by Joss Ware
But she wasn’t certain how she felt about it.
He was handsome and strong, brilliant…and unique. Very special. And the kiss had been very tender. Warming. Unexpected. It had been a long time since she’d been kissed. She’d forgotten how nice it could be.
“It was nice,” she told him, resting her hand gently against his chest where a strong heart pounded beneath her fingers.
“Nice,” he said, and she could tell, even in the dusk of twilight, that he was smiling. “That’s good.”
She looked at him for a moment, feeling a little confused, and a little odd. She’d never really thought about him as more than a friend. What should she do now?
But Theo answered that question for her. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” she said. “I told Lou I’d meet him for dinner.”
“All right, then I can give both of you the update while we eat,” Theo said, seeming to be in a particularly expansive mood. “And then you can get to work on testing out the network.”
That was good. Work was something Sage understood very well.
“Finding Remington Truth isn’t going to be easy,” Lou Waxnicki was saying. He took a big sip of his wine and set the glass down carelessly enough to slop over its edges as Simon chose a seat next to him.
Since they were in one of Envy’s communal restaurants, Lou kept his voice low and his head bent toward the others. The casino resort hotel rooms Envyites lived in didn’t have kitchens, so most people took their meals in one of the three eateries and everyone took their turn with KP duty.
Although he was Theo’s twin, Lou’s appearance was nothing like that of his youthful-looking brother. The older man wore his silvery white hair in a ponytail at the back of his head. He also wore a pair of dark-framed, rectangular glasses that had been at the height of trend in 2010 and sported a neatly trimmed gray goatee.
“No bloody shite,” replied Quent Fielding, with a bit of British in his voice. He was one of the men with whom Simon had emerged from the caves a little more than six months ago. Simon knew he’d lived some of his youth in England before moving to Boston. “It’s going to be damned impossible.”
“But we’re going to try,” Simon said, his attention drawn to the splash of cabernet on the table. It looked like a pool of shiny, dark blood. Soon it would roll to the edge and drip off. Drip, drip, drip.
Simon yanked his attention away, focusing on the conversation, ignoring the flash of memories. He couldn’t do anything about his nightmares, but now, during the day, yes…it was easier to remind himself that the past was past—completely, miraculously erased. And that he would never allow himself to return to it.
“If the Strangers are so intent on finding Truth that they’ve been sending their gangas searching for him for years, he must be important,” he said calmly, using a cloth napkin to wipe up the splash of wine.
Paper towels? Nonexistent in this post-manufactured society.
Lou nodded, oblivious to the mess he’d made and the ugly memories he’d churned up in Simon. “And if it’s important to the Strangers, it’s even more important to us. If we can find the man first…”
Simon knew the name Remington Truth. Most Americans who’d been alive in the early 2000s would, for Truth had been the head of National Security for the second Bush administration. Because of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, you’d have to live under a rock not to know the name…and even though some of those years had been a dark blur to Simon, he hadn’t been completely submerged in his misery.
Although there were times he wished he had been.
“But are we certain it’s the Remington Truth we’re looking for?” Simon asked. “And not some other symbol or object? After all, the gangas have been looking for him for fifty years. As dumb as they are, they should have found him by now.”
“Since I’m pretty certain he was a member of the Cult of Atlantis, and we’re damned sure that they were the ones who caused the Change, I think it’s a good assumption it’s the actual Remington Truth,” Quent replied, his voice flat. “He and my wanked-off father, and a whole bloody cult of rich and powerful people who decided to annihilate the damned world. Even their own countrymen. And their goddamn families.”
Loathing burned in Quent’s blue eyes, and Simon couldn’t blame him. When Quent had seen a picture of the Stranger leaders and recognized his father, Quentin Parris Brummell Fielding, Jr., as one of them, the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. In the photo, Fielding had looked exactly the same as he had fifty years earlier.
The man had not aged, and he had somehow become one of the immortal Strangers, who wore glowing crystals in their skin. Quent’s recognition of his father had been the confirmation of what the Waxnicki brothers had suspected for half a century: the Change had been not only man-made, but premeditated.
That was why they were intent on destroying the Strangers.
If Simon had been unconvinced as to the Strangers’ threat to humans and chalked it up to Lou Waxnicki’s paranoia (as was the case with most Envyites), that hesitation had been put to rest two weeks ago, when he and his friends had helped to free a group of teenagers from the Strangers. They’d been abducted and would have been sold into slavery.
Slavery. Beholden to, owned and abused by another.
Sometimes life could be worse than death.
“Building our network and identifying trusted contacts will help,” Lou said, taking another drink. “When Theo gets back, we should have a fifty-mile circumference of network points in place.”
“He’s back,” Simon told him. “I just saw him awhile ago.”
Lou looked surprised, and Simon could understand why. One would think that his brother, and partner, would be the first person he would see on his return…at least, if one didn’t know he was in love with Sage and would, of course, seek her out first.
“Speak of the devil,” Lou said, looking toward the door.
But Simon, who never sat without a view of all entrances and exits, and with his back protected by the wall, had already seen Sage and Theo walk in.
He hoped it didn’t show in his face, the way his chest squeezed when he saw her, but Holy Mother of God, she was beautiful.
Simon, who had run with and met, and even slept with, a variety of gorgeous women in L.A.—the stock of starlet wannabes who would do anything to get ahead—could hardly breathe when he looked at Sage Corrigan.
Part of it was that what he saw was what God had given her. There was no plastic surgery, no makeup, no hair dye and highlights, no orthodontics in this world. So he knew that the impossible color of her long, curling hair—the color of a shiny new penny with a rosy tinge—was natural. And the unusual blue eyes, pale and vivid, weren’t helped by tinted contacts. Ivory skin, fair and luminous as if she glowed from inside.
She wore her hair loosely tied back, with little tendrils curling around her face, and a casual off-white dress that fell in a single line from shoulder nearly to the floor. Sage carried the books Theo had given her, and as they walked across the room toward them, Simon noticed the way the other patrons turned, watching her.
Not men staring at her with lust or appreciation in their eyes, or women with envy or even admiration. Not curiously or with interest.
No. The room took on a sort of tension. Unease.
Revulsion.
The sort of thing that would happen when Mancusi entered a place like Nobu or Sunset Tower. Though the other patrons and staff knew who and what he was, they dared not express their opinion of him…but the expression in the eyes, the physical distancing, the little hush of silence…told it all.
Sage noticed it too. Simon could see by the way she moved a bit closer to Theo, almost behind him. He didn’t recognize fear or anger in her face. Yet, she kept her eyes focused straight ahead, toward Lou, resignation in her demeanor.
Simon’s eyes narrowed, and he straightened, primed and ready for anything. His hand slid automatically to the shoulder holster under his jacket before
he realized not only did he not wear a jacket, but he had long given up the holster and its weapon.
And the life it represented.
When Sage reached the table, which was tucked into a dim corner, she sat with her back to the room. Theo settled next to her. And Simon continued to observe the other diners, waiting to see what…if anything…would transpire.
Hell, if this was what happened when she ventured into public, no wonder she remained cloistered in that computer lab.
Simon’s attention remained split between the conversation between Theo and Lou and the rest of the room, a simple habit for him to fall back into. After a moment, that odd tension eased a bit, likely because Sage was now out of sight of the others. Still, he continued to scan the room.
“I’ve already begun my search on Remington Truth,” Sage announced, glancing at Quent. “Once you’d mentioned that he was a close friend of your father, and a member of the Cult of Atlantis, I dug deeper. And since the Strangers are looking for him too, I’ve been focusing on that.” She shrugged and spread her hands. “There’s a lot of data, and I’m not sure what to look for.”
Simon remained silent. Not because he didn’t have anything to contribute to the conversation—as a matter of fact, he did—but because he preferred to remain unnoticed, nonparticipatory, under the radar, so to speak. That was part of the reason Mancusi had called him a shadow. Silent, smooth…deadly.
He’d share his information after pursuing it himself, if there was anything worthwhile to share.
“But doesn’t it seem odd that they’ve been looking for fifty years and haven’t found him?” Sage asked, voicing Simon’s own question from earlier. “And if he was a Stranger, wouldn’t he be with them anyway?”
“How do we know they’ve been looking for him for that long?” asked Quent.
Lou adjusted his glasses and set down his wineglass, which was empty. “Because the gangas came on the scene about seven or eight months after the Change. From the first time we saw and heard them, we thought they were saying ‘Ruth’ over and over again.”
“But when Jade was captured by Preston, she figured it out and realized they were saying ‘Remington Truth,’” Sage added unnecessarily. Simon had noticed she liked to spout information whenever the chance arose. “She mentioned that he seemed almost afraid when she asked him about Truth.”
Jade was a friend of Sage’s, and a member of the Resistance. When the teenagers had been abducted, she’d also been captured by Preston—a Stranger who’d once enslaved her after murdering her husband.
“I made her write it down for me, exactly what he told her,” Lou said, pulling a worn little notebook from his shirt pocket. “My memory’s not as good as it used to be.” He flipped through a few dog-eared pages, then read, “The only one who knows about everything is Remington Truth. And until we find him, Fielding has no power over me or anyone else.”
“That’s basically what he said,” Theo agreed, resting his elbow on the table in a display of his muscular, dragon-tattooed arm. “Sounds like they’re desperate to find him…maybe to put him out of commission or at least under their control.”
“Well, if he’s alive, he should look the same as he did before the Change,” Sage said. “That’s assuming, as a member of the Cult of Atlantis, that he has the same immortality as the rest of them and that he wears a crystal.”
“Did you find a picture of him?” Simon asked. He knew she did her research through a sort of cobbled-together Internet that the Waxnicki brothers had been building for the last half-century.
The way they’d explained it, they’d been able to take cached information from any hard drives they were able to find from undamaged personal computers, as well as the big backup caches from local or national hosting and search engine companies like Google, Yahoo!, Comcast, and so on, to re-create a static picture of the Web. That meant that any link might lead to a website with missing pages or images, leaving them with lots of holes. But the more information they gathered, the more holes were plugged. Simon had found Internet research less than a barrel of laughs on its own, but in this case, the process must be ridiculously tedious.
Sage nodded. “I did find several pictures of him that were recent—or at least, recent in relation to the Change—so we know what he looks like. I have some printouts here,” she said, half rising to dig into the pocket of her long, loose dress.
As she leaned forward, the vee-necked bodice gapped a little, offering a teasing peek of glowing, freckle-dusted skin and an enticing curve.
Simon dragged his eyes from her and focused them on the edge of the table. She probably figured the dress, which had some sort of curly feminine stuff along the edges and hem so it wasn’t completely sacklike, enveloped her enough that no one would notice her curves. She would be wrong.
He’d walked onto the roof and found her standing there, the blazing ball that was the sun lighting a fiery nimbus around her amazing hair, making the ends burn and shimmer, settling a brilliant red glow over her figure, and, yeah, through the light, pale-colored material of her dress—he’d seen more than he should have…but less than he wanted to.
Simon would have walked away, leaving her to her solitude if she hadn’t started talking to him. Since they’d exchanged maybe five words including introductions since their first meeting, he found himself intrigued that she meant to press the conversation. She showed no sign of apprehension or nervousness at his presence.
But then again, Sage Corrigan didn’t know anything about him. How bloody his hands were, and how black his conscience was, how irredeemable and unholy he’d been.
Now, she tossed a thick fold of paper onto the table and settled back into her chair, the teasing bodice sliding into place.
“I made several copies,” she said as Theo unfolded the papers and passed them out. “I suppose showing them to people might help us locate the man, if he still exists. There aren’t many places he could be. But I—”
“Unless he’s holed up somewhere alone,” Theo said. “Which is where I’d fucking be if I knew all the Strangers and their gangas were after me.”
“Looks like a bloody wanker to me,” said Quent, who’d barely glanced at the picture. Bitterness flattened his aristocratic features.
“He was born in nineteen fifty-seven,” Sage said as she shoved one of the papers across to Simon. “Grew up in Boston, went to Boston College for mathematics and joined the CIA. Stationed in Russia for a time, then Turkey, then came back to…where was it? Not Quantico. The other place. Anyway—”
“I’m sure you have it all written down, organized chronologically,” Theo interrupted. “If I know you.”
Simon glanced at him, surprised at the faintly dismissive tone in his voice. Not really dismissive, but…he couldn’t put his finger on it. And when Theo reached over and squeezed Sage’s delicate wrist, smiling at her as if she were a puppy who’d just done a new trick, it was all Simon could do not to shake his head.
Right, vato. Treat her like a child.
Sage settled back in her chair, smiling sweetly. The reserved curve of her lips had the effect of elongating her face a bit, making it look almost feline. “You’re right. I can give it to you without rambling on about it. But at least you know what he looks like.”
Well, at least Dragon Boy hadn’t ruffled her feathers.
But the guy had sure been annoyed when he came upon Simon and Sage on the roof together earlier. Simon had met Theo’s immediate questioning—then warning—gaze with a blunt one of his own: message received, but don’t fuck with me.
The old Simon, the one from East Los who always carried and was tied to Mancusi, would have raised both his hackles and the blade he carried in his boot, and drawn a little blood on that overkill dragon tattoo to prove his point.
Whether he gave a shit about the woman or not.
But this Simon, the mellow one, the one who’d had the miracle of rebirth, had merely snorted to himself and walked away.
Now Simon reappl
ied himself to the crinkled paper in front of him and took a good look at Remington Truth. The face in the photo was familiar, but Simon had never had reason to study the man. He looked about mid-fifty, with startling dark blue eyes and silvery hair. His features were unremarkable except for the piercing gaze that displayed marked intelligence, and a strong, determined chin. From the picture, he appeared rather stocky but not unhealthily so.
“That’s why the gangas take only blondes, and kill everyone else,” Simon mused, half to himself. “They’re looking for a man with silver hair.”
“But they’ve been known to take light-headed women too,” Quent said, smoothing his blond hair. He’d taken to wearing a bandanna whenever he might be out of Envy’s protective walls at night.
“Yeah, but they’re dumb as stumps,” Theo said with a quick smile, “so they probably can’t tell a woman from a man anyway. They just know they’re looking for someone with hair that’s not dark.”
Simon realized that Sage had stood, and was now bending to give Lou a quick hug. “See you all later,” she said with a smile as she straightened. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Have fun,” said Theo, his eyes lingering on her for a moment. “I’ll stop by later to see how things are going.” As Sage walked away, he returned to his companions, glancing at Simon as if to check whether he was watching his woman.
He wasn’t.
He was watching the other patrons.
A few of them stared, giving snide looks as she passed by, and Simon recognized the same tautness as before…subtle, again, but noticeable if one were looking for it. Lou and Theo didn’t seem to be aware of the unpleasant attention that Sage attracted, or if they were, they’d become used to it and dismissed it.
Sage, head high and appearing to ignore the looks, passed through the restaurant without any incident, but Simon felt uneasy nevertheless. He glanced at Theo again, who was in a lighthearted argument with his brother about who was more godlike—Donald Knuth or someone called the Woz.