One of the men reached behind a stack of magazines there, and with one gloved hand he removed a device. He held it up so the camera could see—it was cylindrical, with an antenna at the bottom, and a button on top.
The captioning said that security had recovered the detonator. The device was the detonator that had been used to set off the bomb outside.
The words kept scrolling by, but they seemed to suddenly get smaller, and more distant as my stomach dropped. For a minute, I forgot about Gohan, and the colony, and everything else.
It had to be a mistake. Alexei wouldn’t do a thing like that. He was only nine years old; there was no way he would do a thing like that.
Yet all of a sudden, things he had done and said seemed different to me when I replayed them in my mind. I remembered his message, just before the explosion. I’m sorry, Sam. I’d assumed he meant he was sorry for baiting Dragan, but what if I’d been wrong? What if he meant he was sorry not for something he’d done but for something he was about to do?
I’d found him in the back of the smoke shop, right next to the magazine rack. I’d assumed he was just in shock because of what happened, because it was such a near miss. The way he shook in my arms, the look on his face.
I didn’t know those people in Render’s Strip.
I shook my head. If he did do it, he couldn’t have done it alone. He’d have no idea how to set something like that up.
“Dao-Ming,” I whispered.
She couldn’t have gotten to the explosives herself. She didn’t even know about the black hole drop, but Alexei did. Alexei had his own key to my place. If she’d told him to find where I might have hidden them, he could have figured it out. He could have found them, delivered them to her and replaced them with fakes she provided. He loved Dao-Ming. With his own mother dead, he’d latched onto her hard, and he spent a lot of time with her. She could have convinced him.
Alexei, I messaged. He didn’t respond.
Alexei, please answer me.
Over the mix of running water, chitchat, and tinkling I heard a woman begin to cry outside my stall. She hitched for a minute, sobbing, but no one asked her if she was okay. After a while she managed to contain it, and I heard the sink on the other side of the door blast on for a couple of seconds before the valve squealed shut again.
I leaned forward and peeked through the crack along the side of the stall door. I could see the woman’s back as she leaned toward the mirror, dabbing at her face with a paper towel. It was Shuang.
I felt a bitter little surge of glee that brought a grin to my face before being followed by another, more complicated feeling that I didn’t expect. I felt a little sorry for her, sure, but the thought that popped into my head was that I wondered what the hell Vamp had said or done to make her cry like that. It made me a little mad at him, and I didn’t even like Shuang.
“Shit,” she muttered, tossing the wadded-up paper in the trash. Other women clipped past her, finished primping, and curtly left the bathroom without so much as glancing at her. Not even when she began to cry again.
Goddamn it….
I flushed the bloody tissue, and stepped out of the stall. When Shuang saw me, she froze and went wide-eyed like she’d just been caught stealing.
“It’s okay,” I said, putting up my hands. “I didn’t see anything. You came in, peed, and left.”
That made her smile, a little, but it didn’t stick around long before twisting back into a frown.
“Thanks. And I’m sorry about back there. I just—”
“Look,” I said, “don’t take this the wrong way but I’ve got bigger things on my mind right now.”
“I know,” she said, her voice small.
I sighed. “You okay?”
She shrugged. “I just… thought things might be different this time,” she sniffed.
“So… you two were serious?”
She nodded. “I dumped him,” she said. “I don’t know why. Things started moving fast, and I got nervous I guess. I started to feel…”
“Trapped?”
“Yeah.” She tried to smile, failed, and wiped her eye again. “I regretted it later, but by then it was too late. He didn’t want to talk to me. When he called me the other day out of the blue I thought maybe he’d changed his mind, or that the hack was just a pretext to get back in touch, but I don’t think it is.”
“You sure about that?”
“I can tell,” she said, and I could see it really bothered her. I found myself relieved, and put off at the same time.
“You’ve known him a long time, right, Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there someone else, do you know?”
“Did he say there’s someone else?”
“No, but… I feel like there’s someone else, someone he’s got his eye on,” she said, like she hadn’t heard me. “Vamp’s not a player. He acts like he is, but when he settles on someone, he just…”
“Falls in love easily,” I said. “He doesn’t worry about what might happen later.”
She looked back at me, and I saw her eyes go from startled to understanding.
“Oh God, it’s you.”
“Huh?” I said. “Wait. I—”
“It is, isn’t it? It’s you.”
Heads up. The message popped up from Vamp, scatter shot to both of us. We’ve got a problem. Stay where you are.
A beat later, the LCD that ran along the bathroom wall up over the mirrors flashed a security warning. Something was going down.
“What’s happening?” Shuang asked.
“Vamp’s in trouble,” I said. “Come on.”
“He said stay where we are—”
“I know what he said.”
Vamp, I’m coming back.
Sam, don’t—
The message stopped short, and his contact icon turned gray.
“Sam, he said—”
I stiff-armed the bathroom door open, and started making my way back toward the booth.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Sam, wait,” Shuang called as she followed me out. I pushed my way through the crowd, back the way I’d come. When I could see the row of booths, I saw that the door to ours hung open but I couldn’t make out anyone inside. “Sam!”
She grabbed my arm but I pulled away, squeezing between two clubbers as just then, something trickled in through the mite cluster. A low signal, not Nix, but familiar.
“She’s here,” I said.
“Who?”
“A haan. She’s here,” I said.
“I know,” Shuang said. “I was sitting right across from the creepy—”
“Not that one.”
I reached the booth and looked in to see Qian, still dressed in her black slacks and paisley. She had been looking down at Vamp and Nix, but turned to face me when I approached.
Her signal carried regret, genuine regret, but it hummed over an undercurrent of resolve.
“I have warned you about pursuing this line of action,” she said.
“Qian, just hold up,” I told her.
“Get inside the booth,” she said.
“Qian—”
“Both of you, get inside the booth or I will kill them.”
“Who the hell is that?” Shuang asked near my ear, but I waved a hand to shush her.
“You know I can do it,” Qian told me.
“Nix will stop you.”
“Not before I kill your male companion.”
“Sam, who the hell is she?” Shuang asked.
“Do what she says,” I told her.
“Who is—”
“Just do what she says!”
I stepped inside the booth and went to Vamp. Shuang followed, still looking at Qian, not seeing a knife or a gun, and not convinced she posed any real threat. Qian reached over, and slid the door shut behind us.