“Go! Get out, go!”

“The sponsor—”

“Just go!” she snarled, and Coyle jerked his hand away, nodded once and, without another word, climbed to his feet. I followed, gathering up my rucksack in my skinny arms and scampering after him as he strode to the door.

“Coyle…” I murmured, but he shook his head, so I closed my mouth, and followed, and said nothing at all.

Chapter 84

We moved hotel.

I had borrowed a few too many bodies from our present abode to feel safe.

Coyle watched the news.

I paced up and down, and when noon came and noon went, I said, “I’m late for class.”

“Then go to class,” he replied, eyes not moving from the TV screen.

“I don’t care about medical insects.”

“Then find something you care about, Kepler, and do that.”

I scowled and marched out of the hotel room, bag bouncing on my back.

I rode the Subway.

The insect in the jar in the bottom of my bag was growing feebler, rattling limply against the glass. I unscrewed the lid a little, let some air in, then did it up tight again. Laying the jar on the floor beside me, I reached out for the nearest passenger and, uncaring of who they were or how they seemed,

jumped.

I am beautiful, and I shop for beautiful things that will make me more so.

I am tourist, camera on my back, beige loafers on my feet, standing in the gallery of the Natural History Museum, staring up at the mighty monsters who died before me.

I am chubby businesswoman eating chocolate cake that she would probably shun and I adore.

I am schoolgirl, sitting with my legs folded beneath me in the library, reading of times gone by, tales told. And when my mother calls, I run to her side and hold her tight and she says, “Now then, what’s this? What’s the matter?” and she takes my head in her hands and presses her arms across my back and loves me, almost as much as I love her.

I am spotty student who sells T-shirts in the museum shop.

I am taxi driver who has stopped for a smoke.

I let myself get waved down by a stranger who asks to go to Union Station.

In the mirror I look at a puffy-faced man out of breath who doesn’t want to talk and hasn’t much to say, but hell, the sun is setting and this is New York City so I say, “Going home, sir?”

“No.”

“Leaving town?”

“Yes.”

“Business trip?”

“No.”

“Personal?”

“Yes.”

And there ends the conversation.

He doesn’t tip me as I let him out.

I am…

someone, whoever, when the hooker picks me up.

I am quite drunk, hunched over my

another

whisky at the bar of an authentic Irish pub, made authentic, one can only assume, by the uncomfortable stools in the form of a three-leafed clover and the silent misery of the drunks.

She says, you want to go somewhere private?

I look into a face of blue veins and white lines, and say, sure. Why not.

Give me your hand.

Coyle doesn’t seem to have moved when I return to the hotel. He glances up as I enter the room and doesn’t bother to ask my name, so I don’t bother to give it, walking straight into the bathroom.

I take off my shoes.

The high backs are biting against my ankles, and as I run my hands up and down the insides of my calves I feel the roughness of the skin and rifle through my bag until I find the medication that had to be there–a cocktail of prescription meds carefully cut in half to make them go that little bit further, a week’s supply now become two because this body, with its twenty-two dollars and no credit card, can only afford one week more of meds.

I take two of the half-pills at once, stare into a painted face whose make-up cannot disguise the illness.

I am someone not long for this world.

I remember Janus-who-was-Marcel.

Osako Kuyeshi in a hospital gown.

I get cysts.

And I lost my memory.

Seems to me you have the vision, not the commitment.

Not long for this world suits me fine.

In the bedroom Coyle doesn’t turn his face away from the TV as he says, “I called Pam.”

“What’d she say?”

“She’s arranged a meeting with the sponsor. Says he’s very interested.”

“Are you sure?”

“I heard the words.”

“Are you sure it isn’t a trap?”

“No.”

“You two were lovers?”

“Yes.”

“Was it sex, or was it her?”

“Both. It ended a long time ago.”

I sat down on the bed, flexing out the ache in the soles of my feet. “Do you love her?”

“You say ‘love’ too easily, Kepler.”

“No, not really–please don’t call me that. The idea that love has to be a blazing romantic thing of monogamous stability is innately ludicrous. You loved your parents, perhaps, because they were the warmth you could flee to. You loved your first childhood crush with a passion that made your lips tingle, your flesh grow light in their presence. You loved your wife with the steadiness of an ocean against the shore; your lover with the blaze of a shooting star, your best friend with the confidence of a mountain. Love is a many-splendoured thing, as the old song says. So, Pam, do you love her?”

“No. Once. Yes. If bodies are… in a specific time, a specific place. Yes. In my way.”

“When’s the meet?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“OK.”

I tucked my knees up to my chin, let my head rest back against the wall. Coyle’s eyes finally turned to me, looked me up and down. “Hooker?”

I hummed confirmation.

“You look… pale.”

“Dying.” At this his head turned fully, eyebrows raised. “Not immediately,” I added. “I’ve got medication in my bag for a dozen things, but I’ve cut the pills in half to make them go further. This is a good body.”

“You’re OK being in a dying body?”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Not you. Not your rules.”

“I take my example from Janus. He… Funny, I always thought of him as a she, always thought he was… softer than the skin he wore. He dressed himself in a body barely on the edge of life when he died. When he knew he was going to die. It was still murder in that he forced a man to hold his consciousness while you put a bullet into his head. It was still butchery. But we must die someone, somewhere. And yet we lack the courage to slip into the wrinkled hand of the old woman on the ventilator or kiss goodbye on the cheek of he whose heart is fluttering in death. Janus tried before, but never quite managed to go through with it. Unlike most, we have a choice in this regard.”

“Are you planning on dying?”

“I plan on living until the moment I have no options left. But this is perhaps an unhealthy conversation before a day of entrapment and potential demise. How’s your shoulder?”

“I’m not going to play tennis any time soon.”

I ran my fingers through my straw-dyed hair, felt the crackle of broken ends and dying roots, licked my lips and nodded at nothing much in particular. “It is going to be a trap, you know.”

“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything any more.”

“The orders to kill you, to kill me, to kill Josephine–they all had to come from the top. If this sponsor is at the top, then either he’s been worn by Galileo, is being worn by Galileo or is in contact with someone being worn by Galileo–whatever. Galileo knows we’re coming. It’ll be waiting. Maybe not in the sponsor, maybe not in anyone we know, but it’ll be there.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

I shrugged. “If we don’t take this chance now, I doubt we’ll get another. I just don’t want it to be a big surprise.”

“And if Galileo is the sponsor? Will you kill him?” he asked.

“Will you?”

“I don’t know. I thought I would. I thought that, whoever Galileo was, whoever he wore, I’d kill him. If one man, or woman, died so that Galileo was dead, that seemed… an acceptable price. Now… I don’t know what I’ll do, if the moment comes.”