And then he had killed her in a manner which he knew would speak to me; a private code of ritual murder which opened seams into the heart of my being.
‘The woman,’ I said. ‘She was offworld too?’
But Tom seemed no wiser than I about that.
Using Zebra’s phone, I called Lorant, the pig whose kitchen I had half-destroyed during my descent from the Canopy, an eternity ago. I told him I had a final huge favour to ask of him and his wife, which was only that they look after Tom until things quietened down. A day, I said, although in truth I plucked the figure from my head at random.
‘I look after myself,’ Tom said. ‘No want stay with pig.’
‘They’re good people, trust me. You’ll be much safer there. If word gets out that someone witnessed Dominika being killed, the same man will come back. If he finds you, he’ll kill you,’ I said.
‘I always got to hide?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Only for as long as it takes for me to kill the man who did this. And believe me, I’m not planning on spending the rest of my life doing it.’
The concourse was still quiet when we left the tent, meeting the pig and his wife just beyond the cataract of greasy rain which fell endlessly down the building’s overhung side, like a curtain of yellowing calico. The kid went with them, nervously at first, but then Lorant scooped him aboard and their balloon-wheeled vehicle vanished into the murk like an apparition.
‘He’ll be safe, I think,’ I said.
‘You think he’s in that much danger?’ Quirrenbach said.
‘More than you can imagine. The man who killed Dominika isn’t exactly overburdened with a conscience.’
‘You sound like you know him.’
‘I do,’ I said.
Then we returned to Chanterelle’s car.
‘I’m confused,’ Quirrenbach said, as he climbed into the vehicle’s bubble of dryness and light. ‘I don’t know who I’m dealing with any more. I feel like you’ve just pulled the carpet from under me.’
He was looking at me.
‘All because I found the dead woman?’ Pransky said. ‘Or because Mirabel has started going mad?’
‘Quirrenbach,’ I said, ‘I need to know of places where someone might buy snakes; probably not far from here.’
‘Did you hear anything of what we just said?’
‘I heard,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to talk about it right now.’
‘Tanner,’ Zebra said, then stopped herself. ‘Or whoever you say you are. Does this business about your name have anything to do with what the Mixmaster told you?’
‘That wouldn’t by any chance be the same one you visited with me, would it?’ It was Chanterelle speaking now, and it was all I could do to nod, as if in that gesture I made my final acceptance of the truth.
‘I know some local snake sellers,’ Quirrenbach said, almost to ease the tension. He leaned forward, over Zebra’s shoulder, and fed orders into the car. It lifted smoothly, quickly spiriting us above the stench and chaos of the rain-sodden Mulch.
‘I had to know what was wrong with my eyes,’ I told Chanterelle. ‘Why they seemed to have been tampered with genetically. What the Mixmaster told me when I returned with Zebra was that the work had probably been done by Ultras, and then undone — crudely, as it happened — by someone else; someone like the Black Geneticists.’
‘Go on.’
‘That wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t to find out that I must have been in some way complicit in the act.’
‘You think you willingly did this to your eyes?’
I nodded. ‘It wouldn’t be without its uses. Someone with an interest in hunting, perhaps, might consider it. I can see very well in the dark now.’
‘Who?’ Chanterelle said.
‘Good question,’ Zebra echoed. ‘But before you answer it, what about the full-body scan you had when we visited the Mixmaster? What was the significance of that?’
‘I was looking for evidence of old injuries,’ I said. ‘Both wounds were inflicted at about the same time. I was rather hoping to find one and rather hoping not to find the other.’
‘Any particular reason why?’
‘Tanner Mirabel had a foot shot off by Reivich’s gunmen. The foot could have been replaced by an organic prosthesis, or a cultured copy cloned from his own cells. But either way it would need to be surgically attached to the stump. Now, maybe with the best medical skills available on Yellowstone, that kind of work could be done invisibly. But not on Sky’s Edge. There’d be plenty of microscopic evidence — signs which should have easily shown up in a Mixmaster scan.’
Zebra nodded, accepting that much. ‘Maybe that’s true. But if you’re not Tanner — as you claim — how do you know it ever happened to him?’
‘Because I seem to have stolen his memories.’
Gitta dropped to the floor of the tent at almost the same moment as Cahuella.
Neither of them made much of a sound. Gitta had died — in as far as it mattered — the instant the beam from my weapon reached into her skull and turned her brain tissue into something resembling funereal ash; barely enough of it to cup in your hands and watch slipping in grey streams between your fingers. Her mouth opened slightly wider, but I doubted that she’d had any time to register my actions before thought itself failed. I hoped — devoutly — that the last thing Gitta thought, literally, was that I was about to do something which would save her. As she fell, the gunman’s knife etched deeper into her throat, but by then there was nothing left of her capable of feeling pain.
Cahuella — impaled by the beam which should have spared Gitta and killed the guard — exhaled softly, like the last sigh of someone falling gratefully into sleep. He had lost consciousness with the shock of the beam’s passage; a small mercy for him.
The gunman lifted his face to me. He did not understand, of course. What I had done had made no conceivable sense. I wondered how long it would take before he realised that the shot which had killed Gitta — with such geometric precision, bored straight through the forehead — had in fact been intended for him. How long would it take him before he realised the simple truth, which was that I was not quite the crack shot I had dared to imagine, and that I had killed the one person I was striving to save.
There was a moment of strained silence, during which time he might have come halfway to that realisation.
I did not give him time to finish the journey.
And this time, I neither missed nor stopped shooting when the task was obviously done. I emptied an ammo-cell into the man, and kept firing until the barrel was a cherry-red glow in the tent’s dim light.
For a moment I stood with three ostensibly dead bodies at my feet. Then some soldiering instinct snapped into play and I moved again, assimilating what I could.
Cahuella was breathing, though profoundly unconscious. I had reduced the Reivich gunman into an object lesson in cranial anatomy. I felt a spasm of remorse, guilt at having taken his execution well beyond any sensible limit. It was, I suppose, the last twitch of a dying professional soldier. In the exhaustion of that ammo-cell I had crossed some threshold into some less clinical realm where there were even fewer rules, and where the efficiency of a kill counted for infinitely less than the measure of hatred expended.