Veneer (46 page)

“Not with
you
,” he shot back.

“You’d fuck anything that moves,” said Ilya. “And maybe even things that don’t move, if I know boys.” With a wink towards Ramsey, she added, “And I do.”

“Aw, come on,” countered Zachary, “let’s not fight. You and I have a lot in common: we both like fucking chicks.”

Ramsey giggled and the other girl snorted.

“It’s a wonder more girls in this school aren’t lesbians if you’re the best that we have to choose from. I’d rather bury my face in Ramsey’s tits than see you without a shirt on.” Ilya delivered her words nonchalantly, but she could see Ramsey flinch at the mention of her name.

“I bet you would,” replied Zachary, the suggestive smile on his face again.

There was a pall as the four students considered each other. It was finally broken by Mr. Randall who expressed disappointment that they hadn’t even started their lab.

“Take your slides and get your samples, ladies, Mr. Evans,” he ordered.

Never cross a lumberjack, thought Ilya, as she scooted off her seat. Zachary and Bangs got their samples first and for a few moments she was left alone with Ramsey at the materials counter.

“So you weren’t making out with Rosalia?”

Ilya winked. “We’ve kissed a few times,” she admitted.

“I didn’t think she’d be that kind of girl.” Ramsey’s voice was curious; they always started out that way.

“She’s not. I mean, she just does what makes her happy. If kissing a girl doesn’t make
you
happy, don’t do it. But if it does...” She left the rest of the sentence unsaid as she handed a slide to Ramsey. Their fingers touched briefly under the glass.

“Don’t people tease you though?”

“Who? Like Zachary? He’s an idiot. If I cared what people like him thought, I’d never have any fun.”

Ramsey bared her teeth in amusement.

Back at the lab table, Ilya went through the motions of loading her slide onto the microscope and staring vainly into the eyepiece. There were shapes in the water but no way to tell organism from flotsam. It occurred to her that she might be able to reconcile something on the slide, an immobile single-cell creature shaped like a horse.

“Hey, Ilya,” said Zachary. “Do you want to look at my slide? It kinda looks like a little pussy.”

Ilya turned her head just enough. “I’m already looking at a little pussy.”

The smile on his face faded so quickly that his veneer actually stuttered.

“You’re kind of a bitch, you know that?” he asked after stewing for a minute.

Ilya returned to her specimen. “You’re just mad I’m not a pushover like your little cheerleader girlfriends. Empty heads and spread legs—that’s all they are.”

“It’s not just stupid girls,” Ramsey remarked. “Some of them are special needs kids, too. Why do you think they’re always practicing their spelling?” She shared a private smile with Ilya.

Dump one project in first period; gain another before the day was out. Ilya regarded Ramsey carefully, examining each of her features while her attention was focused on the microscope. Her face was squarer than Rosalia’s and her high forehead left something to be desired. Still, there was potential in her eyes, an unspoiled optimism that Ilya wanted to make her own. There was curiosity too, which meant she might be a willing partner instead of a girl so hung up on the socially accepted standards that she was too terrified to stray into unfamiliar territory. Besides, the mystery of the plunging tan-lines ate at Ilya, begging to be solved.

Just as a new fantasy was taking root in her mind, the classroom door opened and in walked the dreaded ex herself.

From the back of the classroom, Mr. Randall asked, “Can I help you, Ms. Collier?”

“Um, yeah,” she mumbled. “I left my palette in here...” She trailed off, pointing down the row of lab tables.

“Go ahead,” he replied, beckoning her into the room.

She looked rattled. The way her eyes kept darting around the room, the way her arms hung motionless at her side, all of it spoke to a deep trauma burning away inside her. Maybe their moment in the shower had been too much for her. Crinkling her nose, Ilya wondered if she actually felt remorse for hurting Rosalia like that.

The moment passed without resolution.

Rosalia avoided Ilya’s gaze as she walked between the two lines of lab tables. There were already whispers spreading through the room. A squeaky voice even called out, “Didn’t get enough this morning?”

It made Ilya chuckle, since in her case, it was true. It could have gone so much better, she thought. She’d had unrestricted access to Rosalia’s body and that stupid bitch had messed everything up. It was her fault she got hurt. If she’d just played along and accepted Ilya’s advances, then everything would have turned out okay. She’d be happy instead of sad, maybe even elated in a post-orgasmic haze.

When Rosalia reached her row, she broke right and approached Ilya, who turned sideways to greet her old friend. Without thinking, she blurted out, “Did you miss me?”

Ilya thought it would have been funny to see the reaction on Rosalia’s face, but her veneer had morphed into anger even before the last word came out. The next thing she knew, Rosalia’s fist had caught her square on the nose, filling her eyes with a million sparks that her body tried to counteract with a spray of tears. Dazed and half-blind, she only remembered Rosalia when the girl’s hands gripped the side of her head. Long fingernails dug into her scalp and then tangled themselves in her hair. She felt herself moving sideways and then being off balance. A moment later, something hard and black was slamming into the side of her head. The lab table created an intense pain on the right side of her face. Then the hands disengaged and moved to her shoulders, to her neck, where they carved out little lines in her skin: some drawing blood, the others just stinging.

The classroom erupted into panic and Ilya felt people all around her trying to stop the fight. Someone was pulling her backwards, away from the attacker she could no longer see through the tears. Wiping at her eyes, her arms shaking badly, she cleared enough away to see two boys holding Rosalia and dragging her away. Mr. Randall was shouting, desperately trying to restore order, but all Ilya could do was stare into those hateful eyes.

It was a side of Rosalia she had never seen, a counter-balance to the mousy girl whose interests were artistic and generally passive. But this, this raw emotion, raw power, there was something exciting about it.

And despite the blood and the pain, Ilya couldn’t help but want her all over again.

60 - Russo

For hours, Russo watched the spectacle unfold from the safety of the diner across the street. Sitting in a booth by the window, he sipped water from a sweating glass and pretended to read his palette, but all he could think about was the crowd forming by the alley next to the Holly Street Hilton’s parking garage. There were so many gawkers, obese Eastonians who waited in anticipation of another onlooker so they could be the one to tell the story, incomplete as it was.

The little boy jumped from the top floor.

I heard he was suicidal because he was fat.

They were all plausible, but they were all wrong.

The way Ruiz had played it up, Russo thought a covert team of black-clad agents would descend on the parking garage and cover up any trace of the incident. Instead, it was a standard cruiser that showed up first, with two uniforms that looked bothered to be there. They disappeared into the alley and a few minutes later, the smaller of the two came back to the car and retrieved a roll of yellow cordon tape from the trunk. She strung it up across the alley and then knelt on the pavement. When her hand touched the ground, a red barrier grew out into the sidewalk, flowing like water up a beach, causing the nearby pedestrians to scurry away as it approached their feet.

After that, the number of uniforms just kept growing. A fire truck got involved for some reason, followed by an ambulance. Two med techs in flashy orange vests jumped out of the back as soon as it came to a stop. Their urgency surprised Russo; did they really think they could resuscitate Jalay? It was a regular circus, far more attention than Jalay could have ever garnered when he was alive.

The show lasted only a few hours, though a solitary uniform remained for much of the afternoon, leaning against the evercrete columns and discouraging passersby from getting too close. By the time Ruiz slid into the booth around two o’clock, Russo was getting antsy. Already, the waitress was giving him dirty looks for taking up space.

There was something cold about the nonchalant way Ruiz sat across from Russo. If he had any desire to see the crime scene, he wasn’t giving into it. The only thing he seemed to care about was Jalay’s palette, which he had taken from Russo the moment he sat down. He had been trying to guess Jalay’s password for a while.

“You want me to try?”

“Try what?” replied Ruiz without looking up.

“I knew Jalay better than you. I could probably guess—”

Ruiz didn’t smile, but there was a haughty undertone when he said, “Yeah, I’m already in.” Clucking his tongue, he explained, “I know every word that Chapman has ever reconciled. All I had to do was play them back one at a time. Sometimes intelligent brute force is the best approach.”

“So...”

“I’m almost done,” said Ruiz, agitated. He swiped his finger a few more times before dropping the palette on the table. Pushing it towards Russo, he pulled his own palette from his jacket and began reconciling his notes. “I need you to look for information, find out how much he’s leaked and to whom.”

“Haven’t you done that already?”

A grin in return. “Yes, but now I want
you
to do it. This is how we learn, Rivera. You’ll want everyone he’s talked to. That’s message boards, mail, instant messages, anything that connects him to other people.”

“Then what?”

A reconciled flame passed in front of the agent’s pupils. “Then we close up the wound before Vinestead loses too much blood.”

It was hard to see that kind of future, hard to see the consequences being as dire as the agent made them out to be. “And if it does?”

“Well,” said Ruiz, standing, “then all of this goes away. You think it’s bad with people like us running the show? Wait ‘til we’re gone, then you’ll see. Or won’t see...”

He left without elaborating, leaving Russo to consider all the ways the world could be better or worse without the veneer. Personally, his goal was still the same—to have a power that other people didn’t, to have an advantage that would put him in another league. All of that depended on the veneer. Without it...

Looking outside again, Russo began to catalogue the reconciled surfaces, from building façades to the paint jobs on vehicles. If the fire truck didn’t have a unique shape, if the ambulance weren’t just a box on wheels, then without the veneer, no one would know what they were for. It might not be that shocking in the short term, but to get everything back to the way it was, to make signs useful again, to make computers replace portals, would take time and resources beyond what Easton had.

That was the point that Ruiz was trying to make by leaving him with a bleak outlook. Russo needed to believe in the veneer, believe in its necessity so that he would defend it with his life because really, it
was
his life.

Russo touched the edge of the palette and flipped the image around. Jalay’s start page settled onto the screen, a mix of small icons spread unevenly around three larger ones in the center. A folder on the left read
Jubs
and when he clicked into it, a grid of smaller icons filled the screen, beige folders with photographs hanging out of them, providing a preview of their contents.

Exhibit A: Jalay had a lot of porn.

It wasn’t much of a surprise; for years he had watched his late accomplice browse the network for titty pics. What he hadn’t noticed was how meticulous an organizer Jalay had been, with all of the folders tagged with keywords. Along the right side of the portal was a list of those tags, followed by a parenthetical number indicating how many photos it applied to.

Asian
.

Nipples.

Rosalia.

Russo smirked at the name and tapped it with his finger.

Exhibit B: Jalay had no explicit porn. All of the images tagged with Rosalia’s name resembled her in some way, but they were all tame. The most objectionable thing Russo found was a folder full of girls holding skulls in front of their pussies.

Fucking Jalay wasn’t even good at collecting porn.

Wiping away the harmless images, Russo returned to the start page and pulled up the instant messenger. Diving back a week, he started going through the conversations, few as they were. When he came upon Sebo Kahani’s name, his eyebrow jumped. Since when did Jalay associate with Deron’s crew? Curious, he pulled up the chat logs and saw that no messages had passed between them, only a file called Jordan. The conversation after that was similarly blank, except the file’s name was Felicity.

Clicking on the filename brought him to a folder full of still photos that showed a young girl sitting at a desk, her oversized tits deforming against the edge of the light wood. Ah, thought Russo, the memory coming back to him. It was the Roommate software that Jalay had pirated off the network. Evidently, he had given it away to Sebo.

But why?

Russo put the palette down and looked over at the alley again. The uniform had moved under an awning as the skies resumed their downpour. Jalay wasn’t the kind of guy that shared his treasures willingly. If he had given them to Sebo, then it was probably in exchange for something. Information, perhaps, or protection?

“Dumbass,” whispered Russo, imagining Deron, Rosalia, Sebo, and Jalay all engaged in a big group hug, unaware that Jalay was a virus, a bug that would bring nothing but pestilence to their perfect little world.

He
was
infected, but with information that put him in danger. And if he shared it with anyone, all of them would have to die. That caused a smile to creep its way onto Russo’s veneer. Even if they
didn’t
know anything, he could just claim they did, say it was for the protection of Vinestead. Sitting back in the booth, Russo took a deep breath.