“Please.” His hands were working at his sides, fingers kneading against each palm. “I’m begging you. I need help.”
“With what? Threatening people?”
“They killed everyone,” he mumbled numbly. “Everyone who might have still been working on your plan. Gone. They were trying to stop you.”
“They failed,” I said. “We won.”
“I can’t trust anyone.” He scrubbed his hands over his face again. “I was on the road when it happened, and I still—I barely got away.”
I wasn’t exactly going to cheer for that.
“They knew too much, too fast,” he said dazedly. “I can’t help but think—everything we did, I look back, and I don’t know anymore. Other than what we did with you, what we were told to do—the orders we received—how can I know?”
“You think Pithica might have been giving all your orders to begin with?” I clarified, once I had sorted through his disjointedness. Well, wasn’t that a delicious twist of irony.
“Or we’ve been playing enough into their hands for it not to matter. We were a cell system; we had some autonomy, but we…we clearly were not having the effect we hoped for…”
“They’re pretty good at the whole butterfly-and-hurricane deal, from what I understand,” I said. “They probably pushed a button in Istanbul and made you hop.”
“That does not make me feel better.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
He shoved his restless hands into his pockets. “I suppose none of it matters now. But—we did help you, did we not? We gave you what you needed, and we suffered for it.” He had the gall to straighten up then, and he looked down his nose at me. I was immediately annoyed. “Will you return the favor?”
“Whoa there,” I said. “We offered you an opportunity to be a small part of the biggest advancement your stated mission has ever had. I don’t owe you anything.”
“Perhaps not, but—perhaps I can still be of service to you. I know a great deal of intelligence about Pithica—”
“Let me stop you right there,” I interrupted. “I’m not interested.” My heart hammered a little faster. The truth was, I couldn’t have said yes if I’d wanted to. I took a quick breath, trying to dispel the feel of Dawna’s greasy fingers on my brain. Damn Rio for not helping me.
Not that I wanted to make a deal with Steve anyway. That was too Faustian, even for me.
“Please,” he begged, with all the grace of an untamed boar. “What can I offer you? I need help. I have to get away—they’re coming after me—”
I highly doubted that. Pithica’s move against his group had been to try to stop Checker’s and my plan from completing. They had swept in and brought the hammer down where they thought it might provide a stopgap. I doubted they were losing any sleep about the collateral damage, but I would have been very surprised if they were still putting any resources into chasing after stragglers. Especially now that they had nothing left to stop. Revenge wasn’t Pithica’s style.
I didn’t tell Steve that, though. I was enjoying the hunted-animal look on him. “You only have one thing I want,” I said.
“What? Anything,” he promised abjectly.
“An answer.” My mouth was suddenly dry, and I had to force the words out. “Anton Lechowicz. And his daughter.”
He looked confused for a moment, which made a hot spurt of anger rise in my chest. He didn’t deserve to forget them. But then he blinked, and looked at me, and faltered. I wondered what my face looked like. “We couldn’t risk Pithica finding us,” he tried to explain, the words thready.
I’d known, or suspected it strongly enough that it was the same thing, but I still felt dizzy, as if every bit of equilibrium had deserted me. “You killed two people I liked,” I said. My voice sounded like it came from very far away.
“I—I’m sorry,” Steve faltered. “It was one of our routine measures; we weren’t trying to—and I only signed off on it; I wasn’t the one who—” He stopped abruptly, confusion and guilt flaring in his eyes, as if only just hearing what he had said, that he was trying to excuse being the one who gave the order by virtue of having kept his hands clean. His mouth worked silently. Then he gathered himself, lifted his chin, and did that nose-looking-down thing he seemed so fond of. “I am not going to apologize,” he said, firming his voice. “We thought it had to be done.”
“So does this,” I said.
I didn’t move as fast as I could have. I wanted to see his eyes widen in startled realization in the split-second before he died.
The body slid to the ground with a quiet thump, and I took what felt like the first clean breath since this had all started. Pithica might not go in for revenge, but I sure as hell did.
Chapter 38
The odd jobs I’d been able to hustle as LA recovered dried up as we hit the second week out from the disaster—people weren’t desperate enough anymore to hire me for necessities, and were still too occupied with rebuilding their lives and routines to worry about trivialities. Arthur had gone back to his own place, leaving me alone with too many thoughts—about Dawna and Pithica, about what she had been able to do to me, about Rio and whatever he hadn’t told me. When I slept it was fitful and at odd hours, and the rest of the time I drank. A lot.
A week and a half after our final confrontation with Pithica, I got an email from Checker saying he’d been keeping tabs, and as far as he could tell, over seventy percent of Pithica’s revenue sources had moved their money out of the organization’s reach. Dawna and her people would need a long time to rebuild those resources. We had knocked them down but good.
I spent a lot of time staring out at the streets wondering when I would see crime start to spike. And then I drank some more.
I woke sober one evening, vivid dreams chasing a blurry reality, scenes so real my brain wobbled for a few seconds before settling on which world was the correct one. Nightmares had plagued me for as long as I could remember, but they had been worse these past couple of weeks.
Since Dawna.
I lay on the blankets and tried to latch onto the shreds of the dream, an intense feeling of déjà vu overpowering me. Places, faces—they wavered just out of reach, the itch of forgotten memory overwhelming my brain and twisting my stomach until I tasted bile at the back of my throat. Whatever had crawled through my subconscious last night, I had seen it before.
Or dreamt it before.
Dawna’s face intruded in my mind’s eye, backlit by forms and figures I didn’t want to see, scenes half-forgotten, visions and memories and a world only half real—
Pain in my knuckles slammed the images away. I’d put my fist through the drywall next to the mattress.
I wiped blood and plaster dust off the back of my hand with my shirt and dragged myself out of bed to find more alcohol. The bottles from the night before—or whenever I had last been awake—were empty, expanding in a glass forest across table and floor and attesting to my usual company.
Halberd.
I picked up a bottle with a stylized drawing of an axe on the label.
Halberd. Why had I just thought that?
The word pinged me like a fragment of another forgotten dream, a half-buried shred of awareness.
Halberd and Pithica, the memo had said, the one Anton had given me a lifetime ago. But no, something else—the word poked at me, itching, an irritating nub that wouldn’t go away, echoing against the edges of my mind.
An echo in Dawna’s voice? Her image swam in my memory, standing tall above me, blurred in a thousand pixelated layers. Her hands on my face, reaching into my brain—I could hear her voice, but the words overlapped in a jumbled mass.