awfully keen to find out.’
‘Just a check-up,’ I said.
‘Well, maybe.’ Pransky knitted together his long and elegant fingers and then made knuckle-popping sounds. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It’s certainly hard to see how it could relate to what happened next.’
I tried to sound interested. ‘Which was?’
‘That you nearly killed someone,’ Zebra said, silencing her associate with a soundless cuff of the air. ‘I saw you, Tanner. I was on the point of approaching you and asking you what you were doing and then suddenly you were taking a gun out of your pocket. I couldn’t see your face, but I’d been following you long enough to know it was you. I watched you move with the gun in your hand; smoothly and calmly, as if this was all you’d ever been born to do.’ She paused. ‘And then you put the gun away, and no one else had been paying enough attention to you to notice what you’d done. I watched you look around, but it was obvious that whoever it was you’d seen was gone — if he’d ever been there. It was Reivich, wasn’t it?’
‘You seem to know so much, you tell me.’
‘I think you came here to kill him,’ Zebra said. ‘Why, I don’t know. Reivich is an old family in the Canopy, but they don’t have as many enemies as some. Yet it makes sense. That would explain why you were so desperate to get into the Canopy that you’d wander into a hunt. And why you were so reluctant to stay in the safety of my home. It was because you were scared of losing Reivich’s trail. Tell me I’m right, Tanner.’
‘Would there be any point denying it?’
‘Not a great deal, no, but you’re welcome to try.’
She was right. Just as I had unburdened myself to Chanterelle earlier in the night, I did the same for Zebra. But it felt less intimate. Perhaps it was the fact that Pransky was standing there absorbing it all. Or the feeling that the two of them actually knew more about me than they had said, and that very little of what I was telling them was news. I told them that Reivich was someone from my homeworld, not a genuinely bad man, but one who had done something very bad out of foolishness or weakness, and had to be punished for that with no less severity than if he had been born a snarling knife-twisting psychopath.
When I had finished — when Zebra and Pransky had grilled me to exhaustion, examining every facet of my story as if looking for a flaw they knew must be present — there was one last question, and it was mine.
‘Why have you brought me here, Zebra?’
Hands on hips, her elbows jutting from the black enclosure of her coat, she said, ‘Why do you think?’
‘Curiosity, I suppose. But that’s not enough.’
‘You’re in danger, Tanner. I’m doing you a favour.’
‘I’ve been in danger since I came here. That’s nothing new to me.’
‘I mean real danger,’ Pransky said. ‘You’re in too deep. You’ve attracted too much attention.’
‘He’s right,’ Zebra said. ‘Dominika was the weak link. She may have alerted half the city by now. Reivich almost certainly knows you’re here, and he probably knows you nearly killed him tonight.’
‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If he’s already been warned of my presence, why the hell was he making himself such an easy target? If I’d been a fraction faster I’d have killed him.’
‘Maybe the meeting was a coincidence,’ Pransky said.
Zebra looked at him scornfully. ‘In a city this big? No; Tanner’s right. That meeting happened because Reivich arranged for it to happen. And there’s something else, too. Look at me, Tanner. Notice anything different?’
‘You changed your appearance.’
‘Yes. And it isn’t the hardest thing to do, believe me. Reivich could have done the same — nothing drastic; just enough to ensure that he wasn’t immediately recognisable in a public place. A few hours under the knife at most. Even a halfway competent bloodcutter could have done it.’
‘Then that doesn’t make any sense,’ I said. ‘It’s like he was taunting me. Like he wanted me to kill him.’
‘Maybe he did,’ Zebra said.
There had been moments when I thought I might never see the outside of that room; that it was where Pransky and Zebra had brought me to die.
Pransky was clearly a professional, and Zebra was no stranger to death herself, given her affiliation with the sabotage movement.
Yet they didn’t kill me.
We took a cable-car to Zebra’s place, Pransky going off on some other errand. ‘Who is he?’ I asked, once we were alone. ‘Some kind of hired help?’
‘Private intelligence,’ Zebra said, discarding her coat in a black puddle. ‘It’s all the rage these days. There are rivalries in the Canopy — feuds and quiet wars, sometimes between families, and sometimes within.’
‘You thought he could help trace me.’
‘Seems I wasn’t wrong.’
‘I still don’t know why, Zebra.’ Once again I looked beyond the room, towards the maw of the chasm which was like the rim of a volcano around which a city festered, on the eve of its own destruction. There was some dawnlight on the horizon. ‘Unless you think you can use me in some way — in which case I’m afraid you’re wrong. I’m not interested in any Canopy power games you might be involved in. I’m only here to do one thing.’
‘To kill a seemingly innocent man.’
‘It’s a cruel universe. Do you mind if I sit down?’ I helped myself to a seat before she had answered me, the mobile furniture shuffling into place beneath me like an obsequious servant. ‘I’m still a soldier at heart and it’s my job not to question these things. The instant I start doing that is the instant I stop doing my job properly.’
Zebra, all angularity and knifelike edges, folded herself into the sumptuousness of the seat opposite me, retracting her knees beneath her chin.
‘Someone’s after you, Tanner. That’s why I had to find you. It’s dangerous for you to stay here. You have to get out of the city.’
‘It’s nothing I didn’t expect. Reivich will have hired all the help he can get his hands on.’
‘Local help?’
It was an odd question. ‘Yes, I suppose. You wouldn’t hire someone who didn’t already know the city.’
‘Whoever’s after you isn’t local, Tanner.’
I tensed in the seat, causing its buried musculature to generate massaging ripples. ‘What do you know?’
‘Not very much, except that Dominika said someone had been trying to find you. A man and a woman. They acted like they’d never been here before. Like offworlders. And they were very interested in finding you.’
‘A man already did,’ I said, thinking of Quirrenbach. ‘He followed me down from orbit, posing as an offworlder. I lost him in Dominika’s. It’s possible he returned with reinforcements.’ Vadim, perhaps. But it would be quite a trick to mistake Vadim for a woman.
‘Is he dangerous?’
‘Anyone who lies for a living is dangerous.’
Zebra summoned one of her ceiling-tracked servitors, having the machine bring us a tray laden with carafes of varying size and colour. Zebra poured me a goblet of wine and I let it wash away some of the accumulated taste of the city, dull some of the roaring in my mind.
‘I’m very tired,’ I said. ‘You offered me sanctuary here a day ago, Zebra. Can I accept that offer now, if only until daybreak?’
She looked at me over the smoked rim of her glass. It was already daybreak, but she knew what I meant. ‘After all you’ve done, you think I’ll keep an offer like that open?’
‘I’m an optimist,’ I said, with what I hoped was the appropriate tone of utter resignation.
Then I took another sip of wine and began to realise how exhausted I really was.
THIRTY
