At least the damned sunburn hurt less than it had and his wardrobe was doing an adequate job of coping with the sloughing epidermis. Which was unpleasant. But, by comparison, didn’t hurt enough to be worthy of the term.
“Is it safe to descend through the canopy?”
He hesitated. “Theoretically.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s a utility fog, and they can be weaponized. Elder Pretoria–”
Her hand flexed on his shoulder. He hid a flinch. “Yes, Vincent?”
Not Miss Katherinessenanymore. “Does anybody on New Amazonia use fog technology? Because something Lesa said led me to believe it wasn’t warmly considered–”
“No,” Elena said. “They don’t.”
He nodded. “Then I can’t guarantee what we’ll run into.”
“Right,” she said, and released him. “Jayne?”
“Elder Pretoria?”
“Bring us down onto the canopy, would you? And let the others know what we’re doing, and why.”
The aircar didn’t have the flexibility of programmable vehicles that Vincent was used to, but he had to admit that the landing nets were impressive. Jointed insectile limbs unfolded, stretching glistening mesh between them, and the aircar settled onto a forest canopy made mysterious by nebula‑light. The trees dimpled and groaned under the distributed weight, and Vincent heard wood creak and twigs snap wetly, but they bore up under the weight. On each side, the other aircars settled into the canopy, surrounding the camouflaged clearing, pastel swirls of night sky reflected in their glossy carapaces so they looked like enormous, jeweled beetles resting on spinners’ webs.
“How do we get out?” he asked, because he knew it was expected of him.
And Elena smiled, ducked down, folded the center rear seat up, and tugged open a hatch in the floor.
The camp was deserted, which surprised Vincent even less than its invisibility. The security personnel had body armor, weapons, metal detectors, and khir trained to sniff for explosives and hidden people, and he was content to let them conduct the search. He stuck close to Elena and to Antonia Kyoto, who had arrived in a separate car, and eavesdropped on incoming reports with their complicity.
It took them less than half an hour to secure the camp, which showed signs of having been abandoned with great haste and insufficient discipline. Supplies had not been taken, and one of Kyoto’s people uncovered a cache of weapons under a bed in one of the ten or eleven huts clustered within the zareba.
It was Shafaqat Delhi who found Robert Pretoria’s body, though, and hurried back into the camp to inform Vincent and Elena–and then had to jog to keep up with him on the way back out, while Elena followed more sedately.
Somebody had rolled Robert over, but that wasn’t how it had fallen. Vincent crouched beside crushed greenery and traced the outline of the body in the loam, running fingers along the deeper, smoother imprint where someone had shoved Robert’s chest into the ground while he broke his neck.
Vincent turned and ran his fingertips across the base of Robert’s skull, below the occiput. The distended softness of a swelling met his fingertips, exactly where he expected.
“Vincent?”
“Blow to the head,” he said, wiping his hands on Robert’s shirt before he stood. The dead man’s pockets had been rifled, and any gear he had with him taken, and the leaf litter in the area of the body was roughed up as if from a scuffle.
There hadn’t been any scuffle. He’d been as good as dead the minute he turned his back.
Vincent stood, his feet where Angelo’s feet would have been when he struck, and turned a slow pirouette. And there it was, exactly at a height to catch his eye. A single hair, black and tightly coiled, snagged in the rough bark of a tree about four meters from the murder scene.
It could have been Robert’s hair, if his head wasn’t shaved. But it wasn’t.
Vincent covered the distance in three long steps and stopped. The forest floor was undisturbed, leaves and sticks and bits of moss exactly as they should be. He crouched again, feeling alongside the roots of the trees, combing through the litter with his fingertips. Worm‑eaten nuts, curled crisp leaves, sticks and bits of things he couldn’t identify–
–something smooth and warm.
His fingers recognized the datacart before he unearthed it, although Michelangelo had wrapped it in a scrap torn from a dirty shirt. Vincent brushed it carefully clean, aware that Shafaqat and Elena were watching him in breathless anticipation. A sense of the dramatic made him hold his silence until he could turn, drop one knee to the ground to brace himself, and raise the datacart into their line of sight before he powered it on. There was a password, but Vincent could have entered it in his sleep.
He had been meant to guess it.
It didn’t beep. Somebody had disabled that function. But it did load something: a glowing electronic image of green and golden contour lines and insistently blinking dots.
“What’s that?” Shafaqat asked.
Elena put one hand out, pressing her palm to the bole of a tree to steady herself, and sighed as if she could put all her pain and worry onto the wind and let it be carried away. “A scavenger map,” she said. And then she stood up straight and rolled her shoulders back. “Come along, Miss Delhi, Miss Katherinessen. No rest for the wicked yet.”
Even by Kusanagi‑Jones’s standards, it was a pretty cinematic rescue. He awoke from a fitful doze at dawn, when a frenzy of animal cries greeted half a dozen digital‑camouflage‑clad New Amazonian commandos rappelling through the canopy. They landed in the glade where Lesa had been half‑crucified on the thorn vines and unclipped, fanning out with polished professionalism. Half a dozen commandos–and Vincent, dapper and pressed and shiny‑booted as always, handling the abseiling gear as if he spent every Saturday swinging from the belly of an ornithopter.
Kusanagi‑Jones rolled onto his back and reached out to nudge Lesa awake, but she was already propped up on one elbow, peering over his shoulder. Her face, if anything, looked more lined with tiredness than it had the night before, and more of her scratches were inflamed, but the smile curving her lips was one of relief. “Come on,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, holding out his hand. “I’ll carry you down there.”
“Fuck that,” she answered. “I’ll walk.”
And she did, or hobbled, anyway, leaning on his elbow harder than either of them let on.
Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t even really mind when the first thing Vincent did was hug him hard enough that it knocked him back a step. Especially when the second thing he did was piggyback their watches together, and give Kusanagi‑Jones’s wardrobe a kick start and a recharge to baseline functional levels.
Later, after the medics had seen to his injuries, and while he was still tucked into bed hydrating on an IV while they worked on Lesa’s more serious wounds, Vincent brought him a tray, and spread jam on crackers for him to eat. They sat silently, shoulder to shoulder. Kusanagi‑Jones had edged over to make room, and Vincent leaned against the headboard with one foot on the floor and one propped up on the bed.
“Can’t go home yet,” Kusanagi‑Jones said at last, over their private channel, when it became evident that Vincent wasn’t going to bring it up.
“No,” Vincent answered, after letting the statement hang for a bit. And then he said out loud, “Eat the soup. It’s good.”
“I hate lentils.” But he ate it, thick and pasty and full of garlic, and it was better than he expected. He needed the protein, anyway. And the salt. “There’s Claude to deal with.”
“There is,” Vincent admitted, “still a negotiation to complete. And a duel to fight if we can’t find that lab, and link Singapore and Austin to it.”
Kusanagi‑Jones glanced down at his watch. Every light shone clean and green, except the blinking yellow letting him know fatigue toxins were building to the point where chemistry wasn’t cutting it anymore. He held it up so Vincent could see. “There’s also this.”
“You know what I think,” Vincent answered, his voice chilly and flat. Kusanagi‑Jones reached out and curved his fingers around Vincent’s wrist, and Vincent didn’t shake him off.