At a vending wall on the same level he ordered a roll of semipermeable adhesive tape and a cloned ham-and-cheese. The tape was served up without incident, but no sandwich appeared on its heels; instead a pair of hand-sized containers slid down the chute, flattened opalescent cylinders with rounded edges. He popped one of them open to reveal pince-nez with opaque jade lenses. He set them on his nose. His jaw twitched slightly as he reset some dental switch. A tiny green star winked on at the edge of the left lens.
“Better.” He looked around. “Depth perception’s not all it could be.”
“Nice trick,” Clarke said. “It talks to your inlays?”
“More or less. The image is a bit grainy.”
Now Lubin took the lead.
“There’s no easier way to do this?” she asked him, following. “You couldn’t just call up the GA head office?”
“I doubt I’m still on their payroll.” He turned left at a t-junction.
“Yeah, but don’t you have—”
“They stopped replenishing the field caches some time ago,” Lubin said. “I’m told any leftovers have long since been acquired by unilaterals. Everything has to be negotiated through contacts.”
“You’re buying them off?”
“It’s not a question of money.”
“What, then?”
“Barter,” he said. “An old debt or two. In-kind services.”
At 2200 they met a man who pulled a gossamer-fine thread of fiberop from his pocket and plugged it into Lubin’s new wristwatch. Lubin stood there for over half an hour, motionless except for the occasional twitching of fingers: a statue leaning slightly into some virtual wind, as if poised to pounce on empty air. Afterwards the stranger reached up and touched the blisters on Lubin’s face. Lubin laid one brief hand on the other man’s shoulder. The interaction was subtly disquieting, for reasons Clarke couldn’t quite put her finger on. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Ken Lubin touch another person short of violence or duty, and failed.
“Who was that?” she asked afterwards.
“No one.” And contradicting himself in the next second: “Someone to spread the word. Although there’s no guarantee even he can raise the alarm in time.”
At 2307 Lubin knocked at a door in a residential retrofit in the middle reaches of what had once been the Toronto Dominion Center. A brown-skinned, grim-faced ectomorph of a woman answered. Her eyes blazed a startling, almost luminous golden-orange—some kind of cultured xanthophyll in the irises—and she loomed over Lubin by a head or more. She spoke quietly in a strange language full of consonants, every syllable thick with anger. Lubin answered in the same tongue and held out a sealed ziplock. The woman snatched it, reached behind the half-open door, threw a bag at his feet —it landed with the muffled clank of gloved metal—and closed the door in his face.
He stowed the bag in his backpack. “What did she give you?” Clarke asked.
“Ordnance.” He started back down the hall.
“What did you give her?”
He shrugged. “An antidote.”
Just before midnight they entered a great vaulted space that might once have been the centerpiece of a mall. Now its distant ceiling was eclipsed by a warren on stilts, a great mass of prefab squats and storage cubes held together by a maze of improvised scaffolding. It was a more efficient use of space than the extravagant emptiness of the old days, if a whole lot uglier. The bottom of the retrofit stood maybe four meters off the original marbled floor; occasional ladders reached down through its underside to ground level. Dark seams cracked the structure here and there, narrow gaps in a patchwork quilt of plastic and fiber paneling: a bounty of peepholes for hidden eyes. Clarke thought she heard the rustling of large animals in hiding, the occasional quiet murmur of muffled voices, but she and Lubin seemed to be the only ones here on the floor beneath.
Sudden motion to the left. A great fountain had once decorated the center of this place; these days its broad soapstone basin, spread out in the perpetual shadow of the squat, seemed to serve primarily as a community dumpster. Pieces of a woman were detaching themselves from that backdrop. The illusion was far from perfect, now that Clarke focused on it. The chromatophores on the woman’s unitard mimicked her background in broad strokes at best, producing more of a blurry translucence than outright invisibility. Not that this particular K seemed to care about camouflage; the ambulatory hair wasn’t exactly designed to blend with the background.
She approached them like a fuzzy cloud with body parts attached. “You must be Kenny,” she said to Lubin. “I’m Laurel. Yuri said you had skin problems.” She gave Clarke an appraising glance, blinking over pupils slit subtly vertical. “I like the eyes. Takes balls to go for rifter chic in these parts.”
Clarke looked back expressionlessly. After a moment, Laurel turned back to Lubin. “Yuri’s wait—”
Lubin snapped her neck Laurel sagged bonelessly into his arms, her head lolling.
“Fuck, Ken!” Clarke staggered back as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. “What are you...”
From the rustling cliff dwellings above them, sudden silence.
Lubin had Laurel laid out on her back, his pack at her side. Her cat eyes stared up at the belly of the squat, wide and astonished.
“Ken!”
“I told you in-kind services might be necessary.” He fished a handgrip of some kind from his pack, pressed a stud on its hilt. A thin blade snicked into view. It hummed. One stroke and Laurel’s unitard was split from crotch to throat. The elastic fabric pulled apart like slashed mesentery.
Chat. Snap. Sag. Just like that. It was impossible to banish the image.
Deep abdominal cut, right side. No blood. A wisp of blue smoke curled up from the incision. It carried the scent of cauterizing flesh.
Clarke looked around frantically. There was still no one else in sight, but it felt as though a thousand eyes were on them. It felt as though the whole teetering structure over their heads was holding its breath, as though it might collapse on them at any second.
Lubin plunged his hand into Laurel’s side. There was no hesitation, no exploratory poke-and-prod. He knew exactly where he was going. Whatever he was after must be showing up on his inlays.
Laurel’s eyes turned in her head. They stared at Lenie Clarke.
“Oh God, she’s alive...”
“She can’t feel it,” Lubin said.
How could he do this? Clarke wondered, and an instant later: After all these years, how could I still be surprised?
Lubin’s blood-soaked hand came back into sight. Something pea-sized glistened like a pearl in the clotting gore between thumb and forefinger. A child began crying somewhere in the warren overhead. Lubin lifted his face to the sound.
“Witnesses, Ken...”
He stood. Laurel lay bleeding out at his feet, her eyes still fixed on Lenie Clarke.
“They’re used to it.” He started walking. “Come on.”
She backed away a few steps. Laurel stared steadily at the place where Lenie Clarke had been.
“No time,” Lubin called over his shoulder.
Clarke turned and fled after him.