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  Something, certainly not any manifestation of conscious thought, took over then, and reality slowed to the speed of a child's flipbook. The flashing lights on the board before him, the blur of the brick walls he passed, the mirror image of the two rockets clicked by in slow motion, everything locked into the same torpid dance of death. Aubry, trapped in the same syrupy motion, extrapolated lines of intersection, relative speeds and movement options, as if he were engaged in a far more personal form of combat.

  And even before he found the correct answers, his hands were moving on the controls. He was climbing, banking, and one of the rockets passed within a meter of the aircar's belly. There was a flash and a jar as the second rocket nicked the bumper of his vehicle and rebounded to the wall before exploding, fire and shards of brick raining down, the wall collapsing even as he sped towards the mouth of the alley. In his mirror he saw the police airsled collide with the shower of brick, and there was an explosion that brought him scant comfort: his own car was out of control.

  He fought desperately to stabilize, but he just didn't have the skill, the intuitive understanding of the car that might have enabled him to neutralize the killing vibrations, the shock of the flying bricks, and keep going smoothly. He was spinning sideways now, directly into the wall of the alley. The plastic bubble exploded as it struck.

  He screamed in rage and frustration, and the nausea returned, choking him, shattering his thought and filling his stomach with knotted flame. There was nothing left to throw up, but the pain of the attempt drove him over the edge. With his last thought he threw himself over the unconscious Promise. Smoke pouring from the front and rear of the car, it rebounded out of the mouth of the alley, skimmed across the street like a misshot hockey puck, and smashed through a boarded-up storefront church.

  The shock of the crash was monstrous, but the car had enough momentum left to plunge on into the wall at the rear of the church before stopping. Aubry felt it but didn't hear it. There was a jolt that felt like a kick in the temple, and then darkness.

  / don't want to move, dammit. I don't want to...

  His body was cut and bruised and possibly broken. Surely his leg was twisted against the crumpled firewall of the aircar. Every breath hurt more than the last. All he wanted was sleep, or death, whichever would come more easily. But there was the sound of a helicopter somewhere overhead, and the sound of a rumbling explosion, and his mind commanded his body to move!

  Aubry told Aubry to go to hell.

  Beneath him, Promise lay motionless. The plastiskin was a dull milky color. She looked dead, blood coating her leg, head laying back with terrible limpness. He looked through the shattered bubble and saw the light of the burning airsled. There was no sense of satisfaction, only more of the devouring illness that sapped his little remaining strength.

  Holding his breath, he levered himself up out of the cockpit, shaking some of the pain out of his leg. He examined his surroundings. The inside of the building was incredibly musty, as though it had been twenty years since fresh air last leaked through the door. The walls were marked with wetrot and dryrot and agerot, and had been stripped bare long ago. The pale outline of a crucifix marked the wall-paper.

  The car had smashed through into the next building, and that was the only way they could go.

  He limped around to the other side of the car, trying to shut the pain and nausea away in his mind. (Giddily, a crazy image formed of a giftwrapped box marked, "Open me first at Christmas," something dark and dirty-nailed scrabbling away at the cardboard on the inside of the box. Open me now, scratch, scratch, open me right now .. .)

  He kept that lid on tight, God, so tight that if he squeezed it any harder the box would burst and everything would come apart right there in his head. He leaned on the side of the aircar, shaking his head and then wincing with the pain that ate through him when he did it. He bent over and worked his arms under Promise's limp body, saying, Shut up! to the part of him that told him to leave her. Go ahead, leave her She'd leave you, you dumb asshole. You owe her nothing. She owes you nothing. Leave her. Maybe you've got a chance without her.

  He straightened up, pain shooting through his back, another wave of dizziness and nausea hitting him as he took the strain of her weight.

  She was awake, just a little, just enough to lock her arms around his neck, making it easier to carry her. "Come on, lady," he whispered fiercely. "We're both getting out of this." Eyes closed, barely conscious, she nodded shallowly and mumbled something he couldn't hear, her cheek collapsing against his chest.

  The air was unbelievably foul as he staggered through into the next building.

  This one hadn't been completely stripped. There were a few rust-eaten steel lockers bolted to the walls and floor. For a moment, Aubry considered the possibility of hiding. Resting.

  He staggered on, carrying Promise in arms too tired to feel anything but cold. Vision blurred and spun, and his back crashed against one of the lockers, the sound reverberating through the dark cavern of the deserted warehouse. There was an answering sound, something that wasn't the thucka-thucka-thucka of the helicopter hovering above.

  He froze, listening. Had they found him already? How long had he been unconscious? It seemed like moments, but... he had to push on, get out of the large open area, into hallways, stairways, anywhere he could hide.

  The sound again. Feet. There were people here. What kind of people? Aubry looked within himself and found nothing but exhaustion and die beginnings of fear.

  There was a quick shuffle and a face popped out of the nearest corridor, stared at him for a second, then disappeared. He blinked, not wanting to believe what he had seen. It was a face out of a nightmare, one eye socket completely hollow. The skin was stretched tight over the skull, almost luminously pasty. The lips had been eaten away, and in the dim light it was difficult to see the crouching black spider that was tattooed in blacks and bloody reds from jaw to brow.

  A wave of weakness swept over him, his spirit buckling under the latest blow. Where do the Terminals go? Where do the Spiders go when it's time to die, and don't want the camps to isolate and sterilize and cremate them when they're too weak to protest?

  Deep Maze.

  More shuffles now, in rhythm, and a moaning that grew louder, deeper. It was a sound of frustration, of hunger, of anger and outrage that two members of the hated society beyond had come here—even here!

  Promise's eyes fluttered open. "Where—where are we?"

  "Don't ask." Aubry scanned the room desperately, looking for another exit, saw a boarded-up door on the far side of the room. Finding new strength, he ran, the burden in his arms growing lighter as consciousness returned. She looked back over his shoulder, and he felt her body tighten.

  "Spiders!" They boiled out of the shadows, out of the corridor behind him, hobbling with the shuddering gait of the spastic and crippled, their nervous systems and muscles eaten away by the disease.

  They wore bits of rags or nothing at all; their voices sounded like air bubbling up through oily, stagnant water, moist and abrupt, the product of weak, ruptured lung tissue.

  Aubry tripped on a broken floorboard and they went down. He rolled, protecting Promise with his own body. He came up to his knees panting, and in his eyes she saw fear and panic clawing at his restraint. Promise tried to get to her feet but couldn't, the effort draining her tiny reservoir of endurance.

  Aubry lunged twice against the boarded-up door. It splintered and cracked, but didn't give. He looked back at the creeping army of Spiders, and his face tightened with resolve. He gathered her up into his arms and drove against the door again, using their combined weight.

  It gave, and he staggered into the room. The floor was wooden and creaked beneath his feet. There was a little morning light leaking through from the far end of the warehouse. He could see by it that the room had no exit, no window low enough to escape through.

  Lowering Promise to the ground, he took a fighting stance, balancing himself, keeping his right s
ide, his strong side, forward. He couldn't fight them all. The tremors in his legs told him that he had almost nothing left. But if he could just manage to hurt one of them, maybe the rest would cut and run. He bared his teeth and made the closest thing to a snarling sound he could manage.

  "Keep the hell away from me," he said through his teeth as the legion of Thai-VI Spiders reached the door, crowding, watching. There must have been a dozen of them, brandishing makeshift weapons, hunger in their eyes, the smell of their bodies and breath a terrible, rotting wind even at a distance of six meters. His vision swam, and he felt the room tilt. "Stay..."

  He wiped his brow. "... away " They weren't coming in after him. By God! They weren't coming in! They were afraid! Afraid of one man who was almost dead on his feet. Crazy laughter tickled his brain. He fought to keep it back, fought as the room spun and the groaning sound in his ears built to a grinding roar.

  A sudden sound of splintering wood ripped him brutally out of his fantasies. Aubry and Promise fell in an avalanche of splinters and dust, into utter darkness.

  He braced himself for the impact, twisting in midair to try to land as cleanly as possible. There was a sudden cold shock, and a voice in the back of his mind whispered, Water! as he plunged beneath the surface.

  Filthy liquid filled his nose and mouth as he gave into shock and pain and fatigue. Unconsciousness was a blissfully enveloping cloud. His last thought was that death was good and that he had been a fool to fear it so long and so deeply.

  9. The Dead Man

  A warm, calloused hand felt for his wrist and found his pulse. After a few seconds there was a sigh of relief, and the figure turned to Aubry's right, took a couple of steps, and knelt down. After a brief rustling sound, there was a more worried exhalation.

  The whispers of sound had seemed genuinely concerned. Aubry decided to risk flexing his arms subtly. With great effort he tensed them, moved them like great leaden weights, but confirmed that there were no bonds holding him down.

  He opened his eyes and looked to the right.

  The room was unfurnished, except for two beds, a chair, and an overhead light.

  On inspection, the overhead light seemed to be makeshift, wired up jerry-rig, with an electric cord stapled to the ceiling and the wall, trailing to the door. The beds were rude, Aubry's about twenty centimeters high, the other little more than a thick mat on the floor.

  On it lay Promise. Her lips were swollen and purplish, and a bruise puffed out on the right side of her forehead. The plastiskin was largely dormant, but occasional, dim flashes of light wormed along in it like a slow-motion electric arc. She seemed deeply unconscious. A small gravity-fed IV dripped plasma into her arm.

  He watched the slow rise and fall of her chest, and sighed contentedly.

  "Awake?" The voice was young, even though the face Aubry focused on seemed old. It was a woman's voice, and once again he had the clear impression of caring from her.

  He nodded, trying to raise his head. Swallowing made his throat feel as if it had been scrubbed out with a wire brush, and the room swam at his attempt to pull upright. The woman was across the room in three scurrying steps and her hand was under his head. "No," she whispered. "Don't try—not yet. Give yourself time."

  He struggled against her for a moment, tears of frustration close to the surface.

  "Shh..." Her face was very close. He could see that she wasn't old, but the circles under her eyes, the tension lines, and gray hairs had prematurely aged what had once been a lovely woman. There were still traces of beauty in her eyes, in the concern that lived, tangibly, in her voice. "Just rest, now. You're very strong, but whatever it is you've gone through in the past few weeks has drained you. Your body needs time to recover."

  Unable to do anything else, he nodded. "What about... her?" He tried to turn over onto his side, but again her hands were at his shoulders, limiting his range of movement.

  "Your friend is... very ill. She needs medical attention. We may not be able to give it to her. We may decide to send her topside."

  "What?" He could feel his strength ebbing again, the darkness swirling in from the periphery of his vision. "Where... where are we? What is... 'topside'?"

  "Don't worry about that now." She wiped his brow with something moist. "You need to rest."

  "No, wait." He was gasping it, and his hearing was flickering on him like a bad holo. "You can't send her to a hospital. They'll kill her. Please... you don't under... under—"

  There was a moment when it felt as if he were swimming up through a pool of ink, the first glimmerings of light beginning to break through the surface. Then there was a sensation of pressure, of touch, and the light was gone again.

  But there were dreams.

  He dreamed that he sat in an empty room, on a wooden chair. The room was very dark, except for a halo of light which played along the length of one wall. A thin line, perpendicular to the floor, grew out of the wall, slowly tracing die outline of a door, which became solid and swung open.

  There stood in the doorway a dead man.

  From the wounds in his flesh to the maggots crawling in a shattered eyesocket, he was as dead as a man could be. His arms were pale orange ribbons of flesh dangling from twisted bones; and he stank. The smell was hideous—a bag of dead cats and human feces hung up in the sun to ripen; the smell of terminal gangrene, of festering sores and rivers of clotted blood.

  The dead man crossed the room and stood over him.

  Who are you? the apparition asked, cracked teeth showing through ruined lips. You bring death and pain to my people. I know. I see. Tell me — who are you that I should not cast you out to die?

  I am Aubry Knight—

  That is your name. Who are you?

  I am a fighter. The best in the world—

  That is your fantasy. Who are you?

  I am a man who made enemies. Killed the one who tried to destroy me—

  That is your story. Who are you?

  A man!

  That is your sex.

  A human being, dammit!

  That is your species.

  I'm something that thinks, and hopes, and hurts.

  That is what you do.

  Well, then, dammit—who are you?

  I am nothing.

  Well, I'm not. I'm something. I'm somebody!

  Who is it that knows?

  I do.

  Who are you?

  I am... me.

  And what is that?

  I... don't have any words for it.

  Excellent.

  But that isn't anything!

  More precisely, it is nothing.

  But what is that?

  Firmly grasped, it is enough.

  Aubry tried to speak, but no more words would come. The dead man backed out of the room, shaking his head, teeth clamped in a death's-head leer as Aubry tried to stand and follow... backed out the door, which shut silently behind him. Which lost feature and depths The edge of the outline disappeared, and once again the room was sealed shut.

  The light faded to black, and Aubry knew nothing more.

  Voices, and the sensation of air swallowed deep into his lungs. Realization: pain had receded, become a part of something distant and only dimly real. A feeling that balanced on the jagged edge between reality and dream. Aubry exhaled and forced his eyes open.

  The young-old woman was in his room again. She was watching him, and he felt profoundly uncomfortable, wondering how long she had been there. He pushed himself to an upright position and glowered at her. "Who are you?" Aubry looked at the IV pouring nutrient into his left arm, and fought an urge to rip it out.

  The room tilted, and with a savage act of will he righted it again. When he had, the woman was at his side and had seated herself, taking his hand gently. Her fingers were very warm. "You're much stronger now. Perhaps we can talk."

  "Damned sure hope so. Where am I?"

  "This is K-section, Los Angeles. Only about a half a kilometer from where you and your friend w
ere found."

  "K-section?" He pushed back in the bed until the cool of the wall was tingling against his shoulders.

  'That's what it's called now. What Warrick calls it. We're near the old World Trade Center."

  He shook his head. "Maybe I'm not hearing right." He glanced at the lower bed. Promise was still unconscious. The lights of her plastiskin crawled feebly.

  "She looks..."

  "Yes, it's severe."

  Aubry thought for a few moments, trying to remember. "She | was shot... I know that "

  "We cared for that. It was more than just that. She's been bruised and cut, and septic water got into the wounds. She's an Exotic. Half of the skin on her body has been replaced with some kind of breathing silicon base. It's complicated our treatment of the infection. We need to cut sections of it away and clean her out. To do that, we'll need to take skin transplants from her right buttock and leg; she'll need massive antibiotics, blood, anticoagulants..." She raised her hands in defeat. "We just don't have the facilities here."

  "Wait, let me think." He shook his head disgustedly, loosening the cobwebs. "I need to talk to the top man. Who's in charge here?"

  "His name is Warrick. You don't need to see him—he's already seen you."

  "We have to talk. This woman needs treatment and she can't be taken 'topside.' That would be the same as condemning her to death. There has to be another way." He looked at her curiously. "Who are you, anyway?"

  "Mira. I'm in charge of the medical facilities. We set them up whenever we mine a new building."

  "What? Oh, never mind. Listen. My name is... Shields. Aubry Shields. And we have to be able to work something out here."

  "I don't think you understand, Aubry. We are willing to share—to a point. The investment in time and supplies has to be a healthy one—or we cannot survive," She paused. "Suppose—just suppose I did try to treat her. That I brought in the proper tools and personnel. Would you be willing to pay for it?"

  His thick brows beetled together. "How?"

  "Scavenging, of course. There is a tremendous amount of wealth down here, under the ruins of the Maze. Convection heat destroyed some of it, but still—you'd be surprised."