Stepping forward and leaving just a narrow sliver of air between us, I tilt my chin up just slightly and kiss him. He tenses for a second with surprise but then engages, putting his arms around me and pulling me in. With nothing to do with my hands, I let them rest on his hips and run across the waistline of his slacks, behind him, grabbing him by his ass, which is surprisingly firm and toned. Evidently the numbers man stays in shape, though it doesn’t show in the suits he usually wears.
His fingers grasping at my back and our hips and chests pressed together, I can feel that whatever this moment is, my control over it is quickly unraveling. What are you doing, Taryn? You let a little girl die and your life is in danger. Even as my tongue touches again with his, I tell myself that this is not the time to be impulsive.
I force myself to pull away, teeming with frustration, refusing to let myself feel the confused feelings welling up from some place inside.
Brady stands stiff, a stunned look on his face, unsure what to do with himself. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just… ” I can’t explain my reasoning to him because I really don’t have any that makes sense. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Maybe… I mean… ” I pace anxiously across the soft moss floor, again unsure what to do with my arms. “I don’t know, Brady.”
He drops his hands at his sides, his silhouette small against the skyline behind him. “I like you, Taryn.”
As if I needed that right now. Unable to control the waver in my voice, my words come out inappropriately loud, abashedly fast. “It’s not the right time for this!”
He takes a strong step forward and yells back, his voice more adamant than I’ve ever heard it. “What if there never is a right time?”
I stop pacing, frozen in place. Something in what he’s said has cut into me, and in a rare moment, I am afraid. I am so close to the edge. My life could have ended fifty times this week, and it could easily end tomorrow. Or the next day, or the next day, or tonight. There’s no clear way out of the problems I’ve become lost in. Brady Kearns is right. Death could come down on me at pretty much any moment, and how much have I really lived? How much have I really done with my time on this world?
But sleeping with him right now will solve nothing. It will only make more problems, more complications. “Sorry, Brady,” I tell him. “Not tonight.”
He grimaces, upset. “Come on!” he snaps, almost comically flustered. “You’re seriously going to do this to me?”
“SCAPE Bank main branch. Tomorrow. We can fuck things up between us after the answers come.”
He shakes his head, staring up at the ceiling for a moment before he walks away without another word down the hall and into his bedroom. As I stand alone in the silence of his living room, staring out through the window-wall at the lights of Oasis City against the dusk, I feel like I should have done something different at some point, but I don’t know what or when. I guess this is regret.
There will be time for regrets later.
Or maybe there won’t.
13
Plagued with thoughts about my parents and Jessi Rodgers and the horrors in Marvin Chan’s office, I’ve been trying to rationalize my place in human society, and I can’t quite get there. The only straw I have to grasp at is the fact that I am a soldier for order and efficiency. As a Collections Agent, I serve a system that may not distribute the most valued resource fairly, but at least does it with minimal waste. It’s not much comfort, but I doubt that history is filled with soldiers who believed in their own individual importance.
Brink has never raised an army and probably never will. There is nothing here worth conquering, nothing worth building a warship over. Armed conflicts between nations are still common on Earth, but they are generally restricted to “small arms,” meaning weapons that can’t wipe out whole cities. The few interplanetary conflicts in history have been small and expensive, due to the high cost of space travel. Fought primarily with arrays of automated drones, some of those wars have left no survivors on the losing side. Humankind has learned how to move things faster than light and with that comes the absurd power to basically wreck an entire planet with an object the size of a truck. If the people of this world wanted to fight for their rights, they would not be able to. Supply and demand is our only weapon, and every year that weapon gets weaker.
One job at a time, I keep telling myself. Finish this one.
I park my ride on the top floor of the parking structure at the SCAPE Finance and Credit main branch in one of the spots reserved for law enforcement or fire vehicles. It’s really the ground floor, the other five stories being arrays of underground racks that operate in sync with the auto-valet. I remove my driving goggles, lock them in the compartment at the side of my ride, and raise a forearm to wipe away a few drops of sweat that have formed just under the line of my tied-back hair in the seconds since I parked. It’s a typically hot day, and the sun is shining down hard, washing everything in crisp orange light.
Leaning against the seat of my ride, I watch the street for Brady’s car. We said maybe ten words to each other this morning before he left to get the Records Request from the Commerce Board, and nothing either of us said did anything to alleviate the awkwardness we created between ourselves last night. Truth be told, I’m not looking forward to seeing him. Best case, he helps me get the info I want, and we get out of here. Worst case… worst case is worse than I’m willing to think about.
Sure enough, his luxury sedan pulls in and stops in the auto-valet zone. He gets out, and the system takes over, driving the car down the ramp and into the garage as Brady strolls toward me. He’s looking business-like, his hair not as neatly combed as usual, his suit and tie a plain gray.
“Hey,” he says. Today he’s shown none of the frustration, or even interest, that he showed last night. He’s the Brady Kearns I first met—a detached, aloof, number-crunching bureaucrat cube. I wonder which of those two faces is more genuine.
“You ready?”
“If you are.”
I shrug and set off ahead of him across the flat, smooth dura-pave and toward the entrance. People come and go, oblivious to us. Paranoid, I watch for any sideward glance or change in step that might indicate an attack. There are hundreds of people here, each one a potential enemy.
Passing through one set of auto-flip doors, we enter the lobby and its vast, cool, open floor of polished stone, load-bearing pillars of smooth aluminum, and arched ceilings of carved stone trimmed with metal moldings. Several lines of waiting customers extend from teller windows. Mounted discreetly in the stone walls are dozens of cameras, probably covering every single millimeter of the floor.
“Lead the way,” I tell Brady, doing my best to filter the emotion out of my voice. “You’ve got the letter.”
“Taryn,” he says, stopping and motioning for me to step away from the crowd with him. We move to an open spot on the floor, near a collection point for the little dust-collecting channels cut into the stone, and he continues, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Here we go. Last thing I want to do right now is dissect what happened last night. “This is not the time, Brady.”
“Listen to me,” he says. “I’m off this.”
This is not what I was anticipating, but… Of course. Just when I stopped expecting him to, he abandons me. I lean forward, hissing with anger. “Talk.”