“He wasn’t your friend. He was a spy and an assassin. He was here to kill us. That cave of his? He picked it as shelter for when he set the pocket nuke off. The mountain was a landmark for his evacuation team.”
“That isn’t true.”
He took her arm just above the shoulder. His grip was tight enough to pinch. “You missed your tutorial this morning. We’ll make it up now. You need to learn something.”
The security offices of the State Building were familiar to her. They were offices like any other branch’s, except for the occasional reinforced door and blast-resistant lock. There were cells there for political prisoners, though she didn’t know if anyone was in them besides James Holden. The forensics lab, however, was new. It was a wide room with a high ceiling and movable partitions that could seal off a section and keep its atmosphere separate. Fume hoods with waldoes and blast-resistant glass lined one wall. The tables that filled the center of the room had aisles between them wide enough for specialized tool carts—chemical, biological, electronic, computational—to be wheeled to wherever they were needed. Half a dozen people stood at the workstations. And on them, Timothy’s things. The carved wood tools. The cot. The cases and boxes that had been his. Even one of the repair drones that had apparently been damaged somewhere in the violence lay on a table, the size and rough profile of a dead animal.
Ilich cleared the room so they would be alone. The technicians left, trying not to be obvious in the ways they stared at Teresa. She saw the curiosity in their faces. What was the high consul’s daughter doing there? What did it mean? The weight of their interest was like a hand on her shoulders, pressing down.
When they were alone, Ilich put her on a technician’s stool and brought a data storage core over. She recognized it from Timothy’s cave, though she hadn’t thought about it much at the time. Ilich synced a monitor, pulled up a file directory, and stepped back, gesturing to it as if to say, Go ahead. Look.
Teresa found she didn’t want to.
“Start with the notes files,” Ilich said. “Let’s see how much Timothy was your friend.”
The notes were dates and times. At first, she didn’t see any pattern in them, but the notations with the entries had a security note from the forensic tech. When she opened it, Timothy’s entries matched the security logs for those dates. He’d been watching the State Building’s guards. Working out their patterns and habits. Looking for a hole. And he’d been tracking James Holden. Those records were more scattered, because Holden had less of a pattern. He’d drifted through the buildings and gardens as he saw fit, and Timothy—Amos, his name was Amos—had marked every time Holden came in sight of his watching post on the mountain.
Once she’d gotten through the notes file, she didn’t stop. She opened a tactical maps file and recognized the architecture of the city, of the State Building. A series of files showed blast radii of a small nuclear device. If it were planted at the wall. If it were set off in the city. If it had been smuggled into the State Building. Each one had notes speculating on deaths, on infrastructure degraded. She opened a file called “evacuation protocol.” Topographical maps showed a primary evac site close to where she’d met him the first time and a secondary a day’s hike away, with notes Timothy—Amos—had added about what parts of the visible defense grid would have to be taken out for each site to be practical.
Here is how he would have killed us. Here is how he would have left. Here is the man he came to save, here are the people he came to destroy. She waited for the rage to come back. She expected it. Instead, she thought of James Holden. If he said he was your friend, then he was.
“Do you see now?” Ilich said. “Do you see what he was?”
All these plans to kill her and her father. To slaughter them all. You should lie down on the floor there. Flat as you can. Put your hands over your ears, okay? Were those the words you said to someone you wanted to kill?
“I understand,” she lied. “I do.”
Ilich shut off the monitor. “Then we’re done here.”
He took her arm again and led her away. She hadn’t seen him order up food, but when they got back to her rooms, it was waiting for her. A thick, white protein slurry like they fed to sick people. A steak of vat-grown meat seared black at the surface and warm pink in the center. Eggs. Cheese and fruit. Sweet rice with flakes of dried fish. It was all on a metal tray with a fork and dull knife. Muskrat trotted in, but caught the sense that something was wrong. When Ilich held his hand out, offering to scratch her ears, she ignored him and went to sit on Teresa’s feet instead.
“Now then,” Ilich said. “Eat your meal. Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow, you will be on time for your lesson. We will be in the east garden where everyone on staff can see us, and you will act as if everything were normal. Do you understand?”
“I don’t want to eat this. I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t care. You’re going to eat now.”
She looked at the food in front of her. Reluctantly, she picked up the fork. She remembered something from an old film she’d seen about a girl in Sol system. On Earth. “I don’t have to do this. Body autonomy is written into the constitution.”
“Not ours it isn’t,” Ilich said. “You will eat this now, while I sit here and watch you. Then we will sit for another hour while you digest it. Or else I will call in Dr. Cortázar with a funnel and tube, and we force you. Am I understood?”
Teresa took a forkful of the steak and put it in her mouth. Intellectually, she knew it tasted good. When she swallowed, Ilich nodded.
“Again,” he said.
After he left, Teresa didn’t move. She just sat on her couch, feeling the weight in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten a meal that large in weeks, and it left her feeling bloated and wrong. Muskrat sensed that something was off, and put her wide, furry head on Teresa’s lap, looking up at her with complex brown eyes.
Teresa put on a feed. The same one she’d watched as a child. The nameless Martian girl and the fairy named Pinsleep. Familiar images washed over her, bringing something close to comfort. A sense of predictability, at least. She knew that at the end, the nameless girl would escape fairyland. That she’d go back to Innis Deep and her family. That in the last scene, she’d pack away all her girlhood toys and leave for upper university and an adult life. That was the sign that she’d won. She was free to make any life she wanted, and not be a prisoner of the elves.
She lay down on the couch, resting her head on a pillow. The girl was taken in by Pinsleep again, and ran, and fought to escape. And escaped. Teresa started it again from the beginning.
Prisoners and their dilemmas. She let the images play and took up her handheld. In her notes, she found Ilich’s old diagram.
TERESA COOPERATES TERESA DEFECTS
JAS
ON COOPERATES T3, J3 T4, J0