Under the Skin (9 page)

"Why are you—"

"Let's go,” Jenner said cheerfully. “Haven't got all night, do we?” He spoke loudly enough that Padraic winced, and Minoru hurried them down the hallway.

Padraic was surprised when a doorway led them to an open-air courtyard. It was small and there were a number of other intersecting pathways that met it. After a few turns, Padraic was sure that he couldn't find his way back.

"Nice,” Jenner said, more quietly this time. “It's a labyrinth in here.” He smiled at Minoru's back, and Padraic realized with a start that Jenner didn't like the Inoue heir at all.

"You could get someone lost in here. You could trap them in any one of these courtyards, couldn't you?"

Even when Minoru didn't respond, Jenner kept going.

"Block off both entrances before and behind them, shoot them full of arrows from the platforms that are sitting behind those lovely, decorative dragon screens, huh?"

Padraic looked up in surprise and realized that Jenner was right. The Inoue compound was the size of a small town, and there was nothing that said that if you went in, you would get back out again.

"You've read a lot of books,” Minoru was saying. He hadn't stopped walking, and every time he got them through a doorway, Padraic heard and felt a small puff of air that told him that their presence was being marked, if not noticed.

"I like your country, Inoue,” Jenner said with a small laugh. “Hello Kitty, rice, fish, yakuza, Pocky, and all."

They had to go underground to get to the final stage of security, and even as the steel doors slid open, Padraic wondered out loud where the guards were.

"Most of the human element has been taken out of this security system,” Minoru said. “Human error turned out to be much more disastrous to Inoue security than machine error."

The main control room, the beating, whirring heart of the Inoue corporation, was much plainer than Padraic thought it would be from the tiered and whitewashed exterior. This area had a retinal scan, and behind them, Padraic felt the hiss of the pressure locks. The air took on the stale, recycled quality that was so familiar to him from labs and basements.

He looked up, and Minoru was handing him a simple lead. Padraic took it. For a moment, he looked at them both: Minoru and Jenner, dark and fair. Jenner had a small smile on his face, and Minoru was looking at Padraic with an expression that Padraic just couldn't read. Suddenly he was furious all over again.

"I'd just like to say that you're both completely disgusting.” He plugged himself in and immediately fell to his knees. After an agonizing moment, he went over on his side. There were colors exploding behind his eyes, and if he had eaten anything at all that day, he would have thrown up.

"All good?” Jenner asked.

Padraic nodded and quickly wished he hadn't. The pain was lessening by degrees, but there were still bright dots in his vision.

"Very cool.” Jenner sounded cheerful, even enthusiastic, and Padraic had a simple and strong urge to strangle him.

"All right,” said Minoru, “Let's... what the hell are you doing?"

Just as casually as he did everything else, Jenner reached out a gloved hand and pulled the lead from the bank that it was connected to. Before the machine could do much more than spit, he sealed his palm over it. When he removed it, Padraic could smell the eye-searing stench of melted alloy.

"Sorry,” Jenner said to Minoru, gently resting his hand on Minoru's chest. Minoru's eyes went wide, and then Jenner pushed him hard, throwing him to the ground.

"What the hell are you doing?” Padraic gasped. Even talking made his head break open again, and it was made even worse when Jenner effortlessly pulled him to his feet.

"What does it look like I'm doing?” Jenner sounded genuinely curious, even as he was hanging on to Padraic's elbow and bending over Minoru's prone body.

He's not... he's just not
, Padraic had time to think blankly, and then Minoru groaned like a wounded animal. There was a smell of charred flesh in the air as Jenner's hand came up, gently cradling something that Padraic's brain somehow refused to acknowledge as a human eye.

"It's cauterized,” Jenner told him gently. “He's not going to die."

Jenner turned toward the retinal scan. After a tense moment, the door opened with a hiss and Padraic found himself pushed through it.

Framed in the portal, Padraic saw Jenner slam his hand against the scanner with that same startling strength. There was a twisting of golden wires and an awful light before Jenner stepped lightly through the door and sealed it behind him. Almost as an afterthought, he crushed the panel and dropped the eye to the ground. He didn't step on it, as Padraic was afraid that he would do, but he did gently scoot it into a corner with the side of his foot.

"Let's go.” Jenner said cheerfully.

"No."

"Really?"

Padraic clutched his head with both hands. The pain had never really stopped, and it was reaching a crescendo when he heard Jenner say, “Then I blow up your new boyfriend."

"He's not my boyfriend. Jesus!” Padraic exclaimed, but when he looked up and saw that Jenner was ready to put his gloved hand against the door, he straightened up.

"Don't pray to Jesus,” Jenner said brightly. “Try praying to me instead."

At that moment, completely alone, with an eyeball gathering grit on the floor and his head threatening to burst, Padraic finally realized that Jenner was completely insane.

As they walked through the halls that were deadly quiet, Padraic felt the tidal wave of pain recede a little, allowing him to do more than just focus on Jenner's back and follow half-blindly.

"How long have you been planning this?” he asked, and then he felt sick, thinking of who might have set it all up. “Is Arch in on it?"

"That would be telling,” Jenner said briskly, without breaking stride. “But no. This is all me."

The next twinge of pain brought a memory with it, Jenner handing him a disc on the flight in.

"You son of a bitch,” Padraic moaned. “You fucked with my tech..."

"Nope, that was all you,” Jenner said, stopping to smash an interface. “Gave me a great excuse to go set up some deals while you were fucking Inoue in the hotel room, though."

Abruptly, he turned to look at Padraic. “Do you know what they're going to do once they catch you, Padraic?"

"Huh?"

Jenner laughed.

"Me, they're just going to shoot. You know, pow, down like a dog. You...” Jenner grinned. “You have seven, eight hundred feet of monofilament in your skull.

"They can keep you alive while they pull it out, inch... by inch.” Jenner's snicker was high-pitched, and Padraic could almost see the man's heartbeat ramp up a notch. “But we are not going to let that happen."

There was an electric blue light skittering over the surface of Jenner's eyes, and that was only marginally less alarming than the possessive gleam in them.

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

Jenner blinked. “Really?"

"Yes, really,” said Padraic, all too much aware that he sounded like Jenner. It was funny that the more he suspected he was in shock, the more he thought he sounded like his bodyguard, who turned out to be nothing of the kind. “There's only so many people you can fucking blow up."

"That's actually true,” Jenner said reasonably. “However, did you know that I have absolutely nothing beyond a marginal interest in keeping you whole and sound?"

Before Padraic could answer, Jenner's hand grabbed his, crunching the bones painfully tight. Padraic could feel the whir of metal underneath Jenner's skin. Jenner's hands could rip flesh, pulverize bone, and he was suddenly dead sure that Jenner wouldn't stop at just a crushed hand.

He wasn't getting the idea quickly enough, though, and Jenner tightened his grip, forcing a groan from Padraic's throat. It was pain, just pain, but it could be so much worse. Jenner looked at him, no more concerned than a man looking at a howling stray dog might be.

"You can carry that thing and still be... damaged,” Jenner said softly. “Makes no never mind to me."

Padraic got up, throat still raw from screaming and face damp with tears, and staggered after Jenner's swiftly retreating back.

They weren't stopped; every few doors, every few levels—hell, every time he could smash something, Jenner used the control panels and then crushed them. Before Padraic knew it, they were in the Inoue underground garage. It was well insulated and completely immune from the winter chill, but Padraic was still shuddering. The light of the garage was blue and watery, making the whole scene look unreal, but maybe that was the shock again.

The pain wasn't so raw anymore, and when he finally looked around, he saw Jenner standing openly in the middle of the garage, concentrating on apparently nothing. He bit his tongue on the obvious question just as a low, black car wheeled around the corner.

There was no one in the driver's seat, and he realized how distracted he must have been, because now it seemed obvious. Jenner's fingers were sketching configurations in the air, turning the wheel, tapping the accelerator, and bringing the car to a gentle stop.

Jenner ran his hand over the hood of the car, and Padraic remembered him making the exact same gesture over the exact same spot that very first day.

"You bastard, you've been planning this all along."

Jenner didn't even bother to look smug or embarrassed; he only opened the passenger side door for Padraic.

"It's what I do,” he said earnestly.

The pain had gotten steadily worse, and then he had blacked out. Padraic dreamed of light, and of a voice telling him that there was an end to all things but that this wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

"No, really,” he was saying. “I can't do this..."

Of course you can. One foot in front of the other.

Padraic woke up with a gasp and felt a pulling at his skin. When he looked down, gaudy green tape held a crude cardiac monitor to his chest. Padraic pulled it off and was going to do the same for the lead that was still dangling from his interface, when Jenner turned to him.

"Hang on for just a moment,” Jenner was saying. He glanced at Padraic.

"If you get off the bed, I'll shoot you.” Jenner gave him a big thumbs-up and didn't even wait for Padraic to settle back down on the bed before resuming his conversation.

The room only spun briefly when Padraic sat up, but that was as far as he felt like going. It was a basic hotel room, his third in Japan so far. There was the same complimentary universal connection wires, the same snow-white sanitary wipes to ensure cleanliness, the same surgical mask, the use of which he could only guess at.

He had nothing to look at, and so he looked at Jenner. Jenner looked no different, but it was so terribly clear that the person he had been talking to before, the person he had come to think of as, not quite a friend, but certainly more than a bodyguard, was a complete fake.

"You're giving me that look,” Jenner said, his back still turned. For a moment, Padraic thought he was talking to his contact, but then Jenner turned those earnest dark eyes toward him.

"Is there anything I can do for you, make you more comfortable or something?” Jenner asked with concern.

"Don't kill me?"

Jenner considered for a moment. “Okay. Yeah, I can definitely do that."

Padraic lay back down on the bed gingerly, not comforted in the least. Jenner got back on the phone, but now he seemed to be speaking Mandarin.

Padraic wondered where Minoru was, and whether whatever kept him from getting mods in the first place would stop him from getting a new eye. Some of the technicians that Padraic knew got them as a matter of course, but he never had, as easy as it would make some of the more photo-sensitive tasks.

He wondered why he cared, and then he wondered why he wondered.

"I'm going into the bathroom,” Padraic said tentatively.

Jenner had a tolerant expression on his face, and he waved Padraic on like a fond parent. On one hand, there was the humiliation of asking permission to take a piss, and on the other, there was the clear consequence of getting his hand crushed to a pulp if he did not.

The bathroom looked startlingly sane, and Padraic found himself contemplating the normalcy of things like towels and sinks before sitting down cross-legged on the floor. It was lovely there, cool and white, and even with only a flimsy door between himself and Jenner, he found that he could think much more clearly.

The trouble was, the more clearly he could think, the more hopeless he felt. His resources were down to the tech that he was carrying and the clothes he was wearing. Padraic twisted the lead between his fingers, letting the wire cut against his flesh before loosening it.

He thought wryly that if he hadn't been carrying stolen Inoue information before, he certainly was now, and that made him think about Minoru again.

Padraic flinched. Minoru had screwed him over, but... there was Minoru with an eye torn out of his head.

If I see him again, we might just call it even,
Padraic thought.

He realized that he could hear voices in the outer room.

"Well, that was just stupid,” Jenner was saying. “Honestly. Did you just show up to get your ass handed to you again?"

There was a muffled explosion and then a sizzle of ozone, and the hair at the back of Padraic's neck stood on end. Padraic could tell from Jenner's startled yelp that he was nowhere near as sanguine as he had been in the Inoue stronghold.

Padraic opened the door just in time to let Jenner's smaller, compact body hit him square in the chest. They both went down on the floor, Padraic cracking his head hard enough on the edge of the tub that he saw stars.

"Oh, there we go, the next thing,” he heard Jenner mutter, and then he was being pulled to his knees in a hasty headlock.

"Wanna see me pop his head off, Inoue?” Jenner panted. Padraic felt something hot and wet hit the crown of his head, and he realized that Jenner was bleeding on him.

Jenner hauled him up with one hand twisted behind his back. Padraic was facing Minoru, who was pale as a ghost and armed with what looked like a better class of taser. The bandage over Minoru's eye was shockingly white.