It takes Nikki a moment to understand that the blackout is not part of Julio’s plan, and another to remember that she has an infrared setting on her lens. It’s standard issue for Seguridad, but for everybody else it’s an expensive optional insurance against an eventuality that almost never happens.
It doesn’t kick in automatically, because nobody wants that happening every time they turn out the light, but the option to trigger it does flash up in response to the lens detecting a sudden widening of her pupil.
She can tell which of the others has it instantly. Those without are frozen to the spot, heads jerking around as they search reflexively for a light source. Julio and Dade, by contrast, look first at each other. They’re checking in, questioning what their move should be, wondering if they missed something and are about to pay a price.
Nikki reacts quicker than either of them. She doesn’t have to check with anybody. She draws and hits Julio with the resin gun. He reads her move and he’s quick, so it’s slightly off-target, but she gets lucky. The cum-shot glues his right arm to his side and partially attaches him to one of the night-blinded pair.
She zig-zags as Dade lunges for her, catching him with the electro-pulse en passant. He’s a big guy so it doesn’t drop him, but he’s reeling and dizzy as she runs for an exit.
She’s outside the octagon now, in the maze of passageways that she had little choice but to put between her rendezvous and the nearest point of egress. It all looks different in the infrared too, which isn’t going to make her navigation any easier, but the situation is still way better than it looked ten seconds ago.
She stops at a junction, trying to remember the way, expecting to hear footsteps hurrying behind her. Instead she hears screams. She can’t tell whose, but she’s not so curious that she’s going to turn back and investigate. She makes it to an exterior door, one that opens right on to Hadfield, except that it doesn’t open at all. An overlay on her lens confirms that it is locked and reminds her that she has no override authorisation, as her Seguridad credentials have been suspended.
She needs another out. She can hear more cries, more screams. The last thing she wants is to return towards the octagon, but to find an alternative exit she’ll need to follow the adjoining corridor, which unavoidably takes her back towards the centre. She proceeds more cautiously, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.
The screams have stopped, and she is sure she hears footsteps, but they are not heavy and lumbering like Freitas or Dade. They are swift and light, a whisper echoing around the walls.
She is midway along the passage when a figure looms into view from around a corner, cutting off her path. It is Sol Freitas. She knew he had to be in here somewhere: probably deployed to secure the perimeter and make sure Nikki didn’t have any hidden backup. From his gait, not to mention the look of focused determination on his snarling puss, he is tricked out for night vision too. He is also toting a telescopic whip-cosh.
Nikki reaches for the resin gun. There is an orange warning light blinking on the handle, indicating it isn’t ready to fire. That’s bullshit, she thinks. The reload time is like a second and a half.
She looks closer, sees that it is reading “chamber empty.”
She curses her own sloppy practice. She can’t remember the last time she fired the thing before today, but evidently she didn’t reload after and she sure as shit didn’t check it before duty any time since.
She thinks about drawing anyway as a deterrent, but Freitas looks like he has sussed her hesitancy. He starts to charge, his muscular frame pounding the floor with each footfall. He’s a mass of white in her vision, growing against the blackness as he picks up speed.
Something flashes past on her left, then it’s to the right, then left again. It is a human figure, jarringly fleet, impossibly nimble. It seems slight, but perhaps only because of the speed, grace and balance with which it moves. The figure is a white streak, human tracer fire in Nikki’s lens, but she is sure she is looking at a woman. She ricochets off the walls, part bullet, part ballet, her angle of approach surely impossible for her target to track.
A second ago Freitas seemed a juggernaut. Now he is like a lumbering quadruped being picked at by an airborne predator.
She takes him down in the blink of an eye. Nikki hears snicking sounds accompanied by gasps and moans, a spray of white arcing across the corridor. Then she sees the assassin drag Freitas around the corner. He looks like he should be too heavy for her to move, but she somehow manages his fall, using gravity to create momentum as she drives him backwards and out of sight.
She hears a voice. It is too quiet to make out the words, but the tone is insistent, punctuated by strangulated replies, cries of agony. Freitas is being interrogated.
Tortured.
Nikki stands motionless for a second. She often asks herself whether there is any part of her that is still a cop, and not some glorified security guard taking every last dollar she can skim. She gets her answer in that moment. She has to help Freitas. She has little confidence that she can, but she needs to try, or she’ll know there truly is nothing left of who she once was.
All she has is a dart gun with zero stopping power, and the electro-pulse baton, which is only useful in close combat. Having seen her move, Nikki sincerely doubts she would get anywhere near this acrobatic assailant. She proceeds nonetheless. There’s no way out behind her anyway.
She sees a white pool on the floor as she nears the junction between corridors, fading as it cools.
Freitas is sitting against the wall a few metres around the corner, his hands on his belly, his head slumped onto his chest. The assassin is gone. Nikki can’t hear any footsteps, only the echoes of desperate cries from deeper inside the building: voices fading, life ebbing.
Freitas raises his head as she approaches, begins reaching towards her, stops himself. That’s when she sees that he needs both hands to hold in his guts. There are tiny stab wounds in multiple strategic locations, surgically precise, and one deep slash across his abdomen. She flashes back to Omega’s crime scene, that nightmare orrery floating in the Axle.
Freitas tries again to reach for her, using his arm to keep pressure on this one wound, while six or seven others gape and bleed. His eyes are pleading. He knows what’s coming. He doesn’t want to die alone.
Nikki crouches beside him, places a hand on his forearm.
“I’m here,” she says. It seems stupid, redundant, banal, but it’s all she can offer.
Blood seeps over his arm and on to her fingers. The warmth of it is a wrench in its familiarity. She’s been here before.
“Who did this to you?” she asks, bringing her mind back to the immediate. She can’t let herself be taken there. Not now. Not ever.
“Guess you were right … about that tiger,” he replies, wincing with the effort.
“What is this alliance? Who has Julio been dealing with? Believe me, I don’t think he’ll be caring much if you tell me.”
Freitas looks at her, the intensity of his stare weirdly amplified by the negative effect of his widening pupils being white.
“Doesn’t matter,” he rasps. “They’ll be dead soon too. Ate the forbidden fruit. Maybe just touched the tree. We’re not supposed to have it. Nobody’s supposed to have it. They’re coming to get it back.”
“Knows about what? Who’s coming?”
He swallows, fighting for the breath to speak.
“Project Sentinel. Anyone who even knows about it is a target. It’s the touch of death.”
His face contorts in what she thinks is pain but is in fact Freitas enjoying his last laugh.
“And I just gave it to you.”
The lights come back on, finding Nikki standing in a corridor over Freitas’s lifeless corpse. There is no more screaming, no more cries or moans, only silence. A dead silence.
She proceeds towards the centre. She’s got her electro-pulse baton drawn, for what it’s worth. She doesn’t think she’s going to encounter anybody, or stand a chance if she does.
She tries toggling through the surveillance feeds, but they aren’t coming up. The cameras have been killed.
Them and everybody else.
The octagon is a slaughterhouse: four bodies scattered about the floor.
For better or worse—usually worse—Julio has been part of her life as long as Nikki cares to remember. A problem, an irritation, an enemy. The rival bootlegging was just a stupid game, like she told Alice: a petty distraction among the insignificant, one she never really expected to be over.
Yoram didn’t want this. Nobody should want this. But somebody had.
Three of them look like they were despatched swiftly, but only so that there was time and space to work on Julio. He has this twisted, horrified expression. It was his voice, his screams that she heard. Nikki knew it at the time, but didn’t want to admit it to herself.
The assassin tortured him, and longer than she tortured Freitas, but she nonetheless worked quickly. She wanted to know something, or maybe merely to satisfy herself that he didn’t know something. Either way, she’s looking at a cleaning-up operation, just like Freitas suggested.
Begging the question: why is Nikki still alive?
A live image blinks into her lens, showing another of Julio’s men lying dead in a passageway. The security cameras are back on.
And now she has her answer.
The cameras recorded Julio and his men entering the octagon to talk to Nikki just before the lights went out. When they come back on, the playback will show her standing over all their bodies.
She tried to tell Julio that this phony turf war was being used as cover for a larger agenda. Now he and half his crew have been taken out, and Nikki set up to take the rap so that nobody goes looking for the real reason they died. She doesn’t know what that was, but according to Freitas it was something they knew, something they saw, something they took.
She has the answer to another question too. This settles any lingering bullshit about blackouts, about her possibly doing stuff she couldn’t remember. She was wide awake when this happened and it sure as shit wasn’t her.
If the body at her apartment is any precedent, the Seguridad will be on their way here soon, probably following an anonymous tip or a silent alarm she would be seeing if she hadn’t been cut out of the loop. The net is closing. She’s got no friends to turn to and she’s even running out of enemies. But it’s not over. Not yet.
She has nowhere left to run to, but she can still run to nowhere. With the authorities searching for her, her only option is to hide someplace the authorities don’t acknowledge exists.