Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(14)
She swallows, and nods toward the comscreen I busted into while she was in the shower. “Fine,” she says simply, and I can’t shake the feeling she’s agreeing just so I’ll stop bothering her and leave. “Show me.”
I retrieve my lapscreen from my satchel and lead her over to the comscreen, hooking the stool out with one leg and sitting down. Fishing around the back, I run through the cables by touch until I find the one I want, pulling it free and plugging it into my lapscreen. I insert my chip, and it only takes a couple of minutes to install a shadow box.
“Here,” I say, tapping her screen, where a new mail icon sits just beside her regular one. “This’ll be my contact, under Jake Cheshire. Send mail here, and it’ll come straight to me, without leaving any trace in your own folders. Keeps the trail clean.”
She nods, still grave. “Thank you, Gideon,” she murmurs.
“Sure. Let me know if you work out how I can return the favor. Or if you need anything, after today.” I return the cables to where they belong, stowing my chip in my pocket and getting to my feet with a wink. I want to make her smile again before we part. “Preferably something that won’t get me shot. It really hurts.”
That last draws a wry little smile. “I’d much rather leave that part of it to you. You’ve got practice.”
“It was very nearly worth it,” I say, as I scoop up my satchel and cross over to the elevator. “Though next time you tell someone we’re engaged, I’m making you go through with it.”
Now she laughs properly. “You have no idea what you’d be getting yourself into.”
The elevator doors hum open, and I step inside, turning to face her. Somehow wanting to remember her face. Even if they find her, she won’t be able to tell them where I am—but I’m hoping with everything I’ve got that they don’t. I hope she’ll be safe.
She speaks just as the doors start to close, gray eyes locked on mine. “Gideon, can I trust you?”
I have no idea why, and I can count on one hand the people for whom my answer is true—but I do know the answer, even if I don’t know why. I grin. “Take a bullet for you twice, if I have to.”
And then the doors are closed.
Agony. Fear. Despair.
Stop. Stop. The thin spot pulses, flashes with urgency, but the young man ignores it all except to make notes upon a tablet. Only when he glances back at the end of each day is there a flicker of guilt there, the only thing that proves he knows exactly what he is doing.
This was not what we glimpsed. This was not what we wanted. They are an infection, bombarding the stillness with their data and their ships and their pain.
We must find an end.
IT TAKES ME A FEW days to get a new security code for my door, and even longer to comb my apartment for bugs carefully enough to be certain my guest didn’t leave anything of his behind. I pore over the footage from my security camera, watching where he goes while I’m in the shower. It’s better to let visitors believe they have time where they’re not being watched, because they’ll do whatever underhanded thing they plan on doing straightaway. If you don’t offer them a blatant opportunity they’ll be sneakier, hiding it, possibly well enough that I wouldn’t be able to pick it up on camera. Back on Avon, this sort of thinking just wasn’t a part of my life—I specialized in sweet-talking extra supplies and inside information out of the guards, not in living an elaborately faked life in someone else’s world. I learned to give visitors a little carefully monitored alone time on my third stop out from Avon, a freighter called the Alanna. Seeing what they did in my tiny quarters when they thought I wasn’t looking told me which crew members I could trust far quicker than anything else would.
He goes over my photos—I think he guesses that they aren’t real—flicks through my browser history, inspects the packages waiting by the door for Kristina when she gets back from the health spa she’s been at for the last month. He stops to look at the Miske multimedia works on the wall, probably the most expensive things in the apartment, but he leaves them alone. I don’t see him plant anything, and I don’t see him do anything shiftier than a bit of snooping.
I check my messages four, five times a day—but there’s nothing from Sanjana Rao, the woman I was supposed to meet at LaRoux Industries Headquarters before the entire holosuite went mad. I can’t afford to lose her after all I’ve been through to find someone with a high enough security clearance to have the information I need, and a reason—whatever it may be—to give it to me. LaRoux proved on Avon that he has powers and defenses far beyond what a normal man possesses, and unless I find a way to neutralize his whispers, I’ll never get close enough to him to repay him for what he did to my father.
I dictate and delete half a dozen messages to Dr. Rao before I decide I can’t improve upon the language, and try to screw up the courage to send it. She’s spooked, no doubt, after the security scare. For all I know, she’s vanished into the woodwork completely, and I’ll have no chance of getting her to trust me again.
That mess last week was just a case of poor timing, my message reads, and had nothing to do with me or you. Please say you’ll meet me again. You can name the time and place, you can take whatever precautions you need to feel safe. Please. Alexis.
I blink at the “send” button and the screen chimes to inform me that it’s done. The address she gave me is gibberish, but it’s how I contacted her before—it’s not her official address, but she’d have been mad to give me anything that could be traced back to her. Not if she wanted to keep her job. Or her sanity.