Sudden motion to the left. A great fountain had once decorated the center of this place; these days its broad soapstone basin, spread out in the perpetual shadow of the squat, seemed to serve primarily as a community dumpster. Pieces of a woman were detaching themselves from that backdrop. The illusion was far from perfect, now that Clarke focused on it. The chromatophores on the woman's unitard mimicked her background in broad strokes at best, producing more of a blurry translucence than outright invisibility. Not that this particular K seemed to care about camouflage; the ambulatory hair wasn't exactly designed to blend with the background.
She approached them like a fuzzy cloud with body parts attached. "You must be Kenny," she said to Lubin. "I'm Laurel. Yuri said you had skin problems." She gave Clarke an appraising glance, blinking over pupils slit subtly vertical. "I like the eyes. Takes balls to go for rifter chic in these parts."
Clarke looked back expressionlessly. After a moment, Laurel turned back to Lubin. "Yuri's wait—"
Lubin snapped her neck Laurel sagged bonelessly into his arms, her head lolling.
"Fuck, Ken!" Clarke staggered back as if she'd been kicked in the stomach. "What are you…"
From the rustling cliff dwellings above them, sudden silence.
Lubin had Laurel laid out on her back, his pack at her side. Her cat eyes stared up at the belly of the squat, wide and astonished.
"Ken!"
"I told you in-kind services might be necessary." He fished a handgrip of some kind from his pack, pressed a stud on its hilt. A thin blade snicked into view. It hummed. One stroke and Laurel's unitard was split from crotch to throat. The elastic fabric pulled apart like slashed mesentery.
Chat. Snap. Sag. Just like that. It was impossible to banish the image.
Deep abdominal cut, right side. No blood. A wisp of blue smoke curled up from the incision. It carried the scent of cauterizing flesh.
Clarke looked around frantically. There was still no one else in sight, but it felt as though a thousand eyes were on them. It felt as though the whole teetering structure over their heads was holding its breath, as though it might collapse on them at any second.
Lubin plunged his hand into Laurel's side. There was no hesitation, no exploratory poke-and-prod. He knew exactly where he was going. Whatever he was after must be showing up on his inlays.
Laurel's eyes turned in her head. They stared at Lenie Clarke.
"Oh God, she'salive…"
"She can't feel it," Lubin said.
How could he do this? Clarke wondered, and an instant later: After all these years, how could I still be surprised?
Lubin's blood-soaked hand came back into sight. Something pea-sized glistened like a pearl in the clotting gore between thumb and forefinger. A child began crying somewhere in the warren overhead. Lubin lifted his face to the sound.
"Witnesses, Ken…"
He stood. Laurel lay bleeding out at his feet, her eyes still fixed on Lenie Clarke.
"They're used to it." He started walking. "Come on."
She backed away a few steps. Laurel stared steadily at the place where Lenie Clarke had been.
"No time," Lubin called over his shoulder.
Clarke turned and fled after him.
Island Airport pushed up against the southern reaches of the static dome. There was no island that Clarke could see, only a low broad building with helicopters and ultralights scattered across its roof. Either there was no security or Lubin's negotiations had seduced it; they walked unaccosted to a four-seater Sikorsky-Bell outfitted with passive cloaking. The pearl shucked from Laurel's guts proved to be the keys to its heart.
Toromilton dimmed in the distance behind them. They flew north beneath the sight of some hypothetical radar, threading between silver-gray treetops. Darkness and photocollagen hid a multitude of sins; for all Clarke knew every plant, every rock, every square meter of the landscape below was coated in ßehemoth. You couldn't tell through the photoamps, though. The terrain scrolling past was frosted and beautiful. Occasional lakes slid beneath them like great puddles of mercury, dimly radiant.
She didn't mention the view to Lubin. She didn't know if his prosthetic eyes came equipped with night vision, but he'd switched them off anyway—at least, the little green LED was dark. Nav must be talking directly to his inlays.
"She didn't know she was carrying it," Clarke said. They were the first words she'd spoken since Laurel's eyes had fixed and dilated.
"No. Yuri made her a home-cooked meal."
"He wanted her dead."
"Evidently."
Clarke shook her head. Laurel's eyes wouldn't leave her alone. "But why that way? Why put it inside her?"
"I suspect he didn't trust me to keep up my end of the deal." The corner of Lubin's mouth twitched slightly. "Rather elegant solution, actually."
So someone thought that Ken Lubin might be reluctant to commit murder. It should have been cause for hope.
"For the keys to a helicopter," Clarke said. "I mean, couldn't we just—"
"Just what, Lenie?" he snapped. "Fall back on all those high-level contacts that I used to have? Call the rental agency? Has it still not dawned on you that a continental hot zone and five years of martial law might have had some impact on intercity travel?" Lubin shook his head "Or perhaps you don't think we're giving Desjardins enough time to set up his defenses. Perhaps we should just walk the distance to give him a sporting chance."
She'd never heard him talk like this before. It was as if some chess grand-master, renowned for icy calm, had suddenly cursed and kicked over the board in the middle of a game.
They flew in silence for a while.
"I can't believe it's really him," she said at last.
"I don't see why not." Lubin was back in battle-computer mode. "We know he lied about Seppuku."
"Maybe he made an honest mistake. Taka's an actual MD and she even—"
"It's him," Lubin said.
She didn't push it.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Sudbury. Evidently he didn't want to give up home-field advantage."
"It wasn't destroyed during Rio?"
"Desjardins caused Rio."
"What? Who told you that?"
"I know the man. It makes sense."
"Not to me."
"Desjardins was the first to slip the leash. He had a brief window in which he was the only man on the planet with all the power of a 'lawbreaker and none of the constraints. He used it to eliminate the competition before Spartacus freed them."
"But it wasn't just Sudbury. Rio took out cities all over." She remembered words and images streaming across the Atlantic. An industrial lifter inexplicably crashing into the CSIRA tower in Salt Lake. A fast-neutron bomb in the unlikely hands of the Daughters of Lenie. Quantum shriekers falling from orbit onto Sacramento and Boise.
"Sudbury wouldn't have been the only franchise seeded," Lubin pointed out. "Desjardins must have obtained the list and gone to town."
"And blamed it on Rio," Clarke murmured.
"All the post-hoc evidence pointed there. Of course, the city was vaporized before anyone had a chance to ask questions. Very little forensic evidence survives ground zero." Lubin tapped a control icon. "As far as anyone knew at the time, Desjardins saved the day. He was the toast of the town. At least he was the toast of anyone with enough clearance to know who he was."