Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  I’d seen that carved on the tunnel walls near the Oblivion gates too. At least, I’d seen parts of it. Defacing the old signs was a popular pastime.

  “So, clean-legal-and-paid-up, what’re you doing out here?”

  Kapa looked to Emiliya, and Emiliya looked back, but only for a second before she turned her face away.

  “I can’t,” she said, more to the crowd than to him.

  Anger sparked in Kapa’s hard eyes. “You used to trust me.”

  “Before you went into the shadows,” she said.

  “Is that what this is?” They’d both forgotten me. Kapa stepped toward her, his body making a plea to her, even as his voice grew hard. “I’m sorry, Emiliya. Sorry my escape made things tough for you…”

  She stared at him, slack-jawed. “I was locked up with the Clerks for days, and my records are permanently dinged. You left me to this, Kapa. This.” She held up her empty, too-thin hands. “For ten years!”

  “I am sorry, E,” said Kapa softly. “You’ve got no idea what it took to get me in here even this soon.”

  “You shouldn’t have come at all. I’ve got people paying attention to me now. I may have to explain this.”

  She turned and strode away into the crowds. Kapa swore and made to follow, but I stepped into his path. He lifted his hand, a casual gesture from someone used to brute force. But he took a second look at my uniform coat and lowered it again.

  “What’re you really doing here?” I asked.

  Emiliya wasn’t the only one who’d suffered for being Kapa’s friend. The morning after he vanished from the academy, I stood in the lineup and got grilled by the instructors and their Clerks. I told them he’d gone to join the shadows—the smugglers, thieves, and other chaos makers—because they already knew that. I didn’t tell them I had a feeling it was coming and, thankfully, they didn’t ask. I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell me, if they’d found the last letter, the one from his parents, the one that told him they were going to commit suicide.

  I never did find out how it had gotten smuggled in.

  Kapa’s eyes slid past me, following the path Emiliya had taken. Then he collected himself. He smiled the sly smile I remembered from when we were boys. It was a strange thing to see in his scarred man’s face.

  “What am I doin’ here? A little of this, a little of that.” He waggled his hand. “And you, Brother?”

  “Little of this, little of that,” I answered.

  “Not in that uniform.” He crossed his arms and eyed me. “You shoulda jumped with me.”

  “I had my reasons.” I shrugged and glanced uneasily around. This was dangerous, and if Kapa didn’t care, I had to. Just standing here with him was enough to get me hauled into a corruption investigation, but I wasn’t about to let him go until I was sure Emiliya had enough time to get away.

  “Your ‘reasons’ are going to get you killed,” he said seriously.

  “Not before yours do.”

  Kapa’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe we’re on the same team for a while.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  The corner of his mouth curled up. He had me, and he knew it. “Take off the coat, and I’ll tell you.”

  I snorted. “In uniform or out, I’m still in the Security.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Take off the coat, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake…” I stripped my coat off and slung it over my shoulder. It was rash, but I wanted to come out of this with the feeling that I’d actually learned something. I could use that as my excuse later if this was played back for me. I could say I was trying to get information from Kapa.

  Kapa grinned and slapped my shoulder. “That’s more like it, Brother Amerand.”

  He strolled away, following the curve of the wall until he stopped at a point between two bay doors. I would bet my payroll that he’d somehow managed to work out the pattern the cleaning drones followed and had brought us to a point that was acoustically dead, at least for the moment.

  Kapa leaned his shoulder against the wall and looked me up and down. I made myself wait. Kapa loved to brag, and patience had never really been his strong point. He’d give it up before long.

  “There’s new money coming in, Amerand. New opportunities. Maybe you could talk Emiliya around for me.”

  “Is this about the new bunch of saints coming out of Solaris?”

  That surprised him. “You heard already?” But within a few heartbeats he’d settled back down. “Yeah, I guess you would.”

  “Kapa,” I said. “The Solarans are strict legals. They are not going to be dishing out anything to smugglers.”

  “I keep telling you, Brother, I’m legal now.” Kapa’s gaze roamed around the port, taking in the knots of spacers, the trade, and the talk. Someone at the dice game shouted. Cards and chits changed hands amid general laughter. “A lot of people think the new heads of the First Bloods are already shaking things up around here. And there’s always cash for some smart player in a shakeup.”

  Which meant someone was paying him for something and that somebody had already laid out a great deal to clear his record.

  Somebody had bought Kapa.

  The idea made me sick. I couldn’t understand why. I hated what he did—hated the smugglers and the chaos makers because they fed the gangs and the tunnel czars. I hated the way he could so casually suggest I give up my family to the Clerks and their executioners. But I’d always had a strange…respect for Kapa. Of all the people I knew, he was the only one who was really his own master.

  “Kapa. Don’t mess with this. Emiliya says Fortress is taking an interest.”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  I prodded him in the shoulder with my finger. The look he gave me was dangerous, but at least he was looking at me. “Do not mess with Fortress, Kapa. The new Saeos are not, I repeat, not like old Lou and Bea. They are diamond hard and twice as sharp.”

  He swatted at my hand, but I’d already pulled it back. “I know, Amerand. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He leaned close. He smelled of whiskey, smoke, and sweat, but his eyes were clear and steady. “What I tried to tell her.”

  A streak of cold shuddered across my shoulders. “You’re not making sense.”

  “I’m making plenty of sense, you just don’t want to believe what your clean little ears are hearing.” He shrugged again, his sharp, restless gaze roaming across the port yard, cutting out whatever he thought he could use. “The Saeos themselves are setting up something special for Solaris, and it’s all hands to help Erasmus and we all rise together.”

  My mouth went dry. “Kapa, you even think about pulling Emiliya into this and I will kill you with my bare hands.”

  “News for you, Brother.” He prodded me in the shoulder, once. “She’s already in it. I was here to get her out.”

  With that, he strolled away across the open port.

  THREE

  TERESE

  When I woke up the morning after Misao’s phone call, I’d managed to deal with the guilt and fear brought by the news of Bianca’s death by becoming righteously angry. What the hell did Misao think he was doing, calling me up on my daughter’s birthday? If he thought he could just interrupt my life anytime he felt like it, he’d learn different. He could just wait until I was damn good and ready to see him.

  So I lingered with my family. David made his classic slow-recovery breakfast: waffles with butter and maple syrup, or ice cream if you wanted it, which the kids invariably did, except for Jo, who ate her waffles naked to prove one of her more esoteric points. Don’t ask me which one. There was also bacon and stewed apples. Not even Jo turned those down. I drank a third cup of coffee while talking about nothing much with the kids.

  I felt Bianca’s eyes on me the whole time. Her dead gaze made a pressure that started right in the black hole beneath my skull. I ignored it as best I was able. If I wasn’t successful, the kids didn’t say anything. Neither did David.

 
; Jo was leaving that day, returning to Hong Kong on the spaceplane. Allie and Dale were staying over. Jo and I would take the cable together to the Ashland ’port. I’d say good-bye to her there, then catch the bullet train down to Chicago. That would put me at the office at about five o’clock. If Misao wanted to badger me for an extra-long time, he’d have to go hungry to do it, and serve him right…

  I’m a liar.

  This is what was really going on:

  I was scared. I was doing everything I could not to admit that. I was afraid of what would happen once I walked back into that building, of what I would think and feel once I heard what the emergency was and how Bianca had died. I didn’t want to leave my family as we sat around the chipped, stained dining table, stuffing food that was going to mean an extra cholesterol-flush for me and David, and laughing at jokes that were over a decade old.

  But there was that stone in my heart and Bianca’s cold gaze on the back of my neck, and neither one would go away.

  “Your eye’s twitching.”

  I jerked my head around and stared at Jo, who pulled a face back at me. We stood on the transit platform, waiting for the cable bus with our small packs on our shoulders and Jo’s luggage piled around us. The lake winds whipped outside the station’s transparent shields, but in here, we were toasty warm and could safely watch the gale raging across Lake Superior. Jo and I had the platform to ourselves. The nervous wouldn’t take the cable on a day like this, but I sort of liked the iron-grey sky and the waters dancing beneath the wind.

  Wars had once been fought over the water in the Great Lakes. Nasty little wars, with smuggling and sabotaged pipelines, and starving locals and slave labor. Now my family lived peacefully on an artificial island in the middle of it, where the architects went in for tempered glass and molded wood, because you only lived out in the middle of Lake Superior for the view, so they wanted to make sure you got as much of it as possible.

  The grey waters surged below us, but in the distance we could see the deep greens and reds of forested cliffs. Soon, they’d be white with snow, like a line of clouds caught between sky and water.

  “So, are you going to tell me who Bianca is?” Jo folded her arms. Her long white hair was piled in elaborate red-tipped ringlets on top of her head. She’d eschewed a hat, and was muffled deep in a black coat, a stark contrast with her artificially ivory-colored skin. Slim red boots encased her legs and a red scarf did more to call attention to her slender throat than keep it warm. I wouldn’t call the look beautiful, but it was arresting—like her words.

  “Dad always told us never to ask, about the Guardians, about anything,” Jo went on. “He told us to let you make your peace with it. That was your business. Making peace.” She cocked her head. “How’s that working out?”

  “Jo…” I began, but the cable bus pulled in—a string of colorful, flexible cars hung on the white spiderweb that stretched from tower to tower over the choppy waters.

  The doors slipped open and a few passengers climbed out. We stepped in, presenting our palms to the door monitors. I made my way to a spot by the window and took off my small pack, tucking it in the holder in front of me. Raindrops smacked against the window, showing minute ice crystals in each tiny puddle.

  Ugly weather, settling in for the long haul. How metaphoric.

  Jo plunked herself down beside me, resting her pack on her knees. “You were saying?”

  The pain was starting up, a steady throb behind my right ear. “Never mind.”

  The car lurched slightly and started forward. In less than a minute, we were gliding above the waters, heading swiftly and smoothly toward the shore.

  “Never mind your never mind,” Jo snapped. “Are you going to tell me who Bianca is?”

  I sighed. Stubborn girl. Stubborn woman. How very like her mother, David would have said, had said, more than once.

  “Bianca is…was…a data tracker.”

  “What, like an analyst?”

  Annoyance pricked me. How could she not know this? Then I remembered. It was because I had consistently refused to talk about it with her or either of her siblings. And while the Guardians make a great show of not keeping any more secrets than is strictly necessary, we also don’t go around advertising our ranks and specialties.

  They don’t. I meant they, not we.

  “A data tracker is a kind of analyst,” I said, lacing my fingers together. “Bianca looked at data flow, ephemeral or solid, in context. A whole world’s worth of it, if she had access. Years of it, if necessary. When she was done, she could predict the critical decision points in real time: people, news sources, gossips, whatever. If you could control the points she identified, you’d cool down any hot spot within a few weeks. She was always right. Always.”

  “You didn’t have an AI that could do that?”

  “Not the way she could.” I smiled a little, remembering the glint in Bianca’s eyes and the sharp twist to her grin that came when she finally had the answer.

  Got’cha, she’d whisper to the screen. You’re mine now. “Bianca could practically feel the current of human thought. She knew who was taking their cues from their spouses, their lovers, their kids. Give her a week in a place where she knew the language, and she’d know which gossip influenced which listener, and how that line of listening tracked to the center of the power structure, no matter how deep the real power was hidden. It was spooky.”

  It took Jo a moment to digest this. She scrunched down into her coat and watched the evergreen-crowned coast getting closer. “Were you friends?” she asked at last.

  I blinked. How did you explain your relationship with someone who had been under your command for more than two decades? How do you begin to untangle that web of duty and love?

  How do you explain your relationship with someone who’d saved your life?

  “Yes,” I said, because it was easiest. “We were friends.”

  “Then I’m sorry you lost her.”

  “Thank you,” I said with overly bland graciousness. I watched Jo jiggle her leg up and down, tapping her heel on the floor in uneasy rhythm. She wasn’t done yet.

  “Was that what you did? When you were in the Guardians? Were you a data tracker too?”

  I sighed. I had no one to blame but myself for this interrogation. “No. I was a Field Commander.”

  “Dad never told us,” she said pointedly.

  “No,” I agreed.

  The red bootheel went rat-a-tat against the floor. My eye twitched. Another sound hovered on the edge of memory. I felt it grate against my eardrums and on the tip of my spine. Rat-a-tat. I smelled burning.

  “It never went away, though,” Jo was saying. “The Guardians. It just sort of hung in the air all the time, like when you can’t figure out where that smell is coming from.”

  That smell. The burning. I knew where it came from—the past. Stay here. Stay here with your daughter. I sighed. “All right, Jo. You’re right. We should have told you. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t believe me, but she went quiet, and for the moment that was all I wanted. I’d be sorry for this later. I was sorry for it at that moment. I should have gone alone. My family had no part of this.

  The cable bus let us off at the Ashland International Transit Port. The ’port surged with people, robot carts, and security drones. The roar of the planes pressed down against the tidal rush of thousands of voices.

  I hugged my daughter at the archway covering the space between the train platforms and the entrance to the plane gates. Jo hugged me back, pressing her face against my shoulder, and I felt the love surging out of her, warmth into my cold. I held her there for a long moment, and she let me.

  Then she pulled back, holding me at arm’s length. You could see the little girl who was still inside if you knew how to look behind the sophisticated shield in her pale blue eyes.

  “You’ll call, right?” she asked earnestly. “You won’t go without calling?”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Jo.”


  Her face twisted up in disbelief and I instantly wanted to take back my words. Jo turned away and waded into the crowd, finding her way confidently and not looking back once.

  I stood where I was while all the warmth from her embrace turned to an extra layer of ice inside.

  I could have turned back then. I could have said it wasn’t worth it and gone home. I was retired. I was free. This war, if it was a war, was for other people. I was too old, too wounded, too long retired.

  Instead, I stepped onto the bullet to Chicago. I found an empty seat by the curving window in the lounge and watched the green-and-grey blur of the world I’d already left streak by.

  FOUR

  TERESE

  Chicago is the Second City, a fact that has never ceased to annoy it. Ever the younger sibling, it has exulted in being boisterous, unruly, and proud of itself even in defeat. During the Great Lakes wars, it neither walled itself off like Toronto, nor changed sides multiple times like Detroit. Chicago remained true to its own traditions and threw open its doors to all comers, turning into a free port where anything was allowed, with the possible exception of getting caught interfering with somebody else’s business.

  Now it is one of the tallest cities in the world, a place of laser-lit and solar-powered towers: marble white, sandstone red, granite pink, crystal, diamond, ruby, amber, emerald, and sapphire. Cable cars, elevated maglev trains, and pedestrian walkways with stained-glass windows lace those towers together. This shining urban web straddles the remains of the ground-level city with its ragged parklands and urban antiquities. Some of those old ground-level neighborhoods are living enclaves existing in the twilight of the new city, while others are quietly crumbling monuments to the old days, both good and bad. The crowds for the ghost tours on Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day in Chicago rival the ones down in New Orleans on Katrina Day.

  Among the most enduring of these ghosts is Union Station.

  “Attention, passengers. Union Station is an active advertising zone. If you do not wish to input/download/receive personal advertisements, please turn off all information-input facilities.”