Jack shut Fist down. He’d pay later in exhaustion, but for now he was too angry to care. [ I don’t want any damaged goods,] shouted Fist’s disappearing voice.
‘He can’t hurt anyone,’ said Jack.
‘I can smell Pantheon on you, Puppeteer. And something worse than that, if you’re here on behalf of Devlin.’
‘I’m here for myself, nobody else.’
‘Bullshit.’
The approaching train roared in the darkness. There was no point trying to speak. Nihal turned away from Jack, ready – once the train had reached the platform and halted – to run for the stairs and the safety of the tunnel. As he did so the door in the wall opened. Nihal started towards it. A short, middle-aged woman emerged. She was wearing off-green combat trousers and a red jacket, and she had dyed her hair blue. At this distance, in this light, it was difficult to see her skin’s blue tint, but Jack knew it would be there. It was the woman who had forced herself into his interview at Customs House.
She raised her hand and pointed something at Nihal. There was a crack loud enough to be heard over the train’s howl. Then the skinner was staggering backwards, a small dark hole shining fresh in his forehead, and tumbling over the edge of the platform. Brakes howled, but the train could not stop. It batted Nihal’s body forward a little way before the corpse rolled over and disappeared beneath its silver wheels. They gleamed red. Emergency brakes squealed the train to a halt. There was silence.
‘I turned the station surveillance off,’ she shouted. ‘Run down the tunnel, they won’t know you were here. So much simpler if I could just kill you too!’ Then, she vanished back through the door. A warning chimed and the train’s doors opened. A few people stepped out and started walking for the exit. The travellers waiting on the platform joined them. They looked serene, untouched by the death that had unfolded in front of them. Jack realised that their weaveware would have blocked the entire scene out. It would now be calmly asking them to move out of the station. There would be apologies for the delay, but no explanation of its cause.
A roaring noise filled the platform, echoing in from the entrance. It was the InSec flyer landing outside the station. Jack had no desire to be arrested. He ran towards the door that the assassin had emerged from. It was firmly locked. The end of the platform was only a few metres away. Jack leapt the barrier and ran down the steps into the darkness of the tunnel.
Chapter 21
Jack left the tunnel by a service door, successfully avoiding any InSec involvement, and made his way back to Harry and Andrea’s house. When Andrea opened the door she was ten years younger. ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling politely. ‘You must be Jack.’
‘Andrea?’
‘Yes. Come in, Harry’s told me a lot about you. It’s good to meet you.’
She was dressed in dead fashions. Harry must have rolled her back. She was now too young to have met him. For the first time, Jack felt the true loss of her. It hit him like a punch. He staggered.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘It’s been a tough day, I bet!’
‘No. I’m fine. Tired. I can come in?’
‘Harry’s waiting for you.’ She led him towards the sitting room. ‘Kitchen’s in there for a cup of something,’ she said brightly.
Jack could barely nod. It was as if the past had been reformatted. Every smile of hers – so bright, so friendly, so clearly impersonal – tore at his heart. But he couldn’t let Harry see his pain.
Harry asked about Nihal. When Jack told him what had happened, he made no effort to hide his irritation. ‘You should have that little bastard under control by now. I told you, my case, my rules.’ Jack forced Fist to manifest but he said nothing, turning his head away from both of them. Jack asked why Nihal was so scared when he mentioned Harry. ‘He wasn’t scared of me. He was scared of you two.’ The answer felt like an evasion, but Jack didn’t want to push it. This time, Harry’s anger had a cold, quiet heat to it that scared him. There was a silence. Jack decided to change the subject. It was impossible not to ask about Andrea.
‘Shouldn’t you just let her run?’
Harry exploded.
‘Who the fuck are you to tell me how to run my relationships? Why are you even asking?’
Jack wanted to threaten Harry, to force him to restore her and not touch her again. But that would make the depth of his feelings clear. He wasn’t sure what the repercussions of that would be, or if he was ready to deal with them constructively.
‘You just fucked up big time,’ continued Harry, ‘you and that idiot puppet. Fuck knows why anyone’s scared of him. You should let me mesh with him now, I’d sort the little shit out. And I’d be much better at using what he’s got to get what we need.’
[ He’s not getting anywhere near me. I’ll eat your brain before I let that happen.]
‘That’s impossible, Harry. The cage.’
‘The cage, the cage. One more thing that stops you doing what needs to be done, and once again it isn’t your fucking fault. You’re a fart in a fucking hurricane, you are.’
In the end, Harry let himself flicker out of existence with a curt farewell. He was – he said – going to use ‘his sources’ to try and find out about the assassin, but hadn’t been optimistic. ‘That was our one chance to get to Yamata. It’s back to square one, buddy.’ Andrea had shown Jack out. He’d barely been able to look at her. He wondered how she’d recover her older self; how she experienced the sudden loss of so much rich living. As he walked away, he heard her start to sing someone else’s song. At that age, she hadn’t yet written any of her own. There was nothing but potential in her voice.
Back at the hotel, he tried to call Corazon. She didn’t answer. He left a message asking her to contact him urgently. He waited for a day, but there was nothing. Thoughts of Andrea tore at him like panthers. It was impossible to distinguish the sense of loss he felt for the woman he’d known so long ago on Station from that he felt for the fetch he’d been so close to while imprisoned on Callisto. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, he made his way to the spot where the body of Bjorn Penderville had been found. It was a kind of masochistic pilgrimage, a means of securing at least part of the past and confirming that it too could not just be deleted.
The murder scene was an empty dock on one of the jetties that floated in space above the open maw of Docklands. Jack let himself hang in the void, floating just past the wharf’s airlock door. The sound of his breath whispered in his ears. He remembered his parents taking him to play in similar docks as a child, carefully introducing him to vacuum suit usage and the hazards of space. Now he wore an adult suit. It allowed no touch or smell. There was only vision to show him the universe. Off to his left he could see bustle – a newly arrived chainship was being disassembled. The wharf to his right was quiet. A command module hung against it like a disembodied head, waiting for a new body to be fitted. Snowflakes hung beyond Station’s shadow. The sun set them ablaze, diagrams sketched on vacuum with an elegant precision far beyond anything that the Pantheon could hope to achieve.
Jack imagined the cathedral beauty of their internal structures. Their physical complexity paled before the technological artistry that each one embodied. He wondered if they were much discussed in the Station. Without access to the weave he couldn’t take part in the discussion. But then, he’d seen precious little interest in the world beyond Station from any of its inhabitants. Perhaps the snowflakes merited little more than the odd, baffled mention, before the conversation returned to introversion.
Beyond the snowflakes, there was nothing. Jack thought of Andrea, then – to distract himself – he remembered the crime scene footage. Penderville had been floating a few metres away from the wharf’s airlock, tethered to it by a length of white rope. The Spine Traffic Controller’s murderer had used a diamond knife to open a tear in the back of his vacuum suit. The sudden decompression had broken him.