–Shell—I didn’t actually dislike him, truth be told. He had a good head on his shoulders and a certain tenacity of spirit. I admire that in a man. It’s no lie to say that he had excellent prospects, and we’re telling the truth when we say his current prospects are most lamentable.
Balot’s feeling of unease started to solidify inside her. John’s words were triggering alarm bells somewhere deep inside her unconscious. Balot tried to put her finger on the reason.
–But our company—we’re just as much victims of Shell as you are. We could just sit here and squabble amongst ourselves, of course, but wouldn’t it be better if we collaborated in prosecuting Shell together? There’s plenty of scope for negotiation here, don’t you think?
“What exactly are you planning to do? Have him imprisoned and transported to a state where they have capital punishment, so that you can have the law do away with him for good?”
John laughed. Balot heard the laugh as if it were echoing in the room right beside her. His future prospects are most lamentable. Someone had said something like this before. Skyscraper.
–We need not trouble ourselves right now about what may or may not happen after Shell goes to prison. The important thing is that there is a certain someone who has been hurt deeply by Shell’s actions—a certain someone who was hoping to marry him and has been damaged as a result of what Shell has done. She’ll be inheriting the mantle of this case—or rather, OctoberCorp will on her behalf.
“Inheriting it…”
–Shell’s case will be closed shortly, and with it he’ll lose the right to have a PI investigate on his behalf. We’ll simply rehire the excellent PI that he currently has in his employ and have him work for us. The contractual negotiations are already in place.
“You’re going to have Boiled kill Shell, is that the idea? You…”
–Well, it looks like the children of Scramble 09 are going to have the opportunity to fight this one out amongst themselves. In the meanwhile, it’ll be our own OctoberCorp that’s wholeheartedly received by the people of Mardock City, just as the Three Magi wanted.
“You dare to invoke the Three Magi? Can you put your founding director on the line to support your cock-and-bull story?”
–She’s a sleeping beauty who won’t be waking up anytime soon. You know as well as I do that she’s brain-dead.
“What I do know is that OctoberCorp is taking advantage of her comatose state to abuse the technology she gave you and make dirty money, under the pretext of ‘what the Three Magi would have wanted.’ You know full well that none of the Three Magi really want such a thing.”
–Is that so? I can tell you that plenty of people in this city would disagree with you—they like being “abused” by our technology, as you put it. We’re just doing our duty as a clan to develop our inheritance—our duty to ensure the progress of OctoberCorp.
“That’s a foul deceit—trying to justify the suffering of innocent victims, hiding behind weasel words.”
–Do you know the origin of what we call the Stairway to Heaven, Mardock?
“What—”
–Mardock was the name of the son of the goddess. He killed his own mother and usurped her role as creator, ruling in her place far more effectively than she ever did. In much the same way, we at OctoberCorp are here to use the technology brought into the world by the Three Magi. The old moral values are obsolete in the face of social progress.
“That’s just a fantasy that you guys conjured up to suit your own ends. There’s no such thing as old or new morals, just morality.”
–I wouldn’t expect you to think anything else—a creature who narrowly escaped destruction only by hiding behind the shield of Mardock Scramble. Your so-called Scramble 09 is nothing more than a smokescreen whipped up by freaks such as you so that you can desperately try to justify your existence to a society who never asked for you in the first place and doesn’t want you now. But has society ever felt that way about OctoberCorp, the OctoberCorp that fulfills so many of its needs? I don’t think so, somehow…
John’s voice was more sonorous than ever, and Balot honed in on the direction from which it came.
“No one who refuses to acknowledge that they themselves are potentially dangerous has any right to lecture others about morality,” Oeufcoque stated boldly. As he did so, Balot jumped into action.
With all her might she threw the glass in her hand toward the mirror at the end of the bar.
The mirror that one of the men’s stray bullets had cracked but not destroyed only a minute ago.
The glass smashed against the mirror, splashing the milk across the surface.
There was an audible gasp on the cell phone. This confirmed Balot’s suspicions, and she moved quickly. She picked up her gun from the counter and unloaded it into the mirror in one swift movement.
It really was a sturdy mirror. It took over ten shots before it gave up the ghost and started to collapse. Finally, though, it started peeling from the wall.
It was a one-way mirror. And the scene behind it was now revealed to all in the bar.
Balot threw her gun down and snarced the left hand of her bodysuit so that she held a brand-new one in her grip.
Gun outthrust, she stood in front of the warped mirror.
A wave of disgust ran over her, one that made every hair on her body stand on end. Before she even had the chance to think about what she was doing, she pulled the trigger, hard. Oeufcoque was there for her, suppressing the bullet, stopping the action inside himself.
“Ah…you seem to have us at a disadvantage, sir. I never imagined for a moment that you would be in such a place. Although I daresay the disadvantage is now all yours…” Unusually for Oeufcoque, his voice dripped with sarcasm. But Oeufcoque was Oeufcoque, after all, and he could only take so much—the whole scene was evidently getting to him. “I can’t say I think much of your hobbies, sir. By the look of it, I can see all sorts of laws being broken…”
Beyond the mirror were five or six boys and girls in varying degrees of undress, all young. Preteen young. In the midst of them was a giant lump of flesh—far bigger than Skyscraper—sprawled on a sofa in a nightgown, holding a phone in his hand and looking at Balot in mute terror.
“This is private property…” the corpulent figure finally managed to spit out. It was the same man they had seen back at the casino—none other than Cleanwill John October.
“Indeed, so we’ll refrain from actually entering unless we’re forced to. We’ll just wait here, keeping you under guard until the police arrive. Cleanwill John October, as a PI and Trustee for this case, I invoke my jurisdiction to arrest you on charges of attempted kidnapping, extortion, and—well, lots of other things.”
Oeufcoque managed to stay levelheaded. The proof of this was that he kept the safety catch on the gun firmly engaged. “Balot, call for police backup.”
Balot shook her head. She wanted to kill them—kill them all, even the young boys and girls with John. She remembered the lecherous smirk on Skyscraper’s face, thought again about what it meant he wanted to do to her, and felt her blood rushing around her body so quickly she thought it might start flowing backward.