Fawkes had warned me against listening to her, but still, I was curious.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but that’s what you told me. You come to me in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake. You keep trying to tell me something, something important.”
“You saw me in a vision?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The green room,” she said. “You come to me in the green room.”
I didn’t know what she was referring to. “And I spoke?”
“You were the one who told me to go to Nico two years ago,” she said. “The last time, you told me the city will burn.”
I remembered her back at the restaurant. Motoko had said that too.
“What did I mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why the messages come through you. Maybe I’m fixated on you …”
She stopped to think about that, curious, like she’d forgotten where she was. It wasn’t until I moved, stepping in closer to her, that she snapped out of it.
“You know something,” she said. “Or …some version of you does. You told me the fate of everything will be in my hands. You need me….”
She was bargaining for her life, I knew that, but I believed she meant it. I didn’t know what it meant, but I believed that she saw what she’d described. Part of me wanted to question her further, to extract the truths out of her ramblings, but there wasn’t time for that.
“You’re trying to tell me something,” she stammered. “You need me for something, or else the whole city will—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have my orders.”
Her eyes were desperate for a few more seconds, and then she seemed to give up. She closed her eyes and let out a long, hoarse sigh.
“Can I at least have a drink first?” she asked. One of the bottles from her bag was intact. I reached down and picked it up.
“Here.” I held it out by the neck.
She opened the bottle and then tipped it back. She drained nearly a quarter of the bottle before she choked and sprayed liquor from her nose. She bent over coughing and, I thought, laughing.
“I’m going to die in an alley,” she said, smiling with tears in her eyes. “I knew it was too good to be true…. I knew all this was too good to be true….”
“It usually is,” I said.
“You want to know what I did last night?” she said, ignoring me. “I killed someone. I killed the guy that killed my friend…. I think I might have actually done it before. I actually killed somebody. Hey, didn’t you used to be a cop?”
“Detective.”
“Right …so doesn’t it bother you, then? To kill people?”
“Did it bother you?”
“Hmm …not really. It felt …good, actually,” she said, taking another drink. “It’s weird. I thought it would freak me out, but it felt pretty good. It felt …right, like he deserved it. You know? Is that how it feels when you do it?”
“No.”
“I saw you die, you know.”
“What?”
“I saw it right before it happened. I called Nico, and he tried to save you.” She frowned. “I actually tried to help you….”
“What do you know about that?”
“I know he went down there, down in the factory, for you, back then. I know he’s been looking for you ever since.”
I’d indulged her, and myself, for long enough. I positioned the blade back over her chest.
“He does it because he still loves you,” she slurred.
I heard the shot before I knew what it was. It boomed through the small alley, and I pitched back suddenly as a collective gasp came from the sidewalk. I noticed several people on the street stop, and some looked over toward us. When I looked down, I saw black blood blooming there. I looked back at Zoe and I saw the gun. It was small, with silver plating and a pearl grip. Smoke drifted from the barrel as warning messages appeared in the air, flickering in between us. My signature wavered before snapping back.
The gun was small, but it had left a large hole. The armor plate under my skin had been pierced. Blood gushed as the nanos assembled a clot, then jetted in a stream as the pinhole closed. Zoe stared with her eyes wide.
I pushed myself off the brick wall behind me, the bayonet firing out as I did so. It whipped through the air as she stumbled backward, then slipped and began to fall. The blade’s tip snagged on her coat, slashing it as she fell into a puddle.
She kicked back, away from me, pointing the gun in front of her. I reached to bat it aside and land the blow, but wasn’t quite fast enough. She fired two more shots into my torso, and I staggered back from her. My signature warbled again, then came back, but not as strong as before. Back on the street, people had started to run.
The blood was coming out fast. My system couldn’t work around the trauma.
I’m hurt. Requesting retrieval.
The confirmation came back as warning messages continued streaming. I tried to reach for Zoe, but she was too far away. When I tried to move, my leg didn’t respond. I stumbled forward and went down on one knee.
I could still kill her if she came close enough. I held out my free hand, the blade by my side with its tip scraping the ground.
“I need to tell you something,” I whispered.
“Why do I keep seeing you?” she asked, looking down at me through the tangles of her hair. “Who are you?”
My heart signature flickered. She stood five feet away, not sure what to do.
“Come closer …and I’ll tell you.”
She stepped through a puddle toward me, and I lunged. My leg didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped, but it held as I pushed off the blacktop. I grabbed her collar and pushed the gun aside as she went back on her heels. We fell into a pile of wet trash bags, her struggling beneath me as the blade came down.
She twisted away, and the blade grazed her cheek before it punched through the bag and hit the ground. Blood welled up inside the wound and began to run back into her wet hair as the gun barrel pressed into my rib cage. It fired off its last round, then just clicked as she kept pulling the trigger.
I tried to raise the blade back but I couldn’t. It retracted on its own, and without its support I slipped to one side. I fell into the trash, face-to-face with her. I could smell the alcohol fumes on her breath.
She realized that she’d stopped me and let out a single, explosive laugh. Then the smile faded and her eyelids drooped. The way she flipped between relief and anger was almost mechanical.
“I remember now,” she said. My blood sizzled on the end of the barrel as she pulled the gun away. “Thirty, one hundred, and zero. Respectively.”
She shoved me over on my back as she stood. I didn’t know what she meant.
“In my visions, you like to give percentages,” she explained. “You said we meet three times. You said my chances of winning were thirty, one hundred, and zero. This is our second meeting. You can’t win.”
Her statement implied that she couldn’t either, but that fact seemed lost on her. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a fresh magazine for the gun. She removed the spent one and tossed it away.
“I think this is all your fault,” she said, reloading the gun. “You dragged me into this mess. I lost everything …I lost …”
She put her hands to her eyes, the pistol pressed against her face as she cried. For a second, she looked like a little girl who was lost and on her own. Then, like before, like a switch was thrown, she stopped. She looked down at me, and her face became calm.
I managed to reactivate the stealth cloak just as she aimed the pistol. The air rippled between us, and her face changed as I disappeared from view. She still held out the gun, but looked uncertain. I moved away as she prodded with one toe. When I wasn’t there, she turned in a circle with the gun still pointed out in front of her.