Innenininennininennin…
I know this place.
I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.
Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.
‘Leila Begin,’ he says, and nods back to where I have come from. ‘Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.’
‘I will,’ I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.
‘Going to turn and fight?’ he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.
‘With what?’ I say, opening my empty hands.
‘Should have armed yourself, pal. Big time.’
‘Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.’
Jimmy de Soto snorts derisively. ‘Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.’
‘You can’t know that,’ I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. ‘You died years before that happened.’
‘Oh, come on, who really dies these days?’
‘Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.’
‘What’s a Catholic?’
‘Tell you later. You got any cigarettes.’
‘Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?’
I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course…
I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.
‘Lucky one,’ says Jimmy de Soto judicially. ‘They missed the socket.’
He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead d.h.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disc with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.
‘I’ve got to do something about this,’ I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.
‘Smell that?’ Jimmy asks, lifting his own face to the chilly air around us. ‘They’re changing it.’
‘What?’ But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Hendrix, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odour I fell asleep to only…
‘Got to go,’ says Jimmy, and I’m about to ask him where when I realise he means me and I’m
Awake.
My eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waif-like figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. I frowned and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on my forearm. No blood. With the realisation, I came fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of incense that had originally nudged me towards consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Hendrix’s olfactory wake-up call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarised glass of the window.
‘You have a visitor,’ said the voice of the Hendrix briskly.
‘What time is it?’ I croaked. The back of my throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.
‘Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes.’
‘And my visitor?’
‘Oumou Prescott,’ said the hotel. ‘Do you require breakfast?’
I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. ‘Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well-cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Prescott up.’
By the time the door chimed at me, I was out of the shower and padding around in an iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. I collected my breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while I opened the door.
Oumou Prescott was a tall, impressive-looking African woman, topping my sleeve by a couple of centimetres, her hair braided back with dozens of oval glass beads in seven or eight of my favourite colours and her cheekbones lined with some sort of abstract tattooing. She stood on the threshold in a pale grey suit and a long black coat turned up at the collar, and looked at me doubtfully.
‘Mr Kovacs.’
‘Yes, come in. Would you like some breakfast?’ I laid the tray on the unmade bed.
‘No, thank you. Mr Kovacs, I am Laurens Bancroft’s principal legal representative via the firm of Prescott, Forbes and Hernandez. Mr Bancroft informed me—’
‘Yes, I know.’ I picked up a piece of grilled chicken from the tray.
‘The point is, Mr Kovacs, we have an appointment with Dennis Nyman at PsychaSec in…’ Her eyes flicked briefly upward to consult a retinal watch. ‘Thirty minutes.’
‘I see,’ I said, chewing slowly. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I’ve been calling since eight this morning, but the hotel refused to put me through. I didn’t realise you would sleep so late.’
I grinned at her through a mouthful of chicken. ‘Faulty research, then. I was only sleeved yesterday.’
She stiffened a little at that, but then a professional calm asserted itself. She crossed the room and took a seat on the window shelf.
‘We’ll be late, then,’ she said. ‘I guess you need breakfast.’
It was cold in the middle of the Bay.
I climbed out of the autocab into watery sunshine and a buffeting wind. It had rained during the night, and there were still a few piles of grey cumulus skulking around inland, sullenly resisting the attempts of a stiff sea breeze to sweep them away. I turned up the collar of my summer suit and made a mental note to buy a coat. Nothing serious, something coming to mid thigh with a collar and pockets big enough to stuff your hands in.
Beside me, Prescott was looking unbearably snug inside her coat. She paid off the cab with a swipe of her thumb and we both stood back as it rose. A welcome rush of warm air from the lift turbines washed over my hands and face. I blinked my eyes against the small storm of grit and dust and saw how Prescott raised one slender arm to do the same. Then the cab was gone, droning away to join the beehive activity in the sky above the mainland. Prescott turned to the building behind us and gestured with one laconic thumb.