No answer, for a long time. Florian had been standing, and in the quiet and the privacy; sat down opposite her, signing, He’s there.
“Jordan? I really need to talk to you. Please answer.”
“Please? There’s a foreign word. Do I recognize that?”
“I need your help. Would you mind if I dropped by?”
“Oh, now this is familiar. ‘Would you mind?’ Try telling the truth and see if I mind!”
“Are we talking about the manual I sent you?”
“I haven’t got time for games.”
“I want your opinion, ser. I need your opinion. You’re one of the few who might know, and I urgently want to talk to you about that manual.”
“Go to hell and take my son with you.”
“That’s not very nice.”
Laughter from the other end. “Fuck you!”
Florian’s face went dangerous. She held up a hand. “Do I take it, ser, that you recognize the case?”
“What is this, a fucking test? I told you, I’m too old for games.”
“Old enough to remember what everybody else has forgotten. I thought you were. I wasn’t sure. Now I know for certain I want you in on this.”
“On what? This isn’t a modern design. This is old history. This is old history; from before I was born, let alone working.”
“You’re good. You just proved that. And I still want you on this case.”
“The hell! It’s a damned trick, and I’m not going with it!”
He broke the contact.
Florian looked at her, questioning, perhaps, whether they were about to do something.
“I can’t force his opinion out of him,” she said. “Not in any useful way. But he knewwhat he was looking at. It made him mad that I didn’t tell him who it was.”
“Many things make Jordan mad,” Florian said. “He’s not that much like Justin, is he?”
It was a good question. She knew things that could make Justin mad. She’d done some of them. But the one that would Get him, above all else, was something happening to Grant; and the one that would Get him, just him, personally–
–if he were in Jordan’s place–
He’d know he’d put his companion in a hell of a place with his actions opposing Ari, that was one; and he’d be damned upset in his career if he was on the outs with Ari.
It was an interesting thought, too, what Jordan would have been, if he’d been lovers with the first Ari long‑term. But that had gone very, very wrong–not because Jordan hadn’t ever loved Ari, she was fairly sure of that, and not because Ari hadn’t likely loved him. What Jordan wanted was being partners with her, learning things, doing things, having that. It wouldn’t have mattered, if he were Justin, whose name was on a published paper; or whether he got official credit; but it had mattered very, very much to Jordan, because–
Switch personae dramatis again–because Jordan was driven, all his life, to be number one, the best, the one who ran things–
And he wasn’t the best. In his view, Ari had turned on him. But she’d seen a danger in him. Seen how thoroughly one hell of a sex drive overlying a god‑complex had blinded what otherwise really was a great mind…
She’d fixed it in the next generation, hadn’t she?
This is it. This is all there is. This is all there’ll ever be.
All there is.
He’d been seventeen, Justin had, and that had to have hurt, because Jordan had always taught him not to trust Ari; but Justin’s own ambition to be the best had driven him to Ari; and afterward–
Afterward he’d had that mantra echoing in his skull, and Grant was the one he could trust, forever after, the way Jordan trusted Paul. Justin had come, finally, to a point he could like her. Just– likeher; and that was a long, long way for that mindset to come.
She’d met Justin on the same territory, hadn’t she? She’d been half afraid of him. And then targeted him for her first adult conquest. And shied off again, bluff called. He’d been scared of her. Grant had been willing to fling himself between. But that had been a dose of ice water, and she’d thought about it later and thought–thank God they hadn’t. Wouldn’t that have made a mess of things?
Liking was good enough.
Jordan hadn’t been that lucky. Neither had the first Ari.
I’ve found two of your mistakes, she thought, addressing Ari. One was ever sleeping with Jordan; the other was letting Giraud run and never just having the fight it would have taken and looking into his competency to do what he was certified to do.
You knew about Denys, didn’t you? Knew damned well he was a genius, and knew Giraud was almostbright enough to handle things. Giraud really wasan Alpha Supervisor. He just wasn’t the best one on the planet. When an alpha gets messed up, it’s a question of who canunwind the tangle he can make of his sets, and that’s probably just very, very few, even among those with the license, isn’t it? It’s hard for me to judge–because I’m good; it was probably hard for you to judge. I wonder how often you ever ran into Kyle, or if you ever looked twice at him.
She looked at Florian, pocketed the com, reached across the table, and laid her hand on his, a little calm‑down.
“I’m not worried about Jordan,” she said. “I’ll Get him. I’ll Get him and not lose Justin in the process. They’ve had a fight about something. But we’ll fix it.”
“We’re worried about Defense,” Florian said somberly. “Sera, we don’t have resources there.”
“We don’t,” she said, “but we’re smarter.”
“They have weapons andnumbers.”
Here and now, Florian meant. Here and now didn’t always figure when she set her thoughts ranging; but trust Florian to pull her back to the real world. Defense, she thought, was her enemy and consequently all Reseune was in danger. Defense was, in the terms of their childhood game, the Enemy, and Vladislaw Khalid…was its modern face.
What have they got? was one thing to ask.
And it was always, always smart to ask–How does what we did play out in their eyes? What do they thinkwe did?
Overthrowing Denys…who had agreements with them.
Bringing Jordan back.
Bringing Jordanback, where Jordan, if he weren’t Jordan, might have been moved to tell her things. A lot of things. Jordan had been dealingwith Defense before Kyle turned Abban into a weapon aimed at the first Ari.
She’d assumed Jordan was innocent. But if there was one person inside Reseune besidesAri in those days who could have run a timebomb like Kyle, it wasJordan. Giraud damned sure couldn’t, and Prang didn’t think she could crack what Defense had done and an alpha had worked over for decades…
Jordan had taken one look at that psych manual and exploded…not because there was anything in it of what Defense had done, but possibly because he knew exactly what Kyle was, and where he had been, if not where he was now.
“Sera?” Florian asked. The real world. The immediate threat.
“We’ve got to take measures to defend Reseune,” she said. “We can’t assume we’re safe from physical attack. And not just me. Everybody. The labs. Everything. We don’t know how crazy things can get.”
“Good,” Florian said, the way he’d used to say when they’d laid plans in the storm shelters. “That’s good.”
They went up to her office then. They called in Catlin, and Wes and Marco, and they said maybe they should talk to green barracks as well as the ReseuneSec senior officers–who weren’t happy about having a very young azi like Rafael down there in charge of them; but, Catlin said, after Wes and Marco, old green barracks instructors, had gone down and explained there was a danger, and that Rafael BR was under expert advice and orders, then ReseuneSec’s seniors had been a lot happier.