“This? You want us to climb this?” She looked back at me over her shoulder. “It’s rusted. It looks like it’s a hundred years old.”
“It might be,” I said. “Ladies first.”
She made a face and I grinned. I was getting soft in my old age. This shit was almost fun. I knew I should be worried-I’d been betrayed, fucked with, and now might end my day with a bullet in the ear. I should be in a bad mood, but instead I was feeling… good.
Glee took hold of the ladder and started pulling herself up. I jumped up right behind her and followed to the next elevator bay.
“Pull this manual release lever?” she called down, and then pulled it without waiting. The outer elevator doors split open with a rusty scrape. Light and music and the hum of a crowd sifted into the shaft and fell on me like dust, weightless. She pulled herself across and up through the doors. I followed as quickly as I could, panting a little as I stretched myself, reaching for the handholds embedded in the ancient concrete.
“Avery’s fat,” Glee said breathlessly from the second floor. “Avery’s fucking huge.” Without transition she burst into a ragged coughing fit, croaking hoarsely.
I squirmed my way up onto the floor and stood, wiping my hands and looking around. The lobby was simple, a dark marble wall a few feet in front of us and a flickering, holographic image of a man in an old-fashioned formal suit, white tie and tails.
“Welcome to Umano,” the holographic man said crisply, appearing to eye us up and down. “You do not have a reservation. Performing credit scan.” After a moment, he brightened. “Welcome, Mr. Cates! And… guest.” I couldn’t tell if it was a true AI hologram or just a projection of an actor in a booth somewhere. “We do have several unfulfilled reservations, and I can seat you. Welcome to Umano.”
Behind the hologram, the entryway seemed to appear out of the stone, thin lines outlining the doorway and getting thicker. A simple enough trick, but impressive looking. This was what people did with yen. I fucking hated being rich. It was exhausting. When you were broke you always thought money would make life easier, but it just gave you more shit to do.
We stepped forward and the world’s greatest holographic man actually stepped aside to let us pass. We stepped through the doorway into the largest single room I’d ever seen. The hum of a hundred conversations going on simultaneously became loud, crushing against us. It looked like every load-bearing column in the whole floor had been removed somehow, and I had an image of the immense and ancient weight of the building above us. It smelled… wonderful. It smelled like real food, and my mouth watered.
To my surprise, an actual person carrying a menu was approaching us, looking tired and pissed off. She was of the usual indeterminate age, blond and blue-eyed, tall and, of course, beautiful. Her legs had been lengthened at some point by some butcher, and she walked up to us with a curious insectoid jerking.
“Welcome to Umano,” she said as she approached. “My name is Mina and I will be your server this morning. Please follow me.”
I blinked. I’d never heard of a restaurant that didn’t use Droids-but that, I supposed, was the gimmick. If you were rich enough, you could afford to have live, actual human beings bring you your food.
As we stepped behind her into the dining room, I heard the second elevator doors open out in the lobby and started moving faster. The room sprawled around us, the whole opposite wall just glass and steel, the surrounding block on display. The tables and chairs were just white cubes-big cubes for the tables, smaller cubes for the seats. They looked like the most uncomfortable things ever devised.
I stepped around our waitress and grabbed Glee’s arm, pushing her ahead of me. I heard the sudden silence of impending ruckus behind us, and we started to run, Glee coughing wetly as she struggled on ahead, the panes of glass temptingly close. Around us, I had the impression of people staring, of the hum getting smaller.
We made it to the windows, smacking into them and pushing our faces against the glass. The feeling of an alarmed and frightened crowd around us was exhilarating. As I’d expected, there was a huge garbage skid on the street below us-the restaurants always had nightly cart-aways. I slapped Glee’s shoulder and we whirled to tear-ass along the window a few feet to position ourselves approximately above our soft-if disgusting-landing. Glee grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but grin back. Landing in a load of rotting imported vegetables was going to be a great story, when she told it.
From behind, I heard a man’s voice, deep and confident, almost completely devoid of any accent-its lack of accent becoming an accent itself. “Mr. Avery Cates!”
I stopped. One moment I was tearing ass, prepared to take up a chair, smash some glass, and make a jump-the next it seemed like a better idea to just stop, and I stumbled to a halt. Glee ran on a few feet and then spun, her face lit up with alarm, snot running from her nose.
“Avery,” she said again. “What the fuck?”
Our eyes met and I pushed as hard as I could, trying to force myself into motion. “Fucking psionic,” I panted. “A Pusher. Keep moving. Go!”
Two men and a woman-kids, really, pink and squeaky-clean-were walking toward me like they owned the place and had just remembered they’d left the lights on. They smelled like cops. They could have been triplets: all white, with dark hair, their faces round in every way-big round eyes that were going to make them look like babies their whole lives, round ears, their skulls globes on top of their necks. The girl was pretty until you realized she was just a female version of the boys. I wanted to turn and check on Glee but couldn’t. The buzz of voices returned with a new urgency, and I could see people talking to the air, using implanted comm units.
“Avery Cates, I presume?” said the kid in the middle, shooting his cuffs and reaching into his jacket pocket, producing a leather wallet. When he flipped it open, he held it up close to my face, with the air of doing me a courtesy. A rainbow-colored hologram proclaimed him to be Richard Shockley, assistant to Undersecretary of the North American Department Calvin Ruberto, one of the shadowy men and women who’d been running things ever since the Joint Council had slipped away into digital senility.
I looked from his ID to his face but said nothing. He snapped the wallet shut and the hologram vanished.
“Mr. Cates,” he said, “I have been asked to come here by Dr. Daniel Terries, director of Public Health, New York Department, to bring you uptown for a conversation.” He spread his hands. “A conversation, only.”
“Sorry, no,” I said, bluffing out of habit. “My sense of civic duty is a little lackluster these days. I’ve got business to attend to.”
He turned to smile around at his two companions, who didn’t look back at him, keeping their eyes on me. The girl was still staring at me, and I wished fervently that she would stop.
From behind, I heard a faint grunt, and Shockley’s hand shot up. Glee’s knife was suddenly suspended in the air between us, hovering as if gravity didn’t apply. A goddamn Telekinetic, I thought. His eyes flicked over my shoulder for a second and my heart lurched. For a moment he stared and then flicked his hand out in a lazy, negligent gesture. I heard Glee scream, followed by the sound of shattering glass. I strained, hoping to hear her soft landing in the garbage, but couldn’t.
The entire restaurant had gone silent. Dimly, I could hear the building shell repeating its warnings in the distance as a stale, stiff breeze buffeted me from behind. The outside air smelled rotten, sweet and fungoid. A wave of disgusted groans filled the air.
Shockley looked at me as the knife fell soundlessly to the carpet. “Mr. Cates,” he said, laughing a little, as I found myself rising an inch or two off the floor. Our eyes met, and his were filled with mean humor, like a boy who delighted in pulling wings off flies. “I am afraid we insist.”