A Long, Long Sleep (18 page)

I didn’t want to open my mouth, but I was afraid if I didn’t supply him with the name, the rest of the conversation would just get worse. “Bren,” I whispered.

“That’s it! Bren! Good boy, Bren. I beat him at tennis a few times.”

I suspected that was a lie, unless he’d played him when Bren was only eight.

“His mom and dad are good employees. I like Sabah; he’s got class. But opposites kind of attract, you know. I know that’s why Sabah married Annie.”

What was so opposite about Annie and Mr. Sabah? “Opposites attract no matter if you want them to or not. You can’t be too careful who you hang out with. I never did approve of Bren hanging out with that Europa kid.”

No. No, please, don’t bring Otto into this!

“I just don’t get it,” he said, his voice slurred over. “Everyone tells me that kid’s so smart, all those scholarships and tests and things, but I just don’t see it.

They’re just trying to improve their diversity or some such. He looks good on their records, but he’s just a dead- faced zombie. Can’t even talk!”

I wasn’t surprised that Otto had never, ever touched Guillory, even if he’d had the chance. Touching that mind would make you need a mental shower. I wondered if that was why Otto saw Dr. Bija —not for his own problems, but for everyone else’s.

“They should just accept it. The kid’s just gorked, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” He shook his head and took another slug of his drink. “I think we should just give up on that whole failed experiment.”

Was he saying what I thought he was saying? The blood left my face again, back to the white rose. Give up? That meant, what? Kill him? My hands clenched in either horror or rage, I wasn’t sure which. I rather wished I had accepted that drink he’d offered, so I could throw it in his face. I could feel my skin trying to crawl off me, trying, I supposed, to get away from this odious gilded creature before me.

He stared at me, his eyes unfocused. “You know, you’re a really cute kid,” he said. “A really cute kid.” Oh, God! He wasn’t about to . . . grab me or something, was he? I tried to remember where I’d left my cell. Damn it, it was still in the shower! He was shaking his head. “It’s a real shame what’s gonna happen to you.”

I tilted my head. “What . . .” My words came out in a raw whisper of horror.

“What do you mean?”

And at that moment I found out.

The door fell open, startling Guillory not a millimeter. “You are Rosalinda Samantha Fitzroy. Please remain still for retinal identification.”

“You!” I screeched at Guillory. He lifted his head to look at me, but I couldn’t read his drunken eyes. It all made perfect sense. Of all the people in the world who might want to kill me, Guillory was at the top of the list. And how else could the Plastine know where I was?

I backed up, my hands gripping my sketchbook like a lifeline. I couldn’t run.

My body still hadn’t recovered from yesterday’s attack. It would do no good to scream. Guillory wasn’t going to help, and the hotel room was soundproof. I ran through my parents’ teachings. Run, scream, fight. I was down to option three.

The Plastine no longer had a stumble stick, but he still carried the control collar in his left hand. He reached for me with his right. I grabbed him by the wrist and twisted. I ducked backward under his arm and elbowed him in the side, to incapacitate him and give me a chance to get away. Or that was the plan. Instead I elbowed him in the ribs and nearly broke my arm. Pain shot up to my shoulder before the whole arm went agonizingly numb. I feared I’d permanently damaged something, and I cried out at the pain.

Meanwhile my head was whirring. The damn thing was built like steel. But I remembered what had happened in my studio. I switched from defense to evasion tactics, though I knew I couldn’t keep those up for long.

I danced behind the Plastine and ducked and dodged, trying to be as slippery as an eel. I was already losing my breath. I was so intent on avoiding the Plastine, I didn’t remember Guillory was behind me. He stumbled into me, nearly knocking me to the ground. I was surprised he didn’t shout, “Come and get her!” Instead he glared, wild- eyed. Maybe he hadn’t intended to actually be present at my death. Blasted coward.

The Plastine swung at me, catching me in a backhand meant to knock me out.

I went with the blow instead of fighting it and cracked my head against Guillory’s. His hand tightened on my arm. He tried to pull me, but I wasn’t having that. I stomped as hard as could on his casually sandaled foot. He groaned, releasing me, and with a mule kick, I raised my heel into his groin. He dropped like a deer, moaning in pain.

I’d neutralized Guillory in the time it took the Plastine to compensate for his backhand blow. He stood before me again, control collar at the ready. I twisted, spun behind him, and kicked the Plastine in the buttocks. It was like kicking a statue, but like a statue, he could also fall. The Plastine tilted, fell, and landed full on Guillory.

There was my chance. I pelted for the door.

One of the lifts was just opening its doors. I jumped inside and stabbed the ground floor button. “Down, down!” I told the thing, in case it had a voice control, too. By this time I was pretty sure the Plastine worked alone, but I was still relieved when the lift opened its doors on the lobby, and there was no one there but the porters and the desk clerk —unless Guillory had paid them off, and they were working for him, too. But no one tried to stop me as I ran through the exquisite lobby and out into the tropical night. Coit. Now what? I had no idea where to go from here. I had no money, and my credit tick was cached inside my cell, which didn’t help me, because my cell was still in the bathroom upstairs, with the assassin and the man who had commissioned him. What did I have? Nothing! I was, thank heavens, in my school uniform and not my pajamas, but that was it. My assets were my ill- equipped body and the clothes on my back. I looked down at my hands and suddenly smiled.

I still had my sketchbook.

“Bren?” I asked.

I’d used my last coin to buy this time in the holobooth. The holobooth was dingy, with unpleasant substances dribbling down a few of the walls, and I wished I still had my cell.

It took seven chimes before Bren fumbled his cell from his bedside table. His face, half awake, appeared sideways in the holobooth, still on his pillow. He looked sleepy and vulnerable, like a little boy. “Rose?” he muttered, still half asleep. “Rose, it’s after midnight, and I’ve school. What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just five minutes, then you can go back to sleep.”

Bren blinked once or twice and then sat up. The cell adjusted and righted his holoimage. “What?”

“I need you to send my limoskiff to come and get me. Can you do that? Then you can go back to bed.”

“What?”

“I need you to send me my limoskiff. It’s down in the garage.

I know you have the key. I haven’t locked the codes —all you need to do is tell it where to go and it’ll go there.”

“Where do you need to go?”

“I’m down at the hover- bus depot. I need it to come and get me.”

“What are you doing at the hover depot?”

Trying to explain my predicament to a boy who was half- asleep was more difficult than I’d imagined. “I bought myself a ticket home,” I said. The words came out triumphant. Though it had taken ingenuity and twenty- four hours, I had made my way back all by myself.

The busker I had seen on the way to Nirvana had given me an idea. With a story of a funny uncle I wanted to avoid, I’d coaxed my way onto a ferry from Nirvana to one of the more commercial Unicorn Islands, this one called Shangri- la. Tourists and travelers were everywhere, even after midnight. I’d situated myself outside the hover- bus depot, drew up a sign, and started sketching publicly. After an hour of advertising my portraits, I’d gotten my first customer. She paid me for a sketch of her boyfriend. People will pay a lot for a decent sketch as a souvenir, particularly at a tourist’s paradise like the Unicorn Islands. Three more sketched portraits had earned me the price of a bus ticket back to ComUnity and a greasy meal I actually managed to keep down.

I was inordinately proud of myself. Mom and Daddy always told me that I wasn’t able to take care of myself, that if left to my own devices I’d be completely helpless. Maybe that had been true then, but I didn’t feel helpless now. With no assets at all, I was able to quite literally make my way through the world.

I finally got Bren to understand what I wanted, and he told me my limoskiff would be down to get me within half an hour. I thanked him and then resumed my nervous pacing in the shadows.

I was ambivalent about those shadows. They made it harder for anyone to see me, surely, but that also meant that if the assassin did attack, no one would see him, either. Not that that would stop the plastic corpse. Secrecy wasn’t exactly in his programming. I was surprised he had managed to elude the police. But of course, now I knew whose help he had been getting.

The Plastine wasn’t the only thing eating at me. Earning my way onto the bus had been exhilarating, but halfway home it had started to depress me. None of the UniCorp of ficials ever entered ComUnity by hover bus. The only people who had shared the seats beside me were the families of the working class, the servants, the waiters, the kinds of people who catered to my kind of people. It wasn’t that I didn’t like these people. In fact, they seemed considerably more genuine than any of the upper echelons. They were like Åsa. But as I sat there in my Uni Prep uniform, I realized what I must seem like to them. A leech. I probably seemed as odious to them as Guillory had seemed to me, even before last night.

Finally I spotted the shiny black outline of my limoskiff gliding to the curb. I stepped over the red- striped pedestrian warning strip to open the door. I’d planned to just tell the skiff to circle round and round ComUnity until I figured out what to do. My plan was thwarted.

“Are you going to tell me exactly what’s going on, now?” Bren asked as I stuck my head inside.

“What are you doing here?”

“You think I’m going to let you go off alone in the middle of the night? My mom would murder me.” He took my sketchbook from my hands in a kind of proprietary gesture and set it on the seat beside him.

“Won’t she murder you for sneaking out?” I asked.

“Probably. So it had better be worth my time. What’s going on? What happened to the Guillory- sanctioned witness protection?”

I took a deep breath. “Guillory took me down to Xanadu. Or . . . Nirvana, whatever it’s called. Did UniCorp really waste so much money on that folly?”

Bren twitched his head in contemptuous acknowledgment.

“And while we were there, the Plastine came.”

“What?” Bren stared at me. “Again? But you were incognito!”

I sighed. “I think someone told it where to find me.”

“How did you escape?”

“Distracted it. Tried to fight it. Nearly broke my elbow. Ran. Then I worked my way back here with my sketchbook, keeping out of sight of anyone from UniCorp.”

Bren was horrified. “That’s it.” He pulled his cell out from under his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Celling Guillory and then the police.”

“What are you doing that for?”

“Because I assume you didn’t. Am I right?”

He was.

“You just let atrocious things happen to you and don’t tell a soul. You didn’t complain the first day of school when you were being tortured by your history class, you didn’t tell Barry and Patty about the first assassination attempt, and you haven’t told anyone about Barry and Patty, either.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the fact that those are two of the most mercenary pseudoparents that have ever been put on this planet, and I haven’t heard one word of complaint out of you.”

“They’re all right,” I said sheepishly.

“They’re all right in that they leave you alone, I guess,” Bren said. “I’m celling Guillory.”

“Don’t!”

He stared at me, his face hard. “Tell me why not.”

“Don’t tell him where I am! Don’t tell anyone!”

Bren frowned. “Rose, you can’t handle this alone.”

“Yes, I can! Don’t! Please, please, don’t cell Guillory!”

“Why not?” Bren snapped. “Tell me. Whatever you’re keeping secret, tell me!”

I blinked. Why was I keeping this a secret? Why did I want to protect Guillory?

I didn’t know. It was almost as if it were habitual. It just seemed to me like the proper course of action, as if I’d kept secrets like this before.

I was puzzling over this when Bren muttered, “Burn this,” and lifted up his cell again. “ Guill —”

I put my hand over his cell. “I think Guillory’s the one who set this thing on me,” I said.

Bren hesitated and then slowly lowered the cell.

“Why?”

I swallowed, unwilling to voice my suspicions. Besides, I wasn’t sure if he was asking why I thought that, or why Guillory would want to.

“I wouldn’t exactly put it past him,” Bren mused, “but it isn’t quite his usual style.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when he kept you a secret in the hospital; that’s more his style. When he signed up Barry and Patty, who worked for him in Florida, as your guardians; that’s his style. He’s . . . more of a worm, less of a snake. He’ll lie, undermine, and manipulate, maybe even steal to get what he wants, but . . . an assassin?” He blinked. “I don’t know. I’d have thought that’s about where he’d draw the line.”

“I don’t think he has any lines drawn,” I said. “He wants to kill Otto. Said we should give up on the whole failed experiment.”

Bren grunted in disgust. “Coiting ass.” Then he looked at me, realization on his face. “Was he drunk?”

I nodded.

Bren sighed. “Yeah, Guillory becomes the world’s biggest prick when he’s drunk. Which is most evenings. Guess I should have warned you.”

“Bren,” I said. “It wasn’t just that. He knew the Plastine was coming, and he didn’t even try to stop it, or cell security, or anything. He just sat there. Then he tried to knock me down so that the Plastine could get me. I’m just like Otto to him —a mistake that should never have happened. If I weren’t around, he wouldn’t have to worry about losing the company.”

“That is a pretty big motive.” Bren tapped his finger on his knee. “If he’d arranged to program a Plastine, there’d be a record of it on his computers.”

“Would there?” I asked. “He had a pseudonym on Nirvana.”

“Those have to be registered, or he’d be arrested for tax evasion,” Bren told me.

“Building, shipping, and programming a Plastine is a highly expensive proposition. To arrange it in the time he’s had since you’ve been out of stass, he’d have to use company funds to do it. Any pseudonym he used would have to be filtered through the UniCorp system.” He frowned. “My grandfather would know.”

“You think?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s only one rung down from Guillory. Could have had Reggie’s job, actually, but he didn’t want it. He knows everything about that company.”

I swallowed. “But if Guillory’s trying to kill me” — I didn’t want to say this —

“might not your grandfather and Guillory have . . . the same agenda?”

Bren’s head snapped up and he stared at me. “If he did, Mom and I would arrest him ourselves. No, Granddad’s got principles. Besides, I doubt he cares enough about you to hate you. Granddad’s kind of a ‘let the chips fall where the may’ kind of guy.”

He hadn’t struck me as such from what little I’d seen of that scowling, angry old man, but I guessed Bren knew him better. “Okay,” I said. “So, what do we do?”

Bren checked the time. It was one AM. “Granddad’s probably in his of fice; I’ll cell him,” he said.

“Don’t say my name,” I said. “If the Plastine is being run through UniCorp, then the UniCorp switchboard might have a voice scan on cell calls, which would be triggered if my name was used.”

“Good point,” Bren said. “You’re clever.”

“Not really. Daddy used to do that when I was a kid,” I said. “Kept an ear on gossip about all kinds of things, dozens of keywords.”

Bren pulled his cell back out. “Granddad,” he said.

The cell hummed for a moment and then the white- haired scowling image appeared in Bren’s lap. “What’s wrong, Bren? It’s late.”

It might have been late, but the head in the hologram did not appear asleep. I could see the suit collar around his neck. Bren was right; he was still up. A workaholic. Just like Daddy.

“I’ve got a serious problem here, Granddad. Can we come see you?”

“We?”

“Yeah, I’ve got an old friend here,” he said, with just enough emphasis on the

‘friend’ to indicate that it probably wasn’t just Anastasia or Nabiki. “She’s in a bit of trouble.”

The hologram turned still for long enough that I suspected a glitch in the connection. “I’ll be at my of fice,” he said finally, and the hologram turned off.

Bren nodded. “All right. Let’s turn this thing around.” He leaned forward and tapped on the dashboard of the limoskiff, activating the location control. “Uni Building, please.”

My skiff slowed, turned in a slow arc, and headed back toward the center of ComUnity. “We should be there in twenty minutes,” Bren said.

I had gotten distracted when Bren leaned forward to tap the dash. He was wearing a soft tennis shirt — he’d probably been sleeping in it, as it looked a little rumpled. The sleeves were short, and the muscles in his arms rippled like water. Holy coit, as they said now. How could he be so damned gorgeous after just waking up? He sat back, and silence descended upon us. The silence grew heavier and heavier, until even breathing seemed awkward.

Burn it. I’d ruined it. Me and my wretched infatuation had broken the easy camaraderie we’d shared since I started school. He’d always been the one to talk —tennis, his friends, school —but my infatuation had killed a certain branch of his enthusiasm, and it was the branch that he used to share with me.

“You must hate me,” I said.

Bren looked at me, more bemused than anything else. “Why do you say that?”

“All I do is cause you trouble,” I told him. “The moment you meet me I faint at your feet. I drag all these reporters into your life. I hang on you at school like an albatross, and then I go and fall in love with you. You know, just to hammer the nail in the coffin.”

Bren laughed. “I actually like you, Rose.”

I realized what I’d said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t fishing for a compliment. I was just trying to say sorry.”

“I know,” Bren said. “You don’t ask for compliments. Or attention. Or sympathy. Or even for a glass of water, I suspect.” He sighed. “You know, when Granddad told me to look out for you, I was petrified. I thought I’d have to deal with some princess used to getting her own way every day of her life. I thought you really would hang around me like an albatross. I thought you’d be arrogant and . . . haughty. And you weren’t. Aren’t. It surprised me that I actually kind of liked you.”

I was confused. “You do?”