November realized that her arm, the one with which she had reached up to McNihil’s face, was numb and trembling; the first pinpricks of sensation had started. They felt as if they were happening to a piece of meat disconnected to her body. She managed to raise her head-the rooftop tilted dizzyingly-and could see her cupped palm, the one without the red numbers written there. A burn mark had been seared into the flesh, as though she had laid hold of a high-voltage cable; the pain from the wound had begun working its way up her stunned arm.

She lifted her gaze from the marked hand to McNihil, standing nearly a meter away from her. The shock must have been powerful enough to launch her through the air, like a crumpled tissue he’d discarded.

“Don’t try that one again.” McNihil had put away the gun. He smiled. “I’m wired, shielded, and all zipped up against your kind of action.”

No shit, thought November. With her still-functioning hand, she rubbed the corner of her brow, feeling a massive traumatic headache coming on. That kind of subcranial block, with a feedback and amplification circuit built in, wasn’t standard asp-head issue; he must have paid for that with his own money, somewhere along the line. Worse, she hadn’t known that McNihil had it, when she’d been operating under the assumption that she had him down cold, all his little details. Now, there was no telling what kind of stuff he had.

That was the kind of surprise for which she had no liking. I’m screwed. All her calculations were meaningless now. And at the same time, she was too far into this situation to abandon it and start over somewhere else. The red numbers in her palm would scroll down to zero before she had a chance of scoring another paying gig. If she had been looking into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, there weren’t any stars there; nothing but empty black, the unknown. For better or worse, her fate was welded to his.

A liquid shiver traced down the center of her spine, as though some central element of her self were being dissected by an asp-head’s clever little knives. A sex twinge, the feeling of things beyond her control, opened below her gut. If she hadn’t been worried about sheer survival, she could almost have been grateful to him.

“Gotta run.” Carrying the trophy container in one hand like an oversized scepter, McNihil moved toward the farther edge of the rooftop. “But like I said. You want to talk? Give me a call.”

November watched as he leapt easily over to the adjacent building. Then he was gone. For a while longer, November stayed where she was, regarding the flames and smoke rising on all sides.

A little too long.

When the rooftop gave way, a section collapsing beneath her as quick as a sprung trap, she found herself falling into smoke and flames. And then she wasn’t falling, and she could only marvel-for a few seconds, before she lost consciousness-at how much it truly hurt.

TWELVE

AMYGDALIC SHUNT OR THUS EVER TO VIOLATORS OF COPYRIGHT

Even after he washed up, he smelled of fire and smoke and burnt things. McNihil came out of the bathroom, into a sonic ambience of vintage Haitink conducting Mahler, the acoustics of the old abandoned Amsterdam Concertgebouw cranked up loud enough to be heard through his whole apartment. He took the towel from across his shoulders and rubbed his gray-flecked hair dry as the contralto came on.

O Roschen roth!

Der Mensch liegt in gro?ter Noth!

Der Mensch liegt in gro?ter Pein!

Je lieber mocht’ ich im Himmel sein

Little red rose, thought McNihil. He always agreed with the singer, about preferring to be in heaven. A goal he had come close to achieving, when he’d been out there taking care of business. Like most asp-heads, or at least the ones who weren’t born cold-blooded, McNihil had an amygdalic shunt microsurgeried into his brain, a tiny shutoff valve triggered by the adrenaline levels in his system; when the juices got high enough, fear became an abstract concept. Even the contemplation of his own death-he’d had time to consider it while he’d been hanging on that disintegrating fire escape-seemed like no more than an assemblage of words, something he’d read about in a book. It worked better than a straight hormonal tamp-down; the adrenal fluids kept the body revved and fast-reacting, while the head contents lived up to the agents’ collective nickname.

“Knock knock,” said the door. The sound got only a slight irritated reaction from McNihil.

When he’d moved into this place, forking over the rent and deposits and key money from one of his last bonus checks from the agency, he’d taken his Swiss Army knife to the workings of the hallway security system, trying to dismantle the annoying visitor-announcement protocols, so that if somebody came to see him, on business or pleasure, he’d hear the sound of actual human knuckles on reinforced simulated-wood-grain fiberboard. He’d been defeated, though; the circuits kept repairing themselves, usually while he was out of town on an extended assignment. McNihil would come home, sometimes bleeding and with the crap almost literally beaten out of him-not every piece of business had gone as easily as this last one had-and would find that the circuits had healed over, soft boards and severed wires seeking each other out and knitting themselves back together again. Though usually in some increasingly crippled manner, the announcement sounds devolving through an entire programmed auditory repertoire after McNihil’s attempts at a permanent silence. He and the system had worked their way through lisping trombones, Everett Dirksenoid kazoos, and splintering glass that shouted in Provencal French before arriving at a compromise: the system remained functional, McNihil put away his miniature tools, and the circuits announced visitors with a realistic-enough simulation of knuckles on wood. McNihil no longer cared beyond that point.

“Knock knock,” said the door again. Leaving the towel draped around his neck, McNihil pulled the door open.

A delivery, the one he’d been expecting; McNihil tipped the kid, an agency intern he vaguely recognized, and carried the long package back to the flat’s living area. The package’s contents had weighed more when he’d been hauling them around, freshly harvested, inside his old trophy container. A note had been tagged on the wrappings, signed by the agency’s head prep tech.

Nice job, McN. Haven’t lost your touch. Keep cutting. R.

He placed the package on the flat glass kidney of the Noguchi knockoff coffee table. For a moment, McNihil idly wondered if he should tie a red ribbon around the package’s middle; it was, after all, intended to be something of a gift. A favor, something nice done for a person he admired-the other red ribbons, the shining wet ones that had pooled around the vivisected body, counted for nothing against that sentiment. He finally decided to omit any fancy wrappings, to just leave the completed trophy adorned in its plain, matter-of-fact agency routing-and-shipping labels. The person for whom it was intended went in, McNihil knew, for that kind of procedural detail. It was something left over from when the guy had still been working and writing, cranking out his trashy and sublime thrillers, and always on the lookout for real-life bits he could stick in to establish an air of authenticity.

McNihil had a row of those books himself, in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled shelf unit. Thinking about them, about the chapters and sentences and carefully strung-together words on the pages, put McNihil in a good mood. Or as good a one as he could be in, considering the aches and bruises he’d garnered while bringing this trophy back from the city farther north on the rim. When he’d first gotten back here and stripped off his smoke- ridden, bloodstained clothes, he’d examined himself in the bathroom mirror and had seen the rickety fire escape’s imprint from his chest to his chafed-raw ankle. I’m getting too old for this, he’d told himself. Way too old. Like those characters in the books; McNihil had found out- eventually-what it was like to be tired and more than a little burnt-out, yet still handing people’s asses back to them. Like that smart-ass little number up there on the roof of the en-flamed End Zone Hotel; he’d seen her eyes go wide when he’d come right back at her, knocking her off-balance in more ways than one. That was the part of his condition that felt as good for him as it did for the fictional old bastards in the yellowing pulp novels; he’d enjoyed that.

O glaube: du wardst nicht umsonst geboren!

Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten!

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