Caine's Law by Matthew Stover Read Free Book Online Page B

won’t even survive the cyborg conversion
.
    Yeah
.
    If he survives the operation, though … they’ll probably hardwire him for data processing. He might live for years
.
    One apologetic cough.
    Not that you’d, uh, want him to, y’know. Not like that …
    Out on my lawn, in the grip of the Social Police, he had rolled his head toward me. He had lifted his twisted hand—his last voluntary function, not quite destroyed by his disease—and he had touched his head, and made a weak patting motion, and then walked his crippled fingers slowly up the chrome bedrail of his travel couch. The last thing he ever said to me.
    Keep your head down, and inch toward daylight
.
    He hadn’t kept his down far enough, and now wires come out of his eye sockets.
    “He’s alive. Sort of,” I murmur, numb and stupid, knocked flat sideways by the way shit seems to come at me from all over at once.
    “Oh yes,” Gayle says. “I have been instructed to emphasize to you that the network into which he is wired is the Social Police global data mine—that his brain is being used to filter electronic chatter and flag potentially seditious communications.”
    This time I can’t make my mouth form my fading mental echo of
holy shit
 …
    Using Dad to track down everybody who is anything like what he used to be. It takes my fucking breath away. It’s like Raithe. Like Raithe and Shanna. Worse.
    It’s a stroke of evil motherfucking genius.
    Gayle nods as if he can read my mind. “You should understand that the ingenuity of their malice is functionally infinite.”
    I don’t answer. I can’t answer.
    “While surrender is painful and humiliating, refusal will be worse,” Gayle says. “Do you understand? They know your, ah, your absolute. Your obligation of manhood. And they are willing to use it in any necessary way.”
    This pulls me back up to the surface of the swamp in my head. “So, what, if I screw with them, they kill him? Some threat.”
    “No. If you don’t cooperate …” He looks at me then, and his eyes go as dead as mine feel. “If you screw with them, they
won’t
kill him.”
    Oh. Of course.
    That makes more sense.
    “In fact,” Gayle says gently, almost delicately, just like Vinson Garrette, “they’ll wake him up.”
    Sure. What else?
    Didn’t matter. None of it mattered. None of it changed anything at all. Except …
    Dad.
    Of course Dad. It’s always been Dad. How could I think it would ever be anyone or anything else? He was right: I am defined by fear.
    My fear is him.
    Not fear of him—I got over that before I was ten years old. Fear I might
be
him. Sick. Crazy. Locked inside a body that doesn’t belong to me anymore.
    Alone with my rage.
    Maybe that’s why I never gave a shit about tossing my life into whatever the next fight was. Is.
    People who say there’s no such thing as a fate worse than death should try telling that to Dad. I don’t know if his ears still work, but if they don’t you’re out of luck. It’s not like you can draw him a fucking picture.
    Funny how they understand me so well.
    I take a deep breath. “Okay.”
    Faller blinks. “What?”
    “I said
okay
. Need me to spell it? Here, watch.”
    I jam my thumb onto the switch. Black oil rolls down toward my feeding tube.
    It doesn’t feel like anything at all.
    “Hey, I’ve got one last question.” I look from Faller to Gayle and back again. “Who’s your favorite character in
To Kill a Mockingbird
?”

 

 
    “I have this dream, y’know? More like a fantasy. That once, just once, somebody I care about is in trouble, and when I show up to help, they’re actually happy to see me.”
    — DOMINIC SHADE
Caine Black Knife
     
    H e walks through a universe of white.
    Snow …
    He can’t remember the last time he saw snow.
    It falls gently as a child’s kiss. Flakes twist and tumble and alight with the hushy whisper of raindrops on tiptoe. With each footstep, he feels a crunch too discreetly crisp to make sound.
    He