“Act now,” I said. “That’s my vote.”
Jolinda turned to Shannon. “You think this has a decent chance of working?”
“I make no promises, but yeah, I do think it might work.”
Jolinda nodded once. “All right. I say yes.”
And: “Yes,” Clarence said.
Trevor nodded. “Yes.”
No one asked Jenny or Rebecca to weigh in: they weren’t Taus. But they made no objection. “We go, then,” Shannon said.
She got on her walkie-talkie, summoning local Taus to the house for a briefing. The only thing that might hinder us now was an end of the blackout, which would put the Het detail back in contact with their leaders and probably back in motion—which was why Trevor let out an anguished “Oh, shit!” when the lights flickered on.
Followed by the pinging and chiming of multiple phones. I took mine out of my pocket. Signal strength was at two bars, and the incoming call was from Amanda Mehta in California.
Chapter 21
People grabbed their phones and walked in different directions. I took mine into Shannon Handy’s kitchen.
The link was dicey. I plugged in an earbud for privacy and so I could pay attention to the screen, since Amanda was using her standard video service. Her voice came through reasonably well, but the video was a cascade of Picasso distortions and checkerboard monstrosities. “We have to talk fast,” she said. “Coverage east of the Mississippi is still sporadic and we could lose it at any time.”
Then, momentarily, an image froze on the screen: Amanda with a wisp of hair spanning the bridge of her nose, black eyeshadow framing each eye in a paisley shape she called a boteh. I was helplessly reminded of the way she had looked the night we first met, the night she took me up to the roof of the tranche house in Toronto to smoke weed and listen to the sounds of the city. On that night I had fallen in love with her, and she with me, but with this difference: I was not her first Tau lover, but she was mine. She had known that, and she had gently and sweetly walked (and fucked) me through the process of learning to distinguish my love for her from my burgeoning love for my Affinity. The years since then had forged a connection between us, fragile but still more substantial than this image of her, which shattered into noise even as I was gazing at it.
I began by laying out the situation here in Schuyler. I told her Jenny was with us but that a group of Hets had kidnapped Geddy for the purpose of threatening her into silence. I explained that Jenny was now unwilling to cooperate with our release of the incriminating video, but she would likely change her mind if we got Geddy back, and I said Trev and some local Taus had cooked up a plan to recover him.
“You can’t do that,” she said.
Another image of her froze in place (her lips in a querulous frown, as if she had caught sight of something troubling on the periphery of her vision), provoking another memory: the way she looked when she talked about what she called my “unfortunate tendency” to form relationships outside my Affinity. There was never any real disappointment or disapproval in that look, just an acknowledgment of a problem that couldn’t be ignored or dismissed. As if to say, We’re Tau, but none of us is perfect; each of us carries some burden of veniality or naiveté; this is Adam’s. As if to say, Adam hasn’t quite learned how to love us exclusively.
“Things are more complicated than you can imagine,” she said. “We’re starting to get reports from every country with a Tau sodality—physical attacks on tranches all over the world. Some of it is probably random. There are plenty of people out there with grudges against the Affinities. But some of it looks targeted. We think Het’s taking advantage of the opportunity to do us some strategic damage. But it would be very hard to prove that, and any kind of clumsy retaliation will just make us look like the bad guys, reckless and violent. Which plays into their hands. Which is maybe the whole point. So, no—Damian and I have been in touch with every sodality rep who can take a call, and the consensus is, we have to stand pat until we can organize a coordinated response. This is critically important. You absolutely cannot go vigilante with an armed tranche right now.”
I thought of Geddy, locked in a room in some moldering farmhouse. He would be terrified. But he would also believe we were working to get him back. He would trust us to do that, without question. “We’re talking about my brother here.”
“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.