Tea From an Empty Cup (24 page)

Now the chief troll-gargoyle was waving around something that looked like a jagged fragment of a mirror, poking it at her face. Her rational mind kept telling her that he couldn’t possibly cut her but her rational mind had shrunk to the size of a quark. The rest of her was believing it the way a Pentecostal convert believed the touch of an omnipotent God made you speak in tongues, believed it to the point where she could feel the small cuts on her face. The bloody and murderous troll had cut her face and in a moment he would cut her throat, by the power of suggestion she would believe her throat was cut and so much for
extremo ruptura
being the sole province of St. Whoever. There just hadn’t been any AR up until now that could compete with the faith of a fanatic saint with stigmata, but now there was,
now there was
. Let the coroner come now, let them all come and see if the power of their own belief and their own galloping head-bugs would allow them to survive –

The torn page in her hand transformed into a larger hand. She tried to let go with a scream but the hand seemed to swallow hers. The face of the gargoyle snapped out of focus and became the big, soft features of Taliaferro. The scream that escaped her now was one of total surprise, pure reaction to the one thing she had expected least of all.

Panting, she looked around. Celestine had thrown herself over her legs while DiPietro had her other arm and most of her upper body. Behind them, Pleshette and Mank were staring at her wide-eyed and Tim Mezzer was yawning with a hand over his mouth. And behind them, standing on a chair, the stringer from
Police Blotter
was filming, filming, filming.

‘Okay,’ Konstantin said, letting out a long breath. ‘Are you guys
trying
to give me a heart attack?’

‘She can see us,’ Taliaferro said. ‘Let her up.’

They stepped away from her and she saw that they had peeled most of the hotsuit off her. The headmount was lying on the floor, shattered. ‘Taliaferro, don’t make me ask what happened like some clod from a bad action movie – Taliaferro?’

‘Over here.’ He was out in the hallway, standing well free of the doorway. ‘You don’t really expect me to stand
in there?
’

‘In –’ she realized he was talking about the tiny cubicle. ‘Okay,’ she said again. ‘What
did
happen?’

‘You were
screaming
,’ said Pleshette, her tone all but lascivious. ‘You were screaming and screaming and you wouldn’t stop. I was keeping an eye on you, you know, and I saw you getting attacked. Then they took your icon cat –’

‘Yes, the one with all your
stuff
in it,’ Konstantin said, feeling embarrassed in spite of everything.

‘You can’t get it back,’ Pleshette said, as if Konstantin had offered.

Konstantin shook her head, not quite believing that Pleshette was really giving her a hard time about AR
stuff
. It wasn’t
stuff
. It wasn’t even a lack of
stuff
. What was wrong with this stupid woman, with all the stupid people in there, especially stupid people who would hurt you – kill you – for the sake of a cache of items that didn’t exist?

Because they
had
been going to kill her, she thought. They’d been going to use her own perceptions against her to do it. She could still feel the places where they had hit her, the pain was still there, throbbing dully. Tomorrow, she’d be one big bruise.

She shook her head again. ‘What about high-speed access?’ she said, dazed.

‘We don’t have that here,’ Pleshette said quickly.

‘Then where would I go to get it?’

There was a long pause. ‘High-speed access, that’s, that’s just a –’ Pleshette paused again to swallow. ‘It’s one of those fairy stories AR junkies tell each other. Somebody went online amped once and claimed that they got everything all speeded up and used less billable time. But that’s, you know, don’t we all wish.’

‘Yes, don’t we. Except video parlor managers,’ Konstantin said. ‘Less billable time, that wouldn’t be such good news around here, would it.’ She eased herself out of the chair but when she stood up, her legs buckled. Celestine and DiPietro caught her, one under each arm. She would have appreciated their solicitude more if they hadn’t turned her toward the stringer.

‘Beginners
always
underestimate the effects of abrupt-disconnect shock,’ Miles Mank said importantly.

She felt her left hand cramp and realized she was still clenching it tight. In her mind’s eye, she saw the image of the coin she had been given, the loop of infinity on one side, Ouroboros on the other. Half expecting to find the coin stuck to her flesh, she tried to unfold her fingers, but they wouldn’t move. She had to have several hours of electrical and tactile massage to loosen the knots that had seized various muscles all over her body, including her hand. When it did finally open, like a late-blooming flower – or maybe, Konstantin thought, a hand-puppet of a flower – there was nothing there at all, and nothing up her sleeve.

It hadn’t surprised Yuki that she had not won the lottery. The only answer she had received from the ticket had been a straight, technical explanation.

Unacceptable – does not fit criteria for acceptance

Simulated – synthetic, artificial, fake, counterfeit meant to deceive by passing as real

Person – human being, or character meant to be the equivalent of a human being

Non-Human Manipulated – moved, activated, set in motion by a force other than a human being, possibly a character meant to be the equivalent of a human being

Standing there on the street with winged gang members soaring overhead, occasionally dive-bombing her in an attempt to make her stampede or at least duck (she didn’t oblige them), she felt a fatigue that surpassed any other tiredness or exhaustion she’d ever experienced.
Sick of you
, she thought, staring up at a winged thug balanced on a crumbling ledge. He was staring right back at her. She shouldn’t have been able to tell because he was so far away, but that was AR for you – all the information you didn’t need and more. And sometimes less, too, she’d thought, looking down at the lottery ticket.
Sick of you
.

A vehicle that looked like a cross between a tank and a double-decker touring bus overturned in front of her, spilling out a mess of people with weapons grafted directly onto their bodies. They all rolled expertly to their feet and ran off in all directions, several of them brushing her roughly as they passed. Yuki imagined they were supposed to look frightening and deadly with their built-in killing machinery but they only suggested an ill-advised laboratory experiment that had escaped from its vat and multiplied. And for all she knew, that was the scenario they were all acting out. Gang Wars in Post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, starring various crimes against nature. Strictly for entertainment value of course, for those of you whose idea of entertainment is to be frightened, intimidated, or even beaten up.
Sick of you. Sick of you, time to go
. She moved her eyes along the periphery of her visual field, waiting for the exit menu to pop up. Nothing happened.

Well, that was okay, too. Joy Flower might be determined to keep her in here, for whatever hinky-kinky reasons, but the bitch couldn’t force her to do anything. She walked past the overturned tank-bus, which had started to burn, and sat down in the middle of the street, waiting for something to fall on her, run her over, or otherwise end her stupid adventure and get her fired. Wherever Tom was, he would just have to find some other way to act out his strange needs. She was done. It wasn’t worth it.
Sick of you
.

‘Sick of you,’ she announced to the sky, hoping Joy Flower could hear her. ‘Sick of you. And sick of me, too.’

Whether Joy Flower heard her or not, the winged thug on the ledge had. He adjusted his diving posture and she knew he was aiming right for her.

There was no transition. She was standing at the open hatch of an airplane tens of thousands of feet up, hanging on with both hands. Someone’s foot was in the small of her back. Her stomach dropped and rebounded in terror, and her fingers tightened their grip. The pressure against her back increased slightly and her body bowed outward.

Not that you could die, of course, she thought, staring down at the patchwork landscape passing underneath, partly veiled by thin, ragged clouds. You couldn’t die from this sort of thing. And if it happened over and over and over, you might even get inured to it and conquer your fear. And then again, maybe you wouldn’t. How many times would it have to happen before you knew one way or another, and what would be left of your mind when it was over?

And while we were at it, what was that bit about Joy Flower not being able to force her to do anything?

Had she only been thinking, or had someone been whispering to her, a tiny voice bypassing the roaring of both the wind and her own hammering heart? Cold air freeze-scalded her face, ripped the moisture from her eyes, drove spikes of pain through her temples. This, too, was part of the sensuous AR experience; enjoy.

She made herself look up into the crystal blue of the sky. And just suppose, she thought, that instead of falling
down
, you fell
up
, at high speed. At a higher speed, say, than falling down, a higher speed than anyone could follow.

And what if no one knew? What if you let anyone who might be watching see your body tumbling down through the cloudy air, plunging toward earth in the typical splayed and helpless position, a human starfish. Was that possible?

There was a sudden hard shove and she was soaring free of the doorway, out in the unbearably cold air where she seemed to hover for a fraction of a second before beginning her rush earthward.

Her inner ear screamed at her that she was going to die of the sensation of falling before the impact killed her. Something made her give in to the feeling instead of fighting it. So she would die of the sensation of falling.
Take me
, she thought.
Pluck my life out of midair, cheat them, leave them with a shell. They’ll never know because in spite of everything else they can do to me in here, they can’t hear my thoughts. They’ll never know
.

For a while, the earth seemed to rock and swing crazily beneath her, sometimes changing places with the sky as she rolled over in the wind. But eventually it steadied and began to close the distance between her and itself with increasing speed, until it was rushing at her fixedly, aimed at her face. She had no breath for screaming but the wind screamed for her and kept screaming as an almost-perfect square tract of bumpy green stretched out in every direction, as if it were unfurling itself just to catch her.

The impact never came. When she opened her eyes, she was back in the open doorway of the airplane.

A hand dug into her hair and yanked her head back. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way!’ Ash bellowed into her face over the wind. He was still velvet-skinned.

‘What do you want?’ she said through gritted teeth.

‘The same thing you want. Find him!’

‘You’re not Ash,’ she said. ‘You’re not anybody. Let me talk to
her
.’

He pulled her head back farther. She was barely managing to keep her feet on the edge of the doorway. If he bent her back any more, she would fall and be sucked out into empty space again. Terror chills radiated from the center of her chest out to her arms and legs, hands and feet, like an electric shock and she couldn’t help it. She let go, felt her body fly straight out like a pennant in a hurricane.

But she didn’t fall. Not yet. Ash still had hold of her hair, and the pull against her scalp was only beginning to be painful. ‘There’s no way out!’ he hollered in her ear. She could feel his velvet face scrape against her head. ‘They’ve got a feeding tube in one end and a conduit for waste in the other. They can last longer than you can, Yuki. They can make the fall worse each time. There
is
an impact module, Yuki, and they can make you feel it, every bit of it, and then bring you back here a heartbeat later and get you ready to do it again. Do you want to do that? Huh? Do you want to?’

She tried to get her hands up to her head; her scalp was on fire now and it would only be a relief if he let go. She saw his head swivel around to look behind him. Then he shrugged and shoved her away. The sky sucked her out into its emptiness and then spat her down toward the earth again.

This time she was rolling over and over on her side, as if she were doing a series of rapid dance turns as well as falling. Nausea and dizziness added themselves to the stew of sensation, while sky and ground strobed to a flicker of light and dark in the mess of her vision.

There was a sudden flash of something else between earth and sky. At first she only glimpsed it briefly, a new element inserted in the moment after the flash of earth and before the flash of sky … or vice versa. As she fell faster, she was able to hold it in her sight a little bit longer and somehow, she just knew that whatever it was, neither Joy Flower nor any of her crew, human or not, had any idea that it was there. If she could get to it, if she could get to the place where it was, they might not be able to reach her.

The image of her inert body in a hotsuit rose up in her mind. Well, yes, they did have her body, there was that. But if she could elude them in here, she might be able to send a message to the outside somehow. To the real Ash, to the police, to somebody somewhere.

She tried to concentrate her attention on the moment between light sky and dark ground, and she almost had it when land smashed against her in midturn, shattering her bones, pulping her flesh, splitting her skin, enveloping her in a physical state that was beyond agony.

‘You explode like a rotten squash,’ Ash told her, dangling her out the doorway by her wrists. His grip was so tight she couldn’t sense her hands even to wiggle her fingers and her shoulders felt as if they were both dislocated. The wind buffeted her legs, alternately knocking her from side to side and pulling on her as if playing tug-o-war with Ash. She tried to look over her shoulder but her shoulders were hunched up around her ears and it was impossible.