Virtual Light

“I’m going to watch you” he said, with another glance up at the open roof-hatch, “so you just go down nice and slow. And if you jump, or run when you get to the bottom, I’ll kill you.”

And she didn’t doubt he would, if he could, but she was remembering something Oakley had told her that day in the woods, how it was hard to hit something if you had to shoot almost straight down at it, even harder straight up. So maybe the thing to do was just proj when she hit the bottom. she’d only have to clear about six feet from the ladder to be where he couldn’t see her. But she looked at the gun’s black and silver eye and it just didn’t seem like a good idea.

So she went to the hole in the floor and got down on her knees. It wasn’t easy, with her hands tied that way. He had to steady her, grabbing a handful of Ski

But she got to think while she was doing it, and that helped her decide to go ahead and try to do what she had in mind. It was weird to be thinking that way, how quiet she felt, but it wasn’t the first time. She’d felt that way in Beaverton, the night she’d gone over the wire, and that without any more pla

She got to the bottom and backed off a step, holding her bound wrists out where he could see them if he wanted to. He came down fast, no wasted movement, not a sound. His long coat was made of something black, some cloth that didn’t throw back the light, and she saw he was wearing black cowboy boots. She knew he could run just fine in those, if he had to; people didn’t always think so, but you could.

“Where is it?” Gold flashing at the corners of his smile. His hair, brushed straight back, was somewhere between brown and blond. He moved his hand, keeping her aware of the gun. She saw his hand was starting to sweat, spots of wetness darkening there, inside the white rubber glove.

“We gotta take the—” She stopped. The yellow lift was where she and Sammy Sal had left it, so how had he gotten up?

Extra bits of gold. “We took the stairs.”

They’d come up the painter’s ladder, bare steel rungs, some of them rusted through. So she wouldn’t hear the lift. No wonder the Japanese guy had looked scared. “Well” she said, “you coming?”

He followed her over to the lift. She kept her eyes on the deck, so she wouldn’t forget and look up to try and find Sammy, who had to be there, somewhere. He wouldn’t have had time to get down, or else they would have heard him.

He held her shoulder again while she swung her leg over and climbed in, then got in after her, watching her the whole time.

“This one’s down” she said, pointing at one of the levers.

“Do it.”

She moved it a notch, another, and the engine whined beneath their feet, gearing them down the incline. There was a patch of light at the bottom, under a bulb caged in corroded aluminum, and she wondered what he’d do if somebody happened to step into it just then, say Fontaine or one of the other people who came to check the electrical stuff. Anybody. He’d shoot them, she decided. Just pop them and roll them over into the dark. You could see it in his face. It was right there.

He got out first, helped her over. A wind was rising and you could feel the harmonics coming up through your soles, the bridge starting to hum like a muffled harp. She could hear people laughing, somewhere.

“Where?” he said.

She pointed to where her bike stood, cabled to Sammy Sal’s. “The pink and black one.”

He gestured with the gun.

“Back off” her bike said when she was five feet from it.

“What’s that?” The gun in her back.

“This other bike. Clunker with a voice-alarm. Keeps people off mine.” She bent to thumb the tab that released Sammy Sal’s bike, but she didn’t touch the recognition-loop behind the seat of her own.

“I fucking mean it, shithead” her bike said.

“Shut it off” he said.

“Okay.”

She knew she had to do it in one go, flip it sideways and over, just her thumb and forefinger on the nonconductive rubber of the tire.

But it was really just an accident that the frame hit his gun. She saw an inch of lightning arc between her bike and the pistol, hot purple and thick as your finger, the particle-brake capacitors in the up-tube emptying their stored charge into the anti-theft system worked into the fake rust and the carefully frayed silver duct-tape. He went down on his knees, eyes unfocused, a single silver bubble of spit forming and bursting between his half-open lips. She thought she saw steam curl from the gun in his hand.

Proj. she thought, crouching to run, but then the black thing hit him and knocked him flat, flapping down out of the dark above them with a sound like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She made out Sammy Sal then, standing up there on a dark carbon cross-brace, his arm around an upright. She thought she saw his white smile.

“Forgot this” he said, and tossed something down. The glasses in their case. Hands tied, she caught them anyway, like they knew where they wanted to go. She’d never know why he did that.

Because the little pistol made a chewing sound then, blue pops like a dozen backfires run together, and Sammy Sal went over backward off the brace, just gone.

And then she was ru

Yamazaki heard gunfire, where he knelt on the floor, his wrists joined by glistening plastic behind the rough metal brace that supported Ski

There was a smell in the room, high and acrid. He thought it must be the smell of his own fear.

His eyes were level with a chipped white plate, a smear of pulped avocado blackening on its edge.

“Told him what I had” Ski

Yamazaki strained at the plastic bonds. Yelped as he felt them tighten. Like something alive.

“You tug, twist ’em” Ski