Chapter 16
The blood was a lie—more than a red herring, a joke. Four different vultures and one shady lab tech at the MercyCorp Hospital, and they all came back with a different analysis. It was McCully’s blood. Terry’s blood. Jojran’s blood. Her blood. Had she mixed up the samples? No, of course not. The needle ring on her middle finger did all the work, one quick, painless prick on McCully and Terry to get their samples, impossible to mistake for the nigh-quart of blood she’d wrung from Jojran/his impersonator or the vial she’d snatched from McCully. Didn’t she know that doppleganger blood was a trickster, that it could corrode and corrupt and play havoc with your data? Of course she did, that’s why she kept the vial and the blood bag separate from her prick ring. And anyway, this wasn’t a case of dopple contamination—that would mess with the results, ruin them, not change them every time. But everyone who looked at the bag of blood came back with a different idea of who it belonged to. The skeevy lab tech had even found Friar’s blood in the mix.
Friar. He knew all about this magical bullshit, understood it even to the point that it was a science for him. And now his ghost was banging around her skull, inviting her to tropical getaways in the midst of some extremely tense situations. Was he really helping her? Or was he just another symptom of this enemy, a stray scrap of misery, a bodiless victim that had gotten stuck in the drunken, angry maze of her brain.
Feasters. The man, the thing, whatever it was wearing Jojran’s skin was a feaster for sure, or one of their servants. What was she expecting? Not that, for sure. Crazy, yes, strong, probably, and clever, a psychopath with an education and a dollop of religious zeal. But that was something else—there was a power there, and she needed to admit it, internalize this as fact, because the sooner she really let herself believe there was alien magic at work, the sooner she could stop underestimating her enemies. Now, in the light of day, walking down Broad Street, surrounded by men in caji suits and women in posh dresses, it seemed silly, like a bad dream that she’d confused with grown-up life. But she could still remember the voices calling to her, that urge she’d felt within her—physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual—to give herself up and join into something greater. She remembered the skin-crawl terror of the security guard calling to her in Jojran’s voice as she slunk away, remembered the way every man and woman on the trek to her hotel—no way she could go home now—had seemed to stop and watch her pass, to whisper nice things in strange voices and offer themselves. She remembered the elzi she passed scattering before her, which frightened her perhaps more than anything, because of course they couldn’t see or hear or know that she was there, and yet they ran from her like she was doom.
Instinct brought her to a bar but she didn’t go in. Somehow, perhaps for the first time in her life, drinking did not seem likely to provide a solution to her problems. She kept sipping from her flask to keep her mind a little zagged, just in case the Friar ghost in her head hypothesis was whack and she was being hacked, but it seemed unlikely. And now what? No trail of blood to lead her to her prey, and she herself was a mark. Flee? Where? The Gaespora would freeze her accounts and she wouldn’t be able to buy an exit visa. And they’d find her anyway. She wasn’t going to let herself be hunted—she was the hunter, she was the aggressive one who kicked down doors and shot first and asked questions maybe later if she needed to find a liquor store. But there were no more doors to kick, no one to beat up and cough up answers.
She spent the afternoon in Rittenhouse Park on a bench, scanning the Net. It was a nice, light-hazy day where you could see pretty far in front of you and breathe without a cheese-grater feeling in your lungs, so there were a lot of people out. It felt comforting to be around other people, people she thought were unlikely to be servants of an alien death God. Passing through the censor walls was a breeze and she quickly found herself in the Wekba, the dark part of the Net where everything fun happened. It was important to have a high-quality spam filter and AI countermeasures or your brain would be overloaded with ads and you’d find yourself sprinting to the nearest alley to buy sky from a tricked soda machine, or you’d be hacked by a prowling viking like Jojran and wake up with your accounts empty and all your sex memories hung like panties on a flagpole for the world to see.
Most of what she could find on the feasters was trashy horror stories. Feasters were vampires that sucked your blood and could kill with a thought. They injected you with their blood and turned you into their slaves. If you looked them in the eyes they could hypnotize you. They were demons who struck bargains in exchange for your soul. They were beings of astonishing romance and had lots and lots of sex with young women and misunderstood young men. Why was she doing this? What did she hope to learn? There were accounts of people who had met with feasters, made deals with them—a businessman who had traded his beating heart for wealth, a lonely mother who had jammed ice picks in her ears to hear the voices of her dead children, a man who had given his cock and balls in exchange for true love. And what would she trade? Was it her body they wanted, or her mind—she couldn’t imagine it being the latter. What made a person? What was their appeal to others or to aliens? And what had that Jojran impostor said? That there really was no price and that we humans were just too dumb of an organism to accept a gift. She could buy that. She’d seen enough sad, desperate people do crazy things for less than the promise of eternal love.
What she really needed to know was how many of them there were—how many people she was going to have to kill to save her own life (and maybe some other people’s lives too, as a bonus). She’d killed one, hadn’t she? She’d checked on the police scanner and saw a murder had been committed at Jojran’s address, a single body—no suspects of course. That was the kind of murder the police liked, a single man with no ties and a good deal of seizable cash. And even if they traced it back to her and decided to wobble their lard asses into action, ElilE would make it all disappear. So the body hadn’t gotten up and walked away, thank God. But what about the mind, the presence, that intellect making him tap dance around. Had that died too? Or was it like an AI virus living in the Net, lurking in your coffee maker and your car and your player? Would she have to destroy the goddamn Net to be free? No, this wasn’t some twisted AI; it was too smart and too dumb at the same time—too organic.
Friar. Of course. Friar had known—and she had known he’d known in the back of her mind, but still couldn’t bring herself to go back. But now she was out of options. She drew herself out of another so-called experience with the feasters, which had turned yet again into porn, and got to her feet. The answer wasn’t in the Net—it was here, in real life, and her problems could only be solved with fist and gun. She shut down all her feeds—all the comedies, coupons, fun facts, and erotic sensory waves, shutting down every distraction and setting herself in business mode. Nothing to interrupt her thoughts but the body scanners, police feeds, and tip offs—the tools of the trade.
She walked to Friar’s house and rested a hand on the fortress door. It swung open easily. Something clicked in her brain—the Friar presence that had been haunting her. A clever man would take his security seriously and the cleverest—and richest—would train his equipment to recognize his psychosomatic profile. She’d thought his presence in her brain could be a fluke, a mistake of his mad-scientist experiments. But perhaps not. Perhaps he had done it on purpose (poorly), trying to help her, so she could continue on when he was gone. And perhaps he’d even known that she would need to come back here. She walked down the hallway, past the study, the living room that looked to be never used, the kitchen with a half-full teacup still on the counter. She found the second fortress door leading to the basement, which also swung open at her touch. Her footsteps echoed, boots clanging on the metal stairs. The lights were off and her waving arms couldn’t find a switch. She tried to activate them with a mental command, and with the effort of the concentration she missed the last step and tumbled face first onto the metal platform.
“God damn it to fuck!” she yelled, words too echoing with the clang of her body against the metal—how big was this place? She picked herself up and rubbed her knee. It was the kind of injury just lame enough to hurt and not activate any combat or healing procedures. She stood still and let her eyes adjust to the near-dark, light supplied by the glowing of instruments. Guided by this she found some promising switches, and after trying several the lights came on. Finally. Now to find a clue and—all the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight. The operating table was empty. No stinky, decayed Friar—she was ready for that. No chance the pigs could have been here, no enterprising vulture or worried relative. She’d told no one, and how could they even get in? Who would take a body and leave all the expensive crap? Friar was dead; she knew that, he was dead for sure…wasn’t he? She’d felt him go still, stuck around to check. But had he faked it? What reason would he have? With a sinking feeling she walked to the edge of the platform. Her eyes followed the lights down, down, down into the pit, to where the massive steel door now lay open.