Eye and Talon Read Free Page B

any impeding vehicles stalled in the streets, losing sight of the target and then spotting it again. The adrenaline rush in her blood blotted out all sensory input except for the focused, radar-like scan of her vision, locked onto the back of her target like some ancient military heat-seeking missile.
    She would run it through her mind again later, when she was savoring these memories on top of all the ones that had gone before it. Standing on the narrow, crumbling ledge at the corner of the building tower, she focused on the precious moment before her. She and the escaped replicant were in end-game mode; above and below her, the building's maze of retrofitted power conduits and ventilation shafts thrummed hollowly with their own blind, nervous energy, as though in sympathetic motion with the blood pulsing tighter and faster from her heart.
    Maybe on whatever off-world colony from which he'd escaped, Enesque had been some kind of high-steel construction drone, expendable and trained for altitude maneuvers. Maybe it was where he felt safest, that far above the ground; so when the chase had eaten up the last of his rational thought processes, reduced him to a thing of gasping anger and fear, that was where he had naturally scrambled to. Iris had spotted him clambering up the side of this building, using the exterior pipes as hand and footholds, heading for the giant geisha-and-pill ad projected onto the low, artificially generated clouds. At least he can't take a shot at me now . She'd also spotted that the replicant had had to stash his gun inside his jacket, to leave both hands free for climbing. Iris had tucked her own gun away, into the silicone-greased shoulder holster beneath the leatherite, and had started after him.
    Part of the magnified geisha's face blanked out, as Iris took another slow step along the ledge, rounding the building's corner and coming in front of one of the projector units. Each breath was sharp with the distinctive metallic tang of the microscopic water droplets, ion-charged so the pulsing magnetic field could sculpt the mist cloud into a smooth enough surface for the animated image. The pulses made the gun lying so close to Iris's heart seem almost alive, as though it also had started beating with the chase's excitement.
    Another wind gust split the cloud, so she could see across the empty space above the street to the old, dead billboard from which the geisha had used to smile and beckon. The projector behind her cast Iris's shadow, twenty times larger than life, onto one corner of the flat, gray rectangle; its shadows wavered with the rain sluicing down the deactivated pixels.
    A different shadow moved on the billboard, at the opposite corner; a shadow with human form which Iris knew didn't belong to anything human. As the mists sealed up again, she turned her head and could discern, through the geisha's enveloping smile, the escaped replicant Enesque, spine and hands flattened against the side of the building.
    He was less than ten meters from her, and with nowhere left to go. The ledge came to an abrupt, sheared-off end, with nothing beyond it but empty night air. In the distance beyond him, the lights of a police spinner blinked and faded away, as though scared of by a sudden gout of flame.
    Maybe the rep wasn't used to heights; maybe it had been only fear that had driven him this far up. Iris could see he was petrified by the greater fear, the emptiness and the falling that lay a couple of inches in front of him. He couldn't even move one hand away from the wall, to reach inside his jacket for his gun. An agonized face turned toward Iris, sweat and rain drawing chalky rivulets through his clown-white stage makeup.
    'Don't . . .' The voice that had brayed and cracked jokes inside the subterranean club was now a dry rasp. 'Don't you have to . . . read me my rights? Or something?'
    'Get real.' The ledge was plenty wide enough for Iris to turn away from the building's wall and face directly toward