Mona Lisa Overdrive

42 - Factory Floor

Cherry's still screaming.

"Somebody shut her up," Molly says, where she's standing by the door with her little gun, and Mona thinks she can do that, can pass Cherry a little of her stillness, where everything's interesting and nothing's pushing too hard, but on the way across the room she sees the crumpled Ziploc on the floor and remembers there's a derm in there, maybe something that'll help Cherry calm down. "Here," she says, when she gets to her, peels the backing off and sticks the derm on the side of Cherry's neck. Cherry's scream slides down the scale into a gurgle as she sinks down the face of old books, but Mona's sure she'll be okay, and anyway there's shooting downstairs, guns: out past Molly a white tracer goes racketing and whanging around steel girders, and Molly's yelling at Gentry can he turn the goddamn lights on?

That had to mean the lights downstairs, because the lights up here were plenty bright, so bright she can see fuzzy little beads, traces of color, streaming off things if she looks close. Tracers. That's what you call those bullets, the ones that light up. Eddy'd told her that in Florida, looking down the beach to where some private security was shooting them off in the dark.

"Yeah, lights," the face on the little screen said, "the Witch can't see ... " Mona smiled at him. She didn't think anybody else had heard. Witch?

So Gentry and big Slick were tearing around yanking these fat yellow wires off the wall, where they'd been stuck with silver tape, and plugging them together with these metal boxes, and Cherry from Cleveland was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, and Molly was crouched down by the door holding her gun with both hands, and Angie was -

Be still.

She heard somebody say that, but it was nobody in the room. She thought maybe it was Lanette, like Lanette could just say that, through time, through the stillness.

Because Angie was just there, down on the floor beside the dead guy's stretcher, her legs folded under her like a statue, her arms around him.

The lights dimmed, when Gentry and Slick found their connection, and she thought she heard the face on the monitor gasp, but she was already moving toward Angie, seeing (suddenly, totally, so clearly it hurt) the fine line of blood from her left ear.

Even then, the stillness held, though already she could feel raw hot points in the back of her throat, and remember Lanette explaining: You don't ever snort this, it eats holes in you.

And Molly's back was straight, her arms stretched out ... Straight out and down, not to that gray box, but to her pistol, that little thing, and Mona heard it go snik -snik -snik, and then three explosions, far off down there, and they must've been blue flashes, but Mona's hands were around Angie now, wrists brushed by blood-smeared fur. To look into gone eyes, the light already fading. Just a long, longest way away.

"Hey," Mona said, nobody to hear, just Angie toppling across the corpse in the sleeping bag, "hey ... "

She glanced up in time to catch a last image on that vid screen and see it fade.

After that, for a long time, nothing mattered. It wasn't like the not caring of the stillness, the crystal overdrive, and it wasn't like crashing, just this past-it feeling, the way maybe a ghost feels.

She stood beside Slick and Molly in the doorway and looked down. In the dim glare of big old bulbs she watched a metal spider thing jittering across the dirty concrete floor. It had big curved blades that snapped and whirled when it moved, but there was nobody in there moving, and the thing just went like a broken toy, back and forth in front of the twisted wreck of the little bridge she'd crossed with Angie and Cherry.

Cherry had gotten up from the floor, pale and slackfaced, and peeled the derm from her neck. "Tha's maj' muscle relax'nt," she managed, and Mona felt bad because she knew she'd done something stupid when she'd thought she was trying to help, but wiz always did that, and how come she couldn't stop doing it?

Because you're wired, stupid, she heard Lanette say, but she hadn't wanted to remember that.

So they all just stood there, looking down at the metal spider twitching and running itself down. All except Gentry, who was unscrewing the gray box from its frame over the stretcher, his black boots beside Angie's red fur.

"Listen," Molly said, "that's a copter. Big one."

She was the last one down the rope, except for Gentry, and he just said he wasn't coming, didn't care, he'd stay.

The rope was fat and dirty gray and had knots tied in it to hang on to, like a swing she remembered from a long time ago. Slick and Molly had lowered the gray box first, down to a platform where the metal stairs weren't wrecked. Then Molly went down it like a squirrel, seeming barely to hang on at all, and tied it tight to a railing. Slick went down slowly, because he had Cherry over his shoulder and she was still too relaxed to make it down herself. Mona still felt bad about that and wondered if that was why they'd decided to leave her there.

It was Molly who'd decided, though, standing there by that window, watching people pop out of the long black helicopter and spread out across the snow.

"Look at that," Molly'd said. "They know. Just come to pick up the pieces. Sense/Net. My ass is out of here."

Cherry slurred that they were leaving too, she and Slick. And Slick shrugged, then grinned and put his arm around her.

"What about me?"

Molly looked at her. Or seemed to. Couldn't really tell, with the glasses. White tooth showed against her lower lip, for just a second, then she said, "You stay, my advice. Let them sort it out. You haven't really done anything. None of it was your idea. Think they'll probably do right by you, or try to. Yeah, you stay."

It didn't make any sense to Mona, but now she felt so dead, so crash-sick, she couldn't argue.

And then they were just gone, down the rope and gone, and it was just like that, how people left and you didn't ever see them anymore. She looked back into the room and saw Gentry pacing back and forth in front of his books, running the tip of his finger along them like he was looking for a special one. He'd thrown a blanket over the stretcher.

So she just left, and she wouldn't know if Gentry ever found his book or not, but that was how it was, so she climbed down the rope herself, which wasn't as easy as Molly and Slick had made it look, particularly if you felt like Mona did, because Mona felt close to blacking out and her arms and legs didn't seem to be working real good anyway, she had to sort of concentrate on making them move, and her nose and throat were swelling inside, so she didn't notice the black guy until she was all the way down.

He was standing down there looking at the big spider thing, which wasn't moving at all. Looked up when the heel of her shoe grated across the steel platform. And something so sad about his face, when he saw her, but then it was gone and he was climbing the metal stairs, slow and easy, and as he got closer she began to wonder if he really was black. Not just the color, which he definitely was, but there was something about the shape of his bald skull, the angles of his face, not quite like anybody she'd seen before. He was tall, real tall. Wore a long black coat, leather so thin it moved like silk.

"Hello, missy," he said, when he stood in front of her, reached out to raise her chin so she was looking straight into gold-flecked agate eyes like nobody in the world ever had. Long fingers so light against her chin. "Missy," he said, "how old are you?"

"Sixteen ... "

"You need a haircut," he said, and there was something so serious about how he said it.

"Angie's up there," she said, pointing, when she found her voice again. "She's -- "

"Hush."

She heard metal noises far away in the big old building, and then a motor starting up. The hover, she thought, the one Molly'd driven here.

The black man raised his eyebrows, except he didn't have any eyebrows. "Friends?" He lowered his hand.

She nodded.

"Good enough," he said, and took her hand to help her down the stairs. At the bottom, still holding her hand, he led her around the wreck of the catwalk thing. Somebody was dead there, camo material and one of those big-voice things like cops have.

"Swift," the black man called, out across that whole tall hollow space, between the black grids of windows without any glass, black lines against a white sky, winter morning, "get your ass over here. I found her."

"But I'm not her ... "

And over there where the big doors stood open, against the sky and snow and rust, she saw this suit come walking, with his coat open and his tie flapping in the wind, and Molly's hover swung past him, out those same doors, and he wasn't even looking, because he was looking at Mona.

"I'm not Angie," she said, and wondered if she ought to tell him what she'd seen, Angie and the young guy together on that little screen, just before it faded.

"I know," the black man said, "but it grows on you."

Rapture. Rapture's coming.