No. He won’t stop the attack.
Then what’s he offering?
He’s willing to take the nukes off the table.
That stopped me for a second. Rain rolled down her face as she stared up at me.
Faye, those weapons will kill hundreds of thousands of people—
We’ve learned a lot about Ai and her people, she said. More than you have. They’re strong, but not as strong as they’d have you think. They’re a relatively new phenomenon, and they’ve organized only very recently, but already they control this whole city. Soon they’ll control everything.
I thought about that.
If they defeat Fawkes, she continued, then their way will be clear. If this window closes, then nothing will stop them. Eventually, their control will be total.
She paused, glancing down the alley toward the street. People were beginning to take notice of us. I moved my hands away as she went back on the soles of her feet.
If it’s true, then show me what he knows, I said. Give me something concrete.
She slid her arms from around my neck and put her palms on my chest. When I looked in her eyes, for a second her expression seemed human. It seemed …
She reached into her cloak and the air warped around her. There was a flicker; then she was gone.
Connection closed.
“Faye?” I reached in front of me, but she wasn’t there anymore.
I turned and started back through the fog and out of the alley. As I walked, I brought up the stats on the program to decommission the obsolete revivor stock; it was ninety-seven percent complete. There was only three percent to go, and the son of a bitch wasn’t in there.
Somehow, he’d managed to avoid the ax. Fawkes was still out there, and he was coming.
Calliope Flax—Pleasantview Apartments, Apartment #613
If the address was right, the stick lived in a shit hole called Pleasantview. There was trash piled on the curb, and someone had used bolt cutters on the chain-link fence around the lot. I parked my bike on the street and killed the engine. The rain tapped on my helmet while I sat for a minute, watching; then the reminder to check my hidden file popped up in the dark in front of me.
She had me paranoid. Any time I did anything I wanted to remember, I wrote it in the file and I checked it twice a day. I knew the stick could make me forget, and I wasn’t taking chances. A lot of people knew a JZI could record, but I kept the text file under my hat. No one could make me erase it if they didn’t know it was there. There were four messages there:
Back from TSP. Wachalowski bailed early, but might help.
Scored Zombie Maker from Eddie.
Called Buckster. He said he’d drop by sometime.
I remembered all those—meeting Wachalowski, Eddie hooking me up with the drugs, then roping in Buckster, who the drugs were for. People had a way of blabbing when they were on Z, and that went double when they didn’t know they were on it. If he had any inside intel Wachalowski could use, I’d get it out of him and he’d never be the wiser.
All that I remembered. The last message, though—that I didn’t remember:
Found a door behind the flag. Checking it out.
A door behind the flag? The only flag I could think of was the one back at my place. I’d brought it back with me from my tour, and I hung it up across from the door to the toilet. There wasn’t anything behind it but wall.
Checking it out.
Something made me write it. There was nothing after, and I had no memory of doing it. Someone fucked with my head. Keeping the list worked; I’d gotten my first hit.
“Son of a bitch.”
I armed the bike’s alarm and stowed my helmet, then went up to the front door and pulled. It didn’t budge.
“ID please,” it said. I flashed my card at it.
“Flax, Calliope. First class. Violations including …”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You are not a registered occupant of this residence. If a registered occupant of this residence is with you at this time, they should provide their ID now. If you are not with a reg—”
I leaned on the buttons next to the door until someone got sick of my shit and buzzed me in. The door was still talking when I slammed it behind me.
Inside, the elevator was out, so I headed up the stairs. The place smelled like piss.
When I shoved the stair door open, I almost ran into some woman with big lips, hips, and tits. She had a mean black eye.
“Excuse me,” she said. She kept her eyes down and tried to go around me.
“Nice eye.”
“Yo, get back here!” some guy yelled from around the corner. From the look on her face, he put the shiner there.
“A regular Romeo, huh?” I said. She stared at me.
“What?”
“You gonna take that?” I asked her.
“What, are you taking a poll?”
“Did you hear me, bitch?” the guy hollered. “I said get back here!”
She pushed past me and went down the stairs.
“Yeah, fuck you, then,” I said as the door slammed shut behind me. I was there for a reason, and she wasn’t it.
I turned the corner and went down the hall until I found 613. When I knocked, someone in there threw something; then footsteps stomped up to the door.
“Fucking bitch,” a guy said under his breath from inside.
The door flew open and a big guy stood there. He had on a tank top to show off his big arms, but half his size was fat. I knew his type; they showed up at the arena all the time. They had big arms and big mouths, but they couldn’t go three rounds.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, making a face. He was the same guy that yelled after the girl.
“I’m looking for Zoe Ott. She in?”
“Who?”
“Ott. Scrawny. Red hair. Big beak.”
That made him mad. He knew who she was.
“Oh, that bitch.”
“She here or not?”
“You got the wrong apartment,” he said.
“Records say she lives here, asshole,” I said. The guy was starting to piss me off.
“They’re wrong, dyke.”
I checked her last known address again to make sure. The number said 613. I looked past him to try to see in, but he moved to block me.
“I said she ain’t here!”
“Did she used to live here?”
“You a cop?”
“No, asshole—”
“Then get the fuck out before I either call one or kick your ugly ass out of here.”
“Like you kicked your lady’s ass?”
He gave me the finger and went to shut the door.
“Yeah, I bet that’s the only thing you ever get up you, limp dick,” I said through the crack, and the door stopped. It opened back up, and the dude’s face was red.
“What’d you just say to me?”
“I said fat pieces of shit who hit their lady can’t make their dick get ha—”
He moved faster than I thought he would, and he caught me off guard. He put his hand on my left tit and shoved me hard. I went back on my ass, cracking my head on the wall behind me.
“Fuck you, bitch!”
That was it. I was pissed before, but that was it. He looked surprised when I got back up and came at him. He even tried to shut the door, but he didn’t make it. It slammed against my boot and I shoved it back open with my shoulder. I reached through with my dead hand and grabbed a fistful of tank top and skin, then pulled him out into the hallway.
“Ow! You fu—”
Still holding him with my left hand, I creamed him with my right fist, and he went down like a sack of sand. He wasn’t out, though, just pissed.
“You want it like that?” he said, blood coming out of his nose as he got up. He came at me like a bull and got his big arms around me when he hit. My boots came up off the floor and he heaved me back with his fat gut. I went down on my back, and he came stomping toward me.