Bella cried afterward and talked about Sharifi.
Li asked herself what else she’d expected when Bella showed up on her doorstep, what she’d imagined Bella saw in her besides the echo of the other woman. Neither the questions nor their too-obvious answers made her feel any better.
“Hannah was a construct herself,” Bella said. “Not part construct, like you. All construct.”
Li nodded, wondering if Bella knew enough about UN politics to feel the weight of the difference between the two things, to know what mandatory registration meant and what went with the red slash across Sharifi’s passport cover.
“She was the first person who talked to me, who understood what it was like to be here, alone. To have no one. She went through all that to get where she was. Gave up her sisters, her friends, her world. Everything. You can’t imagine how hard that is.”
Li said nothing, just lay stroking Bella’s hair, trying to get over feeling ashamed of herself. As she listened to Bella’s memories of Sharifi, she saw that she’d been fooling herself all along. All Bella remembered were the small ordinary things that lovers always remember. And none of that mattered now. Not to Nguyen or Korchow. Not to Li herself. Bella was the only one of them for whom Sharifi was still alive—maybe the only one for whom Sharifi had ever been alive. And in that strangest of moments, Li thought of Cohen and felt even worse.
“It’s not knowing that’s so hard,” Bella said in a voice that still threatened tears. “If I knew what happened to her. If I knew why. That it was politics. Or money. Or anything.”
“What does it matter why?”
“Because,” Bella said, suddenly wracked with sobs, “because I don’t want her to have died trying to help me.”
After that, there was no more talking. Bella cried herself to sleep. Li lay awake far into the night, holding her frail shoulders, listening to her call out the dead woman’s name in her dreams.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
“Hello, Catherine.”
Li jerked awake to find Bella sitting across the room in her only chair, fully dressed, legs crossed, smoke from one of Li’s cigarettes curling lazily around her head.
“Forgive the familiarity, Major, but I feel I know you too well for titles. You don’t mind my calling you Catherine, do you? Or would you prefer Caitlyn?”
The voice had none of Bella’s nervous edge, and the hand holding the cigarette moved with a slightly jerky quality, as if it were being pulled by strings. Bella was wired for a shunt, and someone was along for the ride. A bodysnatcher.
Li shouldn’t have been as rattled by it as she was. Of course Bella was wired. Probably more subtly and pervasively than Li herself. Still, it wasn’t quite the morning-after breakfast-in-bed scene she’d imagined. She sat up and groped for her clothes, lost somewhere in the tangle at the foot of the bed. Whoever or whatever had gotten hold of Bella, Li wanted to be dressed before she talked to it.
“Nice tattoo,” the snatcher said while she pulled her shirt over her head.
“Fuck off.”
But Bella’s voice kept talking to her. “You ought to be more careful. You can catch things in tattoo parlors.”
“Is that a threat?”
“But then you don’t worry much about catching things, do you?”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that it’s always nice to see a XenoGen construct. I feel a certain familial affection for you. Bella’s geneset, for instance”—Bella’s hand gestured at her own body—“is at least 40 percent prebreakaway. Without you she would never have been possible. So unfortunate that the UN lacked the vision to carry that work to its logical conclusion.”
Li stared at Bella’s face, looked for some clue beneath it to confirm her sudden suspicion. “Korchow?”
He smiled a cold smile that had nothing of Bella in it at all. “Clever girl.”
“Leave Bella out of this, Korchow. She has nothing to do with it.”
“She has everything to do with it. The choices you make here affect the patrimony of every construct in UN space and beyond it. If you honor what you are—and I very much hope you will—it all changes. If you turn aside and pass by, nothing changes.”
“Stop talking in riddles, Korchow. What do you want?”
“Don’t you know?” Bella’s eyes widened in amusement. “Don’t you even suspect?”
“I can’t give you Sharifi’s dataset,” Li said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even have the thing. As far as I know, she ripped it up and flushed it into orbit.”
“It’s not about the dataset, Major. It’s gone beyond that.” Bella’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “Nguyen really doesn’t tell you anything, does she? Is it you she doubts? Or the AI? I wonder. Well. What I want is simple. I want to run Sharifi’s experiment again. Or rather, I want you to run it for me.”
Li stared at him.
“It’s not all that complicated. I need three things to pull it off.” He ticked the items off on Bella’s slender fingers as he named them. “Item one, a glory hole. Item two, the intraface. Item three, an AI-human team to run the intraface.” He looked up at Li as if he expected an answer, but she had nothing to say. “It took Sharifi years, and a lot of legally questionable maneuvering to put these three necessities together. However, a series of fortuitous coincidences have placed me in a position to, shall we say, stand on her shoulders? I already have half the intraface—the wetware, in fact, which you were so kind as to extract for me.”
Li caught her breath.
“Surely you suspected our pretty friend here,” Korchow said. “Bella has been so useful in so many ways. A credit to her Syndicate. In any case, I have the wetware. I also have the glory hole Sharifi found… at least until that idiot Haas starts tampering with it. And”—he smiled triumphantly—“I have you.”
“So I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“Far from it. You would see it yourself—would have seen it long ago—if you hadn’t been lying to the humans so long that you yourself have become confused about who you are. The hardware we have was grown for Sharifi. It would take months, years possibly, to redesign it for someone else. But we don’t have to do that, do we? Because we still have Sharifi.” He gestured toward Li. “She’s sitting right in front of me.”
“I’m not Sharifi,” Li said.
“To the intraface you are. None of the cosmetic surgery and camouflage splices, nothing that chop-shop hack did to you changed that.”
Li’s insides turned over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ll return to that later,” Korchow said evasively. “In the meantime, you will steal the intraface operating program—software you’ve already stolen once on Nguyen’s orders. Surprised? What did you think you were doing at Metz? Then we will do one final run of Sharifi’s live field experiment. Just to answer a few unresolved questions.”
Bella’s fingers teased a cigarette out of the pack Li had left on the table and lit it. To Li’s adrenaline-honed senses, the crackling tobacco sounded loud as gunfire.
“Of course, you will have to undergo a minor surgical procedure,” Korchow said. “But we needn’t worry over details.”
“I won’t do it,” Li said.
“Ah, but you will. And let me tell you something more, Major.” Korchow leaned forward confidingly. “I continue to have faith in you. I believe you will help us of your own free will. Because it is what history demands of you. And though you may resent me now, you’ll thank me for helping you to see it. I’m quite, quite sure of that.”