Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (16 page)

Well, Dolores? I know you can hear everything. You got anything to tell me?

She didn’t respond for a moment, and when she did she was loud and clear, like she’d been living in my head, a turtle in its shell.
You won’t like it, Avery.

I don’t like anything anymore, Dolores
, I thought.
Just tell me who has these fucking codes so I can get on with it.

If you thought about it, you’d guess, Avery. It’s Garda, of course. You didn’t think he was just an
assassin,
did you?

For a second, I went calm and cold. Without effort I slammed down an imaginary glass shield, trapping Salgado outside, giving me a second of perfect silence. Michaleen Garda. Otherwise known as Cainnic Orel, the legend. Otherwise known as the last person I was going to kill before shuffling off.

I opened my eyes. “It’s Orel,” I said. “It’s Canny Orel.”

Grisha nodded, frowning. “Orel,” he breathed, coughing once, twice, and then breathing again, leaning back. “That is… unfortunate.”

*  *  *

I found Adora outside SPS’s cluster of interconnected shipping containers, leaning against one of them and smoking, staring off into the distance. She’d cleaned up a little, her face and hands were free of grime, but her hair and clothes were almost pitch-black, hanging off her with greasy weight. She was as beautiful as ever, though, her still, calm face all delicate lines that somehow came together into a perfectly asymmetrical pattern, a fine mouth pursed to blow smoke into the air, her green eyes slitted in the light.

When I was close, she turned and smiled at me, her face opening up and turning bright. She reached out with one hand and squeezed my shoulder. I found that after being pressed against her chastely for weeks on end, her touch was comforting.

“Cigarette?” she said, holding up a case. “They are rich with them here. I did not smoke much before, but this is my fourth one in half an hour. I am dizzy.”

I shook my head. “They gave me a bunch, too.”

She frowned down at her feet. “I am sorry about… about your friend. For all of it. I—”

“Wasn’t your fault,” I snapped. I didn’t want to talk about Remy.

“What will you do?”

I leaned against the wext to her and pushed my hands into my pockets. “What I came here to do.”

She snorted. “Kill everyone.”

I nodded. “For starters.”

She tossed her cigarette away and pushed herself from the wall, shoving her hands into the pockets of her filthy overalls. My arms jerked spastically as I almost reached out to touch her, pull her back. I didn’t know if it was just being cooped up with her for so long, or if she was the first woman I’d met in a while who wasn’t a murderous robot or cyborg, but I suddenly didn’t want her to be anywhere but next to me.

In the end, though, I held my arms tightly against me and said nothing. She took three steps and stopped. She didn’t turn around.

“I go north,” she said. “Toledo. My people are from there, back in the mists of time.”

I nodded, thinking back on our long evening in the
Daniel Krokos.
“I remember.”

“I think I would see it. Perhaps you will come find me when you are finished.”

I smiled at her back. “You’d want me to?”

She started walking again. “There is no one else left.”

PART III

YOU GET AROUND

“Try not to kill this one,” Grisha complained, flicking his cigarette to the street even as he pulled another from behind his ear and placed it between his lips. “At least not immediately, yes?”

“We got what we needed from that ancient piece of shit in Cadiz,” I said easily. Grisha had been complaining for a week about shooting the Pusher. His grousing had gotten familiar and I almost enjoyed it, the way he sawed on and on about things you couldn’t change. It was like rain. You just took it for granted and forgot it was there. “You’re lucky I gave you three days.”

He grunted in dissatisfaction. I got the feeling Grisha didn’t get disobeyed too often these days. He liked to sigh on and on about how SPS was a communal organization without a leader, but Grish had four Techies who followed him around like puppies, and I’d seen him snap his fingers and bring some serious resources to bear. I’d been everywhere over the last few years, and there were whole cities, whole regions where no one had any control, where things were fucking chaos. Grisha and SPS had
resources
. First there had been the efficient and kind of satisfying torture of the old Pusher, who’d squealed like a pig with just a
tiny
Push, terrified at finding himself, for the first time in his life, without his usual power to make assholes like me dance. Grisha had produced some nightmare-inducing devices, applied with a clinical and emotionless efficiency that was worse, somehow, than the devices themselves. There’d been a ragged-looking black box with several thick cables sprouting from it like some terrible plastic and silicone plant, each terminating in a copper clamp that was attached to the old fuck’s
head
in various places, and which made him just scream and vibrate while Grisha stood over him, smoke leaking up in a thick stream from his mouth and nose. There’d been a small, shiny black capsule inserted into the old Pusher’s ear, making his eyes bug out, blood streaming suddenly from his nose. He hadn’t screamed that time, but that had been worse, because I got the feeling he
wanted
to but
couldn’t
.

There’d been four-wheelers to take us from Cadiz into Italy. There’d been more SPS members to act as muscle and lookouts. There’d been yen when yen was being accepted, and there’d been barter when that was the best they could do. Grisha snapped his fingers and things got fucking done. I hadn’t seen much of that recently, and found I liked it.

“We know, what? That he does not know what an Angel is. He had no mark, yes. That he works for the remnants of the SSF.” He laughed humorlessly. “I am thinking, good, this is good. We will ask him who his contact is with the System Pigs. We will get details. Perhaps he knows things we do not even know to ask about! I go into the room and there is Avery, there is a dead Pusher, and there are no more questions.”

I shrugged, picturing Remy on the floor of the hospital in Mexico City, picturing me stepping over him. “What was he going to tell us, exactly? The cops want Marin’s override codes because in a few weeks their avatars are going to shut down and they’ll hibernate until the fucking sun swells up big and red and eats this fucking hellhole. That’s easy.”

Grisha grunted again, irritated, but let it drift. He’d developed a stoop, moving with the slow, oiled grace I remembered but bent over, his shoulders up and his head low, hands perpetually in his pockets. Getting old, I figured. Apparently that’s all anyone was doing—those of us the old Monks used to call
meat
just aging away, and even the Avatars in the world had an expiration date just a few weeks away. He’d developed a little cough, too, a wet-sounding gurgle that punctuated every other sentence. I stole a glance at him as we moved along opposite sides of the square, the sun beating down on the top of my head; he was just strolling, hands deep in the pockets of his jumpsuit, glasses glinting in the light and cigarette bouncing in his mouth. It was like one eternal cigarette, always there.

I looked across the square again. A group of fat, shirtless old men were sitting outside a dilapidated old bar, fanning themselves and shouting simultaneously in Italian. It was a tiny little town, a speck; one second we’d been bouncing along in the four-wheeler Grisha had summoned out of the thin air, thick brush and ragged-looking trees everywhere, and the next we’d been creeping up a shadowed, cool stairway, emerging into a tiny village of faded stone buildings that looked like the System had forgotten about it. A few dozen feet from the group, a man in a showy white suit sat alone at a tiny table, a small cup of what was passing for coffee these days steaming in front of him. His suit looked light and cool, but was wrinkled and grimy, stained. He was just sitting there with his eyes closed, hands folded peacefully on his belly, but that didn’t mean anything.

I looked around, scanning rooftops and balcnies, places I’d put lookouts and snipers if I were going to sit in the middle of an open square drinking fake coffee like nothing could touch me. The town was all pale, yellowed stone and red slate roofs missing tiles, half crumbled. But you got the feeling the buildings had been half crumbled for a thousand years, unchanged. The central square was big and roomy but once you stepped off you got trapped in narrow, winding little roadlets; Grisha had Lok and four other members of SPS, each armed with oddball single-action rifles they’d scrounged from somewhere, positioned at several of the side streets, but we couldn’t man the entire square.

As we approached, the old men stopped talking and looked at us; I wondered if their silence was a signal to our guy that someone was coming. I’d been in Italy before, but it had been a different world: damp, buried by water, everything salty. This little scrub of a town was dry and warm, everything dusty. An old monastery overlooked the square from a mild hill rising up behind us, looming.

We walked past the group, and when we were a few dusty feet away from the man in the white suit, he spoke up.

“You must be lost,” he said without opening his eyes. “Because no one in the whole history of the world has ever come to Fiesole on purpose.”

I froze for a second, my hands in the pockets of my coat, which had been cut to let me pull my gun directly from the hip holster I’d started to favor. “I know you,” I said without thinking, amazed. “I’ve seen you before.”

He was made of a melty red plastic, his skin scaly and angry everywhere. His hairless head was a mass of scarred tissue and rippled, ruined flesh, and he was the cop I’d met in Hong Kong when I’d been there hunting the God Augment, the one organizing resistance to everyone, the one who told me he’d be King of Hong Kong before it was all over. He opened his eyes and looked up, grinning.

“Avery Cates,” he said. “Holy
shit
, you get around.”

“You have met?” Grisha said. One thing I liked about Grish: He never felt the need to pretend he knew more than he did.

“Couple times,” the cop said, grinning. His teeth and eyes were startlingly white and clear in the midst of his ruined face. His hands were gloves of twisted, scorched flesh, too, and I felt itchy and painful just watching him as he picked up his cup of coffee just to show us how unconcerned he was. He sipped his coffee with his eyes on me. “What’s the matter, Cates? Don’t recognize me? You did have someone else on your mind when we met.” He set his cup down and extended his scaly hand. “Horatio Gall, former major, System Security Force.”

I was surprised into a smile. “
Gall
,” I breathed. “You were in Venice, working bodyguard for that old asshole.” Slowly I pulled my hand from my pocket and reached out to take his; it was dry and hot, which was probably my imagination. “You took a bomb there.”

He nodded gaily, indicating his face with the other hand. “Ain’t that the fucking understatement of the century. Don’t worry, I don’t hold grudges. That little incident clarified things for me.” He took his hand back and raised it into the air, gesturing at the silent group of old men up the street. “That’s whI’m sitting here in my own skin, instead of a silicone robot.”

There was movement behind us, and I whirled to find three of the fat old men hauling another table and two more chairs over to us from the interior of one of the two-story buildings along the square. They moved silently, leaving behind another two steaming cups and walking away without a word or glance our way. The fucking System Pigs—even burned-up, resigned ones like Gall—never fucking changed. Everywhere they went, they put under the boot.

Grisha and I looked at each other, and then he shrugged and sat down. “You have expected us, then?”

Gall nodded. “Just for the last few hours. You were spotted bouncing along in one of those wheeled vehicles.” He shrugged. “I don’t have satellites and wireless power anymore, men, but I’ve got fifteen old coots who call me
padrone
and who can sit on a roof with an old sniper scope and give me a warning.” He spread his hands. “Okay, Fiesole has about thirty residents and one business, which you’re sitting in. So you didn’t come here for the wine, which tastes like fucking vinegar, or the food, of which there isn’t any, or the sights, which you just saw on your way in. So,” he said and spread his hands, “you came to see me.”

I shrugged at Grisha, and he plucked his cigarette from his mouth as I shook one of my own out. “We need to make contact with the SSF, the police, up in Berlin. We do not have any routes of communication with them anymore, and even entering central Europe is a chancy thing.” He pointed his cigarette at Gall. “I understand you have maintained some presence within the SSF.”

Gall grinned, his white teeth shocking. “You speak English like you learned it from a mime, pal.
Presence
. I was Marin’s attaché, for fuck’s sake. Every cop in the world reported to
me
. Of
course
I still have some people. Besides,” he said and sat forward, suddenly conspiratorial, “I’m not the only old badge who didn’t like the whole avatar business, who cut ties and ran—or tried to. There’s a bunch of active duties up north who tried to run and got caught by Marin’s murder machine before they could. We share a mind-set, you know?”

I leaned forward. “So you can help us get in touch.”

He nodded. “Can help, yes.
Will
help, maybe. Despite our deep and ancient comradeship, Mr. Cates, as men who have been fucked by Dick Marin, I have to be crude and ask you what’s in it for me?”

Grisha cocked his head. “Mr. Gall, this is not some heist scheme, or an assassination for yen.”

Gall winked at me. “This is gonna be good, huh?”

“Mr. Gall—”