The woman who was sitting in my office must have thought I’d forgotten she was there. I could see her face reflected in the floor-to-ceiling glass, still waiting for an answer to the question she had just asked. I hadn’t forgotten her or her question. I was just wondering how something that had once seemed so strange could now seem so familiar.
The city hadn’t changed much since my arrival.
It had to be me, then.
The window was spattered by rain falling from the Mosquito Net, hard diagonal slashes of it. They said it never really stopped raining in Chasm City, and maybe that was true, but it missed the nuances that rain was capable of. Sometimes it came down straight and soft like a cool mist, alpine clean. Sometimes, when the steam dams around the chasm opened and sent pressure changes squalling across the city, it came at you sideways, lashing and acid-tongued, like defoliant.
‘Mister Mirabel…’ she said.
I turned back from the window. ‘I’m sorry. I got caught up in the view. Where were we?’
‘You were telling me about Sky Haussmann, how you think he…’
She had heard most of what I was willing to tell anyone by then; how I believed Sky had emerged from hiding and remade a new life for himself as Cahuella. I suppose it was odd that I was speaking of these things at all — much less to a prospective recruit — but I’d liked her and she’d been more than usually willing to listen to me. We had finished a few pisco sours — she was from Sky’s Edge as well — and the time had slipped by.
‘Well?’ I asked, interrupting her. ‘How much of it are you prepared to believe?’
‘I’m not sure, Mister Mirabel. How would you have found all this out, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I met Gitta,’ I said. ‘And she told me something which makes me think Constanza was telling the truth.’
‘You think Gitta found out who Cahuella was, before anyone else?’
‘Yes. There’s a good chance she stumbled on Constanza’s evidence, and that led her to Cahuella, even though it was at least two centuries since Sky had supposedly been executed.’
‘And when she found him?’
‘She was expecting a monster, but that wasn’t quite what she got. He wasn’t the same man Constanza had known. Gitta tried to hate him, I think, but couldn’t.’
‘What do you think made her certain she’d found him?’
‘His name, I think. He took it from the legend of the Caleuche, the ghost ship. Cahuella was its dolphin; a link to his past he couldn’t quite sever.’
‘Well, it’s certainly an interesting theory.’
I shrugged. ‘Probably no more than that. You’ll hear stranger stories if you spend any time here, believe me.’
She was a recent arrival to Yellowstone; like me a soldier, but one who had been sent here not on some errand but because of a clerical error.
‘How long have you been here, Mister Mirabel?’
‘Six years,’ I said.
I looked to the picture window. The view across the city had not changed greatly since I had returned from Refuge. The thicket of the Canopy stretched away like a section through someone’s lung: a convoluted black tangle against the brown backdrop of the Mosquito Net. They were talking about cleaning it next year.
‘That’s a long time, six years.’
‘Not for me.’
Saying that, I thought about the time when I had come round in Refuge. I must have slipped beneath consciousness through the blood I had lost from the wound Tanner had inflicted on me, even though I had barely felt it at the time. My clothes had been slit open, a turquoise medicinal salve applied to the suture-like gash where his knife had passed through. I was lying on a couch, with one of the slender servitors eyeing me.
I was a mass of bruises, and each breath hurt. My mouth felt strange, as if it no longer belonged to me.
‘Tanner?’
It was Amelia’s voice. She moved into focus next to me, her face angelic, just as she had looked on the day of my revival in the Mendicant habitat.
‘That isn’t my name,’ I said, startled when my voice came out perfectly normally, apart from a slight rasp of fatigue. My mouth did not feel like it should be capable of anything as subtle as language.
‘So I gather,’ Amelia said. ‘But it’s the only one I know you by, so it will have to suffice for now.’
I was too weak to argue, and not even sure I wanted to.
‘You saved me,’ I said. ‘I owe you a debt of thanks.’
‘You seemed to save yourself,’ she said. The room was much smaller than the one where Reivich had died, but it was illuminated in the same shade of autumnal gold and the walls were chiselled with the same intricate mathematics that I had seen elsewhere in Refuge. The light played on the snowflake she wore around her neck. ‘What happened to you, Tanner? What happened to make you capable of killing a man in that way?’
Her question sounded accusatory, except for the tone in which it was delivered. She was not blaming me, I realised. Amelia appeared to recognise that I was not necessarily responsible for the horrors of my own past, any more than a waking man is responsible for the atrocities he commits in his sleep.
‘The man I was,’ I said, ‘was a hunter.’
‘The man you were talking about? The man called Cahuella?’
I nodded. ‘He had snake genes inserted into his eyes, amongst other tricks. He wanted to be able to hunt any creature in the dark on equal terms. I thought that was as far as it went. I was wrong about that.’
‘But you didn’t know?’
‘Not until it was time. Reivich knew, though. He knew Cahuella had venom glands, and the means to deliver the venom into a host. The Ultras must have told him.’
‘And he tried to tell you?’
I moved my head up and down on the pillow. ‘Maybe he wanted one of us to live more than the other. I just hope he made the right choice.’
‘Of course he did,’ Zebra said.
I turned around — painfully — to see her standing on the other side of the bed. ‘Reivich told the truth, then,’ I said. ‘About the gun. You were only put to sleep.’
‘He wasn’t a bad person,’ Zebra said. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted anyone harmed except the man who killed his family.’
‘But I’m still alive. Does that mean he failed?’
She shook her head slowly. She looked radiant in the golden light, and I realised that I wanted her intensely, no matter how we had betrayed each other or what lay in the future; no matter that I did not even have a name by which she could call me. ‘I think he got what he wanted, in the end. Most of it, anyway.’
There was something in her voice which told me she was not telling me everything she knew. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I don’t suppose anyone’s told you,’ Zebra said. ‘But Reivich lied to all of us.’
‘About what?’
‘His scan.’ She looked towards the ceiling, the lines of her face defined in golden highlights. Her skin stripes were still faintly visible. ‘It was a failure. It was done too hastily. He wasn’t captured. ’
I went through the motions of registering disbelief, even though I could tell Zebra was telling the truth.
‘But it can’t have failed. I spoke to the copy after he’d been scanned.’
‘You thought you did. Apparently it was just a beta-level simulation, a mockup of Reivich programmed to mimic his responses and make you think the scan had been successful.’
‘Why, though? Why did he feel the need to pretend it had worked?’
‘I think it was for Tanner’s benefit,’ she said. ‘Reivich wanted Tanner to think everything had been in vain; that even killing Reivich’s physical body was a meaningless gesture.’
‘Except it wasn’t,’ I said.
‘No. Reivich would have died anyway, sooner or later — but it was really Tanner that did it.’