That wasn’t an option I had.
“Your guest has left the building,” said the Hendrix, jolting me out of my glazed retrospection.
“Thanks,” I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Can you lock the door, and block the elevators from this floor?”
“Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?”
“No.” I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. “Just don’t let them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours.”
Abruptly it was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.
I made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.
And sleep dragged me under.
Chapter Seven
There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a blood-red sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic towards the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.
Innenininennininennin …
I know this place.
I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.
Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.
“Leila Begin,” he says, and nods back to where I have come from. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.”
“I will,” I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.
“Going to turn and fight?” he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.
“With what?” I say, opening my empty hands.
“Should have armed yourself, pal. Big time.”
“Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.”
Jimmy de Soto snorts derisively. “Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.”
“You can’t know that,” I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. “You died years before that happened.”
“Oh, come on, who really dies these days?”
“Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.”
“What’s a Catholic?”
“Tell you later. You got any cigarettes?”
“Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?”
I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course …
I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.
“Lucky one,” says Jimmy de Soto judicially. “They missed the socket.”
He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead d.h.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disc with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.
“I’ve got to do something about this,” I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.
“Smell that?” Jimmy asks, lifting his own face to the chilly air around us. “They’re changing it.”
“What?” But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Hendrix, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odour I fell asleep to only …
“Got to go,” says Jimmy, and I’m about to ask him where when I realise he means me and I’m—
Awake.
My eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waif-like figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. I frowned and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on my forearm. No blood. With the realisation, I came fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of incense that had originally nudged me towards consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Hendrix’s olfactory wake-up call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarised glass of the window.
“You have a visitor,” said the voice of the Hendrix briskly.
“What time is it?” I croaked. The back of my throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.
“Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes.”
“And my visitor?”
“Oumou Prescott,” said the hotel. “Do you require breakfast?”
I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well-cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Prescott up.”
By the time the door chimed at me, I was out of the shower and padding around in an iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. I collected my breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while I opened the door.
Oumou Prescott was a tall, impressive-looking African woman, topping my sleeve by a couple of centimetres, her hair braided back with dozens of oval glass beads in seven or eight of my favourite colours and her cheekbones lined with some sort of abstract tattooing. She stood on the threshold in a pale grey suit and a long black coat turned up at the collar, and looked at me doubtfully.