The enforced passivity is unbearable but the seat won’t let him go. Psychologically better if they at least give you the illusion of control, maybe let you fire one of the car’s ancillary guns. The car shakes as the larboard hull integrity falls.
A sound like a whip cracking right in front of his face and now there are matching holes to his left and right in the darkened windows, each the width of a champagne flute. High-velocity armor-piercing rounds, he thinks, just like before, and if it was his father’s turn then it must be his turn now, and it’s almost a relief that it’s finally happening. Through the holes he sees color and hints of texture—grey of concrete, black of smoke, radiant blue sky—and now he can hear the polyphony of gunfire.
The shooting stops, and the ammunition meters stop counting down. Executive override: Standing down, reads the display. It smells of sulfur, burning rubber, hot concrete.
The crash seat releases him. Crouching on the floor, he tries to decide if he should stay in the town car, though it’s either malfunctioning or compromised and its armor is of demonstrated ineffectiveness, or run for it, though he’d have to fight off unknown and heavily armed attackers with an antique pistol he’s never fired and for which he has exactly six rounds.
The windows turn transparent—there’s a chromatic corona around the bullet holes—and he sees he’s in a wide street in a sort of canyon of favelas. The town car is wedged into a pile of cars, some burning, all wrecked, black smoke pouring up. Shattered bits of chassis smolder on the ground, and the walls are marred with bullet holes and black starbursts of carbonization. Drones swarm in the air—he sees with relief that some have the livery of the Provisional Authority but their guns too are trained on his car. There’s no one around—the favelinos apparently know when to scatter. It’s as squalid as a war zone, the kind of place where death comes easily, and now a woman is stepping through the smoke rising from the wreckage of a motorcycle.
Her face is covered with a cloth, probably against the smoke but it makes her look like a bandit. She seems unfazed as the drones converge on her, and then they arrange themselves into a hemisphere with her at the center, their weapons pointed outward, maintaining formation as she approaches the car.
The town car’s windows descend of their own accord and a drone appears on his right, the side opposite the woman, its guns trained on him at such an angle that the rounds would go through him and into the seats—he remembers how stubborn bloodstains can be, and how particular his father’s valet was about the upholstery—but it doesn’t fire, and he’s aware of the passing of more seconds of life.
The woman leans in through the window and pulls down the cloth that hides her nose and mouth. She’s of his mother’s age, or rather agelessness, and her hair, tied back, reveals a scar on her forehead, and then he realizes that he knows her, that it’s the ragged woman, or her twin, but with none of the evident craziness or erosion of the street.
She’s about to say something but stops short as realization hits and then in a flat, definitive voice she says, “You’re the Brazilian prime minister’s son.”
You said that before, he thinks, as she steps back as though scalded, and then something seems to drain out of her and she suddenly looks old. “Oh,” she says, and holds her face in her hands, and now she’s looking at her hands like they’re someone else’s and peering around as though the morning held a secret.
The drone’s guns are still trained on him, the barrels black tunnels into nothing. The woman seems to have forgotten he’s there, and there’s nothing to do, and nowhere to go, but then he remembers that the town car, for all its sleekness, weighs over seven thousand pounds, and is engineered to run roadblocks—the Mitsui salesmen had said it could easily push a tractor off the road.
The drone in the window rises away, its sudden absence an unexpected grace. He says, “Command escape, all-in, now!” The car’s engine roars as it breasts through the smoldering wrecks and then the acceleration throws him back into the seat.
The car goes up on two wheels as it corners without slowing and Thales looks back in time to see the woman raise her hand toward a drone like a contralto about to sing, and then the drone detonates like a firework.
Her face is washed out in the flash. She looks self-contained, interested, a little sad.
Then she’s gone, but he hears the echoes of more explosions, guesses she’s blowing up the rest.
*
The clinic’s steel gates close soundlessly behind the town car and he kicks open the door and scrambles out onto the courtyard’s sand. The town car’s right side is unscathed but the left looks like a target at a shooting range. Where armor’s been shot up he can see that it’s ceramic, and about half a foot thick, which would be why the interior is so cramped. Bullets are buried in the armor like grubs in a rotten log—he pulls one out between thumb and forefinger—it’s like a crumpled metal mushroom the thickness of his thumb. He watches it scintillate in the light, then flings it off into the garden’s raked sand.
A girl in clinic livery approaches—young and pretty, he notes distantly—and in her posture is both welcome and submission. He gestures at the car and says, “Something happened. There was an attack,” speaking too fast, his fear and urgency demanding a response but she just smiles professionally and he wonders if she heard him because she doesn’t even look at the car, just takes his elbow and ushers him into the cool dark of the clinic. She checks her tablet and says, “We’ve lowered the lights for you, to minimize the potential for”—she frowns—“disturbance,” and he’s going to ask if she happened to have noticed that his car’s been shot to fuck, and call his family, their security, the police, somebody, but he stops, says nothing, somehow certain that his words would disappear like stones dropped in a deep well, and it occurs to him that he’s now inside the clinic and was too distracted to be nervous about bringing in the gun.
The surgeon’s office is as dark as a tomb, the only color the muted red of the worn Persian rug, and from behind his desk the surgeon says, “These are the final tests, on which everything depends, so please do your best today.”
“Actually, today’s going to be different,” Thales says, aware of the weight of the gun over his heart, and it seems like his confidence must be unmistakable but the surgeon just pushes his tablet across the desk and on it there’s video of a man sitting on a stool in a cinder-block room. His arms are folded and he’s staring off to one side, wide-eyed, as though shell-shocked. His sleeveless T-shirt reveals a wiry musculature, and on his shoulders are mottled pink patches of recently regenerated skin. He’s sweating under the harsh overhead light and Thales wonders if this is a deliberate stab at a film noir sensibility.
“Why didn’t you fire?” asks someone off-camera.