“You want me to follow who?” Kat said. “Oh, do you mean the Medusan rover being driven by the teenage cyborg with the big-ass wave cannon? That’s who you want me to follow right now?”
“He’s not a cyborg.”
Kat grimaced. There was something on the cracked windshield, something small, pink and round. Part of an ear. She pressed a switch and the wiper blades flicked it away. “Then who were they? What kind of non-augmented human person can take that many waver burns and go on walking like everything’s peachy?”
“He’s . . . .” I trailed off. I didn’t know the answer. I’d only ever held a small sample of Danae’s memories, and even that was fading quickly, just as she’d said it would—but she knew exactly what he was, and she’d been frozen stiff with fear.
“He has Danae,” I said. “He has my client.”
“Lex.” Kat looked hard at me. “I came here to save you. From what, I didn’t even know. From you. Take one look at yourself and tell me I was wrong. I’m shot? Jesus. You look like you’ve been shot with a fucking anti-tank rocket.”
I turned to give her a look, but through her almost-joking facade, I saw the water in her eyes, and I knew she was only marginally holding herself together. She was worried about me. If any part of my life was flashing before my eyes now, it was all the years I had known Kat—and in all that time, I’d never been able to imagine that she might give me a look like this one, caring so much about me, broken to think of just letting me die. The man I had been then had had no idea.
“No, you’re in no condition to fight,” she said, turning back to the road and stiffening up. “Not even a against weird kid with a lethal wound. You’re not well. Besides which, I dropped everything to come out here into meatspace—which I do not do—putting my own ass on the line, spending my last and best backdoor into the Medusas’ network just to find out the bounty exchange location, and ultimately sacrificing not one but two extremely expensive hired guns, all for the sake of extracting you from this mission—”
“Kat!” I shouted.
She turned the wheel to narrowly avoid a boulder and then continued, “—one of whom, I might add, literally exploded right in front of me, and that’s something I’ll never be able to un-see. All of this to pull you out! And now you want to dive right back in? You expect me to let you do that? Fuck. We’ll be lucky if we even make it back to Bloom City in one piece. Lucky if there’s still a city there by the time we do.”
Ahead of us, the east-west trade road pulled into focus. To the left it would take us back to Greenglass Mountain and thereby, eventually, to the coast. To the right it meandered on into the deeper parts of the scorched lands once known as Arizona, now the jagged fringe of the Holy Western Confederacy.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not well. There’s a lot I need to tell you, and I promise I will. Everything. But to start with, something did happen to me in Antarka. It changed me, and I can’t undo it. I can’t go back to being who I was before that, and I don’t know whether who I am now can live with who I was then.”
Kat braked just shy of the fork, her gaze fixed dead ahead. She closed her eyes, listening to me. Her hands were quivering slightly on the wheel. Fearfully, experimentally, I reached out and touched her shoulder with my bleeding fingers, and the contact shocked us both: in all the years we had known each other, we had never physically touched.
“You can’t die,” she said, her voice creaking. “I can’t let you die.”
“I’ve killed so many people. Men, women, children, animals. It’s all I’ve ever known.”
“Well, maybe this says something terrible about me, but you’re the only other person I’ve ever cared about.”
I took a moment to hear those words. I let them all the way in.
“Then . . . help me finish this,” I said. “After this, I’m done. I’ll come with you, if you want me to. If there’s a world left tomorrow, we can find a corner of it for ourselves, where the Medusas can’t find us. Just let me finish this one last job.”
She didn’t wipe away the tears this time. She said, “Finishing this job, finding your client. Tell me. No bullshit. If you do this, will you be okay again?”
I hesitated. I looked down at all my bruises and lacerations, the fresh scabs over half-treated shrapnel wounds. I said, “I know I’m beyond help if I don’t try.”
She shook her head.
I asked her, “Are you with me?”
Kat’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She blinked and drew a deep breath. She took her foot off the brake, composed herself, and said, “Till the bitter end. How do you want to play this?”
“He’s going northeast,” I said. I focused as hard as I could on the last traces of Danae’s memory, burning the information into my mind, not letting it erase itself. I said, “I think I know where he’s taking her.”
DANAE
It took me a while to grasp that this was all really happening—that it was really Luther sitting right there beside me, wearing someone else’s hollowed-out body, seventy-odd years since I’d started running from him and everything he represented. I’d spent so long trying to soothe myself with the assumption that he was dead, and now he was here. Now we were here together.
“Sybil,” he called. He kept repeating it.
