Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (33 page)

“Gabe is coming,” Richard says, a tinge of Alan—a tinge of alien—creeping into his voice. “Leah, too. You scared them.”

I glance back over my shoulder, don't see anything moving, and press my elbow against my side so the bulge of the glass beads on Nell's feather—still in my pocket—dents my breast. “If I did it, it would be for them,” I answer, realizing how insane my one-sided conversation would look if anyone were watching. “Scientific detachment is all well and good, Richard. But Alberta's going to take a few thousand—maybe a few hundred thousand—people off the planet and leave the rest to rot here.”

“Yes.”

“Genie's going to die, Dick. And this could save her.”

“Yes.”

“The nanites are a self-evolving system. They protect their host.”

“That, too.”

“So—” Still nobody moving back onshore when I turn to look, and the wind this far out on the ice could peel the skin off my face. I kneel on ice like coals of fire. “—why not experiment with a bigger host?”

“What if you're wrong?”

“Then the end comes a little faster,” I say, and brace myself on three limbs. “How long do you think it would take to punch through this?”

It's not easy. Ice chips sting my cheeks for ten minutes before the crust snaps under a sledgehammer blow of my steel hand. My right hand is numb and my ears have quit burning. Lake water splashes my face and I barely feel it. Don't feel it at all as it freezes between the fingers of my left hand, but I stretch them, cracking frost chips off metal. Concave flakes crunch under my knees when I shift back and dig in my pocket for Leah's knife, but my fingers are so numb I have to tear the pocket open and pick it up in my steel hand.

Leah did it wrong.

Right for her purposes, I should say. Wrong for mine. I kneel there on the ice, staring at the knife.
Would you do this for me, Richard? It shouldn't take much, right? I wouldn't have to bleed out. Just a few
—

“I could stop you, Jenny. Right here. Right now. Freeze you in your tracks the way Ramirez did to you and Trevor.”

You won't.
Leah was smart enough to sharpen the knife. I'm so cold I barely feel it dimple the skin of my right wrist. It goes in with a stretch and a sudden pop, and I close my eyes as I drag it upward, lengthwise, not wanting to watch the flesh and tendons peel away from the blade, but then heat spatters my legs and I peek, and all that scarlet freezes like rose petals to the ice around my fishing hole.

Not enough blood, and it's already clotting, pulling tight, pink and slick with lymph and granular tissue at the edges of the wound, sealing up like the ice crystallizing at the edge of the black, black water. “That's just freaky.”

I must have missed the vein.

“Jenny. I won't do it. You're killing yourself for nothing.”

“You'll do it.” My voice is so clear. It rings off the ice and the darkness like wind chimes, breath ripped to streamers by the endless wind. The vein is slick, slippery, blood clotting on my steel fingers as I try to hook under it, pull it up. It doesn't hurt.
And if I didn't die taking three bullets for Riel, what makes you think something as simple as this would kill me?

It doesn't hurt at all.

“Jenny,” he says. “It would take a central processor as big as the
Montreal
's to control the nanite infection on a planet the size of Earth. They need a control chip, remember? Without it, they're just so many creepy crawlies without a purpose in this world except providing spare cycles for me to run processes in.”

I drop the knife when the blood starts puddling and flowing in earnest, rivulets that pool in my palm and run between my fingers like seeds, like black rubies scattered. The blade somersaults, chips off the edge of the hole I made, vanishes into ebony water.

Followed by a tumble of jewels.

Make it happen, Richard.

It's not Richard's voice that answers me, but Alan's. “Master Warrant Officer. This looks remarkably like the actions of an unstable mind. You know that I can simply prevent the nanites from reproducing into the lake water. This is a futile exercise, and you're hurting yourself for no reason at all.”

Damn him.
Put Richard back on, please?
Amazed at my own calmness, I get a foot under me, come up on one knee as the rain of blood slows, stops. I dig in the wound with smeared steel fingers, gasping at how much—now, suddenly,
Jesus
—it hurts. I break the scab, and a fresh line of blood follows, but then suddenly my left hand quits on me and my body freezes, held upright by Richard's grip and not my will—

“You trust
me,
” Richard hisses in my ear, and I sense his tremendous disappointment in me. “Well and good. Trust me all you like—but do you want the
Benefactors
to have this kind of control over everything on Earth, Jenny? Alan and I are not going to let this happen—”

—and I hear somebody yelling, running footsteps, skidding on the frozen lake and the flicker of a flashlight across my back, the blood, the ice.

Somebody.

Gabe.

Marde. All right, Richard; you proved your point. My emotional blackmail won't work on you any better than Leah's did.

“I'm still a computer program,” he says.

You're a computer program that forgot one thing,
I remind him.
Can you hack the Chinese system the way you just hacked mine?

A pause, one I know is for my benefit. “No. Not if they knew I was coming. I've been trying since you were shot.”

So what makes you think that the Benefactors would have any better luck than you?

I can tell that he doesn't have an answer because he lets me go, and I'm standing—a little dizzy with blood loss—to face my tongue-lashing from Gabe by the time he catches up with me.

11:00 PM
Tuesday 19 December, 2062
Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario

The big truck purred to life as Razorface stroked the steering column. Indigo slouched against the passenger door, staring through the streetlamp reflections at pavement and ice. “Indy.”

Nothing, while he reached down and touched the radio on. Razor kept the reach going, cracked his neck out loud, and laid a hand on her arm. She jumped as if he'd snuck up on her. “Indy.”

“What?”

“Don't freak on me, babe. You in?”

She didn't turn to look. Her reflection showed a fine line etched between dark eyes and she suddenly looked her age. She shook her head slightly, hair whispering around her ears, and he pulled his hand back to cover a cough that tasted like molasses.

He nodded. “You're in.”

“Yeah,” she answered. “Where do we go?”

The Bradford ghosted into the stream of traffic, a navy blue shark cruising Toronto's dark waters. Razorface swallowed a mouthful of gunk, flipped the rearview mirror to “night,” and laid both hands on the wheel. “I've been tailing Holmes.”

“Have you.”

“She doesn't always drive home the same way,” he continued, ignoring the darkness in Indigo's voice. “But she's got a Monday route, and a Sunday route—”

He let the list flicker out when the girl half turned and tilted her head to the side. He didn't turn to look, but saw her expression with half one eye. “She thinks we're that dumb?”

“She thinks she's that smart anyway,” Razorface said, and turned west on Bloor. “You game?”

“Yeah.” A long exhalation, like a smoker's release. “Yeah. I'm game.”

0600 Hours
Wednesday 20 December, 2062
Somewhere over the Atlantic

I wake in a dark corner of a private jet, and not Holmes's jet either. This one is lushly appointed, but there's something worn about the edges of the beige leather recliner—almost a couch—that I'm strapped into. Low-angled sunlight streams around the blind to my left; if we're headed for Brazil, it must be morning.

My right arm's swathed with bandages. Tug of an IV in my right ankle when I release the belt and start to swing my legs around: I slide the IV out, keeping pressure on the puncture until it seals.
Richard?
The arm itches fiendishly.

“Welcome back.”

Good morning.
I shiver a little, remembering the cold of the night before, but there's more to it than that. You get used to following orders. Somebody snaps one, and you find yourself doing something you otherwise might not. It takes awhile to get out of the habit.
Valens told you to fix that, didn't he?

“I know. It can't be fixed.”

But can you block it from the outside, like I said?

“A boy can try.”

Light edges a curtain a couple of meters forward, too, and once I sit up I hear muffled voices trickling through. The corridor is narrow enough that I can lean over and pop the windowshade up. Sunrise—I presume it's sunrise—spills through scarred Plexiglas. I look down at my knobby bare toes scrunching carpet and laugh.

Still not dead.

Well, until Gabe gets his hands on me, at least.

The sun slips up a centimeter or three while I peel tape off my arm and lift the gauze to look under. “Damn,” as the compartment brightens and I look up to Gabe's broad shape silhouetted under the pushed-back curtain.

“You fucked yourself up.”

“All better,” I say, and—wincing—peel the gauze back so he can see the ragged black line of scab flaking from pink scar and a very tidy set of, oh, ten or twenty stitches. I hold it up next to my face, tilting my head, trying for wide-eyed innocence.

I've never mastered that one. His scowl informs me that I haven't gotten any better at it. He lets the curtain fall closed behind him. He doesn't say another word, and I worry my knuckle between my teeth as he sits down across the aisle.

Leah's voice, and Patty's, filter through the curtain. I lower mine. “You are so going to kick my ass.”

“No,” he says, and sprawls against the wall, closing his eyes. “Do you ever think about what you're doing, Jenny? Or do you just kind of—do it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Leah and Richard explained your plan. If I can dignify it with the term.” The sunrise turns his curls from ash-and-straw to spun red gold. I get up and cross the aisle, curl myself into the angle of his arm, lean back. He doesn't move away, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “But this noble self-sacrifice shit has got to end, Jenny. You have to think about the rest of us.”

Mon ange, if only you knew
. I cover my mouth with my hand, try to turn it into a cough, but the laugh starts deep and spills up out until I fall back against Gabriel's shoulder, shaking my head against his sleeve. “I was,” I croak between giggles. “Oh. Fucking hell. I didn't mean to scare you, Gabe.”

“You did,” he says. “You made sure somebody would clue. Otherwise what was that little drama for?”

“Ow.” I nibble the knuckle a little harder than I intended. “I—” Pinch my nose against the burning and close my eyes. “There was absolutely no chance that I was going to die from a little cut like that.”

“Good,” he says, and squeezes me as the girls laugh riotously on the other side of the curtain, resuming a conversation that must have been interrupted by my little fit. “Someday you'll have to fill me in on your logic.”

“Yeah.” I wonder how I can explain.
I owe a terrorist a favor. I have to save the world
.

Hmmm.

Maybe not.

I kiss him on the cheek and climb to my feet, not bothering to look for my boots. “I have to give something to Patty,” I say as he pats me on the ass.

“Come back afterward,” he says. “They're having fun. Don't spoil it with grown-ups.”

Patty studied the paper in her hand, avoiding the look that passed between Leah and Casey before the latter took the former by the wrist and led her forward, into the jet's cramped sideways galley.

The envelope's thick creamy paper was soft as felt, and Patty knew the handwriting well from birthday cards. She ran her thumb across it again, reluctant to risk what it might say inside. Frightened, because she couldn't imagine anything that Papa Fred wouldn't say to her face. Frightened, because Casey hadn't been able to meet Patty's eyes when handing her the note.

She slid her thumbnail under the flap and lifted it, the gum stretching at first and then the paper tearing at the edge. Patty glanced up and checked to make sure Leah, Casey, and Leah's dad were all out of sight. She slipped the note out of the envelope and unfolded a thick sheet of cotton laid that smelled faintly of Papa Fred's cologne—crisp and a little musky. The ink was black, formal. A glossy blue-green plastic chit—a data slip—fluttered to her lap, and she picked it up by the edges, unthinking.

It was a moment before her eyes would focus on the page.

Dear Patty,
the note began, under yesterday's date:

I've asked Jen Casey to bring this to you because I wanted you to have something real to take with you, and because I couldn't be there. I love you, and when you get to be my age, you will realize something. It's not how the future remembers you that is important. It's what you leave behind.

You're probably going to hear some nasty rumors about me soon. They're not quite true.

I'm leaving you, and the
Montreal,
and a few other things. Protect those for me, and make the most of your life that you can. Live a long time and be whatever you want to be, and don't ever let anybody tell you that you have to do anything if you know that it's wrong.

The only thing you must do is the thing your conscience demands.

You're a good girl, and smarter than your dad. Don't tell him I said so, but he takes after his mother. (Grin)

I like to think you're more like me.

Be good, but don't be too nice if you can help it.

Love,

Papa Fred

P.S. I've included a data slip with some code numbers that will give you access to my private files. Don't share them with anybody. I trust you to use them as I would have wanted.