Reamde

During his sporadic, Furious Muse–driven efforts to lose weight, he had been forcefully reminded of a basic fact of human physiology, which was that fat-burning metabolism just plain didn’t work as well as carbo-burning metabolism. It left you tired and slow and confused and dim-witted. It was only when he was really stupid and irritable—and, therefore, incapable of doing his job or enjoying his life—that he could be certain he was actually losing weight. So it was in that state that he began to shamble up the switchback trail. But even in his flabbergasted condition, he was soon able to pick up on a basic fact of switchback geometry that was about to become important. Two hikers who might be a mile apart from each other on the trail might nonetheless find themselves separated by only a hundred yards of straight-line distance as one zigged and the other zagged. Assuming that Jahandar was chasing them—which was what they had to assume—they might have started out with an excellent head start. And he hoped that they had preserved that head start by moving as fast as they were able. And yet the moment might come, a minute or an hour from now, when they might look down, and Jahandar might look up, and they might lock eyes on each other from a range that was easily within rifle, and maybe even within shotgun, distance.

Richard wished he could have bullshitted himself into believing that Jahandar would not be aware of this fact. But Jahandar looked like a man who had spent his whole life on switchbacks, and who well understood their properties.

He saw, then, how it was all going to work out. And he understood that his confusion, his laggardliness, his irritability, were not all due to the fact that he was hungry. This was his brain trying to tell him something.

And if there was one thing he had learned in his ramshackle career, it was to pay close attention to his brain at such times.

His brain was telling him that their plan was fucked.

Their plan was fucked because Jahandar was going to catch up with them—had probably been doing so the entire time—and was going to reach the place where he could shoot up the slope from another switchback. Hell, he could just set up a sniper’s perch, get his gun propped up on something nice and solid, make himself comfortable, and wait for Richard and Yuxia to pass back and forth above him, zigging and zagging up the mountain like a pair of lame ducks in a shooting gallery.

I love you, but I’m tired of being the girlfriend of the sacred monster. This had been the last thing that Alice, one of his ex-girlfriends, had said to him before ascending into the pantheon of the Furious Muses. It had taken him a while to decode it—Alice hadn’t been in a mood to wax discursive—but he’d eventually figured out that this, in the end, was the reason that Corporation 9592 had no choice but to keep him around. Every other thing that he had done for the company—networking with money launderers, stringing Ethernet cable, recruiting fantasy authors, managing Pluto—could be done better and more cheaply by someone who could be recruited by a state-of-the-art head-hunting firm. His role, in the end, had been reduced to this one thing: sitting in the corner of meeting rooms or lurking on corporate email lists, seeming not to pay attention, growing ever more restless and surly until he blurted something out that offended a lot of people and caused the company to change course. Only later did they see the shoals on which they would have run aground if not for Richard’s startling and grumpy intervention.

This was one of those times.

The only thing that made any sense at all was to stop, look for cover, wait for Jahandar to catch up with them, hold fire until he came within twenty yards, and try to take him down with the shotgun before he could shoot back.

“Stop,” he said quietly.

“You okay, big guy?” Yuxia asked.

“Fantastic,” he assured her. “But here is where we have to stand and fight.”

“I am so in favor of that,” she said. “Do I get to shoot one of these motherfuckers?”

“Only if I die first.”

CSONGOR ABRUPTLY SHIFTED the SUV into gear, punched the gas, and rumbled out of the parking lot. He had been running the motor to feed juice into Marlon’s laptop.

“What the—?” Marlon asked, as he watched his Wi-Fi connection disappear. Csongor couldn’t tell whether Marlon had cribbed this phrase from comic book word bubbles or was making an arch reference to Chinese nerds who naively picked up snatches of English dialog in this way. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Marlon.

“Something is wrong,” Csongor said.

“I thought you said you couldn’t drive this thing.”

“I can’t drive it legally,” Csongor said.

“Oh.”

“But I can make it go, as you see.”

“I was transferring money,” Marlon said. Not in a whiny, complaining way. Just making sure Csongor knew that his important work had been interrupted.