Solitaire, page 3
“Your needs are changing.” She spoke earnestly, and her hands traced persuasive arcs in the cool recycled air of the room, pale against the earth tones of the smooth walls and the thick woven rug. “Ko wants to make sure you have all the support you need to make what is, after all, a very important transition. So the executive team has decided that I should be available to you from now until your investiture, at least. To be a resource, help you work out any concerns you might have. Think of me as someone to help you with managing change.”
“What's your real job?” She had meant to be assertive, but it only sounded rude. She kept her hands locked around her folded arms so her fingers would not tremble.
Chao answered as if it were a reasonable question. “I'm the Executive Vice President of Organizational Development for Ko Worldwide.”
Jackal opened her mouth. Nothing came out, so she shut it again. She was feeling shaky now: the adrenaline hit had faded and left her with a sour stomach and the beginning of a headache behind her right eye. Maybe she should take the chair after all. What was she doing here? Had she hurt Tiger worse than she realized? She had only meant to hit him in the face, to sting and shame him, but even that had gone wrong. There had been no time to check the damage: two Ko security guards had snapped to her side like stones from a slingshot, quick enough to push Tiger back into the chair he'd kicked aside in his lurch around the table, one hand cupped and filling with blood and the other reaching for her, the machiavelli tiles scattering across the courtyard.
She wished she could grab the moment back and tuck it safely into a pocket until the urge to hurt someone had passed.
“Am I in trouble?” she said.
“No one's in trouble,” Chao replied smoothly. “But of course we're concerned. You offered violence to a web mate. I'm sure you had a very good reason, and I'd like to know what it is so that I can help you with it.”
Jackal thought bleakly, I'm too tired. But she would just have to tough it out. She would have to find something to distract this woman who, given her position, was almost certainly a psychiatrist: something that would keep her from going after the real reason, which had nothing to do with Tiger and everything to do with being a false Hope.
Chao waited, bright-eyed and relaxed.
Okay, Jackal thought. Okay. She unclasped her arms, and plucked at her shirt. “Have you got a towel?”
Chao smiled. “Of course,” she said. “There's bathroom right behind that door. Why don't you clean up and then we'll talk?”
“You and Tiger were lovers,” Chao said matter-of-factly.
Jackal shook her head.
“It's in your record.”
“We did—It was—” She shook her head again helplessly. How to explain the horror of Halloween day, the confusion of brandy and the desperate need to be real again? But she mustn't tell Chao about Donatella's hideous blunder, or that the rest had happened only because Jackal was trying to make the bad news go away. Tell her instead about dancing like a banshee until she had dervished herself into a place where only each single, exquisite moment mattered. That was something a doctor would buy, without looking underneath. Doctors loved the discovery of demons, the moments of I just wasn't myself, those revealing truths that rolled over and yawned in the mud of the hindbrain. Jackal gave Chao the glow of the setting sun that stippled Tiger in gold, the way his face had stilled and then hardened when he saw her watching him. The hours after and their awareness of each other, so intoxicating, a different kind of dance. Leaving the group without looking behind her, knowing he would follow; leading him to his own apartment door, waiting, then the sudden shock of him against her with one arm stretched out to palm the lock. And then inside. The sex was a series of strobe moments, mouth here, fingers there, and she flowed through them click click click as if working a string of worry beads to count her sorrows away. Until, between breaths, she stepped off the shelf in her head where she'd been storing herself, came back into real time to find him on her, in her, his breath in her open mouth.
“What happened then?” Chao had prompted her after a moment.
What had happened was that Tiger said, “I can't believe I'm fucking the Hope of the whole bloody world,” and she had heard again her mother's voice, out of control, screeching. And she hadn't been able to bear it, she had to get away. He had tried to kiss her as she was leaving and she had stopped him without a word, even when he looked confused and followed her out into the hall, calling, “Jackal, what's wrong? What did I do?” And from then on it was bad between them, just as it was between her and her mother. It was the moment when the world began to rot.
Jackal said, “Nothing happened…I mean, we finished, we got up off the floor, I left. End of story.”
“Was the sex bad? Did he hurt or frighten you?”
Jackal began to worry with her teeth at a shred of skin beside a fingernail. “It was fine, there's nothing to tell. Really.” She could feel the heat in her face.
“Then why have the two of you become increasingly hostile to each other over the last weeks? Today's incident is extreme, certainly, but it's by no means isolated from an overall pattern.”
Jackal stayed silent and hoped her face did not show how trapped she felt.
“Perhaps there's some guilt there? Does Snow know about the sex with Tiger?”
“Snow and I are fine, thanks.”
Chao's turn to be silent.
“Yes, she knows.”
“If I asked Snow why you would happily be having sex with Tiger one day and scrubbing his blood off your hands five weeks later, what do you think she would say?”
Jackal imagined Snow in the womb chair under Chao's surgical gaze. She bit hard enough on her finger to draw blood. “She'd probably say she has no idea. Why should she know? I don't even know.”
Chao said “I think you do.” It wasn't a challenge so much as a plain acknowledgment, and a promise to return. “But we'll leave it for now,” she continued. “We'll talk more in a day or two. I want you to do two things: first, you need to believe that I'm here to help you. I'm completely in your corner. I'll do whatever is necessary to make you all that you should be. Second, no more hitting people. I recognize that you're under stress, but today was a very serious breach of acceptable behavior. If someone is a problem, come to me. I'll fix them.”
“No one's a problem,” Jackal said, her mouth dry, imagining Chao turned loose on her mother. “I'm tense about the investiture and I drank too much and made a stupid mistake then and another one today. I'm sorry about it. There's no excuse. It's a web matter, we'll sort it out there.”
“Fine, if that's what you want. In the meantime, we'll schedule a stress management refresher for you. You'll get an e-mail.”
“Fine,” Jackal said, with an inward sigh. She hated those classes; they were silly and obvious and only made her more angry. But if it was the price to keep this woman off her back, then she would pay.
After the calm of Analin Chao's office, the lobby of the executive building seemed stuffed with people; thousands of them, moving purposefully in their business costumes as their footsteps and voices ricocheted off the flagstone floors and the six-meter-tall glass windows. Home was a half-hour ride across the island. Jackal stopped, wondering if her bike was still in the park.
“Ms. Segura.” The guard had come up in her blind spot. His polite, professional voice matched the shuttered face and the body armor and the Ko Security insignia. “Dr. Chao has asked that you be given an escort to the destination of your choice. If you'll come with me.”
By now he would have registered her swollen eyes and the brown blotches on her shirt. He had probably even noticed her bleeding hangnail. He did not touch her, but gestured across the atrium to a set of doors on the far wall. “There's a shuttle van in the west parking lot.”
He stepped back slightly to let her walk in front of him. It was important, that difference between following and leading. In Al Iskandariyah she would follow a security escort, depending upon them for her sense of location until she was fully acclimated into the structure of the Earth Government. Then the balance of power would shift so that she would only receive guidance if she asked for it. But Ko was already her place; on Ko, she led. If the guard thought she needed a wedge through the crowd, he would call for support and then wait until the way was clear before al-lowing her to proceed. But she never had a problem finding a path on Ko. Everyone got out of her way. They smiled politely, maybe nodded, but they never looked too long and they always stepped aside. The problem was that she always had to know where she wanted to go.
People eddied between elevators and escalators and the entrances of the atrium shops, the café that served thick coffee and beignets and never closed. Everyone moved to a purpose, except for one person leaning against a tiled wall near the south tower elevators. Jackal looked again.
She barely noticed as the people-stream opened a channel for her. She simply found the straight line between her and Snow and started walking. Snow met her halfway and pulled her close abruptly, without a word: Jackal stood with her head in the place where Snow's overshirt hollowed against a sharp collarbone.
“How'd you know I was here?” she said finally.
“I always know where you are.” Snow squeezed her shoulder. “Bear called me. Come on, let's go.”
Jackal straightened and found the guard right behind her. “It's okay. Snow will take me home.”
“I was told to accompany you.”
She gave him a look. “And I'm telling you that Snow will take me home.”
“Ah. Of course. I'll inform Dr. Chao.”
“You do that,” Jackal said, and took Snow's hand.
Snow hop-stepped to catch up. “He's only doing his job.”
“Then he should learn when to stop doing it.”
They pushed through the south door into the thin light of the late afternoon. “The look,” Snow said, “really works better with just one eyebrow.”
“You always say that. I can't help it if I don't have the single-brow gene.”
“You seem to have the martial arts recessive.”
Jackal sighed.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
And she did, desperately: wanted to open her mouth and let the words fall out, Hope and Ko and lies. And I'm afraid. Instead she looked up to the daytime moon blooming over Esperance Park. “Not right now,” she said.
“Do you want to go home?”
Jackal shook her head helplessly. “Don't know what I want.”
“Doesn't matter,” Snow answered. “When we start doing something you don't like, you can tell me.”
Jackal stayed quiet and let herself be led to the parking lot. Snow bundled her into the passenger seat of a dormitory car parked in the No Stop zone; Jackal's bike was wedged into the trunk. Snow said, “Don't step on the bag,” and in a canvas backpack on the floor, Jackal found two bottles of red wine and four messy sandwiches clumsily wrapped in a kitchen towel.
“Mmm. Where are we going?”
“Well, I thought, it's a lovely December afternoon. You just punched out a web mate and got yourself a ten-second segment on twenty thousand Who's News broadcasts around the world. We have corned beef sandwiches and some not-very-good Australian cabernet.” Snow shrugged and looked at Jackal sideways. “There's really no point in trying to do anything sensible. Beach okay with you?”
Jackal felt her shoulders drop fractionally and she grinned, the fierce show of teeth that went with the name and her wild dark hair and eyes. Snow drove silently, her eyes colorless and remote in her pale face. Jackal thought, she's so beautiful.
“Did we just choose our web names brilliantly, or did we all grow into them, do you think?”
That earned her a quick look, and Snow's eyes narrowed as she turned her face back to the road, but Jackal knew that only half her attention was on driving now. Good: she liked making Snow think. She watched through the windshield as the car pushed the road ahead of itself like a dog nosing a ball, unrolling the way to the end of Ko, while Snow tapped a complicated rhythm on the steering wheel and shook her head every so often.
Snow stopped the car on a patch of gravel close to the place where the dunes began their slow hump to the sea. The air was cooler here, slow and full of salt, dark brine on the back of Jackal's tongue. She hoisted the carrybag and Snow pulled a blanket from the trunk, and they turned automatically toward the path that led up to the cliffs.
They spread the blanket by a stagger of boulders that deflected some of the breeze. The sun was setting quickly; Snow dialed her portable lamp to low, so there was just enough light to see the cliff edge fifteen feet away. Jackal ignored the sandwiches and went straight for the wine, then fumbled in the bottom of the bag. “Corkscrew?”
Snow snorted, took the bottle and held it in the crook of her right arm while she tweezered her thumb and index finger around the nail of her left little finger. She tugged hard: the nail extruded a half inch and then folded out of her fingertip like an accordion. She pulled it out to a three inch length and twisted; the sections locked into a smooth spike that she used to slit the foil covering and skewer the cork. She handed Jackal the bottle and worked the cork slowly off her nail, watching Jackal watch her. “It's never too late to be your own best tool,” she said.
Jackal raised both eyebrows again. “I don't need a corkscrew that badly.”
“It's more than a corkscrew. Anyway, that's not the point.”
Jackal turned up her hands in a way that said Fine, we've had this discussion before. She drank: the wine made the inside of her mouth feel hollow and large. She settled as best she could against a rock, drank again, rolling the tannin around her tongue and enjoying the warmth of the wine in her chest. They traded the bottle back and forth in silence for a longish time.
“I feel differently about it than I used to,” Snow said after a while. She sat opposite Jackal with her back against a squat pillar of stone, her knees drawn up and her head bent. Long fingers of hair had worked themselves loose from the clip she always wore, that looked like carved ivory, the same pale yellow as the hair it bound. Snow didn't care that it shocked people; having assured herself the ivory wasn't real, she had no need to reassure anyone else. Jackal had seen Snow leave people in mid-sentence, or tasks not quite finished, or holomovies just before the final scene, if it occurred to her that there was something else she should be doing. Where her mind leapt, her body followed with a singleness of purpose that had at some point upset almost everyone who knew her. Except for Carlos, who told Jackal, “It's not true that Snow is easily distracted. In fact, I'd say she was the most focused person I've ever met. It just bothers people when she is so clearly not focused on them.”
Snow was studying her hand, the little finger and the white oval face of the digital display set into her wrist, that could be programmed to tell her the time and temperature and emergency call numbers for any city in the world. “It was a practical thing,” she said. “They're tools, they're useful.” She lowered her knees into a tailor's seat and braced her hands on them, fingers splayed, unusually gold in the light of the lamp. “But it turns out it's more than that,” she continued slowly, turning her hands in the light. “They make me feel, I don't know…elegant, enhanced. Like Jaoli on my team who wears silk panties under her coveralls when she's out installing the power grid in a manufacturing plant. I'm starting to think they make me feel closer to some ideas I have about myself, that I'm competent and also…” She frowned, rubbed her fingers together as if she could snap the thought into coherence. “I don't think I'd want something I couldn't use some-how. The cosmetic stuff doesn't work for me. But maybe being able to screw a steel horn into your forehead does the same thing for those folks that my polymer nail does for me. Maybe it gets them closer to themselves.”
They had drunk the bottle dry. Snow opened the other; Jackal watched her face, the quiet satisfaction as she made short work of the cork and collapsed the nail back into the bone and steel pocket built inside her fingertip.
“How do you know that's who you really are?” Jackal asked finally.
Snow nodded. “That's the same question as the one you asked before, about names.” Jackal blinked: she had forgotten. She was struck again by Snow's ability to connect one idea to another: she imagined Snow's mind as an Escher construct, like the series of waterfalls that flowed back up into themselves, nothing ever lost.
“It's funny that we don't talk about names in the web,” Snow said. “Maybe they're just so much a part of who we are that we don't wonder about them. You've always been Jackal to me. I can barely remember a time when you were Ren.” She peered at Jackal. “Why did you choose Jackal? You could've had any name you wanted, why that one?”
