Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“I want you to look at me.”

“I’m looking. I’m not too impressed.”

“No skin off my nose. Now look at my friend.”

“I looked at him when you walked in the door, lady. He’s bad business. And you’re bad business as long as you’re with him.”

“Think you could describe us if someone asked?”

“Depends who asks.”

“That’s just what I was hoping. This place have a back door?”

“Past the toilets. Which are for paying customers only even when they’re not broken.”

“What about a back room?”

“It’s reserved.”

“I know it. And I’m willing to pay double whatever they paid if you’ll promise to tell the guys who are about to come in here looking for us that we’re already back there.”

“And will you be?”

“How much would I have to pay for you not to care?”

Ten minutes and seventeen hundred shekels later they were across the street, on their rooftop.

Arkady started to ask Osnat how long she planned to wait, but she put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.

He looked down, following her gaze, and saw two men emerge from the shadows.

He could feel his palms sweating in the dank air. His left ankle was twisted awkwardly beneath him, but he was afraid to move, afraid of the telltale rasp of fabric or the scrape of a shoe sole against concrete. A thick fog hung over the city, blowing on a stiff westerly wind so that it split around building fronts and streamed in coarse white threads down the narrow streets. The two men stood just under them, looking across the wet pavement at the bar’s brightly lit windows. They seemed to be talking, but they were too far below the rooftop for even Osnat to make sense of the scattered words of Hebrew that wafted up to their hiding place.

One of the men went into the Maracaibo, was gone for several minutes, then strolled out again. As he returned to his companion a third man joined them.

“Shalom.”His voice carried alarmingly through the dank air. “They’re there?”

“In the back room.”

Arkady felt Osnat’s body relax beside him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know those guys. They’re straight from Didi. We’re safe, kiddo.”

She stood up and started to pull Arkady up after her.

Arkady never felt the blast. He saw its phosphorus-blue flash. He heard a sound like the tearing of a thousand sheets of paper. For a long frozen moment the street lay silent below them, with the few passersby either knocked off their feet or crouching in terror. Then sound returned to the world, and the building began to disgorge a bloody, screaming, weeping stream of people onto the street that suddenly seemed too narrow to begin to contain all of them.

Osnat pulled him back from the roof’s edge, and they were off, running down the moonlit tumble of rooftops toward the Green Line and the only refuge left to them.

ARITHMETIC OF THE SOUL

DOMIN: Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.

HELENA: How do you know they have no soul?

DOMIN: Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside?

HELENA: No.

DOMIN: Very neat, very simple. Really a beautiful piece of work. The product of an engineer istechnically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of Nature.

HELENA: But man is supposed to be the product of God.

DOMIN: All the worse! God hasn’t the slightest notion of modern engineering!

—KAREL CAPEK (1923)

It was evening again when arkady and Osnat came to Yad Vashem’s iron gate.

Arkady felt an exhausted sense of déjà vu as he watched Gavi descend the hill—still with the dog playing around his legs, still with the sinking sun behind him.

“We need help,” Osnat said when Gavi was finally standing in front of them. She sounded like her gut was twisting with the effort of asking for it.

“Well, okay. I’m glad you think you can trust me.”

Osnat glared into the middle distance with a look of profound disgust on her face. “I should probably bat my eyelashes at you, and tell you I was all wrong about Tel Aviv, and do my best to play the dumb blonde in the red Ferrari.”

A smile stole across Gavi’s lips. “You would never do that, Osnat.”

“Don’t be so fucking sure. But anyway…the truth is we have nowhere else left to go.”

Gavi led them up the hill, and scrounged up clean clothes and clean sheets and clean towels, and gave them bread and soup and chicken, all washed down with cold clear well water. He might have been any lonely homesteader on any colony planet welcoming the rare guests who wandered by. Only when they had finished eating did he begin to ask the real questions.

“Go ahead, Arkady,” Osnat said. “Tell him what you told me.”

Arkady told him.

“Do you want more chicken?” Gavi said when Arkady’s explanations and excuses finally petered out. “There’s more if you want it.” And then he meandered off into the shadowy depths of the kitchen and all Arkady and Osnat heard for a few minutes were pots rattling and spoons scraping.

When Gavi came back he was frowning. “Explain this Turing Soup thing again?”

Arkady tried to walk him through Arkasha’s explanation of Turing Soup, neutral networks, gateway mutations, and search engines and only got hopelessly tangled.

“So fertility’s almost a side effect,” Gavi said when he was done. “Except that whereas it offers you in the Syndicates something that you don’t want—or at least that most of you don’t want—it offers us exactly what everyone wants. So however slim your chances of putting it back in the box might be, our chances are even slimmer.”

“How long do you think it’ll take before it turns into war between Earth and the Ring?” Osnat asked. “Ten years? Twenty?”

“Actually,” Gavi said, “I was thinking months not years.”

“We need to get to Didi,” Osnat said. She seemed to be watching Gavi while she spoke, as if she were looking for an answer that she expected to be written on his face.

“Getting to Didi is easier said than done,” Gavi answered. He hesitated as if he were playing out possible counterarguments in his mind, one after another, and rejecting them.

“You talked to Li,” he said finally, “not Cohen. Do you have any reason to believe your message actually reached Cohen?”

“Well, no, but I thought they were the same person.”

“They are. But I’m not sure that means what you think it means. I think our next step should be to go back to Cohen. Directly.”

Osnat shook her head violently.

“I don’t argue that we should trust Cohen blindly,” Gavi said. “But I still think he’s the best person to feel out if we want to get a firmer grip on what’s actually happening in the Office without sticking our necks out too far.”

“I don’t know.” Osnat sighed. She wiped a hand across her face. “I’m so tired I’m about to pass out sitting up.”

“We don’t need to decide anything tonight,” Arkady suggested. “We can always sleep on it and see what we think in the morning.”

But in the morning Osnat was too sick to talk, and Arkady and Gavi were too busy trying to keep her alive to remember the conversation they were supposed to have had.

Her fever was worse than anything that the survey team members had suffered from. For three days Gavi and Arkady nursed her through it, spelling each other, falling back on aspirin and cold-water-soaked cloths when none of the normal remedies seemed to work.

“Is this the same sickness?” Gavi asked at one point. He was sitting with Osnat, mopping her brow with a cold cloth while Arkady looked on in an agony of guilt.

“How should I know?” Arkady said desperately. “I’m not a doctor, and even the doctors on the survey didn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“I’m not asking you for a diagnosis,” Gavi said coolly, “just an opinion.”

“You’re the human!” Arkady protested. “For all I know it could be the flu.”

Gavi gave Arkady a long level look over Osnat’s unconscious body.

“Okay. I don’t think it is either. But…what do you want me to tell you?”

“I don’t know. Is there anything else you shouldtell me?”

“Can I speak with you, Gavi?”

“Of course, Arkady. But come outside. I need to get dinner ready.”

They walked through the visitors’ center, pausing in the gloomy industrial-sized kitchen long enough for Gavi to pick up a hard-used metal bowl and a vicious-looking knife. They stepped outside—that shocking moment of transition that Arkady would never get used to no matter how many brief planetside stays he made over the course of his mostly stationbound life. Gavi set off down the hill toward the shantytown jumble of the chicken coops. When they reached the little flock, Gavi slipped in among them, gesturing to Arkady to wait on the edge. He spoke companionably to the birds, and they clustered around him looking for handouts and caresses.

Gavi took one of his hens in his arms and murmured to her in Hebrew too soft and quick for Arkady to make any sense of it. He ambled back over to Arkady and sat down. The hen rested in his lap chuttering quietly to herself, her eyes all but closed. Gavi smoothed down her feathers and caressed her until she hunkered down into her feathers and closed her eyes in pleasure. Then he gripped her with firm, expert hands and drew the blade across her throat so smoothly and quickly that Arkady only understood what had happened when he saw the blood coursing into the bowl Gavi had nudged into place with his good foot.

“Is that for keeping kosher?” Arkady asked when he had recovered his voice enough to speak.

“No.” Gavi turned the hen’s limp little body in his hand and began plucking the feathers with sharp, practiced turns of his wrist. “It’s for Dibbuk.”

“You don’t keep kosher then?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if God actually exists, I can think of a long list of things He ought to be more worried about than the contents of my intestines. What did you want to talk to me about, Arkady?”

“I…I wanted to apologize.”

“What for?”

“For, well…everything. I thought I was doing the right thing. Or at least one right thing. I didn’t know Korchow had turned me into a weapon.I wish I could make you believe that.”

“I can see that you’re well-intentioned. This is a very complicated situation. You really don’t owe me anything.”

Gavi was still plucking away at the chicken so that it was impossible for Arkady to meet his dark eyes. His voice, however, struck a chill down Arkady’s spine: cool, smooth, gently distant. The voice of a man who had gone through anger and come out the other side. Arkady could imagine going to great lengths to avoid hearing it again.

“I never hid anything from you intentionally. I didn’t understand what Korchow had done myself until after we’d talked. And then, with Safik…well…”

“Safik could wring secrets out of stones. I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am if I thought you wouldn’t tell him everything.”

Arkady looked doubtfully at him. “You’re not angry, then?”

“Being angry would imply that I expected you not to tell him. Or that I felt you had some kind of obligation not to. Why would I think either of those things?” Gavi stood up, the chicken hanging limp and bedraggled and naked in his hand. “Angry’s silly, Arkady. It makes people feel better in the short term, but in the long term it just makes them not think straight. And what possible good can it do anyone if we let ourselves be seduced into not thinking straight?”

“None, I guess.”

“I’m glad you agree with me. Let’s go have dinner.”

“So how come Gavi didn’t get sick?” was the first thing Osnat wanted to know when she was back in the land of the living.

“What do you mean?” Gavi asked, looking sharply at her. “Has someone else gotten sick?”

“Moshe. Well, I think so. The first week. But that’s twenty-twenty hindsight talking. At the time I thought it was just allergies. Same with the guards.” She frowned. “Ash Sofaer didn’t get sick either come to think of it.”

Gavi looked down at his plate. “Maybe Ash and I don’t have what the virus fixes.”

Osnat stared. A charged silence crept around the table and spread to the corners of the room.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Osnat asked.

“Well…Ash has a son. So do I.”

“You what?” Osnat asked. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Osnat grew rigid in her chair. She looked at her plate, her cup, the wall behind Gavi’s head. Everything but Gavi.

“You have a natural child?” she said finally, in an accusatory whisper. “And you just …abandoned him?”

“I like you, Osnat,” Gavi said in his blandest, most noncommittal voice, “but you’re a very judgmental person. And you seem to have the oddest idea that people are required to justify themselves to you when really it’s none of your business. It’s not attractive.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more attractive than thinking you have a right to float through life and break all the rules without ever explaining yourself to anyone!”

Arkady looked back and forth between the two of them, feeling the emotional undercurrent in the fight but completely unable to make sense of it.

“You want explanations?” Gavi said. “Here’s one. My wife was a doctor at a hospital on the Palestinian side of the Line. We lived over there so Joseph could go to Palestinian school. And don’t give me that look, little Miss Ashkenaz. You don’t know what it was like to be an Arab child in Israeli schools, even before the war. When the border crossing started getting sticky, we kept telling ourselves it would blow over. But it didn’t blow over. One day I went to work…and I couldn’t get back across. At first I could talk to them on the phone. Then the satlink was cut. Then I stopped getting any news of them at all. The last thing I heard was that Leila’s hospital had been bombed. Accidentally, of course. It’s amazing how often hospitals seem to get in the way of bombs. They found her body in what was left of the pediatric ward. The children were much harder to identify. But one of the survivors said she’d taken Joseph to work with her that morning because she thought it was safer than leaving him home.” He stood up, moving as clumsily as Arkady had ever seen him move. “So that’s how I deserted my son. Hope you enjoyed our little session of show-and-tell as much as I did.”

“Osnat—” Arkady began when Gavi had stalked out.

“Oh shut up, Arkady! What the hell do you know about anything, anyway?”

It took most of a day for Osnat and Gavi to start talking to each other again; and when they did it was with the quiet caution of a bomb squad tiptoeing around a possibly live piece of ordnance.

“I think we ought to at least put out a feeler,” Gavi said, talking mostly to Arkady. “There’s no reason I can’t drop by to see Cohen and feel him out a bit.”

Osnat raised one eyebrow. “You think you can find out more about him than he’ll find out about you in the first five seconds?”

Gavi got a funny look on his face. “Well…yes, actually. You know the old saying about AIs. It’s not that they’re smarter than us…”

“It’s just that they can be dumb so much faster. But that doesn’t mean you can lie to him and get away with it.”

“I’m not going to lie. I’m just going to offer what Cohen would call a selective sampling of the available data.”

“Are you sure that’s safe?” Arkady asked, thinking of Safik’s warnings about the AI.

Gavi gave him a quizzical look. “What’s he going to do, steal my lunch money?”

They kept Li awake until she’d never been so tired, even in combat. Exhaustion smeared thought and twisted perception. Sleep was the enemy. Sleep was the monster of all her childhood nightmares, hunting her through a distorted landscape while she ran and ran, unable to stop though she knew she would fall sooner or later.

And through the long fight with exhaustion, in the brief lulls between those nightmare flights, came the interrogations.

She was hooded of course. But she didn’t need to see her torturers to know them. Their attentions to her were invasive and intimate, and by the end of the second day she knew the three men better than their own wives did.

There was the one who laughed and joked and obviously enjoyed his work. There was the one who handled her with the brusque impersonalness of a butcher slinging meat. And there was the one who apologized. He was the worst by far because he reminded Li of the last thing she wanted to remember: that there were people on the other end of those cruel hands.

What they wanted was easy enough: her passwords.

They wanted the keys to her hard memory, her procedural backups, her archived spinfeeds, her accumulated knowledge base of past UNSec operations.

But she couldn’t give them the passwords because she no longer had them. They’d been changed by a deeply embedded Peacekeeper security loop the moment her internals processed the fact of her kidnapping. She’d heard rumors that UNSec built such things into Peacekeeper psychware, but until now she hadn’t entirely believed in them. Unfortunately, her captors didn’t seem to believe in them either.

And all the while, they kept hammering at her about some meeting with Turner that she couldn’t remember—any more than she could remember how she’d gotten here. Li, a connoisseur of memory loss, could feel the gap as clearly as she would have felt a missing tooth. And she could locate what was missing, more or less. Not that she really needed to, because her captors questioned her about it almost as incessantly as they questioned her about her passwords and security programs.

Where had she gone before she went to meet Turner?

Who had she spoken to before she spoke to Turner?

Who knew she had gone to see Turner?

Where had the woman and the clone gone to after she’d passed their location on to Turner?

It was no use. She remembered the call from Osnat and Arkady. Then nothing. And the more they asked about Turner, and Turner, and Turner, the harder it got to believe that she could have agreed to meet with him in the first place.

She couldn’t say just when she began to realize that there were other people attending the interrogation sessions. The watchers were silent and invisible—at least to Li, whose whole universe had narrowed down to a few centimeters of burlap darkness. But they exerted a tidal pull on the interrogators, as unmistakably as an eclipsed planet tugging at its neighbors in the dark. Li’s torturers were playing to their audience, like the miners of Li’s all-but-forgotten childhood picking up the pace at the cutting face when the straw boss was watching.

It was the watchers who made them start in on her hands.

They didn’t need to do much. Ceramsteel filament was as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel and much harder. When a filament snapped and its severed ends started floating free against fragile flesh and bone, you’d better pray to whatever gods you believed in that you were within tossing distance of the surgical tanks. And no part of your body outside your relatively protected spinal column was as impregnated with monofilament-thin virally embedded ceramsteel filament as your hands. So when they strapped her hands down, she’d known immediately where the game was headed. The only question in her mind was how far the unseen watcher would allow it to go.

Answer: pretty damn far.

Far enough to make her glad she was blindfolded and couldn’t see what was happening at the far ends of her arms.

Far enough to trigger the memory that had somehow become intimately and inextricably associated with what they were doing to her.

Far enough to send her mind spinning back to Gilead.

The whole operation on Gilead had been fractally fubard. Fucked up beyond all recall in every spatial scale and at every hierarchical level of complexity.

The UNSec spin doctors had made it out to be a positive orgy of heroism, and the war correspondents had bought their spin hook, line, and sinker. But in Li’s opinion Gilead had been just like almost every other episode of storied heroism in every other war she’d ever read about: a bloody mess that would never have been necessary if the deskbound lords of war had done their jobs right.

Most of Li’s colleagues had seen it differently—or at least pretended to. They’d started loudly celebrating the heroic dead of Gilead before the bodies were even buried. And if there were whispers behind closed doors about broken supply lines, endemic communications failures, and blue-on-blue orbit-to-surface strikes, then they only made the public celebration louder and the medal inflation higher.

Monday morning quarterbacking was bad for morale. That was the consensus. Better to celebrate what went right (most of it at the noncom level and below) than to dwell on what went wrong (most of it still alive and wearing stars and striped trousers). And if Li thought that this meant buying morale at a pretty high rate of interest, she’d soon learned that saying so didn’t earn her much love.

Of course, as one of the few Gilead veterans who was in the enviable position of being both a hero and alive, Li was one of the main beneficiaries of the hurricane of spin swirling around the bloody campaign. Not that she was even sure it was spin. All she had to set against the UNSec-washed spinstreams was a nagging feeling of déjà vu and a conviction that her mind had once held a different version than the one UNSec called reality.

It was impossible to explain to civilians what jump amnesia did to you. The jagged holes it punched into your past and your identity. The reflexes, violent ones included, that came at you from nowhere, then sucked back into some subterranean place you couldn’t remember your way down to. The sickening vertigo of having a second set of memories superimposed on the real ones. The gut certainty that what your own brain remembered and the history books and the newspins and the politicians and your next-door neighbors said was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

That must have been how Turner had drawn her into his web. He must have dangled in front of her the one thing she couldn’t refuse: proof. Proof that she hadn’t done those things on Gilead. Proof that she wasn’t the kind of person who could do such things.

She saw now that she had been chasing an illusion. She would never know the Catherine Li who had dropped into Gilead’s gravity well half a lifetime ago. Even if Andrej Korchow descended from the sky in glory to tell her she hadn’t shot those prisoners, he still couldn’t tell her what else she’d done…or been capable of doing.

She would never know her past self even in the illusory, self-justifying, half-fictional way that unaltered humans knew their past selves. All she could know—all she ever would know—was the person she was now.

And the really rotten piece of luck was that just as she was finally beginning to see a way to live with that, it was starting to look less and less like she was going to get a chance to live, period.

It was her own damn fault, of course.

She had known it was a bad idea to try to escape. But what was she supposed to do? Nothing?

And when her tormentors finally slipped up, she was waiting for them. With a scalpel that she’d managed to pilfer with the hand whose fingers still more or less worked.

The first guard’s neck broke with a crunch that made even Li’s stomach churn. She dropped him and drove forward to the next target, still hooded, moving on sound and feel. Her hands were useless, so she used her legs, her feet, her training, her hate.

She had her hood off almost before the second guard hit the ground. The room was dark, thank God, not too difficult to adjust to. But she still made the mistake of thinking she was alone.

The fact that the other person in the room with her was standing very still was only part of her confusion. The real problem was that the woman was covered from head to toe in dusty green cloth.

Wasshe a woman? Was she even an Interfaither? Or merely someone taking advantage of a disguise that blended all too conveniently into Jerusalem’s thronging streets these days?

Li seized the veiled figure. And then she did something she would never, not in a million years, have done if she’d been anywhere within spitting distance of thinking straight.

She grabbed the green cloth and yanked.

“That was unwise,” Ashwarya Sofaer said.

Li just stood there, swaying slightly, poleaxed by memory.

“It was you,” she whispered. “It was you I went to, not Turner.”

Ash shrugged. “I was a bit surprised at how well that took. Your brains really are scrambled, aren’t they?”

“Then it was all a false flag operation? You were never talking to UNSec at all?”

“Oh I was talking to UNSec.” Ash smiled her lovely masklike smile. It occurred to Li, in some relatively lucid segment of her brain, that Ash wasn’t as scared as she should be. “They just weren’t the only people I was talking to.”

“Turner—”

“Does it really matter? It’s not like you’re going anywhere. Before there was a chance. Now…” She shrugged.

“Oh, we’re going somewhere,” Li said…

…and the next thing she knew she was on the ground, her head throbbing with the aftereffects of some nerve agent, and Turner was standing there big as real life looking down at her.

“Well now,” he said, shaking his head like a country bumpkin getting his first eyeful of the bright lights and the big city. “You really are a lady who likes to do things the hard way.”

Ash stood just behind Turner. And she had her veil on again. “Why don’t you take that ridiculous thing off your head?” Li told her.

Ash’s hand emerged from the shadows, rose, hesitated. The veil came away with little more than a light twitch of her long fingers. But instead of removing it entirely she merely settled it around her head and shoulders so that only her face was showing.

That was when Li understood. The veil was no disguise. The veil wasAsh’s true face: the face of an Interfaither who had turned her mind over to the men of God and violence.

That was the reality Li had glimpsed behind the beautiful but impersonal mask that Ash presented to the world. The white suits and the perfect makeup and the self-serving careerism were all nothing but the subtlest kind of protective camouflage.

Li had seen the real Ash just once: in the stretch marks that said she’d gone through natural birth and pregnancy, something only a vanishingly small number of Ring-siders still did. But she’d written that off as meaningless trivia. How could she have been so blind? And what better proof could there be that she herself wasn’t human, had never been human, would never understand humans no matter how long she lived among them?

“How long have you been working for the Interfaithers?” she asked Ash. “And when did you and Turner decide you wanted the Novalis virus?”

But instead of an answer, Ash had another question for her:

“Left hand or right hand?”

Cohen looked very much the worse for wear when he finally answered to Gavi’s knock. Rumpled and unshaven. Dark circles under his eyes. And around his left hand an immaculate white bandage.

Gavi stepped into the luxurious living room of Cohen’s hotel suite. “What happened?” he asked, pointing at the bandage.

“I stuck Roland’s hand through a window,” Cohen said in a voice that distinctly did not invite further questions. “What do you want, Gavi?”

Gavi raised his eyebrows. “Bad time? Should I come back later?”

Cohen slumped into a chair and rubbed his hands across his face. “No. Sorry. Things just…aren’t so good at the moment.”

Gavi looked around. No sign of Li. How to broach the unbroachable question? Well, blunt was always an option. “Is Li around?”

“No. So show me this new source code you’ve cooked up.”

Gavi sat down, repressing the guilty sinking feeling that lying to Cohen gave him. It wasn’t a lie. It was self-protection. No, better than self-protection: the protection of two people who were in deadly desperate need of protecting.

They talked around the subject for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s programming ideas, the false starts he’d made, what he’d learned from them, the current state of his work on and thought about his so-called golem…all the while edging cautiously toward the dangerous topic of the other golem, the one of flesh and blood that was sitting in Gavi’s living room.

He should have been enjoying the conversation. He wasn’t.

At some point he realized that he’d dropped the conversational ball, and that Cohen had fallen oddly silent. He looked up to find the AI staring intently at him.

“So, Gavi. How are Arkady and Osnat doing?”

“How should I know?”

“That’s funny. I wouldn’t have thought Yad Vashem was crowded enough these days that you wouldn’t notice you were sharing the place with them.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since they arrived.”

“Then you know they went to you first. Why the hell didn’t you help them?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Li! Osnat went to her for help before she brought Arkady to me. And she almost ended up on the police blotter because of it.”

Cohen blinked. “Li’s been MIA for two days now. So I think we can assume that whoever came after your little lost lambs bagged her too.”

“Or,” Gavi pointed out in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “we can assume that they want us to think so.”

“You’re off the mark there. Li wouldn’t do that.”

“You know her well enough to be sure of that?”

“I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t sell me out.”

“Everyone has their dumb blonde and their red Ferrari, Cohen.”

“Don’t spoon-feed me Didi’s proverbs!”

“Okay, maybe I spoke out of turn there. Maybe it’s not like that. But…people are who they are. You can’t imagine how angry I was at Leila after she died. I kept telling myself that if she’d really loved me, she would have come across the Line when we still had the chance. But it isn’t that simple, is it? I mean, you can love someone completely and still be bound by who you are, by what you believe in, by the other things and people you care about…by life, I suppose.”

“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Cohen said. “You want to see UNSec behind this. You think Li’s gone back to working for Nguyen, and that Nguyen either ordered the bombing or pressured Didi into ordering it. Well, you’re talking out of turn. You don’t know Catherine. You don’t know what they did to her. You don’t know anything about her.”

But his eyes fell away from Gavi’s as he said the words.

The package arrived just as Gavi was about to leave.