Serpent's Shadow
PREDAWN
It takes too long to realise that the sound in the room is not only the hammering of his own heart. Madre Walker is pounding incessantly at the door, her voice urgent, concerned: “Are you all right, hon?”
He stumbles to the door blindly. One bare toe catches a corner of the side table: that wakes him up. His groping hand finds the panel, he opens the door, blinking as the light floods in.
Madre Walker is standing outside in nightgown and curlers. She looks concerned. In her eyes he sees a brief reflection of how he himself must look: sleep-drunk gold eyes with the vicious scar which had nearly taken his sight slashing diagonally across the right, disheveled mane of gray-brown hair scattered wildly over the bare, muscled, scarred shoulders. “You look a mess,” she announces abruptly.
“Not everyone can look so radiant at all hours of the night,” he returns smoothly. His balance is returning.
“Hmph.” She looks him up and down until he starts to blush in places he didn’t know he could blush. “Tea,” she says finally. “A nice spot of tea will do you right.”
“Dear Madre, I have to be at work at five.”
“Not looking like that, you won’t be. Now go grab a bathrobe or something.” She gives him just enough time to snatch the nearby shirt and pants before she takes his calloused hand into her own meatier ones and tows him to her own small apartment, sitting him down in the brightness of the single lightbulb dangling above the tiny kitchen before she goes bustling about the cupboards for a kettle. He sighed. “Madre, Madre, when are you going to start using that microwave?”
“For tea? Sacrilege.” Her friendly backhand nearly overset him and the chair. “Now be a good boy, and find me where I put that soyspread.”
He shook his head, smiling a little. The den mother to the entire block would never use a microwave if it were the only electric means of heating water available. She’d make a fire first. In her kitchen. And he’d lay nuyen to soycaf she’d manage it without any being the wiser. Madre Walker was so old-fashioned in some things. All – except one.
“Madre, mind if I borrow your vid for a bit?”
“Nature channel again?” He could see the smile playing about her aura, even as she tsked around her tusks. “Some shaman you are, Gray Wolf. I do declare that watching the nature channel is the closest you’ve ever gotten to actual wildlife.”
“Unless you count the Barrens,” he shrugged, easing into the familiar seat with the remote already in his hand. The dream remained vivid in his mind, but, for now at least, it no longer had its claws sunk in him.
DAWN
I
Nothing.
In one hour, when this particular subsidiary of Aztechnology discovered the delayed tapeworm he had dropped into an intranetted terminal, discovered the industrial sabotage Shou-Lin Fang could wreak through its one-time backdoor into a relatively unguarded subsystem: there would be alarms.
Gray Wolf had no intentions of sticking around to hear them. He had done his part of the job. In his pocket rested chip-proof – literally. All that remained was to borrow a secured line to upload the confirmation data to the Johnson’s terminal – and that he would certainly not do until his packmate was well clear, preferably not even until the final meet itself. He had run the shadows too many years to place all his chips in one database.
Still: nothing that was not unexpected. All in all, a good run, so far.
The first drops of the predicted rain stung his face. He turned up the lapels of his coat, smiling a little. Rising, the shaman moved swiftly from shadow to steam-gushing shadow, avoiding the sweep of the security cameras he had mapped out well in advance without consciously thinking about it. Reaching the edge of the building, without pausing: he leaped into space – and turned it into a skidding roll on the far side, having cleared a span of some twenty metres without even a proper running start. The rain was beginning in earnest now. On to the iron fire escapes he had noted in his earlier casing, dodging several laundry lines of flapping sheets along the way (and being cursed, good-naturedly and otherwise, by several of those attempting to quickly retrieve their contents to a dryer safety), he disappeared quickly into the growing numbers of drenched sararimen on their way to work, one acid rain-proof gray overcoat unremarkable among all the others.
Nothing like a little rain to isolate every person in their own misery.