“Radio guy might still be right.” Razor rolled his shoulders, unconcerned or feigning it. He rubbed his jaw. “Sometimes you smell the storms, you don’t get ’em.”
“How much of a trap are we walking into, here?” Mitch held the door for Bobbi while she turned back into the Jeep to get her cane. “Your leg okay?”
“It will heal. I wear nanosurgeons. Knitters. The wound is granulating already.”
Ain’t technology grand. And if she didn’t pick up a resistant infection, she probably wouldn’t even have a scar in three years. We should all live so long.
“Could be a trap,” Razor admitted, checking the hang of his gun. “Probably is. But I gotta check. Leesie done right by me for a long time now.”
“All right. You got a floor plan of this warehouse, Razor?”
The big man grinned like a shark and touched his forehead with a forefinger. “Got it right here.”
“That is not so helpful, Razorface.” Bobbi reached down, smoothing a trouser leg over her bandages.
“Also got it on my hip.” He pulled the little chromed device out of a jacket pocket and laid it on the fender of the Jeep. “Gonna go through these messages first.” He tugged the light pen out of its holder and tapped through the screens. “I got word back from some boys I think I can trust. They gonna meet us.”
“Here?”
“Nah. Nobody knows about this place but me an Leesie. S’why it might be safe. After. I tell ’em Constitution Plaza.”
“You wanna go back to Hartford after all?”
“Got to.” He tapped through more messages. “Can’t have my boys killing each other and everything else. You ain’t got to come—” The grin, which Mitch thought might have been forced, fell away.
“What?” Mitch was glad Bobbi had spoken, because he couldn’t bring himself to.
Several cars hissed by, painting the parking lot in edgy shadows. “Message from that doctor. ’Bout Maker,” Razorface answered, closing his eyes. “She gone into the hospital. She say she’s on her own now, won’t be in touch no more. Maybe for a while.” His voice was dead level.
Heedless of the danger, Mitch laid one hand on Razorface’s leather jacket. “What do you want to do?”
“Shit, man, ain’t nothing we can do.” He tapped the messages off and stowed the light pen, and didn’t knock Mitch’s hand away. Mitch felt the tremors in the big man’s arm through the stiff, cracked hide. “Fuck. Fuck.”
“I know, Razorface,” Bobbi said from the other side.
“Bitch, you don’t know shit.” She stepped back, as did Mitch, and for a moment the warlord almost seemed to swell—eyes gleaming, shoulders up like a prizefighter’s. He rounded on Bobbi like a shining Spanish bull on a matador, and she stopped him with one hand upraised.
The other still rested lightly on the head of her cane. “Razor,” she said in quiet warning. “I don’t like that word.”
Mitch took another step away, more than willing to let these two sort it out without interference. But after a drawn out moment of eye contact, Razorface was the one to look down. “Hell, it ain’t like she’s my momma,” he said to no one in particular, and lit up his HCD to show them how the warehouse was laid out.
“Casey will be here, or here,” Bobbi said, pulling her own light pen out and indicating a rooftop and a high window in the holographic display. “Rotate, please?”
Razorface spun the display while Bobbi chewed her lip. “Yes. From here, she has the street-level approaches. She may have as many as six ronin on the secondaries. I’m going to have to kill some people I know tonight, Razorface.”
“You sure she here?”
Bobbi put her hand back on Razor’s arm. “Razorface. If Alyse is alive, it’s because Barb had her followed. If she’s not alive, then Barb got the information out of her somehow that this is where she was supposed to meet you.”
Face hissed through steel teeth. “Yeah.” He looked up at the crumbling facades. “How we gonna take this?”
“Let me show you,” Bobbi answered, leaning forward.
Mitch stopped crawling and blew on his hands before he dusted them on crusted jeans. White chips like cake sprinkles scattered on the tar-paper roofing. He made sure his switchblade was still in his pocket, although he didn’t expect to use it, and glanced up to low clouds, fat with promise, rosy in the reflected light. The leading edge of the hurricane—which had shifted course directly into Long Island Sound, after all, and was expected to come barreling up the river like the furious breath of God—caught the city glow and lit the night much brighter than he wanted it.
“My kingdom for a rifle,” he muttered, keying the light amplification on his contact up a couple of notches. One eye only—he didn’t want to find himself blinded if somebody hit him in the eye with a spotlight.
But Bobbi had the only rifle, and Razorface was carrying his sawed-off shotgun slung between his shoulder blades, under his armored leather coat. At least I have my vest on, Mitch thought, tracing the outline of a trauma plate with his thumb. For luck. Not that it’ll do me a damned bit of good if she gets the drop on me the way she did Mashaya.
Ah, six or seven trained killers, three of us. That’s a fair fight by anyone’s standards, right? He slid his pistol out of the holster, safety pinching his thumb as he flicked it off, and rose on his knees to peer over the edge of the parapet wall.
And ducked back fast as if burned. A shadow moved on the next rooftop, and Mitch wasn’t fool enough to think that anyone he could see wouldn’t notice him. Especially given the class of people he was hunting.
I guess you’re a ronin now, Mitchy. If he lived long enough to need a job. That didn’t bear thinking about. Are you going to shoot that guy in cold blood?
His stomach went seasick and dark, and he thought hard about the breath he was taking. Murder. He hugged his windbreaker tight over the armored vest when the wind gusted and plucked at it, threatening to blow him backward along the roof.
“Well, yeah,” Mitch muttered. And slowly, delicately, slid his gaze and the muzzle of his pistol over the top of the parapet wall.
Wedging his broad shoulders through a manhole, Razorface heard the gunshot and nodded in satisfaction. Pistol shot. Probably Mitch. Hope that means he got a rifle now. He balanced on the rusted ladder and reached up, dragging the cover back into place. Bring the noise, bitch.
The storm sewer was dark and reeked of rats. Razor felt his descent, probing with the toe of a boot, until he dropped the last foot and found himself ankle-deep in cold rushing water. A pair of grenades, retrieved from the trunk of the Caddy before they’d abandoned it, clicked on his belt.
Hope that storm don’t break while I’m down here. It was still supposed to be hours away.
But you never knew. He reached up and slid a metal band behind his left ear and around his shaved-down head, adjusting the optic in front of his left eye. The sewer sprang into green-and-black outlines.
Razorface slipped forward, footsteps all but silenced in the gurgle of the stream. There were reasons why he’d told Leesie to meet him in this particular place if anything ever went bad. He knew his way around it pretty good.
And there was a way into the basement from the storm cellars.
He paused, listening, one hand on the rusted steel handle of the round-cornered door once he found it. There was no sound beyond. They know we here now anyway, after that shot.
Razorface pushed the handle down, felt resistance for a moment before the lock clicked back. He made a point to get down here and get it oiled a couple of times a year.
The door opened more quietly than it had any right to and he hesitated behind it, but the only sound he heard was the thunder of his own heart and breath. He eased his pistol out from under his jacket, zipped it up to the throat, and peered through the hinge side of the door. He would have expected the low-light optic on his left eye to reveal almost nothing in the darkness of the basement, but some light must have filtered in, because he saw the derelict b
oiler and the outline of a flight of steel stairs.
He stepped up over the high lip at the bottom and—betrayed only by the creak of leather—drifted like a lurking shadow into the basement. The floor creaked overhead, and he paused, cocking one ear. How dumb do they think I am?
Dumb enough to walk into a trap. And he couldn’t deny it, either.
The stairs would be harder to do without making a sound. He wondered if they would have the sense to cover the stairwells, or if Casey was arrogant enough to think she’d pick him off on the way into the building. He shouldn’t have come. One foot after another, he crept up the stairs on the wall side, where they might be stronger.
Leesie was dead already, probably dropped in the river wrapped in chain link with a cinder block tied to the wire. Everything he’d fought for in twenty hard years was gone, taken away with a pass of some faceless company’s hand. Somebody he owed was rotting in a hospital somewhere, and the burning in his chest just kept getting worse.
And Razorface felt the need to do something about it. Something long term, preferably. Permanent, if he could.
He had his hand on the doorknob when glass shattered on the other side of it, and then the gunfire started in earnest.
Outside, Mitch swore under his breath and brought his captured rifle around. He’d left the body of a Boston ronin, drilled once cleanly through the back of the neck, two roofs to the left, and was slowly advancing on the warehouse. A drop of rain spattered the back of his hand as he crab-crawled over the side of a redbrick tenement and dropped to the fire escape with enough noise to make him wince.
They’re not going to hear you over the gunfire. “Bobbi, where are you?” he whispered. Razorface had gone out of contact ten minutes before. Underground.
The wind picked up, smearing his hair across his face. Her light tones followed a moment later. “Breathing,” she said. “I got one.”
“Me, too,” he answered. “Any sign of Casey?”
“She might be inside. Or she might be not here.”
He paused in his descent on the lowest platform of the fire escape, where stairs gave way to a drop ladder. It was going to make a hell of a noise when he kicked it loose, and no mistake. “That would suck. I’m moving for the southern exposure.” And then the storm broke over him like a cascade.
Mitch ducked his head, clinging to the rifle, rainslick fingers of the other hand lacing through groaning metal of the scaffolding on which he stood. He shouted into the wind—“Bobbi!”—and didn’t know if she heard. The wind coiled around him like a snake, slick and humid and as strangely warm as the fist-sized drops of rain that slapped his face. Blinded, right hand knotted on the stock of the rifle, he raised the arm to shield his face.
He lost his contact in there somewhere, sluiced out of his eye by the torrent of water, and swore as darkness added itself to his problems. A streetlight sparked and shattered. You have got to get off this building or you’re not going to make it, Mitchy.
It was an act of will to unlace his fingers from the escape and turn his face back out to the storm. Huddling his back against the building, he unzipped the collar of his wind-breaker and shoved the rifle down his back. Not the best idea in the world. But he was at a loss for options.
He rezipped the jacket, hissed a quick little prayer, and kicked the ladder down before he went over the edge of the platform, feeling for the rungs in the tossing darkness. Hell of a storm, he thought. Knew I should have stayed in college. I could have been a pharmacist.
The rusted metal sliced his hands, blood slicker than water as he fought his way down. That rust, he half thought, was the only thing keeping his hands on the ladder. If the rungs had been smooth, the gust that blew his feet sideways and fetched his hip up against brick would have sent his body tumbling into the alley. He screamed into the wind, or anyway tasted rain, and hauled himself back up against the ladder, shaking.
It was only fifteen feet down to the ground.
He dropped the last five in a lull between gusts and landed crouching.
And this is only the edge of the storm.
Razorface almost jumped back from the door when bullets spattered the far side, but they didn’t pierce the wood. He touched his ear clip. “Killer?”
“I’m in the building. Michael is outside.”
“Leesie there?”
“Razorface.” Her tone told him everything he needed to know.
“Right. You get out on your own?”
“Storm broke. You can’t get out through the sewer.”
“Fuck. Can you blow enough shit up so I can get through this door?”
“Yes, I can. No sign of Casey. I don’t think she’s here. On three, Mister Razorface.”
He changed his pistol for the shotgun while she counted in his ear, and on three he reared back and landed one boot hard on the lock plate of the door. It burst open, ricocheted off the wall, and slammed shut behind him as he stalked into the room. He raised the shotgun and discharged it into the face of a ronin who spun to meet him a half second too late. The body flopped forward instead of back, already dead when Bobbi put a safety shot into it from her perch just beneath the shattered skylight. He saw her silhouetted against the greenlit sky, rain sheeting down around her as she swung slowly through it. She spun and swayed on something that looked like a chain trapeze, and while Razorface watched she laid a careful burst into the chest and face of one man who ducked around a corner to snap a shot at her.
“You a beautiful lady, killer,” he said, spinning on the ball of his foot and surveying the room briefly through his optic. He counted four corpses, including the one he’d made.
“Go for it, Razorface,” she answered in his ear. “I think that’s all of them. And I’ll cover you until you’re out.”
But he couldn’t leave. Not until he searched the echoing, empty building and proved to himself that no one else—living or dead—was there. By the time he finished, Bobbi had made it to ground level and Mitch was inside, dripping water like a half-drowned terrier.
“Fuck it,” Mitch said, laying a hand on his arm again. Again, he let it ride. “Razorface, let’s go home and clean house, all right?”
Physics is like sex. Of course it can give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.—
Richard Feynman
11:00 P.M., Saturday 16 September, 2062
Bloor Street West
Toronto, Ontario
Leah grabbed her dad by the elbow when he came out of Genie’s bedroom, stretching his hands up idly and pressing his fingertips against the ceiling. “Dad.”
“What, sweetie?”
“Are you going out tonight?”
A hot tide flooded his cheeks. “I had plans for later.”
Leah let go of his sleeve and rolled her eyes. “Dad. You know Elspeth can come here, don’t you? God, you act like you have something to be ashamed of.”
“Ah.” He chewed air for a moment, and at last he chuckled. “You’ve been spending too much time with Jenny. But all right. I’ll let her know she’s welcome. Is that all this is about?”
She looked up at him through her lashes, chewing on her lower lip, stubborn jaw thrust out. So like her mother he couldn’t look her in the eye, and he couldn’t look away. “I need you to meet somebody. In VR.”
Later, in the darkness of her new and still sparsely furnished apartment, Elspeth curled into the crook of his arm and let her tangled hair fall across his shoulder and neck. She lay against his body relaxed as a kitten, softness and warmth and skin like satin, and he sighed.
“You’re thinking about Jenny.”
“Among other things.”
She traced a circle in his chest hair with one fingertip. Below the open window, cars drifted past. Shouts and laughter rose up like a song from the street, a helicopter’s rotors providing distant rhythm. “She might survive.”
“Yeah.” He turned to her, folding her in his arms. The room was full of the saltwater smell of lovemaking. “Leah wants yo
u to know you’re welcome to come spend the night at our place.”
She laughed low in her throat. “She does, does she? That’s sweet of her.” Her fingertip stroked the hollow of his throat, the same small pattern over and over again. He blinked as he recognized it as the first letter of his name.
He burrowed between the pillow and her ear, lips moving almost soundlessly against her skin. She reached out and flipped the radio on, and he muffled his face with the blankets, rustling the cloth. “I spoke with your friend Richard today.” And felt her body tense against his.
Her hand traced another letter on his skin. O—?
Clever. “He’s befriended my daughter, it seems. And he’s pretty sure Valens is on to him.”
w-h-a-t-w-a-n-t-?
“He wants …” He took a breath. “He’s hopeful that the worm he got into the intranet will manage to clone his personality there. There’s holofiber run and an intranet connection to the monitors on Jenny’s life support. So Valens can keep an eye on her from his desk, sneaky bastard. Assuming she lives, Richard has a plan …”
In darkness, she listened, nodding, and every so often writing words on his skin.
“Gabe,” she murmured when he was done. “I’m not going to get in between you and Jenny.”
He laughed, wondering if she spoke for the benefit of the monitors. Yes, and no. “Jenny does that just fine by herself. Are you going to hold me at arm’s length because of her?”
He felt rather than saw her shake her head. “No,” she said. “I’m going to hold you at arm’s length because that’s where I’m comfortable keeping you. Oh, dammit.”
“Dammit?”
She sat up, fumbled with the light, and stood. It cast strange shadows across her body as the covers slipped away. He admired the play of the light on her skin. “Dammit,” she said, gliding across the hardwood floor to the bathroom. “I forgot to take my meds.” Water ran; she emerged in a moment, carrying a glass.
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