“That I know.”
“It’s all a lie. All of it.”
“What’s a lie? Why did you run away?”
“I’m—”
And that is when several things happen seemingly all at once.
The music picks up the pace again. It grows louder — louder and more aggressive than ever. The room goes dark, and the flicker strobes turn everything into time-warping, dreamlike bursts of light. A group in Venetian masks swarm around them, separating her from Ragoravich, their dancing fevered and fast. Maggie loses sight of Ragoravich for a moment. She reaches out and finds his hand.
Her grip tightens. He holds on too.
She is staring into Ragoravich’s eyes when she sees them go wide.
Too wide.
His grip on her hand slackens. Maggie tries to hang on to him, to grasp his hand even tighter. She tries to pull him back toward her, but she’s losing him.
His hand slips away.
“Oleg!”
But her cry is lost in the music. The masked crowd moves between them, pushing them apart. Ragoravich is tumbling away from her, almost out of sight.
“Oleg!”
She desperately tries to get back to him. There are too many masked people in the way now. Maggie shoves them hard, throwing punches even, anything to find Oleg.
There.
She sees him. Oleg is only a few feet away. She’s almost back to him, close enough to touch. She reaches out to him.
That’s when she sees a gloved hand pull a blade from Oleg’s chest.
Blood spreads across his white shirt.
Maggie screams. But the music — the damn music — swallows the sound away. Out of nowhere, someone delivers a body blow, almost knocking Maggie off her feet. She starts to spin, tries to regain her footing. But she can’t quite steady herself. Through the flickers from the strobe, she can see that everyone around her is wearing a mask.
She can’t find Oleg.
“Help!”
Nothing.
“A man’s been stabbed!”
She can barely hear her own voice.
Where the hell is Oleg?
She lashes out now, panicked. But she can’t find him. She starts throwing punches again. She searches frantically for Oleg or for blood or for a gloved hand carrying a blade — anything — but the room is too crowded, too dark, too filled with stuttering strobes.
She looks up, toward the open roof and the serenity of the night sky, and in her periphery, she sees a man being carried above the crowd mosh-pit style.
It’s Oleg.
He is already at least ten, maybe twenty yards away from her. She starts flesh-swimming toward him. A beefy man in a black masquerade mask gets in her way. When she knees him in the balls, he folds like a lawn chair. Another dancer bumps her. Hard. Maggie throws an elbow. It lands in his rib cage. Someone else rams into her. And then someone slams her with an open hand on the side of the head.
Maggie staggers and sees stars.
The music still blares. The party patrons surround her, consume her. She reaches out blindly toward the man who just slapped her. Her fingers find his mask. She grabs hold and pulls it down.
It’s CinderBlock.
What the...?
He shoves her hard and turns to hurry away. Maggie bounces against someone behind her, and using that momentum, she leaps on CinderBlock’s back. She’s still screaming for help, but no one is paying attention. Even now, even with her leaping on a man’s back, she doesn’t stick out in this crowd. No one does. Everyone is in constant motion — jumping, dancing, leaping, raising their fists in the air, shouting along with the music.
From her new vantage point on CinderBlock’s back, Maggie scans the dance floor. She sees two people surfing the crowd.
Neither is Oleg.
He’s gone.
CinderBlock tries to buck her off, but Maggie wraps her legs around his waist and then ankle-locks them into place. Her right arm snakes around his nearly indecipherable neck.
Then she squeezes for all she’s worth, choking him.
CinderBlock’s hands start reaching behind him, flailing to grab her. She lowers her face into the back of his head — close enough so he can’t get to her eyes, close enough so she can move with him if he tries a back headbutt.
She regrips and squeezes harder on his windpipe.
His hand movements grow more frenzied, more desperate to reach her, to get free for even a moment so as to get fresh oxygen.
But she has him.
She keeps squeezing. His knees start to wobble. She shuts her eyes and holds on. She will not let go. She will not let go until...
Whack.
A fist slams into Maggie’s lower back, just beneath her ribs. The knuckles land flush on her kidney. The pain is a white-hot piercing stab. A coppery taste flows into her mouth. The blow shuts down muscles, organs maybe, incapacitates her. Maggie tries to hang on through it, tries to finish this off.
But then another punch lands in the same place.
Maggie feels everything in her close down.
Someone grabs her shoulders from behind and pulls her off CinderBlock’s back. Maggie crashes to the floor. People dance all around her, some stamping on her legs and back. She tries to fight through them, to get back up, but there are just too many people. She keeps battling, keeps trying to get up, keeps getting knocked down.
She screams and then screams again. But no one hears her. No one stops.
The crowd parties on.
Chapter Nineteen
Sharon slides into the corner booth at Vipers.
Porkchop is already there. He looks up, sees the expression on her face, and waits. Sharon puts both hands on the table in front of her. She stares at them for a bit — her hands — and then sits back. Sharon’s eyes are everywhere but on him. Her left leg has the jackhammer shakes, but that’s pretty standard for her.
Porkchop knows Sharon is working up to something, so he just gives her space.
A few more moments pass. Then Sharon says, “Do you know what a griefbot is?”
The question is unexpected. But so is his answer. “Yes.”
“You do?”
Porkchop nods.
“I always thought you were the ultimate Luddite.”
“Pinky told me about them after Marc died. I guess he tried one with his mother.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said it’s some kind of software program where the dead, I don’t know, they text you? Supposed to help you cope with losing a loved one. It’s like a digital replica of them or something.”
Someone hits the jukebox. Tears for Fears start telling everyone to shout, shout, let it all out.
“Did you try one?” Sharon asks. “A griefbot, I mean.”
“No,” Porkshop says. “I don’t want a digital replica. I want my son.”
Sharon nods slowly. Then she says, “But you know that will never be.”
“I do. Death is final.” Porkchop gets that Sharon can sometimes be clumsy with her words or overly blunt. “Is there a point to this, Sharon?”
“I created a griefbot of Marc for Maggie. But it’s not like any other griefbot.”
Sharon takes the next ten minutes explaining the machinations, details, ingenuity that have gone into the AI development of the Marc griefbot. Porkchop listens and tries not to react. Sharon talks fast. She rambles a bit. She loses him when she gets too deep in the woods with the technology, but he just rides that out. Again, this isn’t atypical with Sharon. Her mouth is always trying to keep up with her brain, and that’s an impossible task.
Toward the end Sharon veers into the economic realities of her potential startup. “Unfortunately, I’ve concluded that as of now, my griefbot is not a viable marketplace product, fiscally speaking.”
“Why not?”
“It took me two months of working full-time to gather the information on Marc — coding, hacking, researching, development. This is a beta version, a prototype, but I don’t see how I can mass-produce it to the point where it would ever be profitable. It’s too time-consuming to extract and organize the data.”