Glasshouse (43 page)

“Me too,” Throwing caution to the wind: “Is that part of your problem? With being . . . this?”

“It's too close.” He swallows. “To what they wanted me to be.”

I don't ask who “they” were. “Do you want to escape? To leave the polity?”

He's silent for a long while. “I don't think so,” he says eventually. “Because I'd have to go back to being what I want not to be, if that makes sense to you. Kay was a disguise, Reeve, a mask. A hollow woman. Not a real person.”

I snuggle closer to him. “I know you wanted to grow into her.”

“Do you?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Look, why do you think
I'm
here?”

“Point.” He looks momentarily rueful. “Do
you
want to leave?”

We're not really talking about staying or leaving, this is understood, but what he really means by that—“I thought I did,” I admit, toying with the buttons on the front of his shirt. “Then Dr. Hanta sorted me out, and I realized that what I
really
wanted was somewhere to heal, somewhere to be me. Community. Peace.” I get my hand inside his shirt, and his breath acquires a little hoarse edge that makes me squeeze my thighs together. “Love.” I pause. “Not necessarily her way, mind you.” His hand is stroking my hair. His other hand—“Do that some more.”

“I'm afraid, Reeve.”

“That makes two of us.”

Later: “I want what you described.”

I gasp. “Makes two. Of us. Oh.”

“Love.”

And we continue our conversation without words, using a language
that no abhuman watcher AI can interpret—a language of touch and caress, as old as the human species. What we tell each other is simple.
Don't be afraid, I love you.
We say it urgently and emphatically, bodies shouting our mute encouragement. And in the dark of the night, when we reach for each other, I dare myself to admit that it might work out all right in the end.

We aren't bound to fail.

Are we?

BREAKFAST
is an affair of quiet desperation. Over the coffee and toast I clear my throat and begin a carefully planned speech. “I need to go to the library before Church, Sam, I forgot my gloves.”

“Really?” He looks up, worry lines crisscrossing his forehead.

I nod vigorously. “I can't go to Church without them, it wouldn't be decent.”
Decent
is one of those keywords the watchers monitor. Gloves aren't actually a dress code infraction, but they're a good excuse.

“Okay, I suppose I'll have to come with you,” he says, with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing the airlock. “We need to leave soon, don't we?”

“Yes, I'd better get my bag,” I say.

“I have a new waistcoat to wear.”

I raise an eyebrow. His clothing sense is even more artificial than my own. “It's upstairs,” he explains. For a moment I think he's going to say something more, something compromising, but he manages to bottle it up in time. My stomach squirms queasily. “Take care, darling.”

“Nothing can possibly go wrong,” he says with studied irony. He rises and heads for the staircase to our bedroom. (
Our
bedroom. No more lonely nights.) My heart seems to catch an extra beat. Then it's time to clear up the detritus, put the plates in the dishwasher, and get my shoes on.

When Sam comes downstairs, he's dressed for Church—with a many-pocketed vest under his suit jacket, and, in his hand, the briefcase we packed yesterday. “Let's, uh, go,” he says, and casts me a wan grin.

“Yup,” I say, then check the clock and pick up my extra-large handbag. “Let's roll.”

We arrive at the library around ten o'clock, and I let us in. The door to the cellar is already open. I reach into my bag as I go down the steps, conscious that if someone's blown the operation, then the bad guys could be waiting for me. But when I get to the bottom I find Janis.

“Hi, Janis,” I say slightly nervously.

“Hi yourself.” She lowers her gun. “Just checking.”

“Indeed. Sam? Come on down.” I turn back to Janis. “Still waiting for Greg, Martin, and Liz.”

“Right.” Janis gestures at a pile of grayish plastic bricks sitting on one of the chairs. “Sam? I think it'll work better if you carry these.”

“Sure.” Sam ambles over and picks up a brick. Squeezes it experimentally, then sniffs it. “Hmm, smells like success. Detonators?”

“On the sofa.” I spot the stack of spare magazines and take a couple, then check they're loaded properly. “Where are the cogsets?” I ask.

“Coming.” Janis waves at the A-gate. “We need to synchronize our watches, too.”

“Okay.” This isn't going to work too well without headsets and cognitive radio transceivers, but they're last on our list of items to assemble because they're too obvious. They're easier to sabotage than metal plumbing and chemical explosives, and a lot likelier to tripwire the alarms in the A-gate than a collection of antiques. If the radios don't work, our fallback is crude—mechanical wristwatches and a prearranged time to start shooting.

Sam stuffs bricks of Composition-C into his vest pockets, squeezing them to fit. The vest bulges around his waist, as if he's suddenly put on weight, and when he pulls his jacket on it hangs open. What he's doing reminds me of something I once knew, something alarming, but I can't quite remember what. So I shake my head and go upstairs to wait behind the front desk.

A few minutes later Martin and Liz arrive together. I send them down to the basement. I'm getting worried when Greg appears. We're running short of time. It's 10:42 and the meeting is due to start in just a kilosec or so. “What kept you?” I ask.

“I feel rough,” he admits. I think he's been drinking. “Couldn't sleep properly. Let's get this over with, huh?”

“Yeah.” I point him at the cellar. “Gang's down there.”

T minus ten minutes. The door opens, and Janis comes out. “Okay, I'm off to start the show in the auditorium,” she tells me. A fey smile. “Good luck.”

“You too.” She leans forward, and I hug her briefly, then she's off, walking down the library path toward City Hall.

“Where's Sam?” I ask.

“Oh, he had something extra to do down there,” Liz says, a trifle sniffily. “Last-minute nerves.” A moment later he comes up the stairs. “Come on, Sam, want to miss the show?”

I open my mouth. “Time to move!”

Fragments of memory converge on a point in time:

Five of us, three males and two females, walking along the front of Main Street toward City Hall. All in our Church outfits, with subtle changes—Sam's vest, my shoes, Martin's bag. Discreet earbuds adding their hum to our left ears, flesh-toned pickups parallel to our jawlines. Businesslike.

“Merge with the crowd, then when they head for the auditorium doors, break left under the door labeled
FIRE EXIT
. Meet me on the other side.”

Purpose. Tension. Beating heart, nervousness. A faint aroma of mineral oil on my fingertips. The usual heightened awareness.

Cohorts and parishes of regular citizens—inmates—are gathering on the front steps and in the open reception hall of the biggest building on Main Street. Some I recognize; most are anonymous.

Jen looms out of the crowd, smiling, converging on me. My guts freeze. “Reeve! Isn't it wonderful?”

“Yes, it is,” I say, slightly too coldly because she stares at me, and her eyes narrow.

“Well, excuse
me
,” she says, and turns on her heel as if to walk away, then pauses. “I'd have thought you'd be celebrating.”

“I am.” I raise an eyebrow at her. “Are you?”

“Hah!” And with a contemptuous smirk, she wheels away and latches on to Chris's arm.

A cold sweat prickles up and down my spine—sheer relief, mostly—
and I head toward the
FIRE EXIT
sign, which is conveniently close to the rest rooms. I pause for a second to glance around and check my watch (T minus three minutes) then lean on the emergency bar. The door scrapes open, and I step through into a concrete-lined stairwell.

Click. I glance round. Liz lowers her gun.
I'm too slow today
, I think hopelessly. I mute my mike. “Two minutes,” I say, backing into the corner opposite her niche. She nods. I reach into my bag, pull out my gun, stuff the spare magazines into my pockets, and drop the bag. Click. That's me.

One minute. Sam and Greg and Martin, the latter looking slightly harried. I key my mike. “Follow me.”

A couple of weeks ago, wearing Fiore's stolen flesh, I explored this complex—extremely cautiously, taking pains to be certain that Yourdon was occupied elsewhere at the time. The first floor contains the lobby and a big auditorium, plus a couple of things described on the building map as “courtrooms.” The second floor, which we pass without stopping, is wall-to-wall office space. The third floor . . . well, I didn't spend much time there.

We reach the door and pause. “Zero,” I say, tracking the sweep of my watch hand.

A second later there's a chime in my headset.
“Go!”
says Janis.

“Now.”

Greg opens the door fast, and Martin and Liz duck through, then pronounce the bare-floored corridor clear. I lead us along it, then there's another door, and Greg forces the exit bar from our side.
Carpet.
A short, narrow passage.
Yourdon must have left by now, surely?
I rush forward and find myself in a boringly mundane living room, furnished in dark age fashion except for the smooth white bulge of an A-gate in one corner. “Here,” I say. “Spread out.”

We're not experts at house searches. Doubtless if there was armed resistance waiting for us, we'd be easy prey. But the house is empty. Three bedrooms, a living room, an office—there's a desk and an ancient computer terminal, and books—and a kitchen and bathroom and another room full of boxes. It's
empty
. Empty of personality as well as anachronisms like a longjump gate.

“What now?” asks Sam.

“We check out front.” I walk up to the front door of the apartment, then Greg squeezes past me and unlocks it. He pulls it open and steps out, then I follow to see where we are, and the ground leaps up and whacks me across the knees with a concussive jolt too deep to call a noise.

“Panic one,”
Janis says in my ear, a prearranged code for Team Green.
That was a bomb
, I think dizzily.

There's a click behind me, then a scream of pain. I whip round and that saves my life because the short burst of gunfire hammers past me and catches Liz instead, bullets slapping into her body as she spins round. I keep turning and drop to one knee, then fire a continuous burst that empties the magazine and nearly sprains my wrists.

“* * *,” says Janis, in my ringing ears.

“Repeat.” I'm staring at Greg. What used to be Greg. Someone behind me is making horrible sounds. I think it's Liz. “We have a code red, two down.”

“I said, Panic two,” says Janis. “They've got a Vorpal—”

Pink noise fills my ears, and her voice breaks up: cognitive radios meet heuristic jamming. “Come on!” I yell at Sam, who's bending over Liz. “Follow me!”

We're on a landing at the top of the stairs. Yourdon's apartment covers one side of the building, but on the other side—there's a door. I dash toward it, reloading on the go.
Greg tried to kill me
, I realize.
Which means he warned them. So
 . . .

I pause at one side of the door and wave Sam to the other. Then I brace myself and unload the entire clip through it at waist height.

While my ears are ringing, and I'm fumbling the next magazine into place, Sam kicks the door in and quickly shoots the police zombie slumped against the side of the corridor in the head. (That one was still moving, hand creeping toward the shotgun lying in the floor; the two bodies behind it aren't even twitching.) Seeing how efficiently Sam steps in gives me a momentary chill of recognition.
No hesitation.
Behind us, Liz is still moaning, and Martin won't be good for anything. “What is this place?” I ask aloud.

“More offices.” Sam kicks a door open and duck-walks through it.
“Modern offices.” I follow him. The next door is more substantial, opening onto a glass-fronted balcony above a room with open floor space, an office-sized assembler at one side, and a row of glassy doors . . . “Is that what I think it is?”

Bingo.
“Gates,” I say. “A switch hub. How do we get down—”

“Hello, Reeve,”
says my earpiece, in a voice that sets my teeth on edge.
“This isn't going to work, you know.”

Where did Fiore get a headset from? Greg? Or have they captured one of Team Green?

Sam looks as if someone's poleaxed him. His jaw is literally gaping. Too late I realize he's on the same chatline.