Arachne's Web

by Elizabeth Corrigan

  No, it’s not like me, Jack thought. I’m waiting for my girl to come along, and it can’t be this Roslyn. I’m interested in her, sure, but if she were my girl, I would recognize her. Wouldn’t I?

  “I’m researching her because she knew your name, remember?” He pointed at the screen, which had several bullet points of notes, a few pictures, and a dossier of school records. “I’m trying to figure out if she has corporate ties. Which she doesn’t.”

  The more he looked into Roslyn, though, the more he knew his words to Cobalt were a lie. He wanted to know more about her because she reminded him of himself in some ways. She had a life a lot of people on Daedalus would give their right arms for. She was a server, but she was well kept with all those legally mandated benefits. All she had to do for the cushy life was walk a dog, but she wasn’t happy. He wondered if she would go along with a plan to rob a train just because she could.

  Cobalt pointed at the screen. “Would you look at what you’re reading? The girl is by all accounts a genius. Maybe not on your level, but she can speak at least five languages and apparently knows more about dead painters and computer engineers than I can imagine anyone wanting to. Yet she was denied admission to university. You think if a megacorp offered her the opportunity to get off this polished rock in exchange for spying on some criminals, she wouldn’t jump at the chance?”

  Jack sighed. Cobalt had a point. “Then why would she call you by your real name and give herself away?”

  “Because she’s an amateur, obviously. She didn’t expect to have to interact with us.”

  Tapping his finger against the side of his datapad, Jack considered that, but something didn’t feel right about Cobalt’s response. He looked at his usually calm and sedate brother and wondered at his rigidity. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “On any given day, there are a million things I don’t tell you, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this girl being trouble.”

  Jack twisted back and forth on his swivel chair. “Okay, you may have a point. I’ve got an idea. I’ll go talk to her and see if I can get a better insight into her motivation.” And I’ll get to talk to her again.

  “That is a terrible idea,” Cobalt said. “If she is a corporate spy, you’ll be playing right into her hands.”

  “Please. It’s the middle of the night. Who’s she going to call now?”

  “You want to go visit her now?” Cobalt rolled his eyes. “Of course you do. Like the creepy stalker you’ve already made yourself out to be today.”

  Jack grinned. “Her bedroom’s on the third floor. Any chance you know where I can get a set of lift-off boots this time of night?”

  “Jack!”

  Though he thought it might be his imagination, she sounded happy to see him. He hoped Cobalt wasn’t right about her having some nefarious corporation-driven plot to have him arrested.

  “Can I come in?” he asked. “These boots are kind of hard to balance in.”

  She looked surprised for a moment then looked out the window at his power boots. “Oh, sure. Hopefully, it’ll make Snookems stop barking.” She backed up, giving him room to get inside.

  He looked around the surprisingly pink and frilly bedroom. He would have expected something more utilitarian, maybe in red, for her, but maybe the décor was as much her choice as the dog—who had stopped barking—had been.

  “How did you know it was me and not C—Blue?” Jack asked.

  Roslyn studied him for a moment, and he could tell a million thoughts were going through her head. He found that he wanted to know every one of them.

  “You’re not all that similar looking” was all she said.

  He laughed. “We’re identical twins.”

  Giving him a small smile, she said, “Only on the outside.”

  She cringed and put her hand to her head, but he didn’t think the reaction had anything to do with him. Her eye twitched, as though the muscle was spasming, and he realized she was in pain. He wanted to reach out to her, but somehow he suspected that might put him over the top on the creeper scale, if showing up at her bedroom window hadn’t done that already.

  “Why are you here, anyway?” She sounded tense and guarded.

  Not surprising since she’s in pain and I showed up in her bedroom in the middle of the night. But it feels like more than that. Like she knows better than to rely on me. But that’s impossible. She couldn’t know he lost interest in things as easily as he breathed.

  “Blue’s worried you’re some kind of corporate spy sent to destroy us so you can get into college and escape your meager existence.”

  Roslyn let out a bark of laughter. “Someone’s been doing their research.” She pulled back and scrunched her eyes shut with a sharp hiss of breath. “Look, do you mind if I sit down? My head is killing me.”

  Jack nodded as she sank onto the mess of frilly lace comforter and pink sheets. “You’re not angry.”

  She shook her head. “No. Just surprised there was that much to find on someone who’s going to be a dog walker for the rest of her days.” Her breath hitched, as if she wanted to say something else but thought better of it.

  “Yes, well.” Jack didn’t want to tell her the lengths to which he had gone to find out about her, and not just because he didn’t want to creep her out. He didn’t want to tell her about his nefarious talents, yet at the same time, he wanted her to know everything about him. He felt, on some level, she would understand. “Maybe life will surprise you.”

  She gazed up at him, and for a moment, he felt like she already knew all his deepest secrets and didn’t care. His throat went dry, and his hands trembled. He looked down at his palms and saw they were sweating, and his mind dredged up the word for the feeling that had washed over him: fear. He was terrified of the slight girl in front of him. Somehow, he knew she didn’t care about his past, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. Does it mean she would like me anyway, despite my chaos and indiscretions? Or does it mean she doesn’t care about me?

  “Surprises aren’t always good,” she whispered, and her thoughts were a million miles away.

  Jack swallowed and decided to focus on the reason he’d come. “So when you said I did my research, did that mean you are a corporate spy?”

  Roslyn snickered, and it turned into a whimper as she slid down and rested her head on what looked like a very soft pillow. “I don’t know why you would think that.” She closed her eyes, and for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to open them again. “I mean, I guess I do. But I’m not a corporate spy. I just wondered how you knew I wanted to go to university and put an end to the meagerness of my existence. Why would a corporate spy be looking for you, anyway?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Perhaps not.” A small smile graced her lips.

  “How did you know Blue’s real name if you’re not a corporate spy?”

  The smile fell. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She lay with her eyes closed for long enough that he thought maybe she had gone to sleep, but somehow he could not make himself leave. He listened to her steady breathing, how it intermixed with his short, stuttered breaths in a crazy kind of perfect rhythm, and he didn’t want to ever walk away.

  “You never answered my question,” she said after a while.

  Her voice should have surprised him, but instead, its cadence drifted perfectly into the silent music he had created in his head. “What question was that?”

  She opened her hazel eyes, and they held a challenge in them. “Why are you here, Jack? You said Cobalt suspected me of something, but that doesn’t explain why you’re here instead of him.”

  His entire mouth dried out that time, and the trembling in his fingers intensified. He couldn’t face the question standing, so he sank onto the frilly comforter next to her feet, all the while
waiting for a protest from her that never came.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, surprising himself with his honesty. “I don’t know why I’m here. Pulling crazy stunts, that’s totally me. Showing up in strange girls’ bedrooms in the middle of the night, wearing rocket boots, is a new one.”

  “Is it?” She sounded dubious and suddenly closed off.

  “Yes.” He felt like he needed to justify himself to her, to bring her back to him, but he couldn’t explain about his girl, the one who was waiting for him, the one who couldn’t possibly be Roslyn, because if he had met her, he would know. But Cronos, right now, right at this moment, I want it to be Roslyn so badly.

  He felt a hand on his arm, and he realized he had buried his face in his hands. She had sat up next to him, her hazel eyes positively glowing with sympathy and something else he couldn’t quite name or didn’t want to name.

  Her breathing was as unsteady as his. He withdrew his arm from Roslyn’s warm touch, hoping putting some distance between them would help, but it only made him feel fainter. He brushed a strand of hair out of her face, letting his hand linger on the silkiness, and suddenly, the world came into focus. Or at least she did. The rest of the world didn’t matter. She leaned just the slightest bit closer to him, and he felt himself falling toward her.

  A hail of what sounded like scattershot against the windows pulled Jack out of his haze. He pulled back from her and shook his head.

  Roslyn’s eyes were round and terrified. “What was that?”

  Jack groaned. “Blue. He’s probably spent the last half hour calculating the exact trajectory of throwing a handful of pebbles against a window three stories up to sound like the most terrifying thing he could think of. I should go see what he wants.”

  It was a stupid thing to say. Cobalt wanted them to get out of there before Roslyn’s alleged spy plan came to fruition. Jack was going to accede to his brother’s wishes, because he knew if he stayed there any longer, he was going to betray the love of his life.

  Cobalt stared up at the apple tree outside of Roslyn’s window and resented it. It was spring, for Cronos’s sake. During spring, apple trees were supposed to have blossoms, not apples. But the crazy-rich people on Ariadne wanted to have fresh apples in the spring, so they genetically engineered their trees to cycle off-season. It was unnatural.

  He wasn’t really angry about the trees, he told himself. He was angry with Jack for dragging him there in the middle of the night to chase after some girl who probably wanted to see them jailed or worse. But then, he wasn’t really angry with Jack, either. He was angry with himself for being pulled along on another wild goose chase for the sake of that girl. Roslyn. Her name is Roslyn. Somehow, the dog-walker server girl roused a series of feelings in him—anger, resentment, frustration—he didn’t understand.

  That was a lie. They reminded him of how he’d felt when he saw the blond woman on the screen in the detective’s office. He saw her, and thoughts that felt like memories pounded through him. He saw Roslyn laughing, crying, and screaming. He saw her hanging out on some derelict spaceship with him and Jack like she was as much one of them as they were to each other, and he loved her. He saw her railing at his brother, and he pitied her. He saw her kissing Jack, and he resented her.

  Cobalt did not, as a general rule, like his emotions. He had been through the requisite emotional skills training in school and knew that emotions were not technically good or bad, but they still felt irrational to him. He needed to stay calm, to think with his head. If he didn’t, Jack’s emotions would rule their lives.

  But lately, he felt like he was all emotion, and irrational emotion at that. He was imagining whole lives with people he had never met. He feared that when he went to sleep that night, he would dream some vivid memory about Roslyn. In short, Cobalt hated the apple tree because Roslyn made him afraid to sleep. Though that made a lot more sense before he put it into words. He kicked the tree stump. Stupid tree.

  He wondered how long Jack would be up there and what he was doing up there. He’d said he was going to interrogate Roslyn for possible corporate or OBI ties, but Cobalt knew better. He had never seen Jack like this about a girl, and he wasn’t sure hacker-stalker was a good look on his brother. Judging by the visions Cobalt hated to call memories, he knew the odds were good that Roslyn was the girl, the one Jack was so obsessed with saving himself for.

  But Jack didn’t seem to remember her. At least, not the way Cobalt did. Jack clearly felt some kind of connection to her, but when Cobalt had suggested they had met before, he had dismissed it, citing their lifetime residence on different moons. Cobalt didn’t understand why he had the new memories and Jack didn’t, when Jack figured so prominently in all of them.

  Cobalt kicked the tree again. He hated feeling out of sorts. Jack was supposed to be the crazy, emotional one, yet Cobalt was the one having the nervous breakdown. Roslyn has to be a corporate spy. That’s what makes the most sense. These “memories” are crazy fantasies that my too-idle brain has created. That’s the logical answer, and it’s what I’m going to focus on. And that means Jack has spent way too long up there, if she hasn’t had him arrested already.

  Cobalt looked for his brother’s shadow in the window and didn’t see it. He didn’t see anything moving up there at all, except for some flickering light. Crap. He looked around for some small stones. If I throw these at the right angle, I should be able to make an adequate noise.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. The rocks hit the window, and Cobalt cursed under his breath. The entire world would be aware of their presence, but at least the sound had the desired effect.

  Jack stuck his head out the window a moment later. “Cronos, Blue! You trying to wake the whole house?”

  “No, just trying to get you out of there before you get arrested.”

  Jack was already climbing out the window and activating the boots to float back down. “Relax. Servers are allowed to have visitors, you know.”

  “Yes, great. I’m sure the authorities will see us as run-of-the-mill visitors, climbing in the third-story window in the middle of the night.”

  “Well, we were until you decided to see if you could mimic projectile weapon fire,” Jack muttered. “Though I suppose it’s just as well I wasn’t caught. No doubt the Bhanushalis would love to get Roslyn married off to some normal fellow. It would be another server for their paddock.”

  Cobalt felt his eyebrows drift up to somewhere around the stratosphere. “You’re getting married now?”

  “Blue! Don’t be ridiculous. I just met the girl.” Jack got quiet for a moment then said, “I like her. But I don’t think she’s the one, you know? I would know if she were the one, wouldn’t I?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.” Cobalt was aware even as he said it the words were at least half a lie.

  Jack nodded. He was silent the rest of the way home.

  Chapter 18

  Present Day

  After two weeks in the forest, Gavin was the worse for wear. He had tried using his utility blade to shave off his growth of beard a week ago, but a slice or two in his chin had convinced him to embrace the scruff. The stink was harder to deal with, but it had been days since he had seen the one river that meandered through the forest. Hanging around the river was a surefire way to get caught.

  If Archon’s appearance indicated anything, the viewers of the games were not getting a treat, looking at them. Gavin’s friend had always been the perfect clean-cut soldier before, with a smoothly shaven chin and a crew cut refreshed every week or two. After a day or two of survival training, he might have appealed to women—or men—who liked the rugged look, but after two weeks, Gavin wondered if his friend shaved all the time because he couldn’t grow a decent beard. Wisps of uneven hair floated from his chin, and his hair grew unevenly.

  He also didn’t smell any better than Gavin did, but the stink didn’t make it through the came
ras. Some tech experts had experimented with sending scent information through vid screens along with sight and sound a few years back, but complaints about headaches had squashed that beta test.

  Actually, now that he thought about it, that experiment had been over forty years ago. He wasn’t sure why he remembered the story so vividly, almost as if he had been there. Regardless, people watching the games should be grateful they weren’t smelling what he was.

  Beards aside, they were traveling around in full forest camouflage, with leaves covering their hats and clothing, almost making it difficult to see past the falls of green hanging off them. They had adopted the natural garments over the first week, making themselves look shoddy over the vid screens. Then, as soon as they knew the trackers were no longer watching, they redid their “costumes,” making sure to take foliage from a variety of different places.

  A rustle sounded in the trees.

  “Hey,” Archon whispered. “Did you hear that?”

  Gavin motioned for silence, trying not to feel exasperated with Archon. He saw no point in having a battle buddy he’d known for his entire life if they couldn’t take advantage of predetermined nonverbal communication. But he understood too. He hadn’t used his voice in a week, and sometimes at night, he feared it would go rusty.

  Archon scrunched up his nose at Gavin then pointed in the direction of the noise. Gavin tried to identify what had made the sound. It didn’t seem large enough to be fellow competitors or the team chasing after them, but he couldn’t be certain someone wasn’t making a noise to lure him in. The rustling also seemed larger than a rabbit or a squirrel, something that could make a decent single meal. It could be a deer, which would be a mixed blessing. On one hand, it had been a long time since the summer blackberries they had found that morning, and they’d had to make sure to eat only a few of those to leave their tracks clear. On the other hand, a deer was large, and they didn’t want to cut out what they needed and leave behind a body. Nor did they want to carry around a moldering deer carcass.