Cates 05 - The Final Evolution by Jeff Somers Page A

I’d pushed into the soft spot in Remy’s brain a million times: Never reveal weakness. You hide your limps, you smile through searing pain, you never beg off, because when people smell fear they swarm you.
    I squinted around the tiny space and tried my new hobby: ignoring the smell. I remembered standing on the rotting docks in Veracruz and staring at the tanker. The hugest fucking thing I’d ever seen, a slab of metal floating on the water, big enough to carry thousands. No one had seen a hover in the air for months, so I could believe this was how they were getting shit across the oceans these days, but when Javier, the broker Adora made contact with, swept his arm out and announced we were going to be traveling on the biggest fucking boat I’d ever seen in my life, I looked him over, from his old boots with the soles held on by rubber bands and the sleeve of his yellowed shirt held on with a series of rusting pieces of wire, and pointed at him.
    “You’re telling me you ”—I shifted my finger to point at the tanker—“own that ?”
    Javier laughed. I could still hear him laughing. “No, Mr. Cates, I do not own the boat. But I know how to get you on the boat.” He smiled, miming us with his hands. “You walk on, you stay hidden, two weeks later, you are in Spain.”
    Two weeks. I’d gone from New York in the midst of a riot to London in two fucking hours, once, in a hover.
    It was funny, actually. We were in the biggest fucking thing in the known universe, but we were in the smallest possible fucking space in it, trying to be quiet like mice. Javier had come up with a bag of what appeared to be pre-swallowed N-tabs and a box of plastic bottles of water. I thought about asking him if the water would make me spend the two weeks shitting myself, but thought better of it.
    “Anything happening?” I asked Adora. I couldn’t see Remy, but there was only one spot in the tiny room where he could be without physically touching me. The kid had been talking even less than usual, which made him mute.
    “Nothing,” she sighed. “I heard the crew very close an hour or so ago, but Javier was right: They do not come in here.”
    We lapsed into silence. My head was pounding, as usual, and my stomach growled almost painfully—I’d gotten used to actual food, and living on N-tabs was no fun.
    “He is sleeping,” Adora suddenly said. “This is all he does, your friend.”
    I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me well enough to appreciate it. “He’s been through a lot. He’s a project of mine.”
    “A project? What are you trying to do?”
    I shrugged again, feeling tight and hot. “Keep him alive.”
    She paused. “That is not easy, in your line of work.”
    I let that sit for a moment. Adora had told me she was coming along because, first off, I owed her a lot of money and, second, because the System still endured, sort of, in Europe. Headless without Director Marin—good old Dick; it cheered me to think of his buried servers melting under a mushroom cloud in Moscow—and populated mainly by avatar cops who’d had their brains downloaded into bricks, it was still civilization, kind of. A few years ago I would have thought she was crazy, but I understood. The old ways of doing things still counted over there, and Adora was sick of getting hijacked every five minutes and having no one to complain to about it.
    “Well—”
    I paused, shutting my mouth with a click as Adora sucked in breath. Outside the rusty hatch that sealed us into our hiding place voices boomed, echoing off the steel walls. I pulled the Roon and crouched in the darkness, forcing myself to breathe steadily. My HUD flickered into life for a moment, and then faded, and a spike of eye-melting pain flashed through my skull, making me wince.
    his fucking arms get his fucking arms under control
    The voices grew louder, approaching. I heard Remy stirring behind me, creeping up to kneel next to me, and I hoped he knew enough to stay quiet.