Too Like the Lightning (7 page)

My tracker bleeped alarm as my pulse spiked.
「
I don't have it!
」
I cried.
「
I don't have any idea where it is! I don't know anything! It was thirteen years ago! I don't have the remotest connection to anyone who might have ended up with it!
」
Only this far into my reflexive protest did I realize I was cowering, my arms over my head to stave off blows, though no guard moved.
「
Please believe me! I don't know anything!
」

As Director Andō stared me down, I could read in his face the evidence against me massing, ready to draw into a phalanx: my presence at the house, my fingerprints on the paper.
「
Where did you hide it?
」
he asked.

「
It … I don't …
」

「
Where did you hide the device?
」

「
Maybe there were two?
」
Even I could hear the foolish desperation in my voice.

「
There were not two. There was one. Who did you give it to?
」

「
No one, Chief Director! No one! It … it couldn't have been the Canner Device!
」
The words were as much for myself as the Director.
「
The device could swap tracker signals and make someone else's tracker register as if they were Ockham Saneer, but it couldn't get through the rest of the security. I don't know what security
Black Sakura
has, but there are systems at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' that nothing I know of could get through, certainly not the Canner Device. It was only for the tracker system, for swapping two signals, nothing else! It can't have been—
」

「
Martin sent this to you, too.
」
The Chief Director brought an image before my lenses, Martin's scan of the paper I had found in the trash that morning, which I had hardly glanced at among the many messages that had chased me through my ride. The reconstruction was meticulous, rendering the paper fiber by fiber, showing how it had indeed, as Martin said, been crumpled around something. In the next instant the Director filled in that something: the unmistakable, sleek, fishlike tapered body of the infamous device which the hysterical public never should have named for me.

「
You had it last,
」
Andō accused.
「
You know who has it now.
」

「
I don't know! It was years ago. It'll have been sold on to someone else by now.
」

「
Sold? Did you sell it to someone?
」

「
No. Yes! I mean, sort of. I left it …
」
Plausible-seeming lies multiplied in my imagination, but as I started to voice one I could see Chief Director Andō's face tighten. It wasn't plausible. None of this was plausible, least of all my innocence, though innocent I was.
「
I really don't know what happened to it. Please believe me. I was arrested. I don't know what happened after that. The police say the case for the device was empty when they found it, but anyone could have it: crooked cops, organized crime, kids who stumbled on my hideout, anyone!
」

「
You can't have been that reckless with it.
」

「
I was a child!
」

Andō did not need to do more than glare.

Genuine faintness made it easy to fall to my knees before him.
「
Please believe me, Chief Director. I don't know anything about what's happened. You know I have no way to prove my innocence, but you've trusted me a long time and I've never betrayed that, I never would. Even this morning, I could have told Martin the truth about the Seven-Ten list, but I didn't.
」

His glare changed.
「
What truth?
」

「
That Tsuneo Sugiyama didn't write that list.
」
I saw the Chief Director flinch, and I clung to the new topic like a lifeline.
「
Sugiyama always writes
Black Sakura
's Seven-Ten list, but they think the pen should be wielded like a sword, especially the most publicized article of the year. Sugiyama would never have produced anything so uncontroversial, and, when they listed the top seven, they would never have referred to you as Hotaka Mitsubishi, they would have included your birth bash' name.
」

Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi hissed under his breath, and my tracker finally stopped worrying about my heart rate.

「
Masami Mitsubishi wrote this list, didn't they, Director?
」
I tested. I waited.
「
Masami is still interning with Sugiyama, yes?
」

The Chief Director scowled down at me, then turned toward the rear of the room, where a partition, patterned with a calligraphic scene of frogs and goldfish holding congress in a waterfall, separated this outer chamber from an inner one.

A new kind of shiver touched me as the partition opened. I cannot date the beginning of the tradition wherein queens and warlords surround themselves with fawning predators: hounds, lions, serpents on silken cushions, ready to loose their savagery at the master's whim. Chief Director Andō has chosen a more dangerous predator: adopted children, ten in all, fox-cunning and ambitious, just finished with school and ready to carve their names into the world. Six were present in the inner room then, sprawling on the floor like cats, and, as the door yawned wider, they watched me, as cats watch a twitching toy they have not yet made up their minds to chase. They all come from one bash', a batch of ba'siblings who lost the older generation and had been scattered to distant foster bash'es before the childless Andō-Mitsubishi bash' welcomed them all. They were just starting to cross from teens to twenties now, and the three eldest had recently passed the Adulthood Competency Exam, one donning Humanist boots, another a Mitsubishi suit, the third a Hiveless sash, but the rest had not yet chosen, so wore only minors' sashes over soft pajamas, and the sloppy sweaters their adopted mother knitted herself.

Masami Mitsubishi was not among the lounging ba'sibs, not today. Instead a different figure rose to join us, pausing first to set down with loving care the branch of plum blossoms she had been about to trim: Danaë Marie-Anne de la Trémoïlle Mitsubishi, Princesse de la Trémoïlle et de Talmond, sister of Humanist President Ganymede Duc de Thouars, and wife of Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi. She wore a kimono here in her husband's capital, not the unisex kimono one sees on Mitsubishi streets but a woman's antique kimono, birds and blossoms in golds, peaches, and blues, the fabric thick with labor like a tapestry, the obi sparkling around her stiff waist like a puzzle box of silk. She approached with the small, shuffling steps which in Japan code feminine, her white hands nested pale against the cloth like doves. So perfectly anachronistic were her dress and poise she might have been the model for an antique woodblock print, except for her hair, which sparkled in its cage of hair pins with all the rebellious wheat-lush gold of Europe. I will not call Princesse Danaë the most beautiful woman in the world, since that title doubtless belongs to some obscure person, living happily indifferent to the doors of fame that might be opened by the blessings of anatomy. But I do know who would win a worldwide vote for the face on Earth most likely to launch a thousand ships.

「
What good luck, that we have an investigator so perceptive, and so discrete.
」
Danaë's Japanese is elegant and beautifully accented, but too meticulous, the over-perfect Japanese of one who learned it in adulthood and remains self-conscious, even as the decades mount.
「
Surely Mycroft will protect our Masami.
」

Her words opened an aspect of this I had not seen before, the poor young intern, still a minor just whetting his eager pen, swept up in a storm of probing questions, which bitter politics would whip into a hurricane to levy at the whole bash'. Suddenly the wide eyes of the lounging siblings watching from the back room felt like fear.
「
Do you think this is directed against the Chief Director, Princesse?
」
I asked.

「
I don't know.
」
Danaë came to her husband's side. Do not chide me, reader, for using the gendered ‘husband' when she stands so close, sheltering against him as she gazes up into his face with her brilliant, pleading blue eyes edged by maternal fear. Our age's neutral ‘partner' rings false when her every touch and gesture makes such intentional display of ‘wife.'
「
Masami was so excited by this job at the paper—their dream job. I hate to think someone would destroy that just to get at us.
」

「
I'll do everything I can to protect Masami, Princesse.
」
I said it almost without thinking, or with no thought beyond the desire to drive the sadness from that perfect face.

Princesse Danaë rewarded me with a smile, warm, her right cheek framed by one stray golden curl, and I relaxed enough to slump back on my haunches.

「
Poor Masami is quite innocent, but I fear they will seem guilty when the public finds out the truth.
」

「
Finds out what?
」
I asked.

She sighed, brushing back the wayward curl, and the passion rising in my breast split between the impulse to leap between her and the sources of her grief like some white knight, or to freeze that moment like a portrait so I could feast my eye forever on her face. I should add, reader, that I hold no particular lust for Danaë. Rather her arts—mastery of poise and gesture—can inflict these feelings on almost any victim, and when she sighs thus in the council chamber where the Nine Directors meet, one sigh can trump a hundred thousand votes.
「
As I understand, Sugiyama pulled out of writing the list just a few days ago, and had Masami finish it, but the editor wanted the famous name, so was going to release Masami's list pretending it was their teacher's. Masami's just a junior intern, they had no way to object.
」

「
Of course not,
」
I answered instantly.
「
Don't worry, Princesse. I'm sure we can protect Masami. I'll do everything I can, and Martin, too, Martin will understand. Martin understands better than anyone how important it is to keep press and public from hounding Hive leaders' children. We'll keep Masami out of the limelight, I promise.
」

「
Thank you, good Mycroft.
」
Danaë's smile washed over me like sunlight, and she even reached down with those pure alabaster fingers and stroked my hair, as one might stroke a faithful hound.
「
What did you do with the Canner Device?
」

You, distant reader, and I now thinking back on this scene with the distance of weeks, we two can see Andō looming behind his wife, watching in calculated silence as this exquisite tool extracts what he desires. But the Mycroft who kneels before her, he sees nothing but those eyes, keen as blue diamond, which slice even as they sparkle.
「
I … I never had the Canner Device, Princesse.
」

She cocked her head like a bird.
「
You never had it?
」

「
No. I've never even seen it. I only ever had the packaging. I bought the empty box from some arms smugglers. I'd heard about the device from the news back when it was stolen from the lab, everyone did. I wanted the police to think I had the device so they'd think that was how I was sneaking around. It was just a trick to keep them from looking any deeper.
」
It all poured out of me, years of careful silence melted by that coaxing face. I had been close to breaking already, really, the truth brought to my tongue's tip by the fear that being incriminated in this theft might cost me my parole, but if Andō's intimidation was a cudgel, Danaë was that perfect scalpel touch against the artery that makes the blood flow free.

She smiled—what sweet reward, that smile!—and chuckled like a teasing child.
「
Then why didn't you just say so, you little silly?
」

「
I … didn't want anyone to think I still … I can …
」

Her smile turned from teasing to forgiveness.
「
You can still do it, can't you? You can still trick the tracker system, however you did before?
」

「
Yes, Princesse. Please don't tell anyone! They'll lock me up again, I know they will. But if I'd told them they would've taken the means away, and I didn't want to lose it, I need it in case … in case I need it someday to help … somebody …
」

The mercy here was that she instantly assumed my ‘somebody' meant her own bash'.
「
Of course.
」
She gave my hair a second stroke.
「
You did very well to protect that ability. I'm sure it is of great service.
」

「
Thank you, Princesse.
」

Danaë turned back to her husband now, freeing me to look down at the hat in my hands. The sight of it kicked off one of those chains of association which leads in an instant through five links to realization, or, in my case, horror. What had I done? How could I have betrayed so much, so fast? The threat of the device, of being implicated in this theft, it had seemed overwhelming, but I was innocent, and Martin would have believed me. I was not innocent of deceiving the tracker system whenever Bridger or other necessity required. Now, and forever after, Danaë could hold that over me. And so could Andō. I cursed myself inside, although, looking back, I forgive myself now. She was irresistible. Remember, reader, though I use archaic words, I am not from those barbaric centuries when men and women wore their gender like a cockerel's plumes, advertising sex with every suit and skirt. Growing up, I saw gendered costume on the stage, in art, pornography, but to see it in real life is unbearably different: her shallow breaths within constricted ribs, her round French breasts threatening to overflow the low Japanese silks. Here, as Andō wraps his arm around her waist, the costume makes me see them in my mind: the husband wrenching the kimono back to bare the honey-wet vagina. You see now, reader, why, to tell this history, I must say ‘he' and ‘she.' Danaë is a thing long thought extinct, reviving out of time ancient venoms perfected by a hundred generations of gendered culture. We around her—from my weak self to the gaping guards—grew up with no inoculation against this pox we thought our ancestors had vanquished. Movies and histories gave us just enough exposure to learn these ancient cues, weakness without resistance, and we can no more unlearn them than you could unlearn your alphabet when facing an unwelcome word.