“No,” Cricket said, a shrill spasming whine. She couldn’t lift her hand to push at him, so she thumped the heel on the deck for emphasis. She felt him jump. “No doctor. Just…a minute.”
Dying. Cricket—no, Lucienne was dying. Lucienne knew she was dying, and she knew why. And there was no time to explain.
So she showed.
The file was encoded, and Cricket’s breath came back into her with a rush as the flood of numbers washed away the swelling pain in her head. Lucienne had swamped her connex, a massive core-dump—
Corrupt. Corrupt. Corrupt.
“Shit!” The word of the day, apparently. Cricket scrambled to save, to back up, to dump what Lucienne had sent her into a protected hold. Cricket was an archinformist. She had better security protocols than most governments. And she knew how to sling data, and how to repair it—
She went after it, the bones in Jean’s wrists creaking as she clenched her hands. But the file was incomplete. And a nonholographic transmission, so what she had was a chunk of data, but not the sort of chunk that could give you a fuzzy picture of the whole. This was a linear string. Though Cricket was pretty sure she could find the key, because Lucienne would have wanted her—or Jean—to crack the code, she only had part of it.
And now was not the time for trying to patch out a crack on what she had. Not when Jean was leaning over her, moving his hands inside her slackening grip to tug her dressing gown shut over her breasts, breathing so shallowly that listening to him made her lungs hurt.
She let her hands loosen. He touched her shoulder and sat back. “Jean,” she said. She opened her eyes. His, water-colored behind his rimless glasses, looked back.
He sighed, short and sharp. “No.”
She put a hand down and picked herself off the floor. She’d bruised her shoulders on the chair. When she extended her hand to pull Jean off his knees, the stretch of muscle made her wince. “I—”
“It’s not your fault.” Abruptly, preemptive.
“It had to be André.”
“It’s still not your fault.” He straightened, fist pressed into his side like a runner with a stitch. “His responsibility. Did she…send you anything else?”
“Part of a file.” She swallowed. “It was coded. The connex cut off.”
“Shit.” With exactly the same inflection she’d said it, too. Her smile hurt more than frowning had. He opened his mouth, looked at her, shut it.
She couldn’t stand the look on his face, the wary softness of it. Jean Gris should never look so unguarded. “You’re not even going to recite the stupid parable about the snake at me, are you?”
He snorted, a pained laugh that didn’t open his mouth. “No.” And then a pause. “He’s got the knack, doesn’t he?”
“Could he have got past what you hung on Lucienne if he didn’t?”
Untrained, unassisted. Jean shook his head. Cricket’s heart twisted in her chest.
Nobody’d ever loved her like that. “Do you think you can—”…save him…fix him. She didn’t even know the word she wanted.
Jean shrugged. Not a dismissal. A maybe. Even now. “I’ve known men as bad, turned out better.” Jean’s brand of revenge didn’t run to murder. “Once you send me that file, I’ll let you out of it. I know you didn’t want to be involved.”
“In what you and Lucienne were doing?”
He nodded. Even here, it didn’t pay to be too specific.
“Actually,” Cricket said, balling her hands in the pockets of her robe, “I was kind of changing my mind.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, they drank a great deal of tea. Cricket hunched over her mug, sipping distractedly, while Jean filled and refilled it. “So tell me about André,” he said, when her fingers were no longer clenched so tightly on the cup that they whitened at the edges.
Her eyes were red, the lid-edges slick inside the lashes when she looked up. “What do you need?”
“Why does he want to conjure so bad?” She opened her mouth a little too fast, and Jean held up his hand. “Not the facile answer, please. You’re an archinformist”—she laughed—“don’t tell me you didn’t pull his records back to first grade before you got involved with him.”
The corner of her mouth quirked. Touché. “He’d never tell you. He’s got a sister he can’t stand. Left home in his teens, after his older brother got killed in a gang fight and he didn’t pass evaluation for Exigency Corps training.”
“So he wanted to be a god-botherer. He’s got the talent—”
“His mother was a conjure.” She pushed the cup away with her fingertips. Jean felt it scrape through the table and lifted his hands. “His sister is, too. He doesn’t talk about them. I can only speculate…”
“So? Speculate.”
She snatched the teacup and drained it. “I think he blames his mom for…He had a brother. A year older. Honoré. A tough boy, ran with a bad crowd. And whether their mom could actually conjure or not, she couldn’t keep Honoré home.”
“Or André from running with him.” Jean lifted the pot. She held her hand over her cup.
“Or keep Honoré alive,” Cricket said. “André got pretty badly beaten up around the same time. I think he blames his mother and sister for, you know.” She waved at the ceiling.
“Not keeping Honoré alive?”
“Sure. So he tried to get into the Corps, and they wouldn’t take him because of his family background. And he wants nothing to do with Zoë—she’s his sister. She’s a conjure, too.”
“Any good?”
Cricket shrugged. “Are any of them? I mean, other than you?”
“There’s a few,” Jean allowed. He cleared his throat. “So André grew up a killer instead.”
Changing her mind, Cricket reached for the teapot after all. “So it would seem.”
The morning was hotter, humid, and bright. André was intent enough on his interface that he jumped when Maryanne bumped the door open with her hip, though he didn’t look up until she set a tin tray on the steel edge of his desk. The napkin-covered outline of an antique revolver lay beside the coffeepot, the china cup, and a doughnut on the gold-rimmed plate.
Wordlessly, stiff-backed, Maryanne turned on a pointed shoe and left him staring at the thing. He reached out and brushed the napkin aside, then checked the load. One bullet.
Maryanne let the door snap shut behind her audibly. She had to give it an extra little push to get that click, and André read the message in it. Maryanne was his cousin, as well as his employee. Normally, she kept her opinions to herself, and her work for him met both their needs. He got to give something back to his family, and in return got help he could trust.
But Maryanne lived with André’s older sister, Zoë, a charlatan conjurer like their mother, and—
There were family differences. Leave it at that.
He set the revolver aside. There was a real paper envelope underneath, his name in actual handwriting, actual ink. M~ A. Deschênes.
Shit, he thought. And also, at last.
This was more usually a graduation test, as he understood it. A message as plain as the gun: you are playing in the big leagues now. He spun the cylinder, closing his eyes while he listened to it whir, picturing the chamber with the single cartridge dropping to the bottom, away from the hammer, pausing there as the cylinder ratcheted to a halt.
If Kroc knew about Spivak, the weapon was bait. The fix was in, this was no test, and accepting the challenge would mean his death. If Kroc didn’t know—if Cricket had spoken to him about André—then this was André’s chance. He might be able to affect the spin of the cylinder. He might just—get lucky.
Unlike the cat in the box, he did not know if he was dead.
The gun might be archaic, but the antitampering lock was not. The diamond-tipped drill zinged into metal as the cylinder stopped. The weapon shuddered as the bolt slipped home, a delicate warble alerting him to the activation of the transmitter. Kroc would know if he cheated.
The question
being asked had a yes or no answer. Did he want to conjure enough to die for it?
André slid the room-temperature barrel into his mouth, tasting gun oil, sleek and unpleasantly aromatic. He pictured misfire. He pictured a misaligned chamber, a hammer bent enough to miss contacting the primer. A revolver was a primitive machine, an effective machine. Not much could go wrong.
He was dead or he wasn’t. A closed box. About time, he thought, and opened his eyes for one long look at the screen across from his desk, the one that showed the endless blue expanse of bay, the contrail of another lighter towing its string-of-pearls cargo pods toward the spaceport after splashdown. Up and down, up and down, never getting anywhere.
The wake hit; his office rose and dropped, the stylus rolling across his interface stopped by the lip on the desk.
His finger convulsed.
It was the best damned coffee André had ever tasted.
He gulped the first cup in three painful, searing swallows, then poured another and soaked broken bites of doughnut. It was a ritual, a discipline, and he didn’t pick up the envelope until he’d tossed back the crumb-laden dregs and poured himself a third cup, oily and black. By then, his hands were shaking too badly to drink and machismo was satisfied, so he set it aside and picked up the envelope in its stead.
Hand-addressed, as he’d noticed. The writing was smooth and controlled, not jerky the way most people’s was when they were forced to use archaic tools. He knew before he opened it that the note inside, like the envelope, would be real paper, dead trees and cloth fiber, rather than epaper. There would be no data trail.
André read over the address and the invitation and drank his third cup of coffee while memorizing both. Wet memory, not hard.
No etrails.
The fourth cup of coffee was the last one in the pot. It steamed thickly into the humid air while André tapped the last few droplets free and then unscrewed the element from the bottom of the pot. It wasn’t hot enough to glow when he laid the insulated cap down on the tray, but it was hot enough to blacken paper, and—when he bent forward and blew softly on the thin ember—to set it brilliantly aflame.
The invitation burned the envelope, and both scorched André’s fingertips before he dropped them in the recycler and poured half the last cup of coffee on top. What remained was bitter, and there were grounds in it. André could afford the real, imported bean. Not a stunning expense—coffee went through a transmitter just fine—but supplies were limited and that made it a not insignificant one.
He savored those last swallows. Then he stood, and set the cup aside on the painted tin tray, and summoned his weapons and his coat. He walked past Maryanne on his way out; she caught his wrist so he turned and met her gaze. She shook her head so her earrings rattled on her earpiece, lips pressed tight, conservative bleached dreadlocks caught back in a bun.
“Thank God,” she said, and squeezed tight enough to leave nail cuts in his flesh before he pulled back. The half-moon marks blanched, then reddened on pale gold skin inside his wrist—so much lighter than his scarred knuckles, than the back of his arm.
“Nothing to do with God,” he answered, and patted her on the shoulder, feeling her bones shift as she shrugged, before he moved away.
“I’m glad you survived Kroc’s invitation, André. And by the way, I quit.” She smoothed her hair, and then invoked the unholy, the name of André’s sister. “I have to live with Zoë.”
André parked his scoot in front of Jean Kroc’s minifab and paused at the bottom of the floating dock, looking around. He wasn’t surprised to see Cricket sitting spread-kneed on the second step, shucking peas into a bucket set between her sandals. She looked up when he crunched up the seashell-and-broken-plascrete path.
She never changed. Her eyes were still the brown of weak tea or swamp water, and you could see the flecks in them when you got close enough, like loam or bits of leaf. She was skinny and not too tall, blue veins visible under the skin of her throat. Her fine black hair rat-tailed in the humid heat.
She stood up, bucket swinging, colander full of peas set aside on the steps. “Jean’s waiting for you.”
“You know,” André said, before he pocketed his shades, wiped the sweat off his temples, and stole a kiss, “you can buy those.”
“Taste better if you grow them yourself,” she answered, and grabbed a fistful of beard to kiss him back. Her shoulders were tense under the light-colored blouse, though, and her back hunched as if she fought the urge to cringe.
He didn’t withdraw until she’d smoothed one hand across his bald scarred scalp. “Oh, I have time to do that search for you tomorrow if you still need it.”
“No,” he said, shifting his weight. “I took care of it myself.”
A tight smile and a small nod. “Power down, André. No devices inside.”
He blinked. “All I’ve got is a headset. You know—”
“Power down.” She bent over enough to pick up the colander and balanced it inside the bucket, and André didn’t brush against those promising haunches. This time. “Nothing that happens in Jean’s house enters a data hold.”
She swung the bucket into his hand. He took it reflexively, then watched her ass sway up the steps. She paused with her hand on the door, eyebrows raised as she glanced over her shoulder. He sighed and rolled his eyes skyward, where a sticky haze did nothing to cut the heat, and toggled his headset off.
The world went flat. Isotherms, stock ticker, weather report, chat group, reality skins dropped off his display, leaving his head and his vision curiously empty. Even in the mornings, when he ran, he wasn’t this naked.
As if it were a security blanket, he kept the sense augment on. Not even Jean could complain about that. “You want my hardware, baby?”
“No,” said Cricket. “Jean Gris isn’t worried about your guns.”
The body was tangled in the cables, halfway down.
And every time Gourami let the nictitating membranes flicker across se eyes, se remembered. So Gourami tapped the slate on the bar beside se cup to summon another glass of poison, and drew webbed fingery feet up in the rung of the humen-type stool where they wouldn’t get stepped on, balancing awkwardly with knees drawn up to either side of se shoulders.
Gourami was the only person in the tavern. Not that persons were forbidden to enter humen taverns, but generally they kept to themselves, slept wet, stayed low. The contractors didn’t like it if the persons caused trouble. And a lot of humen didn’t care to take the time to understand, to parse a slate or study hand gestures.
But the people’s bars weren’t open yet; everybody was still on shift. And Gourami had badly, badly needed a drink.
Because the body had been tangled in the cables, halfway down, and none of the humen on the tender had been particularly concerned. They’d given Gourami the rest of the day off when se’d brought it up—all limp dangling and waterlogged mammal flesh. But what se’d seen cutting across the green water toward the anchor platform wasn’t a humen hearse or ambulance, but a black-windowed limousine—
The bartender slid a clean glass of cold green tea across the bar and retrieved the dirty one. It wasn’t as poisonous to people’s physiology as alcohol, but had enough of a sting to make one woozy—a pleasant recreational toxin rather than a life-threatening one.
The humen had brought all sorts of interesting things.
Including disrespect for their dead.
Gourami nursed the tea, cupping the humen-shaped drinking vessel between spidery handfingers, the webs tucked together so they wouldn’t cling to the glass. Se rolled the fluid around se mouth, pushing it back and forth through the same fluted cartilaginous plates used for straining water weed and insects from the marshes, if one did not have soup.
It made gums and tongue and palate numb.
Se swallowed and became aware of a shadow darkening the sun-warmth that dappled se back. Gourami disentangled handfingers from the glass and turned, nictitating for a better view. A human stood there, tall a
nd male, by the ringlets of fur on his face. He dropped his hand on Gourami’s shoulder, the dry mammal warmth chafing through se protective mucous gloss.
Gourami pulled back automatically.
—Stand up, the human mouthed. Stand up, frog.
Lips moved, breath brushed across Gourami’s face. Se heard nothing but squeaks and rumbles, and could not have duplicated them to save se life. The frequency of humen voices was all wrong. But se could lipread much humen speech from se job as liaison. And humen body language, too, after a fashion.
Se was in grave trouble.
Gourami could have run; could have fought, exploded off the bar stool and barreled through the big human that stood making exaggerated lip movements and calling se “Froggie.” The humen who weren’t contractors always said they couldn’t tell one person from another.
Except the human was making eye contact, was making physical contact, and while Gourami knew that humen did that to intimidate, between the tea and the endorphins released by the kinesthetic signals, se was too relaxed to initiate violent movement.
—Stand up! The human shaped again, and then made some other short noises and tossed his head, shaking shaggy mud-brown fur out in every direction. Then he reached for Gourami’s slate, grabbing with frustration.
But Gourami did not wish to relinquish it, and so, with the eye and hand contact broken, stood.
The human stepped back a pace, fumbling at his belt. But then Gourami wobbled—standing at full extension required balance, and after…several…helpings of poison, se had little left—and sank back.
Se toefingers curled on the hard dry floor, contracting automatically to protect the delicate webs, but still seeking purchase. The bar rose on the swell of a taxiing lighter. Gourami could have run, again, but still fumbled with the slate, hoping to explain or to obtain an explanation of the human’s odd behavior, when the human managed to slip the shocker from his belt and touch it to the base of Gourami’s skull, above the retracted neck, behind the ear membrane.
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