The girl looked at me as though I’d conjured the cab out of the air. The driver looked at her with a hint of scorn, recognising a streetkid. I didn’t care because we were behind steel doors and speeding towards home and the man with the knife was far behind.
We dropped her at the main road with enough credit for a fare into the heart of town. As she left she muttered thanks and then in a voice like a scared child, too low for the driver to hear, said, “My name’s Luna.”
I guessed she’d pocket the credit and blade back through the night, but that was her choice. When we reached Midway I thanked the driver again and overpaid him. It wasn’t worth trying to explain.
There was a public phone terminal at the top of the hill. Just what I needed for an anonymous call. I wasn’t quite sure why I bothered. It wasn’t going to trouble Blue Eyes any if the peeps found him tomorrow or next week. I just didn’t like to think of what traffic would pass through that room before anyone reported him dead. Didn’t like to think there might be another tenant in there before morning.
I suppose I should have told Byron. Perhaps I would. Later.
The Port was empty. The faint hum of machinery which was masked by activity in daytime was there now, just below the threshold of hearing. Machines somewhere were busy ignoring night and doing whatever tasks they’d been programmed for. My footsteps slapped on the dew-wet asphalt of the forecourt. No one watched me walk across to the dark edge where the Port met the river and I could climb down the rusting ladder to the Pig.
Home. Light. Not the harsh orange of the powered lamps but the old lantern with its smell and its yellow glow and its heat. I held my hands out to its living flame and watched their tremor while a small part of my mind replayed what had happened with the unforgiving precision of a vidcast.
I didn’t open my sack. Didn’t take out the package which lay inside it and which I wasn’t ready to face. Instead I took the cards from their pack and began to lay out a game. The automatic motions steadied my hands but when I stared at the cards they were meaningless. They stared back at me and I saw Blue Eyes in their blind gaze.
No point trying to tell myself I was not involved in his death. At best I had made it come sooner rather than later. At worst I had caused it.
Facing truth is something I have been brought up to do. The truth shall make you free. Soul-searching and public confession were weekly entertainment in the Community. I had never found it came easily, nor did I ever feel any better once everyone knew what I had done. Once I knew what I had done. I felt no better now, either, but the process wasn’t easily stopped. It was partly being born a New Puritan. Another part was a liking for logic. Consequences had to have causes and if I was part of the cause I wanted to know who else had been behind the hand which held the knife. And why.
I kept coming back to that why. Jon’s death and Blue Eyes’ had to be linked. And there had to be a reason why Jon still showed alive on everyone’s screens. The packages collected from the mail box were part of it, but who they were sent to or from I was no nearer knowing. I should have made Luna hand over what she had collected, or at least tell me where she was taking it. She had clutched it to her in the cab and shaken her head at the couple of questions I’d asked but I was bigger and stronger.
The guy who had chased us wouldn’t have hesitated to take it.
And that made me think: had he seen her pick up the packet from the lobby? If his surveillance equipment was more sophisticated than you’d expect from that building – and since nothing else was as it should be, why not? – he might have had a viewer on her, which meant he’d ignored her for two possible reasons. Either it was only me he was interested in and he was ready to ignore what anyone else did. Or he knew exactly what she was doing, which meant they were working on the same project.
Did that mean that she’d never been at risk? Or that it was me talking to her that had put her in jeopardy? Just like Blue Eyes.
And why had she let me have her name?
The cards blurred and I tucked my feet up under me on the padded bench. The smaller problem, that unexpected trust, somehow seemed bigger right then than all the rest. Murder and pursuit included.