I surveyed the damage I had caused. ‘I suppose the last thing you needed was me.’
‘It can all be mended, I dare say. But I think I will help you on your way before you do any more damage, Tanner Mirabel.’
I smiled. ‘That would probably be for the best, Lorant.’
After they had come down from the Rust Belt, Lorant and his wife had found themselves in the employment of a man who must have been amongst the richer individuals in the Mulch. They had their own ground-vehicle: a methane-driven tricycle with enormous balloon-wheels. The superstructure of the vehicle was a mish-mash of plastic and metal and bamboo, shrouded by rain sheets and parasols; it looked to be on the point of falling to pieces if I so much as breathed in its general direction.
‘You don’t have to look so disgusted,’ Lorant’s wife said. ‘It goes. And I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to complain.’
‘Never a truer word was said.’
But it worked, tolerably, and the balloon-wheels did a passable job of smoothing out the imperfections in the roadbed. Once Lorant had agreed to my terms, I managed to persuade him to detour to the place where the wreckage of the other cable-car had come down. By the time we got there a large crowd had assembled, and I then had to persuade Lorant to wait while I pushed through to the middle. There, in what remained of the front of the cable-car, I found Waverly, dead, his chest impaled on a piece of Mulch bamboo, just like one of the deadfalls I had rigged for Reivich. His face was a mass of blood, and might have been unrecognisable except for the blood-filled crater where his monocle had been. It must have been surgically attached.
‘Who did this?’
‘Harvested,’ said a stooped woman next to me, spitting the word through the gaps in her tooth. ‘That’s good optics, that is. Get a good price for that, they will.’
I resisted any burning curiosity to find out who ‘they’ were.
I walked back to Lorant’s tricycle, feeling that in some way part of my own conscience had been ripped out, no less brutally than Waverly’s eyepiece.
‘Well,’ Lorant said, while I climbed back into the tricycle. ‘What is it you took from him?’
‘You think I went back for a trophy?’
He shrugged, as if the matter were of no importance. But as we moved off, I had to ask myself just why I had gone back, if it was not for the reason he had thought.
The journey to Grand Central Station took an hour, though it seemed to me that much of this time was spent doubling back on our route to avoid areas of the Mulch which were either feared or impassable. It was possible that we only travelled three or four kilometres from the place where I had been attacked by Waverly’s people. Nonetheless, none of the landmarks I had made out from Zebra’s apartment were visible here — or if they were, I was seeing them from unrecognisable angles. My earlier sense of having found my feet — the sense that I had begun to assemble a mental map of the city — evaporated like a ridiculous dream. It would happen eventually, of course, if I spent enough time working on it. But not today; not tomorrow, and maybe not for weeks to come. And I didn’t plan on staying that long.
When we finally arrived at Grand Central Station, it was as if less than a heartbeat had elapsed since I was last there, desperately trying to detach myself from Quirrenbach. It was much earlier in the day now — not even noon, as far as I could tell by the angle of the sun on the Net — but no sense of that penetrated the station’s gloomy interior. I thanked Lorant for bringing me this far, and asked him if he would allow me to buy him a meal in addition to what I had already paid him, but he declined, refusing to get out of the driving seat of his trike. With goggles and fedora on and his clothes drawn up tightly around his face, he looked completely human, but I guess the illusion would have been harder to sustain indoors. Pigs, it appeared, were not universally loved and there were whole swathes of the Mulch which were out of bounds to them.
We shook hands — and trotters — anyway, and then he drove away into the Mulch.
TWENTY-FOUR
My first port of call was the broker’s tent, where I sold Zebra’s weapon at what was probably an extortionate mark-down on its true value. I could hardly complain; I was less interested in cash than in losing the weapon before it could be traced to me. The broker asked if it was hot, but I could see there was no real interest in his eyes. The rifle was far too cumbersome and conspicuous for an operation like the Reivich job. The only place you could walk into with a piece of hardware like that and not raise eyebrows would be a convention of heavy-artillery fetishists.
Madame Dominika, I was gratified to see, was still open for business. This time I didn’t need to be dragged there, but walked in willingly, my coat pockets swinging with the ammo-cells I had forgotten to sell.
‘She no open for business,’ said Tom, the kid who had originally hassled Quirrenbach and myself.
I palmed a few notes and slapped them on the table before Tom’s goggle-eyed face. ‘She is now,’ I said, and pushed on through to the tent’s inner chamber.
It was dark, but it took only a second or two for the room’s interior to snap into view, as if someone had turned on a very faint grey lantern. Dominika was sleeping on her operating couch, her generous anatomy shrouded in a garment which might have begun life as a parachute.
‘Wake up,’ I said, not too loudly. ‘You’ve got a customer.’
Her eyes opened slowly, like cracks in swelling pastry. ‘What is this, you got no respect?’ The words came out quickly, but she sounded too lethargic to register real alarm. ‘You ain’t come barging in here.’
‘My money seemed to cut some ice with your assistant.’ I dredged up another note and flashed it in front of her face. ‘How does this look to you?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t see nothing. What wrong with your eyes? Why they like that?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,’ I said, and then wondered how convincing I sounded to her. After all, Lorant had said something similar. And it was a long time since I had experienced any difficulty seeing in the dark.
I extinguished that line of thought — unsettling as it was — and kept up the pressure on Dominika. ‘I need you to do a job for me, and to answer a few questions. That’s not asking too much, is it?’
She propelled her bulk from the couch, fitting her lower reaches into the steam-powered harness which waited by her side. I heard a hiss of leaking pressure as it took her bulk. Then Dominika moved away from the bed with all the grace of a barge.
‘What kind job, what kind questions.’
‘There’s an implant I need removing. Then I need to ask some questions about a friend of mine.’
‘Maybe I ask you questions about friend too.’ I had no idea what she meant by that, but before I could ask, she had turned on the tent’s interior light, exposing her waiting instruments, clustered around the couch which I now saw was spattered with faint rusty scabs of dried blood of varying vintage and hue. ‘But that cost too. Show me implant.’ I did, and after examining it for a few moments, her sharp thimbled fingers digging into the side of my head, she seemed satisfied. ‘Like Game implant, but you still alive.’
Evidently that meant it could not possibly be a Game implant, and for a moment there was no faulting her logic. After all, how many of the hunted ever stood a chance of making it back to Madame Dominika and having the trace removed from their skulls?
‘Can you remove it?’
‘If neural connections shallow, no problem.’ Saying this, she guided me to the couch and swung a viewing device in front of her eyes, chewing her lower lip as she peered into my skull. ‘No. Neural connections shallow; barely reach cortex. Good news for you. But look like Game implant. How it get there? Mendicants?’ Then she shook her head, the rolls of flesh around her neck oscillating like counterweights. ‘No, not Mendicants, unless you lie to me yesterday, when you say you no have implants. And this insertion wound new. Not even day old.’