Page 80 of Throwing Fire

“Yes, sir,” she says.

I’m not sure if she thinks there’s a traitor, or if she’s just agreeingwith me because she’s programmed to. Either way, I decide to make it the AI’s problem, too.

“Find him for me.”

I wake Kez with twenty minutes to spare. Neither of us is dressed, and she may want a few minutes to wake up before we climb on my trike and head out to her plate-picking appointment. I don’t tell her any of what I’ve been thinking about while she’s been asleep. She wakes up with a smile on her face; it doesn’t fade as we dress. She holds my hand as we walk to my trike, humming to herself. She’s happy. And I want her to savor that happiness, without having to think about what I’m about to do to her friend, or the potential horde of people conspiring to murder her.

So I don’t object when she sticks her hand down my pants as I drive. And I take her helmet with a smile when I drop her off at the Crackle planner’s, where Chi and Mike are waiting for her. I brush her bangs back from her face, agree to meet back at Tyng Tower at fourteen-hundred, and give her a deep, sweet kiss before I say goodbye.

It’s only in my rear-viewie that I see her smile fade, and pain etch lines around her eyes, as she watches me drive away, to kill her friend.

I am a hunter of men.I am the strangled cry in the night.

Top read us that shit in AHOS, the advanced training they gave my unit third year in, to make us more efficient killers. While we were spinning around in zero-gee, trying to gut each other while trying not to puke into our breathers, he was standing outside the training pod, reading to us.Anti-distraction training, he called it. I didn’t listen closely. I wasn’t supposed to, and poetry’s not my thing. Unless it’s the poetry of movement. The sonnet Kez’s ass makes as she walks, for example. That’s poetry. The rest is shit and air. But I’ve found over the years that a lot of it has stuck with me.

I am a hunter of men.

I haven’t hunted in a long time. Three and a half years. Since I hunted down Nello and the guards who killed Mouse. That’s the last time I felt this cold rage. The desire to rip the life from someone who has taken away what’s mine. Who took the warm, sweet-smelling, golden-skinned woman I’d fucked so satisfactorily that morning and turned her into a cold, unmoving, piss-stinking lump of torn skin and broken bone. Remembering the Bale Brothers’ plans to do the same thing to Kez, remembering that Duncan gave them the means to do it, fills me with an identical icy fury. I didn’t feel this way when I went after the Bale boys. But then, I didn’t know them. Not the way I know Duncan. I’ve eaten with him, played Vizzion with him, joined him in ribbing Gig and Ape and Kez about the small things that people who live with each other joke about. And all that time he was giving our enemies information that could have taken Kez away from me.

That rage propels me across the rooftops of Nock City. I hunt on foot, from above. My trike’s conspicuous. I don’t want anyone to hear or see me coming. Whatever you might think about how conspicuous a two-meter, hundred-kilogram man dressed all in black running and jumping from roof to roof might be, you’d be wrong. One of the first lessons I learned in SAWL: the sheep almost never look up. When they do, you get the kind of rebellion I was sent in to crush on Trident and Phogath and Tje Dhos. But on prosperous, relatively peaceful worlds like Kuseros, no one looks up. And if they do, they figure they’ve seen a shadow, or an animal. I admit I look more like a kemwar or an old Earth ape than I do a man as I run. When I’ve got a clear, flat roof, I run upright. But the rest of the time I’m bent over as I traverse angled roofs; cat-crawling along roof-ridges, jumping and rolling as I cross the gaps between buildings. As I warm up and the muscle-memory of all those hours running with Creet, the Parkour master who trained my unit, comes back, I get more confident, flipping and leaping between rooftops instead of vaultingthem.

The flow of the run, the immersion of myself into movement, stills the rage. I don’t feel peaceful, not like when I’m with Kez. But I feel focused. So focused, moving over, under, around the obstacles between here and there, that I pass Duncan without noticing. It’s only when I get to his destination, a metal and glaz highrise shimmering with cloverleaf logos – some sort of do-gooder humanitarian agency that Kez takes the same confidential datastick-bundle from Nock’s four detox centers to twice a week – that I realize I’ve passed him.

I retrace my steps until I spot him, pick my ambush spot in an empty alley, and hang from some repair scaffolding sticking off the steeple of a Krister church as I watch him come toward me. He doesn’t see me. Like the rest of the sheep, he doesn’t look up. He’s a strong runner. Good, easy, ground-eating pace. I wouldn’t want to try to take him in a real race. But this isn’t a race.

It’s not even a fair fight.

I drop off the scaffold and land on all fours. Straighten slowly and dust off my hands. Duncan continues half-a-dozen steps down the alley before he pulls up. “Huh-hey,” he says, transitioning from the rhythmic breathing of distance running to talking. “Is everything okay? Did Kez send you?”

Not exactly. “I’m gonna need that package.”

“Sure.” He looks puzzled but hands the wrapped bundle to me without hesitation. He’s got no reason to question my authority, or my motives.

I set it down on the ground, so it doesn’t get damaged, or bloody. While he’s still wondering what’s going on, I launch into a one-handed flip. Land behind him and to one side. I pull my kukri out of my boot, pivot to grab his left hand with mine and force his arm behind his back so I’ve got leverage. Wrap my right arm across his throat. My kukri presses under his chin. Not cutting, not yet.

Duncan goes limp, which I don’t expect. I pull him back against my chest to retain my hold on him. Not the ideal position to cut his throat; I’m going to get wet.

“Do it, man,” he says.

“Why?” I growl.

“I told them you’d figure it out. I’ve been waiting for you to say something ... you didn’t even give a hint at breakfast.”

I have a decent poker face when I want to. And I wanted to catch him away from the Warren.

“Fuck,” he says, and it’s almost a whine. “What are you waiting for? Do it, man.”

“You want to die?”

He shakes his head. “It’s you or it’s them. You’ll just kill me.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah.” He chuckles humorlessly. “You’re not as bad a guy as you think you are, Snow. Only thing that’s kept me from topping myself to end this? Knowing you’d take care of her. No matter what I gave them, you’d protect her.”

Not quite believing either what I’m hearing or what I’m doing, I release his arm and move away from him, slipping my kukri back into my boot. I lean against the wall of the adjacent flash-shop and cross my arms over my chest. “How long’s it been going on?”

He slumps to a crouch. Hangs his head and doesn’t look at me. “What, getting paid to spy on Kez?”

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