Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  He leaned back against his desk and folded his arms. “Now is not a good time. Things are kind of on the boil around here.”

  He knew about Hamahd at the very least. I was not surprised. He was wondering what I was doing here. I shouldn’t have put the uniform back on.

  “Liang,” I said softly. “This is important—and it’s personal.”

  “Why aren’t you asking Terese?” His implication was clear. When I had sent my father to get a message to the saints, I’d sent him to Terese and not Liang, who had been helping me for years. In Liang’s eyes, I’d switched sides somehow.

  Who the hell knew saints had these kinds of arguments?

  The truth was, I had thought about just going to Terese, but in the end I’d hesitated. Terese did not trust Emiliya. Could I really bring her a request to help someone she didn’t trust?

  “Terese hasn’t got a terminal into the Security net, and you do,” I said. “Please, Liang.”

  Liang sighed. He glanced at me again, then at the door. “All right. Once.” He moved behind the desk.

  “Thank you.”

  Liang touched his fingertips to the desktop and looked at me from under his furrowed brow. “Amerand?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m trusting you. You’ve always been as up-front as you can with me, but the commander’s brought you into whatever the Guardians are on. I’m not a Guardian. I’ve got no oath to keep, and I’ve got your people as well as mine depending on me.”

  I nodded. “I told you the truth, Liang. This is personal.”

  “Okay.” Liang lit up the desktop, opening a single active pane with a letter board underneath it. He touched the black area to one side and a new panel opened. His hand moved across it, sketching some colored lines, then redirecting them. They all flashed green for a split second, and the pane was gone.

  “You’ve got ten minutes.” Liang marched out of the room and slammed the door shut behind him.

  The latch snicked back into place without me touching it.

  I swallowed hard and walked around the desk. I couldn’t bring myself to sit in the comfortable chair. I laid my fingertips on the letters. They flashed blue as I touched them. I spelled out my commands and my passwords silently, without any tactile sensation but the smooth coolness of the desktop.

  Liang’s desk was the one terminal that the Common Cause saints had been permitted to connect into our system. It was meant to be our way to spy on their conversations with our people. I’d installed the taps myself. Since then, there’d been a lot of debate about whether we were actually catching everything that went through it. Personally, I had never believed we were, but I’d never bothered to fix it either. It suited me just fine to give Liang some privacy.

  My ears strained. A dull humming filled my mind under my thoughts, and I realized my imagination was supplying the sound of a cleaning drone somewhere behind me.

  Slowly, I worked my way into the Security’s network, and from there through Fortress. From there, I leapt across to Hospital.

  Sweat trickled down my brow even though my hands had gone ice-cold. They were watching me. They had to be watching me. They could see through walls. They could hear thoughts. They were waiting in their silence for me to come out. When I did, it would finally be over.

  But at least I’d know what had really happened to Emiliya’s family. I’d be able to help her, if only a little. It was this thought that kept me going. For once I’d be who I thought I was, who I wanted to be. One child of Oblivion being loyal to another.

  The networks were not connected except by the thinnest of threads. Another way of keeping us apart from each other. But as I inched cautiously forward, the basic functions looked mostly the same. I called for a search. I entered the ID codes I had for Emiliya from carrying her as a passenger on my shuttle.

  The screen cleared. It flashed yellow.

  The droning was all my imagination. They couldn’t really see me, couldn’t really read my mind.

  Numbers and code flashed past, stilled and cleared, and I could read:

  B4291—SUBJECT 94AOB21D

  Known living direct offspring: Child, Male, Amerand

  Laos Jireu 571BG000912AB24

  I stared at my name. I read it again to be sure. My throat swelled and constricted. Child, Male, Amerand Laos Jireu.

  This report was about my mother. My mother. How did Emiliya’s codes get me to my mother? Why did they have a report about her on Hospital? She was out on a work detail. Had she been hurt? Was she sick? My mouth went completely dry. My vision twitched so violently, I could barely string the words together. Had I wasted all this time asking Liang to keep an ear out for word of my mother when I should have been asking Emiliya?

  I forced my eyes to focus. I made myself read.

  I read the data Emiliya had so carefully strung together for me. I read until I could not stand and I fell backward into Liang’s comfortable chair.

  She was dead.

  I had known, on some level, but I hadn’t believed. I’d been able to find my father and pull him out. I had believed I could do the same for my mother, someday, somehow. They had risked everything for me, how could I do anything less for them? I was all they had left.

  But she was dead. Killed on Hospital.

  We all suspected they used us in experiments. We whispered it to ourselves in the dark, but they’d denied it and we’d never seen it, because those sections of Hospital were off-limits to the likes of us. So it had remained on the level of other tunnel rumors, and we let it be.

  Except Emiliya must have known. Emiliya had left this information for me.

  Where is Emiliya?

  My hands moved across the keys. I didn’t even bother to cover my tracks. I used my open ID. I used my real name. I was past caring. I already knew the answer anyway. I was just looking for confirmation. No one could possibly call me out for looking for confirmation of a friend’s death.

  A friend who had died at 12:30:34:14:09, local date and time.

  She found out at the last minute. They killed her because she knew. She always said she was just scan-and-stitch. They kept her away from the laboratory wings. That had to be it. It could not be anything else. I couldn’t survive if it was anything else.

  I looked at the screen again, at the date and time of Emiliya’s death. No cause was listed. I had no right to know so much.

  Of course not. After all, she didn’t belong to me. She belonged to them. She was theirs, like I was theirs, as my parents and Kapa were theirs, to be used up as required, and there was nothing any one of us could do. Oblivion’s children were born to be forgotten.

  The whole desktop flashed bright red, then went black. My ten minutes must have been up. I got to my feet and walked out, closing the door behind me. Liang’s clever lock would surely take care of the rest. I walked out through the lobby. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Terese standing with a scarred, bald man beside the white clinic door. She didn’t see me and I didn’t stop. She and I were finished. There was nothing the saints could do for any of us anymore.

  I was halfway across the courtyard when my father stepped out of the shadows.

  Ever mindful of his role as my servant, my father bowed. “I thought you might require…something,” he said softly.

  I closed my eyes briefly. My guts twisted hard. “No, nothing.” I couldn’t draw him into this. I didn’t want to tell him he was about to lose his last son.

  “Amerand,” he whispered. “Please.”

  My resistance shattered in an instant. I nodded, and we moved out into the middle of the yard, to where we were surrounded by voices. It was one of the paradoxes of an observed life. The place you had the most privacy was in the middle of a crowd.

  I kept my gaze on the shifting mass of people, the tattered strangers who were as much my family as my blood kin had ever been. We’d all walked from prison to a trap. We’d all tried to escape, or to free those dearest to us.

  We’d all failed.

&
nbsp; Softly, I told my father what had happened and what I’d found.

  He swayed on his feet, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look at me. His face remained still as stone, except for the single tear that traced its way down his cheek.

  “I should have known,” he croaked. “Really. I should have known.”

  “There was no way to know,” I murmured.

  “She was the one who got us onto the ship, the one that took us from Oblivion,” he said. He still didn’t look at me. It was as if he had lost the ability to move. “I never asked her how she did it, but she saved all our lives. After that, it was her idea to get you into the secops. She couldn’t save your brothers, but she was going to save you even if it meant…if it meant…” His voice trailed away.

  I tried to conjure up a memory of my mother, anything, but there was nothing. Nothing but the blackness of an empty tunnel. All the past had been stripped away from me.

  “Go to the saints,” I said to my father. “Ask for asylum. They’ll get you out of here.”

  He turned his head, lifting his face toward me. “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to make the Blood pay for what they have done to us,” I said.

  We stood there for a moment, my father and I, looking at each other, each of us finally seeing into the depths of the other, seeing the tunnel darkness, seeing past and future vanish into shadow.

  My father shook his head slowly. “You do what you must,” he said. “I will not be used against you.”

  I nodded. He would choose his ending now, as I had chosen mine, and we would both finally be free.

  I clasped his shoulder once and turned away, wading into the crowd.

  THIRTY-THREE

  TERESE

  “What have they done to her, Terese?” Vijay demanded.

  I was standing against the wall beside the quarantine room. Dr. Gwin’s team had carried Siri inside and barred the door in my face. Vijay had refused to let anyone do anything more than put a field dressing on him to stabilize his broken elbow, then he’d run the whole way back at my side. Once we reached the base house, I had to order him to go with the nurse and get it set. Now he was back, his face white with all kinds of pain and his arm in a stabilization cast.

  “What in all the hells have they done to her?” he asked again, looming over me.

  “Gwin will find out.” My mind still reeled. I wanted nothing so much as to lean against the wall and vomit, but I couldn’t. As it was, everybody was staring at us, Solaran and Erasman.

  “Vijay,” I said to bring his attention down to me and away from the quarantine door. “What did you find out at the yard?”

  He blinked like he didn’t understand the question, then ran his palm across his scalp. “It’s a dead end, Terese. They weren’t loading anything but water.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He plucked his gloves out of his pocket and held them out to me. “You can check it if you don’t believe me.”

  Another time I might have reprimanded him, but I saw the anguish in his battered face. He turned toward the quarantine door again. “She’s got to be all right, Terese.”

  “She will be. If Gwin can’t do anything for her here, we’ll pull her out back to Earth. Misao will make sure she gets whatever she needs.”

  He nodded dully. “Can I stay here awhile? Just, you know, for when there’s word?”

  His cover was totally blown anyway. I nodded and he slumped against the wall. I twisted his gloves in my hands. I tried not to think. I tried to just wait. The answer to so much was inside the quarantine room, inside Siri.

  Siri had gotten far more of this horrible riddle right than I’d been able to comprehend.

  Time stretched out. I don’t know how long. My feet ached. My stomach rumbled. Vijay said nothing. All I could do was sit there with one thought rubbing a sore spot in my mind.

  Siri had been right about so much of this. She’d been right even about what had sounded so insane.

  What else was she right about?

  “Vijay?” I said quietly.

  He turned his ravaged face toward me.

  “How did Bianca find me?”

  “What?”

  “When I was…being held by the Redeemers. How did she find me? Siri…Siri said I had no idea what she did for me.”

  He was getting ready to lie. I could see it even though all the surgical alterations had stiffened his face.

  I could also tell when, at the last second, he changed his mind.

  “She had one of the inner circle picked up. She got a short-haul ship and she took him to it.

  “She tortured him, Terese. And when he gave her the answer, she killed him.”

  No.

  “But it didn’t work. It was the wrong answer. He’d told her what he thought she wanted to hear, to get her to stop.”

  No. No. It isn’t possible.

  “Misao never found out,” said Vijay. “I knew. Siri knew. We didn’t tell you. You’d been through enough, and you thought—you believed—that she’d saved you. Siri covered for her. She said…she said Bianca knew it was a mistake. Said she’d been too outraged, too frightened. Said we all make mistakes and she’d done it for a good reason—to save your life—and we found you in the end and that was all that mattered…”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Stop,” I whispered. “Please stop.”

  Vijay turned his face toward the quarantine door. “I knew you’d ask,” he said. “Siri didn’t think you would, but you were always as bad as Bianca. Neither one of you could leave well enough alone.”

  “How long?” I asked. “Between what…what she did and when you really found me?”

  “A few weeks.”

  I leaned my head back against the wall. Those last few weeks, that was when they’d found Dylan. Bianca had not only broken the first precept, she’d given them time to cut Dylan out of me.

  I should have known. I should have known from the way she let me go, from the way no one on my old team ever came and talked to me. I hadn’t wanted contact, but they didn’t either. Siri didn’t come because she was covering for Bianca. Vijay didn’t come because he was covering for Siri.

  Bianca didn’t come because she knew I wouldn’t be able to forgive her for committing a murder that did nothing more than get Dylan killed.

  Had that murder, that guilt, driven her to attempt the takedown? This time she was going to break the rules and get it right? This time would make up for that other? Save all these lives to make up for the one she’d taken in my name?

  You have no idea what she did for you.

  Oh, Siri, you were right.

  Finally, the quarantine door opened and Dr. Gwin stepped out. Vijay straightened up at once, and I was back at his side almost before I’d realized I’d moved.

  “I need you in here, Field Commander. Not you.” She added to Vijay, “You stay put.”

  She ushered me inside, through the clean lock, and shut the inner door behind us. The sound shuddered all the way through me.

  The quarantine room was white and sterile. Screens had been mounted onto the walls and a whole spiderweb of cables connected them to junction boxes, gloves, and glasses. Siri lay on the table in the center, a pale sheet pulled up to her chin. Blue cuffs circled her wrists, pumping sedatives into her system.

  “What can you tell me?” I said, forcing my voice into a brisk tone.

  “I can tell you we are all in serious trouble.”

  “What?”

  Gwin laid her hand on one of the screens and lit up a video: blood vessels, brain, and bone, all alive for me to see. I recognized the veinlike thread of the Companion implant laid against the shimmering grey matter. “Since you said Siri’s instability was manifesting as voices, I scanned her Companion to make sure the nodes were solid and the output levels were what they should be.

  “This is Siri’s implant after we got her out of the peeled core. See these branches here and here?” She pointed at two threads.

&nbs
p; I nodded.

  “They weren’t there when she left Earth. I did a close-up.” Gwin touched the pane again. The video zoomed in farther, until the threads turned into neat lines of black squares laid over with white threads. “They’re artificial, and they were probably tracked in there by a nano injection.”

  An injection? Like the pressure spray I had permitted Emiliya Varus to administer to Siri for her pain.

  “I haven’t had time to fully analyze this yet, but we’ve seen some of the resulting instability. And I’ll tell you something else.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her face had flushed darkly. “These were clones.”

  “Clones?” I said blankly. “But they’re chips.”

  “Term of art.” She opened a second pane, to display a second set of little black squares, with the same pattern of threads as the ones in Siri’s node. “These”—she tapped the second set—“are from Bianca Fayette’s implant, back when it was whole.”

  Pain filled the empty space in my skull. Sick, hard, relentless pain. The idea of Bianca’s body spread out for the slaves and vultures of Hospital, of her blood measured and microscopically analyzed, of Jerimiah laid bare for their analysts…

  Jerimiah had been damaged. Oh, yes, he’d been damaged. I saw them taking the lace filigree of his network from Bianca’s vivisected skull. I saw them laying it on a pure white table and gathering around it, bent over it, whispering and wondering at what they’d found, recording, measuring, analyzing.

  Some of Jerimiah’s nodes had been “disconnected.”

  Bianca hadn’t sold out to the Erasmus System. She hadn’t gotten Jerimiah cut out to keep him from informing on her. She’d been dismembered. She’d been an experiment. They’d taken her apart to see what her body could teach them, and it had showed them the defense and protection of every single field officer in the Guardians.

  Hospital the size of a planet, Siri’s voice whispered in my ear. We don’t know what they can do.

  The Erasmans were creating a network of human voices that were being implanted in the Clerks, Siri said. It sounded insane. Unless you substituted a couple of words.