“Counselor?” he prodded.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I just don’t have anything to say about that.”
“What am I missing?”
“Me, telling you just now that I have nothing to say. I have to end this conversation now. Terminate connection.”
His image blinked out in mid-protest.
I leaned forward, buried my face in my hands, and tried not to think of all the years I’d spent fearing a sudden knock on my door, a public snatch by extraterrestrial bounty hunters, a negative decision in some Confederate extradition court, the slow death of a trial before some interspecies court of law. I tried not to think of all the years I’d lived with a noose around my neck, about how that had all been a lie, and how the AIsource had just robbed me of even the chance to think any of it mattered.
There was a crystal statue on the table beside the chair where I sat. I don’t know what it was supposed to represent. It was like a vertical length of knotted string, rendered in fine cut glass and tinted a shade of purple that reflected every light source in the suite. It was beautiful, in its way, and typical of objects like it, in that it brought art into the room without also delivering any context or meaning. I found myself hating it. The rage boiled over. I grabbed it and hurled it, with all the strength I could muster, against the opposite wall. I don’t know what it was made of, but it didn’t so much shatter as disintegrate, the shards becoming bright, flaming comets that vanished before hitting anything else.
Typical. I couldn’t even get any goddamned satisfaction out of that.
I wanted nothing more than to barricade myself in the bathroom and scream until the mood went away out of sheer exhaustion, but that was not an option. So I stood up and, pounding heart and all, stormed from the room, knowing I was far too angry to be with people right now but hoping for an opportunity to lacerate somebody with my tongue, before death intruded and I had to be Counselor Andrea Cort again.
An explosion of merriment from the table on the other end of the parlor, aftermath of some unknown witticism, greeted me as I stormed from the suite, in no mood to share the joke. I made unwilling eye contact with Oscin, who I caught in mid-laugh. He was too good to let his smile falter when he read my expression, but he did register that something was wrong.
I looked away and went to the bar, where that silly quiff Colette persisted in sparkling with hateful enthusiasm. The bands of light continued to strobe across her scarlet hair in waves, changing color with each passage in a pattern that I now recognized as linked to soft background music behind her. “Did your conference go well, ma’am?”
“I’m not your ma’am. I need another of those blue drinks you gave me before.”
Her smile was bright, white, and in my face. “That particular liqueur is for before dinner, Counselor. Would you prefer me to recommend—”
“No, I don’t want you to recommend. I want what I had before.”
The customer’s always right, even if her tone of voice is pure poison. Her friendliness not wavering a centimeter, Colette reached under the bar and produced the blue stuff, filling another glass to the rim. I took it from her and swallowed it in one gulp, feeling it hit my system with the force of a body check to the gut. I’d only managed a sip or two of the previous one. Another like this and I wouldn’t know if my insides were solid, liquid, or a gas. Maybe I could drink enough to achieve the same effect as a Claw of God; it would certainly make a great name for a novelty cocktail.
“Can I help you with anything else?” she asked.
I repressed a burp. “No.”
“Thank you, then,” she said. “It’s been a pleasure serving you.”
And that was just one polite gesture too many. “What’s so goddamned pleasurable about it? I was a surly bitch to you, just now. Isn’t a little part of you tempted to tell me to take a hop?”
She infuriated me with an amused chuckle. “You’re not the only stressed VIP I’ve served, Counselor. If I have to deal with any of you at a bad time, I consider it as much an honor as sharing in your happiest celebrations.”
“But what do you get out of kowtowing to these people that’s so orgasmic you can’t wipe that pixie grin off your face?”
The pixie grin didn’t waver, but it didn’t seem forced either; the warmth and the grace never left her eyes. Damned if she didn’t seem sincere. “I take pleasure in being good at my job.”
“Then be good at it and shut up. Pour me another one.”
She obliged, with another smile and thank you and another twinkle of those relentlessly cheerful eyes. Were I in a good mood I might have liked her. But in a bad mood her perkiness was an affront. Nobody had the right to feel that good when I felt this bad.
I almost gulped the freshened drink as well, but hesitated to wait out a warning rumble in my belly. That’s when Skye, who had left the table to come after me, placed a gentle hand on my wrist and murmured, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Everything.” And then the need to release anger, my frustration with being unable to take it out on Colette, the specific knowledge that so much of what I’d taken for granted was wrong, and the weight that had just been placed on my shoulders, collided with my resentment toward anybody inconsiderate enough to disturb how I felt right now. It wrapped itself up in every paranoid thought I’d ever had about the Porrinyards and their own relationship with the AIsource and how it predated my own, and how the AIsource had even prepared them for their relationship with me. I looked at Skye and saw the face of the AIsource avatar superimposed over her own. Here was someone I could be mad at. “Have you been lying to me all this time?”
She flinched, but answered without raising her voice. “No.”
“What about withholding the truth? Have you been doing that?”
“Andrea, what’s this—”
I kept my voice very low and very calm. “Just answer the question. Is there anything you’ve refrained from telling me?”
“Damn straight there is,” Skye said.
The direct answer shut me up at once. I glanced across the room to see what Oscin was doing, and found him in close conversation with the Pearlmans. There was nothing in his expression or manner to betray the confrontation he was also involved in, over on our side of the room. Nor did any of the other diners, with the possible exception of a curious Dejah Shapiro, seem to realize that anything was amiss. Either we were hiding this well, or they were blind.
I realized I was afraid of whatever Skye was about to say.
She took my blue drink and downed it in one gulp, a showy gesture that could have meant nothing or everything. It could have meant nothing because while alcohol, and other mood-altering substances, had the usual physical effects on their individual bodies, their gestalt was capable of compensating for that with relative ease, by simply putting more pressure on the sobriety of the body and mind that remained.
But when she put the empty glass down, her eyes were calm. “I’m your lover, not your property. You have access to my heart and my body and my mind, but you don’t own every last piece of me on demand, and never have. You want that, become our Third. You want to remain separate, that’s fine too, but guess what? Secrets are what living in your own skull means.”
I was not quite ready to discard my anger. “Yes, but…”
“I’ve given you more than I’ve ever given any other singlet. But there are things about Skye’s past, and Oscin’s past, and about my past as a linked pair, that I’ve never felt comfortable about sharing with anybody. There are times when other people share confidences with me that are none of your business. There are other times when I realize things on my own that are also none of your business. And there are times, like now, when you’ve been difficult to deal with and I need a secret piece of myself to rant and rave in, before I come back and show you patience and smiles rather than give you the fight you think you want. These are the things I withhold from you, Andrea. And these are the things you’re going to have to get used to not having if we’re to continue loving each other.”