Law of Survival

by Kristine Smith

  Jani waved good-bye. Watched the lift door close and the numbers flicker as the car descended. Enjoyed the silence. It didn’t surprise her to see the car start to ascend almost immediately. She knew she lived in a busy building, despite the façade of calm.

  Then the car stopped at her floor. She sat up.

  The lift door opened, and Niall Pierce stepped out. Instead of a Service uniform, he wore civvies—a dark blue shirt and black trousers. It struck Jani that while he roughened the edges of any uniform he wore, he lent a strange grace to civilian clothes. A sense of mystery. In either garb, he looked the hatchet man, but in civvies, you couldn’t tell whose hatchet he swung.

  He spotted her and stopped in the middle of the hallway, hands patting his pockets without diving in because the Spacer in him despised the sloppiness. “Jani?”

  He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Nervous?”

  Jani look at Niall. He appeared at first glance to sit easily at the skimmer controls, but closer examination revealed the whitened knuckles, the tension along the jaw. “About as much as you are.” She grinned when he glared at her. “Maybe a little more.” But the smirk soon died, leaving her with the twisty gut and tripping heart. This wasn’t augie’s sort of strain. He had crawled off to recover his strength, leaving her to manage this emotional assault on her own.

  “Shocked the hell out of me when Pull called to say they’d be hitting O’Hare in an hour. Lots of balls got dropped on this one—if it takes me a month to nail all the hides to the wall, I’ll do it.” Niall steered down a tree-lined Bluffs side street, then another, before veering onto the ramp leading to a Boul artery. He had driven with evasion in mind since they left Armour Place, but he changed directions and speeds so smoothly that for scattered moments Jani felt herself on a private guided tour of the capital and the Bluffs.

  “How are they?” She almost coughed the words. Her throat had taken to tightening intermittently, with a pain that felt as though someone attempted her slow strangulation. She’d known someone who died that way, and the memory of being one of the first to find the body piled atop the rest of her jumbled emotions. She could feel the pressure build inside her head, making her feel one raw thought away from exploding.

  “They seem fine. Exhausted, like the rest of us.” Niall emphasized the point with a yawn. “Lots of questions about you. How you were. When you’d be visiting.” The corner of his mouth curved. “Your mom talks more than your dad. Asks a lot of questions.”

  “Your point?”

  “Just making an observation.” He settled back in his seat, smiling quietly.

  Jani let the silence carry them for a few kilometers, but as they continued north on the Boul, her nerves nagged again. “Where is this place?”

  “I told you before. On the base.”

  Jani looked out the window at the homes they passed. Nice, anonymous homes with easy access to the Boul and the lake. “Why not a safe house in the Bluffs?”

  “Not secure enough.” Niall’s voice tightened. “At Sheridan, they’re shoulder-deep in steel blue. No one is going to get to them there.”

  What about the ones that are already there, Niall? Like the ones who dropped the ball on forwarding you the news that my folks arrived ahead of schedule. Jani sat forward, hands on knees, and willed the skimmer faster.

  Dusk had settled by the time they reached Fort Sheridan. The western skies had colored with streaks of pink and purple, backed by the last light of the setting sun. To the east, the darker sky served as backdrop for the base sprawl, the single and multi-story buildings that stretched in street-split clusters to the horizon and beyond.

  Instead of entering the base via the well-peopled Shenandoah Gate, Niall drove farther north and entered through an unmanned control point reserved for emergency vehicles. Once inside, he ignored signs and skimways, gliding over lawns and around buildings and trees at speeds that had Jani muttering a proxy version of the Pedestrian’s Prayer and hoping the Grounds crews had been diligent in pruning low-hanging branches.

  They settled to a stop in front of a nondescript two-story whitestone box. Only one other skimmer sat parked nearby—the place had the deserted look of an office annex in the middle of second shift meal break.

  Niall popped both gullwings; they slid out of the vehicle and hurried up the short flight of steps.

  The lobby consisted of a chip-sized entry, with barely enough room for the solemn Spacer who snapped to attention as soon as she saw Niall.

  “Anyone else come here?”

  “No, sir. You’re the first, sir.”

  Jani felt her legs grow heavy as they entered the lift. She hugged herself as the shivers hit.

  “What’s wrong?” Niall took a step toward her.

  “I’m fine. It’s nerves, I think.” Then her stomach growled. “Damn it!”

  “I heard that from here.” Niall leaned against the cabin wall as his alert stage dropped from red to orange. “Want me to get you something?”

  “Yeah. If I’m going to be here for a while, I’ll need it.” The door opened and she stepped into a short hallway consisting of bare white walls and a floor of speckled grey lyno. “God, this is grim.”

  “Don’t worry—what we saved on the hall, we spent on the rooms.” Niall took a step back when Jani turned on him. “That was a joke.” He rummaged in his shirt pocket and pulled out his nicstick case. “Steady on, Jan, you’re rubbing off.” He shook out a ’stick, bit the bulb, and watched the smoke curl. “Third door on the left. Do you want me to come with?”

  “No.”

  “You’re fine. You look fine. You’ll do fine.”

  “Yeah.” Jani tugged at her jacket as she walked to the door. Why did she wear brown? Maman hates brown. She should have made Niall wait while she changed clothes. The sari would have been ridiculously inappropriate, but she had a wine red suit that she didn’t wear often because she never knew when she’d get a call to the idomeni embassy and under the right light, it looked almost bright—

  She stopped in front of the door, then looked back at Niall, who offered a grin and a thumbs-up. She pressed her hand to the entry pad. The doormech hissed and the bolts slid. The panel moved aside, and she stepped into the breach.

  Niall had been partly correct about the rooms. The walls were still white, but the bareness had been cut with some unimaginative but pleasant landscapes. The depressing lyno had been covered with a green carpet patterned to look like leafy groundcover. The garden motif carried over to the couch and chairs that furnished the sitting room, with their frames of light brown woodweave and cushions awash with red and yellow flowers.

  Declan and Jamira Kilian sat close together on the couch, a magazine spread across their knees. They had looked up as one as the door opened, and stared at Jani as she stepped into the room.

  Jani stared back. Her mother’s napeknot, as ever the poor containment for a thick waistfall of hair, had come undone and now hung over one shoulder in a stream of grey-tipped black. Jamira Shah neared seventy, yet her bold face looked little different from that of the woman whom Jani had last seen almost twenty years before. As always, she wore clothes designed to fight back the storm and wind of the north central islands. Today, bright yellow trousers and a patterned shirt in yellow, white, and orange that carried with them the warmth of a motherland she had never seen and the light of a sun she had felt for the first time that day.

  “Jani-girl?”

  Jani looked to her father, who studied her like a puzzling schematic. Declan the fixer. Kilian, who never met a system he couldn’t crack. His was the seven-decade version of the impish face Dolly remembered, the face Jani had once shared. Upturned nose and apple cheeks ruddied by wind, framed by jet hair, cut by green sea eyes. He wore Channel colors, dark green and darker blue. Like his wife, he showed little of twenty years’ passage. It took a special endurance to live on the islands, and more than time to age her natives.

 
Jani waited for her father to say more, for her mother to say anything. Do I look that strange to you? Did the Misty distort my image—is that why you don’t recognize me? Or is it because you don’t think I look like I could be your daughter? Or anyone’s daughter.

  Is it because you don’t think I look human?

  Jamira raised a hand to her mouth. Let it fall. Then she shoved the magazine onto her husband’s lap. Rising quick and smooth, she legged across the fake greenery floor, strides growing shorter as she picked up speed. “Ma petite fille!” She knocked Jani back a step as she collided with her, wrapping her arms around her waist and pressing her face against her chest.

  “Oui, Maman. It’s me.” Jani’s throat clamped down hard, her voice emerging high and thin like a little girl’s. She gripped the rope of hair, held it fast. Smelled jasmine perfume and makeup and the barest hint of incense from a distant shrine.

  A heavier step approached. Stronger arms embraced. Sharp herb soap and hair like wire and a face rough with new beard. “Jani-girl.”

  “Papa.” Jani heard the roar in her ears and called it the wind and tasted the salt on her face and called it the sea.

  Felt a rent in her heart heal, and called it home.

  “—and then Shamus returns from the stores and tells us that a man is looking for us.” Jamira lifted her spoon from her cup and raised it like a question. “‘What man?’ I asked. ‘No one knows we are at Faeroe.’”

  Jani sat back in her flower chair and watched her mother resume stirring her tea. “No. No one. Only Tante Smruti so she knows to keep an eye on things, and Cheecho so he knows to take care of the birds, and Jones the Grocery so she should stop the deliveries, and then all the people you asked to keep an eye on those three to make sure they do their jobs.”

  “Tell Smruti anything, may as well tell ChanNet.” Declan frowned into his coffee, ignoring his wife’s glower. “So, Shamus being Shamus, he raised his tail and pelted home. Just as he’s gasping the details, I look out and see a skimmer in the circle. Dull green two-seater. Old. Sort of model you see around Faeroe. And out comes the man. Also the sort you see around Faeroe, at least these days. The kind that looks like he’s just waiting for you to turn your back.”

  “He said he had a message from you, Janila. That you needed us and we had to come to Chicago.” Jamira lifted a sandwich from the tray on the table in front of her and took a small, examining bite. “He gave us billets, and money for expenses, and a note in your handwriting. The note read just like you—to the point, with no explanation.”

  Jani looked across the room, where Niall perched atop a low cabinet. “They got hold of samples of my writing and knew enough about me to copy my style.”

  Niall nodded. He took a pull on his ’stick, then held his breath to leech the last molecule of nicotine from the smoke. “My Guernsey friend thinks L’araignée planned to waylay them at Helier Transfer Station. Busy place like that—who’d notice if two travelers disappeared? But the white paper had made the rounds out there, and the name Kilian was on everybody’s mind. When it showed up on the passenger manifest of an Acadian cruiser, it was a footrace to see who’d get to the station first. We won.”

  “White paper?” Declan peered over the rim of his cup at Jani. “Did someone write you up, Jani-girl?”

  “I work for the government, Papa. Someone decided to investigate me.” Jani picked at the makeshift supper Niall had scrounged for her. Slices of kettle chicken soaked with Chinois hot sauce. Lemon wedges and a cup of red pepper for dredging. “When I was in hiding, I did what I had to. I helped smugglers. Tampered with documents. Some people think that makes me a security risk.”

  “Then there are those of us who think that makes her a consultant.” Niall paused to blow a perfect smoke ring. “The white paper is a smear attempt. Your daughter is an important player in our dealings with the idomeni. Because of that, some very powerful economic forces who want to destabilize our relations with Shèrá would like to see her discredited.”

  Declan nodded. “I’ve tried to work with some of those forces. Make that in spite of them.” The lines of his puckish face drew down. As always, sadness made him look angry. “Those people tell you, ‘We want this and this and that.’ And if you don’t give it to them, well…” He drew a shaky breath. “I’ve buried four good friends in the past months. They died because they wouldn’t give up what they’d spent their lives building, because they wouldn’t hand over this and this and that.”

  “Who?” Jani’s hand tightened on the arm of her chair as she braced for the answer.

  “Jani?” Niall leaned forward, voice and posture tense.

  “People seldom leave Ville Acadie,” Jani replied to his implicit concern. “I probably knew them.”

  Declan blinked as he spoke, as though he couldn’t believe what he said. “Simone. The Fuel Cells, not the Butcher. Echevar and Samvoy, the cousins in construction, not their parents whom you knew.” A pause. “Labat.”

  “Labat?” Jani looked again at Niall. “He ran the off-track near our house. He took bets that I wouldn’t make it through OCS.”

  “He didn’t count on your stubbornness, Jani-girl. He didn’t always think things through, and he paid the big price.” Declan’s weak grin subsided. “The day after Labat’s funeral, I shuttered my business and left my home, took my wife away from her family. I fled because I install and rework systems and they look for people like that. I knew one day, the shop door would open and I would look up and see two or three well-dressed, soft-spoken people standing there, and I would know the questions before they uttered them.” His voice grew small. “And I’d think of four dead friends, and the answers I would give…would not be worthy of them.”

  Jamira reached out to him. When he didn’t respond, she gripped his hand and laced her fingers through his. “They have always been in Ville Acadie, but they kept themselves to themselves. Now, they dine in the best clubs, build the largest homes. Send their children here to university. There are no brakes, no walls. Nothing stops them.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Jani watched her parents hold on to one another, and felt her freshly closed wounds ache anew. “I asked you why you left home, why you went to Faeroe. Why didn’t you tell me!”

  “We didn’t want you to worry, Janila. We thought we would come here in the spring to visit, and not go back.” Her mother forced a smile. “But spring came early.”

  “Doesn’t the Acadian government do anything?” Niall didn’t sound angry, only tired, as if he already knew the answer.

  Declan snorted. “Oh, it does something. Takes its cut and turns its back.” A gloomy silence settled, hanging over them until the room entry buzzer offered respite.

  Niall pushed off the lowboy and opened the door. When he saw who stood in the hall, he beckoned to Jani. “We need to discuss logistics.”

  Jani rose awkwardly, hampered by her knee. Before she joined Niall, she leaned over the table and touched her father’s shoulder. “You are worthy of every friend you ever had. The fact that you left La Ville means nothing. Everyone pulls back. Regroups. That doesn’t make you a coward and it doesn’t mean you’re a sell-out. You don’t belong to them.”

  “Yet.” Declan made no move to touch her, no effort to meet her gaze. “That’s what they do to you, Jani-girl. They plant that ‘yet’ in the back of your mind, and it grows until it eats you alive.”

  Jani waited for her father to look at her. When he didn’t, she turned her attention to her mother. Jamira sat as her husband did, her shoulders rounding, her eyes focused on the floor. They both seemed drained of energy. Beaten. Old.

  “I’ll be in the hall with Niall,” Jani said quietly. She watched the carpet as she made her traverse to the door, and found that she could pick out each individual leaf, discern every shade of green. She could thank augie for the heightened senses—it detected her growing rage and responded accordingly.

  She walked out into the hall to find Niall surrounded by a circle of uniforms.
Lt. Pullman was the only one she recognized—he smiled weakly at her, then returned his attention to the heating discussion.

  “This is no time to be arguing jurisdiction, Major.” Niall stood within a handbreadth of a red-faced woman in rumpled fallweights. “Your team lost them at MarsPort, and didn’t pick them up again until they had almost boarded the wrong ship!”

  “They were out of our sensor range for a grand total of ten seconds, and out of our physical sight for less than thirty.” The major closed the distance to two fingers. “That does not, sir, in my estimation, qualify as lost!”

  “I’ve seen people disappear in the time it took to turn a corner.” Jani wedged in between a lieutenant in fallweights and a captain in dress blue-greys. “The time it took to turn around. Glance at a timepiece. Blink.” She stepped inside the circle, shouldering Niall to one side and taking over his position in the major’s face. “Ten seconds is enough time to hustle two people into a lift, or out a side door, or through an airlock.” She saw the uncertainty in the woman’s bloodshot eyes, and rode it. “Who lost them? I want names.”

  “I can’t give you the—”

  “Those were my parents they almost lost. You will give me their names.”

  “She will be reprimanded—”

  “She?” Jani heard Niall groan. “Let me get this straight. You had one operative with a handheld sensor escort two people through one of the busiest transfer stations in the Commonwealth by herself!”

  The woman rocked from foot to foot, then edged back a half-step. “It’s…standard practice. Ma’am.”

  Jani closed the distance the major tried to open. If she left too much space, she’d have room to use her hands; that wasn’t a risk she wanted to take with augie worrying his bit.