Severyn’s stomach churned. “I don’t swim.”
“You don’t swim? You were All-State.”
“Blake was.” Severyn pried off his Armani loafers, peeled off his jacket, as the limousine rattled over the metal crosshatch of the pier. “I never learned.”
“Just trust the muscle memory.” Girasol’s voice was taut and pleading. “He knows what to do. Just let him. Let his body.”
They skidded to a halt at the lip of the pier. Severyn put his hand on the door and found it blinking blue, unlocked at last.
“If you can tell him things.” She sounded ragged now. Exhausted. “Tell him I love him. If you can.”
Severyn considered lying for a moment. A final push to solidify his position. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said instead, and hauled the door open as the Priests screeched to a stop behind him. He vaulted out of the limo, assaulted by unconditioned air, night wind, the smell of brine and oiled machinery.
Severyn sucked his lungs full and ran full-bore, feeling a hurricane of adrenaline that no puppet show or whorehouse could have coaxed from his glands. His bare feet pounded the cold pier, shouts came from behind him, and then he hurled himself into the grimy water. An ancient panic shot through him as ice flooded his ears, his eyes, his nose. He felt his muscles seize. He remembered, in a swath of old memory code, that he’d nearly drowned in Michigan once.
Then nerve pathways that he’d never carved for himself fired, and he found himself cutting up to the surface. His head broke the water; he twisted and saw the gaggle of Priests at the edge of the water, Fawkes masks grinning at him even as they cursed and reloaded the rifle. Severyn grinned back, then pulled away with muscles moving in perfect synch, cupped hands biting the water with every stroke.
The slap of his body on the icy surface, the tug of his breath, the water in his ears—alive, alive, alive. The whine of a bullet never came. Severyn slopped over the side of the hydrofoil a moment later. Spread-eagled on the slick deck, chest working like a bellows, he started to laugh.
“That was some dramatic shit,” came a voice from above him.
Severyn squinted up and saw the technician, a twitchy-looking man with gray whiskers and extra neural ports in his shaved skull. There was a tranq gun in his hand.
“There’s been a change of plans,” Severyn coughed. “Regarding the extraction.”
The technician nodded, leveling the tranq. “Girasol told me you’d say that. Said you’re a world-class bullshit artist. I’d expect no less from Severyn fucking Grimes.”
Severyn’s mouth fished open and shut. Then he started to laugh again, a long gurgling laugh, until the tranq stamped through his wet skin and sent him to sleep.
Girasol saw hot white sparks when they ripped her out of the orthochair and realized it was sheer luck they hadn’t shut off her brain stem. You didn’t tear someone out of a deep slice. Not after two hits of high-grade Dozr. She hoped, dimly, that she wasn’t going to go blind in a few days’ time.
“You bitch.” Pierce’s breath was scalding her face. He must have taken off his mask. “You bitch. Why? Why would you do that?”
Girasol found it hard to piece the words together. She was still out of body, still imagining a swerving limousine and marauding cell signals and electric sheets of code. Her hand blurred into view, and she saw her veins were taut and navy blue. She’d stretched herself thinner than she’d ever done before, but she hadn’t managed to stop the skype from the end of the pier. And now Pierce knew what had happened.
“Why did you help him get away?”
The question came with a knee pushed into her chest, under her ribs. Girasol thought she felt her lungs collapse in on themselves. Her head was coming clear. She’d been a god only moments ago, gliding through circuitry and sound waves, but now she was small, and drained, and crushed against the stained linoleum flooring.
“I’m going to cut your eyeballs out,” Pierce was deciding. “I’m going to do them slow. You traitor. You puppet.”
Girasol remembered her last flash from the limousine’s external cams: Blake diving into the dirty harbor with perfect form, even if Grimes didn’t know it. She was sure he’d make it to the hydrofoil. It was barely a hundred meters. She held onto the novocaine thought as Pierce’s knife snicked and locked.
“What did he promise you? Money?”
“Fuck off,” Girasol choked.
Pierce was straddling her now, the weight of him bruising her pelvis. She felt his hands scrabbling at her zipper. The knife tracing along her thigh. An old panic kicked at her.
“Oh,” she said. “You want that kiss now?”
His backhand smashed across her face, and she tasted copper. Girasol closed her eyes tight. She thought of the hydrofoil slicing through the bay. The technician leaning over Blake’s prone body with his instruments, pulling the parasite up and away, reawakening a brain two years dormant. She’d left him messages. Hundreds of them. Just in case.
“Did he promise to fuck you?” Pierce snarled, finally sliding her pants down her bony hips. “Was that it?”
The door chimed. Pierce froze, and in her peripheral Girasol could see the other Priests’ heads turning toward the entryway. Nobody ever used the chime. Girasol wondered how Grimes’s bodyguard could possibly be so stupid, then noticed that a neat row of splintery holes had appeared all across the breadth of the door.
Pierce put his hand up to his head, where a bullet had clipped the top of his scalp, carving a furrow of matted hair and stringy flesh. It came away bright red. He stared down at Girasol, angry, confused, and the next slug blew his skull open like a shattering vase.
Girasol watched numbly as the bodyguard let himself inside. His fiery hair was slick with sweat and his face was drawn pale, but he moved around the room with practiced efficiency, putting two more bullets into each of the injured
