Contact Imminent (15 page)

After a few moments, she heard footsteps behind her. She picked up her pace, thinking it might be Gisa trying to catch her, but when she heard the muttered curse in Hortensian German, she slowed. “You lied about the threat to my friends, Colonel.”

“No, I didn't.” Brondt drew alongside her. “Feyó hasn't endeared herself with her heavy-handedness; there were rumors that she had sent her security to wrest you away from Colonel Pierce and escort you back to the Elyan enclave. Some of our more militant denizens took that rumor to heart.” His step
slowed as his breathing grew labored—the slope was steep and the heat relentless. “They tend to overreact, and Gisa does us no favors by looking the other way. She believes the occasional skirmish will cause everyone to respect us. She does not understand the fear that such behavior could raise, that hybrids are violent, unstable.” He stopped to wipe his sleeve across his brow. “At times I feel as though I'm juggling grenades.” Jan paused at the cliff's edge and looked to the other side of the bay, where the white buildings of Karistos shone like snow against the red-brown of the rocks. “Could Feyó see those flares? Are they enough to let her know that I'm here?”

“She knows.” Brondt spoke so quietly, one might have thought he hadn't spoken at all.

Jani turned back to him, where he stood amid the rocks and stared down at his hands, a weighty figure with a deceptive ability to maneuver. “I work with a captain back in Chicago who has a lot in common with you.” Yes, the pieces fit. Yes, they made the usual sort of messy political sense. “You're a spy for Feyó. You're the one who let her know that Gisa planned to kidnap me, then you turned around and did the deed yourself to keep Gisa's trust.”

“Ná Feyó knows you're here. She contacted Doctor Shroud and Colonel Pierce immediately after we left the station. She charged me with keeping you safe.” Brondt shot Jani a look of Niall-grade frustration. “As I said, you don't make it easy.” He took a deep breath, and started up the incline.

Jani waited for him to draw even with her, then continued toward the main house. Other hybrids passed them now, singly or in groups, their looks filled with confusion, anger, or a warring combination of both. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“How would that knowledge have made you feel toward me, better or worse than you do now?” Brondt eyed Jani sidelong, then looked away as though he guessed the answer. “You must understand, I am not against ná Gisa. I just…” He sighed. “I want Thalassa to thrive, to prosper. But ná Gisa is too bold and ná Feyó is too timid. There must be a place that is as we are. Somewhere in between.”

As she and Brondt turned onto the walkway that led to the house, Jani caught sight of ná Gisa walking up the road behind them, regarding her with a mixture of expectancy and annoyance. A phalanx of hybrids preceded her, muscular males who had once been humanish, rough-edged and callused.
Behold the more militant denizens of Thalassa.
Unpleasant images coursed before her mind's eye of their reaction if they discovered a double agent in their midst. “You're walking a thin line, Colonel.”

“Indeed.” Brondt drew ahead of her as they approached the entry, and wrestled his expression into one of bland formality. “Remember, ná Kièrshia,” he said as he preceded her through the door, “my future is now in your hands.”

They entered the house to find the demirooms lit by inset lighting and floor lamps, the chairs and couches occupied by hybrids, many of whom held glasses or cups.
I'll be damned—it really is the cocktail hour
. Jani veered away from the scattered groups toward the courtyard, where a series of long tables had been assembled into a U-shape. Some of the younger hybrids, Torin among them, finished laying out dishes and cutlery, then set out candle bowls at measured intervals, shallow dishes filled with oil atop which floated sparkling fuel cells.

They all eat together. In one room. At the same time.
Even though the incident with Eamon's drink had prepared Jani for the fact, the realization still shook her.
Tsecha still follows the old protocols
. As did Dathim, despite his daring in other areas.
How would they react to this?
She settled into the role of observer, so she could describe the scene to them when she returned to Chicago, and so she could set her feelings aside, to deal with later.

“Ná Kièrshia?” Gisa joined Jani at the opening to the courtyard, her composure regained. “You wish something to drink?”

“Water, please.”
Followed by a shower, please.
Jani tugged at the overrobe, which remained twisted around her waist, the flare pistol still hidden beneath. Sweat beaded her face,
while grime streaked her trouser suit from her scramble up the rocks. “Alcohol isn't worth the bother anymore, and I'm picky when it comes to coffee.”

“Been drinking a lot of Johnny's brew of late, have you?” Eamon wandered over, a lime-garnished glass well in hand. “A proper little couple you've become, so I've heard.”

“We see one another once in a while.” Jani took a glass from a tray carried by an agitated Torin. He'd removed his films since their arrival—as she expected, his eyes proved the same deep green that she saw each time she looked in the mirror. “It isn't very complicated.” She watched as he cut across the courtyard, looks passing between him and Brondt as well as the older female that Jani had seen him with after their arrival. Shorter and rounder than any idomeni, her reddish hair in a scalp-hugging clip, she wore a simple shirt and long skirt, and a worried frown.

“I still do not understand humanish pairings.” Gisa stepped aside so that Bon could join them. “Here at Thalassa, I see so much I do not understand—fighting and weeping and sadness—all over something so simple. With the blending comes peace to the soul, this I know and truly. The fighting ends, and pairing is approached with reason.” She crossed her right arm on her chest, palm inward, in a gesture of humility, then departed for the opposite leg of the U, Bon preceding her.

She doesn't want to talk to me
. Jani tasted the water and winced over its bland processed purity.
I've upset her plans to sweep me off my feet.

“Lost in the surreality of it all, are you, Kilian?” In the few minutes that had passed, the sweat had soaked through the front of Eamon's white overshirt. “You've got that look about you. Dead-faced and still as stone, just like you were the day Johnny explained all the things he'd done to you when you were too comatose to object.”

Jani looked across the room as Bon turned toward Gisa and tilted her head in acknowledgment of something her dominant had said. The afternoon sun shone upon the open courtyard and played across her sheared hair, through which
showed patches of scalp as mottled and scarred as her face. “What's wrong with Bon?”

Eamon sniffed, then took a healthy swallow of his drink. “Analogue of Günther's disease. One of the autosomal recessive porphyrias. A cutaneous variety, not the neurologic version that you had. She was already heterozygous for it; I had tried to tweak her heme pathway, and damned if I didn't nail just the right mutation to make her homozygous. A one in a million chance, that, but every so often you hit those.” He shrugged. “Anyway, a month or so after her last treatment, we moved here. The day was sunny, like they all are, and we whiled away the hours going in and out, ferrying personal belongings and furniture and such.” Bon looked toward them, and he lowered his voice. “The porphyrins accumulate in the tissue, the skin. When sunlight hits them, they give off singlet oxygen. Wreaks hell on things organic. The blistering started almost immediately she walked outside. She looked as though she'd been torched by the time we got her downstairs to the clinic.”

Jani looked down at her hands, the real and the fake, imagined the ravaging wrought by the heat of the transport explosion, and wondered what it felt like to watch the destruction unfold. “So why haven't you cured her?”

“Do you think I'm a bloody incompetent then?” Eamon curled his lip. “I repaired the mutation that day, but she wouldn't let me mend the scars. They were
à lérine
, she said. A challenge by the sun, which represented any who would prevent her from hybridizing, from becoming as she was meant to be.” He held up his open hand in front of Jani's face, then slowly curled his fingers. “Her hands—they're like claws, twisted with scar tissue. She could lose fingers if she doesn't get treatment, but she doesn't care. Her hands for her enclave. Her life, if needed, for her enclave. Fair trade, she calls it.” He leaned close, bringing the soupy stink of humanish sweat with him. “They're all like that. This is a religious experience to them—they're the chosen of the gods. You're going to have your hands full managing this
herd, my little tin divinity, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving soul.” He straightened. “Any other questions?”

“Just one.” Jani gave the tasteless water one more chance, then set the glass on the edge of a planter. “Why?”

Eamon's dissolute face set in cruel lines, his weak mouth firming. He'd always been odd man out among the Neoclona Three. He lacked John's elegance, Val's wit and good looks. But he shared their scientific arrogance, and it emerged now, like a mask of youth. “Because they wanted it. Needed it, some of them, to survive.” He smiled. “And because I could. Because old Johnny thought he'd nicked my tendons but good, and I proved him wrong.”

“I thought you had a contract.” Jani grew conscious of movement around her, and stepped closer to the planter to allow hybrids bearing serving dishes room to walk around her to the table. “John and Val stayed out of gadgets, you stayed out of genetics.”

“Contracts were made to be broken.” Eamon shook his drained glass so the ice rattled. “We'll see how eager Johnny is to rack me after he gets here and we've had a chance to talk. He gets a chance to see what his castoff has done.” He headed for the table, then paused and turned back to Jani. “I did it better than he did, you know, the bonny Bon notwithstanding. None of the problems you had with food, with bone and muscle disorders. And I worked over fifty-seven of them. Johnny only worked you.” He took a seat near the top of the U and poured another drink from the bottle one of the hybrids had left beside his plate.

Jani waited, knowing that everyone would seat themselves according to rank and that soon only she and Gisa would be left standing. She sniffed the air, expecting the harsh tang of Sìah herbs and spices, and stilled as a more familiar aroma rattled her sinuses.
Curry?
She sniffed again.
And hot plum sauce?
She looked across the room toward Gisa, who had taken her low seat near the top of the U and now gestured to her and pointed to the chair next to hers, the seat of honor, the lowest seat at the table.

“Anything in a blue-rimmed dish is mine,” Eamon said as Jani took her place, his burr hatcheting through the softer voices around him. “I made them work out a code after I damned near lost the lining of my mouth to a veg stew.”

Jani examined the server that Gisa handed her, which contained a green bean and potato
toran
. “What does a gold rim mean?”

Eamon raised a hand and rocked it up and down in a so-so gesture. “Medium. Anything in the paisley is about your speed. Death to mucus membranes.”

Jani lifted the lid of one of the paisley tureens and inhaled.
“Dahi machi.”
She ladled some onto her plate. “Fish curry,” she added for the benefit of a bewildered-looking Brondt, who sat several seats uptable and poked through the servers as if they could poke back.

“That was our surprise for you, ná Kièrshia. Your fellow Acadians thought to prepare you a proper welcoming meal.” Gisa gestured downtable toward two of the younger hybrids, a male and female who nodded toward Jani, pride battling dismay on their faces and not quite winning the battle.

“It's very good.” Jani took a large bite for the benefit of one and all.

“Good, yes.” Gisa speared more delicately with a twin-pronged Sìah fork. “And yet you question us. Stand upon rocks and shoot pistols into the air. We who cook so as to honor you, who take so much pride in welcoming you here.”

Jani sensed the stillness in the air, the charge of expectation.
You're undercutting my authority
. Hungry as she was, she set her fork aside.
Putting me on the spot in front of your suborns
. “Your interpretation of hospitality is most odd, and truly. You did not behave as seemly, yet you expect me to respond as though nothing untoward has occurred.”

“We were so happy—”

“Happiness does not preclude diplomacy, or for that matter, common sense.” Jani detected Ambassador Shai's tartness in her speech, and wondered how low she had fallen that she considered the Vynshàrau bornsect a model for anything. “We
face a political crisis here of your making, Gisa. If you wish to discuss such over fish and fruit, by all means let us do so. But if you suppose that hunger, fatigue, and the stunned awe I feel at this place will affect my judgment or predispose me in your favor simply because you are as you are, you are most an idiot!” She picked up her fork and resumed eating, conscious of the brittle silence that had fallen, broken only by the sound of Eamon's snuffling gurgle as he laughed into his drink.

 

“Do you always set the room on its ear like that?” Brondt led Jani up the stairs to her quarters. “I mean, I've listened to idomeni in-your-face for years, but
Christ
.”

“She asked for it.”

“She has a point.”

“But wielding it like a club doesn't help.” Jani glanced over the railing, where the clean-up crew cleared dishes and linen and disassembled the table. “I'm sorry, but I have to weigh fifty-seven hurt faces against the stability of the Outer Circle. If you were in my place, what would you pick?” She waited for Brondt to reply, but he kept his thoughts to himself as he led her to a set of double doors at the end of the hallway.