Spin State - Chris Moriarty [49]
A noise. Movement.
She-the-other stood up, turned, looked.
A figure emerged from the shadows. A woman, Li thought. But it was hard to tell; her perspective was disjointed, distorted, as if seen through eyes that had no idea what they were looking at.
The body she was in spoke, but all she heard was a high chattering wail, like the dumb cry of an animal. If there were words in it, they were spoken in a language that meant nothing to her.
The dark figure moved toward her. For a moment her vision cleared, and she put a face to the shadow—a pale face, shadowed by the long, dark fall of hair.
The witch.
She reached out, felt the taut curve of the witch’s waist beneath her hand, drew the girl’s warm body to her.
White light. Endless space. Wind like a knife.
Mountains rose above her, higher than any mountains could be, rimed with black ice, white with hanging glaciers. The sky burned high-altitude blue above her—a color she’d only seen once before, halo-jumping into the equatorial mountains of Gilead.
A hawk’s shadow swept overhead, and she heard her own heartbeat, slow and strong, echoing through the vast mineral silence. Then she was out, back on the grid. Safe.
She probed the net, stretching as thin as she dared to. But he was gone, if he’d ever been there. Shantytown: 14.10.48. Dr. Leviticus Sharpe met her at the door of the Shantytown hospital. He was wire-thin, knobby-jointed, a good two meters tall. He stooped atop storklike legs, a big man trying hard not to intimidate a small woman. Li didn’t need the help—but she still liked him for it. “Welcome to Compson’s World,” he said, smiling. “May you not have to stay long.” Sharpe’s office faced away from town, toward the foothills. It was fall in Shantytown, and the scrub oak was turning. Li saw the familiar wash of scarlet in the canyons, the silver-green ripple of rabbit sage on the lowlands. “Well,” said Sharpe when they were seated. “Here you are.” “You sound like you’ve been expecting me.” He blinked. “Shouldn’t I have been?” Li spread her hands, palms out, and raised her eyebrows. It was one of Cohen’s habitual gestures, and she felt a flush of annoyance with herself for letting it creep into this conversation. “Er . . .” Sharpe shifted in his chair, looking suddenly uneasy. “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here, then, Major.” Li shrugged and pulled Sharifi’s wet/dry wire out of her pocket. Sharpe peered at it, and Li caught the metallic flash of a contracting shutter ring in his left pupil. A bioprosthetic, some kind of diagnostic device. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Wetware isn’t really my bailiwick. Have you tried AMC tech support? The station office is reasonably competent.” “The other half of this system is in your morgue.” “I doubt that.” He bent to look at the wire again. “Any multiplanetary that owned this kind of tech would have put a repo out on it before the operator’s body was cold.” “It’s Hannah Sharifi’s.” “Oh,” he said softly. “I see. That’s different, of course.” “You didn’t turn up the internal components in your autopsy?” Li checked her hard memory, verified what she thought she’d seen. “You signed her death certificate.” He stood up—no longer smiling, no longer stooping—and Li saw the green flash of LEDs as he checked his internal chronometer. “I sign a lot of death certificates,” he said, the friendly, joking tone gone from his voice. “And now, if it’s quite all right, I have patients to see. Tell Haas I said hello.” Li felt like she was stuck in a fog. She followed Sharpe down the corridor, half-running to keep pace with his long-legged strides. He pushed through a pair of swinging doors into a scrub room, bent over a deep sink, and started washing his hands. Li reached out and turned the water off. “You mind telling me what the hell’s going on here?” Sharpe held his soapy hands