Motoko Ai …I didn’t know that name. He wiped the mirror clean, and began writing more quickly, glancing back through the doorway again. Sparks were spitting out from the seam next to the knob of the bedroom door. A cutter was being used to slice through the bolt.
Fawkes has the nukes. He was the buyer. The same buyer was behind the first attack. Fawkes was behind the bombing of Concrete Falls.
He underlined the last part, then stopped writing and turned around as the bedroom door opened and a figure stepped through the smoke. He pulled the bathroom door shut and locked himself inside. Just before it closed, I caught a glimpse of a pale face moving toward him. It was only for a second, but the soft glow behind the eyes was unmistakable. As he turned back to the sink, I saw sparks begin to fly from the door seam as the cutter began making its way through.
Sean turned back to the mirror and started to scrawl one last message:
Second Chance—
Light flashed behind him and he stopped, throwing the marker aside. He opened the medicine cabinet and I watched him remove the small brown glass bottle I found in the trash. The camera looked up at the ceiling as he held the dropper over it. A fat drop swelled at the tip, then fell and the image immediately warped. A second later, it went blank. From the look of it, whoever came for him removed the eye, but was too late. He’d destroyed it.
The mirror above the sink was wiped clean. Either he’d done it after he destroyed the camera, or the intruder had.
Fawkes was behind the bombing of Concrete Falls.
It wasn’t some kind of terrorist protest, then. If it was true and Fawkes was behind it, he wouldn’t have staged a strike like that without a very specific reason. If Sean hadn’t taken the chance to say what that was, then he either didn’t have time or didn’t know.
I rewound the footage, looking for the revivor’s face. The recording was hectic, but he managed to pick up a few frames’ worth anyway. The skin was Caucasian but definitely revivor, with its characteristic gray tinge. It had a complete lack of hair. Follicle dissolution was usually associated with assembly-line revivors. I cleaned up the image, canceling out the motion blur. When I did, I stopped cold.
Faye.
In the image, she was stalking through the smoke, toward the door. Her eyes stared dispassionately but with purpose. She was still out there, and for whatever reason, she had come for him.
I took the recording chip from the unit in the floor safe and slipped it in my pocket. At least for the time being, no one else knew about it. I meant to keep it that way.
She hadn’t been lost in the fire. I’d hoped to track her down one day, but the circumstances couldn’t have been much worse. Sean wasn’t just a federal agent; he was more than that. In another circle, one I wasn’t allowed to ever see into, he was something else entirely.
If it got out who had taken him, it was going to mean trouble, and not just for her.
3 Rise
Faye Dasalia—Alto Do Mundo
I sat in a wooden chair and I waited. A man in the next room spoke on his cell phone, his voice easy and certain. Somehow I felt sure he was speaking to her …that physically frail woman with the oversized head and the fishlike face; the woman he answered to, both his leader and master.
His suite was inside the Alto Do Mundo. The third largest structure inside the city, it housed much of the elite. In life I had seen it only from afar, watching it from the rail that took me to work. Once I investigated a murder there. Part of me had always envied those inside, even then.
His apartment suite was big and very cold. It conveyed his privilege and power to all, no matter where they might look. The design he’d chosen was minimalist, open rooms integrating high-end appliances and electronics, where each line and edge was arranged perfectly. I admired what he’d done, the oasis of order that he’d fashioned away from the chaos of the streets below. My eyes followed the room’s flow, and I found comfort in it, even though I knew that it would soon be gone. Very soon the man on the phone would be dead. Very soon the Alto Do Mundo itself, and everyone inside it, would exist only as fading memories.
Normally, I’d never have gotten inside, but we were a vice of his, and he’d had me brought in, bypassing security. When I arrived, I found the door was open. In the entryway he’d left a cardboard gift box for me, with a note card. The gift box contained a series of items: an elaborate set of silk lingerie, a black wig, and an array of cosmetics. There was a computer printout, explaining what he wanted.
It should have been humiliating to me, applying makeup to my lips and nipples, cinching in my waist, and pushing up my breasts, then sitting and posing while he took his time. It should have been an affront, but as I sat on the chair, I felt nothing. The truth was that I’d hoped I would feel something. I wanted to feel some sense of humiliation, even excitement, but the reality was that I did not. The closest I came was the wanting itself.
What drove me now were purpose and survival. Not survival in the traditional sense—I’d already lost my life—but my mind was still aware. It knew that it was finite, and that whatever came after was unknown …dark and empty and endless.
That unknown was like a void. Beneath my consciousness and my memories, it yawned like a black hole in the depths of space. With each passing second, it pulled me deeper, away from all that I knew. Any second I might fall across that rim, that dark event horizon, and plunge down through the field of my memories to the one thing left that scared me to my core. Life and death were just concepts, but not that endless unknown. That bottomless void was real.
The man on the phone was speaking Japanese. I tuned my hearing a little as he spoke, and watched the translation scroll at the bottom edge of my periphery:
No. Wherever it came from, it wasn’t supposed to be there. I was already out of the building when …
The words passed by over the swell of my breasts. I’d been attractive in life, and I’d known that. Men had stared at those breasts, compelled by their curves, but they were just meat now. The blood that moved through them was black and cold. The veins could be covered up with body paint, but the flesh was not alive.
The man who had me brought to him did not care.
…knew where I was, it was arranged beforehand. I didn’t do anything wrong….
He moved past a doorway, through my line of sight. He wore a gold watch and an expensive suit of which the tones matched my lingerie. He glanced at me, and I captured his image. He was a powerfully featured Asian man, with long hair that was thick and luxurious. His skin was smooth and pampered.
Identity confirmed: Takanawa, Hiro.
He moved out of view and continued speaking. My mind drifted as I watched the words go by.
…should be thanking me. I managed to keep one of them. You only really need one….
The field of my memories stirred like embers, a field of lights that were tagged and catalogued. I could access each at will. I saw images of him at the hotel. During the raid, the agents had let him go. He’d left with something of ours.
My memories were now of two different types: those formed before my death and those formed after. A laser line cut between, and it was there that I found my new purpose. Each second that passed, it was a reminder. In my first living memory, I was five, and for a time my memories had been pure. As my life went on, they became fragmented. Bits and pieces were stolen. They were manipulated and sometimes changed. I had been rewired by an unseen force and lived two lives, and not known. Approaching the memory separation between my life and my death, the embers came to contain more lies than truth.