“It can’t be sold, so it’s got no value,” Rachel said. “That’s a known conflict diamond. Most of these are, too…” she swept a hand across the surface of the desk and the gems rolled over her fingers like water. “Otherwise this’d all be worth ten, twenty times as much. They’ll never go to auction. The feds unloaded them here because this place has good security and they don’t know what else to do with them.”
Santino put down the diamond and wiped his hands together. “And you’re okay with having them around?”
“I like things that seem beautiful until you learn their stories,” she said.
“Somebody was a Goth in high school.”
She chuckled. “Maybe a little bit.”
“Do you have a favorite?”
Rachel turned her sixth sense on the pile to find a particular resonance. She pushed through the stones and pulled out a round pink sapphire the size of her pinkie nail. “Here.”
“Really?” Santino was skeptical. “What did you do, pick the smallest one?”
“Almost. It’s not conflict, and I can afford it when it goes up for sale.”
“What’s its price?”
She shrugged. “Lots. Bunches. I’ve spent the last five years living cheap, though, so I’m due for a splurge.”
“Why do you want to waste your money on something like this?”
Because we’ll leave here someday. Because I need to carry a part of this place with me forever. Because I have to.
“It’s a girl thing,” she said, and pointed to an ornate dining room set stacked high with banker’s boxes and loose pottery. Santino unearthed one of the chairs and dragged it over to her desk, then straddled it so his chin rested comfortably on the padded backrest.
Rachel had taken an especial liking to a golden crown set with emeralds which she referred to as her Thinking Tiara and wore when she typed, but out of deference to her partner’s well-practiced skills in mockery she left it perched atop her old stuffed teddy bear. She groped under her desk for her keyboard. When she had started cultivating her hoard, she had screwed a high metal rail around the edges of her desk to keep the stones from falling. It served its purpose but her desk had become a wicked snare of carpal tunnel, and was all but useless for those who wanted to keep their wrists. Rachel loathed those stupid undermount sliding keyboard trays but she had installed one at the same time she had put up the rail. The company of millions of dollars in gems was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and she would gladly suffer the indignity of poor ergonomic design to enjoy it.
She woke up her monitors and started pulling potentials from the Agent roster. The candidate pool was surprisingly small. When Rachel thought of federal agencies, she went straight to law enforcement or military, but the list was dominated with unpronounceable acronyms which usually led back to the sciences or public policy.
“How about Mako?” Rachel asked. “Says here he was with ASCR. That sounds Air Force-ish.”
“Really?” Santino perked. “How did I not know that about him?”
“Let’s see… ASCR…” Rachel called up her search on the second screen. “Advanced Scientific Computing Research. Not military. What do they do?”
“Pretty awesome stuff. New ways to apply mathematics and computer technologies, mostly. I thought about applying there for a while during grad school.”
“Never get you and Mako drunk together in the same room at the same time. Check.”
He took the high ground and ignored her. “There’s that Jason Atran guy’s name again,” he said, pointing at the list of candidates. “Drug Enforcement Agency?”
Rachel chewed her lower lip. “Yeah. Damn, damn, damn,” she grumbled. “We’re going to have to go with him. He and Zockinski are going to end up stabbing each other.”
“Is he really that bad?”
“No, he’s that good,” she replied. “He was the poster boy at the DEA until he was picked up by OACET. I mean, not to brag, we were all selected for the Program because we had the skills and the talent, but Jason has the ego to go along with it.
“And he’s antisocial with a persecution complex,” she added, knowing her partner would diagnose Jason within seconds without her help. The Agent was one of those who didn’t try to hide how badly he’d been damaged. “It’s a terrible combination. You just want to slap the smug smile off of his face, but if you did that, you’d be proving him right.”
“Okay,” Santino said. “Let’s go with someone else.”
“Well, he’s also a digital forensics expert. He’s the one I mentioned back at the gas station.”
“Oh.”
“Yep,” she said.
“There are hundreds of you cyborgs. There’s nobody else from law enforcement with that specialty?”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t appear to be.”
He thought about it. “If you get Jason, can I please have Phil?”
“I don’t actually want Jason,” she muttered, scrolling through the list to see if someone better was available.
“Why do you type?” he asked.
“What?” The change of topic threw her off. She looked up, not sure what he had meant.
Santino pointed at the monitor, where the cursor flew back and forth, seemingly by magic. “You navigate the screen with the implant, right? So why can’t you do the same thing when you type? Seems like using a keyboard would slow you down.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well, I could, but I’d be typing what I thought instead of filtering content when I entered it manually.”
“That’s my point.”
“Don’t think about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man,” she said.
“Ah.”
“I can autotype but it’s not worth it. It’s not natural. You have to concentrate, remember to format and punctuate… Editing’s a bitch! It’s all conscious, very purposeful. The end product reads like a robot wrote it. Your body has to be involved if you want any feeling in your words.”
Her partner scrambled for the notebook where he jotted down her observations of how she and the other cyborgs balanced their human and technological sides. He referred to the notebook as his eventual bestseller; Rachel referred to it as kindling followed by a lengthy argument. “Want me to leave out that line about editing being a bitch?” he asked.
“Would you?” she sighed, then stood up. “Come on, let’s go talk to Jason. If you don’t want to run him down with a car after the interview, he’s on the team.”
They checked the cuffs of their clothing for hitchhiking gems, and she took him on a shortcut through an enclosed veranda. They crossed the length of the house in the August mid-day heat, then reentered through the servants’ quarters. As the cool of the building returned, a woman in her late twenties spun into the hallway in front of them in her stocking feet and a vintage Funkadelic tee over torn denim shorts, eyes closed and singing along to an old Cameo song only she could hear.
“Zia!”
Zia froze, balanced on her toes like a deer that had scented the hunters. She blushed furiously. “Hey Rachel,” she replied, embarrassed, and then she opened her eyes and saw Santino.
Beside her, Santino surged bright red. Rachel was shocked, not by his sudden lust—with long blond hair and perfect curves, Zia set the standard for the California dime—but from the shift in Santino’s smooth ultramarine core. She had assumed core colors were forever unchanging but his had lightened to cobalt as it seized a thick strand of Zia’s pure honey rose and merged it into itself. Her partner had fallen wildly in love at first sight.
And, as the other woman’s core took in Santino’s blue and deepened slightly towards violet, she saw Zia had done the same.
Oh for fuck’s sake, Rachel thought as she buried her face in her hands.
She quickly introduced Raul Santino, police officer and professional computer nerd with First MPD, to Zia Hallahan, cyborg and professional physics nerd formerly of NASA, then fled to the safety of the nearest bathroom as Santino began the slow and awkward process of remem
bering he already lived with his girlfriend. Rachel set her implant to straight reading mode and grabbed a recent copy of Vogue from the pile of magazines beside the toilet. She cleared some space from the top of the vanity and settled down for a long wait, reminding herself that the star-crossed courtship on the other side of the door was None Of Her Business.
She was bending down the corners on those pages with the most appealing fall fashions when Zia screamed.
Rachel burst through the door and saw Santino with blood streaming down his left arm and his Taser held at the ready in his right. Her partner had been backed into a corner and was using a stack of old carousel horses for cover, shouting warnings at the man menacing him with an antique straight razor.
“SHAWN!” Rachel lashed out with both her voice and her mind. “He’s with me! I brought him here!”
The man with the razor gibbered through the link, and Rachel felt the entire mansion drop what they were doing and come running.
She walked slowly towards Shawn, hands outstretched and open. Shawn had forgotten his clothes again, and Santino couldn’t tear his eyes away from the heavy white scars on his wrists. The Agent lashed out towards her partner with the razor and found Rachel in his way.
“Rachel!” Santino called out.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “Shawn?” She had fully reactivated her implant and the naked man roiled in colors and patterns that were beyond sense.
“get him out GET HIM OUT he hurt Zia”
“He’s a guest, Shawn,” Rachel said aloud. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if talking to a child. “He’s not going to hurt you, and he didn’t hurt Zia. He’s putting the Taser away now, see?”
Behind her, Santino shot her a look of pure confusion, then holstered his stun gun and wrapped the tail of his shirt around the gash on his arm.
Shawn, wild-eyed and face drawn so tight he seemed fifty instead of thirty, stared at Zia.
“he touched her he hurt her”
“No Shawn, he didn’t hurt Zia. Look at her, Shawn. Zia is fine.” The Army had trained her to use names like a hammer in cases like these, to drive home, again and again, the fact that the person on the other end of the name was a living human being. She had yet to see this tactic work and doubted today would be the first time.
“he touched her he hurt her HE DOESN’T BELONG”
“He’s our guest,” she said again. “Is this how we treat guests?”
Shawn exploded in reds and screamed through the link.
Wrong tactic, moron, she berated herself. She felt Mulcahy thundering down the stairs and knew she had to wrap this up before he got there. Shawn hated the man and would certainly go after him with the razor, and that would not end well for Shawn.
Rachel pretended to notice the weapon for the first time. “Oh my God,” she said. “Is that…property?”
Shawn saw the fresh blood coating the old blade. “nooooooooo,” he keened, and the entire collective winced.
“Shawn, it’s against the rules to damage property. You have to leave it as you found it! You know that! You broke the rules!”
“nooooo no no no no no…” The Agent turned gray and his hands went limp, the razor falling to the stone floor. “I didn’t break them I didn’t break them I didn’t break…”
Zia caught him before he collapsed, and he buried his head against her chest and wailed aloud. The blond woman stared at Rachel in horror, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as though she had just caught Rachel assaulting a baby.
Rachel felt awful. Nothing like winning a fight by twisting the knife in the trauma, she thought sadly. She bent down to scoop up the razor as Mulcahy turned the corner and walked into their little hallway, calm and collected, looking for all the world as though he hadn’t run a mansion-sized obstacle course at a dead sprint.
Shawn, weeping uncontrollably in Zia’s arms, was too far gone to notice his arrival.
“Take him back to his room,” Mulcahy said to Zia.
“You can’t leave her alone with him!” Santino shouted. Both Shawn and Zia ignored him. Santino’s heart broke a little as Zia carefully guided his assailant through a set of double doors without a backwards glance.
“How did he get out?” Mulcahy asked Rachel.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I was in the bathroom when I heard Zia scream.”
“He’s supposed to be on lockdown when we have visitors.”
She glared up at him. “Don’t put this on me. I gave you advance warning I was bringing Santino here. Talk to Shawn’s babysitters.”
Mulcahy turned to her partner, who was oozing blood and holding onto a gaily-painted horse as though it were a lifeline. “What about him?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Rachel—”
“I’ll take care of it.”
He looked at her partner and measured the outcomes. Then: “Watch what you tell him.”
“Always.”
“Back to work,” Mulcahy sent out on the public band, and Rachel saw them fade away on the other side of the walls. He pushed through the double doors and was gone.
“Let me see,” she said. Santino stared at her as if she had grown an extra head; he was yellows and grays throughout. “C’mere, let me see that arm.”
“Rachel, what the hell just happened?”
“First things first,” she said. “You’re losing a lot of blood.” Santino took a deep breath and some of the yellow faded, and he hauled himself out from behind the wooden horses.
He peeled the end of his shirt from the wound and she hissed. “Damn, he got you good.”
“He came out of nowhere. I barely got my arm up in time. I think he was trying to kill me.”
“You’re going to need stitches,” she said. It was something of an understatement; Santino had used his left arm as a shield and the wound ran on a long diagonal across the leading edge of his forearm. Shawn had missed anything vital but he had cut Santino deep enough to nick the bone. “We can do it here in the med center, or someone else can drive you to a hospital.
“We’ve got some primo painkillers,” she said, grinning a bit to coax a laugh from him.
He wasn’t buying. “That man, he’s an Agent.” When she didn’t answer, he tried again. “He spoke to you without talking, Rachel. You might not think that’s obvious, but it is.”
She rewrapped his wound with his shirt to keep it covered. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, Shawn’s an Agent.”
Santino was fuming. “And?”
“And you never should have bumped into him. He’s our dark, dirty secret. We think he gave his caregivers the slip.”
“What’s wrong with him? The implant?”
She shook her head. “No. But adapting to the implant pushed him over the edge. The five years between when we got it and when we went public…
“Well,” Rachel paused to measure her words, “they needed to give us better mental health care to help with the transition. Some of us never came all the way through it.”
“He can do everything the rest of you can? Interface with machines the way you do?”
“Him and two others just like him,” she said quietly.
“My God,” he whispered.
“Which is why we keep them chained up in the basement,” she said gently. “Figuratively speaking, of course. They have free run of the place except when visitors are here. But we can’t leave them unsupervised and we can’t tell anyone outside of OACET about them.”
“Insane cyborgs,” he said. “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She nodded. “If it got out that some of us were unbalanced, it’d be open season. We couldn’t protect them, and it’d probably be a good excuse to take us all down with them. You know, just to be sure.
“I’m trusting you with this,” she said, meeting his eyes with her useless ones.
He looked away. “What did Mulcahy say to you?”
“I told him I’d take care of you.”
“Like…” San
tino turned his right hand into a gun and cocked it with his thumb. “…take care of me?”
“Jeez, you and the movies! No, like giving you the option to decide what to do, dumbass. If Mulcahy gets involved, you do as he says, no alternatives. This way, you still have a choice.”
“I’m not going to break down and crumble because of him,” he said.
“It’s sweet how you can still believe that,” she said.
He was silent for a moment. “How big of a risk are they?”
“Shawn and the others?” Rachel realized she was standing at parade rest and forced herself to slouch. “I don’t think they’re a risk at all, not unless something triggers them.”
“Be honest, Rachel,” he said, staring at the stain slowly spreading up his shirt. “What happens if I keep quiet and they set off the nukes? I couldn’t live with that. I need to know if they’re a risk. Do they want revenge or…or what?”
“No,” she said. “They don’t think in those terms. All they want is to be safe.”
Santino suddenly slumped forward. Rachel grabbed him by his uninjured arm as he steadied himself against the horse.
“We need to get you stitched up,” she said.
“I want a cookie,” he mumbled. He saw her confused expression and said, “You know, you get a cookie? For donating blood?”
“Oh thank God, you still think you’re funny,” she said, helping him climb out of his protective pile of wooden animals. “You’ll be fine.”
She took him through the double doors and into the catacombs.
“What. The. Hell.” Santino gasped. “Rachel, what... Am I hallucinating?”
“I wish you were,” she sighed.
During the mansion’s tenure as a drug den, the main hallway connecting lowest level of the mansion had been remodeled after the municipal Ossuary under Paris, complete with faux skulls. The catacombs were a main reason the property had failed to sell, prospective buyers making it as far as the basement before discovering they were to purchase a graveyard which required plastic ghosts.
“We have no idea what they were thinking,” she said. “Cocaine was involved, that’s for sure. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.”
The walls of the catacombs were covered in boxes stacked four deep and eight tall, with a path barely an arm’s length across to allow passage between rooms. The Agents had tried to insulate themselves from poor taste but there was little they could do about the ceiling, which stared down at them with hollow eyes and grinned.
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