Cates 05 - The Final Evolution by Jeff Somers Read Free Book Online Page B

society—you’ve got trade, a social order. Fucking hell, kid. You could do worse than Potosí.”
    “That’s fucking depressing,” she said. “If Potosí is so wonderful, why were you so eager to leave?”
    I opened my eyes. “People were trying to kill me.”
    She smiled. “And you have a man to kill in Mexico.”
    I smiled. “You think that’s bullshit.”
    She shrugged. “You’ve got a man’s gun, that’s for sure. Junior back there has a gun with a fucking capital G, yes? But working for Morales doesn’t mean shit. The world is filled with men who want to be hard.”
    I shut my eyes and tried to work the dull ache out of the small of my back. It was impossible. “Is that what I’m trying to be? A hard man?”
    “You talk like one. Everything is a threat. Everything is funny and nothing is true.” She shrugged again. “In Potosí a lot of people talk like that. Most are dead, now. The army occupied us, you know. For six months we had a major in charge of the town, five thousand soldiers, armor units, silver hovers in the air. They set up military courts—jokes, bad jokes, but anyone caught stealing—shot dead. Caught breaking curfew—shot dead. Don’t want to sell them your… your last fucking cow… shot dead.” She paused, her hands tight on the stick. “The hard ones, they usually didn’t have anything hard to say when facing the firing line.”
    I nodded. “We tend to lose our sense of humor when we get executed, I’ll grant you that. But I’m pushing forty, sister. Life expectancy keeps dropping, from what I can tell, and t widans every year I’m that much more amazing.”
    She laughed, a sudden outburst of snorting and choking that was mildly disturbing. I popped open one eye and turned my head to look at her. She was shaking with sudden laughter, her whole body jerking with the force of it.
    I let it drift, and she didn’t say anything more. We rode along in silence for a few minutes, the rain lashing the rusted chassis, the silent lightning giving us a glimpse every now and then as the four-wheeler sailed down the road. I liked that she wasn’t afraid. I was tired of people being afraid when they saw the gun, when they found out who you were. I liked being laughed at. It reminded me of New York, years ago, Kev Gatz and I crawling through the sewers and starving to death. No one had been impressed by me back then, either, and it was before the Squalor job, before London and Rose Harper and everything that came after, ruining me and then coming back to ruin what was left.
    Poor Avery , a voice whispered in my head, making me jump a little.
    Salgado? I thought, and waited. She didn’t say anything else. When I’d been in Chengara Penitentiary, they’d stuck needles into my brain and tried to upload me to the prison mainframe for storage, but the army had crashed the party and I’d been disconnected before they’d completed the work. Somehow a bunch of other people’s stored minds had backwashed into me, and three of them had lasted long enough for me to get used to them talking to me. My old pal Grisha had told me those three had survived probably because I’d known them, somewhat, in real life. Dolores Salgado, former Undersecretary of the System of Federated Nations, had been in prison with me. The old bat had been important, and then she’d been in prison, and then she’d been dead, and I somehow had a copy of her in my brain.
    The lightning flashed, and Adora sat forward, slowing us down. “Fuck,” she muttered. “Looks like some trees in the road.”
    I hunched my shoulders and leaned forward too, squinting. My augments, buried in my head, sharpened my vision slightly and the darkness outside took on a pale green clarity, like my own personal moon beaming down. A few hundred feet ahead four trees, thick trunks a few feet around, lay across the road, blocking it completely at a point where sheer rocky hills rose up on either side.
    She let us glide to a halt, then sat