The door opened for Joel. As she entered, his content shimmered down from the ceiling. The room itself was blank, aside from a vintage lucite desk, a white tulip chair, and something on a white marble pedestal, shrouded with a square of blue velvet. The crystal ball. For a terrible moment, Hwa had the urge to look into it again. See how it worked. Figure out the trick to it. Because it had to be a trick. A special effect. A prop. It could not be real.
Her hand dropped. No. Not again. She had things to do.
She took a seat at the desk. In a groove inset into the top of the desk was a single stylus. It was very light, and etched with the image of a serpent with a crown on its head hatching from a large egg. It was made of bone.
DANIEL SÍOFRA, she wrote on the desk.
Síofra’s profile effervesced into the air. It was far more detailed than anything Hwa had access to. Performance reviews. (“Mr. Síofra seems very concerned with learning proper procedure in all things; he prides himself on knowing the best way to accomplish any task.”) Pictures of him at every Lynch event with highlights of who he’d spoken to and for how long. Long logs of bio-data: heart rate, brainwaves, temperature, sleeping patterns, calories in, calories out.
Brain scans.
X-rays.
Images of a burned body.
Hwa covered her mouth to keep the moan inside.
“We did our best with him.” Hwa whirled. There in the door stood Zachariah’s softbot. It glided in, buoyant, deflated arms trailing at its sides. “Yes,” it added, after a pause for breath in the other room. “I can direct this device from my ventilator.”
Hwa looked around the room. Shit. “I was just—”
“You were curious about Daniel. That’s natural. A young woman like you. He’s very attractive.”
“It’s not like that,” Hwa said.
“He keeps a close eye on you, too. A little mutual surveillance is,” another pause for breath, “only fair.”
Hwa swallowed. There was nothing for it. Short of asking the old man if he’d blown up the Old Rig, she would never find the answers she was looking for this way.
“Sorry about this. It was stupid. I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She stood up from the desk, put the bone stylus back, and made for the door. The softbot swerved in front of her. She wondered what it would take to puncture it. She’d played with a hugbot, once, during the process of diagnostic therapy for her seizures. It was a tough old thing, built to take a beating, and this looked much the same. It regarded her with soft blue eyes. They spun independently of each other.
“What did you think you would find here, Miss Go?”
Without meaning to, Hwa glanced at the images hanging and twisting in the air above the desk. The specs of machinery. Two deep brain implants. Neural mesh along his spinal column. Labs on chips synthesizing custom drugs on demand. As she watched, the implants and the mesh and the chips faded away, replaced by the original scans of his injuries. Then they assembled themselves. The machines inside him built themselves up, then rebuilt him from within. She watched his metamorphosis over and over. It was total, and it was magnificent. Whoever Síofra was before, Lynch had put him back together piece by piece, including large segments of his brain. And they’d built him better than he was before.
“I was just thinking,” she said carefully, “how much we could have used this kind of technology when the Old Rig blew up.”
“Yes, that was tragic,” Zachariah said, with the softbot’s gentle voice.
Hwa swung her gaze back to him. “My brother died that day.”
“I know,” Zachariah said. “And I am sorry.”
Hwa’s lips felt hot. Her throat began to close. “What are you sorry for?”
The softbot’s limp arms filled slightly and rose in an approximation of a shrug. “At my age, the list of my regrets is much too long.”
“Do you regret not buying this town sooner?”
Both the softbot’s eyes brightened and dilated. She was being focused on. She stared hard into the blue light.
“Did you want to buy it, sooner?” she heard herself ask. “Before the Old Rig blew up?”
From the other room, she heard a rough, awful sound. Laughter. Dry and dying and slow. Zachariah could barely breathe. But he could still be amused. The softbot’s head manifested a giant happy face.
“Pay no mind to gossip, Miss Go,” Zachariah said. “This city was already dead long before that day. Now it is resurrected. Much as our friend was,” a wet, sucking breath, “ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago? Not…” She forced the words out. “Not three?”
“Oh, my dear Miss Go.” One of the softbot’s arms filled and rose and gestured at Síofra’s profile. “Mr. Síofra is very special to me. My hopes for him are quite high. I would never allow him to risk his life in any meaningful way. Not after I invested so much in building it.”
One of the arms slithered over her shoulders. “My hopes for you are similarly high.” He breathed, and the tubing of the softbot’s arms curled around her neck. The pressure was very gentle but very real. Her neck and throat were still sore enough to magnify it. “You are two of a kind, you and he. A man without a past and a woman without a future. You want to have a future, don’t you, Miss Go?”
Mute, Hwa nodded.
The coil around her neck squeezed softly. Right where the sole survivor of the Old Rig had squeezed. “You want to share our future with us, don’t you? With Joel? And Daniel?”
She shut her eyes. “Yes.”
Now the pressure was definite. She fought to take deep breaths. “We’ve invited you deep into our world. Deeper than we’ve allowed outsiders. This is a family business, Miss Go, and you are not family.”
“I know that.”
“But you are valuable, in your own way. Unique. Rare. I like rare things. I like having the best. Are you the best?”
He could squeeze the life out of her, right here and right now. “Goddamn right I am,” she choked out.
The tubing slipped away from her neck. Air rushed into her lungs. “Then I think you should go back to Joel’s room, don’t you?”
She was out of the room before she could agree. When she entered, Joel rolled over and his eyes blinked open. He sat up. “Where’s all the blood?” he asked.
“Eh?”
“He shot you. There should be blood.”
Hwa frowned. She waved a hand in front of Joel’s face. His eyes didn’t track the movement. They leaked sudden tears. Hwa wiped them away carefully. She felt something inside realign itself, like a joint popping back into place. “You’re still asleep,” she said gently. “Lie back down.”
Joel did so, but his body remained stiff and his eyes stayed open. Hwa tested his forehead with the backs of her fingers. No fever. She sat beside him on the bed. “Close your eyes.”
“He shot you. I saw it.”
“You’re dreaming, Joel. I’m right here. I’m fine.” She reached over and pushed a hand through his hair. Joel’s eyes closed. His body went slack. She scratched her fingers across his scalp. Under her nails, she felt the scars where his implants had gone in. “I’m alive. And I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you.”
12
Aviation/Metabolist
“So,” Hwa said. “You’ve done some succubus play, right?”
The Aviation was alive with jazz. Violet light streamed across the black-and-white chequered floor. In the centre of the room, the bar rotated slowly. One revolution an hour. Hwa had counted three revolutions. She had lost track of how many bourbons that meant. Or which of the very specialized types she’d been drinking. Probably all of them.
Layne sipped her drink. “Sure, like once or twice. It’s super rare, though. Like it’s a thing they try once and don’t really go back to, unless they some like it. What are you at?”
“Where did you get the suit?” Hwa gestured at herself. “For being invisible.”
“Oh, my God
. You don’t need to be invisible, Hwa. Get over yourself.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Hwa said, for the second time in as many days. “I don’t…” I don’t want to be invisible, she should have said, but the words were harder to get out than she expected.
“Besides, it’s fucking tough to rent that shit,” Layne said. “Like, it’s super regulated. Like worse than guns. Which is kind of sad. Background checks and everything. They’re woven with smart sensors; if you rent one, the person you rented it from knows where the suit is every minute.”
“Could you buy one?”
“Yeah, a shitty one. Not the good stuff. The military stuff costs.”
“But if I wanted to buy the military stuff.”
Layne looked at Hwa as though she were extremely stupid. “Then go to the Lynches! They have a whole Security branch, right? Don’t you work for them?”
“I’m in another department,” Hwa said. “I file reports to Security, but I’m a…” She struggled to find the right phrase. “Discretionary hire.”
“Well, if anybody has that stuff, it’s them. I even heard them joking about it. Or Eileen did. I think she’s the one what told me about it.”
Hwa said nothing. She’d tried to ping Eileen, just to talk, and had even tried to explain why she’d gone back to working for the Lynches, but nothing came of it. Eileen had written her off. Completely. And Layne knew it. Everyone knew it. And it was awkward and awful as hell.
“What else is going on at work?”
Oh, not much, they just blew up this town so they could build a star in the ruins.
“They’re making me go to Homecoming,” Hwa said. “With Joel. They’re sponsoring it.”
“Don’t look so sad! You can handle it. It’s just a dance.”
Layne looked sleepy. It was late. Her flapper costume was fading. She’d rented the look for only a few hours, and now her pearls flickered in Hwa’s specs.
“It’s the whole principle of the thing,” Hwa said. “I don’t dance. Sunny dances. I don’t dance.”
“Who is Sunny?”
“Never mind.”
“Do you mean your mom? Wasn’t your mom a dancer?”
“No. She was in a girl group, and the group danced, in videos. But she wasn’t, like, a dancer. She wasn’t an artist, or something. She was just following orders.”
Layne brushed her pink hair aside and stared at Hwa hard through the veil of way too many brandy Alexanders. “Go Jung-hwa.” She pointed. “You hate your mother.”
Hwa shrugged. “So? The feeling’s mutual.”
“What did she do when you moved out?”
“Nothing,” Hwa said. “I mostly moved out three years ago, anyway. She was probably just glad to get the last little bit over with. She’ll have another closet, now. That’s why I had to share a room, growing up. Because she needed a whole other bedroom just for all her sexy shit.”
Layne nodded to herself knowingly, like she’d just solved some big mystery. She wagged a finger. “I get it.”
“Get what?”
“No, I get it. I finally get it. You’re worried that if you let any part of yourself be pretty, you’ll turn into your mom.”
Hwa drained her bourbon. As she did, she felt the world turn gently on its axis. This was the moment she had been waiting for. The perfect and complete awareness of her own fucked-up-ness. The moment at which her body finally hinted that maybe, just maybe, she should have a drink of water.
She rapped the bar with her knuckles, and turned to Layne. “No,” she said. “I don’t try because trying would be stupid. I have the kind of face that people edit out of their vision. It’s not going to look any better with makeup, or a subscription, or augments, or whatever. So I don’t bother.”
Layne frowned. Because she was drunk, it looked as though she were trying to thread her whole face through the eye of a needle. Hwa frowned. “Are you okay?”
Layne was not okay. She was clutching her throat. She was turning blue. She was falling off her bar stool.
“Layne!”
Hwa fell with her. Layne slid down her body to the floor. Hwa felt the music thrumming up through the tile and slicing through the air. Drums and trumpets and sharp, shimmering piano. Layne wriggled on the floor. Was this how Hwa looked when she had a seizure? All around her, people were laughing. People laughed when she seized, too. It had happened at school once, when she was in grade four. She peed herself and Sunny didn’t come and so she had to wear clothes from the Lost & Found and everyone called her Diaper Baby and Retard after that.
Funny, the things you remembered, as your friend lay dying in your arms.
It happened faster than Hwa thought possible. A couple of minutes at most. But those minutes stretched out, became unbearable, like a note held too long or a terrible, damning silence. One minute Layne’s eyes were roving around the room, as if she were trying to remember every detail all at once, and her heels were driving into the floor, squeaking and leaving black streaks. And the next minute she was gone. Not still, but absent. Vanished. Like someone had done a magic trick with her body, and replaced the real Layne with a warm, limp dummy.
“Oh, shit,” Hwa heard herself say. “Oh, Jesus. Layne. I’m sorry.”
The music had stopped. Layne stared straight ahead. Pink foam dribbled from one corner of her mouth.
“Come on, baby.” Someone’s arms were around her. Lifting her up under her shoulders. Rivaudais. She knew his cologne. The rings on his hands. “Come on, now. Up you get.”
“She’s dead.” Hwa’s knees went out from under her, and Rivaudais pulled her up. “She’s dead.”
“I know, baby girl. You just come on back.”
“We should cover her up—”
“Someone else can do that. Let’s get you some coffee, right now.”
Hwa untangled herself from his grasp. She stood herself up. “We were just talking.” She pointed. “We were just talking, just a minute ago.”
* * *
The police took her statement at the bar. Rivaudais’s coffee helped. He made it light and sweet with a lot of sugar and real cream. It tasted like a headache. Hwa felt that headache spiking somewhere deep in her skull as she drank it, but she drank it anyway, and then had some more, a fresh cup every time she told the story of the evening. The cops asked her about Layne. How they knew each other. What Layne did for a living. If she’d been sick. If she’d caught anything. If she and Hwa had an arrangement. If this was off-book.
Then Hwa said the words bodyguard, and Joel Lynch, and they focused on something in their eyes, and suddenly they were very nice and said that of course she could leave, this was just a statement, and if she thought of anything else she could contact them any time, day or night, no problem.
It was drizzling by the time she made it to the train platform. More wind than rain. Colder than she remembered. Her shirt stuck to her skin where Layne’s bloody foam had soaked it. It would look a sight on the train, she realized. But there was nothing for it. She pushed forward.
In a pool of orange exit light, Síofra sat waiting for her on a bench outside the station. His hair was soaked black. Even his eyelashes were wet.
“Where is your coat?” he asked.
Of course. She’d forgotten it upstairs. That was why she was suddenly so cold. Hwa examined him. Wherever he’d come from, he’d left in a hurry. “Where are your socks?”
He stood and pulled his coat off and draped it over her shoulders. Hwa watched his fingers doing up the toggles. She didn’t recognize his pants. They were too loose for running, too casual for work. Just a t-shirt on top.
“You were sleeping,” she said.
“Yes.” He folded down the collar of the coat and gently pulled her hair free of it. “Prefect woke me. You were in close proximity to officers of the law, and your heart rate spiked, and you weren’t answering Prefect’s pings. Those are the criteria for that particular alert.”
“But you didn’t come upstairs.”
“I spoke with a Mr. Rivaudais, who assured me you weren’t being detained.” Síofra hugged his bare arms. “He told me what happened. Hwa, I’m so—”
Hwa held up a hand. He silenced. She shut her eyes. She clenched her fists. She made herself hold it all in until the wave passed, until all she could feel was the rain trickling down her scalp, and then she made for the train. Síofra followed.
* * *
He followed her all the way home. At her door, she thought about warning him about the state of the place. Then she decided it was his problem if he didn’t like it—not everybody had spent the past ten years filling their wallets with Lynch’s blood money. But when they pushed through, he just stared at the heavy bag, and the reflex bag, and the trophies with Tae-kyung’s name on them.
“Where are yours?” he asked, finally.
“I kept getting disqualified,” Hwa said. “Illegal moves.”
“If I stay, will you kill me?”
Hwa opened and closed her fists. Tested their strength. One was already weaker than the other. She couldn’t hurt him even if she wanted to. “Not tonight.” She thought of the profile in Zachariah Lynch’s office. Dates and times and locations and heartbeats. His miraculous transformation, like that of some martyred saint, from broken to fixed, vulnerable to invulnerable, all on the Lynch dime. And why? Just because they felt like being generous? No wonder he was so loyal. “If you stay, they’ll know.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m well aware of that.”
She showered and changed. When she finished, Síofra was shutting off the kettle. He fetched down two mugs and started digging in the tea cabinet.
“How’s your stomach?” he asked, without turning.
“Not great.” Hwa pulled a pillow off the bed and sat on it in front of her display. She hunched forward. “Prefect.”
“Ready.”
“Gather all available surveillance from the Aviation bar in Tower Four, over the past three hours. Find Layne Mackenzie, female identified, twenty-five, white, pink hair. Show me every appearance.”
“Visual, audio, data, bio—”
Company Town Page 17