Kelley Eskridge (28 page)

Report to my office tomorrow 1 pm.
Failure to report is grounds for immediate arrest
. Jackal
jam-clicked the mouse on the
Close
button so hard it hurt her finger. Great, wonderful, terrific. Just
what she needed. What did it mean? She paced the room, finally coming
to a stop at the window, where she braced her arms against the sides of
the frame and stared out. The city twitched and shimmied busily
outside. She was still Jackal-under-glass. She sighed, watched a
contrail fluff out across the sky like an angry cat's tail and then
thin into a cirrus cloudbank. It was all out there, and she had no idea
how to get to it. She could no more reach any notion of her life than
she could reach up and touch that cloud. She wished that Snow were
here; Snow would look at Jackal with that particular tilt of her head
and ask a couple of sharp questions that would point Jackal in exactly
the right direction, and they'd have a beer and maybe go over to
Ypsilanti Street for Mongolian stir-fry.

Snow.

She had tried so hard to avoid thinking
about what was lost. Snow was a big shiny blank spot in her soul, where
Jackal had rubbed her out in VC; what was the point in hurting herself
with something that was gone?

She's not gone,
she's right there on Ko where she's always been
, her inside
voice suddenly said, in the matter-of-fact way it had told her in VC
do better next time
. She went cold.
You can talk to her anytime you want. Send
her an
e-mail. Pick up the phone
.

She wondered how she looked, standing at
the window, staring at nothing, mouth open like a fish in a tank. She
felt as if she might crawl right out of her own skin if she didn't
move, didn't get away, but she forced herself to stay still and think
about it. She tried to bring Snow's face into her mind; as before, she
couldn't, not really. She could only get a complex stew of feelings and
the sense of shared experiences now remote. That was the tedious
tragedy of it, that those moments were gone, or scared into hiding, now
that she wanted them back.

But Snow was still real; and Jackal
understood with a deep pang that Snow would never have rubbed Jackal
out like a stain in an awkward place. Snow was somewhere in the world
outside this window, working, talking with her hands in motion,
scattering toast crumbs at breakfast, alive, with the memories and
thoughts of Jackal equally alive inside her.

And
I haven't even thought about her, not really
.

And now her face was hot with shame, and
she pushed herself away from the window to curl up in her chair. Talk
yourself through it, she told herself.

Okay. How about this? She won't want me
back.

How do you know? You haven't asked her.

She's loyal and brave and she has no idea
what's happened to me. She doesn't know that I killed the part of her
that lived inside of me. How could she forgive me for that?

And what if she did?

It wouldn't work. I'm not me anymore.

And there it was: she was not the same
Jackal Segura who had drunk wine on the cliffs and eaten oranges in her
father's kitchen and wept with Snow through the video link between Ko
and Al Iskandariyah. She had gone too far down the powerful road of
isolation. She wasn't Snow's Jackal anymore, and now she had to figure
out how to explain that to Snow. What was she going to do?

She didn't know, and there was no one to
help her. She had no people anymore. The three sisters—maybe they were
called Ko and VC and NNA—had eaten that little boat,

The Jackal
, and now it was
struggling in
the belly of the sea. All this work, making the apartment as nice as
she could, being brave about the shopping and the neighborhood, the
hope of a fingerhold at Solitaire—all this, and she was still simply
trying not to drown.

And there was the matter of Crichton, her
suspicions and her brilliant eyes that saw too clearly. What could
Crichton want with Jackal tomorrow that could be anything but trouble?
Maybe her patience had run out and she would pull the plug on Jackal,
hand her over to the brain-strippers. Or maybe she wouldn't: so what?
If not tomorrow, then someday.

Jackal hugged herself, made herself into a
tight ball. So here it was: she was doomed. The only choice she had was
how she went under and who she took with her. Well, not Snow. Never
Snow. So now I have to do something about this, she thought, with a
sudden deep sense of bitter anger. Why do I always have to do something?

Because you do, she told herself. Well,
she would do it. Then maybe she could stop being so torn and twisted.
Then maybe she could get some fucking sleep.

It took hours to write the pages and pages
of e-mail, the whole story of VC, the frightening solitude and the
madness and the eventual joy; the current danger and the thin strands
of hope still left to her; and her resolution to go it alone. When she
was done, she made a cup of tea and cried while she read it through. It
was a beautiful letter. It explained everything. It would bring Snow
right inside Jackal's head.

Then she deleted it all and sent the
necessary message, a ten-second burst of words whose only possible
result was distance. She used a transient account that she canceled as
soon as she was reasonably sure the message would not bounce for any
reason. Then she sat in the growing dark. She was hollow: waves pounded
her and filled her full of echoes that sounded sometimes like

Snow
and sometimes like
don't leave me, don't leave me
. But it
was done. After a while, she put on her coat and went to Solitaire.

Snow
,

I wanted you to
hear from me that I am out of prison instead of finding out some other
way
.

We can't be
together anymore. We can't be in touch. You won't hear from me again
.

Good-bye
.

Jackal
15

THE BAR HELD A BUSY CROWD, LOTS OF
MOTION AND
rising voices, laughter full of alcohol or some
other high. She put her meld on her left cheekbone where it would make
a white shock against her skin and the unrelieved black she wore,
long-sleeved tunic and trousers and boots; and she used it and the
force of her yawning emptiness to carve a path to the bar.

She didn't return Scully's hello, only
said, “Can you give me six pints on a tray?”

“Did you bring a friend?” he asked, almost
hopefully. She remembered his remark about solos and their friends;
maybe she would ask him about it one day, if she ever cared.

“I have some thinking to do.”

“Ah,” Scully said, “the kind of thinking
that makes a person want to drink a hundred and twenty ounces of beer
in one evening.”

“That's the kind.”

“It's your liver.” But he said it with the
particular stamp that she was coming to recognize as his impersonal
kindness, comforting because it required no response. And he gave her a
dish of olives as well.

She found a table on the outer ring of the
room and set her back to the wall. Solitaire staged itself around her.
She put the beer away slowly and methodically, and thought about the
strange skewed dynamics of anonymous grief in a room full of strangers,
people who would notice but not share. Witnesses. She stripped the
olive flesh from the pits with her teeth and made sure to suck all the
pulp and oil before she dropped them back into the dish. She drank her
beer and imagined a huge bowl full of beads that had been dipped in
various paints and tossed in together; a giant hand shook the bowl and
the beads mixed, bounced against each other, leaving a dent or a streak
of color behind. Soon all the beads would be little lumpy rainbows,
shaped by each other but still discrete. Millions of them, each one
alone in a universe of beads.

She imagined the giant hand reaching into
the bowl to pluck out the Jackal bead and put it in a box of its own
where it could roll unimpeded, no more friction, no more pain.

She drank. When Scully came by to bus the
tables, she told him solemnly, “I know what Solitaire is. It's a
special little box for broken beads.”

“Are you okay?”

She thought about it, shook her head.

“Time to go home, maybe.”

“Not done thinking.”

He didn't answer, just hefted the tub over
to the next line of tables; a few minutes later he set a mug of strong
milky coffee on the table and went away before it occurred to her that
she should thank him. The coffee wouldn't make her any less drunk or
angry, but it was meant to be comforting and she was touched. She
didn't drink it, though. It didn't really go with the beer. She closed
her eyes and let the noise of Solitaire spin around her, a tidal pool
of words and glassware and background music, voices breaking against
her like waves on a reef.

She opened her eyes to find a young man
standing a careful distance away.

“Excuse me,” he stuttered. “Can I ask you
a question?”

“You can ask,” she said deliberately.

“Are you Ren Segura?”

She put both hands on the table, her heart
pumping faster; she wasn't ready for this, not tonight. She thought of
the kill lists and the breathless accounts she'd seen on the web sites;
and then she saw herself as he must see her, the solo meld defiant
against her skin. She wore the badge; she looked at the web sites every
night for her name. She had already consented.

“Jackal,” she said.

“Um, sorry?”

“I'm Jackal Segura.”

His eyes opened wide and his mouth jerked
in excitement. “Ayo! It is so crisp to meet you! You've been number one
on the spotter's list since Mario saw Jeanne Gordineau at HeadSpace
last week!”

She had no idea what to say to that, so
she picked up the last olive. He seemed to take it as a routine
dismissal.

“Well, um, thanks. Um, if you need
anything, I'm Razorboy, I do stuff for Scully sometimes.” He managed a
certain dignity with the introduction, which he promptly spoiled by
adding, “Wait until I tell Cy and Drake about this!” before he faded
off toward the back of the room.

The buzz started to spread no more than
two minutes later. Grateful for the distraction, she put her training
to work charting its course through Solitaire, the one-to-one progress
of the news of her identity, followed by a slow I'm-not-looking scan of
her sector of the room and the equally slow
think-I'll-just-wander-over-to-the-bar stroll that inevitably offered
the chance for at least one

guess what I know
!
exchange with someone along the way. She pretended not to notice the
curious eyes, or the breathless way the crowd shifted to let her up the
line when she decided to go get some more olives, but she did make sure
to stand up straight and look as scary-but-not-too as she could manage.

“Welcome to the party,” Scully said.
“Razorboy is absolutely delighted with himself. And business will pick
up even more the next few days, thanks very much.”

“How thrilling to be useful,” she said.
Then she smiled briefly to show him that she wasn't trying to be rude.

He studied her more closely. “How about
something else to eat? Grilled cheese sandwich?”

“…sure. Okay.”

He built a fat sandwich with orange and
yellow cheeses and thick brown bread, and set it to sizzle on the
grill, slathered with butter. Jackal stared around the room, and the
art wall caught her gaze. She hadn't looked at it closely since the
first day and the aftershock, but now she was curious and the sandwich
would take five minutes; so she left the olives on her table and, beer
in hand, wandered toward the back of the room. People got out of her
way a shade more quickly than on previous nights.

Standing close to the panels made her head
feel like it was trying to expand, and she didn't think that was just
the beer. The images were brutal and direct, but not simple: they spoke
to her of the lonely journey that a person's soul could make when it
was faced, unprepared, with itself. There was a new picture that she
liked, a forearm and hand reaching out of a hole, caught in a moment
that might have been the beginning of a grip or the end of a letting
go; it was left to the watcher to decide whether the person inside
would pull themselves up or not.

But as nice as that one was, she returned
again and again to the panel that was the basis for the solo meld.
Whatever else it was, this was a face that shouted, “Here is what VC is
like.”

“What do you think?”

A woman stood to her right, so close that
her shoulder nearly touched Jackal's arm; the woman from her first day,
who tonight had approached so silently that Jackal hadn't sensed her.
Jackal managed not to spill her beer.

“Well…at first all I saw was pain…” She
hunted for the right words. “But now I think there's more to it. This
one could be a face with no more humanity in it. Or it could be a face
that has had so much experience, so much contradiction, that it's the
complete face. Like it's saying that we can be nothing or all things.
And the common thread is anger and endurance: this has both, whether
you see it as an empty face or a full one.”

The other woman tilted her chin up, as if
considering. Tonight she wore the same fisherman's trousers with a long
black priestcollar jacket over a white ribbed T-shirt, a combination
that gave her a compelling air of being both brutal and severe. “

Muy bien
,” she said finally, with
a
trace
of Euro accent. “That is a graceful thing to say to an artist.”

“You did this?”

The woman shrugged, but in a way that told
Jackal it was hardly a casual subject.

“It's very powerful. It makes me feel
lonely and strong.”

The woman smiled a strange smile. “A
poet,” she said. She turned to face Jackal. As with the last time
Jackal had seen her, terrorizing a tourist, the woman's meld was on her
right cheekbone, a mirror of the one on Jackal's left. She saw the
other woman register the similarity and be flattered. Good; the
imitation certainly was a tribute to her style, and this was not a
person Jackal wanted to offend. There was no wine bottle tonight, but
she remembered the practiced grip she'd seen. And from her time on solo
web sites, she had a name to put to this face like a hungry cheetah's
under the straight black hair.