“I’m going out,” Katya announced, a conclusion Lesa had already drawn. “Do you want anything?”
“No. Thank you. Home for supper or out all night?”
Katya looked down. “It depends if I find a good party.”
The relationship between Lesa and her middle child had always resembled an arms race. Katya had been determined to become unreadable since she was a small child and she was often successful. But Lesa could almost always tell when she was hiding something, if not what she was hiding.
Lesa laid her stylus across the finished response to Claude she had been staring at, and folded her hands over it. Please let it be something innocent. A secret lover, a questionable hobby. Anything Katya thought Lesa should disapprove of.
Anything, but knowing where Robert was and concealing it from the rest of the household.
“All right,” Lesa said. “Try to stay out of fights.”
“Mom.”Katya paused before making good her escape. “Oh, and Grandma wants to see you. She’s up in the solar.”
“Wonderful.” Lesa levered herself from her chair, leaving the stylus laid across the desk but slipping the card into an envelope. “That’s what I was waiting for. Thank you, Katya.”
“No problem.” Katya grinned before slipping out the door.
Lesa followed, but turned right instead of left. She worried at her thumbnail with her teeth as she strode down the short, fluted corridor and climbed the stairwell past the second floor, where Vincent and Michelangelo were temporarily housed. Sweat trickled down her neck by the time she reached the third story and stopped in her own room.
It was full of evening light. Walter dozed in his basket, warmed by a filtered ray of sun, and for three or four ticks she contemplated activating the beacon in his collar and sending him after Katya. But that would hardly be subtle; it wasn’t as if he could be told to hidefrom her.
Lesa would have to track Katya herself, after she spoke to Elena. That would give Katya enough of a head start. In the meantime, Lesa combed her hair, changed her shirt, and went to talk to her mother.
Elena’s solar was at the top of Pretoria house, and Lesa took the lift. That climb was above and beyond the call of casual exercise in the service of keeping fit.
The room was pleasantly open, airy and fresh, with the windows on the sunset side dimmed by shades currently and the other directions presenting views of the city, sea, and jungle. Elena stood at the easternmost side, staring over the bay and its scatter of pleasure craft and one or two shipping vessels cutting white lines across glass blue.
“How much trouble are we in?” Elena asked before Lesa could announce her presence.
Lesa crossed the threshold, stepping from the smooth warmth of House’s imitation of terra‑cotta tile to cool, resilient carpetplant. “It’s less bad than it could be. Antonia Kyoto has injected herself into the situation.”
“What?” Elena’s voice shivered; through the careful modulation, Lesa read the blackness of her mood.
“She’s Parity. Robert was doubling for her.”
Elena laid her hands on the window ledge and tightened her fingers until the tendons on her wrists stood out. “Of course he was. I’ll have him flogged for that.”
“It gets worse.”
Elena turned away from the window. “By all means, draw out the suspense.”
“He didn’t run away to Antonia.”
“Then where, pray tell?”
Lesa held her hands up, open and empty.
She heard Elena take two slow breaths before she spoke again. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
“There’s good news,” Lesa added hastily. “I’ve talked with Katherinessen, and it seems I was wrong about Kusanagi‑Jones. He’s sympathetic, and brings Free Earth assets to the table.”
The latest indrawn breath hissed out again in a sigh. Elena closed her eyes briefly and nodded. “That is good news. And the deal with Katherine Lexasdaughter?”
“Proceeds. She stands ready to present a united front with us. Vincent–Miss Katherinessen–came very well prepared. Kusanagi‑Jones less so, in that he’ll have to carry word of our plans to his contacts on Old Earth personally.”
“Of course, out of twenty named worlds, the defiance of three won’t make much difference in terms of military might.”
“No,” Lesa said. “But House will protect us. And it will mean something in terms of leadership. We just need to show that the Coalition canbe opposed. I’ve provided a full report on the Coalition agents, anyway.” She stretched her back until it cracked, and pitched her voice higher. “House, would you send the report to Elena’s desk, please?”
The walls dimmed slightly in answer, and Elena nodded thanks. “There’s something else.”
“News travels fast.”
Elena’s smile only touched one corner of her mouth. “Agnes said Kusanagi‑Jones received a challenge card.”
“From Claude, yes.”
“What’s he going to do about it?”
It was Lesa’s turn for a collected smile. “I’m going to fight for him.”
“Wait?”Vincent snapped, but Angelo met his gaze with that infuriating impassive frown. Vincent’s fingers tightened against his palm, as if there were any way in the world he could make Angelo do anything he hadn’t already meant to do.
“Can you think of a better plan?” And oh, his voice was so damned reasonable when he said it. “Cheaper than a war.”
“It’s not what I would call ethical,” Vincent said. He glanced up at Kii for support, but the Dragon only watched them, feathered brows beetled over incurious eyes. “You’ve no way to control it, and it will cost a lot of innocent lives.”
“It will,” Michelangelo said, folding his arms, his face relaxing into furrows of worry and grief. “And at least one not so innocent one.”
He meant himself. And he was letting Vincent seehim, the whole story, nothing concealed. The intimacy rocked Vincent in sympathetic waves of Michelangelo’s fear and desperation. He was scared sick. It was in the creases beside his eyes, the crossed arms, the slight lean back on his heels. Scared, and he thought it was worth doing anyway.
Killing off nearly half the population of Old Earth would sure as hell limit the threat of the OECC as a conquering power, Vincent would give Michelangelo that. He still didn’t think it was the world’s greatest solution to the problem.
“You’re not doing this,” Vincent said. “That’s an order.”
“The alternative is letting Old Earth drag the Coalition worlds into a fight that Kii and the Consent would end when it got to New Amazonia. Probably get twice as many killed on both sides. Nuclear option, Vincent. It will save lives.”
Kii’s feathered tufts ruffled and smoothed. “We would not be pleased to do so.”
“No,” Vincent said. “I don’t imagine you would. Kii, I have another option. Would the Consent, uh, consent to teach my people to create Transcendent matrices such as yours?”
“Your species may not be suited.”
“What do you mean?”
“My species chooses to copy our psyches into an information state, and to permit our physical selves to grow old and fail.”
“Of course,” Vincent said. It wasn’t as if one could actually uploadone’s personality, stripping the man out of the brain and loading it into a computer like a Raptured soul ascending bodily to heaven. One made a copy. And that left the problem of what to do with the originals.