Anniversary Day (13 page)

The drink was overcoming everything, including the artificial means she had urged him to get to make sure no one else knew about his problem.

He was fifty years old, still young by any standard, and passed out like he was, he looked at least thirty years older.

She sighed. She could give him the stimulant booster, which would clear his head. She could then give him a special cleansing wash that would clear the beer stink from his mouth and pores. She could get him to wash his face, and put some whitener on his teeth, and she could remind him to smile.

But it wouldn’t do a lot of good.

Oh, he’d show up at the Anniversary Day luncheon speech he was already ten minutes late for, and he would give a rousing, inspiring rendition of his classic “No one can touch us! We’re the best people in the system!” speech, and everyone would cheer and applaud and he would wave to them, and for a moment, she would be buoyed, thinking he had finally heard them, finally understood how much his constituents loved him.

Then he would step out of the room, get into his limo, and look at her. He would say with a resigned sigh,
They’ll applaud for any old crap, won’t they?
and she would feel disappointed all over again.

Once upon a time, she had been a true believer. Once upon a time, she thought the right person in the right place could save the universe. Once upon a time, she had thought Dmitri Tsepen was the right person. She had believed in him so much she had given up a career-track job in public relations to manage him.

And he had been good back then. She had to believe that or she would think she had given up her life for nothing. She had gotten him elected, convinced him that he might want to run for governor-general the next time the job opened up, or maybe take a diplomatic post inside the Earth Alliance.

He had nodded at her, told her to plan it, told her
she
was the brains of the operation, told her he would listen to anything she presented.

And true to his word, he had listened.

He just hadn’t acted.

She sighed, staring at him. The room—his beloved inner sanctum—was dark, a book collection all around him. Expensive old books from Earth itself, rare and unusual and very valuable. Once he had told her he could spend the rest of his life in the dark, one light on his desk, a book beneath the light, a beer in his hand. Nothing more. Just a room, a desk, a light, a book, and a beer.

She had laughed, not realizing he was telling the truth.

She could wake him. It would be so simple. She could wake him and clean him up and send him to that damn speech.

Or she could let him sleep.

He would fail for the first time. He would probably fire her. He certainly wouldn’t listen to her entreaties to clean himself up, to go into a program, get a genetic manipulation, have one of those rehab enhancements that removed all cravings.

He
liked
his beer, or so he told her. And he really didn’t care about politics any more.

She did.

But she didn’t care about him.

Odd that she would realize it on a quiet day in the middle of the year. Nothing had tipped her over the edge, nothing had provoked her. She had just cleaned up his messes too many times.

She left his office, pulling the door closed behind her. Her office was across the hall in the City Building, and her office had windows, lots of light, and no old-fashioned collectibles at all. Her office smelled of flowers. Instead of pictures on the wall, she had screens, tuned to every news feed, constantly scanning for mentions of Tsepen or Glenn Station.

How long had she been the unofficial mayor?

Forever, it seemed. Maybe from the beginning. Certainly from the first time he looked at her, befuddled, asking her what he should do, asking if she could explain what the council meant, asking if she knew how to handle a situation.

She walked into her office, feeling shaken. Soon someone would contact her, wondering where he was. She wasn’t sure what she would say. That he was drunk? That he had passed out? That he had decided to blow off the speech?

Or maybe she would do what he always did, shut off her links and let events happen around her.

She sank into the comfortable chair behind her desk.

Then she looked up at the screens. They were all showing variations of the same image.

Something had happened in Armstrong. Again. On Anniversary Day.

She leaned forward and ordered the sound up on the nearest screen. Mayor Soseki was dead. The deputy mayor was assuring the city that everything was fine.

Clief felt cold.

Whenever Clief assured people that things were fine, they weren’t. They were worse than they had ever been. She was certain that Armstrong’s deputy mayor was doing the same.

Clief glanced at the closed door across the hall.

She should wake him and tell him the news.

She should.

But she wasn’t about to.

No matter what happened, she was done. She was completely, absolutely, and utterly done.

Twenty-three

He knew he was being overprotective.

Miles Flint walked through the gates of the Aristotle Academy. He had parked in a different lot, one that he could access quicker if he needed to. But that meant he had to enter the school through the main entrance.

The grounds were quiet—no students in the various playgrounds, no teams practicing esoteric sports. The main entrance, which opened onto a broad lawn covered with real flowers, trees, and plants. The Academy held ceremonies here and often paid the Dome to change the lighting to something appropriate for the ceremony.

That
was how much money Aristotle Academy had, which didn’t surprise him, considering he spent more for his daughter Talia’s tuition each semester than he had spent for his top-of-the-line space yacht.

He had come in on this side because the younger children were housed in this part of the building. Aristotle Academy, for all its pomp and circumstance, thought homemade art in the windows—rotating digital portraits, tiny handmade stuffed animals—was much more welcoming than the huge gabled building itself.

Modeled after some of the most prestigious schools on Earth, Aristotle Academy looked dark and forbidding, even with the brightly colored art scrolling across the windows. When Flint had first brought Talia here after her disastrous weeks in public school, she had balked.

She thought the school looked like a prison, even though she had never seen one. Flint had seen prisons, and knew she was wrong. Aristotle Academy looked like the prisons in the ancient Earth books he’d had to read for his Classics of the First World class in college, not like the prison starbases he had visited. Those looked sterile and scary because they had no stimulation at all.

He shuddered, thinking it was the day that brought up these thoughts. He hadn’t been in Armstrong during the bombing, so he didn’t quite understand the obsession with it. Although he had seen the aftermath and helped work on clean-up, which was more than Talia had done.

She was smarter than anyone he had ever met, but that didn’t preclude her from getting scared when something out of the ordinary happened. She could handle herself, but the emotional toll was great. He’d seen that after a case he worked on over a year ago, a case Talia had participated in. That case had made Flint decide to take a leave of absence from his Retrieval Artist business, at least until Talia was grown up and out of the house.

He knew the decision was the right one—he had too many cases that put his life or the life of someone he loved in danger. Better to let the work go for a while and concentrate on Talia. He didn’t need the money.

But what he found was that he had a lot of time on his hands, time he didn’t know what to do with. He volunteered with a few charities, acted as a behind-the-scenes advisor for some Disappearance Services, and consulted on some cases that he couldn’t avoid. Mostly, however, he managed the money he had acquired when he quit the police force. The money took a lot of his time—he hadn’t really paid attention to it before—but it wasn’t his favorite occupation.

He spent most days keeping up with the current news and taking apart the latest computer systems.

Flint let himself into the school. It smelled faintly of sweat and dirty feet. No matter how hard the air filtration system worked, it couldn’t get rid of those kid odors. Flint always found that oddly comforting whenever he came in here. School was school was school.

The hallways were empty. All of the classes were in session, which also made him feel good. He didn’t see anyone heading toward the auditorium in the middle of the building nor did he see open classroom doors.

He checked a few as he went past, peering in the windows cut into brightly colored doors. Kids sat in circles or on the floor or in neat rows, heads down as they worked, or hands up as they all struggled to answer the teacher’s question. Only a handful of different races were here. The bulk of the students were human, not because of any overt discrimination, but because many of the other cultures didn’t like the old Earth teaching methods used here, thinking them too human centric.

Perhaps they were. But that didn’t hinder Aristotle Academy’s reputation as the place that the brightest students in Armstrong attended. Flint had always heard that. What actually impressed him, however, was the Academy managed to keep Talia interested. Her brain was so powerful that she usually blew through the standard lesson plan for gifted kids. Then she would get distracted, and she would lose all respect for anyone who tried to help her, from the teachers to the school itself.

So far, that hadn’t happened at the Academy.

Flint hoped it never would.

He walked past a series of potted plants, all of them set up near the cafeteria, mostly to create oxygen that would clear up food odors. He then turned to his right and headed to the administrative section of the building. In addition to housing the financial part of the Academy and an incredibly elaborate internal system of computers, this section also housed the office of the headmistress.

Flint had known Selah Rutledge for years. Three months ago, she had coaxed him out of his leave of absence to help her with a case involving Luc Deshin, one Armstrong’s better known criminals, the kind of man everyone knew ran illegal activities, but no one could prove.

Deshin’s son attended the Academy and nearly got kidnapped on its grounds. That, more than anything, encouraged Flint to help with the case. He wanted to make sure the Academy was the safest place he could send Talia. When he found out how security had been breached, he was a lot calmer. It had been a fluke occurrence, something he helped Rutledge plan for in the future.

She owed him. Hell, Deshin owed him, although the man didn’t know it. Still, Flint kept it in mind. One day he would collect upon a debt.

The entrance to the headmistress’s office looked like any other in this section of the school. A solid door with no window, and a small sign at eye level identifying the room’s purpose. This sign simply said,
Office of the Headmistress
, without even identifying who she was.

That was something else Flint liked about Selah Rutledge. Even though she had risen to the top of her profession, she had no real ego about it. As if Headmistress of the Armstrong Wing of the Aristotle Academy was as unimportant a position as, say, a uniformed officer in the Armstrong Police Department.

He knocked on the door, then grabbed the knob, turned it, and let himself in. The school was old-fashioned down to its doors, although that door knob had more sensors in it than the door knob outside the office for his Retrieval Artist business. The networks here in Aristotle Academy just confirmed who he was, what connection he had to the school, and what the physical indicators of his mood were. That last was an addition he had made to the network, so that distraught people (and students) had a tougher time getting into important parts of the school

The Office of the Headmistress was a comfortable place—for adults, anyway. Large plants, interspersed with three desks, made the room seem smaller than it was. Chairs sat in nooks and crannies around the room, so that kids sent here for punishment or to finalize some kind of appointment didn’t have to sit next to each other. They didn’t even have to look at each other if they didn’t want to.

Rutledge didn’t have human secretaries or receptionists. She let the doorknob tell her who had arrived in her office. She did have a security detail, but it wasn’t visible. Otherwise, anyone who came to the Headmistress’s Office had complete privacy.

Flint was alone here at the moment. He stood among the desks and plants, wondering if Rutledge was even in. He threaded his fingers together, feeling nervous.

That was a relatively new emotion for him as well—nervousness. Or maybe it was an old emotion. He had felt it when Emmeline was a baby, the constant worry that he was doing something wrong. He’d had to remind himself that inexperienced humans had been taking care of babies since the beginning of the race.