Axxter examined the hooks; they had little sensors at the tips, similar to the ones on his pithons.
“Get some sleep.” Sai pulled the lines from his belt up across his chest and fastened them to the wall. “We’ll head out soon as we can see.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.
“I don’t get it.” Axxter fastened the hooked devices onto his own belt. “What’re you doing all this for? What’s the deal for you?”
One eye opened and regarded him “You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened around here. In a long time. You don’t know it, but you’re something . . . historic.” The eye closed; he lowered his chin onto his chest. “You’ll see.”
Axxter reached into his jacket and tore off a small piece of bread. For a while longer, he chewed and watched the figure sleeping next to him.
† † †
“Come on, you gotta let ’em take your weight. Get a little swing going.” Sai, several meters ahead and upwall, looked back, waiting for him to catch up.
The travelhooks – as Sai called them – had been scary at first. Axxter clung to the wall, his hands flat against the cold metal, catching his breath. In the half-morning, when Sai had first strapped the devices onto his arms, it’d taken an act of wild faith for him to turn off the pithons, letting the lines retract into his belt and boots so only their triangular heads showed. His safety lines; the old nausea and fear came back that he’d known when he’d first gone out on the vertical. His head had swum, the immovable building seeming to tilt and rock as he’d looked over his shoulder, down toward the cloud barrier below. That had passed, but it had still been several minutes before he’d worked up the courage to use the hooks as Sai had shown him, anchoring himself with one of the devices while swinging monkeylike, twisting back to front, to reach for the next hold with the other.
Even with his hesitancy, they were fast; by the time the sun came over the top of the building, Axxter figured that he and Sai had covered twice the distance he’d made in his previous traveling. Once the rhythm was established, the peculiar torsion of the hooks as they anchored and then bent around themselves . . . The few times Axxter had screwed up and missed catching the next hold, his gut had clenched in fear as the image of himself falling snapped into his head. Then Sai had taken pity on him and explained the devices’ interlock system; the previous anchoring point wasn’t released until a microsecond after the new one was locked onto.
“Come on –” Sai’s voice called back to him “You don’t have time to lose, man.”
Another hour of traveling; Axxter caught up to where Sai had snugged himself in close to the wall. Axxter’s arms ached, deep into his shoulders; he rubbed them in turn after reeling out the pithons and latching himself secure.
“You’ll get used to it.” Sai nodded toward Axxter’s hand kneading his bicep. “It’s more the novelty of the motion than anything else. The hooks really do most of the work.” He took bread and water from his shoulder-bag. “Break time.”
Munching away, Sai pointed out to the sky. “Hey, there’s your little friend.”
Axxter turned his head and saw the distant figure of the gas angel. Lahft; as she came closer, he recognized her, smiling happily.
She dangled in air next to him, close enough to touch. “Hi. Hello. Falling?”
He leaned back against the pithons, and shook his head. “No. Not yet, at any rate.”
With little swimming motions, she turned around. She looked over her shoulder and the top of the spherical membrane. “Do more. Do the pretty.”
The designs he’d programmed into the biofoil he’d implanted into her were still there.
She’s gotten bored with them
. One of the unfortunate qualities of time: everything got old eventually. He wondered if he’d done her a favor by letting her know that, ending even that small bit of her innocence.
“I guess I can . . .” He hadn’t tried sending out any signal from his transceiver; since the Small Moon’s orbit didn’t include this side of the building, there hadn’t seemed any point. But with the target right in front of him – “Okay. How’s this?” He pulled a tiger playing with a butterfly up from his archive, coded and sent it over the distance of less than a meter. As the screen display dropped from his vision, he saw the image blossoming across Lahft’s membrane.
“Nice.” She turned from admiring herself and looked at him.
“Yeah, it’s nice.” The sunlight coming through the membrane made it radiant, a smooth glowing rose. “That’s the best display I’ve ever had.”
Beside him, Sai nodded. “It’s kind of a shame that all this stuff usually just gets wasted on a bunch of big ugly guys.”
Lahft wasn’t listening to them, letting the breeze slowly draw her away.
“Hey –” Axxter called out to her. “Come back around again sometime – whenever you want – and I’ll do another one for you.”
She considered this, putting a finger to her chin. Then that same unalloyed smile appeared. “When
you
want. You here, and me –” She flung her arm out to indicate some distant point in the sky. “You make you – like a pretty, but
you
– on me. Then I come here. To you.” She had floated several meters away and had to shout the last words. Before she was gone entirely, dwindling to a far speck.
Sai yawned, stretching out his arms in front of him “Angels are okay. You could do a lot worse than being on a friendly basis with them.”
He realized for the first time that Lahft had shown none of the usual angelic shyness around Sai. As if she was used to him, or just not scared of him.
“I suppose. I don’t see what good it’ll ever do me, though.”
Sai shrugged. “It’s like those old stories, you know, fairy tales and stuff, where the kid befriends the ants and the birds. And they wind up saving his ass somehow on the last page. You just never know.”
It wasn’t the first time Axxter didn’t know what the hell somebody was talking about. “What about that other one? That girl?” He assumed that Sai, with his spying around, had witnessed that encounter. “I suppose she’s got her uses, too.”
“That circuit-rider broad?” Sai snorted. “You’d be smart to steer well clear of her. People like that can cause a lot of trouble.”
“Yeah, she seemed pretty demented. Talking some crazy stuff about switching around into different bodies. Like she had a wardrobe of them, or something.”
Sai shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. If she were crazy, then she wouldn’t have such a potential for trouble. But she can really
do
all that stuff – that’s why she’s such bad news.” He tightened the straps on his travelhooks. “Come on. We gotta get moving.”
† † †
“There. That’s it.” Sai pointed ahead of them.
Catching his breath, Axxter looked across the wall. The building’s surface was tinged red by the sun setting at the limit of the clouds. The entry site appeared as a black hole in the middle of reflected fire.
Sai had been pushing to reach the spot before sundown. The speed of their travel, accelerated by his own growing skill with the hooks, left Axxter dizzy, his arms aching underneath the leather straps.
“Told you I’d get you here.” Sai clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on.”
He led the way to the curved edge of the site. Axxter grasped the lip and peered inside. Nothing but dark.
“There should be some of my buddies around. I told them to wait for me here.” Sai leaned his head inside and let out a high-pitched, whistling cry. It echoed inside the building for several seconds. After it died away, yelping whoops came bouncing back in reply. “All right – let’s go on in.” He unstrapped the travelhooks from his arms.
Axxter pulled away from him “Wait a minute. Your friends – people like you – are inside there?” He glanced again at the darkness inside the building.
Sai slung the hooks onto his belt. “Well, sure. Where else?”
He pulled away, a sudden horror prickling across his scalp and arms. “I thought . . . I thought you were an eveningsider. I thought you lived out here.” He gestured around at the building’s exterior.
“So?” Sai peered at him. “What difference does it make?”
Then he knew. “You’re from
in there
.” He pushed himself back from the other, the words
Dead Center
unspeakable, filling his mouth. This one, the smiling figure who’d popped up from nowhere, and all the ones like him, inside, calling back and forth like wolves –
Sai reached for him. “Come on – don’t be an idiot –” Axxter slashed at him with the travelhooks. Sai jerked back to avoid their sharp-pointed tips.
“Stay away from me.” Axxter crawled backward, his belt pithons securing him to the wall. He kept the hooks lifted between himself and Sai, as though he were brandishing a knife. “Don’t come near me. I know what you are. I know what you want.”
Sai looked at him in disgust. “You don’t know shit.” He shook his head, then turned and slipped inside the entry site, into the dark.
† † †
“That was one of your dumber moves.”
The voice came from behind him; startled, Axxter turned his head and saw Felony latched to the wall, regarding him with her level gaze.
She nodded toward the entry site where Sai had disappeared. “What’d you flip out on that guy for? He was doing you a favor. Bringing you all the way here, and stuff.”
Axxter glanced at the dark hole, then back to her. “Isn’t he . . . isn’t he one of them?”
“‘One of them’ – one of them what?”
“You know.” He still didn’t want to say it aloud. “You mean, the Dead Centers?”
He nodded.
“Christ almighty.” Felony rolled her eyes upward. “Is that what you’re all freaked out about? What if he is? You’re spooking yourself for no reason, man. Those Dead Center folks aren’t anything to worry about. They’re harmless.”
Proves she’s nuts
. Or ignorant – she hadn’t seen some of the things that he had, such as the burned-out sector over on the other side. “Well . . . I know different.”
That got a derisive snort. “There’s a bunch of stuff you think you know. And none of it’s true.”
Irritated, Axxter looked away from her, scanning the building’s surface. The last of the twilight was fading, the clouds ebbing to a darker red. He wanted to get well clear of the entry site, but still close enough to keep it in view; if Sai and his Dark Center buddies came swarming out, he wanted to have as much warning as possible.
Plus, there was other business he needed to take care of. His fright at discovering Sai’s true nature had also ebbed away. “You know where I can find a plug-in jack around here?”
“Gotta make a call? No problem. I know where all the jacks are.”
He followed her on a diagonal upwall; she seemed much clumsier moving with her pithons, as if she’d spent little time with them on the building’s surface. A kilometer away from the entry site, he spotted the jack’s concentric yellow markings.
“Here you go.” She secured herself close to the jack.
A taped call was waiting for him as soon as he inserted his finger. NY – YOU CAN GET MEGASSASSIN LOCATION INFO DIRECT FROM A & R. KEEP IN TOUCH. BREVIS. That was cool; his agent had known exactly what he needed to find out. The Havoc Mass was probably making the megassassin’s progress public, just to work up audience interest and add to their reputation:
You can run, but you can’t hide
– that always played well.
Ringing up Ask & Receive revealed that the megassassin was only a little ways out from the Left Linear Fair, having crossed through the day before.
That’s weird
. Axxter broke the connection and leaned back against the pithons. He’d figured the megassassin would’ve been much closer than that; he wouldn’t have been happy to find out that it was just about to clear the curve of the building, spot him, and come barreling across the wall to kick his ass, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Weren’t those big fuckers supposed to be faster than that? He’d always heard that once they got going, they were unstoppable, building up speed, creaming their target as much by force of impact as by all the other goodies grafted into their formerly human bodies. This one seemed to be taking some kind of tourist route to get to him.
“So what’s the problem?” Felony had managed to listen in. “Just means you got a little breathing space.”
Axxter worked at a fingernail. “It just doesn’t make sense. If the Havoc Mass wants to dramatize their lethal effectiveness, they’d want that thing to be on top of me
fast
. Not sauntering around out there on the wall somewhere.”
“And you’re the guy who knows so much. You didn’t get filled in on this one, did you?”
“Meaning what?”
She spread her hands out, palms upward. “Hey – maybe these megassassins aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Or maybe they
are
rough, but they’re deficient in some other skills. Like they’re not the world’s greatest trackers, maybe. It might be having a hard time picking up your trail – you arrived on this side by air, remember.”