Finn's Golem (14 page)

As long as I was able to run flat-out, I was in pretty good shape. The good people of Freeville watched me go by, and there were a few shouts as I did so. One or two punks tried to catch up to me, figuring anyone running that fast must have something worth taking. It wasn’t a bad gamble, I guess, but they gave up pretty easily. There were easier pickings to be had all around them.

There were normally cops everywhere you looked in Freeville. You almost didn’t notice them, until they were suddenly gone. No cop in Bountiful would want to miss the opportunity to take out a mob of armed Synths, or at least say that they did.

After a mile my hands started to shake and I knew that it was either pull it back to something like a brisk jog or risk having nothing left in the tank. The main problem with this was that people did not jog in Freeville. They did not worry about keeping in shape, because they never had enough to eat, and those that did not meet a violent end would almost certainly live to see their systems collapse from one inherited malady or another by the ripe old age of thirty-five.

If I’d stuck to the Corridor I could have tried to hijack a cab. It was a risky play in itself, but it looked real good right now. But taxis did not come into Freeville. There was no point. I did see one rickshaw about three blocks in, but it had been turned over on its side by a swarm of kids who were pulling the thing apart, and the driver with it by the look of things.
No cops in Freeville
. It was a pretty common piece of graffiti, and now they had a chance to show just what they would do if they got their wish.

Over the steady
bossa nova
of the rain beating down, I could hear the shattering of glass. The few shops there were in the district were already being pulled apart by looters, squeezing through holes in broken windows with their arms full of anything they could carry. The
few
business owners willing to sell there would lose everything. For a
couple of
days the looters would feel rich, and then they would find themselves farther from everything. More isolated. And it would fuel their hate.

I heard a woman’s voice scream from up the block and it almost stopped me in my tracks. Women scream for all kind
s
of reasons, I told myself, and it was true enough. If I’d sat down and thought about it, I probably could have figured the first place the cops would have to come from to deal with a Synth uprising in the Access Acre would be Freeville. Who the hell cared about Freeville anyway? Except that these weren’t Synthetics, these were humans. Deeply broken humans. And there’s no
thing more dangerous than that.

Three blocks past the ironically named Kings Court a crowd of about thirty spotted me and started hurling stones. Whatever they could get their hands on. But they were deep into the square, and there was the skeletal remains of a fence they would have had to navigate, so they settled for a rain of rubble, followed closely by a second rain of abuse, and then nothing. It had to be frustrating for them, living all of their lives leashed by a heavy police presence only to realize that they had no idea what
to do with an hour of freedom.

By the time I’d gone another six blocks the air was already thick with smoke. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it didn’t matter. Not to them and certainly not to me.

Ten minutes after I’d left the last of my fan club from Kings Court behind
,
something in a grey sweatshirt with a hood jumped on my back. I couldn’t tell if it was a woman or just a man who’d never learned to tackle worth a damn. I also didn’t care. I flipped the grasping shape over me, grabbing hold of an arm as it sailed past. I twisted the arm behind as the shape fell forward and broke it at the elbow with a well-place
d
stomp of my foot. I dropped the arm and brought my foot down on the thing’s neck twice, after wh
ich it didn’t protest any more.

At that moment, an armored police assault transport
rumbled past
on heavy tracks, tearing up the pavement
as they roared
by
.
They weren’t stopping for anything until the
y
reached the armed Synths that were nowhere to be found in the Access Acre. I hauled my protesting frame back into gea
r and began to run after them.

This worked well for a few minutes, but it was like getting behind a blocker that was moving at forty times your speed. They cleared a path, but it didn’t stay open long enough.

If I’d had the time to move carefully, stick to the shadows, I might have been able to get through without incident. But time was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Somewhere on the other side of
t
his chaos was a woman who was walking straight into a fire. Sure, she’d lied to me, and circumstances dictated that I hadn’t exactly been straight with her either. But she was my client, and that was supposed to mean something.

I stopped in my tracks. I had maybe nine blocks to go before I hit the edge of the Acre. I
wasn’t
out of the woods yet, but every step I got closer to the wail of sirens made the odds of being swept away by the rioters and looters narrower. I was close, but I couldn’t keep going.

I needed to get my wind back, it was true. My heart was pounding in a way that said however I normally conducted my business, it didn’t involve quite this much running. As I leaned over and set my hands against my knees I could see the vapor start to rise off my exposed flesh. I took my hat off and let the rain soak my hair. I was steaming like a horse now. But none of that was what had really stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a realization. A simple fact.

Claire Marsland was not my client.

I didn’t have clients. I was not a detective. I was not Drake Finn. I didn’t know who Drake Finn had been, but the little I’d learned about him told me I didn’t like him very much. The rain was falling harder now,
washing
the stinging salt of my sweat into my eyes.

I was still operating under the assumption that some of the handful of things that I knew about myself were true. But they weren’t
–
I was no one. And if I owed loyalty to anyone or anything, it seemed likely that it was Cyrus Carter. Was that why I hadn’t been able to pump a charge into his chest at the restaur
ant? From somewhere deep inside
, was the Monarch reasserting himself? The lieutenant, the killer, the un-person. That was who I was. Wasn’t I?

I heard a cry from the road ahead of me and moved up a set of concrete steps and pulled into a doorway. There wasn’t time for this, I tried to tell myself. But the truth of the matter was that there was all the time in the world. That the woman who was out there all alone had given me the highlight of the eighteen or nineteen hour span that I called my life was indisputable. But that moment wasn’t up against a lot of competition. The steak... some of the banter with Sixteen... there wasn’t much in the plus column.

There were more yells down the road ahead. They weren’t cries for help, they weren’t exclamations made from fear, they were something else again, something primal. I pulled deep into the doorway and tried to get my wind back. My legs felt like rubber. I spat and wiped the side of my face with my open left hand in a useless gesture against the rain.

There was no point in letting emotions into it. Those were bound to be a little screwed up. Everything else was. But logically, there were three options.

I could ride out the riots in Freeville and walk away from the whole stinking mess. This was certainly the path of least resistance. I would have the paper money in my pockets, the GAT, my copy of
Murder, Sweet Murder
and not another damn thing. Being a Shade seemed like a complicated thing, and
I had no clue how it was done.

The yells were getting closer. There were at least five or six different voices rising up against the roar of the rain. Had to figure for every one that was shooting his mouth off there had to be at least two more. Big crowd.

The most obvious option would be to get back in with Carter. No mean feat, since I had killed at least... what was it now... four of his men. My men. He’d see me as a traitor at worst and at best as a broken piece of equipment. But if I could put this Golem Protocol in his hands...

...I would be delivering what he saw as the last piece he needed to become a God. Somehow I found it hard to see him as anything more than a cruel, Old
Testament
d
eity. And what would I be to him but a liability? Still, there was a chance.

I could see them now. There had to be twenty, twenty-five of them. All men, probably none very far out of their teens, but full-sized by any measurable standard. They were walking in something like a straight line across the entire width of the street and sidewalk. The message was clear.
This is ours. There is no going around. There is no going back
. I kept still.

I thought about Claire’s eyes again. I didn’t want to, because I knew there was no profit in it, but I did anyway. Was the girl that she had shown me much more real than I was? She’d lied to me almost from the moment she had stepped off the shuttle. Hell, she’d been lying to me longer than I could remember. She might be trying to do the right thing by her father, but she was also a
’
Frame spook, and a rogue one at that. Who knew why she was doing anything. There was no goddamned reason to get myself killed for Claire Marsland, to die by some idiotic hero’s code.

I had my wind back now. There was a cry from the far end of the line of hooligans on the other side of the road. I had been spotted. They halted in their tracks and began to gather around the base of the stairs on which I stood.

I pulled my hat back on my head. It seemed pretty damned likely that I was going to die in the next five minutes, and if not, you couldn’t have found a bookie in Bountiful that would have given you odds on my seeing the sunset. Sunsets were overrated anyway. I could die an un-person. I could die a lap-dog. Or I could play detective for a while longer.

I walked down the stairs towards the assembling crowd of punks. I stopped two steps from the bottom. There were concrete railings on either side of me that were higher than my waist and solid to the base of the stairs. This was a bad spot.

I said nothing. They looked at each other. Finally one stepped up.

“What do we have here?” he said. He was scrawny but looked strong, and his flesh was riddled with bumps, like there was a growth under his skin every few inches. He’d never know what they were because he’d never find a doctor willing to look at him, and if he did, he wouldn’t think of anything but robbing him or stealing drugs. He was maybe all of twenty, but probably not so much. He had sharpened hi
s
teeth into points, which in Freeville passed for something to do.

I had nothing to say to this, so I didn’t.

“I’m talking to you, Pops
,” he
said, angrier. I looked in his eyes. He was like a dog. He was just barking, and there was no answer I could give him that would not result in more barking. So I gave him none. Simple enough and it had the desired effect. It pissed him off.

“What’s the matter with you
,
Pops? You got nothing to say?”

There was some excited laughter from the ranks. It was hard to say if the boy with the bumps was the
de facto
leader or not, but he was the one getting in the outsider’s face, and at the moment, that made him the Alpha. That meant taking him down would be like taking down any five of the other
s. A prospect too good to miss.

There was a delicate art to this kind of transaction. Whether they knew it or not, most people who didn’t do this kind of thing for a living followed the rhythms of conversation, even in a situation like this. Meaning any response from your opponent is going to come in the space you have allowed for them to speak. It was an unconscious thing. A wisecrack, a plea for mercy, a punch to the face, they were all expected to come in the same moment, unless you had done this enough times to spot the pattern. My guess was that Bump Boy hadn’t. I could buy him as a petty crook, a gang member, a rapist... but he didn’t seem familiar with this particular role. For one thing
,
he led with his face when he spoke. I could see the knife in his hand, but it wasn’t nearly as nice as the one the last dead bastard who pulled a knife on me had.

Bump Boy wasn’t much of a public speaker. If
Pops
was the best he could do
,
then thinking up his next
bon mot
must have taken some concentration
. W
hen they finally came
,
they weren’t long. The moment to do it was just as he began to open his mouth.

“L-” was about all he said before I brought my foot up and broke his nose with my heel. It was a less impressive move when you remembered that I was standing two stairs higher than him, but I was hoping no one would notice that.

The nose is in many ways the best possible thing to break, as long as you’re the one doing the breaking. It’s exposed, it’s fragile, it spurts blood in a dramatic fashion and every so often somebody takes a little nap right afterwards. There’s also very little chance of killing the person you’re hitting, though I was almost certainly going to do that in the next few seconds anyway.