‘My eyes? That was something I had to hide. It worked, too. But now they’ve returned to their altered state. Maybe that was how I meant it to happen.’
‘You still don’t remember all of it,’ Reivich said, smiling horribly. ‘There was more to it, you know. More than just the eyes.’
‘How would you know?’
He raised a hand, tapping what remained of his teeth in an odd gesture of knowing. ‘You forget. I’d already persuaded the Ultras to betray you to me. Finding out the rest of what they did to you was simple enough.’ He smiled again. ‘I had to know who I was dealing with, you see. What you were capable of.’
‘And now you know?’
‘I think you’re a man who might surprise even himself, Cahuella. Except you claim you’re not him, of course.’
‘I hate him as much as you do,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen things from Tanner’s perspective. I know what he did to him. He isn’t me.’
‘So you share sympathies with Tanner?’
I shook my head. ‘The Tanner I know died in a pit. It doesn’t matter that something survived. It isn’t him. It’s just a monster Cahuella made.’
Tanner sneered. ‘You think you can kill me?’
‘I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.’
Tanner moved forward quickly, approaching the chair. He was going to kill Reivich; I knew it. But Reivich was ahead of him; he had the gun out and drawn before Tanner had taken more than two paces. ‘Now, now,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of you two settling your differences if you do it without an audience?’
I remembered Amelia, somewhere in the shadows. I wondered what she made of all this.
Tanner took a step back, raising his empty gloved palms. ‘I suppose you’re wondering how I survived,’ he said, to me.
‘It had crossed my mind.’
‘You should never have left me alive, even if I was only kept that way by the cuirass.’ He shook his head pitifully. ‘You couldn’t do it; not after the snake failed you. So you told one of your men to do it for you, while you got the hell away from the Reptile House.’
What he said was true, although it was only in his telling that my memories crystallised into surety. ‘I headed south,’ I said. ‘Towards a camp occupied by NC defectors. They had surgeons with them. I knew they’d be able to suppress the work the Ultras had done on me, camouflage my genes and make me look like Tanner. I always intended to return to the Reptile House before leaving the planet.’
‘But you never got the chance,’ Reivich said. ‘The NCs reached the Reptile House while you were away with Dieterling. They killed most of your people, except for Tanner, for whom they had a grudging respect. They brought him back to consciousness.’
‘Bad mistake,’ Tanner said. ‘Even without a foot, I took their weapons and killed them all.’
I remembered none of that, not even faintly. Of course not — those events had happened after Tanner had been trawled; after I had stolen his memories.
‘What happened next?’ I asked.
‘I had a month to get aboard the lighthugger, before it left orbit.’ Tanner angled himself down and scratched his ankle under his greatcoat. ‘I wasn’t far behind. I got my foot fixed and came after you. I killed Dieterling, you know — how else do you think I got so close to him? Walked up to him in the wheeler and popped him.’ He made the gesture, as if he was re-enacting the murder.
It was a classic piece of misdirection.
When Tanner rose to his full height, he did so in a movement swift and fluid. A knife arced from his hand, executing a faultlessly computed trajectory across the room. His aim was perfect — he’d even allowed for the coriolis drift caused by Refuge’s lazy rotation.
The knife buried itself in the back of Reivich’s head.
A digital moan came from the life-support module; an artificially stable note which kept up even when Reivich’s head tilted lifelessly forward on his chest. The gun slipped from his hand and clattered on the floor. I made a move for it, knowing this was probably my only chance to achieve at least parity with Tanner.
But he was faster. He sent me flying, my spine cracking against the floor in a fall which blasted the air out of my lungs. Tanner’s foot kicked the gun by accident, sending it skittering into the twilight between the pool of golden light and the shadows encompassing it.
Tanner reached for the knife and retrieved it from Reivich’s skull, monomolecular blade shimmering with prismatic patterns, like a skein of oil on water.
He won’t risk throwing the knife, I thought. If he missed, he’d lose his only weapon…
‘You’re finished, Cahuella. This is where it ends.’
He had the knife in one hand, balanced gingerly in his gloved palm. With the other hand he reached around the front of Reivich’s face and snapped the optical feeds from his eye-sockets, each line trailing ropy filaments of congealing blood.
‘It ended for you a long time ago,’ I said, stepping forward into his radius of attack. He swept the knife through the air, the blade scything silver arcs, parting the air so surgically that its passage was totally silent.
‘Then what does that make you?’ Tanner pushed Reivich’s body out of the chair, the thin, quilt-shrouded figure falling to the floor like a bag of dried wood.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m nothing like you.’
I tried to time the angle of his swipes with the knife, trying to focus on those specific Tanner memories which would serve me now; what he knew about combat in close quarters.
It was impossible. There was no way I could get an edge on him — and he had the advantage that he didn’t have to fight to retrieve those memories. They came unbidden, deep as reflex.
I lunged, hoping to twist his free arm, to unbalance him before he could bring the blade to bear.
My timing was off.
I didn’t feel the cut itself; only the cold which seeped in after it. I dared not look down, but in my peripheral vision I could see the gash in my chest, right through my clothing. It was not nearly deep enough to kill me — not even down to the ribs — but that was only luck on my part. Next time, he would have me. I was sure of it.
‘Tanner!’
It was not my voice. It was Amelia, calling from the shade. I saw her, half lost in darkness, reaching out to me.
Of course. To her I was still Tanner. She had no other name for me. She had Reivich’s gun.
‘Throw it to me!’ I shouted.
She threw it. The gun slammed into the floor, then skidded for metres, chips of its jewelled husk flaking off.
I spun from Tanner and ran for the gun.
I fell to my knees, sliding until I was within reach of the gun. My hand closed on the grip.
Tanner’s knife flew through the air and slammed into my hand. I dropped the gun, yelling in pain, seeing the point of the knife jutting from my palm like the sail of a yacht.
Tanner ran towards me, his footfalls racing into the echoless gloom. Tears clouding my eyesight, I picked up the gun with my other hand and tried to aim it at him.
I squeezed off a shot, feeling the delicate recoil of the gun. The blur of the projectile glistened past Tanner, missing him by inches. I re-aimed and squeezed the trigger again.
The gun did nothing.
Tanner crashed into me, kicking the useless weapon away for good measure. Forcing me to the ground, kneeling over me like a victor, he wrestled with me while I tried to stab him with the edge of the knife projecting from my palm.
Tanner caught my wrist above my impaled hand and smiled for a second. He’d won now. He knew it. It was just a question of removing the blade from my palm and turning it against myself.
Out of the corner of my vision I saw Reivich’s slumped corpse, his mouth agape, his few teeth catching the golden glow of the chamber.
I remembered him tapping his teeth.
