Noir (57 page)

“Like you said. She’d done her job.”

Nice
, thought November. She didn’t even know who they were talking about, but she could figure out that whatever had happened was entirely typical of the way Harrisch operated.
Somebody
—
some poor little thing
—
always gets it
.

“But still—”The look of confusion didn’t disappear from Harrisch’s face. “How could you tell you were infected? It doesn’t show; TOAW doesn’t work on a visible basis.”

“Not for you,” said McNihil. “But you forgot.
I don’t see things the way you do
. Some things that are real and visible for you, I don’t see—and vice versa. TOAW as a contagious disease is a metaphor—and I can see some of those.” McNihil tapped the side of his face. “My eyes are different. You knew that, but you forgot, or you didn’t think it was important. But it is. Because the way I see things, that kind of vision … it translated your TOAW-as-disease metaphor into something visible for me, something I could see. An actual disease, a physical contagion, with symptoms I could see and feel right on my own body.”

“Yeah?” November was both repelled and fascinated. She couldn’t see anything wrong with him.
But then
, she realized,
I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t have his eyes
. “What kind of disease?”

“Come on. What do you expect?” McNihil displayed no embarrassment. “The designers at the DynaZauber labs put together TOAW using a venereal-disease model—so naturally I’m going to see it that way. One of the classic varieties; the symptoms are pretty hard to mistake. But just to be sure, I had to get checked out—or tried to.” He glanced over at Harrisch. “That was another reason I wanted to meet with you at the hospital. Killing two birds with one stone. Before I came up to the burn ward for our little conversation, I had time to swing by the communicable-disease clinic on the ground floor; it’s their job to find out who’s come down with what. And they couldn’t find anything.
They couldn’t even
see
it—not the way I could. That just confirmed what I’d already pretty much figured out. That something else was going on. Something that had DZ written all over it.”

“You knew,” marveled Harrisch. “You knew that much—and you still took the job.”

“Why not?” McNihil shrugged. “It was the only way to get you off my ass. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The cube bunny had done her job, and now I was supposed to do mine. And then everything would’ve been just the way you wanted it, with TOAW successfully inserted into the Wedge. With everybody lining up, to come in and get contaminated. That’s a fine old tradition with these sex-based industries, isn’t it? Historically, you’re going with the flow on that one; even making a profit from disease isn’t that much of an innovation.” The contempt in McNihil’s eyes turned to pure loathing, something that appeared to November as deep and instinctual, the gaze of a human creature toward a particularly noxious arachnid. “It would’ve all worked out so well for you and everybody else at DynaZauber, except for one thing.
I found a way to keep the contagion from spreading
. There may be diseases in the Wedge, but none of them are TOAW”

“That’s impossible.” Harrisch stared wonderingly at the asp-head. “If you went into the Wedge at all, if you had any contact with anyone there—you would’ve spread it. Sex isn’t necessary for the transmission.”

“Why not before?” The unquieting thought had just occurred to November. She instinctively drew a little farther away from McNihil. “If you were already infected—why wouldn’t you have been passing it on before you went into the Wedge?”

“Because TOAW’s got a lock on it.” McNihil glanced over at her. “You don’t have to worry. The DynaZauber labs wired a bonding inhibitor into TOAW, so they could mess around with it all they wanted back at DZ headquarters and not worry—or at least not much—about anybody catching it there.” He pointed with his thumb toward Harrisch. “That’s why this connector’s not worried about catching it. He’s got the bonding inhibitor as an adjunct to his immune system, like a vaccine. Just another way that TOAW is such an improvement over all those old-fashioned type diseases; with this one, only the right people come down with it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s great for him.” A surge of anger welled up inside
November. “But I don’t have any kind of inhibitor.”
If I’d have known
, she thought viciously,
maybe I wouldn’t have come to this little party
. “I’m running around here without protection.”

“Simmer down,” McNihil told her. “You don’t have anything to worry about, either. It’s not a problem for anyone. Not now. Like I said, I took care of it.”

“You’re lying.” Trembling, Harrisch rose up on his knees. “There’s no way. At the clinic—the Adder clome showed me the proof that he’d disabled the bonding inhibitor on you. As soon as you walked out his door, you were an active infectious agent. A TOAW vector—”

“He may have taken out the inhibitor—but just doing that wouldn’t make me a vector carrying a transmittable disease. I’m way ahead of that one.” McNihil gave the exec a grim fraction of a smile. “You and the TOAW designers back at DZ headquarters overlooked something. You made TOAW communicable between humans and humans, between prowlers and humans, between prowlers and prowlers—you thought you’d covered all the bases. But it’s still essentially a
biological
disease. A disease for the living.”

“Wait …” November reached her hand toward his arm, as though there were some way that she might intervene in what had already happened. “Don’t …”

The identical surmise flashed behind Harrisch’s startled gaze. “You’re crazy—”

“Probably. But that doesn’t change things.” With both hands, McNihil pulled open the front of his shirt. “The dead can’t infect the living. Not that way.”

November could see the wound, the bullet hole above and through his heart. He would’ve had to have used his own weapon, that monstrous tannhäuser he was always carrying around, to have done that kind of perfect damage. It looked like it’d stopped bleeding a long time ago, an old wound, something that would’ve decorated the inhabitant of a stainless-steel morgue drawer.

“Of course,” she murmured. “Now it really does make sense …” The pieces had already started to fall together; now they flew toward one another even faster. “That was why you went into hock, to pay for the skin grafts and everything else I got at the hospital. It wasn’t just to keep me alive, to put me back together and out on the street. It was the debt; it wasn’t a drawback to the arrangement. It was what you wanted.”
She had talked to the dead before, in another place far from this one; she’d gotten used to it. And to what they said.
They always tell the truth
, thought November. Maybe because they no longer had anything to lose by it. “To be in debt,” she mused, thinking about McNihil’s words. “To be so far into the hole, owing so much money, that your own death wouldn’t get you off the hook. You’d be one of the indeadted, a walking corpse—like those ones down in the south of the Gloss.”

“Exactly.” McNihil gave a quick nod. “And when you’re reanimated because of outstanding debts, you’re automatically assigned to whatever ongoing job you might have that has the highest possibility of making enough money to pay off what you owe. I already had this gig with DynaZauber, so I was allowed to go ahead with it. Only the job I had been given was to find out what happened to Travelt and his prowler—and I did that. It’s not my problem if what these people really wanted was for me to infect the Wedge with their TOAW project. Because that didn’t happen; the vector modeling after a venereal disease was too close; it can only be transmitted from one
living
thing, a human or a prowler, to another. They forgot about the dead. But that’s all right.” This nod was slower, with obvious satisfaction. “I didn’t forget about them.”

“You didn’t do it for me at all.” November was amazed at how much clearer that made things. “You just needed to rack up the debt—and doing it at a hospital is the fastest way. Everybody knows that.”

“It’s nothing personal,” said McNihil. “And you got something out of it.”

“No, no—it’s okay. I don’t mind.” The thought struck her, that he’d already been dead, entering into the land of the dead and making it his own, when she’d been coming back from it.
He must’ve done it
, she thought,
right after he finished talking with Harrisch at the hospital
. When he’d been by himself again, up in that shabby little apartment of his.
Just took out his gun and
—
did it
. When they’d been putting her back together, fitting a new skin to her, he’d already had a hole drilled through his heart. A real one at last, to match the metaphorical one. “As long as … it’s what you wanted.”

“Connect this.” Harrisch’s snarling voice broke in. “I don’t care if you think you did the job we hired you for or not—you’re not getting paid. You’re not getting a penny from us. That debt you’re carrying around? It’s yours for good. If you think you’re headed for a quiet grave,
that you’re not going to be indeadted forever—you’re really connected. Anybody connects around with us, gets a long time to regret it.”

“Maybe so.” McNihil’s voice softened. “I’ll have a long time, all right. All that skin didn’t come cheap; what I owe now, I can’t even generate the interest payments on. But I don’t know about regrets—”

His voice was drowned out. For a few moments, November had forgotten about the slow sea, the gel filled with soft bones and human neural tissue, surrounding the building, extending out farther than she could see. The rooftop of the End Zone Hotel had become a little world in itself, the place where the last words were being spoken, the final explanations given. As if they—or it—were listening, the poly-orgynism had quieted itself, the waves subsiding for a time. In that quiet, the clouds overhead had grown darker and heavier, another ceiling rolling nearly within reach. The next rain wouldn’t be fire, but ice and steam mingled together. The sound that swallowed up McNihil’s voice was like thunder and earthquake, the coming together of earth and sky.

The flat world tilted, the rooftop with its gaping holes and solid sections swiveling into a forty-five-degree angle as one entire side of the building collapsed. Falling, November heard the rumble of bricks and girders sliding in chaos onto the gel below. Her spine hit tar paper that flexed like a drumhead with her impact, the edges tearing loose from the surrounding material. She rolled onto her side, head downward, scrabbling desperately for anything to hold on to. Grabbing on to the broken end of a structural beam, jutting out from the collapsing depths of the hotel like the bowsprit of a foundering ship, November found herself shoulder-to-shoulder with McNihil. The dead asp-head’s fingers had clawed a purchase onto the sharp knife’s-edge of a ripped-open ventilation duct; with a kick of his legs, he got his chest up onto the corner of the thin metal.

“I think … she got tired of waiting …” There was no need anymore, for McNihil to gasp for breath. “She can get … impatient …”

“What?” November stared at him. “Who are you talking—”

She didn’t get to finish the question. She’d braced herself for the slam of another wave building up in the slow ocean beneath him, but was unprepared for the butt of a human hand striking her between the eyes. Her head rocked back, as her fingers gripped tighter on their own accord. Through a net of her own blood, November saw Harrisch above
her, one of his hands grasping an insulated electrical cable like a mountain climber’s belaying rope. His thin, ugly smile showed as his other hand reached and fumbled inside November’s jacket.

“It’s been great talking to you.” Harrisch’s voice spat out the words, as his hand came up with the tight-cell phone. “But I’ve got another agenda to take care of.”

November heard the tiny beep of the phone’s send button being hit, as Harrisch clambered up the cable with furious agility. The far edge of the rooftop had reared up, a straight-line peak against the darkening clouds. Storm winds hit the DZ exec full-force, but he managed to let go of the cable and jump, clinging to the highest point; the phone, no longer needed, tumbled like a smooth stone down the roof’s skewed surface.

Beside her, McNihil tried to clamber farther onto the ventilation duct, but the flat aluminum was too slick for him to work his fingertips into. “Relax,” said November. She’d managed to get one bootsole onto the edge of the gap behind and below her; with that and the beam, she got herself back on the slanting roof. What was left of it shook beneath her hands and knees, as more of the shattered building fell away. “I’ll settle his account.”

Harrisch was too busy watching the skies, looking for the corporate jet that had brought him to the End Zone Hotel. He didn’t hear November’s clawing approach, masked by the gel’s rumbling impact, until it was too late. Using one of the smaller gaps as a handhold, she reached up and grabbed his ankle, jerking him back down from the rooftop’s edge.

Startled, he managed to hang on, sliding only a couple of feet down toward her. His kick caught her on the chin, loosening her grasp for a few seconds, letting him scramble back up, farther than he’d been before. Enough to push himself upright into the open air. Beyond him, November saw fiery sparks falling in the distance. The DynaZauber jet, surrounded by drones and swarming
Noh
-flies, banked into its approach run.

November made another grab for the exec’s ankle, but missed. Her handhold gave way, letting her slide painfully across the rooftop’s jagged surface before she could dig in and stop herself.

She looked up and saw Harrisch, out of her reach, climbing up onto the exposed crest of the roof’s highest angle. He took one hand away
from the ridge, signaling frantically to the still-distant jet. That was enough; that, and the next wave that rose up and hit the building. Hot scraps of metal swept across the rooftop as it rolled with the impact. November flinched, shielding her face against one shoulder; she saw only a glimpse of Harrisch’s face as he lost balance and fell over the building’s side.

When she reached the edge, fingertips digging into the crumbling tar paper, November looked down and saw where the exec had hit. The gel of the soft, slow ocean had cushioned Harrisch’s impact; he was still alive and moving, legs and arms splayed out, dazed face looking up unfocused at the dark sky. Across the surface membrane were the scattered pieces of the network crews’ catwalks and equipment booms; none of the cameramen were in sight.
You’re missing it
, November told them inside her head.