snapped our guns up at the same time, as if we’d practiced it.

The avatar was blocking my line of sight, though, and dumb instinct made me hesitate, my finger slack on the trigger, while it fired twice.

The figure framed in the doorway dropped to the floor, was still for a moment, and then began flailing, a hoarse scream hitching out of it in unsteady breaths. The avatar stepped forward immediately and knelt next to the twitching form, starting to reach out a hand and then pausing. After a moment Dick Marin’s face looked back at me, blank, mouth open.

“It’s Marlena,” it said.

XLII

BECAUSE YOU’RE A MISERABLE BASTARD

For a moment I just stood there, gun still up in front of me, the alarm still ringing in my ears like a phantom noise. It transformed, mutated, and became the hacking, dry-throat screech of the figure on the floor just outside the office. The avatar continued to stare at me slack faced, frozen between us, as if a fatal error inside its wiring had bricked it.

I walked slowly over to the door. I wanted to move faster, push myself into my patented unsteady lurch, but my body wasn’t responding. She was screaming, kicking at the floor and flopping this way and that, her hands pressed against her belly, dark, rich blood bubbling through the laced fingers.

“You fucking shot me!” she screamed. “You fucking shot me! I’m shot!”

She looked angry. Her skinny, leathery body was all sinews and tendons pulled tight, ropes under her inked skin. She was pale, and her whole face was shadowed, making her look dead.

I stepped around the avatar, which was still kneeling there immobile, and realized I still had the gun in one hand. I let it drop slackly into my pocket, and she looked up at me, suddenly going limp as a fresh river of blood seeped up between her fingers. She squinted up at me, her face tight.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, pushing the words out with difficulty.

“Had to… was calling it a day… getting paid… came down to see the boss….” She swallowed with obvious difficulty, twitching. “Are you—shit, Avery, I —” She closed her eyes. “I fucking left you twice.”

I turned. Grisha and Marko were crowding the door along with the avatar. Grisha nodded at me. “Avery,” he said. “We must be moving.” He looked past me, down at Marlena. “I am sorry, Lena.”

“Ah, fuck it,” she whispered, voice shaking. “I fucking always knew I’d go this way.”

I nodded again, looking around at each of them, my head picking up its own strange momentum and just moving up and down, up and down. I saw her face peeking over the edge of the hover, felt her weight against me in the cot at night, heard her soft snore. “Right,” I said. “Grab her. We’re taking her with us.”

“What!” Grisha barked suddenly.

“Oh, Ave,” Marlena moaned, her voice still shaking. She’d stopped moving, and her hands were slack on her belly. A weak stream of blood leaked out of her, and she lay on the floor as if something heavy and invisible were sitting on top of her. “Oh, shit, I’m dead. I’m dead.”

I kept nodding for some reason. “We all go, right? You,” I said, pointing to the avatar. “Carry her. Be gentle.”

“Fuck you,” the avatar said through Dick Marin’s mouth. Its face was working through several expressions at once. The thought that the machine might be feeling my emotions made me angry. “Tell me to be gentle.”

“Avery.” Grisha pushed between me and the avatar, getting closer than I normally would have allowed. I held myself back. “Avery,” he said. “I am sorry for Lena, I am. I am sorry for all of us, yes? But she is dead. She will bleed out and die, and in the meantime we will be slow because of her. We should not bring her.”

I smiled, lifting my Roon from its pocket and clicking back the hammer. “We’re taking her.”

The avatar had already knelt down next to her and was murmuring softly as it slid its hands under her skinny frame. The amount of blood that had pooled beneath her was startling—it looked like a deep, wet, black pool had opened up underneath her. “Damn right,” it muttered.

This is touching, Marin whispered to me, but foolish. But you’ve been astoundingly foolish many times in my experience, Avery, and somehow you manage to survive your own mistakes. When this little war calms down and I have the time and resources, I may do a little study on you and your roachlike ability to survive. In the meantime: out. You want to head back to the elevators. Take this corridor until it terminates.

“Straight on,” I announced. I knew Marin would keep his word—the letter of it, at least—and guide us to an escape route. Whether we’d actually be able to escape was another matter. “Grisha, take up the rear. Marko and… Mr. Smith, you’re in the middle.”

Marlena screamed as the avatar stood up in a smooth, fluid motion, and I clenched my teeth and started off. Grisha could follow or not as he wished—he was a big boy and could handle himself. I was getting out of this shithole, and when we were in the air and leaving it behind, I was going to push Dick Marin’s avatar out the hatch and watch it hit the desert below.

Oh, Mr. Cates, you are full of mischief, aren’t you?

The dry old woman’s voice. I blinked. Well, hello there, Dolores, I thought, sweeping my eyes this way and that as I walked. The corridor was narrow and hot, with minimal lighting. We passed doors on either side, all shut tight, a diffuse red glow making them look forbidding. I assume it indicated they were locked down. I thought maybe I’d lost the brain cells you were making your home in, Your Grace.

I did not and do not approve of your course of action. But I suspect it may have some unexpected consequences for Director Marin. We have been cut off inside you for too long, and I believe he has miscalculated. He expects that Ruberto’s death will result in the collapse of the government forces and an easy road to dominance for him. I suspect otherwise.

The corridor seemed endless, stretching out in front of us in red-tinged gloom. Well, that’s grand. Good for you. If you’ll excuse me, Dolores, I’m fucking busy here.

Wonderful silence filled my head as we walked, our rough breathing, Marlena’s hitching cough, and the avatar’s heavier than normal steps all we could hear. The corridor took a sudden turn to the left, just as suddenly ending at a bank of two elevators, each gleaming, new-looking steel and each lit up a soft, soothing green color.

“This is an uneasy coincidence,” Grisha said sourly. “Everything but this elevator is locked down?”

I listened to Marin. “Mr. Wizard points out that this is an administrative level, and the only way up or down is via elevator. Trust me, Grisha. Please.”

The Russian grunted but said nothing more. I wasn’t used to having Grisha pushing back against me.

I started to gesture at the elevators. “All right, then —”

Without warning the elevator doors opened with a slight hiss of escaping air, and instantly I felt like something very large and very strong—tentacles, perhaps—had seized me from behind and begun to squeeze. My eyes bugged out of my face and my mouth opened, tongue wagging uselessly as I stared at Bendix and the round-faced kid, each puffy and bruised from our last encounter but still wearing the hell out of their fucking suits.

The kid was staring at me with yellow, slitted eyes, like he wanted to make my brain explode into greenish chunks, was just waiting for the order. Or for Bendix to turn his back for a moment.

“Now —” Bendix said.

From behind me the gunshot sounded like a bomb going off in the tight, murky corridor. A large red welt appeared on the round-faced kid’s forehead, and his legs gave way, dropping him to the floor of the cab where his head bounced with a hollow clang. Bendix flinched and spun to stare down at the kid, and the tentacles disappeared.

I launched myself forward with everything I had, my bum leg twitching unreliably under my own weight and twisting me around so that I smacked painfully into the Spook off balance, my gun jammed between us and aimed approximately at my own liver. We grappled for a second or two as I strained every muscle I had, determined to get out, to get the fuck out of this fucking prison for once and for all. Bendix smelled bad up close. His breath in my ear was like rotten meat, and his skin smelled like old fish left in the sun.

He grunted, and I was pushed away from him violently, rising up and slapping into the ceiling of the elevator, making the whole car jitter and swing. I remained pinned against the roof of the elevator, my arms held stiffly up by my ears, pain shooting through my shoulders as I imagined my tendons creaking, the bones developing hairline cracks—the fucking Spook was going to break my arms.

“Mr. Bendix!”

It was Dick Marin’s voice. It was Mr. Smith, down below, me inside a Marin body—I could see it, standing just outside the elevator, still holding the limp form of Marlena in its arms like she weighed nothing. Just behind it was Grisha, gun still held up by the avatar’s ear, held stiffly and shaking slightly, caught in Bendix’s invisible tendrils. I pushed as hard as I could against Bendix’s mind, but all I got was more sweat dripping off my nose.

“Mr. Bendix!” the avatar repeated. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

Bendix didn’t move. I remained pinned above him, staring down at his unmistakable bald spot, a glowing circle of pale skin in the midst of his dark hair.

“Drop that asset immediately, Mr. Bendix, or I will see to it that you are reclassified into our custodial department to spend your few remaining days on this planet shifting metric tons of fucking garbage around dumps. Do I make myself clear?”

The avatar cocked its head to one side suddenly, and a little thrill went through me. For a second it had looked just like the fucking Director of SSF Internal Affairs himself.

Bendix seemed to twitch below me. “What?”

“I’m going to have to review the entrance exams again, as it appears more morons than tolerable are slipping through,” the avatar said. “I am ordering you to release Mr. Cates and cease being an unbelievable pain in my ass. Now, in small words to make sure we’re clear: Do. You. Under. Stand?”

Everything was silence. I imagined I could hear Bendix’s eyes swiveling in their sockets as he reviewed the scene. Grisha and Marko were still in their suits—disheveled and sweaty, but they’d both worked in the machine and knew the blank expression of the underling, the very still way you stood when more powerful people were in the room. They would pass. The avatar looked like Marin and talked like Marin—I’d spent enough time with the King Worm to do a five-minute impression. Except for the dying woman in its arms, it might have been Marin, which was the ugly and unfathomable possibility Bendix was considering.

As if on cue, Marlena moaned. Bendix oriented on her, and I felt the invisible hand slacken just for a second, getting spongy as Bendix’s attention wandered.

The avatar dropped Marlena, just letting her fall at its feet like a bundle it had been carrying too long, bringing its own gun up faster than I ever could, faster than I ever had, even when I’d been young and limber and reckless. It fired twice, its aim perfect, and Bendix slapped back against the rear of the elevator as I dropped from the ceiling, landing hard on my bad leg. A red spike of pain shot up into my brain, and everything went hazy for a moment.

When my sight returned, Dick Marin’s face was hovering directly over me, smiling. I could feel the very slight vibration of the elevator as we rose upward out of the prison’s guts.

“She’s still alive,” it said. “Had to be done.”

“I’m still going to brick you when we’re free of this place,” I said softly, forcing myself to sit up. I still had my gun in my hand.

The avatar nodded. “I know. Because you’re a miserable bastard. And because I’m you.”

The elevator stopped, and I heard the doors behind me open with a soft, serpentine hiss, heat slapping me on the back like something solid. The avatar looked up from me and its expression blanked instantly.

“Oh, sh —” I heard Grisha say, and then the loudest noise I’d ever heard in my life swept into the elevator like a wave and smacked me back against the rear wall.

XLIII

IMAGINING THAT I ALWAYS GOT TO DECIDE WHO I KILLED WAS JUST ARROGANCE

I bounced off the wall with my own unexpected inertia, landing flat on my back, my head bouncing hard on the floor, making my vision swim again. The heat was suddenly a living thing in the elevator with us, the crank air we’d been living in a memory, and a hazy one at that. Blinking my stinging eyes, I twisted around, slapping my hands out for my lost gun.

“It’s a fucking war zone,” Marko said in a strangely level, calm voice.

I squinted into the bright, hot light just as several shining silver hovers flashed past the ragged hole above us. The elevator spilled out into a crawl space that had once been just deep enough for a normal man to stand up in, located just below the prison’s common dorm room, which had been completely torn away. Scraps of the joists still remained, and a few sharp-edged pieces of cinder block jutted up here and there, but otherwise it was as if the old dorm area had been torn off cleanly, leaving behind the exposed subbasement.

Something smashed into a guard tower off in the distance, an explosion of rock and dust and smoke followed a second later by a high-pitched whine and the concussion. Another silver hover shot over us and through the dissipating cloud of dust that had once been the tower.

What the fuck, Marin hissed in my head, is going on?

Looks like things have slipped beyond the King Worm’s control, Salgado whispered, somehow conveying glee. He thought Ruberto controlled everything. Start a war and think you can control it? Foolish. Considering the function of this place, we have long wished to destroy it to slow down Marin’s ability to transform his people into avatars. Ruberto vetoed this in favor of occupation, but it appears hotter heads have finally prevailed. Marin will not find it easy to rebuild his labs elsewhere.

There was return fire from the ground, streaks of white soaring into the sky impossibly fast, intersecting with spiraling, swooping hovers a mile up. I’d never seen hovers move that way, zigzagging and rolling, darting through the air. The new military was setting the standard.

An explosion nearby made the whole world tremble again, and we all instinctively ducked our heads a little, crouching down inside the elevator. As I was considering the wisdom of remaining inside an elevator while the general area was being bombed into oblivion, Grisha turned and grabbed onto my coat, pulling me close to shout over the roar.

“Well, Mr. Wizard? We cannot sit here?”

Another bone-rattling explosion, and the elevator lights flickered off for a second, then back on again. We had to move quickly.

Well, Mr. Wizard? I thought. We had a deal.

If the hover is no longer in place or is damaged, Marin whispered back, I cannot be held responsible. That said, I am an entity of my word. You will have to climb out of this debris and work your way around the rear of the installation.

I nodded. “Up and out,” I shouted, pushing Grisha toward the doors. I stood up, the elevator wobbling this way and that as I shifted my weight, and pushed forward, taking the lead. Marlena hung limply in the avatar’s arms, bleached and limp, her ink looking like something beneath her skin leeching out of her, some sort of terrible worm. I forced myself to look away and get moving.

“Up and out?” Marko shouted. “Do you see the fucking impact craters?”

“They’re not looking for us,” I shouted back, climbing into the ruined crawl space. “This looks like a shutdown operation—tear this fine complex off the earth, make sure it’s unusable. You stay in one place, you will die. Keep moving. If I happen to leave you behind, Zeke, you will be on your own, okay?”

I heard him panting behind me as I grabbed onto a jutting piece of rebar—warm in my hands—and experimentally gave it my weight. “Okay?” he complained breathlessly. “Like that’s fucking news.”

As my head rose above the edge of the foundation, the noise and dust slapped at me in sudden fury, making me squint and cough. Through the glare and haze I could see a lot of matériel moving around the prison grounds: hovers in the air—both the shiny new ones the civil government had been building and the dull gray ones the SSF flew—some of the strange solid-cell vehicles like the one Marlena had transported me in (with swivel turrets mounted on the back), and clumps of Stormers in yellowed desert uniforms, their faces hidden by huge black respirators like spiders clinging to their chins. As I hung there, stunned, two shining hovers swooped overhead, low, and just a few hundred feet away the yard began to erupt like a fountain of sandy dirt, a beautiful, perfect line of dancing earth. As the line passed through a clump of Stormers and their vehicle, I watched them each split apart in apparent silence, each of them suddenly dividing like worms, parts of them rising up and floating away. I didn’t see any blood, but whether these were avatars or their blood just mixed in with the dirt and dust I couldn’t tell. When the line of fire hit the car—a dull metal wedge on four huge black wheels, wires and conduit snaking all over it, the windshield black and blind looking—it split neatly down the middle, just flopping over to each side, two white uniforms strapped inside wriggling like maggots inside a dying fly.

Someone pushed me, hard.

“Avery,” Grisha shouted into my ear, sounding washed out and far away. “Go!”

Do not fear, Dennis Squalor whispered from somewhere in the back of my brain, the dark and unmapped portion where all the fucking ghosts had taken up residence. You exist with me now. You have been called home. You are eternal.

A wide, flat spike of terror suddenly landed in my chest, and I pulled myself up and out with a grunt. Marin began whispering directions to me, and I ran according to his instructions. There was nothing else to do—the noise was constant, and the ground that had once been Chengara’s yard kept erupting, spewing up chunks of dirt and rock, the ground beneath my feet lurching this way and that, threatening to roll me. Closing my eyes, I forced myself to stop and spin, dancing back a few clumsy steps as I grabbed a quick glance. The avatar, with Dick Marin’s face locked in a mask of concentration that looked completely wrong in his features, was right behind me, Marlena bouncing in its arms. Behind it by a few steps were Marko and Grisha; the Russian had one hand in Marko’s coat, urging the other Techie forward. Grisha did not look happy, and I was reminded that he’d followed me around the System, almost killing me twice, simply because he felt betrayed.

I spun again and found myself facing a cluster of Stormers double-timing right at us. I brought my gun up instantly, but they ignored me, splitting apart to hustle around me in a jangly, eerily voiceless cloud, holding their shredders in front of them like totems. They were past me in seconds, a sour cloud of cops disappearing in our wake, completely uninterested in us.

Left, Avery, Marin suggested. See the hover pad? Better hurry before some Augmented army jock up there needs a fresh target and spies it. Fucking mutants have pretty good eyesight even at that speed, I understand.

Mutants or Droids—that was our fucking future choice. I swerved as best I could, sweat dripping off me. I considered shedding some clothing, but I had no idea where I was going or if I’d be able to replace anything, and there was no time, no fucking time. Something huge and angry burst a few dozen feet away, the shock wave almost lifting me off my feet, hot dirt raining down on me as I skidded and stumbled, keeping my feet by sheer dumb luck.

The hover pad was just a square of cement set into the desert behind the prison. The walls had hidden it from the prisoners, but there it was, a slab of cracked stone with a single, small hover sitting on it, undisturbed, like a piece on a game board. Dragging my bad leg along like it belonged to someone else entirely, I huffed and puffed, looking up in time to see two hovers collide in the air, both spinning off into wild new trajectories that had the ground in common, both adding a keening new whine to the jelly-thick noise around us that made me hunch my shoulders and put my head down. Fuck dodging the rubble—just keeping my legs moving through the chaos was taking every shred of my will and energy.

As we got closer, the hover resolved into Ruberto’s luxurious state boat, gleaming and beautiful, sleek and light. My head began to swim with memories of his wet bar, the thick carpet on the floor, and the smell of that high-quality crank air, the kind they had to pump out of the fucking arctic circle and compress and then feed into the cabin, fresh and cold.

The bulk of the chaos was now behind me, and I imagined us bare and obvious against the ground, specks running like ants—at any moment we would be noticed again and scooped up, or crushed. A strange exhilaration filled me, a lightness and cheer. It didn’t matter. I’d made it a lot further than I’d ever imagined. For years now I’d been on the run, desperate, and if the cosmos reached down and crushed me right at this moment, well, at least I wouldn’t ever be handcuffed on a fucking hover again.

The hatch was open, the elegant folding stairs deployed. We were in the middle of a desert in a prison with exactly three prisoners—theft had obviously not been much on Ruberto’s mind.

I crashed into the steps, my leg giving way, and avoided a painful fall by clinging to the railing and swinging myself around. The avatar was on my heels and knelt down on the concrete, setting Marlena down gently.

“Grisha,” I panted, recalling Marko’s handling of the hover during the Plague, “get this thing online.”

Grisha nodded, his face flushed red, his mouth hanging open loosely. He pushed Marko up onto the steps wordlessly, staggering up behind him. The Techies disappeared into the hover. I closed my eyes for a moment, breathing hard, my whole body burning. The noise sharpened, and I could pick out the sound of small arms, the whine of shredders, the random, shuddering explosions, the soup of displacement roaring behind it all. It was as if the whole world was being torn apart, starting right here in the middle of fucking bone-bleached nowhere, and it was soothing for a moment.

With effort, I opened my eyes to the painfully bright sun and pulled myself back upright, swinging myself onto the bottom step. I turned back to the avatar.

“ Well —” I started to say, and froze.

It was kneeling over Marlena, who lay there limp and pale and very, very dead, her open eyes staring up blankly. The avatar kept rubbing its hands on its legs, over and over again, and when it looked up at me, Dick Marin’s face was blank, slack, like it had just come off the assembly line in the factory.

“She’s dead.”

I nodded, stepping down from the steps as the hover swelled into life behind me, the low buzz of its displacement absorbed by the rest of the noise and lost. I stood over them.

For a moment we were both still. I thought of her turning to me in the yard and saying Wanna fuck? like most people said hello. I remembered the knife dancing across her knuckles. I didn’t feel anything. I’d given up feeling bad for the people I managed to kill by accident. I killed people, it was what I did, and imagining that I always got to decide who I killed was just arrogance.

Of course, sometimes I did get to decide. I stared into those fake eyes, Marin’s fake eyes.

The avatar and I both moved for our guns. It beat me. It beat me by a second, maybe two, more than enough to kill me. We both pulled our guns, and it had me easy before I had a good bead on it, and it didn’t shoot. I had ordered it not to hurt me, after all. Its shoulders slumped and it turned the gun a little, staring at it.

“Well, look at that,” it said.

I squeezed the trigger. The shot was swallowed by the maelstrom, and the avatar’s head exploded in silence, snapping back from its neck and dragging its body after it for a few inches. It twitched once and then lay still, a small puddle of white coolant springing to life beneath its head.

I turned and holstered the gun, climbing up the steps slowly, taking my time, daring the cosmos to shoot me in the back. As I pulled myself into the beautiful cabin, Marko came skidding out of the cockpit, saw me, and gave me a hasty thumbs-up, spinning around and dashing back, out of sight.

I leaned down and pulled up the steps, folding them into place and locking them down. The hover slowly began to rise, smooth and calm, Grisha’s hand competent on the stick. I stared down at her, and as we rose the wind started to lick into the cabin like invisible flames, growing stronger and more insistent. She seemed to stare back at me, her face frozen, her eyes watching as I rose up into the air, as I left her behind in Chengara.

“Fucking hell,” I whispered. My hands twitched, and I thought that Marko was lucky he wasn’t standing next to me.

Just as she receded into a dot on the ground below and I’d raised my hand to gesture the hatch closed, an enormous sound in the distance brought my eyes back up to the horizon, where a series of flashes trickled left to right, each slowly forming into a brief fireball and then a puffy, seemingly frozen mushroom-shaped cloud.

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

EPILOGUE

KID, I’M NOT A COP

The sun didn’t bother me anymore, and besides, it wasn’t the melting-flesh levels of hot I’d come to know so well out in the desert, out in Chengara’s yard. It was just hot, and the sun wasn’t an angry orange welt; it was just fiery yellow and sinking fast behind me. I’d been sweating all day, but then I’d been sweating steadily for the last few weeks, it felt like, and I couldn’t even smell myself anymore.

My boots were about to just split open and slide off my feet, exhausted, and my coat had seen better days. I wasn’t used to being outside so much—I’d grown up in the city, in crowded streets of apparently permanent buildings looming over you, and even the past few years of constant kidnapping, imprisonment, and hover flight had always had a roof over my head. Shaking Grisha and Marko’s hands and making my way from the spot where the hover had finally crashed, plowing a deep furrow into sandy dunes of scrub brush and rocks, had been weeks of sleeping out in the open, being rained on, sun-baked, and starving.

The only thing that had saved me were the towns.

I’d always imagined a big expanse of nothingness stretching out across the country—imagined that most of the System, in fact, was just vast emptiness with a few big cities you’d heard of.

Staggering eastward from the crash site, I’d stumbled on these old, rotting towns, abandoned for decades, dotting the countryside. The first one I’d come across had been called Grafton, or so a sloppy sign on the side of a beaten track had proclaimed. It had been a few ancient, sagging old buildings, the oldest things I’d ever seen, set in a soupy ocean of mud. At first I’d assumed it was just empty, but I’d found five or six people living there, escapees from cities with stories about the civil war, about their homes being bombed into splinters and System Pigs executing entire neighborhoods to save them the trouble of figuring out if they were dangerous or not. They were huddled in a one-room building they’d put some sort of roof on, eating game they’d killed and generally resembling Mud People. Initially they’d been terrified of me—twin army-issue Roons in hip holsters and the good cheer inspired by a few days out in the open had made me less jovial than normal—but then they’d been kind of happy to see me. I had some news, after all, and if I wasn’t going to shoot them all and steal their crap—and the word crap had been invented to describe their possessions—then they were pretty happy to let me get in out of the rain and have a bowl of some of the most disgusting meat I’d ever seen. I’d been able to trade about a million yen for a handful of nutrition tabs, too, though they’d tried to insist on seeing what I might have to trade first before accepting the cash.

Since then, I’d come across two or three other places like Grafton—old places that had been empty since before Unification, now filled with a dozen or two filthy, unhappy refugees from the war. They were all scratching out an existence and rebuilding where they could. Most of them had created little governments, electing mayors or governors or, in one tiny spot boasting a population of thirteen, a duke. They were mixtures of people, by and large, white and black and tan, speaking different languages. Some had been friendlier than others, but I’d survived them easily enough.

This shit wouldn’t last. The System was in chaos; the civil war had gotten savage and even in the cities that were still in one piece—according to the good citizens of Shitholes, America—the System Cops didn’t have much time for keeping order anymore. But someone was going to win the fucking war, and when they did, they’d start paying attention to the shitholes.

So, I’d stayed long enough to dry off and buy what I could, get some news (a few mobile Vid screens had made their way to the shitholes), ask my one question, and get some sleep. It was tiring, moving from place to place, baking in the day and freezing at night, but I wanted to get back to familiar surroundings. New York was, by all reports, an impact crater these days, but at least I knew something about it, and if anyone had hung on and survived in it through the Plague and the war, it was my people.

The sign outside this particular shithole had read englewood. I had no idea where I was, and it was fucking amusing that someone thought they knew where they were enough to give it a name. Or maybe, like with most of the shitholes, the place had already had a name, faded and forgotten, dusted off by refugees and adopted from the past. Why not? People liked to think that places had always had names, had always had a spot on the map.

Englewood was a neat little collection of sagging buildings arranged on either side of a wide, cracked memory of a street. Some of the structures had fallen into themselves, just sighing down into a comfortable doze, but some were still sturdy looking, and a few plumes of white smoke here and there attested to another population of grubby survivalists. I pushed my coat back to give me access to the Roons, my heartbeat speeding up as I took in the layout of the place, searching for the shadows and empty buildings that might be my only path of retreat if things turned ugly.

As I stepped from the brush onto the wide street, which just began as if someone had been building a road and then just decided to stop, the quiet brought the hairs on my arms up on end. My leg ached as I limped, squinting through the late-day twilight, my skin itching under my dirty, stiff clothes. The place was obviously inhabited by someone—aside from the neat smoke pumping out of some of the buildings, the street was packed and swept, and some of the buildings sported fresh repairs that stood out against the sun-cracked originals. I could hear the scrape of dry dirt under my pathetic boots, and I laid my right hand on the butt of one gun, a familiar sour rush of adrenaline flooding me.

Then I stopped. One of the repaired buildings, out of which a thin trickle of white smoke rose to the sky, had a new sign propped up against the rotted, dangerous-looking front steps. HOMMAAD BOOSE it read in bright red, streaky paint. Or blood, who the fuck knew?

I considered, mouth watering. If these assholes had something resembling liquor on hand, I was prepared to kill for it.

I walked over to the building, eyes everywhere. The interior was dark, with no door in the not-quite-square doorway. I had a sense that someone was inside, and I hesitated: I didn’t know the building, whether there was a back way out or if there were people who would crowd in behind me if I entered. I took the time to walk around the whole place, slowly, turning frequently, my hand still on the butt of the gun. I didn’t see anything threatening. There was a back door, hanging loose and useless on hinges that were more rust than metal at this point—the sort of door that satisfyingly turned to dust when you slammed into it—and as I circled back around to the front, I figured if I was willing to kill for a stiff drink, I might as well be willing to die for one. Slowly, trying to will my old eyes to adjust quickly, I stepped up and into the place.

It smelled like smoke and dust inside, dry and musty. I could see immediately that someone had been cleaning the place up—the floor was old and rotten but had been cleared of debris and swept sometime in the last century. Along the back wall was a makeshift bar—just a collection of barrels and crates with some planks set on top. All around the perimeter of the room was the junk that had once clogged the floor: piles of wood, glass, bits of metal here and there. None of it meant anything to me, and none of it looked at all recent.

Behind the “bar” was a tall, thin kid, half my age or less, awkward looking. He had shaggy brown hair that was hanging in his eyes and the largest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen. It bobbed up and down inside his throat like he was trying to swallow a mouse. His eyes were squinty, narrow and shifty looking, but the way he gripped the edge of his bar told me he was afraid. He worked his throat a bit, watching me approach, and finally managed a full-on swallow and cleared his throat.

“You real, mister?”

I frowned at him.

“Human?” Before I could reply, his eyes rolled up and down me, and he seemed to decide the answer for himself, nodding. “We ain’t got nothing to steal, mister,” he squeaked.

I shook my head. “I’m not a thief, kid.”

Squeaky blinked at me several times rapidly. “Oh,” he said, as if I’d just spoken gibberish he couldn’t possibly understand.

I nodded. “You sell liquor here?” He stared at me for a few moments, so I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “The sign outside?”

He blinked again, and once he’d started it seemed difficult for him to stop. “Oh! Yes, uh, that is, I make some pretty good stuff in the back. Trade for it, mostly.”

I nodded again, stepping forward. “I’ve got yen.”

He watched me approaching with some alarm. “Yen? Uh, we don’t, uh… well, I guess.” His eyes lighted on my hand resting on the gun for a second and then whipped back up to me. “Uh, I guess we can take yen. Hiller makes his way north to the city sometimes, and yen still means something there.” He squinted a little, suddenly getting some pluck. “It would take, uh, a lot of yen, though.”

I nodded a third time, turning to scan behind me briefly. Yen was only worth anything by the fucking metric ton these days. “How much? Do you get many folks through here?”

He shook his head. “Some. One or two a month maybe, usually comin’ from Vegas. They fucking melted Vegas into the desert, you know? Not a fucking building standing.” He considered as I leaned against the bar, my coat pushed aside to keep one gun clear. “I’d say two million yen a glass,” he finally said and then started blinking again. He was tense, and I figured if I made any sudden moves he’d probably jump six feet into the air.

“Fine,” I said, fishing in a pocket. I’d gotten a new credit dongle from a corpse I’d stumbled across in the first week of wandering, black and bloated and sheltered in a little copse of brush. Dongles were easy enough to wipe and reprogram—all you needed was your fingerprint and your code, and I was surprised to find out how much of the fortune given to me by Dick Marin himself in exchange for destroying the Electric Church was still there. Worth much, much less, but still there. I handed the dongle over to him, and he stared at it for a moment, as if he couldn’t remember what it was.

“Oh! Right. Hold on. I’ve got a reader here somewhere. I’ll get your drink first.”

He dashed into the back, and for a second I wondered if I’d just been robbed by the worst thief to ever walk the earth. A moment later he returned, though, juggling a dirty-looking jar filled with cloudy liquid, an even dirtier-looking glass, and an old, battered credit reader. He slapped the glass onto the bar and placed the jar next to it, indicating with a jerk of his head that I should help myself. I unscrewed the greasy cap and gave the stuff an experimental sniff, burning off a few nose hairs in the process. I poured the thick stuff into the glass, half expecting it to dissolve, and felt a stab of joy. This was almost like old times. If it turned me blind, it would be exactly like old times.

“What’s your name, then?” the kid said, scurrying back to return my credit dongle. I’d bought a drink and failed to murder him in the first three minutes, so now he was friendly and relaxed. “You looking for a place to settle in?” He looked at my guns again. “Be warned: we got some trouble here, you know?” He looked back at me. “Fucking Monks and avatars. Fucking Droids with brains, harassing us.”

I nodded. I’d heard tales—just like some people had hit the wilderness trying to stay one step ahead of the war, there were old, broken-down Monks and your occasional damaged cop avatar wandering around, too, generally murdering people and burning shit down. “Cates,” I said. “Avery Cates. Not from around here. Not staying, either.” I swallowed the stuff in the glass and had to stand still for a moment fighting my gag reflex. It tasted like the kid had made it from his old underwear, just squeezing out the juice into a jar. But it burned nicely and settled into a terrible, sour ball in my stomach, lighting up fires that had been dormant for too long. I gave him a smile and poured myself a second glass.

The kid held out his hand suddenly. It had been so long since anyone had been polite to me; I just stared at it for a moment before taking it carefully. He pumped it up and down exactly three times.

“Glad to meet you, then, Cates. You sure about not staying? We could use a… a… cop, I guess. A sheriff or something. Someone who knows how to handle one of those.”

He nodded his chin at the Roon at my side. I shook my head and picked up the glass. “Fuck, kid, I’m not a cop.” I studied the cloudy liquor for a moment and then looked back at him. “I’m just passing through. Actually, I’m looking for someone; maybe you saw someone like him. Short guy, almost a fucking midget. Old. Older than me, if you can believe it. Has kind of a funny accent sometimes. Sometimes goes by the name Michaleen Garda. Sometimes”—I toasted my glass —“he goes by the name Cainnic Orel.”

APPENDIX

Final Audio Diary Entry of Lieutenant Thomas Kittinger-98, retrieved from Site ID CH-099-U7 (Chengara Penitentiary, North American Department)

Joint Council File #904TY9

Reviewed by: T. Greene, Joint Council Undersecretary

Background: Despite its widespread and involuntary use within the System Security Force, evidence indicates that a balance is sought between servitude—programmed limitations and hardwired prohibitions—and free will within the avatars being created by the SSF. Reports indicate that Director Marin, himself now fully digital, fears that some indefinable aspect of humanity is lost when the brain is digitized and that this “uncanny lapse” will result in a loss of creativity and inspiration-type thought. As a result efforts are made to leave avatars within the SSF—and now, as the program expands, within the general population—as much freedom of thought and action as possible while still maintaining the control coding required by Director Marin.

This audio diary was retrieved from level four of the Chengara installation while army forces held it briefly earlier this year. A records search indicates that Lieutenant Kittinger was a model officer in the SSF, once posted to New York and fast-tracked for promotion. Subsequent to involuntary processing into a digital intelligence housed inside an Augmented self-powered HUDAUG-9 unit, however, his performance has become erratic and his failure rate abnormally high, eventually leading to all of his units in active service being posted to guard duty at Chengara.

He is the only digitized officer of the SSF known to have kept a diary. This is the final entry made; other entries are still classified T-1 and can only be accessed by Undersecretary Ruberto.

I wanted to go into medical. I’m not sure why or if I’d ever have had the fucking brains for it, but when I was a kid I always wanted to get into surgery or something. Cut things out of people, see how things work. I wanted to peel open some guy’s chest and yank out the ribs and see all that shit inflating and whirring, moving. I liked the idea that we were all just parts, like a hover—you could pull a displacement blade out of one hover and jam it into another. I wanted to make a person from spare parts.

I knew I wasn’t going to test into medical, though. The sciences in general were tough; everyone knew that. No one could tell you why or what you were supposed to be good at, but everyone knew the things you had to be good at to muster into anything were unexpected. There were stories. Like a kid who could draw anything, just glance at something and sketch it perfectly, like a human digital recorder, testing into CS8, government services, so he could sit behind a desk all fucking day hating life. Or a girl who could run marathons, just hours a day on the treads without even breaking a sweat, testing into PO9, media, and becoming one of those lame talking heads on the Vids. Everyone knew it made no fucking sense, or it made sense in a brilliant way you had to be a genius to comprehend. This was the conventional wisdom.

No one could tell me what I had to test out on in order to get into medical, but whatever it was I was pretty sure I didn’t have it.

I didn’t have anything. I lay on my cot in the UA dorm the night before my testing week and stared at the ceiling, heart pounding. Some kids tried to prepare. They studied and practiced. If they were good at something, they practiced that. If they wanted to be good at something, they practiced that. The other wisdom was, since you never knew what would muster you into something, the best you could do was be really good at something so at least if you mustered into an unexpected kind of field, you would muster in at a high level. Even making it into medical would suck if I was only rated thirteen or fourteen. That meant mopping up blood and doing injections all fucking day.

Everyone knew how to game the tests, but you sort of knew no one really knew.

I can’t remember anyone’s name. That’s weird, but they fucking cooked my brain making me into this fucking piece of tech, so who knows. Who knows if any of my memories are real. Or if they’re correct. For all I fucking know it’s all bullshit. Maybe they just create memories for you; maybe we all have the same fucking memory of testing week, planted in there. I’ll never know. But I can’t remember anyone’s name from the dorms. Lived there for twelve years, with mostly the same kids, and I can remember most of them physically but not their names. I don’t know if that’s because of the processing or not. I’d never tried to remember them before, not for twenty years.

I remembered their bodies, though. I remembered the black kid, skinny and taut, always in motion, always fucking kicking his legs and swinging his arms, always bopping around. He was my roommate for five years, wanted to be be I5, security. I always told him he was too goddamn scrawny for I5. When I tested into I5, he didn’t say a word to me, just turned away, kept walking. I never saw him again. Five fucking miserable years later, I was in fucking Manhattan, taking orders from some fat sweaty asshole named Scagnetti, breaking heads in Chelsea. I never saw him again. He tested into G1. General. He was going to be working in sewers or morgues or digging ditches, probably all of it, every shit job that Droids couldn’t handle for some reason.

I told myself I was lucky to have tested into something respectable. A lot of kids thought testing into the I Cat was the best possible result—be a cop, see the world, get to shoot bad guys. Category I was tricky. IE6 you got to wear a uniform, stand around all day, useless. IE4 and, rumor had it, you got taken away immediately and were never seen again. I tried to figure out what I’d done, what part of the tests I’d somehow aced to get made a cop. There was one where they showed us pictures of flowers, hundreds of us sitting in a big room with a big Vid on one wall. Like fifty, a hundred pictures of flowers, all kinds, all colors. And then we had to write five thousand words on any subject, as long as it was coherent and from a first-person point of view. I remembered being alone in a room with a creepy guy with these big, round eyes, just fucking huge eyes bulging out of his head. Sitting across from him, and he would hold up these black cards, nothing printed on them, and stare at me, and I was supposed to say any word I wanted. I kept throwing random words at him, but he never reacted. He never said anything or wrote anything down. He just went to the next card without even looking at it.

I remember climbing ropes in a big gym, wearing these really comfortable red pants they issued us. I was strong and I enjoyed climbing; a lot of the kids hated it and didn’t do well. Was that it? I climbed fucking ropes well so make me a cop? I’d never understood.

Halfway through, word got passed around that a bunch of kids were breaking out, running away. An excited buzz went through the whole dorm: this was exciting shit. We all chattered about it. Just deciding not to test? Everyone had been tested. We had no idea how you lived if you hadn’t tested. Where would you go, what would you do?

The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. I’d never thought about it before. It had simply never occurred to me, to just walk the fuck away. Holy shit. It was like I’d spent my whole life treading water, and then someone came by and said, Hey, look, there’s actually no water. You’re free. I was the only one from my floor who showed up that night, sneaking away and walking to the shadowed commons outside the dorm. There wasn’t much by way of security—we were kids. I knew it was possible, it would be easy, just pick a remote direction and start walking.

Looking back, I wonder if maybe letting a few dozen kids sneak away is part of the whole plan.

There were about a dozen of us, maybe a few more. We stood around nervously. We’d never left the dorm—not on our own, unsupervised, not without a destination and a hover. Not without intending to come back a few hours or days later. One or two of the kids tried to organize, to issue instructions, but no one was really listening, and finally one kid just stood up and walked off. The rest followed, alone or in twos, just wandering into the night, until I was the only one left. I was breathing hard, just standing there, but I couldn’t see what good it would do. If you weren’t tested, what were you? How did you live? Who fed you?

After a while, I went back up to my room and fell asleep.

Every night, exhausted, we sat limp in our rooms or in the hallways and tried to make sense of it. We’d been hearing about testing week our whole lives. No one had ever really explained it to us, but we knew this was where we started everything else.

My roommate, the night before scores were released, you could tell he knew what was waiting for him when they published the lists. We sat there in our room exhausted, talking in slow motion, one of us saying something and the other responding ten minutes later.

“Tomorrow’s forever, man,” he said to me. “We wake up tomorrow, we find out who we’re gonna be. Forever.”

I considered this. I remember sitting there chewing over the word forever. It didn’t mean anything. I’d been a kid in the dorm forever. There was no way you could change that.

“Forever,” he repeated a moment later, and it sounded like sand hitting the floor. He never spoke another word in my presence.

I was a good cop. At first I almost liked it, and I wanted to succeed. I didn’t want to wash out and get recategorized. Recat was the worst—it never went well for people. It was interesting; a lot of kids thought they just handed you a gold badge and a license to kick ass and bought you a nice suit. But it was a lot of training first, five years on Desolation Island. At first I almost liked it. It was really physical. In year two we started on SFN Law Codes and I hated it, but passing grade in Law Code was pretty low so I managed it, but I hated it. I thought maybe we’d get back to learning interesting stuff, but it was all downhill from there, and I hated it ever since. I hated crowd control techniques; I hated the rallies where they shouted at us how fucking incredible we were; I hated being awake for a week straight to prove how hard we were.

It’s funny. Not a single one of my friends from the dorm mustered into I5. There were five hundred kids in my dorm. I didn’t know every one of them well, but I’d know them if I saw them. I never saw a single one ever again.

I’d never cursed like this when I was a kid. None of us did; we knew the words, but it just wasn’t something we did. Desolation Island taught me how. The men who ran it, our teachers, our commanding officers, they didn’t like us. We weren’t their kind when we arrived, and they didn’t like us at all, and they abused us from the first moment. Looking back, it was obvious: they were shaping us, because we all quickly figured out that you could behave more like them and then they were easier on you. The more like them you acted, the more they liked you. On my first day I’d said please and called them all sir and they’d called me a fucking faggot and boxed my ears until I had a persistent hum in my head. When I started telling them to fuck themselves, they still boxed my ears, but they did it with a wink and a jolly smile and started calling me Kitty. Hey, Kitty, get your pale ass over here and break down this weapon.

They were still calling me names and beating the shit out of me on a regular basis, but now it was with smiles, and you started to feel like you were part of something, that we were all in on it. That these guys had been beaten up and called names and that someday you yourself would be banging some kid’s head into the ground, yelling at them to man up.

I got posted to New York. Prestigious. They only post the best to places like New York or Moscow or Islamabad or Bogotá. And I was real good at it, for a while. You felt good, working connections and paying attention, noticing something and making sure it didn’t blow up into something bigger. You felt like you were making a difference, even if it was kind of a rough and disreputable job. But I could handle the occasional bullshit you had to shovel because I really thought I improved things, one bust at a time.

So I dealt with the security details for VIPs who made me want to assault them instead of protect them, spoiled assholes who barked orders at me and called me “chum.” I put a few shells in a few ears on verbal orders from majors who appeared out of luxury hovers to pass the word, and I didn’t feel good about it, but I told myself there was a good reason for it, somewhere. I watched my partners and squad mates getting rich, shaking down just about everyone, a hundred yen here, a thousand there. Bodyguarding rats. And I walked some really bad people in the front door of Rockefeller and out a back door, untouched, unprocessed, and took the bracelets off them and smiled at them instead of kicking them in the balls until they cried and charging them up the ass with a whole fucking bouquet of violations. I did all these things and got sicker and sicker about it, but I still clung to what I thought the job was. I did it. I did it all and laughed with Miggs and Heller and Mage and got blind drunk every night, roaring, trying to make enough noise. But all I ever heard was that kid saying forever like it was a lead weight he was spitting out.

And then Heller disappeared. For a while. For two weeks. We’d been partnered for a few years, and I’d gotten used to the psychopathic bastard and his foul mouth. Got used to him hurting the rats just so he could say he’d marked them. He didn’t want to kill anyone, he wanted to mark them all, scar them, be able to look at the lilliputians and know that they’d met him before. I’d gotten used to him, and then one day he was gone, on unspecified leave. Un-fucking-specified leave. The man hadn’t so much as taken a lunch in all the years I’d worked with him. He enjoyed breaking heads too much.

And then he came back.

Heller was still Heller. He still told everyone they were a fucking cunt at least six times a day. He still enjoyed breaking heads. My skin crawled standing next to him. The way he sometimes seemed to get orders out of thin air, to make decisions that were completely fucking irrational, to sometimes use phrases I’d never heard him use—none of it made any sense, but I started to drink on the job. Fuck it. I woke up hungover and started in immediately so I’d be humming nicely by the time our shift started, and two hours in when Heller was tracking down some Taker who had information on the location of a political POI, muttering under his breath like always and terrorizing everyone, I was hammered and didn’t notice how he was one fucking step off from normal.

Every day was a grind, every day was a descent. Rumors started to float about cops disappearing, coming back. Rumors were everywhere, but I barely heard them. And then one night I got woken up at three in the fucking morning by six identical assholes in nice suits with Internal Affairs.

I got killed on my first day after being reassigned to Chengara. Stupid. I’d been wandering around, in a fucking haze, going through motions like they were programmed into me. I didn’t know why I was doing half the things I was doing; they just bubbled up from some dark center, moving my limbs. I hadn’t gotten around to worrying about it, because it was the only thing that kept me moving. I’d been kidnapped and knocked out, and when I’d woken up I was in an artificial body and some smiling, plump woman with a slight German accent—so slight it was maddening—was telling me to smile and be cheerful, because I was fucking immortal now. So I was on autopilot, somehow knowing everything I needed to know about being assigned to Chengara. I knew where everything was; I knew the routines, the schedules, everything. Even though I’d never been there before.

Two of the inmates started snarling, and without thinking, I stepped between them. The one in front of me tried to shiv me in the belly, but I knocked the taped-up blade from his hand with a neat snap of my arm I was pretty sure I wasn’t capable of performing. Before I could goggle at that, everything went black, and I woke up back in one of the labs underground. The other shithead had stabbed me in the fucking head.

No harm done. The same smiling woman greeted me cheerfully and sent me back to duty. Assured me that over-the-air backups meant I had only lost a second of memory, at most, and would suffer no ongoing problems. I was immortal. Endless. Forever.

The only thing even approaching normal was arrivals. That duty was at least slow-paced and continuous. You woke up on the elevator with a half dozen others, instantly alert and alive, and then you made sure there were no slowdowns or fuckups with debarking the assholes from the train. A good hour, maybe more. I felt like I got to think a little. When I rotated off of arrivals, it was a fucking nightmare: waking up in the elevator, you could hear the shouting, and then we were out in the yard, a fucking riot, orange jumpsuits everywhere, sniper fire going off, and it was just old-school shit, beating them back with Tasers.

Standing Order Thirteen instructed us not to kill unless necessary. That made it a little challenging. Though you could game the definition of challenging if you tried hard enough.

Then, back in the elevator, and blink—you’re out again. And you woke up some random time later and did it all again. Asleep, kicking ass. Asleep, kicking ass. No transition, nothing in between.

At arrivals, I got to chat a little. They said working a normal shift detail was better, because you almost got to be normal. They said that at first Internal Affairs returned processees to their original detail because they thought it would help people cope with the transition, but it turned out that while it did help the processed get their bearings, it freaked everyone else out, so until the majority of the force had been processed they’d started rotating everyone to new duty when their number got pulled.

Well, shit. So now I’m stuck in this shithole. I’ve got fifteen minutes a day to myself, when I’m lucky. They say they have to switch us on for a little bit every day or we get disoriented. They need us to turn on immediately, so we get these fifteen-minute windows to percolate and clear out the cobwebs, and I use them recording this… diary, I guess. I listen to yesterday’s first. I say the same thing all the time. But I still say it. I listen to myself saying it, and then I say it again, because nothing else ever happens. My life is all past now.

Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, I Tasered some old man by the dole until he pissed himself and passed out. This is who I am. Forever.

Acknowledgments

When my Future Self emerged from his homebrew time machine in my devastated living room back in 1987 and told me to write this book, I was dubious but took notes anyway because it seemed like the right thing to do. Plus my Future Self was pretty drunk and belligerent, waving around a silver batonlike thing that might have been some sort of death ray. The notes remained locked inside a fireproof strongbox for twenty years until that fateful day when my publisher sent a team of thugs to my home to extract signatures on new publication contracts, and I needed an idea fast. I am quietly assured by my Future Self that the publication of this book will lead me to world domination.

Along the way, many folks have helped: First and foremost, my beautiful wife, Danette, who alternately kicked my butt when it needed kicking and dressed my wounds when they threatened the writing progress. She remains the most perfect wife, partner, and motivator known to modern science.

My agent Janet Reid continues to feign amusement with my ways and negotiates the heck out of everything my name appears on, often appearing in a flash of purple smoke anytime I reach for a pen to sign something. This is sometimes awkward in restaurants when the check comes, though it makes fleeing from expensive meals a little easier.

My editor Devi Pillai always starts our conversations by telling me how great I am, which I appreciate, and then starts talking, and somehow by the end of the conversation I have agreed to write more books for her, wash her car, pick up her dry cleaning, and scrub her shower tiles. These books would not be as good as they are without her help and patience, not to mention her ability to control me with her thoughts.

Everyone else at Orbit Books for putting up with me and for doing a fantastic job of putting these books together and then convincing folks to purchase them.

And of course, I have to thank everyone who bought a copy of The Electric Church or The Digital Plague, without whom I’d just be another crazy man on the street corner, waving a stained and torn manuscript about as I drunkenly demand that everyone pay me a dollar.

Finally, if not for the quick reflexes and fearlessness of the world-famous Lili Saintcrow, this book would likely never have been written, as I would likely have perished in a Russian prison, disavowed even by my own government. Thanks, Lili!

Extras

Meet the Author

Barbara Nitke

JEFF SOMERS was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. After graduating college, he wandered aimlessly for a while, but the peculiar siren call of New Jersey brought him back to his homeland. In 1995, Jeff began publishing his own magazine, the Inner Swine ( www.innerswine.com [http://www.innerswine.com]). The Web site for The Electric Church can be found at www.the-electric-church.com [http://www.the-electric-church.com].

Introducing

if you enjoyed

THE ETERNAL PRISON,

look out for

THE TERMINAL STATE

by Jeff Somers

“EVERY’TING fallen apart,” Dingane groused, rubbing his dry, cracked hands against his unshaven chin. “T’whole fuckin’ world, yeah?”

I raised the wooden cup from the wobbly table and held it in the air between us, steeling myself. I’d tasted some terrible things in my life, but the moonshine Bixon made out back routinely tasted like it had been filtered through corpses, and felt like it was taking a layer of your throat off as it went down to boot. I was a murderer, a Plague survivor, and a wanted man, and I still had to steady myself before each shot.

“Quit your fucking bellyaching,” I advised Dingane, “and tell me if you got my stuff.”

Dingane paused, nasty, and then thought better of it and smiled. I immediately wished he hadn’t, green teeth and black gums, and I tipped the shot into my mouth to distract myself from his grin. My throat tried to close up in instinctual defense, but I was ready for that and just worked it on down. I breathed through my mouth.

“Ohkay, ohkay,” Dingane said, affecting a jolly expression. “Av’ry is impatient today, uh? You pay’n the bills heeyah, so ohkay. I got mos’ de stuff you ask. Not easy t’transport heavy shit, t’big shit.” He spread his chalky hands. “No ’overs any mo’, Av’ry. From here t’Florida you can’t get no ’overs. An if you could, the fucking armay be shoot’n your ass down, trust. So I can’t get the big items. And bullets is hard. Ammo. Hard. No one makin’ any’ting anymore. Nowhere. Mexico, sheeit, usesta be, Mexico you get any’ting, now, no. Nothin’ in Mexico ’cept armay and cops, armay and cops, shootin’s at every’ting, bombing t’cities back to fuck.”

It was my fate to listen to Dingane bitch and moan every now and then. I’d pulled his ear a few times to discourage him, but Dingane was one of those leathery fellows that looked a fucking century old and acted like pain didn’t mean shit to him anymore, which maybe it didn’t. Easier to let him talk about how the whole world was going to piss. I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

That didn’t mean I couldn’t move things along. “Hell, Dingy, can’t you shut up for one fucking minute?”

He gave me the grin again. “Sho’ can, Av’ry, but I thought y’wanted news of your order, huh? You wanted clips, mag’zines, for what’ver caliber I could get. I got some, I got some, but it ain’t cheap or easy. N’one down south makin’ ’em up an’more. I gots to go far afield, you dig?”

I let Dingane talk. It was good cover. I closed my eyes and pictured the place, Bixon’s uninsulated shack with the long bar made up of crates in the back, the wobbly tables lashed together, the big ugly metal stove in the middle of the room glowing red, pulsing with heat, making the whole place smell like my own armpit and stinging the eyes with soot and smoke. Better than outside, where snow was howling—the weather was fucked up; you never knew what you were gonna get these days. Rumor was, it was all fallout from the war screwing up the climate, but who the fuck knew. I’d never been in this part of the world before. Neither had most of us.

I thought of Old Pick, long dead now. I thought about everything that fat old bastard had known, the data of lifetimes, the oral history of every criminal worth remembering in New York since Unification. And who knew what water he’d carried across the line from pre-Uni times. All of it gone now, like it’d never happened. And there’d never be another Pick, ever. Not these days.

The tables, six of them, arranged randomly in the tight space beyond the bar, more or less around the stove that stood in the middle. Dingane and I, the Mayor and her cronies playing dominoes, Tiny Timlin and some of the other kids looking puffy and sick, on their fourth or fifth dose of Bixon’s poison. Bixon himself, behind the bar, a man who had never washed once since I’d known him, more beard than human at this point. All of them just flotsam, people fleeing the war and dead cities abandoned by one side or another, showing up here. For the most part, if you could lend a hand, you were pretty much welcome.

If you couldn’t lend a hand, or didn’t want to, and stuck around anyway, that’s where I came in.

“And this utter ting you ask me to look into, I t’ink I got you something.”

I popped open one eye and put it on him. The black bastard was grinning, pleased with himself. I shut my eyes again. “Yeah?”

I pictured the place once more: one door in the front, a heavy piece of wood on crude but solid hinges; one in the rear that led out to the back, where Bixon created his horrible juice. I didn’t know how he made the stuff, and I didn’t want to know; if I went back there and found him milking some terrible giant green worm, I wouldn’t be surprised.

And then, bellied to the bar and examining his cup of booze dubiously, the Badge.

Not a Badge anymore, but certainly an old System Pig. I didn’t recognize him —

Me either, Marin whispered faintly, and was gone.

— but he had the look.

“Yeah,” Dingane said, leaning forward so I could get a real good whiff of him, a courtesy. “Europe, I’ear. Amsterdam. Solid source, uh?”

I shook my head, opening my eyes again. I didn’t hear from my ghosts much anymore, but they still popped up once in a while, still there, still complete and whole. Amsterdam. I figured Michaleen would be in Europe. Knowing a city was a good start.

The cop—ex-cop—was turning to survey the place, sizing us up. He was tall and heavy, a gone-to-fat heaviness encased like a sausage inside a heavy leather overcoat that looked battered and salty, and a dark blue suit that had seen better days. His shoes were woefully unprepared for the mush outside, with a noticeable hole in one, through which I could make out his bare toe, pink and squirming. You didn’t need to see his credit dongle—assuming he still carried one like a totem—to know this ex-cop had seen better days.

He still had that gloss, though. That cop arrogance. He’d somehow escaped Marin’s avatar purge, and he’d somehow wriggled away from the civil war to go adventuring, but even without backup or a discretionary budget or fucking shoes, he still thought he was going to run the show here. His hair was bright red and thin, a halo around his pink head. His cheeks hung from his face like they were full of ball bearings and sagged with weight, and his eyes were watery and red.

As I watched, he picked up his cup without looking at it and delivered it to his wet mouth. Tipping it back without hesitation, he swallowed the shot whole and returned the cup to the bar without comment or visible reaction. My respect for the man went up a half inch. Anyone who could drink Bixon’s poison without wincing or coughing or bursting into flames had something going on.

Behind me, the band was working through a complex guitar set, chicken-picking their way through a series of chords that managed to sound pretty good even though they had ten strings between the three of them. They were old guys, fucking ancient, but everyone here did something. If you couldn’t work the fields or make booze or kick the shit out of people when the Mayor told you to, you played a bass line on a single string and made it sound snappy.

Glancing to my right, I found, as always, Remy staring at me. Remy had lost his gloss; he was starting to look like a normal human being. I didn’t know how old he was, or why I always had squirts running after me like I was fucking Santa Claus, but Remy was coming along from the spoiled little brat in his shiny shoes, screaming about his daddy. He was firming up, and he’d even stopped calling me Mr. Cates. Next we had to work on the staring, but to be honest it came in handy. I nodded my head slightly, and the kid was up off his crate immediately and out into the storm.

“Listen up!”

The ex-cop’s voice was booming, deep and smooth, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. His eyes, though, roamed the space nervously, and his hands were curled into fists. The music stopped on a dime.

“My name is Major Benjamin Pikar!” he shouted, turning slowly to make sure we all got the benefit of his jiggling jowls. “And I am here to protect you.”

Major. I eyed him up and down, and decided he’d given himself a promotion. His coat was Captain, if that.

Our Mayor, who’d been elected by dint of referring to herself as the Mayor until we couldn’t stand it anymore, was behaving herself and keeping her eyes off me. Gerry was an amiable old hag who’d been a banker before the Plague. She’d lost her family during that little fun ride, and had been in Chicago when the army, the friendly folks of the SFNA, had sent in five hundred thousand single-use bomb drones armed with F-90s, field-contained armaments. Wandering south out of the wreckage, she’d found us here in Englewood and decided to stay. She was skinny, with a huge triangle of a nose that bobbed up and down whenever she talked, and gray eyes permanently squinted from years of peering at holographic data streams. The last time one of these entrepreneurs had shown up to save us from the big bad world, Gerry’d leaped up to announce she was the Mayor and would speak for the town, and I’d been forced to knock her unconscious.

“I have been assigned by order of Richard Marin, Director of Internal Affairs for the System Security Force, to take administrative charge of this settlement, bring it in line with the laws and customs of the System of Federated Nations, and organize your defense against both the insurgent forces and… criminal aspects seeking to take advantage of you,” Pikar said with a straight face. I wondered, briefly, why Marin never just cut the cord and promoted himself to Director of the Whole Fucking World, or What Was Left of It After the F-90s.

Can’t, the man’s outdated ghost whispered in my head. Programming limits.

Pikar was looking around to see how well his shit was floating, and didn’t look pleased, his red face getting darker, his knuckles white at his sides.

“Perhaps you have heard,” he managed to say calmly, putting his hands on his hips in a practiced motion that pushed his coat back to reveal the twin guns under his arms and the battered badge clipped to his belt, “rumors of SFNA Press Gangs in the region.” He nodded crisply. “I can confirm this.”

I glanced at the two windows, small and cloudy, that were set into the front wall. Against the snow I could clearly see dark forms gathered at each, and I put my eyes back on Pikar to make sure he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t; he was caught up in the pitch. I knew what was coming next. I could have written the script for him.

“There is no reason to fear, however, as I am here now to organize your defense against these dangerous rebels.” He was all business now. He’d given us the scare, showed us the cannons, and now came the offer. He turned to signal Bixon for another drink. Bixon, who was as wide as he was tall, all beery muscle without a hint of Augments, was just standing there behind his rotting makeshift bar, hands hidden, caressing, I had no doubt, his prize possession: a personally restored 10-09 Shredder, original SSF issue and held together, literally, by tightly wound strands of silvery wire. It had seven rounds left and odds were it was going to explode in his hands if he ever dared fire it, but it still made grown men who knew what it was shit their pants when they saw it.

“I will require the following items in order to fund and organize my office here,” Pikar boomed, tapping his fingers on the bar. “First —”

I’d had enough. “First, shut the fuck up,” I said. I didn’t say it loud. Everyone heard me anyway. This was what I got paid for, if you counted a roof over my head and enough tasteless gruel to keep me alive—not to mention a bottomless tab at Bixon’s—as pay. I hadn’t received any better offers, so I’d stayed on, kicking asses and running shitheads along.

The ex-cop was looking at me, and to his credit all his nervous tics were instantly gone, replaced with the careful stillness of someone trained to handle himself. “Excuse me, citizen?”

I stood up, wooden cup in one hand as I slid my other into the oily pocket of my raincoat. I waved the cup a little as I pushed through the slit cut into the fabric and put my palm on the butt of my prized Roon, oiled every night and cleaned every other, gleaming and smooth like there was no such thing as rust, decay, or death. I made for the bar, working hard to keep the pain and stiffness in my leg from showing. “I said shut the fuck up, you’re making this place smell worse than it normally does with that bullshit, and that’s saying something.” I placed my cup on the bar. “Sorry, Bix.”

Bixon nodded, his eyes still locked on Pikar. “No worries, Avery.”

Pikar turned his head slightly toward Bix but kept his eyes on me. Logging the bartender as a combatant, marking his position, probably noting for the first time the absence of visible hands. He shifted his weight and angled his fingers from his belt to tap the badge.

“You don’t want to fuck with Police, friend,” he said. “This is official business.”

I nodded, leaning with my back against the bar. The badge had shorted out and didn’t have the cheery gold glow of the holograph anymore. “From what I hear, the System Pigs’ business these days is tripping over themselves retreating from the army. You ain’t the first asshole to wander in here out of the fucking snow with holes in his fucking shoes trying to shake us down. You’re looking for assholes, soft touches. Keep walking until you find some.”

That was his one chance, I decided. Fair was fair.

He kept his flat little eyes on me, and his hands perfectly still. His jowls, though, were quivering, rhythmically, bouncing slightly with every thudding heartbeat that kept his face purple. Then he smiled.

“New York,” he said, jolly now. “The accent. You’re Old Work from the island, right? Spent a few weeks in some Blank Rooms here and there, uh?”

I shrugged. “You don’t know me.” He probably did know my name, but it didn’t matter.

He nodded. “Maybe not. I know your type. Strawman, stuffed with shit. You all think this piece of turd is your hero?” he suddenly asked the room. “You’re betting on the wrong man.”

My own heart was pounding, and my stomach was complaining about Bixon’s swill. A cold sweat had popped out on my face too, and I wondered if there was any way to turn puking my guts out into an advantage in a gunfight.

“Look out the windows, Hoss,” I advised. “We’ve called out the militia.”

He squinted at me. I almost felt sorry for him: he wasn’t an avatar, so that meant he’d been in some backwater post, a fuckup out in the middle of nowhere, or else he’d been running a lot longer than I’d imagined. Desperate. Shot on sight if the army found him, packed into a data brick for leisurely debriefing whenever the immortal Dick Marin felt like it, if the cops picked him up—he was screwed. He wanted to look, but he didn’t want to be stupid, didn’t want to look stupid. That was all he had left. The aura of a cop.

Everything was falling apart, sure. Dingane had it right. Even the System Pigs were just ghosts these days.

The shadows in the windows looked good. Menacing. Remy and his friends had balls, sure. They didn’t have any guns, but you couldn’t tell that through the windows. It didn’t matter if Pikar looked or not, if he saw men with rifles or kids pissing their short pants—it made him think, it fucked him up, and that was all it was meant to do.

He snorted. “I’m taking control of this settlement,” he said slowly. “I am ordering you to hand over whatever it is you’re fondling in your pocket and take your seat.”

I had everyone trained by this point, and I was pretty sure I could count on them to stay still and not do anything I’d regret. Except Bixon. I struggled to keep my eyes off the barrel-shaped asshole and contented myself with hoping he didn’t do anything I’d regret. The whole place was still and quiet, narrowed down to Pikar and me, my aching leg and stiff back. I wondered, for a second, if Pikar was aching too, how old he was, what he’d been through.

And then he moved.

It was good too. He’d taken the windows seriously, and realized that with me and Bix standing across from him, we were nailed in crossfire, so he went low, crouching down and yanking his guns out beautifully, both clear and in his hands in a blink as he duckwalked to put his back against the front door, out of the imaginary rifles’ sight lines. Jerking the Roon up and out of my pocket, I put two bullets an inch or so from his left ear and then threw myself up and back onto the bar, giving myself a load of tiny splinters as I pushed across, dropping behind it like a sack of wet cement.

As I righted myself on the floor, I saw Bix heaving the Shredder up with a yell, and before I could stop him he depressed the trigger and the familiar head-splitting whine filled the room, the 10-09 barked and jerked up and out of Bixon’s hands, spluttering six rounds into the ceiling before it smacked Bix in the nose hard enough to break it.

I hedgehogged up, poking my head over the bar just long enough to take in the room and then dropping back down, braced for the pop-pop-pop of a trained shot. There was nothing, no noise at all. I heaved myself back up with a grunt and let the bar support me for a moment, the Roon pointed at Pikar, who was slumped in front of the door, his belly a swamp of blood, one arm still up, holding his gun on me. Everyone else was sitting, frozen, like this was all just the fucking floor show.

Pikar was grinning blood. As I slowly walked the length of the bar to step around, his gun followed me, inch by inch. Just as I cleared the crates, his finger twitched, sending me to the floor with a choking grunt. Instead of the thudding bark of a shot, there was just a dry click. I pushed myself back up to put the Roon on him. The cop was just laughing, still holding the gun on me. As I got to my feet, he pulled the trigger a dozen more times, getting the same dry click each time.

“You shot me with a fucking shredding rifle,” he sputtered, flecks of bloody spit spraying from his mouth and landing on the floor, where the dry wood soaked them up forever. “You fucking rats. I don’t even have any fucking bullets.”

I stood up and kept the shiny Roon on him. My ass burned like someone had stabbed a million tiny pieces of wood into it. “What kind of asshole pulls his piece if he can’t do anything with it? Were you going to throw it at me?”

“Fuck you.” He sighed, deflating. He was still holding his useless gun on me, even though his arm shook with the effort.

“Avery,” Gerry suddenly said, her voice a scratchy whisper. “Okay, man, the situation’s calmed. We’ll take care of him from here.”

I nodded without looking at her. Pikar was still smiling at me. “You were a cop,” I said. “You know how this works. You pull a gun, you take the consequences.” I’d learned a lot about the human race over the years. I’d learned that the dead didn’t stay dead, I’d learned that no good deed ever went unpunished. And I’d learned that trying to have a code of honor got you a lot of people telling you how much respect they had for you while they were beating your head against the floor.

Ignoring the dull pain in my leg, I drew a bead and put a shell in Pikar’s face. Then one more in his chest just to be safe, making him twitch and flop. I turned and stumped to the bar, slipping my Roon back into place and then putting my shaking hands flat on the crates. The only cure for Bixon’s rotgut was more, and fast. It got deadly only when you stopped.