“Panopticon.”
“Yes,” the bad Jane whispered. “They’re watching. They think they’re seeing. They know we can jam their signal, but what they don’t know—Shh! Don’t tell!—is that we can also substitute a false signal. Would you like to know what we’re feeding them now?”
My point of view zoomed out again, until I could see the whole mirror wall. It flickered, and suddenly in the reflection John Doyle was alive again, down on his knees in front of me. I had my NC gun leveled at his chest and was forcing him to keep still as I took swipes at him with a knife.
“Ouch!” the bad Jane said, as my reflection made a particularly nasty cut across Doyle’s scalp. “You know, I don’t know what Love’s orders to you were, Jane, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell you to do this…”
Unable to take the pain anymore, Doyle tried to pull away. Instead of shooting him, my reflection bent forward and slashed his throat. As blood geysered from the wound, I felt real wetness splash me in the chair.
“Oops!” said the bad Jane. “You really want to stand behind the person when you do that…” She clucked her tongue as the vision in the mirror faded. “So what do you suppose Dixon is thinking right now?” As if in answer, the elevator dinged off in the distance. “Uh-oh. This can’t be good…” I heard the suite’s outer door burst open. Footsteps echoed in the hall of mirrors. “All right, Jane, you’re on. Think fast.”
She slapped the back of my neck, and I could feel my arms and legs again. I dove for my gun, but by the time I got turned around in the chair she’d disappeared, and I found myself drawing down on a pair of harlequins. They were armed with horns: rifle-length, brass-belled instruments with rubber squeeze-bulbs.
“Put down the weapon, Jane,” the lead harlequin said. Then he clapped a hand to his head and dropped dead of an aneurysm.
“I didn’t do that!” I shouted at the remaining harlequin. Weirdly enough, he believed me. Instead of blasting me with his horn, he pivoted towards the mirror wall.
Then he was dead, too.
The bad Jane’s gun hand extended from a ring of ripples in the mirror glass. “There are more of them on the way,” I heard her say, as the hand withdrew. “You’d better get out of here.”
I tried to find my comm unit, but she’d taken it. “If you can hear me,” I told the nobleman’s portrait, “I didn’t do this!” The nobleman stared back skeptically.
I left the suite and ran to the elevator. When the doors opened on the lobby a minute later, the corpse of Bozo the bellhop fell into the car. I stepped over the body and saw two more harlequins coming for me. I ran the other way.
A flight of stairs brought me up beside the Grand Canal. A gondola floated by, the tourists inside it all staring. Although I’d tucked my NC gun back in my jacket, my hands and face were still covered with John Doyle’s blood spatter. “It’s just ketchup!” I called to them. Hurrying along, I rounded a bend in the canal and came face-to-face with a mime, who immediately drew a hatchet from his belt.
“Wait!” I said. “I surrender!”
The hatchet clipped a lock of my hair as it flew past my head.
“I surrender, God damn it!”
The air behind the mime shimmered. The bad Jane reached around with her knife, and the front of the mime’s white blouse turned red.
“You see?” the bad Jane said, as the mime crumpled. “Not a drop on me!”
Wink. Gone again.
And I ran on, past more staring tourists, through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, down another hall and some more stairs, coming out finally on an underground loading dock.
A sports car idled at the dock’s edge. “Get in,” the bad Jane said.
I felt the weight of my NC gun pressing against my ribs. My hand twitched.
“Try it and I’ll leave you here,” she said. “You don’t want that.”
Behind me, a door banged open.
“Last chance…”