“Of course,” Bonnie says. “It’s the least we can do.”
No, the least we could do would be to get the fuck out, Huw thinks. He glares at Bonnie, who prods him in the belly with a fingertip.
“But of course, we could also use some help of our own—”
“Quid pro quo?” the Bishop says, its quavering voice bemused now, and that irritates Huw ferociously: the law is at the door, and the Bishop thinks it’s all a tremendous lark?
“Not at all, Your Grace. We came to beg your indulgence long before we knew that there was a favor we could do for you. We need your assistance getting shut of this blighted wasteland. Transport to the coast, and an airship or a ballistic or something that can get us back to the civilized world.”
“And I need to shut down my geotracker,” Huw says, wondering where it has been implanted. Somewhere painful, Sam had told him.
“Yes, you certainly do,” the Bishop says. “You’ll find an escape-line clipped to the balcony out the third door on the right, along with some baskets. Pack the ministers in the baskets, tie them down—don’t mind if they squirm, it’s in their nature—clip the baskets to the line and toss them out the window. I’m making arrangements now for someone to catch them on the other end. If you do this small favor for me, I will, oh, I don’t know.” The Bishop idly strokes their scalps and tickles their earlobes. “Yes, that’s it. There’s a safe house on the coast, a farm where my people have been making preparations for a much more reasonable approach to dealing with the ants than godvomit and nukes. They will be delighted to shelter you for as long as it takes you to make contact with your people and get off the continent. Such a shame to see you go.” It quickly gives Bonnie directions, and Bonnie recites them back with mnemonic perfection.
There’s a distant crash that Huw feels through the soles of his bare feet. “Clothes?” he asks.
“Oh, yes, I suppose, by all means, if you must,” the Bishop says. “Cloakroom’s behind the last door on the right. A lost and found for supplicants who’ve left a little something behind in their blissful state as they left our place of worship. I’m sure we’ll have something in your size, even if it’s only OshKosh B’Gosh.”
“Fanfuckingtastic,” Huw says breathlessly as he makes a line for the door. But Bonnie catches him by the elbow, intent on one last question.
“How many are we supposed to evacuate? I don’t want to miss anyone.” There’s another thunderous crash, this one from closer by.
The Bishop’s eyes roll back into its head, then flip down. “A dozen on the premises, not counting the ones that were on the front door. It seems they’ve been liquidated already.”
“Shit. What’ll we—” Huw dithers for a moment but Bonnie is already heading for the cloakroom door.
“Over here!” She thrusts a bundle of clothing at him. “Quick. Let’s go get the ministers—”
Huw pauses while balanced on one leg, the other thrust down one limb of a pair of denim overalls. “Do we have to?” he asks.
“Yes, we fucking do.”
He fumbles with the fasteners on the overalls’ bib and kicks his feet free of the overlong denim legs, reaching out a hand to steady himself on a piece of heavy kitchen equipment—they’ve found their way to the food-prep area where robots build slop, form it, heat it, season it, and dispense it. He realizes that he’s steadying himself on an open-sided microwave heating platform. He thinks of the idiot beacon and where it must be, gives his left ass cheek a good squeeze to make sure, then lies himself down on the chilly surface of the heater. It’s awkward—none of the spaces are really designed for human ingress—but he just manages it.
“Bonnie, turn this thing on, okay?”
She is about to bark something angry, then she catches herself, half smiles at the ridiculous tableau he’s made, and says, “You want me to cook your ass?”
“Just until I start screaming, okay? The bug should start arcing within a few seconds, long before I get too badly cooked.” She looks ready to argue, but he keeps talking over her. “Look, freethinkers have been nuking their minder bugs for decades. I won’t be the first man who’s irradiated himself to get rid of a pesky implant.”
The pain is worse than anything he’d experienced before he met Bonnie and Adrian and allowed them both to drag him into a series of ever-more-painful experiences. Still, even on the new, post-adventure scale of owies, this is a serious pain in the ass. It starts as a horrible stinging, then a burning, and then a sharp, percussive zap that makes him frog-kick and thrash his head so hard, it feels like he’ll snap his neck.
Mildly, Bonnie says, “Was that it, then?”
“Turn. It. Off,” he says through clenched teeth.
The pain doesn’t stop, but it recedes some, and he gets to his feet and tenderly holds his ass.
Bonnie helps him hobble along. “Right, get that jacket fastened: we are going to hit the garage just as soon as we’ve defenestrated all the perverts.” She shrugs backwards into an upper-body assembly that looks like something left behind by a SWAT team. “C’mon.”
Huw follows her back next door, to find a bunch of blissed-out religionists lazily osculating one another on a row of futons. “Okay!” yells Bonnie. “It’s evacuation time! Huw, get the goddamn window open and hook up the baskets.” She turns back to the coterie of ministers, some of whom are yawning and looking at her in evident mild annoyance. “The bad guys are coming through the back passage and you guys are going down right now!”
“Eh, right.” Huw finds a stack of baby blue plastic baskets dangling from a monofilament line right outside the window. “C’mon ...”
Between the two of them, they haul the dazed and tasped worshippers into baskets and drop them down the line. It all takes far too long, and by the time the last one is hooked up, Huw is in a frenzy of agitation, desperate to be out of the building. There are indistinct thuds and stamping noises below them, and an odd whine of machinery from the hall outside. “What’s going on now?” he says. “How do we get out of here?”
“We wait.” Bonnie gives the last basket a shove and turns to face him, panting. “The corridors and rooms in this place, the Bishop ’s got them rigged up to reconfigure like a maze. This whole sector should be walled off; you can’t find it unless you can see through walls.”
A loud echoing crash from the room next door makes Huw wince. “What if they’ve got teraherz radar goggles?” he asks.
“What if—oh norks.” Bonnie looks appalled. “Quick, grab my epaulettes and hang on, we’re going down the wire!” She steps toward him, reaches around his body, and grabs the monofilament with what look to Huw like black opera gloves. There’s a terminal thud from the doorway behind her that rattles the walls, and then Huw is clinging on for dear life as they drop. A thin plume of evil-smelling black smoke trails from her spidersilk gloves as they descend. “Ow.” Huw can barely hear her moan, and to tell the truth, he’s more concerned with the state of his own stomach, gelid with terror as they drop past two, three rows of windows.
The ground comes up and smacks him across the ankles and he lets go of Bonnie. They fall apart and as he falls he sees a delivery van pulling away, the tailgate jammed shut around a blue basket. “Thanks a million, bastards,” Bonnie says, picking herself up. “Think they could have waited?”
“No,” Huw says, looking past her. “Listen, the Inquisition are round the front, and they’ll be after us any second—”
She grabs his wrist. “Come on, then!” She hauls off and drags him the length of the filthy alleyway beneath a row of rusting fire escapes.