‘Just get the damned thing out,’ I said. ‘Or else I walk out of here with the money I’ve already given the kid.’
‘That you can do, but you no find better than Dominika. That not threat, that promise.’
‘Then do it,’ I said.
‘First you ask question,’ she said, levitating around the couch to prep her other instruments, swapping her thimbles with impressive dexterity. She carried a pouch of them somewhere down in the infolded complexity of her waist, finding those she wanted by touch alone, without cutting or pricking her fingers in the process.
‘I have a friend called Reivich,’ I said. ‘He arrived a day or two ahead of me and we’ve lost touch. Revival amnesia, the Mendicants said. They could tell me he was in the Canopy, but no more than that.’
‘And?’
‘I think there was a good chance he sought your services.’ Or could not avoid them, I thought. ‘He would have had implants that needed removing, like Mister Quirrenbach, the other gentleman I travelled with.’ Then I described Reivich to her, aiming for the kind of vaguely correct level of recall which would imply friendship rather than an assassin’s physiometric target profile. ‘It’s very important that we get in contact, and so far I haven’t succeeded.’
‘What make you think I know this man?’
‘I don’t know — how much do you think it would take? Another hundred? Would that jog your memory?’
‘Dominika’s memory, it not so fast this time of morning.’
‘Two hundred then. Now is Mister Reivich springing to mind?’ I watched as a look of theatrical recollection appeared on her face. I had to hand it to her, she did it with style. ‘Oh, good. I’m so glad.’ If only she knew exactly how much.
‘Mister Reivich, he special case.’
Of course he was. An aristocrat like Reivich, even on Sky’s Edge, would have had almost as much ironmongery floating around in his body as a Belle Epoque high-roller; maybe more than some top-level Demarchists. And, like Quirrenbach, he would not even have heard of the Melding Plague until he arrived around Yellowstone. No time either to seek out the few remaining orbital clinics capable of doing the extraction work. He would have been in a hurry to get down to the surface and lose himself in Chasm City.
Dominika would have been his first and last chance at salvation.
‘I know he was a special case,’ I said. ‘And that’s why I know you’d have a means to contact him.’
‘Why I want contact him?’
I sighed, realising that this was going to be hard work, or expensive, or both. ‘Supposing you removed something from him, and he seemed healthy, and then a day later you discovered that there was something anomalous with the implant you’d removed — that perhaps it had plague traces. You’d be obliged to contact him then, wouldn’t you?’
Her expression hadn’t changed during all this, so I decided a little harmless flattery ought to be brought into play.
‘It’s what any self-respecting surgeon would do. I know not everyone around here would bother chasing up a client like that, but as you’ve just said, no one’s better than Madame Dominika.’
She grunted acknowledgement. ‘Client information, confidential, ’ Dominika added, but we both knew what that meant.
A few minutes later, I was a few dozen notes lighter, but I also had an address in the Canopy; something called Escher Heights. I had no idea how specific it was — whether it referred to a single apartment, or a single building, or simply some predefined region of the tangle.
‘Now you close eyes,’ she said, pushing a blunt thimbled fingertip against my forehead. ‘And Dominika work her magic.’
She administered a local anaesthetic before getting to work. It didn’t take her long, and I felt no real discomfort as she removed the hunt implant. She might as well have been excising a cyst. I wondered why Waverly had not thought to include an anti-tamper system in the implant, but perhaps that had been considered just a tiny bit too unsporting. In any case — in so far as I understood things, based on what I had gleaned from Waverly and Zebra — in the normal rules of play the implant’s telemetry was not meant to be accessed by the people actually doing the hunting. They were allowed to chase the prey using whatever forensic techniques they liked, but homing in on a buried neural transmitter was just too easy. The implant was purely for spectators, and for the people like Waverly who monitored the progress of the game.
Idly, as my mind free-associated on Dominika’s couch, I thought of the refinements I might have introduced if it had been up to me. For a start, I would have made the implant very much harder to remove, putting in the deep neural connections Dominika had worried about, and then an anti-tamper system; something which would fry the brain of the subject if anyone tried removing the implant ahead of time. I would also make sure that the hunters carried their own implants, equally difficult to remove. I’d arrange for the two types of implant — hunter and hunted — to emit some kind of coded signal which each recognised. And when the parties approached each other within some predefined radius — say a city block, or less — I would arrange for both implants to inform their wearers of the proximity of the other, via the deep neural connections I had already sewn. I would cut the voyeurs out of the loop completely; let them track the game in their own fashion. Make the whole thing more private, and limit the number of hunters to a nice round number, like one. That way the whole thing would become infinitely more personal. And why limit the hunt to a mere fifty hours? In a city the size of this one, it struck me that the hunt could easily last tens of days, or longer, provided the target was allowed sufficient time to run and hide in the maze of the Mulch. For that matter, I saw no reason to limit the arena of play to the Mulch alone, or even to Chasm City. Why not every settlement on the planet, if they wanted a real challenge?
Of course, there was no way they’d go for it. What they wanted was a quick kill; a night’s blooding, with as little expense, danger and personal involvement as possible.
‘Okay,’ Dominika said, pressing a sterilised pad against the side of my head. ‘You done now, Mister Mirabel.’ She held the implant between two fingers, glinting like a tiny grey jewel. ‘And if this not hunt implant, then Dominika skinniest woman in Chasm City.’
‘You never know,’ I said, ‘miracles do happen.’
‘Not to Dominika.’ Then she helped me from the couch. I felt a little light-headed, but when I fingered the head wound it felt tiny and there was no sign of infection or scarring. ‘You no curious?’ she asked, as I shrugged myself back into Vadim’s coat, anxious for the anonymity it afforded despite the heat and humidity.
‘No curious — I mean not curious — about what?’
‘I say I ask you questions about friend.’
‘Reivich? We’ve already covered that.’
She began packing away her thimbles. ‘No. Mister Quirrenbach. Other friend, the one you with yesterday.’
‘Actually, Mister Quirrenbach and I were more acquaintances than friends. What was it anyway?’
‘He pay me not to tell you this, good money. So I say nothing. But you rich man now, Mister Mirabel. You make Mister Quirrenbach seem poor. You get Dominika’s drift?’
‘You’re saying Quirrenbach bribed you into secrecy, but if I top his bribe I can bribe you out of it?’