Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (47 page)

Across the patio, Josh was tending bar. The crowd was stacked three deep, most of them running a lustful red as they watched him flip bottles and pour cocktails.

There were the usual family dynamics. The gardeners were clustered by the edge of the new grass, sipping their drinks as they eyed the volleyball players with trepidation. The couples nagged and bickered sweetly. Those with quick hands or combat experience were juggling knives, lit torches, running chainsaws... The mansion provided a wealth of props for those who loved to show off.

She couldn’t find either Phil or Jason, but they had brought dates from outside of OACET. They were enjoying the spoils of fame; Phil said had never been asked out more in his entire life than over the past week. If they were holed up behind a stack of boxes somewhere, she wasn’t about to interrupt. 

Zockinski’s core of autumn orange popped at the edge of the driveway, Hill’s forest green beside it. Rachel nearly sat up in surprise before the topheavy weight of the baby pushed her flat against the lounge. The detectives had come together and arrived late. Rachel hadn’t thought they would come at all. Both men had declined her first invitation, but she had pushed it on them the rest of the week until they finally accepted. She had assumed they had agreed just to get her to shut up.

Avery made a tiny mewling sound, and her hands clenched on Rachel’s shirt as she started to stir; Rachel pinged Mako to come and get his daughter.

Santino scooted his ottoman so his back was against a pillar. “How are the knees?”

“Fine. Davies says I need to take it slow for a few weeks, but there’s no permanent damage.” Rachel had been coerced into a second physical before the party started, but Jenny Davies had had ulterior motives. The medical researcher had received a copy of Phil’s adapted scanning autoscript, and was obsessed with its potential as a diagnostic instrument. Davies had all but held a gun to Rachel’s head to teach her how to apply this new autoscript to deep tissue, blood, and bone. Rachel had tried her best to show Davies what she could, and fought her nausea for almost an hour until she finally threw up in the trash can.

“So…” she said, and paused to search out the end of her straw. 

“I haven’t seen her,” her partner said in a flat voice.

“Okay,” Rachel said. Santino had driven her to the mansion earlier that afternoon and had disappeared after they arrived, so she had assumed the best even though Zia was conspicuously absent from the party. Last Saturday, he had gone out to meet Zia for coffee, claiming they would work through their shared attraction like reasonable adults. He had come home an hour later in a red-white rage. Rachel had taken him straight to the OACET shooting range to let him blow off his anger with a semiautomatic tactical shotgun. He refused to say what had happened and Rachel had gathered that the conversation had not gone well,  but his core colors were thoroughly and permanently saturated with Zia’s and he had stopped mentioning his inevitable reunion with his ex-girlfriend. On Sunday morning, Rachel found a check taped to the coffee pot with “rent & utilities” scrawled across the bottom. They had gone shopping for furniture for the guest room that afternoon.

Mako shuffled towards them over the lawn. The man’s conversational colors were layered in exhausted grays.

“Where’s Carlota?” Santino asked.

“Sleeping, where else?” Mako glanced towards the mansion. “She’s conked out in one of the bedrooms.”

“You’re not with her?” Santino asked. The dark circles under Mako’s eyes made him look as though he was ready to suit up for the Superbowl.

“Pat and I were… uh…” Mako was suddenly interested in everything other than Santino. “… moving stuff for the party.”

“Where’d you and Mulcahy put his car?” Rachel asked.

Santino choked on his beer. “My car? What?”

“It’s your own fault for driving a hybrid,” Mako sighed. “So light, so tiny.”

“What did you do with my car?”

“Don’t worry,” Rachel shushed him as Avery began to squirm.  “You’ll get it back. We’ve got his baby.”

Zockinski and Hill came out of the crowd. “Holy sh... crud,” Mako said, fumbling his way through a new parent’s self-censorship.

“I know,” Rachel sniffed. A gorgeous brunette hung off of Zockinski’s arm; his wife was stunning. “How is that fair?”

When they were close enough so she didn’t have to shout, Rachel asked Zockinski, “No kids?”

“Got a sitter,” he said. His conversational colors dimpled slightly as he told a white lie. “We’ll probably be out past their bedtime.” 

Oh well,
Rachel thought. He trusted them enough to bring his wife. It was a good start. 

“This place is amazing,” Zockinski’s wife said. And it was, a fairy kingdom at twilight as long as you could overlook the cracked concrete and the areas roped off to let the seedlings grow.

“Thanks,” Rachel said. “We’ve been renovating it since we moved in. The work is finally starting to show.”

“You find the mansion okay?” Santino asked Hill.

“Got here a while ago.” The tall man shrugged and took a pull from his bottle. “We would have come over sooner but there’s this guy standing by the bar who really wants to talk about fish.”

“Fishing?”

“No, just… fish.”

“Right,” Rachel said quickly. “Introductions. Mako, this is Detective Matt Hill. We worked with him on the Eric Witcham case. Matt, this is Agent Marc Hill. We call him Mako.”

Zockinski looked between the two Hills and opened his mouth, and Rachel jabbed him in the thigh with her nearest big toe, hard.

The two men shook hands and appraised each other. Rachel noticed their core colors had the same hints of green. Their handshake started as casual but their conversational colors picked up speed as they shifted from casual small talk to vivid red recognition.

“And Matt?” Rachel rolled forward onto her feet and pressed the drowsy baby into her father’s arms before either man could speak. “This is Avery. She’s your first cousin once removed, probably? I think that’s how the genealogy goes.”

Santino coughed, then roared with laughter. Zockinski was right behind him.

The Hills blinked and gaped, and looked down at Rachel.

Who smiled.

Acknowledgements and Apologies

Brown, you put up with my nonsense and give so much good in return. I love you and I’m lucky to have you as my husband.

This book couldn’t have been written without the help of the second readers. Thanks to Fuzz, Gary, Tiff, Joris, Greg, Jackie, and Elizabeth, who slogged through countless drafts and gave excellent critical feedback. Danny, thank you for the last-minute copy edits. As always, Dave, my friend and website administrator, helped me when I had no idea I needed help, and is apparently far more knowledgeable about gun ownership and ballistics than I had realized.

Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising is responsible for the fantastic cover art.

Credit goes to the Foglios at Girl Genius for the lovely and inspirational phrase, “mad social scientist”
—
Eric Witcham will be back.

With apologies to Dante, who let me know that as a person of Irish ancestry herself, she was horrified that I credited whiskey to Tennessee. And my sincere apologies to those readers, authors, and artists I have met online and have no doubt offended in some way. Social awkwardness: it’s how I roll.

I have taken some liberties with locations. The OACET mansion does not exist (although I wish it did), and while First District Station is indeed a recently remodeled elementary school, the rodeo chute off of the Interrogation wing and its attached parking garage are my own additions. 

The Portsmouth Marine Terminal is in the same place but is slightly smaller than described. Directly across the harbor is its sister port, the Norfolk International Terminals, and I’ve combined them into a single entity. The environmental problems associated with the dumping of shipping containers are quite real.

Finally,
Digital Divide
is set in a larger fictional universe. Patrick Mulcahy’s story is free to all readers and is in graphic novel form at
agirlandherfed.com
.
Digital Divide
, as well as the four upcoming novels in the Rachel Peng series, will fill in the five-year gap between when Mulcahy discovered the purpose of their implants and when he was finally able to establish OACET as an independent federal organization. Please excuse the talking koala; he has a good heart.

You can find updates on current projects and novels at
kbspangler.com
and
agirlandherfed.com
, or follow me at
@KBSpangler
on Twitter.

Rachel Peng and Raul Santino will be back in
Maker Space