Falling (2 page)

‘I'll be there.'

The thrash-metal had subsided into a gut-vibrating percussive thumping. Finding themselves largely ignored, the dance troupe were in retreat, pausing only to lap-dance the occasional customer drunk enough to tip for what most of the clientele would have done for free.

‘So,' Miyahara said casually, leaning back in his seat, ‘how is the saving-the-world business these days?'

‘It pays the bills.'

‘Saved anyone famous recently? C'mon, just an off the record rumour, no one's going to trace it to you.'

Jude couldn't quite repress a smile. ‘And what if I did? Let's say I ReTrace to save the President of Outer Mongolia from an assassin, have the guy arrested as he enters the concert hall instead. By definition, there was no assassination attempt. And even your gutter press rag isn't so desperate that it'll report non-events.'

‘Okay.' The female nodded, unfazed. ‘So, what about the inside story on bodyguarding the rich and famous? You have to follow them around, right? So you'll be in the right place to jump back to if anything happens. You must have seen a few things in your time. Sex, drugs, all the usual – and the less usual. I heard Sandra Rose had her vocal chords reshaped to the same dimensions as Elvis's, you got anything on that?'

Jude downed her scotch. She was beginning to get the feeling that, whatever she'd come back here to fix, it had nothing to do with Miyahara.

‘If I spot any starlets with their pants down, I'll give you a call. Right now, I have to visit the freshening room.'

‘I could come and, ah, give you a hand.' Miyahara smiled up at her. ‘Don't say you aren't curious.'

‘It's not that, Miya.' A sudden influx of rowdy girls in short pants had started a crowd current, and she took advantage of it, letting the shifting patterns of movement carry them apart. ‘You should know by now. I never did go for blondes.'

Any attempt to divide the freshening rooms into ladies and gents had long since been abandoned, and inside clubbers of every conceivable gender were fighting for mirror space. Posturing abandoned, they jostled and elbowed, leaning close to the badly-lit glass to powder and paint with fierce self-absorption.

Jude sighed and headed for the cubicles.

The things you had to do to hear reliable gossip these days.

In a competitive market that catered for every taste, Club Andro thrived on its reputation for gossip. You wanted the latest scandal from New Hollywood, or good bets for your share portfolio, or just about anything else, this was the place to come.

Rumour had it that Leonarda, the gone-to-seed porn actress who'd founded the place with her last libel award, paid industry insiders hard cash to break their rumours here first. Just to preserve the club's reputation. You could spot her contacts, people maintained, by the overacted secrecy and the stage whispers. Now everyone who wanted to look important enough to be paid for their info sat hamming it up in corners, muttering just a little too loud and scowling at the tourists.

It tended to make for an interesting evening.

The facilities reeked of cheap perfume, and by the time she'd checked the hidden pockets of her coat – wads of various currencies, a fresh battery in the shock-net sewn into the velvet, painkillers and two trank darts, all present and correct – Jude was finding it hard to breathe.

How anyone ever survived an assignation in here without asphyxiating, she'd never know. Maybe that explained some of the more interesting noises coming from adjacent cubicles.

Buttoning the black cotton shirt defensively to the collar, Jude wrenched the cubicle door open and took two steps into the chaos.

‘We was beginning to think,' a soft voice said into her ear, ‘that you have a weak bladder.'

Turning her head just enough to look MultiLegion in the eye, Jude tried a thin smile.

She knew exactly when she was now.

And she was in deep shit.

‘MultiLegion –'

Echoing the words inside her head, words she remembered speaking, when was it? Must have been early November last year, the streets had been sugared with frost when they went out to the alley…

Not the alley. Don't think about the alley, not yet. Concentrate on the present, on re-enacting everything just right, on looking for the one tiny thing to change.

Staring into eyes the colour of blood, Jude croaked, ‘Whoever it is sent you, whatever they paid, GenoBond will pay you double.'

Drawing himself up to his full seven-and-a-half feet, MultiLegion shook his huge, heavy head. Lank dreadlocks writhed across his copper-brown shoulders. Mock armour was in right now, but she got the feeling the overlapping metal snake-scales of his tunic weren't designed just for appearances.

‘Can't do that,' he said, as if she'd asked him to overlook some minor offence, just this once. ‘Always do what I'm told. That's the deal.'

‘Yeah, you're well known for your honesty.' Jude slid one hand casually across the hip of her coat. Just a few more inches to the seam of the outside pocket and the pressure point to activate the shock net. ‘You should consider breaking the rules once in a while. Keep your adversaries on their toes –'

His vast hand closed on her elbow, forcing her arm flat against her side, into full contact with the hidden steel mesh, just as she hit the pressure point. Five thousand volts arced through the net and earthed, mainly through her. She felt the muscles of her throat contract into a yell that never happened. Then she was face down on the tiles, whining faintly, dim red pulses strobing behind her eyelids.

MultiLegion, who must have taken a considerable amount of the discharge, looked down at her in some puzzlement, unable to work out what had just happened.

‘I think,' he said, ‘I'm doing just fine so far.'

Sure you are, big guy. But then, I figure you weren't exactly like the rest of us even before someone paid for you to go into a clinic and come out part-Superman and part-God-knows-what…

Long muscular fingers bit into Jude's shoulders, tearing the velvet as they dragged her upright. She felt the warmth of his stale, amphetamine-soured breath against the back of her neck. ‘Let's go outside.'

The freshening room had emptied in record time, leaving an array of abandoned lipstick, powder and assorted stimulants. It looked like the aftermath of a police raid, waiting for the photographer.

Maybe one of the evacuees would have the consideration to hit an alarm button on the way out. And maybe not. Fitch must have heard something, at some point, or she wouldn't have made it out to the alley in time to see –

But Jude was here to change her past, not relive it, and she couldn't rely on things happening that way again. Maybe she needed them not to. Maybe being half-dismembered by MultiLegion was the price she needed to pay to swing her future away from that present-time suicide drop.

As the giant's hand fell upon her shoulder, turning her towards the exit, Jude found herself praying fervently that it wasn't.

It was only twenty metres from the freshening room to the exit. Twenty metres of people, squeezed body to body by the slow serpentine currents of the crowd, disguising furtive caresses as accidental collisions of hand and body, relishing the excuse to press closer.

No way even to crawl through their legs, or duck under the tables – wrought iron, too heavy for the average brawler to throw around, but Jude had a feeling that MultiLegion wouldn't have too much trouble with them.

Miyahara was still at his table, but he was too busy flirting with a couple of heavily made up Filipinos, fluttering those yard long eyelashes, and there was no way to attract his attention without MultiLegion noticing.

She was trapped. In deference to the assassin's sheer size, the crowd was parting before them; but it was a token movement, a couple of inches at most, and she knew there was nowhere to go.

For a moment, the nodding heads and animated hands dipped out of sight, and she caught a glimpse of Fitch; using some hidden foothold under the bar to pull herself up and snatch a banknote from some drunk who'd obviously been taunting her diminutive stature. Being Fitch, she clawed him across the face before dropping back out of sight again.

Looked like her best hope of rescue was a short, skinny barmaid with a nice smile. Oh, and cartilage enhanced nails, sharp as razors. Jude had been on the receiving end of those once, and removing the scars had been expensive.

Come on, Fitch. Stop hiding tips down the front of your dress, or exchanging bad jokes with the punters in five different languages. Stop doing your job, sweetheart, and look this way…

MultiLegion's hand tightened on her shoulder, and they were at the door, trying to ease out unnoticed as a gaggle of tourists wearing Afro-Rap-star bodies pressed crumpled bills into the doorman's hand.

This was her last chance.

A squabble somewhere behind them sent a shock wave through the crowd; the tourists hesitated and stumbled against one another in the doorway, and an elbow caught Jude in the ribs, pushing her against the doorframe.

Her fingers closed on the twin layers of metal, found the crack between them, touched the sensor strip for the main alarm. Then another impact shoved her out into the night, and she stumbled, off-balance, down the steps and into the street.

Well, that explained how Fitch found out.

Club Andro was in East Cross, one of the quieter districts. Trendy, of course: on Millennium Avenue, three streets away, where the ground fell away from under you and teenagers committed rollerblade suicide freewheeling downhill towards the Artists' Quarter, there was something resembling overcrowding. Which, these days, meant that more than one floor in any building was occupied.

But East Cross had never recovered from the Migration; its residents had been wealthy and left en masse, and looters had wrecked most of the buildings even before fire swept in from the abandoned suburbs. The rest of the block consisted of forlorn piles of bricks, softened by patches of buddleia and emaciated gorse. Even the hastily whitewashed walls of the Club, seen in daylight, revealed an undercoat of soot and heat-bubbled paint.

Of course, none of the would-be clubbers queuing at the door for a credit check had ever seen the place in daylight. Nor had the huddle of teenagers who'd been refused admittance, and now loitered across the street, blowing on their cupped hands and scowling hostility at the flickering neon facade. They knew better than to look at their dreams under so harsh a light.

Jude didn't bother to look surprised as MultiLegion steered her into the adjacent alley, a jumble of firebombed recycling bins, broken glass and long-lost underwear. She had a reputation for being undemonstrative, even unemotional. In fact, like most ReTracers, she made a point of hiding her initial reaction to any situation; it made life easier if she had to come back to it at any point.

In fact, just like the first time, she was practically shitting herself.

Harchak was waiting in the shadows at the end of the alley, exactly the way he had before.

She found herself comparing details, looking for the things that had changed, the clues to which way to push the situation. The broken bottles arrayed along the top of the low wall, catching the moonlight like lanterns; the way the ivy had punched through the crumbling brick, curling lustfully towards the dim reflected neon. A drainage channel crossing the alley – she'd stumbled there the last time, had to be careful not to do that again – and there was the fragment of red satin, probably a suspender belt, tattered by crows looking to line their nests in style.

And something else.

The way MultiLegion shambled along behind her, the snuffling of his breath, the way his fingers on her shoulder had seemed more like claws. Okay, he'd never exactly been Mr Civilised – not exactly a prerequisite for the job – but now…

The boy, quite obviously, ain't right.

Her heel skidded down the shallow incline of the drainage channel and, startled by her inability to prevent the obvious, she let herself fall. MultiLegion snatched at the small of her back, tearing the coat still further, but she was already on the ground, blinking up at Harchak's luminous grin, rainwater seeping through the knees of her slacks.

‘That's where I like them,' Harchak smiled, stopping his blade absently across the silicised surface of his jacket. ‘On their knees.'

‘Yeah, fuck you too –'

Something was breathing on her cheek.

Turning her head, slow and unthreatening, Jude found herself staring into the wet, red maw of something neither animal nor man.

The eyes were human, blue and clear and infinitely sad, but the head was long, lupine, the skin grey and peeling around enlarged nostrils. It stank of piss and amphetamines and acrid, human sweat.

She turned – on one knee, grinding her best slacks into the mud – and saw the same animal glint in MultiLegion's eyes. The same eyes, the same smell. Variations on the same species.

Miyahara was right. The clinics had gone insane –

And this was definitely not how things happened before.