Kelley Eskridge (2 page)

“I have some news to share with you, but
I'm a little nervous about it because I think it might put us in an
awkward position with each other,” Jackal said. She thought it was a
good beginning; she'd been working on it all the way to the house.

Her mother turned in her chair so that
Jackal could see most, but not all, of her face. It was a power
position:
you have enough of my attention to
serve courtesy, but I'll be getting back to my very important work in
just a moment
. “You don't need to facilitate me, dear,”
Donatella said, managing to sound both irritated and amused.

“I'm not trying to…” Jackal took a breath.
“I want…”

“Ren, just say whatever you have to say.”

She wanted to say, Mama, you're supposed
to be such a good communicator, so why doesn't this ever work better?
But instead she replied, “Okay. I've been asked to take over a new
project in the next few weeks. The Garbo project.”

Outside, a bird warbled a few shrill notes.

“I'm supposed to take Garbo,” Donatella
said.

“The administration has decided it's an
appropriate training opportunity for me.”

“It's not a training project,” Donatella
snapped, and Jackal tried not to wince. “It's much too complex for
someone at your level. I've been preparing for months. It's my
project,” she repeated, as if Jackal simply hadn't understood the
situation and would become reasonable as soon as the point was clear.

“I'm sorry,” Jackal said. “I wanted you to
hear about it from me.” She meant to go on, perhaps say something like
it's not my fault
, or
please don't be mad at me
, but Donatella
rolled right over her.

“This is ridiculous. It makes no sense.
It's huge assignment and you're leaving in a couple of months. What are
they thinking?” Her head was beginning to shake. “Neill promised me the
project himself. He's certainly not going to like this when he hears
about it.”

“My instructions came from Neill,” Jackal
said, trying to make her voice as calm as possible so she wouldn't feed
her mother's tailspin.

“There's been a mistake. I'm sure that's
all it is. I'll talk to him and get it sorted out.”

“Mama,” Jackal began, and heard the
pleading tone that her mother always seemed to bring out in her, “Mama,
I know you're upset—”

“Of course I'm upset! They've got no
right! And giving it to you is laughable, you're clearly not ready for
it.”

Jackal replied, as evenly as she could,
“It's true I need to prepare. I don't know much about the background
and the particulars yet. I would certainly value your advice.” She took
another deep breath. “Of course you can talk to Neill, but he said
plainly that I will be leading the project. I hope you understand I'm
not happy about the way it's been handled. I don't want you to feel I'm
taking something away from you.”

“You little pig,” her mother said
shockingly, sickeningly, her voice like flint. “Of course you're taking
it away from me. Did you even stop to think about it?” She threw up a
hand. “Don't bother to answer. You probably think, oh well, they'll
just give her something else. And they will, but not like this one. Not
as important. Garbo's getting more attention from the Executive Council
than any project in at least the last five years. I've been talking to
Neill about it since Phase One started. I've been working overtime to
get my other projects wrapped up so I could be ready. I've read every
single project report, the minutes of every meeting. And you have the
nerve to sit there and say you don't know much about it. But you'll
take it. Again.
Again
! Because
you're the Hope. No, just be quiet,” she said, her voice rising. Jackal
was trying to say
Stop, Mama, don't do this
.
“And don't look at me like that,” Donatella continued, the words
foaming out. “Of course it's because you're the Hope. Anything Ren
Segura needs, anything Ren Segura wants, whether you're ready for it or
not, whether you can even understand it. All of it taken from someone
else! Every training opportunity,” she spat the words, “every
accelerated class, every place at the head of every line, every second
of attention could be going to someone who's worked and worked and
worked and then has to stand by and see it all go to you because you're
the precious Hope. Again and again and again! But you can't have this,
you can't! You've had your chances. This is mine!” She was shouting
now, her mouth enormous. “It's not fair, they give you everything,
everything, the best chance I'll ever have and you don't deserve it,
you're no more a Hope than I am!”

And then her mother gasped and put a hand
to her mouth, the left hand with the old scar showing stark white: and
they sat in awful silence until Jackal said, “What do you mean?”

Born too late, was what it came down to,
even after all the careful planning, the induced labor, the drugs, the
forceps. They had dragged her out of her mother's womb well past the
first second of the new year; her birth, as with all the potential Hope
births, recorded by tamperproof time-stamp technology supplied by
EarthGov. Which had promptly been subverted by the technicians. “It's
Ko technology, after all,” Donatella said. “We should know how to get
around it.”

And so they had, and little Ren grew up
and took the web name Jackal and worked and trained and prepared, the
unknowing center of an enormous secret, a plan that had seemingly run
itself like clockwork for twenty-two years. Until now: until her mother
had lost her temper in the one way she never should. Jackal understood
why Donatella's voice had changed from fury to fear at the end, why she
had followed Jackal onto the front terrace saying “Ren! Ren, wait! Come
back and let's hammer this out.” But Jackal hadn't gone back. Don't
negotiate me, she had thought bitterly, I'm not a fucking business
deal. Except she was; and that was the real problem, the bottom line.
The company had wanted a Hope badly enough to take the enormous risk of
creating one, and the Hope's own mother had destabilized her at this
most critical juncture. Ko would crucify her mother if they knew.

And maybe they should. How dare Donatella
do this to her, make her so miserable that she could sit surrounded by
her web and feel so alone? She had a sudden longing to hurt her mother.
Hurt her deep. She imagined herself in some vice president's office
telling the story doggedly, piously, saying, “I'm completely on board
with this, but I'm a little worried that my mother is so upset.” God,
it's tempting, she thought.

“What is?” Tiger said, drinks in hand,
startling her; she hadn't meant to speak aloud. Can't tell you, she
thought, can't tell anybody, and then hoped she hadn't said that out
loud as well. “This is,” she said as brightly as she could, reaching
for the glass.

Around her, her web mates chattered on.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to hit something. She wanted Snow to
hold her. But she had come here to get centered, so best be about it.
She roused herself and waded into the conversation, made herself focus
and listen and smile, smile, smile. She shifted so Tiger could perch on
the arm of her chair. She recounted for Bear the entire plot of a play
she'd seen in Esperance Park, complete with arm-waving descriptions of
the fight scenes. She fetched her own next drink from the bar, and
commiserated with someone from another web about the stress of the
holiday season, her voice saying agreeably, “It sounds like you have a
lot on your plate right now,” while her head said
you
have no fucking idea, sport
.

None of it worked. She knew she had only
to say, “I have a problem, I need your help,” and she would get
everyone's undivided attention, the benefit of the dozens of brains
here and the others who were part of the web, whether a mile away or a
thousand. But she couldn't do it; she didn't know how to open her mouth
and say
I'm not a Hope
. It was like
saying,
I am a lie; I am not real
.

“I am real,” she told herself. “I am real.”

“What?” Tiger asked, leaning in closer,
smiling down at her. “What did you say?”

“I am really drunk,” she said. “And I am
really tired of the whole stupid world and I just want to forget about
everything for a while.”

“Then let's dance.”

“That's a great idea. I'd love to. Umm…can
you help me stand up?”

He laughed. “Sure.”

She took his hand. “Don't let me fall,
Tiger,” she said. “Don't let me fall.”

That night she dreamed of Terry on the
cliffs.

They were seven years old, on a school
trip to the south coast of Ko on an early spring day. This was one of
the few natural parts of the island; the rest was human-made, a project
of the company's very profitable custom land-mass construction
subsidiary. Ren and Terry scrambled along the cliff's edge with the
other children, examining rock formations. They were supervised by
teachers and the requisite accompanying parents, including Donatella.
It was already clear to Ren that these trips made her mother restless
and impatient, and she wished Donatella wouldn't come; not all the
parents did, even though they were supposed to take turns. But her
mother always put on her best pair of walking shoes and insisted
brightly that she was looking forward to it, darling Ren, of course she
wouldn't miss it.

Today, Donatella was organizing the
parents and teachers as easily as she ran multinational projects; she
had completely rearranged the supervising teacher's safety plan and was
ordering everyone about. The teacher tried to argue: Ren sighed, and
pulled Terry farther along the bluff, farther than they were supposed
to go. Behind them the teacher's voice grated against the rocks, and
Donatella murmured soothingly.

Ren and Terry dug together for a while,
saving the best rocks aside in a fiber bag, and making a game of
pretending that the rejected bits were horrible criminals being forced
to leap to their deaths. The adult voices buzzed behind them.

“Your mom never yells back,” Terry said,
after a while. He was smaller than Ren, and even better at math, and
the only person she knew beside herself who had ever stayed up all
night just to see what happened to the moon.

“She doesn't need to yell,” Ren answered.
“She always gets what she wants. She calls it clarifying.”

“Maybe—” Terry began, and then the cliff
suddenly sighed and slid away from under his bottom, and he went down
with it in a silent, surprised bundle of arms and legs, his mouth and
eyes wide. He broke apart on the rocks as he fell.

The ground under Ren began to shift. Her
fear was liquid silver weighing down her arms and legs.

“Ren, get away from the edge!” her mother
shouted in her command voice, the voice that must be obeyed. Donatella
was forty feet away, already in motion; but Ren could not move. Down
below, Terry's small body lay in an impossible shape. Another large
section of crust began to slide, and Donatella howled and threw herself
the last ten feet, landed hard on her stomach and flung out both arms
to snatch Ren's wrists as the ground under her went down in a rumble.
Ren hung over the raw new edge and heard her mother's left hand crackle
as one of the big rocks rolled on it. Donatella turned white and began
to pant, but she didn't let go of her daughter until there were two
other adults there to help lift her the rest of the way.

Surgery restored most of the function of
the hand, after endless weeks of physiotherapy and a confining
rehabilitative brace that made Donatella clumsy and bitter. Ren knew
that she was to blame for her mother's pain, because she hadn't obeyed.
And maybe it was her fault that Terry had fallen. She wasn't sure: no
one had told her. But she knew that she had failed in responsibility.

She decided that she must make sure to
never, never forget what she had done. She crept out to the garden and
found the largest stone that she could hold with one hand, a beautiful
ragged thing of gray and brown. It was a day like a painting: a hundred
shades of green in the leaves and grasses and lily pads of the pond, in
the vegetable tops waving from the brown grit of the soil; the sky that
looked as if one of the blue colorsticks in her classroom had melted
across it; the pinks and lavenders and sun-yellows of the flowers whose
names she didn't know, that nodded wild and rangy on their thin stalks
because her father liked them that way. The pain, when it came, was
sharp and orange. She managed to hit her left hand twice before Carlos
found her.

“Oh, Ren,” he said, after he'd made her an
ice pack and wiped her tears. “Don't hurt yourself. That won't help.
The only thing that helps is to do better next time.”

She waited for him to tell her how, but he
only hugged her and said, “Okay?”

She wasn't sure, but she wanted to please
him, so she told him, “I'll do better.”

SOMEHOW LIFE WENT ON IN THE BAD
DAYS AFTER HAL
loween. Jackal hung on to her secret. Sometimes
it felt like a soft animal biting the lining of her stomach, wanting
out. At odd moments, a frightened voice in her head would whisper
They're looking at me funny. Did I say something
wrong? Do they know
?

She only had to stay sharp, stay frosty, a
little longer. The end-of-year holidays were less than a month away,
with the investiture looming behind them, and she saw it as a talisman
of sorts: she would be off the island, just another Hope doing Hope
things, and it would not be so hard to lie to strangers.

This morning she rode her bicycle from her
apartment to the center of Ko. It was a typical early-December day, the
blue sky gathering clouds at the horizon, the sun warm on her back as
she pedaled. Her route traveled the Ring Highway along the coast toward
the south junction, where Fortaleza Road ran north and west into the
center of the island and the Ko Prime corporate campus. Although the
South China Sea lolled along a reef, salty and shallow, only fifty
meters to her left, it was the greenland to her right that she noticed.
The hundreds of acres on this part of the island would probably not be
developed for decades; the company liked to plan for growth, to marshal
its resources early. This wild-ness was safe for years, perhaps for her
whole lifetime, and there was no risk in letting herself believe that
these trees belonged to her; the rough trunks, the startling soft meat
of a broken branch, the knobbled twigs rising in rows like choirs. The
ground belonged to her, the human-made rises and falls of root and
rock, carefully random, beautiful. The flowers were hers, stuporous in
their mulch: the light and the stippled shadow, the stones and the rich
rot underneath them, were all part of this place that felt like part of
her. For the few minutes of passing through it, she was drawn into it
like a breath.