“I’ve done it before,” he says absently, as though that’s no great feat. “But that gala’s going to be swarming with people, and I don’t have a few weeks to try to get hired as an IT guy.”
“We’re going to go as guests.” When he lifts his head in surprise, I flash him a smile. “Don’t panic. It’s not that hard to fit in with that crowd. We’ll make nice for a while, drink the champagne and dance and carry on, but at some point LaRoux, and no doubt his daughter, too, will come out and make a bunch of speeches.”
Gideon’s mouth twitches, brows furrowing slightly. “What if LaRoux knows our faces from the security feeds? They’ll recognize us.”
“We’ll slip out as he takes the stage. The museum itself will be locked down—we’ll have plenty of time to make it to Engineering before they open the exhibits to the public.”
Unless I can get a good shot at LaRoux himself before we slip out of the ballroom. I clear my throat. “Let me just run through the etiquette of this sort of event, so you don’t end up accidentally offending half the planetary delegations.”
As we start going over what’ll happen at the party, I can’t help but think of Daniela, the woman who taught me most of what I needed to know in those first few weeks after I left Avon. In her early thirties, she could no longer play the innocent teen—having a younger accomplice got her places she couldn’t go alone. Three months we were together. And when the time came, Dani betrayed me as easily as she’d taken me under her wing, leaving me for the authorities to find when one of our marks clued in that we were after his money.
My mind refuses to form the words of the question roiling in my heart. I won’t ask myself whether betraying Gideon would be that easy for me, especially now that he’s lost Mae. It’ll just have to be. I want to stop LaRoux as much as he does, but if it comes down to a choice between exposing the rift to take down the company and destroying LaRoux, the man, himself…Gideon’s made it clear he would choose the former. And that means I have to be willing to walk away from him.
We work on our cover story. We’ll be Jack Rosso and Bianca Reine, a couple fresh out of school from the alpha city on Paradisa, attending the opening-night gala as part of a whirlwind tour of the galaxy before heading to university. I follow up on my contact’s lead on a designer looking to offload one of last season’s runway dresses for cheap, and call in Gideon’s measurements to a tailor in midtown. He seems to have unlimited funds for this—I’m not without my own resources, but he’s clearly done well enough for himself that he could’ve chosen a nicer home than the one he just blew up.
As I organize our outfits, Gideon works more magic with his databases and manages to cobble together fake ident chips for us both, complete with holographic projections of our faces in case anyone removes them from our palm pads.
I don’t ask when he scanned me with a 3-D imager. I don’t want to know.
Gideon discovers a picture Mae posted of herself and the twins, time-stamped that day—her way of letting us know she has them back. Some of the weighty tension he carries leaves him at the sight of them together, but I know the loss of this last safe harbor has left him crushed.
The days pass in fits and starts, in flurries of activity and long, agonizing stretches where all we can do is wait. We could use this time to talk about ourselves, to draw closer together, bound as we are by the mission we’ve chosen. But neither of us makes that move. We keep our silence, and our secrets, and hiding in this place that’s suspended in time, it seems as though we’re suspended too.
I try to find some way to leave, if only for a few hours, but Gideon’s stuck to me like glue—which he has every reason to be. Somehow I have to get back to my apartment, just for a moment, to retrieve the plas-pistol from Kristina’s bedroom. Getting such a highly illegal weapon took me months of work, and there’s no way I’ll get another before we execute our plan to board the Daedalus. And I don’t want Gideon to know why I want to sneak a gun in with us.
Two days before the gala, I finally give up. “I’ll need to duck out of here for a while at some point,” I say, keeping my eyes on the screen of the latest burner palm pad he’s given me. I can tell he’s looking at me—his breath has an audible catch to it when he’s watching me—but I don’t look up. I keep my voice casual. “Just need to pick up our clothes and a few other things.”
“Sure,” Gideon replies easily. “I’ll come with. Help you spot trouble before it spots you.”
I clear my throat, glancing up finally from the ground and locating a smile. “Not to wound your macho sense of chivalry, but I can handle it myself.”
“Like you handled it at your apartment?” His grin flickers, and I can tell he regrets the words as soon as they’re out.
I wish I could act nonchalant, like it doesn’t faze me. But instantly I’m back in my penthouse again, hiding in the kitchen from men twice my size. I swallow and settle for dropping my eyes so Gideon can’t see me afraid. “I can disappear easier on my own.”
When he doesn’t answer me, I look up. He’s still watching me, and utterly unashamed to be caught staring. He doesn’t look away but rather tilts his head slightly to the side, as though trying to see me better from some other angle. I’m struck all over again by the quick intelligence there, so easy to overlook when he’s playing the arrogant, smug asshole he projects to the world. Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m fooling him at all with my excuses for wanting to be alone. And worse—suddenly I’m absolutely certain I don’t want to.
“I have to go back to my apartment,” I whisper, before I can stop myself.
Gideon’s eyes close a fraction too long, and I can tell I was right. He knew I was hiding something. Let him think this is it. “Sofia, you can’t.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” I reply, voice sharp. “I know it’s dangerous. But I’ll be in and out in no more than a minute. No time for anyone to show, even if they have surveillance.”
Gideon grimaces, scowling at the floor. “What’s so important that it’s worth risking your life for?”
My gun. The words rattle around in my mind. My only way out of this hell. My only shot, literally, the only weapon I can get through LaRoux’s security. My throat starts to close, and to my horror, I can feel my eyes starting to burn. I try to shove it down, try to channel it into something else—resentment or fervor or confidence, anything—but I can’t. He keeps looking at me, and right now, in this moment, I’m realizing I can’t lie.
“My father,” I croak finally, blinking and sending half a tear spilling out to cling to my cheek. “The only picture I have of him is in that apartment. If I lose it—” My hands clench around the blanket I’m sitting on, a useless attempt to grab for control. “If I can’t get it back, then I lose him entirely. Forever.”
It’s the truth. I do want that drawing, tucked safely behind one of the fake photos on the sideboard, almost as much as I want the gun in my bedroom. Almost—but not quite.
Gideon’s face, what I can see of it through the blur of tears, softens. “I get it, I do. You know that I do.” His eyes go to his pack, and I can see, for the tiniest moment, my grief reflected there in his face. Abruptly I’m reminded of that book he brought with him, the only thing he grabbed from his den that wasn’t computer equipment. “But Sof, it’s just a thing.”
I shake my head, the movement sending another tear to join the first. Even now my memory of the picture—a drawing Mihall made for me, since we didn’t have a camera—is blurring. I try to picture my father’s face, imagine his voice, and the fragments of memory flutter past, fleeting, impossible to reassemble. The particular pattern of calluses on his palm, the half-tuneless ditty he’d whistle to himself while he worked, the shuffle of his boots on the doormat when he came home—each time I grab for one memory the others fly away.