for the first time in my life I was free?' He coughed again and this time I could see the blood oozing out of him, a dark spurt of it that was more black than red, something floating in it that looked essential. A part of him he couldn't afford to lose.
I didn't look at his face as I pressed the gun against his temple and I closed my eyes when I pulled the trigger. Kindness? Anger? I don't know, but there was no question in my mind then that I had to kill him. Kelis watched me and not him as he died. Inside my head, I felt something click into place, but I wasn't quite sure what. I took a moment to look down at Haru's empty eyes, then we both stepped over his body, and walked out through the rear of the hospital, bloody footprints glistening darkly in the moonlight behind us.
'We have to find Ashok,' I told Kelis, the sound of the fighting just a muted roar behind us now. She nodded, though there was no real reason why she should follow me. Or there was only one reason, and it wasn't one I wanted to acknowledge because it wouldn't be right to use her feelings that way.
But that didn't mean I wasn't going to.
We walked two streets before we found a working vehicle. It was a big ugly SUV with two child seats in the back, absurdly suburban. Kelis drove this time, retracing our route, back to the centre of it all. Occasionally a vehicle would roar past, travelling in the opposite direction, reinforcements for the fight. At first I saw men sitting in them, rifles and revolvers clutched nervously in their laps. Then as we got nearer to the Luxor, the cars were filled with women and I realised that Queen M must be winning, somewhere back behind us, because Ash was starting to risk his most precious resources.
Did I want Queen M to win? Maybe. There was no question she was the lesser of two evils. But I didn't think that Ash would stay to face the music if her forces got the upper hand. There was no doubt an escape route already planned, another city he could flee to and start this all over again. I had to find him first.
The further we drove, the more dream-like it became. I felt detached from it, from the bodies I saw lying in the street here and there, outliers for a conflict whose main body of data lay behind us, out of sight. I wondered for a second why I was thinking in this clean, clinical way, but the thought and the worry drifted away into nothing, as insubstantial as the world around me. The lights of the Strip blazed into the night sky ahead of us, near now, and I knew I should have been feeling… something.
I don't need feelings now, they'll just get in the way, I told myself, but the voice I was speaking in didn't seem to be my own. For a brief, horrible moment, a spike of emotion broke through the calm. I knew, in that second, that I was losing something of myself, as crucial as the part of Haru he'd left behind on the operating people. As vital as the gore he'd coughed up onto the hospital floor in the moments before he'd died. I thought some people might have called it my soul, but I didn't believe in that kind of thing.
'Kelis,' I said, and I could hear that my voice was raw with fear and desperation.
Her head snapped round to look at me, fearful and then puzzled as she saw that I was fine and that there was no immediate danger in sight. 'What?' she asked.
'Kill me,' I said, forcing the words out through a throat that tightened against them. 'Kill me now before I turn into him.'
Her eyes were wide and shocked. 'What the hell are you talking about?'
'I'm…' I said. 'I'm…' But the words wouldn't come out. Something stronger than my will was holding them inside me.
Inside my head, one part of me clawed at another, desperate for purchase, but the new certainty within me was smooth, hard and impregnable, and everything else just slipped quietly away. The panic went with it and I didn't remember any longer why I'd been fighting this so hard.
Never mind. It was over now.
I glanced sideways and saw that Kelis was staring at me, the worry plain on her normally calm face. I wondered what my own had been showing, in those few brief moments of struggle. 'Are you OK?' she asked.
'Yeah,' I told her. 'I'm good. I'm better than I've ever been.'
Ash's people were there, massed in front of the Luxor when we drew up in the SUV. The last line of defence. I smiled when I saw them, because they meant that Ash was still inside. Kelis raised her hands, semi-automatic in one, hunting rifle in the other, but she was looking at me and I shook my head. The odds were hopeless and there was a better way.
'Tell Ash I'm back,' I shouted at them. 'He'll want you to let me in.'
'What are you doing?' Kelis hissed at me. 'Do you want him to know you're here?'
'He already knows,' I told her. 'And he'll let me in. He has to. I've got something he wants more than anything else in this city – anything else in the world.'
I could see the doubt in her eyes. There was a moment of poised stillness. Kelis and her guns. The ranks of women in front of us; two lives in one, both at risk if a gunfight started. The new me, the Cured version, didn't care about that. Those half-breeds were meaningless and the bodies housing them expendable. But a fire fight could kill me too and that certainly wouldn't do. It was very important that I get in to see Ash, though I wasn't quite sure why. The Voice only let me know as much as I needed to, and that was fine. It was just fine. It was so much easier to let something else do the thinking. I didn't know why I'd resisted this for so long.
A ripple started in the crowd, and suddenly a path cleared through the centre of Ash's army. 'Go in,' one of them said. 'He's waiting for you.'
Kelis hesitated but I didn't give her time to pull back. The women stared at me as I walked between them and I could read the distrust and maybe fear in their faces. They knew what I meant for the children inside them, they'd figured it out, but no one wanted to be the one to make the first move. Just one spark, which was all it would take, to set this situation on fire.
I walked with complete confidence. The only way to survive this was to show them no weakness. Hundreds of eyes glared at me as I passed. I felt the physical weight of their regard, but I didn't bend under it. And then I was through, Kelis just one step behind me, and we walked past the cheap plastic statues of the long-dead rulers from another land, and into the heart of the casino.
The lift doors opened directly into the penthouse, the metal grate clinking aside to admit us. He was waiting for us, ten paces away, silhouette framed by the moonlight outside the big picture windows. There were only two women with him, big, black and heavily armed. I laid my hand over Kelis' before she could reach for her gun. Brute force wasn't going to get us anywhere here.
'You came back,' he said. 'Changed your mind?'
I nodded. 'My mind has changed, yes.'
His eyes widened, then narrowed, as he understood the full meaning of what I'd said. 'You surrendered at last?'
'Yes,' the Voice said through my mouth, 'she's mine now.'
And I felt Kelis' arm stiffen under mine as she understood my meaning too.
'Why should I believe you?' he asked. He took a step back, the two women flanking him. I thought maybe that he did believe me, and that it was this which was alarming him. I was supposed to be his tool, not his rival. His mouth opened and I knew that it was to give the order to kill us both.
Kelis spoke before he could. 'Jasmine.' Her voice was shaky, her eyes a little wild. I looked back at her, and whatever she saw in mine must have triggered something in her because she snatched her arm from my hand and stumbled back a few steps.
My attention seemed broader now, able to absorb every last detail of the situation in one glance. Ash twitched, his gaze switching restlessly between me and Kelis. The two women's guns faltered, shifting their aim from me to her, sensing a more immediate threat in Kelis' sudden panic.
'Jasmine doesn't live here any more,' I told her. Then, in the second before she could react, I pulled my own gun from its holster and shot her in the gut. She let out a choked gasp, a sound of betrayal more than shock.
The instant I'd shot her I turned my gun on the other threats. One bullet through the throat, another through the heart and both women were falling to the floor. A fierce spray of arterial blood pumped from the neck I'd put a bullet through. A gush of it hit Ashok's cheeks, a dark stain in the dim light of the room. He gagged, bent over, and I knew that some of it must have spurted into his throat.
When he straightened, it was to see the barrel of my Magnum pointed at his heart. For weeks the grip had felt uncomfortable in my hand, the shape somehow wrong, but now it felt as if it belonged there. 'Just you and me now,' I told him.
He nodded but said nothing. Behind me I could hear Kelis groaning. Without looking, I kicked my foot back,
