Bitter Angels (11 page)

Liang shrugged, irritation and anger adding force to the gesture. “It’s hard. They’re playing games with the names. Have you managed to get her ID number?”

“No.” I managed to remain calm. “It is not the sort of thing the Clerks are inclined to share.”

Liang snickered. “Yeah, I’ve noticed. I’ll keep the channels open.”

“Thank you.”

We stayed there in silence, not friends, but not enemies,
using each other, but wishing we didn’t have to, each trying to understand the other as best he could.

“I’m on your side, Amerand,” he said.

I said nothing. I believed him. The problem was he had no idea what he was talking about.

“I need to get back,” said Liang at last. “They’re shutting off the water in fifteen, and I want to make sure the crowd doesn’t get restless. Unless there’s anything else?”

“No. Thank you.” I stood to acknowledge his departure. “Do you need extra Security?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“If any OBs become a problem, send them to me.”

“I will. Thank you.”

Liang left me with only one sideways glance, which I couldn’t read. I rubbed the back of my neck and stared at the closed door.

Something was changing. It involved Kapa. It involved the saints. It involved Fortress and the Clerks. It involved me and Emiliya and Kapa and by extension all of our families.

In the heights, I hadn’t thought I was in trouble.

I had been very, very wrong.

To make matters worse, medical rebirth is boring. And painful.

I had to go through seventy-two solid hours of anesthetic dreams before I was allowed to awake fully to my new physical self. The human body does not like to have its clock reset. It protests and struggles and begs the brain for help. They have to keep you either completely out or fuzzily numb for days while the nanos and the doctors do their work, but even then you are aware in some subbasement of your mind that what is happening is
wrong
.

I had been told I was being put back to the physical equivalent of a woman late in her third decade, but when I first tried to get out of my bed, I felt like I had been accelerated toward death’s door. I swear, my veins burned. Childbirth? Nothing. I’d’ve done it three more times rather than face that new pain.

The therapy to get myself and my body up to speed was much the same as the medical rework: prolonged, painful, and boring. Multiple therapists and trainers worked with me and on me, blithely unaware how close they were to grievous bodily harm. But then, I expect they were used to that.

I didn’t call him either.

Before I went under the needle, Allie and Dale came down, having obviously resolved to try a concentrated-intervention strategy. They argued with me for hours. They reminded me what I was doing to them, what I was doing to their father, what I was doing to myself. They insisted I was not fit to meet the challenges of impending war. Was I aware I might just make things worse?

I pointed out I had a duty to not just the past, but the future. I was doing this to keep them safe, and their families yet to be. I pointed out I hadn’t volunteered for this, not entirely. I was being called back to active duty.

They left—sober, disturbed, and more convinced than I would have believed possible, which gave me the strangest twisted feeling in my heart.

Jo came alone, of course. She waited until after the major treatments, and until I was on my feet again. She walked into the hospital room and looked me up and down intently, memorizing every detail of every change. Then she turned on her heel and left without saying a word.

I huddled under the covers and sobbed with the pillow stuffed in my mouth for ten full minutes before the nurses came and pulled me out.

Slowly, I did adjust to my rejuvenated body. The pain faded and I began to enjoy the strength and energy. I wasn’t that much lighter, but the weight I carried was muscle mass, so I was stronger and less…worn. I ran through the terrace parks, braving the driving Lake Michigan winds and
sometimes risking my new ankles on the ice. I walked through the chaos of the lower city, plowing through drifts for the sheer hell of it, and once getting into a snowball fight with a mob of schoolkids who had slipped the leash for a moment.

Everywhere I went, memory stirred. Not huge things. Most of the actual places I had frequented when I was assigned here—the bars, restaurants, and clubs—were long gone. It was more the feeling. The walkways felt familiar under my shoes. Smells created waves of pleasant nostalgia. Even the air that carried the rush and rigor of the city’s presence felt comfortably familiar.

The doctors said it was a side effect of the medical rebirth. My body had been reset to a previous time, and it was the physical sensation of being that age strengthening the memories of the place around me.

I hoped that was true. Because I didn’t like what the alternative meant. It meant David was right, and something inside me was burrowing through my time with him to the old life underneath. And it felt good.

Indoors, I played in old Xperiensors I’d enjoyed in my second and third decades, and tried some new ones Siri recommended. I took the stairs instead of the elevators and reveled in my speed.

Vijay and Siri came around regularly and we would go out and get dinner, or sit around the room and talk about old times and catch up on the unit gossip.

We did not talk about our personal lives. We never had. For this, I was grateful. I caught all the playful slaps and arm punches that passed between them and hadn’t been there before; all the looks filled with things they were never going to say in front of me. I pretended I didn’t notice. They
let me pretend and we were all satisfied, for the moment anyway.

It wasn’t like we didn’t have plenty to keep ourselves busy. There were hours upon hours of reports in various formats to be reviewed, walked through, and talked over, from plain text to full-sensory, composite XPs. We had to review Siri’s dossiers on key power figures on Dazzle where we’d be based, like Commander Favor Barclay (“He’d like to be a good guy, but he’s too frightened”), as well as potential information sources like Natio Bloom (“the ‘Master of Dazzle’; spends a lot of time trying to convince everybody, himself included, that title still means something. Kind of sad.”). Then there were personnel decisions, equipment decisions, strategic and logistical decisions. I needed to brush up on at least one of the Erasmus dialects. Siri, of course, already spoke the slang fluently—and more than a little smugly.

In addition, I had to spend time coordinating our operation with the Common Cause Assistance Foundation, which was running the current aid mission to Erasmus. I had a few old pangs when I sat down with the board. During the Redeemer crisis, I’d also gone in with an aid mission. It is, in fact, the most common way to insert Guardians into a non-Pax environment. This is not to say the aid is disingenuous, or that the people who give it are not dedicated humanitarians. They are, deeply so. They are our open hand.

This time, oddly, I wasn’t going to be given a cover in the aid mission or even a formal designation with them. I was going under my own rank as Field Commander with an open and visible mission: to find out what had really happened to Bianca. But, as much as possible, we try to work
with any humanitarian agency in place when we go. They have a solid knowledge of the local community and the local power structure. That was important because Siri and Vi-jay’s personal experiences were almost two years out of date.

And, of course, the fact that I was not going in undercover with CCA did not mean that no one was going in with them. I just had not been officially informed about it.

I remained uninformed until six weeks before our scheduled departure, when Vijay abruptly stopped showing up to meetings and ate his meals out. It was part of the deal. He and his were going to be our connection to the black market, the smugglers and the pirates. I couldn’t know where he was or what he was going to look like. He’d get his reports to Siri, and she’d get them to me.

I gave her a week to mope. She, of course, denied that she was moping. But his leaving hurt her. I tried not to imagine their farewell: how they had held each other, laughing and joking together. Siri would have threatened him with assorted interesting and impossible punishments if he didn’t take care of himself. He would have mocked her ruthlessly until she had no option but to give him one of those playful slaps I’d seen, and he would have grabbed her hand, and then…and then…

It wasn’t that I minded that they were lovers. It was the contrast between what I imagined for them and the way I had taken leave of David that was too much to bear.

I turned my face to the world again, and I kept on going.

We were three weeks away from launch when Siri arrived on the threshold of my hotel room and asked to be let in. It was late, but I was up, with my glasses plugged into my set so I could go over the unsteady XPs from one of Bianca’s trips to Fortress.

“So, what’s up?” I asked as casually as I could.

“I had a meeting with Misao, about Jerimiah.”

“And?” Siri had been working with Jerimiah over the past weeks, distilling the information that he—it—still held, matching it against her own experiences in Erasmus. I read the reports closely, but I had stayed as far away from the meetings as I could. I couldn’t stand to be in the same space as Jerimiah, let alone when Siri brought out Shawn, her own Companion, to help with analysis and what passed as interrogation between the two artificial constructs. At those times, the loss inside me opened so wide I felt like I’d start bleeding from my heart.

“I think it would be valuable to have him on the mission with us.”

Him. Jerimiah.

With an effort, I set aside my emotions and tried to think in purely practical terms—about logistics, about advantages and disadvantages. “That means a lot of extra equipment to keep him coherent and to be able to tap in and communicate securely, especially going into a place with such a fragmented datascape. Will Misao authorize that?”

“We wouldn’t need the extra tech if you carried him.”

I frowned. “What?”

“If you had Jerimiah installed.”

I stared at her. I heard what she was saying, but for a long moment, there was a wall between her words and any form
of comprehension. Slowly, understanding leaked through. She wanted me to carry Jerimiah with me, inside me, as I had once carried Dylan.

She was asking me to take on a Companion.
Bianca’s Companion
.

“I cannot
believe
you did that.” My voice shook. Cold surged through me. “Even if it wasn’t completely morbid, even if it wasn’t indecent and disrespectful, and…What in God’s name were you thinking?”

Very softly, Siri said, “That Bianca might still be alive.”

I stared at her until my head ached. She just sat there, calm and collected. Like she believed what she said. Like it was possible.

“Have you lost your mind, Field Coordinator?” I asked quietly, matter-of-factly. It was the only explanation I could come up with.

“No, I haven’t.” Siri had clearly been ready for that assessment. Her eyes gleamed with the light of discovery. “Think about it—about Jerimiah, about his condition, about how he was found.” Siri leaned forward, ticking the points off on her fingers. “He was found damaged, unable to even say how his principal died, in a body that was barely still a body. Even now he is disassociated from himself.”

“I’ve seen all that.” I’d made myself look at it. I’d needed to know where and how Bianca was found if I was to begin an investigation into her death. Now the sight of her decayed body weighed heavily in the hole in my head, and it would probably never go away.

“If someone took her into captivity, if they removed the Companion network and implant…”

“You can’t just remove a whole Companion network.” Pain. Knives and dirty, bloody fingers, and pain and pain
until I passed out and woke to more pain and the hole in my head…

“They have a hospital the size of a small planet out there. They might have been able to do the surgery.”
Instead of butchery
, said the silence of her pause.
Instead of what was done to you
. “They had a look, managed the data alterations in the inorganic components, and put him back. He’d already been through enough trauma. Any mismatch between his organic and inorganic nodes could easily be put down to that.

“Plus,” she went on, gathering steam, “the people who provided the identification of the body aren’t exactly on our side.”

“Her body was shipped back here.” By now I had rallied enough to put some force and incredulity back into my voice. “Are you saying our people can’t run DNA matches?”