by Jake Elwood
"Wow, that's some good detective work." Alexandra rubbed her jaw. "I'm afraid you're right, though. About no one believing you."
"I hate being ten," Lark grumbled, and Alexandra laughed.
"Being a junior constable is a lot like being ten," she said. "Do you know, this is the first assignment I've ever had without a senior constable looking over my shoulder? I'm here because they don't expect anything to happen, and no one else wants to be up all night on a rooftop."
"Well, I'm glad they sent you," said Lark.
"Thanks. And I'll keep an eye out for this janitor guy. Maybe I'll spot him."
Well, I've told someone, and someone believes me. Even if it's just a junior constable. Whatever that means. "Do you still think someone's after me?" she said.
"I don't know. The officers think so. If they only cared about you climbing out, I think they would just put a camera up here. Maybe on a spyder. They think someone might come up here and try to get in."
Lark shivered and rubbed her arms, as much from Alexandra's words as from the cold.
"Don't worry, I'll keep you safe."
They went silent again, and Lark tilted her head back, looking up at the stars. She was starting to learn the constellations. In her first few months on Zemoth, she'd used the stars to reassure herself that her old life really was over. When even the sky was different, it helped her believe that the apartment on Hesperus was far away and the nightmare was really done.
"You can barely see the stars here."
Lark glanced at Alexandra, wondering if she'd heard her right. "What do you mean? I can see hundreds of stars!"
"Yeah, but not like in orbit." The woman's voice became dreamy. "We have these observation lounges. No lights allowed. The Milky Way is like a big white stripe across the sky, and everywhere else, the stars are so thick you couldn’t count them if you spent the rest of your life."
Lark stared up at the sky, wondering what she was missing. She'd seen space from aboard a ship, and it was pretty impressive. Was that what Alexandra saw every day?
"I used to go to the lounge after breakfast," the woman continued. "I'd just stare out at the sky until we passed the dawn line."
Lark blinked at that. Skyland, she remembered, orbited Zemoth once every couple of hours. The Skylanders must have no sense of day and night!
Weird.
"Then I joined the academy and I didn't have time to look at the stars," Alexandra said. "Not that I minded. And they sent me here, and I still can't get used to it."
"You mean the stars?"
"I mean everything."
"What do you mean?"
Alexandra rubbed her arms. "Well, there's the temperature, for starters. It's going to be cold for hours! How do you stand it?"
Lark just stared at her.
"Some things are neat, though," Alexandra continued. "Watch this." She took a flask from her belt, extended her arm, and squeezed. A squirt of water shot out, arced past the edge of the roof, and dropped toward the lawn below. "It falls straight," Alexandra said. "No Coriolis effect at all." She sent another squirt of water after the first one. "I could watch that all night."
Lark shook her head.
"I know, I know, you're used to it. But I've never seen things fall straight before." She glanced at the flask. "I better stop wasting my water."
She looked at Lark. "You're shivering. You must be freezing!" She rose onto the balls of her feet. "Come on. Let's get you inside. If I'm going to protect you, I can start by saving you from hypothermia."
Lark was perfectly capable of climbing back in the window unaided. Still, her hands and feet had gone numb, and her limbs shook as she started working her way down from the dormer roof. It was immensely comforting to have Alexandra there, strong and capable, ready to catch her if she slipped.
When Lark was perched in her own windowsill she turned to the young policewoman. "Thanks for watching out for me," she said.
Alexandra's teeth showed in a smile. "You're welcome. And thanks for keeping me company." She leaned close. "If anyone asks, though, you didn't spot me. Never knew I was here. Right?" The pale gleam of one eye vanished briefly in a wink.
"Right," Lark said, and winked back. Then she climbed inside and Alexandra swung the window shut. Lark locked the window, rubbed her arms, and climbed into bed.
Millie was a dark outline in the other bed, the blanket pulled up to her ears, and Lark felt a pang of remorse. She'd left the window wide open the whole time. She was lucky Millie hadn't gotten up and closed it!
She curled into a ball under the blankets, shivering, waiting for her body to warm up. She was also waiting for her brain to stop racing.
The mysterious villains, whoever they were, were after her. They were apparently after her even before she spotted their janitor spy. Why?
Another of Cassie's lectures came to her. Six months before, Lark had woken up screaming from a nightmare, Cassie shaking her shoulder until she woke up, then holding her and soothing her until the worst of the fear subsided.
Afterward, they had sat in the kitchen drinking cocoa while Lark talked about the nightmare. "What if someone comes?" Lark had said. "Someone who worked for my dad? What if they come when you're not here? What will I do?"
Cassie, to her relief, hadn't answered right away. She hadn't told Lark not to be stupid, not to worry. Instead, Cassie had stared into space for a time, thinking about her response.
"We never know what's coming," she said at last. "And it's not just bad things. That night when I broke into your apartment on Hesperus, you had no idea I was coming. That you were about to leave your home for the last time ever."
Lark gulped, still unable to believe that she would never go back.
"Even if you knew – knew deep down inside – that your dad and all of his people were never, ever going to bother you again, you could always think of something to be worried about. If you couldn't come up with anything better, you could always imagine the sun exploding, or dragons crawling up out of the sewers."
Lark managed not to roll her eyes.
"The point is," Cassie said, "that you have some choice about what goes on inside your own head. I know it doesn't seem that way. You think you're scared because of all the things that happened to you, and because your dad was really powerful and had lots of employees who are still out there. And that's partially true. But you're also scared because you think about those things."
That hardly seemed fair. Lark frowned, wondering if she should argue. She didn't want to make Cassie angry.
"You think I'm full of it, don't you?" Cassie said. She smiled when she said it, and one of the cold lumps in Lark's stomach melted away. Cassie didn't fly into rages because you argued with her. The worst she'd ever done was get grumpy and change the subject.
Cassie leaned forward, resting her arms on the table. "You think you don't have any choice but to be scared. After all, your dad was pretty scary. But consider this." She took a sip of her cocoa, then gestured toward the sky and said, "No one really knows if that star out there is stable. It will explode someday. Probably in a billion years or so, but it might be tomorrow. There's no way to know."
"That's not where it is," Lark said. She pointed toward the floor. "The star is that way right now. That's why it's dark."
"Nobody likes a wise guy, Lark."
"Sorry."
Cassie reached over and ruffled her hair. "You're forgiven. And you're right. Anyway, the point is that if you think about it, that star could kill both of us and everyone else on the planet at any time. It could be exploding right now, burning off the atmosphere on the far side of Zemoth as we sit here drinking our cocoa."
Lark shivered, imagining it.
"If you think about it enough," Cassie went on, "you could probably make yourself terrified. It would be a lot of work, but you could do it if you were really determined."
"That would be dumb."
Cassie nodded. "Yes, it would. But you could do it. My point is, if you're think
ing about things you can't control, things that probably won't happen, then you should probably stop. And you can."
Lark had gone back to bed and slept without nightmares, though it probably had more to do with Cassie making a fuss over her than with the woman's actual words. Now she went over those words and asked herself honestly if there was anything she could do about the vague threat of the Plateau Society hunting her.
There was not. Firmly pushing her worry to the back of her mind, Lark closed her eyes and let herself drift off into sleep.
Episode 4 – The Hidden Assassin
Chapter 12
Kira Talin took a seat on a park bench under the shade of a cypress tree, balanced her PAD on her knee, and opened an innocent-looking letter to an imaginary boyfriend. The little park in the heart of Kingstown held half a dozen people lounging on the benches or the grass, enjoying the late-morning sunshine. In her casual slacks and jacket with a PAD in front of her Kira was as good as invisible. She adjusted her sunglasses, made sure her face was pointed more or less at the PAD, and turned her attention to the hotel across the street.
O'Malley was in the hotel. Her fingers itched with the need to squeeze a trigger as she thought of him. She'd had him in her sights once before, on the roof of the shopping complex beside the opera house. Even now she could hardly believe he'd dodged every shot. No one could be lucky forever, though. Today she'd catch him in the street, with his guard down.
Today, he was going to die.
For a day and a half Hearne and Slan had dithered, wanting to kidnap him and find out what he knew. Now they wanted him dead. All Kira knew was that it was about damned time.
Looking for him inside his hotel was out of the question. The hotel had surveillance cameras in the lobby, covering the bounce tubes, and in the corridors on every floor. Then there were the luggage bots, not designed for surveillance but watching and recording just the same, and endless numbers of staff and guests. No, she would take him out here, in the streets.
Zemoth had some pretty liberal laws where surveillance and policing were concerned. Kira supposed her job would be a lot tougher on most worlds. She didn't know. She'd never been anywhere else. Her life was steeped in a fierce love of her homeland and the endless secret war against the arrogant overlords in Skyland orbiting high above.
The official line was that Zemoth was free, that the Skylanders had every right to keep living in the orbiting habitat that Kira's ancestors had abandoned a hundred years before. But Skylanders had executed half a dozen members of Kira's secret army over the last fifteen years, and they were holding Hiram's son, so clearly the war wasn't what the media called it, the inconsequential antics of a lunatic fringe. As long as groundsiders died at the hands of Skylanders, Kira was going to make sure that Skylanders died too.
Skylanders and their tools, she amended to herself. This O'Malley was an offworlder, either an agent of Skyland or an unlucky busybody. She didn't know which, and she didn't care. He was snooping around the biggest mission the Society had ever planned, and his nosy meddling was about to end.
A man appeared in the lobby entrance, and she stiffened. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and she could make out a shock of blond hair. He gawked like a tourist, too. She was too far off to see if he had a cleft chin, but it was probably him.
He walked out onto the sidewalk, and she was sure. He moved like an athlete, but he limped. Kira hadn't seen the end of the wild chase across rooftops and through the streets of Kingstown, but she'd heard the details from the survivors and on the news feeds. O'Malley had survived and escaped, but he'd taken at least one hard tumble. It was him, all right.
She tucked her PAD into a pocket and stood, keeping back a bit and on the opposite side of the street as she followed him. Her pulse quickened, and the whole city seemed to sparkle around her. This was her favorite part of her entire life, the glorious little slices of time when mayhem and carnage were right around the corner, the delicious moments that might just be her last. All of life's little distractions fell away at times like this. She was fully engaged in the moment, fully, gloriously alive. Five minutes on a mission was worth six months of comfort and safety.
There weren't many people on the streets. The other pedestrians seemed sluggish and slow-moving, and she had to force herself to keep pace. Luckily for her nerves, O'Malley was moving fairly quickly, his limp slowly fading as his muscles warmed up. She watched him walk through the streets of downtown, gazing up at the buildings around him, oblivious to her presence.
Killing him in the street was a possibility, but not one she preferred. She had a laser pistol in her pocket. She could walk up behind him, use his body for cover as she drew and fired, and hurry away while he bled out on the sidewalk behind her. The more modern ground cars had short video buffers, though, to give playbacks in case of an accident, and any fool on the sidewalk might pull out a PAD and get a snapshot of her face. If she was really unlucky a storefront security camera or a nosy citizen would get vid footage of her running away. Gait recognition software could do tremendous things these days, and there were cops who would sell their mothers for a chance to bag the Nightingale.
No, a long-range shot was much better if she could manage it. She could be patient. Sooner or later O'Malley would plunk himself down some place with a view.
Then he'd be target practice.
She frowned when he went into Angelo's Restaurant. The waiter bots never forgot a face. It was part of the service. After your first visit they greeted you by name and offered your favorite drink. There was no way she was following O'Malley into Angelo's.
A shoe store offered her an opportunity to pause while she thought. She stood in the street watching holographic shoe displays change as she considered her options.
Angelo's had a rooftop patio. The locals tended to prefer the ambience of the inside dining room, but tourists inevitably headed upstairs. Kira felt a tingle of anticipation spread across her shoulders.
The biggest draw for the patio was the view. O'Malley would be visible from half the city.
She lingered in front of the shoe store for a couple more minutes in case O'Malley came back out. Then she took a slow stroll around the block, looking up at the buildings around her, considering the possibilities.
There was only one choice, really. Rorke Tower, once the tallest building in Kingstown, had been demolished six months earlier after standing in the same place for an impressive ninety years. There was a new polyform tower going up on the site of the old tower.
Right now it was little more than a framework of girders. Kira didn't know the details of polyform technology. All she knew was that the girders needed several weeks to set before the next stage of construction could begin. The skeleton of the building loomed empty and abandoned, no more than half a kilometer from Angelo's.
The tingle of anticipation spread as she walked toward the tower, until she felt as if she were bathed in electricity. This would be glorious! He'd never know what hit him. She'd be able to shoot him from concealment, her nest close enough for a clean shot but far enough that she'd be long gone before anyone even knew there was a sniper.
It was perfect, and that gave her a moment's pause. It was almost too perfect. She hesitated at an intersection, wondering if this could be some sort of setup. That was absurd, though, and the delicious anticipation was more than she could resist.
A tall fence surrounded the construction site, but kids had already jimmied a door. They'd picked a good door, too, one with a screen of trees to keep out prying eyes. The door stood ajar a finger's width or so. Kira turned on the face scrambler that would make her features into a blur of static on most cameras, glanced around for witnesses, then tugged the metal door open and slipped into the construction site. She pulled the door shut again and stood still, listening for sounds of pursuit.
Nothing came to her ears but the wind in the girders above and the distant hum of electric ground cars a block away.
She stood in a weed-infested yar
d with the nearest girders rising a dozen paces in front of her. The fence put her in deep shadow, and she shivered, the air suddenly cool against her skin. Something rustled in the Devil's Weed, and her hand went to the pocket that held her pistol. The flick of a narrow green tail showed where a small lizard hunted bugs, and she willed herself to relax.
Why there had to be wildlife on the planet was more than she could understand. Sure, they'd explained it to her in school, but she was skeptical. Bugs to pollinate plants, break down biomass, and enrich the soil. Lizards to keep the bugs under control, and little sand cats to hunt the lizards. It all seemed untidy and chaotic to Kira, and she frowned in distaste as she heaped a dozen rocks against the base of the door. If anyone followed her into the yard she'd hear the clatter.
The building had a single staircase, an archaic throwback to earlier times installed as a safety measure in case the bounce tubes should somehow fail. Bounce tubes never failed, and she rolled her eyes as she climbed to the second floor. Once the bounce tubes were installed the staircase would never be used again. It was a waste of space.
She checked the view from the second floor. She could see the wall of Angelo's, but the diners on the second floor were obscured by a blaze of sunlight reflecting from the glass-covered railing that surrounded the patio.
There was a breeze up here that she hadn't felt at street level, and she paused to let the air play across her skin. The view was a mix of rooftops and tower walls. She stayed well back from the edge of the floor. She would be visible from a quarter of the city, if anyone really looked.
The floor beneath her was some sort of hard, untreated polymer surface, covered in loose grit. It was impossible to move silently. Every footstep made low scratching noises, and that pleased her. There was no one up here to hear her, and if anyone came creeping up the staircase behind her she'd hear them well in advance.
