"That's what you say, Jessamyn, but your actions tell a different story."
"It's me or Seth. That's it."
Dr Proctor laughed. "You can't really be that naive. Universes are grinding together to point you two at each other. You have nothing more to say about it than the sea has about the tidal pull of the moon."
Jesse's head hurt. This was worse than she had expected.
"You know, I was expecting some super Op, Redd Harvest or Woody Rutledge. You're not like that. You're like the soce workers back in Denver. You just want to talk."
"Talk is important, Jesse."
She had an urge to tear his throat out, just as she had torn her father's windpipe away. She fought it. You don't reach the Fifth Spiritual Plane without getting some control.
"In another world, we could have worked together," Dr Proctor said. "I have the brains, and you have the body…" He made his first move. "…we could have slaughtered millions of the sheep."
VII
She wouldn't break, but she could bend.
Dr Proctor got her in a sumo hold, hands clasped in the small of her back, and pushed forwards with his forehead. He didn't need to be especially strong to exert the maximum pressure this way. He felt her spinesheath shifting. It was a good product, a GenTech speciality, but it was just a jacket. There were bones inside, and a slender, vulnerable cord inside them. He found the pressure spots in her lower back, and jammed the heels of his hands into them.
An inch before his face, her teeth clenched. "Pain?" he whispered. "Remember it?" He had her arms straitjacketed to her sides. He lifted her feet off the floor. She was off-balanced. "See, no leverage. You can't kick me." She pulled her head back, and struck his forehead, twice. Blood ran into his eyebrows, but he wasn't hurt. "That won't get you anywhere."
He walked her around the courtyard in a parody dance. She was as light as any other girl. Threadneedle preferred minimum-weight technology.
She squirmed, and eased her knees up inside his bearhug, pushing them into his stomach. He felt the strain in his laced fingers, his elbows and his shoulders.
He knew she would break the hold, and decided to use it to inflict a little preliminary damage. He unlocked his fingers, made fists, and struck thumbs-first into the small of her back, then dropped her.
That should get her unaltered insides jarring, and put a bit of a crimp into her pelvic girdle.
She was up, keeping her hurt to herself, and lashing out. He backed away. For all her strength and devastating power, she wasn't an especially skilled martial artist. Streetfighting was about all she knew, with perhaps a touch of jeet kune do. Brawlers' business.
He stepped through her blows, and tapped her collarbones, hooking his forefingers into the nerve points.
Jesse yelped, and floundered. He gave her an elbow in the side of the head, and repeated the procedure three times within the space of a single breath.
"Tired? I can keep this up all day."
She still hadn't really touched him.
"You'll have had Threadneedle undermesh your stomach muscles, so we won't bother hitting you there," he said.
He saw his opportunity, and jabbed a knuckle-pointed punch at her solar plexus. It would be armoured, of course, but he didn't want to break it, just to send a shock through her whole skeleton.
"You see, all that metal inside you can rattle around. It can hurt you as badly as I can."
He pressed her ribs, his hands moving faster than perception.
"A few more of those, and all your boneshields will be loose. That'll be like having breadknives floating around the inside of your chest. You won't care for it. I can promise you that."
She stepped back, away from him. She had worked up a sweat. The sun was up there now. It looked like the thirty-nine thousand six hundred and fifteenth sunny day in a row in Arizona.
"Are you enjoying this little game of 'Sally Go Round the Roses'? I am."
"Freak you."
"Tut tut. Such language. You should gain a command of more elaborate invective."
She made a reach for his throat, which he dodged. Her fingers closed just under his jaw, nails scraping his adam's apple.
"Nice try. Your favourite move, isn't it? Your father's autopsy reports show an especially fine specimen of the throat-grab. And you did something similar to that Daughter of the American Revolution in Moroni."
He pulled out a derringer, and shot at her heart. Her jacket exploded, and he saw blackened flesh below.
"You might be wondering why I did that?"
She was snarling now, not looking like a girl at all.
"I knew it wouldn't kill you…"
She tightened her padded pyjamas, modestly shifting the hole from blueing ribs to smooth skin.
"…it didn't even hurt you, really. You've had your nerves deadened to reduce your pain perception…"
He threw the useless gun away.
"But it did some damage, Jesse. Believe me, inside, you're leaking a little. Nothing serious. It'll clear up on its own thanks to Dr Threadneedle's micro-organisms. But you'd be well advised not to exert yourself further."
He brushed her cheek with his toecap.
"Trust me, I'm a doctor."
His heel slammed into her jaw, knocking her head to one side.
"Of course, my PhD. is in economics, but I have an amateur's informed interest in bio-engineering."
She got a good hold on his ankle, but not good enough. He pulled free.
"Did that dislocate your thumbs? No, well I'm sure it hurt them a lot."
She tucked her thumbs inside her fists, and tried to land a couple of punches on him. If they had connected, they would have broken bones and punctured organs, but he was out of the way and had made sure there would be a stone pillar where her fists landed.
"Did you know that Dr Threadneedle's experimental subjects had a 76% mental breakdown rate when he was with GenTech? Still, I'm sure he made some startling advances before opening you up."
Jesse fell back, her knuckles bloodied, steel glinting in the ruined flesh. There were distinct imprints in the stone where she had punched.
"And that must have been very unpleasant. You know, this is an interesting approach. I'm not really killing you, I'm just seducing you into a slow, painful suicide…"
Dr Proctor knew that everyone else who had faced up to her had been too scared of her ferocity, of her bio-amendments. Too bad Threadneedle hadn't tried some of the new IQ-boost chromosomes on her greymass. If Jessamyn Bonney were intelligent, she could have been a real threat.
She went for one of his knees, and got lucky. No, he had to give her credit. She had seen an oppportunity, and taken it well.
Pain flared up, and he slowed momentarily. She got a kick into his side, and he had to dart back, out of range.
She wasn't really unintelligent, just uninformed. She hadn't even heard of him. Probably didn't follow the newsies, stuck out here in the sand. Like most of the sheep, she was going to die because she was ignorant, not because she was undeserving…
He'd been fought before. He didn't always favour helpless prey. He'd stalked and struggled with the best of them. Others had resisted more than this.
His side throbbed, and he realized she'd done better than he'd thought at first. With a cold anger, he stepped up to her, and used his elbows on her neck, face, shoulders and chest.
Again, he was out of her range before she really knew what he had done to her.
Her face was beginning to blacken.
"Some of those are ordinary bruises, but some of those are nice little pockets filling up with blood from the ruptured vessels."
She wiped her face off with the back of her hand.
"I can mash your face against your durium skull, Jesse. That's what I'm doing. Then I'll get to your greymass through your eyesockets."
She pulled her eyepatch off. He had wondered when she'd try that.
The red lens of the burner winked as it warmed up. He slipped his hand into his side-pocket and palmed the circular mirror.