Noir

She’d already decided that. You don’t get a chance like this very often. A whole new skin, a new life, maybe even a new town-if she could find some place beyond the Gloss, or at least a part of the constantly metastasizing city that was sufficiently different from the rest. Everything that had happened to her… it really was like being reborn, out of the wet womb and into the hands of doctors. Even the tumbling, vertiginous passage through fire; if she beat up the metaphor a little, she could make it fit some pre-uterine notion of sexual passion, heated and consuming and all the rest. My own? wondered November. If so, it was

• the first time that meant anything, really, and

• some weird sign that she had given birth to herself.

Another decision, not to think about any of that, now or ever. Too weird, actually-she closed her eyes, letting the drowsy weight of her shorn head sink into the pillow. The lights of the chamber dimmed in response, pushing her back toward sleep.

Before that could happen, November’s eyes flicked open again. She could feel a little tingling sensation returning to her arm, the one that the med techs had been working on. She pushed herself up on her other elbow, raising her newly reconstructed wrist and turning the tender flesh of her palm toward her gaze.

She didn’t know what she’d see there. What they’d left from before, if there had been anything left from that other life, that other body and world she’d lived in. The stigmata of her own autocrucifixion-If you can birth yourself, why not death yourself as well? But in this case at least, the nails had been pulled out, letting her drop to the muddy ground at the foot of the cross.

The little black symbol was still there, but changed from to. But that was all that showed; now her palm was empty of numbers.

There might’ve been a red zero, if the surgeons and the med techs had left the fast-forward implants under the skin of her hand. All her accounts, her debts and credits, taken to nothing, canceled out and put back to the beginning. If a newborn baby-a real one-had a number in its little pudgy, wrinkled mitt, that’s what it would’ve been.

Take it as a sign, November told herself. An anti-sign, a true zero, an absence as important as anything that could’ve shown there. For all she knew, the number was still on her hand. She didn’t know how deep the fast-forward implants ran in the flesh; she’d been connected out of her mind when she’d had that little job done. The med techs could’ve left it there as a souvenir. Maybe it’s my eyes now, thought November, that’re different. There had been some work done on them, she knew; they’d been pretty badly damaged by the flames. The tiny knives and needles might’ve taken out the wolf filters that had let her see the numbers in her hand, the ups and downs of her razoring career, the cliff’s-edge dancing before the fall…

Or maybe, she thought, I just don’t need to see them anymore. That was why the numbers were gone. Both she and the world had changed. When you were in the zero, the grace of the zero, you didn’t need to look at your accounts to know how well you were doing.

She let that notion drift away, joining the others in the darkness past her fingertips as she lay back down. It was easy to. The techs had put a long-term pouch under her ribs; the device had a photoelectric cell wired into its outermost membrane, and it responded to the dimming of the light with a little surging pulse of drowsy endorphins. November floated on the wave, to a point on the warm, gelatinous ocean inside her, where she could see the last part of the dream she’d had.

That was the strangest part. She spread her hands out on the cool, sterile bedsheet at her sides, her new fingertips counting every fine thread. The man she’d watched falling in her dream, that she’d known was the asp- head McNihil despite his not having a face anymore-in the last part of the dream, he did have a face. But it wasn’t his. And he wasn’t falling, but had landed, not on the ground or in the wreckage of the burning hotel’s lobby-but in an ocean different from the one in which she floated and dreamed. A thick, heavy ocean, without waves but only slow ripples across its expanse when something, a human form, fell and struck its surface; the water was so ponderous that it didn’t even splash, but slowly hollowed under the man’s weight and parted, drawing him beneath the shimmering membrane…

Of course, thought November. She felt so stupid for not realizing it before. The heavy ocean in her dream was the sterile tank of the burn-ward chamber, which she herself had been floating in, her ashes and blackened bits slowly dissolving, before McNihil had paid her tab. Things-the real and unreal, the remembered and envisioned-always got jumbled up in dreams. That was why she wasn’t surprised when she finally worked out whose face it’d been, when the falling man had hit the gelatinous sea.

It’d been Harrisch. She recognized him even without his usual sharky smile, even with the furious rage that his darkened features had shown. Nothing, November told herself. Doesn’t mean anything…

Her eyes were already closed; behind them, she stepped through the rooms inside her head, shutting the rest of the doors and sealing in the sleep that was already there.

SEVENTEEN

TAKING A CHANCE ON LOVE

Did you like that?” The woman’s voice sounded far away. “Then here’s another.”

McNihil looked up from where he lay paralyzed on the floor of the bar. From this angle, he didn’t have tunnel vision so much as something like an optical elevator shaft, a dark elongated space stretching up to whatever night sky existed above. His mouth tasted the way blown-out fuses smell, electrical and singed metallic; beyond his spastically clawing fingertips were the shoes of some of the prowlers who had gotten up from the little tables and come over to watch. He was just vaguely aware of the humanlike figures standing at the fuzzed limits of his sight.

Smiling, the ultimate barfly looked down at McNihil; her blond hair tumbled alongside her face like slowly unfolding staircases of gold. She knelt beside him, her face shifting in and out of focus as McNihil’s eyes, feeling loose and wobbly in their sockets, tried to adjust. Although he knew that she was as she’d been before, and no longer transformed into the one he’d caught that single glimpse of. That vision had already faded, the image of Verrity disappearing back into the darkness behind the woman’s eyes.

He had never seen Verrity before. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he’d been allowed to now.

The barfly’s kiss descended on him as though he were pinned at the bottom of the shaft, and all this world’s softly grinding machinery were about to crush him into a new state of being. Or non, thought McNihil as he felt the woman’s lips press against his own. He was still connected-up from the first kiss; his tongue had wedged inside his mouth like a small animal convulsed in its dying.

“Here you go, sweetheart.” The barfly’s words brushed her lips against his; she inhaled whatever deranged molecules were released in his breath. “A little maintenance dose. Just something to top you up.”

The kiss had unknotted his tongue, enough that McNihil could speak. “I could’ve…” It was like sorting out words onto a tray, assembling them from the fragments left inside his head. “Done without…”

“Sure…” The barfly stroked his sweating brow. “But what fun would that be? Think of all you’d miss.”

Right now, it didn’t seem as though he were missing anything at all. The first kiss, the slip of the tongue, had sparked and made contact in a big way, an explosion from the roof of his mouth to the cellar doors of his throat. The inrush of the memory load-what every prowler bestowed as its personal homecoming gift-had been what had laid him out on the floor.

No wonder, a distant part of McNihil thought, it knocked out that little wimp Travelt. Stuff like this would flatten anybody. Though he figured-one brain cell slowly hooking up with another-that what he’d just gotten was stronger than the usual. The barfly-or somebody-must’ve cooked up a sampler for him, of all that could be found down in the Wedge, in that world she and the other prowlers walked