Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  “Erasmus launching a war?” I could barely frame the thought, never mind the words. “You can’t be serious. They’re scrambling for survival right now. They haven’t got the resources to launch any kind of attack…”

  Misao’s steady silence told me I was wrong. Dead wrong. I felt the blood drain slowly from my face, leaving me cold. “What have I missed?”

  “Are you coming back?”

  Fine. Fine. It’s an out. Take it. Remember David. Remember you promised. Take your out and run!

  I stood. I met those icy green eyes. I felt Bianca behind me. He knew she was there. He knew it and he was not going to give me one ounce of relief.

  “I promised, Misao,” I whispered. “Before we ever got married, I swore to David I was retired.”

  “Then you do not have the clearance to be briefed about the current situation on Erasmus. Good-bye, Mrs. Drajeske.”

  I couldn’t breathe. If he’d punched me in the gut, I couldn’t have been in more pain.

  You son of a bitch. You cold, manipulative son of a bitch.

  “Just tell me,” I croaked. My throat was sore. How had that happened? I felt like I’d been shouting, but I hadn’t raised my voice since I came here. “Did Bianca really say she wanted me out there?”

  Misao laid his hand flat on the desk. “Come here, Jerimiah.”

  The opaque shield that covered the door to the corridor cleared. The door behind it opened, and a young man seemed to walk up the hall and stand framed in the threshold. He was lanky, with copper-brown skin and coffee-brown eyes that drooped in the corners. His straight black hair flopped into his eyes so that he had to keep pushing it back. It made him look boyishly handsome. He probably had a mischievous smile when he wasn’t looking so solemn.

  Once our Companions are installed and established, we meet with an artist for several sessions to describe our impressions of our Companions. A VR portrait is made and stored with our files. This allows for interactive sessions in the real world to reinforce and refine the “relationship.”

  Many of us have good-looking Companions, or at least cute ones. I know one Guardian whose Companion was an eight-year-old girl, and another who had an angel, and yet another who’d had Coco the Wonder Dog. That your Companion appears as someone you’d want to love and protect is part of the point. It helps you fight to stay alive longer.

  My own Companion, Dylan, was taller than I was and older than I was, with rich brown eyes that crinkled up in the corners when he smiled and cinnamon-brown hair he wore in a ponytail. He had a Celtic knotwork tattoo around one biceps, and on his forearm was a set of plain black letters proclaiming enter here for full explanation. I had been surprised at the ink. I never liked it. I’d asked him to get rid of it once, and he just looked wounded. I chuckled and let it go.

  “Hello, Marshal-Steward. How can I help you?” Jerimiah’s voice was light, in keeping with his appearance. It didn’t sound quite right, somehow. The accent…something…it wasn’t what it should have been.

  “Jerimiah, can you tell us how Field Coordinator Fayette was captured?”

  I thought Jerimiah hesitated a little as he looked toward me, but I told myself that was my imagination. This was no thinking creature. The mind behind it, Bianca’s mind, was dead. This was an illusion created by a delicate web of chips and artificial neurons.

  “I don’t know how we were captured, not completely. I am damaged.” Jerimiah spread his hands. His fingernails were chewed down to the quick. I guess a lifetime in Bianca’s head could make you nervous.

  In front of me now, the Companion Jerimiah kicked at the carpet. “We were…waiting for someone. There was an appointment Bianca needed to keep, but not on Dazzle. We were on Dazzle, waiting for someone to take us to see…” He shook his head. “I am sorry. That’s gone. But she was very concerned about the refugee problem, or wanting to create the refugee problem or…” His hands with their chewed-on nails curled into fists. The artist had done a good job with the detail and definition of Jerimiah’s face. I could see the sorrow in the drooping corners of his eyes. The mellow voice hesitated just a little, a fine simulation of feeling. It made me want to reach out to a hand that wasn’t there.

  I remembered what Misao had said about the rats and shuddered. Could a Companion feel pain, apart from the host’s pain? I suddenly felt guilty about not knowing that.

  When I woke up in my Redemption cell with the crusted bandage behind my ear and no Dylan in my head, I tried to kill myself. My captors had found the suicide switch too, but I kept trying.

  I’d almost succeeded by the time Bianca took apart the cell wall and pulled me out. I hadn’t, even then, stopped to think what Dylan felt in his last moments.

  “Word had been spreading about the Pax Solaris’s open-border policy,” Jerimiah was saying. “Moonfive, Oblivion, attempted a large-scale diaspora once before.”

  “I know,” I cut him off.

  “Bianca was afraid they might try a diaspora again, to reach the Pax worlds, and that there might be a large number of deaths if that happened.”

  “Why were you in Erasmus?” I asked Jerimiah.

  “We were finishing off the Grand Tour. Bianca wanted to make the rounds, to see if she still wanted to remain a Guardian.”

  A hundred years ago she’d done the same thing, with me.

  “Was she the one who discovered Erasmus was a hot spot?” I asked.

  Jerimiah nodded. This time he was looking at Misao. Misao looked back, closed-off and impassive as ever. “She believed it was going to blow soon.”

  “Did she have proof?”

  Jerimiah shifted his weight, displaying a kind of uncertainty I had never seen in a Companion. Dylan had never acted like this. “She was looking for it.”

  “Did she find it?” I pressed, feeling guilty at pushing so much on a kid, but I was not going to stop.

  Jerimiah bit down on his lower lip and shook his head hard. “I don’t know. I was damaged. We went to Market. We went to Fortress. We went to Fortress a lot. We talked to the ambassador and to the Erasmus Saeos.” The title was a corruption of the old corporate title, CEO, firmly marking Erasmus’s origins as a for-profit colony. “She made friends with them. I have some records of this.” He pressed his hand against the threshold and Misao’s desk lit up to show the crosslooks. I could easily believe Bianca had made friends with the Blood Family. She could charm anybody if she really wanted to, and she was not above using that talent for work…or for play.

  My gaze slid sideways to Misao. His finger was twitching, wanting to tap out some command on the tabletop. He’d spoken with certainty. A year away from a war, he’d said. But Jerimiah said she’d only been looking for the proof. Either he’d lied to me, or they’d learned something Misao hadn’t told me yet.

  Hadn’t told me and wouldn’t tell me until I took the oath again.

  I turned back to Jerimiah. “Then what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jerimiah muttered angrily. “I don’t know. She died. She died with me in her mind, and I don’t know how!”

  Suspicion bloomed hot and horrendous inside me. “You said you had her last words!” I snapped at Misao. “You said she asked for me!”

  “He had to play her last words for me too,” said Jerimiah. “Some of my surviving nodes became disconnected, and I was not able to reintegrate them.”

  Misao never took his gaze off me. He moved a finger sideways and I heard Jerimiah’s voice over my set.

  “I’m ready, Bianca.”

  “Okay. Okay.” That was Bianca’s husky alto, instantly recognizable to me. But it wasn’t the easy, laughing voice I knew so well. It was choking, raw and filled with tears.

  “…Oh…Oh…it is my time. My time…I didn’t believe this day would come…I’d only hoped…I’d prayed…But here it is. Finally, here it is. Oh, Jerimiah, you can tell them…Please tell them, Terese really is the one I want to replace me. It’s true. I swear. Bring her in and it’ll fall into place…I swear, I swear,
I swear…No one else can make it work. Make sure they know, and make sure they know it was me who said it. They’ll listen to you. Please, tell them.”

  I couldn’t move. Sweat, or perhaps a tear, trickled down my cheek, and I still couldn’t move. In the threshold, Jerimiah bowed his head.

  “I’ll tell them, Bianca. Don’t worry. I’m here with you.”

  “Thank you, Jerimiah. Thank you. Oh, God, I’m shaking. I wanted so much…Well…Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye, Bianca.”

  A snap, a shuffle of cloth, and a soft thump, and silence. Silence stretching out until it felt like pain.

  “Thank you, Jerimiah,” said Misao.

  Jerimiah looked up, his face blank and bleak, and more than a little ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. Then he turned and walked away, and the shield darkened, becoming a blank covering for the door again.

  I was shaking. I was as cold as if there were nothing between me and the winter outside. It was too hard, too much. Too many memories flooded me, drowning thought. I could barely breathe. I was going to be sick in another minute.

  “I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t.”

  Misao pressed both palms against the desk. I don’t know what he was going to say. I never found out. At that moment, a chime sounded on my set followed immediately by a voice.

  “Terese? I’m in the lobby.”

  It was David.

  FIVE

  TERESE

  Misao glanced at his desk, where there was, of course, a report on who’d just called. His eyes widened and his head jerked up. For one of the few times in my career, I saw Marshal-Steward Misao Smith at a loss.

  I touched my set to acknowledge the call. “Excuse me,” I said to Misao.

  I walked out into the hall. The door closed after me.

  I hate doors. I hate hearing them open and shut. I hate the drafts and the clanks, the rattles and the clicks. I hate them closing in front of me, or behind me. After all this time, after all the therapy and regrowth, I still hate doors.

  Move. He can see you standing here.

  I moved back through the busy labyrinth by instinct and memory rather than conscious thought. It wasn’t until I had my hand on the palm reader which, on the near side, would verify that I had the legal right to walk out of this building that I even realized I’d made it back to the lobby.

  And there stood David, and beside him, pale and defiant, stood Jo.

  We stared at each other in silence for a long time. David’s face creased up tight, trying to find some kind of expression that suited the clamor inside him. I stood in front of him, slump-shouldered and exhausted.

  To make matters even more surreal, I noticed that we weren’t alone. Vijay and Siri occupied one corner of the lobby. I don’t know how those two got there ahead of me, but my old team and my family cast sideways glances at each other, neither side quite sure who that was over there.

  I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I couldn’t do either. I couldn’t even move.

  David touched Jo’s arm. “I’ll talk to your mother alone. You’ve still got that plane to catch.”

  Jo tilted her chin up. “Not until I’m sure she’s not going to do something stupid.” She projected an air of righteousness that can only come from someone who hasn’t even finished her third decade.

  I felt Siri’s eyes burning into the back of my neck.

  “It’ll be all right,” said David softly to Jo. “I’ll meet you there.”

  I didn’t think Jo was going to listen at first. She stepped toward me. “See you back home,” she said. Then she turned and walked out, tall and confident: confident that she had successfully removed my choices, confident she had saved me from myself.

  Anger surfaced: a parent’s strange, uncomfortable anger at a child who simply doesn’t understand. It is an awful anger, because you’re only getting angry at the reflections of your mistakes.

  Siri walked up beside me. “Mother? Then this is…”

  “David Drajeske.” David held out his hand.

  “Siri Baijahn.” Siri shook his hand, because what else was she going to do? Her eyes were hard as she sized him up, and she flickered a glance at me to say, This is what you left us for? This exhausted, aging, worried man?

  Family telepathy.

  “Vijay Kochinski.” David and Vijay shook hands. This time the glance went between Siri and Vijay and I felt the current of implied understanding, but of what I couldn’t tell, and my anger redoubled.

  Manipulative little Misao wannabes.

  “Not here,” I said to David. I walked past him and pushed open the doors. Let Vijay and Siri take that back to the boss.

  David followed me in silence, and I let him keep following me. I’d be damned if I was going to talk to him where Misao, and Vijay, and Siri could listen in. I was not going to turn around and say, “What were you thinking!” “Why are you doing this?” or “What on earth made you bring Jo into this?” where they could hear me do it. More than that: I was not going to open my mouth until I had at least some idea what was going to come out.

  The top of Daley Tower 4 has a living roof: a beautiful green and flowering formal garden, shielded from the harsh winds and winters. There is even a marble fountain carved in a very bad classical Greek-revival style.

  I pushed open the door, gritting my teeth as the clean, conifer-scented air wafted over me. It was full dark, and there were only a few footlights on to show us the white-gravel pathways. The winter city, with its colored lights and veins of darkness, spread around us. The shields didn’t filter out the noise, and I could hear Chicago’s rushing, enervating cacophony.

  I stalked down the central path. We had the place to ourselves. The fountain had been switched off for the night and its central faun was giving me a sarcastic look.

  I sank down on a granite bench and looked out across the ledge.

  “They got to you, didn’t they?” David breathed. “You would have re-upped.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I guessed. And I talked to Jo.”

  Of course. I could picture Jo pacing the boarding lounge at the ’port, trying to make up her mind. I could picture her face, the stern set of her jaw the moment her internal righteousness won out and she ordered her set to connect to her father, so she could tell him I was about to betray them even before I was sure myself.

  But then, perhaps I was wrong. David was an experienced investigator, after all. He had lived with me for the same thirty-five years I’d lived with him. He might have been the one to call Jo.

  “I’m sorry, David. Really.” I was. Honestly, truly. Sorry about more things than I could count.

  But David had never let me take the easy way out, and he wasn’t about to now. When he walked into my line of sight, he was shaking. His big, competent hands trembled though he held them in tight fists at his side.

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?” he whispered. He wasn’t a shouter, my David. The more angry he got, the more intense and passionate, the softer his voice grew. “You promised! You swore you were done!”

  Anger, sluggish and bitter as old blood, dripped into the place where I kept my love for David. If you want to get a good fury going, there’s nothing like guilt for fuel. I didn’t want him here. He did not belong here. This was my other life, from before our family existed. I had traveled back in time. He had no right to follow me. Why couldn’t he just go away?

  “You say you trust me? How about trusting me enough to believe I’ll come back!” Go away, go home, don’t BE here. This isn’t your life. There’s no room for you here!

  Disbelief slackened David’s features. He rallied, but it was a slow process. Like me, he was swimming against the current of the years. He walked to the low wall that circled the rooftop, to look at the restless sparks of city light. He spread his hands on the ledge, leaning all his weight on them as if testing the strength of the stone.

  As if testing the strength of himself.

  “How
can you go back to the Guardians, Terese?” he said finally. “They broke you into pieces.”

  “They didn’t break me. That was the Redeemers.” The hands slick with my blood, and the pain and the filthy faces grinning and crooning about the will of God…

  “The Guardians sent you.”

  “I volunteered. I knew the risks.” Flash anger, hot and fresh, pulled me to my feet and clenched my fists. “Damn it, stop blaming the Guardians!”

  “Why?” David swung around. “You’ve blamed them for years!”

  I had. I did. My knees shook. “I might have been wrong,” I whispered.

  “Now you tell me.”

  I stared at him, my eyes stinging with exhaustion and emotion, and the sound that emerged from my open mouth was the last one I expected.

  I started to laugh.

  I dissolved into a torrent of giggles that buckled my knees so I had to drop back down onto the bench and press my hands against my face to catch the tears.

  While I tried to get myself back under control, I felt David’s warmth and smelled his distinct scent as he sat down beside me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” he said in that bland tone that meant all that was right was my reaction to this moment. But at least it was a start.

  I lifted my face, wiping my damp palms on my trousers. “I didn’t lie to you,” I said hoarsely. “Up until yesterday, I meant it. I never would have gone back. Up until three hours ago I meant it.” It was the truth. “But…something has gone very wrong, David. Somehow, this little chunk of anarchy has become a threat at the worst possible time.”

  He made no reply to this, just scraped his shoes on the path as he shifted his weight. The sound reminded me of how Jerimiah had kicked at the carpet, and I remembered the suppressed anger vibrating through the whole of Misao’s frame.

  “They must be desperate,” I whispered. “Why in the hell else would they want me back?”

  David blew out a long breath. “Because you’ve survived what no one else has.”