Lots of yellow eyes and shaggy silhouettes.
That made her nervous.
Montgomery pointed to the indent in the square where Lilia had found the murdered shade without turning on his speaker. Light shone in the recessed space in front of the fountain.
Someone was obviously waiting for them.
The little hairs on the back of Lilia's neck prickled.
Montgomery didn't hesitate, but then, whoever was waiting would have heard the bike already. There was little point in delaying the inevitable. Lilia saw that pairs of torches had been lit, one on each end of each step that descended into the pit. More had been lit around the perimeter.
A figure sat on the lip of the dry fountain, exactly where Y654892's body had been. Lilia knew it was the same spot because there was a bloodstain on the stone.
It was a woman and Lilia didn't know her.
It's true that Lilia couldn't have recognized a woman in pseudoskin and helm, except that her pseudoskin was salvaged and patched. Everyone Lilia knew with a pseudoskin—all Nuclear Darwinists—had a snazzy new model like Gid's.
None of those people would have risked their health and welfare, even to disguise themselves, by wearing a substandard suit.
She guessed that Montgomery's associates were the same.
Lilia could see now that there was an inscription carved into the stone behind the gilded statue of Prometheus.
"Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire to earth that hath proven to mortals a means to mighty ends."
Funny it didn't say anything about pride coming before a fall. Prometheus hadn't had a great ending to his story, and mortals weren't doing too well on that score either.
Maybe fire from heaven was more trouble than humans could be trusted to handle.
The wolves howled behind them as the woman held up a small square item.
It was a palm.
Lilia's heart leapt. She knew whose palm it had been.
The woman touched the base of her helm, activating the speaker. "Is this what you're looking for, Lilia Des-jardins?"
A shiver slipped up Lilia's spine that the woman knew her name. She glanced back nervously to find the wolves half as far away as they'd been a moment before.
Moving as silently as shadows.
Salivating.
Montgomery revved the bike and the wolves backed off a bit.
"They won't come down here," the woman in the pit assured them. "Not with the fire."
Lilia activated her own speaker. "You sound pretty sure of that."
She laughed. "They know that fire means we're serving wolf."
"They always said Gotham was a dog-eat-dog world," Montgomery said in an undertone.
"You'll have to leave the bike behind," the woman said. "And come alone. Like you did last time."
Lilia exchanged a glance with Montgomery, wishing she could see his eyes more clearly. The tinted visor disguised his expression, but he handed her off the bike as if she was a noblewoman descending from a carriage.
"Time for some prudence," was all he said.
"Don't stay up here alone," she murmured. Montgomery got off the bike, leaving it running, and descended a couple of steps behind her. He pivoted and drew his laze, guarding her back.
The wolves immediately swarmed around the motorcycle and past it. They didn't go down the steps. They surrounded the square and looked down hungrily, their toes on the lip of stone.
"You must come here often to know so much about them," Lilia said as she went down the rest of the stairs. She refused to think just yet about how they would get out of here.
One problem at a time.
The woman had the dark filter lowered so that Lilia couldn't see her features. "You could say that. I live here."
"You can't live in Gotham. It's too hot..."
"On the surface, it is. And there are the wolves, of course."
Lilia realized then that there were dark openings around the perimeter of this recessed square. "Gotham doesn't have a netherzone."
"Not officially. Nothing's been built here since the bombs."
She watched Lilia, apparently at ease, apparently waiting.
"There was a netherzone here before?"
"Subways are literally paths beneath the surface of the earth."
Lilia had never thought about it, but the woman was right. "Didn't they flood?"
"Some of them did." Lilia heard laughter in her tone. "Knowledge is power."
Lilia glanced back at the wolves, who watched avidly, and was aware of the press of time. She'd been in the hot zone just a few nights before and needed to watch her exposure. "I came for the palm."
"I knew you would."
"How?"
The woman lifted the filter of her visor and Lilia could see her features. She was older, probably contemporary with Lilia's mother, and there was intelligence in her gaze. Lilia noticed that much, as well as the node on her forehead.
"Because the stories about the third eye are true?"
"In a way. You have to learn to see with it. You have to learn to trust it. I've had good teachers." She smiled. "Besides, it was only logical that you'd come back."
Lilia was feeling a bit skittish about this stranger being so calmly certain of what she would do. "Is the third eye how you know my name?"
"No." She lifted the bootleg palm. "Yvan knew it."
"Yvan? That was his name?" Lilia was relieved that he hadn't just been a number. Yvan was preferable to Y654892. When the woman nodded, Lilia tried again to push her to the point of surrendering the palm. "You survived here in Gotham, with Yvan."
She seemed amused by this. "Not just Yvan."
"But why stay here?"
"Where else would we go?"
It had never occurred to Lilia that people might remain in the old cities, much less that they would choose to do so. But then, those who were visibly shades had little to gain by declaring themselves alive.
When Lilia said nothing, the woman leaned closer. "Yvan was obsessed with finding the people who did this to us. He thought he could ensure that there was justice."
"He wanted to stop it from happening again," Lilia guessed.
She nodded. "Once he realized their plans."
"And he died instead."
She glanced up suddenly, as alert as a rabbit hearing pursuit. Lilia listened but couldn't hear anything. She glanced back at Montgomery, who shrugged.
"How did they put the homing device on you?" the woman demanded.
"What are you talking about?"
"It's probably in your palm," she said, almost to herself.
A homing device? It wasn't possible...
Lilia heard the engine then. It was coming closer.
Lilia looked down at her left hand in horror. Had the intruder installed a souvenir in her palm, as well as copying its contents? Or had Dr. Malachy had viral software on his palm?
Either way, whoever was following them had been led directly to them by Lilia's own palm. She turned it off, even though it was too late.
Montgomery swore and lifted his laze. The engine grew louder, the bike turning into the plaza. The wolves turned to watch the new arrival and Lilia realized the strategic disadvantage of being in a pit.
Her momentary distraction was all the advantage the other woman needed. The woman disappeared into the darkness to one side of the former pool.
"Hey!" Lilia shouted to no effect. "Hey!"
"Lil!" Montgomery bellowed, but Lilia ran after the shade.
The woman knew where she was going and Lilia didn't. She was more accustomed to running in her pseudoskin than Lilia was, and hers was probably lighter.
But Lilia wanted that palm.
Even if it meant running into dark tunnels with no idea of where they led.
It was dark and wet in this old-city netherzone. Lilia was terrified by the darkness and really didn't manage to think any further than not letting the woman out of her sight.
She scrambled down stair
s and along ramps, then into a tunnel of some kind, and Lilia was as close behind her as she could manage to be. A desperate fear that she might get lost alone in this maze kept Lilia running despite her exhaustion. The only light was cast by the woman's helm, which had apparently been retrofitted with a flashlight.
Lilia regretted never having done the same to her own.
She turned into a tunnel that was long and straight. There were rails on the ground, two shining rails, and Lilia remembered her comment about subways. More than paths under the ground, they had run trains underground in many cities, a fact that she'd always found hard to believe. The ground was covered with heavy gravel and there were puddles in between the tracks. Lilia shivered, feeling entombed beneath the abandoned city.
But the two women weren't alone. As Lilia's eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that there were thousands of tiny eyes gleaming in the shadows, watching with interest.
Rats?
Or feral cats?
Or very large cockroaches?
Lilia bolted after the shade, who was making good time down the tunnel ahead of her. She was feeling all her Malachy-inflicted injuries but would worry about them later.
Assuming she survived.
The woman took a branch to the right, two more to the left, scurried across a tiled platform to the other side, and ran down another tunnel. Lilia was panting, but determined to not lose her.
Lilia turned a corner and was shocked to find no light ahead of her. The darkness would have swallowed her whole, and her heart constricted in terror.
Then someone grabbed Lilia's arm and pulled her hard to the right. Her back slammed against a brick wall.
"We don't have much time," the shade said tersely. She flicked on her helm light and offered Yvan's palm. "There are images here that provide all the proof about Gotham you'll need. You have to take this and reanimate it..."
"But why don't you? Why haven't you told anyone?"
"Who would have believed us?" She shook her head and frowned. "And in a way, it seemed irrelevant. What was done was done so there seemed little point in coming forward."
Lilia saw her meaning immediately. "There was only the risk of identifying yourselves as shades and being harvested."
She nodded.
"What changed?"
"Gideon Fitzgerald. He didn't know what he did with his research, not until it was too late. He must have shown his statistics to someone . .."
"He was dispatched by his advisor, Dr. Malachy."
To Lilia's surprise, she caught her breath and glanced away. "Yes," she said quietly. "Telling Liam would be enough."
"Wait. You know Dr. Malachy?"
"I thought I knew him better than I did. Thank God I found out the truth before I married him."
Lilia stared at the woman in shock. "You're Johanna?"
She nodded.
"But I thought you were dead."
"It was easier to let people believe that, than to face them after I'd failed to stop them. At least I understood what was happening that day and what to do to save myself." She nodded firmly. "And I could see the pattern, when Yvan started to gather his shipping data again."
"But Gid—"
Johanna held up her palm. "This was the message Gid sent Yvan. I datashared it, in case Yvan's palm was lost and I needed to find you."
Lilia caught her breath as an image of Gid appeared on Johanna's palm. The display was pulling hard to one side and his face was distorted. She saw the date on the bottom of the display and her heart stopped cold.
August 2.
Lilia swallowed when Johanna started to replay the message, her chest clenching as Gid glanced over his shoulder in obvious fear. He expected to be overheard. His manner was furtive.
He knew the danger he faced.
Lilia could imagine that he had calculated that the risk was worth the potential price.
Oh, Gid.
"All right," he said quickly, "I'll come and see your evidence because there's no other logical way to end this." He looked hard into the vid. "But if anything goes wrong, if anything happens to me, then you have to contact my wife, Lilia Desjardins." He gave Lilia's palm address. His rueful laugh was painfully familiar. "Lilia's the only one who will believe this."
All too soon, Gid killed the feed.
"They must have followed him," Lilia said.
"Didn't you wonder why the wolves never ate his corpse?"
Lilia hadn't wondered, but then she hadn't known much about wolves and their dining habits just days ago.
Johanna shook her head. "They collected him fast, too fast for us to intervene."
"I thought he'd been in the city a week."
"No. He was picked up immediately and put back in the city later that week, just before the patrol came through. They wanted his palm."
"They wanted to know what he knew." It wasn't out of respect for one of their own—their speed had come from a desire to limit potential exposure.
Johanna smiled. "But Gideon didn't leave that info there to be found. Too bad he only got as far as Thirty-fourth and Third or we might have beat them to his body."
"Am I right? Are they going to do it again?"
"Of course. Everything's easier the second time. A precedent means no need for a justification."
"But where? When?"
Whatever Johanna was going to say was never uttered. Lilia felt the laze beam more than saw it, the distinctive sizzle of it on her left. The shot singed the shoulder of her pseudoskin and she ducked instinctively.
Which only gave the assailant a clear shot at Johanna.
By the time Lilia had straightened, Johanna was slipping to the ground, dead.
Lilia quickly reanimated her palm because she wasn't coming back into the old city soon. She needed Johanna's data and wasn't up to cutting her palm loose.
Datasharing with a corpse was the only answer.
Lilia knelt, swallowed her revulsion, and slid her probe into Johanna's palm. She tucked Yvan's palm into her belt. Johanna's passwords were predictable and her firewalls were feeble, sufficiently weak that Lilia's palm overrode them automatically. The datashare was fast and dirty.
Lilia straightened when the download was complete. She still had to get out of Gotham alive.
She pivoted and in the weak light cast by Johanna's helm could see two men wrestling. They were fighting over possession of a laze, presumably the laze that had just been used to kill Johanna.
Johanna had a laze of her own.
It was ancient but it would do. Lilia ripped it out of Johanna's holster, then didn't know whom to shoot.
Two men in black pseudoskins and helms, virtually indistinguishable from each other. In the dim light, it was impossible to guess which was friend and which was foe.
One was Montgomery.
The men fought over the laze, first one claiming it then the other. Lilia pointed Johanna's laze at one, then at the other, but couldn't pull the trigger.
She wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
One man sucker-punched the other, who bent over in pain. He wasn't down, though, because he abruptly kicked the laze out of the hand of the first. The weapon flew high, then fell with a clatter in the shadows beyond the reach of Johanna's fading light.
Lilia went after it. She had a laze in each hand, and no clue whom to shoot.
The men parted, panting, the one who had had the laze straightening. He pushed up the filter on his helm and held up his hands. "Lilia, don't shoot."
"Mike!" Lilia couldn't make sense of it. Mike MacPherson?
"I followed you to be sure that you were okay."
Lilia remembered that Mike had been at the cocktail party when she'd gotten the spiked drink. He was a man in a pseudoskin and could have been the intruder to her room.
He was seventh degree. Attaining the top honor had to get a Nuclear Darwinist into the inner circle.
And he almost ran the research labs.
She wanted to know what
he knew, so she let him talk.
The other man pushed up his filter and Lilia saw that it was Montgomery. He said nothing, but pulled his own laze, which put Mike at a definite disadvantage.
Mike started to talk. "Lilia, he just killed that woman when he was aiming for you." He took a step closer to appeal. "Look at your shoulder. You've taken a hit. He almost got you. We've got to get you some medical care."
Mike had followed them and Lilia knew his gesture wasn't born of goodwill.
Mike didn't stop talking. "Lilia, you have to be careful here in New Gotham. Gid knew that the New Gotham cops are crooked, so they got rid of him."
"I thought it was the Society that Gid learned the truth about."
"That's what they want you to think. NGPD is on the take, from Maximilian Blackstone's campaign."
"What are you talking about?"
"Don't you watch the polls? Blackstone is going to get elected and he wants to get rid of the Society. He's had evidence planted against the Society so that he can 'reveal' in his inaugural speech that Ernest Sinclair and the Society were responsible for the attack on Gotham. He wants to take charge of the shade labs and claim the licensing revenue from the drugs we've developed. It's a lot of money, Lilia, and the only way the Republic can seize it is to discredit and eliminate the Society."
"What about Dr. Malachy?"
"He's been working with Blackstone's people, planting doubt in the Society, finding details that can be used against us. They need someone on the inside to make the story plausible. Can't you see what's at risk here?"
Lilia knew Max well enough to find this possible. This kind of bold, self-serving grab for revenue and positive PR (not to mention wealth and power) was totally characteristic of him. Its very sneakiness was quintessentially Max-like.
Plausibility didn't make it true.
Mike continued in a hurry, perhaps believing that Lilia was on the cusp of being convinced. "NGPD is a part of it. How else can you explain that sloppy autopsy report? Not a single question as to why Gid was in the old city, which is off-limits by senatorial decree."
"I wondered about that."
"I talked to Gid at the end. He was part of a clandestine effort on the part of the Society to stop this before it started. Gid learned that the Republican government actually executed the attack on Gotham and that Maximilian Blackstone's people were trying to pin it on the Society. Gid must have had proof, or gone to get it."
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