Bitter Angels (4 page)

I never did find out how it had gotten smuggled in.

Kapa’s eyes slid past me, following the path Emiliya had taken. Then he collected himself. He smiled the sly smile I remembered from when we were boys. It was a strange thing to see in his scarred man’s face.

“What am I doin’ here? A little of this, a little of that.” He waggled his hand. “And you, Brother?”

“Little of this, little of that,” I answered.

“Not in that uniform.” He crossed his arms and eyed me. “You shoulda jumped with me.”

“I had my reasons.” I shrugged and glanced uneasily around. This was dangerous, and if Kapa didn’t care, I had to. Just standing here with him was enough to get me hauled into a corruption investigation, but I wasn’t about to let him go until I was sure Emiliya had enough time to get away.

“Your ‘reasons’ are going to get you killed,” he said seriously.

“Not before yours do.”

“What’re you talking about?”

The corner of his mouth curled up. He had me, and he knew it. “Take off the coat, and I’ll tell you.”

I snorted. “In uniform or out, I’m still in the Security.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Take off the coat, and I’ll tell you.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…” I stripped my coat off and slung it over my shoulder. It was rash, but I wanted to come out of this with the feeling that I’d actually learned something. I could use that as my excuse later if this was played back for me. I could say I was trying to get information from Kapa.

Kapa grinned and slapped my shoulder. “That’s more like it, Brother Amerand.”

He strolled away, following the curve of the wall until he stopped at a point between two bay doors. I would bet my payroll that he’d somehow managed to work out the pattern the cleaning drones followed and had brought us to a point that was acoustically dead, at least for the moment.

Kapa leaned his shoulder against the wall and looked me up and down. I made myself wait. Kapa loved to brag, and patience had never really been his strong point. He’d give it up before long.

“There’s new money coming in, Amerand. New opportunities. Maybe you could talk Emiliya around for me.”

“Is this about the new bunch of saints coming out of Solaris?”

That surprised him. “You heard already?” But within a few heartbeats he’d settled back down. “Yeah, I guess you would.”

“Kapa,” I said. “The Solarans are strict legals. They are not going to be dishing out anything to smugglers.”

Which meant someone was paying him for something and that somebody had already laid out a great deal to clear his record.

Somebody had bought Kapa.

The idea made me sick. I couldn’t understand why. I hated what he did—hated the smugglers and the chaos makers because they fed the gangs and the tunnel czars. I hated the way he could so casually suggest I give up my family to the Clerks and their executioners. But I’d always had a strange…respect for Kapa. Of all the people I knew, he was the only one who was really his own master.

“Kapa. Don’t mess with this. Emiliya says Fortress is taking an interest.”

“You’d better believe it.”

I prodded him in the shoulder with my finger. The look he gave me was dangerous, but at least he was looking at me. “Do not mess with Fortress, Kapa. The new
Saeos
are not, I repeat,
not
like old Lou and Bea. They are diamond hard and twice as sharp.”

He swatted at my hand, but I’d already pulled it back. “I know, Amerand. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He leaned close. He smelled of whiskey, smoke, and sweat, but his eyes were clear and steady. “What I tried to tell her.”

A streak of cold shuddered across my shoulders. “You’re not making sense.”

My mouth went dry. “Kapa, you even think about pulling Emiliya into this and I will kill you with my bare hands.”

“News for you, Brother.” He prodded me in the shoulder, once. “She’s already in it. I was here to get her out.”

With that, he strolled away across the open port.

So I lingered with my family. David made his classic slow-recovery breakfast: waffles with butter and maple syrup, or ice cream if you wanted it, which the kids invariably did, except for Jo, who ate her waffles naked to prove one of her more esoteric points. Don’t ask me which one. There was also bacon and stewed apples. Not even Jo turned those down. I drank a third cup of coffee while talking about nothing much with the kids.

I felt Bianca’s eyes on me the whole time. Her dead gaze made a pressure that started right in the black hole beneath my skull. I ignored it as best I was able. If I wasn’t successful, the kids didn’t say anything. Neither did David.

Jo was leaving that day, returning to Hong Kong on the spaceplane. Allie and Dale were staying over. Jo and I would take the cable together to the Ashland ’port. I’d say good-bye to her there, then catch the bullet train down to Chicago. That would put me at the office at about five o’clock. If Misao wanted to badger me for an extra-long time, he’d have to go hungry to do it, and serve him right…

This is what was really going on:

I was scared. I was doing everything I could not to admit that. I was afraid of what would happen once I walked back into that building, of what I would think and feel once I heard what the emergency was and how Bianca had died. I didn’t want to leave my family as we sat around the chipped, stained dining table, stuffing food that was going to mean an extra cholesterol-flush for me and David, and laughing at jokes that were over a decade old.

But there was that stone in my heart and Bianca’s cold gaze on the back of my neck, and neither one would go away.

I jerked my head around and stared at Jo, who pulled a face back at me. We stood on the transit platform, waiting for the cable bus with our small packs on our shoulders and Jo’s luggage piled around us. The lake winds whipped outside the station’s transparent shields, but in here, we were toasty warm and could safely watch the gale raging across Lake Superior. Jo and I had the platform to ourselves. The nervous wouldn’t take the cable on a day like this, but I sort of liked the iron-grey sky and the waters dancing beneath the wind.

Wars had once been fought over the water in the Great Lakes. Nasty little wars, with smuggling and sabotaged pipelines, and starving locals and slave labor. Now my family lived peacefully on an artificial island in the middle of it, where the architects went in for tempered glass and molded wood, because you only lived out in the middle of Lake Superior for the view, so they wanted to make sure you got as much of it as possible.

“So, are you going to tell me who Bianca is?” Jo folded her arms. Her long white hair was piled in elaborate red-tipped ringlets on top of her head. She’d eschewed a hat, and was muffled deep in a black coat, a stark contrast with her artificially ivory-colored skin. Slim red boots encased her legs and a red scarf did more to call attention to her slender throat than keep it warm. I wouldn’t call the look beautiful, but it was arresting—like her words.

“Dad always told us never to ask, about the Guardians, about anything,” Jo went on. “He told us to let you make your peace with it. That was your business. Making peace.” She cocked her head. “How’s that working out?”

“Jo…” I began, but the cable bus pulled in—a string of colorful, flexible cars hung on the white spiderweb that stretched from tower to tower over the choppy waters.

The doors slipped open and a few passengers climbed out. We stepped in, presenting our palms to the door monitors. I made my way to a spot by the window and took off my small pack, tucking it in the holder in front of me. Raindrops smacked against the window, showing minute ice crystals in each tiny puddle.

Jo plunked herself down beside me, resting her pack on her knees. “You were saying?”

The pain was starting up, a steady throb behind my right ear. “Never mind.”

The car lurched slightly and started forward. In less than
a minute, we were gliding above the waters, heading swiftly and smoothly toward the shore.

“Never mind your never mind,” Jo snapped. “Are you going to tell me who Bianca is?”

I sighed. Stubborn girl. Stubborn woman. How very like her mother, David would have said,
had said
, more than once.

“Bianca is…was…a data tracker.”

“What, like an analyst?”

Annoyance pricked me. How could she not know this? Then I remembered. It was because I had consistently refused to talk about it with her or either of her siblings. And while the Guardians make a great show of not keeping any more secrets than is strictly necessary, we also don’t go around advertising our ranks and specialties.

“A data tracker is a kind of analyst,” I said, lacing my fingers together. “Bianca looked at data flow, ephemeral or solid, in context. A whole world’s worth of it, if she had access. Years of it, if necessary. When she was done, she could predict the critical decision points in real time: people, news sources, gossips, whatever. If you could control the points she identified, you’d cool down any hot spot within a few weeks. She was always right. Always.”

“You didn’t have an AI that could do that?”

“Not the way she could.” I smiled a little, remembering the glint in Bianca’s eyes and the sharp twist to her grin that came when she finally had the answer.

It took Jo a moment to digest this. She scrunched down into her coat and watched the evergreen-crowned coast getting closer. “Were you friends?” she asked at last.

I blinked. How did you explain your relationship with someone who had been under your command for more than two decades? How do you begin to untangle that web of duty and love?

How do you explain your relationship with someone who’d saved your life?

“Yes,” I said, because it was easiest. “We were friends.”

“Then I’m sorry you lost her.”

“Thank you,” I said with overly bland graciousness. I watched Jo jiggle her leg up and down, tapping her heel on the floor in uneasy rhythm. She wasn’t done yet.

“Was that what you did? When you were in the Guardians? Were you a data tracker too?”

I sighed. I had no one to blame but myself for this interrogation. “No. I was a Field Commander.”

“Dad never told us,” she said pointedly.

“No,” I agreed.

The red bootheel went rat-a-tat against the floor. My eye twitched. Another sound hovered on the edge of memory. I felt it grate against my eardrums and on the tip of my spine. Rat-a-tat. I smelled burning.

“It never went away, though,” Jo was saying. “The Guardians. It just sort of hung in the air all the time, like when you can’t figure out where that smell is coming from.”

She didn’t believe me, but she went quiet, and for the moment that was all I wanted. I’d be sorry for this later. I was sorry for it at that moment. I should have gone alone. My family had no part of this.

The cable bus let us off at the Ashland International Transit Port. The ’port surged with people, robot carts, and security drones. The roar of the planes pressed down against the tidal rush of thousands of voices.