Ghost Spin Read Free Page B

choose between coming home to you or saving Ada. And you wouldn’t have wanted me on those terms. I’d never have been able to look you in the eye again
.
    But he couldn’t tell her that, not with Holmes and Nguyen and the AI police watching. She’d just have to see it for herself … if she ever came close enough to forgiving him to be willing to see it.
    Holmes was in the hall now. She was trying to be quiet, of course.Pathetic the way humans always assumed he couldn’t hear anything they couldn’t. It didn’t take one-millionth of the parallel processors the boy’s DNA now hosted for Cohen to run the various overlapping streams that covered the corridor and snatch the biometrics of every member of the assault team. And of course he could pick out Holmes’s breathing, Holmes’s footfalls. He could practically smell the woman, and the thought of killing her gave him a fleeting surge of satisfaction.
    It passed quickly. He knew how to handle a gun—not knowledge, exactly, but a sort of sleepwalking muscle memory from the shunts he’d ridden on UNSec missions in the days when Helen Nguyen had been cutting him a paycheck instead of trying to kill him. But he’d made it through a very long life without ever killing anyone. He’d done violence when he had to, but not fatal violence. And even then, it had always been distant and digital. This was different, and he knew without putting himself to the test that he didn’t have the stomach for it.
    A shoulder slammed against the door, rattling its flimsy hinges and breaking loose a fine rain of plaster from the wall above. A second slam made it shudder again. He heard Holmes’s familiar voice, flat and dismissive, telling someone to stop being a fool and do it right.
    Ada hated that voice. She hated it with a passion that rose up like a beast breaking out of its cage and threatened to engulf the last tenuous threads of Cohen’s sanity. Cohen dug in and held on. He couldn’t afford to let Ada master him now. He had to make sure the job was finished. He had to put them both beyond all hope of recapture.
    Holmes shot out the lock and kicked in the door.
    For a moment she and Cohen stood facing each other: her in the doorway and Cohen on the bed with the heavy revolver thrust out to the farthest length of the boy’s trembling arm and quavering in her direction.
    “Remember, no head shots,” Holmes told the men behind her. “We need to take him alive.”
    “I don’t think so,” Cohen said.
    He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,
    Silence more musical than any song;
    Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
    Until the morning of Eternity
    —Christina Georgina Rossetti

(Li)
    EARTH’S ORBITAL RING: ZONA ANGELES, THE AI ENCLAVE
    Catherine Li stood in her dressing room staring at the open suitcase containing a small portion of her collection of artificial hands and told herself that some people would consider her a lucky woman.
    This dressing room was bigger than the shantytown miner’s cabin she’d grown up in. There wasn’t a piece of clothing in here that didn’t cost more money than her father had ever made in his life. And the amusing collection of luxury prosthetics that Cohen had always insisted on calling jewelry just for the satisfaction of annoying her? That was wealth taken to the point of insanity.
    In the age of viral medicine, you could get a new hand as easily as a new liver. But Cohen had convinced her not to fix the hand. And Li had her own reasons for not fixing it. She’d lost that hand because she’d forgotten about old enemies—and made the mistake of thinking they’d forgotten her. And that lesson was worth her right hand and then some.
    The most spectacular hand—and oddly, given her usual simple tastes, her favorite—was an intricate jewel-actioned clockwork hand with orbital rubies in every joint. The rubies glittered dangerously—and the jeweler who had made the hand had