Free Touch by Claire North

sniffs, perhaps she drinks and then finds a guy to pay for all of the above. I really don’t know. But you and I needed to talk.”
    A slight intake of breath. “Did we?”
    “It would have been as easy for me to walk you through Chinese customs with five kilos of heroin strapped to your belly as it is to have a conversation. If you talk to me, you might have a chance.”
    “You steal life, you steal choices – her choices.”
    “Not right now. In a few hours her body is her own again and we’ll be gone. A few minutes, a few seconds, everything changes. Or nothing at all. What you do when that moment comes is all that matters.”
    “A thief is a thief.”
    “And a killer a killer. That is the extension of your argument, is it not?”
    He shifted, barely, against the bed. “What do you want?”
    “You killed Josephine,” I answered, a mere breath in the chilly gloom. “You know how I feel about these things. Why did you try to kill me, Mr Coyle?”
    “You tell me.”
    “Sometimes it’s easier to fight than to have a conversation.”
    “You’d talk to the smallpox virus?”
    “If it had stories to tell me of plagues it had seen, of great men it had visited, of children who lived and mothers who died, of hot hospitals and cold freezers in guarded trucks, I’d buy it a three-course meal and a weekend in Monaco. Don’t compare me with a DNA strand in a protein shell, Mr Coyle; the argument is beneath us both. Your passports, your money, your weapons; you’re clearly organised, part of a wider operation. You keep yourself in excellent shape – I haven’t been following the diet or doing the press-ups, I’m afraid. And now you kill people like me.” I sighed. “For no better reason, I’d guess, than because we exist. Did you think you were the first? Sooner or later someone always tries. Yet here we are, as persistent as death itself. In two separate continents through two different paths, two entirely different yet functionally identical species of vulture evolved, nature filling a void. No matter how many of us you kill, we keep on recurring, nature’s hiccup. Here it is, then,” I murmured. “You killed my host, who I loved. You may find the concept hard to believe, but I
loved
Josephine Cebula, and you killed her. You killed her because there was a note in her file which said she wasn’t just a host, she was a murderer. This was a lie. Your masters lied to you. That, and only that, is something new.”
    “The file didn’t lie,” he replied. “Josephine Cebula had to die.”
    “Why?”
    “You know why.”
    “I really don’t. The names in the file – the corpses she was meant to have left behind – Tortsen Ulk, Magda Müller, James Richter, Elsbet Horn. I hadn’t heard of them until I read them, and the manner of their death – brutal, sadistic perhaps. Josephine was not that woman. She lacked motive, opportunity and means, and if you’d done your own research you’d know that. She was my skin, nothing more, nothing less.” He wasn’t meeting my eyes. I caught his chin, pulled his head up and round, forcing his gaze to meet mine. “Tell me why.”
    “Galileo,” he said. I froze, fingers tight across his jaw. He seemed surprised to have heard himself speak. “For Galileo.”
    “What is Galileo?”
    “The
Santa Rosa
,” he replied. “That was Galileo.”
    I hesitated, looking for something in his face, something more, and as I did, he struck, his left hand slamming up in a fist, into my face. I cried out and fell to one side, rolling off the edge of the bed. He scrambled up on to his knees, pulling at the handcuffs, ripping with both his hands at the metal chain, even as the bedpost cracked and begin to splinter. I staggered to my feet and he swung one leg into my belly, but I caught his foot, and as he ripped his hand free from the bedpost I flailed against his trouser leg, felt ankle beneath my fingertips
    and that was the end of that.

Chapter 23
     
    We have always been