And Cohen had become a friend more or less without her noticing it. Only now, in the aftermath of Metz, had she seen just how important it was not to have him disappoint her.
She paid her bill on-line and nodded to the waiter, whose glazed expression suggested he was checking his tip. She crossed the Zócalo and caught the crosstown to Avenida Cinco de Mayo.
She stepped off it into a huge, pressing, gawking crowd.
Tourists, mostly, she realized. And they were staring at a two-meter-tall woman with full-body tattoos and cat’s teeth.
Li didn’t know the model’s name, but she recognized her from the fashion spins. A street celeb, the heartbeat of Ring-side hip. Flash today, gone by simulated sunset.
She sprawled across a blood-colored neodeco sofa, six and a half feet of sinuous flesh, vamping to the camera as single-mindedly as if there were no crowd gaping at her from behind the lights and lenses. But Li barely noticed. All she saw was the man standing over her.
Taller than the model, he hovered just out of the camera’s viewfield. One hundred plus kilos of genesculpted muscle rippled under his expensive suit—as well as the discreet, angular bulk of a Moen-Pfizer vest. A commline sprouted from his cranial jack and ran down beneath his collar. The sunglasses were purely cosmetic: camouflage for the implanted optics that were scanning the crowd in a preprogrammed surveillance pattern.
Hired muscle. The expensive kind. And an ex-Peacekeeper too, most likely. Plenty of washed-up line soldiers ended up turning their skills and wire jobs to profit in private security.
The scanning eyes snagged on Li and stopped, breaking pattern. Viruflex lenses depolarized, revealing flat pupils within a gunmetal gray ring of military-application optical implants. The guard flicked back his jacket with one hand, giving Li a momentary glimpse of the nickel-plated pulse pistol tucked into his belt. A pretty thing, it caught the sunlight and sparkled, dazzling her.
Cohen lived in the Zona Angel, an immaculately tended neighborhood of immense town houses overlooking the quietest streets money could buy. The houses here had names, not numbers, and the streets didn’t appear on any public-access database. Li usually dialed in; on foot she had to backtrack twice before she found it.
There was no one on the street to ask for directions; the Zona Angel was a machine enclave, a tax haven where AIs and the few commercially active transhumans kept homes to establish Ring-side residence.
The wide white sidewalks were quiet between tidy flower beds, and half the houses were probably empty behind their brightly painted shutters.
She started, heart pounding, when a pair of schoolchildren appeared around a corner with their harried-looking nanny in tow. “Excuse me,” she said, but the woman hurried past, eyes on the ground, pulse beating nervously at the base of her neck.
Li lifted her hand to look at the faint tracery of ceramsteel under the flesh. It wasn’t the wire job that had scared the woman, though; it was Li herself. Even her uniform couldn’t dispel the suspicion that a construct in this kind of neighborhood meant trouble. She thought back to her last Ring-side posting. Had things gotten worse since then? Or had her skin just gotten thinner?
She recognized Cohen’s house as soon as she turned the corner. It covered a full city block. Every stone had been magboosted through the Charles de Gaulle Spaceport just before the Embargo. The front doors were twice Li’s height, and as she set her foot on the top step they opened noiselessly, letting out a draft of cool fragrant shadowy air.
She stepped into a long marble-paved hall hung with oil paintings that even she recognized. A guard stopped her, and she held her arms above her head to be frisked.
He searched her professionally, impersonally. And he found everything—which was in itself impressive. Her Corps-issue Viper. Her Beretta. A ceramic-alloy butterfly knife she’d picked up off a Syndicate soldier during the war. And finally the blue box she’d brought with her just in case she ran into the hijacker again.
He handed back the guns and the knife. They only showed up in streamspace because they happened to be on Li’s inert body back on AMC station; the health and safety protocols, and Cohen’s own private security, made them useless. He kept the blue box, though. That kind of weapon never got anywhere near an Emergent who could afford to hire competent bodyguards.
He had searched her without any visible expression crossing his face, except for a momentary flicker of admiration at the butterfly knife. When he finished, he relaxed slightly and grinned. “Hey, Major. Good to see ya.”
“You too, Momo.” Li held out her hand, and they executed an intricate mock-secret infantryman’s handshake. “Where’s Jimmy?”
“Vacation.” Momo shrugged. “Lazy bum.”
“Yeah, well. Tell him I asked. Is Cohen in back?”
“You know the way.”
Cohen was waiting in his study, a bright sunlit room decorated with elegantly framed portraits of somebody else’s ancestors. Glass-paned doors opened onto a walled garden. Antiques scented the air with the smell of old hardwood and beeswax furniture polish.
The whole room lived, breathed. It gave off a fine aromatic dust: wool from the Persian carpets; veneer from the old paintings; goose feathers and horsehair from the furniture. And the building itself shed wood particles, plaster, cool dry limestone dust. It threw off trace like a live thing. It got inside you, like Cohen himself, charming, intoxicating, until you couldn’t tell where it began and you ended.
He sat on a low couch near one of the open doors. He had a book in his hand, an old hardcover, the gilt letters flaking from its cracked spine. He was shunting through Roland today, wearing a summer suit the color of the new-mown hay in the Stubbs portrait of Eclipse that hung behind him. The afternoon sun flashed on swirling dust motes, caught the gold of Roland’s eyes, brushed the whole scene with rich earthy color.
“Catherine,” he said. He jumped up, kissed her on the cheek, took her hand, and sat her down on the sofa next to him. “Back on Compson’s, are we? How bad is it?”
She made a face. He hadn’t let go of her hand, and it was too late now to pull it away without looking like she was trying to make a point. His fingers felt hot and dry and clean against her skin—or maybe her own hand was just clammy.
“I confess I was surprised you accepted the assignment.”
“Didn’t have much choice.”
“Yes.” He smiled more broadly. “Helen has a real genius for that sort of thing. I can just imagine how she presented it. How graciously she must have thrown you a life preserver after she finished torpedoing your career.”
Li’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know Nguyen was involved?”
“Oh, you know nosy little me. Grapes?” He offered a shallow bowl with several dusty green bunches.
She extricated her hand from his and pulled a grape off the stem. She put it in her mouth and chewed cautiously.
It turned out that grapes didn’t taste much like grape at all. They had tough, acrid skin. And they popped between her teeth, sending out a startling burst of juicy pulp with sharp woody-tasting things embedded in it.
“Watch out for the seeds,” Cohen said, as she choked on one. He eyed her intently, evidently expecting some sort of comment.
“They’re, um, good,” she said, nodding.
“You’re an abysmal liar.”