‘She was embarrassed,’ Rhys said immediately. ‘She doesn’t like being caught out.’ Surprise flitted across Callan’s face and Rhys felt embarrassed himself, as if he were making excuses. ‘I mean yes, she was over the top. Did you mind very much? It’s just, I know what she’s like.’ He stopped, because Callan was laughing.
‘No, I didn’t mind very much. And I think it’s sweet that you defend her even when she’s the one giving you a hard time. And,’ his smile took in Aryel now, chuckling softly across the table, ‘I suspect that if anyone else so much as gave you a dirty look she would crack them open like a nut. So she’s okay in my book.’
‘You realise,’ Aryel put in, ‘that potentially that includes you.’ She chortled at Rhys’ horrified face.
‘Oh yes. I recognised the warning shot being fired across my bows,’ said Callan serenely. His hand emerged from under the table and snaked around Rhys’ shoulders. ‘No fear. I’ll do nothing to deserve it.’
*
Much later that night, after the ovations and congratulations were over, the streams had been sent into further paroxysms of excitement with exclusive clips and insider reviews, and most of the crowd had gone home, Gwen cornered him on the upper tier of the club.
‘Does he know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he know really, Rhys?’
‘I’ve told him.’ He felt his gorge begin to rise at the look she gave him, as though questioning whether he really had, or really should have, done as he’d said. ‘Look, what do you expect? That I would let someone get close to me, start a relationship, without telling them what they might be in for?’
The worry on her face was clear now, although she pursed her lips and tried to affect an air of carelessness.
‘It doesn’t need to be a relationship.’
‘It does and it is. He’s not just some boy, Gwennie. He’s … I’ve never … this is different.’
She stared at him without expression for a long moment. Across the room he could see Callan deep in conversation with Aryel and Eli; somewhere in the dimness behind him he could sense a few other stragglers who would probably have to be levered out of whatever amorous tangle had kept them through the various last calls and general bustle of departure. Graca and Da were nursing final drinks with Lyriam and the bluehaired, narrow-faced agent, staff were upturning chairs onto tables and wiping down the bar. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Bethany had not been seen all night.
‘Rhys.’ Gwen spoke quietly, and with a deadly seriousness. ‘Does he really, really understand what happens to you?’
‘None of us really understands what happens to me.’
Her eyes bored into him, overturned his attempt to be glib, and he sighed. ‘He hasn’t seen how I get. When he does, if he does, he might run a mile. He might not want—’
He broke off, feeling the uncertainty wash up in him for the first time in days, the fear that he might be doing wrong, for himself and others. This time he could not help but think also of what too much caution might cost him. He watched the line of Callan’s throat moving as he spoke to Eli, the lazy curve of his smile and the way he tilted his head to listen to Ari. Nascent desire transmuted, sparking into anger at his sister.
‘What do you want me to do, Gwen? Never be with anyone again? Only ever be close to you, and Da, and Ari? Turn myself into an outcast just in case I’m with someone and I have a bad turn and they freak out?’ He could feel his shoulders tensing, and a warning whispered in the back of his brain. He shook his head sharply, drew a deep breath. ‘I can’t live like that. I thought maybe I could, but I can’t. Callan says he can deal with it, and I have to believe him.’
Gwen took a step back, hands up for calm, and he realised his voice had risen a little. He saw Graca turn her head in their direction, and kicked himself as he remembered how sharp gillung hearing was.
Callan glanced over at them, still smiling, unaware, and turned back to Aryel.
‘Ki,’ Gwen said softly. ‘R’no sah.’ Okay. Don’t get upset.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘But look, Da and Ari aren’t bothered, so I don’t know why you should be.’
‘Maybe …’ she murmured. ‘No, you’re right. You have to live your life regardless. I want you to be happy, Rhys, you know I do. I just worry.’
‘Stop worrying. I’m fine, he’s fine, we’re fine. I start the tests tomorrow, they’ll work out what’s wrong, do some gene surgery and fix it. I’ll probably never have another attack again.’
‘I hope so. For all our sakes.’ She was watching Callan too now. ‘He’s lovely, and I can see how good he is for you. You would never, ever want to hurt him.’
QUESTIONS
She wants to know how old she is.
It is a new obsession, one that seemed to arrive along with the tender bumps on her chest, the tufts of feathers on her wings and clumps of hair elsewhere. She has charted the course of her life as far back as she can, has already calculated minimums and maximums from what she can remember and what she has been able to pull off the datastream. But her tablet access remains clandestine, limited by firewalls she dare not breach, and in any case she suspects the most she would find would be batch cultivation and implantation data, foetal and post-natal development charts. That is not what she wants.
‘Why do you care?’
‘Everybody else knows their birthday,’ she says. ‘I just want to know mine. I don’t want a cake or anything.’ She can still hear the sounds of celebration, faint now behind the closed door of Dr Panborn’s office. Someone must have seen her approaching along the corridor, but she’d smelled strange foods and glimpsed red faces over half-full glasses before the door was shut firmly against any closer inspection. She had lingered outside, knowing that Dr Owen would slip out early and find her there.
‘“Everybody else” does not,’ he tells her, ignoring the comment about cake. ‘We do. Gems don’t have birthdays.’
She can see crumbs on his lapel. She wonders what they taste like.
‘Why not?’
‘You don’t need them.’
‘Why do you need them, then?’
For a moment he appears nonplussed. She is having this effect on him a lot lately. The habit of caution is as strong in her as ever, and she keeps her eyes downcast and her face as blank as she can manage. Still, she is faintly surprised that she continues to fool him.
‘It’s not a question of why. We just have them. We’re made differently.’
‘But everybody gets born. That’s just a regular thing that happens to everybody.’
‘You are not a regular person, Aryel, and you never will be. These things are not important for you. Now,’ and he glances ostentatiously at the screen of his tablet, something else he has taken to doing when she perturbs him, ‘you have no business wandering about at this hour. Go back to the dorm. You can play with your tablet for a while before you go to bed, if you like.’
And he walks away, flushed with his own magnanimity, and leaves her trembling with rage and hurt.
One day, Dr Owen, she thinks. One day it might be important for you.
16
‘It occurred to me last night,’ Aryel was saying. ‘You said you hadn’t been able to work out what was so special about the genestock they took?’
‘No. They were older lines, from several different gemtechs.’ Sharon wondered why they were going over this again. Her earset had pinged as she was heading out the door, Aryel’s mellow tones asking if she had a moment to pop up to the roof. I’ve had a thought, she’d said. Something that might help. It was taking her a while to get to it, though.
‘Didn’t that strike you as odd?’
‘Aryel, this whole bloody business strikes me as odd.’
Aryel laughed shortly. ‘Indeed. But I’m guessing that makes it even harder to extrapolate who could want it and what they want it for. Especially since the people who have the expertise you need are mostly going to have links either to the EGA or to t
he gemtechs themselves …’
‘Or both.’
‘Or both. So you can’t ask them. But your hacker knew what he, or she, was looking for. If the stock was old then they wouldn’t have found it in active datastreams, they would have been breaking into and trawling through archives. Searching for specific genetypes, around which there would have been no current research or chatter.’
‘We’ve inferred from the start that they must have had a shopping list.’
‘But what connects the items on that list? You don’t just splice random bits of genestock together and hope for the best. If the hacker already knew exactly what he or she wanted and exactly where it was, the hacks wouldn’t have been needed in the first place. And you said there are a few hacked genetypes for which the corresponding genestock hasn’t been stolen – so presumably the hacker was able to determine that they didn’t meet the criteria. What you need is someone who can reverse engineer that search, work out what those criteria were. You already know what they got, but it doesn’t tell you enough. You need to find out what they were looking for.’
‘We can’t,’ Sharon said grimly. ‘It’s not like I haven’t thought the same thing. But it’s too specialised for forensics – they’re not covering themselves in glory on this one – and the so-called experts they’ve consulted are no better. The people who understand genetype data well enough to have a chance of working it out are the same ones we can’t talk to.’
‘I know someone you can talk to.’
‘Who?’
‘Rhys.’
‘Rhys?’ Sharon stared. ‘What does he know about it?’
‘He doesn’t know anything about your case, apart from that Herran was questioned. But he knows a lot about genetype files, and the data structures that store them. He’s spent years hacking into gemtech archives, trying to find particular genetypes.’
‘He – what? Excuse me? What?’ Sharon stopped in their slow perambulation around the vegetable beds and stared, openmouthed. ‘How does that make him anything but a suspect? What genetypes?’
‘His own, and Gwen’s. They were the only survivors of a crèche fire, they have no history. At first he was just curious about what they were intended for – they’ve a wide variety of mental and physical enhancements, but there’s no one big obvious thing.’ She shrugged deliberately, her wings rising with the movement, feathers softly ruffled by the morning breeze that blew off the river and across the roof garden. ‘Then he started to have occasional spells of illness, seizures, and began searching in earnest. But that’s only been in the last couple of years, long after the government copied over the datastreams. So his trace wouldn’t be any part of what you’re looking at. But it does mean he knows how to interrogate genetype data, and he knows the various gemtech archive structures inside out.’
‘I see.’ Sharon looked out across the Squats, chewing her lip thoughtfully. ‘Did he find his own genetype in all his searching?’
‘No. But that’s because the gemtech that owned the lab which engineered him and Gwen disappeared shortly after the fire, and no public records appear to have survived. This was when the truth about the gemtechs was starting to emerge, the first big scandals, and he found a few mentions of that particular company among those reports. KAG Labs. They had started off as a very big player in the early days post-Syndrome, then had gradually shrunk to being an R&D affiliate and genestock supplier. They weren’t registered for in vivo work. So, considering what was going on at the time, it’s likely the directors scuttled the company, archived the datastream offline – maybe even wiped it entirely – and ducked out of sight. If there had been anything left to find I am absolutely certain that he or Herran would have found it.’
‘Herran helped him look?’
‘Enough to confirm what Rhys already knew. He was very impressed, for whatever it’s worth. “Rhys good job.”’
Aryel took in Sharon’s frown and rolled her eyes. ‘I assume your interview yesterday cleared him.’
‘It did. Which speaking as his friend makes me very relieved, but as a cop helps me not at all. I asked if he knew of anyone else who can do what he does, and he said no. He didn’t mention Rhys.’
‘Rhys is different. His neural wiring is like yours and mine, but he and Gwen have phenomenally high IQs linked to an enhanced analytical ability. He was hoping he’d pick up the KAG trail in the datastreams of other gemtechs, which would make sense if they’d sold the genestock on when they shut up shop. The point is, he was doing exactly the same thing that your hacker must have been doing. That’s why I think he might be able to help.’
Sharon nodded, seeing the logic of it, and trying to reconcile her knowledge that the investigation needed help with her instinctive reluctance to get even more people involved.
‘I’ll have to run it by Masoud. Cover us both. And of course Rhys may not even be interested.’
‘I think he will be.’
‘Why do you want him to take something like this on? Especially if he’s not well?’
‘He is one hundred per cent fine most of the time, and the attacks don’t last very long when they do happen. They’re scary and they tire him out, but he recovers completely within a day or two. It is worrying, and he’s here to try to identify whatever it is and come up with a cure. That starts today – in a couple of hours, in fact. But he won’t have to be at the hospital very much and he’ll be at a loose end, looking for something to occupy himself with. He has the skill, and it’s the kind of problem that will fascinate him.’
Sharon squinted at her. ‘Have you already discussed this with him?’
‘No, I haven’t, I told you.’ Aryel took in her look. ‘Sharon, come on. I’m not that presumptuous. I’m suggesting this because I think you can help each other, but it’s up to you.’
You’re suggesting it because you believe Rhys can find the answer, Sharon thought. That’s a thing to take seriously. And it’s not like it’s the first time we’ve turned to gem civilians with special skills. That’s how you met Gaela, remember?
What had happened to Gaela and her family afterwards pressed in on her consciousness, and her conscience.
Stop it, Varsi. This is tablet work, he doesn’t even have to come to the station. Hardly anyone will know. And anyway, the godgangs are gone.
She looked for more tangible reasons to object, failed to find them, and nodded reluctantly. ‘Where is he? I’ll need to talk it through with him, before I say anything to Masoud.’
*
Rhys was at that moment letting himself quietly into Aryel’s flat, hoping he could make it to his room and into fresh clothes unnoticed. Not that they didn’t all know he had spent the night with Callan, and he was well aware that there could be no escape from the inevitable teasing, but he didn’t feel ready for it just yet. His body still thrummed with the pleasure of their early-morning love-making, his lips still tingled from the last kiss at the door, and he wanted to let the bliss of it ebb out of him slowly, without interruption.
He knew it was a lost cause the moment he stepped inside. Gwen looked up from the kitchen table where she sat with her tablet and the remains of breakfast, and arched a wicked eyebrow at him.
‘Hello, sailor. Finally stepped the mainmast, have you?’
‘Oh god, Gwen.’
‘You shouldn’t be saying that to me, surely.’
‘I’m not going to be saying anything to you, if you keep this up.’
‘What do you expect, when you drift in at this hour? Looking … well, looking rather the better for wear, to be honest. I said he was good for you.’ And she smiled smugly, as if his liaison with Callan had been her idea in the first place.
‘You have some nerve. When did you get back?’
‘Earlier this morning.’
‘How much earlier?’
‘Early enough to be showered and dressed and fed.’ She pushed a steaming cafetière towards him. ‘Here.’
‘I’ve had coffee. And eaten. Shut up,’ as her face
sparkled with mischief. ‘Where’s Da and Ari?’
‘Ari’s gone up to the roof to talk to Sharon, and Da walked Graca down to the river. Said he’d be back in plenty of time.’
‘He doesn’t need to come, if he doesn’t want to.’
‘Rhys, honestly, sometimes you really are a prat. Of course he wants to.’
‘I don’t mean it like that. Haven’t you noticed how the aquatech is taking off? You probably haven’t. Anyway, it’s great but it means he’s really busy, and I don’t want him to feel like he has to choose between helping to close deals and babysitting me.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not like there’s anything he can do, except sit in a waiting room.’
She was staring at him. ‘Rhys. He can talk to the doctors and have a look around, and feel like he knows who’s taking care of his baby boy and whether they’re up to the job. He’s as worried about you as I am.’
‘Well, you can all stop. Worrying isn’t going to help, and anyway I feel fine. It’s been more than a week since the last one.’
‘So what’s been different this past week? Let me think – oh yes.’ The wicked grin was back.
‘Gwen.’
‘How is the lovely Callan?’
‘Lovely. Leave him alone.’
‘I just wondered …’
‘Gwennie, if you start asking me things that are none of your business, I’m going to start asking you things that are none of my business.’
She shut her mouth so sharply that he had to laugh, and felt vaguely triumphant that he had once again managed to catch her out. They were joined by Aryel and Sharon, who looked at him so keenly he felt his spine straighten.
‘Something going on?’ He remembered the conversation last night. ‘Is Herran all right?’
‘Herran’s fine. It’s you I’d like to talk to.’ She chuckled at his expression. ‘Not like that. You’ve been recommended. Have you got a minute?’
Gwen looked curious, but Aryel planted herself firmly beside her at the table and Rhys and Sharon went off to the living room. By the time they’d finished, he had barely twenty minutes left to get ready for the hospital. He thought about what Sharon had told him while he stripped, washed, and dressed in something that he hoped made him look like someone who would one day be there as a medical student, rather than a patient.
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