[02] Elite: Nemorensis (14 page)

The man’s head half twisted. ‘What?’

‘Her. She’s. She’s not who you think.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We both know who she is.’

‘So say it.’

He sighed. A fair approximation of exasperation: habitual rather than impulsive.

‘Why?’

‘Can’t execute someone if you’re not sure it’s them,’ she said. Making it up.

The cops, she was dimly aware, traded glances. Looked at the agent.

‘Fine,’ he said, shrugging. ‘She is Teesa #32A[M/Tertius]. Indentured property of one Madrien Axcelsus. Abscondee. Fugitive. Murderer.’ He started to turn back.

Got you, you little shit.

‘But isn’t that … isn’t that the woman from the
Shattergeist
we’ve heard so much about?’

‘As well you know.’

‘The … the one who’s been destroying all those ships? On the news?’

He turned his head fully at last, to face her. Eyes slendered down. She wondered in that moment if he was feeling it too: the rush of forgotten emotion, the death of numbness. If so, if his expression was indeed a mirror on his thoughts, then the wash of triumphant smuggery infecting him must have been intoxicating.

‘I don’t
have
to kill you,’ he said, quietly. ‘You know that. You’ll die anyway, afterwards. No reward. No nothing.

‘But frankly I’d far rather you saw it coming. Knowing. Do you understand? Knowing I won. Knowing I beat you. That would be nice. I think. But? If you say one more word? Trying to –
what
? To delay me? To buy time? Then I will shoot you in the belly. And your hunt will end in agony as well as defeat.’

She nodded, once. Wanting to scream.

Don’t look round don’t look round don’t look round.

The agent turned away. Back to the Fugitive.

(She: still smiling. Eyes not even flickering.
She knows. She can see them coming. Don’t look don’t move an inch—
)

‘Now,’ said the man. Smiling indecently. ‘Where were we?’

The crowd hit him like a hammer.

Like a cloud, it swallowed him. Boiled around. Slurping the cops into its mass, great sweating lips smacking shut, hair and bodies and tattoos and sequins. No gunshots fired. Fists flying, bones breaking. The mob, the fanboys, the farm-fans. The disciples defending their messiah. SixJen saw a uniformed arm spin from the mass; ragged tatters spuming in its wake. Someone screamed, someone laughed.

The name. That’s all it had taken in the end.
Teesa. Shattergeist.

Poor, culture-starved little Shibboleth. So empty of experience its own news-cycles were clogged with the
Shattergeist
’s adventures. They’d come shuffling forwards to see, their fear forgotten. Close enough to recognise her. Close enough to feel her effect.

She’s madness
, SixJen thought.
She’s love and she’s chaos and that’s normal.

But she’s hate too. She’s hate and she’s venom.

The fugitive knelt through it all. Watching. Still smiling. Letting them touch her, when the mass boiled close. Letting them press bloody lips and sweaty faces to her cheeks, her forehead.

‘Freedom to do what the fuck we want!’ someone yelled, balls deep in someone else. One of the cops, black and blue but happy, had joined in.

Madness.

The fugitive was lost to sight. Buried. Swamped. Taken into the mass like a sacrament to herself.

SixJen the killer reached out with her one remaining hand, shaking, sticky, sick with bloodloss, retching on air, and took up her gun. Tried to focus. Her eyes wouldn’t stay still. Sweating heavily. Lips hanging.
Greyworld colourworld greyworld colourworld
.

She lifted the weapon with tectonic caution. And started shooting.

The panic invaded and insulated. Filled the air. Filled his mind.

Whatever holy mystery informed Teesa’s weird influence on the kids around them, it was evidently no stronger than their more prosaic sense of self-preservation. The spell shattered the moment the mercenary-woman opened fire.

Sparks boiling. The world shaking to every shot.

Myq struggled to his feet amidst it all, shoved and shunted, snotting blood down his chin and chest, eyes watering, and tried to work out what the hell was going on.

The one-handed woman was shooting at the sky. Blood seething from her ruined wrist and across the floor. He remembered, guiltily, thinking her strikingly attractive in the crazy instants before he was knocked out: coffee brown, fastidiously hairless, features finely-printed but dead. Dead in all respects except the minor matter of being Alive.

Like a robot
, he’d thought.

Not now. Now she was ashen, gloss-browed, eyes heavy and limbs limp.
Blood loss
, he figured. And weirdly, as if whatever numbing drug she’d taken (
what else could it be
?) had flushed clear through her open wound, now she was transformed. Fierce-eyed, snarling, firing into the ceiling with chin forward and teeth flashing. Spittle on her lip. Sweaty-faced.

Hot
, Myq thought. Then hated himself.

She was clearing the room, that was obvious. Even through her grimaces, thinking tactically. Not aiming
at
but aiming
to –
to terrify the kids, to blast them back to sense, to send them scampering for the door.

To open a path to—

Tee.

She wants Tee
.

Myq piled into the maul without thinking. Even with the carapace of horny flesh dissipating from the outside, Teesa was buried deep, a crush of limbs and shoes and sequins, of stinking scents and rolling eyes, and Myq found her only by flashes of her hair – silken black, discernible from the peacock-heads around it.

He hauled her out. He drew her from the crush like a survivor from wreckage and barely felt the effort. He dragged her –
her
, giggling;
her
, coiling arms round him;
her
, crooning his name;
her
, high on herself – back from the crowd, back from the killer, keeping the shrieking kids between them. Dragged her behind the bar, towards a service door, into the maw of a strip-lit corridor, out, out,
out
.

Only when he was halfway through the aperture, inured by jangling focus to the roaring weapon behind him, only then did it occur that all his thoughtless machismo, all his adrenal strength, all his uncharacteristic decisiveness, was predicated at least as much upon his seething jealousy at Tee sharing herself amongst all those writhing little shits –
mine! mine! –
as upon the tawdry matter of sparing her from impending execution.

‘Myq?’ Teesa said. A weird note to her voice. ‘Myq, look.’

He stopped. Let her regain her feet. Glanced back.

Someone had got the front door open. The club, like some clumsy decompression rendered in lurching slow-mo, was emptying all at once. And through the pack? Unblinking in the gaps between?

Her.

Standing alone. Yes, hunched and shaking, yes weak, yes grim … but still standing. Still enduring. Still refusing to stop. Strobes bombarding her. Smoke machines wreathing her in colour.

No words. No sneered commands. She simply stared as the stampede thinned, gun gripped ungainly beneath the shoulder of her useless arm, magazine angled open, slotting fresh flechettes into its breach without shifting her eyes.

No panic. No mistakes.

Reloading.

‘Go,’ Myq said. ‘We haven’t got long. Go go go go go g—’

‘Myq.’ He felt Tee’s fingers on his cheek, felt his head being gently twisted. Her amber eyes pinning him to the spot. ‘Myq, she’ll follow. She won’t stop.’

‘But—’

‘Myq. I love you.’

Something fell out from the bottom of Myqel’s world. Something clouded his eyes and eked a current into his blood. Something removed his hands from her waist. Something swivelled his body away from her, back to the nightclub. Something squared his shoulders and set him, solid, in the doorway of the exit.

‘Go,’ he said, fully intending the gravelly heroic tone the situation demanded; in fact hitting an undignified note of petulance.

She kissed the back of his neck, maybe. He couldn’t be sure. She leaned past and fired the laser twice – maybe. He wasn’t really paying attention. She hit a couple of fleeing kids, maybe, who went down all limbs and meat-smoke. Maybe. Chuckled once. Maybe. It all seemed a little abstract.

She loves me
.

And then she was gone.

And then just emptiness, and lights flickering. And the merc.

Striding. Sudden. Dapple-lit.

‘Move.’

He shook his head. Laughed like an idiot. ‘Mine!’ he shouted. ‘She’s mine!’

The merc curled a lip and lowered a shoulder. Didn’t stop. Stumbled just once and barrelled, clumsy, into his side, apparently imagining she could shove past without resistance.

Mmmine!

She rebounded. Shock-faced. And then simply dropped – dropped slithering to the floor, bleeding out. Hissing like a dead balloon.

‘Y-you okay?’ Myq heard himself blurt. Stooping to help her on instinct, then jarring to a halt at the shimmering ridiculousness of it all, hand still outstretched. The merc simply blinked, staring up, eyes fluttering. As if, he guessed, confused at her own weakness. Fumbling again at her gun with an unsteady hand.

He slowly withdrew his arm.

‘Um.’

‘Do you know …’ the woman said, sweat dripping in her eyes, gun lodged once more in her armpit. Breach snapping open. ‘Do you know why she came here?’

‘I …’ Myq coughed politely into a fist. ‘No. No, I don’t really need to.’

‘The man. The. The man who used to own her. Y-years ago. He was a trader.’

‘Thank you,
yes
. Yes, I’m aware of that. If it’s all the same to you, please just be qu—’

‘A shibboletti trader.’

He chewed his lip. Suspecting weirdly that he should be making the most of this moment; that he should be kicking in the damaged woman’s head and running like lightning.

But he didn’t move. Couldn’t.

‘Did you know …’ the merc said, shaking hand plucking at her own chest, fiddling with something gloss-gleaming and tiny. ‘D-did you know that the price of … of shibboletti glands has increased f … four hundred percent … since your little stint killing freighters?’

‘I …’ He flopped his mouth open and shut. ‘No. No, I did not.’

The woman dropped something into the breach of the gun. Snapped it closed with a sigh, then nodded. Exhausted.

‘Well, it has.’

And then she shot him.

Later, after the rush and the escape, as the medbots of the
Shattergeist
plucked and poked at his flesh, later he would discover through the fog of anaesthetics and hormostimms that the wound was barely more than superficial: an exquisitely-placed deposit into the meat on the side of his left buttock. (The beauty of being shot in the arse, as Tee would later giggle, was that in space you never had to sit down.)

But in the moment? In the clanging silence and sharp smoke-stink of the moment, a spot of the old Falling Over Whilst Shrieking occurred. A spot of the old scrabbling to get up, of yelping at the pain, of flitting back and forth between outrage and agony, of fixating – even through all that – on the likelihood that the killer was, even then, stepping over him, stumbling onwards after her prize. And at that, at least, Myq felt a surge of triumph. The merc would never catch Tee now. He’d brought her all the time she needed.

Get to the
’
Geist
.
Get out of here!

(
I love you too!
)

But when he forced his eyes open and tried to swim above the pain the merc hadn’t moved. Too weak. Slumped against the inside of the bar, breathing heavy. Even as he watched she dug in a pocket and crammed a bright little stimm into her mouth. He almost asked if he could have one too.

You can still walk, idiot. Go.

Go go go.

‘She’s not what you think,’ the woman said, when he was halfway up.

Don’t listen. Go. Go.

‘You think she … you think she’s spontaneous. Makes it up as she goes. Because. Because she’s supposed to be. D’you understand?’

‘No.’

‘Runner’s meant to run. Make a scene. Blaze a glorious trail. Nothing else. No plans.’

Raving. Crazy with bloodloss. Ignore her. Just go.

‘That’s how it works. How … How it’s always worked. Runner runs. Hunters hunt.’ The woman turned away, spittle pendulous on her lip. And began slowly, painfully, to crawl back towards the dancefloor. ‘Taken too long, this one. She schemes. All gone wrong. Sick. Sneaky. Has to. Has to be stopped. Victor takes the crown.’ She abruptly groaned. ‘All begins again. Life cycle.’

Wait
– what?

(‘
What do you know
,’ Myq heard Tee say, a ghostly recent memory peppered with the splattered remnants of star-rammed shibboletti, ‘
about life cycles?
’)

‘Hang on,’ he blurted, addressing that fleeting memory as much as he did the bloody killer heaving herself away across the floor. ‘What do you mean?’

But the merc wasn’t listening. Muttering to herself. The early effects of the stimm blitzing her brain before her body could catch up. Soon, Myq supposed, she’d be upright, bleeding or not. Deadly again.

(
Go! Go!
)

But as he turned away she croaked one last instruction amidst the nonsense – ‘Culex …? Tell him. Tell him what she’s done. And the … the King by the Lake.
Tell him
.’

The last Myq saw of her, before stumbling into the drizzling drear, the mercenary was poised over the unconscious body of the FIA agent, methodically cutting his throat with a razor-edged flechette. And whispering a word he couldn’t hear.

Tee picked him up half a mile down the swampy access strip the repairs-crew had cut through the jungle. Hazy sensory signals, powerfully confounded by the relentless arse pain, birthed dreamlike impressions in the gaps between his memories. He recalled a phalanx of whining shapes hovering above the jungle; a tumbling squad of dainty cop-skimmers firing flak at something obscene and pink; a tinny voice too muffled to hear, calling his name; explosions amidst the sporeclouds; a bright rainbow-chute descending from above to claw him up into the sky … and then darkness and loud music and a familiar voice laughing.