Natalie shot him a quick look over the table, a smile in her eyes. “You do?”
Kate nodded. “It’s nice. Everything is new.”
“It’s stupid,” Todd said.
“Come on,” Natalie said. “Why would you say that? You’ve only been here a day.”
“They screwed up soccer.”
How did it work, turning a normal into a gifted? Probably it amplified latent tendencies; if you had always been good at guessing how other people were feeling, you would now be a reader. If you had always had grace on the athletic field, now you would be able to sense the others’ moves before they made them.
My God, though, what a change that would bring. The Children of Darwin thought they had caused some chaos? Their little insurrection was bush league compared to the upheaval that would flow from Erik’s pet project. A magic potion indeed.
Be here now.
He turned to his son. “What do you mean, they screwed up soccer?”
“I played with some kids yesterday. They have all these stupid rules ’cause they’re gifted.”
“Like what?”
“One kid can do the thing you do, where no one can touch him, so to get a goal he has to score and then take the ball back and score again. This other girl just sits in the center of the field. She doesn’t even move, but they picked her first. A girl. Plus, one kid is allowed to use his hands, because he’s seeing math.”
“He’s seeing math?”
“That’s what he said. Angles and stuff, and he needs to be able to pick up the ball and throw it. Then when he does, it does crazy trick stuff and bounces off things and people and no one can get it and it just, like, rolls past you.”
Cooper fought an urge to laugh. Remember when you said a city of mirrors would be cool, kiddo? Welcome to a world of them. “So they’re changing the rules. No one says the rules have to be the same all the time.”
“They do. That’s what rules means.”
“You’re just mad because you lost,” Kate said.
“I didn’t lose. They cheated.”
“I like it,” Kate said. “Nobody here thinks it’s weird that I organize things.”
“That’s not weird, sweetie. You’re not weird.”
“I’m weird at home. Can we stay here?”
Cooper laughed. He was about to reply when a knife slid across the throat of one of his bodyguards, and a fountain of sudden blood sprayed across three tables.
Soren rode.
Passenger side, the backseat of the cab. The driver had a mole on his neck, a hair growing out of it. Out the window, momentary flashes turned into still life paintings. A man and woman walking hand in hand. Look at it slow and notice that her hand clutches harder than his, that his eyes are on a display window, that her neck showed age ten years past her makeup, and his belt was buckled but pants unbuttoned. Grace, permanence, purity—they were illusions. People were just fluids and flesh, meat and hair and bone.
The weapon was what he had asked for, a Fairbairn-Sykes. A fighting knife, dagger-tapered and razor-sharp, thin enough to slide between bone. Made famous during World War II, although those had been steel and this one was carbon-fiber. The edge wouldn’t hold, but it was so light he could move it without any momentum at all, just an extension of his hand. A knife good for killing and little else. His fingers rested on the pommel.
The car began to slow. It would be almost a minute before it stopped. Soren used the time to read the security outside the restaurant. As John had predicted, it was a diplomatic protection team, all gifted, all armed, all wired via earpiece. Guards used to escorting high-value assets, attuned to threat at all times. They would have constant situational awareness, evaluating everything in terms of risk.
So he became a tourist from Missouri, wide-eyed and unthreatening. He had all the time in the world to slip into character. He paid the driver with the mild excitement of someone for whom a cab ride was a novelty, something more often seen on tri-d. Told the driver to keep the change, a buck too much, exactly enough to be appreciated and forgotten. Stepped onto the sidewalk and looked around, trying at once to pretend that he belonged here—keep the muggers away—while simultaneously taking everything in. After a minute and a half that was eight seconds to the rest of the world, he turned and walked into the restaurant, consciously putting a little pleasure in his step, anticipating a meal unlike any he could get in good old MO.
The team registered him, watched him, and dismissed him. Even the reader by the door. Readers amused him. They were so attuned to everyone else in the world, yet his gift meant that to them he was like the optical illusion of a tire rim spinning backward as it sped along—an incorrect approximation based on flawed perception.
Inside, the restaurant was chaos and noise. So many people, all being. Just sitting there being, and so loud about it, volume and intensity. But he was ready, became nothing at all as he walked to one of the two bodyguards and slit his throat, the blade’s edge so sharp that the skin sprang apart at the touch, the carotid neatly bisected.
Arterial spray gushed out in an arc. It was rather pretty, the fluid dynamics of it, and he spent a few seconds admiring it before heading for the other guard. That one was drawing his gun, a smooth and practiced move, and Soren took the time to look at the angle of the man’s arm, the way his left hand was bracing his right, and positioned himself so that the man’s own momentum brought his inner elbow into contact with the blade, the force of the guard’s motion driving the knife through cloth and flesh and muscle and tendons to sever the brachial artery.
There was screaming, but not in his nothing.
For some reason, Soren found himself thinking of the spider, the one he had spent time being when John came to get him. Why? Ah. The calm immobility that preceded lethal motion. Yes.
He turned. The two bodyguards crumpled at about the same rate, as if they had choreographed it.
Soren took in the still life. Nick Cooper was on his feet, his eyes appraising. No hesitation or paralysis. Interesting.
It wouldn’t be enough, of course. But it was interesting.
Cooper was on his feet without thought, reflex taking over. But by the time he had stood up, the second bodyguard was done, a textbook-perfect slice splitting the inner bicep to the bone. He’d have a few seconds of consciousness before the long fall into darkness.
The man with the knife turned, his face calm. Behind him, the two guards collapsed, not clean and quick like on tri-d, but messy, arterial spray lashing like a hose each time their hearts beat. A woman coated with blood screamed a ragged, inhuman sound.
Cooper took in the scene in an instant, his mind patterning for the fight to come. The killer was lean and slight, the knife he carried modeled after the old British commando daggers. He looked at Cooper, and then—
His knuckles aren’t white. His breathing is steady. The pulse in his neck is maybe seventy beats a minute. He just murdered two highly trained guards in three seconds, and he is perfectly calm.
This isn’t an abnorm with a grudge, the brother of one of your old targets. This is an assassin.
Which means he was sent for you. Probably by John Smith.
And your children are here.
—started walking toward the table.
In one move, Cooper spun, grabbed the back of his chair, circled back around, and hurled it at the assassin, an easy throw at ten feet, the chair not heavy but massy enough to tangle the guy up, lessen the advantage of his knife. Cooper kept the momentum going and hopped right up on the table, the shortest distance between a killer and his children being a straight line. He dropped down the other side, following the chair, thinking, Go low, sweep his leg, then stomp his wrist, groin, wrist, neck—