Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (29 page)

“And Clara?” she asked.

“She’s fine for now. She’s locked inside the entrance to the Onkalo facility. I opened the door; she became excited and went inside.”

“And who are you?”

The man lifted his chin arrogantly. “I’m Berrocalino, son of Burgonando, Master and noble on Labari.”

Bruna looked at him in astonishment.

“But that’s not possible. How were you able . . . ?”

“I serve my kingdom. I serve my faith. We need the nuclear fuel to enable us to go on living. The system functioned perfectly for years. We always worked well with Marlagorka. Until that wretch Carlos Yárnoz betrayed us for money. The intermediaries thought they would be able to become independent. They got the death they deserved.”

“You killed them?”

“Marlagorka hired the Black Widow to kill Yárnoz. I killed Nuyts.”

“Nuyts!”

“Don’t look at me like that. I fulfilled my duty. He was going to give you proof that the Kingdom of Labari was using nuclear energy. I went back and slit his throat. I did the right thing.”

“That’s why you were limping so badly the next day.”

“It was worth it. He was a traitor. And a sodomite, a pervert. I also killed Gand! And I’m proud of it. I followed you. When I recognized Yárnoz in the park, I knew that Gand would be in the safe house he had in Madrid. That’s why I got there before you. I killed Gand and took the diamond from him.”

“I assume it’s the diamond that’s enabled you to open the door, right? It contains the missing information about the access code.”

“Very clever. That’s right. The diamond provides an algorithm capable of working out the code, which changes daily.”

“But if you’re all associated with Marlagorka, why did the Black Widow attack us?”

“We weren’t all collaborating by then. On Labari we felt it was too risky to rely on someone foreign to our faith again, so we decided to manage the radioactive supply directly. I suppose Marlagorka didn’t like this, so he hired the Black Widow. When Nichu Nichu attacked us in your house, it was me she was after, not you.”

Bruna looked at him. That beautiful face she’d caressed, those lips she’d kissed.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I want you to understand me before you die.”

“Daniel, or Berrocalino, or whatever your name is, I’m aiming a gun at you, too. You have as much chance of dying as I have. Probably more. I’m a combat rep.”

“Have a good look at your gun, Bruna,” he said with a fierce, bitter smile. “Check the output capacity indicator.”

The rep glanced at it and suddenly couldn’t breathe: it was red.

“I removed the central battery. I destroyed it. Your gun is useless. It’s not good to trust in people so much. I told you: I can overpower you because you love me, and that weakens you.”

The rep lowered her arm slowly. The night before, this man had been inside her. She felt her grief like a physical pain, a pain in her chest.

“Why me? Why did you kill the real Deuil?”

“Because of Gabi’s nuclear incident we thought you had something to do with Gand and Yárnoz. I suppose Marlagorka had the same thought. It turned out not to be the case, but you’ve proved very useful.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“It’s my duty. It’s the Law,” said the man, clenching his jaw. “I must obey the One Sacred Principle.”

“You were in my arms yesterday. You made love to me. To a rep. To an impure being, according to your religion.”

A shiver rippled across the man’s face. And was gone in a flash.

“I sinned. I must do penance. Killing you is my penance.”

“By the great Morlay! Is your brain really so crushed by dogma? Don’t you feel even the tiniest doubt?”

“‘Upset by words, you fall into the abyss. In disagreement with words, you reach the dead end, which is doubt,’” he recited in a haughty voice. “That’s how it is, Bruna. Doubt is a dead end, and your words don’t even touch me.”

And at that very moment the face Bruna thought she knew so well disappeared. It evaporated. It broke up. For a millisecond the long black hair floated in the air, loose and beautiful, open like a sea anemone. Then the hair and the decapitated body fell heavily to the ground, and behind it appeared Nichu Nichu, small and compact, holding a plasma gun in her hand.

“Novices. That’s what happens when you start talking instead of shooting,” she said scornfully.

She squeezed the trigger just an instant after Bruna had started her sideways leap. The devastating beam of black plasma passed millimeters from the rep’s hip and hit a tree. Bruna was still rolling along the ground when she saw that the tree was falling on her. First she heard a horrendous sound—the crack of bones shattering—and it was instantly accompanied by a wave of pain so awful that she was on the verge of losing consciousness. She looked to her left. She was lying faceup on the ground, and a heavy branch of the tree had crushed her left forearm. She howled like an animal as the Black Widow came toward her.

“Bravo. Very good. Much better this way,” she commented as she inspected the damage.

Then she disappeared from Bruna’s field of view. Panting, gritting her teeth, trying not to lose consciousness, the rep heard voices, sounds, a shout in the distance. A short while later Nichu Nichu reappeared. Clara was walking in front of her with her hands on top of her head. The assassin was holding a pistol to the back of her neck.

“You see? She’s trapped, and she’s in a lot of pain. If you do what I tell you, I’ll give her the coup de grâce. If not, I think she’ll have a really bad time. Look, the weight of the branch is acting as a tourniquet. She’s not bleeding a lot. Too bad for her. She’ll take a while to die.”

“Don’t believe her,” mumbled Bruna, her teeth chattering.

Clara didn’t say a word. She was looking at her fearlessly with that serenity and that absolute concentration of a rep in combat, which Bruna knew so well.

Nichu Nichu pushed Clara with her weapon, and the two disappeared again, leaving Bruna imprisoned in the total solitude that extreme physical suffering produces. She felt the irresistible temptation to use the morphine she was carrying around her neck, but with an enormous effort she decided not to do it. She wanted to remain as alert as possible. So she concentrated on breathing and not fainting. On breathing and breathing again the next minute. On breathing and not going mad from the sheer agony of the pain.

41

I
n the end she must have lost consciousness for some time, because she suddenly noticed that night had fallen. The rising moon, however, was flooding the scraggy forest with a livid, icy brightness.

“Bruna, Bruna.”

It was Clara’s voice. It was probably that voice that had dragged her out of her faint. She tried to lift her head so she could see more, and a terrible pain ran up her arm and drove into her brain. She heard a spine-tingling shriek, and it took her a moment to understand that the noise was coming from her own mouth.

“Bruna!”

An irregular shape was coming toward her. Unsteady. Someone was having difficulty walking. It was Clara. Yes, Bruna could now see her well under the silvery light of the moon. Clara, stumbling, coming toward her clumsily on all fours. She got very close to the detective and allowed herself to fall to the ground half on her side. She took an arduous breath.

“Bruna,” the rep repeated, smiling.

Her perfect teeth shone like jewels in the moonlight.

“Bruna, I’ve . . . killed her. I killed her. I overpowered . . . her.”

“Clara, what’s the matter?”

“I broke her neck . . . Slow . . . ly,” Clara said, heaving an exhausted gasp of pride. She lifted her hand to show Bruna a mobile. She put it on the ground between them. “I took her . . . mobile. Everything ought to be on it. I’d be a good . . . detective, eh?”

Clara began to bleed from her nose.

“She made me enter . . . the chamber . . . pick up that stuff . . . I got irradiated.”

The dose must have been incredibly high,
thought Bruna.
A hundred thousand millisieverts.
She’d done a bit of research after the business with Gabi. With a hundred thousand millisieverts you died in less than an hour from a total collapse of your nervous system. Clara was having a convulsion right now. Her teeth ground. When the shaking subsided, she opened her eyes wide.

She sighed. “How quickly it progresses,” she said.

She turned toward Bruna and with a huge effort stretched out her left arm and grabbed the rep’s hand. The same hands, the same faces, the same golden tiger eyes. Clara smiled, squeezed Bruna’s fingers gently, and looked at her tenderly.

“Sister,” she whispered.

And then it was over.

Death trapped us,
thought Bruna.
Death trapped us.

She also thought,
At least she’s escaped her TTT.

Then Bruna screamed and screamed, howled with the pain and the horror in the solitude of that indifferent moon.

When she couldn’t shout anymore, she let go of Clara, scrabbled in the bag she had on her chest, and took out and gave herself a shot of subcutaneous morphine in the neck. Then she grabbed hold of Clara’s still-warm hand and, before the drug could stupefy her too much, thought about her situation. She still had the emergency calling device Lizard had stuck on her days ago, that small fake scar. But she couldn’t launch the call for help, because she didn’t have a hand with which to signal the Morse code. The one time the inspector’s device could have been useful, and she couldn’t activate it. She smiled and noticed that the pain was subsiding. When a sharp physical pain was moderating, there was something akin to happiness. Bruna gazed at the moon. A delicious sliver of silver. But the morphine wouldn’t last long. She had two more doses. Even if she took both of them at once, she wouldn’t die. With her massive resistance she’d probably go on living when she’d finished the analgesic. She had to find a way of killing herself. She sighed. The sky was visible between the bare trees, and if she looked away from the moon, stars became visible. Sparks twinkling in the distance. A very beautiful night.

Then she realized that Clara’s right hand was holding something. A gun. Nichu Nichu’s black-plasma gun. That was what Clara had tried to do. Come back and kill Bruna. But the gun wasn’t within reach. She’d have to drag the rep’s body; she’d have to keep pulling the body upward. She gave the dead rep’s arm a small tug, and the gun wobbled dangerously. It was a big, heavy weapon, and it was likely that if she moved the body, it would drop out of Clara’s hand. She had to wait for rigor mortis to set in. She had to wait until the rep’s fingers closed around the metal.

So she waited. She waited, holding Clara’s hand.

A band of apple-green color appeared in the sky. A line of light that began to curve over itself, to flutter, to acquire a more intense tone, the mythical green fire, increasingly twisted and unsettled, even more beautiful and blinding, until the entire sky was ablaze. The aurora borealis. Particles of sun crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere. That really was powerful. That really was radioactive. Bruna was lying on top of the beast created by humans, eight hundred tons of death and destruction. But above her was burning the full power of the Universe, the dazzling and blinding mystery of the world.

Clara’s hand had gone semistiff. She let go of it with some difficulty and started to pull on the rep’s body. Little by little. It was hard with just one hand, and on top of that the effort was causing a stabbing pain despite the morphine. She finally managed to reach the plasma gun. She had to prize open Clara’s fingers one by one to release the weapon. Exhausted, Bruna let her hand and the weapon rest on her chest for a moment. Already she felt calm. Now she’d be able to kill herself. She thought about Carnal the RRM activist. Now she was going to demonstrate to Carnal that replicants were able to commit suicide. She continued to watch the beautiful dance of the aurora borealis, hypnotized. A swirl of stardust.
Sister,
Clara had said. Somehow Bruna felt vaguely comforted by the idea that there would be other Huskys: D, E, F. Perhaps it was the same comfort humans felt when they looked at their children. The tenacious determination of genes. Life’s blind obstinacy to persist. Bruna raised the gun and placed it against her temple. The advantage of black plasma was that it never erred. Her entire head would be vaporized. Like the head of Deuil-who-wasn’t-Deuil. The long locks of a Labaric nobleman floating through the air. The long black hair of a treacherous lover cascading down on her. Up there in the sky the Universe continued its magnificent electric dance. Bruna was sure that her eyes were reflecting the greenish glow of the aurora. Her tiger eyes, like Clara’s. It was time to die. But no, not yet—she still had some time left.
Three years, nine months, and fourteen days.
Not much. But wasn’t all life, including the life of humans, an insignificant thing compared with the eternal beauty of that fiery sky? There was no salvation for the tiger on the other side of the bars, but maybe he could learn to live inside the cage. She put the gun down on her chest and looked for the mode selector. It was on Explosive Impulse 2; she changed it to Beam 00, the smallest and most concentrated one. Then she grabbed the weapon, gritted her teeth, and cut off her arm above her elbow using the beam. It took twenty-six seconds.

The pain was so intense that she immediately had to give herself another shot of morphine, though she would have preferred to keep it for later. She lay on the ground gasping until the drug began to distribute itself throughout her body in soothing waves. She was in shock, but she knew she didn’t have a moment to lose. Leaning on her remaining arm, she managed to stand up. Legs apart, she put up with a few minutes of vertigo, and then the world started to pause. She was frozen; she hadn’t been aware of it till now. She searched through her backpack, took out a paper-thin thermal poncho, and pulled it over herself. The good thing about black plasma was that it had cauterized the wound; she wasn’t bleeding, and there was no need for her to use the repugnant bioglue. She put the Black Widow’s mobile and gun in her backpack, looked at Clara one last time, and set off. She stumbled as far as the jetty. The boat was there, tied up to a tree; beside it were the bodies of the old man and the dog. Nichu Nichu’s lethal trail. As she was reaching for the rope to untie the boat, she saw that the animal’s small head was twitching. She took out the black-plasma gun and finished off the dog.

She fell into the boat and, incapable of rowing, hoped that the current would carry her to the opposite shore. She was lucky. Not only did it take her there but it took her diagonally in the direction she needed. In the direction of Pori. When the keel hit the rocks, Bruna dragged herself to the prow and disembarked. Standing on the shore, she looked about her, discouraged. She didn’t have a mobile; it was still under the tree. She briefly considered trying to hack the Black Widow’s mobile but felt unable to get into the system without the passwords, and without them she’d only cause it to self-destruct. So she had no maps and no compass. All combat reps had a highly developed sense of direction, another genetic improvement, but Bruna was drugged and shattered.
Life loves to live,
she thought before heading into the thick vegetation.