“I should ask you the same question, Ms. Farrell. Why are you here? You’re not from Yorkstone.”
“No, I’m not. I have reasons for being here. It’s a business matter. I think Carl is somewhere here too.”
Jack rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “What makes you think that?”
“We’re in a similar line of business. I just have good reason for believing he’s here. Isn’t that enough?”
“Is that it? That’s all?” said Jack. She nodded.
He wasn’t happy, but he guessed it would do for now. He said, “Okay, I’m going to have to get you to do a couple of things. We can do the second one in a few minutes, but first I’m going to have to ask you to take off your gloves.”
She frowned.
“It’s something I need to do,” he explained, barely suppressing a sigh. “I need to hold your hand to get an impression, to see if there’s anything I can pick up from the contact. It’s part of how I work.”
There was a little flicker of her brow, and then a brief half smile. Taking her time, finger by finger, she pulled off the soft, black gloves and dropped them into her lap, then reached her hand out across the desk again. Not once during the entire process did she break eye contact. Trying to ignore the look, Jack reached across and took her right hand in his own.
It was immediate. Jack’s head was awash with stars. Black night, sky. He sucked in his breath. Shooting lines, etched in white fire, skittered across the field, sharp, pointed, bladelike tips. The bottom of his stomach fell away. A deep shuddering breath, and he struggled for reality. He couldn’t feel anything. He couldn’t see. He closed his eyes, drawing on his resources, willing himself to feel his body. Slowly, painfully, he released his grip. His teeth clamped shut. Grimacing, he snapped his head back, remembering how to breathe. Remembering where he was. He forced his eyes open.
He was back in his office. The room was there just as it had been before. Breathing shallowly, he relaxed the pressure in his jaw and then took another deep breath, slowly letting it out and lowering his head to face her again.
Bridgett Farrell was watching him with a wide-eyed expression, genuine this time. “What is it?” she said. “Are you all right?”
Jack took a second to control his breathing properly. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything with that intensity. A long time. His heart was still racing.
“Okay, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, forcing himself to speak slowly. He’d been expecting something to do with Talbot, some impression. Not this vast wash of sky and stars. “There’s definitely something there, something that has got me interested. What more can you tell me about this artifact?”
“It’s something of great importance to my family. It’s something old. We’re not sure where it came from, but it’s been in my family for years.”
Okay, so family heirloom. But that didn’t explain the whole thing with the stars and sky. No way. He desperately needed to focus. He was awash with the sensation of vast cold and an inability to draw breath. Not good. He needed to get a grip.
“Ms. Farrell, I need you to try and draw this thing for me. Please go over to the wall and just trace your finger across the surface.
“Image,” he said to the wall.
She stood, picking her gloves up from her lap and placing them on the desk, and then crossed to the wall, looking a little confused.
“That’s it. Just use your index finger.” He was still finding it hard to think. The vision’s intensity had washed all real thought away, and he could use the moment’s respite this little exercise would give him to regain some sort of composure.
Hesitantly, she reached out and traced a line. “Oh,” she said, as a dark line appeared across the wall’s surface in her finger’s wake. She reached out again, this time with more confidence, and traced another line. Within moments she had sketched a shape. She stood back, nodded to herself, and then made some markings on the area representing the upper surface. It was a crude drawing, but it was giving Jack the general idea of what he was looking for.
“Save,” he said. The whole wall flickered briefly and Jack frowned. What the hell was that? The home system just didn’t get interference. He looked around the office quickly, but there was nothing else to suggest anything was out of place.
Bridgett Farrell moved back to her chair, crossed her legs after sitting, then reached across to snag her gloves, pulling them on and adjusting the fingers one at a time. She seemed not to have noticed the brief aberration on the screen.
Jack took a couple of moments before speaking.
“Right. Ms. Farrell. Um . . . describe Talbot for me. Tell me what he looks like.”
She peered across the desk at him, sizing him up. “Dark hair, a little shorter, a little bigger than you. Square jaw. Five o’clock shadow.”
“Bigger?”
“Yes, you know . . .” She pressed her hands to her shoulders.
“Hmmm.”
“How does he dress?”
“Smart. He has style.”
Okay. And Jack didn’t. He shrugged. He had a picture forming in his head, but he had no idea whether it might be accurate. If this Farrell woman was anything to go by, there’d be a touch of something foreign about Talbot’s look, his clothes, something. Something out of the ordinary. He might be making assumptions here, but it was a fair bet. Jack didn’t think it very likely that Talbot came from Yorkstone, especially as she’d said he was “here too,” implying that it was for the same sort of reason she was.
“Does he come from around here, Ms. Farrell?”
She gave a little shake of her head. “No. But does that matter?”
“Not really, but it gives me some pointers about who I’m looking for. I think I’ve got enough to go on for now,” he said finally. “It’s a pity you haven’t got more I can use. Clear image,” he said. He could recall it later, get Billie to work on it. “Where can I get hold of you?”
There was a slight quirk of her lips at that. “I’m staying at the Excelsior.”
Jack nodded. He knew it well. Yorkstone didn’t have too many luxury hotels and The Excelsior sat bang in the middle of the main shopping district. You could hardly miss it.
“Fine. I think I have enough. Just one last thing. I’d like to start with a retainer. Three thousand should do it.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a handipad. There wasn’t the slightest hesitation. She keyed a few commands and then swung around to face the wall.
The transfer went through in moments, the wall mapping the success of the transaction.
Jack nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll see you out.” Whatever the hell it was, she wanted this thing back pretty badly—and whatever it was, it had to be worth a damned lot more than she was prepared to pay for the services of one Jack Stein.
Jack stood, waiting as she also got to her feet, then walked her out of the office and to the door. Billie was nowhere in sight.
At the door she paused, turning to place one gloved hand upon his upper arm. She was little, this Bridgett Farrell, small and petite, but her presence was bigger than Jack might have at first expected. Somehow he’d thought she was larger. She barely came up to his shoulder.
“When will I hear from you, Mr. Stein?” she said. There was something deep and throaty in her voice.
“I’ll be in touch.”
She gave a quick nervous smile and turned, walking off down the hallway toward the elevator. Jack stared after her, watching the prim measured steps, the careful carriage. Billie had seen it; there was something not quite right about this woman, but for fifteen hundred a day, plus expenses, Jack could ignore that fact, at least for now. And there were other things that might just keep him interested for a little longer too.
Three
Jack came back into the living room to face glaring eyes and firmly crossed arms. Billie stood in the room’s center, staring at him accusingly.
“What?” he said.
She turned awa
y from him, her arms still crossed. She said something that he didn’t quite catch. “What, Billie? What?”
“I told you I didn’t like her.”
“Yeah, fine. What about it? She’s a client. We can do with the money.”
She spun about, her chin stuck out. “So why were you holding hands with her?”
“Jesus. Were you spying on me?”
“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head.
“I don’t believe you.”
That was what that flicker in the wall had been all about. Billie had programmed the home system to spy on his office. She probably had it set up to work from her bedroom, somewhere strictly out of bounds to him by mutual agreement. Damn, but she was good. He pursed his lips. Okay, she was smart, but how the hell was he supposed to maintain some sort of order in their life, when she was starting to do whatever she wanted without even consulting him? It wasn’t good that she was listening in either. Sometimes there were things that he’d just rather she didn’t hear.
Jack sighed and sat, running his fingers back through his hair. “Listen, I wasn’t holding hands with her. She’s given me limited stuff to go on. I was seeing if there was anything else I could pick up on. That’s . . . all.”
It was as if she was being possessive. The last time he’d seen her like that was with the Van der Stegen woman, over two years ago. This time, there was another edge to it. Not one that he could afford to let get out of hand. Their relationship was taut enough as it was, without the other implications. Implications that he really didn’t want to think about. There was no way he was going to let on to her about the other thoughts he’d had, right now.
She held her lips in a tight line, but her face relaxed a little.
“Yeah, and you’re right,” he continued. “There’s something about her that I don’t quite trust. But we’ve been there before, Billie. You know as well as I do that we need this job. She’s going to pay, we can live with it.”
She humphed, but his words seemed to have mollified her. She sat on a chair opposite, pulling her legs up in front of her. “So tell me?”
“Location. Retrieval. She’s lost something.” He shrugged.
“What else?” She was looking down at her fingers, picking at the nail on one finger.
“She says this thing has been taken by some guy called Talbot.”
“What thing?” She looked up at him.
“Last image,” said Jack. The quick sketch bled into existence on the living room wall. He jerked his head at it. “That thing.”
Billie studied the drawing and then frowned. “Huh? What is it?”
Jack sighed. “Don’t know. She called it an artifact. Something old. Not much more than that. She said it was a family heirloom. I don’t think that’s enough to go on though. I need you to find out what this is, Billie.”
She was still staring at the sketch. “Uh-huh.”
Jack waited till her attention swung back to him.
“There’s something about this thing, Billie. I don’t know what, but I think there’s more to it than it seems. I got some pretty strong impressions in there. The same with this woman, Bridgett Farrell. I need you to do some work on her and on the Talbot guy too.”
Her eyes narrowed and she gave a quick nod. “Talbot. What Talbot?”
“Carl.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And that’s it for now. Me, I need to work out what they’re doing in Yorkstone. She’s staying at the Excelsior.”
Billie rolled her eyes. “I know she is.”
Of course she did.
“Okay. I need coffee. You want anything?”
“Nuh-uh. Soon.”
Jack frowned. Billie shook her head, then mimed pushing stuff into her mouth with her fingers, looking at him like he was an idiot. “Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah. All right. Soon, okay?”
He pushed himself to his feet and headed into the kitchen to leave her to it. He knew better than to disturb her when she was focused on her particular talent. He’d talk about the whole sky/stars thing later when she’d tracked down some more information. Billie accepted what he did, what his inner senses told him, but she was just as likely to take whatever impressions he’d received and run with them, distracting her from the matter at hand. Sometimes that simply confused the process rather than helped it.
As he waited for the coffee, he decided he missed having a window in the kitchen. It would be good to be able to stare out at the street while he was waiting for things to happen, not that there was that much to see. Instead he was left with his thoughts to play with. If they’d been in a different place in the building, he would have been able to program one, just like he could program the furniture and the other parts of the apartment, but he doubted the neighbors would appreciate a new window looking into their bedroom, even if the building would have let him.
He and Billie had been together for two years now, and in the beginning they’d been through a fair bit. The life he gave her was better than anything she’d had back in the Locality, but there were times, like now, when he suspected it might not be enough. The way she talked to people, the way she reacted. It wasn’t so different, he supposed, from when he’d first met her, but he sometimes wondered whether too much of his own attitude and brusque approach to life had somehow rubbed off on her. That attitude was part of the reason they functioned so well together, but it couldn’t be good for a young girl like Billie. And she was just that—a young girl.
The coffeemaker announced it had finished its cycle, and he poured himself a mug and headed back into the living room. Billie was squatting on the couch, head tilted up, staring at a list on the wallscreen. She barely glanced at Jack as he reentered.
He sipped at the coffee, watching her focus and concentration, envying it a little. Too much distracted him to do such detailed searching—little echoes, resonances that set off tangents in his brain. She seemed to be able to refine her attention, streaming it into an almost obsessive directedness. Ten minutes later, she was still scrolling through screens and his coffee mug was empty.
“Food, Billie.”
She waved at him for quiet.
“Come on. It’s getting late. And let me guess . . . Molly’s, right?”
That stopped her. She glanced at Jack, back at the wallscreen, then back at him again. “Save,” she said.
As they left their building, Jack scanned the surrounding area, looking for anything out of place, not expecting to find anything in particular, but old habits died hard. Yorkstone’s social planning had done much to make the city cleaner, more friendly to normal life. The grime and underlying sense that everything might fall apart was absent. Despite himself, Jack almost missed it, that edgy sense of being just on the lip of a yawning gap. The shuttle stop was not too far from the apartment, but whereas Jack’s old place in the Locality had been on a main thoroughfare, here they lived in a pleasant little side street.
Yorkstone had invested more in the maintenance end of the programming spectrum, and though there was the inevitable decay as the pseudo-organic builders reached the end of their lifecycle, it seemed to happen much farther down toward the city’s tail. In the Locality, you would have seen the marks of that crumbling edge closer to the city’s center. In the Locality, people still lived and worked right within that urban tarnish, the falling apart a constant reminder in the back of the consciousness. Yorkstone’s owners and designers were more careful. The residential areas were defined well away from those sections where things slowly stopped working. You could almost believe you were in one of the old, fixed cities, rather than a mobile, half-alive urban containment.
Jack and Billie strolled up their street, heading for the shuttle. It was dark now. Far above, the ceiling panels revealed a clear, cloudless sky beyond their transparent vault. Jack looked up as they walked, swallowing back the slight chill that came with the starry black picture above them. Outside it would be cold, far colder than the regulated temperature inside. Cold white light, touch
es of something else tracing the edges. The vision washed back into his senses, prompted by the night sky. The sensory flash had been intense. Too intense. He hadn’t had anything like it for well over a year now, and that sudden forgotten power was unsettling. He knew, without thinking about it, that they were about to get involved in something big. He tore his gaze from the sky above and glanced across at Billie. No point in worrying her about it right now. He could wait until they’d eaten and gotten back to the apartment to broach his suspicions.
Billie was humming as they boarded the shuttle, and her apparent quick mood change set him thinking again. As they took their seats, a couple toward the other end of the shuttle smiled at them, then politely looked away to watch the passing scenery. So different. Everything about this place was different. The shuttle cars were clean. The people were clean, friendly, polite. The education program was certainly better than anything offered back at the Locality. Back there, you made your own existence. Everything was available, as long as you could pay for it. Here, money was still involved, but it was a different equation. Society functioned in an ordered fashion. In the Locality, you made your own luck and that was how things worked. That was the funny thing. For years and years Jack had done just that, made his own luck, as haphazard as that had been. But now, here in Yorkstone, that facility no longer served in the way it had. Maybe he just didn’t need to be lucky here.
A sharp nudge brought him back to himself.
“Jack?”
“Yeah, sorry.” It was their stop.
“What is it?” she said.
“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She peered up at his face, but seemed content with his answer. She tugged at his arm.
The shuttle slowed, the doors hissed open, and together they stepped out into balmy, temperate air in a tree-lined plaza. This, their nearest commercial area, was open, lines of stores on either side with glasslike fronts. Advertising crawled up walls and across lintels, but it was in subtle, muted tones, not glaring. There were no advertising drones in sight. Back in the Locality, a place like this would be full of the short mobile devices, programmed to tag passersby and hit them with bursts of light and noise. It was one of the many things he really didn’t miss.
Metal Sky Page 3