Kelley Eskridge (25 page)

“Right on time,” Crichton said. “Shut the
door. Sit.”

No arrest today, Jackal thought again,
coming perilously close to saying it out loud in a chirpy, singsong
tone.

You're tired, her little voice said, be
careful.

“I ask questions, you answer them,”
Crichton began. In spite of her bad sleep and her case of nerves,
Jackal found herself enjoying Crichton's lack of concern for the
niceties. Crichton's eyes were gold today, the shiny color of foil
wrapped around cheap chocolates. She looked like a fierce machine.

She went on, “After our little chat, you
get a once-over from the doctor down the hall so that we can tell
EarthGov we're taking care of you. That'll include the usual basic
neuro exam—follow my finger, that kind of thing. Any questions? Good.”

She picked up her phone and punched in a
number. “Segura's here.” A beat. “If you want to talk to her, come to
my office. If you don't, don't. Well, I told you that, didn't I?” She
closed the phone hard enough to make Jackal's ear twitch
sympathetically. “Idiot.” She propped Jackal's open file against her
stomach and leaned back in her chair.

“Okay, Segura, Segura. You're living
at…Shangri-La.” She gave Jackal a look over the top of the file. “Good.
No performance ratings from your program supervisor because you're not
an employee. Fine. Credit's good. Hah, I guess. It halfway pisses me
off that you've got more money in the bank than I do.” The gold eyes
gleamed.

Jackal kept her mouth shut.

“Made any friends?”

“Excuse me?”

“Have you made any friends?”

“What do you care?”

“Play nice, now,” Crichton said, showing
some teeth. “I ask, you answer. I get to ask anything I want, that's
how this game works.”

The enjoyment was starting to wear off.
“No, I haven't made any friends.”

“Any sexual liaisons since your
reclamation?”

Jackal set her teeth together. “No.”

“I should point out that prior to entering
into a sexual relationship with a guardian of a minor child, you're
required to divulge your felony conviction status and are not allowed
unsupervised access to that child.”

She couldn't help flushing. “I don't hurt
children.”

Crichton gave her a flat look. “You killed
ninety-eight of them less than a year ago. The NNA does not consider
you a good risk.”

Jackal rubbed her hands across her face.
“I didn't…” But she had. She had killed ninety-eight children. She had
been about to say, I didn't mean to hurt anybody, but what difference
did that make? It was strange that only the deaths of the web had
seemed real up until now, that it was always Tiger and Bear and Mist
that she remembered. She hadn't been thinking about ninety-eight
children.

“What have you been doing with yourself?”

Jackal wiped her eyes and wrapped her arms
across her chest. “Getting settled in. I don't know. I bought stuff, I
got my things from Ko yesterday and unpacked them.”

“So what's next?”

I don't know, I
don't know
. “I'm pretty tired. I think maybe I'll just take
some time and learn my way around.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know, okay? God. Unless you have
a post-prison checklist you'd like me to follow?”

“No, but that's not a bad idea,” Crichton
replied calmly, making a note and irritating Jackal even more. Then
Crichton said, “Your test results are back.”

Jackal put on her best politely interested
face; it felt a little crooked, but she hoped that didn't show.

“One of the advantages of all this paper—”
Crichton twitched Jackal's file, but she wasn't looking at it; she was
watching Jackal very carefully “—is that it's very private. Everyone
assumes the electronic files are complete, original data. But when I
see something that interests me, sometimes I'll just put it in one of
my messy old outdated folders so I can chew on it for a while.”

Jackal nodded cautiously.

“I'm not Doctor Crichton, but I've handled
more than four hundred VC cases and I've reviewed a lot of test
results. I know an interesting variance when I see it. I just don't
know what it means yet.” She picked up her mug and drank, never taking
her eyes from Jackal.

Jackal worked to keep her expression
appropriate; it was hard to look relaxed with all her facial muscles
rigid and her heart jammering in her chest. She tried now for a
still-cooperative-but-slightly-puzzled look. “What kind of variance?”

“Don't waste my time,” Crichton said.
“You've got no game face. You can fool these program scientists because
they're morons, but you can't fool me. Something happened to you in VC.
All of you come out changed, we expect that by now. But there's
something different about you, and I want to know what it is.”

Jackal took a slow deep breath, through
her nose so that it was silent, down into her diaphragm. A strong,
steadying breath. There had never been more need for care. In, in; and
out as slowly. Then she let the fear express itself as anger. “I sat in
a square room in my head for six years. I went a little nuts just like
everyone else. Well, maybe not exactly like everyone else, how would I
know? But exactly like me. I don't know if I'm different or not. I'm
not even sure I remember who I was before I went down the rabbit hole.
I don't know what you want me to say. I killed ninety-eight kids and
they shoved me into my head and I stared and stared and stared at the
walls and then one day I was back here and my whole fucking life was
gone—” Her voice had risen; she closed her mouth on whatever else might
come out. It was too easy to make mistakes when she was afraid.

Crichton folded the file closed and placed
it on the desk. “I didn't expect you to tell me. So let me tell you:
almost everything about you is in my bedtime reading pile right now.
You interest me. You had influence and money, you've never been
remotely political in your life, and you gave it all up without a
squeak to plead a charge that any decent lawyer could have beaten with
half their brain excised. So I have to wonder what that's about?”

Jackal could feel her face smooth into a
tight mask of grief. Damn Crichton. She shook her head fiercely, trying
to hold back tears. Crichton waited in silence.

“I am guilty,” Jackal finally said in a
low voice. “I killed those people.”

“If you did drop those people down the
well, I'm guessing it was an accident. Oh, please,” she said
exasperatedly as Jackal looked up in shock. “Do I look stupid? You're
about as much a terrorist as the lab nerds with the white coats. You
wouldn't get two feet inside the door with Steel Breeze.”

Jackal felt numbly scared and, weirdly,
just a little insulted. She didn't know what to do.

“So is it just that there really is a
hard-wired criminal brain-wave pattern and, since you're not a
criminal, you don't have it and so your readings are different? Or did
something happen in VC that you don't want Doctor Bill and his merry
band to get excited about? My money's on door number two.”

Jackal opened her hands: “I don't know
what you're talking about. I can't help you.” And then she waited for
the inevitable: the phone call, the security escort back to the lab.
The new tests. The remand to facility custody. And then what? It was
like being back in her cell in Al Isk, listening to the footsteps in
the hall and knowing they were coming for her.

Crichton's smile was a brief, thin slash.
“Don't fuck with me, little girl. I can make you miserable in ways you
haven't even thought of yet. Now scram.”

Jackal was startled into immobility; but
not for long. She got through the door without trembling, but following
the guard down the hall to the security door, she began to shudder. “Is
there a bathroom?” Her bowels were loose, as shaky as the rest of her.
Afterwards, she ran a cool stream of water over her wrists until she
felt a bit more steady. Her reflection in the mirror was shadow-eyed
with fatigue and shock, and the beginnings of consideration: what does
she want with me?

Some days later, she came awake with her own
voice fading in her mind, as if she had just finished answering
Crichton's party question from that first interview:

I'm an executive-level project manager
.

She lay still, and the room held its
breath around her. Project manager. If she were in Al Isk right now,
that's how she'd be identified. Boring but safe. Maybe it would feel
safe enough to businesspeople here that they would overlook the small
matter that she was a convicted criminal.

Oh, wake up, her voice said. Of course
they won't overlook it. But what else could she do? What else was she
good at? Just shut up and let me think about this, she told herself,
and then wondered if this was a bad sign. She still had occasional
night terrors about the crocodile; she had become used to having
conversations with herself, but she was always vigilant for that sly,
sliding change in tone to tell her that her head was no longer safe.

Whatever Crichton's intentions, she'd
really stirred things up. Jackal dressed, gobbled two fried eggs and a
cup of Irish breakfast tea, scooped up her palmtop, and grabbed a
transport downtown.

She spent the day walking the main
commercial district in a purposeful grid pattern, locating tier-one
service businesses and the corporate operations of luxury product
developers, the types of companies most likely to spend money on her
skills. She needed to get a sense of where the power lay—who had the
best real estate, the hippest icons, and who was sponsoring what at the
downtown museums. Where did they eat their deal lunches? How did they
dress? In the early evening, she drank fizzy water in two different
bars, listening intently to the conversations of people just coming off
work, the stories they shared as they decompressed from the day. Coming
back on the transport, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisle with
commuting workers, she studied everything: the periodicals people chose
to download or read in paper form, their shoes and haircuts, the
unexpected amount of corporate insignia jewelry. Clearly, executives
and senior managers wouldn't be riding transport; but Jackal began to
make some cautious, preliminary assumptions about status markers, and
the clothing and presentation cues that would be reassuring to
potential clients. She was hopeful that even after she filtered the
list based on the restrictions Crichton had outlined, there would be
several good candidates for her services. She wondered if any other
convicted terrorist had ever expressed an interest in business
contracting, and she had a hair-raising vision of Gordineau in Irene
Miller's pink suit trying to blind a room of vice presidents with a
laser pointer.

That night and the next morning she did
the necessary on-line research, and narrowed her initial targets to
three companies, all of which were in a rapid-growth phase and fit her
parameters: a travel agency that designed custom adventure packages and
luxury tours; a downtown art gallery that specialized in corporate
consulting and commissions, and was currently second in market share to
a larger, more stuffy operation; and an upscale event planning service
for corporate charity functions.

The next step was a résumé:
it needed to be particularly effective, since she wouldn't be getting
interviews on the strength of personal contacts. But she couldn't hold
a layout in her head; the concept kept fragmenting into confused bits.
She was distracted by the troublesome, inevitable question:

Ms. Segura, why are you no longer
with Ko
?
Should she just come out with it right up front, do her best to
minimize it? No, that was stupid: it would be hard to minimize four
hundred and thirty-seven dead people on the ruined floor of Mirabile.
She had to make them see her as an incredibly competent person before
they saw her as a homicidal terrorist.

She decided to fudge a little and slant
her Ko experience as if it had been on a contract basis rather than
full-employment terms: she would talk about projects rather than career
path, and forego any mention of Hope status. It wasn't ideal, but she
could think of no better strategy. She began to build the
résumé. She started lists of the particular executives
she might want to approach. But every time she thought about calling or
e-mailing for an appointment, or actually putting on nice clothes and
walking into an office recep tion area, she became so restless that she
could barely sit at the computer. She decided to take a break, and
curled up on her chair—the best and most comfortable she could afford,
she had scrimped on other things to work it into her budget—with a book
loaded into her palmtop, only to find herself skimming the paragraphs
and jumping ahead. It wasn't satisfying way to read. She made Brunswick
stew and dumplings and left it half-eaten, the little flour balls
congealing into paste. She wandered aimlessly through cyberspace, using
a randomizer to pull up web sites that were only interesting for the
time it took to scan them. Finally, immensely irritated, she took
herself for a long walk.

It began to rain, a light patter of drops
that settled into a soft, steady rhythm. She had already resigned
herself to being cold, so being wet as well didn't seem much of an
extra burden. She pulled her jacket close around her and kept walking,
head down, hands jammed into her pockets. It was early afternoon, and
the streets were not so crowded now, so it was as if she were a
drifting jelly-fish occasionally brushing past other sea creatures in
the current that carried them all. Eventually she let herself weave
aimlessly back into her neighborhood, the now-somewhat-familiar streets
and alleys, the storefronts, the dirty facades of the apartment
buildings. She felt tired and grubby, as if the rain had washed her
with a fine layer of soot. Shangri-La was only three blocks away, but
she wasn't ready to face the ramshackle state of her life. Impulsively,
she turned left at the next corner, heading north on a street that
she'd never explored carefully because it dead-ended into a canal, and
had looked, the one time she'd ventured down, like a tired industrial
zone.