The Mech Who Loved Me(62)

"Diet?" His voice rose. "For fuck's sake, Ava, I know you can't help being what you are, but every man and woman in London still sees the draining factories pumping coal in the East End, and they're the ones as bring their children to the blood-letting stations, so they can pay their fucking taxes!"

Her face paled. "Without the blood taxes, you'd have a whole nation of predators forced to feed themselves by whatever means are necessary."

"Predators? Exactly!"

"The queen was right not to close the draining factories, or get rid of the blood taxes entirely," she said firmly. "The taxes are no longer dangerously high-"

"It's not just the blue bloods, it's the whole bloody system they create. People used to kidnap others off the streets and sell their blood!" he yelled, flinging his arms wide. "There were entire slasher gangs in the East End who killed, just for the price of what was in a man's veins."

"Then what about the Nighthawks?" she demanded, her eyes flashing fire. "They're all rogue blue bloods to a man-or woman. Denied the Blood Rites, but infected by chance, and yet they're the reason you're standing here today and weren't guillotined during the revolution. If you put this weapon in the wrong hands, Kincaid, then you cannot tell me innocent people won't die, and that's what I'm afraid of."

"Maybe it's worth it," he said, feeling utterly shaken. "Innocent people died in the revolution. People I considered friends, my cousins, my men. Humans, all of them. So why draw that line now when it's the blue bloods who will suffer?"

She looked taken aback. "You don't believe that."

He didn't know what he believed. Kincaid raked his hands through his hair, letting out an explosive breath. "I'm not going to breathe a word of this, I'm not, but Jaysus, if you only knew...." He laughed then. "Just mentioning a religious name would have earned me fifty lashes four years ago! Is that the world you can defend so vigorously? We could have overthrown them completely. We could have changed the world." 

"I am them!" Ava drew back from him, her eyes wide. "We did change the world. And just so you know, I fought for the revolution too. I marched on the Ivory Tower with the Nighthawks and did what I could to help pull down the corrupt prince consort. This was never a human problem. It affected all of us. And you can't just stand there and insist on murdering an entire race as a solution, because if you do, then you're no better than them!"

"I'm not talking about killing them all."

"But you can't control which ones die," she snarled, and then turned in a whirl of skirts. "I cannot believe you can even stand there and speak of this to me."

"Ava!"

She fled down the narrow alleyway that led to a secret passage into the COR secret house.

"Ava, wait." He followed, but she was already gone, leaving him with an ugly knot in his abdomen.

Damn her. It wasn't an easy matter to say which was right or wrong. Was it? Had he truly lost so much of himself he could consider murder as a solution?

Pressing his mech hand against the bricks she'd vanished behind, he cursed again. Yes. He had lost enough of himself. He'd lost everything, one slow piece of himself at a time. First his sister's suicide, then his brother's death, his friends, his hope.

He wasn't a good man. And he wasn't certain what he was going to do with the information-for a part of him knew what those rioters the other day had felt like.

Angry. There was enough anger in him to burn the world to ashes if he let the leash slip through his fingers. And only the hurt in Ava's eyes stopped him from running out to the nearest sector of humanists who'd slipped back into the population and telling them about it. This needed careful thought. He needed to be able to control the danger of this weapon before he could ever dare use it.

But think of the opportunity! The thought made him breathless. No more Echelon. No more... of the bad blue bloods. If he could control the poison, then he could control who died. Couldn't he?

Kincaid pushed away from the hidden door in the brickwork, cursing under his breath, for there was little chance she'd welcome him tonight. He needed to think and clear his head. He needed a drink.

And so he didn't notice the pale man on the rooftops who watched him.





Fifteen





"COR BLIMEY, IF it isn't Liam Kincaid, back from the dead!" a voice bellowed as Kincaid strode inside the White Hart pub.

Half a dozen heads turned, and Kincaid found himself swamped by big, burly men who clapped him on the back and ruffled his hair.

He mock punched Willie Lewes, a young mech who'd been under his command in the enclaves, and made his way through the crowd of men he'd once known-those who'd shared the same sentence he had. John Hayes, Jem Stanton, Michael Hargreaves.