The Demon and the City - By Liz Williams Page 0,29

that person? All those times, she realized, had been a rehearsal for this one. She moved among the crowds, inconspicuous, at last coming out into Shaopeng as the last green light of the afternoon fell in the strip of sky above her.

As the evening wore on, she bought a takeout and then made her way to the silent warehouses at the back of Shaopeng. You could lose yourself in here forever, if you were lucky: hidden among the little, private go-downs, the maze of back alleys. Robin did not know where she was going, only that as she walked she realized that she was becoming more herself. Every moment that she had lived, since childhood, she had been striving for something else: to better herself, earn money and security. She had molded her personality to make sure that she achieved these things, and now she looked back on the person she had been with a kind of wonder. Robin with the wealthy girlfriend, who only once had dared to criticize and say what she felt. Robin the loyal employee, who had acquiesced in someone else's torment, administered it, lessened it in only little ways. Conscience was something that you had to be able to afford, and she had never been able to do that, until now. If I die tonight, Robin thought, at least I've been able to admit that I was wrong, and I did one good thing. I let Mhara go. Even if he was a demon. Her animal was dancing in front of her, Robin saw without surprise. She followed where it led.

Fifteen

Lights blazed from Paugeng, the whole place lit up like fireworks, lights exploding out across Ghenret and transforming the harbor into a puddle of flame. Jhai Tserai, just returned from Beijing, was on dyamentex to help her think, and it was making her grind her teeth, a sure sign that she'd got the dosage wrong. This annoyed her almost more than everything else. She'd invented it, after bloody all, and now she had given herself some ham-fisted quantity of the stuff. So, she thought, dragging her unruly thoughts back to the central problem. The control had escaped and now so had Robin Yuan, basically because Ei was too stupid to keep a hold on either of them. She did not blame Robin for the Geneva pills or the control's flight, nor for her running from Paugeng, which had been an intelligent move. Jhai recognized the hand of Hell in this somewhere, the characteristic sulphurous reek. She was determined not to have to be rescued by Heaven at the last minute, however, no Faustus she. She wouldn't rat her co-conspirators out. She would not deal, no matter what her contacts in Hell demanded.

The dyamentex stopped her from feeling the possible failure of her plans too deeply, but she knew it would hurt when the dosage wore off. She had instructed Ei to find the control and bring him back here; there was no need to do anything else just yet. They were supposed to find Robin, too, but she had not returned to her apartment, understandably. Tserai thought that she might head for Deveth's old place. She was having that watched as well.

"We will see," Jhai said to herself, and started grinding her teeth again. "We will see."

The link rang and Jhai switched it on to find Ei's grim visage staring back at her. "Colonel?"

"I think you should come downstairs, Madam," Ei said. "We've had to take the detective into custody."

"What?"

So Ei explained, and with growing interest, Jhai listened.

Sixteen

Apart from his arrest, the last thing Zhu Irzh remembered with any clarity was standing at the edge of the site. Then Roche had turned on him in a fury, and that was the last thing that was clear. He retained a confused impression of the man beneath him on the ground, his face bloody and contorted with rage and fright, and after that there was only blackness and silence. His arm stung, and his head felt thick and heavy. Ei must have drugged him when she bundled him out of the transport vehicle. Experimentally, he tried to move, and discovered that his limbs were restrained. His head seemed to be held in some kind of brace, and a strap passed underneath his chin and between his teeth, cutting into the sides of his mouth. They had muzzled him.

"He's moving," someone said, above him.

"Make sure he's still tied, for God's sake," a second person—Ei?—replied. "I don't want him