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By Root 363 0

building from the un-differentiated mass around me, and hobbled up an infinite number of stairs, each about six feet tall. I got lost on one of them for a while, and then came to realize I was standing outside the door to Rat-face’s apartment, and that it was open. This struck me as curious, and I went inside, though I knew that a confrontation with another human being was the last thing I needed. Luckily, the problem didn’t arise, because Rat-face and his buddy had been murdered. Their faces had been rendered nearly unrecognizable by the application of something like a steam iron, and their internal organs were failing to live up to the first part of their name. It occurred to me that I might have done this in the last ten minutes, but the blood was dried and the smell was pretty unpleasant, so I decided that on balance I probably hadn’t.

By the time I made it to Mal’s I was feeling really, really bad. The second rush is the heavy one, and it knits up with every other such rush like a string of Christmas cards on a line. The sound of dead people talking was so loud and dark that I could barely see where I was going. I made it to the middle of Mal’s floor, got out my spike and another foil package, and chased the first dose with a little more. The idea is to round off the edges of the really bad stuff by coating it with some first rush; but it seldom works very well and is the slipperiest of all possible slopes. I slumped there for a while, surrounded by visions of blood and shit, then I checked out for a while.

When I heard someone at the door my eyes opened immediately, and it was only then I realized they’d been open all the time. I’d been very far away, inside somewhere distant and small and old, and my eyeballs were crispy from not blinking.

The door opened. A figure stood silhouetted against the dim light in the corridor. It took me a while to work out who it was. I wasn’t especially pleased.

“How the hell did you find me?” I slurred, my tongue clacking in my mouth like a stick against iron railings.

“Guys at the back entrance called Howie.” Vinaldi grinned. “Said, and I quote, ‘The big fucked-up guy is on the loose again.’ Howie reckoned this was the only place you could be, and he was right. Seen the mess downstairs?”

“It was Yhandim. I saw him with those guys a couple days ago.”

Vinaldi saw the opening, made the pitch. “He’s got the little girl and Nearly with him now.”

“I know,” I said. “This is not news to me.”

“Okay, well, you got to hurry. We let Ghuaji go, after Dath planted a tracker on him, and he’s just left New Richmond and is out in the Portal as we speak. An employee of mine has seen him get in a car, and he’s heading out into the wilds. He’s going home.” Vinaldi held a hand down to me. I didn’t take it.

“I’m still not going,” I said.

His voice was calm. “Yes, you are, Randall, and you know it. There’s a truck outside and I can see that I’m going to have to drive myself, which will be a first in about ten years, so get the fuck up and let’s get after him.”

“I don’t understand you,” I said, trying to climb to my feet. I still had no intention of going. I just wanted to give him a hard time on his own level. The walls moved alarmingly, and I almost didn’t go through with it. But once I was standing, going back down again seemed even harder. “Why don’t you sit tight in your fortress on one-eighty-five and let your men handle it? That’s what you pay them for. I tried to take you down, remember? Why are you hanging round giving me grief?”

“Atonement, Randall. You ever hear of the word?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it, and what does it have to do with you? You said yourself it’s their own stupid fault they got left in The Gap. Even if it wasn’t, everybody did bad things in there and it’s far too late to do anything about it now. You want to atone for something, atone for the drugs you sell that people like Shelley Latoya OD on, atone for the guys you’ve had whacked, and just leave me alone.”

By the time I finished I was shouting wildly. Vinaldi left a pause, and then spoke quietly and with finality.