Eucrasia had rushed forward, grabbing at that huge, muscular arm, trying to stop him. “Daddy, no!” she shrieked, and somehow—it was like a small, dark miracle—he’d stopped.
For a long moment he just stood there, chest working, shoulders heaving. His face was all dark with blood. One red drop fell on Eucrasia’s foot, tickling her little toe. Her father stared around and around him, as if wondering where he was. Then his eyes fixed on Eucrasia, and they both stood there, mouths open and silent, unblinking, looking at one another.
Then he turned away.
“This is far enough,” Heisen said. He stopped and put down his case with a heavy thump. “Why don’t you sit down, Eucrasia?”
They had come to a transparent bar built out from the wall of the skywalk. An octopus was searching for food down by the floor, pulling himself along the glass with graceful swirls of his tentacles. Eucrasia sat on one of the stools. “He was a good man,” she said. “He was a good man. He didn’t deserve for that to happen.”
“This will only take an instant.”
Eucrasia stared out into the darkness. There were a few vague patches of luminosity in the distance, but nothing more. Where were the stars? she wondered. Tiny wheatseed lights edged the boards underfoot and ran along the rim of the bar, but outside all was Stygian gloom.
She felt like she’d been caught in an afterworld where things struggled to take form from nothingness, and failed.
Heisen lifted the headfreezer above her. One of his elbows touched her shoulderblade.
Startled by some movement below, the octopus exploded in Eucrasia’s face. One instant she was staring out into featureless black, and the next she confronted a pale, distorted shape that had leaped before her. A reflexive startlement keyed subliminal memories of empty eye sockets, a mouth that was a gaping scream.
Simultaneously, her claustrophobia gripped her and she realized that somebody was standing at her shoulder, about to put a box over her head.
Eucrasia screamed and lurched to the side. Rebel fell off the stool, one edge of Heisen’s cryonic device smashing against her shoulder, and then she slammed to the floor.
In a white burst of pain she rolled away and tumbled to her feet. Heisen lifted the thing again. “Get away from me!” Rebel cried.
“Now, Eucrasia,” Heisen said. He made soothing, hushing noises. But his eyes were calm and cold and they did not look away from her for an instant. He advanced a step, and she backed away. There was nothing but skywalk behind her—at least an eighth of a mile of tubing without branching or exit.
“Listen, Jerzy, I don’t know how you got in here, but Wyeth’s going to notice I’m missing soon. This place is crawling with samurai— there’s no way you can get out without being caught.”
Heisen stepped back a few paces so he could set the cryonics device on the bartop. He reached into his cloak and removed a case from a liner pocket. Without looking down, he flipped it open.
“Jerzy? Listen to me, will you? I’m sure you can be reprogrammed. You can have a normal life again. Answer to nobody but yourself.” He slipped his hand through the hilt of a fat-bladed dueling knife. It was the kind rude boys favored, a cross between stabbing blade and brassknuckles, because it was almost impossible to lose one’s grip on it in a fight.
Now Heisen smiled calmly and took a swipe at her.
“Oh shit!” Rebel danced back. Grabbing the loose end of her cloak, she whipped it about one forearm. Now she had a shield of sorts. In a giddy, crazily gleeful corner of her mind, she felt like a Renaissance dandy. This was how they had fought in Spain, in Rome, in Greece, all those centuries ago, in desperate back-alley scuffles.
Of course, they’d had weapons of their own.
Heisen advanced slowly; even with the advantage, he was programmed to be a cautious fighter. He feinted twice, stabbing at her face and then her belly, and watched how her arm jerked forward to protect them. Where Heisen’s movements were all smooth, controlled menace, Rebel’s reflexes were made rough and nervous by the jagged edge of fear. It coursed through her veins, danced behind her eyes, and tasted sour in her mouth. She was defeated already.
Heisen’s smile faded, and for an instant he was perfectly still. Then he lunged forward, feinting left to draw away her arm, then slashing downward at the exposed side of her throat.
Rebel leaped away, crashing sideways into the wall. The hot acid edge of the knife drifted across her side, barely breaking the skin, searing the finest possible line over her ribs. Rebel pushed away from the wall, her entire side ablaze with pain, and stumbled backward. Heisen glided forward, his eyes deathly calm.
Something hard slammed Rebel in the back. The edge of the bar. Perfect, she thought. One corner in the entire damned skywalk and I back myself into it. Something smooth and metallic and chill touched her back ever so gently.
The headfreezer.
In one swift motion she snagged the thing from behind her and thrust it at Heisen, gripping the handle in both hands. He fell back a pace.
The problem was that it was not easy to hold the freezing unit up before her. It was heavy, and her arms trembled. It was too short, too blunt, too clumsy. If Heisen weren’t so damned quick, she’d be tempted to just drop it on his foot.
Under one finger she could feel a trigger built into the handle. Which meant that if she could convince him to stick his hand inside the device, she could take him.
Otherwise, it made a lousy weapon.
I’ll have to throw it at him, Rebel thought. Swing it up, catch him under the jaw, break a few teeth. Then grab the knife and hold him for the security people. That was a good plan. It ranked right up there with suddenly learning how to teleport.
She could see Heisen’s muscles tensing. His face went very calm.
All in a flurry, he drove the knife up in a killer stab, she swung the case toward it, and there was a shout from behind Rebel. Reflexively, Heisen’s eyes flicked up, past her shoulder, to assess the intruder. In that second’s inattention, Rebel thrust the headfreezer forward, shoving it over the extended knife and hand. She hit the trigger. The unit grunted, an almost silent mechanical cough.
For a long instant neither Rebel nor Heisen moved.
Then Rebel jerked back the case. Its exterior was hot with transferred energy and painful to the touch. Heisen looked down. Gingerly, wonderingly, he reached out to touch his knife hand.
It shattered.
Both knife and hand fell to the deck and broke into fragments, leaving behind an arm that simply stopped halfway between elbow and wrist. Rebel’s fingers felt weak. She dropped the headfreezer. She couldn’t stopstaring at the amputated arm; it seemed to glow and swell, filling her vision. Behind her came the staccato sound of running feet.
Heisen came to himself then. Showing no sign of pain, he reached with his surviving hand into his cloak and removed a small black ball. “Stand clear,” he gravely advised, and threw the ball at a distant stretch of wall.
The samurai were drawing near when the wall exploded, bursting outward in a shaped gush of water and glass. One seized Rebel and pulled her back, while the other leaned forward, trying to snag Heisen with her pike. But Heisen was already leaping through the new opening. He fell out and away. Wind screamed, and some of the gushing water was thrown back in their faces. The air reeked of salt, and wet strands of kelp were everywhere. To either side of the walk, heavy safety doors slammed shut.
Rebel got one glimpse of Heisen tumbling, his cloak flapping wildly, before the darkness swallowed him.
“What a mess!” a samurai said. He kicked at a flopping fish. Wind lashed his hair.