Still nothing. I stared down, at the faces, wondering if I’d started speaking by mistake in some foreign language. Nobody moved, there was no scandalized buzz, no buzz of any kind. This didn’t seem to mean anything to anyone.
Bewildered, I let go of Maxen and leaned on the lectern. I opened my mouth to speak once more, but nothing came except this, with a dawning white light in my head.
“And five years ago, he had my wife and daughter killed.”
Only then had I realized, and I found that after the realization came, I didn’t have anything else to say.
“Nobody gives a shit, Jack,” said a voice, and I turned to see where it had come from. There, sitting on the end of the sixth row, was Johnny Vinaldi. “Henna, your spares, anyone below the hundreds—to these guys, they’re all just disposables.”
This time there was a reaction from the congregation, although I don’t think any of them could have been as surprised as me. Vinaldi stood up and shook his head at me. “Sure, Maxen here cared a little bit about Suej. After all, she was his daughter’s spare. That’s why he was so keen to get her back, and the real Suej died this morning, Jack, so looks like you got tit for tat. Apart from that, no one here gives a flying fuck. They didn’t come here to mourn. They came here to worship this guy.”
I suddenly understood why Maxen had never visited my Farm in the night: because his own daughter’s spare was there, and that would have seemed wrong to him; and in that moment I realized how many rooms there must be in his head, how tiny and how tightly locked.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Vinaldi quietly, light-headed with a sense of unreality. I knew only the sound of gunshots could make it seem real.
Vinaldi grinned humorlessly. “What you should have been doing,” he replied, and then he raised his hand and shot Arlond Maxen in the face.
He spun round on his axis, still upright, and before the body was on the ground, Vinaldi had emptied his clip into it. Maxen’s glasses skittered across the floor in the silence, and his eyes stared nakedly up into nothing.
The room exploded all around me into flares and tear gas. Out of the shadows ran six of Vinaldi’s men, spraying machine-gun fire all around them, leaving behind the bodies of the guards they’d already killed, the guards who should have been parking bullets in Vinaldi and me. They were aiming now for the remaining Maxen security men, and got most of them, but Maxen’s men weren’t the only people who fell. Maybe it wasn’t deliberate, but people still died, falling to the ground like trees in a forest which had never seen violence, surrounded by the ghostly faces of those who would be left behind. I knew that at least some of them would remember the day when the jungle rose up and came to find them where they lived, but I also knew how little difference it would make.
Vinaldi was surrounded by his men and swept away by their human shield, his mission accomplished. The room flickered with orange light, thick with smoke. I reeled into the chaos, staggering through screams and blood and fire.
Dazed by the fact I was still alive, I wandered toward the thickest part of the crowd, unconsciously seeking cover in the parts where people were screaming loudest and panicked into blindness. I walked slowly through the forest of candles, surrounded by people having the worst day of their lives, but for me it was as if they were barely there. It felt like the whole house was burning down, as if every window was being flung open. I saw Golson in the crowd, but he didn’t see me. He was too busy comforting one of the other guests, who happened to be young and attractive. Others ran past me, their clothes torn or on fire. I saw a costSlot rapidly counting down through the dollars as the garment it was attached to was consumed by flames.
By the time I made it into the anteroom, a stream of people was already ahead of me, sprinting toward the exit. I became part of the crowd again as it surged like a river in flood down the massive staircase to the entrance to the Maxens’ property on the 200th floor. It didn’t look like many people were sticking around for the reception.
Instead of making for the xPress with the others, I slipped out of the current and backtracked along the corridor to an emergency staircase, which I knew must run from a point a couple of hundred yards away. I didn’t think anyone else would know where it was—they don’t get a lot of practice at emergencies above the 200th floor. I felt untouchable, and it seemed I was, because no one got in my face. A little way down the corridor I passed Louella Richardson’s mother, standing by herself. Her hands were shaking but her face looked clear. She was staring straight ahead but didn’t seem to recognize me.
The staircase door was unguarded, presumably because all of Maxen’s men who were still breathing were otherwise engaged in the chaos upstairs. When I reached it I turned and looked back the way I’d come. At the far end I could see the hurtling mass of people, hear the shouts. A smear of faces. It was all taking place in an odd land far away.
Then I opened the door and a hand immediately reached out and pulled me through.
“How did you get up here?” I asked, though I’d lost most of my capacity to be surprised. Howie stood in front of me in the darkened stairwell, armed to the teeth and pumped up in a way I’d never seen in him before.
“Up the stairs,” he said. “Sort of.” He should have looked absurd, perhaps, with spiked hair at forty and his considerable weight wrapped round with guns, but he didn’t. He looked pretty formidable.
“How did you know I’d come this way?”
“I didn’t. There’s guys of ours on all the exits looking for you. Just dumb luck you ran into me.”
“You knew this was going down?”
“Yeah. Vinaldi talked to me last night. I’m going to be working a little more closely with him from now on.”
“Congratulations,” I said, vaguely. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would have fucked it up, and found some way of getting yourself killed in the process. Look,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I’m not saying I necessarily think this was a great thing to do. But I work for Vinaldi. And something else. This was the only way I could think of it going down with you standing a chance of coming out alive. You were going to try to whack Maxen by yourself. They would have cut you in half. Instead, Vinaldi did it, and you’re still walking around.”
His face was dark, and I knew there was something else on his mind.
“But?” I said.
“But Yhandim and the others are going to come for you now, and you alone, Jack. They don’t work for Maxen anymore, and they hate you more than they hate Johnny. Those guys have been comrades for nearly twenty years. You killed three of them, and now the rest can’t get back into The Gap. They’ve got a hard-on for you like you won’t believe.”
I knew what was coming. Howie winced at what he had to say. “You got to run, Jack. You got to get the fuck out of New Richmond and maybe never come back.”
We heard a shout out in the corridor then, about fifty yards away. I reached out and shook Howie’s hand.
“Thanks,” I said, wishing there was some proper way of saying good bye.
Howie said it. “Get the fuck out of here.”
I ran.
I clattered down three flights, legs pumping like a wind-up toy, then fell out of a door onto 197. Stood there gasping for a moment, trying to work out where to go next. The nearest xPress was the obvious answer, but I had to figure that if Yhandim was already on the case, that’s the first place they’d head for.