Spin State - Chris Moriarty [207]
She couldn’t get the air gauge on the tank to light up, no matter what she did. And she didn’t have time to fiddle. She put the mask to her mouth, sucked at it experimentally. No. It wasn’t just the gauge. She wasn’t getting anything.
“What’s wrong?” McCuen asked. There was a nervous edge to his voice that hadn’t been there even when he’d watched his last tank running down before they reached the drop-off point.
“I don’t know,” Li said.
Then the gauge finally flickered into life. The arrow dropped into the red, quivered and stayed there. She fumbled for the fill valve, and when she touched it, it spun loosely at the touch of her fingers. No pressure.
And suddenly she did know what was wrong. Someone had opened the valve and emptied the tank. All the tanks.
They had no air.
“Mirce!” she shouted, already up and running down the twisting drift.
She found her twelve meters past the next bend, her hand still on the rope, the final canister of compressed air lying on the ground beside her. Li looked into the still-clear, still-blue eyes, looked at the head turned a little sideways, baring the strong, clean line of her jaw under the stretched skin. She thought, for no reason she wanted to remember, of magpies’ wings.
The cut ran diagonally across Mirce’s throat, from the collar of her coverall to the soft flesh below her ear. She had bled out fast. In seconds, probably. No sign of a fight; the spreading pool around her could have been water or rehab fluid, except for the rich copper-and-rust smell of it.
“Why?” Bella whispered. “Why?”
“To stop us,” Li said, wondering how that calm professional’s voice could be speaking out of the whirlwind inside her.
“What do we do?” McCuen asked.
“We find whoever killed her and take their air.”
When it finally happened, she was so ready for it that she knew some deep part of herself must have been expecting it. Reading the accumulation of clues, each one insignificant in itself, that told her they were being followed. Listening for the echo that wasn’t an echo. Waiting for the muffled step behind them.
What she wasn’t prepared for—hadn’t even suspected—was the flash of quickly suppressed recognition in McCuen’s eyes.
She’d made a fool’s mistake, she told herself as the hot flush of adrenaline flooded through her. McCuen had betrayed her. Somehow, by some hook she’d probably never know about, Haas had turned him. The proof was right there in front of her, in those wide-open little-boy-blue eyes.
She called a break, drifted to a stop against an outcropping in the passage wall, stretched, and sat down a few feet from him with her back safely against solid stone.
“How could they have known where to find her?” McCuen asked. He talked fast, seizing on the first thought that came to mind, trying to gloss over the footsteps that he too had heard, that he too had been waiting for. “I mean, we were fine before that. She makes the meet, and we all get out.”
“Except Cohen.”
She could see in McCuen’s face that he still didn’t know who she was talking about. He had never met Cohen, she realized, probably never thought of him as more than a piece of equipment. “Well, yeah,” McCuen said. “But . . . you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” she said. “I know.”
She strained her ears, listening to the darkness beyond the lamplight. Everyone has a weakness, she told herself. And their weakness would be their wire.
A flickering double vision swept over her as she tried to hold streamspace and realspace in her mind simultaneously. It was stomach-wrenching, but she couldn’t afford to drop all the way out of realtime. Not with McCuen three feet away from her and an unknown pursuer waiting at the edge of the lamplight.
She stepped into the memory palace.
The door was broken. The fountain had run dry. A storm howled over the turrets, setting roof tiles rattling and shutters flapping. Whole wings of the palace were open to wind and sky. Locked doors confronted her at every turn, and even when she got past them, she found only rain-strafed ruins behind them.
She couldn’t