The Forever Watch (19 page)

It is too much for Barrens. The perfumes from the guests around us, the smoke from the fire, the spices, and the meat are overwhelming. The tightness to his mouth has nothing to do with feeling offended.

“It's okay,” I murmur to him. “Take a walk around their garden, or hang out on the veranda. You're not the only one who finds this a bit much. You've got better odds of making acquaintances out there.”

“I—sorry, Hana—”

“Hush. I'll bring you a cup of mead later, maybe figs and bread and cheese.” A kiss eases his anxieties of disappointing me, and he departs with a smile.

“Finally sent the oaf off?” Jazz places a glass of wine in my hand. The bubbles sparkle. “Have one of these. It's glorious. Wish we could have Yule every week.”

“I wish you wouldn't say that.”

“Is he really who you're shacking up with?” Marcus asks, frowning.

Lyn completes that thought: “You could do so much better!”

Was I like them before? I want to think I always valued every citizen of the Noah.

I try to divert us to the safer, blander topic of our jobs, and what the higher-ups want out of us next year. That only gets them talking about how difficult our work is, the combination of genes for psychic talents, intelligence, discipline, all the rubbish needed to qualify for our positions. It is still about “our place” in society.

Maybe this was a mistake, but I cannot give up my past and my friends just to have Barrens. I should not have to choose.

“It's his schlong, isn't it?” Jazz asks, grinning. “Does he do you good, my dear? I've heard it hurts, when it's too large.”

“Guys that huge usually don't have the equipment to match,” Marcus protests.

They are only this crude when Barrens is what they are talking about.

Why fight it? I will do what I wish. I still love them, but I am not letting anyone shame me out of what I have found.

“Barrens,” I declare, “has a penis worth every one of my past lovers put together. He is good to me and gets me good and wet and ready and has me screaming every time.”

My hands go out just so and my fingers curl. “His dimensions are exactly thus.”

All three of them are bright red now.

They all take long sips from their glasses, ignoring the shocked stares from the guests in earshot. Hennessy is looking right at me and whistling and clapping.

A little more quietly: “Barrens cooks for me and takes care of me. He does not make fun of me when I buy memories of this old lady's cat. He cheered me up after Breeding Duty. He was kind to me when I needed it.” I switch to whispering by Implant-to-Implant multicast.
And not once did he ever make me feel shamed after I was raped.

“Wha—”

They get in each other's way verbally. I never told them. Immediately, there is that guilt. They'll guess it's Holmheim—that guy they liked so much. Whom I just stopped bringing around.

Hennessy is my savior then. He may not have been a target of my foolish words, but that relationship intuition of his tells him that I just did something I am not ready to deal with. He slides in, glib and polished, his gold-trimmed frock coat dazzling by the firelight, and he tugs me away, gushing, “Hey, hey! Come, darling, now you simply must tell me more about all this magnificent fucking you're getting.”

My throat is all closed up and I am hot from forehead down to the small of the back.

“Hana—I have to be able to call you Hana during Yule, right? Is there any chance at all I could borrow one of these illicit memories of yours? I promise I won't even share it with the girls on the team. I'll just talk about it and make them jealous, yes? I would dearly love to know how that mega-cock you were talking about feels.…” His eyes cross as he oohs in imagined ecstasy.

Hennessy has me laughing, even as I dab at my eyes. “If you keep me company while I cool off and then when I apologize to my friends and help me keep Barrens out of the discussion for the rest of the evening,” I get out, “I just might let you have a memory.”

“Glorious! I knew I would get lucky attending this party instead of the stuffy one at Hester's.”

 

 

“Something happen while I was outside sports-talking with the nongirlie men?”

Back at my place, we stand on the balcony behind a barrier of laminar-flow air, kept moving by background threads running on the neural Implants of all the residents. I extend my arms forward, catch the flakes of snow falling beyond the heated current, and touch the cold.

“Oh, just them being them. We amused my assistant, anyway. You know, Hennessy.”

”Oh. He, uh. Makes me uncomfortable. Has this look on his face when he sees me.”

“Leon, he's one of my few friends that likes you and approves of us.”

Barrens's mouth is hot and wet on my neck. His hands slide the straps of my dress off my shoulders. The cloth falls away, pools at my feet.

“Okay. My apologies to him next time. Tell him he's a prince.”

“Ahnnnnnh…” Bites on the nape, on my shoulder. His thigh eases my legs apart. “Not here, please…”

Those hands start doing what they do. Getting hard to think.

“Got to take off early. Should start squaring up your tab already…”

“Wouldn't … nuh … want to let … debts … linger.”

With the alcohol and the emotional balancing act of the evening, I didn't notice the sad tenderness with which he made love to me.

In the middle of the night, I stir long enough to see him sitting at the edge of the bed. He looks down at his tablet. I can't see his face well enough.

“Leon?” Loose, languid, I yawn.

Another kiss. Softer. The softest. “'S nothing. You go back to sleep.”

I should have paid attention. I should have asked what he saw.

12

I wake up alone, in a tangle of carpet and blankets and clothes, a bleak sun looking down at me. Perhaps we overdo it a little, the change of light levels with winter.

An envelope with a card is on the low crystal table in the living room. It is handmade paper, the fibers coarse and distinct under my fingertips.

On the card, Leon has written, in his cramped, irregular scrawl,
Happy Yule, my love.

The eighteen-digit alphanumeric code is an ident number.

The date and the time-stamp match up with the end of your Breeding Duty
. His hand trembled there.
M for male. Last three digits match the last three digits of your ID. I don't know for sure. But this is probably your son.

I am sorry.

The places I have to go, what I have to do next, things cannot stay the same, and I must choose if I will fight or give it up and pretend everything is fine.

The people I've been talking to. They've found something. Something I can't ignore. Mincemeat is not one man. Bullet was right too, though. It's not about execution. There is too much now, to ignore.

I choose to fight. You know I can't choose to do anything else.

And others, less friendly types, I think, have started to close in on who I am, on the Web.

I need for you to stay safe, Hana. I've endangered you enough.

I have never known happiness, till there was you.

Good-bye.

 

 

I send out countless messages. I beg. There are no replies.

When I message Bullet and get no replies from him either, I feel particularly awful.

Really, Leon? You left me behind and took the kid with you?

There is no stopping myself from going to his precinct. And waiting. I don't know how long I would have waited out there, in one of the cramped little chairs in the lobby. But Miyaki Miura spots me and marches out.

“He's a fuckin' idiot. Listen, don't come round here, don't go to his place. Go home, do your usual thing. Wait for me.”

Three days drift by in a haze of numbers and reports and proposals and revisions of proposals. The nights crawl by. I am always cold. Numb. I feel almost as bad as when I was on my post–Breeding Duty meds. As though there were a barrier between me and what I feel.

At work, my face is a storm cloud and nobody questions my black mood.

Nothing tastes good anymore. I force myself to finish off an apple at lunch and take the elevator back to my floor.

Hennessy catches my arm at the door to our department. “Chief? There's someone waiting for you. Umm, she looks kind of scary.”

“Good afternoon, Officer Miura.”

“Hi, Dempsey.”

She steps into my office. “He's gone and cocked it up something terrible, Dempsey.”

“Hana. Just Hana.”

Her smile is brittle, her eyes dart around, taking in who is watching us. “Miyaki. No, um. Then, you can call me Miya. You're only the second allowed to.”

I wave my hands, using
touch
to lower the blinds over all the clear glass that lets me keep an eye on my team when I please, but also lets them keep an eye on me. I also close the blinds on the windows looking out on the street below.

“So.”

Deep breath. Crossing my arms across my chest does not calm me, but if my hands are holding on to something, they will not shake. “He's really missing,” I say.

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

We each examine the face of the other. Do I look soft and weak to her, as all elites seemed to Barrens? Insecurity pecks at the back of my skull. It has no place here.

He's got a storage unit rented in the warehouse districts. “Inherited” it, sort of, from Cal
.
I want you to come with me.

Right now?

I don't know how many people know about it. Maybe it's already too late to retrieve whatever the dumbass hid in there. Maybe not.

If I close my eyes, I will lose myself in the way he held me, that first evening, after Breeding Duty, at that ghastly party. I will think of his voice like a bear's roar and the heat of his smell and the toothy smile on his craggy face that is a snarl to everyone else. I pull on my coat. It feels heavier than it should. My shoulders are stiff, and I know it is from worrying. My bag is heavy in my hand—why even bring that? A neural Implant multicast informs the team that I will be out for the rest of the day.

“Let's go.”

And we are gone, my officemates looking after us, curious, but not curious enough to stop what they are doing.

“James, you're in charge for a bit.”

“Wha—? Chief, there's—”

We are gone.

 

 

We watch each other, though we pretend not to, examining each other's reflection.

I've been in her car about a dozen times, but I never paid much attention to it before. A lean, narrow wedge with three wheels, it is large enough to seat one passenger up front just behind the driver. In the rear is a padded, armored capsule with shackles and straps for a single prisoner.

She drives smoothly, carefully. She stops at every light and sign, signals before each turn, checks her mirrors before changing lanes, and stays at the speed limit. Not at all like the other police captains I have seen, zooming along recklessly just because they can.

“Did he leave you a note too?”

“You got a note? It must be love then. No. He just stopped showing at work. And when I went to his place—” She swallows. Clears her throat.

“Yes?”

“Gray coats. I got one look at them and just kept walking.”

How did they find out? We were so careful. I suppose everyone thinks he is too careful to get caught, until he is.

“I know he got out.”

How can she be so sure?

“Trust me. If they had caught him there, there would have been a fight. They'd never take him in without wrecking the place.”

Another deep breath. I've had to take so many in the past few minutes. Did I think I was feeling drugged and removed from my emotions again? I wish I were because I am terribly afraid right now, and only the thought of Miya's disapproving glare holds back my panic.

“Will they come for me too? Interrogate me?”

“Information Security can't be seen just talking to every person in Barrens's life. Most likely, they've already checked you out and haven't found anything yet. If there was something, they'd have already taken you.”

Small comfort. “Now he's vanished himself. He was so excited, said he found something, a real breakthrough.”

Wait. The timing.

My lists … I try to recall where that particular psi-tablet was, with the latest reports from my botnet. I do an internal memory search for that interface device. Flashing through the images, I see myself setting it down on the nightstand next to my bed, just before I started getting dressed for the party. The next time I walked into that room was after reading Barrens's note, with me crying as I throw myself into bed. That tablet, with both the newest data-crawl results and my latest tweaks to my data-miner code, is gone.

Barrens has it.

I guess that was just one of the things he was working on, with the Monster. The program had changed so much. He was looking into Breeding Duty because of me. Or did he find out through some of the contacts he made, creeping through the wastes of the Nth Web, in the forums and on the boards that pop up for one night and then vanish, the better to protect everyone's identity? Or perhaps one of the collectors of illicit memories. Maybe somewhere out there, some pervert Breeding Duty Doctor is selling memories of births.

How did ISec find him out, but not me? It has to be through these other projects of his, or these other people on the Web, the things he never brought me in on.

Miyaki is right. He must have left nothing suspicious. Otherwise, I would already be in a cell, being questioned, having the memories ripped out of my head.