Page 72 of Throwing Fire

“Here-n-there.” I kneel by her bed and offer my handful to the rabbits. It’s like a furry APC charge. Two of the babies overshoot the mark and end up scrabbling around in my lap. “Dopes,” I tell them. “You can’t even eat this yet.”

Kez extricates Mix and Slinky. Sets them on the bed and tickles their backs with her fingertips until they go into the babies’ squashed pet-me position. “They just get excited when the others do,” she says.

Once the sawrin is gobbled, Chalk flops heavily across the arm I’ve got propped on the bed. Blinks up at me sleepily. Bunny-speak forI adore you, but don’t pet me. It took me a while to interpret this one. When they’re this close and looking this cute, my natural urge is to cuddle them. But petting is only welcomed in the pet-me posture. Attempted cuddling in other poses just earns the offender a glare and foot-flicking. I blink back at the rabbit and wait for her to either go into pet-me or get off my arm.

“I’m ready,” Kez says.

“Grab your helmet,” I tell her. “We’ll take my trike.”

“Ooo.” Kez’s eyes light up. She likes riding the trike. Then she tilts her head at me. “Are you sure you’re up to it? You were all—” She splays her fingers.

I lift an eyebrow. “Exploded?”

“A mess. Not even a day ago.”

I like my interpretation better. “Don’t worry about me, kitten. Just make sure you hang on tight.”

CHAPTER 27

We’ve got a run across Nock to do before heading to my place.

Kez doesn’t like doing it on my trike. She says it’s cheating. But we’ve got a full day, so we get it out of the way, avoiding the congestion in the center of the city where it looks like there’s a water riot in progress.

As we head back towards the river, I open up the trike’s engine. Kez’s arms tighten around me. Not with fear, but with exhilaration. She likes riding the trike. Probably as much as I do. The power between my legs. Wind in my face. My kitten’s warmth against my back. Total freedom.

Those seven-hundred horses in the trike’s powerful engine have us at the gates of my place in under five minutes, even though we’ve crossed the whole city. Away from the snarl of the protest, the streets are clear. There’s no official ground speed limit in Nock, so I let the trike top out. Feels like we’re flying. I know Kez is enjoying it too when she slides her hand down the front of my pants. I still haven’t figured out why she likes to have her hand there when we’re riding the trike, but she does and it doesn’t bother me, so I let her. Besides,the look on people’s faces when they notice her wrist above my waistband is priceless.

There’s no one at my place to notice her molesting me, except the A-Eye. Still, I think I catch a hint of disapproval as it flicks its red beam over us. The outer gate slides open and a display pops up inside my helmet as the house’s H.P.C. links up. I scan the display as I steer the trike up the short drive and through the inner gate. All in the green. They’re still not trying for us where we live.

I revise that opinion when I find a corpse stuck to my shock net. The shock net’s my own version of a million-K fence. There aren’t any sensors on the net; too much clutter in the river. But I’ve got a couple of viewies on the house’s pilings, and I see the dark shape as soon as I flick them on to run a check on the house’s security. The river’s cloudy – run-off from the soyafields of Blyss District – but the shape is unmistakable.

From above, all I can see is part of the arm he got over the barrier before it killed him. It’s on a three-second delay. Spares the fish. From underwater, I can see that he’s stuck face-first to the net. His right leg’s at a funny angle. He might have gotten a knee or foot through the net’s mesh before it killed him. Whatever, I decide to leave him. The river and its occupants will clean him up eventually, and in the meanwhile, he’ll conduct just fine, so anyone trying to climb him is in for a surprise.

I slide my finger across the flexypane screen, causing the viewies to swivel. Mounted to the pilings, they don’t have a huge field of vision. About a hundred degrees. I finally get one to an angle where I can see the dead man’s face. It’s puffy: eyes and mouth reduced to slashes. Long strands of hair, washed from blond to grey-green in the murk, wave around his face like seaweed. I don’t recognize him. I turn to look at Kez, who is in my kitchen, making tea for both of us. She hasn’t noticed what I’m doing yet, and I’m not sure how she’ll feel about my intention to leave the corpse on the fence. It might upset her. Still, he wasn’t here for a social call. This ain’t the time to get squeamish.

With a sigh, I call her over to the wall where I’m standing. She joins me at the viewie, handing me a steaming cup of klee tea. I take it and put my hand under hers as she leans in to look at the pane. Catch her bulb when it drops from her nerveless fingers.

“That’s-that’s?—”

“Who, kitten? Do you know him?”

“No! No, I mean, I don’t think so. Jeez, how could you tell? But that’s outside — in the river — isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I hand her back her bulb. She takes it; takes a long sip as she peers at the monitor’s display. I drink my own tea, enjoying the malty sweetness that’s the mark of well-aged klee.

“No, I don’t think I know him,” Kez says finally.

“Right.” I pull up a command menu, capture the best image I can of the corpse’s face, and plex it to Myhre. Let her chew on that for a while. Then I tap off the monitor. Neither of us needs to stare at that. “C’mon. Into my parlor, said the fly.”

I beckon Kez after me as I move away from the flexypane wall, through the open arch where I removed the original slider between kitchen and dining room, which I’ve turned into a workshop.

Kez follows me. “It’s ‘said the spider to the fly.’ You’re the spider. And what are we doing?”

“I’m never the spider. Particularly not a green one.” That sets her giggling. “I’m going to sketch out that brand while we wait for Doc Gray.”

“Oh, okay.” She watches me while I find some blank flimsy, spread it on my workbench, hunt down a stylus – I have fifty million of the fucking things, where do they go? – and sketch out the symbol I want to turn into our brand. Once I’ve got the outline, I trace around it with my fingertip, consolidating the image. I squeeze it together with my fingertips, resizing it, then spread my fingers, enlarging it.

“How big you think?” I ask Kez as I scale and rescale it.

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