“Okay.”
“People don’t—congregate the way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so—thin, these days.”
Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”
“Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”
“What’s on your mind, Nandita?”
“You got me thinking.”
“About?”
“The price of safety. The next Michael Harris. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t. I just don’t—”
“Twenty thousand gun-related deaths a year, Amal. Down there. Up here.”
“Mainly down there, thank God.” Sabrie said. “But yes.”
“And you got me thinking about how Harris had to be crazy to shoot up a daycare, for chrissakes, how everyone said the death of his sister must have tipped him over the edge. Only...”
“Only?” Sabrie echoed after the pause had stretched a bit too far.
“What if he wasn’t crazy?” Becker finished.
“How could he not be?”
“He lost his sister. Classic act of senseless violence. The whole gun culture, you know, the NRA has everyone by the balls and anyone so much as whispers about gun control gets shot down. So to speak.” Becker grunted. “Words haven’t worked. Advocacy hasn’t worked. The only thing that might possibly work would be something so unthinkable, so horrific and obscene and unspeakably evil, that not even the most strident gun nut could possibly object to—countermeasures.”
“Wait, you’re saying that someone in favor of gun control—someone who’d lost his sister to gun violence—would deliberately shoot up a daycare?”
Becker spread her hands.
“You’re saying he turned himself into a monster. Killed forty people. For what, a piece of legislation?”
“Weighed against thousands of deaths a year. Even if legislation only cut that by a few percent, you’d make back your investment in a week or two.”
“Your investment?”
“Sacrifice, then.” Becker shrugged.
“Do you know how insane that sounds?”
“How do you know that’s not the way it went down?”
“Because nothing changed! No new laws got passed! They just wrote him off as another psycho.”
“He couldn’t know that up front. All he knew was, there was a chance. His life, a few others, for thousands. There was a chance.”
“I can’t believe that you, of all people, would—after what happened, after what you did—”
“Wasn’t me, remember? It was Wingman. That’s what everyone’s saying.” Wingman was awake now, straining at the leash with phantom limbs.
“But you were still part of it. You know that, Deet, you feel it. Even if it wasn’t your fault, it still tears you up inside. I saw that the first time we spoke. You’re a good person, you’re a moral person, and—”
“Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two strangers’ kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”
Sabrie had gone very quiet.
“Corporal,” she said when Becker had fallen silent, “what have they done to you?”
Becker took a breath. “Whatever they’re doing—”
...couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned it...
“—it ends here.”
Sabrie’s eyes went wide. Becker could see pieces behind them, fitting together at last. No drones. Dense crowd. No real security, just a few bouncers built of pitiful meat and bone...
“I’m sorry, Amal,” Becker said gently.
Sabrie lunged for the jammer. Becker snatched it up before the journalist’s hand had made it halfway.
“I can’t have people in my head right now.”
“Nandita.” Sabrie was almost whispering. “Don’t do this.”
“I like you, Amal. You’re good people. I’d leave you right out of it if I could, but you’re—smart. And you know me, a little. Maybe well enough to put it together, afterward...”
Sabrie leapt up. Becker didn’t even rise from her chair. She seized the other woman’s wrist quick as a striking snake, effortlessly forced it back onto the table. Sabrie cried out. Dim blue dancers moved on the other side of the damper field, other things on their minds.
“You won’t get away with it. You can’t blame the machines for—” Soft pleading words, urgent, rapid-fire. The false-color heatprint of the contusion spread out across Sabrie’s forearm like a dim rainbow, like a bright iridescent oil slick. “Please there’s no way they’ll be able to sell this as a malfunction no matter how—”
“That’s the whole point,” Becker said, and hoped there was a least a little sadness left in her smile. “You know that.”
Amal Sabrie. Number one of seventy-four.
It would have been so much faster to just spread her wings and raise arms. But her wings had been torn out by the roots, and lay twitching in the garage back at Trenton. The only arms she could raise were of flesh and blood and graphene.
It was enough, though. It was messy, but she got the job done. Because Corporal Nandita Becker was more than just a superhuman killing machine.
She was the most ethical person on the planet.