Archon's Queen (34 page)

“I’m sure they’ll”―another wave of blurriness rippled through her mind―“benefit from having you as a friend.”

“James… I want to be with you, I’ve never felt so safe.” Her arms tightened around him. “I have to do something for them first.”

Whirring accompanied the small bot as it tended to his abandoned plate and gathered the utensils for cleaning. James glanced at the wall, a faint hint of frown at the corner of his lip.

She stifled another tremble. “Are you angry?”

His face relaxed, his warm breath fell over the top of her head. “No, Anna… I am worried. I do not want you to do anything reckless.”

ine Clifton Hill sat amid a strip of residences that had been rebuilt a few centuries ago, soon after the war. Constructed in an archaic style, the buildings held ten accommodations stacked vertically, each the size of a one-story house. Advertised as ‘full-floor flats,’ they were the purview of the not quite wealthy.

Induced trees sprouted through the footpath, their trunks twisted in an artistic manner through decorative iron grillwork. Branches fluttered in the incessant wind. Rain still came, but it had fallen off to a weak drizzle her new coat shrugged off. Bundled in it, Anna felt like a different person from the one who existed only a night ago. No one so much as offered her a second glance; she looked like she belonged. Her no longer bare midriff gave her warmth, and the presence of underclothes embraced her with long lost dignity.

She had become a Proper overnight.

For many blocks in all directions, patches of pale orange light flickered in the gloom of the approaching storm, a dozen-dozen pictures of Faye in hologram, mounted to any vertical surface someone could find. Little devices the size of a thumbnail projected the vision of a black-haired porcelain doll to the world, smiling in a pose for a class portrait.
She looks so different with her hair blue.

Faye Taylor, 13, missing daughter. Last seen two weeks ago. AF851.185CC.9185F.FFBDD. Reward if found. Ͼ100,000.

That was likely her father’s code; like posting one’s name, address, phone number, resume, and bank account number, an invitation to every cyberspace criminal in the world to come sniff you out.

The man must be nuts to post his PID in the open like that, daft or desperate.

Anna stood by one such hologram, staring into the virtual eyes flickering with windblown debris. The ghostly face looked as innocent on the outside as Faye did on the inside, devoid of blue hair and attitude.

A tiny grey car squeaked past her in the street and came to a halt at the adjacent building. From it, a middle-aged lumpy man emerged in a brown sweater and grey slacks. He squinted into the wind, his eyes receding into a face pasty and puffy. Anna recognized him from Faye’s nightmares: Mr. Bell, the man who had stuck his hand where it did not belong.

Anna thought back to the Crossman in the alley and shifted her stance at the remembered touch, the sensation of a cold finger where she did not want it. Latent anger swirled as she stared at the nervous potbellied man leaning through the open door to gather things from the car. He seemed to feel the malice in her stare and looked around like a mouse sensing the eagle before the dive; with each second, his motions picked up speed.

Her gaze shifted to the warm glow in the windows of number nine Clifton Hill, trying to guess which floor the girl lived on, which floor still held the people Mr. Bell tortured by his continued existence.

She drew her coat tight against a building gust of wind, which knocked one of the man’s parcels to the ground. He stooped to retrieve it and she imagined the Crossmen finding Faye, and then felt the man on top of her again, the cold metal refuse bin digging into her hips. Her mind taunted her with what could have happened if she was an ordinary woman out on the blag with her mate’s no-good boyfriend, taunted her with the dread of what would have happened to her best friend if she had no little monster inside her head.

Come off it, Anna. If you were normal, you’d have a loving home and would never have met Penny.

The lamps on the front of Bell’s car blew off in a shower of sparks, sending him scurrying up onto the porch with a high-pitched nasal whine.

How like a pig you squeal.

“Evenin’ Deacon,” said another man, on his way out of the building.

The two struck up a banal conversation, the sort of things middle-aged men in a well-to-do section of London chatted about in passing. The sort of things people with no true worries or no true desire to be friends used to fill the five minutes that fate and courtesy forced them to interact.

Anna glanced at the empty false lawn in Faye’s yard that approximated the place the old pink bicycle had been left in hers. Her father had only beaten her, drunk and angry at how many things she broke. Drunk and terrified of the creature he shared a flat with, and rightly so. The beating that made her fear for her life had cost him his. What could she do to a wretch like Mr. Bell if she could kill her father for merely hitting her?

Mind made up, her knuckles creaked as she stared at the unsavory man scurrying into his den.

Run you fat bastard of a nonce. Your reckoning’s come calling.

She shifted her weight from the lamppost onto her feet, pacing at a stalk towards the gate. The rumble of a vehicle brought her head about to the left in time to see a large black van park a short distance away on the opposite side. Something about it spooked her train of thought away from vengeance and she kept going, right past Bell’s house and down the street.

The van slid out from the space like an orca on the hunt. Anna sped up and took the first corner she could. When the van followed, her mind raced through all manner of possibilities as to who it could be. Some disgruntled corporate from an old job she had done for Carroll, low-level Syndicate thugs looking for a new piece of ass, or most likely, hired freelancers from BT looking to pay her back for the other night on the roof.

Her coat trailed behind her as she ran and leapt a hedge. She cut through a yard to get away from the road. A barking dog joined the chase until another fence jump ended its pursuit with the sound of a sixty-pound animal having an abrupt meeting with iron bars. The street in front of the adjoining property looked free of large black vans, or much traffic of any kind given the time, and she resumed a nervous walk.

Without warning, a mass of black leapt from the shadows and blocked the footpath in front of her. The man was huge, towering over her with shoulders as broad as two of her. Black material even covered his face, save for two opaque round lenses over his eyes and a filter module over his mouth. The pistols, knives, and other assorted devices on his belt were not the sort of thing common people carried―he was an assassin.

She all but ran into him as she clamped both of her hands over her mouth to swallow a startled scream. His lunging grasp at her wrist stalled her backpedal, and left her struggling like a pickpocket who had been nicked.

“Hello, Miss Morgan. We need to talk.”

Terror froze her muscles for an instant. Her head whirled around to the right at the sound of a sliding metal van door. Two other men, also covered head to toe in black, crouched within the glowing red interior. Puffs of fog appeared at the ends of rifles, and a stabbing pain lanced into her back upon two tiny daggers.

A cold burn spread from the points of impact. The man holding her by the arm was the only reason she had not wound up lying on her back. Flexible rubberized material liquefied away from of his bald head, sliding into a matte black metal ring around his neck. She recognized him from the police checkpoint, the other man that arrived with the telepath who probed her.

The CSB.