Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (9 page)

“It looks like his wife knew about the fake death,” Bruna said. “That explains the secretary’s surprise. But maybe she didn’t know where her husband was hiding. That’s why they tortured her. And that’s why they hired me. So I would take them to Gand. I felt like I was under observation in the park. Then the sensation disappeared.”

“If they were going to follow you, how did they get there first and kill Gand?”

Bruna was confused, really dazed. Nothing made sense.

“It’s strange, yes. Everything about this case is weird. You haven’t found the diamond, right? I assume whoever killed Gand has it. Maybe the secretary is in danger.”

“Not anymore,” Lizard said. “They killed him this afternoon as he was going into his house. A shot from a black-plasma gun, just like Yárnoz.”

“Thanks for sharing your information, Lizard. I’ve got things to tell you, too.”

The techno talked about Ongalo, Ongallow, Onkalo, and the strange blind spot on Terra Vision. She also told him that Yárnoz appeared in her fake childhood memories, and that she’d called Nopal, her memorist, though she still hadn’t managed to get in touch with him. Then she swallowed the rest of her wine, because Oli was coming their way to refill their glasses.

“We make a good team,” Lizard said, raising his glass after Oli had gone to tend to other customers. The hint of a smile danced in his eyes.

“A good team,” echoed Bruna, raising her glass and looking not at Lizard’s eyes but at his mouth.

Those lips. She remembered the taste of them well. That muscular and liquid tongue that would now taste of whiskey, like the first time they made love.

Bruna finished her drink and slammed the glass down too hard on top of the counter. She felt a bit dizzy. She swayed back and forth on her feet, like a metal rod attracted by a magnet.

“I’m amazed that Gand cut off his own arm. He must have had a very powerful reason,” she added, trying to return to the more solid terrain of the investigation.

“It doesn’t surprise me so much,” Lizard replied. “He’d mutilate himself to save his neck of course. It’s actually quite common: lizards leave their tails behind in order to escape. Wild boars and wolves bite off paws caught in traps. Life blindly insists on living no matter the cost.”

Life blindly insisted on continuing to live. Yes, it was true,
thought Bruna through a haze of alcohol. She knew it well. She felt that urgency, that fury, that rage, that yearning, that fear, but would she be capable of self-mutilation? She barely had three years of life left.
Three years, ten months, and seven days.
What would each day gained cost her? How many grams of flesh? How many millimeters of skin? How many splinters of bone? How many strips of torn tendon? Wouldn’t it be too high a price for her short, miserable existence? The bar was becoming more packed by the minute, and someone gave the techno a shove. Bruna briefly lost her balance, maybe because of her inebriation, or maybe because she was pretending to be more drunk than she really was—she’d downed too much wine to make such fine distinctions. To recover her balance, she grabbed Lizard’s chest, a strong and welcoming wall. She was so close to him that she could smell his sharp odor of leather, the forest, smoking wood. She stayed like that, leaning against that scorching flesh, and raised her face. How wonderful to have to raise her head to look at a man.

“Why did you want to see me?” Lizard said.

“To talk about the case.”

“Why did you want to see me?” he repeated with such urgency that he sounded irritated.

Bruna stretched her neck and bit the policeman’s mouth. A restrained bite, bordering on painful, but without drawing blood. A quick nip, enough to take note of Lizard’s warm, slightly grazed lips, to sense him give a start; enough for a fire to devastate her sex, eager and open under her skirt. The rep pushed herself away from the inspector and, stumbling slightly, headed for the restroom. She walked into one of the two stalls and leaned breathlessly against the wall at the back next to the toilet as the door banged against its frame. Her heart was pounding against her ribs, and her entire body was a painful throb of desire. Her mind a blank, she heard someone come in. Footsteps approached, and then the stall door opened. Lizard fell on top of her with the force of an enemy soldier. Despite their combined size, they writhed inside the small space. They filled each other’s mouths, bit each other’s necks, grabbed hold of one another, pulled, scratched, and, without removing their clothes, melted together into a moaning, demented animal with two heads, until they exploded into a small, quick, intense death, an orgasm that felt like a stab wound.

Bruna returned from a faraway inhuman place. She was jammed in the narrow space next to the toilet, standing upright with her back against the wall, still joined to Lizard and partially supporting his weight as he crushed her against the wall. The inspector’s head was buried in her neck and he was very still, as was she. A moment of absolute stillness after the agony and the fury. Lizard’s breathing, still erratic, was audible in the silence. The policeman’s hands were propped up against the wall. He was still inside her but didn’t even seem aware of her presence. Suddenly, Bruna felt an urgent need for some proof that she meant something to him. She needed a kiss, a whispered word, a caress, a look. But the man’s huge body was transmitting only self-absorption, indifference, coldness, distance. They were still coupled like dogs, but he felt so far away. His absence hurt. It was a wound opening in her belly, an ever-deepening, ever more maddening laceration. The impossibility of being loved. Bruna had her arms around the inspector’s broad shoulders, and the affectionate intimacy of the gesture suddenly seemed unbearable to her. She gave him a shove, and he straightened up and separated himself from her. He stood there looking at her.

“Okay. We’ve fucked,” snapped Bruna. “It wasn’t a fantastic fuck to be honest.”

Lizard’s face froze. His heavy eyelids came down over his eyes like a curtain. Unhurriedly, he began to fix his clothes. “Don’t exaggerate, Bruna. Always so extreme. You see everything as black or white. It wasn’t so bad. And remember, you called me. You were the one who started it.”

Something more, something more.
The rep desperately needed something more than this sticky wetness, this void.
By the great Morlay.
She needed feelings. For Lizard not to leave. For him to embrace her. For him to love her. But she was unable to say it, to ask him for it. Bruna had never given in to the demands, the traps, of emotion. Not even with Merlín, her beloved Merlín, the technohuman she had lived with for two years and whom she had accompanied through the final painful journey of his TTT. Out of the blue Bruna knew intuitively that there was a beautiful world of intact emotions within her. It was a dazzling, fleeting vision, like Earth glimpsed from the stratosphere through a gap in the clouds. All that affection and need formed a deep, sad lake inside her chest.

“I was ready for more. Six months ago, when we started,” whispered the rep.

Lizard looked at her. Solid, expressionless, impenetrable.

“No. That’s not true,” he said finally. “You don’t know how to give more. You can’t. And maybe I can’t either.”

He pushed open the door and left.

What a waste!

15

B
runa was lying across her bed, sleeping. She was dreaming that Merlín was pounding her head with a rubber mallet. The mallet was thick and heavy. Merlín was hitting hard and the blows hurt. The rep knew that her lover was hitting her because he wanted to convert her head into a funerary diamond, which it appeared he would do by battering her skull. “But you’re the one who’s dead! So why do you want to make a diamond from me?” she was asking him. “Because I’m lonely and I need you to keep me company” was his answer. Bruna understood him: death must be a desolate, windswept place. She also knew that this was all a dream, and even though she was enjoying Merlín’s presence, she began to search for some way of waking herself up; the blows were becoming increasingly unbearable and painful. Her first thought was to give herself a call, but her lover was holding her in such a way that she couldn’t reach her mobile. The hammering continued, and her pain was getting worse. So then she started to shout in the hope that the noise would save her. Fiery whiplashes ran through her temples as the mallet continued to land heavily and insistently. She redoubled her yelling, finally opening her eyes and emerging from the dream but not from the pounding and the pain. Dazed, she took a few seconds to return to reality. She was lying on her back, the migraine was torturing her, pecking at her head like a vulture, and someone was hammering on her door. She sat up with difficulty and noticed that she was wearing the same clothes as the night before.
Oh yes, last night. Oli’s bar. Lizard.
She suppressed a feeling of nausea. Someone was still trying to batter down her door.

“Enough!”

Her own voice resonated between her ears like a deafening bell. She stumbled to the main screen and saw that her visitor was the tactile.
Naturally. Who else?
At their first and, to date, only meeting, Daniel Deuil had insisted that Bruna was too tense. That she was on the defensive, lost in herself, dug in. That in order for his treatment to be effective, they would henceforth have the sessions in the rep’s apartment, because if she was in her home environment, she would feel more protected, and it would be easier for her to relax. It wasn’t a suggestion; it wasn’t a question: he simply stated it as a nonnegotiable fact. Bruna hated any intrusion on her privacy, into her solitary bear den, the beast’s sacred lair. But she wouldn’t be able to go on working if the tactile didn’t sign her letter of mental aptitude. Plus Deuil had that rare ability to convince—or rather, to impose—himself. Everything he said seemed to be written in stone by a fiery ray. His words carried the weight of an unnamed law.

Bruna opened the door with the reluctant willingness of a condemned creature. Deuil narrowed his slanted eyes to scrutinize her.

“You were shouting, Husky.”

The rep shrugged her shoulders and turned around, heading for the kitchen without a word. The tactile
shut the door and followed her.

“You look dreadful.”

Bruna shrugged again. She was desperately looking in the drawers for an analgesic. She couldn’t remember where she’d left them. She could barely remember anything from the night before, not even the get-together with Lizard. But she knew it had been bad. Very bad. Her recollection of it was patchy, but the pain was still there, intact, like a nail piercing her heart. Even the migraine torturing her was unable to relieve it.

Finally.
A blister pack of Algicid, grungy and out of date. She popped two of the protective seals, put the tablets under her tongue, and turned around. Deuil was scanning her as if he were carrying out an ultrasound, as if he could see right to her core.

“What’s the matter?” bellowed Bruna.

“My thoughts exactly. What’s the matter? It’s not the alcohol. It’s not your obvious hangover.”

Deuil’s devastating look made Bruna aware of her sweaty, smelly T-shirt and her wrinkled skirt. And her lack of underwear. Fed up, she flopped onto the couch. Bartolo flew out of his corner and climbed into her arms. He always liked snuggling there. The acrid odor of the bubi and his furry warmth provoked an unexpected and violent reaction from the replicant. Something writhed inside her. Her throat tightened, and liquid pain surged like a wave toward her eyes. Bruna leaped up, throwing the greedy-guts to the ground, raced to the bathroom, and locked herself in. Since she didn’t know how to cope with her feelings, she threw up. Throwing up was good. You put all your grief into your stomach and then you spewed it out.

She rinsed out her mouth and moistened her face with a tiny amount of precious water. The mirror reflected a haggard, contorted image: she looked like a rep about to start TTT. She loathed herself. Then she felt sorry for herself, which made her hate herself even more.

Fully clothed, she got under the vapor shower, and there, enveloped by the wet, refreshing, deodorizing steam, she slowly and awkwardly removed her clothes, as if she were peeling off an old poisonous skin. Then she rummaged around in the dirty-clothes basket and pulled out some reusable panties, a pair of latex pants, and a T-shirt. At least they were in a better state than the revolting, smelly clothes she’d just taken off. She emerged from the bathroom like an arctic wind and planted herself in front of the tactile, who was still standing in the middle of the living room with his arms crossed.

“Now what?”

“Sit on the couch. Try to relax,” Deuil said, smiling. “Why are you afraid of me?”

“Afraid?” Bruna replied indignantly. “Aren’t you being a bit arrogant?”

The tactile
smiled some more—that small, maddening habit he had. “Sit down.”

Husky reluctantly obeyed. The bubi jumped back into her lap, and the rep made to get rid of him.

“No, you can leave him where he is. The greedy-guts humanizes you.”

All the more reason,
thought the rep, throwing the animal onto the floor with too much force. Bartolo yelped and curled himself up in a corner, his hair messy and erect, his eyes gazing from above his big squashed nose like those of a lost soul.

Deuil went around to the back of the sofa and stood behind his client.
He must be doing that trick with his hands again,
thought Bruna. For a brief moment she almost believed she felt the heat on her ears. She tried to relax and not to think about it. She was sitting very upright, leaning against the back of the couch, feeling quite comfortable after her shower, her headache dulled by the pills. They might be past their use-by date, but they still worked. She really didn’t have much time to waste on the tactile’s nonsense. She had to locate her memorist, obtain more information about Ongalo and Onkalo, and investigate who had intercepted and erased the alert protocol activated by the hospital. She sensed that all the radiation cases were somehow related. As she sighed deeply, a pleasant tiredness was slowly working its way throughout her body—like that warm, muscular relaxation you feel as you are falling asleep, your body blissfully vanquished.

Then she felt Deuil’s fingers on the back of her neck. And then on her shaved, sensitive skull. And then lightly descending, going around her neck. Electrifying fingers. Bruna’s entire body focused on that light touch—so light that at times it was as if she were imagining it; a broken, incandescent contact that left the skin hungering for more.

“Bruna, Bruna,” murmured the tactile right beside her ear.

She bristled at the vocal incursion. Deuil had progressed to the intimacy of first names.

“Bruna, I’m going to tell you something I think you’ll find interesting. Five years ago, when I was twenty-six, I suffered from a blood clot on the brain, a cerebral embolism. It might have been the result of TP disorder, because I’d just done a teleportation transfer. They treated it in time, so there weren’t any consequences, bar one. I lost my childhood, my entire childhood. I didn’t remember anything before about eight or nine. I set about reconstructing that lost time with videos of my childhood and things my family told me. Very quickly the memories started to return, lots of memories filling the gaps in my mind. But at that stage I discovered that all those memories were false. Evidence showed me time and again that my supposed memories were in fact imaginary constructions, stories my damaged brain was feverishly inventing to close the hole, to fill that unbearable emptiness. Because the human brain is a magician, an illusionist, an incontinent storyteller who constantly rewrites reality, reinvents and reinterprets it for us. In my case that activity is carried out at fever pitch to the nth degree. And it’s still there in my head, that unreal memory, that fake childhood rich with intricate detail and full of color and emotion. I’m like you, Bruna.”

Both of Deuil’s hands were now wrapped around Bruna’s neck. They could be the hands of a murderer—they could tighten and strangle her—but she felt that the tactile’s fingers were protecting her. His hands were a bulwark, a shield. No, Deuil wasn’t like her, and yet . . .

A colossal bang reverberated in her ears, and a shower of smoking plastic and wooden splinters rained down on them. Bruna made herself as small a target as possible and then leaped upright and turned around. Her front door had disappeared, vaporized by black plasma. There was a woman standing where the door had been. Human, slight, sinewy, calm, dangerous. And holding a K40, an illegal and lethal weapon. Bruna noted all that in a fraction of a second. And also saw that Deuil was by her side, equally prepared for action, just as fast. But if they made a move, the woman would undoubtedly fire. All three froze.

“Right,” said the intruder with a smile. “I don’t have much time. Where’s the diamond? You’ve got thirty seconds to answer. The first shot will be his left leg. Have you ever seen a foot vaporized by black plasma?”

Bruna’s enhanced sense of perception registered a tiny movement, a minute contraction of the woman’s hand: she was going to fire now. The bit about the thirty seconds was a lie. She would shoot to create fear and force them to talk. But Bruna knew nothing about the diamond. She knocked Deuil to the ground. The ray grazed the man’s foot and opened a hole in the synthetic wooden flooring. But there was no question the next shot would finish one of them. As the more dangerous of the two of them, she would be the chosen target. Bruna turned toward her assailant, sure that she would die, when a sort of reddish, hairy, screeching rag fell on the woman’s head, momentarily blinding her. Bruna seized her opportunity and aimed a kick at the K40, which flew out of the assailant’s hands and landed in a corner of the room. Then she flung herself at the intruder, who had already rid herself of the red rag, and immobilized her with a rapid and effective choke. Bruna thought the battle was over, but suddenly she felt a discharge—then diffused pain, numbness. She released her prisoner and, momentarily confused, fell to her knees. The woman fled through the wrecked door. The rep got up. Her thigh burned. She lowered her pant leg; there was an electric pistol burn, a half-moon, blue black and smiling.
Three years, ten months, and seven days.
Her time wasn’t over yet.

“Ayayay, poor Bartolo, ayayay, poor Bartolo!” wailed the bubi from his corner.

Bruna glanced over at Deuil. He was on the floor, white as a sheet, holding one of his feet. But at least he seemed to have a foot to hold. The rep picked up the K40 and walked over to the blubbering greedy-guts, who grabbed her.

“Hold on, hold on. Let me have a look at you,” Bruna said gently, feeling the bubi’s body, squeezing his little arms and skinny legs, checking the hairy skin for any sign of a wound. Other than a blow to his big nose, which had swollen to twice its normal size, the bubi seemed to be perfectly fine. Astonished, Bruna realized that this absurd alien creature had just saved their lives by throwing himself at their assailant’s head.

“You’ve been very brave, Bartolo. Very brave. We’re very grateful.”

“Bartolo good, Bartolo beautiful,” said the bubi, beaming.

“Yes, very good and very beautiful.” Bruna knelt down next to Deuil, still holding the greedy-guts and the K40. “How do you feel?”

“I’ll survive,” replied the tactile through gritted teeth.

“Let me have a look.”

Deuil moved his hands. The pinkie toe on his right foot had disappeared. The good thing about plasma was that it desiccated the flesh, sealed the tissue, and cauterized the edges of the wound just like red-hot iron, so the hole wasn’t bleeding.

“It’s nothing,” said the rep as she helped him sit more comfortably on the floor and propped a cushion behind his back.

“I know,” gasped Deuil.

Bruna called Lizard and used her mobile to show him the blasted door and the tactile’s foot.

“Don’t move from there,” ordered the inspector.

They had no intention of doing so. The rep sat down facing the door, cradling the K40, ready to repel any further attack. The trembling bubi clung to her neck. Some of the neighbors and one of the doormen peered cautiously from the landing, but when they saw the destroyed door and the armed combat rep they quickly disappeared. Bruna assumed that the police would be receiving a few calls. The rep was worried. The woman who had attacked them was most definitely a professional. And a very good one at that. A lone wolf, she wasn’t intimidated by combat technos, and she knew how to handle black plasma. A mercenary hired by someone to be sure. Now, with time at her disposal, Bruna recovered their assailant’s features from her photographic memory and got down to analyzing them. Slim and slight but extremely tough. There was something of the insect about her, the cold and perfect economy of an organic design as lethal as that of a spider, like a black widow.
The Black Widow,
Bruna repeated to herself, sensing she was closing in on something submerged in her mind, something important. She recalled the woman’s hands, the width of her shoulders, the position of her neck, the shape of her skull.
Yes, yes!
The intruder was the same woman who had passed herself off as Rosario Loperena, Gand’s widow. Which meant she was the same person who had tortured Loperena. It was easy for Bruna to mentally cover the assailant’s features with the crude silicone mask she’d used to assume the role of the real widow. Who, at that point in time, wasn’t even really a widow, since her husband had still been alive.