The Eternal Prison (37 page)

 

As I looked at him, a pink puff appeared briefly behind his right shoulder. He jerked and cried out, hitting the icy ground hard.

 

I reached out and took hold of Grisha’s shoulder, dropping down onto the ice and pulling him down with me. “Sniper!” I hissed. “Stay down!”

 

Grisha hissed something into the snow I didn’t catch, wriggling to flip over onto his back. “Worms?” he panted. “More of Marin’s little robots?”

 

I started to shake my head when I noticed that Amblen, in Marin’s avatar, was still standing. As I pushed myself toward him, reaching out, the side of his coat silently exploded into a jumble of frayed threads. He didn’t even flinch. Dick Marin’s body stood there in the street like a statue, a slightly constipated expression on his square face.

 

“Down!” I hissed. “Dr. Amblen,
down!
”

 

“I’ve been shot,” Amblen said. “But I don’t think it matters.”

 

I finally hooked a hand onto his ankle and pulled, sending the avatar crashing to the street. “Override code sixty-forty-tenner-forty-alpha,” I panted. “Stay the fuck
down.
”

 

“As you suggest,” Amblen whispered back.

 

I rolled onto my back and pulled out my automatic. “Mr. Marko, you okay?”

 

“No, I am not
okay,
” he complained, his voice strained and tight. “But I won’t bleed to death
immediately,
which experience tells me is all you fucking care about at the moment.”

 

“Good,” I said. I pictured the street, the river, our little piece of the city. The collapsed buildings we’d just passed gave way to a group of semicollapsed ruins, but the first floor offered decent cover and small chance of being buried alive in crumbling masonry. The silence that smothered us when we stopped talking was immense, thick, like a gas. “Can you move?”

 

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, damn you, you fucking…
fuck.
”

 

“On our left, building with no facade,” I whispered. “Stay down. We need cover. Amblen, override code sixty-forty-tenner-forty-alpha, stay down and follow us.”

 

“As you suggest,” Amblen said amiably.

 

We crawled, tensed for the next puff of snow or fabric or blood that would be our only indication of another shot fired. The sound of scraping ice and our breathing seemed incredibly loud as we wriggled over the ice and rubble, finally finding shelter behind a semicrumbled wall of cinder blocks and the last vestiges of a stucco facade. I lay there for a moment, leg aching, and stared at the thin trail of pinkish blood Marko had left behind.

 

You see how existence is a wheel. You put death into the engine, and death comes out of the engine. You have killed so many as they begged for their lives, no doubt this is how your own end will be. Now or later.

 

I closed my eyes.
Shut up,
I thought.

 

As usual, when one of them woke up and started talking, the others were roused. I didn’t understand it. They were walled off—I couldn’t examine them or see their thoughts. I could speak to them, in a sense, and they to me. They could answer questions, and usually did. And I couldn’t stop them from talking to me. I could ignore them, push them back until they were so far away I could
almost
pretend they weren’t there, but they came back. They always came back.

 

Well, Mr. Cates, I can’t say I’m surprised. You’re a quarter mile from my seat of operations! You didn’t expect I’d never find you, did you?

 

Shut up,
I thought again.

 

Death,
the first one whispered,
is not inevitable. But you may have missed your own path to immortality.

 

“Avery?”

 

I opened my eyes and looked at Grisha, whose face had the familiar expression of worry. I was losing my mind. I didn’t blame him, and struggled to concentrate. “Sitting here waiting is a death sentence,” I said. “I’m going up and out to take a look. You stay here and keep these two alive.”

 

“
Now
you want to keep me alive?” Marko panted.

 

“There may be more than one,” Grisha advised. “They may have spotters. You may be shot the moment you poke your head out.”

 

I nodded. “Maybe.” I gestured at Marin’s avatar. “He was standing there for what, ten seconds? Sounds like a single shooter reloading a precision weapon.”

 

Grisha chewed on that for a moment and nodded. “Yes. But there may be others
without
precision weapons, yes?”

 

I nodded back, checking my auto. “In that case, no problem.”

 

I stood up and ran my eyes over the interior of our little shelter. Fragments of a second floor were still in place, supported mainly by the rubble beneath them. I saw daylight not too far above that and judged I could get up there, even with my leg feeling like someone had jabbed an ice pick into the nerve. As I moved upward onto a small mountain of stone and rebar, I heard Marko coughing behind me.

 

“Well, shit,” he spluttered. “This plan’s going
perfectly.
”

 

I found the climb up easier than I’d expected—the rubble was at a decent incline and was stable enough that after a few wary seconds I threw caution to the wind and just started pushing myself up, my leg complaining. I was standing on the scrap of floor left on the second story in just a few moments, and on the side of the building, miraculously, was an almost perfectly preserved balcony, crusted in dirty ice. I stepped onto it slowly, senses straining for any sign of collapse, and then crouched down so that my eyes just cleared the railing. I had a good view of the road we’d been following and the river. I scanned carefully, blinking the glare out of my eyes, and then froze.

 

Unbelievably, a single figure was making its way rapidly along the road, jogging with something long and thin in its hands. I stared for a moment, wondering at the existence of someone skilled enough to even get a shot close to us at that range but stupid enough to come jogging up the road in plain view.

 

No one on my payroll would be that stupid,
Marin said in my head. I had no idea how old the imprint of the King Worm in my head was, how recent its information was.

 

“You’re right,” I whispered.

 

A second later, a creak of the blasted roof above made me freeze.

 

“Don’t move,” she said.

 

The voice was so familiar it was as if months hadn’t passed since I’d last heard it. I saw her face again, twisted up in horror, in regret, in emotions I wasn’t even sure I could identify. My heart lurched into a furious pounding. I opened my mouth to say her name, but my tongue was too thick and I just hung there.

 

“Drop the cannon.”

 

I doubted Grisha or Marko could hear us below. I could make noise, but she might get hurt in the ensuing chaos. I set the automatic down on the balcony floor, wind whipping up and spraying ice dust around me. I swallowed what felt like a rock in my throat. “Marlena,” I said, my voice raspy, unwilling. “You’re —”

 

“Shut your fucking fake mouth, you fucking robot,” she hissed. I heard a hollow popping noise and then the unmistakable hum of something powering up. “They told me what you were. They told me this would shut you down pretty good.”

 

Here we go,
I heard Dolores Salgado whisper.
Clench your teeth, or you’ll bite your tongue off.

 

I started to say something else when she smacked something against my back and pain ran into me like electric current, setting every individual cell of my body on fire.

 

 

 

 

PART FOUR

 

 

 

 

XXXII

STARTING TO BLACKEN ON THE EDGES

 

 

 

 

I awoke to a sensation of movement—rapid and bumpy, my stomach lurching against gravity, my shoulders biting into tight straps painfully. A sizzling echo of pain remained under my skin, dull and fading but hinting at something terrible, as if whatever had been used on me had singed my cells, my atoms.

 

It took me a moment to realize that my eyes were still closed.

 

I was inside a small vehicle, something I’d never seen before. We were ground level, the landscape streaking past the windows that lined the sides. The interior was divided into two halves separated by a sturdy-looking metal cage; my half contained two hard chairs outfitted with straps and handcuffs—one of which was my current perch—and nothing else aside from the smell of piss. The front was filled with a huge bank of controls, all backlit blue and red, glowing in the dusky light of the interior as if the vehicle were burning within, and a single seat situated in front of a round stick that turned smoothly from side to side. Sitting in the seat was Marlena.

 

I studied her for a moment. She looked as I remembered her—skinny as hell, without a curve to her name, but graceful in her way, compact and minimal. I hadn’t seen her since the hover had lifted off from Chengara, leaving me lying there about to have my brains sucked out of my skull, her face leaning out over the edge of the hover’s hatch. I could picture her in that moment, her exact expression, and I still thought it was completely raw shock and horror. She hadn’t wanted to leave me behind. Her ink looked like shadows clinging to her skin.

 

“What the hell is this thing, anyway?”

 

She didn’t react. After a moment she said, “Ground transport. Solid fuel cell.”

 

Inefficient,
Squalor grumped in my head.
Ancient tech.

 

I turned my head to watch the world rocketing by. “What is this, the fucking dark ages?”

 

She shrugged, her shoulders moving under her skin. “Hovers have a tendency to get shot down these days. Things are pretty hairy out there, Plastic Man. Once we hit the shore I was given this thing to stay under the radar, you know? Right now the fucking government is knocking everything out of the sky.”

 

“So Marin gave you
this?
”

 

Hell, I didn’t even know we had stuff like this! How long have I been off loop, anyway?

 

“Fresh out of the factory. I think there’s only five or six of these in the whole System. It’s all-terrain—you can drive underwater in it if you have to. The Pigs are cranking out some seriously amazing shit because of this war.”

 

I waited a few seconds to see if she was going to start talking, but she just moved the wheel a little this way and that, course correcting. “Why?” I finally asked.

 

She didn’t answer right away. The off-rhythm thump of the ground beneath us was soothing. “Because you’re a fucking robot that looks like someone. Because you shouldn’t be shopping his face around. And because they’re paying me a lot of money to scoop you up and offered me a full walk, my file deleted.”

 

She said it all in a bland, flat voice.

 

“I’m not an avatar, Marlena.”

 

Sure you are, Avery!
Marin barked cheerfully.
We all are!

 

She snorted. “You’re a fucking Droid. A new model of Monk. They…” She paused for a second or two. “They ripped his brain out of him, and they made… you.”

 

She’d been sold on me as an avatar, and I didn’t think there was much I could say from my present position to change her mind. Of course I was dead—just about everyone processed into an avatar died. Surviving the experience almost never happened.

 

Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand perish,
Squalor breathed.

 

Almost never,
Marin agreed.

 

“Who hired you?” I said instead of arguing.

 

“Marin’s people,” she said immediately. “They’re paying us an
immense
amount of money to gather you up. It hasn’t been easy. Don’t you stay in one place for any length of time?”

 

“Not anymore. I don’t have any place to stay.”

 

We rode along in silence for a while. I mulled it all over—that last night, the chaos of the riot, the hover lifting off without me, the underground lab, Ruberto’s soldiers busting in. I let the atmosphere in the cabin settle down, get calm and smooth, and then asked her my question.

 

“Do you know where Michaleen is?”

 

“That fucking piece of short shit,” she spat immediately. “No. Wish I did. Filled Grisha with sunshine about you betraying us, but I knew better. Set that hover down in Mexico and said he was stepping out to check on the displacers. I gave him five minutes and went out to maybe beat the truth out of him, and the motherfucker was gone, like a ghost. Like he’d dug a hole and climbed in. Fuck, if that son of a bitch showed up in front of me now, I’d slit his throat twice without thinking. He
killed
you. Just like he’d pulled the trigger himself.”

 

I tested the straps a little, seeing if they had any give. They were pretty advanced, though, giving when the vehicle lurched and I was carried along by momentum, but refusing to move at all if I just tried to lean forward. My hands were bound in the usual silicone bracelets I was already almost free from, twisting my wrists out of her sight. I tested the straps again and realized their variable give was tied to momentum—if I tried to move slowly, carefully, they gave a little, and I could spool out enough slack to duck under.