Liquid Crystal Nightingale

by EeLeen Lee

  Three high-backed white leather chairs faced the bed in an interrogatory arrangement. The bed saw little signs of wear and tear. It was new although expensive to replace, being of the type that had no legs; its only means of support was a chromed platform fixed to a bulky headboard, giving the illusion that the bed was floating. The occupants, whether sleeping or having sex, were above the floor and dirt in all senses.

  Someone born into that much wealth possessed a measure of entrepreneurial sense by default. How exactly Gia had channeled this know-how, Pleo had decided, was none of her business. But the thrill of slumming it must have worn thin very early on. Pleo wondered when Gia had realised that more visceral kicks arose from how dangerously close both of her existences—Aront scion and sub-letter—came to colliding.

  And the collision had finally happened when Pleo followed Gia to the hard currency block.

  After their spat outside the fla-tessen hall, in front of the mural of Ignazia Madrugal, Pleo had spotted Gia scurrying out of a Polyteknical side door in an asymmetrical black coat and matching boots. Gia was heading towards Polyteknical Station without her security detail, an air filter mask strapped over her mouth. It was uncanny how Pleo had almost missed her: Gia had effortlessly shed her Tier Dweller persona, leaving it in the fla-tessen hall changing rooms. Pleo imagined a translucent moult of Gia’s skin, rolled up and wedged behind the basins, to be retrieved the next day.

  A minute later Pleo was tailing Gia as she crossed the bustling concourse of Polyteknical Station. She had thrust her fists into her coat pockets while busily skirting the rank of sentry turnstiles. Pleo kept track, noting that Gia paced back and forth five times as though she was bargaining with the turnstiles, or she didn’t know how to take a T-Car. Finally, Gia had reached a decision, pulling a string of fare tokens out of her coat pocket and striding through. Pleo hung back and pretended to study a map of the T-Car network. She let Gia go up to the platform, keeping a distance of twenty metres.

  Naturally Pleo had assumed Dogtooths relayed Gia back to her home at the end of a long day in Polyteknical: any Aront offspring would not be slumming it with the riff-raff in the downmarket accommodation nodes. Maybe she found riding a T-Car without trailing a squad of Dogtooths a thrill in itself? Nothing scandalous about that, only foolhardy, but if she rode the T-Car past the ’Cinth and into Exterior Zone 1 she would be tempting fate.

  Pleo’s curiosity faded when both of them boarded the next T-Car stopping at the platform. She decided to get off at the ’Cinth if Gia did the same. Both of them could lose each other there and Gia would never need to know she had been tailed.

  The T-Car had been delayed for a full ten minutes at the ’Cinth before continuing eastwards away from the central zones of Chatoyance. Gia remained in her seat while Pleo swore into her air filter mask, pleading with the idiot Tier Dweller to get off when she still could.

  Six stations later Gia stepped down onto the platform of Canal Mouth.

  Pleo would have had no reason to stop here; Gia even less so. Canal Mouth was a planned commercial hub that turned out to be an expensive failure. No advertisements overloaded the senses here, selling hair and beauty products or real estate on Cabuchon or Anium—only enclosures of corrugated metal and bare walls. It was not a sector to visit or select from the T-Car map unless you had a good reason. Clusters of vacant purpose-built blocks and warehouses had already attracted businesses of a different sort. The streets still gave off an air of expectancy despite the dead leaves and dogshit piles scattered on the footpaths.

  Gia kept to the edge of one of these paths. Pleo gave her due credit for her street smarts. It was obvious Gia was accustomed to being followed—by potential kidnappers, corporate spies, reporters—and Pleo had cast herself in a similar yet undefined role. Gia showed no sign that she knew she was being tailed. Just in case, Pleo followed a footpath to the disused loading bay of the nearest warehouse and watched her from the doorway.

  Gia headed for a building that was more glass than walls, supported by interior steel columns. Pleo waited until she went inside before slipping away from her hiding position. She had never been to a hard currency block before, but she recognised the trademark washed-out taupe of the entry steps and door; she didn’t know whether to be amused or dismayed that the colour actually matched the taupe of low-intermediary fla-tessen shifts. The paint job was recent, judging by the lingering smell. From the outside, the repurposed office was sterile, unremarkable and, most importantly, anonymous.

  She had pushed open the narrow door, expecting bells to ring, garish signs and tattooed thugs barring her entry. Instead an empty lobby, dimly lit by multicoloured lights in the floor, greeted her; and instead of transactional seediness, Pleo saw disuse running its course. In more prosperous pre-Downturn times, there would have been a virtual night manager stationed in front of the panelscreens, and the fountain in the reception area bubbling with dyed water. Now it was dry and filled with detritus.

  Gia had disappeared around the panelsceen wall, its dozen inactive glass displays capturing her reflection for an instant. Pleo followed her up a short flight of stairs to an adjoining atrium.

  It had been like entering a different realm. Pleo looked up at a dozen chandeliers suspended above the spiral glass staircase, all swaying like giant jellyfish tentacles. Daylight was diffused through a grimy stained-glass roof, built to scroll aside when the weather was good. The scoured synthmarble floor was typical of a place which had changed hands many times, each owner becoming less dedicated to upkeep than the last. The harsh administrative lighting made Pleo feel like she was here to get her off-system visa renewed.

  A man and a woman, both clad in shapeless brown faux-suede raincoats, had emerged behind her from the gloom of the lobby. They brushed past Pleo and stopped at a fallen chandelier lying at the foot of the spiral staircase. The man reached out and broke a prism off the ruined fixture, perhaps as a way of recording his anonymous visit for the hard currency block’s unseen landlords. Pleo noticed that the chandelier had been stripped of half its crystals and bulbs.

  She sat on the bottom step and watched the couple disappear up the stairs. She wondered how long she could sit there without anyone noticing, and to see how hard currency block users and tenants conducted their business.

  Laughter drifted down from several floors above, and Pleo recognised the lone familiar voice. Her feet crushed shards of glass as she broke off a prism from the chandelier like the couple had done. As an afterthought, she took another one. It made sense to act like she was more than a regular visitor and the extra prism would make a handy weapon.

  She went up the stairs, stopping at each floor. The rooms were arranged in narrow corridors encircling the atrium. The laughter waned but did not die down, drawing her nearer and nearer.

  Pleo reached the top floor; the glass roof was more forlorn and dirtier than it had looked from lobby level. Dust, feathers and birdshit smeared the other side of the cracked glass. She set off down the corridor, certain Gia was here. The uppermost floors of most accomodation usually had the best views and most expensive rooms.

  Pleo had walked the entire length of the corridor. Most of the doors to the other rooms were kicked in, but one unbroken door had broken prisms piled up outside it. Sounds of furniture moving around mingled with the laughter. She waited, expecting the start of or the conclusion to some debauchery: however, the noises persisted. Pleo didn’t find any markings on the door or prisms, and took a wild guess at the security gesture by dropping the broken prism on top of the pile with its siblings. It made a loud clink, and by some crude mechanism the door opened with a drawn-out click.

  Pleo peered through the gap at the spectacle of Gia Aront putting the room in order. She ran a fingertip over the backs of the chairs to check for dust, her brow furrowed in concentration as if a lab session was in full swing. It was absurd and yet plausible that Gia Aront’s life was so cosseted that she had found tidying up a joyous novelty. And that she had to do it in the la
st place her parents would expect of their only child.

  She appeared blissfully ensconced in her own contented bubble. It would be a shame if Pleo punctured it by announcing her arrival.

  “Ant.”

  Without looking up from her task, Gia had casually tossed the word at Pleo by way of greeting.

  Fatigued and not prepared to take offence, Pleo sucked on her teeth and turned around to go back down the stairs.

  “Wait, wait. You came here alone?” Gia called after her, too quickly, sounding like an apology—as though that word had slipped out due to force of habit. But she remained calm, perhaps relieved and perversely elated at being discovered. “Do what you have to now, make it quick and clean.”

  “What?”

  “You’re in the best place to kill me. It’s convenient.”

  Pleo had frozen for a dangerous moment, recalling those mornings on the T-Cars when she went through every fantasy about revenge she ever had since Cerussa died. A few of them involved Gia Aront. There had been talk behind closed doors of retaliation, a fantasy briefly held by the children of the Forty after the Incident. They knew the risk and let our loved ones die. Their lives for our lives.

  “‘Convenient’?” repeated Pleo as if it was the most ridiculous of concepts. The word struck her as redundant. Wasn’t Gia’s entire life all about convenience? The notion incensed Pleo; how Gia could entertain the thought of her death as a mental exercise? Or on her own terms, as if it was a simple transaction.

  “No surveillance inside the private rooms, considerable foot traffic and frequent guest turnover—”

  “Ahh,” Pleo interrupted. Her fury garbled her voice as she imitated a tabloid newsreader. “‘How far will Gia Aront go this week for her kicks? Try: Murder in a Hard Currency Block! Because the wealthier you are, the closer you have to get to the edge for your thrills.’”

  Gia blinked and sat on the bed, unprepared for Pleo’s vehemence. But there was more in store.

  “Kill yourself, Aront bitch. Do your own dirty work for once!” Pleo hurled the second chandelier prism at Gia with surprising precision, nearly slicing off her nose and sticking in the headboard. Gia’s Adept reflexes had just saved her from disfigurement. Pleo was relieved she had missed, but her anger remained unabated. “Use that. Or I suggest using your forceps to join the Nosebleed club with my sister, but it’s probably not exclusive enough for you.”

  “Come in, now. The whole of Canal Mouth heard you,” Gia snapped as she got up from the bed. She dragged Pleo into the room and slammed the door.

  “I’m no killer,” Pleo said.

  “If you tried you’d make prisoners of both us. I’d never leave my Tier again, and as for you...” Gia trailed off and left Pleo’s fate up in the air. She slumped into one of the three chairs that faced the bed.

  Silence fell between them for a while. Pleo’s mouth was dry after her outburst. She coughed, ready for the bile still churning in her guts to spew forth again.

  “Have you been inside a hydrocarbon mine?” asked Gia, with sudden bright eager curiosity.

  “People don’t go for the scenery. My sister and I were born in one,” Pleo snapped. “No gemstones, only layers of stinking flammable gas compressed by time and gravity. No sparkle, no glitter. People actually die in them.”

  Mining scum, Pleo recalled Gia’s words. Who are still living in boxes because they had travelled like cargo. Successive waves of settlers’ vessels who opted for the one-way ticket to work in terraforming and mining. Descend into an asteroid hydrocarbon mineshaft and crawl out with crushed dreams.

  “I’m aware.”

  “That people die in mines?”

  Gia ignored Pleo’s sarcasm and rose from the chair. “You and Cerussa were twins.”

  “And?”

  “I, too, have a twin,” she said after some hesitation.

  Pleo stepped back in surprise, stumbling into the chairs. Everyone thought Gia was an only child.

  “Break one of these chairs and you have to pay for it,” said Gia, a second before forcing a laugh and rolling her eyes at Pleo. “Oh, look at your face! Sit down. You couldn’t afford it anyway. Spit on the chairs if you want—they cost me nothing. The Aront Tier is overflowing with stuff like that.”

  Pleo’s legs sighed in relief after walking for so long. Still reeling from Gia’s revelation she managed to ask, “Your twin brother? Sister? Where are they?”

  “Oh, he’s with me, right inside the bathroom.”

  Pleo studied the closed bathroom door next to the bed. If anyone was behind it, she preferred them to stay put. Let them listen, she couldn’t have handled any more disruption.

  “What’s his name?”

  “It doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t matter enough to my parents.” Gia was holding back, and Pleo wasn’t sure whether it was tears or anger. For all the attempted bravado in her voice, her emotions were clear. “When I turned eighteen I stopped being their beloved child—I turned into an inconvenience. My mother’s words exactly, along with ‘wasted chance.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to run away.”

  “No, I mean, what happened?” Pleo asked. “Why the sudden change in affection?”

  Gia raised a perfectly tweezed eyebrow and tsked at her. Can you be less obvious? “In the beginning I just ran ‘away.’ Away from the Aront Tier, from everyone connected with my parents. From my whole cherished existence.”

  “You still have the means to go anywhere off system,” Pleo had reminded her.

  “Only on a very long leash.”

  “Cut yourself off from your family.”

  Gia fell back on the bed and sighed. “My parents’ empire is quicksand. It’s everywhere, and it all looks like solid ground until you step in it. “

  Pleo sucked in her cheeks in mock sympathy. “Freedom. The one thing Gia Aront can’t buy.”

  “Then what would you do—” Gia did not say the second part of the question but Pleo heard it inside her head: ...if you were me?

  Pleo didn’t answer that because she could never imagine herself as Gia Aront. “You expect a presentation on how awful the rest of the world is off your Tier?”

  “I don’t need it.” Gia stretched her arms and legs out on the bed. Her bravado had returned. “This place has given me a great view. You can have a genuine conversation here, just like I’m having now. You can have a tryst. Or inject, inhale or shove any shit or drugs into your preferred orifice. I needed to capture that pulse—the Tiers lack so much pulse they’re on life support.”

  “And what does your twin brother think about all of this?” Pleo indicated the bathroom.

  “Nothing,” shrugged Gia. “You’d think my parents would be happy that I’d shown initiative and found my own income stream.”

  “Not what I expected—”

  “Everyone says that.” She sighed. “It’s not ‘respectable,’ according to them.”

  “It isn’t,” Pleo said.

  “Too bad it upsets them when I dispense with pretensions of respectability. They think I’m acting out. But for people who love boasting about their ‘vision,’ they’re so shortsighted. I’m merely filling in a niche.”

  “The clientele who come here; what’re they into?”

  “Letting off steam. Nothing too deviant or rough.”

  “Guess that rules you out?”

  Gia ignored the jibe. “They can’t afford bruises and bites showing on their faces or necks. Or to change or dirty their uniforms too often. And they can’t stay long, since they’re all on the clock.”

  “You’re talking about your House Guards?”

  Gia smirked without mirth. “All House Guards: Madrugal, Cizen, Oslis… Even an occasional off-duty Spinel.”

  “You like watching them?”

  “I like to pretend certain people are watching.” Gia lifted her head from the bed to look at Pleo. “Three chairs: two for my parents and an extra for a ‘friend of the family.’ There’s always a ‘
friend of the family’ hovering around my home. Attaching themselves onto my parents like barnacles until another one with greater sucking power comes along and dislodges them. Shitty judges of character—both of them.”

  Pleo felt their presence now: in the over-dismissive tone Gia used, watching their daughter confide in the unlikeliest of people. She wasn’t sure what to say, and they sat in silence.

  Eventually, Gia said, “A few days ago I received this. One of my mother’s personal guards delivered it to me at Polyteknical.”

  A flower made of dogs claws. Tacky and in bad taste, but Pleo did not understand.

  “A message from my mother,” Gia told her.

  “She sent you this trinket? It’s like her idea of a birthday gift?”

  “It means I don’t have much time. And I don’t know if I can run again. You don’t know my mother. Be glad you don’t.”

  Pleo shifted in the chair and tried to think of what to say.

  “You can make use of this room when I’m gone,” Gia said. “The rent on it has been paid for a while.”

  “I can’t accept it.”

  Gia got up from the bed and looked as though she wanted to hug Pleo. Instead she stood in front of the three chairs.

  “Understand, Tanza,” she began. “What has happened here between us changes nothing.”

  “I wasn’t expecting any different.”

  “Indeed. When we next meet in Polyteknical I’ll make your time there harder. Understand again, it’s necessary; if anyone in Polyteknical sees us getting too close, my secret here is out. My life is already at risk. You were never supposed to be involved.”

  INCLUDE ME WITH your parents for misjudging you, thought Pleo. She recalled her outbursts at Gia with regret. One never sets out to become a killer—and just like sex, you never forget your first one.

  And the parents of Pleo’s first kill weren’t going to forget about her either.

  She pulled the prism out of the headboard and looked at the bathroom door. There was something about the way Gia spoke about her twin brother, dancing on the edge of past tense. There was no one in the bathroom right now, but yet something had to be there. The thought nagged and pestered at her until she could stand it no longer.