“I assumed you were here for her. Why wouldn’t you be?”
“Lots of reasons,” I said.
“My father has no need to send… nannies after me. I’m not a child.”
“Nobody said you were! Calm down. He’s worried, he says you were lying to him. About being in school. The school said you dropped out. He was going to come find you himself, but he couldn’t make it. What are you trying to pull, anyway? They’re not gonna do anything to you, but who even knows what they’ll do to me?”
She blinked, having clearly stopped listening to me halfway through my rant. The anger drained away from her face, leaving a terrible uncertainty and betrayal, the expression of a kid promised something only to have it suddenly yanked away. A moment later it was gone, and she was all business again.
Somehow, even in formalwear, she looked businessy too: the long, silvery-blue dress was cut like a suit at the top, and she was wearing heels so high we were eye to eye. Makeup too, dark lipstick and eyeshadow, metallic on her deep brown skin. Her long hair was tied back, the curls in front ferociously bobbypinned; the crisscrossed metal resembled a secret language. A cuneiform curse, no doubt.
But her face. Don’t lose track of that. Saying into the silence: He sent you? After all I did to rig it so that he would be here tonight?
I said, “He said he was going to send his new… what do you call it. Secretary?”
“Assistant.”
“Yeah, Sherwood or whoever. Is that his first name or his last name? Anyway, Louis thinks he’s too new. So he sent me. So it would be less weird.”
It’s still weird, her sneer said. “Let’s look over here instead!” she announced, pulling me further towards the perimeter of the room, then hissed, “I’m on spring break. I’m allowed to go on holiday, you know!”
I shook my arm free. “Look, are you going to tell me what you’re doing or not?”
“Nothing! This is unbelievable. He sent you all this way, and you—you said yes, you agreed to come all this way! To what, spy on me? It’s nothing, I got a cheap flight, and I had plans with friends, they did not work out this week, then I decided I would still come by myself.”
“Okay,” I said. “You know. For the weather. Which is so nice. In Scotland. In February.”
“People don’t travel for the weather, Nicholas.”
Johnny was wandering back towards us, the blonde head bumping through the crowd. Like the shark from Jaws, but little. I held down a laugh that I knew would come out in a donkey screech.
“Now knock it off or I’ll tell her everything,” Sofia whispered, and smiled again, brilliantly, as she took my hand.
“Me? You’re the one who—”
“Yeah, and on top of the bull,” Johnny was saying even before she reached us, “we’re actually being audited by the IARE too. It started off as just a health and safety thing, but they’ve got the entire ethics department involved now. They think multiple facilities are falsifying and publishing data. Can you believe it?”
“Incredible!” Sofia shook her head.
I pursed my lips. She’d been audited before, though mostly for safety stuff; it was both horrifying and unsurprising how many accidents she’d had, apparently thinking that safety standards were something for other people. They hadn’t found anything at her facilities, as a result, but at a minimum I knew she’d been burned by acid, had a few solvent inhalation incidents, got blasted with one of her early particle accelerators (luckily at low power), been on the sharp end of ten or twelve explosions—I’d lost count—poisoned herself, fallen off ladders, cabling, catwalks, rigging, and bookshelves in her ridiculous house-slash-laboratory, been electrocuted about six times, and Chem-Bot had accidentally sampled part of her arm once. And that entirely left out the dozens of incidents where genetically-screwed-up insects and plants had escaped ‘containment’—usually a carelessly-lidded plastic tub, as I’d discovered more than once while scavenging for a snack.
She ran her empire in roughly the same fashion as ancient kings insisting on going to war personally rather than staying in the castle and moving pieces on the map with a wooden stick. But that was something. The audit… why would the Society be here for that?
“There’s a completely private one for my personal guests,” Johnny was saying when I tuned back in. My watcher-wounded hand had started to hurt for some reason, quietly building, as if ice were forming from some tiny core within it. “Down that hallway, and you’ll see a guy in a dark green suit? Tell him I sent you, and say ‘Independent review.’”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” she laughed.
Sofia disentangled herself, gave me a peck, and slipped through the crowd, her dress a trickle of mercury through all the dark fabrics. Where her lips had touched my cheek felt like a cigarette burn.
“Let’s go get some more food.” Johnny wriggled out of her sweater and handed it to Wayne, who folded it neatly to the size of a paperback book and placed it inside his own jacket pocket.
The crowd parted almost frantically around us. Her touch phobia, which to this day I wasn’t sure was real or staged, was well-known, in fact had literally been the subject of a documentary once, and although many palms hovered in congratulations over her bared shoulders, people probably knew they would have set off, at best, a crying jag and a swift retreat, or, at worst (and it had so often been worst) a couple of swift blows ending in broken collarbones, fingers, or jaws. Even a dislocated shoulder once, I remembered. An older man had touched her from behind and… bad angle. Bad land. She struck out like a bee, not strategizing, just looking to jam in her sting and flee. It had disappeared after the Anomaly, or her stubborn maintenance of the act had slackened off, but no one else here could know that.
Near the fireplace, the room was stifling; sweat gathered in my hairline and crawled down my face. I heaped up plates of random food in the low scarlet light, handed one to Johnny, and, although I was beginning to suspect she was already a little drunk, let her get two more glasses of champagne. Or no, what was the word…?
“Flutes, Nicky,” she said airily, as if I had projected it from my head like the lightshow outside. “Chug, chug. It won’t go flat right away but it’s kinda gross when it gets warm.”
Her tone was affectionate, familiar. If I hadn’t spent so long remembering and recreating everything she had done to me, it would have been so easy to just… tell her everything. Fall back into the deep permanent me-shaped rut that she wanted me to see was still there, and still perfectly intact, even though we were both so different now. Look, she was saying. I won’t treat you any differently. Everything you miss is waiting for you. Everything you’ve been missing during this long, cold self-enforced solitary sentence. See, I don’t even mind your girlfriend, or you not telling me. Because we’re best friends. Blood brothers. Aren’t we?
I took the glass and we wandered away from the fire into relatively cooler air. I’d play along, no more. Couldn’t she see, she who had known me all my life, that I wasn’t hers anymore? That she had thrown me away by telling me the truth? At the very least, could she not fucking tell that I had a higher mission now than being her pet?
Anyway, I’d put something on her plate that I hadn’t put on mine, and I wanted it. “What’s that?”