“Is she all right?” And if she’s not, he thinks, I’ll kill you, somehow, however improbably.
“No,” says Hiro, and smooths her hair with abstracted tenderness. “She might not wake up again, and even if she does her time is almost up. She knew it was a possibility when she signed on. If it makes you feel any better, the damage was done when she got her operation—I’m not hurting her.”
Hiro’s laptop chimes. “Well,” he says, shutting it, “let’s have a look at you.” He turns on the light and in the sudden illumination Kern sees Akemi’s eyes moving under their lids, as though she’s searching desperately for something in a dream, and her face and the sheet are streaked and clotted with blood, and there’s a cable connecting Hiro’s laptop to her socket. Hiro is wearing a conservative dark suit and he has an arrogance, but no, in fact it’s just the total absence of fear, which interests Kern, professionally, for he’s fought men fueled by rage or hate or ambition but always underneath there was a terror, which Hiro lacks, somehow, as though life and death are one to him.
Hiro looks him in the face and then at the dried bloodstains on the knees of his pants, where his guilt is plainly writ, though no one, so far, has been able to read it, but he can see Hiro’s wonder, disbelief, dawning amusement, and now Hiro’s hand is drifting toward his gun, and with that Kern is on the balcony without ever having decided to move.
With the lights on Hiro will only see his own reflection, Kern thinks, standing on the balcony’s wall, the other balconies staggered below him like a giant’s staircase. When the light goes off he’s already jumped.
He falls through floating particles of snow. Jarring impact as he lands on the wall of the next balcony down and his ankles waver but his fingertips find traction on the snow-crusted stucco and momentum carries him into the next jump. Aloft, his heart rises.
*
He stands on the cold sand, leaning on his knees, not letting himself sit down. Black ocean roars and sighs unseen before him. He gets his breath back slowly, his descent still filling his mind. He looks back at the hotel, its lights, its improbable height; Hiro is up there, probably on the balcony, peering out into the dark with gun in hand. He could double back, try to catch Hiro off guard—he’s pretty sure he’d wreck him in a stand-up fight—but they probably wouldn’t let him back in the hotel, much less let him skulk around the lobby. Maybe sometime he can go back for her but for now it would just mean dying uselessly. It’s cold on the beach but he doesn’t feel it, in fact feels like lying down, resting awhile and watching the sky, but it’s plainly time to act, not least because Hiro might take the elevator and come looking. He tests his ankle—tender, but he can walk on it. He tries to think where to go. Airports are safe, Akemi had said, and then he remembers he has a ticket for Thailand.
*
If he closes his eyes, the airport’s hubbub sounds like running water. Guards with automatic weapons patrol the concourse, scanning the crowd, which, bizarrely, allows him to relax—this must be what it’s like being middle class.
His flight should have him in Bangkok before noon. He wants to do nothing, meanwhile, but compels himself to take out his laptop and plan the next step.
He finds a muay thai camp on the most isolated stretch of Thailand’s southern coast. It looks like there’s nothing out there—the towns were mostly washed away, he reads, in the tsunamis of decades past. The camp’s website has pictures of Thai coaches who look like pocket-sized Bruce Lees, and of ocean the color of the sky, coconuts floating in the surf, smiling Thai girls on scooters. There are thousands of other camps, but the options are overwhelming, and it’s easier to ignore them. It occurs to him to send the camp an email, but Lares was always going on about how email isn’t secure, so it’s probably better to just show up.
He told himself he wasn’t going to, but the ethernet cable is still in his bag, so he cables the phone to a port in the wall, because maybe Akemi’s okay, and maybe she’s escaped, but there’s still no one there.
37
Cloudbreaker
From her chaise longue on the villa’s rooftops in the sun Irina sees other islands in the distance and swallows arcing through the air and it’s silent but for the wind sighing through the worn crenelations. There’s a serenity, and a timelessness, as though she’d found an hour from the morning of the world, and now she lets it go.
There’s a fast router up in the tower whose shadow is just touching her legs; she closes her eyes, connects to the router and then the servers Iliou rented her to add to her strength and then she reaches for a website that has a number but no name. The site shuts down as she touches it but in the last millisecond of its existence it yields another number for another website and so on in a chain that turns to ash before her eyes until she comes to a site that serves her a long contract in dense legalese that requires her in essence to respect the laws of every state with any history of pursuing computer crime beyond its borders, and she remembers Philip saying that the very pomposity of the language was meant as a distraction from the fact that the contract was unenforceable, really just a pro forma stab at ass-covering, but in any case she duly agrees and it gives her a link to the Cloudbreaker AI.
Darkness, as she opens the connection, and emptiness like a flat black sea, and there, the barest possible suggestions of shape, like islands over dark water, rushing closer, revealed as dense massifs of seething glyphs whose heights fill her eyes as the fugue hits.
But somehow she’d forgotten that there’s work to do, a digital lock she needs urgently to open. The lock is intricate, and at first glance impenetrable, but she sets her will against it and its layers start to peel away, for all the world like a flower opening, and she finds it comes naturally, as though she knew the lock well, which gives her pause, and then she realizes she’s dismantling her own implant’s security, at which Cloudbreaker, which has been intent on her, gives up and sinks back down into its roiling hallucinations.