She looked into the bright front window of the Molly as she passed by, but there was no sign Mirce had ever been there.
Korchow was livid. “What exactly did you think you were doing out there?” he asked in a voice that would have chilled any sensible person to the bone.
“None of your business,” Li said, and pushed past him.
“I think it is.” He followed her into the back corridor. “It’s my business when you endanger this mission. It’s my business when you disappear to do who knows what, and even Cohen can’t find you. And it’s most certainly my business when you go to a political bar and meet with a known IRA operative and miner’s union rep.”
Li turned on him. “You had me tagged?”
“Naturally. And now that that’s clear, why don’t you tell me exactly what you told Perkins. What? Not feeling talkative? You found plenty to talk to her about back in the bar.”
“Fuck off, Korchow.”
“I’ll find out whether you tell me or not,” he said, and she saw his eyes flick toward her blinking status light.
“I don’t think so,” she said, and shouldered past him.
He grabbed her arm. Li whirled around, locked her left hand on to his throat, slammed him into the wall hard enough to rattle the panel bolts, and held him there while he gasped for breath.
“I’ll do your job for you,” she said to his white, drawn face. “But you don’t own me. Don’t even start to think that.”
She let him drop and turned down the hall toward the open doorway of her room. “We’re moving up the start date,” Korchow called after her. “We’re going tomorrow.”
But Li was no longer listening. She was staring into her room with a sinking sense of déjà vu—at Bella sitting on the bed waiting for her.
“I need to talk to you,” Bella said, holding out a cube Li recognized as a UNSC air-traffic recorder. “I need to read this.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From Ramirez.”
“What, he just gave it to you out of the goodness of his heart?”
Bella looked away.
“Oh, Christ,” Li said. “Him too?”
“What do you care?”
Li frowned, but she took the datacube from Bella and slotted it into her portable.
It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. Then she saw it. Automated flight logs for the station-to-surface shuttles. The same ones she and McCuen had both looked at fifty times over. But when she compared them to the duplicates in her hard memory, she saw that the digital signature of this file was different. Someone had altered the station logs. They’d done a good job of it, but they hadn’t bothered to change the off-grid planetary-transport control recorders. They’d probably figured no one would care enough to check them.
But Bella had cared enough. Bella had cared more than anyone else on the planet, Li included.
Li found the key entry in the early predawn hours of the twenty-third. A single shuttle trip. A shuttle that came back up empty in time to carry down a twenty-four-man crew at the normal start of first shift. A shuttle that left Hannah Sharifi on the surface during the heart of the graveyard shift when the landing platforms and headframe offices would have been at their emptiest. Li accessed the passenger information, and there they were, Sharifi’s companions on her last trip into the mine. Jan Voyt and Bella. And no one else.
Voyt, Bella, and Sharifi had gone down together. And only Bella had come back.
“The file must have been tampered with,” Bella said when Li showed it to her.
“I don’t think so. Look at the Fuhrman count.”
“It’s altered. Any computer can be outsmarted.”
“Look at the file yourself, if you want. I think it’s clean.”
Bella opened her mouth as if to say something, then sat down heavily on the bed. Li closed the datacube and carefully erased the tracks she had laid while she opened and read it. No reason for Korchow to know about it. Or anyone else for that matter.
“Are you all right?” she asked when she was finished, but Bella gave no sign of hearing. When Li touched her shoulder, she flinched as if she’d been burned. “Would knowing who did it really change anything?” Li asked.
The brilliant eyes stared up at her, and there was that black, bottomless emptiness that Li had seen in them from the beginning. She had a sudden vision of Bella lying across Haas’s desk, of the blank, cold, catatonic stare of her eyes under the loop shunt.
“Knowing who did it would change everything,” Bella said finally. She stood up and smoothed her dress over her hips. Something glittered at her neck with the movement. A pendant. A pendant made of a single sliver of Bose-Einstein condensate.
Li stared, everything else forgotten. “Where did you get that?” she asked.
Bella moved her hand to cover the pendant in the same half-embarrassed, half-protective gesture Li had seen the cleaning girl in the Helena airport use. Then she said what Li had known beyond a doubt she would say: “Hannah gave it to me.”
“When?” Li said. “When did Hannah give it to you?”
“The night before she died,” Bella answered, her voice no more than a whisper.
“Before or after she sent the message from Haas’s quarters?”
“She didn’t send—” Bella stopped, looked at Li for a long moment, then sighed. “After she sent it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before, Bella?”
“Because she asked me not to. Because it was a secret. Hannah’s secret.”
“That secret may have killed her.”
Bella jerked her head back as if Li had slapped her. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Who was the message to, Bella? Who did she talk to in Freetown? What did she tell them?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even listen. I didn’t want to know.”
“Because if you’d known, Haas would have found out?”
“Haas, Korchow. What does it matter who? I couldn’t risk knowing.”
Li laughed softly and rubbed at her sore shoulder.
“You don’t understand,” Bella said, her voice harsh, urgent. “The contract, all that… it was secondary. She asked me to help her. She came to me. She said she needed me, that I was the only one she could trust. That it was the most important thing she would ever do, the most important thing either of us would ever do, but that it had to be our secret. I did it for her.”
A gust of wind buffeted the flophouse, and the big sheet of viruflex that sealed the window snapped and billowed like a ship’s sail. Bella jumped, trembling. “Why don’t you believe me?” she whispered.
“I do believe you,” Li said. “I do. I just… I don’t know what it means.”
Li had put a hand on Bella’s shoulder while they talked, and now Bella turned into her arms and buried her head in the hollow of her neck. Li started to pull away, then realized the other woman was crying. She put her arms around her, reluctantly, and found herself patting Bella’s fine-boned shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Bella said, “it’s just…”
“No, I’m sorry,” Li said. “It’s none of my business what you do. You didn’t promise me anything.”
“I would, though.” Bella looked up at her. The violet eyes had cleared, though there were still tears hanging on her eyelashes. Bella reached a pale finger up and touched Li’s mouth, just where Cohen had touched her. “What I said about… you and Hannah. I was just angry.”
Oh, Christ, Li thought. It’s time to leave. Now. So why did she feel like her feet were bolted to the floor?