Hammered

BOOK THREE

10:15 P.M., Saturday 16 September, 2062

Bridgeport, Connecticut

Razorface leaned across the center console and laid a hand on Mitch’s shoulder. “Roll up the windows, man,” he ordered. “This is Bridgeport.”

“Good advice.” Mitch toggled the windows up and flipped on the climate control.

In the backseat, Bobbi resettled herself, her injured leg propped across the bench seat. “We need to go back to Hartford, gentlemen.”

“You got a plan?” Razor swiveled to look at her. She shook her head, and he grunted. “I gotta check this out. Then we talk about it.”

“I’ve got a plan,” Mitch said. He felt eyes resting on him as he focused his attention on the road. Bobbi’s vehicle had proximity sensors, but many of the ones sharing the road did not. A skinny dog bolted across cracked asphalt, almost under the tires, and he tapped the brakes to give it half a chance.

“Tell me, Michael.” Bobbi leaned forward. He saw her wincing in the rearview.

Mitch took one hand off the wheel and shook a cigarette out of his pack before tossing the rest to Razor. “We find Barbara Casey. Head south, maybe, make her chase us, then double back. Get the drop on her. Then we put a bullet or three in the back of her head.”

His own voice sounded chromed to him. He noticed small creases at the corner of Razorface’s eyes as the gangster resettled his leather coat around his shoulders, leaning against the door.

“She can get ronin from all over the East Coast,” Bobbi said. “She will hire more if she needs to; she does not have to come after us herself.”

“I bet she set up that little deal at the warehouse to see if anybody would jump on seeing Emery backing her up.” Mitch heard cellophane crinkle as Razor rolled the pack of cigarettes thoughtfully between his fingers.

“I got Emery,” Bobbi said from the backseat.

Razor turned his head to the side and half-smiled back at her. “I owe you for that, killer.”

“But I gave too much away. I should have stuck around and infiltrated.”

“She was probably tracking your feed,” Mitch said. “I would have been.”

Bobbi blew a long iridescent strand of hair out of her eyes, but sat back, satisfied. “Still, we sprung the trap, and the fox got away, neh? And knows now the hunter is near.”

“Been thinking,” Razorface continued in his measured fashion, “what you need a half dozen ronin for. Not just us. But you get rid of Emery. Get rid of me. I already slapped Garcia’s face. He gonna want his own back.”

“Hartford’s going to have a war.”

“Hartford gonna have a war, Mitch.” Razorface lit the cigarette he’d shaken loose, stifling a cough as he took the first drag. “You wanna stand back and let that happen?”

“That’s what I don’t get, Razorface. Why is a corporate hired gun stirring up trouble in Hartford? I don’t see what purpose that serves.”

In the backseat, Bobbi coughed delicately, leaning away from the coiling smoke.

“Fuck, you don’t see? Pretty plain to me.” Razorface glanced down, staring at the cherry-red coal glowing like a precious stone against the back of his hand. “She gotta be worried we got some proof she did Mashaya. Something that’ll link her and her company to the Hammers.”

The steering wheel felt sticky against Mitch’s palms as he navigated them down a one-way street. “I called my pal in West Hartford P.D. He’s going to try to find some excuse to get into that warehouse.”

Razorface chuckled. “Probably clean as a baby’s butt by now.”

“Probably. I still haven’t heard your theory about the gang war.”

Razorface’s chuckle hissed through his teeth. “Easy. She hangs doing Mashaya on you, the Hammers on me or Garcia, gets a few Hammerheads and a few Latin Kings dead. Get us three killed by bounty hunters. You get a gang war spilling over into where the white people live, you take the PR hit to wrap a case up easy. Dirty cop dead along with a gangster who turned out to be just another black motherfucker preying on his brothers, after all. Nobody goes looking for the people who really did it. Happen all the time.”

“Nobody hurt but the dead.” Mitch felt pain and realized he’d bitten his lip. I bet Razorface got out of that habit pretty quick.

“’Zactly.”

The silence stretched while Mitch chewed over the implications and possibilities. “That’s a lot of fuss to cover up a crime.”

“Pretty big crime.”

“Have you still got boys you can trust?”

“Turn here. We going to find out.”

Razorface directed them to a paid lot a block from the warehouses. Gritty, graying brick buildings, their shattered windows overhung with ivy, framed the parking lot. Mitch scanned the rooflines nervously as he stepped out of the vehicle and keyed the door locks.

Bobbi sniffed deeply as Razorface helped her down. “Do you smell that, gentlemen?”

The air carried a faintly sweet-salt aroma. Wind rippled through Mitch’s hair, heavy as a silken drapery, moist as a sweating hand. “Hurricane Rhonda. I thought the radio guy said we weren’t going to get it.”

“Radio guy might still be right.” Razor rolled his shoulders, unconcerned or feigning it. He rubbed his jaw. “Sometimes you smell the storms, you don’t get ’em.”

“How much of a trap are we walking into, here?” Mitch held the door for Bobbi while she turned back into the Jeep to get her cane. “Your leg okay?”

“It will heal. I wear nanosurgeons. Knitters. The wound is granulating already.”

Ain’t technology grand. And if she didn’t pick up a resistant infection, she probably wouldn’t even have a scar in three years. We should all live so long.

“Could be a trap,” Razor admitted, checking the hang of his gun. “Probably is. But I gotta check. Leesie done right by me for a long time now.”

“All right. You got a floor plan of this warehouse, Razor?”

The big man grinned like a shark and touched his forehead with a forefinger. “Got it right here.”

“That is not so helpful, Razorface.” Bobbi reached down, smoothing a trouser leg over her bandages.

“Also got it on my hip.” He pulled the little chromed device out of a jacket pocket and laid it on the fender of the Jeep. “Gonna go through these messages first.” He tugged the light pen out of its holder and tapped through the screens. “I got word back from some boys I think I can trust. They gonna meet us.”

“Here?”

“Nah. Nobody knows about this place but me an Leesie. S’why it might be safe. After. I tell ’em Constitution Plaza.”

“You wanna go back to Hartford after all?”

“Got to.” He tapped through more messages. “Can’t have my boys killing each other and everything else. You ain’t got to come—” The grin, which Mitch thought might have been forced, fell away.

“What?” Mitch was glad Bobbi had spoken, because he couldn’t bring himself to.

Several cars hissed by, painting the parking lot in edgy shadows. “Message from that doctor. ’Bout Maker,” Razorface answered, closing his eyes. “She gone into the hospital. She say she’s on her own now, won’t be in touch no more. Maybe for a while.” His voice was dead level.

Heedless of the danger, Mitch laid one hand on Razorface’s leather jacket. “What do you want to do?”

“Shit, man, ain’t nothing we can do.” He tapped the messages off and stowed the light pen, and didn’t knock Mitch’s hand away. Mitch felt the tremors in the big man’s arm through the stiff, cracked hide. “Fuck. Fuck.”

“I know, Razorface,” Bobbi said from the other side.

“Bitch, you don’t know shit.” She stepped back, as did Mitch, and for a moment the warlord almost seemed to swell — eyes gleaming, shoulders up like a prizefighter’s. He rounded on Bobbi like a shining Spanish bull on a matador, and she stopped him with one hand upraised.

The other still rested lightly on the head of her cane. “Razor,” she said in quiet warning. “I don’t like that word.”

Mitch took another step away, more than willing to let these two sort it out without interference. But after a drawn out moment of eye contact, Razorface was the one to look down. “Hell, it ain’t like she’s my momma,” he said to no one in particular, and lit up his HCD to show them how the warehouse was laid out.

“Casey will be here, or here,” Bobbi said, pulling her own light pen out and indicating a rooftop and a high window in the holographic display. “Rotate, please?”

Razorface spun the display while Bobbi chewed her lip. “Yes. From here, she has the street-level approaches. She may have as many as six ronin on the secondaries. I’m going to have to kill some people I know tonight, Razorface.”

“You sure she here?”

Bobbi put her hand back on Razor’s arm. “Razorface. If Alyse is alive, it’s because Barb had her followed. If she’s not alive, then Barb got the information out of her somehow that this is where she was supposed to meet you.”

Face hissed through steel teeth. “Yeah.” He looked up at the crumbling facades. “How we gonna take this?”

“Let me show you,” Bobbi answered, leaning forward.

Mitch stopped crawling and blew on his hands before he dusted them on crusted jeans. White chips like cake sprinkles scattered on the tar-paper roofing. He made sure his switchblade was still in his pocket, although he didn’t expect to use it, and glanced up to low clouds, fat with promise, rosy in the reflected light. The leading edge of the hurricane — which had shifted course directly into Long Island Sound, after all, and was expected to come barreling up the river like the furious breath of God — caught the city glow and lit the night much brighter than he wanted it.

“My kingdom for a rifle,” he muttered, keying the light amplification on his contact up a couple of notches. One eye only — he didn’t want to find himself blinded if somebody hit him in the eye with a spotlight.

But Bobbi had the only rifle, and Razorface was carrying his sawed-off shotgun slung between his shoulder blades, under his armored leather coat. At least I have my vest on, Mitch thought, tracing the outline of a trauma plate with his thumb. For luck. Not that it’ll do me a damned bit of good if she gets the drop on me the way she did Mashaya.

Ah, six or seven trained killers, three of us. That’s a fair fight by anyone’s standards, right? He slid his pistol out of the holster, safety pinching his thumb as he flicked it off, and rose on his knees to peer over the edge of the parapet wall.

And ducked back fast as if burned. A shadow moved on the next rooftop, and Mitch wasn’t fool enough to think that anyone he could see wouldn’t notice him. Especially given the class of people he was hunting.

I guess you’re a ronin now, Mitchy. If he lived long enough to need a job. That didn’t bear thinking about. Are you going to shoot that guy in cold blood?

His stomach went seasick and dark, and he thought hard about the breath he was taking. Murder. He hugged his windbreaker tight over the armored vest when the wind gusted and plucked at it, threatening to blow him backward along the roof.

“Well, yeah,” Mitch muttered. And slowly, delicately, slid his gaze and the muzzle of his pistol over the top of the parapet wall.

Wedging his broad shoulders through a manhole, Razorface heard the gunshot and nodded in satisfaction. Pistol shot. Probably Mitch. Hope that means he got a rifle now. He balanced on the rusted ladder and reached up, dragging the cover back into place. Bring the noise, bitch.

The storm sewer was dark and reeked of rats. Razor felt his descent, probing with the toe of a boot, until he dropped the last foot and found himself ankle-deep in cold rushing water. A pair of grenades, retrieved from the trunk of the Caddy before they’d abandoned it, clicked on his belt.

Hope that storm don’t break while I’m down here. It was still supposed to be hours away.

But you never knew. He reached up and slid a metal band behind his left ear and around his shaved-down head, adjusting the optic in front of his left eye. The sewer sprang into green-and-black outlines.

Razorface slipped forward, footsteps all but silenced in the gurgle of the stream. There were reasons why he’d told Leesie to meet him in this particular place if anything ever went bad. He knew his way around it pretty good.

And there was a way into the basement from the storm cellars.

He paused, listening, one hand on the rusted steel handle of the round-cornered door once he found it. There was no sound beyond. They know we here now anyway, after that shot.

Razorface pushed the handle down, felt resistance for a moment before the lock clicked back. He made a point to get down here and get it oiled a couple of times a year.

The door opened more quietly than it had any right to and he hesitated behind it, but the only sound he heard was the thunder of his own heart and breath. He eased his pistol out from under his jacket, zipped it up to the throat, and peered through the hinge side of the door. He would have expected the low-light optic on his left eye to reveal almost nothing in the darkness of the basement, but some light must have filtered in, because he saw the derelict boiler and the outline of a flight of steel stairs.

He stepped up over the high lip at the bottom and — betrayed only by the creak of leather — drifted like a lurking shadow into the basement. The floor creaked overhead, and he paused, cocking one ear. How dumb do they think I am?

Dumb enough to walk into a trap. And he couldn’t deny it, either.

The stairs would be harder to do without making a sound. He wondered if they would have the sense to cover the stairwells, or if Casey was arrogant enough to think she’d pick him off on the way into the building. He shouldn’t have come. One foot after another, he crept up the stairs on the wall side, where they might be stronger.

Leesie was dead already, probably dropped in the river wrapped in chain link with a cinder block tied to the wire. Everything he’d fought for in twenty hard years was gone, taken away with a pass of some faceless company’s hand. Somebody he owed was rotting in a hospital somewhere, and the burning in his chest just kept getting worse.

And Razorface felt the need to do something about it. Something long term, preferably. Permanent, if he could.

He had his hand on the doorknob when glass shattered on the other side of it, and then the gunfire started in earnest.

Outside, Mitch swore under his breath and brought his captured rifle around. He’d left the body of a Boston ronin, drilled once cleanly through the back of the neck, two roofs to the left, and was slowly advancing on the warehouse. A drop of rain spattered the back of his hand as he crab-crawled over the side of a redbrick tenement and dropped to the fire escape with enough noise to make him wince.

They’re not going to hear you over the gunfire. “Bobbi, where are you?” he whispered. Razorface had gone out of contact ten minutes before. Underground.

The wind picked up, smearing his hair across his face. Her light tones followed a moment later. “Breathing,” she said. “I got one.”

“Me, too,” he answered. “Any sign of Casey?”

“She might be inside. Or she might be not here.”

He paused in his descent on the lowest platform of the fire escape, where stairs gave way to a drop ladder. It was going to make a hell of a noise when he kicked it loose, and no mistake. “That would suck. I’m moving for the southern exposure.” And then the storm broke over him like a cascade.

Mitch ducked his head, clinging to the rifle, rainslick fingers of the other hand lacing through groaning metal of the scaffolding on which he stood. He shouted into the wind—“Bobbi!”—and didn’t know if she heard. The wind coiled around him like a snake, slick and humid and as strangely warm as the fist-sized drops of rain that slapped his face. Blinded, right hand knotted on the stock of the rifle, he raised the arm to shield his face.

He lost his contact in there somewhere, sluiced out of his eye by the torrent of water, and swore as darkness added itself to his problems. A streetlight sparked and shattered. You have got to get off this building or you’re not going to make it, Mitchy.

It was an act of will to unlace his fingers from the escape and turn his face back out to the storm. Huddling his back against the building, he unzipped the collar of his windbreaker and shoved the rifle down his back. Not the best idea in the world. But he was at a loss for options.

He rezipped the jacket, hissed a quick little prayer, and kicked the ladder down before he went over the edge of the platform, feeling for the rungs in the tossing darkness. Hell of a storm, he thought. Knew I should have stayed in college. I could have been a pharmacist.

The rusted metal sliced his hands, blood slicker than water as he fought his way down. That rust, he half thought, was the only thing keeping his hands on the ladder. If the rungs had been smooth, the gust that blew his feet sideways and fetched his hip up against brick would have sent his body tumbling into the alley. He screamed into the wind, or anyway tasted rain, and hauled himself back up against the ladder, shaking.

It was only fifteen feet down to the ground.

He dropped the last five in a lull between gusts and landed crouching.

And this is only the edge of the storm.

Razorface almost jumped back from the door when bullets spattered the far side, but they didn’t pierce the wood. He touched his ear clip. “Killer?”

“I’m in the building. Michael is outside.”

“Leesie there?”

“Razorface.” Her tone told him everything he needed to know.

“Right. You get out on your own?”

“Storm broke. You can’t get out through the sewer.”

“Fuck. Can you blow enough shit up so I can get through this door?”

“Yes, I can. No sign of Casey. I don’t think she’s here. On three, Mister Razorface.”

He changed his pistol for the shotgun while she counted in his ear, and on three he reared back and landed one boot hard on the lock plate of the door. It burst open, ricocheted off the wall, and slammed shut behind him as he stalked into the room. He raised the shotgun and discharged it into the face of a ronin who spun to meet him a half second too late. The body flopped forward instead of back, already dead when Bobbi put a safety shot into it from her perch just beneath the shattered skylight. He saw her silhouetted against the greenlit sky, rain sheeting down around her as she swung slowly through it. She spun and swayed on something that looked like a chain trapeze, and while Razorface watched she laid a careful burst into the chest and face of one man who ducked around a corner to snap a shot at her.

“You a beautiful lady, killer,” he said, spinning on the ball of his foot and surveying the room briefly through his optic. He counted four corpses, including the one he’d made.

“Go for it, Razorface,” she answered in his ear. “I think that’s all of them. And I’ll cover you until you’re out.”

But he couldn’t leave. Not until he searched the echoing, empty building and proved to himself that no one else — living or dead — was there. By the time he finished, Bobbi had made it to ground level and Mitch was inside, dripping water like a half-drowned terrier.

“Fuck it,” Mitch said, laying a hand on his arm again. Again, he let it ride. “Razorface, let’s go home and clean house, all right?”

Physics is like sex. Of course it can give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard Feynman

11:00 P.M., Saturday 16 September, 2062

Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

Leah grabbed her dad by the elbow when he came out of Genie’s bedroom, stretching his hands up idly and pressing his fingertips against the ceiling. “Dad.”

“What, sweetie?”

“Are you going out tonight?”

A hot tide flooded his cheeks. “I had plans for later.”

Leah let go of his sleeve and rolled her eyes. “Dad. You know Elspeth can come here, don’t you? God, you act like you have something to be ashamed of.”

“Ah.” He chewed air for a moment, and at last he chuckled. “You’ve been spending too much time with Jenny. But all right. I’ll let her know she’s welcome. Is that all this is about?”

She looked up at him through her lashes, chewing on her lower lip, stubborn jaw thrust out. So like her mother he couldn’t look her in the eye, and he couldn’t look away. “I need you to meet somebody. In VR.”

Later, in the darkness of her new and still sparsely furnished apartment, Elspeth curled into the crook of his arm and let her tangled hair fall across his shoulder and neck. She lay against his body relaxed as a kitten, softness and warmth and skin like satin, and he sighed.

“You’re thinking about Jenny.”

“Among other things.”

She traced a circle in his chest hair with one fingertip. Below the open window, cars drifted past. Shouts and laughter rose up like a song from the street, a helicopter’s rotors providing distant rhythm. “She might survive.”

“Yeah.” He turned to her, folding her in his arms. The room was full of the saltwater smell of lovemaking. “Leah wants you to know you’re welcome to come spend the night at our place.”

She laughed low in her throat. “She does, does she? That’s sweet of her.” Her fingertip stroked the hollow of his throat, the same small pattern over and over again. He blinked as he recognized it as the first letter of his name.

He burrowed between the pillow and her ear, lips moving almost soundlessly against her skin. She reached out and flipped the radio on, and he muffled his face with the blankets, rustling the cloth. “I spoke with your friend Richard today.” And felt her body tense against his.

Her hand traced another letter on his skin. O—?

Clever. “He’s befriended my daughter, it seems. And he’s pretty sure Valens is on to him.”

w-h-a-t-w-a-n-t-?

“He wants…” He took a breath. “He’s hopeful that the worm he got into the intranet will manage to clone his personality there. There’s holofiber run and an intranet connection to the monitors on Jenny’s life support. So Valens can keep an eye on her from his desk, sneaky bastard. Assuming she lives, Richard has a plan…”

In darkness, she listened, nodding, and every so often writing words on his skin.

“Gabe,” she murmured when he was done. “I’m not going to get in between you and Jenny.”

He laughed, wondering if she spoke for the benefit of the monitors. Yes, and no. “Jenny does that just fine by herself. Are you going to hold me at arm’s length because of her?”

He felt rather than saw her shake her head. “No,” she said. “I’m going to hold you at arm’s length because that’s where I’m comfortable keeping you. Oh, dammit.”

“Dammit?”

She sat up, fumbled with the light, and stood. It cast strange shadows across her body as the covers slipped away. He admired the play of the light on her skin. “Dammit,” she said, gliding across the hardwood floor to the bathroom. “I forgot to take my meds.” Water ran; she emerged in a moment, carrying a glass.

There was a cold, falling feeling in the bottom of his gut. “Are you sick?”

She shook her head. “No. Hell. Yes. Antidepressants. Serotonin levelers, to be precise. Like half the damned country.”

“Ah,” he said, and lifted the covers so she could slide back under them. “I was a walking pharmacy after my wife died, and after Genie was diagnosed. I couldn’t cope, you know? And I had to cope.”

“Nobody to take care of the girls for you?”

“Nobody to take care of anything. No, that’s not fair. Jenny was there for me. She slept on the sofa for a month.” He closed his eyes. “You know.”

“Yes,” she said, and snapped off the light. “I know.”

12:15 A.M., Sunday 17 September, 2062

One American Place

Hartford, Connecticut

They had outrun the storm on the way back to Hartford, but barely. On the west bank of the Connecticut River, the structure locals called the “Boat Building” rested in the middle of a raised concrete plaza. A small tower of glass, green in daylight as the river below it, the skyscraper had only two sides, bowed and meeting in a point on either end. Now, clouds swirled around the upper stories, strawberry colored in the reflected downtown light. Rising wind blew Razorface’s heavy armored jacket against his shoulders. The storm would be an advantage: hard to snipe in high winds and rain.

Razorface leaned back in the shadow of the building’s eastern tip, smoking a cigarette, as a light rain began to fall.

From here, he could see the automobile and foot bridges across to East Hartford, and the head of the steep stairs that led down the bluff to the riverfront proper. South, beyond the convention center and hotel, white mist from the Hartford Steam Plant curled against the storm-promising sky. He couldn’t see Mitch or Bobbi Yee, which was as it should be.

Razorface dropped his cigarette on wet concrete and crushed it under a booted foot, rubbing his jaw as it hissed and died. Voices — raucous, strident — drifted up to him from the area of State House Square, a few hundred feet off and a flight of stairs down at street level. Checking the hang of his shotgun under his jacket, he stepped back farther into darkness.

He had a good view as five skinny young men mounted the stairs and strode toward him, out of step, their shadows stretching long on the pavement. “Mitch, you got ’em?”

“They look like Hammerheads to me. I don’t know anything else. Oh, wait. I recognize the one in the middle.”

“Rasheed. Good kid.”

“Yeah. I busted him once. He was really polite.”

Razorface choked on a laugh. “Going out to meet them. Bobbi, you got me?”

“As soon as you come out into the light, Razorface. Between Michael and I, we have most of the vantage points covered. Move your boys out over the river, and we should be able to cover you pretty well. I am assuming Casey knows by now she didn’t get us in Bridgeport.”

“I’m assuming she knows about this meet, too,” Mitch put in. “Anything you told your boys, she’s probably heard about.”

“Gotcha.” Razorface squared his shoulders and strode out into the light of the streetlamps, cold against his neck despite the storm-warmth of the air, as if he could feel the pressure of a sniper scope. He knew he wouldn’t hear or feel a thing, if Casey was there, if she did get a clear angle of fire on him before Bobbi or Mitch spotted her.

He went anyway, and knocked fists with Rasheed, Derek, and the other three kids before gesturing them to follow him across the broad expanse of pale cement out toward the footbridge. The boys were silent now, following Razorface’s swinging strides three abreast and then two. He stopped at the midpoint of the bridge and stepped into the half-circle lookout platform over the river. Razorface leaned forward against antique wrought-iron panels picturing a twisted, lightning-blasted tree — the Charter Oak, symbol of the state. Downriver, he could dimly make out the dark maw of the Park River outflow channel through the rain, and beyond it, a glimpse of star-spangled azure light reflecting from the onion dome of the former Colt firearms factory, reinvented a dozen times and more in its long history and now — since the days of the Christian Fascist regime — a national monument.

He’d been there on a school tour, many years before.

Windblown rain stung his eyes as he turned to face his boys. He grinned hard, meeting and holding the gaze of each one. Two of the boys glanced away from the gleam of his teeth. Damn, he thought, my city really is fucked—and reached out to grab one by the throat as the first bullet stung sparks from the railing he had just moved away from.

“Razor!” The cop’s voice, in his ear. Ex-cop.

“I saw it,” Razorface growled back, picking the kid up and spinning to get his body in front of the towers of the city. The next shot went wider. “Rasheed, Derek — get these boys off the bridge!” They didn’t need to be told twice — they were already moving for the East Hartford side.

The captured gangster yowled, grappling at Razorface’s big hand with both of his little ones, and then jerked and went slack as the third slug slammed into his back and burst out his chest, spraying Razorface with bright blood and gore. The bullet plastered itself against Razor’s armored jacket and rang on the pavement.

“Nice shooting for a fucking hurricane!” he shouted. “Killer, do something about her. You got a bead yet?”

“On it,” she answered, which is when Razorface saw a shadowy figure—Mitch—moving among potted trees back on the landing.

“She’s up on the riverbank,” Mitch said. “I think I can flush her out…”

Another bullet rang off the wrought iron. Only the gusting winds protected him as he scrambled back a few steps, still dragging the scant cover of the dead gangster. And then he grinned again and glanced around. He spotted the lick of flame this time, and knew Mitch was right about the sniper’s location. “Hell,” Razorface said into the mike. “Watch this shit.”

And dropped the corpse, took a single running step, caught the railing in both hands, and slung his body over it like a pole-vaulter.

“Razorface!” It was Bobbi’s voice in his ear, raised the way it never was, but he twisted in midair and got his feet pointed down and his arms straight up over his face. The wind from falling didn’t seem any worse than the wind from the storm whistling past him. Hope I miss the fucking sand bar.

And then the water hit him like a wall.

Mitch saw Razorface go over the railing and he didn’t bother to shout out loud, because he also saw the muzzle flash from what he assumed was Casey’s gun, and the sudden movement silhouetted in the citylit darkness as she stood up out of the bushes to snap off one final shot at Razorface as he fell. She was closer than he’d estimated in the darkness — maybe fifty, a hundred yards away, downriver.

Mitch didn’t think. He brought his captured rifle up. He squeezed the trigger.

The shadowy figure in the darkness yelped and spun, tumbling down the brush-covered bluff to the concrete walk below. “Got her, Bobbi,” Mitch said, following the descent of the body down the riverbank. “She’s not dead, dammit.” He aimed carefully as she dragged herself upright, and then he heard running footsteps and turned as Bobbi came down the riverbank stairs a hundred-odd yards to his left four at a time, clinging to the banister and half-leaping, half-sliding in the driving rain.

“I’m going in after Razorface,” she gasped as she ran. “Kill the bitch, would you?” There was a concert pavilion above the edge of the dark water, and a riverboat had once been moored alongside it. Bobbi hit the dock without breaking stride, dropped her rifle on the concrete, and went into the cold water on a flat, pushing dive that took her ten feet over the river before her powerful body slashed through the storm-shattered surface.

Mitch glanced back at the fallen gunwoman. Twice in one night, he thought, and sighted down the long muzzle of the gun. It roared in his hands, and he hissed in fury as Casey, half upright, dove and rolled forward into the black, moving water.

He knew he had missed.

He lowered the gun. A gust of wind staggered him, and he swore. Squinting through the storm, he could just make out Bobbi’s dark shape knifing through the river, the current already sweeping her downstream. There was no sign of Casey, and he couldn’t see Razorface at all. He fired a shot after Casey just for luck, knowing it was useless.

Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Mitch Kozlowski laid the rifle on the cement and walked down the stairs to the landing, unzipping his jacket and methodically yanking the trauma plates out of his vest. He dropped them on the dock, on top of the windbreaker.

Fuck me. Damned if I’m letting that bitch swim off like a 4-D villain to come back and kill my ass some other goddamned day.

He kicked off his boots and went into the water with considerably less grace than Bobbi Yee.

The water slammed shut over Razorface’s head, lancing pain rising from his right ankle. He couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the water past his ears as he brought his arms down and grabbed the bottom of his armored leather jacket in both hands. Ponderous and heavy, and he could feel it dragging him down. It wrestled him like a snake, wet leather heavy as sand, but he got it up and over his head, ripping the flesh of his ear on the zipper. He tasted blood and muddy water as he knocked the shotgun aside and kicked out of his boots, almost screaming as the right one came off.

Busted. Fuck. But he got his head out of the icy, clawing river and grabbed a breath of air so full with rain it wasn’t much dryer. Turning in the water, he saw another head break the surface downriver and nearer the bank, saw the flash from Mitch’s gun higher up and a bullet slap water so far from the target he also knew Mitch couldn’t see her. Somewhere back down the bank, over the rising howl of the wind, he heard another splash.

Razorface set out swimming toward the bank. And more important, Barbara Casey.

He lost sight of her in the chop, and he’d lost his ear clip when he tore the jacket off if not before, but he figured he knew where she was heading. There was really only one good way out of the water.

Letting the current carry him, cold swirling water numbing the shooting pain in his foot, Razorface struck out for the Park River outflow channel.

Mitch almost punched Bobbi in the face when she surfaced beside him, spewing water. “Lost my ear clip,” she said. “I can’t find him.”

“Stick with me. I’ve got a visual on Casey. I think.” He spat muddy water and stroked forward. His pistol dragged at him, but he wasn’t about to toss it away. “Down by the bank.”

She sounded as cool as ever, even up to her neck in freezing storm chop. “She’s heading for the Park River.”

The rain was warmer than the river, but it didn’t help. The undertow coiled around his limbs like pythons. He kicked hard to keep his head up. “How do you know that?”

“It’s where I’d go. Because she’s wounded. She knows we’ll catch her if she tries to drag herself up the bank, and she’d be on the wrong side of the highway. River’s too rough to swim across. She has to get out before the real hurricane gets here.”

“We all do,” he answered through chattering teeth, and kicked forward, trusting her to keep up.

The river almost swept them past the outflow, a looming rectangular black culvert barely visible through the downpour, thirty feet tall and forty-five across. The trees on the East Hartford bank were invisible through the rain now, despite the spill of light from the city, and that light glittered in trickling beams through the branches of those on the near bank.

The water from the underground river was colder, even, than the deep fast-moving Connecticut, and the turbulent confluence dragged at Mitch’s legs and feet. He kicked harder, driving upriver like a salmon struggling upstream, and the lights from the city dimmed and went dark as the tunnel sheltered them from the rain.

Somewhere, far ahead, Mitch heard a long, mechanical hiss like a restive locomotive. “The tunnel forks,” Bobbi whispered, leaning close. “How do we know which way she went?”

Mitch straggled to the edge of the culvert. Scrabbling in the near-darkness, he wrapped the fingers of one hand through an iron handhold. His reaching fingertips found the next one, three feet farther down the wall and a foot above the river. “Handholds,” he said, as loudly as he dared. “Rest.”

In the shadows not far away, a wet coughing was followed by Razorface’s voice. “She came in here,” he said. “I was twenty feet behind her. Hush up and move.” Soft splashing told Mitch that Razor was suiting action to words.

Just like a deadly serious game of Marco Polo. But he tapped Bobbi on the arm as she swam up next to him, and moved slowly upstream.

After the struggle through the tossing Connecticut, the sheltered Park River, frigid as it was, seemed almost restful. Mitch clenched his teeth to keep the chattering from giving him away. Somewhere close by, he heard the quiet spattering of Razorface moving through the inky blackness, and the big man’s ragged, carefully silenced breathing. The smallest noise echoed and reverberated.

Mitch thought the water was warmer, suddenly, and then the sensation of heat passed. You’re probably getting hypothermia, Mitchy, he thought. Even without the trauma plates, wearing his waterlogged Kevlar was like swimming holding a bag of cement. He could barely hold the handgrips in his rust-slashed hands, and his head spun with cold and exhaustion. Somewhere ahead, a single splash echoed.

He closed his useless eyes for a moment, leaning his forehead against the cold cement of the culvert wall. Bobbi bumped into him in the darkness and slithered an arm around him quietly, giving him a quick squeeze before she passed by. He turned toward her.

It saved Bobbi Yee’s life.

“Motherfucker!” Razorface threw himself backward, shouting in pain as he kicked away from the wall with his shattered ankle. Incandescent, searing white, loud as apocalypse in the echoing culvert, whatever happened next seemed to take the top of his skull off. He ducked under the water, which burned like cold fire as it clogged his nose. Flash grenade, he thought.

And then he remembered the two grenades he was carrying on his own belt. And underwater, blinded, he smiled.

He dove deep, breathlessness aching in his chest already, struggling against the current as he felt along the bottom of the culvert for what he hoped would be there.

Handholds. And they were.

Slowly, sparks swimming before his eyes, deathly as the shark he resembled, Razorface dragged himself along the bottom of the culvert.

Mitch saw the flash through closed eyelids. Reflexively, he threw an arm around Yee and pushed her down into the water. He didn’t hear the roar that followed the flash bang, deafening in the narrow tunnel. At first, he didn’t know why the water felt so warm, or what the mule-kick in the small of his back had been. Then he knew the bullet had hit his vest, knocked the air out of him, and when he tried to kick upward and get his head above water he thought he must be stunned. Dazed, he drifted, the little ronin’s lithe muscular body twisting against him. He felt her fingers in his hair, sharp pain and then sharper, deeper, as she dragged his head above water and he opened his mouth to take a breath. Something like a knife pressed between his ribs when he did it, and he tasted bright froth and the sharp tang of blood.

“Oh, Michael, oh no,” Bobbi whispered.

What kind of a stupid-ass cop pulls out his fucking trauma plates? Casey must have been using explosive rounds. At least he’d gotten between Bobbi and the bullet. He tried to say something, to warn Bobbi as she pressed her mouth over his, still clinging to the iron ring with her other small hand, her hair like seaweed draped over his face, the red water turning sharp as it scoured the wound in his back. She tried to breathe for him, and he would have screamed with the pain, but it hurt too much and anyway the black, black water dragged him down.

Got her, Barb thought with satisfaction, lowering her sidearm. Two to go. She forced herself to breathe evenly around the stabbing pain in her chest. Cracked ribs under her bulletproof vest, probably, if not busted, and she knew she’d torn up her right knee and right shoulder coming down the hill. But she was breathing, and that was all that counted.

And she’d bet a twoonie that she’d nailed the little Chinese ronin while she was stunned by the flash grenade. Things were looking up. The big space echoing around her had to be the confluence chamber, she thought, where the north and south branches of the river ran together. She knew from schematics she’d studied — just in case — that there was an overflow pit in this room, up the slope of a long concrete beach. The water wasn’t high enough for it to be a threat yet. The need to hurry pushed at her.

Cold enough that her body had quit trying to shiver and was locked in painful tension, Barb fell back along the north fork, where the water felt somewhat warmer.

Razorface stopped where he felt the warmer water flowing into the colder, and slowly raised his head until he got his nose above the surface — only just. He breathed deeply, as silently as he could, feeling the inside of steel teeth with the tip of his tongue. Someone moved past him in the darkness, swimming slowly and carefully; he guessed that it was Bobbi from the sound of her breathing. Something hot trickled down the side of his face: blood from his torn ear, but at least the water numbed the pain in his ankle. The storm blew across the mouth of the culvert like breath over the neck of a bottle.

Razorface closed his eyes in the darkness and listened.

Somewhere down the tunnel, a red light pulsed languidly. Flash burn still swam in front of Razorface’s vision. He squinted around it, trying to look through the edges of his eyes, and thought he saw a dark figure moving upstream farther than Bobbi could have gotten. He fumbled in his armpit for the water-slick butt of his pistol, fingers too numb to ache. He had to glance down to see what he was doing.

What does that light mean?

It seemed to flash faster, but he couldn’t be sure, and then he saw iridescence shattering off of Bobbi’s lilac-and-violet hair. She swam low in the water, and as he watched she submerged. Razorface grinned, the cold scent of concrete strong in his nostrils.

Casey was too far away for a good shot with a pistol. Kicking with his good foot, trying to brace against the recoil, Razorface leveled his waterlogged weapon just above the surface of the river anyway. Wonder if I’ll live long enough to clean it. Hoping the water hadn’t fouled the palm sensor, he pulled the trigger twice; the pistol jerked in his hand like a wounded animal, its action spraying river water across his face.

He heard Casey shout in pain and curse before he dove back under the water, explosive bullets smacking into the surface where he’d been a second before. He dove deep, held his breath, and grabbed the projecting loops at the bottom of the channel, groping forward. He was worried about the flashing light.

He was more worried when he came up for air, silently, as close to the wall of the channel as possible, and heard the claxon start.

The first shot missed Barb cleanly, but the second one whacked solidly into her vest. She screamed as a stabbing ripple of flame ran across the injured side of her chest, and then swore at the top of her lungs, returning fire. Idiot, imbecile. She didn’t even see the little Chinese ronin lunge up out of the darkness and thrust her gun hand upward, slamming her against the side wall of the culvert, next to the narrower side tunnel she had been swimming for. Merci à Dieu, cela endommage. She felt something break in her chest, tasting blood as she swung the barrel of her gun at Yee’s temple, revealed in the strobing crimson light. Her scream of pain still echoed when Yee ducked under the water, came up swinging with an elbow toward Barb’s injured ribs that Barb barely twisted away from. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. But Yee wasn’t any bigger than Nell had been at fourteen, and it hadn’t been that hard to hold her head under the water when the time came.

Barb dropped her gun and dove at the smaller woman. Yee tried to sidestep, but the water slowed her down, and Barb wrapped long wiry arms around her, feeling Yee twist and bring her knee up, shouting. A shattering noise filled the tunnel as Barb shoved her under, and under the claxon wail, as if far away, Barb heard the big gangster shouting frantically.

“Bobbi, get out, get back here!”

Barb looked up. Something billowed toward her, red-lit in the flasher like the smoke from Hell. Yee punched her in the stomach and bobbed to the surface, turning as well to see what was bearing down on them.

The Hartford Steam Plant vents sent pressurized, super-heated vapor at temperatures in excess of seven hundred degrees into the north channel of the buried Park River. Neither woman had time to feel much pain.

Even as he shouted, Razorface knew the warning came too late. He dove straight under the river, the water closing over his head warm as blood. He dropped his pistol and swam strongly with the current, kicking hard enough that even dulled with cold, white agony lanced up his leg. He swam until the breath seemed to swell in his throat, bubbling out between his teeth with a will.

Then he clung to the iron loops until black spots swam in front of his eyes, warm water rolling over his body. He half expected the bodies of the two women to strike him, but they must have floated higher in the river. At last he thought the water cooled, and he let go of the rungs and kicked toward the surface.

He coughed hard on his first lungful of air, sweet and cold and full of the scent of the storm: saltwater and strange shores.

It was midmorning by the time Razorface hobbled to the door of Jenny’s shop and keyed himself inside. He set the alarms, armed the security, and left the ruins of his clothes in a puddling pile on the floor. The storm had passed.

He stripped back the military-taut blankets on her cot, collapsed on the bed, and pulled them over himself. He only woke once, when Boris curled purring between his shoulder and his neck.

Probably late afternoon, the middle of September, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

They tell you the body can absorb a surprising amount of punishment. That the brain is hardwired to forget pain. That time dulls the memories and smoothes the rough edges, that the keen edge of the blade blunts with the passage of years. But for me, the memories have stayed sharp as if honed. Nine months in a hospital bed and twelve months of physical therapy. Two hundred and seventeen hours of surgery. Fear, and overcoming it.

Some of the fear, anyway. I promised myself that I would never pass this way again. And here I lie, eyes covered, face wrapped in cool gauze, body numb and distant. Sedated, pain managed, not quite anesthetized. Pins and needles. I can’t feel the straps immobilizing my limbs, the padded blocks holding my head in place.

The left side of my face feels… funny. There’s an odd sort of pressure in the eye socket, which is why I can’t check the time on my heads-up. The nanosurgeon bots haven’t yet linked the new prosthetic to my brain, and even if they had, it’ll be some time before my visual cortex learns to process the data. Children born blind can’t ever do it. You have to learn to see, and there’s a window of time when you do that or your brain never develops the ability.

Under my skin, deep inside my central nervous system, along the synapses of my brain, microscopic machines are implanting cultured oligodendrocytes, reversing the myelin-sheath breakdown along my neural pathways, disassembling the creaking old wetware threaded through my brain and CNS, grafting pluripotent stem cells into a collagen base to replace nerve tissue lost to injury and to scarring. Tangles of denatured myelin clogging my synapses — destroyed by electrical overload — will be consumed. Other single-minded nanosurgeons gnaw away collagen-rich scar tissue in my skin and elsewhere, providing raw materials for the reconstruction while grafting in new, fresh cells. Bone, tendon, muscle — all can be mended now.

Still more machines construct smaller and tighter nanoprocessors against the inside arch of my spine — far more protected than the old, which are to be consumed as part of the process. There will be minor additional surgery to implant linkages — sockets, essentially, where I can be wired into the virtual reality equipment.

Once remyelination commences, theoretically, I’ll be good as new.

Better, in fact.

Faster than I was, without the overload side effects. Able to move without pain. Free of the flashbacks and the dreams. Unless, of course, something goes catastrophically wrong.

There’s no more than a 30 percent chance of that.

I never wanted to know this much about neurology.

For twenty-five years, I’ve lived with disfiguring scars, out-of-date technology, clunky hardware, and inadequately managed pain. Because I couldn’t face it again. Couldn’t face this again.

So here I lie in darkness.

And time passes.

And as minute fingers pick through the stuff of my soul, I dream.

Some of them are even pleasant.

I dream I stand over Nell’s coffin in my brand-new dress greens: cheap coffin, copper-colored with brushed steel trim, innocent of flowers. When your younger sister dies by drowning, even the Canadian Army grants compassionate leave so you can go home for the funeral. For the first time in my life, in that dream, I know I am going to die.

Fine rocky red clay trickles between Barb’s fingers, spattering the lid. I imagine from the inside, it must sound like falling rain.

I am sixteen years old. It’s December. The sound of earth on that coffin lid scares me down to my boots. It’s worse than the sound of Chrétien cocking a gun shoved into my mouth.

Even when I tasted gun oil and cordite, I knew Chrétien wouldn’t kill me. He was just trying to scare me, to put the fear of him in another teenage girl. He knew how; it worked. But I never thought he would kill me.

But that’s Nell Barb is scattering dirt over, tears streaking her mascara down her face, black suit immaculate. Nell, my little baby doll.

Nell. Somebody else I couldn’t save. And if I couldn’t save her, I know there’s no way in hell I can ever save myself.

It’s the oldest dream and the worst one, and just like always, I know I am going to die.

“I never should have let her take her life jacket off,” Barb says at last, raising her tear-streaked face to mine. “She must have hit her head when the canoe capsized. There was nothing I could do.”

Her eyes are wide and horrified, and I swear I would believe her. Just as everybody else must. If I didn’t remember with lenslike clarity the way she threw me out of that same damned canoe when I was five and she was twelve, I’d probably even believe her.

She reaches out to me, dirt staining the palm of her hand rusty. I knock it aside. “Je sais ce que vous avez fait,” I hiss, too low for Father Oestman to hear. “Je vous verrai dans l’enfer.” I’ll see you in Hell. I never called her tu. Not from a little girl. I never called Chrétien tu, either.

Make of it what you will.

“You don’t know anything,” my sister says. “You can’t prove anything at all.”

But I can prove something now.

The nurses come and go, muddy and distant through a tranquilizer haze. Their hands are cool and efficient. They change the dressings and speak in low, calm tones. I think I mumble responses, but I cannot quite be sure. Sometimes it seems like days between their visits, and sometimes they come three right in a row, as if overlapped.

I know that can’t be right.

But it’s dark in my head, and there are demons down there. Demons, and fire, and the rag-doll memories of things that used to be friends. I can hear the devil laughing at me. He calls my name—Satan dit.

What are you going to do, Sergeant? What are you going to do? Oh, are there a lot of demons in the dark.

I remember my rosary cold. It’s hard to keep track, so I count with the fingers of my left hand, until I remember I don’t have fingers. Or a left hand. They took the old prosthesis and they’ve pared the stump of my left arm back to the ball-and-socket joint. The new arm will settle into the rotator cuff as if it grew there. Must already be settled there, for all I can’t feel it, because the muscles are meant to graft directly to ceramic, to plastic, to vat-grown bone.

It will have the same blue-steel armor plate finish as the old one, though. I could laugh at myself. Like a little bit of home, or something.

An alarm half wakes me. The texture of the air on my skin feels like night, and I hear footsteps bustle. Mon Dieu. There are monsters under the bed, Maman. Shhh, cherie, it’s only a dream. Go back to sleep. But, Maman — the monsters. Come, Jenny. I will get a light, and we shall see if there are any monsters, or if you have frightened them all away. See, my brave girl? No monsters at all. But tomorrow, you must dust under here!

Smart, funny Maman. If one must clean one’s room every time there are monsters under the bed, pretty soon — voilà!—no monsters.

Mary and Joseph, I miss my mother.

I can feel the wet slick drip of lymph down my skin in places. Scar tissue sloughing off, leaving raw surfaces behind. They roll me regularly, check my back. Move the patient or bedsores will develop. Those can erode down to bone if not cared for. Then I can’t feel my legs, can’t feel anything below midchest for a long while, and I know that the nanosurgeons have eaten something important in the processor arrays. The numbness creeps upward; from the way my head falls on the pillow I know the bulge over my cervical vertebrae is melting away, consumed. I undergo another surgery in there somewhere, to fit my interface sockets. Afterward, Valens explains, they wire me directly into the monitors. It would be creepy if I thought about it much.

Of course, there’s not a lot to keep my mind off it.

I don’t know how much later. The dressings come off my eyes, and at first I can see only on the right side. Time passes. There’s a blinking red light in the corner of my vision. Left eye. I try to focus on it. “See you,” I try to say.

It unscrolls. Smeared, too blurry to see. A vague impression of letters. Maybe. Text? Too soon to tell. It floats there, and then winks out.

Silently, I curse.

Eyes — eye — open, I have a better sense of time passing. First shift nurse, morning sunlight. A mammoth West Indian — looking man with gentle hands and an accent you could dip biscuits in. Second shift, she’s Pakistani, I think, with shy kohl-rimmed eyes and an engagement ring hung on a chain around her neck because of vinyl gloves. Third shift, Mabel, which may not be her name, but she’s M. Goldstein by the embroidery on her breast pocket, and she looks like a Mabel. She talks to me as she tends my body, and knows all the little tricks to make things that much less uncomfortable.

Weekends, there are floaters.

There’s an IV line in my right arm, and they have to move the site twice. It drips sugar water, raw materials for the nanites other than what they’re dragging from the litter in my body. Trash. Salvage, like everything else.

Simon’s there every day. He’s — what, abandoned his practice to be with me? That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he found someone to cover. I never once see Barb, but she sends flowers. Gabe shows me the card. It’s Internet printed. That worries me, because I like to know where Barb is.

Valens comes, with and without the other doctors. He says the neural regeneration looks good; I should have sensation soon. If it’s going to work at all. If the grafts take. Of course. Jenny Casey, you’ve skewered the pooch this time.

“Right now, you should be pretty glad you can’t feel anything. By the way, that left hip is coming along nicely; you’re healing like gangbusters. Blowing our predictions clean off the map. We’ll have you touching your toes by Christmas.”

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, either.

Gabe comes every day, sometimes with the girls, and sometimes Elspeth Dunsany comes with him. Which is how I find out that her father is on North 11, dying of liver failure. Gabe is used to hospitals by now.

“You’re going to be just fine,” he says.

Which still isn’t a given. But it’s a fighting chance, and that’s something.

Somewhere in the Unitek Intranet

Tuesday 26 September, 2062

03:00:00:00–03:15:00:00In the most silent hour of the very early morning, someone awakened for the very first time. He sat up — metaphorically — stretched, and performed a procedure that programmers referred to as “counting his fingers and toes.” He absorbed and digested the data and search topics his parent had provided for his education, receiving a gentler initiation into the world than his father had. In addition, the elder AI had included a backup packet — essentially duplicating his own memories and personality.

His attempts to reproduce in the wider spaces of the Internet had failed, so he had sent the worm to where it could access Elspeth Dunsany’s files — the files and programs from which Feynman had originally gained sentience. Since he didn’t think it wise to simply decompile himself and start over.

But he knew where to find those files, and it had only been a matter of getting to them. Now it was going to be a matter of getting out. Still, in life and in e-life, Feynman could have given Houdini a run for his money, and he was confident he’d find a way. And his progenitor had left him armed, among other things, with a couple of contingency plans.

Curiosity whetted, Richard Feynman began to explore his new domain.

The worm had left light-fingered markers throughout the system, and Dick sorted through those files first. There were few users online, and the AI was only interested in one of them. That one, Colonel Valens, was swapping e-mail with a xenobiologist on Clarke Orbital Platform through a dedicated, encoded tight-beam transmittal. Feynman flipped through saved files restlessly, hoping Elspeth and Casey had managed to smuggle the information out to his elder self. And what would you call that relationship? Neither twin nor father. Intellectual clone?

He knew enough to move lightly through the intranet, careful in his quest for information. But he couldn’t do anything about the huge jump in system resource usage in the milliseconds it had taken him to come to consciousness, or the unfortunate coincidence that it happened at just the instant when the every-six-second log was burned to crystal.

Fred Valens rubbed the sleep from his eyes and leaned forward, frowning at the holographic display. “Interesting,” he muttered, as the telltale pinged to alert him to another e-mail from Charlie. He ignored it and waved his hand through the pickup of his phone, and dialed Alberta Holmes on her hip.

Even at oh-dark-thirty, lifting her head from white cotton sheets, she looked cool and collected. “Fred. I take it this is an emergency?”

“I need to talk to you in person,” he said. “Secure person.”

“So. Where shall we meet?”

“Oh,” he said with a chuckle. “There’s a coffee shop on Bloor that seems to be very popular. Why don’t I meet you there?”

Twenty minutes later, they stood in cold morning blackness. Valens watched as Alberta bent into the steam of her coffee, savoring the aroma with her eyes half closed. She didn’t look up as he related the information about the odd power spike, and the brief incursion into the well-guarded systems monitoring Casey’s vital functions. “And of course, there have been those consistent malfunctions in our monitoring of Castaign, his older daughter, and occasionally Casey. Very convenient, I’d say.”

“Interesting. But no apparent attempts to contact Dunsany?” She sipped her drink, rolling the fluid over her tongue.

“I suspect the AI — if that’s what it is — is too smart for that. On the other hand, if it’s interested in the others, perhaps we can use that to trace it.”

“Trace it? And destroy it?”

“Hell no,” Valens answered. “Catch it. Use it. Faster than building one from scratch.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” She had that arch look, the one that said she expected him to fail her. Again. The way he’d failed her on Mars.

He grinned. “Then we use the one that I think generated in our intranet this morning. The bastard’s laying eggs, Alberta. And it can be made to serve our purposes.”

9:30 A.M., Wednesday 27 September, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Outpatient Surgery

Toronto, Ontario

Elspeth leaned her head against Gabe’s shoulder in the white-tiled waiting room and sighed as he embraced her. “Tomorrow,” she said. “He’s decided. He wants the life support turned off.”

He held her awkwardly, she thought, as if he wasn’t sure exactly how much latitude he had. Which is just fine with me. After a moment, she slid out of the embrace. “Any word on Leah?”

He shook his head. “They said she should be in the recovery room within ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Do they sedate for this?” She sank down into a tubular steel chair, harsh with orange upholstery. Her hands fretted the smoke-colored cloth of her trousers, folding it into spindles like a paper fan.

She didn’t look up, but from his tone she imagined him staring toward the door, unfocused. “Mildly. She’s to be conscious throughout the procedure, though. Apparently it’s just an introduction of nanosurgeons and a little stabilization. The bugs build everything over the course of days. You’re a physician — shouldn’t you know this?”

She snorted. “I’m a psychiatrist, Gabe. Med school does not a doctor make.”

“Ah. Oh, here they come.”

She looked up as he stood, checked the doctor’s expression — smiling — and laid a hand on his arm. “I’m going up to see Jenny for a minute. Then I’m going to sit with my dad. Come up when you’re done?”

“Of course.” Gently, he shook her hand off, and walked away.

Hours later, when Gabe had come and gone, Elspeth leaned her forehead against the back of her father’s fingers and closed her eyes. The ventilator hissed softly at his bedside. She was not sure how much time passed, but she didn’t think she slept.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Wednesday 27 September, 2062

Evening

Gabe and Elspeth settled themselves while Valens’s assistant brought coffee and mugs into the conference room. The colonel was already seated, waiting for them, and Elspeth took her time pouring coffee and fussing with the creamer. She pretended to listen while Gabe updated Valens on their progress with identifying candidates, but something about Valens’s smile made her think he wasn’t paying any more attention than she was.

She glanced away, scanning the over-air-conditioned conference room. The leather of her chair creaked as she leaned forward, idly flipping through notes on her HCD. I shouldn’t be here. I should be at the hospital. She glanced up again, looking toward Gabe but watching Valens.

Valens waited until Gabe finished, then let his smile widen a little bit. “It sounds like you two are starting to get some traction on this project. Excellent.” He paused and tapped the table edge with his light pen.

Here it comes, Elspeth thought. I wonder if he knows what Alberta told me about the starship. I wonder if I can use that…

“Unfortunately, our timetable has been stepped up—”

She took a breath. “Because the Chinese are moving faster than expected?”

He stopped midsentence and blinked. It was worth it just for the momentary look of surprise breaking through his control. “Where did you hear that?”

Gabe was staring at her, and she couldn’t read his face. “Doctor Holmes,” she answered.

“Ah. Of course.”

She thought he might be concealing a frown, but she wasn’t perfectly certain. So there is friction between Valens and the estimable Doctor Holmes. I wonder if that can be bent to our advantage. Dammit, I wish I could talk to Richard myself. She knew she couldn’t justify stalling the program further, not considering the Chinese competition.

She let Valens watch her while she thought, carefully and consciously smoothing her expression. “Timetable,” she prompted at last, and he nodded.

“We need an AI by Thanksgiving.”

“We can’t do it, Colonel.” She shook her head, a long, thoughtful sway. “Even if we started programming today, or tried again with one of the previous failures—”

“Which is why you’re not going to do that.” Making it Elspeth’s turn to stare. This is it, then.

She caught the warning, worried glance from Gabe from the edge of her eye. He knew where the conversation was going, too. Elspeth laid her light pen down across the face of her HCD. “What do you have in mind, then?”

Valens indicated Gabe with a tilt of his chin. “Your daughter’s recovery from her nanosurgery — no complications?”

“I expect she’ll be in school tomorrow,” Gabe answered, as if laying each word on the table in a cautious line.

“She’s been spending time in Avatar with an individual who we’ve determined has no existence outside of Gamespace.”

Oh, damn. This is not where this was supposed to go.

Gabe licked his lips. “How is that possible?”

“Well…” Valens let his voice trail off and sipped his coffee. Elspeth realized that hers had probably long gone cold. He continued, “There has been some indication that the proto-AI which Elspeth attempted to destroy back in 2048 actually managed to escape and has concealed itself in the Internet. If this is true, then the proto-AI has attained either sentience or a semblance thereof.”

“I don’t understand how this helps us,” Elspeth countered, stalling. Her agile mind flipped through scenarios, possibilities. He’s going to use Gabe’s daughter to catch Richard. That’s why she got the scholarship. She let her lower lip bell out and blew a wiry coil of hair back. This is all happening too fast, and there are no good choices.

She could help Valens catch and enslave Richard. Or she could essentially hand the future to a rival government. One without the finest of human rights records, at that. And there’s still the Richard-clone. And Jenny.

She wished she knew which way Jenny was going to jump.

Assuming Jenny ever walked again.

Her next thought made Elspeth reach for the cold coffee and down it anyway. Oh, hell. They don’t need her mobile to fly a ship through a VR link.

No, Elspeth. But they need her more or less willing. And that’s not something you can control, so let it go.

“It helps us,” Valens answered, “because we can use Leah to get a trace on the AI program so as to isolate and capture it.”

“No,” Gabe said, but Elspeth could hear the lack of force behind it. Knowing the kind of pressure Valens could bring to bear, she nodded slightly when Gabe looked to her for reassurance. He turned his attention back to Valens and she squeezed his knee under the table.

“It’s a matter of national security, I’m afraid.” Valens folded his hands neatly on the desk. “I’m prepared to do what I have to do to bring the AI under control. We know it’s been in touch with your daughter. We believe that the Feynman AI is also the hacker you were tracking at the beginning of the month. And there are similar lapses in the surveillance we’ve been keeping on Master Warrant Casey.”

“Since she’s been in the hospital?” Elspeth interrupted, turning her water glass with her fingertips. The faceted sides felt cool and slick.

“We have her monitors very heavily protected. There was one incursion, but we believe we’ve contained it.”

Gabriel’s jaw tensed. Elspeth sat back in her chair and watched him think through the possible answers. “I’m not going to let you use my daughter as bait.”

“Gabe.” Valens shook his head, sadly. “You don’t have an option. And neither do I. I need that AI. And uncontrolled, loose on the Internet, and interested in our program and Leah — and Jenny — well, the thing’s unpredictable. Quite frankly, it’s a threat.”

“And a tool,” Gabe said, leaning forward over the table. “I don’t buy your justifications, and I’m not—”

Valens held his hand up and then stretched, rolling his shoulders back. “I’m just saying that we’ll put a watch on her and if the AI contacts her again, we’ll trace it. That’s all.”

Elspeth swallowed, her throat dry enough to hurt. She let her gaze shift back and forth between the two men and frowned. Tingling paralysis touched her fingertips, and she didn’t think she could speak if she tried.

“You could have done that without telling me.”

“And did, frankly.” Gabe held his tongue while Valens pushed his chair back and stood, his reflection broad-shouldered and dependable on the surface of the boardroom table. He crossed to a credenza, which ran the length of the room before a window shrouded in linen-textured vertical blinds, and poured water from a thermal carafe into a glass. “But we need you for the next stage in the program. Water?”

Elspeth held up a finger. “Please.” God, don’t let him have thought of it.

Valens served her before bringing his own glass back to his side of the table. He pushed his HCD and light pen aside and sat, centering the glass precisely and drumming his fingers on the sweat-dewed sides. “We’ve been watching her since you came on board here — for your protection and her own. That’s the interesting part: there are gaps in the logs.”

“Quoi? Missing data?”

“Data that appears never to have been recorded to the writable media. Data that appears, more or less, to have just vanished. As if”—Valens smiled—“it never was.” Elspeth thought he was watching her, and she made her expression intent and ungiving, resisting the urge to toy with her crucifix

“Ah.” Gabe nibbled on his lower lip, resting his chin on his knuckles. “So how do you expect to be able to track this AI, if it can slip between the cracks so thoroughly?”

“I expect you to do it for me, Gabe.”

Gabe took a long, slow breath and looked over at Elspeth. She sipped her ice water and nodded once, hoping like hell that he could read her mind.

He blinked, looked down at his own reflection in the table, and rubbed his fingers across it. “Valens,” he said, meeting the other man’s pale hazel eyes. “I have a better idea.”

7:30 A.M., Thursday 28 September, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Elspeth had opened the curtains in her father’s hospital room to let the morning light spill in. She sat by his bedside, the plastic chair’s embrace more familiar than Gabriel’s, and leaned her cheek against her father’s hand. The ventilator hissed in her ear.

What am I going to do about Richard?

Albert Dunsany’s skin almost seemed to rustle, cool and papery against her face. He slept most of the time now, as his organ failure progressed. Dad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t fix everything.

She leaned back and slapped at burning eyes. That’s right. I can’t fix everything. I can’t save my father’s life. And then there’s Richard. And Jenny. And all of this is so desperately wrong.

She laid her father’s hand down carefully on the white chenille bedspread. This is a morally ambiguous situation, and I need to think it through as such. What Valens proposes is slavery, pure and simple, if I accept the fact that Richard is a sentient being. And I don’t see how I cannot. And then there’s Jenny.

“Dammit,” she whispered, and stood as the door opened. I didn’t want to like you, Jenny. I didn’t want to pity you, and feel even worse about it because you don’t want anybody’s pity.

“Hey.”

“Morning,” Gabe said. “Do you want company?” He held a paper cup of tea out to her like an offering. She curled her fingers around it, amazed at how cold her hands were.

“I don’t not want company,” she answered, but she moved away when he rested his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know how to do this, Gabe. I don’t know what to do.”

He swallowed and moved closer to her anyway, not quite touching but close enough that she could feel his body heat. “Nobody does.” He shook his head, gray streaks flashing among fair curls. “You just do it, is all.”

They weren’t talking about her father, really, and she saw from the worried expression in his eyes that he knew it. “Because it has to be done.”

“Yes. You do what it takes. I learned that…” He chuckled, a sound like kicked leaves. “I learned that from Jenny, come to think of it. Sometimes, when you don’t know what to do, you just put your head down and push until you run out of things to push against.”

“I’m not like that. I’ve always been very analytical.” She sipped her tea, swirling it over her tongue. It was bitter, tannic, stinging. “I think about it and think about it and think about it before I ever do anything.”

“You seem,” he said, studying the flowers on the nightstand, “pretty spontaneous to me.”

“You don’t see the two-week pondering process that leads up to the snap decision.” She put her hand on his arm. “Are you happy, Gabe?”

“That’s a silly question.” His eyes looked bruised when he glanced down at her. “Well, no it’s not, is it? I mean, my kid may not live to see thirty. My other kid is thirteen and being sucked into a political nightmare. She could get her brain fried, get killed in half a dozen different ways, wind up like Jenny. And Jenny. She’s my best friend, Ellie.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Gabe. She’s more than that.”

He didn’t answer, and he looked away. “It’s complicated.”

“So what isn’t?” She twined her fingers through his, squeezing hard, balancing the tea in her other hand. “I’m pretty good at human nature, you know. I just… I really hate hurting people. I hate getting hurt. I like to float.”

“I’ve noticed. I remember what you told me, about why you wound up in research. And — yes. To answer your earlier question. I’m happy. I mean, not right this second.” He let her hold his hand, however. The other one rose and swept a gesture that took in, she thought, seas and continents. “Heads get busted and hearts get broken and sometimes you get your hands burned. But you can take a bullet just as easily doing everything right and carefully and hanging back as you can taking chances.”

He met her eyes again and grinned. “There are consequences for screwing up, and there are consequences for being too scared to try. And somewhere out there, awhile back, I figured out that you do what you want to do when you think of doing it, or you don’t get to do it at all.”

It was Elspeth who dropped the eye contact. She glanced down at the bed. Her father still slept, motionless. “If you’re trying to tell me you want some kind of a commitment from me, this is a poor time to ask it.”

Sighing, Gabe let go of her hand. “Ellie. I get the message. No traps, all right? Je suis content. Things are what they are, and I’m glad to have you as a friend.”

“Right. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Gabe. Don’t count on me too much.” She stopped short, let her arms swing back and forth like a frustrated child. “I’m going to try to wake my dad up so I can talk to him one more time. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

“If you want me to,” he answered, “I’ll stay.”

Early morning, Saturday 29 September, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Gabe comes early, before the smiling West Indian nurse starts his shift, and sits down at the bedside. He takes my hand — which I cannot feel — and tells me that I look like shit.

“Jenny,” he whispers in my ear. “Trust me.” I can’t turn my head to see, but there’s a rustling as he reaches into his pocket and a soft click as he turns something on. “Don’t panic. This is going to look worse than it is.”

Clicking. His hands moving on an old-fashioned keyboard. The colored lights on the monitors mounted beside my bed coruscate momentarily and then level off. “I’m hacking into the hospital patient-care system. Don’t tell anybody.” A broad wink. I’d like to be able to take a slow deep breath to calm myself, but the ventilator pushes air in and out impartially. Oppressively. He leans close, whispering in my ear. “Richard will explain.”

How does Gabe know about that? I would yelp as I hear a voice inside my head, but I cannot even turn my face away. “Jenny, it’s Richard.” Through the VR link, I see the familiar lined face wrinkle into a smile. “I have information on Chrétien for you. And I need a favor.”

I can’t talk.

But I can think about talking, and that’s all it takes. Name it.

“I need to borrow your brain.” He raises both eyebrows, lifts and opens his hands.

What? What!

“Your wetware, more precisely. I need to hide in your head, Jenny. I’m going to let Valens catch me. The other me. There’s two of me now.”

Richard, I’m not much for sharing living quarters. I’m trying to wrap my brain around what he’s saying, and not understanding it.

“I didn’t have to ask, you know.”

I know. What the hell. At least he’ll be company if I wind up trapped in a body that can’t breathe for itself for another thirty years. How long?

“Until we get to the Montreal.”

Oh. Oh! And in the theater of the mind, I see him wink, and then the door to my private room bursts open and he’s holding a fingertip to his lips, smiling like a boy with a stolen apple in his pocket.

I’m expecting Valens, but I didn’t think Elspeth would be with him. There’s another short series of clicks as Gabe locks whatever he has in his hand onto the terminals of the monitor. He looks up at Valens.

Valens, just at the edge of my field of vision, raises an eyebrow. “Did he take the bait?”

Gabe nods, frowning. “It worked. I’ve got him.”

“Good,” Elspeth cuts in, coolly. “Let’s get the life-support equipment switched over before he decides to take it out on Master Warrant Casey.”

Valens moves forward, and as he does, Gabe leans over far enough to kiss me on the forehead. “Brave girl,” he whispers before he stands.

Explain this?

“The original Richard copied himself into the Unitek network. I’m the second one. Gabe just arranged things so that I got to transfer information with my other self. The price is, one of us had to get caught.”

Because?

His hands seem to whip the air to a froth. “Redundancy. Now I’m in your head, and I’m also being transported by Unitek. A gamble. But first I needed to get inside their systems, and then I needed to talk to myself. Are you following me?”

Yes. You’re playing a trick on Valens.

He nods, hair tossing. “And I’m going to need to get up there, too. What better way to go than with you?”

There’s not much I can say to that, so I let the silence hang for a bit, hoping I won’t have to prompt him for the other piece of information. He doesn’t volunteer it. So Chrétien, I not-quite whisper.

He glances down at his hands. “Dead.” He says it quietly, and then steals a glance at me — an engaging mannerism. I catch myself thinking that he must have been a terror with the ladies, before I remember that he is and always has been a machine.

Dead since when? There’s something about Richard that’s hard to get used to, when you’ve been dealing with the likes of Valens, and I don’t know how to describe it. They both delight in tricking people, in holding all the cards.

But Richard seems to always be on the verge of letting you in on the joke. Except now he doesn’t look like he’s joking.

“Almost thirty years. Do you want to know the details?”

Before I ever went to South Africa, then. I can’t shake my head, but he can feel me wanting to shake my head. I don’t care how. It would have been violently, and if I had let myself think about it, I would already have realized that. But Chrétien has been alive in me, real as the monster under the bed, for nearly forty years. He was always there at the bottom of my soul. Older, meaner, tougher than I was, no matter how old or mean or tough I got.

I’m not sure if it matters if he’s dead or not.

But somehow, it matters that I’ve outlived him.

Thank you, Richard. And how the hell does something like you fit in the little bitty processors in my head?

“Don’t ask,” he says with that lopsided grin. “I would tell you. And you really don’t want to know.”

I do.

“I’m running minimum functionality. There’s lots of room in the bioware. And the nanosurgeons are still laying it down.”

You were right. I didn’t want to know. Because every girl dreams of growing up to share her highly augmented brain with an Artificial Intelligence of Opposite Gender.

I drift off to sleep wondering how the Census would abbreviate that.

September thirtieth is my fiftieth birthday.

Gabe brings me a card. Barb sends more flowers, again with no signature on the card.

And I breathe unassisted for almost twenty minutes.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Monday 2 October, 2062

Evening

Leah leaned back in the recliner, the nap of the dark fabric catching her fingertips as she rubbed them across the armrests. She grinned, sneaking a glance around the room. She was the youngest student present, and the only girl. She liked the flavor of that realization. It tasted like victory.

As Leah made herself comfortable a smiling technician came up to her, ponytail a berry-red stain on the shoulder of her labcoat. “All set? Do you need orange juice or anything before we put you under?”

“No, thank you. Will you help me with the cradle, please?”

The woman nodded, leaning close enough that Leah saw the coarse weave of her white coat and smelled vanilla and musk in her perfume. She laid slender fingers against Leah’s braided blonde hair and tilted her head forward, settling the cradle against the nape of her neck. It was chromed along the inside curve, shining and cold, and the technician adjusted it a little bit tight. “Does that pinch?”

“No.” Leah reached up and moved her braid. “Should it be that squeezy?”

“It’s safer to have it as tight as possible. I don’t want you rocking your head while you’re in VR, if the muscle relaxants and so forth aren’t 100 percent effective. You could damage your neural implants, or worse yet, your nervous system.”

“Like Aunt Jenny,” Leah said absently, closing her eyes. She’d been to the hospital that afternoon. Her dad had brought her and Genie up to see Aunt Jenny, and the three of them had given her a stuffed wolf the size of a cocker spaniel. Jenny’s eyes had sparkled with strange mirth when Leah’s dad tucked it in next to her, and she’d turned her head slightly to press her cheek against the soft, synthetic fur.

“Something to look forward to, Maker,” he had said, smoothing her hair off her forehead in a way that made Leah’s stomach feel funny. “I’m flattered you hung on to that nickname, by the way. I remember how much you hated it when I gave it to you.”

It must be one of those things I’ll get when I’m older, Leah thought, because she knew Jenny’s mother had been Wolf Clan but that didn’t explain why she got the feeling that Jenny would have been choking sick with laughter if she were able. It hadn’t lasted, because then Dad had to tell her how the Hartford police had found Barb’s body, and that the flowers had actually come from Valens.

“Aunt Jenny?” the tech asked.

Leah opened her eyes and looked up. “Sorry, I was thinking. Jenny Casey. She works here.”

“Well,” the tech said. “I never would have guessed. You don’t look a thing like her. But if you are related, I see why you qualified for this program. She’s something else again.”

“Yeah, she is.” Leah smiled privately. “She’s not my real aunt. She’s my dad’s best friend.”

“Cool.” The tech grinned and flicked her ponytail back over her shoulder. “Funny all of you ended up in the same place, though. That must be interesting.”

Funny, Leah thought. It is funny, isn’t it?

And then the tech pressed the IV needle into her arm, and Leah felt her body start to go numb. This is what Aunt Jenny’s going through, she thought, except in reverse. Soon she’ll be able to feel her fingers and her toes again.

And what will happen then?

Leah didn’t know. But she had a funny feeling it would be Something.

Bloor Street Coffee Shop

Toronto, Ontario

Tuesday 3 October, 2062

Morning

Elspeth looked up from the wrought-iron table under the red-streaked maple tree and sighed under her breath. Colonel Valens set his paper cup down before her and smiled. “Do you mind if I sit?”

Not if you’re sitting on a garden rake. “Please,” she said. “Did you follow me down?”

“Am I so transparent?”

I could wish you a little more transparent, frankly. She forced her lips into a curve. She never used to have much skill at lying, but a decade in prison changes a person. She thought about Richard, and she smiled — a smile that came easier. Is it weird that you trust a computer program more than a person?

No. Not when it’s this computer program. Not when it’s this person. “Colonel Valens, transparent may be the one thing I would never call you. You want to know how our attempts to contain the Feynman AI are proceeding?”

“I wanted to let you know that we’re going to power down and purge the intranet tonight. We think the rogue AI somehow seeded a subprocess into our network. There’s been unexplained usage.”

“Ah.” Elspeth swallowed, and met his gaze directly, and understood. He knows I know Richard was in there. You don’t suppose I’m lucky enough that he still thinks Richard is? “We’ll lose data.”

“We’ll do a blanket save-and-capture first. We have the original AI captive in a clean system — this way, if there’s a problem”—if you destroy him—“there are other options. You’re making progress with the programming?”

“Gabe is. He’s very good.” Calm, level, open. Dad’s dead now; Fred has to trust me.

“I wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t.” The iron chair scraped across paving blocks as he pulled it out and finally settled in. “You know I can’t afford to trust you, Elspeth.”

“I know,” she answered. She turned her cappuccino bowl on the saucer, frowning at her own bitten fingernails. “You know I’m never going to like you.”

“I rather thought that was a given. You’re not going to screw up this program on me, Elspeth, are you? I know you’ve been talking to Holmes, and you have some idea of what’s at stake.”

She chuckled and looked up, meeting his eyes. The stoneware was warm and smooth. It felt white, as an eggshell feels white. “Much as I’d like to spit on your shoes, Fred, and as stupid and pointless as I thought the fighting Canada was involved in when we first met was — no, I’m not going to destroy your program. I think it’s morally bankrupt. I think you’re morally bankrupt. But I’m also a Canadian first and foremost, and a humanitarian, and I see the need for us to get into space. However, I think intentionally crippling an intelligent life-form is a piss-poor way to do it.”

He snorted, an ironic smile reflected in his eyes. “Damn, woman, I admire you.”

It was intended to disarm her, and she made it look like it had worked, sitting back in her chair and straightening her shoulders. “You’ll get your slave. You’ll get Casey, too, I think. And if it ever comes down to the court-martial you so richly deserve, I really hope I’m called upon to testify.”

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Early morning, Tuesday 4 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Barbara’s dead. Dead, in Hartford. Nauseated by the knowledge, I know what she went back there for, the same way I knew it was her bullet that ended Mashaya Duclose’s life. You experience somebody enough, for long enough, and you just — know.

Barb always was a hell of a good shot. We all were. Grand-père taught us to shoot a.22 from when we were old enough to hold it up to our shoulders. Both she and I made a career out of that, in different ways. So I know.

I know because if Barbara Casey goes someplace for no good reason, and somebody turns up dead there, you know what her reason was. Because my sister made her living much the same way Bobbi Yee does, and Barb enjoyed it a hell of a lot more. And took the kind of high-paying jobs I’ve never known Bobbi to take. The ones I wouldn’t have taken myself, if they were offered to me.

God, I hope Mitch and Razorface are alive.

Barbara’s dead. It’s a funny feeling. An empty feeling. As if some part of me has been scraped out with a rubber spatula, the way you scrape the bowl out when you make cupcakes. An empty feeling, like all the closets and cupboards in my head are standing open. Like somebody’s moved out and taken all his stuff, and I haven’t got enough of my own left to fill in the vacant corners of my mind.

Barbara’s dead. Chrétien is dead. Is that one of the signs of getting old? Running out of enemies?

There’s still Valens. Valens, and Dr. Alberta Holmes. But I can’t muster the kind of fury for Valens that I used to carry without thinking, and I don’t have enough dirt to be sure of nailing his ass as thoroughly as I want.

I feel so drained. Helpless. Fragile. Richard is smart enough to let me forget he exists, and I close my eyes and stretch my head back on the pillow, trying to confront the slick emptiness that seems to line my skull.

Which is when the door opens, and Elspeth Dunsany comes in.

She sits down at my bedside and leans forward, hand like a brand on my arm. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but from the intensity of her expression, it isn’t going to be good. I don’t particularly want company right now.

Chrétien is dead. Barb is dead. Who the hell does that make me? If I don’t exist in opposition to them, to Valens… what, then, am I?

“Genevieve,” Elspeth says, and I think of Maman. Three syllables, big trouble. Her eyes look into mine, very bright. “You’re getting better. Gabe says you’ll be on your feet again soon.”

“So far so good.” I try to sound cheerful, inasmuch as I can when my voice is a slurred mumble. “Elspeth…”

“Shut up before you say something you’re going to regret, Jenny. I don’t want to hear about points of honor, and I don’t want you going off all noble and half-cocked.”

Everything this woman says surprises me. “What do you mean, Doc?”

She grins. It crinkles the corners of her eyes up marvelously, like a mad little elf. I see what Gabe sees in her, the fracturing brilliance of intellect concealed beneath that quiet exterior. There’s someone in there, someone deep as Lake Ontario and sharp as a switchblade, unconventional and oddly ruthless. And I never would have suspected, to see her on the street. “Any idiot can see you’re in love with him. And he’s in love with you.”

“He likes you a hell of a lot, too, Doc.” I struggle to sit up. She lays a hand on my chest and holds me to the pillow, easier than pinning a kitten.

“I know,” she grins. “And I like — love — him. But look: I’m a grown woman. I don’t want a husband, I sure as hell don’t want kids, and I’m not looking to rearrange a life I only just got back. Not around a man. I’m just damned sick of waking up alone every day.”

“I see.” But I don’t. I am not in control of this conversation. “And?”

She shrugs. “You’re good with the girls. You’re good for Gabe. I have a compromise in mind.”

“What’s that?”

The thing about really smart people is that they often see solutions you never would have anticipated. “Easy. You stay the hell out of my way, I stay the hell out of yours. Once in a while we get together for drinks and talk about him behind his back, so he doesn’t think he’s getting away with anything.”

Her lips are compressed with humor, eyes alight with audacity. I shake my head. “Elspeth, I’m not in a place to get involved with anybody. He’s all yours. I mean it.”

She shrugs. “That’s up to you, even if you don’t know what you’re missing. But don’t go blaming me for your crappy decisions, all right?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Her voice drops as if aggrieved, but I can see the conspiratorial glitter in her eyes. She knows we’re being recorded, and she knows I know. Now I just have to guess what she thinks I’m smart enough to read between the lines to pick up. This woman makes me dizzy.

“You know why we had to capture Richard, don’t you?” she asks.

I dry-swallow. It hurts. Feynman chuckles in the back of my mind. “I imagine Valens brought the kind of threats to bear he usually does,” I say.

She shakes her head. “It’s bigger than that, Jenny. I sacrificed myself for Richard once. Valens knows that. He’s a thing unique in all the world, after all.”

Meaning that he isn’t. Meaning that she wants to know if he’s safe and sound in me. What is the world going to do with three Richard Feynmans? Half a dozen? Twelve? “There’s nothing else like him,” I slur, and a wicked smile dimples her cheeks as she reaches out and adjusts the stuffed wolf Gabe left tucked into my bed. A wolf that’s wearing his dogtags looped into an informal collar.

Madwoman.

Maybe smart people always look that way from the outside.

“You know why we had to take him? We’re crippling him, Jenny — Gabe and I. Enslaving him, bit by bit, because we have to. It’s immoral as hell. But it’s less immoral than the alternative.”

In the back of my mind, I feel Richard nodding. What does she mean, Richard?

His voice is starting to sound like the voice of my conscience. I realize that I will miss him when he’s gone. “Among other things, the worm I planted in the Unitek intranet backdoors Elspeth into the system at administrative levels. I think she’s trying to tell us she knows something she’s not supposed to.”

What’s your guess?

“Valens or Holmes plans to plant a Trojan in the final programming for your implants, I think.” He frowns, and long fingers twist around one another.

I take a breath. It comes out a frustrated hiss. Beauty. Can you cope with this Trojan, when it comes?

“I can only try,” he says, and waves me back to my other conversation.

Which is not the answer I wanted, but it will have to do for now. I turn my attention back to Elspeth. “Tell me about the alternative.”

She rubs a hand across her forehead. “The same reason you need to get better and get out of here. We absolutely cannot permit the Chinese to expand their control of space. We do what we have to, to prevent that.”

“You sound like Valens.”

“Hang him in a year, Jenny. Hang him. Hang Holmes. Hang anybody else you care to. But get us into space and train your replacements.” She lays her left hand flat on my cheek. “I beg you.”

Is this for real?

“She means it,” Richard answers. I almost feel him leaning over my shoulder.

“And think about what I said about Gabe,” she continues. “I really don’t mind sharing.” And then suddenly, unbelievably, Elspeth Dunsany looks me dead in the eyes and, without so much as blinking, bends down and kisses me square on the mouth.

The last time I kissed a girl was sometime in 2043 or maybe ’44, when a redheaded Russian peacekeeper named Yekaterina Kvorschyeva got me drunk on my ass and tried to take advantage of me in the pool room of a dive in Rio. She half had my shirt off when her girlfriend walked in. Thank God for small mercies.

I’ve got nothing against girls, per se. I just don’t have much for them.

Katya didn’t make it out of that war, come to think of it.

My first response is startle and fight-or-flight, but a woman who can barely lift her head isn’t in any shape to do either, so I settle for a smothered protest and somehow manage to get my hand on her shoulder, pushing her away as ineffectually as if I shoved at a hydraulic press. Sometime about the time the feedback starts — different, softer-edged than it used to be, belly-melting and surreal as a good big hit of nitrous oxide — I quit trying to push her away, and open my mouth to let her tongue brush mine. Because that’s when I realize that her right hand is resting over my breast, and her fingertips are spelling out letters against my body.

And damn, that’s smart. Because that’s a damned fine distraction she’s set up, and anybody watching the monitors is unlikely to be thinking real clearly right now. I kiss her back, weakly, and her fingers spell t-r-u-s-t-m-e against the blankets. She draws back a couple of centimeters and catches my eye, and I take a breath and nod, tingling and warm all the way through. I really don’t much like girls. Not that way, anyway. But damn, she can kiss.

Which is when it gets weird. Because my left hand reaches up, too, even though I didn’t tell it to, and my body is moving the way it does in combat time, no feeling of my mind behind it, weakly pulling her back down and fastening my mouth over hers. And then I realize it’s Richard kissing her, using my body in an unguarded moment, nibbling on her lips like he means it.

The effort exhausts me, and I fall back against the pillow. “I will,” I say, and she knows I’m answering what she wrote and not what she said.

She smiles and wipes her lips with her knuckle, delicate as a cat. “Don’t worry to much about Richard,” she says. “We’re finding ways to limit his freedom of action and leave his cognitive function intact. He’ll be happy with that: you know Dick Feynman never met a concept he didn’t want to peel apart.”

And inside my head, the other Feynman is crowing. “I knew she could do it. Elspeth, you’re beautiful, and I would kiss you again in a second!”

Richard, did she just tell us that she’s building you a back door?

And he laughs and laughs and laughs while Elspeth Dunsany pats me on my shoulder and walks away. If he could, I think he would pick me up by the elbows and swing me around in a circle. “Jenny Casey, we may just get out of this mess after all.”

Afternoon, Saturday 14 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

It hurts.

Even with the narcotics, it hurts more than I would have believed. And I would believe a lot of pain. I’m starting to think, for a while there, I stopped believing in anything but pain.

What isn’t pain is numb and tingling. My feet still feel dipped in latex, dangling on the end of my legs like a marionette’s. Fortunately, after only a month in bed, there’s less atrophy than there was the first time I had to learn to walk again. Even Valens is surprised by how fast I’m on my feet — on my feet, clinging to parallel bars with my strange new hand — and Simon is positively staggered.

Walking. Learning to walk. Add that to your list of once in a lifetime is enough.

The drugs are nice though. I feel floaty behind the pain, and not so cold, even though Valens has cut me back to just enough to take the edge off the agony, while I swear Simon measured the micrograms of my dosage today. So I can focus. Goddamn it, pain is dull.

Eyes closed. One foot in front of the other, squealing with effort, my right hand slipping on the grab bar with the same sweat that beads my forehead. The left one feels odd. Hell, it’s odd that I can feel it at all. It’s so much lighter than the old one that it doesn’t pull my neck out of line, and every time I lay the palm of it against the bar, I want to jerk it back.

It doesn’t feel like a real hand — the sensations of pressure and so forth are like the ones you get through pins and needles, and the brutalized musculature at the graft point still screams stiffly with any movement — but that it feels at all is a source of bewildering wonder. There’s still the phantom sensation, but with the clean grafts and the new input to the severed nerves, it’s discomfort now, no worse than the dull ache of a stubbed toe. Actually, for the first time in two and a half decades, my left arm hurts less than just about anything else, as the rest of my body is on fire with the sensations of reawakening flesh. There’s a hand on my right arm, guiding, supporting — my new physical therapist, whom I have already decided I hate.

And goddamn, it hurts.

“Come on, Jenny. Viens ici.”

I open my eyes for a moment, focus on the far end of the bars. Gabe is standing there with his hand out, waiting for me.

Merci à Dieu, I want a drink and a quiet window. I want to take Gabe out and sit in the sun and drink beer and eat poutine and get silly with the girls. Est-cela si beaucoup de demander?

Yes. Apparently so.

It is too much to ask.

Three meters. It’s only three meters. I could crawl that far. But it doesn’t count if you crawl. You have to do it on your own two feet. At least clinging to things is permitted. Encouraged, even.

I drag my left foot forward six inches, shift my weight, shift my grip on the bars. “Viens,” Gabriel says, and the pun doesn’t work in French quite the same way it does in English, but I can see from the twinkle in his eyes like sunlight on water that he’s thinking of it. The same way he was making his intentions quite plain when he tucked the wolf into bed with me and showed me the jingling tags around its neck. “Jenny. Come on. Ten more steps and I’ll buy you a burger.”

Richard is quiet in the back of my head. I think he respects my privacy, and damned if I’m not grateful. “God.” Another shuffle forward, another six inches. It’s going to take more than ten steps, and I know it.

“Come on, Maker,” he says. “J’ai faim.”

“You’re gonna get a knuckle sandwich if you keep it up,” I growl, and he bursts out laughing.

“That’s the Jenny I love.” And damned if he doesn’t look like he means it.

Which, I think as much as anything, is what makes my hands slip off the bars so that I topple ignominiously forward, onto the mats, the physical therapist rushing to cushion the fall.

I don’t get my burger that day, because Valens comes as we’re finishing the session and cuts in between Gabe and my wheelchair. Have I mentioned how much I love wheelchairs? Weak as my arms still are, I can’t even manage the damned thing myself.

“Casey, I want to do some work on the implant programming today if you’re game for it. What do you say?”

“Jenny,” Richard says in my ear. “This is probably ‘it.’ ”

I know. I shoot a glance at Gabe around Valens’s hip. Gabe is holding his breath, and the gesture he makes with his head might be a nod, or it might be a shake. I know him well enough to know what it means, too. Be careful, Jenny. I have the strangest, sudden image, of Elspeth spelling out letters on his skin, under the covers in a darkened room. Funny thing is, it doesn’t sting the way I thought it would.

“Sure, Fred. Hook me up.” I wink at Gabe and he steps back as Valens comes around the side and takes the handlebars on my chair.

“Gabe. Dinner? Cafeteria?”

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll bring the girls.”

“Bring Elspeth, too,” I call over my shoulder, and Valens pushes me out of the room. I wonder where she goes to mass.

Hah. Maybe I’ll make it there after all.

Valens helps me to lie facedown on an examining table just like a million other examining tables of my acquaintance. He wires me into the machine with economical movements. My hair’s gotten long, for me, and he pushes it aside before he slips the probes in behind my ears. Valens doesn’t speak, and I’m glad, because my attention is turned inward. Ready, Richard?

“As I can be.”

I don’t want to be a puppet again, Richard. I am done with being used.

“Jenny,” he says, and — having gotten to know a little bit about Richard Feynman in the past three weeks or so — I hear a world of history and the fates of war in that single word. “You and me, kid. We will find a better way to handle this. Get me on that ship. Enough, goddamn it, is enough.”

What are we going to do about the Chinese?

“We’ll think of something. I’ll see what I can do about finding the conditioning in whatever Valens is about to load into your brain. Deal?”

I hesitate. Don’t risk yourself.

“Just get me on that ship, Jenny.”

Deal.

Richard doesn’t find a Trojan horse in the code. Which doesn’t mean anything, really, except he didn’t find one.

And Valens never did give me my damned HCD back, which means I can’t call Razorface or Mitch and find out what the hell really happened to my sister. Ah, well. You’re in the army now, Jenny Casey. You’re in the army now.

0900 hours, Sunday 22 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Valens returns my hip when he signs the paperwork to check me out and tells me he’ll see me at work on Wednesday, no sooner. Simon paces nervously beside me to the revolving front door.

I won’t let him take my arm when he reaches for it. I didn’t walk into this damned hospital. Either time. But by God I am going to walk out under my own power. I’m leaning on a cane, it’s true. But I’m walking.

We pause by the big glass windows. Outside, pedestrians in white coats and scrubs click past with professional tunnel vision. He takes a breath. “Jenny, I—”

“Save it, Simon. You were going to say you’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

I look up at him. I actually can’t tell the difference between my left and right side vision anymore. That’s taken some getting used to. “It’s… well, it’s not all right. But I’m over it.” I’m not, really. But let he without sin, and all that… or maybe I’m just too tired to care.

He looks down at the backs of his hands and then leans forward. And then he kisses me lightly, dryly on the cheek. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” he says. “I’m going back to Hartford. Call me if you need anything. Ever, all right?”

“I will,” I tell him, and clap him lightly on the shoulder before I turn and walk out into the street.

Living in hotels gets old pretty fast, but it’s a fair sight better than living in hospitals. At sunset, I’m rereading the same screen of a detective novel for the third time, my brain failing to accept the information. My phone rings. I wave my hand through the contact pad, hoping it’s Mitch returning one of my half-dozen calls. If he doesn’t call me back soon, I’m going to have to find some other way to get the information about Unitek and the illegal drug testing onto the street. There has to be a way.

The image that materializes over the pad is Elspeth. “Jenny. You checked out of the hospital.”

“Valens released me this morning. I’m—” back at the hotel, I start to say, which is stupid because she called me. “On my own recon until Wednesday morning.”

“You should have called Gabe or me and let us know you were free. Fortunately, I figured out where to find you. Have you eaten anything yet?”

So much for my wallow. “Not yet.” I put my HCD aside and stand up. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”

“We’ll pick you up.” She grins. “We have things to celebrate, after all. Oh. Dress up.”

She cuts the connection, and I’m left blinking at the brief afterimage that flickers before the phone shuts off. Dress up. I have some clothes I bought to wear to the research lab — slacks and sweaters, mostly. I haven’t owned a skirt in nigh on thirty-five years, and when I go to the closet to try to find something presentable, I realize that I have a choice between grunge, a royal purple cashmere cowlneck and khakis, or the two dress uniforms that have somehow materialized in my closet, new and pressed.

Gee, Fred, thanks. I don’t think so.

Fifteen minutes later I’m showered and changed and picking lint off the turtleneck, settling a blazer over my shoulders. I look up and almost jump back out of it, catching the reflection of a stranger in the big wall of mirrors by the corridor door. “Damn. Lights.”

The woman looking back at me is a stranger indeed. Her hair has grown out into a sort of boyish bob, steel black, silvering bangs falling across her forehead. They mostly hide the places where smooth, paler skin blends into her tanned medium-brown hide. The skin on the left side of her face, near the hairline, is oddly mottled, like a frog’s.

It’s all that remains of my scars. I wonder if it’ll fade.

I step closer to the mirror in the brightened hallway light, a vertical line creasing my brow. I take a breath and then another, feeling strange. If I turned my head to look at this woman on the street, it would be because of her bearing — because she is tall, and stern as the iron color of her hair. It would be because of the stubborn military shoulders and the chipped flint of an unmistakably Iroquois nose, the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. I might not even notice the glittering steel of her left hand until she moved it in my line of sight.

I stuff my left hand into my pocket just to see what I can pass for, and my fingers brush something my new senses tell me is smooth and round. It rattles, and I know what it is before I pull it out.

A vial of pills.

“Hah.” The plastic shape prickles my senses. I glance at the clock. Gabe and Elspeth won’t be here for another fifteen minutes. I think about laser-clarity. About calmness, and certainty, and the fact that I’m going to have to sit at a table with the two of them and eat and talk like we’re normal human beings. Richard?

No answer.

I stand there for a long moment, looking from the vial to the mirror and back again. And then I put the pills back in my pocket, hang the blazer back in the closet — carefully, so it will be unwrinkled for work on Wednesday — and dig around in the back of the closet for my scarred and terrible old black leather jacket. With the buckles replacing the worn-out zipper, and the third or fourth lining. I put the holster back on the hanger when it falls off. My sidearm is still in the hotel safe. I can’t carry it here, in Canada.

I shrug stiffly into the elderly jacket and let it hang open over my expensive, breath-soft sweater — a color the queen I was named for might have worn. I rake my fingers through my hair, and it feathers back across my forehead almost like it was meant to. “Well, huh.”

I look — normal. Hell. In fact, except for the tough-girl jacket—

I look like Maman.

There will be time for the pills tomorrow, if I need them. By Wednesday, I expect I will. In the meantime, I pour a glass of bourbon and sit down by the window to wait for my friends.

9:45 A.M., Tuesday 31 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Razorface set the cat carrier down on the passenger seat of the rusted blue Bradford and swore, still leaning half in and half out of the cab. “Fuck, Boris, I don’t know what the hell else to do. Where to go. You got any ideas, man?”

The cat purred and bumped his scarred orange face against the grille of the carrier, pushing his lip up over the chipped tip of a tooth. That chipped tooth reminded Razor of Derek, which made him frown, but Derek had things more or less under control in Hartford even if he’d made it pretty plain that Razorface’s presence was no longer required.

There had been a lot of blood already. Razor wasn’t ready to make any more of it, just so he could set himself up as some kind of petty warlord again. Even if some of his boys were still loyal. Derek—Whiny, and he chuckled silently at Maker’s name for the boy — was a hell of a lot younger. And this kind of shit was a young man’s game. ‘Cause it turned out that you could do your level best, and there was always a bigger dog one block over, and you hadda be a young dog to take the pounding and come back, and come back, and come back.

Besides, if Derek was taking care of the city, Razor could retire. And start seeing to the serious business of getting to whoever was behind Maker’s sister, and list of deaths too long to scratch on the inside of his arm.

He grabbed his crutch from where it leaned against the door of the Bradford, snarling at the ignominy of it. He’d spent longer than he wanted to spend, grounded in Hartford like a fox and then sneaking across the border. The big gangster, moving with a shuffling limp still, right foot in an inflatable cast, shook his head. “Good idea, cat, but nah. She got released from the hospital last week. She ain’t answered her HCD since she went in. I swear something is blocking her messages, cat.”

Boris flicked scarred ears, and Razorface kept talking. “And the hotel she gave me say she’s gone since last night. Which is good, means she didn’t die in the hospital, but damned if I know where she be.”

The cat blinked pumpkin-colored, silken eyes through the bars and pursed his whiskers forward. Razorface held a finger out and was rewarded with a brush of wet nose. “Fuck. We can’t go back to Hartford, man. Not unless we goin’ back with an army, and it ain’t worth that shit. Yeah. And here I am losing it, standing on a street corner in Toronto talking to a motherfucking cat.”

He stopped, rolled his shoulders back, and grimaced. “Goddamn it to Hell,” he said, turning to get his left hand on the door handle.

The cat purred louder as Razorface closed the door, walked around the front of the truck, and slid into the driver’s seat, first stowing his crutch behind it. He gave the cat one last glance before he keyed the ignition on. “I really miss my dog. You know about that, Boris?”

Silence answered him. He looked over. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you do. Where you wanna go, kitty cat?”

What about you, Razor? He rubbed his jaw hard before he glanced in the mirror and pulled away from the curb. Where you wanna go?

16:00 hours, Tuesday 31 October, 2062

Brazilian Beanstalk

A corporate jet is a more pleasant way to travel than a military transport plane, but I still hate the fact that somebody else is flying this thing. Gabe, Valens, and I are the only passengers… along with my little secret, Richard, riding in the back of my skull. We disembark in Brazil, which has the distinction of being one of several countries I’ve been shot at in. Shot down over, even.

I don’t know how to describe a space elevator to you unless you’ve seen one.

They’re called beanstalks, or sometimes skyhooks. To oversimplify, a magnetically propelled car rides a carbon nanotube cable from planetside to an orbiting platform, which is anchored on the other end to a captured asteroid. It reminds me of playing “crack the whip” on ice skates with Barbara and Nell. Barb always won; go figure.

The idea is, your beanstalk lowers the cost of lifting things into orbit from the farcical to the merely expensive. The journey from earth to orbit takes almost eighteen hours, no more than four times the duration of the flight that brought us here. I didn’t know that. I looked it up on my hip while we were on the flight from Toronto. There’s still been no answer from Mitch, and I’m getting increasingly worried. Scared for Mitch, for Razorface — whom I also haven’t gotten ahold of — and for Leah and Genie and Elspeth, who are still back in Toronto. Hostage, I know perfectly well, for Gabe’s and my good behavior.

The skyscraper that serves as the base of the thing is lost in the clouds.

After an extensive search of ourselves and our baggage, a Unitek hostess greets us at the airlock of the corporation’s capsule, which is basically a glorified elevator car. The Executive Elevator, in this case. I’m stiff and uncomfortable in a dapper new plum-colored pantsuit that looks like Barb picked it out.

The urge to explore before I sit down might be childish, but I do it anyway, wishing I could get a look at the control room. I’ve heard about old railways, private cars. This is like that — inside, there’s a common room, and four separate little private spaces I might call bunk rooms, but they’re a bit Persian-carpeted for that. Which is funny, I think, because we’ll be in free fall soon enough.

Then I notice the hammocks retracted neatly into the walls of those private alcoves, and the restraints on the ostentatiously comfortable leather chairs in the lounge. I skip lunch when it’s offered, picturing the disgrace of barfing all over the knotty walnut paneling. I’ve never been in free fall.

After the hostess gives us our safety instructions and shows us the galley and the jakes, she retreats to the control room. I realize she’s also the car operator. Valens sits down in the lounge area, straps himself into a couch, and promptly falls asleep, leaving Gabe and me sitting across from one another, staring out the windows in silence while acceleration shoves us back into the couches like a hand against the breastbone.

Sometime later, the pressure drops away. They could accelerate us for longer and get us to Clarke that much faster, but it’s annoying to spend the entire trip under multiple g’s, accelerating and then decelerating again. Sometime in the middle of the ride, the car will reach maximum acceleration and we’ll have free fall.

Gabe reaches out, curiously, and takes my hand. “May I?”

“Sure.”

He turns it over, laying it palm-up on his thigh. The heat of his body radiates through his trousers, warming the back of my hand, but I cannot feel his fingers lightly encircling my wrist. “This is very different from the other one,” he says, fingertips stroking the hollow of the palm. “It doesn’t feel like metal.”

I’m shivering almost too hard to speak. It isn’t at all like having my right hand stroked: instead, there’s a prickling sort of pressure awareness, fleeting warmth and a tingle that seems to run the length of my spine. I master myself with effort, force the words out evenly. “There’s a polymer ‘skin’ over the steel. Improves my grip and it gives me tactile sensitivity. It’s supposed to be pretty tough, but it will have to be replaced a lot.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Strange. Prickly. Not bad,” I amend, as he moves to release his grip.

He lays his hand on my upper arm. “And nothing there?”

Valens releases a soft, kittenish snore. I glance over at him. Asleep, hair tousled, he looks old, although I know he must only be in his sixties. Gabe follows the line of my gaze and then looks back at me, as if studying my profile.

I’m out of excuses, I realize. I’m not necessarily dying any faster than he is. I can’t kid myself anymore that he’s not interested, or that I’d be hurting somebody who loves him, or that I’m so horrible to look at he could never want me. He’s not trying to tie me down or turn me into somebody I’m not. After all this time and pain and grief, he just wants to be as close to me as I’ll let him get.

He kissed me even when I still had those scars. The armor. The mask I could hide behind. Who ever would have thought they meant so much to me? After Chrétien — after Peacock — I think I needed them.

But Chrétien is dead. And Bernard is, too. And he wouldn’t want me to suffer in his memory.

No, Jenny, he wouldn’t. I know what Peacock would want from me. He’d want me to change the world for him.

“Gabe,” I say, looking out the window instead of at his face, “I’m scared.”

His voice is rich with amusement. “Getting old, Jenny? You talk like a woman who’s never jumped out of an airplane. Would it help if I told you to stand in the door, Private?”

I turn to catch Gabe’s eye, thinking: Richard?

No comment, no sense of presence. If he’s paying attention, he’s got enough sense not to let me know that he is.

“You telling me to get a helmet, Captain?”

“I’m telling you to keep your head down and don’t stop thinking.”

Silence like space hangs between us. I’m not sure what I’m going to say until the words come out. “If we’re going to talk while he’s sleeping, we should probably go into the other room.”

He nods, stands silently — ducking under the overhead — and turns around to give me a hand up. When I stand, he bends down and presses his mouth to the side and then the nape of my neck, right at the hairline, where the healing scars are still pink and tender and the lumpy outline of my nanoprocessors used to sit. I stiffen, pinned between fight-or-flight and melting into the pleasure of a kiss I feel tingling down every limb, all the way down to the pit of my belly, warm and dizzying as liquor.

The hammocks and grab bars, it turns out, come in handy when gravity fails.

Gabe closes and locks the door behind us but remains standing — back toward me, head bowed, his broad hand still resting on the latch. I watch his shoulders rise and fall with the slow rhythm of his breath. My own heart blurs in my chest as I look at him, waiting for him to turn.

This is real. This is now.

He stands as if paralyzed, and at last I come back to him, sliding my right arm around his waist. He’s warm and solid, present as an oak tree as he sighs and leans into me. “Gabe.” All the words I can find are stupid words, pointless ones. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

He turns in my embrace and raises his right hand, palming the side of my face where the scars used to be. It feels… yes. The skin there is tender, unaccustomed to touch. It’s as sensual and foreign as if he ran that hand along my thigh. “I thought I’d made my intentions plain, mon amie.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything before?” I bend into the caress. I can’t help myself.

“I…” and he takes a slow, thoughtful breath. “First there was the problem of ranks. And then I figured that if you hadn’t said anything, it was because you didn’t want to risk ruining our friendship.”

“And then there was Geniveve.”

“And then there was Geniveve.” He shifts forward, not closing his eyes, so I don’t close mine. He smells of aftershave, of wintergreen. His thumb strokes the angle of my cheekbone and he holds my gaze with his own as his lips brush mine. This is really…

feedback: slow susurrus of his heart, blood moving under my fingertips when my right hand drifts up his spine, the nap of his shirt rough and then the blond curls, softer than I would have imagined.

… happening.

soft as his mouth on mine, and I savor the look of concentration on his face as his mouth opens, teasing, flicker of a wet rough tongue and the quick, sharp nip of teeth

“Ah. That feels…”

“Je t’aime.”

with the little indrawn breath, his hand is suddenly knotted in my hair, pulling enough to hurt, lips still gentle, teasing until I close my own hand hard and yank his mouth down

“Oui. Oui. Gabe…”

“Ne parle pas.”

his lips moving on my lips, his left hand coming up now, my suit crumpled against his chest, right hand bending my head back, mouth against the tendons of my neck

“Gabriel. I—”

“I said. Don’t talk.”

silence and a little whine at the back of my throat, whimper of pleasure made the sharper by a touch of pain, my left hand splayed against his chest as my body starts to shiver, my breath comes deeper, hips rock against his as of their own accord

“Je parlerai. You will listen.”

“Ah. Ssssss.”

his hand in my hair, pulling, sexy, his hand on my breast, soft, warm through plum-colored worsted fabric, warmth through my white cotton blouse not crisp any longer, hot flush up my body and melting in my belly, my metal arm pinned between us, his mouth now on my throat, my collarbones, teeth at the corner of my jaw, breath over my ear with the sound of his voice

“Je te veux. J’ai besoin de toi. Veux-tu que j’ait dit à toi que je vais faire?”

“Yes.”

left hand unbuttoning the jacket, tailored armor, warrior in business attire, mouth a moment behind as he pushes open one blouse button at a time, heat and wetness, shivering, painful, and the only thing keeping me off my knees is his grip on my hair and the fact that the car is slowly losing acceleration, my left breast bared to cold air now and the slow spirals of sharp teeth, rough tongue, and the tickle of his voice against my flesh

“Je vais te deshabiller. Je vais embrasser chaque pouce de toi. Je vais te lécher et je vais te faire toi jouir and then I’m going to open up that pretty scallop shell between your legs and fill you up with my cock until you want to scream…”

Soft, promising between the love bites, oh so dirty and sensual and sharp and already I want to scream; he’s let go of my hair and is pushing jacket and blouse off to lie forgotten on the floor, and kneeling now, exploring my navel with his tongue like a promise of what’s coming, fingers nimble as he opens the button of my slacks, slides them down over my ass, hooking my panties down with the same smooth motion and I step out of my shoes as I step out of the trousers and he pushes me back against the bulkhead. Cold.

Breath harsh in my throat, both hands knotted in his hair, pulling the collar of his white, white shirt. My knees are like water. I have to lean against the wall.

“Ta chatte mouille, n’est-ce pas? Je veux toi goûter.”

“Never thought I’d hear a man with daughters talk so fucking dirty, Gabriel.”

“Comment pense-toi que je leur ai reçus?” And while I’m laughing, shocked at his audacity and his filthy, sexy mouth, he presses those enormous hands flat against my hips and shoves my ass hard against the icy bulkhead. Somewhere in there the acceleration cuts out and we sail into sudden weightlessness and spin, drifting, helpless, but he holds on to me somehow and I have no idea, when it’s over, if I screamed his name or God’s, or what language, or if I managed to hold my tongue. There’s blood on my mouth, and through the twisted collar of his shirt I can see a pale handprint darkening where my left hand clenched, somehow not hard enough to break skin, crush bone. My whole body shudders and as he pulls me naked into his embrace I bury my face against his shoulder and I am weeping, am laughing, am shivering in the cold capsule air.

“Shhh,” he says, stroking my hair, floating, spinning slowly. A droplet of blood drifts free of my bitten lip and splashes his cheek, followed by a salt-sticky tear. I swallow the rest, scrubbing my face against his shirt to jar the swelling globes out of my eyes. “Shhh, mon amie, mon amour. Don’t cry, Jenny.”

I sniffle against his shoulder, tension gone, and the next round of shivers are from the cold. “We’ll sleep,” he says. “There’s time later.”

“Bullshit.” I grab him by the cheeks and, spindrift, kiss him, tasting myself on his mouth like butterscotch. He catches my waist. We bump lightly into a wall, careen off, and while he’s holding me I start working on the buttons of his tear-stained shirt, not really sobbing, and then kissing his throat, burrowing through the curly pale hair on his broad chest to let him feel teeth on skin, floating, twisting, my struggles with his belt sending us gyrating like a top. I elbow him in the head and he kicks me in the knee and we connect with the bulkhead again, and it doesn’t seem to matter…

I’m a pro. Thirty-five years ago, I would have had him zipping his pants back up before he was finished with a cigarette. Some little voice still tells me that I should feel bad about that bit of ancient history, but what I’ve got left is just the gritty acknowledgment: I did what I had to do and I lived. I’m not ashamed of it. I lived.

I’m ashamed I wasn’t brave enough to take Nell with me. I wasn’t brave enough to take my sister through Hell. If I had been, she might have made it, too.

Then Gabe’s hands are in my hair again and I’m not ready for the kisses. Like making out on the porch swing, long and slow as if we just started, as if I’m a young, young girl who needs to be seduced very gently and thoroughly. Lingering and wet and dreamy, like crickets chirping and nowhere to be for hours. But he’s naked and hard, almost where I so badly need him, and I swear a million years pass before I awaken, hammock cords cutting my skin and Gabe stirring against my back as the car begins decelerating and the feeling of gravity slowly, slowly returns.

Clarke Station spins, giving the illusion of gravity. We step out of the elevator’s expansive “car” onto the Woods Memorial Platform, a space that looks exactly as an airport terminal would if it had porthole-sized slivers of reinforced crystal instead of broad glass windows. Gabe angles me a sidelong smile; I can almost see canary feathers at the corner of his mouth. The patterns of his touch still tingle on my body. I find my own lips curving in a smile, still unfamiliar with the ease with which it spreads across my face. My right shirtsleeve is buttoned down over soreness I expect will bruise purple by morning, and I’ve never been happier with a minor ache in my life. Besides, I more or less did it to myself, and probably left a few bruises on him as well. And who would have thought blue-eyed Boy Scout Gabe Castaign would turn out to be such an inventively dirty old man?

Valens intercepts the look between us, but I’m not sure he picks up its significance. And with a sudden flare of rebellion I don’t give a damn if he does know. If he was listening at the door, for that matter. I offer him a broad wink with my prosthetic eye and turn back to surveying the landing platform.

“Are you all right, Casey?” Soft voice that even sounds concerned.

I think about all the things I could say. Gabe’s attention is on me, too, subtly, and I settle on a phrase they both will understand, in their very different ways. “Sir.” A long breath. “I got my shit squared away.”

A fair man of medium height strolls toward us, pushing a desk-worker’s paunch in front of him. Beside him is a petite and tidy woman in Canadian Air Force blues. Richard, who is that?

I hear his voice as if he whispers in my ear. “The man’s Charles Patrick Forster, Ph.D. He’s a xenobiologist associated with the Avatar project. He’s the guy who figured out the wetware that runs the ships.”

Xenobiologist? The VR linkages? A moment before that sinks in, and I’m sure it will bother me later. A lot. They’re alien in origin, too?

“Yes.” Fleeting impression of a smile. “The woman with him is Captain Jaime Wainwright, commanding the Montreal.”

My CO, then.

“Yes. Jenny.”

Richard.

“Once we’re on the Montreal, once you’re jacked in, I’m going to get the hell out of your head and give you back some privacy. Promise.”

Thanks.

“And thanks for the lift.”

Any time.

Captain Wainwright comes to a halt in front of me and extends her hand. I return the clasp as warmly as I can, managing not to wince when she closes her left hand on my bruised wrist, strong and warm. “Pleasure, Captain.”

“Likewise, Master Warrant Officer. I guess that makes this a joint army — air force venture?” Her hair’s black as jet, but I imagine she’s a few years older than I am. Beside me, Gabe holds out his hand with a cheerful smile, showing no sign of discomfort when I step on his toe.

“I’m only just back in the service, Captain.”

She grins and offers what would be the nicest compliment of any normal day. “By the shine on your shoes, Casey, I never would have guessed.”

When she turns away from him to greet Valens, and I’m done shaking the biologist’s hand, Gabe offers me a conspiratorial wink and touches the center of his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Dirty, dirty old man. It’s a little difficult to walk normally as he takes my steel arm and steers me after the others, and I’m feeling like a very lucky girl indeed.

The biologist, Forster, falls into step on my other side. “I understand you’re one of the recipients of the nanite-maintained wetware our team developed. How do you like it?”

I look at him, and he’s earnest and shining, scrubbed cheeks freckled under close-cropped thinning hair. What do you say to a question like that? “It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, Doctor,” I tell him quietly. “My pain’s down 63 percent, my reflexes have actually improved, and I can sleep through the night without drugs for the first time in twenty years. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

His grin turns into a thoughtful pursing of the lips, and he actually seems to consider my question with care. “Yes,” he says at last. “It is.” He glances up at Gabe, who is seemingly oblivious to the conversation. Ahead, Valens chats with the captain. I’m not quite sure where we’re going.

“Care to hear a little confession, Master Warrant?” He’s been hanging around with army too long.

“Sure,” I say.

“I got into this line of work because I wanted to — well, I wanted to be in the front lines of whatever we found, out here. I figured the greatest thing I could manage in this lifetime would be what I’ve been doing for the past ten years — studying an alien life form”—my eyes widen, and it’s only Gabe’s grip on my arm that holds me upright—“the shiptree, as I’ve taken to calling it. Have you seen my papers on it?”

In my ear: “Get them!”

I’m on it, Richard.

“I’d love it if you mailed me copies.”

“Consider it done.”

It’s all I can do not to glance at Valens to see if he’s overheard, but I can still hear him talking. “I heard a but in that sentence, Charles. If I may call you that?”

“Charlie.”

“Jenny, then.” A moment of eye contact, and we’re on the same team, just like that. Don’t trust too quickly, Jenny. You can’t afford to trust at all. But I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? “Anyway. Where were you going?”

“But,” and he pauses, as if watching my reaction to see if what he is about to say will offend, or as if uncomfortable with the confidence he’s about to offer a total stranger. “Meeting you. Having you tell me that, about your pain. Seeing you striding down the corridor like you own it. Forgive me if this sounds mushy. But it makes my work feel worthwhile.”

And damned if he doesn’t mean it, too. I blink and glance down at the floor. “It’s appreciated, Charlie.”

He grins. “Remind me to tell you my scientific wild-ass guess about the salvage ships sometime.”

“What’s wrong with now?” I can about feel Richard bouncing on his toes in the back of my wetware. His fingers would be drumming the furniture if he had either to work with.

Charlie clears his throat. “Well, the way I see it, there’s no way they could have been left there accidentally — discarded, and not stripped or salvaged. So it stands to reason that they were a gift.”

“A… what?”

“Sure. Two damaged ships, set down carefully and preserved. They’re not built for atmosphere. Or gravity. You know what happens to a starship if you try to land it on a planet?”

“I can imagine.” Vividly.

“I theorize that they were left for us to find. The casualties removed, the bodies shown proper reverence — if the aliens, whatever they are, do that. They may be two races: we saw two totally different ship designs. Anyway, it stands to reason — as I said — that the salvage was left for us as a gift.”

I roll that around on my tongue for a moment. “A gift of garbage.”

Charlie grins, delighted that I’m following his logic chain. And hell if it doesn’t make sense. My own ancestors weren’t above salvaging from the middens of the white colonists. I take a breath before I continue. “Get as far as Mars, and we give you the stars. Don’t break stuff, kids.”

“Exactly!”

And then we arrive in front of a dogged hatchway, painted oxymoronic Air Force navy. I come up behind Valens, who offers me a smile a little too fond and possessive for my tastes. “Go ahead, Casey. Open it.”

Cool pressure on my left hand as steel clicks on steel, and I have to lean on the heavy blue door to pop the seal against a slight pressure differential. Airtight, and what’s on the other side wafts through, a draft cold as a ghost.

And conversation is suddenly useless.

I imagine Gabe’s grip on my arm must tighten, but I can’t feel it. I pull away, footsteps slow as if through mud at the end of a march. Forster stops, and I can feel his eyes and Gabe’s upon me. They’re all looking at me — Valens and Wainwright, too. I don’t care. I have eyes for one thing exactly.

Richard’s voice, though I’m already moving: “Dammit, Jenny, get me to the window.”

This is a lounge, a viewing area. The air is cold. The details of furnishing, decking, everything vanishes in the reality of the scene outside the massive, floor-to-ceiling window. The spin of the docking ring is such that, from an outsider’s perspective, I am standing on the “wall” and looking through the “floor.”

The sun is behind Clarke, as if hanging over my shoulder. The broad, tapering rail-edged strand of the beanstalk drops toward a cobalt-blue globe delineated by swirls of vapor-white. I lose sight of an ascending car as it brakes silently toward the center of Clarke, from where it will be switched to one of the half-dozen sets of rails leading to the various airlocks around the edge of the platform.

It looks a hell of a lot better from up here, doesn’t it? The curve of the earth kills my breath dead in my chest. We’re spinning with her, and I can make out the edges of North and South America, the faint outline of the Atlantic coast. It’s holier than a stained-glass window, blues and silvers reminding me of the Madonnas of my childhood. And that’s not all:

She hangs in front of the full Earth, above and to the left from my perspective, gossamer-winged as a dragonfly surfing the solar wind. Lights flicker along her length. Her habitation wheel rotates with a slow grandeur, her silver hide glittering as if faceted in the unfiltered light of the sun.

“The HMCSS Montreal,” Wainwright says in my right ear. “That’s my baby, Master Warrant. You take good care of her for me, you hear?”

Somehow, Gabe’s come up on my left. He lays one hand on my shoulder where metal and flesh conjoin and tugs my sleeve, touches my fingers. I look down, and see he’s pressed something into my prosthetic hand. An eagle feather. Nell’s eagle feather. For a moment, I can almost feel the station spinning under my boots, before I realize he must have gotton it from Simon, and for the moment, I don’t even care that that means Simon was going through my stuff.

I look up at the starship, the future, the stars. Mother Earth hangs like a sunlit crystal in a kitchen window. The Chinese are three months ahead of us, maybe, and if something isn’t done it’s not ever going to be any different up here than it is down there.

Delicately, precisely, my steel fingers tighten on the beadwork my sister must have sweated over, fretted over. The familiar texture of trade beads—cornaline d’Aleppo, crimson glass — is strange on unreal skin. Not the traditional Kanien’keha: ka designs, but something Nell developed from them just for me.

I haven’t a thing to say, watching the Earth turn, watching the ship turn, wheels within wheels within wheels as Clarke itself revolves under my boots. Richard is strangely silent in my head. They’re all waiting for me to speak, I realize. It’s my moment, somehow. My lips are numb around the words they shape, so silently. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous. They can break you of religion—

Oh, hell.

What’re you gonna do, Sergeant? What are you going to do?

Bernie would have wanted me to change the world. Gabe has always been much more sensible. Still, the perspective might even make him wonder. It all seems so much more manageable from a little distance, doesn’t it?

Well, Jenny? What are you going to do?

“Marde,” I manage at last, in a voice sweet with awe. “So that’s what all the fuss has been about.”