Sid felt a noose around his phantoms in pssi-space, choking them back. Zoraster was pinning them. Sid had started sliding into the cracks of the digital infrastructure in the tunnels, looking for ways up and out. It was habit.
“There’s a reason you’re not getting access to outside networks,” said the Grilla, tightening the virtual noose it threw around Sid. “Want to guess why?” The Grilla dropped twenty feet from the service tunnel to the pit floor, effortlessly, without a sound, its hulk looming over Sid. “I don’t trust you.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.” Sid backed up a few steps. “I even got Willy down here to talk with you.”
“You might think you’re making friends, that you’ve got these underminers and ‘cutters wrapped around your little finger,” Zoraster rumbled, “but trouble follows you and your friends.”
“But I told you—”
The Grilla shoved Sid back against the cold stone wall. “Save the sad story. Your friend Bob disappearing, you left all alone, your friend Indigo tracked to the Ascetics, goddamn gangster freaks.” Sid could feel the Grilla’s heat, his breathing like the bellows of a locomotive. “You’re good at sneaking around, Horowitz. You know what Grillas are good at?”
Sid trembled. Where he’d been able to easily anticipate what Bunky and Shaky would say, even Sibeal and ReVurb, he had no idea what this Grilla would do. He shook his head.
The Grilla turned and stalked away, jumping and swinging up the pit wall. “Killing,” Sid heard it growl as it disappeared into the blackness. “That’s what we were built for. Killing.”
11
He had no choice. Bob had to kill the man in order to escape.
He’d run through hundreds of simulations after bringing the rat back into the jailhouse and sneaking it up to the man’s chair, using its little hands to slip free the keychain. With his low smarticle count, maintaining control over the rat was draining.
Bob was exhausted.
He slipped some of the rat’s smarticles into the guard by getting it to lick his hand. The guard was asleep, but his theta and alpha waves frequencies were shortening, his sleep lightening. Bob tried his best to push the man’s mind back down, but his circadian cycle was completing its daily loop, the Earth’s spin pulling this place back toward sunshine. The animal was awakening within. Daylight was coming, and there was only a half-hour gap between shift changes.
Bob had to hurry. They were coming for him. Who “they” were he didn’t know, or at least didn’t know who they were working for, but the likelihood of his situation improving was dwindling as quickly as his smarticle reserves.
The guard was asleep against the door, and there was no way to ensure getting out without risking his raising an alarm—except to kill him. In Bob’s weakened state, knocking him unconscious would be unreliable and noisy, as would trying to slip into his mind and take control.
He slipped into the rat’s consciousness. Pull, little friend, pull, he urged. The rat dug its incisors into the fraying rope, dragging the keychain under the wooden door. Its body strained, and then pulled free and started toward Bob, the keys jangling as they skidded across the stone floor.
Pulling his awareness out of the rat, Bob got up from his cot and looked around the room. The priest was awake, sitting rigidly upright, his eyes luminous saucers in the reflected moonlight. Bob reached down between the bars of his cell and the rat backed up onto his hand, bringing the keys. Setting the rat on his shoulder, Bob reached around the bars and slid the key into lock, then creaked open the door to his cell. Barefoot, he padded across the cold flagstones, his heart thumping in his chest.
Fear, that predator that lurked in the back of the mind, was shaping Bob’s mindscape, morphing his dreams of the future, coloring the ghosts of his past—fear for himself, fear for Nancy and his family, fear of the unknown. He wanted to curl into a ball and retreat into one of his fantasy worlds, but he couldn’t. They were counting on him, even if they didn’t know it. He couldn’t fail. Not again.
His throat parched, his tongue sandpaper, he opened the door to the front office and peered through. Combining the rat’s visual input, staring from his shoulder, with his own, he built a low-light and infrared model of the room. The man’s janbiya, a curved dagger, sagged on one side of his sash. Everything was still where it should be. Everything was set.
Could he kill a man? He didn’t want to, but really, he just had to plan it. Outside the window, a thin light was dusting the horizon. The man stirred.
Bob let go.
He released his body into a pre-programmed routine, his quickened nervous system sliding the door open, stealing silently across the floor. In an instant his hand grabbed the man’s knife, unsheathed it, and then just as quickly drove it through the man’s jugular, slicing it into the back of his neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Bob severed the man’s spinal cord in one motion.
The man’s body jerked, and blood sprayed Bob’s face, spurting out on each heartbeat. The man’s eyes opened wide, just inches from Bob’s, the man’s mind surfacing from a dream world for one final moment. Inadvertently Bob connected into some of the smarticles the rat had transferred into the man. It wasn’t much of a connection, but enough to sense the void of the unknown opening below the man’s mind, the fear swallowing him, falling, falling.
Bob snapped back into his own mind and stared into the man’s dead eyes.
“Come,” hissed the priest, behind him, and then in the open doorway. “We must hurry. They will be here soon.”
Bob was frozen, immobile. He couldn’t move. This man had been in the way to Bob’s freedom, to the safety of his loved ones. Bob hadn’t had a choice, had he? He needed to sacrifice this man for the greater good, and it wasn’t as if his captor was innocent.
Nobody was.
Bob inhaled the sweat-smell of a body whose mind was gone, but whose biological systems were still toiling through their final, futile metabolic processes. He’d killed a million times in his gameworlds, felt hot blood splash across his face, but this was different.
“Come!” urged the priest, now outside the doorway.
Bob regained control of his body, pushing himself off the guard. Reaching down he grabbed the man’s water canteen, and then stumbled out the door into the cool night air. The sun was coloring the horizon, the stars washing from the sky.
12
It was a night of fitful sleep.
Vince gave up while it was still dark. A nice hot shower would help get his brain cycling. He quietly stole into the bathroom, then turned on the water and stepped into the stall. He closed his eyes and let the water pound against his sore body. He could have stood in the shower forever, letting his mind wander. He was the one that had reached out to the local gangsters, but since they’d been sequestered in this room, he had no idea what was going on. He assumed they’d just want some money, but maybe he assumed wrong. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the temperature selector to its coldest setting and exhaled. The icy water blasted against him, and he gritted his teeth and counted to thirty. If that didn’t wake him up, nothing would.
After his shower, Vince went onto the balcony to watch the sunrise over the waterlogged metropolis, the ruined buildings of the city rising like ghosts through a blood-orange fog that burned off as the sun gained in the sky. The hours passed. Connors sat on her bed, and Vince on his, in silence through most of the muggy day, listening to the sounds of catcalling and drunken arguments outside as Bourbon Street came back to life.
It was a lot of time to think.
“You’re wrong,” said Vince finally as night began to fall again.