by Mel Odom
She looked classy, like she had just walked out of the pages of a glamour screamsheet. I was still carrying a lot of bruises even six days after the run, and I wore a hideaway cast on my shin, holding the break together.
Normally, I wouldn't have answered the questions Archangel was asking me unless Peg had asked them.
Which Peg had asked, and I had answered, so I was already somewhat practiced. It had helped that Peg had stayed out of my biz until after I put Andi on the jet to Boston that morning.
"Villiers offered her a chance to come back into the corp." I said. I'd put a white noise generator on the table to keep our conversation private.
"And she did?"
"Yes. She had some paydata that Villiers hadn't gotten in an earlier download."
Archangel's eyes remained hidden behind the White-laws sunglasses she wore. "And you just let her go?"
"I couldn't hold her."
"She might have stayed if you'd asked."
I looked at her then, knowing the questions she was asking me were coming out of her own situation, three years unsettled and still fresh in her mind. "I didn't want to ask."
"All the love was gone?" She sounded sarcastic or bitter. I didn't know which and I didn't try to figure it out because I knew both emotions came out of the same place.
"No. That's what made putting her on the plane this morning so hard."
"Then why let her go?"
"Because she couldn't stay." I replied.
She understood then. "Because of you, or because of her?"
I started to say both, because it was in me to protect Andi if I could. I'd protected her somewhat that morning by calling Villiers after I'd put her on the plane. The conversation was short. He'd offered me a job with NovaTech at an obscene salary. I'd turned it down, then offered him advice to the effect that I didn't want to hear of anything bad happening to Andi at his hands while she was in his employ. Or anything that might be construed as happening at his hands. He'd told me he'd take that under advisement. But my advice had rankled, as well as my turning down the offer. Villiers was a man who was used to getting what he wanted. For the moment, I knew I had a powerful enemy if he chose to handle it that way.
With Archangel and the prying I'd already done, I remained honest. "Because of me." I said.
"You didn't want her to stay?" She looked surprised. "But the two of you stayed in a hotel room together for the last five nights."
"I slept on the couch." I said. Sencio had needed me there while she put herself back together, reassembled that tough armor that she needed to make Villiers come around to her way of thinking. I'd made her feel safe, and I'd taken some comfort in that as I worked on healing myself.
"Why?"
"Because I think more clearly when sex isn't involved."
"Sex doesn't necessarily have to mean love."
"No. I'm not a prude. But with someone like Andi, with the history we'd shared together, it would have been too confusing."
"For her or you?"
"For me." I answered. "I can't say how she'd feel."
Archangel sipped her soykaf, thinking. I could see it in the way she held herself. "Do you think she would have stayed if you'd asked?"
"I don't know."
Archangel fixed me with her stare, her eyes and deeper emotions still invisible to me. "I think she would have."
"Why?" I asked. "Would you have stayed if you'd been asked?"
She gazed at me, and for a moment I thought I'd gone too far. She'd been treading around the real issues at hand and I'd deliberately stepped on them. "I don't know." she said finally.
"You bailed before the issue even came up." I pointed out.
"It would have interfered with my work. After everything I've been through, I don't need all the insecurity that comes with a relationship. All I've got in this life is me. I had to work hard to get that. And I don't want to lose it."
I heard the brittleness in her voice, saw the glimmer of moisture on one of her cheeks. She was hurting and we both knew it. "Sometimes." I told her, "you have to face your greatest fears by looking them in the eye, not just beating them into submission. You didn't look your situation in the eye. You picked up and moved on, beat it on one hand, and that may have been harder on you than staying and dealing with any potential problems on your team." I thought about Toshi and Hawk. "People in the shadows that you can trust, they're far and few between. And the ones you can love? They're priceless."
She looked away from me. "I've got to be going."
"If you really want my advice." I told her, "go see this guy Jack that you've been thinking about. Face him and face yourself, then let the chips fall wherever they may. It's been three years for you, and it's still like yesterday."
"It's not that easy."
"I didn't say anything about it being easy. I've got some issues of my own I have to face." I was thinking about Brynnmawr, remembering that dead planet construct in the Matrix what was left of him was stuck on, surrounded by graves that he'd helped fill. "Even this thing with Andi might not be over with. But I know what it is right now. You can't say the same thing."
She stood up from the table and smiled down at me. "I'll think about it, Argent. I appreciate your time. I know you didn't have to answer these questions." She offered her hand and I took it. "If you ever need a decker for another run and Peg can't cover for you, give me a call."
"I will." I said.
She turned and walked away. I watched her for awhile, wondering how she was going to handle her situation, knowing she was going to have to deal with it because it wasn't going to go away. The feelings ran too deep. But so did the fear that I saw inside her.
Back in the hotel that afternoon, I had Peg jack me back into the Matrix and take me to Brynnmawr.
"Are you sure this is something you want to do?" she asked as we stepped down into the desolate world where he'd been confined. The eternal night draped shadows over the cemetery around us.
I gazed around at the row of tombstones, looking for him. "It's something I have to do." I told Peg. I spotted him walking toward us. Peg had changed her persona to look like me. In the Matrix I couldn't feel the pain from the broken leg or the bullet wounds quite so bad.
"Argent, my boy, what are you doing here? Is something wrong?" He sounded genuinely concerned, his eyes raking me from head to toe.
"No sir." I responded. "Everything is fine."
"You're moving different."
I guessed that some of the gingerly way I'd been moving while recovering from the run had bled over into my mannerisms. Peg had looped a feedback into the program to allow her to read my stored body language.
"I was wounded, sir."
"Of course you were. But are you well now?"
"I'm getting there, sir. Thank you for asking."
Brynnmawr reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the pecans that he gathered from the trees over the graves. He cracked it between his fingers, dropping bits of the hull onto the ground.
"I brought you something, sir." I held up a plain white box with Peg's help. She was still in control of the persona.
A wary look entered his eyes and he drew away slightly. That was the first time I'd ever seen him appear frightened, and seeing that reaction hurt me.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A gift, sir." I flipped open the top, revealing the dozen bagels inside. "Something to offer a change to the palate." I'd asked Peg to design a program that would replace the pecans the construct Brynnmawr had been imprisoned in forced him to eat. She'd told me that she guessed the pecan data was a small support program designed to help keep the integrity of the construct attuned to Brynnmawr's needs.
"I've always had a fondness for bagels." He tossed the pecan away and reached in for one.
Peg's programming was good. The bagels still gave offbeat, and I could tell how soft they were from the way Brynnmawr tore them in his hands. "There's something special about the box too, sir." I closed the lid, then ope
ned it again. Once more, there were twelve bagels inside. "As long as you don't completely empty the box, it will refill." The program was also designed to replicate itself if it wasn't totally used up.
"Ingenious." Brynnmawr graciously took the box. "I thank you for the gift, my boy, but why?" His face got suddenly stern. "If this is given out of pity, I'll have none of it."
"No sir." I said. "It's just a gift. Maybe you can even consider it as a down payment."
"A down payment for what?"
"I've come to realize something lately, sir." I said. "You taught me everything I knew in the beginning. And I've gone on to teach myself several other things. But you've never once taught me everything you know."
Brynnmawr smiled. "So the prodigal has returned."
"There are some things I'd like to talk over with you sir. Some things I need to understand."
"Sencio didn't stay with you?"
I shook my head.
"I'm not surprised." Brynnmawr said. "She was never as disciplined as you were."
"I don't feel very disciplined, sir. Frankly, these past few years, I've kind of felt all over the place."
"Because of your lost team mates?"
"I think that brought things to a head, sir." I told him. "There's more left over from my time with you than I'd thought. I need a clearer understanding of you to put it all into perspective."
"Introspection is never a good thing for a field agent." he told me. "But as for becoming a man, truly becoming the man you were born to be, there's no harsher teacher than one's own self. And it's the only thing that will allow you to be what you most need to be." He smiled and clutched my upper arm, pulling me into motion, guiding me again like he had all those years ago.
I went willingly, following him into the gravekeeper's house in the middle of that virtual cemetery, surrounded by the dead of his life. I wondered what the house would look like on the inside, what kind of comforts or tortures his captors would have dreamed up and programmed for him.
"You and I talking." Brynnmawr said, "it's not going to be the same. We've both grown."
And I wasn't as young or as idealistic, or as sure of myself. He knew that.
"I know how you feel, my boy." he told me in a low, compassionate voice that surprised me. "Broken up and busted inside. It hurts having to look at your own mortality and your own capability for making mistakes."
"Yes sir."
"But those things are truths, my boy, and the truth shall set you free."
I went with him into the house, to learn the things that only an adult son could learn from a father. And I was already feeling freer than I had in a long time.
END UPLOAD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mel Odom is the author of over 60 books in the science fiction, computer gaming, action-adventure, horror, young adult, and juvenile fields and makes his home in Moore, Oklahoma. Besides writing books, he coaches his nine-year-old's and fifteen-year-old's basketball teams, a Little League baseball team, and teaches.
In addition to being a contributor to the Shadowrun® universe, he's writing books for TSR's Forgotten Realms setting, for Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Alex Mack, and a popular on-going adventure series.
He's also done the recent Blade movie novelization starring Wesley Snipes. His books have been translated into Russian and German, and he is an inductee of Oklahoma's Professional Writers' Hall of Fame. At a young age.
He shares his life with wife, Sherry, and their five children, Matthew Lane, Matthew Dain, Montana, Shiloh, and baby Chandler. And a lot of friends and ball teams.
He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and welcomes comments.
Copyright
A ROC BOOK
ROC
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First Printing, February, 1999
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