She dropped the detonator; I dropped the auto-injector; we both went for our guns. We both tried to stop time again, too, and in the slow-motion world that resulted, the shots we fired were actually visible. The bad Jane’s NC gun spat thick jagged bolts the color of arterial blood; my own gun sprayed wispy white lines of narcolepsy. None of the shots connected, and after dodging back and forth for a moment, we both rolled for cover.
Crouched behind the polished bulk of a silver Mercedes, I listened to the stumbling of the parking valets until I had a clear picture of where they all were. Then I thumbed the dial on my NC gun to MI and popped up firing. I’d killed three of them and was about to shoot the fourth when I heard the beep of a Mandrill bomb being activated, and the soft swoosh as the bad Jane lobbed it overhand in my direction. I put a hand on the roof of the Mercedes and flipped myself up into the air. My foot connected with the incoming bomb and kicked it back the way it had come, with a slight course correction; it smacked into the chest of the last valet and detonated.
The blast, much more powerful than the previous one, broke the windows on most of the cars in the garage; as I dropped back to the ground I had to cover my head against a shower of safety glass. By the time the rain stopped the bad Jane had gotten back in her sports car and was revving the engine for a getaway. As she reversed out of her parking slot, I jumped up again, using the hood of the Mercedes as a springboard to launch myself through the air. I landed on the roof of the sports car even as the bad Jane was shifting into forward gear; when she hit the gas, I reached down through the broken front window and gave the steering wheel a hard yank. I rolled clear as the car swerved into a concrete pylon.
The crash killed the sports car’s engine. The bad Jane fought free of the deflating air bag and crawled out over the crumpled hood. Back on my feet, I tried to draw a bead on her, but then another Mandrill bomb came skittering across the garage floor, its countdown timer reading 0:01.
I closed my eyes and teleported behind another concrete pylon. The bomb detonated, shattering more glass. An alarm began to wail—and beneath that, I heard the bad Jane’s footsteps receding, and the sound of a stairwell door.
The stairs led back up to the casino level. By the time I got there, the bad Jane was out of sight. As I stood searching for some sign of which way she’d gone, a security guard approached me. I recognized him as the same guard who’d eyeballed me when I’d first entered the building, and I hesitated, not sure whether he was a Troop member, a Scary Clown, or a civilian.
A second security guard tackled me from behind. He locked an arm over my windpipe and tried to shove me up against the wall, but he was no bad Jane: I melted out from under his chokehold, reappeared behind him, and gave him a double shot of narcolepsy to the back of the head. Then I turned to deal with the first guard, but he’d already been knocked senseless by a burst of sound from a brass-belled Clown horn.
“Hello again, Jane,” Robert Love said. “Enjoying the rush?”
“Yes, actually…But you could have told me in advance.”
“What, and spoil the surprise? That wouldn’t be very tricky.” He giggled, but then his grin turned to a grimace. “Ouch!”
“Love?”
I was worried he’d been shot, but he didn’t fall down. He stretched out his arm, opening and closing his fist. “Must’ve pulled a muscle climbing out of the elevator…No matter. Listen: I’ve got Clowns on X-drugs guarding all the primary exits, but that will only delay her. You need to hunt her down before she finds another way out.”
“Right…” I stared at the casino floor, focusing on the individual fibers that made up the carpet. Out of the thousands of random impressions left by passing gamblers, a fresh set of footprints appeared, as visible to me as tracks in grass. “Got her.”
I sprinted away at superhuman speed. The bad Jane’s trail led out under the pyramid atrium, where another pair of security guards tried to get in my way. I’d just finished taking them down when I heard a horn blast off in the distance. I ran towards it, and the bad Jane came darting right in front of me, her hair more than just mussed, now—she looked like she’d been through a tumble dryer. She saw me and tried to snap off a shot, but the barrel of her NC gun had cracked, rendering it as harmless as the toy it appeared to be. A look of real fear came into her eyes then, and she took off in a blur.
I stayed right on her heels. I could sense that she was almost out of power, in need of another dose, but between the Mandrill bomb explosions and the horn blast, any X-drug vials she was carrying would have shattered by now. All I had to do was keep pressing her until she was completely tapped out.
I chased her into a corner of the atrium, where she broke through another stairwell door. The stairs went up, the flights staggered to follow the incline of the pyramid. The geometry of it made me dizzy, so I forced myself not to look up the central well and just concentrated on running. By the time I passed the fifth landing, it was more like flying.
We flew up and up, all the way to the top—I nearly caught her at the three-quarter mark, but she put on a final burst of speed and pulled away again. Then I was at the top landing, in front of a door that radiated heat. The door was unmarked, but if you were going to make a sign for it, the symbol off the organization coin would have been a good choice.
I nudged the door open and stepped into the eye of the pyramid. It was like stepping into the sun: the Luxor’s searchlight was the size of a swimming pool, and though it pumped most of its energy into the sky, enough reflected back off the inside of the glass cap to turn the room into a bake oven.
My pupils shrank to pinpoints as I climbed onto the catwalk that encircled the searchlight. The air above the light was one big heat-shimmer, but I thought I glimpsed a human outline on the far side of the catwalk.
“You might as well show yourself,” I said. “I know you’re here, and you don’t have enough juice left to get past me.”
She solidified. “Careful with the gun.” She gestured at the glass walls. “If you miss…”
“I’m not going to shoot you. I need you awake so I can beat the truth out of you.”
“The truth.” She smiled. “You sure you want the truth, Jane? Because the truth is, even if you get me to tell you where Phil’s hiding, you won’t save him. He belongs to the Troop now. You might catch him, but you won’t turn him. He’ll curse you for even trying.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”
“I know you are worried about it. That’s why there’s a part of you that really would like to shoot me, to shut me up before I can talk. Go on, check it out.”
I glanced down at the gun in my hand.
The dial was turned to the MI setting.
“Yeah,” the bad Jane said. “If you kill me, Phil gets away, and then you can go on pretending there’s hope. But there is no more hope, Jane. You had your chance to protect Phil twenty-three years ago. Now he’s got power, and position, and a purpose—more than you ever had—and he’s never going to give that up willingly. He might have shared a little of it with you, but that chance is gone too. So all that’s left is death. You can hunt him down and execute him, like the bad monkey he is. Is that the truth you’re looking for, Jane? You want to be responsible for finishing Phil off?”
As she talked, she moved along the catwalk towards me. She started to get a little too close for comfort; I took a step back and my heel caught, throwing me off-balance. It was all the opening she needed. She came forward in a blur, chopping her hand against my wrist to make me drop the gun. Then her hands were around my neck.
“Don’t fight it,” she said. I tried to melt away, but she held on to me firmly, using the last of her power. “Don’t fight it, Jane…You know this is the best way.” She bent me backwards over the catwalk railing. I felt the heat of the light scorching me. “Just let go. Just let go. No more guilt for you, no more screwups, and Phil gets to go on…”