Through the open door that held a fringe of stray flames seeking out the ceiling in the hallway, he saw that the smoldering apartment had been consumed by the fire. Nothing could have lived through that.
He thought about Larisa and felt hollow, wondering if he'd ever know the truth. The sudden clamor of alarms drove him to action.
Glancing up and down the hall, he saw that most of the dosses had their doors open. A small cluster of people was gathered at either fire escape while the pall of smoke from Larisa's apartment poured out into the corridor. Several of them had spotted Skater and were pointing him out to others.
Embers still clung to his clothing. He ran to the elevators and jammed his fingers between the doors to open them. He knew from the digital reader overhead that the cages were already near ground level.
"Get away from those fragging doors!"
Skater caught the Knight Errant sec-guard in his peripheral vision. The guard wore an armored uniform and was charging down the hall from the crowd around the fire escape route to his left.
Skater spread the elevator doors and looked inside. The cage was a dozen floors below and still moving. The tracked cables rolled with the cage.
"Last chance, brainwipe," the sec-guard yelled. He took a weaver stance with a Narcoject pistol pointed ahead of him. The blunt muzzle centered on Skater.
Without hesitation, Skater threw himself into the elevator shaft. Darts stabbed into the duster, needling their way through, then pinged into the corridor wails and the elevator doors. The darts were proof against most armor and would have nosed their way into his flesh if not for the layer of Kevlar next to his skin. Removing the duster later was going to be a cautious thing.
His leap carried him out into the elevator shaft. He wrapped his arms and boots around the tracked cable and moved with it.
The elevator doors banged shut overhead and filled the shaft with black so impenetrable that Skater's low-light vision couldn't make out any details. An instant later the doors reopened, spilling an elongated rectangle of harsh white light into the shaft. By then. Skater had dropped three floors and was gaining speed.
"He just left fifteen," the Knight "Errant guard called out over the clamor from the hallway. "Elevator three-cee." He aimed the Narcoject pistol and fired a half-dozen rounds.
Skater dropped like a stone, nearly at terminal velocity. With the added speed and the narrow confines of the elevator shaft, the cage had the illusion of coming up at him.
"Not in the cage, damn it," the Knight Errant said. He stood in the open elevator doors nine or ten floors above Skater and reloaded the Narcoject. "On top of the slotting thing."
With less than two floors separating him from the descending cage. Skater tightened his grips again. Pain burned bone-deep into his arms, chest, feet, and knees. He held on as long as he was able, then abandoned the cable less than two meters above the top of the elevator cage. Going limp, he crashed to the hard, irregular metal surface waiting on him.
Before he could regain his breath, a pale ellipse of halogen-powered light fell over him, tearing away some of the protective shadows. He forced himself to his feet and stood swaying as the cage slowed. For the first time he noticed the meter-high numerals painted in red on the gray steel shaft walls next to the doors.
The three went by, and the cage was almost at a stop. Moving to the front of it, he leaned out and caught the lip at the second-floor level. Even with the boosted reflexes kicking in extra adrenaline and adding speed to his nervous system, his endurance was flagging.
He kicked his feet against the wall and pulled himself up even with the second floor. Shoving his fingers into the space between the double doors, he pried them open and tried to ignore the double-imaging taking place in his vision. For a moment, he didn't think he was going to get the doors pushed back to the break-over point. Then they slid apart effortlessly.
Two Knight Errants stood in the doorway with drawn Narcoject pistols.
Skater held onto the lip because he had nowhere else to go. The cage below him blocked any escape to the first floor, and he didn't have the strength to climb back up the cables, much less dodge flying darts.
A steady ssshussh came from overhead. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the sec-man from fifteen sliding down the cable after him, at a sedate pace with his pistol pointed directly at Skater.
He was fragged no matter what he did.
"Looks like you're all crapped out," the grim-jawed Knight Errant ork with sergeant's chevrons said. He kept his pistol aimed at Skater's face.
8
Knight Errant worked the switch with Lone Star in a little over an hour. It wasn't a new record as far as Skater knew, but it was still pretty slotting quick. Knight Errant was merely the private security agency for the neighborhood, and had to bow to Lone Star's official position as police in and around Seattle.
By dawn, he was in an interrogation room in the Lone Star Security building on the comer of First Avenue and Union Street awaiting the arrival of two groundhounds. He'd been deloused in the biotech ward, retina-scanned and fingerprinted, DNA-scanned and cyber-scanned. The only conversation he'd gotten had been a steady stream of abuse. He'd already been tagged as a runner.
He sat in a flimsy metal chair in the interrogation room on the other side of a folding table that held a years long collection of carved graffiti and cigarette burns. One of the tubes in the track lighting overhead flickered constantly, altering the shadows and driving the phalanx of flying insects that had made their way into the room crazy with frustration.
When they'd deloused him, they'd taken his clothing and given him an orange jumper with PROPERTY OF LONE STAR stenciled in black across his shoulders. Word on the street was that some Halloweeners liked to hack off the legs and sleeves and sport the jumpers proudly as gang colors if they'd been wearing them when they'd escaped from jail. There weren't many. Lone Star quietly offered a bounty to rival gangs for any returned jumpers-with or without return of the escaped prisoner, and the transactions were brokered by a third party.
Skater shifted and tried in vain to find a comfortable position. His hands were pulse-cuffed behind him to keep him from using his cyberware, secured to the chair, and ankle chains held his feet half a meter apart. He was barefooted, and the stone floor was cold to the touch.
The pale green walls and ceiling offered no mental diversion, and the room's only window had been covered over in black paint years ago.
Instead of dwelling on what he didn't know and what might happen, Skater went inside himself the way his grandfather had taught him. Andrew Ghost-step had been a hard man, and not one easy to get close to. He'd been a leader in his community, and his daughter's excesses hadn't been easily put aside. Skater hadn't learned until later that when his mother abandoned him to her parents, many of his grandfather's political and personal friendships within the tribe had withered and not recovered.
Skater knew some of the Salish ways, though he didn't practice them, and some of the lore. But Ghost-step's teachings about self-discipline and control had helped him handle his problems then, and many since. There'd once been a hope that he might be a shaman because of some latent abilities, but that had died when no totem spirit had claimed him during his vision quest. He'd been twelve at the time, and the failure had distanced him further from his grandfather.
He let himself relax in his bonds, his muscles coiling naturally to spread out his weight.
The door creaked open, briefly letting in fragments of conversations, die steady slap of passing footsteps, and the stink of cigarette smoke and unwashed flesh.
Skater opened his eyes to slits, taking in the troll-sized boots next to the human-sized ones in front of him. He didn't for a moment believe he was entirely safe inside Lone Star.