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4.12.2004


 
ZEPHYR



Around sixty-one and a half kilohertz.

That's my frequency.

Mister We Don't Quite had a hard, nervous pulse that vibrated the carotid in his thick neck, and I could pick it up on the second or third FM harmonic, a little ripple in the Doppler that came back to me as part of the constant echo from bisonar pings.


My mother was one of the six original carriers of the Garrett-B virus, which wiped out most of the population of Chang Mai before WHO and CHO contained it and distributed a stopgap vaccine. Eight of nine children in our household died. I was left without most of a visual cortex, which I guess was lucky, considering. I also got sent to a hospital in Bangkok for being autistic and psychotic.

As it turned out I was all right, apart from being blind. And even that didn't slow me down much. Kids got all kinds of ways to compensate, and then as I got older and got working, I could pay for technology to help me along.

Vaughn designed the box that made me licensable, though. Suppose that's part of the reason I wouldn't sell him out, this sweet piece of wire that makes sound do what light does when you're sighted.

Bounce.

Bounce so good that when Mister We Don't Quite started to breathe hard and his blood pressure kicked up, I knew just how much.

So good that when he reached for the weapon Rico missed, I had already squeezed the trigger, nice and easy, and he was already falling down.


I'm professional, not loyal. I can't stand Vaughn, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't think much of me either. Don't mistake courtesy for sentimentality. Around our kind, it's a subtle but important distinction.


On the ground, Mister We Don't Quite was dead. None of this disarm and immobilize crap: unlike a lot of operatives, I don't worry much about justifiable use of lethal force. I get contracted for the ugly dangerous jobs, with the clients who expect me to act conclusively, no questions, the first time. And funny how I've never had to show up in court, never had to apologize or explain.

I've never missed a target. I've never killed anyone who wasn't about to deserve it.

At least in my client's eyes.



After we came off shift, Rico took me to a Chinese place, Gold Pagoda or something, sits up right on the cliffs above the ocean, so the whole place smells both like egg flower soup and oily sea brine.

Rico's Portugese-Armenian, which has got to be one of the most fucked up combinations next to Trinidadian-Thai.

He knows I like girls and that I'm not big on being touched anyway. But we both got drunk and wound up fucking, against the back wall of the restaurant under the heavy heat of a west African night sky.


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