Superego (28 page)

I ran between the creature's legs while Diane ran around the side of it. It had four brown, seemingly bark-covered legs in addition to its massive claws (which I ducked). I hoped I was too agile for a three-story creature to snatch, but I had never seen one of these hunt before, so this would be a big learning experience for everyone.

The tree wraith flailed at us with its claws, each about the size of my torso, but a shot aimed at us hit it in one of its legs. And while I'm not qualified to assess the mental state of a tree wraith, I would guess from its reaction that that made it mad. With one swipe, the man who'd shot it disappeared in a spray of crimson (that's the color of human blood, if I haven't mentioned it). Our other attackers now ignored us to concentrate their fire on the beast, giving Diane and me a chance to bail out through an emergency exit many of the civilians had run through. I assumed the men with guns would eventually win the battle, but I wished the tree wraith the best.

Outside, we quickly stashed our guns inside our clothes and tried to get lost in the crowd, but then I saw a familiar face. Or, I should say, a familiar species, as it wasn't like I'd have been able to tell them apart. Close to us, standing by his car and watching people exit the zoo, was, I was pretty sure, Agent Verg. I ran toward him, and he quickly noticed me and pulled out his gun just in time for it to reach my hand and become my gun, which I placed to his smooth, gray head.

“You're going to give us a ride.”

CHAPTER 31

“Evasion plan beta, Dip.”

“Understood. I still won't be able to retrieve you, though, while you're within a thousand miles of the city.”

“What was that?” Diane asked.

“Just taking care of my things.”

Diane and I really needed some time to talk, but sitting in the back seat of Verg's car with a gun to his head wasn't the right moment. I didn't know what she thought about so many of Morrigan's people coming after me, but I was hoping she had a flattering explanation I could roll with. She didn't seem too preoccupied with me, though, as she was currently burning a hole with her eyes through the back of Verg's head. “So what do you know about all this?” Diane barked at him. “I will kill you if you lie to me!” I was pretty sure that was true.

“I don't know what's going on!” Verg said. His manner of speaking was really odd and hard for me to read, but I guessed he was scared, as his voice had become louder and his speech patterns a little faster. “I'm not even sure who you are! Is one of you humans Rico Vargas?”

“Yep,” I answered. “And the other one you recently interrupted a dinner of mine to pursue.” Of course, I knew for a fact that Verg wasn't a part of Nystrom, but I hadn't yet decided how helpful it was to get Diane to the same conclusion. Shooting someone in the head was a very simple way to deal with things, but Diane seemed a bit on edge—certainly different from how I had seen her—and perhaps more killing wouldn't help her mental state.

“Detective Thompson?” Verg glanced at Diane. “You changed the color of your follicles…I guess you can do that.”

“Are you claiming you're not with all those people trying to gun us down inside the zoo?” Diane demanded.

“I was in the area and heard that there was a disturbance there. The police hadn't responded yet, but I thought I should check it out, considering all the recent terrorism.”

“Rudle was probably ordered to back off on this,” Diane said to me, the hate intensifying on her face. “You see the problem we have here? The government is no help—everything is under their control.”

“Under whose control?” Verg asked.

“Nystrom…or one of the other syndicates,” Diane said. “Do you really claim to be this clueless? You never noticed anything suspicious about your partner?”

“I don't know what you're talking about! I've worked with Agent Dawson for only a couple of months, but I'm not sure what is considered odd for a human.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

“No…We have a lot of work to do, and she's been handling security measures for the conference independently today. Are you saying she was part of that shootout at the zoo?”

Now seemed the time to firm up my story. “I had just met with her. When she saw the skills I displayed in handling the terrorists, she apparently wanted to recruit me on behalf of the Nystrom syndicate. When I expressed that I wasn't interested, she sent people after me.”

“She's part of Nystrom?” Verg asked incredulously. “But they're the ones trying to kill Gredler…Are you saying she's the assassin?”

“I don't know the details, but she's obviously trying to ensure he does get killed,” Diane said. “She fingered me as the killer as a distraction, and then she…” Diane looked about ready to break down, but she regained her composure. “…had my friend and her family killed to draw me out. I was part of Nystrom many years ago—that's true—and they want revenge on me for the way I left.”

“This is…confusing,” Verg said. “I have to say, some things really didn't add up about your being a sleeper assassin working on Nar Valdum for ten years, but it's hard to believe an agent as high in the government as Dawson would be compromised.”

Diane finally lowered her gun from Verg's head. “The whole government is compromised, you naïve dimwit! Chief Rudle is obviously a part of this, too, and he's helping to cover up Nystrom's actions. There's basically no one to turn to on this except a rival syndicate.” She sighed and looked out the window. “This is so pointless. Just take us down here.”

Verg brought the car down into a pretty empty part of town that held mainly warehouses. “Are you going to let me live?”

We got out of the car. “Yes, Verg,” Diane said. “We're not the bad guys.” That was even true of me—for the moment, at least.

“I don't know what you plan to do, but I'll look into some of your claims.”

“Don't bother,” Diane said. “Something huge is about to go down here, and you obviously haven't the slightest idea about it. If you start making noise, they're just going to kill you. If you really aren't a part of any of this, just make an excuse to leave the planet.” She shut the car door, and Verg took off.

While Diane was worried that Verg might get himself killed, it was apparently my job to be practical. “He's going to call this in, and the police and others will descend on us any second.”

“We'll be long gone.” Diane led me to a secluded alleyway and started taking off her zoo uniform. “I'd like to say I have some plan beyond immediate survival, but that would be a lie.”

“Well, Nystrom probably doesn't have much of a plan either, beyond crushing us with their immense power.”

Under her uniform, she wore a white tank top and extremely short black shorts. Also, the rest of her skin was much darker than her face. “That plan will probably work,” she said. She took out a small purse concealed inside the uniform and applied some sort of cream to her face, which caused her face to match the rest of her body. She then did something to her hair—I wasn't sure what, but it suddenly went from brown to completely black. It was a neat trick.

“You make me feel pretty unprepared. I don't even have fake facial hair with me.”

She didn't react to the joke…except to pull something out of her purse that she pressed against my face—I assumed this to be the aforementioned facial hair. She also put sunglasses on me and took off my coat and tossed it in the alleyway, along with her uniform. “Let's get moving; we'll talk when we get there.”

I placed my recently acquired guns in my waistband and concealed them under my shirt and followed her. Of course, I had no idea where “there” was, but by all indications of Diane's preparation so far, it would have whatever we needed. As we walked through a sparsely populated area, I tried to catch a glance at myself in a window, as I was curious what I looked like with a goatee. I never really did disguises—people should want to hide from me, not vice versa.

We walked for a while and soon reached a more populated area. We didn't look at all conspicuous out on the street. There were a few stores around, but there were mainly apartments and homes here, most of which looked pretty neglected. The places may have been nice enough once upon a time, but apparently at some point this had become the bad part of town. There were a few threatening types around—threatening in that they were street thugs, not in that they were trained killers…you know, actual threats to me—but I just ignored them, as usually people figure well enough not to mess with me. I realized Diane could have appeared vulnerable to some of them, so I made sure to stay close to her.

Eventually we came to a stairwell that led to the basement of one of the buildings. Diane unlocked the door and let me inside and then followed me in and locked the door behind her. It wasn't much: barren walls with a few cabinets on them, a cot, and what looked like a bathroom. “This is just a little place I held onto in case something happen—”

She then lost it, crying so hard I thought she was going to fall over. “I'm sorry…I need…” She tried to fight it, but the breakdown was there, and nothing was stopping it. And there I stood, feeling completely impotent. I had no idea what to do in this situation. I had seen plenty of women cry—and had many times been the cause—I had just never cared before. I wanted to help her through it, but this was such an unnatural situation for me. I had seen how others had responded before, though—maybe in movies—so I held her tight and tried to think of some comforting words.

“We're going to get through this,” I said as she cried into my shoulder. And that was true—one way or another we would reach an end. A lot of those paths to the end involved torture and other indignities if one of the syndicates caught us. The better paths meant quick deaths in a gunfight. If there were other possible outcomes, I hadn't figured them out yet.

Her sobbing died down a little bit. “I just bring pain and misery to everyone around me. It's all I've done all my life.”

I held her firmly. “No, that's not true.” I certainly didn't feel pain and misery from being around her, just things much more confounding.

Her crying stopped, but she still looked on the edge of a breakdown. “But why are you doing this? Why are you here?”

“Because this is where I want to be.” I could feel emotion creeping into my voice as I looked into her tear-filled eyes. “I want to be with you.”

We kissed, and as far as I was concerned, there was no stopping there.

CHAPTER 32

She lay naked beside me, not sleeping but also not speaking. Her wig had come off, exposing her matted, dirty-blond hair, and whatever she had used to change her skin color had begun to fade, leaving her skin mottled. I guess she was an ugly sight, but that wasn't my opinion at the time. I just watched her as she stared at nothing. Never before had I been so interested to know what was going on in someone else's mind. A lot had happened to her recently—it was quite possible that she wasn't even thinking about me. It didn't seem likely, though. Maybe she was thinking how lucky she was to have the love and support of such a hero as Rico Vargas from Rikar. Or maybe, as astute as she was, she'd seen through the illusion to what I really was: a man who'd taken advantage of her emotional fragility to get what he wanted.

The sex drive is a strong primitive impulse that constantly tries to control your actions. It's not something I should have been indulging under dire circumstances where I'd need to think clearly. Not to mention the emotional toll. Not for me, of course, but I've seen it in others. That had never mattered before, but I was planning to depend on Diane for whatever new course my life was to take, and now I'd possibly ruined things. So I looked at her as she silently spaced, waiting for her to speak, since I had no idea what to say myself.

“I think I'm losing myself,” she finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“I built up this new person—someone I thought was so much stronger than the old me—and I feel her chipping away. I don't know what else to do under these circumstances, though.”

“These aren't circumstances normal people deal with.”

“No…but I'm still just dealing with bad choices I made over a decade ago. Things I thought I left behind…but…you are what you are, I guess.” She finally turned to look at me. “When you talked to Hana, did she mentioned that transport with the jump malfunction that killed 340 people?”

“Yes.”

“I made that happen.”

She let that hang there a moment. That was pretty extreme. I've killed more than that many people myself—but not all at once like that. Of course, I do things one-on-one, and that usually comes with less collateral damage than faking a transport malfunction. “Are you trying to shock me?”

“I'm just telling you who I am. I'm not just a murderer—I'm a mass murderer. That's who you're in bed with. That's the side you've chosen.”

She was trying to shock me. “You don't seem like a mass murderer.”

“Well, I am, and that's a pretty low nadir to climb your way out of.” She went back to staring at nothing. “I used to just blame my circumstances. Easy enough. I was fourteen when I came home to find my mother and father murdered. I couldn't cope with that.”

“So you joined a rival syndicate?” I'd known stories of lots of sociopathic killers. I'd never found their stories that interesting; they'd taken long journeys to become what I was born as. But Diane had gone there and tried to come out of it; that was interesting, because it was different.

“It's not quite that simple.” She was quiet for a moment, and then a smile finally appeared on her face. “My parents were good people. My dad worked in the mines—just basic, honest work. He and my mom were convinced I was a genius and destined to do great things. They encouraged me to study and saved up to put me in a fancy school. They also tried to teach me religion, but eventually I thought I was too smart for that.