The masked men bull-rushed Finch as he crumpled, sweeping him up under the arms, and Severyn saw the wide leering smiles under their hoods: Guy Fawkes. The mask had been commandeered by various terroractivist groups over the past half-century, but Severyn knew it was the Priesthood’s clearest calling card. For the first time in a long time, he felt a cold corkscrew in his stomach. He tried to put his finger on the sensation.
“He has a husband.” Severyn’s throat felt tight. “Two children.”
“He still will,” the voice replied. “He’s only a wage-slave. Not a blasphemer.”
Finch was a heavy man and his knees scraped along the tarmac as the Priests hauled him toward the van’s sliding door. His head lolled to his chest, but Severyn saw his blue eyes were slitted open. His body tensed, then—
Finch jerked the first Priest off-balance and came up with the subcutaneous blade flashing out of his forearm, carving the man open from the hip to ribcage. Blood foamed and spat and Severyn felt what he’d missed at the puppet show, a burning flare in his chest. Finch twisted away from the other Priest’s arm, eyes roving, glancing off the black glass that divided them, and then a third Taser hit him. Finch fell with his jaws spasming; a Priest’s heavy boot swung into him as he toppled.
The flare died inside Severyn’s pericardium. The limousine started to move.
“He should not have done that,” the voice grated, as the bleeding Priest and then Finch and then the other Priests disappeared from sight. Severyn watched through the back window for a moment longer. Faced forward.
“I’ll compensate for any medical costs incurred by my employee’s actions,” he said. “I won’t tolerate any sort of retribution to his person.”
“Still talking like you’ve got cards. And don’t pretend like you care. He’s an ant to you. We all are.”
Severyn assessed. The voice was synthesized, distorted, but something in the cadence made him think female speaker. Uncommon, for a Priest. He gambled.
“What is your name, madam?”
“I’m a man, Parasite.”
Only a split second of hesitation before the answer, but it was more than enough to confirm his guess. Severyn had staked astronomical shares on such pauses, pauses that couldn’t be passed off as lag in the modern day. Signs of unsettledness. Vulnerability. It made his skin thrum. He imagined himself in a boardroom.
“No need for pretenses,” Severyn said. “I merely hoped to establish a more personable base for negotiation.”
“Fuck you.” A warble of static. Maybe a laugh. “Fuck you. There’s not going to be any negotiation. This isn’t a funding op. We just caught one of the biggest parasites on the planet. The Priesthood’s going to make you an example. Hook you to an autosurgeon and let it vivisect you on live feed. Burn what’s left of you to ash. No negotiations.”
Severyn felt the icy churn in his stomach again. Fear. He realized he’d almost missed it.
Girasol was dreaming many things at once. Even as she spoke to her captive in realtime, she perched in the limousine’s electronic shielding, shooting down message after desperate message he addressed to his security detail, his bank, his associates. It took her nearly a minute to realize the messages were copypasta. Grimes was trying to trigger an overuse failsafe in his implants, generate an error message that could sneak through to Nokia.
Such a clever bastard. Girasol dipped into his implants and shut them down, leaving him half-blind and stranded in realtime. She felt a sympathetic lurch as he froze, gray eyes clearing, clipped neatly away from his data flow. If only it was that easy to reach in and drag him out of that pristine white storage cone.
“There aren’t many female Priests,” Grimes said, as if he hadn’t noticed the severance. “I seem to recall their creed hates the birth control biochip almost as much as they hate neural puppeteering.” He flashed a beatific smile that made Girasol ache. “So much love for one sort of parasite, so much ichor for the other.”
“I saw the light,” Girasol said curtly, even though she knew she should have stopped talking the instant he started analyzing, prying, trying to break her down.
“My body is, of course, a volunteer.” Grimes draped his lean arms along the backseat. “But the Priesthood does have so many interesting ideas about what individuals should and should not do with their own flesh and bone.”
“Volunteers are as bad as the parasites themselves,” Girasol recited from one of Pierce’s Adderall-fueled rants. “Selling their souls to a digital demon. The tainted can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“Don’t tell me a hacker riding sound waves still believes in souls.” “You lost yours the second you uploaded to a storage cone.”
Grimes replied with another carefully constructed probe, but Girasol’s interest diverted from their conversation as Pierce’s voice swelled from far away. He was shouting. Someone else was in the room. She crosschecked the limo’s route against a staticky avalanche of police scanners, then dragged herself back to the orthochair, forcing her eyes open.
Through the blur of code, she saw Pierce’s injured crony, the one who’d been sliced belly to sternum, being helped through the doorway. His midsection was swathed in bacterial film, but the blood that hadn’t been coagulated and eaten away left a dripping carmine trail on the linoleum.
“You don’t bring him here,” Pierce grated. “You lobo, if someone saw you—
“I’m not going to take him to a damn hospital.” The man pulled off his Fawkes, revealing a pale and sweat-slick face. “I think it’s, like, shallow. Didn’t get any organs. But he’s bleeding bad, need more cling film—”
“Where’s the caveman?” Pierce snapped. “The bodyguard, where is he?”
The man waved a blood-soaked arm towards the doorway. “In the parcade. Don’t worry, we put a clamp on him and locked the van.” His companion moaned
