Deus Ex: Black Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m looking at it.” She bared her teeth when she spoke. There were a few grumbles and angry murmurs of support from the other residents. She pointed with both hands. “I got a vibe off you from the start, Jensen. And I didn’t listen to my gut.” Belle shook her head. “My mistake.”
    “I don’t have time to play games.” He let his arms drop to his sides. “You got something to say to me, spit it out. Or else, get your toy boys out of my way.”
    Belle spread her arms in a gesture that took in everyone around them. “See these people, Jensen? We all got something in common. We all lost things in the incident. Lovers and families. Homes. Money. Our goddamned lives, we lost.” There were more growled assents, and a cold, creeping realization dawned on Jensen as the woman went on. “And now those natches blame us for everything. We’re prisoners here, man. All because
somebody
fucked us.” She pointed right at him.
    His breath caught in his throat as another unbidden memory came to vivid life in his mind’s eye. Another woman’s voice – the silken, almost childlike tones of Eliza Cassan – laying out a series of brutal, final choices before him, each one more unpalatable than the last.
    “You were there, in that place that sunk into the sea,” Belle snarled, her voice rising. “Did you do it, Jensen?” Her words became pure fury, and he guessed that despite her brutish manner, Belle had been as much a victim of Darrow’s terrible attack as anyone else. “Answer me!”
    He pushed his reaction aside. “Who told you that?”
    “It doesn’t matter what I was told,” Belle shot back. “I don’t hear you denying it.” She advanced on him. “Look around, you son of a bitch. Look what you did. To people just like you!”
    He could see them all, drawing on the anger and the pain that had been festering beneath the surface for those long months. They desperately
needed
someone to blame, someone who was here and real and in front of them, not a ghost like Hugh Darrow, his body crushed beneath thousands of tons of steel in the Arctic Ocean. They wanted a scapegoat, and somebody had decided it was going to be
him
.
    Jensen lost focus for a moment as that thought echoed through his head, and it was enough for someone behind him in the crowd to shove him forward, spitting and jeering. He stumbled, and the tattooed man hurtled toward him, snarling. He had kitchen knives in both hands.
    Reflexively, Jensen cocked back his cyberlimb and triggered the nerve impulse that would have deployed the blunt-tipped nanoblades concealed beneath the forearm – but there was nothing but a hollow click and he recalled too late that the augmentations had been disengaged. Instead, he went into a clumsy block that set the knives cutting across the polycarbonate shell of his arm.
    Jensen turned the inelegant move into a counterattack, dropping low and throwing a punch into the tattooed man’s gut. He took it with a grunt but little else, the shear-thickening gel in the dermal armor absorbing most of the force of impact.
    The crowd were shouting at him, baying for his blood. It wouldn’t matter what he said to them. He was the outsider, the new and the unknown, and even if she was their tormentor, Belle was still one of them. It wouldn’t have been hard to manipulate people like this, to pour all their hate into one single target. They didn’t care about the truth. Jensen had been on Panchaea, that was a fact, and it was like they smelled the scent of that place – and what was done there – still on him.
    The knives fell toward the exposed flesh of Jensen’s throat, but his attacker was inexpert with them and held the makeshift weapons too close together. Jensen’s free hand snapped up and grabbed the closest blade, hearing the metal crunch against the surface of his cyberarm’s synthetic palm. He pulled the tattooed man toward him, forcing him to overbalance. Then, as he fell, Jensen struck with his other arm and