‘Only the truth.’
I shook my head minutely. ‘Sorry, but you’ve just given it to me, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough.’
‘It wasn’t everything.’ Her voice was quiet and somehow relieved. ‘I’m not working for him any more, Tanner. He thinks I am, but I’ve betrayed him.’
‘Reivich?’
She nodded, face down, so that I could barely see her eyes. ‘Once you stole from me, I knew you were the man Reivich was running from. I knew you were the assassin.’
‘It didn’t take a great deal of deduction, did it?’
‘No, but it was important to be sure. Reivich wanted the man isolated and removed from the picture. Killed, not to put too fine a point on it.’
I nodded. ‘That would make sense.’
‘I was meant to do it as soon as I had definite evidence you were the killer. That way Reivich would be able to put the matter out of his mind for good — he wouldn’t have to worry that the wrong man had been killed and that the real assassin was still out there somewhere.’
‘You had more than a few opportunities to kill me.’ My hand softened on the gun now. ‘So why didn’t you?’
‘I almost did.’ Zebra was talking quicker now, voice hushed even though no one was remotely within earshot. ‘I could have done it in the apartment, but I hesitated. You can’t blame me. So then I let you take the gun and the car, knowing I could trace either.’
‘I should have realised. It seemed easy at the time.’
‘Credit me with more sense than to let that happen by accident. Of course, there was another way to trace you if that failed. You still had the Game implant.’ She paused. ‘But then you crashed the car, had the implant taken out. That only left the gun, and I wasn’t getting a very clear trace from it. Maybe you damaged it in the car crash.’
‘Than I called you from the station, after I’d visited Dominika.’
‘And told me where you’d be later on. I hired Pransky to help me. He’s good, don’t you think? Admittedly his socials skills could use a little work, but you don’t pay people like that for their charm and diplomacy.’ Zebra took a breath and wiped a film of accumulated rain from her brows, exposing a strip of clean flesh beneath the caul of sooty water. ‘Not as good as you, though. I saw you attack the Gamers — the way you injured three of them and then kidnapped the fourth, the woman. I had you targeted the whole time that was happening. I could have opened your cranium from a kilometre away, and you wouldn’t have felt an itch before your brains hit the street. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just kill you like that. And that’s when I betrayed Reivich.’
‘I felt someone watching me. I never guessed it was you.’
‘And even if you had, would you have guessed I was a twitch of an eyelid away from killing you?’
‘Eyelid-triggered sniper’s rifle? Now what would a nice girl like you be doing with something like that?’
‘What now, Tanner?’
I withdrew my empty hand from my pocket, like a conjuror whose trick had gone spectacularly wrong.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it’s wet out here and I need a drink.’
THIRTY-ONE
Methuselah looked very much the same as when I had last seen him, floating in his tank like a monstrous piscine iceberg. There was a small crowd around him, just as before — people who would linger for a few minutes at the marvel of the age before realising that, really, all it was was a large old fish, and that, size apart, there was really nothing about Methuselah which was intrinsically more interesting than the younger, leaner, nimbler koi which thrived in the ponds. Worse than that, in fact, since the one thing I noticed was that no one turned away from Methuselah looking quite as happy as when they had arrived. Not only was there something disappointing about the fish, there was something ineluctably sad as well. Maybe they were too scared that in Methuselah they glimpsed the inert grey hulk of their own futures.
Zebra and I drank tea, and no one paid us any attention.
‘The woman you met — what was her name again?’
‘Chanterelle Sammartini,’ I said.
‘Pransky never explained what happened to her. Were you together when he found you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’d argued.’
Zebra did a creditable double-take. ‘Wasn’t arguing part of the bargain? I mean, if you kidnap someone, don’t you generally assume that there’s going to be some arguing?’
‘I didn’t kidnap her, no matter what you think. I invited her to take me to the Canopy.’
‘With a gun.’
‘She wasn’t going to accept the invitation otherwise.’
‘Good point. And did you keep this gun on her the whole time you were up here?’
‘No,’ I said, not entirely comfortable with this line of debate. ‘No, not at all. It turned out not be necessary. We found we could tolerate each other’s company without it.’
Zebra arched an eyebrow. ‘You and the Canopy rich kid actually hit it off?’
‘After a fashion,’ I said, feeling oddly defensive.
From across the atrium, Methuselah flicked a pelvic fin and the suddenness of the gesture — no matter how feeble or involuntary — generated a mild frisson amongst the onlookers, as if a statue had just twitched. I wondered what kind of synaptic process had triggered that gesture, whether there was any intention behind it, or whether — like the creaking of an old house — Methuselah occasionally just moved, no closer to thought than wood.
‘Did you sleep with her?’ Zebra asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but there just wasn’t time.’
‘You’re not comfortable talking about this, are you?’
‘Would you be?’ I shook my head, as much to clear it of confusion as to deny anything deeper about my relationship with Chanterelle. ‘I expected to hate her for what she did; the way she played the game. But as soon as I started talking to her I realised it wasn’t that simple. From her point of view there was nothing barbaric about it at all.’
‘Nice and convenient, that.’
‘I mean she didn’t realise — or believe — that the victims were not the kind of people she’d been told they were.’
‘Until she met you.’
I nodded carefully. ‘I think I gave her pause for thought.’
‘You’ve given us all pause for thought, Tanner.’ And then Zebra drank what remained of her tea in silence.
‘You again,’ the Mixmaster said, in a tone which conveyed neither pleasure nor disappointment, but a highly refined amalgam of the two. ‘I had imagined that I had answered all your questions satisfactorily during your last visit. Evidently I was mistaken.’ His heavy-lidded gaze alighted on Zebra, a twinge of non-recognition disturbing the genetically enhanced placidity of his expression. ‘Madame, I see, has had a considerable makeover since the last occasion.’
It had been Chanterelle, of course, but I decided to let the bastard have his amusement.
‘She had the number of a good bloodcutter,’ I said.
‘And you emphatically didn’t,’ the Mixmaster said, sealing the outer door of his parlour against other visitors. ‘I’m talking about the eyework, of course,’ he said, ensconcing himself behind his floating console while the two of us stood. ‘But why don’t we dispense with the lie that this work had any connection with bloodcutters?’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Zebra asked, entirely with justification.
‘A small internal matter,’ I said.
‘This gentleman,’ the Mixmaster said, with laboured emphasis on the last word, ‘visited me a day ago, to discuss some genetic and structural anomalies in his eyes. At the time he claimed that the anomalies were the result of inferior intervention by bloodcutters. I was even prepared to believe him, though the edited sequences bore none of the usual signatures of bloodcutter work.’