“Cohen—”
“It’s taking me apart in order to put itself together. It’s doing what it did to Sharifi, to your father, to all the people who died down here. Except that it figured out with the field AI that an AI is much, much better for what it needs. That if it goes through an AI, it can get into streamspace, understand it, use it.” He was talking fast now, the words rushing and tumbling. “You need to go to ALEF, Catherine. You’re taken care of. I’ve made sure of that. It’s all yours. Everything. You’ll lose some networks. Some won’t accept you, won’t accept any human. Don’t worry about it. You’ll hold on to enough to make it all work. The ALEF contact is—”
“Stop it! You’ll go yourself.”
“But if something happens—”
“Nothing will happen!”
He put a hand up to touch her face, but she jerked away, her throat tight with panic. “Don’t you sacrifice yourself for me and leave me to live with it. I won’t let you. And I’ll hate you for it.”
“Don’t say that, Catherine.”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to say?” she shouted.
I want you to say you love me.
He took a step toward her, and this time she didn’t back away.
“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink somewhere when this is all over and say it.”
“Say it now,” he whispered. “Just in case.”
She said it. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t even get the words out without stuttering. But she said it.
Then he set a hand on her hip, and she stepped into his arms, and it was all so, so simple. Something shivered and let go at his touch, something she’d never even known she was holding on to. And with a jerk of recognition, she found that dark unmapped territory in her own heart that was his already—shaped to him, made for him, the exact width and breadth and depth of him.
This time there was no chasing, no hiding. Just everything they wanted spilling through their hands and running away like water.
“We’re getting the truth now, I think,” Voyt said. His voice was level, but there was a brightness, a loose-limbed alertness to him that turned Li’s stomach to acid.
Sharifi was still sprawled across the steps. Li could feel the cold stone biting into her back, setting shattered ribs grinding. She blinked, and a razor’s edge of agony shot through her now-blind right eye. God, what had they done to her?
“Is she dying?” Haas asked. Li recognized the doubting hitch in his voice: a civilian’s cautious uncertainty about just what kind and what degree of violence a human body can tolerate.
“I know my business,” Voyt said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Your recorder off?”
Voyt twitched irritably. “I’m not a complete fool.”
“Good.” Haas had been drawing closer as they spoke. Now he stretched Bella’s slender hand toward the Viper, “Give me that.”
Voyt hesitated, then handed it to him.
Haas stepped around Voyt and pressed the tongue of the weapon against Sharifi’s head.
“Careful,” Voyt said. He spoke in the even, artificially calm voice of a soldier watching a civilian do something stupid with a gun and not wanting to scare him into making a big mistake out of a little one.
“Oh, I will be,” Haas said.
Voyt relaxed slightly. But Li could see, through Sharifi’s single good eye, what Voyt couldn’t. She could see the look on Haas’s face.
“Did you think I didn’t know?” he asked Sharifi. “Did you think I’d just stand back and let you fuck her?”
But Sharifi didn’t hear him.
All she heard was Bella’s voice. All she saw was a beloved face bending over her. All she felt was Bella’s hand touching her, taking the pain away.
She reached out with one hand, a gesture that was no more than a breath, a tremor. Li was the only one who heard the soft snick of the trigger.
As Sharifi died something gave in the rock above them, booming and cracking. A hot blast of air pulsed down the gangway, hitting hard enough to knock Bella to her knees.
“Run!” Voyt yelled, but his voice was lost in the roar of falling rock.
It’s going to kill them, Cohen said.
She heard Voyt scream and fall, but the sound seemed to come from far, far away. She saw Haas pass a hand over Bella’s brow. She felt him slip off the shunt just in time, just the way he must have planned it. Then the last barrier broke, and the worldmind was running free, unfettered, ripping through Voyt, through Bella, through Li and Cohen like wildfire sweeping through dry grass.
For one wild, surreal moment she saw it all. The dark cavern around her. The flesh and ceramsteel mélange inside her own ringing skull. The blazing silicon vistas of Cohen’s networks. The antique shop, smelling of tea and sandalwood. Arkady’s unconscious figure sprawled among the sleek curves of the generation-ship artifacts. And above, around, and through all of it, the endless weight and darkness, the million voices of the worldmind.
The stones were singing.
In the end Cohen, or whatever was left of him, cut her out of the link. She begged, in that last moment, not even sure he could hear her. She cursed him, cursed herself, Korchow, Nguyen, the whole killing planet.
Then she was alone in the darkness, and there was nothing left of Cohen but the hole inside her where he should have been.
The Anaconda Strike: 9.11.48.
Adry breeze blew across her face, winding from nowhere to nowhere like a desert river.
Her internals were shattered. Ghosts, fragments. She felt the abuse her body had taken through the long hours in the pit. And behind it, worse than the physical pain, the memory of what Voyt had done to Sharifi, and of the whirling, chaotic, living darkness Cohen had cast himself into to save her.
Bella and McCuen were staring down at her, their faces white, drawn, terrified.
“Did you see that?” Li asked, sitting up.
Bella nodded. “Cohen?”
Li looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Bella said, and when Li searched her face she saw that she really was sorry. “He was… kind.”
Li checked her rebreather gauge instead of answering. She checked her internals, found with relief that at least the basic programs were working, and ran a quick air-use calculation.
“We’ve got to go,” she said. “We have twenty-eight minutes to get to Mirce and the fresh canisters. Maybe less.”
She glanced at McCuen. His face looked shockingly pale, but maybe it was just the lamplight. “I… didn’t see much of anything,” he said. “Just stuck around to pick up the pieces.”
“You didn’t miss much,” she said, hefting her rebreather.
“Catherine?” Bella asked. Where had she picked that habit up? “Can we make it to Mirce? How long will it take us?”
“Less than twenty-eight minutes,” Li said. “Or forever. Let’s go.”
The mine had come alive. It rumbled, rang, sang. The sound resonated in Li’s chest, set her fingers twitching and her teeth buzzing. And along the intraface, beyond her control but still flickering in and out of life according to some obscure rhythm, coursed a bustle and roar of high-speed traffic that shorted out her internals and flashed cryptic status messages across her retinas like tracer bullets.
She probed the intraface as they walked. It seemed to work regardless of whether Cohen was on the other end of it. At one point she almost managed to access the memory palace and its operating systems. But the framework wouldn’t evolve, and she ended up cut off, stranded in a blind alley of the loading program. Cohen himself was a ghost presence: an absence given flesh and substance by her own body’s refusal to admit that he was no longer part of her. That feeling, the sense that he was both there and not there, reminded her of stories about amputees who still kept waking up years later feeling the pain of lost limbs.