by Julia Keller
She sensed that whoever was tracking her had nosed ahead of her. So this was a pro. That was the secret of a good tail: You never stayed exclusively behind your prey. Kendall had taught her that, too. Sometimes you let yourself get a little bit ahead, before looping back around. You had to make it look natural. Natural helped you stay unnoticed.
In the near distance, Violet spotted a gap between two buildings, a crevice that looked like a great hiding place. Her purser had surely seen it, too. And now waited for her.
Ready to pounce.
Violet moved ever closer, keeping the rhythm of her pace. Acting as if she hadn’t seen a thing. But she was on high alert. Her fists were tight. Just in case.
And then something glinted. Something … metallic.
A slab gun. Had to be a slab gun. Violet’s heart gave a terrified twist. But now that she’d seen it, she knew she could handle it. She’d be able to kick it out of the shooter’s hand before the firing mechanism engaged. She’d practiced that very maneuver with Kendall in the police gym, going over it again and again; whirl, kick, disarm.
Suddenly she swerved. She peeled off her straight course, diving toward the shadowy space in the chasm between the buildings. She aimed herself like an arrow. A figure crouched on the ground. Violet was a quarter of a second from what she envisioned as Full Attack Frenzy—punches, kicks, jabs, and then maybe a few curse words for good measure. This creep who’d been following her would be sore for a week, with plenty of time to regret having even considered messing with Violet Crowley.
She pulled back her fist, ready to deliver a solid roundhouse blow.
“Hey, wait! Wait! Don’t hit me!”
Violet hesitated. The voice was young. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she realized she was looking at … a kid. Just a kid. He was about ten years old. His mouth hung open, and he was panting in frantic desperation, having followed her for well over a mile on much shorter legs.
What had caused the glint? The answer winked at her: It was the kid’s console, an old-fashioned clunky one. Its wide metallic face had caught the early-morning light and reflected it back.
“I’m not going to hit you,” she said.
“Sure looks like you are.” He nodded toward her cocked fist. Violet looked at her fist, too. Pretty impressive, if she did say so herself.
She dropped it.
The kid stood up—slowly, cautiously—and Violet grabbed his shoulder. She hauled him out onto the sidewalk. She wanted a better look. He tried to resist but didn’t put much oomph behind his resistance.
He had large ears that stuck out on either side of his narrow head, big round eyes, and dark brown hair that jumped off his scalp in a fuzzy spray.
“So why were you following me?” she said.
“Because,” he said. Or rather snarled, there being enough razor-edged pugnacity in his tone to scrape the paint off the hull of a transport pod. The moment Violet let go of him, he plunged his hands into his pockets.
“Because why?”
“Because you’re not doing your job. And I wanted proof. You’re not really trying to find out what happened to my sister.”
“Who are you?”
“Jeff Bainbridge.”
Amelia Bainbridge’s little brother.
He was still glaring at her. His feet were spread and his chin was thrust out in what looked like a tough-guy pose he’d practiced for hours in front of a mirror.
“Why do you think I’m not doing my job?” she asked.
“My mom hired you to find out what happened to Amelia. She told me. So I came to Hawking to see if you were making any progress. I saw you leave your office yesterday. Followed you to some factory. They wouldn’t let me in, but it didn’t matter. I could tell you were just goofing off. And then you went home. It’s pretty clear that you’re a big fake.” He sounded thoroughly disgusted.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe that factory’s related to your sister’s death?”
“Is it?”
“As a matter of fact—yeah, it is.”
The next thing that happened took Violet by surprise. Jeff Bainbridge—the tough kid who’d had the nerve to follow her, the punk with the chip on his shoulder as big as one of the mega-magnets on Farraday—began to cry. But it wasn’t ordinary crying. He wept great gusty, swirling, sloppy bucketfuls of tears until he was barely able to catch his breath.
By now a couple of early risers had shown up on the street; one woman slowed down to make sure the sobbing kid wasn’t seriously hurt. “He’s okay,” Violet said. “Just doesn’t want to go to school today. You know how it is.” She grinned heartily and slung an arm around Jeff’s shoulder. “Really. He’s okay.” The woman moved on.
In the meantime, the boy had moved from sobbing to wailing. “Hey,” Violet said, because she didn’t know what else to say, and “Hey” was a sort of all-purpose, fits-anywhere word. “Hey. Hey. Hey.” She tried to ruffle his hair, the way she’d seen some of their friends do with their younger siblings, but it was hopeless. Utterly hopeless. She simply wasn’t very good at comforting people, not even a ten-year-old who had just lost his sister.
“Hey,” she repeated, even more feebly.
He blinked at her. Tears clung to the ends of his eyelashes. Violet felt a quick zing of envy. People younger than she was—Jeff would have been seven at the time the Intercept was destroyed—barely remembered the technology and what it did. They might be embarrassed by their feelings, but they never had to worry, as she’d had to worry, that their heartbreaks would be raked up and then used against them. They were free.
She was free now, too, of course, but she was still cautious. Still nervous. Worrying about the Intercept was a hard habit to break.
Jeff was snuffling now. The wails and sobs had tailed off. With the back of his hand, he wiped the snot that dangled messily from his nose, leaving a smeary yellow trail that spread across his face all the way to his right earlobe.
“How do you know it’ll be okay?” he asked, his voice thick with phlegm and sorrow. “How do you know?”
Bright kid. He’d put her on the spot again. It’s just something people say, Jeff. Got that? They’re trying to be nice. They don’t mean it. And I don’t mean it, either. Truth was, Violet was convinced—despite the lingering questions, questions she might not ever be able to answer—that Amelia Bainbridge had killed herself. The girl was upset and depressed and she had needed relief, and she had made a bad decision. A spectacularly bad decision.
That was all there was to it. Amelia’s mother and brother could search for a reason as long as they liked—and hire all the detectives they wanted to hire and try to complicate it with tangles and nuances and complications—but the reality was pretty simple: It was suicide. And they might never find the specific trigger amid all the potential troubles that must have haunted Amelia Bainbridge. Without the Intercept, human emotion was a locked box again. A riddle. A mystery. A conundrum.
And suicide was a sudoku puzzle that no survivor ever solved.
Which didn’t necessarily mean she had to give back Charlotte Bainbridge’s deposit. Did it?
“I’m trying my best to find out what happened,” Violet said.
“Starting when?”
His sentence came at her like a bayonet lunge. Despite his tears, he really was a tough kid. Violet’s admiration for him was rising by the minute. She sensed that she would’ve liked his sister, too.
“Starting yesterday at TAP,” she answered. “I went over the tram car she was riding in. And by the way, I do have other cases, you know. This isn’t my only one.”
The look of skepticism he aimed at her was bold. It unsettled her. Had he somehow sneaked a peek at her console appointment calendar? Or was it just a lucky guess? Because of course this was her only case at the moment. She’d get more. Absolutely, she would.
And in the meantime, it was high time she got to work on this one. The kid’s courage had inspired her. Okay, so Amelia had killed herself; Violet would
try her best to find out why. There would be no lurking uncertainties. No lingering questions. This boy and his mother would know that Crowley & Associates had done everything possible to get to the truth. That truth might be hard to swallow—but it would be the truth.
“I need to tell you something,” Jeff said. He jammed his hands even deeper into the pockets of his jeans.
Violet waited. He studied the sidewalk, twisting the toe of his sneaker against the surface that glittered in the morning sunshine of New Earth.
“My sister really loved her life,” Jeff finally said. “She studied all the great buildings in Old Earth history so that she could build them up here—only she’d do it better. She had dreams and plans. There won’t ever be anybody like Amelia.” He gulped hard. “My sister would’ve understood how hard it was for me and my mom to lose her. She would’ve known that. She was sensitive that way. Sometimes too sensitive. She worried that she’d never be able to do all the things she wanted to do. But she always tried. As hard as she could. Always. So there’s no way she’d kill herself, okay? Never.” He gulped again. “Which means somebody did this to her.”
Violet let a few seconds pass. In a soft, gently probing voice—she wanted him to understand the illogic of his position all on his own—she said, “How, Jeff? How would they do it? And why?”
“I don’t know.” He raised his eyes. The tears were gone, and the sadness suddenly was replaced once again by fierceness. He’d turned back into the mean kid, the one who’d followed her that morning. “But that’s your job, isn’t it?” he pressed her, yanking one hand out of his pocket so that he could jab a stubby finger in her face. “You’re the one my mom hired. You find out what happened. You catch whoever did this to her. And when you do, you let me at ’em. I’ll beat ’em up. I’ll rip ’em to shreds. I’ll tear ’em apart until there’s nothing left but a pile of stinking—”
“Whoa. Settle down, okay? Don’t get all worked up again. And aren’t you supposed to be in school right now?”
Reluctantly, he departed. Violet watched him go. She felt a mixture of irritation and sympathy for this pushy kid who’d followed her, challenged her—and who, given what he’d been through, had a perfect right to do both.
Her console chimed. When she touched the screen, a shimmering pink jewel rose. It hovered in the air for an instant and then opened. Jonetta’s face appeared. Violet knew in a flash that something was wrong.
“Vi,” Jonetta said in a trembling voice. For once Violet didn’t jump in and correct her. She could see how upset she was.
“What happened?”
“Don’t you know? It’s all over the news. It just happened.”
“I’ve been busy. Haven’t checked my news feed. What’s going on?”
“Two more suicides. It’s … it’s just awful, Vi. They were little girls. Twins. And they—” Jonetta couldn’t go on.
Violet’s stomach was doing its funny twisty thing again. One suicide? Okay, maybe. That could happen. But two more? In such a short space of time?
No.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. And if something struck you as very, very wrong—and if, by sheer coincidence, the person with the expertise to help you figure it out also just so happened to be your best friend—then you knew where you needed to go. Right away.
And that’s where Violet went.
9
Shura Lu, M.D.
“Could you hand me that catchspark triple-wattage agitator?”
Shura’s voice sounded hazy and preoccupied. Violet wasn’t even sure she had fully realized yet that she had company. For all Shura knew, the body-sized bundle of heat emanating from an area near the door of her lab—a bundle otherwise known as Violet—was a random TechRob, and the energy was just runoff from a power cell. Shura had six Technical Assistance Robots working in her lab.
Well, five, actually, Violet reminded herself. One of the TechRobs had perished last week when the emergency shutoff on the sonic intensifier failed to engage. Shura had told her all about it. The mess on the floor was large and off-puttingly gooey.
But despite the possibility of being ignored for a long period of time, there was nowhere else Violet wanted to be just now. She was upset and confused, and she knew that, eventually, Shura would be a great help. In the meantime, having dropped in unannounced, Violet had to take what she could get.
And what she got, when she visited Dr. Shura Lu in her lab, was this: a highly focused physician-researcher who was probably working on a project that would change New Earth forever and save millions of lives—or working on a painting, Shura’s other great passion. Violet’s apartment was filled with Shura’s paintings, including the most precious one of all: a portrait of Violet’s mother.
But today was a science day, not an art day. Violet had figured that out the moment she walked in and saw Shura perched on a stool, her back to the front door, crouched over a microscope while two TechRobs, one on either side, switched out slides with the speed of an aide-de-camp supplying artillery in a firefight.
“The what?” Violet said, looking around at the crowded but superbly well-organized lab.
“The catchspark triple-wattage agitator,” Shura said. She still hadn’t lifted her gaze from the eyepiece. Instead she gestured with one hand, waving it vaguely toward the shelf across the room. “It’s that red metal thingy with the iron hoops on the side and the crooked antenna. These guys always get it mixed up with the catchspark double-wattage agitator.” By guys, she’d meant the TechRobs. “Rookie mistake.” Shura sounded miffed. The good thing about robots, she’d once told Violet, was that you could insult them all you liked and they never got mad.
Violet rummaged for a bit.
“Um, Shura?”
“Yeah?” She still didn’t look up from the microscope.
“I don’t see … oh. Wait. Yeah, there it is.” Violet scooted through the room, sidestepping bundles of thick black wire that rested on the floor like sleeping pets and nearly capsizing an entire row of test tubes sitting perkily atop a metal table. She reached to retrieve the catchspark triple-wattage agitator.
“STOP!”
Shura’s mighty shout was accompanied by a large crash as she leaped up from the stool, knocking over a nearby box filled with springy purple wires and oil-encrusted engine parts. She lurched toward Violet, whose hand was just about to close around the handle grip of the catchspark triple-wattage agitator.
“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” Shura yelled again. She grabbed Violet’s arm. She was breathing heavily. “I forgot. I rigged it to explode if it’s touched by any entity that hasn’t received a dose of synthetic lexco-megachloridactive-oblator compound. SLMO. Slo-Mo, I call it.”
“And you rigged it that way because…?” Violet was shaken by her brush with annihilation, but still curious.
“It’s a new chemical I’m testing to counteract explosive components. So far, I’ve only injected the TechRobs. It’s not safe yet for human trials. The only way to see if Slo-Mo works is to rig something to explode when the compound isn’t detected in whoever touches it.”
“Which would’ve been me.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Shura gave her a rueful, please-forgive-me smile. “When it’s just me and the TechRobs in the lab, I never slip up like that. I’ve got to pay better attention when humans come around.” Shura tilted her head and looked at Violet. “Why did you come around? I mean, it’s cool and all, but you hardly ever just drop in for no reason anymore.”
“There’s a reason. Can you take a break?”
“Um.” Shura was very busy. Violet knew that. She hated to ask, but she needed her friend’s help. She couldn’t come back later, because she had to be in court that afternoon.
Their eyes matched up. Over the years they had endured so much together—good things, bad things, in-between things. They’d consoled each other through bad grades and bad breakups. Shura had been there when Violet’s mother died. And Violet had been there when Shura’s mother was cr
itically injured.
It was true that they’d been drifting apart lately. Shura didn’t like the idea of Violet being a detective, and she also thought Violet hung out too often at Redshift. And Violet wished Shura would spend more time with her paintbrush and less with her microscope. There were other issues, too, but their shared history kept them tethered to each other, even through the rocky patches and occasional stretches of silence.
“Of course,” Shura said. “Go grab some chairs. I’ll clear out a spot on this table and make us some coffee.” She started to pick up the catchspark triple-wattage agitator to relocate it elsewhere.
“NO!” Violet yelled, snatching back her friend’s arm just in time.
“Oh. Right.” Shura grinned. “I save your life and then you save mine. We take turns. Just like old times, right?”
* * *
“So you’ve heard about the suicides.”
“The what?”
Violet looked at her friend in disbelief. “Don’t you ever watch the news?”
“No. I don’t. If I took time to do that, Violet, I’d never finish redesigning the HoverUp.” Shura pointed to an especially crowded area along the wall of her lab, where a passel of short steel rods twisted like pretzels were stacked next to a smorgasbord of switches and dials, and next to the switches and dials, an endless assortment of red-and-gray wires were gathered into huge loops. “I had a real breakthrough the other day. I think I can eliminate the operational noise entirely.” HoverUps were devices used by people with spinal cord injuries; they enabled limbs to move by sending powerful jets of air to manipulate them, triggered by a user’s thoughts. Among the flaws was the soft but incessant whish-whoosh sound created by the HoverUp’s propulsion system. “Kendall’s given me a ton of great pointers. I’m still running the computer simulations. There’s a lot left to do. But if I’m right, I actually might finish it before I’m an old lady.” She smiled at Violet. “Because I don’t watch the news.”