“Am I entering into an alliance with you?”
“You both are.”
“No offense meant, ma’am, but why would I do that?”
“I’ve already seen it. You do,” she said, and I could see that was all the answer she needed. She didn’t know the why. It was irrelevant to her.
Precognition, I thought. Unlike Zoe, who often seemed confused or frightened by the things she saw or thought she saw, Ai seemed completely at ease with it.
“Do the things you see always come true?” I asked her.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “There are levels of probability, but once they reach certainty, then yes, they always come true.”
Penny fiddled with her cell phone while Zoe looked over a menu. She was flustered to find it was completely in Japanese.
“Don’t worry,” Ai said. “We won’t get to order.” Penny looked disappointed when she heard that. Based on some of the dishes I’d seen pass by, I was a little disappointed myself.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because things are very dangerous right now,” she said. “We’re being watched.”
“Then why come here in the first place?”
“Significant events are tied to this meeting,” she said. “It happens here.”
“Because you foresaw it?”
“Because I felt like it.”
“But if it’s dangerous—”
“With the exception of one of us,” she said, “I know when everyone at this table dies. The one I’m unsure of outlives the rest. I know that much. None of us dies here.”
Ai and Penny both suddenly glanced over at Zoe at the same time. Zoe’s pupils had gone wide, but she looked confused. A second later they went back to normal. Penny gave Zoe a little shake of her head. Ai didn’t say anything. She just looked back to me.
“I know you know who I am,” she said.
“I’ve heard of you.”
Her little body shivered as her pupils, black on dark brown, swelled to fill the irises. I felt a wave of dizziness, far worse than I’d felt with Sean or even Zoe. She was trying to control me.
I let my eyelids droop a little as the dizziness passed. Ai smiled as her eyes went back to normal.
“Don’t pretend,” she said, waving one tiny hand. “That may have worked on your friend, but not me.”
She watched me for a few more seconds, the silence stretching out before she spoke again.
“How long have you been like that?”
“Two years. You’re not surprised?”
“Just the opposite. I’ve been waiting for it. What caused it?”
“Before the assault on the factory, I was injured, and flatlined for several minutes. It happened then.”
“I can’t influence you,” she said. “If I can’t, then you truly are shut off from us.”
I thought that fact would put her on edge, but instead the edges of her lips curled just barely.
“Do you know you share that immunity with revivors?”
“Yes.”
“Who first told you about us?”
“Samuel Fawkes.”
She smiled broadly then, having assumed, I thought, that I would lie. She nodded.
“Did he also tell you about me?”
“Not specifically. He told me there’s an underground movement of people with abilities like yours.”
“And?”
“That this movement has a hierarchy, and that they manipulate society in secret.”
“As a means to their own unscrupulous ends?”
“That was the gist of it.”
“Well, Agent Wachalowski,” she said, “You’ve heard from Mr. Fawkes. Now I would like you to hear from me, if you don’t mind.”
“Please.”
I glanced over at Zoe. She was staring like she was in a trance.
“Do you have any idea how many people Mr. Fawkes killed two years ago?” Ai asked in a low voice.
“There were a lot of names in his database, but very few deaths were actually reported.”
“If they were reported, those names would obviously all be connected. We didn’t want that, but believe me—Fawkes was very successful. When the National Guard was deployed and the revivor units went missing, they moved on a large spread of targets. We were not expecting that.”
“You didn’t foresee it?”
Her large eyes narrowed a little, and the dreamy expression cleared. “We knew he would attack.”
“But not the specific form the attack would take?”
“We’re not here to talk about that,” she sniped. “They went into people’s homes and killed men, women, and children alike. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I’d seen the names coming off the database Fawkes kept, and I knew he’d kept it accurately. Their bodies were disposed of using Leichenesser, and those who survived had covered it up, but I’d always suspected that hundreds of people had been killed that night.
Something buzzed across the table, and Penny reached into her purse. She removed a second cell phone and snapped it open, looking down at the screen.
Using the backscatter, I peered through the plastic casing of the phone until a fuzzy image of the LCD appeared. From my side the text was backwards, but I captured a piece of it before she moved.
…anawa tracked …IMO 1092
Takanawa, maybe. IMO stood for International Maritime Organization. The message might have had to do with an incoming shipment. Were they tracking Fawkes’s supply lines themselves?
“It’s easy sometimes,” Ai continued, “to stop seeing your enemy as human. In battle, it can be easy, maybe even convenient, to remove yourself from the human cost your struggle inflicts on your enemy. You understand that.”
I nodded.
“Sometimes war necessitates ugly choices, but Mr. Fawkes is not a nation and he is not a soldier. Mr. Fawkes is an individual. Strictly speaking, he is not even a citizen of this country any longer. No matter what his beliefs are, he had no authority or right to do what he did.”
“I agree.”
“Fawkes is still a threat. We both know what he recently acquired, and we both know he’ll use them.”
“Miss Motoko, if you have specific information—”
“I have specific information,” she clipped. “I have more specific information than you would believe. The devices he acquired are just part of his plan; he is gathering an army, and when he is ready, he will unleash both on us. He means to wipe us out completely, Agent, and it doesn’t matter to him who gets in the way. It doesn’t matter to him if he has to destroy this entire city to get rid of us.”
“Fawkes has an army of revivors?”
She nodded.
“Where? How?”
“We don’t know how yet,” she said. “We don’t know where, either—not yet. We’re closing in on their location, but what I said before about probabilities is true; stopping Fawkes is not a certainty. There is a very real possibility that this entire city and everything you see around you will cease to exist in a matter of days.”
Her eyes stared at me evenly from across the table, while a bad feeling began to sink into my gut. Zoe’s eyes were wide, and her mouth had parted slightly.
“The city gets destroyed?” she whispered.
“It will start here, but it won’t end here,” Ai said. “There will be almost no survivors.”
I wasn’t expecting that, but again, she was deadly serious.
“What do you mean ‘It won’t end here’?” I asked.
“Just what it sounds like,” she said simply. “Fawkes will destroy this city, and then, one by one, the rest will begin to fall.”
“That’s impossible—”
“I’ve seen it too,” Zoe said quietly. Her face was pale. She looked scared.
“When?” I asked her. “When does this supposedly happen?”
“Soon,” Ai said.
“Fawkes has most likely been destroyed by now,” I said. “If not, he will be soon. Haven’t you seen to that?”
She raised her thin eyebrows a little, like she was surprised I was so dense.
“Fawkes doesn’t get destroyed with the rest of his obsolete generation,” she said. “You kill Fawkes. The cull will locate him, but you, the one who is immune to our control, will kill him. That’s why you’re here.”