Cates 04 - The Terminal State (36 page)

“I am sure that I don’t know,” Belling said in the Poet’s voice, without the Poet’s inflections or rhythms. “Because I’m a separate entity, you see.”

Michaleen nodded, pursing Mara’s lips, ticked his arm up an inch and put two shells into the wall behind Belling, missing him by precise centimeters. Belling didn’t flinch or move the gun from my cheek. Sweat streamed down my face. I felt like the gun attached to me was all that was holding me up, like I was hanging off of it.

“
Don’t
get fucking smart with
me
, Wallace,” Michaleen snapped. “Dying ain’t pleasant whether you’re flesh and blood or silicone and coolant, I’m thinking. At least when there’s a professional involved. And if you die
here
, Wa, die knowin’ I’m gonna kill each and every one of you out and about, yeah? So you got any theories on where you are right now, with my fucking property? And keep the fucking vocabulary small, eh, ’cause you know I’m just a rat from the streets, lackin’ your education.”

“Cainnic,” Belling said slowly, “I do not
know
where my physical body is. I have been with you, riding herd on Mr. Cates and his charming array of personal tics. We are, in fact,
assuming
that this is my doing. Perhaps I failed in my mission.”

Mickey grinned, shaking Mara’s head again. “Nope, this is classic Wallace Belling, ain’t it? You probably spent days loitering about, sneaking in and out just to show you could, and when you finally got tired of fuckin’ with them, you came in here and made the biggest fuckin’ mess you could. That’s you all over, Wallace. Nice suits and pretty words but you’re still that fucked-up kid I took under my wing, performing surgeries on dogs without anesthesia.”

Belling’s avatar shrugged as I went over the preceding weeks in my mind, searching for clues. It was uncanny how well Belling had played his role. I’d figured Mara for an avatar, and on some inner level I’d suspected much longer, but Belling had completely fooled me, and it made me want to reach out and strangle him. But there was no fucking point. Michaleen had his toy, and if it actually worked, he was going to be the most dangerous man in the System—what was left of it—and I’d lost my chance to make him regret ever fucking with me.

“If it
was
me, Cainnic, I still don’t know where
me
is, okay? Stop living down to my expectations. We need to—”

“Ah, the hell,” Michaleen muttered, jerked his arm up precisely, and shot him three times in the chest.

Belling dropped to the floor and Michaleen was in the air, launching his avatar toward us. Belling rolled into my legs, knocking me over and taking me out of the equation for a second—which seemed unnecessary; I was filled with lead and acid. It felt like I was dying, a little faster than usual.

Before I hit the floor, Belling’s avatar was up, a pinkish mixture of fake blood and white coolant spraying out of his belly and coating me. Michaleen landed where he’d been a moment earlier and slid an extra foot, losing his balance in Mara’s slim, flexible form, his feet shooting out from under him. I pulled on every remaining bit of energy left to me and scissored my legs underneath myself, pushing me up into a wild stagger. I crashed back into Londholm, knocking the chair and its grisly occupant over and landing on top of him. He burst open under my weight, the smell hitting me in the face as I flipped backward over him, avoiding clubbing my head on the windows by an inch or so.

I dragged my Roon from its pocket; it felt heavy and impossible in my hand, and as I tried to get a bead on either one of the fucking robots, it was like I’d slowed down my own personal time; the gun trailed behind them, waving this way and that, fucking useless. The tiny exclamation point representing Berserker Mode blinked in the corner of my eye, the only part of my HUD that hadn’t wilted into a dark, angry red or yellow, every single system monitored by my augments warning me of impending shutdown.

Michaleen sprang up, whipping his gun around, but Belling ducked low and barreled into the smaller avatar, slamming him back against the wall hard enough to crack the drywall. The old man—in his shiny young avatar—sprang back immediately and dived down, taking hold of Michaleen’s thin, girlish legs and jerking backward, straightening up and letting him slap down hard on the floor again.

I caught sight of Belling’s face—the motherfucker was grinning.

He stepped halfway backward and swung Michaleen around once, halfway again, and let go, sending him sailing into the wall that separated the bathroom from the rest of the space. Mara’s taut body slammed into it and formed a deep impression, then fell on her ass into a perfect sitting position. Without even a second of hesitation, she raised her gun and fired six times at Belling as he danced to the side and retreated toward the entrance of the room. Three of the shots shattered the glass behind me, letting in a sudden maelstrom of damp wind and noise.

Michaleen leaped, tucked and rolled, and came up gun in hand in the hallway, but Belling had disappeared. He dropped a clip and reloaded as Belling shouted from beyond the walls, the Poet’s voice still sounding crazy in my ears without the weird beats he’d always had.

“C’mon, you ancient cunt! You still think you have a step on me? I’m not twelve any more, Cainnic, and I am sick to fucking death of your mush-mouthed bullshit!”

Mara’s body sprinted into the darkness of the outside hall. I put my gun on her back and held it there, shaking, until she was swallowed up. Then I let my arm drop and turned to look over my shoulder.

Hong Kong was being burned to the ground.

There was fire everywhere. Darkness had crept up on us and the sky was near black, the military hovers outlined in dim lights like tiny stars cutting through a haze. Directly across from me, a tall building that was like increasingly smaller blocks set one on top of each other was burning, fire licking out of all its windows above the fifth floor or so, and it wasn’t the only building on fire. New blooms of flame erupted on the ground every few seconds, and in between the roar of them was a constant noise, without shape or definition, just an undercurrent of sound I felt more than heard.

As I stared, something streaked through the air, almost invisible, and seemed to be coming right at me for a moment, disappearing overhead for a second and then smacking into the Shannara, making the room roil around me for a second like it was made of rubber, undulating in a way that rooms normally don’t. All of the remaining glass in the window shattered and fell away, and my audio augments flatlined as the explosion pushed all the air out of the whole fucking building. Huge flaming chunks of building sailed dreamily down, like giant misshapen birds set on fire.

The building began to groan, a steady, unchanging note of severe distress.

“Might be time to get out.”

I turned, slowly, and found Michaleen standing just beyond the bathroom. Mara’s avatar had been torn up; one arm hung limp and bent at her side, and she was stained with coolant and fake blood. One of her cheeks had been sliced and torn and hung like a flap on the side of her face, something unnaturally white poking through the layer of artificial gore.

I raised the gun and held it up again.
If I had unlimited bullets
, I thought,
I might manage to hit a wall
. Before I could do anything else, the voice of the building’s shell boomed through the air.

“Attention: This structure has suffered damage. Insufficient power to engage safety systems. Structural integrity is threatened. Please evacuate immediately.”

I looked at Michaleen; our eyes met, and he put the gun right on my face from across the room and squeezed the trigger, getting the dry click of an empty chamber in return. I couldn’t focus and hold my own gun up at the same time, so I let my arm drop and got my legs under me, forcing them to move. “Seal all exits,” I said into the air. “Invoke special provision for public safety. Elevators to lobby and locked.”

There was a beat. “Token confirmed.”

“Fuckin’
pain in the ass
,” Michaleen snarled, stuffing the gun into Mara’s coat pocket and coming up with the tiny black square of my remote. “One thing I’ll give ya, Cates,” he said in Mara’s soft, almost pretty voice, “you never know when to—”

I launched myself forward as he extended the remote toward me. As his finger came down, toggling me to
dead
, I jabbed the exclamation point in the bottom corner of my HUD and everything turned red.

I crashed into Mara’s body in slow motion, a sharp pain like an ice pick jabbing into my head—but that just dissolved into the general feeling of being on fire, my skin burning, every muscle feeling torn. We hit the floor and skidded into the already smashed-up wall outside the bathroom, and I felt nothing—well, I felt
everything
, but the new pain was lost in the ocean of acid I was suddenly floating in.

Like on the train, I felt like I was just faster than everything. Beneath me, Michaleen was squirming, trying to break out from under my weight, and I knew that as an avatar he would be able to just toss me off, but he was so
slow
. I marveled at being able to feel him writhing beneath me, being able to anticipate his movements. He twisted left, digging his hands into the carpet to give himself some leverage, and tried to buck me off, so I reached around the slim waist of the avatar and hugged it to me, squeezing with everything my shredded, crystallized muscles had in them, and jabbed the Roon into Michaleen’s chest, firing twice.

Dying ain’t pleasant whether you’re flesh and blood or silicone and coolant, I’m thinkin’
, he’d said, and I hoped he was right.

The back of the avatar exploded, inches from my face, showering me with the same pinkish mix of fake blood and coolant I’d seen erupting from Belling—I wondered how much longer they’d bother putting in the fake gore, the layer of blood and tissue designed to fool assholes like me into buying the Droids as real people; one of these days, probably tomorrow, everyone in the fucking System was going to be an avatar, and what would be the point?

He flopped once under me and then went still, a thick, warm pool of white coolant spilling out beneath us. Something like an ice pick traveled through my head, making me flinch and twitch, the pain rising until I couldn’t bear it anymore. I tried to put my hands on my head to contain the swelling, but my left arm refused to move, just hanging limp and suddenly numb by my side. Then Michaleen started to laugh, and it was strange, because everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, taking decades to get to me while I hummed along, but when he started to speak in Mara’s hoarse, high-pitched voice, I had no trouble understanding him.

“Shit, this is unpleasant,” he spluttered, gouts of coolant drooling from his mouth. Then he focused on me. “You’re not dead. Ain’t that fucking bullshit, huh? Damn military tech’s as bad as the Pigs. Half the shit don’t work.”

I tried to say something back at him, but my mouth just moved in an odd way I didn’t understand. My face felt heavy and numb.

“You gonna shoot me again? Funny thing is, Avery, tomorrow I’m gonna wake up
somewhere
, y’know? And you’re not.”

The whole room suddenly twisted under us, the floor moving like rubber before settling again. The persistent groan of the building got louder.

I was shaking, heart pounding. Everything still seemed to be happening slowly, and my ruined hand didn’t bother me at all. I pushed myself up onto my knees and then tried to get up onto my feet. My left leg didn’t want to take my weight, and I staggered backward a few steps before finding the right distribution and getting stable. I dragged myself back toward the avatar, beat to hell and still grinning at me, Michaleen’s ancient mind inside the girl’s head.

“Ah, shit, I’ve pissed him off now,” Michaleen cackled as I limped toward him. “You ain’t looking so good, Avery. Maybe the revenge business isn’t good for you, eh? You should stick to doing my dirty work for me. It suits ya.”

I leaned down and with my good hand I took hold of the avatar’s coat. Blood pounding in my temples and static electricity sizzling under my skin, lifting the avatar was easy, my back popping and a searing line of distant pain shooting down into my legs as I jerked it up off the floor. Turning, I started walking toward the smashed-in windows, dragging Michaleen’s avatar behind me.

Outside, more of the city was burning, and the sky was filled with the shimmering lights of hovers. Tracers still seared up from the ground into the sky, and off in the distance a hover was crashing slowly, flames outlining it against the night. It looked like a cloud of fire just drifting lazily toward the ground. The floor shook again as I arrived at the edge of the window frame, shattered glass crunching under my feet. Wind, damp and heavy, pushed in at me, dark gray smoke trailing in behind it and slithering to the floor.

With a jerk, I tossed the avatar at the floor, where it landed awkwardly and slid a few inches to rest up against the lip of the window frame right above the floor. Mara’s face grinned at me, the flap of torn skin making it look like it had two mouths beaming at me.

“Sure you don’t wanna stuff me in a bag and carry me around? ” Michaleen squawked as I leaned down and took hold of one thin leg with my working hand. “For company? You’re a lonely guy, Avery.”

I wanted to say something back, to say,
I got enough fucking demons whispering in my ear
. I wanted to promise him that I was going to find him, the
real
him, and then we could have a little chat. I moved my mouth, but it was like the muscles had been disconnected, and nothing manifested. So I just took hold of the avatar’s leg and lurched forward, Michaleen’s laughter—Mara’s laughter—bubbling up from below as I flipped the avatar over and rolled it out of the window.

Glancing down, Mara’s upturned face was swallowed by the darkness immediately, the sound of her digital laughter cut off as if the dark were a solid barrier between us.