“Who ordered them shot?” Sula asked.
“Lady Sula!”the others chanted.
“Who fired her weapon?”
“Lady Sula!”
“Whose bullets struck them down?”
“Lady Sula!”they cried, and all three broke into laughter.
This must stop,she told herself. They couldn’t go on this recklessly.
But still, it would be good to put out another edition ofResistance, with the heading “Death of a Traitor.”
Sula bought Team 491 a first-class dinner that evening at Seven Pages, a restaurant with silent, dignified waitrons and a wine list that scrolled along the display hundreds of lines. The meal went on for hours, little plates arriving every ten minutes with some small, ambrosial treat, each displayed with perfection on a plate of near-translucent Vigo hard-paste. Sula could tell that Spence and Macnamara had never been in such a place before.
Not that she had, or at least not often. Not since she was a girl named Gredel, and the real Lady Sula had paid.
“Would you care for a sweet?” the waitron asked. “We have everything on our list except the Chocolate Fancy and the Mocha Gyre.”
“Why not?”
The waitron shook his glossy shaved head. “I regret there is no cocoa of a suitable quality. May I recommend the Peaches Flambé?”
“Hm.” Sula looked at Macnamara and Spence, both deeply relaxed after consuming two bottles of wine, and smiled. “I hate life without Chocolate Fancy in it,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange something.”
She spoke with the chef before they left and asked how much she would offer for top quality cocoa.
The chef frowned and tugged at her lower lip. “Business isn’t so good, you know. Not sincethey came.”
“Think how much better business would be if you had good chocolate again.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How good?”
“Kabila’s. We have sixty-five percent cocoa and eighty percent. Imported from Preowin.”
The chef tried unsuccessfully to conceal the flare of greed that burned briefly in her eyes. “How much do you have?” she asked.
“How much do you want?”
They settled on a price, seven times what Sula had paid for the cocoa when it sat in a warehouse complex on the ring.
“I’ll deliver tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll want payment in cash.”
The chef acted as if this arrangement weren’t unusual. Perhaps it wasn’t.
“I wish I knew how you did that,” Spence said as they walked away.
“Did what?”
“Change your accent like that. You have the voice you use back in Riverside, and the Lady Sula voice, and you used a completely different voice with the waitron and the chef.”
Sula cast her mind back to the restaurant. “I don’t remember doing that,” she said. “I was probably just imitating them.” Neither the chef nor the waitron had spoken with the drawling speech of the Peers of the High City, but a comfortably middle-class approximation.
“Wish I could do that,” Spence said again.
“You’ve been out having fun,” One-Step said later that night as Sula returned to her apartment. “You’ve been having fun without One-Step.”
“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. She sprang up the stair and reached for the door, the thin plastic key in her hand.
One-Step stepped into the light that poured down from one of the first-floor apartments, and Sula paused a moment to bask in the dark light of his liquid black eyes.
“One-Step could show you a wonderful evening, better than you had tonight,” he said. “You only have to give One-Step a chance.”
Sula wondered how to explain her position in this matter.I don’t go out with boys who refer to themselves in the third person?
“Maybe when you get a job,” Sula said. “I’d hate to take your last few zeniths.”
“I’d spend my last minim to make you happy.”
She rewarded the use of the personal pronoun with a smile. “So what do you hear?” she asked.
“Riot at the Blue Hatches, the place where they were shooting people,” One-Step said. “A crowd of mourners got arrested for killing a prison officer.”
Sula paused a moment, thinking. “Was it on the news?”
“No. One-Step heard it from a…colleague.”
Street rumor would spread fast, Sula knew, though what it gained in speed it lost in accuracy.
“Anyone killed?” she asked.
“My friend didn’t know. Probably there were deaths, though. There’s a lot of killing going around.”
He stepped forward and held out something that shone yellow-white in the light that spilled from the apartment window.Resistance.
“I’ve seen it.”
The plastic flimsy vanished. “You be careful,” One-Step said. There was a surprising earnest quality in his voice. “You step out into the street, you look for police first. Look for police at the train, at the market. Always make sure you have an escape route.”
Sula looked at him. “Doyou have an escape route, One-Step?”
His black eyes shone in the light as again he silently held out the pale sheet of plastic.
Resistance.
Sula turned. “Good night, One-Step.” She slid her key into the door lock, and alloy bolts drew back.
“Good night, miss. Keep well.”
He’s going to die,she thought as she walked slowly up the stair.They’ll be shooting at me, but they’ll hit him.
Plenty of bullets had been aimed at her earlier in the day, after all, but killed nearly five hundred other people instead.
EIGHT
Three watches ticked by with nothing for Martinez to do but spend his time at hypertourney, check the tactical display to see if anything had changed, and stare at Terza’s picture in the surface of his desk. No one invited him to dine. He considered having the lieutenants to an evening inDaffodil — the ex-civilian yacht that had brought him toIllustrious, and which he had turned into kind of an informal club, an alternative to the full-dress dinners Fletcher had imposed on the cruiser—but then he reflected that he’d have to invite Chandra and decided against it.
No one was in a mood for amusement anyway. Not with Termaine coming closer and closer, and the memory of Bai-do fresh in everyone’s mind.
After breakfast the next morning, Martinez occupied himself with the list of Authorized Names. When the Shaa made a conquest, they produced lists with names authorized for children. Names with subversive content—Freedom, Prince—were forbidden, along with names relating to superstition or other irrational beliefs contrary to the Praxis.
Since the conquest thousands of years ago, humanity had changed in countless ways, but the names had stayed the same.
Not that this was a particular hardship: there were still thousands of names to choose from, all sanitized by higher authority. Martinez liked the long list, because he could spend hours at it, and he could think about his unborn child the entire time.
Perhaps his child could be called Pandora, “All Gifts.” Or Roderick, “Renowned Ruler.” Or Esmé, “Beloved.”
If male, he could be named after Terza’s father, Maurice, or his own, Marcus, except that he didn’t quite understand what the names meant. “Moor” and “Of Mars,” all right, but what were Moors and Mars?
If she were a girl, she would surely be beautiful, and therefore could be named Kyla, or Linette, or Damalis.
Pity that he couldn’t simply name his child “Genius,” because surely that would apply better than anything.