Glasshouse - Charles Stross [145]
Fake-Fiore, Robin, blinks slowly, pudgy eyes closing: I tense but he opens them again before I can gather my wits to move. “It was after you killed Fiore,” he says. “I got into the assembler and backed myself up, programmed in a body merge and neural splice, so I’d come out in Fiore’s skin instead of like . . .” He nods at me. “I put a two-hour hold on it to give you time to get the mess sorted out, but you must have blanked in between. So I wake up inside the gate and find the basement has been partially cleaned, and you’re missing, and I had to finish the job. Fiore’s backed up in the gate, and I’ve got his biometrics, so I manage to get a dump of his implant, and when one of him showed up to check on you, I told him you’d just gone missing. He believed me. He’s not very good at handling multiplicity.
“On Sunday morning I went to visit Cass in the hospital,” he says quietly. “It turns out I wasn’t her first visitor that morning. I haven’t heard anything about it through the rumor net, but it was pretty bad: I think Hanta covered it up afterward but if you were wondering . . . I caught Mick. He’d been living in the basement of an empty house, stealing stuff from folks’ kitchens while they were at work—we’re a trusting bunch, have you noticed that? We leave our back doors unlocked. He’d gagged her and you saw the tissue scaffolds Hanta had her legs in. She couldn’t do anything. I mean, she was trying to get away, but not getting very far. He was raping her again, Reeve, and you know what I think about third chances.”
I nod, gulping for breath. The horror of it is that I can see everything in my mind’s eye: me-in-Fiore’s-flesh creeping up on Mick as he humps away, Cass thrashing around helplessly—Mick’s probably tied her arms out of the way—and me-in-Fiore’s-flesh saps Mick at the base of the skull. He doesn’t do it very carefully, because he’s beyond fury at this point; beyond caring about inflicting subarachnoid hemorrhages. He doesn’t care at all whether Mick wakes up again. In fact he thinks Mick’s waking up would be a very bad idea, at least for Cass, and maybe come to think of it he can use Mick to send a message to any borderline sociopaths who are thinking about following his example—
It’s very me. Me as I used to be, not me as I was before (quiet, peaceful historian, devoted family man) or me as I am now (slightly squirrelly, evanescent with the joy of discovering what it’s like to surrender after fighting for what seems like my entire life), but me as I was in the middle, the grim-faced killing machine. But then I meet his eyes, and I see an awful sadness in them, a sick sense of guilt that mirrors what I feel at the knowledge that I’m absolutely going to have to shop him to the Bishop because we can’t afford to have a murderous doppelganger of one of our most respected citizens running around—
I grab the first thing my fingers scrabble across: a heavy file of paper hardcopy, part of the dump of Curious Yellow from the closet upstairs. I take two brisk paces forward as I raise it and bring it down on top of his head as hard as I can. He sags and falls over, but I don’t stick around to finish the job. Instead, I turn and run for the stairs. If I can make it to the top and slam the door, he’ll be trapped down here for long enough to call—
“Going somewhere?” drawls Janis, pointing a stungun at me from the top step. I can see her trigger finger whitening behind the guard.
I start to raise my hands. “Don’t—”
She does.
I groan and reach up to touch my head, which hurts like hell where Reeve thumped me. Someone grabs my wrist and tugs experimentally, and I open my eyes. It’s Janis. She looks concerned. “What happened?” I ask.
“I caught her running up the stairs, in a real hurry to get somewhere.” Janis peers at me. “What about you?”
I touch my head finally and wince at the sharp pain. “She thumped me with something, a box file I think. I fell over.” Stupid, stupid. I feel a bit sick. Looking round brings a stab of pain to my neck. “Hit my head on the A-gate plinth.”
“Then it was lucky I was in time.”
“Huh.