Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“I’ll call you later.”

“No need.”

“Well, tomorrow then.”

“Whatever.”

“No,” she heard Cohen saying as she walked off, in answer to some whispered question. “Just business.”

Li decided not to go, then changed her mind again at least eight times.

She told herself she was getting too old to follow her hormones everywhere they led her, and that her excuse for accepting the invitation—asking about Sharifi—was nothing short of pathetic. If she really wanted to blow off some steam, she’d be better off picking up some stranger in a bar than chasing after a woman that any sane person in her position would know enough to steer clear of.

In the end she arrived two minutes early and dithered on the doorstep wondering if she should buzz or just walk around until it was time. Just as she was telling herself it wasn’t too late to turn around and leave, Bella opened the door.

She wore white: a long fall of silk that flared around her ankles in the station’s low gravity. Somehow, Li was quite sure Haas had bought the dress for her.

“Are you sure he’s off-station?” she said, and cursed herself for asking.

Bella just smiled serenely, took the flowers Li had brought, and led her through a narrow door into the kitchen.

“He’s in Helena,” she said as she poured water into a vase for the flowers. “AMC managers’ meeting. It runs until the day after tomorrow. So…” She flicked her dark hair back and leaned over to cut the flower stems, baring the long pale line of her neck.

Li caught her breath. “So you’re a free woman,” she said, and bit her tongue again. She couldn’t put a foot right tonight.

“Free,” Bella repeated without a trace of a smile. “I have never understood what humans mean when they use that word.”

Dinner was good, though Li didn’t have much appetite. She felt like she was in a play, the stage already set, the lines already scripted. Eating Haas’s food on Haas’s china. And across the table, Haas’s… what? Mistress? Employee? Indentured servant? One thing was certain: this wasn’t headed for a happy ending.

Bella talked, mostly. She seemed desperate to talk, terrified of the charged silences that hung between them. She talked about her childhood, her schooling, her life before the contract. None of it was what Li had expected. She had expected one of those mythical constructs you heard about in OCS classes and mission briefings. Brilliant, single-minded, every speck of individuality trained and programmed and disciplined out of her from the instant her tank’s umbilical cords were severed. Instead, she heard a lonely young woman stranded a few hundred light-years from her home planet.

Bella described the same things Li had seen during the Syndicate Wars. Gestation tanks, crèches, study labs. But she described them as home, spoke in words that made Li wonder if she’d seen what was really there on Gilead, or just what she wanted to see.

“The night I came here was the first night I spent alone in my life,” Bella said. “I couldn’t shut my eyes. I heard voices, noises. I thought I’d gone mad.”

“Did it get easier?”

“No.”

“Then why stay?”

“It was my part.”

Li blinked, thrown back to the interrogation rooms on Gilead, to the D Series soldiers she had seen mouth those same words. My part , they always said, as if the phrase had been stamped into them. My part to serve. My part to kill. My part to die . She felt a sudden, unwilling kinship with Bella: a murky intuition that, war or no war, the Syndicate soldiers she’d spent nearly a decade killing were closer to her than the Ring citizens it was her duty to defend against them.

“How did you end up with Haas?” she asked, seizing on the first change of subject that came to mind.

“With—? Oh.” Bella’s eyes dropped. “It just… happened.”

“You make it sound like a spilled drink.”

“It’s in my contract.”

“Your contract requires—?” Li couldn’t bring herself to voice any of the possible endings to that question.

“The contract doesn’t require anything. But… he told me he would be displeased if I didn’t. And that if he were displeased, he would terminate the contract and ask for a replacement. I… I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t be one of those. Terminated.”

“Having an affair with your boss seems a little above and beyond the call of duty, Bella.”

“It’s not an affair,” Bella said sharply. When Li glanced up her face was flushed, furious. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m not… I’m not abnormal.”

Abnormal. Li considered the word and the peculiarly ominous ring it had coming from a Syndicate construct’s mouth. She wondered what the source of Bella’s shame was. That Haas was foreign, unplanned, male? All three things? “You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” she told Bella. “You’re a long way from home here. You wouldn’t be the first person in history who adapted to survive.”

“No,” Bella said. “You don’t understand. You can’t understand, coming from… where you come from. It was a privilege to be sent here. All of us who were chosen knew the risks, the hardships. Even the Ds. They told us it was the most important thing we would ever do for our home Syndicates. I can’t fail after that. No matter how bad it is.”

“And how bad is it?” Li asked.

Bella’s fork lay forgotten on her plate rim. She picked it up, made a halfhearted attempt to eat something, then gave up entirely. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was just now and then, at first. And Haas can be… very charming. Then I met Cory.”

She fell silent for the space of a few breaths, looking down at her plate. Li said nothing, reluctant to break the thread of the memory that gripped the woman. “He was a surveyor,” she continued. “Cory Dean. Is that Irish?”

Li nodded.

“I thought so. He was nice. He didn’t stare. And he talked to me. He’d tell me jokes while we worked, stories. Haas got it into his head that he was my lover. He never said anything, but he thought it. It was ridiculous, of course.” Her nose wrinkled in obvious distaste. “I didn’t want him. Not that way, at least. But I hadn’t lived with humans long enough to see how it looked.

“Cory was missing for days. They checked the whole station, the mine, Shantytown. Voyt found him.” Bella’s face twisted as if it hurt to say Voyt’s name. “Someone had beaten him. Stolen his credit chip and then just left him in the gutter. He drowned in his own blood. I didn’t know you could do that.”

Bella shifted in her chair. When she spoke again, her voice was as hard and unyielding as virusteel. “The Shantytown watch had him for days before they called the station; they thought he was just a drunk miner. They said he’d gotten in a fight, but Cory would never have done that. Still, they’d found witnesses somehow, people who were willing to say they’d seen him fighting. You don’t have to throw around much money in Shantytown to get people to say what you want.