Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“You have me.”

She closed her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want, Cohen. I lost it years ago.”

“I didn’t fall in love with that child you’re so scared of remembering,” Cohen said after a long silence. “I fell in love with you.”

“There’s no such person,” Li said, and pulled her hand away.

Night had fallen. There was no light, no movement in the open space of the dome below them. A light flared overhead, flashing across the sky like a shooting star, and it took Li a moment to realize that the light was there beside her; Cohen had picked up his lighter and was fidgeting absentmindedly, passing Ramirez’s fingers back and forth above the blue flame.

“I’ll call it off,” he said. “I’ll tell Korchow you can’t do it. I’ll figure out how to make him believe it.”

Li laughed bitterly. “You think this is a bridge game? You do that, and he’ll kill me.”

“No. No. I’ll take care of it.”

“There are some things you can’t take care of, Cohen.”

“Then what?” he asked, his words muffled by a fierce gust of rain outside.

“We go forward. We make the intraface work and we go through with it. And when it comes to the point —the real breaking point—we do whatever the hell it takes to walk out alive. Can you do that?”

“Can you?”

“I can damn well try.”

“All right, then.”

A drop of rain slipped through a cracked panel seal and fell next to Li with a sharp plink. She leaned over, stubbed her cigarette out in the water, and smeared it around into a dirty, sooty mess.

“Catherine?” Cohen touched her shoulder, as if to turn her attention to him.

She looked around. He was close, very close, and he sat so still it was hard to believe Ramirez’s heart was beating.

He touched her cheek, and she felt his fingers slide across drying tears. Then he curved a hand around the nape of her neck, and drew her head down onto his shoulder.

She relaxed into his arms, letting her body shape itself to his, letting her breathing slow to match his. A safe comfortable warmth spread through her. She was tired of hiding, she realized. Tired of fighting. Just tired.

Gradually, so gradually she didn’t at first notice it, the comfortable warmth gave way to a different kind of warmth. She began to notice Cohen’s particular smell—or Ramirez’s smell. She began to feel, through the link, how she smelled to him. The sensation of his fingers on the back of her neck took on a new focus and urgency. An image took shape in her mind: herself, raising her head, parting her lips, offering her mouth to him. Did it come from her mind or his? Was it her desire or his she felt? Did it matter?

“Cohen,” she said, but her voice sounded so blurred and muffled in her ears that it seemed as if a stranger were speaking.

He raised her face toward his, brushed away a last tear, ran a soft fingertip along the curve of her upper lip. He looked at her. A soft, defenseless, questioning look. A look that demanded an answer.

The blanket swished in the airlock and someone stepped into the room, moving quickly. Cohen pulled away. Li looked down, her pulse hammering in her ears, and saw Bella staring up at them.

“Korchow wants you,” Bella said. Li could see her eyes shifting back and forth between them. “He wants to try another run.”

She knew where she was going when she slipped out of the safe house that night, even though she didn’t admit it to herself.

It was embarrassing really to see how little her life had changed her. She was still hiding, still lying to herself, still playing the same games she’d played in these streets as a scabby-kneed ten-year-old.

Don’t walk in front of a black cat or a white dog. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Throw salt over your shoulder and the mine whistle won’t blow . And, of course, the main rule, the unbreakable one. Don’t admit what you want, even to yourself, or you’ll never ever get it.

She couldn’t believe she found the house. It unnerved her to see her own feet take her there as if this street, this turning, this particular crooked alley, were etched into her body with something more tenacious than memory. The way seemed so natural, so familiar in the darkness that she wasn’t sure she would have known it in daylight. Why was it that she only seemed to have walked this street after dark? How many times had she half-run past these doors, eyes riveted on her hurrying feet lest she look up and accidentally see some terrible sight that would stop her heart before she made it to dinner on the table and the lights of home? And how many of those times had been after she was already working underground and far too old to be scared of the dark? Or at least too old to admit it to herself.

The alley took a last turning and dumped her out into a narrow laundry yard. If she’d stopped and looked around, she might have lost the thread of memory she was following. She didn’t. She kept her head down, crossed the yard, and turned in to the third doorway as unerringly as a homing pigeon. There was a light switch, a lot lower on the wall than she remembered it. She pressed it. No light.

She climbed the stairs in the dark, hearing their familiar creak underfoot, and stopped on the third floor, just under the steep roof. A final half flight of stairs ended in a roof door marked EXIT. Its viruflex panel shed a little light onto the landing, enough for her to see the crate of empty milk and beer bottles that had always stood by the door of the apartment. And there, propped up against the far wall, a bicycle that she could swear she remembered riding.

‹Where are you?› Cohen asked, popping into her head suddenly and shockingly.

She grimaced. She hadn’t wanted him to know about this. ‹None of your business,› she told him.

‹Korchow’s looking for you.›

‹I’m busy.›

‹Doing what?›

‹If I wanted you to know, I would have told you. Now leave me alone. And I mean it this time.›

A suspiciously long pause. Then, ‹All right. Just don’t do anything stupid.›

Someone walked overhead with heavy, flat-footed steps, and Li spun around to face the roof door. It opened, letting in a gust of wet, fecund air. A man in street clothes and bedroom slippers shuffled past Li and down the next flight of stairs, staring at her all the while with a flat, suspicious look on his face. He had a freshly strangled capon tucked under one arm and a small splash of blood on his sleeve where he’d cut himself, or the bird, in the plucking. Li watched him until she heard a door close behind him a few flights below. Then she turned, stared at the door for a minute, and knocked.

A latch opened, and a chain clinked on the other side of the door. A finger’s breadth of lamplight spilled onto the landing. A thin, Irish-pale face pressed itself to the crack in the door.

Relief and disappointment battled in Li’s heart. Not her. Too young. “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins,” she said.

The girl shifted, and Li caught a glimpse of a baby riding her hip. “What are you selling, then? Oh, never mind, we don’t want it.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

The girl opened the door another few centimeters and looked Li over. “Oh,” she said, and her voice sounded like a door shutting. “Cops.”

“Is she here?”

“No.”

“Where then?”

The girl hesitated. Li could see her weighing the risk of personal trouble against the certainty that Li would find Mirce even if she didn’t help her. “Try the Molly.”

Li heard herself laugh nervously. The Molly Maguire. Of course. Where else would half the Irish-Catholic population of Shantytown be a few hours before midnight mass on a rainy Saturday night?