COUNT ZERO

27 STATIONS OF THE BREATH

HE BROUGHT THEM in through avenues lined with rusting slopes of dead vehicles, with wrecker’s cranes and the black towers of smelters. He kept to the back streets as they eased into the western flank of the Sprawl, and eventually gu

“What happened back there?” she said, her cheekbones green in the glow of the instruments.

“I shot down a helicopter. Mostly by accident. We were lucky.”

“No, I mean after that. I was... I had a dream.”

“What did you dream?”

“The big things, moving...”

“You had some kind of seizure.”

“Am I sick? Do you think I’m sick? Why did the company want to kill me?”

“I don’t think you’re sick.”

She undid her harness and scrambled back over the seat, to crouch where they had slept. “It was a bad dream...” She began to tremble. He climbed out of his harness and went to her, held her head against him, stroking her hair, smoothing it back against the delicate skull, stroking it back behind her ears. Her face in the green glow like something hauled from dreams and abandoned, the skin smooth and thin across the bones. The black sweatshirt half unzipped, he traced the fragile line of her collarbone with a fingertip. Her skin was cool, moist with a film of sweat. She clung to him.

He closed his eyes and saw his body in a sun-striped bed, beneath a slow fan with blades of brown hardwood His body pumping, jerking like an amputated limb, Allison’s head thrown back, mouth open, lips taut across her teeth.

Angie pressed her face into the hollow of his neck.

She groaned, stiffened, rocked back “Hired man,” the voice said. And he was back against the driver’s seat, the Smith & Wesson’s barrel reflecting a single line of green instrument glow, the luminous head on its front sight eclipsing her left pupil.

“No,” the voice said.

He lowered the gun, “You’re back.”

“No. Legba spoke to you. I am Samedi.”

“Saturday?”

“Baron Saturday, hired man. You met me once on a hillside. The blood lay on you like dew. I drank of your full heart that day.” Her body jerked violently. “You know this town well...”

“Yes.” He watched as muscles tensed and relaxed in her face, molding her features into a new mask.

“Very well. Leave the vehicle here, as you intended. But follow the stations north. To New York. Tonight. I will guide you with Legba’s horse then, and you will kill for me “Kill who?”

“The one you most wish to kill, hired man.”

Angie moaned, shuddered, and began to sob.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re half way home.” It was a meaningless thing to say, he thought, helping her out of the seat; neither of them had homes at all. He found the case of cartridges in the parka and replaced the one he’d used on the Honda He found a paint-spattered razor-knife, in the dash tool kit and sliced the ripstop lining out of the parka, a million microtubes of poly insulation whirling up as he cut. When he’d stripped it out, he put the Smith & Wesson in the holster and put the parka on. It hung around him in folds, like an oversized raincoat, and didn’t show the bulge of the big gun at all.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, ru

“Because it’s hot out there and I need to cover the gun.”

He stuffed the ziploc full of used New Yen into a pocket. “Come on,” he said, “we got subways to catch

Condensation dripped steadily from the old Georgetown dome, built forty years after the ailing Federals decamped for the lower reaches of McLean. Washington was a Southern city, always had been, and you felt the tone of the Sprawl shift here if you rode the trains down the stations from Boston. The trees in the District were lush and green, and their leaves shaled the arc lights as Turner and Angela Mitchell made their way along the broken sidewalks to Dupont Circle and the station. There were drums in the circle, and someone had lit a trash fire in the giant’s marble goblet at the center. Silent figures sat beside spread blankets as they passed, the blankets arrayed with surreal assortments of merchandise: the damp-swollen cardboard covers of black plastic audio disks beside battered prosthetic limbs trailing crude nerve-jacks, a dusty glass fishbowl filled with oblong steel dog tags, rubber-banded stacks of faded postcards, cheap Indo trodes still sealed in Wholesaler’s plastic, mismatched ceramic salt-and-pepper sets, a golf club with a peeling leather grip, Swiss army knives with missing blades, a dented tin wastebasket lithographed with the face of a president whose name Turner could almost remember (Carter? Grosvenor?), fuzzy holograms of the Monument...

In the shadows near the station’s entrance, Turner haggled quietly with a Chinese boy in white Jeans, exchanging the smallest of Rudy’s bills for nine alloy tokens stamped with the ornate BAMA Transit logo.

Two of the tokens admitted them to the station. Three of them went into vending machines for bad coffee and stale pastries. The remaining four carried them north, the train rushing silently along on its magnetic cushion. He sat back with his arms around her, and pretended to close his eyes; he watched their reflections in the opposite window. A tall man, gaunt now and unshaven, hunched back in defeat with a hollow-eyed girl curled beside him. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the alley where he’d abandoned the hover.

For the second time in an hour he considered phoning his agent. If you had to trust someone, the rule ran, then trust your agent. But Conroy had said he’d hired Oakey and the others through Turner’s agent, and the co

He closed his eyes, shut out the reflections. Something stirred, deep in the silt of Mitchell’s recorded memories. Shame. He couldn’t quite reach it... He opened his eyes suddenly. What had she said, at Rudy’s? That her father had put the thing into her head because she wasn’t smart enough? Careful not to disturb her, he worked his arm from behind her neck and slid two fingers into the waist pocket of his pants, came up with Conroy’s little black nylon envelope on its neck cord. He undid the Velcro and shook the swollen, asymmetrical gray biosoft out onto his open palm. Machine dreams. Roller coaster. Too fast, too alien to grasp. But if you wanted something, something specific, you should be able to pull it out...

He dug his thumbnail under the socket’s dustcover, pried it out, and put it down on the plastic seat beside him. The train was nearly empty, and none of the other passengers seemed to be paying any attention to him. He took a deep breath, set his teeth, and inserted the biosoft...

Twenty seconds later, he had it, the thing he’d gone for. The strangeness hadn’t touched him, this time, and he decided that that was because he’d gone after this one specific thing, this fact, exactly the sort of data you’d expect to find in the dossier of a top research man: his daughter’s IQ, as reflected by a