I wasn’t sure it was an improvement.
‘How does it feel? I did a good job, I think.’
He was sitting opposite me with a gun. I remembered him pushing the probe against my head. I reached up to touch my scalp. Above my right ear was a shaven patch, still scabbed with blood, and the feeling of something hard encysted beneath the skin.
It hurt like hell.
‘I think you need some practice.’
‘Story of my life. You’re a strange one, though. What’s with all the blood coming out of your hand? Is that some medical condition I should know about?’
‘Why? Would it make any difference?’
He debated the point with himself for a few moments. ‘No, probably not. If you can run, you’re fit enough.’
‘Fit enough for what?’ I touched the scab again. ‘What have you put inside me?’
‘Well, let me explain.’
I hadn’t expected him to be so talkative, but I began to understand why it might make sense for me to know some of the facts. It must have stemmed less from any concern for my wellbeing than the need to have me primed in the right way. From previous games, it had become clear that the hunted made the whole affair more entertaining if they knew exactly what was at stake, and what their own chances were.
‘Basically,’ he said urbanely, ‘it’s a hunt. We call it the Game. It doesn’t exist, not officially; not even within the relatively lawless environs of Canopy. They know about it, and speak about it, but always with discretion.’
‘Who?’ I said, for the sake of saying something.
‘Postmortals, immortals, whatever you want to call them. They don’t all play it, or even want to play it, but they all know someone who has played it, or has connections with the network which makes the Game possible in the first place.’
‘This been going on long?’
‘Only in the last seven years. Perhaps one might think of it as a barbaric counterpoint to the gentility which pervaded Yellowstone before the fall.’
‘Barbaric?’
‘Oh, exquisitely so. That’s why we adore it. There’s nothing intricate or subtle about the Game, methodologically or psychologically. It needs to be capable of being organised at very short notice, anywhere in the city. There are rules, naturally, but you don’t need a trip to the Pattern Jugglers to understand them.’
‘Tell me about these rules, Waverly.’
‘Oh, they’re nothing that need concern you, Mirabel. All you need do is run.’
‘And then?’
‘Die. And die well.’ He spoke kindly, like an indulgent uncle. ‘That’s all we ask of you.’
‘Why do you do it?’
‘To take another’s life is a special kind of thrill, Mirabel. To do it while being immortal elevates the act to an entirely different level of sublimity.’ He paused, as if marshalling his thoughts. ‘We don’t really grasp the nature of death, even in these difficult times. But by taking a life — especially the life of someone who wasn’t immortal, and who therefore already had an acute awareness of death — we can obtain some vicarious sense of what it means.’
‘Then the people you hunt are never immortal?’
‘Not generally, no. We usually select from the Mulch, picking someone reasonably healthy. We want them to give us a good chase for our money, of course, so we’re not above feeding them first.’
He told me more; that the Game was financed by a clandestine network of subscribers. Mostly Canopy, their numbers were rumoured to be augmented by pleasure-seekers from some of the more libertarian carousels still inhabited in the Rust Belt, or some of the other settlements on Yellowstone, like Loreanville. Nobody in the network knew more than a handful of other subscribers, and their true identities were camouflaged by an elaborate system of deceits and masques, so that no one could be exposed in the open chambers of Canopy life, which still affected a kind of decadent civility. Hunts were organised at short notice, with small numbers of subscribers alerted at any one time, convening in disused parts of the Canopy. On the same night — or no more than a day before — a victim would be extracted from the Mulch and prepared.
The implants were a recent refinement.
They allowed the progress of the hunt to be shared amongst a larger pool of subscribers, boosting the potential revenue enormously. Other subscribers would help with ground coverage, risking the Mulch to bring video images of the hunt back to the Canopy, with cachets to those who obtained the most spectacular footage. Simple rules of play — which were more strictly enforced than any actual laws which still prevailed in the city — determined the accepted parameters within which the hunt could take place, the permitted tracking devices and weapons, what constituted a fair kill.
‘There’s just one problem,’ I said. ‘I’m not from the Mulch. I don’t know my way around your city. I’m not sure you’re going to get your money’s worth.’
‘Oh, we’ll manage. You’ll have an adequate headstart on the hunters. And to be frank, your not being local is actually something of an advantage to us. The locals know far too many shortcuts and hidey-holes.’
‘Pretty unsporting of them. Waverly, there’s something I want you to know.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going to come back and kill you.’
He laughed. ‘Sorry, Mirabel, but I’ve heard it all before.’
The cable-car landed, the door opened and he invited me to step out.
I started running as the cable-car damped its lights and climbed above me, heading back to the Canopy. Even as it ascended, a dark mote against the milky strands of aerial light, more cars were descending, like fireflies. They were not headed straight for me — that wouldn’t have been sporting — but they were certainly headed for my general part of the Mulch.
The Game had started.
I kept running.
If the area of the Mulch where the rickshaw kid had left me was a bad one, then this was something else: a territory so depopulated that it could not even be termed dangerous in the same sense — unless you happened to be the unwilling participant in a night’s hunt. There were no fires burning in the lower levels, and the encrustations around the structures had a look of deserted neglect: half-collapsed and inaccessible. The surface roads were even more dilapidated than those I had travelled earlier, cracked and twisted like strips of toffee, apt to end abruptly in mid-span as they crossed a flooded abyss, or simply to plunge into the flood itself. It was dark, and I had to constantly watch my footing.
Waverly had done me a kind of favour, dimming the interior lights as we dropped, so that my eyes had at least accustomed themselves to the darkness, but I didn’t feel an overwhelming rush of gratitude.
I ran, glancing over my shoulder to watch the cable-cars as they sank lower, dropping behind the closest structures. The vehicles were close enough now that I could see their occupants. For some reason, I’d assumed that only the man and the woman would be chasing me, but obviously this wasn’t the case. Maybe — in the way these things were handled in the network — it was just their turn to find a victim, and I had strolled blithely into their plans.
Was this how I was going to die, I thought? I’d nearly died dozens of times in the war; dozens more times while working for Cahuella. Reivich had tried to kill me at least twice, and had nearly succeeded on both occasions. But if I hadn’t managed to have survived any of those earlier brushes with death, I would at least have admitted some grudging respect for my adversaries, a sense that I had chosen to do battle with them, and thereby accepted whatever fate had in mind for me.