Dick. It's a prayer, a plea. It's the best I can do. What kind of a goddamned morality leaves us to hang, you bastard? Help me now and I'll give you anything you want. Anything.
I swear, I swear, I swear I feel his lips brush across the top of my hair, his hands on my shoulders in a moment's benediction. I swear I feel the sharp sting of his tears in the corners of my eyes. “I don't believe in God,” Richard whispers in my ear. “And moreover, I don't believe you need any God you have to bargain with, Jen. Now. Go do what you have to do.”
And then he's gone, a whisper in my ear, a faint and subtle presence I can't feel nearly as well as I can feel Min-xue, and the thin, thready pain-dazed awareness that's Patty Valens, swimming groggily back into consciousness.
And then I smile, because Dick hasn't abandoned us. He's just told us we're old enough to bloody well take care of ourselves. The smile doesn't last, though, because all of a sudden I can see the way out, if we're lucky. And it means sending the kid right the hell back into harm's way.
I wasn't fast enough, Patty thought. I wasn't fast enough. I got shot, I got hit—
“Patty.” A calm even voice in her ear, in her mind.
Jen. I'm okay, I think I'm okay, but I'm bleeding a lot—
“You're doing fine.” Just a little emphasis on the last word. Just enough to ease the tightness in Patty's chest and calm the thunder of her heart. “Patty. I need you to do something.”
Show me. Which was the right thing to say, mind to mind like that. Show me, not tell me. And Jen showed her, a mental picture so crisp that Patty realized she could manage it without even having to open her own eyes. “Get it?”
Got it, Patty answered. She grabbed one cut-short breath, pain dull and piercing between her ribs, before she had the time to psyche herself out, and shoved herself stiff-armed off the floor. Her wounded shoulder failed her; the arm collapsed. She screamed; it didn't matter, because she had the momentum by then and her other arm was strong enough.
Barely. She rocked down, fishtailing, her pelvis lifting as her nose banged into the carpeted floor and white-red flashes like police car lights lit up her vision. Her hand slipped in blood, carpet burning the heel of her palm. Her elbow smacked hard on the edge of a stair. But her feet shot up and she donkey-kicked out hard—hard—with both legs at once, and nailed the prime minister right in the gut.
Riel didn't have time to shout. She went back like an unbraced kickbag, right into the arms of the man with the stolen gun. One shot banged Patty's eardrums. She yelped and buried her face in her arm as two more answered.
The pricelessness of the gunman's expression when Min-xue drills him between the eyes would be easier to appreciate if Riel hadn't gone down with him, folded over like a rag doll, blood spurting through the fingers she's clamped over her face. I'm running, stepping over Patty as Patty feels me coming and rolls out of the way, kicking the gunman's pistol skittering under the seats just in case he comes back to life like a 3-D villain.
The chances are slim. Even a cursory inspection reveals that if Min-xue's shot didn't take the top of his head off, mine sufficed for follow-up. But Christ, Riel, Riel's bleeding like a stuck pig, and she whimpers when I try to pry her fingers away from her face. “Connie, let me see it. Connie. It's over. Are you okay? Are you all right?”
Richard, I need medical teams. I've got it secured down here, but I need EMTs, trauma docs, I need them fast, I've got multiple gunshot casualties, at least eight… no, ten, no — I don't even know what the hell I've got—
It occurs to me as I yelp directions that maybe he meant he wouldn't be around to help at all anymore, and I should be running for the door, running for help myself. Patty drags herself to her feet behind me, staggers down the steps with one arm hanging limp, and Min-xue has crouched back down between the seats. I can hear him counting. CPR, of course.
She's going to check on her granddad, I know. I can't bring myself to grudge it.
And then, “I'm already summoning help,” Richard says in my ear, and I burst into tears. Seriously, no shit, crying with relief like a kid punched in the belly, still tugging gently at Riel's wrist, trying to see how much of her face she's had shot off. She finally lets her fingers relax, and the only thing wrong with her is—“Marde, Connie. That bastard shot your nose off.”
She looks at me looking at her, at the expression on my face, and bursts out laughing, which breaks a clot and sprays blood over us both. But at this point, who the fuck could tell?
BOOK THREE
I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his.
General George S. Patton, June 1944
Genie floated in the darkness, calm and aware. No one touched her there; she couldn't feel Richard or Alan, Patty or Jen, Charlie or Leslie. She couldn't feel herself, or the Benefactors, or even the Montreal.
It was perfectly silent, and perfectly safe, and perfectly warm. And perfectly alone. Carver Mallory, she thought, naming a boy she's heard talked about but had never met. I've wound up like Carver Mallory, crippled and locked in my own head.
She reached out and found nothing. The last sensation she remembered was the pressure on her opened hand as Papa slid the wire into her chip, and then falling, and then the dark.
She wondered if this was what it had been like for Leslie and Charlie, adrift in space. She wondered if she would ever find her way home. At least it was warm, warm and quiet…
But she was bored.
And time went by.
She became aware of sensation. None of the ones she'd been expecting — not the softness of sheets or the smell of antiseptic or the hum of a ventilator, and not the prick of a needle in the crook of her arm. Not even soreness lingering in the back of her hand where Elspeth had ever-so-carefully cut her.
No. This was strangely neutral — but definitely a sensation, the way water has a flavor, even if it doesn't taste like anything, exactly. Water. Yes, actually, that was what it reminded her of. Water the exact temperature of her body, water flowing over her skin effortlessly, darkness and a swell and pulse as if she took deep deep breaths, breaths deep enough to stretch her entire body, and then puffed them out again hard—
There was pain on her skin, but it wasn't significant. Patches like sunburn, a sloughing kind of itch, and she knew they were less than they had been, and growing lesser still. Healing. Which didn't explain why she had too many arms and legs, come to think of it, or why the glimmerings of light that reached her faintly were watery, aquamarine.
Or why she felt the familiar internal pressure of sharing her head with somebody else.
Richard?
“Right here, Genie.” Something… different about his voice.
Oh, good, she thought, and laughed hysterically, except no sound came out. Where are we?
He laughed along with her, but his chuckle didn't have that frantic edge. “You're on a ride-along in a jumbo flying squid. Dosidicus gigas. I thought it would be nicer than waking up in a hospital bed, given how much time you've spent in those.”