Having no choice, Irina sidles past her, achingly aware of the empty air at her back. The other doesn’t even look up.
After a few steps Irina stops, turns back, says, “No. I’m not just going to leave. You’re part of me. Talk to me. If you need my help, I’ll give it, even if you just need to die. I’m in a hurry but by god I’ll find a way.”
“Heh,” the other says, her voice more human now. “You have a kind spirit. But no, just get out of here—the other part of me is fickle, and might change its mind. Besides, it really isn’t so bad. I’m starting to like it, how it’s wearing me like a skin. There used to be such a void in my life.” She laughs again, a hard sound to hear. As Irina turns away for the last time the other mutters, “O lord, make me unmurderous, but not yet.”
*
Stars speckling the palest of blue skies. She’s floundering her way up a snowy slope. In all her time here the sun has yet to move.
There’s an ocean of cloud below her, masses of white and shadow comprising forms she’s learned to name.
Very cold now. Her legs and lungs burn—she tells herself not to mind it, but worries it’s symbolic of more real distress.
The knee-high powder is exhausting. She wipes blood from her nose with the back of her hand and stands there contemplating the pathless slope. It looks too steep to climb, but it’s hard to be sure with the light making everything look uncanny and flat.
Someone is watching her. It’s a skier, above her, wearing goggles and high alpine technical gear, his tracks receding up the mountain behind him.
“Excuse me,” she calls, her voice thick, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. “Can you help me? I’m not sure where I am.”
The skier cocks his head, skis closer, stops. “I know you,” he says. He pulls off his goggles, and it’s Constantin, who was lost forever.
She embraces him.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“Off-trailing,” he says. “It’s been a hell of a run. It feels like it’s never-ending.”
“I’m lost,” she says into the wool of his scarf.
“You’re trying for the summit? It’s that way,” he says, pointing. “Is that what you need?”
She doesn’t want to let go of him but her nosebleed is getting worse—his scarf is clotted and sticky—and she knows she has to hurry.
Hiking on, she looks back, sees him leaning on his poles, watching her go.
In her ear Thales says, “There you are! I lost you for a minute.”
“Where have you been?”
“Tying up loose ends, but I’m back, and it looks like you did it.”
“I did it?”
A shadow stands before her in the whirling snow. Not Constantin. It looks like no one.
“This is it,” Thales says. “I’m overclocking your implant as far as it’ll go. It’s not sustainable but it puts you on something like equal terms, so go tear it up.”
There’s a change at the core of things, and suddenly she’s wide awake, perfectly poised and everything seems easy. If thought is light, she’s a sun now.
“Who are you?” she demands of the shadow, all force and purity.
“I’m a mathematician,” it says, and steps toward her.
66
Change of Plan
“By the way,” Thales says, “I managed to turn on the heaters in the tunnel.”
He waits a beat, then another, but Irina doesn’t respond.
The flow of information between Irina and the central node has spiked, become torrential.
Her other memory had been legible, but now, looking into it, he only sees turbulence—she seems to be undergoing some catastrophic change of phase. It’s the fifth time this has happened—she’s always come back before, he tells himself, so he need not worry.
While she’s away, it falls to him to tend her body; her blood oxygen has dipped, so he deepens her breathing, then nudges up her heart rate, levels off her dopamine. He feels like the caretaker of a recently vacated house. It’s a deeper intimacy than he’d ever expected to have with a living human being.
Motion on the node draws his attention—there’s another thread of communication, distinct from Irina’s, going out into the world. Is it the mathematician? He tries to find the thread’s point of origin—it’s from the vicinity of the apex of the tower, but beyond that he can’t tell. He follows the thread out into the net and then to Water and Power’s servers, where it weaves elegantly around their firewalls and into W&P’s in-house lab, where it’s disconnecting before his eyes from a viral synthesizer. He rides the thread in as it dissolves, sees that the synthesizer’s last job ran ten minutes ago.
He zooms out, looks into W&P’s security system, sees that Cromwell’s troops have left, which means Irina’s ruse worked. He gets access to W&P’s cameras, sees a trail of sprawled bodies and then links to the helmet cam of Irina’s hired soldier as he walks into Cromwell’s office.
Fast pan over bookshelves, fossils, the grey glass of the far wall’s windows. Cromwell is at his desk with a laptop, Magda peering over his shoulder. There’s a laboratory beaker on his desk, empty except for a few drops of water. They look up at the same moment—Magda’s surprise turns instantly to fury but Cromwell seems to sink into his own calm.
“James Cromwell, your hour has come,” the soldier says as his rifle acquires Cromwell as a target.
“Real wealth,” says Cromwell, folding his hands on the table before him. “That’s what I’m offering if you sign on with me right now. If you got this far you’re an expert, and expensive, but compared to what I’m going to give you all the money you’ve ever seen in your life amounts to loose change. Why do I want you? Because I’m to rule, you see, if I survive today, and I need the best warriors. But how can you be sure I won’t have you killed the moment you let your guard down? Because, as you may or may not know, I plan to live for a very long time, and it’s inevitable that assassins will sometimes get through to me, and I would have it widely known it’s by far in their best interest to take service with me instead of pulling the trigger. We’ll put a video on the web right now in which I formally retain you, and then I’ll be truly committed. So you have a choice. You can have honor, and command, and wealth beyond reckoning, and stand at my right hand as I claim my empire, or you can have the dead body of an old man and, forgive me, remain expendable. I realize it’s a leap of faith but this is the one time in your entire life you’ll ever have this opportunity. Come, my friend. This is a beginning. Sometimes fate extends a hand.”
That’s a good offer, Thales thinks, and unanticipated, and Cromwell might just have bought his life back, but the soldier says, “Sorry, boss. I abide by my contract. That’s the rule.”
Magda flings the beaker at his head but he ducks fluidly and stands again without the crosshairs leaving Cromwell’s head.