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“Why the fuck did you do all this?” I whispered. “Why involve me at all, if you didn’t want Bancroft to find his answers?”
“Because you are an Envoy, Kovacs.” Kawahara spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. “Because if anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you. And because I knew you well enough to predict your moves. I arranged to have you brought to me almost as soon as you arrived, but the hotel intervened. And then when chance brought you to the Wei Clinic I endeavoured to bring you here once again.”
“I bluffed my way out of the Wei Clinic.”
“Oh, yes. Your biopirate story. You really think you sold them that second-rate experia rubbish? Be reasonable, Kovacs. You might have backed them up a couple of steps while they thought about it, but the reason, the only reason you got out of the Wei Clinic intact was because I told them to send you that way.” She shrugged. “But then you insisted upon escaping. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.”
“All right.” I noted vaguely that I was trembling. “I’ll do it.”
“Yes. Of course you will.”
I searched for something else to say, but it felt as if I had been clinically drained of the potential for resistance. The cold of the basilica seemed to be creeping into my bones. I mastered the trembling with an effort and turned to go. Trepp moved silently forward to join me. We had gone about a dozen steps when Kawahara called out behind me.
“Oh, Kovacs…”
I turned as if in a dream. She was smiling.
“If you do manage to wrap it up cleanly, and very quickly, I might consider some kind of cash incentive. A bonus, so to speak. Negotiable. Trepp will give you a contact number.”
I turned away again, numb to a degree I hadn’t felt since the smoking ruins of I
“Come on,” she said companionably. “Let’s get out of here.”
I followed her out under the soul-bruising architecture, beneath the sneering smiles of the hooded guardians, and I knew that from among her grey-wombed clones, Kawahara was watching me all the way with a similar smile. It seemed to take forever to leave the hall and when the huge steel portals cracked open to reveal the outside world, the light that spilled inward was an infusion of life that I grabbed at like a drowning man. All at once, the basilica was a vertical, a cold depth of ocean out of which I was reaching for the sun on the rippled surface. As we left the shadows, my body sucked up the warmth on offer as if it were a solid sustenance. Very gradually, the shivering began to leave me.
But as I walked away, beneath the brooding power of the cross, I could still feel the presence of the place like a cold hand on the nape of my neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
That night was a blur. Later, when I tried to get it back, even Envoy recall would only give me fragments.
Trepp wanted a night on the town. The best nightlife in Europe, she maintained, was only minutes away, and she had all the right addresses.
I wanted my thought processes stopped dead in their tracks.
We started in a hotel room on a street I could not pronounce. Some tetrameth analogue fired through the whites of our eyes by needlespray. I sat passively in a chair by the window and let Trepp shoot me up, trying to not think about Sarah and the room in Millsport. Trying not to think at all. Two-tone holographies outside the window cast Trepp’s concentrated features in shades of red and bronze, a demon in the act of sealing the pact. I felt the insidious tilt at the corners of perception as the tetrameth went barrelling along my synapses, and when it was my turn to do Trepp I almost got lost in the geometries of her face. This was very good stuff …
There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked si
“This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,” yelled Trepp above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. “Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it?”
I got drinks, quickly.
The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for mille
“Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction to the people sort of thing,” shouted Trepp. “But I take your point.”
Evidently the words that had been ru
“Thing is,” Trepp was still yelling, “you’ve got ten days.”
Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-coloured light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under’ my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is gri
Street scene:
Tiered balconies on either side, tongues of light and sound splashed out onto pavements from the myriad tiny bars, the street itself knotted with people. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats.
There was something I had forgotten. Something clouded.
Something impor—
“You can’t nicking believe something like that,” Trepp burst out. Or in, into my skull at the moment I had almost crystallised what I—
Was she doing it deliberately? I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d believed so strongly about cats a moment ago.
Dancing, somewhere.
More meth, eye-shot on a street corner, leaning against a wall. Someone walked past, called something out to us. I blinked and tried to look.
“Fuck, hold still will you!”
“What’d she say?”
Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.
“Called us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.”
In a wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.
I had no idea how long I’d been there.
I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.
None of this seemed to matter because …
The mirror didn’t fit its frame—there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.
Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.
The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.