by Jenn Lyons
does that have to do with anything?”
“Keepers, Mallory! He doesn’t realize!—”
I jabbed a knee up into Randolph’s groin, grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back, and yanked on his pretty golden hair. He was mine now, a rag doll I could play with at my leisure.
“If you had family in the League, with the Wilders or the Strikers, you’d know that if the Sarcodinay discover the identity of a rebel who originally came from a megacity, they arrest their whole family. Their entire family. The children are sent to a crèche for re-education. Adults are sent to the Deimos Mines, where they die. Disobedience is a weakness, you see, and weakness is genetic. A rebel will have rebel family. It’s in the DNA. If you had family in the League you would know we use pretentious code-words like ‘Maverick’ because we’re trying to save the lives of our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters.”
“You made your point, Mal. Let him go.”
“Not yet.” I tightened my grip on his hair. “Here’s why it matters to you, Randy. Solar Independence League law makes it a capital offense to publicly reveal a striketeam member’s real name the way you just did.”
He whimpered as that fact sank in.
“Please! Oh Keepers! Let me go!” He twisted like a gutted salmon. “I didn’t know!”
“And that, Randy, is why you’re still alive. So while I’m considering Nick Rhodes’ contribution to the war effort, I want you to consider this: if you’d opened your pretty little mouth after the peace signing, you’d be in a cell and your name would be on a very short list waiting to be crossed off. Isn’t it funny what a difference two weeks can make?” I looked up at Jonathan, Vanessa’s would-be blind date. It wasn’t going to work out after all.
Jonathan backed up slowly, hands up. His eyes were wary and shadowed, and I had the sense he’d use much the same tactics if he unexpectedly came across a jaguar in a QZ. “It was nice to meet you,” he said in a soft voice. “But you should go.”
I nodded and let Randolph fall from my hands. I walked past his moaning shape to the exit.
No one tried to stop me.
TWO.Paul
“Are you pleased with yourself?” A voice whispered from the vicinity of my left earlobe. Normally the voice sounded sweet, female and human, but it was all illusion. Medusa’s voice was a synthesized creation hooked in through a feed pick-up in my earring, and linked back to her main processor through a sub-hyper relay I didn’t plan on letting anyone look at too closely any time soon. She was neither female nor human, and at the moment, she didn’t sound very sweet either.
“You mean the skald? He had it coming.” I stepped out into the cool evening air, savoring the gentle breeze and trying to clear my head. I smelled ozone on the wind, the fresh tang of a fast approaching storm. Which was, of course, entirely ridiculous.
“Had it coming? Why? Because he’s done what he’s had to, in order to survive? Because it’s been less than a week and he hasn’t memorized League laws yet? He didn’t have it coming. He gave you an excuse.”
I pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of my handbag and lit it. No one tried to stop me. No one tried to stop me when I had landed in an unregistered shuttle or when I’d breezed past security setting off fifteen different kinds of alarms, including a dreaded Black Flag. No one tried to stop me from bringing weapons into FirstCity, even though a week earlier they’d have been shooting first and asking questions to my corpse. No one tried to stop me when I assaulted Randolph Patel: no one would likely even report it.
I was one of the winners, the new guys in charge. The underdogs were now the top dogs, and nobody with any sense wanted to be on our bad side. Oh no. No one would try to stop me. I could probably commit murder and no one would try to stop me.
Vae victis.
I needed another drink.
“Drop it, Deuce. I saved that man’s life. If he’d told his story in front of a real striker they’d have picking pieces of Randy’s brain out of the other guests’ hair.”
“That may be, but how is attacking some poor high-caste who was obviously shaken, upset, and not thinking clearly going to improve the chances of a lasting peace? He had a point: the colonies are expecting to walk in and rule Terra when they’ve never been here, and that seems naive. If you hadn’t been so petty, you might have learned something valuable from that man.”
“Petty? I’m petty now am I?”
“All right—not petty.”
“Thank you.”
“Just a bitch.”
“I love you too, Medusa.”
“It’s hard to love you when you act like this, even if it’s how you programmed me.”
I inhaled deeply on the cigarette. A few people tossed me stunned looks, but my prophetic powers held true and no one tried to stop me. I stood there, looking over the view of the city.
“It hasn’t changed at all,” I murmured.
“Is this why your stress levels are so high? Returning to FirstCity?”
I didn’t answer. Something was wrong. The patterns were off, the ebb and flow of the city hitching like an engine on the verge of a breakdown. The flaw was a nagging shadow in my mind, but nothing I could quantify, nothing I could point at with any certainty. Probably just shock, I told myself. Peace.
“Or is it because of Paul?”
I turned away from the view. The restaurant Paul had named was three quarters over and security was still glitched to hell. I’d have to hurry if I wanted to make it there on time. I wished, not for the first time, that I’d been of sufficiently high rank to commandeer one of the Sarcodinay executive transports that breezed through the quarter marker checkpoints, but it was the privilege of lieutenants on the equivalent of shore leave to hoof it on foot just like all the other serfs.
“It’s both, isn’t it? Your return to FirstCity and your impending meeting with your ex-lover.”
“Paul and I were never lovers.”
“That’s even worse, isn’t it?”
“Since when are you such an expert on relationships?” I puffed on the cigarette a few more times, pacing, then crushed it out half-smoked and threw the remains into a trash bin.
“I’m learning through observation. You put that into my programming too, remember?”
“Sadly.” I paused. “How do I look?”
“Glorious angel, bright-eyed,
Awe would seize upon every mortal as they gaze
At the luster of your flashing gold...
...but you tell me I’m biased.”
“Anyone who calls me a glorious angel must be. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a demon type. You know, haunting nightmares and the like.”
“This Paul of yours. Does he know?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Then how you look is the least of your worries, isn’t it?”
ggg
My luck couldn’t hold forever. When I reached the restaurant, someone tried to stop me.
The Farthest Shore was the most expensive restaurant in FirstCity, and until recently it was impossible walk through the door unless you were holding up the train on a jeweled Sarcodinay robe. A good, useful high-caste might be allowed to come here for her birthday if she played her cards right and kissed the right bronze butts.
The food was Sarcodinay, of course. I doubted that would change under the new regime. Humans can eat and enjoy imported Sarcodinay foodstuffs, but we can’t metabolize their food properly, no more than they can live on ours. You can eat all the Sarcodinay fare you like and never gain a gram. Be careful you don’t starve yourself to death: it has happened.
A place that rarefied had its own security to keep the lower-castes from bothering their betters. That security didn’t mess around. It apparently didn’t communicate much with the main office either, where I was on the new cleared lists.
Three steps inside the door red laser lights played over me. I cursed, and felt real fear freeze my blood, because this was precisely the sort of situation that one didn’t ever dare waltz in
to unprepared: full body scans and automated defenses that could turn a living, breathing member of the rebellion into steak tartar in under 15 seconds. This was the sort of security you made damn sure to turn off before you ever reached it, because once you were caught in the trap it was all over.
