A Memory in the Black (The New Aeneid Cycle) (13 page)

"It's alright
." She waited for him to calm a bit before asking about what caught her ear the most. "Ondrea is out to get you?"

He shook his head as before.
"I didn't say that—didn't mean that. She's always helped me. She's the one who got them to let me out to help me remember things." He shook his head vehemently. "She's trying to take care of me!"

Though it felt like he was telling himself that as much as he was Caitlin, he said it with such force that she wondered if it would be wise to question the assertion.
She settled for a middle ground. "But you don't want to go back."

"Something.
 . ." he started, and then cut himself off. "No."

"Will you be alright if you don't?
Will it affect your recovery?"

"I want you to answer my questions now.
Tell me what it is you say I'm recovering from. Who did it? Why?"

"Your sister really only said it was an accident and left it at that?"
It wasn't so much that Ondrea hadn't offered more that struck her as off, but that he hadn't asked the woman for any further details.

"Yes.
Whenever I spoke to her, learning more about it felt unimportant compared to other things we had to discuss. I would know what you claim to have seen."

She told him then, keeping the story brief. She described to Gideon his own search for Diomedes, their pairing to bring Ken Wallace to justice, and the argument that ended with Diomedes pulling the trigger.
She told him of how they ran off Diomedes, of the difficult decision to leave Gideon's body—beyond help, they believed—to be found by the authorities, and finally, how they destroyed the captured weapons in accordance with his original intentions.

When she was finished, she waited, watching Gideon where he sat.
At first he continued to simply listen as he had before, giving no reaction to indicate that he'd just heard the tale of his own violation. She was trying to decide what more to tell him when suddenly he spoke.

"You said this Felix was the one you were with today.
Can you trust him?"

"Very much.
Felix was the first to believe you weren't the arsonist Wallace had painted you as, and he's the one who got Diomedes to work with you. I've never known him to break his word. He has a reputation for that, as a matter of fact. And," she added finally, "we've been seeing each other for the past five or six months. I could hardly do that without trusting him."

"But you le
t Diomedes go."

Though his implication took her by surprise, there was so little emotion in the statement that she was not entirely sure how he'd meant it.
"I'm not a killer," she said after a breath. "Diomedes is wanted. There's a bounty."

"For what he did to me?"

She shook her head. "I made sure word got out about town that he did, but there's footage of him assassinating a man in the Corporate District last week."

"The man is a killer."

"Yes," she whispered, "he is."
But you let Diomedes go.
It had never occurred to her to second guess her part of that decision. To let him go. To let him be free to kill again. Now. . .

No.
She would not hold herself responsible for every action the bloody freelancer had chosen to take since that night.

"He is a killer, and today he tried to kill me."
The tone in Gideon's voice jarred her from her own thoughts. The wrath she would have expected from him was absent, and what was there was something she had not anticipated: fear. Though she had never conversed with Gideon directly at any great length, she never knew him to show a trace of apprehension. Yet there it was. He was afraid.

Her immediate instinct was to try to comfort him. That the thought of trying made her immedia
tely uncomfortable was not helped by the fact that, moments later, Gideon himself shook his head and scowled in a portrait of self-loathing.

"What do you intend to do?" she asked instead.

"I don't know. I need to stay out of sight. From him, from my sister, from everyone. It's important I remember more. I have to remember. Have to. I need to stay here."

Caitlin's stomach tightened.
She knew as soon as he said it that she couldn't let him. But then what? Simply turn him away? Turn her back on him again? She liked neither choice.

"What if they find you again?
Either of them."

"They won't.
After they found me at my apartment, I began to suspect Marquand placed a tracer on me. If they did, I started jamming it after leaving my apartment."

"Jamming it?"

"Marquand didn't just heal me. They added features to my cyberware."

"You are jamming Marquand's tracer with their own equipment?"

"Yes." He scowled. "I am aware of the irony."

"It isn't irony so much as I'd expect
they would assure that such a thing wouldn't work."

"I was on your balcony for an hour without any sign of them."

Caitlin stood, went to her desk, and fished in the bottom drawer. She found the device by feel, tucked back beneath a stack of envelopes. "I can check for any unusual signals coming from your implants."

"You are an engineer?"

She shook her head. "Not so much. But this is useful for finding bugs, and I don't need a PhD to use it. If you'll permit me?"

Gideon stood with a nod.
She passed the scanner in an arc across the front of his body and then along each arm and leg. There was no indication of a signal.

"Anythi
ng?"

"Nothing yet."
Perhaps it wouldn't be foolproof, especially if Marquand was using anything fancy. She moved around to his back, continued the scan, and still found nothing. Caitlin was closing the scanner and realizing how little comfort it gave her when she noticed the bullet hole.

"Oh my god.
Gideon, you're shot."

He looked over his shoulder at her.
"It's small. Just a ricochet knick."

"You've got a hole through your jumper here.
It's big enough to have a care with so it won't get infected. There's not hardly any blood, though."

He strained to see it, though the wound's location on his back must have made it impossible to get a good view.
"It doesn't feel like much," he told her, but removed the jacket nonetheless.

The shirt he wore beneath it had a similar hole, and again, far much less of a stain around
it for the amount of blood she'd anticipated. Caitlin knew of blood augmentations that would result in faster wound clotting, but even so, the colour of the stain didn't look right.

Her gasp that followed lifting
his shirt was one of both revelation and shock. "Gideon," she whispered, "what did they do to you?"

"I won't recall the teams, Ondrea.
You've had more than your chance, and you blew it!"

Julius Tseng scowled at her from behind the expanse of his mahogany desk, framed by the bird's-eye view of the city behind him. Ondrea might have been impressed if she weren't so livid.

"And if they find him when I'm not there to calm him down?" she demanded. "What if he's confused? If he gets violent? Where's your precious low-profile going to be then?"

"The low profile was
why we kept him in the building. The low profile was what you jeopardized when you asked to let him out the first time! If you didn't let him see that he
could
leave, we wouldn't be in this blasted mess!"

"You know
damn well why
we
did that! Retrigger his memories to settle the confusion. Hell, you agreed with me it was best!"

"Tho
se aren't the memories we should be concerned with! I let you persuade me against my better judgment. I now see that was a mistake."

"You knew I was right
!" She said it through clenched teeth. "It's my project, my idea that pulled this off!"

Tseng dismissed her comment with sweep of his hand. "Your idea or not, the rest of us should have seen that your personal feelings would get in the way.
We had him in a hospital bed under light security when he should have been locked up! Maybe then we wouldn't be having this conversation while he's out there for someone to get their hands on him!"

"
Damn it!" She heaved an exasperated sigh and tried to reel herself in. "I told you it's not something you'll be able to force. And even if it was, I'd be damned if I'd let you cage my brother like an animal."

"He's not your brother, Ondrea.
Marquand made him, Marquand owns him. You may have convinced us the personal connection would help control him, but—"

"He made himself!"
Anger rode high in her voice over a rush of sorrow that forced her to choke it back before she could continue. "All you did was use him."

"Just washing your han
ds of your part in that, are you?"

She glared at the question, ready to lash out again. But she was losing time.
"You have to let me find him first. I'm the only one who can reach him. He needs me! Recall the search teams."

"I won't do that
. However, you will be allowed to look for him. Were it up to me, you'd be off the project completely, but for better or worse your success in bringing your brother into all of this has made the others regard you as some sort of asset. They think we still need you."

"You always wer
e the dumbest of the lot, Tseng." To hell with company politics.

His eyes narrowed.
"I'm not looking for your approval, Ondrea. If someone else gets to him because of this fiasco it's not going to matter who you're sleeping with; your butt will be on the street so fast you won't know what hit you."

She fought the urge to ram h
er fist through his face for that. She hadn't slept with anyone to get where she was and he knew it. "The second one of your teams finds him," she bit off, "they call me in."

"They'll cal
l you. But if they need to act before you get there, they will. And in
that
, I'm in the majority. But you'll have your chance."

"Then I'm getting the hell out of your office to make sure I do get there.
Like it or not, you're still going to need me."

He gav
e another dismissive wave.

Ondrea turned on one heel, digging it into his carpet in a childish attempt to do some sort of damage,
and then crossed to the door without a word.

"Ondrea," Tseng called as her hand found the knob, "whether you like it or not
, you're using Gideon, too."

Her stride faltered a moment, then renewed. He didn't know what
he was talking about.

Beck was waiting for her
in a waiting area outside the door. He stood upon seeing her and then rushed to catch up when she refused to stop. "Well?" he asked.

"Well,
what
?"

"Well
—I mean, it's—what did he say?"

Ondrea
left Tseng's outer office and pushed into the corridor of executive offices without another word to Beck. Let him wait. The first thing he'd done once he'd picked her up after Diomedes attacked was panic at the gunfire and go exactly opposite of where she needed to be. She was surprised he managed the courage to pick her up at all before he abandoned her brother and fled. Beck had been babbling as he clutched the wheel and floored the gas, and by the time Ondrea managed to shout some sense into him, they'd lost track of Gideon and her best chance at pursuit.

"Ondrea?"

"Shut up, Beck, I'm still mad at you." They'd lost Gideon, and now Tseng's teams would act without her if they "needed" to. Selfish, short-sighted bastard!

She remained quiet until they reached the elevator and
their standing in silence overwhelmed her resolve. "Still nothing on the tracker?" she asked, already sure of the answer.

"Nothing.
I'm pretty sure you're right, he's got to be jamming it. Sorry, I should have built the homer better."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Beck, it's a cascading jammer, that'd have been damned near impossible.
It wasn't even supposed to be installed yet if they'd listened to me," she continued, watching the elevator display. "They had to rush everything, push everything. Now look where we are."

"I shouldn't have panicked.
It's my fault we lost him."

"Yeah, I know
."

"I'm really sorry, I just
—"

"You keep saying that, Beck, but it doesn't change the fact that Gideon's still out there and we can't find him."

Silence.

The elevator doors opened finally, and they stepped inside. "Tseng's got people out looking for him now and he's not pulling them back to let me find him first.
I don't know what Gideon will do if an armed group tries to bring him in and I'm not there."

Beck heaved a heavy sigh. "Geez
. What'd Tseng say about the drive-by?"

"I didn't tell him."

"You— Ah. . . Why? I mean, that guy tried to kill us?"

"He tried to kill me and Gideon, Beck, he wasn't even shooting at you."

"Um, yeah, okay, but he was shooting?" Beck always ended his statements as questions when he wanted to argue but couldn't find the nerve. He must've thought it was diplomatic, but it just got on Ondrea's nerves. An actual argument would be less irritating.

"We're not going to tell them about him." She turned to look
Back in the eye. "Not yet."

He
held up his hands. "Okay, alright! It's just that maybe they might be able to tell us who he is? And if we know who he is then maybe we can figure out—" He pouted in the face of at the glare she shot him, and then shrugged in resignation as the elevator opened.

Ondrea had already resolved to keep Marquand from
learning that Diomedes had tried to kill her. The video footage implicating Diomedes was common knowledge, but no one knew that she'd made it. The fact that it was Ondrea who'd personally hired the freelancer to take out Curwen made the company comfortable enough to not be overly concerned by the video's existence. If Diomedes got arrested and tried to implicate them, they would have sufficient distance to pin it all on Ondrea.

It was a chance she'd been willing to take in order to have her revenge on the freelancer and get her brother's project approved, but it was quite another matter if they knew she had actively put the company at risk.
If Marquand found out—or even suspected—that Diomedes had turned on her for setting the camera? It was a leap of logic that she couldn't risk. They would accuse her of willfully sabotaging the security of the project and hand her head to her, possibly more than just figuratively.

Thankfully,
Beck didn't have enough clearance to know about Diomedes's part in the project. He spent so much time in the lab that it was fully possible he didn't even known about the shooting, let alone the footage of it.

They reached the lab entrance. Ondrea swiped her keycard and touched her hand to the palm reader.

"So, what is the plan, then?" Beck asked.

"We weren't the only ones at Gideon's old building.
Did you see the man and woman with us on the steps?"

"No.
I mean, I did, but not clearly. They weren't just tenants?"

"I don't think so.
If one of them's who I think, I'm almost certain their being there was more than just a coincidence."

Beck followed her like a puppy to one of the workstations and stood behind it as she logged on.
"So now you're. . .?"

"Seeing if I'm right."