Electric Church

XX IT HURT MY EYES A LITTLE JUST TO LOOK AT HER

“Well, this is depressing.”

I ignored Gatz. He was the only one I thought I could count on to at least not slit my throat. Kieth intended me no harm, I thought, but he wouldn’t lose sleep if I got hurt, either; I wasn’t even sure he regarded other people as people, and not as especially well-designed Droids. Milton and Tanner were in it purely for the money, and people in it for the money could never be trusted.

That left Kev Gatz.

We stood on the Dole Line near Downing Street with every other citizen of the System. A few blocks back were the twisted remnants of a heavy-duty black metal gate, half of it torn from its moorings and the other half melted. I twisted my head and could see a jagged wall of masonry still standing on Downing Street itself, just inside those gates, where a small sign was amazingly clean and uncharred, reading DOWNING STREET, SW1, CITY OF WESTMINSTER. I considered asking when the fuck London had been the City of Westminster, and then considered my companions and decided against it. The Abbey was called Westminster, too, and the Abbey had looked like the oldest fucking thing in the world, so maybe it had been a long time ago, fifty years or forever.

I imagined some of the people on the line-snaking for miles up and down the street several times before disappearing-were actually waiting for their issue of Nutrition Tabs and Necessities Coupons, sponsored by several of the richer families in London, but the Dole Line was really just a meeting place. Most of us were there looking to make deals, usually illegal. You had the cream of London’s underground standing around in broad daylight, so despised by their betters that no one paid any attention.

I was looking for guns.

Just a mile away our target sat behind a high wall and the security system: Westminster Abbey, Worldwide Headquarters of the Electric Church. The Abbey itself was largely gone, carried away by Unification and riots and the simple erosion of a population so desperate that ancient bricks became valuable. All that was left was one wall and most of one tower, upright by the grace of God or whatever, the new wall around it a cinder-block monstrosity.

I followed Gatz at a leisurely pace. He was working the line, making inquiries after a gun dealer Kieth recommended. I didn’t have any contacts in London, so I took the advice offered and hoped for the best. It was a gray, rainy sort of day, a steady drizzle of subtle dispirited precipitation that soaked your clothes before you realized it.

I had Brother West in my head, the poor fuck. I’d had people plead with me not to kill them. I’d never had someone beg me to pull his plug. I was happy to take Dick Marin’s money, I was happy to kill whomever he wanted me to in return for what he’d offered me, what did I care? But listening to West, I’d realized it really was true. Inside every Monk there was a human being silently screaming in digital, with no mouth.

I followed Gatz, my hands in my pockets, my best hardassed mask on, staring at the Monks. A gang of them worked the Dole Line. They smiled their way up and down, politely asking if anyone wanted to hear their personal testimony. They got a few takers, thin, pale men and women with deep, blank eyes who probably thought that if they joined the EC they wouldn’t have to stand in line for a whole day just to get some super-rich asshole’s version of charity. The Monks were all immaculate. Clean, polished, calm, polite, well-spoken, but every time I looked at them I saw a scream. I made fists inside my pockets and wanted to rip each latex face off.

“Ave,” Gatz said, gesturing me closer. “This guy knows our man.”

I stepped forward. Gatz was standing with a short, gaunt, completely toothless man who sported a thin line of drool out of the corner of his mouth. He grinned at me and I wanted to punch him just to make him stop.

“You know Jerry Materiel?” I asked.

Drooly nodded slowly. “Shure, shure,” he lisped. “He’s on line right now, doin’ bizness. I could point ’im out to you for, say, five yen.”

I stared at him, keeping my hardassed mask on. I felt Gatz glance at me through his glasses.

“You want I should give him a nudge?” he asked.

I bunched my jaw muscles. “No,” I said firmly. There were rules, or ought to be. Or had been, once. If you just fucked everyone you met, fucked and fucked and fucked people, where did it end? The man had made an honest offer. I fished a credit dongle from my pocket. “Five it is, friend, on delivery.”

Drooly nodded happily, spittle flying, and broke away from the line. We followed him for about two minutes, an endless, featureless line of desperate people passing us, most engaged in furtive discussions, some making exchanges. The city around us looked desolate and abandoned, and incredibly ancient. On the horizon was a tall, broken tower that soared upward and ended in jagged, black-char teeth. The whole place felt like the riots had ended twenty years ago, and everyone had just left it as it was-every stone on the street, every destroyed building, every evacuated family-all just collecting dust all these years. It was a ghost city. Drooly stopped in front of a group of men who looked a little too well-fed for the Dole Line and pointed.

“Here’s Jer,” Drooly sputtered. “Wit’ the broken nose.”

I ignored Drooly’s outstretched palm and stepped up to the group. One of them did have a prodigiously broken nose, sitting at a noticeable angle to his face. I nodded at him. “You Jerry Materiel?”

He looked me and Gatz up and down. “Mabe, who’el you, den?”

His accent was so thick I could barely understand him. Sifting through the mangled syllables, I squinted until I thought I looked inscrutable and deadly. It had worked before. “Avery Cates, out of New York.”

He studied me for a moment, and then grunted. I knew enough about people like Jerry to determine this meant he’d heard my name. “Bawl ov chawlk, lads, eh?” The men who had been standing with him drifted a few feet away, smoking cigarettes and talking. The cigarettes marked them as fairly prosperous crooks; it had been weeks since I’d had a steady supply of smokes.

“Cates outter New Yawk, awright,” Jerry Materiel grunted, looking me up and down again. “I heard you Captain Kirked the Kendish hit. That you?”

Kendish… I thought a moment, and then brightened. Mitchell Kendish had been a Joint Council undersecretary. He’d launched an investigation into a group stealing SSF laundry hovers and tearing them apart, selling the parts right back to the SSF to repair the remaining hovers. It had been genius, but Kendish had spoiled everything. The undersecretaries, who were the people who did most of the day-to-day real work of running the System, can usually be bribed-they were the worst in the whole damn filthy System, worse even than the System Cops because they didn’t have a Department of Internal Affairs to keep track of them and meddle once in a while.

What made the whole insane machine run was bribes, really. No matter how corrupt and broken the machine was, everyone could rely on the magical power of yen and that stabilized things. But Kendish hadn’t wanted anything to do with a bribe. So I’d been hired to put him away. I didn’t mind; you didn’t get to be an undersecretary by being a saint, and the price was right. That had been my most high-profile job-and one of the few that had gone off without a hitch, professional and dry, no mess. I thought longingly of the money I’d been paid for that. Long gone, into Pickering’s, into a lot of bullshit. “Yeah, I poked Kendish.”

Jerry nodded. “Awright, I know you. What kin Jerry do for Mr. Avery Cates outta New Yawk, then?” He squinted at me. I was still in my stolen duds, and they hadn’t gotten too beat up yet, because I’d gone a remarkable seventy-two hours without being shot at, beaten, or chased. “Assuming ’e’s gawt the bees and honey for the job.”

In response, I made a show of paying Drooly, who’d been standing there grinning in five-yen ecstasy, for his time. “I’ve got yen,” I said. “You have an office?”

Jerry Materiel spread his arms and smiled, his teeth brown and cracked. “The whole field a wheat’s my office, Mr. Cates! Tell us what y’be needin’.”

I had laboriously written a list onto a scrap of paper. “Any two or three of these would be fine.”

He ran his eye over the list, raised an eyebrow, and licked his thumb. “Y’know what yer doin’, fer sure. I’ll ne’ s’resurance. Say twenty would relax me on the subbeck, eh?” He produced a small hand-held credit scanner. Glancing around, I paused: A flash of red hair down the street, ducking behind something, made me stiffen. I ran my dongle through the scanner and it lit up green. I glanced back at Jerry Materiel and he grinned.

“No need to wor’ abut the whoppers, Cates. They don’t bust the Dole. Too borin’ for ’em. If’n yer gon’ wor’ abut sometin’, wor’ abut the feggin’ Tin Men.”

I nodded. “I worry about the Monks,” I said. “Be sure of that. I also need building plans. Old ones, pre-Unification.”

Jerry winked. “My speci-ali-tee, Cates. I’ll have a butcher’s and see what can be done. You gawt an addy?”

I slipped him another piece of paper. “Where and when, Mr. Materiel?”

He stared at the second slip for a moment, chewing his lip, and then glanced back at the list. “Here, Mr. Cates, in twenty.”

“Done.” I leaned forward slightly. “Tell me, is there a red-haired woman about a block away, sort of hiding behind that ruined wall, but watching me?”

Jerry Materiel didn’t move his eyes from my face, but that terrible, brown-black grin appeared again. “Lumme! She sure has been eyeballin’ you, Cates, since you got ’ere. She ain’t SSF, or you’da been shown the heels, right?”

“Thanks. In twenty then.”

Materiel sketched a salute and melted into the Dole Line. Gatz stood close to me as we pretended to join the line. “That your Vid anchor?”

I nodded slightly. “That’s her. Let’s see if we can get her off the street.”

We wandered. We didn’t know London. In some ways, all the cities were the same: half-ruined, never rebuilt after the Riots, and continually razed a little more every time there was a food riot or something. New York, especially Old New York, the original city, before urban spread had absorbed most of the other cities on the seaboard and formed the huge, endless city it was today, was a snarling mass of people, people, people-

people crushed into the streets, into the few livable apartments, into the rare legal taverns and the hundreds of temporary gin mills. The gray mass of men and women roiling through the streets was a permanent fixture. Sure, you wandered above Twenty-third Street in Manhattan and things thinned out as things got richer, but I didn’t think there was an inhabitable area in New York that wasn’t packed with people. London was different. It had the same razed look, the same crumbling buildings, and the same remnants of the Riots, but there weren’t any people. The streets were comparatively empty, winding off who knew where. In Manhattan, you could let yourself be carried along by the tide of people and know exactly where you’d end up. In London, I got the feeling that it was all narrow, winding streets, and the space made my skin itch. I felt exposed. And in New York, things had been crufted back together. Rubble cleared, windows boarded up, spared furniture rescued and reused. London looked like entire neighborhoods had just shrugged their shoulders, packed up, and left.

Gatz and I wandered, keeping the dirty river on our left and letting her keep us in sight, until we were on a wide but deserted street. At one time it had edged the river, but recently the river-a dirty, brown-flavored sludge flowing stolidly past us-had topped the embankment and lapped halfway across the broken pavement. When the time was right we ducked into the shadows offered by a wall of rubble dumped there decades ago and waited. Across the river from us was a hemisphere of rusted metal, a huge spoked contraption half-buried in river sludge, leaning at an extreme angle but somehow peaceful in its stillness. It was bent slightly, and I tried, briefly, to imagine it upright and suspended in the air again, but it was hard to imagine anything whole and functioning again.

She appeared a few minutes later, clean and coiffed and wearing more on her back than I’d ever possessed in my whole fucking life. It hurt my eyes a little just to look at her, someone who ate real food, who bought new clothes whenever she wanted, some girl playing at a profession because she was bored. The only legitimate jobs to be had, aside from maybe being a Crusher, didn’t pay enough to survive on-everyone who’d lived the streets, like me, knew that. The only people who could afford to have jobs were rich. I watched her pass our hiding spot, bold as brass because she was convinced nothing could happen to her, that the whole SSF would spring into action if she was so much as stared at rudely. It made my heart sing to follow her silently for a few seconds, and then reach out and wrap my arm around her neck, cupping the hand over her mouth to cut off the squeak of protest she managed.

“If I flex my bicep your neck will snap,” I whispered into her ear. “You believe me?”

After a moment, she nodded.

“Good. You’ve been following me, Ms. Harper. Bad idea.” Kev stepped in front of us. “I can’t have Vid reporters doing stories on me, now can I? Let me introduce my colleague Kev Gatz. He’s going to have a look at you.”

She tensed in my arms, not sure of what was coming, and probably believing the bullshit the Vids pumped out about the jobless mass they ruled over: that we were without conscience, without honor, without souls. Some of us were, but I liked to think there was still honor, still some humanity. I breathed in the smell of her hair-clean and perfumed-and swallowed involuntarily, shifting my weight to keep a sliver of air between us.

Gatz lifted his shades and I averted my eyes. “Ms. Harper, look at me.” He sighed.

I frowned. “Kieth said you didn’t need to look people in the eye.” Harper rolled her eyes toward me and then back toward Kev, trying to see us both simultaneously.

He shrugged. “I dunno. I can’t do it without eye contact. It’s like a block or something.”

And then, just before-just a split second before-the barrel of the gun touched my ear, I heard the faintest rustle of a coat, the faintest hint of someone behind me. I barely moved my head, and the gun was in my ear. I thought, Fucking hell, who the fuck moves that lightly?

“Mr. Cates, a pleasure,” a deep, roughly accented voice said quietly. “Please ask your friend to put his glasses back on, as I have no intention of looking at him.”

I nodded, not moving. “Go ahead, Kev.”

After a moment, the gun was removed. “Very well, Mr. Cates, you can move if you wish.”

The voice was calm and sounded amused, as if there was no worry over me making any sort of move against him. I released the reporter, who stood there in a Gatz-induced daze, and slowly turned. A few feet away stood an old man-at least fifty years old if he was a day, with a shock of white hair over a permanently pink face-dressed all in black, quality clothes, not flashy. The gun he held casually on Gatz and myself gleamed in the damp storm-light: a silver-plated, custom Roon model.

He looked me up and down, a hint of a smile on his clean-shaven, lined face. “You move well, Mr. Cates,” he said cheerfully, “but you have a bad habit of assuming that if you can’t see something-say, anything behind you-it can’t hurt you.”

I studied his face-he was the oldest man to ever hold a gun on me, that was for sure. I didn’t recognize it. “I don’t know you, do I?”

His smiled widened subtly. “Of course you do, Mr. Cates. I’ve been Gunning since before you were born. I’m sure you’ve heard of me. I admit I’ve been lying low for the last few years, but I’d like to think the good work I did for the cause in Ireland is still spoken of.”

I shook my head. “You’re telling me you’re Canny Orel?”

The old man just raised a snowy eyebrow.

Gatz grunted with sudden, unexpected animation. “Can’t be. Canny Orel’d have to be like fifty years old. He’s dead.”

I hesitated, because in a way it made sense. Canny Orel was a man who had killed upward of three hundred people, never been tapped by the System Pigs once, who’d founded the Dъnmharъ, and who had retired rich and healthy. I knew I wasn’t in that class, but I’d lived to a ripe old age myself, on the streets of New York, and it took skill to sneak up on me in broad fucking daylight.

And… I wanted to believe it. Here was someone who’d survived, who’d spent his life just like me, crawling from one emergency to another, who’d killed people-but better than me, because Canny Orel had always killed people for a reason, for a cause. Not just for money. Whatever he’d done before Unification, Orel had killed for Saoirse in the cause of Irish independence. When that had ultimately failed in the face of the newly constituted SSF, he’d formed the Dъnmharъ, an organization of Gunners that, while profit-motivated, had only taken jobs assassinating System officials or SSF officers. As far as I knew, Orel was the only person who’d killed SSF officers and lived to tell the tale… until me. So far. Canny Orel had been the best, and he’d done it for a reason. I wanted him to be standing here in front of me.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his smile disappearing. “You can call me Mr. Orel. Now, enough of the fanboy bullshit, eh? There’s business to attend to.”

Sudden panic rippled through me. This was no fucking coincidence, I thought-the man had been hired, sent after me. I shut my eyes. I didn’t know if it was Moje or the Electric Church or who, but someone had gone out and spent top dollar for the best there was to cut me down. At least I knew when they spoke of me back in Pickering’s, I’d be the guy cut down by the legend. I’d be legend. Whoever had found him and hired him, I’d at least have that.

And I thought longingly of the Monks and their nuclear batteries. I thought of Brother West, going mad, but alive, always alive, forever. I was suddenly and inexplicably sure that I was about to die.

I eyed his gun, trying to figure a way past it, an angle. I didn’t see one. Heart pounding, I nodded. “Okay.” I wasn’t going to beg him. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself. I wanted Canny Orel to go away thinking I was the hardest ass he’d ever encountered.

“Good show, Mr. Cates.” He racked a shell into the chamber. “Now tell me: Where in fuck is that little slimy bastard Ty Kieth?”