Velvet Dogma About 3300 wds (9 page)

"You hungry?"

"Famished. Let me clean up and then we'll talk about breakfast."
 
She pushed herself off the couch and limped into the bathroom. The mirror told her the tragic truth. She looked all of her forty-four years. Pasty skin hung loose under her eyes. Her matted hair had lost its sheen. Drained of color, her lips were only slightly darker than the surrounding skin. Her blue eyes looked washed out grey. If she'd been back in prison, she'd have left it that way. After all, who was she going to impress? The guards?

But she'd been out for twenty-four hours. A day of freedom and she looked like ten miles of bumpy road. Who did she have to impress now?

Nobody.

The whole world.

And Andy.

For some reason she wanted to show her best face. So, she did what she could with water and soap. She'd kill for some make-up. With mascara and lipstick she might have hope. She began checking the drawers and cupboards which had been used as storage for wires, chipsets and other unidentifiable electronics. She found what looked like Vaseline, some chap stick and what might be like mascara. She was able to spike her hair and wash her face, but the mascara brush couldn't be more alien. Instead of what she was used to, this appeared to be nothing short of a stylus. No matter how many times she dipped it in the slim bottle and applied it to her eyelashes, nothing happened. Finally she tossed it back in the drawer. This was as good as she was going to get. How good was it? A long look in the mirror told her more than she wanted to know. She ignored reality and Hepburn-pretended, striding confidently back into the room.

Andy stood as she entered, looking just as good as he had the night before. He'd manage to find another T-shirt, and his jeans were wrinkled but clean. He looked her up and down. "Wished I cleaned up as well as you."
 
He proffered a plastic tube about a foot long. "Here. All they have is old gamer grub."

Ignoring his flirtation, Rebecca accepted the food and read the directions on the side. She tore open an end and squeezed free an inch of what promised to be blueberry pancakes and sausage. Andy sat on the couch across the narrow room from her and only after he'd inhaled half of his did she take the most tentative of bites. It was delicious. She sat back on the couch and squeezed out more. Closing her eyes, she ate the rest of it in silence, pretending that she was sitting at a table in a normal kitchen doing normal things eating normal food. She could even taste maple syrup.

When she finished Rebecca got up, tossed the wrapper in the trash, then returned to the sofa. "Got one filled with coffee? I like mine with three sugars and two creams."

"No, but we can get you some java real soon."

"We can leave? What did Panchet tell you?"

"It was as you suspected," admitted Andy. "The network wasn't broken. You were followed."

"How do we keep from being followed again?"

"There's nothing we can do, really. We have at least two stops to make, Olga's and your grandmother's. We just need to make sure you aren't at either one of them for very long."

"I've been thinking," Rebecca said. "Do you think that those Black Hearts had something to do with David's death? I think it's too much of a coincidence that they were there right after he died. Almost as if they were waiting for me."

Andy nodded grimly. "I thought about that too. And you know what? I can't argue with your logic. But I still can't fathom why they killed him to get to you. They're into retrieval and espionage, not assassination."

"Yet they attacked like they were assassins."

"That they did."
 
He smiled humorlessly. "I wished I had the answer, Bec. I really wish I did. If it helps, I spoke with Panchet and he's also working on it. It's only a matter of time before we figure this out."

Sometime between when she'd gone to sleep and now, Rebecca had remembered that she had some questions she needed answered. She had a problem with the drugs. She still didn't understand the relationship with the boarders. Panchet had created the technology. Andy was Panchet's friend. But what else? That couldn't be the whole tale. How would she broach it? Where she came from a person didn't just walk up and ask
Are you a drug dealer?

She jerked as she heard a noise from the other room.

"Just a couple of boarders crashing out." Andy told her. "They need some down time."

She frowned. "Is it the drugs? Is that why?"

"Are you a prude, Bec?"
 
Andy's eyebrows caterpillared. "Things are different now. The stimulants they need are legal."

She hated that word—
prude
. How dare he.

"Listen. I could tell you were wondering about this earlier, so let me come clean. Do I provide the drugs for Panchet's boys? Yes. Does that make me a drug dealer? Yes."
 
He held out a hand. "But let me explain, okay?"

Rebecca nodded slowly. She wondered if she really needed to know. It wasn't as if she and Andy were going to become an item. Or were they? She'd known plenty of men in her life who'd done drugs. College was filled with them, programmers among the worst abusers. She'd even known a few who'd hooked-up their friends and had, arguably, become drug dealers themselves, depending on your point of view. But to think that Andy dealt drugs...why did that bother her so much? A week ago she wasn't even thinking of him. A day ago they'd just met again after twenty years. Rebecca reminded herself that Andy was the first man she'd talked to at any length since her incarceration. Maybe what she was feeling was familiarity.
  

"
Live fast, die young
boarders don't grow on trees. Neither do they advertise on the vids," Andy explained. "Those who want the life aren't the types who hang out in the places regular folk go. There are places where they hang, bad places, places where you never want to go alone. Many of them are already hooked, running from one law enforcement agency of another, unable to return wherever they came from. Remember those men in the hooded robes we saw in the alley on the way to Panchets? They're the worst kind of pusher. They're chip heads who push free augmentations to any boarder, hacker or inVi-designer who'll have them. On the surface it seems like a good idea, but they cause more problems than they solve. Sure you can think more clearly and process more efficiently if your brain is coupled with micro-processors, but with each loss of humanity, there's a longing that can only be quenched by very special drugs. Drugs that they sell for the price of a soul."
 
He lowered his voice and watched the door separating them from the pair of boarders sleeping in the next room. "We don't go that far. We won't. We only provide the drugs these kids need to operate, to survive. I know it sounds bad, but we need them more than they need us. Most are already junkies when they arrive, cashed out, bombed out, needing to feel the rush of a new fix.

"And we provide it for them. In exchange they do our bidding, the drugs fueling their systems to perform normally impossible feats of dexterity. I'm not proud of the drugs, but I am proud of the network we've created, and without the security of such a network, let me just say we wouldn't have been able to move to the next step."

"The end justifies the means."
 
She'd heard that one enough times.

Andy nodded. "In this case it does."

"What is this end? You said 'next step.'
 
Next step in what?"

He smiled like a kid caught with a cookie. "I can't tell you yet, Bec. I want to, but now's not the right time."
 
Seeing her expression, he hurriedly added, "Trust me. You're going to like it. More—you're going to be amazed by it."

Too much subterfuge. Rebecca watched him as he sat and smiled at her. She should know better by now. So far, every time she'd gotten an answer for a question, it had created two more. She shook her head. She hated it when people said 'trust me.'
 
Her father had said that if a person had to remind you to trust...they weren't trustworthy to begin with. But what was she to do? She had her grandmother to save and she needed a place to stay. Looking around the house, Rebecca doubted this place would be available for much longer. And she liked him. Against her judgment she liked Andy.

She decided to let it ride. As a virtual Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, there were a lot of things she didn't understand. For all she knew drugs were legal now. So much had changed. She didn't know what was lawful and what wasn't. She was convinced she'd be surprised at some of the things now against the law. Spitting could be a misdemeanor. Jaywalking could be a felony.

Then there was that matter of coincidence. Meeting Andy so soon after her brother's death, arriving at the apartment almost simultaneously...the events were too strange. Her gut said that Andy wasn't involved in David's death, but he was involved
somehow
. He had to be, unless she planned on becoming a connoisseur of coincidences. So she'd watch and listen and maybe he'd let something slip.

"You're staring at me," Andy said, worry coloring his hazel eyes.

"Trying to figure things out is all."

"Having any luck?"

"Some."

"Good. If you need my help, all you have to do is ask."

I'll bet
, she thought. "I'd just as soon leave if we can."
 
She stood and brushed the wrinkles from her pants.

"Are you excited?"

"That's a word for it. Maybe a little scared."

"I had Panchet run a check. Your grandmother is okay."

Just what she needed to hear. "Thanks, Andy."

"It's what we're here for."
 
He headed towards the back door, then paused and looked back at her. "Are you coming?"

She'd been caught staring at the way his jeans hugged his legs and the curve of his behind. She blushed fearsomely, smiling to hide her embarrassment. "I'm coming. Are you?"
 
She remembered the kiss she'd given him on the street and blushed even more deeply. She squeezed past him out the door, her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her.
 

T
hey caught a bus at Melrose and made their way west along Oakhurst, then went north to Sunset Boulevard. Buildings blurred past as memory and reality merged. Some styles were familiar from before her incarceration, but others were like she'd seen recently, either concrete industrial or neo-Japanese. This part of Sunset used to be known for its gauche colors and crazy architecture. From giant billboards to hotels like The Grafton, to the old Washington Mutual building which looked like a neon green flying saucer that had crash landed and was held captive by shrubs, all Rebecca's landmarks had vanished. Their absence reminded her that this was not her L.A. and yanked her from somnolent feelings of nostalgia. Even as she gazed out across the bowl of Los Angeles to Rancho Palos Verdes, she realized that hardly anything she'd known had survived.

Gone was the patchwork effect of the city streets. From Malibu to Venice, a glistening three hundred-foot wall of metal and steel shrouded the once famous arc of beaches, probably meant to stave off another tsunami. Where planes had been queued in the air from Palm Springs and waiting to land at LAX, the skies were now empty except for the air tunnels she'd thought originally to be ribbons of light. Now she could see the cars shooting through the translucent tubes heading towards the valley. Slums on a scale beyond imagination sprawled in the area she'd known as
west of the 405
, encompassing Inglewood, Compton, Hawthorne and slummier points east.

So many things had changed, from the little to the large. Back at the safe house she'd compared her predicament to Twain's famous book,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
. Rebecca realized now she'd had it backwards. She hadn't gone back in time. She'd essentially gone forward. Like all of those B-movies she'd watched on cable as she'd grown up, she'd stepped in a machine and stumbled out twenty years into the future.

Only her machine had been a place called prison.

Rebecca shook her head and appraised her fellow passengers. They seemed like the usual bunch of POD people living their life elsewhere, mixed with some regular folk and some not so regular. A boarder leaned against the rail near the exit door. When his eyes met hers, he grinned.

She elbowed Andy and pointed at the boarder.

"Yeah," he whispered. "They're gonna be watching out for us for awhile. When you get a chance, look behind you. The one who's looking at you is Scoundrel. He's the one who helped me yesterday. The one behind you is Pony. You've already met."

She stared at Scoundrel for several moments, noting his colors and his rail thin frame. Of Hispanic origin, his olive skin was weather-worn and creased, like the skin of a much older man. Rebecca wondered what his motivation was. Why would he volunteer to be a server? It couldn't just be the free drugs. Well, it
could
, she admitted to herself, but she couldn't believe it was that simple. She smiled to acknowledge him, but he'd already looked away.

The bus stopped and a voluptuous young woman stepped aboard. Every seat was filled, so she slid down the aisle, then languished near where Rebecca sat. The young woman wore a sleek silver body suit that fit like a second skin. As she grasped the overhead bar, many of the male passengers admired the way the fabric hugged her skin, shimmering from her neck, across her breasts, down her flat stomach and both legs. The scent of sweat and pumpkin spice wafted from her like it came from her breath.