It was night, and the Original Tribe was mostly sleeping. Decimal River dozed before the glowing screen of his laptop, a blanket over his legs.
Cloud Singer entered the cave silently, her dark skin and bloodred clothing making her just another part of the shadows, only the whites of her eyes giving away her presence. On bare feet, she walked across the cave and stood over the laptop, staring at its screen. The screen had been set to energy-save mode and was much duller than normal, but she could still read the details there.
Subject: Kane. Status: Active.
Subject: Grant. Status: Active.
Subject: Baptiste. Status: Active.
Their minds were trapped; that was the essence of the situation. Their minds were trapped, never to free themselves, never to reenter Realworld, digital files held in stasis forever, or until someone pulled the switch, wiped the program. And what would happen then? Cloud Singer wondered. Would they dissipate into nothingness, would their souls float free without bodies or would they somehow re-form or even acquire new shapes, like a chrysalis becoming a butterfly?
Beside her, Decimal River stirred, rolling his muscles as he woke up. “Cloud Singer,” he gasped, his tongue thick with sleep.
“I need to go inside,” Cloud Singer told him, her voice firm, “into the trap.”
Decimal River was still for a moment, trying to make sense of her words as he came to full awareness. “Broken Ghost said not to,” he reminded her.
“Broken Ghost wasn’t there when our friends died,” Cloud Singer told him, “and I was. Neverwalk was fifteen, and they killed him. It was his first field mission—he didn’t even get the chance to fight. They didn’t just kill him—they ripped his throat out. His death was slow agony, Decimal River.”
Decimal River nodded, absorbing this information.
“Broken Ghost didn’t see him,” Cloud Singer continued after a moment, “and I did. And now I want to go inside the trap to make sure, to see for myself, that they are truly stuck, that they will be lost forever.”
Decimal River nodded wearily. “I understand,” he told Cloud Singer, “but I don’t think that you should.”
“Can it be done?” Cloud Singer urged, ignoring his concerns. “Can you put me inside the trap?”
Decimal River nodded again. “I included a back-door coding into the program. It will allow one of us to enter, to become a character within their new world,” he said.
Cloud Singer stood, arms outstretched, head back. “Send me, then,” she said.
“And what do I tell Broken Ghost?” Decimal River asked.
“Broken Ghost is asleep,” Cloud Singer said. “I checked before I came here. She need never know.”
“Better that she doesn’t,” Decimal River agreed, rifling through a box of attachments until he brought out a reel of cable with a USB jack at one end and a headset at the other.
“What’s that?” Cloud Singer asked, looking at the cable with its headset.
“I cannibalized a mike headset,” Decimal River said, proud of his own ingenuity. “It will pick up your brain-waves and let you operate inside the trap while your body remains here.”
Cloud Singer nodded, taking the headset from Decimal River and placing it over her head as she sat before the laptop. “I see,” she said.
Decimal River attached the USB spike to a port in the side of the laptop, and began running a series of codes through the mainframe. “Where do you want to go?” he asked. “Which one of them do you want to see?”
Cloud Singer thought back, remembering the savage battle in the bunk room beneath the Caucasus Mountains, the skeletons of Russian soldiers all around them as she and Rock Streaming fought with the tall, muscular American with eyes of steel and the build of an alpha male dingo. “Kane,” she said. “Take me to Kane.”
SHE FELT AS THOUGH she was caught in a sudden downpour, the sort that soaks the dry plains of the outback with much-needed water, that comes with sheet lightning and deafening thunder, the type that’s all energy and exhilaration. And then, whatever the barrier was, the change of thinking, the rewiring of the brain, she was through, inside another world that seemed every bit as real as the cave in Australia where her body resided, its sounds and smells and the taste of the very air itself a definable quality.
Cloud Singer looked about her, saw the huge tower that dominated the center of the walled man-made settlement. This was Cobaltville, she understood, or a Cobaltville simulation, at least.
Figures moved about her, indistinct, unreal, like phantoms, forming from polygons and blocks into human shapes as they walked away from her. Concerned, Cloud Singer looked at her hands, down at her body. She was intact, the bloodred strips of her battle clothes perfectly reproduced in this new world. As Broken Ghost and Decimal River had explained, whatever a prisoner took to the trap would be remade here, their wants twisted.
Cloud Singer was standing in an alleyway between two buildings.
She stepped warily out into the street beyond. Directly opposite the alleyway where she had arrived was a towering structure that dominated the entire ville. Cloud Singer read the words beneath: Administrative Monolith.
As she watched, the phantoms around her became people, solid and fully realized, each now an individual with character and distinct mannerisms. Cloud Singer turned to her left and saw two new figures approaching. One was a boy, still going through puberty by the looks of him, about the age that Neverwalk had been when he had been killed. The boy walked with his head bowed as though afraid. Behind the teenager, a large figure walked purposefully forward, a commanding presence, shoving the boy between his shoulder blades whenever he tried to slow down. She recognized the man instantly, despite the dark lenses that he wore to mask his face: Kane.
Cloud Singer began moving, picking up her pace as she headed directly toward Kane and his charge. She wanted to run, to attack the man, kill him for what he had done in that underground bunker in Russia. She saw his head turn slightly, some intuitive sense realizing that he was being approached, and in that instant, she realized her folly. She turned, blending into the crowd, hiding herself from his view.
KANE GRABBED THE PERP by the collar and yanked him to a halt just before the wide concrete steps that led up to the Administrative Monolith. Someone was watching him. He knew it instantly, some sixth sense, his point-man instinct kicking into high gear and automatically scanning the faces in the crowd.
The people seemed normal, ordinary Cobaltville residents going about their business, no two faces alike. He watched the pedestrians walking past, always busy, always with places to go, living their carefully ordered lives. A rickshaw passed by, pulled by a dark-haired man with an olive complexion, probably of outlander stock.
“What are you doing, man?” the teenager’s whiny voice came to Kane. “I thought you were going to turn me in.”
“Hush,” Kane told the perp as he clung tight to the youth’s collar, not bothering to look at him. He continued scanning the crowd, examining the faces with practiced speed, moving through them like the pages of a flick book.
A little way back, across the far side of the street, a figure was retreating, trying to lose itself in the crowd. A woman, not very tall, her form svelte but muscular. Her skin was dark and, as gaps appeared in the crowd about her, Kane saw that she was covered with tattooed designs, lines and swirls that looked like circuitry. Her clothing was strange, too, strips of cloth of a very dark red, so dark as to be almost black.
The woman was facing away from Kane, her head down, but she seemed nervous, her movements anxious. That wasn’t so unusual; people got that way around Mags sometimes. And yet there was something odd about the woman, and not just in her clothes or her strange, almost tribal tattoos.
Kane couldn’t put his finger on it. He filed the information away for later and shoved his prisoner up the steps and through the main doors of the tower.
TURNING AWAY, Cloud Singer watched Kane’s reflection in the glass windows of the buildings she walked past. She saw the Magistrate enter the Administrative Monolith with his charge at last. As the doors closed behind the two figures, the crowd around her faded, becoming ghostlike blocks, then just strips of code as she watched them. Suddenly, she was in the street alone.
The street, too, was an artificial construct, she realized as the people-codes evaporated. The map had to be finalized, however, a complete construction that was available at all times while the people only appeared as needed. As soon as Kane, or one of the others—Grant or Baptiste—appeared, the details of the world would form around them, a radial pattern of activity that surrounded them no matter where they were. The perfect illusion of a living, breathing world; they would never know any difference.
How many people do we truly interact with in our world? Cloud Singer wondered. How much of it could be artifice, sleight of hand, a confidence trick feeding our perception of what a world should be?
She stood there, looking at the tower, wondering what activity was occurring inside, convincing Kane that this play-world was real.
KANE MARCHED THROUGH the double doors into the high-ceilinged lobby of the Hall of Cappa Level, watching the slouched shoulders of the perp who stomped ahead of him.
A tall statue loomed over the wide room, a robed woman holding scales and wearing a blindfold—justice. The statue towered to almost three full stories, bearing down on proceedings within the large, open area. Kane walked the perp past it to the main reception desk, recognizing the Magistrate on duty there.
“One for the cells, O’Brien,” Kane announced, pushing the teenager against the desk and pinning his arms in a swift, practiced movement to ensure that he could not move. The teen grunted in discomfort.
The desk Mag glanced contemptuously at the pimple-faced teen before looking up and acknowledging Kane with a warm smile. “Kane, I thought you were off duty today.”
Kane nodded sourly. “I am. This sewer rat happened to bust in on my free time.”
O’Brien tsked and shook his head, his gaze returning to the teenager. “What did you do, son?”
“Nothing,” the teen replied far too quickly.
“Bag snatch out on Market Square,” Kane elaborated when O’Brien threw him a questioning look. “Toss him in a cell until I come on shift tomorrow. Run him through the system, let me know if he’s got any priors, okay?”
“Sure thing, Kane,” O’Brien agreed, pulling a pair of plastic riot cuffs from his desk.
Muttering under his breath, the boy turned and let the desk Mag cuff him as Kane made his way past the statue of justice and through the Cappa Level lobby. As he stood by the doors, a Mag in riot gear came striding through, his black visor splintered where it had taken a hit. Kane acknowledged the Mag with a curt nod, holding the door open for the man.
CLOUD SINGER HAD FOUND a drop-down fire ladder running up the side of one of the buildings opposite the Administrative Monolith, which she clambered in a matter of seconds. The ladder led to some iron stairs, and these in turn brought Cloud Singer to the roof of the building where she could look out over the ville. Birds flew through the air up here, pigeons and white gulls, cawing and chirping as they swooped through the high canyons between the interconnected towers of the Residential Enclaves.
There was a caste system in operation here, Cloud Singer understood, yet another vision of utopia built upon the structured limitation and suffering of others, and the system expressed itself through proximity to the sky. The closer one’s apartment and workplace to the apex of the towering Administrative Monolith, the higher one’s social standing.
Not that any of it mattered, Cloud Singer knew. The whole thing was just an artifice, a construct to imprison the Cerberus warriors. A mirror that lied, a cruel trick.
She looked out across the ville and spotted a pocket of activity across from her.
The boulevard that ran along an apartment block across to the south showed people walking up and down. As they got farther from the building’s windows they disappeared, ceasing to exist, their roles all played out. One of the Cerberus people had to be entering that building, or perhaps was already inside, gazing out of the windows at the seemingly normal street scene beyond the glass, utterly unaware of the brief lives that the people he or she saw were living.
Hearing street sounds waft up toward her, Cloud Singer turned back and saw people on the street once more, becoming substantial as the main doors to the building opened and a dark-clad figure stepped out. It had to be Kane, of course.
Cloud Singer stood at the roof’s ledge, peering down, watching the broad-shouldered man make his way along the busy street. He was utterly unaware that the people around him ceased to exist as he turned a corner, with new ones forming wherever he went.
She could kill him right now, she realized, kill him in this world.
Kill him in his own world.
She began to walk along the rooftop, mirroring Kane’s movements, several stories above where he walked. He continued moving, heading south, the bubble of activity massing around him all the while, like moths around a lamp.
Cloud Singer had reached the end of the roof, and she peered down, watching Kane’s retreating figure surrounded by the buzz of activity.
Cloud Singer stood at the very edge of the roof, her bare feet on the ledge, toes curled around it, watching the violent man walk freely through this strange playground. It didn’t seem right to her that he had all of this after killing her colleagues. This was a trap, true, but she wanted him to suffer, to feel the pain that her friends had felt, that Neverwalk had felt.
Kane’s figure became smaller as Cloud Singer watched, then the man turned into a cross street and disappeared from view. She stood atop the roof, and her hands clenched into tight fists, remembering Neverwalk with the missing piece of his neck, the bloody pool that his body lay in. Kane reappeared, striding across the gap between buildings, other people passing him.
Cloud Singer stepped back from the ledge, looking over her shoulder. Then she backed up, walking backward until she was midway across the roof. She leaned down, coiling her muscles, settling her breathing as she adopted a runner’s crouch. And then she sprang into action, legs racing, arms pumping, running as fast as she could at the far ledge of the rooftop. A moment later she was at the edge, kicking off from it, leaping high into the air between the buildings.
Slam! She hit the far rooftop with curled toes and the balls of her feet, and her legs bent to cushion the impact. She didn’t stop, not even for an instant. Her body was already moving ahead, arms cleaving the air in rhythm at her sides, feet pounding against the grit-covered rooftop beneath her.
Ahead, in the gaps between buildings, she saw Kane reappear once more, still making his way south. Cloud Singer ran onward, vaulting a boxy air vent slick with condensation, then veering to her left to follow Kane.
Again the edge of a roof appeared, but Cloud Singer didn’t slow, just held her head low to her body, arms and legs pumping as she leaped out into free space, cutting the air with her body until her feet met with the next rooftop and her body navigated over one obstacle, around the next.
Cloud Singer reached the edge of the building in a few seconds, muscles powering her onward, kicking out into the air above the street, letting her body land where it may. The building facing her was constructed in a series of glass tiers, shaped like an Inca pyramid, and she landed on one of the steps, rolling her body to diffuse the momentum of the leap. She looked about her—the building continued up, reaching ten stories into the air, higher than the structures around it.
Looking down at the streets below, she spied Kane once more, easy to spot by simply looking for the crowds. He was just a block away; she could reach him in twenty seconds.
The buildings around her were low, four-and five-story structures, pristine clean, glimmering in the afternoon sun. Two window cleaners worked on a mobile scaffold along one side of one of the buildings, going about their business in silence. As she looked more carefully, Cloud Singer realized that they weren’t cleaning the windows; they were burning off the grime from the brickwork using some kind of acetylene blowtorch. The rulers of Cobaltville believed in utter cleanliness, complete, near fanatical order.
She ran along the step tier of the building before leaping from it, arms outstretched, flinging her body like a dart at the next building. Her hand slapped at the building’s edge and she pushed herself forward, driving her body over the lip and onto the rooftop, running across it in a few seconds. The service alleyway was just ahead of her, and she flung herself into the air feetfirst. Her bare feet slapped against the wall before her, and she seemed to almost run down it for the first two stories, using gravity and momentum to her advantage before kicking off and tracking from one wall to the other, back and forth to shed her speed before she reached the ground.
Kane turned at the last moment, realizing that something untoward was happening in the alleyway beside him, but he was too late. Nine feet above him, Cloud Singer kicked off from the wall and dived through the air at the darkly clad Magistrate, raising her other leg into a sweeping kick that connected fully with Kane’s chest.
The Mag dropped, arms windmilling as he fell backward. Kane swiftly pushed himself up and looked around. He saw the dark-skinned woman coming up from her crouch, her fierce eyes fixed on his. It was the same woman whom he had spied on the street, the woman with the eerie tattoos and the red-black rags of clothing.
Automatically, Kane tensed his wrist tendons, calling the Sin Eater to hand, his finger crooked to begin shooting immediately. Nothing happened, and—damn!—he remembered that he was not wearing his weapon.
Before him, the girl spun on one foot while her other kicked out in a high circle, clipping the side of Kane’s head so that he saw bright flashes for a second. He blinked back the disorientation and pain, positioning his left arm before him to block the girl’s follow-up kick. Her foot slammed into his elbow with solid finality, and Kane staggered sideways, struggling to retain his balance.
The girl was fast; he’d give her that. Fast and powerful, and she clearly had no intention of holding back. She looked so young, probably not even in her twenties, Kane realized. Her hair was braided, thick, clotted twists arrayed all about her head. Her skin was dark, but lighter than Grant’s, and she was naked other than the straps of material along her arms, legs, chest and groin, her bare skin glistening with sweat, her feet bare also. Her body was covered in tattoos, lines etched along her arms and across her chest. The tattoos were strange swirls mixed with fiercely straight lines, the latter so much like circuitry.
Kane realized then that he knew the girl, but he didn’t know from where or how. He recognized her as someone he had seen in the past. Not in a book or a Mag video, but in the flesh, in combat.
The girl rushed at him, sweeping her hand along the ground and tossing gravel at his eyes before she swung a punch at Kane’s chin. He blinked away the gravel rapidly, fending off the punch at the same time and feeling its tremendous impact jar along his blocking arm.
“Die,” the woman spat, angling her right foot behind his and sweeping it toward her, dropping Kane to the ground like a sack of grain.
Kane swept her punches away as he struggled on the hard surface of the street. Then his right fist powered forward, knocking into the girl’s face as she tried to attack him once more, and she sank back, her legs giving out from under her.
Kane took a moment to catch his breath, watching the tattooed warrior and wondering why she seemed so familiar. There was a room, he remembered, with no windows. The room was full of bones. Skulls and ribs, arms and legs, dead people all about them. And she had come at him in a series of blinks, as though she weren’t really there at all, or as though she moved so fast as to be beyond his comprehension.
There had been another one, too, a man in his twenties, tattooed like her and wearing loose clothing that left his firmly defined muscles on show. He had attacked Kane in the room of bones with a knife. No, not a knife, it was larger than that. A cleaver? A sword?
The girl stood and gave him an up-from-under look, her thick braids dropping over her face, her teeth set in a grimace. Kane couldn’t place her, couldn’t place the fight in the room of bones, but he was sure that it had happened. It felt so real.
Then the girl moved, leaping high in the air, her right foot snapping out at Kane’s face. He arched his back, pulling himself just clear of the arc of her attacking kick. The tattooed woman landed, her body sinking into itself to absorb the impact. And then, still in motion, she spun and ran off.
INCREDIBLE AS IT SEEMED, Cloud Singer had forgotten how fast Kane could be. The man was as powerful as a stallion and yet he used that brute strength with subtlety. He was a true warrior, able to weigh and outthink an opponent, learning from every move of their developing conflict. That was how he had trapped and presumably killed Rock Streaming, pinning the man down in the room of bones, preventing her blood brother from dreamslicing to escape.
He was following her, she knew. She felt his presence behind her, his long-legged, powerful strides eating up the distance between them, relentlessly driving himself after her.
Cloud Singer ran, remembering the cleaners working at the outside of the building. Kane was stronger than her, yes, and more powerful, that was also true. But she knew something that he didn’t—none of this was real.
She drove herself onward, heading for the cleaners in their rig over the street. They were at the building just ahead of her, using the acetylene torch to peel layers of residue from the third-story window frames. Cloud Singer looked about her, her eyes narrowing as she spied the drainpipe running down the side of the building, the trash can affixed at the edge of the sidewalk. She leaped, her speed never slowing, kicking against the trash can so hard that the metal popped with a loud gong, a dent appearing in its side. From the trash can, her body was already in motion, twisting as she hurtled up in the air toward the building. Her left foot slapped into the side of the building, followed by her right an instant later. Then her left hand was swiping at the drainpipe, grasping it and driving herself upward as she continued to sprint up the wall.
KANE COULD ONLY watch in amazement as the tattooed female warrior clambered up the wall like a cat, her movements seeming to defy gravity in an astounding display of parkour.
In a few seconds she was at the cleaning rig, three stories above the street. Kane tracked the girl’s movements, cursing that he didn’t have his Sin Eater to hand. Atop the scaffold, she kicked out, hitting one of the cleaners full in the face so that his teeth burst from his jaw in a spray of splintered shards. The man crashed against the base of the cleaning rig, making it wobble to and fro on its support wires. The girl spun, and her hands grasped the collars of the other man on the rig, yanking him off his feet and tossing him over her shoulder. The man cried in pain as he landed heavily on the blowtorch he held, and he began screaming as his clothes caught fire, becoming a human torch as Kane watched helplessly from the street below.
All around Kane, people stopped and stared, muttering in amazement at the bizarre turn of events. The residents of Cobaltville lived in a perfectly ordered society. They had never imagined such a situation was possible outside the Tartarus Pits. Kane looked about him, wondering if there was another way up to the cleaning rig. The rig used a pulley system that was attached to the roof of the five-story structure and its controls were on the rig itself. There was no way to operate it from down here. If Kane was to enter the building, either to work the controls from the roof or to try to ambush the girl at the rig itself, he would have to lose sight of her and, in that time, she could seize the opportunity to escape, to disappear once more into the crowd.
“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Kane grumbled to himself as he watched helplessly.
And then he saw the woman warrior do something extraordinary. She took the acetylene torch in one hand and, holding her free arm extended, she set the torch on her arm, playing its thin blue flame up and down her skin until it caught fire. The flesh popped and burned beneath the fierce power of the torch, the strips of material fizzing into flame, and all the while the girl simply gritted her teeth, watching the flames dance higher and higher along her arm.
CLOUD SINGER TOSSED aside the torch and placed her hands together, almost like praying, bringing her elbows forward until they touched. The flames flicked from her left arm to her right, dancing to and fro in the breeze as she watched. The sensation was unearthly, a pain of such intensity that it threatened to overwhelm her.
She stood on the swaying rig above the street and spread her burning arms out to her sides, hands outstretched, palms facing the skies above. A flock of white gulls flew by her, cawing and squawking their endless chatter, and Cloud Singer reached out and snatched one from the air, holding its body in her burning hand. Its pure white feathers caught light in a second, turning gray as an oily smoke poured from its squawking body.
Whatever the pain is, she reminded herself, none of it is real. It’s all just a part of the illusion, the trap, the mirror that lies.
With that confirmation running through her mind, she tossed aside the burning carcass of the gull and leaped into the air, plummeting toward the ground below where Kane waited, watching her.
KANE BRACED HIMSELF as the warrior woman came at him through the air, her arms bright as the fires played along her flesh. She had to be high on something, whacked out on some illegal hallucinogen that was being produced in the Tartarus Pits or imported from the Outlands. No one would voluntarily set fire to themselves during battle, would they?
Kane jumped aside as the girl landed on the sidewalk, crouching there as she watched him with fierce eyes, the flames licking up and down her arms.
“I don’t know what your problem is,” Kane told her, “but you need to turn yourself in right now if I’m to help you.”
The tattooed woman ignored him, leaping up and swinging her burning fists at him, left then right then left again, closer and closer, the flames whooshing dangerously close to Kane’s face and chest. He took a step back, then another, cursing again that he didn’t have his Sin Eater pistol with him so that he could deal with this rapidly moving nut job at a safe distance.
As her right fist swung again, Kane saw an opening and he kicked out, his booted foot knocking the girl’s forearm and staggering her. She spun, recovering instantly as Kane stamped out the flames that now licked at the toe of his boot.
The woman looked at him, her eyes narrowed in contempt as the flames reached her shoulders and began to play across her chest and torso. She uttered one word before driving at him again: “Die.”
Kane slapped her blows aside, feeling the heat of the flames on his bare skin as the crowd around them kept their wary distance. The girl was a whirlwind of movement, moving faster and faster, increasingly frantic as she attacked him.
It hadn’t been a sword, Kane remembered suddenly, thinking back to the battle in the room of bones, it had been a boomerang made of steel or titanium.
The girl kicked at his solar plexus and followed up with a right cross of such power that it felt like it would remove Kane’s head from his shoulders. He avoided the kick but took the punch to the side of his face, feeling the heat of the flames beside his ear.
Grunting, Kane lashed out blindly, sensing rather than seeing where the tattooed girl was. His fist connected with something solid, and he opened his eyes in time to see the girl stagger and trip, her burning hands reaching for her chest.
As the tattooed woman fell, Kane lunged forward, his foot outstretched, ready to pin her to the ground where the flames could do the least damage to him. His foot raced toward her chest and slammed down hard…against solid ground.
The girl was gone. Disappeared.
Openmouthed, Kane looked at the paving slabs beneath his foot, then up and down the street. The cleaning crew was back at work on the building, seemingly as though nothing had happened. The pedestrians and gawkers who had been watching the battle just moments before were all wandering off, heads down, going about their business as though nothing had happened.
Kane grabbed a passerby, pulling the bewildered man by his shirt and pointing at the ground where his foot rested. “You saw her, right?” Kane demanded.
The man shook his head.
“A woman,” Kane continued, “about five foot five, body covered in tattoos, arms on fire.”
The man looked at Kane as though he were insane, and Kane shook him angrily.
“Do I need to remind you that lying to a Magistrate, even an off-duty one, is an offense?” Kane snarled.
The man answered in a timid voice, his eyes wide. “I didn’t see anything,” he admitted. “I’d never lie to a Mag. Really I wouldn’t. Please let me go. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Kane looked at the man, detecting his fear and trying to press for untruths, but he felt nothing. The man’s body language, his tone and stance, they all pointed to one thing: he believed every word he said.
Annoyed, Kane let the man go. He watched him make his way along the street, glancing over his shoulder once to see if the “crazy Magistrate” was still watching him.
Kane stepped back, pacing to the spot where the woman had lain. There was no evidence of her, no scorch marks or charring where the flames would have burned, nothing. People walked to and fro along the sidewalk, ignoring the confused Mag standing there, eyeing the scene.
It was odd. Like…like something that hadn’t really been happening at all, Kane realized. Like a training simulation after you pressed Reset.
“What the hell is going on here?” Kane muttered under his breath as he stared at the empty paving slabs.
THE FIRST THING that Cloud Singer became aware of was Decimal River, staring into her eyes. “She’s coming out of it now,” he said, his voice betraying no emotion.
Cloud Singer reached up, momentarily surprised to find that her hands were no longer on fire, and touched at her skull. “What…?” she began, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. Hadn’t she been fighting with the Cerberus man on a sunlit sidewalk in some majestic, towering ville so beautifully integrated that it looked for all the world like an artist’s sculpture?
“What did I tell you?” The woman’s voice came in a harsh whisper from Cloud Singer’s right and she looked there to see Broken Ghost’s skeletal face bearing down on her. “What did I say about desire, Cloud Singer?”
“That it is a parasite,” Cloud Singer replied automatically, “that ensnares the individual.”
“So why did you go into the trap, Cloud Singer, tell me that?” Broken Ghost snapped angrily.
“Because I wanted to see how the trap worked,” Cloud Singer replied, feeling embarrassed and humble now before the fierce warrior. “I wanted to ensure that it was working as you had promised.”
“You ‘wanted’?” Broken Ghost mimicked.
“Well,” Cloud Singer said, “what if there had been a flaw, what if you hadn’t realized it until it was too late?”
“Desire is a parasite that traps the individual,” Broken Ghost said, her voice low and ominous. “You went inside the trap because you wanted to, Cloud Singer, no other reason than that. And so your desire almost trapped you there, too.”
Cloud Singer was about to respond when she stopped herself, considering the assassin’s words. “Desire is a parasite,” she said, “within me, too.”
Broken Ghost nodded. “Very good, Cloud Singer. You’ve learned a lesson.”