Spin State - Chris Moriarty [199]
She’d never seen a cricket, and she kept stopping, searching through the tall green stalks for them until Cohen laughed and asked if she wanted him to catch her one.
“No!” she said, speaking too quickly, too sharply. A memory welled up in her, clear as running water across the stretch of more than twenty years.
Her twelfth birthday. Her father had bought her a small-gauge over-under Gunther. It was fake, a rim-manufactured knockoff, but it was still an outrageously extravagant present. They climbed into the hills at dawn, crossing creeks heavy with red spring runoff, too excited to stop and look for the stocked fish that lurked in the riffles. They penetrated far enough into the canyons to smell native air and feel their breath start to shorten. When her father started coughing, they dropped altitude and hiked sideways along the cut line of an old lake bed.
They found the magpies just as the sun began to silver their backs and flash blue fire off their long tail feathers.
The magpies made a game of it, just as they made a game of everything. They hopped from tree to tree flaunting themselves, cackling at the slow, stupid, earthbound humans. She loved them. She loved their defiant beauty, the strong curve of chest to wing to pinion, their gleefully unashamed thievery. She wanted one of them more than she could ever remember wanting anything.
She snugged the shotgun into her shoulder the way her father had shown her. She led the target, reveling in the dog-sharp reflexes that had been her construct’s birthright long before the first piece of Corps wetware burrowed into her spine. She squeezed the trigger softly, felt the give of it, the final burr of resistance as the slack of the uncocked mechanism gave way to the sharp, clean union of brain, trigger, firing pin. She fired, and the blue-black-and-white glory that had been a magpie burst into a tumbling whirl of blood and feathers.
It fell into a puddle. She remembered that very clearly. She remembered running, impatient to see the bird, to get it in her hands, to possess it. She remembered kneeling in the dirt, picking up a broken, bedraggled, limp thing with a shattered chest. She remembered crying. It was the last time she could remember that Caitlyn Perkins had cried. She certainly hadn’t cried when her father died.
She surfaced from the memory to feel Cohen beside her, inside her. Are you the hunter or the bird? he asked. A question only Cohen could ask.
She looked into Chiara’s gold-flecked eyes and thought that the world was the bird, and the miners were, and the crystals. Everything people used and used up. “I guess I’m both,” she said. And she felt Cohen accept both the spoken answer and the unspoken one.
In place of a reply, he reached over her shoulder and plucked a cricket out of the greenery to sit chirping on his outstretched palm. “Disappointed?”
“No,” Li said.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
“It’s a she?”
“We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
He put his hand against a sunflower stalk. The cricket marched onto the stalk with slow dignity, sat down, and went on singing as if its visit to Cohen had been just another walk under the warm sun.
“How did you do that?” Li asked.
“Oh, this is all me. It’s a place I used to have in Spain. Gone now, of course. We’re in one of my memory palaces. Whatever the crystals are doing to us, they’re using my networks to do it. They’ve just . . . locked us in a back room while they search the house, I guess you could say.”
“Christ!”
“Yes. Well. There’s not much we can do about it. And you don’t want to see what’s happening out there. It has a lot more to do with shooting magpies than catching crickets.”
She stared at him, stricken, but he was already bending over the cricket, talking about what crickets did and ate, how they used their legs to make that fantastic, improbable noise. “They always liked hot,