He turned away and started walking, feeling guilty that he had nothing to give her. Andrea had always been appalled by sweatheads, so she never used her weaveware to block them out. It was hard to imagine anyone who’d known her accepting that she’d died of an overdose. He imagined her wake – friends gathered together, talking carefully around the fiction that explained her death, afraid to speculate on the truth. He hoped that, if he’d been there, he’d have had the courage to question the official version of events.
The smell of frying food leapt out of a doorway and tugged at him. He’d never needed the weave to find a good café. A bell rang as he pushed through the door. The staff were friendly until he told them how he’d be paying. He had to try two more places before he found somewhere that would accept InSec cash.
A server led him to a small table, set with two places and two chairs. The room was about half-full. Other customers were dabbing bright pink meat in red sauce or pushing brown fried bread round plates to catch vivid yellow smears of egg yolk. The server took Jack’s order, almost managing to hide a combination of pity and contempt. The coffee came instantly, food a little later. Without flavour overlays, the brightly coloured meat, bread and egg scarcely tasted any different from each other.
Fist shimmered into being, sitting in the chair opposite Jack. He had his head in his hands. Non-essential communications were still muted. It looked like he was groaning and swearing. Jack enjoyed the silence as he ate. He was about halfway through his meal before Fist realised.
[ YOU MUTED ME, YOU BASTARD. I’M GOING TO TAG EVERYTHING AS ESSENTIAL FROM NOW ON.]
Jack laughed. [ You’re lucky I let you out at all, after last night.] The tasteless food was at least filling him with calories, leaving him feeling generous. He unmuted Fist.
[ That wasn’t me, Jack. That fucking patron of yours left a trigger in me. I had to take you to him.]
[ You mean you aren’t normally an annoying, aggressive little wanker?]
[Shut up and eat, meatbag.] Jack used a piece of bread to mop up the last greasy remnants of an egg. [ You don’t know how lucky you are,] Fist continued. [ Nobody can reach into your head and rewrite you.]
[ They put you in my head.]
[ You’re still you, Jack, even when I’m here. That never stops.]
[ It will soon.]
The server cleared Jack’s plate away and refilled his cup of coffee. A small group of people came in, clattering noisily as they found seats and debated breakfast choices. The noise would have pained Jack before he’d eaten. Now it created a soft, almost comfortable ache in his mind.
[ You’ve got free will,] said Fist. [ They can’t turn you into something else without you even knowing.]
[ We get told what to do. And sometimes we lose out if we don’t do it.]
[ That’s different. You don’t have to do it, not if you really don’t want to. I’ve never had that.]
[ That’s just self-pity.]
[ Really? When do I ever get to decide anything? It’s always you, Jack, whether we’re surrendering to the Totality so you can feel better about yourself or getting ourselves tortured so you can impress a ghost.]
[ There’s more to it than that, Fist.]
[ Not from where I’m standing.]
[So we should just walk away?]
[ Yes. Grey was right. Leave it all to Harry. To someone who actually knows what he’s doing.]
Jack sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Its heat bit at his tongue. The windows of the little café burned with midday spinelight, but he was in a shaded corner. Its gentle cool soothed him. The group at the table were laughing together. Others were chatting or just tucking into their food. Behind the counter the cook was flipping eggs on a hot cooking plate. The server was taking an order from an attractive young man, flirting a little as she did so.
Jack was offweave, irretrievably distant from these people, but he found himself suddenly struck by an exquisite sense of deep kinship with them all. Hunger could never be virtually satisfied. There were so many human needs that the weave could never meet.
[ Well fuck all this,] grumbled Fist. [ I’m going back to sleep.]
Jack felt the same sudden contentment as the night before, when he’d told his patron that he wouldn’t allow himself to be used as a weapon. He wondered if Fist was right. Perhaps this was how he should spend his last few weeks, enjoying small pleasures, watching people in cafés and bars, feeling a subtle closeness to all around him. Then he thought of his father. His hangover blunted emotion, allowing him to consider the pain of their meeting with something approaching detachment. Without fresh evidence it would be impossible to change the way he understood the past. He imagined the old man tottering into age, only able to see his absent boy as an unresolvable problem. Hurt shimmered over peace like silent lightning over a summer sea.
As he sat there, a message flag pinged in his mind. [Get it yourself,] muttered Fist. It was Corazon. ‘We need to talk. Call me as soon as you get this.’ A memory of Harry appeared in his mind, forbidding all contact with her. But Jack trusted Corazon, and Harry was no longer his boss.
[Come on, Fist. Let’s go back to the hotel. We’ve got a call to make.]
Chapter 19
Jack thought it would be hard to reach Corazon. To his surprise, the call went straight through.
‘I followed your suggestion,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking at the files. There is something strange there. I think – I think I’m beginning to believe you now.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. And there’s something I want to ask you too.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I need you to find someone for me.’
‘Let’s discuss that in person.’ There was fear in her voice. ‘This call might not be safe.’ Jack wondered how much of a leap it had been for her to realise that. ‘We need to meet as soon as possible.’
A couple of hours later she sent Jack a one-off Homelands entry permit. It specified time and place of entry and exit, but no particular user. That helped calm Fist down a bit. [She doesn’t want anyone tracking you,] he said. [At least we won’t be drawing too much attention to ourselves.] Jack was to take a train through the Wart to Chuigushou Mall, changing once at Vitality Junction. Corazon would wait for him in a particular coffee shop, wearing civilian clothes.
[ I think we should sell the travel pass to a sweathead, and let them go begging in Homelands. Or find those little bastards that were attacking your squishy friend and give it to them. They’d find some good victims in the malls.]
Jack presented himself at Wound station gate and entered the ticket’s code in a manual terminal that looked like it hadn’t been used for decades. Soon they were trundling through the darkness of the Wart on a nearly empty train.
[Going after the Pantheon traitor,] said Fist. [ You’re turning into Grey’s weapon after all.]
[ I’m doing this for me. And Andrea. And you, come to that.]
[ You’re endangering my future,] snorted Fist.
[ I’m making sure you have one. Those bastards want to use you up and throw you away.]
Outside, darkness rushed by. Homelands was a sudden blaze of light. Jack wished he had some sunglasses. His eyes had hardly adjusted when the train pulled in to Chuigushou Mall station. Large escalators led down from the platform into a perfectly circular piazza. It was at least five hundred metres across. The open space was defined by two white marble colonnades, which encircled it like hugging arms. They came together in a pointed arch directly opposite the escalators. A glass façade loomed up behind it, several storeys high – the main body of the mall.
Jack remembered a hectic commercial bustle. The piazza’s serenity was a shock to him. There were no colours but white marble and black weave sigils; no sound but the hushed bustle of feet on stone and the excited susurrus of shoppers anticipating purchases or taking joy in new goods. Most of the colonnade arches had restaurants set into them. Waiters bustled between tables, sometimes shouting, sometimes stopping and staring into space as customer management systems fed new commands to them. Diners busily forked food into their mouths. Almost all were staring up as they ate, barely registering each mouthful.