Solitaire, page 20
And so she entered into a time of strange, dislocated freedom; she ate and slept as necessary, and in all the moments between, she worked fiercely and with the clean satisfaction of getting things done. She made herself into a project: the reconstruction of Jackal Segura. Her wish list was enormous. She categorized it and then began to explore the city, on-line and by transport, finding her way to one neighborhood after another, comparing prices and weighing alternatives, making notes on her new palmtop: it took much longer than it should have, because she would suddenly get the shakes in a busy store or on a crowded sidewalk, and would have to find her way back to her apartment in a controlled panic.
When she had enough data, she ran a draft budget and sliced the list in half. She agonized over the shade of yellow, the white and green for the bathroom: she picked a deep muddy blue for the bedroom because as a little girl she had always wanted a room like an underwater cave. She held a brief memory of that other Jackal; then the hundred things still to do pushed it almost casually from her mind and she went on with her spackling and sanding.
Occasionally, someone would pound on the wall or underneath her floor, and she would know it must be late. Then she would turn to quiet chores—configuring her new desktop, washing down the kitchen shelves, haphazardly hemming curtains for the window, so badly that she had to rip out the stitching and redo the entire job. She could not rest until everything was done.
Her belongings arrived from Ko, and it took her almost a whole day to move them from the storage space to her apartment, one crate at a time on a rented hand truck that she maneuvered slowly along the sidewalks. She was managing the crowds better now; there were whole days when she didn't get scared by the press of other people. Today she was able to nod to the Laotian grocer sorting canned goods in his shop window, and raise a hand to the sausage vendor each time she reached her building. A group of neighborhood gang kids watched her interestedly throughout the afternoon from their place on a stoop four buildings west of Shangri-La. On her last trip, one scooted out to meet her, right hand casually riffling a butterfly knife through its paces.
“Ho,” the young woman said, slender blades fluttering.
“Hello,” Jackal answered. She did not want to stop, but the girl had placed herself in the middle of the sidewalk. Jackal braked and silently cursed the loss of momentum.
“Whatcha got?”
“My things,” Jackal said economically.
“Nice things?”
“Not really. Nothing you'd be interested in.”
“You never know,” the girl said conversationally. “What will you do if I am interested?”
“I will dislocate your left knee,” Jackal answered immediately and as calmly as she could. She could hear Neill say good, Jackal, specific examples are always more convincing.
The girl grinned. “Okay,” she said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.” She stepped out of the way.
“Thanks,” Jackal said. “Delighted to be here.” She grunted as her sore shoulder took up the strain of restarting the hand truck. She left the kids whooping on the stoop behind her, their laughter punctuated by the castanets of the flicking knives. It was the closest thing she'd had to a personal conversation since she had left Crichton.
She unpacked and arranged all her precious things in a seven-hour burst of adrenaline focus, smiling in delight to see them emerge from their wrappings. She opened a box and found Frankenbear, and was overcome by the memory of her first minutes in VC-Ko, reliving the astonishment and the way she'd felt as if a huge wind had blown her wide open. Then she sat Frank on her dresser and went on with her unpacking. There were some interesting omissions: all of her jewelry, many of her books, a letter opener that had belonged to her
abuelo, other small items. Well, she would write to Ko and get someone in Facilities Management on the case. Or maybe not; maybe better to be grateful that the price for this particular reclamation was no higher.
And then, quite suddenly, it was over. The clock on her desk told her it was two forty-seven in the morning; she wasn't quite sure of the day. There was nothing more to do. The list was complete, the work finished. The apartment smelled vaguely of new paint and lemon cleaner, overlaid with street grease borne on the night breeze that belled the new curtains slowly in and out. It was very quiet: no tugboats, no transport engines whuffing along the street, no shouts or laughter or screams. There was a faint sound of music from far away, a bit like flamenco guitar. She turned off the lights and sat in the chair that she had placed so that she could see both the door and the window. She breathed; and the quiet filled her up.
14
SHE WOKE IN THE CHAIR THE NEXT MORNING WITH A stiff neck and no feeling in her right leg, her desktop calendar gently beeping to remind her that she had her first parole appointment with Crichton in two hours. She panicked and tried to dash for the shower, and yipped as the prickles ran up and down her leg with the returning circulation; she saved herself from falling at the cost of a wrenched wrist. Then she forgot to double-check the transport route before she left, and had to guess where to transfer. It made for a tense ride.
She finally found herself about a half mile from where she needed to be: in spite of the bad start and feeling like a wrung-out paint rag, she had enough time to walk the rest of the way. She felt a bit like she had been running at top speed and just smacked into an invisible wall; stunned, and not quite sure that she had stopped moving. It took a while to realize that no one was paying her any attention. Perhaps it was her clothes, rumpled and musty from their journey in a Ko shipping crate; or maybe the stoop of her shoulders and the way she had straight-armed her hands into her jacket pockets. She lifted her chin and stood taller. It made her feel better, and no one pointed or stared. As she made her way through the trickle of shoppers and couriers and businesspeople rushing to appointments, she finally noticed that it was a beautiful day; thin white sun washed over the dense blue sky like yolk inside an eggshell; light flecked the glass-fronted buildings; the air was cold, especially at corners where the wind tumbled about before gathering itself for the next run down one of the canyon streets.
Crichton's office, when she eventually got through the security checkpoints, was the shabby room she remembered, still devoid of any personal touch save the same mug, with what looked like a fresh chip along the base, and a number of self-adhesive notes stuck to the wall, curling at the edges from the heat pumping out of the floor vent beside the desk. There was also a new filing cabinet in the corner, by far the nicest piece of furniture in the room. Jackal assumed it held the folders that had been threatening to take over the office. She wondered why people still used paper files; she herself was very happy to manage all her information electronically, but most people she had known at Ko still kept some paper records. And, in fact, there was Jackal's folder, primly closed on Crichton's desk.
“Right on time,” Crichton said. “Shut the door. Sit.”
No arrest today, Jackal thought again, coming perilously close to saying it out loud in a chirpy, singsong tone.
You're tired, her little voice said, be careful.
“I ask questions, you answer them,” Crichton began. In spite of her bad sleep and her case of nerves, Jackal found herself enjoying Crichton's lack of concern for the niceties. Crichton's eyes were gold today, the shiny color of foil wrapped around cheap chocolates. She looked like a fierce machine.
She went on, “After our little chat, you get a once-over from the doctor down the hall so that we can tell EarthGov we're taking care of you. That'll include the usual basic neuro exam—follow my finger, that kind of thing. Any questions? Good.”
She picked up her phone and punched in a number. “Segura's here.” A beat. “If you want to talk to her, come to my office. If you don't, don't. Well, I told you that, didn't I?” She closed the phone hard enough to make Jackal's ear twitch sympathetically. “Idiot.” She propped Jackal's open file against her stomach and leaned back in her chair.
“Okay, Segura, Segura. You're living at…Shangri-La.” She gave Jackal a look over the top of the file. “Good. No performance ratings from your program supervisor because you're not an employee. Fine. Credit's good. Hah, I guess. It halfway pisses me off that you've got more money in the bank than I do.” The gold eyes gleamed.
Jackal kept her mouth shut.
“Made any friends?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you made any friends?”
“What do you care?”
“Play nice, now,” Crichton said, showing some teeth. “I ask, you answer. I get to ask anything I want, that's how this game works.”
The enjoyment was starting to wear off. “No, I haven't made any friends.”
“Any sexual liaisons since your reclamation?”
Jackal set her teeth together. “No.”
“I should point out that prior to entering into a sexual relationship with a guardian of a minor child, you're required to divulge your felony conviction status and are not allowed unsupervised access to that child.”
She couldn't help flushing. “I don't hurt children.”
Crichton gave her a flat look. “You killed ninety-eight of them less than a year ago. The NNA does not consider you a good risk.”
Jackal rubbed her hands across her face. “I didn't…” But she had. She had killed ninety-eight children. She had been about to say, I didn't mean to hurt anybody, but what difference did that make? It was strange that only the deaths of the web had seemed real up until now, that it was always Tiger and Bear and Mist that she remembered. She hadn't been thinking about ninety-eight children.
“What have you been doing with yourself?”
Jackal wiped her eyes and wrapped her arms across her chest. “Getting settled in. I don't know. I bought stuff, I got my things from Ko yesterday and unpacked them.”
“So what's next?”
I don't know, I don't know. “I'm pretty tired. I think maybe I'll just take some time and learn my way around.”
“Then what?”
“I don't know, okay? God. Unless you have a post-prison checklist you'd like me to follow?”
“No, but that's not a bad idea,” Crichton replied calmly, making a note and irritating Jackal even more. Then Crichton said, “Your test results are back.”
Jackal put on her best politely interested face; it felt a little crooked, but she hoped that didn't show.
“One of the advantages of all this paper—” Crichton twitched Jackal's file, but she wasn't looking at it; she was watching Jackal very carefully “—is that it's very private. Everyone assumes the electronic files are complete, original data. But when I see something that interests me, sometimes I'll just put it in one of my messy old outdated folders so I can chew on it for a while.”
Jackal nodded cautiously.
“I'm not Doctor Crichton, but I've handled more than four hundred VC cases and I've reviewed a lot of test results. I know an interesting variance when I see it. I just don't know what it means yet.” She picked up her mug and drank, never taking her eyes from Jackal.
Jackal worked to keep her expression appropriate; it was hard to look relaxed with all her facial muscles rigid and her heart jammering in her chest. She tried now for a still-cooperative-but-slightly-puzzled look. “What kind of variance?”
“Don't waste my time,” Crichton said. “You've got no game face. You can fool these program scientists because they're morons, but you can't fool me. Something happened to you in VC. All of you come out changed, we expect that by now. But there's something different about you, and I want to know what it is.”
Jackal took a slow deep breath, through her nose so that it was silent, down into her diaphragm. A strong, steadying breath. There had never been more need for care. In, in; and out as slowly. Then she let the fear express itself as anger. “I sat in a square room in my head for six years. I went a little nuts just like everyone else. Well, maybe not exactly like everyone else, how would I know? But exactly like me. I don't know if I'm different or not. I'm not even sure I remember who I was before I went down the rabbit hole. I don't know what you want me to say. I killed ninety-eight kids and they shoved me into my head and I stared and stared and stared at the walls and then one day I was back here and my whole fucking life was gone—” Her voice had risen; she closed her mouth on whatever else might come out. It was too easy to make mistakes when she was afraid.
Crichton folded the file closed and placed it on the desk. “I didn't expect you to tell me. So let me tell you: almost everything about you is in my bedtime reading pile right now. You interest me. You had influence and money, you've never been remotely political in your life, and you gave it all up without a squeak to plead a charge that any decent lawyer could have beaten with half their brain excised. So I have to wonder what that's about?”
Jackal could feel her face smooth into a tight mask of grief. Damn Crichton. She shook her head fiercely, trying to hold back tears. Crichton waited in silence.
“I am guilty,” Jackal finally said in a low voice. “I killed those people.”
“If you did drop those people down the well, I'm guessing it was an accident. Oh, please,” she said exasperatedly as Jackal looked up in shock. “Do I look stupid? You're about as much a terrorist as the lab nerds with the white coats. You wouldn't get two feet inside the door with Steel Breeze.”
Jackal felt numbly scared and, weirdly, just a little insulted. She didn't know what to do.
“So is it just that there really is a hard-wired criminal brain-wave pattern and, since you're not a criminal, you don't have it and so your readings are different? Or did something happen in VC that you don't want Doctor Bill and his merry band to get excited about? My money's on door number two.”
Jackal opened her hands: “I don't know what you're talking about. I can't help you.” And then she waited for the inevitable: the phone call, the security escort back to the lab. The new tests. The remand to facility custody. And then what? It was like being back in her cell in Al Isk, listening to the footsteps in the hall and knowing they were coming for her.
Crichton's smile was a brief, thin slash. “Don't fuck with me, little girl. I can make you miserable in ways you haven't even thought of yet. Now scram.”
Jackal was startled into immobility; but not for long. She got through the door without trembling, but following the guard down the hall to the security door, she began to shudder. “Is there a bathroom?” Her bowels were loose, as shaky as the rest of her. Afterwards, she ran a cool stream of water over her wrists until she felt a bit more steady. Her reflection in the mirror was shadow-eyed with fatigue and shock, and the beginnings of consideration: what does she want with me?
Some days later, she came awake with her own voice fading in her mind, as if she had just finished answering Crichton's party question from that first interview:
I'm an executive-level project manager.
She lay still, and the room held its breath around her. Project manager. If she were in Al Isk right now, that's how she'd be identified. Boring but safe. Maybe it would feel safe enough to businesspeople here that they would overlook the small matter that she was a convicted criminal.
Oh, wake up, her voice said. Of course they won't overlook it. But what else could she do? What else was she good at? Just shut up and let me think about this, she told herself, and then wondered if this was a bad sign. She still had occasional night terrors about the crocodile; she had become used to having conversations with herself, but she was always vigilant for that sly, sliding change in tone to tell her that her head was no longer safe.
Whatever Crichton's intentions, she'd really stirred things up. Jackal dressed, gobbled two fried eggs and a cup of Irish breakfast tea, scooped up her palmtop, and grabbed a transport downtown.
