She wondered when.
She wondered why.
She understood how he knew the receptionist, and why he cared so much about her death, even though she had been a shade.
She'd been classed as a shade because of her scars.
If Lilia summoned official help, Montgomery would be classified as a shade too. The very idea made her feel sick, sicker even than the sight and smell of his blood.
It was out of the question.
But if he completed his mission, whatever it was, he'd leave her and the Republic forever. The prospect made Lilia dizzy.
She still had to do right by him. She retrieved his cloak and tucked the faux fur and velvet over his shoulders, hiding his scars from view. She pushed him back from the pool of light, hoping she wasn't making his injury worse by moving him so much.
"Montgomery, you've got to help," she whispered urgently, giving him a shake. "We have to go to the pleasure fringe and I can't drag you all that way."
He didn't move. His eyelids didn't even flicker.
The sirens echoed loudly from above and the smell of fire carried down the stairwell. Lilia heard the firefighters pounding up the stairs toward Breisach and Turner. It would be just a matter of moments before they came into the building's basement, if only to find an auxiliary water source.
The silvery fog slid across the floor of the netherzones, looking to Lilia's fanciful eyes as if it was making a bee-line for Montgomery. There was a decided lack of intervening angels.
Time for Plan B.
Lilia darted farther into the netherzones, her heart pounding that Montgomery was alone for even a moment. She didn't know what she was looking for, but she recognized it when she saw it.
There was a rickshaw parked in a lot nearby and it was neither locked nor secured. It might as well have had an invitation nailed to the front of it.
Addressed to her.
Her luck was back, in spades. Lilia stole the rickshaw without a moment's hesitation. Moving Montgomery into it was easier than she expected.
Maybe terror gave her extra strength.
Or maybe it was another power of black lycrester.
Montgomery awakened, groggy and in pain, in the darkened back of a jostling vehicle. There was a jumbled stack of paperwork tossed onto the seat beside him. His back hurt more than his temple or his shoulder. He checked and discovered that his clothing was shredded: whoever had put him in this rickshaw must have seen his scars.
Fearing the worst, he pulled himself forward and peered out the front of the moving vehicle.
Lilia, in her black evening suit, was pedaling the bike of the rickshaw. He would have recognized her figure anywhere, never mind her determination. She looked particularly stylish and overdressed for a rickshaw laborer, even though her hair had come out of its coil. They were rolling through the netherzones at a good clip, nearing the periphery of the pleasure fringe.
She wasn't harvesting him for the Republic, or even the circus.
He grinned, knowing he'd guessed her motivation accurately. Her actions never lied.
"So, what's your plan, Lil?" he asked lightly, noting how she jumped in surprise. "Are we running away together?"
"You're running away," she said, firing a hot glance over her shoulder. He didn't miss the flash of relief in her eyes or the way her gaze ran over him. "I'm just the cheap help."
"Since when? I thought I couldn't afford you."
She cast him a wicked glance, one that made his pulse leap. "Maybe I'll take the comp in trade."
Montgomery couldn't argue with that plan. He didn't have the chance anyway: they went over a seam in the concrete and he nearly fainted at the pain. The rickshaw had lousy shock absorbers.
"Sorry," she said with a grimace.
"You didn't cast the floor, Lil," he said, hearing how tight his voice was with the pain. "It's just one of those things."
"You need a tissue regenerator," she said with purpose. "Any likely candidates in the pleasure fringe? At home, I'd ask the guy with the tattoo parlor. He drinks and sometimes messes up, so he calls the generator his insurance plan."
Montgomery smiled at her pragmatism but knew he had to ask. "The EMS team must have been right there. They would have had a tissue regenerator. You could have just whistled them up, Lil."
"I didn't think you were in the market for a tattoo, Montgomery."
He'd guessed right: she had seen his back.
"So, we're going to the circus instead?"
Her glance was contemptuous. "You're a cop, Montgomery. Nobody pays admission to the circus to see cops."
He couldn't stop his grin. It wasn't about the comp, after all.
"Two passages up, take a right, Lil," he said. "I know the bartender in that jazz bar. He'll get rid of the rickshaw and help us get to the cathouse."
"Oh, so I'm killing myself to get you one last hurrah?"
He chuckled, hearing the bite of jealousy in her tone. "Something like that," he conceded and his smile broadened at her disapproval. "You haven't shown me your tattoos yet, Lil, and it was your idea that I repay you in trade."
She biked in silence and he wondered what she was thinking. She followed his directions and dismounted, then walked back to him. To his surprise, she looked shaken and uncertain. She framed his face in her hands and her eyes were wide. "I thought you were dead."
He pulled her close. "I guess I'm tougher than I look."
"There's certainly more to you than meets the eye."
He arched a brow. "I'm not alone in that."
She studied him for a moment. "So, when do you leave?" she whispered, her heart in her eyes.
He couldn't lie to her. "When my quest is fulfilled."
She nodded and averted her gaze, her throat working. "So much for my legendary luck," she quipped, then reached up and kissed him sweetly.
He tasted her fear and wanted only to reassure her. He pulled her closer, deepened his kiss, speared his fingers into her hair. She was softer and more vulnerable, more open to him than she had been yet. Her trust sent a welcome heat through him, made his pulse race, made everything within him quicken.
He was alive.
He was mortal.
He was in love.
Montgomery loved to mess with her mind. Lilia knew it, but she was too glad that he was conscious again to complain about it.
She also liked the glint of mischief in his green eyes and the curve of his smile as he watched her. Something had changed between them and she didn't want to examine it too closely in case it vaporized.
Every moment she had with him, after all, felt like a gift. Or a theft. An unexpected treasure to be savored. She'd never forget him, she knew it, and she wanted to collect as many memories as possible in the time they had together.
The cathouse he'd chosen had a Victorian theme and a pair of whores who regarded him with affection. Lilia refused to speculate on any reasons for that. They were suspiciously quick to cede their room and promise their silence. Lilia refused to consider what Montgomery done to earn such loyalty.
The women also fetched the cathouse doctor, who had a bootleg tissue regenerator. It was a small unit, probably so it could be easily hidden away, but the doctor assured them that it worked quickly. As much as Lilia respected pirated technology and its timely appearance, she intervened before the unit could be installed on Montgomery.
"Is he going to get extra thumbs?" she demanded.
The good doctor smiled. "Those aren't the default extra appendages it grows."
The whore with three breasts laughed, but Lilia didn't appreciate the joke.
"Well, override the default. Muscle tissue, veins and arteries, and skin only. No appendages of any kind."
"Demanding," the doctor said to Montgomery.
"It gets worse," Montgomery agreed easilv. Lilia didn't like how he grimaced as he settled himself on the four-poster bed.
"I like him just the way he is." Lilia shrugged.
The whore with the golden skin
smiled. "Who says your opinion is the only one that counts?" she purred, running her fingertip down Montgomery's boot.
"I do," Montgomery said quietly and offered Lilia his hand. He gave her a hot look to go with it, one that both surprised and pleased her. She went to stand beside him, liking how his hand engulfed hers. His grip was strong and she knew she could get used to having him around.
Permanently.
Although that looked like it was too much to ask.
In the interim, she'd give him anything she had.
"Can they be trusted?" she asked after the whores and doctor were gone.
"It's all in the tokens," he muttered. "You could say that I have a credit here."
"I don't want to know the details."
He squeezed her fingers and pulled her to sit on the edge of the bed. He looked pale, in need of blood as well as tissue, but that would come. He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes as the regenerator hummed busily. Lilia thought he might sleep, but he surprised her. "What file did you take?"
"The file for the Society. I hope it was the right one."
"Let's find out."
"You should rest."
"I can do that while you read to me." He gave her a bright look and Lilia got the file. It was a mess, seeing as she had snatched up all of the invoices and jammed them back into the folder in her haste to get Montgomery to safety. Her fingers shook at the close call they had had, but she refused to dwell on it.
Instead, she sat beside him on the bed. Montgomery watched and waited. It took Lilia awhile, but she sorted the file's contents into chronological order again.
"Why did you pick the Society's file?" Montgomery asked.
"Someone has to ship all those oranges," Lilia said. "See? Breisach and Turner has been shipping the Society's oranges for the Sunshine Heals program on their hybrid canola-electric fleet."
"That's not suspicious." Montgomery frowned and took the sheet from her. "Even though it's an old contract."
"But this is suspicious." Lilia handed him another piece of paper. It was a bill for additional charges, given excess weight of the payload picked up in 2069.
"More oranges, or heavier ones?" Montgomery asked.
"Maybe." Lilia found the invoice from the previous year, for a shipment of roughly the same number of crates of oranges, and played compare-and-contrast.
"The weight on the 2069 invoice was eight or nine times higher, for roughly the same quantity of oranges." She glanced at Montgomery. "That was some kind of iodine they'd injected that year."
He shook his head. "There must have been something else in the shipment."
"There's no way of knowing. This initial contract says that the shipments are to be packed and sealed in the Society's warehouses."
"What else could they have shipped, under Orv's banner?"
Lilia flipped through the file and stopped cold.
Montgomery leaned forward. "What have you got?"
She lifted it out of the file with uncertainty. "An insurance claim for four trucks lost in the 2069 attack on Gotham."
"Bad timing?" Montgomery mused. "They must have been four trucks loaded with Sunshine Heals oranges to be in this file."
Lilia recalled one snippet of information from her years at the Institute and sat back in astonishment.
"What is it?" Montgomery asked, seeing her shock.
"It's my suspicious mind at work again."
"Tell me."
Lilia swallowed. "A ten-kiloton nuclear device fits on the back of a flatbed truck."
Montgomery checked the insurance claim. "Which was what these four vehicles were."
Lilia tapped up a bit of history on her palm, her heart racing with the implications. Montgomery sat straighter, sensing her dismay. "I was right," she said, wishing she'd been wrong. "Experts speculated not only that the bombs had been detonated near the ground, but that the total force of the blast had been forty kilotons."
The two of them eyed the stolen file.
"How much extra weight was there?" Montgomery asked.
Lilia tapped up a Gid-worthy calculation on her palm. She did it three times to make sure, then met Montgomery's gaze. "Enough for those boxes to have contained enriched uranium, not oranges."
Montgomery looked away, frowning. "What did the Society do?"
Lilia was pretty sure they both knew.
"What else is in the file?" he asked after a moment.
Lilia flipped through it to the end. "The last item is a letter of intent from 2070, confirming that Breisach and Turner will continue delivering the Society's oranges."
"Breisach and Turner figured it out."
"And the Society made a deal with them to keep them silent," Lilia concluded. "Did your friend ever actually meet the partners?"
Montgomery sobered, then tapped his fingers on the desk. "Breisach died in a skiing accident last winter."
"Turner?"
"She never said much, but she was upset last August. Turner had had a rickshaw accident but died in the hospital."
"Of what? A broken leg?"
"Supposedly of a mistake with his medication, an inadvertent overdose."
"In August," Lilia mused. "At the same time Gid died."
Their gazes met and held for a potent moment.
Lilia knew there had to be more. The hit on Gotham was old news, thirty-year-old news. Gid couldn't have been killed for figuring out that the Society was responsible. "Do you still have that datachip?"
"And one last scrambler," Montgomery said, reaching for his boot. "There's got to be a public reader in this place."
XIX
There was a public reader, although it was hidden. Montgomery hadn't expected otherwise. The reader was in a small room off the reception area, hidden behind a framed oil painting. The painting turned out to be on a hinge. Montgomery managed to make it down the stairs under his own steam, the tissue regenerator having done a quick job on his shoulder. Lilia guessed that the owner had paid for a speed upgrade, so that any injured whores could get back to work more quickly.
They'd decided not to worry about the quality of his manufactured tissue, at least for the moment. He liked his increasing sense that they were a team and a pretty good one.
The owner advised them to be quick about their usage before he left them alone. "The juice cost kills me," he said.
Montgomery grimaced once he was gone. "You always said that everything has its price, Lil."
"In the pleasure fringe, it can be a lot more than you expect."
He put the scrambler on Gid's chip and pushed it into the port. The spreadsheet came up immediately but didn't look any more significant to Montgomery than it had the last time.
Lilia's gaze brightened and he wondered what she saw. "Look. Here's where the shade populations bottom out, then spike again. The dates are familiar ones: numbers diminish through the 2030s, then spike in 2035 and 2036."
"Just after the first hit in the Second Global War," Montgomery said, remembering his dates.
"The spike probably began its upturn four to five months after the nukes," Lilia told him. "The greatest damage occurs in utero, when the mothers are exposed."
"Nice."
"It's a weapon, Montgomery, not a welcome wagon." She tapped the display with excitement. "The same pattern repeats: over time the shade population diminishes, until our next spike ..."
"The years 2051 and 2052. The Pacific Rim Conflict."
Lilia nodded. "Then the same cycle occurs. The shade population numbers drop through the 2060s. Notice that they reach lower lows than previously, both in raw numbers and per capita."
"And then Gotham was hit," Montgomery said, with some impatience. He could hear sounds of activity in the foyer of the cathouse and didn't like the possibility that they might be observed. "Lil, this isn't news."
She straightened and he knew she was going to say something outrageous. "Quick question: who has the most to lose if there are no more shades?"
"Eve
rybody."
"No." Lilia shook her head. "Not everybody would suffer equally. Individuals would be inconvenienced or be compelled to do more physical labor themselves, but one organization would cease to have a rationale for existing. A rich organization, with connections at all levels of government, connections based upon its exploitation of shades."
Montgomery knew which one she meant. "You've got no proof."
"Do you have the images from the palm of the shade who wanted to meet me?"
Montgomery tapped into the NGPD database and pulled it up.
"I've got to love organized men," Lilia murmured, then leaned over to expand the first image. The image was a shot of traffic, time-dated in the lower right corner: 08:38, July 11,2069.
Montgomery tapped up the news file on the Gotham strike to confirm the time. "Just before the detonation," he said softly.
The image was grainy, but the logo of Orv the Orange was clearly visible on the crates loaded on one truck. The truck was bigger than the other traffic entering the tunnel, looming large over the bicycles and rickshaws. Above the entrance to the tunnel were signs and beyond that was a distant cityscape.
"Do you know where this is?" Lilia asked.
"It says it's the bridge into Gotham."
"There's a crater on the other end where one of the bombs was detonated. I went around it the other night."
"And this image was purportedly taken just before the attack."
Lilia was insulted, as he'd known she'd be. "Purportedly?"
"It could be a montage, Lil, put together after the fact. You can't even detect the good ones these days."
"No, it is what it looks like it is."
Montgomery swivelled in the chair, feeling compelled to be the devil's advocate. So to speak. "Prove it."
"Why would anyone have taken pictures of these trucks before the attack was known? Obviously because someone had a whiff of what was going to go down."
"Then why haven't the people who had this image come forward in thirty years?"
"I can think of a whole bunch of reasons for that, most of which involve the suppression of information by a central authority," Lilia said, her tone tart. "Although I probably shouldn't say as much in the company of an official being compensated by the central authority to administer its information-suppressing policies in this particular geographic area."
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