for finding fault with them, yet they were the first to suggest that we throw down our own weapons. They complained that we had offered them no payment and we countered that they should therefore not be here. It was the old argument backed by the grand old wall of fire. Nothing was too rich or precise for it. Did it feel forced? Maybe I was projecting.
Jose didn’t help. He had switched to single-shot and was firing in a contrary style that was only heightened by his obvious self-satisfaction. For a while he scuttled several feet backward with every shot, as if mirroring the bullet’s trajectory. Then he would shout a word inaudibly at the same instant he fired, so that even the finest marksmen felt they were missing something. Finally his encouraging cry of ‘Go!’ just after shooting, supplanted by his peering through an opera glass to spectate the bullet’s progress, created in everyone a sense of dismal failure and boredom.
A burning squadcar peeled off, snapping over the headless free gun and fishtailing from side to side. Then it slowed to a stop, the driver emerging to roll around and beat at the flames, or perhaps he was energetically waving his arms and legs to communicate something he’d realised amid this extremity. Several kids shot at him, not with the wholehearted delight one would expect but with a grim maturity, as though it was a duty. I jerked my head around at a sharp explosion. Jose was replaced where he stood by a cloud of blood. Blince was firing a Hardballer while stuffing his face with a submarine sandwich.
My rail gun flurred on empty. Murphy tapped me on the arm and I saw she was priming some sort of goop unit. She pitched it and we ran. The muscle grenade expanded, ramming the street with meat. The undifferentiated tissue began dissolving almost immediately, but it was enough to clog everyone in position for several moments. We quickly left the messy series of reprimands and counter-reprimands behind us.
We found the Mantarosa and I opened a pint screen in the dash. Madison Drowner frowned out. ‘Why don’t you come through?’
‘Got company - coker.’
‘Fed?’
‘And the Hand’s missing from the recharging well. I need your help on launch windows for a timebomb.’
‘Pipe or sphere?’
‘Sphere.’
‘Transparent kinda like a powerball?’
‘More metallic colours like a Christmas decoration, but faceted.’
‘It’s probably a Vanzetti LPR - localised progress reset device. There are three default settings: ten minutes, ten hours, 24 hours. You look like hell.’
I peered in a wing-mirror - my face was bruised purple black across the middle, like there was a vulture flying out of my eyeline. My hair was spiky with dried blood. ‘Colour me damaged, babe. Back soon.’
‘See that you are.’
I popped the beak of the car to free the swan unit. Folded down to the size of a toy harp, it was like an obstetric sculpture in white plastic. ‘Wake up,’ I whispered, and the swan unfolded itself wing by wing, tilting to stand, and raising its head last. Its eyes blinked on. It looked cute. I grabbed its face by some jowls which extended automatically for just such occasions. ‘You crazy swan,’ I cried, tugging the jowls. ‘You crazy swan! I love ya!’
‘Don’t do that,’ said the swan.
‘You crazy swan! Anyways, I need you to look out for new arrivals at the Stina Gate.’
The swan hopped away from me, waddled on the ground a little, and took off, flapping into an iron sky.
6 DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WHOOP
At the hotel Murphy fixed herself an October Surprise and sat on a smashed TV whose innards looked like a city with kidney-coloured streets. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened a can of water. My left hand felt like a wedge of poison sticks. I’d wrapped it in a strip of rotten curtain patterned with brown roses. The beating was enough to prompt me to put everything else aside and deal with the pain. ‘I think my eye’s blown.’
‘Lose much blood?’
‘I’ve got DNA base pairs I haven’t even used yet. That was nice of you to haul my chestnuts out of the blaze back there. Kind of a miracle.’
‘So’s bleeding upwards.’
‘Was I doing that again? They seemed determined to find me mistaken. Their ancient form of wonder-working depends on it. Pretending you’re not helpless is just a coping strategy. I would have died for nothing.’
‘All do.’
I lit a shock absorber. My alertness was for her sake - as was the fact that I was awake atall.
‘As for the broken nose, I’ve decided to take it as a distinction - one of many bad decisions in my life. How’d you find me?’
‘Hole in the gap. You reversed into the story like a Florida gran, Atom. What’s the connective tissue?’
‘No mystery there. A slabhead warned me off the kid so I got serious. Then I found the Mexicans fiending for him at the Gate. They screwed up with a chronobomb. I’ve seen better timing from a stuffed olive. But the banditos caught me off-balance - I’ve been out of town a long time. There seems to be way less torque under the hood these days, but maybe I haven’t engaged enough to feel it yet.’
‘Fed training says the most dangerous town is one where the advent of crime is very recent and its novelty keeps everyone wasteful and imprecise, thinking they’re proving something. I don’t think there are any towns like that anymore. Why’d you leave?’
‘I figured out what the cops were doing right. But when I incorporated the lesson, they didn’t care for it. Now I get back and find Cortez is growing human in the ground.’
She smiled. ‘Yup. Neon headstone, flashing arrow pointing jauntily down. Casket with a half-lid, the works. Inscription says “This Tombstone is Not a Toy”. I guess there’s justice if you dig deep enough in a graveyard.’
‘No, that’s just forgetting.’ I dragged on the shocker. ‘Well, you’ve given me no cause to doubt you’re human, at least. How long you been here?’
‘When bad things happen to good people.’
‘Always? Thought you were from out of town.’
She humphed. ‘I got assigned right here on the seamy side of life.’
‘It’s the seams that hold it together.’
‘What I kept telling them. They interpreted it as dud loyalty tuning. Got a burn notice from the ruin.’
‘Can they afford to burn anyone these days?’
‘There was some knock-on when the Pentagon went up five years ago. Thank god the populace hadn’t the balls to take over even when there was a corpse at the wheel.’
‘When payback has atrophied for that long, it loses its spring.’
‘But meanwhile years of my life were run under those wheels. I’d earned the wrong things, obviously. Even my compromises are in ruins. I want to live the sort of life that’ll have consequences, Atom. A free agent.’
There was something in back of her explanation but I didn’t know what it was. I watched the smoke pirouette upward from my gasper. ‘Or maybe you’re keeping their deals warm for them.’
She stood up and started moving with a sort of evasive aimlessness. She was a bullet of a girl, a design classic. Her weight would have doubled if she grew her hair. She lifted the cover of the Gamete book with the tip of a finger. ‘What’s the book about?’
‘Amnesia conceals a killing, as usual,’ I lied.
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