“Just tell me where it hurts.” He was at her ear, now. Urgent. Whispering. Pleading. “You were so right to come here, Hwa, I’m so glad you did, but you have to let me help, now, you have to talk to me—”
“Did you feel bad for me?” It was not the question she thought she would lead with. But it came out all the same.
“What?”
Now she could face him. She brought her head up and watched him searching her eyes and then her wounds. “Did you feel guilty? Is that why you hired me?”
He frowned. “For what happened with the saucer? A little. But that’s not why I hired you. Why are you asking this, now?”
“Why did you hire me? Why did you hire me back? Why do you…?” She didn’t know how to ask the next part. Why are we friends? Are we really friends? “Why do you try so hard?”
His hands stilled beside her. He caught her eye. “Is now the time for this conversation?”
Hwa blinked hard. “Did you know? Did you know that my brother died there? On the Old Rig?” Her throat hurt. She wanted to scream. “Did you know that, when you hired me? Is that why you did it? Because you felt bad?”
Síofra rocked back on his heels. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Don’t.” Hwa stood up. He stood with her. In front of her. She tried to move and he moved with her. “Just don’t. I know what you did. So stop lying.”
“What are you saying—”
“Stop. Lying. To. Me.”
“I’m not!” His hands fluttered. They settled on her shoulders. “Hwa—”
“Don’t touch me.” She broke his grip instantly. “Did you know?”
His hands hovered in the air. Almost near her face. But not quite. “Know what?”
Hwa swallowed. Her throat hurt so much. Her brother’s murderer had tried to choke her out, just hours ago. It seemed like days ago. Like years. Like he’d wrung the life out of one version of her, and another version had left the elevator.
“How long have the Lynches wanted this town?”
Síofra glanced quickly out the window at the city’s elder towers glittering in the dark. Far away, a train wailed over the water. From here it was a banshee sound. As though the dead beneath the waves were calling to the living above the surface. “I have no idea. That’s another branch, that’s acquisitions, that’s not me—”
“Where were you, three years ago?”
A quiet understanding settled over him. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “What are you accusing me of, Hwa?”
“The day the Old Rig blew. Where were you?”
“I don’t know. It was years ago.”
Hwa shook her head slowly. “Not good enough.”
“You want me to dig back in my records? Because I will. But you won’t believe me, will you? No matter what I say.” He gestured at the apartment. “Hwa, these people took me in when I had nothing, and gave me all this. You can’t just ask me to believe they would do something like that. They’re like my family. I don’t have anyone else.”
“Neither do I!” She shut her eyes. It was easier than looking at him. He looked so hurt. So shocked. She wanted to believe him. Terribly. “The person I loved the most went up in that blast. It killed almost a hundred people. And I just met the sole survivor.”
Her eyes opened. Her voice came out low. Lower than she’d ever heard it. As though she were speaking from deep inside a pit. “I was hunting the phantom. And I found one.”
Síofra’s eyes widened considerably. “Hwa.” He swallowed. Licked his lips. “Assuming everything you say is true, assuming this person, whoever they are, wasn’t lying to you, I need to ask one thing.” He took a deep breath. “Is he still alive?”
Hwa made herself smile. It pulled taut across her face until it became a snarl. “You’ll never find him. I can promise you that.”
Síofra’s hands rose to cover his mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut tight. “Oh, Hwa. Oh, God.”
She made to leave. She had thought she might hit him. Kick him. Draw more blood. Fight him again. Finish what she’d started up on the catwalks, that first day. If he pushed her. If he touched her one more time. But he hadn’t. And somehow that was worse.
“What will you do?” he asked. “Will you quit? Again? Tell the world? Tell Joel?”
Joel. She remembered his weight on her shoulders. His back to her back, in the ventilation shaft. The way he could laugh away what was happening around him, claiming that it was just an accident or just a mistake, because he’d never truly been hurt. Never lost anything. Not yet. His family of murderers had kindly insulated him from tragedy. And it was very likely, Hwa realized now, that one of them was trying to take him out. It was one of the first things she had taught Calliope and the others in her self-defence class: The people most likely to hurt you are the ones closest to you. The stats bore it out—marital rape, child abduction, domestic violence. Murder, too. And if the Lynches were willing to blow up an oil rig full of workers to score a deal on a ruined city, what was one more life?
“There is someone after him,” Hwa said. “Someone wearing invisible armour attacked us, today. The same person on the footage from the school. Joel won’t tell you about it. But someone means to kill him. And I mean to stop it.”
* * *
By the next Sunday dinner, most of her bruising had faded. Síofra was not there. “He had a conference in Toronto,” Joel told her, when she arrived. “Sorry. Now you’ll be bored.”
There might have been a message to this effect in Hwa’s account. There was something with Síofra’s name on it. She had not allowed herself to look at it. If she read it, she would have to start taking his pings, and then she would have to hear his voice.
“I won’t be bored. You’re here.”
Joel grinned. He led her in. There had been some sort of brand strategy meeting, so much of his immediate family was there: his father Zachariah, his brother Silas, his sister Katherine, and a set of fraternal twins named Paris and London.
“Paris is my brother,” Joel reminded her quietly. “His husband is over there. And that’s London. Her wife and their girlfriend are by the champagne bucket. Paris and London share that girlfriend, actually. She’s really nice. And you know Silas. His wife left him last year. I think he’s with my cousin’s ex-girlfriend now, but she’s not here. Then Katherine, from Dad’s third marriage. She doesn’t see anyone seriously. Then me.”
“How come they’re all white?” Hwa asked.
Joel shrugged. “Dad only married white women, up until my mom. She’s Eurasian? I guess? Sort of like you! She still lives in Singapore. And he wouldn’t marry her.”
Zachariah had given up on marriage by the time he’d conceived Joel. Or had him conceived. “Too expensive,” the old man had said, once.
Whatever the reason, it meant there was a wide gap in the ages of his children. Hwa had never really considered the gap between her and Tae-kyung—she had certainly never talked about it with Sunny—but realizing that Joel’s cousins had children who were still older than he was threw her for a loop. Part of it was Zachariah’s age: the old man acted like he was going to live forever, and so far none of the women in his life had cared to disagree. In practise, it meant that Joel’s middle-aged brothers and sisters looked at him like he was a new puppy their father had adopted in his dotage. Cute, but bound to make a mess.
No wonder they wanted him gone.
“I like your suit,” Joel said.
“Thanks. I forgot how much I liked it, until recently.”
“I’m sorry about your friend.” Joel grimaced. “Do they know what happened to her, yet?”
Hwa felt a prickle of pain in her arm, thinking of that night under the Acoutsina. She needed to pay Dixon Sandro a visit, and see what he’d built with the machines pulled from Calliope’s sample. “No. Not yet.”
The chime rang for dinner. The dining table was a huge slab of pink salt supported by two whalebones. It sat under a chandelier of bleached antlers. Unles
s they were eating soup, or some form of dessert (which Hwa always shoved over to Joel), they ate without plates, scraping food directly off the salt.
“It’s very healthy,” Zachariah had insisted, the first time she joined the family dinner. “Healthier than plates. Bacteria gets in there, you know. In the micro-fissures made by knives and forks. This is much more sanitary. Nothing can grow in all that salt.”
“Sure,” Hwa had said, and he laughed and laughed, and Katherine poured more wine for everyone.
Now they sat down to an amuse-bouche of oysters on the half-shell. It should have bothered her, breaking bread with the architects of New Arcadia’s destruction, her brother’s murderers. Maybe she should have found a way to poison them all. Maybe if they let her keep coming to dinner, she would. She contemplated the dinner knife at her place setting. Like everything else at the table, it was well-made, blade and handle fashioned from a single piece of steel. It was certainly sharp enough to do some damage. She could probably jam it in Zachariah’s neck before anyone wrestled her to the ground.
“Don’t you like oysters?” Joel asked.
“What?” Hwa blinked and put her knife down. “Oh. Sorry. I was just admiring the cutlery.”
“We’ll get you a set,” Joel said. “Dad, Hwa needs some more knives and forks at her new place.”
“Then she shall have them.” Zachariah drew a circle around his place setting with one finger, splayed all ten fingers at the setting, and made a pinch-and-throw motion in Hwa’s direction. Her watch purred, and there it was, an alert about the gift. The old man smiled. “Ten place settings. No plates, though.”
“I think I can manage the plates,” Hwa said. “And thanks.”
“Do you do a lot of entertaining, in Tower One?” Katherine asked.
Had anyone but Sunny raised Hwa, she might not have recognized the shade for what it was. But Sunny had accustomed her daughter to being despised. “Not as much as I’d like,” she said. “My friends work unpredictable hours.”
“Still keeping in touch, as it were?” Silas asked. Paris and London tittered.
“Oh, aye,” Hwa said. “On Fridays we have sleepovers. Pillow fights and practise-kissing. Then we sell the footage to the highest bidder.”
The table was silent. Hwa slurped her oyster. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “That was a joke.”
Zachariah guffawed. It was a surprisingly resonant sound, coming from such a fragile body. The old man did a good job of pretending not to be sick. He raised a flute of champagne in Hwa’s direction. “I do wish you would come to dinner more often, Miss Go. The one thing I forgot to engineer in my children was a sense of humour.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Hwa said, and Zachariah laughed even harder.
They moved on through the soup course (pumpkin-coconut bisque, served in small gourds), and the salad (shaved fennel and blood orange, laced with olive oil and pink peppercorn), and the entrée (pork loin on whipped celeriac, with a black garlic gastrique).
“Let us talk about the future,” Zachariah said, after the soup was served. “Joel, tell your brothers and sisters about your science club project.”
“I’m designing a generation ship,” Joel said. “In the library immersion unit. It has the highest level of processing power we’re allowed for intramural competition.”
“Using the lessons gleaned from your experience here, no doubt,” his brother Paris said. “This city is a closed system, too, of sorts.”
“Of sorts,” Joel said. “It would be better if it were closed off entirely. That’s what Mr. Branch says. It would be better to be self-sufficient.”
“We thought the same, on the commune.” Zachariah slurped his soup noisily. “We grew our own food. Barrelled our own rainwater. What rainwater there was. It was too late, of course, for California. But California has always been a place where dreams go to live or die.”
“A dream is a wish the heart makes,” London Lynch said, and they all raised their glasses and drank, except Hwa, who was still nursing her gin and soda.
“Generation ships are a good thing to put your mind to, Joel,” Zachariah said, when they were done toasting. “Someday we’ll leave this whole planet behind, and we’ll need that kind of thinking.”
“And we’ll need the Lynch brand out there, too,” Silas added. “You and your little friends have any idea how to shrink the reactor we’re building, down there?” Silas stamped on the dining room floor to indicate the one several hundred miles below, in the Flemish Pass Basin. “Because that’s what you’d need, to power one of those ships you’re talking about.”
“I know,” Joel said. “But the spectral analysis probes are showing us rocky surfaces out there in the Kuiper. That means thorium. We just need to get to it first.”
Silas looked nonplussed. It didn’t translate to Hwa, either. But it made Joel happy to work on it, so she didn’t mind. Mostly all she cared about was that Mr. Branch wasn’t touching on him in a weird way, and that none of the other kids in the club locked him in a supply cabinet. She’d have felt the same no matter what he was working on, even if he randomly decided to take up knitting, or breeding rare iguanas, or chain-saw sculpture. That last one would actually be pretty good for his upper body strength.
“Of course, humanity will never make it to the stars,” Zachariah said. “Not as we are. We must change. Become more durable. Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Go?”
Hwa pretended to carefully examine the dripping red segment of blood orange trembling on the tines of her fork. “I don’t really feel any need to go to space.”
“You don’t want to ascend into the heavens, and be seated at the right hand of evolution?” Katherine asked. “Why ever not?”
Hwa lifted her drink. “I doubt they have gin there. So there’s no reason for me to leave.”
Again, Zachariah laughed, and then they all laughed, for as long as seemed required. “But of course you, Miss Go, must feel the need to transform,” Zachariah said, when the laughter died down. “You have a number of conditions which could be easily corrected. You could live on indefinitely, with the proper treatment. Why sentence yourself to a short, unhappy life?”
Hwa drank deeply from her gin and club soda. “This is the thing I’ve always wondered about vampires,” she said, after a moment. “Every vampire story is about how sad they are. You’d think it would be great, eh? But no. And after I got me first job, I understood. If you want to live forever, you have to work forever. Unless you’re rich. To be a vampire, you have to be rich.” She finished her drink and rattled the ice cubes in the empty glass. She stared around the table at all the Lynch siblings in turn. “And I got no taste for blood, me.”
Flatware clinked onto the salt table. Gazes flicked from Hwa to Zachariah and back again. Zachariah himself was staring at her, and she didn’t know if he was profoundly amused or deeply offended.
“But you have to live a long time, Hwa,” Joel said, plowing through his salad as though nothing had happened. “Because I’m going to live a long time. Even longer than Dad. So you have to get the treatment. Implants or machines or editing. Even a whole new body. Whatever’s the best, you have to get it. I’m going to run things one day, and I won’t trust anyone else to protect me.”
Hwa reached over and squeezed his shoulder. She smiled at the other Lynches. She again thought about how quickly she could kill them. “You got me there, Joel. You got me there.”
* * *
Later, she wheedled an overnight invitation out of Joel. It was after the sorbet and cheeses, when the older siblings and their partners were all doing cognac and coffee, and Hwa was checking her homework against Joel’s, and it was getting on toward 22:00.
“It’s silly for me to go all the way back to One,” she said carefully. Joel was trying to juggle, as he paced the length of his room. The juggling wasn’t going well. The pacing he was fine at. “We’re just going to school in the morning anyway. And Síofra isn’t in town for me to run with. I have a spare uniform
at school, so that’s not a problem.”
“You should just come live here,” Joel said, watching the balls in the air. “I know you’re still technically on probation, but I think it would be better if you lived here.”
Hwa frowned. “Better how?”
“Well, more efficient. We have the same schedule. And it would be safer.”
Until now, Hwa hadn’t noticed any sign that Joel might be nervous about the death threats. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t. “Are you worried about stuff like that?”
Joel gave her a completely disdainful look that, for once, made him look fifteen and not fifty. “I didn’t mean safer for me,” he said. “I meant safer for you. Daniel says that the Tower One security isn’t nearly good enough.”
Hwa snorted. “You want me to be a Fiver like you guys, eh?”
“Would that be so bad?”
Hwa didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine living this way. The moment she finally got used to it, it would all be taken away for one reason or another. And she would be afraid of that eventuality, all the time, and so she’d never be used to it, would always be waiting for the other shoe to drop. So it was better to stay where she was. But she couldn’t possibly explain all that to Joel.
After Joel was in bed, Hwa relaxed somewhat. She listened for the other Lynches to leave, until it was just Zachariah and the softbot that followed him around. Hwa wasn’t even sure the old man slept normal hours. Then she heard the steady rhythm of his machine, and knew he was down for the count.
Even so, she waited another hour just in case. By then both Joel and his father were sleeping soundly. They breathed in synchronicity, the old man and the boy, even across the flat. Joel must have grown up hearing the sound of his dad’s iron lung. Maybe by now it was a comfort. Better than the alternative. For the first time, Hwa wondered what would happen to Joel if the old man died soon. Which of the assholes at the salt table would be his legal guardian? It seemed like a reasonable concern, and yet no one had brought it up to her. Did the old man really think he was going to live forever?
Hwa rolled herself off the smart cushion beside Joel’s bed, took the boy’s watch, and made for the old man’s study.
Company Town Page 16
