She heaved herself up and tried to run, but it was hopeless. Li knew, even if Sharifi didn’t, that Voyt had pulled that first blow, afraid of killing her outright. He hadn’t pushed through the hit, hadn’t put anything but unenhanced muscle into it. He hadn’t needed to.
Voyt did everything Li would have done, and he did it with the precise savagery of hardwired reflexes and ceramsteel-reinforced muscles. He tackled her, driving with his legs so that the force of his impact knocked her up and backward, and when she hit the ground he delivered four swift, carefully calibrated kicks to her ribs. Li felt the jerk and snap of breaking ribs. She didn’t need internal monitors to know that one of those ribs had punctured Sharifi’s lung. Nor did she doubt what was going to happen if Voyt kept delivering this kind of punishment.
But he didn’t. He backed off as soon as he was sure she couldn’t get up, and waited. He did nothing when Sharifi got to her hands and knees. Even when she tried to drag herself up the steps, he waited. Haas caught up to them just as Sharifi collapsed in pain. He looked over Voyt’s shoulder.
“What she said just now,” he told Voyt. “About Nguyen. Ask her what Nguyen needs to know.”
Voyt rolled Sharifi onto her back and took her hand in his. He did it slowly, almost gently, and suddenly Li understood the way Bella had always talked about him. She knew it in her gut, with a guilty certainty that made her want nothing for Sharifi but a quick painless death. Because no matter what else Voyt had done, no matter what uniform he’d worn or what excuses he’d made for himself, he had the heart of a torturer.
He smiled. He had a nice smile; he’d been a good-looking man, she realized. He explained, calmly, the risk of biting through one’s tongue during questioning. He pulled a rag out of his pocket, handed it to Sharifi, showed her how to put it in her mouth. Gave her time to do it. Time to think about it.
Li watched the sickening dance unfold. She felt Sharifi’s pulse slow. She felt her skin go clammy and then dry. She felt her eyes lock on to Voyt’s and begin to follow his every glance as if he were a lover she couldn’t bear to disappoint, as if her very life depended on his happiness.
There’d been a Voyt on Gilead. Lots of Voyts. Li had tried not to be around when they’d done their work. But she’d used the information, God help her. She’d hung on every bloody word of it.
Catherine?
Shame clutched at Li’s heart. Later, Cohen. You don’t need to see this.
This can’t wait, he said.
She was so wrapped up in Sharifi’s fear and pain that she didn’t immediately understand him.
The missile’s almost at the field array.
Then they had to get out. Before the field AI died—before they were trapped in the mine, cut off from Cohen’s backups, dependent on a home-brewed Freetown network that couldn’t support his systems without the field AI’s processing capacity.
I can get you out, he said, plucking the thought from her backbrain as effortlessly as if she’d spoken it aloud. And she read his unspoken thoughts just as easily. He could get her out. But only her.
Then we stay and take our chances, she told him.
And back in the glory hole, the dance went on.
Voyt tied Sharifi’s hands. He spoke to her quietly, reasonably. He pulled out a small knife and set it on her chest, just where she had to crane her neck a little to see it.
Behind Voyt, Bella was a slim, watching shadow. She stepped forward a little as Voyt went to work, and Li saw in her face—in Haas’s face—the guilty fascination that the first sight of hard interrogation always brings, even to people who are used to ordinary violence.
Voyt made Sharifi wait to tell him. His timing was so perfect, so by the book, that Li could predict each groan he would ignore, each desperate plea he would pretend to misunderstand. Just enough of them that when he finally pulled the gag from her mouth and let her speak, she would tell him everything she could possibly think of that might make it be over.
But she didn’t tell. And when Li probed her mind looking for the source of her strength, she found something that made her stomach curclass="underline" the hope—no, the sure and certain belief in a rescue. Sharifi was gambling like she’d always gambled. Gambling that she was more valuable to Nguyen alive than dead. Gambling that she was too famous to die like this. Gambling that she was too important a pawn for Nguyen to lay down willingly, no matter what betrayals she had committed.
She’d always been right before. Her luck, like Li’s own luck, had always held. She had a whole lifetime of being right to back up her faith in her gambler’s instincts. And this shuffle might have broken her way too if not for Bella.
When the missile hit, Li thought it was just the Viper again.
Then she was out of the glory hole, struggling to find her bearings, reorienting herself, unbelievably, in the shadowy clutter of Korchow’s antique shop.
Korchow sat at his desk, head bowed, face in shadow, the orange circles of contact derms pulsing at his temples. Outside, lithe and furtive shadows flitted past the shop front. From the back room, Li heard the muted clink of a metal buckle knocking against a carbon compound rifle stock.
Half a heartbeat later, the shop exploded into motion. The flare of a pulse rifle arced out from behind the back curtain toward Korchow. Camouflage-clad figures burst through the front door—masked paras with UN-issue weapons and blackout tape patched over their unit insignia.
She lost the image. She dialed around frantically, desperate to know what was happening, who had rolled up Korchow’s network. She found the gunman’s feed, on a narrow band UNSC channel, and tapped in to it just as he put out a booted foot and rolled Korchow’s body over.
But the face that turned into the light wasn’t Korchow’s at all.
It was Arkady’s.
She started to ask Cohen if he’d seen it, if he knew who’d sent the gunmen, but before she could get the thought out, they were in real-time trouble.
Korchow’s shop was gone. Cohen was gone. She was alone, truly alone, for the first time in days. And she was buried alive in some past, present, or future of the glory hole that had nothing to do with anything else the worldmind had shown her.
She stepped forward and stopped, unable to see the ground before her.
“Careful.”
Hyacinthe stood behind her. He looked tired and drawn. His face was smudged with coal dust, and the shoelaces looped over his shoulder were broken and knotted.
Li watched him the way she would have watched a tiger.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She stepped forward to stare into the dark eyes.
It was Cohen, after all. She was sure of it. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“For now.”
“What does that mean?”
“The worldmind is running on my network. Using me like it’s used the field AI since the first fire. I don’t think it has any other way to organize its thoughts… not in any way that we would understand.”
“But you don’t have to hold out for long,” Li said. “Nguyen—”
“Nguyen didn’t even try to intercept the missile that blew the field AI,” Cohen said. “She seemed more interested in wrapping up Korchow.”
He caught his breath and shuddered. The image of Hyacinthe flickered ominously.
“What’s wrong?” Li asked.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. But there was a telltale hesitation in his voice. “I’m afraid,” he said at last. “It wants me to hold it up. Hold it together. And… I can’t.”