She shifted her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.
“Have an aperitif.”
The jaws of the tool plunged into the underside of my eye and a spurt of blood sprinkled Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.
She’d go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista and who knew how many others.
“That’s fucking enough,” I muttered in a slurred tone, and at the same moment, driving the muscles in my thighs to work, I locked my legs around Kawahara’s waist. My left hand slapped down flat on the sloping glass.
The muffled crump of an explosion, and a sharp cracking.
Dialled to the short end of its fuse option, the termite microgrenade was designed to detonate almost instantaneously and to deliver ninety per cent of its charge to the contact face. The remaining ten per cent still wrecked my hand, tearing the flesh from the Khumalo marrow alloy bones and carbon-reinforced tendons, ripping the polybond ligamenting apart and punching a coin-sized hole in my palm.
On the downward side, the window shattered like a thick plate of river ice. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I felt the surface cave in beside me and then I was sliding sideways into the gap. Vaguely, I registered the rush of cold air into the cabin. Above me, Kawahara’s face had gone stupid with shock as she realised what had happened, but she was too late. She came with me, flailing and smashing at my head and chest, but unable to break the lock I had on her waist. The pliers rose and fell, peeling a long strip of flesh from one cheekbone, plunging once into my wrecked eye, but by now the pain was far away, almost irrelevant, consumed entire by a bonfire of rage that had finally broken through what was left of the betathanatine.
Tell them: still angry.
Then the portion of glass we were struggling on gave way and tipped us out into the wind and sky.
And we fell …
My left arm was paralysed in position by some damage the explosion had done, but as we started to tumble down through the chilled darkness I brought my right hand around and cupped the other grenade against the base of Kawahara’s skull. I had a confused glimpse of the ocean far below, Head in the Clouds rocketing upwards away from us and an expression on Reileen Kawahara’s face that had left sanity as far behind as the airship. Something was screaming, but I no longer knew if the sound came from within or without. Perception was spiralling away from me in the shrill whistling of the air around us, and I could no longer find my way back to the little window of individual viewpoint. The fall was as seductive as sleep.
With what remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard enough to detonate.
My last thought was the hope that Davidson was watching his screen.
Chapter Forty-Two
The address was, ironically enough, down in Licktown. I left the autocab two blocks north and walked the rest of the way, unable to quite shake an eerie feeling of synthesis, as if the machinery of the cosmos were suddenly poking through the fabric of reality for me to see.
The apartment I was looking for formed part of a U-shaped block with a cracked and weed-grown concrete landing area in the centre. Amongst the array of sad-looking ground and flight vehicles, I spotted the microcopter immediately. Someone had given it a purple and red-trim paint job recently, and though it still listed wearily to one side on its pods there were shiny clusters of expensive-looking sensor equipment fitted to the nose and tail. I nodded to myself and went up a flight of external steps to the second floor of the block.
The door to number seventeen was opened by an eleven-year-old boy who stared at me with blank hostility.
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.”
“Yeah, well she ain’t here.”
I sighed and rubbed at the scar under my eye. “I think that’s probably not true. Her copter’s in the yard, you’re her son, Daryl, and she came off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there’s someone to see her about the Bancroft sleeve.”
“You the Sia?”
“No, I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for her.”
The boy stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word. From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to smoke.
Five minutes later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the market.
“You want to see me?” the synth voice asked unevenly. “What for?”
“I’m a private investigator working for Laurens Bancroft,” I said as gently as I could. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your duties at PsychaSec. May I come in?”
She made a small noise, one that made me think she’d probably tried to shut doors in men’s faces before without success.
“It won’t take long.”
She shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black entertainment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like an obscure machine-god’s idol, and the remaining furniture had been rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter’s paint job, it looked new.
Daryl had disappeared from view.
“Nice deck,” I said, going over to examine the machine’s raked display front. “When did you get it?”
“A while ago.” Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly in the centre of the room. Her face was waking up and now its expression hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. “What do you want to ask me?”
“May I sit down?”
She motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted to go through with this after all.
“Well?” She jerked her hand at me nervously. “What do you want to ask me? You wake me up after the night shift, you’d better have a good goddamn reason for this.”
“On Tuesday 14th August you went into the Bancroft family’s sleeving chamber and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something. I’d like to know what it was, Sheryl.”
The result was more dramatic than I would have imagined possible. Sheryl Bostock’s artificial features flinched violently and she recoiled as if I’d threatened her with a riot prod.
“That’s a part of my usual duties,” she cried shrilly. “I’m authorised to perform chemical input on the clones.”
It didn’t sound like her speaking. It sounded like something someone had told her to memorise.
“Was it synamorphesterone?” I asked quietly.
Cheap synths don’t blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by its owner.