by Wren Weston
She laid her forehead against her bedroom mirror, wondering if they’d come for them while she was at the Closing Ball. Would they leave any uniforms behind for her to treasure? Just one to remember her old life by? The day she’d arrived at Bullstow for militia training and been fitted for her first blackcoat. The day she’d run after her first intruder in the Randolph compound, hoping he didn’t have a tranq gun or knife or worse. The day she’d received her first militia commission and had to learn how to manage a group who considered themselves different from the other highborn on the property.
All those days had been just as sweet as the day she’d been made chief.
All those days couldn’t be erased by taking away her old things.
But her mother would order it anyway. Her uniforms would be thrown out without a care, just as her mother had thrown out everything she had worked for, just as she might throw out the childhood toys of a teenage girl. Toys she had clung to, rather than growing apart from.
Lila sniffled, feeling very foolish for letting such sentimentality strike her right before she must face her mother. A mother who would be looking for weakness before the ball.
Lila stood up straighter, determined not to fall apart again. She’d done enough crying.
But when she caught her face in the bedroom mirror, she didn’t see a face full of resolve. She saw a face full of misery, eyes half-laden with tears.
Instead of triggering more waterworks, it pissed her off.
Screw her mother. She wasn’t prime yet.
She’d have her one last goodbye, no matter what.
She’d earned it.
Putting on one of her formal militia uniforms, she dressed in her blackcoat for the last time, adding her Colt and officer’s short sword to her holster. Then she brushed her hair and marched downstairs, head held high.
Chapter 14
Chairwoman Randolph raised her wine glass as Lila entered the parlor, silver fabric fluttering around her thin form. Her eyes paused on her daughter’s blackcoat but did not linger. “We awaited our prime before entering the dining room, as is custom. It would help for you remember that from now on. Otherwise, we might all die of hunger.”
“I’m not prime yet,” mumbled Lila, nodding toward Jewel’s whitecoat. It wrapped around her figure like a pool of velvet, all aflutter, gauze thin on the air. Senator Dubois held his lover’s hand on the couch, his elegant burgundy jacket settled around him. They’d been talking of the wedding, no doubt, for Pax sat forward in a chair beside his mother, listening with a large smile. He’d worn a wrinkled crimson jacket, one cuff smudged with ink.
Her mother shifted the folds of her silver coat and stood. “Details, Lila.” She led the little group into the dining room with Jewel following immediately after, Senator Dubois at the former prime’s side.
Pax lingered in the parlor, offering his elder sister a bow. A mischievous glint lurked in his eyes. “Jewel will have to get used following behind you soon. As well as the new seating arrangement.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“You don’t care, but Jewel does.” He winked before bounding away, keen not to miss any wedding plans.
Lila followed them all, taking a place next to Pax and across from Senator Dubois, in the table’s lowest position. She’d never considered it low, though. Since it was far away from her matron, she’d always considered it a perk.
Alex gave her a little wink as she circled the table, settling the first course of the evening in front of them, bowls of creamy asparagus soup that turned the air salty.
“Did you really have to wear that ugly thing tonight?” Jewel asked, crinkling her nose at Lila’s blackcoat.
Lila unfolded her napkin and set it in her lap. “As I’ve said many times before, regulations state that when in the presence of the chairwoman and her family, the chief of security should—”
“We know, but that hardly matters now.”
“Regulations always matter to the chief of security.”
“You aren’t—”
The chairwoman put her wine down on the table, clinking it against the side of her plate with purposeful clumsiness. Jewel closed her mouth immediately.
“Will you excuse us, Ms. Wilson?” Chairwoman Randolph said, raising her voice.
Alex bowed, abandoning the soup cart and filing out of the room.
As Lila had not yet received her wine, she stood up and poured a glass of Gregorie herself. Manners be damned.
It was going to be a long night.
Chairwoman Randolph leaned over the table, her eyes burning into Jewel’s. “Child, you will act as a prime should until Lila’s place is official. If you cannot discharge this last breath of your duties, then I will be forced to reconsider your chosen employment afterwards. The art gallery isn’t yours yet.”
“I don’t understand why any of this is necessary, Mother. Everyone suspects. They knew the moment you sent Lila to the clinic. Just because it isn’t in the common press yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t on the lips of the highborn on the estate. It will have spread throughout the compound and the rest of the city after the Closing Ball.”
“Perhaps no one would suspect Lila’s business if you hadn’t spent the entire night caterwauling about yours. There’s only so much damage control that I can do, and our staff has ears. So, as I said, I suggest you act with care.”
“Don’t blame the staff, Mother,” Lila said. “Everyone knows because you’ve begun to leak it, at least my intention to take a lover at the Closing Ball. Mother’s playing her little games again,” she said as she sat at her place, wine in hand.
“Leaked it? Why would I do that?”
“So that the senators attending the Closing Ball don’t commit for the season, at least not until they receive an answer from me. I suspect Senator Dubois has already been busy today, shuttling the information to choice prospects.”
Dubois’s gentle expression turned to a frown, and he stared intently at his plate.
“It’s okay, Senator Dubois, you’ll be a Randolph soon. You should get used to being my mother’s puppet. Sometimes you might even get paid for it.” Lila stared at her mother. “Who else has been your puppet recently?”
As expected, her mother’s gaze did not waver. “I am often a spectator to those who ill-use people in silly schemes. I do not believe that Senator Dubois feels ill-used on this occasion. Do you, senator?”
Jewel fiddled with her spoon.
Dubois sensed her unease and rubbed her back soothingly. “Of course I don’t. Why would I? If your mother had not given me her blessing, then my friends would have felt slighted and betrayed. Should I have kept such information from my very best friends, from my brothers and cousins?”
“What did you tell them about my situation?”
“Only what you said before, that you were in the mood to take a suitor for the season.”
“So none of them know that I will be prime?”
Dubois shook his head. “I would never betray you like that. I consider you a dear friend, madam. We are to be a family soon.”
Pax’s stomach growled, and he glanced up in embarrassment.
“Well then, shall we call Ms. Wilson back and eat as a civilized family?” the chairwoman asked, her gaze landing on Jewel. “You should take care with your behavior, child. You’ll scare away your beloved if you aren’t careful, and then poor Lila will be free to run the security office once again. Where would that leave you in the end?”
“Jewel couldn’t scare me away.” Dubois chuckled. “I love everything about her even when she lets her passions rule.”
Jewel gave a hard little smile and said nothing more for the rest of the meal.
Lila didn’t either. She listened as Pax described two difficult operations that he had observed earlier in the day. Both patients had required surgery for heart problems.
One had been his own age.
Dubois encouraged every detail. “Pax, you should join one of my mother’s focus groups,” he said during a lull. “She’ll be testing some new games at the start of the next quarter. They’re designed for slightly younger teens, but she wants to release a few titles for an older crowd next year. You could sit in, perhaps help the developers plan their work after. I’ve told her that you would make a valuable resource, and there would be boys your age observing.”
Now that Lila knew that Dubois would never be a father, it was difficult to watch how easily he maneuvered Pax into leaving the house, into interacting with other boys his age. He would be—would have been—a great father. It seemed criminal for him to lose the chance at a child so early.
Senator Dubois’s loss was still on her mind as she trudged back upstairs.
Lila peeked inside her closet anxiously, but her uniforms still hung inside, just as she’d left them, the neat row of toy soldiers waiting for a battle that would never come. Erring on the side of caution, she took off her formal uniform and unpinned the remaining stars on her collar. She fished out one of the many informal uniforms, as well as another she wore for physical training, and folded them into a thick stack. Then she tucked the folded clothes and her blackcoat into her canvas bag and stuffed it into her secret compartment.
She had no more room for remembrances.
Lila sat in front of her desktop and pulled up the results of her search for the Baron. Her snoop programs had not found the ID anywhere, even after digging into all the dusty crooks of the net. As far Lila knew, the Baron did not exist, not until the snoop had slipped into BullNet and laid the first faltering trap. The Baron might have practiced stealing into Bullstow under a different ID, but she had no other ideas for how to find it.
Lila drummed her fingers upon her desktop. The only avenue she had left to explore was the Liberté bank account, the same account that connected Sergeant Davies to his latest bribe. Perhaps the account holder would lead her to Xavier Masson, a long-dead teen from the Masson family whose ID had been stolen by her blackmailer. The article the hacker had sent to her mother had been sent from it, leaving no trace of the culprit’s identity.
It was infuriatingly competent.
Lila pulled open the secret compartment once again, carefully donning her workborn clothes. She withdrew a laptop from a bottom drawer of her desk and loaded it into a satchel, then stuck a few star drives into her pocket.
Her fingers had already typed in Tristan’s ID on her palm before she realized what she was doing. Though he’d helped her the last time she hacked the Liberté, he wouldn’t help her again. He likely wouldn’t help her with anything anymore.
And Dixon?
He was Tristan’s brother. He’d have his allegiances.
She’d have to do it alone this time, just as she had done everything alone before she met Tristan, just as she’d always do things from now on.
Sliding her palm back into her pocket, she slipped downstairs and left the great house, entering the family’s garage only a few moments later.
A small pool of oil now stood as a monument to her broken Firefly, the only evidence that anything had ever sat there at all. The space seemed much too wide and much too empty to contain her bike.
Jewel’s red Firefly leaned nearby as though it were a bored teenager, wanting a night out with a side of trouble. It tempted Lila greatly. Jewel would never even know she’d taken it, not that her sister would care a whit one way or another. Each part, each wire, each tube seemed the same as her beloved bike, only in Randolph red instead of silver.
Perhaps the danger was the same as well. Lila knelt beside it, squinting at the brakes. She didn’t see any plastic cubes on the brake lines, but what if the intruder had done something else to Jewel’s bike, hoping to knock out two primes in a row through different means? The assassin might not know that Jewel never rode hers.
But Lila had no idea what to look for.
Shirley had said that only luck had saved her, that luck was the only reason why she still lived and breathed. Luck was only reason why Pax sat upstairs studying, rather than grieving for his elder sister.
If she had died, what would have happened to Jewel? Would her mother have demanded that her sister invoke the right of eyre-cleue and produce children with other senators, marriage and love be damned?
Probably.
Lila swept off the pile of GPS and audio bugs she’d laid atop the seat and called up her snoop programs. If something had been planted on Jewel’s Firefly, she’d find it. It took only a moment to pass the device over Jewel’s bike, but the computer did not beep once. She shook it pointlessly and tried again.
She found nothing.
It had to be safe, though. Jewel might not have ridden it recently, but the mechanics that tended the family’s garage surely had, all under the guise of keeping it roadworthy. Jewel’s bike likely had more kilometers on it than her own, even though the odometer never ventured above five hundred. Indeed, the few times that Lila had snuck out of the estate on it, her added kilometers had magically disappeared only a few days later.
Janice, her family’s lead mechanic, could probably give Shirley a run for her money.
Had Janice been the one who messed with her bike?
Lila thumbed her palm and restarted the programs, peering at the brakes. Nothing alarmed her, though nothing had alarmed her about her own bike that morning.
Was this what the intruder wanted? Did the assassin want her to be afraid?
No, the assassin probably wanted her dead.
Lila trudged to a black Cruz sedan nearby and passed her palm over the frame. Within seconds, the computer beeped. She found two GPS chips hidden behind the bumper and a small audio bug attached to a crook in the front dash.
Lila dropped the devices to the ground and crushed them under her heel, then passed her palm computer over Jewel’s Firefly a third time. Then a fourth time, assuring herself that she was only being cautious.
She aborted her fifth attempt as paranoia and shoved her palm back into her trouser pocket. Hopping up, Lila retrieved Jewel’s key on a peg near the door and started the bike with a thundering roar. She’d be damned if she gave up riding just because some crazy person wanted her dead.
Gingerly climbing on the purring beast, she pulled from the garage.
Moments later, she passed through the southern gate, riding slowly through downtown New Bristol. She needed a safe spot to stage her assault against the Liberté. Chances were high that the Wilson estate still had a good net connection, since her mother’s people had been on site for weeks, making plans for what would be torn down and what would be remodeled.
Chaucer’s Ghost might not be a bad idea. She and Tristan’s people had nearly been caught there, but the Wilson militia now worked security jobs for the lowborn or other highborn families in the region. Few even lived in New Bristol any longer, and none would linger near their old home.
Lila could relate. She’d likely never stroll inside the security office again after she became prime, regardless of Sutton’s offer.
The Randolph militia wouldn’t pass by Chaucer’s Ghost, either. She’d been the one to approve the patrols around the Wilson compound.
Chief Shaw’s blackcoats might, though. The city owned the blocks around the compound. They’d refused to sell them to Chairwoman Randolph, or rather, they’d delayed the sale until other families might get involved in the bidding. Now that the Randolphs owned the Wilson compound, those blocks had become much more lucrative. Her mother wouldn’t snap them up cheaply.
Lila parked several blocks away from the restaurant, just on the off chance that Sutton had changed the patrols. The streets had not changed much in the last few weeks. Graffiti still covered the walls, especially the boarded-up windows. Old receipts and leaves and paper flyers had blown into the gutters, stamped into patch
es of hard-packed dirt and decomposing like mulch, their color leeched away in the autumn rain. It seemed everything had been leeched away, even the colors in the cars that slipped past. None slowed in the neighborhood, not for playing children and certainly not for the teens who stood around in groups. Not for the homeless who lived nearby, either, occasionally sticking out a fingerless, soiled glove for a bit of spare change.
Lila hitched her satchel higher on her shoulder and picked up her pace, the butt of her Colt a balm to the dangers around her. No one wanted to tangle with a tranq, not even for a twenty, and the people who tarried in this neighborhood recognized her boot knife bulging at her ankle.
The only thing they couldn’t recognize was a woman who couldn’t throw a punch to save her life.
Lila turned toward Chaucer’s Ghost. She hacked into the terminal on the abandoned restaurant’s side door and slipped inside.
Her breath caught at the change. No more pigeons cooed inside. Someone had cleared away the droppings that had littered the floor a month ago, as well as the smell of death from their fallen brethren. Only a whiff still lingered, a soft note amid the silence.
The city had hired cleaners to prep the property for sale.
Luckily, the cleaners didn’t work at nine o’clock at night. She climbed upstairs and sat upon the floor in an empty room, reclining against the wall. Last time she’d been inside, Dixon had played lookout down the hall. Tristan had stayed at the window, his eyes fixed outside for any sign of movement. Toxic had helped research the results, straining to prove herself as a competent hacker.
They’d laughed together. They’d been nervous together. They’d nearly been caught together.
They’d run away together, all doing their part to get away.
This was what she’d give up to follow her mother’s dictates. This was what she’d trade for family dinners and Randolph business and assassination attempts.
This was what must be given away, and given freely.
Tristan must be given away, for he refused to share.
Lila frowned and pulled her laptop from her bag, uploading her snoop programs. It wasn’t her fault they’d broken up. She didn’t want to end things. He wanted to end them because he couldn’t agree to her terms.