“With the rich and powerful, always a little patience,” she said. The guards stood away and let them through. There was a little pop when the door opened, and the air pushed in with them. Inside, the next set of security protocols blasted them with air and scanned every millimeter of their bodies before the inner door opened.
Inside, the Pen was almost more reassuring. It looked like the kind of lab she’d been in for decades, on and off, at half a dozen universities and research institutions. Safety procedures were posted on the wall in bright fonts and six languages. The air smelled of phenol soap and air scrubbers.
“Come on,” Ochida said with a smile. “I’ll walk you over.”
Don’t get comfortable, Elvi told herself. This isn’t your home court. You aren’t safe here.
“I just had the most interesting conversation,” Fayez had said back on the day she’d first been assigned her task.
“I could say the same. But mine’s classified, so why don’t you go first.”
“Well, he was being awfully cagey. But I think our old friend Holden just told me Cortázar’s plotting murder.”
Elvi had laughed because it was a statement too horrifying to match the pleasant setting, and sometimes being overwhelmed was kind of funny. “I’m not sure I can deal with that right now,” she said. And then, “Did he really?”
Fayez shrugged. “No, he didn’t. He very carefully and specifically didn’t. We had a perfectly lovely conversation about the importance of teaching children about negative space as a tool of political analysis. Then we talked about everyone at the head of the science effort except Cortázar while he made significant eye contact. And then made a weird segue into the history of political power struggles on old Earth, with a focus on Richard the Third.”
“That’s… obscure.”
“Not that obscure. Shakespeare wrote a play about him.”
“What was it called?”
“Richard the Third,” Fayez said. “Are you feeling all right?”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. He was warmer than usual, but it wasn’t strange to run a low-grade fever when a limb was regrowing. “I wasn’t a theater major, and I’ve had a long day. What was the point of it?”
“Richard was an asshole and killed a bunch of people, but specifically a couple of kids. Heirs to the throne or something.”
“You weren’t a theater major either.”
“I was not.”
Far above them, a thin sheet of clouds moved across the stars, blotting some and revealing others. She wanted to close her eyes and fall asleep right there and wake up in their shitty apartment back on Ceres before she’d ever heard of Laconia or Duarte at all. All the things she’d learned, all the money and status and discovery could vanish like a dream, and she’d still have been happy as long as all the rest of it went too.
“So negative space and then everyone but Cortázar, and a king who killed some kids.”
“Well, technically a prince who clawed his way to power by killing some kids. I think.”
“Spiffy,” she said.
“Wasn’t Cortázar one of the ones that worked for Protogen back before Eros?”
“Back during Eros,” Elvi said.
“I’m just saying it wouldn’t be his first time.”
“He created the catalyst,” Elvi said. “For me. Doesn’t mean I’m a murderer.”
“Yeah,” Fayez said, but he knew she was thinking, Except that it kind of does. That was what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.
He sighed, shifted, and put an arm around her. “I may have been reading more into it than was there. It just seemed strange and kind of pointed.”
“He meant something by it,” Elvi said. “Maybe not what you got, exactly. But something.”
“You’re thinking about tracking him down and asking him?”
“I am.”