Promissory Note

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Micah didn’t stay on his feet long enough now for her to determine if he really was limping.

  The hood came over them. It didn’t darken because the lights in the district were already turned to late-night low. That meant anyone who saw the car would be able to see who was in it. They would see her sitting next to Micah Thorn.

  For right now, she didn’t care. She just wanted to get home in any way she could. There, she could close the door on the world and be by herself.

  Micah got the car going and eased out into the Aventine proper, heading for the Artery.

  Laura realized she should probably start a conversation. It was the polite thing to do. She just couldn’t think of anything to talk about and it wouldn’t occur to Micah to speak unless he had something to say. So the silence in the car stretched on.

  It was a respite, not to bother trying to think of subjects and questions.

  “Did you acquire the scarf you are wearing yourself, or was it a gift from one of your many friends and admirers?” he said, making her jump. She had been lulled by the silence, her nerves subsiding.

  Laura touched the multi-colored silk at her neck. “This is an Emmaline Victore pattern. I don’t have that amount of rations to spare. And that’s a personal question I shouldn’t have to answer.”

  “I have no prurient interest in the matter,” he assured her. “I wanted to establish the truth I had already suspected. You have very few energy rations left, once you have fed yourself.”

  “You’re still thinking about supply and demand even now?” She let her head fall back against the cradle, too tired to even sound pissed about it. Of course he was thinking about his project. What else? She pulled the scarf away from her neck and squeezed it in her hand.

  “I’m thinking about the terms of our agreement,” he replied, his voice low. “They were not meant to punish you.”

  “They’re not.”

  “While you are working off your debt, you are deprived of any other opportunities to better yourself.”

  She rolled her head to look at him. He was staring ahead, steering the car through the spaces between the quarters scattered over the Bridge end of the Esquiline, as there was no mag strips here.

  “Why do you care? It’s your debt I’m working off.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. His jaw rippled, as if he was clenching it. “It is a debt that would not be impacting your life so greatly if the value of your contribution to the deal had not been eradicated.”

  She was having trouble following him. Sleep was thickening her thoughts. “You mean, if a radiation leak hadn’t wiped out my garden?”

  He nodded. “Kelly Peck gave you his house. The value of the house never changes, except to increase. You, though, offered a bargain chip that is fragile and transient…and lost its value completely through an event that was outside the deal.”

  “Really, Micah,” she said slowly, “you have to stop thinking sometimes.”

  “There has to be a better way to capture the value of something,” he said, his voice low. “Some way that locks in the value permanently.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t care right then, either. She could see the green walls of her house just ahead, anyway. Sanctuary was very close.

  “Lauressa,” Micah said softly, bringing the car to a halt barely two paces from her door.

  Laura drew in a deep breath. She had been falling asleep. “Call me Laura,” she whispered.

  “Lauressa is the name your parents gave you, is it not? Laura is what your friends call you.”

  “Mmm…”

  “Lauressa, are you listening?”

  “Mmm.”

  “From now on, you are to return home at eight every evening.”

  Laura sat bolt upright, her tiredness gone. “That gives me only three hours every day to do your work!”

  His gaze didn’t waver. “I insist, Lauressa. Or I will cancel our agreement and name you in breach of your note.”

  Her breath was coming faster. She stared at him, despair biting into her. “I’ll never get it done….”

  “At the end of two years, we can reassess,” he said. “By then, there might be enough data I can use for me to be able to forgive the balance. I refuse to be the reason you work yourself into ill health. Look at you. You don’t have the energy to get out of the seat.”

  Laura pushed herself up, intending to climb out all by herself despite him. Her arms gave out. She sat for a second, her heart thumping unhappily. “Don’t you dare try to help me,” she breathed.

  He kept his hands on the controls and looked straight ahead. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  “None of your business.” She gathered the scraps of energy she had left and driven almost purely by the desire to avoid his help, she tried to haul herself out of the car.

  She couldn’t do it. She closed her eyes, her humiliation complete.

  Silently, Micah got out and came around to her side. He bent over and scooped her up into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all and walked over to the door. “Open it,” he said softly.

  “I can walk.”

  “Shh. Open it.”

  She pressed her thumb against the pad and the door unlocked with a heavy sound.

  Micah pushed it open with his foot and moved inside.

  He was in her house.

  Laura knew she should be furious about that. Or at least annoyed. Or even just worried. She couldn’t summon up any feeling at all. His chest was against her shoulder and hip and she could feel good heat and the strength that had surprised her the first time they had met in his office.

  He smelled of…something. It was an intriguing scent. It was a puzzle, just like him.

  He carried her over to the wide bench. She had put the table away this morning so he was able to lay her down.

  “Stay there,” he said shortly. He went over to her bedroom. This was a standard one-person separated living quarters and the arrangement of rooms was identical, so he didn’t need to ask for directions. He emerged carrying the thermal cover and dropped it over her. “Sleep,” he said. “That is the best thing for you right now.”

  She pulled the cover up over her shoulders and turned onto her side. She couldn’t argue with him.

  “Eight o’clock every night, Lauressa,” he told her. “Not a minute over.”

  She sighed. With her eyes nearly closed, she watched him walk back to the door. He was limping now, almost reeling with it.

  When he glanced back at her as he shut the door, she closed her eyes. She didn’t want him to know she had seen the limp, although she didn’t know why.

  Chapter Six

  Micah actively enforced his curfew. Every evening, shortly before eight o’clock, he would emerge from the back offices and stand at the end of the rows of desks, watching her, until Laura reluctantly shut off her desk and went home.

  There was a small amount of teasing from the others about bed-time and chaperones, although none of them would say a word when Micah was in the room, which took away most of the spontaneity and fun for them.

  After two weeks of returning home promptly at eight each night, Laura could feel her energy levels pick up. Even better, the moments when her brain and body were not hers to control dwindled. It annoyed her that Micah had been right to insist upon the shortened hours, even though she fretted about how much longer it would take to finish the project.

  With the return of energy and health, she found a renewed interest in all manner of things. She cleaned down her roof, preparing it for the day when she could restart her garden. She occasionally met Tivoli and Keton and the others for drinks and once, she went to a tankball game, arriving late in the first period. Her friends kept a seat waiting for her.

  Oskar carefully didn’t look at her during the game, even though he had told her it was easy to spot people he knew if they were sitting in the lower seats. Laura didn’t mind being ignored. It was nice just to be among friends and to
be able to relax and scream herself hoarse as the Esquilino team was smashed to pieces.

  The spare time and rest stirred her mind and along with it, her curiosity.

  She remembered with unusual clarity the sight of Micah limping as he left her house that night. On one of the evenings when she was home and enjoying the silence and solitude of her house, she tapped into the Forum and pulled up Micah’s public profile. She had consulted it once before but had only looked at the top level, to get the most basic information about him. Now she wanted to dig farther.

  There was nothing there to find.

  Laura scrolled around the single level of public information, puzzled. Not even the private code that they used in the coders’ suite to contact Micah directly was listed there. The code on the profile was for the house AI.

  There was nothing else.

  Laura pushed the board away and propped her chin on her hand, thinking it through. It wasn’t possible for someone of Micah’s age to not have generated hundreds of pages of logs and events, notes and posts, even if they were the most anti-social person on the ship. Just moving about the day, interacting with people and working a job generated entries. The raw logs the Forum tapped into to create the indexes were hundreds of lines long for a single person, for a single day.

  Those hundreds of entries were if a person did nothing else on the Forum. Many people lived their lives as open books on the Forum, convinced that honest, open lives were the primary reason anyone was selected to be a parent. The more enthusiastic Forum participants had profiles that ran for thousands of pages.

  The only way Micah’s profile could be so empty was because it had been deliberately deleted.

  “Coders….” Laura breathed. Of course he would have the skill necessary to hack the Forum and delete his indexes. Only…why?

  What was he hiding?

  The coders in the front room of the suite were her next best source of information. Rose was always happy to gossip, even about Micah if she thought there was no chance of being caught doing it or when Amil didn’t shut her down for being negative. When Amil left the room, Laura asked Rose the question at the top of her mind.

  “What limp?” Rose asked bluntly, puzzled.

  “He limps,” Laura assured her. “I’ve seen it.”

  Even Havel was looking at her now. “Are you sure? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

  Laura bit her bottom lip, thinking it through. She remembered when he had walked to her front door that night. It stood vividly in her mind. The limp had been undeniably there, making his gait lopsided and heavy.

  Only, she couldn’t remember if he had been off-balance the next day. Did that mean he had recovered? Or had he been hiding it? So Laura shrugged. “Maybe I was seeing things,” she said lightly.

  “Must be,” Rose said. “Coders live at their desks. The most dangerous thing we do is make coffee. Or drink Havel’s.”

  Havel’s jaw dropped. “I make the best damn coffee in the building, except for Laura!”

  The conversation had moved on and Laura didn’t try to bring it back to Micah. She was just uncertain enough to not press it any farther. If everyone in the coders’ room swore that Micah was not lame, then perhaps she had imagined it. She had been very tired and recovering from one of her moments, too.

  Except the entry was there in her journal, written in the very early morning hours, the next day.

  Has Micah been injured somewhere in his past? Why is his leg weak enough to make him walk that way?

  She trusted her journal absolutely. She trusted what she wrote there. She had to, for it propped up her memory. She had learned to speak only the absolute unvarnished truth on those pages, or she would be leading herself astray.

  She wouldn’t have spoken of a limp unless she had really seen it. Only, with Micah’s empty Forum profile and the coders both being dead ends, she was forced to let the question go.

  That left only a few hundred others to be answered.

  She got the opportunity to prod at one of the other mysteries a few weeks later, when she had finished a section of promissory notes. She went through to Micah’s office to report the milestone to him.

  The door opened for her without challenge. Startled, she stepped inside.

  Micah was sitting in the big chair in the corner, his head back and his eyes closed. His legs were elevated and the chair was moving around him.

  “Massage…” Laura breathed. “I should have realized.”

  Micah sat up abruptly and pushed himself out of the chair before it could adjust to his change in posture. “What is it?” he demanded, his tone more peremptory than she had ever heard before.

  Behind him, the chair folded itself up properly and shut down.

  Laura’s attention was pulled away from him by the room itself. There was color on the walls. It was a deep, rich, dark brown that seemed to shimmer with golden highlights. It was a warm color. A very interesting color, too. The lighting was very low, making the screens stand out. The floor was invoking a thick carpet feel, too, that was an even darker brown.

  “Oh…” she breathed, looking around. The coloring was such a good match to Micah, it was awe-inspiring.

  “What do you want, Lauressa?” he said sharply.

  “You know, if you spoke to people in a more pleasant tone, you probably wouldn’t have to wear that scowl nearly as much as you do,” Laura told him.

  He scowled. “People make me use this tone. Most don’t know how to think.”

  Laura guessed that included her, as he never did anything but scowl when he was looking at her. “Is that why you locked that coder in his house for three days?” she asked. “Did he annoy you, too?”

  Abruptly, his scowl vanished. There was a lightness in his face and black eyes that told her he was amused. He just wasn’t smiling. “You believe I would do that to someone?” he asked.

  She bit her lip. She had questioned whether anyone could do that to another person the very first time she had heard the story. Only, that had been before she had met Micah Thorn. “When I first met you, I would have said yes,” she said truthfully.

  “Now you think you know me better?” he asked and there was a cautious note in his voice that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

  “I don’t know you at all. You make sure of that, don’t you?”

  His gaze met hers. He didn’t answer, which was typical for Micah.

  “If you didn’t do it, then who did?”

  Micah went over to his shelf and sat on the edge of it and crossed his arms. Carefully, he arranged his feet. Almost too carefully. “You are better off asking who profited from the event.”

  “There was no profit.”

  “The engineers who rescued Johnnie Norris were lauded for their efforts. Their institution was publically thanked for the work put into the investigation and remedial steps taken to ensure something like that never happened again. They profited handsomely.”

  Laura was aghast. “The institution did it to him?”

  Micah shrugged. “Perhaps it really was the simple act of fate they proposed after their investigation. Corrupt coding and unlucky timing conspired to lock the doors and keep the house sealed for three days. If anyone did deliberately do it, then it pays to look at those who profited from the outcomes, first. I assure you, I did not profit at all.”

  “Unless you want everyone to think you did it. Maybe you’re profiting from a freak coincidence just as the Institute is.”

  He studied her as if she was another of his screens. “The rumor exists. I don’t promote it. The past should remain where it is. I have better things to do.”

  “Is that why you deleted your Forum profile?”

  “I did not,” he said simply.

  “Most of it,” she amended. “The interesting stuff. Your past.”

  “My past is my business and you should stay out of it just as you have exhorted me to stay out of yours.” There was plasteel in his voice.

  Laura hel
d up her hand. “I’m sorry. You’re quite right, as usual. I’m being far too nosy. When you put up walls like that you’re just asking people to try to climb over them.”

  “They can’t if the walls are high enough,” Micah said flatly. “So why are you here, Lauressa?”

  She pushed her hair over her shoulder, suddenly nervous. She felt as though she had almost grabbed a live wire and only just withdrawn her hand at the last second. Her heart was racing. She couldn’t remember why she was here and her journal was back on the desk. She hadn’t expected to be side-tracked in this way. Most of the time when she came to report to him, she put a foot in the door, told Micah the status of the project and went back to her desk.

  Micah made an impatient sound. “Very well. I have another, very small research project for you.”

  “You’re punishing me for not remembering?” she asked, astonished.

  He ignored her question. “Look through the news datariver for the entire ship for the last one hundred years. Just the big events. Everything except the tankball games, for they are another system entirely. Examine each event and record which individual or institution or group profited from each event and their fate in the next year, compared to a year before that.”

  “That will take me a month!” she cried.

  “Oh, I think you’ll see the pattern long before that,” he told her. “Shut the door on your way out.”

  * * * * *

  There was a pattern. Even though most of the events were quirks of fate, accidents and tragic incidences, the groups or professions that profited from them showed an increase in prestige. The house AI suggested other criteria she could measure and Laura built a 3D chart of rising fortunes, with major events sitting at the bottom of every spike. Then she had it projected into the middle of the room and watched it turn.

  Even Havel was staring at the holograph, fascinated, for he had been privy to her muttering and swearing as she had built it.

  “You found it,” Micah said from the back door.

  Laura looked up. “Actual profit,” she said. “In the next few years, the profession in question saw an increase in energy rations, news items and recruiting numbers spiked even harder.”