Tails You Lose (32 page)

Alma woke up suddenly as fingers touched her hand. Her move-by-wire system kicked in immediately, and in one smooth motion she whipped the blankets off her body, yanked the hand that had touched hers away and down, and drew her legs up. A split second before she lashed out in a lethal kick, her mind registered the fact that it was Akira Kageyama who was leaning over the bed, wincing with pain at the pressure-point hold she was using to force his hand back against his wrist. Letting him go, she sat up in the unfamiliar bed and looked around.

The last thing Alma remembered was lying down on her own bed and activating the REM inducer with a prime-number countdown. She was no longer in her apartment. Instead, she had awakened in a room with walls and ceiling made from frosted glass. The bed she was in had a massive mahogany headboard and footboard, carved with entwined dragons; a matching bedside table stood next to it. One of the pillows was smeared with what looked like gold and black paint; Alma also saw a smudge of gold on the back of her hand. She touched her cheek, and her fingers came away streaked with gold.

There was one door out of the room; beside it was a long, low table that held a collection of tiny bonsai trees. A chair near the opposite wall was draped with a pair of pants and a jacket that dripped water onto the floor and a rubbery black garment; after a moment, Alma recognized it as a diver's drysuit.

"Where am I?"

"In my home." Kageyama stood beside the bed, rubbing his wrist. He wore only black silk pajama bottoms. His feet were bare, and Alma could see that he had only four toes on each foot. "You came here, early this morning, asking for sanctuary. I have granted it."

This morning? Alma activated her cybereye's clock and stared at the glowing red numbers that superimposed themselves over Kageyama. It was 6:22 a.m. Where had the last eight hours and twelve minutes gone? The only thing she could remember was a fragmented dream about riding through the night sky on a motorcycle and then falling from it, tumbling endlessly down into a cold, wet, dark place . . .

Her cyberear picked up the faint sound of trickling water coming from another part of the building. She realized where she must be: in the underwater condoplex that Kageyama had inherited from the dragon Dunkelzahn: Vancouver's most famous "leaky condo."

She had no memory of coming here or of asking Kageyama for sanctuary. Looking at him now, noticing that his chest was bare aside from the
pi
stone that hung around his neck, she wondered what else was missing from her memory. His smile was just a little too knowing, a touch too sensual. She realized that she was naked and pulled the covers back over her body.

"How long have I been asleep?" she asked.

"About fifteen minutes. You fought to stay awake as long as you could, but toward the end you were doing more yawning than talking."

Alma seized upon the one thing she was able to understand: the fifteen-minute sleep. It must have been REM induced, since she felt as refreshed as if she'd slept all night. She couldn't have been sleeping for the past eight hours, since clearly she'd spent at least part of the evening traveling to the condoplex and talking to Kageyama. The only conclusion she could draw was that something must have gone wrong with the REM inducer—some glitch that caused her to move around and talk in her sleep, without any memory of having done so. She wondered if this was the first time it had happened.

"Was I sleepwalking? What did I talk about?"

Kageyama sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for her hand. Alma's first instinct was to jerk away, but the feel of his long, slim fingers holding hers was somehow reassuring—and disturbingly familiar. She could see from the expression on his face that he was searching for the best way to tell her something he thought might upset her. She braced herself for bad news.

"You arrived at my door just after five o'clock this morning, pleading with me to let you in. You said you had important news for me, that you knew what the three dragons were after: a magical coin."

Alma shook her head in disbelief. What would have possessed her to do that? Her subconscious mind had obviously been dwelling on Night Owl's offer. "I must have been talking about the coin that Night Owl mentioned in her message to me on the cell," she said, thinking out loud.

Kageyama stared at her, his eyes filled with questions. "Night Owl?" He paused, then tried again: "You're talking about her as if . . . but she said you knew . .

He shook his head in wonder. "She was wrong. You
don
'
t
know, do you?"

"Know what?" Alma asked, exasperated.

"That you and the shadowrunner Night Owl are the same person—that you share a single body. As she so eloquently put it, you're two sides of the same coin." Alma felt suddenly lightheaded, as if the air had been sucked from the room. It was difficult to take a full breath, and her stomach felt cold and loose. With the detached awareness of a person who has just gone into shock, she noticed that her breathing was very shallow and that her left hand was trembling.

"No," she whispered. "Night Owl is Abby, one of the other Superkids from Batch Alpha."

Kageyama released her hand and stood. He walked over to the wet clothes, unzipped one of the jacket pockets, and pulled a flat square of plastic from it. He turned it upright as he walked back to the bed, and Alma saw the familiar human pyramid of a dozen Superkids materialize above it. He handed the holopic to her.

"Night Owl wanted you to have this," he said. "She said to remind you that she's been a part of you since you were eight years old and asked me to plead with you to reconsider your decision."

Decision? Alma had no idea what Kageyama was talking about. She stared at the holopic, feeling as disconnected from the here and now as she did from the eight-year-old girl who flipped off the top of the pyramid and landed in a handstand in front of the other children, over and over again. Like the girl in the holopic, Alma's mind kept looping through the same cycle—question and denial, question and denial—as her eyes darted back and forth between Abby and herself, trying to sort out which one really was Night Owl.

What if it was true? What if the REM inducer was malfunctioning, causing Alma to act out dreams in which she played her polar opposite: a shadowrunner, instead of a security guard? Like dreams that fade with wakefulness, all knowledge of what she'd done while she was "sleepwalking" would have disappeared from her conscious memory—just as the memory of last night had.

No, she told herself. According to Hothead, Night Owl had been running the Vancouver shadows for at least three months. If Alma had been active as Night Owl for all that time, surely there would have been some evidence of her nocturnal excursions. It wasn't possible for her to have left no trace of her comings and goings.

But she had left traces: the first had been the "break-in" to Alma's apartment last November. It had happened exactly three months ago, around the time that Night Owl had first shown up in Vancouver. Then there were a handful of occasions when Alma had had the sense that something in her apartment was just
slightly
out of place. That had to have been Night Owl, touching and moving things as she crept around Alma's apartment.

No, she told herself. It had to be Abby who had broken into the apartment.

But what if it wasn't? What if it was true that this alter ego had been part of Alma since long before the shadowrunner "Night Owl" had appeared? Age eight was when the Superkids program had been shut down, and Poppy had killed himself. What if Akiko had been right: that it was Alma, and not Abby, who had found Poppy after his suicide? Perhaps Alma had tried to block the pain of his death by telling the police that her name was Abby, and over the intervening years had convinced herself that it really
was
Abby who saw the severed head.

No, she told herself—it was Abby who found the body. Alma would have remembered something like that.

Then she thought back to the vivid images that had filled her mind as Hothead was describing what "Abby" had seen. The hollow feeling in her stomach grew as she realized that maybe, on some deeper level, she
did
remember.

One final question remained. If the REM inducer really had caused Alma to act out her darkest urges in bouts of sleepwalking, why hadn't Gray Squirrel noticed that something was wrong? Surely a glitch of that magnitude would have rung an alarm somewhere.

Alma noticed that her left hand was still shaking. Staring at it, she realized the truth. A warning bell
had
sounded—eleven days ago. The doctor at Executive Body Enhancements had been right: the tremors that had plagued Alma for the past week and a half weren't the result of TLE. They were caused by the REM inducer. Alma had told Gray Squirrel that her left hand had started mysteriously shaking, and he had agreed to run some tests. He'd been on the verge of discovering the glitch when Night Owl had killed him.

No—when
Alma
had killed him.

She heard a cracking noise and realized that she was gripping the holopic so tightly that she had fractured it. A thin line of static crackled across the image, cutting the pyramid of children—and Alma—in half.

Alma looked up from the holopic. "What did she—did I—mean: 'reconsider my decision'?"

"You were referring to your appointment, later today, at the Executive Body Enhancements clinic. When the REM inducer is removed, Night Owl will disappear, perhaps forever. She asked me to let you know that she never meant to hurt you—she was protecting you, although you didn't realize it. Gray Squirrel was a monster, and the experiments PCI was conducting were morally wrong. You—she—said she's sorry that she hurt you—that she tried several times to tell you what was happening, but you wouldn't listen. You wouldn't let her wake up."

"But I never . . . I wasn't going to . . ." The trembling in Alma's left hand grew stronger. The hand fluttered against the bedsheets as if trying to signal her attention. Alma was suddenly very tired and had to fight to stifle a yawn. Then she realized what was happening: Night Owl was trying to wake up.

With a mental effort that made sweat bead on her temples, she forced her hand to lie still. The exhaustion and craving for sleep instantly disappeared.

So it was true—it was all true. She
was
Night Owl. She nearly laughed at the irony. She'd finally learned who the killer was, and as a result she could never go back to Pacific Cybernetics. Her career as a security expert was over; everything she had built in her life had come crashing down. The flip side of her personality—the darker, brooding side—was a killer and an outlaw. Even though it wasn't really "Alma" who had committed the crimes, it was Alma who would pay for them. She would be an outcast, untrusted and unwelcome in the corporate world. The only community that would ever consider embracing her was one filled with murderers and thieves: the shadowrunners.

Then she realized that none of that mattered—the scenarios she'd just run through in her mind assumed that she still had a future. Activating the countdown mechanism in her cybereye, she saw that there were only five hours, thirteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds remaining until the bomb in her head exploded. Now that she could never prove her innocence to PCI, there was no escape. She couldn't have the REM inducer removed—not by a PCI technician—and that meant one of two things: brain damage, or death.

Her hopes rose briefly as she considered one possible course of action. She would go to Mr. Lali and explain to him that, yes, she was the one who had extracted Gray Squirrel, but that it was the REM inducer that had hived off the Night Owl personality—that his death was really PCI's fault. But that hope ebbed when she realized that Night Owl wasn't a separate entity—she was part of Alma. An alter ego, a part of herself that she had deliberately suppressed, but still very much a part of herself. She was guilty.

Even if Mr. Lali was willing to overlook that, Alma wasn't certain that she could trust PCI, now that she knew what Gray Squirrel had been involved in. The corporation had given its blessing to the callous murders of the alpha-test subjects and was more than willing to sacrifice Alma herself—the cranial bomb was proof of that. She'd trusted PCI and looked up to Mr. Lali as a father. Now she realized that she was no daughter to him. She'd been an employee, and then a test subject, and then a security risk to be eliminated—no more than that.

Weeping tears of frustration, she hurled the Superkids holopic across the room. "You said I came here 'asking for sanctuary.' From what?"

"The three dragons who were chasing you," Kageyama answered. "You managed to anger Mang, Li and Chiao to the point where all three wanted to kill you." Alma's laugh was bitter. What did that matter now? "Don't worry," Kageyama quickly added. His eyes twinkled with mischievous delight. "You also faked your own death—apparently in a very convincing manner. All three dragons think you died in a plunge from the Lion's Gate Bridge."

Alma's mouth dropped open, and for the first time since she'd awakened, she was consciously aware of the ache in her face, hands and shoulders. It felt as though she had been slapped across every centimeter of her body by something as hard as cement. Her eye fell on the wet clothes and the drysuit that lay over them. Something like the ice-cold waters of Burrard Inlet, for example.

"Why would the dragons want to kill me?" she asked, curiosity sparking her out of her apathy. "The only one I could have angered was Mang, when I aborted your extraction."