Company Town (23 page)

Layne nodded to herself knowingly, like she'd just solved some big mystery. She wagged a finger. “I get it.”

“Get what?”

“No, I get it. I finally get it. You're worried that if you let any part of yourself be pretty, you'll turn into your mom.”

Hwa drained her bourbon. As she did, she felt the world turn gently on its axis. This was the moment she had been waiting for. The perfect and complete awareness of her own fucked-up-ness. The moment at which her body finally hinted that maybe, just maybe, she should have a drink of water.

She rapped the bar with her knuckles, and turned to Layne. “No,” she said. “I don't try because trying would be stupid. I have the kind of face that people edit out of their vision. It's not going to look any better with makeup, or a subscription, or augments, or whatever. So I don't bother.”

Layne frowned. Because she was drunk, it looked as though she were trying to thread her whole face through the eye of a needle. Hwa frowned. “Are you okay?”

Layne was not okay. She was clutching her throat. She was turning blue. She was falling off her bar stool.

“Layne!”

Hwa fell with her. Layne slid down her body to the floor. Hwa felt the music thrumming up through the tile and slicing through the air. Drums and trumpets and sharp, shimmering piano. Layne wriggled on the floor. Was this how Hwa looked when she had a seizure? All around her, people were laughing. People laughed when she seized, too. It had happened at school once, when she was in grade four. She peed herself and Sunny didn't come and so she had to wear clothes from the Lost & Found and everyone called her Diaper Baby and Retard after that.

Funny, the things you remembered, as your friend lay dying in your arms.

It happened faster than Hwa thought possible. A couple of minutes at most. But those minutes stretched out, became unbearable, like a note held too long or a terrible, damning silence. One minute Layne's eyes were roving around the room, as if she were trying to remember every detail all at once, and her heels were driving into the floor, squeaking and leaving black streaks. And the next minute she was gone. Not still, but absent. Vanished. Like someone had done a magic trick with her body, and replaced the real Layne with a warm, limp dummy.

“Oh, shit,” Hwa heard herself say. “Oh, Jesus. Layne. I'm sorry.”

The music had stopped. Layne stared straight ahead. Pink foam dribbled from one corner of her mouth.

“Come on, baby.” Someone's arms were around her. Lifting her up under her shoulders. Rivaudais. She knew his cologne. The rings on his hands. “Come on, now. Up you get.”

“She's dead.” Hwa's knees went out from under her, and Rivaudais pulled her up. “She's dead.”

“I know, baby girl. You just come on back.”

“We should cover her up—”

“Someone else can do that. Let's get you some coffee, right now.”

Hwa untangled herself from his grasp. She stood herself up. “We were just talking.” She pointed. “We were just talking, just a minute ago.”

*   *   *

The police took her statement at the bar. Rivaudais's coffee helped. He made it light and sweet with a lot of sugar and real cream. It tasted like a headache. Hwa felt that headache spiking somewhere deep in her skull as she drank it, but she drank it anyway, and then had some more, a fresh cup every time she told the story of the evening. The cops asked her about Layne. How they knew each other. What Layne did for a living. If she'd been sick. If she'd caught anything. If she and Hwa had an arrangement. If this was off-book.

Then Hwa said the words
bodyguard
, and
Joel Lynch
, and they focused on something in their eyes, and suddenly they were very nice and said that of course she could leave, this was just a statement, and if she thought of anything else she could contact them any time, day or night, no problem.

It was drizzling by the time she made it to the train platform. More wind than rain. Colder than she remembered. Her shirt stuck to her skin where Layne's bloody foam had soaked it. It would look a sight on the train, she realized. But there was nothing for it. She pushed forward.

In a pool of orange exit light, Síofra sat waiting for her on a bench outside the station. His hair was soaked black. Even his eyelashes were wet.

“Where is your coat?” he asked.

Of course. She'd forgotten it upstairs. That was why she was suddenly so cold. Hwa examined him. Wherever he'd come from, he'd left in a hurry. “Where are your socks?”

He stood and pulled his coat off and draped it over her shoulders. Hwa watched his fingers doing up the toggles. She didn't recognize his pants. They were too loose for running, too casual for work. Just a t-shirt on top.

“You were sleeping,” she said.

“Yes.” He folded down the collar of the coat and gently pulled her hair free of it. “Prefect woke me. You were in close proximity to officers of the law, and your heart rate spiked, and you weren't answering Prefect's pings. Those are the criteria for that particular alert.”

“But you didn't come upstairs.”

“I spoke with a Mr. Rivaudais, who assured me you weren't being detained.” Síofra hugged his bare arms. “He told me what happened. Hwa, I'm so—”

Hwa held up a hand. He silenced. She shut her eyes. She clenched her fists. She made herself hold it all in until the wave passed, until all she could feel was the rain trickling down her scalp, and then she made for the train. Síofra followed.

*   *   *

He followed her all the way home. At her door, she thought about warning him about the state of the place. Then she decided it was his problem if he didn't like it—not everybody had spent the past ten years filling their wallets with Lynch's blood money. But when they pushed through, he just stared at the heavy bag, and the reflex bag, and the trophies with Tae-kyung's name on them.

“Where are yours?” he asked, finally.

“I kept getting disqualified,” Hwa said. “Illegal moves.”

“If I stay, will you kill me?”

Hwa opened and closed her fists. Tested their strength. One was already weaker than the other. She couldn't hurt him even if she wanted to. “Not tonight.” She thought of the profile in Zachariah Lynch's office. Dates and times and locations and heartbeats. His miraculous transformation, like that of some martyred saint, from broken to fixed, vulnerable to invulnerable, all on the Lynch dime. And why? Just because they felt like being generous? No wonder he was so loyal. “If you stay, they'll know.”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm well aware of that.”

She showered and changed. When she finished, Síofra was shutting off the kettle. He fetched down two mugs and started digging in the tea cabinet.

“How's your stomach?” he asked, without turning.

“Not great.” Hwa pulled a pillow off the bed and sat on it in front of her display. She hunched forward. “Prefect.”

“Ready.”

“Gather all available surveillance from the Aviation bar in Tower Four, over the past three hours. Find Layne Mackenzie, female identified, twenty-five, white, pink hair. Show me every appearance.”

“Visual, audio, data, bio—”

“Everything.”

Síofra set down a mug of something steaming in front of her. Turmeric-ginger-chamomile. The same hangover cure she herself would have chosen. “You don't have to do this,” he said. “Not right now.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I kinda do.”

Síofra nodded. He stretched out on the floor beside her, propped on his elbows. As he crossed his ankles, his trousers rode up a little. The freckles on his inner left ankle formed a perfect circle, like a fairy ring.

To stop staring, she focused on the display. “Is there a camera behind the bar?”

“Several. The clearest feed is the one from the bartender's right eye.”

“So it was live while Layne and I were there?”

A pause.
“According to the end user licence agreement, recording during work hours appears to be a condition of employment.”

“Show me.”

The bartender switched between filters of vision as he worked. Thermal vision was pretty handy for knowing exactly when a martini was icy enough. The shaker always turned a special shade of purple before he poured out its contents. Layne and Hwa weren't always directly in his line of sight, but he did keep glancing at Hwa, toggling between filters as he tried and failed to focus on her face.

It was odd, seeing herself the way augmented people saw her. The bartender couldn't turn his eye off, so he always got an adulterated version of her. First there was the Stop Staring version, where her face was a real-time render of what it would have been had Sunny made different decisions as a mother. Then there was the thermal version, where her left side was just slightly brighter than her right, on account of all the tangled nerves and blood vessels. But he spent the most time in the iContact filter, as the focus-detection algorithm in his eye found everyone in the crowd around the bar who was trying to catch his eye, and ordered their faces into a queue for service. Hwa's face didn't show up in that filter. She was just a dark, empty blur, like a shadow. Like a ghost.

No wonder he'd kept offering Layne another round first.

Hwa kept her attention on the bartender's hands as he mixed the drinks. He kept his hands in full view, focusing on them in a way that seemed intentional. Maybe that was part of his contract, too. Hwa watched him pour the last two drinks for her and Layne. Nothing amiss. Then the bartender retrieved the next face in the queue, and began mixing a martini. He switched to thermal vision. He focused on the shaker.

Something flashed bright white in his vision.

It was there, and then it was gone; the bartender flipped over to focus-detection and the flash vanished, like he was trying to rid himself of a common glitch. Hwa was just a shadow Layne was talking to. Then Layne fell. Then Hwa moved. The other faces in the room scattered away from them, focused on them and not the bartender, depopulating his vision. Hwa twitched back along the reel. She landed on the right moment. There in the centre, frozen in that single second, the blazing white shape loomed.

“It's him.”

Hwa nodded. “Aye. But what would he want with Layne?”

Síofra watched her carefully. “Do you not see it?”

“See what?”

Síofra logged in. He had a whole folder to show her. He twitched back along footage until he found the place he wanted. Hwa recognized the weigh station within the
Angel from Montgomery
almost immediately. Once more, she saw herself in thermal vision.

And there, behind her, that blinding white heat in the shape of a man.

“But…” She couldn't look away from the image. “Joel's the one with the death threats.”

“And you're the one with a stalker.”

“But…” Hwa frowned. “That would mean that whoever switched the rounds during the drill … killed Layne.”

“Perhaps your friend picked up the wrong drink, Hwa.” He looked toward the air mattress. “May I have one of those pillows, please? Dawn isn't for a few hours.”

*   *   *

Hwa didn't hear him leave. She didn't properly remember falling asleep, either. They'd been discussing next steps, and then for some reason he started telling a very long story about a job he'd done at a reactor in Vladivostok, and it involved an explanation of Russian baths, and talk of hot steam and cold pools, and how you had to be careful not to go to sleep in the sauna, and she thought it would be fine to close her eyes, just for a minute. After that, she slept until the door buzzed her awake.

“I didn't order this,” Hwa said, squinting outside at the delivery man holding tiffins of food.

“T'were a gentleman's name on the order, Miss. Said your head were right logy.”

Hwa pinched the bridge of her nose. “Aye. He's not wrong.”

She brought the tiffins in and opened them. The kitchen looked different. Cleaner. Neater. Good Christ, he'd done the dishes. His performance reviews weren't kidding about that quest for perfection.

“You didn't have to do the dishes,” she said, when she called.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“And thank you for breakfast.”

“I thought it might help. Do you plan to go to school with Joel?”

“Aye.”

“And after that?”

She had stuffed the shirt with Layne's blood into a self-sealing pouch. Hopefully its time on her floor hadn't contaminated it. “Have to see a man about a blood sample.”

“And where is he, now?”

Hwa shook her head, then remembered he couldn't see. “You're not coming.”

“Hwa—”

“It's not your kind of place,” she said quickly. “You're too…”
Pretty,
she wanted to say. “You're too fancy.”

“You would feel the need to protect me.”

Hwa rolled her smile inside her mouth. “Aye, and I already have one bodyguarding job. Which reminds me, I want you to call Joel and take him out somewhere, when my shift ends.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Just get him out of the flat.” Hwa cleared her throat, thinking of Zachariah's softbot coiling one of its many arms around her neck. “He asked me to come live there with him. Joel did.”

“That's sudden. Are you sure the two of you aren't moving too fast?”

“Very funny.” She contemplated the air mattress and the boxes. Síofra had slept on a yoga mat with a blanket spread over it. “I'd be in Tower Five a lot.”

“That would make things easier.”
He coughed.
“Running, for example.”

“Aye. Running.”

*   *   *