Almost hidden by the wind, I heard distant hover dis-placement.
“Give me his neck,” the voice said.
A new set of hands-hard, cold hands encased in creaking leather gloves-took me by the hair and chin and bent my head painfully to the left. There was an endless moment of silence as I knelt there, held in place by two pairs of strong hands, thinking Do it, do it, just fucking do it. Something stabbed into my neck like a fragment of glass being dragged along my jugular, a pain that went on and on. Then something cold was being pumped into me, a cold I could feel as it traveled in my blood, like a worm wriggling in my papery veins.
I’d gritted my teeth so hard they ached. I hadn’t said a word. The fragment of glass was dragged back again and then was gone.
“Good-bye, Avery,” the voice said. “And don’t worry: when it is over, you will be punished again. He has told me how this will end. And He is never wrong.”
The two pairs of hands vanished simultaneously, and I toppled over onto my side. My neck throbbed, and although it was fading, I could still feel the cold lump moving through me, warming as it went. I thought that if it didn’t warm up enough before it hit my heart or brain I’d be dead, a shock aneurysm flooding me with black, smothering blood.
The hover displacement was louder now, and I could hear my kidnappers beating retreat. I flipped myself back up onto my knees, grit and sharp-edged stones biting through my pants into my skin, and stayed that way, the snow lightly burning my skin, my hands numb from the bracelets, listening to the heavy boots crunching in the snow and the hover getting closer, until the displacement started to beat against me, invisible fists. The ground shuddered beneath me as the hover settled home, the engines cutting off abruptly and leaving me, for a moment, with just the wind and my own ragged breathing. Blood, warm and wet, trickled down my neck and soaked into the fabric of my shirt.
I made fists with my hands as I heard the hover’s hatch snap open. I worked my mouth up and down, trying to maintain control over myself. I’d been close to death a dozen times. Hell, I’d been dead for a brief time in London all those years ago.
I was angry.
“Chief?” I heard Gleason call out. She’d come a long way from a skinny kid who liked to play with knives. She’d been one of our first recruits when Belling and I had returned from London, rich, traumatized, and already marked for death by Dick Marin and his System Cops. “Chief, you okay?”
I heard their feet packing down the snow. I was shaking with the rage that had filled me, adrenaline tearing through my veins. I thought that if I wanted, I could snap the restraints with just a twitch. Whoever these fuckers were, they’d had their chance. They’d had me on my knees, hands bound, and for some reason they’d walked away. I didn’t know what they’d done to me, but I wasn’t going to forget and I wasn’t going to count my fucking blessings.
“Keep your eyes open,” I heard Belling shout, his smooth voice agitated. “Fucking amateurs.”
“Hold on,” Gleason said into my ear. I could smell her, a clean, nice smell, and felt her tugging at the rubber bracelets, and then heard the familiar snick of one of her blades. Gleason liked knives. Refused to carry a gun, saying that guns were for shitheads, for street soldiers downtown. She could throw a properly balanced, custom-made knife from across the room, in the dark, and kill you every single time. I remembered when Glee had been this skinny little girl, almost fucking mute. Now I couldn’t shut her up, usually.
A tug and my hands were free, the bracelets snapping away into the air. I stood and whirled, tearing the blindfold from my face. I paused for a moment, blinking in the bright, white sunlight. We were in a city, all right, standing in front of a church. Around us, the city was a deserted field of rubble, with buildings jutting up here and there like broken teeth. The ground around the church had been cleared and was a clean, uniform off-white, a sheet of frozen snow. The fucking church was enormous; broken, pitted steps rising up to a set of empty doorways. Above the doors was a gaping hole, a few ragged spikes of old stone still jutting up. The sheer weight of the thing beat at me in pulses, as if it had been eroded from softer rocks around it by acid rain and pollution.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked, struggling for breath and control. Without a word, Glee moved her shoulder under my arm and took some of my weight, her long red hair fanning out in the wind. I allowed her to without even thinking about it-anyone but Gleason I’d have twisted their arm back behind them. With Glee, I leaned down and let her help me stumble about.
“Newark, Avery,” Gleason said, looking around. “You okay?”
Newark. Newark wasn’t even a city anymore, it was a blast crater that happened to have a few dozen buildings still standing here and there. For years it had been a backwater for criminals and independent sorts who fled the cities proper to escape the System Cops and the crowds and, ever since the Monk Riots, whatever Monks who’d managed to hang on to control of themselves and avoid the SSF cleanup. A surprising number were almost sane.
I felt in my pockets and found my cigarette case and gun, right where they were supposed to be-my captors had been so confident they’d left me my weapon. As I shook out a cigarette and stuck it between my dry, chapped lips, the anger inside me swelled until I thought I’d start vibrating. I was Avery Cates. I’d killed fifty-four people. I’d killed Dennis Squalor and destroyed the Electric Church, crawling around beneath Westminster Abbey and leaving a half dozen dead friends in my wake. I’d been betrayed by Dick Marin, the fucking unofficial emperor of the whole damn System, but I’d survived and even put a bullet in his artificial, avatar face. I was Avery fucking Cates, and they’d left me my weapon.
I turned to face the hover. Belling was standing in front of it, glaring at everything as if personally affronted-which he should be, since he’d been in charge of my security. I could see Candy, fat and dark, peering at me from inside the cabin, which meant Glee had grabbed whoever was available. I liked Candida-she had a round face that was always laughing, and she hadn’t screwed me yet-but she was useless in a fight.
Belling gave me his stern face, humorless and terrifying. “What are we doing, Avery?”
I lit my cigarette and sent a cloud of blue smoke into the dirty air. I turned and started walking for the hover, the kid acting as a crutch.
“We’re going to crack some heads,” I said. “Get Pick on the horn and start him digging into the grapevine. Send someone over to Marcel and buy out a contract for information-have him get the word out, a million yen to anyone who gets us next to whoever the fuck did this.” Marcel, fat and lazy on his throne in his ancient hotel, hadn’t moved under his own power in years and thought way too much of himself, but he could get shit done, for the right price. “Take a fucking head count and let me know if anyone’s out of place. Glee and I are gonna do our bad-cop worse-cop routine and milk some of my straight contacts. Reach out to whatever System Pigs like taking our money and see if they have any information. Let New York know that Avery Cates is fucking pissed off, and things are going to get hot.”
I was a big fucking deal these days.
“Okay, okay,” Glee said. “Avery-you sure you’re okay? Your neck is kind of-”
She sounded a little shaky. I hissed into her ear, clutching her to me to conceal the fact that I was suddenly hot and dizzy. “I am not fucking okay, kid. I was fucking sold out. I was on my knees. I had a rod in my goddamn ear. I am angry, Glee. I am not okay.” As we neared the hover, the two guards hastily stepped aside, their eyes on the horizon. I let her help me put one leg up into the cabin and turned back to the kid, putting a numb hand on her shoulder. Gleason was on a very short list of people I thought I could trust. As I spoke my eyes shifted up and over her to look at Belling, who’d turned to regard me, hands in his coat pockets. No one would ever trip up Belling like that, I thought. “Get us up in the air and get to work. I want to know who the fuck did this, and I want to know fast.” I looked around the shattered remnants of the city. “I am going to have to kill a lot of people.”