“Yes.” A new voice now, even colder than the first. “Tell us about Cohen. Tell us what Cohen said to you.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she breathed.
“Wasn’t it?”
She felt for the doorknob again, her hand trembling. She touched something, gripped it. But instead of metal, she felt skin.
Someone shoved her forward into the center of the room, and she fell on her knees, hands pressed over her ears to shut out the hateful, hissing accusations.
“It’s not my fault!” she screamed, over and over again. But she couldn’t block the voices out. It was her fault, they kept saying. It was all her fault. All of it.
“Are you all right?” McCuen asked.
She looked at him, chest heaving. She glanced at Bella, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Glitch on my commsystem.”
Then she heard Cohen talking to her.
She opened her eyes in VR to find Hyacinthe taking her hand, drawing her to her feet, tugging her back toward the terrible room.
But this was no Hyacinthe she had ever known. This was a mere memory dump, an interactive tutorial triggered by her entry into the memory palace. It explained how to access networks, bank accounts, corporate records, how to run an empire it kept insisting was hers now. It explained everything except the only thing that mattered: that if she was here, if this program was running, Cohen must be gone.
“I still need to get into the AMC net,” she said when he was done. She felt numb, as if her voice were coming from someone else’s throat.
But the others wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t do it for her. And even with Hyacinthe’s help she couldn’t make them do it. “Cohen wanted this!” she said finally, frightened and furious.
That got a bitter laugh from a voice she hadn’t even heard before: a powerful, saturnine presence who made it clear that he despised her so much he hadn’t bothered to participate before. “Cohen wanted you too,” the voice told her. “And look what that got him.”
As it spoke, she felt a burning jealousy behind the words. A child’s jealousy? A lover’s? Or was this some other thing entirely, some splinter of Cohen’s inhuman soul? But this was no child, she realized. It was Cohen’s old communications AI—the only entity in the shifting ruin of his networks that was capable of controlling its fellows.
She started to answer, to argue. But before she could form a thought, a wave of anger battered her, cold as ice water, and she was cut off, out of the link, kicked off the intraface.
“Where are you going?” McCuen asked.
“To take a piss.” She forced a grin. “You want to come?”
He flushed. Like a little boy, for Christ’s sake. But he stayed put. And that was all she had really wanted from him.
She stepped into the shadows and slipped her butterfly knife from her belt, relearning its balance, feeling the blade blossom, lilylike, from the cross-gripped handle.
She could smell their pursuer. She could feel him with the hairs of her arms, with her raised hackles, with the skin of her face. She could have found him by touch if she’d had to. She was deep into her own territory now. She didn’t need maps, not even Cohen’s maps. She was about to murder someone. And she’d known how to do that for as long as she could remember.
She eased around the corner, stopped, listened, stopped again. She weighed the dark and the silence, took their measure.
She took her own measure too. Heavy-soled boots that could crunch against grit or scrape on rock. Cloth that could rustle and whisper treacherously. Loose buckles, loose straps, loose bootlaces. And her own breathing, sweating, shedding body, casting off trace faster than her skinbugs could scramble to camouflage it. She’d heard it said that Earth’s extinct carnivores had no scent, but that was a lie, like so many other things people said about the planet. The truth was they’d just known how to hide their scent from those they preyed on—a last, deadly secret.
She found her prey two meters past the bend in the drift. He sat in the dark, back to the wall, rebreather hanging lose around his jaw, infrared goggles laid on the ground beside him. He was eating.
She inched along the wall, arms out, knife ready. Waiting for him to turn. Waiting for the telltale catch of breath that would tell her he’d heard her.
It never came.
He struggled at the last, standing up, trying to throw her off as her left hand grasped his head and stretched his throat taut. But by then it was over.
“Christ!”
McCuen. With the gun in his hand that she should have, damn her, taken from him.
She let the dead man slide down the length of her body to the ground.
“You killed him,” McCuen said, his voice a ragged whisper. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe you’d do it.”
Li shook her head. Her ? What was he talking about?
Bella came around the corner before she could ask him. She saw the fallen guard, gave a strangled cry, stopped and drew back, her hand over her mouth.
“Go up the drift and wait for me,” Li told her. “You’re just in the way here.” And I don’t want you to see this. I don’t want anyone to see it.
Bella started to speak. Then her eyes slid away from Li’s. She turned and walked back up the drift, leaving Li and McCuen alone.
They stared at each other. His betrayal and her knowledge of it hung in the air between them. He made a move, just the slightest flexing of his ankles.
She lunged, still hoping to keep the fight quiet and not alert the other three pursuers. She feinted toward McCuen’s face with the knife, and he threw up his left arm to cover himself, just as she’d known he would. He kept the gun more or less pointed at her while he did it, but he lost time. And in that instant, she reached up, wrapped her left hand around his wrist and broke it.
He screamed. The gun fired high and wild, then dropped from his hand and rattled along the slate floor into the darkness. She heard it come to rest behind her, fixed the point in her hard files, and set a subroutine to track it so she could retrieve it when she needed to.
She cursed her own slowness. That one shot could set Kintz on her before she had time to take care of McCuen. And even if it didn’t, she no longer had surprise on her side. Now they would know she was coming for them.
She brushed her regrets aside to focus on the job in front of her. McCuen was crippled. Not just by his lack of internal wetware or his broken wrist, but because Li could push back her mask and breathe freely, for a few moments at least, while he had to keep struggling to suck air through the cumbersome mouthpiece. He’d never fought her either. Not for real. He had no idea what he was up against.
Forty seconds into the fight she landed a clean kick, and McCuen’s leg collapsed under him with a grinding snap that told her she’d found her target. She was on top of him before he hit the ground, thumb and forefinger locked on his windpipe.
She lifted her knife hand to his face and ripped off his infrared goggles, leaving him blind. Then she straddled him, got a good purchase with her boot soles, sat on his stomach. As she did it, she had a flash of Voyt doing the same thing to Sharifi, and it turned her stomach.
“Who did Haas send?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”