That brought her up short. She looked at the unnamed woman and saw ice-blue eyes staring back at her. She looked back at Daahl and saw the same pale eyes, the same cold mistrustful look. He despises you, she thought. The words floated to the surface of her mind before she could suppress them. He despises you, and he’s right to. When did you become such a hypocrite?
She shoved the thought down savagely. “You make it sound like war,” she said.
“It is war. And you chose your side fifteen years ago.”
She looked out the window toward the helipad and saw a group of guards clotted around the perimeter.
No. Not a group. A line. Behind the line stood the white-and-orange coveralls of company techs, the blue of pit management. This side of the line there was only a roiling tide of miners and Shantytowners.
They stood, heads down, shoulders hunched, not quite facing the company men. A low buzz rose from their mouths, a sound as subtle and menacing as a wasp’s nest waking to a careless footfall.
Li knew that sound. It was the sound of a mob getting ready to hurt someone. The strike had begun.
“Go!” Daahl said.
As she walked away, she felt the two pairs of pale eyes boring into her back, as if they could see right through skin and ceramsteel to the coward she had somehow become.
* * *
She must have slept on the shuttle; she had no memory of the journey back to the station.
When they finally docked, she stumbled to her quarters, ignoring the littered corridors, the open doors, the rescue personnel flooding in from every other mining station in-system. She could barely see straight, and her eyes and throat felt like they’d been peeled.
She pressed her palm to her door seal and swayed unsteadily in the corridor while it read her implant. She had stepped inside before she felt the faint twinge of alarm that told her something was out of place.
Before she could react—before she could even think about what had triggered the feeling—a hard hand closed over her mouth.
“Leave the witch alone,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, “and don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
She scanned to see if her attacker had a weapon and found none. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had the kind of probe shielding that could only go with a wire job.
He spun her around and slammed her head into the wall hard enough to make her eyes water.
“Accidents can happen on-station too,” he whispered, “not just underground.”
Then he was gone—just in time for Li to realize that the stink filling her nose was Kintz’s cheap aftershave.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
The knock came at her door well after two in the morning station time.
“Who is it?” Li asked hazily, trying to remember if she’d put on enough clothes when she went to bed to be decent now. The whispered reply was enough to jolt her wide-awake and halfway to the door.
Bella all but fell into Li’s arms as the door hissed open. Li supported her to the bed. Bella clung to her as if she were drowning while Li brushed her hair back from her face to reveal a new bruise blossoming over the old ivory stain of the last one.
Her first thought was that Haas had done it. Then she caught herself. Had Bella ever come out and accused him? Had she ever done more than deal in hints and innuendo? Haas had been off-station for days, first in Helena, then dealing with rescue operations on the surface. Did this mean he was back? Or had someone else done it? And what, in the end, did she really know about Bella?
“Haas doesn’t know I’m here,” Bella said, shuddering. “He… fell asleep.”
“Let’s go down to Security, Bella. You can file a report.”
“No,” Bella whispered. “You’ll leave, sooner or later. Then there’ll be no one to protect me.”
Li stared at her, knowing what she said was true, hating it, hating herself for not being able to change it.
Bella started and pulled out of Li’s arms.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, picking up Sharifi’s copy of Xenograph from the floor where Li had dropped it when she fell asleep. “It’s Hannah’s.”
“I took it from her room.”
Bella looked at her, and that calculating look drifted across her face again. “Read to me,” she said. “Like Hannah did.”
Li hesitated.
“Please. I just need to hear your voice.”
Li thumbed through the book, wondering what passages Hannah would have read to Bella. What she would have said about them. She remembered the secretive habits she’d developed during a childhood of reading library books: cracking their spines so the next person who checked them out couldn’t spot her favorite passages, couldn’t read over her shoulder and trace her own reactions in the rut of her reading. Had Sharifi been like her, a private, furtive, guilty keeper of secrets? Li doubted it; the Sharifi she remembered watching, the Sharifi that Bella and Sharpe and Cohen talked about, hadn’t been interested in hiding.
She held the book up and let it fall open. Sure enough, she saw a line of Sharifi’s neat writing in the margin. She read out the words Sharifi had underlined:
I write these words sitting in our field camp. Behind me rise the eight thousanders of the Johannesburg Massif, still unclimbed every one of them. To my left lie the salt flats of that ancient ocean whose banks I spent two years walking. To my right, the highlands that Cartwright and Dashir mapped. All untouched, alien, perfect as it was on the first day we saw it.
But on my way to camp, I passed the terraforming plant. I passed algae flats, the furrows of farmers’ fields. And I have now a wheat ear lying across the page I write on. I plucked it from the trailside. Life in a blade of grass.
Life for another planet. For this one, death—and the slow, fatal rot that follows the map of our best intentions.
We were mapmakers. Monks and worshipers. We came into the country like saints coming to the desert. We came to be changed.
But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And in the margin, Sharifi’s scribbled words—words Li didn’t read to Bella:
But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
Li raised her eyes from the page to find Bella staring at her. She closed the book, started to speak. Bella put a finger to her lips.
“Hush,” she murmured, leaning into Li, ducking her head so that her hair brushed Li’s mouth and tickled her nose.
“How I can help you, Bella? Tell me. What can I do?”
“Just hold me.”
So Li held her, her pulse racing at the smell and the feel of her, her stomach curling with shame at what she couldn’t help wanting.
They sat that way for so long that Li began to think Bella was asleep when she finally spoke again.
“How strong are you?” Bella asked.
Li frowned, caught off guard. “Strong.”
“Stronger than a man?” A warm hand slipped under Li’s T-shirt, slid over her flanks and stomach.
“A lot stronger,” Li said.
The hand paused in its exploration. Bella looked up at her intently. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
Li started. She thought of Korchow of all people, half-expecting a joke or an accusation. “Of course I have,” she whispered.
“What’s it like?”
“Not nice.”
“Do you ever feel guilty about it?”
“Sometimes.” She saw Gilead’s brilliant sunrise, its snowcapped mountains rushing up at her in the split second before her auxiliary chute popped open. “Some of them.”
“But then you jump to a new star, a new planet, and you forget all about it. That’s a gift. To be able to leave a place behind forever. To forget the person you became there. Some people would give anything for that.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Li protested, but Bella wasn’t listening anymore.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Li swallowed.
“Do
n’t you want to?”
“Listen,” Li began—but whatever she’d been about to say caught on an indrawn breath as Bella’s fingers circled her nipple.
“You look at me like you want to,” Bella whispered into her ear, a whisper that was itself a caress.
“Looking isn’t doing,” Li said with the last rational part of her brain. But those were just words, and Bella knew it as well as she did.
Instead of answering, she dropped to her knees in front of Li and kissed her stomach, her waist, the point of one hip.
The book fell to the floor and lay there unnoticed. I can stop in a minute, Li told herself as she drew Bella to her. If I want to. I can stop anytime I want to.
Then she pressed her mouth to Bella’s pale face and buried her hands in the dark torrent of hair and found the lips that were searching for hers.
* * *
Bella cried afterward and talked about Sharifi.
Li asked herself what else she’d expected when Bella showed up on her doorstep, what she’d imagined Bella saw in her besides the echo of the other woman. Neither the questions nor their too-obvious answers made her feel any better.
“Hannah was a construct herself,” Bella said. “Not part construct, like you. All construct.”
Li nodded, wondering if Bella knew enough about UN politics to feel the weight of the difference between the two things, to know what mandatory registration meant and what went with the red slash across Sharifi’s passport cover.
“She was the first person who talked to me, who understood what it was like to be here, alone. To have no one. She went through all that to get where she was. Gave up her sisters, her friends, her world. Everything. You can’t imagine how hard that is.”
Li said nothing, just lay stroking Bella’s hair, trying to get over feeling ashamed of herself. As she listened to Bella’s memories of Sharifi, she saw that she’d been fooling herself all along. All Bella remembered were the small ordinary things that lovers always remember. And none of that mattered now. Not to Nguyen or Korchow. Not to Li herself. Bella was the only one of them for whom Sharifi was still alive—maybe the only one for whom Sharifi had ever been alive. And in that strangest of moments, Li thought of Cohen and felt even worse.
“It’s not knowing that’s so hard,” Bella said in a voice that still threatened tears. “If I knew what happened to her. If I knew why. That it was politics. Or money. Or anything.”
“What does it matter why?”
“Because,” Bella said, suddenly wracked with sobs, “because I don’t want her to have died trying to help me.”
After that, there was no more talking. Bella cried herself to sleep. Li lay awake far into the night, holding her frail shoulders, listening to her call out the dead woman’s name in her dreams.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
“Hello, Catherine.”
Li jerked awake to find Bella sitting across the room in her only chair, fully dressed, legs crossed, smoke from one of Li’s cigarettes curling lazily around her head.
“Forgive the familiarity, Major, but I feel I know you too well for titles. You don’t mind my calling you Catherine, do you? Or would you prefer Caitlyn?”
The voice had none of Bella’s nervous edge, and the hand holding the cigarette moved with a slightly jerky quality, as if it were being pulled by strings. Bella was wired for a shunt, and someone was along for the ride. A bodysnatcher.
Li shouldn’t have been as rattled by it as she was. Of course Bella was wired. Probably more subtly and pervasively than Li herself. Still, it wasn’t quite the morning-after breakfast-in-bed scene she’d imagined. She sat up and groped for her clothes, lost somewhere in the tangle at the foot of the bed. Whoever or whatever had gotten hold of Bella, Li wanted to be dressed before she talked to it.
“Nice tattoo,” the snatcher said while she pulled her shirt over her head.
“Fuck off.”
But Bella’s voice kept talking to her. “You ought to be more careful. You can catch things in tattoo parlors.”
“Is that a threat?”
“But then you don’t worry much about catching things, do you?”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that it’s always nice to see a XenoGen construct. I feel a certain familial affection for you. Bella’s geneset, for instance”—Bella’s hand gestured at her own body—“is at least 40 percent prebreakaway. Without you she would never have been possible. So unfortunate that the UN lacked the vision to carry that work to its logical conclusion.”
Li stared at Bella’s face, looked for some clue beneath it to confirm her sudden suspicion. “Korchow?”
He smiled a cold smile that had nothing of Bella in it at all. “Clever girl.”
“Leave Bella out of this, Korchow. She has nothing to do with it.”
“She has everything to do with it. The choices you make here affect the patrimony of every construct in UN space and beyond it. If you honor what you are—and I very much hope you will—it all changes. If you turn aside and pass by, nothing changes.”
“Stop talking in riddles, Korchow. What do you want?”
“Don’t you know?” Bella’s eyes widened in amusement. “Don’t you even suspect?”
“I can’t give you Sharifi’s dataset,” Li said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even have the thing. As far as I know, she ripped it up and flushed it into orbit.”
“It’s not about the dataset, Major. It’s gone beyond that.” Bella’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “Nguyen really doesn’t tell you anything, does she? Is it you she doubts? Or the AI? I wonder. Well. What I want is simple. I want to run Sharifi’s experiment again. Or rather, I want you to run it for me.”
Li stared at him.
“It’s not all that complicated. I need three things to pull it off.” He ticked the items off on Bella’s slender fingers as he named them. “Item one, a glory hole. Item two, the intraface. Item three, an AI-human team to run the intraface.” He looked up at Li as if he expected an answer, but she had nothing to say. “It took Sharifi years, and a lot of legally questionable maneuvering to put these three necessities together. However, a series of fortuitous coincidences have placed me in a position to, shall we say, stand on her shoulders? I already have half the intraface—the wetware, in fact, which you were so kind as to extract for me.”
Li caught her breath.
“Surely you suspected our pretty friend here,” Korchow said. “Bella has been so useful in so many ways. A credit to her Syndicate. In any case, I have the wetware. I also have the glory hole Sharifi found… at least until that idiot Haas starts tampering with it. And”—he smiled triumphantly—“I have you.”
“So I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“Far from it. You would see it yourself—would have seen it long ago—if you hadn’t been lying to the humans so long that you yourself have become confused about who you are. The hardware we have was grown for Sharifi. It would take months, years possibly, to redesign it for someone else. But we don’t have to do that, do we? Because we still have Sharifi.” He gestured toward Li. “She’s sitting right in front of me.”
“I’m not Sharifi,” Li said.
“To the intraface you are. None of the cosmetic surgery and camouflage splices, nothing that chop-shop hack did to you changed that.”
Li’s insides turned over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ll return to that later,” Korchow said evasively. “In the meantime, you will steal the intraface operating program—software you’ve already stolen once on Nguyen’s orders. Surprised? What did you think you were doing at Metz? Then we will do one final run of Sharifi’s live field experiment. Just to answer a few unresolved questions.”
Bella’s fingers teased a cigarette out of the pack Li had left on the table and lit it. To Li’s adrenaline-honed senses, the crackling tobacco sounded loud as gunfire.
“Of course, you will have to
undergo a minor surgical procedure,” Korchow said. “But we needn’t worry over details.”
“I won’t do it,” Li said.
“Ah, but you will. And let me tell you something more, Major.” Korchow leaned forward confidingly. “I continue to have faith in you. I believe you will help us of your own free will. Because it is what history demands of you. And though you may resent me now, you’ll thank me for helping you to see it. I’m quite, quite sure of that.”
“You crazy fuck.”
He smiled. “Just idealistic. Have you read any syndicalist political philosophy? Alienation? The Decline and Fall of Species? ”
“I saw the movie. And don’t waste your time feeding me some line about gene duty and gaps in the ranks and choosing my part. I’m not playing.”
“Unfortunate. Though, I must confess, not entirely unexpected.”
Korchow lifted Bella’s hand, and a pale ideogram appeared under the curve of her palm. It rotated, unfolded, blossomed into a dog-eared piece of yellow paper covered with close-set numbers.
“What is that?” Li asked, and even she could hear the tremor in her voice.
“I think you know,” he said as he handed it to her.
It felt real in her fingers, so real that she imagined for a moment she could just rip it up, burn it, get rid of it somehow. But she knew that the rough nap of the paper under her hands, even the slightly musty smell of it, was illusion. The original was somewhere far away. Down on Compson’s where Korchow was. Maybe even back on Gilead.
“I don’t know what you think this is,” she said, though of course she did know.
“Read it,” Korchow suggested.
Block letters ran across the top of the page: REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES, S.A., J.M. JOSS, M.D.G.P., B.S., SPECIALIZING IN ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND REMEDIAL GENETIC ENGINEERING. Below the letters were a series of numbers: medical codes to the left, prices to the right. The prices were given in both UN currency and AMC scrip.
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