My shard rang in my pocket, and this time I was too dazed not to answer.
For a long moment there was no sound but Kat’s ragged breath, scrambled into uneven bursts of static.
I skipped our usual catchphrases. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know if you were hurt,” she shouted. “One moment everything was fine, mission nearly complete. Then you were out of contact. All feeds dead. You’ve never done that to me before. You cannot fucking do that to me, Lex.”
I said nothing. The Medusan woman’s cold, patient gaze never left me. Music throbbed through the wall from the rooms beyond.
“Something happened to you in Antarka, didn’t it?” Kat asked me.
The memory stung me when I blinked. The afterimages were still burned into the insides of my eyelids. I shuddered deeply, and before I could stop myself the words had already left my mouth, “I think . . . I saw God.”
She laughed nervously. “Uh. Please be fucking kidding me.”
“I saw it. How it looked through me. It knew everything. What I’ve done, all my crimes. It—”
“That’s absurd. Tell me exactly what you saw.”
An eyeball. A vast, unblinking eye in the sky.
I shook my head and said, “You must have known someday you’d have to forget about me and go on with your own life. You had to know that.”
Her breath went silent on the other side.
“Never,” she said.
Duke’s underling watched and waited—ready to pin me to the metal floor if I tried to leave, if I reached for a weapon to hurt myself, if I declined the treatment that had been prescribed.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll call back with details on a new job.”
Kat’s voice was incredulous. “Already? What is it? . . . Lex? Hello?”
I don’t know why my hand moved automatically for the thing hanging from my neck. It was the only good luck charm I’d ever carried: a short length of copper wire, once bent into the crude shape of a person but now only a twisted barb—and I finally knew, remembering the glint of those two rebar spikes aimed at my heart, and peering now through that yonic entryway at the salt-greased bodies on display in the smoky red light ahead, exactly what I needed: none of the things I had spent my life up until then pursuing. Not mastery. Not money. Not sex.
All I needed now was the job that would finally kill me.
I
I remember the calm on that last night in Bloom City. We had no warning of the bloodshed to come. Fifty thousand refinery workers and plankton farmers and Medusan soldiers danced and drank themselves to exhaustion, then crawled into the darkest and driest corridors in sight and faded out one by one. By four a.m. the chatter in the habitat level had died down, and then there was only the ceaseless and ever-present thrum of the refineries, gulping down seawater and letting out a slow but steady flow of deuterium: that liquid gold that made the great oceanic city-states so rich, providing an endless supply of ammunition to the wars that had ravaged dry land for a hundred years.
That night found Alexei Standard staring up at the ceiling of his room in the love hotel. His host lay motionless next to him, her closed eyelids dusted with dim pink light, but he had no doubt she was awake and keeping up her vigil. His electromagnetic armor and coat hung on the wall, but he’d set his wave rifle in arm’s reach and pointed it pre-emptively at the door: an old habit that clung to life harder than he did himself. Tomorrow he would leave this place and head for the strife-ridden hinterland—and in that thought, for the first time in three solid days, he felt the promise of sleep begin to tug at the edges of his mind.
On a deeper tier of the city, Danae stared over the ridgeline of Naoto’s body at the mural he had begun to paint on her wall, letting it sink in that she’d never see it finished—that tomorrow she would either die, or live to stand under the real sky again. She wanted to believe in the latter, to hold that image in her mind and cherish it, but in the long hours of that night there was nowhere left to hide from the deeper fear: there was no home for her to go back to. Not really. Even if she made it out of this prison city and all the way back to Redhill—even if she found the rest of herself again—she would still be condemned to the isolation of a single, fragile body. She would still never be forgiven. She would still be a murderer.
At that moment, a pale man with a blue corporate tattoo on his cheek crept alone among the habitat level’s shuttered fronts and sleeping bodies and passed, again, the elevators down to the Medusan barracks module. Without thinking he gritted his teeth, so hard he could hear a molar begin to crack. It had taken him more than sixty years to find Danae—to stand here and know the two of them were separated now by only a single elevator and a few sealed doors—but he’d spent weeks trying and failing to cross that last distance, and he had no more patience. There was no privacy in this place. He could never get anyone alone long enough to put on their flesh, and without that he couldn’t become anyone who the Medusas would ever allow into their protected keep. The only solution he could imagine was to flush his target out into the open, where he might reach her. So he took a deep breath and braced himself for what was
