Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,45

heavier, more muscular body I now wore. In her new one, however, she managed it with barely a grunt. “I guess there are some advantages to being a boy.” Even now, she said the words as if she didn’t truly believe them and I heard the small undercurrent of pain.

I shrugged. “I’ve always thought so.” I slowly put weight on my left leg. It held but brought with it a shooting line of fire that coursed from hip to ankle. I drew a breath and let it out as a hiss. On the plus side, compared to the leg, my arm felt fine. I took a tottering step into the apartment.

“What are you doing?” Chan asked. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got…” She paused as if querying her agent. “Maybe six minutes before this place is crawling with security.” She also looked significantly at the doors around us, which had continued their own private symphony of opening a crack before slamming shut once again. “And we’re not exactly alone here, either.”

“We’ve got to check the coil,” I said. I took a few more steps into the room, and Chan, a look of doubt on her face, ducked in behind me. She used one booted foot to kick the door closed. It didn’t latch, but it at least gave us some semblance of privacy.

“You can barely walk. Are you sure about this?”

In point of fact, I was already starting to feel better. The nanites in my system had gone to work, and were no doubt efficiently repairing damaged blood vessels, reknitting tissue, and pushing the bullet and any other foreign materials inexorably to the surface. It still hurt, but a wound that would once have been life-threatening was little more than an inconvenience these days. A painful inconvenience, but nothing that I was too worried about. The VaccTech suit had even tightened around my leg and arm, providing rough compression bandages, and slowing the bleeding even further.

In lieu of an answer, I wobbled over to Malcolm Copeland’s late coil and knelt beside it. He had been shot in the chest, multiple times. Even the best nanites couldn’t do anything once the heart and lungs were full of holes, and it looked like Copeland had been dead before he’d hit the ground. “Did you clean up any footprints you may have left from the various hacks you did?” I asked Chan as I continued to examine the body.

She gave me a look of pure incredulity, and I raised one arm—my right arm—in supplication. “Sorry, just asking.” There was something off about the body. He’d been shot in the chest, but his head had a wet, sticky look to it that I recognized. Fighting back revulsion, I reached out and twisted the head to one side. “Damn.”

“What is it?”

A neat incision had been made near the base of Copeland’s skull. The edges were almost surgically precise, though lacking the cauterization that would have been present from a laser-scalpel. The flaps of the wound had been folded back, obscuring the depth of the cut, but I’d seen—and performed—the same procedure too many times in the past not to recognize it. “The killer popped his core.”

Chan sighed. “We’ve only got a few minutes left.”

“We aren’t getting out of here before the police,” I said.

“What?”

“No point. How many cameras are we on? How many people in the complex saw us? You can’t hack them all, and we certainly can’t silence the witnesses. And I can’t run. We’re caught.” I smiled. “But we’re not caught doing anything wrong, Chan.”

She surveyed the apartment: bullet holes, shattered glass, furniture knocked aside, plenty of blood, and, last but certainly not least, a corpse in the middle of the room. I chuckled at the look that flashed across her leonine features. I could tell she was wondering if I had finally lost my mind.

“Can you blank this apartment’s cameras from right after we walk inside?” I asked. She nodded mutely. “Good. Then all the authorities will see, all they’ll know, is that two people got off the elevator and interrupted a crime. One of those two happened to be armed, and, acting purely in self-defense, exchanged gunfire with the bad guy. Hell, it even has the advantage of being the truth, Chan. As long as we leave out all the unfortunate bits about interplanetary conspiracies, re-animating coils, and hacked backup centers, we should be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Well, no, of course I wasn’t. But nanites or not, I wasn’t