she sat at attention.
Ai herself was very small. I would have thought she was a child, except for her face. Her clothes had to be tailored specially for her, and the jewelry she had on display must have cost a fortune. Her head was large, a little too large for her body, and her thick lips protruded over an overbite, giving her a vaguely fishlike appearance. I realized then that I’d seen that face before. The last time I’d seen it, I’d pulled its image from the camera buffer of a dead man’s eye. She’d sent a freelance news reporter to Goicoechea Plaza the night I busted Tai and his smuggling ring, the night it all started.
“Hello,” she said, smiling. She had a slight accent, but her diction was perfect and her voice was quite deep, despite her small size. “I am Motoko Ai, and this is one of my associates, Penny Blount.”
“Hello,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you, and thank you for bringing us here.”
She waved her hand as if it was no big deal and I saw her small fingers twitch. She kept her eyes on me, but they looked strangely unfocused.
“Please sit,” she said. Zoe sat down right away next to Penny, and I took the remaining chair.
“This can’t be any small expense,” I said.
“I wanted to impress you.”
“You have.”
“I also wanted this to be formal.”
“Wanted what to be formal?”
“Cementing your alliance with me.”
She was completely serious. She had an air of power and authority, but also a confidence beyond anything I’d ever seen. It wasn’t just arrogance or bravado or even ignorance. She believed what she said. She was certain of it.
A small tremor moved through her hands again. Her head bobbed, and I saw Penny tense up for a second. Was something wrong with her?
“Am I entering into an alliance with you?”
“You both are.”
“No offense meant, ma’am, but why would I do that?”
“I’ve already seen it. You do,” she said, and I could see that was all the answer she needed. She didn’t know the why. It was irrelevant to her.
“Do the things you see always come true?” I asked her.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “There are levels of probability, but once they reach certainty, then yes, they always come true.”
Penny fiddled with her cell phone while Zoe looked over a menu. She was flustered to find it was completely in Japanese.
“Don’t worry,” Ai said. “We won’t get to order.” Penny looked disappointed when she heard that. Based on some of the dishes I’d seen pass by, I was a little disappointed myself.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because things are very dangerous right now,” she said. “We’re being watched.”
“Then why come here in the first place?”
“Significant events are tied to this meeting,” she said. “It happens here.”
“Because you foresaw it?”
“Because I felt like it.”
“But if it’s dangerous—”
“With the exception of one of us,” she said, “I know when everyone at this table dies. The one I’m unsure of outlives the rest. I know that much. None of us dies here.”
Ai and Penny both suddenly glanced over at Zoe at the same time. Zoe’s pupils had gone wide, but she looked confused. A second later they went back to normal. Penny gave Zoe a little shake of her head. Ai didn’t say anything. She just looked back to me.
“I know you know who I am,” she said.
“I’ve heard of you.”
Her little body shivered as her pupils, black on dark brown, swelled to fill the irises. I felt a wave of dizziness, far worse than I’d felt with Sean or even Zoe. She was trying to control me.
I let my eyelids droop a little as the dizziness passed. Ai smiled as her eyes went back to normal.
“Don’t pretend,” she said, waving one tiny hand. “That may have worked on your friend, but not me.”
She watched me for a few more seconds, the silence stretching out before she spoke again.
“How long have you been like that?”
“Two years. You’re not surprised?”
“Just the opposite. I’ve been waiting for it. What caused it?”
“Before the assault on the factory, I was injured, and flatlined for several minutes. It happened then.”
“I can’t influence you,” she said. “If I can’t, then you truly are shut off from us.”
I thought that fact would put her on edge, but instead the edges of her lips curled just barely.
“Do you know you share that immunity with revivors?”
“Yes.”
“Who first told you about us?”
“Samuel Fawkes.”
She smiled broadly then, having assumed, I thought, that I would lie. She nodded.
“Did he also tell you about me?”
“Not specifically. He told me there’s an underground movement of people with abilities like yours.”
“And?”
“That this movement has a hierarchy, and that they manipulate society in secret.”
“As a means to their own unscrupulous ends?”
“That was the gist of it.”
“Well, Agent Wachalowski,” she said, “You’ve heard from Mr. Fawkes. Now I would like you to hear from me, if you don’t mind.”
“Please.”
I glanced over at Zoe. She was staring like she was in a trance.
“Do you have any idea how many people Mr. Fawkes killed two years ago?” Ai asked in a low voice.
“There were a lot of names in his database, but very few deaths were actually reported.”
“If they were reported, those names would obviously all be connected. We didn’t want that, but believe me— Fawkes was very successful. When the National Guard was deployed and the revivor units went missing, they moved on a large spread of targets. We were not expecting that.”
“You didn’t foresee it?”
Her large eyes narrowed a little, and the dreamy expression cleared. “We knew he would attack.”
“But not the specific form the attack would take?”
“We’re not here to talk about that,” she sniped. “They went into people’s homes and killed men, women, and children alike. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I’d seen the names coming off the database Fawkes kept, and I knew he’d kept it accurately. Their bodies were disposed of using Leichenesser, and those who survived had covered it up, but I’d always suspected that hundreds of people had been killed that night.
Something buzzed across the table, and Penny reached into her purse. She removed a second cell phone and snapped it open, looking down at the screen.
Using the backscatter, I peered through the plastic casing of the phone until a fuzzy image of the LCD appeared. From my side the text was backwards, but I captured a piece of it before she moved.
Takanawa, maybe. IMO stood for International Maritime Organization. The message might have had to do with an incoming shipment. Were they tracking Fawkes’s supply lines themselves?
