The area he referred to might have been a restaurant or bar at one time. Corridors headed off in four directions from there, three of them flanked by small hotel rooms. Five of those rooms had a revivor signature inside.
Opening the kitchen door a crack, I used a backscatter filter to peer into the walls on the other side. There were two cameras hidden behind the tiles there, one watching the kitchen and one watching a corridor to the left.
The baffle screen would disrupt the cameras, but also my internal recording buffer. They’d send someone to check out the disturbance, but I didn’t need long.
I slipped past the camera and headed down the corridor. There were a few rooms on the south side of the area. Two of the rooms had revivor signatures present.
I listened at the door but didn’t hear anyone inside. Sticking close to the wall, I reached out and tried the knob. It was locked.
I showed my badge to the scanner and the bolt clicked. No one inside moved or spoke. Using the backscatter, I looked through the door. No one was waiting on the other side.
I pushed open the door and slipped through. There were more cameras mounted in the ceiling but they were turned away, watching the bed.
The hotel room was lit by simulated candlelight. As soon as I was inside, I caught a blast of perfume and damp air. There was a water stain on the far wall where a strip of wallpaper had been torn away. The bed was made and the blankets turned down. The revivor signature was coming from the bathroom.
Moving into the room, I noticed something under the bed.
Across from the foot of the bed I saw the revivor through the open bathroom door. It was standing in the dark with its back to me, looking into the mirror over the sink. It was female, with stick-thin legs and a pair of sheer briefs hanging from a flat behind. It wore a wig the color of bubblegum.
I got down on one knee and looked under the bed. In the shadows, I saw a pair of bare feet, toes down.
“She put her there,” the revivor said from the bathroom. When I looked, it still had its back to me.
I grabbed the ankles, and the skin was cold. Keeping out of range of the cameras, I dragged a second female revivor out from under the bed. It didn’t have a signature.
“Who did?” I asked. In the bathroom, the revivor just kept staring in the mirror. I left the body and moved in behind it.
I came within a foot of it, until I saw its eyes reflected back in the mirror. It had a pair of large, bare breasts thrust out in front of it with the characteristic dark gray nipples and black veins tracing the curves. Underneath them, ribs stood out, and down the middle of its back, I could see the knobs of its spine. When I leaned in, I caught a whiff of decomposition underneath heavy perfume. Wherever the thing was made, it was a botch job. The inhibitors were failing, and the body was beginning to rot.
“Who put the revivor under there?” I asked.
“She did.”
I blinked hard, deactivating the JZI. For a few seconds, I’d be completely offline. The revivor looked at me in the mirror, and met my eye.
“Am I for you?” it asked. I spun it around so it was facing me. I took a photograph from inside my jacket and held it in front of its face.
“Have you seen this woman?” I asked it.
“It’s a revivor.”
“I know that. Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“Do you know the name Faye Dasalia?”
The factory fire where I’d last seen her burned for three months straight. When it finally died down to the point where it could be scrubbed, there was nothing left. There was no way to know if Faye or any of the other revivors had come out of there intact, or where they’d gone if they had.
It looked up from the picture, focusing on me again.
“I don’t know that name.”
I blinked and the JZI reinitialized. Before it could say anything else, I touched the scanner to the back of its neck and squeezed the contact, firing a wire filament up into the spine. It made contact with the primary revivor’s node, and the body went rigid for a second before it went limp. I caught it as it started to fall.
That was Vesco. He’d been keeping an eye on me, a little too closely. Someone had their hooks in him.
The revivor felt cold through my wet shirt. Hoisting it up, I eased it back into the bathtub.
The data miner started boring through the security they’d installed on it. A central command was being used to control them, which meant they needed an open connection to each revivor. A centralized hub like that, in the hands of an amateur, could allow access to all their systems if you made a direct connection with one of the revivor nodes. I was counting on that.
On the edge of my peripheral vision I could see audio waves piped in from the eye in the sky. The analyzer was pulling out three voices spiking over the haze of conversation. They were coming from the basement level, where a second group of revivors were located.
The miner drilled down and opened a channel. Using the JZI, I joined the revivor network.
Five upstairs. The rest had moved to the basement. The link went green, and I tapped into the central node. They’d put plenty of security on all the typical channels, but sure enough, the revivor spokes were wide open.
I started pulling the files. Less than ten seconds later, I heard a boom that vibrated through the floor. The audio being monitored spiked, and I heard shouting as footsteps tromped down the hallway. The last of the files came through, and I broke the connection to the revivor.
The door opened and a man came through, pointing an automatic pistol. I fired twice and he pitched back, his gun clattering across the floor.
“This way!” someone yelled from outside.
I picked up the pistol and handed it to a SWAT officer as I stepped back out into the hallway. Several more of them had men under armed guard.
“This is a raid! Get on the ground now!”
Down the hall, uniformed men were holding rifles on three guys. Two were in sports jackets and the last was in his underwear, holding a balled-up bedsheet to his chest. Mike Vesco waded through the mess, holding up his badge.
“Drop it and get down!”
“Step away from the—”
A high-pitched hiss blasted through the air back in what used to be the hotel lounge. Behind the bar a white
