*Libera,* she says, the old password, and the icon fades slightly, disclosing the trapdoor. She glances behind her once, unfolding her scan, and sees/feels nothing untoward, no particular attention from the watchdogs. She gestures then, furling her programs, and steps through the nebulous doorway.
She emerges into a new space, green-walled, floor of jagged emerald grass imprisoned beneath an invisible surface, so that she walks above the apparent surface of the ground. It is a lot of effort for a shadow board, and she looks sharply sideways, letting the scans unfurl around her, but there is nothing untoward, no tang of unexpected security. The watchdogs are bred from the shadows, and she recognizes at least the pedigree if not the hand that made them—and in any case, they are turned toward the walls, watching for intruders, not for the people who use the space. It is less crowded here—no need for the illusion of a crowd, to bolster the ego—and she can feel the faint current, gentle feedback, a hint of emotion, that signifies another brainworm, or maybe more than one. Definitely the right place, she thinks, and lets herself stroll toward the source of that sensation, walking, almost floating, over the top of the gleaming grass.
At the center of the space, by the message pole that runs from floor to arched ceiling, she sees a familiar icon—Mario, his name is, and he once tried to crack her IC(E), though he was good enough to get away once she’d jumped him. This is neutral ground, however, and she gives him a careful distance, feeling his surprise and quickly controlled anger feed back into the net. He’s on the wire, too, unusually, and she doesn’t want trouble from him.
And then she feels it, the familiar warmth, a whisper of sensation that’s like a well-known voice. She quickens her step in spite of herself, in spite of knowing better, and sees, around the pole, the shape of a harlequin, dancing, pipes in hand.
*Trouble,* she says aloud, and the word comes out exultant, and she doesn’t quite know why.
The harlequin turns, lifts hand to half-mask, and she sees the mouth below it smile. *Cerise.*
Cerise stops three virtual meters from her former partner, suddenly not sure what to say or do, and Trouble lifts her hand. Evoking a program, Cerise thinks; tensing—she can feel the routine as yet undefined, its potential trembling in the virtual air around the other woman’s fingers—and Trouble says,*Shall we talk?*
It is the tone, the same tease, half-amused, half-seductive, in which she would have said, Shall we dance?, and Cerise smiles in return, deliberately slow and mocking. *Why not?* she says, and calls her own program, throwing a silver sphere around them, to keep out the lurkers. Trouble has seen the gesture and in the same moment launches her own program, so that the two spheres, silver, silver gilt, meet and mesh so that they stand under a mottled sky that streams with color. Trouble lifts her hand to her face, and her own face appears through the mask—a gesture of respect, Cerise acknowledges, but a cheap one. She can feel the other’s presence, the feedback from the brainworm, knows Trouble feels the same, and that if either one of them relaxes that same feedback can spiral, each feeding on the other, until it carries them both away.
*I thought you’d come,* Trouble says, *but I didn’t expect you so soon.*
*I’m not particularly happy with the current situation,* Cerise says, and hears herself less sharp than she’d intended.
*No more am I,* Trouble says, and laughs aloud. *For what it’s worth, it wasn’t me.*
*I didn’t think it was,* Cerise answers. *Not your—style.*
*Thanks for that.*
There is a little silence between them, and in that silence Cerise hears the thread of a sound, the ghost of a siren: her passive watchers, warning her that security is interested in the private sphere. Trouble hears it, too, or some warning of her own, looks over her shoulder.
*We can’t talk here,* she says, and Cerise nods.
*I’m at Eastman House,* she says. *Join me for breakfast.* She lifts her hand to break the sphere, feels Trouble’s agreement even as she dissolves the program’s construct in a cloud of buzzing smoke and fragments, and takes a quick five steps sideways so that by the time the smoke clears and the watchdogs arrive, sniffing avidly, she is well away and Trouble is nowhere to be seen. There is nothing else she can do—she has already done more, much more, than she’d expected—and she walks back along the spiral, lost in thought, retracing her steps out of the spiral path until she can ride the data home again.
Trouble sat unmoving in the darkened room, the sea-damp air chill on her bare arms. Beyond the half-opened window, the fog rolled past in slow billows, bringing a smell like peppermint and gasoline with it from the beach. She sniffed it automatically—the peppermint smell was like the one her bioware used to label a particular class of data—but did not move to close the window. The lights, linked for economic reasons to a motion-sensor, had turned themselves out while she was out on the net; they would not go on again until she touched the switch. There was enough light from the window, from the neon on the street below, to show the shapes of the furniture, and the flickering telltales on her hardware cast faint orange light across the table where she’d set up her system. She stared at it, noting successful shutdown with one corner of her brain, thinking about Cerise. She had expected Cerise to come to Seahaven herself—that was Cerise’s style, to step briskly in when angels would think twice before acting—but she had not expected quite so rapid a response, if only because she had not expected Multiplane to be able to act so fast. The fact that they had meant that Cerise had been expecting—something, and had set up her departure in advance. And will I go to breakfast? Trouble thought, and smiled, seeing the icon again in imagination, Cerise’s cartoon-woman walking toward her under the green-glass dome of the BBS. It had been a strange thing to see her again, to feel her presence, silk and steel and taut-strung wire; stranger still to feel her own response, heart turning like a wheel, rolling over into the familiar habit of trust, despite everything—and that was foolish, stupid beyond permission, as Cerise herself would say. Old habits die hard, but die they must: I’ll go to breakfast, she decided, but not without setting up some fallbacks of my own first.
She turned back to the system, wincing a little at unanticipated stiffness in her shoulders and back. She had slipped sideways at some point, come back from the net to find herself slumped painfully against the side of the chair. The dollie-cord slithered across her shoulder, and the healing flesh around the new socket was starting to hurt again, a dull throb of pain at the back of her head. She would make the fallbacks in the morning, she decided, when she was fresh and rested, and freed herself from the system. She undressed in the dark, not bothering with the room lights—her eyes had adjusted now to the dimness, and it seemed pointless to put on a light for the few minutes she would be awake and active—used the toilet, and crawled between the clammy sheets. She fell asleep watching the blink of the system telltales mirroring the neon.
She woke to brilliant sunlight, slanting in under the imperfectly lowered shades, lay blinking for a moment before she pushed herself upright. She was still stiff from the previous night’s work, and the back of her head felt bruised, puffy and sore to an exploring touch. She grimaced, and swung herself out of bed, hoping that a shower would help. Washed and brushed and dressed, she felt a little better, but the muscles of her neck still twinged with each unwary move. She rolled her head from side to side as she moved toward the media center, touched keys to call up time-and-temperature. It was later than she had realized, well past nine, and she swore under her breath. Cerise wasn’t a morning person, and when she said breakfast, she meant ten o’clock and no earlier, but that barely left Trouble enough time to reach Eastman House. I knew I should’ve taken care of fallbacks last night, she thought, and shook the anger away. It was too late, that was all; she’d have to chance it. But I must stop being stupid about Cerise. She shut down the sleeping system, unplugged the central brain, and shoved it into her bag along with what was left of her money and the disks she had collected—her emergency kit,
the absolute minimum that would let her walk the nets—then let herself out of the room, sealing the room lock and the extra override behind her.
It was about a half-hour’s walk into Seahaven proper, across the drawbridge that spanned the Harbormouth. Trouble walked easily through the nearly-empty streets, seeing only a few people gathered outside the waffle shop behind the beach arcade. It was low tide, and the air smelled of salt mud, and oil, and, faintly, still, of peppermint. It was cool, the breeze off the water cutting through her vest and jersey, but the sunlight was warm. Crossing the drawbridge, it struck diamond highlights from the water left in the central channel, and lay in sheets across the exposed flats, where the mud was still wet from the receding water. A boat was moving along the dredged channel, heading for the fish docks, and a trio of gulls wheeled behind it, following the scent of food. They were very bright against the autumn trees that lined the horizon. At the top of the bridge, the concrete changed to metal mesh, and Trouble walked warily, careful of the slick surface. From that point, she could see down into Seahaven and beyond, past the seawall that enclosed the town and even out onto the beach itself. The sand lay in ugly patches, green and grey and oily brown, sand changing to sludge at the tideline. Even at this distance, she could see the heaped seaweed smoldering as the air hit it, releasing the chemicals it had collected from the sea. The remains of the Pavilion Bandstand were very bright against the blues of sea and sky, and someone had scrawled the beginning of a word, K and O, in scarlet across the broken shell. She wondered vaguely what it had been going to say, and started down the bridge into town.
It was more crowded here, runabouts moving along the narrow streets, and a bus passed her halfway up the avenue, carrying the night shift home from The Willows. She kept walking, moderating her pace so that she didn’t seem too conspicuous, turned at last onto the little road that led toward Eastman House and to The Willows beyond. The sidewalk here was well repaired, like the roadway itself, and the grass to either side was expensively maintained, the irrigation and fertilizer heads showing like brass nails at regular intervals. There would be one-way filters buried beneath it to keep the beach chemicals from leaching into the new-laid soil, Trouble knew, and security devices laced into the neat hedges that bordered the property. For an instant she wished that she could have approached it on the wire, so that she could see the networked security blazing out of ground and trees, but that was beyond even experimental capacity now.
She did not hesitate at the entrance to Eastman House, but marched between the carved pillars as though she owned the place—as though she’d been invited, which she had. The doorman eyed her warily, taking in the casual, uncorporate clothes, but held the door open, and even offered a smile. Trouble grinned back, unable to keep from enjoying his uncertainty, and crossed the lobby, her bootheels echoing when they hit the strips of marble between the islands of carpet, to fetch up at the reception desk.
The young woman behind the desk frowned slightly, then muted that expression almost instantly, but her hand still hovered over a security button. “May I—?”
“I’m here to see Cerise,” Trouble said, and smiled again. “I’m expected.”
“Of course,” the young woman said. She took her hand away from the button to punch codes into a keyboard, managed an uncertain smile of her own in return. “Who may I say is here?”
“I’m expected,” Trouble said again. That was a risk, but less of one, she suspected, than giving her real name. Besides, when the corporations dealt with the shadows, they dealt on the corporation’s turf. Let them think that, let them think that Cerise is buying grey-market goods, Trouble thought, and we’re home free.
“Of course,” the young woman said. She was too well trained to show any hint of annoyance in tone or expression, but Trouble could hear it in the click of fingernails on keys. “Ah, yes,” the clerk went on, after a moment. “Don’ll show you up.”
“Thanks,” Trouble said, and turned to face the doorman as he approached. The clerk handed a slip of paper across the counter, and the doorman took it, glanced quickly at it, and turned to Trouble.
“If you’ll follow me, ma’am?” He started toward the elevators without waiting for an answer.
Trouble followed, felt the hairs at the back of her neck prickling. This was the tricky part, the dangerous part: if anyone was looking for her, if The Willows had somehow spotted her, recognized her from Treasury have-you-seens, this was the time when they could take her. She kept her shoulders loose with an effort as the elevator doors closed behind them, wishing, not for the first time, that she still had a gun. Or a knife, she thought, or anything.
The elevator doors opened at last, and she kept close behind the doorman, keeping him between her and any lurking security. They stepped out together into a beige-walled hallway, gently sky-lit, beige shadows on beige carpeting; the only color was the scarlet of the flowers in a niche at the very end of the hall. It was very quiet, too, only the faint hiss of the environmental system, and Trouble felt herself relax slightly. No one was waiting here; that left only Cerise to worry about, and despite everything, she couldn’t quite be wary of her. She shrugged that recognition away, annoyed with herself, and the doorman stopped in front of one of the beige doors. He touched the intercom button, said, in the deferential voice The Willows taught its employees, “Ms. Cerise, your guest is here.”
“Thanks.” The voice even through the distorting intercom was unchanged, the same clear soprano. “It’s open.”
The doorman pressed the handle, and held the door, and Trouble walked past him into the suite. The light was stronger here, and she blinked once, startled, as the door closed again behind her. Cerise was waiting more or less as she’d expected, sitting with her back to the west-facing window in one of the hotel’s big armchairs, legs crossed, fingers steepled to proclaim she didn’t have a weapon, and didn’t need one. Trouble had never been fully sure whether the pose was bravado or misdirection, if there really was a palm-gun somewhere close to hand: Cerise had never owned a gun when they were together—there had been no real need, all the aggression had taken place on the nets, virtual violence, where a woman could easily be as hard and tough as any man—but she had demonstrably known how to use one. Cerise did not move, and Trouble took a step sideways, out of line with the window, so that she could see Cerise’s face against the sky and the slough beyond the glass. Cerise smiled then, full lips quirking up into something like genuine amusement. She had gone back to dark hair, Trouble saw, jet-black hair that emphasized the alabaster pallor of her skin, and was stark contrast with the deep pink of her lips and nails. The black suit was expensive, top of the line, like the pink-heeled shoes. It jarred with the makeup, the hard cheap color flat as the icing on a cookie, but, as always, Cerise carried it off.
“It’s good to see you again,” Trouble said, and Cerise laughed.
“You’re late.”
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Trouble said, and then the amusement vanished from her voice. “And I didn’t want to draw too much attention. Someone’s been taking my name in vain.”
Cerise nodded. “So I’d noticed. So lots of people have noticed.” There was a little silence between them then, and Cerise looked up at the other woman. Trouble had changed more than she’d expected, more than she herself had—she was heavier now, though not fat, the sexy child’s curves maturing into something fuller, rounder, a shape that promised adult pleasures. She’d let her hair go back to its natural brown, cut short to keep the heavy curls subdued, but she still wore her clothes, jeans, man-style shirt, boots, a Japanese-patchwork vest, all mock-simplicity, with the old understated edge of menace.
“I’m not best pleased,” Trouble said, quite mildly.
“Coigne—my immediate superior—wants to shut you down.”
“Was it him who set Treasury on me?”
“I don’t know,” Cerise said. “That may have just been natural causes—this new Trouble’s pushing the envelope pretty hard. It w
as bound to attract attention.”
“What concerns me,” Trouble said, “is how that attention got turned on me.”
“You—we—were pretty well known,” Cerise answered. “No one’s forgotten Trouble.” They had forgotten Alice, though, she thought, with a too-familiar touch of bitterness—or, no, not forgotten, but Alice-B-Good had gone to the corporations, joined the enemy, and her name had disappeared from conversation. She uncoiled herself from the chair, and crossed to the breakfast table set up beside the media center. “Coffee?”
“Thanks,” Trouble said, and took the cup held out to her. “What I’d really like to know is where this punk got the idea my name was up for grabs.”
Cerise nodded slowly, poured herself a cup and set the pot aside, all without taking her eyes off the other woman.
“You’ve been less than visible for quite a while. I don’t know where you were, and I looked.” In spite of herself, the old anger sounded in her voice; she controlled it instantly, and went on with only the slightest of hesitations, “There was a rumor that you were dead. He—she—may have thought the name was free.”
“I’d love to know how that story got started,” Trouble said, and settled herself on the nearest chair.
Cerise went back to her armchair, set her cup down and tucked her legs back under her. She could feel the narrow skirt straining, riding up on her thighs, and didn’t care, was even mildly pleased with the effect. “I wasn’t very happy with you,” she said, and Trouble gave a wry smile.
“I guess not.”
“Did I have cause?”
Trouble looked down into her cup, wrapped both hands around the fragile china as though she needed the warmth, staring into the black liquid. She said, without looking up, “I fucked up, leaving like that. But I was right—I had to go.”
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