from her shape under the T-shirt. She had luminous wide eyes, and she smiled prettily.
'Then you can buy me a drink in the bar.'
First, Kendrick went up to his room and dumped his stuff. All he had really was his jacket – and his wand, which he didn't intend to let out of his sight. He thought again about getting rid of it but reminded himself how much harder it would be for Todd, or anyone else, to help him if he did so.
He checked the instrument for the hundredth time since he'd glanced out of the plane window and first seen New York on the horizon. Todd's GPS tracker told him that Hardenbrooke was already somewhere in the city. That meant there was a chance that Caroline was somewhere nearby.
Kendrick resisted the urge to run out and start looking for her immediately. He had to be careful if he didn't want to end up in the same boat as her. Rest up, he told himself; he was feeling jet-lagged, run-down. He wasn't sure that he could handle the pressure of so much happening.
Kendrick showered, then studied himself in the mirror for several seconds. As he got dressed and headed for the bar, he wondered about the guilt he was feeling.
Later.
Kendrick leant over to smooth one hand along Helen's jeans-clad thigh, feeling her small hands slide up around his head, then reach down to tug at his shirt. She pulled him down towards her and they kissed deeply. He let his fingers slide under her own shirt, feeling the firm curvature of her breasts.
Caroline – did he still love her, he wondered? Maybe he hadn't really accepted that it was over between them. She'd been right, after all: he had deceived her.
Helen slid down, still lying under him on the bed, and started to wriggle out of her jeans.
Every muscle in Kendrick's body ached; for months – no, years – he'd been wound up like a steel spring, wondering if he was going to live, wondering if he was going to be allowed to live. And he noted with a certain detachment how easy it was to put everything that had been happening out of his mind – just for a little while.
Helen pulled her T-shirt off, her jeans already on the floor. Then Kendrick was inside her, feeling her hips rise to meet him – not Caroline, whose face was still hovering, unwelcome, in his mind's eye, but this woman Helen.
How long had it been? A long time – there'd been nothing like this since the break-up with Caroline. Alcohol buzzed in his brain.
Just then, as Helen shifted under him, her body moving with a languid animal rhythm, it was easier to think of Caroline not at all.
24 October 2096 The Chelsea Hotel, New York
When Kendrick woke a few hours later he knew that he had made a terrible mistake.
Helen coughed, a soft sound verging on the inaudible, but enough to cause him to wake up to near-darkness, the only light a thin yellow luminescence seeping in from the street lamps beyond the drapes.
He did not even need to move to know that Helen was no longer lying in the bed beside him. Perhaps, he thought, she had picked this as an opportune moment to dress and leave for her own room.
The sound of her cough reflected off the hard surfaces of the hotel room's walls before arriving at Kendrick's ears. There his augmentations processed the sound through a variety of arcane algorithms, thus generating a crude map of the space contained by the four walls.
So Kendrick did not literally 'see' Helen standing in one corner of the hotel room, but he could sense her.
Then another sound, a faint creak that Kendrick interpreted as his wallet being opened.
Alarmed, he lifted his head a few inches from the pillow. Now he could make out her silhouette.
She stopped then and glanced over at him. He could not be sure if she could see him watching her.
'Helen?' he said softly.
She turned away again, and his eyes, more fully adjusted to the light, could now see that she was studying the contents of his wallet. Angry and confused, he slipped naked from the bed and went over to her. He reached down to take the wallet from her hand, thinking how easily he'd been taken in and that she was nothing more than a thief.
Helen whirled, her limbs and torso blurring in motion. Some enormous force lifted him and threw him against the opposite wall. He landed back on the bed, its springs creaking in protest. A cheap framed print tumbled from the wall above the bed and fell to the floor.
She flew at him across the room, and at once he realized that she was an Augment. The heel of her fist slammed into Kendrick's chin, pressing him so hard into the mattress that he could feel the springs digging into his spine.
However, she no longer held the advantage of surprise. Kendrick twisted his legs and thighs upwards, allowing him to slide a few inches down lower on the mattress and dislodging the main focus of her grip. Grabbing at Helen's hair, he pulled her face down towards him. Then he dug the fingers of his free hand into one of her eyes, feeling a sense of satisfaction bordering on the sadistic when he heard her scream.
As she managed to twist out of his grasp he seized the chance to pull himself off the bed. She came at him again, kicking and punching blindly.
Kendrick barely managed to fend off her attack. Whatever kind of augmentation Helen had, it made her react faster than he could.
Still, he had learned in the Maze what he was capable of, so he managed to block some of the blows that rained down on him at lightning speed, if not all of them. Helen glared at him, the flesh around her right eye now bruised and raw-looking. As one blow caught him on the side of his head, Kendrick felt the back of his skull rebound off the hotel-room door. He heard wood crunch under the impact.
While he was still dazed, Helen pushed him to the floor and, gripping the top of his head in both hands, began to slam his cranium against the floor.
The first couple of impacts stunned him and he tasted blood. It didn't take long for him to lose consciousness.
The sound of someone drawing on a cigarette. Then a silence, lasting several seconds.
'Awake yet?'
Kendrick heard footsteps moving closer. A hollow click, as of the safety being taken off a gun. Tensing, he found that he was tightly bound, the bonds cutting painfully into his flesh.
A painful tearing sensation as the blindfold was removed, and he stared up into sunlight so bright that he had to screw his eyes up tight against it. He tried to speak but found that he'd been gagged.
Kendrick stared up at a face reduced to a hazy silhouette by the jagged ferocity of the sun at high noon. Wherever he was now, it was somewhere very hot.
The dark outlines at the edge of his vision told him that he'd been deposited in the boot of a car. His body was folded up painfully in the limited space.
Hands dragged Kendrick out, the hard metal lip of the boot scraping painfully against his flesh. Now he could see that his wrists were bound in front of him with narrow strips of white plastic. Although these strips looked relatively fragile, he could barely flex his hands.
With some dismay, he realized that his legs too were bound. He fell down hard on a dusty desert road.
A handgun wavered into view, a vicious-looking thing with a long barrel. Its muzzle was pressed against his
