Bobbi looked down at herself. “Yeah. And how did you get that information?”
“I made a point to steal brother Chin’s records when he died. Don’t worry; I wiped all other copies of it. I was, after all, anticipating this meeting.”
He did not turn his eyes from them, but they had become a little unfocused. He must be wired into the system. “You’re going to have to excuse me, Lionel.” She stepped up to the edge of the table and placed her hands against its rim; the thin antenna of a wireless control plug jutted from somewhere behind Lionel’s ear. “We didn’t mean to twist you up, you know? I heard you were in town again, and I thought we’d come and see what you’re doing now.”
Lionel continued to stare at them. Not them so much as Violet, whose presence caused his brows to knit deeper and deeper. “I don’t like the way your company looks. I see Babylon inside of her. Did you bring her to change my mind with chemicals? Get rid of her.”
Violet hissed. Barely-restrained violence radiated from her like a wreath of black light, and she bared her teeth at him.
Bobbi laid a hand on Violet’s arm to calm her. “No. She stays with me.” Drawing herself up and putting her shoulders back, she fixed her gaze anew upon Lionel. She understood his distrust, but there was no way in hell that she would let him disrespect Violet. “Look, I just heard from someone that you had come back into town, and yeah, I wanted to make sure everything was all right. I wasn’t sure if you had left because of Genefex, or if they had disappeared you themselves, or what.”
Lionel frowned. “And who told you I had returned?”
“You remember Pierre Gatineau, yeah? Used to operate in town?”
“I do.” Lionel’s gaze lingered on Violet for a moment before turning back to Bobbi. “How did this man come across such information?”
“Old employee of yours.” Bobbi shrugged. “He really wasn’t happy about how his business got affected with your disappearance. Now that you’re back, I figure he’s putting the bug in my ear to see if I can find anything out for him.” Bobbi watched Lionel’s face, how his mad eyes cleared somewhat. Suspicion remained, however, and his brows knit. “I see. But we aren’t here to get information for Pierre Gatineau, are we?”
Bobbi and Violet glanced at one another.
“No,” Bobbi said. “We aren’t.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“The Doll, of course.” Bobbi blinked slowly at him, letting him get a good look as her lashes shuttered, then revealed her sparkling green eyes. Though she no longer wore the exotic flesh of ignorance in favor of the plain body with which she had been born, her eyes were always beautiful – and also a warning, one which she displayed now. “You didn’t get disappeared by Genefex, so you must not have just taken off for your health.”
Lionel’s eyes narrowed in return. “I don’t know what you mean by that, sister.”
Bobbi didn’t budge. “Yeah, you do. And I know, I gave her to you in trade, I’m not trying to take her back.”
He seemed to stiffen somewhat. “A long time to come back and check in.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Bobbi tried to play it casual, deciding to try and get a further read on him. “Been pretty busy, you know? A lot of shit gone down since last we met, Lionel.”
“When last we met…“He scowled at Bobbi. The cruelty she remembered resurfaced. “When last we met, you left Babylon here.” The patois emerged, or at least a trace of it. “You left me with the duppy girl.”
She and Violet glanced at each other.
“I don’t know what you mean by that, Lionel,” Bobbi said. “Don’t know what a ‘duppy’ is, you know?”
“Obeah!” His voice cracked like a whip, and Bobbi tensed herself as if to prepare for a blow. “The man you came with that night, he brought a duppy girl.” Lionel’s eyes widened as he bent toward them, his hands clenching the corners of the laboratory table. “Babylon, evil spirits, the dead come walking. You and your government man.”
“Yeah.” Bobbi didn’t like the turn the conversation took. “But she wasn’t any threat to you, Lionel. She was dead, and her brain was dissolving – you told us that.”
He stared at Bobbi. “Nothing is so simple as it appears, sister. Perhaps it’s time you make your exit.”
Bobbi didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Listen, Lionel. I was just in town, heard you surfaced after all these years. I wanted to come see you, but you obviously got something going on yourself. Why don’t you tell me what’s up, and we’ll go from there?”
Lionel frowned. “Your man was government, and a rogue agent. He brought a curse down on me with that duppy girl – obeah, sister. Evil magic, evil spirits. Or as close to such that technology can bring on.” He shivered, snowy dreads slithering down his back. “No. Maybe more than that.”
“Black magic?” Violet grunted, playing her part alongside Bobbi. “Come on.”
“Ay!” He stabbed an angry finger at Violet, eyes flashing. The old patois cracked from his tongue like a whip. “You hear m’seh dat? Don’t you know watagwaan, sistren?”
“Hey, hey!” Bobbi lifted her hands slowly, surprised both at the suddenness and sharpness of his bark. “It’s all right, man, we’re not here to give you shit. We just don’t understand, that’s all. I mean sure, Tom was a loose Fed, but that doesn’t mean he was into anything hinkey. That girl was one of three he was chasing down. They’d gone nuts, he’d ended up having to shoot one of them. The one we gave you for analysis was dead when we found her.” She spread her hands, signifying ignorance. “I mean what you showed us was bad enough, sure, but he wasn’t on the run because he’d done anything wrong. See, they thought he was covering up for whoever made these girls, and that wasn’t the case.”
“And what be the case, then, sister?” Lionel folded his arms over his chest.
Though she could not see them, Bobbi’s experience and imagination—long having merged into a very special kind of paranoia, though she would argue against that definition—conjured the shadows of hidden defenses, turrets or gun-drones waiting in the shadows to try and kill Violet and her. Or maybe the table, with its manipulators tipped with scalpels and saws.
“Well,” Bobbi began, “They were Wonderland-made. Question is, for who.”
Lionel’s eyes tracked hers, implacable and piercing.
Time to advance things a little bit. She blew out a gush of breath. “All right… We figured out later that it was a corp that had these girls made, for reasons we don’t know.”
His lips pursed. “Which company was this?”
Bobbi and Violet shared a look.
“Genefex,” Bobbi said. “Genefex made them. Turns out, they’re behind a lot of stuff overseas. Most of Wonderland, in fact, through one way or another.” She pursed her lips, affecting a look of mingled discomfort and contrition, as if she gave away the secret under sheer duress. Not that Lionel Knightley would ever be able to move her with his eyes, not when she had looked into those of monsters. “Look, Lionel. What is this all about?”
“Obeah,” he muttered to himself, and paced back and forth. He made two angry passes before he stopped and faced the two women, stabbing his finger in the air at them once more. “Do you swear that you didn’t know what it was you brought in?”
That was easy. “I swear, Lionel. We had no idea. We knew she was something crazy as hell, but we couldn’t begin to guess she was some kind of corporate prototype.” Bobbi wondered for a fleeting moment if having that knowledge earlier in their quest would have kept them from going further. But how would they have gotten it otherwise? The great white spider had snared them both in her web long before they ever had the ghost of a chance.
Lionel stared at Bobbi again, and his eyes slid out of focus. “Very well. I choose to believe you for the moment, sister. You say Genefex made this girl – that would explain many things. Why the company bought up most of the black clinics in the Verge, for one.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Bobbi said.
“Maybe ‘buying up’ is too strong a word.” Lionel shrugged. “But put them on the payroll, definitely. Save for a couple, like Chin. That’s why he died. Genefex has been very aggressive in making sure they know who’s getting work done in this city.”
Bobbi frowned slightly. “I had that checked out, though. Chin had a car accident, mechanical failure. Whole batch of the ‘eighty-two Sorondas had to be recalled because of seizing steering modules.” Toyota had lost billions on the whole deal, she’d read in the Berne Weekly. Whole big boondoggle.
“Maybe.” Lionel frowned. “Maybe it’s just coincidence, but they came to me, too. Suggested I sign on with them, was polite when I said no.” He gave her a meaningful look. “Too polite. After that, two of my staff ended up on a slab due to ‘accidents.’”
Whether or not Lionel was right about Chin, Bobbi found herself thrilled she had wiped the surgical records for her, Violet and Scalli from the system after he had died. They were under false names, but they could have been back built in a number of ways. “All right. I got you. So you sold instead and took off for a bit.”
Lionel frowned. “I did.”
“Sure, you right about that,” Violet scoffed. “So what made you come back here? To Tenleytown?”
“Genefex does not have a hold here.” Lionel smiled. “And a doctor is a very welcome thing. Now, sister, I have told you all that I have to tell you. If you don’t have business otherwise, I have patients that I must see.”
Bobbi drew in a breath to reply, but Shaper’s voice crackled in her ear, and he didn’t sound happy.
Her back straightened. “Excuse me.” She gestured to her ear. She took a step back before she murmured into the subvocal pickup.
Frost crept down her spine.
Bobbi let out a long breath. Mark Tanaka and Wilson Syme had been corporate soldiers in the past. Well trained, well-armed.
Bobbi hesitated.
Lionel and Violet both looked at her with interest.
“All right, Lionel,” Bobbi said. “But we’ll be back, okay? To be continued.”
Lionel nodded – and with that, Bobbi walked out of the laboratory with Violet in tow, the two women already muttering to each other over the link.
A gnawing pit of doubt had opened up, hungry and snapping. They reached the end of the hall and stepped into the airlock. The drawer in the wall opened, revealing their needlers.
Bobbi had already checked her own weapon, feeling its lightness, and knew the cause. The fat block of alloy that served as the needler’s magazine was gone. “Vi? Vi, where does Shaper say they’ve gone?”
She didn’t get the chance to reply. The clinic doors hissed open, revealing a pair of men in the angled gray drapes of bulletproof dusters and wearing the cyclops-bands of combat visors. Both held small automatic pistols. She recognized them.
“All right,” Mark Tanaka said, his mouth twisted into a hard, thin smile. “Let’s drop ‘em and go back inside, you two. Don’t make me ask twice.”
hen they left Cuidad del Carmen, Walken sat in the co-pilot’s seat of the stealth plane –named the Agincourt, he had learned, hence its nickname – fully invested in the cause, cleared by Stadil’s ghost, and thus considered trustworthy by its pilot. Jacinto seemed pleased to see Walken when he emerged from his conversation with the disembodied intelligence, as if they had been old friends newly reunited. They were on their way to Seattle, and Walken had little time to process the revelations that had been made over the last few hours.
The Yathi had been disrupted enough to slow them down over the last few years, but not enough to stop them. It would never be enough to stop them. Stadil had told him about another warrior-cyborg and her force of Yathi converts, his first experiment in fomenting anti-Yathi action, and how this Redeye woman had died in vain trying to destroy the colonial matrix. The matrix hadn’t even been there, just some long-mothballed clonal program from when the Yathi tried to regenerate their original bodies. Stadil said he had not expected Bobbi to start her own resistance group based on her experiences at the time, but Walken didn’t believe that for a moment. Stadil wanted to bring down this whole thing, sure, but it did not strike Walken that he had any true interest in the lives of his chosen pawns.
At least this time, he knew where he stood.
“I bet you’re interested to learn how Seattle’s changed since you’ve been there last,” Jacinto’s voice sang in his ear – instead of a helmet, Walken wore a button commset in his ear. “Not too much, really, except they launched this big effort to reclaim the Old City with the feral population down so low. Bobbi and her people, they cleaned out a large number of the most dangerous ones, and the rest either continued to spread out to the fringes or civilized and ended up in Tenleytown.”
“Tenleytown.” Walken knew that place, of course. “That is where we’re going, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Doc Knightley’s there, he’ll help you figure out what you’re capable of.” Lead-colored clouds swirled past the plane as they journeyed over the southwest states, the dawn still abated as they continued to cross time zones. “We don’t have access to anything else like he has, or at least not anymore.”
“What happened to your equipment?”
“Stayed with Bobbi when we split,” Jacinto said. “See, I was with the other camp.”
Walken looked down at Jacinto’s head. The narrow cockpit consisted of little more than an aisle running next to the two seats, surrounded by the instrumentation of each station and the plane’s tinted, armored canopy. “Why did you leave? She couldn’t have been a bad leader.”
Jacinto shrugged. “I know the story that Scalli gave us, that she stopped being fully for humanity. Spent too much time tending to the Reclaimed – that’s what she called the people who supposedly came back from possession – and they were just crazy as hell. I don’t see why he would think anything else, considering. Just too damned unpredictable, too damned powerful. Mix that up together and you get a lot of problems. We decided to go with him when we split, because we knew who he was really for.”
Walken did not respond, instead staring at the back of Jacinto’s helmet. Its matte black surface swam with vague patches of light from his station’s instruments. The faint urge to put his fist through it rose, shuddered, and sank back beneath the ice within him. “And how do you feel now that you know everything?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Another shrug from the pilot, and he busied himself with scrolling through holographic status windows that sprang up around him. “I mean…I understand why Scalli thought what he did. She was insisting that we rely heavily on the Reclaimed and keep from doing anything out in public, but that was kind of what we were, you know? We were soldiers, fighters. A lot of us were former PMC troops, especially the ones who were drawn to Scalli. He came from corporate security, you know, but he understood us. The whole thing felt jus
t…I dunno. Like it was destined to happen, when I look back.”
That did not impress Walken in the slightest. “Given the two major powers with whom we are working, perhaps that might be a bit unrealistic. More likely it was planned.”
Jacinto’s blistered helmet looked like a misshapen egg as he turned toward Walken. “Do you really think that’s possible?”
“Certainly more likely than destiny,” Walken said. “The most likely case is that someone within the organization, or who was at some point, fomented this opinion.”
“I thought that too.” Jacinto’s head bobbed before turning back to the instruments.” We even talked to Scalli about it. He just didn’t think it was possible, though. So they split, and we fought on for another year and a half. And well…you know the rest.”
Walken nodded. “I do.” He watched the clouds for a little longer, curiously at ease with all that he had agreed to do. Finally, he looked back to Jacinto. “So how does Strikeboy fit into all of this?”
“He really doesn’t.” Jacinto’s gloved hands danced through holographic panels, calling up sensor data. “He provides me with network support and all. He’s pretty decent as a hack artist and electronics crew, but I keep him as ignorant as I can. I love him, you know? Why would I put him in the way of things? Plus, I mean…if I go, he’s got a whole life ahead of him.”
“I doubt that he would agree.”
The pilot’s voice took a hard edge. “Maybe not, but in this case, what he doesn’t know won’t kill him. Or at least lessens the chances. You’re not intending to say anything to him, are you?”
Walken approximated a snort. “I intend to play my role. There’s no point in complicating that by dragging people further into this than they need to be.”
“Man…” Jacinto shuddered. “That voice. How do you get used to it?”
“You mean, having a voice that sounds like mine did, yet has no emotional inflection? It is…difficult to communicate with others like this.”
“I bet.” A low whistle came from inside the helmet. “‘Cause man, no offense, but you sound like a damn robot.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 15
