Готовый перевод Нова Проспект / Nova Prospect: Against the Tide (Адам)

Against the Tide (Adam)

* * *

"I haven't slept in three days, Jensen," Pritchard's voice cut through the noise. "Tell me you have good news."

Leaning against a wall in a narrow alleyway between the skyscrapers of the China International Bank and a standard five-star hotel, Adam gazed at the blazing Tai Yun Medical building in the distance; billows of thick, sticky-looking orange smoke rising upward.

//"Civilians. A damn bunch of civilians sandwiched between monsters, Tyrants, and elves. It remains to be seen which one is worse."

You can't save everyone. He had tried too many times not to know for sure.

Ciri splashed rusty water in every direction, vigorously washing her face over a small fountain. Her sharp shoulder blades went back and forth beneath the tight-fitting suit, and the plum-sized bruise on her neck seemed almost black in the semi-darkness.

"I knew it was too much to ask," Pritchard didn't wait for an answer. "What happened this time? Come on, I'm ready for anything. Godzilla? Aliens? Tentacle monsters?"

The last suggestion almost made Adam choke on his cigarette.

"Ciri is with me," he replied, not letting the girl out of his sight for a second. "At Tai Yun Medical, she was attacked by a creature. It looked like a mutated underwater life form. It was also capable of becoming invisible... Or disappearing... One or the other."

In his head, that sentence sounded not so schizophrenic.

When she finished washing her face, Ciri tried to fix her hair, but it was hopelessly messy, and the ashy strands were now tangled around her shoulders. After several unsuccessful attempts at makeup, she stared at Adam with the most exhausted look she could muster. He fumbled for the last chocolate and roasted peanut-flavored energy bar in his pocket and put it in her hand, still talking:

"I'm assuming this is not an incident or an instance of an isolated individual. We have a problem, Pritchard. And by "we," I don't just mean Sarif Industries."

Either a strange fog covered Hensha or the color map of the visual module began to fail: everything was seen in blurred yellowish-gray tones.

"One more time: an invisible mutated underwater life form?" Pritchard asked in a deliberately patient voice, like a special needs kindergarten teacher. "Listen, Houston, does our problem have anything to do with alcohol?"

Pritchard's banter has long been seen as white noise.

"Go to hell," Adam said mournfully. "I made a video just for you, Pritchard."

It lasted about two minutes, and even at maximum resolution, it looked like an amateur horror movie. Nothing could be seen, and what could be seen was blurred just enough to let the imagination run wild. The wet sheen of black biomass and the pulsing of purple polyps, the reddish lights of what served as the creature's eyes, flickered in the frames.

"Lousy CGI," Pritchard's voice dropped to a whisper, losing his sarcastic tone in the process. "And no tentacles."

Adam remembered exactly how the creature had tried to imitate human language. He could even hear individual phrases in the animal's gurgling - but all he could pick up on the video were beleaguered shotgun blasts.

"Could it be Tai Yun's failed experiment?" Pritchard suggested uncertainly. "I read in Midnight that she and Versalife have a joint project to develop deep-sea biological augmentations."

It said Elise Kassan was just a brand name for an army of clones. In response to the shaky theory, Adam grinned and strode back and forth along the narrow trench between the skyscrapers, putting out his cigarette on the concrete slab of the wall.

"All right, Jensen, get out of there. Belltower's gonna do a napalm sweep."

Getting off the island was harder than getting on it. The concentration of Belltower mercenaries at the outposts had multiplied in the last hour. Air and sea traffic was closed, with drones stationed on the border to kill any object that didn't have its ID number loaded into its memory.

Whatever happened to Hensha, the outside world must not know anything about it.

"Do you have any idea how?"

"I'm out of energy and ideas," Pritchard sighed. "But the bills won't pay for themselves. Give me half an hour and I'll see what Lee's got."

Adam pressed disconnect and leaned against the wall, replaying the events of the last few days in his head. That there were life forms and worlds other than Earth had been expected. Nothing was surprising about intelligent sea creatures: the ocean was one of the most favorable habitats, the cradle of evolution, especially since...

"Adam, take off your glasses."

"Why?"

Ciri looked at him with the frightening determination in her eyes that women usually have when an obsession has taken hold. His system told him it was a bad thing, and it had excellent predictive abilities.

As soon as he obeyed, Ciri reduced the distance to a dangerous minimum, stood on tiptoe, and pressed her weathered lips against his own.

Adam felt like he'd been electrocuted. Before he realized what had happened, his brain produced a weighty list of arguments against it: the age difference, his ward's aggrieved position, the conflict of interest, and the unethical nature of what was happening. The "pro" arguments had nothing to do with reason.

Unable to find any logical way out of the situation, Adam let it go. Ciri pulled away, noticing his confusion.

" Ciri..." he began, ready to give at least a dozen convincing arguments as to why what had happened was a damn bad idea.

Before he could finish, a storm of resentment with confusion ran across her face. She looked a couple of years younger with that look on her face.

"Ciri," Adam said more firmly, trying to stop the coming storm.

The familiar green sparks ran through her fingers that never meant anything good. No, the last thing he could afford was a woman's resentment. If she ran away, or worse, teleported away, if... How would he explain that to Sarif?

"Forget it, I'm not stupid," Ciri snorted like an angry cat and fixed her hair, trying to cover the scar with a nervous gesture. Damn it, he didn't mean it. "I won't bother you again."

Adam did what he had to do. A little more eagerness than the conflict required - and a few moments later, when Ciri pressed her body against him, wrapping her arms around his neck, a lot more eagerness.

The last time he'd made out like this was in the back room behind the bar at a college pub in Phoenix, back when kissing wasn't a guarantee of sex. True, his female classmates smelled mostly of Budweiser and marijuana, not roasted peanuts and chocolate. Adam ran his palm down Ciri's narrow back; the sensors on his fingertips conveyed the feel of the molded body beneath the jumpsuit with intoxicating multidimensionality.

It was only when he heard the distinctive buzzing of the scout drone that he realized he'd gotten too caught up in crisis management, and pulled Ciri deeper into a deserted courtyard between skyscrapers covered in artificial ivy.

She was flushed, a wet film on her lips, and her dilated pupils made her eyes seem almost black in the semi-darkness. Ciri licked her lips before she said something, but instead of her voice, Adam heard a far less pleasant one:

"Jensen," Adam jerked as if he'd been caught doing something embarrassing, and he scowled, promising himself to turn off the Infolink at times like this. "Why are you so edgy?"

He took a couple of steps back and put a finger to his temple.

"Just a second, Ciri," Adam raised his hand. "Pritchard, didn't you say half an hour?"

"Is this a bad time for me?" Pritchard resented. "All right, I'll call your remains back under the collapsed Hensha."

"Pritchard."

Anyway, Jensen, I've been going through the garbage that Lee had collected, and I'll tell you that even in a dump like this, you can find something useful. In this case, the access codes to the adorable seventy-foot baby, Zhao Yun Zhu's yacht. She will take you to the artificial islands of Sumimoto, which is already Japanese territory. And there - Farida, Detroit, and a bright future.

Pritchard accompanied his proposal with photographs documenting the location of CCTV cameras and guard posts around the pier and on the ship's lower deck.

"Gotcha."

The first large drop of the trademark brown color slid down the water-repellent lapel of his raincoat. Since they'd been in China, not a day had gone by without this downpour.

"Please, Pritchard, thank you for spending your life in a three-by-three room, Pritchard...."

Adam interrupted the Infolink connection and nodded to Ciri. They have to get to the yacht before the Upper Hensha buries the Lower Hensha underneath it. It would be a great metaphor for capitalism.

"What, is it time already? Right now?" Ciiri, who had not yet had time to let go of her romantic veneer, was stunned. Adam covered his eyes with his lenses and nodded in the direction of the approaching storm. "All right... As you command, your Highness!"

Happy with the title she had coined, Ciri bit her lip and smiled. Adam noticed for the first time something terribly hooligan in her shabby appearance and couldn't resist smiling back.

The way to the pier was through a shopping street, where at any other time an unprepared person could develop a panicky fear of crowds in half an hour.

Empty boutiques with Asian-style luxury windows looked like temples of an extinct sect that worshipped gold and chrome. The robotic invitations offered Adam the chance to buy diamonds that could put even the Queen of England to bed; to install the latest model augmentations without unnecessary bureaucracy, ultra-precise watches, and self-cleaning suits without unnecessary bureaucracy.

Abundance without a consumer was something like a prostitute who had been in a bar until midnight and was slowly becoming desperate.

The wind blew the lightest watery dust from the China Sea. Adam preferred China, as crowded with people as the earth was with worms after rain, to its desolate, misty twin.

He thought of the quicksand-like black void wich slowly climbed toward the shopping avenue.

"Láirén a! Jiùmìng a! (Help! Help!)"

A piercing maiden's scream echoed from the nooks and crannies between De Beers and Sumimoto Electronics, repeated several times, and abruptly cut off.

Didn't someone have the brains to evacuate? Tsiri pulled her wakizashi out of its sheath with lightning speed, assuming a fighting stance. A thin wave of adrenaline immediately ran through her nerves. Adam weighed the Steiner-Bisley assault rifle in his hand.

"Don't," Ciri said, touching the floral pattern on his shoulder fleetingly. "You don't call for help that way."

Is she hinting at a trap? Why would Belltower set it up like this?

"When one calls for help," Ciri said quietly, "one sob and gasps, not repeat the same thing."

He played the soundtrack back - the phonograms of all the screams played were almost identical - not enough to think it was a put-on rewind soundtrack, but too monotonous for human speech.

"Another creature?"

"Excellent hearing, Ciri," Adam praised, and set his pupils to the proper sharpening setting, peering cautiously into the alley.

He fought the sticky, irrational curiosity to find out what lurked in the darkness of the inland alleyway. His eyes caught tiny movements in the fog, like quick ripples on water.

//"Come on, show yourself, whatever you are."

Ciri tugged demandingly at the sleeve of his cloak, snapping him out of his hunting trance.

"Do you know the first rule of being a witcher, Adam?" Ciri waited for a questioning nod before continuing: "If we don't get paid for a monster, we're going by."

The wall in the alley was adorned with a garish abstract painting, with the words ++"Bring Back the Communist Party" painted in fluorescent red paint in the middle of it. Then he saw the outline of something that looked like a garbage bag stuffed to the brim.

"We're going by, Adam," Ciri repeated.

The body could barely be discerned because of the layer of dirt, blood, and the shroud of brown rain, but the infrared scanner picked up fading heat.

Adam stepped closer and squatted down, leaning over the unfortunate man. The mercenary's chest was a bloody mess, his entire body, including the carbon fiber of his prosthetics, was covered with thin, long scratches, as if they had tried to cut the skin off him centimeter by centimeter. Fading eyes stared up at the sky.

"He's still alive," Adam said quietly.

The mercenary was defending himself, or at least trying to. A loaded MAO was lying nearby. Adam grasped the dying man's rough chin with one hand and his shoulder with the other, and with a swift movement, he broke his agony.

"Well, it's only temporary," Ciri muttered. "You'd better not touch other's food... Kurwa!"

Jensen jumped to his feet, but couldn't see where the threat was coming from. There was no one in the direction Ciri was looking.

For a moment he thought he'd gone blind, but when the visual module registered the creature appearing beside him, claws were already trying to tear the carbon fiber.

Despite its odd proportions - limbs twice as long as human limbs - the lifeless figure was humanoid. The emaciated skin covered the skull so tightly that it seemed to show through.

If you stretched your imagination, you could mistake the creature for the work of transhumanists trying to adapt the body to survive in non-human conditions. But far beyond that line was the concept of humanity.

"We need silver!..." shouted behind him, Ciri.

Adam pushed the creature away from him, which seemed weightless. He couldn't even feel the flesh beneath his fingers. He fired his automatic before he could raise it to chest level: the glass of the storefront windows shattered into a hundred small pieces, but the bullets didn't reach their true target.

Because the creature vanished into thin air. The vision module was jammed: Adam kept seeing an elusive movement in the periphery of his vision, scratching at his eye like a speck of dust that couldn't be removed.

There was a whoosh of air splitting behind her. Ciri jumped away from the creature, from the long translucent paws, and ducked under them, aiming for its ankles, but she hit nothing but air. His eyes blazed again; Adam heard the wet sound of tap-dancing fangs.

"Silver," Ciri exhaled, "...I hold it."

Where the hell would he get it now?! Adam was feverishly figuring out where it would be used now. Batteries? Optics? Would the alloy retain its antimagic properties or would pure silver be needed?

An unexpected blow struck him in the back; he felt claws tearing through the calfskin of his cloak, hoping to reach human skin. Pushing Ciri aside, Adam turned around and fired another line aimed at nothing.

That was like trying to shoot a shadow.

"Trust me at least..." Ciri took a couple of steps back, scrabbling with the broken glass under her feet, toward the main street, luring the creature into the light. "Once!"

How can you hold something you can't touch...? The bait worked - dodging the claws, Ciri suddenly went from defense to offense with the speed of an attacking snake. Its fangs were as if the genes of a glowing shark and an alligator had been mixed.

Ciri shrieked angrily and lunged, not forcefully but with a powerful swing as if trying to scare him. It dawned on Adam where he could get silver. De Beers. Three hundred, maybe four hundred meters away. But he couldn't leave Ciri alone with a creature that defied the laws of the material world...

"I said," Ciri said, losing all patience, "I'll hold them!"

Adam raced down the main street with all the speed his cyber-prosthetics could muster. He had to circle the shopping plaza until he saw the coveted white mother-of-pearl letters on black chrome.

++DE BEERS. EVERYTHING SHE DREAMS OF.

The door and its hinges were blown off with a single blow.

Adam saw some movement ahead, and a squat, ornate robot, covered in gleaming plates, rolled out of the alcove. It paid no attention to the broken door, and from the doorstep it began to tap in an elaborate tap dance as Adam darted from rack to rack: "Do you know what your beloved needs? Conquer her heart with exclusive South African yellow diamonds!". The synthesized voice rattled with the joy of seeing the customer again - these models are programmed with a desire to please the customer akin to physical attraction.

"Silver," Adam bellowed, "she wants silver!"

Of all the possible answers in terms of profitability, he chose the worst. "You can see the silver jewelry collection in the corner rack in the small hall, first door on the right. We wish you an enjoyable time at DeBeers."

Adam followed the instructions clearly and behind the clear armored glass, he saw the massive silver chain worn by every petty scum of the Triad in Hensha. His fist came down on the display case with a force the glass makers hadn't counted on.

The De Beers' security system reacted instantly. When Adam heard the click of the slabs moving away and the low rattle of the turrets unfolding above his head, he understood why the looters hadn't looted the jewelry yet.

Shit.

Realizing he wouldn't make it to the exit in time, Adam threw himself to the floor, taking cover behind the shelving. The lamp above his head shattered, showering him with splinters from head to toe. When the first volley died down, the storefronts behind him were reduced to rubble. Crunching the shattered glass, Adam crawled over the shards toward them, along the racks, trying to keep his head down.

If he raises his head an extra millimeter, he risks becoming a metal colander. There are a few alternatives: he can't overpower the turret, but Ciri may well be dead already.

Reaching the very edge of the racks, Adam estimated the distance to the display cases - about ten meters - threw on his optical camouflage and dashed off.

The De Beers' security system immediately woke up from its hibernation. Adam's system registered a bullet in his forearm that a couple of years ago would have left him writhing on the floor in pain, but now it was more like an intrusive pop-up message.

As Jensen collapsed to the pavement of the main shopping street, the Health Guardian informed him of two more missed bullets. At least the biological damage was minimal, and the carbon fiber would be repaired at the company's expense.

Jumping back to his feet, Adam swung across three flights of stairs at Cyber Olympian speed and flew back into the alley. Ciri was breathing heavily, waiting for the invisible enemy to attack again. Sweat was pouring down out of her.

As soon as the creature made the mistake of reappearing, the silver chain closed around its neck. The dry translucent flesh finally began to take shape. Adam twisted his wrist, twisting the trapped head around its axis several times, hearing a satisfying animalistic crunch. The creature let out a wet, choking grunt and died, slipping out of his grasp and onto the splintered ground.

He put about five bullets into its head, holding his breath after each shot.

There was blood coming out of Ciri's nose. She squelched her nose loudly and wiped it with the brush of her hand. There was no other damage except for the torn overalls on her leg and forearm.

"And what was that?" Adam stared at the remains, which after death looked less and less like a person and more and more like a blob of biomass.

"Foglet, damn it," Ciri rested one hand on her knee, the other on her side, breathing noisily. "What happened to you, St. Melithele? The jewelry store attacked?"

Adam snorted. Blood, similar to fuel oil in color and consistency, dripped from the silver chain onto the asphalt. Biochemists would probably be interested in looking at the DNA; he'd bet a hundred bucks they'd find traces of predatory amphibians in there. Where do you want that chain to go? Not in his pocket?

Ciri must love bling; back then on the roof, she was wearing an emerald-encrusted silver belt.

"This is for you," Adam handed her the chain, "but don't wash the blood off yet."

As soon as he uttered that phrase, the tactical blunder became obvious. His hand remained frozen in the air.

"That's very romantic, Adam, but corpse blood corrodes human skin," Ciri snorted, crossing her arms over her chest, "you keep it yourself. You'll be fine."

In fact, he still has some of his biological skin left... Okay. There wasn't a damn thing De Beers didn't know what 'she' was dreaming about. Adam shrugged, wrapped the chain around his fist, and slipped his hand into his pocket, hoping he wasn't still holey from the turret fire.

* * *

The satellite navigation system guided them exactly along the yellow line. The farther they got from Hensh's second level, the dirtier the streets became, littered with the usual urban trash: food wrappers and scraps of rags that looked like bodies mangled by machine guns.

The endpoint of the treadmill was the docks, divided in two by a high concrete fence: on the one side was a paving stone broken by the frequent transportation of goods, and on the other side was a clean pier with expensive ships. Taking cover in one of the observation towers, Adam compared the landscape with the data from the video cameras.

Zhao Yun Zhu owned a luxurious yacht whose outline resembled the tip of a dagger. "Cassiopeia." The name was engraved on a copper plate on the open part of the deck. Spotlights slid along the sides, and it looked like the ship was the sea scene's star.

Belltower mercenaries armed with MAO submachine guns, which had supplanted the AK-74 as the primary security weapon, patrolled the yacht. Two on the lower deck, two on the pier, almost at the gangway. One of the mercenaries was rubbing a cigarette butt into the white paving stones with his boot, leaving gray stains on them.

Not the most impressive security. The main focus seems to be on protective drones on the borders.

And for nothing.

"You see that white yacht? Take cover there while I deal with security. Internal code 0-4-5-1 and hashtag. Square with dashes."

Ciri took an assessing look, clenching and unclenching her fists.

"Step back about five meters. Or better yet, ten."

"Sir, yes, sir, your Highness," Ciri grinned.

Adam threw her a skeptical look, but she was already rushing down the stairs.

What he liked about the docks was the junk piled in them - boxes, racks, cargo containers, unattended crane transports. That is everything that allowed him to ghost toward his goal, meter by meter - slowly but inexorably. It was as if the junk had been deliberately placed to create narrow passageways and prevent people who might want to attack the ship from land.

Adam waited for the moment when one of the guards would relax too much, whether it was taking a smoke break, doing something inappropriate like checking the news on the phone or taking a piss in a secluded spot. Any misfire will do, and in his experience, you never have to wait too long for it. That's why Japan is already reducing human error on an industrial scale with cyber reliability.

Finally, the bigger one decided to obey the call of nature and didn't bother to go to the right place - the sea would do. As he unbuttoned his pants, gazing out over the dark waters of the South China Sea, blissfully unaware of the silent footsteps behind him, Adam sent a neural order to the wrist mechanisms. The neural latch threw the blade outward. Deep into the body, it pierced through the neck, severing the jugular vein from the vascular system. Blood didn't spurt until the first spasms subdued the body to gravity. With a strangled shriek, the bulky man took one hesitant step and fell forward.

Adam lurked behind one of the shipping containers, waiting for the "how-long-can-you-piss" question. He didn't have to wait long. Kicking off the safety lever, the second mercenary went on a reconnaissance mission. As soon as he rounded the wrong corner, Adam took a silent step and was right behind him. He was tipping him backward with a foot strike to his hamstring, wrapping both arms around his neck, and shifting it sharply to the side. The sound of broken cervical vertebrae was like the crunching sound of Arthur and Margie's golden Labrador nibbling on chicken bones.

As Adam stepped up on deck, his vestibular system picked up the slightest vibrations of the ship, and he immediately remembered why he disliked ships, and even more why he disliked underwater operations.

The guard on the upper deck was sprawled out on his stomach. Too stiff to be alive. Wow, someone had done his job for him.

"Dead," that someone said, not without smugness. "I was distracted by you, didn't expect to be hit from behind."

It was the first time he'd ever seen Ciri kill a man, and judging by the look on her face, it wasn't her hundredth. She'd done it brilliantly: avoided open combat, attacked from behind, and left two deep cuts in his neck. This is exactly why you shouldn't take your helmet off in the workplace. She's clearly had time to work on this tactic.

Ciri looked at him defiantly, clearly expecting praise. Adam nodded favorably.

The yacht, despite its European name, shone with Asian luxury with its carved sandalwood panels and gold leaf jewelry - you could feel the elusive feminine presence of the owner.

=="Welcome back to Cassiopeia," a voice greeted them, purged of any sign of living human speech, "Mistress Zhao Yun Zhu.

CEO Tai Yun Medical might well have invested in a visual identification system inside the yacht. But that would mean surveillance, which in turn meant an outsider could see what was going on inside. And that would be a devastating blow to her once sterling reputation.

"That woman," Ciri exhaled, stopping halfway to the deckhouse, "she saved me! And they... Eredin mutilated her."

Following her gaze, Adam looked up at the Renaissance-style portrait. Zhao Yun Zhu, in her unchanged standing collar and lotus-embroidered dress, looked at him with the expressiveness of a kabuki mask. The woman who had created China's largest corporation from scratch, which had posted quarterly growth of at least five percent for ten consecutive years.

"She was beautiful," Ciri noted regretfully.

She also conducted behind the scenes the market for "black meat" and the sale of failed augmentations, which ensured the stable operation of Chinese crematoriums for the next half-century. Zhao Yun Zhu was called the Dragon Lady - to her eyes, at least. Lower Hengsha nicknamed her the Lui Hou of the twenty-first century.

But Adam didn't want to completely destroy Ciri's belief that there were good people in his world.

While he was setting up his route in the control room, Ciri settled down at the bar, dangling her feet in the air and running her finger thoughtfully over the rim of her glass. Keeping your distance, and limiting yourself to general questions, is a lot easier on the perpetual run than when you're trapped alone on a ship on the high seas. Adam broke the silence with a question:

"What happened at Tai Yun Medical? Did someone hurt you?"

Ciri leaned on her arm, digging her flesh-cuted fingernails into her cheek. There were five red welts on the skin.

"Of course he did," she gritted her teeth. "Not the first time... and not the last. It's okay, I'm not sugar."

She was clearly the sort for whom complaining was a sprawling painting of her own helplessness. Adam shrugged and went to look for something in the racks of the bar. His point was to ask.

It took a moment for her to feel embarrassed by her own rudeness.

"I'm sorry, I..." Ciri faltered, squaring her shoulders guiltily, "Thank you for asking, Adam. I... he... I'll do everything to make him pay for everything. Whatever it takes."

"I promise you he'll end up behind bars," Adam said softly, slamming the shelving doors shut.

"Behind bars?" Ciri interjected. "He should be on the gallows, not behind bars. Him and his gang."

There was even something endearing about her medieval bloodthirstiness.

"We have a moratorium on the death penalty," Adam smirked.

As well as a thousand ways to get around this moratorium.

It's unlikely that this elf is still alive. Not after a bout with an opponent like Jaron Namir. Adam glanced over the brief biography of the Tyranid commander that Lee had put together. He doesn't kill quickly or easily. If records from the period of Israel's war with the United Arab Front were to be believed, even then Namir was a killer, not a soldier. At least he could have used the Geneva Convention of '84 instead of toilet paper.

Adam saw the explosive-torn lab and the fire-mangled face of the lab assistant again. He'd seen the images countless times in his mind, but it hadn't gotten any better. What idiot had coined the expression "time heals"?

"Your laws are stupid," Ciri said. "Men like Eredin deserve nothing less than the scaffold and the rope."

What did he do to her? What if?

At the thought, Adam's mind went into the kind of stultifying rage that a crime report on child molesters and rapists usually provoked. With such scum, he was allowing himself what in America was called "police brutality."

"If you need medical help," Adam mustered the strength to continue: "I mean, a woman's doctor... Say."

Ciri shivered. Where the hell did Zhao Yun Zhu keep the alcohol?

"No, he didn't rape me if that's what you think," she snorted. "I wouldn't have had the strength. No, his henchman took the... well... well, the ovum out of me."

At first, Jensen thought he'd misheard. He'd already established his image of elves as medieval thugs, and such a delicate operation didn't fit that image.

"What?" Adam broke away from his search, glaring at her: "How would they have...how would they know how to do it? They'd need tools and storage containers. Skills."

Why do they need an ovum? What's so precious about Ciri's ovum? Who and where are these pointy-eared bastards going to impregnate?

"The world is not without good people," Ciri replied muffled, twirling a slim designer glass in her hand. "They found the tools and the containers."

Most women would need the services of a therapist for the rest of their lives. Maybe that sudden impulse was just an attempt to control a body over which she had lost control. Sexuality that had been trampled on with medical instruments?

"If you need to talk to someone..." Adam repeated the hotline reference that was ingrained in his memory.

"I'm talking with you," Ciri shrugged, "that's good enough for me. Don't look at me like I'm crippled, there's nothing wrong with me! Nothing Wilgeforz hasn't done to me. I've had worse," she wrinkled her nose painfully and clenched the glass in her hand. "Much worse. If I'd been snotty every time, I'd have died in that arena in Claremont."

Adam wasn't sure if he wanted to know what this arena was, or what Ciri was doing there, but he was already guessing where she had learned to kill.

He glanced at Ciri's slumped face, staring at one point, and a pang of pity pricked him. She needed his support. Something comforting had to be said right away.

"No one will ever hurt you."

Who the hell says that? Bruce Willis from the '90s action movies? //"No one else is going to hurt you, baby." To add credibility to the phrase, Adam touched her shoulder as casually as he could with his fingertips. At least he tried to make the gesture careless. Any touching of her now was like walking through a high-tension zone in the pouring rain.

Adam's personal life had been completely empty since the augmentations had been implanted; the occasional one-two-three-must-call woman only fueled it. The vacuum had been filled by work. Ciri's kiss was an invasion of no man's land.

"Don't promise what you can't deliver," Ciri smiled weakly. "You didn't sign up for what was done to you, either... Who was it, by the way?"

//"The very man I promised to deliver you to." There was an awkward silence, and Adam stretched out the pause, desperately jealous of Sarif's ability to answer any question diplomatically.

" It doesn't matter anymore," he finally replied evasively. "It's in the past."

It must have reflected something on his face, because Ciri looked at him intently and, judging by the skeptical arching of her eyebrows, didn't believe him.

The list of Zhao Yun Zhu's many sins was peppered with sobriety. Adam never found anything containing alcohol but instead found an issue of Haaretz from two weeks ago. It was unlikely that a Chinese woman would be so interested in Israeli news.

"Do you think," Ciri changed the subject, "is there anything to eat on this ship?"

Adam wasn't sure about the food, but there had to be computers on this boat and on them the protocols for communicating with Tai Yun Medical's server. Personal effects. Something had to be here, or the yacht wouldn't have been guarded and missile launchers put on it.

"I'll figure something out," Adam said absent-mindedly, remembering the original question.

"No, no," Ciri said quickly. "Don't. Let me do it this time, huh?"

Adam nodded in relief and Ciri began rummaging through the refrigerator like a ravenous bear.

Zhao Yun Zhu's private quarters smelled stiflingly of lavender and strong cleaning agent. Twenty meters wide; the walls were upholstered in green velvet, and the light was provided by origami pieces coated with fluorescent compound and arranged on low carved stools. Strangely enough, this eclecticism seemed viable.

A holographic display with some kind of data was slowly rippling above the table. A desktop computer couldn't be better. Adam squeezed into a desk chair customized to fit the frail woman.

After half an hour, he came to the disappointing conclusion that the terminal was impenetrable. Nothing - not a hacker module, not a multitool, not David Lee's codes, not Pritchard's emergency tech support. Nothing could penetrate the dense cybernetic wall of Sumimoto Electronics. Adam tried everything possible before reclining in despair in the soft white leather chair with the lotus embroidered on it.

++"Give up this lost cause," Pritchard wrote, "it's impenetrable.

Adam resisted the thought for a while longer and, cursing through gritted teeth, climbed back into the kitchen. Ciri stared hypnotically at the pot, which she had placed with pedantic precision on the circle of the induction burner, occasionally poking at it with a spoon. It smelled vaguely of something between vegetable mix and stale bread.

"No need to make a fire," she informed him, "no need to heat the stove. Magic!"

He sat down at the bar, pulling a stool closer; soon he had a thick soup and dry cookies that Ciri had dug up somewhere to diversify the slurry.

"What is it?" Adam asked, always preferring to scan the situation before taking action.

Adam had heard of Eastern Europeans' passion for soups in which a spoon would get stuck, but the concoction in his plate looked like something a tank would get bogged down in.

"Try it," Ciri said cheerfully, sitting across from him and shoveling out something that looked like mashed green peas with a spoon. "It's better than your candy bars. Everything in your world is so terribly sweet, sour, salty, peppery....."

He tasted it.

Somewhere in the settings, there was a function to turn off the taste buds.

"What do you think? I learned to make axe soup on the run," Ciri sighed.

It didn't seem to be a euphemism. Trying to swallow the contents without getting them on his tongue, Adam nodded approvingly and grabbed the spicy ketchup and ranch sauce at the same time. A mixture like this would make concrete appetizing.

"When we're in Detroit," Ciri said, scraping a spoon across her plate, "I want to understand how things work. And why they work that way. And I also want to shoot. Will you teach me?"

The last idea didn't elicit any enthusiasm from Adam, but Ciri chose not to notice it.

We'll see.

Ketchup made it bearable.

"Why are you pouring..." Ciri sighed. "Okay. Is it possible to put silver bullets in your gun? I'd like to make it a present for my father."

"I'd rather do a silver plating, it's too soft a metal for bullets," Adam replied thoughtfully, wondering how to hack into the damn server. "Can't the imperial guards handle it?"

And if you wash it down with Dr. Pepper, you can live.

"I meant the stepfather," Ciri corrected herself, "Geralt. The Witcher, the monster hunter. Remember I mentioned that?"

His recollection was embarrassingly vague. In the past, Adam had tried not to delve too deeply into her biography, trying to maintain a working distance that now seemed utopian.

"I was also raised in a foster family," Adam shared. "My biological parents died in a fire."

"Mine drowned," Ciri said shortly, and laughed awkwardly. "We have so much in common, just to think about it."

He casually asked her about Geralt and her foster family, and Ciri seemed to burst into tears. She pushed her plate aside and talked so much that one would have thought she'd spent the last few years alone.

Some of the story was lost in translation from Polish (Ciri claimed that her imperial father had first appeared to her mother in the form of a hedgehog), some parts of it were like a bad action movie (no matter how good she was in battle, her ability to chop up a hundred people while on skates was hard to believe), and some, especially those involving a scum named Bonarte, pissed him the hell off.

Her voice cut through the silence of the boat, where only the muffled rumble of the engines could be heard. Adam did what little he had to do-silence and listening - and he did it beautifully.

And now I'm here," Ciri finished her confession, which probably lasted at least half an hour.

Judging by her bio, it's time for Jensen to stop complaining about his own.

"Yeah," Adam sighed. "Surely there were better worlds?"

"Yeah," Ciri grinned. "I've had better."

She was silent for half a minute.

"Adam, I'm exhausted. I haven't gotten much sleep since Red Bank.

From Red Bank. Sumimoto Electronics' latest software protects inter-corporate databases... Databases.

He still has a copy of the Wintermute metavirus.

"Take any cabin you want," Adam said, rising from the table.

Back in Zhao Yun Zhu's quarters, Adam loaded the metavirus into the system. What followed was like acute poisoning. The defense system thrashed about like a man caught in a vat of acid as Adam watched the defenses shut down one by one.

A ghostly copy of Tai Yun Medical's central server appeared on the screen. A huge library of files encrypted with names he didn't recognize. Adam clicked on the first message he saw.

++THEME: Elise Kassan's condition

How long will the fix take? Plug in the backup AIs: what is the status of the Morpheus project?

Re:

In the test phase. It's dangerous to turn on an AI of this power right now. We haven't checked all the containment settings.

RE:

We've lost control of the media. Solve the problem ASAP.

What...? Adam reread the letter several times, each time realizing more and more clearly what it could mean, and the realization made him gooseflesh. No, Pritchard had told him such a theory once at lunch, but Adam had thought it was nonsense at the time.

THEME: Tai Yun Medical

Send him to hell. Zhao Yun Zhu fucked up the operation, if she dies, I personally don't give a shit, Namir is needed more right now. How much does the elf know?

THEME: Gravity anomaly

See the preliminary results of the reports.

WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING URGENTLY. WE GOT A HOLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HANSHA. I repeat, this is priority NUMBER ONE..

Adam saved the report to a third-party drive, not yet mentally ready to open it.

THEME: Melina's birthday

Sweetheart, if I promised, I'll be there. I've got some business to take care of, we're in a bit of a rush right now. Give Melina a kiss for me and tell her I'll bring her a beautiful pendant like an elven princess.

THEME: Fedorova upgrade and repair

I have a cost-optimizing suggestion. Why don't we fuck it up? The cache is at zero right now.

THEME: Metal alloy

We further analyzed the bluish metal found in the dagger of one of the elves. It's an alloy of platinum and osmium. Details are in the appendix.

THEME: David Sarif

I'm meeting him in Detroit on Monday. We need to take a more serious look at recruiting him. His robocop is giving us too much trouble.

Sarif? The "Sender" field was encrypted. Deciphering was Pritchard's prerogative, but Adam didn't want to involve him just yet.

TOPIC: URGENT! Taggart

Andrew, you are royally screwed. Get to Geneva right away and explain to Taggart about those pointy-eared creatures.

There were at least a hundred messages in all. What he was looking for - evidence of an attack on Sarif Industries - wasn't there, but Taggart, Rand, Zhao Yun Zhu - names Adam had never seen in common before were forming a frightening mosaic.

Adam collapsed back in his chair, closed his eyes, and rubbed them with his fingers. He'd gotten himself into a scheme the extent of which he couldn't quite fathom.

Having copied all the data to a third-party medium, he considered whether to share it with Sarif Industries, but decided against it for now. Pritchard, as if smelling treachery, dialed him up on Infolink:

"Jensen, did you watch the news?"

"I don't have time for this now."

"You should. It's the first time something interesting has been shown there in years."

Without looking, Adam pressed the remote control button and turned on World Picus News in the background. What they were talking about made him glance at the screen.

The red-haired girl, the perfect synthesis of all Hollywood starlets, stared pitifully at the viewer with her slanted gray eyes. A single tear rolled down her bloodstained cheek. Some women have a special skill for crying a single tear without smearing their mascara, and it is best to stay away from such women.

"What the heck was that?" Adam asked.

The dress on the girl's chest was torn in a way that suggested the worst. Adam had learned well during his years in the police if the worst had happened, the dress would not have torn so neatly.

"Elves."

It was the first time Adam had been able to see them up close. Slanted almond-shaped eyes, elongated faces with protruding cheekbones, pointed ears peeking out a couple of centimeters from behind their hair, straight, long noses. These faces gave him an uneasy feeling, reminiscent of the "uncanny valley" - his mind picked up on the irregularity of the features, but couldn't grasp the catch.

And if their facial expressions are similar to human facial expressions, you'd think they ate a pound of shit each before going on stage.

"I see, Pritchard, what are they doing on Picus News?"

The shots changed to the familiar predatory face of the badly wounded man on the scaffolding. Adam felt a pleasant sense of justice at the sight of the massive wound on his chest, which immediately died when he remembered how good medicine was in Switzerland.

What's with the Tyrants' aim, since they couldn't kill him with a point-blank shot, nor the elven bastard.

"They're complaining about racial discrimination," Pritchard said grimly. "It's time to give Sharp-Eared an Oscar, the way she squeezes tears out of herself! I thank the Academy and Tai Yun Medical for my acting career."

"How did this happen? What's Taggart doing there? Did they cut off the elf's arm?"

One of the speakers had a late-model hydraulic prosthesis, equipped with what appeared to be a data transmission module, judging by the half-dozen shiny silver connectors.

"And they put in the latest generation of Augs. It's like they made a martyr for the Front."

The world was slowly slipping away like a retractable platform.

"Tell me this is a joke."

"Just kidding," Pritchard said. "If you want to hear something funny, Janet - you know, the blond one in Human Resources - came in today wearing a top that said "Save the Elves". Last month she had Navy SEALs, this month she has elves. I liked the Navy SEALs better, to be honest."

Janet had once tried to sell him Herbalife to help his scars heal faster after surgery, so Adam didn't doubt her intellectual abilities.

"Ciri doesn't need to see this."

Pritchard smirked, and his sarcastic tone took on a new quality.

"You've got your parental instincts kicking in?"

"What the hell is parental instinct," Adam hissed, "she's at most ten years younger than me!"

"What are you tense, as if from a power surge?" Pritchard stretched out contentedly. "I was joking."

Adam urgently changed the subject.

"She's been through enough lately to admire the newly minted celebrities."

"Yeah, Jensen, I'm gonna finish my coffee and tear down all the posters in Detroit and hit TVs with a bat. I've been wanting to do that for a long time."

The news, meanwhile, was raging with defrauded shareholders of Tai Yun Medical, once again victimized by ritual abuse at the hands of company management.

"All right, Jensen, I'll see you in Detroit. You owe me a case of beer."

"Yes," Adam agreed.

His thoughts bounced from the messages he'd read to elves to elves to elves to monsters, and he could feel himself slowly beginning to overload. He felt like he was in some kind of Kafkaesque maze, where more absurdity awaited him around every corner.

Surprised at his composure, Adam put out his cigarette and went into the next cabin. Ciri was asleep, the smooth curves of her body visible beneath the light blanket. A strand of ashy hair fell over her face, a hand with long fingers stretched along the bed.

He noticed a strip of white skin between the blanket and the sheets and suppressed the urge to touch it.

* * *

When Sumimoto had nowhere else to dump waste, they figured out how to make a living space out of it and built a group of islands in the East China Sea, naming it the New Hope Archipelago. New Hope Territory. By dumping about ten thousand tons of waste a day, the Japanese were expanding their presence in the Pacific at an enviable rate. And fast-growing frontiers are very difficult to secure.

They left the yacht adrift, bobbing languidly in the dark water. Farida waited for them by the featureless bizjet.

"Nice to meet you, Ciri. Farida Malik," Ciri accepted the firm handshake knowingly, smiling back. "Welcome aboard."

Whether because of her roots or simply because of her nature, Farida could not adopt the American smile, and her face still reflected Arab cordiality.

The interior of the bizjet looked exactly as it should: equipped with the standard set of white leather and walnut wood paneling. The only thing missing was a stewardess in a shortened uniform. The light scent of leather from the upholstery was far more pleasant than the stale sea odor that had haunted Adam during the cruise; the seat molded to his shape, snug against his body.

"It'll shake a bit on takeoff," Farida reported from the cockpit.

Farida's "a little shake" would have been considered an emergency by other pilots. The airplane shook as if it were a washboard instead of a runway, and soared upward. Ciri clutched at the armrests as if she'd been put in an electric chair.

"Dog's blood, we'll collapse," she whispered. "We'll crumble, and then we'll be dead."

The air pocket at the edge of the dark clouds seemed to have been waiting for those words; it felt like they'd been thrown about two hundred meters. Adam sighed and reassuringly covered the trembling palm with his own. The dark carbon fiber covered the pale skin without a shadow of tan, and they both watched the contrast for a couple of seconds.

"Small planes always shake," Adam said calmly.

Ciri took a deep breath and leaned back, listening for any noise, of which there was plenty. Adam had once read that the main cause of aerophobia was a lack of understanding of aerodynamics, and he continued:

"The principles by which it works are far more reliable than magic. Believe me. The airplane's engines create thrust, and the shape of its body and wings allow it to rise upward. Like..." Adam struggled to find a medieval alternative, "...like a kite. Did you play kites as a kid?"

"Yes," Ciri replied surreptitiously. "And they fell. Once right on the maid of honor's head."

Should he take a course in comforting women?

She relaxed only when they reached cruising altitude. She let go of Adam's hand and stared out the window. There wasn't much to admire - they were flying over the coast of Okinawa, which, after the last man-made disaster near Ishikaga, was nothing but scorched earth.

When the controls went to autopilot, Adam headed for the control room. He sat next to Farida, admiring the flickering LEDs on the control panel.

"Adam, you can't smoke in this plane," Farida grinned as he reached for a cigarette. "It's written in large print in the lease terms."

Damn Japanese.

"Well, how are you?" Farida asked softly. She was one of the few people who asked that question sincerely.

Adam nodded vaguely.

"So that's it," Farida sighed, smoothing her short hair. "A spy boy and a lightning girl. Unexpected..."

No, he wasn't ready for this conversation, especially not with Farida. Adam slid a glance at the control panel and realized they'd been given away by the cabin's security cameras.

"What do you mean?" Adam shrugged.

"Come on, Adam," Farida said, a touch of sadness in her voice. "Just because you don't notice these things doesn't mean others don't."

There was an awkward pause, but Farida quickly shut it up with office gossip. The new Polish biotechnologist who'd been poached from Versalife had won the adoration of the entire HR department, someone had stolen Pritchard's lunch box from the fridge, Eliza Kassan rumors said to have neuroposin cancer... Adam loved listening to Farida. Somehow her chatter reminded him of birds chirping in the morning. You know, when they were still chirping.

Back in the cabin, Adam took up reading a flyer on the latest transhumanist technology. Versalife presented a design for a new underwater man: legless and pelvic girdles, the body ending in a long, muscular tail fin. What he saw reminded him of the Foglet. How long would they be able to pass off what had happened in Hensha as a man-made disaster?

Meanwhile, Ciri tried to read the latest copy of Scientific American, underlining unfamiliar words with a pencil, but after half an hour, having exhausted almost all the pages, she gave up. She found the latest issue of Steiner-Bisley much more entertaining.

And he can't even smoke, and that thought made the itch even worse.

"Do you want to watch something?" Adam asked, turning on the multimedia system.

Ciri pulled away from the Steiner-Bisley avenue and looked at him for a couple of moments as if he had posed a confusing philosophical question to her.

"Remember I told you about the movies?"

"Moving pictures?" Ciri clarified, her eyes lighting up like two green lanterns. "I do, of course!"

The movie library on board was not so rich.

"Fiction or fantasy?" Adam asked thoughtfully.

What's out there from a fantasy... Lord of the Rings... No, there are elves, and they're better off not being shown to Ciri.

"Fiction," Ciri decided firmly. "And it had to have ships and guns."

"Star Wars" fits the request perfectly. Just as he was about to make himself comfortable, he was interrupted by an Infolink request.

"Chief."Chief.

While Pritchard rarely turned on the video link, careful not to flash chip bags, video game figures, and questionable screen content, Sarif always did. Because there was never a time when the chief didn't look like he'd just returned from a gala.

This time he was wearing an elegant Italian suit, on which the pocket square shone dazzlingly.

"Well done, son," Sarif said, "it won't go unrewarded. Come back home. Everything is ready for your return."

What, "everything"?

"Ciri has been through a lot in China. She needs to rest before..."

Sarif smiled sympathetically without parting his lips and nodded:

"For God's sake, Adam, who do you think I am? We're not Tay Yung Medical. Cirilla is a welcome guest, and it's our duty to give her a warm welcome. No one is going to put her in a cage and experiment on her."

//"How-dare-you-think-so," Sarif's tone inclined as if Adam had tried to unfairly incriminate him in a heinous act, like killing babies or avoiding taxes.

"It's not just blood and genes, Adam, it's more than that. There are so many worlds, so many opportunities, so many unique resources... With diplomacy, we can achieve so much more."

Adam felt he had hopelessly lost control of the conversation.

"It's important to me," Sarif said softly, "that you establish a warm relationship with the girl. But I can see you're working hard on that."

"I'm not going to use her affection for any purpose," Adam shrugged, but it wasn't the careless gesture he'd hoped for.

"Don't worry. All I'm asking you to do is take care of her. You didn't feed her candy bars, did you?"

Adam crossed his arms over his chest, squaring his shoulders at such an accusation. Hell no, they'd walked into every Michelin restaurant in Upper Hensha.

"That's what I thought. No wonder she's in such a hurry to get out of this world. I'll get you a table at Mia Francesca's, on the company's dime - she needs to learn about the good things in our world. And for these steaks, I'm willing to take responsibility for them with my head."

Sarif's Italian pronunciation was excellent. Adam hadn't realized where he'd come from in all this time. He spoke in a perfect blend of dialects, interspersed with an assortment of American accents. His file said he was from Boston, but it could have been anything.

"There's something else," Adam changed the subject. "There's been a biological disaster on Hensha. I'm not sure of its true nature, but I have reason to assume the worst."

Sarif shrugged, but something in his face changed subtly. He knew exactly what he was talking about, but didn't show it. One of the CEO's responsibilities is to hide fear and exude confidence at all times.

"I understand your concern, Adam, but this is not a problem that I or you can solve right now."

Finishing his connection with Sharif, Adam watched Luke's adventures half-heartedly. Time was slowly turning into a viscous syrup. He dreamed of mounds of water that moved smoothly like black muscles. Something was moving beneath the uneven surface of the ocean, but he woke before it reached land.

They traveled against the sun, flying out at night and arriving at night.

Adam had always loved Detroit, especially the view out the window. A phoenix city rising from the ashes thanks to the augmentation industry. All around them, the lights of the city and the overturned gray bowl of the sky in the glow of neon...

It was snowing, large sparse snowflakes; they fell on the pavement and disappeared without a trace.

"It's beautiful," Ciri approved, "like a fair."

Downtown stretched below - streams of cars pulsed through the streets, obeying the synchronized logic of programmed traffic lights, a string of multicolored logos blending into an acid rainbow. And a couple of kilometers to the south, the gray chip on the facade of the Chiron Building, the windows of his penthouse carefully provided by the company.

//++""Chiron Building? - Adam texted Pritchard as soon as he saw the e-mail with instructions on Ciri's accommodations. - Have you prepared an apartment for her in the Chiron Building?"

Pritchard answered messages and calls so quickly, it was as if he existed by being plugged in.

++||"Well, she'll be safest under your wing, won't she? Right next door."

Hm.

* * *

++WELCOME HOME, ADAM. I HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD DAY.

"You can't even imagine," Adam muttered.

Moonlight was streaming into the room through sectors of multi-colored glass through the elongated Victorian windows. It was a deep Sunday night.

He's home.

Adam opened the refrigerator, where a mouse would hang if cases of beer didn't take up all the space. There was a pizza in the freezer, but the expiration date was uninspiring. Finally discouraged, Adam pulled his personal bag of cornflakes from the cupboard and looked inside.

Not a crumb. Well, a beer's a beer.

"PLEASE GET ME OUT. I'M STUCK," came a mechanical squeak. The cleaning robot was stuck in a maze between chair legs and two empty beer bottles. Adam thought he was one of the most polite creatures he'd ever met and freed the unfortunate fellow from his captivity.

Turning on the television for a needed dose of information noise, Adam settled on the couch with his laptop and opened his corporate e-mail. In three days of the chief's almost total absence, the security department should have fallen into disrepair and its autocracy should have been replaced by anarchy.

Wow, no. He didn't even have to be reminded twice about the security report on Ciri's apartment. For once, everything had been done for him - the triple security perimeter of the Chiron Building, the security drones... Now, what was that?

Adam clicked on the twenty security cameras. The screen projected an image of Ciri trying to crack the coffee maker, in five angles. A camera in each of the rooms, including the bathroom and bedroom.

Pritchard's icon was still green.

"Did you stuff the apartment with video cameras?" Adam said instead of hello.

Rolling his eyes, Pritchard waved the question away as if it were an annoying fly.

"We can't afford any other excesses, Jensen. Literally, as you'll see by the sour faces in accounting tomorrow. If you're worried about me peeking at her in the shower..."

"She has to know she's being filmed and consent to it."

Legally, of course not: the Security Act, armed with the lobby of an entire conglomerate of co-ops, long ago defeated the Privacy Act.

"No one knows who is filming it right now, and no one certainly consented to it. Can we talk about this tomorrow?" Pritchard yawned expressively. "I want to sleep. For the first time in three days, by the way, did I mention?"

"Three times already. No, wait..."

"Good night, Jensen."

Adam stared at the laptop screen. "Turn it off." "Off," he said. While he was trying to perform this operation, Ciri had already managed to figure out how the coffee machine worked. Now all that was left was to figure out why she needed coffee at midnight.

++"The operation can only be performed from the main security terminal. For more information regarding video surveillance protocols, please contact A. Jensen, CSO".

Holy shit. Adam slammed the laptop lid shut and headed for the shower. The longer he stood under the water, the more annoyed he became at the thought that Ciri's every move was being broadcast to the monitoring stations.

//"Tomorrow I'll explain to her about the cameras and the surveillance system," he thought. - But today she'll be safer here

Before going down to the floor below, he glanced at his reflection in the chrome door of the refrigerator and smoothed a lock of dark, stiff hair. Every time he looked in the mirror, he was haunted by the feeling of being a passive bystander, disconnected from the image he saw.

Ciri opened the door after the third knock. She was wearing a white T-shirt with the Sarif Industries logo, stained with water dripping from her wet hair, which she was vigorously wiping off with a towel with the same logo. Slowly, corporate America is adopting the keiretsu model: apartments on the company's dime, towels on the company's dime, augmentations on the company's dime, and funerals on the company's dime.

Just of the shower, too. God forbid Pritchard makes another witty joke about it, or he'll have to ruin Sarif Industries' safety record with a work-related injury.

"I see you're jetlagged," Adam leaned his shoulder on the doorjamb. "Maybe we should finish watching Star Wars."

Ciri's lips stretched in a snide smile.

"I, well..." she shook her mane and clarified: "Star Wars finish watching?"

Adam gave a phlegmatic nod.

"Why not," Ciri shrugged and scratched the tip of her nose.

There was exactly no one in the Chiron Building on a Friday night. They went to the floor above, and Adam swiped his card across the lock. Normally, entry to the building was done by fingerprint, but in his case... In his case, there was only the card left.

"That's very bachelorish of you," Ciri whistled as she walked into the living room.

He had moved in two years ago after the designer had furnished the apartment on the sole request of "less junk". Adam's only attempt at coziness had been a late Renaissance wall clock, and he'd decided to stop there. Oh, and the candelabra that Athena had given him for his discharge from the hospital, which he had never bothered to move.

Inviting Ciri to sit on the small blue and white upholstered couch, Adam generously poured cheddar cheese-flavored chips into a bowl.

Walking over to his bar Adam meticulously looked over the few remaining bottles. His gaze somehow settled on a bottle of whiskey. Uncorking it, he sniffed the neck and took a glass. He sipped the whisky without taking his eyes off the bottle.

"Pour me something, too," Ciri asked.

//"Yeah definitely more than twenty-one," Adam overpowered himself and took a second glass. He turned on the plasma - trying not to accidentally bump into the news channel - and put on A New Hope from where they'd left off.

Ciri tucked her legs under her and leaned against the back of the couch, Adam squeezed in beside her. He had a small bachelor's couch that he couldn't quite make himself comfortable on his own. But he'd known that before he'd invited her over.

Holding the first sip in his mouth, Adam felt a pleasant burning sensation in his throat and hurriedly swallowed the whiskey without even a wince.

"There's a broken mirror in the restroom," Ciri said with concern, briefly stepping away after Kenobi and Vader's battle.

"Oh, shit, that's right," Adam realized. "It had broken by accident. The landlord promised to replace it next week."

Ciri clutched the glass with both hands, bowed her head over it, and then looked at Jensen again.

"Accidentally hit the very center of the mirror with your fist?" she clarified.

"My arm twitched," Adam said and took a noisy swig of whiskey.

She looked at his hand carefully, as if wondering if that could be the case, but she remained silent.

"Can I have one, too?" Ciri asked, tilting her head as Adam took a drag.

Either women have a subconscious ability to assume the most figure-emphasizing pose on couches, or he has very good lighting in his living room.

"You shouldn't. I have lung implants, you don't," Adam shook his head.

"Adam, how old do you think I am?" Ciri snorted. "I'll figure it out on my own."

That's a great question, by the way.

"How much?" Adam asked casually.

"You don't ask a girl that," Ciri said with a snicker. "And to be honest, I don't know. Time flows differently in different worlds. But I've seen twenty winters for sure."

Adam sighed. If he had three or five more, he wouldn't feel so guilty that he was more interested in watching a girl than in the adventures of Luke Skywalker. And Ciri was constantly distracted, occasionally fidgeting on the couch and glancing at him inadvertently.

The cleaning robot silently slid the empty whiskey bottle under the couch, apparently mistaking it for part of the interior. Adam discreetly picked it off the floor and rolled it to the farthest corner.

The infolink whirred.

"JENSEN! - Pritchard's shriek, which was as loud as a fire siren, immediately cheered Adam up, "Ciri's gone! She's gone fucking somewhere else again! She's not in the apartment! When am I gonna get some sleep?!"

Why the fuck would he be out in the middle of the night checking cameras?

"Easy, Pritchard. Take it easy. She's in my place."

"What? She's in your place.? Аh..."

Pritchard's "Ah" turned out to be very meaningful.

"Anything else?" Adam asked with emphasis.

"I didn't mean literally," Pritchard replied thoughtfully, "to take her under the wing."

Adam thought his coworkers cared too much about his personal life.

"Pritchard, is there anything else?"

"Oh, one more thing. I'd like to remind you that medieval customs required that after a night together..."

"Good night, Pritchard," Adam dropped the call without waiting to continue.

When he returned, Vader's fighter was already attacking Skywalker's ship, and Ciri found the battle terrifyingly exciting. She stared mesmerized at the screen, the flashing images of the battle reflected in her eyes. She was equally fascinated by the weapons on Steiner-Bisley Avenue.

Ciri finally bloomed and laughed, tossing back her ashy hair as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were presented with their awards. Adam thought it was the cutest thing he'd ever seen in his life and stared at the bronze ring of whiskey at the bottom of his glass.

"Part two?" he suggested as the credits started.

The question hung in the already heavy air.

"What, there's another part?" From the look on her face, Ciri didn't look very enthusiastic about the prospect. "No, I can't sit through part two like this. I should probably get going. It's time for bed."

She liked it, didn't she? Or is that not what she meant?

Adam took a large sip of whiskey. He was usually pretty good at fooling himself but ran out of options.

Of course, there are the unwavering and valiant Hollywood cops, and then there is the reality of life. And in life, some things are very hard to resist.

"There is one more suggestion," Adam's voice existed now as if separate from him.

Ciri immediately no longer wanted to sleep.

" Which one?"

Giving up the fight over ethics, he leaned in to her lips. And, judging by the eager reaction, he should have done it an hour ago.

It was still a mistake, and he still should have been smarter. But stopping in front of the girl snuggled up to him was harder than moving a speeding train off the tracks.

She's not going to find out who Luke Skywalker's father is today.

* * *

Ciri leaned back against the armrest of the couch, wrapping her arms around Adam's neck and pulling him into a deep kiss. It lasted so long that my eyes blurred with the aching, throbbing pain in his groin.

He carefully pulled off her top, exposing her rapidly heaving small breasts. Ciri's defenseless appearance was both enticing and frightening at the same time. The ridiculous thought slipped into his mind that one wrong signal from his brain to his prosthetics would be enough to turn the tender flesh beneath his fingers to mash.

Empty fears. Her breasts rested in his palms as if they were molded to them. When he reached for his jeans, Ciri lifted her hips, just slightly, trying to pass it off as a casual movement rather than a desire to help him.

There wasn't a hell of a lot of room for two on that little Italian couch.

"It's a little cramped in here," Adam whispered in her ear. "Why don't we move to the bed?"

Ciri nodded, slipping out from under him, dressed in her birthday suit, and scampered toward the bed in the small steps that shy naked women took. Adam got up from the couch after her, dimming the soft light of the fluorescent lamps throughout the studio as he went.

She had an odd combination of athletic leanness and fragility. Long muscles cut across her belly, and a narrow triangle of almost colorless hair cut her groin. Ciri fidgeted on the bed, shifting her weight from one arm to the other. The sight made the blood rush to his temples, though there shouldn't be any left. No, he could imagine what the clothes were hiding - the video of her practically naked in Bumby's video - but there were some things a digital recording couldn't convey.

Ciri tugged impatiently at his tank top, touching his belly with her fingers. Adam inwardly shuddered. The last time he'd taken off his clothes, the show-me-how-it-works had lasted half an hour, after which he'd wanted nothing more than a smoke.

The less she sees, the better. Adam pulled off his clothes as quickly as a barracks drill, tossing them into the farthest corner, and stepped out of his jeans. His lips quickly touched the slender neck before Ciri could stare at the connector plaques on his collarbones.

He reached for the bedside table with his other hand, blindly trying to fumble for the plastic rectangle. Napkins, Swiss knife, batteries, headache pills... Where are they?

"What are you looking for?" Ciri asked incredulously.

Found it. The Versalife emblem fluoresced, especially for those lost in the dark. Ciri raised herself on her elbows, and the semi-darkness emphasized the seductive shape of her figure. Her normally bunched ashy hair now fell to her frail shoulders.

"What's that for?" Ciri stared at the rectangle clutched in her fingers as if it were the latest sex shop product.

Adam froze in place. The voice of conscience told him that if the girl didn't know what a condom was, it was too soon for her to have sex.

"So you don't get pregnant," Adam said.

"Don't worry," Ciri smiled enigmatically, "I know my moon days."

Adam had no idea what moonlit days were, but everything he remembered about the demographics of the Middle Ages said that the thing was highly unreliable. Ciri leaned back on the pillows, smiling slightly, and pulled him to her, burrowing into his short hair.

"No, Ciri."

"Let's do without that, Adam," Ciri begged, kissing him for reassurance. "Please?"

Naked girls have a great talent for persuasion. Okay, let her have it her way. It's time to remember the old college method of pulling out in time.

Ciri moaned softly. At least, at first - then louder and louder, and something that sounded a lot like...

"No," she answered quietly, brushing beads of sweat off her face.

Of course, it hurts - you don't have to turn on CASIу to recognize a lie. When will women learn to clearly say what they want - especially in bed?

"Relax," Adam whispered in her ear, sliding his palm over her tummy.

Adam remembered the rest of it vaguely. Only that the clock had fallen from the bedside table, shattering to pieces, the frantic dancing of his pulse on the internal display, and the sensation of a body as supple and hot as red-hot mercury. The sense of time was replaced by an exponentially increasing feeling, inexorably approaching the top.

The orgasm like a bat knocked all thoughts out of his head, and for a while, there was a blissful emptiness in his skull. Ciri was breathing heavily beneath him and looking a little dazed. Adam rolled over onto his side in a gentlemanly manner, finally wrinkling the sweat-damp sheets.

"Was it your first time?" He asked doomedly, knowing the answer in advance.

Ciri remained silent. Adam sighed and took a drag.

"Not the first," she said stubbornly.

She needed to either stop lying or learn how to do it. Adam turned his head and gave her an attentive look.

"Well, maybe with a man first," Ciri grudgingly admitted.

Such revelations almost made him cough, but it explained her sensitivity to oral caresses.

"Honestly," Adam touched his lips lightly to her temple, brushing away an ashy strand with his finger, and continued guiltily: "If I'd known, I would have arranged things differently. The candles there... The wine... All that stuff."

He wouldn't have signed up for that kind of responsibility if he knew.

Whiskey and chips are good, too," Ciri murmured, trying to get comfortable on his chest, but the internal system connectors prevented her from doing so. Only the drowsiness that came with it made her ignore the inconvenience.

He watched her, stroking her with his fingertips until she fell into a dead sleep, curled up in a ball and smiling. In her sleep, she looked tired and terribly content, as if she'd been the first to run a relay race.

The last time he'd fallen asleep so light-heartedly and quickly had been about ten years ago. It was about the same time girls her age had last fallen asleep in his bed.

Adam stared at the dark ceiling for a long time. From this angle, it looked like a vast black ocean.

* * *

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http://notabenoid.org/book/86809/569553

Переводчики: Camrad_RIP