For a few moments, I just sat there. Gatz was the one person I was pretty sure didn’t want to hurt me. He maybe didn’t care much if I lived, but he wasn’t actively pursuing my death, either, and as sad as that was, it was the best I could do. We sat there side by side, both dirty, disheveled, and tired. We came from the same place. I felt comfortable next to him.
My eyes slid to the right, and Marilyn Harper was staring at me, eyes watery, drool pooling under her mouth from the ruthless gag. I looked away. I was amazed at how complicated everything had become. It had only been a few days. And amazingly, it would probably all be over, one way or another, in a few more.
Footsteps behind me, and I turned to find Milton and Tanner, looking clean but just as leathery.
“Come on, then,” Milton snapped.
“The surgery’s open. No hard feelings, brother.” Tanner grinned.
“Can’t have you goin’ septic on us, can we?”
I blinked. “What?”
They looked at each other simultaneously, and my head ached from watching them. “Your cheek, asshole,” Milton said. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
I sat on the crate we used as a table in the corroded kitchen while Milton and Tanner fussed over me. One of the Droids sat silently between them, bearing our meager medical supplies. When Tanner lifted a thick needle attached to coarse black thread, my hand whipped up and grabbed her wrist.
“You are not pulling that fucking cable through my tortured flesh, right?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be a baby, sonny. You see any plastic skin grafts here? You see any laser scalpels? A Med Droid? We have,” she held the needle and thread in front of my nose, “good old-fashioned needle and thread.”
Milton chuckled. “You’ll never be pretty again, Cates,” she said. “But you’ll heal. We were running on the streets when you were just bad news on the horizon. I’ve stitched up more people and set more bones than you could count.”
I looked at her closely, the faint lines around her eyes and mouth, the lean, taut look of her. “Tell me, how’d you manage to retire?”
She laughed. “You mean, retire alive?”
I shrugged.
“It’s like anything else in this fucking world. We got lucky.”
I grimaced as her sister leaned in and began shoving the needle through the flaps of my wound. It hurt so intensely that moments after she started I was numb. I ground my teeth as the sisters stared at me, Tanner’s nose still red and angry.
“What?” I grunted.
Milton folded her arms across her chest as Tanner sewed me back together. I realized with a start that as her sister leaned in and out, working on me, she moved just a bit forward and back, in rhythm. “We’re here, Cates. We’re at each other’s throats and getting bullets thrown our way. And I have yet to hear a plan from you for getting into this fucking place.”
I looked at her and then down at my hands, dirty and covered in scabs, some of which had been torn off and leaked blood wearily. “I’ve got an idea.”
Tanner snorted. “Glory be.”
“The bad news is, it isn’t something Kieth can wiggle his nose at and make happen with geek power and a few batteries.”
Tanner snorted again. “So there’s-”
“-good news?” Milton finished.
I paused for a second or two. “Not really.”
Tanner paused, the needle buried in my flesh and burning. “Do tell, mistuh boss.”
I sighed. “Well, to start with, we’re going to need some stuff.”
XXIV
MAKING EVERYONE SEEM FADED AND WATERY
I wasn’t used to wearing dark glasses; anything that reduced a Gunner’s vision was a bad idea. But with my face now linked to Harper’s it was a necessary precaution. Everything felt wrong: I was wearing someone else’s clothes, someone else’s sunglasses, in someone else’s city. All day, I watched every Vid we passed, looking for my face, and saw eyes on me everywhere.
“Calm down,” Canny Orel said quietly, as we climbed over a huge shattered column that had toppled over and crashed into a building, making a show of studying the list I had laboriously written out for us as if climbing over rubble required just a tiny amount of his amazing brain. “You’re like a fucking Paranoia Broadcaster. I’m getting itchy just standing next to you.” He squinted at the list. “Who the fuck came up with this? What the hell are we going to do with two digital video cameras?” He glanced at Gatz on the other side of me. “We prerecording our confessions to avoid the standard SSF beating?”
Gatz didn’t say anything. After a moment Orel leaned in close to me.
“I have a strong urge to pinch your friend, just to make sure he still has a pulse.”
“Be careful,” I replied easily. “He’s getting better every day. One of these days he’ll pop a vessel in your brain from across the room.”
Orel chuckled. “Your bunch is entertaining, Cates, I’ll give you that.” He sighed, scratching behind his ear. “This is a lunatic’s laundry list. You’re not going to give me a hint?”
I shook my head. “Need-to-know basis, Mr. Orel.”
He squinted down at the list again. “You’re not going to tell me what we need,” he paused, licking a finger, “tetrodotoxin for? Not to mention what the fuck it is and where we’re going to get it.”
We ended up on a long wooden bench on the improbably named Pudding Lane that appeared to have been launched from a burned-out church during one set of riots or another. The bench was surprisingly unscathed, just sitting on the side of the street, remaining undisturbed by one of those twists of human nature that gave me little bursts of hope from time to time. The sun shone down weakly, making everyone seem faded and watery.
“It’s a neurotoxin,” Gatz said, his voice scratched and acid-pocked.
Orel raised an eyebrow and looked from Gatz to me. “Why, Cates, I swear I can’t see your lips move or your hand up his ass. All right. We’re shopping for a neurotoxin, digital video equipment, and, still, a gun for Mr. Cates. Meanwhile, the other members of Team Cates are out on their own mysterious shopping excursions, leaving that cocksucking Kieth in sole possession of the Monk. I’m beginning to think I should have asked for some collateral.”
“Too late,” I grunted. “Anyway, here’s our man.”
Jerry Materiel had been watching us from a second-floor window across the street for some time. I’d let him have his recon; hell, I’d be nervous, too. Man disappears in the middle of a transaction, turns out to be the most famous crook in the System at the moment, then contacts you out of the blue to make another large transaction, then shows up with a strange face. I’d sit tight a while, too, see if anything shook free. I noted Materiel’s boys from the Dole Line stationed here and there on the street, trying to look casual and uninterested. Crowds of people wandered by, aimless and cranky, and if I hadn’t seen Materiel’s boys before they might’ve blended in.
That was okay, too. I liked a man who took precautions, and anyone who could afford retainers was obviously doing well.
Jerry didn’t emerge from the building he’d been watching from; I smiled in approval as he walked out of the one next door, smiling, looking for all the world like a man without enemies walking free and easy in the weak sun, ready to do business.
“Mr. Cates,” he said, proffering a nondescript paper bag. “You absented yersef before I coul’ deliver the deliverables, including a set o’ blues I think you’ll find intrestin’.”
I took the bag cautiously and found, to my surprise, my lost gun order gleaming in its depths, along with a tattered set of schematics-paper, pre-Unification, looking ancient and delicate. Kieth could digitize them in no time. While I made a show of inspecting its contents, Jerry inspected Canny, trying to decide if we were still safe to deal with. Canny beamed back at him, pleased to be a disconcerting mystery.