‘I’m sorry.’
‘One of my favourites. I didn’t even know.’
‘I’m sure she had faith you’d come for her.’
‘No. You don’t understand. She was one of the ones I loved, one of the ones I was taking most care of. I watch them all the time. I am always present to them. I thought she was in bed, asleep. Then the image of her in my mind flickered, and there she was, dead. I reached out and touched her. Her body was already cold. They’d hidden her from me for hours.’
‘We already knew there was Pantheon involvement …’
‘But I see everything, as soon as it happens, and I know every secret! I am the eye in every room, the ear that always hears, the mind that always knows. My newsrooms, my weavecasts, my telenovelas and keitai shousetsou and bandes dessinées and shadowplays – what are they if I can’t know that I’m watching the world, and reflecting it? How can something so important be hidden from me? What else haven’t I seen, Jack?’
A small hand grabbed his shirt. A tear grew from her eye like a tiny, transparent leaf, then dropped away down her cheek. Another joined it, then more, and she was weeping. Jack was unsure how to respond appropriately, how to comfort a god. She pulled herself in closer, both hands clutching him. Very tentatively, he moved one arm round her, then the other. Over her shoulder, Fist winked and leered. Jack closed his eyes, ignoring him.
The goddess’ hair smelt of static. Jack felt a gentle buzz as it brushed up against him. He was standing in an awkwardly formal way. She nestled in further, burying her head in his chest. Tears moistened the front of his shirt. Her body pressed against his with the softness of cinema seats. She was sobbing, and she shook with every sob. Every quiver of her body rippled against Jack. He struggled to quell a growing arousal. But then she was looking up at him, alluring as a midnight advert, and her hand was reaching down, and he was stiffening at her touch.
‘I can’t …’ he said, ‘Grey …’ but his breathing quickened as he said it.
‘He’s an old man,’ she replied, ‘fallen from grace.’ She kissed him once. Her lips snatched at his. ‘And he let you fall too.’ Her hot mouth touched his again, her tongue opening his lips, and then she was inside him. All that was divine in her took him and made him a vessel, pouring itself into him again and again and again.
Jack would never remember much of their love making. Later, he’d think back to the young man he’d seen her take in Ushi’s, after Andrea sang. The acolyte’s face had been rising towards a kind of blank perfection – a television screen, ecstatically detuning itself, finding release in the empty space that lies between channels. Jack assumed that he’d been lost in that same erasing joy.
All Fist would say was, ‘You looked as happy as a pig in shit.’
Towards the end, East let Jack find enough of himself to know that she was whispering in his ear.
‘I am remaking you, little Puppeteer,’ she breathed. ‘I’m slipping the chains from your little creature and sending you both out to be my revenge.’
‘I am no one’s vengeance but my own.’
‘Because of you, my Corazon is dead.’
Then she nibbled at his ear. His mouth had to sigh open and his back had to arch and press him so much deeper into her. As he entered further into her, so she dug deeper into him.
‘I’m going to make you a weapon again.’
Now she was far enough in to reach Fist. As Jack exploded into orgasm, the last of his defences dropped away and she had full access to them both. The world shattered. For a second that drifted forever he was not himself. In the distance, he heard Fist screaming, but he was too fragmented to care.
When he came round, he was lying on a stone altar next to the one supporting Corazon. East stood over him, perfectly dressed, her clothes, hair and makeup immaculate. No sign of their lovemaking remained. She was holding Fist by the scruff of his neck, her free hand clamped over his mouth. His eyes were wide with terror. His legs and arms thrashed around as he tried to free himself.
‘I’ve removed all the blocks they put on him. Be careful how you use him – they won’t know I’ve done this. I’ve made some changes to you, too.’
‘Why are you holding him like that?’
‘I saw that you’d been having problems with him. I’m going to burn him out for you.’
‘What?’ Jack felt groggily detached from himself. His mind ached. He wondered how much celestial weaveware East had forced into him. Resentment surged in him.
‘I’m going to wipe his personality structures,’ she continued. ‘He’s just going to be software. No more Fist. No more rebellion.’ Fist tried to howl. It came out as a muffled series of grunts. ‘Just say the word.’
‘Why haven’t you done it already?’
‘Fist’s leased in your name and licensed to you. I need your direct permission.’
Jack sighed. ‘Can you change the licence conditions? Stop him from taking my body?’
Sadness drifted across her face. Jack was reminded of an advert where a woman had been grieved by her inability to find an effective financial adviser. ‘No, Jack. I can’t break that kind of agreement. But I can burn out the thinking part of him.’
‘He’ll still own – this.’ Jack waved down at his body.
‘It will pass out of your control, yes. But there will be nothing of him to guide it. Just – silence.’
Fist kicked out against her. His eyes blinked, rapidly. He was trying to cry, but was too afraid to.
‘I can’t let you do that,’ Jack told her. ‘I thank you for unlocking him. But I can’t let you touch his mind.’
Fist’s eyes opened wide.
‘He tried to attack me while you were still asleep,’ replied East. ‘Then he told me I should let him take your body now.’
‘His software partitioned part of my mind, and made him there. Everything in him comes from me.’
‘He won’t obey you. He’ll try and stop you.’
‘If you kill him, you kill part of me.’
‘You can’t trust him.’
‘I can’t always trust myself.’
East snorted. ‘Let’s see what he has to say.’ She took her hand away from Fist’s mouth. For once, he was silent. He remained limp in her arms. She set him down at her feet. He tottered slightly, as if standing for the first time, then looked up at her. She stared back, arms crossed. He broke and ran to Jack, leaving a dozen spreading silver circles behind him, and threw himself into his arms, his little voice whispering ‘thank you’ over and over again.
‘You’re going to regret this,’ spat East.
The myriad ripples Fist had left behind bounced forwards and backwards between the two altars.
‘Yamata and her patron may be afraid of him,’ replied Jack. ‘But I’m not.’
‘He’s an unpredictable psychopath. Seems to me that they’re the sensible ones,’ East replied dismissively. ‘Oh, and there’s one more thing I have to do for you.’
Jack was cradling Fist in his arms, soothing him. He looked up at her.
‘What’s that?’
East touched the wound on the forehead of Corazon’s weave presence. The policewoman’s body was already losing definition. A lifetime’s worth of data was falling into the Coffin Drives. ‘I ring-fenced the last hours of her life.’ East’s fingers sunk into Corazon’s head. She grasped something and pulled it out – a bullet. A small pistol appeared in her other hand. ‘I’m going to share them with you.’ She slipped the bullet into the pistol. ‘Find her killers.’
Then she straightened her arm, and shot Jack in the head.
Chapter 23
When Jack came round, floating just off the Spine, his mind felt broken. It took him hours longer than it should have done to walk back to his hotel. Fist had to help him, displaying an embarrassed, awkward solicitude as – at various points – he slid into full control of Jack’s body and helped him totter through the streets. It was late, so very few people were around.