Chris Moriarty - Spin State

She dropped to the ground beside the nearest tank and began hurriedly booting up the onboard comp and connecting the feedlines.

She couldn’t get the air gauge on the tank to light up, no matter what she did. And she didn’t have time to fiddle. She put the mask to her mouth, sucked at it experimentally. No. It wasn’t just the gauge. She wasn’t getting anything.

“What’s wrong?” McCuen asked. There was a nervous edge to his voice that hadn’t been there even when he’d watched his last tank running down before they reached the drop-off point.

“I don’t know,” Li said.

Then the gauge finally flickered into life. The arrow dropped into the red, quivered and stayed there. She fumbled for the fill valve, and when she touched it, it spun loosely at the touch of her fingers. No pressure.

And suddenly she did know what was wrong. Someone had opened the valve and emptied the tank. All the tanks.

They had no air.

“Mirce!” she shouted, already up and running down the twisting drift.

She found her twelve meters past the next bend, her hand still on the rope, the final canister of compressed air lying on the ground beside her. Li looked into the still-clear, still-blue eyes, looked at the head turned a little sideways, baring the strong, clean line of her jaw under the stretched skin. She thought, for no reason she wanted to remember, of magpies’ wings.

The cut ran diagonally across Mirce’s throat, from the collar of her coverall to the soft flesh below her ear. She had bled out fast. In seconds, probably. No sign of a fight; the spreading pool around her could have been water or rehab fluid, except for the rich copper-and-rust smell of it.

“Why?” Bella whispered. “Why?”

“To stop us,” Li said, wondering how that calm professional’s voice could be speaking out of the whirlwind inside her.

“What do we do?” McCuen asked.

“We find whoever killed her and take their air.”

When it finally happened, she was so ready for it that she knew some deep part of herself must have been expecting it. Reading the accumulation of clues, each one insignificant in itself, that told her they were being followed. Listening for the echo that wasn’t an echo. Waiting for the muffled step behind them.

What she wasn’t prepared for—hadn’t even suspected—was the flash of quickly suppressed recognition in McCuen’s eyes.

She’d made a fool’s mistake, she told herself as the hot flush of adrenaline flooded through her. McCuen had betrayed her. Somehow, by some hook she’d probably never know about, Haas had turned him. The proof was right there in front of her, in those wide-open little-boy-blue eyes.

She called a break, drifted to a stop against an outcropping in the passage wall, stretched, and sat down a few feet from him with her back safely against solid stone.

“How could they have known where to find her?” McCuen asked. He talked fast, seizing on the first thought that came to mind, trying to gloss over the footsteps that he too had heard, that he too had been waiting for. “I mean, we were fine before that. She makes the meet, and we all get out.”

“Except Cohen.”

She could see in McCuen’s face that he still didn’t know who she was talking about. He had never met Cohen, she realized, probably never thought of him as more than a piece of equipment. “Well, yeah,” McCuen said. “But… you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” she said. “I know.”

She strained her ears, listening to the darkness beyond the lamplight. Everyone has a weakness, she told herself. And their weakness would be their wire.

A flickering double vision swept over her as she tried to hold streamspace and realspace in her mind simultaneously. It was stomach-wrenching, but she couldn’t afford to drop all the way out of realtime. Not with McCuen three feet away from her and an unknown pursuer waiting at the edge of the lamplight.

She stepped into the memory palace.

The door was broken. The fountain had run dry. A storm howled over the turrets, setting roof tiles rattling and shutters flapping. Whole wings of the palace were open to wind and sky. Locked doors confronted her at every turn, and even when she got past them, she found only rain-strafed ruins behind them.

She couldn’t find the communications programs, couldn’t even figure out which networks they were on. She thought about dropping into the numbers to look, but the memory of the disaster Cohen had averted last time stopped her.

Then she heard something.

Footsteps. Echoing around the next turn in the hall, up the next flight of stairs, across the floor over her head. Footsteps and a mocking quicksilver laugh flickering across the dead link like heat lightning.

She tracked the sound through cold dark halls, across vast, rubble-choked courtyards. She’d almost given up when she stumbled through a half-open door and saw the arches of the cloister, the wind-whipped, moonlit tangle of wild roses.

She stepped out from under the arcade, one hand up to shield her face from the wind. Someone was sitting on the bench under the roses. She saw the tarnished copper of rain-soaked curls. She saw Roland’s golden eyes glinting out of the shadows.

She ran.

Both of them were cold and slick with rain, and a dead leaf had blown against his face like a little black moth so that she had to brush it off before she could kiss him. “You came,” she whispered.

And then she was kissing him, searching for him with lips, hands, heart, her mind stripped of everything but her need for him.

He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her away from him. She looked into the golden eyes and saw… nothing.

“No,” she whispered. “ No .”

“He couldn’t come. I’m supposed to tell you he’s sorry.”

The rain stopped. The darkness around them deepened. She glimpsed tall windows flung open to the lowering clouds, and realized that they stood on the threshold of the hall of doors.

Roland pointed to a door like all the others. “There,” he said.

Then he was gone.

She pushed it open and stepped into a darkness blacker and more storm-charged than the sky outside.

“Who is it?” a voice said.

It was not a friendly voice. Not a friendly question.

“Me,” she said. “Catherine. Don’t you know me?”

“Oh, yes. We know you.”

The lights came on. She was alone in an empty room.

“Why did you come here?” the voice asked. It was the walls, or whatever was behind the walls, speaking to her.

“I need to access the AMC station net.”

Silence.

“I need to.”

“And why should we help you?”

We?

“Because—”

Another voice spoke. Words she couldn’t make out. Whispers. Suddenly the room was boiling with whispers. She stepped back, feeling for the door behind her. “But Cohen said—”

“Yes.” A new voice now, even colder than the first. “Tell us about Cohen. Tell us what Cohen said to you.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she breathed.

“Wasn’t it?”

She felt for the doorknob again, her hand trembling. She touched something, gripped it. But instead of metal, she felt skin.

Someone shoved her forward into the center of the room, and she fell on her knees, hands pressed over her ears to shut out the hateful, hissing accusations.

“It’s not my fault!” she screamed, over and over again. But she couldn’t block the voices out. It was her fault, they kept saying. It was all her fault. All of it.

“Are you all right?” McCuen asked.

She looked at him, chest heaving. She glanced at Bella, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Glitch on my commsystem.”