Cautiously, Matilda takes the key from the motel owner’s hand. She returns to James’ side, and they both make their way to the stairs. It’s only when they reach the first step that the owner calls out again.
“And, Taciturn – you’re responsible for the Scry.”
Matilda’s hands instinctively reach for her blades, but James reacts quickly to stop her, fixing her gaze with his own. “As you say, Hermit,” he answers, casting a glance over his shoulder. “No innocents will be harmed tonight.”
An unnatural smirk breaks through the folds of the old man’s wrinkled face and unkempt beard. He shakes his head.
“There are no innocents, Taciturn. All are guilty of something.”
The Hermit’s other hand reaches up from behind the counter and James tightens his grip on Matilda. He can feel the muscles of her body tensing, but the Hermit’s hand rises in the form of the mano pantea.
“Death comes for all in this town, Taciturn. For both those who deserve it and for those who unknowingly await escape.” The Hermit lowers his hand, “I will remember you.”
The mercenary releases his grip on the Scry, exhales, and concludes the ritual phrase of the Hermits.
“As I do remember you, Hermit.”
A run-in with a Hermit is no small matter, and the experience has shaken James’ mind nearer to wakefulness. Side by side, he and Matilda make their way up the stairs.
Chapter 8: “The Hunt”
The instant the door closes behind them, Matilda blurts what both of them are thinking.
“How the hell does he know I’m a Scry? I thought the whole point of Stephen’s work was to hide me!”
James slowly paces across the room’s worn carpet. “I… I don’t know. Hermits are strange people. Nobody really understands anything about them. He must have seen something else in you. I mean, the disguises worked on the train, didn’t they?”
Matilda throws her hands up in irritation. “How the hell am I supposed to know? More importantly, how can we trust that old man not to rat us out? I mean, right now, how do we know he isn’t—”
Taciturn’s hand is flexing open and closed.
“He isn’t. Probably. Hermits’ whole philosophy revolves around them not interfering with others. They’re too preoccupied with holding onto their own past.” His words don’t sound as comforting as they’re supposed to, even to himself. He sits on the edge of one of the beds. It groans under his weight.
All at once, it’s as if the sound brings the whole of the room’s squalor to their keen attention. They’re surrounded by dilapidated walls with chipped paint, stained and tattered curtains, a cracked data terminal, and a bathroom that looks unsavory at the most generous assessment. Matilda sighs heavily and sits down on the other bed. It too has something to say about the state of their accommodations.
“I don’t trust the guy. I don’t like the way he looked at me. Which means we need to move fast. I’ve been thinking about it. Won’t we need access codes to get into Donovan’s Tower?”
James doesn’t answer. He stares dully at, and then distantly through, the cracked glass of the data terminal’s reflective surface. He too has been thinking about how they’ll get into the Tower.
“I understand.”
Matilda persists, “I mean, it’s not like we can just walk up the front gate and say ‘Hey, just two dudes here to see the boss man’…”
She fidgets at his continued silence. “We’re going to need… special access, y’know? Like, something that can get us through a side entrance or something. Like… something a security guard would have.”
Taciturn’s reflection stares back at him. Knowing where this is headed. Not any happier about it.
“Yes,” he says.
Neither of them speaks for what seems like a very long time as the fading daylight beyond the single grimy window makes its way through the moth-eaten curtains. The disheartened reflection in the fractured terminal-glass goes through the motions of lighting a cigarette.
It is the Scry who breaks the prolonged silence.
“I mean, I’m just saying. You promised the guy downstairs that nobody is going to die tonight.”
James exhales a stream of smoke. “I said no innocents were going to die.” The Taciturn in the cracked terminal-glass meets his gaze with level, mute judgment. “I think we’re both clear enough on what we need to do.”
Matilda all but springs off the bed. She will be hunting tonight. The Scry instinct that’s been straining at its chains fairly writhes in anticipation. In a single fluid motion, Matilda scoops up her gear. Shaking out her hair, she opens the door and strides out into the corridor, leaving a pensive Taciturn staring silently at his own reflection.
Matilda makes her resolute, solitary way through the gathering bustle and din of the city’s approaching night. Her lips are slightly parted, her movements smooth and graceful, her eyes slightly narrowed. To a passerby, she might well look drugged, and it’s not too far from the truth. Now that she’s on the hunt, her Scry faculties have taken the wheel, and she is as much along for the ride as in charge of it.
First, she connects herself to a plane of the Cyberside accessible only to her kind. Even as she moves with, through and athwart the street-throngs of Babylon, Matilda sees the world with a heightened perception the multitudes around her could hardly begin to comprehend. People move past her as blurs of vectored, logged data-packets, but anything she focuses on resolves in absolute clarity. Each individual’s coding emanates an exclusive signature, the Cyberside analog of a given prey’s unique scent, and Matilda roams the streets until she finds one of the sort she’s looking for. It doesn’t take her long to zero in on one, and it leads her directly to the kind of establishment she imagined from the start. A perverse, rebellious part of her hopes that it doesn’t stay this easy.
Despite the earliness of the hour, a considerable line has already formed at the club, eager patrons awaiting the arbitrary, aesthetic judgment of the gate-keeping bouncers. Matilda makes her way to the front, where she is granted immediate entrance into the dimly-lit club – to a chorus of objections by the primped and perfumed women in line, not to mention no insignificant number of appreciative looks from certain of the males in waiting. She makes her way into the strobelit, darkened clamor of the club.
As always, when she is close to her goal, another ability triggers inside her. Her hunger allows her to see events a few minutes ahead. Changing, transforming into the present, for the sake of the future that has already happened. She sees fragments of thoughts, clouds of desires, colors of the moods of those around her. Through the tangling mess of bodies and urges, she sees him. The one who is destined to become a part of her memories, her personal archive of information. He will disappear from the world of the Cyberside, leaving her to keep all what he once was. To be stored in her small but valuable treasure-memory, which will give her the means to live.
The Scry moves to the bar, where her target sits, staring at a half-empty glass of whiskey. The man has long changed out of his Tower uniform, of course, but she nevertheless sees its imprint well enough, still on him. A sense of pride and proxy authority flows from it, not quite masking deeper accretions of pain, inadequacy, and general, free-floating discontentment.
As Matilda studies her prey from her end of the bar, a bartender appears in her peripheral vision and asks her what she’d like to drink. She orders a cosmopolitan. While waiting for her drink, she notices her target noticing her, and she returns the favor. When her drink arrives, she’s finally ready to start her game. She takes half the over-cranberried concoction at a single slug and makes certain that the target registers her level gaze before she makes her way over to him.