Alice can barely look at Nikki any more, but nor can she let her out of her sight again. She desperately needs some air, so this is when the reality of CdC truly hits home. The best she could hope for right now is to go out onto Mullane and try to fool herself that she’s outdoors.
She feels disgusted and she feels disgusting. The sensation of the blood-soaked material against her chest is making her skin crawl. She walks away, heading for the bar. If she can’t have air, another element will have to suffice.
“Can I get something to drink?” she asks the woman behind the gantry. From across the room Alice thought she looked mid-twenties, and was asking herself how she got here so young. Up close she can see she’s older than Alice, maybe thirty-five. Her true age is in her eyes. Alice wonders what else they’ve seen, and how she can stand to be working down in this vault, serving people who come here to watch bloodshed as entertainment.
“Sure thing. What’s your poison?”
Her accent is Nigerian, though her appearance is Somali. Someone else who knows what it is to feel like nowhere is home.
“I just want a glass of cold water.”
“I can’t get you something stronger? You look like you’ve been through some heavy shit tonight.”
“Nah, she won’t touch any fun stuff. Bought her one of Lo-Jack’s famous mojitos at Sin Garden and she wouldn’t even take a sip.”
Nikki appears by her side, leaning against the bar. Alice doesn’t want to acknowledge her, but she makes brief eye-contact via a mirror behind the gantry.
“Can I set you up, Nikki?” the barmaid asks, scooping ice into a glass for Alice’s water.
“Whisky please, Kinsi. Speyside if you got it. Had a couple Qolas earlier because I couldn’t source anything else. Need to remind myself what a real drink tastes like.”
Kinsi places the iced water in front of Alice.
“You sure I can’t offer you anything more?” she asks.
“Not unless you have a spare shirt or a shower back there.”
Kinsi reaches for a bottle of Glenfiddich and glances at her other customer.
“Nikki lives just around the corner,” she suggests in a helpful tone. “I’m sure she’s got something clean you could borrow. You could grab a shower there too, couldn’t she, Nikki?”
Alice can’t imagine anyone feeling less enthusiastic than she does in response to this notion. That is until she looks in the mirror and sees how Nikki is taking it.
“I don’t think Alice would be all that comfortable stripping naked and taking a shower in my apartment right now,” she says, trying to shut it down.
She’s damn right on that score, but suddenly Alice’s discomfort is less acute than her curiosity about why Nikki doesn’t want her there. Even the way she said it was an oversell. She didn’t need to talk about stripping naked: that was clearly intended to make her imagine her vulnerability and awkwardness.
Nikki really doesn’t want Alice inside her apartment.
“No, I couldn’t feel less comfortable than I do right now with that woman’s blood sticking to my chest. Is her place really nearby?”
She directs this last at Kinsi, knowing she’ll get the truth.
“Two minutes away.”
Alice turns to face Nikki.
“Let’s go, then,” she states. It’s not a request or a suggestion.
Nikki looks trapped; one of the few occasions since they met when she doesn’t have a backup move. She sighs, downs her shot of whisky and gestures to go.
Thirty seconds later they’re at street level, walking along Mullane once again. Alice gets fewer second looks than she would expect. She guesses the sight of someone walking along here covered in blood isn’t that rare, particularly in the company of Sergeant Freeman.
Nikki is conspicuously shifty, eyes darting back and forth like she’s looking for a new option. Alice is starting to wonder if Nikki is about to take off again, prompting her thoughts to turn to when she took off last time.
“You sure you don’t want it call it a night?” Nikki asks.
“We’ve got plenty of work still to do.”
“Okay, I get that, but wouldn’t you rather pop back to your own place to get changed? If you’re worried about losing track of me again, I’ll come with you back to Wheel Two.”
“No. Your place is fine. We’re against the clock.”
Alice didn’t lose track, she got abducted—the details of which Nikki has asked surprisingly few questions about.
They are walking past Sin Garden, Nikki leading at a far slower clip than the last time they passed this way. Alice thinks about that mojito, how keen Nikki was for her to drink it.
She skips back a few minutes, replaying the conversation in her head. As always, she has perfect recall.
I woke up, I was strapped to a table and someone was hacking into my wrist unit, wiping my grabs.
Who was he? You get a name?
Alice never said it was a man. Maybe there were reasons she might make the assumption, but Alice suspects it’s because Nikki knew.
There are some people who are concerned that you were backstage without a pass, so to speak, snooping where you weren’t welcome and witness to what you had no right to see.
At the time, Alice couldn’t think what she had seen that might be damaging to anyone, when in fact everything she had seen was damaging to one person and one person only.
Witness testimony doesn’t have the same traction without grabacións backing it up. Things tend to be a lot less binding when it comes down to “he said, she said.”
After being conspicuously evasive all day, Freeman had undergone a volte-face, suddenly speaking candidly and behaving in an altogether less guarded manner. Alice now understands that it was because she had hit upon a plan to have her observer’s grabacións erased, reckoning nobody would believe Jessica’s word against hers.
She thinks about how Nikki told her to stay put. She didn’t just take off, she told Alice she was taking off. She did it to make sure Alice would follow. She must have set it up with Lo-Jack and with the people Alice saw her wrestling down on the concourse.
She sees also that when it came to getting her into that metal box, this was an elaborate contingency. There was a far simpler Plan A. She was supposed to drink the mojito. It was what they used to call a Mickey Finn, and this is why Alice feels a new kind of ire coursing through her. This, more than anything else, gives her the measure of Nicola Freeman’s ruthlessness.
She thought she would be drugging Jessica Cho, an inexperienced young intern on her first trip to CdC. When Jessica pitched up much later, she would be hung-over and disoriented, having lost her subject and had her observation files erased. She would be an inexperienced young girl who was dazzled by the Mullane neon, fell into temptation and got drunk when she was supposed to be carrying out her duties.
Nobody would believe anything she said about Nikki. She would be fired, sent home in disgrace, her career over before it even started. And it was nothing personal. Jessica was merely an obstacle in Freeman’s way. A problem to be Fixxed.
Was Dev Korlakian a problem to be Fixxed too? she begins to wonder. She can’t trust anything Nikki has said about him or about Julio Martinez, and certainly not about Yoram Ben Haim.
It is with a chill that Alice remembers she is still in Nikki’s cross hairs: a far more dangerous problem than when Nikki thought she was merely Jessica. And she has just talked her way into going back with her to Nikki’s apartment.
They turn the corner into a far narrower thoroughfare, a gloomy and claustrophobic passageway where little light can penetrate between the buildings. She can see the dark panels where elements have burned out and never been replaced. It feels like an old place somehow, her mind drawing upon images from Victorian stories, where lanes and alleyways gave shelter for the darkest deeds.
There is barely room for two people to pass each other, but this matters little, as she sees no other people.
No witnesses, she thinks.
Did Nikki pull that reverse bluff on her again? Demonstrably trying to put Alice off coming here so that she would be all the more determined to follow?
No. She’s getting paranoid now. There is a witness: Kinsi knows they are headed to Nikki’s place. And Nikki definitely didn’t want that to happen.
Nikki leads her into a cramped vestibule, with a vending machine squeezed into a tight space between the door and the staircase.
There is a Chinese lady coming down the stairs slowly. She looks matronly, not a sight Alice has seen often around here; like somebody’s grandma. She gives Nikki a cursory acknowledgement but stares curiously at Alice for a duration that strays well into rudeness, before proceeding into the alley.
They ascend two storeys, Alice still able to hear and feel the thump of music from the venue on the ground floor. There are three doors on the landing. Nikki opens one of them, which leads straight into a tiny combined kitchen and living area with two other doors off it. One of them is open to her right, allowing Alice a view into a combined toilet and shower cubicle, the head one of those automated foldaways that flip up into the wall when you’re done, giving an extra meaning to the word flush. Adjacent to that is presumably the bedroom door, currently closed, Nikki taking position defensively in front of it.
Alice feels a twinge of something, maybe guilt, maybe embarrassment. This is Nikki’s home, and the whole place must be a fraction the size of her digs back at the Ver Eterna.
Nikki stands with her back to the bedroom door, redundantly pointing Alice towards the bathroom. She gets the impression she is being anxiously ushered there, which implies she is being directed away from someplace else.
“Okay, you go use the shower,” Nikki says. “I’ll go to my closet, see if I can’t find something for you to wear. I’m taller than you but I probably got a shirt you can borrow, long as you don’t mind looking a little scruffy.”
“I’ll take scruffy over blood-drenched.”
Alice steps into the cubicle and closes the door. She begins to tug at the sticky shirt when she realises something is missing.
“Hey, do you have a towel, or is it one of those …” she begins, stepping back into the living area.
Nikki is standing in the bedroom doorway with her back to Alice. She spins around, pulling the door closed with a slam and standing in front of it in a hopeless attempt to appear halfway natural.
She looks guilty and cornered, and she knows it.
“What? A towel? No, it’s an air-dry system.”
“What’s in the bedroom, Nikki?”
Her eyes dart around.
“That’s my personal space. You got no right to go in there.”
There is a moment’s stand-off, the two of them silently staring at each other. Then Nikki makes a lunge. Alice senses it a fraction of a second before, picking up on micro-gestures. She flinches, anticipating attack, but it’s flight not fight. Nikki runs straight out of the apartment and disappears down the stairs.
Alice doesn’t give chase. She’s been burned by that already. Instead she steps to the bedroom door and turns the handle, half expecting it to be locked. It isn’t. She pushes it open very gently, slowly revealing another tiny space. The bed is pushed tight against one wall, barely clearance on the other side to stand and reach into the shallow closet.
On the bed is the reason Nikki didn’t want Alice to come here. She tried to bluff it, must have thought she could still get her showered and out again without seeing this. And maybe she would have but for the want of a towel.
There is a woman lying on the bed, her eyes bulging in a permanent horrified stare. Livid marks ring her neck, bruises and cuts marring her face, blood spattering the pillow. She’s been beaten and strangled in the last few hours, while Alice was being kept out of the way by Nikki’s careful arrangement.
CdC now has two homicides, and one suspect.