Spin 01 - Spin State (54 page)
“You have me.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want, Cohen. I lost it years ago.”
“I didn’t fall in love with that child you’re so scared of remembering,” Cohen said after a long silence. “I fell in love with you.”
“There’s no such person,” Li said, and pulled her hand away.
Night had fallen. There was no light, no movement in the open space of the dome below them. A light flared overhead, flashing across the sky like a shooting star, and it took Li a moment to realize that the light was there beside her; Cohen had picked up his lighter and was fidgeting absentmindedly, passing Ramirez’s fingers back and forth above the blue flame.
“I’ll call it off,” he said. “I’ll tell Korchow you can’t do it. I’ll figure out how to make him believe it.” Li laughed bitterly. “You think this is a bridge game? You do that, and he’ll kill me.”
“No. No. I’ll take care of it.”
“There are some things you can’t take care of, Cohen.”
“Then what?” he asked, his words muffled by a fierce gust of rain outside.
“We go forward. We make the intraface work and we go through with it. And when it comes to the point —the real breaking point—we do whatever the hell it takes to walk out alive. Can you do that?”
“Can you?”
“I can damn well try.” “All right, then.”
A drop of rain slipped through a cracked panel seal and fell next to Li with a sharp plink. She leaned over, stubbed her cigarette out in the water, and smeared it around into a dirty, sooty mess.
“Catherine?” Cohen touched her shoulder, as if to turn her attention to him.
She looked around. He was close, very close, and he sat so still it was hard to believe Ramirez’s heart was beating.
He touched her cheek, and she felt his fingers slide across drying tears. Then he curved a hand around the nape of her neck, and drew her head down onto his shoulder.
She relaxed into his arms, letting her body shape itself to his, letting her breathing slow to match his. A safe comfortable warmth spread through her. She was tired of hiding, she realized. Tired of fighting. Just tired.
Gradually, so gradually she didn’t at first notice it, the comfortable warmth gave way to a different kind of warmth. She began to notice Cohen’s particular smell—or Ramirez’s smell. She began to feel, through the link, how she smelled to him. The sensation of his fingers on the back of her neck took on a new focus and urgency. An image took shape in her mind: herself, raising her head, parting her lips, offering her mouth to him. Did it come from her mind or his? Was it her desire or his she felt? Did it matter?
“Cohen,” she said, but her voice sounded so blurred and muffled in her ears that it seemed as if a stranger were speaking.
He raised her face toward his, brushed away a last tear, ran a soft fingertip along the curve of her upper lip. He looked at her. A soft, defenseless, questioning look. A look that demanded an answer.
The blanket swished in the airlock and someone stepped into the room, moving quickly. Cohen pulled away. Li looked down, her pulse hammering in her ears, and saw Bella staring up at them.
“Korchow wants you,” Bella said. Li could see her eyes shifting back and forth between them. “He wants to try another run.”
She knew where she was going
when she slipped out of the safe house that night, even though she didn’t admit it to herself.
It was embarrassing really to see how little her life had changed her. She was still hiding, still lying to herself, still playing the same games she’d played in these streets as a scabby-kneed ten-year-old.
Don’t walk in front of a black cat or a white dog. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Throw salt over your shoulder and the mine whistle won’t blow
. And, of course, the main rule, the unbreakable one.
Don’t admit what you want, even to yourself, or you’ll never ever get it.
She couldn’t believe she found the house. It unnerved her to see her own feet take her there as if this street, this turning, this particular crooked alley, were etched into her body with something more tenacious than memory. The way seemed so natural, so familiar in the darkness that she wasn’t sure she would have known it in daylight. Why was it that she only seemed to have walked this street after dark? How many times had she half-run past these doors, eyes riveted on her hurrying feet lest she look up and accidentally see some terrible sight that would stop her heart before she made it to dinner on the table and the lights of home? And how many of those times had been after she was already working underground and far too old to be scared of the dark? Or at least too old to admit it to herself.
The alley took a last turning and dumped her out into a narrow laundry yard. If she’d stopped and looked around, she might have lost the thread of memory she was following. She didn’t. She kept her head down, crossed the yard, and turned in to the third doorway as unerringly as a homing pigeon. There was a light switch, a lot lower on the wall than she remembered it. She pressed it. No light.
She climbed the stairs in the dark, hearing their familiar creak underfoot, and stopped on the third floor, just under the steep roof. A final half flight of stairs ended in a roof door markedEXIT . Its viruflex panel shed a little light onto the landing, enough for her to see the crate of empty milk and beer bottles that had always stood by the door of the apartment. And there, propped up against the far wall, a bicycle that she could swear she remembered riding.
She grimaced. She hadn’t wanted him to know about this.
Someone walked overhead with heavy, flat-footed steps, and Li spun around to face the roof door. It opened, letting in a gust of wet, fecund air. A man in street clothes and bedroom slippers shuffled past Li and down the next flight of stairs, staring at her all the while with a flat, suspicious look on his face. He had a freshly strangled capon tucked under one arm and a small splash of blood on his sleeve where he’d cut himself, or the bird, in the plucking. Li watched him until she heard a door close behind him a few flights below. Then she turned, stared at the door for a minute, and knocked.
A latch opened, and a chain clinked on the other side of the door. A finger’s breadth of lamplight spilled onto the landing. A thin, Irish-pale face pressed itself to the crack in the door.
Relief and disappointment battled in Li’s heart. Not her. Too young. “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins,” she said.
The girl shifted, and Li caught a glimpse of a baby riding her hip. “What are you selling, then? Oh, never mind, we don’t want it.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
The girl opened the door another few centimeters and looked Li over. “Oh,” she said, and her voice sounded like a door shutting. “Cops.”
“Is she here?” “No.”
“Where then?”
The girl hesitated. Li could see her weighing the risk of personal trouble against the certainty that Li would find Mirce even if she didn’t help her. “Try the Molly.”
Li heard herself laugh nervously. The Molly Maguire. Of course. Where else would half the IrishCatholic population of Shantytown be a few hours before midnight mass on a rainy Saturday night?
Her feet knew the way to the Molly almost as well as they knew the way to her house. Five minutes later she was stepping into the front room of the rusty Quonset hut and shouldering her way past the laughing, jostling crowd that always seemed to mill around the Molly’s threshold.
Every table she could see was taken. Even at the bar there were only a few empty stools left. She found one and settled onto it.
“Triple,” she said to the barkeep. He started slightly, but only at the unfamiliar face; half the Molly’s regulars were at least part construct, and even the most Irish of the Irish bore the marks of Migration-era genesplicing. The triple stout was good when it came, thick and peaty and so rich you could drink it instead of a meal in a pinch. Whatever else might go on at the Molly, or in the dark alleys behind it, the beer was on the up and up.
She drank thirstily and looked around the long, narrow space under the curving roof. Nothing had changed here except her. There were the same hard-muscled, hard-faced miners that still stalked her dreams. There were the pictures of famous local sons and the cups and ribbons of twenty years’ soccer championships gathering dust above the bar. There were the same cheap wall holos, opening onto the stone walls and heartbreakingly green fields of Ireland.
Li let the talk flow around her, listening to the hard-edged flat-voweled voices, relishing the same Saturday night arguments that had always bored her to tears. Wives trying to get their husbands to dance. Husbands trying to keep arguing about soccer and politics. The inevitable table of Gaelic speakers, talking a little too loud and sounding a little too much like they’d learned it out of books. The loners at the bar solving life’s injustices with drunken earnestness. But there weren’t many loners at the Molly, of course. Everyone was someone’s cousin, someone’s brother. Even the shabbiest drunk had two or three or five friends ready to stand by him in a fight or just carry him home if he needed it.
She could see the door into the back room, and she could guess what would be going on in there on a busy Saturday night. Cartwright had been a backroom regular, she remembered. So had her five-yearsolder-than-her third cousin. The one who taught her to shoot. The one with whom she had stolen her first, groping, furtive kisses up on the hill behind the atmospheric processors. What had happened to him? Killed, she thought. But she couldn’t remember if it was in the mine or back on Earth. How could she have forgotten his name? Well, all the backroom regulars would be at the big table tonight. Living in the past. Planning the next futile gesture. Hanging on every word of some hard-eyed young Republican just back from Belfast or Londonderry. She’d never known whether they were for real or not, those boys. She still didn’t know.
A movement caught her eye. She glanced sideways and locked eyes with a broad-shouldered redhead leaning against the back wall watching her. He pushed off the wall and shouldered through the crowd toward her.
“Sláinte,”
he said when he reached her. Li noticed that another man had come up behind him. Neither of them were smiling.
“Sláinte
yourself,” she said.
“Need some help, sweetheart?”
“Not unless you can help me drink alone.”
His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you just got lost and wandered in here by accident?”
“I suppose.”
“Like to make a donation then?” His tone suggested that refusal was not an option.
“What for?”
“Irish orphan relief.”
“Oh.” So that was all it was. Li almost laughed. “How many new guns do the orphans need this winter?” she asked, pulling out her billfold.
“Very funny. And we don’t take cash.”
He pulled a portable scanner from his pocket and held it toward her. His companion slipped around behind her stool, cutting off any possibility of retreat.
Li stared over the smaller man’s shoulder for a moment, straight into a bleak holo of jumpship-sized icebergs calving off the Armagh glacier. Then she shrugged and ran her palm across the scanner.
The redhead looked at the readout, blinked, and looked back up at her. “What do you want here?” “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins. Someone said she’d be here.”
“She’s here, all right.” He hailed the bartender, who arrived so fast he had to have been watching. “She’s looking for Mirce. A cop.”
A slow tidal effect swept through the bar as he said the word. People shifted subtly in their seats, or even took new seats farther away from Li. A few customers slunk toward the exits. Li watched with amusement, but it still worried her; there were a lot of dark alleys between here and the safe house, and she’d been a fool to let herself be tagged as Corps personnel in a place where her internals were worth more money than the rest of the patrons would ever legally earn in their lives. Then Mirce Perkins stepped out of the back room, and Li forgot about the walk back to the flop and the precautions she should have taken and everything else except the woman walking toward her.
She knew that face. And not just from distant childhood memories. It was the woman she had seen with Daahl. The woman who’d made him jump when she walked up to them at the pithead. The woman who, in fact, he’d never actually introduced to Li.
Li searched the strong-boned face, the wire-muscled miner’s body for some point of commonality. Some sign that they had shared a home and a life with each other. Some hint that this was the woman who had masterminded the swindle that sprang Li, against all odds, from the trap of Compson’s World. She saw none of those things. Just a hard-eyed stranger. “Mrs. Perkins?”
She lit a cigarette, cupping her hand over the flame so that Li could see the missing joint on the first finger—and the new ring on the third finger. “It’s not Perkins,” she said. “I remarried.”
Li’s heart skipped treacherously as if it had slipped on a patch of black ice and almost gone down hard. She’d never thought about her mother’s remarrying. Certainly never imagined her having other children. Somehow, in some part of Li’s mind, it all stopped when she left. Her present went on, but her past stayed put, sealed in amber, always there for her if she really needed it. She should have known better.
“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Mirce asked coolly. “Major Catherine Li, UNSC.”
“Can I see some ID then?”
Li fished in her pocket and handed over her fiche. Mirce took it in both hands and stared intently at it, glancing back and forth between Li’s face and the ID holo several times. Li swallowed. “Can we go somewhere and—”
Mirce shook her head, a barely visible gesture, so brief that Li could have imagined it. Her pale eyes slid toward the barkeep wiping down glasses a few feet away.