“Your stepbrother. Not even a blood relative.”
I wondered if it was possible that the bad connection had fucked up our Tau telepathy. “I grew up with him, Amanda.”
“I know. But, Adam, we all grew up with somebody.”
The camera captured an image of her bare right arm as she turned in her chair. A Chinese dragon lived between the dimple of her elbow and the ball of her shoulder, green-scaled and with black ophidian eyes, coiled around what could have been a letter X but was in fact a Phoenician tau. A declaration of fealty, carved in the clay of her body.
The kitchen ceiling light flickered. “We can do this,” I said. “We can do it cleanly. And with Jenny’s cooperation we can still release the video.”
“No—Jenny’s cooperation doesn’t matter anymore.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You copied the video to us before the blackout. We can release it as soon as we have reliable access to media, with or without her consent.”
“But it won’t work if Jenny doesn’t back it up. People will say it’s CGI. Nobody trusts raw video without corroboration.”
“Jenny’s not the only one Aaron pissed off. We’ve been in contact with his most recent ex-girlfriend, and she gave us a signed affidavit about his treatment of her. It’s all the corroboration we need. We can take it public anytime.”
But no one had told me that. The screen offered one more frozen image, Amanda with her head half turned, the bodeh curving from her left eye like a crow’s wing, and I thought of the night we had come back from Vancouver, her arm in a sling and her bullet wound still fretting her, how she had sat with me and Trevor in the attic room of the tranche house and confessed that she was going to California with Damian, how at the end of that confession she had turned to kiss Trevor and then leaned the other way to kiss me, long kisses fraught with meaning, three breaths conjoined.
Her voice began to break up. “Adam, are we clear on this? You absolutely cannot go after Geddy. We have complete consensus at the sodality level. Do you need Damian to confirm that? He’s in the next room talking to Europe, but I can fetch him if I have to.”
“No.” What would be the point?
“So it’s agreed?”
I said, “Agreed.”
Long pause. No image now, just a confetti of random pixels and a background noise that sounded like ghosts conversing in a language of sparks and echoes.
“Are you sure?”
Rrr you sssure?
“Of course I am.”
“Because it sounds like—”
Bekkkuz it sssouns lie-kkkkk—
Then the audio died, the signal bars on the display drained to zero, and the kitchen light went dark again.
* * *
I went back to the living room, where everyone was staring at dead phones. Trevor looked at me expectantly. I bought a moment by asking him who he had been talking to.
“Brecker,” he said, “at the hospital.” One of the Tau security guys who had been run off the road shortly before the blackout. “Everybody’s stitched and bandaged, but I don’t think they’ll be of much use to us in the short term.”
“Okay.”
“So—you were talking to Damian?”
“Amanda,” I said.
“And?”
“I made her aware of the situation regarding Geddy. I told her we’re working on a plan to get him back.”
“And?”
For the last eight months I had worked for Tau as a diplomatic liaison, and I had learned how to deploy a strategic lie. But lying to a tranchemate was different. Trev was giving me a puzzled look, which I met and held, because eye contact mattered: avoiding eye contact was a liar’s tell. But I felt like I was staring, and I had to remind myself to blink.
I said, “She wants us to go ahead and get Geddy back.”
He cocked his head as if he had heard a distant but ominous sound. Then he shrugged and smiled. “All right. Let’s get it done.”
CHAPTER 22
Shannon’s house was suddenly crowded with local Taus, and over the course of the next couple of hours we finalized the details of the plan to retrieve Geddy. It had a reasonable chance of succeeding, I thought, but we needed time to assemble resources, and it was already well past midnight. Best to come at them at dawn, Shannon suggested. Which gave us three or four hours to place people and supplies and make the necessary preparations.
Assuming the telecom system didn’t reboot during that time. A word from Damian or Amanda to Trevor was all it would take to stop the project in its tracks.
Shannon added more wood to the stove as the night progressed. A drizzling rain set in, fogging windows and slicking the dark streets. Rain would make everything more difficult. But we were committed now, and we told ourselves it didn’t matter. Trevor moved around Shannon’s living room briefing Taus, rehearsing them in their roles, making sure everyone knew his or her task and was suited for it. It was a kind of collaborative choreography, the genius of the Affinities manifesting itself in this apparently random collation of ordinary people: I felt it, and Trevor felt it, too. He sat with me for a few minutes as we waited for one of Shannon’s tranchemates to come back with a car. A gust of wind threw rain against the window like a handful of pebbles, and he said, “You know what this reminds me of? That time way back, not long after you joined the tranche, when Mouse was having trouble with her crazy ex.”
Mouse, right. Mouse had moved west a few years ago. She lived in Calgary now, working as an accountant for a mostly-Tau construction firm. But she kept in touch, called the tranche house every Christmas and always made a point of speaking with Trev and me. “We were amateurs,” I said. “It was lucky we didn’t get hurt. Worse.”
“We were learning what it means to be a Tau, taking risks we wouldn’t take for a stranger. But yeah, we’re better at it now. Still the same impulse, though, right? The way you feel when someone tries to hurt the people you love.”
“Right.”
“Except this time it’s not a jealous ex with a baseball bat, it’s a bunch of Hets who want to take down our entire Affinity. We’re not protecting one guy, we’re protecting Tau as a way of life.”
I nodded.
“So it’s not about Geddy, and it’s not about Jenny. It’s about all of us. We need to keep that in mind.”
He was looking hard at me again.
“Right,” I said.
“Okay. So you’re up for this?”
“I’m up for it.”
“Good.” He grinned. “Because I think that’s our ride pulling up at the curb.”
* * *
The car, supplied by one of Shannon’s tranchemates, was a Toyota sedan that had seen twelve winters; its paint was blistered and the interior smelled like tobacco smoke and stale Doritos. But its motor was fully functional, and it was a good choice, given what we had in mind for it. I volunteered to drive.
My passengers were three local Taus, and they were mostly quiet. We drove through the north end of Schuyler toward the highway, and the town was eerie in the misting rain, streets deserted, dawn just beginning to reveal a sky of tumbling clouds. The car’s radio picked up the analog radio station that had been our only source of news since the blackout, and the news this morning was mixed and mostly speculative. Something terrible had happened in Mumbai, and there were rumors of pitched battles in Karachi and Islamabad. Unnamed experts claimed that a cyberattack aimed at Indian military systems had spread catastrophically and globally, which had triggered retaliatory responses from major players: the unleashing of dozens of varieties of military malware targeting infrastructure nodes in virtually every industrialized nation on the surface of the earth. But electrical power had lately been restored to the west coast of the United States and to some urban areas in the east, and telecom providers were slowly and erratically coming back on line. Which was good news for the world, but maybe not for me—or Geddy.