Gredel called Lamey on her phone. He was amused by their dilemma and said he’d be there soon.
Gredel made coffee while they waited, and served it in the paper-thin cups.
“So tell me about Lamey,” Caro said.
Gredel told her about Lamey’s business. “He’s linked, you know? He knows people, and he moves stuff around. From the port, from other places. Makes it available to people at good prices. When people can’t get loans, he loans them money.”
“Aren’t the clans’ patrons supposed to do that?”
“Sometimes they will. But, you know, those mid-level clans, they’re in a lot of businesses themselves, or their friends and allies are. So they’re not going to loan money for someone to go into competition with them. And once the new businesses start, they have to be protected you know, against the people who are already in that business, so Lamey and his people do that too.”
“It’s the Peers who are supposed to protect people,” Caro said.
“Caro,” Gredel said, “you’re the first Peer I’ve ever seen outside of a video. Peers don’t come to places like the Fabs.”
Caro gave a cynical grin. “So Lamey just doesgood things, right? He’s never hurt anybody, he just helps people.”
Gredel hesitated. They were entering an area she tried not to think about. She thought about the boy Moseley, the dreadful dull squelching thud as Lamey’s boot went into him. The way her own head rang after Lamey slapped her that time.
“Sure,” she said finally, “he’s hurt people. People who stole from him, mostly. But he’s really not bad,” she added quickly. “He’s not one of the violent ones, he’ssmart. He uses his intelligence.”
“Uh-huh,” Caro said. “So has he used his…intelligenceon you?”
Gredel felt herself flush. “A few times,” she said quickly. “He’s got a temper. But he’s always sweet when he cools down, and buys me things.”
“Uh-huh,” Caro said.
Gredel tried not to bristle at Caro’s attitude. Hitting was what boyfriendsdid. It was normal. The point was whether they felt sorry afterward.
“Do you love him?” Caro asked.
Gredel hesitated again. “Maybe,” she said.
“I hope at least he’s good in bed.”
Gredel shrugged. “He’s all right.” Sex seemed to be expected of her, because she was thought to be beautiful and because she went with older boys who had money. It had never been as pleasurable as she’d been led to expect, but was nevertheless pleasurable enough so she didn’t want to quit.
“Lamey’s too young to be good in bed,” Caro declared. “You need an older man to show you what sex is really about.” Her eyes sparkled and she gave a diabolical giggle. “Like my Sergei. He was really the best! He showed meeverything about sex.”
Gredel blinked. “Who was Sergei?”
“Jake Biswas’s wife’s sister was married to Sergei. We were always sneaking away to be together. That’s what all the fighting in the family was about. That’s why I had to move to Maranic Town.”
“How much older was he?”
“In his forties somewhere.”
Black, instant hatred descended on Gredel. She could have torn Sergei to ribbons with her nails, with her teeth. “That’s sick,” she said. “That man is disgusting.”
Caro gave a cynical laugh. “I wouldn’t talk if I were you,” she said. “How old is Lamey? What kind of scenes doeshe get you into?”
Gredel felt as if Caro’s words had slapped her across the face. Caro gave her a smirk.
“Right,” she said. “We’re models of stability and mental health, we are.”
Gredel decided to change the subject. “This is lovely,” she said, and held up the cup.
Caro looked at it without expression. “I inherited that set. That’s the Sula family badge, those three crescents.”
“What do they mean?”
“They mean three crescents. If they mean any more than that, nobody told me.”
Caro’s mood had sweetened by the time Lamey turned up. She thanked him for taking her home the previous night, and took them both to a restaurant so exclusive that Caro had to give a thumbprint in order to enter. There were no real dinners on the menu, just a variety of small plates that everyone at the table shared. Gredel had never heard of some of the ingredients. Some of the dishes were wonderful, some weren’t. Some were simply incomprehensible.
Caro and Lamey got along well, to Gredel’s relief. Caro filled the air with vivacious talk, and Lamey joked and deferred to her. Toward the end of the meal he reached into his pocket, and Gredel’s nerves tingled when she saw the med injector.
“Panda asked me if you wanted any more of the endorphin,” Lamey said.
“I don’t have any money, remember?” Caro said.
Lamey gave an elaborate shrug. “I’ll put it on your tab.”
Don’t,Gredel wanted to shout.
But Caro gave a pleased, catlike smile and reached for the injector in Lamey’s hand.
Gredel and Caro spent a lot of time together after that. Partly because Lamey wanted it, but also because Gredel found that she liked Caro, and liked learning from her. She studied how Caro dressed, how she talked, how she moved. And Caro enjoyed dressing Gredel up like one of her dolls, and teaching her to walk and talk as if she were Lady Margaux, the sister of a Peer. Gredel worked on her accent till her speech was a letter-perfect imitation of Caro’s. Caro couldn’t do voices the way Gredel could, and the Earthgirl voice always made Caro laugh.
Gredel was learning the things that might get her out of the Fabs.
Caro enjoyed teaching her. Maybe, Gredel thought, this was because Caro didn’t have much to do. She’d left school, because she was a Peer and would get into the academy whether she had good marks or not, and she didn’t seem to have any friends in Maranic Town. Sometimes friends from Blue Lakes came to visit her—usually a pack of girls all at once—but all their talk was about people and events in their school, and Gredel could tell that Caro got bored with that fast.
“I wish Sergei would call,” Caro said. But he never did. And Caro refused to call him. “It’s his move, not mine,” she said, her eyes turning hard.
Caro got bored easily. And that was dangerous, because when Caro got bored she wanted to change the music. Sometimes that not only meant shopping or going to a club, but drinking a couple bottles of wine or a bottle of brandy, or firing things into her carotid from the med injector. It was the endorphins she liked best, though.
The drugs weren’t illegal, but the supply was controlled in various ways, and they were expensive. The black market provided pharmaceuticals at more reasonable prices, and without a paper or money trail. The drugs the linkboys sold weren’t just for fun, either: Nelda got Gredel black market antivirals when she was sick, and fast-healers once when she broke her leg, and saved herself the expense of supporting a doctor and a pharmacy.
When Caro changed the music, she became a spiky, half-feral creature, a tangled ligature of taut-strung nerves and overpowering impulse. She would careen from one scene to the next, from party to club to bar, having a frenzied good time one minute, spitting out vicious insults at perfect strangers the next.
At the first of the month, Gredel urged Caro to pay Lamey what she owed him. Caro just shrugged, but Gredel insisted. “This isn’t like the debts you run up at the boutique,” she told her.
Caro gave Gredel a narrow-eyed look that made her nervous, because she recognized it as the prelude to fury. “What do you mean?”
“When you don’t pay Lamey, things happen.”
“Like what.” Contemptuously.
“Like…” Gredel hesitated. “Like what happened to Moseley.”
Her stomach turned over at the memory. “Moseley ran a couple of Lamey’s stores, you know, where he sells the stuff he gets. And Lamey found out that Moseley was skimming the profits…” She remembered the way Lamey screamed at Moseley, the way his boys held Moseley while Lamey smashed him in the face and body. The way Lamey kept kicking him even after Moseley fell unconscious to the floor. And the sound of his thudding boots.