He was touched and amused. Young Amy was taking her recently-acquired Alpha license very seriously, and doing outstandingly welclass="underline" the game did keep his mind off what, if he were half-tranked and locked in solitude, would have been absolute hella situation which was still hell, what time he let himself worry whether the plane had landed yet, whether Justin was safe, what was going on with Jordan in Planys.
He wished he were on that plane; but he figured he was actually doing more good for Justin as a hostage, being civil and cool-headed and not pouring fuel on the fires of juvenile excitementor Administration paranoia.
Poker was also an interesting game, in which Amy said an azi had two considerable advantages, first, profound concentration, and second, the ability to conceal one's reactions. Sera was right. He very much wanted to try it with Justin.
When Justin got home.
It was the little thoughts like that, that sent panic rushing through him, with the thought that something could happen, that somehow an order could come through that sera Amy could not resist or that authorities elsewhere could take Justin into custody; and, Reseune holding his Contract, they might not meet again. Ever.
Then he might not sit placidly waiting for re-training. Then he might do something incredibly unlikely for an azi designer, and get his hands on a weapon: in a very fluxed way it seemed what a CIT might do and what was the best thing to do. At other momentshe was fluxing that wildlyhe knew that his own personal CIT might fight to be free, but he would never turn a weapon on sera Amy, nor on Quentin AQ, and that Justin could neverhe had told the truth to ser Denysnever harm any of the people who had harmed him. His CIT might threaten with a weapon, but pull the trigger Justin could not, not even if it was Giraud, who was dead anyway.
No, when it came to it, Grant thought, studying the hand young sera had dealt himhe could not see himself surrendering to the hospital; but he could not see himself shooting to kill, either.
Young Amy told him that the secret of the game she was teaching him was to keep one's intentions and one's predicaments off one's face. Young Amy was very intelligent, and quite good at it herself, for a CIT. Possibly she was playing more than one game and trying to read more than what cards he held, the same way he was trying to read her for more information than she was willing to give.
So meanwhile he gambled for small markers, because one was supposed to play for money, but he owned none that was not Justin's; and he would not risk that, even at the minuscule levels young Amy proposed. He risked nothing that was Justin's, was very glad to have enough liberty in the apartment to know that Justin's papers were safe, and generally to catch what bits of information he could . . . dumb-annie was a role he still knew how to play. I'll be all right, Justin had said to him. And after all was said and done, he had to rely on that, like any aziwhile he kept fluxing on Winfield and the Abolitionists and the fact that at thirty-seven he was legally a minor; and Amy Carnath at eighteen was legally an adult. Dammit, he wanted to shout at her, take advice. Tell me what's going on and listen to someone with more experience than you have.
But that was not likely to happen. Amy Carnath took Ari Emory's orders; and whether it was Denys Nye or Ari Emory managing things nowhe could not at all figure.
viii
The airport stirred boyhood memories, himself in the terminal gift shop, begging a few cred-chits from Jordan for trinkets and gifts for home: Justin thought of that as they walked the safeway from the plane to the Novgorod terminal, with armed Security going ahead of them and crowding close behind.
No passage through the public terminaclass="underline" Ari had explained that; no transfer to a car in the open. Things were too dangerous nowadays. They took a side door, hurried downstairs to a garage where cars waited with shielded windows.
There Security laid hands on him and took him apart from Ari and Catlin and Florian. Ari had warned him it would happen and asked him to do exactly what Security told him, but they were damned rough, and their haste and their force getting him into the car was more than it need have been.
He kept his mouth shut about it, sandwiched in between two guards in the back seat, and with a heavy hand on his shoulder as the doors locked.
Then the man let go of him and he settled back, watching as the first few cars left the garage. Their own driver joined the tight convoy, whisking out past RESEUNE ONE's wing, along the edge of the field and out a guarded gate where they picked up more escort.
It was the son of official protection, he thought, that must have attended Giraud Nye in these troubled years. He sat between the hard-muscled bodies of two of Reseune's senior House Security, with another, armed, in the front-seat passenger side, and one driving. He watched the road unfold to the river, the bridge and the drivehe remembered itwhich led up to the government center, green crops growing in the interstices, a handful of trees which had prospered in the years since he had ridden this road at Jordan's side, taking the tour
The Hall of State loomed up around a turn, suddenly filling the windshield; and he felt a chill and a sense of panic. "Aren't we going to the Bureau?" he asked his guards quietly, calmly. "I thought we were going to the Science Bureau."
"We follow the car in front of us," the one on the left said.
He figured that much. Damn, he thought, and sat and watched, wishing he had Grant's ability to go Out awhile. He wanted this day done with. He wanted
God, he wanted to go home.
He wanted a phone, and a chance to talk to Jordan, and to find out the truth, but the truth, Ari had said it, was the least important thing.
He was numb, in overload, total flux. He tried to find answers and there was no information to give them to him, except the ones Ari herself led him through, bringing order where none existedor finding the only way through, he did not know any longer. He had found himself agreeing to lie to the press, agreeing to deny his father's innocenceto which he himself could not swear
He found himself doubting Jordan, doubting Jordan's motives, Jordan's love for him, everything in the world but Grant. Doubting his own sanity, finally, and the integrity of his own mind.
Not even Giraud did this to me. Not even Giraud.
Flux of images, the older Ari, the younger; flux of remembered panic, interview in Ari's office:
. . . You make my life tranquil, sweet, and stand between me and Jordan, and I won't have his friends arrested, and I won't do a mindwipe on Grant, I'll even stop giving you hell in the office. You know what the cost is, for all those transfers you want. . . .
. . . I told Denys you're mine, that I ran a major intervention, that Grant is far more of a hold on you than your father is; that you'd choose him over your father if it came to a choice. . . .
The convoy drew up under the portico at the side of the Hall of State. He moved when his guards flung the door open and hastened him out and through the doorsnot so roughly this time: this time there were news cameras.
Ari stopped and took his arm. The thought flashed through his mind that he could shove her away, refuse to go farther, tell the cameras everything that had happened to him, shout out the fact that Reseune was holding Grant hostage, that they had worked on him to divide him from his father, that Jordan might well have spent twenty years in confinement for a lie