Even the flailing Bulls front office had managed to sign that half-thally power forward from Duke. Finch couldn’t remember his name. Cletus something. Finch had played football, himself. Sometimes he wished he’d kept going with it, but his fiancé had cared more about intact gray matter than money. Of course, he hadn’t been thrilled when Finch chose security as an alternative source of income, but…
In a distant corner of his mind, Finch felt the clamp loosening. He kept breathing steadily, kept his heartbeat slow, kept thinking about anything but the clamp loosening. Cletus Rivas. That was the kid’s name. He’d pulled down twenty-six rebounds in the match-up against Arizona. Finch brought his hand slowly, slowly up toward his shoulder. Just to scratch. Just because he was itchy. Closer. Closer.
His fingers were millimeters from the clamp’s burnished surface when the van’s radio blared to life. His hand jerked; the clamp jolted. Finch tried to curse through his lockjaw and came up with mostly spit. So close.
“Listen up,” came a voice from the speaker.
Finch had no alternative.
“I can turn off the clamp and unlock the van, but I need you to help me in exchange,” the voice said. “I’m in apartment 401, sitting in an orthochair, deep sliced. There are three men in the room. The one you cut up, the one who Tasered you, and one more. They’ve still got the Tasers, and the last one has a handgun in an Adidas bag. I don’t know where your gun is.”
Finch felt the clamp fall away and went limp all over. His muscles ached deep like he’d done four hours in the weight room on methamphetamine—a bad idea, he knew from experience. He reached to massage his shoulder with one trembling hand.
“Grimes told me a non-duress passcode to give you,” the voice continued. “So you’d know to trust me. It’s Atticus.”
Finch had almost forgotten that passcode. He’d wikied to find out why it made Mr. Grimes smirk but lost interest halfway through a text on Roman emperors.
“You have to hurry. They might kill me soon.”
Hurrying did not sound like something Finch could do. He took three tries to push himself upright on gelatin arms. “Is Mr. Grimes safe?” he asked thickly, tongue sore and swollen from him biting it.
“He’s on a leisurely drive to a waiting ferry. He’ll be just fine. If you help me.”
Finch crawled forward, taking a moment to drive one kneecap into the inactive clamp for a satisfying crunch, then hoisted himself between the two front seats and palmed the glove compartment. His Mulcher was waiting inside, still assembled, still loaded. He was dealing with some real fucking amateurs. The handgun molded to his grip, licking his thumb for DNA confirmation like a friendly cat. He was so glad to find it intact he nearly licked it back.
“Please. Hurry.”
“Apartment 401, three targets, one incapacitated, three weapons, one lethal,” Finch recited. He tested his wobbling legs as the van door slid open. Crossing the dusty floor of the parking garage looked like crossing the Gobi Desert.
“One other thing. You’ll have to take the stairs. Elevator’s out.”
Finch was hardly even surprised. He stuck the Mulcher in his waistband and started to hobble.
Half the city away, Severyn wished, for the first time, that he’d had his cars equipped with seatbelts instead of only impact foam. Trying to stay seated while the limousine slewed corners and caromed down alleyways was impossible. He was thrown from one side to the other with every jolting turn. His kidnapper had finally cleared the windows and he saw, in familiar flashes, grimy red Southside brick and corrugated steel. The decades hadn’t changed it much, except now the blue-green blooms of graffiti were animated.
“Pier’s just up ahead. I told my guy there’s been a change of plans.” Girasol’s voice was strained to breaking. Too many places at once, Severyn suspected.
“How long before the ones you’re with know what’s going on?” he asked, bracing himself against the back window to peer at their pursuers. One Priest was driving manually, and wildly. He was hunched over the steering wheel, trying to conflate what he’d learned in virtual racing sims with reality. His partner in the passenger’s seat was hanging out the window with some sort of recoilless rifle, trying to aim.
“A few minutes, max.”
A dull crack spiderwebbed the glass a micrometer from Severyn’s left eyeball. He snapped his head back as a full barrage followed, smashing like a hailstorm into the reinforced window.
By the time they burst from the final alley, aligned for a dead sprint toward the hazard-sign-decorated pier, the limousine’s rear was riddled with bullet holes. Up ahead, Severyn could make out the shape of a hydrofoil sliding out into the oil-slick water. The technician had lost his nerve.
“He’s pulling away,” Severyn snapped, ducking instinctively as another round raked across the back of the car with a sound of crunching metal.
“Told him to. You’re going to have to swim for it.”
Severyn’s stomach churned. “I don’t swim.”
“You don’t swim? You were All-State.”
“Blake was.” Severyn pried off his Armani loafers, peeled off his jacket, as the limousine rattled over the metal crosshatch of the pier. “I never learned.”
“Just trust the muscle memory.” Girasol’s voice was taut and pleading. “He knows what to do. Just let him. Let his body.”
They skidded to a halt at the lip of the pier. Severyn put his hand on the door and found it blinking blue, unlocked at last.
“If you can tell him things.” She sounded ragged now. Exhausted. “Tell him I love him. If you can.”
Severyn considered lying for a moment. A final push to solidify his position. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said instead, and hauled the door open as the Priests screeched to a stop behind him. He vaulted out of the limo, assaulted by unconditioned air, night wind, the smell of brine and oiled machinery.
Severyn sucked his lungs full and ran full-bore, feeling a hurricane of adrenaline that no puppet show or whorehouse could have coaxed from his glands. His bare feet pounded the cold pier, shouts came from behind him, and then he hurled himself into the grimy water. An ancient panic shot through him as ice flooded his ears, his eyes, his nose. He felt his muscles seize. He remembered, in a swath of old memory code, that he’d nearly drowned in Lake Michigan once.
Then nerve pathways that he’d never carved for himself fired, and he found himself cutting up to the surface. His head broke the water; he twisted and saw the gaggle of Priests at the edge of the water, Fawkes masks grinning at him even as they cursed and reloaded the rifle. Severyn grinned back, then pulled away with muscles moving in perfect synch, cupped hands biting the water with every stroke.
The slap of his body on the icy surface, the tug of his breath, the water in his ears—alive, alive, alive. The whine of a bullet never came. Severyn slopped over the side of the hydrofoil a moment later. Spread-eagled on the slick deck, chest working like a bellows, he started to laugh.
“That was some dramatic shit,” came a voice from above him.
Severyn squinted up and saw the technician, a twitchy-looking man with gray whiskers and extra neural ports in his shaved skull. There was a tranq gun in his hand.
“There’s been a change of plans,” Severyn coughed. “Regarding the extraction.”
The technician nodded, leveling the tranq. “Girasol told me you’d say that. Said you’re a world-class bullshit artist. I’d expect no less from Severyn fucking Grimes.”
Severyn’s mouth fished open and shut. Then he started to laugh again, a long gurgling laugh, until the tranq stamped through his wet skin and sent him to sleep.