by Jenn Lyons
self-deprecating smirk remained the same. I didn’t lower my side arm.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
“Nuts.” I scowled at him to let him know I wasn’t happy.
He didn’t seem fazed. In fact he wore an air of laid-back confidence that I’d never seen on a slave-caste with a gun pointed at his head. “Say, if you’re planning on shooting me, could we move this to the kitchen? I’d hate to splatter blood all over my work.”
“Who ARE you?”
“My name’s Ian Delgado.” He peered at me, waiting for my reaction. “Ian? Delgado?”
The name meant nothing. “Sorry.”
“Damn.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I told you: I live here.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you—” I stopped myself. “Since when?”
“Since I heard there was an open spot. I traded with a guy who wanted to be closer to his girlfriend. This is a double, you know—for families. In the event that it’s given to someone other than a family, Housing Authority makes it policy to double up. You’re my new roommate.”
“You’re joking.”
“If I was, you’d be laughing. Are you going to fire that thing, or are you waiting for me to grow horns and a tail?” He walked over to a side cabinet without looking at me, or even acknowledging any hint of personal danger. He opened the doors, pulled out an old beat-up paper book (the kind you might have seen in any bookstore on Terra circa 20th or 21st century), and started thumbing through the pages.
I stared after him, my expression bemused. He wasn’t scared. If someone tried to fake me out and act tough, I could usually still tell what sort of turmoil was boiling under the surface. But with this man, Ian, the still waters ran all the way to the bottom. He was more scared for his art than his life.
“Why were you at that party?” I asked him as I put away the pistol.
“I was looking for you,” he explained while staring down at the book and chewing thoughtfully on a corner of his lip. “See, you were supposed to meet me in the back, and then I would have been able to explain all about the roommate situation before you tripped and fell over it. Instead I ended up looking like some kind of creepy stalker.”
“You’d have looked like one anyway. How did you know I was going to be at that party? How did you even know who I was?”
“A friend of mine told me that one of the people who was going to be at this bigwig skald shindig was a colony scientist named MacLain.” He smiled. “And I’ve always known who you are.”
“Now see? Statements like that are why a girl could be forgiven for thinking you’re a creepy stalker.”
“Only because you don’t remember me,” He pouted, and then brightened. “Do you have any clue what Angostura bitters taste like?”
I tilted my head. “Nobody’s had the real recipe since the Plague. I hear somebody on Liberty backward engineered a decent substitute.”
He nodded. “Good. Got some of that.” He held up a bottle with a small label. “Hopefully that’s close enough.”
“Where should I remember you from?”
“Right here.” He started pulling bottles out of the cabinet. Some of the bottles were labeled; most were not. They were all filled with liquids in various colors of gold, red and brown, much like the colors of the apartment. I recognized a few of the labels, although I usually saw them cracked and broken on the ground in a Quarantine Zone bar. I raised an eyebrow and wondered where he’d pilfered the liquor.
“In FirstCity?”
He snickered. “No, Mal. Here. Right here. In this room.” He pulled out two glasses and looked at them intently, as if he could make them fill themselves if he stared hard enough.
“Right...”
He added a small spoonful of sugar syrup and several dashes of Liberty bitters. He was following a recipe in the book. “That painting you like. Care to guess its name?”
“I’m not really in the mood for games right now.”
“Go look then. I’m not playing 20 questions. The name’s on the back.” He filled each glass with ice, and began to stir.
I stared at him and then turned around, walked over to the painting in question, and flipped it over.
The title was printed in neat letters on the back: “The Arrest of the MacLains.”
I turned the painting back over and hung it back on the wall. The painting captured a moment in time that I could never forget: the pain, the terror, and the anger like a red wave pounding through my brain. I remembered my mother trying to calm me, shouting that everything would be fine and she would see me soon, even as the Sarcs dragged her with them. The hard crack of noise as my father was hit on the head. My screams...the dark sticky feeling of death. Death. So much of it...I threatened to drown. The feeling of the MOJ officer’s mind as it crumpled, withered, dragged down into a void. The shock in the faces of my childhood friends, drawn by the noise and...I would never see any of them again. Not my parents. Not my friends. My friends...
“Ian,” I whispered.
I heard his steps behind me. So much adrenaline was pumping through me, I could hear his heart beating.
“Now you remember?” His voice was gentle.
“Little Ian. I remember.”
“Not that little anymore. Kids have the damnedest habit of growing up.”
My hand felt cold. I worked through the shock and realized he’d handed me one of the drinks. It might have been poison or a knockout drug or just a cocktail made with ingredients that had spoiled to vinegar fifty years earlier, but he’d timed it perfectly. I drank.
Ian smiled. He had a nice smile. “You should have seen me jump when he said your name. I’d almost convinced myself you were dead.”
“Not for lack of trying.” I held up the glass. “Old-fashioned? I’m impressed.”
“You know your drinks.” He seemed pleased.
“Some. Occupational hazard.”
He wandered back over to the kitchen. “If you’re hungry, the spaghetti is almost ready.”
As if on cue, my body decided to remind me that I hadn’t eaten in half a day, and that last bit had been no more nutritious than air. My stomach growled.
“Deuce?” I whispered.
Her reply was so quiet it was a memory of speech. “He’s not lying as far as I can tell. MOH would have assigned you a roommate. I would have expected that roommate to be with the League, but this is a building marked for lower-castes. Also, if he traded with someone, it might not make its way into the correct computer databanks for weeks.”
“Okay.”
Ian pulled out two plates, table settings, glasses, acting as if he didn’t notice or hadn’t cared that I’d pulled a gun on him. Most people take that sort of thing personally. Ian Delgado was obviously made of sterner stuff. He looked up at me. “You want some of this, don’t you?”
Only since the moment I’d first laid eyes on you. I shook my head and reminded myself he was talking about spaghetti. Well, he was probably just talking about spaghetti. “Sure. Maybe afterward we can try out some more cocktail recipes from your book.”
“Why not? It is a special occasion after all.” He pulled a pair of tongs out of one of the drawers and began transferring pasta from the colander to the plates.
“What’s the occasion?”
He winked at me. “You decided not to shoot me. I’d call that damn special.”
I walked over to the wire basket I’d left by the door. “Mind if I play some music?” I shouted back into the kitchen.
“Go right ahead. The link’s against the wall.”
No standard link in any megacity yet would play what I had in mind. Those silver disks were too primitive. I located my bedroom and the bags that had indeed been left there, and rummaged until I found a small flat metallic case, about an inch thick and nine inches square. I dropped one of Paul’s CDs inside and hooked it back to the main link. Music beg
an to play.
Ian Delgado poked his head back into the living room. “What the HELL is that?”
“Funeral music?”
He stared at me for a minute, and then cocked his head. “Huh. Has a beat, doesn’t it?”
I nodded and cranked up the volume. Maybe it wasn’t like any funeral music I’d ever heard either, but I decided Black Sabbath suited my mood.
SIX.Penrolyr
“Mallory, wake up.”
I blinked wearily to the sound of Medusa’s voice. I was curled up in a corner of the wide bed in my room, sheets wrapped around me like a strait-jacket. I wiped my blurry eyes, which queued the men with jackhammers to start on my head. I groaned.
“You wouldn’t wake up in such pain if you didn’t drink so much.”
I grunted and flipped her off. That hurt quite a lot, so I retreated back to groans.
“Mallory, there’s a squad of Kantari outside who want to know if you can take a joke. If you don’t get up, I’m going to tell them you’re a humorless bitch who hates to smile and then give them access to secure storage.”
“That’s dirty, Medusa.”
“You have no one but yourself to blame. You made me.”
“It was for a good cause. At least it seemed like a good idea at the time.” I groaned again. “Oh Keepers, did I sleep with him?”
“No.”
I cracked open one eyelid. “Are you sure? I remember—”
“Technically he returned to his own room to sleep. If you meant to ask if you’d had sexual intercourse with him on the other hand—”
I laughed, which only proved that the guys over in the League had made a mistake when they hadn’t listed laughter as one of the forbidden forms of torture. I practiced my groaning technique