— Oh please no—
"— your own involvement in all this."
Jovellanos slumped back into her chair and waited for the axe to fall.
"Dr. Desjardins's disappearance leaves—well, a vacancy we really can't afford at this time," the corpse continued.
Jovellanos looked at the backlit tribunal. A tiny part of her dared to hope.
"You worked closely with him through a great deal of this. We understand that your own contribution to date hasn't been negligible—in fact, you've been working below your own potential for some time now. And you're certainly farther up the learning curve than anyone else we could bring in at this point. On the usual scales you're overdue for a promotion. But apparently…that is, according to Psych you have certain objections to taking Guilt Trip…"
I. Can't. Believe. It.
"Now please understand, we don't hold this against you," said the corpse. "Your issues concerning invasive technology are— very understandable, after what happened to your brother. I can't honestly say I'd feel any differently in your shoes. That whole nanotech thing was such a debacle…"
A sudden, familiar lump rose in Jovellanos's throat.
"So you see, we understand your objections. But perhaps you could understand that Guilt Trip hails from a whole different arena, there's certainly nothing dangerous—"
"I do know the difference between bio and nano," Jovellanos said mildly.
"Yes, of course…I didn't mean to—"
"It's just that, what happened to Chito—logic doesn't always enter into it when you…"
Chito. Poor, dead, tortured Chito. These haploids don't have the slightest clue the things I've done.
All for you, kiddo.
"Yes. We understand that, of course. And even though your prejudice—again, entirely understandable—even though it's held you back professionally, you've proven to be an exceptional performer. The question is, after all these years, will you continue to be held back?"
"Because we all think that would be a shame," Slijper said.
Jovellanos looked across the table and said nothing for a full ten seconds.
"I think….I think maybe it's time to let go," she said at last.
"So you'd be willing to get your shots and move up to senior 'lawbreaker," Slijper said.
For you, Chito. Onward and upward.
Alice Jovellanos nodded gravely, stoically refusing to let her facial muscles do a whole different kind of dance. "I think I'd be up for that."
Scheherezade
Fossil water, cold and gray.
She remembered the local lore, although she was no longer certain how she'd learned it. Less than one percent of the Lakes hailed from run-off or rainfall; she swam through the liquid remains of a glacier that had melted ten thousand years before. It would never refill once human appetites had drained it dry.
For now, there was more than enough to cover her passage.
For days the mermaid had passed through its depths. Visions of a past she couldn't remember rose like bubbles through the dark water and the pain in her side; she'd long since stopped trying to deny them. At night she would rise like some oversize plankter. She couldn't risk coming ashore, but she'd stocked her pack with freeze-dried rations in Chicago; she'd float on the surface and tear into the vacuum-sealed pouches like a sea otter, resubmerging before dawn.
She thought she remembered part of a childhood, spent where the three greatest lakes converged: Sault Sainte Marie, commercial bottleneck into Lake Superior. The city sat on its locks and dams like a troll at a bridge, extorting levies from passing tonnage. It wasn't as populous now as it had been; four hundred kilometers from the edge of the Sovereign Quebec but still too close for some, especially in the wake of the Nunavut Lease. A giant's shadow is a cold place to live at the best of times; a giant grown invincible overnight, nursing grudges from an oppressed childhood, was a complete nonstarter. So people had left.
Lenie Clarke remembered leaving. She'd had a whole lot of first-hand experience with shadows, and giants, and unhappy childhoods. So she, too, had moved away, and kept moving until the Pacific Ocean had stood in her way and said, no farther. She'd settled in Hongcouver and lived day-to-day, year to year, until that moment when the Grid Authority had turned her into something that even the ocean couldn't stop.
Now she was back.
Past midnight. The mermaid cut quietly through a surface squirming with reflected metropolitan light. The walls of a distant lift-lock huddled against the western sky like a low fortress, holding back the elevated waters of Lake Superior—one relic, at least, still resisting depletion. Clarke kept the lock to her left, swam north to the Canadian side. Derelict wharves had been rotting there since before she'd been born. She split her hood and filled her chest with air. She left her fins behind.
Even with night-eyes, there was no one else to be seen.
She walked north to Queen and turned east, her feet following their own innate path beneath the dim streetlights. No one and nothing accosted her. Eastbourne Manor continued to rot undemolished, although someone had swept away the cardboard prefabs in the past twenty years.
At Coulson she stopped, looking north. The house she remembered was still there, just up from the corner. Odd how little it had changed in two decades. Assuming, of course, that those memories hadn't been…acquired… more recently.
She still hadn't seen a single vehicle, or another human being. Farther east, though—on the far side of Riverview—there was no mistaking the line of hovering botflies. She turned back the way she'd come; there too. They'd moved in behind her without a sound.
She turned up Coulson.
The door recognized her after all that time. It opened like a mouth, but the inside lights—as if knowing she'd have no need of their services—remained off.
The front hall receded in front of her, barren and unfurnished; its walls glistened strangely, as if freshly lacquered. An archway cut into the left walclass="underline" the living room, where Indira Clarke used to sit and do nothing. Past that, the staircase. An empty gray throat leading up into hell.
She wouldn't be going up there just yet. She sighed and turned the corner into the living room.
"Ken," she said.
The living room, too, was an unfurnished shell. The windows had been blacked out, but the faint street light leaking in through the hall was more than enough for rifter vision. Lubin stood in the middle of that stark space; he wore dryback clothes, but his eyes were capped. Just behind him, the room's only furniture: a chair, with a man tied into it. He appeared to be merely unconscious.
"You shouldn't have come," Lubin said.
"Where else was I going to go?"
Lubin shook his head. He seemed suddenly agitated. "It was a stupid move. Easy to anticipate. You must've known that."
"Where else was there?" she said again.
"This isn't even what you think it is. This isn't what you remember."
"I know," said Clarke.
Lubin looked at her, frowning.
"They fucked me over, Ken. I know that. I guess I knew it ever since I started having the—visions, although it took me a while to…"
"Then why did you come here?" Ken Lubin was nowhere to be found. This thing in his place seemed almost human.
"I must have had a real childhood somewhere," Clarke said after a moment. "They can't have faked all of it. This seemed like the best place to start looking."
"And you think they'll let you? You think I can let you?"
She looked at him. His flat, empty eyes looked back from a face in unexpected torment.
"I guess not," she sighed at last. "But you know something, Ken? It was almost worth it. Just— learning this much. Knowing what they did to me…"