by Sage Walker
That little bombshell delivered, Mena stood up and stretched. “It’s time to go pry Archer out of his cave. We’re scheduled to have a relaxed chat, in the plaza, for some documentary people.” Her voice held an edge of near hysteria. This was not a Mena Helt knew, this person who seemed determined to make light of what she’d just said.
The documentary, at least, explained the pretty blouse and the earrings. Mena never wore dangly earrings when she worked. He remembered Mena washing her face in his steamy bathroom, a soapy thumb and finger on a naked earlobe. She didn’t fancy having Calloway stitch up a rip in one, she’d said.
“Oh, the pastries. This whole business kills the appetite. Maybe the camera crew will eat some of them. Let me get some boxes.” She walked past St. Phocas and disappeared into the kitchen.
“She’s gone nuts.” Doughan stood up, following his dismissal signal like an automaton. “She doesn’t mean that.”
Helt had never stood in front of a prompter and watched the words scroll by. He hadn’t read this screenplay. He didn’t know his next line. If Mena broke ranks and said, “No, my people stay,” could Archer and Doughan override her decision? Would they?
Mena came back with paper boxes, scooped equal portions of the pastries into them and handed one to Doughan.
“While you’re at it, Helt, I want to keep my best gene-splicer as well. It’s really time for you to find an alibi for Elena.”
She gave Helt his box and kissed his cheek, a quick, emotionless brush of dry lips on his early stubble. “Take these to her. She’s waiting at the gate.
“Doughan, wait just a minute. I forgot something.” Mena hurried off into the hallway that led to her bedroom.
21
Retracing Steps
Outside Mena’s gate, Helt thumbed his interface to catch real-time audio from Mena and Doughan, but got nothing. He was eavesdropping. That he was doing it disgusted him. Anything they recorded would go in the SysSu records anyway. Voice activations were time-stamped and would show if they blocked what they said, so there was really no reason to keep their feeds coming to his pocket.
His screen stared up at him, blank, waiting for notes. The list was growing too long for his distracted memory and he hadn’t made any during the Susanna interview. He hadn’t wanted to break the tension in the room. Everything they’d said was recorded. He could review it all later.
Helt walked past the gate, his goodie box in one hand and his interface in the other.
Elena waited at the far end of Mena’s wall, her black-and-white plaid shirt striped by shadows cast by the maple overhead. Bloodred leaves drifted down in singles and pairs. Her shoulders braced her against the wall. She leaned against it with one ankle crossed over the other, her arms wrapped across her chest, a cowboy drifter waiting for something to happen.
The strangeness of Mena’s challenge, of Doughan’s determined passivity in the face of Helt’s unplanned—mostly unplanned—defense of the turf they had given him flashed through his mind, replaced by fascination with what was coming next, what he would say to Elena, what she would say to him, what they would learn from each other.
Through light and shadow, Helt carried Mena’s pastries toward the unknown person who was Elena, slowly, so he could watch her unaware of him for a few more moments. She kept her eyes on the interface she held in one hand and didn’t look up at him.
“Hello,” he said.
She turned and stared at him. Her hair, gathered in a clip at the back of her neck, fanned across her left shoulder and caught red highlights from the maple trees behind her.
She wasn’t smiling.
Helt tried to read her face, tried to see signs of anger, of apprehension, of curiosity about what they might have said about her when she wasn’t there to hear. What he saw was the blank face of a student in a lecture, an appearance of attention over concerns that were far, far away.
“You’re wondering what we talked about,” Helt said.
“Yes,” she said.
She looked down at the interface in her hand.
“I asked Susanna a lot of questions. I think her answers were honest, but I can’t be sure of that.” The aggression he’d felt with the midwife was gone now. He felt lost.
“Did you scare her?” Elena asked.
“I think so.”
“Did you need to do that?”
“I think so.”
“I’m sorry,” Elena said.
“For Susanna?”
Her answer came slowly. “For you, I think. And for Susanna. I’ll hear about it. You know that.”
“I know it now. I thought you would talk to each other. That’s okay,” Helt said. But he didn’t want to talk about Susanna. Elena was still looking at the interface in her hand.
“Mena said for me to clear you from the suspect list, today.”
Elena turned her interface so its screen faced him. He saw himself, his hesitant walk and the worried look on his face as he approached her. His uncertainty about the response she would give him was clear on his face.
The interface display was a challenge to his vanity. His walk would be there for anyone to see, the tensions in it; he looked like a kid expecting to get yelled at.
“You’re playing by the rules,” Helt said. “No moment undocumented.”
“Yes,” Elena said. Her face was impassive, on guard against him. “So you’re going to get me off the suspect list. How do you propose to do that?”
“You’ve been through the blank hour.”
“Over and over again. I was in the lab. I left it and went to Athens tower. I was on the train for most of it.”
“Okay. Let’s go to your lab. Let’s walk it through. Between us we’ll find something, something that can’t be argued away.”
She put her interface in a pocket and fell in step with him. They walked with their heads down, scuffling through the leaves on the path that led to Petra station. Her boots had round toes and thick soles. They looked like a child’s boots. He liked that. He hadn’t found anything about her he didn’t like.
He didn’t know her. She was not yet formally accused of murder but she knew that NSS and the execs on this ship knew her links to Cash Ryan, and her proximity on Tuesday night to where and when he was killed. That had to hurt. She had to be deeply hurt by this, already. Helt, again, regretted that he hadn’t known, and now would never know, the Elena she was before this happened.
“I suppose it’s a place to start,” Elena said. “Although the reality is, you’ll be looking for evidence that I was not innocent of this murder.”
There was no denial he could make that wouldn’t be a lie. Anything he said now was going to be wrong. There was no help for it.
“I can only…” He wanted to hold her. He wanted to explain who he was and what he was and why, and what he hoped for and what he feared. “… promise you that if you killed him, you’ll have to prove it to me. You’ll have to give me hard proof, because I’m going to be hard to convince.”
She didn’t smile. What he thought he saw in her face was concern for him.
“That’s fair,” Elena said.
“You are not the only woman on this ship with connections to Cash Ryan.”
“Susanna?”
“Cash Ryan found her interesting, at least. You know I suspected it. I told you and Mena I did.”
“And now you have proof.”
“More than I wanted. I’ll show you.” He reached for the interface in his pocket. “When we’re on the train.” Notes, notes, he needed to make them.
“Wait.” He stopped short. “Just a moment…” Helt hauled his interface out of his pocket.
ZAIDA
SEVERO TAIL FOR COPANI
ELENA-RYAN NEAR-MISSES
DAVID II DOUGHAN’S SATURDAY AFTERNOON
“Please forgive me. Homework.”
Her hand covered the little screen of his interface. He looked at her reproachful face. “For one, that’s rude. For two, you’re avoiding talking abou
t Susanna.”
“I’m sorry. Yes, I’m avoiding talking about Susanna.” He pointed to his screen. It’s listening. So is yours.
She nodded. He put the interface back in his pocket. “The notes—the work’s for you,” Helt said. “Things I don’t want to forget. In part, it’s for you…”
“Because Mena told you to clear me.”
“Not just that. I have other reasons.”
“But you’ll have to give them nonverbally.”
“If I can.” He was closer to her than he’d been when they started walking. He wanted to brush her hair away from her throat, but he didn’t.
“You’re on the record as promising that.” This time, Elena’s smile was genuine. “Are you hungry? Is that why you look like you want to be nipping at my neck? I mean, have you had lunch?”
Oh, Elena. Yes, let’s search for at least the appearance of something normal here. Thank you. “No. Maybe that’s why I feel shaky.”
They were close to the Petra canteen.
“I thought you were trembling for other reasons,” Elena said while they examined today’s food offerings.
“Perhaps I am. You want to guess what they are?”
“Not for the record, no,” Elena said.
Helt admired a beef burgundy, but that was messy eating. “One of these days I’m going to cook,” Helt said.
“One of these days I’ll let you,” Elena said, and that sounded like a promise. Helt liked the sound of it. They stashed hand meals, a picnic of sorts, in a canvas rucksack from the counter supply. Elena liked half-sour pickles, Helt noticed. So did he. She liked kalamata olives. He didn’t. In the picking and choosing, some of the tension between them went away. They could have been carefree; they could have been exploring each other’s tastes, in the simple way new friends do. But they weren’t that. Still, he wanted to believe they could happen, even now. Helt added Mena’s box to the rucksack.
On the train, the familiar sensation of free time, suspended time, came back for an instant, a space in his head created by familiar upholstery, the accustomed feel of the seat back, by neutral views of cut stone and distance rushing past. It was always quiet except for the rush of the wheels, a space where he moved effortlessly toward work, or went toward home and rest. It was twenty minutes of free time, time for daydreams.
Not today. A warm, beautiful, perhaps dangerous woman sat beside him, breathing mysteries. Helt sighed and pulled his interface out of his pocket. “We have to look at this,” he said.
“At what?” Elena asked.
“Camera captures of times and places where Ryan was in the same space with Susanna.” He scrolled through a few of them. “It happened too often to be random. Did she know it? Do you know if she knew him at all?”
“She didn’t.” Elena’s words were flat, a statement of fact. “She would have said something while we were waiting for Zhōu’s baby. The news about the death was out then. But we didn’t talk about him at all.”
“Okay. Camera captures of times and places where Ryan was in the same space with you, before or after you were there. I’ve asked for the data but I haven’t reviewed it. This will be new for both of us.”
Elena leaned forward for a better view of the little screen in his hand. He moved it to the support of the armrest between them. She pulled his wrist to change the angle of the screen and let her fingertips stay on the back of his wrist.
The set covered Elena’s appearances on public cameras, plus captures of Cash Ryan taken by the same camera, plus or minus ten minutes. Ryan was there, in the corridors of Level One on Stonehenge, at the Petra station morning and evening, on the wide stone circles at the base of Petra tower, Athens tower. Helt looked at captures of Elena when she was unaware of being observed, Elena yawning, tired after a day’s work, Elena going somewhere for an evening, her careful, sure-footed walk. He watched as Cash Ryan bought food at the Petra canteen after Elena left, as he drank coffee in the Athens plaza at tables Elena had vacated minutes before his arrival. The man’s casual stride, his glances at this or that, seemed studied. There was no way, now, that Helt could evaluate Ryan’s actions with an impartial eye. Ryan was good-looking, okay. He moved like a cat, long strides and then sudden, momentary pauses.
Elena’s hand fell away from Helt’s wrist.
In the next capture, Cash Ryan followed Elena on her way home to her quarters in Petra, but he slowed and stopped, well away from her door, to stare at the river as if something in it had caught his eye. He turned back as if he’d seen what he had come to see.
Helt watched the dates scroll by. The captures were thick three years ago. He paused the display.
“The number for the convergence of two people who don’t live in the same town is around eight per year,” Helt said. The train slowed for Stonehenge. “We’ll finish this in your lab.”
“I could use a break. This isn’t easy to look at,” Elena said.
Helt located Susanna Jambekar and Yves Copani on the PS functions and set up a constant feed of their locations to NSS, with a note to Severo.
Helt. Surveillance on Yves Copani and Susanna Jambekar. Fleshtime if necessary. Warrant follows asap.
He’d look for a boilerplate surveillance warrant later. Helt shoved his interface back into his pocket as the train stopped.
They went down to the corridors of Level One at Stonehenge, deserted and full of Sunday calm. Elena led him into her lab, a quiet place today except for the white noise of motors and the occasional gurgle of fluids. The lab lights were balanced for work, not daylight. Center, above them, seemed far away. If you added a heartbeat, this could be a well-lighted womb. They sat side by side at Elena’s desk.
Helt savored the closeness of her, the little things he was learning about the texture and shine of her hair, the shape of her long, tapering fingers, the ovals of her matter-of-fact short nails, the pace of her breathing beneath that soft flannel shirt.
“That first one,” Elena said. “The very first one. I saw him and turned away before he saw me. That’s what I hoped, anyway.”
Larger, on Elena’s screen, Helt replayed it.
“See? It’s so clear now. I was about to get on the train for home and I turned and went back to the elevator. I went up to Mena’s office on some excuse or other. I didn’t tell her why,” Elena said. With Cash Ryan’s eyes on her back. “Twenty-four of these captures would be random. We haven’t seen that many. You’re telling me there are more.”
“There are more.”
“Let me see them,” Elena said.
In the second year, the captures stopped abruptly in June. After that, the next one was in late September. Helt went back to June to check.
“What are you doing?” Elena asked.
“Watching time and date stamps,” Helt said. “What happened there? That gap of time?”
“I went to Puget Sound. The family’s there.”
“To say good-bye,” Helt said.
“To my mother, of course. To the elders. To Pilar, especially, a sort of grandmother.”
Helt knew her name, and a little of her history. A brief phrase of her music had flashed by, this morning, startling him because he didn’t know the versions he’d heard of that song were covers.
“She’s gone now…”
“I’m sorry,” Helt said.
Elena smiled. “She sent a keepsake. I’ll tell you about it someday.” Meaning, I’m not recording this for the world, not this little personal thing.
“Okay. Elena, you don’t have to watch all these. We’re on the downhill slope now.”
“I want to see them.”
At the end of it, she shuddered.
“It’s not the numbers, is it?”
“No,” Helt said. “You okay?”
“It’s feeling like an object. It’s like being observed by a squid or something. Not that I have anything against squid. I accept their worldview as being different from mine.”
“A giant squid. One who wanted you for lunch.”
“Yeah. By the numbers, this could have been chance,” Elena said.
“It wasn’t. You know it. I know it. It’s not the frequency, it’s the distribution. No way these are random. Look at this.”
Dates only. The frequency of the encounters dropped after Elena’s return. It was if Ryan checked in from time, but had been content with what he saw. In the past year there were four captures of Ryan-Elena. Only four.
“He stopped hunting me,” Elena said.
“Heh. Let me look at something.” Side by side, he put up columns of the dates of capture for Elena-Ryan, Susanna-Ryan. Ryan had found Susanna shortly after Elena went Earthside, and his attention stayed on Susanna from then on.
“He found a substitute,” Elena said. Her voice was flat.
“We could look at more of the Susanna-Ryan captures. They’re much like yours, only there if you look for them.”
“No. Poor Susanna. I once heard a woman say—she was a counselor, worked in the pit in Chicago, in shelters, with battered women and she’d lost one, a woman murdered by a man she’d run from. The victim—I really hate that word—did all the right things, changed her name, left the state, warned everyone she knew not to have contact with him. He found her and strangled her with an extension cord.
“The counselor was giving a lecture to a bunch of MDs and she said that one strategy for a battered woman to stay alive was to find a new victim for the abuser. She ground out the words as if they were forced. You could see her struggling with her conscience when she said it. Horrid, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Helt said. “Elena, you didn’t do that.”
“Damn! He was sicker than I thought! If I’d known. If I’d looked…”
“You thought he was leaving for good. He did nothing, nothing that could have clued you, or anyone, about his problems while he was here.”
“Or if he did, no one’s said so.”
“If anyone knew how he spent his time and can tell us, I’ll be listening,” Helt said. “I’ll be listening very carefully.”
Elena got up. “I want this taste out of my mouth.” She grabbed bottles of water from a fridge and brought them back to the desk. She tipped her head back and drank. Helt admired the curve of her throat. He watched her eyes close. Her lashes were so black, so thick. He looked away, back to the screen.