Cloak of Embers by Jonathan Moeller

Author:Jonathan Moeller [Moeller, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub

13

PAY THE PIPER

On March 2nd, Conquest Year 319, the freelance assassin known to a select few as Incubus drove alone through the desert of New Mexico, the headlights of his stolen car piercing the nighttime gloom.

Well. Almost alone.

And Michael Durst really couldn’t call himself freelance any more, could he?

Not after his disastrous encounter with Nadia MacCormac.

Not after what Hood and Edge and the other Singularity scientists had done to him in the…aftermath.

They had kept him awake for it, the drills digging into his skull, the surgical saws slicing into his flesh…

He forced the thought from his mind, his fingers pressing against the steering wheel, which drew his gaze to his hands.

His right hand looked as it always had.

His left looked as if it had been badly burned and then healed, leaving a layer of scar tissue. But that wasn’t actually scar tissue. If Singularity wanted him to walk about unnoticed in the general population, he couldn’t do it with a metal freaking arm, could he? They had given him a material to spray over the cybernetic limb to make it look like scar tissue. It was ugly and unattractive…but much better than the truth.

A metal arm, its anchors sinking into his flesh, linking to the computers they had installed in his brain.

Durst’s skin crawled with revulsion whenever he thought about it for too long.

He hated, hated anything metal piercing his skin. It was irrational, he knew, but at least he understood the reasons why.

A long time ago, back in Texas, his mother and father had gotten into one of their interminable drunken quarrels. They had never hit each other, but dear God, his mother could screech like a banshee when she was drunk and angry, which was most of the time, and his father had been able to shout so loudly dust fell from the ceiling.

His mother had been cooking dinner during that particular drunken argument, and she accidentally sliced her hand open with a kitchen knife. Since Durst had been too young to stay at home, he had been forced to accompany his parents to the emergency room. The waiting room had been crowded, and he sat across from an obese elderly man in shorts and a T-shirt. The old man was in the advanced stages of diabetes, a condition no doubt exacerbated by his personal habits since he was obviously drunk and smelled of cigarettes. His right leg was missing below the knee, replaced by a gleaming metal prosthesis. The stump had been infected and inflamed, pus oozing from it to drip down the shiny metal limb.

It had been the single most disturbing thing that Durst had seen in his young life (at least to that point), and ever since then, he experienced a revulsion at the thought of metal piercing his skin. Sometimes, when he took a woman to bed, he made her take out her earrings first. Other times, when he planned to kill the woman and feed on her life force when he finished, he ripped the earrings out, enjoying her pain and fear.

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