THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

by B. A. Chepaitis

  "Okay," Rachel said, and then, echoing his thoughts, "but it's not particularly safe. And the corporate mind-set isn't something Jaguar has a very good handle on. When you talk to her, remind her to be careful."

  "Rachel," Alex said, "I only wish it would do any good."

  The bar was crowded, and the crowd was lively. Jaguar, her hair sleek and her black boots shined, was singing a clipped and acerbic song about unrequited lust. She could see Adrian sitting at a table, listening, his eyes glued to her. This was her favorite part of the Planetoid. She had started singing on a dare from one of her former prisoners who played guitar and said Jaguar was just too scared to get up and perform. She'd surprised him. He didn't know that her grandparents taught her to sing for ceremony, encouraging her to use her voice the way athletes use their muscles—with precision, with the freedom of unrestrained passion, with something like joy, if anything as direct and cutting as her voice could be called joyful. She sang in college, too, to earn extra money. The stage was familiar turf.

  The audience, like the general population, was made up of many ex-prisoners who were waiting out their prerelease year, and many who had chosen to stay and become team members for Teachers, helping them set up programs, working their assigned parts in those programs. They all liked a night out, and they weren't the kind of people who took anything for granted. Responsive didn't begin to name their attitude.

  It was also the one place where she allowed people to call her Jag. Most of them, she figured, were only up to one syllable at a time.

  The band she was working with was all ex-prisoners, some of them past assignments of hers. Players changed on a regular basis to accommodate arrivals and departures from the Planetoid, but this group had been together almost a year, and they were getting quite good. Their timing was tight, and their improv was loose. They knew each other's rhythms and riffs, and weren't afraid to take chances with each other or the music.

  The Governors' Board would probably have disapproved, but Alex had put this activity in her report file as community-service volunteer time. She was, after all, encouraging new skills in the prisoners.

  She sang out the song, then announced the break. She was sweating, feeling buzzed from the sound, as she turned to her keyboard man, Gerry.

  "Jesus, Gerry." She laughed. "What the hell were you on about tonight? The size of your nipples?"

  "I don't know, Jag," he said, wiping his face with a towel they kept on stage. "It's a new piece. I was letting it fly."

  "You sure were." She reached for the towel. "Sounded great, though. I think they liked it."

  "They are big nipples," he said. "Wanna see?"

  "I think," she said, "I'll defer the pleasure."

  She walked off the stage and over to where Adrian sat, beaming at her. She picked up his beer and took a long pull from it, then sat down. "Enjoying yourself?"

  "Man," he said, "you're great. You ought to forget about being a cop and go on the road."

  "Sure," she said. "You ever deal with the music industry? More criminals there than on the Planetoids."

  He laughed, but he wouldn't let it drop. "Really. You should just do it."

  "Whatever for?"

  "Fame and fortune."

  She reached over and ran a finger across his smooth face. "I have you to get me the fortune. The fame is something I can do without."

  He held her fingers, and kissed them. "You always smell of mint. Why?"

  "Because I always carry it with me."

  "Mm. It's nice," he murmured into her hand. "Didn't you ever want to be somebody?"

  She blinked at him, surprised.

  "I can somebody," she said. "Aren't you?"

  He nuzzled the palm of her hand. "Right," he said, speaking into it. "I'll be somebody after I make a little more money. Nobody's anybody unless other people say you are. You know that."

  "No," she said, "I don't. I don't know that." It was soon to be approaching the fear, but she'd take the opportunity to work it. Something soft, she thought. A little gentling of the spirit.

  She pulled his face toward hers and began the process of making contact. An odd moment for it, but Teachers were always flying by the seat of their pants in terms of timing. As she was about to respond to the sorrow she saw lingering in him, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She startled, and turned.

  "Slumming again, Jaguar?" Nick said.

  She grimaced, then smiled tightly. "Nick, dear," she said. "I'd invite you to pull up a chair, but there aren't any. So maybe," she suggested, "you ought to just fuck off."

  He chuckled. "Always do what you're best at, right? But I don't think so. I'm at my best watching you work someone over."

  She pushed herself away from Adrian and the table and made as if to stand, but Nick put his hand back on her shoulder and pushed her down, holding her with the pressure of his weight.

  Jaguar surveyed him, going cold and still between a sense of loss and imminent danger. There was loss here. He'd taught her so much. It was Nick who told her to avoid all the fancy techno-tools the Board tried to foist off on Teachers. Stick to the basics, he told her. They wouldn't let you down.

  "Use your head and forget the rest," he had said. "Like the sensors. They scan for everything except glass. You know how much damage a glass knife can do to a gut?"

  She felt the cool edge of the glass knife she carried resting against her wrist. It was a gift. From Nick.

  There was loss and danger. She had to get him away from Adrian before he blew the assignment. She pushed his hand off her shoulder and he laughed.

  "Jag," he said, "what have you been saying about me, and who have you been saying it to?"

  "Besides that you're a lousy fuck, which I tell every woman I know?" she said coldly. "Not much. I don't like to waste breath."

  Adrian narrowed his eyes. "What the hell is this?" he asked, pointing at Nick as if he were a specimen in a laboratory.

  "Nothing much," Jaguar replied. "Every party needs an asshole to keep things lively." She leaned across the table and stroked Adrian's cheek briefly. "Could you be a gentleman and go get me a tequila? Double shot, something gold and expensive."

  Adrian made a sound of protest, but she shook her head at him, held his eyes briefly with hers, and stroked his face once more. "Salt and lemon with it," she said. "And no ice. Got it?"

  He pulled back from her hand, eyed her suspiciously, then rose and made his way toward the bar.

  "You're a rotten Teacher, you know that? Letting this happen in the middle of a case. With your subject right here, too." He tossed a nod toward Adrian's receding figure.

  "And you're determined to fuck it up on me, aren't you, Nick?"

  "That little boy? You could take him overnight. What're you waiting for?"

  She leaned back in her chair, stretching her long legs out in front of her. He lifted his leg and placed a large foot on her chair, next to her thigh, leaning his elbow on his knee and resting his chin in his hand.

  "I'm trying to do it right, Nick. You can't just walk into someone as if they're your living room."

  He reached over and ran his thumb along the line of her jaw. "I can, baby."

  She kept her body still, her eyes steady on his face, as she felt the pulse of need to push into her, to have her, to be in her. But she'd been practicing the arts all her life, and knew the gestures of resistance. He was potentially strong, but he had no deftness, and no technique. She blocked him, and held him just outside of where he wanted to be.

  "You couldn't last time, Nick."

  He chuckled, pushed her face away. "Well, well. Our Lady of the Empathic Arts speaks. If you're jealous because I'm working your turf, why don't you just say so?"

  At this, Jaguar had to let go and laugh. "Jealous? That's your realm, Nick. You're the man who got crazy over the amount of time I was spending with my supervisor."

  "Your supervisor and I had a little talk the other day," he cut in.

  "I know all about it," she said. "Alex told me." />
  "Alex told you," he mimicked her, "Alex told you. What did he tell you? That he'll look out for you as long as you give him a piece now and then? Protect you from the Board? Get rid of old Nick when you're sick of him?"

  She said nothing as he turned his face down to hers, narrowed his eyes, then slid his gaze away.

  It was enough. She could see the shadow sickness in him. It hadn't been that apparent last time she saw him. It was moving fast, but he could still return from it.

  "Nick," she whispered, "you need help. Why don't you let someone help you?"

  "You can help me," he whispered back, leaning close to her again, pressing his tension through his hand, into her shoulder. "You know how to make me feel good, Jaguar. You always have."

  There. This was the hard part. Right here, where he claimed her by his need, by their long association, by past friendship. She felt the pull of it, that longing for an old warmth, long dead.

  Your darkness. Where you walk with the dead.

  But there were so many connections between them, and none of them dead yet.

  About five years after the dust settled from the Killing Times, a group of volunteers started sorting through the warehouses of items that had been collected from the dead. Houses full of furniture, closets full of clothes—the stuff of life was given away to charities. Personal items such as photo albums and letters were sorted, and any remaining family members were contacted to come back to their cities and collect their past.

  Jaguar had been called back to Manhattan for her grandparents' pictures, ceremonial clothing, and jewelry. When she walked into the noise and chaos of the warehouse with its long tables and long lines of clamoring people, she found herself looking into Nick's face once again after six years.

  "Nick?" she said. "Are you still alive?"

  He laughed, then eyed her good. "You grew up nice," he said.

  He told her he was just here for a few days, volunteering on this assignment. That he'd started working on the Planetoids. Couldn't seem to stand Manhattan anymore.

  He pointed up, toward the sky outside the window of the room they were in, and she followed his finger with her gaze, looking out and up. Out and up and away.

  "Can I get a job there?" she asked.

  "You?" he had said. "You could probably get a job just about anywhere you want." And he'd arranged for her to visit with another Teacher who was returning that afternoon. She'd met Alex, spoken with him, ended up back in school, and was now a Teacher herself.

  She owed Nick. She owed him a lot. Maybe that was the problem she had with him.

  "Why are you filing a complaint against me, Nick?" she asked now. "You know what I did for you on that last one."

  "I know," he admitted. "But you won't back me up with the Board, and I'm not ready to retire. Jesus, Jaguar, you can take this one for me. All you'll get is a little slap on the wrist. Naughty, naughty Jag. But you're used to that."

  He was right. She'd get off easy, but he might be forced into early retirement. The Board was careful to watch for any signs of burnout, and Nick would probably look like a classic case to them. She'd be helping him out, maybe evening the debt between them.

  "Back me up," he continued, "and then ... I'll let you help me with the other. The empathic stuff. We can try again, together. C'mon, Jaguar. You know we just fight because we're two of a kind. We've both been through it.

  I know what you need, who you are, what you've seen. Let's give it another try."

  Another try. They were two survivors. Two people who understood what it meant to survive hell.

  "Jaguar," he crooned at her, "aren't you sick of sleeping with prisoners? Wouldn't you like something better than that?"

  She searched his face, asking his eyes to be still and connect with hers, but they wouldn't. Shadowed. Cold and distant and dark, chasing some monster inside himself that even he couldn't name. Did her face look like that, evading contact?

  Where is your darkness?

  Words came out of her mouth, surprising to her in their harshness, their anger.

  "I won't back your lies, and I won't sleep with you, Nick. Sleeping with prisoners is better than sleeping with a dead man."

  She saw his face grow white, blood leaving the surface of his skin as his rage at her grew. He leaned closer and lifted a long strand of her hair, feeling the silk of it between thumb and index finger, then winding it slowly around, down to his hand.

  "Watch it, Jaguar," he said. "I put up with a lot of shit from you because we got history, but I'm not as easygoing as I used to be."

  He twisted, then jerked hard, snapping her neck back. He held her there, and with his free hand he caressed her throat, feeling the place where the carotid beat like thunder in her neck.

  Out of the corner of her eye, at an odd angle, she saw Adrian weaving through the crowd with her tequila. She had to get Nick out of here. Had to get him away before Adrian saw this and smelled the setup she'd created for him.

  She reached up and wrapped her hand around Nick's wrist, pressing her fingers between the joints of bones. "Let go," she said.

  "You let go," he responded.

  She could see Adrian drawing closer. Damn. Damn and hell. Someone had to let go first.

  She dropped her hand.

  "Subject coming back?" he asked without looking. Then he laughed. "I'm not as dead as you'd like to think, Jag. Just remember that."

  He slowly unwound his hand from her hair and released her. He waited with his foot still on her chair until Adrian returned, then pushed her chair roughly back and turned toward him, punching him playfully on the chest and causing him to slosh tequila over himself.

  "Watch out for her, buddy," he said. "Ask her sometime what happened to her last assignment. And Jaguar," he added in parting, "say hello to Clare for me."

  When he left, Adrian eyed her suspiciously. "What was that?"

  "Another cop. Don't worry. Just some shit about his propensity to screw up cases and find someone else to blame. I had to testify at one point. He wasn't happy about it. He still thinks my word carries weight. That's how crazy he is."

  "Jaguar," Adrian started, but she stopped him. She was distracted by Nick's mention of Clare. What was that to him, and how did he know she had the assignment if it was classified?

  "I want to know what's going on," Adrian insisted, and she turned her attention back to him.

  "Leave it alone," she said. "I gotta get back to work." She stood and leaned over him, nipped at his earlobe. "Did you like that last one? Lust takes a nap at the back of your head," she sang. "Waiting for you, waiting for you, waiting for you."

  "Sure," he said. But he pulled away from her.

  Shit, she thought. Just when they were doing so well.

  5

  "I don't care what he wants to charge me with, you tell him to leave me the hell alone. He's not to touch me, he's not to talk to me, he's not to even think about me."

  Alex looked from Jaguar, to Terence Manning, who had been going over recent statistics with Alex when she flung open the door and began telling him, with the precise and pointed asperity of white-hot anger, about Nick's recent visit to her.

  "Will you," Alex said, "calm down. Say hello to Terence. Be sociable."

  "Hello, Terence," she said, then returned her attention to Alex. "I am perfectly calm. I'm also justifiably angry. That asshole's about to blow my whole assignment for me. He's not fit for this work anymore, Alex. You should pull him. Now."

  Alex swiveled his chair back and forth, considering her. She could be right, but she was also holding something back. What, though? Something Nick had on her? Something she knew about him? He focused on her, grabbing hold and pulling in just a little. Those sea eyes, green and gold and soft and deep. She was—wait—what the hell was that?

  This wasn't the way it worked. She was pulling him in.

  He felt the tension of it, a wire strung between them. Then the inrush of feeling, here where she occupied him. So quickly. She could act so qu
ickly and she was so smooth, like the edge of her glass knife, slicing air, slicing through to a place she had no right to be.

  He felt something like her laughter, and then saw himself young and walking down a city street strewn with bodies, smelled fetid death. A young man in the army, trying to be a hero and save people from their own idiocy.

  Her eyes showed him to himself as he bent over the groaning form of a young woman, her gold-skinned face and dark hair perfect under the perfect brilliance of sun and clear sky.

  Can I help you? he asked her, a polite young man from a safer world, trying to exercise courtesy in the face of unimpeded death like trying to be respectful to a rabid dog.

  Can I help you? What do you need?

  And the young woman's beautiful arm raised, an automatic weapon in it. Her perfectly beautiful grin as she fired. His dodge, just in time, so that he caught the bullets in his arm and not his face. His rage in kicking the weapon from her hand, then kicking her over and over and over again. His rage, and the betrayal. The betrayal of such a perfectly beautiful kind.

  Perfect beauty. Perfectly beautiful killer.

  Then, just as swiftly, the image dissolved, the feel of it gone as Jaguar pulled back, her laughter riding the wake of his memory.

  He sat in his chair again, with Jaguar staring at him, her eyes smooth as a glassy sea.

  Perfectly beautiful.

  She tilted her head to one side and said, very low in her throat like a purr or a growl, "Care to go for a swim?" And as she spoke he could see, gleaming red at her wrist, the tip of the retractable glass knife he knew she carried there.

  He leaned forward, placed the palms of his hands on his desk, and pushed himself to standing. No, he wasn't shaking. He was very calm. Quiet. All quiet now.

  "You're way out of line, Dr. Addams," he said coldly. "Whatever Nick's doing, I'll handle. You better keep track of yourself."

  "Oh, I can track myself. Don't you worry." She leaned toward him, resting her hands on his desk and putting her face level with his. "I can track a cat under a new moon, or the smallest scent of death in open air. I can track last week's eagle in a cloudy sky. I can even track you, Alex. Even you. And if you don't get this asshole away from me, I'll take care of him myself. My way."