“So I’ve heard,” he said. The finger stopped tapping and his grays moved into black. “Mako doesn’t talk about what they did to you guys.”
He was lying, but Rachel let it pass: Hill was family. “That’s another place that should be forgotten.”
“How bad was it?”
Alienation. Brainwashing. Depression so dark you stared up at the sun until night fell forever… “Bad.”
“That conspiracy theory you mentioned,” Hill said.
“Hm?” Rachel glanced up. It wasn’t exactly a non sequitur, but he had been the one introducing topics which paired well with tinfoil hats.
“The one where Homeland stages an attack to keep its funding.”
“Homeland’s never been in danger of losing its funding,” Rachel said. “Public support, maybe, but there’s no way in hell they’re going to lose their funding. Can you imagine if Homeland got hit with cutbacks, and there’s another attack on the scale of 9-11? It would be told-ja-sos and finger-pointing of Orwellian proportions. The government’ll gladly pay billions just to keep that from happening.”
Hill nodded, and waited.
“I don’t think we did this.”
“No,” he said. “We didn’t. You and me? We got out.”
“If this hadn’t happened?” Rachel said, pointing at her head. “I would have stayed. I would have stayed until I died of old age and they gave me a monument at Arlington.”
“You were CID,” he said. “You didn’t—”
“No,” she cut him off. “Don’t say I wasn’t a real soldier and I can’t understand. I saw more combat than almost any other woman over there. My unit was the clean-up crew for the shit you ‘real’ soldiers left behind.”
He blinked at her. “I was going to ask if you’d still stay, even when you knew the brass was tripping you up.”
“Oh.” She took a breath to calm herself. “That.”
It was a good question. Army CID had a long history of fighting with their commissioned officers: one of Rachel’s jobs had been to solve crimes committed by soldiers, and one of the officers’ jobs was to show that soldiers upheld the military code, and these two jobs came into conflict more often than Rachel had liked. Much of her time had been spent trying to find new and innovative ways to hold soldiers accountable for crimes that certain officers thought were best forgotten.
(She had lost more of these cases than she liked to admit, many of them swept aside and dismissed as casualties of war. Not forgotten, though—never forgotten! Like her ambition, the names of those victims were lurking at the back of her mind, waiting for the right moment. Her to-do list stretched for years in either direction.)
“Yeah, I’d have stayed,” she said. “You know those people who say they were born to join the Army? That used to be me.”
“Used to be.”
“Yup. OACET got in the way. Still, I don’t think we did this.”
Hill said nothing, but his green core was lost within the black.
“I’m not saying we aren’t capable of doing this,” she said after a few awkward moments. “I just don’t think we did. For the sake of argument, let’s say the attack on Gayle Street was done by Homeland. So why is there evidence?”
Hill leaned back against the bench and looked at her, curious yellow peeking through the black.
“That’s what bothers me,” she said. “There’s enough evidence to suggest we did this to ourselves.”
“You’re a cop. You know there’s always evidence.”
“Yeah. And each piece of evidence we find is usually part of a puzzle. Bombings especially: every single scrap of paper or piece of broken glass has to be put back together. Here, every time we find one piece, it goes right into its proper place.” She thought back to Shawn, sitting on the floor of the medical lab and swiftly fitting the cardboard pieces together without knowing the final design. “I don’t like how easy it’s been to implicate our own people as the bad guys.”
“Sometimes it’s easy.”
“No, it’s almost always easy. It’s almost always the asshole holding the gun, or the kids running away from the backpack full of pressure cookers. What did you tell me last August? It’s almost always the boyfriend, the husband, or the ex.”
“Or the junkie,” he said. “Rage or money, almost a hundred percent of the time.”
“Right,” Rachel said. “And this wasn’t about money, so, what? Rage? What would make Homeland so mad they’d blow up an entire street? Or what would make them so careless that they’d kill two cops, and then come back after we found the scene to erase it? I can’t think of a single thing.
“Or,” she said, as she turned that scenario around in her head. “What would cause someone to get so mad they’d blow up an entire street to get back at Homeland?”
“Loss,” Hill said, and shrugged. “Loss, or being lied to.”
“Human beings are fairly resilient to both of those,” Rachel said with no small degree of certainty.
“Not always,” Hill said, as his fingers went tap, tap, tap. “Sometimes, it gets to be too much.”
She nodded, thinking again of Shawn.
“You ever think about what might happen if you snapped?” Hill asked. “Took what they gave you, and just let yourself… cut loose?”
Rachel reached out to the nearest Wi-Fi hub and gave it a light ping, then followed the connection through six laptops and a few dozen smart phones, across the phones to the nearest cell tower, down to the signaling station… Wipe them out, she thought. Just a touch, just a thought, and all the circuits go crispy brown, and you can finally—finally!—escape from these stupid, screaming machines… “Do I need to hide your rifle rounds?” she said, half-joking.
He didn’t answer.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Doesn’t everyone? It’s the big bad fantasy we all carry around with us in our heads.”
“Maybe someone wasn’t happy with the fantasy. Maybe someone decided it was time to draw the line.”
“Someone from Homeland, maybe?”
“Someone’s who’s lost too much. Or someone who was tired of being lied to.”
“Or both.”
He nodded. “Or both.”
EIGHTEEN
THE THIN LEATHER CLUTCH BUMPED against her hip. Rachel pressed it down with her hand to pin it against her side. She had pulled the tiny bag out of the back of her closet that morning, thinking that leaving her usual oversized purse at home would show she had put in the extra effort to dress up. Now, a quick scan of the restaurant told her she was underdressed. Excepting shoes, she was the only person in the room with a leather anything.
Oh well, too late now. Rachel tipped her chin up and swept through the front doors, smiling kindly at the maître d’ as she passed him on her way to the bar. He smiled back at her, an ugly scornful orange hidden behind splendid orthodontics.
There was a certain simple irony to the fact that she was going on her first real date in months while the city was ready to burn. Rachel had called to see if they should cancel; Becca didn’t want to. Instead, Becca insisted on confirming their reservation. She told Rachel everyone in her office was planning to go out that evening to send the message that they were not afraid, and it was likely the restaurant would be overbooked.
Becca had been right. About the overbooking, not the message—Rachel was pretty sure that terrorists or Homeland Security or an invading foreign army didn’t really care if Washington D.C.’s upper class got to order the veal or not. The restaurant was packed.
Her date was early. Becca was nursing a drink and making small talk with a young man whose conversational colors put him as more than casually interested; her cool jade green core made a nice contrast against his surface colors of lusty red.
As a color, “jade green” was something of a misnomer. Rachel’s maternal grandmother had once laid out a dozen pieces of jade stone on an old threadbare piece of cotton to prove to her how each was unique, ranging from white to pink to blue and nearly black, a
nd had told her that a narrow definition would never give her the full sense of what things were, or what they could be. Even at the tender age of seven, Rachel had seen what her grandmother had meant, but she was also a child of Crayola and the name on the crayon was forever fixed in her mind. And, two decades later, “jade green” was how she defined the core of the beautiful Latina waiting for her at the bar.
Becca had a lovely spill of long brown hair, and she was not-so-subtly inspecting this for split ends as the businessman insisted on freshening her drink. She saw Rachel coming and straightened in her seat, her conversational colors brightening.
They kissed in the way of new friends, quick on the cheek; the businessman’s lust pulsed. As Becca turned to order her a drink, Rachel gave him a long, dark glare. The businessman fumbled in his wallet and threw some cash on the bar, then scampered towards the door. She flipped her implant to reading mode and saw he had accidentally dropped a fifty; the bartender was about to have a good night.
“What did you say to him?” Becca asked.
Rachel blinked at her, pure innocence. “Not a word!”
The maître d’ arrived to escort them to their table. There were linen napkins folded into pointy swans, and more knives than Rachel had expected. Multiple forks and spoons, those were a given, but when a restaurant offered more than one knife she began to get twitchy. They ordered wine, appetizers, and Rachel tried to ignore how Becca kept sneaking peeks at Rachel’s chest over her menu in a curious yellow way.
After a few moments of small talk, Rachel finally had to pretend to notice. “What?”
“I don’t want to be rude, but… Are you okay? Your hand’s in a cast, and you look like you’ve lost fifteen pounds in the last week.”
Oh. The cast spoke for itself, but this was the first time they had met somewhere fancy: Rachel was in a sleeveless dress which had left no room for her usual ballistic vest.
“It’s work-related,” Rachel said. “I usually have to wear some extra layers. And the cast isn’t the nicest accessory, I admit.”
“Ah.” Becca wrapped her hands around her wine glass, her conversational colors going ever so slightly gray.
“We’re still not talking about work?”
“We can. We should.” Becca said. “I just… I just don’t want to.”
“Bet you a dollar my job is worse than yours.”
“My job’s not bad! But…”
Becca was thoroughly gray now, intensely worried. This was probably the point right before her typical date stomped off, appalled. Rachel had to force a straight face; she had never been on this side of the conversation. It was a lovely change of pace.
“Prison?” Rachel asked.
Becca shook her head. “No.”
“Dogfighting, cockfighting, bullfighting?”
“Investment banking.”
Rachel laughed; she couldn’t help herself. “That was my next guess.”
Becca gave her a sharp glare, and her conversational colors flared a hot red. Rachel grinned back at her. God, how she loved fire.
“Okay,” Becca took a deep breath. “Remember the subprime mortgage scandal in 2008?”
“The one that ruined the global economy?” Rachel lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah. I remember.”
“Okay,” Becca said. She looked down and toyed with the tablecloth. “Okay, I might have… had something to do with… that.”
“The what? The mortgage scandal? I think a lot of people were involved in that.”
“Yeah, well… Did you hear about Goldman Sachs? How they made a profit from betting on short-selling mortgages?”
Rachel ran a quick search through Wikipedia. “Yeah,” she said slowly, mentally skimming the text as quickly as she could. “They knew the junk mortgages were bad and shorted the market.”
“Yes.” Becca nodded. “That was sort of… my idea.”
Rachel felt her jaw drop.
“I was just a summer intern! I didn’t think they’d take me seriously!” Becca insisted. “They held a cheap throwaway meeting with a Board member, one of those introductory seminars that’s supposed to convince the kids they’re a valued part of the organization. They told us to write up any proposals we had to advance the company. I… I might have suggested a bundling process involving high-risk mortgages.”
“Oh my God,” Rachel said. “You tanked the planet!”
“Not alone, but I definitely helped,” Becca said, and then sighed. “Honestly, I did make a shitload of money.”
“Did you keep it?”
“Ah… Not all of it,” Becca said as she reached for her wine. “I donated most of it. And I do a lot of pro bono work for a legal firm who helps recover bad mortgages for lower-income families. I’m trying to put it right, but I’ve got a lot of bad karma.”
Rachel shook her head, chuckling. “This is hilarious.”
“No!” Becca was indignant. “No, it’s not! It’s terrible! Do you realize how many people lost their jobs, their homes! I ruined families! People killed themselves over what I did!”
She fell silent, her colors sad and damp, with a trace of fierce red that was aimed directly at Rachel. Rachel put on her most sympathetic face, and the red faded.
“No, you’re right,” Rachel said. “The banking scandal? Not funny at all. I’m laughing because I’m usually the one giving the ‘This is what I do for a living and hey where are you going?’ speech.”
“Sure.”
In response, Rachel reached into the tiny clutch and took out her badge. She flipped its protective folio open, and the bright green and gold of the OACET seal gleamed in the low light of the room.
“You’re a cop?” Becca smiled. “That’s not so bad.”
Rachel pushed the badge towards her. “Read the fine print.”
Becca leaned forward, then snapped the badge off of the table for a closer look. Her colors bleached white in shock as she first stared at the badge, then up at Rachel, her mouth forming a small and perfect o.
“And this,” Rachel said, “is usually when my dates end.”
“You’re a…”
“Cyborg,” she sighed. “Or, in the language of past dates: freak, machine, creature, and the all-encompassing one of those… and they add a long pause for emphasis… things.”
“Oh.” Becca said quietly, then asked, “That’s what happens? They call you names?”
“Well, one time I got a glass full of wine thrown in my face,” Rachel amended. “She stormed out without saying a word.
“Stuck me with the bill, too,” she added.
Becca snorted, hard. It was an odd sound, completely out of place coming from a beautiful woman perfectly at home in an expensive restaurant, and Rachel found herself laughing.
It took a few tense seconds, but Becca joined her.
“Heh,” Rachel said, after the moment had passed. “Okay, that’s the best full disclosure has ever gone.”
“For me, too,” Becca nodded. She was an uncertain yellow. “But… um…”
“You get one trick,” Rachel said.
“What?”
“To prove I really am OACET.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you don’t,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “You won’t believe until you have proof. That’s just how this works. The easiest trick is you hold up some object, and I send that image straight to your phone. It’ll be from my perspective, so you’ll know it’s from me. But there’s a bunch of other ways, if you think I’m wearing a hidden camera or something.”
“Oh.” Sympathetic wine red bloomed through Becca’s surface colors, swirling through the yellow. “You get a lot of shit, don’t you?”
Rachel shrugged.
The waiter glided up to their table, tiny salads swimming in dressing on his tray. There was an unwelcome pause in the conversation as he pushed ground pepper; Rachel sent him running to the kitchen for bread to sop up the vinaigrette.
“So,” Rachel said, “let’s do this, let’s get the image out
of the way. Unless you want a text message instead? Or, you can pick another person in here at random and I’ll make their phone ring…”
Becca shook out the cloth swan and draped the napkin across her lap. “Do you believe I’m a banker?”
“Hm?” Rachel blinked; Becca had deviated from the usual script.
“Do you think I’m lying to you about what I do? Or about… what I did, back when I was just starting out?”
“No,” Rachel said, catching on. Smiling.
“All right, then,” Becca said, pushing the inedible salad aside. “Let me bore you with my fantasy football team.”
They pointedly ignored all talk of work. It was slightly awkward between them, at first, but they soon settled into a pattern of jokes and complaining about family. By the time they had finished the main course, they were happily comparing overbearing Old Country grandmothers.
“Dessert?” Rachel asked.
Becca shook her head. “Not here, but do you have a few minutes? There’s a bakery nearby that does some of the best assortment of ethnic pastries I’ve found. We can show each other what Grandma used to make.”
Rachel shuddered. “You’ve obviously never had a traditional Chinese pastry. Most of them are a scary breed of jelly doughnuts.”
“I love jelly doughnuts.”
“Sugar was pretty expensive in China,” Rachel said. “They did without in a lot of recipes—think Fig Newton without the flavor.”
Becca gagged.
The check came and went, Becca’s platinum card eating the sum. The two women gathered up their coats and left, walking west towards the old warehouse district. Rachel kept her scans active; there were more people out tonight than was usual, and plenty of red in the street, but it wasn’t worth breaking the evening.
“Tell me something,” Becca said.
Yellow, but not questioning. Curious? “Tell you what?” Rachel asked.
“Anything. But it has to be something you wouldn’t tell me until the tenth date.”
“Huh?” Rachel laughed. “Shouldn’t we save that for the tenth date?”
Maker Space Page 28
