CHAPTER 10

Fifty kilometers outside Van Horn, Interstate Highway 10 laid down a luminescent pale strip of gray in the desert night, stretching away toward low, horizon-hugging mountain ranges whose names the man calling himself Eddie Tanaka had never bothered to learn. Stars punctured the velvet blue-black above like knife points, sharp white contrast to the dull red glowing orbs of the autohaul rigs below as they hammered along through the darkness in both directions, following the highway with insectile machine focus. Rising drone, blastpast rush of dark noise and wind, drone collapsing back into the distance. Passing the garish LCLS lights of Tabitha’s with a detachment no human driver could have mustered.

Well, maybe a gleech, he allowed sourly. They don’t got much use for this kind of merchandise.

He glanced up at the brothel’s skyline billboard—the name in vampiric spidery red lettering the original Tabitha would never have agreed to if she hadn’t sold up and moved to the Rim as soon as she had the capital. Behind the spiky-thin lettering, as if caged in by it, female figures switched back and forth in full flesh-toned color, pixeled almost—but, legal requirements and all, not quite—up to human footage perfect.

Gleech wouldn’t be out here on the highway anyway. They don’t drive.

That you know of.

That Kenan knew of, and he fucking was one, smart guy.

Smart guy? Yeah, you’re some fucking smart guy, Max, out in the parking lot of Tabitha’s with whore’s snot on your jacket and not even a blow job to show for it. All your plans and schemes, your carve-out-a-new-life bullshit, look where you’re standing still. Snot on your clothes and no blow job. That’s how fucking smart you are, smart guy.

“Smart guy…”

He heard his own mutter, final echo off the abrupt, tinny dispute he’d just mounted in his head, knew he was subvocalizing again, knew why. Knew, too, why he hadn’t bothered, couldn’t be bothered to push Chrissie into blowing him.

Never can fucking leave it at just one shot, can you.

He’d dumped the synadrive into his eyes a couple of hours earlier, and the thing was, this was quality product, right out of his own stash, not the stepped-on shit he shifted to the kids in Van Horn and Kent on a Saturday night. So he fucking well knew he’d only need that single squirt—and initially that was what he settled for, just the one dropperload dribbled down onto the quivering surface of his left eye, what the kids called pirate dosage. But pirate shots always, fucking always, left him feeling weirdly unbalanced, and that was on a good night—which tonight wasn’t—and so as the synadrive came on, that feeling of fucked-up symmetry built and fucking built until it seemed like the whole right side of his body was just too slow and sleepy to bear, and so he gave in and tipped his head back one more time before he hit the road, and the fluid rolled down his right eyeball like tears.

Was a time, he recalled, you had the disicipline. Discipline or self-respect, either way something that wouldn’t let you do this to yourself.

He was remembering that time a lot these days, staring into mirrors at rooms he abruptly couldn’t believe he belonged in, wondering how he’d wound up here and where it had all leaked away to. That time when syn was a tool like any other, useful and used with a wired confidence that would have been arrogance if it hadn’t all felt so fucking clean and right. Back before it all turned to shit and a black pall of smoke across a Wyoming sundown sky.

Was a time…

Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you’d never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max—get over it. Skip the fucking nostalgia, let’s get where we’re at.

And here he was. Snot and no blow job, out in the night.

He wiped a hand down his jacket, not bothering to look. The synadrive hooked in visual memory and sparked a link to neuromotor precision, put the gesture right on target, and his fingers came away gummy with the snot. He rubbed them back and forth, grimacing. He didn’t need this shit right now, not the way things were. Not like he didn’t have enough stress. He told her, he fucking told her he had other stuff cooking, stuff that needed managing, not like this pimping shit was his main gig—

Yeah, right, the syn told him crisply. How many years we been saying that, exactly? Smart guy?

Different this time. This pays off like it has been, this time next year we’re out. Out for good.

And if it doesn’t?

If it doesn’t, we’re already set up to cover. Quit worrying.

Set up to cover, yeah. And go on being a pimp for life. What you going to do about Chrissie then?

What he was going to do then, he reflected somberly, was going to have to do about Chrissie then, was probably something violent. Should have seen that one all along—fucking bitch always had been high maintenance, even back in Houston when she was still working street corners. Cotton-candy mane of blond and that manicured fucking Texan drawl, and now the subcute tit work he’d gotten for her, he should have fucking known she’d start with the airs and graces as soon as she settled in at Tabitha’s. Acting just like she actually was the bonobo purebred they’d packaged her as. Calling him at all hours, or pushing Tabitha’s management so they called instead, bitching about how she wouldn’t work on account of some headache or stomach cramp or just plain didn’t like some fat fuck who’d paid good money to get between her legs, sitting there on the fucking bed bright-eyed and whining Eddie this, Eddie that, Eddie the fucking other, forcing him to wheel out the whole nine yards of bully-threaten-cajole like it was some favorite comic routine she liked to see him do.

So why the fuck didn’t you just take Serena or Maggie for that subcute work instead. Either one’d be half the fucking trouble.

In the hyperlucid blast of the syn, he knew why. But he turned on his heel and put the knowledge at his back along with the blink-blink carnal come-on of Tabitha’s skyline billboard. The relative gloom of the softly lit parking lot darkened his vision. He blinked hard to adjust.

“Hello, Max.”

The voice jolted him as he blinked, kicked him back to the Scorpion memories, to times and places so vivid he opened his eyes and almost expected to find himself back there, back before Wyoming in that other, cleaner time.

But he wasn’t.

He was still here, in the deserted parking lot of a second-rate Texas bordello, with a sassy whore’s snot drying on his fingers and too much syn for his own good sparking through his brain.

The figure detached itself from the shadows around his car, stood to face him. Soft violet light from the lot’s marker lamps threw the form into silhouette, killed facial recognition. But something about the stance chased up the memories the voice had stirred. The syn gave him a name, features to put on the darkened form. He stared, trying to make sense of it.

“You?”

The figure shifted, made a low gesture with one hand.

“But…” He shook his head. “You…You’re on fucking Mars, man.”

The figure said nothing, waited. Eddie moved closer, arms raised toward a tentative hugging embrace.

“When’d you get back? I mean, man, what are you doing back here?”

“Don’t you know?”

He made a baffled smile, genuine in its origins. “No, man, I’ve got no fucking—”

—and the smile collapsed, bleached out with sudden understanding.

For just an instant, the desert quiet and the rushing away of an autohauler on the highway.

He clawed across his belly, under his jacket. Had fingers hooked around the butt of the compact Colt Citizen he kept cling-padded at his belt—

He’d moved too close.

The knowledge dripped through him, and it was a Scorpion knowing from that other time, somehow sad and slow despite the speed at which he could see it all coming apart. The figure snapped forward, bruising grip on his wrist, and pinned his gun arm where it was. He flung up a warding left arm, chopped at the other man’s throat, or face, or, too close, too fucking close in, and here came the block, he had nothing, could do nothing. A low kick took out his legs from under him, a full-body shove, and he went down. He rolled, desperately, don’t let the fucker get on you with his boots, land on your back maybe, the gun, the fucking gun—

The cling-clip held. He got a grip of the Colt’s butt again, dragged it loose and sprawled backward with a snarl of relief, raising the pistol, the Citizen had no safety, just squeeze hard and—

The figure stood over him, black against the sky. Arm down, pointing—

And something flattened him to the ground again, something with god-like force.

Muffled crack. His ears took it in, but it took him a couple of moments to assign it any importance. The stars were right overhead. He watched them, abruptly fascinated. They seemed a lot closer than you’d expect, hanging low, like they’d taken a sudden interest.

He wheezed, felt something leaking rapidly, like cold water in his chest. He knew what it was. The syn forced a merciless clarity.

He lifted his head and it was the hardest work he’d ever done, as if his skull were made of solid stone. He made out the figure of the other man, arm still pointing down at him like some kind of judgment.

“I figured you’d fight,” said the voice. “But it’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it. Too long. Maybe that’s why.”

Why what? he wondered muzzily. He coughed, tasted blood in his throat. Wondered also what Chrissie was going to do now, stupid little bitch.

“I think you’re done,” said the voice.

He tried to nod, but his head just fell back on the gritty surface of the lot, and this time it stayed there. The stars, he noticed, seemed to be dimming, and the sky looked colder than it had before, less velvet-soft and more like the open void it really was.

Dead in a brothel parking lot, for fuck’s sake.

He heard the blastpast of another autohauler out on the highway, saw in his mind’s eye the cozy red glow of its taillights accelerating away into the darkness.

He ran to catch up.