Kelley Eskridge

For Nicola, my sunshine

BEFORE THE FALL

SO HERE SHE WAS, FRAMED IN THE OPEN
DOUBLE DOORS
like a photograph: Jackal Segura on the worst day
of her life, preparing to join the party. The room splayed wide before
her, swollen with voices, music, human heat, and she thought perhaps
this was a bad idea after all. But she was conscious of the picture she
made, backlit in gold by the autumn afternoon sun, standing square,
taking up space. A good entrance, casually dramatic. People were
already noticing, smiling;
there's our Jackal
being herself. There's our Hope
. It shamed her, now that she
knew it was a lie.

She took a breath and stepped into the
chaos of color and noise, conscious of her bare face. Most people had
made some effort at a Halloween costume, even if only a few finger
smears of paint along cheekbone or forehead. Enough to make them
unrecognizable, alien. She had a vision of Ko Island full of monsters
lurching to the beat that boomed like a kodo drum, so loud that she
imagined the huge western windows bulging under the pressure, only a
moment from jagged eruption. It could happen. There was always a
breaking point.

But she should not be thinking about
things breaking, about her life splintered like a bone that could never
be set straight. She should wipe from her mind her mother's voice, thin
and sharp,
They give you everything and you
don't deserve it, you're no more a Hope than I am
! She
should stop wanting to split Donatella's head open for saying it. And
she should not yearn to lay herself in her mother's lap and beg her
take it back, Mama, make it better
while
Donatella stroked her hair. What good would it do? Her mother would
only find a way to break her all over again.

Enough. She shook her head and braced
herself against the jostle of bodies. Fuck Donatella. Jackal would
cope. She would find a way to work it out. She was here, that was the
first step: and somewhere in this confusion were the people she
needed—her web mates, her peers among the second generation of Ko
Corporation citizen-employees. Her web was the world. Her web was
safety. She only had to brave the crowd long enough to find them.

She guessed they would stake out their
usual space by the windows that faced the cliffs and the sea beyond.
They would be drinking and laughing, expansive, expecting only what
everyone expected—that the world turned, that business was good, that
the company prospered and its people prospered with it, flowers in the
sun of Ko. With Jackal as the tallest sunflower in the bunch. It was a
ludicrous image, with her olive skin and dark eyes, but it was true.
Every person of the company—the three hundred in the room, the four
hundred thousand on the island, the two million around the
world—watched their Hope with a mix of awe and possession, as if she
were a marvelous new grain in the research garden, or the current stock
valuation. They knew her latest aptitude scores and her taste for mango
sorbet. They had opinions about her. They parsed her future at their
dinner tables. Is she ready? Will she be a good Hope? Compelling
questions for the past twenty-two years, gathering urgency now as
Jackal approached her investiture. In just two months she would go to
Al Iskandariyah, where the heart of the world government pumped, to
stand with the other Hopes in the first breath of the new year, the
shared second of their birth. At twenty-three, they would be of age in
any society, legally entitled to take up their symbolic place in the
global administration. But what was the task?
You
are the world builders
, the official letter from Earth
Congress read. Jackal knew it by heart; she bet all the Hopes did, the
thousands scattered around the planet who had been born in the first
second of the first attempt to unify the world.
We
honor you as the first citizens born into the new age of world
coalition. You are the face of unity: the living symbol of our hope to
be a global community with shared dreams and common goals
.
That was who she was: the Hope of Ko. The Hope of the only commercial
entity on the planet with its own home territory and almost-realized
independence from its host nation, only a few negotiations away from
becoming the first corporate-state in the new world order.

“Coming through!” a man called as he
bumped past her and spattered beer on her shirt. She bit down on the
impulse to say something nasty; instead, she ducked her head and
stepped back. The Hope must be always gracious. The Hope must show the
best face of Ko.

She had been aware for most of her
twenty-two years that she carried the future of the company in some way
that was undefined, emblematic. She had tried to visualize it. She
could see herself in Al Iskandariyah, living in a functionary's
apartment near the marketplace with its smells of boiled wool and
incense and calamari fried in glass-green olive oil. She could imagine
the cool hallways of the Green and Blue Houses of government. But she
never pictured herself doing anything. What exactly was a Hope supposed
to do? All she was being taught was what any manager at Ko might learn,
albeit more quickly and with more personal attention from her trainers;
there had to be more to being a Hope than that. She squeezed her eyes
shut against the frenzied loop playing in her brain:
no more a Hope no hope no hope
—

Breathe, she told herself. The music
seemed louder, the air thicker with sweat and the smell of beer. A new
track was playing, that song about fame, and she felt her lips pull
back from her teeth. Easy—people were watching. She pulled her jacket
tighter around her chest and managed a general nod to as many of them
as she could. She had to find the web. Especially Snow. All she wanted
right now was someone to be safe with. But maybe she would never be
safe again; never safe, never—

“Jackal!” A hand on her arm. “Great,
you're here. Hey, they're playing your song.” Tiger laughed at his own
joke, and she made herself smile even though it was hard.

“Hey, Tiger.”

“Where've you been? Everybody's asking for
you. Come on, we're over here. I'll get you a drink.” Drawing her into
the music and the laughter, his body warm from dancing, just a little
too close. Another thing to deal with. Later, she thought. First a
drink and some space to wind down. And Snow. I'll deal with the rest of
it later.

He led her to the back of the room,
opening a path with a touch on one person's shoulder, a gentle nudge of
his hip to an enthusiastic dancer, a grin and a clever word for all of
them as he cleared them from his way. The music battered at her; her
heart took up the beat. And there was the web, some dancing in the glow
of the sea-refracted sun, some stuffed two to a chair, loud and
laughing; a few at a corner table with a pitcher of beer, muttering
over a project timeline. Business and life, moving belly-to-belly. Ko
might be structured along traditional lines of management, but it was
sustained by the webs that cut across hierarchies and divisions, people
focused on the company but loyal to one another. As familiar as family.
Web mates liked or loved or despised each other, but regardless they
made each other successful, and Ko thrived.

“Jackal!”

“Hey, Jackal.”

“Hey.” She was especially glad to see Bear
and Turtle, both good friends, both solid and safe. She smiled,
settling into a chair next to them. Bear blinked at her from behind his
feathered half-mask, turquoise and scarlet, dramatic against his
mahogany skin. “Where's your costume? We should send you back home and
make you change.”

“She came as an ordinary person,” Turtle
said, leaning over to hug her. From someone else it might have been a
nasty remark. Today, it hurt precisely because it was so earnest, so
obviously well-meant. “
Feliz Víspera de
Todos Los Santos
,” he said with a smile.

“She always looks like that,” Mist said.
That wasn't exactly nasty, just disapproving.

Tiger had come up beside her with a tall
glass of something orange and cold. “Oh, lay off,” he said. Then, to
Jackal, “Here, try this.”

“What is it?”

He gave her a look. “Try it. If you don't
like it, I'll get you something else.”

She took a sip: lovely, cool orange juice
with something warm and rich behind it. “Mmm,” she said, nodding.
“Good.” She took another, larger swallow. “What is it?”

“Brandy and orange juice. My new favorite
drink.”

“It's revolting,” Mist said. Tiger rolled
his eyes at Jackal. She raised her glass to him and drank down the rest
in one breath, then wiped her arm across her mouth. Turtle chuckled.

“Well,” Tiger said. “You'd better have
this one too.” He handed her his glass.

“Thanks.” Another deep swallow, until her
stomach felt hard and full, and waves of heat started up her spine. The
party rolled around her, music and laughter, people in motion. She
wanted Snow. The others were talking over her; as far as she could
tell, she'd interrupted a debate about planning the web's holiday
celebration. She tuned it out: she didn't care. She didn't mind New
Year's Eve; there were no presents to buy, and she liked champagne, and
the New Year toast always morphed into everyone wishing her a happy
birthday. But she did not expect to enjoy this New Year's. She would be
in some official residence in Al Iskandariyah preparing for
investiture, unless of course someone found out about her and de-Hoped
her, whatever that entailed.

That made her want to cry. She blinked and
peered at her empty glass. She could feel Tiger watching; she asked,
“Can I have another one of these?”

He studied her for a moment before he
answered. “Whatever's wrong, is there anything I can do?”

She gave him a plastic cheerful smile.
“Everything's fine. All I need is another drink and to find Snow. Do
you know where she is?”

“She's taking around a group of little kid
trick-or-treaters. She left about a half hour ago.”

Oh, damn, damn, she thought, and knew he
saw it. She had been counting on Snow's comforting arm and anchoring
solidity. Tiger sighed so briefly that she almost missed it, and it was
one more thing she couldn't cope with right now. He said, “Does that
mean you're going too, or do you still want that drink?”

Great. Just terrific. Snow was gone, Tiger
was hurt, and Jackal felt overwhelmingly tired of all of them,
especially her own helpless self. What did people do when they were
uprooted, a torn tree tumbling in the funnel cloud? “Drink,” she said,
ignoring the voice inside her that was saying
be
careful, Jackal
. “I'll definitely have another drink.”

“Okay,” Tiger answered, sounding surprised
and slightly mollified. “I'll be right back.”

But he wasn't. She could see the crowd
around the bar, and she imagined him patiently negotiating a way
through the thicket of raucous people because she had asked.
They give you everything and you don't deserve it
!
the mother-voice screeched again, rolling over her like the waves she
had seen breaking onto the beach as she walked to her parents' house
earlier that afternoon. It was a beautiful day: the sunlit asphalt road
overhung by brilliant dying leaves and a periwinkle sky, quiet except
for the creek at the edge of the property chewing its mouthfuls of
silt, and a seagull skreeking toward the sea.

Her mother was in her office, working. She
put her cheek up distractedly for Jackal to kiss. “Ren, sweetheart,
what a lovely surprise.”

Jackal could see that she meant it. That
was the hardest part sometimes. She sat on the visitor's chair by the
desk, gathering herself. She thought she was ready, although she always
dreaded these conversations. When she was little, she had for a time
carried school papers and awards home as proudly as a cat with a dead
garter snake; but she had learned that Donatella responded strangely to
her daughter's success. And this time would be worse. Still, she had to
deliver the news, and then do her best not to see her mother's jaw
stiffen and her head start to shake very slightly, her gaze flatten as
her smile grew wide; Donatella would show too many teeth, and her
congratulations would be bracketed by the usual “Well, of course, if
they really think you can handle it,” or, “Now don't worry, I'm sure
they'll give you lots of backup, they do make a lot of allowances for
you.” Then her father would see her to the door, saying softly, “Of
course your mother loves you,
hija
,
she's just very competitive by nature,” as he had a thousand times
since Jackal was old enough to start having accomplishments of her own.

But today Carlos wasn't there, and things
went bad right away.