Chris Moriarty - Spin State

But now she was seeing it through Cohen’s eyes. She felt Roland’s knees tremble and his breath quicken. And she felt something else behind the organic interface, something cleaner, sharper, truer. As if an infinitely complex mechanism had come into alignment, bolts sliding, tumblers clicking and turning over, locking in on her looking back at him, wanting him, making him real. On the dizzying, exhilarating, precisely calculated certainty that nothing, once she touched him, would ever be the same again.

Christ, she thought. What did I do to him? Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?

But she had known how he felt, hadn’t she? Why else had she been so unbearably, unforgivably cruel to him?

She jerked back into the present and saw Cohen sitting on the bench looking up at her, holding his breath like a child who still believed you could make dreams come true just by wanting them hard enough. It was the same look she remembered from that night—and God help her if some awful part of her didn’t still want to slap it off his face.

He blinked, and her stomach clenched with shame as she realized he’d caught the edge of that thought.

“You’re a very confused person,” he said.

“It took you six years and a fortune in wetware to figure that out?”

“No. It took me five minutes.” He smiled. “It just didn’t seem polite to mention it before now.”

Something tickled at the back of her mind like the soft trailing ends of fingers. She realized she’d been feeling those fingers for a while. All the time she’d been exploring the sun-drenched garden of Hyacinthe’s memory palace, there had been a little cat-footed thief prowling through the dark passages of her own subconscious, probing her memories, weighing her responses, taking the measure of her own feelings. A little sock-footed soccer-shorts-wearing thief is more like it , she thought.

“I won’t have you sneaking around inside my head,” she told him. “I won’t have your prying.”

“Prying? And what do you think you’re doing here?”

“That’s different. I have to be here. It’s not personal.”

“Isn’t it?” He bit his lip and looked up at her through Hyacinthe’s dark lashes. “This is as personal as it gets, Catherine. And it doesn’t go one way. The link won’t work until you accept that.”

“Then I guess it won’t work,” she said.

She turned away, meaning to leave—and found herself tangled in one of the long suckers that arched out from the rose thicket. “God dammit!” she muttered, trying to pull it off her and only managing to gouge the razor-sharp thorns into her arm through the thin fabric of her shirtsleeve.

That was when she smelled Gilead.

What had Cohen said about finding in the memory palace what you brought to it? This was one memory she’d certainly brought in with her. A copy of her own UNSC datafile.

It was Gilead, sharp and real as if it were happening all over again. There was the mud, the filth, the constant, stomach-wrenching, soul-killing fear. There were the faces of dead friends she no longer remembered grieving for. There were the bodies of soldiers—and not only soldiers, God help her—that she hadn’t until this very moment remembered killing.

Because this wasn’t the edited spinfeed stored in her datafiles. It was the Gilead of her fears and nightmares and jump-dreams. It was the real Gilead: the original realtime feed that she’d recorded all those years ago. Somehow Cohen had accessed a file Li herself wasn’t cleared to look at, a file that should have been lying dormant in the deadwalled UNSC headquarters archives. And this file was different from the official memory. Different in ways she didn’t want to think about.

When she saw Korchow’s young, bloodied face looking up at her, when she heard herself saying those words he’d reminded her of back in the cluttered shadows of his antique shop, she broke and ran.

Has it occurred to you that this might not work?” Cohen asked Korchow a moment later. Li slumped in a chair, drenched in nightmare sweat, unwilling even to look at him.

“Try again.”

“God, look at her, Korchow. She’s had it.”

“One more time.”

“You keep pushing, she’ll break.”

“She’s strong enough.”

“You really are a fool, aren’t you?”

Korchow didn’t answer. After a moment Li heard the rustle of cloth and the sound of Cohen’s chair scraping against the floor as he stood up. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, and left.

“Why do you think he protects you?” Korchow asked.

“Guilt,” Li said without looking up. “Or he just feels like it. How the hell should I know?”

“Do you think a machine can feel guilt?” Korchow asked. “I would have said no.” Li didn’t answer.

“I begin to wonder if you two are holding out on me,” Korchow murmured. “And when I ask myself why you would do such a thing, I find I can imagine far too many reasons.”

“I’m not holding out on you, and you damn well know it.”

“Then why is it that you can’t seem to manage this relatively simple task?”

“I don’t know,” Li whispered, her head still in her hands. “Maybe it can’t be done.”

“Sharifi did it.”

“I’m not Sharifi.”

Korchow tapped through a few screens on the console in front of him. Just when Li thought their conversation had come to an end, he spoke again. “I talked to Cartwright this morning. The UN has sent in strikebreaking troops. We’re running out of time.”

Li looked up at him dully.

“I’m sure you understand what failure will mean, for you most of all.”

“I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said, and pushed herself to her feet. The last thing she saw as she walked out was Korchow’s narrow stare.

She stepped to the street door, opened it and looked out into the alley. It was raining again, hard enough to set the loose roof plates of the nearby houses rattling.

Korchow hadn’t actually locked her in since Alba, but there was an unspoken agreement that no one would create unnecessary risks of discovery. And where was there to go anyway? Certainly nowhere worth braving the stinging chemical rain to get to. She closed the door, turned back down the hall, and walked into the open space of the geodesic dome.

Standing under the dome was almost like being outside; it was the one place in the safe house where she didn’t feel cramped and constricted. Today it felt like stepping into an aquarium. Rain pattered on condensation-loaded panels. The evening light, filtered through wet viruflex, took on a soft, velvety, underwater quality. Li rubbed her eyes, stretched, sighed.

“Enter the love of my life, stage left,” said a voice from somewhere high overhead. She looked up and saw Ramirez’s long legs dangling from the catwalk that circled the upper flank of the dome. “Come sit with me,” Cohen said.

There was a ladder bolted into the side panels of the dome, she realized. The rungs started out vertical then curved back along the flank of the dome until they finally inverted completely a dozen meters above Cohen’s head. The ladder was meant to be fitted with a climbing rig, but whatever equipment came with it had long ago been cannibalized and put to use somewhere else in Shantytown. How Cohen had gotten up there she didn’t want to think. He probably had only the most theoretical understanding of what happened to people who fell from that kind of height. “I don’t know if I can make it up there,” she said.

“Of course you can. A little exercise will improve your outlook on life.”

She snorted. “You sound like Korchow.”