"And here he is," Kelis said. "Did you predict that?"
But she must have, because the moment Ash's people came, the shooting began. Ash had sent everything he had: ground troops, jeeps and three helicopters, hovering over the battle like angry hornets. The noise was deafening. I took one second to think that, of course, this explained why Ash's people hadn't followed me and Kelis. They'd had bigger things to worry about.
Then it was all about surviving. I dived to the left. A moment later I felt the heavy impact as Kelis' body landed on mine, squeezing the breath out of me. A rib might have cracked, the sharp pain of it like a knife in my side. I felt a stab of anger along with the physical pain. Then some other strong feeling I couldn't identify as I realised that she was shielding me with her body. Shards of concrete spat at us and fragments of metal that took lumps of skin with them. I knew we'd die if we stayed there.
It should have been one-sided, a massacre. This was Ash's town and he held all the cards. Except every soldier he'd sent here was a man - his weakest force. He didn't want to risk the women, I realised, not now he thought these might be the only children he had.
Machine guns blazed from the sides of the helicopters, cutting through the ranks of Queen M's soldiers. I saw a spray of bullets catch one woman in the centre of her chest, just below her breasts. It left a jagged tear, the shape of her still beating heart visible in the centre of it. Her legs folded, her mouth still screaming in fear and pain even as her eyes glazed over. Then another of Queen M's people lifted a rocket launcher to his shoulder and that was the end of the helicopter; a molten mess of metal, shrapnel and, somewhere in there, scraps of flesh and shards of bone. I'd lost track of Queen M long ago, but I knew where she'd be, somewhere at the back of it all. Like Ash, she was happy to let other people do the dying for her.
Kelis' body was still a dead weight on top of me. I felt her shudder and I knew something had hit her. "Are you OK?" I asked.
She levered herself off me and I knew she couldn't be too badly hurt. "We've got to get out of here!" I shouted. She nodded, kneeling above me. I drew myself up to my knees too and tried to see any way clear of it all.
"Back through the hospital," Kelis said. She was right. Some of Queen M's men had taken shelter there, but the odds were still better than for any other route out. She leapt to her feet and I followed, shooting behind as she shot ahead, a move so fluent it was almost rehearsed.
I don't know if I hit anyone. People were dropping all around, the bullets were coming from everywhere. These were deaths I didn't have to own. Ten paces and we were at the hospital door. Kelis shot the two men before I could even train my gun, neat holes in the centre of their chests.
Then we were past them and into the lobby, and there was Haru, on his hands and knees, dragging himself away from the battle an inch at a time. A dark trail of blood flowed behind him and I could see that the bandage had come loose from around his waist. I could see what it had been covering now, the thick black thread that held shut the void at his centre - a horrible, ironic echo of the pubic hair which had once been there. His head swung round to watch as we approached him, looking like it was too heavy on his neck.
"That boy whose photo you showed me," I said. "Was he even really your son?"
"Yeah." His voice was a rough rasp. His hair hung over his eyes, limp and soggy with sweat, face whiter than I'd ever seen it. "I didn't lie to you about that."
"And he's really crippled?"
"Please," he said. "You have to help me. She'll kill me if she finds me. I'm no use to her now."
"Yeah, it's a real great lady you've chosen to give your loyalty to," Kelis said.
He laughed but it turned into a cough and then a choked scream of pain. "You gave her your loyalty too, once. You're the traitor - I never changed."
"And your son?" I asked. "The one she made you leave behind."
"Fifteen years I took care of him," he said. His voice was fading but he kept on crawling forward, one painful inch at a time. "When she took me away I woke up that first morning and I suddenly realised that I had no one to take care of. I didn't have to feed him, or listen to him, or wipe his arse. Why would I want to go back to him, when for the first time in my life I was free?" He coughed again and this time I could see the blood oozing out of him, a dark spurt of it that was more black than red, something floating in it that looked essential. A part of him he couldn't afford to lose.
I didn't look at his face as I pressed the gun against his temple and I closed my eyes when I pulled the trigger. Kindness? Anger? I don't know, but there was no question in my mind then that I had to kill him. Kelis watched me and not him as he died. Inside my head, I felt something click into place, but I wasn't quite sure what. I took a moment to look down at Haru's empty eyes, then we both stepped over his body, and walked out through the rear of the hospital, bloody footprints glistening darkly in the moonlight behind us.
"We have to find Ashok," I told Kelis, the sound of the fighting just a muted roar behind us now. She nodded, though there was no real reason why she should follow me. Or there was only one reason, and it wasn't one I wanted to acknowledge because it wouldn't be right to use her feelings that way.
But that didn't mean I wasn't going to.
We walked two streets before we found a working vehicle. It was a big ugly SUV with two child seats in the back, absurdly suburban. Kelis drove this time, retracing our route, back to the centre of it all. Occasionally a vehicle would roar past, travelling in the opposite direction, reinforcements for the fight. At first I saw men sitting in them, rifles and revolvers clutched nervously in their laps. Then as we got nearer to the Luxor, the cars were filled with women and I realised that Queen M must be winning, somewhere back behind us, because Ash was starting to risk his most precious resources.
Did I want Queen M to win? Maybe. There was no question she was the lesser of two evils. But I didn't think that Ash would stay to face the music if her forces got the upper hand. There was no doubt an escape route already planned, another city he could flee to and start this all over again. I had to find him first.
The further we drove, the more dream-like it became. I felt detached from it, from the bodies I saw lying in the street here and there, outliers for a conflict whose main body of data lay behind us, out of sight. I wondered for a second why I was thinking in this clean, clinical way, but the thought and the worry drifted away into nothing, as insubstantial as the world around me. The lights of the Strip blazed into the night sky ahead of us, near now, and I knew I should have been feeling... something.
I don't need feelings now, they'll just get in the way, I told myself, but the voice I was speaking in didn't seem to be my own. For a brief, horrible moment, a spike of emotion broke through the calm. I knew, in that second, that I was losing something of myself, as crucial as the part of Haru he'd left behind on the operating people. As vital as the gore he'd coughed up onto the hospital floor in the moments before he'd died. I thought some people might have called it my soul, but I didn't believe in that kind of thing.
"Kelis," I said, and I could hear that my voice was raw with fear and desperation.
Her head snapped round to look at me, fearful and then puzzled as she saw that I was fine and that there was no immediate danger in sight. "What?" she asked.
"Kill me," I said, forcing the words out through a throat that tightened against them. "Kill me now before I turn into him."
Her eyes were wide and shocked. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm..." I said. "I'm..." But the words wouldn't come out. Something stronger than my will was holding them inside me.
Inside my head, one part of me clawed at another, desperate for purchase, but the new certainty within me was smooth, hard and impregnable, and everything else just slipped quietly away. The panic went with it and I didn't remember any longer why I'd been fighting this so hard.
Never mind. It was over now.
I glanced sideways and saw that Kelis was st
aring at me, the worry plain on her normally calm face. I wondered what my own had been showing, in those few brief moments of struggle. "Are you OK?" she asked.
"Yeah," I told her. "I'm good. I'm better than I've ever been."
Ash's people were there, massed in front of the Luxor when we drew up in the SUV. The last line of defence. I smiled when I saw them, because they meant that Ash was still inside. Kelis raised her hands, semi-automatic in one, hunting rifle in the other, but she was looking at me and I shook my head. The odds were hopeless and there was a better way.
"Tell Ash I'm back," I shouted at them. "He'll want you to let me in."
"What are you doing?" Kelis hissed at me. "Do you want him to know you're here?"
"He already knows," I told her. "And he'll let me in. He has to. I've got something he wants more than anything else in this city - anything else in the world."
I could see the doubt in her eyes. There was a moment of poised stillness. Kelis and her guns. The ranks of women in front of us; two lives in one, both at risk if a gunfight started. The new me, the Cured version, didn't care about that. Those half-breeds were meaningless and the bodies housing them expendable. But a fire fight could kill me too and that certainly wouldn't do. It was very important that I get in to see Ash, though I wasn't quite sure why. The Voice only let me know as much as I needed to, and that was fine. It was just fine. It was so much easier to let something else do the thinking. I didn't know why I'd resisted this for so long.
A ripple started in the crowd, and suddenly a path cleared through the centre of Ash's army. "Go in," one of them said. "He's waiting for you."
Kelis hesitated but I didn't give her time to pull back. The women stared at me as I walked between them and I could read the distrust and maybe fear in their faces. They knew what I meant for the children inside them, they'd figured it out, but no one wanted to be the one to make the first move. Just one spark, which was all it would take, to set this situation on fire.
I walked with complete confidence. The only way to survive this was to show them no weakness. Hundreds of eyes glared at me as I passed. I felt the physical weight of their regard, but I didn't bend under it. And then I was through, Kelis just one step behind me, and we walked past the cheap plastic statues of the long-dead rulers from another land, and into the heart of the casino.
The lift doors opened directly into the penthouse, the metal grate clinking aside to admit us. He was waiting for us, ten paces away, silhouette framed by the moonlight outside the big picture windows. There were only two women with him, big, black and heavily armed. I laid my hand over Kelis' before she could reach for her gun. Brute force wasn't going to get us anywhere here.
"You came back," he said. "Changed your mind?"
I nodded. "My mind has changed, yes."
His eyes widened, then narrowed, as he understood the full meaning of what I'd said. "You surrendered at last?"
"Yes," the Voice said through my mouth, "she's mine now."
And I felt Kelis' arm stiffen under mine as she understood my meaning too.
"Why should I believe you?" he asked. He took a step back, the two women flanking him. I thought maybe that he did believe me, and that it was this which was alarming him. I was supposed to be his tool, not his rival. His mouth opened and I knew that it was to give the order to kill us both.
Kelis spoke before he could. "Jasmine." Her voice was shaky, her eyes a little wild. I looked back at her, and whatever she saw in mine must have triggered something in her because she snatched her arm from my hand and stumbled back a few steps.
My attention seemed broader now, able to absorb every last detail of the situation in one glance. Ash twitched, his gaze switching restlessly between me and Kelis. The two women's guns faltered, shifting their aim from me to her, sensing a more immediate threat in Kelis' sudden panic.
"Jasmine doesn't live here any more," I told her. Then, in the second before she could react, I pulled my own gun from its holster and shot her in the gut. She let out a choked gasp, a sound of betrayal more than shock.
The instant I'd shot her I turned my gun on the other threats. One bullet through the throat, another through the heart and both women were falling to the floor. A fierce spray of arterial blood pumped from the neck I'd put a bullet through. A gush of it hit Ashok's cheeks, a dark stain in the dim light of the room. He gagged, bent over, and I knew that some of it must have spurted into his throat.
When he straightened, it was to see the barrel of my Magnum pointed at his heart. For weeks the grip had felt uncomfortable in my hand, the shape somehow wrong, but now it felt as if it belonged there. "Just you and me now," I told him.
He nodded but said nothing. Behind me I could hear Kelis groaning. Without looking, I kicked my foot back, spinning her fallen weapon out of reach. Her hand reached out to grasp weakly at my ankle, her skin pressed against mine. Warm and still alive. In that moment of contact I felt... something. A spark of some feeling I couldn't identify hissed up the nerves of my leg and into my skull. It illuminated something there I hadn't been able to see - a part of me I'd forgotten existed.
I shook my head, trying to dislodge that uncomfortable spark and the unwelcome illumination it brought. I walked to the two fallen body guards and picked up their guns in my left hand, then shoved them into the waistband of my trousers. They were slick with gore and I wiped my hand against my t-shirt after I was done, leaving a perfect red palm print on the white cotton.
"I'm just as fast and just as strong as you now," I told Ash. "Don't even think about it."
"Why would I want to? We're the same now, you and me. We want the same things."
Did we? A half of me seemed to think so, but something else had shaken loose, blasted free by the shot I'd fired into Kelis. I felt a split inside me, a rift between two parts that had seemed like a whole. "I'm not your brood-mare," I told him, one thing at least that both halves agreed on. "I'm Cured too."
"I provide the seed, you provide the eggs - it's an equal contribution. And the end result will belong to both of us. They'll surpass us both."
My eyes drifted as my mind struggled with itself. I felt compelled to make these children, this new race. That feeling was so strong it seemed to seep into every part of me. But then I saw the bodies of the two guards, the women I'd killed, and I saw the rounded swell of their stomachs, the embryonic lives inside which I'd murdered at the same time. "You need to save the half-breeds too," I told Ash. My voice was thick as I said it. A part of me was resisting these words.
"It's too late," he told me. "The death of my wives will buy time for you and me to escape. We can find another city, gather new receptacles. They're finished - but we can start again."
"No. You can still save them."
"How?" There was interest in his voice. He took an involuntary step towards me until he saw my eyes narrow and stopped where he stood. He was almost close enough to touch now.
"Tell them to surrender. Give the signal. Queen M will spare them if they lay down their arms."
"Or she might just kill them all," he said.
I shook my head. "They're fit, and they're fighters, and they're pregnant. Believe me - she'll want them."
He stared at me for a long moment. My eyes didn't waver, though inside I felt as if my head was tearing itself apart.
Finally he nodded. Holding his hands carefully away from his body, he walked to the control bank at one end of the room, incongruously high-tech in the middle of all the faux old-world opulence.
"This is your leader speaking," he said. Distantly, I heard the words echo back, and I knew that he really was doing as I'd told him. "Lay down your arms, the fight's over. You've served me well, but now I'm asking you to switch your allegiance. Join the forces you're fighting, take your commands from your new queen. This is the last order I'll ever give you. You're hers now."
I couldn't be sure that the order would be obeyed. Or that if it was, Queen M would believe it. But I'd tried to save them - and one
half of me at least was glad of that.
I waited until he'd pressed the switch that ended the transmission before I stepped closer. My breath felt tight in my chest, my vision narrowed down to just his face, his eyes. My mind felt like an inferno, burning up.
"I guess that's all that I really need you to do," I told him.
I could tell in his face that he knew what I intended. He didn't look afraid, exactly. The Cure didn't allow fear. But he didn't want this to happen and he refused to believe that it would.
You know that thing they say - about being able to see yourself reflected in the pupils of someone's eyes? Bullshit. When you're standing that close to a man, all you can see in the centre of his eyes is darkness. But when I looked at him, I did see myself. An epileptic flash of memory on my retina, I saw myself back when I'd first met him. Jesus, how was it possible to ever be that young? And then an epileptic flash of the future, I looked at him and saw what I would become.
He smiled, a vivid flash of white in the brown of his face. And, despite everything, I smiled back. "Jasmine," he said. "How did this happen? How did you and I come to this?"
I raised the gun and pressed the muzzled hard into his cheek, the soft flesh yielding around it. I gave him the gun, because it was easier than the answer. "We did this to ourselves," I told him. "It's only right that we're the ones who pay the price."
"But our children," he said. "The new race. You need me."
He's right, the Voice said, somehow separate from me again, but louder than ever and almost impossible to ignore. There was another sound in the room, quieter but more profound, the sound of Kelis breathing. I fixed all my attention on that; each painful, rasping in-breath, every wet exhalation. In - one, out two. In three, out four. On the fifth in-breath I pulled the trigger.
The bullet passed through his cheek, leaving a ragged hole. I could see the ruined remnants of his tongue through it, flapping in a wordless scream against the roof of his mouth. It only lasted a second. He looked smaller when he lay on the floor, as if his body had already begun to decay and fall in on itself. A pool of blood spread around his head like a dark halo.
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