David Gunn - Death's head

“Shut it,” I tell Aptitude.

She’s fighting so hard to roll herself away from me that I give up being nice and put a gun to her head.

“I’m trying to save you.”

Aptitude spits.

“Strip,” I tell her.

She knows a lot of bad words for someone so well brought up.

“Change into this.” I toss her the body armor, then the clothes that the dead woman was wearing. Seeing them is enough to make Aptitude’s face crumple. We’re seconds away from a full-blown meltdown, and those are spare seconds that we don’t have.

“Change,” I tell her.

She looks at the dead woman, then the clothes in her own hands. My guns are taking half of Aptitude’s attention, but there are too many questions and no obvious answers. Outside in the street there are sirens and a chopper is hovering overhead and that’s not good, either. We need a clean getaway, no lenz and definitely no witnesses.

“Aptitude,” I say.

She looks at me, wondering why I’m using her name.

“Your mother sent me…”

It’s not true, but it’s not quite a lie.

“Believe it or not,” I tell her, “I’m trying to save your life.”

Her eyes flick to the dead woman and I can tell the kid wants to say she doesn’t believe me for a minute. But why is she alive if I want her dead? And why would I drag her mother into it anyway?

“Listen,” I say.

She waits.

“I met your ma in Paradise, Anton, too…”

“You know Dad?”

“Tall man, used to be a soldier. Loves your mother, even if they’re divorced and she drives him a bit nuts.”

Aptitude’s crying. “They’re still alive?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Both still alive. We need to get you out of here.”

“But you killed Sophie.”

My gaze flicks to the dead woman. “Your bodyguard?”

The kid nods. “Sophie.”

“Sophie tried to kill me. She died doing her job.” Maybe that means more to me than it means to Aptitude, because she doesn’t seem to regard it as much consolation.

“Change your clothes,” I tell Aptitude. “Please. Do it now.”

“Turn your back,” she orders.

“Already turned.”

At the bottom of the stairs flames are already beginning to eat the portrait of Senator Thomassi. That’s good in one way and bad in another. Fire locks us off from the hall and keeps us safe for the moment, but it also means we can’t go back that way.

“You done?” I ask, glancing around to catch a flash of naked shoulder. Body armor rustles as it fits itself to its new owner and begins to adopt her skin coloring.

“Hey,” says Aptitude. “You’re not allowed to look.”

“I’m not.”

The kid glares at me.

“You done here?” I ask her.

She nods, struggling into a combat jacket that doesn’t quite fit. The trousers are better.

“And the boots.”

Aptitude does what she’s told.

It takes longer than I’d like to get Sophie into Aptitude’s wedding dress. Although first I have to get her into that silk chemise.

“Not my choice of clothing,” says Aptitude.

“The senator?”

She nods, face carefully impassive. This is a girl who’s gotten used to hiding her emotions.

“Turn your back,” I tell her.

My shot takes the dead bodyguard through her head, blowing away half her skull and smearing sticky jelly across suddenly shattered tiles. As Aptitude tries to look back, I turn her roughly away and strip gold bracelets from Aptitude’s wrists and a ring from her finger. It’s a struggle to make the wedding ring fit the dead woman’s hand, but the bracelets go on easily enough.

The fire is climbing the stairs now, helped by wall hangings, polished wooden banisters, and the sheer force of the flames.

“What’s up there?” I ask Aptitude.

“Bedrooms.”

“And beyond that?”

“Servants’ quarters…the attics. Some storerooms.”

We take the stairs in silence. All the while Aptitude’s glance flicks between my face and the flames behind her. She’s having a hard time working out where the danger really lies. When she looks at me again, I realize it’s because I’m swearing.

“What?” she demands.

“Just thinking.”

Mostly about how the fuck I’m meant to be getting the kid out of here. What have I got? A talking gun, a collection of dumb weapons, some weirdshit slug in my throat, and voices clamoring for answers at the edge of my mind.

Realization halts me midstep.

Where are the maps?

As the thought slides into my mind so do floor plans for Villa Thomassi. A blink and I’m looking at the map of an area west of Zabo Square; another blink and Farlight is spread out beneath me, flicking between an aerial photograph and what looks like a transparent overlay. The kyp is feeding me information faster than I can swallow it. Returning the map to close detail, I try to make sense of the house plans.

“What’s down there?” I demand, pointing to a corridor. On the plans a chute can be seen. It seems to lead to a basement. The big advantage of that is it will take us through the rising flames into the coolness below.

“An old laundry.”

“We go that way.”

Aptitude looks like she’s about to protest, which is good, because it means she’s already thinking of us as a team. Short-term maybe, but Aptitude’s no longer looking to escape from me at the first opportunity. “How old are you?”

“Why?”

“Just wondered.”

For a second it looks as if she’s going to refuse to tell me. Not that it matters really, I’m just interested.

“Fifteen.”

I’d killed half a dozen men by then, gotten drunk, gotten laid, caught whore fever, and been whipped for the stupidity. But that was then and this is now and we’re very different people, not just because she’s a girl but also because our worlds are not worlds that are meant to collide.

“Sven,” I tell her.

She looks at my outstretched hand, then good manners click in. “I’m Lady Aptitude Tezuka Wildeside,” she says, shaking my bloodstained fingers.

See what I mean?

Dawn finds us limping through the landing fields at Bosworth. A plume of black smoke rises into the sky behind us, newly visible now that the sun has begun to rise. No one seems in a hurry to put out the fire, although two copters hover overhead and fat cargo ships keep straying from their courses to take in the sight.

Aptitude’s still furious because I threw her down the chute when she refused to jump, and her head still aches from where I put a slug along the side of her skull. It’s been a long walk and her feet hurt, along with everything else. My shoulder’s not good, but the pain is getting better. Sometimes I forget that other people don’t automatically mend.

I’m looking for a small boy and a newly morphed spider bot. When I find him, he’s sitting near the wing of a rusting drone while his spider chews the wing into something that looks like iron filings. These fall into a plastic bucket that the boy moves occasionally as his bot shifts position.

“How you doing?”

“Okay.” He looks up, tries to work out if he knows me, then flicks his eyes to the bot and I know he has it. “Who’s she?”

“A friend,” I say. “Got hurt in a fall.”

The kid cocks his head sideways, considering Aptitude’s bloodied skull. “Looks like a bullet to me.”

I laugh, and Aptitude glances between us.

“Your dad around?”

“Out the back,” the boy says. “I’d show you, but I’m not supposed to leave here.”

Per Olson is standing next to a broken Casmir coil, and every now and then he sucks his teeth and walks around the wreckage of a cargo cruiser’s heart. It’s a mass of precious metals and crystals. All he has to do is extract what’s valuable without consigning himself and a five-hundred-yard circle around him to oblivion.