Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (15 page)

Santino suddenly slumped forward. Rachel grabbed him by his uninjured arm as he steadied himself against the horse. 

“We need to get you stitched up,” she said.

“I want a cookie,” he mumbled. He saw her confused expression and said, “You know, you get a cookie? For donating blood?”

“Oh thank God, you still think you’re funny,” she said, helping him climb out of his protective pile of wooden animals. “You’ll be fine.”

She took him through the double doors and into the catacombs. 

“What. The. Hell.” Santino gasped. “Rachel, what... Am I hallucinating?”

“I wish you were,” she sighed. During the mansion’s tenure as a drug den, the main hallway connecting lowest level of the mansion had been remodeled after the municipal Ossuary under Paris, complete with faux skulls. The catacombs were a main reason the property had failed to sell, prospective buyers making it as far as the basement before discovering they were to purchase a graveyard which required plastic ghosts. “We have no idea what they were thinking,” she said. “Cocaine was involved, that’s for sure. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.”

The walls of the catacombs were covered in boxes stacked four deep and eight tall, with a path barely an arm’s length across to allow passage between rooms. The Agents had tried to insulate themselves from poor taste but there was little they could do about the ceiling, which stared down at them with hollow eyes and grinned. 

They made slow progress and walked single-file, Rachel at the lead. Santino, understandably gun-shy, jumped at every noise. She told him she had her implant set at full scanning mode and that she’d know if someone was lurking in a cardboard foxhole, but he was still shaking and she wasn’t sure how much confidence he had in cyborgs right now.

“His wrists,” Santino said softly.

“Yeah,” she replied. She meant it to be an answer, and hoped he wouldn’t ask.

“That scarring… it was all ragged. Like... bite marks.”

“There were more than three of us who couldn’t adapt,” Rachel said.  “Shawn and the other two? They were the ones who lived.”

“How could someone do that to themselves?” he asked. “It’s crazy.”

Rachel glanced up at the smiling skulls with their empty sockets and wished she knew the answer.

EIGHT

“Should I be worried this place is better equipped than an emergency room?”

“Shhh.” Jenny Davies was no longer used to working with patients who needed to vocalize. She was remembering old skills as she stitched the gash on his arm closed. “If you’re going to talk, turn your head away from the injury. Saliva is a bacteria engine.”

The Agents had set up their medical center in the wine cellar. The catacomb theme had been carried into this room. Santino had turned down Percocet in favor of codeine so he wouldn’t be completely useless for the rest of the day, but he was still having problems focusing. He jumped between critiquing the fake bones and complimenting the physician on her surgical technique as she repaired the gash across his forearm.

Santino reached out with his good hand and poked the nub of a femur positioned upwards to form a cradle for a thirty-year-old merlot. “Both too much and too little planning went into this design,” he said. 

Davies grabbed him by his shoulder to stabilize his injured arm. The petite brunette was loads of fun at parties but she brooked no nonsense on her table. “If you don’t stop moving, I will have Rachel tie you down.”

“I got me truckloads of rope,” Rachel agreed, sitting off to the side and away from Davies’ surgical stage. She had gone back to the bathroom for the fashion magazine. Winter was coming, and she wasn’t about to spend another year freezing in the thin piece of cloth that had passed for her coat back in California.

“All right, all right,” he muttered. “Why are you down here in a wine cellar?”

“It’s quiet, it had built-in refrigeration, and it keeps us amused. Those skulls are hilarious anatomy fails.”

“What were you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Davies asked, tying off the suture. She had removed her sunglasses to focus on the knots and the strain of a headache was starting to pull her eyes tight.

“Before the implant. What were you? You’re too young to have been a doctor.”

“Aw, thanks. Flattery will get you more drugs,” Davies smiled. “But I am a doctor. Graduated from Harvard Med with honors. Medical research was my calling, though. I was at the National Institutes of Health for about a year before I got picked to join OACET.

“All of our medical team used to be in health and human sciences,” she added, snipping the line. “Now, I’m going to clean the site again before I cover it. It’ll be disgusting; you’ve been warned.”

Rachel, who had already set her implant to exclude most visuals, moved in her chair so the magazine hid the action on the table, and wondered if she should ask her therapist why she was fine with gore anywhere but inside of a doctor’s office.

“You think you’ll go back to research?” Santino asked, watching closely as Davies dabbed the drying blood and tissue from his arm.

The physician shrugged and applied some topical disinfectant. “Probably not. My education and training are five years out of date, and that’s an eternity in science. Even if they were willing to put up with the security risks, my old team wouldn’t want me. It’s not the end of the world. Now I get to study cyborgs, and that’s a groundbreaking field. 

“Besides,” she said quietly, “everybody is trying to cure cancer. They don’t need me.”

There was a light tapping on the door and Zia let herself into the wine cellar. She was holding a small bundle of folded clothing and stopped when she saw Santino. He leapt up and started towards her, deaf to Davies’ protests as the roll of sterile gauze she was wrapping around his arm was yanked from her hands. He managed a few steps before he started to wobble from a combination of blood loss and head rush. 

“Sit down, idiot,” Rachel said as she stuck out her foot and nudged him back towards his seat.

Her partner slowly lowered himself back on to his stool. Davies removed the contaminated gauze and started rewrapping from a clean roll.

“What’s all this, then?”
Davies asked via a closed link.

“Inevitable tragedy,”
Rachel replied.
“Or true love straight out of a fairy tale. Maybe both.”

“Rachel said you needed some clothes.” Zia said. She was staring openly at Santino. Davies had cut off his bloodied shirt to treat him, and he had a swimmer’s lean muscular build. 

“Don’t let him tell you I’ve never done anything for him,”
Rachel told Davies. The physician laughed, but quickly covered her mouth in a Mulcahyism. Neither Santino nor Zia noticed.

“How are you?” Zia seemed to have a problem finding words. Rachel wondered exactly what had happened between them while she was in the bathroom, and why Shawn had become so angry, so quickly. She knew firsthand that anyone who had met Zia nursed a small crush, but maybe Shawn had seen something more than small talk.

“It’s fine, I’m okay,” he said, and moved his arm to prove it. The gauze jumped out of Davies’ grip again and she swore as she grabbed for it.

“Rachel told me about Shawn. I’m…” Santino glanced away, then back to Zia. “I’m sorry there’s a Shawn.”

Zia looked as though she couldn’t decide whether to smile or cry.

“We are invisible,”
Davies said to Rachel.

“Yeah,”
she replied. She hadn’t guessed that her small effort to patch things over would lead to live theater.
“Finish taping him up so I can take him out of here. I’m sure this is a perfect moment for them, but it’s just embarrassing for anyone else.”

Davies wrapped the ends of the gauze and gave Santino a bottle of water from a box stored at the bottom of the white wine fridge. “Drink this,” she told him, “and eat something with protein.” 

“We have sandwiches!” Zia, unsure how to put things right, hurled the promise of food.

“They are adorable,”
Davies said.
“But you shouldn’t encourage them. If you do, he’s just going to get hurt. She can’t have an honest relationship with anyone outside of the Program.”

“Hello, medieval!”

“Be realistic, Rachel. He doesn’t belong here. Zia knows that.”

So did Rachel. And even if a miracle happened and Santino and Zia made it work, some of the other Agents would resent him, or at the very least would remind Santino every waking hour that his life hung in the balance of how he treated her. Six months into it and the coupling was starting to stabilize, the madcap roulette of attraction finally winding down. The spares were many and mostly male; with nearly twice as many men as women in OACET, the math of traditional relationships didn’t play out. Mild panic was setting in among the unattached, Rachel among them. She hadn’t clicked with any of the other women in the Program and was beginning to wonder how a monogamist such as herself would deal with a lifetime of superficial one-night stands. 

“He’d be good for her,”
she sent back.

“You can’t seriously believe that. You work with him, but so what? It’s not as though you trust him.”

And suddenly Rachel realized she did trust him. The shock of it hit her so hard it must have been physical, as Davies felt it through their link.

“Oh,”
Davies said. On the other side of her table, Zia’s long hair fell around Santino like a golden curtain as she stood over him, lightly touching his injured arm while they spoke in hushed voices about that mildest of all topics, childhood pets. It didn’t change Davies’ mind, but Rachel knew that the other Agents regarded her as a very accurate judge of character. And so Davies gave the highest blessing she could:
“At least she’ll be safe.”

“Lunch!” Rachel clapped loudly, and Santino and Zia broke apart as though caught
in flagrante delicto
and not discussing long-dead guppies. “Zia, thanks for the shirt. Santino? Put it on, or I swear I’ll find a stapler.”

Rachel fled the med center, forcing her partner to chase after her in a cloud of fabric and apologies. Through a screen of plastic bones and cardboard, she watched as Zia started after them but was called back by Davies.
Girl talk,
Rachel thought, and wondered what Davies would say.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, moving down the long central hall of the catacombs. The Agents had set up this hallway like a subway tunnel, with alcoves in the stacks every thirty feet to prevent collisions between those passing in different directions. These offshoots were deeper than they were wide, and when they had first moved in, the ossuary’s bare smiles would peek out at them as they walked by. The others had told Rachel it was astonishingly creepy to see these glimpses out of the corners of their eyes and she believed them; she always did a superstitious scan for wayward serial killers whenever she came down to the catacombs. Someone had gotten fed up with it and had hung sheets and mismatched curtains over the exposed sections, which went a long way towards muting the feeling of living in a haunted house. Still, the ceiling leered, and the medical team had been known to mess with the others; sometimes the fabric was pulled tight across the skulls and strategically-placed LEDs flared in the sockets, and then it was all over but the shouting.

“What were you?” he finally asked.

It was not what she had expected. She had thought he would move towards something different, something about either Shawn or Zia, and told him so.

“Please don’t change the subject,” he said, and pulled her into an alcove where they had some room to breathe. “You were military police in the Army before you got recruited, I know that. But you weren’t just a cop, were you?” 

She looked away. Across the path was a maple coffee table standing strong on tall bun feet. Rachel made an idle mental note to come back and check its provenance; if it wasn’t an antique priced up in the stratosphere, it would be a perfect replacement for her ugly pine beast.

He waited.

She relented. “Right before I left I was a Special Agent in Criminal Investigation Command.”

“That’s an achievement, right?”

She kept her attention on the table. “It was a big deal at the time. I was the youngest ever to qualify.”

“And what did you plan to do after that?”

“It’s not important,” she said. “That’s all over now.”

“Humor me,” he said, stepping towards her. Rachel reactivated the full capacity of her implant and he was suddenly stark blue and yellow in front of her, intent on an answer. “I’m starting to put things together.” 

Man’s too smart for his own good,
Rachel thought, but the lies didn’t come as easily as they usually did. Damned epiphanies, tripping up her style.
Well, fine. Let’s try the truth.
 

“After that, I planned to leave CID and go to West Point, then serve as a career officer as high as I could go. But the Senator I found to write my letter of recommendation to the Academy?” She blanked out the visual spectrum and closed her eyes, and there was Senator Hanlon seated across from her at a restaurant so far out of her league she would have been tossed out with the trash if she had gone there alone. The man in her memory smiled at her with tiger’s teeth. “He said he could offer me something better than a General’s star, and the next thing I knew, I’m in OACET.”