Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

She looked up at him through her lashes, chewing on her lower lip, stubborn jaw thrust out. So like her mother he couldn’t look her in the eye, and he couldn’t look away. “I need you to meet somebody. In VR.”

Later, in the darkness of her new and still sparsely furnished apartment, Elspeth curled into the crook of his arm and let her tangled hair fall across his shoulder and neck. She lay against his body relaxed as a kitten, softness and warmth and skin like satin, and he sighed.

“You’re thinking about Jenny.”

“Among other things.”

She traced a circle in his chest hair with one fingertip. Below the open window, cars drifted past. Shouts and laughter rose up like a song from the street, a helicopter’s rotors providing distant rhythm. “She might survive.”

“Yeah.” He turned to her, folding her in his arms. The room was full of the saltwater smell of lovemaking. “Leah wants you to know you’re welcome to come spend the night at our place.”

She laughed low in her throat. “She does, does she? That’s sweet of her.” Her fingertip stroked the hollow of his throat, the same small pattern over and over again. He blinked as he recognized it as the first letter of his name.

He burrowed between the pillow and her ear, lips moving almost soundlessly against her skin. She reached out and flipped the radio on, and he muffled his face with the blankets, rustling the cloth. “I spoke with your friend Richard today.” And felt her body tense against his.

Her hand traced another letter on his skin. O—?

Clever . “He’s befriended my daughter, it seems. And he’s pretty sure Valens is on to him.”

w-h-a-t-w-a-n-t-?

“He wants…” He took a breath. “He’s hopeful that the worm he got into the intranet will manage to clone his personality there. There’s holofiber run and an intranet connection to the monitors on Jenny’s life support. So Valens can keep an eye on her from his desk, sneaky bastard. Assuming she lives, Richard has a plan…”

In darkness, she listened, nodding, and every so often writing words on his skin.

“Gabe,” she murmured when he was done. “I’m not going to get in between you and Jenny.”

He laughed, wondering if she spoke for the benefit of the monitors. Yes, and no. “Jenny does that just fine by herself. Are you going to hold me at arm’s length because of her?”

He felt rather than saw her shake her head. “No,” she said. “I’m going to hold you at arm’s length because that’s where I’m comfortable keeping you. Oh, dammit.”

“Dammit?”

She sat up, fumbled with the light, and stood. It cast strange shadows across her body as the covers slipped away. He admired the play of the light on her skin. “Dammit,” she said, gliding across the hardwood floor to the bathroom. “I forgot to take my meds.” Water ran; she emerged in a moment, carrying a glass.

There was a cold, falling feeling in the bottom of his gut. “Are you sick?”

She shook her head. “No. Hell. Yes. Antidepressants. Serotonin levelers, to be precise. Like half the damned country.”

“Ah,” he said, and lifted the covers so she could slide back under them. “I was a walking pharmacy after my wife died, and after Genie was diagnosed. I couldn’t cope, you know? And I had to cope.”

“Nobody to take care of the girls for you?”

“Nobody to take care of anything. No, that’s not fair. Jenny was there for me. She slept on the sofa for a month.” He closed his eyes. “You know.”

“Yes,” she said, and snapped off the light. “I know.”

12:15 A.M., Sunday 17 September, 2062

One American Place

Hartford, Connecticut

They had outrun the storm on the way back to Hartford, but barely. On the west bank of the Connecticut River, the structure locals called the “Boat Building” rested in the middle of a raised concrete plaza. A small tower of glass, green in daylight as the river below it, the skyscraper had only two sides, bowed and meeting in a point on either end. Now, clouds swirled around the upper stories, strawberry colored in the reflected downtown light. Rising wind blew Razorface’s heavy armored jacket against his shoulders. The storm would be an advantage: hard to snipe in high winds and rain.

Razorface leaned back in the shadow of the building’s eastern tip, smoking a cigarette, as a light rain began to fall.

From here, he could see the automobile and foot bridges across to East Hartford, and the head of the steep stairs that led down the bluff to the riverfront proper. South, beyond the convention center and hotel, white mist from the Hartford Steam Plant curled against the storm-promising sky. He couldn’t see Mitch or Bobbi Yee, which was as it should be.

Razorface dropped his cigarette on wet concrete and crushed it under a booted foot, rubbing his jaw as it hissed and died. Voices — raucous, strident — drifted up to him from the area of State House Square, a few hundred feet off and a flight of stairs down at street level. Checking the hang of his shotgun under his jacket, he stepped back farther into darkness.

He had a good view as five skinny young men mounted the stairs and strode toward him, out of step, their shadows stretching long on the pavement. “Mitch, you got ’em?”

“They look like Hammerheads to me. I don’t know anything else. Oh, wait. I recognize the one in the middle.”

“Rasheed. Good kid.”

“Yeah. I busted him once. He was really polite.”

Razorface choked on a laugh. “Going out to meet them. Bobbi, you got me?”

“As soon as you come out into the light, Razorface. Between Michael and I, we have most of the vantage points covered. Move your boys out over the river, and we should be able to cover you pretty well. I am assuming Casey knows by now she didn’t get us in Bridgeport.”

“I’m assuming she knows about this meet, too,” Mitch put in. “Anything you told your boys, she’s probably heard about.”

“Gotcha.” Razorface squared his shoulders and strode out into the light of the streetlamps, cold against his neck despite the storm-warmth of the air, as if he could feel the pressure of a sniper scope. He knew he wouldn’t hear or feel a thing, if Casey was there, if she did get a clear angle of fire on him before Bobbi or Mitch spotted her.

He went anyway, and knocked fists with Rasheed, Derek, and the other three kids before gesturing them to follow him across the broad expanse of pale cement out toward the footbridge. The boys were silent now, following Razorface’s swinging strides three abreast and then two. He stopped at the midpoint of the bridge and stepped into the half-circle lookout platform over the river. Razorface leaned forward against antique wrought-iron panels picturing a twisted, lightning-blasted tree — the Charter Oak, symbol of the state. Downriver, he could dimly make out the dark maw of the Park River outflow channel through the rain, and beyond it, a glimpse of star-spangled azure light reflecting from the onion dome of the former Colt firearms factory, reinvented a dozen times and more in its long history and now — since the days of the Christian Fascist regime — a national monument.

He’d been there on a school tour, many years before.

Windblown rain stung his eyes as he turned to face his boys. He grinned hard, meeting and holding the gaze of each one. Two of the boys glanced away from the gleam of his teeth. Damn, he thought, my city really is fucked— and reached out to grab one by the throat as the first bullet stung sparks from the railing he had just moved away from.

“Razor!” The cop’s voice, in his ear. Ex-cop.