Chris Moriarty: Spin Control

Cohen and Turner were still waiting, though Arkady had no idea what for. It was bitterly cold. Arkasha didn’t have a coat and was shivering where he stood. Arkady began to say something to Gavi about it—but then he realized that no one seemed to have a coat and that a lot of people were shivering, himself included.

“Go,” Gavi whispered at last, responding to some signal Arkady had missed.

Arkady stepped forward toward the Palestinian side of the courtyard, shuddering when one of the Enderbots’ laser sights played across his leg. He and Arkasha crossed paths just beside the snow-stilled fountain, each of them staring sideways at the other. By the time Arkady realized he could have put a hand out to touch Arkasha, the moment had passed and they were each alone again behind their own line of Enders.

Turner made his move as soon as Arkady and Arkasha were out of the line of fire. He caught Yusuf’s attention with a brusque flick of his big hand. “You have what you came here to get,” he told him. “Now do what you promised to do.”

Something flickered in Arkady’s peripheral vision. When he looked toward the movement, he saw that Yusuf had drawn a gun, and it was leveled at Gavi’s head.

A quiver ran down the line of Enders as one rifle after another rose to track the two men.

“No!”

The word echoed through the courtyard in a voice that Arkady only recognized as Gavi’s when he realized that Gavi had put his own body between Yusuf and the Israeli Enders.

Gavi and Yusuf faced each other in the snow, as isolated as the last two pawns left on a chessboard before checkmate.

Yusuf cocked his weapon.

“It was supposed to be Ash,” Yusuf said sadly. “You weren’t supposed to be here. How could Didi have made such a mistake?”

For Cohen, the few seconds that Yusuf stood poised to shoot encompassed an eternity.

An eternity in which he had ample time to wonder where Ash was and if the promised backup was ever coming. An eternity in which he had ample time to take the measure of everything he owed Gavi—and everything he had done to insulate himself from Gavi’s rightful demands on him. He sent a query snaking through the Enders’ now fatally compromised gamespace, regretting the loss of router/decomposer more bitterly than ever. The Enders were a mess, trapped in a fugue state that reduced a dozen human soldiers and all of EMET’s brilliant command and control algorithms to a malfunctioning synthetic weapons platform. Gavi’s GOLEM was chaos…but a chaos that was rapidly tuning itself toward criticality.

Cohen cast a tentative datastream across the firewall and recoiled in horror. He poised on the brink of commitment, in a state of what would have been shivering hesitation if he’d had the spare bandwidth to make poor Roland’s long-suffering body tremble.

But as Cohen hesitated, Yusuf steadied his gun with firing range precision, whipped his slender body around, and shot Turner dead.

Turner’s bodyguard reached for his gun, but Osnat put a bullet through his head before he could even unholster it. And suddenly the Enders were on the move. Everyone was on the move.

But the two men remained still at the center of the storm, staring at each other.

No, Cohen corrected himself. Not two men. A man and a boy.

And then he saw it. That something around the mouth that you wouldn’t notice unless you knew you were looking for it, and that you couldn’t not notice once you’d seen it. And those extraordinary green eyes that were nothing like Gavi’s eyes…but exactly like the eyes of a woman at whose wedding Cohen and Didi Halevy and Walid Safik had all danced twenty-five years ago.

Yusuf glanced down at the gun in his hand and blinked as if he’d just remembered it.

“I’d better be going,” he said. “Our Enders will take Arkady across the Line. Korchow will be waiting for him on the other side.”

He retreated to the gate and paused to take a last look back into the courtyard. The snow had started up again; a faint shroud of white dusted the boy’s bare head and glittered in his eyelashes.

“Joseph,” Gavi said.

Yusuf’s eyes locked onto Gavi’s.

“Tell your father…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just tell him thank you.”

Yusuf smiled. “Call it a gift from Absalom.”

He stepped into the stormbound street. In two steps he was just another anonymous pedestrian hurrying along under the swirling snow. Then the gate swung closed behind him and he was gone.

Arkady slipped into the shadows of the house behind Arkasha, moving on feet that were suddenly sure and silent. He’d seen Arkasha duck into the house in the stunned instant when everyone’s eyes were on Gavi and Yusuf, and he’d known that this would be their best and only chance to speak to each other. He felt that he’d rehearsed this moment, that he’d known in his heart he would face some test in the crumbling rooms of the old house.

“Hurry!” Arkasha whispered. “There’s no time. Everything’s gone wrong. I can’t explain. Just take your clothes off. We’re to switch, and Korchow has a plan to get them to trade you back once they realize they’ve got the wrong man.”

Arkady knelt on the dusty floor in front of Arkasha. He noticed now that Arkasha’s hair was longer than usual and had been ruffled into a fair imitation of Arkady’s cowlicked mop. And he was rough-shaven just as Arkady was. And he’d put on a good ten kilos and even gotten some sun somewhere between now and the last time they’d laid eyes on each other. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make Arkasha and Arkady look alike.

He could have laughed. All Korchow had to do was ask him; he could have told him perfectly well that no human would look closely enough to see the minute differences between them.

But Korchow would have known that. Just as Korchow must have known that he didn’t have to send Arkasha…any Arkady would do.

Korchow has a plan.

Arkasha’s hands were at Arkady’s collar, fumbling with the unfamiliar buttons. He put his own hand up to force Arkasha’s into stillness.

“Arkasha—”

“Shh. Hurry.”

“Korchow has a plan? Or you do?”

Arkasha silenced Arkady with a kiss. His cheek was rough with stubble, but his lips were as smooth and cold as the snow outside the walls. “Don’t ask,” he whispered against Arkady’s lips. “If you don’t know, you can’t get in trouble for it.”

Arkady returned the kisses, but his hands and his heart felt deathly cold. “Why?” he asked. “All you have to do is walk out that door and you’re free. No more renorming ever again. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Not alone.”

Arkasha’s lips were on Arkady’s, his arms were around him. But it was no good; knowing it was the last time made it worse, not better.

He put his hands on Arkasha’s chest and pushed him back to arm’s length. “If you go back,” he said harshly, “you’ll end up on the euth ward. Not tomorrow, maybe. Not next month or next year. But sometime.”

He said it without thinking, but as soon as he spoke the words he saw the truth in them. There was something human about Arkasha. Arkady could see it clearly now, with his new, hard-won knowledge of humans. The men who had built Earth’s cathedrals and cured her diseases and discovered her continents must have shared Arkasha’s very human virtues. But they were virtues of Earth, not space. And humans had eaten all the fat and left only the lean, and there was no room for people like Arkasha. Except, perhaps, on Earth.

He stared into Arkasha’s eyes, steeling himself for the lie that was all he had left to offer him. It was funny how Arkady had always thought that he was the weak one, and Arkasha the strong one. In fact Arkasha wasn’t strong at all. Just brittle. If you knew where to push you could knock him right over.