State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  Her partner, ever the gentleman, went into the hall to wait.

  FOURTEEN

  The old front door of their house worked about eight months of the year. Rachel and Santino would ride that sweet spot until mid-May, and then they’d have to wrestle with knobs and shims until early September. Nothing seemed to bring it to square. They had changed out the hinges and planed down the sticky bits, and it still got hung up on the corners.

  Rachel opened the door to the season’s first squeak of wood grinding over wood. She glared at the bulky monster; she had no energy to deal with anything else, be it human or humidity.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” she said. “And then I’m going to burn my clothes.” The cuffs of her dress shirt had gone stiff as the blood had dried. Whether it was Hill’s or Noura’s was anyone’s guess, and Rachel didn’t much care. She just wanted it off of her body.

  “Good. You smell awful,” her partner said, and then surprised her by pulling her into a hug.

  Warm relieved blues and the rich reds of belonging swept over her; Rachel returned the hug gladly. They had discussed the car chase on the way back from OACET headquarters, and the reality of what should have happened had finally sunk in. “I could have killed someone,” she said. “It’s a miracle I didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But…”

  He struggled to put a positive spin on it before giving up.

  She nodded against his chest. “It’d have been one thing if Noura survived, but… Yeah. That whole mess was a waste.”

  “You’re alive. Hill’s alive. Nobody else got hurt, and the Secret Service has eight new people to interrogate. That’s not a waste.”

  He didn’t quite believe it—Noura’s poppy-seed gray lingered within storm clouds at the edges of his conversational colors—but Rachel appreciated the sentiment and told him so.

  Santino let her go, and she made her way upstairs, a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bell-shaped glass hanging by its stem from the other.

  Her bathtub was one of the reasons she had bought the house. The master bath had been renovated by the previous owner, and a freestanding soaker tub took up a third of its footprint. The porcelain tub was shaped like a lady’s slipper, one end higher than the other for safety during those long baths when you couldn’t quite stay awake.

  Rachel nudged the lever for the freestanding tub faucet all the way to the right, and dug around under the sink until she found an old bottle of cinnamon-scented bubble bath. She usually avoided bubbles. She didn’t respect them. Bubbles were too scatterbrained to deserve respect.

  Today, she needed something to be different.

  Her service weapon went into its usual spot in her nightstand, her bloody shirt into a garbage bag. Then she knelt by the edge of the tub and watched the water pour down, down…

  She let her mind go within the movement of the water.

  Noura.

  The thief’s death had hit her harder than she expected. It wasn’t the loss of Noura herself, and God knew that Rachel’s own hands were redder than Hill’s, but…

  Killing people on purpose was one thing; not being able to protect someone from getting killed was something entirely different.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, and decided she might drop by the local church next Sunday. Maybe. If she had the time.

  She turned off the water, and stepped into the tub. The water was almost hot enough to scorch her skin, but she pushed through until the bubbles sat at her neck. One deep breath, followed by another, and then the water felt merely toasty-warm and welcoming. Even the new incision on her left buttock felt better, the waterproof bandage blocking the sting of the water while letting the heat soothe the wound.

  Wine, bath, and book, she thought. Let’s do this.

  The Braille e-reader was slightly thicker than a tablet, its back and edges sealed in some sort of silicone to make it waterproof. Calling it a first-generation device would have been generous: the thing was so far removed from the production line that it might as well have come from the technological equivalent of a farmer’s table. The silicone was lumpy, the metal shell beneath covered in deep scratches where a Dremel tool had kicked sideways, but the reader’s face was as smooth as glass. Santino and Mako had made it for her, and it had quickly become one of her favorite things in the world.

  Rachel poked the upper right corner, and the device hummed to life. Its face started to churn, and she flipped off visuals as she began to read.

  It was smut. She had told the Agents who converted books for her that she needed to master Braille before she plunged herself back into high literature. Romance novels and paperback mysteries, with their familiar lexicon and predictable rises and falls in plot, were good practice. She said she was honing her fingertips on Brontë and Evanovich, Austen and Steel…

  And she knew she wasn’t fooling anyone.

  She wasn’t sure how the e-reader worked. Santino said it was like an Etch A Sketch, but with iron instead of aluminum, and magnets to push and pull the raised bumps into place. There were no buttons save for the power switch; a nudge from her implant and the text refreshed, as easy as turning a page.

  Her skin was ten minutes from wrinkly, which was good; she tended to misinterpret letters when she had sat in the bath too long. The words flew beneath her fingertips, a world of ripping bodices and sassy heroines…

  When it came down to it, she had regretted nothing about going blind except her inability to lose herself in a book. Once she no longer had her eyesight, reading had become a chore. Books were her first real love, but there was a severe disconnect between her and the words when she had to concentrate to see them.

  Braille had bridged that gap. She had picked up a children’s book in Dr. Gillion’s office, one with text and Braille both, and idle curiosity got her flipping through the pages. Braille had been one of those things that she hadn’t felt played a role in her new life—I’m not really blind. I can read if I have to—and it had never struck her as an option.

  Gillion had kept her waiting long enough for her to realize there might be another way for her to get lost in a book. Rachel had almost thanked him for that.

  She was picking up Braille faster than she had thought possible. Jenny Davies had told her Braille wasn’t technically a second language, that it was just a different way of internalizing English, and that she shouldn’t be so insufferably smug about her progress. Rachel had stuck her tongue out at her friend, and had gone home to read.

  The implications for language acquisition via the implant hadn’t escaped OACET’s resident scientists. Imagine an Agent receiving the same kind of language instruction as a student in a classroom. Where the student would remember a word here or there, feedback from the implant might assist in everything from interlanguage processing to improved comprehension of variation between the first and second languages. There was no good way to test this hypothesis, as nobody in OACET had a specialization in languages. There were a few dabblers—Rachel was one of them, with her hack-and-slash fluency in Mandarin Chinese—but a calling to study multiple languages and a job in federal service rarely aligned, and OACET hadn’t gotten lucky enough to pull such a specialist into their roster. There was some floundering about with what might happen and what would probably occur when an Agent sought to acquire a new language, or what outcomes could result if a non-native English speaker developed autoscripts in their native tongue, but it was all guesswork. Nobody had the spare time needed to test these theories by mastering a second language from scratch.

  For herself, Rachel was just happy she could read again. There were dozens of ways she could perceive text, but none of those came close to having nothing between her and a good book. In that respect, her eyes and her fingers were nearly the same, and she had finally bridged the physical gap between herself and plain, unadorned text.

  Today was Sabrina Jeffries, with her dukes and their desires. Rachel didn’t much care about lavishly embroidered cummerbunds (and what might be found
beneath), but Jeffries wrote the most delicious ladies…

  There was a knock on the bathroom door, and she flipped on visuals to see Santino, anxious oranges moving through professional blues.

  “If you make me get out of this tub, I’ll shoot you,” she warned.

  “Idle threat. I know where your gun is. Listen,” he said from the other side of the door, “the White House murder story just hit the news feeds.”

  Rachel groaned and started to bang her head against the back of the tub.

  “Yup,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

  “Thirty!” she shouted.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Twenty,” she said, staring wistfully at the mostly-empty bottle of wine. “I’m slightly drunk.”

  She moved the Braille reader to its private shelf, and went to take a shower to rinse off the bubbles. By the time she was dressed, her buzz was mostly gone. Hummingbird metabolism, she thought to herself as she dithered around with her makeup. Still can’t decide whether it’s a blessing or a curse.

  Her stomach grumbled, and she made her way to the kitchen to cram herself full of energy bars.

  Santino wasn’t there, which was odd: he usually paced the lower level of the house while waiting for her. She searched for his cell phone, and found her partner reading a book in his garden, a bottle of hard cider beside him.

  She kicked open the storm door. “Santino, what the hell?”

  He flushed an embarrassed red. “Oh, shit,” he said. “You were in the shower when Alimoren called. He said that you and Hill should…uh…”

  “Hide?”

  “Yup. He promised he’d take the blame for the car chase, but unless you want to do interviews for the rest of the week, you guys should lay low.”

  “Nice,” Rachel said, as she went back inside to reclaim her bottle of wine. “Mandatory state-sponsored vacation time. Can’t beat it.”

  On her way down the stairs, her implant twitched, requesting her attention at the motion sensor that Santino had set up over their driveway. She cast her scans through the front of the house to find the sunny citrus core of Randy Summerville as he walked towards the front door.

  “Today?” Rachel muttered to herself. “Why on earth did he decide today was a good day to drop by?”

  She reached out through the link and pinged Mulcahy, who told her that Summerville’s visit was most likely a good thing, but no, he could not sit in on the conversation as he was currently doing damage control after one of his Agents had torn up a goodly portion of the landscaping in front of Howard University Hospital, and perhaps she could handle this on her own?

  Fine, she thought, as her boss snapped their link. First I’m a spy, now I’m a politician. What a week this has been.

  The doorbell chimed.

  “Coming!” Rachel called. She ditched the wine glass and its companion bottle behind a lush cluster of red-edged dracaenas, and ate a handful of lemon thyme from a window garden to kill the smell of alcohol.

  Then, smiling politely, she gave the doorknob a firm yank.

  The door had come unstuck again, and flew open with a crash.

  “Mr. Summerville? What a nice surprise. Please come in,” she said, as if threatening prominent lobbyists with her front door were an everyday occurrence.

  Over Summerville’s shoulder, a flurry of reds and blacks had popped out of the car: Summerville’s assistant, now acting as his chauffeur, was marching up the driveway, asking in a neighbor-rousing tone of voice if his boss needed any help. Summerville quickly waved the young man back to the car with assurances that he was fine, but it was too late. Mrs. Wagner, Rachel’s elderly next-door neighbor, had appeared on her front porch with a golf club in her hands.

  “In the house,” Rachel muttered. “Hurry up, hurry up…”

  Rachel maneuvered Summerville into the foyer and slammed the door behind them. Mrs. Wagner had all the time in the world at her disposal, and expected all persons within earshot to share her fondness for idle conversation. She had also adopted Rachel as a surrogate…something. Not a daughter. Definitely not a daughter. It was more like she thought of Rachel and Santino as feral cats who had moved into the abandoned house next door, and she was trying to domesticate them through proximity and the occasional gift of food.

  Through the door, Rachel watched as Mrs. Wagner cornered the young man on the way back to his car. His colors took a quick leap towards orange, but didn’t shed her Southwestern turquoise.

  “Your assistant doesn’t like me much, does he?” Rachel asked.

  “He doesn’t like anybody much,” Summerville answered. “He’s my nephew. Bright, but my brother didn’t hug him enough as a child.”

  There was the mournful red of family secrets in there; Rachel decided to go easy on Summerville’s assistant.

  “Would he like to join us, or maybe sit in the garden while he waits?” she asked. “Gardening’s a hobby for my partner, and he’s always happy to give a tour.”

  “Jordan would appreciate the offer, but he needs to get some work done,” Summerville replied. Dimpling appeared across his shoulders with the white lie.

  Good, Rachel thought. She hadn’t been looking forward to throwing oddball topics at him to see if she could catch him lying. Her experience with Jenna Noura had shaken her in more ways than one.

  “Well, what brings you by?” Rachel asked, inviting him into her private study. “Were you in the neighborhood?”

  Summerville raised an eyebrow. “Please. It took a lot of work to get your home address. This is definitely not a social call.”

  “I appreciate the honestly,” Rachel said, as she helped herself to the chair closest to the window. “It’s a timesaver. I assume you’ve heard I can read microexpressions?”

  “Actually, they told me you’re a mind reader. Among other things…” Summerville trailed off as he took in her study. Since Santino had moved in, every room on the main floor of their house was always spotless. Sunlight played off of glass on the built-in cabinets, Rachel’s collection of poetry and paperback romance novels behind it. Hundreds of books, all of them well-loved, their spines broken and covers torn to hell. The leather armchairs were overstuffed and comfortable, with standing lamps peeking over their backs like curious birds, and even more books stacked in neat piles across the nearby coffee table.

  It was a room made for reading. Definitely not the kind of room one expected to find in the home of a blind woman.

  “Oh?” she asked, all innocence, and glad her Braille reader was safely upstairs.

  “Never mind,” he said. “People are idiots.”

  “I agree. What brings you by?”

  Summerville sighed and settled back in his chair. “The news just broke that a man was murdered at the White House.”

  Rachel said nothing, her chin propped on one hand. She began to weave her frequency shield, to make sure anyone (cough, young nephew Jordan, cough) trying to snoop with a surveillance device would get an earful of static.

  “Rumor has it,” he continued, “that the woman who murdered him was killed on your watch.”

  She caught herself before she could react. Interesting, she thought. Is that what Mulcahy meant when he said he was doing damage control? Making sure that Alimoren wasn’t able to dump the blame on me? Alimoren promised to take the heat, but pushing it onto OACET would be so convenient…

  “Nothing?” he asked her.

  “You know I can’t comment on any ongoing investigations, whether real or figments of imagination.”

  Summerville watched her, his colors weighing her Southwestern turquoise against three different hues of gray stress. One of those grays hung heavy across his shoulders, and was weighed down at the bottom by a streak of Hanlon’s woody brown core.

  Rachel pretended she had discovered something of particular interest under a fingernail, and didn’t meet his eyes.

  “A year ago,” Summerville said, “I thought OACET was the worst thing that could possibly happen to this country.”
>
  “Me, too,” she said.

  “I bet you weren’t working to pull OACET down,” he said. “Like I was.”

  That got her full attention. Her head came up, and Summerville’s colors fluttered and paled as her eyes caught his. “Oh?” she asked, as mildly as she could.

  “Please don’t pretend that’s news to you,” he said. “OACET keeps its secrets, but everybody knows you have one of the best information networks around.”

  Rachel dropped her gaze and nodded. “To be honest,” she said, “I was surprised when you approached me at the White House.”

  It was true: OACET had initially identified Summerville as a possible threat, but that had been reassessed after Rachel had begun a working friendship with a local city judge. Rachel had been tipped off to Summerville’s involvement in a possible anti-OACET movement during the Glazer case. Summerville had been courting the judge, who had his sights set on attaining political office. One thing led to another, certain people got shot, and the judge and Rachel had developed a solid professional relationship. It seemed as though the judge had passed that message on to Summerville.

  Summerville confirmed this: “My employers and I were…angry…when you turned Judge Edwards. We had plans for him.”

  Rachel grinned. “I didn’t turn him. I showed him that OACET was made of people.”

  “You did,” he said. “And he convinced me.”

  She chuckled. “I hope OACET had something to do with that. We work hard to show we’re just everyday civil servants who got stuck in a bad situation.”

  Summerville’s colors rolled towards purple amusement as she fell into the patter of the OACET party line, and she shrugged, caught. I actually like this guy, she thought. God help me.

  “Yes. You do go above and beyond to show that you’re worth keeping around,” he said. “Not just when you’re working, but after hours, too… Your people donate your time, your abilities… Must be stressful.”