Jack Yeovil - Krokodil Tears

"'What is it, Gabby?'

Dr Proctor's eyes shone. Jesse's hands rested lightly on her hips. It was her fighting stance.

"'Roy, how about giving us a song?'"

Nobody laughed.

On the outside, Seth's man was a disappointment. He looked like a prosperous accountant. He had to be more than that, of course. The Elder had sent him to do a job that an entire Agency had failed to accomplish.

He turned to look at her. She looked from his ordinary face to Hawk-That-Settles. He was to stay out of it.

"Miss Bonney, how nice to meet you."

He extended his hand. She didn't take it.

"I'm Dr Proctor."

"Your name doesn't matter to me."

"You should know it before you die. I always let them know who I am."

She had a bad feeling about this one. She closed her right eye, and studied his heat pattern. He was literally cool, with none of the orange hotspots she would have expected from a man about to fight for his life.

"I've never heard of you."

That fazed him, offended him. He pursed his lips in a tiny moue. "A shame. It would mean much more."

The sun was rising over the walls. The monks should have been at their devotions hours earlier.

"I am going to give you a species of immortality, Miss Bonney. Who would remember Mary Kelly, Elizabeth Stride or Polly Nicholls had they not been blessed…"

"I don't know who those women are either."

"They were nothings, Miss Bonney. Drab tarts. But they were killed by Jack the Ripper."

"Him, I've heard of."

Dr Proctor pulled a knife out of his jacket, and threw it. She snatched it out of the air, and tossed it aside. He smiled.

"Just testing."

"You know I'm stronger than I look."

"I know a lot about you, Miss Bonney. I probably couldn't break your bones with a sledgehammer, and your flesh is reinforced with durium thread. And you have some other surprises implanted in your body. You're a proud cyborg. Your fathers made you well. Bruno Bonney made your mind, and Simon Threadneedle your body."

"I'm unbreakable, then?"

Dr Proctor cocked his head, as if considering.

"Probably. I'll concede that."

"And yet you've come here to break me?"

A sly grin appeared. "No, to kill you."

"You 're an honest man."

"That's the first time anyone's ever said that to me, but it's a perceptive comment. I am perhaps the only honest man. I do what I want, and I'm not ashamed of it. You were much the same, Jazzbeaux. I've read your records. But you've changed."

"You've said it." She clenched her fist in the air, feeling the metal through her palm.

"Not just like that. Inside," he tapped his head and heart. "You don't do what you want any more. You do what is wanted of you. That's why you have to die. If you'd been content to be just another high-speed sociopath, you might have lived to a ripe old age, but you had to get that old-time religion, you had to save the world…"

"I'm not interested in saving the world."

"That's what you say, Jessamyn, but your actions tell a different story."

"It's me or Seth. That's it."

Dr Proctor laughed. "You can't really be that naive. Universes are grinding together to point you two at each other. You have nothing more to say about it than the sea has about the tidal pull of the moon."

Jesse's head hurt. This was worse than she had expected.

"You know, I was expecting some super Op, Redd Harvest or Woody Rutledge. You're not like that. You're like the soce workers back in Denver. You just want to talk."

"Talk is important, Jesse."

She had an urge to tear his throat out, just as she had torn her father's windpipe away. She fought it. You don't reach the Fifth Spiritual Plane without getting some control.

"In another world, we could have worked together," Dr Proctor said. "I have the brains, and you have the body…" He made his first move. "…we could have slaughtered millions of the sheep."

She wouldn't break, but she could bend.

Dr Proctor got her in a sumo hold, hands clasped in the small of her back, and pushed forwards with his forehead. He didn't need to be especially strong to exert the maximum pressure this way. He felt her spinesheath shifting. It was a good product, a GenTech speciality, but it was just a jacket. There were bones inside, and a slender, vulnerable cord inside them. He found the pressure spots in her lower back, and jammed the heels of his hands into them.

An inch before his face, her teeth clenched. "Pain?" he whispered. "Remember it?" He had her arms straitjacketed to her sides. He lifted her feet off the floor. She was off-balanced. "See, no leverage. You can't kick me." She pulled her head back, and struck his forehead, twice. Blood ran into his eyebrows, but he wasn't hurt. "That won't get you anywhere."

He walked her around the courtyard in a parody dance. She was as light as any other girl. Threadneedle preferred minimum-weight technology.

She squirmed, and eased her knees up inside his bearhug, pushing them into his stomach. He felt the strain in his laced fingers, his elbows and his shoulders.

He knew she would break the hold, and decided to use it to inflict a little preliminary damage. He unlocked his fingers, made fists, and struck thumbs-first into the small of her back, then dropped her.

That should get her unaltered insides jarring, and put a bit of a crimp into her pelvic girdle.

She was up, keeping her hurt to herself, and lashing out. He backed away. For all her strength and devastating power, she wasn't an especially skilled martial artist. Streetfighting was about all she knew, with perhaps a touch of jeet kune do. Brawlers' business.

He stepped through her blows, and tapped her collarbones, hooking his forefingers into the nerve points.

Jesse yelped, and floundered. He gave her an elbow in the side of the head, and repeated the procedure three times within the space of a single breath.

"Tired? I can keep this up all day."

She still hadn't really touched him.

"You'll have had Threadneedle undermesh your stomach muscles, so we won't bother hitting you there," he said.

He saw his opportunity, and jabbed a knuckle-pointed punch at her solar plexus. It would be armoured, of course, but he didn't want to break it, just to send a shock through her whole skeleton.

"You see, all that metal inside you can rattle around. It can hurt you as badly as I can."

He pressed her ribs, his hands moving faster than perception.

"A few more of those, and all your boneshields will be loose. That'll be like having breadknives floating around the inside of your chest. You won't care for it. I can promise you that."

She stepped back, away from him. She had worked up a sweat. The sun was up there now. It looked like the thirty-nine thousand six hundred and fifteenth sunny day in a row in Arizona.

"Are you enjoying this little game of 'Sally Go Round the Roses'? I am."

"Freak you."

"Tut tut. Such language. You should gain a command of more elaborate invective."

She made a reach for his throat, which he dodged. Her fingers closed just under his jaw, nails scraping his adam's apple.

"Nice try. Your favourite move, isn't it? Your father's autopsy reports show an especially fine specimen of the throat-grab. And you did something similar to that Daughter of the American Revolution in Moroni."

He pulled out a derringer, and shot at her heart. Her jacket exploded, and he saw blackened flesh below.

"You might be wondering why I did that?"

She was snarling now, not looking like a girl at all.

"I knew it wouldn't kill you…"

She tightened her padded pyjamas, modestly shifting the hole from blueing ribs to smooth skin.