Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Richard doesn’t find a Trojan horse in the code. Which doesn’t mean anything, really, except he didn’t find one.

And Valens never did give me my damned HCD back, which means I can’t call Razorface or Mitch and find out what the hell really happened to my sister. Ah, well. You’re in the army now, Jenny Casey. You’re in the army now.

0900 hours, Sunday 22 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Valens returns my hip when he signs the paperwork to check me out and tells me he’ll see me at work on Wednesday, no sooner. Simon paces nervously beside me to the revolving front door.

I won’t let him take my arm when he reaches for it. I didn’t walk into this damned hospital. Either time. But by God I am going to walk out under my own power. I’m leaning on a cane, it’s true. But I’m walking.

We pause by the big glass windows. Outside, pedestrians in white coats and scrubs click past with professional tunnel vision. He takes a breath. “Jenny, I—”

“Save it, Simon. You were going to say you’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

I look up at him. I actually can’t tell the difference between my left and right side vision anymore. That’s taken some getting used to. “It’s… well, it’s not all right. But I’m over it.” I’m not, really. But let he without sin, and all that… or maybe I’m just too tired to care.

He looks down at the backs of his hands and then leans forward. And then he kisses me lightly, dryly on the cheek. “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” he says. “I’m going back to Hartford. Call me if you need anything. Ever, all right?”

“I will,” I tell him, and clap him lightly on the shoulder before I turn and walk out into the street.

Living in hotels gets old pretty fast, but it’s a fair sight better than living in hospitals. At sunset, I’m rereading the same screen of a detective novel for the third time, my brain failing to accept the information. My phone rings. I wave my hand through the contact pad, hoping it’s Mitch returning one of my half-dozen calls. If he doesn’t call me back soon, I’m going to have to find some other way to get the information about Unitek and the illegal drug testing onto the street. There has to be a way.

The image that materializes over the pad is Elspeth. “Jenny. You checked out of the hospital.”

“Valens released me this morning. I’m—” back at the hotel, I start to say, which is stupid because she called me. “On my own recon until Wednesday morning.”

“You should have called Gabe or me and let us know you were free. Fortunately, I figured out where to find you. Have you eaten anything yet?”

So much for my wallow. “Not yet.” I put my HCD aside and stand up. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”

“We’ll pick you up.” She grins. “We have things to celebrate, after all. Oh. Dress up.”

She cuts the connection, and I’m left blinking at the brief afterimage that flickers before the phone shuts off. Dress up. I have some clothes I bought to wear to the research lab — slacks and sweaters, mostly. I haven’t owned a skirt in nigh on thirty-five years, and when I go to the closet to try to find something presentable, I realize that I have a choice between grunge, a royal purple cashmere cowlneck and khakis, or the two dress uniforms that have somehow materialized in my closet, new and pressed.

Gee, Fred, thanks. I don’t think so.

Fifteen minutes later I’m showered and changed and picking lint off the turtleneck, settling a blazer over my shoulders. I look up and almost jump back out of it, catching the reflection of a stranger in the big wall of mirrors by the corridor door. “Damn. Lights.”

The woman looking back at me is a stranger indeed. Her hair has grown out into a sort of boyish bob, steel black, silvering bangs falling across her forehead. They mostly hide the places where smooth, paler skin blends into her tanned medium-brown hide. The skin on the left side of her face, near the hairline, is oddly mottled, like a frog’s.

It’s all that remains of my scars. I wonder if it’ll fade.

I step closer to the mirror in the brightened hallway light, a vertical line creasing my brow. I take a breath and then another, feeling strange. If I turned my head to look at this woman on the street, it would be because of her bearing — because she is tall, and stern as the iron color of her hair. It would be because of the stubborn military shoulders and the chipped flint of an unmistakably Iroquois nose, the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. I might not even notice the glittering steel of her left hand until she moved it in my line of sight.

I stuff my left hand into my pocket just to see what I can pass for, and my fingers brush something my new senses tell me is smooth and round. It rattles, and I know what it is before I pull it out.

A vial of pills.

“Hah.” The plastic shape prickles my senses. I glance at the clock. Gabe and Elspeth won’t be here for another fifteen minutes. I think about laser-clarity. About calmness, and certainty, and the fact that I’m going to have to sit at a table with the two of them and eat and talk like we’re normal human beings. Richard?

No answer.

I stand there for a long moment, looking from the vial to the mirror and back again. And then I put the pills back in my pocket, hang the blazer back in the closet — carefully, so it will be unwrinkled for work on Wednesday — and dig around in the back of the closet for my scarred and terrible old black leather jacket. With the buckles replacing the worn-out zipper, and the third or fourth lining. I put the holster back on the hanger when it falls off. My sidearm is still in the hotel safe. I can’t carry it here, in Canada.

I shrug stiffly into the elderly jacket and let it hang open over my expensive, breath-soft sweater — a color the queen I was named for might have worn. I rake my fingers through my hair, and it feathers back across my forehead almost like it was meant to. “Well, huh.”

I look — normal. Hell. In fact, except for the tough-girl jacket—

I look like Maman.

There will be time for the pills tomorrow, if I need them. By Wednesday, I expect I will. In the meantime, I pour a glass of bourbon and sit down by the window to wait for my friends.

9:45 A.M., Tuesday 31 October, 2062

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Razorface set the cat carrier down on the passenger seat of the rusted blue Bradford and swore, still leaning half in and half out of the cab. “Fuck, Boris, I don’t know what the hell else to do. Where to go. You got any ideas, man?”

The cat purred and bumped his scarred orange face against the grille of the carrier, pushing his lip up over the chipped tip of a tooth. That chipped tooth reminded Razor of Derek, which made him frown, but Derek had things more or less under control in Hartford even if he’d made it pretty plain that Razorface’s presence was no longer required.

There had been a lot of blood already. Razor wasn’t ready to make any more of it, just so he could set himself up as some kind of petty warlord again. Even if some of his boys were still loyal. Derek— Whiny, and he chuckled silently at Maker’s name for the boy — was a hell of a lot younger. And this kind of shit was a young man’s game. ‘Cause it turned out that you could do your level best, and there was always a bigger dog one block over, and you hadda be a young dog to take the pounding and come back, and come back, and come back.

Besides, if Derek was taking care of the city, Razor could retire. And start seeing to the serious business of getting to whoever was behind Maker’s sister, and list of deaths too long to scratch on the inside of his arm.