Kelley Eskridge (35 page)

She sighed. “Come in. Come inside.” She
picked up Snow's duffel bag with one had, and used the other to draw
Snow up the steps and into Shangri-La.

She watched Snow take it all in: the
five-foot-square elevator with the bad air quality and a control plate
crimped from the last time someone had tried to pry it off; the
threadbare carpet in the hallway, and the paint that was obviously
ancient latex-based because it was peeling rather than repairing
itself. Snow said nothing, but Jackal saw the line of her mouth and
knew what she was thinking.

Inside the apartment, Snow's face relaxed.
She stopped just inside the door for a good long look. “Well, this is
nice,” she said, and the mix of “we can work with this” and dismissive
disapproval of the rest of Shangri-La was absolute, essential Snow.

“God,” Jackal said in a small voice. “It
really is you. You're really here. You're here.” She felt a bit dizzy,
and she let herself drop onto the sprung sofa that she'd kept in
hopeful anticipation of guests someday. She rubbed her eyes and her
forehead, pushed her hair back from her face.

“Are you okay?”

She should say

I'm
fine
and then she should do the polite
make-the-guest-at-home things: pull out pillows and a duvet for Snow to
use if she wanted to curl up on the sofa; point out the bathroom and
the tea kettle; put Snow off with
you
must be
tired, why don't you rest, we'll talk later
. Then she should
start figuring out the most efficient, least hurtful way to get Snow
back on a plane to Ko, before anyone learned she was here. Before Snow
got any wrong ideas about staying.

Snow was still waiting for an answer,
studying Jackal's face with that total attention like a spotlight that
always made Jackal feel completely seen.

“And don't say ‘I'm fine,’” Snow said.

Jackal closed her eyes, feeling a jolt of
something surprisingly like anger. Angry at Snow? Well, maybe I am, she
thought. What am I supposed to say to her? I've been locked in my own
head for ten hours or four days, I'm not really sure, and I've had no
fucking sleep, and my apartment has mold in the bathroom that makes my
nose run every morning, and VC did something to my brain that I don't
understand, and I spend my evenings with people who think it's cool
that I smashed our web all over Mirabile's marble floor and you know
what, sometimes they convince me that I really am that cool and that
makes me wonder about myself, and maybe if I try hard enough I can find
one person in this whole lousy city who will give me a job and someday
I'll get out of this building that doesn't meet your exacting
scandinavian standards. Other than that, I'm just peachy. And who
invited you here anyway? Why is it any—

“And I know you didn't ask me to come
here, but please don't tell me it's none of my business,” Snow went on
with an edge in her voice.

And Jackal couldn't help it, she had to
chuckle and shake her head, and speak the truth: “I never have to tell
you anything, you already know I'm not okay,” and then she was sobbing
and Snow's arms were around her, holding her, and Jackal was saying,
“I'm not okay, I'm not okay,” and Snow was saying, “I'm here.”

She woke in the late afternoon tucked under
a blanket on the sofa, with the sun painting a warm stripe across her
legs and the smell of marinara sauce filling the apartment. Her eyes
were still sore from crying, but she felt better, lighter and cleaner,
as if some particularly nasty toxin had been flushed from her system.

She stretched, and then hauled herself
into a sitting position. Snow stuck her head around the frame of the
kitchen door and said, “How are you feeling?”

“I'm okay.” She got two seconds of Snow's
searchlight glare and then a nod. “I'm gonna take a shower.”

“Beer after?”

“That would be great.”

And it was, as was the linguine and the
sauce and the garlic toast that Snow had made with the last of the
bread. The conversation was casual and arrhythmic, lots of silence and
then a spurt of talk about projects Snow had worked on, favorite meals
they had shared, a competition to see who knew the most alcohol toasts
in the greatest number of languages. Jackal won, but the fun went out
of it when Snow said curiously, “Where on earth did you get that one?”
and Jackal realized she'd heard Duja say it one night in Solitaire: and
that brought back all the ugly realities she'd put aside for the last
hour. But bless her for that hour, she thought, bless Snow.

She took a breath and let it out hard, the
way she might before hefting a heavy weight. “Okay. What are you doing
here?”

Snow leaned back in her chair and folded
her arms across her chest, looked at Jackal for a long moment.

“I got your e-mail,” she said slowly. “I
don't think you can imagine how that felt. I didn't know about the
program, I didn't know that you were in it…I've been staying off the
newsnet, particularly anything to do with EarthGov. I thought you were
in the Earth Court prison in Al Isk. I even went and found their web
site and got a picture of it so I could try to imagine what it was like
inside, what you were doing. I wrote you e-mail every day and sent it
to the prisoner drop address. I started trying to find out about
visiting procedures. Finally Analin Chao called me into her office and
told me that Earth Court prisoners weren't allowed to send or receive
messages or have visitors. And she'd read all my letters.”

Snow reached jerkily for her beer and
seemed surprised to find it empty. “Do you mind if I have another? You
want one?” She kept talking as she went into the kitchen. “She was a
real pig. She wanted to talk about my conflicted feelings, and she
suggested that clinging to a one-way relationship with you was not in
the best interests of my long-term emotional health.”

She came back and handed Jackal a bottle.
Jackal could picture it clearly: Snow in the womb chair, not conscious
of the design cues but not falling for them either, straight-backed and
stubborn, mute with anger.

“Did you know your mother's working for
her now? I ran into them once in the plaza.” Snow looked as if she
might say more, and then shook her head and took a sip of beer.

“What? What's she—no, never mind, tell me
about it later.”

“Anyway, after that I just tried not to
think about anything except my projects. I mostly stopped talking to
people. I kept writing you e-mail but I didn't send it. It made me feel
a little better, because I was still thinking about you. You were still
there, even if you couldn't talk back. I finally realized that I was
depressed, but I didn't care. I was going to stay connected to you no
matter what anyone said. That went on for a while.” She pursed her lips
and looked up over Jackal's shoulder, toward the window that showed a
thin ribbon of sunset orange under a wide belt of evening blue.

“And then I got your message. I was just
checking e-mail and there it was. I sat in front of the screen for
ages, trying to understand. It wasn't really you who sent the message.
It was you but something horrible had happened to you and you didn't
want me to know, you didn't want to be a burden to me. Somebody was
making you do it. Prison had made you insane and they put you out and
you were all alone. But I knew it was you, and I knew you weren't
crazy, and at some point I just thought, Jackal is telling you that she
doesn't love you anymore.” She looked at Jackal with hurt hollow eyes.
“And I was so sad,” she said simply, and Jackal bowed her head.

“And then I got smart. Finally. I just
thought, no, damn it, she does so love me so what the fuck is going on
here? And it finally occurred to me to wonder what you were doing out
of prison. So I did a net search for your name, which I hadn't done in
ages because…well, I'd seen all the trial coverage and it was too hard
to read about Mirabile….And there you were with practically no hair
drinking beer someplace. So I did a bunch of research on the program
and that's when I knew that you must be in trouble and that I'd better
come.”

She stopped, took two big swallows of
beer, and looked at Jackal as if that explained everything.

“So you just got on a plane and flew to
the NNA.”

Snow nodded.

“Even though I said not to. Without giving
me any warning.”

“I was afraid you might say no.”

“Oh, so instead I just don't get a choice?”

Snow folded her napkin into a tidy packet
and shifted her body somehow so that she appeared to become rooted to
the chair. It was a trick that Jackal had often admired and could never
imitate, the act of becoming unmovable. “Do you want me to leave now?”
Snow said icily.

“I…no.”

“Fine, you just got to choose.”

Jackal raised both hands. “Sorry. Never
mind. It's just…unexpected.” She wrinkled her forehead. “And how did
you find me, anyway?”

Silence.

“Snow?”

“It's a long story.”

Jackal settled back. “I have time.”

Snow swallowed. “I learned enough from the
research to understand that you shouldn't have been in the VC
program—what?”

“What do you mean?”

“The demographics are skewed. Didn't you
look into this?” She frowned. “Ninety-five-plus percent of the
participant pool are nonviolent criminals up on regional charges. More
than sixty percent of them ended up serving one virtual year or less.
The rest never went over four virtual years. The only exceptions I
could find were you and five others: McAffee, Smetyana, Borja—”

“Estar Borja?”

“Yes, and Jeanne Gordineau and Eric Ronn.
The six of you are convicted of international crimes, high profile, not
the kind of cases that should be eligible for a standard research
protocol. So I kept looking and I found out that the common link
between the other five is money.”

“Huh?”

“Borja's mother is worth two hundred and
seventy three million pounds, give or take. Gordineau's father is the
head of a military-industrial manufacturing firm in Rouen, which
explains how she got hold of all that stuff. Ronn's grandfather owns
half of Burma. And so on.”

“You think they paid to be in the VC
program?”

“I think their families bought an Earth
Court verdict and this program was part of the deal. I'll bet a big
chunk of the program funding comes from these people. But the big
indicator is the length of sentence. The six of you are the only ones I
could find with sentences longer than four virtual years.”

“That's not right. I've met other people
who were in for as long as that.”

“Maybe in some of the social rehab
programs, but not in virtual solitary confinement. And not on an
involuntary basis.”

Snow sounded so definite that Jackal
closed her mouth and thought about it. She said eventually, “You might
be right.”

“I am right. Go do the analysis yourself,
it's all there on-line or in EarthGov public reports, although you have
to be really determined to get through those things. But I was.” Jackal
smiled. “And I found something else: all the deals for the lower level
participants were a matter of public record, whereas the big six were
barely announced, even with all the publicity about the program
transfer to the NNA. You had to be really paying attention to find out.
I've never seen something so successfully minimized in the major news
media. I read a little about Gordineau and McAffee on these watcher web
sites they have here. These are scary people.”

Jackal nodded.

“I couldn't understand what you were doing
in this group. Your family doesn't have that kind of money. So I had to
assume that Ko paid for you.”

Jackal became very still.

“And then it made sense to me why you said
you were guilty. You made a deal. They made you say it and then they
got you in the program.”

Jackal barely breathed. Snow was looking
off into the middle distance now, and Jackal recognized her tone, the
vocal equivalent of the thousand-yard stare: Snow was using the part of
her brain that dissected things and turned the pieces over to see all
sides of them, and then put them in order, like fitting stones together
to build a bridge.

Snow continued, “But why would you do
that? You didn't murder those people, so it must have been some kind of
accident. Surely that's easy enough to prove, so why would you take the
deal? And why would Ko want you to? Why wouldn't they want you to be
proven innocent?” She stayed quiet for a moment, still in the analysis
zone; and then she came back to the moment and looked at Jackal. “There
were lots of different scenarios I could build around that,” she said.
“None of them were happy. They all added up to you being in trouble. I
knew I needed to find you but I didn't know how, so I—well, I don't
know what you'll think about this, but I had some help.”

Oh, god. “You told someone about this?”

Snow nodded.

“Someone at Ko?”

“Gavin Neill.”

Jackal put her face in her hands.

“I had to talk to someone. I couldn't go
to Khofi. When you…when you were gone he's the one I talked to about
visiting you, I'm pretty sure he turned me in to Chao. So I tried to
think of who you would trust the most, who you would go to for advice.”

And now Ko was aware of whatever Snow
knew. Jackal wanted to leap up and throw some clothes into a bag and
run away. But that was silly: there was no more running to be done. She
took a deep breath, held it, exhaled. “Okay. I want you to tell me
everything and I need another beer.”

“There's two left.”

Jackal took the dirty plates with her into
the kitchen and brought back the beer and some pre-sliced jack cheese
that she absently shredded into bits while Snow told her about Neill.

The idea had occurred to her in the middle
of a strategy meeting and, being Snow, she'd simply walked out while
her boss was in mid-sentence of a discussion about one of their
critical decisions. She'd gone straight to the Executive One building,
heart pounding, cheeks flushed, and didn't stop to think about what she
was doing—bearding an EVP in his own office and confronting him about
the company's most sensitive public-relations issue—until the elevator
doors were opening onto Neill's floor. She almost did not step out:
easy enough to let the doors close, to take some time, to think it
through. But she imagined Jackal in the NNA, alone, maybe homeless or
cold, certainly afraid; she held Jackal's face in her heart like a flag
and let it lead her to Neill's open door.