“Yes.”
“Genie's going to die, Dick. And this could save her.”
“Yes.”
“The nanites are a self-evolving system. They protect their host.”
“That, too.”
“So—” Still nobody moving back onshore when I turn to look, and the wind this far out on the ice could peel the skin off my face. I kneel on ice like coals of fire. “—why not experiment with a bigger host?”
“What if you're wrong?”
“Then the end comes a little faster,” I say, and brace myself on three limbs. “How long do you think it would take to punch through this?”
It's not easy. Ice chips sting my cheeks for ten minutes before the crust snaps under a sledgehammer blow of my steel hand. My right hand is numb and my ears have quit burning. Lake water splashes my face and I barely feel it. Don't feel it at all as it freezes between the fingers of my left hand, but I stretch them, cracking frost chips off metal. Concave flakes crunch under my knees when I shift back and dig in my pocket for Leah's knife, but my fingers are so numb I have to tear the pocket open and pick it up in my steel hand.
Leah did it wrong.
Right for her purposes, I should say. Wrong for mine. I kneel there on the ice, staring at the knife. Would you do this for me, Richard? It shouldn't take much, right? I wouldn't have to bleed out. Just a few—
“I could stop you, Jenny. Right here. Right now. Freeze you in your tracks the way Ramirez did to you and Trevor.”
You won't. Leah was smart enough to sharpen the knife. I'm so cold I barely feel it dimple the skin of my right wrist. It goes in with a stretch and a sudden pop, and I close my eyes as I drag it upward, lengthwise, not wanting to watch the flesh and tendons peel away from the blade, but then heat spatters my legs and I peek, and all that scarlet freezes like rose petals to the ice around my fishing hole.
Not enough blood, and it's already clotting, pulling tight, pink and slick with lymph and granular tissue at the edges of the wound, sealing up like the ice crystallizing at the edge of the black, black water. “That's just freaky.”
I must have missed the vein.
“Jenny. I won't do it. You're killing yourself for nothing.”
“You'll do it.” My voice is so clear. It rings off the ice and the darkness like wind chimes, breath ripped to streamers by the endless wind. The vein is slick, slippery, blood clotting on my steel fingers as I try to hook under it, pull it up. It doesn't hurt. And if I didn't die taking three bullets for Riel, what makes you think something as simple as this would kill me?
It doesn't hurt at all.
“Jenny,” he says. “It would take a central processor as big as the Montreal's to control the nanite infection on a planet the size of Earth. They need a control chip, remember? Without it, they're just so many creepy crawlies without a purpose in this world except providing spare cycles for me to run processes in.”
I drop the knife when the blood starts puddling and flowing in earnest, rivulets that pool in my palm and run between my fingers like seeds, like black rubies scattered. The blade somersaults, chips off the edge of the hole I made, vanishes into ebony water.
Followed by a tumble of jewels.
Make it happen, Richard.
It's not Richard's voice that answers me, but Alan's. “Master Warrant Officer. This looks remarkably like the actions of an unstable mind. You know that I can simply prevent the nanites from reproducing into the lake water. This is a futile exercise, and you're hurting yourself for no reason at all.”
Damn him. Put Richard back on, please? Amazed at my own calmness, I get a foot under me, come up on one knee as the rain of blood slows, stops. I dig in the wound with smeared steel fingers, gasping at how much — now, suddenly, Jesus—it hurts. I break the scab, and a fresh line of blood follows, but then suddenly my left hand quits on me and my body freezes, held upright by Richard's grip and not my will—
“You trust me,” Richard hisses in my ear, and I sense his tremendous disappointment in me. “Well and good. Trust me all you like — but do you want the Benefactors to have this kind of control over everything on Earth, Jenny? Alan and I are not going to let this happen—”
— and I hear somebody yelling, running footsteps, skidding on the frozen lake and the flicker of a flashlight across my back, the blood, the ice.
Somebody.
Gabe.
Marde. All right, Richard; you proved your point. My emotional blackmail won't work on you any better than Leah's did.
“I'm still a computer program,” he says.
You're a computer program that forgot one thing, I remind him. Can you hack the Chinese system the way you just hacked mine?
A pause, one I know is for my benefit. “No. Not if they knew I was coming. I've been trying since you were shot.”
So what makes you think that the Benefactors would have any better luck than you?
I can tell that he doesn't have an answer because he lets me go, and I'm standing — a little dizzy with blood loss — to face my tongue-lashing from Gabe by the time he catches up with me.
11:00 PM
Tuesday 19 December, 2062
Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario
The big truck purred to life as Razorface stroked the steering column. Indigo slouched against the passenger door, staring through the streetlamp reflections at pavement and ice. “Indy.”
Nothing, while he reached down and touched the radio on. Razor kept the reach going, cracked his neck out loud, and laid a hand on her arm. She jumped as if he'd snuck up on her. “Indy.”
“What?”
“Don't freak on me, babe. You in?”
She didn't turn to look. Her reflection showed a fine line etched between dark eyes and she suddenly looked her age. She shook her head slightly, hair whispering around her ears, and he pulled his hand back to cover a cough that tasted like molasses.
He nodded. “You're in.”
“Yeah,” she answered. “Where do we go?”
The Bradford ghosted into the stream of traffic, a navy blue shark cruising Toronto's dark waters. Razorface swallowed a mouthful of gunk, flipped the rearview mirror to “night,” and laid both hands on the wheel. “I've been tailing Holmes.”
“Have you.”
“She doesn't always drive home the same way,” he continued, ignoring the darkness in Indigo's voice. “But she's got a Monday route, and a Sunday route—”
He let the list flicker out when the girl half turned and tilted her head to the side. He didn't turn to look, but saw her expression with half one eye. “She thinks we're that dumb?”
“She thinks she's that smart anyway,” Razorface said, and turned west on Bloor. “You game?”
“Yeah.” A long exhalation, like a smoker's release. “Yeah. I'm game.”
0600 Hours
Wednesday 20 December, 2062
Somewhere over the Atlantic