The Perdition Score by Richard Kadrey

dressed for the normal world.
    Or as normal as ours ever gets.
    A LLEGRA ’ S CLINIC IS in the same building as Julie’s detective agency. Julie upstairs and Allegra downstairs. Allegra worked at Max Overdrive when I first got there. Then she discovered she had a talent for healing and took over the clinic after Doc Kinski was killed. Allegra has patched me together after fights more times than I can count. Perhaps more important than that, though, she and Vidocq are an item and I think introducing them is one of the best things I’ve done since crawling out of Hell.
    While Candy heads upstairs I go into the clinic. Fairuza is in the waiting room doing paperwork for a couple of Lurkers. Fairuza is a Lurker herself, a Ludere. Blue skin and horns, and always in a schoolgirl uniform. She also plays drums in Candy’s band. When she sees me, she straightens.
    â€œHey, Stark. Go right in. You’ve got the two of them all aflutter about whatever it is you gave them.”
    â€œThanks. Kasabian says hi.”
    â€œHmm,” she says, and looks at her papers. She and Kasabian have had an on-again, off-again thing. I guess it’s off again.
    I go through the waiting area into the exam room.
    Vidocq and Allegra are inside talking quietly. Her hair is close-cropped and shaved on the sides. She recently got a tattoo on her right forearm—two snake skeletons wound around each other in the shape of a Caduceus—and the ink looks good on her café au lait skin. She and Vidocq are huddled over an odd device with a lot of stacked lenses, a bit of Kinski’s old hoodoo medical gear. Engrossed in what they’re doing, neither she or Vidocq looks up when I come in. Allegra just motions me over when she hears me close the door.
    â€œStark, get over here and look at this.”
    They get out of the way and I walk over. The device looks like an upside-down spider with brass legs holding the lenses that swing in and out of the way. I have to move the top one around to get a sharp view.
    It’s no surprise that I’m staring down into a dark blob of black milk. The smell of the stuff fills the room. What’s weird is that there’s something twitching and moving through the muck like a hairy electric eel. Tiny blue sparks glow along its edges.
    I nod.
    â€œVery pretty. Was the wiggler in there already or is it a new pet?”
    â€œWe added it just before you came in,” says Vidocq.
    Allegra stands close to me so she can look through the lenses too.
    â€œThis isn’t an ordinary microscope,” she says.
    â€œNo shit.”
    â€œIt doesn’t just see the form of an object, but other characteristics, like its life force. That’s what the blue glow along the sample is. It indicates that it’s alive.”
    â€œBut what is it?”
    â€œThe leg of a dead roach we found outside,” she says. “We put it in a tiny amount of black milk and it sort of woke up. If you look closer, you can even see that where we cut the leg off has healed itself.”
    I stand up and look at them both.
    â€œYou’re telling me that angels are using this stuff to reanimate bugs?”
    â€œNo,” says Vidocq. “Look again.”
    I watch the roach leg happily swimming through the stinking milk, kicking up sparks. Allegra gets an eyedropper and adds a tiny speck more milk to the mess.
    The leg begins to spasm like it’s having a seizure. It goes on like that for a few seconds more before it stops moving and the sparks along its edges disappear.
    â€œYou murdered it, you fiends.”
    â€œYes, we did,” says Vidocq.
    â€œEugène showed me the bacon you reanimated,” says Allegra. “We’ve been testing different things in the milk all night.”
    She points at the device.
    â€œLook at the leg now.”
    I look through the lens. The leg isn’t there.
    â€œWhere did it go?”
    Allegra says, “It dissolved. That’s the