Severyn vaguely recognized the song breezing through the car’s sponge speakers, but outdated protest rap was a significant deviation from his usual tastes.
“Music off.”
Silence filled the backseat. The car took an uncharacteristically long time calculating their route before finally jetting into traffic. Severyn leaned back to watch the dark street slide past his window, lit by lime green neon and the jittering ghosts of holograms. A moment later he turned to his bodyguard, who had the Loop’s traffic reports scrolling across his retinas.
“Does blood excite you, Finch?”
Finch blinked, clearing his eyes back to a watery blue. “Not particularly, Mr. Grimes. Comes with the job.”
“I thought having reloaded testosterone would make the world… visceral again.” Severyn grabbed at his testicles with a wry smile. “Maybe an old mind overwrites a young body in more ways than the technicians suspect. Maybe mortality is escapable, but old age inevitable.”
“Maybe so,” Finch echoed, sounding slightly uncomfortable. First-lifers often found it unsettling to be reminded they were sitting beside a man who had bought off Death itself. “Feel I’m getting old myself, sometimes.”
“Maybe you’d like to turn in early,” Severyn offered.
Finch shook his head. “Always up for a jaunt, Mr. Grimes. Just so long as the whorehouses are vetted.”
Severyn laughed, and in that moment the limo lurched sideways and jolted to a halt. His face mashed to the cold glass of the window, bare millimeters away from an autocab that darted gracefully around them and back into its traffic algorithm.
Finch straightened him out with one titanic hand.
“What the fuck was that?” Severyn asked calmly, unrumpling his tie.
“Car says there’s something in the exhaust port,” Finch said, retinas replaced by schematic tracery. “Not an explosive. Could just be debris.”
“Do check.”
“Won’t be a minute, Mr. Grimes.”
Finch pulled a pair of wire-veined gloves from a side compartment and opened the door, ushering in a chilly undertow, then disappeared around the rear end of the limousine. Severyn leaned back to wait, flicking alternately through merger details and airbrushed brothel advertisements in the air above his lap.
“Good evening, Mr. Grimes,” the car burbled. “You’ve been hacked.”
Severyn’s nostrils flared. “I don’t pay you for your sense of humor, Finch.”
“I’m not joking, parasite.”
Severyn froze. There was a beat of silence, then he reached for the door handle. It might as well have been stone. He pushed his palm against the sunroof and received a static charge for his trouble.
“Override,” he said. “Severyn Grimes. Open doors.” No response. Severyn felt his heartbeat quicken, felt a prickle of sweat on his palms. He slowly let go of the handle. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Take a look through the back window. Maybe you can figure it out.”
Severyn spun, peering through the dark glass. Finch was hunched over the exhaust port, only a slice of red hair in sight. The limousine was projecting a yellow hazard banner, cleaving traffic, but as Severyn watched an unmarked van careened to a halt behind them.
Masked men spilled out. Severyn thumped his fist into the glass of the window, but it was soundproof; he sent a warning spike to his security, but the car was shielded against adbombs, and theoretically against electronic intrusion, and now it was walling off his cell signal.
All he could do was watch. Finch straightened up, halfway through peeling off one smartglove when the first black-market Taser sparked electric blue. He jerked, convulsed, but still somehow managed to pull the handgun from his jacket. Severyn’s fist clenched. Then the second Taser went off, painting Finch a crackling halo. The handgun dropped.
The masked men bull-rushed Finch as he crumpled, sweeping him up under the arms, and Severyn saw the wide leering smiles under their hoods: Guy Fawkes. The mask had been commandeered by various terror-activist groups over the past half-century, but Severyn knew it was the Priesthood’s clearest calling card. For the first time in a long time, he felt a cold corkscrew in his stomach. He tried to put his finger on the sensation.
“He has a husband.” Severyn’s throat felt tight. “Two children.”
“He still will,” the voice replied. “He’s only a wage-slave. Not a blasphemer.”
Finch was a heavy man and his knees scraped along the tarmac as the Priests hauled him toward the van’s sliding door. His head lolled to his chest, but Severyn saw his blue eyes were slitted open. His body tensed, then—
Finch jerked the first Priest off-balance and came up with the subcutaneous blade flashing out of his forearm, carving the man open from hip to rib cage. Blood foamed and spat and Severyn felt what he’d missed at the puppet show, a burning flare in his chest. Finch twisted away from the other Priest’s arm, eyes roving, glancing off the black glass that divided them, and then a third Taser hit him. He fell with his jaws spasming; a Priest’s heavy boot swung into him as he toppled.
The flare died inside Severyn’s pericardium. The limousine started to move.
“He should not have done that,” the voice grated, as the bleeding Priest and then Finch and then the other Priests disappeared from sight.
Severyn watched through the back window for a moment longer. Faced forward. “I’ll compensate for any medical costs incurred by my employee’s actions,” he said. “I won’t tolerate any sort of retribution to his person.”
“Still talking like you’ve got cards. And don’t pretend like you care. He’s an ant to you. We all are.”
Severyn assessed. The voice was synthesized, distorted, but something in the cadence made him think female speaker. Uncommon, for a Priest. He gambled.
“What is your name, madam?”
“I’m a man, parasite.”
Only a split second of hesitation before the answer, but it was more than enough to confirm his guess. Severyn had staked astronomical shares on such pauses, pauses that couldn’t be passed off as lag in the modern day. Signs of unsettledness. Vulnerability. It made his skin thrum. He imagined himself in a boardroom.
“No need for pretenses,” Severyn said. “I merely hoped to establish a more personable base for negotiation.”
“Fuck you.” A warble of static. Maybe a laugh. “Fuck you. There’s not going to be any negotiation. This isn’t a funding op. We just caught one of the biggest parasites on the planet. The Priesthood’s going to make you an example. Hook you to an autosurgeon and let it vivisect you on live feed. Burn what’s left of you to ash. No negotiations.”
Severyn felt the icy churn in his stomach again. Fear. He realized he’d almost missed it.
Girasol was dreaming many things at once. Even as she spoke to her captive in realtime, she perched in the limousine’s electronic shielding, shooting down message after desperate message he addressed to his security detail, his bank, his associates.
It took her nearly a minute to realize the messages were irrelevant. Grimes was trying to trigger an overuse fail-safe in his implants, generate an error message that could sneak through to Nokia.
Such a clever bastard. Girasol dipped into his implants and shut them down, leaving him half-blind and stranded in realtime. She felt a sympathetic lurch as he froze, gray eyes clearing, clipped neatly away from his data flow. If only it was that easy to reach in and drag him out of that pristine white storage cone.
“There aren’t many female Priests,” Grimes said, as if he hadn’t noticed the severance. “I seem to recall their creed hates the birth control biochip almost as much as they hate neural puppeteering.” He flashed a beatific smile that made Girasol ache. “So much love for one sort of parasite, so much ichor for the other.”