well.’
‘Would Waverly’s friends be arriving from offworld?’
‘Probably not. Unless they were just posing as offworlders, like Quirrenbach.’ She closed the door of the car behind her and the vehicle immediately took itself off on some other errand. ‘He might have come back with reinforcements. It would make sense for him to try and pick up the trail in Dominika’s, if that’s where you lost Quirrenbach in the first place. Wouldn’t it?’
‘It would make perfect sense,’ I said, hoping that I had kept the edge from my voice.
We walked to the rim of the landing ledge, to one of the pedestal-mounted telescopes. The railing which encircled the ledge was chest-high, but the telescopes all had little plinths at their bases, which meant that one was standing further from the ground, the drop all the more vertiginous. I cupped the end of the telescope to my eyes and panned around an arc of the city, struggling with the focus wheel until I realised that nothing would ever be in focus when there was so much murk in the air. Compressed by perspective, the tangle of the Canopy looked ever more complex and vegetative, like a cross-section through densely veined tissue. Reivich was out there, I knew, somewhere in that tangle; a single corpuscle caught in the pulmonary flow of the city.
‘See anything?’ Zebra asked.
‘Nothing yet.’
‘You sound tense, Tanner.’
‘Wouldn’t you be tense, in my position?’ I slammed the scope round on its pedestal. ‘I’ve been sent here to kill someone who probably doesn’t deserve it, and my only justification for it is some absurd adherence to a code of honour no one here understands or even respects. The man I’ve been sent to kill might be taunting me. Two other people might be trying to kill me. I’ve got one or two problems with my memories. And on top of that one of the people I thought I could trust has been lying to me all along.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Zebra said, but it was obvious from the tone of her voice that she did; more than sufficiently. She did not necessarily understand, but she did follow.
‘You aren’t who you say you are, Zebra.’
The wind whipped at us, almost snatching her answer away. ‘What?’
‘You’re working for Reivich, aren’t you?’
She shook her head angrily, almost laughing at the ludicrous-ness of the assertion, but she overdid it. I was not the world’s best liar, but neither was Zebra. The two of us should have started a self-help group.
‘You’re mad, Tanner. I always thought you were a little on the edge, but now I know. You’re over it. Way over.’
‘The night you found me,’ I said, ‘you were working for him even then, from the very first moment we met. The sabotage story was a cover — a pretty good one, I have to say, but a cover nonetheless.’ I stepped down from the plinth, suddenly feeling vulnerable, as if a particularly strong gust might cast me over for the long fall down to the Mulch. ‘Maybe I really was kidnapped by Gameplayers. But you already had your eye on me before then. I’d assumed I’d shaken the tail Reivich put on me — Quirrenbach — but there must have been someone else, keeping more distance so they weren’t so obvious. But you lost me until Waverly put the hunt implant in my skull. Then you had a way of tracking me again. How am I doing so far?’
‘Insane, Tanner.’ But there was no conviction in her words.
‘Do you want to know how I realised? Apart from all the little details which just didn’t add up?’
‘Astonish me.’
‘You shouldn’t have mentioned Quirrenbach. I never said his name. In fact, I was very careful not to, just in case you made a slip and it came out. Seems my luck was in.’
‘You bastard.’ She said it sweetly, so that — to anyone watching us from a distance — it might have been a term of affection, the kind lovers give themselves. ‘You sly bastard, Tanner.’
I smiled. ‘You could have used an excuse if you’d wanted. You could have said that Dominika mentioned his name when you asked who I’d been travelling with. I was half expecting you to do that, and I’m not quite sure I know how I’d have reacted. But it’s all moot now, isn’t it? Now we know just who you are.’
‘What were the little details, out of curiosity?’
‘Professional pride?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You made it far too easy for me, Zebra. You left your vehicle active so I could steal it. You left your weapon where I could find it, and enough money to make a difference. You wanted me to do it, didn’t you? You wanted me to steal those things, because then you’d know for sure who I was. That I’d come to kill Reivich.’
She shrugged. ‘Is that all?’
‘Not really, no.’ I drew Vadim’s coat tighter around myself. ‘It didn’t escape my attention that we made love the first time we met, despite the fact that you barely knew me. It was good too, for what it’s worth.’
‘Oh, don’t flatter me. Or yourself, for that matter.’
‘But the second time, although you seemed relieved, I wouldn’t say you were particularly happy to see me. And I didn’t feel anything sexual pass between us at all. At least not from you. It took me a while to work out why, but I think I understand now. The first time you needed intimacy, because you were hoping it would lead me into saying something incriminating. So you invited me to sleep with you.’
‘There’s such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn’t have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn’t get the impression you regretted any of that.’
‘Probably because I didn’t. I’d have been too tired if you had made any overtures the second time — but that was never on the cards, was it? You knew all you needed to by then. And the first time was strictly professional. You slept with me for information.’
‘Which I didn’t get.’
‘No, but that hardly mattered. You got it later, when I skipped with your gun and car.’
‘It’s a real sob story, isn’t it?’
‘Not from where I’m standing.’ I glanced over the edge. ‘From where I’m standing it’s a story that might just end with you taking a very long fall, Zebra. You know I’ve come a long way to kill Reivich. Did it occur to you that I might not have too many qualms about killing anyone who tries to stop me?’
‘There’s a gun in your pocket. Use it if it’ll make you feel any better.’
I reached for the gun to check it was still there, then kept my hand in my pocket. ‘I could kill you now.’
To her credit, she managed not to flinch. ‘Without taking your hand out of your pocket?’
‘You’re welcome to try me.’ It felt like a charade; like a scripted piece we had fallen into rehearsing. It also felt like we had no choice but to follow the script to its conclusion, whatever that happened to be.
‘Do you really think you could hit me like that?’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve killed someone firing from this angle.’ But, I thought, it would be the first time I had meant to do it. After all, I had not intended to kill Gitta. I was also unsure I really wanted to kill Zebra.
Had not meant to kill Gitta…
I’d been trying not to think about it, but like a maze with only one exit, my thoughts always meandered back to that one moment. Now, after long repression, they welled up and exploded like a gang of rowdy gatecrashers. I had not remembered it before now. Gitta had died, yes, but I had comfortably avoided thinking too closely about the manner of her death. She had died in the attack — so what else was there to think about? Nothing.
Except the simple fact that I had killed her.
This is what I remembered.
Gitta awoke first. She was the first to hear the attackers as they swept past the cordon, concealed in the strobe-lighting of the electrical storm. Her yelps of fear woke me, her naked body tensing against me. I saw three of them: three silhouetted shapes cast against the fabric of the tent, like grotesqueries in a shadow theatre. When each pulse of lightning flashed, they were somewhere else — sometimes one of them, sometimes two, sometimes all three. I could hear screaming — recognising in the timbre of each exclamation one of our own people. The screams were very short and concentrated, like trumpet blasts.
Ionisation-trails scythed through the tent and the force of the storm reached through the gashes like a creature of rain and wind. I cupped my hand across Gitta’s mouth and felt under my pillow for the gun I had placed there before retiring, satisfied when my hand detected its cool presence and found its contoured grip.
