Tails You Lose (21 page)

The bodyguard was gone. In his place stood a Eurasian man wearing black pajama-style pants and a blood-red silk shirt. He stood with his back to the clinic, as if waiting for the elevator, but his head was turned to the side as if he was watching someone walk away from him down the corridor. Alma's hackles rose as she put one and one together and came up with a pairing she didn't like.

Behind her, she heard the examining-room door opened, and Kageyama thanked the technician. As his footsteps approached, she was just about to turn and greet him when the man near the elevator turned in her direction. A shock ran through Alma as she saw that the man's eyes were a solid white, without iris or pupil. She had the sudden, chilling sensation that those eyes could see her, despite the one-way glass. This had to be the man the rogue Superkid had warned her about: the one with the strange eyes.

In that same instant, Kageyama touched her elbow. Alma had to instantly counter her move-by-wire system—her hand came halfway out of her pocket, injector at the ready, before she was able to stop it.

The feeling of being stared at eased, as if the man with blank eyes had suddenly lost interest in her. He was still looking in the direction of the clinic, however, and now he started to walk toward it.

"Hello, Jane, " Kageyama said, oblivious to the approaching threat. He placed a slight emphasis on the name, as if saying it tongue-in-cheek. "I'm glad you're still here. I wanted to talk to you about—"

The man with the blank white eyes opened the door. Alma could sense that his attention was no longer on her; it seemed to be focused on Kageyama
instead.

Kageyama blinked . . . and then a shudder ran through him. "No!" he shouted. With reflexes as fast as Alma's own, he leaped into the air and planted a martial-arts kick squarely on the other man's chin. The man's all-white eyes blinked shut as his head snapped backward, but a second later he came in through the door low and fast, sweeping Kageyama off his feet with a spinning kick as soon as he had cleared the doorway. Kageyama bounced back to his feet, and the two came together in a blur of punches and kicks. Kageyama aimed a kick at the other man's kneecap, but his target danced back out of range. The blank-eyed man grabbed a fistful of jacket and tried to use Kageyama's own momentum to hurl him across the room, but like a fish wriggling off a hook, Kageyama slipped out of his grasp, the jacket tearing off him as he wrenched free.

Had she not been cybernetically enhanced, Alma would have been left standing like a statue, watching the whirlwind fight. Only her boosted reflexes allowed her to react in time. The man with white eyes was ignoring her, concentrating on Kageyama. Her left hand was closest to him. Whipping it forward, she tried to jam the injector into his back.

Something threw her aim off—later, she wasn't sure if it was the blank-eyed man's lightning-fast reflexes or the fit of trembling that suddenly gripped her hand. She thrust shakily forward, missing the white-eyed man by several centimeters. The injector connected with Kageyama's side as he sprang back onto his feet, and the load of gamma scopolamine was injected with a loud hiss of compressed air.

Kageyama's muscles tensed. The man with the blank eyes chuckled and stepped forward to grab him as he staggered and fell. Cursing her bad luck—the chaos the I Ching had predicted had caught up to her at last—Alma whipped her right hand into her pocket.

As she pulled out the second injector, Alma forced herself to heed the advice of the I Ching: to center, to balance. She pretended to draw away from the man with the strange eyes, sliding her hand up and out of her pocket while hiding the injector it held with her body. At the last moment she whipped her hand forward and stung his arm with the second injector. A single word whispered in her mind—
Stop
—before his pupils dilated and his mouth clenched shut. Rigid as a statue, his arms still wrapped around Kageyama, he toppled to the floor.

Suddenly, everything was quiet. Behind Alma, the robot receptionist on the wall monitor was asking the "new client" to sign in, please.

Alma bent down to tug Kageyama free, only to start back in surprise as he suddenly wriggled out of the blank-eyed man's grip himself. Kageyama staggered to his feet, and for a moment Alma wondered if gamma scopolamine had any effect on him at all. Then she saw his dilated pupils and heard the slur in his voice.

"Thanksh, Ni-howl." He stared around groggily, as if uncertain what to do next.

His uncertainty matched Alma's own. She glanced back and forth between Kageyama and the man who lay on the floor, blank eyes bulging and muscles rigor-mortis stiff. She was strong enough to carry both of them out of the arcology, but there were several securicams on the way. She'd never make it. She had to choose one or the other—and Kageyama was at least mobile.

He seemed the logical choice. According to the message on her cell this morning, the blank-eyed man was looking for the rogue Superkid and knew what she looked like. But he didn't seem to have mistaken Alma for her when he had stared at her through the door. He'd discounted her, as if she was an innocent bystander. He didn't know the rogue Superkid
that
well, it seemed. Kageyama, on the other hand, had just thanked Alma as if she was his friend. Perhaps . . .

One of the examining-room doors was opening. Despite the soundproofing, someone must have heard something. That decided Alma. She scooped the blank-eyed man up and shoved him into a chair, and then grabbed Kageyama's arm and steered him out of the clinic, toward the elevator.

The elevator doors opened, and she shoved Kageyama inside. The three passengers already on board drew back slightly and wrinkled their noses, as if discreetly sniffing for alcohol. Alma punched the icon for the rooftop.

Kageyama might have shaken off the physical effects of the gamma scopolamine in record time, but he had succumbed to the drug's "truth serum" effect. He looked at Alma as trustingly as a puppy, but his eyes were rapidly clearing. She could see that it wouldn't be long before the drug wore off entirely. Despite the other passengers, she had to start asking some questions.

"Do you recognize me?"

The high-speed elevator surged upward, causing Kageyama to stagger slightly. "Of coursh," he answered with a sloppy grin. "You liberay . . . liberay . . . shtole the dour f r us. And you shtole my shtashue. Wha'd'ya do that for?" He waggled a finger at her, then giggled when he noticed that his cybered little finger was moving back and forth of its own accord. He watched it, fascinated.

The elevator stopped at the eighteenth floor. Two passengers got off—but five more boarded. Just before the doors closed, Alma heard an alarm begin to peal in the corridor. She shifted position so that an enormous troll stood between her and the securicam mounted near the elevator's ceiling and then did the only thing she could think of to conceal Kageyama's face. Grabbing his head with both hands, she yanked him forward and kissed him.

He kissed her back with a skill she hadn't thought possible from someone whose lips were numbed by gamma scopolamine. A rush of sexual energy filled her, flushing her skin. Her hands began to tremble—both of them.

She held the kiss until the elevator reached the rooftop. As the doors opened onto a glass-enclosed walkway beside the helicopter landing pads, Kageyama at last broke away and blinked. "That was ni—"

She hurried him out of the elevator, consulting the clock in her cybereye. It was 10:32 a.m.—despite everything that had happened, her extraction was only two minutes behind schedule. All she had to do now was find the right sky cab, assuming the shadowrunner had bothered to show up on time . . .

She spotted the yellow and black helicopter—Black Chopper number fifty-one—and ran across the rooftop toward it, dragging Kageyama by the hand. A door in the side of the helicopter sprang open, and they clambered inside, both of them soaked with rain from their brief dash across the roof.

Buzz—a dwarf with a crewcut and puckered pink scar tissue on his face and throat where his beard should have been—cocked his head to listen as Alma and Kageyama settled into the back of the cab. His eyes were fully cybered: twin fiberoptic cables were jammed into the "pupil" of each, connecting him with the helicopter's internal and external vidcams.

"Where to?" he growled in a voice like a strangled pit bull's. Whatever injury the shadowrunner had suffered had nearly taken his voice as well as his beard.

"Circle over the city," Alma said. "I have a few questions to ask our passenger before we drop him off."

Buzz nodded. The rooftop sank away beneath them as the helicopter rose smoothly into the air. Alma breathed a sigh of relief. She'd pulled it off: she'd extracted Kageyama. Now she just had to decide what to do with him.

She was startled to hear Kageyama's voice beside her, clear and crisp, the last slurrings of the drug gone: "I have a few questions for you as well."

Alma turned slowly and saw that his pupils were back to normal—which only served to confirm her suspicions about him. Gamma scopolamine would freeze up the muscles of an ordinary human or meta for an hour and would linger in the body for an hour more after that. Kageyama had shaken off the drug entirely in . . . she consulted her cybereye . . . just under fourteen minutes.

She hoped that the man with the blank eyes wasn't capable of the same thing.

She stared at Kageyama a moment, trying to decide if he was the sort of man who would succumb to a threat. The helicopter wouldn't touch down until she authorized Buzz to do so; Kageyama was a prisoner inside it. But even with his jacket gone and his shirt torn open and soaked with rain he seemed composed. His bright green eyes sparkled with curiosity—there wasn't a hint of fear in them. Alma suddenly realized that he knew he was being extracted—and was actually
enjoying
it.

"I'll trade you," she said. "Question for question, and answer for answer. All right?"

Kageyama nodded. "Please—you first."

"Do you know my real name?" she asked.

"Of course." He smiled, not volunteering one word more.

"What name did you call me, back at the clinic?"

"Sorry, but it's my turn to ask a question," he teased. He thought for a moment. "Who hired you to kidnap me?"

It was Alma's turn to be coy. She recalled Bluebeard's speculation about who—or what—was behind the Komun'go Seoulpa Ring. She had a fifty-fifty chance of being right.

"A dragon," she answered.

Kageyama's eyes widened. "Ah." Before he could say anything else she fired off another question. "Who do you think I am?"

He frowned. "Quit joking with me, Night Owl. You've changed your clothes and hair—even disguised the way you move—but I know your aura."

Alma froze. If Kageyama was indeed Awakened, then he could read her aura. Was it really possible that Kageyama knew one of the Superkids intimately enough to confuse her aura with Alma's? And could that one Superkid be the very woman Alma was searching for?

Alma could hear her heart pounding in her chest. Her breathing was suddenly very shallow.

Center, she told herself. Center and balance.

Her cyberears picked up the whine of a lens adjusting, and she noticed that the vidcam with its built-in microphone was aimed straight at her. Buzz was listening in. For all Alma knew, the shadowrunner might be a friend of this Night Owl.

She glanced down at the city. "Buzz," she said to the vidcam, "we're far enough from the arcology now. Set us down on the closest landing pad. Pick one that's not too busy."

"You got it."

As the helicopter sank toward the ground, Alma realized that she was taking a chance. Once they landed, Kageyama might just turn and run. The only thing she could count on was his curiosity. He wanted answers as much as she did.

The helicopter came to a feather-light landing in an almost empty parking lot, in front of a large cement building that looked like a college. Alma tossed a credstick to Buzz, who caught it without even turning in his seat. Then she cracked the helicopter's side door.

"You want me to wait?" Buzz growled. "You still got cred remaining."

Alma shook her head. "You can go. I'll handle it from here."

She climbed out into the rain, followed by Kageyama. She led him to the shelter—a glass-walled enclosure with a black plastic roof that rattled under the heavy rain. Yanking the door shut behind them, she did a quick scan. Good—they were alone, and the waiting area's securicam was out of order. They'd have privacy.

She turned to Kageyama as Buzz's sky cab lifted in a wash of downdraft that smeared raindrops sideways across the enclosure's windows. "I'll make a deal with you," she told him. "I'm not who you think I am. My name isn't Night Owl, even though I resemble her closely. I want to find her. Tell me how to do that, and I'll tell you everything I know about who hired me to extract you, and why."

Kageyama thought about that one a long time. "Why are you looking for her?"

"She committed a crime," Alma answered. "The people she stole from mistook the two of us, just as you did, and I was blamed. I want to prove my innocence. After that . . ."

She paused. After that the rogue Superkid would be questioned at length by PCI security and then turned over to the tribal police to stand trial for the murder of Gray Squirrel. Like Akiko, she'd probably wind up on death row.

As for Alma herself, she would be forced to retire—permanently. Although her superiors at PCI knew that she was a former Superkid, she hadn't fully explained to them what this meant: that there were others out there who had the same genetic makeup as she did. She'd failed to recognize and disclose this potential security risk, and now she'd be lucky to keep a job—in any capacity—with PCI. But at least she could prove her innocence to Mr. Lali.