Kelley Eskridge (3 page)

Ahead, the treeline thinned and Fortaleza
Road pulled away from the coastline into a neighbourhood of houses that
muscled their way out of the rock, built with open spaces and expanses
of E-glass to take full advantage of wind and solar energy. Beyond them
rose clusters of angled apartment buildings, grouped around common
sports and shopping areas—vertical communities, every bit as
comfortable and modern as the executive homes. Lately, Jackal had begun
to see this as the place where the company lifted itself from the
ground like something protean raising a head full of teeth. Everything
was constructed and furnished with company-made materials, tools,
appliances, fixtures, textiles, electronics, entertainment equipment.
The company name was everywhere: KO, the O flattened at top and bottom
in the universal symbol for the map of the world. Everyone on the
island ate food grown with Ko hydroponics technology, and relied on the
Ko network to talk across the street or around the world. Jackal's
mother had been part of the team that developed the “Kommunications”
name and marketing campaign, and Jackal was certain that Donatella had
much to do with the success of the project. Her mother had the
temperament of a moray eel, which at first consideration did not seem a
good fit with her position as an Assistant Director of Corporate
Participation: but Jackal understood that biting down hard and fast was
Donatella's path to success. “I'm not there to get my own way,”
Donatella would say, “just to get results.” And recognition: Jackal
knew her mother loved her job and the corporate pin she wore every day
on her right shoulder. And her father loved her mother, and was made
proud by his Dona's pride. They had given themselves to Ko long ago.
And then they had given her. Riding between the apartment towers,
toward the glass canyon of skyscrapers, one hundred nineteen
subsidiaries' world headquarters and the twin executive towers of Ko
Prime, Jackal felt two million minds turn toward her, full of Hope.

She still did not know what to do with her
tension and fear. They were growing; these days, any small friction
could make her cramp with anger. Carlos had called the day after the
party: “
Hija
, your mother's very
upset about the argument you had. She won't tell me what happened, but
whatever it was, can't you forgive her? At least call her and tell her
things are all right?” But Jackal couldn't. She wasn't much good at
talking to anyone right now, not even Snow, who had been asking more
and more often what was wrong. Just tense about the investiture, Jackal
told her, and a fight with my mother. Nothing new. She was relieved
when Snow said, “I won't push, at least not right now.”

She parked her bike and went on with her
busy morning of workshops and research. In the afternoon, she went to
Esperance Park for the web's monthly game day. She thought games were
stupid, mostly because she rarely won. But she knew that failing at
something unimportant made people more comfortable with her, so she
played. Games were an easy way to fail.

But she should have known better today.
Losing wasn't so easy when a person was full to the back teeth with
rage, and what had she been thinking, agreeing to play machiavelli with
Tiger? In just an hour he had won three consecutive rounds with a speed
and a jolly, obvious contempt that humiliated her.

She said as quietly as she could, “Tiger,
ease up, okay? You're really sharking me.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “You're the Hope of
Ko and you can't even hold your temper over a game of machiavelli? Good
thing the fate of the world didn't depend on you today. You'd have lost
at least a couple of fourth-world countries.”

He spoke in his smiling, public voice,
pitched with just the right tone to send the message
we're only playing here
to the people
watching in the small plaza. He made them his audience so easily: they
loved him, her web mates crowded around the table, the strangers at a
respectful distance enjoying one of the last warm days of the year
before the slide into January cold. Tiger was vibrant against the
brushed-steel buildings that towered over this end of the park, their
banks of mirrored windows washing the warm afternoon light back in
dapples over the tended, careful trees: he glowed like a candle, his
eyes black-bright against his golden skin. She had a moment of piercing
regret that things had gone so bad between them.

“Don't they teach you anything in those
process classes?” he was saying. “Feedback is an integral part of
improvement, Jackal. You really ought to learn how to handle it.” There
was a bite to the words, and a challenge; and then he smiled in a way
she recognized, and she understood that he was picturing himself on top
of her, moving his hips slowly while he held her face in his hands and
said—

“Stop,” she said.

The smile deepened. “Oh, don't be like
that,” he said. “I know you like to play.” And that did it. Her heart
juddered hard against her breastbone once, twice, and Tiger became
outlined in crimson, and she let the leash inside her slip: just this
once, she thought wildly, just this one time, and lunged across the
table, and broke his nose with the blade of her hand.

Ko always moved fast, particularly where
Jackal was concerned: Tiger's blood was still damp on her shirt when
the assistant showed her into Analin Chao's office in the Executive Two
tower. Chao was short and sleek: Jackal gangled over her while they
shook hands.

“Sit down.” Chao waved her to an armchair
that looked large enough for two of Jackal, with an ottoman
conveniently canted to one side.

“No, thank you.”

“Why not be comfortable?”

The furniture, upholstered in a deep blue
fabric, looked slightly worn and indeed very comforting, as if it could
cradle all her troubles away. From its corner on the far side of the
office, the chair faced a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out to
the east coast of the island. It was a clear day: Jackal could see the
hazy bumps of the Hong Kong skyline on the horizon of the flat sea. A
person could sit in this chair and be safe without being trapped; a
person could be wombed here. But she wasn't falling for it. She had
studied with the lead designers of Ko's consumer psychology division:
they had even used last year's model of this chair as a class
discussion topic.

She shook her head.

“Ah,” Chao said, “of course, you'd be
aware of the subliminals. Sorry, most people don't get that training
until director level, at least. How about this one?” She pulled her own
chair from behind her corner desk.

Jackal ignored it. She did not like being
so easily read, and she was determined not to let this Chao disconcert
her. All she wanted was to go home and curl up in a hot bath and be
tired of everything. She folded her arms across her stomach, smearing a
brush-stroke of blood across her shirt along the underside of her left
breast. She made no move to wipe it off; Chao was watching everything.

Jackal said, “Dr. Andabe is my usual
counselor.” That was the right note, just casual enough but still firm.
Good.

Chao smiled as if Jackal had said
something clever. “Yes, he is,” she agreed. “He'll get copies of all my
notes, of course. But Khofi is really more of an educational and
motivational advisor, after all, and you're certainly past that now,
don't you think? Your training is almost finished, Al Iskandariyah is
less than a month away. You're about to be officially invested as a
world Hope. It's important that any difficulties—” she smiled and
opened her hands in a way that made those difficulties shared, “—be
resolved efficiently before they complicate your taking up your new
position.” She sat easily on the edge of the ottoman, waved again to
the chair she had pulled out for Jackal.

“Your needs are changing.” She spoke
earnestly, and her hands traced persuasive arcs in the cool recycled
air of the room, pale against the earth tones of the smooth walls and
the thick woven rug. “Ko wants to make sure you have all the support
you need to make what is, after all, a very important transition. So
the executive team has decided that I should be available to you from
now until your investiture, at least. To be a resource, help you work
out any concerns you might have. Think of me as someone to help you
with managing change.”

“What's your real job?” She had meant to
be assertive, but it only sounded rude. She kept her hands locked
around her folded arms so her fingers would not tremble.

Chao answered as if it were a reasonable
question. “I'm the Executive Vice President of Organizational
Development for Ko Worldwide.”

Jackal opened her mouth. Nothing came out,
so she shut it again. She was feeling shaky now: the adrenaline hit had
faded and left her with a sour stomach and the beginning of a headache
behind her right eye. Maybe she should take the chair after all. What
was she doing here? Had she hurt Tiger worse than she realized? She had
only meant to hit him in the face, to sting and shame him, but even
that had gone wrong. There had been no time to check the damage: two Ko
security guards had snapped to her side like stones from a slingshot,
quick enough to push Tiger back into the chair he'd kicked aside in his
lurch around the table, one hand cupped and filling with blood and the
other reaching for her, the machiavelli tiles scattering across the
courtyard.

She wished she could grab the moment back
and tuck it safely into a pocket until the urge to hurt someone had
passed.

“Am I in trouble?” she said.

“No one's in trouble,” Chao replied
smoothly. “But of course we're concerned. You offered violence to a web
mate. I'm sure you had a very good reason, and I'd like to know what it
is so that I can help you with it.”

Jackal thought bleakly, I'm too tired. But
she would just have to tough it out. She would have to find something
to distract this woman who, given her position, was almost certainly a
psychiatrist: something that would keep her from going after the real
reason, which had nothing to do with Tiger and everything to do with
being a false Hope.

Chao waited, bright-eyed and relaxed.

Okay, Jackal thought. Okay. She unclasped
her arms, and plucked at her shirt. “Have you got a towel?”

Chao smiled. “Of course,” she said.
“There's bathroom right behind that door. Why don't you clean up and
then we'll talk?”

“You and Tiger were lovers,” Chao said
matter-of-factly.

Jackal shook her head.

“It's in your record.”

“We did—It was—” She shook her head again
helplessly. How to explain the horror of Halloween day, the confusion
of brandy and the desperate need to be real again? But she mustn't tell
Chao about Donatella's hideous blunder, or that the rest had happened
only because Jackal was trying to make the bad news go away. Tell her
instead about dancing like a banshee until she had dervished herself
into a place where only each single, exquisite moment mattered. That
was something a doctor would buy, without looking underneath. Doctors
loved the discovery of demons, the moments of
I
just wasn't myself
, those revealing truths that rolled over
and yawned in the mud of the hindbrain. Jackal gave Chao the glow of
the setting sun that stippled Tiger in gold, the way his face had
stilled and then hardened when he saw her watching him. The hours after
and their awareness of each other, so intoxicating, a different kind of
dance. Leaving the group without looking behind her, knowing he would
follow; leading him to his own apartment door, waiting, then the sudden
shock of him against her with one arm stretched out to palm the lock.
And then inside. The sex was a series of strobe moments, mouth here,
fingers there, and she flowed through them click click click as if
working a string of worry beads to count her sorrows away. Until,
between breaths, she stepped off the shelf in her head where she'd been
storing herself, came back into real time to find him on her, in her,
his breath in her open mouth.

“What happened then?” Chao had prompted
her after a moment.

What had happened was that Tiger said, “I
can't believe I'm fucking the Hope of the whole bloody world,” and she
had heard again her mother's voice, out of control, screeching. And she
hadn't been able to bear it, she had to get away. He had tried to kiss
her as she was leaving and she had stopped him without a word, even
when he looked confused and followed her out into the hall, calling,
“Jackal, what's wrong? What did I do?” And from then on it was bad
between them, just as it was between her and her mother. It was the
moment when the world began to rot.

Jackal said, “Nothing happened…I mean, we
finished, we got up off the floor, I left. End of story.”

“Was the sex bad? Did he hurt or frighten
you?”

Jackal began to worry with her teeth at a
shred of skin beside a fingernail. “It was fine, there's nothing to
tell. Really.” She could feel the heat in her face.

“Then why have the two of you become
increasingly hostile to each other over the last weeks? Today's
incident is extreme, certainly, but it's by no means isolated from an
overall pattern.”

Jackal stayed silent and hoped her face
did not show how trapped she felt.

“Perhaps there's some guilt there? Does
Snow know about the sex with Tiger?”

“Snow and I are fine, thanks.”

Chao's turn to be silent.

“Yes, she knows.”

“If I asked Snow why you would happily be
having sex with Tiger one day and scrubbing his blood off your hands
five weeks later, what do you think she would say?”

Jackal imagined Snow in the womb chair
under Chao's surgical gaze. She bit hard enough on her finger to draw
blood. “She'd probably say she has no idea. Why should she know? I
don't even know.”