A hand touched her shoulder. She slapped it aside and wearily pulled herself to a sitting position and wrapped her arms around each other as if to warm herself. With the back of her hand she swiped spittle from her lips.
“Look what they’ve done to you…” she heard a voice say.
It was the voice of a man—a big man, well-built, dressed in white slacks, a blue Chinese shirt and a straw boater hat. He reached out a hand to touch a bruise by the side of her face and it was brusquely slapped away.
“Don’t touch me,” said Ning Yan. She staggered over to a ditch, retrieved her bundle containing Vivian’s lacquered music box and clutched it preciously to her chest as she walked away.
“Must’ve been hard.” The man started after her. “I’m sent to get you back in service, take care of your needs.”
“You’re a dastardly pimp working for the Seers.”
“I saved you.” The man hastened his strides and held out his hand. “Name’s Khun. I presume you will be called Vivian from now on?”
Ning Yan did not answer and did not stop walking either.
“I’ll let you in on a secret.” He twisted his hands together. “I’m one of you, so I know how this feels. I’m coming on seventy. Tell me, dolly, how old are you?”
She pushed past him. “Too old.”
“Where are you going?”
“To kill myself.”
“Doesn’t work with the Preservation Protocol, dolly. And if they learned of it they’ll put you through Torment,” said Khun.
She walked on.
“Grieve, but not too long.” Khun raised his voice, revealing a twinge of annoyance. “After all, they’re just farmed orphans.”
In a whirring flash Khun found himself on the ground, the left side of his face numbed as if it had been ripped away by the jarring blow. He leapt to his feet, and in a fit of rage attempted to grab Ning Yan but caught only air. In that same instance his nose met a wall. He rose to his feet, swung clumsily around to deliver a punch and instead had his face dashed against the edge of a drain. He hobbled to his feet, blood streaming from his nose. Again he struck, and again he was whipped back onto the ground. Only this time he did not rise.
Farther away Ning Yan walked on, weeping once more, mourning her lost daughter, and passing beyond the shaft of lamplight.
41
LABRADOR
AT EXACTLY TWO-thirty in the morning Marco’s GTR rumbles into the driveway of the Inter-Continental. There, Casey perches on a stone bollard and stands up when she sees the arriving coupe. In a startling act of courtesy Marco leans across the seat and opens the door and watches her enter. “Neutralised the jamming bug in him?” he asks.
“Naturally.” She does not look at him, but takes out a touchpad and taps on it.
“How? Kisses?”
“From the water I gave him at the clinic.” She glances at him. “In the past we used to do micro-cuts on the lips. Now the new stuff works through saliva.”
She raises the pad to him. On its small, mirrored screen Marco sees the rush of an image enlarging, its details crystallising—the viaduct, the roadway, the white infrared specks of two living individuals, one of them of a darkening shade. A flickering triangle appears over the brighter speck, and sets a grin on Marco’s face. “That’s very good.”
“After you’ve disposed of Alpine-One I figured you’d need another Tracker.” Casey pinches her lips; the smile slight, tentative, bordering between formality and irony.
It pleases Marco. “Coming on fast, Gaius-Four,” says he. “What’s your alias?”
“Casey,” says the young lady.
“Well, we should get to know each other first, Casey.”
“Where’re you taking me?”
“Your choice, love.”
They drive onto Mackenzie Road and turn up into Mount Emily Park. By a small slipway Marco conceals his GTR in the dark of a banyan tree. He applies the brake, leaves the engine running and proceeds to inspect his new prize. But Casey does not reciprocate just yet. She goes on tapping on her pad and humming a tune to herself.
It annoys him more than he thinks it would. “I’ve never seen you.”
“I worked undercover as the doctor’s assistant.”
“Ah, that explains it,” he says. “You are very good.”
“The doctor was a good man.”
“A sacrifice for the Cause.” Marco fingers her arm. “Quick, painless and full of grace.”
Casey says nothing to that. For another minute she goes on tapping and wears out Marco’s patience. He tries peering over at it but sees nothing through the privacy film. At last curiosity gets the better of him. “What are you doing?”
“Programming a tag,” she answers.
“Whose tag?”
She looks up and smiles. “Yours, darling.”
Whiteout. Marco rushes at Casey but she slips easily beyond his reach and out of the car. He lunges but the constriction in his chest has begun, and the shock of it washes over him like a shroud of death. Seconds later a debilitating stab of pain infuses his heart. He crouches, his arms wrapped tightly around his torso as if he is about to defecate. Then as a dying vessel he keels over to his side.
A car pulls up behind them without its headlights on. A man emerges, his hair waxed and combed sideways, his sharp, studious gaze bearing down coldly upon the thrashing body, and with the same unassuming poise he had exuded when a Chronomorph named Anton Lock had singled him out to a pair of constables for stealing a dead man’s omnicron.
He was at once the dapper young man who had led Hoo to Aldred, the freshman down at Rookie Row who had dropped John the warning of Marco’s imminent arrival.
And through his ailing sight Marco remembers the headlock…
Julian.
Their gazes meet, if only for an instant. Julian doesn’t speak to Marco, but continues watching him with chilling apathy. “Tag type?” he asks Casey.
“It’s old.” She checks her pad. “Nineteen-fifties—the time when they made him Agent, thereabouts. Works through the blood, delivered via the standard tongue-and-lip micro-cuts.”
“You have the source?”
Casey flips the pad over to reveal Hannah’s pensive monochromatic portrait—the same one John had discovered in Marco’s computer. “Alpine-One.”
Marco, his back arched and fingers curled, now convulses in a pool of his own vomit. He defecates in his underwear. His face bloats. He starts weeping blood from his eyes and ears. “Fabian…” He croaks into his shirt collar.
Aversion develops in Julian’s gaze. “Sure the Chronie’s clean now?” he asks. “I don’t want any glitches when we do the pickup.”
“Positive.” She slaps Marco’s omnicron in his hand. “We got his guy an hour ago.”
“Fabian…” Khun strains a whisper, his good eye darting madly about.
“We’re all part of the same system, Marco. Tracker to Tracker.” Julian finally speaks, tucking his hands thoughtfully into his pockets. “Nothing personal.”
The dying centenarian is helpless to respond. That arch in his back has crushed a few vertebrae and the pain has stalled even the muscles in his jaws. Drool spills over his lips, and then a crimson foam follows. Julian turns around and saunters back to his car.
“Check his vitals, note time of death.” Marco discerns Julian’s voice above the whine of the engine. “And call the Morgue. You know the rest.”
What is a century in eternity? Not even a microsecond in a minute.
Thunder still rumbles even though the rain has ceased. Landon drifts along the roadway; insensate and soulless. He is walking away from the racetrack, away from a past forever lost. Everything feels unreal, as if entombed in the ashes of a powerful and malignant secret the world would be better off without.