looked like Reivich, but his body language and manner of speaking was all wrong. There was no hint of a Sky’s Edge accent and his physicality would have been alien to Reivich’s aristocracy. ‘It’s about pain,’ he repeated. ‘Because pain is what it keeps away. Do you understand?’
‘Not really, but go ahead.’
‘You don’t usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That’s because you’ve only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.’
‘Boredom isn’t a stimulus, Voronoff.’
‘I’m less sure,’ he said. ‘There is, after all, a part of the human brain which is responsible for the sensation we call boredom. You can’t argue with that. And it must logically be made active by some external stimulus, just like the brain centre for taste or sound.’ He raised a hand. ‘I anticipate your next point. That’s one of my talents, you see — anticipation. You might say it’s symptomatic of my condition. I’m a neural net which is so well adapted to its input that it hasn’t evolved in years. But to return to the point in hand. You were doubtless going to say that boredom is an absence of stimulus, not the presence of a particular one. I say there is no difference; that the glass is both half empty and half full. You hear silence between notes; I hear music. You see a pattern of black on white; I see a pattern of white on black. More than that, in fact — I see both.’ He grinned again, like a maniac who had been chained in a dungeon for years and was now having a meaningful conversation with his own shadow. ‘I see everything. You can’t help it when you reach my — what shall I call it? — depth of experience?’
‘You’re quite mad, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve been mad,’ Voronoff said, apparently not taking it as an insult. ‘I’ve been through madness and come out the other side. Now being mad would bore me as much as sanity.’
I knew he was not mad, of course — at least not screamingly insane. If he had been, he would have been no use to Reivich as a lure. Voronoff had to have some residual grasp on reality. His mental state was almost certainly unlike anything I had ever experienced — and I had certainly known boredom — but it would be lethal to assume he was in anything other than absolute control of his faculties.
‘You could end it all,’ I said, helpfully. ‘Suicide can’t be the hardest thing to arrange in a city like this.’
‘People do,’ Zebra said. ‘People like Voronoff. They don’t call it suicide, of course. But they suddenly take an unhealthy interest in activities with a very low survival-probability, like diving into the gas giant or saying hello to the Shrouders.’
‘Why not, Voronoff?’ And then it was my turn to smile. ‘No, wait. You almost did it, didn’t you? Posing as Reivich. You were hoping I’d kill you, weren’t you? A way out of the pain with something approaching dignity. The wise old immortal gunned down by the out-of-town thug, just because he happened to take on the persona of a murderous fugitive?’
‘With no bullets? That’d be a trick worth dying to see, Mirabel.’
‘Good point.’
‘Except,’ Zebra said, ‘you realised you liked it too much.’
Voronoff looked at her with ill-concealed venom. ‘Liked what too much, Taryn?’
‘Being hunted. It actually eased the pain, didn’t it?’
‘What would you know about the pain?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Be honest, Voronoff. She’s right, isn’t she? For the first time in years you actually remembered what it was like to live. That’s why you started taking stupid risks — to keep that buzz alive. But nothing was good enough, was it? Even jumping into the chasm was just mildly amusing.’
He looked at us with new eagerness. ‘Have you ever been hunted? Have you any idea what it’s like?’
‘I’m afraid I have had that pleasure,’ I said. ‘And fairly recently, too.’
‘I’m not talking about your little hunting games,’ Voronoff said, spitting the words with total contempt. ‘Scum in pursuit of scum — present company excepted, of course. When they hunted you, Mirabel, they stacked the odds so heavily in their favour they might as well have blindfolded you and put a slug through your head before they even let you run.’
‘Funnily enough, I would have almost agreed with you at the time.’
‘But it could have been different. They could have made it fair. Let you get further away before they came after you, so that your death wasn’t absolutely inevitable. Allowed you to find your hiding places and use them. That would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’
‘Almost,’ I said. ‘Of course, there would have been the small matter that I never volunteered for it.’
‘Maybe you would have, too. If it was worth it. If there was a prize. If you thought you could make it through the game.’
‘What was your prize, Voronoff?’
‘The pain,’ he said. ‘Its absolution. For a few days at least.’
I started to answer him, probably. I think I did, anyway. It might have been Zebra, or it might have been the taciturn heavy with the bludgeon-sized gun. All I remember with any clarity is what happened several seconds later, the intervening moments neatly edited from memory. There must have been a pulse of light and heat, at first, as the other car opened fire on us. Then there would have been a blast of eardrum-piercing sound as the shockwave of the beam weapon slammed through the flensed-open cabin, followed by an explosion of metal and plastic and composites as the car’s innards eviscerated themselves in a hot cloud of fused machinery. Then we would have dropped, as the shattered roof-mounted arms, amputated and twisted by the attack, lost their grip on the cables.
A second or so later our descent was arrested, violently, and that was when, approximately, something like normal consciousness resumed. My first memory — before the pain hit — was that the car was upside down, with the moundlike table now dimpling down from the ceiling, and the neon-patterned floor evincing a gaping, jagged hole, through which the lower reaches of the city — the festering complexity of the Mulch — was far too clear, and far too far below.
The heavy was gone, except for his gun, which was rattling to and fro on the new floor as the car lurched and swayed, adjusting to its precarious new equilibrium. The heavy’s hand was still present, clasped around the gun. It had been neatly severed by shrapnel. Seeing the bony details of the wrist reminded me of the absence of my foot in the tent, after we had been ambushed by Reivich’s people; the way I had pawed at the stump and held my blood-drenched palm to my face, in abject denial that a part of me had been removed, like a strip of annexed territory.
Except — as I now knew — none of that had happened to me.
Zebra and I had tumbled into one corner of the cabin, thrown together in an untidy embrace. There was no sign of Voronoff — or any parts of Voronoff. I was being assailed by waves of pain, but as I began to pay particular attention to my discomfort, I decided there was nothing sharp enough to be actual broken bones.
The car swayed and creaked. It was remarkably quiet, apart from our breathing and the soft moaning which came from Zebra.
‘Tanner?’ she said, opening her eyes to pained slits. ‘What just happened?’
‘We were attacked,’ I said, realising that she had had no knowledge of the other vehicle; that she had not been expecting anything at all, whereas I had been mentally tensed for some kind of intervention. ‘A heavy beam weapon, probably. I think we’re stuck in the Canopy.’
‘Are we safe?’ she asked, wincing as she untangled one limb. ‘No; wait. Stupid question. Incredibly stupid question.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘I umm… just a moment.’ Her eyes, glazed as they were, conspired to glaze a degree more, for an instant. ‘No; nothing that can’t wait for a few hours.’
‘What did you just do?’
‘Checked my body-image for damage.’ She said it dismissively. ‘How about you, Tanner?’
‘I’ll make it. Assuming any of us makes it.’
The car lurched, slipping vertically downwards before something arrested its progress, shakily. I tried to keep my gaze away from the maw in the floor, but if anything, the Mulch looked further away than ever, like a street map held at arm’s length. A few of the lowermost merged limbs of the Canopy intersected the view, but they were spindly and uninhabited, and served only to enhance the sense of tremendous height. Shadows moved beyond
