“You. Don’t. Know.” Lucien slipped his hand behind her head and pulled her to him, kissing her hard enough to hurt. He’d rinsed his mouth with a peppermint concoction—the sharp taste filled Jani’s sinuses and made her eyes water.
“Tell Kern he better come through with that retainer,” he whispered as he broke away. The door had closed after him before Jani thought to breathe.
She spent the balance of the afternoon alternating between Kern’s files, Devinham’s dock data, and the other Treasury reports. As the sky darkened, she prepped a strange supper of Neoclona Chicken Surprise washed down with lemon tonic. The chicken did indeed surprise her by tasting good. She buried thoughts of how a fully human mouth would perceive the tangy wine-herb flavor she enjoyed, and sopped up the sauce with bits of bread.
Late evening found her restless, brain churning with Nema’s troubles, Lucien’s actions, Roni McGaw’s trepidation, and her own white paper-lined collision with her past. She tried to decompress by flipping through a holo album her parents had sent her the month before. First came sceneshots of north Acadian wilds near Oncle Shamus’s tourist compound, the moors and the rolling hills. Then came the more personal images. Her mother, Jamira, grey-edged black hair twisted into a loose knot, holding up a rainbow-hued sari she bought for Jani to wear during her expected visit home. Her father, Declan, sleeves rolled up to expose sinewy arms, displaying with self-conscious pride the oaken salmon he had machined to hang over the mantel of Shamus’s lodge fireplace.
Jani stilled the rolling image and studied her father’s face—the turned-up nose, snub chin, straight black hair—and saw the face she had worn before Evan van Reuter’s bomb blew her out of the Shèrá sky. Her chest tightened. She slammed the album closed and shoved it back in her desk drawer, then pulled a Service-surplus field coat from her front closet.
The urge to bolt, which never lurked too deep beneath her surface, broke through several times as she walked to the lift. She could pack in minutes, catch any of a dozen trains or ’movers to O’Hare, lift off for Luna within the hour, be halfway to Mars before anyone realized that she had left Chicago.
No, I don’t do that anymore. I’ve signed a rental contract. I have clients, obligations. I’m a free and functioning member of society.
Then why did she feel more trapped now then she ever had as a fugitive?
The air held a hard, brittle quality, as though it would sing like glass if Jani brushed her fingers through it. She pulled up her collar and stuffed her hands in her pockets, her internal thermostat having decided now was the time to freeze her to death. She trudged down the empty sidewalk and across the deserted street, past the tarpaulined silence of the renovation and down a side lane, until she came upon a small park nestled between two Family townhouses. She wiped an unseasonable dusting of frost from a slatwood bench, and sat.
Despite the cold, she savored the night silence. She hadn’t been entirely truthful with Lucien—the blasts and clatters of construction did bother her. Not her augmentation, no. What they did was uncover memories. Of the bombs. The stench of smoke and char. The rubble, and what lay beneath.
Yolan Cray died during the first round of shelling at Knevçet Shèràa, when the Laumrau shatterboxes wrought their first wave of destruction. Windows had sharded. Safety doors had blown. Walls collapsed, and killed. Buried. Entombed.
Jani closed her eyes as once more, Borgie’s sobs filled her ears. She could see him, clear as relentless remembrance could be, as he lifted Yolan’s broken body and buried his face in her wispy blonde hair.
Silence. Silence felt like heaven. Jani tensed as the distant scree of a ComPol siren broke through. She thought of a seat on an outbound shuttle, and clenched her hands into fists. She forced herself to sit still as silence, and watched the shaded windows until the last light faded.
CHAPTER 8
Jani awoke with a start to find she had worked her way over to Lucien’s side of the bed. She buried her face in his pillow, filling her nose with his scent as fragments of a rather pleasant dream drilled heat-tracks through her brain and down her spine.
I’m not in love. She struggled into a sitting position. I know what love is, and this ain’t it. This was lust, the enthusiastic appreciation of a beautiful body and all the wonders it could perform. It worked beneath her skin like a constant prickling, as though nerves that had never felt before had suddenly come alive. It was ridiculous. It made no sense.
It was profoundly human and she would cherish its every ache and throe for all the human time she had left.
Love had nothing to do with her feelings for Lucien. Nor trust. She didn’t trust him to give her the right time, but she had never felt that was part of the deal. She allowed him access to Nema, and a chance to build his career; he took her out of herself for a little while, and accepted her at face value. In the series of deals and trade-offs that had comprised her life for over twenty years, this one worked better than most.
Love, on the other hand, felt like a calm refuge in the midst of a raging storm. Nasty thing about love—it let you get comfortable, then threw you a curve. She’d loved Evan van Reuter once, with the handed-down-from-heaven certainty of a twenty-one-year-old who thought it all started with her. That ended when she realized what giving herself over to a Family member really meant. When she learned that the public Evan and the private Evan were two distinctly different men, and that while he didn’t think that mattered, she did.
She tottered to the bathroom, collecting clothes along the way. And then there’s John Shroud. A few weeks before, she had made the mistake of spending a day in the Neoclona documents archives to research a last-minute project. Funny how John needed to look up some data that very day. They’d spent hours discussing, bickering, and laughing over everything from the results of the latest Cup match to exactly what color are Val Parini’s eyes, anyway? And when they didn’t talk, they worked at their respective tasks, or read, or daydreamed, content simply to be in each other’s company.
Jani didn’t realize until she’d returned to her flat that she had once again given herself over. That she’d let John choose the chair in which she sat, the food she ate, the color of the folder she used to bind her report, and that she’d set her conscious will aside and allowed it to happen. She didn’t blame him. Not entirely. They were inextricably bound, as only creator and created could be. He had saved her life, rebuilt her to the best of his ability, sheltered her from Service justice until she dug deep and found the will to shake him off.
He was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. Her mutant eyes, as green as the edge of a pane of glass. The harbinger of what was to come, the point man for the changes her body was going through.
Jani arranged her clothes and showering gear in the over-mirrored bathroom, all the while avoiding her myriad reflections. She bent over the sink to brush her teeth—the strong mint odor of her tooth cleaner irritated the inside of her nose. She sneezed, then groaned as she felt the telltale loosening over her right eye as the film fissured. She peeled away the ruptured hydropolymer and rummaged through the drawers for her filmformer. Bottle in hand, she made ready to apply and let dry, then stopped herself. “I need to look in the mirror to make sure it spreads evenly.” Her filmed eye could wind up looking like a fried egg if the polymer didn’t coat properly. One…two… She took a deep breath, and looked at her naked eye.
The iris had increased in size and darkened profoundly over the summer, thanks to her accelerated hybridization. Half again as large as a human iris, a forest green shattered marble accentuated by the lighter hue of her visible sclera. She pulled down her lid, exposing the edging of slight darkening that inscribed the border between green and white. Sweet baby jades, Val had dubbed them, as though giving them a nickname would help Jani accept their inevitable change.
John did this because he loved me. Because he didn’t know how else to save me. Because he had convinced himself that he possessed the know-how to construct a human-idomeni hybrid tha
t combined the best of both species but left the unwanted effects behind. Because he felt that since he did what he did with the best of intentions, for love and for science, that the law of unintended consequences didn’t apply.
“That’s love for you.” Jani shook the drops of filmformer onto her eye and counted off the setting time.
She adjusted the shower to a pounding spray that massaged the constant stiffness from her muscles. She dressed for comfort, in a white Service surplus pullover and dark blue fatigue pants, since she had no appointments until her dinner with Steve and Angevin that evening. Not unless Derringer drops by. She didn’t look forward to that. He’d pick up their argument where it left off at the embassy, and she’d have to employ every duck and dodge she knew to keep him from breaking out his particular set of thumbscrews.
She was in the midst of toweling her hair when the bedroom comport squawked.
“Good morning, Mistress Kilian,” Hodge entoned formally. “Colonel Pierce is here.”
“Good morning, Hodge. Send him up.”
Hodge glanced off to the side, and nodded. “If you would, Mistress, attend here please. Colonel Pierce would prefer to discuss the matter in another venue.”
In other words, Niall wanted to talk outside. “Tell him I’ll be right down.”
By the time Jani entered the lobby, she found Niall had already adjourned to the sidewalk in front of the apartment house. He wore fallweights—dark blue trousers cut by a mainline red stripe, paired with a long-sleeved grey shirt. He set his dark blue garrison cap on his head, then dug into his shirt pocket. When Jani saw him remove the nicstick case and shake out a ’stick, her stomach roiled.
“Pretty Boy up there?” He spoke without turning around, his eyes fixed on the street activity.
“No.” Jani pulled up beside him, and caught a whiff of the astringent smoke. Her nose tickled ominously—she circled around Niall in search of clean air and started up the walk.
Niall fell in beside her. Luckily, the light breeze blew his smoke in the opposite direction. “Plan to see him today?”
“No. He does occasionally show up out of the blue, though. He’s keyed into the flat, and he keeps things there.” Jani stopped at a kiosk and purchased a packet of crackers. Her stomach was letting her know that skipping breakfast had been a dumb idea, and tasteless with a little salt had proved safe in the past. “Is there a point to these questions?”
“Yes.” Niall glanced around uncertainly, then reached into his shirt pocket again.
Jani watched him shake out and ignite another ’stick. “OK, Niall, what don’t you know how to tell me?”
They had come upon a small playground. Niall leaned against a low fence and watched two small boys launch a tiny pondskimmer in the shallow pool of a fountain. “It’s your parents.” His eyes widened. “I began that badly. I’m sorry. They’re fine. They’re—they’re on their way here. They hit MarsPort tonight. They touch down at O’Hare the day after tomorrow.”
Jani ran the words over in her mind once, then again. She knew what she’d heard, but it made no sense to hear it from Niall. “Repeat what you just said.”
“Jani, you heard me.”
“Why didn’t they let me know?”
“I don’t know. I have a few guess—”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I got a bare bones Misty earlier this morning from a buddy in Guernsey. Ares Station called to confirm that they’re on their way.”
The boys argued over which of them should control the skimmer. As their high-pitched quibbling intensified, they lost track of the craft. Jani watched it veer off-course, bounce off the side of the fountain, and spin in tight circles. “Does this have anything to do with the white paper?”
“I don’t know.” Niall leaned out over the fence as the toy popped out of the pool, catching it before it clattered to the cement. “We’re going to debrief them during the trip from Mars to Luna.” He held up a hand to silence her protests. “They’re coming here under very strange circumstances. We have to find out what compelled them. Were they told something about you that made them fear for your safety? What? From whom?”
“From whom?” Jani waited. “Spit it out, Niall.”
Niall ran a finger along the pondskimmer’s bow, and scraped a thumbnail over a colored decal. “Ever hear of a group called L’araignée?”
“Spider?” Jani shook her head. “Sounds like one of those trumped-up gangs that takes over a loading dock and calls itself a syndicate.”
“This is a little more than a trumped-up gang.” Niall flicked the skimmer’s safety switch, then tossed it back in the water. “It’s a well-organized alliance of colonial businesses. Their stated goal is to ‘maintain standards and markets throughout the Commonwealth,’ whatever the hell that means. The problem, according to my Guernsey friend, is that the membership wasn’t very well vetted. They range in legitimacy from rock-solid to ones like you mentioned, gangs taking over loading docks. Unfortunately, the gangs seem to be taking over L’araignée, as well. My buddy says that in the months since its inception, L’araignée’s been responsible for all sorts of interesting incidents. Money laundering. Diversion of goods. The odd hijacked transport.” He watched the bickering boys, still oblivious to their dead-in-the-water ship. “They’re based in the Channel. That’s why I wondered if you’d heard of them, if your folks had ever mentioned them.”
“No.” Jani backed away from the fountain, her hands pressed to her ears—the boys’ screeching made her head pound. She envisioned her parents disembarking at MarsPort, surrounded by uniforms. Did Spec Service receive training in making smalltalk with parents? Could Niall snag her a seat on a shuttle so that she could meet them at Luna? Were they afraid? “Does Mako know they’re coming?”
“Of course Mako knows they’re coming.” Niall herded her up the street. “He assigned me to head up the welcoming committee.” His weathered face set in grim lines. “They’ve become his new special project. He knows you’d ring the curtain down on him if anything happened to them.”
“I’d never do anything that could take you out.”
“You say that now. I’ve watched you look through holo albums for the past four months.”
“Niall.”
“Yeah.” Niall pulled out another ’stick. “I told you I would check on who had been involved in compiling the information in that white paper, right? Well, matters got interesting in one hell of a hurry.” He snorted smoke like a Tsing Tao dragon. “Guess who spent the first six months of this year zipping to most of the same cities covered in your report? Guess who met with agents based in the locations that he didn’t manage to visit in person? Go on, guess.”
“The Service was looking for me at the time, Niall.” Even as she spoke, Jani felt a chill flood her limbs that had nothing to do with her wonky internal thermostat. It was augie, she knew, clamping down on the blood flow to her extremities, prepping her for the dash to safety that she couldn’t afford to make. “It made sense to send Lucien after me. He did know me and he is in Intelligence.”
“Intelligence.” Niall gave the word a gamy twist. “Speaking of trumped-up gangs.” They pulled up in front of Jani’s building. “I’m going to be a little hard to get hold of until your folks arrive. I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll notify you as soon as we have them.”
“I want to be there.”
“Not a good idea. Save the reunion for the safe house. I want them in plain sight as little as possible, and I don’t want the three of you together in public.” He touched her arm, a brush of the fingers only. “I’ve got them. They’ll be fine. You have my word. We have them sighted. We know when they’ll arrive at MarsPort. We have people there to take charge of them. They’ll be under close guard until they get here. I will meet them at O’Hare personally and place them in protective custody immediately.”
Niall escorted Jani back to her flat. She tried once more to talk him into letting her come along to O’Hare, and he again
stated reasonably and firmly why he felt that wasn’t a good idea. He then took his leave, his the light step of someone who had an order of mission and a timetable and all those other things that kept the hours from hanging over your head like a sword suspended by a steadily unraveling thread.
“We also serve who only sit and go mad.” Jani walked to her desk and fell into her chair. Her comport incoming message light showed dark for the first time in weeks, and she had her for-hire projects under control for the moment. She dug McGaw’s affidavit out of her duffel and tried to examine it, but couldn’t muster the concentration she needed. The image of two figures huddled in a ship’s cabin had formed in her mind and refused to yield the floor.
Her stomach grumbled, and she went into the kitchen to shut it up. Her throat clenched with every swallow of the Neoclona premade, and she expected at any point to expel into the sink everything she had just swallowed. But augie ran her now, and his orders were always simple and to the point. Eat first. Sleep. Study. Evaluate the facts. Then act.
She lay down on her side of the bed. Lucien’s scent didn’t interest her now. The problem with Niall’s quick and dirty assessment of the source of the white paper was that she could indeed imagine Lucien compiling it. “I can’t see him leaving anything out, though.” He enjoyed creating anxiety. Jani could imagine him dropping details of her deed-copying for months, then savoring her every start and display of unease.
She struggled to forget about Lucien by performing thought exercises that she’d developed during her years on the run, when augie threatened to blow out the top of her head unless she acted and she knew action was the last thing she should do. She inhaled slowly. Exhaled. Visualized her limbs sinking into the mattress. Concentrated on a mental image of Baabette, a storybook character from her youth. In her conception, the white sheep with the black face sat at a workstation and assembled a hologram landscape, an absurdity that for some odd reason Jani found calming. She had just reached the point where sleep seemed possible when her comport screeched.
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