Bobbi snorted. “You’re always expecting trouble.” She slipped her arm around Violet’s shoulders in a brief hug. “Lucky for me.”
“Lucky for all of us,” Violet said. “I packed one for everybody. It’s not like they’ll let Shaper through the door with a magazine in his arm.”
“Fair enough,” Bobbi said. “Right, well, let’s just stick to the story when we get there, huh? And don’t hand the guns out until we’re clear of the militia. They’re expensive, and I don’t feel like playing Santa for a couple of rubes with assault rifles.”
Violet leaned in and gave Bobbi her best fluttering lashes. “Aren’t you from Tenleytown yourself?”
Bobbi chucked her shoulder gently. “Hush.”
They made it through the gates with surprisingly little fuss. The original fence that had girded the patchwork urban structure had long been replaced with a much larger, semipermanent cordon of jersey walls, chain link, and fractal-edged wire. The militia were much better equipped than last time, too, but even their sniffers couldn’t find the small sensor-scattering vault installed under the floor of the van. Soon enough, they parked in a lot specifically laid out for visitors, picked up their needlers, and headed off to play tourist.
The plan sounded simple enough: Shaper and Sumire would do their Bonnie-and-Clyde gig, sniffing out the flourishing underground market. They knew this place, and had done business here often before. In the meantime, Bobbi and Violet would go find Lionel. With luck, they’d only be there for a few hours. A little time spent in public, so to speak, but minimal exposure even if Scalli did have agents lurking there. The size of the place, which Bobbi hadn’t been prepared for, made it a lot harder for them to be detected, which in turn made her more confident of the decision to come, and put her a bit more at ease. The four of them made their way through the outlying bazaar, ducking neon and holographic signs, shouldering through the crowd that fairly choked the lanes.
“Busy times here,” Bobbi said to nobody in particular.
“Quite a lot of that, yeah,” Shaper said. “It’s interesting how things expanded. After Redeye and her group did their thing, that was about it for the ferals. If they’re around now, they’re in the deeper areas. South of Renton, maybe Federal Way.”
“She’d be happy to hear that,” Bobbi said. “We’ve never quite been able to figure out where all the ferals came from, you know. Or rather, what purpose the Yathi had for dumping them out here.”
They ducked under the awning of a closed stall. The smell of cooking meat proved a bit of a distraction for Bobbi, who hadn’t eaten since they had gotten off the plane at Sea-Tac. They huddled together, watching the passersby and crowding out the winter dampness.
“I wonder,” Sumire said after a moment standing there, “if the proper question may not be not what the purpose may have been for dumping them, but why they are no longer being released.”
“That’s obvious,” Violet said. “Queen Bitch doesn’t want another Redeye on her hands. We took whoever was left out here, and killed off the unsalvageable ones –before your time, Sumire. Real early days, after the Eye perished.”
“So you say,” said Sumire mildly. The colored lights of the stall next door bathed her china-doll mask, converting it into something seen in a stained-glass window. Our Lady of Strategic Analysis, always calculating. “Perhaps they were so arrogant as to believe they could use this for a dumping ground. Or perhaps our lost brothers and sisters went ‘bad’, so to speak, when they were already installed. Remember the sort of facilities that were located out here – drone processors and laboratories, secure installations. Now? All gone overnight.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘overnight,’” Bobbi said. “We blew up a good number of them.”
“But the majority of these installations disappeared, it is recorded. Seemingly at once.”
“Probably let them be sacrificed so that they could vacate the rest,” Shaper said.
Violet hissed softly. “Fucking inscrutable bullshit. Wish we could have just carpet-bombed every site.”
Bobbi frowned. “Maybe. They were all combat units, the ones that Redeye had gathered. Violet was the only one who wasn’t an out-and-out war machine.”
“Yeah,” said Violet. “But I can sniff them out.”
“I never understood that.” Bobbi squinted at Violet. “If that were so, then why keep you out in the hinterlands? Why not, I don’t know, keep you close where you could be sent out? That ability, it’s so damned useful.”
“Easy.” Shaper looked among them with knowing eyes. “Redeye was trying to protect her investment.” At their looks of disbelief, he continued. “Look, no, think about it. Redeye always kept herself surrounded by killers. Unstable, armed, and constantly out for blood. So what if there was an accident and Violet was killed? What if someone dropped a bunker-buster on the whole lot of them? There were a whole lot more of them before, you’d said, and they’d basically lost most of their numbers hitting that facility when you’d met up with them. They were ready for a last stand.”
Bobbi squinted at him. “And?”
“Well, what if she had been planning for Violet to survive, to get picked up by someone else?”
They all looked at each other. “Well, who would she be looking for?”
Shaper pursed his lips. “What about you?”
“Or someone like her,” Violet mused.
“No,” Shaper said with a toss of his head. “I mean her specifically. Look, you lot have consistently affirmed that this whole thing has been Cagliostro’s doing, right? Getting hired by his living body, her mate Tom, meeting up with Redeye, the whole thing. And then there’s that transgenic lady that he knew.”
“Her name was Freida,” Bobbi said, surprised at the sharpness in her tone.
He waved the words away. “No, look. Cagliostro created Redeye, too. Someone has to be pulling strings here. Our ghostly friend pulls some, sure, maybe a lot of them – but not necessarily every one. There has to be someone else involved.”
Bobbi’s squinted. “If so, then who?”
“Mother, of course.” Sumire blinked serenely. “This is nothing that has not already been proposed, however.”
“I’m not in on all your strategic meetings, Sumire,” Shaper said. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” Bobbi nodded. “Like Sumire says, it’s not the first time we talked about it. The question being here is why.”
“Let’s see if we can’t talk about it later,” Violet muttered. “Subvocals or not, I really don’t feel like we should be kibitzing about the Almighty Crazy right now.”
Sumire looped her arm through Shaper’s. “Quite. Mr. Shaper? I should like to go see the automatic weapons now.”
“Right, then.” Shaper gave Violet and Bobbi a ‘can you believe this?’ look, because frankly nobody really spent a great deal of time in the wild with Sumire and the whole ‘Mary Poppins, Warrior Princess’ thing was putting them all a bit off balance. After all, Sumire was usually cheerfully sequestered in her interface tank, plotting strategy. Shaper led her away past the stall and down the market lane, looking like a lanky guard for an elegant lady on a slumming excursion – which, in a perverse sort of way, summed things up to a tee.
“So what now?” Violet looked back at Bobbi, her blue eyes alert and wary. Even as she looked at Bobbi, she scanned the crowd beyond, a pale, pretty watchdog on duty once again.
Bobbi smiled at her and shrugged. “Well… We came to see a doctor, right? But first, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. C’mon, honey, let’s get something to eat.”
They stopped at a stall to buy skewers of grilled chicken, which turned out to be flavored fungal protein grown from Tenleytown’s own my coplant. “We do our own veg and algae, too,” the proprietor had cheerfully told them, indicating that portions of the core buildings had been given over to hydroponic gardens and the like.
“Seems a bit odd,” Violet said as they walked through the market, munchi
ng on their skewers and drinking cold beer from waxed paper cartons. “I mean, they’ve got contact with the city now, right? They’ve got trade. Why the self-sufficiency?”
“Tenlies have always been self-sufficient.” Bobbi shrugged. “They’ve had this place all to themselves nearly forty years with nobody to depend on. Makes sense to me that they’d want to keep as much of that autonomy as possible, even with the new lines of contact.”
“I suppose.” Violet munched on a mouthful of ‘chicken.’ “It’s all going to go away in time, though. They can’t exist outside of the government if all this is reclaimed.”
Bobbi had nothing to say to that, so she just smiled and forged on. She didn’t want to think of Tenleytown as anything beyond what she had known, the collection of independent minds and pioneer hearts, criminal or otherwise. Tenleytown had long since eclipsed that, though, and she had left it behind even longer still. What right did she have to be upset about it?
And yet…she thought about what was coming, what always came with connection to the outside world. Consumerism, avarice, all that human bullshit, sure…but at the forefront, the Yathi would bear the torch leading them to destruction. Bobbi wondered just how many operatives the monsters had in Tenleytown now, ridden meat like Diana or properly borged-up examples of their kind. She knew Violet kept watch for them. She always did.
Eventually, they passed the inner fence and entered the collection of old towers and ramshackle gantries, the Tenleytown Bobbi knew. Here, at least, the warm cloak of familiarity draped over everything; the strip mall and the office buildings, repurposed into a makeshift urban center, were more or less as he had remembered even when coming out with Scalli four years ago. The same flags made from old blankets hung from the walkways, the same ribbons of colored cloth streamed from the web of utility cables connecting the various structures. A cacophony of music and sound rose like a fog from ground level, added to by the many offices turned apartments, and the background hiss of life buoyed her up as she stood amongst it.
They tossed the remnants of their skewers and beer into waiting receptacles.
“Let’s see if Medic’s Row is still open,” Bobbi said, and she made for the alley that ran between the two tallest office towers. “He might be right there.”
Medic’s Row had once been something of a joke for the citizens of Tenleytown, a small collection of former paramedics or the occasional disgraced physician, none of whom usually stayed in town for long after seeing the kind of injuries that life in the Old City was capable of inflicting. Now, though, the space between the buildings had been converted into a small clinic all its own. Bobbi and Violet stared at the facade of the clinic, constructed in the space between the office buildings. A modern greenhouse frame comprised the structure, two stories of foamed steel girders set with large panes of heavily tinted glass. An airlock gate stood where a swinging door should be, and over it, glowing serenely, a holographic image of a caduceus serving as a final signpost of its purpose.
“Well,” Bobbi said with soft surprise. “I guess they’ve got a proper clinic after all.”
“That’s bulletproof material,” Violet said. “The ‘glass,’ I mean. What do you think? Lexan? Transparent alloy?”
“Hard to say.” Bobbi didn’t much care. The money that went into the structure interested her, not its composition. “I guess this is where he’s set up, in any case. If he sold his old practice like Pierre said, he’s likely to have more than enough to build several places like this. What do you think?”
“I think it’s weird as hell that someone would dump a thriving underground practice to disappear for a few years, and build something else in the Old City.” Violet stared at the sign before looking back to Bobbi. “I was expecting something a bit crazier in appearance. Didn’t Pierre make it sound like this guy had gone total googoo?”
Bobbi had gotten the same impression. She squinted at the door for a moment, and shrugged. “Well, we’re not going to find out what’s up by standing out here. Come on, let’s see if we can’t get an appointment.”
They passed through the heavy hatch and into an anteroom. White tile, nonslip, bright white hospital lighting. The faintest smell of antiseptic in the air. At the other end, another airtight hatch. The door behind them hissed shut. A faint hum and the telltale buzz of what Bobbi thought to be an electromagnetic scan filled the air. After a moment, the sensation passed.
A polite female voice filled the chamber. “Good evening. How may we help you today?”
“Two to see Doctor Knightley,” Bobbi replied.
“And what is the nature of your medical needs today?”
They looked at each other again.
“Consultation,” Bobbi said. “My friend has a malfunctioning implant. We’d like him to have a look at it.”
A short pause. “And what is your friend’s name?”
“Anna Marinsky. We have an appointment.”
Another pause, much longer than the last. For half a moment, Bobbi expected to be shown the door. Instead, a section of tile recessed and slid away, and an empty drawer slid out in its place. “The doctor will see you. Our scans indicate that you are carrying firearms; please deposit them in the indicated receptacle. You can reclaim them at the conclusion of your visit.”
“I hate it when they ask that,” Violet muttered, but she did not hesitate to draw her needler when Bobbi held out her hand for it. “Do people really shoot up hospitals anymore?”
“Are you kidding me?” She eyed Violet as she stepped back from the drawer, which slid closed.
“Oh.” Violet ducked her gaze. “I, uhh, never watched the news when I was young. You know. Before.”
Bobbi laid a hand on her arm and smiled. “C’mon, you. Let’s go see the crazy.”
As if the door were listening, it unsealed with a hiss and opened. The two of them stepped through to find a trim man in a pair of red plastic surgical scrubs waiting for them.
“Good evening.” He smiled pleasantly. “The doctor will be ready for you in a short while. Please follow me.” He led them down a corridor to a small waiting lounge with couches of plush black leather and magnetically-suspended wafers of steel serving as tables. Once they sat, he asked if they would like any refreshments, but they politely sent him on his way. Bobbi thought of the smooth, white tile walls, how they were so similar to the ruined corridors of Orleans Hospital she had glimpsed while talking to Tom over the network. Everything came back to him. Cagliostro had engineered the course of events leading to Bobbi’s meeting Tom, everything leading up to his meeting Mother, in the hopes that he would kill her before she could recruit him.
But he hadn’t, and he had disappeared – only to reappear two years later on a life-support slab in a Yathi facility. What was so important about him that the Mother had decided to keep him alive? They sat in silence for what felt like hours, but after what turned out to be only ten minutes, the technician reappeared.
“The doctor will see you now.”
He led them up a short flight of stairs to the second level, then down a narrow corridor that seemed to run down the middle. At the far end a double door waited, to which the technician led them before departing. Bobbi felt a sudden flash of anxiety; sensing this, Violet smiled before reaching out and squeezing her hand. The momentary sensation vanished, and Bobbi nodded before she pushed forward through the door.
Though small and economical compared to the elegant, decades-old building Lionel had inhabited in the Verge, the laboratory that lay beyond seemed no less advanced. Indeed, the room was a study in modern medical technology: machines lined the walls, every one of them something out of the technical journals and corporate advertisements. Tissue printers, stand-up surgical units, DNA replication devices, and other things she could not identify that looked as if they had come from the set of a holofilm. In the center of the room lay a table, a wide slab of steel bristling with manipulators, which while folded into their inactive positions looked like the limbs of some enormous, d
ead beetle. Years of dealing with secret and horrible things made her entirely distrustful of shrouds, and the hair rose on the back of her neck as she squinted at the anonymous cluster of machinery.
“All right,” Violet muttered next to her. “Where’s the guy?”
A moment later, a figure rose from beneath the far end of the lab table. Dressed in surgical scrubs and a lab coat that looked as if they had been slept in for several days, Lionel Knightley stared at them with large, gray eyes that boiled with a feverish energy. Once, Bobbi had thought them lovely and calm, albeit calculating. Now, however, they bored into the two women as if they were demons that had stepped through the veil of reality. His long mane of dreads had turned snowy white, and for some reason, that seemed to spook her worst of all.
“Uhh, hey there.” Bobbi felt uncertain now, and wished she had not left her pistol in a security drawer. “We’re here for an appointment?”
Lionel stood silently watching them, hands in the pockets of his coat, unknowable and potentially lethal. Bobbi felt Violet tense beside her, ready to pounce on him or to throw herself in front of an incoming attack. He spoke in a dim, hollowed version of the patois-laced purr she had once known, devoid of accent, devoid of patois – just a dull, penetrative rumble. “Stand right there, and do not move.”
What else could she do? They stood there, Bobbi trying to read those crazy eyes while Violet readied defense. A buzzing sensation passed over them, the same that they felt in the clinic’s foyer. A scanner. After a moment, Lionel’s steely eyes narrowed into slits.
“You come under false pretenses,” he said. “I know who you are, little sister. Been a long time since I’ve seen you. Been all of six years.”
Bobbi didn’t even blink, but her hair stood on end. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, Lionel. We’re just here to say hello.”
“I know your nervous system better than anyone else,” he said. “So many things could be faked, but your nerves are a map well known to me.” He squinted at her. “You’ve been through several surgeries since last we met.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 14
