The screen went dark, and he came back to himself in a rush, feeling the blood still dripping from his painful nose.
"I said, get the kid and come on." Gina was standing over Manny, holding the end of the connection she had ripped out of his system. The torn wires looked like crooked insects' legs. She threw it down. "You said it. The hardware would give before his skull did." She looked at the kid, now getting up and rubbing the back of his head. "We should have thought of that, tried ripping it out of the system instead of him."
"Gina-" the Beater started.
"Shut the fuck up. You want to get out of here or not?" The lights flickered, buzzed, and went out.
The weak early-afternoon light coming through the window by the table filled the office with shadows. Gabe's mind automatically began to make them pulse; he ground his fists into his eyes and then blinked. It was still happening.
"Yah. Me, too." Gina gave him a hard look and turned to the kid. " 'It won't cut the power.' "
"It didn't cut the power," he said shakily. "Just the lights."
"Find me something to burn," Gina said, looking around. "It's gonna be pitch in those fucking hallways."
"Not quite," Gabe said, and pointed. Glowing blue strips ran along the top of the baseboards. "Those are all around the building. They'll last about five hours, maybe longer."
"I'd feel a fuck of a lot better with a searchlight." Gina started rummaging through Manny's desk drawers.
"I doubt if-" Gabe cut off when she came up with a hand-cam. She switched it on, and a narrow high-intensity beam above the lens played briefly across the walls before she shut it off again. He shrugged. "Okay. I feel better, too. Let's go."
Holding Gina's arm, he waded through the pulsing shadows into the hall. As soon as he did, he was glad Gina had found the cam. The blue glow was entirely too unsettling, too much like one of the cheaper fun-house sequences from House of the Headhunters.
"Ease the fuck up," Gina whispered, twisting her arm in his grip. "You're breaking my fucking bones."
"Freight elevator," said the kid urgently.
Gabe looked up and down the hall. His sense of direction had suddenly deserted him, leaving him adrift in a glowing blue void. Patches of deeper darkness were swimming through his vision even here, pulsing in a way that was all too familiar. He tried to force them away somehow, but there was nowhere he could look where they were not. He squeezed his eyes shut, and they played on the backs of his eyelids, insistent, compelling, calling to the image deep in his brain, a lake under a gray sky with a stony shore-
"Over here, Ludovic. Look over here. Now!"
He turned in the direction of Gina's voice and was blinded by a bright light shining directly into his eyes. It hurt, but at the same time it felt oddly good. The angle of the light changed, and blinking against the afterimages, he could discern Gina's face bathed in part of the beam from the cam.
"Okay now?' she said.
He blinked again. Afterimages still, but no pulsing shadows. "Yah," he said, amazed. "What-ah, how-"
She chuckled grimly. "Easy to see you ain't lived rough. The vermin always scuttle back into their hidey-holes when you turn on the light. Now where the fuck is the freight elevator?" She did something to the cam, and the beam widened, illuminating the corridor all around them.
"That way," he said, pointing, and she pulled him along, holding the cam on her shoulder. "Around the next corner and down at the end of the hall."
They rounded the bend and then stopped so suddenly the kid and the Beater bumped into them from behind, almost knocking the cam from Gina's grasp. Someone was sitting in the middle of the hall.
One hand went up, fending off the light. "Whoa, it's too early or too late for that, don't know which-"
The voice was Clooney's, but the intonations were Mark's. Gabe felt Gina stiffen as she shifted the cam from her shoulder, holding it chest-high with both hands.
"Well." Clooney pushed himself to his feet, still trying to block the light. "Old habits, they do die hard, don't they, Gina. All those things. Change for the machines. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. And looking for Mark. That's yours, ain't it-looking for Mark. Gotten so now that even when you're not looking for Mark, you're looking for Mark. And finding him."
Clooney shuffled forward a few steps, and the alien smile on his face was only nominally vague. There was a new hardness in it-or maybe that wasn't so new, Gabe thought as his own startlement began to turn toward fear. Maybe hints of it had always been there, something that kept the smile always looking vague to mask what was really at work underneath.
"And now you can find him wherever you look," Clooney went on. "What you've always wanted. Whether you know it or not. You don't, do you? Nah, that's not one of the things you'd care to face, being the way you are, Gina. Laugh it off, break it up, and break it down, that's you. But that doesn't change anything for anybody, least of all you. And I want you. I want you."
He got within arm's reach of her, and then she swung the cam up and out, right into Clooney's face. He staggered back, crashed into a wall, and then keeled over facedown.
The kid started to go to him, and Gina stopped him. "He looks okay to me. Come on."
As if by some unspoken agreement, they were all suddenly racing for the elevator still gaping open the way Gabe had left it. Or maybe it was just that they were fleeing from Clooney's body, Gabe thought as Gina shoved him into the elevator and played the light from the cam over the empty hall behind them. Nothing there but Clooney, who hadn't moved. Gabe looked away, not wanting to have to see blood pouring from his ears, too, and locked eyes with the kid, who frowned a little and jerked his head at Gina.
Gabe shrugged and reach over to touch her shoulder. "What is it?" he said. "What are you looking for?"
She brushed his hand away, irritated. "What's the matter, you deaf or something?" She turned away from the corridor and went to lean against the wall. "Take it down."
"Wait a minute," said the Beater, looking around at them. "If that's what happened to Rivera, and to that guy, what about everybody else? All those pits-"
"You don't want to know," said the kid, closing the door. "And neither do any of us." He looked at the control panel for a moment and then pressed for the ground floor.
They rode all the way down in silence and went out an emergency exit into the chaos that was no longer really a city.
30
A few hours after Art disappeared, Sam and Rosa were picking their way through the human debris under the Hermosa Pier with hand-held scanners while a couple of Rude Boys acted as bodyguards. The cases were smelly, and the Rudes were bored. Gator had promised to pay them in tattoos, and they were hot to get themselves marked. Sam wondered what Gator was going to mark them with-an ordinary design or some other piece of Art Fish? No, had to be an ordinary design; Gator had destroyed all the paper copies of Art. Safer, she said. Anyone could steal paper, but you need one of my scanners to get at the tattoos; custom-built. How did you divide something like Art up, anyway? She found the whole thing rather dizzying. Or maybe just dizzy.
Rosa seemed unburdened by considerations of the abstract; Sam could tell that what was bothering her was the smell. She wouldn't have minded a gas mask herself, but apparently that was one of the few things you couldn't get on the Mimosa, along with personal hygiene products.
She ran the scanner over an intricate design of a spider web on the back of a gaunt man who seemed unaware of her most of the time. At least he wasn't resisting or trying to get friendly. Most of the cases had been passive, barely curious. Files, nothing more than files. What was in this one, she wondered-Art's sense of humor, or his tendency to posture, or some collection of associations that contributed to his self-awareness? An AI encrypted in tattoos. Or perhaps translated was a better word.