by Fonda Lee
“Reyes, confirm?” Thad said.
“That’s Strong Winter, all right,” Donovan said into his comm unit transmitter. He kept his feet moving forward. Surprisingly, seeing the terrorist leader didn’t arouse the surge of vengeful hatred Donovan had imagined it would. Instead, he thought: Saul looks tired.
“Turn around and face the gate,” Donovan ordered, and was relieved that his voice came out as strong, flat, and professional as anyone could expect of a SecPac officer. “Hold your arms straight out from your sides and keep them there until told otherwise. Everyone in your party will be searched and your vehicles inspected before you proceed into the Round.”
Saul’s square jaw dipped fractionally. His combat boots clomped on the pavement as he complied, the rising motion of his thick shoulders scrunching up the vest around his neck. Donovan ran a scanner over him, then patted him down with brisk but thorough efficiency. He felt around the man’s waistband, inside the tops of his boots, checked his lighter, and looked inside his box of cigarettes. None of the Human Action Party delegates would be allowed to carry so much as a nail file into the Round; on that point, Tate had been adamant.
Saul’s eyes were impassive, but the corners of his thick lips pressed together as he stood in stoic acceptance of the ordeal. The last two times they’d met, Donovan had been at Saul’s mercy; this time he was armed and in uniform and surrounded by erze mates who were watching closely for the sapes to make any wrong move. Perhaps Saul too felt the irony of their reversed roles because he grumbled, in a low voice that only Donovan could hear, “We’ve come a long way from the Warren, haven’t we, zebrahands?”
“You can put your arms down,” Donovan said. “Once the rest of your delegation has been cleared, two SecPac vehicles will escort you through the Round to the hotel where you and your people will be staying.” As Commander Tate had said, orders were orders. He was determined to handle this uncomfortable situation by the rule book, as if he were a SecPac officer with no personal history or connection to any of these people. A stripe doing his job.
The other half dozen soldiers-in-erze in the inspection area had been scanning the SUVs from a wary distance, in case the whole thing turned out to be a ruse and the Sapience vehicles were laden with explosives intended to blow the checkpoint to smithereens. Upon seeing Donovan’s all-clear signal to Thad, they moved in and motioned for the people inside the cars to exit and present themselves for inspection. The Human Action Party had sent about a dozen delegates in total. A few of the people who lined up facing the gate appeared to be lawyer types, but the rest looked like Saul—militant revolutionaries fresh from some Sapience hideout, who’d recently swapped out submachine guns for Human Action Party credentials. With an unpleasant jolt, Donovan recognized one of the men and a woman; they’d been at the hostage standoff last year and tried to drown him in an algae tank.
He began to move toward the line of people, but at that moment, the rear passenger door of the lead vehicle opened and a thin teenage girl stepped out. Donovan’s heart seized in his chest and he stopped as if he’d run into a wall. “Anya.” The name left him softly and involuntarily, like a released breath.
Anya wore a baggy black nylon jacket and the bottoms of her jeans were tucked into the tops of her mud-stained boots. She saw Donovan at once. Her large eyes grew even larger in her fine-featured face as her lips parted in a small intake of breath. For the longest second that Donovan had ever experienced, they stared at each other. Donovan stood immobilized. She was like a bright floodlight dimming everything else; all the people and surroundings seemed to recede into the periphery of his awareness.
Anya turned and joined the rest of Saul’s people, facing the wall at one end of the line, arms outstretched.
Donovan felt something inside him crumbling, the detached resolve he’d been determined to carry with him falling apart in her presence. He moved in behind her and patted her down with the same careful, professional efficiency he’d used on Saul, as if she were a stranger, but he felt as if every nerve ending in the surface of his hands was raw. He ran his palms over her arms and down her sides. His fingertips brushed along the skin around the top of her waistband and he drew his hands briskly down each of her legs. He felt abruptly ashamed that he was doing this—that he had to treat her in such a perfunctory and humiliating way, as if she were nothing to him, just a nameless criminal suspect, not someone he’d spent so many months yearning to see again. He remembered, too late, and with a deeply embarrassed jolt, that under the circumstances, she could’ve requested to be searched by a female officer, but he wasn’t sure she knew that, and in the shock of the moment he had forgotten to tell her. He swallowed his mounting discomfort and managed to say, in an undertone, “What are you doing here?”
“What does it look like?” she whispered back. Amused defiance.
The Human Action Party delegates were climbing back into their vehicles. Thad gave the signal for the inner gate of the Round to be opened to allow them through. Donovan stepped back. Anya dropped her outstretched arms and moved her chin, briefly following him with her eyes. Then she turned and walked back to Saul and the SUV. She got in and closed the door.
Two SecPac patrol vehicles stood ready to escort the visitors to their destination. As Donovan watched the convoy of five vehicles pull away from the checkpoint, he felt Jet and Vic come up behind him. When Jet spoke, there was a warning note in his voice. “That was her, wasn’t it?”
Donovan let out a held breath that was all the answer needed.
They got off duty at eighteen hundred, after the opening session of the Future Summit had already concluded. Throughout the day, Donovan had caught snatches of news in which journalists and political analysts speculated about what was being discussed behind closed doors. The biggest questions on the table, the experts said, concerned the speed and extent to which humankind could be expected to take responsibility for things that the zhree had always controlled, such as erze selection, and Hardening, and planetary defense.
When they got home, Donovan went upstairs and into his room, exchanging the bare minimum of words with his erze mate, who looked at him strangely but let him go. He closed the door and sat heavily on his bed, desperately wishing he could go back in time to the few minutes he’d had with Anya at the checkpoint that morning. He’d do things differently, say something better.
He heard Jet go into his room next door. His partner’s voice was muffled through the wall but it sounded as if he was talking to Vic over his comm.
A minute later, a message flashed onto Donovan’s comm display. It was from Vic. We’ll be talking for a while … Now’s your chance.
Donovan stared at the message for a long, stupefied moment, not sure whether to be shocked at Vic’s presumption or mortified by how his feelings for Anya must’ve been blatantly transparent that morning. He got to his feet and sent a reply. I owe you big time.
Just be careful.
Thanks.
With a degree of stealth that made him feel embarrassingly dishonest, Donovan eased his bedroom door open, then snuck back down the stairs and out of the house.
The Future Summit was being held in the Towerside Hotel, a modern, expansive building only two miles from the Towers themselves. The initial plan to hold the meetings in the seat of zhree governance itself had been rejected; the Towers weren’t equipped to provide lodgings to that many human visitors at once, and Commander Tate insisted on minimizing the amount of travel by the delegates so SecPac could keep a better eye on the proceedings.
There were plenty of SecPac vehicles already nearby so Donovan was confident his skimmercar’s arrival would go unnoticed. The hotel’s three wings were connected by zhree-style walkways and the walls were inlaid with different shades of metal forming artful designs resembling abstracted erze patterns. Donovan parked nearby and went in the main entrance.
There were a handful of SecPac officers posted on the main level; Donovan went straight up to Nicodemus in the lobby and asked to se
e a list of the delegates and their room assignments.
There was another SecPac officer on guard in the lobby of the ninth floor, a middle-aged non-Hardened reservist, one of those people who did the less dangerous and less interesting noncombat jobs in the erze. The man nodded as Donovan exited the elevator, deferring to his rank and armor without question. His heart climbing steadily into his throat, Donovan walked down the hall and stopped in front of room 912. He hesitated for a long moment outside the closed door, but every protest he expected to hear in his own head had died to an acquiescent silence.
He knocked. The door opened so quickly it seemed Anya must’ve been waiting for him on the other side. For what might have been five seconds or thirty, they faced each other through the open doorway as if caught on opposite sides of a transparent glass barrier that allowed them to gaze through but held them invisibly apart.
She’d changed and yet she was the same. He recalled perfectly her eyes, the slight pout of her lips, the set of her shoulders, and the way she stood, perched slightly forward on the balls of her feet like some alert forest creature. She’d dyed her hair again; it was a deep chestnut brown with lighter highlights and fell barely past her softly framed chin. She was still skinny, but he thought she looked better fed than when he’d last seen her, or perhaps that was because he was encountering her here, in a bright, five-star hotel room and not in the damp concrete surroundings of an underground bunker. The incongruity, the oddness of it, of them being together again, of her, as seemingly out of place here as a deer on a space station, dried the words in Donovan’s mouth.
Anya stepped aside wordlessly and Donovan walked in. She closed the door and he turned to face her. He cleared his throat. “How’re you—”
She took two quick steps forward and suddenly the space between them was gone, snapped like the release of a stretched elastic band, and they were kissing—she was kissing him, and he was kissing her back, and then his hands were on her waist and her arms were around his neck, and it was every bit as good, no, even better than he remembered.
He couldn’t get enough of her; she was like a bubbling spring of cold, fresh water, the most delicious thing he’d ever known. When they came apart at last, they were both breathing hard and Donovan’s heart was pumping wildly against the hand she left pressed against his chest.
“That wasn’t exactly how I thought it would go,” Anya said weakly.
They sat on the bed together, close enough that their knees touched. He could smell the faint scents of pine soap and cigarette smoke on Anya’s clothes. Her very presence next to him made Donovan’s chest radiate with warmth. “I’m glad to see you,” he said.
“Me too. I’ve thought about you a lot, you know.” She gave him a small smile that seemed uncharacteristically bashful. “Sometimes I’d worry about you doing stupid stripe things that might get you killed.”
“I worried about you too,” he said. “After you left your apartment, I wondered where you’d gone, what you were doing. I don’t understand; I thought you were with your sister.”
Anya bit her bottom lip and scuffed the toe of her boot against the hotel room carpet. “I didn’t want to go with her to Kansas City. We ended up having a big fight and I took off. I thought about leaving you a message or something, but it happened kind of suddenly, and I didn’t want you to try and find me. You know, reasons.” She glanced at him apologetically.
“Yeah.” The way she’d left without telling him still rankled fiercely, but he couldn’t really blame her. They were who they were, after all. A Sapience operative advertising her movements and location to him would make about as much sense as him informing her of his mission plans. Logic, however, did not blunt the stab of hurt and deep disappointment. She had no idea what kind of anxiety she’d caused him, how much time he’d spent staring at that wooden post and wondering why she hadn’t responded, how upset and relieved he’d been when he’d finally mustered up the courage to find out she’d moved away. Seeing her today at the gate had dashed the hope that he’d clung to so perniciously: that she’d stayed with her sister and left her terrorist ties behind, had started a new life in a new place. She’d done none of those things.
He made his voice nonchalant. “So where did you go?”
Anya pulled her legs up onto the bedspread, picking at a loose thread and not answering at first. “Kevin wanted to go see Saul, so I went with him.” Donovan stiffened instantly at Kevin’s name. Anya noticed and said defensively, “Kevin’s the best there is at getting around and not getting caught. He knows the Sapience network better than anyone. So when he gave me the chance to go along with him again, I took it.”
It was difficult enough to accept that Anya was still in Sapience. The thought of her still attached to Kevin Warde made Donovan feel mildly sick. “So you can overlook him torturing and killing innocent people.”
Anya leaned away from him. A note of anger and possibly shame colored her sharp retort. “I can’t stop him from doing some of the awful things he does. But I’m not a part of it.” To Donovan’s surprise, she tugged at his hand, as if she desperately wanted him to understand. “Kevin’s the one friend who’s always been there for me when I needed him. And I needed him to take me to Saul. I was listening to Saul’s speeches and wanted to join in what he was doing.”
The defiant lift of Anya’s chin drifted. “But when we got there, Kevin and Saul had an argument—a bad one. Kevin said some harsh things; he said that losing Max had taken the fight out of Saul and he’d lost his edge and been manipulated by you at the algae farm. And Saul said that Kevin was in love with his own ego and his brutal way of doing things would drive people away from any hope of real change.”
Donovan stared at her in surprise. So it was true. Sapience really was divided.
“Kevin said we were leaving, but I said I didn’t want to go. So he said, fine, if that’s the way you’re going to be after everything I’ve done for you, and he … he left me there.” Anya blinked and turned her face away; she sounded truly sad about losing Kevin, possibly for good.
Donovan refrained from voicing his hope that her break from Kevin was permanent this time. Instead, he asked, “So how did you end up coming to the Future Summit?”
Anya’s shoulders loosened a little, and she settled back in beside him. “I’ve been helping Saul with his broadcasts. I’m kind of like his technical assistant now. I do the recording and sound editing and try to get the episodes out on a sort of regular schedule to as many people as I can. It’s …” She shrugged, her expression brightening with a satisfication that Donovan had never seen in her before. “Great, actually.”
“So you’re a producer,” Donovan said, unable to help smiling in return.
Anya snorted. “Yeah, can you believe it? I was never into computers or technical stuff. But what I’m doing now is making a big difference. Saul’s speeches have brought a lot of new people into the Human Action Party.”
Donovan thought about the clip of Saul’s broadcast that the Prime Liaison had played in Commander Tate’s office. He remembered in an almost physically uncomfortable way how disgusted and angry it had made him feel. Those offensive words against exos … Anya had helped to put them out there, to millions of people, and she was proud of having done it.
The strangeness, the wrongness, of the situation hit him then, and for a second, Donovan felt as if his insides were being yanked apart. He could feel his face turning wooden, his armor rising up his spine. How could he sit happily next to this girl, wanting more than anything in the world to lean in and kiss her again? How could she kiss him, when she was doing everything she could to sow hatred and resentment against people like him? How did it make any sense?
Anya went on, oblivious to Donovan’s internal distress. “Not everyone loves the speeches, though. They’ve caused problems because there are folks in Sapience who agree with Kevin; they think Saul’s not going far enough, that he’s softening his position to get more followers. After the news came out that the
shrooms are planning to leave Earth, some people were upset that Saul agreed to come here and talk instead of calling for an uprising against the government right away.”
“Why do you think Saul even agreed to come, then?”
Anya pursed her lips. “Saul wants to change the world, not watch it burn. I think that … after Max, he started thinking about the price we’ve paid, and …” She picked at her uneven nails. “He says it’s time we fought for the future that we can get instead of the past we lost.”
She paused and looked up at him, noticing his reticence. “You’re asking me an awful lot of questions,” she said slowly. “What about you? You haven’t said much.” She sat back slightly and seemed to take him in fully for the first time—his uniform, his markings and exocel nodes, everything about him that identified him as one of the enemy. Anya’s expression turned uncertain; Donovan could almost hear her mind grinding through the same doubts he’d struggled with a minute ago. Perhaps she too felt that awful tearing inside, because her shoulders curled forward slightly and she crossed her arms over her chest, guarded.
Last year, he’d been an injured and vulnerable prisoner and Anya had been a new Sapience recruit tasked to watch over him. Now she was Saul’s assistant, a delegate for the Human Action Party and firmly entrenched in the Sapience cause. He was an armored and uniformed SecPac officer on home turf in the alien-constructed city he’d lived in all his life. There was no one and nothing forcing them to be together right now; they were here by choice. And they were further apart than they had ever been. Whatever connection they clung to now was thin and fragile, the gulf between them enormous. The lust and joy in their first rush of greeting felt strange, maybe even silly.
Donovan stood up and held out a hand to her. “Come on.”
Anya got to her feet cautiously and put her hand in his, her eyebrows drawing together in confusion. He led her to the door of the hotel room and opened it, tugging her out into the hallway.
