The hatch popped off the hover with a loud cracking noise, and immediately three Monks were climbing into the cabin. The Stormers opened fire as one, and for a second or two the cabin was solid sound, the noise almost a wall that squeezed the breath out of me.
I stepped quickly toward the cockpit. “Ty!” I shouted. “Ty, can you hear me?”
In the cockpit I could barely make out his voice. “Ty is a little goddamn busy, Mr. Cates!”
“Ty, where are you?”
There was no response. In the cabin, the roar of gunfire grew impossibly louder, and then added to it was more hollow pounding from above as Monks worked their way in from the top. I made fists. “Ty, goddammit, we’re being invaded, and you’re sitting in a spot that took you about fifteen seconds to get into! Where the fuck are you?”
I waited another moment. “Mr. Cates… we have an understanding, yes?”
I struggled to stay still, to keep my face blank. “Ty, you have my word.”
After another moment of listening to the Monks hammering at the hover, Happling’s gleeful voice roaring above it all, a panel in the floor almost at my feet slid away in a smooth, mechanical motion, and Ty’s bald, gleaming head appeared, nose twitching nonstop. We stared at each other.
“Redundant manual repair module,” he said with a shrug. “Almost no one knows these exist, since most of the work is done digitally or by Droids.”
I kept staring at him. Here he was, the living kill switch to the little devils eating up the human race, floating around inside me and biding their time. I had a gun in my hand and every other living and not-living thing in the area distracted. My arm wouldn’t move, though. I’d made a promise; I’d given my word. As I stared at Kieth I thought, Fuck my word. This wasn’t about honor. This was about living, and not just me.
I checked that, tightening my grip on my gun. Why lie to myself? It was about me living. The rest of the world was a bonus.
My arm twitched and started to bring the gun up but then I paused, a blurry feeling of calm, pleasant buzzing seeping over me. A much better idea, I thought, was to investigate the entry point, see if it posed a threat of infiltrating Monks. A grin, crooked and loose, formed on my face. “Shove over,” I suggested, stepping forward and jamming the gun into my coat. “Show me how you got in.”
Kieth blinked in surprise but did what he always did when you moved toward him-backed away. I followed down into a cramped space where we had to almost embrace, crouching over the prone shape of Mr. Marko, who stared up at me as sweat streamed down his face from every pore, and Kieth gestured at a dark crawl space behind me barely wide enough for someone my size to fit into. I dreaded it on sight. Once inside I would barely be able to breathe, much less move myself along.
Still, the curious feeling of cheerful laziness filled me, an oily, viscous sensation that coated every thought I had. Should I report this to the Pigs? The feeling said no, too much trouble. Should I squeeze myself into the crawl space and hump to the entry point, make sure of it? The feeling said emphatically yes, that was an excellent idea. I gave Kieth the same crooked smile.
“Stay here,” I suggested. “I’m going to check it out.”
Kieth jumped as if he’d been stabbed with a pin. The banging noises, carried by the hull, were just as loud in the hole as they’d been up above, but with extra echo, as if they were happening deep below the earth. “Mr. Cates! I can assure you-”
I didn’t stop to listen. Without hesitation I pushed myself into the pitch-black tube and began wriggling forward. I felt fine. I was calm, almost happy, and perfectly sure of my actions. It was a familiar feeling, and as I wriggled through the greasy ductwork toward a slowly growing pin of watery light, I wondered idly why it seemed familiar. It wasn’t an urgent worry, just a mild curiosity I was confident would resolve itself eventually.
Sweating and gasping, I managed to slide the last few feet down to a thin wire grating that separated me from the outside world. Peering through it, I had a good view of the muddy ground beneath the hover and could tell the grating was hidden inside a surrounding well of metal not easily seen from anywhere but directly below. I could see the mechanism that snapped a protective plate over the grating when the hover was pressurized. The Monks would likely not discover it for some time yet.
I watched, bemused, as my arms reached out and smacked against the grating, easily knocking it out of its clips. It fluttered to the ground and didn’t even make any noise I could pick out amid the din. As I let myself slide forward, I realized I was still smiling, the expression stuck on my face. I decided I would worry about it later.
The ground jumped up at me and I landed awkwardly, tumbling out onto the wet earth. I lay there for a moment, staring up at the scorched, riveted underbelly of the hover, its landing gear looking monolithic, like trees made of metal and cable. The noise around me had swollen back up to full size, but I wasn’t concerned. Sitting up, I stared around for a few moments before struggling awkwardly to my feet, hanging on to the bottom of the hover for balance, my head ducked uncomfortably. I stumped out from beneath the hover and found myself in the middle of a battlefield.
The Monks were everywhere, clinging to the hover like barnacles. I staggered forward, smiling around, feeling at peace as I watched the Tin Men pounding their alloyed hands-some without any skin covering the chromelike fingers-into the hover’s hull while a constant stream of them assaulted the narrow hatchway, getting chewed up by the Stormers within for their troubles. None took any notice of me as I limped toward the river, where their leader stood with its arms folded across its chest, looking like a new penny. Wa Belling stood next to it, and for once didn’t look particularly pleased with himself. It was such a new expression for the old man that I was momentarily startled, the whole world seeming to rush back into me for a heartbeat, and I remembered when I’d felt this way before: years ago, in New York, before everything.
I studied the Monk as I approached. It still seemed like a good idea, and I didn’t worry about it because I knew I didn’t have much choice. My decisions were being made for me.
When I was right in front of the Monk I stopped and gave it the benefit of my loopy smile, cocking my head to one side. After another heartbeat all the calm burst inside me, bitterness and fear rushing in to take its place, my whole body shuddering with suddenly remembered pain and anxiety. I kept the smile in place, though. I was Avery Cates. I smiled at everything. Even ghosts.
“Hello, Kev,” I said. “You’ve looked better.”
XXVII
Day Nine: It’s What I Do
Long ago I’d been Pushed by Kev Gatz, my old, dead friend, and I knew the feeling, I knew the print of his mind on mine. He was better at it, more refined and more in control, but now that he’d lifted the Push off me I recognized it, and recognized it from earlier at the church, too. I stared at him and my carefully maintained cool started to melt away as he smirked his plastic Monk face at me, trying to smile.
Kev and I had rattled around New York for years. He’d always been a little cracked, a little strange, and the only thing that had kept him alive was the Push, the psionic power he’d been born with. Somehow he slipped under the SSF’s radar and hadn’t been disappeared like every other kid who showed any kind of mental talent-kids who grew up to be the Shockleys and Bendixes of the world-and had managed to become a minor criminal, a bottom-feeder. And when I’d gotten the Squalor job, when Dick Marin had rammed the Squalor job hot and glowing up my ass and told me to kill the founder of the Electric Church or be killed, I’d taken Kev Gatz with me as my psionid ace in the hole. He was the only reason my plan had worked, and it had cost him his life.