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Peanut Jar Mixers Development 12

The King's Justice

E. M. Powell

Chapter 7

God has committed to the King the care of all his subjects alike. Aelred Barling repeated this refrain to himself many, many times on the hot ride to the village of Claresham. More specifically, he revisited it every time Sir Reginald Edgar irritated him afresh. Which was several times every hour. Had it not been for this man, with his untimely appearance before the justices and his inebriated confusion about the law, Barling would not now be sat astride a sweating horse, his muscles cramped from many uncomfortable hours in the saddle. He would be in the shade and calm of the court, with its ordered rhythm of document, case, document, case, as soothing as a mother's heartbeat to an infant. To add to Barling's annoyance, the thick-set Edgar, riding close beside him on an equally coarse-bodied horse while the messenger, Stanton, brought up the rear of their trio, was one of those individuals for whom the retelling of a tale was an equal pleasure to the first time. The man went over and round and back over the hideous murder of Geoffrey Smith and much besides: how it was a singular event in the whole time he had had control of his lands. How extensive his lands were. Yet even so, how he normally kept the best of order, with not even a turnip thief escaping retribution. How, in his experience, swift justice was the best justice. The man's rambling tongue was no doubt kept loose by the large leather bottle he drank from with great frequency. 'Swift, sure, strong, Barling,' Edgar wittered on. 'That's what you need with the law. Men like Lindley: dispatch them. Show no mercy, show them none. None whatsoever.' And on. Fortunately, the man shared that other feature of lovers of incessant speech: he did not seem at all concerned with checking if the listener had heard or cared. Debate was certainly not required. 'Indeed.' Barling swatted at the flies that danced before his sweat-coated face, landing on his mouth and nose with a foul tickle. To no avail. They were back again the second he stopped. Under his neatly pinned cloak, his body perspired worse than his face. But he would not loosen any of his clothing to allow the benefit of the soft breeze. He was the representative of the King's rule of law. His appearance must reflect that at all times. 'Do you not enjoy a draught of the good grape, Barling?' Edgar held up his depleted leather drinking bottle. 'No, I have very simple tastes.' Barling's innards rebelled, not only at the trail of spittle attached to the neck of the vessel, but at the idea of what warm wine would do to his overheated body. 'I require water for my thirst. Nothing else.' For once, his answer seemed to interest Edgar. 'I'll say that's simple.' Edgar took a sup from his own foul receptacle. 'And unusual. Men of the court like the best things that life has to offer.' Barling had no wish to respond further. 'Speaking of water, I have very little left. If we have much farther to travel, I will need to collect some.' 'No need.' Edgar tipped his head back to take the last draughts, reminding Barling of a pig opening its mouth for an apple. 'We're almost at Claresham. You see that dip in the road up ahead? That's the start of my estate.' 'Did you hear that, Stanton?' Barling looked back and his hands tightened on his reins in impatience. As if God were not testing him enough by sending him out into the disordered, violent world, He was sending the young Hugo Stanton along with Barling as a further trial. 'Yes, sir.' Not only marked with his blackened eye, the young Hugo Stanton had flung his cloak back over his shoulders and undone the top of his undershirt. His hat rested on his saddle pommel and the wind had blown his hair about in a tangled mess. 'In the name of the Virgin,' said Barling, 'tidy yourself up. You are here as a servant of his Grace, not a peasant on his way to the fields.' 'Sorry, sir.' Stanton set about making himself look respectable with a visage that lacked even a hint of apology. Edgar gave a sharp whistle. 'You.' Barling looked to where a young boy collected kindling from under a stand of yews by the side of the road. 'Fetch my nephew at once,' said Edgar. 'Tell him to meet me at my hall.' 'Yes, my lord.' The boy darted off. 'My nephew, William Osmond, is the rector of Claresham,' said Edgar. 'You can see the roof of his church from here. His house is next to it. My hall is over there, in those trees.' Barling followed his point to see where he meant, then gave another glance back. Stanton now looked as well presented as possible, which was not a great deal. The village came into view, unremarkable in every way. A fair size, but nothing to compare to the teeming, tightly packed London streets that had always been his home, or even the busy city of York. The wattle and daub houses and cottages built along the main thoroughfare were mostly modest, with one or two large ones and a handful wretched. A high-walled well stood about halfway along, and a family of ducks feasted on the thick grass which grew near to it. Floods seemed unlikely from the high-banked small river, which kept the mill wheel turning in a steady, splashing trundle. Much of the place still bore the scars of the terrible winter and stormy spring. A mighty fallen oak had crushed a small barn. Many damaged roofs still needed tending to even after so many months, while others had fresh thatch repairs. Fields stretching into the distance had sheep grazing or were busy with men making the best of the last of the good day. Smoke rising from roofs and the smell of cooking told of women preparing supper. But nothing out of the ordinary was to be seen. Nothing to suggest this was a place where a stranger had cracked open the skull of the village smith in a vicious attack. The clatter of the three sets of hooves on the road that led down into the village had caused raised heads in the fields, had brought curious faces to front doors. 'My nephew will be surprised that you have come to join us for our meal,' said Edgar to Barling. 'I'm sure he'll be very interested in why you are here too.' 'Sir Reginald, our meal can wait,' replied Barling. 'Where is the gaol?' 'The gaol? It's down that way.' He pointed to a narrow track that led from the main street. 'But we have travelled for many hours, we—' 'Your prisoner is the reason for my travelling, Edgar. Not your repast,' said Barling. 'Do you have the keys?' 'Of course,' said Edgar. 'As I have told you, I keep the best of order here.' Barling ignored the lord and nodded to Stanton instead. 'Stanton: the gaol. We need to be prompt.' Their arrival had already been noticed. It would not be long before the villagers gathered, he was certain of that. 'Yes, sir.' His messenger set off at a swift trot that Barling struggled to match. Edgar still protested but followed along. They dismounted outside the gaol and tethered their horses. Barling's stiff, sore muscles felt like they belonged to another. 'You can see our murderer isn't going anywhere, Barling,' said Edgar. 'It certainly looks secure, sir,' said Stanton. 'It does.' Unlike many of the other village buildings, the low-roofed gaol appeared to be in the best of repair. Thick stone walls and roof, a stout wooden door, the metal lock large and new. Behind it, the man who had to answer for this crime. Barling stepped up to the door. 'So that means Lindley is available to answer my questions.' 'As he will be tomorrow,' said Edgar, 'when I have rested my backside from this journey.' 'Unlock it, Edgar.' 'Sir.' Stanton's brow creased in concern. 'Perhaps we should wait. The prisoner could be very dangerous.' 'The only danger is to him,' said Barling. 'We are the law, and there are three of us.' 'Uncle! You have returned.' 'Four.' Barling corrected himself with a satisfied nod as a man hurried towards them, clad in priest's robes. Edgar's family blood flowed in the veins of the approaching young rector, no doubt about that. Barling saw much of an old boar in Edgar, and while the nephew was softer and pinker, the blunt nose and the small, angry eyes were the same. 'I have, William,' replied Edgar. 'Though not with the news you hoped.' 'What news would that be?' As Edgar launched into a tangled explanation, Barling met the gaze of an uneasy-looking Stanton. 'Pull yourself together, man,' he muttered. 'To show doubt is to show weakness.' 'Yes, sir.' Stanton nodded, but his expression did not alter. 'And that, William, is why we have the King's men in our midst.' Edgar finished with his hands flung up in disbelief. The King's men. Barling opened his mouth to correct the preposterous idea that a messenger could be included in his own authority. William Osmond interrupted him. 'You needn't have troubled yourselves, good sirs. My uncle could have overseen the man's hanging while I will pray for his soul.' His eyes rose to heaven. 'Though to no avail, I fear.' He crossed himself with great extravagance. 'It is not about need, sir priest,' said Barling. 'It is the law.' He could see that many of the villagers were hurrying along the street to the gaol. To be expected, but most undesirable. 'Edgar, no more delay. Please unlock the door.' Edgar exchanged a frown with his nephew, then hammered on the robust planks with a meaty fist. 'Lindley! Move away from the door!' He unlocked it as he spoke, then flung it open.

The Lion of Cairo

Scott Oden

Chapter 64

Yasmina cleaved to the shadows like a creature born of Night. She made barely a sound as she trailed Musa and the leper, Djuha, down refuse-strewn alleys that reeked of despair and across dim courts hedged in by walls of age-gnawed mudbrick, each step taking them deeper into the labyrinthine heart of the Foreign Quarter. With practiced care, Djuha led them around the places where men gathered for their evening's sport, the wine shops and pleasure houses with their guttering cressets and copper censers and drunken laughter. Places where one with his affliction would not be welcome. Yet, Allah must have been smiling upon Yasmina, for at every turn—when habit caused Musa to glance behind them for any sign of pursuit—chance obstructions hid her from the beggar's glowering eye. She kept just within earshot and just out of sight. "How much farther?" Yasmina heard the one-eyed beggar snap. They paused near the juncture of two narrow streets; beneath veneers of flaking plaster, the ancient buildings on either hand still bore blackened scars of a long-forgotten conflagration, an inferno that likely gutted the whole neighborhood. Not a stone's throw away, the Egyptian girl crouched in the lee of a jutting façade, in a well of gloom cast by crude mashrafiyya hanging precariously over her head. From these, faint voices chattered in a tongue Yasmina found incomprehensible while strains of alien music drifted on the still air. "How much farther, damn you?" The rotting pander, who purred a constant litany of endearments to the filthy urchin serving as his crutch, was slow to answer. "Not far, now." Even at a distance the sight of Djuha fawning over the boy, stroking his hair and caressing his cheek, sent waves of disgust shuddering through Yasmina; it must have been worse for Musa, who cursed under his breath as each obscene delay forced his hand closer to the hilt of his knife. "So you've said before! Merciful Allah! If this is your idea of a jest—" "Don't be a fool, beggar," she heard Djuha wheeze. "We might have taken a more direct approach, but all that would accomplish is to alert your mistress's killer that we are watching. No, we must instead come upon him crabwise, to a spot where we might survey his lair from relative safety—which is, I presume, what you want." "You're not even certain it truly is her killer." "The man I saw matched his description down to the slightest detail. Surely that must account for something?" "Perhaps," the beggar growled, his voice fading as they continued on down the street. Quietly, Yasmina emerged from her hiding place and followed. "When did you see this man?" "I have glimpsed him on occasion over many months, coming and going from his lair. I saw him last this evening, after sunset, returning from some errand. He had six other men with him, and between them they looked to be carrying—Allah smite me if I lie!—they looked to be carrying corpses." "Corpses?" "Aye. Three of them. They—" Musa stopped abruptly. The leper paused as well, his head cocked to one side. "What goes, beggar?" Yasmina froze, certain that Musa had gotten wind of her—perhaps he had heard something, or simply felt the intensity of her gaze. Regardless, she steeled herself, her mind already spooling convenient lies for questions he had yet to ask. But, rather than whirl about and confront her, the one-eyed beggar simply stood in the middle of the street, nodding from side to side and tugging his beard as though trying to work something out on his own. Yasmina took advantage of this pause, quickly sidestepping into the shelter of an open doorway. "Three, you say? Allah! This cannot be coincidence!" Musa's hand shot out, iron fingers digging into the leper's arm without regard to his affliction. Djuha hissed and tried to pull free, but the one-eyed beggar dragged him closer. "Forget stealth, man! Get me to this lair, and swiftly!" Djuha tore his arm from Musa's grasp and staggered against the cowering urchin. "Do not touch me!" The leper glared at Musa. Slowly, he regained his balance, his composure, and gestured for the beggar to follow. "Come, then. It is not far." Nor was it. The winding street emptied into a ragged square, a hollow where moonlight picked out sparse detail in a faint wash of silver—the tall weeds and shattered chunks of masonry, the drifts of refuse like sand dunes piled against the foundations of a pair of ramshackle tenements. These jutted from the earth, misshapen fingers of crumbling brick and age-blackened timber, with crude keel arches and windows hacked into the walls almost as an afterthought. Both looked abandoned to Yasmina. Abandoned and ominous. Djuha slunk to the right-hand side of the street and dared go no farther. "This place is called the Maydan al-Iskander, after an old Greek king. Do you see it?" he hissed, pointing. "There, between those two buildings..." Yasmina sidled closer, cognizant of her every footfall, and tried to follow the leper's gesture. A few hundred yards to the east—beyond the tangled streets—lay Cairo's walls and the crenellated towers of the Bab al-Rum, the Foreign Gate. Its relative proximity afforded her little in the way of solace. Musa leaned out. "I don't ... Wait! What is that?" From her vantage Yasmina saw it, too, though just barely: a long black cleft in the ground between the two tenements, still showing raw earth and fresh growths of weeds around its edges. "A cellar entrance, perhaps," Djuha said. "That's where they took the bodies?" "It is, and that's where I have seen the one you seek—coming and going into the earth like a djinn." Musa raised a hand as though to grab on to the leper, then thought better of it. "I would ask a favor, Djuha ... return to Abu'l-Qasim's caravanserai by the quickest road possible. Tell him what we—what you—found here! By Allah! Bid him gather his Berbers and come with all haste!" Cloth rustled. Djuha shook his diseased head. "No, no. I have done all I set out to do, beggar. Now, I must see to my own business as you must see to yours." "Goddamn you, man! Forget your cursed business! Abu'l-Qasim will make this worth your while!" Yasmina, though, had heard enough. Even before Djuha could answer, she left the relative shelter of the open doorway and glided in the direction of the two men, her movements as silent and deadly as an emir of al-Hashishiyya. She was within arm's reach before either man noticed her. "Leper," she said, in a voice harder than stone. Both men whirled; the urchin squeaked, clutching at Djuha's legs. Musa had his knife half drawn before he recognized the slender figure. "Yasmina? What the devil...?" She ignored him. "You, leper. This man you say you saw so often—what manner of weapon did he carry?" "What goes?" Djuha glared at the one-eyed beggar, who shrugged and eased his blade back into its sheath. "Who is she?" "One of Mistress Zaynab's companions." Yasmina stopped in front of the Bedouin, her head barely reaching the level of his sternum. "Answer me, damn you!" Djuha frowned. "He ... He sported a knife—long and straight with a Frankish hilt. Why do you ask?" Yasmina nodded. "Leave us," she said, turning to Musa. "He is the man we seek." Musa glanced at the leper, indicating with a sharp jerk of his chin that he should take the urchin and go. Djuha, his eyes burning slits of suspicion, draped an arm around his boy and did as he was told. "You were right to trust him," Yasmina said, returning her attention to the square that lay before them. "Wait here. I'm going in to flush our quarry out." "I'll decide what we will and won't do, girl! You shouldn't even be abroad this time of night. It's—" Yasmina turned to face the beggar. "We failed her, Musa. You and I. Her father. We let him take her from us. It's time to settle accounts." "Don't be a fool, girl." Musa exhaled. His voice was heavy, pained; the voice of a man forced to confront a harsh reality. "We didn't fail her. She fell victim to her own ridiculous pride. She should have known her enemies would try and use that against her! No, girl. By not thinking her actions through properly—as her father damn well taught her—Zaynab failed us, not the other way around. We can talk about this later. You wait here and keep an eye out. I'm going back to fetch Abu'l Qasim—" Yasmina cracked the back of her slim hand across the beggar's jaw. "Hold your tongue!" The blow filled Musa's vision with dancing motes of light. Anger suffused his pox-scarred visage as he shook his head to clear it, wiped at the trickle of blood starting from his split lip. "Damn you!" Musa snatched her up by the scruff of the neck. "You're just as foolish as she was! I don't know what will come to pass, if Abu'l-Qasim will send his Berbers to deal with the killer or if he will come himself, but I do know this: you're going back to the palace where you damn well belong! This is a matter for men, not a scrap of a girl like you!" Musa shook her for emphasis. Yasmina's eyes were aglow with the lambent flames of madness, her lips curled in a rictus of hate as she tore free of the beggar's grasp. The speed of her movement caught Musa wholly off guard. Before he could so much as raise a hand in his own defense, Yasmina's fingers closed on the knife at his waist. The blade sang free, flashed in the gloom, and then sank hilt-deep into Musa's abdomen. The one-eyed beggar howled. He stumbled back, hands clawing at Yasmina's arm as she sawed the blade upward. Blood spurted over her fingers; it soaked the fabric of her gown as she wrenched the knife free. Musa staggered and fell, curling his body around the gaping wound in his belly. Hands slick with blood clawed furrows in the hard-packed filth of the street. He glared up at her, tears streaming from his good eye, and tried to curse, to scream, to pray, but waves of white-hot agony allowed for a single gasping plea: "W-why...?" "Why?" Yasmina hissed. The youthful Egyptian Zaynab had saved from a life of misery was no more; in her place stood a grim and haunted figure, unrecognizable under a patina of gore. Musa flinched as she knelt by his side. "Why? Do you see the blood on your hands, Musa—on my hands? It's not yours or mine ... it is Zaynab's! You called me a fool for thinking we'd failed her, but I know whereof I speak. We let her die! And as she suffered, so must we ... and so must he!" She jerked her chin toward the cleft in the square. "It is Allah's will." "You ... you s-stupid little bitch!" Musa gasped. "He'll k-kill you!" "Not before I kill him. It is Allah's will." And with that, Yasmina rose and stepped over the beggar's writhing form. She stalked toward the cleft between the tenements. A ribbon of blood drooled from the knife clenched in her fist. She was a killer. Yasmina wanted that pale-eyed Frank to remember his words. She was a killer ...

In the Company of Ogres

A. Lee Martinez

Chapter 9

It wasn't until late morning that Ned's absence was discovered, and it wasn't until late afternoon that his corpse was found by the gravediggers Ralph and Ward. In addition to planting bodies, they were also responsible for keeping the cemetery tended. They were prepared for their weekly weeding, and instead found their new commander sprawled across his own plot. Neither knew what to make of it. "Is he dead?" asked Ward. Ralph nodded. "Yup." "What's he doing out here?" "I don't know." "Looks a little bloated, doesn't he?" "Yup." "Should we scare away that vulture?" The large scavenging bird atop Ned picked at his flesh. It'd just found the meal and hadn't done much damage yet. "Do what you want." Ralph rubbed his jaw. "I've got weeding to do." He went to work. Ward watched the vulture chew on Ned's ear a while. He'd raised a vulture as a boy and had grown to love it. Then came the Feast of Saint Carrion, a revered ogre holiday, and his mother had slaughtered Mister Nibbles and served him for dinner. This vulture resembled Mister Nibbles only in passing. It was a thin, gawky sort of buzzard. Not the healthy fat bird he'd cherished. But it had the same spirit, the same boldness, to not fly away as he approached. He patted it once on its head. Then raised his shovel to brain it. He loved buzzards. Especially in cream sauce. Ward hesitated, and the bird could've easily fled. Instead it glared back at him with its cold, black eyes. Eyes like polished glass. Merciless and cruel and hungry. He lowered his shovel. "Go on, little fella. Have another bite." The vulture smiled—at least it seemed so to Ward—and pecked some more at its breakfast. "How do you think he died?" asked Ward. Ralph sniffed the air. "I smell magic. Maybe that's what did him in." Ward shooed away the buzzard. It hopped only a short distance away. Ward bent over and turned Ned on his back. A small burn mark showed on his chest. It didn't look like much, but it must've been enough to kill him. The face had been spared the vulture's sharp beak, but Ward blanched at the body's puffy grimace. "He sure dies a lot for a guy named Never Dead Ned." "Yup." Ward turned Ned facedown. He ignored the corpse for a while and joined Ralph at work. The vulture hopped over cautiously and tore off pieces of Ned's flesh, which it gobbled down its snapping beak. After they'd plucked the last of the weeds, Ward asked, "Should we bury him?" Sneering, Ralph rubbed his jaw. "We're not supposed to bury him. Those were his orders." "Maybe he changed his mind," said Ward. "Maybe he decided he was ready to be buried, and that's why he's out here. Only he didn't time it right and died before he could get back in his grave." "Sounds pretty stupid to me." "Why else would he be out here?" "I don't know. And I don't care." Ralph pulled back his leg to kick the corpse, but thought better of it. "Orders are orders. If he wanted to be buried, he should've told us." "We can't just leave him out here," said Ward. "Why not?" "He'll get eaten by wolves or vultures or something." "So what?" "He is our commander, Ralph." "He was our commander." This time Ralph kicked Ned, though not too hard for fear of perhaps shocking the corpse back to life. "Now he's just a dead asshole. Let him rot, I say." Ralph had been rubbing his jaw since finding Ned. He hadn't forgotten Ned's punch. The jaw was fine, but it was still a wound to his pride. Ward, on the other hand, had developed a begrudging admiration for this human. Ned hadn't seemed like such a bad guy, and after that drunken punch, Ward deemed the human either very brave or very stupid. Both qualities were well appreciated by ogres. Bravery for obvious reasons. Stupidity because it was just plain amusing. Scowling, Ralph ran his fingers along his chin, and Ward smiled. "What's so gods damned funny?" growled Ralph. Ward ignored the question. "Dead or not, I like the guy." He scared away the vulture and threw Ned over his shoulder. "I'm taking him back and seeing what Frank wants to do with him." They started back, and the vulture followed. Ward stopped and smiled at the scavenger. "Oh, no," said Ralph, "we're not keeping him." "But look at him. How can you turn away that face?" Ralph looked into those black eyes set in the featherless, wrinkled pink head. The vulture spread its wide black wings with sparse feathers and screeched. Ralph shook his head slowly. "Fine, but you clean up after him. I'm not doing it." Ward peeled off some loose bits of Ned's skin. He was sure the commander wouldn't mind. Then he fed them to the bird. It hopped onto his empty shoulder. Its talons drew blood, just like Mister Nibbles used to, and Ward, a tear in his eye, smiled. The gravediggers headed back to the citadel. They passed the installation's command center, which had long ago been taken over by goblins and converted into a recreation room. No one knew exactly what went on behind those closed doors, what sort of depravity goblins enjoyed in their spare time. And no one over four feet high wanted to know. One of the previous commanders, a man of storm and fury, had tried to reclaim the room from the goblins. Three minutes behind the doors, he'd emerged pale and shivering. He never uttered a single word of what he saw, but there'd been madness in his eyes ever after. And two months later, when he'd been crushed beneath an avalanche of mead barrels, he'd died with a thankful grin on his face. "Applesauce," he'd wheezed with his final breath. "Dear gods, the applesauce." Since then the goblins had been left to their own. The center of power for Copper Citadel had shifted to the next most logical place: the pub. Ralph and Ward found Frank sharing a drink with the twins. They sat at one of the tables just beside the pub in the open courtyard. Ward dropped Ned's corpse in an empty chair. "We found the commander, sir. He was in the graveyard." Private Lewis held out an open palm. "You owe me a silver piece, Brother. I told you he hadn't deserted." Corporal Martin, having command of the right side of their body, reached into his belt pouch and tossed a coin to his brother, who caught it and stuffed it back into the very same pouch. "Serves me right, Lewis," said Martin. "Always think the best of everyone. That's what Mother always said." "Surely she was a wise woman," agreed Lewis. Ned fell over. His head cracked loudly against the table. Frank grabbed the body by the hair and glanced at the face. He let go, and Ned slumped. Frank swished his mead in his tankard. "Fragile sort, isn't he?" "Must be all that practice he's had dying," remarked Martin. "Practice makes perfect," seconded Lewis. "Such dedication is an inspiration to us all." Gravedigger Ralph said, "He's your problem now, sir. I'm getting a beer." Muttering and still rubbing his jaw, he disappeared into the pub. "That's a scrawny buzzard there," said Frank. "Not much good eating." The vulture screeched, turning its head to glare at Frank. "He's not for eating, sir." Ward help up his arm. The vulture traipsed down Ward's limb. Its talons dug shallow scratches in his thick ogre flesh. The bird spread its wings and affectionately pecked at its master's fingers with its pointed beak. "Once I get him healthy, I thought we might make the little guy into the company mascot. With your permission, sir." "Just don't get him too healthy, private. Feast of Saint Carrion is right around the corner, and Legion supply might not send down enough vultures for the occasion." Frank pushed Ned aside so he could put his feet up on the table. "Got a name yet?" "Yes, sir. Nibbly Ned. In honor of our commander." "I'm sure he'll be touched by the homage." Ward and Nibbly Ned went into the pub to fetch a drink. Several nearby ogres eyed Nibbly while licking their lips. "Copper piece says Nibbly won't make it through the month." said Lewis. "Ten days," said Martin. The twins shook hands to make the bet official. "What, may I inquire, sir, do you plan on doing with the commander?" asked Lewis. Frank eyed the corpse. "I don't know. In a normal situation like this we usually just bury the human. But this isn't a normal situation." "Mother had a smashing recipe for human soup," said Martin. "Dear brother," countered Lewis, "though I loved Mother's cooking every bit as much as you, I really must point out the impropriety of eating a superior officer. It simply isn't done." "Of course, Martin. It was merely a recollection, not a suggestion." "I've never eaten a human before," said Frank. "They must be prepared just right, and even then it's usually not worth the trouble. Tastes like gopher." "I hate to contradict you, Brother, but humans do not taste like gophers. Gophers taste like humans." "Perhaps you're right, Martin. But in either case, gophers and humans are not very good eating." Frank, having tasted neither, had no opinion and left the twins to their culinary discussions. He finished his drink, grabbed Ned by the hair, and dragged the body across the courtyard. Ned's boot heels thumped against the cobblestones. It didn't take Frank long to find Regina, who was busy with a training exercise. Training in Ogre Company was voluntary. In truth, most everything in Ogre Company was voluntary in the sense that there were no consequences for skipping it. Discipline had long ago deserted the installation. But Regina rather enjoyed the martial arts, and she practiced for three or four hours every day, drawing a regular audience. The soldiers pretended to study, but they were really there to ogle her athletic form as she grunted and sweated in her two-piece training gear. It was the only time ogling was allowed since she took combat training too seriously to notice. Sometimes her students practiced alongside her. Sometimes they even learned something. And on occasion one or two would openly challenge her to a sparring match. She remained undefeated. At present she was busy hacking away at a straw dummy with a scimitar. The blade was a whirling flash. It cut the dummy with dozens of shallow slashes. Straw flew in the air for a solid minute before Regina ended her demonstration and sheathed the blade. "You must be losing your touch," said Frank. "I was merely demonstrating the death of a thousand nips. You have to imagine all that straw is blood to understand the full beauty of the technique." Frank had never developed a taste for fancy swordplay. Ogre tactics rarely grew more sophisticated than smashing opponents until they stopped twitching. As a very large ogre, his weapon of choice was a nice, solid tree trunk. The technique had never failed him. In a duel, Frank expected he could best Regina, but all that blood littering the ground (even in straw form) gave him pause. "We have to talk to Gabel." He held up Ned. "Oh, hell." She drew her sword, spun around, beheaded the training dummy, and put away her weapon in one fluid motion. Her audience applauded with much appreciation, both for her technique and the slippage of her top's neckline to reveal a tantalizing glimpse of her bosom. She toweled her glistening flesh, so distracted by Ned's corpse that she didn't notice the leering soldiers. "Lesson over. Tomorrow we'll cover the pike with particular emphasis on gouging and impaling. If there's time, I'll demonstrate the proper way to mount a head." She threw a less revealing robe around her shoulders, and her students dispersed. Frank, grasping Ned by the neck, shook the body. Its stiffened limbs flopped like a cheap marionette. "He's dead." Regina cupped Ned's chin and stared into his single, glassy eye. "How?" Frank lowered his voice. "You don't know?" "What are you implying?" "I'm not implying anything." He dropped Ned, who fell in a heap to the ground. "I'm asking you directly. Did you kill him?" "No, I didn't," she replied. "Did you?" "Don't be absurd. I know the agreement." "So do I." She snarled. "None of us gets rid of a commander without first discussing it. That's the agreement that I've sworn to, and an Amazon never breaks her word." They wasted a moment on an exchange of furtive, mistrustful glances. "Gabel must've done it," Regina said finally. "Never trust an orc to keep his word. Especially an orc that's really a goblin." Frank nodded. "I guess we should have a talk with him. This could be trouble." She readily agreed. The three ranking officers of Ogre Company had taken a more active role in their advancement opportunities, but all their previous accidents had been neatly above suspicion. But Ned was dead with no clear cause, and that was sure to draw attention. Ogre Company's run of fatally poor luck might not stand against closer scrutiny. It wasn't like Gabel to make such a mistake, but perhaps he'd just grown impatient, they guessed. On the way to see Gabel, Frank dragged Ned by his leg. Regina, marching directly behind, found herself staring at her commander. Some incomprehensible, alien sensation stirred within her. It wasn't pity. She had none for the dead. Nor was it guilt. Killing was her profession, and she had little moral qualm with slaying anyone who got in her way. All the previous commanders had been buffoons. She'd seen nothing in Ned to make her think he would've been any different. But as his head bounced against the cobblestones, she found that unidentifiable stimulation remained. "Do you have to carry him like that?" she asked. "Like what?" "Like that. He's lost half his scalp." Frank stopped and saw bits of hair and skin trailing behind them. "I don't hear him complaining." She didn't know why she cared, but she did regardless. "Just let me carry him." She gathered Ned in her arms. He stank a little of decay, but she hardly noticed. She gazed into his bloated face and for some unfathomable reason, she smiled. "Should I leave the two of you alone?" asked Frank. Her only comment was a harsh grunt. She tossed Ned over her shoulder and proceeded to Gabel's office. He was busy filling out forms, something he did with clockwork precision. Brute's Legion was a never-ending struggle against a tide of paperwork, and to fall behind was to court disaster. Gabel was displeased by the interruption, but even more so by the reason. "Which of you did it?" he asked at the sight of Ned propped in a corner. "Which of you idiots couldn't wait until the right moment?" "Don't look at me," said Frank. "I didn't do it," replied Regina. "We assumed you had." "I had nothing to do with it," said Gabel. "If you did, you should just tell us," said Frank. Gabel slammed his palms against the desktop. A stack of requisitions toppled to the floor, and sighing, he gathered them up. "I'm telling you, I didn't kill him." The trio exchanged glances of unspoken skepticism. Their alliance had survived thus far because no one had acted without the others' approval. Now that spotless trust wasn't quite so spotless, and they found themselves looking at a roomful of assassins. Regina put her hand on her scimitar. Frank clenched his gigantic fists. Gabel sat back down, reaching for a short sword he kept strapped under the desk. And Ned continued to rot in the corner. "I swear I had nothing to do with it," said Gabel. "Neither did I," said Regina. "Nor I," said Frank. "I guess that settles it then." But Gabel kept his fingers on the sword. Frank cracked his knuckles. "I guess so." "Agreed." Regina lowered her arms from her weapon, but her fellow officers knew she could draw it in a flash. "It must've been an accident," said Frank. "A real accident." "Poor timing for one," said Gabel, "and hardly believable. When the head office hears of this..." "Why should they?" asked Regina. "He's Never Dead Ned. Shouldn't he come back to life?" Frank exhaled with relief. "I'd nearly forgotten about that. I guess that's a lucky break." Gabel nodded to the corpse. "Even a cat has only nine lives. Still, let's assume he'll return. I guess we should just put him back in his room until then." "I'll do it." Regina hoisted the body across her back, and before either man could disagree (although neither had any intention) she was out of the room. "Is it just me, or is she acting strange?" asked Gabel. Frank didn't reply. He studied the orc with narrowed eyes. Gabel met the ogre's stare. "For the last time, I didn't kill him." Frank shrugged. "If you say so." Regina laid Ned in his bed. She tucked his swollen tongue back into his mouth as far as it would go, closed his eye, and pulled his blanket to his chin. Then she stood by his bed for a short while and studied his bloated features. She sneered, but it was a halfhearted attempt to remind herself that this dead man before her was beneath her contempt. She didn't understand this. Outside of an odd talent for resurrection, Ned wasn't anything special. As far as she could tell, he wasn't even much of a soldier. Yes, he was handsome in a scarred, disfigured way only an Amazon might appreciate, but that hardly seemed enough to warrant her reaction. She hoped he would just stay dead this time and rid her of the problem. The door opened, and Miriam stepped inside. "Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am. I just came in to see how the commander was doing?" Regina stepped aside to allow Miriam to view the corpse. "Still dead?" asked the siren. "Still dead." Miriam went to the bedside. Neither woman said anything for some time, lost in their own private thoughts. "How long do you think it'll take for him to recover?" asked Miriam. "It only took a few hours last time," observed Regina. "I guess I'll wait then." Miriam sat on the end of the bed. "You'll wait?" "I'd like to be here when he wakes up." "You like him?" Regina's already rigid posture stiffened. Her brow creased in a hard glare. "You like him?" The three fins atop Miriam's head raised and flattened. "Yes, ma'am." "Why?" "I don't really know." She reached under the blanket and took his hand. "You know how soldiers are, ma'am. They're all bluster, always trying to impress each other with how drunk they can get or how long they can keep a badger down their trousers. But Ned doesn't put on a show. He's just himself. It's hard to find a guy like that. Especially around here." Regina worked her way quietly behind the siren. The Amazon silently drew her dagger. "It's not like he's much to look at, I know," continued Miriam, oblivious. "And he isn't great in bed either. Although he was pretty drunk. But I like him. I wouldn't expect you to understand, ma'am." Regina, poised to slit Miriam's throat, hesitated. She had no problem killing when it suited her purposes, but there was only one reason to slay Miriam. And that reason, absurd as it seemed, lay decomposing on that bed. To kill her rival would be admitting she had a rival. She wasn't ready for that. Miriam glanced backward at Regina, who was now picking her fingernails with the dagger. "Sometimes I wish I were an Amazon," said the siren. "It must make life so much easier." Regina forced a smile. The hostility within her eyes was not lost on Miriam, but as Regina's eyes were always full of seething fury, the siren had no reason to suspect some of that fire was directed at her. "I'll wait with you." Regina plopped down into a chair. "Just to keep you company for a while." Miriam put a tender hand to Ned's cheek and smoothed his hair. Regina, caressing her long, sharp dagger, locked her stare onto Miriam's throat.

Emma

Jane Austen

Chapter 37

A very little quiet reflection was enough to satisfy Emma as to the nature of her agitation on hearing this news of Frank Churchill. She was soon convinced that it was not for herself she was feeling at all apprehensive or embarrassed—it was for him. Her own attachment had really subsided into a mere nothing—it was not worth thinking of; but if he, who had undoubtedly been always so much the most in love of the two, were to be returning with the same warmth of sentiment which he had taken away, it would be very distressing. If a separation of two months should not have cooled him, there were dangers and evils before her: caution for him and for herself would be necessary. She did not mean to have her own affections entangled again, and it would be incumbent on her to avoid any encouragement of his. She wished she might be able to keep him from an absolute declaration. That would be so very painful a conclusion of their present acquaintance; and yet, she could not help rather anticipating something decisive. She felt as if the spring would not pass without bringing a crisis, an event, a something to alter her present composed and tranquil state. It was not very long, though rather longer than Mr. Weston had foreseen, before she had the power of forming some opinion of Frank Churchill's feelings. The Enscombe family were not in town quite so soon as had been imagined, but he was at Highbury very soon afterwards. He rode down for a couple of hours; he could not yet do more; but as he came from Randalls immediately to Hartfield, she could then exercise all her quick observation, and speedily determine how he was influenced, and how she must act. They met with the utmost friendliness. There could be no doubt of his great pleasure in seeing her. But she had an almost instant doubt of his caring for her as he had done, of his feeling the same tenderness in the same degree. She watched him well. It was a clear thing he was less in love than he had been. Absence, with the conviction probably of her indifference, had produced this very natural and very desirable effect. He was in high spirits; as ready to talk and laugh as ever; and seemed delighted to speak of his former visit, and recur to old stories; and he was not without agitation. It was not in his calmness that she read his comparative indifference. He was not calm; his spirits were evidently fluttered; there was restlessness about him. Lively as he was, it seemed a liveliness that did not satisfy himself: but what decided her belief on the subject, was his staying only a quarter of an hour, and hurrying away to make other calls in Highbury. "He had seen a group of old acquaintance in the street as he passed—he had not stopped, he would not stop for more than a word—but he had the vanity to think they would be disappointed if he did not call; and, much as he wished to stay longer at Hartfield, he must hurry off." She had no doubt as to his being less in love, but neither his agitated spirits nor his hurrying away seemed like a perfect cure; and she was rather inclined to think it implied a dread of her returning power, and a discreet resolution of not trusting himself with her long. This was the only visit from Frank Churchill in the course of ten days. He was often hoping, intending to come; but was always prevented. His aunt could not bear to have him leave her. Such was his own account at Randalls. If he were quite sincere, if he really tried to come, it was to be inferred that Mrs. Churchill's removal to London had been of no service to the wilful or nervous part of her disorder. That she was really ill was very certain; he had declared himself convinced of it, at Randalls. Though much might be fancy, he could not doubt, when he looked back, that she was in a weaker state of health than she had been half a year ago. He did not believe it to proceed from any thing that care and medicine might not remove, or at least that she might not have many years of existence before her; but he could not be prevailed on, by all his father's doubts, to say that her complaints were merely imaginary, or that she was as strong as ever. It soon appeared that London was not the place for her. She could not endure its noise. Her nerves were under continual irritation and suffering; and by the ten days' end, her nephew's letter to Randalls communicated a change of plan. They were going to remove immediately to Richmond. Mrs. Churchill had been recommended to the medical skill of an eminent person there, and had otherwise a fancy for the place. A ready-furnished house in a favourite spot was engaged, and much benefit expected from the change. Emma heard that Frank wrote in the highest spirits of this arrangement, and seemed most fully to appreciate the blessing of having two months before him of such near neighbourhood to many dear friends; for the house was taken for May and June. She was told that now he wrote with the greatest confidence of being often with them, almost as often as he could even wish. Emma saw how Mr. Weston understood these joyous prospects. He was considering her as the source of all the happiness they offered. She hoped it was not so. Two months must bring it to proof. Mr. Weston's own happiness was indisputable. He was quite delighted. It was the very circumstance he could have wished for. Now, it would be really having Frank in their neighbourhood. What were nine miles to a young man?—An hour's ride. He would be always coming over. The difference in that respect of Richmond and London, was enough to make the whole difference of seeing him always and seeing him never. Sixteen miles—nay, eighteen—it must be full eighteen to Manchester Street—was a serious obstacle. Were he ever able to get away, the day would be spent in coming and returning. There was no comfort in having him in London; he might as well be at Enscombe; but Richmond was the very distance for easy intercourse. Better than nearer! One good thing was immediately brought to a certainty by this removal,—the ball at the Crown. It had not been forgotten before; but it had been soon acknowledged vain to attempt to fix a day. Now, however, it was absolutely to be; every preparation was resumed; and very soon after the Churchills had removed to Richmond, a few lines from Frank, to say that his aunt felt already much better for the change, and that he had no doubt of being able to join them for twenty-four hours at any given time, induced them to name as early a day as possible. Mr. Weston's ball was to be a real thing. A very few to-morrows stood between the young people of Highbury and happiness. Mr. Woodhouse was resigned. The time of year lightened the evil to him. May was better for every thing than February. Mrs. Bates was engaged to spend the evening at Hartfield; James had due notice, and he sanguinely hoped that neither dear little Henry nor dear little John would have any thing the matter with them while dear Emma were gone.

Breath of Frost

Cate Corvin

Chapter 11

I decided to wear my pajamas out to breakfast. If Jack tried to steal me out of my own kitchen on a breath of frost after the night I'd had, he could damn well deal with me being dressed like an absolute mess. When I heard running water, I quietly slipped out of my room, holding the door open for Ceri. I wasn't entirely sure the ghostly dog couldn't just phase through the walls on his own, but he wagged his tail and trotted past, pressing his cold nose against my thigh as he went. I stopped in the entrance to the kitchen. Then I rubbed my eyes, sure I was still somehow dreaming. Clove and Tarragon were setting the table in their usual haphazard way. They'd made a small table out of an upside down shot glass for Sisse, who was drinking from a thimble and wearing a cute little powersuit woven of jasmine petals today. It was Robin who really surprised me. He was standing at the stove, flipping chocolate chip pancakes, and wearing a frilly pink apron that said Kiss the Cook in glittery script over his white shirt and black pants. Our lazy fire salamander was snoozing on the grate at the back of the stove, and Robin's own salamander, Cinders, was happily munching chocolate chips as he circled beneath the pan. "I'm dreaming or dead," I decided. "I was actually killed last night, and now I'm going to spend the rest of eternity trapped in a weird limbo where Robin wears pink and makes me pancakes in the morning." Robin looked up, a faint smile on his lips. He tossed me a chocolate chip and I caught it, popping it into my mouth. "I could actually get used to being dead." As long as Robin feeding me chocolate was part of death, I was perfectly A-okay with that. "You're not dead. You put on the coffee, since Clove assures me that he's more likely to produce swamp sludge than anything drinkable." Robin flipped another pancake onto the platter on the counter, then poured more pancake batter into the pan. I dutifully filled the coffee machine with fresh water and began measuring out level scoops of coffee grounds. By the time I'd finished estimating measurements for enough coffee for five people, the sound of water running from my bedroom had gone silent. A moment later, Gwyn stepped into the kitchen. He wore the same jeans, but had pulled on a clean tee shirt and had his long hair wrapped up in a blue towel like a turban. "Thank you for the clothes," he said to the twins, taking their measure with his gaze. Somehow I knew he was sizing them up, even though his demeanor was nothing but friendly. It seemed impossible for Gentry males to be around other Fae males without getting into some sort of silent dick-measuring contest. "No problem." Tarragon began taking coffee mugs out of the cabinet. "So you're another one of Bri's boyfriends, eh?" I just about choked on my spit, but Gwyn wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "One of them, yeah." He said it while flashing an easy grin at Robin. "Probably the strongest and most handsome one, actually." I sent up a silent prayer to the Blessed Branches. It was probably thanks to that prayer that Robin ignored Gwyn, without so much as a single snarky comment in return. The coffee machine finally beeped, and I began distributing cups of coffee as the twins rushed to get the syrup, fruit, and pancakes on the table. I rummaged in the fridge for the cream, and when I straightened up, I realized that Robin and Gwyn were still standing, while the twins were already digging in. "Eat, guys. I'm coming." Robin stepped behind me and grabbed the jar of sugar cubes from next to the coffee maker. "Not without you." He put a hand in the small of my back, casting a sidelong look at Gwyn as he guided me to my spot at the table. Right between them. I chose to say nothing about the extremely obvious dick-measuring that was going on between them. I just sat down, scooted my chair in, and began pouring cream in the steaming cup of coffee in front of me. Gwyn and Robin both sat down and also scooted in, the legs of their chairs squeaking on the tile floor. They were sitting close enough that I felt their legs brushing my bare thighs on either side. Sisse, sitting primly on her overturned shot glass, held up her thimble. "Refill me please, Briallen?" Her eyes glittered like flecks of oil against her tiny face as I managed to pour a few droplets of cream into the thimble without overflowing it. She looked like she was giving a valiant effort towards holding back the world's biggest smirk. I passed the cream around as Robin heaped pancakes on my plate. It was utter chaos, hands and arms criss-crossing everywhere, and despite the tension I felt from the Gentry on either side of me, I felt...peaceful. At home. Surrounded by people I unconditionally adored. I smiled at Gwyn as I passed the syrup on, and next thing I knew, there was something very warm on my bare leg, just above my knee. A rough, familiar sensation from one night last month. From Robin's side of the table. He squeezed my leg gently, and my heart rate shot so high I could feel it pounding in my throat. I licked my lips, which suddenly felt very dry, and glanced at him. Robin just gave me a lazy smile and offered a bowl of strawberries. "Here, for you." When he took his hand away, he let his fingers trail over my leg. His fingertips caught the edge of my silk pajama shorts and skimmed it for an inch of skin that felt like a mile. Despite his assurances that I did not, in fact, die last night, I was pretty sure that was about to become a lie. My heart would explode if it pounded any harder. I picked a strawberry out of the bowl, and caught Sisse's sly wink at me as I bit into it. Gwyn was in conversation with Clove about a new shipment of dwarven fire whisky at one of the Acionna Harbor bars, but he shifted his leg, wrapping it around mine. The warmth of his skin soaked through me, and he smelled like my body wash. Okay. I was going to eat my pancakes, and not dissolve into a puddle in front of Sisse and the twins. My only goal was to make it through the rest of this group breakfast without imploding—I'd figure out the rest of the day later. I took a bite of the chocolate chip pancakes, almost groaning with happiness at the taste of warm, melty chocolate and the slightly-caramelized vanilla batter. I'd completely forgotten to eat last night, and my stomach roared back to life with a vengeance. "Oh my trees, boss. You can come over and cook any time." Robin looked at me, his sapphire eyes somehow as warm and heart-melting as the chocolate in my mouth. "I have to give you an incentive to stay with my side of the Garda." He sounded like he was joking, but he reached out and ran his thumb over the edge of my lip, catching an errant smear of chocolate. I stared at him wide-eyed, but he didn't pull away. If anything, he let his hand linger a whole ten seconds longer than he would have if we were by ourselves. The warmth of his skin seemed to sear against me like a brand. It was a heat I always craved, always needed, but always just out of reach. And it scared me to hope this much. "For these pancakes, I wouldn't just stay on your payroll, I'd marry you," I joked back, but my voice was weak. Robin licked the chocolate off his finger, eyes sparkling. My toes curled under the table, imagining the other places his tongue had been. Then Gwyn's arm wrapped around my shoulders. "We can feed you just as well in Annwyn." There was no malice in his voice, but the possessive edge was almost palpable. He gave Robin a look verging on a glare over my shoulder. In response, Robin smiled wolfishly. His hand was on my leg again, and the primal part of my brain was gleeful about it. I glanced at Clove and Tarragon for help, but they were shoveling pancakes in their face at an alarming rate, and clearly enjoying my discomfort, judging from their identical wicked grins. Sisse lightly fluttered down to the strawberry bowl, perching on the edge and using a tiny knife, no larger than the tip of a needle, to cut herself a chunk out of one of them. "Oh, I don't know, Briallen. What about Jack?" I swore both of the Gentry stiffened at the name of a potential rival. Never mind the fact that I didn't want Jack at all. Not even if he made me feel normal and happy at times when I should've felt monstrous. Not even if he possessed the beauty of a frozen angel. Not even if I felt a deep need to heal his loneliness and melt some of that ice. It was ludicrous to even consider it. I snorted, taking another gulp of coffee. The caffeine wasn't settling my overactive nerves at all. Maybe I'd hit total overload and find nirvana if I just chugged the whole pot right now. "Jack would rather turn me into an icicle and push me off a cliff. Trust me, he's not lining up to make me pancakes." Sisse was about to reply, no doubt to stir the shit even further, when the temperature in the kitchen plunged from comfortable to ice cold. The wind that swirled through the apartment was gentle, but it left a tall, pale figure in the middle of the dining room. "Did someone say my name?" Jack asked, sounding bored, but his pale eyes brightened as he took in the homey, chaotic tableau of our breakfast. "Oh, what's this?" His gaze drifted over Gwyn's arm around my shoulders, the possessive tilt to Robin's stance, and traveled down beneath the table to the leg twined around mine and the hand on my thigh. Robin sat up, but he didn't take his hand off me. If anything, his grip felt even more possessive. Jack let out a rough, cold laugh. "The lot of you never fail to amuse." He strode around the table and leaned over me, stealing a strawberry from the bowl. "However, time's up for playing happy family. Say goodbye, Briallen." His hand slipped down my arm and somehow found the one handhold of exposed flesh that Gwyn wasn't touching. Sisse darted at me. Just before I felt myself yanked out of Avilion, out of Gwyn's arms and Robin's grip, I felt a sharp pain in my scalp as she tangled herself in my hair beneath my ear. With a roar of wind and a flutter of snow, we were gone.

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

The Third Murder

Spade went into the Hotel Sutter and telephoned the Alexandria. Gutman was not in. No member of Gutman's party was in. Spade telephoned the Belvedere. Cairo was not in, had not been in that day. Spade went to his office. A swart greasy man in notable clothes was waiting in the outer room. Effie Perine, indicating the swart man, said: "This gentleman wishes to see you, Mr. Spade." Spade smiled and bowed and opened the inner door. "Come in." Before following the man in Spade asked Effie Perine: "Any news on that other matter?" "No, sir." The swart man was the proprietor of a moving-picture theater in Market Street. He suspected one of his cashiers and a doorman of colluding to defraud him. Spade hurried him through the story, promised to "take care of it," asked for and received fifty dollars, and got rid of him in less than half an hour. When the corridor door had closed behind the showman Effie Perine came into the inner office. Her sunburned face was worried and questioning. "You haven't found her yet?" she asked. He shook his head and went on stroking his bruised temple lightly in circles with his fingertips. "How is it?" she asked. "All right, but I've got plenty of headache." She went around behind him, put his hand down, and stroked his temple with her slender fingers. He leaned back until the back of his head over the chairtop rested against her breast. He said: "You're an angel." She bent her head forward over his and looked down into his face. "You've got to find her, Sam. It's more than a day and she—" He stirred and impatiently interrupted her: "I haven't got to do anything, but if you'll let me rest this damned head a minute or two I'll go out and find her." She murmured, "Poor head," and stroked it in silence awhile. Then she asked: "You know where she is? Have you any idea?" The telephone bell rang. Spade picked up the telephone and said: "Hello.... Yes, Sid, it came out all right, thanks.... No.... Sure. He got snotty, but so did I.... He's nursing a gambler's-war pipe dream.... Well, we didn't kiss when we parted. I declared my weight and walked out on him.... That's something for you to worry about.... Right. 'Bye." He put the telephone down and leaned back in his chair again. Effie Perine came from behind him and stood at his side. She demanded: "Do you think you know where she is, Sam?" "I know where she went," he replied in a grudging tone. "Where?" She was excited. "Down to the boat you saw burning." Her eyes opened until their brown was surrounded by white. "You went down there." It was not a question. "I did not," Spade said. "Sam," she cried angrily, "she may be—" "She went down there," he said in a surly voice. "She wasn't taken. She went down there instead of to your house when she learned the boat was in. Well, what the hell? Am I supposed to run around after my clients begging them to let me help them?" "But, Sam, when I told you the boat was on fire!" "That was at noon and I had a date with Polhaus and another with Bryan." She glared at him between tightened lids. "Sam Spade," she said, "you're the most contemptible man God ever made when you want to be. Because she did something without confiding in you you'd sit here and do nothing when you know she's in danger, when you know she might be—" Spade's face flushed. He said stubbornly: "She's pretty capable of taking care of herself and she knows where to come for help when she thinks she needs it, and when it suits her." "That's spite," the girl cried, "and that's all it is! You're sore because she did something on her own hook, without telling you. Why shouldn't she? You're not so damned honest, and you haven't been so much on the level with her, that she should trust you completely." Spade said: "That's enough of that." His tone brought a brief uneasy glint into her hot eyes, but she tossed her head and the glint vanished. Her mouth was drawn taut and small. She said: "If you don't go down there this very minute, Sam, I will and I'll take the police down there." Her voice trembled, broke, and was thin and wailing. "Oh, Sam, go!" He stood up cursing her. Then he said: "Christ! It'll be easier on my head than sitting here listening to you squawk." He looked at his watch. "You might as well lock up and go home." She said: "I won't. I'm going to wait right here till you come back." He said, "Do as you damned please," put his hat on, flinched, took it off, and went out carrying it in his hand. An hour and a half later, at twenty minutes past five, Spade returned. He was cheerful. He came in asking: "What makes you so hard to get along with, sweetheart?" "Me?" "Yes, you." He put a finger on the tip of Effie Perine's nose and flattened it. He put his hands under her elbows, lifted her straight up, and kissed her chin. He set her down on the floor again and asked: "Anything doing while I was gone?" "Luke—what's his name?—at the Belvedere called up to tell you Cairo has returned. That was about half an hour ago." Spade snapped his mouth shut, turned with a long step, and started for the door. "Did you find her?" the girl called. "Tell you about it when I'm back," he replied without pausing and hurried out. A taxicab brought Spade to the Belvedere within ten minutes of his departure from his office. He found Luke in the lobby. The hotel detective came grinning and shaking his head to meet Spade. "Fifteen minutes late," he said. "Your bird has fluttered." Spade cursed his luck. "Checked out—gone bag and baggage," Luke said. He took a battered memorandum-book from a vest pocket, licked his thumb, thumbed pages, and held the book out open to Spade. "There's the number of the taxi that hauled him. I got that much for you." "Thanks." Spade copied the number on the back of an envelope. "Any forwarding address?" "No. He just come in carrying a big suitcase and went upstairs and packed and come down with his stuff and paid his bill and got a taxi and went without anybody being able to hear what he told the driver." "How about his trunk?" Luke's lower lip sagged. "By God," he said, "I forgot that! Come on." They went up to Cairo's room. The trunk was there. It was closed, but not locked. They raised the lid. The trunk was empty. Luke said: "What do you know about that!" Spade did not say anything. Spade went back to his office. Effie Perine looked up at him, inquisitively. "Missed him," Spade grumbled and passed into his private room. She followed him in. He sat in his chair and began to roll a cigarette. She sat on the desk in front of him and put her toes on a corner of his chair seat. "What about Miss O'Shaughnessy?" she demanded. "I missed her too," he replied, "but she had been there." "On the La Paloma?" "The La is a lousy combination," he said. "Stop it. Be nice, Sam. Tell me." He set fire to his cigarette, pocketed his lighter, patted her shins, and said: "Yes, La Paloma. She got down there at a little after noon yesterday." He pulled his brows down. "That means she went straight there after leaving the cab at the Ferry Building. It's only a few piers away. The Captain wasn't aboard. His name's Jacobi and she asked for him by name. He was uptown on business. That would mean he didn't expect her, or not at that time anyway. She waited there till he came back at four o'clock. They spent the time from then till meal-time in his cabin and she ate with him." He inhaled and exhaled smoke, turned his head aside to spit a yellow tobacco flake off his lip, and went on: "After the meal Captain Jacobi had three more visitors. One of them was Gutman and one was Cairo and one was the kid who delivered Gutman's message to you yesterday. Those three came together while Brigid was there and the five of them did a lot of talking in the Captain's cabin. It's hard to get anything out of the crew, but they had a row and somewhere around eleven o'clock that night a gun went off there, in the Captain's cabin. The watchman beat it down there, but the Captain met him outside and told him everything was all right. There's a fresh bullethole in one corner of the cabin, up high enough to make it likely that the bullet didn't go through anybody to get there. As far as I could learn there was only the one shot. But as far as I could learn wasn't very far." He scowled and inhaled smoke again. "Well, they left around midnight—the Captain and his four visitors all together—and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from the watchman. I haven't been able to get hold of the Custom-House men who were on duty there then. That's all of it. The Captain hasn't been back since. He didn't keep a date he had this noon with some shipping agents, and they haven't found him to tell him about the fire." "And the fire?" she asked. Spade shrugged. "I don't know. It was discovered in the hold, aft—in the rear basement—late this morning. The chances are it got started some time yesterday. They got it out all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody liked to talk about it much while the Captain's away. It's the—" The corridor door opened. Spade shut his mouth. Effie Perine jumped down from the desk, but a man opened the connecting door before she could reach it. "Where's Spade?" the man asked. His voice brought Spade up erect and alert in his chair. It was a voice harsh and rasping with agony and with the strain of keeping two words from being smothered by the liquid bubbling that ran under and behind them. Effie Perine, frightened, stepped out of the man's way. He stood in the doorway with his soft hat crushed between his head and the top of the doorframe: he was nearly seven feet tall. A black overcoat cut long and straight and like a sheath, buttoned from throat to knees, exaggerated his leanness. His shoulders stuck out, high, thin, angular. His bony face—weather-coarsened, age-lined—was the color of wet sand and was wet with sweat on cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and bloodshot and mad above lower lids that hung down to show pink inner membrane. Held tight against the left side of his chest by a black-sleeved arm that ended in a yellowish claw was a brown-paper-wrapped parcel bound with thin rope—an ellipsoid somewhat larger than an American football. The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade. He said, "You know—" and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said. He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. Holding himself stiffly straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls. Spade, wooden-faced and nimble, sprang from his chair and caught the falling man. When Spade caught him the man's mouth opened and a little blood spurted out, and the brown-wrapped parcel dropped from the man's hands and rolled across the floor until a foot of the desk stopped it. Then the man's knees bent and he bent at the waist and his thin body became limber inside the sheath-like overcoat, sagging in Spade's arms so that Spade could not hold it up from the floor. Spade lowered the man carefully until he lay on the floor on his left side. The man's eyes— dark and bloodshot, but not now mad—were wide open and still. His mouth was open as when blood had spurted from it, but no more blood came from it, and all his long body was as still as the floor it lay on. Spade said: "Lock the door." While Effie Perine, her teeth chattering, fumbled with the corridor door's lock Spade knelt beside the thin man, turned him over on his back, and ran a hand down inside his overcoat. When he withdrew the hand presently it came out smeared with blood. The sight of his bloody hand brought not the least nor briefest of changes to Spade's face. Holding that hand up where it would touch nothing, he took his lighter out of his pocket with his other hand. He snapped on the flame and held the flame close to first one and then the other of the thin man's eyes. The eyes—lids, balls, irises, and pupils—remained frozen, immobile. Spade extinguished the flame and returned the lighter to his pocket. He moved on his knees around to the dead man's side and, using his one clean hand, unbuttoned and opened the tubular overcoat. The inside of the overcoat was wet with blood and the double-breasted blue jacket beneath it was sodden. The jacket's lapels, where they crossed over the man's chest, and both sides of his coat immediately below that point, were pierced by soggy ragged holes. Spade rose and went to the washbowl in the outer office. Effie Perine, wan and trembling and holding herself upright by means of a hand on the corridor door's knob and her back against its glass, whispered: "Is—is he—?" "Yes. Shot through the chest, maybe half a dozen times." Spade began to wash his hands. "Oughtn't we—?" she began, but he cut her short: "It's too late for a doctor now and I've got to think before we do anything." He finished washing his hands and began to rinse the bowl. "He couldn't have come far with those in him. If he—Why in hell couldn't he had stood up long enough to say something?" He frowned at the girl, rinsed his hands again, and picked up a towel. "Pull yourself together. For Christ's sake don't get sick on me now!" He threw the towel down and ran fingers through his hair. "We'll have a look at that bundle." He went into the inner office again, stepped over the dead man's legs, and picked up the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. When he felt its weight his eyes glowed. He put it on his desk, turning it over so that the knotted part of the rope was uppermost. The knot was hard and tight. He took out his pocketknife and cut the rope. The girl had left the door and, edging around the dead man with her face turned away, had come to Spade's side. As she stood there—hands on a corner of the desk—watching him pull the rope loose and push aside brown paper, excitement began to supplant nausea in her face. "Do you think it is?" she whispered. "We'll soon know," Spade said, his big fingers busy with the inner husk of coarse grey paper, three sheets thick, that the brown paper's removal had revealed. His face was hard and dull. His eyes were shining. When he had put the grey paper out of the way he had an egg-shaped mass of pale excelsior, wadded tight. His fingers tore the wad apart and then he had the foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal and shiny where its polish was not dulled by wood dust and fragments of excelsior. Spade laughed. He put a hand down on the bird. His widespread fingers had ownership in their curving. He put his other arm around Effie Perine and crushed her body against his. "We've got the damned thing, angel," he said. "Ouch!" she said, "you're hurting me." He took his arm away from her, picked the black bird up in both hands, and shook it to dislodge clinging excelsior. Then he stepped back holding it up in front of him and blew dust off it, regarding it triumphantly. Effie Perine made a horrified face and screamed, pointing at his feet. He looked down at his feet. His last backward step had brought his left heel into contact with the dead man's hand, pinching a quarter-inch of flesh at a side of the palm between heel and floor. Spade jerked his foot away from the hand. The telephone bell rang. He nodded at the girl. She turned to the desk and put the receiver to her ear. She said: "Hello.... Yes.... Who?... Oh, yes!" Her eyes became large. "Yes.... Yes.... Hold the line..." Her mouth suddenly stretched wide and fearful. She cried: "Hello! Hello! Hello!" She rattled the prong up and down and cried, "Hello!" twice. Then she sobbed and spun around to face Spade, who was close beside her by now. "It was Miss O'Shaughnessy," she said wildly. "She wants you. She's at the Alexandria—in danger. Her voice was—oh, it was awful, Sam!—and something happened to her before she could finish. Go help her, Sam!" Spade put the falcon down on the desk and scowled gloomily. "I've got to take care of this fellow first," he said, pointing his thumb at the thin corpse on the floor. She beat his chest with her fists, crying: "No, no—you've got to go to her. Don't you see, Sam? He had the thing that was hers and he came to you with it. Don't you see? He was helping her and they killed him and now she's—Oh, you've got to go!" "All right." Spade pushed her away and bent over his desk, putting the black bird back into its nest of excelsior, bending the paper around it, working rapidly, making a larger and clumsy package. "As soon as I've gone phone the police. Tell them how it happened, but don't drag any names in. You don't know. I got the phone-call and I told you I had to go out, but I didn't say where." He cursed the rope for being tangled, yanked it into straightness, and began to bind the package. "Forget this thing. Tell it as it happened, but forget he had a bundle." He chewed his lower lip. "Unless they pin you down. If they seem to know about it you'll have to admit it. But that's not likely. If they do then I took the bundle away with me, unopened." He finished tying the knot and straightened up with the parcel under his left arm. "Get it straight, now. Everything happened the way it did happen, but without this dingus unless they already know about it. Don't deny it—just don't mention it. And I got the phone-call—not you. And you don't know anything about anybody else having any connection with this fellow. You don't know anything about him and you can't talk about my business until you see me. Got it?" "Yes, Sam. Who—do you know who he is?" He grinned wolfishly. "Uh-uh,' he said, "but I'd guess he was Captain Jacobi, master of La Paloma. He picked up his hat and put it on. He looked thoughtfully at the dead man and then around the room. "Hurry, Sam," the girl begged. "Sure," he said absent-mindedly, "I'll hurry. Might not hurt to get those few scraps of excelsior off the floor before the police come. And maybe you ought to try to get hold of Sid. No." He rubbed his chin. "We'll leave him out of it awhile. It'll look better. I'd keep the door locked till they come." He took his hand from his chin and rubbed her cheek. "You're a damned good man, sister," he said and went out.

(WWW 1) Wake

Robert J. Sawyer

Chapter 19

It was now way past Caitlin's bedtime, but—hot damn!—she was seeing the Web! Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn't see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and— The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, "Long Distance, Unknown Caller." She hit the speakerphone button and said, "Hello." "Miss Caitlin," wheezed the familiar voice. "Dr. Kuroda, hi!" "I have an idea," he said. "Do you know about Jagster?" "Sure," said Caitlin. "What's that?" asked her mom. "It's an open-source search engine—a competitor for Google," said Kuroda. "And I think it may be of use to us." Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed "jagster" into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn't Jagster itself—no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi!— but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it. From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: Google is the de facto portal to the Web, and many people feel that a for-profit corporation shouldn't hold that role—especially one that is secretive about how it ranks search results. The first attempt to produce an open-source, accountable alternative was Wikia Search, devised by the same people who had put together Wikipedia. However, by far the most successful such project to date is Jagster. The problem is not with Google's thoroughness, but rather with how it chooses which listings to put first. Google's principal algorithm, at least initially, was called PageRank—a jokey name because not only did it rank pages but it had been developed by Larry Page, one of Google's two founders. PageRank looked to see how many other pages linked to a given page, and took that as the ultimate democratic choice, giving top positioning to those that were linked to the most. Since the vast majority of Google users look at only the ten listings provided on the first page of results, getting into the top ten is crucial for a business, and being number one is gold—and so people started trying to fool Google. Creating other sites that did little more than link back to your own site was one of several ways to fool PageRank. In response, Google developed new methods for assigning rankings to pages. And despite the company's motto— "Don't Be Evil"—people couldn't help but question just what determined who now got the top spots, especially when the difference between being number ten and number eleven might be millions of dollars in online sales. But Google refused to divulge its new methods, and that gave rise to projects to develop free, open-source, transparent alternatives to Google: "free" meaning that there would be no way to buy a top listing (on Google, you can be listed first by paying to be a "sponsored link"); "open source" meaning anyone could look at the actual code being used and modify it if they thought they had a fairer or more efficient approach; and "transparent" meaning the whole process could be monitored and understood by anyone. What makes Jagster different from other open-source search engines is just how transparent it is. All search engines use special software called Web spiders to scoot along, jumping from one site to another, mapping out connections. That's normally considered dreary under-the-hood stuff, but Jagster makes this raw database publicly available and constantly updates it in real time as its spiders discover newly added, deleted, or changed pages. In the tradition of silly Web acronyms ("Yahoo!" stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"), Jagster is short for "Judiciously Arranged Global Search-Term Evaluative Ranker"—and the battle between Google and Jagster has been dubbed the "Ranker rancor" by the press ... Caitlin and her parents were still on the phone with Dr. Kuroda in Tokyo. "I've got a conference call going here," Kuroda said. "Also on the line is a friend of mine at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. She's part of the Internet Cartography Project. They use data from Jagster to keep track moment by moment of the topology of the Web—its constantly changing shape and construction. Dr. Decter, Mrs. Decter, and Miss Caitlin, please say hello to Professor Anna Bloom." Caitlin felt a bit miffed on behalf of her mom—she was Dr. Decter, too, after all, even if she hadn't had a university appointment since Bill Clinton was president. But there was nothing in her mother's voice to indicate she felt slighted. "Hello, Anna." Caitlin said, "Hello," too; her father said nothing. "Hello, everyone," Anna said. "Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki's site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster." "What if it overloads her brain?" said Caitlin's mom, her tone conveying that she couldn't believe she was uttering such a sentence. "I rather doubt that's possible from what I've heard about Caitlin's brain," Anna said warmly. "But, still, you should have your cursor on the 'abort' button. If you don't like what's happening, you can cut the connection." "We shouldn't be messing around like this," her mom said. "Barbara, I do need to try things if I'm going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world," Kuroda said. "I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input." Her mother exhaled noisily but didn't say anything else. "Are you ready, Miss Caitlin?" "Um—you mean right now?" "Sure, why not?" said Kuroda. "Okay," Caitlin said nervously. "Good," said Anna. "Now, Masayuki is going to terminate the software download, so I guess your vision will shut off for a moment." Caitlin's heart fluttered. "Yes. Yes, it's gone." "All right," said Kuroda. "And now I'm switching in the Jagster datastream. Now, Miss Caitlin, you may—" He perhaps said more, but Caitlin lost track of whatever it was because— —because suddenly there was a silent explosion of light: dozens, hundreds, thousands of crisscrossing glowing lines. She found herself jumping to her feet. "Sweetheart!" her mom exclaimed. "Are you okay?" Caitlin felt her mother's hand on her arm, as if trying to keep her from flying up through the roof. "Miss Caitlin?" Kuroda's voice. "What's happening?" "Wow," she said, and then "wow" and "wow" again. "It's ... incredible. There's so much light, so much color. Lines are flickering in and out of existence everywhere, leading to ... well, to what must be nodes, right? Websites? The lines are perfectly straight, but they're at all angles, and some ..." "Yes?" said Kuroda. "Yes?" "I—it's ..." She balled her fist. "Damn it!" She normally didn't swear in front of her parents, but it was so frustrating! She was way better than most people at geometry. She should be able to make sense of the lines and shapes she was seeing. There had to be a ... a correspondence between them and things she'd felt, and— "They're like a bicycle wheel," she said suddenly, getting it. "The lines are radiating in all directions, like spokes. And the lines have thickness, like—I don't know, like pencils, I guess. But they seem to ... to ..." "Taper?" offered Anna. "Yes, exactly! They taper away as if I'm seeing them at an angle. At any moment, some have only one or two lines connecting them; others have so many I can't begin to count them." She paused, the enormity of it all sinking in at last. "I'm seeing the World Wide Web! I'm seeing the whole thing." She shook her head in wonder. "Sweet!" Kuroda's voice: "Amazing. Amazing." "It is amazing," Caitlin continued, and she could feel her cheeks starting to hurt from smiling so much, "and ... and ... my God, it's ..." She paused, for it was the first time she'd ever thought this about anything, but it was, it so totally was: "It's beautiful!"

Downfall and Rise

Nathan A. Thompson

Go Tunneling

During one of the football games my sophomore year, I had been injured in a freakishly bad collision. I was a tight end trying to catch a difficult pass. Somehow three other players slammed into me, twisting my torso one direction, my neck another direction, and my head a third direction (if it's hard to imagine, just picture yourself trying to look as far sideways as you can, while slowly rotating your neck around in a complete circle, while being bent into a pretzel at the same time). I was knocked out instantly. When I woke up, the doctors told me that I narrowly avoided a broken neck. Instead, I had a concussion, something that would go away as long as I got plenty of rest. I got plenty of rest. And it never went away. Instead, it got worse. My headaches turned into dizzy spells. My dizzy spells turned into balance problems, meaning most days I could only walk very carefully, with the aid of a cane or a hand on the wall. I started having memory problems for the simplest things. Like genuinely, honestly forgetting what my Mom had told me to do less than five minutes ago, or some trivia fact I had been quoting for years. Just imagine waking up one day and not recognizing a single Monty Python reference. If you have any friends that have heard of Monty Python at all, that will scare you. Needless to say, my grades begun to suffer. Not at first. I had thrown myself into my schoolwork to distract myself from Dad's death and actually gotten entered into a rare scholarship program available to students before their senior year. All I had to do was pass a test at the end of the year. After my disability, I had failed the test two years in a row. But because of my disability, my mother and therapist had both written to the scholarship program, detailing my situation, and they agreed to give me one last shot. That was this year. I failed that shot. There was no point in asking for a fourth chance. I had finished out secondary school trying to pass the test with nothing to show for it. To have failed so spectacularly at the end meant that everything I knew to be true was not. I was getting worse, not better. The jocks were right. My head was crippled after all. The only good thing was that it had answered the question I used to hear people whisper in church: no matter what my genes and my choices, I would never turn out to be a pervert like my father because I would never get the chance. Heck, I could donate my brain to science and let doctors study this mysterious, incurable disease to their hearts' content. Speaking of doctors... Black became blurry. Blurry became a hospital room. I must have fallen unconscious again. Davelon was right after all. I really did need to go to the hospital. My bad. Not that it mattered. Being conscious had brightened my vision, not my thoughts. I looked around anyway. I was in a typical hospital bed. Typical white hospital walls. Typical IV-thingie hooked up to my arm. <Pull it,> a dark, painful corner of my mind whispered immediately. <Rid your family of the burden you've become.> I looked at the cord. "You're awake!" a voice to my right said. I turned my head and saw the haggard form of my mother. <She was aging>, I finally realized. She had a young face for her age, not that she was even in her late forties yet, but for the first time I had noticed the lines that had begun to form. Dad's suicide and everything else had been hard on her. My face flushed with shame. Leaving her and my sister would not relieve them of a burden. It would only add more lines to my mother's face. More crying into my sister's pillow. "Mom," I said, turning my head from her. "I lost it. I'm sorry." "Hush dear," my mother said, leaning forward and grabbing my hand. "I lost it too. I should have believed you." I turned my head to look back at her. "What do you mean?" I asked. "I mean all of it." She gave a sad, but grateful, smile. "The bullying. The hazing. The gaming. The testing. Instead I pushed you and pushed you, and when you had done everything right I pushed you more, until you finally broke." Her lip trembled for a moment. "You suffered for it, and I'm so sorry." I swallowed. I didn't know what to say. "Thank you," I finally settled on, then tried to change the subject. "Uh... What happened after I passed out?" "I called the ambulance," Mother said simply. "But you probably figured that. Then I called the school and heard that you got into it with Mr. Jammers. I had trouble believing you were at fault with that, so I called Davelon—he's coming to see you later too—and found out that you were attacked, and that was why your helmet was dented in the back. Christ, Wes, I can't believe you didn't say anything about it. And you still tried to take the test." "I knew they wouldn't let me retake it," I said uncomfortably. I realized it hadn't mattered in the end, but I was really tired of defending that decision. "And normally I would have said you were being irrational. Davelon told me he said the same thing until he heard Mr. Jammers with his own ears." Mom's eyes narrowed. "So after what happened today, with you getting attacked in the middle of the hallway, with no one protecting you or at least disciplining the attackers, for lying to me about the whole thing and trying to cover it up—by pinning the blame on you, of all things—I'm going to call a lawyer, then go to the papers and tell them about what the school did. Those cretins could have killed you, never mind the scholarship. You better believe I'm suing the school for every penny they have and letting everyone know why I'm doing it." "But I would have failed the tests anyway," I offered, not sure why I was arguing. "The testers said I failed all three subjects." "The testers were wrong, and called me earlier explaining their mistake. Apparently they confused your test with someone else—I don't know who, but they only admitted to it after I started screaming about what had happened to you today." Mother gave another sad smile. "But I got an idea of what your results probably were from your teachers. You excelled on your English test—both portions, the teacher loved your essay and wants to post it online—you barely passed Math, and you failed Science, like you said. I'm sorry," she added, still sounding sad, but proud. "I know you're not satisfied, but it's the best you've ever done. I'm proud of you, honey. I really am." I turned my head away from her again. "Still lost the scholarship," I muttered. "And that's the school's fault," Mother snarled. "If they don't make another exception for you, I'm going to make sure we get every penny out of them for it, no matter how long it takes me. I promise you that, honey." I wasn't sure that would work out, but I'm glad Mom was optimistic. And I was glad I had her on my side. There was a knock on the door. "Mom?" my sister's voice called through the door. "Is he awake now?" "Yes, honey. He just woke up. Come on in." A slender and beautiful girl several years younger than me walked in. Her hair was a darker red than mine, cut very short, and she wore a black jacket and black skirt. She looked mad. "You better be okay, because you fell again and didn't tell anybody. Again," Rachel said, her eyes practically stabbing at me as she spoke. I sighed. "Now that you understand, Mom, can you answer her? So that I can catch a break?" "Wes was attacked at school, dear. And when the school found out, they wouldn't let him reschedule the test or get help." My sister stared at my mother with her mouth open for a moment, then closed it. "Mr. Jammers again?" she finally asked. I nodded. "Figures," she said, taking a small notebook out of her jacket and flipping it open to a page with a lot of writing on it. The top of the page had the title "Punch List." She took out a pencil, erased a name that had a line drawn through it, then rewrote the same name. "This is still how you write his name, right?" she asked. I nodded. "Yeah, sis, but you can't punch a teacher." "I respectfully disagree with your hypothesis, but will test it for you anyway," she said loftily. "No, really," I said, a little concerned that my sister had a list like that, and that I hadn't noticed before. "You can't just punch a teacher. Even one like Mr. Jammers. You'd get expelled." My sister gave me that pained, patient look, the one she started using back in 6th grade, then held out her hand and slowly began to count. "One, I usually don't physically punch a person on my list, and if I do decide to I'm not going to just punch them, so that entire first sentence is wrong. Two, it's Mr. Jammers. No matter how good his lawyer is, there are too many other lawyers in this town that would be willing to help me counter-sue him for free. You have no idea. Finally, expulsion? Really?" She snorted. "If Mom still has me enrolled in this school next year, I'm running away to go find a school on some other planet, where people are more normal and less douchey." "That's fine, dear," Mother said. "By the time I'm done suing the school, you'll have enough money to study wherever you want." "Really?" My sister's eyes widened. "That's great! Our school's super-rich! And you can probably sue the football program too!" My sister turned to another page and started scribbling something else. "Sis," I warned. "I can't remember for a fact whether a football player hit me or not." My sister snorted again. "Gonna need you to say that online," she said, still scribbling. "I'm pretty sure there's a website where I can bet money that it was the football team, and make a lot of easy cash. Then you can use it to buy me and Mom a new car. And yes it has to be you buying," my sister added, waving the pencil. "Studies still show that guys get better deals from car salesmen. You're the man in the house now. It's your job." I grinned at her. "Can I get out of the hospital first?" I asked playfully. "And how did you get here without a car? Did Mom drive you?" "Nope," she answered, still scribbling. "Himari and Andre did. Oh right." She suddenly looked up. She walked over to the door and stuck her head out. "Hey guys! He's up!" Apparently my room really was that close to the waiting area, because Himari and Andre came right around the corner. Himari and Andre were two international students from Japan and Mexico, respectively, that came over for seventh grade, and then wound up staying when their families moved over. People in our town welcomed them at first. But when it became known that they liked anime and black clothing, they had a hard time finding people to get to know, despite the fact that they both spoke English pretty well. But their cultures seemed fascinating to me, and I figured they deserved a chance as much as anyone else, so I tried to show them around at school. A lot of the other kids still stayed at arm's length around them, but they really hit it off with the drama team and my sister. Since they were closer to my sister's age than me, they wound up hanging out with her more, but they somehow started idolizing me like she did, even after my accident and the family's drama. I've never understood that, but I've always appreciated their friendship. "Hey, man," Andre said as they both walked in. "Heard you had a bad day." I flushed for a moment, then I realized he wasn't talking about me losing it at home; he was talking about everything else that happened. "Yeah, well," I tried to smile. "They come and go." "Well if you need anyone beaten up," Andre began with a light tone. "...Himari knows karate." "I do not," Himari said, punching him in the shoulder. "And you pronounced it wrong." She turned back to look at me, eyes worried. "Nii-san, are you really alright?" she asked me. "Why are you calling him nii-san?" Andre whispered. "You don't hear me calling him 'mano." She ignored him and waited for my answer. "Yeah, Himari, I'm fine," I said, still smiling. "Thanks for asking. And thanks for coming, both of you. And bringing my sister." "No sweat, man," Andre said. "I mean, de nada." Himari rolled her eyes at him. "We just wanted to make sure you were alright, Wesley. We were worried about you." "Seriously, man," Andre added, his eyes darkening. "You need anyone beaten up?" I shook my head, but my sister saved me from answering. "Too late," she said. "Mom's suing everybody responsible. This way you and I don't go to jail for beating anyone up, and we all get rich instead. So this time I can drive you guys in my car instead." "Well alright," Andre said. "But you have to buy Wes some new shoes first, okay? His went out of style like five years ago." "Oh I know," Rachel responded, rolling her eyes. "You wouldn't believe how hard he's holding onto those old things." "I can't help it that they're so comfortable," I replied, then continued. "Don't worry guys. I'm not dying. I'll get out of here, and I'll see if I can figure out school after all of this." I had no idea as to what that looked like. But I wasn't ready to tell anyone that yet. And they weren't ready to hear it either. "Well, we're not really worried, mano," Andre said. "You've always come out on top. We just wanted to be able to see you before the game this weekend. That's still on, right?" As I said, Himari and Andre mostly hung out with my sister, but I still came to their role-playing tabletop games. Aside from electronic media, it was about the only thing I could do with people that didn't hurt. That was another thing, something else I could share with people; I'd lose it if I quit on life. "Yeah, guys. As long as the doctor clears me, I'm in." Himari smiled. "That's good, nii-san. We need our paladin back." I smiled back at them all—Mom, Rachel, Andre and Himari. I decided then and there. I didn't know what there was left for me. But I wasn't giving up. Not today.

Chasm City

Alastair Reynolds

Chapter 15

The man who looked through my belongings had a whirring and clicking eyeglass strapped to his head. His hairless scalp was quilted with fine scars, like a broken vase that had been inexpertly mended. He examined everything I showed him with tweezers, holding the items up to his eyeglass in the manner of an aged lepidopterist. Next to him, smoking a handmade cigarette, was a youth wearing the same kind of helmet I'd taken from Vadim. "I can use some of this shit," the man with the eyeglass said. "Probably. You say it's all real, huh? All factual?" "The military episodes were trawled from soldiers' memories after the combat situations in question, as part of the normal intelligence-gathering process." "Yeah? And how'd they fall into your hands?" Without waiting for an answer, he reached under the table, pulled out a little tin sealed with an elastic band and counted out a few dozen bills of the local currency. As I had noticed before, the bills seemed to have been printed in strange denominations—thirteens, fours, twenty-sevens, threes. "It's none of your damned business where I got them from," I said. "No, but that doesn't stop me asking." He pursed his lips. "Anything else, now that you're wasting my time?" I allowed him to examine the experientials I'd taken from Quirrenbach, watching as his lip curled first into contempt and then disgust. "Well?" "Now you're insulting me, and I don't like it." "If the items are worthless," I said, "just tell me and I'll leave." "The items aren't worthless," he said, after examining them again. "Fact is, they're exactly the kind of the thing I might have bought, a month or two ago. Grand Teton's popular. People can't get enough of those slime-tower formations." "So what's the problem?" "This shit has already hit the market, that's what. These experientials are already out there, depreciating. These must be—what? Third- or fourth-generation bootlegs? Real cheap-ass crap." He still tore off a few more bills, but nowhere near as much as he'd paid for my own experientials. "Anything else up your sleeve?" I shrugged. "Depends what you're after, doesn't it." "Use your imagination." He passed one of the military experientials to his sidekick. The youth's chin was fuzzed by the first tentative wisps of a beard. He ejected the experiential he was running at the time and slipped mine in instead, without once lifting the goggles from his eyes. "Anything black. Matte-black. You know what I mean, don't you?" "I've a reasonably good idea." "Then either cough up or get out of the premises." Next to him, the youth started convulsing in his seat. "Hey, what is that shit?" "Does that helmet have enough spatial resolution to stimulate the pleasure and pain centres?" I said. "What if it does?" He leaned over and slapped the convulsing youth hard on the head, knocking the playback helmet flying. Drooling, still convulsing, the youth subsided into his seat, his eyes glazed over. "Then he probably shouldn't have accessed it at random," I said. "My guess is he just hit an NC interrogation session. Have you ever had your fingers removed?" The eyeglass man chuckled. "Nasty. Very nasty. But there's a market for that kind of shit—just like there is for the black stuff." Now was as good a time as any to see what the quality of Vadim's merchandise was like. I handed over one of the black experientials, one of those embossed with a tiny silver maggot motif. "Is this what you mean?" He looked sceptical at first, until he had examined the experiential more closely. To the trained eye, there were presumably all manner of subliminal indicators to distinguish the genuine article from sub-standard fakes. "It's a good quality bootleg if it's a bootleg, which means it's worth something whatever's on it. Hey, shit-for-brains. Try this." He knelt down, picked up the battered playback helmet and jammed it onto the youth's head, then prepared to insert the experiential. The youth was just beginning to perk up when he saw the experiential, at which point he pawed the air, trying to stop the man pressing it into the helmet. "Get that maggot shit away from me..." "Hey," the man said. "I was just going to give you a flash, dickface." He tucked the experiential away in his coat. "Why don't you try it yourself?" I said. "Same damn reason he doesn't want that shit anywhere near his skull. It's not nice." "Nor's an NC interrogation session." "That's a trip to the cake shop by comparison. That's just pain." He patted his breast pocket delicately. "What's on this could be about nine million times less pleasant." "You mean it's not always the same?" "Of course not, or there wouldn't be an element of risk. And the way these ones work, it's never exactly the same trip twice. Sometimes it's just maggots, sometimes you are the maggots... sometimes it's much, much worse..." Suddenly he looked cheerful. "But, hey, there's a market for it, so who am I to argue?" "Why would people want to experience something like that?" I asked. He grinned at the youth. "Hey, what is this, fucking philosophy hour? How am I supposed to know? This is human nature we're talking about here; it's already deeply fucking perverted." "Tell me about it," I said. At the centre of the concourse, rising above the bazaar like a minaret, was an ornately encrusted tower surmounted by a four-faced clock set to Chasm City time. The clock had recently struck the seventeenth hour of the twenty-six in Yellowstone's day, animated spacesuited figurines emerging beneath the dial to enact what might have been a complex quasi-religious ritual. I checked the time on Vadim's watch—my own watch, I forced myself to think, since I had now liberated it twice—and found that the two were in passable agreement. If Dominika's estimate had been accurate, she would still be busy with Quirrenbach. The hermetics had passed through now, along with most of the obviously rich, but there were still many people who wore the slightly stunned look of the recently impoverished. Perhaps they had been only moderately wealthy seven years ago; not sufficiently well-connected to barrier themselves against the plague. I doubted that there had been anyone truly poor in Chasm City back then, but there were always degrees of affluence. For all the heat, the people wore heavy, dark clothes, often ballasted with jewellery. The women were often gloved and hatted, perspiring under wide-brimmed fedoras, veils or chadors. The men wore heavy greatcoats with upturned collars, faces shadowed under Panama hats or shapeless berets. Many had little glass boxes around their necks, containing what looked like religious relics, but which were actually implants, extracted from their hosts and now carried as symbols of former wealth. Though there was a spectrum of apparent ages, I saw no one who looked genuinely old. Perhaps the old were too infirm to risk a trip to the bazaar, but I also recalled what Orcagna had said about the state of longevity treatments on other worlds. It was entirely possible that some of the people I saw here were two or three centuries old; burdened with memories which reached back to Marco Ferris and the Amerikano era. They must have lived through great strange nesses... but I doubted that any of them had witnessed anything stranger than the recent transfiguration of their city, or the collapse of a society whose longevity and opulence must have seemed unassailable. No wonder so many of the people I saw looked so sad, as if knowing that—no matter how things might improve from day to day—the old times would never come again. Seeing that all-pervasive melancholia, it was impossible not to feel some empathy. I started navigating my way back to Dominika's tent, then wondered why I was bothering. There were questions I wanted to ask Dominika, but they could equally well be directed to one of her rivals. I might need to talk to them all eventually. The only thing that connected me to Dominika was Quirrenbach... and even if I had begun to tolerate his presence, I'd known all along that I would have to ditch him eventually. I could walk away now, leave the terminus completely, and the chances were that we'd never meet again. I pushed through until I reached the far side of the bazaar. Where the furthest wall should have been was only an opening through which the lower levels of the city could be seen, behind a perpetual screen of dirty rain sluicing from the side of the terminus. A haphazard line of rickshaws waited: upright boxes balanced between two wide wheels. Some of the rickshaws were powered, coupled behind steam-engines or chugging methane-powered motors. Their drivers lounged indolently, awaiting fares. Others were propelled by pedal-power, and several looked to have been converted from old palanquins. Behind the row of rickshaws there were other, sleeker vehicles: a pair of flying machines much like the volantors I knew from Sky's Edge, crouched down on skids, and a trio of craft which looked like helicopters with their rotors folded for stowage. A squad of workers eased a palanquin into one of them, tipping it at an undignified angle to get it through the entrance door. I wondered if I was witnessing a kidnapping or a taxi pick-up. Although I might have been able to afford one of the volantors, the rickshaws looked the most immediately promising. At the very least I could get a flavour of this part of the city, even if I had no specific destination in mind. I started walking, cutting through the crowds, my gaze fixed resolutely ahead. Then, when not quite halfway there, I stopped, turned around and returned to Dominika's. "Is Mister Quirrenbach finished yet?" I asked Tom. Tom had been shimmying to the sitar music, apparently surprised to find someone entering Dominika's tent without being coerced. "Mister, he no ready—ten minutes. You got money?" I had no idea how much Quirrenbach's excisions were going to cost him, but I figured the money he had recovered on the Grand Teton experientials might just cover it. I separated the bills from my own, laying them down on the table. "No enough, mister. Madame Dominika, she want one more." Grudgingly I unpeeled one of my own lower-denomination bills and added it to Quirrenbach's pile. "That'd better be good," I said. "Mister Quirrenbach's a friend of mine, so if I find out you're going to ask him for more money when he comes out, I'll be back." "Is good, mister. Is good." I watched as the kid scurried through the partition into the room beyond, briefly glimpsing the hovering form of Dominika and the long couch on which she did her business. Quirrenbach was prone on it, stripped to the waist, with his head enfolded in a loom of delicate-looking probes. His hair had been shaved completely. Dominika was making odd gestures with her fingers, like a puppeteer working invisibly fine strings. In sympathy, the little probes were dancing around Quirrenbach's cranium. There was no blood, nor even any obvious puncture marks on his skin. Maybe Dominika was better than she looked. "Okay," I said when Tom re-emerged. "I have a favour to ask of you, and it's worth one of these." I showed him the smallest denomination I had. "And don't say I'm insulting you, because you don't know what it is I'm about to ask." "Say it, big guy." I gestured towards the rickshaws. "Do those things cover the whole city?" "Most of Mulch." "Mulch is the district we're in?" No answer was forthcoming, so I just left the tent with him following me. "I need to get from here—wherever here is—to a specific district of the city. I don't know how far it is, but I don't want to be cheated. I'm sure you can arrange that for me, can't you? Especially as I know where you live." "Get good price, you no worry." Then a thought must have trickled through his skull. "No wait for friend?" "No—I'm afraid I have business elsewhere, as does Mister Quirrenbach. We won't be meeting again for a while." I sincerely hoped it was the truth. Some kind of hairy primate provided the motive power for most of the rickshaws, a human gene splice resetting the necessary homeoboxes so that his legs grew longer and straighter than the simian norm. In unintelligibly rapid Canasian, Tom negotiated with another kid. They could almost have been interchangeable, except that the new kid had shorter hair and might have been a year older. Tom introduced him to me as Juan; something in their relationship suggested they were old business partners. Juan shook my hand and escorted me to the nearest vehicle. Edgily now, I glanced back, hoping Quirrenbach was still out cold. I didn't want to have to justify myself to him if he came round soon enough to have Tom tell him I was about to get a ride out of the terminus. There were some pills that could not be sugared, and being dumped by someone you imagined was your newfound travelling companion was one of them. Still, perhaps he could work the agony of rejection into one of his forthcoming Meisterwerks. "Where to, mister?" It was Juan speaking now, with the same accent as Tom. It was some kind of post-plague argot, I guessed; a pidgin of Russish, Canasian, Norte and a dozen other languages known here during the Belle Epoque. "Take me to the Canopy," I said. "You know where that is, don't you?" "Sure," he said. "I know where Canopy is, just like I know where Mulch is. You think I'm idiot, like Tom?" "You can take me there, then." "No, mister. I no can take you there." I began to unpeel another bill, before realising that our communicational difficulties stemmed from something more basic than insufficient funds, and that the problem was almost certainly on my side. "Is the Canopy a district of the city?" This was met by a long-suffering nod. "You new here, huh?" "Yes, I'm new. So why don't you do me a favour and explain just why taking me to the Canopy is beyond your means?" The bill I had half unpeeled vanished from my grip, and then Juan offered me the rear seat of the rickshaw as if it were a throne finished in plush velvet. "I show you, man. But I no take you there, you understand? For that you need more than rickshaw." He hopped in next to me, then leant forward and whispered something in the driver's ear. The primate began to pedal, grunting in what was probably profound indignation at the outcome to which his genetic heritage had been shaped. The bio-engineering of animals, I later learned, had been one of the few boom industries since the plague, exploiting a niche that had opened up once machines of any great sophistication began to fail. Like Quirrenbach had said not long ago, nothing that happened was ever completely bad for everyone. So it was with the plague. The missing wall provided an entrance and exit point for the volantors (and, I presumed, the other flying craft), but rickshaws entered and left the parking area by means of a sloping, concrete-lined tunnel. The dank walls and ceiling dripped thick mucosal fluids. It was at least cooler, and the noise of the terminus quickly faded, replaced only by the soft creaking of the cogs and chains which transmitted the ape's cycling motion to the wheels. "You new here," Juan said. "Not from Ferrisville, or even Rust Belt. Not even from rest of system." Was I so obtrusively ignorant that even a kid could see it? "I guess you don't get many tourists these days." "Not since bad time, no." "What was it like to live through?" "I dunno mister; I just two." Of course. It was seven years ago. From a child's perspective, that really was most of a lifetime ago. Juan, and Tom, and the other street children would barely be able to remember what life was like in Chasm City prior to the plague. Those few years of limitless wealth and possibility would be blurred with the soft-focus simplicity of infancy. All they knew, all they truly remembered, was the city as it now was: vast and dark and again filled with possibility—except now it was the possibility that lay in danger and crime and lawlessness; a city for thieves and beggars and those who could live by their wits rather than their credit ratings. It was just a shock to find myself in one. We passed other rickshaws returning to the concourse, slick sides glossy with rain. Only a few of them carried passengers, hunched sullenly down in raincoats, looking as if they would rather have been anywhere else in the universe than Chasm City. I could relate to that. I was tired, I was hot, sweat pooling under my clothes, and my skin itched and crawled for want of a wash. I was acutely conscious of my own body odour. What the hell was I doing here? I had a chased a man across more than fifteen light-years, into a city which had become a sick perversion of itself. The man I was chasing was not even truly bad—even I could see that. I hated Reivich for what he had done, but he had acted much as I would have done in the same circumstances. He was an aristocrat, not a man of arms, but in another life—if the history of our planet had followed another course—he and I might even have been friends. Certainly I had respect for him now, even if it was a respect born out of the way he had acted completely beyond my expectations when he destroyed the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso. Such casual brutality was to be admired. Any man that I misjudged that badly had my respect. And yet, for all that, I knew I'd have no qualms about killing him. "I think," Juan said, "you need history lesson, mister." What I had managed to learn aboard the Strelnikov had not been very much, but it was all the history I felt that I had an appetite for right now. "If you're thinking I don't know about the plague..." The tunnel was growing lighter ahead. Not much, but enough to indicate that we were about to enter the city proper. The light which suffused it had the same caramel-brown texture I'd seen from the behemoth: the colour of already murky light filtered through yet more murk. "Plague hit, make building go wacko," said Juan. "That much they told me." "They no tell you enough, mister." His syntax was rudimentary, but I suspected it was an improvement on anything the rickshaw driver was capable of. "Them building change, real fast." He made expansive hand gestures. "Many folk get die, get squashed or end up in wall." "That doesn't sound too nice." "I show you people in wall, mister. You no make joke no more. You shit own pants." We swerved to avoid another rickshaw, scraping against us. "But listen—them building, they change fastest up at top, right?" "I don't follow." "Them building like tree. Got big lot of root, stick in ground, right?" "Constructional feedlines, is that it? Leeching raw materials from the bedrock for repair and regrowth?" "Yeah. What I say. Like big tree. But like big tree in other way, too. Always grow up top. Unnerstan'?" More hand gestures, as if he were shaping the outline of a mushroom cloud. Perhaps I did understand. "You're saying the growth systems were concentrated in the upper parts of the structures?" "Yeah." I nodded. "Of course. Those structures were designed to dismantle themselves as well as grow higher. Either way, you'd always want to add or remove material from the top. So the nerve centre of the self-replicating machinery would always rise with the structure. The lower levels would need fewer systems; just the bare minimum to keep them ticking over and for repairing damage and wear, and for periodic redesigns." It was hard to tell if Juan's smile was one of congratulation—that I had worked this out for myself—or sympathy that it had taken me as long as it had. "Plague get to top first, carried by root. Start making top of building go wacko first. Lower down, stay same as before. By time plague got there, people cut root, starve building. No change any more." "But by then the upper parts had already changed beyond recognition." I shook my head. "It must have been a terrible time." "No shit, mister." We plunged into daylight, and I finally understood what Juan meant.

(Sprite Brigade 1) Candy Canes and Buckets of Blood

Heide Goody

Chapter 98

Esther was having trouble processing what she was seeing. Dave had just scurried into the rear section of the sleigh. Further ahead, though mostly out of sight, she had seen her son taken at knife-point onto the front of the sleigh and (although it had taken her long enough to realise it) the bearded elf with him was little Guin. Her family, through accident rather than design, were now all aboard the sleigh. All of them, all in one place and with the means of escape. Which was brilliant, except for the fact Esther had just planted a bomb on the sleigh. What was she to do now? Could she get her family off, or could she remove the bomb before it departed? Both options were fraught with risk. Esther couldn't face the idea of choosing the wrong one. She sighed: the only thing to do was to get back on the sleigh and get to the bomb as quickly as she could. If she disassembled it, at least she could buy some more time. She climbed under the rear of the vehicle, picking her way carefully along the length of the sleigh.

Bloody Rose

Nicholas Eames

The Cornerstone

There were four people you could always find at the Cornerstone. The first was Tera, who owned the place. She'd been a mercenary herself before losing her arm. "I didn't bloody lose it!" she'd say, whenever someone asked how it happened. "A bugbear tore it off and cooked it on a spit while I watched! I know exactly where it is—it's inside his damned dead body!" She was a big, broad woman, who used her remaining hand to rule her tavern with an iron fist. When she wasn't cussing out the kitchen or dressing down the serving staff, she spent her nights discouraging fights (often by threatening to start one) and swapping stories with some of the older mercs. Her husband, Edwick, was always there as well. He'd been the bard for a band called Vanguard, but was now retired. He took the stage each night to recount the exploits of his former crew, and seemed to know every song and story ever told. Ed was the opposite of his wife: slight of frame, cheerful as a child on a pony's back. He'd been close friends with Tam's mother, and despite Tuck Hashford's rule concerning his daughter playing an instrument or consorting with musicians, the old bard often gave Tam lute lessons after work. Next was Tiamax, who'd been a member of Vanguard as well. He was an arachnian, which meant he had eight eyes (two of which were missing, covered by crisscrossing patches) and six hands with which to shake, stir, and serve drinks. Consequently, he made for an excellent bartender. According to Edwick, he'd been one hell of a fighter, too. The last permanent fixture in the Cornerstone was her uncle Bran. In his youth, Branigan had been an illustrious mercenary, a prodigious drinker, and a notorious scoundrel. But now, almost ten years after his sister's untimely death had brought about the dissolution of his old band, he was ... Well, he was still a thief, still a drunk, and an even more notorious scoundrel, though he'd since added compulsive gambling to his list of vices. He and Tam's father had spoken rarely over the past decade. One had lost a sister in Lily Hashford, the other a wife, and grief had led them each down very different paths. "Tam!" her uncle shouted at her from the second-floor balcony directly above the bar. "Be a darling and fetch me a dram, will you?" Tam set the stack of empty bowls she'd collected on the stained wooden bar. The tavern was busier than usual tonight. Mercenaries, and those come to rub shoulders with them, crowded the commons behind her. Three hearths were roaring, two fights were in progress, and a shirtless bard was beating a drum like it owed him money. "Uncle Bran wants another whiskey," she said to Tiamax. "Does he?" The arachnian snatched up the bowls and began rinsing them with four hands, while his remaining two cracked open a wooden shaker and poured something fragrant and rose-coloured into a long-stemmed glass. "What is this?" asked the woman he'd made it for. "Pink." "Pink?" She sniffed it. "It smells like cat pee." "Then order a fucking beer next time," said Tiamax. The mandibles sprouting from his white-bristled chin twitched in irritation. One of them had snapped in half, so the sound they made was a blunted click instead of the melodious scratching others of his kind produced. The woman sniffed and sauntered off, while the arachnian used a rag to dry three bowls at once. "And how will your uncle Bran be paying for that whiskey, I wonder?" "Tell him to put it on my tab!" came Bran's voice from the balcony above. She offered Tiamax a tight smile. "He says to put it on his tab." "Ah, yes! The inexhaustible tab of Branigan Fay!" Tiamax threw up all six of his arms in exasperation. "Alas, I'm afraid that line of credit is completely and utterly exhausted." "Says who?" demanded the disembodied voice of her uncle. "Says who?" Tam repeated. "Says Tera." "Tell that bastard hatcher I'll handle Tera!" yelled Bran. "Besides, I'm about to sweep the board up here!" Tam sighed. "Uncle Bran says—" "Bastard hatcher?" The bartender's mandibles clacked again, and Tam caught a malicious glint in the manifold facets of his eyes. "One whiskey!" he exclaimed. "Coming right up!" He chose a cup off the counter behind him and reached up with one segmented arm to retrieve a bottle from the very top shelf. It was coated in mouldering grime and thick with cobwebs. When Tiamax pulled the stopper free it fairly disintegrated in his hand. "What is that?" Tam asked. "Oh, it's whiskey. Or near enough, anyway. We found six cases of this in the cellar of Turnstone Keep while the Ferals had us trapped inside." Like every ex-mercenary Tam knew (except, of course, her dad), Tiamax rarely missed an opportunity to recount a story from his adventuring days. "We tried drinking it," the arachnian was saying, "but not even Matty could keep it down, so we turned them into bombs instead." The stuff trickled from the bottle's mouth like honey, except it looked and smelled like raw sewage. "Here. Tell your uncle it's on the house, courtesy of that bastard hatcher." Tam eyed the cup skeptically. "You promise he won't die?" "He almost certainly will not die." The bartender placed a spindly hand over his chest. "I swear on my cephalothorax." "Your seffawha—" Tera came bursting through the kitchen door wielding a sauce-stained wooden spoon as though it were a bloody cudgel. "You!" She levelled her makeshift weapon at a pair of burly mercs wrestling on the rushes in front of a fireplace. "Can't you read the bloody sign?" Lacking another arm with which to point, Tera used the spoon to draw their attention to an etched wooded board above the bar, and even deigned to read it to them. "No fighting before midnight! This is a civilized establishment, not a godsdamned brawling pit." She started toward them, patrons scrambling from her path like she was a boulder rolling downhill. "Thanks, Max." Tam seized the cup and fell in behind the proprietress, using the swathe she cleared to cross half the commons before plunging back into the mob. Tera, meanwhile, had kicked one fighter into a curling ball and was thrashing the other's ass with the wooden spoon. Tam slipped, slithered, and sidestepped her way toward the balcony stair, pilfering gossip like an urchin picking pockets in a market square. A trio of merchants were discussing the early frost that had wiped out most of Kaskar's harvest. They'd got rich importing provisions from Fivecourt. One of them made a jest about paying tribute to the Winter Queen, which drew a hearty laugh from the northerner on his right, while the Narmeeri on his left gasped and traced the Summer Lord's circle over his breast. Many were discussing who would fight in the Ravine tomorrow, and, perhaps more importantly, what they'd be squaring off against. Fable, she heard, had opted to let the local wranglers decide, and rumour was they had something special in store. Most of the conversations swirled around the host of monsters assembling north of Cragmoor. The Brumal Horde, they dubbed it, and everyone—from fighters to farmers—had an opinion as to what its intentions were. "Revenge!" said a merc with a mouthful of something black and gummy. "Obviously! They're still sore about getting their asses kicked at Castia six years ago! They'll try again next summer, mark my words!" "They won't attack Castia," insisted a woman with a white spider tattoo covering most of her face. "It's too far away, and too well defended. If you ask me it's Ardburg needs to worry. The marchlords better keep their men sharp and their axes sharper!" "This Brontide fellow ..." mused Lufane, a skyship captain who made a living taking nobles on sightseeing tours above the Rimeshield Mountains. "Word is he's got a mighty grudge against us." "Us?" asked spider-face. "Everyone. Humans in general." The captain drained the last of his wine and handed his bowl off to Tam as she went by. "According to Brontide, we're the monsters. He led a raid over the mountains a few years back and smashed to rubble every arena he could find." The first merc flashed a black-toothed sneer at that. "A giant calling us monsters? Well, it don't much matter what he thinks, does it? The day after tomorrow every band in the north'll be bound for Cragmoor, lusting for glory and looking to make a name for themselves. The Brumal Horde'll be nothing but bones in the muck come spring," he was saying as Tam moved on, "but the bards'll be crowing about it for the rest of their lives." She skirted the stage. The drummer had finished up, and now Edwick sat perched on a stool with his lute in his lap. He spared her a wink before starting into The Siege of Hollow Hill, which drew a chorus of cheers from the commons crowd. They liked songs about battles, especially ones where the heroes were hopelessly outnumbered by their enemies. Tam loved the old man's voice. It was weathered and warbly, comfortable as a pair of soft leather boots. Besides teaching her to play the lute, Edwick had been giving Tam singing lessons as well, and his assessment of her vocal prowess had ranged from "Careful, you'll break the glassware," to "At least they won't drag you offstage," before finally she'd garnered an approving smile and the murmured words, "Not bad. Not bad at all." That had been a good night. Tam had returned home wishing she could share her joy with her dad, but Tuck Hashford would not have approved. He didn't want his daughter singing, or playing the lute, or listening to the lionised tales of retired bards. If not for the wage she brought home, and the fact that he'd had trouble holding down a job since his wife's death, Tam doubted she'd be allowed anywhere near the Cornerstone at all. Bran glanced over as she approached. "Tam!" He thumped the table with an open palm, scattering coins and toppling the carved wooden figurines on the Tetrea board before him. His opponent—a hooded man with his back to Tam—sighed, and her uncle made a poor attempt at feigning innocence. "Oh, dear, I've accidentally upset the pieces. Let's call it a draw, Cloud, shall we?" "Is a draw where one person is about to win and the other cheats to avoid losing?" Bran shrugged. "Either one of us might have prevailed." "I was definitely about to prevail," said his opponent. "Brune? Back me up here?" Brune? Tam stopped where she stood, gaping like a baby bird beneath a dangling worm. Sure enough, the man sitting to her uncle's left was Brune. As in the Brune. As in Fable's fucking shaman, Brune. Legend or no, the vargyr looked like most other northmen: He was big and broad-shouldered, with shaggy brown hair that did its damndest to hide the fact that Brune wasn't much to look at. His brows were wildly unkempt, his nose was crooked, and there was a finger-wide gap between his two front teeth. "I wasn't paying attention," the shaman admitted. "Sorry." Tam's mind was still reeling, struggling to make sense of what her eyes were telling it. If that's Brune, she reasoned, then the man in the cloak ... the one Bran called Cloud ... The figure turned, drawing back his hood to reveal long ears pressed flat against green-gold hair. Tam's mind barely registered the ears, however, or the druin's pointed, predator smile. She was pinned by his gaze: half-moons hooked against a colour like candlelight glancing through the facets of an emerald. "Hello, Tam." He knows my name! How does he know my name? Had her uncle said it earlier? Probably. Definitely. Yes. Tam was shaking; ripples shuddered across the surface of the Turnstone whiskey in her trembling hand. "Branigan here has been telling us all about you," said the druin. "He says you can sing, and that you're something of a prodigy with the lute." "He drinks," said Tam. The shaman laughed, splurting a mouthful of beer over the table and the Tetrea board. "He drinks." Brune chuckled. "Classic." Freecloud produced a white moonstone coin and examined one side of it. "Brune and I are mercenaries. We're members of a band called Fable. You've heard of us, I assume?" "I ... uh ..." "She has," Bran came to her rescue. "Of course she has. Isn't that right, Tam?" "Right," Tam managed. She felt as though she'd wandered out onto a frozen lake and suddenly the ice was groaning beneath her. "Well," said Freecloud, "it so happens we're in the market for a bard. And according to Branigan you're just what we're looking for. Assuming, of course, you're willing to get a little mud on your boots." "Mud on my boots?" Tam asked, watching cracks spiderweb across the ice in her mind's eye. Uncle Bran, what have you done? "He means travel," Bran told her. There was something thick in his voice, a sheen to his eyes that had nothing to do with being shitfaced drunk. At least she didn't think it did. "A real adventure, Tam." "Ah." Freecloud's chair scraped as he stood. The coin in his hand disappeared as he gestured behind her. "Here's the boss herself. Tam," he said, as she turned to find a legend in the flesh just an arm's reach away, "this is Rose." So that was it for Tam's knees. As they buckled beneath her, Bran leapt from his chair. He reached her in time to pluck the cup from her hands before she collapsed. "That was close," she heard him say, as the floorboards rushed up to meet her. "She's too young," someone said. A woman's voice. Harsh. "What is she, sixteen?" "Seventeen." That was her uncle. "I think. The edge of seventeen, anyway." "Not the sharp edge," grumbled the woman. Rose. It had to be. Tam blinked, got an eyeful of glaring torchlight, and decided to lie still a moment longer. "And how old were you when you picked up a sword?" asked Freecloud. She could hear the wryness in the druin's smile. "Or when you killed that cyclops?" A sigh. "Well, what about this?" Armour clinking. "She fainted at the sight of me. What will she do when blood gets spilled?" "She'll be fine," said her uncle. "She's Tuck and Lily's girl, remember." "Tuck Hashford?" Brune sounded impressed. "They say he was fearless. And we've all got a bit of our fathers in us. The gods know I do." "Our mothers, too," said a woman Tam didn't recognize. "Does she even want to go? Have you asked her?" You do, said a voice in Tam's head. "I do," she croaked. She sat up, instantly regretting it. The noise of the Cornerstone commons screeched in her skull like a boat full of cats. The four members of Fable stood around her. Bran was kneeling by her side. "I want to go," she insisted. "Where ... uh ... are we going?" "Someplace cold," said the woman who wasn't Rose. It was the Inkwitch, Cura, who regarded Tam as if she'd found the girl squished on the bottom of her boot. Where Rose was sturdy with lean muscle, Cura was waif-thin and wiry. She wore a long, low-slung tunic cut high on the hip, and black leather boots boasting more straps than a madman's jacket. Her fine black hair was long enough to tie back, but shaved to stubble on either side. There were bone rings in her ears, another through her left eyebrow, and a stud in her nose. Her skin was porcelain pale and crowded with tattoos. Tam's eye was drawn to a sea creature inked on Cura's thigh, its serpentine tentacles curling out from beneath the hem of her tunic. The Inkwitch caught her staring and gave the cloth an inviting tug. "You ever see one up close?" Her impish tone implied that she wasn't referring to the creature tattooed on her leg. Tam looked away, hoping her sudden flush was attributed to her fall. "You're going to fight the Brumal Horde?" she asked. "We're not," said Rose. "We're finishing our tour first, and after that we have a contract in Diremarch." "Our final contract," said Freecloud. He shared a meaningful look with his bandmates. "One last gig before we call it quits." Branigan perked up at that, but before either he or Tam could ask anything further, Rose cut in. "I should warn you," she said. "What we're going up against could be just as dangerous as the Horde. Worse, even." To Tam, there was nothing worse than the prospect of never leaving home, of being cooped up in Ardburg until her dreams froze and her Wyld Heart withered in its cage. She glanced at her uncle, who gave her a reassuring nod, and was about to tell Freecloud that it didn't matter if they were facing the Horde, or something worse than the Horde, or if they were bound for the Frost Mother's hell itself. She would follow. "One song," said Rose. Branigan looked up. "Say what?" "Take the stage." Rose set a halfpipe between her lips and rooted beneath her armour for something to light it with. Eventually she gave up, and settled for a candle off the table beside her. "Pick a song and play it. Convince me you're the right girl for the job. If I like what I hear, then congratulations: You're Fable's new bard. If I don't ..." She exhaled slowly. "What did you say your name was again?" "Tam." "Well, in that case, it's been nice knowing you, Tam."

Influx

Daniel Suarez

Fallen

Grady twisted around, struggling to right himself as he fell—then hit hard against the ceiling of Hedrick's office. Curio cases, furniture, and other bodies landed around him, but they didn't smash to pieces in the way he'd expect. The building seemed to be half a second behind them in falling, as soul-wrenching cracks and groans tore through the air—a sound like city-size icebergs colliding. But now the building, too, had begun to fall before the room's contents impacted on the forty-foot-high ceiling. With the wind knocked out of him, Grady struggled for breath as he attempted to stand—which he found easy since he was in free fall. He staggered around in a daze amid floating furniture and objets d'art, his feet barely touching the ceiling, which now could just as easily have been a wall. He looked up to see a static view of Paris out the window, looking down the Champs-Élysées. It corresponded not at all with the free fall he was in, and his brain rebelled—and he began to feel nauseated. The sound of mountains colliding rumbled through the walls. The room lurched again, and a sharp crack ripped the air, setting his ears to ringing. His body suddenly forgot to vomit as he twisted around and saw Morrison and Alexa struggling with each other in free fall. Her gun floated yards away. Grady guessed it had fallen from her hand when she hit the ceiling. "Alexa!" She didn't answer. She was busy trying to find some leverage to use her superior strength against Morrison as they grappled in midair. She finally pushed off a floating sofa and slugged Morrison twice in the face. But Morrison refused to let go. Grady had strayed from the ceiling somewhat, and he tried to swim through the air to get back to it—to use it as a launching pad. "I'm coming!" She shouted back at him. "Hedrick! Get Hedrick!" Grady scanned the cavernous office with his eyes. It was difficult to remember which way had originally been up—he was lost as he looked across a debris field of floating furniture, art, and other objects, broken and whole. But then he saw Hedrick's massive desk, upside down, and Hedrick pulling himself hand over hand along the walls to get to a side door. The man was forty feet away. "Hedrick!" Hedrick didn't look back. He just kept moving as a set of double doors opened automatically to admit him to a gallery beyond. Grady thought he remembered it—and then it occurred to him that Hedrick was heading toward his museum of "contained" technology. "Goddamnit..." Grady clawed at the floor or wall or whatever was next to him and pushed against floating objects to use their inertia to impart forward movement on him. He wracked his mind to calculate the best way to make progress. And there in his sight line Grady saw his gravis wrapped around the scout helmet and floating amid the other debris. It must have landed near him since he'd had it in his hands when he fell. Grady grabbed them both and started buckling the gravis on. As he did so, he passed below Morrison and Alexa. He could see Morrison had somehow gotten hold of a Victorian desk clock, and he was trying to bludgeon her with it. He shouted toward her. "I found my gravis! I'm coming—" "I already have one! Get Hedrick!" Grady powered it up and pulled his helmet on. He glanced back at the doors where Hedrick had already disappeared. He then looked back up at Alexa and made his decision—changing his direction of descent toward her and Morrison. But he went nowhere. He was still in free fall. She glared down at him from thirty feet above as she peeled Morrison's fingers from her throat. "You're in a more powerful mirror! That's how Morrison stopped us before! Your gravis is useless inside it!" She slugged Morrison again. He shouted, "I don't understand!" "You invented the damn thing, you tell me! Just go after Hedrick! There are places he can escape to! Don't let him get away!" She grunted and did a backward somersault, wrapping her legs around Morrison's head and squeezing until his face reddened. Morrison struggled mightily. "Aghh, you bitch!" "Are you going to be all right?" "Go, Jon!" Reluctantly, Grady continued pulling his way through the free-falling debris field and out the gallery doors. He couldn't help but wonder at the interaction of the gravity fields—was it a matter of power? Was it like acoustics? Did they subtract each other? No... because equal fields didn't seem to. He snapped out of pondering gravity and looked ahead. He could now see the long exhibit gallery—only everything was turned upside down, with exhibits floating in midair. He shaded his eyes against the blinding white light of the first fusion reactor, suspended in its sealed case. Up ahead he could see Hedrick clawing his way along the carpet. "Hedrick!" There was another huge rumble, followed by a colossal CRACK. A seam appeared in the wall nearby and quickly expanded, wood splitting. Suddenly the howl of wind started blowing through the corridor—although Grady was still surrounded by interior walls. He was nearly blown back out the gallery doors into the office again, but as he looked up, he could see that Hedrick had fallen back along the exhibit gallery as well. Grady finally got a good look at the man. Hedrick looked worried but also determined. In a moment the director fished through his pockets and came up with a small object, which he aimed back at Grady. "Shit..." Grady pushed off from the wall and sailed across the corridor just as an explosion blasted apart the burled wood paneling and sent him rolling end over end. He landed hard against something. He got his bearings, feeling the carpeting with his hands, and looked up through what was suddenly a great deal more debris, smoke, and now fire to see Hedrick upside down thirty feet ahead, struggling with some sort of large piece of equipment. "Hedrick!" Hedrick aimed again, losing control of his rotation as he looked up. The shot went wide. Grady ducked down as another blast tore apart several display cases. Thousands more pieces of flaming debris entered the air around him, burning him as he batted them away. The flames were fanned by the howling wind. And then another sharp CRACK, like the earth itself coming apart, filled the air so loudly it momentarily drowned out the howling of the wind. The building groaned deafeningly.

(Renegades 2) Archenemies

Marissa Meyer

Chapter 21

Winston Pratt held the puppet in both hands, peering into its sad face with apparent indifference. Adrian had not known what to expect when he brought the doll to him. The counselor had insisted on being there, pointing out that objects that were significant and sentimental to a patient could result in strong outbursts of emotion—positive and negative. So Adrian had been prepared for delighted squeals, or wretched sobs. But had not been prepared for total apathy. Even confusion, as Winston tilted his head from side to side. He seemed to be inspecting the doll's face, but for what, Adrian couldn't begin to guess. "Well?" Adrian said finally, his patience reaching its end. The counselor shot him a disgruntled look, which he ignored. "That is Hettie, isn't it?" "Yes," said Winston Pratt. "This is Hettie." He rubbed the pad of his thumb across the black teardrop on the puppet's cheek, as if trying to scrub the paint away. It didn't work. Holding the doll in both hands, he lifted it to eye level and whispered, "You did this to me." Adrian cast a glance at the counselor. She looked worried, like she was ready to step in and divert Winston's attention to more cheerful subjects at the first sign of trouble. Clearing her throat, she took a subtle step forward. "What did Hettie do to you, Mr. Pratt?" Winston looked up, startled, as if he'd forgotten they were there. Then his lip curled in annoyance. "Hettie is a puppet," he said, shaking the doll so that the wooden head bobbed back and forth. "It can't do anything it isn't made to do." The counselor blinked. "Yes," she said slowly, "but you said—" "It's what he symbolizes," Winston said. His indifference vanished, and suddenly, his face was carved with emotion. His brow creased, his eyes burned. His breaths turned ragged. "It's what he did!" With a scream, he pulled back his arm and threw the puppet. It clacked hollowly against the wall and fell to the floor, its limbs splayed at odd angles. Adrian watched, frozen, and wondered distantly if he should come back in an hour or two. But then Winston took in a long breath and giggled, almost sheepish. "I didn't mean to do that." He looked at Adrian. "Could you hand him back to me, pretty please?" When the counselor didn't object, Adrian scooped the doll from the floor. Winston snatched it from his hand and spent another moment trying to scratch off the teardrop with his thumbnail, before huffing with irritation and tucking Hettie against his side. He met Adrian's eyes again and shrugged, a little sadly. "I shouldn't have taken my anger out on poor Hettie," he said, petting the doll's fluffy orange hair. "It really isn't his fault." Adrian forced a smile, not sure how else to respond. He waited a full ten seconds before lifting his eyebrows. "So?" "So?" said Winston. His fist started to tighten and Adrian shoved it into his pocket in an attempt to make it less obvious. "We had a deal. The puppet, in exchange for information. You promised to tell me who killed my mother." Winston clicked his tongue. "No, no. I promised to tell you something you would want to know." Adrian's hand squeezed tighter, until he could feel his nails digging into his palm. He'd known better than to trust an Anarchist. He'd known. He was seconds away from leaping forward and snatching the puppet away from the villain when Winston started to smile. Teasing and sly. "And I will tell you something you want to know. More than you realize." Adrian held his breath. "You told me that you watched the Detonator kill Nightmare," said Winston. "That you were there. But... I'm afraid, young Master Everhart, you were mistaken." His eyes twinkled. "Our precious little Nightmare is very much alive."

The Chestnut Man

Søren Sveistrup

Chapter 31

'Sorry I wasn't there this morning. I understand you've let Hauge go, but it might not matter. We need to talk about that fingerprint again.' 'The fingerprint isn't important.' As Thulin stalks down the long corridor, she hears Hess behind her. 'The boy said the doll wasn't there before the murder. You need to investigate whether anyone else can confirm that. People who live out there, people who might have seen something.' Thulin has nearly reached the spiral staircase leading down to the central courtyard. Her mobile rings, but she doesn't want to lose speed, so she lets it ring as she swings down the stairs with Hess on her heels. 'No, we've already explained that. In this department we generally take the view that time is best spent on cases that aren't solved rather than on ones that are.' 'That's what we need to talk about. Hang on a minute, for Christ's sake!' Thulin has reached the bottom of the stairs and emerged into the deserted central courtyard when she feels Hess grab her shoulder, forcing her to a halt. She twists free and glares at him, while he jabs his finger at a folder she recognizes as a case summary. 'According to the original analysis, there was no trace of bone dust found on the weapon Linus Bekker used to dismember Kristine Hartung. It had traces of her blood, and they assumed that that plus Bekker's statement was enough to make dismemberment sound plausible.' 'What the hell are you on about? Where did you get that report?' 'I've just come from Forensics. Genz gave me a hand with an experiment. When you cut through bone, doesn't matter what bone, you get microscopic bone dust left in the cracks and notches in the blade. Look at this blow-up of the machete we used in the experiment. It's pretty much impossible to remove the particles, no matter how thoroughly you clean the weapon. But the original forensic-genetic analysis only found traces of blood. Not bone dust.' Hess hands Thulin a few loose sheets of close-up photographs of what looked like small particles on a metallic surface, presumably the machete. But it is the severed limbs in one of the other images that catch her eye. 'What's that in the background? A pig?' 'It was an experiment. It's not proof, but the important thing is –' 'If this were relevant they'd probably have mentioned it before, don't you think?' 'It wasn't important then, but it might be now – now we've found the print!' The main door opens and the cold wind whirls inside, carrying with it two laughing men. One is Tim Jansen, a towering and solidly built investigator who is usually seen only in the company of his partner, Martin Ricks. Jansen has a reputation as a sharp and experienced detective, but Thulin knows him as a chauvinistic pig, and she remembers clearly how he rubbed his groin against her during combat training that winter, only letting go when she buried an elbow in his solar plexus. Jansen is also the investigator who, along with his partner, wrung a confession out of Linus Bekker, and Thulin has the feeling their position in the department is unassailable. 'All right there, Hess. Back on sabbatical?' Jansen accompanies the greeting with a smirk, and Hess does not respond. He waits until they've passed through the courtyard before saying anything else, and Thulin feels like telling him his caution is absurd. 'Maybe it's nothing. Her blood was there, after all, and personally I couldn't care less one way or the other, but you need to go to your boss and find out where to go from here,' he says, holding her gaze. Thulin doesn't want to admit it, but after visiting Magnus at Glostrup Hospital she, too, logged on to the archive and read up on the Hartung case, just to reassure herself that there really wasn't anything she should bear in mind; and as far as she is concerned, there isn't. Besides the reminder of how painful it must have been for the parents when she and Hess showed up at their house the other day. 'And you're telling me this because your work at the Hague makes you an expert in murder cases?' 'No, I'm telling you because –' 'Then keep out of it. I don't want you making a fuss and clumping around in people's grief because somebody else did their job while you weren't doing yours.' Hess looks at her. She can see in his eyes that he's taken aback. It's a mitigating factor that he's been so far along his train of thought he hasn't realized he's doing more harm than good, but that doesn't change anything. She's about to head for the door when a voice echoes across the courtyard. 'Thulin, the IT techs are trying to get hold of you!' Thulin peers up the staircase at the officer walking towards her, a mobile phone in his hand. 'Tell them I'll call back in a minute.' 'It's important. Laura Kjær's mobile has just received a message.' Thulin senses Hess becoming alert, turning to face the officer, and she takes the phone he hands her. There's a computer tech on the other end. A young guy whose name she doesn't catch. He speaks quickly, gabbling as he attempts to explain the situation. 'It's about the victim's mobile. We always cancel it with the phone company once we've finished examining it, but that takes a couple of days, so it's still active, and you can still –' 'Just tell me what the message said.' Thulin gazes at the columns around the courtyard, the bronze-coloured leaves swirling through the air, and senses Hess's eyes on the back of her neck while the tech reads the message aloud. A chill draught blows through the loosely latched doors, and she hears herself ask whether they can trace the sender.

M.C.A. Hogarth

Chapter 15

"Sensors report no ships in orbit, Captain," 'Star said. Standing at the balcony rail, Alysha frowned and looked over her shoulder at the other woman. "None? Are they in atmosphere? I didn't think they'd be small enough for that, given the amount of trouble they're causing." "It doesn't take much," 'Star murmured, sorting through the data funneled up to her from the various stations on the lower bridge. More definitively: "We're not close enough to scan the planet yet, but it would be... surprising... if the vessel there was also capable of Well. Few ships capable of landing on a planet are." And the ones that were tended to be expensive. She couldn't imagine a pirate possessing one. But then, she hadn't imagined a pirate visiting its depredations on a single planet so consistently without anyone stopping them, either. Alysha tapped her fingers lightly on the rail. "They might have dropped off a raiding party." "A more likely scenario," 'Star said. "Though one wonders why they fled. Fuel is not inexpensive; staying in orbit would have been the more economical choice." "But if they're here, why are they hiding? Paranoia?" "Surviving this long might have required it." Alysha huffed softly. "We must also allow that the pirate may be Dusted." "That implies a rather powerful ship." 'Star nodded. "I would tend to doubt the existence of a Duster on a pirate vessel, but without more evidence we cannot exclude the possibility." Her ears flipped back. "Arii, I don't like this. They are behaving unpredictably, and we lack too much data to interpret the data we do have correctly." From 'Star, the sobriquet was a rare public break in her reserve, and she always made those choices consciously. The woman must be frustrated—and concerned. "We'll figure it out," Alysha said. "We don't have a choice." She smiled a little. "You've been on the 'Dancer longer than I have, 'Star. Trust our people." The other woman glanced at hear, ears sagging, then nodded. But she was still uneasy, and Alysha shared her misgivings. Her eyes fell on the heads of the women downstairs at work at their various consoles, now crowded by the addition of the personnel sent to emergency back-up stations by the alarm that had been reduced to a steady red warning light lining the computers and the walkways. Alysha had once been one of those young faces, sneaking glances at the main screen and wondering what would happen next—or, all too often, being caught by surprise, because what did ensigns know about the affairs on the second level? They were trusting her to know what to do. Or if not to know—to decide, in the face of 'Star's scant evidence, because sometimes that was the only way forward. Alysha leaned on the rail. Taylitha's report suggested either the pirate ship had gone atmospheric or had dispatched a shuttle to scour the city. And 'Star was right... she couldn't imagine the pirate was small enough to land, which meant the likeliest possible was the latter. The real mystery was the location of the pirate ship. While Alysha didn't doubt the pirate would rather flee than face a Fleet vessel, a shuttle represented a significant investment in hull, crew and cargo. He would think twice before abandoning it; replacing it would cost too much. "He's hiding somewhere," Alysha said aloud. "He's seen us already and gone quiet, hoping that we'll leave system so he can pick up the shuttle." "Presuming that it is a shuttle." Alysha nodded. "But if it isn't and that's the entire ship down there, we'll have ample time to scoop them up. They're trapped on Gledig with us in orbit." 'Star's brown ears flicked backward. "Trapped animals become desperate, Captain." "I'm counting on it," Alysha said. "I need these people to start making mistakes." She rolled her shoulders and stepped back from the rail. "But there's no need to take chances. We'll stay at general quarters, with the shields up. Take us all the way in." The other woman relayed the command to the helm before saying to her, "There might be hostages." The thought had passed through Alysha's mind several times. Mostly at night, when it could keep her awake. "Even a pirate should know how officials charged with the mission of the Alliance are required to deal with hostage situations." "The people of Gledig have already suffered enough," 'Star said softly. "Yes. But displaying weakness to a pirate is like showing throat for a knife. And even if we accepted terms, there's no guarantee they'd keep their word." Alysha ran a hand through her dark hair, anxiety puckering the skin around her closed eyes. "I left Taylitha and Laelkii there for a reason. We'll have to trust them to do their jobs." "Two people in that tumult..." "Three, 'Star," Alysha said, staring at the world growing on the holographic display. "Three." "This is no good," Taylitha growled from the meager cover of the stone lintel of an abandoned house. "Until they get out of that boat and onto the ground, we're not going to be able to stop them without heavier armament. I don't suppose you have any artillery lying around somewhere? In a cache that Maire hasn't exploded?" "Artillery!" Svetlana exclaimed, squinting as another building blossomed yellow-tinged smoke. "We haven't had factories that could make anything that heavy for years. Anything close would have gone up with the base." "All of it wasted on each other, and now we've got this," Taylitha said, her frustration leaking into the words. "If she'd only held some of it back...!" "Well, she didn't," Laelkii said. "No use crying about it." Taylitha grimaced, rubbed her head. "Right. Well, they're going to have to land if they want to grab cargo. We'll just have to wait." "What I don't understand is why they're bothering to strafe the city," Laelkii said. "Wouldn't it be easier to sneak in, get what they want, and leave without rustling up any resistance?" "What resistance?" Svetlana asked bitterly. She stared at the sky, fingers clutching the door frame in the dark. "We don't have any ships to send after them. Our few ground-to-air or ground-to-space defenses were destroyed by pirates years ago, along with the industrial capacity to manufacture them. Their only opposition is whatever citizens have palmers and are brave enough to use them... and what citizen is, when everyone has a story about a relative or a friend who's been taken or killed?" A silence, filled only by the sound of shattering windows and distant cries. "It still doesn't make sense," Taylitha said. "Even if they don't care about, or don't expect, resistance, doing this... they're destroying their own prospects. Something else is going on in that shuttle." "They'll land," Svetlana said, low. "Even the most homicidal pirate won't be able to resist leaving with prizes." "And then?" Laelkii looked at her. "And then Maire and hers will probably storm the shuttle." Laelkii's ears sagged. "With what? Didn't you just finish saying they've blown up all their heavy weapons? Or you all have with the cavern?" "They'll do it with their bare hands, if they have to," Svetalana said. "And then the pirates will cut them down with the shipboard armament, or their personal weapons, all of which will be heavier than anything you all have." Taylitha lifted her head, following the lasers. "No, we have to have a better plan. Come on, I think it's safe to move." The three darted down the dark alley, trying to catch up with the distant crowd of Pro-Accord fighters. Taylitha glanced up the blank buildings as they stole through the night, saw a tiny face in one of the windows, wide-eyed with fear. Her ears slicked to the back of her head. Laelkii followed her gaze and scowled. "This isn't how things should be." "No, alet," Svetlana said quietly. "It most certainly isn't—Duck!" They hit the ground. Taylitha winced as the raw fabric over her knee split against the crete sidwalk. In front of them the intersection of the alley and the street erupted in a cascade of crimson palmer fire. "Who is it?" Laelkii hissed. "They found us," Svetlana said. "Are they crazy?" Taylitha whispered, "We have bigger quarry to bag!" "Wait, who's found us? They-the-pirates or they-the-Secessionists?" Laelkii asked. "The latter," Taylitha said, crawling forward. Laelkii grabbed the tip of Taylitha's brown tail. "Where are you going?" "To get a better look." Laelkii tightened her grip. "You have got to stop with the 'bravely scouting out dangers that would force me to deliver a corpse back to Alysha' thing." "This is why she sent us, Snowhide. Let go." Laelkii sighed and released her. Taylitha slid to the edge of the intersection and peered into the yellow light cast by the street lamps. Just as she saw a rash of silhouettes, utter dark dropped on the street with the abruptness of a flicked switch. "The power grid's out," Svetlana said behind her. Laelkii dragged herself beside Taylitha, still lying on the ground. The other woman's hips and shoulders added welcome warmth, given how quickly the cold crete was drawing it out of her body. "Looks bad. Why hasn't it come back up?" "Are there back-ups?" Taylitha asked. "Generators? Fail-over stations?" In the faint light of the stars, Svetlana's drawn brows and mouth had a melancholy cast. "Commander... won't you ever learn?" Most members of Fleet talked as peers with only a veneer of formality to separate the most senior from their underlings, but some sense of propriety remained. Svetlana's words were more than enough cause for Taylitha to dress her down... but Taylitha had never been interested in calling people to task for trivialities. You didn't develop people with negative feedback. If there was one characteristic she shared with the captain she'd loved since they'd met as untried ensigns, it was the desire to help people succeed. So she said, "I hope Gledig will have the opportunity to change before I do, arii. Can you see anyone?" Svetlana shook her head and warily gained her feet, edging around the corner with Dylan's knife in hand. "They've run down the street, I think." She peered into the dark, then nodded at the sight of a lattice of needle-thin fire to the north. "They're heading in the right direction at least." Taylitha joined her at the corner. "I didn't expect Brushnie to be pushing his agenda given the circumstances." "I don't think it's him," Svetlana replied. Taylitha glanced at her, lifted one crimson brow. "So, that little difference of opinion we observed in the café?" "If this 'difference of opinion' is between 'talking with people to try to reach reasonable compromises' and 'bombing state dinners'," Laelkii said, "I don't think it's very little." Svetlana waved them after her and headed up the street. "My capture wasn't authorized by him. I was interrogated by one of his people, a human who'd acted without his direction. The same one from the restaurant." Laelkii said, "I don't like the sound of that." "So he really doesn't have the control over his people that we'd want. Or he would, for that matter." Taylitha's tail lashed despite her best efforts. "That's very, very bad." "That doesn't necessarily mean that all the people who disagree with him on how to run his movement are dishonorable," Laelkii said. Taylitha smiled dryly. "Want to bet your life on that one, Snowhide?" "No," the healer said promptly. "I rolled the dice once when that window blew out. I don't want to again. I'm just..." She smiled a little. "You know. Advocating for the devil." "You're being contrary is what it is," Taylitha said, scanning the streets. "Hells, I wish they'd get the lights working again." "So this bit about trouble in the ranks," Laelkii asked. "Was it this Brushnie fellow who told you?" Taylitha didn't miss the shiver that rolled up Svetlana's spine. She met Laelkii's eyes and tried to communicate her concerns. "Yes." "I hate to sound like a skeptic," the healer said slowly. "But are you sure he was telling the truth?" Svetlana's shoulders lifted and fell as she sighed. "If you can find a way to be sure of the truth, I'd like to know it, alet." Her voice softened. "I hope he wasn't lying." "You're not the only one who wants to believe good of him. I liked his eyes. And if even half of what he was saying was true, then the grievances of the Secessionists are real." Taylitha placed a brown hand on Svetlana's shoulder. "But we have to be careful anyway. Sometimes the most sincere-seeming people are the ones without a conscience, so they don't mind lying." She stopped at the next intersection and checked in both directions, ears trembling at attention for any sound. "The civilians are holed up tight, aren't they?" "Wouldn't you be?" Svetlana asked. "I'm glad of it, though I'm afraid for the people in the upper stories," Laelkii said, coming up behind them. "Svetlana-arii. I'm sorry to be skeptical." Svetlana shook her head. "No. You're right to question me. I have a... a weakness where he's concerned. His story... it's tragic. I have a hard time blaming him for things when I understand where he's come from. This is..." She gritted her teeth. "This is our world, aletsen. We're both just trying to keep it safe, the best way we know how. We might disagree on the method, but we want the same things." "Bast and An hear you," Taylitha murmured. She squinted. "It's clear. Do we keep going north?" "Yes," Svetlana said. "Taylitha?" Laelkii said. "You liked his eyes? Really?" Taylitha grinned ruefully over her shoulder. "What can I say? They were memorable. He presents himself as an honorable man with the charisma you'd expect of a leader, so you hardly expect him to be handsome. A Harat-Shar would make short work of jumping him." She dashed across the street. The other two followed her. "I'm surprised he doesn't have a little harem following him around." "Maybe he does, and we don't know about it," Laelkii offered. "No," Svetlana said. "No, the last thing on his mind is romance." Touch of fingers, gliding to her wrists, cupping them tenderly. She remembered his eyes, too. The anger in them, and the hopelessness, even as he'd kissed her palms, her lips. She quivered. "The last thing." The clouds flashed, their edges lurid red, as the fire from the shuttle streaked past them. The three glanced up, then jogged through the beleaguered city as above them and around them spears of light competed with the stars. "Any word from the Stardancer?" Courtland asked, pacing in the governor's dining room. The damaged table had been removed, leaving plenty of space in front of the repaired window to wear a line in the carpet. "None, sir," Lindsey said, nursing the bank of candles she'd set up on the bench. "Any word on when the power will be back up?" The foxine shook her head. "None of the technicians are willing to leave their homes to see what's wrong with the pirates overhead." "Is there any word about anything?" Courtland asked, frustrated. "I'm sorry, sir." Courtland stared out the window, fighting the wash of acid from his stomach. All his plans... they were crumbling, and his chances of figuring out how badly were being blocked by lack of data. He couldn't choose whether to plan for a graceful exit or continue developing his narrative of Representative Courtland, the decisive leader who'd steered Gledig through its worst crisis, without knowing more. But if they weren't talking to Lindsey, the only way to scare them into action was to go down there and do it himself. If he did, he'd be exposing himself to danger... but if he didn't, he could kiss the whole 'brave voice imposing control on the chaos' story goodbye anyway. He strode to the door. "I'll be back." "Back!" Lindsey fluttered, flew to him. "Sir, where are you going?" "I'm going to get those technicians in their trucks and out to the repair sites," Courtland said. "And then I'm going to find out what in all hell is going on down there." "You can't mean to go out in that! Pirates and all the factions fighting in the streets and no power and the Fleet's not here and the governor's missing... without you, everything will fall apart!" "I don't know if you've noticed, my dear," he said, gently patting her cheek, "But everything already has." She didn't stop him when he walked past her, which was for the best. If she'd tried, he might have thought twice about what he was about to do, and quailed. But he'd made his choice after all, it seemed. And really, he was in less peril than she thought. With some privacy and a secure terminal, he could call the pirates off. It was just a matter of getting to one. After hours in the cold dark, the Scythe finally cleared her silent orbit of the planet and swung into sight of her quarry. "That's a rhacking huge ship," the man at the helm whispered. Pwyll stood. He'd never served on a battlecruiser, but he recognized the lines of the vessel with a hunger that hurt like lost chances. He'd had plans once to ascend to a position on the bridge of one of the Paradox-class starships like the one before him. Her body rose from the darkness into the sun, her skin as sleek as poured metal, the blued silver of it blooming to a subtle peach where it gathered the light. The pylons that swept out to support her Well nacelles bled brilliance into the stark black of space, and Pwyll caught the briefest of gold glitters in a curved arch: her halo shields. "We're going to attack that monster?" the man said, turning to Pwyll. The Hinichi stared at it, trembling. Now that it was before him... awe and regret faded before fear. That the end would hurt too long. Or not long enough. Or worse, that the ship would leave him alive. Yes, that would be worst of all. He couldn't let them do that. "That's what we came for." The man stared at him. Mistaking his urge for self-destruction for the desire for battle? For confidence? Pwyll didn't care, as long as the thug did what he was told. He sat and watched the battlecruiser swell into his bridge's tiny display. His eyes catalogued the weakest points in the ship's design, armed with memories of the class's blueprints, gauging at which sectors he should aim his unusual missiles. There was no going back; even being cashiered was nothing compared to having been a pirate. Fleet would never rehabilitate him now. No matter that he and Kamaney had been used; that their relationship had been the convenient excuse for the captain to deflect executive attention away from his own misdeeds. There was no returning for Pwyll. All that was left was to make sure he didn't live to suffer. A quick death, and then he would pay for all of his sins to a higher power. At least that one would know everything, and the judgment would be fair. "We'll be in position in twenty minutes," Pwyll said. "Not before then." "We'll be right under her rhacking belly!" Pwyll's head dipped twice. "Yes. I'll be running the attack from Engineering. You can stay on the bridge. The view should be spectacular." The man eyed him. Pwyll didn't know what he was thinking and didn't care. It was immaterial now. He had a buoy to launch, and then... Dylan watched the shuttle hovering over the city, a metal falcon illumined only by the faint silver sheen of the stars. It was large enough for a hundred people, maybe more, all of them better armed than anyone on planet. None of which changed their duty. Beside him Perisse sat on the ground, one hand on the wrapped wound on his arm. The insides of his ears had paled to a chalky gray. "Dylan, we've lost too many people to do what I know you're thinking we should. Three quarters of the group you led out of the tunnel are fighting the pro-Accords, or each other." "Let them," Dylan said. "We won't be." Perisse was silent, briefly. When he spoke, his voice was tired. "Going after the pirates won't wipe away everything we've done, Dylan. You'll never go back to being the paladin who joined the movement because he wanted to save everyone else's sisters if he couldn't save his own. Years of association with the Medearins of the world won't be washed out by a single fight. Not in anyone else's eyes, and not in yours." He heaved a sigh. "It's too late." Almost, Dylan smiled. He did rest a hand on the pard's good shoulder. "Fortunately, I'm not doing it to redeem myself." "Are you trying to commit suicide, then? Is that it? Going out in a final, heroic stand?" "I haven't thought that far ahead," Dylan said. "Sihfaill, the only thing that matters to me is getting that shuttle down." "That's what you think," Perisse muttered, but he subsided against the brick wall. Dylan patted him gently and resumed tracking the movement of the shuttle. Would it come down over the commercial district? Or was it hunting slaves this time? There was nothing else worth taking by now. He was still waiting, impatient for action, when Langorn's orange eyes preceded his body out of the dark. "The Pro-Accords are skirmishing with us in the western and northern quadrants. We have casualties." Perisse roused himself enough to ask, "Any dead?" Langorn shook his head. "We don't know. People aren't stopping to count. We do know Maire's in the northeast." "Where the shuttle is," Dylan said. "Of course. Do you have Kerenkev?" Warily, Langorn eyed him. "What's left of the reserves are holding him just outside city limits. I didn't think you wanted to risk him, what with all the 'let him be properly executed by a trial' talk." Which it was obvious the wolfine believed would never happen. More fool he. "We'll want him closer for when they call for him. Bring him in town. Use one of our warehouses." When Langorn hesitated, he said, "Go. Hopefully by the time you wrestle him into position, the shuttle will have set down and you won't have to worry about whether it'll kill him." "What about the pro-Accords?" Perisse said. "Accidents happen." "He should be so lucky," Dylan said. "He won't be. Langorn?" "Right." The wolfine's eyes dipped as he nodded. Dylan's ears tracked the sound of his footsteps, light and fast, as the he jogged to the east, followed by the handful of men he'd brought with him. "And us?" Perisse asked. He made as if to roll to his feet. "Should we move?" "Sssh," Dylan said. "Sit. We'll rest here until Langorn comes back." He watched the shuttle. "Until that ship sets down, there's no use chasing it." "Where do you think it'll go?" Dylan said quietly, "Somewhere near the governor's residence." He smiled, a faint shadow drawn over his mouth. "Make note, sihfaill. This will be the last day of the life we've made for ourselves. When the stars rise tomorrow, it'll be over. For good or ill." Perisse stared at his knees. "That'll be strange. We've spent all our lives at this. I... I guess I never expected anything would change, much less that it would wind up like this." He waved a hand weakly at the city. "What do you think will happen?" Dylan leaned against the corner. Tension sang up his back and legs, and his hand ached from gripping the hilt of the sword. He flexed his fingers. "It depends on where the Stardancer falls. And what happens with the shuttle. The people will decide tonight. We've forced the issue by bringing the fight openly into Daleth, Perisse. There's no pretending this is a demonstration turned riot, or a precision bombing to free political prisoners, or any of the other lies all of us have told." Screams and the soft hisses of palmer fire striking turf and brick punctuated the pauses between sentences. "There's no hiding anymore, from ourselves or anyone else." "Maybe it was about time," said Perisse. Dylan closed his eyes. There was no wind between the buildings.

The Whispering Room

Dean R. Koontz

Chapter 171

Jane into the high lair, nine thousand square feet of Olympian grandeur where a mad god did whatever gods with a lowercase g do when they aren't destroying one world and building another... The pitiable circumstances in which the rayshaws had lived was proof of D.J.'s contempt for these simplest of his creations. She doubted he would want one of them to share his personal space, and he surely wouldn't keep a programmed ape here on the ninth floor. If there were servants—housekeeper, cook, butler—they would be like the citizens of Iron Furnace, allowed a degree of apparent autonomy but nonetheless tightly controlled. He would not bring into his personal space servants with their free will intact, when he could ensure his privacy by staffing his homes with his higher-level semizombies. Their enslavement was permanent; if she had to kill them to get to their master, she would be freeing them. In the event there was a guest or two... Well, any guest was likely to be an Arcadian. She would have to do with them whatever the situation required. Along a short hallway, past a kitchen, she proceeded through a few grand rooms that flowed gracefully one to another, furnished with Art Deco antiques, museum-quality furniture by Deskey, Dufrêne, Ruhlmann, Süe et Mare....Antique Persian carpets suitable to the palaces of sultans. Everywhere were exquisite Tiffany lamps of the rarest patterns. Chandeliers by Simonet Frères. Voluptuous paintings by Lempicka, Domergue, Dupas. Sculpture by Chiparus, Lorenzl, Preiss. Enamels by Jean Dunand. Here in one residence were tens of millions' worth of antiques and art—and so far not any sign of an inhabitant. How strange it seemed that a man who meant to overturn the past, rewrite history to his taste, and create a future divorced from everything that had come before should create for himself this haven designed in every detail to transport him to the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps he perceived in that past age some promise that had never been realized, that he intended now to fulfill. As she passed through this residence of museum-quality art and furnishings, Jane felt a little disoriented, perhaps because these relentlessly elegant items, acquired with so much effort and at such expense, arranged in judiciously considered order, was in unsettling contrast to the eighth-floor horror of rayshaws and apes and bloody violence. A curious and inconstant tinnitus afflicted her, two or three oscillating electronic tones weaving together, swelling but then fading to silence, like a soundtrack to her disorientation. As on the eighth floor, windows here were of thick bulletproof glass. Ashen morning light, sheeting rain, and a cityscape as gray as if rendered in pencil provided a contrasting background to the warm colors and glamour of these interiors. When Jane entered the great room with its half dozen seating arrangements, there were as well the sounds of Nature's current performance: the periodic grumble from the throat of the storm, the susurration of the rushing skeins of rain, the patter of droplets slanting under the tenth-floor overhang to puddle on the paving stones of the ninth-floor balcony. The double doors to that deep deck stood open wide. As though he had ridden down from the heavens on the currents of the storm, David James Michael appeared at that threshold and stepped in from the balcony. She was overcome with the desire to say, This is for Nick, and shoot the bastard right there, right then. She would have done it if she hadn't needed his testimony. He smiled. "Mrs. Hawk, your persistence and endurance are remarkable. Welcome to my humble home. I'd offer you a drink, but that seems to be an excessive courtesy, considering that you would like to see me dead." "Dead is good. Better would be impoverished and in prison." He might not have been alone on the balcony. No one was visible through the tall windows, but there were areas she couldn't see. "You don't look well, Mrs. Hawk. There's blood on your jacket." After pressing a button to activate the PatrolEyes videocam that hung from her neck, she kept a two-hand grip on her pistol. He said, "Would you like me to call the paramedics?" "No, Mr. Michael. I'll call them when you need them." He stood beside a Ruhlmann chair, a chunky block bergère buttered by the light from a Tiffany dragonfly-motif floor lamp in shades of yellow ranging from dark amber to lemon. The warm glow flattered him. A handsome boyish-looking forty-four, with tousled blond hair, he stood there in sneakers and jeans and untucked shirt, projecting his preferred image as a free spirit, a billionaire without pretensions. Of course the sneakers were maybe by Tom Ford, the jeans by Dior Homme, the shirt by David Hart, a three-thousand-dollar ensemble, not counting the underwear. Just being in the same room with him left her feeling unclean, to see him looking her over as if considering her for Aspasia. "Tell me about the Tech Arcadians, Mr. Michael." "Sounds like some second-rate band. What do they play—retro dance music from the eighties?" "You're a smug sonofabitch, aren't you? But you'll talk." "How will you precipitate an interrogation, Mrs. Hawk? Zap me with a Taser, chloroform me, strip me naked, tie me with cable zips, and tease my penis with a switchblade? Is that what you were taught back at Quantico? Hardly seems constitutional." He cupped a hand to one ear. "Do you hear that?" She didn't want to play his game. Instead of answering his question, she said, "Park your ass in that chair." "Do you hear that?" he repeated. "It's the future calling. It's a future you don't understand and in which you have no role." She would have liked nothing better than to kill him, with or without a confession. "Mrs. Hawk...Or should I say Widow Hawk? No, you might find it painful to be addressed as such. Just Jane. Jane, because I know your type so very well, I'm sure you believe in the existence of a conscience. A little inner voice that tells you right from wrong." "Because I know your type so very well," she said, "I'm sure you don't." He moved away from the chair, toward a Süe et Mare gilt-wood settee and matching armchairs upholstered in an Aubusson tapestry. Moving with him, remaining peripherally aware of the open doors to the balcony, alert for movement elsewhere in the large room, Jane decided for the moment to let him do this his way, as it might lead to revelations more quickly than would an interrogation. He was such a narcissist, he no doubt believed that he could persuade her of the rightness of his position—and that even if he could not win her over, he would by some unexpected twist of fate overcome her, if only because destiny would always bend the course of events, bend the universe itself, to ensure a favorable result for D. J. Michael. "You think a human conscience is essential for civilization to exist and remain stable," he said. "Well, I propose to install just such a thing where it does not now exist. In a sense, we're allies." He didn't sit in either the settee or one of the chairs, but stood staring at a series of Ferdinand Preiss figurines that stood on the Ruhlmann coffee table: cold-painted, intricately costumed bronze dancers on marble and onyx bases, their faces and limbs of carved and tinted ivory. Jane's tinnitus grew louder, and she surveyed the room as if some musician might be seated in a corner, playing a theremin. But of course the sound was internal, and again it faded. "When refined to perfection in a year or two," D. J. Michael said, "the ultimate nanoimplant will rest so lightly within the skull that those graced with it won't have the slightest suspicion that their free will to do evil has been restrained. The decisions they make and the actions they take will seem always to be their choices. Their values and morals will be corrected with such subtlety that every change of opinion will seem to have been a product of their own reasoning." She said, "And you—just you—will decide what is evil, what's moral and what's not, what the right values are." Until he looked at her, she would not have thought that a smile could convey such acidic pity, such scalding contempt. Yet his voice remained soft and reasonable as he continued to speak this unreason. "Look at the world in all its horror, Jane. In all its chaos. War and injustice. Bigotry and hatred. Envy and greed. The codes of right and wrong that humanity has designed and endorsed—have they ever worked, Jane? Are not all the codes misguided in one way or another, and therefore unworkable?" He moved away from the Süe et Mare suite and turned his back to her and went to a sideboard of Macassar ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which was flanked by windows. He stood gazing at a Tamara Lempicka portrait that hung above the sideboard: a stylishly dressed man portrayed against a backdrop of skyscrapers, all rendered in the artist's signature style, cold and painterly and powerful. He said, "Those graced with such an implanted conscience will never be troubled by doubt or guilt, because they will know that they are always doing the best and right thing. They will not know worry or restlessness of spirit. There will be nothing left in the world to fear." Arms weary, Jane had lowered the Heckler. "You put it in such high-minded terms, but it sounds low and vile to someone who knows about the Aspasia girls, the rayshaws, the cruelty with which you've used them." She raised the pistol again. "Sit the hell down." He returned to the bergère beside the Tiffany dragonfly lamp, but he did not obey her. "There is no cruelty in what we've done, Jane. The world is full of people whose lives have no purpose. They wander through their meaningless existence, often in despair. We select those who are aimless and unhappy—and then we remove the reasons for their unhappiness and give them purpose. Or in the case of your husband, we remove those who are a threat to the future as it needs to be if the masses are to have a chance at contentment." As earlier, the billionaire cupped a hand to one ear and stood as if listening to something inaudible to her. "Do you hear destiny whispering, Jane?" She squeezed off a shot, not at him but at the antique bergère. The upholstery on the chair split, and a brief exhalation of thin smoke issued from the bullet hole. "Sit down and discuss with me the specifics of what you've done, or I'll wreck your precious décor and then break you piece by piece in as painful a way as I can imagine. And I've got a vivid imagination." His hand still cupped to his ear, he said, "Don't you hear the whispering, Jane? All the whispering in the whispering room? If you don't hear it yet, you soon will." With that, he turned his back to her and walked to the open balcony doors. Following close behind him, she said, "Stop right there." Instead of obeying, he dashed across fifteen feet of balcony, vaulted the decorative steel railing, and leaped into nine stories of air empty of all else but rain.