Dreamfall (31 page)

“This remains a dangerously volatile situatiotl,” Sand said
to Kensoe after a silence that seemed to last for years. “Pursue every
opportunity to keep this situation under control. For humanitarian reasons ...
and for practical ones as well, you ought to keep your options flexible. But I
think you understand what I am saying.” More nods== around the table.

His glance flicked to me. “That brings me back to you. You
said you’d do anything in your power to help Joby. It will be up to you,” he
said, and his stare was a black hole, sucking me in, “to make the Hydran
radicals understand that this act of terrorism will gain them nothing. Tau will
not meet their demands. The people they claim to be doing this for will only
suffer, if they cause Tau more trouble with the FIA. That would be disastrous
for Tau and disastrous for the Hydrans as well. Surely that isn’t what they
want. There can be no winners in such a situation. Make them see reason.”

“Me?” I said. “I’m not a diplomat. How am I supposed to
change their minds? I can’t even change yours.”

He looked at me. “Do you believe what I just told you?”

Slowly I nodded.

“Then you can make them believe it. Just let them look into
your mind ... your soul.” His face was absolutely expressionless.

I shook my head. “But I don’t even know how to contact them—”

“They’ve obviously chosen you to be their go-between. They’ll
contact you; soon, I would expect. They’ll have to.” He rose from his seat,
smoothly and unexpectedly, nodding to each phantom Gentleman and Lady of the
Board in turn.

“I’m not a trained negotiator,” I protested, twisting in my
seat as he started past me. “I’m not even a Tau ctttzen Why are you putting this
on me—?”

“Because,” he murmured, leaning over and lowering his voice
until only I could hear him, “from what I can see, no one associated with Tau
has even the slightest idea of how to resolve the situation without bloodshed.”
He straightened up again,”I’m sure you’ll do everything humanly possible to
prevent a tragedy from occurring, Cat.” I wondered whether he was being ironic.
“If everything you can do is still not enough, Administrator Borosage is
responsible for any further actions that Tau takes.” He glanced at Boroszge,
back at me. ‘And now, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, I must be going, if I’m
to make the shuttle.”

“Going?” I said. “You’re leaving?”

Sand shrugged. “I’ve been called home by Draco.”
Obtt of
the line of fire.
The worst thing I could have imagined happening as I’d
come into this meeting had happened before it even began: Draco had already
distanced itself, literally and figuratively, from any of the repercussions
they’d decided were going to strike Tau.

I sank back into my seat. “You coward,” I breathed, and saw
him frown. But he went on toward the lift without stopping.

Around the table the Board Members began to wink out of existence
one by one, until I was left with only Perrymeade, that lifeless puppet, and
Borosage, who was smiling.

I cor rJp. “Let’s go,” I muttered to Perrymeade. I struck
the back of his seat.

He stood up without protest, glancing at Borosage and back
at me. He nodded once and led the way to the lift.

I heard Borosage leave his seat behind us; heard his
footsteps closing in on us. Somehow I kept myself from looking back or
flinching as he crossed into my line of sight. He blocked my path as we reached
the lift.

I had to stop moving or run into him. I stopped.

“ft’s just you and me now, freak,” he said, aS if Penymeade
had disappeared along with the rest of them. ‘And you heard what he 5a[d—”
Sand.
“You make the rest of the freaks understand that Tau isn’t caving in on
this. Because I’m in charge here, and they’re making me look bad. This is going
to cost them no matter what they do. It might not cost them too much, but only
if they suffender the boy soon. You understand 6s—?”

The lift doors opened, slowly, silently, behind him. But
there was no way to get by him until I gave him an answer.

I chewed the inside of my mouth. Finally I muttered, “I understand.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it.” He glanced at
Perrymeade. “You get that freak Hanjen on line and tell him what’s going to
happen. The Council must know something—those people have no secrets. Tell him
they’d better cooperate with us. I’ll be waiting. I’ll be watching,” he said to
me. His mouth twitched. ‘All the time ... freak.” He looked down at my databand
before he moved out of my way and let us pass.

Perrymeade took me back to the hotel, not to the site where
the research team was working. He looked out the window the whole way; never
looked at me once until the mod settled in the usual spot in the square.

“So this is it,” I said. “I’m off the team? What does that
make ie, then? Your prisoner? Borosage’s meal—J”

He looked at me then, finally. His eyes were wet and red.

I closed my mouth and got out. I crossed the plaza without
looking back as the mod rose up again behind me.

Ezra was waiting in front of the hotel when I reached it. My
hands fisted as I saw him, until I realized he wasn’t waiting there for me.

He wasn’t even looking at me. He was standing in the center
of a pile of luggoge, looking up into the sky as an air taxi came drifting
down. It settled in front of him; a hotel worker began stowing his belongings
into the maw that popped open in its side. Ezra got into the passenger
compartment just as I reached the hotel entrance. I took the last bag out of
the staffer’s hand. He took a look at me and went away. I threw the bag on top
of the others and sealed the hold. Then I went forward until I was standing by
the mod’s raised door.

Ezra looked out, starting to say something, spasmed in
surprise as he saw me. He swore instead. His hand rose to cover his face: A
patch of sudoskin still hid his nose, with purple bruise seeping out from under
its edges. “What do you want?”

“Just wanted to say good-bya,” I said.

He glared at me, lowering his hand. “I don’t need this—” He
gestured at the hotel, the town, the planet, file. “This means nothing.” Only
the bitterness in his voice told me how much of a lie that was. “I could have
been working on half a dozen better projects.” He slammed his hand down on the
door control; the open door began to arc down above me. “I’ll get her back—”
Kissin-dre.
“TWenty years from now I’ll be at the top of my field. And you’ll still be
nothing but a freak.”

I ducked aside as the door came down. ‘And you’lI still be
an asshole,” I said. The door sealed with a soft hiss. I stepped back, watching
the mod rise, watching his face and the hatred on it grow smaller and smaller
until he merged into the mirroring window surface, into the mod itself, into
the sky, until he’d disappeared.

I went into the hotel, straight to the nearest access port,
and put in a call to the Feds. The message that came up on the empty screen
told me they were gone from the hotel. Not just for the day—for good. Tau had
taken them away, probably far away. I didn’t have to guess whY.

I thought about tracking them down, sending a message after
them, telling them why they had to come back. But even as I requested the
search, my mind was calling up half a hundred rea’ sons why it would never
happen. And there was only one that mattered: They really didn’t give a damn.
They’d been oblivious to Tau’s fawning and flattery. They’d been just as
oblivious to everything I’d done to get their attention. Nothing really
mattered to them; they were what I’d always thought the Feds were: drones,
going through the motions and collecting their pay. Nothing short of a dome
caving in on them personally was going to change how they saw any of this.

For a moment I actually wondered how I could make that happen.
And then I canceled the search. I remembered Natan Isplanasky, the head of
Contract Labor, the single genuine human being left in the entire FTA as far as
I could tell: A man without a life of his own, who spent most of his waking
hours jacked into the Federation Net just to track Contract Labor’s highest
levels of operation. The man that I’d told HARM could help them.

At the rate things were falling apart here, I wasn’t sure a
message would even reach Isplanasky before it was too late. There was still no
direct faster-than-light communication in the Federation. Any messages that
went outside a single solar system went on a ship, just like the humans who
sent and received them. Transmission cost more than I wanted to think about,
and it would be days before an answer came, even longer before there could be
any significant change in the situation.

And yet, if my information reached Isplanasky in time, the
system might still work for me, this once. If there was a better answer, I was
too exhausted to see it. I input a request for an inter-world message relay.

I fed my message into the Net; watched the credit line on my
databand take a nosedive. I started back across the empty lobby toward the
hotel entrance.

I stopped again when I was almost to the door. A Tau Corpse
was standing outside, talking to one of the hotel people. He looked up at me,
touched the edge of his helmet in a salute, and smiled. It wasn’t a meaningless
smile. He went on watching me until finally I turned around and went back
inside.

By the time I reached my room, the message light was
blinking on the console. I requested the message, half afraid of anything that
might appear on the screen, because I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to see
there right now.

What did come up on the screen was so unexpected that I read
it twice before I believed it:
The message you wish to send has been
rejected by Tau’s censors.

I couldn’t reach Isplanasky. Probably I couldn’t reach
anyone else, now. I wondered whether the door to my hotel room would open for
me; whether they’d sealed me in. I didn’t try it to find out.

I wore a path in the room’s carpet, climbed its walls with
my mind as I tried to find a way out of the trap that Refuge had suddenly
become for me. Nothing else happened for hours. I ordered room service. The
food came out of the service unit in the wall, and I didn’t eat it. Finally I
lay down and closed my eyes, letting my body’s exhaustion seep into my brain,
hoping that nothing would happen faster if I slept through it.

I slept. I dreamed, my mind filled with a bleak twilight landscape
that I had to keep moving through, making wrong turn after wrong turn on a
journey I couldn’t turn back from. The light never changed and the landscape
never changed, and it seemed to me that I would never make any progress toward
a goal I couldn’t name ....

But then after an eternity lost, the light began to grow,
like an unspoken whisper murmuring my secret name, and I realized that I’d
always known what I’d been searching for ....

For someone who could flow through my solid flesh as
though it was an illusion, to touch me like this, shocking alive every nerve
ending in my body. Pleasure sang through me at the speed of thought as I opened
to a timeless place ...

I opened my eyes, feeling my body stretch like a satisfied
animal below the unfocused form hovering over me. “Wha—J” I blinked, trying to
make the face one I knew ....

“Jeezrrl” I sat up, half scrambting backward on the bed. “MiYa—”

She stood over me, her own face stricken, gesturing desperately
with her hands for me to be quiet.

Miya.
I mouthed the word silently; touched her lips
with uncertain fingers. She closed her eyes as if it had been a kiss, and color
rose in her cheeks. It took all the control I had then not to pull her down and
make the kiss real. I could barely tell what was a dream now, what she’d been
doing to me before I woke up. Whatever it was, it left me feeling stupefied,
aroused, needing—“What?” I whispered, shaking my head.

She made a gesture like she thought—or maybe knew—that the
room was bugged. I got up from the bed, wondering whether she was right. If she
was, there was probably visual or infrared too, and nothing was safe.

I looked toward the door. Our only choice was to get out
now, but not that way. There was only one way that we could be certain of.

Looking back at Miya, I realized that she already knew it.
She took hold of my arrns; I felt her mind make contact, preparing us for a
teleport—

The door exploded behind us. The window/wall in front of us
gaped on open sky and a gleaming mass of CorpSec technology. Uniformed bodies
were everywhere. Something exploded in the heart of the room before I could
even react, knocking me flat, filling the air with fog. I heard Miya cry out,
felt my own shout of disbelief sucked out of mY lungs.

Everything turned inside out, and flat on my back on the
floor, I felt myself falling—

I hit the floor agaLn, hard. But it wasn’t my floor. Not
even a floor, but the hard ground in some back alley .. in Freaktown. I
staggered to my feet, swearing, bruised, shaking myself out.

Naoh stood in front of me, her eyes burning. Behind her I
could see the brink of the canyon, and Tau Riverton in the distance. Looking
back into her eyes, all I could think was that HARM had kidnapped me: they
thought I’d betrayed them, and even if they didn’t kill me Borosage would never
let me get back across the river ....

But then I remembered Miya, the way she’d looked at me fn
the moment before the Corpses had burst in on us.
Miya.

I didn’t see her. The fear that she’d been left behind broke
Naoh’s spell, closed my throat as I turned—

Miya was behind ffi€, sprawled on the ground like I’d been,
slowly picking herself up. She moved like her body had become a stranger to
her, and her face was the color of ash. Two of the HARM members helped her to
her feet.

I stumbled to her side, ignoring the rest of them. “Miy’ ...
awright—? wha’ happ’n’?” I broke off as the words registered, as I heard the
slurring. I shook my head again, swimming through confusion as thick as sewage,
not understanding why I sounded like I’d been drugged. Only one thing was clear
in my mind:
T6u had betrayed me again.
And not just me this time.