Standing below their feet, I found myself at a loss for words. The two of them watched me, blinking slowly. Bryce scraped his chair to the center of his cell and sat down. Juliet spoke first.
“It’s been almost a year, Mom.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I stepped closer to her case and she winced like she wanted to scoot her chair backwards. “I haven’t been feeling well. The doctors had me on bedrest for three months.”
She frowned. “Your Baron’s? Is it under control?”
“It is now,” I lied. “Up and about for a couple days.” Juliet’s face softened and she pulled her chair to the glass. “Do you know what’s been going on outside?” Bryce leaned forward. The cells weren’t quite close enough together to have a normal conversation.
“Murders in Redmond. I heard children died.”
“Just one. But it’s bad. Things in the block are tense, the AMU is stepping up. I’m trying to find out what happened and resolve it.”
“You don’t know what happened? After Harriet, you really don’t know?”
“Nobody knows that. Not yet.”
Juliet scoffed and shook her head.
“I’m trying to get in touch with an engraver that supposedly worked on the android.”
“Harriet was never transferred here,” said Bryce. “The video didn’t go over?”
The prison had revoked our filming privileges after the incident. The footage we had was unusable. “No,” I sighed.
“I would have liked to see her.”
I looked at them both. “The truth is, Harriet is in trouble. She could be shut off within a year.” Bryce recoiled like I’d slapped him. “We’re doing everything we can to save her.”
“You had better be!” He stood up and put his hands on the glass. “You and Swan and all of them. She stood for everything you believe in. You can’t let that happen to her.”
“We are, I promise. We’ve got members of congress on our side. We’ll relocate her if we have to. Harriet is not going anywhere.”
Juliet sat, legs crossed, staring off at the white portal out of the exhibit hall.
“Someday, we’re all going to be back together,” I said. Her eyebrows raised but her gaze didn’t shift. “As long as I’m still around, I’ll fight for that.”
“Keep making promises you can’t keep, and people might stop putting stock in you, Grace.”
“Juliet.”
I waved him off. “It’s okay, Bryce.” I went to Juliet’s glass. “You know I regret nothing more than what I did to you. It kills me to see you two like this. Dancing and curtsying for them.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it is a dance anymore,” she said softly, softly enough that Bryce couldn’t hear. “The people that come here, they read our story, they meet us, and they ask about themselves. And I can’t help myself, I indulge them. I tell them their life is special, their love is real. If I ever get out of here…do I even want to be human again? Petty, self-absorbed things.”
“I hope you’ve held that in,” I said.
She finally looked at me, disgusted. “I wouldn’t put myself in jeopardy like that. If I go, Bryce is alone. I can’t do that to him.”
“I’m getting you out of here, I swear to God.”
—
The night before, an android had been murdered in Lomond. Sense video was published anonymously, showing the owner and his friends chasing an old-model Baird down an empty road. “Come back, frankie! Hey, come on back!” The Baird was fast, but clumsy. It glanced off a parked car and spun onto the ground. The car’s alarm went off. As the Baird began to get to its feet, one of the boys swung a metal pipe into its face. “Ohh!” groaned the cameraman. “Ohh, ohhh!” His foot appeared, to kick the android back down.
“Sir, you’re hurting me,” the android said.
“I’m hurting you?” He kicked again. “You don’t know what pain is, you shit.”
“This is for all of you frankies and bleeding-heart Animus faggots,” shouted one of them. The camera jolted up to him. He raised the pipe. “Stay off our street!” Little cogs and coolant and shards of plastic sprayed across the asphalt. The rounded cap of the skull cartwheeled off camera.
Swan couldn’t stop watching it. She sat across from me at the diner, shaking with rage as she rewound and replayed the crush. I was chain smoking. Four butts stood up in the ashtray. We were meeting with Swan’s Sons of Man contacts in Redmond, if they ever showed up.
“They’re half an hour late.”
She didn’t look up. “They’ll be here when they’re ready. Enjoy your cigarettes.”
“I have work to do today.” Out the window, a girl leaned over into a bike taxi.
“It wouldn’t be work around here, would it?” Swan was looking up at me now. I couldn’t come up with anything to say. She rolled her eyes and took the cigarette from my fingers. “You know, I did have my reasons for asking you not to play detective down here.”
“And I have mine.”
She took a long, choking drag. “These never work on me,” she said, and crushed the cherry with her thumb. “You need to accept that your personal time is private only to a point. People are watching us.”
“I think most people would want Animus involved in figuring this out.”
“You’re a little too at home in Redmond. Might start some talk about your motives.”
“You think I’m here on vacation?” Angry, I lit another.
“I wasn’t talking about myself.”
“Oh, please! I had to turn my back on Redmond to even think about working on Animus with you. You think I’m engraving again?” Quieter, “Jetting?”
“I’m only worried about the temptation, Grace. When you signed on with me, you agreed. It’s a toxic place for you.”
“It’s where I’m useful. Listen, I found some things out. There was an engraver involved. And he works for SAI. I think he caught a rap, and contracted out.”
Swan frowned, and stared through me.
“You didn’t want to hear that, I know.”
“Who did you get that from?”
“A contact.”
“‘A contact.’” She jabbed the ‘t.’
“We don’t know how direct his orders were, or even if he was ordered. All I know is we have access to SAI’s records and labs, and someone who can look into it for us.”
“Kyle?” Her eyes went wide. “You keep him out of this.”
“Kyle’s my employee.”
Again, Swan snapped the cigarette from my hand, and threw it down the far side of the table. It bounced off the window. “There’s not much I can do to keep you from running amok, Grace, but I won’t let you endanger him like this.” She stood up, hands on the table.
“Sit down.”
“Kyle’s not participating in your little investigation. Understand?”
“Sit down, and let’s discuss this.”
“I’m not sitting down!” she yelled.
“Swan.”
She looked around us at the people who had turned in their seats to watch. She sat down. “I’m sorry. This fucking video.”
“I know.”
“This is never going to be investigated. Unless it’s by people like us.”
“We aren’t giving Shinohara a pass on this. I’m contacting that engraver, Swan.”
Before Swan could argue, she got a look on her face and stood up again. “We’re not done,” she muttered. “Fame! Quill!”
I turned and saw the android who’d given Swan her gun. The name fit. Quill. A lanky, hangdog body. Olive vest, dark blue shirt and pants. “Finally, we meet,” he said. His voice was deep, maybe even modulated to shake my guts. “Grace Nguyen.”
“Gaban, now,” I said, shaking his hand. His touch was unnaturally smooth.
“We’ve been looking forward to a meeting.” Fame had been sculpted professionally, or perhaps by someone with more passion than that. Her features were elfin, otherworldly. She followed Swan down the booth, scooting with her, flirtatiously entering Swan’s bubble. When Swan looked confused, Fame laughed and returned to her side. She put a hand across the table for me. “It’s about time we sat down together, Grace.”
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I never would have thought I would be having this meeting.” I took her hand.
“That is a beautiful ring.”
I looked at it and rubbed the blue stone. “It is.”
“We have a lot to make up for, we know.”
A server approached our table. “Can I get you folks anything? Coffee?”
“No, thank you,” said Fame.
“Water?”
“Sure. No ice, please.”
Swan ordered a cup of tomato soup and a salad with no dressing. Quill ordered nothing. I took coffee and lit another cigarette.
“I won’t make excuses for our predecessors. What happened to you and your family is impossible to imagine or atone for. Even so, you should understand, that attack is one of our deepest regrets. Most of all, we regret not communicating with you. It could have prevented… many mistakes. You’re an ally the Sons should have reached out to decades ago. Your rescue the other day really drove that home.”
Swan cocked her head. “Rescue?”
“Grace stared down an AMU squad that was harassing one of our community leaders,” said Quill.
Swan got a disbelieving smile on her face.
“Jacob could be trapped inside a box right now, if not for Grace.” Fame sipped some water. Swan, still smiling, jabbed at her salad. “He told me you were impressed with our outreach.”
“Another thing I thought I’d never see,” I said. “How long have you been working here?”
“A couple years. We’ve only gotten the resources for a real operation recently, though. There’s several people in our organization who spend their time fundraising. You know how Redmond is. It’s a grassroots effort; far too difficult to secure state or federal funding. And there’s the AMU to contend with, as you saw.”
Swan gave me a look, and gave a small tilt of her head towards Fame.
“Animus works directly with a few members of congress. I may be able to lower the heat on your community workers.” Fame raised her eyebrows, and I felt Quill shift to look at me. “After the massacre, Redmond is back in the news. Support for work like yours may be a priority soon.”
“Our name is still a dirty word,” said Quill. “The only time we rate the national feeds is to stoke fear. It might be risky to call attention to our activity like that.”
I shook my head. “There’ll always be people who fear you. Showing people your good works is a net gain.”
“If you can get the AMU to back off our kiosks, it would be a great help,” said Fame. “That would be a good start. And once your government lines see what we do, it may set the stage for more productive cooperation.”
“It’ll be done. I have a meeting later today with two of our allies.”
She nodded in approval. “As long as we’re on the topic, what kind of relationship do you imagine having with the Sons?”
Swan didn’t speak up, and simply listened for my answer. “Look, at this point, everyone knows Sons of Man is a collection of cells, not a monolith. But there’s a baseline of suspicion still there. Even for me, all due respect. Ideologically, we’re in agreement. The relationship I imagine long-term is a partnership. Working together, we could get a lot done, but we need to be sure about you, and we need to be able to sell the connection.”
“That’s fair. For now, we’ll cooperate. Watch out for each other.”
“Good deal.”
Fame smiled. “Next item. The video.”
“Grace, you probably know it was filmed in your block,” said Quill.
The thought made me shudder. I had only watched the video once, but it was enough. The looks on the boys faces. The nauseous camera. “I know.”
“We’re trying to find the attackers in the video. Grace, you had planned a program to educate on sentients, before. Do you still have a line to Lomond’s schools?””
“What for?” I asked cautiously.
Fame spun a sugar packet on the table. “Right now, the police are withholding information because, they claim, some of the boys are minors. I don’t think they deserve that level of privacy.”
“We want names, biographies. We’ll make them known, we’ll make them hated. Without that kind of spark, the cops will bury the case and nobody will care.”
“You think we could change the course of the investigation? By law, their only crime is destruction of property.”
“That’s why we need to publicize them,” said Swan. “You show this video to anyone, and they’ll feel sick. People know this is about more than vandalism. They know killing an android is murder. Putting names to the faces brings this to a spot where people can demand action. Not against an abstraction like android murder, but against individual murderers.”
“And you hope the issue will evolve to addressing the real question.”
“Whether it works like that or not,” said Fame, “I want them to hurt for this.” Swan and Quill nodded at her.
Stargazer 