Carnival

“Roll up your sleeves,” Miss Pretoria said. He didn’t bother; his wardrobe didn’t mind wet. He plunged arms webbed with distended veins in water as frigid as if it flowed from a cave. The cold first saturated his arms and ached in the depths of the bones, and then the slug of chilled blood struck his heart and spilled up his throat. He gasped and remembered to knock his hat off before sticking his face into the water.

When he straightened, water dripping down his forehead and under the collar of his shirt, he was suddenly clearheaded. He turned and slumped against the wall, tilting his head back to encourage the water to run from his braids down his neck and not into his eyes. He coughed water, blew it from his nostrils, and panted until the last of the dizziness faded. His wardrobe, out of the sun now and given half a chance to work, cooled him efficiently, evaporating sweat and water from his skin, drawing off excess heat.

“Thank you,” he said, when he dared open his eyes and try to focus. It worked surprisingly well. First he saw Shafaqat, and then, over her shoulder, he saw something less encouraging. Five women, sidearms drawn, faces covered by Carnival masks.

“Miss Pretoria?” He surreptitiously dialed his wardrobe up.

She turned, following his gaze, and stiffened with her hand hovering above her weapon.

“There’s only five of them,” Shafaqat said.

“Good odds,” Pretoria said. She sounded as if she meant it. Vincent pushed away from the wall and stepped up to cover her flank. If it were histarget, he’d have another team covering the side street. “Three more.”

“Thank you.” Pretoria’s right hand arched over her weapon, a gunslinger pose, fingers working. She’d unfastened the snap; Vincent hadn’t seen her do it.

Pretoria and Shafaqat shared a glance. Shafaqat nodded. “Run,” Pretoria said. Flat command, assumed obedience.

“I don’t know where I’m ru

“Pretoria household.” Miss Pretoria stepped diagonally, crowding him back.

“Lesa, there’s eight–”

Her grin over her shoulder was no more than a quick flash, but it silenced him. He looked again, saw the way the masked women paused to assess every shift of balance–Pretoria’s even more so than Shafaqat’s.

He recognized that fearful respect. Lesa Pretoria had a reputation. And for whatever reason, they didn’t want to kill her. He acquiesced, though she probably couldn’t see him nod. “How do I get there?”

“Follow the ghosts,” Pretoria snapped, as the first group of adversaries picked closer, fa

“Ask House,” Shafaqat clarified. Slightly more useful. She stood with one shoulder to the street, narrowing her profile, her hand also hovering over her holster. “We’ll delay them. Go left”–through the line of three, rather than the line of five–“Go on. Go.”

Vincent went.

Angelo might looklike the dangerous one, but that didn’t mean that Vincent had no idea how to take care of himself in a fight. He charged, zigzagging, and trusted his wardrobe to soak up any fire he didn’t dodge.

When the fire came, it wasn’t bullets. A tangler hissed at his head, but his timing was good, and his wardrobe caught it at the right angle and shunted it aside. Gelatinous tendrils curled toward him, and sparks scattered where they encountered the wardrobe and were shocked off. Two of the masked women grabbed for him as he sidestepped the tangler, and his wardrobe zapped their hands. He shoved past them as shot from a chemical weapon pattered behind him, spreading the sharp reek of gunpowder, while he twisted against grabbing hands.

Firearms echoed again, and one of the women who was clinging to his arm despite the wardrobe’s defenses jerked and fell away. Vincent shouldered the other one aside and ran.

Leaving a couple of women to do his fighting for him. But they were security, and they had ordered him to clear the area.

If it had been Michelangelo, he would have done the same.

Once he reached the crowded street, he could no longer hear the footsteps behind him. He wove between clusters of merrymakers, half expecting some good Samaritan to trip him as a purse‑snatcher or runaway, but it was Carnival, and other than a few turned heads, bright laughter, and a startled exclamation–no one paid him heed.

He couldn’t run for long. His head started spi

He ducked down a side street strung with more cut flowers, past three men and five women carrying shopping bags, and stepped into the shade. “House,” he said, feeling ridiculous, although he’d waited until there was a gap in the flow of people, “show me how to get to Pretoria household.”

At first there was no reaction. But then a shimmer formed along the wall, neither an arrow nor a trace, but something like a ripple on water. It was a pale sheen of blue luminescence, dim in shadow and brighter in sunlight, and it led him further along the street he had ducked down.

It didn’t take him long to realize that he wasn’t being led by the most direct route. Instead, House brought him down side streets, less populated ways, and through shadowing courtyards. It concerned him, but he didn’t know which other way to go, and so he followed. The shimmer ran along walls, or sometimes immediately underfoot, always a half‑step ahead until it brought him back into sunlight on a quiet byway with only a little pedestrian traffic, not broad enough for a car. There, at the bottom of a set of broad shallow steps leading to a screened veranda, it abandoned him, vanishing into the pavement like oil dispersing on water.

He looked up the steps at the front door, which glided open. Behind it stood a young woman with Lesa’s broad cheeks but a darker complexion and curlier hair. “House said to expect you,” she said. “I’m Katya Pretoria. Come in off the street.”

That’s a bit more than a goddamned giant utility fog,Vincent thought, but he didn’t hesitate to climb the steps.

“Your mother might need help,” he said, pausing to glance over his shoulder, back in the direction from which he’d come.

“Household security’s on the way.”

10

“MISS KUSANAGI‑JONES,” MISS OUAGADOUGOU SAID AFTER he had entirely managed to lose track of the time after, “do you need to check in with your ship?”

He glanced up from sketching schematics on his watch, refocusing on Miss Ouagadougou through shimmering green lines that overlaid the physical gallery. His watch identified her as an individual rather than a part of the landscape, and backgrounded the display plan behind her. It looked odd, sandwiched between her and a Gerуnima Cruz Montoya casein‑on‑paper painting. “Sorry?”

“It’s past teatime. And the station should be overhead in a few ticks. We’ll eat upstairs, and I thought you might–”

“Very kind,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, recollecting himself. “Does this suit?”

“The schematics?” Her hair bobbed on the nape of her neck. “If you finalize them, I’ll upload them to the ministry net, and they’ll keep a crew in tonight to finish the setup. It actually works out better this way.”

“It?” He was already sealing the plans, satisfied with the exhibit. Miss Ouagadougou had a good eye. “Lead on,” he said, before she finished fussing with her headset.

They ascended the lift in companionable silence, Miss Ouagadougou still fiddling and Kusanagi‑Jones pulling up a sat‑phone license on his wardrobe menu. He’d need a relay station; his watch couldn’t power orbital communication.