My phone vibrated in my pocket. I glanced at the display. It was Nico.
“Faye, please,” Shanks said.
“Shut up.”
“I—”
“Doyle, shut up.”
I flipped open my phone and started talking.
“Nico, I know who the killer is. These murders and what happened that morning are related, I—”
My voice trailed off as I noticed the spots on the floor, like blood but darker. As I watched, several more appeared, dripping down from out of nowhere. I followed the drops upward, and the source should have been right in front of me.
“Faye, you’re in danger,” I heard him say. “Where are you?”
The air rippled, and all at once the revivor appeared. It was standing right there in front of me. It must have already been in the apartment when we came in. It had been watching us the whole time.
I was still staring when it lashed out and I caught a metallic flash under the light. Something warm spattered the side of my face and neck. Shanks collapsed onto his knees, then forward onto the floor, his gun falling free from his hand.
“Faye!” Nico’s voice barked from the phone.
It turned to me. The moonlit eyes glared down at me, orange light flickering behind the pupils.
“It’s here—” I said into the phone, as the revivor reached forward and took it, snapping it closed before placing it on the end table.
There was no way it was going to leave me alive. I went for my gun, but before it was fully clear of the holster, the revivor’s right hand and forearm split apart to reveal a dark gap inside where something metallic caught the light.
It struck me in the chest with its palm, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and at that same instant, I heard what sounded like a burst of air followed by an awful crunch.
“What a waste,” the revivor said.
All the strength went out of me, and my fingers slipped off its wrist. Looking down, I saw that some kind of blade had actually thrust out of a chamber inside its forearm, impaling me through the middle of the chest. With a loud snap, the blade pulled free and disappeared back into its arm, which closed over the seam, and the gun slipped from my fingers and onto the floor as I began to fall.
At the last second, terror welled up inside me. It came on like a light from inside, and everything seemed crystal clear. There were no flashes or memories from my life, just that terror, pure and solitary, for just an instant.
The fear subsided, and I was floating weightless, drifting backward into the darkness and a long, long overdue sleep.
8
Coil
Nico Wachalowski—Shine Tower Apartments, Unit 901
The city was crawling with police and soldiers. After the second bomb went off, Ohtomo had begun deploying the revivor soldiers. They’d all be animate and on the ground by nightfall. Checkpoints were being set up at the bridges. Overhead, a military helicopter passed between two buildings as I turned, numb, onto Faye’s street.
At the end, where her apartment sat, trash bags and snow bordered the road. There was no place to pull over, so I nosed into the no-parking zone in front of her building and cut the engine. Sitting there, feeling the heat leech out of the cab, I tried to take some solace from the fact that the girl, Flax, would most likely be dead if I hadn’t been there, but it didn’t provide much.
Zoe’s warning had come too late. I called Faye immediately, but the call was cut off. Before I’d gotten to the main drag, I got word from the local police. I was too late. Noakes had ordered me back to the arena, where I dealt with the fallout for half the night. Part of me was glad.
Wind blew over the car as a jeep slowed down at the intersection ahead and the soldier riding shotgun peered in at me from behind his visor. I held up my badge and pressed it against the inside of the windshield. After a few seconds, the jeep continued on.
When I shouldered open the car door, it crunched into a bank of snow, and a blast of cold, damp air blew into the car. The sky was overcast, a sliver of gray trailing through the building tops. Even though it was barely afternoon, it looked almost dark. Somehow it seemed fitting.
I pulled myself out of the car and pushed the salt-covered door closed with my foot. Looking around, I saw dirty slush and snow that had refrozen so many times it formed a slick, gray-black trench that bordered the narrow street. Cars were jammed in tight, some covered up to their windshields. Garbage bags stood in piles, waiting to be picked up, stinking faintly even in the cold.
This was where she lived? Sometimes I forgot what a difference full citizenship could mean, even for a public servant. I remembered how tired she’d looked at the restaurant, and how the stress had worked its way into her eyes. She was jacked up on stims and strung out. I’d known something was wrong, but when she smiled I looked past it. When she smiled, it took me back those ten years to before we’d made our choices, back to when she looked happy, and when, if the right song came on, she would dance.
It wasn’t like I never expected to see her again. On some level, I think I hoped our paths might cross someday, but when I extended my tour, the months turned into years, and before I knew it a decade had passed. When I heard her voice out of the blue, I wasn’t sure how it made me feel. But when I saw her in the restaurant, I knew I’d made a mistake back then. Things should have been different.
I didn’t have a good answer for that. Something stopped me. It had been a mistake. Now, after all those years, we reconnected just long enough for me to listen to her last words over a cell phone, unable to lift a finger to help her.
The face of the apartment building looked old and weathered. The front doors were double locked with bulletproof glass. I held my badge up to the scanner, which made a ticking sound.
“Unauthorized for access,” a voice said. “If you are visiting a tenant, you may—”
“I’m a federal agent,” I said, still holding up the badge. The scanner ticked again, reading the badge number then running it.
“Go right in, Agent.”
The doors snapped and I pushed them open. A bank of mail slots were arranged on the wall to my right in ten-by-ten grids. Scanning them, I found hers was empty. At the end of the empty entryway was a single elevator door. I took it up to the ninth floor.
The hallway was quiet as I made my way down toward the yellow tape that had been crossed over the door at the far end. Most of the commotion seemed to be over.
“Hello?” I called. Someone stirred inside, and a moment later a man with graying hair approached the door. His eyes narrowed when he saw me.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked me from the other side of the tape.
