His hands tried to withdraw, but I grabbed them, held them to me, tighter.
«I can’t take revenge if you won’t tell me,» he snarled.
«Then don’t.»
«We had everything we wanted! They were going to execute you. Even the Cousins were screaming for your blood. The whole world was going to dirty its hands, and you signed yourself away to MΑSON. Someone made you do it, and left this shell of you behind!»
I pressed my lips against his throat, so I could taste his last days’ marauding: street dust, laurel branches, sweat, goats, gunpowder, sunburn, and, underneath, that skin which is almost my own. «Finish it,» I begged. «Kill Tully Mardi. Finish for the old Mycroft who was yours heart and soul. That’s the only revenge I need.»
He snarled—the lightning beauty of that snarl!—and let me nip back at his bare ear, where no tracker ever rests. My perfect, secret Saladin.
«Don’t let them catch you,» I cautioned. «Tully will be expecting me, they won’t be ready for you. I know you can do it.»
I turned fully, to let myself see Saladin now, the most beautiful face in the world: fierce teeth, eyes narrowed so they seemed all black like a lizard’s, with no lashes, no eyebrows to interrupt the smooth contrast of eye and skin. His blond wig had slipped back, baring a scalp with no hair to keep my fingers from enjoying the warmth of blood within. His cheeks had once been as impossibly smooth as rose petals, or as new skin when a callus has just fallen away, but they had weathered fast these last years, and there was wrinkling around his eyes: time. Like me he had just passed thirty, but he looked like an adult.
«You’ve been forgetting your anti-aging meds,» I chided, cupping his dry cheek in my hand. He’d had his gene-splices as an embryo, as we all do, but every long year of his self-neglect made clearer that they only do so much.
«Meds are such a pain to steal.»
«Don’t you dare shorten your days, Saladin, not by one hour, not while I’m still stuck here.»
He stared at me, those wild black eyes.
«I need a favor,» I said.
«Oh?» His teeth traced the edges of the chunk that he had bitten from my right ear in our youth, and I, in return, felt through his threadbare shirt for the old scar above his heart, where I had cut from him my first taste of human flesh.
«You know the child I often visit in the trench at Cielo de Pájaros?»
«I’ve seen ’em. I’ve seen nasty business circling there too. Even the Mob is scared.”
«About what?»
«The Black Sakura theft, and you poking around about who had the old Canner Device. No one I’ve talked to has a clue what’s going on, they just don’t want trouble from someone else’s crime.»
That aligned with what I’d guessed. «The child’s name is Bridger.»
Suspicion turned his narrow eyes to slits. «So?»
«I want you to watch Bridger for me. I want you to … » The words refused to come. «You’re right, there are dark things circling. Another predator.»
«I’ve seen them. Just a glimpse, dark, European-looking Blacklaw, keeping out of sunlight, careful as a lynx.»
«If it comes to it, if I can’t keep Bridger out of their hands, if Dominic is about to … » I had to clutch his arms tighter to steel myself. «I need you to be ready to kill Bridger for me. Please? Not now, just if there’s no other way. You can do it gently.»
«Do it yourself.»
«I can’t.»
«You grip the skull with both hands and twist.»
«I can’t! I love Bridger like family. We’re almost out of time, Saladin, please!»
Saladin could not anymore ignore the frantic beeping of my tracker as it felt my pulse race.
He turned over so could I lie upon him, chest to chest, and we ravished each other as best we could in those precious seconds, lips tasting lips, hands spreading ecstasy through backs and buttocks, our rising sexes all but touching through the clothes we did not have time to open. He was the first to find the strength to break away.
«I’ll think about it.» With that he turned his back, lifted the hood of his Utopian coat, and, between the Griffincloth and shadows, my Saladin was gone.
Thou traitor, Mycroft! All these years thou hast let me think that there was justice in the world, that thine evil had been caught and punished, yet here I find thy fiercer half still free! I would have locked my doors, and bade my children hurry home at night if I had known! Or perhaps, reader, you take the other side: Thou traitor, Mycroft! Thou hast left me in despair this decade, thinking that we had lost our Noble Savage, that the last human beast still free of the chains of conscience and society had been captured and tamed, while all these years there were two of you, and the nobler (and hope with him) still roamed free! Reader, the slave I am now lays open his heart at your command, but the free creature I was back when I roamed with Saladin owes you nothing; I had no right to expose his secret until this history required.
«Be careful,» I called to the air where he had been and might still be. «Don’t let the child touch you.»
A subtle swish of something told me he had heard.
I rose as soon as I was strong enough, and barely had time to smooth my uniform and hide the traces of Saladin’s nails with a smear of dirt before the police cars descended to block the alley before and behind me like barricades. Five armed police came with their commander, all uniformed in Romanova’s blue but with different cuts of jacket, a Mason here, a Brillist there, an Indian or Chinese Mitsubishi, like the many exercises of a tailor trying to pick a final form. Why five? Not because they thought that number could take me if I resisted, but because any fewer would be too scared to approach. Even with so many they seemed unhappy with the task, not nervous faces but those too-grim expressions the police adopt to keep you from sensing anything beneath. Only their chief at the center was relaxed, slouching as he drew from his satchel the special manacles the Utopians designed for me. He tossed them to his men as if pitching a baseball.
“Morning, Papa,” I greeted in common English.
Do not read too much into the nickname; everyone who knows him, from a Romanovan Praetor to the lowest clerk, uses that name for Universal Free Alliance Police Commissioner General Ektor Carlyle Papadelias.
“Morning, Mycroft,” he answered. “What was it this time?”
“Some kids ran by blasting Canner Beat.” It was an old excuse, and often true.
“Will this do, Papa?” one of his backup called, tapping a steel beam which braced one of the buildings.
Papa shook his head. “Car’s more reliable.”
I kept my arms as limp as possible as they shackled my wrists to the squad car’s bumper beam behind me. I know the cops feel better if I make no contact, but I could not keep my fingers from brushing one’s wrist, and she recoiled as at the touch of burning coal. Sometimes I think Papa brings novices on purpose for these visits, as if facing Mycroft Canner were their baptism as true servants of the law.
“All secure, Papa,” they reported.
“Good.”
The Commissioner General’s nod let the rest fall back to the periphery, while he settled in, leaning against the curved nose of a second car opposite me. Age seems to have given Papadelias more energy, not less, as fat and muscle waste away, leaving nothing to weigh down his skeleton but his ever-burning brain. He marked his hundredth birthday two years ago, but thanks to modern medicine he still has hair on his scalp and pink in his skin, and still sprints like a jackrabbit. In my mind his true title will always be Detective Inspector, for it was the rank he truly wanted, fleeing promotion like the plague for almost seventy years, but no pleading could keep Romanova from promoting the man who captured Mycroft Canner.