“Yeah. That going to be a problem?”

Bautista barked a laugh. “Are you ragging me? Entry without a warrant. Organic damage to unarmed suspects. What the fuck do you think?”

“Sorry about that.” I started to move off the killing floor. “Maybe we can work something out.”

“Hey.” Bautista caught my arm. “They took off a Bay City cop. No one does that around here. Someone should have told Kadmin before he made the fucking mistake.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ortega or me in my Ryker sleeve, so I said nothing. Instead, I tipped my head back gingerly, testing for damage, and looked up at Trepp. She was reloading the frag gun.

“Hey, are you going to stay up there all night?”

“Be right down.”

She jacked the last shell into the frag gun, then executed a neat somersault over the gantry rail and fell outwards. About a metre into the fall, the grav harness on her back spread its wings and she fetched up hanging over us at head height with the gun slung across her shoulder. In her long black coat, she looked like an off-duty dark angel.

Adjusting a dial on the harness, she drifted closer to the floor and finally touched down next to Kadmin. I limped up to join her. We both looked at the ripped-open corpse in silence for a moment.

“Thanks,” I said softly.

“Forget it. All part of the service. Sorry I had to bring in these guys, but I needed the backup, and fast. You know what they say about the Sia around here. Biggest fucking gang on the block, right?” She nodded at Kadmin. “You going to leave him like that?”

I stared at the Right Hand of God martyr with his face shocked into abrupt death, and tried to see the Patchwork Man inside him.

“No,” I said, and turned the corpse over with my foot so that the nape of the neck was exposed. “Bautista, you want to lend me that firecracker?”

Wordlessly, the cop handed me his blaster. I set the muzzle against the base of the Patchwork Man’s skull, rested it there and waited to feel something.

“Anyone want to say anything?” cracked Trepp, deadpan. Bautista turned away. “Just do it.”

If my father had any comments, he kept them to himself.

The only voices were the cries of the injured spectators, and those I ignored.

Feeling nothing, I pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I was still feeling nothing an hour later when Ortega came and found me in the sleeving hall, seated on one of the automated forklifts and staring up into the green glow from the empty decanting chambers. The airlock made a smooth thump and then a sustained humming sound as it opened, but I didn’t react. Even when I recognised her footfalls and a short curse as she picked her way between the coiled cabling on the floor, I didn’t look round. Like the machine I was seated on, I was powered down.

“How you feeling?”

I looked down to where she stood beside the forklift. “Like I look, probably.”

“Well, you look like shit.” She reached up to where I was seated and grasped a convenient grill cover. “You mind if I join you?”

“Go ahead. Want a hand up?”

“Nope.” Ortega strained to lift herself by her arms, turned grey with the effort and hung there with a lopsided grin. “Possibly.”

I lent her the least bruised of my arms and she came aboard the forklift with a grunt. She squatted awkwardly for a moment, then seated herself next to me and rubbed at her shoulders.

“Christ, it’s cold in here. How long have you been sitting on this thing?”

“ ‘Bout an hour.”

She looked up at the empty tanks. “Seen anything interesting?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Oh.” She paused again. “You know, this fucking lethinol is worse than a stungun. At least when you’ve been stunned, you know you’re damaged. Lethinol tells you that, whatever you’ve been through, everything’s just fine and just go ahead and relax. And then you fall ass over tit on the first five-centimetre cable you try to step over.”

“I think you’re supposed to be lying down,” I said mildly.

“Yeah, well, probably so are you. You’re going to have some nice facial bruises by tomorrow. Mercer give you a shot for the pain?”

“Didn’t need it.”

“Oh, hard man. I thought we agreed you were going to look after that sleeve.”

I smiled reflexively. “You should see the other guy,”

“I did see the other guy. Ripped him apart with your bare hands, huh?” I kept the smile. “Where’s Trepp?”

“Your wirehead friend? She’s gone. Said something to Bautista about a conflict of interest, and disappeared into the night. Bautista’s tearing his hair out, trying to think of a way to cover this mess. Want to come and talk to him?”

“All right.” I shifted unwillingly. There was something hypnotic about the green light from the decanting tanks, and beneath my numbness, ideas were beginning to circle restlessly, snapping at each other like bottlebacks in a feeding spiral. The death of Kadmin, far from relieving me, had only touched off a slow-burning fuse of destructive urges in the pit of my stomach. Someone was going to pay for all this.

Personal.

But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anenome, cut up on a surgical platter; about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be re-sleeved; Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months; Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung-heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.

A little dizzily, I climbed down from the forklift and helped Ortega down after me. It hurt my arms to take her weight, but nowhere near as much as the sudden, freezing knowledge that these were our last hours together. I didn’t know where the realisation came from but it came with the solid, settling sensation in the bedrock of my mind that I had long ago learnt to trust more than rational thought. We left the re-sleeving chamber hand in hand, neither of us really noticing the fact until we came face to face with Bautista in the corridor outside and pulled instinctively apart again.

“Been looking for you, Kovacs.” If Bautista had any feelings about the hand holding, nothing showed on his face. “Your mercenary friend skipped and left us to do the cleaning up.”

“Yeah, Kristi—” I stopped and nodded sideways at Ortega. ”I’ve been told. Did she take the frag gun?”

Bautista nodded.

“So you’ve got a perfect story. Someone called in gunfire from the Panama Rose, you came out to look and found the audience massacred, Kadmin and Carnage dead, me and Ortega halfway there. Must have been someone Carnage upset, working off a grudge.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ortega shake her head.

“Ain’t going to scan,” Bautista said. “All calls into Fell Street get recorded. Same goes for the phones in the cruisers.”

I shrugged, feeling the Envoy waking within me. “So what? You, or Ortega, you’ve got snitches out here in Richmond. People whose names you can’t disclose. Call came in on a personal phone, which just happened to get smashed when you had to shoot your way past the remains of Carnage’s security guards. No trace. And nothing on the monitors because the mysterious someone, whoever did all the shooting, wiped the whole automated security system clean. That can be arranged, I take it.”