"I'll tell y'everything I know." The words trickled from her dumbfounded grin, dried blood from her nose painting it in dark burgundy. The girl closed her eyes, exhaling melodramatically between eggshell teeth.
"Twelve hours ago," there was omnipotence in her voice, "you were contacted by a Faust Cunningham, alias Dante." The woman's hair was raven black, in a strained bun, pulling her pale face too tight. Her head was thrown back gently, and because of the angle of her oval glasses to the light, her eyes had been replaced by two blank discs. She licked at the front of her teeth and produced a pen that had been perched on her ear.
"That's right." Fara glanced at herself in the mirror cut into the room's wall, wondering if there was anyone on the other side, wondering if there was another side. "He'd foun' himself at th'*CENSORED* end of Westview whif' 'alf a dozen pistols at'is forehead."
Dante's smile broadened, and he stuffed a bite of cheeseburger into it. Staring through the car's windshield, he watched two ivory sedans slow to a stop in front of a stinking fish market in Chinatown. The first packed a handful of toughs with shaved heads and unkempt collars; from the second stepped a short, thin man dressed to the nines and yelling into his cellular phone. "You're late, Adrian," he chuckled to himself.
"Can you identify this man?" queried the woman needlessly, tapping her pen on the cold, steel desk. The tink tink kept a perfect rhythm as she pulled a photograph of a small man in a seersucker three-piece suit from a folder and slid it toward the girl.
Fara knew who it was without looking at the picture. "Yeah, that's Adrian Noble. He was some crime lord wannabe whif' a Napoleon complex."
"Was?"
Fara trained her gaze lazily on the woman's lips and countered with a Cheshire grin.
The man closed his phone with a snarl and stepped into an alley, the bald men followed. A few minutes passed, enough time to let some pretty tramp in a red cocktail dress and a fur coat to step out of the sex shop down the street and hail a taxi. Dante opened his car door and stretched, leaning upward. A shiver caught him off-guard as the season's biting wind slapped at his leathery face.
The driver's thin black suit leaned over before Dante closed the door behind him. "Try to exercise a little more caution this time, yes?" Lethe grinned knowingly, and the expression mirrored itself on Dante's face as he checked the clip in his overzealous magnum, and replaced it in his coat. The door shut with a decided click, and a shining crimson coat seeped into a crowd of charcoal suits and cobalt ties. Lethe was twirling a knife around its handle as the shots reverberated through the cluttered chasm of a street. He glanced upward with a yawn and watched the crowd scatter, a clean hole through each car's driver-side window.
Aboard the Equinox, there was an uncharacteristic air of serenity. Jouzu's massive form was crooked over itself, asleep on a single-form table with his face in a pile of small devices he had been fiddling with. Domino was on the floor next to him, curled up comfortably under a large sweater. The two newer men had decided to remain at New Antigone while a windstorm passed through. No doubt, they had met women.
Systemic's tanned body had finally collapsed onto the bolt launcher she had been reassembling for a marathon eighteen hours. Ooidal had lost a bet that she could make it to twenty without blinking. His massive tumor of a frame oozed over the operator's chair as he silently clacked away at a keyboard, rerouting a hard drop that had been patched downtown. Two of his monitors were still strewn akimbo from the melee with Dante after he had kidnapped the brat.
Fara was lying on her stomach, the corrugated steel of the bed-slash-table digging cold, red pockmarks into her cheek. Violent images of war flashed through her vision each time she closed her eyes: guillotined preteens and fires that would never burn out.
Those thoughts turned to ash, and were replaced with vague, out-of-focus memories. She was with the terrorist – Pyraci – with rocks sharpened to knives at one another's throats, one making their way through Zero One as blackmail for the other. Jagged structures ripped into the blackened sky, and impossible machines drifted around the two, infinitely patient for a moment of vulnerability. Then, she was stripped of her upper hand, and her consciousness.
She was pulled through an endless black tunnel that seemed only and exactly large enough to fit her body by a torturous cramp that fastened itself snugly around the small of her neck; it cradled her head and vaulted a sharpened spike into the back of her head, lapsing her connection with reality, and causing her ears to cough blood. The rest was too hazy – a null, distant stinging every now and then, but more than anything, a feeling like her brain was bloated and full. She did not need to remember it though; the patchwork scars and poorly healed stitches that painted her body told the story themselves.
"How did you know Mister Cunningham?" Absently, a few notes scribbled themselves onto the woman's open notebook. She reached for a glass of water, and remembered that the pitcher had been left on the other side of the mirror, where the tape recorders had been set up.
"He'd tried t'kill me." The girl patted down her pockets, and found a rumpled pack of cigarettes she had pilfered from Dante's jacket. She did not smoke, but placed one precariously on her lips anyway. "Why d'y'ask?"
His magnum unloading shot after shot at the hairless yeti, Dante swam through a whir of SMG fire. He lunged at the man, and they toppled through a splintered door, met by the surprised stares of a double-handful of trigger-happy thickset thugs. Frenetically, he bounced limbs across the first part of each that he could reach, and managed to subdue three of the men before being halted by a lead penetration in his left shoulder, and a shattered collarbone.
"Faust Cunnin'ham, as I live 'n breathe." Noble had a nasally voice with an accent like he had grown up on a bayou. A hand slapped Dante from shock, and he bit his tongue to give the small man a close-lipped grin. "Naw, this'us adorable. Here, I thought I'd missed th'opportune time t'kill you yea-us ago, back when you pulled a Houdini on us. But look 'ere. You've so puh'litely dropped in and deliv'uh'd me an early Chris-muss present." Noble stepped over to the chair he had been sitting in, and pulled an intricate, antique revolver from his jacket. "Find some rope."
"And the relationship between Cunningham and Noble?" She was glancing between the wall clock and her watch, checking if they were still in sync.
"Between you an'me I 'fink they were in love. This whole thing just seemed like a lovers' spat." Fara giggled mockingly.
"Please."
"Beh-fore Dante fell out 'huv th'machines' favor, he had a man inside some exile organization oh-r'unother. Y'know, before they got organized." The girl decided that gesturing with the cigarette between her bloodied fingers when she spoke gave her an authoritative flair. "Th'whole mob deal sorta' 'fing. Vuh-ry hush-hush; get on th' 7:15 at Mara and off by Achan. They'd gi-"
"There's no train service between Mara and Achan."
"Maybe they took th'bus."
Her head spun and her pupils shriveled as Ooidal tore open the shrieking metal door to the dormitory. "Dante jus' put out'tuh call f'ur you." Fara stumbled from the table, noiselessly landing on the cold ground with thinning socks. She kept the sweater-turned-blanket wrapped around her delicate form, remembering that she was in only a stained and threadbare camisole and the shorts that had been haphazardly torn to the crux of her thighs to accommodate the unseemly braces she had worn when first returning from the city. Their age difference gave Ooidal and Fara a father-daughter affinity, but she had before caught him stealing an inappropriate glimpse.
"Jus' came in. I duh'no what t'uh make 'huv it." He tapped at the monitor as Fara scanned through the message.
"Hey, friend. Listen, I think we need to bury the hatchet and get on with our lives about this whole thing. So I've got a little business proposition for you. Meet me in Chinatown – east end of Westview. You remember the spot, don't you? –Dante"
"Th'ur's some attachment I'm havin' some trouble decryptin'. Might take a while." Fara nodded without hesitation, and Ooidal stepped around her to his seat, running to protocols to find a hack closest to the market. Only a week ago, he had dropped her at the same spot – a payphone by the bathrooms of some cheap gambling hall where people always ended up shot to death. "Don't worry 'bout me," she had said, and went off to finally end that scum Dante.
He could not bring himself to tell her the truth: Dante's hand in the lost boys' survival, the strings he had pulled to keep Zero One from sending the four horsemen after the Equinox. If keeping her in the dark meant keeping her alive, than he would make it his mission to smash every lightbulb in the world. The machines needed more people like her. They could take care of the math, but there was always an element that needed to come from something, someone youthful and fresh. There needs to be a human side, a pretty face, someone to step to the podium and take responsibility, and answer questions, and write the press release.
On more occasions than he cared to admit, he had questioned how long it would be before the machines would decide to kill off their little army of awakened. When the news of the truce had first reached Babylon, he spent almost two weeks debating the longevity of his situation. But then, Dante's first death and Vice's last had helped him reach a decision. He swirled those thoughts around his head for a vacant moment and tried to come up with a tidy metaphor. But he gave up, because there was no metaphor to come from it – he had just stumbled upon a part of his brain that he did not like: the part that held irrefutable facts that made life seem too short and too simple.
