With a mouth full of terror and indignation pounding in his temples, Ecko pulled himself upwards until his forearms and elbows rested along the top of the wall.
His shoulders sang relief. He didn’t dare look at his fingertips.
Here, the stone was unbroken; here, he was shielded from the arc of attack. For a moment, he paused, feeling the sleet on his skin, the blood on his hands, the cloak flapping like a dead thing round his legs.
So much for the fucking cavalry, Lugan. The thought was a bitter one, but there was a savage sense of righteousness in doing this by himself.
What had Lugan said, after his interview with the Boss? “You get this right, mate, an’ she’s promised she’ll have Eliza fix you up proper, d’you know what I mean? No expense spared.”
Ecko responded as he’d done that morning, “What’m I, your fuckin’ bike, now? You think can customise me any which way? You fuckin’ hypocrite! You leave my cyberware alone an’ you stay the hell outta my head.”
There was motion. A door, booted feet. A clipped, military voice.
Salva.
Holding his breath, he watched.
Salva was coldly efficient, covering the shattered remains of wall and roof garden. Ecko didn’t need oculars to clock the precision in the way she scanned the area, ducked back, paused, and moved to the next checkpoint.
It’d be about sixty seconds before that checkpoint was slap-bang in his face. If he was gonna pull this off, he needed to move. Like, now.
He let the wind swing his body sideways, got one foot on the top of the wall. Not thinking about the drop below him – thinking about the ’bot, the ’bot – he rolled silently over the top and down onto the gravel.
The wind suddenly cut off as the stonework shielded him, his ears sang with cold. He stayed still, waiting, watching.
As Salva moved to cover the trashed remnants of the roof garden, Ecko realised that she was alone – her goons had not come with her.
At last, the Bogeyman’s luck was with him; he might just fucking do this after all.
Hope and adrenaline flooded his system.
Mom had built Ecko to be many things – stealther, spy, thief, tech – but her vision and genius had not stopped with reconnaissance and Bogeyman trickery. He had also been constructed to excel at something else.
Assassination.
Guilt, fear, compassion; these had little meaning against the adrenal boosting that supercharged his coordination and reflexes, against the ocular targeting that cross-haired the most elusive objective. His mottle-skin was spider-silk woven, lighter and tougher than Kevlar; biospheres in his bloodstream doubled his healing rate and fought infection. Increased capillarisation improved his body’s ability to transport and process oxygen. He was as strong, as tough, as fit as the characters he’d grown up with.
As Salva came closer, so Ecko went from joker to combat machine.
He had one shot at this.
The first kick hit her knee and snapped her leg. The same foot flashed again, connecting with the side of her head as she fell. Doctor Grey’s elite fighter never knew what’d hit her – she was dead before she hit the gravel.
Her rifle was in Ecko’s hands.
But the ’bot was moving.
He heard the high-pitched whine of the barrels, saw the thing turn into his field of vision. He raised the rifle butt to his shoulder; his targeters cross-haired the sensor array in its head. With a snarl of defiance, he squeezed the trigger to blow it away.
He missed.
His arms were shaking too badly. Overstrained, he wasn’t strong enough to hold the weapon and it climbed, rounds flying high and wide of his target.
In the split second he had before the tin can opened fire, Ecko knew he was screwed.
There was no cover up here; nowhere to go. Turbocharged or not, he wasn’t a fucking action-movie hero able to dodge short-range rifle suppression with no cover.
He did the only thing he could do. He went over the edge.
And fell down, down into the screaming and the dark.
3: THE WANDERER
THE WANDERER, ROVIARATH
Ecko drifted through layers of consciousness.
“...Why he even brought it inside.” The speaker was young, female. His head was clouded with fug; as the voice hazed into focus, he groped for a name. “We’ve got enough strays: new cook, new bar staff. Oh come on, mush, I’m never inhospitable...”
“The Bard said he knew what it was.” The second voice was male, clear and deep. Soft footsteps moved somewhere behind where Ecko lay.
Behind him...? Where...?
He couldn’t think. His limbs and head felt heavy: he’d been sleeping very deeply. The last thing he remembered...
The roof garden. Bloody handprints across the shattered wall. Insanity screaming in muscle and weather.
Falling.
Stupidly, his first solid thought was that Lugan never reached him in time.
They must’ve scraped him off the tarmac like so much roadkill. In the thick, sheltered blanket of awakening, he wondered: why was there no pain?
“Anyway, we can’t leave it up here.” The woman was brisk, authoritative. “I don’t even know what it is – we can’t have it running around, it’ll scare the customers.”
“This is Roviarath,” the man answered her. “Their only concern would be what they could trade it for.”
She giggled.
No pain... Ecko tried to focus on that realisation. No pain. Only his hands... Gradually, pushing back the smothering warmth, he allowed his awareness to expand. He wasn’t restrained, though his webbing and cloak had gone. His cheek rested upon something supple, cool to his skin. He had no injuries. A brief, subvisual check showed all systems normal, although the flamethrower tanks in his chest weren’t full. His memories were washing up slowly, garbage on the riverbank – Doctor Grey with his half a reefer, a scanner, blood red through the rain...
In the bottom corner of his field of vision, his digital time readout was jittery: he’d no clue how long he’d been out.
Even Grey wouldn’t’ve seen anything like Ecko before. Dimly he wondered: maybe they were gonna do experiments on him?
Humour flickered. Heh... would they be in for a surprise.
He remained still, his breathing unchanged. The air was clean – but there was no hum of purifiers. He could hear a party – but there was no music. More fragments floated belly-up to the surface – the woman, burning on the bed; Lugan saying, “You get in, you get out. No mess.”
Yeah, right. Whatcha gonna do about it now, biker-boy?
The female voice tutted. “Look, do you think it’s all right to leave it? I need you downstairs, we’re in the wrong part of the city here.” She walked round where Ecko lay, her footsteps soft, indicating carpets or rugs. “Roviarath can be difficult – c’mon, Sera.”
Ecko waited for a third voice but the man answered, “It seems quiet for the moment... yet it seems you are not giving me the choice.”
Sarah? A guy called “Sarah”, for chrissakes? Ecko tried to pull his concentration together. What was downstairs? And where was “Rovi-ar-ath”?
Were Grey’s goons talking like this when they’d passed him on the stairwell?
He heard a door open.
The sound was two, maybe three metres away. Though still unseen, the room took on shape and size. For a moment, the noise of the party became louder.
Then long, easy bootsteps crossed towards him.
A sudden, peculiar tension brought Ecko fully awake. He lay motionless, stilled by incomprehension. Who...?