Lock In (Lock In, #1)(52)

“What is it?” Stern said.

“You have your phone on you?”

“Yes.”

“Stay here,” I said, and then pointed to the apartment door. “If I don’t come out of that door in exactly one minute, call the police. Then get back to your office and stay there. Got it?”

Stern looked at me like I had just turned into an octopus or something. I left her, went to the patio wall, and heaved myself over it, landing as quietly as possible on the bare patio. I crouchwalked over to the patio door, turned on my recording mode, slid the door open enough to slip through, and entered the apartment. I stood up.

A matte-black threep was there, standing in the dining nook, twenty feet away, an envelope in its hand.

We both stared at each other for a good five seconds. Then I closed the patio door behind me and locked it. I turned back to the threep.

“FBI,” I said. “Freeze.”

The other threep bolted for the front door.

I went after it, leaping over a couch to do it, and collided with the threep about three feet short of the entrance, ramming it into the wall. The drywall cracked but held.

The threep tried to hit me in the head but had no leverage. I grabbed it and heaved it, sending it stumbling back between the living room and dining nook. The envelope it had in its hand fell to the ground.

“You’re under arrest for breaking and entering,” I said, walking toward the threep in an arc to keep it from thinking about trying for the patio door. “You’re also under arrest for assaulting a federal officer. Give up now. Don’t make this more awkward than it already is.”

The threep feinted toward the door and then headed into the kitchen, which was dumb, because it was walled in on three sides. I came around to the open side. The threep looked around, saw a set of knives in a butcher-block holder, grabbed one, and held it at me.

I looked at it and then looked at the threep. “Are you kidding me?” I said. My threep’s body was carbon fiber and graphene. A knife was gonna do dick to it.

The threep flung the knife at me, and I flinched involuntarily. It pinged off my head and back onto the kitchen floor. When I came back up, the threep had pulled a large pot out of the pile of dirty dishes in the sink and aimed it directly for my head. There was a gonging sound as it connected, twisting my head aside and caving in a portion of it.

It was then I realized that my rental threep’s pain receptors were dialed up really high. Some part of my brain recognized this made sense, since the rental place wanted to keep its customers from doing anything stupid with the threep, and dialing up the sensation of pain would certainly do that.

The rest of my brain was going ow jesus f*ck ow ow.

The threep raised its arm back for another swing and brought it down again. I made a fist and punched the pot as it came down and then shoved myself into the threep, driving my elbow into the threep’s neck as I did so.

That’s what I wanted to do, anyway. What I ended up doing was a lot less kung fu and a lot more drunken scuffle. But on the other hand I managed to push the threep backward and make it stumble. Which was the point.

On the stove was a skillet with the remains of some scrambled eggs in it. I grabbed it and looked back at the threep, who was back up, pot in hand.

“Come on,” I said. “Are we really going to do this?”

The other threep spun the handle of the pot in its hand, waiting.

“Look,” I said. “The police have already been called. They’re on their way. You might as well—”

The threep went high with its pot and swung down heavy. I backed up and stepped to the side, avoiding the pot. The threep’s arms came down, leaving its head exposed. I smacked my skillet into it like I was a tennis player returning a volley. The threep fell back flat on its ass.

I took advantage and kicked it in the side as it tried to scramble back up, sliding it farther back and to the right, into the kitchen. Its right arm, the one holding the pot, was splayed out. I drove my legs into it, immobilizing it, pushed the body into the stove, driving the other arm under the threep body. I raised my skillet.

The threep looked at it, and then at me.

“Yeah, I know, a goddamn skillet,” I said.

Then I drove it into the threep’s neck, edgewise, seven or eight times, until the carbon fiber casing cracked. Then I reached over and picked up the knife from the floor and slid it under the cracked casing, until I could feel the tip resting against the bundle of control fibers that went from the threep’s processor to its body systems.

“See, this is how you use a knife in a threep fight,” I said, and then hammered the knife on its handle with the skillet.

The knife severed the bundle fibers. The threep stopped fighting me.

I wedged the knife in and cracked open the neck a little more, looking in until I could see the cord that carried power from the battery back to the processor in the head. I reached into the neck and wrapped a finger around it. Then I looked at the threep.

“I know you’re still there and I know you can hear me,” I said. “And I know this threep can still talk. So why don’t we do this the easy way.” I looked around at the mess. “Well, the easier way, anyway. Tell me who you are and why you were here. I have your threep. I have its onboard memory. I’m going to find out all of it sooner or later.”

The threep said nothing. But whoever had been controlling it was still there, still looking at me.