by Sean Platt
Dominic looked at Leah then Leo. “Okay. So how do we handle the rest of the Organas?”
It was Leah who answered.
“We scavenge all the Beam-connected hardware we can find in the prison’s contraband lockers,” she said, “and introduce Organa to its new drug.”
Chapter Three
“She knew?”
Kai waited for Micah to settle. He was always like this: calm and stoic through even the worst of what he already knew but tending to blow when learning something unpleasant for the first time. In the past, Micah’s tendency to pop had scared Kai. He’d had been like a father to her — the kind of dad who showed his love by ruining the public image of kids who pulled her hair on the playground. Those kids, if Kai had known Micah when she’d been a girl, would never have been able to get a job in public service, thanks to all the scandal. And forget extra snacks after nap time.
But now, watching Micah’s reaction, Kai found herself strangely unaffected. She might be getting numb to him. There was something about fearing a man for months that stripped some shock from the ordinary.
“Yes, she knew,” Kai repeated.
“Because you gave yourself away. Because she could read you the minute you walked in. I told you, she’s not just some delicate old lady. She’s smart and dangerous. And security there isn’t a joke.”
Kai rolled her eyes, slouching into a doorframe. “Oh, give me some credit. Do you think I went in there with a dagger raised? Maybe one of those little pearl-handled pistols? Or at least with my hands out. Admit it: You think I greeted her like this.” Kai made strangling hands and held them out toward Micah’s neck.
He sighed, his body language a mixture of defeat and annoyance. If Rachel knew that Micah wanted her dead, he knew perfectly well she wouldn’t be dying without granting permission. Fortunately (and this was the part Kai would tell him when he was done pouting), the old woman’s permission was exactly what Kai had left with.
“She’s a snake, Kai. She invented deceit. You never should have gone over just to talk. Why did you do that? Do you always do that?”
“This time felt different. I don’t get the impression she ever leaves the building. And the building has security, as you said. I needed to get the lay of the place.”
“Which allowed her to see right through you.”
“You’re not understanding,” Kai said. “She opened the door already knowing who I was and why I was there.”
Except that wasn’t really right, was it? The Rachel who’d opened the door for Kai had been just another part of an elaborate simulation.
“What do you mean?”
“‘So you’ve come to kill me.’ That’s what she said. I didn’t even say hello. That was her hello.”
“She said that?”
Kai nodded. “Then she rather casually mentioned that she knew you were behind it. Didn’t seem particularly perturbed.”
Micah’s eyes snapped wide. In that second, Kai saw whites all the way around his gray irises. Then he became Micah again: cool, calm, collected, calculating.
“You’re sure.”
“That she wasn’t particularly perturbed?”
Micah’s lips pressed into an annoyed line. Kai was enjoying this rare turnabout, but loving it too much would be a mistake.
“That she knew I sent you,” he clarified, “to take care of her.”
“I don’t remember her exact words, but yes, she knew. Before I said anything.” Kai couldn’t check those exact words, either, because something in Alpha Place had zeroed her recorder. Kai’s memory for details was decent, but she’d come to depend on Beam records and had let her native mind atrophy more than she liked. It was very human. It was disappointing.
Micah began pacing back and forth in front of his Dali painting, and Kai had a strange moment wondering what family get-togethers would be like when everyone knew some family members had contracted to kill others. The guilt mongering between siblings must be intense: You’re going to kill Mom? Aw, I’m telling!
“So what did she say?” Micah asked. “When she got it all out there, about me, about you…what did she say about it?”
Kai chewed her cheek. She had to give him something.
“Actually, she said I could do it.”
“She said….” He trailed off as if he’d missed the end of Kai’s sentence.
“She said I could kill her. She gave me permission.”
“Just like that?”
“Not just like that, actually. I had to audition.”
“Audition?”
Kai peeled away from the doorframe and walked toward Micah. She rather liked the feeling of making Micah reel for a change. Throughout their relationship, he’d been her provider and protector — perhaps a perverse sort of friend. But there had always been a leash between them, with Micah holding the end. She was given a home in the Presque Beau, but the threat was always there: Do something Micah doesn’t like, and it all goes away. For once, she was delivering some of the punches. And best of all, they were Rachel’s punches, not even Kai’s. No wonder she found herself liking the old woman so much.
“Yes, Micah. She made me prove myself.”
“How?”
“She asked how I’d kill her. On your orders.”
Micah flinched. Kai stepped closer.
“Would I use my hands to kill her?” she said, “But no; there were reasons hands wouldn’t work. A weapon? An improvised weapon, like something in the room? She gave me reasons those wouldn’t work, either. It wasn’t even rebuttal, and it certainly wasn’t defense. Honestly, Micah, what your mother gave me was half coaching — troubleshooting, maybe.”
“And the other half?”
“Trial. Testing. She wasn’t going to give me the answer. She might have thought I didn’t have one, and the whole thing was a joke — a way of sticking out her tongue at me and saying, ‘Ha ha. You and Micah can’t get me.’”
“That sounds like her. That wasn’t a test. That was just bullshit.”
Kai gave a sexy, taunting smirk. This time, she reached out and ran his lapel between her long fingers and thumb.
“It wasn’t bullshit. Because I passed. And after that, she told me exactly how it had to be.”
“How it had to be?”
“How I’d kill her. Where. And when.”
“What did you do?” His voice lowered. “She’s not dead already, is she?”
Kai almost laughed. If her assignment was already complete, it wasn’t the kind of thing Micah would be uncertain about this far into a conversation. She could get her hooks into him. And she’d thought Micah Ryan was so impervious and unflappable. Just went to show that mothers always carried knives nobody else had at their disposal.
Kai wanted to answer, What did I do to prove I could do it? I killed her, that’s what…but no, she’s not dead.
Instead she said, “I showed her that I’m a creative thinker.”
“How?”
“Maybe you’d like to do this, if you have so many questions.”
“Just tell me, Kai,” he snapped.
She took a long, deliberate sigh. Then, reaching the end of her teasing seduction, she gave him what he wanted.
“After Nicolai went to see her, I pulled a hair off his coat. I had someone I know make a booby-trapped red blood cell that matched her DNA.”
“And?”
“And the rest is a trade secret. But it must have passed muster because she gave it her thumbs-up, figuratively speaking.”
“What the hell does that mean, ‘passed muster’?”
He seemed so scattered. It was delightful to see Micah not in charge for once. Kai still wasn’t sure what he was supposed to get out of any of this, though she assumed it boiled down to advancement: one lion clawing his way to the top of the pride after killing his kin. Micah had promised Kai advancement, implying that Rachel was in the way…but knowing Micah as she did, Kai thought it was equally likely that the trade was more quid pro quo: You solve my prob
lem, and I’ll solve yours.
Kai sent her mind back to her discussion with Rachel — the real Rachel, after the sim had ended. Both players had their motives, and Kai seemed to have ended up the broker in between.
“She said that if you were going to have her killed, that was fine. She’s lived long enough. She’s tired. She told me she’s expected to die for a while, but that someone kept propping her up.” Kai pointed at Micah, indicating the irony of wanting to kill someone he kept saving. “But she said that if you were going to succeed, your assassination attempt had to be believable.”
“Believable?”
“Yes. Because if I did something that her security or internal protections would normally prevent, it would be obvious that she’d taken a dive, like a prizefighter losing on purpose. I guess it’s important that you come out looking like an honest victor.”
Micah said nothing, looking both angry and lost. This hadn’t turned out as he’d imagined, and now he must be wondering whether Rachel submitting to die was the same as her ending up dead as a surprise. The result would be the same, but now there was another ingredient in the mix: his mother’s plans, hiding in unknown shadows.
“That’s also why she said it has to happen in public. If she dies in her apartment, Alpha Place will cover it up.” Kai was unable to keep a disgusted, ironic smile from her lips when she delivered the rest: “And if that happens, you won’t get credit.”
“This is insane.”
“Oh, come on, Micah. She’s just looking out for you. Making sure you get the gold star you deserve.”
Micah sat on the edge of his desk. Kai saw it as the moment of weakness it clearly was, but it seemed necessary. Micah would either sit or fall.
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“She was either lying to me about all of this, or she honestly didn’t know that Rachel would see it coming.”
“Who?”
He just shook his head.
So he was reporting to someone higher up. Someone at Rachel’s level, higher than even the fabled Beau Monde. Someone who’d fed him information. Someone who’d made promises that even Micah Ryan had been naive enough to believe.
Kai thought of puppets. Of Micah pulling Nicolai’s strings, unseen, all those years.
Who had been pulling Micah’s? And was that person an ally, as Micah had apparently thought…or an enemy who turned out to be in bed with Rachel for reasons unknown?
Kai’s jaw offset, and she touched tooth to tooth — her private posture of thinking.
Whoever held Kai’s ticket into the upper echelon, it had to be a woman.
Chapter Four
April 3, 2078 —District Zero
It was after hours at the O Club, but the entertainment was still in place for the visiting VIP. Micah could hardly pay attention. Alexa would likely be back any minute, but in the meantime he was probably supposed to sit here at the table in the dim room, sipping his scotch.
But across from him, two people were having sex in a glass-fronted booth.
Above, in what at first seemed to be skylights, two nude women writhed on glass, their asses pressed flat.
Alexa returned. She slid into the booth across from Micah, blessedly blocking the view just as the man in the booth turned the woman around to try a new angle.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“No problem.”
“One of our high rollers had a special request.”
“And you had to fulfill it personally?”
Alexa smiled. She knew better than to take the remark personally. Alexa Mathis’s name was synonymous with selling sex — from the digital page, in film, in clubs, and intimately, in person. But she’d never been so much as a glass table girl and never would be. Micah didn’t know all that Alexa had done to manipulate the sexual culture that coincidentally made O thrive today, but he’d heard rumors. The unofficial line was that while Alexa had done plenty (under various socially conscious aliases) to destigmatize the words “whore” and “slut,” she’d never come close to being one herself. Even Clive, who the high-level rumor mill implied had once had an affair with Alexa, was mum on the topic. She was business, through and through.
“High rollers have a correspondingly high sense of entitlement. Mostly, I just had to stand there while he explained why he wasn’t happy about one of our girls.”
“Why?”
“She bit him.”
“Hmm. And this wasn’t something he wanted.”
“Apparently not. But that’s what she said: that it was something he’s secretly into. I talked to her too, away from him. She said he wanted it but didn’t want to admit it. Hence the complaining.”
Alexa shifted. He caught a glimpse of bouncing breasts against glass behind her.
“How do you do this, Alexa?”
“Do what?”
“All the mind games.”
“And you don’t play mind games? Come on. If you didn’t know this already — if you don’t know it intimately from politics and if it’s not in your blood, thanks to Rachel — I’m sure working with Kai has taught you: everything is — ”
“‘Everything is about sex,’” Micah recited. “I know. I beat Kai to that little truism when I hired her. But people don’t know it or won’t admit it, and it makes them stupid. Like your client. He doesn’t even know himself, if he wants it rough and won’t admit it.”
Alexa shrugged as if this were no big deal. “It’s just a different paradigm. An evolution of what we’ve always done. Chloe changed everything. Half of the intuitive programming and conditioning we do today — not to mention a lot of the AI that’s pollinated the wider Beam — relies on new algorithms that more accurately determine deep desires against surface wants. But applying that knowledge isn’t straightforward, and all the algorithms in the world can’t replace art. The girls are still the limiters. Some have a gift for knowing when to act on buried cravings and when to let them stay buried. Others — like this one, the biter — don’t. We’re able to replicate Chloe’s deduction, but not her intuition.” Alexa took a swig of water and said, “Kai knows the difference.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You’ve never partaken? Not once?”
Micah gave a little shrug. “I’m not interested.”
“Repressed? Or secretly gay?”
“Maybe I’m not as much of an out-of-control animal as most of your spa clients. Maybe I’ve done a better job of channeling my ‘everything is about sex’ into other pursuits.”
“Like lifting weights. Hitting things. Growling.” Alexa smiled.
“Like business.”
Alexa bit her cheek as if choking off a small smile. She turned and took ten long seconds to watch the couple in the glass booth. Micah watched them finish then begin again. The wonders of modern nanotechnology, turning sex workers into perpetual motion machines.
“So you’re not affected by the decorations?”
“I’m just here because you wanted to meet on your home turf.”
“Hmm. So if I were to do a quick tumescence scan using this table’s sensors…” Alexa trailed off, smiling, still halfway turned.
“What did you want, Alexa?” Micah asked, making his face more impatient than he felt.
Alexa cocked her head as if giving up then shifted so she was again blocking the booth’s performers. She exhaled, sipped, and said, “How is Kai doing for you, Micah?”
“She’s doing fine.”
“For your professional jobs, of course.”
“That’s what I hired her for.”
“Killing your enemies,” Alexa said.
Micah resisted the urge to look around the room. There was nobody in the closed club, and the entertainers were in soundproof enclosures, the Beam glass fronts programmed to make lip reading somehow impossible. She was trying to get a reaction out of him, but Alexa had done her own share of dirty dealing. If Alexa hadn’t co
mmissioned murders, people around her must have. She was in his mother’s circles, for shit’s sake, and it’s not like Dear Old Mother had ever flinched at dirty hands. He’d hired Kai for killing. He wouldn’t sit here and pretend he hadn’t.
“That’s right.”
“And you’ve found her worth the pay?”
“Have you found it worth her being gone from here?” Micah countered. “Kai implied she was a great earner.”
“One of our best. Not just for us. For herself, too.”
“I’m not arguing for fair trade practices. I’m just asking.”
“Curious about the talents of Miss Dreyfus?” Alexa asked, her voice almost a purr.
“I told you. It’s professional.”
“Just curious then. About nothing in particular.”
“Why did you ask me to come here, Alexa?”
She gave Micah a touché look. “All right. Down to business then.”
“If you want.”
“Do you remember when we met?”
She wanted to dance and play coy. Fine. Micah, despite his bearing, wasn’t in a hurry.
“It was before you died,” Micah said.
“Officially, I never died. Officially, I’m a recluse.”
“But everyone talks like you died. It’s all past tense. Have you searched the deep Beam? Do you know how many layers are in all of this technology you built your business upon?”
Alexa showed teeth at the corner of her smile. “I know a lot more than you give me credit for. The earliest detaching spy AI? My people wrote it so we could watch customer behavior when they used our toys and peripherals. Autonomous device agents? That was us, too. And not even O. Most of this is well before I met the other five. When it was just me, just Alexa the dumb little dirty author. Before Crossbrace and way before The Beam. So yes, I know.”
