Tears in Rain (37 page)

She filled her lungs with air and sprinted for the door. She kicked it open. Nobody. Exhilarated, she thought,
I’ve nearly made it
. And at that moment, she smelled sweat and adrenaline and sensed a slight vibration in the air behind her. She thought about turning around but there was no time; something hard hit her head and shoulder. Her vision blurred and she opened her legs wide to prevent herself from falling. Hazy assailants, emerging from who knew where, threw themselves on top of her.
It’s not possible
, she thought for an exasperated moment.
Where were they? Where the hell had they been hiding
? She fired her plasma gun at a shape, but a searing pain in her wrist forced her to drop the weapon. Half-stunned, she defended herself against her attackers with the fury of a wild animal. She hit, she kicked, she bit. The blows she was receiving didn’t hurt, but she was conscious of them landing on her.
Too many blows
, she calculated.
I won’t be able to take many more
. Then her knees went out from under her and she found herself on the floor.
It’s the end
, she told herself coldly. Without any fear. Without surprise. And she thought about Merlín.

“B
runa...how are you feeling?”

The rep didn’t recall having fainted. She thought she had been conscious the whole time—perhaps a bit stunned, but conscious—and yet she must have missed something, because there was no one around now. At least, none of her assailants. Only Lizard was there, leaning over her. He made a large, pleasant shadow, like a protective cave.

“How are you feeling?”

“Perfect,” answered the rep.

Or that’s what she tried to say. In reality, it sounded something like “purrffcc.”

“Bruna, do you know who I am? What’s my name?”

Irritation got her going.

“Oh, by-aw-the-speeshies, you’re Paw. Paul. Wha-you-dooo-here?”

She was recovering by the minute. And with lucidity came pain. Her neck hurt. Her hand hurt. Her kidneys hurt. Her head hurt. Even the air going slowly in and out of her lungs hurt.

“I tracked you. Just as well. You were taking a long time to come out so I decided to have a quick look around. The door was open and I found you lying here. They’ve given you a real beating. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anyone. There’s a hidden door in
the entrance hall that leads to a back staircase. They must have escaped that way.”

Bruna tried to sit up and groaned.

“Hold on.”

Lizard raised her up as easily as if he were lifting a doll and left her sitting with her back against the wall. That hurt, too. Her back, or maybe the wall.

“How do you feel?”

“Dizzy.”

She carefully felt her mouth with her hand.

“I think they’ve broken a tooth,” Paul announced.

“You’re joking.”

Bruna spit a clot of blood onto the floor. Which reminded her of the mem pirate.

“There’s a man here who’s—”

“Dead. Yes. They shattered his neck with a shot,” replied Lizard.

A pair of scared young FCPs appeared at the door.

“It’s about time you turned up. There’s a present for you over there,” said the inspector, signaling with his head toward the body.

“I’ve already alerted the examining magistrate. Nobody touches anything until he gets here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Meanwhile, Paul was examining the rep’s body with experienced hands, moving her legs, her arms, feeling her ribs.

“You’re covered with blood, but I think most of it is his.”

“I’m fine,” said Bruna.

“Sure. Come on, I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“No, not the hospital. To my place.”

“Okay. To your place, but via the hospital.”

Lizard picked up one of the android’s shoes from the floor—it had come off in the midst of the maelstrom—and raising her leg, he put the shoe on her foot with exquisite gentleness. And
then Bruna felt that something was breaking inside her, that something was beginning to hurt her more than all the other aches in her bruised body.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, barely resisting the ridiculous temptation to cry.

Oh, what was going to become of her? To make love with someone was easy. To sleep with the inspector, for example, would have been a very simple and banal thing to do. A gymnastic triviality quickly forgotten. But that someone would place a missing shoe on her foot, that someone would put the shoe on her foot with such gruff care, with such awkward tenderness—that was impossible to surpass. Lizard’s small gesture had left her defenseless. She was lost.

A
t the hospital they gave Bruna a full body CT fluoroscan and, surprisingly, there was no major damage. Her organs were fine, there was no internal hemorrhaging, and the knock on the head hadn’t produced any lasting trauma. She had a couple of cracked ribs and a superficial wound on her wrist from the plasma shot; luckily it wasn’t black plasma so it hadn’t affected the bones. In summary, there was nothing that couldn’t be cured with a round of subcutaneous paramorphine injections. As far as the broken tooth was concerned, they dealt with that in the same emergency cubicle by extracting the stump, inserting an implant and screwing on a new tooth that was totally indistinguishable from Bruna’s own. She was undoubtedly benefiting from being there with Paul Lizard. Bruna was paying with her own mediocre health insurance, but the inspector knew half the hospital personnel and he had managed to arrange for her to receive first-class treatment.

“It’s the medical center the Homicide Squad uses; that’s why I brought you here.”

I brought you
, Bruna repeated softly to herself as Lizard was helping her into his car. The rep had the feeling that he was making too many decisions for her. Under other circumstances, she would have found that situation infuriating. But she was exhausted and the paramorphine was deadening her nerves, so
she sank back comfortably into her seat and allowed herself to be taken away without saying a word. As they left the hospital parking station, a blast of gale-force wind rocked the car.

“Siberian wind. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but we’re in a state of emergency. There’s a polar crisis on its way.”

Not even the peacefulness of the drug could prevent the android from feeling a deep irritation at the news. Although climate change had caused the annual average temperature to rise several degrees and had turned previously temperate, wooded zones into desert, an inversion of the so-called Arctic Oscillation—a phenomenon Bruna had never managed to understand—periodically caused brief and unusual waves of extreme cold, with one or two days of heavy snowfalls, howling gales, and plummeting temperatures that in Madrid could easily reach minus four degrees Fahrenheit. Although the crisis had only just started, the temperature was going to drop still farther. The pedestrians, their faces cold, were struggling to walk against the wind, and were standing in line to buy provisions or, even worse, heaters and thermal clothing. The rep was always amazed at people’s lack of foresight; there were at least two polar crises each year, but people lived as if they were a one-off occurrence, something abnormal that would never happen again. And so, every time a cold snap arrived, supplies of thermal articles sold out.

“Look, it’s snowing already,” said Lizard.

And he was right. Half-dissolved snowflakes were crashing against the windshield. Deadly snow, thought the detective; the icy cold always left a trail of victims: the very old, the very sick, the very poor. The android breathed deeply, feeling incredibly good in the warm, soft interior of the vehicle, in the fuzzy calm of the drug, in the protective company of Lizard.

“You’re going the wrong way. It’s straight ahead.”

“We’re not going to your place, Bruna. I think it would be better, at least for today, if you rested in a safe place, and I’m not
convinced that your apartment is it. You could say that in recent times too many people have been bent on assaulting you.”

True
, thought the android. Before the memorist killers, there had been the thugs who had intercepted her on the way to her apartment, and before that, the attack by her neighbor Cata Caín, who had the scene of Bruna’s murder written on her deadly mem. The image of the rep gouging out her own eye lit up briefly in Bruna’s mind like a lightning flash of blood. She shivered.

“So where are we going, then?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“To my place.”

The android gave a slight frown. That wasn’t a good idea; it wasn’t at all good to give in to the inspector’s wishes, to assume the passivity of a wounded animal, the comfortable weakness of a victim. It wasn’t at all good to allow Paul to make decisions on her behalf without even pretending to consult her; to allow him to control her, no matter how gently he did so. On any other occasion, the rep would have refused, would have argued and protested, but now she allowed herself to be led, feeling a rare pleasure in her compliance. A perverse pleasure.
What difference does it make?
she thought.

“What difference does it make?” she growled softly.

Suddenly she remembered that, a few days back, she had left her panties on the hood of this very car, and she gave a little smile. What had the inspector thought when he found her gift? Had he guessed that it was from her? It was the night she met Lizard for the first time. A mad night; her body had been burning from the candy. Just the thought of the oxytocin cocktail made Bruna feel as if her body was slightly on fire. Indistinct but searing memories of her carnal rapture began to ignite in her head. But then she also remembered that she’d ended up in bed with the Omaá, and the mild, erotic excitement she was feeling suddenly vanished. All that had happened eight—no, seven—days ago. Friday, January 21. How many things had happened in that short time! If she were capable of living every day of her
life with such intensity, her short technohuman existence would seem very long indeed.

She tipped back her seat and closed her eyes.
Four years, three months, and fourteen days.
Today was Friday, January 28, 2109. Merlín had died on March 3; it would be the second anniversary of his death in just over a month. Bruna wondered what the exact date of her own death would be. Her obsessive countdown only provided the time left before she reached the fateful ten-year border, but as of that point TTT could take two to three months to finish her off. She figured it would be in April or May, or perhaps even June.

She must have fallen asleep, because she suddenly opened her eyes with a start and saw that the car had stopped, and Paul was saying something to her.

“Come on! We’re here.”

The snow was beginning to settle in, and as she got out of the vehicle, the intense cold pierced through her thin clothes like a thousand pinpricks. Lizard flung an arm across her shoulders and leaned his large body in close to hers. He did it so naturally that Bruna didn’t find it at all odd; on the contrary, her own body automatically adapted itself to the inspector’s as if it had made that move a thousand times in the past. And just like that, holding tightly on to each other, leaning into the cutting edge of the wind and protecting each other, they covered the distance to the building.

As she was going through the entrance, however, the detective, somewhat embarrassed, immediately disentangled herself. The movement produced a sharp stab in her injured ribs.

“So this is where you live,” she remarked foolishly, just for something to say, as she tentatively felt her rib cage with her fingers.

It was one of those old houses in what used to be the heart of Madrid, renovated on the inside a few decades earlier but not very well maintained. The narrow space next to the worn stairs housed a single, vintage elevator. Lizard opened his mailbox and a few holograph flyers emerged, shrieking. He crushed them with
his hand and put them into the sealed bin. Then he opened the elevator door for Bruna.

“You take it. Fourth floor. I’ll take the stairs.”

It was no surprise that he should walk up, as the cage was so small that the two of them would have fitted in only if they were tightly embraced.
A pity
, thought Bruna with a small smile as the elevator rose, shaking suspiciously. When it stopped on the fourth floor, Lizard was already there, only slightly out of breath. He wasn’t in bad shape, especially considering his bulk.