“Not enough to make you any smarter,” Rory said. She nodded at the humans. “Destroy him.”
They brought out guns. When they primed them, Javier smelled horseradish. Puke rounds. The last time he had smelled any this close was when he’d taken Amy hostage on that prison transport truck. It felt like so long ago. At the time, he told himself he simply wanted to get the hell out of another jail term, and that was why he’d taken such an audacious risk. Now he knew the truth. He had never been rescued, and he had the chance to rescue someone else. Someone who was in the same position he’d been in, once. Someone who was obviously too young to know what she was doing. Someone who had done something bad in the pursuit of doing something good. No one had ever saved him. But he could save someone else.
If he lived through this, he would save her again.
The first round hissed past his head, and he jumped. He jumped randomly, bouncing against a rafter and falling down clumsily to the “street” below. The humans looked entirely different, now. They were no longer tourists, or even actors. They fired without blinking.
“You called the fucking army?” He jumped higher. He had to find a sprinkler. Something that would trigger an alarm. Anything.
“I guess she never changed you,” Rory called. “If she had, you’d be able to fight back.”
Javier jumped down into the food stalls. He overturned the bowls of goldfish. They sloshed down to the ground. He flipped over carts of fruit. The smell of the bullets stung his eyes. A fine yellow mist was rising. He jumped higher, again. If he went down there again, he wouldn’t even be able to see. As he watched, some of the humans reloaded.
He was going to die, here. Slowly. No one was going to save him. No one was coming. Amy was gone. Powell probably had his kids, already. Jack was on the run. Holberton and Alice and Manuel and Tyler and Simone were all far away. He should have stayed with them. They’d all offered him the one thing he’d never had: a home. And he’d gone on this stupid quest instead, and had nothing to show for it, not even the diamond where the love of his life had her soul encrypted. Now all that was left of her was her psychotic grandmother.
Portia.
“PORTIA!” He stared at Ringmaster Rory. “Help!”
For a moment, nothing happened. Below, they all stared at him as though he'd lost his mind. Maybe it wouldn't work. Maybe she wasn't listening. Or maybe he just hadn't said the magic word.
"Please! Portia! I need your help!"
Ringmaster Rory jerked. A look of horror crossed her face. She tried to run into the crossfire. But as Javier watched, she ran straight for the barbecue pit, instead. She paused to beam up at him. "Looks like I'm the answer to your prayers, sweetie. Now cover your eyes."
Then she picked up the charcoal grill, lifted it over her head, and threw it at the humans. Sparks flew. Hot coals spilled free. Two humans were pinned screaming beneath its weight. He smelled burning flesh. His vision started to pixel. The humans were shooting at Portia, now, but she ran straight into the bullets, hands out, mouth open. Belatedly, he realized there were three of Rory in the room. Now all three were Portia. Their skin began to ash away, flaking up in spirals just like the sparks, but they each chose a human and beelined for their new targets.
He covered his eyes. He covered his ears. He heard the cracking, anyway. The ripping. The screaming. And then Portia's terrible laughter. It sounded thick and wet, like her mouth was full of meat.
"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change, darling. You just keep that in mind."
Everything went black.
When they pried him loose from the rafters, he told them that the vN in the room had all gone insane. The spiders – he spoke with three, all in one room – all nodded their huge bodies and spun their claws and downcast their many eyes.
“It’s so unfortunate,” one said. “It’s been happening so randomly to that clade, we thought we’d still be OK using it as security.”
“You might want to look into that,” Javier said. “You know. Revamp that particular policy.”
And after he signed an affidavit promising never to talk about what he’d seen, they let him go.
His new citizenship granted him the privilege of sleeping in a capsule room for a month while he made other living arrangements. It was a seven-by-three-by-four foot space, complete with a futon, a tiny display, a fan, and a little set of shelves no deeper than an old paperback. You entered it by waving your little petty cash card at a door in a blank-looking building and taking the elevator that blinked a green light at you. On the seventh floor, another blinking green light led him to a hatch. He waved his card at it, and it popped open.
“Hello, Javier,” Rory said, when he closed the hatch behind him.
He looked at the hatch just in time to watch a bolt slide across it.
“Hija de puta,” he muttered. “What do you want now, Rory?”