Chapter 157: You flinched

"Adam." The giant tasted the word. "It is a very nice name. Short, plain, easy to forget. A man who wanted to disappear would choose a name like that."

"It is the name my parents gave me."

"And the face?" Batnac leaned forward, and the thrusters flared. "Did your parents give you that one as well?" 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

Leon did not blink. "I don’t know what you mean."

"It does not matter." Batnac waved a claw as if brushing a fly out of the air.

"I do not know how you changed it, and I do not care. Faces are the easiest things in the world to change. Names are even easier. But there is one thing that no man can ever hide, and that is what his body leaves behind him."

He raised the left wrist, and the little holographic map flickered in the morning light. A tiny red dot sat in the middle of it, glowing steadily. It was not floating in the air above a street or a building.

It was sitting precisely on top of Leon’s chest.

"Service unit," Batnac said. "Confirm."

A flat mechanical voice crackled out of his wrist, loud enough for the whole street to hear. "Confirmed, master. Signature match is ninety-seven percent."

"Ninety-seven," Batnac repeated, with deep affection. "It went up since this morning."

"Master, you are currently being observed by two hundred and nine civilians."

"Wonderful. I need an audience."

Leon felt Iris shift beside him. She had taken a small step to the side, and when he glanced at her, her eyes were wide and fixed on his face.

There was something in them that he could not read. It might have been fear, and it might have been something worse, and she did not say a word.

"Shall I tell you how I found you, Leon Allistar?" Batnac said. "You are going to ask, I am sure of it."

"I am not going to ask anything," Leon said.

"You will, because you are curious." The giant swayed gently in the air.

"In the Allistar house, there was an old shirt that you left behind. It was only a shirt, and it had been washed and folded and forgotten. But a little of you was still stitched into the collar."

Leon’s chest went tight.

"Do you know what a man leaves behind on a shirt?" Batnac asked sweetly.

"A signature that is all his own, his DNA. I took it to my machines, and they read it for me. And then I sent two hundred thousand little eyes into the sky, and I told them to smell for it."

He gestured upward, and the silver discs above the street turned slowly, like a school of fish.

"They found you in Ratdale, and they found you in a hotel. They found you in a library, and they found you here."

"Every door you touched told me about it, and every gate you walked through whispered your name."

"You have been leaving a trail across this country that a child could follow, and the Association has spent all that time arguing over what to eat for lunch."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Leon said.

"Of course you do." Batnac’s smile did not flicker. "You killed Teon Allistar."

The words fell on the street like stones.

Somebody behind Leon began to cry quietly. Someone else was whispering a prayer. Iris had gone completely rigid beside him, and he could feel her eyes on the side of his face.

Inside him, his anger was starting to boil, but he swallowed it down.

"I am sorry," Leon said. His voice was quiet and perfectly even. "But I don’t know what you’re talking about."

Batnac did not stop smiling.

He tilted his head, and the little map on his wrist glowed again. The red dot sat on Leon’s chest as steady as a nail in a board.

"You don’t know," the giant said slowly.

"I don’t," Leon said.

"That is very interesting, because my map disagrees with you." Batnac lowered himself until his feet hung only a few meters above the road.

The white fumes from his thrusters rolled across the pavement and tugged at everyone’s clothes.

"I will be honest with you, boy. You are very good at this. Most men would have run by now, and some of them would have cried."

"You stand there and say you don’t know, and you say it as if I had asked you for directions."

"I am not hiding anything," Leon said.

"Everyone says that."

Batnac tapped the screen with one claw, and the dot pulsed once.

"Here is what I see. I see a man who arrived five days ago, slept in a hotel in the central district, he walked into a public library, and he has spent most of his days since then in this old neighborhood."

"Over every one of those places, my drones found the same signature. It does not change, and it does not lie."

"Then maybe your map is broken," Leon said.

For a moment, the whole street was silent.

Then Batnac threw back his head and laughed so loudly that the windows shook.

"Broken! Did you hear that? He says my map is broken!" He wiped at his eye with a claw.

"In nine years, my machines have not made one mistake. Not a single one. I would sooner believe that the sun was broken."

Batnac’s smile vanished, and one of his right arms came down like a falling tree.

The claw slammed into the road a hand’s width from Leon’s boots, and the pavement cracked in a ring around the impact.

Dust jumped into the air. Somewhere behind Leon, a woman screamed, and someone else began to run.

Leon flinched.

He had decided to do it a moment before the claw landed, because an ordinary man would flinch, and he took a half step backward and raised one arm in front of his face.

It was not a very good performance, but it was a believable one.

’You were a little late,’ Medusa said. ’A real civilian would have jumped before the arm even moved.’

’Thank you for your help.’

’I am always happy to help.’

The giant studied him for a long moment. The claw stayed pressed into the road, and the thrusters kept up their steady roar.

"Interesting," Batnac said at last. "You flinched."