weapon.”
“Silver makes it easy?”
“About as easy as killing an ordinary person. The Power has no grip on it. We don’t know why.”
“I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never even really wanted to kill anyone, just get away from them however I could, but I’ll make an exception for you-know-who. So, she was… her body was lying there?”
“Yes, like this, in a sort of coma.”
He halted for a moment and crossed his forearms, each hand resting on the opposite shoulder, before he went on: “The aetheric form went out onto the terrace in her default day-walking shape. Then it waited until it sensed the Wreaking turning Hajime against me, transformed and attacked. You have to be careful in animal form. You’re… still you, but you are the beast as well. It can be hard to retain purpose.”
“Thanks. And so Adrienne swooped down to rescue Michiko’s grandfather. Who she hates and despises. Who Michiko sort of hates, I think, or at least resents an awful lot.”
“We’re not a very social species and I think T?kairin Hajime hasn’t quite realized what it means. His grandchildren are so much closer to pureblood. Seventy-five percent and up. He’s about two-thirds, and he was raised by people who were less than half. There’s more human in him, and he’s trying to run his clan as if it were made up of humans.”
“But then why did she rescue him?” Ellen puzzled. “I don’t think she’s the sort who just swoops in to save the day.”
Adrian frowned and sipped again at his drink. “That’s the question; though maybe what she stopped was him spitting me on that damned silver-plated katana. Was she trying to use me to kill him without any blame attaching to her? But then as you say… or was she trying to get credit with Hajime? But what for? And she didn’t try to pursue me in winged form-that eagle looked fast, and it could have twisted the head off any bird-form I have. There is some elaborate game here, one with multiple strands, multiple objectives.”
“Which right now we don’t know. How long do I have here?”
“Probably a while. It’s natural for us to sleep most of the day and wake in the afternoon.” A small smile. “Notice how many mad dictators had work patterns like that? Not a coincidence.”
“Then… this may sound odd, Adrian, but can we take a walk? I’d like that.”
He smiled, the charming expression with a hint of shyness she liked, and they rose and walked down the steep streets hand in hand. He bought them gelato; they fed the pigeons in front of the cathedral, and she explained the details of the frescos-his knowledge of art was broad but without system, a jackdaw’s accumulation picked up in spare moments. He seemed at first amused and then impressed as she told-showed-him the links between the High Medieval techniques in the thirteenth-century building and the Quattrocento and the Renaissance.
“We should have talked about this more,” he said at last.
“Says the man who used to derail any conversation that wasn’t commonplace!”
Adrian laughed ruefully and ran a hand over his hair, taking off his sunglasses and hanging them through the neck of his shirt.
“When you begin on a basis of lies… even lies of omission… the areas you cannot talk about grow and grow, I find.”
“We don’t have to lie now. It’s… almost worth it all.”
“I’m glad to be honest, but I don’t think it’s worth what you’ve gone through, Ellie.”
“I said almost.”
They wandered on by the busy harbor, amid a smell of fishing-boats and yachts, tourists and locals and thin, wandering, wary cats. The sun declined into the Mediterranean, and the terraces of stone and stucco above them took on a green-blue translucence. At last she took a deep breath and asked: “Adrian, after this is over, if-when-I’m back in, ummm, real life, do you want to try again? With the two of us.”
“If you do. I would like that very much. But-”
“Don’t tell me how I’m going to be feeling then, Adrian! I don’t know that yet!”
He laughed, a wholehearted sound. “Touch? once more, Ellie!” He took her in his arms; he was just an inch taller than her, perfect height for a kiss. It grew lingering.
“Dammit, I don’t want to go back!”
“It’s time.”
“All right. Zap me back, then. And we’re going to win!”
Adrian slept, woke in darkness to stumble to the bathroom, hardly noticing that his leg would bear him once more; drank enormously from bottled water by the side of the bed, slept again and woke clearheaded, the wounds itching less fiercely.
And smiling, he thought for a moment. And it has been a while since that happened.
“You’re looking a mite more cheerful,” Harvey said.
He was sitting at the table, making sandwiches from commercial rolls and convenience-store cold cuts. His coach-gun was on the table by his hand, and Adrian was awake enough to feel the slight drifting chill of a no-see Wreaking, not powerful but enormously subtle.
“It’s calories,” the Texan said, jerking a thumb towards the pile he’d made. “That’s all that can be said for it. Except that the preservatives will keep your corpse lookin’ pretty without the expense of an embalmer.”
“It is to food as the Red Cross supply is to blood,” Adrian agreed.
He limped carefully to the table and looked at the platter with disgust. But he ate, trying not to think of the taste.
“At least it’s morally permissible to eat decent food, most of the time. It compensates for the foul blood, a little.”
“You’re still looking cheerful and you just bit into that so-called salami.”
“I high-linked with Ellen. She’s… much better than I expected. And she had some information for me. We have an agent in the enemy’s camp.”
He filled the older man in on the relevant details.
“That might be useful. If there were a lot of bodies around this Congo site, we could maybe isolate the virus strain; their lab, now, that’ll be somewhere else. Somewhere with reliable electricity, which the Congo doesn’t have.”
“Neither does California, compared to the old days.”
“It sure does compared to the fucking Congo, ol’ buddy.”
“A point.”
“You know,” Harvey said after a moment, “I’m startin’ to feel a mite guilty about this.”
Adrian looked. “How so?”
“Now don’t misunderstand me. Ellen’s your obligation, and you’re mine. OK, that’s giri, as our buddy Hajime would put it. We go through with this, and Adrienne most certainly needs killing. But the fact of the matter is we’ve got information on something damn big the Council has planned for the world, and we’re not doin’ dick about that. What good’s rescuing Ellen if she dies of… whatever it was?”
“Dalager’s Parasmallpox,” Adrian said. “Although, in fact, I could cure a virus.”
On a limited scale, went unspoken.
“And if they’re planning that, or some faction of ’em is, from your Seeing it’s not too far in the future. That means they’re already gettin’ it ready. If we knew the rest of ‘where’-where the labs and storage shit are-there might be something that we could do about it.”
Adrian snorted. “Except that would mean the other option I Saw. I’m fairly sure that my sister is the nexus point between the probabilities, with us important mostly as we affect her.”
“Yeah,” Harvey said. He leaned back meditatively, staring at the ceiling. “That other un definitely sounds to me like an EMP attack. That would account for the stalled cars and such.”
“Could that be done to the whole world?” Adrian asked; his mentor had always liked keeping up with weapons technology.
Harvey bit into one of the sandwiches himself. “Oh, sure. Most of the big powers got specialized high-altitude nukes for EMP work; mebbe the Council’s behind that. And the Council could set ’em off; squeeze on the leaders, mind-Wreaking, or just send in teams to Power-fuck the control systems, then launch enough to blanket the planet, minus the poles and oceans. Instant Ay-poc-al-ypse without much blast damage or fallout. ’Cept when all the
