Dee looks up from rummaging through Parris’s picture collection. She feels nauseous. It’s impossible to tell if the pictures are of real scenes, or posed, or are simply computer-generated imagery. She doesn’t particularly care. She wants to wipe them from her memory, and their originator from the world.
She still doesn’t know if she can do it, or even stand by and let Ax do it. She doesn’t know if the permissions for her lethal skills have been reset. She suspects that if they haven’t, it won’t be anything dramatic; no staying of her hand, no rooting of her feet; just some quite reasonable and natural-seeming inhibition, a distaste or disquiet that won’t let her follow it through.
‘Haven’t you done enough of that?’ she asks Ax.
Ax tugs the knife out of the wood once more. ‘I suppose so,’ he admits. He grins at her. ‘You get carried away.’
Dee takes her pistol out of her handbag, tucks it in her waistband and walks over.
‘Well I say finish it,’ she says.
‘Fine,’ says Ax.
He opens the splintered door. Inside, Parris is still hanging in his bonds. His eyes are tightly closed. Tears are running down his face, and the sticky-tape gag is slimed with the snot that the tears have brought with them and which he’s blown from his nostrils in frantic snorts.
Ax traces a line with the knife’s tip, along the man’s bare belly. Parris’s eyes open, and roll from side to side, looking at Ax and then, as if in appeal, to Dee. Blood wells along the cut. The sight of it makes Dee stop, and catch Ax’s arm.
‘No!’ she says. The images from Parris’s collection are crowded out by images from Soldier, an encyclopaedia of injury and blood: spurting, spraying, oozing, dripping. She imagines it spattering her clothes, and shudders.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s enough.’
Ax glares at her, but she outstares him. He backs off. Dee sets to work, loosening, unshackling, unbinding. She steadies Parris as he stumbles out, and lets him sink to the floor. He’s making noises through his nostrils.
‘Oh,’ says Dee. She’d forgotten that. She stoops to rip the tape from his mouth, and as it comes off she notices that Parris has come, and more than once, even with his cock bound back. Semen is drying on his thighs.
He falls forward into a kneeling posture, and looks up at her, gasping and smiling.
‘Thank you, mistress,’ he says in a low voice. ‘I deserved that, all of it, I truly did!’ He looks at her with sly hope. ‘When can you visit me again?’
Dee stares at him. She takes a few steps backward, still thinking of keeping her nice new clothes clean. She turns and walks further away, past Ax, to the top of the stairs.
‘Mistress, please…’ Parris calls after her.
‘Oh, fuck this,’ she says.
She draws the pistol from her skirt, takes aim, and blows his head off.
The shot echoes around the circular spaces of the room and the stairwell and leaves her ears ringing. She grins at Ax, who despite his instigation of the whole thing is looking at the remains of Parris, and then at her, with a shocked pallor.
‘Now I know,’ she says. ‘I do have free will.’
‘That must be very useful,’ Ax says. ‘I’m a bit of a determinist, myself.’
Dee smiles at him reassuringly as she briskly gathers up her stuff.
‘Time to go,’ she says.
Ax is pointlessly wiping the tip of his knife on a piece of drapery.
‘Shouldn’t we, you know, clean up?’ he asks. ‘Can’t you see fingerprints and stuff?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Dee says, fastening her cloak. ‘They’re all over the place. And our skin-cells. Not to mention our images on the house’s cameras.’
She looks up and smiles and waves at a tiny, hooded lens.
‘Shit,’ says Ax. ‘Can you do anything about it?’
Dee flashes him a puzzled look and starts to go downstairs.
‘Of course I can,’ she says. ‘But it’s very important that I don’t, and you know it. Come on, before somebody comes.’
Ax follows her, still reluctant.
‘Nobody’s gonna come,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Parris had his nest video-linked to the nearest security-service.’
‘I guess not.’
Unlocking the door doesn’t require any of Dee’s deeper abilities. It closes itself behind them as soon as they’re out. They walk down the long ramp in silence. Near the bottom a side-ramp leads to a nearby residential door. Dee scans its electronics.
‘This’ll do,’ she says. ‘Somebody’s home.’
Ax stops walking. For a moment, he looks like a stubborn child.
‘This isn’t what I meant,’ he says.
Dee tries not to wheedle.
‘It’s important,’ she says. ‘It’ll help your cause, as well as your case.’
‘I don’t give a fuck about a case,’ Ax says. ‘That shit is over.’
Dee regards him levelly while recalling the things he’s said earlier.
‘The dead may rise,’ she says, ‘and you may be right, but one way or another, this will all come to judgement.’
Ax stares back at her for a moment, then nods.
Together, they walk down the small ramp to the door. Dee pings the bell. They wait. A little screen above the bell lights up, a woman’s face appears.
‘Yes?’ she says.
Dee stands a little straighter and taller.
‘This is Dee Model and Ax Terminal,’ she announces firmly. ‘We have just killed your neighbour up the way, Anderson Parris. Call you witness.’
The woman gives an exaggerated blink.
‘W-witnessed,’ she says shakily.
‘Thank you,’ Ax says.
‘Goodbye,’ says Dee.
Then Dee and Ax hurry back to the main ramp and down steps and slopes to a level walkway, and up in a lift to a high platform, where they join a small queue of well-dressed people waiting at the air-stop to catch a flit. Ax occupies his time by tuning in to the stop’s news-service. Every so often he shakes his head and smiles at Dee: no hue-and-cry yet; and uses these interruptions in his glassy trance to study a list.
Dee sees he’s already crossed off one name, and that there are a lot more to go.
Tamara looked at the little stack of incriminating material on the table: the Talgarth file on Wilde, the picture Dee had made, and a scrawled apocalyptic rant from Ax. Wilde had just finished reading it.
‘God,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of suicide notes, but this is the first time I’ve ever come across a murder note.’
Tamara was holding her hands to the sides of her head.
‘I’ll murder the little pervert, if I ever get my hands on him,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Comrade Wilde, if I’d even suspected he was capable of going off the fast end like this I’d never’ve let Dee out of my sight.’
Wilde reached over and caught her hand.
‘Easy,’ he said, ‘easy. What have I ever done to you to make you call me “Comrade Wilde”? My name’s Jon, OK? And you’re no more responsible for losing Dee than I am for losing Jay-Dub. They’re both free agents, isn’t that what this is all about?’
‘I suppose so,’ Tamara said. ‘And Ax is claiming he wasn’t, when he did some…degrading things. I can see why, too, in a way, but then…Aaach! It’s so complicated! What do we do?’
‘Tamara,’ Wilde said gently, letting go of her hand and sitting down, ‘how long have you lived?’
‘Twenty years.’
Wilde lit a cigarette.
‘New Mars years?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve lived in an anarchy twice as long as I ever managed to, and you surely know the answer to that, or the way of finding the answer.’
Tamara sat down at the table and looked back at him, baffled and defiant.
‘I don’t get you,’ she said.
‘Look,’ Wilde said, ‘when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law.’