I fly back to the car on my engorged cloud. The gunman really was an impressive marksman to make those shots from this far away. I feel the vibrations of Lin’s wailing inside the car long before my physical ears are close enough to hear her. I check the car.
Shit.
Yang Song is slumped against the steering wheel. Lin kneels on the ground next to the driver’s seat, crying and holding a hand with no pulse. I focus my cloud and have a good idea of what happened by the time I arrive.
Yang Song took a bullet wound to the head. She must have been hit by that first partially deflected shot. There’s an entry wound, but no exit wound. The bullet was slowed enough by my shield then going through the driver’s seat headrest so that it didn’t blow all the way through her head. Instead, it penetrated into her skull and then bounced off the bone inside. Even if I had medical bots with me, even if I had given her my full attention as soon as it happened, and even if I were as good with them as Louise, there wouldn’t have been anything I could have done to save her.
“Oh, Lin,” I say as I reach the car and open the door. “I am so sorry.”
It’s some deep-rooted instinct that draws the words from my mouth, not anything I’m actually feeling. Even as I say it, I know it’s a lie. I don’t feel guilt anymore. I’m never really sorry for anything.
“No,” Lin says. Her voice is frozen fire. “This was not you.”
“He was aiming for me.”
“No,” Lin says again, even more firmly this time. “You didn’t fire at us. This is not your fault.”
“But—”
“No!” she says, with a finality that I can’t argue with. “Yang Song knew there were risks in coming with us. You did everything you could. If it’s anyone’s fault, it is mine. I should have been paying better attention.”
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She stands up and looks at me.
“If I don’t get to blame myself, then neither do you.” If I can’t feel real loss for the loss of all the family Lin had left, maybe I can at least keep her from hanging the guilt around her own neck. My cloud silently opens the driver’s side door and lifts Yang Song’s body from the seat. “You gave us all the warning you could. That guy was a trained sniper. He was making shots way past the range that the clouds are designed to protect against.”
I pop open the trunk and lay Yang Song’s corpse inside as gently as I can.
“I saw what you did back there,” Lin says, her voice still icy cold with a little bit of her old accent. “I heard it too.”
I stop for a moment. I didn’t realize she could see remotely. Would I have done things differently if I had known she was watching? I don’t know.
“I didn’t know you could do that. The interface isn’t supposed to have ranged vision or audio yet.”
She reaches inside the car and retrieves a pack of tissues. “The hardware abstraction layer wasn’t hard to find, and I’m that good.”
I nod, silently waiting for her to decide that she can’t be with me anymore. She takes a tissue and wipes the blood from my cheek where the bullet grazed me.
“You did well,” she says simply.
She just saw me torture that guy and still isn’t revolted by me. I really have found my soulmate.
“So, you know we have one more interrogation to do then?” I ask as I start cleaning the car. The broken rear windshield takes some attention to fuse back together. The fine wires in the glass had kept the pieces together, so I didn’t need to hunt for the shards, but getting glass panels repaired and evened out isn’t something the libraries automate. Making them usable again takes more time and attention than you might think.
She nods, watching me work.
“You got the last one. I’ll get the next one,” she declares. Her tone doesn’t allow for any arguments.
I finish extracting the blood from the upholstery and floor mats on the driver’s side. The headrest isn’t worth saving. Textiles are a pain anyway. I remove the bullet-holed, bloodstained piece and put it in the trunk with Yang Song. I swarm my enormous cloud back to the hospital and quickly finish copying the last pages of the final file, putting everything neatly back in place when I finish.
“Come on then. Let’s go meet Otis.”