I didn’t know how I felt about that. He didn’t just say he’d check in; he wanted to use me as a consultant, on the department payroll. He wanted to keep it very quiet, though. I thought that would make me happy, but it didn’t.
Mostly that was because he changed. At some point between the time I left him in the storage unit and the time he held me in his lap outside the factory, he’d changed. Not his personality, even though his face had changed a little and his left eyelid had gotten a little droopy. He still acted the same, and he still talked the same, but he was different.
“I can’t change him anymore,” I said into my glass.
“What?”
“Nico,” I said. “I can’t change him anymore. I can’t—”
I almost said “control him,” but I stopped myself. When I looked, I could see the colors around him. I could see the pain and the confusion and all the rest of it, but when I pushed, the colors didn’t change.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Karen said. She didn’t get it. She couldn’t.
“How am I supposed to know what he’s thinking?”
“You’re not supposed to know,” she said, smiling a little.
“Then what do I do?”
“Get to know him.”
My drink was gone, and without asking she poured me another one, but a small one.
“Oh, by the way, I found this slipped under the front door,” she said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a blank business card with some writing on it. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Is it for you? From your friend Nico, maybe?”
I took the card and turned it over. There was handwriting in small print on the back of it.
“It’s not from Nico,” I said.
“Do you know what it means?”
I crumpled up the card in my hand, then dropped it in the trash.
“No,” I said. “If it’s okay, I think my place is with you.”
Calliope Flax—Bullrich Heights
A couple days after the whole thing went down, I stood out in the cold to wait for the bus, and it was goddamn gray out. The sky, what you could see, was gray; the buildings looked gray; everything was gray. The wind howled down the street, kicking up the dusting we got. It was cold. I heard that where I was going they had the opposite problem, but it couldn’t be much worse.
When the bus finally showed, it looked like it was going to blow by, but he saw me there and pumped the brakes. It rolled to a stop, front tire half in a puddle of slush when the door squealed open.
I hoisted my bag up on one shoulder and got on. It was warm in there and all the glass was fogged except the front. The driver looked like he came with the bus, and he’d get buried with it too.
“Pass,” he said.
I took out the little yellow chit they gave me when I signed up to serve. The driver gave it a look and I dropped it in the slot. It landed in the box with a few others.
“Just you?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Have a seat,” he said. “It’s a long trip.”
There were three other guys in the back. Two looked like they were passed out, and the last one looked like he wished he was. I sat down as far from them as I could and put my bag in the seat next to me. I wiped the fog off the window and watched with my head against the cold glass as we pulled out of Bullrich Heights.
I’m not sure what made me do it. Part of it was the G-man and something he said. He said he thought I was worth more than the arena. He said I impressed him down in that hellhole. He didn’t say “Go sign up”—that part was my idea—but I think I believed him.
That was part of it. The big thing, though, was that once it was all over, nothing felt right anymore. When I got back to my place, it was like it didn’t even look the same. As soon as I was through the door, I knew I’d leave. Anyplace had to be better than there, even the grinder.
The guys made some noise and we all went out for a big bash my last night, and I drank until I puked. I passed out facedown and said good-bye to my life, for what it was worth.
As the bus took me out of there, I thought about the G-Man, Nico. The training and the skills were just the start. The implant, the wiring, the strength, and the power …it could all be mine. I held his card in my hand as the bus took me where I was going, reading his message and his number.
For better or worse, things were going to change.
Nico Wachalowski—FBI Home Office
The first thing I saw when I finally woke up was the last of the diagnostic messages scrolling past the darkness behind my eyelids. The second thing I saw was the communication-pending message from Noakes marked URGENT.
Opening my eyes, I saw Sean sitting at the monitor on the bench in front of me as I lay in the maintenance chair. The rice paper underneath me crinkled as I cracked my back, and he glanced over, thin lips grinning. The dark shadow still floated in front of my eyes.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“How long was I down?”
“A long time.”
He got up, and I saw he hadn’t shaved. He looked tired as he stepped over to the chair and looked down at me, holding the scanner up to my right eye.
“How am I doing?”
“All things considered, pretty well,” he said. “I had to call in some help on this one. Your sternum was split, so it had to be replaced with an artificial one, and that plate you had behind it got dimpled, so it had to come out.”
“What about the rest of me?”
“You suffered a severe myocardial infarction and a lot of blood loss,” he said. “The chemicals released by the JZI kept you alive, but they take their own toll. It took almost a total transfusion to get you right, but you’ll be back on your feet.”
“I’ve got a blind spot in front of my right eye.”
“You had some oxygen starvation even despite the implant; you were down for a long time. I won’t lie; you had some pinprick necrosis in a section of your brain, but you got lucky.”
“Hang on,” I told Sean.
The last time I saw Faye, she was with one of the black-market revivors Fawkes had brought in. While I waited with Zoe and Calliope outside for the EMT to arrive, I’d searched for her signature, but I never picked it up
