Kelley Eskridge (11 page)

“Yeah. Me too,” Jackal said, and they both
leaned back in their chairs and looked up. There were no stars, only
cloud smeared across the sky like grease on glass. They held each
other's hands.

A WEEK LATER THE RECALCITRANT
HARDWARE DEVEL
oper began turning up in fuzzy bunny slippers,
and Jackal knew she was back in the groove. The project kicked into
higher gear as the team began preparing for the relocation, and Jackal
was in charge, confident, supported by Chao and Neill, back in tune
with Snow. Her father was preparing to accompany her to the
investiture. Her mother had declined to come. Jackal called and
recorded an awkward message, but perhaps she'd left it too late.
Donatella never called back.

There was another issue hanging over her
head, and she made up her mind to attend to it after an earnest talk
with Snow. “You have to,” Snow said. “It's not just about the two of
you, it's about the whole web. Everyone's waiting.”

So on a Saturday in mid-December, she
rolled out of bed and kissed Snow and took herself off to Tiger's
apartment. It took all her nerve to press the intercom button. He
wasn't there. She made a good guess and found him in the gymnasium,
sitting in a half-lotus, eyes closed, on the thick mat in the area
reserved for martial and meditative arts. His nose was still taped, but
the bruising had gone down.

He opened his eyes as she approached. She
braced herself for the conversational barbed wire, but all he did was
sigh and say, “I give up, Jackal. Call off your dogs.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at her without expression.
“Didn't you hear? I had a little chat with Executive Vice President
Chao last week.”

Jackal said stupidly, “Analin Chao?”

“Maybe she's Analin to you. She told me to
call her ma'am and she handed me my ass on a platter. You say jump, I
ask how high.”

“Oh, hell,” Jackal said. She sat down on
the floor next to him. “I didn't know she was going to do that, honest.
I'd have asked her not to. I wanted to take care of this myself.”

“You already handed me my nose.”

A deep breath. “I'm really sorry about
that. I got mad.”

“You know, I was ready to hurt you back.
If security hadn't been there so fast, I would have tried. Chao told me
that if I'd laid a hand on you I could have been terminated from Ko.
Maybe my whole family.”

That chilled her. “I'm sorry.”

“No need to apologize to little old me.
I'm just a pebble in your road.”

“Tiger, can't we just make up?”

“I suppose we can if you say so. You seem
to be in charge of everything else around here.” He sounded so bitter,
and there was a part of her that wanted to cup his face in her hands
and try to smooth away all the misunderstanding. But she didn't know
how to do that in this public place, when perhaps he felt that he
couldn't refuse her touch; and it would kill her if he flinched.

“I wish things weren't so hard,” she said,
and stood up. “I don't want us to be like this.”

“How do you want us to be?”

She opened her hands helplessly. “I'll see
you later,” she said finally, and left him. At the other end of the gym
she turned around and saw him, head down, pounding one fist over and
over on the mat.

“Nobody else can make him that mad.” She
turned back and found Bat next to her, watching Tiger with patient
sadness. “Would it kill you to be nice to him?”

“It wasn't like that,” Jackal said, and
began to move away, but Bat caught her arm.

“There's a trip to Hong Kong next week. To
shop for the holidays. Do you want to come?” They both looked at Tiger.
“He'd like it,” Bat said finally.

“I might.” But she knew the right thing to
do. She had hurt Tiger and damaged the web, and now she would have to
roll on her back and show everyone her throat so they would know she
still belonged to them.

She said, “All right. I will.”

Jackal and her web mates took the Nan Hai
tunnel train from Ko Island to the Apleichau Island Omniport. The
omniport was a gift from Ko, a multibillion dollar project that had
included extending Apleichau's land mass by twenty-seven percent to
make room for the immigration complex and the water, air, and
tunnel-train arrivals. No one entered or left Hong Kong without passing
through the port. The security network, the immigration computer, and
the entire port-of-entry traffic management system were Ko technology.
Jackal imagined Hong Kong had been very grateful.

She spent the entire journey trying to get
Tiger to meet her eyes, but he wouldn't. He sat close to Bat and acted
as if Jackal were invisible. In spite of herself, she was starting to
feel irritated. She told herself he had a right to be mad, but part of
her just wanted to shake him until his damn nose fell off. Snow would
have laughed and offered to help, and eased Jackal's tension: but Snow
was on her way to Quanzhou for a three-day conference on
macroengineering challenges in Asia. “I'm proud of you. You're the glue
that holds the web together,” she had told Jackal when they said
good-bye.

At Immigration, the web was herded into
the ends of several long lines at the row of checkpoint counters that
separated arriving passengers from the cavernous main waiting area of
the omniport. Surveillance optics in the ceiling and walls blinked red,
green, red, green as they recorded still frames in preset sequences.
Guards patrolled the lines and stood at the exits and counters. All
were Chinese; no one else was allowed to carry a weapon in Hong Kong or
the mainland. The guard nearest Jackal paced back and forth along the
last third of their line, talking to himself in an angry voice.

She was always uncomfortable here,
although she had regularly breezed in and out of Hong Kong since the
age of eight. It was the interminable standing and the sour smell of
the room that made her itchy; it was the size of it, the way that she
could never quite see the far wall. She usually believed it was her
imagination, and lately she had wondered if she would ever again feel
confident at any identity check. But today, looking around, she
realized that the entire space was designed to make the occupants feel
crowded, pushed, hemmed in. Trapped. And, paradoxically, isolated and
revealed.

She and Turtle and Mist talked about it.
“It's not just the drugs-and-guns people anymore,” Turtle said. His
voice was low, even though it was hard to hear over the loudspeakers
that constantly announced arrival and departure schedules in four
different languages. “The Chinese will find them and take them out if
they can—” he paused as the guard passed by “—but what they're really
worried about is Steel Breeze.”

Jackal nodded, and after just a moment too
long, so did Mist. Normally, Jackal would pretend not to notice and do
Mist the courtesy of letting her figure it out as the conversation went
along. Mist wasn't stupid, after all, just lazy about the world outside
Ko. But today was different; today Jackal wanted honest conversations.

“Do you know what we're talking about,
Mist?”

Mist looked startled; so did Turtle. Mist
widened her eyes and smiled with half her mouth. “Well, of course.”

“I don't think so. I'll bet you don't know
anything about Steel Breeze.” The muttering guard wandered back, and
Jackal had a bad moment wondering if he had overheard. Like Turtle, she
was trying to keep her voice low. Just talking about Steel Breeze in a
government facility could get her a frightening hour of detention and
hard questioning before her identity was established.

“Why are you being so mean?” Mist said in
a small voice.

“I'm not being mean. Honestly. I'll be
happy to give you the short course in international terrorism so you're
better informed. I just hate it when you go along with people like
that. Some day it'll get you into trouble,
hermanita
.”

“People like being agreed with,” Mist
retorted, surprising her. “Nobody but you thinks there's anything wrong
with getting along.”

“I get along with people.”

“Oh, sure. Don't you mean that the other
way around?”

“Mist—” Turtle tried to cut her off, but
Jackal could see that there was no chance Mist would stop now.
“Everyone gets along fine with you because they have to,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” When Mist
did not answer, Jackal turned to Turtle. “What's this all about?
Turtle?” Her face was hot. Turtle stepped hard on Mist's left foot.

Mist winced, took a deep breath, let it
out, and shook her head slowly. “Forget it, Jackal. It's not your
fault, you didn't do anything.”

Jackal waited.

“It's not your fault. I know you didn't
turn Chao loose on Tiger. It's just that it's hard sometimes, being in
a web with a Hope. You're always the most important person. You always
get everybody's extra attention. I know you need it, I know that you're
going to have this really tough job and everything, but we're all
trying to help you and you don't have to be so mean.” Mist kept her
head down. “Just forget it.”

“I'm sorry, Mist. Really, I…” Turtle shook
his head, and Jackal stopped. She felt hideously uncomfortable and a
little shaky. She wanted to touch Mist, but Mist was still clenched in
on herself like a fist. Turtle stared at his feet.

Jackal sighed. “I'm sorry,” she said again
to Mist. “I really am trying to make up with everyone, I'm just doing a
worse job than usual.” Mist nodded, but there was no more conversation.

The wait was long: she assumed that the
system was slowed by the holiday influx. She gave Nat, the entry
officer, a sympathetic smile when she got to the head of the line.

“Segura!
Qué
tal
, babe?”

“Your accent is still terrible,
amigo
.”
She handed him her ID, relaxed
against the counter as he fed it into the reader.

“Yeah, maybe after the new year I'll have
time to breathe and sleep and eat, stuff like that, then I can worry
about my Spanish accent in a city full of Chinese-speakers. Everyone
else thinks I sound great.”

The reader spat out her card. A ponderous
electronic voice issued from the computer speaker: “We are honored to
have a Hope among us.”

“Oh god, Nat, I thought you guys were
going to fix that.” The voice repeated the phrase in the three other
official languages of Chinese business. People nearby had turned to
look and were whispering to each other, pointing at her. Behind her,
Turtle chuckled. Two ranks over, Tiger watched without blinking.

“Sorry, honorable Hope, but I'm afraid
that's way below eating and sleeping on the priority list right now.”

“All right,” Jackal grumbled. “Just stop
calling me that.”

“Enjoy your stay in Hong Kong, Your
Hopefulness.” He returned her card and waved her out of line.

“I hope you never sleep again,” she spat.

“Excuse me, what's her problem?” she heard
him say to Turtle, both of them laughing.

She walked into the public area of
Victoria Omniport. Her face burned. People were still staring. She
straightened, stepped harder so that her boot heels rapped. The noise
was solid, confident. The problem was, when it came right down to it,
she liked being treated like a Hope. She liked it. It made her walk
proud, consider her words, look people in the eye. She wanted everyone
in the station to point discreetly, tell each other
That's her
!, wonder for a moment what it
must be like to walk in her skin, destined for an unimaginable life in
the glamour of Al Iskandariyah.

She loved it. And hated it, hated herself
for a liar and a cheat, unworthy, trapped; and there was nowhere to go
but across the open concourse to the escalator that led to the city
trains, to board with the rest of the web, to leap from station to
station across the bay to Kowloon in a bullet-shaped firefly that
glittered in the coming dark.

She found no comfort on the train, not
even room to stand where she did not have to inhale someone else's
breath. The crush of riders held her immobile against one side of the
car. Something sharp dug into her ribs; she searched behind her with
one hand and felt an open plastic container full of leaflets. She
tugged one out and pulled it around where she could see it. On the
front, three poor-quality black-and-white photographs and a sentence in
violent red:
HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE
? On the inside,
another headline:
TAKE THE WIND OUT OF STEEL BREEZE
.

Oh, please, she thought. That made Steel
Breeze sound more like a rival sports team than an international
cooperative of terrorist groups. She started to crumple the flyer, then
changed her mind and reached under a stranger's arm to poke Turtle in
the back. When he looked around, she pushed the leaflet toward him.

“Give it to Mist. Don't tell her it's from
me, just say you found it.”

Turtle raised an eyebrow. At the next
stop, when a few people left the train, Jackal caught a glimpse of Mist
perched on the edge of a seat, frowning over the pictures with her hair
hanging in her face.

The web pushed out at Tsimshatsui stop,
but leaving the train brought no relief; everyone, it seemed, wanted to
shop at Mirabile. Jackal was carried along in a crowd of chattering
foreigners who stopped in all the wrong places to stare, gumming the
flow of traffic hopelessly and causing people behind them to step on
each other's heels and curse. Moving more easily through the flows and
eddies were the Hong Kong executives; the four-to-a-rented-room
university students; kids in their street colors. They all moved
together through Mirabile,
Wonderful
,
and it was wonderful, all glimmer and sheen: Hong Kong's Tsimshatsui
shopping district paved over into a mile-square foundation from which
Mirabile zigged and zagged and thrust up, enfolding offices and
restaurants, clubs, casinos, theaters; level upon level of darkness,
color, whitelight, quiet, romantic, wild, exciting, and always for a
price. there were mazes of corridors lined with tiny shops that sold
herbs, crystals, sex toys, drugs, baby clothes, artificial limbs. There
were open expanses of marble dotted with fountains that sprayed colored
water. Everything smelled of an improbable stew of sugar, sweat,
grease, chlorine, and fruit. An amusement park in the center of one
enormous outcropping opened up to the night sky in a seeming canyon of
dark glass that reflected the blinking jade and inky purple neon of a
massive Ferris wheel. Kowloon Park was gone: in its place, an exercise
trail that spanned two levels and a public pool with a ten meter board
from which divers with waxed bodies dropped like darts, arrowing into
the water not thirty feet from the transparent wall of one of
Mirabile's hundred restaurants.