Law of Survival

by Kristine Smith

  Tsecha said nothing in reply; Shai said no more. Humanish often said that there were times when no words were necessary. This was one of those times.

  CHAPTER 27

  She stood in a hallway, or an alley. Dim light seemed to come not from a single point but from all about her, as though the surfaces themselves served as the source of illumination. But even though she could see, she couldn’t tell exactly where she was. The light wasn’t bright enough to define any doors or openings that could identify the space. She could only sense that she stood in a walled place, long and narrow.

  Her breathing came quick and hard. She could feel her heart pound, the pulse in her throat. Her right knee ached. She knew she had been running, but she couldn’t remember why.

  She touched the nearest wall. Green, it seemed to be—she couldn’t see the color, but green made sense for some reason. The wall felt smooth as glass. Cold. The surface possessed a strange translucence, like a leaf coated with ice.

  “Jani!”

  She wheeled toward the shout. She recognized the voice, knew the name it called was hers. Strange name. She hadn’t used it in a long time.

  “Where the hell are you!”

  A man’s voice. Young. Angry.

  I’m running from him. She remembered now.

  “They’re waiting for us at Gaetan’s.” Lucien appeared in the distance. He wore drop-dead whites, the formal Service uniform; he looked like the officer in his painting. “Your parents are there. They’re worried about you. Your mother asked me why you ran away. I told her they needed you at the embassy—I didn’t know what the hell else to say.”

  Jani remained silent, watching him. He looked far away, but she knew that was illusion. He had always been closer than she thought.

  “Jani?” Lucien stepped down the narrow space toward her. What little light there was reflected off the white cloth, the badges and the gold braid on his shoulders. His silver-blond hair. How he glowed, like a platinum column. “They’re waiting. Niall. Nema. John. Everyone.” He removed his brimmed lid, the same gold-trimmed white as his uniform, and tucked it under his arm. “We can take the long way back, if that would make you feel better.” He smiled as he held his hand out to her. His face seemed as translucent as the walls, as though it possessed layers, as well. “Let’s go.”

  She backed away. One step. Another. Then turned and ran—

  “Jani!”

  —and collided with Sasha. Blood streamed down the side of his face. Jani reached out to touch the blood—just as she did, the light exploded through the coated walls. The force of the blast drove shards of ice into her body. She collapsed, heard Lucien close in from behind as her blood poured from gaping wounds and spread across the floor—

  “Jani! Damn it, come on!”

  She felt a hand close over her sore left shoulder, and struck out with all her remaining strength—

  “Shit!”

  The voice jarred Jani awake. Her heart stumbled and her chest tightened as she pushed herself into a sitting position, her hands scrabbling for purchase on the soft pillows. She comprehended the familiar around her—the armoire, the dresser, the windows, and walls.

  “Jesus, gel! Steady on.” Steve backed away from the bed, his arm crossed over his stomach. “Tryin’ ta knock the wind outta me, or what?”

  “I told you to just keep calling from a safe distance until she opened her eyes.” Angevin stood at the foot of the bed, arms folded. “The last time I tried to wake her up by shaking her, she almost broke my wrist.”

  “No I dint—” Jani coughed the dryness from her throat. Then she licked her teeth, which felt unpleasantly coated. She looked down at herself. She recalled falling into bed fully clothed; sometime during the night, someone had removed her trouser suit and replaced it with a T-shirt and shorts. She hoped it was Angevin, but given the young woman’s reluctance to approach her as she slept…

  “We just wanted to see if you planned to wake up before the end of the year.” Angevin remained by the footboard. “You’ve been sleeping for almost fifteen hours. Even Lucien’s starting to worry.”

  “How is he?” Jani looked toward the door to make sure that he wasn’t standing there, listening.

  “He’s fine.” Steve’s lips barely moved, as though two words concerning Lucien took more effort than he wanted to expend.

  “You’ve had calls.” Angevin frowned. “We wouldn’t bother you otherwise.”

  Jani dropped her legs over the side, and let the momentum pull her to her feet. “What calls?”

  “—and something stinks!” Derringer’s reddened face filled the comport display. “Nobody questions this letter for weeks. Then you get involved and two days later, every dexxie in the city is backpedaling!” His eyes looked dull despite his anger, the skin beneath smudged with fatigue. Jani could imagine the late night meetings with Callum Burkett that led to his current exhausted state.

  “I don’t know what you did, you meddling pain in the ass bitch.” Derringer paused to yawn, striking his desktop with his fist as it went on and on. “But I will find out and when I do, you can kiss any reversal of your bioemotional restriction good-bye.”

  Jani watched his face still, then shard like the ice walls in her nightmare. “What was the time stamp on this?”

  “Oh-five twelve this morning. Judging from the look of him, he’d had a long day and a damned short night.” Steve tipped back in his chair, his feet braced against the edge of Jani’s desk. “I don’t believe he let himself be recorded making a threat.”

  “He’s panicked. He sees his quest for a star going down in flames, and every time he makes a move to cover himself, there’s Callum Burkett asking him for a full and complete report.” Jani stifled her own yawn. She still felt tired, even after her more than full night’s sleep. “I’m not too worried. I think that by this point, he’s screwed himself enough that Cal might be willing to listen to my side of the story.”

  Steve nodded, his fingers drumming a beat on his knees. “Not going to tell us what letter he’s talking about, are you?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know.”

  “You know, working with you is like punching through a GateWay without knowing if you’ll make it out the other side. You just says yer prayers and takes yer chances.”

  “Sorry,” Jani said, without feeling very sorry at all. The less you said, the less you needed to lie. The less you lied, the less you needed to remember.

  “Well,” Steve finally said, when it became obvious Jani wasn’t going to say any more. “Then there’s this cryptic masterpiece.” He leaned forward and hit the comport pad.

  Roni McGaw looked as though she’d gotten even less sleep than Derringer. “I left my stuff in your skimmer. Eight files, next to a big, empty box.” The hollow-eyed face stilled, then fragmented.

  “See what I mean?” Steve turned to Jani before Roni’s image had dissolved completely. “You don’t have a skimmer.”

  Jani suppressed a sigh as she watched the display dim. What had Roni found out? Had she been able to check Ulanova’s calendar in Exterior systems? Had Security taken the next step and shut down the ministry entirely?

  Steve crumpled a piece of notepaper and tossed it at the display. “She didn’t even tell you what time she were bloody stopping by.”

  Yes, she did—oh-eight tonight. But she wanted to meet Jani in the garage instead of their favorite bookstore.

  “Roni’s good. She’s been Exterior Doc Chief for three years.” Angevin had dragged one of the dining room chairs beside the desk, and sat heavily. “At least she lends an air of legitimacy to all this muck.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” Jani started to rise, but Steve’s hand on her arm compelled her to stay seated.

  “There’s one more.” He picked up his nicstick case from its resting place atop a stack of files, and shook out a gold-and-white striped cylinder. “This was the kicker. Took us both aback, me and Ange.” He hit the pad and sat back, smoking ’stick f
ixed between his teeth.

  Jani groaned as this face formed.

  “Janila?” Her mother looked back and forth, then up and down, as if she could look into Jani’s flat if she tried hard enough. “Are you all right? Dr. Parini says that you are, but he has not seen you, so how would he know?” She leaned forward and dropped her voice. “He said I should not call you, but why not? His comport is secure, is it not? And yours, surely—” Her eyes widened as something off-screen captured her attention.

  “Mère Kilian? Who are you talking to?” John’s bass resounded in sharp question. “Val asked you not to contact anyone.”

  “I am just playing, Dr. Shroud. I am bored and I am playing.” Jamira’s hands moved toward the disconnect, but not quickly enough. A white hand shot in from the side and caught her wrist. A white face followed.

  “Damn.” John’s cheeks pinked as he comprehended the code on Val’s display. He wore a jacket in Neoclona lilac, and had filmed his eyes the same startling shade. The purple accents heightened his flush so that he looked enraged. “You shouldn’t have done this, Mère Kilian.”

  “No! No! Do not touch me, you—!” Jamira pulled back from John, but not in time—he caught her two thin wrists in one hand with a grip Jani prayed was more gentle then it looked. “Let me go!” Jamira tried to twist away, but John held on to her with brutal ease as he reached for the comport pad. “Janila, I am so sorry! I love you! Please come—”

  Jani watched as the scene of her mother struggling in John’s grasp faded. She hit the comport pad’s reply button to try to reconnect to Val’s flat, and felt only a little reassured to find the code had been blocked to all calls. Then she sat forward and buried her head in her hands.

  “Jan?” Steve spoke. “Is that yer mum?”

  Jani nodded. “My father’s with her. They’re”—she couldn’t force herself to say the words—“at Val’s flat,” even though it didn’t matter, even though every security force in the city knew where her parents were by now. “They’re in a safe place.” What had been a safe place. She wondered if John felt spooked enough to move them to one of the numerous Neoclona buildings located throughout the city. “Someone tried to set them up to be kidnapped, but we found out in time.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  Jani’s head shot up. Beside her, Steve muttered a not-so-soft “Shit.”

  Lucien sat on the edge of the couch back. He had exchanged his pajamas and robe for winter base casuals. Thanks to a combination of augmentation and a twenty-six-year-old body, he had lost the haze of pain and weakness; he looked merely tired now, rather than debilitated. “Neoclona’s security force has always been overrated, in my opinion.”

  “Has it?” Jani rose, waving off Angevin’s murmur of concern. “I disagree. Considering some of the things that had to be done, we didn’t need an Office of Professional Standards getting in the way.”

  “Any security officer who answers to an OPS would have made sure the comports were blocked for outgoing. Failing that, they sure as hell would have canceled the transmission of that call.” Lucien stood. “That’s the problem when you use an actual home for a safe house—the people who live there tend to still treat it like a home.” He waited for her to circle the desk, then walked to her. His step was still slow, but steady, unhampered by his injury. “I would have thought your good friend Niall would be involved in this, but no Service safe house that I know of lets their guests call out. Where are they, with John or Val?”

  Jani brushed past him, her pace quickening as she neared her room. In the opening to the hallway, however, she stopped and turned back. Steve and Angevin regarded her as she expected them to, with a mixture of anger and hurt. She’d seen the look before, had accepted it as an inevitable and necessary part of her life. She would have worried if the faces around her looked too happy all the time. “I consider you my friends.” She took care not to look at Lucien as she spoke. “But I’ve known people to die because they told their friends too much. I’ve known the friends to die, as well. The people Steve talked about at dinner, the ones who kill over a crateful of chips, those are the people we’re dealing with here.”

  “We understand that,” Angevin piped. “But—”

  “But what?” Jani took a step back into the room. “But you wouldn’t have said anything? But you’d have promised not to talk? How long would that promise last if someone held a shooter to your head? To Steve’s head? How long would it last against an injector full of Sera? That was my mother’s face on the display, not yours. If anything happened, you’d lose a few nights’ sleep. But you’d get over it, because you’d have saved what meant most to you. Well, looking after what means most to me is how I’ve lived for the last twenty years, and I’m too goddamned old to change. You’re both sweet kids, but if absolute push came to bottom line shove and you had to choose between each other and my mother, who would you pick?” She turned and headed for her room before they felt compelled to answer. Some things could never be spoken of between people who called themselves friends, or they wouldn’t remain friends for long.

  The memory of her mother struggling in John’s grasp replayed in Jani’s mind, and she struck the doorway with the flat of her hand on the way through. She already had her T-shirt up over her head when she heard the door open again. She pulled it off anyway, because she had slept the day away and had only a few hours before her meeting with Roni. Because she needed to shake off the last of her languor, shower and change clothes and brush the coating out of her mouth. Because she needed to contact John and find out if he had moved her parents, contact Niall and find out where the hell he was. “I don’t have time for company.”

  “This isn’t a social call.” Lucien sat on the edge of the bed. His eyes fixed on her bare breasts, but only out of generalized interest. “Drives you crazy to be out of the loop, doesn’t it? To not know what’s going on. Well, triple it and you’ll know how I feel.”

  “I didn’t know that you felt at all.” Jani sought the refuge of her closet, riffling through the hangers for her favorite Service surplus gear. She chose a muddy blue mechanic’s coverall she’d swiped from a recycle bin, and added a black pullover to wear underneath in deference to the cold.

  “Who are you meeting? John? McGaw? Going to go pound the last fastener in Derringer’s career coffin?”

  Jani turned to find Lucien standing in the closet entry. Even though he gripped the sides of the doorway, blocking her in, she didn’t feel threatened. He wasn’t yet back to full strength. If he did get out of hand, she’d just punch him in his burn. “Who said I’m meeting anybody?”

  “Come on—I heard those messages!” Lucien’s hair caught the light as it did in her nightmare. His show of anger weakened him—the way he sagged against the doorway implied that he needed the support. “You’re going out there alone, with no idea who’s waiting for you, unarmed, with no back-up. Is that what you call taking care of what means most to you?”

  “Do you know something I don’t?” Jani bundled her clothes in front of her bare chest and turned to Lucien. “That’s nothing new, is it?” After a few seconds of warring stares he stepped aside with a huff and she retreated to the sanctuary of the bathroom.

  CHAPTER 28

  When Jani emerged from the bathroom, she found Lucien standing in front of the dresser, studying the painting of the lovers’ triangle.

  “This is about the shooting, isn’t it? You think I set you up.” His voice held the matter-of-fact tone he always used when discussing matters of life and death. “That’s why you’ve shut me out. You don’t trust me.”

  Jani tossed her clothes and towels in the cleaner. “I never trusted you.”

  “You did for some things. For things that mattered to both of us.” He had managed something akin to a sad expression, which meant he felt as upset about someone else’s feelings as he ever could. “I’ll bet that’s why you let me stay here. You wanted to keep an eye on me.”

  Jani turned her back on him and ac
tivated the cleaner. When the goal was to keep the lies to a minimum, you learned fast which things just weren’t worth lying about.

  “Do you think I’d have missed?” The injury in Lucien’s voice had been replaced by chill pride. “If I had tried to kill you or had set you up to be killed, do you think I’d have failed?”

  Jani walked to the dresser, working her fingers through her damp hair. “There’s a first time for everything.” She stepped around Lucien to collect her comb, and stopped in mid-grab when she saw the two halves of the casino marker lying atop the mirrored tray.

  “Angevin tried to wake you to undress, but you’d turned to dead weight by that time. She didn’t want to touch you—you strike out in your sleep, it seems. So she asked me to help.” Lucien leaned close, until he spoke directly in Jani’s ear. “Did you go in through the front of the dresser, or the back?”

  “The back.” Jani looked at him. His eyes had gone brown stone, which meant that whatever anger he felt hadn’t claimed him completely. What she needed to watch for was the truly dead light, when he looked at her the way he did at everyone else. That would signal the true point of no return, the end of the arm’s length discussions and tense treaties. That would mean only one of them would emerge alive. “Drawers are too difficult to break into quickly. The back is always faster.”

  Lucien nodded. Knowing him, he’d filed the knowledge away for future reference, if he didn’t know it already. “Did you leave a mess?”

  “The rear panel is a little bent. Somebody with a protein scanner would know I was in the room, but they’d have expected that since you keyed your door to me.” Jani picked up one of the marker halves. “You killed him. Etienne Palia.”

  “As if you didn’t know.” Lucien shrugged. He tried to insert his hands in his pockets, but the pull of the cloth over his wound made him wince, forcing him to settle for a one-handed lean against the dresser. “You were living in Majora at the time—I considered tracking you down.”