And for a long time, for me, there wasn't much distraction. A couple of guys I'd call boyfriends. A couple of days thinking about the beach or skiing or something besides the knife my dad'd once given me that I swore, improbably, I'd use to kill at least one mutie. Beyond that… there wasn't a beyond that. Just school, the academy, whatever assignments I could pull that'd better position me for MTac.
And then I heard about Soledad.
It was like hearing about the heroes again. Only, she was our hero, not some mutie.
Then I made MTac and I met Soledad. It was like meeting the queen bitch. She was cold and single-minded. She was also genius enough to make her own modifications to an O'Dwyer. She was unstoppable by any freak that'd been stupid enough to show its face to her. And I thought, damn. Really. That's what I thought: daaamn! That, and how much I wanted to be like Bullet. Only, don't let her hear you call her that. Don't let her know you respect, admire … call it what it was. Don't let her know you worship her and want to be a third of the cop she was so you can be a thousand times the cop most others are.
And I knew she wasn't really cold as she played. I knew, or at least I figured when I got to know her, I'd see the soft to her. Hadn't she cut me major slack when I accidentally put a couple of slugs into Vin?
But I never got the chance to really know Soledad. Don't know anyone could.
Then I read her journal. Should've taken something else when her mother offered. Should've taken her favorite sweatshirt, a hat. Should've taken something that wasn't page after page of bitterness and scorn and loneliness and guilt and a whole lot of self-hate.
That fucked me up. Not reading Soledad's true nature in her writing. What fucked me up, what I read, I could've been reading my own words. It was my life she was writing, lived at arm's length and by rote. I had to actually look in the mirror, had to stare at myself and tell me that I wasn't like her. Bristled when Vin insinuated I was. I was human and normal and functional. Then I reminded me I'd thrown myself off my own balcony trying to collect an injury. I'd lost my mind. I'd lost my direction. I had gone on an excavation looking for signs of life and found nothing but a warning from beyond the grave in the here and now.
Someday a freak could very well kill me. But it was my own life I was taking.
Page after page after page after page. I expected something more from Soledad. Something better. I expected, in her private moments., she didn't owe me anything, but I expected where I thought she was callow for callowness' sake toughness because tough is what an MTac, a black woman MTac in particular, needed to survive.
What I didn't expect.…
Page after page, after page after page of more of the Soledad I already knew. From the day she started keeping a journal it was filled with entries about her hate of the freaks, her disdain for freak lovers, her adherence to the law because the lack of law gave rise to the freaks in the first place.
I'd hoped maybe there'd be some levity, some light. Some life.
I wanted that from her.
I wanted it for me.
I wanted to know we could do what we do, hut remain whole and human. I wanted those things.
But I had bitten nearly clean off the ear of someone I wanted Intel from.
To be like Soledad? I had evolved-devolved-way beyond that.
Soledad only carried the guilt of living through May Day. My loss was tangible. M y wounds deeper. I didn't need to worship Soledad to have my rage.
Reading her journal helped me to see all that I could do with it. Or all the rage could do to me.
It could help me become one of the best MTacs to ever job on the LAPD.
It could also turn me into a cop who dies wondering if there's anyone anywhere who gives a fuck about her.
Here we watch, we wait, we note. We fight with our heads, not our fists. The grunt mentality stays with MTac."
Couldn't be sure, but Eddi was willing to make book this was the same speech Soledad, same speech every ex-MTac got when they arrived for duty at DMI. Abernathy's perfunctory delivery like the corporate-approved greeting at a Holiday Inn or the requisite «bye-bye» as you disembark a major carrier's jetliner. It was made all the more passionless by Abernathy's movie-announcerish voice. It was like preparation for watching a once active career go stale.
Not stale. Doing Intel on freaks was important work. To Eddi it just wasn't as significant as being an MTac. And Eddi would double down her bet that rather than smiling and nodding to the sentiment, when Soledad'd gotten "the speech," she'd opted to make her true feelings known to Abernathy.
Eddi said nothing.
Eddi threw off a serious, by-the-book, "I get your meaning" expression. Tightening of the eyes. Furrowing of the brow. A hearty nod of her head. She exuded all indicia she was DMI-ready. It was like doing theater. It was like Eddi'd studied and studied a part, then walked out onto a stage. Before a self-fractured wrist landed her there, Eddi had never been to DMI HQ. Only knew a few DMI cops in passing from the job. But she knew from her journal these were the hails Soledad had limped along with her bad leg. One of these offices had been used by Soledad to push paper. Soledad'd worked very briefly with Raddatz. and a small group of cops. Those cops, Soledad chief among them as far as Eddi cared, were dead. Tucker Raddatz was alive. Raddatz was center of Eddi's sights. From what she could take from Soledad's journal he was most probably a thug. And he had almost certainly killed Soledad. A freak had taken her life, but Raddatz had maneuvered her into that situation. Eddi wasn't buying it was just a surveillance gone south. The stats were against it. The circumstances just toe convenient.
A DMI inquiry said otherwise. How F'n surprising was that; cops clearing their own?
A court. A review board. The law. They weren't about to come down on Raddatz. But if Eddi proved things to her satisfaction… Used to be all she wanted was to drive her daddy's knife into the heart of a freak. A farewell to her father. Holding on to that pledge, Eddi'd crawled from a life of devastation to a new normalcy. She wasn't feeling normal anymore, was thinking taking her knife to Raddatz would cure the feeling.
But as close as she was, close as Eddi was to the edge, that's all she was. Close. She wasn't over all the way. She wanted blood, but the want was a base desire. What she needed, to confirm what she believed: Raddatz killed Soledad or got her killed or had her killed. Whatever variation was truth, the truth Eddi wanted to know. To know, she had to get next to the one person who'd walked from the incident. To get next to him, she had to fake like she was a good little DMI cop.