[ What about the rest of you?]
[Ma! Ma! Where IS the rest of me?] Fist shouted, giggling hysterically. [ Where? Where? Where? Where?]
[Maybe best you sleep.]
The giggles cut out suddenly, like a recording that had been turned off. Jack had to look back. The Yamatas were gaining on him. They’d started to move more fluidly. The lead Yamata looked almost human. She raised her tranquilliser gun to fire again. Jack sprinted round another corner, pushing himself to leave them as far behind as he could.
East drifted into being beside him.
‘The puppet’s in worse shape than I thought. Maybe I should show you the way myself. Oh, and you’re so sexy when you’re panting.’
Jack didn’t trust himself to reply. Each breath was a choking catch at the air. He wished he’d spent more time keeping fit when he’d been a prisoner.
‘You’ll be able to slow down in a moment. Make sure you take the next left.’
Jack was tempted to dart out of her plans and let his pursuers kill him, freeing him from both gods and men. But then, there was the risk that Fist would fall into Kingdom’s hands. Flight remained the safest option. There were mysteries to solve, too. Harry and Yamata had both become strange new creatures, challenges to Jack’s understanding of the world. The question of Kingdom’s deep motivation remained. Lack of knowledge left Jack feeling that he was still little more than a pawn. The only way to start acting on his own terms was to uncover the truth. And at the last, there was Andrea. He needed to warn her about Harry. He so wanted to see her again.
So Jack followed East’s instructions and turned, ammunition dancing in the air around him. Then he skidded to a halt, astonished and horrified in equal measure at the joke that East had played on him. Her soft laughter chuckled through his head as he confronted a vast crowd of Yamatas. There were perhaps two or three hundred of them, all identically dressed, all limping and shuffling in an insect parody of human movement.
‘YOU FUCKING BITCH!’ he shouted.
‘Oh, bless your paranoia, Jack,’ she laughed. ‘So, so scared of my lovely little flash mob.’
As the Yamatas tottered towards him, Jack realised that they had very little in common with the lethal creatures chasing him through the night. They were dressed and made-up to look like his pursuers, and were doing a very tolerable job of imitating them. But they were all different heights and shapes, all – in fact – different people. They were all quite young, too. It was difficult to see past the makeup, but most appeared to be teenagers.
‘My little acolytes,’ said East, her voice full of pride. ‘All sneaking out to help you. I’ve been setting this up for a little while, now. Dropping images of Yamata into fashion magazines. Hinting at exciting events. Getting them all so thrilled about it all. Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘You knew that Yamata would chase me?’
‘I thought you’d run into her, sooner or later. When you found her lair, I sent out the call – and assembled my little throng.’
There was something almost maternal in East’s voice.
‘But – the Yamatas are armed. These kids are going to die.’
‘Only some of them. And they’ll die happy. They’ll be legends and their fetches will be so proud. But there’s only one of you. Keep running!’
Refusing to think about the implications of his choice – of his endorsement of East’s vicious, wasteful rescue plan – Jack started forward again. He pushed through the crowd of Yamata lookalikes, feeling his breathing and pulse slow as he did so. The mob let him through, coming back together behind him and covering his path. They were packed close together, filling the whole street. It would be near impossible for the Yamatas to break through them in their weakened state. They’d have to shoot hundreds to have any hope of catching him. Jack hoped they weren’t that ruthless. He kept moving.
A few of the Yamata flash mob costumes had been carefully prepared, but most looked hastily thrown together. Dark blue dripped down faces from poorly dyed hair, pale blue face paint sweated away in dark lines. Eyes were uncomfortably red behind cheap purple contact lenses.
It was the massed conviction of all the individual performances that made the mob impressive. As Jack pushed through it, nobody broke character; nobody smiled, or flinched, or did anything to reveal that they were just pretending. Their commitment was absolute. Jack risked a look back. The real Yamatas were stalking into view. Now the flash mob would be tested. The Yamatas stopped, as amazed as Jack had been by the sight of several hundred imitators.
The mob moved towards them and started to chant one phrase again and again. ‘Hello Yamatas, we’re Yamatas’ built from a mutter to a roar as Jack reached the end of the flash mob. It echoed back off the buildings around them. Empty office blocks became a chorus, chanting commentary at the drama. Their words weren’t strong enough to drown out the stutter of gunfire. The first flash mobbers reached the three Yamatas. Some fell immediately. Most poured on, a blue-stained wave rolling over Jack’s pursuers. Unable to add any support, he fled. After thirty seconds or so, the shooting stopped and there was only chanting. Then, suddenly, there was silence. Jack was too far away to see how many had survived as the crowd dispersed.
‘Oh, they’ll be all right,’ said East casually. ‘And now, you’ve got to hide yourself. You’ve got to go somewhere even I don’t know about! Because who knows if one of my little subsidiaries has been compromised, and people who shouldn’t be there are inside me now, watching. So now I’ve saved your life, I’m going to stop following you. Aren’t I good?’
‘How many died back there?’
‘Nobody died, Jack. Fifty-two people just became immortal.’
With that, East winked out of existence. Jack kept moving, pacing through the city at a half-run, a speed he hoped he could keep up for a little while longer. He would find refuge, and reassemble Fist. Only then would he let himself think about what East had just done to rescue him, what Yamata and Harry had become, and how he was going to stop Kingdom.
Without Fist to manage his connection, he assumed that he was comprehensively offweave. He didn’t know how visible his absence was to InSec; whether they would – as Lestak had promised – start searching for him now that he had broken the terms of his access to Homelands.
For the moment, it was difficult to care.
Chapter 35
Jack’s flight took him through an abandoned light industrial zone. Fist’s emergency repair systems whispered status reports. None showed any progress. East’s intervention had hindered his recovery. The puppet was going to be unconscious for hours, if not days. Jack hadn’t had so much privacy for seven years. To his surprise, he felt lonely.
The road led through a shattered collage of factory units. They embodied a very specific decadence. Neglect of such usable space would be an obscenity elsewhere in the Solar System. In Homelands, it went unchecked. Jack wondered what kind of luminous imagery overlaid this dead district. Station was sometimes known as ‘Dreamlands’ by those who lived beyond it. It was meant as an exaggerated slight. Here, it was a literal truth. He snorted in half-laughter as he moved through perhaps the truest symbol of his home that he’d yet come across.
With that, Jack realised where he could seek refuge. The streets around him were buried behind a layer of illusion, but people still moved through them. By contrast the void sites, forbidden to all, were kept entirely apart, providing the perfect hiding space. Without Fist he had no weave presence, so wouldn’t trigger any alarms when he moved into one. It was unlikely there’d be any physical security systems present. The weave’s pervasiveness made them largely redundant.
The landscape changed. Broken factory spaces dropped away, to be replaced by housing and educational sites. These buildings were occupied. The rain fell back to a light drizzle. Jack was surprised at the silence of the night and realised again that he was missing Fist. He spotted a void site.