C. Cherryh - Cyteen

He waited the few seconds until Ari deliberately passed her eye across him, a silent summons; she seemed to say something dismissing Giraud, because Giraud looked back too, then left.

Ari waited.

"What's this about Grant?" Justin asked when he was face to face with her.

"I need him," Ari said, "that's all. He's a Special geneset, he's relevant to what I'm working on, and I need him now, that's all. Nothing personal."

"It is." He lost control of his voice, seventeen and facing a woman as terrible as his father. He wanted to hit her. And that was not an option. Ari, in Reseune, could do anything. To anyone. He had learned that. "What do you want? What do you really want out of me?"

"I told you, it's not personal. Nothing like it. Grant can get his tilings, he can have a few days to calm down– You'll see him. It's not like you're not working in that wing."

"You're going to run tape on him!"

"That's what he's for, isn't it? He's an experimental. Tests are what he pays for his keep—"

"He pays for his keep as a designer, dammit, he's not one of your damn test-subjects, he's—" My brother, he almost said.

"I'm sorry if you've lost your objectivity in this. And I'd suggest you calm yourself down right now. You don't have your license to handle an Alpha yet, and you're not likely to get it if you can't control your emotions better than this. If you've given him promises you can't keep, you've mishandled him, you understand me? You've hurt him. God knows what else you've done, and I can see right now you and I are due for a long, long talk—about what an Alpha is, and what you've done with him, and whether or not you're going to get that license. It takes more than brains, my lad, it takes the ability to think past what you want, and what you believe, and it's about time you learned it."

"All right, all right, I'll do what you want. He will. Just leave him with me!"

"Calm down, hear? Calm down. I'm not leaving him with anyone in that state. Also—" She tapped him on the chest. "You're dealing with me, dear, and you know I'm good at getting my own way: you know you always lose points when you show that much to your opposition, especially to a professional. You get those eyes dry, you put yourself in order, and you take Grant home and see he comes with everything he needs. Most of all you calm him down and don't frighten him any further. Where are your sensibilities?"

"Damn you! What do you want?"

"I've got what I want. Just go do what I tell you. You work for me. And you'll show up polite and respectful in the morning. Hear me? Now go take care of your business."

"I—"

Ari turned and walked out the door that led to the service area and a lift upstairs; Catlin and Florian barred his way, azi, and without choice.

"Florian," she called from some distance, impatient, and Florian left Catlin alone to hold the doorway—the worse, because Catlin had no compunction such as Florian had, Catlin would strike him, and strike hard, at the next step beyond her warning.

"Go the other way, young ser," Catlin said. "Otherwise you'll be under arrest."

He turned abruptly and walked back to the other door, where Grant stood, very pale and very quiet, witness to all of it.

"Come on," Justin said, and grabbed him by the arm. Ordinarily there would be a slight, human resistance, a tension in the muscles. There was none. Grant simply came, walked with him when he let him go, and offered not a word till they were down the hall and in the lift that took them up to third level residencies.

"Why is she doing this?"

"I don't know. I don't know. Don't panic. It's going to be all right."

Grant looked at him, a fragile hope that hit him in the gut, as the lift stopped.

Down the hall again, to the apartment that was theirs, in a residential quiet-zone, only a handful of passersby at this hour. Justin took his keycard from its clip on his pocket and inserted it with difficulty in the slot. His hand was shaking. Grant had to see it.

"No entries since last use of this key," the monitor's bland voice said, and the lights came on, since that was what he had programmed his Minder to do for his entry at this hour, all the way through the beige and blue living room, to his bedroom.

"Grant's here," he mumbled at it, and more lights came on, Grant's bedroom, visible through the archway leftward.

"I'll get my things," Grant said; and, the first sign of fracture, a wobble in his voice when he asked: "Shouldn't we call Jordan?"

"God." Justin embraced him. Grant held on to him, trembling in long, spasmodic shivers; and Justin clenched his own arms tight, trying to think, trying to reason past his own situation and the law inside Reseune which said that he could not protect the azi who had been a brother to him since he could remember.

Grant knew everything, knew everything that he knew. Grant and he had no difference, none, except that damning X on Grant's number, that made him Reseune property as long as he lived.

She could interrogate him about Jordan, about everything he knew or suspected, test systems on him, put him under tape with one structure and another, put sections of his memory under block, do any damned thing she wanted, and there was no way he could stop it.

It was revenge against his father. It was a hold on him, who, the same way Grant had just been transferred, had been Aptituded into Ari's wing. Let her, he had said to his father. Let her take me into her staff. Don't contest it. It's all right. You can't afford a falling-out with her right now, and maybe it's a good place for me to be.

Because he had had a notion then that his father, harried with plans (again) for getting a transfer, could lose too much.

You tell me, Jordan had said with the greatest severity, you tell me immediately if she makes trouble for you.

There had been trouble. There had been more than trouble, from his second day in that wing—an interview with Ari in her office, Ari too close and touching him in a way that started out only friendly and got much too personal, while she suggested quietly that there was more reason than his test scores that she had requisitioned him into her wing, and that he and Grant both could . . . accommodate her, that others of her aides did, and that was the way tilings were expected to be on her staff. Or, she had hinted, there were ways to make life difficult.

He had been disgusted, and scared; and worst of all, he had seen Ari's intention, the trap laid—slow provocations, himself the leverage she meant to wield against Jordan, a campaign to provoke him to an incident she could use. So he had gone along with it when she put her hands on him, and stammered his way through reports while she sat on the arm of his chair and rested her hand on his shoulder. She had asked him to her office after hours, had asked him questions, pretending to fill out personnel reports, and he mumbled answers, things he did not dwell on, things he did not want even to remember, because he had never even had a chance to do the things she asked him about, and never wanted in his life to do some of the things she talked about; and suspected that without tape, without drugs, without anything but his own naivete and her skill, she was in the process of twisting his whole life. He could fight back—by losing his capacity to be shocked, by answering her flippantly, playing the game—

–but it was her game.

"I'll think of something," he said to Grant. "There's a way put of this. It'll be all right." And he let Grant go off to his rooms to pack, while he stood alone in the living room in the grip of a chill that went to his bones. He wanted to phone Jordan, ask advice, whether there was anything legal they could do.

But it was all too likely Jordan would go straight to Ari to negotiate Grant free of her. Then Ari might play other cards, like tapes of those office sessions—