by Sean Platt
Kai didn’t know what to say to that, either. The way Micah told it, Rachel was in Kai’s way.
“My question for you,” Rachel said, “is why you’re here. You specifically. You, who clawed your way up from the gutter. Who worked for my friend Alexa.”
“You knew Alexa Mathis?”
Rachel cackled. “Honey, everyone knows Alexa Mathis.”
Kai paused. Twice, Rachel had referred to Alexa in the present tense, but O’s leadership had gone underground forever ago. Everyone assumed Alexa was dead, but here was Rachel, speaking of ghosts as if they dined with her weekly.
“And as a former O girl, I know how she trained you,” Rachel went on. “You’ll know Chloe, maybe taken in some of the Chloe AI, or at least its conditioning. But you were impressive even before O, weren’t you? I know about the stunner. About the people you killed because they got in your way.”
“What stunner?”
Rachel smiled. She didn’t answer, but Kai’s attempt to divert had been pathetic anyway. Nobody knew Kai’s revenge story, from her gutter days, except for Kai herself. And, somehow, Rachel Ryan.
“Someone like you, Kai Dreyfus, you wouldn’t just do what any man told you. You remind me of myself, back when my tits were perkier.”
A man in butler uniform entered their tiny circle. He held two drinks on a sterling silver platter. One, Rachel’s, was in a martini glass. The other was apparently for Kai. It was a Pabst & Richarz — not the drink she ordered with clients or in public, but the one she drank when alone. With a glance at Rachel, Kai took it. She looked up at the butler as he turned. His eyes were proper stuffy slits, his black hair slicked back against his scalp. He had white gloves, a coat with tails, and a tiny mustache on his upper lip, deftly split in the middle.
“So tell me,” Rachel said. “Why did you come? Why do you plan to kill me — not because Micah told you to, but for your own reasons?”
Kai held the drink in her lap, glancing intermittently down.
“You think I poisoned it,” Rachel said, looking at the beverage and setting her earlier question aside.
Kai said nothing.
“You’re sweet,” said Rachel. “If I’d wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be breathing now. Killing someone with a drink is so…”
“So predictable?”
“So rude,” Rachel said. “It’s insulting. Just like how, when you came in here, you were thinking about snapping my neck.”
“I wasn’t — ”
“Let’s cut the shit,” Rachel said, her demeanor flipping like a switch. “I admire your moxie; you’re in over your head. Maybe you’ve spilled your share of gutter blood, handling the assholes Micah sics you on. Presque Beau, maybe a few Beau Monde, if they’re not prepared and don’t see it coming. Someone like you, with Alexa’s training, you’d go in with guile rather than force. If I had to guess, and I actually don’t, I’d say you came here to figure me out — not to discover my weaknesses, because you’re arrogant enough and have a good enough track record that you don’t need frailties to get what you want. No, you came here to decide if you want to kill me. So what do you think, Miss Dreyfus? Does Micah Ryan’s mother deserve to die?”
“I — ”
“Let me tell you a few things about my life,” Rachel interrupted. “In the teens and ’20s, my father’s company was working behind the scenes of the old American government, manipulating lobbyists through threat and bribes. His people stalked your boyfriend, Nicolai’s, father, Salvatore Costa, trying to bully him out of the first hovertech. They couldn’t just steal the technology; they needed Costa’s mind. So they began killing people around him, and still neither he nor Allegro Andante would budge. When the ecology began to shift, those same thugs were about to strike at Salvatore’s family.” She leaned forward. “Tell Nicolai something for me, will you? My father isn’t responsible for his family’s death. But that’s only because the Fall got to them first.”
Rachel stood. Kai scooted back in her chair, unsure which end was up. None of this was going according to plan.
“In the ’30s, Ryan Enterprises initiated hostile operations to take the melting arctic from the first movers. Many deaths were conveniently covered up. Others, later, you yourself helped us perpetuate, meaning that as much as you might hate us now, there was a time when you could be bought, like a whore. But before you, there was me. And before me, there was my father. I’m the Ryan in Ryan Enterprises. Not Micah and Isaac’s father. He changed his name. I didn’t change mine because by then, I’d taken over.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“You’re here to find out if I deserve to die. So what do you think? Do I?”
“I’m not sure if I — ”
“Stand up, Kai. You’re better than this.”
Slowly, Kai stood. Again, she was struck by the difference in how Nicolai had described the old woman and the way she appeared. Her skin was wrinkled and her hair was white, but she didn’t move like an old-model droid at all. No. Rachel Ryan moved like a spider.
“If I’m to be killed,” Rachel said, “it won’t be by someone who cowers.”
“I don’t cower.”
“Don’t you? So why are you shrinking back?”
“You’re not what I expected.”
“Really. Did you expect your grandmother? Grandma Kelsey? You’d have to because you couldn’t expect your paternal grandmother, seeing as you never knew your father.”
When Kai didn’t answer, Rachel cocked her head as if to say, Well then.
“How would you have done it, Miss Dreyfus? How would you have killed me?”
Kai realized, quite suddenly, that she’d never admitted to her plan. Now that the old woman was holding her feet to the fire, could she still back out, still pretend this was all a mistake? Sorry for the confusion, Mrs. Ryan. Micah just sent me here to deliver this greeting card for his beloved mother.
No. That wouldn’t work. But how did you speak of the deed while meeting the victim’s eyes?
But there was another problem, too. Rachel was right: Kai hadn’t come because Micah told her to. She’d come to determine if she, on her own, wanted to do as he asked. On the possible upside, if Micah wasn’t lying (always a possibility), killing Rachel might free the logjam keeping Kai and Nicolai from the Beau Monde. But on the downside…
Well, on the downside, Kai kind of liked Rachel Ryan.
The woman was a killer. She was crude, bold, and arrogant. Ruthless, cold, and calculating. She’d even shit on Kai while simultaneously complementing her, doubling the word “whore” like a weapon. But still, Kai found herself admiring Rachel. Few people could face their killers with gusto.
Kai could at least keep them on equal footing.
“I guess I’d have broken your neck,” she said.
Rachel snorted. “My neck is reinforced Plasteel. Try again.”
“Crush your head, then. Slam it into a wall. Maybe that table there.”
Rachel knocked on her scalp. “Skull. Plasteel.”
“Deploy a nanoswarm.”
Rachel put a leathery hand on her own neck. “Filters. Perimeter protection. Keep them coming.”
“You’re fragile. Your skull is strong, but I could rattle it to death.”
“Blunt. Uninventive. Security AI would intervene immediately. More.”
“Go in through the eyes.”
Rachel took a step forward. Her chest was almost against Kai’s. She pointed at her own eyes. “Carbon nanotube matrix. Xenia models you can’t get and don’t know about, unless we were right about Doc Stahl and his big fucking mouth. You’d never get through them.”
“Neural disruption then. I have — ”
“I know what you have. It’s all been deactivated. You want to kill someone above Beau Monde? You’ll need to do better.”
“What’s above Beau Monde?” Kai asked, her eyebrows drawing together.
“Your nanobots have been erased. Not Gaussed; it’s another technology above yo
ur pay grade. I could kill you, though; your defenses are down, and I happen to have plenty of unknown horrors at my disposal. You wish for a life in the Beau Monde, Miss Dreyfus? You’d better prove you’re worthy, and that you have more in your bag than parlor tricks.”
Now Kai was angry. Nobody told Kai she wasn’t up to a challenge, or stood in her way.
“So it is you keeping it from me. Micah was right. The minute you’re gone, I make Beau Monde.”
“You came here for a reason,” Rachel said, sneering, not bothering to answer Kai’s question. “Come on. Show me that you have what it takes. You want to convince the others you’re worth promoting? Convince me.”
Kai tried to shove against the old woman, but Rachel was rock solid. She couldn’t believe Nicolai had thought her frail. The woman was a tank — in frame, body, and will.
“You can’t just push me around,” Rachel said. “Nobody will buy it. Nobody will believe I was that stupid, or that I’d ever be that stupid. Nobody would believe it was for real.”
“‘For real’?”
“Can’t get past my skin. Can’t knock me down. Can’t use any of your fancy tricks. What if I told you that Ryan Enterprises controlled most of the legalized prostitution in District Zero…and much of the illegal prostitution before that? What if I told you that some of my father’s first associates were nothing more than bargain-basement pimps he floated when times were toughest — men who were pigs and criminals and scum, but who managed to bring in a decent income unless some uppity bitch killed them with a stunner?”
Without thinking, Kai slammed her index finger hard into Rachel’s neck. When she pulled it away, a minuscule trickle of blood — no more than a drop — slipped from the tiny lancet wound she’d made with her retractable device.
Surprised, Rachel’s hand went to her neck. She looked down at the red dot on her palm.
“I’ll bet you don’t have anything in place to protect you from your own blood, do you?”
Rachel met Kai’s eyes. “Cloned blood? Something from Xenia? Something Stahl brought you?”
Kai shook her head. “I guess you don’t know all the players in town after all.”
Rachel staggered back. She gave a mechanical, artificial lurch as the synthetic hemoglobin coursed through her system, indistinguishable from her own until its modifications had spread within the space of a few heartbeats, turning each red cell into a miniature magnet. Instead of platelets clinging to form a clot — something a person like Rachel would have monitored and handled in her system — the red cells themselves gripped her miniature mechanical parts.
Freezing metaphorical gears.
Blocking arteries.
Rachel fell to her knees then rolled to her side, gasping, fists clenching.
When it was done and the old woman stopped shaking, Kai stepped back. And as she did, an odd sound surrounded her. It took Kai a moment to place it. It was an old woman’s throaty, cackling laughter.
The room shimmered. The posh surroundings evaporated like mist, and Rachel Ryan’s dead body did the same.
Kai found herself in an alcove off the Alpha Place lobby, where she’d apparently been since she’d entered the building’s front door a half hour ago.
She was in a simulator and had been all along. She’d never met Rachel at all.
Behind a thick, transparent barrier, Kai saw Rachel Ryan — for real this time. She was sitting in a chair, looking as shrewd but frail as Nicolai had described her. And she was laughing.
“Very good, Miss Dreyfus,” the old woman said, her voice conveyed through the barrier by an intercom. “I’ve lived long enough, and I will allow you to kill me.” She smiled a crone’s smile. “But it must be at the right time, and in the right place.”
Chapter Six
November 11, 2066 — Soigné Spire
Doc looked down at his wrist. The nano watch appeared: 4:20 p.m.
Doc laughed, recalling his stoner buddy Hank who’d always celebrated 4:20, daily, for its tie to an old marijuana joke. Doc had never got it — he wasn’t a smoker, himself — but since those early days, he’d never seen 4:20 on a clock without laughing.
The building’s guard looked up at the sound. Doc made his face impassive, not wanting to give the guard a reason to kick him out. The guard already didn’t like Doc. Doc had no idea why, though he suspected it was because the guard was ugly and Doc was handsome. Doc got tons of ass, and the guard was probably lucky not to chafe his dick on his callused Directorate hands. Already, in the half hour Doc had been here, he’d seen the man’s duties move from guard to garbageman to doorman to repairman (when the shelf behind the registration desk inexplicably slipped from its bracket and the prissy clerk called for help). You’d think, in a building this fine, they’d spring for more staff. But no. This jealous snob was it.
“You sure you have the right time, and you’re in the right place?” the guard said, clearly believing the answer to be no — or rather implying that Doc and his man-whore ways should clear the fuck out regardless.
“I’m just fine, thank you.”
The guard looked like he might object, but then the old-fashioned elevator dinged and the doors opened.
Doc shivered watching the elevator, wondering if his waiting time was finally up. He’d been eyeing the box for a while, as people had come and gone through the lobby. It didn’t even seem to be Beam-enabled. It looked and sounded like a box carried between floors on ropes tugged upon by idiot motors from a thousand years ago. In nicer old buildings like this one (there weren’t many; most of the older buildings had become ghetto a long while back), antiquity seemed to be a point of pride. Why upgrade a classic? It’s not like the slidebox was a miniature death trap or anything.
But that was just nerves talking.
Nerves that had to do with Doc’s dislike of confined spaces. He’d grown used to space flight with effort, but boxes and tunnels? Not fun.
Nerves that had to do with what he was here to do.
And — most bothersome — nerves that had to do with an intuition that had been growing louder over the past half hour as he’d waited. Under his skin, Doc was now almost positive that he wouldn’t be meeting with Mrs. Astor after all. It was a deep-down feeling — the kind that Doc, even today, felt foolish even acknowledging. But those deep-down feelings had kept Doc alive, and he’d learned to give them his grudging respect.
Obeying a childish impulse and feeling stupid all over again, Doc stood up before the elevator doors had fully parted and began to walk toward the exit, on his way out of this dumbass situation.
Bitch wants to keep me waiting until 4:20? Fuck her. Maybe I owe it to myself to go and fire up a blunt.
But the voice calling to Doc from the open elevator was, of course, not that of Cordelia Astor.
“Mr. Stahl. Hold on a moment, if you please.”
It wasn’t even a girl’s voice. There was no potential upside here.
Still, Doc turned. Because he could connive and scrap all he wanted, but the law was still the law.
Doc put a huge, toothy smile on his face. It was his panty-melting smile — the one that gave him deep dimples and earned him his way more often than not. But the small, unassuming man he found himself shining it upon when he turned probably wasn’t wearing panties, and didn’t look interested in melting for Doc.
“Yessir,” Doc said.
The man gripped a handheld above his wrist. Doc watched a Department of Responsibility seal flash onto its face. “My name is Roger Green. I’m your tester with the DOR”
“I was tested at Choice,” Doc said.
“How long ago was that?”
Doc’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t bother to answer.
“Every twenty years,” Green said. “Your time is up.”
“I don’t have time today,” Doc said. “I’m the sole proprietor in my business and can’t afford to be away.”
“Everyone I test is a sole proprietor, Mr. Stahl.”
“I have a big
deal brewing. If I don’t — ”
The tester sighed heavily, cutting Doc off. It was the sigh of a man who’s given the same exasperated sigh over and over again for his entire life. Then he started into a speech: one he’d maybe thought he could get away without this time, but was now disappointed to realize he’d be delivering yet again.
“Section 14.04 of the NAU revised constitution provides for a two-party economic and sociological system. And as part of that statute, all members of the Enterprise are required to submit to voluntary testing every twenty years, beginning with Choice at age eighteen. And — ”
“Voluntary, huh?” Doc said. “What if I don’t volunteer?”
“Anyone who refuses or cannot be tested will be changed in designation from Enterprise to Undefined and will be entered into a temporary Directorate pool, pending further classification.”
“So in other words, we’re all Directorate unless we prove otherwise,” Doc said, trying to sound indignant. This was still a free country, wasn’t it? This man was tying his hands.
“Mr. Stahl, allow me to enumerate a few truths for you. First of all, almost every individual I test tells me they are the only person who earns an income, and that without working this one day, they will starve. More than half tell me they have a big deal brewing, and that stopping for their test will ruin it. Second truth: you are, as an NAU Enterprise citizen, required to be tested for your own benefit.”
“I can take care of myself. I don’t need you to tell me what’s in my own best interest.”
“Fact three,” the man said. “Without fail, every single Enterprise test subject says what you just said after I run through this.”
“If I could just postpone…”
“Fact four: There are no postponements. The Beam determines the optimal time for testing of every subject, based on confidential data pulled from your systems. Neither I nor the Department of Responsibility know exactly why right now is best for you and will minimally impact your business and ‘hot deals,’ but I trust that it is. And lastly, fact five: because I am required to disclose how you came to be here, I must tell you that your arrangements with ‘Cordelia Astor’ were a Beam fabrication, as permitted by section 14.04.21 — ”
