Entertainment must be dancing merrily through each restaurant. Jack wondered what he would be seeing if he were onweave. Presumably it would be something far from this classically elegant space. The latest musics would be pounding through his mind, personalised advertising displays bursting in front of him like small fireworks. Years ago, he’d been a reasonably frequent mall visitor. He remembered little of those visits, beyond a certain strained excitement that had tipped too easily into sensory overload.
He reached the arch and stepped on to a moving walkway. It pulled him up into the western end of the mall. Spinelight shone through the mall’s peaked glass roof, high above. Its floor stretched away into the distance. Walkways crisscrossed its great central nave, connecting its side walls. Each one was segmented into seven or eight floors of shopping space. Balconies alternated with advertising hoardings, painted with great, multicoloured sigils that ran from floor to ceiling like brilliant windows.
Two arched voids opened up halfway down it, leading to smaller north and south wings. The nave continued beyond the crossing, its eastern space holding the more expensive and exclusive stores. Only the elite could visit them. Jack had been taken into one of them once by an advertising executive he’d briefly dated. The lunch he’d bought her had cost him the best part of a month’s wages. Even then, he could only afford half an hour’s worth of flavour. They’d had to eat quickly to enjoy it.
The mall ended with a great sunwards-facing logo carved into its final, eastern wall. Light poured in through it, turning it into a brilliant tribute to the bounty of Silver and of the Pantheon as a whole. The fulfilment that Chuigushou Mall provided was their gift to the people of the Solar System, the highest aspirations of post-Terran man made concrete and consumable. Its blaze was blinding. After a moment, Jack had to look away.
[ This place is full of wankers,] said Fist.
[ I know.]
[And it’s far too loud! I’m going to climb back into my little box till we’re out of here.]
[ No skin off my nose …]
[ We shouldn’t have come here, Jack.]
Jack was surprised to see that a couple of shops seemed to have been attacked. Workmen were replacing the glass windows and carrying broken furniture out of one of them. The frontage of the other had been entirely boarded over. He wondered how and why the damage had been done. It implied a chaotic violence that jarred with the commercial serenity of the rest of the mall, and the wider world of Homelands.
Corazon hadn’t reached the café yet. Jack waited for her just outside it. A small, dirty child ran past, ragged clothes fluttering behind her, a younger version of Ifor’s attackers. She was carrying something heavy, but vanished before Jack could see what it was. She too seemed so out of place. For a moment, he wondered if she was a glitch – but of course, he was offweave.
‘I don’t know how you can look so relaxed in here,’ shouted Corazon when she emerged from the softly bustling crowd. She was dressed in loose white clothes that drifted endlessly around her. Black sigils danced across expensive fabrics. ‘It gets so loud. That’s why I thought it would be a good place to meet.’
Jack followed her to an empty table. All he could hear were variations on near-silence. Corazon flicked a hand around her head, banishing a hubbub of datasprites. Her voice dropped to a more normal level. ‘Gods, I need a coffee.’ She waved at a server to catch his attention. He nodded as he received her request. When he brought the cappuccino he looked questioningly at Jack. His expression switched from surprised to worried as the café’s ordering systems found no weave presence to mesh with. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Corazon then, turning to Jack, ‘what do you want?’
‘Plain black,’ he answered.
‘On my tab,’ she told the server. He whispered to a colleague as he poured the coffee out. The colleague brought the coffee over, suppressing a nervous giggle as she put it down.
‘Probably never met a long-term offweaver before,’ said Corazon.
‘I’m not about to start throwing tables around. Now, what have you found?’
Corazon leant in towards Jack, talking quietly but urgently. ‘Too much missing from the Penderville file. Your investigation into the Panther Czar’s finances for starters. There’s a full datacomb reference for it, but nothing stored at that address. Someone’s wiped it, the backup’s gone too.’
‘That should be impossible.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that. And most of Harry Devlin’s interviews have been deleted – including Aud Yamata’s.’
‘She was the only real suspect. They must have got rid of the rest to avoid pointing too obviously to her. What about Penderville? Did you manage to talk to his fetch?’
‘He was tagged as a terrorist. His fetch is frozen. Nobody can reach him.’
‘Ah.’ Jack sat back in his seat, wondering how much to tell her about Harry. ‘Unusual.’
‘Freezing a fetch is very serious. There should be a lot of evidence to justify it. But there’s nothing.’
‘Deleted too?’
‘There’s no record that it was ever there, that any sort of due process was followed.’
‘Pantheon.’
Corazon looked down into her coffee. ‘That’s not something I wanted to believe.’
‘There’s no belief about it. It’s fact. Only a god could wipe files and backups, and cage a fetch with no evidence at all.’
She looked up at him. There was a terse, defensive anger in her voice. ‘I hoped I wouldn’t find it. It confirms everything you said.’
‘The fetches in particular – Penderville’s not the first to be interfered with. I’m surprised you didn’t try to talk to Harry Devlin. You wouldn’t have been able to.’
‘They froze him too?’ Disbelief and fear jostled in Corazon’s voice.
‘They corrupted his dataself,’ said Jack.
[Liar …] whispered a quiet voice from deep inside him.
‘Shit. So one of them really is smuggling sweat and going all out to cover it up.’
‘They’re after Fist now,’ replied Jack.
‘Yes, you said.’
‘They want to use him when I’m gone.’
Corazon clutched at her coffee mug, her firm grip whitening her knuckles. She laughed bitterly. ‘I feel like such a fool. Even when East told me that I couldn’t choose my own career – I thought they’re all good, they’ve got our interests at heart. She knows what’s best for me.’ A moment of moving through her own memories, of letting her new knowledge roil in her, and then she snapped herself back into focus. ‘And I may be pissed off with her,’ she continued, ‘but I still hope she’s got nothing to do with this. And that’s what’s next, isn’t it – find out which one it is?’
‘Yes. And we’ll do it through Yamata, and her skinner.’
Corazon looked round then whispered ‘David Nihal.’
‘That’s him. How did you know?’
‘I looked back to see what Yamata was up to around the time of the murder. Sometimes she was there, and sometimes she wasn’t.’
‘We’d started to look into that ourselves. How did you work out it was him?’
‘I ran a full search on her links with known skinners. For a while, he was a regular face in her life. Once every couple of months, there he was – standing at the door of a nightclub she’d just gone into, or walking in a park that she’d just left. No traces of them ever meeting, but …’
‘They must have wiped the weave surveillance.’
‘Yes. But only when they’re actually together, not when they’re arriving or leaving.’