Arriving at the entrance to the Clinical Laboratory, according to the rusty old sign on the wall, Simon paused in the corridor and did not enter, as if he were afraid of being sucked into the darkness that eclipsed the interior of the room.
A current of cold air went down through the ventilation duct above his head and slipped under his jacket, freezing his neck and causing him a very particular chill. His father used to call that feeling ‘Death Passing Near,’ and since he had always feared his father more than death itself, he had renamed it ‘Dad Passing Near.’
Trying to shake off that icy caress that ran down his back, as if it were an inopportune insect, Simon tapped the floor with the tip of his boots, but all he did was produce a sinister metallic echo in the iron corridor.
He observed the interior of the room from the outside until his eyes adjusted to the dim light inside, and he distinguished in the shadows who he was looking for. He pushed aside his military jacket and exposed his bandaged chest. Hidden there were two major wounds, one left by Malin’s heel and the other left by Adam. That was the worst. The blow from that cursed man, who had mixed the force of lightning with some mysterious ghostly flames, had caused him a deep cut and difficulty breathing he might carry until the end of his days. He felt the urge to scratch the scar, but he couldn’t; it was enough to brush his chest for the wound to burn like hell.
“You knew this would happen, right?” Simon scolded the one in the lab, though not as vehemently as he would have liked. His voice was shaking with anger, and he was so nervous he was sweating, even with the cold air from the vent blowing over his head.
With a slap of his hand, he wiped the sweat from his chin and mustaches, and waited for an answer below the threshold; he didn’t dare to enter and speak to him closely.
Inside, with no other lighting than the brightness of the screens and consoles reflected on his empty face, the A60 android stood in front of a computer terminal, still, silent, with an arm outstretched and connected to one of the many ports of the machine through wires. A small point of light pulsed on his forearm; first white, then changed to red, over and over again, following a hypnotic rhythm. It was as if he were giving himself an intravenous infusion of pure information.
“That’s why you told me to go after Malin, right?” Simon insisted. “You used me as bait to awaken the powers of that sissy boy, right?”
But the android didn’t respond; he didn’t move or even look back at him as he had done on other occasions.
The silence returned to the dim lab; only the buzzing of computers and other electronic devices sounded in the background.
Simon stayed put and covered his bandages with his combat jacket once again. He had to pull himself together; he had to watch his mouth, even if what he was saying was true. Everything showed the android had its systems turned off and didn’t hear him, but he knew that wasn’t the case. One more tantrum and his current boss could dispense with his services and take him down with a single punch.
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That was when his partner showed up behind him: a grotesque guy almost three feet taller than him, with a back three times wider than his and with arms so big and strong that they looked like the arms of a gorilla. He was bald, with small eyes, and a huge mouth, and he had hundreds of scars that made pale marks on his shiny, hairless skin.
“He’s sleeping?” the big man asked, referring to the Cyclops. His voice sounded guttural and paused.
Simon cast a glance at the android, then he looked back at his partner.
“No,” he said. “Charging up batteries.”
The giant smiled, showing his crooked teeth, and cracked his knuckles.
“When he wakes up, tell him I went to pay that pretty boy a visit,” he said. He turned around and continued his way down the corridor; he was so huge he barely fit in it.
Simon chuckled. “Yeah, you go. If anything happens to that sissy boy, the android will cut you in half,” he warned, but the big guy didn’t listen to him. Today, like any other day in his life, everyone ignored him. “You stupid mastodon,” he snorted then, and watching him leave threw a spit at him from a distance.
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6:49 P.M.
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The day-to-day city racket, that conglomeration of sounds that went from the murmur of people to the street traffic to a thousand noises, between music and the nearby crossing of a plane about to land, did not exist in that place. There, she could only hear the distant bantering of some children playing, the creaking of the insects announcing the fall of the sun, and the dull hum of the vehicles driving down the highway, beyond the slum that was at her back.
Malin confirmed her location with the phone’s GPS. She was in Otaru, a neighborhood at the southern end of the Magenta Area, on the edge of Proxima. After having combined buses, used the subway, and walked for several blocks, she crossed the entire city, arriving at her destination.
How much time she would have saved having brought the Daedalus thruster along with her! But she had left it folded in the apartment; she hadn’t even touched it since bringing it from Markabia, the last time she had transported through the Kappa Points to get to this city. That Friday night, when Juzo had asked her to investigate that Eddanian woman at the nightclub, she had jumped out of the window and flown with the Daedalus because time was pressing—and because she didn’t think her time on this continent would take so long. Now that things had changed, she couldn’t risk being seen soaring through the skies. Many vultures were hovering nearby, as Adam had said a few days ago; vultures in suits and ties that she had to avoid, one way or the other. Impractical as it was, for the moment it was better to move on land.
She stopped in front of an old rusty wire fence, and with her arms akimbo, gazed out at the vacant lot behind it. A vast piece of land with nothing but weeds and garbage, with a huge, abandoned warehouse in the middle, three hundred feet from the fence. A huge old car hangar turned into a sanctuary for carelessness.
She looked around; no one was there; she went over the fence with a couple of jumps, and immersed in the shadows of dusk, ran toward the warehouse. A couple of iron sheets from the sidewall had fallen off for lack of maintenance, creating a gap that looked like the gaping mouth of a homeless man with several missing teeth. Before her eyes could make out what was inside, beyond the rusted beams of the structure, by smell, Malin knew she would find dust, moisture, and neglect. Then she took a deep breath and slipped through the hole, plunging into the darkness.