Mona Lisa Overdrive (34 page)

Brigitte walks beside her, and there is no pressure, no hollow of night, no hive sound.
There are no candles. Continuity is there too, represented by a strolling scribble
of silver tinsel that reminds her, somehow, of Hilton Swift on the beach at Malibu.

“Feeling better?” Brigitte asks.

“Much better, thank you.”

“I thought so.”

“Why is Continuity here?”

“Because he is your cousin, built from Maas biochips. Because he is young. We walk
with you to your wedding.”

“But who are you, Brigitte? What are you really?”

“I am the message your father was told to write. I am the
vévés
he drew in your head.” Brigitte leans close. “Be kind to Continuity. He fears that
in his clumsiness, he has earned your displeasure.”

The tinsel scribble scoots off before them, across the satin dunes, to announce the
bride’s arrival.

The Maas-Neotek unit was still warm to the touch; the white plastic pad beneath it
was discolored, as if by heat. A smell like burning hair …

She watched the bruises on Tick’s face darken. He’d sent her to a bedside cabinet
for a worn tin cigarette box filled with pills and dermadisks—had torn his collar
open and pressed three of the adhesive disks against skin white as porcelain.

She helped him fashion a sling from a length of optic cable.

“But Colin said she had forgotten.…”

“
I
haven’t,” he said, and sucked air between his teeth, working the sling beneath his
arm. “
Seemed
to happen, at the time. Lingers a bit …” He winced.

“I’m sorry.…”

“ ’Sokay. Sally told me. About your mother, I mean.”

“Yes …” She didn’t look away. “She killed herself. In Tokyo …”

“Whoever she was, that wasn’t her.”

“The unit …” She glanced toward the breakfast table.

“She burnt it. Won’t matter to him, though. He’s still there. Has the run of it. What’s
our Sally up to, then?”

“She has Angela Mitchell with her. She’s gone to find the thing that all that comes
from. Where we were. A place called New Jersey.”

The telephone rang.

Kumiko’s father, head and shoulders, on the broad screen behind Tick’s telephone:
he wore his dark suit, his Rolex watch, a galaxy of small fraternal devices in his
lapel. Kumiko thought he looked very tired, tired and very serious, a serious man
behind the smooth dark expanse of desk in his study. Seeing him there, she regretted
that Sally hadn’t phoned from a booth with a camera. She would very much have liked
to see Sally again; now, perhaps, it would be impossible.

“You look well, Kumiko,” her father said.

Kumiko sat up very straight, facing the small camera mounted just below the wallscreen.
In reflex, she summoned her mother’s mask of disdain, but it would not come. Confused,
she dropped her gaze to where her hands lay folded in her lap. She was abruptly aware
of Tick, of his embarrassment, his fear, trapped in the chair beside her, in full
view of the camera.

“You were correct to flee Swain’s house,” her father said.

She met his eyes again. “He is your
kobun
.”

“No longer. While we were distracted, here, with our own difficulties, he formed new
and dubious alliances, pursuing courses of which we could not approve.”

“And your difficulties, Father?”

Was there the flicker of a smile? “All that is ended. Order and accord are again established.”

“Er, excuse me, sir, Mr. Yanaka,” Tick began, then seemed to lose his voice altogether.

“Yes. And you are—?”

Tick’s bruised face contorted in a huge and particularly lugubrious wink.

“His name is Tick, Father. He has sheltered and protected me. Along with Col … with
the Maas-Neotek unit, he saved my life tonight.”

“Really? I had not been informed of this. I was under the impression that you had
not left his apartment.”

Something cold— “How?” she asked, sitting forward. “How could you know?”

“The Maas-Neotek unit broadcast your destination, once it was known—once the unit
was clear of Swain’s systems. We dispatched watchers to the area.” She remembered
the noodle seller.… “Without, of course, informing Swain. But the unit never broadcast
a second message.”

“It was broken. An accident.”

“Yet you say it saved your life?”

“Sir,” Tick said, “you’ll pardon me, what I mean is, am I
covered
?”

“Covered?”

“Protected. From Swain, I mean, and his bent SB friends and the rest …”

“Swain is dead.”

There was a silence. “But
somebody
will be running it, surely. The fancy, I mean. Your business.”

Mr. Yanaka regarded Tick with frank curiosity. “Of course. How else might order and
accord be expected to continue?”

“Give him your word, Father,” Kumiko said, “that he will come to no harm.”

Yanaka looked from Kumiko to the grimacing Tick. “I extend profound gratitude to you,
sir, for having protected my daughter. I am in your debt.”

“Girt,” Kumiko said.

“Christ,” Tick said, overcome with awe, “fucking fancy that.”

“Father,” Kumiko said, “on the night of my mother’s death, did you order the secretaries
to allow her to leave alone?”

Her father’s face was very still. She watched it fill with a sorrow she had never
before seen. “No,” he said at last, “I did not.”

Tick coughed.

“Thank you, Father. Will I be returning to Tokyo now?”

“Certainly, if you wish. Though I understand you have been allowed to see very little
of London. My associate will soon arrive at Mr. Tick’s apartment. If you wish to remain,
to explore the city, he will arrange this.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“Goodbye, Kumi.”

And he was gone.

“Now then,” Tick said, wincing horribly as he extended his good arm, “help me up from
this.…”

“But you require medical attention.”

“Don’t I then?” He’d managed to get to his feet, and was hobbling toward the toilet,
when Petal opened the door from the dark upstairs hall. “If you’ve broken my bloody
lock,” Tick said, “you’d better pay me for it.”

“Sorry,” Petal said, blinking. “I’ve come for Miss Yanaka.”

“Too bad, mate. Just had her dad on the phone. Told us Swain’s been topped. Told us
he’s sending round the new boss.” He smiled, crookedly, triumphantly.

“But you see,” Petal said gently, “that’s me.”

Cherry’s still screaming.

“Somebody shut her up,” Molly says, where she’s standing by the door with her little
gun, and Mona thinks she can do that, can pass Cherry a little of her stillness, where
everything’s interesting and nothing’s pushing too hard, but on the way across the
room she sees the crumpled Ziploc on the floor and remembers there’s a derm in there,
maybe something that’ll help Cherry calm down. “Here,” she says, when she gets to
her, peels the backing off and sticks the derm on the side of Cherry’s neck. Cherry’s
scream slides down the scale into a gurgle as she sinks down the face of old books,
but Mona’s sure she’ll be okay, and anyway there’s shooting downstairs, guns: out
past Molly a white tracer goes racketing and whanging around steel girders, and Molly’s
yelling at Gentry can he turn the goddamn lights on?

That had to mean the lights downstairs, because the lights up here were plenty bright,
so bright she can see fuzzy little beads, traces of color, streaming off things if
she looks close. Tracers. That’s what you call those bullets,
the ones that light up. Eddy’d told her that in Florida, looking down the beach to
where some private security was shooting them off in the dark.

“Yeah, lights,” the face on the little screen said, “the Witch can’t see.…” Mona smiled
at him. She didn’t think anybody else had heard. Witch?

So Gentry and big Slick were tearing around yanking these fat yellow wires off the
wall, where they’d been stuck with silver tape, and plugging them together with these
metal boxes, and Cherry from Cleveland was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed,
and Molly was crouched down by the door holding her gun with both hands, and Angie
was—

Be still
.

She heard somebody say that, but it was nobody in the room. She thought maybe it was
Lanette, like Lanette could just say that, through time, through the stillness.

Because Angie was just there, down on the floor beside the dead guy’s stretcher, her
legs folded under her like a statue, her arms around him.

The lights dimmed, when Gentry and Slick found their connection, and she thought she
heard the face on the monitor gasp, but she was already moving toward Angie, seeing
(suddenly, totally, so clearly it hurt) the fine line of blood from her left ear.

Even then, the stillness held, though already she could feel raw hot points in the
back of her throat, and remember Lanette explaining: You don’t ever snort this, it
eats holes in you.

And Molly’s back was straight, her arms stretched out.… Straight out and down, not
to that gray box, but to her pistol, that little thing, and Mona heard it go
snik-snik-snik
, and then three explosions, far off down there, and they must’ve been blue flashes,
but Mona’s hands were around Angie now, wrists brushed by blood-smeared fur. To look
into gone eyes, the light already fading. Just a long, longest way away.

“Hey,” Mona said, nobody to hear, just Angie toppling across the corpse in the sleeping
bag, “hey …”

She glanced up in time to catch a last image on that vid screen and see it fade.

After that, for a long time, nothing mattered. It wasn’t like the not caring of the
stillness, the crystal overdrive, and it wasn’t like crashing, just this past-it feeling,
the way maybe a ghost feels.

She stood beside Slick and Molly in the doorway and looked down. In the dim glare
of big old bulbs she watched a metal spider thing jittering across the dirty concrete
floor. It had big curved blades that snapped and whirled when it moved, but there
was nobody in there moving, and the thing just went like a broken toy, back and forth
in front of the twisted wreck of the little bridge she’d crossed with Angie and Cherry.

Cherry had gotten up from the floor, pale and slackfaced, and peeled the derm from
her neck. “Tha’s maj’ muscle relax’nt,” she managed, and Mona felt bad because she
knew she’d done something stupid when she’d thought she was trying to help, but wiz
always did that, and how come she couldn’t stop doing it?

Because you’re wired, stupid, she heard Lanette say, but she hadn’t wanted to remember
that.

So they all just stood there, looking down at the metal spider twitching and running
itself down. All except Gentry, who was unscrewing the gray box from its frame over
the stretcher, his black boots beside Angie’s red fur.

“Listen,” Molly said, “that’s a copter. Big one.”

She was the last one down the rope, except for Gentry, and he just said he wasn’t
coming, didn’t care, he’d stay.

The rope was fat and dirty gray and had knots tied in it to hang on to, like a swing
she remembered from a long time ago. Slick and Molly had lowered the gray box first,
down to a platform where the metal stairs weren’t wrecked. Then Molly went down it
like a squirrel, seeming barely to hang on at all, and tied it tight to a railing.
Slick went down slowly, because he had Cherry over his shoulder and she was still
too relaxed to make it down herself. Mona still felt bad about that and wondered if
that was why they’d decided to leave her there.

It was Molly who’d decided, though, standing there by that window, watching people
pop out of the long black helicopter and spread out across the snow.

“Look at that,” Molly’d said. “They know. Just come to pick up the pieces. Sense/Net.
My ass is out of here.”

Cherry slurred that they were leaving too, she and Slick. And Slick shrugged, then
grinned and put his arm around her.

“What about me?”

Molly looked at her. Or seemed to. Couldn’t really tell, with the glasses. White tooth
showed against her lower lip, for just a second, then she said, “You stay, my advice.
Let them sort it out. You haven’t really done anything. None of it was your idea.
Think they’ll probably do right by you, or try to. Yeah, you stay.”

It didn’t make any sense to Mona, but now she felt so dead, so crash-sick, she couldn’t
argue.

And then they were just gone, down the rope and gone, and it was just like that, how
people left and you didn’t ever see them anymore. She looked back into the room and
saw Gentry pacing back and forth in front of his books, running the tip of his finger
along them like he was looking for a special one. He’d thrown a blanket over the stretcher.

So she just left, and she wouldn’t know if Gentry ever found his book or not, but
that was how it was, so she climbed down the rope herself, which wasn’t as easy as
Molly and Slick had made it look, particularly if you felt like Mona did, because
Mona felt close to blacking out and her arms and legs didn’t seem to be working real
good
anyway, she had to sort of concentrate on making them move, and her nose and throat
were swelling inside, so she didn’t notice the black guy until she was all the way
down.

He was standing down there looking at the big spider thing, which wasn’t moving at
all. Looked up when the heel of her shoe grated across the steel platform. And something
so sad about his face, when he saw her, but then it was gone and he was climbing the
metal stairs, slow and easy, and as he got closer she began to wonder if he really
was black. Not just the color, which he definitely was, but there was something about
the shape of his bald skull, the angles of his face, not quite like anybody she’d
seen before. He was tall, real tall. Wore a long black coat, leather so thin it moved
like silk.

“Hello, missy,” he said, when he stood in front of her, reached out to raise her chin
so she was looking straight into gold-flecked agate eyes like nobody in the world
ever had. Long fingers so light against her chin. “Missy,” he said, “how old are you?”