Forty-Seven
FORTY-SEVEN
The traitor knees protest as she sprints through the bowels of the Bridge.
She has to slow down; Martim and Thea lag behind her.
Eighth-generation synthtechnology is shockingly lifelike in most normal interactions, but it’s clear where the limits are.
The second stagers run slowly and with an odd, overly uniform gait that makes her think of someone jogging to the beat of a metronome while wearing braces on their legs.
Although crafted to appear as human as possible, they weren’t designed for robust athletic activity.
It’s not like jarbrains need to exercise.
At least they can’t get tired, and their knees don’t fucking hurt.
She knows this building well, has accompanied clients here many times over the decades.
She’s mapped out the route in her mind, gone over it again and again in the last few days.
Past the administrative wing with its work cubicles and meeting rooms, downstairs to the kitchen, through the staff and service corridors, to the concrete doors by the loading dock where shipments and deliveries are received.
Their strange trio doesn’t encounter anyone.
River Thea held two of Uchi’s security guards back and had them clear the way ahead of her client.
The pair of SoCon GasPro gencons in uniform are waiting at the exit, having reached it first to make sure it’s open and unobserved.
They fall in around Martim as he, Isako, and Thea emerge behind the building.
Isako scans the area; the long driveway is enclosed by desert garden landscaping that surrounds the Bridge with serenely manicured public space. At the edge of the grounds, three hundred meters away on the corner of Pine and London Street, she’s relieved to see the car and driver she asked for.
A group of four wagemen choose that very worst of moments to round the corner of the building.
One of them is carrying a sign with an unflattering caricature of Sandbar Uchi’s face.
Another has a shock baton somehow liberated from a Cityhab Security officer.
They come to a startled halt and stare at Martim in disbelief.
“Hey!” one of them exclaims. “That’s him, that’s Uchi!
He and his tracs are trying to get through the back door! ”
Isako draws as she runs straight at the man.
Her ejecting longknife slices through the sleeve and into the flesh of his raised forearm.
The shock baton falls to the ground. The man stumbles back, holding his arm and screaming.
She snatches up the baton, toggles it on, and jams the business end into his side, dropping him to the ground like a rigid board.
Two of the remaining wagemen rush to attack; the third flees. Isako leaves Uchi’s two gencon guards to deal with them. She grabs Martim’s elbow and points at the car. “Go!”
The three of them cut across the coarse sand, destroying the harmony of the grounds with sloppy, unsightly footprints as they run over clumps of scrubgrass and desert succulents, plantings of yarrow and meditation rocks. When they’re nearly at the car, Isako stops. “Go to SatOps without me.”
Martim turns, alarmed. “You’re not coming? But I need you there.”
“No, you don’t. You can handle this.” The plan was for her to accompany him to the meeting with Savannah Minto. To help broker an agreement that would serve her client’s interests and keep Martim and Thea alive.
But Marsh Elias is here, hunting. Waterboy and his followers have murder on their mind.
She won’t be able to forgive herself if either of them succeeds.
She shifts Kob’s longknife on her shoulder.
She brought him into all this, and she’s not leaving unless it’s together.
She doesn’t want to live without him. She doesn’t even want to die without him.
“I’ll meet you there as soon as I can,” she promises.
Martim starts to say something else, then changes his mind and simply nods in understanding. He takes her hand and squeezes, briefly but with feeling. “Thank you, Isa.” Then he follows Thea, and they continue on without her.
Isako turns and starts running again.
She’s halfway back to the building when the tundra motorcycle jumps the curb.
It speeds toward her, electric engine nearly silent, the grinding hiss of its tires against the sand the warning that gives her time to spin back around and shout, “ Run , get to the car, now!”
She crouches, slams her triggersheath forward.
The longknife flies into her hand and she slashes wildly upward as she dives out of the way of the oncoming motorbike.
Gravel sprays her legs; thick tires built for ice and rock fly past a handsbreadth away.
A second slower, and she would’ve been crushed beneath them with no more of a bump than an uneven bit of permafrost.
Isako hits the ground. Kob’s triggersheath flies off her shoulder and into nearby shrubbery.
She scrambles back to her feet, planting herself as the driver makes a skidding U-turn and comes racing back toward her.
He guns the engine and leans forward over the handlebars, tearing toward her like a demon.
The only part of his face visible through the motorcycle helmet is his eyes; they bulge with the same terror she saw before he turned and fled through the water recycling plant. But he’s not fleeing now.
What changed your mind, shadowcon? Isako wonders curiously, selfishly.
Has he spent sleepless nights sick with shame, thinking of how he ran away like a little pussy when his comrades did not?
How many hours has he stewed in his failure, questioning his choices and searching deep within his soul for answers?
When did he find the courage and conviction to finish what he started?
And then: what patience it took, to track her down, to prepare for this moment.
Closer and closer. Isako holds her position. The shadowcon on the motorcycle is death and she is in its path. Every fiber of her being is screaming for her to move, but she wills it not to do so, not until the last moment, when she pivots, fast and precise.
Opening the Path , the evasive Sixth Stance, letting death pass her by as she fills the space she exits with her own blade.
The shadowcon tumbles. The riderless motorcycle goes skidding wildly across the garden.
It churns a furrow through the sand, coming to rest meters away in a clump of aloe.
The man on the bike hits the ground and is rolled end over end like a tumbling carpet, but somehow he scrambles to his feet and draws his longknife.
His left arm is broken, limp against the side of his body, but he’s still not running, not this time.
Thea realizes what’s happening. In defiance of Isako’s orders, she starts running back. “ Stop ,” she shouts. “The job’s over! I didn’t ask you to keep going. It’s over , motherfucker, stop!”
Her orders go unheeded. Like a bespoke wedding cake, one does not hire shadowcons on a whim and then cancel the order. That’s not how it works.
He attacks. Even with a busted arm, he’s younger, stronger, and faster than she is. Her advantage in the quick draw is gone, and he doesn’t fuck around: killing thrust straight to the chest. She deflects, counters with a crosscut. He knocks it aside as if her longknife is a light training blade.
He’s injured, furious, and ready to die. Isako feels for him. Understands him.
Then his blade clips her across the collarbone and she feels blood seep into her thermals. With her left hand, she’s trying to gesture frantically for Thea to get the fuck out of here. She parries the next two attacks, which are inelegant and hacking, but powerful. She’s forced to give ground.
Shit. She might actually die here in the rock garden behind the Bridge, under the knife of a tardy, second-rate shadowcon. Kob is going to be so pissed with her for that.
She stops retreating and counterattacks, aims for the shadowcon’s weak side, his injured arm, cutting it wide open across the shoulder because he can’t move it well.
It doesn’t make much difference to his mobility, but it hurts a lot, will bleed a lot, will slow him down and make him hasty.
He grunts with pain and advances, tries to jam up her fighting space with his greater size, force her onto her heels.
She has to find a way to end this fast, or he will simply wear her down.
“Take Martim and get out of here!” she bellows over her shoulder.
Thea hesitates, then seems to come to her senses and remember what her priorities are. She turns around and runs in that herky-jerky jarbrain way back toward Martim and the waiting car.
The shadowcon lunges, blade seeking her throat—and stumbles.
His leading leg buckles at the precise moment he puts all his body weight on it—too much weight, because even though he’s young and strong, his high-speed fall from the motorcycle did more damage than he accounted for and he tips forward, barely catches his balance, and his kneecap goes sideways.
It’s the knees, always the knees, Isako thinks. Knees are fucking ridiculous.
She drives her longknife into the space between his neck and collarbone, pushes him down with all her trembling body weight.
He looks up at her in surprise, all the anger gone, just vague astonishment.
Young men always imagine they’re invincible, she thinks sadly.
Even at death’s door, they’re convinced that there’s been some mistake, that surely they are not supposed to be here.
The shadowcon falls face-first into the sand. Isako turns, staggers numbly away from the body.
When the gunshot goes off, it’s with a resounding bang.
Much louder than the snap of the two-shot printed pistol.
She looks down at herself. Fuck , she thinks. She braces for the blinding pain. Or maybe things will just go dark and that will be the end.
But she feels nothing. No blood, no blackout, no fatal wound.
A strange sound rises: a high keening whine like the feedback of a busted speaker. It takes Isako a moment to understand what she’s hearing. Synthetic voice boxes can’t replicate the kind of scream raw enough to sear the throat.
The driver of the car is getting out, and people are running and shouting incomprehensibly, but Isako seems trapped in slow motion as she walks as if through a fog to where River Thea sits on the ground thirty meters from the car.
Martim’s head is cradled in her lap. They look, for a second, like a pair of lovers reclining in the serenity of the rock garden, an odd sight for the media—the great Sandbar Uchi and his beautiful young wife, in another life, another reality.
The exit wound in Martim’s head is a neat and bloodless flower.
Around the deformed alloy metal skull are whitish-pink bits of brain, all the original matter left of the man within.
Sandbar Uchi’s sky-gray eyes are open and his face is as still and expressionless as it was when there was no one inside.
The longknife slips from Isako’s fingers and tumbles to the ground.
She turns and raises her eyes to the roof of the Bridge, and sees the figure of the gunman disappear.