Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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Текущая страница: 42 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

(105)

Even in Tony Sic’s fultballer body I didn’t have the lung power I’d had in the old suns. But still, if you know how to cough into a blowgun, you can send liquid out with enough force to practically go through a closed eyelid. And Grgur almost certainly wouldn’t close his eyes anyway. People trained the way he was… well, he was like us Ball Brethren. We do not blink, even when losing a limb. If their eyes get dry they wink one and then the other.

I blasted it out. He didn’t close his eyes fast enough. He squinted in obvious agony, orange drips sliding over his face, but still he just held my arms tighter behind my back.

I looked back at Hernan. He had his hand in his jacket pocket but he wasn’t pulling a gun.

I did a porcupine, pulling my legs up and curling into a ball, trying to wrench my left arm free, but of course what I really wanted was the right arm, the cast arm, and Grgur let his grip on that slack for just a beat, enough for me to twist it against his thumb and line up the shot, and I slammed the cast down into his inner thigh and drew it up along the artery into his groin, leaving a trail of bloody shredded fabric.

It got him to relax his grip enough for me to slide out and down to the floor, at the edge of the stairs.

Hernan had partly gotten his act together and was nearly on me, even with one arm wrapped around his throat.

So I tipped myself over and rolled down the stairs. At the first landing I sprang up and turned and half ran, half fell down around onto the next flight, four at a time in my little paper booties, pitching forward onto the landing below, my back tingling with imagined bullet-wounds.

I grabbed the inside railing with my left hand and wheeled around. In most combat situations one main thing is to just be decisive and book when you can. A lot of people stick around too long when they’re ahead.

There was one flight of metal-and-tile institutional stairs between me and Grgur, but I could hear him run-creeping down toward me, I could practically see him through the stairs, and as a single foot turned the corner I slashed at it with my cast and it slid out from under him.

I held on to the banister and struck again around the corner at his knee.

He grabbed my arm just before the second swipe could connect but I pulled my cast back and down into the crook of his elbow, the big artery there spraying blood onto the wall, and as he released the cast I backhanded him with it up into the left eye.

I was pretty proud of the job I’d done on my little hand-mace. After working on the thing near forever it was nice to see it doing its job.

Behind Grgur Hernan was crawling down the stairs at us, all bloody like a flayed captive. So much for the instant-killing technique. It was taking this guy’s uays forever to leave. And his body was still thrashing around dangerously. I dropped back from Grgur, decided to take a chance, and gave Hernan a shot in the split-open neck with my left foot.

Ordinarily I’d never kick in an actual weapon-based fight, it’s not worth possibly getting off-balance, but this time it seemed like the timing and everything was right and when the futbol-edge of my foot flipped his chin up he spittered up a fountain of arterial blood and crumpled.

I noticed a sort of porcelain knife, a six-finger-width black-blade thing with a blue Chinese-water-beast-skin handle, lying on the floor next to him-I guess he’d pulled it and I hadn’t even noticed-and I grabbed it and turned back around to Grgur.

For a beat I thought I was fucked and then I realized it wasn’t a gun in his hand, just a phone. Maybe he didn’t even have a gun with him.

Still, he’d probably hit some alarm. Just as bad. I gave him a left haymaker to the cheekbone with the butt of the knife, being careful not to break a finger, dropped it, twisted the phone away from him with my left hand, hooked his legs out from under him, and as he slid back down against the wall I tried to size him up.

Grgur definitely didn’t look hazardous. So just to be safe I picked the light little knife back up, scampered up the stairs again to the landing-I was feeling like a little grasshopper-dancer, an elf, sort of-and got behind Hernan, sunk the blade into his head under the ear, pulled it out, and wiped both sides on his shirt. I could smell Hernan’s shit releasing as he died. I went back down, sat behind Grgur, and started choking him with the elbow of my mace-arm.

I sat behind him, holding his neck from behind with his fat muscular ass between my legs and I was a little embarrassed because with all the excitement and everything I had a kind of serious hard-on and it was pressing up against him. Not that I found him at all attractive, it was just that sort of blood-rush adrenaline thing.

Kind of sluggishly Grgur got his arms up and started going for my head so I poked the knife into his elbows, one after the other, trying to pinpoint the nerves that drove his lower arms.

I had to try a couple times on the first one, but finally, from the way his hands reacted, I figured I’d gotten it right. His squeals didn’t come out like much. Hernan’s urine was running down the stairs from above, along with blood and other liquids.

I dug into Grgur’s lapel pockets with my good hand and found his wallet and Marena’s Sylphide lighter, which I guess he’d found on me and was going to give back to her. There were two different key cards with Florida Hospital on them. One said S-WING RESTRICTED USE A. Fabulous.

I felt a disturbance in the air, wind coming up from the bottom of the stairwell eight floors below, probably people answering Grgur’s alarm, and Grgur probably felt it too.

I held the cards against the handle of the knife and jammed it into the cast on my right hand. It went into my flesh a little bit but I could hardly feel it. The blade was facing his neck, and I pulled my arm back as far as it would go without cutting him.

“Let’s try to stand up together,” I said. If I fell over, or if he tried to break away, he’d be caught in the crook of the cast and the knife. Or at least that was the idea.

We stood up. His mangled leg nearly slid away from him and then he got it back under control. I was practically riding on his back. His arms dangled.

“So, look, why don’t we go back up to our floor, and we’ll be really, really mellow, and check out the pharmacy?” I asked.

Even though he was gasping, I could see him thinking. I hoped what he was thinking was that if he was too recalcitrant I’d probably just kill him and run, but if he came along, the others would probably find us and pick me off pretty fast while he broke away.

“Grgur? Okay?”

“Okay.”

(106)

His card relaxed the jaws of the door. Maybe it opens everything, I thought. A little demon in the wall switched on the caged lightning.

The tiny Pharmakopia room was all eye-dazzling shelves of many-hued translucent jars, some with seals in colors I’d never seen before. Magic Elixir City. Excellent.

I squeezed my cast elbow tighter around his neck and when I could feel his legs about to give out I pulled out the knife, sliced off his live badge with my left hand, and held it up to his left eye.

“So listen,” I said, “what other tracking equipment do I have on?”

He tried to shake his head. “Nothing,” he mouthed. I heard the door shut itself behind us.

“What else do you have on?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you get that alarm sent?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying,” I said, “I’m going to gouge your eye out on the count of one.” I held the black blade up to his eye. “Zero.”

“There’s nothing else.”

“Dogshit. Show me the other trackers. One.”

“Go ahead,” he whispered.

“Never mind, I believe you,” I said. I squoze off his air for another thirty beats, to the point where he was just beginning to pass out, and let him sprawl on the floor.

I found some surgical tape and wove his fingers together around the bolted-down leg of a metal shelving unit.

I sat down and started sawing the tracking box off my ankle with the white-bladed knife while I watched him. It took thirty-nine beats. By the fortieth beat Grgur’d stopped coughing and was getting it back together.

“So how do I get in to see Lindsay?” I asked. Jed would probably have asked whether Grgur was working primarily for Lindsay or for Marena, and whether Marena had given the order on No Way, and a whole bunch of other trivia, but I really didn’t care.

“That’s. Difficult,” Grgur choked out.

“Well, so then what are you good for?”

“I can try him.”

“How?”

“On the phone.”

“Where is Lindsay right now?”

“He went to assens today.”

“Assassins?” I asked. I got the ankle box off and sliced off my ID bracelet just in case. I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything else on me. Had they implanted a surgical tracker? That would be a little much even for this group.

“No, Athens, Greece,” Grgur said.

“What’s the best way to reach him?”

“Text him.”

“I mean in person,” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Hang on,” I said. I stuffed some cotton pads into his mouth and surgi-taped over it, leaving enough of a gap so that even if his nose stopped up he wouldn’t die. Next I cut some airholes in a big plastic trash bag, poured in three economy family-sized boxes of cotton pads, foomped it down over his head, twisted it, and taped it around his neck. He looked like-who?

Jack Pumpkinhead, Jed thought.

Right, I thought back. Next. Badges. Steenking batches. Think.

“Back in a third,” I said.

I opened the door and walked out, ready to cast-slash anyone in sight, but there was nobody. I wiped some blood spots off the floor in front of the door with the toe of my goddamn cloth slipper and I walked through the blazing flat light to the little waiting area. The couches were this acid orange that kind of upset me, and I tried not to look at them. I climbed up on one and looked out the window. It looked out on a closed courtyard, and there was a fire escape. And it was dark down there. After some fumbling I got the leaf, I mean, the key card I’d taken, to slide into a three-finger-wide crack, threw the glove with the trackers out into the warm dark, and closed the window again. There were footsteps coming up the hallway. I walked back to the pharmacy, closed the door with good delicacy, got behind Grgur, pulled the bag down a bit, weighted his arms and legs as much as I could, and choked him some more to make sure he’d be absolutely silent. If the cops or whoever came through the door I’d throw him at them and then go out the back and see if I could still get away. Although that didn’t sound good.

The footsteps went by outside. I didn’t breathe.

All right.

Pause.

For a few beats I thought about skinning him and wearing his face out, but, based on experience from doing the same thing in the old days, I figured it wouldn’t actually be so convincing. You needed trained taxidermists to work on it, and even then the effect was odd. And even assuming his head was big enough to fit over mine, there would be the bloody eye sockets and nostrils, and the whole nose issue would be a real problem, and if I couldn’t sew the lips together they’d hang open and show another pair underneath.

So even if they mistook us for him, they’d think we were so messed up they’d bring us right back to the hospital, where we don’t want to be. And skinned faces don’t really look that much like their previous owners until you preserve them correctly. Without all the muscle attachments and everything on underneath, they just look kind of droopy and abstract. Taxidermy is an art, and the human variety is the hardest.

“So, look, you’re going to transfer me out,” I said. Grgur mumbled something like “Okay.” He was still bleeding so I surgi-taped his worst wounds, just so he wouldn’t shock out on me, before I started rooting through the shelves. Hmm. Turbocurarine. Meprobamate solution. Most of the potions seemed familiar, I suppose because Jed had spent so much time in hospitals when he was little he’d memorized a volume known as the Physicians’ Desk Reference.

Let us see. A few bottles of Percocet. Some dioxyamphetamines in case I had to stay awake for a while. Some scalpem. Scalpels. Aha.

Downerland.

It took a little longer to find syringes. They were way up on the top shelf where the little kids couldn’t get them. I dumped a drawer of twenty– and hundred-millimeter disposables down into Grgur’s bloody lap and climbed down next to him with my bottles.

All right.

I mixed a few things up in little jar, a solution of about four milligrams of Pavulon, four grams of meprobamate, and thirty milligrams of tubocurarine chloride.

If he weighed two hundred pounds, that would make it about a quintuple dose of each. He’d feel it as fast as if it were heroin, but it wouldn’t get him right away. When it got distributed, though, he’d have had it. I pulled his sock down, found a clear vein on the inside of his upper ankle, and shot it in. He was squirming a little so I sat on him, pulled the bag off his head, pulled the wad out of his mouth, and while he was still gasping made a big wad of cotton and taped it over his mouth and nose. He’d be able to talk normally and I’d just be able to hear him, but if he started screaming it wasn’t going anywhere. His head was all red and sopping wet. I unwrapped one of the hundred-milliliter arterial syringes. It had a nice long sturdy needle. Beautiful.

I looked at his watch. We’d been in here for about thirty-score beats. Ten score since the injection. I should really give the shit another ten-score beats to kick in before I tried anything. You just can’t cover everything, though, it’s all a compromise. Give it another fifty-score beats.

“So this may be a cliche,” I said, “but can I ask whom exactly you’re working for?” I got more weight on his head, turned it sideways, and felt the edge of his jaw.

“Mrmff,” he said.

“You can talk,” I said. I slid the dry needle through the thin skin over the lower arch of his mandible, under the masseter muscle and away from the facial vein, and rested it against the nerve-rich bone. There was only a tiny bead of blood.

“Now twist, now writhe in ant-blood tickles,” I said.

I drew the thick needle through a wide arc, scraping against the bone. Grgur didn’t groan but I felt his involuntary tense and shiver. That’s nothing, I thought.

“You understand I look like Tony Sic, but I’m-ah-I’m Jed.”

“Yuh. Somebody said-”

“Come on. Who is your steward of long things?”

“Huh?”

“Your commanding officer.”

“Lindsay Warren,” he said.

“Who put up the money?”

“For what?”

“For the Stake, in Belize,” I said. I tried not to look at the drifts of precancerous dander under his pathetic thinning sideburns.

“Lindsay’s investors.”

“Who’s Lindsay’s superior?”

“As far as I know, um, I don’t think…”

“Hurry up.”

“I think Lindsay’s his own boss.”

“Really? Okay, how do I get in there?”

“Where?”

“His office. At the Stake.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d still better get some codes and names and whatever on the table. I’m serious.”

“I’m serious, I don’t know.”

“Okay, you obviously have nothing to offer.” I drew the needle back and scraped it over and over into his mandible toward his teeth, not widening the single puncture but etching a deep line in the bone, over and over, like I was jerking him off. He started shrieking way back in his throat but I gave him a full twenty strokes before stopping. Working on him was getting me back on track.

“There’s a Warren weapons test on for December twenty-first,” I said. “I want you to help me find out about it.”

“Okay.”

“So, okay, tell me about it.”

He paused like he was thinking of making something up, but he must have decided not to.

“I don’t know,” he said, “there’s a Christmas party at the Hyperbowl, if there’s something on for the Stake I’m not in on it.”

“How do I get to see Lindsay?”

“I don’t even know when he’ll be back, they move his schedule around-”

“Please, be terse.” When the stuff took effect he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything. “What codes do you have?”

“I just have a card.”

“How long is it good for?”

“Forever.”

I eased the needle in further, pushing it down from above with my finger, under his loose, bristly skin, until the point threaded into the base of his number-three molar. He tensed. Maggots of waxy sweat welled up out of his pores.

“Come on, how often does the card change?”

“All the time, it’s live-”

“I mean the whole card.”

“It gets replaced every week. I get the new one in two days.”

I felt footsteps again, and voices I couldn’t make out went down another hall, more urgent and official-sounding this time. I jammed the drift of cotton into Grgur’s face.

(107)

Twenty beats later I heard them come around on the other side into the nursing station and run off.

It’s a big sun day, I thought. Excellent. They’re following the badges. I eased up on the wad.

Grgur seemed immobile so I started doing some repair work on my cast-mace, taping in a few scalpels in a sawtooth pattern and then rewrapping the outside with regular white surgical tape.

“Who gave Jed-Sub-One the fake anticoagulant?” I asked.

“When?”

“Back on Halloween.”

“I don’t know, some other cutout.”

“Why?”

“We were not going to kill you, we were only supposed to bring him-you-in.”

“Bring me in to whom?” I asked. I scraped him again. He just squeal-whimpered a little. “Grgur? Seriously. To whom?”

“To Mr. Warren,” he said.

“Who else was going to be there?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what was the next step?”

“We were just going to move you out, we’re here to protect you.”

“We were here to protect you,” I said, trying to imitate him.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “If you walk out of here you’re dead, they know where we are, the whole place is covered… you’re sick, they put stuff in you that’s going to kill you if you don’t let them take care of you-”

“You’re crazy,” I said, sounding a bit more like him. I tried to raise my voice to the pitch he’d have if he weren’t so hoarse. “You’re a dead man. They know where we are. I’m here to protect you. You’re crazy. I’m here to protect you.” It wasn’t brilliant, but I thought it might pass.

Grgur must have gotten what I was up to because he shut up, but I wadded and scraped him again. Tough or not, he screamed and screamed. The cotton wad buzzed like a vibrator.

“Come on,” I said. “Who doesn’t like me? I mean, the most?”

“No, that’s the way it is.” He was starting to sound a little slushy.

“All right, let’s just chat, then. Tell me about Lindso’s Grand Prize Game.”

“I don’t know about things like that.”

I held the wad over his mouth and dug the needle in under the tooth. I didn’t find the nerve right away, but a few hundred beats after I did find it his eyes started tearing and five-score beats later he was screeching into the wad.

It’s kind of intimate and pathetic when someone actually breaks, when his whole tough-guy thing-which is a big part of his sense of self-just evaporates. Sometimes an interrogator can start feeling sorry for the subject at that point and stop pushing as hard, and then, even though the subject’s in a pretty bad way, he might still notice and start withholding information. I didn’t have that problem, though.

“Come on.”

“Let. Um. Me think. For… a minute. Okay, please?”

“Forget it,” I said, “you’re right, you can’t help me.” It was probably true, this whole session was a waste of time. Anyway, they must be finding those badges by now. Better hustle.

It had made me feel a lot better, though. Not out of revenge, like I cared about No Way or anything, but just more like I was back on my sacrificer track.

“You’re going to check me out of here.”

“Whatever you say, asshole,” he whispered.

“Look, here’s the deal,” I said. “Are you listening?”

“Sorry, what?” he said. He was trying to stall me.

“I know you heard that,” I said. “Okay. You feel sort of numb and cold right now, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve given you a mix of paralytics and depressants and a few other things and it ought to kill you in less than a half hour. You got that? And it will be very… claustrophobic, it will feel like you are drowning in feathers. So, we are just going to take the other elevator down into the Emergency entrance and you’re going to tell everyone who hassles us how okay everything is. Okay? And if you, if you screw up, I just will not tell them anything, and by the time they figure out the mix of things that’s wrong with you you’ll be a big blue bulgy-eyed turd.” I held the little drug bottles up in front of his face. “But if you’re really helpful, I’ll give you the bottles when I leave and maybe they’ll figure out what ails you. You understand?”

He grunted a little.

“You got that?” I asked. “Otherwise they’ll never work it out in time.”

He made another grunt that sounded a little more affirmative. Meprobamate is a hypnotic and I hoped he was getting into a receptive state of mind. Not like it was a truth serum or anything. Nothing is.

I took the wad away. He was gasping and I was pretty sure he wasn’t faking, he had that rattling shiver specific to Pavulon. This stuff is great, I thought. Maybe Jed did have a grain or two of useful information in his head.

I looked into his eyes. He was still glaring, but his eyes were already looking a little dilated and lymphy. I got the feeling he didn’t believe I’d care enough to let him live.

“Lube, I’m serious,” I said. “You may not know me, but the one thing I wouldn’t do is renege. On the other hand, if your guys pick me up I’m not talking. You know, even if they think to ask what’s wrong with you. I mean, I’d be upset to get nailed, but letting you die would take a little of the edge off. Okay?”

He nodded a little.

“Okay, here we go,” I whispered. I stood him up. He was weebly but he could stand, so I guessed the stuff was working correctly. I realized I was still in my gown. There weren’t any doctor costumes in here. Damn. Have to remember to take Grgur’s jacket on the way out.

Okay. Anything else? No. I cleaned his face up a bit with some Sani-Wipes and squirted some Phisohex on his stringy hair and slicked it back. I tied his right wrist to mine with a surgical tube and held on to it so that at a distance it would look like we were handcuffed together. I opened the door and walked him out to the elevator. There were glass doors two rope-lengths ahead of us, and it even looked like there were car lights past them. We took four steps out of the elevator. Grgur was pretty sluggy but so far he could walk. There were some cops around, but with all the flat bright artificial colors, like everything was flat weavings, I couldn’t really pick out whether they’d noticed us. This era has so many dyes and paints and Electromats, anything can be any color. In front of the eye-dazzler stew a woman who looked kind of in charge came toward us from around a desk and I turned Grgur’s head away. I read her name tag. Teresa de la VillaReal.

“Good night, Teresa,” I said in his voice through my almost-closed lips. “So now I gotta transfer Mr. Sic to the state police. Sorry. See you later.”

“Wait, are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I made Grgur say.

“You have to wait,” Teresa said. “The other police are here, there’s been a killing-” She was the voice I’d heard before, upstairs.

“It’s okay,” he/I said. Teresa hit some keys on a black thing in her hand and an alarm started wheeping like a hundred linked screech-owls. Some big guys in suits were pushing toward us from the other side of the lobby and there already were four cops between us and the doors. I veered us left, dragging Grgur, into an area where the crowd was thickest. There was some sort of punk gang dressed as neo-Maya bloods over there, five or six nearly naked teenagers with major tats and dyed green feathers, who I guess had been in a fight because a couple of them were bleeding into sorbents. There was a boom box with rack music blasting softly, and a couple of interns running around trying to get them all to settle down.

“Freeze, asshole,” somebody said in a studiedly authoritative voice, stepping in front of me. It was one of the cops from upstairs. He had his gun out but I pushed Grgur into him. “The prisoner has drugged me,” I shouted in Grgur’s voice. “He’s got a bomb.”

The cop hesitated for a beat. It wasn’t even that convincing, it was just weird, I guess. Then he realized what was going on but I’d already cut myself free of Grgur and I slid left into the knot of kids. Grgur kind of grabbed at the guy as he fell, and that gave me another beat. I singled out one of the healthier-looking of the punks and punched him in the face, not hard enough to really hurt him.

“You’re under arrest, scumbag!” I shouted. He recovered and he and a couple of friends came at me, grabbing my hospital gown. I shrugged out of it, letting it rip over my head, and punched my way through the gathering melee over another tier of waiting-room seats and I vaulted over it. It felt good. I tossed the tranq bottle into a big pebbly trash can. Old Gruggle’s had it, I thought. He shouldn’t have messed with Big Red in the first place. He was bug meat from Go.

“Hang on,” some major male voice said into a megaphone on the right. “ Sir! ” I just pushed toward the doors, only ten arms away. Through the fabric I spotted a couple of big guys in light suits pushing into the area along with the cops, but now there was a whole big Mexican extended kinship group coming in around us-a couple of the teenage bloods or guys or whatever they’re called were wearing Kings colors-and I sort of steered us around them and got to the outer door and started to dance through it, like I was just a drugged-out party dude. Somebody grabbed my shoulder from behind and I whirled, not seeing well through the cheesecloth-covered eye-ovals in the mask, but it was just the kid I’d punched in the nose. I snapped the tip of my cast through his wrist and he dropped back, looking at it. I turned and walked at a relatively normal pace, toward the first pair of big double glass doors, and they opened around me. It seemed like being nearly naked was working in my favor, it threw people off a bit. Still, the sound coming from behind me gave me the impression that the Warren security people had almost gotten to us. The second door opened into a rush of blissfully real hot toad-breath twilight air. I didn’t look back, I just padded across the concrete, opened the shotgun door of the Mexican family’s old Dodge van, and slammed the door. There was a middle-aged woman, a maiden-aunt type, sitting at the wheel, and a couple of kids in the back. I crawled into the front seat and across her lap and looked out the open window. There was a black Maxima low-rider with a weird black-light glow coming out from under the chassis, like it was floating on a Xibalban color-cloud, and there was another fifteen-year-old pseudo-Maya wannabe at the wheel. I slid out the driver’s door of the van, opened the Maxima’s passenger door, slid in, way, and yanked the door shut behind me.

“Don’t do anything or I’ll kill you,” I said in Spanish. “Drive around that taxi.” The kid started to grab for something between his legs, so I killed him, swishing my cast-mace between his eyes, through the bridge of his nose, and then back through his Adam’s apple. Instead of pushing him out I just shifted into drive, crouched down, pressed his foot down on the pedal, and steered us around the taxi judging by the lights overhead and then around a couple of minivans, sensed their bumpers with the low-rider’s little catfish-barbels, and got us out into the far left lane and accelerated. We got out from under the overhang. Out of range, I thought. I stuck my head up and started really driving. I floored the thing around the sort of rotary and got to the ramp leading to the highway, scraping the ground. Low-riders are great, they really do corner. No flip, no slip. There were cop cars with sirens pulling into the overhang from the other side, way too late as usual. I buzzed over the road’s molars– rumble strips, Jed’s mind said, automatically but a little late-out of the hospital complex and up a curved slope and onto a frictionless gray sacbe, sliding between crystals of topaz, all identical and as big as a fist, set into the surface. Even with the sled’s masks down– windows open – I was starting to smell the dead pre-blood’s feces and urine, so I steadied the car for a few beats in the left lane, managed to get his jacket off him, and when I got up to about fifty I just opened the driver’s-side door and body-nudged him out. I felt him bounce and the car started jerking all over. His leg was still partly caught in the shoulder harness and he was scraping along the asphalt, and from the way he twitched he was still partly alive. There was a little auto-rush of revulsion from the Jed side of my head, sort of fear and loathing combined, but I slashed through the strap with my cast-mace and finally he rolled away from the sled like a used-up captive into a mass grave. As the back roller bumped over him the car nearly skudged into the median strip, but I wrenched it inexpertly around, got back on course, and closed the door.

I knew to let Jed’s motor memories take over. Despite my shameful fear of the giant sled he got the car onto the Great Sacbe. The wind felt great through my bandages. I’m just getting started, I thought. No stink of them here. SOUTH, I read off a green sign. Wrong color for South, I thought. I was going too fast to look around but I moved the rearview mirror from side to side. No cars coming up behind me, at least not fast. I looked at the gas. Enough, I somewhere knew the needle pointed to. Jed’s mind seemed to think that the night watcher bloods, I mean, the police, might be relatively easy to shake because no matter what bonuses they were getting they’d still only assign a couple of people to the case. But I also had a large, well-funded private organization after me, which is a lot more serious. I figured I’d cruise as far as possible for about four-hundred-score beats and then change cars. No sweat, as they say these days. I started pulling at the last layer of magically clear cloth that was still stuck to my right hand. I watched the yellow speed indicator clicking up through these people’s gangly base-ten numerals, up through a sort of sky or ceiling that Jed’s mind called the Invisible Gardol Shield, 67, 71, 79, 83, 97. I touched the CRUISE glyph at 94 and held on to the steering plate like a child on its mother’s back, feeling the speed of twenty Mixtec runners.