Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Not that he actually enjoyed the shower, of course. Because instead of luxuriating in the hot water pummeling Roland’s back, he stood there, wreathed in steam, and brooded about the Game.

Hyacinthe had programmed the first rudimentary version of the Game into Cohen’s original Beowulf clusters almost four centuries ago. The Game had started out as a combination of chess, multiagent roleplay, and Turing-style conversational interaction. During the DARPA years it had been briefly and unpleasantly derailed for military research. After Cohen’s Great Escape (but that was another story) he’d assumed full control over his architecture, and the Game had begun to evolve into something too complex, fluid, and internally contradictory to properly be called a game at all.

There were by then some several thousand subsets of gameplay, platformed on a shifting tide of neural networks that might arguably be sentient itself—though not in any way that organics would recognize. Cohen navigated between the various versions of the Game, thanks to a densely swarming vast heterarchy of semiautonomous agents who constantly optimized play based on prior player hits, nonhit interactions, and inscribed player use histories. The whole system had become far too complex for any organic to grasp more than a tiny corner of it. But the basic mission primitives that motivated Cohen remained essentially the same ones that Hyacinthe had written so many centuries ago:

1. Initiate play based on the most current version of the Game;

2. Track player hits, defined as:

  i. positive emotive cues as perceived by the pattern recognition ES;

  ii. increased playtime and intensity of play

  iii. explicit player feedback

3. Expand and evolve the Game to maximize player hits.

4. Assign highest priority to maximizing hits from inscribed players.

That was the curse that Hyacinthe had coded into his core architecture. Cohen needed the Game. He needed to be forsomeone. And he was set apart from every other surviving Emergent AI in that the someone needed to be more or less human.

Ergo Gavi, whom he could not stop loving though he might be a traitor.

Ergo Li, who was sanguinary, secretive, perfectly capable of having done all the horrible things they’d accused her of, and pigheadedly bent on refusing everything Cohen could give her.

All that Cohen was—once you stripped away the extension languages and interface programs and the three-century accumulation of upgrades and patches and extensions—was his accumulated memories of interactions with the Game’s inscribed players. And if Li left, it would mean a reweighting of mission primitives so drastic that Cohen had no real way to predict what new realignment of identities would come out the other side. She had become so deeply ingrained in his networks that when she yanked herself out it would call the bluff on the smoke-and-mirrors cognitive architecture that passed for Cohen’s identity.

And Li knew all about running on smoke and mirrors.

Born in the Trusteeships, she’d been destined for a short, poisonous life as a Bose-Einstein miner. Instead, she’d bought a dead girl’s face and geneset from a chop-shop geneticist, lied her way into the Peacekeepers, and hacked her own memory in order to pass as human. And when it was time to tell all to the psychtechs she’d spun a fake childhood to go with the fake passport and the fake geneset.

She had walked into the maze and cut the thread. All she knew about the childhood she remembered was that it had never happened, at least not to her. The minute she went into the psychtechs’ tanks there was no “before” to go back to. All the fears and joys and tics and habits that connected a whole person to their past led back to enlistment day and stopped. She would never know herself in the way that most humans, floating in the vibrant web of a lifetime’s memories, knew themselves. She would never know what she’d done on Gilead, any more than she’d ever know the child she’d been before she went to Gilead.

That was what had first drawn them together: the woman who had no memories and the machine who was nothing but memories. But Cohen was slowly coming to the heartsick realization that it might also be what drove them apart.

Or at least that was how it seemed to Cohen. But he could be fooling himself. He’d certainly done that before…as router/decomposer was always all too ready to remind him.

By the time he was dressed and presentable, Li had already demolished breakfast for two and most of the morning’s paper.

“How’s your Deep Blue-Kasparov sim going?” she asked from behind the sports page as he sat down across from her.

“Oh, I finished with that ages ago. The whole match was a hoax, it turns out.”

The sports page dropped. “Really?”

That was Li for you: always seduced by the faintest whiff of crime. Could you find a more perfect example of the old truism about cops and robbers being two sides of the same coin? Or, in her case, soldiers and mercenaries.

“Really,” Cohen assured her, doing his best to sound smug. “I’m going to write an article about it for Physical Review Letters.”

“And how do you figure they pulled off the fake?”

“Easy. There was a little man inside Garry Kasparov.”

She groaned and went back to her paper.

Cohen poured himself a glass of what passed for orange juice these days and hunted for the marmalade. “Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”

“Yes it was.”

Cohen shook out his napkin (Li’s napkin still lay folded on the table, naturally; why use a napkin when you have a sleeve?) and began investigating the viennoiseriesituation.

Grim. Decidedly grim.

“I ought to look up some of my old friends in the Legion while we’re here,” he said. “Maybe they know where to get a decent croissant in this town.”

“What do you want a croissant for? You’re in the Middle East. And you know that thing people are always saying about when in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Cohen had been staring dubiously at the so-called toast, and he expanded his circle of doubt to encompass Li. “The people who are always saying that aren’t French,” he told her. “And if they are, then I can assure you they’re not talking about breakfast.”

Outside, the sunlight flickered across the hoods of passing cars, throwing bright spears of shadow into the room through the still-half-shuttered windows. Cohen froze, distracted by the rhythmic play of light and shadow. What was it that it reminded him of…

By the time he realized Roland was going into a seizure, it was too late to pull him out of it.

“Wake up, Cohen. Come on, wake up. Cohen? Roland!”

Li had him rolled over on his side (Roland’s side, a skittish subsystem nattered at him), and she was hanging on to his hands with a strength that reminded him abruptly of the difference between her ceramsteel-reinforced, half-machine reflexes and Roland’s fragile flesh and bone.

“I forgot my drasticodracostochastic control measures,” he muttered woozily.

“It’s not funny!” Li snapped.

Nor was it. As far as Cohen could tell the packet compression needed to push data downstream from his Ring-based systems to Earth had interfered with the shunt software’s ability to match his data pulses to Roland’s neural firing rhythms. Essentially he’d given him a spintronic version of photoinduced epilepsy. And that was bad. Bad for Roland’s little beating heart. Bad for his finely honed brain too if Cohen couldn’t downclock reliably.

“I’m putting you to bed,” Li said. “No arguments. No questions. And then you’re going to check out and give Roland a proper rest. Twenty-four hours off so he can sleep and have a chance to clear the circuitry.”

“And leave you alone down here?”

“I think I can hold down the hotel room on my own.”

Cohen remembered the sight of Ash’s head bent over Li’s, and felt a sudden rush of jealousy. He was careful to hide it from Li—and equally careful to hide his discreet inquiries about Ash. He buried both of those incriminating processes with a massive “nice” command and pipelined their outputs into a low-traffic subdirectory with instructions to his routing meta-agent to move the files automatically should Li ever happen to access the subdirectory.

Instead of executing the command, router/decomposer sent an un-characteristically snide message floating across the lowest layer of Cohen’s internal traffic:

‹You’ve got me shuttling things around so fast I don’t even know where to find them. And anyway, how do you expect her to trust you when you’re playing a thousand and one moving files with her?›

‹Did I ask for your advice on my sex life?› Cohen snapped.

He regretted it immediately. Patience might be running thin, but squashing intrasystem feedback was a textbook-perfect recipe for losing good associates.

He sent an apology rippling through the local system. The routing meta sent back something suspiciously like a shrug.

Li blinked and shook her head slightly.

She’d caught on to the edge of something there. But it wasn’t the routing meta. So what, then? He catenated the several hundred mostly routine processes he happened to be running at the moment, but saw nothing when he passed them in review that could explain that little shiver he’d felt in her.

Perhaps it really had been nothing; sometimes all it took was an accidental glimpse at the traffic on the other side of the firewall he kept between her and his core systems.

“You scare me sometimes,” she said.

It was a lie. A lie by omission, anyway. He’d sensed the first wordless thought that those words replaced: You scare me.No sometimes about it.

Cohen hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll give Roland a chance to catch up on his beauty rest. You know where to find me if you need me.”

He paused to set the various trap commands that would alert him if the hotel’s formidable security systems were breached. He thought about setting a hash log on Li’s own internals to see if she went anywhere while he was gone, but decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of her catching him at it. Then he released his various selves into streamspace, abandoning Roland’s exhausted body to the sleep it so desperately needed.

THE FEMALE GOLEM

They said about Rabbi ben Gabirol, that he created a woman, and she waited on him. When he was denounced to the authorities, he showed them that she wasn’t a perfect creature, and [then] he returned her to her original form, to the pieces and hinges of wood, out of which she was built up. And similar rumors are numerous in the mouths of everyone, especially in the land of Ashkenaz.

—RABBI JOSEPH SHELOMO DEL MEDIGO, MAZREF LE-HOKHMAH(1865)

Li snapped into wakefulness. A minute and a half before her internals were set to wake her. She opened her eyes and lay in absolute stillness, savoring the wired wide-awake feeling that always came to her before a mission.

But there was no mission today. No last-minute fixes to see to. No orders to follow, good or bad. That life was over. All she was following today was a name, whispered into her ear as she stepped into Didi’s armored car.

She hadn’t decided what to do about that name.

Or whether to tell Cohen about it.

It can’t hurt to talk,she told herself in the last dark corner of her mind that she’d managed to shelter from Cohen’s devouring presence. I’ll just see what she wants. And then I can tell him about it. What harm can that do?

She eased out of bed, though she knew her caution was pointless; Roland was sleeping the sleep of the dead, his body worn down by the relentless assault of Cohen’s presence. Still, there was something corpselike about the faces when Cohen had used them hard. And he was using Roland very hard indeed on this trip.

Outside, the city was mean and yellow with the khamsin.Cohen had said the winds had gotten worse when their seasons shifted. Li figured that had to be true; no people in their right minds would have settled here with this banshee spitting at them.

A quick dogtrot took her up King David Street and cutting over toward the neighborhood that showed up on the Legion maps as Mea Shearim. She passed the sign at the quarter’s entrance, which she vaguely remembered Cohen pointing out to her a few days ago. It was written in Hebrew and English, but not UN-standard Spanish, which was odd, she thought, if they wanted the tourists to understand it:

REQUEST AND WARNING TO WOMEN VISITING OUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOT TO APPEAR IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN SHORT GARMENTS (NOT COVERING THE KNEE) IN SHORT-SLEEVED CLOTHING (NOT COVERING THE ARM). THE TORAH OBLIGATES TO DRESS IN MODEST ATTIRE THAT COVERS THE ENTIRE BODY

—Residents of the Neighborhood

No problem there,Li joked to herself. The accused pleads guilty to the charge of being a golem instead of a woman.

Cohen claimed that the ultraorthodox neighborhoods had shifted—the hidden life of cities, he’d called it—and that the sign was maintained more for historic than for enforcement purposes. But it was awfully well maintained, Li thought. And she’d seen enough of the version of human history maintained Ring-side to know that people mostly maintained the pieces of history they agreed with.

She twitched her shirt cuffs over her wrists—Cohen, in one of his usual old-maidly excesses of caution had made her order a bunch of new shirts with particularly long sleeves before they left—and checked that her jacket collar was covering her neck reasonably well. Then she straightened her back and stepped out a little more soldierly…just in case anyone in those narrow little alleys happened to be looking her way and thinking about anything.

She felt she was seeing a new Jerusalem—and not the one she’d sung about in church when she was a kid, either.

Before, Jerusalem had always been mediated for her by Cohen. Now, alone, it took on a new and vaguely menacing aspect. The narrow streets seemed airless and claustrophobic. The men passed her by with averted eyes as if she were an abomination, and the few women on the street were so thoroughly wrapped up against the rain and cold that they hardly seemed human, let alone female.

All the conversations she overheard seemed to be arguments, and the one time she caught a sentence of English it came from an irate young woman who stood in a street-level window shouting, “What am I, a professor?” in answer to an unseen questioner.

Even the graffiti raged apocalyptically. A lurid poster informed all passersby that

It is forbidden to participate in the abominable elections

and followed up with a helpful swastika in case anyone missed the point. A second poster proclaimed

Death to the Zionist Hitlerites

Someone (a Zionist Hitlerite? There couldn’t actually be such a thing, even on Earth, could there?) had tried to tear that poster down, but, defeated by the apparent superiority of anti-Zionist Hitlerite glue technology, had settled for defacing it with the words

BARUCH THE APOSTATE MAY HIS NAME AND MEMORY BE BLOTTED FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE!

The more Li saw of Jerusalem, the more convinced she became that the people who thought Earth needed to be protected from the Ring had it all completely ass backwards. It was the rest of the universe that needed to be protected. And it needed to be protected from the maniacs that passed for human beings inside the Embargo line.

To her relief the neighborhood seemed to be getting less crazy as she got closer to the address Ash had given her. She passed a coffee shop called the Up/Spin. A streamspace access point? She’d been offstream since she left the King David; after all, you never knew who was watching. But now she reached out cautiously and felt the familiar comfort of the uplink.

‹Oh. Thereyou are.›

Shit.

‹What are you doing, router/decomposer? Following me?›

‹No! No! I’m not here! He told me not to tell you I was here!›

Li froze in midstride, and an evening shopper slammed into her from behind and passed by, cursing her.

You’re not that incompetent,she started to say. And then she stopped herself.

Of course he wasn’t that incompetent. He was acting on instructions. Instructions that he was following to the letter…and completely violating in spirit. She looked back at the affective fuzzy set that had accompanied his confession. Sure enough, it was an almost vaudevillian parody of dismay, embarrassment, self-recrimination. And it was definitely canned; the syntax was far too polished not to have been prepared in advance.

‹Why don’t you go home before you get yourself into bigger trouble than you already have,› she told him.

‹I need to make sure you’re safe, and…›

‹Well, don’t worry. It’ll be the last time you need to spy on me. I’m going to have a little talk with our mutual friend when he climbs out of his pod tonight.›

‹Even though I personally loathe shunting, I have to tell you I find the bodysnatcher jokes demeaning. So where are you going? You can tell me. I can keep a secret.›

Li snorted, and was amused to see several nearby pedestrians dive sideways in an attempt to avoid the crazy woman. Talk about hicksville. ‹You actually expect me to believe that?›

‹Check my code if you don’t believe me.›

She checked. Unbelievable. He had more cutouts than a chain of paper dolls. He was squirreling all kinds of data away that Cohen had no idea about. Including data that Li had thought she was successfully hiding under her own steam.

‹Why are you doing this?› she asked warily.

‹I’m interested in you. Not like Cohen is. In a more theoretical way. I want to see what you turn into.›

‹Right now I’m afraid I’m turning into a bad person.›

He appeared to pause and consider this. The pause was faked, of course; designed to make the exchange feel natural at organic processing speeds. But it was the thought that counted. ‹You’re falling into the identity myth. That’s the problem with nonfunctional nomenclature. Names encourage people to harbor the illusion that there’s identity beyond interface. That you can be good or bad apart from the effect of your actions on the world.›

‹Good intentions have to count for something,› Li protested.

‹Good intentions are just a fairy tale humans tell themselves so they can sleep at night.›

‹But some actions have unpredictable effects.›

‹What do you expect? Life is an intervention in a complex adaptive system.›

‹So you’re saying you can’tknow whether you’re a good or bad person?›

‹Not once you exceed the CAS’s Lyapunov time. At that point you have to wait until you can take a final measurement of the end state of the entire universe.› A note of impatience slipped into his affective sets. ‹What do you want from me, a physics lesson?›

It was half an hour shy of sunset, but the elevator in Ash’s building had already been switched over to its Sabbath rhythm. It would travel up and down its appointed route, one floor at a time, stopping long enough for even the slowest of the orthodox to board without breaking the Sabbath by operating a mechanical device.

When Li arrived, the light claimed that the car was on the sixth floor. After watching it sit there for a good minute and a half, she got tired of waiting, located the stairwell behind a door that looked like it led to a broom closet, and climbed five flights. She didn’t lose her breath, she was pleased to note, but behind the smooth push of the wires she could feel her almost middle-aged joints complaining under the relentless assault of Earth’s gravity.

“What?” she asked before Ash had even fully opened the door to her impatient knocking. “What’s so private and important you have to drag me halfway across the city to tell me about it?”

“Say hello to Auntie Li,” Ash crooned.

The child on Ash’s hip looked to be a little over a year old. Li guessed uncertainly that it was a boy; she hadn’t seen many babies in her life, and she’d been only minimally interested in the ones she’d seen.

“Yours?” she asked.

Ash smiled and gave a little shrug that looked like she’d practiced it in front of the mirror a hell of a lot more than once.

Li followed the mother and child into a living room full of just the kind of sleekly forbidding glass and steel surfaces Li would have expected to find in Ash’s home. The stark white and chrome of the decor made an incongruous backdrop to the trail of bright plush and plastic toys strewn across the carpet, into the tiled kitchen beyond the dining area, and across every flat surface the furniture offered.

“Sorry.” Ash pulled a wry face. “Can’t keep up with the little guy these days.”

She bent, the child still over her hip, to pluck a red-and-purple squishy cube off the one relatively free chair so Li could sit down. As her shirt rode up with the movement, Li saw the faint silver fishtails of stretch marks riding her hips like notches on a gun barrel.

“So why am I here?” Li asked.

Instead of answering, Ash crouched down between the vat leather couch and a lethal-looking glass coffee table and carefully settled the baby on a beach towel already spread out for that purpose. This took several minutes and involved the kinds of noises Li had last heard from Cohen’s Italian greyhound puppies.

Eventually, however, Ash finished stalling, settled herself on the sofa facing Li. “I have a message for you from an old friend.”

Oh shit.

Ash smiled.

Li didn’t.

Silence arrived.

Li, who had outgrown the urge to make nicey-nice long before her first day of interrogation training, let it stay.

For one thing it gave her a chance to reexamine the impressively contradictory woman sitting in front of her. Gone were the high heels and the high-tech now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t suits. Ash was still carefully made-up—and Li never could quite bring herself to trust a woman who wore makeup—but she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and thick wool socks, and her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was more beautiful like this, Li decided. Certainly she was more approachable. But there was something slippery about her: a hard, unnatural self-assurance that repelled every attempt to access the person inside the beautiful package.

Basically, there was no there there. Unless you counted the toddler and the stretch marks. And that was the kind of “there” that could only make any sane person duck for cover.

“You haven’t asked who the old friend is,” Ash prompted. “Is that because you don’t want to know, or because you already do know?”

“Helen Nguyen and I have known each other since before you kissed your first boy. Or girl. Or whatever. We aren’t friends anymore, if we ever were. So why don’t you skip the dance of the seven veils and tell me what she wants from me?”

“Your help,” Ash said simply. “Your help to get the Interfaithers out of Israeli Intel.”

“And I should care about this because…?”

Ash’s perfectly made-up eyes widened. “I would think you’d be the last person to ask that question.”

“Are you about to become the next rich Ring-sider who takes one look at my DNA and thinks she knows what I should think and who my friends should be? It’s a long line. You’ll have to take a number.”

“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Well, I’m not very bright, I’m afraid. You know how those Xenogen constructs are. Bet you’ve sat through any number of nice dinner parties where your mother complained about how hard it was to turn them into decent kitchen help.”

Ash’s lips tightened in anger.

Li—finally—allowed herself the faintest of smiles.

We have a decision, gentlemen. Bottom card fight to the lovely Miss Catherine Li on a technical knockout. And may it not come back to bite her in the ass when it really counts.

“Fine,” Ash said. “Here’s what Nguyen told me, and you can do whatever you want with it. I’m just the messenger. No need to shoot stray voltage my way.”

Stray voltage? Just the messenger? Had the woman watched so many action spins that she thought people actually talked like that?

The baby hiccuped twice and seemed about to cry. Ash leaned forward and patted absently at his diapered bottom. Amazingly, the gesture seemed to calm him.

“Mind if I smoke?” Li asked, taking out her cigarettes.

“Yes, actually. I never got used to it Ring-side.”

“Thought you were from the Ring.”

“Not exactly.” And there it was again: the momentary sensation that the real person behind the mask had appeared and just as quickly vanished. Like those times in hard-vac ops when a teammate cleared his visor to get an unmediated look at the field of battle. Mirroreyesmirror. All in such quick succession that you were left doubting you’d even seen the face inside the helmet. “It’s complicated.”

“Can’t see how that would be.”

The real person—or whatever it was in there—peeked out once more. “I’d say I was surprised to hear you say that if I didn’t think you’d jump down my throat again.”

“And I’d ask you what the hell that meant if I thought you’d tell me.”

“Right then.” Ash leaned forward, jeans hiking up over ankles that were, okay, yes, Li could admit it, fabulous. Even if the woman was sent straight from the treacherous hands of General Helen Nguyen.

Li sat up, blinking at a sudden and surprising thought. Was Ash Nguyen’s latest and greatest protegée? Had this lovely package filled the void left behind by Li’s defection? Well, Helen had always had eclectic taste.

“You heard Didi’s briefing. Everything he said was true. But there’s more. And that more is why I’m talking to you. Didi was surprised by Absalom’s resurrection. We weren’t. We’ve been tracking high-level leaks for a while now. Information has gotten out that was very, very tight band. So we took a page out of Gavi Shehadeh’s book—or should I say Didi Halevy’s book?—and cooked up a few barium meals of our own. We sent them through Didi’s office. And had them pop out in some of the last places anyone wants to see them.”

“The Interfaithers,” Li hazarded.

“Try KnowlesSyndicate.”

“The Interfaithers and the Syndicates aren’t exactly fellow travelers.”

“No, they aren’t.”

“But the Syndicates and the Palestinians are another matter. So we’re back to Absalom.” Li caught her breath. “Or are you suggesting that someone in Didi’s office is directly tied to Korchow?”

“Does it matter?” Ash let the question hang fire for a while. “You know about the prime minister’s list?”

“The kidonlist?” Legend had it that there was a list, the single most classified document in Israel, containing the names of men and women with Jewish blood on their hands whom the Mossad’s kidon,or assassination teams, were cleared to kill as and when opportunity presented itself. “Sure. I’ve heard of it. So what?”

“Gavi Shehadeh’s name is on it. Naturally. But the prime minister hasn’t initialed it, so they can’t do the hit. Didi’s the one who’s keeping it from happening.”

“So they’re old friends.”

“Did I say different?”

No. Just walked me up to the brink and let me look over the edge all by my little self. Helen couldn’t have done it better.

“What are you saying? That Didi is Absalom and framed Gavi to keep from taking the fall himself? Or that Gavi really was Absalom and Didi’s in it with him? Or…I mean, what actually? You open up that can and you’ll find out it’s pretty hard to get the worms back inside.”

“Look, if Helen’s wrong, then no one will be happier than me. But if she’s right, we’ll be glad we played our hand close to the vest.”

“The problem with Helen—can I have a drink of water?”

Ash rose wordlessly and padded to the kitchen. Li heard the clink of glasses jostling each other in the cupboard, the burp of a bottle being uncapped, the rippling pour of water.

“The problem with Helen,” Li said loudly enough for Ash to hear her in the next room, “is that sometimes when she gets a hard-on for someone, it’s patriotism. And sometimes, at least in my experience, it’s just politics. And I really dislike being the hatchet man in a back-alley political brawl.”

“This isn’t political.” Ash came back to stand in front of Li, glass in hand, water dripping off her long and immaculately manicured fingernails. “I’ve seen it unfold firsthand. I’ve seen the spinfeeds and the office logs. This is the real deal. Your country calls. Rough men report for duty.”

“The last time Helen quoted Orwell at me, she ended up trying to kill me.”

“You just got between her and Cohen. It wasn’t personal.”

“Bullshit,” Li snapped, dangerously close to losing her temper. “Killing’s always personal. I know. I fucking do it for a living.”

“Not anymore, last time I heard.”

They stared at each other. This time Ash didn’t budge or blink or even smile.

“Tell me true, Catherine. ’Cause there are some people up at UNSec HQ who really want an answer from you. Are you ready to come in from the cold?”

And there it was. The long drop. With no warning at all to let you steel your nerves and your stomach for it. One step you’re on solid flight deck, next one you’re free-falling into the gravity well of some godforsaken ball of dirt that looks like you could fall past it into open space if you twitch wrong.

Ash was a messenger from Helen Nguyen, as she had so subtly insinuated she might be the other night at Didi’s house. And Helen Nguyen had just handed Li her own personalized, customized dumb blonde in a red Ferrari.

She wanted it. She couldn’t deny that. She wanted the power. She wanted the independence. She wanted the sense of setting her own course in life rather than being dragged along in Cohen’s wake. She wanted the ego-gratifying feeling that she mattered: that she was one of the rough men who stood ready to wreak violence so the good people of the world could sleep peacefully in their beds at night. And, yes, she wanted the adrenaline and the danger. She wanted the life, when you really came down to it.

But she knew exactly what Cohen would have to say about all this, when she eventually got around to telling him. Which she would. Eventually.

What she didn’t know was where that left the two of them.

She met Ash’s eyes. The other woman was watching her as intently as a cat tracking a songbird’s erratic progress toward its claws.

“Very poetic.” Li’s voice was steadier than she’d thought it would be. “Is Helen offering a main course after the entrée of worn-out clichés?”

“She said to tell you that there’s a proposal on her desk to allow individually cleared genetic constructs to work for the Security Council on an independent contractor basis. It would be done quietly, administratively. Without a General Assembly vote. But the effect would be the same: You’d be a Peacekeeper again, without an official commission, of course, but with everything else. Everything. She’s ready to bring you all the way in. You just need to give the nod and let us know you’re ready to come back.”